I’m three years into this blogging endeavor and I really value the experience. I’ve refined my thoughts, improved my written and verbal communication, and spread my ideas and thoughts to friends and family.
I’m not even close to where I want to be as a writer. I still make horrendous grammatical errors and I don’t proof as much or as diligently as needed.
My goals for the next year are:
Thanks to all my visitors, readers and linkers.
I finally gave in to the most recent reindeer game on Facebook. This turned out to be an enjoyable effort.
This is an very clear and concise explanation of deflation as it pertains to our current mixed-economy nightmare. Being somewhat of an economic noob, I had to read it carefully a few times to grasp all the underlying premises - good stuff.
George Reisman is my favorite and most reliable source for coherent and rational economic musings.
Only minutes after resuming my daily browsing from a holiday break, I stumble on this great read by Mark Stein.
“The greatest dangers to liberty,” wrote Justice Brandeis, “lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”
Now who does that remind you of?
Ha! Trick question! Never mind Obama, it’s John McCain. He encroached on our liberties with the constitutional abomination of McCain-Feingold. Well-meaning but without understanding, he proposed that the federal government buy up all these junk mortgages so that people would be able to stay in “their” homes. And this is the “center-right” candidate? It’s hard for Republicans to hammer Obama as a socialist when their own party’s nationalizing the banks and its presidential nominee is denouncing the private sector for putting profits before patriotism. That’s why Joe the Plumber struck a chord: He briefly turned a one-and-a-half party election back into a two-party choice again.
‘Well meaning but without understanding’ is pragmatism.
If you went back to the end of the 19th century and suggested to, say, William McKinley that one day Americans would find themselves choosing between a candidate promising to guarantee your mortgage and a candidate promising to give “tax cuts” to millions of people who pay no taxes he would scoff at you for concocting some patently absurd H.G. Wells dystopian fantasy. Yet it happened. Slowly, remorselessly, government metastasized to the point where it now seems entirely normal for Peggy Joseph of Sarasota, Fla., to vote for Obama because “I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage.”
It seems normal because our philosophical path has detoured through the candyland of collectivism where morality is a duty of gray drudgery, need is worshiped and individual sovereignty is a guilt ridden concept.
That is the ultimate goal of our anti-conceptual leaders, and to the extent that we’ll let them. As they attempt to work their way towards that goal, our standard of living will suffer in every aspect. One of the most intimidating venues is the socialization of medicine. Those in the medical field are already responding as any individual subjected to the threat of slavery would, resistance and avoidance.
In the last several months there have been reports in medical journals about an impending shortage of primary care physicians. This spring in the health policy journal Health Affairs, researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia and the federal Department of Health and Human Services published a study that projected a generalist physician shortage of 35,000 to 44,000 by the year 2025. The researchers based their figures on current physician usage patterns and did not take into account increases that might occur because of rising access to health care.
The news got worse in September, when The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study showing that just 2 percent of graduating medical students are choosing to enter general internal medicine. The students surveyed were concerned in part by what they perceived to be a more difficult personal and professional lifestyle, compared with other fields. They felt that the paperwork and charting required of primary care physicians were more onerous, and they were not eager to care for the chronically ill in a health care system that focuses on acute care. [emphasis mine]
This phase of typically oppressive red tape at all levels is only the very beginning of the collectivist vision of medicine. Not only are those currently in the field looking to escape, individuals aspiring to work in and around the medical field are considering other options. Pharmaceutical, medical equipment and biotechnology sales are fields that will see less growth as a result of regulatory stagnation.
Nearly half of them said they planned in the next three years to reduce the number of patients they see or to stop practicing altogether. While these doctors rated patient relationships as the most satisfying aspect of practice, over three-quarters felt they were at “full capacity” or “overextended and overworked.” [emphasis mine]
The reasons are simple. It’s in man’s nature to be free. His focus will gravitate towards the arena of return where he can most freely exercise choice. Conversely, short of tremendous potential for return, he’ll shy away from an environment where his volitional capacity is limited. So long as he respects the rights of other men to life, liberty and property, there is virtually no limit to his potential for productive return. Only when man has force initiated upon him do we see stagnation, shortages, depressions, credit crunches, famines, poverty and misery. What else, other than wholesale violation of rights via regulation, could create a shortage of human capital in what are arguably the most highly demanded industries?
Eventually the talented, the exceptional, the type of individual and mind one wants their life to depend on if needed, will be noticeably absent from the field of medicine. An independent and competent mind won’t submit to force, the type of mind that will won’t provide the quality of care that people demand. The result will be an abysmal circus of incompetency and regulation going through the motions of medicine while corpses pile up and citizens become desperate for other options. A black market for routine care will inevitably develop and many of us will have to choose to criminally act towards our survival or become a statistic in the collectivist death machine affectionately known as Universal Health Care.
All this because we’ve deluded ourselves into the poison that we are our “brother’s keepers”, and are willing to condone and implement force to sacrifice any individual for construction that deadly ideal.
by Paul Hsieh
After a resounding electoral defeat, in which voters in this once-red state rejected Republicans McCain, Schaffer, and Musgrave, the Colorado Republican Party will undoubtedly be asking themselves, “Why did we lose?”
I want to let them know that they lost the vote of many former supporters (including myself) because they have chosen to embrace the Religious Right.
I voted Republican in 1996, 2000, and 2004. I believe in limited government, individual rights, free market capitalism, a strong national defense, and the right to keep and bear arms - positions that one normally associates with Republicans.
But I didn’t vote for a single Republican in 2008. I’ve become increasingly alienated by the Republicans” embrace of the religious “social conservative” agenda, including attempts to ban abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and gay marriage.
The Founding Fathers correctly recognized that the proper function of government is to protect individual rights, such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion. But freedom of religion also implies freedom *from* religion. As Thomas Jefferson famously put it, there should be a “wall of separation” between church and state. Public policy should not be based on religious doctrines.
Instead, the government’s role is to protect each person’s right to practice his or her religion as a private matter and to forbid them from forcibly imposing their particular views on others. And this is precisely why I find the Republican Party’s embrace of the Religious Right so dangerous.
If a woman chooses not to have an abortion for reasons of personal faith, then I completely respect her right to do so. But she cannot impose her particular religious views on others. Other women must have the same right to decide that deeply personal issue for themselves.
The Religious Right’s goal of outlawing abortions would violate that important right, and sacrifice the lives of actual women for clumps of cells that are only potential (but not yet actual) human beings, based on religious dogma. As a physician, I find that position abhorrent and deeply anti-life.
In his October 24, 2008 radio broadcast, Rush Limbaugh told pro-choice secular supporters of limited government such as myself that we should leave the Republican Party. Many of us have already taken his advice and changed our affiliation to “independent.”
The Republican Party stands at an important crossroads. The Republican Party could choose to follow the principles of the American Founding Fathers and promote a limited government that protected individual rights but otherwise left people alone to live their lives.
This includes affirming the principle of the separation of church and state. If they did so, I would happily support it.
Or the Republican Party could instead choose to become the party of the Religious Right and seek to forcibly impose the religious values of one particular constituency over others (thus violating everyone else’s rights).
In that case, it will continue to alienate many voters and lose elections — and deservedly so.
Even though I no longer regard myself as a Republican, I definitely regard myself as a loyal American.
My parents immigrated legally from Taiwan to America over 40 years ago. They had very little money, but they worked hard, sent two children to college and medical school, and are now enjoying a well-earned and comfortable retirement.
Their life has been a real-life embodiment of the American dream. America is a beacon of hope to millions of people around the world precisely because our system of government allows honest, hard-working people to prosper and thrive.
Our system is a testament to the genius of the Founding Fathers, who recognized that the proper function of government is to protect individual rights, such as our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Hence, I believe the Republican Party should choose the first path - the path of limited government, separation of church and state, and protection of individual rights.
This is the America that brought my parents from a ocean away in hopes of a better life for themselves and their children. This is the America I want to live in. And this is the America I want the Republican Party to stand for.
Paul Hsieh is a practicing physician in the south Denver metro area and co-founder of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (FIRM). He lives in Sedalia.
Everyday I catch myself thinking “I have to remember this…” Sam is growing up so fast, it’s hard to retain it all. I’m starting a list of phrases, images and thoughts that I want to make sure I retain. I’ll update it whenever something new comes to mind.
With the arrival of Fall, my favorite season, I’ve turned a new technical leaf.
My web hosting requirements have outgrown my shared environment of 6 years (who seems more concerned with marketing their carbon neutrality than offering competitive hosting value), so I started looking into options for a more performance oriented setup. After a good bit of research I decided to go with a pair of Linode 720 Virtual Private Servers (VPS). I’m now hosting several sites as well as facilitating quite a few web-based utilities on one production and another development oriented server.
Linode offers several tiers of hosting based on dedicated allotments of memory, disk space and bandwidth - ranging from $20/month for their smallest package to $160/month for a monster with 3GB of RAM and nearly 100GB of disc. In addition, they also offer an a la carte upgrade system where you can add even more memory, disk space, bandwidth or static IP’s. They offer 16 different Linux distributions to cater to those who prefer a particular variant.
The trade-off is the environments are unmanaged. They keep the power on, the net accessible and the disks from croaking - other than that, you’re on your own. The reality of assuming responsibility for security, configuration and backups can be intimidating at first, but anyone familiar with Linux and networking fundamentals can setup a fairly reliable and secure server, especially considering the wealth of online documentation and how-to information. I spent about a week migrating my sites over, setting up security, backup jobs, SSL keys/certs, Apache/MySQL/PHP configuration, DNS setup and testing.
The luxury of tweaking the LAMP stack for applications such as Drupal and Wordpress enables substantial performance gains - especially the former. My largest site, ResoNation was limping along sluggishly in the shared environment. The flexibility of custom configuration along with advanced caching optimizations cut page load times by ~75%.
I increased my monthly hosting bill by $30. For the extra money I upgraded from 4GB of disc space to 48GB, from 240GB of monthly transfer to 800GB, and I increased the performance of all sites involved significantly. Additionally, I now have a fully redundant source code repository, a development mirror of the production environment and plenty of on-site storage for media content. At the current loads I have more than enough hardware to host several additional sites.
If you’re looking to step up from the restrictions of a shared environment, you can checkout Linode’s offering with a 7 day trial. By the way, their sign up process, billing and setup processes are flawlessly executed. You can pay month to month and they prorate fees at signup. So far, this has been a completely positive experience and I highly recommend Linode VPS.
A very cuisine-savvy friend introduced me to Aria a few years back. I’ve had a bottle of 2002 staring at me for almost two years. I finally popped the top last night and it was well worth the wait. To me a good Port is what most people want wine to taste like. I’ve never felt the need or the desire to become a connoisseur of wine, one who’s able to distinguish gustatory subtleties - but Ports, especially this one, throw the flavor right up in your face - there’s no way you could miss it unless you guzzle it like a fool. The finish of Aria is all any fan of Hazelnut could ask for.
If you enjoy any sipping beverage - Aria should be on your list to try.
