If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.
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The most prescient thing ever said about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare, was articulated by then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”
The medical reform package is quite the hodgepodge. Actually reading the whole thing makes taking on Middlemarch, War and Peace, and In Search of Lost Time a course of light entertainment.
The latest revelation from its thousands of pages? A passage prohibiting doctors from asking their patients questions about guns in the home.
The Washington Post reports that many gun control groups are incensed at the power of the NRA to limit their ability to “collect information”:
Physician groups and public health advocates say the cumulative effect of these restrictions undercuts the ability of the White House and lawmakers to make the case for new laws, such as an assault-weapons ban, in the face of opponents who argue that there’s no evidence such measures are effective. Advocates for regulating guns lament that reliable statistics are limited in part because physicians and health researchers who could track these patterns are being inhibited.
Considering the quality of previous doctor-led sociological studies into gun usage — and really, this is not a medical problem but a complex, society-wide issue far beyond the competence of medical training to comprehend — the prohibition might really best be described as a defense of scientific method.
But the big issue here is not the politics of “research.” It’s that a health care reform package passed nearly three years ago contains hot potatoes such as this, and we are only discovering them now.
Nancy, you were all too disastrously correct.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Another New Year.
Should I have used an exclamation point? Shouted out the calendrical truth?
When each new year brings the same old nonsense, an exclamation point seems a bit like overkill. British novelist E.M. Forster famously said that democracy was worth “two cheers, not three.” Does a new year deserve at best half an exclamation?
After all, there will be many repetitions in 2013 of what we saw in 2012.
Incumbent politicians will just “happen” to throw up hurdles, making initiative measures harder to put on the ballot as well as more difficult to pass. They will also continue to support “campaign finance” regulations that will “just happen” to make incumbents more likely to get re-elected.
And of course they will continue to heap scorn on, and oppose any way they can, term limits.
Further, their tendency to avoid properly dealing with unsustainable government worker pension programs set to unravel in too many states and localities, will still continue, up until (and past?) the last possible moment for reform.
Similarly, the national debt will grow. Politicians will still get away with calling slight reductions in expected spending increases “spending cuts,” even when spending continues to soar.
But hey: at some point the politic avoidance of responsibility will evaporate when the economy these fools are driving hits the proverbial wall.
Before that happens, it sure would be to our advantage to take over our own government, wresting power away from politicians and creating real measures of accountability. We’ll need democratic tools like initiative and referendum.
Three cheers for citizens who take the initiative . . . and a few unashamed exclamation points!!
This is Common Sense! I’m Paul Jacob.
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Thoughtful Kindness
Bumper stickers. Now that’s free speech. Which I love. But that doesn’t mean I love all bumper stickers. Sure, some are cute, funny, occasionally brilliant. Others are just crude.
But my least favorite bumper sticker might surprise you. The bumper strip that ticks me off the most reads:
“Practice Random Acts Of Kindness And Senseless Acts Of Beauty.”
Now, most folks who put this one on their car are nice. They’re thinking about “kindness” and “beauty” — so, I’m certainly not gonna say anything if I see them at the market.
But . . . why waste kindness by doing it randomly? The random implies heedlessness, thoughtlessness. How much better to be provident in kindness, thinking ahead and in context.
Should the purse-snatcher really benefit as much or more from our kindness as the little girl in the neighborhood who is always helping us with our groceries?
Should our lazy, good-for-nothing brother-in-law get what time we have for kindness or should it go to someone who will take our kindness and turn it around into even more kindness?
Now, I’m not suggesting anyone be unkind to anyone. But precisely because practicing kindness is so important — it’s the glue that holds a friendly society together — it is worth taking the time to recognize and reward good behavior. Rather than bad. Or just sticking the dial on “random.”
And how can beauty ever be senseless?
How about a new bumper sticker: “Practice Thoughtful Acts of Kindness and Sensible Acts of Beauty”?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
This installment of Common Sense first aired in November 2006.
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John Wycliffe
This Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People. [Prologue to the 1384 translation]
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John Wycliffe
I believe that in the end the truth will conquer.
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Townhall: Want Milk?
This weekend’s contribution to Townhall.com by Yours Truly concerns another one of those automated congressional time bombs. You know, like the “fiscal cliff” but less cliffy and more bomby. Head on over, and then back here, for a few links:
- Thomas Jefferson’s pithy contribution to the socialist calculation debate, here.
- The Washington Post’s “dairy cliff” article, here.
- What Jia Lynn Yang said, here.
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Video: Don’t Tell the Kids
Penn Jillette has some provocative things to say about how to talk to kids about school shootings and the like. And the provocation is not just his swearing:
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Langston Hughes
There are words like *Freedom*
Sweet and wonderful to say.
On my heart-strings freedom sings
All day everyday.
There are words like *Liberty*
That almost make me cry.
If you had known what I knew
You would know why.
Agenda-less improvement of Colorado’s constitution is the goal of a “group of Colorado’s top civic leaders, bipartisan in its makeup,” according to the Denver Post. All they want to do is correct constitutional inconsistencies.
The difficulty of getting the revisions is so acute that many of the state’s “top civic leaders” believe that it is time again to press for a constitutional-review commission empowered to send proposed changes to the voters directly, via multi-subject initiatives that can substantially revise, rather than simply amend, the state’s governing charter. (A single-subject rule obtains for hoi-polloi signature-gatherers.)
Must be nigh impossible to get a question on the ballot the way things stand now, eh? But — wait — one of the Civic Leaders pushing for a commission, Bob Tointon, laments that people “are frustrated by the issues that get on the ballot so easily in Colorado.” And Colorado’s Future, the main organization pushing for the commission, has always argued that it’s too darn easy for the mere people to post an initiative.
Which is it? It’s too hard to post a question onto the ballot, or too easy?
Both. It’s too easy for the general public to use the initiative process, but it’s too hard for Civic Leaders to scrub voter-approved initiatives out of existence.
Opponents of this elitist brainstorm worry that the proposed Super-Commission would seek to undermine the state’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR), a popular citizen initiative passed two decades ago limiting government spending and requiring voter approval of new taxes. The fear is legitimate.
The long-standing agenda of this cast of Civic Leaders is no secret: kill TABOR.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.