Television Crisis!

The United States Congress recently gave television stations an extension for the digital switchover in the hopes Americans would be granted more time to prepare for this momentous event.

After all, there is now the risk that some Americans might not be able to watch television. Wouldn't that just be horrible? What would we do in the face of this catastrophe? Read books? Talk to each other? Go outside and look around? Oh, the horror!

Healthcare Will Be Linked to Reproduction

Since healthcare is at its root an ethical question, at some point we are going to end up linking it to reproduction.

In any place where some sort of minimum healthcare is guaranteed, the society immediately faces the question of when to give up on people and let them die. Taking this a little further, it seems likely that at some point some governments will likely tie healthcare to reproduction.

That is, either you can live, or your children can live. The more children you have, the less healthcare the society will be likely to want to give to you.

Though it may seem cruel, it is a rather fair way of looking at the issue. If someone has ten children, they are creating ten more consumers of the healthcare system. At some point, the system needs to cut off the parent in favor of the children.

How spoiled are Americans?

The American standard of living has become so high that Americans seem to be unable to tell how good they have it.

The United States is embroiled in two wars, but the average American has no day-to-day experience of those wars. Could anyone in any other nation say the same? When the U.S. was involved in World War II, Americans could not buy cars or fancy clothes. The entire economy was dedicated to winning the war. Now America simply deficit spends while Americans are urged to go out and spend, spend, spend on whatever they can to "support the economy."

The United States is in a recession, but the average American lives like a king. Americans still pay for mobile phone service, premium television, luxury automobiles, and so many other luxuries that seem unthinkable to the "middle class" of many other nations.

What will it take for Americans to be able to realize what their own nation is doing?

American Unions: Go to China

Now that we have a global economy, it should not be surprising that disparate nations such as the United States and China are equalizing. China is getting rich and the U.S. is getting poor. People blame Walmart for this, but it is the American unions who should take the most blame.

Don't get me wrong: American unions have served a very important role in protecting the rights of labor. But they then kept going, greedily taking far more than is justified. Now American industries are horribly crippled by the unions, who demand insane privileges from the companies who hire them.

Is it any wonder that American companies want to go to China, where the labor is cheap and powerless? Is it any wonder that Americans buy Chinese products, which cost far, far less because of their cheap production costs?

An ironic consequence is that Americans are losing their jobs to Chinese workers. So, why don't people realize the core problem here? It is American unions which are destroying American jobs.

If the American unions really wanted to serve the American worker, they would go to China and fight to get rights for Chinese workers. (And India and Viet Nam, etc.) Not only would this be good for American workers, it have many, many other benefits. Obviously it would be good for Chinese workers. And it would be good for the American economy, for the environment, and in the end for all humanity.

So, American unions: are you ready to go back to your days of real labor organizing? It's dangerous in China, but if you actually want to serve your core mission, it is your duty to move almost all of your efforts overseas. NOW.

Energy Is a Problem of Consumption, Not Production

There is no such thing as clean energy. First, there are always costs to energy production, even among the so-called green sources. Hydro power destroys estuaries. Solar power robs the land of heat and sunlight. Wind energy kills birds.

And generally, the use of energy itself is a problem. Generating electricity adds heat to the Earth's system, or at the very best, moves heat from one place to another. Taken on a large scale, this alters climate patterns.

Instead of looking for cleaner sources of energy, we should be looking for ways to use far, far less energy. Converting to alternate energies costs a lot in terms of both money and resources (which then has other environmental impacts). Conserving energy can cause an immediate reduction in emissions without any investment of money or resources.

The Healthcare Issue Is about Choosing Who Dies When

Modern medical technology has advanced to the point where the United States cannot pay for all the healthcare we can give. Considering the millions of dollars it can take to keep one person alive, how can we expect to offer total healthcare to every citizen?

This means that at some point we have to decide when it is not cost effective to keep someone alive. No politician wants to admit this, so we keep pretending that it's not the central issue. But it is, and until we admit it, we will not be able to solve the "healthcare problem."

How Are Unions Different from Welfare?

Labor unions have been a great boon to workers. There is no denying that in the 20th century, workers were at a tremendous disadvantage and needed something like unions to achieve some basic rights in the workplace.

But unions didn't stop at leveling the playing field; they just kept demanding more and more, and they have managed to tip the balance strongly in their favor.

Now we have the United Auto Workers (UAW) demanding that, for example, the U.S. federal government bail out the American auto manufacturers so that union jobs can be protected. The auto manufacturers hardly seem to even want the bailout: they would rather go into bankruptcy protection so they can get out of the crippling union contracts.

I'm not saying that the car manufacturers are wonderful, or that they aren't at least partially responsible for getting into this mess in the first place. But why should the government pay to protect jobs that the industry doesn't want? Isn't that just welfare?

Wouldn't it be cheaper for the American taxpayer to just give welfare checks to the UAW workers instead?