Who's "we," Kimo Sabe?

Seems most citizens right now are all upset over AIG giving out $165 million or so in bonuses to some employees. I say, big deal. That's only a small part of the larger citizen rip-off. And it's only money. As Senator Dirksen once said, "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money." The latest AIG fiasco pales in comparison to the Stimulus Package and the Pork Bill and just may be a diversion from all the other crap that's still on hold in congress or slowly and tediously making its way through committee.

What concerns me more is Mr. Obama apparently throwing down the gauntlet about his proposed "reforms." I saw only a brief news clip about this on TV. He saying something like, "If you have a better solution, let me hear about it." Not sure what kind of solution he was talking about, but it got me thinking about the Macro view in general.

Some talking head on TV a while back said something like, "We've spent $600 billion on health care over the last five years."

Who's "we," Kimo Sabe?

I've spent a total of $60.00 on health care over the last 10 years. I had the flu about 1999 or so, and it turned into a worse lung infection. I went to a clinic run by a local, very large hospital, saw a doctor after about a 20-minute wait, and she checked me out and gave me a couple sample blister-packs of a penicillin antibiotic, which was a really nice thing to do and sincerely appreciated (the pills would have cost $100+ at a drug store.) The visit cost $60.00 because I don't have health insurance -- costs too much. Told ya, I'm self-employed.

At any rate, it occurs to me, what kind of a "solution" is the president looking for? I mean, solution to anything?

He seems to want to find some single method of dealing with health care. One way to do education. Some single type of energy or energy grid and a single method of using it.

One size fits all? What's wrong with this picture?

Take health care (pleeeze....) Right now there are a number of options for getting health care. I described one above. A lot of people get health insurance from their employers. Some people have HMOs or buy individual packages from insurance carriers. But do we really even need health insurance?

I think this only muddies the issue. People need health care, not necessarily health insurance. Read something from a doctor complaining about how the insurance industry regulates what he can or can't do for his patients. Now the government wants a crack at regulating it. Will that help?

Why can't you just go to a doctor and pay him for the visit? Does that need to be regulated or controlled by anyone?

Same with education. What's wrong with a couple teachers getting together and starting their own academy? Doesn't have to be expensive, though right now there surely is a status thing attached to private schools. Maybe because students' parents pay twice for it -- once in taxes for the public school, a second time in tuition to the private school.

This is where vouchers enter into it. You pay your taxes and you qualify for a voucher for education. You can take the voucher to any school -- not necessarily the public school. What's wrong with that? Yet a successful voucher system in Washington, DC, was recently terminated, by the US congress, which is responsible for DC.

The teachers' unions don't like it because they say vouchers take money out of the public school system. Well, someone ought to. It doesn't seem to be working very well. I suspect the union teachers really just don't want to have to work as hard as they might have to in order to compete with private institutions. First rule of unions: don't work too hard, we're all getting paid the same, and if you do something extra, we'll all have to do it. (See my blogs on Socialism, Feb. 2009)

How about home-schooling? If kids learn at home, the worst they may experience is that they don't learn how to hate school and learning in general. They might not learn that it's much more important to be popular and wear the most expensive shoes than it is to do the homework. Home-schooled kids might just learn to love learning. Something wrong with that?

Chicago for a long time had some of the lowest-rated public schools in the US. The Democrat Machine that runs things there has gone to some lengths and spent a lot of money trying to fix the system. Not sure how that's going. But at the time the public schools were notoriously bad, some friends of mine put their kids in Catholic school, even though they weren't Catholic. Or they home-schooled. And in Chicago, one private school run by an enterprising teacher took in the "problem kids" who'd been kicked out of the public schools and somehow she managed to teach them successfully.

The thing is, in a free country, there should be an endless number of ways to take care of all of these things. The solutions are limited only by peoples' imaginations.

You only run out of options when you're more worried about controlling a system -- any system -- than you are about creating a solution.

There are no end of solutions for anything. In a free country, people sit up all night thinking up ways to use their skills and talents to make money -- like what have they got that other people would be willing to pay for? Teaching their skills and talents are one way they can always make money -- or one way they should be able to, but teacher certifications and other regulations generally protect the teachers' market from anyone non-unionized.

The same applies to health care. There's no end of ways for doctors and other health care professionals to deliver their services. What about midwives? LPNs? Paramedics? I'm guessing most of the people who take up doctors' time could be wholly cured with bandaids and aspirin. Do you need a full-fledged physician to take care of this?

However, from the view of macro-economics -- Washington's perspective -- no one person can control all these solutions. They're likely to spring up overnight like mushrooms. Good things could be happening for people all over the place, and all driven by lone individuals and small businesses. Washington might not even know anything about it. That would get Obama's and Pelosi's panties all in a twist, no doubt; no reason to dump monumental debt on the citizenry, herd us into some nightmarish conformity, nothing to run on in their next election campaigns. Whatever would the bureaucrats do to fill their empty days?

The best thing these idiots can do to provide viable and affordable solutions to the problems that beset the nation is to get the hell out of the way and let private citizens get to work on them.