Buying without Paying. Legally.

When you can "buy" a product or service you want but charge it to someone else who you think can afford it, you'll buy more than you would if you paid for it yourself...unless you aren't human. The overall cost of providing those products and services will go up, not down, because more will be purchased than otherwise would. I illustrated this in a "Produce Stand" fable some years ago.

This is the fundamental issue in the health insurance debate. Mandated insurance or government provided "insurance" (i.e. through Medicare or Medicaid) make you think you can buy the medical services while someone else pays the bill for you. Frankly, the more your insurance premiums rise, the more you feel "entitled" to get lots of medical services: you feel even more justified in running to the ER, or getting a second opinion, or getting that extra test, or trying the other medicine. But someone has to pay for all the services you are getting.

As John Stossel put it in a recent column,

Someone else paying changes our behavior. We don’t shop around. We don’t ask, “Do I really need that test?” “Is there a place where it’s cheaper?”

Imagine if you had “grocery insurance.” You’d buy expensive foods; supermarkets would never have sales. Everyone would spend more.

Following is his complete column (with my emphasis added) which I heartily recommend.
Curt
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Free Market Care

By John Stossel

Apr. 2, 2017

President Trump and Paul Ryan tried to improve Obamacare. They failed.

Trump then tweeted, “ObamaCare will explode and we will all get together and piece together a great healthcare plan for THE PEOPLE. Do not worry!”

But I do worry.

Trump is right when he says that Obamacare will explode.

The law mandates benefits and offers subsidies to more people. Insurers must cover things like:

—Birth control.

—Alcohol counseling.

—Depression screening.

—Diet counseling.

—Tobacco use screening.

—Breastfeeding counseling.

Some people want those things, but mandating them for everyone drives up costs. It was folly to pretend it wouldn’t.

Insisting that lots of things be paid for by someone else is a recipe for financial explosion.

Medicare works that way, too.

When I first qualified for it, I was amazed to find that no one even mentioned cost. It was just, “Have this test!” “See this doctor!”

I liked it. It’s great not to think about costs. But that’s why Medicare will explode, too. There’s no way that, in its current form, it will be around to fund younger people’s care.

Someone else paying changes our behavior. We don’t shop around. We don’t ask, “Do I really need that test?” “Is there a place where it’s cheaper?”

Hospitals and doctors don’t try very hard to do things cheaply.

Imagine if you had “grocery insurance.” You’d buy expensive foods; supermarkets would never have sales. Everyone would spend more.

Insurance coverage — third-party payment — is revered by the media and socialists (redundant?) but is a terrible way to pay for things.

Today, seven in eight health care dollars are paid by Medicare, Medicaid or private insurance companies. Because there’s no real health care market, costs rose 467 percent over the last three decades.

By contrast, prices fell in the few medical areas not covered by insurance, like plastic surgery and LASIK eye care. Patients shop around, forcing health providers to compete.

The National Center for Policy Analysis found that from 1999 to 2011 the price of traditional LASIK eye surgery dropped from over $2,100 to about $1,700.

Obamacare pretended government controls could accomplish the same thing, but they couldn’t.

The sickest people were quickest to sign up. Insurance companies then raised rates to cover their costs. When regulators objected, many insurers just quit Obamacare.

[Last] month Humana announced it’ll leave 11 states.

Voters will probably blame Republicans.

Insurance is meant for catastrophic health events, surprises that cost more than most people can afford. That does not include birth control and diet counseling.

The solution is to reduce, not increase, government’s control. We should buy medical care the way we buy cars and computers — with our own money.

Our employers don’t pay for our food, clothing and shelter; they shouldn’t pay for our health care. They certainly shouldn’t get a tax break for buying insurance while individuals don’t.

Give tax deductions to people who buy their own high-deductible insurance.

Give tax benefits to medical savings accounts. (Obamacare penalizes them.)

Allow insurers to sell across state lines. Current law forbids that, driving up costs and leaving people with fewer choices.

What about the other “solution” — Bernie Sanders' proposal of single-payer health care for all? Sanders claims other countries “provide universal health care … while saving money.”

But that’s not true.

Well, other countries do spend less. But they get less.

What modern health care they do get, they get because they freeload off our innovation. Our free market provides most of the world’s new medical devices and medicines.

Also, “single-payer” care leads to rationing.

Here’s a headline from Britain’s Daily Mail: “Another NHS horror story from Wales: Dying elderly cancer patient left ‘screaming in pain’ … for nine hours.”

Britain’s official goal is to treat people four months after diagnosis. Four months! That’s only the “goal.” They don’t even meet that standard.

Bernie Sanders' plan has been tried, and it’s no cure.

If it were done to meet American expectations, it would be ludicrously expensive. In 2011, clueless progressives in Bernie’s home state of Vermont voted in “universal care.” But they quickly dumped it when they figured out what it would cost. Didn’t Bernie notice?

It’s time to have government do less.

COPYRIGHT 2017 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

Orwell's 1984 in Living Color?

The protestors of today want to make parallels between the story "1984" and the current administration. Amazing how inaccurate this is! Professor Schlueter writes much better than I, so I will just encourage you to read his article from National Review, copied below for your convenience. 

Curt

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The True Lessons of 1984

The novel is a warning against socialism that Democrats should heed.

By Nathan Schlueter — February 9, 2017

One of the most intriguing developments in our current unpredictable political climate has been the Left’s co-opting of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 as a dramatic warning of the dangers of the Trump administration. The book has surged to first place on Amazon’s best-seller list, and a stage production is in the works. Michiko Kakutani’s recent New York Times article “Why ‘1984’ Is a 2017 Must-Read” highlights the kind of connections liberals are making between, say, Kellyanne Conway’s appeal to “alternative facts” and “Newspeak,” the reductive language of 1984 designed to “narrow the range of thought.”

I, for one, wholeheartedly endorse Kakutani’s suggestion that people take up and read 1984, not only because any increase in substantive reading by ordinary Americans is a good thing, but also because readers may discover there something quite different from what they are being lead to expect, something that they have great need to know. 1984 is not a warning against populist despotism, troubling as that possibility may be. It is a warning against socialism, whose inner dynamic always tends towards totalitarianism.
Begin with a fact that virtually every recent piece on 1984 fails to mention: The governing philosophy of Oceania is “English Socialism.” The ruler of Oceania, Big Brother, with his “heavy black mustache,” looks unmistakably like Joseph Stalin; members of the Party address one another as “Comrade”; and the non-party members of Oceania are called “proles” (short for proletariat), an allusion that clearly identifies the provenance of the ideas Orwell is criticizing. From its opening lines, 1984 captures the grim atmosphere and grinding poverty of socialism: “Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled in his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.” The description could fit any city behind the Iron Curtain.
1984 can fruitfully be read alongside two other warnings against socialist totalitarianism, F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) and C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (1943), which were published several years before 1984 (1949).
In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek traces the logic that leads from socialism to totalitarianism. Socialism seeks to overcome the greed, waste, competitiveness, and inequality generated by the free market with central economic planning by administrative and regulatory “experts.” But whoever controls the means of life, Hayek observed, necessarily controls the ends of life. Moreover, central planning, because it requires minute and particular decisions by some centralized political authority, is incompatible with the rule of law and limited government. The concentration and exercise of power required by central planning explains “Why the Worst Get on Top,” as one chapter puts it.
Oceania, with its Ministry of Truth, Ministry of Peace, and Ministry of Love, with its constantly shifting quotas and rations of coffee, gin, shoes, and cigarettes, where “nothing [is] illegal, since there [are] no longer any laws” (but where one can still be “punished by death”), where the rulers live in luxury while systematically depriving others of basic needs, where all mediating institutions between the state and the individual have been crowded out, eroded, or deliberately destroyed, exemplifies the bureaucratic and despotic nightmare of centralized planning. As the book describing the aims of Oceania’s Party states: “It had long been recognized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called ‘abolition of private property’ which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before.”
Hayek shows why the central planning required by socialism ultimately undermines its own ends. And indeed, the socialist Party in Oceania only nominally pursues the original goals of socialism. This fact perplexes the protagonist of 1984, Winston Smith: “I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY,” he writes in his diary.
The deep roots of this “why” can be found in C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. There Lewis uncovers the philosophical roots of socialist totalitarianism: Francis Bacon’s scientific project to conquer nature for the relief of human suffering. That project entails a reconceptualization of nature, from an intelligible order of formal and final causes to mere matter in motion that must be “tortured” by human technology to reveal its secrets. To assist this project, Bacon in his New Atlantis invented a new form of literature, “science fiction,” in which he celebrated the complete scientific domination of nature.
But as Lewis’s argument suggests, the culmination of the Baconian project is not New Atlantis but 1984. On the one hand, Lewis points out that technology never simply increases “mankind’s” power over nature. It always only increases the power of some men over other men. Moreover, nature as Bacon conceived of it excludes the possibility of a “natural moral law” (what Lewis called the “Tao”) that might restrain and guide “nature,” or raw appetite. Left unchecked, therefore, the Baconian project of increasing man’s power over “nature” must eventually result in the victory of “nature” over man.
This victory of “nature” over man does not consist in the denial of this or that particular truth (for example, the size of the crowd at a presidential inauguration), as troubling as that might be; it rests on the denial of the possibility of truth. Confidence that truth exists is the foundation for Winston’s hope that the Party will one day be defeated. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows,” he writes in his diary. The same point is made by John Paul II in Centesimus Annus: “Totalitarianism arises out of a denial of truth in the objective sense.”
The concept of truth entails the possibility that the mind can conform correctly (or incorrectly) to extra-mental reality, and therefore that there is something in nature (and human nature) that can resist domination and control. But as Immanuel Kant clearly saw (the epigraph for his First Critique is from Bacon), Baconian science rests on the assumption that reality conforms to the mind, not the mind to reality. This is not far from the claim that the mind makes reality.
O’Brien, the novel’s voice of the socialist Party, denies that there is any “objective reality” apart from the mind. “Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else,” he tells Winston. “You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of nature. We make the laws of nature.” O’Brien’s aim is to “cure” Winston of the “insane” belief that there is any reality apart from his will. O’Brien makes clear to Winston what this surrender will mean. “Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling,” he tells Winston. “Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity.” Is this the ultimate consequence of an educational system predicated upon cultural relativism and the systematic denial that truth exists?
There is one other source of hope for Winston: “If there is hope it lies in the proles.”Unlike the members of the Party, the proles are given almost complete freedom to travel, buy, sell, trade, and otherwise spend their leisure. Winston is attracted to a natural goodness he sees in the proles. He writes in his diary about watching a violent war film that features the dismemberment of small children by a bomb. The audience cheers, “but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of the kids they didnt it aint right not in front of the kids it aint until the police turned her out.”
Later, observing with “mystical reverence” a prole woman singing outside his window as she hangs her laundry, he comments: “The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing. . . . You were dead; theirs [i.e., the proles’] was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two makes four.” Winston’s arrest occurs immediately after this episode.
But Orwell shows the reader the proles alone are not a real alternative to totalitarianism, but a complement to it. Although the Party does not directly control the proles, it rules them inwardly by feeding them on a steady diet of mass-engineered sentimental music and pornographic literature. This along with “films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling filled the horizon of their minds.” Orwell highlights the fact that the proles are also without a conception of truth, because they lack the capacity for making the kind of universal judgments that truth requires, and “being without general ideas, they could only focus [their discontent] on petty specific grievances.” At one point Winston attempts to learn from an old prole what life was like before the revolution, but all he can get are particular descriptions: “A sense of helplessness took hold of Winston. The old man’s memory was nothing but a rubbish heap of details. One could question him all day without getting any real information.” Expressive individualism, fed on Hollywood pop culture, assists, rather than resists, totalitarianism.
In the end, 1984 is an unbelievably dark novel, but there are moments of light, and those moments are instructive. What they show is that the prospects for resistance to socialist totalitarianism rest in fundamentally conservative sentiments and ideas. Those sentiments and principles consist in the affirmation of transpolitical goods that set firm limits to political authority. Two of these moments are worth mentioning.
One day while surreptitiously exploring the shops in the prole part of town, Winston comes across a heavy lump of glass with a pink piece of sea coral in its center. He is immediately attracted to it, and purchases it. “What appealed to him about it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one. . . . The thing was doubly attractive because of its apparent uselessness, though he could guess that it must once have been intended as a paperweight.” Orwell then adds: “It was a queer thing, even a compromising thing, for a Party member to have in his possession. Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect.”
In this moment Winston transcends the Baconian conception of nature that surrounds him. The coral at the center of the glass ball exemplifies nature, and the glass ball exemplifies culture. Coral is the skeleton of a sea polyp, which — to quote Shakespeare on coral in another place – “suffers a sea change / Into something rich and strange” (The Tempest I, ii, 399–400). Coral points to the ultimate beneficence of nature, to its capacity to bring beauty even out of death. The purpose of the glass ball, a work of art, is not to use up or destroy the coral, but to preserve it and to present it for human contemplation.
The paperweight is a symbolic education in limited government. It reflects not Bacon’s godless nature, but “nature and Nature’s God,” which point to goods like beauty and truth that transcend, and therefore set limits to, politics. But in 1984 even the comfort of this experience is fleeting. When Winston is later arrested, someone smashes the paperweight on the hearthstone. “The fragment of coral, a tiny crackle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it was!”
The other moment involves Winston’s romance with Julia. One of the aims of the Party is to control and direct the sexual impulses of its members through arranged marriages and organizations like the Junior Anti-Sex League, of which Julia is a leader even as she covertly despises it. When they first secretly meet in the country for a sexual liaison, Winston asks Julia, “You like doing this? I don’t mean simply me; I mean the thing itself?” Julia responds, “I adore it.” Orwell then writes: “This was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: That was the force that would tear the Party to pieces. . . . Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.”
In a very uncharacteristic misinterpretation, C. S. Lewis in The Four Loves took Orwell to task for this reductionistic depiction of sexual desire. But in fact Orwell subtly acknowledges the poverty of this initial opinion and gradually corrects it. The real danger of sexual desire for totalitarianism, Orwell suggests, is not the sexual act itself (after all, the proles have plenty of that) but the intrinsic tendency of sexual desire towards the transpolitical good of a community of persons rooted in exclusivity, permanence, and domesticity. Legal marriage being made impossible by the Party, Winston and Julia secretly rent a room in the prole section of town, where they dress up, dream, and enact the private life of a married couple. And it is precisely through this friendship that they decide to engage in a revolt against the Party, knowing that it will eventually mean their death.
In conclusion, the person reading 1984 for insight into America’s current political situation should ask a number of questions: Which political party had a leading presidential candidate proudly declare himself to be a socialist? Which party’s president consistently sought to expand the regulatory administrative state, often by lawless means? Which party dominates the institutions of higher learning, where the possibility of truth has been consistently undermined by assumptions of skepticism, scientism, and value relativism, and where utility has replaced contemplation as the end of education? Which party controls America’s public-school system, where these same ideas are consistently promoted? Which party is most closely associated with Hollywood’s celebration of sexual liberation and sentimentalism? Finally, which party has sought to elevate the state over God by coercing private individuals to violate their consciences?
In sum, if 1984 has a practical lesson, it is this: There is a world of difference between a despotism dedicated to the expansion of socialism through federal-government power and a despotism dedicated to dismantling it. The former suffocates; the latter, though not without its serious dangers, just might create room to breathe. Conservatives must work to ensure that this breathing space becomes the occasion for the revival of true conservative ideas, principles, and sentiments.
— Nathan Schlueter is a professor of philosophy and religion at Hillsdale College. His most recent book is Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives: The Foundations of the Libertarian–Conservative Debate, written with Nikolai Wenzel.

When it Was Trump, That Was Different

According to the "Mainstream [can we really still call them that?] Media" and other self-righteous leftists, when Trump implied he might act like Al Gore and not "accept" the results of the election without question, he was extreme, offensive and a threat to democracy. What  an ironic week this has turned out to be, well-said and well-illustrated by the following humorists. Enjoy!
Curt

“Quite frankly, you gotta' watch what you say nowadays. There are a lot of people out there with love in their heart who wish you dead if you don’t have as much love in your heart as they do.” —Dennis Miller

Spare Us Your Indignation!

The conservative voters who didn't consolidate the vote around the viable conservative candidate early in the primary process are, I hope, learning a very painful lesson. How many election cycles does it take to learn that when we have a legitimate shot with a good candidate in the early primaries, we should stop splitting our vote among the various flavors and shades of conservatives.

One of two people will be POTUS in January, and I am conscience-bound to vote for the candidate least likely to use the power of the presidency to harm Christianity and the freedom of individuals to lovingly exercise and share it. The most important issue in this presidential election is whether there will be five individuals who believe they are the Supreme Legislative Body empowered to impose their vision of social justice, diversity and deviancy on us all.

Nate Jackson makes some excellent points in the following column. I may be more disgusted than he seems to be with Trump. Donald is immoral and insufficiently repentant. But either he or Hillary will be president, those are your only two choices. And when it comes to their records and promises regarding governing, the least-destructive choice is still clear.

Curt
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Donald's Boorish Comments and Bill's Criminal Actions

Nate Jackson · Oct. 9, 2016

Hillary Clinton and her Leftmedia super PAC got their dream candidate. We warned throughout the primary that the Leftmedia wanted Donald Trump as the Republican nominee because stories like the one that broke Friday afternoon would help boost Clinton, an incredibly weak candidate. And indeed, the Left couldn’t ask for a better October surprise than to be able to run headline after headline about Trump’s awful comments and GOP leaders withdrawing their support and calling for the nominee to step aside.

We’ll leave Trump’s actual lewd and despicable comments for others to repeat, but the reason they’re so devastating is, as Andrew McCarthy put it, “[T]he power of a tape to make its mark on our consciousness is simply unequaled by written and oral descriptions.”

In any case, there are a couple of primary takeaways. First, Trump is Trump, and he’s never going to change. If that wasn’t clear before, well … it should have been. Second, for Clinton and her Leftmedia allies, this is all about women voters. How they feel about Trump will either depress his support and/or increase Clinton’s. She’s depending on women to win.

But we’ll say this to Clinton and her leftist gaggle: Spare us your indignation. What Trump said and did is horrible and inexcusable. But Bill Clinton raped several women, had an affair with another in the Oval Office itself, and Hillary Clinton viciously attacked those women in public in a craven attempt to save her own political future. This was consistent with her character, too. As a young lawyer, Clinton defended a child rapist, happily destroying the victim’s character in the process. As the nation’s top diplomat, Clinton broke federal law regarding classified information, endangering national security, and she ran a pay-to-play operation called the Clinton Foundation. What Trump said 11 years ago doesn’t change the fact that Clinton is manifestly unfit for office. And either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is going to be president come January. Make your choice, America.

Not Voting for the Lesser Evil is to Vote for the Greater Evil

I didn't vote for Trump in the primary. I would have preferred most of the other candidates. But in November, we have to vote for or against Hillary Clinton, who is a known commodity. The only way to vote against Clinton is to vote for Trump, a rather unknown commodity who has made some pretty good promises (such as with respect to the Supreme Court) and selected a very solid running mate.

Following is a thoughtful column which I believe states a good case for why all Christians and conservatives must vote for Trump in the general election. This is going to be the first of several such postings. If your conscience is troubled by the thought of voting for Trump, read on.

Curt

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From #NeverTrump to #NeverClinton

Vote for the Supreme Court! Choosing not to vote for the "lesser of two evils" is a vote for the greater of those evils.

By Mark Alexander · July 27, 2016   

"In the midst of these pleasing ideas we should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections." —John Adams (1797)

(Aggravation Alert: I have received a considerable number of objections from fellow Patriots this year complaining either that my analysis of Donald Trump was too hard or too soft. This column is directed at those who believe either one to be true — the #NeverClinton and #NeverTrump folks who plan to abstain or vote for a third-party candidate.)

It's no small irony that the Socialist Democratic Party is hosting its confab in Philadelphia this week, the cradle of Liberty and Rule of Law.

On the opening night, Bernie Sanders, the candidate who was narrowly defeated by Clinton thanks to hacked DNC emails indicating they rigged the primary, offered this assessment of the last eight years: "Together, my friends, we have begun a political revolution to transform America, and that revolution — our revolution — continues."

If that sounds familiar, it should. That "political revolution to transform America" would be the fulfillment of Obama's 2008 campaign promise of "fundamentally transforming the United States of America."

On the other hand, Republicans should be debating the re-election of Mitt Romney this year, but we aren't. Here's why.

Without debating Romney's merits all over again, the reason that the contest this year is not between Romney/Ryan and Clinton/Kaine is because millions of "faith and values" voters chose to sit it out in 2012. Weeks before the 2012 election, I had a very intelligent young Christian woman ask a question far too typical of evangelicals: "Can you really vote for a Mormon?"

Of course, in addition to those evangelicals, there were also millions of principled conservatives who didn't cast their ballots in 2012, protesting that Romney was a centrist, moderate, Northeastern elitist.

So how did that work out?

Four more years of Barack Obama's colossal failures in both domestic and foreign policy.

Let's review.

Obama's domestic policies have been defined by his litany of lies and legacy of scandals, most notably the failure of his so-called "economic recovery" plan; his long list of ObamaCare lies; his IRS Enemies List targeting conservatives; his "Fast and Furious" gun control ploy; the VA death panels cover-up; the immigration crisis on our southern border, and the long-overdue resignation of his corrupt attorney general, Eric Holder.

The Obama-Clinton foreign policy malfeasance is unparalleled in American history, including the Benghazi cover-up ahead of the 2012 election; the "Russian Spring" in Crimea; the hollow "Red Line" in the Syrian sand; the Middle East meltdown in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Jordan and Gaza; the disintegration of Iraq; the dramatic resurgence of al-Qa'ida; the rise of the Islamic State; and the re-emergence of Iran as the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, which is now metastasizing into Western Europe and North America.

All that being the case, once again, millions of conservatives are reluctant to vote because the choices are the assurance of extending Obama's disgraceful legacy for four more years under a Clinton regime or the prospect that Donald Trump will prove to be the "lesser of two evils" come January 2017.

For value and principle conservatives wrestling with whether to vote for Trump or not at all, political philosophers and moral theologians have written for generations about the "incommensurability in values," or, in common parlance, choosing between the lesser of two evils.

Some of my conservative friends subscribe to the observation of 19th century British theologian Charles Spurgeon, who wrote, "Of two evils, choose neither." But Spurgeon's words, as related to evil actions, are taken out of context in reference to civic duty. Of such duties, Spurgeon said, "I would not, however, say ... despise the privilege which you have as citizens."

The question of voting for Trump is no quandary for me.

While I understand well the nature of presidential character, and believe both Clinton and Trump fall substantially short of that character, I also understand that the outcome of the November election will not only determine our president for at least the next four years, but also the composition of the Supreme Court for at least the next quarter-century. Think about that before you decide to stay home this year or to cast a "protest vote" for a third-party candidate.

On this point, I would state emphatically that those who choose to sit this election out or "choose neither" are making a choice. In fact, I would argue that handing this election to Hillary Clinton is far more evil than choosing the lesser of the two. If you can't vote for Trump, then at least vote against Clinton. If you can't vote for Trump, then at least vote for the Supreme Court. And make no mistake: A vote this year for a third-party candidate in any state where the Clinton v Trump contest is close constitutes a vote for Clinton and a third term for Obama. Period.

After the conservative congressional advances across the nation in 2010 and 2014, despite the needless presidential loss in 2012, throwing this year's contest to Clinton would be disastrous.

Conservative political analyst Dennis Prager wrote a letter "To My Conservative #NeverTrump Friends," in which he makes the case for supporting Trump:

"The 'conscience' argument that one can sleep with a clear conscience by not voting for Trump [asserts] that your conscience is clear after making it possible for Clinton to win. ... In the 2016 presidential race, I am not interested in moral purity. I am interested in defeating the left and its party, the Democratic Party. The notion ... that we can live with another four years of a Democratic president is, forgive me, mind-boggling. To that end ... multiple additional leftists on the Supreme Court, a Republican presidential victory in 2020 would mean nothing. ... Left-wing judges pass so many left-wing laws that they render those who control Congress, and even the White House, almost irrelevant. I just don't understand how anyone who understands the threat the left and the Democrats pose on America will refuse to vote for the only person who can stop them."

(Notably, Prager argues that Trump's convention speech was not "dark enough.")

Last week, Donald Trump delivered his GOP convention acceptance speech, outlining in the broadest terms what his objectives would be if elected president.

This week, Hillary Clinton will conclude the DNC convention with a similar speech, promising mostly the antithesis of the Trump platform. And it is unlikely that any of her adoring media will highlight her extensive record of incompetence and lawlessness.

In advance of Clinton's diatribe, we compiled a list of questions for consideration by those who are not yet committed to vote for Trump. Our editors have expanded that list to include the following questions:

Who will achieve more with Republicans in Congress?

Who will nominate judges for the federal bench and Supreme Court who will uphold Rule of Law?

Who is more likely to formulate and enforce stronger foreign policy in an effort to restore America's standing in the world?

Who is more likely to seek to begin rebuilding America's military might?

Who is more likely to implement policies to protect America and the West from catastrophic terrorist attacks?

Who is more likely to clearly identify the greatest ideological threat to the West as "Islamic extremism"?

Who is more likely to treat our nation's military personnel and veterans with the dignity and respect they have earned?

Who is more likely to enforce immigration laws and protect American borders?

Who is more likely to support the Second Amendment?

Who is more likely to reduce taxes?

Who is more likely to balance a budget?

Who is more likely to address our ruinous national debt?

Who is more likely to be a better communicator of free market principles?

Who is more likely to reduce oppressive central government regulations?

Who is more likely to repeal ObamaCare and implement market solutions for health care?

Who is more likely to repeal the onerous Dodd-Frank regulations?

Who has more experience creating and protecting American jobs?

Who is more likely to promote Americanism rather than globalism?

Who is more likely to flex American muscle when dealing with foreign tyrants?

Who is more likely to aggressively pursue energy exploration?

Who is more likely to re-write trade agreements that undermine the U.S. economy?

Who is more likely to populate their administration with free enterprise advocates?

Who is more likely to advocate for retention of Republican majorities in the House and Senate?

Who is more likely to resist the influence of Wall Street?

Who is more likely to reject Obama's unconstitutional executive overreach?

Who is more likely to denounce Black Lives Matter and other Democrat Party fronts seeking to disunite America?

I'm sure you can add to this list, and I'm equally sure that Trump will fare better across the board than Clinton.

In her convention remarks, Michelle Obama declared, "This election ... is about who will have the power to shape our children for the next four or eight years of their lives." Indeed it is, and well into the next generation. Will our children and their children fare better with leadership from Democrats on the Left or Republicans on the Right?

So to my fellow conservatives who don't plan to vote in 2016, I ask the following: What will our nation look like in 2020? How about 2030?

I ask this question not only as a citizen and fellow Patriot, but also as one who, like many other Patriots, has family blood on the line in this election. As the father of a young Marine who is bound by oath to "Support and Defend" our Constitution, I am, like so many of you, deeply concerned about who will be our next commander in chief.

The last seven years have been very demoralizing for those of us who are in the trenches every day advocating for Liberty. But take heart. While Liberty is eternal, the contest to maintain its beacon of freedom is also eternal, and sitting this election out or voting for a third-party candidate in a closely contested state only makes that contest more difficult.

Finally, the Demos are very divided. Let's finish them off. Hillary Clinton is a deeply flawed status quo candidate in an election year for change. My advice to anyone who hasn't yet committed to vote for Trump and the Supreme Court, or at least vote against Clinton: Embrace the suck. Just do it, and convince everyone you know to do the same.

Democrat Perspective: Shape Our Children

During her speech at the Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama declared: 

This election ... is about who will have the power to shape our children for the next four or eight years of their lives.

Of course she says that as if the obvious response would be, "Oh, you're right. We must vote for Hillary!" And from the faithful delegates of the DNC - who not incidentally  booed loudly during the invocation opening the convention - no doubt Michelle evoked that response.  

But reading her statement (of course I did not listen to any of the convention!) inspired a couple of thoughts in me as well.

1. Who has the power to shape our children? In the mind of leftists, the government. Not parents. Not pastors. Not aunts, uncles and grandparents. No, the federal government "shapes our children." This is the fulfillment of the vision of Marx, John Dewey, and other proponents of centralized control. Was any Democrat delegate in that convention hall the least bit disturbed by this concept? Apparently not. The fact that half of our nation embraces this concept is alarming.

2. On another hand, she is right. The President does have an ability to influence the lives of our children. For example, the President can direct his Department of Justice to threaten all public schools in the nation with legal action if they keep boys out of the girl's locker rooms and restrooms. The President can choose not to enforce immigration laws, and thus allow (a) illegal aliens to roam our country robbing and killing innocent people, and (b) non-tax-paying aliens to flood the public school system and rob it of the resources available to law abiding citizens. The President can veto good laws, and arm-twist legislators into passing bad ones, which deprive you of freedom to choose your doctor, which wreak economic devastation on the country, which reward non-workers and punish workers, and which shift the burden of today's vote-buying expenditures onto the backs of our children as the next generation of workers. We could go on, of course. So yes, perhaps Michelle was right. The President does have an ability to shape our children's lives.

3. Finally, perhaps she understated the case. Not just for four or eight years, but the next President will appoint federal judges who will support the constitution, preserve the liberties expressly stated in the Bill of Rights, and enforce the laws enacted by our representatives (such as Thomas, Alito and the late Scalia) or re-write laws against the will of the democratically elected representatives (think of more justices like Ginsburg, Kagan, Sotomayor, Kennedy and Breyer). That means the President gets to shape the world in which our children will live for at least 25 - 30 years.

The stakes in the election could not be higher. Trump was not my choice. I would have preferred any of at least a dozen of the original Republican candidates. But I am voting #NeverHillary in this election. And anything other than a vote for Trump would be a vote for Hillary.

Breeding crises to cure

We are manufacturing problems for ourselves. Then politicians are careful not to "waste a good crisis."

We pretend that humans are immune from powerful sexual desires. Worse than merely sticking our heads in the sand, we actively fan the flames of such desires with all sorts of images, music, movies and even public policy pronouncements. While fanning such flames on one hand, we simultaneously ridicule timeless principles of sexual restraint and the beauty of committed monogamy.

Those who claim to have won the culture war are doing everything they can to encourage unrestrained sexual activity. In most areas of the law, solicitation to commit a crime is itself a crime. So how can tempting people to behave as animals with regard to sexuality be considered good public policy?

Why is this on my mind? Senator Kirk brought it up. He wrote the following:

Dear Mr. Ferguson,

Studies show the prevalence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among sexual assault survivors in the military is higher than that for those who saw combat. Thousands of servicemen and women have been unfairly discharged from the military based on questionable mental health conditions or minor misconduct related to the assault.   

In this year’s annual defense authorization bill, which passed the Senate earlier this month, I cosponsored an amendment with Senator Gillibrand (D-NY) that would expand protections against wrongful discharges for those with PTSD. This includes service men and women who were sexually assaulted as well as those who saw combat. The provision ensures that if a medical professional diagnoses PTSD based on combat service or sexual assault, that the military member cannot be discharged for non-disability mental health conditions.     

The Department of Defense (DOD) estimates there are over 20,000 sexual assaults annually and nearly 8 out of 10 of those attacked do not report the incident. Despite recent Congressional reforms, more should be done to take care of servicemen and women who have been assaulted and to ensure the Department is doing everything to prosecute their offenders. 

Sincerely,
Senator Mark Kirk

Is it just possible that the centuries-old wisdom of not mixing men and women in far away places under strenuous conditions was and is still good policy? Likewise, to exclude from such circumstances people who assert they are sexually drawn to those of the same sex?

Senator Kirk and the rest of the liberals who are using our military for social experimentation should step back and consider: when on a wrong road, you don't get to a good place by increasing speed or determination. The wise person (as C.S. Lewis said, the most "progressive" person) turns back toward the right route.

Sadly, these politicians aren't on a road they even consider wrong, because their agenda isn't to get to a good place. It is to make a majority of voters animal-like, to justify controlling us all by force.