A Hobson's Choice

Your Money or Your Life
© 2011 Ross Williams

Headline: Did Humans Crowd Out Neanderthals

Article synopsis: British anthropologists studying hominid settlements in southern France have opined that early modern humans out-reproduced the Neanderthal and simply squeezed them out of existence in the same way dandelions take over a lawn. Other anthropologists criticized the research calling it an old and outdated finding that doesn’t mesh with the current position that humans assimilated Neanderthals – mating with them – until they had no separate identity.

What I see: This is among the tedious academic dichotomies in the soft sciences that would consider themselves hard; it is the nature/nurture of anthropology. Was there prehistoric diversity? or was it the first case of cultural-specieist imperialism foreshadowing the future of the fledgling human race?

The answer is “yes”. There is ample genetic evidence that humans and Neanderthals procreated; there’s also archeological evidence that humans and Neanderthals fought. They would have fought over the same things that people fight over today: resources, paranoias, threats, “Otherness” .... Same as every higher-order species on the planet. And since Neanderthals don’t exist today ... it was their assimilation into, and their losing struggles against, the humans that did them in.

Conclusion: Nature will out. “Diversity” doesn’t work the way the soft-skulled soft scientists believe it does. Static diversity, the kind being pushed by today’s “enlightened” eugenicists which denounces assimilation as “cultural imperialism”, is nothing short of the religious fundamentalism of anti-intellectual academics. Diversity is assimilation if the diversity is to evolve, and the evolution includes force. If diversity doesn’t evolve, it will consign one of the cultures to extinction by force alone. Assimilation is the only mechanism in which the useful traits of the inferior culture can be taken into the future.


Headline: Prosecutors Want Anthony to Pay for Trial

Article synopsis: The lazy and inept prosecutor who failed to get Casey Anthony convicted of murder because he only provided evidence that she was nothing more than a self-involved mother of a dead child has asked the court to compel the bad mother to pay for the failed prosecution. The amount they’re requesting is currently $141,000; it may go higher.

You’ve gotta be kidding me: Citizens in this country have a presumption of innocence – even when, as with O J Simpson and Casey Anthony – they are very likely guilty. But you have to prove they are guilty. If you can’t prove they’re guilty then we’re obliged to treat them as if they are innocent. Compelling an innocent person to pay the government for trying to prove him guilty is insulting, despotic, and is effectively punishing them through the wallet for the government’s legal incompetence.

Conclusion: It was the prosecutor’s incompetence, not her guilt. Nut up and take the blame. And if the voters send the prosecutor packing for wasting their money, ... he’ll be the only one in this case to get what he deserved. At least someone will.


Headline: Economy Slows – Americans Worry

Article synopsis: The recession, which the government keeps insisting is over, was bigger than previously believed, the rate of recovery is less than believed, and American consumers – who haven’t gotten a decent pay raise in years – are simply not spending on anything they don’t have to. Neither are American businesses.

Knock me over with a feather: How long has this been happening? How many people who understand the fundamental connection between government control of the economy and the results of same have been predicting this to be the result?

You don’t saddle the economy with regulation and costly mandate without incurring a penalty. The penalty for coating businesses with, in the example I’ve mentioned before, $500 billion regulations aimed at preventing 3,000 people from getting a tummy ache is that the businesses facing that regulatory cost will raise their prices and/or not hire more employees. Period. That’s the way it works. You aren’t getting around that. It doesn’t matter how eloquently you explain why spending over $150 million for each of those 3,000 people is a good thing.

Prices, which are rising independent of the current regulatory and mandate nonsense, directly affect what consumers will buy. Consumers don’t have the government’s luxury of ignoring their credit card bill. If they do, then they will incur a penalty.

Conclusion: None of what’s going on should be a surprise to anyone unless their name is Keynes, who was notoriously dense. The rest, even the semi-socialist democrats among us pushing for more and more government, have been repeatedly warned what would happen ... and here it is. The only remaining question is whether they will understand what is happening, or whether they’ll blame the evil spirits and spell-casting of modern-day political mysticism. ...by which I mean: the other party and its conspiring league of fiends.


Headline: US Healthcare Expected to Cost $4.7 Trillion by 2020

Article synopsis: ...per year. And that’s if the population remains the same [it won’t], and that’s if government estimates for the government’s share of those costs conforms to current assumptions [they never have, why would they start now]. This also assumes that the true cost of Obamacare will only be fractionally lower than the cost of “healthcare as we know it” continued out [which is highly speculative and irrationally optimistic at best]. Also, many employers will drop their group insurance forcing more into the government program[s]; those who won’t will incur wide job losses due to greater government control of the healthcare plans they provide.

Who’d-a guessed: A far better manner of figuring the true cost of a government program is to take the official government estimate, double it, and then add a zero immediately to the left of the decimal place. The budget office for the Congress which gave us the Obamacare monstrosity declared that it would cost the US $1,000,000,000,000 over ten years. One trillion over a decade. For the purpose of providing health coverage for the declared 15 million Americans who are involuntarily not covered by another health coverage plan. There are another roughly 30 million Americans who decline coverage that is offered and who would be required by law to buy health insurance, and these people would not directly be included in the Obamacare program.

At $1 trillion over a decade to provide government health insurance for 15 million of us, this is a health insurance policy which costs almost $7,000 per year, per person. This is the type of health insurance that, if it were auto insurance, would be advertised late at night and offering low weekly rates regardless of one’s driving record.

Obamacare’s true cost? $20 trillion over ten years. I’ll be far closer to the actual figure ten years into it than the CBO was before it started. Due in no small part because – as the article notes – it will be required to include those who are newly involuntarily uninsured because their employers dropped their group plans. The penalty is cheaper than the cost of the benefit.

Conclusion: There’s nothing so bad that government intervention can’t make it worse. Most of the reason for the problems assigned to health insurance in the first place, and that Obamacare was created to address, are because government got involved with it and declared what had to be covered. Stop helping, already. You’re helping us to death, by way of gross fiscal irresponsibility.