Levin on Gov’t-Run Health Care: If Gov’t Ran Food Production, ‘We’d All Starve to Death’

On his nationally syndicated radio talk show Monday, host Mark Levin compared government-run health care with government-run food production, saying that if the government controlled food production, “we’d all starve to death.”

“Trust me, if the government controlled food production in this country, we’d all starve to death,” said Mark Levin. “If the Department of Housing and Urban Development was truly in charge of housing in your neighborhood and construction costs and everything else, we’d all be homeless. We’d all be homeless. Why would we take one of the most complex areas of life, and that is health care, which is really and truly a personal decision, and surrender it to the federal government?”

Below is a transcript of Levin’s comments from his show on Monday, July 10:

“Trust me, if the government controlled food production in this country, we’d all starve to death. If the Department of Housing and Urban Development was truly in charge of housing in your neighborhood and construction costs and everything else, we’d all be homeless. We’d all be homeless.

“Why would we take one of the most complex areas of life, and that is health care, which is really and truly a personal decision, and surrender it to the federal government or have it seized from us, and then make all these excuses: why it’s great, and people with pre-existing conditions?

“Ladies and gentlemen, if the only issue was people with pre-existing conditions and poor people, why do we have to destroy the rest of the health care market? They use these as excuses, as lies -- that people can’t get health care with pre-existing conditions.

“Number one: If you’re healthy and you don’t have insurance, what the hell is wrong with you? Then if you get sick, everybody else has to pay for it? Well, that’s why they have group insurance. We cannot set up a rational system aimed at the lowest common denominator. We just can’t. It won’t work.

“So, what’s necessary? Competition, choice, freedom, individual responsibility, individual decisions: that’s the only way we’re going to get the cost down. That’s the only way you’ll be able to buy a policy that you want. It’s the only way you’re going to see the doctors you want to see. There’s no other way. And why we resist it, I don’t know.

“Was the Industrial Revolution really so horrible? That we have clean water? That you can flick a switch and get electricity? That you can drive an automobile? Was it really that horrible that we can’t apply it to health care? These aren’t theoretical matters. This is reality. There’s a system that works and a system that doesn’t.

“And it seems to me that the progressives have won the battle of the minds. It just -- They just have. Just incredible.”

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After minimum wage hikes and ammunition taxes, the lesson is don’t be like Seattle

On June 2, 2014 Seattle’s city council approved a raise in the minimum wage to a highest in the nation $15 an hour. Not one member of the council voted against it. Like most liberal progressives, the Seattle city council believed they could regulate prosperity. The law did not have the intended consequences.

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization conducting economic research, published a paper, on June 26, about the impact of the increase in the minimum wage on Seattle. The working paper is called “Minimum Wage Increases, Wages, and Low-Wage Employment: Evidence from Seattle.”, and was put together by a team from the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance of the University of Washington.

The report analyzes of data from the second quarter of 2014, right before the law was passed, and the second quarter of 2016. The data shows a reduction of 39 percent in jobs that pay less than $13, as to be expected. However, the data also showed a decline in jobs, 4,528, that pay under $19. This is where the jobs were the loss in jobs under $13 was supposed to go.

The bad news didn’t stop there. Over the same two-year period, the data showed a significant reduction in the amount of hours worked. People making under $13 showed a decline of 5.8 million hours in reduction, while people making under $19 lost 1.7 million hours of work. Once again, there was supposed to be a decrease in hours of people making less than $13 with an increase in people making less than $19. Just as the number of jobs decreased, the hours worked by those that held onto their jobs decreased.

Overall, this was a disaster for the working class in Seattle. Yes, people got raises, but thousands lost their jobs, and those that could keep their jobs, saw their hours decreased. For someone working for an hourly wage, it’s simple math, work more hours, make more money. It is estimated the race to make $15 the minimum wage in Seattle cost low-wage earners an average of $1,500 per year. The increase in pay, did not make up for the reduction in hours. I don’t remember “work less, get paid less” being a slogan of the $15 movement.

The federal government should use the Seattle model as a warning. According to the U.S. Census data there are approximately 84 million jobs that make under $40,000. If Seattle’s experience is any indicator of how a national minimum wage hike up to $13 an hour would work out, the cost could be a loss of 1.2 million jobs making less than $40,000 a year, without being moved to a higher wage.

In another winner from the Seattle City Council, a “violence” tax went into effect on January 1, 2016. The measure placed a $25 tax on firearms sold in the city, and up to 5 cents per round. The city tried to hide the attempted denial of Second Amendment rights, by saying the tax would be a revenue raiser with the proceeds going towards violence research. It was expected to raise between $300,000 and $500,000 per year. Let’s just say, it didn’t quite work out the way they planned.

The measure failed spectacularly in two ways. First the measure failed to raise the expected funds. Seattle has yet to release how much was raised last year, probably because it is ashamed to mention the number. What we do know, is that it is less than $200,000. That is at least 33 percent less than the minimum expected revenue. And what revenue has been collected, has not been spent on the promised research. There is a lawsuit challenging the tax, and the city will not spend the money until the suit is resolved. The city went forward with the research spending and spent $275,000 on the research. So, the “violence tax” has so far cost taxpayer over a quarter of a million dollars, and if the lawsuit goes against the city, they will never see the money.

What about the violence the tax was supposed to mitigate? Once again, Seattle failed miserably. Comparing the first five months before the tax was initiated with the first five months of this year, you get startling statistics. Rapes have gone up by 56 percent. Aggravated assault has gone up by 18 percent. Homicide and robbery have stayed the same. The Seattle violence tax did nothing to discourage violence. Will they ever learn?

Two laws passed had the exact opposite affect the laws intended. When it comes to the progressive left, no matter how much evidence presented of a failed policy, nothing changes.

Seattle now stands as a message to other cities across the U.S. The city enacted laws that tax citizens who want to defend themselves, or ended up getting them fired all together. Don’t be like Seattle.

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The Level of Evil That Existed at Auschwitz Under Hitler Exists Today

By Charlie Daniels, country music star

Congressman Clay Higgins at Auschwitz. (YouTube Screenshot)
Recently Congressman Clay Higgins visited Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where untold thousands of Jews were gassed to death, their bodies burned in furnaces and their ashes disposed of like garbage.

Congressman Higgins has come under heavy fire for videoing and narrating his visit, and in graphic language explaining the horrific process, step by step, location by location as the Jews were first herded into the mass execution chambers and moved to the furnaces where their bodies were disposed of.

I remember, in the waning days of the Second World War as the Allied Forces liberated the concentration camps and the newsreels and magazine articles exposed the gas chambers and furnaces and captured film of bulldozers pushing the skeletal bodies of Jews who had been starved and worked to death into mass graves.

This happened. It is undeniably documented, and every man, woman, and child in the free world should know that it happened. They must understand just how far prejudice and rabid hatred can push evil men and the lengths they are willing to go to achieve their dark ambitions.

They need to realize that, given the chance, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram and any number of

radical Islamic groups or governments would gladly repeat the same or worse.

Hitler is not an anomaly or a prototype. He is just one of the monsters who visited demonic evil on mankind, along with Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and now the demented Islamists who take great joy in hacking off the heads of infidels, throwing gays off the rooftops of tall buildings, burning and drowning helpless people in steel cages, and crucifying their enemies on crosses.

Is this any less evil than what the Nazis did?

Should the world not be aware that this level of evil exists, past and present? Should not the ovens and gas chambers where six million Jews were mercilessly murdered be exposed to the light of day?

Should not the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, ISIS and all the rest of the monsters responsible for the murder of millions of human beings and the methods they used to accomplish it be made public knowledge, to be reviled and abhorred and prevented from ever happening again.

I have visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Israel, and it was a heartbreaking experience.

As you walk through the exhibits, see the actual box cars where Jews were herded like cattle and transported to their final destination, the graphic photographs, the Children’s Memorial and Hall of Remembrance where the pictures of beautiful Jewish children who died at the hands of the Nazis, their names read aloud one after the other, you can’t help but wonder, “Why didn’t somebody stop this?”

So, Congressman Clay Higgins, I care not what criticism others level at you, those who say you defiled a hallowed place by injecting reality and reminding the world that such evil existed and making us face the fact that it still exists today.

As one who remembers those days and observed them from afar, my hat is off to you, sir. I only wish that some of our other “public servants” would do something as realistic and useful.

As a Christian, I join hands with my Jewish brothers and sisters to reinforce the Israeli national motto, “NEVER AGAIN!”

What do you think?

Pray our troops, our police and the peace of Jerusalem. God Bless America

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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