Posted by
C. L. Palmer on Friday, August 29, 2008 11:09:57 AM
I have to admit that I was moved by Barack Obama's speech last night. He sounded like a patriot. His oratory was eloquent and powerful. His ideas sounded like they just might be feasible. Then my brain kicked in.
My first thought was, "This man has never played Sim City."
You see, in Sim City, you have to run a town. You establish taxes, hoping to provide enough services to keep up the infrastructure while keeping the city an attractive place for business. Businesses can leave. Hence, when you raise taxes too much you often end up with less revenue. Obama's plan, taxing "the hell out of" business, will send even more of them overseas. Unless he's willing to put up massive trade barriers with China, who owns the bulk of our national debt and could presumably sink the dollar by calling it in, his ideas will result in a loss of jobs, more Americans on welfare, and a real recession. Have we learned nothing from Europe? Having government take the role of parent leads to bankrupcy. Look at France.
I don't doubt that Obama loves America, or at least what he thinks America should be. He wants to improve the lot of the average Joe; that's a good thing. The problem is that, like most Liberal initiatives, the path to Hell is paved with good intentions. Has welfare ended poverty in our lifetime? Did the amnesty of the 1980's end illegal immigration? Are there fewer pot smokers in Caifornia now that it's quasi-legal? No. Liberal ideas reflect an ignorance of both economics and human nature. Liberals, in general, are not bad people. They're just hopelessly naive.
My health care plan? I would Wal-Martify health care. Wal Mart has, single-handedly, made prescription drugs affordable again. Let's see them do the same with doctor visits. What is the government's role in all of this? Pass a law to establish more medical schools and graduate more doctors and nurses. This will drive costs down. We gradutate approximately the same number of doctors today as we did thirty years ago, thus creating a supply scarcity which raises costs to the consumer. Another idea is to get together a task force of businessmen to come up with a non-profit medical plan, regulated and inspected by a business efficiency team on a regular basis, to see just how cheap health coverage can possibly be. The government covers only the start-up costs, then backs off. If we could get the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Lee Iacoca to head up the team, I think amazing things could happen.
Those are some of my ideas. Notice that they are not, by and large, funded by the taxpayer. We've got enough to worry about. On that issue, Barack was dead on.