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How does this plan grab y’all:

We create a new Federal agency, the Federal Paper Commission. All paper in the United States will be owned by the public, and managed by the FPC in the public interest. Newspapers and magazines will apply for a paper license, and be given a renewable license to use part of the public’s paper supply, but in return will be required to use that paper in the public interest, as defined by the FPC.

One advantage of this plan is that it will prevent the owners of newspaper and magazine enterprises from hijacking the political process by printing one-sided political propaganda – since such activities are clearly not in the public interest, a properly functioning FPC will disallow that and allow the people to vote without undue inflence by corporate interests.

And it’s not even a violation of the First Amendment. You’re still free to speak your mind; you just can’t use the people’s paper to hijack the political process with your propaganda.

You don’t like this idea? Well, these same rules are currently in effect with respect to the broadcast spectrum, and some of our friends on the left heartily approve and are loudly advocating that the FCC take advantage of these rules to banish political advocacy from the airwaves.

Folks, when the First Amendment was written, the Founders didn’t insert any language forbidding Congress from nationalizing the country’s entire paper supply because such an outrageous usurpation literally didn’t occur to them. And if it had, they’d have figured that the absence of the authority to do that among Congress’s enumerated powers would prevent it.

They wrote the First Amendment for the very purpose of preserving for all time the right of the people to freely disseminate their views and allow everyone to freely participate in the marketplace of ideas. Had they any prescience of the possibility of long-distance wireless communication and broadcast, they’d have assumed that the First Amendment would cover people’s use of the devices and the broadcast spectrum just as it covered their use of more traditional printing presses and paper.

Instead, in a blatant end-run around the First Amendment, we got a complete nationalization of the entire broadcast spectrum, and an explicit mandate for the agency charged with managing “the public’s” airwaves to prevent exactly the sort of political advocacy that the First Amendment was intended to preserve and encourage. And Michael Powel is called “something of a tool” by our friends on the left for not being quick enough to use the usurped power of the FCC to cut off political advocacy and silence the offering of a political viewpoint. And they have the nerve to call Bush a fascist, and claim that the right is secretly plotting to destroy our democratic tradition?

So if you don’t approve of the FCC managing the airwaves, how would you prevent interference?

Well, deeds of ownership to small slices of a large divisible resource is not exactly cutting edge technology. You might just as well ask how we’d prevent interference in the use of land without a Federal Land Commission to manage all of US soil in the public interest. Or for that matter, how we’d prevent interference in the use of paper without the Federal Paper Commission.

Despite the best efforts of researchers to date, all of us are doomed. Unless something else gets us first, we can all look forward to a slow, lingering, painful death in less than 100 years.

Our only hope of survival is further technological advance in the medical and pharmaceutical fields. Every single day that the necessary advances are delayed, 100,000 people die of “natural causes”.

Now advances tend to build on each other, and they especially build on previous advances that have proven themselves in the laboratory and in the marketplace. Thus, inserting a bureaucratic delay of one year in each step of the process can lead to a delay of dozens of years in the final development and deployment of anti-aging treatments, with each one of those years costing more than 3.6 million deaths. Given the length of time that the FDA has been in existence, I’ve got a feeling that every death by “natural causes” over at least the last ten years (~36 million) were already completely unnecessary and could have been avoided if only the FDA and other controls on the medical industry hadn’t been established.

Reducing the payoff for introducing useful treatments will, of course, cause more delays and more deaths. Pharmaceutical price controls, single-payer health plans, and other interventions are therefore extremely dangerous to all of us in the long run, and the the mere threat of their introduction may have already sealed the doom of those in their so-called “golden years” by discouraging current investment that would otherwise pay off over the next 15-20 years. Our health care policy is badly in need of reform – free-market principles need to be introduced, not taken away, and controls need to be lifted, not added to, in order to give us our best chance at survival. We need everyone involved in the pharamceutical and health care industry to know that they can get filthy stinking rich and freely gouge the public for huge sums of money if they come up with even a partial solution to this scourge that has plagued every single generation since the Dawn of Man, without any danger that clueless leftists will take their earnings or their freedom to pursue further discoveries and further profits in peace in the health care industry away from them.

And that, as far as I can tell, is by far the most critical “health care issue” there is. I don’t see how anything else even comes close.

Being poor today is a lot different from being poor in the past. It wasn’t all that long ago that being poor meant you went hungry on a regular basis and froze all winter. Thanks to the capitalist system, and a whole bunch of smart capitalists inspired and rewarded by that system, this is no longer the case.

But that doesn’t mean that poverty has become a walk in the park. There are still problems associated with poverty, and these problems fall into two categories: problems that capitalism can’t solve, and problems that capitalism is being actively prevented from solving. In both categories, changes in government policy are called for, but nothing like the usual changes recommended when someone talks about “doing something” about poverty (i.e., either handing over money, or forcing the evil plutocrats to hand over money)…

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It’s interesting to see the other side state their basic assumptions explicitly. Usually, you have to divine their premises from their proposals and actions, and you sometimes sound paranoid when you do; not only that, they get to accuse you of lying about them, and point out that they never did come out and say the underlying assumption you think they’re using.

Well, here it is, spelled out in black and white. In the middle of telling us about George W. Bush and the Republican evil plot to enrich the plutocrats at the expense of regular people, Jacob Hacker of The New Republic writes, and I quote:

“Conservatives demand a go-it-alone world of personal responsibility. Yet, the truth is that Americans can’t cope with insecurity on their own. ”

It doesn’t get much clearer than that. If you read the whole piece, it’s an attack on the very idea of transferring to individuals any of the responsibility for providing for their financial well-being. No replacing company store health plans with cash. No replacing pensions with 401(k)’s. No tax-deferred savings or health savings accounts. No expecting people to save for unexpected expenses or layoffs. All of these things transfer nothing but “risk” to ordinary people, while enriching the plutocrats. Apparently, average Americans can’t handle using plain old American dollars to meet their needs and provide for the unexpected, but need the guiding hand of Washington to look after them for the rest of their lives and see that they don’t get themselves into trouble.

From that basic assumption he goes on to claim that Americans still have too much responsibility (or, as he puts it, “risk”), and outline a plan for “universal insurance”, whereby everyone “contributes” “premiums”, and anyone can get a payback if his income drops (for any reason?). He seems to notice (“To some extent”) that this has “moral hazard” written all over it, but then waves his hands and says that corporations have limited liability “to encourage risk-taking” (Actually, it’s to encourage investment – just imagine what life would be like if a judgement against any corporation represented in your 401(k) meant that the plantiff could go after all of your assets to pay for it…) and that ordinary American families need the same thing in order to preserve the dynamism of American capitalism. While risk-taking is certainly a big part of America’s success stories, I don’t see how encouraging people to risk other people’s money (without their consent) on prospects that they wouldn’t risk their own money on is supposed to be a winning proposition for us or for society.

At any rate, all the hare-brained schemes that we find ourselves burdened with rest on the basic assumption, rarely stated so baldly, that Americans never actually grow up, that they need parental guidance and care for their entire lives, and that anyone who presumes to allow Americans any measure of liberty or ask them to assume any measure of responsibility for their own well being is on the same moral level as someone who would toss a small child out on the street and ask it to fend for itself. How they can possibly believe this about a population largely descended from individuals that willingly left everything and everyone they knew behind, crossed a major ocean, and eagerly fended for themselves in a strange new land escapes me, but there it is. That’s the proposition that we stand in opposition to, that’s the basic assumption of all of our opponents, and that’s the belief that we need to convincingly discredit in the minds of those with political power if we’re ever to reclaim the full measure of liberty that is the very purpose of this nation’s existence.

(Link courtesy of The Three Toed Sloth)

They probably won’t set off a nuke in Manhattan, or “lose” one of their nukes to their terrorist subsidiaries, at least unless they’ve got a really surefire way to get away with it.

But observe that they are already backing at least part of the “insurgency” bedeviling Iraq. If they go hog-wild, we can always muster support for an invasion – for now – so there’s limits to what they can do there.

But with a nuke, they’ve suddenly invasion-proofed themselves. Like the Pakistanis, the Chinese, and the Russians, they’ll either get nuked or scolded and/or embargoed, but almost certainly nothing in between.

All of a sudden, the limits to their insurgency-backing activities in Iraq are gone. We’re going to enter a nuclear exchange because they’re vigorously backing insurgents? Not bloody likely.

So what we end up with is a proxy war against another nuclear armed power. We don’t have the option to take the fight to the backers no matter how much they escalate the situation, because they’ve got nukes. So we’re stuck blasting away at their agents (who quickly get replaced by the backer) and taking significant numbers of casualties in return for years on end, making life awfully rough for the locals in the meantime, until one side finally runs out of patience and throws in the towel. If it’s us that throws in the towel, then life gets really rough for the locals and our reputation goes in the toilet.

That sounds awfully familiar. Didn’t John Kerry make a passing reference to the time he was in that situation a few decades back? As I recall, it didn’t turn out too well last time around…