Sunday Musings 12/29/13

And a Happy New Year to you.  I am going to try and shut this down for a week.

The New York Times summarized an exhaustive inquiry into the tragedy in Benghazi.  It was really too much for me to read.  Link to Article   But it has some great lines that summarize the difficulties of the U.S.A. pursuing the Neo-Con dream of the US military making the world look like the U.S. politically.

"It shows the risks of expecting American aid in a time of desperation to buy durable loyalty, and the difficulty of discerning friends from allies of convenience in a culture shaped by decades of anti-western sentiment."

On to why everyone needs Health Insurance

Milliman, an actuarial firm, tried to do a study of health care costs for the uninsured under age 65.  They found that even with the uninsured paying 30% more on average in billing than what the insurance companies pay (what an outrage that is), 50% of that population will pay $2,700 and less in any given year.  50% will obviously pay more and 5% will pay more than $47,300.  The upper limit is not defined.  I have never had a house burn, but I know I have hundreds of thousands of dollars of value in my home, so I have homeowners insurance.  I know that eventually I will need health care and I  know that I cannot predict when that will be.  That is why I purchase health insurance.  So I don't have to face the prospect of choosing between death and bankruptcy.  That is the point of insurance and why every individual needs health insurance, just as states require every driver to have car insurance.

The Power of Freedom and the Draw of a Capitalist Society

I recently saw Twelves Years a Slave, the true story of a free African male with a family in Saratoga, NY who made the mistake of traveling to Washington D.C. in 1841, where he was abducted and sold into slavery with no rights whatsoever, and only his innate intelligence to help him survive and eventually figure out a way to regain his freedom through then limited legal means available.

Today, reading the book reviews, I noticed a novel about "a runaway slave in pre-Civil War South" and another story about "a Revolutionary War veteran and his slave, put to work as a breeding stock."  These merged into my brain the lengths people will go escape miserable situations for a shot at working as a free person in a safe environment.  They will take exceptional risks because the upside is so much better than their existence or what will happen to them if they fail.

My initial thought was just how wrong these idiots on and the viewers of the reality show Duck Dynasty are in their idealizing their flawed memory of life in Jim Crow America.  But it is just Television, and eliminating flawed thinking in rural America is a very long term task that is beyond any one individual or cause.  I know, because my father had some views that I can only describe as worthy of both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.  With my education, I could get him to acknowledge that he might be wrong, but it didn't change his views about Big Business. RIP Dad.

But where I really want to go with this is Immigration.  People are drawn to the U.S. because they want economic freedom and to be safe from corruption in all its forms.  People who are brave enough to get here by any means possible are not terrorists, they are the foundation on which the economy of this country is built.  They take minimum wage jobs, they perform horrendous tasks, and they want a better life for their children.  That is the commonality between runaway slaves and central americans who have walked across the Rio Grande.  The terrorists all flew into the US and overstayed their visas.  They were too soft to risk death coming across the desert. Sh*t, I am too soft to do that.  Thank goodness I was born here.

If there is anything I think the Republican Party believes in it is their origins as an anti-slavery party that believes in freedom for all individuals and respects every human life that resides in this country. There may have been laws non abided by, but no one was harmed by that violation, and now we need a plan for how these 11 mm undocumented workers are going to be brought into the system.  We cant' send them back because (i) it will shrink the labor force by 3% leading to a recession we cannot afford; (ii)  we probably cannot find them all; (iii) deportation is neither humane nor within the thinking of Judeo-Christian thought about kindness to others; and (iv) it is hardly pro-family to send the working father back from where he came while the rest of the family are U.S. citizens.