Bombshell Report! Majority of Immigrants on Welfare, Including 73 Percent of Mexicans and Central Americans

It's from Steven Camarota, at the Center for Immigration Studies, "Welfare Use by Immigrant and Native Households: An Analysis of Medicaid, Cash, Food, and Housing Programs."

And a write-up at USA Today, "Report: More than half of immigrants on welfare":

More than half of the nation's immigrants receive some kind of government welfare, a figure that's far higher than the native-born population's, according to a report to be released Wednesday.

About 51% of immigrant-led households receive at least one kind of welfare benefit, including Medicaid, food stamps, school lunches and housing assistance, compared to 30% for native-led households, according to the report from the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for lower levels of immigration.

Those numbers increase for households with children, with 76% of immigrant-led households receiving welfare, compared to 52% for the native-born.

The findings are sure to fuel debate on the presidential campaign trail as Republican candidates focus on changing the nation's immigration laws, from calls for mass deportations to ending birthright citizenship.

Steven Camarota, director of research at the center and author of the report, said that's a much-needed conversation to make the country's immigration system more "selective."

"This should not be understood as some kind of defect or moral failing on the part of immigrants," Camarota said about the findings. "Rather, what it represents is a system that allows a lot of less-educated immigrants to settle in the country, who then earn modest wages and are eligible for a very generous welfare system."

Linda Chavez agrees with Camarota that the country's welfare system is too large and too costly. But Chavez, a self-professed conservative who worked in President Reagan's administration, said it's irresponsible to say immigrants are taking advantage of the country's welfare system any more than native-born Americans.

Chavez said today's immigrants, like all other immigrant waves in the country's history, start off poorer and have lower levels of education, making it unfair to compare their welfare use to the long-established native-born population. She said immigrants have larger households, making it more likely that one person in that household will receive some kind of welfare benefit. And she said many benefits counted in the study are going to U.S.-born children of immigrants, skewing the findings even more.

"When you take all of those issues into account, (the report) is less worrisome," she said.

Chavez, president of the Becoming American Institute, a conservative group that advocates for higher levels of legal immigration to reduce illegal immigration, said politicians should be careful about using the data. Rather than focus on the fact that immigrants are initially more dependent on welfare than the U.S.-born, she said they should focus on studies that show what happens to the children of those immigrants.

"These kids who get subsidized school lunches today will go on to graduate high school ... will go on to college and move up to the middle class of America," Chavez said. "Every time we have a nativist backlash in our history, we forget that we see immigrants change very rapidly in the second generation."

Yeah. Sure. And all these immigrants are about to start voting Republican, right Linda Chavez?

The system is out of control, frankly. What happened to the rugged individualist, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps ethic that immigrants to America used to have? Well, for one thing, we've got Obama, and the welfare system has just gotten more generous and much larger with the hard-left Democrats in office.

It's a national disgrace.

Weaponizing Ebola for Democrat Party Political Warfare

At Legal Insurrection, "Dems seek to weaponize Ebola politically."

The 'Food Insecurity' Hoax

Another one of those leftist buzz-phrases designed to promote dependency and expand government.

And it's a hoax, via iOWNTHEWORLD.

#ObamaCare's Future? Medi-Cal Problems Get Worse (and Worse) as Dependency Continues to Grow

The situation never improves as these dependency programs expand. They always get worse, but the Democrats then lock-in the dependency coalition, so the problems not only never get fixed, there's no political incentive for them to be fixed in any case.

It's statist corruption at its worst, right here in the once Golden State.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Medi-Cal struggles to provide services to ever-growing clientele":

Alisha Gutierrez, whose email address refers to her as the "tooth fairy," has spent years connecting developmentally disabled patients with specialized dental care.

But when a Santa Rosa man needed a root canal on a troubled molar earlier this year, the closest dentist she could find willing to perform the procedure was in Bakersfield — a 10-hour round trip by car.

"I felt terrible," Gutierrez said. "They would have to choose to travel that far, or choose to extract the tooth."

The tooth was pulled, and the choice was a reminder for Gutierrez that many needy Californians are struggling to receive care through Medi-Cal, the state's version of Medicaid. Concerns about access to care have taken on a new urgency since Medi-Cal enrollment began to swell in the wake of President Obama's federal healthcare overhaul.

The program, the state's second-largest expense after schools, is expected to cover one in three Californians by next year.

But the current state budget continues a 10% cut in reimbursements to some healthcare providers, a lingering sore point for advocates, lobbyists and lawmakers who have pushed to reverse the reduction. Doctors say the reimbursements are too low, forcing them to limit the number of Medi-Cal patients they treat...

More.

Dennis Miller Interviews David Horowitz

Listen to the interview, at Blazing Cat Fur, "A Most Excellent Explanation of the Left's Takeover of America."

Horowitz has a new book out, of course, "Take No Prisoners: The Battle Plan for Defeating the Left."

More Than Half of British Households Take More in Government Benefits Than They Pay in Taxes

It's unsustainable.

At Telegraph UK, "More than half of homes take more than they contribute: Official figures reveal record numbers of people who receive more in benefits and public services than they pay in tax":

In March the Institute for Fiscal Studies warned forcing Britain’s highest earners to foot a greater share of the tax bill is putting the long term finances at risk.

“Lumping more taxes on the rich” is not a sustainable strategy because the ability and willingness of high earners to pay more could eventually run out, the IFS suggested.

Just 300,000 high earners now pay 30 per cent of all income tax and 7.5 per cent of all tax, official figures show. Households with an average income of £104,000 paid £30,000 more in tax than they received from the state last year, ONS figures show.

The top ten per cent of earners contributed £26,984 in income and council tax, plus £10,303 in indirect taxes such as alcohol duty and VAT – a contribution to the public purse of £37,287. They received £2,284 in state cash benefits, which include child benefit, maternity pay and pensions.

The cost of educating their children came to £1,274, while they used NHS treatment worth £3,410 – meaning their total cost to the Exchequer was £7,264.

By contrast, a family with the national median income of £23,069 received £3,798 more in benefits and services than they paid in taxes last year.

They paid £4,620 in direct tax and £5,029 in indirect taxes, but received £6622 in cash benefits. They received schooling worth £2623 and NHS services worth £4,202. In total, they paid in £9,649 and received £13,477. It means for every £1 they paid in, they got £1.40 back.

The poorest ten per cent of families, with wages of £3,875 a year, paid £4,611 in direct and indirect taxes and received £13,559 in cash benefits and services. It means they received £2.94 in state support for every £1 they paid in tax.

The figures also show middle class families have seen the steepest fall in living standards since the financial crisis.

Also at the Daily Express UK, "Most households in Britain get more in benefits than they pay out in tax, new figures show," and London's Daily Mail, "Half of families receive more from the state than they pay in taxes but income equality widens as rich get richer."

The Left's Failing Economic 'Wreakovery' After Five Years

From Michelle Malkin, "5 years later: How’s that Wreckovery working out for ya?":

On Feb. 17, 2009, President Obama promised the sun and the moon and the stars. That was the day, five years ago, when he signed the $800 billion “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.” President Modesty called it “the most sweeping economic recovery package in our history.” He promised “unprecedented transparency and accountability.” He claimed the spending would lift “two million Americans from poverty.” Ready for the reality smackdown?

The actual cost of the $800 billion pork-laden stimulus has ballooned to nearly $2 trillion. At the time of the law’s signing, the unemployment rate hovered near 8 percent. Obama’s egghead economists projected that the jobless rate would never rise above 8 percent and would plunge to 5 percent by December 2013. The actual jobless rate in January was 6.6 percent, with an abysmal labor force participation rate of 63 percent (a teeny uptick from December, but still at a four-decade low).

Five years after the Recovery Act, 10.2 million people are out of work. The number of able-bodied Americans who have simply given up looking for work or are “not in the labor force (but) who currently want a job” has exploded. By some estimates, a record 90 million-plus people are hopelessly sitting on the sidelines.

The unemployment rate for black Americans is 12.1 percent: nearly double the national rate. The Obama campaign excoriated President George W. Bush when it exceeded 10 percent under his watch. The black teen jobless rate is now a whopping record 38 percent. Some 50 million Americans remain below the poverty level. And 47 million are now on food stamps, a third more than when Obama first took office in the halcyon days of Hope and Change.

After $150 billion in stimulus and other spending on green energy boondoggles, what does the White House have to show for it? According to The Green Corruption Files blog, 32 Obama-backed environmental firms have gone bankrupt as of February 2014. These include crony-clogged Solyndra at a cost to taxpayers of $535 million; Beacon Power, $240 million; Abound Solar, $400 million-plus; Fisker Auto, $529 million; A123, $250 million; ECOtality, $100 million; and Ener1, $118.5 million. In addition, 22 other Obama green energy projects are now in dire financial trouble.

Unprecedented transparency? Section 1513 of the Recovery Act required the White House to submit a progress report every three months. Last year, blogger Doug Powers noted: “Under their own guidelines, the administration should have released 14 of these reports by now, but they’ve only submitted eight of them for public review.” Whatevs.

Obama promised an avalanche of “shovel-ready” jobs to build vital infrastructure before signing the Recovery Act. Instead, stimulus money went to wasteful makework and non-work, including: bridges to nowhere; a California project to photograph ants; a University of North Carolina computerized dance program; a privately owned martini bar and Brazilian steakhouse in Missouri; a bogus New Hampshire beauty school; and renovations to Vice President Joe Biden’s favorite Amtrak train station in Delaware. Somehow, stimulus “Sheriff” Biden overlooked the hundreds of millions in stimulus money steered to General Services Administrations junkets in Las Vegas and Hawaii, ghost congressional districts, dead people, and those ubiquitous stimulus propaganda road signs stamped with the shovel-ready logo.

In 2012, Ohio State University economics professor Bill Dupor reported that more than three-quarters of the jobs created or saved by the stimulus were government jobs. Dupor and another colleague also concluded that the massive wealth redistribution scheme “destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs” by siphoning tax dollars “to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment.”

America's being taken for a ride by liars and collectivists. But I repeat myself.

More at the link.

IMAGE CREDIT: The People's Cube.

Girls as Young as 13 Get Free 'Plan B' Contraceptives in New York City Schools

Actually, this isn't a new story.

Fox News reported on this last September, "NYC schools to dispense morning-after pill without notifying parents."

What's new is that this made the front-page of today's New York Times, "Ready Access to Plan B Pills in City Schools":

She was only 16, with big dreams — too young, she thought, to have a baby. Yet she had had sex without protection, and she could see those dreams evaporating. Terrified, she found her way to the basement of her school, Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, where the nurse’s office was tucked away.

First the nurse weighed her and checked her blood pressure. Then she relayed the information to a doctor and made sure it was all right to give the girl Plan B One-Step, the morning-after pill. The nurse checked to see if the girl’s parents had returned the opt-out form that was supposed to have gone home at the beginning of the year. They had not, so she was free to take the pill.

Taking a pill out of a locked cabinet, the nurse handed it over with a cup of water and waited for her to swallow it, the girl recalled. After that first time, the girl took Plan B at school two or three more times. She said her mother had not signed the opt-out form, because she had wanted to have sex and so had never given it to her. “My mom, she doesn’t even know they have this stuff,” the girl, a junior from Coney Island, said.

Last month, the Obama administration seemingly changed the landscape of access to emergency contraception across the country when, in a reversal, it agreed to allow the best-known pill, Plan B One-Step, to become available to all ages without a prescription. Until recently, only those 17 and older could buy it over the counter.

But New York City had long ago come to an accommodation with the idea that girls as young as 13 or 14 should have easy access to the pill.

Through a patchwork of nurses’ offices and independent clinics operating in schools, students can now get free emergency contraceptives like Plan B One-Step in more than 50 high school buildings, generally in neighborhoods with high teenage pregnancy rates. Girls needing the drug have been able to get it immediately under the supervision of doctors or nurse practitioners with prescribing ability. School clinics began dispensing the pills several years ago, and in the 2011-12 academic year alone, about 5,500 girls received them at school at least once, according to the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

“Most teens go to school,” Deborah Kaplan, the department’s assistant commissioner for maternal, infant and reproductive health, said, explaining the city’s decision to make Plan B available in schools, as part of a bigger sex education campaign.

New York is not the only city to take Plan B right to teenagers; similar school-based health centers either prescribe or administer the contraceptives in Baltimore; Chicago; Oakland, Calif.; and all over Colorado, among other places. But New York’s ambitious push on Plan B is striking in light of its history with contraceptives in schools. Two decades ago, a decision to distribute condoms in schools without parental consent was one of several controversial moves that ultimately cost Schools Chancellor Joseph P. Fernandez his job.

Now, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has power over schools, and his administration can make such decisions without public debate. Even today, however, providing Plan B to minors remains a sensitive issue. In the 13 schools where the contraceptives are handed out by a school nurse after phone consultation with a doctor, parents must be notified of the program and given a chance to opt out, a provision that originated with a court ruling related to the condom protests in the early 1990s. (In 40 schools where an independent provider, which is typically a hospital or local health clinic, provides the pills, no parental consent is required.)

Across the United States, half of all school-based health clinics are prohibited from handing out any contraception, including condoms, by school, district or state regulations or laws, according to a survey by the School-Based Health Alliance, based in Washington.

Critics of the use of the pill have argued that it encourages sexual activity among teenagers and that parents ought to thus have a strong say in whether their children should have access to it. “Teens who are otherwise going to think twice about sex are going to say, ‘This is always going to be available to me,’ ” said Anna Higgins, director of the Center for Human Dignity of the Family Research Council.

“The moral and physical consequences to this premature sexual behavior are very real,” Ms. Higgins added, “and they need to be addressed by the person who knows the child and who loves the child best, which is the parent.”

Only 3 percent of parents in the 13 schools sign the opt-out form, according to the health department. Dr. Angela Diaz, director of the Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center, which runs clinics in three Manhattan high schools (where opt-out forms are not needed), said some parents tacitly condoned the program because it was so hard to talk to their children about sex.

“They wish that their kids would talk to them, but given the reality, they’re happy there is a place where they can be helped,” Dr. Diaz said.

That's basically just giving up your children to the state. The parents are giving up responsibility for their child's well-being to the schools, who don't care about the values or propriety of 13-year-old children having sexual intercourse. And of course, no doubt many young girls simply become pregnant, and thus you have children having children.

The regressive left loves all of this, of course. Indeed, access to all the sex enablers are part and parcel to the left's social justice program. You build generations of Democrats dependent on government. Who cares if you destroy untold numbers of lives in the process?

Sickening.

Still more at the link.

Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, Takes Disabled Parking Spot as Government Slashes Programs for the Disabled

Folks are outraged, at Mirror UK: "George Osborne parks in disabled bay: Tory Chancellor causes outrage by ignoring restrictions" (via Memeorandum).

Friday's front page exclusive: George Osborne caught parking in disabled bay after cruel cuts to disability benefits twitter.com/DailyMirror/st…

— Daily Mirror (@DailyMirror) April 4, 2013

Meh. Worst thing is giving the idiot progressives a ready target. Not smart, Osborne. (He claimed he didn't know he was in a handicapped spot.)

Mick and Mairead Philpott Guilty of Manslaughter in Deaths of Children

Also guilty was friend Paul Mosley. But the Philpotts were despicable welfare dependency cases.

At London's Daily Mail, "Vile product of Welfare UK: Man who bred 17 babies by five women to milk benefits system is guilty of killing six of them."

More:

* "Michael Philpott is a perfect parable for our age, writes A.N. WILSON: His story shows the pervasiveness of evil born out of welfare dependency."

* "Group sex on a snooker table, dogging and a girlfriend who shared his marital home: The sordid sex life of 'manipulative' Mick Philpott and his wife Mairead."

And see Telegraph UK, "Lies behind death fire couple's mask of grief," and "Derby fire: Sex-obsessed Philpott lived tawdry lifestyle."

Starkly Different Responses to Defeat of Proposed Los Angeles Sales Tax Hike

A follow-up to my post from yesterday, "South-Central Voters Went 60-100 Percent in Favor of Failed Los Angeles Sales Tax Hike on Tuesday's Ballot."

And remember, the local sales tax would have surged to 9.5 percent. An Angelino would be paying nearly an additional 10 percent to taxes for each taxable consumer purchase in Los Angeles.

At the Los Angeles Times, "L.A. tax-hike vote patterns tell a tale of two realities":

Those in higher-crime areas, who vote in lower numbers, supported the proposal almost to the same extent that more affluent voters rejected it. The hike was defeated.

Nearly every week, 70-year-old Barb Johnson hears word of a nearby robbery or car break-in in Vermont Knolls, her neighborhood of modest bungalows just west of the Harbor Freeway in South Los Angeles.

So it was alarming, she says, to learn this week that voters had rejected a proposed city sales tax increase that the mayor, the police chief and other civic leaders said was vital to shoring up the Los Angeles Police Department and improving emergency services.

"How are we supposed to keep our streets safe if there's no money?" the retired office manager asked.

Over the mountains, in the distant northwest San Fernando Valley suburb of West Hills, Orly Salem, 59, was unmoved by City Hall's plea. A construction company bookkeeper, Salem dismissed the proposed half-cent increase in the sales tax with a weary assessment: Enough is enough.

"Every time it's more, more, more," Salem said. "When I don't have money, I cut my expenses. Why can't they do the same?

A detailed Times analysis and interviews with those and other voters found starkly contrasting vote patterns and perceptions of the proposed sales tax hike across the nearly 469-square-mile expanse of the sprawling city.

In many South Los Angeles precincts, support for the tax increase was overwhelming, as high as 86%. The opposite was true across large swaths of the northwest San Fernando Valley, the Westside and San Pedro, where "no" totals ran as high as 83%. Overall, the measure was defeated with 55% of voters opposed, according to unofficial results.

The contours of the results — and the overall outcome — show the well-established voting dynamics in Los Angeles that will play a significant role in the current campaign to replace Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. More fiscally conservative, independent and Republican voters are concentrated in middle- and upper-income neighborhoods on northern, western and southern fringes of the city. And Tuesday they followed a historic pattern of going to the polls in larger numbers.

Yeah, that's pretty predictable.

The haves vs. the have nots, right? Or the big-government dependents vs. the anti-tax hike independents. Either way, this local divide says a lot about American politics. Mitt Romney's 47 percent comments were crude and politically incorrect. But they really captured the essence of the debate on the role of government in society today.

Obama Inauguration T-Shirt Touts Second Term as 'Earned, Not Given'

Via Garance Franke-Ruta, whom I tweeted:

@thegarance Would that they felt the same about individual success and upward mobility! #Obama #Inauguration #Dependency
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 20, 2013

RELATED: At Weasel Zippers, "Inauguration Poster Likens Obama to Jesus…"

Detroit Welfare Mob Riots for Section 8 Housing Vouchers

We're going to hell. Soon enough, alright. Shit's hitting the freakin' fan.

At Blazing Cat Fur, "Riot Breaks Out at Housing Assistance Event In Metro Detroit."

Also at Lonely Conservative, "In Michigan 5000 Show Up For 1000 Section 8 Vouchers, Chaos Ensues."

In Michigan 5,000 people showed up at a human services office to pick up Section 8 housing vouchers. The problem – there were only 1,000 vouchers available and the crowd got out of control. The state police had to be called in with riot gear and the giveaway was canceled. Of course, the people who were turned away empty handed act like victims, and one young woman lamented that so many elderly people were turned away. That’s sad, maybe if all of these young, able-bodied people weren’t there to get theirs the elderly frail people would have been taken care of.

Yeah, I'm heartbroken about this.

The Face of Britain's Decline

From Dave Blount, at Right Wing News, "Leanna Broderick":

Even as once great Britain’s eyes go dim, life is still good for the freeloaders who are bleeding it to death...

Continue reading.

Republicans Have Leverage in Fiscal Cliff Standoff

From Keith Hennessey, at the Wall Street Journal, "Time to Call the President's Budget Bluff":

... While the president has a strong hand, he is overplaying it. Republicans have some leverage. They need to use it effectively.

• The president's veto threat is a bluff. Without a new law, tax increases and spending cuts will likely increase unemployment to 9% and might trigger a new recession. Even if he could shift all the political blame for such a legislative failure onto congressional Republicans, Mr. Obama cannot afford to risk a new recession that would irreparably damage his second term. He can neither veto a budget-deal bill that Congress sends to him, nor can he allow Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to tie a bill up in the Senate. He can, however, try to bluff Republicans into giving away the store.

• The president's proposal for more spending and taxation puts him to the left of many in his own party, and Democrats up for re-election are not lemmings looking to follow Sen. Patty Murray, who has welcomed a plunge over the fiscal cliff. Democratic Sens. Max Baucus and Mary Landrieu oppose the president's proposal to increase the estate tax. Sen. Chuck Schumer has defined "rich" at $1 million of income, much higher than the president's $250,000.

Many Democrats don't want to raise taxes on successful small business owners without Republican votes as political cover. Members of both parties are terrified at the prospect of subjecting 27 million additional tax filers to the Alternative Minimum Tax if there is no new legislative "patch," as Congress has annually passed for many years.

If exposed to the light of day, these intraparty Democratic divisions provide opportunities for Republicans to negotiate a centrist or center-right agreement. In the short run, this requires Republicans to publicly challenge their Democratic colleagues on these specific policy questions. In the long run, Republicans must refuse to engage in ad hoc summitry and insist upon a return to a regular, committee-based legislative process that includes annual budget resolutions and open-floor amendments.

I've been saying the same thing. Republicans are in good shape if they stand firm. It'll be Obama's recession if we go over the cliff. Fuck him.

More at the link.

Rachel Maddow and the Left's Depraved Agenda of Unchecked Power Over the Individual

You don't have to go much farther than Rachel Maddow's marquee MSNBC broadcast to understand how far America's fallen from the society's basic standards of decency and self-government. When AIDS protesters launched their disgusting bare-naked Capitol Hill protest last week, Maddow thought that was sweeter than a load of steaming hot-passion lesbo giz. Robert Stacy McCain had the perfect headline, "Naked Protesters: Unattractive People Demand Action to Protect Boondoggle":

In terms of newsworthiness, it might be a clever idea to have, say, Brad Pitt and Anne Hathaway stage a naked protest in Harry Reid’s office, demanding action to reduce out-of-control federal spending. On the other hand, it’s hard to see the logic of sending out a bunch of ugly freaks to harass John Boehner about their pet boondoggle...

Yes, ugly freaks. Very ugly, and f-king depraved. But there's more:

Exactly why the federal government has a program to provide housing for AIDS sufferers but not, say, people with herpes or chlyamida, can only be explained in terms of identity politics. Over the past 30 years, clever organizers have succeeded in making AIDS a propaganda sledgehammer with which to bludgeon politicians. “AIDS funding” includes a vast category of government spending, of which HOPWA is a classic example, that is considered sacrosanct because anyone who doesn’t support it will be slammed as a heartless homophobe.

Now that's where you're gonna get Rachel Maddow all lathered. Anything to expand the role of government over the individual, using tactics so depraved to make one vomit, and Maddow is totally down with it. She is the perfect representative of how far to the left the so-called establishment has shifted in recent years. Progressives want nothing less than the destruction of traditional values and the respectful nature of the individual, the decent, respectful nature of the individual. It must be destroyed to make way for far-left cultural values and the secular state enforcer.

For more on this check out Sheldon Richman's essay at Reason, "Rachel Maddow's Blind Deference to Government Power." I don't think the essay is introduced as well as it should be --- for example, the key quotation at the piece does not coincide with the video to which it links. But the fundamental argument is a good one: that Rachel Maddow is totally in the service of the expansion of government power over the individual. Indeed, Richman's offering a theory of Maddow's philosophy of the general will, in which the atomized individual is meaningless except to the extent that it fuels the social mass subservient to state power. Here's the key section:

Echoing President Obama and Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren, Maddow apparently believes that no private accomplishment is possible without government support through spending on infrastructure, education, and research. But that is wrong. All of those things can be and have been provided in the private market. Government has a way of crowding out private efforts and then asserting its own importance because of the lack of private alternatives. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy!

Government doesn't just crowd out private-sector activities; it also substitutes inferior ones in their place. No one is pleased with education—which has been under government control for close to 200 years. If the infrastructure is in disrepair, who's to blame for that? Politicians don't think about fixing things until they need a rationalization for "stimulus" spending. Why does it take a recession to make them think about the roads and bridges? American history is rife with examples of private roads and bridges, whose owners didn't wait for an economic crisis to fix them. Their incomes—their businesses—depended on satisfying customers. That goes for education and research too....

Maddow needs to be reminded that we live in a world of scarcity. That doesn't mean great things can't be accomplished, but it does mean that if politicians and bureaucrats decide what is to be built, the scarce labor and resources used in those projects will be unavailable for other projects—particularly those that private entrepreneurs are willing to take risks on. It's Bastiat's broken-window fallacy again. We readily see a government project being built. (Don't worry, the politicians will make sure of that.) What we don't see are all the things not being built because government preempted free enterprise.

But we must ask: Who is better qualified to determine how scarce labor and resources should be invested, politicians or private individuals? Politicians operate under a perverse set of incentives and lack critical information. They aim to please electoral constituencies and special-interest donors, while having no market feedback to guide them in choosing among the many alternative projects; they risk no capital of their own and acquire resources by force—taxation. Why would we expect them to make good decisions? They may call what they do "investment," but in economic terms, it is consumption not investment.

On the other hand, entrepreneurs—at least when government provides no safety net of bailouts, guarantees, subsidies, cheap credit, and the like—do risk their own capital or must raise it from investors who are free to say no. (Try saying that as a taxpayer.) It's not an infallible process, but if consumers are ultimately unhappy with what is produced, they are free to withhold their dollars and send the misguided entrepreneur into bankruptcy, a process that will transfer resources to more able hands. That's a kind of clout which political subjects can only wish they had....

Maybe that's why Maddow prefers government "greatness" to private "smallness." She doesn't want plain people calling the shots, which ultimately they would do in a freed market. She seems more at home with the governing elite and their court intellectuals, who promise to take care of the rest of us rather than let us look after ourselves through the vast mutual-aid society known as the free market.

Right.

Maddow wants the state bureaucrats and socialist political hacks to rule over all the private social and economic space of the individual and the family. It's totalitarian, for there is no end to what the left would like to do. Again, you have to get the context of Richman's essay, which isn't as well devoloped as it should be. The link at the post goes to one of those MSNBC "Lean Forward" promotional spots the network's been running for a year or so now. Maddow stands out in front of the Hoover Dam in one of the more classic ones, extolling the virtues of the gargantuan New Deal infrastructure projects put in place during the Franklin Roosevelt-era of progressive socialist government. Maddow pines for a revamped, steroid-fueled homosexualized New Deal. She and her cohorts at MSNBC ---- self-declared socialists like Lawrence O'Donnell --- are hell bent on eviscerating private initiative in the name of state power and secular values. I'm blown aways sometimes watching those shows, for example, Ed Schultz's recent Blitzkrieg broadcasting assault on Walmart.

These are bad people. They are, by definition, un-American, for what they propose for our governing future is the European model of an ever-enveloping state sector, with crushing bureaucratic power, economic stagnation, and a growing entitlement state with double-digit employment a permanent feature of economic life. Recall from yesterday, "Professor Harvey Mansfield: Obama Voters 'Are Voting for Dependency, for Lack of Ambition, for Insolvency...'"

This is the new reality. Polls are showing an even greater tendency toward socialism and socialist organization in the American polity. The voters ratified this vision of government when they reelected President Obama. But as I've been saying, nothing is permanent in politics. At some point the left's entitlement goody bag becomes so stuffed that even the most productive people in the world aren't able to fill it. We're seeing it happen in California, as the bills are coming due in this once great state. It's only a matter of time nationally. The left is preparing the grave for its own catastrophic fall from indulgent, decadent power.

Dying Patients on Liverpool Care Pathway Never Told That Life-Saving Treatment Was Being Withdrawn

The socialist state is a cold, calculating killer.

The Telegraph UK has more on Britain's National Health Service hospitals that send their patients home to die, and in this case, the patients aren't even told what's happening. See, "Half of those on Liverpool Care Pathway never told":

Almost half of dying patients placed on the controversial Liverpool Care Pathway are never told that life-saving treatment has been withdrawn, a national audit has found.

The study suggests that in total, around 57,000 patients a year are dying in NHS hospitals without being told that efforts to keep them alive have been stopped.
It also reveals that thousands of dying patients have been left to suffer in pain, with no attempt to keep them comfortable while drugs were administered.

Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, last night described the disclosures from records held by 178 NHS hospitals as "totally unacceptable".

He said the failure to consult patients would now be examined by an independent inquiry, which will also look at payments made to hospitals for meeting targets to place people on the pathway.

Each year around 130,000 patients are placed on the pathway. The national audit by the Marie Curie Palliative Care Institute Liverpool and the Royal College of Physicians examined a representative sample of 7,058 deaths which occurred between April and June last year, at 178 NHS hospitals. Of these, X were on the pathway.

The new disclosures demonstrate just how routinely hospitals are placing patients on the pathway without informing them that steps which could hasten their death have been taken. The national audit found...

Well, that doesn't sound so lovely now, does it?

And it's not like it isn't coming here. Perhaps we'll have some other name besides "death pathways," but we'll have identical death by rationing soon enough.

Check Paul Hsieh's report from October, at Forbes, "Get Ready For ObamaCare's Medical Rationing":

ObamaCare supporters are now waging a high-profile public relations campaign to make medical rationing palatable to the general public.

The latest front is the opinion pages of the New York Times, which recently published two Op-Eds openly advocating medical rationing. The first was by their economics columnist Eduardo Porter, “Rationing Health Care More Fairly” (8/21/2012).

Porter argued that rationing was “inevitable” and the only question was how best to implement it. He advocated a system like Great Britain’s, which doesn’t pay for medical therapies costing more than $31,000 – $47,000 per year of life gained. Similarly, he praised New Zealand’s approach of not paying for vaccines that cost more than $20,000 per year of life gained.

For Porter, the only question was the precise dollar value the government should set on a year of a patient’s life. Supporters of government-run health care used to argue against market-based approaches because “you couldn’t put a price on human life.” But that’s precisely what Porter wants the government to do.

The second pro-rationing piece was by Obama administration advisor Steve Rattner, “Beyond ObamaCare” (9/16/2012). Rattner stated up front, “We need death panels.”

Rattner advocated restricting medical spending on the elderly, especially on patients in their last year of life, because such spending “consumes more than a quarter of the [Medicare] program’s budget.”

One big problem with Rattner’s approach is that we often can’t know what will be a patient’s final year of life until after they’ve died. It’s easy for a bureaucrat to say in retrospect, “This unnecessary spending didn’t extend the patient’s life.” But the treating physician doesn’t always know whether a patient will live or die from a surgery or procedure. If the surgery succeeds and the patient lives another 5 years, then it was money well spent. But if the patient dies, a bureaucrat can classify it as “wasteful.” Do we really want the government deciding whether or not a doctor is allowed to save your grandmother’s life?

In a recent New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) article, former Obama administration officials have also advocated a more indirect form of rationing. They’ve proposed a fixed cap on aggregate private medical spending (not just government spending). Such a cap has already been enacted into law in Massachusetts and the authors wish to extend that to the rest of the country. Of course, any cap on private medical spending necessarily means the government must restrict Americans’ right to spend their own money for their own medical care.

One of the co-authors of this NEJM article, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, has already laid the intellectual groundwork for overt rationing in a 2009 Lancet article, “Principles For Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions.” Dr. Emanuel is a former White House health care advisor and the brother of Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s former chief of staff.

Dr. Emanuel proposes rationing based on a combination of factors including patient age, expected “quality adjusted life years,” and the patient’s “instrumental value” to “society.” Given that the government would be making (and paying for) these rationing decisions, value to “society” will become “value as determined by the government.”

Such rationing completely inverts the relationship between the individual and the state. Rather than the state existing to serve the individual, the individual’s existence is sustained at the discretion of the state. This is the opposite of the American founders’ intention that the government be the people’s servant, not their master.

None of this should be surprising. Lots of folks warned of the horrible, horrible inevitability of rationing under ObamaCare while it was being debated. Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, for example, "ObamaCare Is All About Rationing." But critics were dismissed as cranks and racists, conspiracy theorists pushing crazy fever swamp theories "death panels" hatched by Sarah Palin and her "unhinged" followers. The critics were right, although for the time being, it just doesn't matter.

As I've been saying, the new era of socialist dependency government is upon us. The voters ratified the ObamaCare monstrosity last month. Things are now starting to take effect. Death be upon us now, too late to cry about it, however. The wheels of the gargantuan maw of progressivism are rolling, and political dissenters are being eliminated by campaigns of demonization from the shock troops of the Democrat Party regime. There is hope, of course. And that lies in the electorate waking up before too much damage has been inflicted. We'll have midterm elections in 2014 and perhaps libertarian-minded tea party conservatives will be elected in greater numbers. Perhaps even the possibility of a GOP majority in the Senate will open up. I'll have more on that. In the meantime, folks should hunker down and take care of themselves and their families, for the weakest among us will be the first to make the last journey down the left's pathway of death.

RELATED: At London's Daily Mail, "Now sick babies go on death pathway: Doctor's haunting testimony reveals how children are put on end-of-life plan," and "Doctors 'are withholding treatment from dying cancer patients because they think it is futile to continue'."

Professor Harvey Mansfield: Obama Voters 'Are Voting for Dependency, for Lack of Ambition, for Insolvency...'

A great interview with Professor Mansfield, at the Wall Street Journal, "The Crisis of American Self-Government" (via Memeorandum):

Cambridge, Mass.

'We have now an American political party and a European one. Not all Americans who vote for the European party want to become Europeans. But it doesn't matter because that's what they're voting for. They're voting for dependency, for lack of ambition, and for insolvency."

Few have thought as hard, or as much, about how democracies can preserve individual liberty and national virtue as the eminent political scientist Harvey Mansfield. When it comes to assessing the state of the American experiment in self-government today, his diagnosis is grim, and he has never been one to mince words.

Mr. Mansfield sat for an interview on Thursday at the Harvard Faculty Club. This year marks his 50th as a teacher at the university. It isn't easy being the most visible conservative intellectual at an institution that has drifted ever further to the left for a half-century. "I live in a one-party state and very much more so a one-party university," says the 80-year-old professor with a sigh. "It's disgusting. I get along very well because everybody thinks the fact that I'm here means the things I say about Harvard can't be true. I am a kind of pet—a pet dissenter"....

the electorate that granted Barack Obama a second term was unwise—the president achieved "a sneaky victory," Mr. Mansfield says. "The Democrats said nothing about their plans for the future. All they did was attack the other side. Obama's campaign consisted entirely of saying 'I'm on your side' to the American people, to those in the middle. No matter what comes next, this silence about the future is ominous."

At one level Mr. Obama's silence reveals the exhaustion of the progressive agenda, of which his presidency is the spiritual culmination, Mr. Mansfield says. That movement "depends on the idea that things will get better and better and progress will be made in the actualization of equality." It is telling, then, that during the 2012 campaign progressives were "confined to defending what they've already achieved or making small improvements—student loans, free condoms. The Democrats are the party of free condoms. That's typical for them."

But Democrats' refusal to address the future in positive terms, he adds, also reveals the party's intent to create "an entitlement or welfare state that takes issues off the bargaining table and renders them above politics." The end goal, Mr. Mansfield worries, is to sideline the American constitutional tradition in favor of "a practical constitution consisting of progressive measures the left has passed that cannot be revoked. And that is what would be fixed in our political system—not the Constitution."

It is a project begun at the turn of the previous century by "an alliance of experts and victims," Mr. Mansfield says. "Social scientists and political scientists were very much involved in the foundation of the progressive movement. What those experts did was find ways to improve the well-being of the poor, the incompetent, all those who have the right to vote but can't quite govern their own lives. And still to this day we see in the Democratic Party the alliance between Ph.D.s and victims."

The Obama campaign's dissection of the public into subsets of race, sex and class resentments is a case in point. "Victims come in different kinds," says Mr. Mansfield, "so they're treated differently. You push different buttons to get them to react."

The threat to self-government is clear. "The American founders wanted people to live under the Constitution," Mr. Mansfield says. "But the progressives want the Constitution to live under the American people."

Continue reading (via Memeorandum).

The party of dependency and insolvency. Oh boy, what a legacy to leave to your children.