Unconventional Wisdom

I hope you enjoy taking this quiz of sorts. I scored a 61 and that makes me a medium core libertarian. I think I like that.

There are plenty of things a Libertarian and I could certainly agree on.

To be sure it’s actually pretty good, but since he made his remark regarding President Bush in the last Presidential race in ’04 and other attempts to make a humorous comment well it’s to be expected isn’t it. Still it’s worth noting here and thanks to The Political Realm…

“There once was a man named Vitter
Who vowed that he wasn’t a quitter
But with stories of womenAnd all of his sinnin’
He knows his career’s in the–oh, never mind.”

–Senator John Kerry, joking about Senator David Vitter at a fundraiser last week, from The Hill.

Do you guys think this was a good jab? Well I think so although I’ll honestly admit that I haven’t been following the story of Sen. Vitter (Republican from Louisiana) in the news.

If you read my other blog, It’s My Mind, you’ll find that one frequent topic of discussion is health care. Well this would get some play there, but why not discuss this issue over here.

Yeah the article is from an Illinois newspaper serving the state capitol (link from my favorite Illinois politics blog The Capitol Fax), but some good points are made here…

Sometimes the advocates of socialized medicine claim that health care is too important to be left to the market.

That’s why some politicians are calling for us to adopt health-care systems such as those in Canada, the United Kingdom and other European nations. But the suggestion that we’d be better served with more government control doesn’t even pass a simple smell test.
Do we want the government employees who run the troubled Walter Reed Army Medical Center to be in charge of our entire health-care system? Or, would you like the people who deliver our mail to also deliver health-care services? How would you like the people who run the motor vehicles department, the government education system, foreign intelligence and other government agencies to also run our health-care system? After all, they are not motivated by the quest for profits, and that might mean they’re truly wonderful, selfless, caring people.

As for me, I’d choose profit-driven people to provide my health-care services, people with motives like those who deliver goods to my supermarket, deliver my overnight mail, produce my computer and software programs, assemble my car and produce a host of other goods and services that I use.

There’s absolutely no mystery why our greatest complaints are in the arena of government-delivered services and the fewest in market-delivered services. In the market, there are the ruthless forces of profit, loss and bankruptcy that make producers accountable to us. In the arena of government-delivered services, there’s no such accountability. For example, government schools can go for decades delivering low-quality services, and what’s the result? The people who manage it earn higher pay. It’s nearly impossible to fire the incompetents. And taxpayers, who support the service, are given higher tax bills.

Our health-care system is hampered by government intervention, and the solution is not more government intervention but less. The tax treatment of health insurance, where premiums are deducted from employees’ pretax income, explains why so many of us rely on our employers to select and pay for health insurance. Since there is a third-party payer, we have little incentive to shop around and wisely use health services.

There are “guaranteed issue” laws that require insurance companies to sell health insurance to any person seeking it. So why not wait until you’re sick before purchasing insurance? Guaranteed issue laws make about as much sense as if you left your house uninsured until you had a fire, and then purchased insurance to cover the damage. Guaranteed issue laws raise insurance premiums for all. Then there are government price controls, such as the reimbursement schemes for Medicaid. As a result, an increasing number of doctors are unwilling to treat Medicaid patients.

This website FreeMarketCure.com gives us videos about the run-down of the Canadian health care system. So this article breaks out this fact…

Before we buy into single-payer health care systems like Canada’s and the United Kingdom’s, we might want to do a bit of research. The Vancouver, British Columbia-based Fraser Institute annually publishes “Waiting Your Turn.” Its 2006 edition gives waiting times, by treatments, from a person’s referral by a general practitioner to treatment by a specialist. The shortest waiting time was for oncology (4.9 weeks). The longest waiting time was for orthopedic surgery (40.3 weeks), followed by plastic surgery (35.4 weeks) and neurosurgery (31.7 weeks).

As reported in the June 28 National Center for Policy Analysis’ “Daily Policy Digest,” Britain’s Department of Health recently acknowledged that one in eight patients waits more than a year for surgery. France’s failed health-care system resulted in the deaths of 13,000 people, mostly of dehydration, during the heat spell of 2003. Hospitals stopped answering the phones, and ambulance attendants told people to fend for themselves.

I just found out that this article was written by Economics professor and frequent Rush Limbaugh guest host Walter E. Williams. So this sure is a must read and I’m glad I did.

BTW, I should mention in Illinois right now the state government is headed towards a shut down as state Democrats who are in control of both the governor’s mansion and the state legislature seem unable to come to an agreement on the budget. Gov. Rod Blagojevich wanted to have a gross reciepts tax to fund a major health care program and has been pretty single-minded about getting there.

His proposal went down in flames in the Democratic controlled Illinois House of Representatives. Since the governor seems very unwilling to compromise on the issues of health care and education the legislature has been in overtime ever since. Worse still though while gridlock might have got a gross reciepts tax stuck in a rut, there might still be a tax increase of some type for the purposes of government operations even if the governor never gets his health care program.

Finally Dr. Williams says the quote that I really agree with along the lines of that I have no problem with people advocating socialism, but the problem is when they attempt to drag everybody into socialism with them.

Here it is. See it in all its glory. And this also means that I should probably watch it myself. Oh well enjoy this.

CNN/YouTube Democratic debate: Complete video

I missed this interesting debate last night on CNN where everyday people submit questions to the Democratic candidates for President thru YouTube. But here’s some anaylsis with regards to Clinton v. Obama…

FOR HILLARY CLINTON, the presidency is not in the bag. Even winning the Democratic presidential nomination is considerably less than a sure thing. But of the 18 Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, Clinton is the most likely to be the next president. And she did nothing last night in the bizarre presidential debate in Charleston, South Carolina, to alter that.

Clinton managed to maintain at least the outward appearance of seriousness in a debate that included a taped question from someone dressed as a snowman, another from a sanctimonious Planned Parenthood official who asked if the candidates had talked to their kids about sex, and an especially silly one about whether the candidates would be willing to be paid the minimum wage as president. Most of them lied and said yes.

This was the first of six debates sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee. Based on this one, there’s a long and tedious season of yakking ahead in the presidential race. With You Tube providing the questions and the candidates offering special one-minute commercials, the idea was to make last night’s debate livelier and more fun. Often, though, it was merely unserious, excessively cute, and frivolous.

There was a key moment, however, and once again it pitted Clinton, the New York senator, against Barack Obama, her counterpart from Illinois. The question was whether they’d promise to meet in the first year of their presidency with the leaders of such enemy nations as Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Iran, and Syria.

“I would,” Obama said, foolishly showing his inexperience, and perhaps his naivete as well, in foreign affairs. After all, he said, President Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and still talked to Soviet leaders. “I think it’s a disgrace we haven’t talked” to leaders of the five anti-American countries, Obama said.

Clinton benefited from getting to answer after Obama, and she made the most of it. She said, firmly and coolly, that she wouldn’t promise to meet with them. Clinton said the new president had to be careful not to be exploited by hostile leaders for propaganda purposes and not to do anything “that would make the situation worse.” Before any meeting, she’d have to know “what the way forward would be.”

The verdict on whose answer was better, Obama’s or Clinton’s, came from John Edwards, the next candidate to speak. He echoed Clinton.

Get it together Sen. Obama!

We’ll I’ve got it installed so I did something right, now I have to figure out the little problem with creating a Database.

Check out my handiwork here.

Why am I bothering with it?

I needed to play with MySQL to create some kind of database. And for what? I mean do I install it onto my webspace or do I use it from my own PC.

So many programs to use to make this conversion works, but so far I’ve done one thing right. I actually downloaded WordPress onto my webspace. That’s a victory, but everything else I must research.