Viet-Justice

The GOP has unveiled a new website in an attempt to look hip and appealing to more people.  The GOP has moved to a red banner with some stars faintly placed near the top center.  Even while squinting (we Asians do that often) I could not see any stripes by the stars, which leads me to believe that the GOP is actually flying the Chinese flag.  They are also The People’s Party as mentioned in their Who we are section in big red letters.  The Republicans are doing what they can to be on the good side of the real People’s Party when they come to repo America.  You can thank Geithner and crew for your new Chinese landlords.  It gets even better now that the Chinese will get another $122B of America.  If someone asks if you like Chairman Mao you should probably say Yes.

Brother Grim asks the question of who is better for you, the government or the insurance companies?

Or are you willing to rein in anarcho-capitalism long enough to come up with a solution that works for everyone? People who rail against “Socialized Medicine” live in constant fear of having medical decisions made by government bureaucrats, but would you rather live at the whim of insurance company executives who see you as nothing more than an account ID? Choose your poison folks.

Ironically he cites a life expectancy graph that has Japanese at the longest lived.  First of all, there is no comparing Japanese society to American society.  Diet is typically cited as the reason Japanese people live so long, not the kind of health care they have. As a matter of fact the Japanese system is more privatized than the US according to Professor Naoki Ikegami with 80% of hospitals being truly private with no government subsidy or subsidized workers.  Americans need to drop the burgers for some rice, tofu, and fish.  Then hit the gym more than they do to get the effect of walking everywhere like the French and Japanese do.

On the topic of which is better for you, the government plan or the plan of the big corporate insurance providers, we can take a look at the pros and cons of each.  Brother Grim says that the corporations will treat you like an account ID.  Well the government will treat you like a social security account ID, so there’s no difference with regard to identifying you.  Government is also a less trustworthy due to remarks that ignoring constituents because “they are just people” and the partisan closing of GM and Chrysler dealers.  It would appear that viability of the dealership was not a criteria, but who the owners donated to was.  This shows that government does not look at numbers only when making decisions, which is bad.  You know that the decisions made by government will be to the political benefit of who is in power.  Unlike China where there is only one party, you are at the mercy of your party being out of power when you have to depend on government.  So a government system is automatically stacked against 49% based on the consensus of the popular results of the general election.

How are the corporations superior to the government system?  Both identify you by some number and treat you like a number.  Where does the corporate system have greater benefit?  First, you get to choose which entity you want to go with.  I’m also including HSAs in the mix for young people who want to be self insured.  This lets the population choose which plan suits their lifestyle.  The next area that insurance companies excel at is data.  Actuarial tables and the Statistical Value of Life (SVL) can be used to calculate an appropriate payout.  This is superior to the government solution which relies on humans to make the decisions and puts these decisions in the hands of economists, mathematicians, and programmers.  If the formulas used by an insurance company are under change control and auditable then the consumer knows what circumstances they can expect the insurance company to pay and what circumstances the insured is better left to their fate.

This serves to enhance marginal private benefit by letting the formulas decide for families the appropriate time to stop throwing good money after bad.  There is no single formula for SVL, but many take into account occupation, education, hereditary diseases, current age, and other factors.  There are also general flat rate formulas such as the US DOT’s Treatment of the Economic Value of a Statistical Life.  If you’re in a plane crash you’re worth $6million.  Any way you calculate it, you can determine what is the best solution for your family.

How does this benefit a family?  If you have ever had to serve under medical power of attorney, you know that it is illogical to run a family into bankruptcy expending resources on someone where the computations indicate a lack of equlibrium between cost and benefit.  Americans unwisely bankrupt themselves on spending for end of life care.   If it makes little numerical sense to put grandma’s house on the auction block to pay for 6 months of chemo or dialysis then why do it? Another area is nursing home care which costs approximately $6000 per month according to the 2007 Genworth Cost of Care Survey.  It may may more sense to ship grandma to Portland Oregon or Beijing China where an honorable assisted suicide is legal, rather than wasting the family’s money on a futile effort or worse, allowing the government to seize grandma’s estate to cover her care costs, thus depriving the clan of resources.

That resource could be used to fund the college education of the children of the clan then why undertake such “heroic” measures as the medical care field says.  This leaves fewer resources to pour into a dynasty trust which in turn leaves fewer resources for education and betterment of the clan unit.  In one generation a clan can go from blue collar and poor to white collar through education.  We can also apply the same principals to child care as well.  If a very young child has a terminal disease the parents can always make another one.  This would be logical if the family has more than one child to care for.  With a minimum of $200,000 of child raising expenses, it’s better to reboot early on than spend a ton of money then lose out and have to reboot.

The corporate alternative provides us with a logical and auditable solution that doesn’t put families in the poor house, and maximizes marginal private benefit without the introduction of subsidies, taxes, and dead weight loss.  It also benefits the individual by creating the positive externality of reducing marginal social benefit that a government plan would introduce, thereby reducing competition for resources and enabling the individual to obtain said scarce resources in a more accessible fashion.

Lai Jiansheng is a hero.  Chen Fuchao decided he was going to ruin everyone’s day by threatening to jump off a bridge.  Well Lai was not going to have any of that.  He walked past the police barricade, shook hands with Chen, and then pushed him off the bridge.

“I pushed him off because jumpers like Chen are very selfish. Their action violates a lot of public interest,” Lai was quoted as saying by Xinhua. “They do not really dare to kill themselves. Instead, they just want to raise the relevant government authorities’ attention to their appeals.”

Unfortunately Chen survived the fall, so this means he is going to have to try again later.  Lai should be getting a medal from the police for quickly resolving a situation that could have impeded commerce for a long time.  We should take Lai’s example in the US and legalize pushing jumpers off their objects.  After all it is being a good samaritan when you help others attain their goals.

The concept of a clan is something that many people have a hard time dealing with. Brother Grimm seems to think that the concept of society is exactly the same as a clan except on a larger scale. How can you shoot down the concept of subsidized health care while applying a shared agreement with a clan? All clans are in competition with each other for resources or in the case of the modern world, jobs which provide money which provide resources. Supporting all of society reduces the comparative advantage that you and your family have in competing for those resources. Since resources are limited it would be self defeating to follow such a course of action. If you were around in the 1990′s when the Internet boom hit you will remember that HTML “programmers” were making $300/hr easily because there were too few of them around to meet demand. As more people learned how to “program” in HTML and tools such as Front Page and Dreamweaver came along the value of this occupation dropped. The same is true with traditional occupations such as doctor or lawyer. The difficulty of obtaining the education and experience keeps the market rate high; however, if the survivability of others is enhanced it will drive down the value of all occupations due to dilution. Choosing to join together as a family unit is something you are not forced into, but it is to your advantage. Being forced into a societal family unit is not a choice and it does not benefit you directly. This is the difference between cooperation within small groups and a whole society. By keeping competition for resources at the forefront those who are the “have nots” will be enhanced by competing for those resources. We have seen this with countless categories of immigrants. Irish and Italians no longer wanted to work in factories so they made the decisions that lead to getting out of those jobs. Asians work in nail salons and dry cleaners until they earn enough money to go to college or send their kids to college. Latinos move from agriculture to prominent places in society in a very short amount of time. This is what white and black people have forgotten. Both races have a sense of entitlement and believe that pulling yourself up the ladder is not that important. I’ve known many white people who are angry at outsourcing jobs to India or Mexicans who lower the market price of lawn work. They ask, why can’t I make a decent living as a programmer or why can’t I charge $60/hr to cut grass and make a decent living? Well this is what happens when you have too many people on the planet. According to the UN there are over 200 million people that are unemployed across the globe. That says that the planet has 200 million people too many, just for starters.

This leads us to my second point. Society means global, not just the United States. To spread the wealth around means hugging trees and singing kumbaya with the whole human race. Does Al-Qaeda deserve the same consideration your clan does? In a black and white world the answer is no. Even in a world with infinite shades of grey the answer is still no. Both the USSR and the EU have dabbled in socialism with less than stellar results. Presently the United States through capitalism has shown the greatest level of success for its people. You can’t get off the boat in France and become a millionaire in less than 20 years through hard work. Keep in mind that millions aren’t a lot in a world where a starter condo in the city will cost you more than half a million in most markets. China and Vietnam are communist on paper, but there has always been a system of payoffs and tipping to assure proper service. Since these are the two largest and most powerful Asian economies it stands to reason that the quality of life is coming up through capitalism modeled after the United States. The key objective is to put yourself in a position to better your situation, rather than thinking you can ride through life cutting grass for a living. Asians have long understood that you need to first go after what will enable you to improve your life, then pursue what you really like later on. I would also like to point out that the concept of clan transcends national boundaries. It’s a global economy and Americans will be working everywhere, therefore those that work abroad will need all their resources rather than having them redistributed to people who don’t live in the same country where they are working. When working in Dubai should we spread the wealth around to them as well as Americans? When enlarging wealth redistribution on a global scale it makes even less sense than doing it in one country. It also lends opportunity to keep those excess 200 million people alive who will be competing with your children for resources. Some liberals may think that socialism will create a safer world for the children, but instead it will lead to a world where eventual poverty will arise because there are more people in the world than there is food. This may take many years to reach this point, but it will happen. This is why the family unit must be strengthened to weather economic and environmental forces at work. Some people will die from disease, crime, war, drunk driving, etc. but that is a fact of life. Not everyone wins the lottery, and when the grand prize is getting struck by lightning you should be hoping that you not in that 576000:1 odds of winning range. The objective everyone should be seeking is to make sure that other people are the ones to fall while your entire extended family can weather the storm. You can’t fix everything and fixing people you don’t know personally can’t be a factor when you have family and friends to worry about. Just remember when bad things happen to other people it’s to your benefit, especially when you take steps to reduce the risk of those things affecting your clan.

In a counterpoint to Brother Grimm’s bad argument for socialized healthcare I would like to point out that the reasoning behind his bad argument are flawed. First of all Government should be minimalist and all of the Libertarian flaws that he points out regarding affordable roads and police forces are foolish. In is an inevitable fact every family will become more wealthy over time. I must qualify that “family” is meant in the Asian sense of the word to mean the entire clan, not just a mother, father, and immediate children. When wealth is pooled across an entire clan it is possible to afford private police forces and private road repair. Just look at many Asian communities and you will find private policing and private funding paving roads more often than the government does.

Back to the story of paying for other people’s health care there are many reasons why the government should not get their grubby hands on our clan’s money to pay for some other clan’s problems. First is the feasibility issue. In a clan structure you are indebted to your relatives to chip in where they chipped in for you. For example, if your 3 uncles helped pay for your college, then you need to chip in to help pay for their children’s college. Since you have no control over how many children they have had you might be chipping in quite a bit. You also have to look at the cost of private nursing when your elders become too old to take care of themselves. That is quite a burden on the individual and I’m not quite sure how one can afford to take care of their own family, pay for private police and roads, contribute to charitable causes and pay higher taxes to cover people that aren’t related to you and who aren’t going to be contributing to the success of your family.

Military Generals must make life and death decisions every day. CEO’s must decide what is worth it to the business. As an individual you are a General and CEO for your immediate family and if you are among your elder council you are the Board of Directors for your entire clan. Socialized medicine has no place in a world where you can ask The Board for help with your medical expenses. In addition as CEO of your household you have the responsibility to decide on the proper course of action. In the case of Tyler, his parents chose to engage in deficit spending based on human emotion and hope that things would end up ok. They ended up losing in the end and have a huge debt burden to cover now. How is this my problem? Is it my uncle’s problem? My 5 year old 1^st cousin’s problem? No, we aren’t related to the family in question, therefore we owe them nothing unless it is out of charity. As rulers of the household the parents could have came to the conclusion that there was no ROI to be had by spending money on treatment after the first round. Perhaps they may have opted out of treatment entirely or tried holistic medicine. Sometimes the responsible thing to do is say that treatment is not worth the burden it will place on our checkbook and our relative’s checkbook. Responsible does not always equal kind or fair, but life isn’t fair. Get over it.

Grimm is totally off base when he says it is time to step up.

If we are the nation that we all say that we are, it is time to step up, pitch in, make sure your friends and neighbors aren’t left to the tender mercies of Social Darwinism and come up with a solution. Insurance companies aren’t going to do it. Doctors and hospitals aren’t going to do it. We have to do it as one nation, under God (or Allah, Buddha, Vishnu, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Insert the deity of your choice here), indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, not just those who can afford it.

Darwinism is a necessity that human society has attempted to eliminate. The animal kingdom has gains and losses and attempts to tamper with the balance have resulted in the need to cull the herd. Deer populations have exploded with the elimination of natural predatory forces. As a result we have licensed slaughters of deer referred to as hunting season. Don’t think that communist countries magically solve all of society’s woes. Government run homeless shelters sometimes overflow leaving some people out on the street in the cold. What happens when you have too many people to take care of? In the Eastern Bloc communist party youth sometimes took to setting homeless people on fire to reduce the consumption on the system. That may not happen in America literally, but it shows that once the system is overloaded measures must be taken to bring it back into equilibrium. This may mean reducing coverage or creating a shortage, meaning long lines for critical care. The latter means that the government would deliberately create a shortage so many people would die off before money is spent on their treatment. That would be the same as figuratively setting people on fire, so you can say we’re a bit better off than the USSR was. In modern China the people have to buy their own insurance because the government coverage is useless. There is minimal government coverage for general practitioners and if you need a specialist you have to cover that yourself. That’s modern socialism for you. With economic theory the opportunity cost is what you give up to get something else. What socialized medicine does is it takes free will out of the individual’s opportunity cost analysis. There is no reason to give up some of your family’s wealth and comparative advantage to assist someone else. This is especially true when the world is facing a population crisis. We need more Darwinism and other population controls, not less. By maintaining the status quo we are maintaining an environmentally friendly platform. Most liberals are perfectly fine with abortion, but want to expend tons of resources once the child is born. Conservatives on the other hand are likely to take the opposite approach and expend tons of resources protecting an unborn human, but spend little on its development after it is born. We need to mesh both of these philosophies to reduce the population before it goes up and to get rid of some of the population that is here.

There comes a time it is not possible to justify the costs associated with a particular situation, no matter what that situation is. A company will not expend millions of dollars on a losing venture and will stop funding the effort once it is apparent that no amount of money thrown at the problem can turn the situation around. Insurance is referred to as a vehicle of Risk Transference. What is left over is residual risk; however, many people choose not to quantify those risks and choose to spend themselves into oblivion without stopping at a hard number. Socialized health care will result in shifting that decision out to a government bureaucrat who will be making those same life and death choices for you based on how much money is left in the pot. The situation is exactly the same after introducing socialized medicine. Since the situation will be exactly the same in the end, except that personal liberty will be reduced, and that we will be fighting against Darwinism when the human race is overpopulating the planet, there seems to be no reason to switch philosophies regarding the care of your fellow man. Therefore I believe it is ok to say, “Tough Shit” unlike Brother Grimm. That’s not to say I wouldn’t be swayed in the future. Check back in with me when we reduce the planet’s population by a minimum of 200 million.

Mohammad Ahmed, 32, and member of Generation X is a slacker that is suing Tesco over being made to carry alcohol in a warehouse.

He said: “It’s in our religion that we are not allowed to handle alcohol. In the UK there’s equal opportunities that should protect me and my beliefs.

“I was asking for my rights. I am not saying I am a perfect person but there was a conflict with my beliefs.”

There are equal opportunities for profit. Mr. Ahmed apparently does not want to partake in these opportunities. One thing Europe needs to realize is that China and the US are ahead of them culturally in the world of business. Even our immigrants understand the value of hard work, no matter what that work is. If you want to make it in the world you need money, a very simple fact. Mr. Ahmed is willing to put his religion ahead of profit which says he is lazy and wants to take a back seat to his future Chinese overlords.

Over 6000 Chinese children are sick after consuming contaminated baby formula. The food products were contaminated with melamine which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of dogs and cats in the US after corrupt officials turned a blind eye to spiking pet food with the chemical. It’s nice to see that Karma does exist in this world. No word on how many executives and government officials are going to face the firing squad.

A recent study has shown that high concentrations of soy foods results in reduced sperm count among test subjects. Anecdotally this does not really a appear to be a problem in Asian countries. If one were to look at the population of China then this would be quite apparent. More than likely any negative effects were bred out of the Asian population centuries ago. The studies appear to provide us with some insights in solving some of the greatest problems the world faces today. Overpopulation is one problem that we face. One group of people we can blame is religious fundamentalists. I’m speaking mainly of the Catholics and the Muslims. By banning contraception the Catholics have increased the typical family size to numbers beyond reason. This is resulted in famine and suffering in many parts of the catholic world. Muslims marry a large number of wives thus have a larger number of children. The fact that these two groups breed at an alarming rate is something that the rest of us should be deeply concerned over. The Asian solution is quite clear. For the good of the planet we should embark upon a campaign to provide a limitless supply of soy products to the Middle East and Latin America. By wiping out hunger now we will wipe out hunger in the future by reducing the population of two very troublesome groups that do not play well with others in their ecosystems. By reducing the population of Catholics we stand a better chance of saving the rain forest. By reducing the population of Muslims we reduce the number of suicide bombers which is a great thing for everyone.

More news from who cares department. According to the rumor mill McCain strategist, Charlie Black, said that an attack on US soil would help McCain in the election. For some reason people find the truth offensive. Here’s a little truth for you. Police like crime. If there were no crime then they wouldn’t be getting new cars every year, fancy equipment, or promotions. If crime drops then you have layoffs on the police department. It is a simple fact of life that some people make money directly or indirectly off other people’s misfortune. The security and counter terrorism industry started booming after 9/11 and if you are a stock holder in one of those companies you know that as long as there’s fear and hype of another attack you will be making money.

There is no morality in the issue as it is merely the way the universe works. Therefore Charlie Black did not really say anything offensive or morally wrong. It’s a simple fact that Americans like payback and if we are attacked before the election we’ll be calling to drop nukes on the most likely suspect country. Though now that McCain’s campaign has openly said this, it is almost assured that there won’t be an attack. Having McCain as President would be the absolute last thing Osama Bin Laden would want. The terrorists will be quiet until after the election.

Arizona Sen. John McCain refused to apologize yesterday for his use of a racial slur to condemn the North Vietnamese prison guards who tortured and held him captive during the war.

“I hate the gooks,” McCain said

Hats off to McCain.  Hey, if it walks like a gook and quacks like a gook then it is a gook.  He uses the slur, rightfully so, against North Vietnamese which is perfectly ok since they are not even human.  That’s right.  I said North Vietnamese are not even human.  They sided with Russia and China against the United States and France (ok I can forgive them for the latter) during the Vietnam War.  Is there any real reason we should say nice things about them?  I mean they lived in underground tunnels in the middle of a jungle.  How is that for advanced civilization?

“The use of a racist slur can’t be acceptable for any national leader, regardless of his background,” said Diane Chin, executive director of the San Francisco-based Chinese for Affirmative Action. “For someone running for president not to recognize the power of words is a problem.”

Diane Chin has proved that she is an absolute idiot.  If you are the leader of the country with the most nuclear warheads you can say what you want, but nuclear warheads aside it is perfectly acceptable to use any vocabulary you choose.  Why? Because of the first person point of view.  The first person point of view is always valid over all others.  If McCain wants to call them Gooks then that is perfectly valid.  If I want to call them Gooks too that is perfectly valid.  For someone to not recognize that their statements do not agree with John McCain or the mighty Quan Tran is a major problem.