Campaign For Liberty — gintstopgitprr's Profile

Campaign For Liberty: gintstopgitprr

Angela Aronoff
gintstopgitprr
Regular member
Location: Washington, DC
Last login: 11/14/09

RSS feed

Fun Facts

Born in Texas, Grew up in California, Moved to the East Coast for college

I graduated from George Washington University in May 2009 with a BA in Political Science and a minor in journalism.

I took Japanese for 7 years.

I am extremely interested in Antifederalists (William Findley, Luther Martin, Robert Yates,etc).

gintstopgitprr's weblog

Operation Health Freedom: Tom Woods Transcript (Unedited)

Posted by gintstopgitprr on 11/10/09
Last updated 11/10/09

Watch here.

Tom Woods:

Well as an American Historian, I have some opinions on this subject that are based on history and I think a lot of times people get caught up in whatever the current way of doing things is; and they become so intellectually bound up in that, that they sort of carelessly assume that nothing could ever be done differently from how it’s done now.

So, for example, we have Medicare now, and people think “Well, if we didn’t have Medicare, we’d be stepping over the corpses of old people on our way to work” right?

I mean of course this would just be an epidemic of dead people in the street, you know, what would we do without it?

Well. OK, well this is where a historian can come in a little bit, I mean if you look at 1961, you pick up a newspaper, do you see any headlines about corpses of old people filling the street?

I mean you don’t see anything like that.

To the contrary, what you find statistically, and you can also bring in Medicaid dealing with the poor, is that people who are of relatively limited means, were admitted to hospitals at about the same rate as people who were of much more significant means. They had as many doctor visits, and so on and on. In terms of hospital stays, it was also comparable. So the long and the short of it is this isn’t supposed to happen according to the conventional wisdom which is that without the government everybody would be dead, there’d be no healthcare; well, what in fact happened?

What accounts for this? And what accounts for it is that in the old days everyone understood that part of the physician’s occupation, part of his calling, really, involved the provision of medical services at low-cost rates, or for free, for people who couldn’t afford it.

And this is how Ron Paul operated his medical practice even in the crazy modern system that we have now. And so it was understood that this was part of your job, and so this is how it worked.

Now today, of course no-one does that, there’s too much – the malpractice possibility is too high – no-one does that anymore, but when you actually look at Medicare and Medicaid what were the actual consequences? In terms of do people get more medical care than before?

What we actually see is that what you had was a wealth transfer from middle class tax-payers to middle class health professionals. I mean, that’s what you had. You had people now being paid to do what previously they had volunteered to do.

And you also had, because of the government subsidy, a massive stimulus to an increase in the price of these goods. Anything the government gets involved in, or encourages, or stimulates – the price accelerates dramatically just like higher education – I mean what is it like 500 zillion dollars a year to go to some crumby third rate school now?

You think that’s just a coincidence? Or that might have something to do with the government saying “hey, here’s an open available credit spigot for anybody who wants to go!” I mean this is what leads to these things.

If you look back earlier in American history, earlier in the 20^th century, how did people get medical care in the early 20^th century? They got it through fraternal societies; that today have hardly any role at all because the government has usurped the whole role.

But, David Beito of the University of Alabama talks about this in his book, “From Mutual Aid to Welfare State”, it’s a study of fraternal societies; a totally forgotten episode in American history; there are 50 zillion doctoral dissertations on every trivial nothin’ you can imagine; but nothing on this subject and why?

Because it suggests that we can in fact order our lives, including our medical care, without intervention by our wise overlords, and that in fact what happened is that these fraternal societies were able to contract with physicians and get group rates such that you could get a doctor visit for a couple of bucks, and people had abundant supplies of medical care, again without government provision.

So this world really does exist in history, I mean, it happened, it occurred. It’s not like this is some crazy libertarian fantasy. You don’t have to believe me; you can believe your own eyes, looking back into the past. It really happened.

So, anything that moves in any other direction apart from individuals or groups contracting with individual physicians according to what suits them best, is absolutely the wrong direction. So, that’s the brief perspective of the historian.

Tags:

Showing comments 1—1 of 1

Posted 11/10/09

rightsman
Las Vegas,, NV

Mr. Woods,
I am old enough to remember what you have written about here. The perspective may be brief, but it is spot on. We took care of each other. If a lady was incapacitated and couldn't cook dinner, the neighbors bore dishes of hot food to the family. Even to the cleaning of houses, and doing the laundry.
We also had the folk medicine. Medicine that really worked.
Thank you,
Robert Walker

You must be logged in to post comments. [Become a member]

Operation Health Freedom: Daniel Hannan Transcript
(Unedited)

Posted by gintstopgitprr on 11/06/09

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crZQyFlOYfY

Daniel Hannan:

The National Health Service was founded immediately after the second World War, it was conceived during the second World War, in 1944, and that's a very significant fact because it was the product of total mobilization. At that time the United Kingdom had rationing for food, it had identity cards, it had seized all the major industries for the war effort, it had conscripted the male population; there hadn't been such an enlargement of state power before, and there hasn't been one since. Every resource was mobilized for the contingency of defeating Nazism.

Of course, since the war, most of these other things have eventually been undone.

But we're left with one outstanding bit of wartime planning which is the idea of a healthcare system funded wholly out of general taxation and without any market mechanism with distribution according to need and rationing by queue.

Why do we still have it 60 years on when in every other field we've moved away from government control, when we've privatized our airlines, our telephones, our trains and so on? Why do we have this one remaining bureaucracy that is unresponsive to consumer demand?

I think part of the reason is that it is so large that it is very difficult to reform.

I found this myself when I came here and remarked on a television station that it was not a good system if you took the comparators of survival rates and waiting times; you know we're not the worst in the developed world, but the United Kingdom does pretty badly. And this was immediately portrayed by the British left as an attack of the people in the system, which of course it wasn't, it was no such thing.

But it makes it extremely difficult to have any serious kind of discussion as long as anything you say is then immediately portrayed as an assault on the doctors and nurses and cleaners and porters and all the other people in this system - who are of course, good and honest people, it's not by their choice that they're working in a system that doesn't always maximize their gifts.

The other problem is that people are naturally conservative. And it's very difficult then for people to think that something could be better elsewhere, and this is especially true when people see people like Michael Moore coming from the United States and portraying an American healthcare system where people are regularly left without any medical attention because they're poor.

There's this constant thing about people won't look at your medical card, they'll only look at your credit card. So the combination of these things means that it is extremely difficult to have any meaningful reform away from a system that is still run, as I say, on socialist lines, that is, contribution according to ability, distribution according to need, everything funded out of general taxation and without any payment.

Even though, as I say, we're not doing very well, and I think the main thing I've found in the last month in the UK, the main differentiator, is whether people have lived in another country. By and large, the strongest criticism of the NHS comes from people either who have lived in North America, or in another Western European country, or in another place of comparable wealth.

People who haven't done that, simply take queuing as a fact of life. They don't think it's unusual to be told to come back 6 months later for an operation, or 3 months later, or whatever it is.

I think that there must be a better way for us to organize our healthcare system.

But in terms of the American debate; I don't think your system's perfect, no system in the world is perfect, mine has fallen. And I'm sure there are problems and the big insurance companies can be unresponsive; but the one thing that is by definition going to be bigger and less responsive than insurance companies is the federal government.

And so rather than going in the direction of a nationalized system, something that has been rejected in every other field of public activity, you should be, it seems to me, going in the direction that I would like the United Kingdom to go in, with more control for the individual. Personalized healthcare accounts, more responsiveness, more of a free-market which is what drives up standards.

One final point. It's always phrased, on both sides of the Atlantic, as necessary to have a system that will look after the poor. I agree. Of course, it would be inhuman in a wealthy country not to have a system in which those who are without means are deprived of good quality healthcare; but we have to understand, that as in any other field, the poor will have their interests better served, if there is a system in which choice and competition have driven up standards for everybody. The pushy middle class people who through their discernment are in a position to demand and secure better treatment, thereby in the process also secure treatment for the worse off. I'm convinced that a system where there is consumer choice, and where people have some control over what they do with their resources is going to be better both for the wealthy, and the less well-off.

Categories: Health Freedom, Video
Tags:

No comments yet.

You must be logged in to post comments. [Become a member]

Lesser Known Historical Figures #1

Posted by gintstopgitprr on 09/01/09
Last updated 11/14/09

During the state by state ratification of the Constitution, papers were published in support of the new Constitution (The Federalist Papers) and with concerns about the Constitution (the lesser read Anti-federalist Papers). Out of both groups, only one writer was a female.

Mercy Otis Warren was born on September 14, 1728. One of her brothers was James Otis who famously said "Taxation without representation is tyranny." Although she sat in on some of her brothers' lessons, she never received a formal education.

She married James Warren who served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and later became president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. The Warrens became increasingly involved in the push for American independence. Their house became a meeting place for the Sons of Liberty and she became a correspondent and unofficial adviser to many political leaders such as Patrick Henry, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Samuel Adams. She wrote satirical plays which took aim at Governor Thomas Hutchinson as well as writing an Anti federalist pamphlet under the name “A Columbian Patriot.”

During the Revolution, Mercy had written drafts of the events that transpired. In 1805, her three-volume History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution was published. Her book contains her controversial opinion that the Battle of Yorktown was not really a battle.

She died in October of 1814. She was 86.

History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (Volume 1)

History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (Volume 2)

Tags:

No comments yet.

You must be logged in to post comments. [Become a member]

Interning for the movement

Posted by gintstopgitprr on 08/28/09

Hi. My name is Angela and I'm one of the Fall 2009 interns for Campaign for Liberty. I graduated from George Washington University in May with a BA in Political Science and a minor in journalism, but I grew up in California.

I first became acquainted with the ideas of liberty through the "We the People" Civics program (think competitive civics) when I was in my senior year of high school. My unit was dealing with the founders (both Federalist and Antifederalists). I became extremely interested in the Antifederalists as many of their concerns would prove to be valid. This led me to my shared beliefs with Campaign for Liberty. I'm also very interested in auditing the Federal Reserve.

I'm super excited to be interning here and for the Mass Action Day coming up on September 15th (if you're in the DC/VA/MD area come join us for the petition drop). I hope to become much more articulate about our issues, less nervous about blogging, and get in touch with more of the grassroots through this experience.

http://www.facebook.com/araronoff

Tags:

No comments yet.

You must be logged in to post comments. [Become a member]

Recent Entries

Operation Health Freedom: Tom Woods Transcript (Unedited)
Operation Health Freedom: Daniel Hannan Transcript (Unedited)
Lesser Known Historical Figures #1
Interning for the movement

gintstopgitprr's contacts

Showing contacts 1—2 of 2

JChristopherStearns

tshoes4liberty