Tag Archives: freedom

He Built This

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…and it’s not pretty.  The costs of Obamacare are starting to come home to roost, now that its various mandates are starting to take effect.  Gerri Willis has a listing; this is a brief summary.

The requirement that lets grown adultschildren stay on mummy and popsy’s health insurance policy until they’re 26 will cost $3,400 per grown adultchild per year.  But there’s an additional cost: employers are beginning to not include such policies at all in their benefits package; they’re too expensive.  There’s yet another cost: colleges where Buffy or Junior might go—and might have gotten coverage as students—are beginning to drop the policies: they’re too expensive.

But wait.  There’s still the little 26-year-old tyke’s pre-existing condition that’s required to be covered.  Except that coverage still is hard to find.  Willis writes

Insurers in 20 states have given up offering child-only insurance plans.

Those child-only plans matter because that’s all that’s left after those other policies have been withdrawn from the market.  RTWT.

There’s more, though.  Medical equipment manufacturers are being forced to cancel plans for medical equipment manufacturing in the US.  Cook Medical, the US’ largest privately held maker of medical devices, with annual revenue of more than $1.8 billion and employment of around 4,000 people in the Bloomington, IN, area and 10,000 worldwide, is an example.

Cook says it will have to cancel plans to build an additional five manufacturing plants, each employing 300 people when those plants were scheduled to open.  The medical device tax that’s another important part of Obamacare, will cost Cook Medical $20 million this year alone—that’s the price of one of those additional manufacturing plants.

It gets worse—or better, if you like the Obamacare move.  Follow the Fox News link to the larger article and video at Indianapolis Business Journal.  Executive Vice President of Strategic Business Units at Cook Medical, Pete Yonkman, described one of those unintended consequences that are so monstrous and so ubiquitous in Obama’s centerpiece.  With this medical device tax, Cook can’t economically bring a new technology to patients and hospitals in the US; Cook instead is looking to Asia.  Moreover, as this technology is developed in Asia, that’s where the expertise will be developed.  As a consequence of that, that’s where the engineering, and then manufacturing, jobs will appear:

It’s important to have that [engineering and scientific expertise] around your manufacturing base[.]

And this: Yonkman noted that

One of the fastest growing areas in our company every year is always our regulatory team having to deal with the increased burden coming from…increased regulation….

A medical device manufacturer’ fastest growing area has nothing to do with its device manufacturing or sales.

And finally this: Obamacare’s medical device tax is a 2.3% tax on medical devices; however, the impact is greater than just this immediate 2.3%.  Yonkman said the impact on actual earnings is another 15%.

He’ll stop that from being built.

You Didn’t Build That

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Now President Obama has an ad out in which he tries to walk away from his earlier comments that business owners—especially small business owners—didn’t build their businesses, that they owed government for their success.

Now he’s insisting that what he was talking about was Big Government “investing” in education and training, roads and bridges, research and technology.  And more:

Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.

No.  Today’s successful schools are charter and other schools to which parents send their children by choice.  These schools are run by private businesses; they’re not government organs, as today’s public schools are.

Private enterprises built the roads and bridges; Big Government didn’t send in the Seabees or the Army Corps of Engineers to build our transportation network, or to maintain it, except in the direst of localized emergencies, like post-Katrina.  Even then, though, the government’s constructors have been adjuncts to the private construction companies.  It’s true that Big Government funded significant portions of those build-out and maintenance projects, but the Government’s “investment” was heavily inflated: the privately run construction companies were—and are—required to pay “prevailing” union wage rates; the companies are not allowed to bid competitively.

It was Xerox that built the Internet, for instance, not Government, as Obama claims, and Xerox built it so they could share internal data on internal computer networks more easily, not “so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”

And that “unbelievable American system that we have?”  That’s our free market economy that private individuals, singly and in groups, built up since our inception as a nation.  Big Government had no role in that.  Little Government had the important role of staying out of the way of our private, free enterprise, only enforcing laws against cheating and the like.

As an aside, President Obama had a closing refrain in his “You Didn’t Build That” speech: Americans often work together to do things they can’t do, or do as efficiently, alone.  But who was he talking about in this “working together” of his?  Not Americans working together on their own initiative—forming companies or charitable organizations, for instance—oh, no.  Obama was talking about Big Government as the “together,” a Government that does things for us.  Not at all anything about Americans working together without government…help.

A Bit More on Free Speech

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Indiana University Southeast has a rather appalling view of the First Amendment.  One aspect of it, as Maegan Vazquez notes in a recent Fox News article is

One stipulation in the code requires that students may only “express opinions” within a free speech zone….

Yet, according to the Indiana University system’s overarching code,

In accordance with the state and federal Constitution and university policy, the university recognizes the rights of all students to engage in discussion, to express thoughts and opinions, and to assemble, speak, write, publish or invite speakers on any subject without university interference or fear of university disciplinary action.

What the IUS’ code says on the matter is this:

  • Persons wishing to express their opinions, distribute materials or assemble on campus in accordance with the state and federal constitution in relation to their right to free speech, must submit an Application to Schedule Facilities form. … This Application should be submitted at least five (5) days prior to the event. Approval must be granted before an event can take place.

and

  • … The free speech area on campus is customarily in the McCullough Plaza. However, other locations which do not disrupt functions of the university may be identified by the Director of Campus Life in consultation with University Police.
  • … Materials may not be posted on campus other than the designated kiosk in the Commons.

Notice that.  IUS presumes to demand an academic week’s advance notice before an expression of opinion—a demonstration, a protest—can be conducted.  To be sure those wishing to express an opinion can appeal the decision, but only to an IUS agency—they’re forced to ask the university to overrule itself.

The university, in a statement to Fox News actually said the following with a straight face:

[The guidelines] were intended to provide some guidance on the issue so that those wishing to gather and express an opinion could do so without endangering people or property.  The guidelines also were intended to protect the rights of all students to have unfettered access to educational activities on campus (in other words, the exercise of free speech rights should not result in blocking access to buildings or disrupting classes or campus events).

Here is the university cynically ignoring the myriad of state and Federal law that already governs “endangering people or property.”  Instead, IUS wishes to engage in prior restraint: restrict legitimate activity on the idle speculation that nefarious results might—might—ensue.

Here, too, is the university cynically ignoring the fact that no small part of free political speech—that 1st Amendment bit that’s part of that confusing, older than 100 years scrap of paper that isn’t binding on anybody, anyway—is attention-getting disruptions.  They’re also ignoring that such disruptions contribute to the credibility—or its lack—of the protest message.  By insisting on controlling for themselves political speech, they’re also insisting that their non-protesting students are too stupid to draw their own conclusions about the message of the protest (which makes me wonder on what all those students are spending their college money, to be getting such shoddy teaching in critical thinking).

Associate Professor of Political Science and Dean of the School of Social Sciences at IUS, Joseph Wert, says with equal seriousness,

We have to regulate other groups who come from off campus. Some come and preach a lot of hate. We just can’t have them wandering around campus with bullhorns over here….  Governments have the right to restrict the time and place of these things….  If they were regulating content–I’d have a problem with that[.]

Let me see if I understand this.  In order to control the behavior of those with no affiliation with the university who enter the campus from outside, the good Professor actually thinks it’s necessary to regulate the speech of university students.  Never mind that the university—like all colleges and universities—have the authority to restrict access by outsiders, and to restrict the behaviors of those outsiders allowed onto campus, without at all touching student activity.

Then there’s this: when the university restricts the time and location of speech, it is perforce, regulating its content—by permitting it to be spoken at all, or not, except at a time and place of university choosing.

In the end, what we have is a university restricting even individual peaceful expressions of opinion to a specific location of the university’s choosing, at a time of its choosing.  Even simple flyers expressing free opinions are permissible only in a designated location—too small to accommodate everyone’s flyers.   Everywhere else on campus, it’s not legal under IUS’ Code to express a differing opinion.  Not at all.  Not anywhere.   Never mind that this is a direct contradiction of the Indiana University system’s governing Code.

As the Senior Vice President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Robert Shibley, put it,

[The University is] teaching [college students] that they’re not equipped to live in a free society.

Another Take on Free Speech

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Comes this from Fox News.

The mayor of Boston is vowing to block Chick-fil-A from opening a restaurant in the city after the company’s president spoke out publicly against gay marriage.

Mayor Thomas Menino told the Boston Herald on Thursday that he doesn’t want a business in the city “that discriminates against a population.”

Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy told the Baptist Press this week that his privately owned company is “guilty as charged” in support of what he called the biblical definition of the family.

So, if a government disapproves of a political remark, it’s allowed to drive the speaker from the arena.  Free speeches?  We ain’t got no free speeches in Boston.  We don’t need no free speeches.  I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ free speeches.

More Federal Dishonesty

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This time, it’s an assault on our veterans, using their Mount Soledad Veterans Memorial Cross as the cudgel.  This is a case where the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled the veterans’ memorial unconstitutional because it uses a cross—a globally recognized symbol of a fallen soldier, as well as a global religious symbol—at the center of its memorial display.  Last month, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of the matter.

Now we learn that after President Obama had his Solicitor General join the appeal, which increased the likelihood the Court would take the case (but did not guarantee it, as we’ve just seen), Obama had his DoJ engage in what would seem to be ex parte discussions with the ACLU—the opposition in this case—without the major plaintiffs, the Mount Soledad Memorial Association, present.  This also had the effect of cutting out the MSMA’s legal representation, the Liberty Institute.

This is an atrocious attack, not only on our veterans’ memorial, but on the concept of our right to petition our government for redress of grievances, and on our right to representation in the cases we have before any court of law.

Whatever you think of the memorial itself, feel free to call Attorney General Eric Holder’s office at 202-514-2001 and let him know, in no uncertain terms, your…dismay…at his underhanded duplicity.  While you’re at it, call your Congressman and both Senators with the same message.

And call President Obama: 202-456-1111 or TTY/TTD: 202-456-6213.