House of Representatives Republicans -- via the "Republican Study Committee -- are scheduled tomorrow to make public their own healthcare reform plan.  If the plan is worthy, I applaud them and yell "yahooooo".  If, as I expect, it is not worthy, I'll clap with one hand and yell "boooooooooo".  The elements I'd like are as follows:

• Sunset Medicare.  As to Parts A and B: For those age 60-or-older continue Medicare under existing rules.  For those younger than 60, eliminate Medicare coverage.  As to Part D: The existing rules will apply for exactly one year, then be gone.
• Sunset Medicaid..  The existing rules will apply for exactly one year, then be gone.
• Sunset Social Security.  For those age 60-or-older continue Social Security under existing rules and rates until they die.  For those 50-and-older, but less than 60, continue Social Security less 5% for each year or part-year less than 60.  For those younger than 50 nothing.  Social Security benefits will be paid from the general fund.
• Sunset SCHIP.  Same formula as for Medicaid.
• Eliminate/repeal an and all mandates on health insurance companies vis-a-vis what they must cover and where they may sell.
• Amend tort law so that the loser pays legal and court costs for the winner.
• Eliminate government licensing of practitioners.
• Repeal all proscriptions on the sale of human organs, tissues and bodies in the free marketplace, ala ebay.
• Disallow any future mandates on employers requiring the provision of medical benefits.
• Either equalize the tax treatment of employers and individuals vis-a-vis medical insurance and medical care, or pass the FairTax.

In short, fairly restore the free marketplace.

Enjoy this brief video of FDR signing social security into law right here

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a speech to congress January 1935 said, “The amount necessary at this time for the initiation of unemployment compensation, old-age security, children's aid, and the promotion of public health, as outlined in the report of the Committee on Economic Security, is approximately one hundred million dollars.” In 2005 the annual tab was $500 billion and more than 1/5 of the federal budget. In the early 1940s it was much less than 1/5 of 1%.

In 1965 LBJ promised Americans that Medicare would cost $500 million per year from the general funds. In 2009 Medicare has a $74 trillion debt. Has it been 148,000 years since 1965? The cost of Medicare in 2008 was some $200 billion and growth is geometric. There are a couple of possible life-lessons here. First, when liberal-fascist statists speak, they lie. Second, when liberal-fascist-statists speak, you should be afraid, very afraid.

President Barack Obama tells us that the $1.6 trillion+ (according to the CBO) “healthcare savings bill” will be paid for, not only by surtaxes on “the rich”, but by huge cost savings from prevention. What he refers to is the system’s saving because people quit smoking, reduce obesity, exercise more, and live “healthier”. Please remember the life-lesson. When companies develop “wellness” programs and incentives for their employees, those companies reduce their costs. Where do the costs go? They go to Social Security and Medicare . . . down the road.

Here’s another life-lesson. Humans aren’t immortal as humans. Everyone dies. Those who don’t smoke, aren’t overweight, exercise regularly, eat sensibly, drink alcohol in moderation, and etc. live healthier lives, certainly long enough to retire from their employers, and without overly taxing the medical-care “system” . . . yet. So, let’s say that they don’t get heart disease or lung cancer or whatever until they’re eighty. At that point, they’ve been on the Social Security and Medicare tab for a decade and a half already. Had they gone toes-up at sixty, assuming ambient temperature, they and their employer would have picked up the total tab.

Typically, we spend 2/3 of a lifetime’s medical-care tab in our final year that we personally blow CO2 into the atmosphere, contributing, I’m told, to either “global warming” or “climate change”. President Obama’s latest “emergency” proposes to save boatloads of money by picking up the tab for all that. A review of the life-lessons yields the following warning: If you’re into, say, your second decade or more of AARP eligibility, President Obama’s alleged savings are gonna both change and shorten your life.

When medical care becomes single-payer – as in Canada, and it will by design -- unlike a young doctor or a new clinic or a hospital, the government won’t be beating the bushes for new patients. The government’s sole motivation will be reducing costs, and most of that will come from rationing care. If there are 20 thirty-somethings and 20 certified members of the chronologically-gifted set wanting hip replacements, and the government’s budget includes, say, 15 of them, the odds of a CG getting one of them is lower than a liberal in congress giving an honest, frank (Sorry) and responsive answer to a Fox News interviewer. My fellow codgers should be afraid, very afraid.

The late Margaret Sanger, along with Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and their mutual admirer, Adolph Hitler were strong advocates of birth control. Not uniform, but targeted. They all recognized that the wrong kind of people had the highest birthrates. They advocated sterilization and abortion, and with Hitler mass-murder. Eugenics was their common theme, and it was later trumpeted by Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That abortion rates among blacks is much higher than among whites, for Justice Ginsburg, is validation of Roe v. Wade.

The current “healthcare reform” push is consistent and continuation. Down the road a Sarah Palin baby with down-syndrome will not be delivered by a doctor . . . by law. And no American in America will survive to be 100 de facto by de jure. Neither will be judged cost-efficient.

Two of a half-dozen universal truths about systems are that they all suffer bureaucracy and all suffer entropy. The human system, for example, has evolved over time to having opposing thumbs and fingers which play different and various roles. A typical university early on had a dean, but now has a dozen or more assistant provosts atop a dozen or more deans. We used to have medical doctors. Now there are a hundred or more specialties.

Entropy is the systemic evolution of systems toward having its parts deteriorating and functioning randomly and not in sync with one another. Witness human aging or what happens to your car over time. Accountants recognize this with the term “depreciation”. Witness how departments in a company become less and less coordinated both intra- and inter-department.

Great organizational leaders understand this and reorganize, flattening their organizations, reducing redundancy, getting back to basics, re-tooling. They also work to create negative entropy. There’s repairs and maintenance. There are vacations for people, and training and development. Jack Welch, legendary ceo of an earlier iteration of General Electric Corporation had a policy of firing the least productive ten percent of employees annually and hiring replacements. You jog, go to the gym, improve your diet and nutrition, read nonfiction.

Governments get more and more bureaucratic, but have political leaders, not system leaders. Government bureaucracies add, never reorganize, focus on survival as individuals, departments, divisions, and the whole . . . exclusively, with absolutely no consideration of mission, role, effectiveness or efficiency. Governments employ negative entropy in the political realm, but never in the bureaucratic realm. There are periodic elections and term limits, but they don’t apply to the “civil servants”.

News flash!! Liberal-fascist statists are in control of the federal government. News note: Ditto vis-à-vis most of America’s large cities, northeastern and west-coast states. All have an abiding interest and motivation to grow government. But, that’s not what’s being discussed herein.

The United States federal government has become so large, so bureaucratic and so entropic, that it is unmanageable, unleadable, and uncontrollable. No U.S. president will be capable of reorganizing and shrinking the huge government bureaucracy. Picture an untethered barge, slowly floating downriver. The new prexy jumps aboard and tries to stop it. The hundreds of tons of barge have momentum. The river, which always flows downhill, is with the barge. The couple-hundred-pound super-conservative prexy has no chance.

The Founders created a federal government which was to be small, focused on its extremely-limited enumerated powers, and be less than one single percent of the U.S. economy, most of that the nation’s defense. Erosion of the rule of law commenced in 1789. Since the Wilson administration in the 19-teens, the Constitution has had the shelf-life of a New Year’s resolution. Three-quarters of the federal government is now unconstitutional and that government is now twenty-five times what was intended and designed.

Today’s federal government is, maybe, five-to-ten times a size which might be reformed, reorganized, and shrunk from within. Nothing can stop government’s bureaucratization and entropy, but a total overthrow from the outside. A Ronald Reagan president and with the Gingrich-led congress of 1995-96 couldn’t turn this barge of state around. We could hand-pick the entire Executive Branch, replacements for 435 congressmen, replacements for 100 senators, impeach judges and justices wholesale, and the barge would still continue to roll down the river.

I think that most politicians, once elected and sworn in (albeit with fingers crossed and having a Pinocchio moment), come to see and understand this. Then, elected officials do what’s best . . . for government and for their continuation as part of it. Explain Senator Lieberman, the Independent. Explain Arlen Specter. Explain McCain-Feingold. Explain recent rulings on eminent domain. Explain why and how defeated incumbents pop back up as lobbyists, political appointments or government bureaucrats.

Nothing can stop government’s bureaucratization and entropy, but a total overthrow from the outside. The United States of America has never had a civil war. Yes, every single one of the government-school history textbooks is wrong. Back almost 150 years ago, the Confederacy didn’t fight to oust the bums in power and take over the federal government. They fought to secede from the bums and get out . . . and lost. In this the 21st century, civil wars and coups happen in banana republics, but do you really see that happening in the USA? Really?

"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened."  (Norman Thomas [1938], six-time Socialist Party of America candidate for President)

"For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time."  (Justice George Sutherland [1938])

"When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.  When the government fears the people, there is liberty."  (Thomas Jefferson)

Americans have and continue to adopt the fragments.  Most stretch forth a hand, but with palm up.  Even the most-conservative patriots have come now to fear the government.  Enlightened self-interest has made government partners of General Electric, most of Wall Street, even WalMart.  They're employing negative entropy, re-inventing themselves, adapting to the new reality.  JFK once said at one of those legendary Saturday touch football games at Hyannisport, "You know why we'll play by my rules?  Because it's my ball."  Big business knows who has the ball.

It was 12 days ago that my computer (actually its screen) died, went toes-up, assumed room temperature, started a permanent dirt nap, went to be with the supreme microchip in the skies.  I shipped the carcass to Vision Computers in Atlanta.  On its arrival at the Vision Hospital, Tech Chris examined it, and pronounced it DOA June 26.

While driving northbound on I-75 in Kentucky, I had Chris transfer the call to the sales weenies.  It's like when you lose a pet dog as a kid or like when you fall from a horse, I think.  You get a new dog or climb back on right away.  So I immediately ordered a new one.  I'm on my second day of trying to decipher anything, anything at all.  With the capable, kind, patient an solicitous assistance of the TH Blogmaster, Chris Regal, and the blogging denmother of many of us hereon, Bobbie Kelley, your host of gumballs returns.

So there were 12 days.  For 10 of them, I had two of my five grandchildren with me, almost-12 Eric and now-13 Evelyn.  For the last two of those days I had their mother, my daughter Lara, join them, bringing a 19-year-old girl in tow.  For the last three I had my brother JT and his wife Bonnie in.  For the last 2 3/4 I had my almost-26 son Sean and his girlfriend of significant tenure Piper down from the Big Apple.  So for most of my 12 days away from Townhall, I was -- with my lovely (and still working-for-a-living) wife Terrie -- running a camp, B&B, marina and drinking emporium.  Tubing, waterskiing, wakeboarding, and just cruising here on the Tennessee River just off our deck were daily.  I did lots of food prep and cooking, and it went well.  The first day and last day of the 12, book-ending the grankids' visit, I played golf . . . badly . . . both times.  In some quiet moments, I finished reading Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism and read the whole of Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny.  Both great reads, and recommended.

During those twelve days, I neither received nor sent an email.  During those twelve days, I never watched a news program or listened to talk radio.  I never read a newspaper, other than the local sports section.  I participated in not a single political discussion.  I did watch some great tennis, the women's and men's finals at Wimbledon, and some of Tiger's golf tournament.  Great on my front-projection HD 108" screen, I must say.  An even bigger show was 4th of July fireworks displays in panorama from the boat.

Having, then, dropped out, made love not war, focused on friends and family, not Washington and the world; having pondered and mind-wandered over single-malt and over cognac and over a red with a prime-tenderloin roast; having tuned into the minds of our many of all ages and perspectives; I conclude that we get more energized getting somewhere than getting back.  I conclude that fledgling entrepreneurs are fighters and corporate execs are appeasers.  I conclude that building something engenders more commitment than preserving something.  I conclude that people yell "Gimme more!" louder, much louder, than people yelling "Gimme less!"  I think that statists are trying to get somewhere and Constitutionalist lovers of liberty are wanting to get back.  I think that statists are always entrepreneurs and conservatives are just holding on.  I believe that statists are building big government while conservatives and libertarians are but seeking to preserve.

A dozen days ago, I had come to believe that America is toast, and had posted such here.  If there were ever to be a tipping point, a last straw for productive and thinking Americans, the eight months of Obama and the statist liberal fascists, starting last November, should have been it.  The most we've seen, though, has been a bucketload of group hugs, aka "Tea Parties".  A dozen days later, I still believe that America is toast.  However, it's been a great dozen days.