Here is another novel thought by, none other than, Tom Sowell. Since it is rational and it is more likely to be rejected by liberals and emotional progressives. (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)
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The intent of 'Obamascare' always was for government to control a growing portion of our nation's GDP and our personal freedom. Therefore, Obama knew he was lying when he told Americans they would be able to keep their own health programs because he knew his proposal would drive the cost of private health care up so high it would become prohibitive. (See 2 below.)
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I have often written education and a sound family structure are among the most important pillars holding up any free society.
Thursday, I will be attending my first board meeting of a local charter school which is just getting started and intends to provide a classical education. I am also told it already has 150 applicants but is having trouble renting a vacant school while a permanent facility is being readied. Diverse educational opportunities are deemed competition for our failing public school system when, in fact, they should be seen as additional opportunities.
My second daughter knows something about starting a school from scratch and raising millions in order that it was adequately endowed and successful (See WestEndSchool.Org in Louisville, Ky.) It is a remarkable story about a school in the inner city that is providing a solid education for kids and teaching them a way of life of personal responsibility they were neither getting.from their dysfunctional family structure nor from the local school authorities.
Unions control education in our country and they have dumbed America down because their interests do not align with the needs of our youth and nation. That is a tragedy! (See 3 below.)
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One down, more to go. Which city will be next because of demands by greedy unions and incompetent city managers and officials? Yes, liberals can be greedy and intractable! (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)Guns Save Lives
We all know that guns can cost lives because the media repeat this message endlessly, as if we could not figure it out for ourselves. But even someone who reads newspapers regularly and watches numerous television newscasts may never learn that guns also save lives-- much less see any hard facts comparing how many lives are lost and how many are saved.
But that trade-off is the real issue, not the Second Amendment or the National Rifle Association, which so many in the media obsess about. If guns cost more lives than they save, we can always repeal the Second Amendment. But if guns save more lives than they cost, we need to know that, instead of spending time demonizing the National Rifle Association.
The defensive use of guns is usually either not discussed at all in the media or else is depicted as if it means bullets flying in all directions, like the gunfight at the OK Corral. But most defensive uses of guns do not involve actually pulling the trigger.
If someone comes at you with a knife and you point a gun at him, he is very unlikely to keep coming, and far more likely to head in the other direction, perhaps in some haste, if he has a brain in his head. Only if he is an idiot are you likely to have to pull the trigger. And if he is an idiot with a knife coming after you, you had better have a trigger to pull.
Surveys of American gun owners have found that 4 to 6 percent reported using a gun in self-defense within the previous five years. That is not a very high percentage but, in a country with 300 million people, that works out to hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns per year.
Yet we almost never hear about these hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns from the media, which will report the killing of a dozen people endlessly around the clock.
The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate.
Although most defensive uses of guns do not involve actually shooting, nevertheless the total number of criminals killed by armed private citizens runs into the thousands per year. A gun can also come in handy if a pit bull or some other dangerous animal is after you or your child.
We need to recognize the painful reality that, regardless of what we do or don't do about gun control laws, there will be innocent people killed by guns. We can then look at hard facts in order to decide how we can minimize the number of needless deaths.
But that is not the way the issue is presented by many in politics or the media. Every story about an accidental shooting in the home will be repeated again and again, while a thousand stories about lives saved by defensive uses of a gun will never see the light of day in most newspapers or on most television newscasts.
More children may die in bathtub accidents than in shooting accidents, but you are not likely to read that in most newspapers or see it on television newscasts. Some in the media inflate the number of children killed by counting as children the members of criminal teenage gangs who shoot each other in their turf fights.
Many seize upon statistics which show that Britain has stronger gun control laws than the United States and lower murder rates. Yet they ignore other countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, but which have much higher murder rates, such as Brazil, Russia and Mexico.
Even in the case of Britain, London had a much lower murder rate than New York during the years after New York State's 1911 Sullivan Law imposed very strict gun control, while anyone could buy a shotgun in London with no questions asked in the 1950s.
Today, virtually the entire law-abiding population of Britain is disarmed-- and gun crimes are vastly more common. Gun control laws make crime a safer occupation when victims are unarmed.
The gun control crusade today is like the Prohibition crusade 100 years ago. It is a shared zealotry that binds the self-righteous know-it-alls in a warm fellowship of those who see themselves as fighting on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. It is a lofty role that they are not about to give up for anything so mundane as facts-- or even the lives of other people.
1a) How Liberals Corrode Society
By Christopher Chantrill
In the girl section of the Wall Street Journal last weekend Matt Ridley had an article on nice vs. nasty, cooperation vs. competition. Researchers have found, he writes, that families that stay together cooperate better than families that are far apart.
This is not the first work to find mathematical evidence that there are conditions under which cooperative behavior drives out selfish behavior... So long as there is little geographic mobility, clusters of networked kin and friends develop, putting an advantage on being nice.
Who knew?
The knock on the modern era is that, what with rampant individualism and people migrating to the ends of the earth, little remains of good old family bonding and the village community in which people used to cooperate so well. As community broke down, they tell us, and got replaced by homo economicus, the universe of cooperative behavior collapsed. Thus we needed socialists and their revolution or liberals and their big government programs to curb the ruthless individualists and restore the cooperative spirit of the old days.
Only the liberals were wrong.
The great untold story of the modern era is that, all along while socialists and liberals where deploring the loss of community, people have been working hard to create a new kind of community to retain the cooperative benefits of the old family closeness. Instinctively accepting the idea that "clusters of networked kin and friends" are the key to cooperation, people in the industrial age have been busily inventing new institutions that rewarded people for "niceness."
The basis of the left-wing view, that the modern era is a nightmare of exploitation and/or inequality, is epitomized in The Dialectic of Enlightenment by neo-Marxists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in the 1940s. "What men want to learn from nature is how to dominate it and other men." The lefty solution, from Marx to Obama, was to defeat domination with counter-domination, courtesy of big government.
Obsessed by power and domination they have missed the real story -- of ordinary people since the Enlightenment in their everyday lives engaged in an unceasing effort to create new institutions of cooperation to replace the old face-to-face community.
We can start with Adam Smith's invisible hand. The whole point of the price system is that nobody gets to dominate with their products and services, at least not for very long. You have to offer your product to the world, and you have to adjust its price and its quality as you discover what people want and are willing to pay for. And when the world changes, a great corporation like Dell Computer must go back to the drawing board and hope it can reinvent itself before it's too late.
Then there is the project to replace the close community of village and kin, first of all in religion. According to Max Weber, people in European cities learned how to trust non-kin from Christianity. And the whole point of high-cost religion is to build a long-term trust community by flushing out untrustworthy people that are too selfish to pay their fair share.
Almost forgotten today are the "fraternal" associations, the Masons, Elks, and Odd Fellows. What do you do when you migrate out of your home village into the wide world? You replace the brothers you left behind with new brothers, by courtesy rather than by blood. You trust your new lodge brothers and help them, knowing that they trust you and will help you in return.
Working men formed labor unions, to create a brotherhood of workers that could speak with one voice, as the brothers in a real family might do, against their local bosses.
But then came the liberals. Liberals have wrecked the modern movements of sociability, because liberals believe that only liberals can be allowed to dominate nature and other men. So they declared war on business and gave us crony capitalism. They declared war on the churches and gave us gay marriage. They staged a ruinous Great Depression and replaced fraternalism with the paternalism of the welfare state.
Now scientific research is showing that people that stay together work together, because people in long-term relationships are nice to each other. Wow. You think that explains why corporations try to structure their employment conditions so people stick around and churches work to put people into family-style Bible-study groups?
The real problem with the modern era is the modern ruling class. All over the western world ordinary people, with creative abandon, have been inventing new ways of encouraging our instinctive natures as social animals to be nice rather than nasty. But the ruling class gives us a president whose only talent seems to be to sow mistrust and divide us. They give us a politics that regresses to the band of robbers, recruiting people to its ranks with promises of "free stuff" and loot.
Surely, we Americans deserve better.
Christopher Chantrill (mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com) is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his usgovernmentspending.com and also usgovernmentdebt.us.
1b)Inconvenient Headlines
It's a deeply felt conviction among liberals that they are the caring party. It's not too much to say that liberals are quite confident that they are nicer, more moral people than conservatives.
It must require truly titanic powers of denial for the "moral" and "compassionate" party to maintain its position on abortion -- a position that leads them into some macabre rationalizations. Consciences among the morally superior party are agreeably quiescent.
But recent headlines have not been similarly cooperative. In Florida, the legislature is considering a variant of the "Born Alive Infants Protection Act," which would require that abortionists provide medical assistance to infants who are "accidentally" born alive and kicking during an abortion. (Then State Senator Barack Obama vociferously opposed similar legislation in Illinois.)
Ms. Alisa LaPolt Snow, representing the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, testified against the bill. Florida representative Jim Boyd, apparently unsure that he had understood her correctly, asked:
"So, um, it is just really hard for me to even ask you this question because I'm almost in disbelief. If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion, what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?"
Ms. Snow responded that her organization "believes that any decision that's made should be left up to the woman, her family and the physician." In short, as the Weekly Standard summarized, Florida Planned Parenthood is in favor of "post-birth abortion." This is consistent with the position of the president of the United States and most members of the caring party.
Ms. Snow was asked why she didn't support simply transporting a breathing, moving infant to a hospital where he or she would have the best chance of survival. Snow developed a sudden concern for ambulance convenience: "(T)hose situations where it is in a rural health care setting, the hospital is 45 minutes or an hour away, that's the closest trauma center or emergency room. You know there's just some logistical issues involved that we have some concerns about." Really? Logistical concerns?
So if a baby is brought to a rural clinic suffering from, say, meningitis, and the nearest trauma center is 45 minutes away, does Planned Parenthood have "concerns" about the "logistical issues" involved? Or does Planned Parenthood stand for the principle that when a woman chooses abortion, she is entitled to a dead baby?
Snow's testimony comes at an inopportune moment for the deniers -- the "abortion rights" absolutists who hotly deny that infants are ever born alive during botched abortions -- because in Philadelphia, an abortionist is on trial.
Dr. Kermit Gosnell is on trial for murder in the deaths of one woman and seven second trimester babies. The 41-year-old woman had sought an abortion and was given an overdose of narcotics at Gosnell's clinic. The seven babies were all born alive, according to the indictment. Gosnell then used scissors to "snip" their spinal columns. One of his assistants, who pled guilty to third-degree murder, said that such "snippings" were "routine" for late-term abortions -- so there were probably many more than seven.
Gosnell wasn't at all particular about gestational age. An ultrasound technician recorded the age of one baby as 29.4 weeks, or about 7.5 months. In Pennsylvania, abortions are not permitted after 24 weeks (and survival is above 85 percent for babies born at 27 weeks). In one case, a nurse testified that a baby cried after being born. Gosnell snipped his neck and told the nurse that there was nothing to worry about. He was placed in a basin on a counter. Another large baby was disposed of in a shoebox, but he was too large and his feet dangled over the sides. In another case, Gosnell allegedly joked with a nurse that a baby was so big "he could have walked to the bus stop."
Gosnell seems to be a particularly freakish "provider." He kept fetal feet in jars in an office prosecutors described as a "house of horrors." (Pictures are on the Internet, but beware: They are graphic.)
Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer of California who engaged in an unwise colloquy with then-Senator Rick Santorum about when infants deserve to be treated as people, spoke for many of the caring elite when she said that life begins when "you take the baby home from the hospital."
Some day, our descendants will look back at this and ask how we could have tamely accepted such barbarism. A special obloquy will attach to the Orwellians who call it compassion.
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2)Small Businesses Won't Have Plan Choices Under Obamacare
Citing the challenges in establishing a new health insurance marketplace, the Obama administration is delaying a key provision of the Affordable Care Act designed to provide employees of small businesses affordable health coverage.
The New York Times reported Monday that in most states employers will not be able to provide workers with a choice of health plans as the law intended. Instead, they will be limited to a single plan.
One of the health law’s provisions, known as “employee choice,” called for each state to operate a Small Business Health Options Program, known as a SHOP exchange.
The exchange, which was to start operating in January, is designed to allow small businesses and their employees to compare health plans and enroll employees for coverage. However, in 33 states where the federal government will be running the exchanges, the choice option will be delayed until 2015, meaning employees of small firms will only have the choice of one plan. Other states operating their own exchanges will also have the option to only offer a single plan as well.
A number of insurers, including Aetna, had asked the Obama administration to delay the “employee choice” option, citing their experience in Massachusetts, which put through health reforms that were the model for the Affordable Care Act.
Insurers say they asked for the delay because the administration did not provide final rules for the small business exchange until last month. However, a few states including California and Connecticut will begin offering the employee choice option next month.
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3)A Victory for School Choice
The school choice movement -- which germinated 50 years ago in free-market economist Milton Friedman's fertile mind -- recently counted its largest victory. The Indiana Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of the state's school voucher program. Under it, more than half a million low- and middle-income Hoosier students -- and about 62 percent of all families -- are eligible for state aid to help pay for a private or religious school.
This is what school choice has traditionally lacked: scale.
Since the first experiment in Milwaukee in 1990, voucher programs have been resisted by a powerful combination of interests. Teachers' unions have fought what they regard as a diversion of resources from public education -- while conveniently undermining a source of professional competition and accountability. But this opposition has been empowered by the skepticism of many suburban parents, who have paid a premium to buy homes in better school districts. When educational outcomes become less connected to the ZIP code you inhabit, some property values will decline.
It is a paradox Friedman would have appreciated. Vouchers have been blocked by unions resisting market forces and by suburban parents reflecting those forces. Not surprisingly, support for school choice programs is often twice as high among urban residents as it is among suburban ones.
This has generally relegated vouchers to the margins of education reform, in underfunded micro-programs aimed at the very poorest. The District of Columbia's scholarship program, for example, capped participants at 3 percent of the student population while increasing funding for public education. The political price of providing vouchers to disadvantaged children has often been to shield public schools from even the mildest competitive pressure.
A limited choice program is not the same thing as a healthy, responsive educational market. "A rule-laden, risk-averse sector," argues Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, "dominated by entrenched bureaucracies, industrial-style collective-bargaining agreements and hoary colleges of education will not casually remake itself just because students have the right to switch schools."
But even small, restricted choice programs have shown promising results -- not revolutionary, but promising. Last year a group of nine leading educational researchers summarized the evidence this way: "Among voucher programs, random-assignment studies generally find modest improvements in reading or math scores, or both. Achievement gains are typically small in each year, but cumulative over time. Graduation rates have been studied less often, but the available evidence indicates a substantial positive impact. ... Other research questions regarding voucher program participants have included student safety, parent satisfaction, racial integration, services for students with disabilities, and outcomes related to civic participation and values. Results from these studies are consistently positive."
Only recently, a few innovative governors -- particularly former Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana -- have decided to bring this promise to scale. The Louisiana Supreme Court will soon issue a judgment on Jindal's program. The Indiana verdict could hardly have been more favorable to the choice movement. The court found that Indiana is serving valid educational purposes both by maintaining a public schools system and by providing options beyond it. And it held (as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002) that including religious schools as an option does not establish religion. "Any benefit to program-eligible schools, religious or non-religious," the Indiana court concluded, "derives from the private, independent choice of the parents."
These principles have broader implication. The pursuit of the public interest does not always require a public bureaucracy. Medicare pays for services provided at Catholic hospitals. The GI bill allowed veterans to use their scholarships at religious colleges and universities. The proper role of government is to ensure the provision of essential services -- not always to provide those services itself.
In the case of children in failing public schools, this argument gains moral urgency. Choice may not be a system-wide panacea. But it remains a disturbing spectacle when teachers' unions count it a legal "victory" when disadvantaged children are returned to troubled, unsafe institutions.
Yet it is probably not the moral arguments that will prevail. The opponents of educational choice are attempting to defend the monopoly of the neighborhood school in a nation where most monopolies and oligopolies (see the phone company, the post office or newspapers) have come under pressure. Parents, including suburban parents, increasingly expect educational options such as charters, home schooling, magnet programs and career academies. Customized, online learning will accelerate the trend. The tie between a ZIP code and an educational outcome is being broken -- whatever our intentions.
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4)Ruling Sets Up Pension Battle in Bankrupt City
After declaring Chapter 9 bankruptcy last year, Stockton eliminated tens of millions of dollars in city services and said it would cut some bond payments in a way unseen before in municipal bankruptcy. But bondholders objected to Stockton’s effort to protect pensions while forcing losses on investors.
Many states have statutes and constitutional provisions making it illegal to cut public workers’ pensions. Until now, there has not been a prominent test of those laws in bankruptcy — particularly not in California, where the big state pension system, known as Calpers, has been girding for battle on the issue, trying to avoid the precedent of a cutoff or shortfall in a city’s pension contributions.
Federal bankruptcy law often trumps state laws, but municipal bankruptcies are so rare that there is almost no precedent on how to apply the law to state pension provisions.
In the ruling, issued on Monday in Sacramento, which affirmed the legal status of Stockton’s bankruptcy, Judge Christopher M. Klein said he could see battle lines being drawn between Calpers — formally the California Public Employees’ Retirement System — and the city’s other major creditors, including several Wall Street companies that either bought Stockton’s bonds or insured them. But he ruled that it was still too early in the case for that battle to be joined.
“There are very complex and difficult questions of law that I can see out there on the horizon,” he said.
The judge said he would decide those questions during the next phase of Stockton’s bankruptcy, in which the city’s creditors will contest whether its so-called plan of adjustment is fair. A plan of adjustment in a municipal bankruptcy is comparable to a plan of reorganization in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy; a city cannot emerge from bankruptcy unless the judge confirms its plan of adjustment.
“The day of reckoning will be the day of plan confirmation,” Judge Klein said near the end of a two-hour session in which he read his decision. “The city is going to have a difficult time confirming a plan over the objection of unfair discrimination.”
The Wall Street creditors had been trying, until now, to persuade Judge Klein to throw out the case, arguing that the city was not truly insolvent and had not treated them fairly. Specifically, they argued that they were being forced to take big haircuts while Calpers was not asked to give up a single dollar of what Stockton owed it, an estimated $900 million. Those creditors included Assured Guaranty and the National Public Finance Guarantee Corporation, which insured some of Stockton’s bonds, and two high-yielding mutual funds, led by Franklin Advisors, which invested in the bonds. Wells Fargo Bank also objected, in its role as bond trustee.
But Judge Klein found that the group, which he called “the capital markets creditors,” had raised the fairness issue prematurely. He also said he found their claims that the city was feigning insolvency unpersuasive. Municipalities must clear several legal hurdles before they can qualify for bankruptcy court protection, and Judge Klein said Stockton had done more than necessary to demonstrate its eligibility.
For example, he said the city had already made big cuts in its work force and had wrung painful concessions out of the workers who remained. He cited rising drug trafficking and gang violence and said the police force and fire department had been reduced so much that any further cuts would put residents at an unacceptable risk. Even after all those cuts, he said Stockton had reached a point where the only way it could keep from running out of cash was by defaulting on its bonds.
The judge also said that California statute required all Chapter 9 candidates to go through a 60-day mediation period before declaring bankruptcy, and creditors were supposed to help pay the cost. But the capital markets creditors dropped out of mediation, he said, when they learned Stockton was not seeking any concessions from Calpers. That left the city to pay the whole bill.
“The capital markets creditors contend that the city gave them a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, and that that is not negotiation,” Judge Klein said. “I’m sorry. I’m not persuaded. Negotiation is a two-way street. You can’t negotiate with a stone wall. You cannot do it. It cannot be done. It is a contradiction in terms.”
Stockton’s city manager, Bob Deis, expressed satisfaction with Judge Klein’s decision in a written statement. “After nine months and millions of dollars in legal fees, the judge validated what we have been saying from the beginning, that the city is insolvent and needs the protection of bankruptcy to adjust its debts.”
Calpers’ chief executive, Anne Stausboll, issued a statement saying that Stockton “has consistently acknowledged the importance of providing benefits to its employees through its existing relationship with Calpers, consistent with state law.” She said that Calpers would continue to act as a fiduciary as the bankruptcy progressed, “and protect and defend the integrity and soundness of the pension plan.”
A spokesman for Assured Guaranty, Robert Tucker, said the company “respectfully disagrees” with Judge Klein’s decision on the question of eligibility. He said the insurer had made several proposals in mediation but Stockton did not yield. He said Assured Guaranty believed that “the real, substantive issues posed by the city’s Chapter 9 filing” would still be addressed, in the next phase of the case.
Municipal finance specialists said one lesson they were drawing from Stockton’s case was that Chapter 9 was not as effective as it ought to be, given the scope of the city’s fiscal problems and how long it was taking Stockton just to bring Calpers, its biggest creditor, to the negotiating table.
“You can’t restructure without dealing with your largest creditor,” said Karol K. Denniston, a lawyer with Schiff Hardin whose practice includes advising financially troubled municipalities in California. She said some members of the California state Legislature were already watching Stockton’s case and another in San Bernardino, with an eye toward new state laws that could help troubled cities avoid such expensive and debilitating struggles.
“I think we’ll see legislation next year,” Ms. Denniston said. One idea being considered, she said, was amending the state pension laws, to give Calpers the authority, but not the obligation, to restructure the debts that distressed cities owe it.
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