Separated at Rebirth?

I happened to notice these books lying next to each other on the buy one, get one 50% off table at the local Borders today:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He may be a “big hitter the Lama,” but he’s no Dan Brown.

In any case, the two books side-by-side seems to me a perfect juxtaposition of the Buddhist concepts of prajna (wisdom, insight) and shunyata (emptiness). Seen from the outside they may look alike, but it just goes to prove that the world of appearance is an illusion.

The House That Greed Built

Wright Thompson of ESPN presents a fascinating look inside New Yankee Stadium’s Legends Suite:

Much has been said and written about The Moat and how it highlights the divide between the haves and the have-nots. But that’s not quite right. There are no have-nots here.

That’s not automatically a bad thing; a business should sell its product for as much as it can, as long as it’s not putting temporary profit over long-term growth. When a business makes that mistake, longtime pollster Rich Luker calls it harvesting. Starbucks is struggling, he says, because it harvested. Wal-Mart is not because it hasn’t.

“The American sports industry is in harvest mode,” Luker says. “The industry has lost its regard for human beings.”

A recent poll discovered an unsettling trend emerging for the first time. American families whose household income is $75,000 or less now have zero dollars of discretionary income. According to Luker, that means about 75 percent of the country can never responsibly afford to go to a live professional sporting event. Franchises want them to be fans, to buy the gear and pull for their teams and watch the telecasts the leagues are paid billions for. But they don’t need them to come to their stadiums. There are, right now, plenty of rich people who love games. The prices reflect that. The reason sporting events cost so much now, Luker’s research shows, is because they are designed to be affordable only to those making $150,000 or more a year.

This wasn’t always true. Ten years ago, it was cheaper to go to a baseball game than to a movie in half of the big league markets (take away parking at the game, and it was cheaper in every market). Today, there isn’t a single city in America where it costs less to go to a major league game than to a movie. Everywhere we turn, we see examples of the collapsing middle class. This is where that issue lives in the world of sports, and it has predictable consequences.

“The lower the income,” Luker says, “the less they’re enjoying sports.”

His August poll discovered a third of Americans are less interested in sports because of the declining economy. That’s bad news, made worse by a problem he first noticed in 2004 and which has continued since: For the first time, the largest number of sports fans aren’t 12- to 17-year-old boys. The baby boomers are the group that shows the greatest increase in a love of sports, and they’ll be dying soon.

Who will replace them?

By excluding 75 percent of the population from experiencing the best part of spectator sports — actually holding a ticket in your hand — franchises have created a potentially fatal problem for themselves. Luker predicts the future of sports by looking at the decline of soap operas. Once, there were 30. Now, because the audience changed, there are seven.

“We have the first true sustained evidence of less interest in sports than there was 10 years ago,” he says. “It won’t happen overnight. It will take a generation. But in general, sports will not be what it is today. We’re burning out the love of sports.”

Read the whole story here.

Last year, Major League Baseball celebrated the 100th anniversary of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” the early 20th century Tin Pan Alley song that eventually became the unofficial anthem of modern baseball. The lyrics were written by Jack Norworth and set to music by Albert Von Tilzer. Norworth was inspired while riding a subway train by a “Baseball Today — Polo Grounds” sign, Ironically, neither of them had attended a major league baseball game when they composed their 1908 hit song.

The verses to the song are now largely forgotten, even as millions of baseball fans sing the chorus during the 7th inning stretch (another baseball tradition) of every game in every ballpark across America:

Katie Casey was baseball mad,
Had the fever and had it bad.
Just to root for the home town crew,
Ev’ry sou
Katie blew.
On a Saturday her young beau
Called to see if she’d like to go
To see a show, but Miss Kate said “No,
I’ll tell you what you can do:”

[Chorus] Take me out to the ball game,
Take me out with the crowd;
Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,
I don’t care if I never get back.
Let me root, root, root for the home team,
If they don’t win, it’s a shame.
For it’s one, two, three strikes, you’re out,
At the old ball game.

Katie Casey saw all the games,
Knew the players by their first names.
Told the umpire he was wrong,
All along,
Good and strong.
When the score was just two to two,
Katie Casey knew what to do,
Just to cheer up the boys she knew,
She made the gang sing this song:

[repeat Chorus]

Saul Steinberg wrote that “It is impossible to understand America without a thorough knowledge of baseball.” Within the next generation, the sublime experience of enjoying a hotdog and a beverage, keeping score, maybe catching a ball hit into the stands, while celebrating what was once America’s favorite pastime will be as unfamiliar to most Americans as the original lyrics to its 1908 anthem.

The New Yankee Stadium or as Thompson calls it “The House Next To The House That Ruth Built,” bears a superficial resemblance to the iconic ballpark where I grew up watching legends named Mantle, Maris, Ford, Guidry, Jackson, Munson, Gossage, Righetti, Williams, O’Neill, Rivera and Jeter. I went to hundreds of games over the years, watching most from unassigned General Admission seats, which let you sit anywhere you liked in the uppermost seats. I’d get to the ballpark two hours early, climb to the top of the park and seat myself directly behind and a couple hundred feet above home plate. At $3 per ticket (movie prices were higher), it was the best entertainment value in New York. Since then, movie prices have more than doubled, but the best seats in the Legends Suite were originally priced at $2,500 apiece, or an 82,333% increase from the cost of my General Admission seat. That’s not harvesting; that’s goughing the customer’s eyes out.

In a strange way, the new ballpark is as much of an anachronism as the 1908 verses of Take Me Out to the Ballgame. Not in the sense that Thompson’s decadent description of the Legends Suite reminds the reader of a scene from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby or Thorstein Veblen’s embittered critique of capitalist excesses in The Theory of the Leisure Class. But because the ballpark and its $2,500 seats (since reduced to $1,250 yet still empty) is a monument to a faraway time in 2007 when we all believed our incomes would eventually catch up with our spending and imagined that les bon temps would continue roulez-ing forever.

I don’t know if F. Scott Fitzgerald was a baseball fan, but I suspect he would have found himself equally at home amidst the opulence of the New Yankee Stadium Legends Suite and the financial straits in which we find ourselves. Fitzgerald once quipped that baseball was “a game played by idiots for morons.” When Fitzgerald died not unexpectedly from a massive heart attack after years of alcohol and drug abuse, on hearing the news, Dorothy Parker cried: “the poor son-of-a-bitch.” Fitzgerald may not have understood baseball, but having wrestled with demons through both the Jazz Age and the Great Depression, the poor SOB understood the American Dream, and he knew first-hand the heartache of waking from a dream of a better tomorrow inexorably fading into the past.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out Daisy’s light at the end of his dock. He had come such a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it. But what he did not know was that it was already behind him, somewhere in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning —

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Making Felons of Us All

The libertarian blogger The Hippo’s Ass has an interesting post from the “truth is stranger than fiction” department:

We are all becoming criminals. Here is yet another example of the Government overreaching its authority and criminalizing ordinary citizens who had no intention of breaking the law.

In 2006, Federal Agents burst through the door of the home Kathy and George Norris, 60 and 66 year old Grandparents of six grandchildren. They ransacked the house, overturned drawers, emptied bookshelves, threw the Norris’ belongings on the floor and searched their home.

Were these SWAT clothed agents from the FBI? The ATF? Homeland Security?

Nope. They were from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service….and their mission: Looking for illegal orchids.

That’s right. Orchids. Seems that Mr. Norris, who owned a home-based business cultivating, importing and selling legal orchids, did the unthinkable: he ordered perfectly legal orchids from a supplier overseas, but failed to fill out the necessary paperwork properly. The result? Mr. Norris spent two years in prison.

Read the whole thing here: When Orchids Are Made Illegal, only Criminals Will Own Orchids

Two years in prison for improperly filling out paperwork. About orchids. Think about that.

The Norrises aren’t criminals. The federal agents, prosecutors and judge, all subsidized by our tax dollars, who put two innocent American grandparents through a Kafkaesque nightmare reminiscent of the Soviet show trials are the real criminals here. But they will never be held to account for their role in this miscarriage of justice.

In a new book titled Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, author Harvey Silverglate relates how federal laws have become so complex and confusing that ordinary law-abiding citizens commit on average three felonies a day.

Silverglate isn’t talking about hardened criminals or “greedy” businessmen purposely trying to skirt or evade known laws, but wholly innocent people inadvertently running afoul of laws that seem purposely intended to make felons of us all.

It began with the so-called War on Drugs, but first we need to review some Constitutional history, specifically the Fourth Amendment. Since the beginning of the 20th century, federal case law interpreted the 4th Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures to require the exclusion of any evidence obtained during an illegal search. This affected only a tiny percentage of criminal cases, since most criminal activities were governed by state, not federal law, and most states did not follow the federal exclusionary rule. They agreed with Justice Benjamin Cardozo, chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, who declining to adopt the federal exclusionary rule, famously asked “Must the criminal go free because the constable has blundered?” To ask the question is to answer it.

The biggest problem with the exclusionary rule is that it benefited only criminals, since if a law-abiding citizen was victim of an illegal search, presumably no criminal evidence would be found and he was left without redress for the infringement of his Constitutional rights. But if a criminal was the subject of an illegal search, then the exclusionary rule served as a Get Out of Jail Free card. The problem was compounded by a series of Warren Court decisions in the late 1950s and early 1960s. First, the Warren Court decreed that most of the Bill of Rights (even when they say “Congress shall not.”) apply to the states. This meant that the federal exclusionary rule now applied to the states. Next, the Warren Court expanded the “protections” of the Fourth Amendment to increasingly hamstring legitimate law enforcement activities. One particularly egregious example was their wholesale invention of the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine, which extended the exclusionary rule to throw out not only evidence obtained in, but as a result of, an illegal search. This meant that if the police received a tip during an event later ruled to constitute an illegal search, and then the police obtained a warrant based even in part on the tip and found evidence during a subsequent legal search, the evidence still had to be discarded under the fruit tree doctrine. Finally, the Warren Court turned the definition of an illegal search on its head. A police officer acting on clear probable cause obtains a warrant from a magistrate, conducts an appropriate search and finds evidence of a crime. However, it is later discovered that the warrant contains an error, such as misspelling the target’s name or transposing numbers on the address. The warrant is declared defective, the search deemed “unlawful” and the evidence thrown out.

Getting back to the War on Drugs, by the early 1980s, thanks in large part to Warren Court decisions, the drug lords seemed to be winning. The narco-terrorist drug cartel in Cartagena nearly brought down the Colombian government. In the U.S., we witnessed the spectacle of obviously guilty drug dealers acquitted on technicalities. When the drug cartels started executing Colombian judges and politicians and threatening our own law enforcement agents, it was time to fight back … with a vengeance.

By the mid-1980s, even liberal federal Circuit Court of Appeals clerks cynically joked about the “drug-dealer” exception to the Fourth Amendment. We went from one extreme to the other. From solid evidence obtained during good faith searches thrown out on technicalities to the opposite extreme of no-knock warrants and routine infringements of civil liberties. If you had the misfortune of living next door to a drug dealer or a suspected drug dealer … or a disliked neighbor that an anonymous tipster accused of drug dealing, the SWAT teams might break down your door in the middle of the night by mistake. If you assumed they were burglars or worse and grabbed a weapon to defend your family, it would be your funeral. Literally. But if you were lucky enough to survive the ordeal, the exclusionary rule would help you … if the weapon was illegal.

Something else happened over the last 25 years. In 1970, Congress enacted the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly referred to as RICO. While its intended use was to prosecute the Mafia and drug traffickers, its application was greatly expanded to potentially ensnare virtually any legitimate business and its management. RICO applies when there is “a pattern of racketeering activity.” However, “racketeering activity” is broadly defined to include not only gambling, murder, kidnapping, arson, robbery, extortion, and drug trafficking, but also fraud, including securities fraud. And “pattern” requires only two “predicate acts.” While Federal prosecutors appropriately used RICO to go after the Gambino crime family and assorted mobsters, in 1989, they also used RICO to threaten Michael Millken and Drexel Burnham Lambert with 98 felony counts based on allegations of market manipulation and technical violations of securities regulations that previously carried no criminal penalties. Millken and Drexel ended up pleading guilty and no contest to lesser charges, since Millken faced life imprisonment if convicted, and an indictment would have put Drexel out of business.

Since then, the federal criminal code has literally created thousands of new “crimes” ranging from fish and game and environmental regulations to HIPAA recordkeeping requirements for insurers and medical practitioners, as documented in a 2004 Cato Institute book, Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything, written by Gene Healy.

Under traditional common law, criminal liability required both a criminal act (actus reus) and criminal intent (mens rea), and the prosecutor had the burden of proving his case “beyond a reasonable doubt.” No longer. The new federal criminal statutes ignore the core principles of traditional common law, especially the criminal intent requirement. This makes it extremely easy for federal prosecutors to bring charges against people like the Norrises. Even if you are a law-abiding person, even if you have no intent to commit a crime, even if you act on the advice of an attorney or the government, you can go directly to jail, thanks to what the book describes “an unholy alliance of tough-on-crime conservatives and anti-big-business liberals has utterly transformed the criminal law” into dystopian nightmare that’s part Kafka, part Orwell, part Heller.

When they came for the orchids I did not speak up, etc.

But when I awoke the next morning from unsettling dreams, I found myself changed into a monstrous vermin.

The Postman Never Thinks Twice

Today’s Drudge Report has a link to this piece from The Smoking Gun:

Plea In Post Office Pilferage: Man admits lifting 3012 Netflix DVDs from Massachusetts mail facility

SEPTEMBER 22–A postal worker who stole more than 3000 DVDs mailed by Netflix to its customers pleaded guilty yesterday to federal theft charges. Myles Weathers, who worked at a mail processing and distribution center in Springfield, Massachusetts, was nabbed last year for the video heist after Netflix officials became suspicious about the frequency with which DVDs were being pinched. Weathers, 49, was subsequently arrested after surveillance footage showed him removing DVDs from Netflix envelopes and placing the discs into his backpack. The below criminal information filed yesterday in U.S. District Court does not disclose whether Weathers was building an impressive home video library or planning to sell the hot titles. A plea agreement, an excerpt of which you’ll find here, valued the recovered 3012 DVDs at $36,471. Weathers, now a former government employee, is scheduled to be sentenced on December 23. While his felony plea carries a maximum of five years in prison, sentencing guidelines call for a term of about a year in custody (emphasis added).

To recap, a government postal worker pleads guilty to a felony for stealing Netfilx DVDs he could have rented for $7.95/month. I wonder if this might be an example of the “savings” President Obama talks about under the government healthcare plan.

Netflix’s inventory tracking system detected the pilfering fairly quickly. Then the authorities got involved. It probably took them a while to obtain a court order and set up hidden cameras for the sting. In the meantime, 3,012 Netflix DVDs were stolen. Makes you wonder how effectively a government-run healthcare system will deal with hospital employees pilfering controlled substances. There are savings to be had, but only if you look at things from the criminal’s point-of-view.

I wish I could find the link, but Mark Steyn wrote a piece some years ago regarding the government’s ineptitude keeping track of terror suspects. Beyond the government’s usual Inspector Clouseau fumbling, you have the Jamie Gorelicks intentionally creating Chinese walls to ensure the left hand can’t know what the right hand is doing. Despite billions spent on counter-terrorism, our government failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks even though weird conversations like this at flight schools were reported: “Just teach me how to fly the plane, infidel! I don’t need takeoff or landing instructions.”

Meanwhile the private sector has no trouble targeting products to specific customer interests. Steyn humorously noted that Amazon probably sent the 9/11 hijackers emails along the lines of “Dear Muhammad, As someone who recently purchased Death to Infidels by Mustapha bin Saudi, we thought you might be interested in Jihad Forever! from the same author.” Hilarious, if you don’t mind gallows humor.

To reiterate Steyn’s point, Amazon’s and Netflix’s systems cost a fraction of what the government spends, yet they gather pertinent intelligence more efficiently. Meanwhile, President Obama claims against overwhelming evidence to the contrary that a government-run healthcare system will be more efficient and more affordable than private insurance.

If you want to get a glimpse of what a government “option” would look like, check out the series Parking Wars on A&E. My good friend Sam C. (who really ought to have his own blog so I can link to him instead of plagiarising his ideas) introduced me to this reality series, which follows employees of the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA), ticketing agents, booting and towing crew, and impound lot clerks. I’ve only caught snippets from a couple of episodes. In one, a pregnant woman’s car is towed while she was in labor. In another, a woman’s car keys are missing from the impound lot.

One surreal scene involved a clueless cashier at the impound lot. To retrieve one’s vehicle, in addition to paying the hefty impound fees, the owner must provide paperwork from the traffic court indicating they paid the fine, along with a valid driver’s license and insurance card. The PPA cashier at the impound lot inexplicably refuses to release the vehicle because the insurance policy effective date had passed. The clerk persists in his refusal even after the owner points out that the policy’s expiration date hasn’t lapsed.

The mixup is eventually straightened out, but what’s the car owner’s remedy if it isn’t? You can’t fight City Hall, and the hefty impound fees continue to accrue while you waste more time and effort trying to tell your side of the story to a municipal judge. The municipal judge may be marginally smarter than the impound cashier, but he is equally immune from being fired for incompetence. Who decides?

Bureaucrats get to decide who are the winners and losers, yet their decisions often resemble the fable of the crow who challenged the nightingale to a singing contest. A group of pigs agree to judge the competition. The nightingale sings a beautiful, haunting melody, while the crow loudly shrieks “Caw, caw, caw!” to raucous cheers from the bench. The pigs predicatbly declare the crow the winner. Afterwards, the disconsolate nightingale is seen crying. Another songbird tells her not to cry because she lost. The nightingale replies, “I’m not crying because I lost. I’m crying because the judges are pigs.”

They say the postman always rings twice (and steals 3,000 DVDs apparently), but under a single-payer system the government official always gets the last word. And the rest of us can either accept the pigs’ decisions and humbly eat crow, or we can go postal.

To Serve Man

A shop assistant in Beijing displays a shirt bearing an image of President Obama’s face imprinted over that of Communist dictator Mao Zedong. The Chinese characters depict the Maoist slogan “Serve the People,” written in Mao’s calligraphy. According to Reuters, the shop has sold thousands of shirts bearing the “Oba Mao” design since the products arrived a month ago.

Considering that Chairman Mao “served” nearly 50 million of “the people” in the Great Leap Forward just fifty years ago, the sale of such Maoist iconography in China is simply mind-boggling. It’s as if T-shirts “celebrating” Kristallnacht with Ahmandinejad’s image emblazoned over Hitler’s suddenly became a fashion rage in Tel Aviv (though I’m sure they’d be quite popular elsewhere in the Middle East) .

At least there’s still a majority of Americans left who don’t trust Communists. Or should I say Kanamits?

“There is nothing ulterior in our motives, nothing at all. You will discover this for yourselves before too long simply by testing the various devices which we will make available to you. We can show you, for example, how to add a certain very cheap nitrate to the soil and end famine on earth for good and all. We can demonstrate to you quite practically the principles of the force field in which you may cloak each nation with an invisible wall, absolutely impenetrable by bombs, missiles or anything else. We ask only that you trust us, only that you simply trust us.”

Narrator: “That was what we all thought. It was the age of Santa Claus, only these Kris Kringles came without white whiskers or rosy cheeks or twinkling eyes. They were nine-foot tall enigmas who descended on us like locusts, but nobody was counting or worrying.”

Sound familiar? Perhaps a T-shirt with Obama’s image morphed over a palimpsest of a Kanamit savior would serve as a clue to the motives of those who claim to “serve the people.”

Hat tip: John Derbyshire at National Review Online.

A Republic, and We Will Keep It

Today marks the 222nd anniversary of the signing of the Constitution.

On September 17, 1787, 39 of 55 delegates attending the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia signed a document that when ratified by all thirteen states, established a form of government unlike anything the world had ever seen.

It did not come easily. Only 55 of the 74 delegates selected by their respective states attended the Convention. Rhode Island chose not to send delegates. The delegates to the Convention originally met to advise the Continental Congress on how “to devise such further provisions as shall appear to them necessary to render the [Articles of Confederation] adequate to the exigencies of the Union.” They soon recognized the defects of the Articles were too great and too many to cure by amendment, and that a new form of government was needed.

On May 25, 1787, George Washington was unanimously chosen president of the convention and deliberations began. Over the next four months during a sweltering summer, a relatively young (average age 42) but experienced and brilliant group of political thinkers intensely debated questions about natural law, human nature, the proper scope and source of authority of government, the relationship between the national or federal government and the states, and the balance of power between larger and smaller states.

The Framers drew upon their vast wealth of shared experience living under the British Crown, upon deep insights into the lessons of history, and upon the best of classical and modern thought to create a document described by a good friend as a “masterpiece of minimalism.”

The English philosopher John Locke provided their shared belief in a natural law that entitled every person to life, liberty, and property, and that the proper role of government was to protect these rights. The French political philosopher Baron de Montesquieu provided the framework for the system of separation of powers they adopted to prevent the undue concentration of power in a single person or body. Because the states were preexisting political entities and their concern about encroachments from the new national government, they invented a previously unheard of system in which the national and state governments would exercise dual sovereignty in separate and prescribed areas.

The Convention delegates met in secret throughout the long, brutal summer of 1787. Records of its proceedings were not reported to the public, who clamored for news of the deliberations. When the Convention finally finished its great work, a Mrs. Powel asked Benjamin Franklin as he was leaving the state capitol building in which the delegates met: “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

“A republic if you can keep it,” Franklin replied.

Today, 222 years later, it’s worth asking ourselves Mrs. Powel’s question: “what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” But instead of asking our representatives in name only what government have we got, we must send them this message loud and clear:

We have a Republic, and we intend to keep it.

The Sound of One Hand Clapping

Last week, a message was circulating on Facebook promoting the following sentiment: “No one should die because they cannot afford health care or insurance and no one should go broke or bankrupt because they get sick.” The message asked everyone who agreed with the statement to post it on their Facebook status box.

This week, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times made the absurd claim that anyone who disagrees with the post-racial President™ is racist. Silly me to think that one of the few benefits of electing to the presidency an inexperienced community organizer with disturbing ties to shady characters was that it would finally put an end to such race-baiting nonsense.

There’s no need to spend much time on Dowd’s piece. To paraphrase the legal maxim, her ignorance speaks for itself. Evidently, subtlety is not among Dowd’s strengths. Nor does she seem to possess the ability to discern irony, as evidenced by her Obligatory Two Minutes of Hate screed against Joe Wilson, the Left’s Emmanuel Goldstein de jour, in a piece ostensibly directed against the right’s alleged propensity to label political opponents as “the Other”:

The outburst was unexpected from a milquetoast Republican backbencher from South Carolina who had attracted little media attention. Now it has made him an overnight right-wing hero, inspiring “You lie!” bumper stickers and T-shirts.

The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president. Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber.

The Facebook message and Dowd’s demonization of opposition to Obama are good examples of the liberal/statist good cop/bad cop attempt to frame the debate on controversial subjects like government-run healthcare.

No one really disagrees with the sentiment expressed on Facebook. It’s a noble-sounding sentiment, but noble-sounding sentiments are a dime a dozen. They contribute nothing toward the enormous cost of providing health insurance for 30 million or 47 million uninsured. That’s a large part of their attraction: it costs liberals absolutely nothing to give a thumbs-up to a message approving lofty-sounding, utopian goals. Giving lip-service to lofty-sounding platitudes is much easier and psychologically more rewarding than presenting factual and logical arguments in favor of one’s policy preferences. Also, they get to frame political issues simply as contests between morally enlightened persons like themselves who favor a universal, government-subsidized healthcare option and evil, reactionary troglodytes like us who secretly wish to deprive poor people of lifesaving care.

Outside the liberal world of magical thinking, most of us understand that, like most things, healthcare costs include a broad range of goods and services that are not free, but must be paid for. For most of us, the question is which system will provide the best overall healthcare at a reasonable cost. While insurance is a necessary means of financing extremely expensive but relatively rare occurrences, it is an inefficient and costly way of paying for everyday expenses. This is a question liberals are generally not very interested in examining, else they would not instinctively gravitate to the same single-payer models that have demonstrably failed everywhere and every time they have been tried.

Imagine how much your auto insurance would cost if it was administered the way most people’s health insurance works. Instead of paying for routine maintenance like oil changes out of pocket, you would file a claim with your auto insurer, who would either have to pay whatever the mechanic charges, fight over the reimbursement rate for each “claim,” or go through the trouble and expense of developing and contracting a network of preferred mechanics to keep such costs down. You and I certainly wouldn’t go through the bother of looking for the cheapest/best mechanics because the insurance company would be the one paying the bill.

A much better way to fix problems with health insurance is to make health insurance function more like auto insurance. Limit insurance to expensive drugs/procedures via a high-deductible policy and pay for everyday healthcare expenses, such as checkups and routine preventive care, with your own money. Health insurers should also be allowed to charge higher premiums to people whose lifestyles demonstrably correlate to higher healthcare costs. Again, this is something auto insurers currently do, charging higher premiums to young male drivers, people with a history of accidents, etc.

Safeway has implemented several innovative market-based solutions, such as paying employees who quit smoking, lose weight, lower their blood pressure and cholesterol levels, etc. As a result, their healthcare costs have remained flat over a four-year period whereas overall health insurance costs have grown at nearly double the inflation rate over the same period.

Tort reform is another way to control costs, not just the ridiculous multi-million verdicts on junk science claims that former Democrat VP candidate John Edwards specialized in, but also billions in unnecessary and redundant tests performed not because they are appropriate, but to defend against such frivolous malpractice suits.

Yet these and other reforms that actually would help (like eliminating wasteful government mandates that continue to drive up insurance costs) are conspicuous in their absence from Obama’s healthcare proposals. But for true believers, the healthcare debate isn’t about actually improving the healthcare system, but about validating their failed leftist worldview and reaffirming their unswerving faith in their own moral superiority.

The title of this piece comes from a famous koan by Hakuin. It describes the ineffable concept of a soundless sound. But the sound of one hand clapping is all around us. It’s the familiar sound of a liberal driving around in his Prius with only one hand on the wheel. You see, he can’t drive using both hands because one hand is continually kept busy patting himself on the back, congratulating himself for his presumed moral superiority over the rest of us.

Hayek called it “the fatal conceit,” the idea that “man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes.”

The fatal conceit is the deafening soundless sound of one hand clapping.

Never Forget

Slick Willie 2.0

The Seven Big Lies of Obama’s Speech

Must-read article by Robert Tracinski in today’s Jewish World Review. Not just a fisking of Obama’s Teleprompter’s healthcare speech last night, but insightful on Obama’s use of classical rhetorical devices to deceive his delusional flock of singularly stupid sheep.

We had our warning during the campaign, we really did.

Remember Barack Obama’s famous speech on race, back in March of 2008? Obama had spent 20 years listening to the sermons of Jeremiah Wright, full of venomous anti-Americanism and attacks on “white America.” Yet when the reverend’s rants were revealed to the public, Obama tried to convince us that he just happened to be missing from the pews on any well-documented Sunday, and that the Jeremiah Wright we saw and heard was not the Jeremiah Wright he knew.

It was a giant, implausible lie. Yet the speech was smoothly delivered and well-turned, perfectly balanced to seem to empathize both with the grievances of blacks and with the concerns of whites. So most people seemed to believe it.

This is what Obama’s supposed gift for rhetoric amounts to: the ability to tell a smoothly polished bald-faced lie.

And that was the whole essence of Obama’s big night. It was a pack of lies from beginning to end, and if we’re going to finally see through this flim-flam artist once and for all — as more and more people are beginning to do — then we had better identify them one at a time.

Flim-flam artist and pack of lies pretty much sums up this character and his healthcare speech last night. I couldn’t stand to watch more than 15 minutes. Here are the seven big lies:

1) Obama’s proposal is just minor, incremental tinkering.
2) Obama’s plan is bipartisan.
3) You can keep your existing insurance.
4) The “public option” will not be subsidized by government.
5) The health-care bill will pay for itself with cost savings.
6) There are no death panels.
7) Obama doesn’t want a government takeover of medicine.

Please read the entire piece. I‘ll just add my two cents re: Big Lie #3. Obama swears that there is nothing in his plan that will force you to give up your existing [employer-provided] insurance. In the very next breath, he cited a laundry list of so-called reforms he would imposed on insurers that according to Obama would “make the insurance you have work better for you.” Here’s the text:

What this plan will do is to make the insurance you have work better for you. Under this plan, it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition?. They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime. We will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses. And insurance companies will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care.

Of course each of these government-mandated changes would drive up the cost of insurance premiums for employers when his supposed rationale for “fixing the system” is that healthcare costs are already too high. By raising costs already bordering on prohibitively expensive, these changes will force employers to choose between cutting the workforce during a time of high unemployment, cutting healthcare benefits or dropping healthcare coverage altogether forcing employees into the public option (since new private individual plans will not be allowed), or slashing wages.

This sort of dishonest cant simply insults one’s intelligence. Yet the Democrats were not insulted. Even worse, they rewarded such drivel with a standing ovation.

Live and Let Die

Proponents of single-payer systems (read Socialized Medicine) frequenty cite infant mortality rates to demonstrate the alleged deficiencies in our healthcare system vs. other industrialized countries. Statistics don’t lie, but people reporting and citing numbers often do. Because other countries have very different standards for counting and reporting live births, apples-to-oranges comparisons present a skewed and dangerously misleading impression.

In a 2005 piece titled Infant-Mortality Myths, physicians Michael Arnold Glueckand Robert J. Cihak explain:

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) definition, all babies showing any signs of life – such as muscle activity, a gasp for breath or a heartbeat – should be counted as a live birth. The U.S. strictly follows this definition. But many other countries do not.

Switzerland doesn’t count the death of very small babies, less than 30 centimeters (11.8 inches) in length, as a live birth, according to Nicholas Eberstadt, a former visiting fellow at Harvard’s Center for Population and Developmental Studies. So comparing the 1998 infant mortality rates for Switzerland and the U.S. (4.8 and 7.2,respectively, per 1,000 live births) is comparing apples and oranges.

In other countries, such as Italy, definitions vary depending on where you are in the country.

Eberstadt notes “underreporting also seems apparent in the proportion of infant deaths different countries report for the first 24 hours after birth. In Australia, Canada and the United States, over one-third of all infant deaths are reported to take place in the first day.”

In contrast, “Less than one-sixth of France’s infant deaths are reported to occur in the first day of life. In Hong Kong, such deaths account for only one-twenty-fifth of all infant deaths.”

As UNICEF has noted, “Under the Soviet-era definition … infants who are born at less than 28 weeks, weighing less than 1,000 grams [35.3 ounces] or measuring less than 35 centimeters [13.8 inches] are not counted as live births if they die within seven days. This Soviet definition still predominates in many [formerly Soviet] countries. … The communist system stressed the need to keep infant mortality low, and hospitals and medical staff faced penalties if they reported increases. As a result, they sometimes reported the deaths of babies in their care as miscarriages or stillbirths.”

The point about how medical statistics are politicized in Communist countries is not just a historical footnote. In that island paradise celebrated by Michael Moore, the Congressional Black Caucus, Dan Rather, and countless Hollywood celebrities, Cuban doctors are forced to abort babies with prenatal defects. Most of these abortions are done without the mother’s consent and often without their knowledge. As you read this, take a moment to think of a courageous black physician named Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, who is currently serving a 25-year term in a Cuban prison for refusing to participate in forced abortions, putting the lives of his patients ahead of Cuba’s precious infant mortality statistics.

Considering the devastation wrought by 50 years of Communism, we must concede that Cuban infant mortality stats look pretty good. As they should since they exclude infants deliberately killed in order to inflate those stats. Killing defectives also cuts costs. Jeremy Bentham would approve. The greatest good for the greatest number. Well not exactly, but certainly the greatest good for El Numero Uno.

A more helpful indicator of the quality of neo-natal care is survival chances of very premature, very low birth-weight babies:

American advances in medical treatment now make it possible to save babies who would have surely died only a few decades ago. Until recently, very low birth-weight babies – less than 3 pounds – almost always died. Now, some of these babies survive. While such vulnerable babies may live with advanced medical assistance and technology, low birth-weight babies (weighing less than 5.5 pounds) recently had an infant mortality rate 20 times higher than heavier babies, according to WHO. Ironically, U.S. doctors’ ability to save babies’ lives causes higher infant mortality numbers here than would be the case with less advanced treatment.

This week, the Daily Mail reported the heart-wrenching story of Sarah Capewell and her son Jayden . Born prematurely at 21 weeks and 5 days, Jayden was breathing on his own, had a strong heartbeat and was moving his arms and legs, but his British doctors refused to care for him because of medical guidelines endorsed by the British Association of Perinatal Medicine and followed by NHS hospitals.

Guidance limiting care of the most premature babies provoked outrage when it was published three years ago.

Experts on medical ethics advised doctors not to resuscitate babies born before 23 weeks in the womb, stating that it was not in the child’s ‘best interests’.

The guidelines said: ‘If gestational age is certain and less than 23+0 (i.e at 22 weeks) it would be considered in the best interests of the baby, and standard practice, for resuscitation not to be carried out.’
Medical intervention would be given for a child born between 22 and 23 weeks only if the parents requested it and only after discussion about likely outcomes.

The rules were endorsed by the British Association of Perinatal Medicine and are followed by NHS hospitals.
The association said they were not meant to be a ’set of instructions’, but doctors regard them as the best available advice on the treatment of premature babies.

In the US, Jayden would have been given every chance to survive. In fact, just a few weeks before the guidelines were published, a baby in the U.S. named Amillia Taylor, who was born prematurely at 21 weeks 6 days, nonetheless received medical care and is alive and healthy today.

Advances in medicine and technology make it possible for very low birth-weight premature babies to survive in cases that were unimaginable even a few years ago. You won’t know until you try the saying goes, but the 2006 guidelines drawn up by a faceless group called the Nuffield Council on Bioethics would not let Jayden’s doctors try to save Jayden’s life. All because Jayden had the temerity to be born 48 hours before the guidelines said he should.

I’m sure the experts in bioethics on the Nuffield Council would bristle at the suggestion that they constitute a Death Panel, but their utilitarian calculus, meticulously applied by the callous clinicians at James Paget Hospital in Norfolk, who denied responsibility using a variant of the Nuremberg defense (“We were only following guidelines”), meted out a de facto death sentence on Jayden. Because he was born 48 hours too soon. Perhaps their efforts would have been for naught. Perhaps he would have died anyway. We’ll never know. During her labor, Sarah Capewell desperately begged a pediatrician “You have got to help,” to which he replied, “No, we don’t.”

Limiting available healthcare options to whatever level of medicine is currently feasible will likely ensure that future medical advances are less likely to occur. There’s a reason why the US leads the world in R&D for life-saving prescription drugs and countries that ration healthcare do not. That’s the pragmatic argument. For me, the more compelling reason is the harm to our souls when we ignore the transcendent univeral moral code written in our hearts. If the human soul and moral law do not exist, then my argument is meaningless. But if they do exist, then we are literally playing with fire. In stifling the natural human tendency to show even minimal compassion for a distraught mother and her infant, we lay the groundwork for an inhumane system that values statistics and views people as numbers.

Woody Allen once quipped that 80 percent of success is just showing up. One never knows until one tries whether our efforts will make a difference, but I’d say 80 percent of making a difference is in the trying.

Jayden’s doctors didn’t even try. Shame on them.