A business friend asked me to attend a meeting where he was pitching a life saving device to an elder care facility’s management. This was a system designed to help prevent grandma from hurting herself accidentally. So there we were with the campus administrator and a couple other people, one of whom was the staff federal government insurance expert.
As my friend glided through slide after slide of how this innovation was going to save lives, save money, and avoid lawsuits, with every new feature the head administrator looked at the insurance expert and asked one question: “Is this reimbursable under Medicare?”
The administrator asked us no questions whatsoever. There was no concern over how much money they would save, how easy the system is to use, what it costs, or what reduction in lawsuits could they expect. No, the only question was, would the taxpayers pay the bill?
Then last year I made an appointment for a physical at a doctor’s office where I was a new patient. The lady asked me on the phone for my insurance information. I told her I would pay cash. Silence. “Hold on.”
A minute later she came back on the line and told me that she had talked to their business office and they would give me the Medicare price. She did not promise their best market price, but the Medicare price. She sounded pleased with herself, like she was cutting me a deal.
Medical practices apparently do not set their own price schedules any more. They use the Medicare schedule. Sometimes they will charge more than that, a lot more, but the Medicare schedule is generally the lower limit for pricing. Private insurers are in on the game as well. Doctors are not the least bit inclined to bargain prices, or even advertise prices. They know that every doctor in town charges basically the same on the bottom end. In any other industry it would be called price fixing, but if you are using the government approved charge sheet it’s all perfectly legal!
We have all heard that the government is funding the covid scam. One such example is the CARES act, signed into law in March, 2020, which provides $140 billion dollars to US health care, including $100 billion directly to hospitals. There are 6,090 hospitals in the US, and ignoring the categories of federal vs. state vs. private hospitals, that amounts to $16.4 million per hospital. How many doctors or nurses at the large hospitals are going to call BS on the futility of masks, or writing “COVID” on just about every death certificate? That would be effectively zero. The hospital administrators shamefully whore themselves out to Congress for a few bucks. The staff plays along. Do you realize that you cannot by default trust any medical professional receiving government money?
As another example, I have another friend who is fed up with the impersonal attitude of the medical system. He was looking for a new general practitioner, but found out quickly that he could not talk with any doctor on the phone, nor would they respond to emails. He did discover that they will respond to a fax! He sent ten doctors a fax requesting five minutes of their time at no charge to simply ask about their practice and charges. He received an invitation to meet from only one doctor.
See the pattern? The first three examples show how government money, specifically the Medicare reimbursement schedule and Congressionally apropriated compensation, distorts medical pricing and treatment. The last case shows how government money and regulation destroys competition and customer service in a supposedly free market.
What about the energy industry? A friend in another state was telling me of a company petitioning his county to put up a bunch of wind turbines on local mountains. This is a pristine part of the country where there are few footprints, and actually not a lot of wind, either. But now the ridge tops are scheduled to be abominated with windmills which are taller than any building in the nearby city. The county commissioners are all for it, sniffing the increased tax revenue. No matter that every home in the county is already wired for power and rate regulated by the state. It’s not like prices are going to go down.
I told my friend to ask the county administrator one question. What happens when the federal wind subsidies dry up? After that, the installation will be unprofitable and will fall derelict, sitting idle on top of a beautiful mountain range. I urged him to hammer his idiot county commissioners to ensure there are some millions of dollars held in escrow to scrape that garbage off the top of the ridge when the subsidies are revoked. Not holding my breath.
What about education? Several years ago I heard about a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) program going into the local school systems. Having some experience in each of those letters, I contacted several schools and offered to help, on a volunteer, unpaid basis. Conspicuous silence. I pressed again, and received only tepid interest. They apparently have no need for anyone who has actually done STEM. For free even.
Then I realized what is going on. STEM is not about teaching kids science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. STEM is only about local school systems receiving STEM grants. That’s it. They love STEM because it means building out more facilities and hiring more master’s degreed teachers to fatten up the union dues account and pension fund. If some children actually learn about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, well, so what? I know from personal experience that most of those kids do math by counting on their fingers, but so what?
How about scientific research? I pulled up the National Institutes of Health web site, entered the term, “climate change,” into the grants search box, and this is the first item that appeared, from 2010.
“This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is being issued by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with participation from the following NIH components: FIC, NCI, NCMHD NHLBI, NIA, NIBIB, NICHD, NLM and OBSSR. This FOA encourages research applications to examine the differential risk factors of populations that lead to or are associated with increased vulnerability to exposures, diseases and other adverse health outcomes related to climate change.”
Scientific research should be about pursuing truth, no matter the source, no matter how it impacts our prior research or assumptions on how the universe works. We should approach each research task with an open mind and no preconceived notions. However, this solicitation clearly presumes the climate change hoax, dogma, and zealotry. If you were a researcher and you submitted a proposal in response to this summary disputing the existence of anthropogenic climate change, you would be certain to receive a rejection. You might even be internally blacklisted. (Hey, it happens on Twitter!)
In the research community, the PhD’s know full well how to write a winning application against this solicitation, and it better assume anthropogenic climate change, else the money’s not going to flow and their tenure track will be terminated. Thus, government money corrupts the search for truth.
The government is blatantly intentional in this corruption. For example, I received a communication from a local relief group that works with the poor. The subject line was, “Help us eliminate poverty.” Awesome! How can I help?
But wait. While the Good Samaritans are handing out meals and blankets, and sheltering battered women, the federal, state and local governments are pouring trillions of dollars a year into programs to intentionally grow poverty and dependency. The relief group’s substantial million dollar budget is literally a million times smaller than the government’s. They fight a raging forest fire with a garden hose while the socioeconomic arsonists of government air drop tankers of fuel on the flames of poverty.
The annual $4,000,000,000,000 budget of the Unites States works out to $126,800 per second. Good luck to the charities trying to eliminate poverty. Lechery has nullified their million dollar budget in less than 8 seconds.
Government money distorts and destroys everything it touches. It distorts the medical system, the educational system, scientific research, the energy industry, the lives of the poor, and on and on ad infinitum.
But here is the biggest offender. The government is paying upwards of half our population to withhold their talents and skills from society. Take note of the number of people receiving these debilitating benefits:
Social Security Recipients (2020): 69,768,000
Welfare Recipients (2014): 110,000,000
Government Pension Recipients (2013): 19,500,500
Unemployed Benefit Recipients (2020): 21,000,000
Now I spent an hour of my life digging up just these four numbers. The sheer obese bulbosity of government web sites and data search facilities is breathtaking, and I could search for days and days and not find numbers for the same point in time. It is infuriating that we have to pay for this level of expert statistical incompetence. But I digress.
Since the numbers are for different years, and there is some overlap, I will not add them directly, but these categories certainly sum to over half of our population. That’s over 150,000,000 people the government is paying not to work.
A bunch of the welfare recipients are legitimate victims of liberalism. (I’m not into victimology, but this is true predation on the weakest in our society, making them government pawns.) They were born into welfare, were educated by the welfare state to be incapable, and they are living their lives sitting in front of the television. Sometimes a prison television.
However, many, many of the half-population had productive careers in the private sector. But at a certain age, BAM! Congratulations! You’re retired! You have earned it! Stop that work! Stop contributing! Stop teaching your younger peers how to do what you’ve become and expert at! Stop mentoring! Stop growing! Stop learning! Go home! Watch television and vote for bigger government to secure your benefit check!
What a hideous waste of lives.
As a student of history, I know that retirement is a relatively new thing. For working class people, historically you worked until you died. If you had saved enough, you could take on a reduced schedule in your twilight years, or your family would take care of you. But there was no public fund paying you not to work.
That changed in 1935, with the signing into law of Social Security by FDR.
Thus, government money again poisons an aspect of American life. The last 30 years of each American life, to be specific.
Are you receiving Social Security payments, conservative? Would you give up that money for freedom? Would you start working full time again, contributing to our economy more than bouncing your grandchildren on your knee? I know many conservatives who complain nonstop about the condition of our country, but who would never give up that check. Now that’s some powerful bad socialism.
“But that’s my money I’m getting back!” Sorry to rain on your benefit parade, but that money was wasted decades ago. It’s plum gone. Your check is coming out of current tax receipts and borrowed funds. And even what you are getting is not a fraction of what you would have had if you had invested the money yourself, apart from government. You’ve been scammed. The cost of the scam has been shifted to your grandchildren.
(Bernie Madoff’s private investment scam and the Social Security government investment scam are the same type of scam, but with curiously different outcomes. What could be the difference?)
Yes, they have you by the short hairs. I understand and I’ll lighten up. You cannot swear off that check. This just goes to show how deep the government dollars have penetrated, when conservatives are ensnared.
What can we do? To be clear, we cannot beat the government at their own game. We do not have the money. Shoot, they do not have the money, but they have the credit, our credit, and they are signing our names to every bond they sell. If we could sway the majority of Americans to vote with their dollars, perhaps some headway could be made, but that’s not going to happen at this point. The government has already bought too many slaves. Transformation is not going to happen within the current system, it is just too far gone.
We have to move outside of the current system, to a new system, a new economy, even if it runs in parallel with the old. We can take our wealth from the old economy and pump it into the new. Have you read about the Free People of America? That’s the place to start.
There is a developing underground economy, legal for now, including doctors who work for cash outside the government/insurance crime syndicate. Purchasing your food and supplies directly from farmers and craftspeople circumvents government taint. Building community with others of like mind cuts President Sock Puppet and the uniparty right out of the deal. Home schooling children vaccinates them against socialism. That’s the only vaccine the liberals hate.
We also have access, access to all the people they want to corrupt but have not yet. Young people, most of whom are not sitting in classrooms any more! We can teach them values that the people in government have long lost: the value of a hard day’s work, honesty, truth, knowledge, virtue, honor, decency, courage, and life. And love, for the government has no capacity for love. We have to teach our youth that confiscating someone else’s productivity is theft.
The people who do not participate in the new system will still be enslaved to the old, which is going down fast. The socialists are burning it down. Those not willing to believe the obvious decline will hold out hope that government will save them, but they are headed to violent destruction, or slow starvation. Where they are going there are no pensions, no welfare, no Social Security, and no government health insurance.
I’m not on that trip, and I hope neither are you.
Start building your alternative community today, if you have not already. You know who to talk to. The catch is, there are a lot of people who are totally fed up and think there is a solution in politics, or some military coup, or whatever. You and I know that’s not the case, and all those people need to turn off their video feeds and get face to face with people yearning for real freedom. A lot of good people we know are going to be caught in their underwear watching banned videos when their doors get smashed in. That’s a waste. Get them out of the house to spend time with freedom loving brothers and sisters.
Are you ready? I urge you to go dark, disconnect from the system, get connected to each other, and be ready to rebuild after the socialists destroy the United States. Stop carrying that cell phone everywhere you go. We need you.
Remember, we are not going to have to lift a finger to see the collapse of socialism, for it cannot survive without our productivity. When the communists took over Russia a century ago the population was under economic strife, but the people were accustomed to and willing to work. Our socialists today have created a country where half the population is being paid not to work, and a large portion of them refuse to work. This is a millstone around the neck of American socialism. It most certainly will fail. Only a matter of time.
Don’t be baited into the streets; there will be enough false flags to falsely indict you as you wait it out! This will all proceed at warp speed after the EBT cards quit working, or the power goes out for a week, or prescription antidepressants become scarce. There are a hundred scenarios. You and I will have to watch the last shred of freedom die as the government lurches, killing people who oppose them, but that won’t stop their fall. A large chunk of that 150,000,000 are going to strike out in anger, not at us, but at failed Mother Socialism. When your adversaries are fighting each other, what do you do? Step out of the way.
Then our sun will rise again, without government money! You need to be ready to rebuild, you and your neighbors, your children, and youth whom you have educated in freedom and responsibility. Ready?