Dig in Deep

If there’s a running theme to these quotes, it’s that modern-day liberals are basically socialists who don’t believe in personal freedom, unless it involves not removing someone who has committed perjury from the office of the presidency.

John Stossel: Control Your Own Health Care

If people paid their own bills, they would likely buy high-deductible insurance (roughly $1,000 for individuals, $2,100 for families) because on average, the premium is $1,300 cheaper. But people are so conditioned to expect others to pay their medical bills that they hate high deductibles: They feel ripped off if they must pay a thousand dollars before the insurance company starts paying…

Whole Foods puts around $1,500 a year into an account for each employee. It’s not charity but part of the employee’s compensation. It’s money Whole Foods would have otherwise spent on more-expensive insurance. Here’s the good part for employees: If they don’t spend the money on medical care this year, they keep it, and the company adds more next year…

Most important, since employees control the money, their behavior changed. Whole Foods workers started asking “how much things cost,” Mackey said. “They may not want to go to the emergency room if they wake up with a hangnail in the middle of the night. They may schedule an appointment now.”

There was no need to ask about costs before because the insurance company seemed to pick up the tab. But that drove up costs for everyone. Now, saving money makes sense to employees because the money belongs to them.

HSA critics ask whether individual accounts will encourage people to save money at the expense of their health.

Mackey has the right response. “The premise in those kinds of questions is that people are stupid. They’re not smart enough to make these decisions for themselves. It’s sort of an elitist attitude. The individual is the best judge of what’s right for the individual.”

Well, of course, liberals (and socialists) always believe those in power know better than you do, as long as they’re the ones in power. They have no concept of true freedom. They have no concept of the free market. They believe that if a situation is to improve, the government must intervene. The idea of individuals taking control of their healthcare frightens them.

John Stossel rules, by the way. John Stossel for president!

C.S. Lewis on Government Education:
OK, it’s not specifically about government education, but our current government education exactly matches what C.S. Lewis was complaining about. Boortz quoted this earlier this week, and it’s worth re-quoting.

What I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence — moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how ‘democracy’ (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient dictatorships, and by the same methods? The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be ‘undemocratic.’ Children who are fit to proceed may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval’s [of the same age] attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. We may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when ‘I’m as good as you’ has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway, the teachers — or should I say nurses? — will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men.

It is quite amazing how accurate his analysis was.

Coulter on Why She Doesn’t Support Fred Thompson:

In 1999, Sen. Fred Thompson joined legal giants like Sens. Jim Jeffords, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins to vote against removing Bill Clinton from office for perjury.

Thompson, whom President Nixon once called “dumb as hell,” claimed to have carefully studied the Constitution and determined that perjury by the president of the United States did not constitute “high crimes and misdemeanors.” He must have been looking at one of those living, breathing Constitutions we’ve heard so much about.

When the framers chose the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” for the Constitution, they were using a term taken from British parliamentary impeachments. There’s a 600-year history of what this phrase means — and Clinton met it about a dozen times before he gave a single statement under oath or suborned a single witness’s testimony…

But, as The New York Times recently said, Thompson “agonized over what he saw as two ‘bad choices…’”

So Thompson could either: (1) Follow the Constitution and make his constituents happy or, (2) disregard the Constitution and make his Hollywood friends happy…

This isn’t the time to be toying with any Republican who had a Clinton in his sights and ended up shooting himself in the foot.

Speaking of Ann Coulter, I just got her new book. There are a few choice quotes from that book that I’ll be sharing once I’m done with it.

Boortz on Hillary:

Watch this woman. All she seems to be doing lately is coming up with ideas for government entitlement programs … and government entitlement programs are nothing more than wealth redistribution programs. Check your scorecard we have:

* Nationalized Health Care.
* The Baby Bonus
* American Retirement Accounts
* Hillary’s idea of government involvement in our children’s education even before kindergarten!

In the meantime … have you heard one single idea from Hillary that would increase your personal freedom? Have you heard one single idea that would decrease the intrusiveness or the power of the Imperial Federal Government? How about one idea that would promote competition in the free market?

You’re right … you haven’t.

You haven’t because Hillary Clinton worships the God of Government. This is a woman who feels that there are only a select few in this country who are capable of ordering and living their own lives without guidance from those smarter and more capable than they. This is a woman who believes to the depth of her soul that you can’t exist without embrace of government guiding your every step and picking you up every time you stumble.

The further we get into the presidential race, the more I’m sure that Hillary will get the nomination. Why, then, is she making this so easy for the Republicans? She keeps offering new entitlement programs, hoping to buy more votes. If the Democrats’ type of pandering is successful, our form of government cannot withstand much longer. Most of the voting public is intelligent enough to see through her desparate attempts to buy votes. Let’s just hope that it stays that way.

It’s interesting that as socialism is receding throughout the world (with the notable exception of Cindy Sheehan’s best friend, Hugo Chavez), Democrats are still trying to get Americans to participate in a bold socialist experiment. They are patient, though, and are more than willing to expand the socialist ideal one step at a time.