- If they don’t pay, then arrest them and deport them. Publicize this loudly. Then probably they’ll come with money to pay their bills.

- When they arrive at the emergency room, take their fingerprints and run them through a national database. If they show up as deadbeats who haven’t paid previous bills, call the cops.

- Allow doctors to decide whether the symptoms really qualify as emergency. If not, tell them to go to a regular clinic. Don’t let doctors be sued if they make a reasonable diagnosis of non-emergency. Many/most ER visits are non-emergencies and will not result in “people dying in the streets” if treatment is refused for non-payment.

- There are many people without insurance who do pay their bills. I am one of them. I have a regular doctor and make appointments like anyone else. When I leave I pay with my debit card. I don’t go to emergency rooms except in case of genuine emergencies (twice in my adult life). When I needed an MRI or needed a surgeon’s opinion I paid for those visits. And the doctors got paid without any paperwork and faster than if they had had to wait for an insurance company.

Like a spider, socialism spins its sticky web then holds powerless its victims before it devouers them.

All of that has changed in the past two days. I think she is handling this round of interviews with grace and poise and she clearly is not the bimbo she is portrayed to be by the MSM.

It is her firm position on support for the military that will get my vote (if she runs for anything). I am sick and tired of worrying about whether my son, a Marine machine gunner, will be provided the resources he deserves as he embarks — voluntarily and with my support — on his third deployment. The first two were in Ramadi and Baghdad and this one will be to Afghanistan. I demand some sign from the C-in-C soon that he gives a damn.

As a Senator, she would be literally free to wreak havoc on that good old boy network. I would love nothing more than watching Sarah kickee her some Chuck Schumer butt.

And, I think 2020 would be perfect for Ms. Palin’s coming out party.

The standardization that marked the arms industry by the Civil War transferred into all aspects of American manufacture. The consequence of standardization is that semi-skilled labor can do the assembly. The War, opening the West, and burgeoning cities began an agricultural labor diaspora, many of whom wound up in railroads and factories where they were in competition with the large numbers of immigrants coming into the Country in the last third of the 19th Century. In the new mass production labor environment, little skill was required and the contracts that had been common with skilled trades, craftsmen, and guilds largely fell away into a system of “at will” employment at the lowest wage that would attract labor and at the least expensive conditions that the labor would tolerate.

Unionization and burgeoning growth dramatically improved the lot of labor in the north and west by the end of the first quarter of the 20th Century but The South with its huge overabundance of illiterate, unskilled agricultural labor resisted all attempts to improve standards of living. The major thrust of the New Deal’s agricultural and labor policies was to do something about that “one third of a nation” largely in The South and Appalachia that lived in an unrelenting poverty of both the body and mind. Tthe vestiges of that surplus agricultural labor, still almost a third of the Nation, still bedevil our politics and our economics.

I live in Wyoming and agriculture is an important part of our economy. Other important and booming sectors are coal mining and oil and gas and because these industries pay better they get first pick of the qualified labor force. Agriculture gets the dregs of the labor force. But agriculture is still getting by and the ranchers are not importing large numbers of cheap illegal labor. Mainly they are getting more efficient. They now derisively call the 75 to 100 lb hay bales that I stacked as a kid “idiot cubes”. Now most of them use 1000 lb to 1500 lb round bales and one man (or woman or even a kid) can do the same work that took a 10 person hay crew when I was a kid. And they do it in air conditioned comfort too.

I’ve never studied the strawberry industry but I have done some reading on the raisin industry. It turns out that the Australian raisin industry is about 1000% more labor efficient then the American raisin industry because they have largely automated it.

Cheap labor is often a curse that prevents capital investment. It is no accident that the best places to live in the world all have tight labor markets and relatively well paid workers and all of the worst places in the world all have abundant cheap labor. Tight labor markets force people to invest in productivity enhancing capital and high productivty and a high standard of living are directly related.

If strawberries are too expensive I’ll plant a strawberry patch. They are dead simple to grow.

Regardless, I was just pointing out that Ronald Reagan and she are not anywhere near comparable in terms of foreign policy, if only because she holds the “default” opinion (i.e., the one that is fortunately dominant among the general public), while Reagan’s views were a distinct and marginalized minority at the time that he was advocating for them. Even if you don’t consider Reagan’s copious amounts of time educating himself and being a part of the foreign policy discussion as foreign policy, this alone makes Reagan head and shoulders above virtually any modern politician in therms of foreign policy.

As to picking strawberries, just as was the case when the Great Society made it far more comfortable to be on welfare than picking cotton and cropping tobacco for Blacks, automation will solve the fruit and vegetable cropping problem when the growers no longer have the cheap labor.

This crap about taking jobs American’s want is just that, crap. Either that or I’m just getting to Home Depot AFTER all the white and black American day laborers have been picked up and all is left are the hispanics.