Flowers for the Sick

Margaret Flowers, M.D. responds to the SOTU in an open letter to Barack Obama:

There was an opportunity this past year to create universal and financially-sustainable health care reform rather than expensive health insurance reform.

Flowers is talking about single-payer or as she likes to call it (in a move I suppose she intends to be an argument in its favor) “Medicare-for-All.” This was followed closely by:

This poor value for our health care dollar is due to the waste of having so many insurance companies.

So on the one hand, Flowers gets that health care and health insurance are two different things. But then she thinks that health care value is bad because of health insurance competition.

Smashmouth

Talk to the window manufacturer in Philadelphia who said he used to be skeptical about the Recovery Act, until he had to add two more work shifts just because of the business it created.

President Barack Obama, State of the Union speech, 01/27/2010

Many people (I imagine) will be quick to accuse the Prez of hiding the truth beneath layers and layers of rhetoric in his speech. I think they are being unfair. Who else commits the Broken Window Fallacy by actually talking about broken windows? Say what you will, but he’s no obscurantist.

Leading By Example

I have thirty-eight brains and not one of them thinks you can sign a contract to be a slave, especially now that we have a black President.

These were the words of Eliza Dushku’s character Echo in “Omega”, the season one finale of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse.

Especially now? Does she mean that especially now that Barack Obama is POTUS, the argument against voluntary slavery is somehow more convincing? If so, I think I’ve been too hard on Obama. If he is capable, simply by assuming power, to make liberty more convincing, perhaps we shouldn’t protest too much. Give him a few more years and we might not have to convince anyone of the obviousness of anarchy.

[And, Joss, you just lost major geek points for throwing in an awkward “We [sic] Won [sic]” shoutout to the Hollywood Messiah.]

Anarcho-Obamicons

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon