Some bureaucrat has decided that squirting an active virus up a child’s nose is a vaccination. That child will be infected, and will shed the active virus for several days everywhere the child goes. This guarantees the spread of the virus. We are told that this is a good idea. That is a lie.

Bureaucrats are in the habit of lying. Why not? They have job security, and they can’t lose. When the CDC was threatened with irrelevance during the u201880s, they jumped on the news that a few gay men in San Francisco had died of exotic diseases. I was working in a small rural hospital at the time, and I wondered about the sudden hyperventilating in the press about this event. My best friend worked in a teaching hospital in Oakland and he started sending me local Berkeley papers with articles written by Peter Duesberg. As time passed, I handed copies of these articles to AIDS patients who began to trickle in. Those who stopped taking the toxic AIDS drugs and adopted a healthier lifestyle survived.

Bird Flu came along in 1997. SARS followed in 2002. Both came from Asia with great fanfare and dire predictions of a pandemic, which failed to materialize. Did these viruses come from labs? Were they natural? We’re not likely to find out.

This year we are confronted with swine flu, a novel combination of pig virus, bird virus, and human virus. This time the advertising has been coordinated and relentless, and miraculously a vaccine has been released in the nick of time. This drama reads like a script.

I came to the conclusion that every aggressive assertion announced by a bureaucracy was a self-serving lie many years ago. The FDA is controlled by the pharmaceutical industry, and duly lies in their interest. The NIH serves the interests of several cartels, including the AMA, controls medical research, and only releases results that favor its predetermined conclusion. But this only scratches the surface of government deception.

The Federal Reserve is neither federal nor a reserve, but is a private banking cartel owned by the banks that it is bailing out, with full cooperation from the U.S. Treasury. It is saving itself with our money. Its spokesmen lie to us daily.

The health care "debate" has routinely neglected the enormous bureaucracy that has gown and grown since the Medicare Act of 1965. The ratio of bureaucrats to providers was a hundred to one the last time I looked several years ago (here and here). The Medicare Administration fixes prices and their third-party-payers, the "private" insurance companies, follow their denial guidelines. The high cost of health care is the high cost of bureaucracy. Everything Congress is telling us is a lie.

I wonder about the increasing frequency and ferocity of the lying. It reminds me of the psychopath who is finally trapped by reality and is desperately trying to avert attention to another subject. Meanwhile, we do have real problems that are not being addressed at all.

MRSA has been killing thousands of people annually for years, yet it is not labeled a pandemic, which it is, and the bureaucrats yawn and tell us to wash our hands. Meanwhile, hospital patients are incubating even worse antibiotic resistant bacteria, VRSA, VRE, C.diff, and TB. Influenza might make us sick, and might kill us, but these bacteria will not only make us sick, they are sure to kill us. Why is there no hue and cry in the media about this threat to public health?

The proliferation of hazards in our time is not remarkable, but the selective attention paid to them is. The bureaucrats and their tamed media would have us focus only on the hazards that the bureaucrats want us to focus on. The only vaccine against their story-line virus is the truth, which we must find for ourselves. Infectious lies can be fatal.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

Robert Klassen Archives

Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong, staff reporters at the Seattle Times, deserve a Pulitzer Prize for their extensive investigative reports on MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). The subject is not new to me and I have written about it several times in this space, but their presentation gave me facts I never knew, like how long MRSA has been around.

The reporters write that staph infections resistant to penicillin-type antibiotics emerged in hospitals during the 1970s. One would think that this information would be vitally important to patient care personnel. I had been working in critical care since 1963, and I never heard about it in continuing education lectures or read about it in the literature. I did not know anything about MRSA until I took a close look at isolation signs posted on patient’s doors in the mid-1990s, and then I had to ask what it meant.

As I was reading the above linked article, I was struck by the time frame. MRSA evidently appeared at about the same time our old-fashioned isolation procedures disappeared, as I described here. Not coincidentally, I think, it was also about the time that business school—educated hospital administrators began to be hired by hospital boards to manage the business. Hospital boards of directors are seldom, if ever, medical professionals themselves, so it was a case of the blind leading the blind, otherwise known as a bureaucracy. In my experience, they were far more concerned with hospital cosmetics than with the messy details of patient care.

The reporters also describe the concerted efforts of hospitals to hide or cover up the frequency of infection and the mortality of infection. Often it was one lone crusader against a legion of lobbyists, and congress critters voted reform proposals down. While I’m sure hospitals don’t want the public to be able to judge them on the basis of facts, I think the real culprit nationwide is the CDC. This agency has effectively stonewalled any effort to establish infection control procedures in hospitals for decades. Why?

I don’t know, but I must wonder whose hand is in whose pocket. The hand with the biggest stake in this game is big pharma and to them being sick unto death means money. The CDC covers itself by focusing attention on non-existent problems. Meanwhile, we have an epidemic that’s becoming worse by the day. MRSA can only be treated with high-powered antibiotics, like Vancomycin. So we have VRSA waiting for us in hospitals. We also have VRE and C. Diff. and TB. These highly communicable bacterial infections can be stopped, or nearly stopped, by rigorous infection control procedures.

I urge you to read the entire series by Berens and Armstrong. It’s fine work.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

Robert Klassen Archives

"Doctors know some patients needing lifesaving care won’t get it in a flu pandemic or other disaster." So begins an article on guidelines for deciding who will die. Who is creating such guidelines? The Department of Health and Human Services, The Department of Homeland Security, The Centers for Disease Control, and "the military." The only infectious disease cited in the article was SARS, a non-performer as diseases go, so what are they thinking about?

I have written about MRSA in this space a number of times. It is a genuine epidemic that state agencies would rather not discuss; it didn’t come from Asia, after all, and those same agencies are largely responsible for it. Does that mean if grandma gets MRSA she’s history? Maybe so.

I have mentioned VRSA a few times. It’s the variety of staph that can emerge after treating MRSA with Vancomycin. As far as I know it’s still confined to hospitals, as is another resistant bacteria called VRE. However, recently I read about another one that got out. It’s an old time bacteria called Clostridum Difficle and there is a deadly mutation running rampant across the country.

There is no question that these bugs were born and raised in hospitals. The number-one need is to disinfect hospitals and keep them disinfected. That is neither easy nor cheap, but it is not impossible. New products and services are becoming available. Here is a stabilized bleach wipe for cleaning hard surfaces. I ordered it on Amazon. Here is a fogging service specifically designed to disinfect hospital rooms.

But I digress. The "flu pandemic" mentioned above refers to Bird Flu, of course, the favorite political pandemic du jour. In ten years Bird Flu has infected 348 persons and killed 216 in 14 countries. In 2005 MRSA infected 94,000 and killed 18,250 in the US alone. Which one is a problem?

The article I began with also mentioned "or other disaster." Once again I wonder what they are thinking. Another Katrina? Civil insurrection? Banking collapse? Or maybe the onslaught of baby boomers in the Social Security and Medicare systems. Like the war against terra, they mumble words that could mean anything.

These "guidelines" do challenge my understanding of humane and competent medical practice. I see these armchair practitioners designing the fate of millions bit by bit and undermining the Western traditions of medicine. Certainly they have witnessed the bovine acceptance of TSA terrorism, police terrorism, military terrorism, so they can safely assume the people will accept the deliberate neglect unto death of the old, feeble, sick, or poor. It’s easy for a politician to promise one thing and deliver another. Free universal health care sounds great until you find out, too late, that you’re scheduled to die.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

Robert Klassen Archives

An old and dear friend of mine wrote to express disbelief about my articles on the MRSA menace. He had some pimples, he got a shot, they went away. Where’s the problem?

To explain the problem, in part, I sent him three photos of my staph infection. First, we must remember that staphylococcus is a natural occurring bacteria on our skin and in our environment. Our bodies likewise have natural defenses against this bacteria. Normally, if we cut our skin, these defenses go to work, bringing on discoloration and swelling around the wound, which usually goes away in a couple of days.

I must make clear that I’m talking about plain old staph here, not MRSA.

My case was simple. I fell off a dark ramp to a restaurant with a take-out carton of food in hand and landed on the edge of a concrete walk, shattering my left radius. This is called a Colles’ fracture. It was a tough one to pin back together, but the orthopedist did it. I was pleased, but a week before the cast was to come off, it started to stink of staph and I started to feel sick — my immune system was responding.

The cast was removed, he pulled out the pins, and there was a small area of skin infection, maybe half an inch in diameter, which he doused with Betadine. He put me on Keflex for five days. That infection went down the pin holes into the bone. I went back a week later with this:

You can see the cast line on my hand here, and the infection site encompasses all four pin holes. The doctor said he had never seen anything like it. But he did write a prescription for Augmentin for ten days.

I knew I was in trouble at this point, so I started my own routine. I soaked the arm in a pan filled with warm water mixed with salt, Betadine, and bleach for twenty minutes a day and I picked out the dead tissue and solidified pus with forceps. That worked, but about the time that lesion healed up, this one broke out:

That is under the wrist. The doctor said he’d never seen anything like it, and he put me on another ten days of Augmentin. By this time, I must say, I was too sick to argue, although I knew this guy was brushing me off. Then we got this:

You will note that the first lesion is healed up. These lesions appeared above the last one under the wrist. The doctor said he had never seen anything like it.

A normal staph infection is serious business. I was afraid of sepsis, of osteomyelitis, and of endocarditis, none of which occurred thanks to the antibiotic and the daily cleaning routine. However, I remained sick for a year.

Yesterday I found a new product called StaphAseptic at Amazon. I don’t know if it works, but it claims to kill even MRSA at skin wound sites. Maybe if I’d had this product three years ago, I would not have had the problem.

MRSA, by contrast, is staph that is resistant to penicillin-type antibiotics, like Augmentin. I did not have MRSA. This "superbug" either escaped from hospitals and mutated, or escaped from bioweapons labs in its present form. It can be defeated with Vancomycin, but there is already another variety of resistant staph lurking in hospitals called VRSA.

Why do I keep writing about this? Because we cannot trust the powers-that-be to either keep us informed, which was the CDC mandate, or to protect us from sloppy incompetence in medical care. The system doesn’t work because it’s controlled by nameless, faceless bureaucrats who don’t care about medicine or public health, including the doctors and nurses on their payroll. The system can be fixed: Shut down the NIH, the CDC, and JCAHO, shut down bioweapons "research" and destroy their spawn, and outlaw lobbying. If hospital administrators and boards of directors and doctors see that they cannot hide behind the "rules" of the bureaucrats, they will stop this epidemic of infections. In lieu of that unlikely scenario, we owe it to ourselves to keep informed and skeptical.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

From S. Murf, London, UK:

I grew up in Milwaukee in the 70s and 80s. I remember the massive decline in manufacturing, the layoffs, the company closings. Milwaukee went from a city that was justifiably a priority nuclear target for being the nation’s machine shop to one in continuous financial difficulty as the massive wealth generating companies and their high wage manufacturing jobs disappeared.

I remember being age seven, and helping my father, a full time Milwaukee firefighter and part time tavern operator, prepare over 100 take out/delivery fish fries and helping him deliver them to Masterlock on a Friday night for their dinner/lunch hours. From 7th grade through high school, I remember constant reports of major problems for the many companies located in the city. As an adult, repairing copiers, I frequently went into business office buildings that were the converted structures of old manufacturing buildings, warehouses, and such. They were well built, beautiful brick structures with many period features from their 1880—1930 construction periods. No one could afford to build buildings like them again, no one could afford to tear them down, so they wisely remodeled them as office structures which stand as obvious testimony to Milwaukee’s industrial past and service based present/future.

Unfortunately if you think of a major company that was around in the 70s or 80s, the chances are it is gone or severely downsized, and its well paid jobs with it, from just about any industry you can think of. They are too numerous to recount with any completeness, but here is a short list of names you will probably recognize.

Schlitz Brewing, Pabst Brewing, Harley Davidson, Johnson Controls, Allis-Chalmers, AMC Motors, Masterlock, Allen-Bradley, Rockwell, etc. With them the smaller service companies and machine shops also go. The nearby communities, Kenosha, Racine, etc., all manufacturing towns with their Chrysler plants, General Motors, Case Tractors, all go. Companies like GE that are still present shift their major manufacturing abroad more and more, leaving HQ and admin behind. Where manufacturing remains locally, all expansion occurs abroad and the places stagnate.

The railroads and links which were so important to industrial Milwaukee have all atrophied and are hardly what they were. My grandfather (and also my Godfather) were railroad men. “Fortunately” my grandfather was retired before the government takeover and federalization, but my godfather recounted that nightmare and the decline of a proud industry during frequent family gatherings.

Between unions, federal reserve inflation, taxes, and regulations, not to mention increasingly spendthrift government, Milwaukee (and many other communities) have had their economic hearts ripped out. It didn’t help that Milwaukee is a one party town (Democrat) and even had a socialist mayor! Remaining people and businesses face higher tax burdens and lowered services, plus growing crime from the welfare/criminal underclass.

This combination drives more businesses out. The middle class is gutted, and much of the remaining middle class are civil servants dependent on the tax rolls of the remaining businesses and property owners. One income families become two income families, each earning a fraction of the lost manufacturing wage, and so on. So often, the well paid jobs that remain are government sector jobs, and most of the economically ignorant populace doesn’t see the link between the loss of manufacturing on one hand and the veritable explosion in government agencies and jobs on the other. Milwaukee went from having a federal building (ONE), and a State Government building (ONE), and a city hall, which then became a Federal Courthouse that housed various government agencies (INS, FBI, Marshals, etc.) to having literally hundreds of government offices scattered throughout the area and suburbs as the agencies multiplied and the existing ones outgrew their offices. I know. Repairing copiers meant that I went anywhere copiers were, which meant places that generated loads of redundant paperwork, which is the definition of a government agency.

London is the same. It’s a city that is all about services but I have yet to see a manufacturing business. I am sure there are a few around, but they are well hidden and few and far between. I don’t think Milwaukee is going to become a world financial center any time soon as London has.

The destruction of manufacturing and family farms (the latter accomplished as much by regulation, subsidy, and inheritance taxes as anything) IS the destruction of the middle class. So many of the jobs that replace manufacturing are not adequate to replace the income of the jobs lost. I understand the value of service jobs, I largely am oriented that way in my career with R&D and design engineering. The reality is that there are only so many high wage, high value jobs in the service industries, and they are increasingly portable and no longer location dependent, so like me, people will offshore themselves, getting paid in third party non-tax jurisdictions (if they are smart). Increasingly countries like China and India will also pick up the jobs requiring intellectual skills as they develop the manufacturing proficiency. You know that.

I guess my real gripe is that the USA, as typified by Milwaukee (and Detroit, and Chicago, etc.), for all of its proud history, its emotional pull as my home town, appears to be in a terminal decline, one hastened by the Federal Government’s profligate deficit spending and military adventures. Though I am increasingly making my family’s future independent of the USA, or any nation, and we will probably make our “permanent” home in some low tax nation like Uruguay or Costa Rica (perhaps Andorra, etc.), it pains me to watch the American nation that was free and prosperous, with a large and happy middle class, fall into the pattern of third world nations as the foundations of that greatness erode.

All I can say is <sigh> and build a brighter future for my family, one without the nationalistic ties that no longer seem as emotionally or politically rewarding as they once were.

From (Name Withheld), Minneapolis, MN:

Good article…in Mpls., MN the Minneapolis Moline tractor factory met the same fate…the prime space is a shopping center…

In my late teens I worked one summer at the Ford Motor assembly plant in St. Paul, MN…now the St. Paul Ford Plant has been plowed under and fancy high rise apts will take the place of the Ford Plant along the Mississippi…are we living thru the slow death of America??

Teens nowadays have no well-paying factory jobs and the industrial worker is now a greeter at Wal*Mart…glad to be 73…and Bush is running what is left of the USA into the ground…the folks in the USA must really be asleep.

From R. Kremer, Terre Haute, IN:

Your reference to the UAW strike of 46 stirred up a few memories and thoughts that bear somewhat on a point or two you made.

I lived on 69th street less than a mile north of the main gate, so the plant was almost in my back yard. My father worked at AC during the strike when I was about 5. When I say “during” it’s in the literal sense. My pop was not “management” and elected to keep working so as the needs of his family could be met. My mom and grandmother were worried sick for his welfare as there was a lot of blood flowing at the main gate. I saw it firsthand many times while riding the trolley…scenes burned deeply into my memory. In time the company laid everyone off, and my dad worked elsewhere for the strike’s duration. After peace was declared…sort of…he went back to work and retired after about 37 years of service…as “management” at that point.

Like you, I had the opportunity to work at AC for the summer of 1959. I delight in having had that experience. Looking back now I understand that AC was a key (if not the key) component in what Isoroku Yamamoto described as America’s “awesome industrial strength.”

About 11 years ago I moved to Terre Haute, Indiana from Milwaukee to work for the railroad branch here. My father often spoke of the AC Terre Haute plant and what an unproductive disaster the whole initiative had been. They built a plant from scratch to build compressors for the USAF. Prior to the plant’s completion AC set up a temporary facility in town, brought in sophisticated machinery from the USAF and was going to start training locals for the work to be done at the completed plant. Surprise, surprise, the UAW stepped forward and said, “NOT.” More blood. This was all about 1952 according to newspaper clippings in the local library file. After peace was declared…sort of…everyone went to work…sort of. According to my father, the productivity in Terre Haute was so low that West Allis brass came here to address the issue with managers and/or the rank and file. They offered a straightforward deal: if productivity were to increase the plant would remain open. If no such increase was forthcoming the plant would be closed and moved to West Allis. Sometime in the early 60s it closed. And sure enough, although the entire plant wasn’t moved, one erecting shed from Terre Haute to this day stands on old AC property near 60th street in West Allis.

After reviewing those library clippings and giving the matter just a little thought, I came to the conclusion the UAW was trying to reassert itself in Terre Haute after taking such a nasty whipping in West Allis during the 46 strike. The unmitigated gall. There was a fellow by the name of Meyer, University of Wisconsin system, who wrote a book on the history of UAW Local 248 entitled Stalin Over Wisconsin. It’s an excellent…and pricey…read for anyone wanting to understand AC during the 30s and 40s. I bought a copy new in the mid 90s when it came out to the tune of almost 50 dollars. I’m glad I did because I go to it now and again to refresh some of those things I heard all my life from my pop.

About a year ago I finished up about 38 years with what was left of the old Milwaukee Road Railroad. I still live in Terre Haute, but spend a lot of time in Milwaukee with family and friends. At least once every 2 months I drive through what’s left of AC. Let’s see…there’s a K-Mart back there in one of the old plant buildings, a dollar store of some sort, a sub sandwich shop…I think you get the picture. There was an old rail car rusting away on a set of tracks toward the rear of the property, up until recently at least. On one of those tours with my dad (he left us about 2.5 years ago at 91) he mentioned that the company built the car to accommodate a load no railroad in the nation could supply a car for. That’s just one very small example of the approach the company seemed to take towards problem solving.

End note: American manufacturing accounted for 53% of GDP in 1965, according to this source. Today it’s 9%. Is this what the unions wanted? I wonder.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

If it’s not bad enough to have a criminally insane person as President, and another one as Vice-President, in a country that has placed nuclear weapons at their fingertips, plus a Congress that wants that power and is itself beholden to another insane state, we have to have a trickle-down effect in every other state institution that is likely to decimate us. Politics is all about grandstanding and posturing, while the truth is shunned and oozes like melting fat from a broken refrigerator onto the kitchen floor. I refer to this bit of rancid news.

That link is to a Chicago Tribune article about MRSA spreading into the public housing slums from the prisons. It is rapidly becoming an epidemic that is neither friendly nor benign. It’s a killer. I have written about this menace before. It is a common everyday bacteria that was pushed to mutate inside hospitals by treating multiple infections in brain-dead patients at the same time that the NIH relaxed infection control procedures. With such enforced sloppiness, this superbug was bound to get away, and it did.

MRSA can be treated with Vancomycin, the last ditch in antibiotics, so you know what’s coming next: VRSA. Indeed, it came. This superbug is still confined to hospitals, as far as I know, but it will be on the street soon enough, because nothing has changed.

I was hospitalized for two days in January in a supposedly high-tech and cutting-edge hospital. Magnificent lobby, fast admission, a fine ER, with everything sparkling clean and private rooms, and the worst telemetry floor I’ve ever seen.

Let me explain that term. If a patient needs heart monitoring, but isn’t likely to die, he or she is wired to a small transmitter that sends the heart rhythm to a bank of monitors that is watched by somebody who presumably can interpret the signal. I worked on such a floor for a few years. The patient population is a mixed bag of medical and surgical, young and old, and terminally brain-dead. It’s cheaper than ICU, and riskier because of the patient mix, the lack of infection control, and the uneven levels of staff competence.

I arrived on the floor with two intravenous lines, both badly placed in my elbow joints. That’s a sure sign of rookie nurses. An RN duplicated the verbal history I had given in the ER, but was called away so often that she could not absorb it. The nurse’s aide would not listen when I told her that the automatic blood-pressure machine and oxygen saturation meter would not work on atrial fibrillation. (Same story in the ER and in the cardiac catheterization lab.) I was not encouraged. Then I saw the bathroom. During my forty-year career in hospitals I never saw such a filthy room.

The reason there is a world of difference between the front-end façade and the back-end operation lies at the feet of the mighty NIH. Their power over anything relating to medicine in America radiates in every direction and their method of operation differs little from the Pentagon: posture, strut, duck, and cover. Their subservient agency, the CDC, is in the news right now for hounding an individual who may or may not have TB. This is curious because they have singularly ignored worse cases of proven resistant TB. Why the sudden interest?

I don’t know, but it seems an awful lot like the White House beating the drums for war while losing two of them. The MRSA epidemic is real. The risk to the public is real. It is a losing battle that the NIH started by relaxing infection control procedures years ago, which they will never admit. So? Don’t look there! Look over here! See Bird Flu, SARS, TB. See the new wars we’ll win, not the old ones we’re losing.

Is it really so hard to cope with new street diseases? No. It’s a matter of management priorities that trickle down from the NIH, through the CDC, to The Joint Commission, the AHA, AMA, ANA, etc., to the individual hospital administrator who says, we’ve got to clean this place up — and I don’t mean the front lobby.

Well, I lucked out. Four months later there is no sign of infection. That’s better than my last encounter with hospitals as a patient in 2004. Sadly, luck has everything to do with it these days, just like surviving political insanity.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

Fifty-years ago I got my first summer job at Allis-Chalmers, as a mail boy. The LaPorte factory was called the Harvester Division because they designed and built the all-crop harvester, also known as the combine, the round-bale hay baler, and various other farming implements. My job was to pick up and sort the mail and deliver it throughout the factory four times a day.

The mail boy went everywhere on the 150 acre site, so I saw the executive offices, the engineering department, the pattern-making shop, the foundry, the powerhouse, the machine shops, the paint shop, the metallurgy lab, the experimental department, and the assembly lines. If I had time I’d stroll through the idle government building where they had built armored personnel carriers during WWII and later the Ontos for the Marines. The sights and sounds of a major manufacturing plant in operation were fascinating and impressive to this sixteen year-old boy.

It’s all gone now. The very last building left standing, the powerhouse, is about to be demolished. The site, located in the middle of town, is intended to be a shopping mall. So where American machines were once invented, designed, manufactured, and exported all over the world, soon manufactured goods imported from all over the world will be sold. How did this happen?

I can only touch on the highlights in this space, but the story begins in the 1800s with the Allis Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and the Rumley Company in LaPorte, Indiana. Allis merged with Chalmers and diversified, and that became the company method of expansion; by the early 1900s it was a leading manufacturer of gigantic electrical generators. Meanwhile, the Rumley Company had adapted the early stream engine tractor to kerosene and manufactured the Oil Pull farm tractor. This ponderous and slow giant could pull a sixteen-bottom plow, which was just what prairie farmers needed.

Allis-Chalmers decided to diversify into farm machinery and they bought Rumley in 1931, mainly, it is said, to acquire their widespread distributorships in farming communities. Indeed, A-C manufactured their own gasoline engine tractors, and the Oil Pull gradually disappeared (those machines are worth a fortune today).

The LaPorte plant closed in 1984 and the farm equipment division was sold to a German company the following year. Allis-Chalmers disappeared the same way it had appeared, one division at a time. LaPorte lost 3000 jobs. But why?

I’ve read and I’ve heard a lot of stories. The indisputable fact is that the company lost its market edge during the UAW strike of 1946 — 1947 that lasted 329 days. Many people have said it was orchestrated by Stalin through the American Communist Party to cripple American industry. Allis-Chalmers was the central manufacturer of industrial products that were sold to other industries and the goal was to stop this supply. If that story is true, Stalin misjudged American industry. Competitive industries immediately rushed into the gap, while Allis-Chalmers bled cash for a year.

Many companies benefited from that hiatus. Caterpillar and John Deere come to mind, but Westinghouse and General Electric also gained market share. I don’t think A-C ever recovered. When I worked there ten years later, the bad feelings between management and union were still palpable, which had to have had a hidden cost. Top management was also scrambling to catch up with the rapid changes in both industry and agriculture. They bought the Gleaner company in 1955 to compete with the fast self-propelled harvesters that were taking over that market. The small family diversified farm was history, so small farm machinery didn’t sell. If one guy was going to handle 2000 acres of corn, say, he wanted big, fast, and efficient machines. Unfortunately, A-C resisted the trend until it was almost too late. They also had growing legal problems in the farm machinery division, because there is only so much an engineer can do to idiot-proof a complex and highly dangerous machine like a baler, corn picker, cotton picker, or harvester. I wonder how many one-armed farmers lived on the legal settlements.

I’m glad I had the chance to see a manufacturing industry in operation first-hand. I had no idea it was an era coming to an end. My high school was chiefly devoted to teaching entry-level skills in manufacturing, like metalworking, woodworking, typing, and accounting. And socialism. The school actively promoted union socialism. Well, they won. The union played a major role in the demise of Allis-Chalmers.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

Medical cost is the great political football. If a talking head runs out of politically correct subjects that he or she is paid to holler about, the ever-rising cost of health care is right there on the shelf. But what is it?

I recounted my experience as a private pay patient earlier. I never did know the total cost, because they didn’t tell me, however I did pay eight-hundred and some dollars out of pocket. That was in 2004.

Three years later, I woke up one morning short of breath. What? That’s never happened before. I took my pulse. Thirty. Oh my, that’s never happened either. I’ve had abnormal heart rhythms from childhood and atrial fibrillation for over two decades, but these were always fast, not slow, so what was this? Hospital time. Forty-eight hours later I walked out feeling fine with a pacemaker installed. What did it cost?

Hospital
$32,446.

X-ray Doc
49.

ER Doc
492.

Cardiologist
1,780.

Total
$34,767.

But we’re not finished, because now Medicare "adjusts" the charges.

Hospital
unknown

X-ray Doc
—30.

ER Doc
—323.

Cardiologist
—959.

And Medicare paid:

Hospital
unknown

X-ray Doc
0.

ER Doc
135.

Cardiologist
572.

This leaves me with an out-of-pocket expense of $302 so far (I haven’t received the "adjusted" hospital bill yet, three months later). However, this does not answer the question, what was the medical cost? Was it the original charge, or was it the adjusted charge? Where do these numbers come from?

Every time I hear or read about the high cost of American medical care, I wonder which set of numbers is being used. Then there are numbers that we don’t see or hear about at all, and those are the indigent write-offs, such as the first hospital charges that I generated and never saw three years ago. Some percentage of that "charity" is reimbursed to the hospital annually, but I don’t know how much or by whom. Without any way to prove it, I’m guessing that around half of the medical costs that we hear about vanish into the air from whence they came.

Yet doctors and hospitals have operational costs that cannot vanish, so they must know in advance about what to expect in return for charges. If they expect half of what they charge, then they must budget accordingly. But for the medical service provider, surprises always await. Congress can change the rules, third-party payers can change the rules, and providers are stuck with the changes.

This is, sadly, a perfect example of socialist central planning. The consumer has no idea what it’s going to cost when he or she walks in the door. The provider has no idea what he or she is going to be paid. Neither the consumer nor the provider has third-party quality evaluation; there is no consumer’s guide to hospitals and doctors, there are only rumors.

Third-party payers, that is insurance companies, which are also Medicare contractors that do the "adjusting" and paying, actually run the whole show. They are massive protected bureaucracies that couldn’t care less. They might pay the whole bill, they might pay part of the bill, and they might pay nothing.

In The Market for Medical Care, Devon M. Herrick and John C. Goodman provide a useful analysis of this situation and offer some examples of innovative solutions to the problem, one of which is the walk-in cash clinic with prices posted. These are popping up in shopping centers, but of course they can’t cope with major trauma or illness. The authors call for the elimination of secrecy among providers, the elimination of paper records (an enormous waste of time and money), and for quality evaluations open to both the providers and the consumers. In other words, put competition into the business. These are policy recommendations and, as such, go against the policy of established and protected cartels like the AMA and the AHA.

Would I have done a cost and quality comparison on that fateful day? If such information were available online, yes, I would, but more likely I would have been tracking such information for years in advance. That ‘s the way I shop. As things stand, nobody knows medical cost.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

I reported my first encounter with this fraud here. Readers may recall how I was stonewalled by the Humana representative on the phone. They had no application on file, after all, so he promised to send my objection to their dis-enrollment department. You may imagine my surprise when I received an enrollment card at the mailing address I never gave them, soon followed by a payment coupon book.

I’m not a confrontational person, which is to say I’m not aggressive, but I do have a short fuse and a fierce temper, maybe a inheritance from my Scotch-Irish-German ancestors, so I let myself calm down for a couple of days and then called them. This time I got a lady at Humana who was nearly as provoked as I was. I daresay she had been dealing with seniors like me for days. She immediately told me that the company was not responsible, that I had been enrolled by Medicare. Oh boy, I lost my temper all over again.

The state has me in a box labeled dependent, and they can do with me as they please. While I had refused Medicare Part D, the drug "benefit," when it was offered, they decided to enroll me anyway and they gave the contract on me to Humana. So I called the SSA, which is slick and easy enough to scare you, and "opted out" of the drug benefit program once more. I received a written confirmation of that within a week.

Now that’s interesting. If they can promptly confirm that I’m "out," why didn’t they inform me that I was "in"? This saga began with a bill, after all, not a notice. Did some bureaucrat gamble that X% of seniors would simply pay the bill?

I thought I was finished with this nonsense, then I received a bill and a notice from some collection agency. Humana wants $42 for insuring me from the time Medicare enrolled me until I dis-enrolled myself. My member number continues to be a set of zeros, which means I was never a member; indeed I’ve never done business with Humana in my life. So what do I do with this?

I thought about it. We have two bureaucracies here, state and insurance, that have been hand-in-pocket with each other since 1965, and any sense of right and wrong has long since vanished. Sue them? Oh, sure. But it is fraud, or more specifically mail fraud, and it is interstate fraud, so I filed complaints with the USPS and the ICC. How the four sets of bureaucracy deal with it, or not, remains to be seen.

I can imagine five lawyers sitting around a conference table discussing this:

Insurance lawyer: You authorized this.

Medicare lawyer: Yes, but you agreed to do it.

FTC lawyer: Technically, charging people for something they didn’t buy is fraud.

USPS lawyer: You can’t use the mail in this manner.

DOJ lawyer: The practice must cease. We’ll cover up the complaints.

I’ll never know the truth, of course. We are ruled by unaccountable, nameless, faceless bureaucrats who care nothing about the consequences of their decrees. It’s up to us to recognize fraud when it visits us, and refuse to accept it. I won’t be paying that bill.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

Current research indicates that our planet started cooling down 18 million years ago. This had long-term impact on flora and fauna. Tropical forests gave way to open savanna and some species came out of the trees to become ground foragers. The Sahara Desert region was wetter or dryer in long cycles, alternately attracting flora and fauna and repelling both. This is called the "Sahara Pump." The primate called Homo Erectus presumably spread from southern Africa into Europe and Asia around 2 million years ago via this mechanism.

The Neanderthal primate appeared in Europe 150,000 years ago. I thought this lecturer’s description of the appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens in Africa 200,000 years ago was mighty fuzzy, but he finally settled on an African date for "fully modern humans" of 115,000 years ago. These people eventually "pumped" into Europe and Asia after 100,000 years ago, roughly coinciding with the onset of the Ice Ages.

Small populations of Homo sapiens sapiens lived near small populations of Neanderthal for 40,000 years. This lecturer adamantly insisted they could not interbreed. I took his reasoning at face value and thought about putting a population of click-speaking (Khoisan) Pygmies next to Indo-European-speaking Caucasians for a similar time to see what would happen. A current genetic mapping project should settle the issue.

Now we come to the definition of civilization. It’s the state. A state means civilization and civilization means a state. I know that a good many of my friends would disagree, but this is the academic definition in this course. The first city-state was, according to this lecturer, Uruk in southern Mesopotamia. A city-state was defined as a centralized location with a population of at least five-thousand having a central ruler, therefore Uruk was by definition the first civilization. I think this is nonsense.

People had been farming in Mesopotamia for thousands of years before Uruk. Farming villages were scattered everywhere and the natural human trend toward specialization of labor was well under way. Distinctive Halaf and early Al-’Ubaid pottery was traded far and wide. Farmers specialized in raising grain, sheep, goats, and donkeys and all were traded up and down the rivers. The precursors to writing were small clay counters shaped like the goods traded. People specialized in weaving goat hair and wool, and that was traded. Trading itself was of singular importance; timber used for construction in the south was floated down the rivers from a thousand miles north. Academics seem to think that the important feature of Uruk was its temple. I think it was the appearance of a bakery and a brewery, critical specializations in a society which lived on bread and beer. All of this occurred before the rise of a central strong-man ruler, but according to the definition used here it wasn’t civilization. They had no wars.

As the lectures proceed from region to region around the planet, we see the same pattern emerge again and again. In southeast Asia, for example, the farming villages thrived in autonomy for 2,000 years before they were "civilized" by a centralized state. I would say they were enslaved, not civilized.

I was intrigued by ancient Crete. Part of what we think we know comes from Greek mythology and part from archeology; I dismiss the mythology. They call the cities there palaces, but when I examine the photos I see residential commercial emporiums. Indeed, the people of Crete specialized in making olive oil and wine for export and they were the long-distance traders of the Aegean. Unfortunately the island was buried under volcanic ash before historic times.

I was also intrigued by Mohenjodaro on the Indus River, because it looks much like the commercial cities on Crete. It was probably destroyed by flood, but the later Mauryan Civilization seemed to take up and expand international trade by sea as if it had that tradition in memory. International trade outlived Indian empires.

I am not particularly interested in the brutalities of the Chinese warring states or the brutalities of the Meso-American warring states. Although the academic focus of interest seems to be on the periods of violent contest for power, I think they were aberrations of normal human behavior. As boring as it may appear, production and trade were demonstrably the real foundations of civilization. The strong-man central state was the parasite that infected normal human society, and killed it.

I don’t expect academics to change their definition of civilization anytime soon. They play their own kind of nose-counting politics. This professor, who is keenly aware of the role of global climate changes in human history, subscribes to the suddenly popular anthropogenic hypothesis of global warming, which is false. The "science" of eugenics had a similar reign of popularity. But I suspect that the underlying reason for rejecting observational evidence in both cases is an ideological devotion to the state as the giver and the protector of their special class.

Buyer beware, these are professionally produced, directed, and rehearsed courses. They are entertaining, informative, and occasionally deceptive. Human prehistory is particularly difficult because archeological evidence is scarce, yet I have to wonder if we’re not finding what we’re not looking for? For example, archeobiologists working in Syria revolutionized our knowledge by refining their method of recovering ancient grass seeds at hearth sites. What was human life at Uruk like before the rise of political government and the building of its defensive wall? Maybe if we think in those terms, we’ll find out.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

I am a creature of habits. I admit it. I like rich food, I like to cook spicy dishes, I like red wines, cigars, and unfiltered cigarettes, I’m addicted to Mozart, and I spend endless hours reading. I couldn’t possibly acquire another habit at my age, could I? Yes, I could: taking recorded courses.

The Teaching Company was founded by a bureaucrat, Thomas M. Rollins, in 1990. One might say that he saw an important and unrecognized niche in American marketing: the educated commuter who wanted to know more, but didn’t have the time to learn more. If one is a busy lawyer, let’s say, who wants to know about music, what better way to learn than to listen to lectures and examples on the commute to and from work? Although I was a long way from commuting anywhere at the time, I was thoroughly sold on the idea by Professor Greenberg’s lecture series on music and opera.

Consequently I’ve got into the habit of finishing my day with two or three lectures. That may be every bit as eccentric as it sounds, yet it really does divert me from all of the miserable news of the day. I’ve tried various other diversions, but I can’t stomach most movies and I can only enjoy Sherlock Holmes mysteries again every five years or so. I don’t own a television set.

By now I’ve taken several music courses, some of which I will repeat, and courses in ancient history and archeology. It’s been fun and I did pick up tidbits here and there that I didn’t know, but the exercise has chiefly been interesting to me in picking out the professor’s bias, which I presume is politically correct in academe. For example, any subject touching on the lack of archeological evidence for some mythology is buried in rhetoric. Clearly there are some firm lines in the sand that cannot be crossed.

Most recently I finished an eighty-four lecture course with the formidable title, Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition. Wow! This must be a big deal! It was a most diverting irritation from beginning to end. There are multiple professors lecturing, I assume within their specialty, about "philosophers" from the pre-socratics to the present day. The superficial subject was, universally, epistemology, that is, what constitutes knowledge, and how do you know when you’ve got it? But the real subject was how do we justify the State? Why must the "great minds" continually justify the state? That’s a good question. Why must they continually come at it from epistemology? That’s a better question. I’m not one of them so I don’t know, but I do recognize a confidence game in progress when I hear one.

Here I would appeal to anyone who has waded through Kuhn, Quine, Derrida, and Gouldner to tell me their native species and planet, because I do not recognize them as Homo Sapiens from planet Earth, regardless of their State sinecures. I recall being amused some years ago by an American President quibbling about what the meaning of "is" is, and I wondered where he got such a silly notion? Now I know.

Please accept that I am not criticizing The Teaching Company. They seem to find the best lecturers that they can. But if this is the best philosophy that academe has to offer then we are, indeed, as Nock concluded before I was born, neolithic barbarians on the road to self-destruction.

My next seminar is Ralph Raico’s History: The Struggle for Liberty from The Mises Institute. I’ve decided to stick to rational thinkers for the new year. After Dr. Raico I think I’ll take the whole course on Austrian economics. Just for fun. It’s become a habit.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

"Compliance" is an important noun in medicine. It means: "Willingness to follow a prescribed course of treatment." So if a doctor tells you to take one baby aspirin every day and you do so, you are "in compliance." But there is a subtle hint of choice in the concept as well, contained in the idea of willingness. What if you’re not willing? No big deal, you’re not in compliance, that’s all.

Now what happens when JCAHO inspectors decide a hospital is not in compliance with its rules? First the hospital is warned, and then the inspectors return to verify compliance, but there is no hint of choice in the matter. Either the hospital obeys orders or it loses its Medicare/Medicaid provider status, that is to say, its income. Now it’s true that any provider is free to reject the M/M status and run a cash-only business, but that becomes a dicey issue if the business is "publicly" owned by a corporation, city, county, state, or the federal government, and is operated by a board of directors. What I’m saying is that a hospital either acquires a JCAHO seal of approval, or it’s finished.

Is JCAHO a federal agency? Not exactly. I urge you to read the history on their web site. Maybe we should call it a parasitic and symbiotic private bureaucracy that wields State power in the interests of the State. Provider "membership" is voluntary in the sense that paying taxes is voluntary.

Before JCAHO got a total grip on hospitals, a hospital staff still had the incentive and discretion to make decisions in response to immediate problems by itself. I hark back to the sudden outbreak of lung infections in one unit (1972) that nearly got out of hand. The hospital staff stopped it in a short time by imposing strict infection control procedures and enforcing them. We had five hospitals in that community and each one experienced occasional infection outbreaks, but none of them got out of hand — for the same reason. Nobody reached for the JCAHO rulebook first to see if they were in compliance before acting, that is before spending thought and money on solving the problem.

Personally, I have always had a distinct allergic response to medical bureaucrats, so I only know how they operate by observing the results. I can only presume that JCAHO gets its orders from the NIH, the massive federal bureaucracy that sits on top of the medical power pyramid. Under them comes the CDC, which decrees what is a disease and whether it’s important. These people know perfectly well that there is an epidemic of hospital infections in the US. They know that these infections are escaping into the community, mutating, and posing a serious threat to public health. Yet they yap about Bird Flu, the Asian Threat. What’s with those people? Do they only care about political agendas? I don’t have a clue.

The business of medicine is suffering from its own disease: the centralization of decision-making tied to the centralization of money. We’ve seen this process occur time and again in the fields of education, welfare, security, justice, and so on. The faceless, nameless bureaucrat in some office somewhere makes the decisions and dispenses the money with no responsibility or accountability. They don’t pay heed to the rate of infection, expense, disability, or death that results from their decisions, The District of Criminals is firmly in charge and answers to nobody. We’ve seen it happen before in history. This political disease is terminal.

I would like to conclude this series of articles on infection control with an email that I received from a biological-research laboratory technician:

Our lab has mice in a “mouse room” in the vivarium of the research-building. In each mouse-room, there is a sterile air-flow hood, and racks of mice, which are all inside cages that only receive air through filtration systems. Upon entering the room, we have to put on shoe-covers, gown, face-mask, a cap to cover our hair, and gloves. We must then mop in when entering, and mop-out before leaving, with a germ-killing solution.

So, apparently, it is quite well believed that these types of operating procedures work for eliminating disease in mice, but amazingly, resistance is given to using the same procedures for people!

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

I would like to thank the many people who sent comments on my last article. MDs and RNs from every region of the US corroborated the magnitude of the hospital infection problem, and expressed their own sense of frustration in dealing with it. People sent their personal horror stories experienced in the US, Britain, Scotland, and Australia. Considering all the hype about Bird Flu, the relative silence in the media about a real epidemic growing in our hospitals is a mystery.

I discovered from my readers that in the three years since I retired the infection problem has gone from bad to horrendous. The old hard-nosed nurses and technicians, like me, are mostly gone, and there seems to be a kind of deer-in-headlights paralysis in the system. True, administration is the Green Zone of hospitals, but even they must be getting nervous. Can it be fixed? I think so.

A reader sent this. It’s about a chlorine-based disinfectant. Oh my, back to the future. A doctor thought that hospitals could no longer be disinfected. Wrong. This kills everything, but only on hard surfaces. Out with the carpets, drapes, and upholstery. I checked with my friendly Haz Mat pro and fire chief. Yes, they could do it, and Homeland Security (sic) might pay for it. So rip out the fabric, saturate the place with 10% bleach, and start over.

Sadly, I don’t think that’s about to happen. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, the people in charge will continue to spin fantasies and pretend that everything is under control when it clearly is not. A curious person could examine JCAHO, the quasi-private organization that "accredits" hospitals every three years, to see if they’re part of the problem. Look for their seal of approval in the lobby of any hospital. The present epidemic occurred on their watch, so they share the blame for it. But what is it that they do?

Here my experience fails me. My boss always made sure I was off duty when the inspection team came calling. We did have their requirements in the office, however, and I read them (five pounds of documents), and I compared them with our standard procedures (another five pounds). Evidently, the inspectors did too, or at least they wanted to verify that the documents were there. Documents matter to bureaucrats.

I gathered that the inspectors spent a great deal of time reviewing patient charts, randomly chosen, to ensure compliance with their rules. Consequently the staff had to endure an attorney’s lecture on charting every year or so. The bottom line was always the same. It didn’t matter what you did or what actually happened, what mattered was what you wrote in the chart. If there is an easier way to intimidate or terrorize a medical professional, I can’t think of it. You are creating a "legal" record that can be used against you in a court of "law." In this environment unpleasant facts are stuffed under a contaminated rug. The intellectual process of suppressing the truth becomes a habit after a while. Maybe reality will go away if we ignore it.

But this nightmare is not going to magically vanish by ignoring it. We made it happen, and we can fix it, but another five pounds of documents will not do the job. Only confronting the problem head-on and appropriately applying effective infection control procedures will work. Significantly, I have not heard from any person in hospital administration or on a hospital board of directors. Sure, maybe none of them read LRC or receive email referrals, but I doubt it. They would ask, is this guy a threat? Nope. End of story. No comment.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

The first hospital I worked in was a three-story limestone building from the 1920s. It had a central boiler and radiators throughout for winter, but no air-conditioning for summer. The patients had no television, no radio, no telephone, and their call-bell was, literally, a bell they could ring if they could reach it. The place reeked of antiseptic solutions, and it had no carpets or cloth furnishings anywhere. It was a bleak and forbidding place in appearance. It was also clean.

That hospital was run by a formidable team. The Administrator was a middle-aged RN. The Director of Nursing was a slightly younger RN. Under them came five charge nurses responsible for all shifts on four wards and surgery. Then came the clerks of accounts receivable, accounts payable, and purchasing — one each — the pharmacist, the chief radiology technician, and the chief lab technician.

In those days RNs wore white dresses and starched white caps, except in surgery. The white caps were a badge of accomplishment and pride. I don’t recall a single one of them who was a "nice" person in the sense of being lenient or bending. They enforced the rules. Period. While they still had the habit of rising when an MD walked in, and carried his charts on rounds, the doctors had to toe the line around them too. I saw tempers flare from time to time, but the RNs always won.

That changed after Medicare went into effect in 1965. The hospital was suddenly overwhelmed with patients — we had them head-to-foot in beds in the halls — and the staffing was wholly inadequate to cope. A united cry went up to Congress, naturally, and they responded in typically near-sighted fashion by throwing more money at the problem they had created: Build a new hospital, you bumpkins.

A new profession was also born during this free-flow of tax-money: the hospital administrator. These people came from business schools, not medical schools. My last experience with a hard-nosed RN administrator was in 1968. She was replaced by a young man with a degree and no experience. His first order of business was to make the hospital look more friendly, more like a hotel, by carpeting the whole place, except for the emergency room and surgery. This happened everywhere in the US.

Thirty-odd years later I watched a large medical center change its "image" in the community by remodeling the entrance foyer to resemble a five-star hotel in Las Vegas — minus the slot machines and bar, unfortunately. This same hospital had recently remodeled its orthopedic ward with the same theme and intention — however the architect neglected to factor in the heavy portable equipment that tore up the floor coverings. Far worse, nobody factored in the spreading of infection inside the building or gave a thought to the principal vectors for such a spread: shoes and carpets.

My brief mini-series on infection brought considerable email from every region of the US, and the message was the same. We have an epidemic raging in hospitals, and something even scarier is going on in the community. How can we stop this?

We have all heard the news reports about infection outbreaks on cruise ships. What do the cruise-liner companies do? Ignore it? Oh, no, they’re not the State, they are private enterprise; their reputation, their money, their existence are all in jeopardy. They dock, they compensate the passengers, then they disinfect the ship — at their own expense. Why can’t hospitals do the same?

What am I suggesting? Close the building, rip out all fabric and incinerate it, sterilize the building, put in only hard surfaces that can be disinfected, and then treat the building itself as a strict isolation unit. Make visitors change clothes. Forbid child visitors. Make the building a bleak and forbidding place once more — a building that’s clean — a hospital.

I urge you to read the article that I linked to above. That is a tragedy that should not have happened in America. Please note the CDC response as well. Deny-and-cover-up is as well established in DC as MRSA is in hospitals. Blame the doctors for prescribing antibiotics? Okay, which doctors for which patients? They don’t say. How about the doctors in medical centers forced to deal with consecutive and multiple infections in brain-dead patients? That’s where this disease, and the ones about to follow it, come from, but there is a kind of deathly silence about this subject. I wonder why?

A hospital is a necessary institution in every community. We should be able to trust it. Now we cannot. It’s time we changed that. It’s not a hotel.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

What is knowledge? How do we acquire it? How do we verify it? An invisible pendulum has swung between two opposing sets of answers to those questions in Western Civilization for over 2500 years. One side says we can’t know reality; our senses only perceive appearances. The other side says we can know reality; our senses perceive what exists. Which claim is true?

First, I’d like to say that I respect the thousands of people who have struggled with this issue throughout history. Here I would only like to examine how the swinging pendulum affects our everyday lives. I choose the context of medicine because I’m most familiar with it. Second, for the sake of brevity I’m going to call one side NO, meaning we can’t know reality, and the other side YES, meaning we can know reality.

Ignaz Semmelweis guessed there was a connection between the spread of disease and standard hospital procedures during the 1840s. He surmised that something unseen was being passed from patient to patient, so he devised new practices of hygiene, including hand washing by the staff, to test the idea. His methods worked. He kept meticulous records and published them. For this his peers hounded him out of Vienna. Louis Pasteur discovered micro-organisms, bacteria, about twenty years later. Joseph Lister invented antiseptic surgery based on the work of Semmelweis and Pasteur. So modern medicine was born. Why did it happen so quickly? And why didn’t it happen earlier?

The latter question reminds me of the quip: Why didn’t Caesar drive a Lincoln? All of the necessary foundations for an automobile existed in the first century B.C., like metallurgy, engineering, steam-engines, and that black, stinky stuff that oozed out of the ground — and burned — but the automobile didn’t happen. Neither did antiseptic medicine. I would argue that the pendulum swung from Plato’s NO to Aristotle’s YES and back to the middle, so that by the time Augustus made himself emperor of Rome, and hired the writer Virgil to justify it, people were satisfied with political power and life as it was.

The pendulum swung further toward NO as the generations passed for the next thousand years in Europe. The Black Death was a total mystery, and its recurrence was explained in terms of fantasy and magic. Meanwhile, a third of the population died. (I should add that bubonic plague is still around, and a few people die from it every year, but it’s easily treated and cured these days.)

The discovery of ancient Greek documents via Arabic translations during the Italian Renaissance pushed the pendulum back toward YES. By 1600 we find Bacon, Bruno, Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo engaged in YES activities, which culminated in Newton’s grand synthesis. This gave rise to a multitude of new thoughts, like John Locke’s notion of liberty, and Semmelweis’ notion of an invisible carrier of disease.

What came to be called the germ theory gained acceptance largely due to the success of trial and error experiments that produced an observable improvement in results, that is fewer deaths and fewer epidemics. It wasn’t until the compound microscope was refined and widely used that microorganisms could actually be identified.

One might imagine that the obvious benefits produced by science and technology during the 18th and 19th centuries pushed the pendulum permanently to YES, but it did not. A significant number of intellectuals in Europe denied the benefits and despised those grubby people who got dirty doing experiments and inventing things. True knowledge was to be found in contemplating the hidden reality beyond the observable world, and only a select few could do it. They alone understood the perfect society, and they would force people to behave accordingly. The pendulum swung back and forth, and it hasn’t stopped yet.

Responses to my essay on infection control were varied and revealing. One nurse said MRSA was a hoax and the procedures were unnecessary. Another nurse said their whole staff had MRSA and they didn’t have time to follow procedures. One citizen said these sick people should die at home. Another citizen said that germ theory is nonsense. Sounds like confusion to me. A valuable input on how seriously they take this problem outside the US was sent by another reader; this article also blames the CDC for letting things get out of hand.

I think we are seeing the all-powerful State trying to make the pendulum stand still at NO. They have usurped the authority and tell us, only we know the truth. The State controls medicine from top to bottom. The State decrees what is disease, how it may be studied and by whom, how it must be treated and by whom, how it will be funded and how much they will pay. Hospitals and doctors are confined by State regulations to a narrowly defined range of choices. If a given issue, like HIV, SARS, or Bird Flu, hits the media and gains popular attention, it immediately becomes a political football and the State decrees new policies, procedures, and money, while the real problems go begging.

Who are these mighty rulers of American medicine? They’re bureaucrats. And what do bureaucrats do when they make a mistake? Deny-and-cover-up. It’s standard policy in the White House, in Congress, at the DOJ, the Pentagon, and all of the alphabet agencies, including the CDC. So if the CDC declares that MRSA is not a problem, but Bird Flu is, that’s the way it goes. It confuses people who actually work with the sick and infected day in and day out, and it confuses the public who only see the façade and don’t know what’s going on inside the building. And when the bad news hits the media, they’ll deny-and-cover-up, as usual.

I think this pendulum is going to swing hard in the other direction one of these days.

Thanks to David Calderwood for the idea.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

I just Googled the words "infection control" and got 26,100,000 citations. That’s a bit too many for me to investigate so I will leave it to your curiosity, and move on to my own observations and suggestions on the subject.

The issue did not exist in the 60s. The fabled killers of the past, like cholera, smallpox, polio, and tuberculosis were no more. Huge strides forward in hygiene, diet, pharmacology, and medical care had succeeded in eliminating these scourges. Then a strange and unanticipated thing happened. As medical technology advanced in life-support systems, new killers emerged. What was happening?

Let me describe what I experienced in the early 70s. After seatbelts were introduced we stopped seeing frequent chest injuries from traumatic encounters with steering wheels. Instead we started seeing frequent head injuries from traumatic encounters with mother earth by motorcycle riders. Those who survived the ER, surgery, and ICU were often still unconscious and attached to ventilators — breathing machines — and the question was, what to do with them? The hospital where I worked established a step-down unit, a kind of way-station between ICU and the wards. There the patients could be weaned off the machines, hopefully restore consciousness, and move on. We had nine patients in one large room.

Suddenly, almost overnight, all nine patients acquired pseudomonas infections in their lungs. Now this is one of those everyday bacteria, like staph, that we live with, but it’s not supposed to get into the lungs, where it becomes a killer. The stench was awful and it spread throughout the hospital. So did the bacteria. When it hit the orthopedic ward, the doctors went ballistic and persuaded the hospital administration to apply draconian infection control procedures. Strict isolation meant one patient per room, door closed, mats saturated with disinfectant at the door, gowns, gloves, mask, hat, and booties, and a basin of disinfectant for the hands. No exceptions. It was a chore, it was expensive, and it worked. That outbreak was stopped.

Hospitals then started building special isolation rooms on wards that included an anteroom for putting on and taking off the gear and for washing up. Fine, but they removed the booties and the floor mats, so now we tracked stuff in and out on our shoes. In ICU we stopped treating patients in an open ward and put them in separate rooms that could be isolated if need be. Yet overall the infection problem continued to grow. Why? Where was it coming from?

Now I want to tell a story that I know you’re not going to like, but here it is. In the mid 90s, a middle-aged man in seeming good health keeled over in a shopping mall. Some passersby tried to help. One started CPR, another called 911. An emergency crew arrived, took over, and transported him to the ER. There he was stabilized and sent to ICU on life-support. His electrocardiogram, echocardiogram, and blood work all showed massive heart damage and he was not stable enough for invasive diagnostics or surgery. He was also not conscious. The man survived his heart attack, but his electroencephalogram demonstrated brain death. What on earth do we do now?

That man’s heart actually got better as the months passed, and his brain stem still worked enough so he could be removed from the ventilator. So now we had a living, breathing body with zero higher brain function. Brain dead. The controversy about what to do next waxed hot and furious. The healthcare system had already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on this case, way beyond any possible insurance coverage or asset recovery. The family refused to let him die. And nature was going it’s own way: Infection after infection attacked this body. Doctors ran through their armory of antibiotics, vitamins, dietary supplements, consultants, you name it. Nature beat them every time.

I ran into this patient in his third year of living death. I will spare you a description. However, I found him on my assigned list of patients on a busy medical-surgical ward where the new post-op heart surgery patients recovered after ICU. He was there because they had a heart monitoring system. He was in an isolation room. I knew better than to take short-cuts with this patient, I could smell him down the hall, yet I saw staff doing just that. His wife ignored the isolation procedure altogether.

Later I encountered him on the medical ward which took care of sick old people and cancer patients. Still later I found him on the remodeled orthopedic ward. These wards did not have isolation rooms, but only a notice on the door that usually remained open. Staff largely ignored the rules, and breezed in and out of the room. He finally came to rest back in ICU, where nature won the battle.

That hospital had six patient-care floors and this single patient contaminated five of them directly — considering hands, shoes, and carpets as vectors, probably the whole building. With what result? I don’t know. I do know that during my four years there the rate of cross infection was growing out of hand. New post-ops were getting wound infections. Sometimes every other room was marked isolation. That’s intolerable.

We have reached a sticking point in medical science, art, and technology on this issue. What can we do with the living-dead who become the breeding grounds for new diseases? We need a bridge technology here to buy time. Instead of moving these poor souls from place to place and making the problem worse overall, let’s put them into one place, an absolute isolation unit, where we can care for them, study them, learn from them, while protecting ourselves and our community at the same time. A community of 100,000 people might need a three or four room unit dedicated to this purpose.

I am proposing something here that apparently doesn’t exist, so please allow me to repeat. I am not talking about patients who are conscious and responsive. I am talking about patients who are both brain-dead and chronically, repeatedly infected. Nobody wants to cope with these patients. Their existence challenges us emotionally, spiritually, scientifically, and technically, yet they offer us an opportunity to understand another aspect of nature’s mysteries: the source of new and dangerous bacteria. Let’s absolutely isolate them, and come to understand. This would be an effective step toward humane infection control.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

One of the comments on my last essay made me think. Imagine, if you will, sitting alone in a hospital cafeteria at lunchtime, and a group of employees wearing their colorful pajamas is sitting at the next table. You overhear this conversation:

"Don’t you use sterile instruments?"

"No. It’s all baloney. Hey, they’re clean, you know. I wash them myself."

What would you think? If you knew nothing else about medicine, you know that instruments, whatever they are, should be sterile, whatever that means. You also know that you should quickly and quietly leave this hospital.

Now suppose you overhear a slightly different conversation:

"Don’t you follow universal precautions?"

"No. It’s all baloney. Besides, we don’t have time."

What would you think? A professional says that something or other isn’t necessary because it isn’t true, and it wastes time. Seems plausible.

If I heard either of these fictional conversations, the second one would make me run, not walk, to the nearest exit. The principle underlying sterilization of instruments, eliminating bacteria, is similar to the principle of universal precautions, eliminating the spread of bacteria, i.e., infectious disease.

There is no hocus-pocus to universal precautions: Keep the other guy’s bodily secretions where they belong. Wash hands properly, wear gloves, gowns, masks, hats, and booties when necessary. When is it necessary? Aye, that’s the question.

Please allow me to digress on my own education at this point. As a student of philosophy, literature, and languages in 1963, I walked into a hospital and applied for a job. They made me an orderly, and a middle-aged nurse’s aide taught me bedside patient care. Six months later I talked my way into the operating room, and learned the technician’s trade from watchful and demanding RNs. I learned how to clean an operating room, how to wash instruments, wrap them, autoclave (sterilize) them, how to prep patients, how to scrub for surgery, how to pass instruments, and so on. Five years later I switched to respiratory therapy full-time and focused on intensive care treatment. This was a learn and perform education with firm and set rules and only one alternative: get out.

I am far removed from standard systems of education today — my role as a clinical instructor ended in 1979 — so I am not qualified to judge what’s going on today, but I have had some hints. For example, I had to re-certify in CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) in 2000 to keep my license. I was working for a large teaching medical center. After the session I asked the RN who ran it about the practicality of some changes in procedure. He couldn’t answer. He said that he had never actually participated in a real CPR.

This raises more issues than I can address here, but I wonder how medical professionals are taught about infection control these days? How does a practitioner arrive at the conclusion that it’s all baloney? The very idea startled me, yet I get to look at and live with the results of that idea every day: an arm crippled by a post-op staph infection. It never occurred to me before that the surgeon might think infection control is baloney. What are these people being taught? I don’t know.

The continual spread of infections in hospitals has raised monumental obstacles for the staff. One isolation room out of forty rooms is tolerable, if tiresome, but a dozen or more strain the whole organization to its limits. People will naturally break rules when the situation becomes intolerable, so isolation doors are left open, staff foregoes the gowns and gloves, and maybe even the hand washing. "Oh, I’m just popping in to check." Right. Or the gofer from radiology, who knows nothing, transports a patient from the ward to the x-ray department with no precautions whatever.

What’s the next step in this process? Why, to downgrade the problem, of course. What’s the big deal if everybody is infected? And when it starts killing off the debilitated? That’ll be good for society. I am hearing that kind of talk already.

What’s the solution? Remove interior designers and bureaucrats from planning committees, remove all carpeting and cloth curtains, strip hospitals down to hard surfaces that can be disinfected, retrain all housekeeping staff for that job, and put some hard-nosed, experienced RNs in charge of enforcing infection control procedures. That would be a good beginning, given the mess we’ve got. Better would be a money-back-guarantee: No Infection, or your money back. Don’t hold your breath waiting for that one.

American medicine is a half-stride into a giant step backwards toward the superstition and magic of the Dark Ages. The reasons are multiple, but we can trace the symptoms back to the ultimate source: the State. Only a hypothesis? Sure. So here’s a prediction: The CDC will change the definition of hospital infection to enable a relaxation of the rules. It’s all baloney, after all.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

PBS recently aired this four part series, which I just watched on their DVD of the same title. Overall I think it’s worth buying and watching and thinking about. Because this was my life’s working environment, I’d like to offer my observations and opinions about their presentation.

Part one was a real tear-jerker for me, both because it was about the death of a child and because of the dramatic portrayal of the story. I do not object to drama in a documentary – it’s a valid method of getting and keeping our attention, but we must be careful to not lose the facts in our emotional response. In this case, the fourth child of a well-to-do family apparently decided to take a bath on her own and scalded herself. She was taken to a medical center and ended up in their pediatric intensive care. She survived, and was discharged to a pediatric ward. There she developed severe dehydration, a well-known risk factor in burns, and her altered behavior caused her mother to repeatedly ask for help. The "nurse" said she was all right. She had a cardiac arrest and died.

The first time I read this story in an email from a friend, who had seen it on television, my immediate response was, the "nurse" was not paying attention to business. But let me back up and talk about hospitals for a minute. In intensive care the staff to patient ratio is about one to two, and usually the staff consists of highly specialized RNs. On a ward the staff to patient ratio might be one to ten or more, and the staff usually consists of RNs, LVNs, NAs (nurse assistants), and student nurses of widely varying education, experience, and competence. An ICU can be a busy place, especially in the morning, but there are plenty of eyes and ears, minds, and electronic monitors paying attention to patients, whereas on wards the pace can get so frantic and confused that nobody can keep track of patients. So who (what) was the "nurse" in this case? They don’t tell us.

The consequence of this tragedy was most unusual. The parents used the settlement money to establish a foundation in their daughter’s memory to fix the system, and the medical center decided to cooperate with the effort. The latter was unprecedented, to my knowledge, but here the documentary overlooks some long-standing standard procedures to celebrate supposedly new procedures. The "Rapid Response Team" that they advertise as new has been operational under different names in hospitals since the 1970s. It was called the "code team" everywhere that I worked. Quality Assurance departments were established soon after the Reagan Medicare Reform Act in 1985 and now consist of a small army of bureaucrats who review patient records to be sure that standard procedures are followed and that patient treatment conforms to doctors’ orders. An MD specialty emerged from this and now large hospitals employ full-time doctors who review records, see patients, and otherwise troubleshoot on the wards. That does not count the post-graduate residents in teaching hospitals who do a similar job. The documentary implies that these improvements came about as a result of this singular incident. I don’t think so. Is it enough? Again, I don’t think so, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

The next problem they undertake is infection control, which I have addressed before. They speak only of MRSA, and not the more dangerous VRSA, and they imply that hospitals are the victims, not the perpetrators, of the menace. These antibiotic resistant forms of everyday bacteria were born and raised in hospitals, and nowhere else, although now MRSA has escaped into the community. I thought the presentation was feeble at best, despite the fascinating evidence of the money wasted fighting and not preventing these infections. To get an idea of the magnitude of the problem, see the November, 2006, report from Pennsylvania: 19,154 infections costing $3.5 billion to treat in 2005.

Then they move on to medication errors. Here the blame is again pinned on the "nurse" without defining the word. Let’s follow the paperwork. First the doctor sees the patient, then the doctor writes orders for medications and treatments. Those orders go to a ward clerk, not an RN, who then transcribes them and sends them to the appropriate department, in this instance the pharmacy. There a pharmacy aide, not a pharmacist, records the order and often fills it, and sends the medication to the ward. Do you see the opportunity for error? Let’s say the ward clerk has thirty sets of orders to get through in time for a lunch date and there is an indecipherable squiggle after a medication order. Does that say PRN? (As needed.) Sure. But it doesn’t, it’s a squiggle. Error. Or the ward clerk misspells a word and the pharmacy aide makes a guess and sends the wrong drug. Bad error. (Our first rule in respiratory therapy was, read the original order yourself before you do anything.) Medication errors are usually caught by on-site QA review before anything bad happens, but not always. The documentary implies that the solution lies in computer technology where a doctor transmits orders directly from one computer to another. Maybe. I’m not so sure about that.

Part three is about the "epidemic" of diabetes in Los Angeles and elsewhere that threatens the economic existence of the health-care system. Multiple complications of diabetes result in escalating and costly ER visits. The solution described involves dedicated clinics and home-health nursing to monitor diabetics more closely and catch complications before they require a hospital visit. The problem is money. Medicaid and Medicare will not pay for prevention, but only for treatment. The documentary does not mention the cash-only clinics in LA which have successfully competed with the welfare clinics in poor neighborhoods. Nor does it mention the long-standing home-health nursing businesses, both public and private. These are serious omissions.

The final program returns to pediatric medicine. They feature some uncommon childhood birth defects and chronic diseases, which I thought was a strange choice. Here the family is invited to participate in building design and patient care. That’s a good idea, but it isn’t new. My first experience with a pediatric ward room designed for both the patient and the family was in 1969, and the family most definitely participated in patient care decisions there. While that is hardly the norm, the idea did not arise as the documentary implies.

My own solution of the non-financial clinical problems cited is simple and complex: Pay attention. If care-givers are not paying attention, bad things can happen. Simple, but there are moments in a hospital when paying attention is next to impossible. Change of shift is such a moment. When one shift is reporting off to the next, who is watching the patients? Meal breaks and rest breaks reduce staff, so nurse X who knows patient Y is gone; it takes years of experience to immediately assess an unknown patient. Stress levels can rise to the point where some staff literally blank out and can’t pay attention. How do we solve those problems? Better building design, parental involvement, new computer systems, and yet another layer of bureaucracy do not even address the problem.

Nor does PBS show the viewing audience the simplest infection control procedure, that is putting on and taking off gloves. Putting on gloves is simple, but taking off gloves is critical. Imagine that the glove is grossly contaminated with a visible substance, how do you get it off without getting it on yourself? Easy. Peel the glove off so it’s inside out. Then wash your hands. This is counter-intuitive to people who are not accustomed to it.

In summary, I think the documentary is valuable, both to acquire a grasp of the problems involved in US health-care systems, but more importantly to see which way the systems are moving. Decentralization is happening. Supplementing MDs with RNs is happening. Not in the documentary, cash-only systems are happening. Not in the documentary, foreign competition for big ticket surgery is happening.

Despite its flaws, I think that Remaking American Medicine is worth watching.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

Trumpets sound, banners wave, and a cheer goes up after every election. Or so we’re told. What? I saw it on television! Oh, yes, but television cameras can conceal as well as reveal, so we must beware their subjective selection. What do the numbers tell us?

I search for this data after every election to get an idea of the "majority" who is ruling us in this winner-takes-all political game of ours. So far I’ve found it in only one Reuters report. Voter turnout: 83 million. The 2006 mid-term brought out 40.4% of eligible voters. That compares to 39.7% in the 2002 mid-term election.

There is a fascinating assumption underlying those percentages. Somebody is assuming that there are 207.5 million eligible voters, which is itself an astonishing 69% of the US population. But then the US Census Bureau claims that 72.1% of our population was registered to vote in 2004, so how do we judge? I really don’t know.

Maybe I happen to run in the wrong circles, but I only know two people (2%) who are registered to vote and actually do so. Since the Departments of Motor Vehicles were authorized to register voters, is the Census Bureau using DMV records? Again, I really don’t know, but like the economic data rolled out by DC bureaucrats, something about this stinks.

Well, let’s take them at their word anyway, and see what we get. Reuters reports that House Democrats got 31.7 million votes to gain their majority rule. That’s 10.5% of our total population or 17.8% of eligible voters. This then is how democracy works: A small minority seats a tiny minority on the thrones of power to rule over the vast majority. Is that what they teach in civics class? Hardly. Political democracy is pure mythology, a fiction, a fantasy, and there’s a good chance the teachers themselves don’t know it.

This year I decided to participate in on-line polls that appeared to be genuinely representing several major universities. I was curious about the questions they would ask, and I was not disappointed. Their major premise was obvious, although never mentioned, namely that the State is a good and proper institution; a secondary premise assumed the validity of democracy; a tertiary premise assumed that only two political parties mattered. Their questions were based on these hidden premises. I had a lot of fun answering these questions based on my own contrary premises. I imagine that my answers will be thrown out as statistical anomalies, which doesn’t matter to me, but the exercise demonstrated how firmly the mythology is embedded in academia. Not one question addressed a libertarian or market anarchist point of view.

If we turn to the democracy of the marketplace, we get a totally different picture of the concept. As I wrote before, I vote with my buck; I buy what I want and I pay for it. If somebody feels like they need a "Decider" in their life, let them buy one and pay for it. This is a simple idea, but today it is only permitted to work in limited areas. Above all the State forbids competition to its monopolies, so while our minority elite endlessly preaches "security and justice," they deliver neither, and they refuse to refund any money for their failure. Who will sell me coercion insurance?

So we had another election, and the State won, as usual. What’s to cheer about?

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

I got a bill in the mail today. That’s odd, because I don’t generate bills, and my mailing address is known only to the Social Security Administration, the IRS, my publisher, my bank, and Amazon.com. But I got a bill — from an insurance company. The message opens with this sentence: "This is a reminder that as of October 03, 2006, we have not received payment of the past due premium balance shown above."

I will not name the company, but I will say that it’s a major player in the insurance business and it is a name you would instantly recognize. If they are stooping to this fraud, then it’s likely that all of the big names are doing so as well.

The message continues with this threat: "You will still be liable for the past due premiums accumulated through the disenrollment date."

Never in my life have I been involved with this company in any way. So what are they talking about? "This letter pertains only to your Medicare Prescription Drug Plan benefits." Ah, yes, thank you, now I know where they got my address, and this may help to explain a puzzling letter from Medicare that I got last week; it listed my income and assets and instructed me to respond only if I had more than that. I asked somebody else to read it to be sure I got that right. I was verifying something for some unknown purpose by not responding. Ain’t that curious? Now I get this bogus bill.

At the bottom of the insurance message was an escape clause: "If you believe we have made a mistake" call this number. I borrowed a phone and called immediately. After going through two automated messages, one of which asked for my SS number and didn’t recognize my laughter, I punched in the account number on the bill. Their system didn’t recognize that either, but it did fetch a live human being, after a five-minute wait. The poor fellow must still be wondering, why me?

I demanded to know why and how I got this bill. He wanted my name. I refused. I gave him the account number on the bill. It wasn’t in his database. I ranted a bit. No dice. Finally he asked me if I lived in Pennsylvania. What? "Some states automatically enroll people," he said. My, my, a little ranting wasn’t entirely wasted on this fellow. Finally I gave him my name. There were two of me, one with the correct DOB, so he had me identified. He searched for my application. There wasn’t any in his database. He promised to send my name to the "disenrollment department," but he wanted contact information. I said, "Google my name," and hung up.

From top to bottom, this is fraud. Did some hotshot marketing person assume that Americans over the age of 65 were morons who could be intimated by a fraudulent demand for payment? Are insurance companies themselves being hustled by the federal bureaucracy to enroll seniors in their latest fraud? Could it be that seniors have not signed up for further entanglement with multiple bureaucracies? Is this bankrupting prescription drug "benefit" falling on its face? I don’t know.

But I do know that during my wait on the phone, a lilting voice informed me that my premium for a Medicare Prescription Drug benefit could cheerfully be deducted from my Social Security. Oh, that’s cute. The "private" insurance industry has devolved into one more state bureaucracy, tightly leashed and fed by the District of Criminals, and that’s what makes me angry. The most important social innovation in history, insurance, has been discredited and destroyed by the state. Now they act like the state. Beware the fraud.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

Making sense of this world is important to me for some reason. Some issues that don’t make sense are the endless wars, global warming, 9/11, and peak oil. I’m grateful to Butler Shaffer for partially settling my mind about 9/11. I’m not any kind of expert on any of these issues; my area of expertise is a tiny niche elsewhere, but in that niche I learned to be a keen observer and a skeptic — medicine has a bad habit of confusing correlation with causation.

I believe I’m sufficiently on record as opposing these insane wars. Global warming evidence is too politicized to make any sense to me. But I’m getting an impression of peak oil that might be of interest. As in medicine, we have here a mixture of science, technology, political power, and a whole lot of wealth riding on the issue. I’d like to look at some of the evidence.

Peak Oil is the hypothesis that oil is a limited resource that will run out after its exploitation reaches a peak of available supplies. The first question is when? Well, prophesies have varied over time and the date keeps moving forward. That bothers me. When the doomsayers keep moving the target, I conclude that either they don’t know or they are lying. Either way, the practice looks like fraud to me.

I do understand that manipulating people by fear has a long history of success, so the constant promise of doom has a certain effectiveness, although it wears thin after a while. Oil companies have a proprietary interest in tending quietly to their business, investment counselors have a proprietary interest in also being quiet about what they know, and politicians wouldn’t know that the truth mattered even if contemplating it from a jail cell. Scientists seldom work independently from an employer, like the state, who doesn’t have a stake in financial results. The overall short-term objective of all interested groups seems to be to keep the price of oil up (except during election cycles).

This whole game rests on the assumption that dead animals and plants buried under mountains of dirt turned into rock became fossil fuels, that is biological hydrocarbons. This has been an appealing hypothesis since the nineteenth century. I fail to see why. I’ve observed dead animals and plants decay and disappear in the open and I cannot imagine millions of tons of dead organic matter suddenly buried under trillion of tons of rock without first decaying in the open; our fossil records depend on isolated sudden burials of individuals, not massive world-wide burial of species. In the twentieth century we discovered that hydrocarbons exist on dead planets and moons that never supported dinosaurs or fern forests, and still the fossil origin is hyped. This is nonsense.

Recently I bought and read an authoritative book on the subject. Thomas Gold makes sense. His hypothesis is that certain planets and moons produce hydrocarbons in the "deep, hot biosphere" if the right elements are present in the initial accumulation of space debris by the object. In other words, hydrocarbons come from deep inside the planet and seep out toward the surface. Why would liquids and gasses seep out? Centrifugal force from a rotating mass. Dr. Gold managed to use his considerable prestige to finance an actual test and proved his hypothesis by deep-drilling where oil should not be found. (I note that Russian scientists claim precedence to the hypothesis, an interesting dispute for a claim to an idea that the pundits say is nonsense.)

One revealing tidbit appeared in the news not long ago. Chevron has been exploring the deep Gulf of Mexico for years and over the past few years planned to bore a test hole in seven-thousand feet of water. They announced success, finding oil and gas at twenty-six-thousand feet underground. What? That’s five miles down! The expense is as impossible for me to grasp as the achievement. They’re hinting at a floating oil production city out in hurricane alley! Oh, woe to the doomsayers. Has Chevron confirmed Gold’s hypothesis? Nobody is saying.

Meanwhile, back on dry land, our kind and generous bureaucrats allowed tests holes to be drilled to a thousand feet in the massive oil shale deposits in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming in order to find a politically correct method of extraction, which was done. It remains to be seen if the mighty pencil pushers approve the method, but my question is why only a thousand feet? How did the oil get there? (I repeat this question for the Canadian oil sands, another vast reserve.) Why don’t they drill down a few miles to find out where it came from? Surely drilling on dry land is cheaper than drilling in the deep blue sea.

Certainly the pristine and impoverished sagebrush deserts of the American West are Holy Ground to urban environmentalists who don’t live there, and they have the political clout to halt progress, for reasons I don’t understand, but when the US state goes to war for hegemony over the middle-east oil states if we are not, in fact, running out of oil, what’s going on?

Smoke and mirrors. No, I don’t believe there is a conspiracy, I believe it’s only political business as usual: Never tell the truth when a lie will do. It’s a mind-set, a habit, a knee-jerk response, and nobody who works for the state or who works for a state-corporate alliance will ever give us a straight answer to any question. But the truth has a way of wiggling out from under tons of sediment, kind of like oil, if we’re trying to make sense of the world.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

As I was cruising through my favorite web sites last night, my web browser suddenly went blank and seemed to freeze up. I thought, here we go again, the computer is crashing. But no, the audio came through loud and clear. Somehow I had stumbled across some kind of surveillance center. Here is what I recorded.

"Hello, Mr. Casinovich? This is Lewis at the RVSPKVTV polling center. Would you answer a few questions?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Are you registered to vote?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Are you a Republican or Democrat?"

"Uh, oooooooo."

"Was that a no?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Then you are an independent?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Okay. Tell me, Mr. Casinovich, do you have a speech problem? This is off the record, of course."

"Uh, yeah."

"I see. Thank you. I’ll try to keep things simple here. Will you vote for the Republicans this year?"

"Uh, oooooooo."

"Okay, that’s a no. How about the Democrats?"

"Uh, oooooooo."

"I see. Okay, let’s see how you rate the nations problems. Is war high in your list?"

"Uh, yeah."

"How about gas prices?"

"Uh, yeah."

"The environment?"

"Hhoo, yeah."

"Do you think same-sex marriage is a problem?"

Here there is a moment of silence except for a strange panting sound.

"Mr. Casinovich? Hello? Are you there?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Well, do you think that’s a problem?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Thank you. Now I’d like to ask …"

The interview was interrupted at this point by a background disturbance and all I could distinctly hear was a man’s voice saying, "Honey, the damned dog is on the phone again."

(Thanks to the Houston Chronicle.)

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

For example, somebody who is in control of a region’s resources, population, and military wants to keep it; somebody who is not in control of the same region wants to steal it. A kind of war ensues wherein both sides destroy as much of what each one wants as it can, namely the resources, population, and military.

This doesn’t make a great deal of sense unless one thinks in terms of violent urban gangland rivalries that lead eventually to one gang’s supremacy at city hall. On the world stage, a Stalin could reign supreme for years even though he was a known criminal who murdered millions of people.

There is a kind of ideology here that we common folks tend to overlook. It is the ideology of The New World Century. To the intellectual heirs of Lenin and Trotsky, resolutely standing backwards, the whole planet is a plum ripe to be picked, and they’re the ones destined to do it. All they needed was a pliable executive, an emergency, and the Pentagon. What they did not see in this frenzied vision of power was the Pentagon facing the same way, backwards.

I am no connoisseur of warfare, but since William S. Lind started publishing on the Internet I have followed his thinking on the subject with great interest. As he frequently reminds us, there were no Panzer Divisions, no fortified lines of troops, no navy, and no air force opposing US attacks in the Middle East. There was no siege of Stalingrad with a fixed artillery battle, no Omaha Beach, no Iwo Jima. From a military point of view, firmly standing backwards, our invasions of Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq really were a "cake walk." How could they be so wrong?

For an answer to that, perhaps we should look way back at our Indian wars, and then look carefully at what’s happening in Afghanistan and Iraq. Indians avoided open confrontation with "disciplined" troops, let them pass, then picked them off one by one from hiding. This idea is more or less codified by military experts like Lind as fourth-generation warfare, which as I understand it is when the natives don’t want you in their territory, they will pick you off from hiding. The Afghan people employed this technique to drive out the British (1839—1919), the Russians (1979—1989), and now the American NATO (2001—present), and it is being employed by the Iraqis.

The Pentagon seems to desperately wish for an organized enemy to hammer as in the good old days, but there is none, not even a Ho Chi Minh with a "regular army" in the jungle. Propaganda staffers crank out one bogeyman after another, then "kill" him off to demonstrate "victory," but the "resistance" continues.

There are two ways to respond to that. One is to kill all the natives; the other is to quit, go home, and buy what you want (oil?). While the second alternative makes sense, those standing backwards can’t see it. Instead they must destroy the infrastructure, pulverize entire cities, and poison the environment with radioactive dust. If they could they would build a wall around the people and annihilate them wholesale.

In Iraq the neocon cabal wants permanent military bases with a fortified central command center, and the state-corporate cabal wants the oil, but to get either or both they need people to live and work there. Radiation makes no distinctions, however, and no amount of political spin will make it go away. How will those enthralled with what they imagine the future will bring in the middle-east cope with the reality of their own chronic death?

Here in America another backward state movement is underway. While the media hypes elections, only a small percentage actually votes. Bush was "elected" by 15% of the population or less depending on how one measures the fraud. In any case, Bush did not and does not have any "mandate" from the people, no matter how you slice it. This reality is not lost on the neocon cabal (although all reality seems lost on Bush).

As the neocons look backwards fondly at Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler, they see the "solution" to the problem of an indifferent or hostile population at home in the tried and true methods of their intellectual ancestors. First, break the middle-class. Second, imprison and murder the ideological trouble-makers. Third, militarize the rest.

The Federal Reserve has done a fine job of beginning step one. The expansion of concentration camps is under construction for step two. And the legislation to draft every male and female between 18 and 42 is in committee to complete step three. Nice idea for, say, Russia in 1920, Germany in 1936, or China in 1955, but it won’t work in America in 2006 or beyond.

The modern reactionary totalitarian overlooks many factors, beginning with the size of human populations and the individual human tendency to pursue self-interested goals. While the Fed successfully pumped up the stock market bubble and the real estate bubble, which has affected both Europe and Asia, and consequently damaged thousands of marginal "investors," it has failed to significantly damage the reservoir of wealth in middle-class hands across the planet, not just in the US. People around the world watch the US, British, and Australian political march backwards warily and correctly translate it into their wealth at risk, which in turn translates into threatening the credit of the backward states. Concentration camps? A universal draft? Our planet’s elite might like the idea, but not if it’s going to drown them too when the ship goes down; if America sinks, all sink, and they know it.

I believe that our political con-artists would like us to ignore the world picture or at least keep us ignorant, but the Internet has destroyed such wishful thinking. The people are no longer standing backwards.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

Whenever my mind drifts over such questions, I find myself considering two preliminaries. Is it important? Does it matter? For example, if the time of day is the question, it’s not important to me and it no longer matters; ten years ago it was the opposite. If the spot price of gold is the question, it is important to me, but it doesn’t matter because I’m not in any hurry to buy or sell. The fullness of that glass is important to me as a measure of human progress, and it matters because my future actions depend on my answer. As Spencer MacCallum recently wrote, "[I]t is productive to assume that human society … is a work in progress and that we will outgrow/are outgrowing the conflicted behavior of politics." I agree, and I want to know where we stand.

In order to judge, I have two empirical resources available, past and present events, and a hypothetical extrapolation that awaits testing. I am unable to view present events without trying to correlate them with past events. I’ll try to review a few. We have a political executive who promotes lying, cheating, stealing, torture, and murder. I fail to see any substantial difference between this one and all of those who preceded him, although this one is more obvious. We have a secretive elite that manipulates the political process for its own purposes, which as always means trying to enslave the masses to enrich the elite. The state is bankrupt, as usual. So far we could still be living in 1790; today’s political system differs only in size, not in substance.

Our political founders did not see the Industrial Revolution coming, but the political faith absorbed it with aplomb: We don’t know what it is, but we can rule it. And so they did and do, but before they got a vice grip on discovery and innovation, the eruption of innovation between the era of Lincoln and Wilson changed the everyday life and expectations of mankind to this day.

Just as the private and independent achievement of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk in 1903 eluded the genius assembled in DC, so did the achievements of a few unknowns decades later (Jobs, Wozniak, Wayne, Gates, Allen, Ballmer, Berners-Lee). Suddenly the personal computer appeared, but what good was it? It’s nothing, said the elite, said congress, said bureaucrats, it’s nothing, and the state ignored it. (Thank goodness.)

Monolithic assumptions have been fractured by the personal computer connected to the Internet, so today we have multiple remnants competing for attention. There is the political remnant, roughly 20% to 30% of the population who still care to engage in voting, a percentage remarkably similar to the number of public employees. There is a military remnant who still cares to engage in military coercion. There is a remnant who still wants to punish or reform human nature. And who could leave out the elite? Here is a tiny remnant who would like to rule the whole of mankind.

To be generous, let’s say that half of the population has an ax to grind in one leftover niche or another. But what are the other half thinking? Now that people can be arrested, prosecuted, and convicted of thinking something, not doing anything, at least half of our population is at some risk for saying what they think, but will they shut up? No.

Mankind has barely come to terms with the unexpected Industrial Revolution, and now it has a formerly unthinkable reality to cope with: every person’s opinion and judgment plastered all over our planet. This never happened or could have happened before.

The state and the elite would very much like to stop this infernal proliferation of information, and they are buying every means they can to do it, yet I seem to hear laughter echoing from somewhere and I suspect this is one cat they can’t put back in the bag. A few high-tech traitors to mankind can be bought, no question, but can they be paid enough to betray their own interests?

So where do we stand? What about the glass? I think our glass is half full, and I think that by drips and drops it’s getting fuller. Given the chance, people cooperate spontaneously to get what they want, as commerce has demonstrated forever; today people discuss ideas and issues across political boundaries without intermediaries or censors as never before. Predation by the state is obvious, and belittles it. Stealing "elections" is also plain, and discredits the process. DC’s old imperial intentions are laid bare. Who believes a word these crooks say? Their glass is empty.

I have but one hypothetical issue: Who will sell me coercion insurance? When I have a positive answer to that, my glass will be full.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

This farm was located two-miles west of LaPorte, Indiana. The town was named by French trappers as "The Door" out of the forests to the prairies of rich soil to the south. Our farm sat on the edge of the glacial boundary, on the leftover sand and clay and stones of the melted glacier. Around sixty-five acres, the soil was fertile enough to grow anything appropriate to that climate with sufficient patience and labor.

Our family consisted of three generations, eight adults and nine children, living in three separate households. Our immediate neighbors lived on parcels of one to ten acres and comprised a dozen adults and two-dozen children. By working together in completely free and informal manner, expressing an innate spirit of cooperation, all of these people survived the privations of the Depression and WWII without suffering. How?

What I remember most clearly is a spontaneous division of labor, and trade. Our family produced raw milk, chickens, eggs, fruit, cider, honey, and grains. One neighbor specialized in strawberries and sweet corn, another in vegetables, another in goat products. Food was traded within the group, and the surplus was sold in individual roadside stands.

There was no fuzzy warm feeling of family or community here, that was simply the way things were done. There was a fierce sense of property ownership, and woe betide cheats or trespassers, including children — maybe especially children who stole watermelons. Borrowed tools were returned promptly, and if a neighbor asked for help with a major job, one would be wise to arrive early and stay late, or at least until milking time.

I was born into this micro-community ten-years before it disappeared. The post-war economy offered far-flung economic opportunities to the children who grew up there, left home, and never returned. The old folks changed their focus to money, and either rented or sold off the land; their kids wound up in the suburbs somewhere, making money, and feeling a loss they could not express. Their children in turn, now pushing forty, would not understand such an expression anyway, although a vague idea of it seems to haunt some of them. There appears to be a selective urban yearning for the country life.

I saw this yearning expressed in the commune movement of the late Sixties in the US. Unless rigidly ruled by an ideological authority with a constantly changing group of adherents, most communes vanished as fast as they appeared. The fundamental problem was and is property ownership. If the major premise of any endeavor is that you don’t own yourself or anything else, the endeavor won’t survive. Communist Russia and China proved that beyond realistic doubt. Yet urban intellectuals continue to yearn for a fantasy world of individual self-sacrifice for the good of all, like the Plymouth colony before it starved and changed its ways.

One of my correspondents sent a well-written unpublished essay describing a rural set of villages in India with an emphasis on a single household of fourteen people. The woman who runs the household owns nine acres. She is also the keeper of the seeds; if the seeds run out or the crop fails, she can borrow seeds from a community supply with a payback of two seeds for one borrowed. She can feed the entire family three meals a day on the produce from one acre of land and sell the surplus from the balance of the land. She is illiterate, but the children are learning to read and write. When salesmen or bureaucrats come through the area, neighbors are warned by a recorded message distributed by hand. Something about this social model seems idyllic to the author, who would like to import it to the city.

I know nothing whatever about this region, so I take the author’s word for it. The people residing in this set of villages are practicing a simple and common version of laissez-faire capitalism, based on individual initiative, ownership, borrowing at interest, self-improvement, and community defense. I see my own family in this picture at a different level of technology, while the principal difference is literacy. The soil and the climate there must enable multiple harvests per year, although I have to doubt that it’s as simple as broadcasting seed on unprepared ground and waiting for harvest.

Seed itself is an issue, according to the author. State sponsored corporations are trying to sell these people single-harvest hybrid seeds, and discourage the use of native seeds that will reproduce identical genetic copies year after year for free. I have to agree that costly hybrids are inappropriate to poor subsistence farmers even though potential yields may be many times greater, because high-tech agriculture presupposes high-tech farmers, which they are not. The matriarch interviewed in this essay simply said no to hybrid seeds. No sale. What’s wrong with that? It doesn’t take a UN resolution to say, I won’t buy it.

This kind of rural model cannot be imported to the cities, and city dwellers would not willingly be exported to the rural model. The millions of hungry urban people require intensive mechanized agriculture with its high-yield hybrid seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides plus thoroughly educated farming practitioners and skilled banking creditors. For urban dwellers rhapsodizing on an organic garden theme in nature, I suggest they try it before they try to sell the idea: turn over an acre with a spade, break it up with a hoe, rake it out, plant it, cultivate and harvest by hand, and then talk about it. They didn’t call it back-breaking work for nothing. Even Thoreau hired a teamster with oxen and plow to break Emerson’s land at Walden.

But what about the rural spirit of cooperation, the spirit of community? I have to admit that I’ve never lived anywhere that it was missing, although I’ve only lived in North America — East, West, South, and Central, cities, slums, suburbs, and country. What I’ve experienced everywhere is a kind of give and take, live and let live, mind your own business, help when needed sort of thing. The only people I’ve learned to distrust are "public servants" and the only places that worry me are "public" places; I recommend privatizing both so that there are owners and managers who have a genuine interest in the public.

The spirit of community has been under relentless attack by the state for over a century. Their key weapons are fiat money and fiat regulation. The state abhors competition from families and communities alike, for families and communities can survive threats by spontaneous cooperation that needs no organization, no state, just as they have always done before. Intellectuals who would like to engineer this cooperative spirit into some kind of coercive state mechanism should review the history of failure of such projects. In other words, communities cannot be organized by some master agency to survive threats, but they will do it themselves if left alone.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

The earliest documented civilization in history arose in Sumer around 6,500 years ago among a people who were apparently indigenous to the region. Here were the beginnings of many things, including writing, religion, slavery, trade, money, and the city-state. Here the natural human inclination to use force to satisfy desire was codified as a state monopoly, and elevated in status by many fanciful myths that we continue to revere to this day. Here political government was born.

It failed. The idea that a monopoly on the use of force could somehow provide security to the people who produced something useful, like food, failed at the outset. Naturally nobody sat down and said we need to rethink this system of government, the proto-governors and their myth-makers saw to that. No, all we need to do is fix it.

Mankind has been fixing political government ever since, and still it fails. Roughly two hundred and twenty generations of human beings have faithfully practiced a social organizing principle that doesn’t work and can’t be fixed. Knowing no more than the history of political government, one can safely predict it will fail again, but how can we track that failure and how might it be different this time?

To answer the first question, I suggest that we track the progress of fiat money, and the use of force against a given political jurisdiction’s own tax-paying residents. Purchasing power of a state’s currency declines in a direct ratio with the dual frauds of printing more money and authorizing credit expansion; the state is first hog at the trough and invariably spends its own largess on its non-productive military. Meanwhile the masses struggle to keep up with rising prices and watch the value of their savings dwindle away. Political governments are reluctant to allow a systemic fiat collapse across the board and have established international safety nets to cope with a failure here and there; Argentina was permitted to destroy its powerful middle-class by this means, for example, and was then bailed out. This won’t work in the US; if and when the fiat dollar fails, we’ll see Greenspan’s "cascading cross-defaults" in every other political jurisdiction on the planet. In the near term, say ten years, we can easily track the dollar and know where we stand.

All political jurisdictions eventually use their own military against their own people; it is the real purpose of standing armies. In all cases this is something obvious to track. (I am using the word military in a generic sense that includes all armed employees of the state who are authorized to kill on command, or choice.) Sadly for our Republic, the ink was hardly dry on our Constitution before the true nature of the beast was revealed during the tax protest dubbed the Whiskey Rebellion. In our own times we have witnessed small-scale demonstrations at Wounded Knee, Kent State, Ruby Ridge, and Waco, not to mention innumerable attacks by SWAT teams. With the passing of the Vietnam generation of damaged personalities into senescence, training a new crop was essential to the health of the state. With the rule of law a dead issue in the District of Criminals, it’s only a matter of time before these people are loosed on our civilian population to maintain "order and security." When we see the armored and armed Humvees patrolling our streets, we will know the end is near.

Ordinary people have always found a way to work around the restrictions and proscriptions of political governments in the past, even though they sometimes died trying. The spirit of laissez-faire — the principle of least action in operation — is as deeply ingrained in human nature as the urge to use force, although it is widely ignored. Life is simply easier without confrontation and violence, and people tend to avoid both. I think we would be wise to keep this human characteristic in mind during the next transition, and focus on it when we choose a replacement for the state. The pressing question to answer now, before the fall, is how to create security and justice without using fraud or physical force at all? I think it can be done.

Thanks to our modern science and technology, we’re not going to get a grace period of three centuries as the Romans did. Political systems are going to fall fast and hard this time. Precipitating factors abound: the fraudulent stock markets, the fraudulent derivative markets, the fraudulent currency markets, the criminal central banks, or the criminal political governments each could trigger the failure of all, all at once. Our wannabe dictator for life could do it by himself, tomorrow. I hope that more of us have more time to think about it, so that we may pass through the chaos safely and quickly, and arrive at something that works better than political government after the collapse.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

Gosh, I didn’t know that. Maybe you didn’t either. I always believed that insurance was about risk management, and that we paid these people to "assume risks" for us. But Mr. Wilson is on a career track that doesn’t appear to include selling insurance, so maybe the shareholders do count more than the customers to him; shareholders can vote for him. How very political — does he have an eye on a Senate seat?

Of course, the key words are "a price that is not fair or adequate." Yes, that is no doubt a problem. The article’s author, Spencer S. Hsu, writing for the Washington Post, seems to be unaware of insurance actuarial departments whose job it is to calculate the risks. He writes: "For taxpayers, a coordinated system to accurately price and insure against the risk of disasters would create true market incentives …" Dear Mr. Hsu, that’s what insurance company actuaries do for a living, but how is it a taxpayer’s problem, and who does the coordinating?

That is the whole issue in a nutshell. Insurance companies are regulated by law and must apply for rate approval from state bureaucrats who may or may not know what they’re doing, and who have no proprietary interest in the business anyway. Insurance company executives want to protect their bottom line, and want to force the taxpayers across the board to pay for catastrophic damages. In our current paradigm of corporate fascism, or mercantilism, the executive class does not seek independence or freedom from state meddling in their business, they seek more. The hapless consumer is trapped between rapacious thieves.

Want to buy a house on the coast? Okay, buy one for cash, and self-insure it. Haven’t got that kind of money? No problem. The Federal Reserve will print some, float it over to your bank, which manufactures some more, and they will buy your house with their funny money for you if you sign over part of your life-time income and insure the property for them. Now the big primary insurers don’t want to mess with high-risk areas like the East Coast, the Gulf Coast, the West Coast, the New Madrid Fault region, or Tornado Alley. Can’t blame them really, their after-tax profit growth rate was only 12% in 2005, according to Mr. Hsu. This ain’t Halliburton! Yet.

It looks to me like the real estate insurers are trying to follow in the footsteps of health care insurers. They would really like to force people to buy insurance, and then enforce a single-party payer system, via federal taxation, to pay for it. Oh my, wouldn’t that be grand? I imagine that even the shareholders would like it — for a little while, at least.

When insurance companies don’t have a clue about the nature of their own business we’re not in good hands at all.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

Last week a friend sent me this link to an essay by Arun Shrivastava, who writes a fair warning on the danger of DU. Ever the skeptic, I started searching for more information. I didn’t like what I found.

Naturally DC has been lying about the danger all along, but the unexamined issue is why did they decide to use these weapons at all? Why did we need armor piercing ordinance against "enemies" who had no armor? Were we up against tanks and battleships in the Balkans and Afghanistan? Were Iraqi tanks impervious to conventional weapons? Are mud-brick buildings really that tough? What is the point of seeding a region with radioactive aerosols and dust that will kill for generations to come? Only one comes to mind: Depopulate the region.

Is DC capable of such monumental evil? Obviously. They even believe they can garrison this Land of Death. Do they believe there is magic in political boundaries? Apparently. But the dust will spread around the world and radioactive fallout will rain on us again, as it has done since July 1945, after the first atomic detonation in White Sands, New Mexico. Fatal cancers will increase (sure, blame smoking), and even the elite will fall.

Did we Americans ever get over our love affair with nuclear weapons? It doesn’t look like it. Now we have radioactive GIs coming home with the gift of cancer for themselves and their loved ones. Is this evil enough to satisfy the plutocrats who yearn for ever more power? I have only one question for them: If every continent loses three-hundred million people, who wins? The arithmetic is simple.

"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." Shakespeare sure got that right.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

In an earlier essay I described some simple ways to avoid taking hospital infections home, namely don’t touch anything with bare hands, wash hands, and spray shoe soles with disinfectant. Hospital bacteria should stay in hospitals. Well, one got out.

What we commonly call staph is a garden-variety bacteria that humans have lived with forever. We normally carry around a number of different kinds of bacteria — we couldn’t digest our food without them — and as long as we’re strong and healthy, our immune system can cope with them. Confrontation with a strange new variety of bacteria, however, can cause serious problems.

MRSA is one such bacteria. This is a strain of staph that mutated into a form that is resistant to penicillin-related drugs. Its existence is one more unintended consequence of good intentions, in this case the intention to keep bodies alive long after the person has died. For better or for worse, determining brain death is relatively simple in a hospital, while deciding to pull the plug is immensely difficult. Nature recognizes the situation before we will admit it, and these otherwise benign bacteria attack. We fight the bacteria, and they fight back.

This silent war with nature has been going on in hospitals for many years. It never attracted much attention outside of hospitals until this bug got away. It seems to have found a new home in athletic locker rooms, which makes some kind of sense. Here’s a warm, wet environment that bacteria like, and a whole host of hosts. Get scratched up on the playing field? Here’s something your immune system didn’t anticipate.

Incidentally, the argument that doctors prescribing antibiotics for viral infections, like a cold, caused this problem, is not only false, it’s a deliberate lie. Journalists who spread this nonsense should be held accountable for covering up the truth. This stuff comes from hospitals, nowhere else.

And there’s worse on the way. VRSA is the result of using the powerful antibiotic, Vancomycin, in the same bio-culture media, the ultimate petri dish, the human body, to fight off MRSA. In other words, we have produced a staph bacteria that is resistant to all antibiotics. It’s almost an epidemic in hospitals.

What to do? Be very careful inside a hospital, wear gloves, wash your hands, spray your shoes, and pass on the warning. Schools must clean locker rooms/showers with antibiotic solutions daily; they would do well to consult hospital personnel responsible for cleaning operating rooms. Better yet, homeschool the kids and keep them away from that environment altogether.

Beyond that, I can only say we’ve got to reconsider post-death life support systems. This is not a legal issue, it’s a personal issue. People must decide when dead is dead and not leave their loved ones to decay on life support only to produce horrendous new threats to the living. Bird flu is chicken feathers compared to what we already have at our doorstep.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.

Nope. I broke the law. Any price I set on any thing was illegal. Furthermore, I didn’t inventory the junk I sold, I didn’t record my capital gains (or loss, subject to review), I didn’t have a commercial license, and worst of all, I didn’t charge, or pay, the state sales tax. The bureaucrats on the policing end of this deal, people who earn their living from collecting taxes, really don’t care for people like me, hence I’m a crook.

Now let’s take that idea to the Internet, and see what happens. Here we have the biggest garage sale in history. We can buy anything, and the price, oh my, might be set by the buyers, and not the sellers. Here is a conundrum for the bureaucrats: both the buyers and the sellers are crooks. And what about sales tax? Where do the regulators get their cut?

Without revealing where I happen to live at the moment, which might not be a good idea, I will say that we can buy a whole lot of stuff tax-free, and still be happy with shipping charges, which can go to private companies if we choose. I have purchased big-ticket items this way, and I always came out ahead.

They want to stop this, of course; what’s commerce without our friendly government’s hand in our pocket, for gosh sakes? Besides, it’s a major big deal! I save, on average, about a hundred dollars a month by buying on-line from out of state. This must stop!

Well, it’s stopping. Tax-supported agencies are using tax-supported courts to stop it. Easy. These people know where their money comes from. Courts are, of course, well protected from backlash by an angry population, if people even hear about a lawsuit under way. Appointed federal courts are beyond any judgment of the people whatever.

The attack on Internet commerce has begun. Cigarettes are an easy target, and a major source of sales tax revenue. In some states prices can be three times greater than Internet prices. The states can’t attack the Indian Reservations that sell tax-free cigarettes directly, so they first attacked the transaction: you can’t use a credit or debit card, but must use an electronic check instead. The added complication and delay peeled off some consumers, but not enough, so they attacked the shipping, making it illegal for the retailer to ship from some states to certain other states, or especially within a state, like New York. That’s still not enough, so now courts are squeezing the manufacturers with mere threats to not sell their product to the Indian retailers.

So it’s only tobacco products, so what? Foot-in-door is what. The real question is, what’s next? Amazon and E-Bay come to mind, but specialty retailers are also in sight, like Drugstore.com and The Crutchfield. Domestic shipping companies are also at risk of losing their home delivery business, including the USPS.

This moment of Internet freedom in commercial history may be slipping through our fingers as we read about it. Meanwhile, I’m a crook.

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here’s his web site.