SIX DOCTORS AND A FUNERAL

   My pre-med nephew and five of his fellow med-school students held a funeral after the congressional vote on Obama-care.
   It was a funeral for their own hopes and dreams. They methodically thought through the debts they would incur that accompany a costly medical school education, their future prospects as doctors, the time it would take to reach the break-even point and their hopes for marriage and children.  They concluded that despite their lifelong goals of being doctors, their government had made it a no-win proposition.  So they, along with many of their classmates--my nephew estimates more than half--have decided not to pursue a career in medicine.
   If it weren't so destructive an attitude, it would be almost entertaining to observe liberals' blithe assumption that all problems can be solved with well-meaning legislation. In the case of Obama-care the assumptions presume that there will always be enough doctors to fulfill their fantasies of more care for millions more patients for less total cost.
   Bulletin: It ain't gonna happen.
   You can't force people to become doctors, although the Obamunists would doubtless wish otherwise.
    Reality check: Under the future price restraints, fewer and fewer doctors will accept patients whose care must be billed to the government at cut-rate prices.
    Inevitably, there will be rationing of health care.
    I recently got an education on how "single-payer" health care works on one of the more advanced Caribbean islands, member of the British Commonwealth with the British-style national health service.
    It works like this. If you are diagnosed with an illness that a government panel deems too costly to treat, based on their evaluation of your worth to society--i.e., being productive and paying taxes--the best a person can hope for is to be made comfortable until death.  The alternative is this:  persuade an intermediary, most likely a pastor, to offer a sum of money--typically about $20,000--to a doctor for blackmarket medical care, outside the system.  
    Welcome to your future!

THE LEFTIST TIPPING POINT--ACCOMPLISHED?

The aim of big-government advocates, by whatever "ism" they're called, is to make so many people dependent on the government that they constitute a majority with a vested interest in that government continuing in power, however feckless or destructive it may be to the nation as a whole.

Have we reached that point--that tipping point? If not, we're dangerously close, as becomes evident in a single statistic just released by the Tax Policy Center, which simply studies the dry numbers regarding who pays and who doesn't.

The relevant number is now 47%. Forty-seven percent of U.S. households will pay no...zero...federal income taxes for 2009. In terms of their contribution to the cost of operating the government, they are all take and no give.

Add to that figure the non-specific but obvious multitudes who pay little but collect much and you have a constituency for not only maintaining but expanding the kind of big government that necessarily suppresses economic incentives for the ever-shrinking productive sector of society.

A population that is led to believe an all-beneficent government will provide for every need either doesn't know or, more likely, doesn't care that somebody else is paying the freight for their freeloading. The Obama government and today's Democratic Party are going to unprecedented lengths to foster that attitude in ways that make the old FDR manifesto, "We will tax and tax and spend and spend and elect and elect," look like children allocating their lunch money.

We who have foreseen the ambitions of the leftists and their leader have every reason to hold the dark suspicion that if the Democrats retain control of both houses of Congress in November's election, the robust world-leading America we've known in the past will be irretrievably gone.

There is much talk about whether the Republican Party can co-opt the tea partiers into their "big tent." Given the ineptitude demonstrated by the leadership of the Republican Party, beginning with their utterly incompetent national chairman, Mr. Steele, one could readily conclude that that only salvation for the party lies in the hope that the tea partiers, with both principles and enthusiasm, can co-opt IT.

LEFTIES AND THEIR IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS

On rare occasions a latent streak of masochism causes me to go for a dip in the cesspool of what passes for thinking by liberals. A few minutes exploring the murky mind of Eleanor Clift is usually sufficient to remind one of just how plain silly they are.

In a near-orgasmic frenzy over Barack Obama's plan of step-by-step disarmament of the United States,

Ms. Clift leads her Newsweek column with this: "Eradicating nuclear weapons should still be our ultimate goal."

Dear childish Ms. Clift, your fantasy goal could only come about if two basic principles of human existence that have never bent could be abolished.

Number one is so simple that one would think even the liberal mind could comprehend it. It's this: nothing that has ever been invented has ever been un-invented. The knowledge of nuclear weapons design is now common currency among thousands--millions?--who have some scientific knowledge. High school students, just as an exercise, have designed nuclear weapons that would work, given the raw material essential to make them go "boom!". That material is widely available. (Iran's effort is to make weapons with an even bigger "boom!")

Number two calls for an understanding of elementary human nature. An understanding that is clearly beyond the grasp of the liberal cohort, including various actors, eternally sophomoric college students and, yes, the likes of Eleanor Clift. Short of the Utopia of their fantasies, there will ALWAYS be the politically powerful with ambitions to expand that power. Given access to nuclear weapons, they will NEVER disarm themselves. And because they will do no such thing, only self-destructive fools in charge of other nations would be foolish enough to leave themselves vulnerable to nuclear blackmail.