By saying it was the VA I was wrong. It wasn’t the VA. (See how that’s done? I’m still alive, even though I admitted I was wrong. Great lesson in there. Adults know how to do that.)

Second, VA, Medicare, it matters not. The Great Capitalist, GWB, and the Republican Congress shoved it through for Medicare. No negotiations. Shovel money to Big Pharma.

You made my point.

It’s just in the same vicinity.

You have been flat wrong on almost every statement you’ve made in the past three days. You make crap up faster than any one person could possibly deal with it. I stand here holding a garden trowel in the presence of a manure pile that actually has clouds gathered around its peak.

To pull one–only one–at random from just this last short post:

“The second is that in the free market, competition driven, capitalist America the VA has to pay whatever any company wants to ask for drugs. Cannot negotiate. Guess who writes those laws.”

The VA has and does routinely negotiate lower prices for pharmaceuticals. Even lower than Medicare.

The actual research studies on this are behind journal paywalls, but it’s not hard to find news articles on this since a key argument made by those proposing Medicare be able to negotiate drug prices is the use of the VA as a positive example.

Another article here.

That’s just one of your items.

Of literally dozens. And all I’ve got is this little trowel.

The first are the tax breaks allowed the oil industry, including subsidies. The oil industry writes those laws and no one repeals them.

The second is that in the free market, competition driven, capitalist America the VA has to pay whatever any company wants to ask for drugs. Cannot negotiate. Guess who writes those laws.

American elections are an illusion. No one can with without drug, weapons and oil support. The laws are written by those folks.

As demonstrated.

I’d be interested to know how many Americans attend church 12 times a year. I simply do not believe 76% are practicing in any form.

At the hospice pretty much everyone states “Christian” or “Roman Catholic” as the religious preference. Maybe, just maybe, 1 in 10 welcomes a visit by the chaplain. And that’s just a visit, by a person who is dying.

There are Union excesses, but nothing like the WorldCom, Enron or Madoff scandals. And Unions are the ONLY way a worker has to protect himself from the excesses of capital. As it is now the well paid, bonus eating executives make money screwing the worker to the wall. Even in companies losing money due not to Union excesses but management excesses. Blaming Unions for the situation is like blaming a the problems of the banking industry on the oh-so-high wages of the tellers. Greedy tellers with their hands on the shareholders necks wringing every dime out of their benevolent beings.

I advocate teaching about religion, too. It’s conservatives who complain that teaching about Islam is the same as prosletyzing.

The Constitution was absolutely clear on separation of Church and State. It was also absolutely clear on “well regulated militias” and private gun ownership, so it is understandable why people are confused. If the Supreme ignores the one, why not the other? Something valid there.

The point I tried to make, and did poorly with, is that the Conservative dream government would look a lot like Mexico. No rights for workers, no protections, no social services.

When the opposite should be true. Government priorities should be the welfare of citizens, including police protections. Way, way down the list should be foreign entanglements, wars, getting Americans killed for the benefit of mega-corporations, etc.

Like all self-evident and perfectly obvious good advice, that statement can be taken to ridiculous extremes. But so can even the most reasonable and well-considered objections to it.

Government must be based on compromise, and compromise depends on human negotiation and even conflict, short of violence–politics. Even violence has its place; the British Crown, the French Aristocracy, the Southern slaveholders, and Adolph Hitler did not give up their “god-given rights” easily. Still, wise men prefer committees to combat, beware those who are always pontificating about the blood of patriots and the tree of liberty; they are usually too old to fight and they’ve often already picked all the fruit from the lowest branches.

The Law, the Constitution, the Government, is a human artifact. It is a machine devised to perform a vital but not specifically defined function: promoting the public welfare. Like all machines, it must follow natural law, but those laws are not universally agreed upon, so to a certain degree we must rely on empirical results, or how we interpret them, for even wise and honest men do not always arrive at the same conclusions when presented with the same results.

Like all machines, once a design is agreed upon, we are locked into whatever advantages and disadvantages that architecture has, but we are also free to evaluate its performance and modify its configuration as conditions change, and they will change. The best designs are those which are easily modifiable. This process is not without problems, and carries no guarantee of success, but the alternative is either chaos or tyranny.

You can get good advice from the founding fathers, the Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen or even the Bible, but working Law must come from people sitting around a table arguing and it will always be a compromise that fully satisfies no one. Beware of the “Principled Solution”, the “Obvious Human Right”, or any so-called scientific “ism”. They are all frauds calculated to disguise personal self-interest as profound intellectual philosophy–or worse, as “science”.

Speaking as a fiscal conservative/social liberal, I like to say a few things.

Just because we reject Obamacare doesn’t mean we want all government services privatized.

Private property is the key to capitalism. Protect it? Hell yeah. Capitalism’s not perfect but there is no other system that I know of that I’d rather be a part of.

I have a big problem with unions, especially government unions. The amount of what a member pays in health care premiums is far less than their counterparts in the private sector. Their pay is more too. Do these union workers actually deserve more than the rest of us? (Sounds like some thing you would say but the other way around.)But the worst thing about unions is pay increases based on how long they’ve been in the union, not on merit. And with teachers union, try to fire one for poor performance. In NYC, in the 5 years from 2006 to 2011, Only 32 teachers were fired- out of 132,000. They can’t all be that good.

There would be no Social Security? More like there won’t be any SS at the rate we’re going. Let’s keep the rest but reign in an EPA that’s out of control. I’d give you examples like I have before but you never read them. Or at least don’t respond.

Flat tax? We had a tax system that was working before Bush came along.

I don’t want prayers lead in school either. But you should note that 78% of the population is Christian. 16% don’t believe in anything.1.7% are Jewish. All the rest amount to less than 1% each. I wouldn’t have a problem with a teacher having a Christmas tree in his/her classroom. I also wouldn’t have a problem with a Jewish teacher with a menorah during Hanukkah. Kwanzaa? why not.

Would it hurt to expose children to different religions and culture? Where’s all the “celebrate” diversity sentiment. And why should 16 percent of Americans be entitled to dictate to the other 84? Before you say it’s unconstitutional, it wasn’t a SCOTUS issue before 1948 and religion wasn’t effectively ripped from the public school system until 1962. I don’t think we’re better off without it.