Category Archives: Propaganda

Updated: Obama’s Politburo Of Proctologists

Barack Obama, Economy, Healthcare, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Political Economy, Propaganda, Regulation, Socialism

The excerpt is from my new, WND.COM column, “Obama’s Politburo Of Proctologists,” now on Taki’s Magazine:

“…The laws of supply and demand don’t answer to Barry the Bolshevik. Private practitioners and providers, in extant and nascent markets for medicine, must know that if The Man and his Machine bring in a ‘public option,’ offering coverage to whomever wants it, the marketplace will change. …

If you think the misallocation of bailout billions has been criminal, wait until Obama’s politburo of proctologists attempts to figure out how many Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanners to purchase for The Plan. Courtesy of bureaucratic calculus, the waiting time for an MRI scan in British Columbia, Canada, runs into weeks and even months; not ideal if you have a malignancy.

Yes, the hubris. Where the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics failed, the ‘United Socialist States of America’ will prevail. ….”

The complete column, “Obama’s Politburo Of Proctologists,” is now on WND.COM.

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

Updated (June 26): American healthcare is not “privatized”; it’s highly regulated. Still, it’s better than Canada care, which I’ve experienced (and nearly lost my daughter to), the UK’s, Cuba’s and North Korea’s, upon which the former two “systems” are modeled. American medicine vs. Canada care: never the twain shall meet. I’m not sure why readers are intent on looking at health care as a “system” needing the state’s ministrations, rather than as a service delivered to individuals by other highly skilled individuals. Perhaps the “food system” is bad in the US, as the population is so unhealthy. Perhaps, by logical extension, we should let the state supervise the food “system.” C’mon.

Updated: Obama's Politburo Of Proctologists

Barack Obama, Healthcare, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Political Economy, Propaganda, Regulation, Socialism

The excerpt is from my new, WND.COM column, “Obama’s Politburo Of Proctologists,” now on Taki’s Magazine:

“…The laws of supply and demand don’t answer to Barry the Bolshevik. Private practitioners and providers, in extant and nascent markets for medicine, must know that if The Man and his Machine bring in a ‘public option,’ offering coverage to whomever wants it, the marketplace will change. …

If you think the misallocation of bailout billions has been criminal, wait until Obama’s politburo of proctologists attempts to figure out how many Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanners to purchase for The Plan. Courtesy of bureaucratic calculus, the waiting time for an MRI scan in British Columbia, Canada, runs into weeks and even months; not ideal if you have a malignancy.

Yes, the hubris. Where the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics failed, the ‘United Socialist States of America’ will prevail. ….”

The complete column, “Obama’s Politburo Of Proctologists,” is now on WND.COM.

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

Updated (June 26): American healthcare is not “privatized”; it’s highly regulated. Still, it’s better than Canada care, which I’ve experienced (and nearly lost my daughter to), the UK’s, Cuba’s and North Korea’s, upon which the former two “systems” are modeled. American medicine vs. Canada care: never the twain shall meet. I’m not sure why readers are intent on looking at health care as a “system” needing the state’s ministrations, rather than as a service delivered to individuals by other highly skilled individuals. Perhaps the “food system” is bad in the US, as the population is so unhealthy. Perhaps, by logical extension, we should let the state supervise the food “system.” C’mon.

Update II: Medicine In The Missionary Position

Government, Healthcare, Hillary Clinton, Labor, Political Economy, Propaganda, Regulation, Socialism

During the recent ABC News Obama Health Care infomercial, Obama promised that his systems would work as the Mayo Clinic does, “where experts had figured out the most effective treatments and eliminated waste and unnecessary procedures.”

The key to Mayo, and many such private not-for-profits, is not its experts. Mayo clinic operates efficiently because it is a private clinic, where a mission and market forces are at play; and where entrepreneurs are still strongly motivated to make greater profits and avoid losses, so as to plow them back into an organization in which they are invested.

What’s the government’s mission? To get Americans into the missionary position?

Moreover, the institute of private property ensures that we have prices. Prices are like a compass: pegged to supply and demand they ensure the correct allocation of resources. Conversely, in a nationalized system there are no prices because there is no private property. Absent such knowledge, misallocation of capital is inevitable.

In freeing up medicine it is important, among other steps, to prohibit the American Medical Association from acting like a medieval guild, or a cartel, in curtailing freer entry into the medical profession, and thus reducing supply and pushing up prices.

The sick-making reality is that sixty-two percent of Americans support a so-called government insurance plan. Contrast that with the country that rejected Hilary Clinton’s Health Security Act (HAS) in 1993, lock-stock-and-barrel.

More on medicine in the missionary position in tonight’s WND column.

Update I: Roger, there are ample good products on the market for catastrophic insurance. We once had one. For the rest, we paid for our own very occasional routine visits, and because we paid cash, as you point out, it was always cheaper than the insurance price the doctors set. It’s sheer nonsense to say government must supply anything at all. I am always appalled by the lack of appreciation Americans show the marvelous markets. Not a day goes by when I don’t hear ads on the boob tube for affordable insurance. The last one I listened to was a $6 per-day offer for pretty comprehensive coverage. The problem is that the average immoral idiocrat believes that I should be taxed to pay for his care; the doctor ought to be enslaved in his service; and he ought to be able to spend the $6 on a six pack.

Keep your powder dry. There’s more to come tonight.

Update II (June 26): I appreciate the response in the Comments Section from the American Medical Association. However, in cahoots with the state, professional organizations, acting like trade unions, very often do act to protect their members by inadvertently limiting entry into the profession. Strong support for state licensure is one example.
The AMA draws up lists of approved schools and hospitals vis-a-vis internships, not so? It is instructive to note that lists of AMA and state-approved medical schools coincide. The AMA lays down the standards of practice and admission; the state enforces them, to mutual advantage.
It is this symbiotic, rent-seeking relationship that the AMA would have to relinquished for the sake of a proliferation of providers and products.
(Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, in Block et al.)

Update II: 'The Narcissism Revolution'

America, Democracy, Foreign Policy, History, Intelligence, Iran, Old Right, Propaganda

Richard Spencer of Taki’s Magazine makes astute observations about the cloying American coverage of what he dubs “The Narcissism Revolution.” “The blogosphere has been far worse. If Republicans are saying, ‘We’re all Iranians now!’ then with the bloggers it’s, ‘The Iranians are all Americans now!’ It’s the Narcissism Revolution, and everything that happens in Tehran is, pretty much, all about us.”

Richard captures the self-absorption madness. To apply his whipping words to McCain (they were meant for Jonah Goldberg): “Hate to break it to [you], but [Iranians] don’t like you, they really don’t like you.”

Does anyone think Iranians are hanging on the words of the sanctimonious moron who let loose with the ditty, “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran”? I don’t think so.

I don’t get the National Geographic Channel. My impression is that it’s stacked with skirts such as Lisa Ling, transmitting the propaganda du jour, as they travel through “dying” forests and straddle “dissolving” icecaps.

Now that Ling is preoccupied getting her sister free after the latter was caught nosing around in North Korea, they’ve allowed an intelligent man, in-the-know, to impart to a mind-numbingly ignorant people something of the history of American interference with Iran.

I believe Michael Scheuer is associated with “Iran and the West,” although I can’t see his name among the list of credits.

It should be worth watching.

Update I (June 22): “The Narcissism Revolution” is in full swing. Glenn Beck, indistinguishable from the neocons on foreign affairs, entertained a guest on his show, from one of the Spread Democracy think tanks. The man said, and I paraphrase, “the Iranians are holding up signs in English; they are speaking to us.” As Spencer observed, “It’s all about us.” The same contention I’ve heard made repeatedly by the Republican Mullahs.

Update II (June 23): A good post by Prof. Bainbridge, who conjures Russel Kirk in support of the paleo-libertarian, in my case, (paleo-conservative in Buchanan’s case) mitts-off approach to Iran:

Of Bush 41’s war on Saddam, Kirk wrote that: “Now indubitably Saddam Hussein is unrighteous; but so are nearly all the masters of the “emergent” African states (with the Ivory Coast as a rare exception), and so are the grim ideologues who rule China, and the hard men in the Kremlin, and a great many other public figures in various quarters of the world. Why, I fancy that there are some few unrighteous men, conceivably, in the domestic politics of the United States. Are we to saturation-bomb most of Africa and Asia into righteousness, freedom, and democracy? And, having accomplished that, however would we ensure persons yet more unrighteous might not rise up instead of the ogres we had swept away? Just that is what happened in the Congo, remember, three decades ago; and nowadays in Zaire, once called the Belgian Congo, we zealously uphold with American funds the dictator Mobutu, more blood-stained than Saddam. And have we forgotten Castro in Cuba?” To which one might now add Hamas in Gaza.

Kirk pointed out that the policies of Bush 41 resulted in a situation in which, “in every continent, the United States is resented increasingly as the last and most formidable of imperial systems.”

Bush 43 made that situation even worse by trying to impose democracy by military means.

And that’s what paleos despise.

Concludes Bainbridge: “I’ve changed my mind in recent days about Obama’s handling of this issue. On this issue, I think he’s being remarkably prudent in Kirk’s sense of the word.”