Silken Slippers and Hobnail Boots Surviving the Decline and Fall

by R.E. Hannay

  * End the penalties on cash payment for medical services.

  These are not matters to be bargained away by career politicians trading political favors for support. They involve billions of dollars and the health and well-being of 310 million people. Reforms need to come from the public studying all aspects of health care, including preventive health care, ignored in most discussions, and then telling their Congressmen what they want done. Careful study of the experience of different HSAs, attempts to reach a non-political public consensus, and unhurried action are in order. There is no reason why the various aspects of health care can't be considered carefully and acted on separately rather than in monstrous political proposals, hastily considered without public participation and without the congressmen and medical community studying in detail what they are voting on.

  Government medicine is a demonstrated failure in the rest of the world and it is imploding here. We need to disable the disastrous Obamacare legislation and improve the system we have, not destroy it. One of the deliberate consequences of Obamacare is changing our outstanding private medical system into another inefficient socialized government bureaucracy. Many physicians are leaving medicine or selling their practices and themselves to hospitals, in effect becoming just another group of government employees.

  It doesn’t take a village, but it does take a direct personal interest and control of our medical care, which the politicians and bureaucrats have stolen from us with absolutely no constitutional authority.

  THE WAR ON DRUGS

  The “War on Drugs”, started by President Nixon in 1971, was lost long ago. Its futility and enormous costs in money and ruined lives should be apparent to everyone by now -- especially to the many insiders who see the failure but whose jobs depend on it, and who continually ask for more taxpayer funding for their failed programs. Current spending is estimated at over $40 billion per year, with a total cost since 1971 estimated at over $1 trillion. Approximately 45 million arrests have been made, with 1.6 million persons now in federal and state prisons on drug convictions.

  John Stossel: “Myth: Drugs cause crime. Truth: The drug war causes the crime… Banning drugs certainly hasn’t kept young people from getting them. We can’t even keep these drugs out of prisons. How do we expect to keep them out of America?”

  Many substances, if used unwisely, are harmful. Some require special permission to use. In many cases there appears to be no logic in the distinction. Consider the effects of alcohol, caffeine, cocaine, Big Macs, heroin, Hagen Daas ice cream, marijuana and thousands of other substances. Obviously, some are potentially more harmful than others, but all are capable of harming or even killing people.

  Given the obvious failure of the war on drugs, except for a few rational appeals like Nancy Reagan's “Just say no,” continuing our present policies is irrational. Something like sixty percent of the inmates of our federal prisons are there on non-violent drug convictions and we can't build new courts and prisons fast enough to keep up with new violations. That problem doesn't exist in the Czech Republic, where adults can legally use, possess and grow small quantities of marijuana. Their overall drug arrest rate is 1 per 100,000 population, versus 585 per 100,000 in the United States. The Czech robbery rate is 2 per 100,000 population; the FBI says our robbery rate is 145.9 per 100,000. It appears that marijuana legalization may create a roadblock rather than a gateway to hard drug use. As with prohibition of alcohol, our drug-related crime wave appears to result largely from our prohibition of marijuana use.

  Eleven years ago Portugal, with one of Europe’s worst drug epidemics, decriminalized illicit substances. Going beyond previous liberalization in places like the Netherlands, Portugal changed drug possession from a matter for the courts to one of community and public health, doing away with arrests, courts and jail time for people carrying a personal supply of anything from marijuana to heroin. It established a commission to encourage casual users to quit and backed 78 treatment centers where addicts could seek help. Before decriminalization, Portugal was estimated to have 100,000 problem heroin users. Eight years later, chronic users of all substances had dropped to about 55,000.

  Netherlands has a history of open drug sales to study, and Mexico’s federal government has said, “This war is not winnable.” The New York Times reported August 21, 2009 that Mexico’s federal government decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, meth and LSD, effective the next day.

  In Mexico, the drug war is a real war. The slaughtering of police, mayors, judges, journalists and thousands of citizens is spilling across our southern border. As long as prohibitionist policies in the United States continue, the violence will continue. Ending prohibition would take most of the profits that fund the Mexican drug cartels and their wars. In 2009, the Pentagon estimated 100,000 Mexican drug warriors, and the State Department declared, “Corruption throughout Mexico’s public institutions remains a key impediment to curtailing the power of the drug cartels.” Mexico is at risk of becoming a failed state – with a 2,000 mile border with the United States. An estimated 75,000 people have died since Mexico’s anti-drug campaign began in 2006. In 2009, it was estimated that 450,000 Mexicans were involved in drug trafficking in Mexico alone.

  In February, 2009, former presidents of Brazil, Columbia and Mexico reported in Rio de Janeiro on the conclusions of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy: “Today we are farther than ever from the goal of eradicating drugs … We propose the possibility of decriminalizing the possession of Cannabis for personal use … treating consumption as a matter of public health – not repression.”

  We apparently learned little from alcohol prohibition. If people want to use or misuse potentially harmful substances, they will find a way to do it. The only sensible alternative is to eliminate the profits of drug trafficking by decriminalizing some or all of these substances, control their quality and distribution, and inflict heavy penalties on crimes committed by individuals under their influence. At the same time, it is imperative to initiate and maintain an effective public education program to show people the results of using and abusing controlled and some uncontrolled substances.

  There are principally two kinds of uses of marijuana. The "recreational" users describe the typical effects as "happy, hungry and horny." Medicinal uses vary widely. There are more than eighty chemical components in different varieties of the plant. Some kinds are used for pain and others for eye, skin and other medical and health problems.

  The U.S. Supreme Court is continuing to consider the federal efforts to usurp the constitutional authority of the states. By October, 2009, 14 states had passed medical marijuana laws and the Justice Department decided not to prosecute individuals who possess or distribute marijuana in such states. In 2013 Colorado and Washington legalized its use without a doctor's prescription and several other states have proposed changes pending. Again Obama has chosen not to enforce the federal law prohibiting its use -- more legislating by the executive branch.

  Unfortunately, an ever-growing army of drug-war soldiers have a big stake in continuing our failed war strategy. If all the police, lawyers, judicial and prison employees, rehabilitation experts, therapists, counselors, social workers and bureaucrats involved in the fight were to lose their enemy and their jobs, much money would be saved and crime substantially reduced.

  Two other inevitable results of ending the drug war require consideration. Both involve problems that could have been solved long ago, but the votes of too many drug warriors and promoters are at stake. The economies of many inner-city areas and barrios are largely based on illegal drugs, crime and government welfare. From the Cato Institute: “In poor and working-class black America, a man and woman raising their children together is an unusual sight. The War on Drugs plays a large part in this. It must stop … Spending time in prison is a badge of honor … The hideous drop-out rate among ghetto teens – watch it fall as soon as there’s no way to put money in your pocket withou
t a diploma. If we truly want to get past race in this country, we must be aware that it will never happen until the futile war on drugs is a memory.”

  The second issue, long overdue for reform, is immigration. A large percentage of people involved in the illegal drug business are unskilled immigrants and illegal aliens. Los Angeles police report that there are several thousand known gangs in that area alone, which has an estimated 4,000,000 Latinos. If the business of illegal drug trafficking were eliminated, many illegal Latinos currently involved in the drug business would return home.

  The following are proposed changes in our policies on prohibited drugs:

  1. Decriminalize most or all "street" drugs, monitor their quality and distribution as necessary, and organize a comprehensive public education and treatment program.

  2. Reform welfare, making certain it is less attractive to live off the many taxpayer-paid unemployment, welfare and useless "retraining" programs than it is to work.

  The drug war cannot be stopped suddenly; mistakes would be made and it would be too disruptive. These changes should be implemented gradually, and only after thorough research and experimenting. Studies are needed to determine what has been successful and what has not in areas that have decriminalized various kinds of controlled substances, and the results should be publicized and debated. Public education and discussion are vital to understanding both the failed war on drugs and new strategies, and for achieving adequate public support of proposed changes.

  SURVIVAL OF THE UNFITTEST

  Forever and ever, our world has developed, improved and prospered under the first law of nature, The survival of the fittest. But during the last century, in much of the world, mankind, with the best intentions, has virtually repealed that law.

  Modern medicine has developed miraculous products and techniques to combat disease, correct deformities and repair injuries, helping the less fit to survive and reproduce. Even the least healthy and talented are now able to overcome problems and, in many cases, reproduce at higher rates than the healthy population, effectively downgrading our breeding stock.

  Finally, there is a general attitude that staying alive is better, no matter what, and mostly at someone else’s expense. What heartless, uncaring solutions do we propose? We could never return to people paying their medical costs directly. Once people have become accustomed to someone else paying their bills, that is seen as another entitlement and reform is politically impossible. However, we could return to individuals and families having control of their own medical expenses through medical savings accounts, incorrectly called health savings accounts (HSA).

  Obviously, a return to a pure survival of the fittest is neither possible nor rational, but now cost-benefits analysis is often absent. Medical ethics and major medical measures always involve tough decisions and tradeoffs. Some years back eugenics was popular and some serious moves to limit reproduction of inferior people considered, but aside from Nazi Germany's slaughtering Jews and Gypsies and recruiting young blue-eyed, blond youths to go to breeding camps and do their thing, eugenics has almost disappeared. It's an interesting medical-philosophy subject, given modern medicine and birth rates among the Muslims and sub-Sahara Africans.

  THE RIGHT OF PRIVATE ASSOCIATION

  Among the so-called natural rights in our Constitution, one very important right is not mentioned -- the right of everyone to associate with the people they choose.

  It is a right ignored by U.S. courts, our legislators and unelected bureaucrats, and Obama’s unelected, unconfirmed, radical, soviet-style “czars”. They tell us whom we must employ, how we must deal with other people, and that we are unable to choose whom we want to do business with.

  If these Orwellian restrictions on our freedom had been proposed in 1932, people would have sneered at the suggestion. Now people have been so brainwashed by lawyers, the courts, legislators, bureaucrats, the pointy-headed “intellectuals”, the liberal news media, the race and gender demagogues that now most people accept all these decrees and commandments as legal and proper.

  They are not. They are just another unconstitutional police-state destruction of our rights.

  MORE MATH AND SCIENCE, OR BETTER EDUCATION?

  U.S. education observers preach that our schools don't stuff our children with enough math and science, and they mean everyone. A working knowledge of mathematics is certainly needed by everyone, but why spend a huge amount of time and effort teaching everyone how to do laboriously what a computer can do in nanoseconds, to replicate software available for little or nothing, to reduce reality to abstractions or do arcane mathematical equations, unless they are likely to be needing those in the future?

  In our technical/scientific world we need many capable engineers, math whizzes, chemists, physicists, IT engineers and such. For all students, some math and science knowledge is needed as part of a broad education and for brain development and improving analytical skills. However, we don’t need is to spend large amounts of school time and money teaching disinterested students how to do differential equations, memorize atomic tables and other arcane tools of occupations they are not likely to remember or use, information they can look up easily if and when they need it.

  Everyone needs to know enough about math and science to understand where to find scientific information and how that information may be used, and basic math and science are useful in teaching people how to think. But most important, we need people who can quickly assimilate large amounts of information, draw intelligent conclusions and communicate them clearly and concisely. We need many kinds of capable, motivated people but we don’t need to try to make everyone into an engineer, mathematician or scientist unless that is their goal. The time and money spent in education needs to be directed for optimum useful, productive results.

  Some knowledge of statistics is an aid to identifying lies. Benjamin Disraeli cautioned, “There are three kinds of lies – plain lies, damned lies and statistics.” What is most needed in mathematics by everyone is an understanding of basic principles and the eventual outcomes of proposals and facts involving numbers. The old parable of the emperor of China and the inventor of chess applies here. The emperor was so grateful for the gift of chess that he asked the inventor to name any price. The inventor said all he wanted was one grain of rice for the first square of the chessboard, two grains for the second, four for the third, eight for the fourth and so on through the 64 squares. The emperor readily consented, not realizing he was giving away his empire. Two to the 64th totals 18 million trillion grains of rice, which it is said would cover the entire world two times over.

  Understanding the significance of numbers is tricky, particularly the way big ones are tossed out. One billion dollars is just a rounding number to our magnificent political leaders; they have increased our national debt six trillion dollars just during Commissar Obama's five-year reign of terror. Calculating their tiny one billion number in hours, it is 114,155 years! Calculating one trillion in hours would launch the computer into earth orbit.

  We need to abandon the college-for-everyone dream of Obama and others, for several reasons. One is the big oversupply of young college graduates, many unemployed and many others working as bartenders, laborers or cooking fries at Burger King. A December, 2013 Gallup poll reported 41 percent of U.S. college graduates saying their jobs don't require a college education. The alternative of cooperation between high schools, community colleges and other post-secondary schools in offering courses in the trades and technician fields offers great opportunities. Skilled trades like welding and medical technicians, for example, often involve some calculating, so specific math courses need to be included in their curricula but spending time and money to teach such people a lot of higher math that they will never use, just to be able to show higher math scores in group testing, is not sensible. The same applies to many science and other subjects -- how useful are they likely to be? A few generations ago many schools required students to learn Latin and
Greek so they could read that literature in their original languages. Would it have been better to have read ancient literature in English, while learning a useful modern language?

  If our mediocre K-12 government schools did the job they once did, by mid-high school they could transition from purely academic curricula toward preparing students for future vocations, including the professions. Many community colleges are doing a good job of vocational education in expanding fields and also continuing education in many occupational and academic fields. Continuing, life-long education makes more sense than spending many early years in expensive schooling. Free and inexpensive high quality on-line education is available for continuing education, needed to keep up with rapidly expanding knowledge and advances in all fields as well as to round out and expand minds and abilities as people develop as adults.

  One common mistake made in managing schools and raising children is believing everyone should be good in all subjects. One person may make a good rocket scientist, another a good auto mechanic and another a good high-rise window washer, but there is no reason to believe that each person should be competent in all three occupations.

  Human memories are leaky buckets. There are many sources of information available and there are computers and other marvelous tools to do much of the drudgery involved in developing ideas and applications. Most children in this country have ample time and opportunities to learn enough math and science but many spend endless hours watching junk television, playing computer games, texting phone messages or chewing the fat at McDonald's rather than doing or learning something useful and productive for their future. Parents, "social promotions" (failures) and poor curricula deserve most of the credit for that problem. Unfortunately, much time is ill-spent in our expensive and poorly managed government schools, increasing costs and choking off progress and efficiency.

  For an example of the deterioration of education in this country, here is a sampling of the 50 questions on the eighth grade final exam in Salina, Kansas, 1895:

  • (Grammar) Define case. Illustrate each case.

  • (Arithmetic) What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 40 rods?

  • (U.S. History) Show the territorial growth of the United States, and describe three of the most prominent battles of the rebellion.

  • (Orthography) Define the following, and give examples of each: trigraph, subvocals, dipthong, cognate letters, linguals.

  • (Geography) Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each. Describe the mountains of North America.

  Try those questions on your nearest college graduate.

  Good computer materials and audio-visuals can do wonders in improving the quality of teaching as well as in reducing school costs, but the teachers' unions are very strong, very busy and very successful at thwarting progress in educational methods. As Peter Drucker and others have noted, with the technology and facilities now available, the role of the teacher in many cases should change from being the principal teacher to a kind of coordinator-facilitator in the learning process, with students learning more from available Internet and audio-visual resources rather than being taught primarily by the teacher. Thank the Luddite Teachers Unions for blocking that progress. Each student receives outstanding, three-dimensional teaching and can proceed at his own pace rather than at that of the slowest students in the class, as is typical with the indefensible "mainstreaming" policies of many government schools. The federal No Child Left Behind program has been called No Child Allowed Ahead.

  Another example of Obama' impediments to learning is protecting undisciplined classroom behavior by minority students. His Justice Chief Eric Holder has implied a threat of lawsuits against schools whose discipline policies result in a higher proportion of minority students being punished than white students. Thomas Sowell asks if sane people can believe there is no difference between the behavior of black boys and white girls.

  The most important thing we need to teach our floundering graduates is, “There are no free lunches. Get out in the world and produce something that is needed and useful.” Liberal dogma permeates our educational systems. Our liberal schools and counselors encourage students to prepare to work in government jobs, in ever-expanding “social programs”, the environment and other unproductive -- in the economic sense -- jobs. Until the educators, politicians and bureaucrats learn that economic prosperity and the general welfare depend on most people having the abilities and incentives to produce needed and wanted economic goods and services at competitive and affordable prices, much of our national and individual potential will not be realized. Increased productivity does not come from government interference and "management" -- it comes from providing maximum incentives for individuals and businesses to produce, with a minimum of government interference. The most important subjects missing from our school curricula, and from whatever home learning is done, are not Math and Science. They are Productivity and Enterprise, and we suffer for lacking them.

  Another major failure of many of our education systems, including our great universities, is that they often provide not an education but indoctrination, with ivory-tower liberal humanities teachers grading their students on parroting the teacher's opinions, perspectives and filtered versions of facts. Often two or more views are not discussed except to criticize opinions that differ from the teacher’s. Instead of teaching students how to think, many teach them what to think. Many schoolteachers, administrators and college professors worship at the altars of radical environmentalism, multi-cultural ethnic diversity, women’s studies, black studies, homosexuality, equality not of opportunity but of outcome, self-esteem, global socialism and government planning and control of everything. In many colleges and universities, traditional humanities study -- history, geography, literature, languages, philosophy etc. -- has largely been replaced with these liberal junk courses.

  Traditional learning, the open study and discussion of conflicting ideas and opinions, is often discarded in favor of developing liberal attitudes in students. These changes have occurred under every president since Eisenhower through the ever-expanding U.S. Department of Education, which has no constitutional basis for existence. This political meddling with public-school and university education has been a toxic, expensive mistake. A return to local control of education is needed.

  Why do parents, students and taxpayers tolerate this? Most are not aware of the problem, are too preoccupied to bother or assume they are powerless to correct it. Unless they get involved, nothing significant will change. Our teaching of math and science should be based on real need for it, not just to compete with Chinese test scores, and the garbage courses put where they belong.

  GENETIC ENGINEERING OF FOOD

  Many people are convinced that genetic improvement of food is bad – unnatural, immoral and perhaps even fattening. Some see it as tantamount to playing God, while others fear harmful side effects -- global warming, global cooling, unlimited abortions or another election.

  Genetic engineering is nothing but a speeded up, more controlled method of selectively breeding plants, our historic method of producing more and better food and using fewer and better human and natural resources to do it. A century ago about 50 percent of American workers farmed, producing about enough to feed the United States. Now fewer than 3 percent are farmers, and yet we produce enough to feed our huge population and export large amounts to help feed the world.

  Originally, corn was a short grass with a tuft containing a few seeds. Over thousands of years of selective breeding it was developed into modern corn and maize and, with the help of genetic engineering, is now resistant to pests and diseases.

  The foods now called organic – those grown without chemical fertilizers and pesticides – are said by their advocates to be healthier. A spokesperson for the organic food industry, when questioned about whether organic foods are actually healthier, repeatedly answered, “They are as nutritious as traditional foo
ds;” she refused to say they are better. They probably are better in some ways but often contain bacteria that are not present in ordinary food because of the use of manure for fertilizer in growing organic foods.

  The Frankenfood Myth, a book by Henry I. Miller of Stanford’s Hoover Institution and Gregory Conko of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, makes the case that foods modified by recombinant DNA splicing present no new or special dangers, but improve the lives of millions worldwide. The book examines the anti-scientific alliance that seeks to thwart agricultural progress, and counters with this message that should be driven home to all agriculture policymakers: Gene modification is not new. New technologies are simply an advancement of centuries-old techniques including interspecies hybridization and mutation breeding. While these older, cruder techniques often cross over or change a wide number of genes in the hope of achieving a beneficial result, new technologies allow for targeted modifications with more predictable outcomes. Few people are aware that already an estimated 70 percent of the food sold now in U.S. markets is from genetically engineered plants.

  So why is Greenpeace International so angry and many Europeans so afraid of genetic engineering? Even the cautious European Commission has said that these new types of modified crops are “probably safer than conventional plants and foods,” while the Paris-based Office for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded in 1995 that recombinant DNA techniques create no unique risks over traditional modification methods.

  Groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have made draconian demands and resorted to militant activism, including seizing shipments of genetically modified seeds and damaging research facilities. Strangely, the largest agribusinesses have sometimes joined the opposition. They see more regulation as a way to raise barriers to entry and reduce competition, but they admit they have no scientific justification. The cost of securing U.S. Department of Agriculture approvals is ten to twenty times more for organisms modified with the new techniques than for conventional products, and the EPA and FDA insist on adding their oversight. The result is that only the largest agri-businesses can afford to play the game of developing new products, and they like that protection from competition.

  One example of mindless agricultural restrictions comes from . . . France. Their strict government control of wine production prohibits approved vineyards from using irrigation, fertilizer or pesticides. The grapes must grow “naturally”. The predictable results are good, bad and mediocre years in both the quality and production of wine grapes. That was a useful way for the growers to limit competition when the French produced much of the world’s wine, but it hardly makes sense now, even for the exclusive club of “controlled” growers.

  Still, there may be hope even in France. When our hot air balloon ran low on fuel over a vineyard in the Montrechet region of Burgundy, we landed next to a winery with the owner’s home upstairs. He gave us a tour of his facility, told us the lofty prices of his choice wine and how the production of his eleven acres is pre-sold two or three years in advance. We asked him where he got the technical help for his ultra-modern winery and vineyard. He replied, “Davis!” -- the University of California at Davis. The rumbling noise we heard was de Gaulle turning over in his grave.

  The same don’t-play-God people who object to genetically engineered food also object strongly to using human embryos in stem cell research. It is one thing to clone animals and humans artificially, but to use surplus in-vitro eggs, discarded embryos and umbilical cords, which otherwise would be thrown in the garbage, to research possible cures for such terrible diseases as Alzheimer’s is reasonable and desirable. Genetic engineering used rationally and conservatively is a valuable tool in improving the quality of human life.

  Humans are often very – terribly is a better word – nervous about change, particularly when it redefines what is acceptable, but change is the way our world progresses.