2 PARAGRAPHS 4 LIBERTY: #169 “ABOLISH THE BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS!”

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Even though Henry Ford is not my favorite person in the world socially because he was basically Anti-Semitic, he made a comment that should make an imprint upon everybody’s thoughts by saying “Anyone who feels they can thrive by relying on the Government should talk to the American Indian.”  Look what that reliance has done for Native Americans for more than 200 years: low productivity, health, education and employment.  In fact, Native Americans as a class are mostly at the bottom of the every social and economic ladder.  So how has that happened?  Their lives on the reservations have mostly been governed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA – which many Native Americans refer to as “Bossing Indians Around.” 

                  And these results should have been easy to predict.  Treat people as victims and that is what many will become.  Depriving them of the ability to own their own homes has translated into “Why remodel or improve the property if I don’t own it?” or “How can I start a small business if I can’t mortgage my house for seed money?”  And on and on.  No, if society would treat Native Americans like adults, they will soon get adult-like results.  For example, even though the stereotype was that the Irish drank too much, we never had a Bureau of Irish Affairs.  How is this any different with Native Americans?  What we have done to them is demeaning, harmful, limiting and self-defeating.  So the BIA should be phased out and soon eliminated.  Give Native Americans Liberty in the form of the responsibility of meeting their own needs, and that is what will happen.  It worked with the Irish!

Judge Jim Gray (Ret.)

2012 Libertarian candidate for Vice President, 

along with Governor Gary Johnson as the candidate for President

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Quote of the Week: “The challenge is not one of effort but of outcome.”  Thomas Parham, Incoming President of California State University at Dominguez Hills

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2 PARAGRAPHS 4 LIBERTY: #168 “STOP THE BUREAUCRATIC MANDATES!”

Recently the California Energy Commission announced that as of the year 2020 all houses built in California must include rooftop solar panels to generate electricity.  Now I know that most people favor conservation and the environment, but this mandate has three big problems.  In the first place, how can non-elected bureaucrats have the authority to dictate such an order?  If at all, this should be done by elected legislators.  Secondly, this will add somewhere between $10,000 and $30,000 to the cost of each house – which will violently exacerbate our housing shortage.  Thirdly, if the overall goal is to reduce mankind’s pollution of the environment, we must take into account that most solar panels are now being manufactured in China with the use of coal-fired electric plants.  So that certainly works against the overall conservation efforts.  What group supports this dictatorial measure?  Well, the solar panel industry certainly likes it and, you can be sure, lobbied hard for this result.  (Of course, this only underscores the ancient truth that if you want to rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always count on the help of Paul.) 

--> But, fundamentally, how can we in a Republic have the government dictating which consumer products we must purchase?  Not only does this not make sense from a Liberty standpoint, it also is bankrupt from an economic one.  With the current state of solar panel technology, it will take about 20 years for a typical homeowner financially to break even.  Of course over time, as the technology improves – which it certainly will – many homeowners will logically choose to purchase the solar panels on their own.  But artificially requiring them to do so now with today’s technology will not only result in them being punished economically, it will also logically result in fewer more efficient solar panels being used in the future.  Once again, Liberty and the Free Market System provide a far better approach.   So we must stop this and other bureaucratic mandates.  They simply don’t work, either from a theoretical or a practical sense!

Judge Jim Gray (Ret.)

2012 Libertarian candidate for Vice President, along with Governor Gary Johnson as the candidate for President

Quote of the Week: “The sexiest thing I ever saw was a blank paper and a pencil.”  Frank Lloyd Wright

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By the way, these columns are now on Facebook and LinkedIn at judgejimgray, Twitter at judgejamesgray, and wordpress at judgejimgray@wordpress.com.  Please visit these sites for past editions, and do your part to spread the word about the importance of Liberty!

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2 PARAGRAPHS 4 LIBERTY: #167 “DEATH FROM BUREAUCRACY”

The article “When Cancer Was Conquerable” by Sarah Constantin in the June 2018 edition of Reason should be required reading for all voters!  In it Ms. Constantin documents how, over the years, the Food and Drug Administration has slowed down the process of creating new approaches to combatting cancer, and made them so highly expensive, that tens of thousands of cancer patients have probably and unnecessarily died as a result.  How is that?  Because, for example, in 1952, before the FDA’s intrusion into the Free Market, a chemist was able to run clinical trials on a new drug successfully to treat leukemia, and was able to have it on the market by 1953.  Similarly, two protocols to treat Hodgkin’s lymphoma were quickly brought to the market in the late 1960s, with the result that complete remission quickly went from barely above zero to 80 percent, with about 60 percent of those people never relapsing.  So now, as a result of this treatment, Hodgkin’s lymphoma is basically regarded as curable. But since those times, the FDA has bureaucratized the process so much that, for example, in 1985, when a new technique called Adoptive Cell Transfer was found to produce regressions in cancerous tumors, it took the FDA until 2017 to grant its approval for the technique to be used.  That’s 32 years!!
Under present-day FDA requirements, most medical tests must now be peer-reviewed, protocols which used to be used as guidelines are now mostly considered to be legally binding, and reporting has given rise to long questionnaires categorizing subjective symptoms along with the requirement of confirming blood tests.  And for what purpose?  As one researcher noted: “It is just not all that important if it was day 5 versus day 6 that the patient’s grade 1 fatigue improved, particularly when the patient then dies on day 40 of uncontrolled cancer.”  And, bluntly, when it comes down to it, shouldn’t patients have the right to choose to use an “experimental” drug, as long as the risks are fully explained?  And even if the drug doesn’t work, shouldn’t patients have the gratification of knowing that they at least helped to show what doesn’t work?  Furthermore, consider this literal fact, Free Market mechanisms alone would provide the proper level of care and protection, as long as risks are fully disclosed and drug makers are held to fully pay for wrongful harm they cause, and these goals are achieved by plaintiffs’ attorneys.  So, bottom line, isn’t the FDA unconscionably interfering in the Liberty of some truly sick people?  Shouldn’t this interference be stopped?

Judge Jim Gray (Ret.)

2012 Libertarian candidate for Vice President, along with Governor Gary Johnson as the candidate for President

Quote of the Week: “The kindest word in all the world is the unkind word, unsaid.” James Ransom (2003 –  2016)
By the way, these columns are now on Facebook and LinkedIn at judgejimgray, Twitter at judgejamesgray, and wordpress at judgejimgray@wordpress.com.  Please visit these sites for past editions, and do your part to spread the word about the importance of Liberty!


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