RUTHFULLY YOURS

Republicans won the presidency and majorities in Congress based in part on promises to replace Obamacare. Nonetheless, with so many Republicans facing re-election in states that voted for Clinton, the strategy of “repeal and replace” is easier said than done. Furthermore, in view of the challenges involved in garnering enough votes for the “Obama-Lite” alternative that barely passed the House, Republicans appear to be running out of options.

If the “gradualist” strategy is so problematic, why not move to single payer? In Japan, healthcare spending makes up only 10% of GDP even though it has the world’s highest percentage of people 65 or older. In the U.S. it is an appalling 17% (Fig. 1). Japan also has the world’s lowest infant mortality, while in America this healthcare indicator exceeds that of all other developed nations with a comparable GDP (Fig. 2). If lack of access to healthcare is responsible for this shocking statistic, why not “get with the program” and shift these costs to taxpayers as they do in nearly all other affluent nations?

Before turning over 17% of GDP to the government, we should not overlook one extraordinary exception to this worldwide trend: Singapore is second only to Japan in having the world’s lowest infant mortality (Fig. 2) even though it has the least-subsidized healthcare in the developed world (Fig. 1). Singapore also stands apart from other developed nations in that it spends less than 5% of its GDP on healthcare (Fig. 1). If privatization works so well in Singapore, why have market forces failed so miserably in America?

While it is common knowledge that increasing the supply or decreasing the demand results in lower costs, many overlook the importance of having a critical mass of savvy customers shopping around for the best deals. This selective pressure ensures that the product or service gets better and cheaper for all consumers. In Singapore, patients shop around because co-payments cover a considerable portion of their medical bills and everyone is required to have a health savings account. In the single-payer systems that predominate in Europe, it is the government that does the shopping and bargaining. In America, health maintenance organizations stabilized prices in the 1990s by bargaining with providers and rationing services. However, many patients objected to “managed care” and the ensuing backlash resulted in government mandates that limited what these HMOs could do to cut costs. In the absence of a conscientious buyer, hyperinflation resumed by the end of the decade. Even though European governments provide healthcare at a lower cost, Americans who want to replace Obamacare with single payer should be careful what they wish for. More on this later.

Another reliable strategy for lowering costs is deregulation. We need not look abroad to see this principle applies to medical services: The cost of cosmetic surgery in the U.S. has remained remarkably stable despite a huge increase in demand. This has been attributed largely to a streamlined regulatory process that makes it easier for competitors to enter the market and for cost-cutting innovations to get approved.

An ex-Marine and blogger by the name of David Risselada published on Freedom Outpost an interesting and probing analysis of Antifa, “Antifa: Useful Idiots Too Brainwashed to Know They are Being Used.”

They are so brainwashed, writes Risselada, that they refuse – nay, are unable to see the contradictions pregnant in their violent actions – because contractions are either “white” constructs of the privileged order, or are direct permutations of Communist/Nazi ideology, and therefore can be dismissed with a fist in the face or a kick in the head. They do not believe in debate; their only recognized form of argumentation is physical violence. The brown shirts in training (other than college students) propose to oppose fascism by adopting fascist activism, which employs the physical obstruction of freedom of speech (and other civil liberties) with violent and passive means (but mostly violent). Britannica defines and discusses fascism:

Although fascist parties and movements differed significantly from each other, they had many characteristics in common, including extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, and a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites, and the desire to create a Volksgemeinschaft (German: “people’s community”), in which individual interests would be subordinated to the good of the nation.

Ostensibly, Antifa poses as being an anti-establishment force to contend with, when in practice and in ideology (what there is of one) it is and will remain part of the establishment, as a kind of Mafia enforcer. There are no “victims” of Antifa violence. Only “fascists.” Risselada writes:

Across the nation, the group Antifa is continuing its call for revolution by staging massive riots and acts of violence against innocent people. They are pushing the narrative that they are engaged in a revolutionary struggle against Fascism and that the time to act is now in order to stand against oppression. They have been brainwashed to believe that America represents racism and our constitution was written only to protect the interests of a few privileged white men. They are demanding an end to constitutional government and the enactment of a communist system which they believe will be fairer. In this facebook video posted by Columbus Ohio Antifa, they are asking military veterans to remember their oaths and join their national militia. Obviously, these people have no idea what they are talking about nor do they have any clue what it means to take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

This new special edition of The Glazov Gang presents the Daniel Greenfield Moment with Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the Freedom Center and editor of The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

Daniel discussed Communism’s Murderous Inspiration for the Left — from Portland to Venezuela to the New York Times.

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch the special episode of The Glazov Gang that featured Dr. Jordan Peterson, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. Dr. Peterson shared his views on Non-Traditional Gender Pronouns, unveiling the dire consequences of the control of language now reaching the legislative level in Canada:

There is nothing more inequitable than treating two fundamentally different things as if they were the same. This should be the retort to the media-Democrat complex’s latest “we wuz robbed” 2016 election narrative: The claim that the FBI became a rogue partisan, publicizing the investigation of Hillary Clinton while keeping mum on the investigation of Donald Trump.

This theme was hammered by Democrats in the questioning of FBI director James Comey during Wednesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. It was, moreover, the leitmotiv of the New York Times’ 8,000-word report on the FBI’s handling of the two investigations — the losing side’s best shot at writing the definitive history.

It is also dumb as a doornail.

Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal, based on mountainous evidence of law-breaking, resulted in a criminal investigation. The suspicion that associates of Donald Trump have troubling ties to Kremlin insiders, based on comparatively sparse evidence, has resulted in a foreign-intelligence investigation. The two types of inquiry are fundamentally different — dissimilar in their objectives, their processes, and their presumptions about secrecy and disclosure. The only similarity is that each is called an “FBI investigation.” To contend that this makes them equivalents, suitable for similar treatment, is akin to saying red and blue must be the same thing because each is a color.

A criminal investigation is launched when investigators have a good-faith basis to believe one or more penal laws may have been violated. It is an inquiry that targets a particular person (or persons in the case of concerted criminal activity). Once investigators are convinced that a crime has been committed by the suspect, the objective of the investigation is to build a case fit for prosecution in a court of law — i.e., to amass sufficient evidence to prove the essential elements of the statutory offense beyond a reasonable doubt. The investigators fully anticipate making a formal public charge against the suspect (i.e., an indictment), which will be followed by a public trial — the presentation of witness testimony and tangible evidence in a judicial proceeding open to the media and other spectators.

For commonsense reasons, various aspects of criminal investigations are secret. Search warrants and wiretaps would not be very useful if police had to notify the suspect in advance of their raids and surveillances. It would be very difficult to get the cooperation of witnesses or compel the production of relevant documents if grand jury proceedings were conducted in public. Most significantly, the suspect is presumed innocent. To publicize investigative information before a person has an opportunity to test its credibility under due-process rules would undermine the presumption and brand the person a criminal.

Nevertheless, even amid the secrecy, an expectation of publicity hovers over every criminal investigation. Because resources are finite and crime is plentiful, police agencies rarely waste their time on unprovable cases. It is anticipated that charges will be filed, and that eventually everything will be revealed: Affidavits supporting warrants will be unsealed and provided to defense counsel; there will also be discovery of the evidence to be presented at trial, the grand-jury testimony of the witnesses, investigative reports detailing surveillances and witness interviews, and any potentially exculpatory information in the prosecution’s files.

All of this is disclosed because of what a criminal investigation, in essence, is: an effort by the government to deprive a person of his constitutional right to liberty. We permit this only under the strictures of due process — a trial of the accused before a jury of his peers in which he enjoys the assistance of counsel, the right to confront witnesses, and an opportunity to present any defense he may have. Because the whole point is to assure the society that the government has met its burden of proof before a person’s liberty is removed, the proceedings must be public.

To say I didn’t know my great-uncle, Wolfe Levine, would understate things. Though my grandfather and I were close, for years I didn’t know he had a brother. In retrospect, it’s clear Wolfe was simply unmentionable. We’d write it off today as the stigma of mental illness.

Wolfe’s story is tragic, dating from an era of large public asylums that America has sought to forget. His journey to the Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Lima, Ohio, began in 1910 with a criminal conviction: one to five years in a reformatory for pickpocketing. Six years before, Wolfe had immigrated to America at age 14. Theft was not a shocking charge for a young man in Cleveland, living on a block of ramshackle frame houses with his widowed mother and her three other children. Once convicted Wolfe would never again be a free man.

After less than two years in the reformatory—later made famous as the setting for “The Shawshank Redemption”—he exhibited “persecutory delusions” and “auditory hallucinations.” That’s how he wound up in Lima, where the conditions were so bad that by 1974 a federal judge chastised Ohio for failing to ensure “dignity, privacy and humane care.”

My great-uncle was still there. He died in custody in 1982, at 92, and was buried near Toledo, the costs covered by a fund for indigents supported by a local Jewish federation. Wolfe had spent 72 years in institutions. In the language of reformers, he had been “warehoused” for his entire adult life. His aspiration to be a playwright, the occupation he listed when admitted to the reformatory, would prove a dark irony for someone formally diagnosed with dementia praecox—schizophrenia, as it later came to be called.

Yet the story is not so straightforwardly bleak as it seems, and it casts light on how far America has come—and not come. Are we treating the severely mentally ill better today than we did a century ago?

Wolfe did not do well at the reformatory. In a year’s time, more than 300 days were added to his sentence for misbehavior. This almost certainly reflected an onset and worsening of his mental illness. The family may have been involved in the decision to transfer him to the hospital. My great-aunt, now nearly 100, recalls my grandparents discussing what to do with Wolfe. “Dave and Ethel were just starting their own family,” she says. “They just couldn’t take care of him.” Nor was his extended family well-off. My grandmother’s immigrant father was still making deliveries on Cleveland’s East Side with a horse-drawn wagon well into the 1920s.

Thus did Wolfe arrive at Lima in 1915. Little information exists on daily life there, but census records portray an institutionalized American melting pot. My great-uncle was listed as a “Russian Jew”; his neighbors—all of whose occupations were listed as “patient”—included natives of Alabama, Indiana, Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, England and Italy. The hospital was enormous, with 17 wings for 1,400 patients. It was considered the largest poured-concrete structure in the world until the Pentagon.

The nationwide hospital system was the product of a 19th-century reform movement, led by Dorothea Dix and Horace Mann, outraged by the imprisonment of so many of the mentally ill. By 1940, America had institutionalized 450,000 patients. Though the care given was far from perfect, it aspired to be therapeutic.

A little-known book provides a remarkable window into the era. In 1931, a 52-year-old journalist named Marle Woodson checked himself into Eastern Oklahoma Hospital in an attempt to kick his alcohol problem. As he dried out, he wrote “Behind the Door of Delusion,” which did not describe a quiet warehouse: “About me the daytime activities of the hospital hummed. All the work was done by the patients. There was little detailed supervision by the attendants, although they were here, there, and everywhere all the time.” A “floor gang” polished and shined, and a crew for making up beds did its work “with a neatness which would shame many of the maids in good hotels.” Patients worked in the “art department, bakery, the store, or other departments of the institution.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Nice column by an erudite senator who is a GOP star…..but Diana West wrote a splendid book on this issue back in 2008
The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization by by Diana West Sep 16, 2008

We all know the noun adult. But I was perplexed last year to hear the new verb to adult. In social media, especially on Twitter and Instagram, it birthed a new hashtag: #adulting. As in: “Just paid this month’s bills on time #adulting,” or “Decided I couldn’t watch Netflix 8 hours straight and went to the grocery store instead #adulting.” It even got a nomination from the American Dialect Society for the most creative word of 2015.

“Adulting” is an ironic way to describe engaging in adult behaviors, like paying taxes or doing chores—the sort of mundane tasks that responsibility demands. To a growing number of Americans, acting like a grown-up seems like a kind of role-playing, a mode of behavior requiring humorous detachment.

Let me be clear: This isn’t an old man’s harrumph about “kids these days.” I still remember Doc Anderson standing in the street in 1988, yelling at me to slow down as I drove through his neighborhood in our small Nebraska town. I was 16 and couldn’t stand that guy. Years later, when I had children of my own, I returned to thank him. Maturation.

What’s new today is the drift toward perpetual adolescence. What’s new is seeing so much less difference now between 10-year-olds and young adults in their late teens and early 20s.

As many parents can attest, independent adulthood is no longer the norm for this generation. Data from the Pew Research Center show that we crossed a historic threshold last year: “For the first time in more than 130 years, adults ages 18 to 34 were slightly more likely to be living in their parents’ home than they were to be living with a spouse or partner in their own household.” Fully one-quarter of Americans between 25 and 29 live with a parent—compared with only 18% just over a decade ago.

A great many factors have contributed to this shift toward perpetual adolescence. The economy has something to do with it, of course—but social and cultural developments do too. The list of culprits includes our incredible wealth and the creature comforts to which our children are accustomed; our reluctance to expose young people to the demands of real work; and the hostage-taking hold that computers and mobile devices have on adolescent attention.

Our nation is in the midst of a collective coming-of-age crisis. Too many of our children simply don’t know what an adult is anymore—or how to become one. Perhaps more problematic, older generations have forgotten that we need to teach them. It’s our fault more than it’s theirs.

My wife, Melissa, and I have three children, ages 6 to 15. We don’t have any magic bullets to help them make the transition from dependence to self-sustaining adulthood—because there aren’t any. And we have zero desire to set our own family up as a model. We stumble and fall every day. CONTINUE AT SITE