The ObamaCare Train Wreck

Do these people really understand what they are doing with ObamaCare? It doesn't sound like it.

Hugh Hewitt had a couple of ObamaCare supporters on his radio program on Monday. And they, Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic and Henry Aaron of Brookings, didn't have a clue.

They didn't really know where the Medicare savings were coming from. Except that Jonathan Cohn knew they were coming from productivity improvements like better infection control. Dr. Henry Aaron knew the money was coming from somewhere:

The story is that if one is going to extend coverage as the Senate plan would do to 25 to 35 million, or currently uninsured Americans, they’re going to consume some more health care services. And the money to pay for that needs to come from somewhere. Most of the money would come from projected growth in productivity of health care delivery under Medicare.

This sort of thing shows that the Democrats have lost the plot. They are just playing one group off against another. They are going to give uninsured Americans more health care services and they are going to take it away from other Americans.

But that's not what Democrats are for. They are for giving America glorious benefits and taxing the rich or evil corporations. Nobody is supposed to have to pay for all this. Especially not grandma. It is all supposed to appear magically.

You cannot suddenly turn up and say that, hey, we are going to take away benefits from you seniors to give to the uninsured Americans. Not after a century of demanding benefits for seniors. You don't do that. You don't ever take benefits away from welfare state recipients.

My view is that the current generation of Democrats are like the inheritors of an imperial dynasty. Two generations back there were rough tough Democrats that came out of the hills and conquered the United States for themselves and their supporters.

But now the Democrats are soft and civilized. They are used to the easy life in their inherited Senate seats and their fluffy think tank berths and their leisured academic tenure. They think that grants grow on trees. And they don't know how to appeal to the great mass of Americans.

Actually, they don't like the great mass of Americans.

More and more, it is looking like a Perfect Storm coming up for our Democratic friends. They played their tactical game beautifully in 2006 and 2008. They blamed everything on Bush and the Republicans, and they sold the American people on the idea that they were post-partisan moderates.

Now they want to govern like McGovern and the American people are upchucking.

And the upchucking has only just begun.

"Blind Side" a Hit

It was nearly three years ago that we wrote about the story of Michael Oher. He's the left offensive tackle for the Baltimore Ravens, and his story was told by Michael Lewis in The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game.

Oher was a throwaway child of the ghetto and a drug-addict mother. Until he was adopted by a Christian high school and a wealthy couple.

Now The Blind Side is a major motion picture with $100 million in grosses for the first two weeks.

Star Parker writes about The Blind Side today, and, as a black conservative, well she might. It's all very well to look at the inspirational side of the story:

Michael Oher's story has already received much attention. How a homeless black 15-year-old winds up in a Christian private school and how a white Christian couple adopted him and helped him develop to get the grades to stay in school, become a star athlete, an All-American football player and a multimillion-dollar NFL draft pick.

But then there's the other side.

Our wake-up call should be that the factors that saved and transformed Michael Oher's life stand in stark contrast to the government solutions we hear from Washington about dealing with our problems relating to poverty and education.

Oher had attended 11 different public schools. He had a grade point average of 0.6. He had been in foster homes and typically would sleep on the floor at different houses, finding food where he could. Maybe was saved him was that he was a "gentle giant."

Of course, he was as dumb as a post.

When they first tested him at Briarcrest, the Christian school, he had an IQ of 80. Then later when they tested him again after he'd brought his school work up, he tested at 100-110. "The psychologists were dumbfounded."

President Obama wants to spend more government money on schools. What is is smoking? Government never did anything for education.

School choice and traditional values are the answers. It's freedom, not bureaucrats, that produces miracles. Michael Oher may be an exceptional individual, but his story need not be an exceptional story.

We can change all this liberal failure and injustice, you know. Any time we want. It's called voting.

The Worse the Better

That was the line attributed to Vladimir Lenin. Actually, it seems that Lenin was quoting the Marrxist theoretician G.V. Plekhanov:

If the Cadets don’t stick to the rule—the worse, the better...," says Plekhanov, "they themselves will have to admit that they have made a big mistake[.]

At any rate, when the other side is doing its best to wreck the country then you sometimes wish they would do the job properly.

Conservative commentators are falling all over each other reporting on the devastation of the Obama age.

Here is Fred Barnes:

"Change must come to Washington," Mr. Obama said in a June 2008 speech. "I have consistently said when it comes to solving problems," he told Jake Tapper of ABC News that same month, "I don't approach this from a partisan or ideological perspective."

Candidate Obama was also strongly against lobbyists: "they're part of the problem," he said. But when you grow government, as the president clearly is trying to do, you increase partisanship and you increase the need for interests to send lobbyists to Washington.

Then there is Kim Strassel reporting Sen. Jim Imhofe's (R-SC) assertion that "Cap and Trade is dead:

So declares Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, taking a few minutes away from a Thanksgiving retreat with his family. "Ninety-five percent of the nails were in the coffin prior to this week. Now they are all in."

"This week" refers to ClimateGate, or the CRUTape Letters, the revelations of cooking the books at Britain's Climatic Research Unit.

Now there is Victor Davis Hanson saying that, when it comes to bad news, "We ain't seen nothing yet." If you are worried about "High unemployment, the recession, and a terrorist resurgence in Afghanistan," don't worry. There is more bad news coming. Think: increased oil prices, increased interest rates for Uncle Sam to pay, increased terrorism, and increased taxes.

And at the center of it all is the utterly wrong-headed reinvention of health care, panned by Charles Krauthammer. It amounts to:

hundreds of new provisions, regulations, mandates, committees, and other arbitrary bureaucratic inventions. Worse, they are packed into a monstrous package without any regard to each other. The only thing linking these changes — such as the 118 new boards, commissions, and programs — is political expediency. Each must be able to garner just enough votes to pass. There is not even a pretense of a unifying vision or conceptual harmony.

It really does seem as though President Obama and the Democrats are determined to run the ship of state on the rocks. Kim Strassel:

Nearly every Obama policy has thrilled either the president's base in the Democratic Party or a liberal interest group but practically no one else. Nearly every policy is unpopular with a majority or large plurality of Americans.

Democrats have spent the last 30 years claiming that Republicans and conservatives were the most monstrous and demented extremists. Their campaign hit a fortissimo in the last years of the Bush administration and yielded bumper returns in the campaigns of 2006 and 2008.

Well, now we are getting a dose of real extremism, in contrast to the mild conservatism of President Bush, and this extemism is spelt O-B-A-M-A-R-E-I-D-P-E-L-O-S-I.

And the American people hate it.

Don't Take Freedom For Granted

It's Thanksgiving, the holiday when we count our blessings. And it's the time also to count the second greatest of them all. We are talking about the trio of blessings: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Marriage activist Maggie Gallagher has something to say about this.

Freedom may well be a right, but the most important thing about freedom is that it is a good.

What's the difference? Rights are what you are owed. Goods have to be made. Freedom is a gift. We didn't make it by ourselves for ourselves. We have to be grateful for it.

We owe the simple debt of thankfulness to those who came before -- who suffered, celebrated, fought and died to create the society we now enjoy. That's history. And we owe it to those who created our freedom to pass on the gift.

Then Gallagher gets to the pure Burkean moment.

That is patriotism: the debt that we the living owe to the honored dead, which we can pay only by caring for future generations yet unborn.

I would say rather: "That is conservatism." Modern conservatism is the self-conscious articulation of the unarticulated Way of the ancestors. And the central point is the argument made by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Let us run the actual quote:

Society is indeed a contract. But it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature.

It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible worlds, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place.

The great gift of Edmund Burke, as the founder of modern conservatism, lies in this articulation of the unspoken wisdom of the ages. The social contract we live under is not just between the living. It is "between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." And this is not just an artifice, a trick of social control. It lies at the center of life and its purpose.

For if we humans survive and thrive it will be because we have maintained the gossamer thread that is the contract between the generations. Between us the living, between those already gone before, and those yet to come.

That is why we are thankful, on this day of all days. We are thankful to have received the gift of life and the gift of freedom. From those who have gone before.

Thank Goodness It Wasn't Any Worse

Many conservatives are railing today at the financial bailout of Fall 2008. After the failure of Lehman Brothers Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson engineered a $700 TARP fund to prevent the contagion from spreading. And conservatives hated it.

I maintain that a banking bailout was the right policy, and a banking bailout--designed to prevent a meltdown of the credit system--is the only kind of bailout that makes sense in an economic crisis. If the credit system goes, then everything goes.

Today, at Thanksgiving 2009, it looks like the worst is over and that the economy will survive its worst crisis since the Great Depression.

That is something to be thankful for.

But it is clear that the national elite has not learned the proper lessons from the crisis. We have seen no effort to reduce the subsidization of debt. We have seen not effort to get the government out of gunning the economy. We have seen no effort to reduce the politicization of the economy.

The lesson of 2008 is clear. Government can't be trusted with monetary policy. It can't be trusted with credit policy. It can't be trusted with economic policy. The reason is simple. The only thing that politicians and activists and lobbyists are interested in is power. Their interest in monetary policy extends no further than printing money when the government gets in a jam. Their interest in credit policy extends no further than subsidizing their supporters. Their interest in economic policy extends no further than apologies for government domination of the economy.

The only thing that government can do is fight against enemies foreign and domestic. To this end, of course, it needs complete access to the nation's wealth when it is actually fighting a war. But after the war the resources should be surrendered back to the private sector.

Because politicians know nothing about money, credit, and business. And they like it that way.

The best way to celebrate future Thanksgivings would be to give thanks to the day when we got the government out of the economy.

"I have also felt really tired"

The dam has burst on the politicized climate science operation, the Hockey Stick Team, run by Phil Jones at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and Michael Mann of Penn State University.

The release of a decade of emails between the principals of the Hockey Stick Team shows that the team was not really doing science. It was doing politics. Roger Tracinski's piece on the release of the CRUTape letters is as good a review of the situation as any.

What does it mean? It means that Steve McIntyre, the Canadian statistical expert and proprietor of Climate Audit (and now CAMirror), is vindicated. It was years ago in the early 2000s that McIntyre started looking at the Mann Hockey Stick paper, MBH98, and discovered what was to him a startling lack of due diligence.

Since then Steve has plugged away, "auditing" the work product of the Hockey Stick Team, exposing all the shoddy work and trying, with increasing success, to get access to their raw data and their methodology.

On November 22, 2009, in a comment, Steve McIntyre responded to a commenter asking him about the data in the CRUTape Letters.

Sure, I’ve nibbled at it, but I’ve spent more time on the mail so far. It’s hard to know where to start. I also have felt really tired.

Yes. I imagine after a decade of work, and after years of battling against calumny and obstruction, there is a "Nunc Dimittis" feeling about this moment. For you folks without a religious education, it means: "Now let thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word." In the large sense, McIntyre's work is done. He has got the world to pay attention to his voice crying in the wilderness. Now the consequences will play out according to their own momentum.

Because now the Hockey Stick Team has been exposed. The Team members have fiddled with the data; they have politicized the scientific publication process; they have had troublesome people fired.

And all the world knows it.

The Hockey Stick Team has had millions of dollars to play with. Other climate researchers have had billions to spend.

But one thing we can say today for sure. We do not have a scientific basis for spending trillions of dollars battling climate change. We just do not have the knowledge to justify it.

Especially now that we know that we can't trust the scientists doing the research.

Now It's Obama's "Boob Panels"

The current flap over breast-cancer screening illustrates the utter folly of the government-expert model for health care.

Recently the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force issued new guidelines for women getting mammograms to screen for breast cancer. It recommended that regular screenings not start till the age of 50.

Unfortunately, the government has been running a PR campaign for decades advising women to seek regular mammograms from the age of 40. Naturally the breast cancer activists are all in a tizzy, and now the White House has gotten into the act trying to damp down the firestorm. Reports Fox News:

The White House went on defense Wednesday about new government findings that advise against routine mammograms for women under 50, saying the guidelines are merely a recommendation and that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that produced the report out this week has "no power" to deny health care coverage.

Well, no. Of course not. No power. Not today. But this is just another outbreak of the "death panel" syndrome. Of course this is just an advisory from a government task force. But you can easily put two and two together and predict that down the road, when ObamaCare is desperately trying to reduce health care costs, that it will start to make the findings of advisory panels mandatory, and that the "boob panel" will decide when and where women can get mammograms.

This is not rocket science. It issues from the very concept of rational government by experts. You set up a bureaucratic program based on rational, scientific findings. You implement the rules uniformly, nationwide.

The problem here is with the whole concept of government health care. In a world of freedom women pay for most of their health care at the point of delivery. Women that believe themselves to be at risk of breast cancer based on family history or other causes pay to get regular mammograms. They discuss the risks with their doctors and they understand that there are risks associated with regular X-rays. No problem here, unless you can't afford a regular mammogram. In that case, you are dependent on the kindness of strangers.

But in the liberal government model, mammograms are a "benefit," paid for by the government-mandated health plan. Whether you like it or not, mammograms are included in the standard benefit package mandated by various government advisory panels. Or they are excluded by order of one of the government expert advisory panels. Now everyone is dependent on the kindness of strangers.

Only trouble that politicians and activists and experts are not kind. They have other interests: power, notoriety, fame, science. To them, any one woman worried about a strange lump in her breast is roadkill, unless she can be used as a helpless victim, a prop in a media report on New Hope for Cancer Sufferers. Even then she is roadkill.

So the solution is not to have dozens of advisory panels mandating this and that. The solution is to have a free and prosperous citizenry that can afford to pay for their own preventative care, if that is important to them, or not, if it is not.

This is important. You can spend you money on cancer screening, or maybe you want to spend it on better schooling for your child. Either way, you are taking a risk. Maybe you should spend the money on screening. Maybe the special enrichment program you send your kid to turns on a lightbulb and changes a life.

It's not a very hard concept to visualize. Not unless you mind is clouded by the idea that government experts make all these decisions: who should have breast examinations and where; which kids have enrichment programs and how.

The concept is called freedom.