My official response to the healthcare bill....

I decided that the only way that I can address this issue is in a single comprehensive statement. I thought it best to not focus on the things that I cannot change but rather, determine what I can. After two days of listening to the pundits on both sides of the issue, looking at the bill myself and thinking about the foundation of the issues, I have determined that my issue is not with health care, but with government in general.

Anyone can make a 2000+ page bill sound bad or good depending on their perspective. So the bill will not be the focus of my response. Simply, I detest the entire process. The bill is only a symptom of what is appearing more and more to be a festering, terminal disease on the back of the American people. There is no basis for this kind of government involvement in individual lives and this is not the first but just another entitlement that is designed to relieve the people of not just their responsibility but their freedom as well.

Beginning with the earliest regulatory agencies, the government took more and more liberty from the people. In the guise of protecting people from evil profiteers, the EPA, the FDA, and thousands of other agencies were formed. The argument that we must be protected from these people assumes that we would not ultimately protect ourselves. This argument is based on the fact that the government essentially believes that the average person is too stupid to know that they are being taken advantage of.

I would pose that there is some degree of truth to that assumption. In all the time leading up to the rise of the American empire, species survived and became extinct based on their adaptation to the surroundings they were placed into. Only in the last several hundred years and much more in the last 50 years has it been the goal of government to protect and reward the weakest of the species. Is this the best thing to do is the question that is posed today as we are looking at the newest and largest entitlement program in the history of the world.

You can argue that it is inhuman to allow failures to fail. That companies that fail have to be protected because of all the workers that would be misplaced if they weren't bailed out. What about the children, they can't go without food and shelter. To some of these issues, I agree totally. However, not all and the ones I do agree on are not the responsibility of the government to manage. We should be responsible for our actions both good and bad.

So my answer to the health care bill is that I am not for it, not because I don't believe that people don't need health care but because I don't believe in the level of government we have become indentured to. The will of the people will be vetted in the mid-term elections and hopefully this huge advance in the size of government will be reversed by a clear voice from the people.

Life is about choices and consequences. Good choices result in good consequences, bad choices in bad consequences. At least that is how it should be. In America today, people who make good choices are punished by higher tax rates and a smaller percentage of earned income than those who make bad choices. Sometimes, the bad choices are even rewarded through one of thousands of government entitlement programs. Someday this has to stop. One way or another, either the redistribution has to stop or in time the lack of reward for the industrious will result in the lack of industry. There is no sustainability to our current path.

Please vote in November to remove the Washington insiders, both Democrat and Republican and replace them with people who believe that America can still be the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Don