Wire Report

(NoThirdSolution: David Zemens) – For many people (and yes I’m jumping to conclusions and making sweeping generalizations here) “No one should die because they can’t afford health care” is the weasel way of saying “I want someone else to pay for it” without sounding like a panhandler. So, take what follows with a grain of salt, OK?

On that note, someone’s Facebook status said:

“No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.”

No one should die just because they were born in sub-Saharan Africa, either. But they do. Doesn’t make it fair, but it happens. For every “poor” or underprivileged Westerner complaining about their lack of “health care” (NB: even the poorest Americans have access to better health care than, I would venture to guess, 85% of the earth’s population has ever had), there are a million people living on $1 and a cup of rice each day — so cry me a river.

Every one of us will die at the crossroads of some particular circumstances, time, and place:

• Some of us die in our sleep. Some of us are merely in “the wrong place at the wrong time”.
• Some of us will die because the technology to cure what ails us has not yet been invented.
• Some of us will die because we made poor choices that presently impact our ability to care for ourselves, and
• some of us will die unfortunately through no direct fault of our own, because we can’t afford to pay for the technology that does exist.

To lament the fact that some people die under seemingly inopportune circumstances is folly; it ignores the lion’s share of the equation. Financial circumstances are a scapegoat, because at nearly any time and place where the individual isn’t DOA, a change in financial circumstances might forestall death for a few hours, days, weeks, or months.

You’ll get no arguments from me, if you say that “health care is too expensive”: blame the AMA cartel, the FDA, blame “Big Insurance”, etc. But national health care is health care fascism; the insurers want guaranteed profits, guaranteed customers for life, and Uncle Sam to pay the bills. They want to sell you your own welfare.

You’ll get no arguments from me, if you say that “the system” needs to be reformed: specifically it needs to not be a system at all. People aren’t permitted under the law to care for themselves or to arrange for the care of others. Or because the consumer is not the customer, and the customer enjoys certain tax privileges that the consumer does not, etc. Or because people have been conditioned to believe that “insurance” should pay for an annual check-up and dental exams and all sorts of other routine maintenance instead of just providing for accidents and serious illnesses.

The problem is that health care, medicine, long-term care, etc., is damned expensive. Government is the problem in health care, which keeps it unaffordable.

Asking or forcing others to pay the costs, which you can’t afford, will do nothing to actually solve that problem; it just shifts the burden, messing up someone else’s life circumstances, exacerbating the problem for the future.

About the Author: David Zemens

David Zemens is the Editor & Publisher of No Third Solution, and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business and a Master’s degree in Economics. A self-taught libertarian, David has recently begun delving in to “agorism” a political philosophy developed by Samuel Edward Konkin III, which aims for a society built on voluntary associations and exchange, thereby resulting in a true free market. He considers one-day subverting state propaganda completely by opting to teach at the local community college. David currently works as a market-research analyst and he and his wire were happily married in September of 2008.

Tarrin Lupo

SAVANNAH, GEORGIA – Last week we reported on the growing outrage by Savannahians paying exorbitant fines of $140 to $200 fines simply for jaywalking. However as we see in the video the government and its agents feel this law as well as parking laws do not apply to them. Thus, further illustrating the growing trend of government viewing the citizenry as nothing more than their private piggy-bank.

Finally, we  check in on the progress of the petition being circulated by “Savannahians Against Ticketing for Jaywalking” during a recent “Savannah Sand Gnats” baseball game.

Source(s): Savannahians Against Ticketing for Jaywalking Facebook Group • LCL Report

Tarrin Lupo

SAVANNAH, GEORGIA – Residents and business owners are banding together in order to protest the city’s new revenue generating cash cow; $208 Dollar Jaywalking fines in downtown. Consequently, the new ‘jaywalking trap’ in the business district comes at the expense of policing one of the most deadly intersections in the city, just five miles out from Savannah’s new golden goose.

Further illustrating the arrogance of government officials, I manage to record a parking enforcement officer failing to stop at the very intersection in question. His dedication for safety is obviously secondary to his desire to please his city bosses by the issuance of as many parking citations for recently expired parking meters as possible.

Finally, we get the chance to speak with both the owner of ‘24e’ a furniture boutique in downtown Savannah, Mr. Ruel Joyner, and Mr. Michael Gastner head of the recently formed citizens protest group, ‘Savannians Against Ticketing for Jaywalking.’

Source(s): Savannahians Against Ticketing for Jaywalking – Facebook Group

Joseph Marohl

One “mixed blessing” of Facebook is that I have been reacquainted with people I knew 30-40 years ago in my fundamentalist, conservative past.

It puts me in the odd position of having to come out of the closet all over again, and then, inevitably, I get involved in debates over whether Obama is an anti-American Muslim, whether Western society persecutes Christians (surprising, how many fundies STILL see themselves as persecuted), and whether Republicans or Democrats are to blame for the shithole America has become.

I haven’t heard from any of that crowd in over two weeks, so I may have pissed the last of them off, though I’ve maintained a fair and reasonable tone in pointing out the lapses in logic and the absence of evidence in their arguments. Well, maybe not–I did tell the Obama-is-a-Muslim person that only slobbering idiots believe that story.

Also, for some reason, the only students of mine who have signed me on as a Facebook friend are conservative and Christian, but they, having had me in class recently, must know I can pick over their bones for supper, so they never raise the issues of politics or religion with me directly.

Oddly, my chief appeal for the past 15 years as a college English instructor has been to conservative, religious students. Perhaps they perceive my strictness as authoritarian and take an immediate masochistic shine to me. Sometimes I think it’s the Flannery O’Connor factor, that the grotesqueries of that mindset are still somehow apparent in my bearing and speech, even though I no longer actually have that mindset.

Sometimes I think they like that when I disagree with them, I don’t attack them personally (except, on rare occasions, to say that only “slobbering idiots” believe the sorts of things they believe).

And sometimes I think they sense a kindred spirit–somebody who’s been where they are and escaped—and, though right now they have absolutely no consciousness of it, they would like to escape, also.

Conservatives prefer to play with a stacked deck in argument–they hardly ever simply look at evidence with an open mind and deduce their positions from the available facts. Instead, they like to approach the facts with a prefabricated position already in place. Typically, they enter an argument with a handful of strong factual evidence that supports their claim, but almost never can defend the representativeness of their evidence (i.e. their facts are usually “exceptions,” not “typical cases”) and almost never can integrate their evidence into a consistent and coherent big picture. (Fundamentalist Christians, especially, have got so used to accepting inconsistencies in their dogma that they are usually blind to the inconsistencies in their politics.)

The irony that for the past 20 years almost all terrorists are ultra-conservative escapes most conservatives–who prefer to imagine that Bill Ayers and the Weathermen and perhaps even the Symbionese Liberation Army are still major threats to the security of the nation.

But the so-called Islamo-fascists are pro-life, anti-gay, anti-feminist, God-first, country-first (not even a contradiction in a theocracy), pro-preventive war (“the Bush doctrine”), pro-shock-and-awe (i.e. terrorism), and pro-strategic-use-of-torture.

American-born terrorists target abortion clinics, gay nightclubs, and black churches, not the Elks Lodge or Macy’s. Ann Coulter once quipped, “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is that he did not go to the New York Times building”.¹ Eric Robert Rudolph, who bombed the 1996 Olympics Centennial Park, as well as an Atlanta lesbian bar, became a folk hero for a large number of conservative Southerners, one of the reasons the FBI gave for its having taken seven years to find and apprehend him.²

Despite all this, conservative wags like Bill O’Reilly continue to paint liberals (and the left in general) as the “friends of terrorists.”

My old conservative acquaintances are upset with me when I point out such inconsistencies in thinking. Oddly, they are less upset to find out that I’m homosexual and godless (hardly blinking, apparently, at the thought of my frying for an eternity in Hell).

The cut-off point for their tolerance appears to be when they hear I’m voting for Barack Obama. That I consider myself considerably to the left of Obama on almost every issue, including war, the death penalty, and “family values,” is, to my conservative friends, quite beyond the pale.

Source(s): ¹Gurley, George. “Coultergeist.” New York Observer.26 Aug. 2002.  ²“Profile: Eric Rudolph.” 14 Apr. 2005. BBC News.