Category Archives: Individualism Vs. Collectivism

Updated: Big Daddy Dodges Questions About Healthcare Diktat

Barack Obama, Healthcare, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Media, Propaganda, Rights, Socialism, Taxation

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos exposes BO’s thesaurus of excuses for what most media are euphemizing as “a mandate to buy health insurance,” also a tax.

Writes Stephanopoulos:

“…in our most spirited exchange, the President refused to accept the argument that a mandate to buy health insurance is equivalent to a tax.

Here it is:

STEPHANOPOULOS: You were against the individual mandate…

OBAMA: Yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: …during the campaign. Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don’t. How is that not a tax? …

[Observe the president’s slithering and sliming for yourself.]

STEPHANOPOULOS: I — I don’t think I’m making it up. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary: Tax — “a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.”

[SNIP]

BO’s ignorance and evasion would pose no major obstacle given the dogged devotion among the dogs of the media to minimizing and covering up Da Man’s many mistakes.

However, even this master of manipulation might find it hard to slither away from his latest faux paux: The Baucus bill reads:

Excise Tax. The consequence for not maintaining insurance would be an excise tax. If a taxpayer‘s MAGI is between 100-300 percent of FPL, the excise tax for failing to obtain coverage for an individual in a taxpayer unit (either as a taxpayer or an individual claimed as a dependent) is $750 per year. However, the maximum penalty for the taxpayer unit is $1,500. If a taxpayer‘s MAGI is above 300 percent of FPL the penalty for failing to obtain coverage for an individual in a taxpayer unit (either as a taxpayer or as an individual claimed as a dependent) is $950 year. However, the maximum penalty amount a family above 300 percent of FPL would pay is $3,800. [P. 29]

Of course, the Baucus-Obama coercion is simply a natural extension of the collectivization of choices. If the state is to become the custodian of every individual in this country, and assume the onus of their care—then said serfs cannot act as they please. Big Daddy puts it as follows:

[F]or us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore than the fact that right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase. People say to themselves, that is a fair way to make sure that if you hit my car, that I’m not covering all the costs.

Being a freeman and receiving freebies from the State are mutually exclusive. A pact with the devil has consequences. These will be bearable for the parasites who demand some form of taxpayer-subsidized care. Not so for those of us who yearn to live free.

Update: Here are a few pertinent points (which, naturally, do not address rights) made by Philip Klein of the American Spectator:

“While it is true that some people end up showing up in emergency rooms without paying and that imposes costs on others, there’s two things that Obama isn’t taking into account. First, just because you mandate coverage it doesn’t mean you elimate [sic] the uncompensated care. Second, if you have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on subsidies enabling people to purchase insurance, then that costs far more than whatever would be saved by reducing uncompensated care. … Many of those who are currently uninsured simply have very low health care costs, which they are willing to pay out of pocket when they get sick. The reason why Obama supports a mandate is that he wants to be able to force insurers to cover those with preexisting conditions, and the only way to do that is to bring uninsured healthy people into the system. So really, this isn’t about eliminating freeloaders, it’s about forcing healthy people to pay for more health care than they need to so that they can make premiums more affordable for the sick.” [My italics]

Updated: In The New Individualist

Ilana Mercer, Ilana On Radio & TV, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Media, Objectivism, Ron Paul

As soon as I complete the manuscript of my new book (plus/minus two months, for those who’ve kindly inquired), I hope to write regularly for The New Individualist. Under Sherrie Gossett’s capable editorial and stylistic tutelage, TNI is both sleek yet substantive, rather than tinny and ideological. The Summer 2009 issue of TNI features a piece by me: “The Lightweight: Meghan McCain stretches the bounds of the G.O.P.’s ‘big tent.'”

Do purchase this stylishly austere issue to show your support for this writer and the publisher. Featuring writers-cum-thinkers such as David Kelley and Roger Donway, you’ll be well-rewarded.

I’LL USE THIS SPACE to let you know that on Friday the 28th, I’ll be chatting to my old friend Chuck Wilder, nationally syndicated by CRN, Digital Talk Radio. Chuck’s show is “Talkback.” Topic: “B. Hussein In History Wonderland.” Time: 1:05 to 1:30 PM Pacific Time.

Update (August 27): Regarding Ron Paul and Objectivists: TNI has a new editor. Somehow I think the strident, almost neoconservative slant it had acquired is on the wane. Witness the publication of a piece by yours truly. I was pretty much persona non grata, for the most, in TNI’s previous permutation.

Co-op Or Co-optation?

Barack Obama, Democrats, Healthcare, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Regulation, Republicans, Socialism

As members of the two-party monopoly come together to hammer out a “compromise” on how best to send the health care we have to hell in a handcart, I thought you ought to know a bit about the co-op option; it is, after all, the buzzword being bandied about to replace the less-than soothing “public option” phrase. A co-op is “simply government-run health insurance by another name.” Over to Cato’s Michael D. Tanner:

“Now, if this was really going to be a co-op like rural electrical co-ops or your local health-food store — owned and controlled by its workers and the people who use its services — it would be a meaningless but harmless diversion. America already has some 1,300 insurance companies, so it’s hard to see what one more would add, but it would be unlikely to do much harm.

But these aren’t true co-ops. The members wouldn’t choose its officers — the president would. Plus, the secretary of Health and Human Services would have to approve its business plan, and thus could force it to offer whatever benefits, premiums and reimbursement schedules Washington wants. Finally, the federal government would provide start up, and possibly ongoing, subsidies.

[This is a] ‘co-op’ run by the federal government, under rules imposed by the federal government and with federal funding…

The Senate compromise also drops the job-killing employer-mandate that businesses provide their workers with health insurance or pay a penalty — and substitutes a more regressive employer mandate.

The compromise would have no specific mandate for employers to provide insurance. But any employer who failed to do so would have to pay the cost of all subsidies that the government provides his or her workers to help them pay for insurance on their own.

It is hard to see how this is different from any other employer mandate — except that it will hurt low-wage workers most.

Business owners care about the total cost of hiring a worker, not how that cost is apportioned between wages, taxes, health insurance or other benefits. If they have to pay the cost of subsidizing health insurance for their workers, employers will simply offset the added cost by lowering wages, reducing future wage increases, reducing other benefits (such as pensions), cutting back on hiring, laying off current workers, shifting workers from full-time to part-time or outsourcing.

It will ultimately be the worker who pays the subsidy’s cost. The government will be giving the worker a subsidy with one hand, and taking it back with the other. Does that make sense for any reason other than ‘compromise?'”

The complete Tanner piece here.

Michael D. Tanner is a Cato Institute senior fellow and the author of Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It.

Natural Politics In The Hell Hole Of New Haven

Affirmative Action, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Multiculturalism, Race, Racism

What happens when a “community” is no longer a community, but “a conglomeration of competing ethnic groups and social classes” like New York City, New Haven or the United States? The peerless Thomas Fleming breaks it down for us in “New Haven’s Poor Little Lambs.” We disagree only slightly in that although the backdrop to the case of the New Haven firefighters warrants cynicism, it doesn’t change the fact that men such as Ricci have been wronged, and that women like me think—as any right-thinking individual would—that Ricci et al should not “go gentle into that good night,” but put up one hell of a fight.

Over to Dr. Fleming:

“[If] blacks and Mexicans owned and operated New Haven, we should expect them to act on their own behalf. But, in fact, they transparently do not own and operate New Haven, which is actually controlled by a white elite, some of whose power is based on the ability to manipulate minorities and thus to suppress the upwardly mobile European ethnics. Some of the elite is a residue of the old Yankee WASP elite; some are Jews, and some are converts from the European ethnics, children of parents stupid enough to send them to Ivy League schools that destroyed their minds and characters. Like other members of the American Elite, the people who run Connecticut are anti-Christian leftists who despise all our country’s traditions. Instinctively, they aim at power through the shortest route possible—today, that is minority politicking and Marxism—but most of them appear genuine in their leftism. They really do think that black firemen fail intelligence tests because of the history of racism and discrimination.”

Read on.