Reflections From a Murky Pond

It is truly amazing – horrifying really to any true American – the lengths to which Liberals and Obama cultists will go to justify ObamaCare.

Their arguments are not only false, in the sense that they’re not actual arguments, but they’re unhealthy and dangerous to America because they fly in the face of the Constitutional restraints placed upon the federal government.

Peter Coy’s commentary on US District Court Judge Henry Hudson’s decision in Virginia v. US Dept. of Health and Human Services is par for the course when it comes to these quasi- and non-arguments.

To win the legal battle—as well as the battle for public opinion—the Obama Administration must address directly the qualms about overreaching that Hudson expressed in his opinion. The way to do that is to make a persuasive case that mandatory coverage is not the first step on a slippery slope to totalitarianism.

The best case against the slippery slope argument isn’t even a legal one. It’s in an amicus curiae brief filed in November in a broader Florida case by 41 top economists, including three Nobel laureates, Kenneth Arrow of Stanford, Eric Maskin of Princeton, and George Akerlof of Berkeley. They argue that health care has unique characteristics that justify the congressional mandate—and since other markets such as food and housing don’t have those characteristics, Congress will never have any justification to intervene in them to the same degree.

The economists’ argument bears attention. Arrow, 90 years old, has been probing the peculiarities of the health sector since 1963, when he wrote a much-cited paper, “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care,” that’s mentioned in the brief. Arrow and the other economists say—in agreement with the Obama Administration—that a health insurance system that must accept all comers but can’t require everyone to join will quickly enter a death spiral. Healthy people won’t opt in until they need coverage, so many or most of the insured will be sick and costly. As a result, insurers will have to raise rates, pushing the last few healthy customers out, forcing rates on the rest to go even higher, and so on until it leads to collapse. Amitabh Chandra, an economist at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government who joined the amicus brief, writes in an e-mail: “We don’t let people buy car insurance after they’ve wrecked their cars, or after we find their house is on fire. For the same reason, the individual mandate is absolutely key.”

— Peter Coy
Commentary: The Health-Care Act on Trial

Firstly, this is a false argument. Judge Hudson did not state his ruling as being a bulwark against some “the first step on a slippery slope to totalitarianism.” His ruling was based on the Individual Mandate being, in and of itself, an unconstitutional expansion of government interference.

Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market. In doing so, enactment of the [individual mandate] exceeds the Commerce Clause powers vested in Congress under Article I [of the Constitution.]

–U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson
Virginia v. US Dept. of Health and Human Services

Secondly, argumentum ad consequentiam has always been a piss-poor response to receiving an unfavorable ruling and, in this case it’s a dangerous argument to be used or entertained. There is never a valid justification for allowing the federal government to exceed its constitutional granted powers over the American people and that attempt at justification is all that these “economists'” amicus curiae is.

“Reviewing court must strike down unconstitutional law even though that law is “designed to promote the highest good. The good sought in unconstitutional legislation is an insidious feature, because it leads citizens and legislators of good purpose to promote it, without thought of the serious breach it will make in the ark of our covenant, or the harm which will come from breaking down recognized standards.”

– US SCOTUS Opinion,
Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Co., (259 U.S. 20), May 15, 1922

It doesn’t matter a whit whether or not ObamaCare is worthwhile or not; it matters even less whether or not ObamaCare will fail without the Individual Mandate. What matters is whether or not the Individual Mandate is unconstitutional – and the US Federal Courts have repeatedly, though not unanimously, decreed that it is not constitutional.

While it’s dangerous close to the “slippery slope” argument, I’ll put forth that ignoring our Constitution and the limits it places upon the federal government is a far more dangerous and unhealthy enterprise than anything that currently perceived as wrong with our overly intertwined health insurance and healthcare industries. I say this because legal precedents linger for a very long time and are often used to justify future rulings largely unrelated to the original cases.

The California Supreme Court ruled on Monday, January 3, 2011 that the police do not need to obtain a warrant prior to searching a cell phone owned by someone who is currently under arrest. Such searches were ruled legal under the prevailing legal precedents surrounding Searches Incident to Arrest.

Legally this was the right call and decision.

It’s also, however, a decision that has scared and angered a number of people, for variety of knee-jerk, self-serving, and some valid reasons respectively, since the shifts in technology have lured many people into storing vast amounts of private information within their mobile devices.

We granted review in this case to decide whether the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution permits law enforcement officers, approximately 90 minutes after lawfully arresting a suspect and transporting him to a detention facility, to conduct a warrantless search of the text message folder of a cell phone they take from his person after the arrest. We hold that, under the United States Supreme Court’s binding precedent, such a search is valid as being incident to a lawful custodial arrest. We affirm the Court of Appeal’s judgment.

— Supreme Court of California
The People v. Gregory Diaz (S166600)

The police have the legal right, as affirmed multiple times by the SCOTUS, to search anything on the person of- or in the immediate control of anyone that they arrest without the requirement of obtaining any form of warrant to do so. Any evidence found during such searches is admissible in court and is not limited to such as is pertinent to the charges that the arrestee was originally detained for.

The previous SCOTUS opinions on: Harris v. United States (1947), United States v. Rabinowitz (1950), and Chimel v. California (1969) even extend this right of search and seizure to the room in which the suspect is arrested within – Chimel being a limiting factor since the Court held that the seizure of the entire contents of a house and its removal to FBI offices 200 miles away for examination, pursuant to an arrest under warrant of one of the persons found in the house, was unreasonable.

None of this is new; this is settled law. What is new is the amount of type of data that people carry on their persons and which is therefor subject to warrantless search in the event of their arrest.

America is still, despite supposed economic gains, dealing with an unemployment rate hovering around 9%. It’s only a matter of time before this becomes truly untenable and society adjusts and becomes willing to entertain more drastic and reactionary measures to improve those deplorable employment figures.

Hie Yourself Back To Yon Kitchen, Wench

Forget the race-baiting by Liberal proponents by illegal immigration; it’s not the immigrant population, illegal or otherwise, that will bear the brunt of these “corrective” measures. It will be American women.

Women comprise 46.8% of the total US labor force – 13.46% above the global average of 40.5%. Therefor, if they can convince or coerce 19.23% of those women to leave the workforce America’s official unemployment numbers would be 0%, though a more realistic goal of getting 12.8% of the currently working women out of the workforce would net America an approximate 3% unemployment which is considered far healthier than 0% and would be easier to achieve.

Even just culling enough female workers to bring America down to the current global average would drop our nation’s unemployment figures down to around 6 – 7%, which is not too far above the the US average (5.65%) since 1948.

What makes this prediction most likely and most dire is that it can be actualized without the conscious effort or machinations of any individual or group. It only requires that people do not actively work against various economic and societal pressures that will achieve this resulting reduction of women in the workforce.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since this is the beginning of a new year – per the Gregorian calendar – I decided it would be interesting to see what were the most common search terms that brought readers to Reflections From A Murky Pond over the course of 2010.

In many ways I’d have to say that the results, while somewhat expected, were rather discouraging.

The Top 25 search terms used during 2010 by people to reach this blog during 2010 were:

This matches up well statistically with the fact that the top 2 posts – Support The Arts (NSFW) and Denying Atzlan (NSFW) – respectively accounted for 18,484 and 11,714 of the 152,089 page views that Reflections From A Murky Pond got last year. The blog’s home page accounted for another 28,430 views.

Oh well. I suppose it doesn’t really matter what brings the readers here. What matters is that they read what they find.

Some days, and many more nights, it strikes me odd how we humans make arbitrary divisions of time. We as a species compartmentalize time into a plethora of units that have no bearing upon anything but how we perceive time and level set our goals.

This has no bearing upon the greater reality but seems essential the working of the human mind.

A more fluid and/or holistic view of time actually seems detrimental to our happiness and sanity. Without these goal points in time that we’ve created we seem to descend into depression, frustration, and madness in fairly short order.

This strikes me as both odd and counter-survival oriented. It does seem to be the way we’re built though.