First Presidential Debate

I thought the first presidential debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney went quite well. While both pretty much dominated Jim Lehrer, not letting him get a word in edgewise when their time was up, the debaters remained civil in the midst of making jabs at the other’s platform. While it appears that the pundits have basically declared Romney the winner of the debate by a fairly large margin, I thought it was by a smaller margin.

Obama has been accused of being a teleprompter speaker, meaning that he is a great orator with the words in front of him, but not so good when speaking off the cuff. Actually, I was quite impressed with Obama’s knowledge and point making abilities in this impromptu environment. Of course, Romney was just as good. However, it was obvious that much of what passed as answers to Lehrer’s questions were simply the talking points they use every day on the campaign trail.

While both candidates expressed their views rather well, I have to give the edge to Romney despite a couple of misspoken words.

First, there were times when Romney cited studies concerning the negative consequences of Obama’s policies that Obama left unanswered, deciding rather to move on to other aspects of his policies.  This leaves the impression that he knew of the negative consequences and did not want to address them, or he did not have a good counter argument. Either way, it’s a point loser for the debate.

Second, while both candidates spoke about the prosperity that free enterprise brings to a nation, Romney seemed to back this up more with the plans he has for the future. There was also somewhat of a difference concerning how much regulation is enough, with Romney indicating he thought there was too much in some cases.

That being said, I was a bit disappointed that there was so little difference in Obama’s and Romney’s views of the role of government in society. It is obvious that they both believe in big government. Their differences were more over where the money should be spent rather than how much should be spent. Oh sure, they both gave lip service to reducing the deficit, but I didn’t hear much about any specific substantial cuts. Romney seemed to be on the right track when he talked about cutting funding to the Public Broadcasting System and a few other items, but when it came to education, he said the funding should remain the same, but turned over to the states to decide how to use it. However, there was one ray of hope amongst Romney’s statements. It was when he said that he would judge a program’s usefulness by asking himself “Is this program so important that it is worth borrowing money from China to fund it?” This sounds like an excellent criterion for budgeting decisions, but I fear that there will be too many programs that Romney believes are worth borrowing money for. That has been the trend of federal government regardless of which party controls the presidency.

We desperately need Gary Johnson in these debates to counter the big government philosophy with a true small government view. While I don’t agree with everything Johnson stands for, I believe having a real alternative to a tax and spend government presented in the debates would be quite refreshing. But alas, that might be difficult to pull off given that the Republicans are spending so much time and money to keep Johnson off the ballots in the key swing states for fear he will sway too many Republican voters to turn to the dark side of Libertarianism.

GREED

I recently posted a one-sentence thought about greed on several social media sites. I decided to expand on this thought with a blog post. Here is what the original post said.


“Greed can be found more in the poor who demand the goods of others than in the wealthy who earn their own.”


I have found that a number of people balk at such comments and may think I have something against poor people. But just the opposite is true. I want all of us to live in a society where it is possible for poor people to become wealthy. I have nothing against poor people, but I do have something against being poor. Therefore, to better understand my one-sentence thought, let’s take a look at a typical definition of the word greed.


“An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth.” -- The Free Dictionary


Most people tend to concentrate on the first part of this definition, “…more than one needs”, rather than the second part, “…more than one deserves”. I tend to think of the former as a good type of greed and the latter as a bad type of greed. Why? Because of the consequences of each. Let’s take a closer look.

When someone says that another person is greedy because they have a great desire to have more than they need, a number of questions need to be asked. How much does a person truly need? Does need end at the point of survival? Or does need mean having enough to live comfortably? What do you consider to be an excessive desire as opposed to a moderate desire? Does a person’s actions in pursuit of more possessions play into the equation at all?

Here in the United States as well as other developed nations, the free enterprise system has provided its citizens with the means to become wealthy beyond our wildest imaginations. In countries where free enterprise is non-existent, the populace tend to live in poverty. Sure, the leaders may live a life of opulence, but the average person does not, and has very little chance of getting out of his situation apart from leaving for a freer nation. Most countries today have mixed economies, meaning that the economy is free to some degree, but controlled by the government to some degree also. In general, the wealth of a nation increases with the degree to which it is free.

So, what happens when a greedy entrepreneur decides he wants more than he needs. WEALTH! That entrepreneur, in order to gain what he so desires, must develop a product or service that other people want and are willing to pay him more than he put into creating it. That provides the entrepreneur profit. But it also benefits the buyer because they needed or wanted the product or service more than the money they paid for it. It also benefits all those people the entrepreneur had to hire to design, develop, and produce his product. Most people understand this. When people think of greedy people, most are probably thinking of the ones that are willing to cheat or steal to get their wealth. Yes, those actions are wrong. But one must keep in mind that it is not the greed that is wrong, but rather the means by which they went about satisfying their greed. Let’s simplify. There is nothing wrong with my desiring to have a new flat screen TV, and there is nothing wrong with me working at a job to earn the money to buy the TV. However, if I just went down to Best Buy and took it without paying, that’s stealing, and it is wrong. Yet, my desire for the TV was still not wrong, just the means I chose to satisfy my desire.

This leads to the second definition of greed: an excessive desire for more than one deserves. What does one deserve? This should be easy. A person deserves whatever they can obtain honestly. If a person has skills that only earns them $10,000 per year, then $10,000 in goods and services is what they deserve. If a person has skills where they can honestly earn $6,000,000 per year, then they deserve $6,000,000 in goods and services. To say otherwise is to create artificial boundaries. Yes, it sometimes appears that there are a large number of people who become wealthy by cheating and stealing. I personally believe this is mostly perception rather than reality. The press writes a lot about rich crooks, but very little about rich honest people. So, in our minds, we tend to think that a large proportion of rich people got that way by cheating. But even if I am wrong, my point is still valid. It’s the actions one takes to satisfy his greed that determines right and wrong, not the greed itself.

So, can poor people be greedy in the sense of having an excessive desire for more than they deserve. Well, of course they can. And they can cheat and steal just like rich people can. They may not steal as much as the rich, but the principle is still the same. It is wrong to cheat and steal to obtain that which we did not earn. Acting on this type of greed almost always requires one to do wrong. Why? Because how else can one obtain more than they deserve? I can only think of one moral way. Charity. This is where people voluntarily donate time, goods, and money to help those who got a bad break in life though no fault of their own. Yet, there are quite a few people who believe they are due more than they can obtain honestly or through charity and are willing to commit a crime to obtain it. Or, and this is a big OR, they get government to obtain their largesse for them.

Unfortunately, what we are seeing more and more of these days are able-bodied people mooching off the working public via a state-sanctioned welfare program. If one were to suggest that these particular people should be removed from the rolls, many protests would arise because this charity is now thought of as something deserved.

So, let’s summarize. Desiring more wealth is not wrong in and of itself regardless of your status in life. Call it greed if you want, but don’t call it wrong. I call it wanting to improve your lot in life. Even if you consider it wrong for the super wealthy to desire more, surely you can’t believe that it is wrong for a person to desire more, even strongly desire more, if they live at subsistence level (meaning they have just what they need and no more). Would you be willing to walk up to a frail person in a third world country who is surviving, but not thriving, and tell him he is greedy for desiring more out of life? If so, then shame on you. All people should be free to pursue whatever status they so desire. And therein lies the problem. The countries where the people do not thrive are the ones where the leaders are oppressive. Most of these nations’ citizens probably desire a better life, meaning more wealth. What they need are new leaders that allow them to be free.

Now, back to my one-liner. “Greed can be found more in the poor who demand the goods of others than in the wealthy who earn their own.” Here I am using the word “greed” in the sense of desiring more than one deserves. As such, I believe my statement to be true.

Free Health Care For Everybody

In the January 30, 2012 issue of our local newspaper, the TimesDaily, there was a photo of some graffiti left by an Occupy Oakland participant in California. The graffiti consisted of the exact words I used for the title of this post: “Free Health Care For Everybody.” Now who could disagree with that statement? Everybody likes free stuff, and given how expensive healthcare can be these days, getting it free would be a great money saver.

So, how do we start? What plans must we put in place to make this worthwhile venture a success? Well, a good place to start would be to ask doctors to quit charging for their services. Most of the cost of healthcare most likely resides here since millions of people visit doctors of one type or another every day. I suspect that they will object to this and try to convince us of how expensive it was to attend medical school, how much money it takes to rent a space for their practice, and how they must pay for equipment, utilities, malpractice insurance, staff salaries and benefits, and a myriad of other things. Well, don’t be fooled. Healthcare is too important a commodity to be left to the vagaries of a free market with the greedy doctors trying to actually make a profit. But we can expect most if not all doctors to claim that supporting their families is more important to them than helping the rest of us. So, we must be prepared to force them to provide their services without recompense.

The same will have to be applied to hospitals and all the people that work for them. And let’s not forget about all those pharmaceutical companies. We will have to forcefully make it known that we still expect them to spend billions of dollars developing new lifesaving drugs, but provide those drugs at no cost to the public.

We can expect retaliation from all these medical professionals in the form of strongly urging the rest of us to provide our services to them for free also. They’ll probably say something like, “Food is just as important to a person’s health as is medical care. Since we don’t have any money, and we need food to survive, we should have our food provided for free. And while we are at it, we also need housing and transportation. So, give us these things also.” No matter how logical their arguments may be, we must stand strong and insist that they pay us for the goods and services we provide while they continue to provide their services at no cost to us.

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Well, as you can hopefully tell, I’m being facetious. There isn’t any such thing as FREE healthcare. And for that matter, there is no such thing as having any goods or services that cost nothing. What the Occupy Oakland graffiti writer really means is “free healthcare for me at somebody else’s expense.” So, how would that work?

There have been many methods suggested for how to provide universal healthcare within the US. Some methods are already being used in other countries. But the bottom line for all of these methods is that some people pay nothing, some pay less than the cost of the services provided to them, some pay the same as the cost of the services provided to them, and some pay more than the cost of the services provided to them. So, it ends up being a great deal for some and a terrible one for others.

You might ask, “Isn’t that exactly the same result people get when buying insurance?” And indeed, the answer is “Yes.” Insurance is one of those strange commodities that people purchase with the hope of NEVER getting their money back. But, there is one major difference. Insurance is voluntary; a government program is not. There has been a lot of controversy lately about the Constitutionality of an individual mandate for health insurance. In other words, is it Constitutional for the federal government to force all individual citizens to purchase some form of health insurance?

I personally believe that it is extremely UN-Constitutional for the federal government to force its citizens to buy ANYTHING, including health insurance. But even if it were Constitutional, I believe it can ultimately lead to some very bad consequences, such as taking away many of the freedoms we currently enjoy. It may take many years for the problems to manifest themselves to an unacceptable level, just as communism took many years before it failed in the Soviet Union. However, I believe the problems will eventually come.

Suppose we implement a healthcare plan here in the US that provides all people with any medical services they need at any time. Almost immediately all of those expensive procedures that people chose not to have done due to the cost will be scheduled. Over time, as more and more procedures are done, the authorities will begin to see that there is more money being spent than being taken in. Choices will have to be made. Charge everybody more for their “insurance,” or cut costs in some way. Most likely both will occur. They will begin paying doctors and hospitals and drug companies less for their goods and services. This will cause some on the edge to go out of business, and it will most likely affect people in rural areas the most. Eventually, the feds will begin to realize that they cannot cut payments anymore and will try to ration care to cut costs. This will upset many people who will have to forego medical procedures that could help them. Additionally, the feds will also realize that many of the procedures that people are getting relate to bad lifestyle choices. They will begin pushing for regulations on a number of different fronts. Some of these would be: smoking, fat and sugar intake, alcohol consumption, and the amount of exercise people are getting. So, little by little our healthcare will dwindle as our lifestyle choices become more and more regulated. In other words, we will become less free.

When people buy insurance, they do so with the knowledge that certain activities on their part can lead to their insurance costing more than another person’s. For instance, if a person is a smoker, they will pay more. If they are overweight and already have high blood pressure and high glucose levels, they’ll pay more. If they are into extreme sports, they’ll pay more. But the individual’s lifestyle choices remain his or her choice. On the other hand, the tendency for government plans is for the leaders to begin mandating actions rather than charge people differently according to risk.

So, which would you rather have? Freedom or “free” healthcare? I’m afraid the evidence points to a fact that many simply refuse to accept: WE CAN’T HAVE BOTH.

Wild River

I found the 1960 movie Wild River to be intriguing. The movie is about an employee of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) who is tasked with arranging the purchase of various tracts of privately owned land that would be flooded once a dam was built on the Tennessee River. While performing his duties, he encounters an elderly lady who is intent on thwarting TVA’s plan to obtain her property.

One of my favorite parts of the movie is when the TVA man shows up at the elderly property owner's house. The old woman begins asking one of the farm hands how much he wants for his dog. He responds by saying that he didn’t want to sell his dog. She tells him that she wasn’t asking if he wanted to sell, she was telling him he had to sell. She just needed to know how much he wanted. The banter continues until the man tells her she doesn't have the right to make him sell his dog. She then relents and says he is correct. And just like she didn't have the right to make him sell his dog, the government didn't have the right to make her sell her property, even though they were going to give her “fair” compensation.

The conflict between the private and the public realm of civilized life is a longstanding one. This was made clear to me while watching the first episode of Ken Burns: National Parks - America's Best Idea. Back when the National Park system was just beginning, there was great debate concerning whether it was within the authority of the US Congress to take control of large tracts of land for the purpose of preserving it for all people, present and future. Many believed that the senators and representatives were overstepping their bounds and hampering American entrepreneurship and business. Others felt that without the protection of government, greed would drive individuals to exploit some of the most scenic spots in the country. They pointed to Niagara Falls (as it was mid-19th century) as an example.

Wow! This is one of those tough issues for me. When I think about it, I can feel my inner self being torn apart. It’s as though some of the most liberal and some of the most conservative congresspersons have become body snatchers and have picked me as their victim. I am a very strong advocate of free enterprise where people are allowed to build businesses and compete in the open marketplace for customers without interference from the government. Free enterprise is what has elevated the common man in many countries to a standard of living only kings could have dreamed about 500 years ago. If a regular ole Joe from that era could come back and see how millions upon millions of people live today, he would be overwhelmed and probably quite envious.

Yet I have visited many of the US National Parks and am totally enthralled with them. I can identify with the words of John Muir when I saw Yosemite Valley: “No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite... The grandest of all special temples of Nature.” Who could want this place, thought by many to be the most beautiful place on earth, to be denuded by a few people for their own gain? Yet I, like Ayn Rand, also see the beauty of the manmade. I look in awe at the Empire State Building just as I look in awe at Half Dome.

It would seem that there must be some sort of balance between the public and the private when it comes to land. I just find it extremely hard to put my finger on where the dividing line is. I will talk about this further in future posts.