How should it work? Nigel Strange answers everything.

The political/financial/medical system that we currently have is so far away from how it should be, that it is difficult to even imagine how it should be. I'll attempt to draw a picture, though.

• Medical providers: Health care providers should be competing with one another to provide the best care at the lowest cost. I don't believe this is happening, and why they don't seem to care if they have your business or not is largely because they are not rewarded for your customer loyalty. To them, you're just another number they have to squeeze in, paid for by some monstrous insurance program. They're not making money off you. They're not benefiting from your business. If they had to keep your business, they'd try harder.
• Medical insurance: Same deal. They should want your business, so they should want to charge affordable rates and give good service. If they do not provide coverage as stipulated in the contract, only THEN should the government step in to settle the dispute. That's the legitimate function of government: to enforce contracts. If you're being screwed by an insurance company that you paid for coverage, then you ought to get your coverage, and someone who is able to force the insurance company to make good on its deals needs to muscle them a little. When you're dispute is settled, they are done. If you don't want insurance, then you get to pay out of pocket. If you can't pay out of pocket, then you pay on time or try to negotiate a deal.
  
• Income tax on compensation: It wasn't legal when they drafted the constitution, it wasn't legal when they ratified the constitution, so why is it legal now? It's not. Don't be fooled. Just because everyone is doing it does not make it legal. The feds know this, but they maintain the facade of legality in order to rake in the money. Compensation is not profit, and was never meant to be taxed. Since the government is not going to be used in the capacity of catch-all safety net for everyone in every circumstance, they can get by with less money. What do they have to do? Protect the borders, protect our rights, and protect interstate commerce. So, why do they need trillions of dollars every year? They don't. They just keep eating more money in order to continue raising (illegal) taxes.
  
• Social Security: I don't feel very secure at the moment, even though I've been paying into this chimera since I started working. When they originally billed it, they told everyone that there was as "special account" set aside for you, and all the years you are working, the money you earn is deducted from your paycheck and added to your individual account. If this were the case, why do YOU have to do this all over again when you set up a Roth IRA through your bank and set up a 401K with your place of employment? Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. If they were honest about how it worked from the beginning, they never would have gotten it through. Right now, there should be little warning bells and red flags waving. You should be asking yourself: If Social Security was passed by lying to the people, what might they be lying about today to push legislation through?
• Money should be real. Not fiat money that can be printed up whenever the Federal Reserve wants to issue more debt. If we had real money, there wouldn't be appreciable inflation. Wouldn't this slow down the economy? I suppose it might, but putting breaks on a car that's rolling down hill off a cliff would tend to slow it down, and I would see that as a good thing. What is real money? Gold. Silver. etc.
  
• Corporations: They are not persons.
• Campaign contributions: Should be illegal. All of them. Money is not speech. Money is bribes. Speech is free. Money is not. Why is this so hard to fathom? If someone is running for public office, then the press should cover it because it's news. If they can't put their lying commercials on the tele to dupe voters into voting for legislation that is worded to mean exactly the opposite of what voters think they are voting for, then even better.
• Criminal justice. The system is way too complex. The laws need to be reduced and rewritten to serve the values of the community. Murder, stealing, rape...we can all agree that crimes that victimize people deserve punishment. Insanity is not a valid reason to allow people to escape punishment. If someone is insane, maybe a lesson or two on reciprocation would help them learn a something about reality. If a crime is committed, and nobody is a victim, is it still a crime?

OK, that's not everything, but it's a start.

The Blind for Reform

Taste the delicious irony as you watch this video. The organizers don't really seem to get what's going on until they walk into the punchline:

"So you're controlling the message?"

Several things are going on, though I feel that I am insulting my reader's intelligence by pointing them out. Well, except yourself, then, and consider the explanation for those who are coming here for the first time and don't know any better.

• Obviously, the people who are rallying in support of Obama's health initiative do not make their own signs, or even look at them, or if they do, they don't understand them. I wonder how much they are getting paid.
• Part of fascism is controlling the message, controlling the media, and ultimately controlling what people are allowed to say, what they are allowed to think. The organizers are simultaneously claiming that their movement is not fascist, while simultaneously doing all of the above.
• To their credit (I must give them credit for this) they did not violently assault the prankster or the cameraman, which is something we've seen from this thugocracy before. Maybe they didn't get the joke, or if they did, they took it in good spirits. So, maybe there is some hope for these people, after all.
  

Meme war pt 1: cultural relativism

There is this article about an ex-Muslim girl who is afraid that her own father will kill her because she converted to Christianity.

Tolerance, as an ideal, is not universal. We, Americans, are being brainwashed into a kind of listless tolerance for everything un-American. On the other side, everyone else learns to be more intolerant of us. It is a one-sided meme war.

When asked by CNN, the girl's father said: "We are not bad people. We are not like that, we are normal."

What does "normal" mean? In America, we had this idea of normal meaning having normal American values. However, in a multicultural America, the word loses all meaning. There are many "normals," and we are not allowed to consider the imposition of our own code of conduct on others. In some parts of the world, it is normal to kill a girl for the crime of being raped. In some parts of the world, it is normal to decapitate people for changing religions. So, when someone says "normal people" it has meaning there. When someone says "normal people" in a culture that has defined itself into nonexistence, as Americans have been brainwashed into doing, it is entirely meaningless.

So, is it by accident or by design?

It is by design.

For those new to this blog, you might want to start by reading the 45 stated goals of the communists here.