Copyright 2013 John T. Reed

The following is a facebook post of mine, plus a comment on it, and my response to the comment.

“You’re going to be able to purchase high-quality health insurance for less than the cost of your cell phone bill.” So said Obama.
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The avg. cell bill is not agreed upon, but it seems to be about $100 a month. I visit two doctors regularly, My wife has others that she goes to. My doctors sometimes refer me to specialists and physical therapists, as do my wife’s. We get our health care from Kaiser, an HMO. We pay $821 a month for Kaiser, which is only part of the bill. The other part, of unknown-to-us amount, is paid by FDIC, from whom my wife retired in 2006. She is back to work at the Federal Reserve Bank now but we still have FDIC health coverage
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Kaiser has doctors, nurses, pharmacists, drugs, buildings, and expensive equipment. There is no way anyone can provide all that for $100 a month. Either he’s flat lying, which is rather dumb considering he will get caught in that lie rather soon, or he is planning a major income redistribution to subsidize the extra amount above the $100 a month for the Democrat voters to whom he was speaking.
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America has lost its mind.

Facebook post by a reader
I think what might be at play here is the very definition of "Freedom". I mean who doesn't want to be free? I think the real question is how and who thinks this way. If you ask his supporters, they likely will tell you they want to be free of needing to work so hard, not having to make difficult choices, free of being solely accountable for results, or freedom from worrying about whether there's a safety net, etc. That's not my definition of free but I'm certain that's how those who lean toward Socialism tend to think. Does that seem about right?

Just for putting it out there...My own definition of "free" is freedom from restrictions. To me, that type of free doesn't come easy but it's worth the amount of personal due diligence that goes into it. In short: Freedom to decide for myself. (I have a feeling most of us on this thread feel this way)

Geoffrey Lin on Facebook

I’ll tell you who doesn’t want to be free: most Americans. On the web and in my books, I exercise the most famous American freedoms: speech and press. Most people are horrified by the stuff that I say, albeit perhaps entertained. They probably think similar thoughts, but they would never publish them—because they fear for their careers.
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This was especially true when I was in college and in my first job, Army officer. I think it’s actually against the law to speak freely in the U.S. military. A common line in military movies is “Permission to speak freely, sir?” with emphasis on movies. In the real Army, no one would ever dare speak freely or ask permission to. Army officers also give up such freedoms and the ability to choose where they work, what clothes to wear, how to cut their hair, whether to have facial hair, and whom their colleagues are.
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Liberals hate freedom when it is exercised in ways that they do not like by others, e.g., owning guns, painting their house an unusual color, being fat, smoking, etc.
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I have said that freedom can be extremely precisely defined by the % of your income you get to spend versus the % the government gets to spend. That has gotten up to about 50% counting local, state, and federal taxes for the affluent. It is also defined by the number of laws and regulations that exist in our country. That number has been exploding every business day for decades. We here in the “Land of the Free” probably have more laws and regulations about more things now than the Nazis did in Germany in 1942.

Free men decide. Un-free men comply.

Almost all Americans agree that Karl Marx was not for freedom and almost all Americans agree with the idea of “progressive income tax” laws and a “government safety net.” But those two Fabian Socialist phrases are precisely the equivalent of the most succinct definition of communism: “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.

The American people cannot even define freedom, let alone give any but the most abstract lip service to evidence their love of it. And in terms of actions, they couldn’t care less about freedom. America has stopped being the Land of the Free and switched to the Land of the Free Lunch. The laws of the Democrats purport to give us a free lunch. But the laws of economics tell us, “There is no free lunch.”

John T. Reed