Tag Archives: freedom

The Democrat’s Freedom Dilemma…

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For years, I couldn’t understand the liberal fascination with the liberal arts.  There was a powerful force at work beyond a casual name association. Our best and brightest have been encouraged to get degrees in spectacularly useless subjects like sociology and comparative literature.  Nowhere in the educational system are people encouraged to study math or the sciences.  Go to any engineering or math department in an American university, and you will be almost entirely surrounded by our “deportation class” of immigrants facing a one-way flight home within days of graduation.  It is almost as if our public education system (and immigration policy) shuns competence in logic based degrees.

Disdain for the sciences isn’t by any means a typical characteristic of leftist regimes.  Soviet Russia, China, and other old-school socialist havens have long encouraged their citizens to study the “useful” sciences.  So why is so important to the American left to suppress the left side of America’s brains?

The answer is Freedom.  Ever the foe of collective control, freedom is the number one hurdle to an argument for big brother.  A free society is allowed to question big brother and has access to information that quickly defeats arguments for collectivism.  The Soviets and Chinese didn’t have to contend with freedom when feeding information to their subjects thirty years ago.  Their citizens were not able to make logical conclusions about their conditions with the little information provided by Big Brother’s press. When Reagan freed up investment capital with massive tax cuts in the early 80′s, free Americans, backed with a new flood of Venture Capital, launched the Information Revolution.  Freedom knocked down the doors of the Soviets and Chinese as information leaked into their countries and the logical associations of freedom with happiness and progress broke the arguments of Big Brother.

The virtues of free markets were so self-evident, that few dared to suggest that we should return to big government.  Even the leader of the American Left made this declaration in the mid 1990′s:

The Devil doesn’t sleep, and politicians love power, so how do Democrats overcome this “freedom dilemma” and the information revolution feeding its progression?  The gross failure government largess is at everyone’s fingertips now.  Everyone knows that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.  The math just doesn’t add up.

Wait, how do you add that up again?  The government spends over 150% more than it takes in?  Every year? Is that a lot? No?  I shouldn’t worry about it then? That’s a relief.  So, 4.5 million jobs have been created since Obama took office?  How many have been lost in the same period?  Oh, that’s not important? Ok.  Quick question: How is government is going to rein in the costs of a government controlled health system with more government oversight? Didn’t Medicare go from $100 Billion / year in 1990 to about $500 Billion / year in 2010 under their watch?  It would have been more in the private system because the profit motive drives the cost of things up? Ok. Sounds funny, but I’ll believe it.  Give me a second, I need to go to Wal-Mart and buy a hammer made in Taiwan, a pineapple grown in Brazil, a quart of milk from a cow 500 miles away, and 10 pencils with parts originating from five different countries around the globe for under $20…

If the American public doesn’t know what to do with the numbers or how to logic through a Krugman non-sequitur, then free information loses value.   Creation of a dependent class becomes possible again once government-controlled education ensures that the masses are dependent on the ruling class to think.  How else would one explain the constant erosion of standards in the school system? Why would school districts in California go out of their way to graduate Hispanic students who don’t speak the tongue of the politicians? Ignorance is vital to Democratic success no matter what form it comes in.  Even among those with “higher education”, when logic is abdicated for the “virtue” of the liberal arts, big brother can tell them how do add up numbers that don’t make logical sense. Who is to say that Santa Claus doesn’t exist?

And the Outsourcer of The Century Award Goes To…

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President Barack Obama!

It is very intuitive that the spectacular deluge of regulations and taxes unleashed on US industry by the 44th President would be extremely detrimental to business and grind our economy to a near stop.  The last time we saw a massive tax increase and regulatory takeover of the economy in the face of a recession was under Herbert Hoover in 1932. It would take the greatest war the world has ever seen to pull us out of the depression that resulted. If you need an illustration of how taxes and regulation hurt the economy, consider the following example from the med tech industry:

Lets say you are a running a small medical device company trying to survive in our so-called “free” country.  It costs you between $35 million and $90 million to get a new device approved for use in the US.  It also takes you between 5 and 10 years of R&D and regulatory to get FDA approval and there is well over a 75% chance that your company will fail along the way (run out of cash, the device doesn’t work, a test subject has a lawyer relative, etc). You watch as an unregulated low-cost internet industry takes over the VC community that used to fund medical technology ventures.  Your life is one of regulatory and financing hell and your family hates you because there is a good chance that the next bump in the road will be the end of your company.  The only humor in your life is a sad chuckle when you hear a delusional acquaintance say that it’s the NIH that actually ”invents” things.  You stay focused on the supposed pot of gold that waits for you at the other end of the minefield you’ve chosen to navigate.

Now imagine if, in addition to your woes, the President and Democratic congress declare an all-out war on your industry.  The FDA is given a “stonewall mandate” as internal whistleblowers are unleashed on the agency to root out any industry friendly regulators and blackball privileges are given to even low ranking officials.  Taxes are promised to be raised 33% on investment capital which will not only drain the pool of financing you need, but steer it even further towards low-cost unregulated alternatives like a college programmer with a hot idea.  Mid-tier med tech companies that might buy yours are run out of the nation or swallowed up by bigger companies because their small margins can’t take the special med tech tax in Obamacare (2.3% of revenues can look a lot more like 23% at the bottom line).  That same Obamacare med tech tax (used as Chicago-style punishment to the industry for not supporting Obamacare) drains billions of dollars from the pot of gold (med tech acquisition budgets) that you and other small med tech companies look to for cashing out after all the hard work.  Now you are competing with the other companies for a much smaller exit value, much like the animals in a nature special surrounding a small African watering hole during a drought…  And then your elected representatives in government add “comparative effectiveness studies” to the list of things your diminished money supply will somehow have to pay for.  These are studies that could stop most groups from compensating your technology, even if it somehow gets through the Obama FDA. You have to show that your technology is cost-effective… unlike nearly any technology right after launch before economies of scale can bring the price down!  At what point do you fold up shop and/or leave the country?

Am I being overdramatic? Look around you.  Pick up the paper.  What do you see?  And this is before the real regulations are slated to kick in…

Here is an example of one such company:

This next company obviously doesn’t have a lot of faith in what Obamacare will do for our markets.  If only the CEO had a chance to talk to the president about it…

It is hard to imagine that this the same country of 20 or even 10 years ago.  In my youth, there was a worry that the Russians would invade the US and replace freedom with socialism at the point of a gun.  The man who brought down the Red Army warned us it would happen another way, and only take a generation to accomplish: