The Tipping Point

Once upon a time Americans cared about "freedom". Some even went to war and died fighting, believing they were defending their country from tyranny. 

Not without reason. After all, when aggressive tyrants such as Hitler and Stalin were not busily invading and occupying other countries, they were secretly arresting and imprisoning their citizens indefinitely, without trial or charges. In these sad slave states, anyone deemed to be an enemy of the regime was likely to be killed at the tyrant’s sole discretion, without any kind of due process.

We used to frighten ourselves by reading "1984", George Orwell's classic. Orwell depicted a grim future in which “Big Brother” would read everyone's mail, intercept all communications, and literally watch each individual’s every move.

Apparently things have changed.

FJB


This site is not affiliated with any political party. Its goals are to advocate for individual liberty, traditional morality, and domestic peace and to resist all forms of tyranny and statism. Please bookmark this link, forward it to others, and return often. Thank you for your interest. 

"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names." -Chinese proverb

My first hospital office more than forty years ago was in a Midwestern teaching hospital situated directly across the hall from that of the Chief of Medicine. His stock introductory message to each new crop of first-year residents was direct. "Eighty percent of all human disease is self-limiting," he would say, leaning back in his chair with his feet up on his desk. "Most of your patients will get better with or without your efforts-just don't screw it up!"

Now I don't pretend to know if Fred's "eighty percent" number was accurate. I do know that his comment was in no way intended as a disparagement of sick people who truly need medical care. However his central point-that most patients will recover without medical intervention-is not only true but essential to understanding one of the principle reasons that national health care costs have exploded. Much clinically unnecessary care demand-and the costs associated with meeting that demand-is generated by patients who don't have to pay for it. It is necessary to spend only a few minutes in any hospital's Emergency Department to confirm this observation's validity.

Because "The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" inflates public perceptions of entitlement and expands the number of people who have "insurance", it will produce increased demand for health care service. As a result, the only way that national health care costs can be reduced is to dramatically constrain the actual delivery of health care. This is accomplished by simply refusing to pay¹ for any delivered health care that is not "officially approved". This politically-brilliant strategy allows elected officials to appear caring and generous in their promises to voters while shifting the unpopular onus of health care rationing to physicians and hospitals.

The partial menu of "health care reform" initiatives and program mandates shown below² outlines the shape of the rationing mechanism.

• The Electronic Health Record: The EHR mandate requires each hospital and physician's office to create and maintain a continuously updated automated database of complete medical and treatment history, health status, medication record, and demographic information by 2014. Each local database must conform to the template of data fields provided by the Department of Health and Human Services. Each must be able to transmit specified data across organizations. The result is the creation of a gigantic system of linked databases containing information on every patient in America. This is a central planner's dream.  

• Meaningful Use: This program pays providers to create their own local EHR database. Incentive payments and continued full participation in the Medicare and Medicaid programs are dependent upon demonstrating that each local EHR is capable of recording the mandated data set and transmitting data to other database system components. 

• Comparative Effectiveness Research: Comparative effectiveness research "informs patients, providers and decision-makers about which interventions are most effective for which patients under specific circumstances", a provision encouraging providers to treat patients as a data set, rather than a human being. 

• Evidence-based medicine: "Evidence-based medicine (EBM) or evidence-based practice (EBP) aims to apply the best available evidence gained from the scientific method to clinical decision making. It seeks to assess the strength of the evidence of risks and benefits of treatments (including lack of treatment) [emphasis added] and diagnostic tests. This helps clinicians understand whether or not a treatment will do more good than harm." Professional judgment will be subordinated to officially approved evidence. What could possibly go wrong?

• Value-based Purchasing: "Redistributes Medicare payment so that hospitals with higher performance in terms of quality" [editor's note: more accurately, conformance with Medicare statistical requirements] "receive a greater proportion of the payment than do the lower performing hospitals." 

• Pay-for-performance (P4p): Offer financial incentives to physicians and other health care providers to meet defined quality, efficiency, or other officially-approved targets. 

• Readmission penalties: More than 2,000 hospitals - including some nationally recognized ones - will be penalized by the government starting in this month because many of their patients are readmitted soon after discharge, new records show. Together, these hospitals will forfeit about $280 million in Medicare funds as the government begins a wide-ranging push to start paying health care providers based on the officially-defined and administered "quality of care" they provide³. 

• Accountable Care Organizations: "Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) are groups of doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers, who will be financially rewarded when they come together voluntarily to give coordinated high quality care to their Medicare patients" [as officially defined and centrally controlled].

It all sounds so "scientific" but, as the "readmission penalty" footnote at the bottom of this page points out, even patients who share CPT and ICD codes, present with tremendous variation in care needs. Moreover, treatment results also vary and real-world results for an individual patient cannot be predicted from aggregate data. "The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" simply ignores these realities. It transforms physicians into clerks whose compensation depends upon their willingness to subordinate professional judgment to statistically-determined and centrally-administered rules. It treats each patient as a dehumanized aggregation of ICD and CPT codes and permits or withholds treatment based on those codes. It perversely incentivizes physicians and hospitals to avoid providing care to the most ill, those patients whose conditions are more likely to produce an unfavorable outcome.

Concealed within the lofty promises amid the fine print is a dehumanizing, amoral, and technically incompetent rationing scheme that grants to faceless bureaucrats the power to decide not only who may receive health care but what the course of that care must be. Mussolini wrote in Fascism: Doctrines and Institutions, "The fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State." It is not too much to say that "The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" operates on exactly this same principle because it places the financial interest of the State above the value of human life.

FJB

¹ This is nothing new. Medicare denied payment for health care provided to 99,546 patients in 2008 because the service provided was "not deemed a 'medical necessity' by the payer."

² Quoted language is taken directly from CMS documents and other official program sources.

³ Perhaps nothing better illustrates the profound absurdity of efforts to ration health care through statistics than the imposition of "readmission penalties". Patients, even those who share CPT and ICD codes, present with tremendous variation in care needs and in their willingness and/or ability to comply with post-discharge instructions. Neither physicians nor hospitals have control over these factors. The inevitable consequence of statistically-dictated "readmission penalties" will be that some patients, potentially those most in need of care, will not receive it.

This site is not affiliated with any political party. Its goals are to advocate for individual liberty, traditional morality, and domestic peace and to resist all forms of tyranny and statism. Please bookmark this link, forward it to others, and return often. Thank you for your interest. 

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." -Mark Twain

That fee-for-service medicine is a cause (if not the cause) of the "health care" cost explosion is a matter of received wisdom for establishment policy wonks. Consider these recent examples:

"There is widespread agreement among policymakers, payers, and health care leaders that the current fee-for-service method of paying for care is one of the drivers of the unsustainable growth in health care costs." Hospital Readiness for Population-based Accountable Care, Health Research & Educational Trust, Chicago: April, 2012 

"This antiquated model [fee-for-service] is the culprit behind exponential health-care cost growth." Judith Barnes, Director of Health Policy, Bipartisan Policy Center, The Atlantic, "Moving Away from Fee-for-Service," May 7, 2012 

"The current fee-for-service system raises the cost of care by 20 to 30 percent for services that provide little or no health benefit." Victor R. Fuchs, Professor Emeritus of Economics and Health Research and Policy, Stanford University, The New York Times, Room for Debate, "Competing for Better Outcomes and Lower Costs", June 28, 2012 

"A new study suggests that global budgets for health care, an alternative to the traditional fee-for-service model of reimbursement, can slow the growth of medical spending and improve the quality of care for patients." David Cameron, Harvard Medical School Communications, Harvard Science, "Moving beyond health care's fee-for-service, Global budget payment model lowers medical spending, improves quality," July 11, 2012 

Really? Then why aren't the costs of haircuts, dry cleaning, and lawn care also overwhelming the economy? These services, like virtually all services in a free economy, are provided on a fee-for-service basis. With all due respect, the conventional wisdom has it completely wrong. The problem is not how charges are generated. The problem is how they are paid.

The total cost of "health care" is calculated as shown below:

N x U = C

Where:

N = Total demand for service
U = Unit cost
C = Total health care cost

Whenever potential consumers of any highly desirable service are shielded from the financial consequences of the consumption decision, demand for that service will be virtually infinite.

Insurance programs and plans that insulate patients from the real costs of medical care (especially Medicare and Medicaid) are the primary cause of exploding health care costs, not fee-for-service medicine. National health expenditures in the U.S. reportedly reached $2.7 trillion in 2011. Of that amount approximately $555 billion was expended by Medicare and $398.6 billion by Medicaid, both of which are technically bankrupt. Moreover Medicaid, which consumes an average of 21% of state revenue, threatens to bankrupt states from California to Illinois and beyond.

It is time to face the music and admit that the insurance model adopted from other casualty loss protection products simply doesn't work as an effective way to pay for medical care. Claims against an automobile, homeowners, or life insurance policy are initiated as the result of an external event over which the insured has no control such as an accident, a fire, or death. In the case of insurance for medical services, the insured controls the claims initiation from start to finish. This is a recipe for disaster.

As Medicare and Medicaid are propelled by immutable economic laws and unforgiving demographic realities toward their mathematically-inevitable demise, defenders of these so-called "entitlement programs" have redoubled their efforts to conceal health care costs from patients by expanding socialization of those costs. "The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" manages to worsen a very bad situation on both the demand and supply side of the total expenditure equation. It fuels service demand ("N") by expanding the number of "insured" people even as its resource-consuming regulations constrain health care delivery and drive up unit costs ("U") for hospitals and physicians. 

Albert Einstein once defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" is hideously misnamed public policy insanity. It is time to rethink our health care assumptions before the nation spends itself into oblivion in pursuit of an impossible dream. It is time for a Plan "B".

FJB


This site is not affiliated with any political party. Its goals are to advocate for individual liberty, traditional morality, and domestic peace and to resist all forms of tyranny and statism. Please bookmark this link, forward it to others, and return often. Thank you for your interest. 

Payback Time!

Things that make you go hmmmm....

• The Colorado state government has enacted Obama's ban on "high capacity magazines" and so-called "universal background checks". 
• Colorado state and local governments project a combined deficit of $7.5 billion for 2013.
• Outdoor recreation in Colorado (hunting, camping, fishing, skiing, etc.) generates…
• $13.2 billion in consumer spending
• 125,000 direct Colorado jobs
• $4.2 billion in wages and salaries
• $994 million in state and local tax revenue

Given the fragile nature of Colorado's economy, the actions of the Democrat legislature and governor go beyond just plain dumb all the way to felony stupid.

Bullies don't stop being bullies unless and until they experience an unpleasant personal outcome as a result of their behavior. True to type, America's socialists pause their relentless attacks on the Second Amendment only when punished. Bill Clinton learned this life lesson the hard way when the last "assault weapons" and "high capacity magazine" bans were enacted. That "victory" cost the Democrats control of the House of Representatives in 1994 but had absolutely no effect on crime.

Today's socialists are generally as insulated from the real world as they are arrogant. Accordingly, they were absolutely gobsmacked when the American people reacted to Obama's anti-gun rhetoric by launching a buying frenzy that literally cleared the shelves of every firearm and cartridge available for retail sale in the United States. Perhaps that fierce reaction accounts for the amazingly sparse "news" coverage that followed the most recent "gun control victory" in Colorado.

Unfortunately, restricting the rights of law-abiding Americans is more important to Colorado's control freaks than the damage their actions are going to cause to their state's finances. Very well. It is time to make them pay and their blind arrogance has put them in a world of hurt. You see, they desperately need the money of the very people whose rights they have so stupidly attacked and all we need do is nothing. We just refuse to spend any money in Colorado and Colorado's socialists will be out of a job quicker than you can say "Saul Alinsky". That means no camping trips in Colorado. No vacations of any type in Colorado. No conventions in Colorado. No elk hunts in Colorado. No travel in Colorado. Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho are splendid alternatives for most purposes. I-80 works as well as I-70 to many destinations and it's a pretty drive.

Please consider sending this message (or its equivalent in your own words):

Hello. Although I love your people and your mountains I will never set foot in Colorado again or spend any money in your state for so long as any of the just enacted anti-firearm legislation remains in effect. Thank you.

To these addresses:

John W Hickenlooper, Governor
136 State Capitol
Denver, CO 80203-1792

The Governor's e-mail address.

The e-mail address of The Official Site of Colorado Tourism.

Please help us put the immense power of the Internet to work for freedom. Send a link to this page to every 2nd Amendment supporter on your mailing list and post a link to this page on every Second Amendment-oriented or firearms-related blog, discussion group, forum or other potentially sympathetic web page that you frequent.

Molon Labe! Thank you.

FJB


This site is not affiliated with any political party. Its goals are to advocate for individual liberty, traditional morality, and domestic peace and to resist all forms of tyranny and statism. Please bookmark this link, forward it to others, and return often. Thank you for your interest. 

Lies!

“In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State” 

 --Alexandr Solzhenitsyn 

So wrote the great Russian novelist Alexandr Solzhenitsyn of his country, the former Soviet Union. In our country, the United States of America, the lie is not just a pillar of the state. It has become the State! Everything issued out of Washington is a lie. The unemployment rate is a lie. The inflation rate is a lie. Social Security and Medicare are lies. The "war on terror" is a lie. Even our money is a lie!

President Obama looks squarely into the television cameras and solemnly warns the nation that teachers, police, and ambulance crews will be unavailable unless the crisis is resolved on his terms. He suffers no political consequences for these stupendous lies because many of his "low information" supporters really do not know that these services are not among Washington's required responsibilities. Other members of Obama's Cult of Personality know better but they do not care. Anything that advances The Cause is "socialist truth" insofar as Saul Alinsky's disciples are concerned and nothing else matters.

For their part, the Republicans present an artfully divided front. One faction argues forcefully that compromise is essential to avoid imperiling America's national security. They fear that the the U.S. might find itself compelled to bring home some of the troops that now "defend our freedom" in more than 130 countries around the world. Another faction takes the more fiscally conservative position that the deficit and the ever-growing national debt must be dealt with, even if it means suffering the "terrible pain" of sequester.

Every bit of this is a lie. Democrats and Republicans are united in a decades-long effort to keep the public focused on the deficit. Every tool in the propaganda arsenal is dedicated to defining the deficit as "The Problem" because that problem can be cured by simply raising taxes!

	Receipts	Outlays	Deficit
2013	$2,901,956.00	$3,803,364.00	($901,408.00)

The deficit, bad as it is, is only a side effect of the real problem: the explosive growth of federal spending.  The graph below tracks that growth, decade by decade.
                                                                                                                                                                                  

 
Since 2008 the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve have created trillions of dollars out of thin air through "TARP" (the "Troubled Asset Relief Program") and numerous rounds of so-called "Quantitative Easing" and poured them into the "too big to fail" banks. Then came "the sequester".

The sequester has been hysterically described as a mutual suicide pact for both Democrats and Republicans. The official version is that when Washington's factions could not find common ground on an approach to reduce the deficit in 2011, they agreed that unless and until the "two sides" could identify some combination of tax increases and spending cuts totaling $1.2 trillion dollars over the next 10 years, $85 billion dollars in "cuts' would be automatically imposed in early 2013. A "draconian cut" of this size, we are repeatedly told, will produce catastrophic results, putting the nation's entire economy at risk.

This entire charade is designed to continue the massive fleecing of the American people and it is as false as it is absurd. In fact, federal spending has more than doubled in real terms since 1993. It has increased by more than two-thirds in just the last ten years alone! The threatened sequestration does not reduce spending. It only slows the rate of increase. Washington will actually spend more in 2013 after sequestration than it spent in 2012. To put this in perspective, $85 billion dollars is only enough to fund the government of the United States for eight days!

The two competing wings of the Welfare/Warfare State's establishment are in a struggle for control. Both are committed to the growth of the State's power. Obama and his socialists want to use that power to enforce equality and destroy private property. This requires the destruction of the middle class, the nationalization of all industry and enterprise and the total subjugation of the people. For their part, the neoconservatives who control the Republican Party want to use that power to grow and govern an Empire that will impose their vision of the future on the world. This requires the establishment of a police state, never-ending wars of aggression, and the virtual silencing of any effective opposition.

Lost amidst concern about the economic consequences of the federal spending explosion is a public understanding that money is a symbol of power! To the extent that the State's control of money expands, so does the State's power. To the extent that the State's power expands, the individual is diminished and liberty dies. The monstrously corrupt governing apparatus that rules every aspect of American life long ago forfeited any claim to constitutional legitimacy. So confident of its power has Washington become that it no longer pretends to care whether its lies are believable. It has abandoned even the pretense of moral authority.The American nation and what little remains of individual freedom are being systematically destroyed. The ruling establishment has effectively declared war upon the American people.



FJB


This site is not affiliated with any political party. Its goals are to advocate for individual liberty, traditional morality, and domestic peace and to resist all forms of tyranny and statism. Please bookmark this link, forward it to others, and return often. Thank you for your interest. 

― 

Guns, Government, and the Clash of Cultures

Second Amendment supporters who attempt to “educate” gun control advocates by citing the Constitution or providing facts about the mechanical differences between a semi-automatic and a select-fire assault rifle are destined to fail. That’s because the post Sandy Hook gun control fight isn’t about guns. It is about existential values, the beliefs around which people organize and live their lives.

Two completely distinct and incompatible political cultures have developed in the United States. The gun control fight marks an irreconcilable fracture, a fault line between traditionalists who value individual liberty and personal responsibility (including an absolute right to defend self, family, and home) and establishment-led collectivists who believe that the individual must be made subordinate to the collective and that the collective's agent, government, must have an absolute monopoly on the use of force.

Many in the collectivist camp have been so thoroughly conditioned that the very thought of self-defense is alien, repugnant, and perhaps impossible. How could it be otherwise? By now generations have been taught that to physically resist an attack by a school yard bully is to earn a suspension.  “No tolerance” policies make no distinction between aggressor and victim. Self-defense requires the use of force and that is not to be allowed. Toy guns—even pictures of guns—are forbidden by imbecilic administrators and school boards across the country. “Dodge ball” is banned because it encourages aggressive behavior. Collectivists genuinely do not understand that their calls for public disarmament are seen by the millions of Americans who own firearms and are proficient in their use as deliberate efforts to place their families in harm’s way. The Welfare State’s schools have done their job well.

The division between these two cultures is so deep and so wide that the two literally cannot understand each other, a condition that bodes ill for the future. When political opponents agree upon ends, it is possible to successfully negotiate disagreements about the means to achieve those ends. When the disagreement is about existential ends, there is no common middle ground. As an example, if you and I both want to go to Chicago, we can probably resolve a disagreement about whether we should drive or fly to get to our destination. However, if we have only one vehicle and you believe we must go to Chicago and I believe we must go to Los Angeles, compromise is impossible. That is exactly where America's two opposing cultures stand today.

The establishment's primary weapon against traditionalist opponents is orchestrated propaganda, relentlessly employed by establishment-controlled news and entertainment media outlets. The extent to which journalism's historic principles have been compromised can be seen by contrasting the behavior of establishment news media in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy against the words contained in the preamble to the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics which reads as follows:

Members of the Society of Professional Journalists believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. Conscientious journalists from all media and specialties strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist's credibility. Members of the Society share a dedication to ethical behavior and adopt this code to declare the Society's principles and standards of practice.

Given this commendable commitment to do journalism's duty by "providing a fair an comprehensive account of events and issues", why, in the wake of Sandy Hook, did the establishment news media apparatus devote its entire effort to demonizing firearms (and firearms owners)? Why did it fail to ask the elementary "who", "what", "when", "where" and "why" questions that are a standard component of every reporter's professional routine? For example:

• Did the Sandy Hook Elementary School's security system have security cameras? 
• If so, where is the video footage of Lanza shooting his way into the school? 
• If not, where are the still police photographs of the school entrance?
• Who was Adam Lanza's physician? 
• What prescription medications, if any, was Adam Lanza taking?
• How did Lanza get from his home to Sandy Hook Elementary School?
• What kind of long gun was removed from a car trunk on camera on Sandy Hook's school grounds?
• Who owns that car and how did Lanza gain access to it?
• Did Adam Lanza have an e-mail account? 
• If so, what do his e-mails say about his interests, his state of mind, and his possible motives?

These questions still require answers today. Instead Obama, his posse, and the establishment news media launched a coordinated blizzard of misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies to exploit the shock and horror generated by Sandy Hook slaughter ("never let a good tragedy go to waste") in an effort to ram through national gun control legislation. That non-stop 24/7 effort just may be the greatest public relations miscalculation in political history. The American people's riposte was a stunning act of immediate and unremitting defiance. They queued up for hours to buy virtually every firearm of any type that could be found available for sale in the United States (plus all available ammunition stocks) and placed additional firearms and ammunition orders amounting to a year's worth of manufacturing output!

The people's massive and negative reaction sent a wave of shock through establishment ranks. Unfortunately, this does not mean that an increasingly frightened and desperate political establishment will end its current effort to impose gun control. That the news media has not yet learned its lesson is demonstrated by (1) its continued focus on "gun violence" instead of overall violence; (2) its insistance that semi-automatic rifles are "assault weapons;  (3) its continued claim that the U.S. has an unusually high murder rate; and (4) its repeated assertion that the widespread private ownership of firearms is responsible for the murder rate. The facts are readily available to anyone who cares to look for them and they still are not being accurately reported by the establishment media.

• The U.S. homicide rate per 100,000 population has been dropping since 1993 and is now at its lowest level since 1968! Exceptions are cities which have the tightest restrictions on the private ownership of firearms such as Obama's Chicago.  (See FBI-Uniform Crime Reports.) 

• The U.S. homicide rate (murders per 100,000 population) ranks 108th of the 207 countries for which data are reported according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s most recent report (see http://www.unodc.org/). All countries reporting higher murder rates than the U.S. require firearm registration and have very restrictive (virtually prohibitive) licensing requirements. Bear in mind that these data are from “the most recent year reported” and are subject to change as new information is added.

• Gun ownership data comes from http://www.gunpolicy.org/. Although the U.S. leads the world in per capita ownership of firearms, more than one-half of the countries in the world have a higher murder rate than the United States, many of them much higher. If private firearms ownership “causes” murder, the U.S. murder rate should be the highest by far. It’s not even close.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. reported 12,664 murders in 2011, continuing a decline that has been occurring since 1993. To put these data in perspective, had the U.S. experienced El Salvador’s homicide rate, there would have been 218,039 murders in 2011 and yet private firearms ownership is 15.3 times that of El Salvador! Greenland’s rate applied to our population would have resulted in 60,496 murders. It becomes very difficult in the face of these data to seriously argue that there is any meaningful correlation between private gun ownership and national murder rates.

It is also absolutely clear that the propensity to commit murder (and the probability of being murdered) is not equally distributed among the U.S. population. Black Americans kill and are killed at eight times the rate observed in the rest of the population. Again, see FBI-Uniform Crime Reports. The effect of this unequal distribution on the national murder rate is enormous. When the black murder rate is “normalized” to those levels observed in the rest of the U.S. population, the U.S. murder rate is cut virtually in half and falls close to rates seen in Western Europe and Canada. These data do not support the idea that there exists any causal relationship between national murder rates and private firearm ownership.

Incidents such as the mass killings at Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, and Sandy Hook are of a special type. Unlike the killings that account for most U.S. murders in which black Americans are disproportionately both victims and killers, in mass killing incidents the killers tend to be White or Asian male mental patients.

Prior to 1968, there were virtually no mass killings in the United States and it was possible for anyone to purchase any legal fire arm with no background check. Guns could be mail-ordered from catalog stores such as Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Wards, JC Penny, or Spiegels and they would be delivered by the U.S. Postal Service. Then, beginning in the decade of the 1970s,  the U.S. experienced a dramatic increase in the number of mass killings. Two factors accompanied that increase and both warrant exploration.

• Throughout the 1970s, mental health care reform emptied out the state mental hospitals and made it much more difficult to have dangerous mental patients involuntarily committed for treatment.

• In 1987, the “anti-depressant” PROZAC was approved and widely prescribed followed by ZOLOFT, PAXIL and other SSRI drugs. Known side effects include suicide ideation and violent behavior. Most—if not all—of the mass killers from 1980 on were taking one or more of these drugs.

The Sandy Hook tragedy invokes feelings of shock, horror, and great sadness in all of us. It is essential that we identify and understand the true causes. It will be a greater tragedy still if we allow this terrible event to be exploited to advance a dangerous political agenda that will do nothing positive and place all Americans at grave risk.


FJB


This site is not affiliated with any political party. Its goals are to advocate for individual liberty, traditional morality, and domestic peace and to resist all forms of tyranny and statism. Please bookmark this link, forward it to others, and return often. Thank you for your interest. 

Who Killed the Republican Party?

The GOP's "conservative base" is frustrated, angry and confused. It appears to many that almost overnight the Republican Party somehow morphed into a "socialist light" version of the Democrat Party. They watch in baffled disbelief as the GOP's national leadership systematically betrays cherished principles and abandons the pursuit of pro-life, pro-Constitution, and limited government policies. Even as Obama launches a full scale frontal attack on the Second Amendment, the leadership of the GOP, including prominent Republican Senators and Members of Congress stand silent and unengaged. How did this happen?

Shocked and dispirited Republican true believers are painfully experiencing the truth of Mark Twain's observation, "It ain't what you don't know that'll hurt you. It's what you know for sure that ain't so!" Despite what passionate partisans desperately want to believe, the Republican Party is not a stalwart defender of Constitutional principals and free market economics. The GOP and the Democrat Party have operated as wings of a single political party, the Washington Party, for many decades. Neither wing has the slightest interest in the Constitution which today is trotted out only when necessary to mollify flyover country rubes. Neither has the slightest interest in controlling spending. Both are fully-invested in the Welfare/Warfare State.

Most Americans, busy raising families and earning livings, are only marginally interested in the daily behind-the-scenes machinations that define Washington's political landscape. Because it received almost no coverage in the popular press or television news outlets, only a few know of the decades-long war waged beneath the surface for the Republican Party's soul, a war ultimately lost by traditional conservatives. Fewer still understand the motives of the combatants or appreciate the impact of that struggle's outcome on today's political scene.

In the 1950s a small group of Trotskyite intellectuals became disenchanted with aspects of Marxism and began a philosophic migration away from communism. The new movement paused briefly at the "Scoop" Jackson/Hubert Humphrey faction of the Democratic Party before selecting the Republican Party as its final host. The migration was led by Irving Kristol and Leo Strauss, the intellectual fathers of neoconservatism.

Kristol, father of The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol, was Managing Editor of Commentary magazine from 1947 to 1952 and Professor of Social Thought at the New York University Graduate School of Business from 1969 to 1988. Since 1988 he has been ensconced as a Distinguished Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Strauss, who died in 1973, was a Political Science Professor at the University of Chicago for most of his career. Unfortunately for those who value Constitutional government, Kristol, Strauss, and their acolytes brought a lot of socialist baggage with them when they "came over" to conservatism.

To provide some context, it is important to understand that the Reagan Coalition was not a movement so much as it was an expedient alliance of people united by a shared opposition to Communism and the Welfare State. That alliance included traditionalists, constitutionalists, libertarians, social conservatives, and militant nationalists. When the Soviet Union imploded, so did most of the Reagan Coalition's cohesion. Today the tattered remnant is barely held together through an uneasy collaboration of fiscal conservatives, Eastern establishment liberals and, of course, the neoconservatives.

Traditional conservatives never really understood the power of propaganda, naively believing that facts and logic would carry the day. They even allowed neoconservatives to define the terms under which the battle for control of the GOP would be waged. The very labels that the neoconservatives assigned to the combatants (neoconservative and paleoconservative) served the neoconservative purpose. Those labels conferred an undeserved legitimacy on neoconservatism, creating the illusion that a symmetrical division existed within the body of conservatism when, in fact, that which calls itself neoconservativism is not conservative at all.

The first overt volley fired on behalf of the neoconservatives in the War for the GOP's soul was an article appearing in National Review on March 16, 1992, entitled "In Pursuit of Anti-Semitism Chapter II." The article was a long, rambling, and utterly dishonest attack on the editorial positions of Joe Sobran and Pat Buchanan occasioned by their reasoned disagreement with American policy toward Israel. Sobran and Buchanan were accused of anti-Semitism, a canard reminiscent of Jesse Jackson's frequent allegations of racism against those who opposed Welfare State social policies. At the time I could not understand the motive for this completely unwarranted hit piece. The article's blatant falseness and unfairness so infuriated me that I cancelled my subscription, one that had been in effect since undergraduate school.

In hindsight, the motive has become obvious. The smear campaign against Sobran and Buchanan was the opening gambit in the process of "redefining" conservatism. By discrediting the most prominent and effective spokesmen for traditional conservatism, potential impediments to that redefinition would be neutralized. By the way, that many neoconservatives are Jews is true but irrelevant. The neocons use this demographic fact to vaccinate themselves against opposition by playing the "anti-Semitic" card whenever their policy preferences are challenged. The tactic is intellectually dishonest and illogical but it has certainly been effective.

For those who wonder how in the name of God's Green Earth "conservatism" ever came to mean support for an explosive increase in domestic federal spending, the expansion of welfare state programs, federalization of local and state issues, warrantless surveillance, executive branch dominance, Wilsonian global intervention, and endless war, it is only necessary to understand the blatant and unblinking arrogance that is among neoconservatism's defining hallmarks. As none other than Irving Kristol wrote unabashedly in The Neoconservative Persuasion, "...one can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills [emphasis added], into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy."

That quote should send chills down the spine of every American who reads it. In a single sentence one of neoconservatism's founding fathers arrogantly admits his intention to "redefine" the politics of GOP and conservatism itself (whether Republicans and conservatives like it or not) and demonstrates his eagerness to consign the American constitution to history's ash heap in favor of "modern democracy."

Kristol, Strauss, and their disciples are moral relativists who share a disregard for truth that is nearly as great as their disdain for the essential American idea of individual liberty. Kristol wrote, "There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work."

On the role of the State, Kristol is quite open. He wrote, "Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable. Because they tend to be more interested in history than economics or sociology, they know that the 19th-century idea, so neatly propounded by Herbert Spencer in his "The Man Versus the State," was a historical eccentricity."

For his part, Strauss wrote an entire book ("Natural Right and History") praising what he called the political realism of the ancients who denied that there was any natural human right to liberty or truth. He was especially taken with Plato's discourses on "noble Lies." Strauss implicitly believed, as did Plato, that "noble Lies" were essential to stable government because they gave the people meaning and purpose. Strauss also believed that secrecy is necessary tool for ruling elites. In "Persecution and the Art of Writing", he explained that "the wise" must conceal their motives and actions in order to protect themselves from uprisings and reprisals.

If you wonder what has happened to the Republican Party and to conservatism, understand that neoconservatives remain ascendant within and close to the power structure of the GOP. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, Philip Zelikow, former Attorneys General Alberto Gonzales, and Michael Mukasey are numbered among them. Neoconservatives also control much of what passes for the conservative media including The Fox News Channel, The Washington Times, The Weekly Standard, National Review, the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal and most of putatively conservative Talk Radio.

So there you have it. According to the prolific written admissions of the movement's founders, neoconservatives are purposeful liars and incipient totalitarians who hold the American people and their traditions in absolute contempt. Today they control much of the national GOP's internal workings. How much do you appreciate where the neocons have taken "the Republican party, and American conservatism...against their respective wills?"


FJB





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