freedom

Election years are depressing experiences for friends of freedom. The campaign stump, invariably, brings out even more of the worst in mainstream politicians who make their living by making promises they cannot keep through spending other people’s money. The 2016 presidential election cycle has only magnified this pattern.

In this podcast, Brase joined Health Care News Managing Editor Michael Hamilton to tell the world that patients and physicians are flocking to cost-effective, free-market, patient-centered alternatives to the predominant health insurance and government-payer model. These alternatives are “the wedge,” and they’re setting patients and doctors free.

Radical environmentalists have convinced the global elite the greatest threat to mankind is the changing climate produced by the burning of fossil fuels. It has become the dogma of much of the nation’s establishment, even though replacing fossil fuel with medieval technologies of wind, solar, and biomass is not feasible now and won’t be in the foreseeable future. No one has told the true story of the world’s, and particularly the United States’, vast, inexpensive nonpolluting fossil fuels as Stephen Moore and Kathleen Hartnett White have in their new book, Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy. Every high school student currently being bombarded by green lies should read this book. The authors’ lucid, precise, comprehensive, yet simple writing style can help set the world back on a course toward energy sanity.

Pennsylvania, one of the first colonies-turned-states to declare unalienable a person’s right to life, must act soon to avoid becoming one of the last states to secure for terminally ill patients the right to try to save their own lives.

Meet a pediatrician who voluntarily surrendered her board certification in order to protest extortion of physicians by the American Board of Medical Specialties, provide better care for her patients, and influence lawmakers to act.

Given any quantifiable standard, freedom and private property have proven themselves superior to planning, bureaucracy, and the welfare state. As the great laissez-faire economist Jean-Baptiste Say wrote in 1803, “Nothing can be more idle than the opposition of theory to practice!” Say’s message is as clear now as it was then: the mechanics of liberty work precisely because they respect our individual rights.

The daily and unending bombardment of political campaign reporting and news, with its “drama” about who will be the Republican and Democratic Party candidates for the U.S. presidency, hides from view the continuing and real choice facing the American public: freedom or statism, individual liberty or government control.

Let us be clear. We are living, right now, in a time of emotional fear, hysterical anger, illogical demands, and dangerous temptations. In other words, liberty and prosperity are at risk. A decent and tolerant society is threatened. Common principles of humanity are being undermined.

Big Healthcare is no exception, and it is important to understand just what healthcare is. The trillions of dollars of revenue sucked in by Big Healthcare are not just for medical care. “Healthcare” is mainly concerned with collecting and distributing the money. Perhaps half of the money gushing through the system pays nurses, doctors, orderlies, receptionists, or therapists, or buys medications, oxygen concentrators, wheelchairs, bandages, or x-ray machines. The rest is diverted to something else. It’s hard to figure out just how much because insurers may, in calculating the “medical loss ratio,” call a lot of things “healthcare” that you might call “administration.”

Presidential election years, more than many others, focuses our attention on politics, those running for political office, and the promises the competing candidates make to sway our allegiance and votes toward one or some of them in comparison to others. They want us to give them political power by promising to use that power to benefit some of us in ways that can only come at the expense of others in society.

The Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act (PITFA), receiving a large bi-partisan approval in the House of Representatives earlier this year, is supposedly going to be taken up in the Senate this week. The provision has been added into the conference report (the final version of a bill to be considered by both chambers of congress) of the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015.

The federal government each year now takes from us record tallies of tax dollars. Yet the Feds have accrued nearly $19 trillion in debt – and that ridiculous number keeps hurtling skyward.

The year that is just closing, 2015, has been full of events that continue to dominate the news, including renewed racial tensions on the streets of American cities, growing fears about terrorist attacks on the territory of the United States, and one of the most fear-focused presidential campaign seasons in living memory.