iPandora

In case you had trouble guessing: I like businesses.

If there weren’t business there wouldn’t be internet, iphones, cars, bicycles, buildings, tents, sleeping bags, fresh produce in the middle of winter, heat and A/C, in cars too, hospitals, medication, surgery…

You get the picture.

We’ve had government since the beginning of time, and it hasn’t done a thing directly to benefit or develop beneficent products and services (except nuclear energy and other war-related items).

We’ve also had businesses since the first person decided he’d rather spread and grow his wealth instead of laboring over the same rows in the same farm for his own families sustenance.

Chipotle is an excellent example of a good business.

Our wealth allows us to pay premium price for food raised and prepared in a reasonably environmentally conscious and sustainable manner.

And it tastes good, too.

Walmart is not too different from Chipotle.

The monstrous store chain that’s easy to hate until we need cheap razer blades and jeans and socks and hand towels and garbage can liners. Then everybody loves it.

Except the unions, who are never going to love Walmart until it caves to their regressive and stiflingly stupid and anti free market strong man tactics and effects.

I pray Walmart never does, and for good reason.

When Walmart enters an area, consumers win as the often cheaper prices at Walmart “encourage” the other stores to moderate their own prices.

The prices are not always better, but they are better enough of the time and for enough products to justify the crowds you normally find at these supercenters.

Does Walmart Save You Money? (read the comments, many people report savings in the $1000′s each year while others disagree with their perception of the business practices)

But enough about prices already, Walmart benefits your health!

Huh?

Indeed, studies are showing that people living near a Walmart or “club store” (Costco, Sam’s Club, etc) are lighter on average.

But don’t all the fat and ugly people shop at Walmart? No, it’s just the ugly people and me.

In an article published in Forbes Magazine, Art Carden, an Professor of Economics at Rhodes College in Memphis TN, reports on studies showing that the increased buying power people experience when benefiting from the Walmart effect has a direct and close correlation to the health of those people.

There are several reasons this may be, and the why or how is always a bit murkier than fact of correlation, but all of the possibilities enjoy sound economic sense.

Those benefiting most from the Walmart affect are…

…women, the poor, African-Americans and people who live in urban areas.

The arguments as to why and how and many, as I noted earlier, and some may find them difficult. Read it a few times if necessary.

Our evidence is indirect, but we think it shows that price changes can have subtle and sometimes hard-to-detect consequences. Any change in price results in two phenomena. The first is the substitution effect: a change in consumption mix due to a change in relative prices. If a bag of salad is $2 and a bag of potato chips is $1, then the price of salad in terms of chips is two bags and the price of a bag of chips is half a bag of salad. If a Wal-Mart opens and reduces the price of salad to $1 a bag and the price of chips to 75 cents a bag, the “salad price” of chips has risen (from 1TK2 bag to 3TK4 bag) and the “chip price” of salad has fallen from 2 bags to 4TK3 bags. In short, salad has become cheaper relative to chips.

This argument is based on basic price comparison. If the salad cost 2 times what chips cost before Walmart,  Jack and Jill are more likely to buy the salad now because it only costs 1.3 times more than the chips now.

Then there is the income effect:

If Wal-Mart sells food at lower prices–even if our incomes don’t change–every dollar can buy more. Therefore, we’re richer.

The crux of their findings is that people, when given a choice and a suitable price range, will purchase healthier foods.

Our data suggest that we buy healthier food when our purchasing power increases. There is a small increase in consumption of fruit and vegetables in places where Wal-Mart does a lot of business and a decrease–or smaller increase–in fatty food consumption relative to places where Wal-Mart doesn’t do business. That is, people might consume more fatty foods, but consumption of those unhealthy goods increases more slowly than it does for the rest of the population.

There are other facts, findings, and arguments in the article. I urge you to read the whole thing: Wal-Mart’s Weight Effect.

The point is, don’t be too quick to denigrate or disparage the current state of our free martket system.

It’s not always pretty, and it’s easy to find fault.

However, compared with any other system out there, capitalism and the free market are the best at providing escalating levels of service and product to the most people most equitably and with the least amount of downside.

It’s been proven time and again, yet we in America now are dangerously close to forgetting completely, if we haven’t already.

The free market and capitalism isn’t about the blind, mindless pursuit of money at all costs, that’s anarchy.

Free markets and capitalism are about working in tandem with those around us to maximize our return by providing the best service or product to others. It’s a mutually beneficial system.

And we’re in danger of throwing it away.

The true solution is revealed in the nice lady who says that some bakeries have noted some demand for this healthier fare.
So then why do we not simply allow the market to work? If there is demand for healthier fare, bakeries will take advantage of that demand and work to supply product to meet the demand.

No fines or fees or arm-twisting needed.

No, it is just so obvious that the real reason the city of New York has made this a legal issue is that there are people who believe they know best how we ought to live. And they view themselves are caretakers of the general populace, protecting the idiot rest of us from our own carnal desires. These kinds of people tend to congregate in government, and they find each other.

For their own good, we should outlaw them.

In a previous article, Priorities Of Preservation, I discussed the importance Christianity puts on the entirety of an person: body, mind, and spirit.

While the world, in a misguided and myopic view constrained by sin, only really cares for the preservation of the body. And through ignorance, loses the whole person.

In a report released last week which most have already heard of or commented on, it was noted that 1/4 of the US Teenage Female population is infected with one of several Sexually Transmitted Diseases.

The immediate cry was that Abstinence Education must be completely abandoned and further explanation of the ins and outs of safe sex be taught to every child.

I find those making that argument to be their own worst enemies, and I am determined to sit and watch them tear themselves apart trying to make sense of what they’ve said.

Better have a good belt to hold these sides in. The problem is, this is no laughing matter: peoples lives are at stake.
At the blog dbTechno (“Providing Science And Technology News Since 1996″) under the headline “Teens Having Sex, Getting STD’s Due To Lack Of Knowledge” (strongly caution) there is a small picture of three bikini-clad young women shaking their derrières before the camera. This was the picture Google had selected on it’s news aggregator to highlight the several articles on this topic this morning.

In our sexified culture it is considered “emancipated” for a woman to be so “comfortable” with her sexuality that she feels willing to flaunt her body either scantily clothed or free of clothes before the whole world.

I don’t think that it is a sign of a healthy self-image that women are willing and even choose to clothe themselves that way.

I am not for arbitrary requirements in clothing, but it is saddening that, younger and younger, we are compelling out daughters and sisters to choose between frumpy and scandalous.

Removing their modesty with bits of lycra and spandex.

Revealing their bodies for the eyes of all the world.

And then we worry that too many of them are having sex.

I think a healthy self image will result in true self-worth, where the woman will not feel compelled to dress “sexy” to get the approval and acceptance of others.

When a woman is dressing revealingly they are revealing their insecurity, not their assuredness.

The Florida Sun-Sentinel Editorial Board this morning published an article titled “Abstinence-Only Education Needs To Go” (no scandalous images here) in which they completely demolish their own claims, twice.

First, early in the article they lay claim to the moral high ground:

From here, it would be easy to play the blame game. But that would be unproductive. It doesn’t matter if you’re the pro-sex education or abstinence-only type, the statistics speak for themselves, and what matters most is that something be done to make our children more sexually responsible and safe.

And then, in the very next paragraph:

Let’s start with re-tooling the failed abstinence-only approach backed by the Bush administration. Let’s teach teenagers about contraceptives and other precautions that could help protect them if they are sexually active.

Yes, lets avoid the blame game, and lets look at the facts. The Bush Administration has indeed backed and supported an abstinence-only education approach, because no one who practices abstinence contracts an STD, no one. It make sense to back a winner. But how many education programs has the Bush Administrations policy actually affected? Good question.

I would be willing to bet that with state policy, and NEA policy, and DoE policy, there is precious little abstinence-only education going on in the public schools of America.

The article then goes on to make an astounding statement. I very nearly cheered, at work, when I read this:

Abstinence teaching has its merits. It not only promotes a sure-proof defense against STDs and unwanted pregnancies, but also the idea that sexual activity requires a high level of maturity and understanding. An adolescent who engages in “protected” sex prematurely may not run the risk of physical infections, but could be exposed to long-term emotional and psychological damage.

And then gets to the…

BOTTOM LINE: Place more emphasis on contraceptives and STDs in sex-education classes.

And they reached that how?

With this simple caveat they have attempted to justify their entire tortured argument, and by extension, rationalize their continued support for the torture of young minds and bodies with illness both physical and psychological:

Like it or not, half of the teenage girls in this country are already sexually active, according to the study. Something has to be done to make them wiser in their choices, or we soon could have an even bigger public health crisis on our hands.

Do they not see the cruel irony?

Because we’re a bunch hapless, helpless dolts who’ve bought the lie that children are capable of making their own informed decisions regarding sex and mature relationships.

Because we’re a bunch of laissez-faire non-present parental units who feel no particular responsibility to counter the culture’s claims that boys are animals and girls are meat.

Because we’re a bunch of lazy do-gooders who value intentions over actions and outcomes and are willing to allow our children to do whatever they please so long as it makes them feel good.

We will complete ignore what we already know to be true: that premature involvement in adult relationships, emotional and physical, will not only harm the body but will also damage the mind.

So long as we tell enough of them to use condoms, we are perfectly willing to let them hop into bed with any yahoo or floozy who comes along.

Yea, that’s advanced society and parental love for you.

See also:

The Condom Conspiracy: Sex, Lies, STIs and Teenage Girls – the evangelical outpost

While we have Planned Parenthood and sex educators claiming that condoms can “offer effective protection against most serious sexually transmitted infections” the report finds there’s no scientific basis for that claim.

STD Data Comes As No Surprise, Area Teenagers Say – Laura Sessions Stepp and Katherine Shaver in the Washington Post

The Marrow girls offered several reasons why teenagers have sex.

“It’s to fit in, peer pressure,” Christine said, noting that virgins are often mocked. Also, “sex sells on TV.”

Khadijah chimed in that some young girls found their inspiration in the popular R&B singer Rihanna, whose latest album is titled “Good Girl Gone Bad.”

But Christina suggested something closer to home. “Write this down,” she said. “Bad parenting.”

In the Cleveland Plain Dealer Blog, V. David Sartin lays out differences in the two Democrat candidates health-care plans.

Can two practical failures, moral evils, and spectacularly bad ideas be compared?

Hillary Clinton and Barak Hussein Obama can claim as many times as she pleases that their plan will only cost X, but when the plan is applied, there is no telling how high the actual cost will go.

A key fact of every other socialized health-care plan across the globe is that the actual costs far exceed the proposed cost.

And is it really going to be cheaper? In my current insurance setup I (a single, healthy person) am paying about $40 from each paycheck of $1200 (or 3.5%) every two weeks. Meanwhile I am paying about 15-20% in taxes from that same paycheck.

The most conservative estimates of the increase in fees due completely to taxes will be about double, with an expected load of 30-40% in taxes alone, most of this going to pay for the increased costs involved in Government shouldering the burden for health insurance.

Government is not efficient, it is really the antithesis of efficiency. If you were to give the government and a private company each a dollar, the private company will accomplish more with their dollar than the government. Much more, even with the corporate salaries and such. A business which does not use it’s dollars well fails.

Government has no such check. It can use it’s dollars as wastefully as it pleases and there is nothing to stop it besides oversight by you and I. And government does not like us watching it, despite it’s own desire to watch us and our business more and more closely.

Even beyond the obvious efficiency issues though, is a constitutional and moral issue: Is it the governments responsibility to provide health-care to each and every one of it’s citizens.

Individually we are each very much for personal freedom: allow us to do as we please, please.

If we surrender control of our health choices to the government, are we not giving an extremely powerful entity control over our lives to an unprecedented extent?

A private health insurance company can ask us to live more healthily, can raise our rates based on our risk factors and history. But it cannot compel us with force of law and punishment besides increased costs and denied service.

The government can.

And as the government seeks always to expand it’s grasp in every way: say as much as you like that it will not abuse it’s power. Government will compel us, with force of law and real punishment, to live according to it’s ideal of health.

Now is that freedom?

Or is having universal, expensive health-care really worth that cost?

Anybody else think the average IQ of people in the news is falling faster than the thermostat in Chicago this winter?

In case you still think they actually have anything to add to any debate anywhere, these juicy tidbits ought to rearrange your thinking:

• Healthy Lifestyle Is the Secret to Longer Life, Researchers Say
  

  Not smoking, regular exercise, maintaining normal weight, and avoiding diabetes and high blood pressure seem to be the secrets of living to age 90, researchers say.

  No! Really?

• Some with chronic illnesses function as well as healthy peers
  

  Even people who develop heart disease or diabetes late in life have a decent shot at living to 100, according to a study published Monday.

  “You don’t necessarily have to be in good health for all of your life to attain age 100,” said Dellara Terry, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine.

  It’s a choice. It is always a choice. Humans are moral directors: we decide. When faced with a challenge, true strength tries harder.

I laugh.

Obama and Clinton being children:
There’s a bold line between idealism and fantasy,
neither of them have grown enough to know the difference.

With big thanks to Sweetness & Light.

McCain is the front runner, but he’s not won yet. America’s Mayor has endorsed him after ending his own bid to become America’s President. The Governator is expected to endorse him as early as today. (Politico)

McCain will be a “hold-your-nose-and-vote” nominee because even he will be preferable to any alternative.

It is telling that, following exit polls, we know that liberals and moderates voted for McCain in Florida, while conservatives voted for Romney.

Speaking of Romney, he has some tough choices to make: Will he write the big check?

Huckabee needs to get his personal vendetta against Romney out of his eyes, drop out of the race, and endorse the one man who will support a real conservative agenda who still has a chance of winning.

Liberals Anonymous is looking for new members:

Liberals Anonymous (LibAnon) is a nationwide organization of current, former, and recovering American liberals and Democrats. Its sole mission is to establish and maintain recovery programs designed to help similar individuals overcome the plethora of congenital illnesses inherent in postmodern American liberalism with which they are embittered. Liberals Anonymous accomplishes this worthy goal by making the idiosyncratic elemental disease nature of liberalism self-evident to the afflicted individual.

(From the American Thinker)

Back to Romney, and Hugh Hewitt. Ace of Spades apologizes for not getting it right…

I can’t keep knocking Hewitt for being a bit overly enthusiastic about being, ultimately, right. If some of us had seen the lay of the land as well as Hewitt and supported Romney as the best realistic consensus conservative candidate, we might not be in the position we’re in now.

…and endorses Romney.

Jay, do you truly think the media darling candidate is your candidate? Come on, you’re better than that. I know it.

And Orson Scott Card thinks religion may play a bigger part of this than we realize:

After the Iowa caucuses, an African-American friend of mine from Los Angeles wrote to me, scoffing at the idea that Obama’s victory there meant that a black man could now be elected president.

I thought he was too pessimistic. But then came Hillary’s “comeback” in New Hampshire.

I keep hearing about how the pollsters “got it so wrong” and how Hillary’s victory came from the Democratic regulars getting out the vote for her.

And Mitt Romney’s defeat was also laid at the feet of many causes, none of which sounded particularly solid to me. Yes, McCain is something of a “favorite son” in New Hampshire now. But he also has another “virtue” that Romney and Huckabee both lacked: He’s not openly religious.

I suspect that racial and religious prejudice are both playing more of a role than anyone is willing to admit.

Read Card’s latest WorldWatch.

Riehl ponders:

Has anyone stopped to think that if McCain gets the GOP nod, there will come a time when the party has to draft a platform with an obstinate, if not defiant, McCain – an often angry man with a history of holding conservatives in disdain?

We need speeches like this more often. Bob Corker, Senator from Tennessee, in debate on the tax rebate checks said:

“What I see in this package is nothing but a political stimulus,” said Corker. “It’s a stimulus to make the American people think that we, as a body, are doing something to actually cause the economy to be stronger.”

(From Copious Dissent)

My chief argument against this package is that it is not tied to taxation. Those who pay no taxes will get as much as those who pay taxes. That is wrong.

This will tie economic stimulus and government largess together irrevocably. Government is a burden. A necessary burden, but a burden nonetheless. The way the government to affect the economy meaningfully is to lighten itself, not to quixotically throw money back to us who were compelled to surrender it to them in the first place. That is adding insult to injury.

Back to Romney. American Thinker asks why the other candidates hate Governor Romney. Some of the answers:

• He can win
• He isn’t beholden to special interest groups
• He believes America’s best days are ahead of it

And once more, from the American Thinker: What does that ACU score really mean for McCain?

So where did McCain differ from the ACU?  The big areas were taxes, campaign finance reform, the environment and, most recently, immigration.  There was also a smattering of support for trial lawyers; federal intervention in health, education, safety or voting issues; internationalism; and some social issues.

Update: Bumped, Will and I have been going at it for a few days. Read the comments…

The Study:

In the UCSF study, researchers found that men in a clinic for HIV-positive patients who had a history of having sex with men were 13 times more likely than other HIV-positive patients to get a particular form of community-associated staph infection called MRSA USA300. But this does not mean that there is a new “gay” form of MRSA, the study’s authors say. USA300 has been around since 2002 and has appeared in at least 38 American states among heterosexual and homosexual patients. What is new is the rapid rate the bacteria spread among this particular population of gay men, studied between 2004-2006. Why these men are more vulnerable than the heterosexuals studied is still a question. Researchers stopped short of labeling USA300 a sexually transmitted disease, but they did note that the infections in the men they studied were commonly found on parts of the body where skin-to-skin contact occurs during sexual activity.

The Rebuttal:

Gay men’s health advocates point out that MRSA can be spread through any kind of skin-to-skin contact, either sexual or nonsexual, without regard for sexual orientation. And they have been very critical of the media for its focus on the sexual aspects of the story. “It’s very unfortunate,” says GMHC’s Stackhouse. “It’s very stigmatizing, it’s alarmist, it’s homophobic and it’s just unnecessary.”

There you have it. Just because the disease can be transmitted by other forms of skin-to-skin contact, the fact that it is 13 times more likely to occur in those who engaged in homosexual relations than in those who didn’t means it’s homophobic to consider homosexual behaviour an increased risk for MRSA.

Read it all on Newsweek.

Either it pays for itself or it’s 4 billion of your dollars down the hole in 5 years.

The State of California (sometimes it’s more a state of mind than anything substantive) is facing a 14.5 billion dollar shortfall, and yet, in their reckless pursuit of assuaging all societal inequities, the majority of the Democrat Legislators and the Republican Governator are seeking to enact socialized medicine in California.

Using additional fees on each and every employer, worker, and hospital, plus a $1.75 tax hike on each pack of cigarettes, the system seeks to ensure universal coverage in the Golden State.

California’s big problem right now is that it’s legal climate has driven all meaningful business out of the state. It is getting more and more uneconomical to maintain a business in the state as stifling and confiscatory taxes, fees, and regulations increase alarmingly.

As businesses flee the state and close down, revenues will continue to decrease in an increasing trend.

California is a good example of liberal policy carried to it’s logical conclusion.

Soon, my parents and siblings and relatives will be waiting in line at the clinics to received government-mandated testing and/or procedures.

Think I’m getting a bit apocalyptic? What about the push to require the HPV vaccination of all girls? Somebody somewhere will have some golden idea that sounds great and looks like the “greater good” and someone else will believe them. That’s all it takes where there is no accountability and more stultifying bureaucracy.

The health care plan aims to extend insurance to roughly 70 percent of the state’s uninsured population by expanding government health programs, forcing businesses to provide coverage to workers or pay a fee to the state, and imposing new taxes on hospitals and tobacco. If the proposal wins the support of the Legislature, voters would have to approve a ballot initiative in November in order for it to become law.

In a best-case scenario, the plan’s revenues would cover its costs in the first year, Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill wrote in her review released Tuesday evening. However, by the fifth year, she estimates the program’s annual costs would exceed revenues by $300 million.

From the San Jose Mercury News.

Read more articles on this, from Google.

And what about the plans being touted by each and every Democrat running for president? If the State of California will suffer this badly, let us just tank the entire US economy while we’re at it.

Remember, reform is not worthwhile if it makes the problem worse.

In the Colorado Springs Gazette, an opinion article points out that, regardless of individual positions on embryonic stem cell research and cloning, we should agree the government should not sponsor ANY scientific research.

The central government of the United States has no business funding radical medical experiments, whether or not the president deems them morally correct. It’s not the government’s duty.

Highly recommend this article. The free, unregulated market provides support to those who deserve, need, or work hard for the support, and denies support to those who do not try or whose ideas have no merit.

Government handouts always create an atmosphere of expectation and dependence. The government is not only poorly equipped for accurate and fair judgment of proposals for grants, it is significantly more prone to scamming and cheating in spreading its copious amounts of money.

Look no further than the times when altruism and human goodness should have most triumphed: natural and national disasters. The cleanup after hurricane Katrina was as much a disaster as the hurricane itself, with longer lasting damage continuing even today.

Take all grants and pork out of the government pot. Deny congress and any government authority the ability to give money to anybody for any reason beyond payment for services rendered. Then take the largess which will be left over from that and return it to the people who’ve paid for the privilege of living in this great nation. With the extra money suddenly available there can be nothing but good as they choose the destination for their additional retained earnings.

Millions of individual moral agents are deciding the destination of their own money is vastly more efficient and entirely superior to one vast immoral one spreading its unearned largess to the noisiest mouths.

Beyond the fiscal and governmental arguments, there are inescapable moral arguments in this issue:

While the attempt to obtain embryonic-like stem cells for the purpose of establishing cell lines without destroying embryos is, in principle, morally laudable, any procedure that places at risk the health and life of a human embryo for purposes that do not directly benefit the embryo is morally unacceptable.
~Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D.

David Limbaugh, in his January 3rd column, contemplates the foundations of the American Experiment and the assaults against those foundations by ignorant yet usually well-meaning people of all stripes.

He asks whether or not conservatives have that “fire in the belly” necessary to motivate the country into entrusting its direction to their hands again.

Before Reagan was elected, there was much more for conservatives to be concerned over, the country had bought into massive economic and social lies and was being led by its nose down a path of recession. But Reagan led on ideas and hope, and with solid economic principles he allowed the country to see the truth in his dreams.

Have we now forgotten the strengths of America are not magic or unassailable permanent fixtures of our corner of the world?

We expect liberals to believe: We can punish the producers in this nation without reducing overall output and hurting all economic groups; we can socialize health care without destroying its quality, quantity and affordability; we can assault our traditional values and cultural institutions without eroding the nation’s character; unbridled, illegal immigration without assimilation will lead to multicultural Nirvana; and we will be secure at home if we’ll just be nicer to foreign nations and more sensitive to the terrorists’ concerns.

But what about conservatives? Do we also need a reminder that free nations are the exception in world history and that our liberty was purchased with the greatest sacrifices and will ultimately disappear without a rededication to our founding principles?

Read it all. Then tell Fred Thompson to get some fire in his belly.

His greatest strength is that he doesn’t need to be president. But his greatest failure is that he doesn’t recognize the necessity of at least acting as though we need him to be president. If the strength of his own convictions is this weak, what is there to entrust to him?