Oct
31
Panic! At The Capital
Filed Under Healthcare | 2 Comments
Let’s talk about preferences.
I have preferences, and you can find them listed on my Facebook. Likewise for a good friend of mine. I like playing Wii, history, and Seinfeld. My friend likes running, Donnie Darko, and filmmaking. We both like the Discovery Channel, writing, and football.
When it comes to music, my friend and I have different preferences. Especially regarding one of my favorite bands, Panic! At the Disco. Music expert, I’m not, but I love Panic. Their songs are catchy, their lyrics clever, and their stage presence unparalleled. My friend has railed online several times against Panic. Their tunes are pop garbage, their lyrics nonsensical, and garb bizarre. So it goes with different preferences.
My friend also has a preference for health care reform and a public option, put forth by Democrats. My preference is for a free market to provide health care in the way it provides us shoes, microwaves, and software. My friend prefers that younger individuals are forced to subsidize health care for older ones. I prefer that individuals are allowed to subsidize their own older days with increased tax-free health savings accounts in their youth. My friend prefers the government dictating what coverage is necessary for individuals. I prefer consumers dictate what their own needs are, via a dynamically competitive private insurance market, sans the interstate barriers and coverage mandates that make up the status quo. My friend sees the current health care challenges as the failure of the market. I see them as stemming from the absence of it.
When it comes to solutions, my friend and I clearly have different preferences, just like with Panic! At the Disco. But how are they different?
Differences settled over coffee and on Facebook are absent of force. Differences settled on Capitol Hill are dependent on force. Private preferences for something like health care allow good ideas to be tested. More importantly, however, they allow bad ideas to be refused. There is no recourse with a government solution. When government agencies run against your personal preferences, your personal preferences don’t matter. Innovative ideas won’t be tested, because they don’t have to be. The status quo is a guaranteed sale.
I can’t force my preference for Panic! At the Disco on my friend. He controls his iPod. But if things go the Democrats’ way, my friend will force his preferences on me. There’s nothing compassionate about that.
Oct
9
This Just In
Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment
In addition to his inexplicable Nobel Peace Prize, President Barack Obama was awarded the Heisman Trophy, selected most likely to succeed at New Brighton High School in Bethesda, Maryland, won the Next Food Network Star contest, and won the Conn Smythe trophy.
Oct
1
It’s A Shame
Filed Under Crime | 2 Comments
That Ol’ Sparky wasn’t still around to get this done. Or just a simple noose.
TBO - Jessica Lunsford’s killer, John Couey, dies of cancer:
HOMOSASSA - News of the death of John Evander Couey, condemned to die for killing 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford in a case that sparked legislation across the nation clamping down on sex offenders, was met with mixed - but strong - emotions Wednesday.
“God done this in his own time,” said Ruthie Lunsford, Jessica’s grandmother, who said Couey’s death Wednesday morning from anal cancer came as a surprise. “I am not crying.”
…
According to prosecutors, Jessica - her parents always called her Jessie - was abducted from her home in the middle of the night in February 2005.
Couey kept her in the closet of his nearby mobile home and sexually molested her before binding her wrists and ankles with speaker wire, stuffing her inside two black plastic garbage bags and burying her alive in a 4-foot-deep hole.
Couey, 51, was on death row at the Florida State Prison near Starke until Aug. 12, when medical personnel there sent him to Jacksonville Memorial Hospital, which has a contract with the Florida Department of Corrections to treat inmates when prison doctors can’t. He died at 11:15 a.m. Wednesday, corrections spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger said.
John Couey was probably the most vile creature to ever crawl out of the swamps of Central Florida. He was a perverted animal whose soul was as dark and black as the tomb he burried his victim alive in. The case was also a stunning example of the failures of the modern judicial system. Couey was arrested 24 times before he met Jessica Lunsford, yet was still a free man. If society shares any blame in this tradgedy, it is from our failure to let people face the consequences of their actions, and on the state’s obsessions with endevours that do not protect against force and fraud.
I’m not a religious person, but for people like John Couey, I hope there’s a hell.
