VA Senator Mark Warner had a couple of articles published over the weekend, one on economic/monetary policy, and one on health care.? Unfortunately I was not surprised by his view on either issue.? What he proposes in his articles is, of course, more government.?
Archive for the ‘2009’ Category
The Answer….More Government?
Monday, June 29th, 2009Gun Control
Thursday, June 11th, 2009Looks like there may be a good development coming up in gun control. Alan Gura, the man behind the District of Columbia v. Heller (07-290) case that got the Washington, D.C. handgun ban struck down, may be heading back to the Supreme Court to fight basically the same battle again in McDonald, et al., v. City of Chicago, except this time he has to successfully argue that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees that such rights (i.e. the Second Amendment) “may not be violated by any form of government throughout the United States”. If he argues successfully, this would mean that no government entity could take away your right to carry. Since D.C. is run by the Federal government (they are not a state), this is a new case as it is applying the Fourteenth Amendment to over-ride states rights to legislate away your “fundamental” rights (like your right to carry as granted by the Second amendment).
Moral Busybodies
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009This kind of thinking is, I think, a large cause of the troubles in the world today.
Although The Lancet study is proof of concept, experts still question the ethics of a pill for lifestyle issues.
Critics say the problems of high blood pressure and cholesterol should be tackled with diet and exercise rather than by popping a pill.
Why is it someone else’s business if I choose to “pop a pill” in order to address health issues instead of going the “correct” route of diet and exercise? And who are these “experts” that make this decision that diet and exercise are the “correct” route? Who appointed them our overseers? It’s this kind of thing that erodes away at our freedoms a tiny piece at a time if we don’t address them. First they criticize, then they suggest solutions, then they legislate what we can and can’t do. Why do they think that they can run our lives better than we can?
Jailbirds
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009I caught sight of the title of this article: Localities recoup incarceration costs and I thought, sweet, it’s about time we stop paying the criminals way in the world. Then I read the article. Needless to say I was not pleased, I had thought we were recouping the cost from the criminals in some way, turns out we’re just passing the buck on to the federal government, so it’s coming out of everyone in the whole countries wallet, not just ours in Virginia. NOT the direction I wanted this to be heading in. I’m all for recouping the cost, if someone is found guilty of a crime they need to not only “do their time” but they need to pay for it monetarily as well. I know that’s not exactly what this article was about, it’s talking specifically those incarcerated but not convicted. In order to address that cost we’ll just need to be careful who we incarcerate.
Government run… anything (or everything?)
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009I am in the IT industry and ran across this article concerning Obama’s plans for Healthcare IT. While I don’t have a problem with the goals that Mr. Obama is setting, I do have a problem that government thinks that it needs to get involved in the process. As we all know from past experience, government run anything is always less efficient than a privately run version. What we’re going to end up with is a one-size fits all implementation of health “care”, similar to what we now have in our government run schools. It is simply too expensive for a large beauracracy like the federal government to do anything except meet the lowest common denominator, they cannot possibly have rules for all contingencies, and cannot allow lee-way in making exceptions as that will lead to corruption of the system (not that corruption won’t happen anyway). I’m not writing this to bust on one party or the other, as George W had this as a goal for us as well, Obama is just being more aggresive with the timeline. What I would like to see is someone that would take us back to the expressly allowed powers granted to the Federal government, not someone that wants to expand the government to run everything.
