Tag Archives: government

Progressive-Democrats’ Letter and a Medical Panel

Posted on by
Reply

Seventeen Progressive-Democrat Senators wrote a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr decrying the medical experts he’d appointed to a creation of the Progressive-Democratic Party, the US Preventive Services Task Force, from back when the Senate joined with the House to unilaterally pass Obamacare.

We are greatly concerned about the potentially outsized impact these members could have in pushing for services within their specialty[.]

Never mind that Kennedy’s appointees are actual medical experts in the variety of fields which the panel was designed to oversee. These specialist doctors replaced a collection of generalists wholly unqualified to oversee the plethora of specialties that need treatment recommendation oversight. After all,

Primary care doctors are less familiar with new research on diseases and screenings than specialists, which is one reason the panel is often behind the medical curve.

One example of the panel’s heretofore failures is this bit regarding PSA testing for prostate cancer in men:

[T]he panel retained its recommendation against PSA tests for men 70 and older. Why? Who knows, but some on the left argue that screening older men could result in unnecessary treatment since they may die of something else before cancer kills them.

That’s just cynical and has no basis in the practice of medicine. The specialists will be much more efficient, much more accurate, and so much more cost effective with their recommendations.

Kennedy hasn’t responded yet, at least publicly, but were I in his shoes, my response would be public, and it would be short and sweet. My responding letter would have this appearing at the top right of the body:

Reference A: [Make up of the US Preventive Services Task Force]
Reference B: [The Progressive-Democrats’ letter]

The body of my response would have consisted of this in its entirety:

Reference B noted. Reference A applies.

Nothing else need be done or said or written.

Government Rules

Posted on by
Reply

James Freeman asked, in his Wednesday WSJ op-ed, how many of these are necessary.

How much government could we all do without? President Donald Trump says that red tape, when cut, becomes beautiful. Truer words were never spoken, and last week this column noted his encouraging progress in repealing misguided rules enacted by his predecessors. Now a few recent examples [not repeated here] suggest that half or more of government regulation is completely unnecessary.

I submit that we already have a nearly complete set of government rules in our Bill of Rights, backed up by the Bill’s overarching document, our Constitution.

I would add two rules to flesh the list out to completeness. One would enforce the sanctity of contracts. When two or more parties agree on a thing, that contract should be entirely enforceable as it stands, with severe sanctions applied to those who violate it. There really are only two legitimate ways to deviate from a freely done agreement. One way is if all of the parties involved agree to alter the contract or to dissolve it altogether. The other way is through the bankruptcy of one or more of the parties, making it impossible for them to uphold their parts of the bargain. Current bankruptcy law deals quite nicely with this sort of eventuality.

The other government rule centers on truth in advertising. Advertisements are contracts between the advertiser and the buyer, and so within the sanctity of that contract, not being truthful should be a felony if the distortion can be shown to have been deliberate, or a civil offense if the distortion can be shown to result from either party’s negligence.

Such a cleanup of our rules and regulations regime would result in how many pages of the Federal Register becoming obsolete and without effect. It also would virtually eliminate compliance costs and very greatly simplify our lives and our economy.

Even better it would render the vast majority of the Civil Service unnecessary, with those personnel returned to the private sector, all to the profit of a greatly downsized and so more efficient government, of the civil and now private employees, and to our economy writ large, through no longer having to compete so much for the same resources that the government had heretofore competed for.

Yes, I’m ignoring environmental and climate regulation in this. Those milieus are well enough covered by our Bill of Rights and the proposed contract sanctity rule.

Fixing Itself

Posted on by
Reply

A question arises: can France fix itself so it can fix its economy so it can get its debt under control and on a downward path to a sensible level?

That answer depends on whether it can fix its national method for settling questions and the disputes that give rise to those questions.

A free democracy has one primary method for settling national questions and disputes: debate, argument, and then voting for one or another of the politicians the people want to represent them and to lead the government, or voting against another or one of those politicians.

France is unique in that it has a second method of settling national questions and disputes. This method has been in prominent use since the months and days leading into the Revolution of 1793: rioting in the streets, destroying businesses, attacking police personnel. Over the course of the Fifth Republic, extant since the 1950s, the technique of rioting and destruction has become elevated to the same level as voting. That elevation has resulted from the French government’s inability to quell the rioting and to restore order—an inability that results, not from a true lack of capacity, but from utter cowardice on the part of the men and women in charge of the government, especially the President, Prime Minister, and members of the National Assembly and the Senate.

So far, the rioters have succeeded in intimidating the government personnel into backing down and giving them what they demand, however bad for the nation as a whole over any timeframe beyond tomorrow. See the Yellow Vests riots of 2020 and the current “student” and “teacher” riots today.

Macron’s government men and women, including Macon himself, were intimidated into significant watering down of economic reforms that Yellow Vesters disapproved, and his government today is on the verge of giving prima donna pupils and (union) teachers whatever they want.

The answer to the question, then, at least for what France is confronting for its future, is…No.

A Misreading

Posted on by
Reply

Matthew Hennessey has misread what the Progressive-Democratic Party wants when it gains majorities in the House and the Senate.

There are no policies underpinning the Democratic grand strategy, no major proposals on the table for discussion and debate. There are only the Four Fears.

That’s not entirely accurate. There are those fears, which Party is fomenting in lieu of specifics regarding economic and foreign policy goals: fear of artificial intelligence, fear of data centers, fear of Donald Trump, and fear of MAGA.

Those, though, are just tools Party is using in pursuit of its major proposals. Hennessey is right, though, to the extent its major proposals are not up for debate.

The Progressive-Democrats have promised to eliminate the filibuster, reducing our republican democracy to a popular democracy and reducing our Senate to just another House, this time whose members have State-wide districts. They’ve also promised to stack the Supreme Court, reducing it from a Court upholding and applying our Constitution as it’s written to an activist court for whom our Constitution is just a collection of suggestions, if not entirely irrelevant, and which is malleable to Party demands.

Naïve or Ignorant?

Posted on by
Reply

Former Senate Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm (R) and Donald Boudreaux, an econ prof at George Mason University, centered their op-ed in Monday’s WSJ on the premise that if the Republican party gets suitably drubbed this fall, the remnants will revolt against President Donald Trump’s (R) tariffs and revert to Reagan-esque free trade economics. On regaining majorities in the House and Senate, there will be a Republican backlash against Mr Trump’s tariff policies and those policies suitably altered or rescinded.

I’m hard pressed to determine whether these two, who should know better, are really that naïve or they’re that ignorant.

An ascendant Progressive-Democratic Party, whose leadership has sworn to fundamentally change our nation and our economy will set about doing exactly that. Beginning with their elimination of the Senate’s filibuster, they will transform our nation’s republican democracy structure, a structure that protects minority party rights and authorities, into a popular democracy, a one-party structure that ignores minority party imperatives. Popular democracies in this way are indistinguishable from authoritarian- or tyranny-run nations. They will continue their “transformation” with packing the Supreme Court, installing a majority of activist Justices instead of Justices sworn to defend our Constitution and to apply it and any statutes before them as they are written rather than as the newly installed activists, or their Party masters, want them to be written. Party has long opposed election laws that limit the franchise to citizens; once they’re in control this time around, they’ll not only control voting laws, they’ll also control vote counting process.

Party has already begun its promised transformation, beginning with that filibuster elimination commitment. It’s continuing with its open clasping of the Democratic Socialists of America to its bosom. The DSA is committed to centralized government control of our private economy, ex-President Joe Biden’s (D) fundamental economic transformation. DSA, and so Party, are committed to subordinating our Court system to Congress, although this would be redundant with the packed Court. More long-term, they’re committed to eliminating the Senate altogether, although this may prove unnecessary: with the elimination of the filibuster, the Senate would be indistinguishable from the House—each State would simply have two legislators elected at large along with those elected district by district. This is ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) dream of changing our nation.

With Party control of government, there may well be no further Republican majorities in either house of Congress.