Category Archives: Liberty

Update III: Code Blue! How Canada Care Nearly Killed My Kid

Healthcare, Human Accomplishment, Liberty, Natural Law, Regulation, Socialism, The State

The excerpt is from my new WND.COM column, “Code Blue! How Canada Care Nearly Killed My Kid,” now on Taki’s Magazine:

“Code Blue Intensive Care Unit,” “Code Blue Intensive Care Unit”:

When the Code-Blue alarm sounded over the hospital’s loudspeaker system, my husband and I knew it sounded for our daughter. It was 11:00 at night. The hallways of the British Columbia hospital were dark. Only one emergency operating theater was in use. She was in it. The skeletal staff came running. Resuscitation carts were rushed toward the theater.

My own heart nearly stopped, because she is my heart.

To follow Dr. David Gratzer’s plainspoken definition (the good doctor is a Canada-care whistle blower), Code Blue is “the term used when a patient’s heart stops and hospital staff must leap into action to save him.” My then 12-year-old had stopped breathing on the operating table and was being revived. …

A cursory investigation into why [my daughter] coded that night was conducted. The findings were, conveniently, inconclusive. …

If you want to understand why the “subpar care Nicky had received” was just “a day in the life of a patient interned in a state-run health care system,” read the complete column, “Code Blue,” now on Taki’s Magazine. That’s where you can catch the weekly fare every Saturday.

Update I (July 31): The child can take pain. As a child, she suffered from severe asthma, which runs in the family (a great uncle died during an attack). My child’s heroic stoic composure during some of the procedures she endured in the course of this deadly disease—I cannot praise enough.

Update II: Readers: please make a habit of posting your comments to the blog, rather than sending them to me. I cannot answer all letters (although I try). Besides which other BAB posters here will often respond eloquently to your questions about liberty.

Rebutting those who say that my experience is typical of private establishments as well lies in advancing rights-based and utilitarian/economic arguments—you must address natural rights, and the structure of incentives in socialized systems. I speak to those issue in my work, regularly; have for years. But I also explain in the current column why this episode is certainly par for the course in the sphere of the “public option.”

Please check out the Articles Archive under socialized medicine and natural rights. The Barely A Blog archive (search “Socialism,” “Regulations,” and “Health & Fitness”) is a good source too, as we’ve conducted extensive debates on this lively forum.

I’m afraid that defending liberty demands the STUDY of—and familiarity with—principles. In other words, some work, a mental effort. Quick answers won’t replace the work liberty’s defenders must do. All too often readers demand quickies. Intellectual sloth extends to not even searching my accessible web and blog databases.

Begin by signing up for the Mercer Weekly Newsletter.

Update III: Socialist America Sinking

America, Founding Fathers, IMMIGRATION, Journalism, Liberty, Old Right, Political Philosophy, Socialism, Taxation

In “Socialist America Sinking,” Pat The Patriot pulls open and holds back a curtain to reveal what the blind and bombastic leadership and commentariat don’t see: an America in permanent decline, “far … off the course the Founding Fathers set for our republic”:

“In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson called George III a tyrant for having ‘erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.’

What did George III do with his Stamp Act, Townshend Acts or tea tax to compare with what is being done to this generation of Americans by their own government?

While the hardest-working and most productive are bled, a third of all wage-earners pay no U.S. income tax, and Obama plans to free almost half of all wage-earners of all income taxes. Yet, tens of millions get Medicaid, rent supplements, free education, food stamps, welfare and an annual check from Uncle Sam called an Earned Income Tax Credit, though they never paid a nickel in income taxes.

Coming to America to feast on this cornucopia of freebies is the world. One million to 2 million immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive every year. They come with fewer skills and less education than Americans, and consume more tax dollars than they contribute by three to one.

Wise Latina women have more babies north of the border than they do in Mexico and twice as many here as American women.

As almost all immigrants are now Third World people of color, they qualify for ethnic preferences in hiring and promotions and admissions to college over the children of Americans.

All of this would have astounded and appalled the Founding Fathers, who after all, created America – as they declared loud and clear in the Constitution – ‘for ourselves and our posterity.'”

[SNIP]

A must read, as is the case with most of Mr. Buchanan’s columns. He is assuredly one of the few patriots left among the government-fed news filters.

Update I July 20): Actually, there is no chance of “turning things around”—not so long as the US practices unfettered immigration, importing millions of people each year, into a country that no longer transmits or practices its founding values. The nature of immigration policies is such that it ensures most newcomers will end up consuming rather than paying taxes, and voting for more and more Statism. I wish people would realize that there will be no liberty when America is a Third World country. The reason Americans refuse to articulate this simple fact—that the American people are being dissolve and a new people elected—is, I suspect, because they are brainwashed about the wonders of diversity and multiculturalism, and have been taught that America is nothing without this tsunami of immigrants.

So no, Pat knows as I do that it’s all over. Pat is sad. Smart people will be sad.

Update II: Myron; you misunderstand Pat, who is 100% correct in his assertion about taxpayers vs. tax consumers. He is referring to those people–50% or so–who get back more from you and me than they pay in all taxes combined. I call them net tax consumers.

Update III: As I mentioned, people refuse to concede–are unable to due to a hippie, left-liberal state of mind—that not all immigrants come to this country to be rugged individualists. In fact, most are lured by a generous welfare state. Or, as I have pointed out a million times in immigration columns; one productive immigrant brings in a tribe (under the family reunification program), which falls to you and me to support.

The premise for our good reader’s optimism is precisely what has just been said: the goodness of the immigrants the law selects. So what if the economy is rapidly being socialized? There are still a few Atlases who carry the $13 trillion economy on their weakening backs. It takes a while to break the backs of the best. Decades hence, immigration will slow. Until then, the hordes will come to feed at the trough, which is still relatively full compared to other troughs.

But as I complain again and again, a liberal state of mind among Americans refuses to recognize that American immigration policy guarantees that socialism spread like kudzu. But since we have a mixed economy; not one in which all the means of production are nationalized, there are still a sufficient number of good people for the parasites—via the state—to feast upon for decades to come.

A July 4th Toast To Thomas Jefferson & The Anglo-Saxon Tradition

Founding Fathers, Government, History, IMMIGRATION, Liberty, Natural Law, The West

The excerpt is from my new WND.COM column, “A July 4th Toast To Thomas Jefferson,” a version of which was first published by VDARE.COM:

“The Declaration of Independence—whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate this Saturday—has been mocked out of meaning.

To be fair to the liberal establishment, ordinary Americans are not entirely blameless. For most, Independence Day means firecrackers and cookouts. The Declaration doesn’t feature. In fact, contemporary Americans are less likely to read it now that it is easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.

Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. Printer John Dunlap had worked “through the night” to set the full text on “a handsome folio sheet,” recounts historian David Hackett Fischer in “Liberty and Freedom.” And President (of the Continental Congress) John Hancock urged that the “people be universally informed.”

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, called it “an expression of the American Mind.” An examination of Jefferson’s constitutional thought makes plain that he would no longer consider the mind of a McCain, an Obama, or the collective mentality of the liberal establishment, “American” in any meaningful way.” …

The complete column, “A July 4th Toast To Thomas Jefferson,” is now on WND.COM.

Miss the weekly column on WND.COM? Catch it on Taki’s Magazine every Saturday.

A July 4th Toast To Thomas Jefferson & The Anglo-Saxon Tradition

Founding Fathers, Government, History, IMMIGRATION, Liberty, Natural Law, The West

The excerpt is from my new WND.COM column, “A July 4th Toast To Thomas Jefferson,” a version of which was first published by VDARE.COM:

“The Declaration of Independence—whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate this Saturday—has been mocked out of meaning.

To be fair to the liberal establishment, ordinary Americans are not entirely blameless. For most, Independence Day means firecrackers and cookouts. The Declaration doesn’t feature. In fact, contemporary Americans are less likely to read it now that it is easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.

Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. Printer John Dunlap had worked “through the night” to set the full text on “a handsome folio sheet,” recounts historian David Hackett Fischer in “Liberty and Freedom.” And President (of the Continental Congress) John Hancock urged that the “people be universally informed.”

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, called it “an expression of the American Mind.” An examination of Jefferson’s constitutional thought makes plain that he would no longer consider the mind of a McCain, an Obama, or the collective mentality of the liberal establishment, “American” in any meaningful way.” …

The complete column, “A July 4th Toast To Thomas Jefferson,” is now on WND.COM.

Miss the weekly column on WND.COM? Catch it on Taki’s Magazine every Saturday.