It looks obvious

I tend to accept Fred Thompson’s denial of his alleged support of the so called fair tax:

Former Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., appears to have flip flopped on his pledge to sign federal legislation replacing all federal taxes with a 23 percent sales tax, according to an unedited FairTax.org video reviewed by ABC News.

"He has not taken this pledge," Thompson spokesperson Linda Rozett told ABC News.

Currently Fred Thompson is very careful not to say anything of real substance, and with great success, so why should taxation be any different?

This sound like a good advise, maybe because I argued the same here before…

But instead of trying to find another Reagan, Republicans might be better advised to find a conservative icon of an earlier vintage: Barry Goldwater.

Goldwater, of course, may be a puzzling model for conservatives looking to retain the presidency in 2008. The Arizona senator was walloped at the hands of President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. The senator known as "Mr. Conservative" lost all but six states and garnered only 39 percent of the popular vote.

But students of history know just how important the Goldwater candidacy was for the future of American conservatism. The loss of Goldwater laid the intellectual groundwork for the notions of small government, less taxation and muscular foreign policy that begat the Reagan landslides in 1980 and 1984, as well as the Republican Revolution in 1994, which ended 40 years of mostly Democratic rule in Congress.  

And the GOP doesn’t need to look far to find a new Goldwater, They already have one already among the candidates.

I really hope that this report is wrong, I have a lot of sympathy to Yahoo and I like using its services. If it is true some people at Yahoo should ask themselves when they look in the mirror if it worth loosing their soul for few more dollars.

An email subpoena sent to Yahoo! China, which led Chinese authorities to sentence journalist Shi Tao to 10 years in prison for distributing information about the Tiananmen massacre, contradicts what a Yahoo executive told Congress.

The document requested identifying information on an email account used to send prohibited political information to a democracy group, saying the information was necessary to investigate a person suspected of "illegal provision of state secrets to foreign entities."  However, Yahoo General Counsel Michael Callahan told Congress in 2006 that the company "had no information about the nature of the investigation" before it handed over account information to the police.  

I am not concerned so much about the possible false testimony - I don’t think that the US congress has the right to question Yahoo activities abroad; nor does it have the moral justification while it require the same companies to do the same through the Patriot Act. What I found sad it the willingness of companies, and mostly of some executives, to sell their soul for good quarterly report.

I like Microsoft’s SQL Reporting Services. It is a nice tool that allow me to roll tools to users fast. I usually use the reports at the beginning of projects as a way to understand the real needs, while providing a first phase useable tools. The relative easiness producing report also allow me allocating developer times better by building the report by analyst and not by programmers.

That being said I really don’t understand why can’t Microsoft get over themselves and avoid producing confusing, and unnecessary, additional functions and buttons. If someone will be able to explain why does any user need two different button - "refresh" and "View Report" button beside of the obvious reason of confusing the hell of them?

One of the most compelling arguments, used by those who favored nationalized health care system, is that health is not profitable. Therefore leaving the sick and old in the hands of companies that tries to maximize revenue and profit, even in a competitive market, often leave those who are in need with less than desired service. The only way to provide good, and fair, health service is to remove the profit motives from the system - or in other wards make it a service provided by the state.

However what this argument doesn’t revel is the fact that nationalizing health care systems doesn’t eliminate the economical considerations,  it just shifting them to the government. After all, the fact that one doesn’t pay directly for health services, either through insurance or directly to the service provider, doesn’t make the service itself free of cost - it just shift the cost somewhere else. Even if we remove the doubt that governmental program will be more efficient in allocating resources, We cannot ignore the fact that the allocation of resources isn’t infinite. And as always, decision making about allocation of scarce resources requires prioritization. 

Such prioritization will include cost benefit analysis - or in other words which are the most important services we can provide with the budget we allocated for health care. And while nationalized health care might have some benefits of broader access, although I seriously doubt it, it is coming at a cost - setting the priorities for one’s health is invoked by bureaucratic system that might have different consideration about spending his/her tax money. 

It isn’t that the American Health Care system is working, evidence probably will suggest the contrary. However it is debatable if what we see is a cause (Free Market) and effect (low level of health care system).  However, arguing that nationalize health care system purify the decision making from economical decision is wrong. The prioritization of scarce resources leads to:

I asked them if they liked their health care system. They all said yes, very much, particularly for the day to day needs and common procedures like childbirth. However, they also told me the system breaks down when you get really sick. There’s just not enough money for treating terminal diseases and so they "just let you die".

How important is it, for the society as a whole, that an old women will get hearing device? how critical is it, for national health care? obviously, and understandably,  not so much:

A woman aged 108 has been told she must wait 18 months before the Health Service will give her the hearing aid she needs.

Former piano teacher Olive Beal, one of the oldest people in Britain, has poor eyesight and uses a wheelchair.

The delay could mean she will be unable to communicate and listen to the music she loves.  

But how important is it to the old lady? would she allocate her resources differently? most likely.

There is a lot to say about innovation, drug development and improvement under nationalize system compared with relatively free market system, but I’m trying to gather more data to demonstrate my point of view.

Does Romney belong to the same party that Ronald Reagan was? The President that said that he: "I don’t believe in a government that protects us from ourselves."; The President that coined:

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’

Romney symbols the deterioration from Party that advocate for personal freedom to a party of authoritarian people who will try to run your life. The coming election representing the choice not between smaller or bigger government, not between Capitalism and free market against Social Democracy and Welfare State but between who will run our life - social conservatives or social-democrats.  

Scary!

We took Ronie to an amusement park for the first time today, and the mutual pleasure was great.

More Pictures, as always, can be found here.

This was a very rough week, and it is still not over. Problems at work that had operational consequences and that had to be dealt with immediately, with the obvious pressure for fast solutions. It is Friday afternoon and I’m starting to fill the weight of the long week. No wonder than that what I’m doing now is bothering my wife at work with plans to go to vacation in Santorini or Tuscany.

Maybe next year, because in November I’m going to be in Israel.

. . . like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master. You now have your freedom–if you can keep it. But do remember that you can lose this freedom more quickly to yourselves than to any other tyrant.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

After I linked to reviews about Harry Potter’s Libertarianism and to the different approaches for individualism and struggle to preserve liberty in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Ring it is just natural to link to this interesting review of Robert Heinlein’s legacy in the Wall Street Journal:

Robert A. Heinlein, who died in 1988, lived a life inspired by two great loves. One was America and its promise of freedom. As one of his characters put it: "Your country has a system free enough to let heroes work at their trade. It should last a long time–unless its looseness is destroyed from the inside." And he loved and admired women–not just his wife, Virginia, who provided the model for the many strong-minded and highly competent females who populate his stories, but all of womankind. "Some people disparage the female form divine, sex is too good for them; they should have been oysters."

In another hundred years, it will be interesting to see if the nuclear-powered spaceships and other technological marvels he predicted are with us. But nothing in his legacy will be more important than the spirit of liberty he championed and his belief that "this hairless embryo with the aching oversized brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes will endure. Will endure and spread out to the stars and beyond, carrying with him his honesty and his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage and his noble essential decency."

I was reading the Rasmussen Report about Ron Paul with great interests. After all this is the first time the the famous pollster are running a national survey and trying to analyze the support in Dr. Ron. The results are, somewhat surprisingly, encouraging.

The bottom line of the report is that if Ron Paul was the Republican nominee, and the election would held today, he would loose by a margin of 15%-20%. This should not be shocking to any sane observer of the 2008 Campaign. After all Ron Paul is still a second tier candidate in the Republican pack of candidates, and although he manage to get decent donations the amount of money he can spend is very small compare to the first tier candidates in both parties. However it was just few weeks ago that Ron Paul had no presence at any poll, obviously not a national one. The reason that Rasmussen are running the survey is an indicator by itself that Ron Paul support is increasing and becoming a factor that cannot be ignored.

It is interesting to note that Ron Paul attracting 13%-15% of the democrats. The report tries to associates the democrats support to Ron Paul’s long opposition to the war, however the democratic aren’t lacking candidates that oppose the war so the reason for Ron Paul’s appeal lay somewhere else. I would assume that most of these voters belongs to the group that the Cato institute’s study suggested as the 15% Libertarian leaning voters. Ron Paul’s candidacy, while probably incapable to win the national election - and realistically not even the GOP nomination,  expose the large group of voters that would have like smaller, and much less intrusive, government.

While it would be highly desirable if the majority of the voters would be Libertarian, or Libertarian leaning, in practical terms being the recognizable swing vote isn’t a bad place to be. I suggested before that Ron Paul’s success, even if limited, might force the other candidates in a tied race to adjust their position so they can win Dr. Paul support. The Rasmussen Report might indicate that candidate from both parties might have to adjust their campaign, and their policies, to win the Libertarian leaning swing block.