TimManBlog

Won’t Get Fooled Again

Since I’ve been travelling the past few days I haven’t been able to write much. What I have been able to do is to check the musings of another obscure blogger who goes by the moniker The Sage of Mt. Airy. I’ve never met “the Sage” but through friends I hear he is a retired military man who later became a professor of medieval philosophy for a while, and then retired a second time. Nice resume.

In “The Real Cost“, the Sage pulls the covers off the recent mortgage shake-down of five large banks by the Obama administration:

But first folks, please understand that no bank will ever pay any part of the $25 billion settlement.  Basic economics:  It’s their customers who will pay; it’s only their customers who can pay.

Let me be clear. If Obama ordered Archers-Daniels-Midland to give everyone “free” corn on the cob it wouldn’t really be free. Their customers would pay for it. Let me be clear. Some would praise the President for “helping alleviate hunger” or some such, but it wouldn’t really be free. Let me be clear: You Got Fooled Again.

Announced around the same time as the $25 billion sleight of hand was what the Wall Street Journal’s “Best of the Web Today” called the Abortifacient Shell Game (topic occurs halfway down the article):

 “If a woman works for an employer that objects to providing contraception because of its religious beliefs, the insurance company will step in and offer birth control free of charge,” ABC reports.

It’s not clear who will “step in” if the institution self-insures, and in any case this sounds like something of a swindle. Unless insurance companies have access to magical abortifacient trees, somebody has to pay for this stuff. One way or another the benefits will be priced into the cost of insurance, and even if insurers give Catholic institutions a discount and pass the cost on to everybody else, the former will still be purchasing a package of benefits that includes what they find abhorrent.

Let me be clear. Insurers can’t “step in” and give away things for free. Let me be clear: that’s as basic an economics lesson as “there is no free lunch.” Insurers do not have access to “abortifacient trees.” Let me be clear: You Got Fooled Again. First Amendment be damned.

So Meet the New Boss: Lord of the Banks, Lord of the Insurance Companies, Lord of the Car Companies, Lord of the Churches, Lord of Religious Correctness, etc. etc. We heard all about him 40 years ago and we all swore We Won’t Get Fooled Again.

Rather than electing one New Boss after another to rule over one industry after another (while the bottom line is I pay for it all anyway) — I’d prefer “A Servant.”