Category Archives: Freedom

Health care thoughts part II

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Part I was here. You really should read all the comments if this topic interests you even a little bit.

I got a response back from Benjamin who gave me permission to use his name:

I think I’m picking up what you’re putting down, and it all makes sense. I do have some counter questions though.

First question.
If the cost of healthcare is too high to provide adequate healthcare to all through a government run system, is there a way to encourage healthcare to cost less?

When I got what was left of my appendix out, it cost me roughly $12,000 (This was 1999 and so I just don’t remember exactly) but included an overnight stay, and extensive surgery to get the poison out of my belly. Five years later I broke my arm and had outpatient surgery to have two screws put in my elbow so I would regain full range of movement, which I never got back. That surgery cost me $6,000, and both times the anesthesiologist cost around 60% of the total cost.

While I understand that medical costs are high because the penalty for failure is high. If I lose and arm because it gets infected, the surgeon doesn’t get all the poison out of my belly and I die, or the anesthesia isn’t administered properly I might die. But it seems like the amount that it costs to get basic or complex medical procedures done is disproportionate to their difficulty or cost in materials. My $12k and $3k bills, as well as lesser bills over the years have made me believe there is a lot of waste involved purely by the number of people I have to pay. Burning through 14 checks to pay for a single outpatient surgery is not reasonable.

Second question.
You state that immortality or close to it will be achievable soon.
First by the rich and then later by the middle class. But what mechanism (Similar to supply and demand or some-such) is in place to drive the prices down and make it achievable?

It seems to me that in the small window of time I have been an alert adult, medical costs have only seemed to go up and not down. I’ve been paying for my own medical care for 11 years. The cost of stitches, X-rays, and CT scans has gone up, and not down. While I know that the medical field stretches far beyond emergency and trauma related care, my view point is not showing a drop in cost.

Discrimination
I want to try and say that race, socioeconomic status, what gender you choose to love, how much of an asshole you are, or church you attend (or don’t), won’t have any impact on the quality or duration of healthcare you receive. But it really hurts me to say that I know that I would be full of shit and wrong with every single syllable I strung together, no matter how beautifully I managed to do so. America rocks. I fucking love this place. But americans are ignorant, self centered, asshole cowards, on the whole. Fearful of what they don’t or choose not to understand.

Benjamin

P.S. Thanks for being informed and opinionated. I really like knowing that there are people out there who have an opinion for a reason, know how to share it, and do. I spend some time nearly every day listening to the two local conservative and an one liberal AM radio talk stations. Glenn Beck, Rush Vicodin, Randi Rhodes, Lars Larson, and whoever else sort of scare me.

My response:

Barb says she will write up something for me to post on my blog soon as well. She has a lot of experience with government run health care.

First Answer:
Basically, I don’t have any knock-out good answers.

Getting the government out of the health care business will help some. The price of drugs is probably 20 to 100 X what it would be without the FDA being involved. Just like anti-gun people only citing the costs of guns in society and not mentioning the benefits the FDA costs are seldom mentioned. Not only in the incredible expense to get a new drug to market but the number of lives lost because of the delays.

Requiring hospitals to give free health care to those that can’t pay raises the prices for everyone. All the paperwork required raises the price a bunch as well. This isn’t just the governments though. Insurance fraud has contributed a great deal as well. Insurance also raises the cost not just because of the extra documentation required but because they put a lot of pressure on providers to reduce the price and providers give them discounts of something like 40% over what an individual would pay.

A looser pays court system would help but I’m not entirely comfortable with that concept either.

Another thing that makes the comparison from 10 or 20 years ago to now difficult is that the quality isn’t the same. MRI’s weren’t available. Many of the drugs available now did not exist then. Lots of people that would have died or been permanently disabled a decade or two ago now go home and have many more healthful years left.

Second answer:

There will be lots of research, engineering, and failures going into the first efforts. Think of Microsoft Office–the first copy costs many millions, the second copy costs pennies. It won’t be that dramatic but drugs really aren’t that much different. The costs are weighted very, very heavily on the front end.

I hope Barb will be able contribute more.

Health care thoughts

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I occasionally post about the adverse results of socialized medicine but probably haven’t said much about what I think about it. A friend asked the following via email:

I have been meaning to ask you for a more detailed explaination of your stance on universal government run health care as it is being proposed right now. I understand you oppose it, but as someone who is poor and hasn’t had healthcare for 11 years and has used the emergency room for most of my healthcare needs, why it is bad.

I know there is no free lunch.
I know that someone is paying for it.
I want to know why YOU are opposed to it and why.

My response (except for a few personal things that were deleted to protect privacy):

Health care… Big, big topic.

I understand the no insurance situation. [details deleted]

I have tried to express this in a “Just One Question” format but haven’t quite been able to do it. Here’s my best attempt:

If it were possible to keep someone alive and robust essentially forever (baring catastrophic injury) but it cost $1M/year per person should the “government” supply it for everyone?

Of course the answer is “we can’t afford that”.

The thing is we are rapidly approaching the point where immortality may be achievable for some people. I suspect age-wise I am just above the cutoff line where it will be technically feasible. My kids (and probably you) have a good chance at that.

All government health care plans equalize (for the most part–people in power typically are more equal than others even if the law says otherwise) the care. There simply isn’t budget for everyone to get “the best”. Care will be rationed or it will be substandard. Look into what happened in the UK. The waiting lists cause people to die. Too old, too fat, or smoke? You don’t get the knee replacement or other care because that money would be “better spent” on someone younger or healthier.

Government bureaucrats will make the rules and/or review cases deciding who gets care and who dies. It WILL be abused. It might be on racial or religious lines or it might be on the basis of who you know. Whatever the case it won’t be on the basis of what you and/or friends and family think you are worth or can afford. When someone pulls the plug on me I want it to be because I and/or my family decided it was time or couldn’t afford the cost rather than some government official that decided they didn’t like my skin color or I had been just a little too uppity with some of my blog postings.

If Bill Gates and other extremely wealthy people are allowed to pay for whatever the free market can come up with immortality will probably be achieved soon. It will be extremely expensive and only a few will be able to afford it. But the price will come down and someday it will be affordable by the middle class. If equality of care is enforced we may never have that available to us.

See also what Alan Korwin has to say about it:

http://pagenine.typepad.com/page_nine/2009/07/dangerous-health-care-insanity-spreads.html

Quote of the day–Lyle @ UltiMAK

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[I]f you’re in favor of welfare programs, for example (allowing some people to live at the expense of others, by threat of force, i.e. to acquire value without having earned it) then what moral or intellectual tenet is going to stop you from saying those same people should never be arrested? If they can receive goods and services they didn’t earn by work or productivity, why then, exactly, shouldn’t they have freedom they didn’t earn through respecting other people’s rights? If you favor forced redistribution, you’ve thrown out the concept of rights at that point, so what basis do you have for punishing property crimes that would be intellectually or morally consistent with forced redistribution? Is there some huge difference between the government robbing you to support a layabout, and said layabout robbing you directly? Seems to me the latter would accomplish the same thing far more efficiently, leaving out the middle man as it does.

Lyle @ UltiMAK
July 31, 2009
Comment to Fearsome firearms or crap for brains?
[But the “man in the middle” is the main beneficiary and may, in fact, be the entire point of the theft.–Joe]

Good question

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Ry points out:

The April 2009 edition of the NFA Handbook has removed pin & weld from the methods that are allowed to extend barrels to the minimum (16″ rifle, 18″ shotgun) length to avoid paying an SBR/SBS tax.

And asks:

What happens to the millions of barrels out there that were pinned and welded?

It’s possible that 100s of thousands of criminals were just created by a simple regulation change without even a whisper of notice in Congress. Is it tin-foil hat time? Or are they really out to get me?

Ayn Rand indeed.

Mike Lux report

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A few days ago I reported I might have a chance to ask Mike Lux a a question or two. I got my chance last week and reported via Twitter here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The Twitter posts are below, indented, and in italics:

At the meeting room to hear Mike Lux speak. He should show up in a few minutes. Wearing my Rearden Steel t-shirt. World War Z on my Zune.

Rearden Steel is a little obscure. But it has a very significant meaning. I chose that shirt very deliberately. I’m pretty sure it was lost on everyone at the meeting but it made me smile.

World War Z just happened to be what was next in my queue for listening material but I thought it appropriate listening when about to subject myself to such a “progressive”.

Lux says, “I believe the economy is fundamentally broken.” “We are on the verge of a great change if we embrace it.”

He talked of great moments in history such as the 1930s with the “New Deal” and the 1960s with the “Great Society” and civil rights legislation. He was disappointed with the Clinton administration that they didn’t seem to have an real direction or make any progress. Now we have a chance to make some progress if we can just get our act together.

I still get a chill going through me when I think about this. Could it be our financial crisis was very deliberately brought on to make it more likely that socialism will be accepted by U.S. citizens? I had sort of half thought that this might be the last straw and people would have their complete fill of socialism and embrace the free market and our constitution as a result of our current situation. Can’t people see that the Obama administration is only making things worse? Or will they be convinced that only he and socialism can save them?

Brrrrr… the chills that gives me.

He talked for quite a while about all the Bill of Rights violations by the Bush administration and expressed some concern President Obama wasn’t moving fast enough to correct them.

I asked him to address his concerns over BOR violations by conservatives versus progressives ignoring the 2A and 10th.

I was the last person called upon. There were to be no more questions after mine.

His response was, “We just have a different interpretation of the BOR.”

He also said the the government has the “right” to “invest” in the economy and “reform” health care via regulating of interstate commerce.

I corrected him on rights versus powers and he said he didn’t know the difference.

Wow, just wow. He thinks mandated health care falls under the regulation of interstate commerce? I think that justification was lost on nearly everyone in the room. After this and my little email exchange with Senator Patty Murray how can a “progressive” claim to have any concern for the BOR or the constitution? How can they claim to have any principles?

Constitutional law advice for Sotomayor

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Bitter and Sebastian has been pointing out just how bad nominee Sotomayor is on the right to keep and bear arms. This is probably the most damning.

She does not want to admit that people have a right to self-defense. She is smart enough to know it is a slippery slope to the acknowledgment of the right to keep and bear arms if she were to admit that. The British have learned that lesson sliding down the slope in the other direction–if there is no right to keep and bear arms then there is no right to self-defense.

Alan Korwin gives Sotomayor some pointers on what the U.S. Supreme Court has said about self-defense. It’s not a question mark at all. The conclusion:

The Supreme Court has recognized, addressed and answered all the most fundamental questions about self defense. The idea that they have never addressed this core American issue is completely false, as the numerous cases clearly demonstrate.

Nationalized health care

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Nationalizing our health care system doesn’t just fail my Jews in the Attic Test, it’s bad for your health as well.

See also:

Barb works in the medical profession and I would tell you what she thinks of government involvement in health care but I try to keep the language here acceptable for polite society.

And I thought I was rebellious

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I pay cash for nearly everything I can. Rent and utilities for the underground bunker in the Seattle area, and most of my gasoline, ammo, guns, and range fees are all paid for with cash.

I don’t hesitate to call people advocating gun control bigots or say they have mental problems.

I encouraged Barb to keep her own name when we got married (which she did). And that was nearly 33 years ago when it was far less common than it is now.

I advocate pushing the limits of what is acceptable and pushing buttons in people. I challenge people to make them think and to slow down the encroachment upon our freedoms.

I’ve started open carrying in certain places.

But a fellow Idaho resident makes me look a bit pathetic in my timid attempts at rebellion. See how she handled the marriage license and the SSN. I’m proud she lives in the same town as I (sometimes) do.

Quote of the day–James Higham

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There was a time when it was not necessary to defend oneself in this country of ours. There was a time when an Englishman’s home was his castle. There was a time when a Briton wouldn’t dream of being armed.

That time has passed.

James Higham
July 20, 2009
[defending ourselves] the time has come
[James lives in the U.K. and is saying the gun and self-defense bans aren’t working and it’s time to change things. It is a little more timid than I would (and do) approach the subject but perhaps that is more appropriate when dealing with these people.

James uses several of the references I provided via email (and blog post). He also quotes Just One Question and my Jews in the Attic Test. Thanks for the links James.

So far the comments are essentially neutral. Perhaps people are thinking about it rather than just lashing out. If so, then perhaps there is hope for them yet.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Dmitry Orlov

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Food. Shelter. Transportation. Security. Security is very important. Maintaining order and public safety requires discipline, and maintaining discipline, for a lot of people, requires the threat of force. This means that people must be ready to come to each other’s defense, take responsibility for each other, and do what’s right. Right now, security is provided by a number of bloated, bureaucratic, ineffectual institutions, which inspire more anger and despondency than discipline, and dispense not so much violence as ill treatment. That is why we have the world’s highest prison population. They are supposedly there to protect people from each other, but in reality their mission is not even to provide security; it is to safeguard property, and those who own it. Once these institutions run out of resources, there will be a period of upheaval, but in the end people will be forced to learn to deal with each other face to face, and Justice will once again become a personal virtue rather than a federal department.

Dmitry Orlov
February 13, 2009
Social Collapse Best Practices

For our fellow freedom fighters in the UK

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I received a request for help from James in the UK. Here was my response (actually sent in two pieces, but combined here):

I would like to suggest you follow the links in the post Just One Question. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) reviewed a number of studies and was unable to conclude gun control made people safer. That review, and the studies they looked at, are probably the most reliable data points.

The following links are not to statistics. The CDC study would be the best reference I have for that.

I don’t have it but I think this book would be very useful:

http://www.joyceleemalcolm.com/books/guns_and_violence

I’ve read a few excerpts and it seemed quite good.

This might also be worthwhile:

http://www.joyceleemalcolm.com/books/keep_and_bear_arms

For more background and potential ways to approach the problem take a look at these:

https://blog.joehuffman.org/?s=%22James%20Kelly%22&submit=Search
https://blog.joehuffman.org/category/places-without-guns/
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/britain-is-capital-of-crime-says-us-tv-channel-715251.html
http://www.reason.com/news/show/28582.html

Good luck!

Update:

Gun control also violates my Jews in the Attic Test.

Quote of the day–Howard Nemerov

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Don’t like Jews or Catholics? Hitler disarmed them and then murdered millions in concentration camps, along with Gypsies, homosexuals, etc.

Hate Christians? After Uganda banned guns, 300,000 were rounded up and murdered.

Don’t like “smart” people? After banning guns, Cambodia rounded up and murdered over one million of them.

Hate people who disagree with you? After the Soviet Union established gun control, over 20 million dissidents were rounded up and killed.

By comparison, the Second Amendment has actually saved millions of lives. It also protects your right to religious freedom, your pursuit of happiness, and your opportunity for upward mobility. It raises the cost for thugs who want you rounded up and murdered.

It also shows that anybody who is against the civil right of self-defense is a person who hates your life, liberty, and happiness.

Why would you want to be disarmed before such a person?

Howard Nemerov
July 16, 2009
Does civilian gun ownership cause bloodshed?
[Just a friendly reminder of the costs of weapon restrictions. And can you tell me again–just what are the benefits?

I have to conclude the people advocating weapons restrictions are either ignorant or consider the costs listed above are actually benefits. Since information is so readily available the ignorance is willful hence no matter how you look at it such people are contemptable no matter how they arrive at their position of restricting the private ownership of weapons.–Joe]

Managing Us Verses Protecting Our Rights – mutually exclusive concepts

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This is for J H.  He and Joe were discussing statistics related to gun restriction in comments here.

This line of argument, taken by itself, is to say nothing of human rights, the right to live being most fundamental and the right to self defense going hand in hand with the right to live.

If we are to leave out any discussion of rights, and focus purely on how people get injured or how they die in accidents and crimes as a means of determining and justifying laws, then we’d start by banning the wheel.  Swimming pools, access to rivers and lakes, etc., and stairs would be ahead of guns in private hands as a focus of legislative restriction.  Somewhere in between would be legal restrictions on unprotected sex and leaving the home while ill.  But that would be government thinking of the people in the same way that a farmer thinks of his cattle.

It is when we look at guns in the hands of governments that we find mass death, numbering in the tens of millions, and there you find the primary purpose of our second amendment– defense or deterrence against tyranny, or more to the point it should be seen as defense of human rights by those who hold those rights (we the people).  Who then should look at whom as property?  Keeping our servants in government (our cattle) properly de-horned is, historically, the more important concern if we are to have any sort of owner/property relationships with one another.

Once we’ve accepted the Nanny State as the ideal form of government, all bets are off anyway, and arguing figures and statistics alone is to fight the battle on your enemy’s chosen ground.  Even being wrong in their figures, your enemy has won by deciding the terms of battle.  People are in fact injured and killed through the use of or involvement with guns in private hands.  That is a fact.  Hence the Nanny State will find an excuse to restrict them if that’s what they want and if they feel safe in doing it.

The true winning argument is that the state has no legitimate jurisdiction over any behavior or possession that in itself does not violate the rights of other people.  If I have a gun in my pocket I haven’t violated any other person’s rights by that fact alone.  If I haul off and smack someone at random in the head with a baseball bat, it is not the fault of the state for allowing free, un-restricted access to baseball bats.  It is I who would have committed a crime by violating the rights of another person, for which I would rightly be held accountable.  In attempting to restrict generally the access to baseball bats as a result of my crime, the state would be perpetrating tyranny by way of making victims out of innocent persons.  We call that sort of behavior “prior restraint”– restraining someone in some way prior to them having threatened or done anything wrong to anyone.

It is well and good to point out the stupidity of arms restrictions, and how their effects are virtually always counter to the stated goal of making people safer, but those issues are a distant secondary to the issues of human rights.  Otherwise we’d be confiscating automobiles, banning certain sports, et al.  Without human rights as the fundamental principle guiding our policies, the totalitarian state is an inevitability.

Isn’t it About Time…

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…that a movie was made, paralleling “Reefer Madness” exactly, scene for scene, gesture for gesture, line for line including the dramatic introduction, merely substituting “marihuana” for guns?  Yes, I believe it is.  An NRA agent arrives in town, starts promoting guns, and all hell breaks loose.  “Gun Madness”.

If you haven’t seen the 1930s movie “Reefer Madness”, by all means do watch.  It’s not only illustrative of what the totalitarians have been up to for generations, it’s a real hoot, especially considering that those who made it were trying very hard to appear serious.  I can picture Di Fi standing before the concerned parents at the school meeting, eyes glaring, finger pointing at the camera…

Hmm..you don’t suppose the VPC or other anti-gun groups could be talked into providing some of the funding?

Finding a cure

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Apparently this is an actual image from a poster planned to be used in the case of a quarantine (page 420):

Via email from Chet.

Quote of the day–Mark R. Levin

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So distant is America today from it’s founding principles that it is difficult to precisely describe the nature of American government. It is not strictly a constitutional republic, because the Constitution has been and continues to be easily altered by a judicial oligarchy that mostly enforces, if not expands, the Statist’s agenda. It is not strictly a representative republic, because so many edits are produced by a maze of administrative departments that are unknown to the public and detached from its sentiment. It is not strictly a Federal republic, because the states that gave the central government life now live at its behest. What, then, is it? It is a society steadily transitioning toward statism.

Mark R. Levin
Page 192, Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto
[H/T to Kevin who inspired me with this quote to get the book.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Joe Golonka

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The NRA perfectly epitomizes the paranoid and hate-filled mind-set of the Republican voting base.

The registration and tracking of firearms, which is so necessary for effective law enforcement and actually protects legitimate gun owners, is equated by the ultra-loons at the NRA with an utterly paranoid and wholly unsupported claim that “they are coming to take my guns away.”

Joe Golonka
Paranoid NRA thinking
July 11, 2009
[It sounds to me like Mr. Golonka has a little bit of hate going on there himself.

“Unsupported claim”?

“Necessary for effective law enforcement”?

  • Does he know how many crimes have been solved in Canada because of gun registration? I do (as of 2000 it was one).
  • Does he know how many crimes have been solved in Hawaii because of gun registration? I do (as of 2000 police did not know of any).
  • Does he know how effective the Nazi Police Battalions were in law enforcement because of gun registration? I do. Between July 1942 and November 1943 just one Battalion murdered an estimated 38,000 Jews. They lost only two of their own (read Hitlers Willing Executioners for the details).

Ignorance and bigotry is a terrible thing. Poor Mr. Golonka exhibits all the symptoms.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Frederic Bastiat

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Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations!

Frederic Bastiat
[This isn’t the first time I’ve quoted Bastiat see here, here, and here. I really should get a book or two on or by him.

Additional info about Bastiat from Wikipedia:

Bastiat asserted that the only purpose of government is to defend the right of an individual to life, liberty, and property. From this definition, Bastiat concluded that the law cannot defend life, liberty and property if it promotes socialist policies inherently opposed to these very things. In this way, he says, the law is perverted and turned against the thing it is supposed to defend.

Which is entirely consistent with our consititutions and entirely at odds with our governments.

Via Marc Gallagher.–Joe]

‘Investment Coordinators’

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You can pick a socialist out of large crowd in about 3.5 to 3.85 seconds.  He’s the one angrily protesting the use of the word “socialist” while simultaneously advocating socialism, while simultaneously trying to sound educated.  That’s quite a trick.  You have to give socialists that much; they can be fairly good at multi tasking and they have been known to work hard.  Loudly advocating stagnation and decay, while strenuously denying it at the same time, all while taking and disposing of other people’s property and money, while compiling massive lists of massive lists of massive sub lists of dos and don’ts for all of us to follow, all under various threats, isn’t easy.  Fighting the revolution and getting the constitution written and ratified was a minor task by comparison.

In comments here, Endif, running full speed and damn the torpedoes into my nets, referred to the federal takeover of banks and automakers (and presumably everything else the government has taken over in whole or in part, from education to agriculture to energy and transportation industries, to drugs, alcohol and gambling, etc., etc., etc., etc.) as “Investment”.

Socialists get all agitated and defensive at the mention of the “S” word.  What is to be done about it?  What term designating state sponsored coercion would they accept as properly defining their belief system?  We know they quit liking the term “Liberal” and they never understood that “Fascist”  applied to them.  You call one of them a Fascist and they’ll take offense, thinking you’re calling them a conservative.  It’s great fun but it doesn’t lead to even a rudimentaqry level of understanding when two people are using the same words but speaking entirely different languages.  They seem to be using “Progressive” less and less too, now that more people know where and when that political term originated.

What’s happening in the U.S. is more akin to Fascism.  It’s all the same to me, or to put it another way; the subtle distinctions between different versions of state sponsored coercion don’t interest me, nor do the distinctions between the Crips and the Bloods.  Nor do I much care what the advocates and practitioners of socialism prefer to be called– I just know what they don’t like being called, and that in itself is interesting.

Tell us which you prefer, Socialists, the word “socialism” or the word “Fascism”.  If you dislike being called a socialist, surely you have some specific preference.  We know you don’t like “Nazi” mainly because you think it too means conservative.  “Moderate” works for me, since moderates are people who have accepted the premises of socialism but aren’t willing to admit it.  “Socialist in denial” is pretty descriptive too, if redundant.  Ooh; how about “Investment Coordinator”?  Hey, I like that.  We can henceforth refer to socialists as Investment Coordinators.  They’ll like that, I bet.  But wait; what would we call real investment coordinators?

On second thought, I’ll keep calling socialists socialists.  We all know what it means, even if socialists try to act like they don’t.

Merchants of death cooperate with ATF

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Even though gun businesses are vilified by the anti-gun bigots there is a lot of cooperation with the ATF when they play half-way decent toward reasonable goals. The NSSF is gearing up for another “Don’t lie for the other guy” campaign. My experiences with the ATF have all been positive even if there have been a few government bureaucracy moments.

I am of the opinion the ATF is unconstitutional and should be completely disbanded but that doesn’t mean they don’t do some good as well as the obvious harm. Ruby Ridge and Waco are just two of the worst instances, dozens, if not hundreds of incidents of abuse occur each year. But I don’t really see the harm advocating gun dealers not sell to violent criminals or them asking for a sample of my explosives for forensic comparison (they haven’t actually done this, but they said they might and I agreed to do so).

When the anti-gun bigots whine about people exercising their specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms I think they should be asked, “Who has done more to catch criminals using guns and explosives for evil, anti-freedom advocates, or the “Merchants of Death”?