The most popular topic in the political world lately has been health care. I have tried to refrain from writing about it because of its charged nature.  However, I haven’t been completely quiet about the issue. I have my opinions and Facebook has seen quite a bit of it!

First off, I am competely against the bill and the idea of universal health care. There is no such thing as a good bill that is thousand pages long and there is no such thing as a well run government system. Those are both fairytales.

It is entirely ineffective that those on the side of the bill resort to name calling in the form of the Bush Administration’s tactic of calling critics unpatriotic and the Obama Administration’s tactic of calling critics racists. Both are unproductive and not what a debate is about.

As expected, those who want the bill passed don’t want a debate; they just pay lip service to the idea. The real debate is not whether we should have reform or not. No one disagrees that the current system is imperfect and needs to be reformed. However, reform is a vague term.

There is no guarantee that any old reform will make things better. Things aren’t so bad that there is no way the government can make it worse. We aren’t at rock bottom.

The real debate should be what kind of reform we should have. The only way we can have an intelligent debate on is if we understand what the problems are and not how to solve the symtoms.

The problem is not that we have an estimated 45 million uninsured people in the United States. Having health insurance and having health care is not the same thing. For whatever reasons, we have become conditioned to believing that the two terms are interchangeable. It is how the media talks about it and it is how the politicians talk about it.

The underlying problem with health insurance is that we are insuring every medical procedure under the sun. It doesn’t matter if its a check up, a cold, cancer, or broken bones. The system insures it all. This is not the case in any other insurance industry. No one buys car insurance to cover oil changes and tune-ups. We don’t buy house insurance for carpet stains.

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Honestly, I don’t know much about Chuck Norris outside of the Chuck Norrisisms and the movies that I’ve seen. It was a very pleasant surprise when I found this. Chuck Norris writes an intelligent piece advocating the abolition of the Federal Reserve or at least the passing of HR 1207–Ron Paul’s Audit the Fed Bill.

Last week, the Senate blocked the bill even before it was introduced on the floor under “procedural grounds”. What the hell is that?

The truth of the matter is that the leaders in the Senate do not want the Federal Reserve audited. It is their “cash cow” so to speak. The Federal Reserve doesn’t make money the way the rest of us do, they make money by literally “making” it with paper and printing presses. This is good for the politicians who want their programs funded, bad for the rest of us.

Norris quotes Henry Ford on the banking and monetary system–controlled by the Fed–of the United States:

“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

I believe that the nation would be in revolution if we all knew the reality of the Federal Reserve and how they manipulate our monetary system. So let’s inform the people!

I was going to go to bed and perhaps have an early rise in the morning but, I decided to surf Facebook and found myself tagged to a note on someone’s thoughts about capitalism. I had debated this person on the topic of Obama’s economic policies in the recent past. What was obvious from the debate is that I am in support of Liberty and freedom and he is in support of central planning and big government.

It is certainly not rare to have big government supporters in the State or city of New York. Since Obama has become President, I have become more and more a fish out of water when it comes to political debates. Where everyone was against Bush’s idiotic policies, no one dares criticize the Messiah’s idiotic policies. The scariest thing is that they don’t see the similarities.

I consider myself a student of Mises and have learned a great deal from economists, philosophers, and statesman–not statists–who are knowledgeable of his work. While Mises has long ago refuted Marx, it has not stopped the boneheaded Marxian ideas from spreading.

So, while every centrally planned form of government has failed since Marx and before Marx, we are still debating whether a free society is the best one to live in. It was Einstein who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. In that sense, all Marxists are insane–and so are their policies.

My motivation to write this instead of sleep was from a Facebook note. This note came about because of a quote I posted by Henry Hazlitt:

“The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are.”

The author of the Facebook note was outraged. Before I had read this note, I did not know the author was a Marxist. I knew he supported big government and believed it to be a good idea to steal from one group to give to another–in this case it was stealing from the poor to give to the rich or what is known as bailouts.

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The single biggest debate topic I have with my European friends is about guns. I have already written about the guns after discussing it with them. No one has changed their minds since. My political stance on every issue revolves around the protection of Liberty.

From what I have gathered, Europeans treat guns as if they were nuclear weapons. While I do not disagree that guns can kill people and have been used to kill people, I do disagree that we should have laws against guns. There are many reasons for this line of thinking. The most important one being that owning a gun does not directly harm anyone and disallowing someone to own a gun is a violation of Liberty.

I refuse to take away any Liberty. I do not believe you can take away some Liberty so that some other Liberties can be protected. That is what the recent debate was about. I first head this argument after a few beers–perhaps some tequila as well–but, I still understood that owning a gun is not a violation of Liberty.

The credit for the argument that the act of owning a gun is a violation of Liberty–and that being why I should be against guns–goes to my German friend who is also teaching me German. Her argument is that guns have no purpose outside of killing. Because its only purpose is to kill, it is a violation of the Liberty.

I do not know if gun technology is useful for anything else. I’m not that knowledgeable about guns. No one knows if gun technology can be useful in the future. I can accept that guns have no use other than killing–whether in defense or aggression. The part where her logic falls through the floor is claiming that ownership of a gun is violating Liberty.

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Not that this should be a surprise anyone but, the US Treasury paid $78 billion extra for Wall Street assets–I really meant crap–last year with the TARP funding. As is usually the question, who is going to regulate the regulators?

The government never does anything right and paying 30% extra for “toxic” assets is completely in character. How can we possbily trust these idiots to man an “economic recovery” when they can’t even do this correctly?