One of the more frustrating things I find when engaging others in political discussions, is that some people seemingly have either an unwillingness or inability to contemplate how too much of a good thing can still be bad.

I say frustrating, because it’s intuitive to understand this.  As Paracelsus was quoted saying centuries ago:

“Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.”

But even without that thought, it seems as if examples are around us daily.  The easiest one to spot is the current tax code.  Looking at individual deductions, it’s easy to see why most exist.  Deductions for raising children or owning a home or small business tax cuts for those hiring or charitable deductions…..etc, etc, etc – They all seem innocuous by themselves.  Even if you disagree with some specifics, the arguments seem valid.

Yet you transition from this basic idea of rewarding people for certain actions through the tax code, to today and you end up with (here):

…the current tax code is 60K pages of government sponsored corruption where the normal citizen or even the IRS agent has little idea exactly what all 60K pages means together, but special interests, nonprofits, businesses, and others all work to make the code a little better for themselves. (Freedomworks – Top Ten Reasons to Scrape the Code here)….

The criminal & regulatory codes are no better.  Their infinite complexity and shear volume, promotes the same corrupt, rent seeking behavior (ever wonder why health care reform is 1600 pages?).

This complexity inherent in all these laws and regulations creates not only rent seeking behavior, but also makes it easier for those in power who wish to abuse others through the system to be able to do so.  You see, once the system has become so complex, then even the average citizen runs the very real risk of unintentionally being on the other side of the law.  When enough people are on the other side of the law, then you get selective enforcement.

But when you’re a Senator and there are potential political points to score…. the trees are just too pretty to worry about that whole forest thingy, so you add more to it by introducing legislation to ban a specific crib because of 32 infant deaths since 2000.

Even on the merits, this law isn’t needed as the 32 deaths weren’t all by the same failure in the drop-down crib (via government’s own report) and no one has yet made any claim that the design itself is the reason for the deaths:

…CPSC has also received reports of 20 other drop side incidents, 12 of which involved the drop side detaching in a corner of the crib. In two of these incidents, a child became entrapped. One child suffered bruising from the entrapment. There are five reports of children falling out of the cribs due to drop side detachment. One child suffered a broken arm as a result of the fall.

In addition, CPSC has received 8 reports of mattress support detachment in these cribs. Due to the space created by the detachment, three children became entrapped between the crib frame and the sagging mattress and four children crawled out of the crib. There was one report of cuts and bruises….

What they found was this was actually the products from one single manufacturer which  is now out of business.  The report goes further to note:

…Due to the fact that Generation 2 went out of business in 2005, CPSC has limited information about the cribs. Although CPSC does not know the total number of units distributed or the years of production, it is believed that there were more than 500,000 of these cribs sold to consumers…..

Which means, that even out of the number of products sold by this one company, the government doesn’t have any real information on such things as failure rates.  32 out of 500K is a small failure rate (assuming all failures can be attributed to product failure versus other causes like improper installation).  Combine that with the knowledge that these numbers are guesses and only include one single company, our Senator should think of herself as being on shaky ground.

The calculus for any potential opponents however is obvious:  lots of potential downside when being labeled as pro-infant death and very little upside as few people seem to care.

So for now, while the trees might know the forest exists and vice versa, until voters are able and willing to contemplate the difference, we will simply continue to lose sight of one in favor of the other.

Being reported @ Politico, there’s once again some new polling data out that is both semi-understandable and interminably frustrating (here):

…The Quinnipiac polls, conducted in three states across the past month, all find likely voters to have complex and contradictory views on these repeal lawsuits as well as health care reform itself.

By a slight majority, likely voters tend to oppose the health care reform law. But they also tend to oppose the repeal lawsuits as a “bad idea” that would, for a sizeable portion of voters, make them “less likely” to support a given candidate….

Which seems roughly equivalent to wanting to win the football game, but not really wanting to deal with scoring points…. or as Politico reports:

…In short, voters simultaneously don’t want to [sic] health care reform but don’t want to challenge it either…

There is a scientific explanation for this called cognitive dissonance (DA posts here).  There’s also some logical evidence that helps explain why we as humans seek to reduce anything seen as contentious by the rest of society.

It’s frustrating because time and time again it seems the majority does understand that government is not some Utopian solution.  For instance, they seem to understand that the current tax code is 60K pages of government sponsored corruption where the normal citizen or even the IRS agent has little idea exactly what all 60K pages means together, but special interests, nonprofits, businesses, and others all work to make the code a little better for themselves. (Freedomworks – Top Ten Reasons to Scrape the Code here).

Yet polls showing voter disgust, such as the dismally low congressional approval ratings, only show feelings.  The reality is even with rates of congressional approval as low as 16%, the rate for the election of incumbents is well over 90%.

There’s a Japanese Proverb that begins with “Vision without action is daydream.”  Well, here we are, proving, that some truths are universal.  Proving that believing in something strongly or knowing something real well is meaningless if never acted upon.

Use a simple analogy to prove this true – what good is the best doctor in the world without patients or students?  What good would have come out of Newton’s genius, or Salk’s genius, if their abilities were followed up by only inaction?

The only good thing that can really be said about genius without action, is that it doesn’t directly harm anyone.  You can make a moral argument that Salk had some level of obligation to help since he could, but inactive genius shouldn’t be the main concern as the real problems will come from people acting without understanding.

& there’s where the second 1/2 of the proverb comes “Action without vision is nightmare. ”

Too bad we’re seemingly in a society today where both are true depending only upon the group in question.

I have long been of the belief that our President is not stupid.  He’s always seemed very smart, especially with respect to Constitutional law.

For instance, in 2001, he stated correctly, that the Constitution is a charter which guarantees negative liberties.  For some this might seem obvious, but I doubt most of our current politicians understand what he meant and what is meant by the statement itself.

Now Mr. Obama’s policies belie the notion that he agrees the Constitution should be a defender of only negative liberties, but I think it was an instructive quote on his understanding of the fundamental principles which made America what it is.

Irregardless, over the time of his presidency, I’ve seen more clues to insecurity and lack of basic focus through the administration’s constant attempts to attack various news outlets and pundits directly, as well as the President’s comments without teleprompters.

& Last week was little exception.  @ Newsweek Blogs, Mr. Obama, when being asked about the new SCOTUS nominee stated (here):

“I don’t have litmus tests around any of these issues, but I will say that I want somebody who is going to be interpreting our Constitution in a way that takes into account individual rights, and that includes women’s rights, and that is going to be something that is very important to me.”

With all due respect to the President and anyone who agrees with this statement, but logically individual rights are mutually exclusive to “women’s” rights.

By definition, an individual right would be one that can be held and exercised by any individual, whereas any collective right, such as women’s rights, is the exact opposite; a right held by that group.

Maybe this is overly pedantic, but words have meanings & regardless of what “ism” might or might not be practiced by this administration, collectivist thought is the enemy as it serves as the basis for most of the world’s failed political philosophies.

As Calvin Coolidge stated:

“Liberty  is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty.”

To me, and indeed historically, that a fear society & freed society are mutually exclusive.

& like all consistent lessons from history, we haven’t seemed to have learned this lesson and seem to be determined to repeat it.

Towards that end, the Wall Street Journal online published two articles on Friday, under the shared title, Undressing the Terror Threat. The first article by Paul Campos & Nate Silver explains correctly:

…The world’s greatest nation seems bent on subjecting itself to a similarly humiliating defeat, by playing a game that could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts as long as there are terrorists who want to harm Americans; and

(2) If terrorists should manage to kill or injure or seriously frighten any of us, they win.

These rules help explain the otherwise inexplicable wave of hysteria that has swept over our government in the wake of the failed attempt by a rather pathetic aspiring terrorist to blow up a plane on Christmas Day. For two weeks now, this mildly troubling but essentially minor incident has dominated headlines and airwaves, and sent politicians from the president on down scurrying to outdo each other with statements that such incidents are “unacceptable,” and that all sorts of new and better procedures will be implemented to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

Meanwhile, millions of travelers are being subjected to increasingly pointless and invasive searches and the resultant delays, such as the one that practically shut down Newark Liberty International Airport last week, after a man accidentally walked through the wrong gate, or Tuesday’s incident at a California airport, which closed for hours after a “potentially explosive substance” was found in a traveler’s luggage. (It turned out to be honey.)…

The authors make a very good point here, though I do object to the term “rather pathetic aspiring terrorist”… as I saw on a blog somewhere in retort “What you really need are suicide bombers with experience!”.

Beyond that, they then try to take some statistics too far.  Using murder & suicide rates to show how are fears aren’t lined up with a real assessment of risks, they write:

…The country’s homicide rate is approximately six times higher than that of most other developed nations; we have 15,000 more murders per year than we would if the rate were comparable to that of otherwise similar countries. Americans own around 200 million firearms, which is to say there are nearly as many privately owned guns as there are adults in the country. In addition, there are about 200,000 convicted murderers walking free in America today (there have been more than 600,000 murders in America over the past 30 years, and the average time served for the crime is about 12 years)….

Taking those numbers, they conclude that which doesn’t follow:

…Given these statistics, there is little doubt that banning private gun ownership and making life without parole mandatory for anyone convicted of murder would reduce the homicide rate in America significantly….

& Even though they aren’t advocating such a policy, they basically state that the number of guns in private hands necessarily affects either homicide or suicide rates.

I think this ignores the historical evidence that governments typically ban weapons prior to mass murdering their own citizens, but it also isn’t proven by the numbers they give.  Because regardless of how people kill themselves or others, removing the primary instrument doesn’t necessarily means those actions will halt.  Lastly of course, even that assumes the government has the ability to remove the primary instrument in question, which is highly unlikely.

Either way, overall they use the example that is hysteria over terrorism to show parallels to the war on drugs, traffic accidents, and other risks to conclude:

…What then is to be done? A little intelligence and a few drops of courage remind us that life is full of risk, and that of all the risks we confront in America every day, terrorism is a very minor one. Taking prudent steps to reasonably minimize the tiny threat we face from a few fanatic criminals need not grant them the attention they crave….

The thing is that I agree with the authors’ basic premise, or what seems to be their basic premise, that fear based policies are wrong, even though I disagree with the facts they’ve lined up and think that using terrorism as too narrow an example has severely undermined their case.

First, while it’s certainly true that the gap between objective terrorism threats and hysterical policies seems large, there are valid reasons for that.  They discuss one, which is we need to focus money on preventing mass catastrophes such as a nuclear detonation, but they fail to mention the organizations themselves and how they differ from murder in general.

It’s true, that in any free society, a lone nut, bent on killing others, will have the opportunity to do so and there’s little we can do, while maintaining a free society to prevent that from happening.

However, were terrorism and even gangs, the mob, and other criminal organizations differ is that we have to attack those organizations directly.  Dealing with each instance of terrorism as non-related criminal events is exactly what allows their organizations to gain grounds on operational abilities.  Ignoring the organization therefore, seems to dictate a increase in the likelihood of a major incident.

Outside these specific critiques however, I think our society has become very easily motivated by fears instead of reason and logic.  When we allow victims of drunk driving incidents dictate the driving laws, or say a murdered victim’s family members to seek emotional healing through a policy of revenge, or use those in the most destitute of scenarios to control medical policy… whatever it is, if  we allow fear to take a hold of our government policy, new legislation, or even on a personal level, allowing fear to control our own lives… if we allow this, we should at least be doing so with the knowledge that it’s not conducive to freedom.

Detailed Abstractions has more articles about fear based policies here, here, & here.

For months since the reelection of Iranian President Dictator, protests against the Islamic regime have ebbed and flowed.  DA (Detailed Abstractions) covered the reelection farse  here & here.  While the news was dismal, massive protests started in June and continue to this day.  The most recent protests staged on December 7th (via CNN):

Now I’m not a big fan of protests in most of the free world, but these students deserve the world’s attention.  Unlike protests in America, their heroic protests are done in the face of threats of violence against not only the protestors, but their families as well  (@Stratfor):

…Iranian Prosecutor General Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei announced Dec. 8 that “intelligence and security … forces have been ordered not to give any leeway to those who break the law, act against national security and disturb public order.”  He added that “families are responsible too if their children are arrested. They will have no right to complain.”…

Lest we forget though, every totalitarian terrorist regime in the world, is only beating  people for their own good:

“Our people can no longer take this… it is our duty to defend the rights of the people.”

That’s right – the regime is taking that stance that by actively preventing free speech through threats of violence tothe  protestors and their families they are in some way preserving the rights of others.

As Plato said:

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

Is it just me or does Vice President Joe Biden actually appear to be a non-member of the White House staff?

I could be seeing patterns where they don’t exist, but it seems that each time Mr. Biden opens his mouth, the WH either ignores it completely or attempts to restate it.

Remember  the swine flu thing? (at NPR):

“I would tell members of my family — and I have — that I wouldn’t go anywhere in confined places now,” Vice President Joe Biden said today as he made the rounds of the morning TV news shows. “It’s not just going into Mexico. If you’re any place in a confined aircraft and one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft.”…

Followed shortly thereafter by WH clarification (LA Times):

…”I think the vice president misrepresented what the vice president wanted to say,” said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs….

Later in the day, Gibbs was pressed about the discrepancy between Biden’s original words and the White House’s.

“I understand what he said. I’m telling you what he meant to say,” Gibbs said…

After proving his immense knowledge of swine flu, he went on to call Russia a crumbling system (@ Washington Times):

…Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was forced Sunday to correct publicly Mr. Biden’s characterization of Russia as a crumbling country, a description that infuriated Russian officials and contradicted President Obama’s efforts to “reset” relations with the world power….

Just like that one crazy uncle, he’s the comedic gift that keeps on giving.  This week, as the White House has pushed hard to show how the stimulus has worked, Mr. Biden started using words like “depression” (@ ABC News):

In recent weeks, Vice President Joe Biden has said that the U.S. economy has been in what he calls “a great recession” and has stressed that it is not a depression, echoing the general consensus of the nation’s economists.

But today the vice president took some liberty with the economic terms to illustrate the continuing struggles of the unemployed in the United States.

For the millions of Americans without a job, “it’s a depression,” Biden said….

In fact, not only does Biden seem to misrepresent the curent administration’s positions, he isn’t even internally consistent (ABC News):

…Just two weeks ago, Biden said that he calls the current state of the economy “the great recession” because it’s “the single worst economic circumstance” the United States has been in, “short of a depression.”

On Oct. 2, Biden said that “fears of a depression have been replaced by forecasts of recovery” and on Sept. 3 Biden said that “instead of talking about the beginning of a depression, we’re talking about the end of a recession eight months after taking office.”…

Now it’s true that some statements made by VPs are seemingly stupid only because the VP is being pushed to say things the President can ‘t.  This is especially true during campaigns, but also during any actual administration.

Either way – I’m truly torn.  On the one hand, I honestly hope Mr. Biden starts getting invited to WH briefings in order to reduce his perceived idiocy on the world stage.  On the other hand – almost every time he talks, I get a good laugh.

For more than 20 years now, with legislation leading back almost 40 years, the United States government has been pushing the idea that every citizen should have a home.

Based upon several studies showing high correlations with positive societal behavior for homeowners, politicians, leaders, non-profits, lots of people pushed for easier access to affordable housing.  In a Federal Reserve report published in 1999, they state:

A number of recent studies attempt to measure whether there are nontraditional benefits to homeownership, such as increases in the success of children (Green and White [5]), citizenship (DiPasquale and Glaeser [3]), and a variety of family outcomes and attitudes (Rossi and Weber [11])….

This is only 1/2 the story of course.  What these studies, our politicians, our leaders, & the rest of them  can’t conclude from this data is whether home ownership actually affects any of these additional traits.  The study itself hints at this:

…Because of the preferential tax treatment accorded homeowners, particularly low-income homeowners, and the large degree of wealth accumulated in housing, these authors argue that it is important to know the full range of homeownership benefits and costs. However, given the difficulty of credibly assigning causality to housing externalities, it is not surprising that such factors have been previously ignored.

In one such paper, Green and White [5] find a strong statistical correlation between homeownership and the likelihood of dropping out of school or becoming pregnant. Yet a reasonable interpretation of their result is that of omitted variable bias. Clearly, homeowners are different from renters along a variety of dimensions. As a result, those factors that are latent in their work, such as parental skills, interest in the educational process, wealth, and family stability, potentially bias upward any homeownership effect….

In other studies, they show correlations between home ownership & wealth accumulation, to help give more force to the “everyone needs a home” meme (study dated 2004):

For many years the federal government has promoted homeownership as an important goal for low-income families. A primary motivation of this policy goal is the concept that owner-occupied housing can be an important means of wealth accumulation, particularly for those lower-income and minority families that are able to purchase homes….

They as well admit the difficulty with this assessment:

…However, very little has been done in the housing literature to determine the importance of housing and non-housing sources of wealth accumulation. This determination has been difficult to address for three reasons. First, detailed wealth information on families is seldom available on a consistent basis. Second, such information on wealth is even less likely to be available over time so that changes in wealth can be observed. Third, the process of housing wealth accumulation is dynamic. Housing wealth accumulation depends critically on how soon a family that is renting becomes a homeowner, whether or not the family graduates to more highly valued owned units over time, or becomes a renter again and never regains homeownership….

With the current practice of press & political standards however, you might be hard pressed to find any evidence that assigning non-traditional benefits to home ownership is anything but an unqualified good.  The majority of reports dealing with low income housing stimulus are positive  (here & here).

In some cases, overly emotional logic is used (here):

After business dried up in May, Jodi Morris’ employer, an insurance agent, stopped sending paychecks.

Since then, the 43-year-old single mother has had to sell almost all of her furniture – her kitchen table and chairs, bed frames, dresser and armoire, and living room set – to pay the bills.  Morris and her 7-year-old daughter, Karly, now sleep on mattresses on the floor of their two-bedroom Ahwatukee apartment. And with no table, the two eat dinner on their cream-colored couch.

An eviction notice that arrived this month threatened to put Morris and Karly out on the street.  But Morris could be the first Phoenix resident to receive a lifeline from the federal government that seeks to rescue those on the verge of homelessness….

& without exception, our government is not immune.  The US government is right now, before the housing crisis even fully contracts (I wrote about it here), spending money to help low income families purchase homes.

Even before the housing crisis though, economists, experts, non-profits, were asking whether home ownership should be considered an unqualified good.  Unfortunately, reports questioning these basic assumptions are a very low percentage compared to the constant noise.

In some cases, even questioning the wisdom of subsidizing low income home ownership has resulted in kill the messenger attacks from non-profit groups, community leads, and even Democratic leadership, by leveling charges of racism.  With a simple misdirection trick, questioning the basic assumptions is anti-low income & since low-income households are generally minorities, questioning these assumptions must be due to institutional racism.   Politicians and leaders everywhere have a grand ole time setting up straw men in a fields of hay while standing by with gasoline and matches, but we should expect more.  We should expect to be able to ask all relevant questions we can and to get answers to as many questions as possible.  Lastly, we should let the data lead to its natural conclusion.

Assuming we truly want the best answers we can get and the best progress we can have, we must be willing to ask tough questions and live with the answers reality presents.

Anything less is little better than just allowing random superficial rhetoric to control policy.  It’s almost like we never moved away from the world Richard Feynman spoke about in 1974:

…But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFOS, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I’ve concluded that it’s not a scientific world.

Over at the Huffington Post, Keli Goff wrote an interesting, yet disturbingly short sighted piece about particular health care costs which exist in large part due to personal private choices.

She begins the piece titled Mad at Greedy Insurers for This Health Care Mess? Then Why Aren’t You Mad at Your Greedy Neighbors discussing the government’s bail out of private businesses:

Raise your hand if you are still filled with anger when you hear the name AIG and picture the more than $100 million of your tax dollars that were delegated–without your consent–for employee bonuses there.

Now raise your hand if you were angry when you learned that Citigroup (which has received so much bailout money that American taxpayers have been dubbed “its major stockholder”) was planning to spend $50 million of your money on a luxury jet….

Even though the numbers she sights are a far cry from the actual tax dollars given to private business, she uses the anger over the bail outs to compare with the lack of anger of health care costs related to personal choice:

…There is something inherently distasteful about being expected to foot the tax bill for someone else’s personal choices–particularly bad ones–and not being given any choice of your own in the matter. Which is why I am so surprised that there has been so little anger expressed by leaders on either side of the health care debate when it comes to the issue of personal choice and responsibility in health care…

…According to the Centers for Disease Control, “obesity costs our nation as much as $147 billion per year in direct health care costs and lost productivity.” And according to the nation’s oldest anti-smoking organization smoking costs taxpayers a whopping $300 billion dollars annually, or 1,000 times the amount of the AIG bonuses….

Utilizing this ratio of anger levels contrasted with actual dollars, she follows through by discussing the trait both costs have in common, personal responsibility:

…Some health care reform advocates will argue these costs would be lower if there were government subsidized health care, but my question is why should the government, specifically taxpayers, subsidize health care costs for conditions that are not only preventable but essentially chosen by the patient? With all of the anger surrounding the health care debate, at town halls, in the House and Senate, where is the anger about personal responsibility?…

Like many before her, she perfectly frames the clear distinction between individual actions which don’t harm others and societal responsibility.  She uses our innate disgust of having to foot the bill for the negative consequences of others and sees the fundamental issue of both problems.

If only she had stopped there.  If only she understood clearly that when I hurt myself, I should be the only one liable for the resolution, we’d be in total agreement.  Instead, she illogically assumes that individual responsibility is shared among all citizens:

…To be clear, personal responsibility is not only up to consumers.  Mayor Bloomberg’s success in curbing smoking in New York is due to a multi-pronged strategy of aggressively fining bars and restaurants that allow patrons to flout the anti-smoking ban and raising the cost of cigarettes, in essence targeting the dealer as much as the addict….

Not only is responsibility shared in her view, but government force is also the solution.  Therefore since targeting these “bad smoking” behaviors has coincided with a decrease in the number of smokers , why not continue these policies to control other “bad” behaviors?

…A similar strategy should be undertaken federally against fatty foods and drinks (including many of the ones I love).  But as long as groups like the AFL-CIO oppose efforts to hold Americans financially accountable for their personal health choices, so that the system can afford to treat those who do not choose to be sick…

Thinking more critically though, this turns out to be very short sighted thinking devoid of any historical context and antithetical to fundamental human behavior.  Indeed, I think most people agree with her that when people make bad decisions that affect only themselves, they should be solely responsible for the consequences.

Where she fails is in properly analyzing government as the solution.  If one fully analyzes her solution, the lack of follow through in her thinking becomes easily spotted.

First, we know that human behaviors are heavily influenced by incentives.  It’s natural and obvious; we do things that benefit us.  For those willing to see reality for what it is, examples are all around us.  We can see it in the use of commission programs for corporate sales force.  We see it in TV commercials and marketing campaigns.  We even see it in the tax code.   Through denial or lack of contemplation though, some fail to see that this same fundamental human behavior also affects our decisions as they relate to health care.

In fact, one of the reasons for rising health care costs and bad personal choices is individual consumers have been moved further and further away from the actual cost.   In the US, part of rise in health care costs can be attributed to  government incentives which pushed health care plans away from individuals and towards employers.  For the same reason, others countries with socialized medicine also see rapidly rising costs of health care.

Second, we also know that historically, when governments are given the power continue to assume more and more control over individual lives, it ends in tyranny.  As we allow government to assume more responsibility for individual actions, we necessitate their ability to control those actions.

Assuming we still believe in a free society, one of the prices we pay is having the responsibility for the negative consequences brought about by our choices.

For instance, if you smoke – society doesn’t owe you CHEMO.  If I you eat 30K calories a day – society doesn’t owe you gastric bypass surgery.  If you drink a bottle of whiskey a day – society doesn’t owe you a liver.

However, by not of following the logic of her solutions and ignoring historical contexts, she can safely and happily assume government control is the answer:

…So the next time you are reminded of how angry you are at AIG or any other institution that was “bailed out” with your money, just remember that AIG may have mugged you once, but McDonald’s and your neighbor keeping them in business (and whoever invented the doughnut, bacon cheeseburger), will be sucking your wallet dry for decades to come….

Which only leaves us in the end with nothing more than a false dichotomy as if we only have two choices:  either we pay for it or we control it.

Really, due to faulty logic, she has unwittingly made a very cogent argument against government provided health care.  IE – we don’t need to control that behavior if we are not paying for it.

But I don’t know if she understands that by continuing to promote societal responsibility for individual choices, she is also logically promoting less freedom and more government intrusion.  I don’t know if she even believes in the value and morality of freedom.  I also don’t know that she doesn’t fully understands all of this, but due to value differences only, still believes government control to be the answer to health care problems.  And I really don’t know which is worse – being wrong based upon ignorance or understanding the full ramifications of increased government control, but not caring.

The truly concerning part should be that it doesn’t matter which is worse as the results are always the same.   For as long as we have enough people with these types of beliefs, we will continue to lose more and more individual freedoms.

As Hayek stated:

“We must show that liberty is not merely one particular value but that it is the source and condition of most moral values. What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.”