"What Is Seen And What Is Not Seen"

The following is my response to an article ML's sister sent to her. The article by Michael Ventura gave statistics and asked if America was still number one.


This article discusses what is. I do not care if the statistics are correct. Statistics cannot determine what should be. God does not care about statistics. He does not need to guess.

One cannot look at statistics and decide the way a country should be governed. The founding fathers had no statistics. They did a fine job building a country around ideals not emotional reactions to leading statistics. Statistics provide information, but they must be examined critically.

The most important thing economics teaches is there are two parties to every transaction. The trade and debt statistics the article cites means very little. Everything must equal zero in the end. China is not giving the US cheap goods for free. They are investing in the US. They think these investments are going to pay off. Who are we to disagree with them? The same can be said about private debt. The credit card companies expect the money to be paid back. Nobody makes loans without expecting to get paid back. Both debtors and their creditors think these loans are worth it. Don't you think the individuals involved in the transaction know the worthiness of these loans better than we do?

Here is the choice the world has to make:

We can either reject or champion individual liberty.

The U.S. has championed individual liberty for hundreds of years. The US has no national healthcare, because national healthcare rejects individual liberty. It makes people conform. The healthy subsidizes the sick. A non-smoker pays the same fees as a smoker. A doctor studies for ten years and has his income limited by the state. The incentives for new medicines and procedures are determined by the state. People wait in line. People die while they are waiting. National healthcare contradicts Americans' ideals.

Individual liberty requires people to make decisions for themselves. Some decisions are tough. Some families forfeit health care in favor of food and shelter. But it is their decision. Their lives are not put in the hands of some bureaucrat like ourselves.

The major flaw of the article is it accepts the myth of regional economics. Countries cannot compete. The US is not competing with Europe. Individual citizens compete. Some Americans (like ourselves) are moving up the social scale. Some are not. Do we spend all our money, time, and effort on those who are not? Or, do we get out of the way of those who are?