The Face of Britain's Decline

From Dave Blount, at Right Wing News, "Leanna Broderick":

Even as once great Britain’s eyes go dim, life is still good for the freeloaders who are bleeding it to death...

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Republicans Have Leverage in Fiscal Cliff Standoff

From Keith Hennessey, at the Wall Street Journal, "Time to Call the President's Budget Bluff":

... While the president has a strong hand, he is overplaying it. Republicans have some leverage. They need to use it effectively.

• The president's veto threat is a bluff. Without a new law, tax increases and spending cuts will likely increase unemployment to 9% and might trigger a new recession. Even if he could shift all the political blame for such a legislative failure onto congressional Republicans, Mr. Obama cannot afford to risk a new recession that would irreparably damage his second term. He can neither veto a budget-deal bill that Congress sends to him, nor can he allow Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to tie a bill up in the Senate. He can, however, try to bluff Republicans into giving away the store.

• The president's proposal for more spending and taxation puts him to the left of many in his own party, and Democrats up for re-election are not lemmings looking to follow Sen. Patty Murray, who has welcomed a plunge over the fiscal cliff. Democratic Sens. Max Baucus and Mary Landrieu oppose the president's proposal to increase the estate tax. Sen. Chuck Schumer has defined "rich" at $1 million of income, much higher than the president's $250,000.

Many Democrats don't want to raise taxes on successful small business owners without Republican votes as political cover. Members of both parties are terrified at the prospect of subjecting 27 million additional tax filers to the Alternative Minimum Tax if there is no new legislative "patch," as Congress has annually passed for many years.

If exposed to the light of day, these intraparty Democratic divisions provide opportunities for Republicans to negotiate a centrist or center-right agreement. In the short run, this requires Republicans to publicly challenge their Democratic colleagues on these specific policy questions. In the long run, Republicans must refuse to engage in ad hoc summitry and insist upon a return to a regular, committee-based legislative process that includes annual budget resolutions and open-floor amendments.

I've been saying the same thing. Republicans are in good shape if they stand firm. It'll be Obama's recession if we go over the cliff. Fuck him.

More at the link.

Rachel Maddow and the Left's Depraved Agenda of Unchecked Power Over the Individual

You don't have to go much farther than Rachel Maddow's marquee MSNBC broadcast to understand how far America's fallen from the society's basic standards of decency and self-government. When AIDS protesters launched their disgusting bare-naked Capitol Hill protest last week, Maddow thought that was sweeter than a load of steaming hot-passion lesbo giz. Robert Stacy McCain had the perfect headline, "Naked Protesters: Unattractive People Demand Action to Protect Boondoggle":

In terms of newsworthiness, it might be a clever idea to have, say, Brad Pitt and Anne Hathaway stage a naked protest in Harry Reid’s office, demanding action to reduce out-of-control federal spending. On the other hand, it’s hard to see the logic of sending out a bunch of ugly freaks to harass John Boehner about their pet boondoggle...

Yes, ugly freaks. Very ugly, and f-king depraved. But there's more:

Exactly why the federal government has a program to provide housing for AIDS sufferers but not, say, people with herpes or chlyamida, can only be explained in terms of identity politics. Over the past 30 years, clever organizers have succeeded in making AIDS a propaganda sledgehammer with which to bludgeon politicians. “AIDS funding” includes a vast category of government spending, of which HOPWA is a classic example, that is considered sacrosanct because anyone who doesn’t support it will be slammed as a heartless homophobe.

Now that's where you're gonna get Rachel Maddow all lathered. Anything to expand the role of government over the individual, using tactics so depraved to make one vomit, and Maddow is totally down with it. She is the perfect representative of how far to the left the so-called establishment has shifted in recent years. Progressives want nothing less than the destruction of traditional values and the respectful nature of the individual, the decent, respectful nature of the individual. It must be destroyed to make way for far-left cultural values and the secular state enforcer.

For more on this check out Sheldon Richman's essay at Reason, "Rachel Maddow's Blind Deference to Government Power." I don't think the essay is introduced as well as it should be --- for example, the key quotation at the piece does not coincide with the video to which it links. But the fundamental argument is a good one: that Rachel Maddow is totally in the service of the expansion of government power over the individual. Indeed, Richman's offering a theory of Maddow's philosophy of the general will, in which the atomized individual is meaningless except to the extent that it fuels the social mass subservient to state power. Here's the key section:

Echoing President Obama and Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren, Maddow apparently believes that no private accomplishment is possible without government support through spending on infrastructure, education, and research. But that is wrong. All of those things can be and have been provided in the private market. Government has a way of crowding out private efforts and then asserting its own importance because of the lack of private alternatives. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy!

Government doesn't just crowd out private-sector activities; it also substitutes inferior ones in their place. No one is pleased with education—which has been under government control for close to 200 years. If the infrastructure is in disrepair, who's to blame for that? Politicians don't think about fixing things until they need a rationalization for "stimulus" spending. Why does it take a recession to make them think about the roads and bridges? American history is rife with examples of private roads and bridges, whose owners didn't wait for an economic crisis to fix them. Their incomes—their businesses—depended on satisfying customers. That goes for education and research too....

Maddow needs to be reminded that we live in a world of scarcity. That doesn't mean great things can't be accomplished, but it does mean that if politicians and bureaucrats decide what is to be built, the scarce labor and resources used in those projects will be unavailable for other projects—particularly those that private entrepreneurs are willing to take risks on. It's Bastiat's broken-window fallacy again. We readily see a government project being built. (Don't worry, the politicians will make sure of that.) What we don't see are all the things not being built because government preempted free enterprise.

But we must ask: Who is better qualified to determine how scarce labor and resources should be invested, politicians or private individuals? Politicians operate under a perverse set of incentives and lack critical information. They aim to please electoral constituencies and special-interest donors, while having no market feedback to guide them in choosing among the many alternative projects; they risk no capital of their own and acquire resources by force—taxation. Why would we expect them to make good decisions? They may call what they do "investment," but in economic terms, it is consumption not investment.

On the other hand, entrepreneurs—at least when government provides no safety net of bailouts, guarantees, subsidies, cheap credit, and the like—do risk their own capital or must raise it from investors who are free to say no. (Try saying that as a taxpayer.) It's not an infallible process, but if consumers are ultimately unhappy with what is produced, they are free to withhold their dollars and send the misguided entrepreneur into bankruptcy, a process that will transfer resources to more able hands. That's a kind of clout which political subjects can only wish they had....

Maybe that's why Maddow prefers government "greatness" to private "smallness." She doesn't want plain people calling the shots, which ultimately they would do in a freed market. She seems more at home with the governing elite and their court intellectuals, who promise to take care of the rest of us rather than let us look after ourselves through the vast mutual-aid society known as the free market.

Right.

Maddow wants the state bureaucrats and socialist political hacks to rule over all the private social and economic space of the individual and the family. It's totalitarian, for there is no end to what the left would like to do. Again, you have to get the context of Richman's essay, which isn't as well devoloped as it should be. The link at the post goes to one of those MSNBC "Lean Forward" promotional spots the network's been running for a year or so now. Maddow stands out in front of the Hoover Dam in one of the more classic ones, extolling the virtues of the gargantuan New Deal infrastructure projects put in place during the Franklin Roosevelt-era of progressive socialist government. Maddow pines for a revamped, steroid-fueled homosexualized New Deal. She and her cohorts at MSNBC ---- self-declared socialists like Lawrence O'Donnell --- are hell bent on eviscerating private initiative in the name of state power and secular values. I'm blown aways sometimes watching those shows, for example, Ed Schultz's recent Blitzkrieg broadcasting assault on Walmart.

These are bad people. They are, by definition, un-American, for what they propose for our governing future is the European model of an ever-enveloping state sector, with crushing bureaucratic power, economic stagnation, and a growing entitlement state with double-digit employment a permanent feature of economic life. Recall from yesterday, "Professor Harvey Mansfield: Obama Voters 'Are Voting for Dependency, for Lack of Ambition, for Insolvency...'"

This is the new reality. Polls are showing an even greater tendency toward socialism and socialist organization in the American polity. The voters ratified this vision of government when they reelected President Obama. But as I've been saying, nothing is permanent in politics. At some point the left's entitlement goody bag becomes so stuffed that even the most productive people in the world aren't able to fill it. We're seeing it happen in California, as the bills are coming due in this once great state. It's only a matter of time nationally. The left is preparing the grave for its own catastrophic fall from indulgent, decadent power.

Dying Patients on Liverpool Care Pathway Never Told That Life-Saving Treatment Was Being Withdrawn

The socialist state is a cold, calculating killer.

The Telegraph UK has more on Britain's National Health Service hospitals that send their patients home to die, and in this case, the patients aren't even told what's happening. See, "Half of those on Liverpool Care Pathway never told":

Almost half of dying patients placed on the controversial Liverpool Care Pathway are never told that life-saving treatment has been withdrawn, a national audit has found.

The study suggests that in total, around 57,000 patients a year are dying in NHS hospitals without being told that efforts to keep them alive have been stopped.
It also reveals that thousands of dying patients have been left to suffer in pain, with no attempt to keep them comfortable while drugs were administered.

Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, last night described the disclosures from records held by 178 NHS hospitals as "totally unacceptable".

He said the failure to consult patients would now be examined by an independent inquiry, which will also look at payments made to hospitals for meeting targets to place people on the pathway.

Each year around 130,000 patients are placed on the pathway. The national audit by the Marie Curie Palliative Care Institute Liverpool and the Royal College of Physicians examined a representative sample of 7,058 deaths which occurred between April and June last year, at 178 NHS hospitals. Of these, X were on the pathway.

The new disclosures demonstrate just how routinely hospitals are placing patients on the pathway without informing them that steps which could hasten their death have been taken. The national audit found...

Well, that doesn't sound so lovely now, does it?

And it's not like it isn't coming here. Perhaps we'll have some other name besides "death pathways," but we'll have identical death by rationing soon enough.

Check Paul Hsieh's report from October, at Forbes, "Get Ready For ObamaCare's Medical Rationing":

ObamaCare supporters are now waging a high-profile public relations campaign to make medical rationing palatable to the general public.

The latest front is the opinion pages of the New York Times, which recently published two Op-Eds openly advocating medical rationing. The first was by their economics columnist Eduardo Porter, “Rationing Health Care More Fairly” (8/21/2012).

Porter argued that rationing was “inevitable” and the only question was how best to implement it. He advocated a system like Great Britain’s, which doesn’t pay for medical therapies costing more than $31,000 – $47,000 per year of life gained. Similarly, he praised New Zealand’s approach of not paying for vaccines that cost more than $20,000 per year of life gained.

For Porter, the only question was the precise dollar value the government should set on a year of a patient’s life. Supporters of government-run health care used to argue against market-based approaches because “you couldn’t put a price on human life.” But that’s precisely what Porter wants the government to do.

The second pro-rationing piece was by Obama administration advisor Steve Rattner, “Beyond ObamaCare” (9/16/2012). Rattner stated up front, “We need death panels.”

Rattner advocated restricting medical spending on the elderly, especially on patients in their last year of life, because such spending “consumes more than a quarter of the [Medicare] program’s budget.”

One big problem with Rattner’s approach is that we often can’t know what will be a patient’s final year of life until after they’ve died. It’s easy for a bureaucrat to say in retrospect, “This unnecessary spending didn’t extend the patient’s life.” But the treating physician doesn’t always know whether a patient will live or die from a surgery or procedure. If the surgery succeeds and the patient lives another 5 years, then it was money well spent. But if the patient dies, a bureaucrat can classify it as “wasteful.” Do we really want the government deciding whether or not a doctor is allowed to save your grandmother’s life?

In a recent New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) article, former Obama administration officials have also advocated a more indirect form of rationing. They’ve proposed a fixed cap on aggregate private medical spending (not just government spending). Such a cap has already been enacted into law in Massachusetts and the authors wish to extend that to the rest of the country. Of course, any cap on private medical spending necessarily means the government must restrict Americans’ right to spend their own money for their own medical care.

One of the co-authors of this NEJM article, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, has already laid the intellectual groundwork for overt rationing in a 2009 Lancet article, “Principles For Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions.” Dr. Emanuel is a former White House health care advisor and the brother of Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s former chief of staff.

Dr. Emanuel proposes rationing based on a combination of factors including patient age, expected “quality adjusted life years,” and the patient’s “instrumental value” to “society.” Given that the government would be making (and paying for) these rationing decisions, value to “society” will become “value as determined by the government.”

Such rationing completely inverts the relationship between the individual and the state. Rather than the state existing to serve the individual, the individual’s existence is sustained at the discretion of the state. This is the opposite of the American founders’ intention that the government be the people’s servant, not their master.

None of this should be surprising. Lots of folks warned of the horrible, horrible inevitability of rationing under ObamaCare while it was being debated. Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, for example, "ObamaCare Is All About Rationing." But critics were dismissed as cranks and racists, conspiracy theorists pushing crazy fever swamp theories "death panels" hatched by Sarah Palin and her "unhinged" followers. The critics were right, although for the time being, it just doesn't matter.

As I've been saying, the new era of socialist dependency government is upon us. The voters ratified the ObamaCare monstrosity last month. Things are now starting to take effect. Death be upon us now, too late to cry about it, however. The wheels of the gargantuan maw of progressivism are rolling, and political dissenters are being eliminated by campaigns of demonization from the shock troops of the Democrat Party regime. There is hope, of course. And that lies in the electorate waking up before too much damage has been inflicted. We'll have midterm elections in 2014 and perhaps libertarian-minded tea party conservatives will be elected in greater numbers. Perhaps even the possibility of a GOP majority in the Senate will open up. I'll have more on that. In the meantime, folks should hunker down and take care of themselves and their families, for the weakest among us will be the first to make the last journey down the left's pathway of death.

RELATED: At London's Daily Mail, "Now sick babies go on death pathway: Doctor's haunting testimony reveals how children are put on end-of-life plan," and "Doctors 'are withholding treatment from dying cancer patients because they think it is futile to continue'."

Professor Harvey Mansfield: Obama Voters 'Are Voting for Dependency, for Lack of Ambition, for Insolvency...'

A great interview with Professor Mansfield, at the Wall Street Journal, "The Crisis of American Self-Government" (via Memeorandum):

Cambridge, Mass.

'We have now an American political party and a European one. Not all Americans who vote for the European party want to become Europeans. But it doesn't matter because that's what they're voting for. They're voting for dependency, for lack of ambition, and for insolvency."

Few have thought as hard, or as much, about how democracies can preserve individual liberty and national virtue as the eminent political scientist Harvey Mansfield. When it comes to assessing the state of the American experiment in self-government today, his diagnosis is grim, and he has never been one to mince words.

Mr. Mansfield sat for an interview on Thursday at the Harvard Faculty Club. This year marks his 50th as a teacher at the university. It isn't easy being the most visible conservative intellectual at an institution that has drifted ever further to the left for a half-century. "I live in a one-party state and very much more so a one-party university," says the 80-year-old professor with a sigh. "It's disgusting. I get along very well because everybody thinks the fact that I'm here means the things I say about Harvard can't be true. I am a kind of pet—a pet dissenter"....

the electorate that granted Barack Obama a second term was unwise—the president achieved "a sneaky victory," Mr. Mansfield says. "The Democrats said nothing about their plans for the future. All they did was attack the other side. Obama's campaign consisted entirely of saying 'I'm on your side' to the American people, to those in the middle. No matter what comes next, this silence about the future is ominous."

At one level Mr. Obama's silence reveals the exhaustion of the progressive agenda, of which his presidency is the spiritual culmination, Mr. Mansfield says. That movement "depends on the idea that things will get better and better and progress will be made in the actualization of equality." It is telling, then, that during the 2012 campaign progressives were "confined to defending what they've already achieved or making small improvements—student loans, free condoms. The Democrats are the party of free condoms. That's typical for them."

But Democrats' refusal to address the future in positive terms, he adds, also reveals the party's intent to create "an entitlement or welfare state that takes issues off the bargaining table and renders them above politics." The end goal, Mr. Mansfield worries, is to sideline the American constitutional tradition in favor of "a practical constitution consisting of progressive measures the left has passed that cannot be revoked. And that is what would be fixed in our political system—not the Constitution."

It is a project begun at the turn of the previous century by "an alliance of experts and victims," Mr. Mansfield says. "Social scientists and political scientists were very much involved in the foundation of the progressive movement. What those experts did was find ways to improve the well-being of the poor, the incompetent, all those who have the right to vote but can't quite govern their own lives. And still to this day we see in the Democratic Party the alliance between Ph.D.s and victims."

The Obama campaign's dissection of the public into subsets of race, sex and class resentments is a case in point. "Victims come in different kinds," says Mr. Mansfield, "so they're treated differently. You push different buttons to get them to react."

The threat to self-government is clear. "The American founders wanted people to live under the Constitution," Mr. Mansfield says. "But the progressives want the Constitution to live under the American people."

Continue reading (via Memeorandum).

The party of dependency and insolvency. Oh boy, what a legacy to leave to your children.