To characterize mandating that every adult citizen must get health care insurance. Obama argues that it’s not a tax:

Sept. 20 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama said requiring individuals to have health insurance doesn’t amount to a tax increase and that a Senate Finance Committee proposal will move the effort to revamp health-care forward.

“For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” Obama said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” program. “Right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase.

If not a tax, it’s not entirely clear just what it is exactly. And certainly its a close to a tax as is possible without being a tax. Can you imagine if this health cares passes, and you lose your job, and therefore your health insurance, the hassle to get subsided health care to avoid being fined for not having health care. The last fucking think after losing my job that I want to do is deal with another bureaucracy to get subsidize health care to avoid being punished by the state. It none of the state’s fucking business if I have health care.

And by the way mandating health care is so transparently an attempt by the state to use their monopoly on coercion to force young healthy people to support older unhealthy people that it makes me want to scream. While you won’t actually reduce the cost of health care you forcibly increase the funding thereby making it seem more affordable. If insurance companies could force health people to get health care the premiums for all of their customers would go down which according to the Democrats a state goal of health care reform. Why don’t they support legislation allowing insurance companies to force healthy people to buy their insurance?

Why do Democrats complain about the Patriot Act taking my rights away from me but then happily push legislation that clearly and plainly takes my right to private property away by forcing me to spend my money on health care. That is a violation of the right to private property, that is the right to do what you want with you possessions, including money, and is a right the Democrats have been pissing on ever since I can remember. For me, that’s ironic because of all the rights I have, the one I associate most closely with freedom is the right to do what I want with my money, and even though the Democrats say they support freedom a great portion of their policies aims to curtail the to right private property (ie cap and trade, wealth redistribution, universal health care, environmental regulation, financial regulation, corporate regulation, campaign finance reform).

If you see the right to private property as the fundamental right to freedom then you best steer clear of the Democratic party. And even though the current administration does not call individual a mandate for health care a tax its certainly is another curtailment of the citizenry’s right to private property.

Update: Lookie I have video. Be warned, Obama does not come off looking very good in his response. Especially when Stephanolous breaks out the dictionary definition of tax.

The empirical evidence showing that government expansions reduces the prosperity of the citizenry is pretty convincing. In fact might say their is an economic consensus. Just to be clear, using the state to redistribute wealth shows that the propersity of the citizenry is reduced. In a roundabout way you could aruge attempt to redistribution the wealth to help the poor in fact harm the poor. It underscores the importance in not using state coercion to force ‘charity’, but rather rely on non governmental agency, such as religion, to put pressure, not coercion, on wealtheir indivduals to donate to the poor. In this way, the poor are helped by overall increased prosperity and also by wealthier people responding to societal demands.

The only problem is this method requires relying on a moral system. A moral system that left abhors, despite at every turn trying to stuff it into the political system.

Autoworkers Compete to Keep Jobs, Livelihoods on New Reality Show

Fifty years of car safety development beautifully illustrated here:

It felt good watching this:

Time lapse of the accumulation of tea party protesters in DC today.

Check out this video that makes a compelling argument as to why American is expectional. Which by they way, America is mos def exceptional.

Arguably, the single biggest problem with public schools is that teachers get tenure. Jonah Goldberg notes:

But of all the myriad problems with public schools, the most identifiable and solvable is the ludicrous policy of tenure for teachers. University tenure is problematic enough, but at least there’s a serious argument for giving professors the freedom to offer unpopular views. Tenure for kindergarten teachers is just crazy.

It makes no sense that a public school teacher should get tenure. The whole point of tenure is protect professors with unpopular ideas from retribution. The problem is public school teachers are not paid to develop ideas. They are paid to disseminate the most widely accepted ones. If a high school teachers want’s to advocate unpopular ideas they sould go get a university appointment.

Let me give you an idea at how angry I am that public school teachers get tenure. Im so mad that I would be willing to entertain the idea that a constitutional amendment banning public school teachers from tenure. Tenure for public teachers is such a bad idea that I might be willing to compromise my libertarian principles just to eliminate it. Now that’s angry.

She has an oped piece on health care in the WSJ:

Instead of poll-driven “solutions,” let’s talk about real health-care reform: market-oriented, patient-centered, and result-driven. As the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon and others have argued, such policies include giving all individuals the same tax benefits received by those who get coverage through their employers; providing Medicare recipients with vouchers that allow them to purchase their own coverage; reforming tort laws to potentially save billions each year in wasteful spending; and changing costly state regulations to allow people to buy insurance across state lines. Rather than another top-down government plan, let’s give Americans control over their own health care.

If there is to be reform, I would not oppose any of her suggestions.

I also liked this bit:

Finally, President Obama argues in his op-ed that Democrats’ proposals “will provide every American with some basic consumer protections that will finally hold insurance companies accountable.” Of course consumer protection sounds like a good idea. And it’s true that insurance companies can be unaccountable and unresponsive institutions—much like the federal government. That similarity makes this shift in focus seem like nothing more than an attempt to deflect attention away from the details of the Democrats’ proposals—proposals that will increase our deficit, decrease our paychecks, and increase the power of unaccountable government technocrats.

At one point Michael hated Palin, I wonder if hes coming around to her, especially since alot of her reform suggestions echo his own.