First Maxine Waters suggested that she might just want to nationalize the US oil industry; now Maurice Hinchey of New York is jumping on that bandwagon. And why wouldn’t they? It’s all the rage these days. Just look at Venezuela, which is rapidly emerging as a South American hellhole paradise after Hugo Chavez started nationalizing everything. Why should we be left behind?

Read more on Taking a Left Turn at Chavez Boulevard…

Why yes, yes she did:

Via Hot Air.

From the UK:

I never for a moment thought that a life could be decided by something as arbitrary as one’s address.

The often-maligned US health care system is by no means a free market for health care services; rather, it is more of a hybrid public/private system. It’s imperfect and in need of reform, to be sure. But heaven help us if that reform takes the form of a governmental takeover of the entire system. How such a “reform” would improve our flawed system is beyond me.

Read more on Another Tale of Glory from the World of Socialized Medicine…

Continuing with my posts highlighting just how wonderful things will be here in the United States when the government finally does its job and takes over the healthcare sector of the economy, I’d like to bring your attention once again to the fabulous success story that is the Canadian health care system:

Read more on Utopia!…

Don Surber thinks so, and it’s hard to argue his point when you see stories like this:

Sorry about the wait for that angioplasty…

More than 400 Canadians in the full throes of a heart attack or other cardiac emergency have been sent to the United States because no hospital can provide the lifesaving care they require here.

Most of the heart patients who have been sent south since 2003 typically show up in Ontario hospitals, where they are given clot-busting drugs. If those drugs fail to open their clogged arteries, the scramble to locate angioplasty in the United States begins…

…While other provinces have sent patients out of country – British Columbia has sent 75 pregnant women or their babies to Washington State since February, 2007 – nowhere is the problem as acute as in Ontario.

At least 188 neurosurgery patients and 421 emergency cardiac patients have been sent to the United States from Ontario since the 2003-2004 fiscal year to Feb. 21 this year. Add to that 25 women with high-risk pregnancies sent south of the border in 2007.

Although Queen’s Park says it is ensuring patients receive emergency care when they need it, Progressive Conservative health critic Elizabeth Witmer says it reflects poor planning.

That is particularly the case with neurosurgery, she said, noting that four reports since 2003 have predicted a looming shortage.

“This province and the number of people going outside for care – it’s increasing in every area,” Ms. Witmer said.

“I definitely believe that it is very bad planning. …We’re simply unable to meet the demand, but we don’t even know what the demand is.”

Read that last line again: “We’re simply unable to meet the demand, but we don’t even know what the demand is.”

Well, that’s a confidence builder.

The Canadian system is supposedly one of the main models upon which the coming American health care revolution will be based. And yet this wondrous Canadian system seems to be more and more incapable of providing relatively common medical procedures to Canadian citizens, even in Canada’s most populous province. Because the system is controlled by a bureaucracy, it doesn’t respond to market pressures (goodness knows that most of the time, bureaucracies barely respond to political pressure) and in fact can’t even figure out what the market is demanding. All of this results in the Canadian government relying on the supposedly inferior US system to provide lifesaving care in many instances. No wonder 3 out of 4 Canadians live within easy driving distance of the US border.

So what happens if we decide to go down the path toward single-payer health care in the US? You’d have to be a fool to think that we could try the same thing that the Europeans and Canadians have done and get different results. No, in the long run, we’ll experience the same sorts of inefficiencies, quality and supply problems that plague the government systems, and yes, more Canadians will die, because the safety net that currently exists for the Canadian system here in the United States will be gone.

More: Check out the video after the jump… Read more on Will Socialized Health Care in the US Kill Canadians?…

As a person with a strong family history of cancer, this story warmed my heart. Oh wait, did I say “warmed my heart”? What I meant to say was “chilled me to the bone“:

Read more on Socialized Medicine Just Keeps Getting More Glorious…

It’s a shame that the marvel of government-controlled health care hasn’t been implemented in the US yet:

Seriously ill patients are being kept in ambulances outside hospitals for hours so NHS trusts do not miss Government targets.
Thousands of people a year are having to wait outside accident and emergency departments because trusts will not let them in until they can treat them within four hours, in line with a Labour pledge.

What a fool I’ve been to oppose this massive improvement in standards of care. Hat tip to The Corner for pointing this one out.

Read more on The Glory of Socialized Medicine…

Ronald Reagan delivers his radio commentary

When I lived in Egypt one of the Egyptian drivers for diplomats at the American Embassy in Cairo explained how people had to wait five to seven years for a phone. He proudly stated he was on the list, but poked fun at the long wait for service. Of course, he also added that you might be able to speed the process up by a few months with bribes, or as it is more affectionately knows as in Egypt, “baksheesh.”

Ronald Reagan loved to tell jokes about the former Soviet Union, especially about the stark differences between the United States and Soviet economic systems. It was a tactic he often used to take the hard edge off his criticism of the Soviets, while still drawing sharp contrasts between the competing systems. It also deftly showed his solidarity or sympathy with the Russian people.

Often to the horror of some of his top foreign policy advisers, he loved delivering the jokes directly to Mikhail Gorbachev at summit meetings. Gorbachev would politely smile or sometimes counter by adding that the joke was just a caricature of the Soviet system. But Reagan had carefully collected many of the jokes from former citizens of the Soviet Union, diplomatic officials, and some of them were passed to him by the CIA. Many of them were real jokes that had circulated inside the Soviet Union.

Many of Reagan’s jokes were a critique of the insufficiency of the Soviet system.

A Russian man goes to the official agency, puts down his money and is told that he can obtain delivery of his automobile in exactly 10 years. “Morning or afternoon,” the purchaser asks. “Ten years from now, what difference does it make?” replies the clerk. “Well,” says the car-buyer, “the plumber’s coming in the morning.”

Another joke Reagan liked to deliver summed up his thoughts well. Two Russians are walking down the street, and one says, “Comrade, have we reached the highest state of communism?” “Oh, no,” the other replies. “I think things are going to get a lot worse.” Read more on Ronald Reagan on Free Enterprise…

Rev. Sirico wrote about Pope Benedict XVI’s recent encyclical, Spe Salvi, in an op-ed in the Detroit News yesterday. In the encyclical, writes Sirico, “Pope Benedict XVI has delivered a wonderful — and oh-so-needed — reminder of what socialism was (and is), and why it went wrong.”

Read more on Rev. Sirico on ‘Spe Salvi’ in the Detroit News…

What have many academics and a good number of religious leaders learned from the collapse of communism and the failures of so many utopias of socialism that couldn’t deliver on their promises? Well, nothing. In “The Great Lie: Pope Benedict XVI on Socialism,” Rev. Robert A. Sirico looks at a critique of the socialist impulse offered by the Pope in his new encyclical Spe Salvi.

Read more on Rev. Sirico on ‘The Great Lie’…