More on the Healthcare Fiasco

I read this article by Ann Coulter, which will be a great help to cut through Democrat deceit on this healthcare issue, especially when you hear that they are saying that they are being misrepresented. But almost more interesting were some of the comments to her column. I've chosen a few of the best ones I scanned:

#1 was the NY Times columnist, "economist," Paul Krugman's slip-out on the death panels. Now that the bill is passed, he easily admits that the death panels are reality. Here's the comment:

Death Panel? YES! Death Panels.

N.Y. Times columnist: Death panels will save 'a lot of money'.

"Paul Krugman tells 'Roundtable' economists agree it's 'going to be major.''

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=134401

"Left-leaning New York Times economic columnist Paul Krugman says the so-called 'death panels' established by President Obama's trillion-dollar nationalized health-care plan will end up saving 'a lot of money' for the government.

"The comments from Krugman, who also writes on the New York Times blogs, came during a discussion of "Obamacare" on the ABC News Sunday program 'This Week.'

"People on the right, they're simultaneously screaming, 'They're going to send all the old people to death panels,' and 'It's not going to save any money,'" he said.

"Another panelist interjected, 'Death panels would save money,' to which Krugman responded:

"The advisory panel which has the ability to make more or less binding judgments on saying this particular expensive treatment actually doesn't do any good medically and so we are not going to pay for it. That is actually going to save quite a lot of money. We don't know how much yet. The CBO gives it very little credit but, but most, most of the health care economists I talk to think that's going be a really, uh a really major cost saving."

#2 is actually several comments by someone named John, who broke down the issues of this healthcare bill in an excellent way.

Economic Reality #1

The fact is that all scarce commodities (a commodity for which the demand outstrips the supply) are rationed in one way or another. A pricing mechanism is the only rational way to ration any scarce commodity as it is the only rationing system which is self-correcting in that not only does a pricing system determine where resources are directed but it also, unlike any other rationing system I'm aware of, encourages the development of substitutes for the commodity being rationed and the creation of additional supplies of the commodity being rationed in response to the price, leading to a reduction in the price of the commodity over time.

A quick review of the (unrepealable) laws of supply and demand. The law of supply states that at higher prices, producers are willing to offer more of a commodity for sale than at lower prices, that the supply increases as prices increase and decreases as prices decrease and that those already in business will try to increase productions as a way of increasing profits. The law of demand states that people will buy more of a commodity at a lower price than at a higher price, if nothing changes; that at a lower price, more people can afford to buy more goods and more of an item more frequently than they can at a higher price; and that at lower prices, people tend to buy some goods as a substitute for others that are more expensive.

Economic Reality #2

In the real world where we live, there are many commodities that are rare. But rarity does not necessarily equal scarcity and a high price. I haven't seen an 8 track player in years and I would bet they are pretty scarce. But if I had 1,000 of them I think I would have a hard time even giving them away. There's no demand. For the finite commodity of health care, however, there is an almost unlimited demand. If you apply the laws above to health care and make it essentially "free" (ie, the individual receiving the health care is not required to directly exchange any resources of their own for it) demand will skyrocket. We've already seen this with Medicare and Medicaid. These are the programs that are driving health care costs up because the government does not reimburse doctors and other provides for the full costs of the care they provide so those of us not on the government programs pay extra to cover the "free" care received by those in these programs.

Extend that phenomenon to the entire health care system by eliminating all private health insurance and forcing everyone onto a government run, monopoly (why is a monopoly good when the government has it but bad when a private company has it? Are government bureaucrats really so much more worthy of trust?) single payer "public option", the stated goal of Barak Obama.

Economic Reality #3

Once health care becomes "free" for everyone, there is no incentive for any individual to limit their consumption of the resource. On the contrary, there is every incentive to use as much of the resource as possible before it runs out. And since the government sets the price it pays for the commodity it is providing "free", government reimbursement rates will be set artificially low as they already are in the Medicaid/Medicare system. Thus there will be no incentive for anyone to provide more of the scarce commodity, health care, nor to search for substitutes for any of the components of health care (ie, new drugs, new surgical procedures etc.). There certainly will be no incentive for anyone to undergo the long education and preparation to become a doctor when all that means is being an overworked, underpaid flunky in a government bureacracy leading to a shortage of doctors. This will probably at least be partially rectified by an influx of non-native doctors (Indians and Pakistanis as has happened in both Britain and Canada) who will still be willing to work for the lower wages because at least they are in the US. But for everyone of them that comes here we leave a hole in the health care system of their home country. How moral is that?

What the plan does is eliminate any incentive at all for anyone to participate in the health care system as a producer of any of the components.

Economic reality #4

I see people with signs saying "Get the profit out of healthcare". OK, fine. But why stop with health care? Isn't food an even more basic need than health care? We all need food every day. Why should farmers be making a buck off of my need? That's just plain immoral! We need to have a government run food supply system that will reduce cost and make sure everyone gets all the food they need, even if they can't pay. You know, create some competition with the big agribusinesses to "keep them honest". Maybe we can merge all the farms into big collectives and have the government manage them.....just like the USSR used to do. After all, it was fair wasn't it?

So government rationing, unlike rationing by price, will not lead to the introduction of more resources into the system but will actually lead to the removal of resources from the system leading to even greater shortages and more rationing, rationing that would be conducted not by merit but by how well you know or can manipulate the health care bureacrats who will control access to care. To paraphrase Cicero, when the government bureaucrats control health care, the first ones to get health care will be the bureaucrats.

Enjoy.

The Only One Bible Belief

I just wrote a comment to someone and I thought I'd publish it here, except removing the name of the one to whom the comment was directed.

Let’s completely take the term “KJV” out of the equation and replace it with the the term “Bible.” Let’s even get out of our head for the moment the concept of “translation."

The Bible is not paper. It isn’t ink. It is Words made from letters. Scripture presents one Bible, one set of Words. Since the Bible is so dependent on Words, since that is what it is, Words, you can’t say that there are two Bibles or four Bibles or ten Bibles and yet they are all the same. That is not possible. It’s like this: 4 does not equal 5. Or, 93 does not equal 100. Those are not the same, but in this we are supposed to say that they are the same. They are not.

Now if someone were dealing with the Iliad and Odyssey by Homer, and you had 7% word differences, you might say that they were both the Iliad and Odyssey. But with the Bible, unless the very Words don’t matter, you can’t say that two books that are 5-7% different are both the Bible. This flies in the face of what Scripture says about itself. So as we view this in a doctrinal way, we don’t have a basis for accepting two different sets of words as the same. I will not join you in that idea. And I am talking about 5-7% difference between the CT and the TR. You’ve got bigger problems if you look at the differences between the manuscripts of the CT.

Now you may say that the words don’t change any doctrine. We have established that is not true in Thou Shalt Keep Them, our book (which you can buy here: http://www.amazon.com/Thou-Shalt-Keep-Them-Preservation/dp/0974381705/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270054256&sr=8-1 incidentally). Does the Bible tell us what doctrine is or do we determine what Bible we believe by what doctrine it contains? Because they are not the same. I’m not saying that they teach two different gospels, but that’s not a standard that we would expect either by what the Bible teaches. They do teach different doctrine though.

What you are asking us to accept though, [Person], is to accept more than one Bible. Do you see that? You make this very statement: “We do deny that it is the ONLY Bible that is of God. ” Can you imagine an unbeliever getting a hold of that? It would be confusing. “You mean there is more than one Bible?” I can hear him say. Answer from you: “Of course.” Well, that seems rather strange. I don’t accept the two Bible idea. It isn’t scriptural. This is where faith comes in.

Now you may say that you believe there is only one Bible, but you don’t know what the Words are. You can’t, if you are CT/eclectic, ever claim to know what the Words of God are. You may think that you can’t know. If that’s true, then how do you know what the 66 books are? Perhaps that’s less of a leap with your mind. Your mind can handle 66 books. Your mind can handle rejecting the Epistle of Barnabas for instance or the Shepherd of Hermas. Why? It doesn’t relate to what Scripture says, it again comes down to being rational to you.

How rational are many of the events of Scripture? Esther. Jonah. Genesis 1. Genesis 3. Every Gospel. Revelation. And how rational are many of the events? We receive them by faith. Abraham did that many times—going to the Promised Land, offering Isaac, etc.

[Person] and others here, join us in faith in, in the belief in, the providential, perfect preservation of Scripture in the language in which it was written. Without faith it is impossible to please God.

President Obama's "Great" Health Care "Victory"

As you read the after reports of the passing of Obamacare, you heard of his greatness, the giant victory, and the making of or the validating of his presidency. I want us to consider what really occurred to evaluate whether this did measure a victory and his greatness.

First, President Obama won his presidency running as a candidate that would bring change to the political discourse of the federal government. He would be someone open and transparent and ready to listen. Voters, especially independent ones, gave him the benefit of the doubt based upon that hope, the latter word one that Obama wanted people to buy into. They voted for him, because they believed that he could bring people together through his leadership, through a kind of sheer force of personality and charisma. Voters believed President Obama would usher in a new era of bipartisanship and unity. Of course, then Senator Obama had that 25 to 30 percent, that made up his liberal base, who wanted him to transform the government into their vision of socialism, but he wouldn't have won the election if everyone thought that was what they were voting for. There were many who were warning that he was not going to be some force of change for peaceful relations in Washington, DC, but people instead opted for "hope," which was probably more like a fantasy.

Second, as President Obama came into office, the economy of the country was nearing cataclysmic conditions. The voters trusted President Obama to make the kind of decisions that would improve the economy and increase the employment rate. He talked during the campaign as though this would be his top priority. Then when he came into office, he focused immediately upon the government take-over of health care, what even Governor Howard Dean is calling "redistribution of wealth." So the economy never was Obama's top priority, that was just campaign rhetoric to get votes. He took on the healthcare subject early in his presidency with the hopes that the natural economic cycles would improve about the time his re-election campaign kicked off, knowing that he would perhaps sacrifice his majority in either the House or the Senate. He knew that his political capital would be shrinking, so he needed to move fast before it got so small that he couldn't control Congress, even with his huge Democrat majority.

Third, let's make sure we understand this huge victory that President Obama got. He persuaded zero Republicans. He didn't even get all of his Democrats. The victory he won was in getting a very, very small majority with the party that was already in control of Congress. He persuaded his own party!! Yippeee!!! What great a task is that? And we know, of course, that he would not even have been able to get the support of his own party without all sorts of shady deal making behind the scenes. And then he had to finish it off in the Senate with a parliamentary type of procedure called "reconciliation." He knew he couldn't get a filibuster proof majority in the Senate, so he settled on a reconciliation process that would only require a majority of the votes in a Senate where the Democrats have a 59-41 majority.

So that's our big, transformative victory? It isn't bipartisan. Poll after poll shows that people didn't want the bill to become law. Democrats will argue that when you poll the individual parts of the bill, people wanted it. Right, but the parts that they polled on were the things that almost anyone would want with all the bad stuff that came with getting those things that people wanted. It essentially ignored what President Obama had said he would work on, the economy. We might all be happy that he couldn't do anything worse to the economy than the healthcare bill itself. And last, he talks barely a majority of his own party into voting for it. Surely many of them will be having second thoughts about what they did. This was no kind of big victory. Democrats should have expected this kind of legislation to pass with control of both the executive and the legislative branches. They have a rubber stamp to get almost anything that they want, so this was no kind of victory. It's about as much a victory as my getting out of bed in the morning.

In one sense, I have to admit that I'm cynical, but it is difficult to trust someone so duplicitous. As soon as the health care "victory" is won, President Obama takes a trip to visit the troops. He leaves the United States after his great victory. It's not a victory he wants to stick around and "enjoy." And whatever negatives he could receive from a nation, who by a fairly large majority didn't want his health care bill, which are a lot, would be swallowed up by the positive of visiting the troops. It's like hitting a guy wearing glasses. You don't want to criticize a guy who's visiting the troops. How could a guy so untrustworthy be so bad who surprises the soldiers in Afghanistan? Premeditated. Contrived. Hard to appreciate.

Is it a victory for our country when you can't even persuade all of your own party, let alone anyone in the other party? Is it a victory for the country when you can't even persuade the country itself that the bill is going to be best for it? Is it some great victory when you accomplish it at the expense of all the other things you said you would actually do? John Lott writes today in an article published while I was writing this:

Would Barack Obama and the Democrats have won in 2008 if he had promised what he ended up doing: to dramatically increase government spending and deficits, raise taxes on the middle class, hide special deals on health care, and make it impossible for people to keep their current doctors and health insurance plans?

No. He wouldn't have won the election. And he knew that. So what is this great victory? It is the victory for dishonest politicians, who make promises, knowing that they aren't going to keep them. It's a victory for them.

Fundamentalist Seminary Attacks Centrality of the Church part two

Jeff Straub has come back and written a follow up to his Restoring the Centrality of the Local Church? about which I wrote a very short post to identify it to my readers. His follow up is entitled, Overstating My Case? A Second Reflection on 1 Tim. 3:15. I appreciate his reflection on his first essay, but I'm afraid he may just be digging his hole a little deeper. I do not gloat in any way over all this, but this whole incident could be very instructive to many, and I think corrections need to be made.

Straub, I believe, was primarily concerned over what Dave Doran of Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary had written at his blog about Straub's post. Doran had written something similar to what I had. Does Straub have a point of view and then look in the Bible to accommodate it? I'm not sure, but he was off on this one and then stayed off. This will not be answering his entire post, but will refute the particular exegetical point from which he buttresses the whole.

In his first offering, he said that the church of 1 Timothy 3:15 was "the universal church." Doran and myself both said that the church of 1 Timothy is local, and especially the one in 1 Timothy 3. Of course, I believe that the church is always an assembly, since that's what a church is, an assembly. There is no such thing as an unassembled assembly. Universal and church are a contradiction in terms. But for the sake of this argument, we're just looking at 1 Timothy 3:15. Straub would like his point to remain, so even though he does some backtracking in his second essay, he still misses it when he tries to further his exegesis. Here's what he wrote:

Recently I suggested that a local church is not the pillar and ground of the truth because of the tendency that local churches have to stray into error. Dave Doran has rightly challenged my use of 1 Tim. 3:15, and I confess that I should have phrased things differently. In the text in question, Paul is giving instructions to Timothy for local assemblies. Indeed, churches rightly ordered are pillars and grounds of the Truth. Note that in the text of 1 Timothy, the phrase is anarthrous so that we are talking of a pillar and ground and not the pillar and ground.

"Phrased things differently"? OK. We'll give him that. But then we get the "a" pillar and ground and not "the" pillar and ground. Dr. Straub should know that there is a reason why the KJV, NASV, NKJV, NIV, etc. all translated this "the pillar and ground of the truth," even though it is anarthrous. Anarthrous does not mean indefinite. I don't think we can get away with "phrase things differently" on this one, however.

On p. 239 of his Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, Daniel Wallace writes:

In genitive phrases both the head noun and the genitive noun normally have or lack the article. The construction is known as the Apollonius' canon, named after Apollonius Dyscolus, the second-century Greek grammarian. Apollonius observed that both the head noun and the genitive noun mimicked each other with regard to articularity. Rarely did they go their own separate ways.

Later Wallace relates on p. 245: "Though by definition an articular noun is definite, an anarthrous noun may also be definite under certain conditions." Then he lists some of these conditions. The eighth of these is a "genitive construction" (p. 250). He says that in the genitive construction, "[i]t makes little semantic difference whether the construction is articular or anarthrous."

In other words, according to the Apollonius' canon, if "the truth" is definite, which it is, then "pillar and ground" must also be definite. The translators understood that no article was necessary to make "pillar and ground" definite. It was definite. So they translated it "the pillar and ground," making it definite by adding the English article.

A good example of this canon in play elsewhere is in Colossians 3:5:

For the hope which is laid up for you in heaven, whereof ye heard before in the word of the truth of the gospel;

Notice "the word of the truth." This is very similar to 1 Timothy 3:15 because "word" is anarthrous in the Greek, no Greek article. And yet "word" is still definite, "the word," because "the truth" is definite.

Our understanding based upon Greek grammar is that 1 Timothy 3:15 should be understood as "the pillar and ground of the truth," not "a pillar and ground of the truth," because of the Apollonius' canon. Jeff Straub erroneously sees something with the lack of article before "pillar" that really isn't there at all. So the point stands that the assembly, the local church alone, is the pillar and ground of the truth, and not anything else. This is an instance where someone cherry picks something from the Greek to find a theological point that isn't there at all.

President Obama's Humiliation of Israel

Here is a great article by London Telegraph writer Nile Gardiner. This guy is fast becoming a favorite read of mine. He indicates how President Obama treated the Prime Minister of Israel. It's an embarrassment and intolerable to me.

Fundamentalist Seminary Attacks Centrality of the Church

I've not read anything this blatant, but I've got to appreciate the clarity. Most, it seems, try to be ambiguous today, so that you can't quite figure out what they mean. Not in this case. Here, Jeff Straub, on behalf of Central Baptist Theological Seminary, says that the church is not central (no pun intended). Fundamentalism has already been attacking the centrality of the church for a long while, holding churches under its sway, but no one is trying to hide anything with this essay. Now I know those who read the article will say, nuh-uh, he does so say the church is central. Right. The "Universal Church." This is a seminary training men to interpret the Bible in its context. Straub says that the "church" that is the pillar and ground of the truth, the one in 1 Timothy 3:15, is all believers, the so-called "universal, invisible church." Of course, that's blatant eisegesis. The church of 1 Timothy 3:15 has a pastor and deacons (see all of chapter 3). So who's the pastor of the "universal church"? Who are the deacons of that "church"? Some are so entrenched in this Augustinian and Platonic interpretation, really allegorizing the understanding of "church," that they see it everywhere.

So this fundamentalist seminary attacks the centrality of the church. I hope the best for them. But they are wrong. I would wonder what churches would think of sending their men there to train. I guess men wouldn't need to think about a church sending them anyway. As long as they are in touch with the big one, the big nebulous, cloudy one, they would have all the authority they need. I find Kevin Bauder, their president, an interesting guy, but all the church hoppers of the world are yelling, "Amen!" Parachurch organizations giving the thumbs up. They could be central (not the seminary). Hey, one free floating blogger could be central. That's a thought.

How Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Codify Uncertainty and Doubt

I've written a new article at Jackhammer that I don't want my regular readers here to miss. So please click on this link, and read it all. I think it is vitally important. If you don't like commenting at Jackhammer or just prefer to comment here, then please do comment here.

Iran and the Nuclear Bomb

Alan Dershowitz, Harvard law professor, has shown himself not to be some flaming conservative, so what he says about the nuclear bomb and Iran should be even greater cause for pause. Read what he writes here.