Should the government control insurance rates?

The Sun-Times editorial (“Quit overcharging women for auto insurance” May 20) touches on a big question in public policy: how much should the people most directly affected by something be responsible for paying for it?

Some examples: People who drive on the tollway pay a fee to use it.  People who don’t drive on the tollway don’t pay it.  Everybody pays taxes to pay for schools, even if you don’t currently have children who use them.  Should smokers and drinkers pay more for health insurance than those who don’t smoke or drink?  Isn’t that sometimes sold as an incentive for people to take better care of their health?

The Sun-Times believes that gender is not an appropriate factor for charging different insurance rates, even though the insurance industry notes a distinct difference between average male and female behavior on something that directly affects insurance costs.

The Times seems to suggest that either insurance companies don’t like women or that they should not look at all the data that drives their costs. 

The bottom line, of course, is that if the rate for women buying insurance goes down, the rate for men will go up, even though on average their behavior produces less costs to the insurance companies.  In other words, their good behavior will go unrewarded and may result in their foregoing of that which will then drive up insurance costs for everybody. 

If the cost for auto insurance is too high, then let the competition force it down.  The government does too much meddling into the affairs of private businesses.  In a competitive market, companies know exactly what their costs are, what they need to take in to be profitable, and what they can charge and retain their customer base.  They have no guarantee they’ll even be in business in five years. 

segregation, schools, and funding - a response to Jesse Jackson

Jesse Jackson is always a good read, even if you aren’t always satisfied with his conclusions.

Such is the case with his latest article (65 years after Brown v. Board of Education, we risk going backward – May 14).  It is a plea to our country to do better, but I think he unnecessarily loses some necessary sympathy from his readers along the way.

He insists, agreeing with a Supreme Court decision, that segregated schools are inherently unequal and unconstitutional. 

Are all-girl and all-boy schools unequal and unconstitutional as well?  It seems there’s quite a demand for all-girl schools, but people do have a problem with all boy schools.  I was glad that I could attend an all-boy high school when I was younger.

USNews ranks 80 historically black colleges and universities.  I didn’t check each one, but I’m guessing they are all black by choice rather than by government edict.

There’s a difference between a school being all black, because they weren’t allowed to go to the school of their choice and being all black because that is what they chose.  Technically, under Jackson’s definition, it’s still segregated, unequal, and unconstitutional.

Brown vs. Board of Education is not law.  The Supreme Court cannot make laws.  Only the legislature can do that.  Art. 1, Sec. 1, right at the beginning of our Constitution.

He is correct to note the disparity in school funding between rich white towns and poor black towns.

The answer is not to bus the poor black children to rich white areas, because, well, there are far more poor black children than there is room in rich white schools.  The answer is also not to take the money that the rich paid for their schools and send it to poor black areas.  Why?  Because they paid it for their schools.  It’s definitely not American to try to improve one person’s school by making another person’s school worse.

The problem is that in Illinois we rely too much on property taxes to fund schools.  And why is that?  Because the politicians in Illinois for too long have seen their positions in power as a golden opportunity to enrich themselves at the public expense. 

But the simple answer is to establish a basic level of school funding to be paid for through the income tax.  Then allow the school districts to raise more money through property taxes or other means.

Jackson laments that schools are segregated, because our neighborhoods are segregated.  What he forgets is that in a free country, people can move where they want.  If a neighborhood is segregated, it’s not so much because certain people can’t move in, it’s that certain other people move out when certain other people move in.  Is that bad?  Perhaps so, but that is a price of freedom. 

Improve the schools through better funding.  I have fought for this for years, but nobody is interested.  Pay for a desired level of school funding through the income tax.  Allow school districts raise more however they like.  And cut property taxes by the amount raised through income taxes.

The Separation of Church and State is Not What You Think

For generations now we have been told that religion must be absent from public life and policy, because there is a firm and large wall between church and state, or between religion and state, or anything to do with God and public life. 

Now the very idea of a separation of church and state doesn’t even come from the Constitution but from a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote about 16 years later.  That letter has been the source of a lot of scrutiny and debate, but we don’t need to even go there to settle the debate.

Everybody knows that the United States is the country of rights.  Ask any immigrant, whether he has been here for 30 years or just entered the country.  This is why they come, and no other nation has more people who want to go there than the United States.

But there are 2 kinds of rights.  And this is where the problem lies.  We don’t talk about this anymore, in our schools or in the halls of Congress.  It’s just all about rights. 

Rights as commonly understood today are things that the government is required to see that you have.  And the list keeps growing.

You have a right to an affordable house, you have a right to health care, you have a right to a good education, you have a right to live in a good neighborhood,  you have a right to a living wage, you have a right to a basic income, and the list goes on and on and grows with every election cycle.

This kind of rights requires the government to oversee just about everything and to spend enormous amounts of money, which means that the American people must pay enormous amounts of money in taxes to pay for all this.  This is the main reason our federal government is $22 trillion in debt.

But this is not the kind of rights that our country was founded on.  Our country was founded on unalienable rights, which precede and supersede government.  Unalienable rights are things you can do without the government’s permission or regulation, like the right to freedom of speech, the right to peacefully assemble, the right to the free exercise of religion, the right of a free press, and the right to keep and bear arms. 

What is forgotten, misunderstood, or left out in all this is the fact that government cannot give you unalienable rights.  Unalienable rights can only come from God.  And specifically, the God of the Bible and Christianity and Judaism.  No other religion has unalienable rights.

So without the government acknowledgement that our country is founded on the Bible and Judeo-Christian beliefs, you don’t have unalienable rights.  You only have what rights the government deems to give you.  So when they say that we live in a secular country, they are essentially saying that there is no such thing as unalienable rights.  At least not in this country. 

So while the number of government-given rights are growing all the time, what were long considered unalienable rights are being restricted.  Slowly and gradually.  Your right to free speech is being restricted if somebody might be offended by what you say.  Your right to keep and bear arms is being restricted in multiple ways in the name of safety, as a secular nation seeks to cope with the violence of a nation not governed by the Bible principles of love, forgiveness, and self-restraint.  Your right to free exercise of religion is restricted if your religious beliefs now conflict with the higher moral values of secularism, or political correctness.

And this push to downplay unalienable rights for government-given rights is also a major driving force behind the push for socialism in our country today.  We used to be responsible for our own lives; now the government is. 

But, but, but   what about the First Amendment where it says that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion?  The phrase establishment of religion is strange to us today but was well-known at that time.  It had to do with a church that was the official church of the state or nation, like they had and still have in England today, the Church of England, often supported financially by them as well.  Notice that the First Amendment says that Congress shall not make such a law.  Many of the original states had established churches until they realized that they were doing the very thing many of them had fled from when they came to the New World.

We cannot separate God or Christianity from our government and public life, because our very existence as a free nation depends on it.

Things to remember about tariffs

Tariffs are often in the news, and they are always pictured as something bad.  Really bad.  We may have to pay more for something when we go to the store.

But we forget some things, if we ever knew them at all.

1)         Taxes on imports paid for almost our entire federal budget for most of our nation’s history.  We didn’t even have an income tax until 1913.  Which would you rather pay: an income tax with hours and hours of filling out forms and going through a ton of paperwork, or paying a little more for something that you buy?

2)         When we stopped taxing imports, millions of good paying jobs left our country, and the middle class shrunk dramatically. 

3)         We got cheaper products, but we paid a lot in taxes to pay for people who now depended on government assistance.

4)         We don’t make anything here anymore.  Try to find something made in America beside small novelty items.  Maybe it’s just me, but I find that a little embarrassing as a nation.  It was American industry that saved us during World War 2.  Now we make China rich by buying from them all kinds of things that we used to make here.  And they are one of the reasons we have to spend so much on our military. 

I think we should bring all the jobs back to America.  American companies shouldn’t have to go out of the country to make their products.   You can always make something cheaper somewhere in the world, but I think we lose more than we gain when we do.

The Bible in public schools

A reader to the Times complained today about efforts to bring the Bible back to public schools (May 13).  Oh, wait.  The reader didn’t say ‘bring back,’ just ‘bring.’  He seems unaware that the Bible played a prominent role in public education for most of our nation’s history.  It took a Supreme Court decision in the early 60s to stop that, almost 200 years after our nation’s founding.

And why would the Bible be a part of public education at all? 

Our nation was founded basically on the principle that God gave unalienable rights to human beings.  Now where did our Founders get such an idea?  Some point to Enlightenment Philosophy, but philosophy can never tell you that God did anything.  The Founders got that from the Bible.  In fact, no other religion teaches about that.  So, yes, there is a reason why the Bible was used in public schools rather than the Quran.  The Quran doesn’t talk about unalienable rights, which are essential to the American way of life.

Unalienable rights focus on freedom and liberty.  But you can’t have freedom and liberty in a society without a very high personal moral code.  That would only create chaos and anarchy. 

So the same Bible that speaks of unalienable rights also provides that moral code: the Ten Commandments, Love your neighbor as yourself, and Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

The reader notes “how ignorant our society is of the principles and procedures that encompass our government.” 

The first principles we need to learn about our government are from the Declaration of Independence: God gave unalienable rights to human beings, and we form governments to protect those rights, and when it fails to do that, we have the right to alter or abolish it and make a new one that does.  And this is precisely where we are now with relation to our government. 

Shooting children

I often have strong reactions to the news, but today’s article “Daddy, am I on the list of children to be shot?” May 13 prompted a much stronger reaction that usual.  Downright anger.

Anger at the direction that our country has taken over my lifetime.  It was the court called supreme that got the whole rolling with a number of rulings that removed God from public life. 

That court more than anyone should have known that our country was founded on the principle that God gave human beings unalienable rights.  The Court would call that today a religious opinion; our Founders called that a fact. 

Guns have always been a major part of American life, and the Founders called that a good thing.  We were armed and free, unlike those in Europe who were unarmed and ruled by kings and dictators.

We were also governed by a moral code of loving our neighbors and doing unto others as we would have others do unto us, plus, of course, the Ten Commandments that taught us that we are accountable for our actions to a Much Higher Power.

 

All these school shootings are the result of an arrogant society that thinks it can rule and control itself apart from a moral code given to us by the One who created us, who knows human nature better than we do, a society that thinks it can ignore God and still find utopia. 

F-bombs

The Tribune published a major column asking the question: “When did everyone start dropping F-bombs?” May 13   I think the author was actually looking for the answer to another question: Why are so many prominent people dropping the F-bomb in public? 

For most of our nation’s history, we had a moral code that was based on the Bible.  We had the Ten Commandments, Love your neighbor as yourself, and Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

But the court called supreme called all that religious baloney, and so they were not fitting for a secular society.  Baloney was not their choice of words, but it could have been.

Our society, with the Court’s prompting, developed a moral code intentionally devoid of anything having to do with God, because one that did would not be fitting for a society that considers itself at the high end of the evolutionary process. 

And what great moral code did it create to replace the old moral code: tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.  Definitely much better than all that talk about actually loving your neighbor.

But back to the original question.  The F-bomb is modern society’s way of saying good riddance to that stifling, burdensome old moral code that dared to tell us things we ought not to do.