Global Wealth “Redistribution” for Equal Poverty: The Egalitarian Ideal

Global Wealth “Redistribution” for Equal Poverty: The Egalitarian Ideal

"As Fox News reports, the United Nations is seeking to “create global taxes that would transfer hundreds of billions, and even trillions, of dollars from the rich nations of the world—especially the U.S.—to poorer ones.”

Full post is here.

Government Control of Medicine Necessitates Rationing

Government Control of Medicine Necessitates Rationing

"Rationing is inherent in government control of medicine. When government provides “free” (or subsidized) health services, politicians and bureaucrats necessarily decide how that spending will be allocated. And, to the degree that the related taxes and controls drive out private health providers and disable individuals from affording their own health care, government rationing restricts the health services that individuals may use."

Mark Steyn: Obama a better president of the Future

Mark Steyn: Obama a better president of the future | future, belong, obama - Opinion - The Orange County Register

"One of the reasons why Barack Obama is regarded as the greatest orator of our age is that he's always banging on about some other age yet to come – e.g., the Future! A future of whose contours he is remarkably certain and boundlessly confident: The future will belong to nations that invest in education because the children are our future, but the future will not belong to nations that do not invest in green energy projects because solar-powered prompters are our future, and, most of all, the future will belong to people who look back at the Obama era and marvel that there was a courageous far-sighted man willing to take on the tough task of slowing the rise of the oceans because the future will belong to people on viable land masses. This futuristic shtick is a cheap'n'cheesy rhetorical device (I speak as the author of a book called "After America," whose title is less futuristic than you might think) but it seems to play well with the impressionable Obammysoxers of the press corps....

No doubt living in Obama's future will be peachy. But in the meantime we have to live in his present – the one he's nominally in charge of, the only one available. It is tempting to compare him to a great magician, artfully producing flags of many lands from his breast pocket while misdirecting the audience. In fact, Obama's misdirection isn't even that good: In essence, he's promising to perform spectacular tricks at some unspecified point in the future even as he stands on stage with an empty top hat, and the girl in spangled tights he sawed in half is bleeding all over the floor..."

Our Feckless First Leader

Our Feckless First Leader
by Thomas Sowell

"Barack Obama is not the first leader of a nation whose actions reflected some half-baked vision, enveloped in lofty rhetoric and spiced with a huge dose of ego. Nor would he be the first such leader to steer his nation into a historic catastrophe.

In Barack Obama's case, the potential for catastrophe is international in scope, and perhaps irretrievable in its consequences, as he stalls with feckless gestures as terrorist-sponsoring Iran moves toward the production of nuclear bombs.

The rhetoric of Obama 1 says that he will protect Israel but the actions of Obama 2 have in fact protected Iran from an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities -- until now it is questionable whether Iran's deeply buried nuclear facilities can be destroyed by the Israelis.

Those deeply buried facilities took time to build, and Obama's policies gave them that time, with his lackadaisical approach of seeking United Nations resolutions and international sanctions that never had any serious chance of stopping Iran's movement toward becoming a nuclear power. And Barack Obama had to know that."

Kelly Victory MD: Fighting for Our Lives: The Ten Worst Things About ObamaCare

Kelly Victory MD: Fighting for Our Lives: The Ten Worst Things About...:

" The gauntlet has been laid down. With less than 50 days until the election, and what many agree will be the most significant political and philosophical decision point of our lifetimes, it’s time to take the gloves off. Not in terms of dirty politics, misleading television commercials or mud-slinging, but with regard to educating the American public about exactly what calamity will befall us if we do not vote President Obama out of the White House and repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The clock has run out; the time is nigh. Failure to repeal this legislation before it is fully implemented will have nothing less than devastating consequences for our country and our lives. Americans need to fully engage in this battle.

We Stand FIRM: Two From the NYT

We Stand FIRM: Two From the NYT:

""Rationing health care under the guise of quality". 

"Under ObamaCare government "quality measures" will be imposed throughout all branches of medicine, not just transplant surgery.  These metrics will create powerful incentives for doctors to limit care in order to protect their practice statistics.  Doctors will be increasingly hesitant to perform the riskier heart surgeries or cancer surgeries on the sicker patients.  Instead of an incentive to practice medicine, doctors will be soon working under perverse incentives to not practice medicine.

And it will be the sickest patients who will suffer the most"

Obama’s Iran Failure is Complete

Obama’s Iran Failure is Complete:

" Four years of Obama’s policies have brought Iran to what may be the brink of a nuclear weapon with little, if any, time left to stop them by the use of force. The Iranians have ruthlessly exploited the president’s self-regard and his blind faith in diplomacy and international institutions. Far from being a mixed record, this is one of unmitigated failure."

The Religion That's Killing The World Isn't Just Islam, It's Also Democracy - Forbes

The Religion That's Killing The World Isn't Just Islam, It's Also Democracy - Forbes

"For democracy zealots like Mr. Obama, the most important thing about the Muslim savages ruling Egypt is not that they are savages and U.S. foes, but that they were “democratically-elected.” Democracy zealots believe the vote validates anything, just as Weimer Germany thought it validated Hitler and his Nazi Party in the 1930s....

Political Islam has never embraced freedom or rights; historically, its brutality was curbed only when ruled by autocrats like the Shah in Iran, Saddam in Iraq, and Mubarak in Egypt. Democracy zealots among Western intellectuals and U.S. political leaders have sabotaged such autocrats (and U.S. allies) in the region, in favor of overt enemies.

Starting in 1979 in Iran, it was out with the secular military regime and in with a tyrannical theocracy; ever since then, but especially after 9/11, the pattern has been repeated in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Libya. The U.S. apologized for supporting secular rule and helped oust allies, in favor of elected theocrats and Islamic constitutions.

From Carter to Obama the U.S. has preferred cold-bloodied, religious tyranny, as long as it arrived by majority vote. The religion that’s killing the world isn’t just Islam but also democracy – a deadly but undying faith in the superiority of Rousseau’s “popular will.” Alexander Hamilton rightly called democracy “our real disease,” and yet Republicans today, the progeny of his Federalists, and those who should extol constitutionally-limited secular republic, as their name implies, instead plead for religion and democracy."

We Stand FIRM: Catron on Obama's AARP Speech

We Stand FIRM: Catron on Obama's AARP Speech:

"Catron does some fact-checking on Obama claims, including:

"We've added years to the life of the program by getting rid of taxpayer subsidies to insurance companies that weren't making people healthier"

"[O]ver the next 10 years, we expect the average Medicare beneficiary to save nearly $5,000 as a result of this law"

"We lengthened the life of the trust fund by eight years"

"Their plan replaces guaranteed Medicare benefits with a voucher that wouldn't keep up with costs"

Religious terrorism escalates in atmosphere of appeasement

Religious terrorism escalates in atmosphere of appeasement

"What is the moral status of an American government that turns aside and does nothing when a foreign power permits a multi-million reward for an innocent individual’s murder to beincreased with a public announcement?

For our view, read “Religious Terrorism vs. Free Speech,” an essay by Dr. Leonard Peikoff from1989, when the Rushdie fatwa was first issued. Some of the contextual details have changed, but not the principles or the urgent need for action when the principle of freedom of speech contained in the Constitution’s First Amendment comes under attack."

Free speech surrendered: Q&A with Elan Journo and Keith Lockitch

Free speech surrendered: Q&A with Elan Journo and Keith Lockitch

"What is required to defend freedom of speech, Elan and Keith explain, is a moral declaration by the West of an unwavering commitment to freedom in thought and expression. Sadly, we have seen anything but that response."

“'No Substitute for Victory': The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism” by John David Lewis

“'No Substitute for Victory': The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism” by John David Lewis

"Even though circumstances may change, human nature remains the same; and certain human elements—especially moral and psychological factors—are at the root of all wars... Differences in technology, politics, or economics will always remain secondary to the ideas that motivate aggressors to launch bloody attacks and that empower—or restrain—defenders opposing those attacks.

In that spirit, let us begin by considering an event of cataclysmic proportions, a deadly attack against Americans, and then examine two possible responses to it. This approach will show us that the crisis we face today—a series of highly motivated attacks against the heart of civilization—is not unique, can be understood, and can be ended—if we choose to understand and end it."

Rampaging Islamists

Rampaging Islamists

"Western civilization in the balance: Islamist aspirations grow with improved communications and weakened Middle Eastern governments, ultimately posing an existential question for Westerners: Will we maintain our historic civilization against their challenge, or will we accept Muslim dominion and a second-class dhimmi status?

In sum, Islamists want to impose Shari'a, Westerners are divided, and the battle of wills is just getting started."

 Dear America:

You might as well hear now what your doctors will be telling you if ObamaCare ever gets implemented. An eloquent message from Dr. Rich Fogoros. Thank you.

" Direct-pay physicians are being castigated all across the land for being greedy, elitist, selfish, lazy and unethical.  And if they cannot be shamed into returning to the medical gulag, they will soon be prosecuted into doing so.

When the attacks become serious, direct-pay doctors need to be prepared with a clear and compelling answer; an answer that does not offer any apologies; an answer that does not rely on the “goodies” that go along with having a direct-pay physician (things like same-day appointments, or access to the doctor’s cell phone number and e-mail address); an answer that instead boldly expresses in plain language that what they are doing does not destroy but salvages medical ethics, and indeed, it is the ONLY way that remains for doctors to practice their profession ethically.

What direct-pay doctors need is a John Galt speech.

And since I fear most of you have missed it, I reproduce my proposed John Galt speech here.
(I have liberally borrowed parts of the first three paragraphs from the actual John Galt speech in Atlas Shrugged. The blame for the rest of it falls solely upon your faithful author.)

A John Galt Speech For Direct-Pay Practitioners

DrRich | September 12th, 2012 - 6:52 am

“You demand to know what has happened to us, the physicians you thought you controlled. You have cried that our sins are destroying the world and you have cursed us for our unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every turn. You have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight. 

You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.
“While you were dragging us to your sacrificial altars, we physicians who value justice, independence, reason, and self-esteem – we finally came to see the nature of the game you were playing, which we had previously been too innocently generous to grasp. And we have chosen to play no longer.

“All the physicians who have vanished from your system, the doctors you hated, yet dreaded to lose, we are gone from you. Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider your need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don’t. Do not beg us to return. We are making our own way, apart from you.

“In your cynical attempt to control the healthcare system, you have coerced us – with your threats to our livelihood, threats of massive fines, threats of jail – to abandon our sacred obligation to our patients. Society must come first, you say. The needs of the collective are paramount, you insist. We must do what the experts tell us to do, you demand. And in the process you have destroyed the doctor-patient relationship which is the backbone of our profession. 

You have reduced physicians to ciphers, to puppets. And you have reduced our patients – the living, loving, hoping, striving people who come to us, who place their trust in us and their lives in our hands – to interchangeable members of a vast herd. You have demanded that we guard society’s interests, and abandon our sick to their own devices in your cruel and parsimonious healthcare system.

“Your process is now firmly established. Your methods have been legislated by Congress, embodied in volumes of rules, regulations and “guidelines” (strictly and ruthlessly enforced), upheld by the courts, and finally (and most tellingly) sanctioned as being entirely “ethical” by your allies, the leadership of our own professional organizations. You have made the healthcare system untenable for doctors who value true medical ethics.

“You have placed us into a position where we must either resign ourselves to an unethical, demeaning, health-destroying style of practice, or get out. We have gotten out.

“We have gotten out. We have left your Program. We refuse to sacrifice ourselves for you any longer. We will not sacrifice our livelihoods, our morals, our independence, our minds, or our patients for your bastardized idea of virtue...."

Read The Whole Thing Here

Religious Terrorism vs. Free Speech

Religious Terrorism vs. Free Speech

"The Ayn Rand Institute is releasing this 1989 editorial--originally published as an advertisement in the New York Times--because the same essential issues underlie the Rushdie debacle and the current uproar over cartoons of Mohammad. In both cases, the ultimate target is not “blasphemy” but man’s faculty of reason and the principle of free speech--values our leaders are too gutless to defend as absolutes.

In both cases, Islamic leaders have incited violence and issued death threats against Westerners--but have met with a pathetically appeasing response (Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie still stands, and has just been reaffirmed). And today as in 1989, the West’s craven response is motivated by the same fundamental cause. Failure to combat such self-righteous barbarism invites further aggression--a lesson history continually teaches, but which Western leaders refuse to learn."

Conclusion: 

 Force used in self-defense, retaliatory force striking back at those who initiate violence, is a moral necessity. To adopt a pacifist stance--or to engage in infinite behind-the-scenes "negotiations" that lead nowhere--is to surrender the world to brutality. Timid half-measures are worse than none; one does not respond to murder merely by withdrawing ambassadors or cutting back on trade. One cannot appeal to reason in dealing with those who reject it. Force is the only language intelligible to those who live by force.

Read the whole thing here.

Ayn Rand Institute’s warnings on the dangers of appeasement

Ayn Rand Institute’s warnings on the dangers of appeasement
  
"Our continuing appeasement of Islamist aggression has clear implications for America’s near future. If Washington declines to change its policies, we can expect (1) government intimidation and censorship of those who expose Islam’s evils, for the sake of appeasing Muslim sensibilities; (2) failure to protect American citizens, at home and abroad, against fatwas and other violent Islamist reprisals, and (3) more deaths of American soldiers, and more military expenditures, stemming from increased entanglement in the Middle East."

Read the whole thing.

A Map of Muslim Protests Around the World - Obama Built That !!

A Map of Muslim Protests Around the World - Global - The Atlantic Wire

 Thank you President Obama: for your sage foreign policy of inspiring global peace, inter-faith love, cooperation and unity by reaching out to our Muslim brothers in a spirit of generosity and good will. Our generous gifts of of billions of dollars of US foreign aid, billions more invested in wars of liberation and the sacrifice of thousands of American soldiers to the democratic aspirations of peaceful , democracy loving Arabs have reaped generous rewards. I hereby nominate you for a second Nobel Peace Prize for your tremendous foreign policy achievements. You Built That !!

Three years later, in light of the global consequences we see of President Obama's policies, the accolades bestowed upon him  for his global accomplishments in 2009 by the Nobel Committee take on a whole new meaning:


" The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons. << Please excuse our accidental oversight of Iran, Parkistan, North Korea, China, Russia....>>

Obama as as President created a new climate in international politics . Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play.  

Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. << ....with the possible exception of conflicting cinematic preferences, where violent riots prove more effective.>>  The  [ hallucinatory ] vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.
For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama's appeal that "Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.

The Second 9/11: The day our government became our enemy

The Second 9/11: Today will go down in infamy as the day our government became our enemy

"...It’s all so counter-intuitive that the average person likely cannot grasp what is happening at this moment: The United States is switching sides. We are joining forces with a nation of people that hates us and everything we stand for, while simultaneously turning our backs on a nation of people that love us. And we are agreeing with those who do not even grasp the bedrock of our political system, much less approve of it.
In other words: Our government has become overtly anti-American. We are aiding our enemies. We apologize when they attack us, and agree with their reasoning. We discard our own Constitution if our enemies take offense at it.

We are committing suicide. Correction: We are not committing suicide. The Obama administration is committing nation-cide on us, an act of euthanasia on the United States. A mercy killing of our way of life.

Forget about the economy, the campaign, the polls, the partisan jabs: Today’s events all by themselves are more than reason enough why Obama needs to be removed from power as quickly as possible. The mask is completely removed. If he remains in office, by 2016 the United States will be fully allied with Islamic regimes, will be in a state of undeclared hostilities against Israel and our former allies, will clamp down on any speech that criticizes Islam and (eventually) any other politically protected ideology or belief. The First Amendment, and by extension all the amendments that follow, will be in tatters.

Today is the second 9/11."

Complete article here

Another Islamist Assault, Another Western Cringe

Another Islamist Assault, Another Western Cringe

" Attacks on Tuesday against American missions in Cairo and Benghazi fit into a familiar pattern of Islamist intimidation and Western appeasement that goes back to the Salman Rushdie affair in 1989. The Obama administration's supine response to the murder of American diplomats increases the likelihood of further such assaults."

Rampant anti-Americanism in the Middle East: The Consequences of Obama weakness t

DECKER: Consequences of Obama weakness - Washington Times

"The murder of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens in Libya on Wednesday is the direct consequence of President Obama’s weakness as a leader. His administration’s support of Islamist uprisings across the Middle East has led to a destabilized region where radical anti-Americanism is running rampant. The images being transmitted across the planet today give a glimpse of what the world looks like absent strong U.S. leadership in international affairs: Rioting mobs ripping down the American flag from our embassy in Cairo and a diplomat’s brutalized body being dragged through the streets of Benghazi. These are not isolated incidents but the predictable result of four years of Mr. Obama meekly trying to “lead from behind.

Read more:  DECKER: Consequences of Obama weakness - Washington Times

Docs4PatientCare Physician's Prescription for Health Care Reform

The Docs4PatientCare Physician's Prescription for Health Care Reform

"The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) neither protects patients, nor does it lead to affordable care.  The two fundamental problems that drive up the cost of health care in the United States are the lack of true competition in the health insurance industry and the isolation of physicians and patients from the true costs of health care.

Rather than addressing these problems, ObamaCare aggravates them by limiting choices of insurance, increasing regulation, and centralizing decision making.  It is the wrong prescription for health care reform in America.  A majority of Americans, particularly physicians, recognize this and thus oppose the new health care law and support its repeal.

Docs 4 Patient Care is an organization of physicians dedicated to the preservation of the doctor-patient relationship.  What follows is our prescription for health care reform in the United States.  Our primary concern is the health and well-being of our patients.  An additional concern is the health and well-being of our country –physically and financially.

Accompanying each of the following eight recommendations is a rationale.  These recommendations are intended to serve as a framework on which responsible legislation can be constructed...."

See below for the health care reform policy recommendations.

http://docs4patientcare.org/prescription

ACO's in Health Care? "Bigger Is NOT Better"

We Stand FIRM: Domenech on "Bigger Is Better":

"ObamaCare law explicitly drives increasing consolidation of doctors, hospitals, and providers.  Proponents argue this allows of increased efficiencies of scale.

But the real agenda is that it allows greater government control.  It's much easier for the government to regulate 100 large "Accountable Care Organizations" than 100,000 individual hospitals and private practices.

Such consolidation is merely a continuation of a much older strategy. Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism described how the Roosevelt administration sought similar consolidations of American agriculture and business during the New Deal. As Goldberg noted:

[If] you want to use business to implement your social agenda, then you should want businesses themselves to be as big as possible. What’s easier, strapping five thousand cats to a wagon or a couple of giant oxen?

Bigger may be "better" for the government, but not for patients or doctors."

Check out: 
"The Obamacare Fallacy: Bigger is better".

Vdieo: Dr. Jill Vecchio Explains ObamaCare Pt 1: Who Will - and Will Not- Be Covered?

One page summary against Obamacare

One page summary against Obamacare

"Having someone else pay for your medical care is the most expensive way to pay for it because it adds insurer overhead costs to the cost of the actual service. "

Fighting ObamaCare: " What Can One Do?

"What Can One Do?"
by Ayn Rand

"This question is frequently asked by people who are concerned about the state of < today's health care system and the looming imposition of government -run ObamaCare > and want to correct it. "How can an individual propagate < the correct ideas> on a scale large enough to effect the immense changes which must be made in order to create the kind of ideal social system < or American health care system > which you picture?"

If this is the way the question is posed, the answer is: he can't. No one can change a country single-handed. So the first question to ask is: why do people approach the problem this way?

Suppose you were a doctor in the midst of an epidemic. You would not ask: "How can one doctor treat millions of patients and restore the whole country to perfect health?" You would know, whether you were alone or part of an organized medical campaign, that you have to treat as many people as you can reach, according to the best of your ability, and that nothing else is possible.

People approach intellectual issues in a manner they would not use to deal with physical problems.
They would not seek to stop an epidemic overnight, or to build a skyscraper single-handed.  Nor would they refrain from renovating their own crumbling house, on the grounds that they are unable to rebuild the entire city.

But in the realm of ideas, they still tend to regard knowledge as irrelevant, and they expect to perform instantaneous miracles, somehow or they paralyze themselves into inaction by projecting an
impossible goal.

If you are seriously interested in fighting for a better < US health care system and against government -run health care>, begin by identifying the nature of the problems. The battle is primarily intellectual (philosophical), not political. Politics is the *last consequence*, the practical implementation, of the fundamental philosophical ideas that dominate a given nation's culture.

You cannot fight or change the consequences without fighting and changing the cause; nor can you attempt any practical implementation without knowing what you want to implement. In an intellectual battle, you do not need to convert everyone. History is made by minorities or, more precisely, history is made by intellectual movements, which are created by minorities.

Who belongs to these minorities? Anyone who is able and willing actively to concern himself with intellectual issues. Here, it is not quantity, but quality that counts (the quality and consistency of the
ideas one is advocating).

An intellectual movement does not start with organized action. Whom would one organize?
A philosophical battle is a battle for men's minds, not an attempt to enlist blind followers. Ideas can be propagated only by the men and women who understand them.

An organized movement has to be preceded by an educational campaign, which requires trained- self-trained - teachers (self-trained in the sense that a philosopher can offer you the material of knowledge, but
it is your own mind that has to absorb it).

Such training is the first requirement for being a doctor during an ideological epidemic and the precondition of any attempt to "change the world."... Today, most people are acutely aware of our cultural-ideological vacuum <and the legal and economic chaos of our health care system>;  they are anxious, confused, and groping for answers. Are you able to enlighten them?

Can you answer their questions? Can you offer them a consistent case? Do you know how to correct their errors? ... * A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war.*

If you want to influence a country's intellectual trend < or help bring rational reform to the American health care system>, the first step is to bring order to your own ideas and integrate them into a consistent case case, to the best of your knowledge and ability.

This does not mean memorizing and reciting slogans and principles; knowledge necessarily includes the ability to apply abstract principles to concrete problems, to recognize the principles in specific issues, to demonstrate them, and to advocate a consistent course of action....

When or if your convictions are in your conscious, orderly control, you will be able to communicate them to others. If you like condensations (provided you bear in mind their full meaning), I will say: when you ask "What can one do?" the answer is "SPEAK" (provided you know what you are saying).

A few suggestions: do not wait for a national audience. Speak on any scale open to you, large or small, to your friends, your associates, <your patients>, your professional organizations, or any legitimate
public forum.  You can never tell when your words will reach the right mind at the right time. You will see no immediate results, but it is of such  activities that public opinion is made.... it is never too late or too early to propagate the right ideas- except under a dictatorship.

If a dictatorship <or government run socialized medicine> ever comes to this country, it will be by the default of those who keep silent. We are still free enough to speak. ...

http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/DocsFighting4HealthCareReform/message/13

The myth of a democratic socialist society funded by capitalism is finished

The myth of a democratic socialist society funded by capitalism is finished

Excellent article which identifies the unstable political-economic fault lines  in the current  US system which will undergo seismic shifts in the November election one way or the other and determine the future course of American history:

"  ...What is being challenged is nothing less than the most basic premise of the politics of the centre ground: that you can have free market economics and a democratic socialist welfare system at the same time. The magic formula in which the wealth produced by the market economy is redistributed by the state – from those who produce it to those whom the government believes deserve it – has gone bust.

The crash of 2008 exposed a devastating truth that went much deeper than the discovery of a generation of delinquent bankers, or a transitory property bubble. It has become apparent to anyone with a grip on economic reality that free markets simply cannot produce enough wealth to support the sort of universal entitlement programmes which the populations of democratic countries have been led to expect.

The fantasy may be sustained for a while by the relentless production of phoney money to fund benefits and job-creation projects, until the economy is turned into a meaningless internal recycling mechanism in the style of the old Soviet Union...."

What is actually being exposed with stark clarity is the economic throes of the US under the current Obama regime  of socialist class warfare  and the economic and political instability of a "mixed economy".

This was identified and described here in vivid detail by Ayn Rand- as as unstable intermediary form of government on its way to the  inevitable degradation into full socialism and dictatorshiip- as America is on its way to finding out:

"A mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and controls—with no principles, rules, or theories to define either. Since the introduction of controls necessitates and leads to further controls, it is an unstable, explosive mixture which, ultimately, has to repeal the controls or collapse into dictatorship.

A mixed economy has no principles to define its policies, its goals, its laws—no principles to limit the power of its government. The only principle of a mixed economy—which, necessarily, has to remain unnamed and unacknowledged—is that no one’s interests are safe, everyone’s interests are on a public auction block, and anything goes for anyone who can get away with it.

Such a system—or, more precisely, anti-system—breaks up a country into an ever-growing number of enemy camps, into economic groups fighting one another for self preservation in an indeterminate mixture of defense and offense, as the nature of such a jungle demands.

While, politically, a mixed economy preserves the semblance of an organized society with a semblance of law and order, economically it is the equivalent of the chaos that had ruled China for centuries: a chaos of robber gangs looting—and draining—the productive elements of the country.

A mixed economy is rule by pressure groups. It is an amoral, institutionalized civil war of special interests and lobbies, all fighting to seize a momentary control of the legislative machinery, to extort some special privilege at one another’s expense by an act of government—i.e., by force.

 In the absence of individual rights, in the absence of any moral or legal principles, a mixed economy’s only hope to preserve its precarious semblance of order, to restrain the savage, desperately rapacious groups it itself has created, and to prevent the legalized plunder from running over into plain, unlegalized looting of all by all—is compromise; compromise on everything and in every realm—material, spiritual, intellectual—so that no group would step over the line by demanding too much and topple the whole rotted structure.

 If the game is to continue, nothing can be permitted to remain firm, solid, absolute, untouchable; everything (and everyone) has to be fluid, flexible, indeterminate, approximate. By what standard are anyone’s actions to be guided? By the expediency of any immediate moment.

The only danger, to a mixed economy, is any not-to-be-compromised value, virtue, or idea. The only threat is any uncompromising person, group, or movement. The only enemy is integrity..."

What is the solution?  As a country, the US must learn to embrace and uphold the proper Principles of a Free Society.