Health Care Reform and Status Quo

Several weeks back, CNBC aired, “The Meeting of the Minds: The Future of Health Care.” As advertised, this seven member panel contained “leaders, thinkers, and visionaries.”

In a short and scripted film clip, our President Obama addressed the panel, as well his fellow Americans, with a clarion call, “When we talk about the future of health care, we are talking about the future of America.”

The president continued, “There are those who argue that we cannot afford to confront the challenges of health insurance reform. But the bottom line is this: deferring the reform is nothing more than defending the status quo and the status quo is unsustainable.”

Two distinguishing remarks deserve mentioning.

Firstly, deferring one is not equivalent to defending the other;--if one so weighs the proffered reform the lesser against the current set of circumstances and affairs, no defense exists for the so-called “status quo,” only simple rationality.

For example, why would one individual acting rationally purchase a new calling plan for her cell phone wherein she will be paying substantially more for a coverage area that appears unchanged, however, now she will experience a guaranteed rise in dropped calls and additionally have more of her incoming calls sent directly to voicemail?

She simply would not, as a rational consumer. The current calling plan, no matter its shortcomings, persists as the better buy.

The task is gravely more subtle and difficult: to provide her with greater coverage with fewer dropped calls for lower the cost.

Yet, the health care reform pushed by Progressives and modern Liberals does not meet this task. These advocates forget economic data.

For example, health economist Linda Gorman notes, since “health coverage stabilized in the 1980’s,” only thirteen to sixteen percent of people have at any given time been not covered, “despite numerous expansions of government coverage programs and a massive increase in illegal immigration.”

Moreover, the only increase with government’s expansion into the health care sector has been costs. There surfaces an inverse relationship between the number of those covered and the cost of said coverage, as predicted by elementary economic theory.

Secondly, if the status quo is unsustainable, then even a “cost neutral” plan is unsustainable;--that is, if costs and the rise therewithal remain the same, then per capita costs and GDP percentage remains the same.

As Washington Post columnist, and once medical physician, Charles Krauthammer points out, “[T]he president argues that health care is killing the economy--that the costs are--and he is right in that, absolutely right.”

Krauthammer though adds, “If health care today is destroying our economy because of its costs, revenue neutrality leaves us on the same net trajectory to insolvency and ruin [the president] himself has said is going on right now.”

Only two major schemes prove to reduce costs: free markets and government rationing. The former, unlike the latter, also supports and delivers technological and procedural innovations, in so doing drives costs even further downwards.

For example, health economist John Goodman identifies lasik eye surgery--a section of health care not covered by government or even private insurers--and its rapid innovation as examples of freer markets at work.

Yet, more importantly, he mentions, compared to health care funded by government programs or paid for by insurance, the “prices on average have gone down by 30 percent.”

In sum, when President Obama says he will “not accept the status quo,” or opponents only think it is “better politics to kill this plan than improve it,” he conveniently misses that his current plan with its dubious measures is equal to, if not worse than, the status quo.

And he, therefore, overlooks the “rational consumer” in each of his fellow Americans.


This is another installment into my series on health care reform. I find the topic interesting and I hope all reading this piece does. Also, this mounts a hopeful return to writing columns for the Parthenon this term, but as a regulator, more as a fill-in on days that a weekly columnist cannot fulfill his or her deadline.

Health Care Reform and Existing Regulations

Earlier this week, our President Obama, not knowing the truth to which he spoke, stepped forwards to assert, “Time and again, the American people have suffered because people in Washington played the politics of the moment, instead of putting the interests of the American people first.”

He continued, “That is how we ended up with premiums rising three times faster than wages; that is how we ended up with businesses choosing between shedding benefits or shutting their doors; that is how we have been burdened with runaway costs and huge gaps in coverage.”

The president undoubtedly believes more government involvement in the health care sector can “pressure” America to better-controlled costs, whilst covering an even larger segment of the American citizenry.

When he says, “[T]here are going to be some areas where we want to regulate the insurers a little more,” what is one to gather other than such?

Yet, few in Washington acknowledge--let alone accept any responsibility for--the political catastrophe wrought by decades of shortsighted regulations, instead they seek perpetually to portray this health care situation as a free market failure.

However, government-run health care, if when one views the economic literature, cannot with all its poorly channeled incentives, insulated inefficiencies, and scores of hidden costs provide patients with the quality of care and reasonable prices as well as a well-designed private sector.

With such said though, health economist Patricia Danzon wrote, “The performance of the current U.S. health care system does not provide a guide to the potential functioning of a well-designed private market system.”

She further noted, “Cost and waste in the current U.S. system are unnecessarily high because of tax and regulatory policies that impede efficient cost control by private insurers…”

The health care industry stands as one of the most heavily regulated, and thusly strangled, sectors in the American economy.

Although the multitude of these ill-starred regulations commenced rapidly in the New Deal era and developed ever-increasingly thereafter, America’s economic history has never been as laissez-faire as some, for better or worse, want to perceive.

For example, Congress insipidly mimicked the British in 1789 by funding the Marine Hospital Service by monthly taxation of American seamen.

Health economist Linda Gorman observed, “As U.S. government grew, [politicians] continued passing laws to regulate the kind of health coverage people could purchase.”

These regulations run the gamut from blocking entry into the medical profession to limiting extensively selective options for managed care plans, from artificial cost controls on insurers, hospitals, and pharmaceutical providers to numerous moralistic laws that dictate the very lives of individual Americans.

All these added regulations do not come without their own set of unpleasant economic consequences;--that is, imposed regulatory costs push up health care prices which directly lead to increased numbers of uninsured.

The economic phenomenon, known as “The Regulatory Wedge,” pilots inflation upwards due exclusively to government prescribed regulations.

With the given amount of existing regulation, some health care analysts have reported that the regulatory wedge to be larger than eight percent of total cost spent annually in this sector.

Gorman, also, remarked, “The true cost of health care was hidden from covered individuals. Vast spending increases were the result. The introduction of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 made the situation worse.”

For example, National Bureau of Economic Research’s Amy Finkelstein discovered that Medicare itself increased real hospital expenditure by some 23 percent within the first five years of the program.

The myriad regulations, broad and minute alike, enforced by government to lessen the weight of costs below the given market equilibrium only distorts the supply-and-demand factors, whilst shifting the true cost to less seen areas.

President Obama, alongside many congressional members, lacks the economic comprehension to understand it requires more than just regulating costs, for prices are signals, or more fitting symptoms, of markets actually working, healthy or otherwise.


Several issues arose with this column. One being that the last paragraph was published without “economic,” “actually working,” as well as “otherwise” was not changed from “not.” Second being that it lacked a certain "smartassness" that I felt the other two in the series had.

Health Care Reform and Gov’t Bureaucracy

Within the past week, House and Senate Democrats delivered Congress two Health Care Reform bills, each meeting the nonsensical guidelines set forth by our President Obama. As well, the president released a statement praising and endorsing the House bill, saying this “proposal will begin the process of fixing what’s broken….”

According to Fortune’s senior editor at large, Shawn Tully, “The two bills [will] require states to establish insurance ‘exchanges’ that [will] offer a variety of plans.” Interestingly, each state’s ‘exchange’ will exist as completely separate markets, not benefiting from national competition--thusly, not benefiting consumers and taxpayers.

For all of these plans, the federal government will impose across all states minimum standards;--that is, standards “often more stringent and expensive than the existing laws require.”

The Senate bill already has a preliminary menu, including mental health and substance abuse programs.

Tully continued, “A special panel of experts [will] add to that list, and [one] can bet that the additions [will] be substantial and costly.” Noteworthy, added regulations and more bureaucracy have only augmented and exacerbated costs and inefficiencies, never lessening.

The myopic idea that a “public option” will compete squarely against private plans--let alone spur innovation--lacks basic economic realism. Ultimately, this “public option” will spur private insurers thoroughly out of the marketplace altogether.

In the 2005 article, “The Thing Itself,” political economist Michael Munger wrote, “We [cannot] make government more efficient, or more like business, because it insulates officials from such pressures by design.”

Government bureaucracy, or as Calf. Rep. Henry Waxman wants it known as “accountable organizations,” shares not in the incentive mechanisms by which the private sector must abide.

Public options, merely by the inescapable nature of bureaucracy itself, cannot efficiently allocate its resources to meet its demand; from this occurrence, a deadweight loss materializes. With such a loss, we can only expect unparallel shortages and surpluses nationwide, as witnessed in energy markets through the 1970’s.

More so, bureaucracy with its prodigal incentives survives solely by undercutting its inefficiencies and incompetence through government appropriated subsidies at the taxpayers’ expense.

Private insurers, however, lacking such profligate capacity, compete by addressing their allocation of resources efficiently and doing so continually.

By maximizing profits, whilst minimizing costs, they are impelled perforce through competition to provide better benefits at better prices to their consumers, or they simply cease operations, in which freeing up resources for others to use more efficiently.

This--Capitalism--is what spurs innovation, not government monopolies, dancing on political heartstrings at bureaucratic impulses.

As health economist Patricia Danzon explained, “Both economic theory and a careful review of the evidence… suggest that a government monopoly of financing and provision achieves a less efficient allocation of resources to medical care than would a well-designed private market system.”

In addition to the forgone benefits experienced by the consumer, government health care structures and systems harbor numerous hidden costs, unlike free market systems.

However, when by good intentions government gets involved, consumers and taxpayers get taken obligatorily in lordotic fashion by roughshod bureaucrats.

The president, nonetheless, has proclaimed from the stump to the Oval Office: “[I]f you’re happy with your plan… you keep it.” Yet, with the federal government underwriting costs artificially by use of taxpayer subsidies, no private insurer will be able to compete.

Our President Lincoln once said, “You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.”

Undoubtedly, President Obama, as most, has heard this hackneyed passage before, yet one must question if he bides by such an overtly honest sentiment.


This my second column in the series on Health Care Reform for Marshall University's campus paper, The Parthenon. It is presently the Featured Article at the Marshall Libertarians website. Links to both site in the top left-hand links' box. The column itself turned out to be better that I thought it might at moments.

Health Care Reform and the Individual

Two weeks back, ABC News hosted, “Questions for the President: Prescription for America”--that is, a Health Care Reform forum with our President Obama.

The president fielded, and vacillated himself through, a number of intentionally severalfold questions. These questions were posed by an array of individuals, representing the medical profession, patients, and just simple taxpayers.

The president attempted, struggling to maintain his notedly disarming ease throughout the evening, to assured his fellow Americans that this reform bears no similitude to big government bureaucracy.

The president reached to comfort some by downplaying their Orwellian anxiety, as he put it, “the whole big brother fear,” by playing up his usual soundbite: “[I]f you’re happy with your plan… you keep it.” Yet, a soundbite only simplifies the complexities of the world at the bastardization of reality.

Nonetheless, one audience member told of her 105-year-old mother and how five years back the mother came into need of a pacemaker.

The mother’s general physician was honest about the apparent unlikelihood of the procedure after one arrhythmia specialist claimed the patient was just too old, yet he sent the mother to another arrhythmia specialist. This specialist, however, taken aback by the mother’s “joy of life” agreed to perform the operation.

After this situational explanation, the questioner poised her query: “[I]s there any consideration that can be given for a certain spirit, a certain joy of living, quality of life? Or is it just a medical cutoff at a certain age?”

The president joked and bloviated through his response to finally conclude: we cannot “make judgments based on peoples’ spirit,” noting that to “be a pretty subjective decision.” Clarifying simply, he said, “[W]e have to have rules…”

However, when pushed by the same questioner, President Obama stated, “[I]f we’ve got experts… advising doctors across the board that the pacemaker may ultimately save money, then we potentially could have done that faster.” The potentiality of government efficiency has not been backed by the numbers and/or by history.

One cannot escape pondering, who shall these “experts” making these “rules” be?

The answer austerely remains the same even amongst Washingtonian doublespeak. These “experts,” no matter political titles, are bureaucrats.

How can this Health Care Reform be patient-based, when the individual is left out?

When the president claimed these decisions cannot be based on so-called subjectivity, he simply should have mentioned it as it is: decisions cannot bear on individuality.

However, no physicians cannot acknowledge that each patient comes with a different medical background, a different attitude, a different “quality of life.” This is where doctors, along with patients’ guidelines, make the final judgment based on these individualities.

What is lost upon advocates of this type of Health Care Reform is that all patients and doctors are making the cost-and-benefit analysis. When we outsource these analyses to government bureaucrats under compulsory laws, we cannot expect but to out-ship patients, as did Norway several years back, by sending patients to private, foreign hospitals.

“I don’t want bureaucracies making [the] decisions,” the president told the audience, “but understand… [the] decisions are already being made….” He cited that they are “being made by private insurers.”

The president fails jejunely to recognize the individual element. Individual patients are individual consumers in the health care market, in which goes medical insurance. And under a free market system, as Disney CEO Bob Iger said recently, “The consumer is king, not us the content provider and not you the distributor.”

This discussion is not solely societal, political, economic, or even medical. It is all of these and as well a philosophical one. We must be willing to ask ourselves some deeply rooted questions about our own individuality, such as where does the individual stand when against the collective.

The answer historically is in a line with a number.


This column is the beginning of a series on the issue of Health Care Reform. I find the topic interesting, yet more so it seems in need of serious and thoughtful discussion.

Batman and One's Moral Philosophy

Firstly, the most dynamic of heroes and villains must be neither contrived solely of evil nor good, of black nor white, yet exist within the myriad greys of life for a viewing audience to relate. No longer the starkly poised construct of idiosyncratic foiling will pass simpleton critique. The fundamental distinction, however, arises in that the villain finds meaninglessness in the grey reality of the present world of circumstance, while the hero develops out of this chaotic veracity a moral paradigm wherein a black-and-white system must evolve, separating the blurring shades into two demarcated groups.

Secondly, an example of this is shown in our mythology of Batman. Here is a man who is struggling for order out of an arbitrary world, where his foes find only the opposite. What divides him from the rest simply is that he strives for a moral philosophy, while the rest accept none. A world without man is a world without moral philosophy, for only he can rein in his environment;--it stands so for his survival. So, the mental fitness of man basically is all with which he is equipped.

Finally, once I would have agreed with the relative nature of morality, yet coming away from that stance wherein I developed (as we all must) a personal philosophy, mine being of productivity. In so saying this, a society grows and prospers where the morality is steered by personal property, personal responsibility, personal choice, etc. Myths and folklore find little space, if any, in the era of science and reason. I can justify many actions founded on a cost-benefit analysis, due to personal responsibility, yet no form of rape can be justified, for it attracts personal property and personal choice;--thusly, undermines the very fabric of efficient and productive civilization.


This is a cleaned-up YouTube reply I penned several months back. I find interesting in some fashion. I hope it is enjoyed.

Human Nature and the Institutions that Retain It

Mankind has not civilized itself by advancing as moral, or even ethical, beings, yet on the contrary, by the sole erecting of institutions to assist in the mitigating and the isolating of man’s nature.

Firstly, many thinkers from the French Enlightenment to modern Marxists, as well as numerous philosophers and social scientists, have emphasized the role of society over human nature.

English Philosopher John Locke thought of human nature as a “tabula rasa” or a “blank slate” with no rules or guidelines, only social experiences to direct the mind of the individual.

According to Australian Historian of Philosophy John Passmore, English Philosopher David Hume had “one thing he never doubted [that] was that there was such a thing as human nature. This was a point that he differed from Locke.”

Passmore added, “[Hume] says he thought [to deny human nature] was a ridiculous view, human beings do have angers, fears, all the rest of it… which are innate, which are inborn in them, and which are constant throughout human history.”

For one to aggressively underrate, or to casually dismiss, the historic observation that man seeks today the glories and treasures for which he sought at any yesteryear in his existence, denies flatly his biological nature and the limitations thereof to which these neurological attributes adjourn.

Secondly, the Framers of the American Constitution and the American System, in general, comprehended the role of human nature in mankind’s progress.

For example, James Madison stated, “What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

With this perspicacious understanding, the Framers constructed fundamental institutions to check and balance, not the institutions themselves, but the human factor involved.

Due to these institutions, any individual spending time researching America’s prosperity, as well as much of the Western World’s, and the poverty of much of Latin America, Asia, and Africa will unearth much of the variance.

These nations lack the institutional structure to palliate the nature of man, himself. They rely on what American Economist Thomas Sowell would call the “Unconstrained” archetype of a leader.

Thirdly, in Sowell’s book, A Conflict of Visions, Sowell discusses two countering “visions”: the “Constrained” and the “Unconstrained”.

To clarify, “visions” are “the implicit assumes with which [one] operate[s].”

The “Constrained” maintains that human nature is flawed, yet fixed. The question then presented is how to design institutions to retain the flaws, while permitting one to live in the best social situation possible. More so, mankind is “Constrained” by his own human nature.

The “Unconstrained” argues that “the things that we suffer” are “the failure of other people to be as wise and as noble” as oneself. From this notion comes the Thomas Paine line, “to begin the world anew,” for institutions and virtueless men are causing this pain and suffering.

For examples of the applications of these “visions”, one need look only to 18th Century France and America.

Sowell explains, “In France, the idea was if you simply put the right people in charge and create the right institutions then all these problems would go away.”

Basically, with stationing a “political messiah” in power that loves the people, all then becomes well and good.

However, “[i]n the United States, it was assumed from the outset that there were very limited things you could do. What you needed to do above all was to minimize the damage done by the flaws of human nature.”

With this acceptance of human nature, constitutions and institutions are constructed for the purpose of diversifying the governing powers, so one may not control the multitude.

Finally, few current Americans--particularly, young ones--gather much in the way of political lessons from the Scottish Enlightenment, the Framers, and just history, in general.

With electing President Obama, America forgot or just dismissed the concerns of the Framers or the Founding Fathers, in general. But, Americans only shortly remembered the “Spirit of ‘76” once nationhood came to be. So, nothing is truly new.

Nonetheless, though, the elected individuals on the whole attempted and still so to implant the “Unconstrained” view in their constituents, for institutions bar their governing powers; hence, for the fortification of our liberty and individualism.

The fundamental institutions assembled by the Framers and at few other periods in our nation’s history have been the protection for us, as a people, not the men and women we have elected or will in the future do the same.

This column was not published this week for conflicting opinion on the use of the Opinion Page in a newspaper. I enjoyed the research for this column.

Marketplace of Ideas and the Student’s Role

In 1967, the Supreme Court in Keyishian v. Board of Regents summarized in its decision, “The classroom is peculiarly the marketplace of ideas.”

This construct often enough is attributed to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. His 1919 dissenting opinion in Abrams v. United States carries as far the implicit, without the explicit: “[W]hen men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas…”

Holmes continued, “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which [any of man’s] wishes safely can be carried out.”

As in the market for any other commodity, competition delivers the consumer with a better product at a better price.

When ideas are exchanged in this marketplace time is given to the argument, the act of criticisms and rebuttals. Whereby, the idea that remains stands less porous and more strengthened—that is, better intellectually, as a whole or more often amended to the new information gathered in the argument experience.

The other ideas linger on with pockets of individuals still speaking the gospel of his or her determined convictions. For no idea dies, no matter how poor, how corrupt, how wrong it may be. Once an idea is brought into the world, it exists with no regard to mortality.

Likewise, ideas carry no burdensome message of value, such as good or bad, moral or immoral, righteous or evil. Ideas just are, as an apple just is an apple.

Thomas Jefferson in a letter to William Roscoe in 1820 wrote, “This institution [University of Virginia] will be based upon the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

Jefferson spoke poetically, yet in this he struck upon the utmost ideal of an academic institution.

In the present day, however, the competition in the marketplace for ideas wanes.

Economist Thomas Sowell wrote recently, “Elementary as it may seem that we should hear both sides of an issue before making up our minds, that is seldom what happens on politically correct issues today in our schools and colleges. The biggest argument of the left is that there is no argument--whether the issue is global warming, “open space” laws or whatever.”

Granted that many a time more than only two sides of an issue exist, Sowell succinctly notes “the biggest argument” is to argue that “there is no argument.”

As consumers of education in the marketplace of ideas, we, as students, are told that no competition--no ideas, no debate, no thinking--is needed to uphold the high quality of our education. And we are foolish enough to believe this economic fallacy and to gaily digest the asininity.

Many causes have led to this effect: bad institutional incentives, academic politicization, societal complacency, etc. Maybe, however, the biggest is the student body itself.

The individual students remain not as victims, but as co-conspirators.

We aid and abet the crimes perpetuated against us. We seek not to push ourselves, personally or jointly; more so we accept naively, for to accept and not to question is the path easiest to stumble on Friday and Saturday nights.

Mark Twain may well have been correct, “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”


This week's column came into form after reading a campus editorial and listening to an interview from the Hoover Institution with Justice Antonin Scalia, as well as with further reading of Thomas Sowell, John Dewey, and Oscar Wilde recently.

By a Few Great Minds

In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Francisco d’Anconia tells Dagny Taggart, “You can’t have your cake and let your neighbor eat it, too.”

With this turn-of-phrase, one discovers a long running economic fallacy: the villains, as in relation to Rand’s work, want to “have” a bigger piece of the cake, whereas the heroes perceive society as a bakery to continually “make” endless amounts of said cake.

Milton Friedman, Nobel prize-winning economist, once stated, “Most economic fallacies derive--from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.”

The heroes take the world as wherein party one has a price at which he will sell and party two has a price at which he will buy and the price is set and the transaction made if and only if through this each benefits, yet neither will proceed if harm is to befall either.

The “looters,” however, live by a code that reflects the misconception;--they can only mentally grasp this world as the proverbial fixed pie, wherein “wealth [is] a static quantity--to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor.”

Francisco expands on such logic, “That phrase about the evil of money… comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves--slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody’s mind and left unimproved for centuries.”

These were “centuries of stagnation and starvation”, in which looters through force, inheritance, and government bureaucracy, not producers, not traders, not entrepreneurs, stood as the exalted among men.

“Stagnation”--the very word helps the reasoning mind to pause and then take the leap into the internal workings of the looter’s. If money is a “static quantity,” then, the cake and the dividing of it, would be a somewhat reasonable motive for the actions and reactions to the consequences of the prior actions by the looter.

Yet, time and again, the looters and the moochers witness, such incidents, as Rand’s fictitious Twenty Century Motor Company, where money lays abandoned, because they “look upon money as the savages did before [them], and [they] wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of [their] cities.”

As a torpid crowd comprised of looters and moochers at a wedding listens to Francisco explain that “Money is made possible only by the men who produce,” and that “Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think,” one learns the value of ideas and the production by which these ideas are manifested in society.

When Francisco asks rhetorically, “Have you ever looked for the root of production,” he elaborates by drawing to the forefront of his audience’s minds that the electric generator was not “created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes” and he even challenges them to attempt to grow “wheat without the knowledge left [them] by men who had to discover it for the first time.”

Francisco succinctly phrases, “Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and you'll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed…”

However, in this present time of political correctness, none seems to be comfortable with stating the unquestionable: civilization presses forwards only by the very few great minds, not by the numerous strong backs.

These great minds with solely their “virtue of selfishness,” not their altruism, expand for us all the knowledge of the once tribal to the now celestial. On the mental coattails of these, ever we all ride into prosperity and betterment.


I hope this is a clearer understanding of a post or two I added a while back. This column was to run today, yet I cannot find it on the paper's website. I do not know to what reason it might not have been published. Unless for stylistic differences.

Belief in Miracles is Irrational

No rational person can believe in miracles, to put it simply.

A miracle is by definition a given act or revelation of a supernatural being that defies and denies the natural order and the cosmological laws.

Miracles, ergo, mock nature and disregard reality. The belief in them, quintessentially, tears at the fabric of intelligence.

Thomas Paine greatly understood and boldly states in his 1793 work, “Age of Reason: Part I,” that something revealed to one individual is a “revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.”

In the paragraph following, Paine adds, “[A]nd though he [the individual to which the revelation was revealed] may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.”

One must notice that lying is a part of the human condition; all human beings at one point or another become economic with the truth and commit, thusly, their fair share of perjury.

With this fact, how can one rationally side on the abrogation of nature’s laws in the light thereof of human nature itself?

One simply cannot.

Paine illustrates, “When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so.”

Another example, Paine uses, “When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes too near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second-hand authority as the former. I did not see the angel myself, and, therefore, I have a right not to believe it.”

To consider Christianity, a religion with its unmitigated doctrine entirely based on the notion that the miracles of Jesus Christ denoted in the Gospels are nonetheless true; thusly, proving that Christ was the son of God and worthy of worship. A textual problem arises, since everyone recognizes the Gospels were penned no less than a generation after Christ’s supposed crucifixion.

Sam Harris, neuroscientist and author, explains that “The truth is even if we had multiple contemporaneous eyewitness accounts of the miracles of Jesus it still would not provide sufficient basis to believe that these events actually occurred.”

One might ask, Why not?

Harris continues, “Well, the problem is that first-hand reports of miracles are quite common even in the 21st-century.” He tells further about hundreds of Western educated men and women who think “their favorite Hindu or Buddhist guru has magic powers. The powers ascribed to these gurus are every bit as outlandish as those ascribed to Jesus.”

The foundational Christian claim that miracles of the sort, as by the present Hindu swami Satya Sai Baba, Harris explains, “become especially compelling when you set them in the pre-scientific religious context of the first century Roman Empire decades after their supposed occurrence.”

With at least a million eyewitnesses to certain miracles of Sai Baba, this man still does not, as Harris states, “even merit an hour on the Discovery Channel.”

Man’s two countering dispositions, as a creature, are to question and to accept. These two temperaments led man to battle himself socially and personally. However, only through questioning, not by accepting, did he come to a better understanding of his place in nature.

He began to simply understand. He began to place miracles in the same drawer as commonplace parlor tricks.


The paragraph before “To consider Christianity...” did not appear in the column published in The Parthenon, due to my attempt to be under 600 words this week. I like the paragraph because it hits on another religion. I dig this column.

Cradle of an Abstraction

If in a time of national threat from a domestic or foreign enemy--as in war, either symmetrical or asymmetrical--should we, as Americans, sacrifice liberty for safety?

For as long as this current war has been surging, I defended the argument, one well backed by history, that in wartimes all Americans relinquish certain liberties for protection. Furthermore, with an end to any of these particular crises, we would then reclaim our surrendered liberties, as well as additional ones.

The argument that by reining in our freedoms, restricting our way of life, fettering our principles, we then have lost the war from the outset, I heard numerous times.

As well, the Revolutionary sentiment, often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

These lines of reasoning ate away at the core of what is honor, what is principle, to the basic questions of man, what is right and wrong. And to the greatest couplet of questions: why and why not.

I viewed the surrender of certain liberties as a way to combat the threat in its many arrays by more flexible means, and the resoluteness of a single, immovable stance existed only in a black-and-white world.

The idea liberty becomes a casualty of war was rebutted with the simple proclamation that a life saved is a battle championed, yet I found these all inconstant with my value of principle.

The principles that liberty divides us from our foes and unites us with our allies, liberty mirrors the civilized and well-informed citizenry and lures the curious to our shores, liberty to all grants all the ability to accept and to be accepted and thusly to be equals.

Yes, liberty battles with one arm tied, yet liberty always maintains the upper hand in the moral, ideological battles, which run alongside the physical.

Better for a thousand to die for the preservation of liberty than one to be saved by liberty's crucifixion. What value does one have, if the whole is lost?

The American Experiment displays the fragility and the power of the abstraction of liberty and the majesty of the execution of such by millions who believe so ardently in the principles of liberty that death for it is something for which countless volunteer.

Not saying countless offer to wear a blindfold and smoke a last cigarette, but that countless will risk their lives for the principle that liberty must remain or the American Experiment fails, thusly, all that is fair and just or the ever attempt forwards such then fails.

What I am saying translates basically as liberty cannot be a casualty of any conflict, no matter how severe, for the principle of the abstraction then unwinds and the abstraction disappears as a dream in the closing hours of a simple, commonplace twilight and there, forgotten by the time the dreamer opens his eyes.

Paramount with all that said, politics is not a science rather a game of strategy;--hence, of compromise. Liberty and safety exist not divorced of each other, as above here summarized and as many may as well portray. We, as individuals, need the balance of this temperamental ratio of liberty and safety.

What one should come to understand, accept, and expect is for an individual--when the lines are not clearly demarcated, when the costs and benefits are not so certain, when ethics are dissociated with their functional construct--to then err on the side of liberty, the great attraction.

For from the cradle of safety comes only withering of tender liberty, while from the cradle of liberty, safety flourishes in all its yields.


This column was taken from an earlier blogpost. The title was changed by the paper for their reasons, which it is fine. It was changed to "Seeking only safety hurts liberty". Some sentences were changed as well. The last three paragraphs critique the afore read paragraphs, yet the deletion of the transition makes the argument seem inconsistent. But life goes on.

These Scars, Part Three: Responsibility

With The Dark Knight pinned beneath a steel rail, stories above the pavement, and with the weight of The Joker compounding the existing encumbrance, Batman remains on his back immobile. When The Joker mentions that “It’s a funny world we live in,” The Joker stops and looks at his incapacitated foe.

Continuing, he says, “Speaking of which, know how I got these scars?” Batman, drawing from an earlier scene in which he receives from Lucius Fox a new batsuit, responds, “No, but I know how you get these…” With his spiked vambraces now equipped to propel the spikes forth, he does so, striking The Joker and giving himself the ability to become free.

As we have learned from The Joker’s two differing tales of the origin of his scars, scars originate and manifest in equally different manners, nevertheless, leaving the same result--a scarred individual.

In the past two weeks, The Joker, as we have come to understand, actually, highlights within his own unique allegoric pedagogy and acute blend of postmodernist surveys of anthropology, psychology, sociology, and the neurosciences.

First, we discover that high stress experienced in the early developing years of childhood can alter the essential structural hardware of the brain, having a direct effect on the mind’s software. One cannot simply delete or erase these neurochemical scars.

As English poet and polemicist John Milton penned in Paradise Regained, “The childhood shows the man / As morning shows the day.” More often never does it seem that a bad morning extends into a good day.

Second, we find that empathy, one of the key elements to our very humanity, can be what initiates the trauma that separates us from our fellow man, leaving each to mirror the scars of the other.

As economist and ethicist Adam Smith observed, to merely draw into one’s mind the plight of “our brother upon the rack” was enough for one to “enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him.” As keen as this notion of “fellow-feeling” is, he ends before mentioning how the “brother upon the rack” sees his fellow man, and in that, comes the “personal distress” and the separation.

Yet, how far can society go in addressing these types of issues and the actors that propagate forth from such?

The Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope states, “No man is hurt but by himself.” If seeking a more modern translation of this concept, one need look no further than a recent Country song, in which one will hear, “[W]e all live with the scars we choose.”

One should question if a contradiction exists between the science and the philosophy. However, no contradiction does.

When examined further we come to find that trauma, and thusly, its scars, can be navigated through in time and with fortitude. The mind can never be swiped clean, yet it can learn to augment itself with new software to assist in the participation of the traumatized with the societally functional.

Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, notes, “One way to regulate emotion is to get more information.” From this, he continues, “[I]f you are able to separate yourself, then the non-overlap in the neural response frees up processing capacity in the brain for formulating an appropriate action.”

We have the choice in how we approach our trauma;--that is, to let it affect us, or for us to control it, to funnel it into something productive or just something that does not obstruct our progress.

Take Bruce Wayne--a child left in a damp alleyway alone holding the hand of his dying father, after witnessing both his parents being shot--he made a choice about his trauma, he learned through information and the acquisition of knowledge how to understand his trauma, and he focused his mental and physical being around these scars.

Batman comprehends that each individual--no matter his chaotic childhood, no matter his emotional trauma, no matter his past, in general--is responsible solely for his actions and must bear the consequences thereof.

To understand why and how one does as one does is to only prevent future traumatic experiences, and therefore, similar situations, yet negates naught of the actions that have already befallen.

This finishes this thought on The Joker's Scars and the society. It was not the most actively received of columns, yet life goes on.

Always Smiling, Part Two: Empathy

Sen. Patrick Leahy, portraying an unidentified gentleman at Bruce Wayne’s party for the new District Attorney Harvey Dent, replies to the green-haired man, “We are not intimidated by thugs.” The Joker momentarily contemplates, examining this man’s facial mien, before replying, “You remind me of my father; I hated my father.”

With The Joker’s knife blade seeking a new victim, Rachel Dawes interrupts by stepping forward. The Joker comments ostentatiously on her beauty and notes her nervous nature. He asks, drawing close, “Is it the Scars? Wanna know how I got them?”

After forcefully compelling Dawes to look at him, he explains tenderly, “I had a wife, beautiful like you.” His wife gambled and got “in deep with the sharks,” yet she thought he need not “worry” and to just “smile more.” When the “sharks” collected their returns out of her facial assets, the young couple had “no money for surgeries.”

His wife did not handle the scars well; moreover, he “just want[ed] to see her smile again” and for her to know he did not “care about the scars.” So, he inserted into his mouth a razor, thusly scarring himself, but because of this, she would not even look of him. She eventually just leaves.

The Joker mentions he found understanding, “Now, I see the funny side;--now, I am always smiling.”

With understanding that through caring, physically and emotionally, for the traumatized one also becomes such himself, we learn the infectious and destructive nature of trauma.

Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma, states, “Mirror neurons”--neurons that fire both in the response to an individual’s actions and in the observations of these acts by another--“allow us to grasp the minds of others, not through conceptual reasoning, but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking.”

These simulations are what allow one individual to share in another’s joys and/or another’s sadness. It is these mirror neurons that direct us in our emotional comprehension of others, particularly, through “empathy.”

“And if you see me choke up, in emotional distress from striking out at home plate,” Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, exemplifies, “you automatically have empathy for me. You know how I feel because you literally feel what I am feeling.”

Empathy, in general, as Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at University of Chicago, explains begins with the involuntary “shared emotion.”

“This is something that is hard-wired into our brains--the capacity to automatically perceive and share others’ feelings.” He notes, how when a baby hears another cry how it begins to cry, as well.

“People of all ages,” Decety continues, “will unconsciously mimic the facial expressions of those they see.” Difficult it is to refrain from laughing, when amongst a crowd of a jovial character.

When an individual loses himself in another’s pain, Decety explains, the self experiences “personal distress.” The “other-oriented” nature of empathy is put to the side and “personal distress turns inward.” So, basically, one now forfeits his ability to assist in the recovery or treatment of the other.

The scars The Joker’s wife received, in consequence for her own actions, and then compounded and internalized by his love for her leaves him equally scarred. It is through the trauma, in direct relation to his empathy and compassion, that he now faces the world, at large.

Interesting how the traumatized despises the traumatized, as in his wife’s leaving, after he eventually becomes the same as she, yet nonetheless.

Just curious how trauma is passed from one to another, as simply as a joke or even just a smile, if only it faded as soon.


This is the most interesting story for which The Joker gives as an origin to his scars, at least in the The Dark Knight film. I have for a few years now found Neuroscience quite interesting;--one of the many fields of economics that I enjoy is the peripheral branch of Neuroeconomics. Nonetheless, important it is to understand the effects of trauma, if it is from childhood stress or empathy at any age. Once we understand that a little is good, a little is natural, a little is evolutionary, then we can be able to deal with ourselves more fully.