It is built on the same flawed foundation as the House bills, starting with a so-called “individual mandate” that would penalize any American who didn’t sign up with government-approved insurance.

The “individual mandate” as it stands and is implemented in the Democrats’ proposals, would force, especially without the “public option”, individuals to find insurance in an environment that is not friendly to low cost type consumers.  Thus, the gamble is, once you force insurance upon people, the public will call for the “public option” to lower and control prices.  The “public option” will then in turn do one of two things:

1.)  The “public option”, backed with huge government subsidies will drive down insurance costs too well, which is what it is intended to do, creating de facto reliance on the “public option”, now not being an option at all, as private insurers go belly up because they can’t compete in the low price environment.

2.)  The “public option”, backed with huge government subsidies, goes “postal”.  Despite its low cost, it is seen by the mass public as an inefficient system, long waits, bad service, and hidden costs drive away consumers, who prefer the more streamlined private insurers who allow access to more medical professionals.  In essence the “public option” becomes the U.S. Postal Service and limps along becoming rather irrelevant.

Let it be known though that path #1 is more likely and risking otherwise is a gamble I would never take.

So to the final point.  In the debate over health care we must not be satisfied with winning the removal of the “public option”.  Government control over health care can come in a very public and visible way, the current proposal in the house, or through a rather insidious and dishonest way, the Baucus proposal in the Senate via the “individual mandate”.   Republicans must be cautious not to focus too much on the “public option” as the absolute evil, or we risk losing the public capital to attack the “individual mandate” as well.  Even if the “public option” is defeated there lies a greater battle to explain, unmask, and defeat the “individual mandate” as well.

While this is an interesting thesis, I continue to think and will argue that the U.S. market, and really the global market, is too diverse and would need a catastrophic shock to cause anything truly on the scale of the 1930′s or to send any first world countries to a third world status. But then again, maybe I’m also falling for the fallacy of “too big to fail”.

My father explains:  A dealer can go into a state called “out of trust”.  He explained that it happens, and anymore is probably happening a lot.   Being “out of trust” means that the dealer cannot pay the bank or GMAC or sometimes another financing company for the car he just sold.  What happens is really problematic.  In the case of my friend and many other Americans, they cannot get the title to the vehicle they just bought because technically the dealer doesn’t own it and the bank hasn’t received money from the dealer.  The dealer may be owe the bank a million or so dollars even.  This is caused because the banks may not audit often enough (he said they most banks used to audit a car lot every week, now it could be much longer).  If the car is sold, the bank may not necessarily know it, and the dealer may spend the money received for the car elsewhere.  Eventually the bank does an audit, sees the car is gone, and sees that it received no money.  Next, the bank reposes the car from the unlucky buyer, and the dealer tells the buyer they’re out of luck.  The only recourse is to sue the dealer, and for a lot of people, that is too expensive.

So why is this story interesting?  It has two really important implications.  One is that disreputable dealers may have just hoodwinked a great deal of Americans in the “Cash for Clunkers” scam the government was pushing.   This means that in a few months, some Americans may be without their new car, their cash, and their clunker, and probably without the financial means for legal recourse.

The second implication is really important.  During the course of my father’s story, I asked him: Why isn’t this illegal?  Why do banks only check every so often?  Why can dealers do this?   His response was troubling.  He simply said, there is no difference between what is happening with these “out of trust” dealerships and what Bernie Madoff did.  So I extrapolated it even further.  Congress, especially under Democratic control has a habit of borrowing against nothing, and worse yet, raiding the Social Security fund and Medicare for extra cash.  In essence the U.S. government could be considered being “out of trust”.

I found this all interesting and thought I would share it with you all.  I think, though, the “out of trust” label would be a neat and catchy political slogan to push against the Democrats and out of control spending.   Just a thought.

The resignation (probable force out) of Green Jobs Czar Van Jones got me thinking today and I pulled out my copy of the U.S. Constitution (if you don’t have one handy I recommend Cornell Laws Online version: http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.overview.html ).  Under Article II, Section 2, Presidential Power is outlined.   In it, the Constitution clearly states that (note this is in the second paragraph of Section 2)

He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.

Now a strict reading of this, at least my reading, would illustrate that the appointment of Van Jones or any other Czar without the “advice and consent” of the Senate is unconstitutional.  For clarification though, does anyone know if Congress has granted power to the presidency to make such appointments without approval?  If not, we could have an interesting constitutional case here.

Even as the GOP stand to benefit from the internal strife between the coastal liberals and the Midwest conservatives in the Democratic Party, the Republican’s are experiencing a far more heated and potentially far more destructive conflict within their own ranks. In the 1960’s William F. Buckley Jr., a man who leaned much farther right than many of his collogues and modern contemporaries, purged the radical elements from the Republican Party, most notably the John Birch Society. Founded by businessman and conspiracy theorist Robert Welch, the John Birch Society had become a haven for reactionary and delusional elements of the Republican Party. The society then had to be dealt with, as they damnant quodnon intelligent. Without the radical, delusional, conspiratorial, and racial temperaments of the John Birch Society infecting the Republican discourse, Buckley, Kirk, Goldwater, and other Republican intellectuals and leaders of the 1960’s were able to build a political coalition, broad in interest, but yet rooted in conservative thought, ideals, and values, that would dominate the political landscape for another thirty years.

I apologies for the length of the bountiful soliloquy above but it serves to a point. On ne change pas un équipe qui gagne, French for “One does not change a winning team”. While I admire and support the earnest push for a return of conservative principles in a party that has honestly lost its way, George W. Bush, while surely a principled, honest, man of convictions, was ultimately less than successful as a president, and may have caused the some of the most damage any president has ever caused his party short of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter (In the modern era at least). So back to the point I am slowly coming around to, mainly because I know it is contentious and reaction to many opinions on this matter have been passionate if not perhaps ill informed and in the worst case blatantly vitriolic and dumb (Again not that I mean to point fingers at anyone in particular, though some current “conservative” best sellers and Television/Radio hosts may fit into the latter grouping). So the point is, the GOP needs a renaissance, a reboot, and a retooling, but one definitely not conducted by David Frum (I can say I’m biased against Canadians running the GOP… just kidding but Frum… no way Jose… too much time with Bush, too much time listening to Michael Gerson). What will this re-do… do exactly? Conservative intelligencia need a good crack across the head, as do the grass roots. The grass roots of the GOP need to commit to a little bit more reading, I recommend The Conservative Mind, The Conscious of a Conservative, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and for some flair read Theodore Dalrymple’s columns in City Journal (Dalrymple is hilarious, insightful, and has a sophisticated yet common touch, I mean he is British….). The “conservative elite” or intelligencia, the David Brooks types, the David Frums, the pin heads and pencil pusher types at the newspapers and magazines, the writers like Michelle Malking and Ann Coulter, and the talking heads of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh ( I leave out Michael Savage because I’m not really sure what he stands for anymore or even if he has any listeners anymore, besides, he seems to be a bigger deal in Great Britain than in the U.S. anymore…), well they need to calm their rhetoric… Limbaughcoultermalkinbeck (That sounds like a good name for a rich German ale…) and in the case of Frum and Brooks and the likes, they need to honestly rethink their positions, and realize that having a spine is not a bad thing and that amoebas are pretty low on the food chain. Essentially, the radical right needs to calm down just a bit and the neo-neo-neo con types, who think their right but are really just about left enough to be wrong, need to revaluate just what party they belong to and re-read also some conservative cannon (Goldwater, Kirk, Locke, and company).

This brings me to my final point within this greater point. In regards to the bickering over and with Rick Moran, he does and does not have a point, just like many people in his line of thought. The GOP does need to focus on issues not “death panels”, “birth certificates” and really the whole “Obama speech to our school children”, however, Van Jones is fair game, especially the whole czar system and its circumvention of federalism and checks and balances. Additionally we should be hitting harder on fiscal policy, on tort reform, on issues regarding nuclear energy, cap and trade, reduced government influence in education, etc, we can return to a mix of more recent policy issues and good old conservative bread and butter. That is where our grass roots should be focusing, our tea parties and town hall events should but hitting on these issues, and not some hysterical fear that President Obama is a communist or even socialist or delusions of the like. Rick Moran was right, at least in part so I cannot give him much credit, the issue is not liberty versus tyranny in right versus left. The real issue is one that goes back to the French Revolution and the intellectual movements that lead up to it, it is David Hume verses Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it is the Empiracists (mostly conservative) versus the Rationalists (for the most part liberal although Spinoza had some interesting thoughts that have influenced some libertarian and conservative lines of thought). This isn’t a battle of isms but a battle of ists. Conservatives must act upon and argue from empirical thought, from experience, from history, from what we have learned, that is where our roots are, those are our first principles. Let the liberals fantacize and attempt to prove that which has not been tested, let them buy into delusional hysteria, that is that which is theirs. Conservatism stands upon the solid ground of centuries of experiential thought, observation, and scholarly study. If the Rationalist win, which polls show the Democrats aren’t winning, then perhaps something new will be discovered though more than likely something will be discovered not to work and the people of the United States will still turn to the conservatives, the empiricists to rebuild our society on the sturdy foundations of history. And if the Republican’s retake the House of Representatives and Senate in 2010 or 2012, well we have a lot of work to do.