The Great Eyeglasses Rip off

By Madeleine Kando

After procrastinating for years, I finally got my new prescription for glasses. My current glasses are at least 10 years old and I had forgotten how expensive and time-consuming it is to buy new classes.

For someone who cannot even decide on which leg to get out of bed, the choice of frames is overwhelming. Besides, trying on frames is an exercise in futility since all you see is a blurred self in the mirror.

I finally selected a frame in the midrange. But frames are not much use without lenses and those make up the bulk of the cost. I finally settled on a pair of Flexon, high-index, anti-glare titanium glasses and went home with a $500 hole in my pocket.

Barely out of the door, the thought of having paid a small fortune for 3 pieces of plastic stuck together with screws that I knew doesn't cost more than $20 to produce, gave me a severe case of indigestion . I returned them the next day.

I figured there was enough juice left in my 10-year-old glasses to research why the industry puts a 1000% markup on their glasses. Especially for something that should be fully covered by insurance, like high blood pressure medication.

The reason is simple: the eyewear industry is a near-monopoly, dominated by an Italian/French company called ‘Essilor Luxottica’.

It was founded in 1961 by Leonardo Del Vecchio. The company owns the biggest retail chains, such as LensCrafters and Sunglass Hut, and controls over 80% of the major eyewear brands, including Ray-Ban, Oakley and Vogue Eyewear. Without competition, this company keeps the prices so high that it bears no relation to reality.  It even owns Eyemed, the biggest eye insurance provider in the world. So, you see quite a big party! Read more...

Stupidity: Our Worst Enemy

by Madeleine Kando

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil”

wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1943. He was a German pastor known for his staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship, for which he was imprisoned and later hanged. In prison, he wrote ‘Prisoners of War’, later published as ‘letters and papers from prison’, in which he tried to understand how Germany had entered such dark times.

Thinking about the nature of evil, he came to the conclusion it was not evil itself that was the most dangerous enemy of the good. It was stupidity.
“You can fight evil” he said. “It always makes men uncomfortable, if nothing worse. Evil carries with itself the seeds of its own destruction. To prevent willful malice, you can always erect barriers to stop its spread.”

“But against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. To persuade the stupid person with reason is senseless and dangerous.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer points out three important facts about stupidity:

First, it is a moral rather than an intellectual defect. ‘There are men of great intellect who are fools and men of low intellect who are anything but fools’. If you know that something is evil, but choose to ignore it because others ignore it, you are not only stupid but you are also immoral.

Second, stupidity is acquired rather than congenital. ‘The power of one needs the folly of the other. It is apparent that a very strong upsurge of power is so terrific that it deprives men of an independent judgment, and they give up trying […] to assess the new state of affairs for themselves. […] One feels, somehow, especially in conversation with him, that it is impossible to talk to the man himself […]. Instead, one is confronted with a series of slogans, watchwords, and the like, which have acquired power over him. He is under a curse, he is blinded, his very humanity is being prostituted and exploited.’ — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

And third, it is less common in the unsociable or the solitary than in individuals who are inclined to sociability. It is a sociological problem rather than psychological.

    

If stupidity is applied to an individual, that’s one thing. I would qualify some of my neighbors as stupid. The one who cut down a 250 year old white pine because he didn’t want to bother raking pine needles in the fall. Or another neighbor who almost burnt down his own house because he started burning brush on an extremely windy day. But when a group of people starts acting stupid, believing that the Covid vaccine is the government’s way of implanting chips in your brain, it affects me and others in society.

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In Defense of Abortion

Philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson

by Madeleine Kando

For most of history abortion was regarded as a necessary evil, but not as an illegal act. The old philosophers believed that a fetus does not begin to have ‘life’ until the 4th month of pregnancy and even the Old Testament refers to the fetus as ‘property’, but not necessarily ‘endowed with the sanctity of life’.

In the Western world, abortion was accepted if it was carried out before ‘quickening’, i.e. once the fetus moved in the womb. Until then it was regarded as part of the mother, so an abortion was not considered unethical. It was performed by trained midwives who specialized in female anatomy.

By 1880, the Church and the medical establishment decided that abortions should be illegal. Under the pretext that it was unsafe (which it was not, since midwives were highly skilled practitioners), they pushed for legislation that would criminalize abortion under any circumstance, except to save the mother’s life.

Thus, for an entire century (until Roe vs. Wade (1973), women had to turn to illegal means. The mortality rate jumped up and figures from the late 1920s show that some 15,000 women a year died from illegal abortion procedures. (Abortion in American History)

These days, the topic of abortion has become so politicized that it is almost impossible to say anything sensible about it without rousing the ire of anyone with an opposing view. The debate is mostly fueled by the question of how ‘moral’ it is to have or perform an abortion. Does that mean that we have become more moral as human beings? Or is the whole morality argument a smoke-screen for less lofty motivations?

The Pro-abortion argument goes like this: 1) making abortions laws more restrictive has terrible consequences for women (illegal abortions), and 2) denying access to abortion is to deprive a woman’s right to control her own body.

The Anti-abortion arguments are: 1) A fetus is a human being and has the right to life. Therefore abortion is murder, regardless of the consequences of restricting its access. 2) Mere ownership of your body does not give you the right to kill an innocent person inside your body. Read more...

Thomas Nagel: Is the Mind just a Piece of Flesh?

by Tom Kando

I just reread a classic: Thomas Nagel’s 1979 anthology Mortal Questions. This book consists of fourteen amazing articles by that author. Each raises a fundamental philosophical issue. Nagel’s fourteen articles can be bunched into two major areas, plus a couple of other disparate topics: 1. Articles 11, 12, 13 and 14 are about the Mind and Consciousness. 2. Articles 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 are about Morality, Ethics, Values and Judgment. 3. Article 1 is about Death and article 2 is about the Absurd. 

Some may say that much of what Nagel (and all other philosophers) write(s) is just so much verbiage. That in the end, nothing they write makes any difference. Such an accusation applies to someone such as Nagel a fortiori, as his writing is extremely convoluted and esoteric, peppered with expressions such as Sub specie aeternitatis (meaning: “what is universally and eternally true"). But I have chosen to take this in stride, and to join his game. I enjoy it. Who knows, some of you may do so as well. 

Nagel’s Preface: Labels and Philosophical Schools 

Nagel is classified as belonging to the school of Analytic Philosophy. This is the dominant orientation in the Anglo world. Its adherents include Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. It emphasizes language, as well as math and science. It is distinct from continental European orientations such as Existentialism and Phenomenology. 

I first thought that Nagel might be labeled a “phenomenologist,” because his central preoccupation is Consciousness, which he describes as subjective experience. However, I was wrong. Phenomenology, founded by the German Edmund Husserl, is a method for the investigation of phenomena as consciously experienced. It is an epistemology, a theory of knowledge. Nagel’s quest is ontological and metaphysical: He asks questions about the fundamental nature of reality, for example the relationship between mind and matter.  Read more...

Do we need more Religion?

by Tom Kando

I recently came across an article by Andres Oppenheimer titled “Churches, Religion Losing Followers Around the World” (Sacramento Bee and Miami Herald, April 13 ‘21). He, in turn, quotes Shadi Hamid’s article titled “America Without God” in the April 2021 issue of The Atlantic. 
Neither of these pieces is earth-shattering, but I will use them as a prompt for some comments about religion. 
To quote Oppenheimer and Hamid: “The decline of religions in the western world is leaving a huge vacuum.... Human beings by their very nature are searching for meaning...and that won’t change....The danger now is that religions will be replaced by secular political fanaticism....If religions aren’t around to teach us basic values - you shall not lie, you shall not be indifferent to oppression, etc. who will do it instead? Christianity, Islam and Judaism (should) reinvent themselves... (They) offer us ancient tales of wisdom....they can serve as a much-needed moral guide...(if) they adapt to modern times. (Otherwise,) their decline will continue and dangerous secular radicalism will take their place.” 
Wrong. 
The only thing which Oppenheimer and Hamid got right is that “human beings by their very nature are searching for meaning,” and truth, I should add. That is what philosophers and scientists have been doing for thousands of years - from Plato’s Idealism and Aristotle’s Metaphysics to Darwin’s theory of evolution, Twentieth Century Existentialism, Socialism and Einstein’s Relativity Theory.  Read more...

What is the Mind, What is Consciousness?

Tom Kando 

Introduction: 

1. What is Consciousness? Nagel 

2. Reductionist Materialism vs. Phenomenology 

3. The Hard problem of Consciousness 

4. Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

5. Zombies 

6. The Self 

7. Free Will and Agency 

8. Humanity’s Future 

PAR TWO: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND ZOMBIES 

4. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Consciousness Chapter 10 in Harris’ book “Complexity and Stupidity,” is an interview with David Krakauer, a mathematical biologist. Harris and his guest stress that intelligence must not be confused with consciousness. 
Humans have managed to build highly intelligent machines. However, throughout the book, Harris repeatedly warns against the potential danger of creating machines that are more intelligent than us, and then they get out of control - sort of a Frankenstein monster. 
In chapter two, titled “Finding Our Way,” where Harris interviews David Deutsch, the Oxford University quantum physicist, he expresses his misgivings about this possibility (misgivings which Deutsch does not share). 
For one thing, Harris argues, once machines become more intelligent than humans, they may take over even if they do not have consciousness. This might then be the end of consciousness. These future machines could be incredibly intelligent, they would be able to do just about everything, but without consciousness they would be zombies. “The lights would not be on.” They would not have experiences. 

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America’S Ranking

by Tom Kando

 Regarding Covid-19, there is quite a bit of talk about “herd immunity” lately. This is the view that the best response to the pandemic is neglect. That is, let the epidemic spread until a majority of the population is infected, after which most people recover and become immune. In this approach, mitigation measures are kept at a minimum; as is damage to the economy... and more people die. 

Sweden is one country which tried this route initially. However, when its Covid-caused death rate soared, it changed course. In the US, it is the Republicans and the Trump administration of course who advocate “herd immunity.” The president himself, having survived the virus, is more than ever convinced that the pandemic will blow over and that there is little need for major mitigation. 

 
Absent a vaccine, “herd immunity” can only be achieved if, say, 75% of the total population goes through the wringer (= catches the virus). But how many people die? 

I fervently hope that our nation does not throw in the towel, and does not resign itself to “herd immunity,” i.e. to accepting the current astronomical rates of infection and death as the new normals. 
However, our record so far is not promising. Read more...

Did Trump Invent the Shoulder Shrug?

by Madeleine Kando

I gave up expecting Trump to say something remotely interesting a long time ago. His descent into the abyss of incoherence is accelerating by the day, be it a result of mental deterioration or an unwillingness to step outside of his adolescent comfort zone.

His body language, however, has fascinated me since he became President. In the Movement Therapy profession, we talk about a person’s ‘movement vocabulary’, similar to a verbal vocabulary. I witnessed the lack of this nonverbal vocabulary when I worked in a state mental hospital, here in Massachusetts. On the locked wards of this asylum, patients moved about like robots, mostly a result of over-medication. They had lost all their capacity to express emotions through movement. Some approached us with a rambling gait, eyes staring at this new apparition in their otherwise monotonous existence, then went back to rocking in their corner, smoking one cigarette after another. In the dark, pea green halls of this medieval place, we witnessed what untreated, overmedicated mental illness can do to a human being. They were the forgotten souls of our profession and the health care system in general.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, there is the rich and expressive vocabulary of the dancer, the clown and the mime. The late Marcel Marceau was a nonverbal virtuoso. I invite you to relish this amazing mime in action here: Marcel Marceau I Bip As A Skater [1975] 

With this background in mind, what are we to make of Trump’s nonverbal lexicon? Where does he fit into the spectrum of what is possible for a human being endowed with a body that can convey a practically infinite amount of nonverbal messages? 

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Memories from Wisconsin

by Tom Kando

On August 23, Jacob Blake was shot 7 times in the back by a cop in Kenosha, Wisconsin. This reminds me of some of my own experiences with racism in that state when I lived there: Nothing as horrific as the Blake case, but “interesting” even so:

In 1968-69, I had my first job as an assistant professor at a branch campus of the University of Wisconsin. - Stout, in the godforsaken town of Menomonie.

I had just gone through a nasty divorce. I was broke, miserable and lonely, renting an apartment in the snowbound college town. My girlfriend Nicole lived in Chicago. I tried to visit her most weekends and holidays.

To save money, I advertised for a roommate to share the rent. Several students applied. I ended up selecting Clark Dawson, a fine young black guy.

Clark dated a white girl. Her name was Sylvia and she was an attractive, intelligent, soft spoken, brown-haired, bespectacled girl. The first time Clark brought her back to the apartment, I recognized her immediately, because she had taken my introductory Sociology class.

At first I thought that Clark had brought her home for a study session, but my roommate promptly dispelled that misunderstanding by saying, “Hi Prof. Kando (he still didn’t call me by my first name), let me introduce you to my fiancée, Sylvia.”
To tell the truth, I was briefly taken aback. Not because I disapproved, to the contrary. All my life I have had the unswerving conviction that the future of mankind lies in the total integration of the races at all levels, social and biological. However, the percentage of interracial couples was still infinitesimal in 1969, certainly in the upper Midwest. I was just surprised by a statistical anomaly. Read more...

“Mother Nature”?

by Tom Kando

Let me try this: A good word to describe the coronavirus crisis is “biblical.”

Now I don’t want you to misunderstand: I don’t believe in God. A biblical interpretation of this crisis goes against everything my rationalist mind and education have taught me.

But the paradigm, or the metaphor, seems so apt. This is Sodom and Gomorrah all over again. God’s revenge, punishment for our sins, for our descent into greed and selfishness, for raping the planet, for excessive hedonism and materialism, for Wall Street, etc.

Okay, convert the term “God” into “Nature.” Then, the metaphor works better already: We are destroying the planet. Even so, a near unanimity of economists - left and right - still agrees that the solution to poverty, inequality and all other economic problems is GROWTH. It is almost universally agreed that a 1% growth rate is bad (that’s often Europe’s rate), a 3% rate is pretty good (something the US achieves occasionally) and that 6% to 10% annual growth, which China has often achieved in recent decades, is the envy of the world. Read more...

Violence; John Wick 3

by Tom Kando

 My wife and I just saw the movie John Wick 3 - Parabellum. Or actually, we just saw about half of it. Then we walked out.

It takes a lot to make me walk out of a movie. I’m a miser. I don’t like wasting my money. I generally consume everything I pay for.

I find this new movie’s enormous popularity and the rave reviews it gets from both the public and the critics a scandal. During its first week, the film ranked Number One at the box office.

The audience rating at IMDb is 8.2 out of 10 - the same as classics such as Metropolis, The Third Man, and Indiana Jones. Absurd! The audience of Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 93% approval rating, and the critics at Rotten Tomatoes nearly as much - 89%. The general public’s taste can be expected to be flawed, but the critics? What’s the matter with these folks?

Of the 216 reviews published by Rotten Tomatoes, only 24 are negative. The remaining 192 are superlative. Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times writes that this film is “superb wall-to-wall action entertainment, filled with dark humor...” he gives it three-and-a-half stars out of a maximum four. I usually like Roeper’s reviews. I really enjoyed his show with Roger Ebert, and I miss it. But this? Shame Read more...

The Absence of Racism

by Tom Kando

 As children, my sisters and I spent several years (1950-52) in a French boarding school. The place was called Valmondois, near the town of Auvers, about 80 kilometers north of Paris. This was the dark and grizzly place made famous by Van Gogh and his paintings of the potato people.

The boarding school was actually not unattractive. The setting was rural, located in a lush wooded region. The supervision and teaching were adequate.

The Institution housed about seventy kids. It was a relatively middle-class boarding school, not a penal institution or a place for wayward juveniles, but neither a fancy Swiss-like place for millionaires’ kids. It was an institution where hard-working Parisians parked their children for a few years, visiting them on weekends, as did our mother.

The children ranged in age from seven to fourteen. When my mother dropped us off, my sisters were nearly eight and I was nearly ten. Not that toughness wasn’t expected. Any group of young children has its pecking order, its bullies, its sadists, its victims, its conflicts. Cliques always exist, groups gang up on their weakest members under the demagoguery of brutal and cunning leaders. Lord of the Flies is a familiar scenario. Read more...

Did the Ancient Greeks Invent Beauty?

by Madeleine Kando

I went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston the other day. It is rated as the second best Fine Arts Museum in the country, so it is a mystery why I don’t go more often.

Amongst their many galleries, they have an incredible Ancient World collection of 85,000 works of art. There are rooms full of Greek and Roman statues, pottery, coins and jewelry and one feels somewhat overwhelmed. As Greek and Roman statues usually are, they are large, white and the ones that are full bodied are mostly of muscular, extremely well-built men. This period in history and art was totally devoted to the human form. And how do you portray the human form best? Naked of course.

It is an orgy of male beauty, not female beauty. Women are conspicuously absent in these rooms. It is ALL about men. Men eating, fighting, disk throwing, killing lions, making love (to other men)… The concept of beauty was the domain of men, not women. Greeks and Romans adored the human body, but it was the male body that they went bonkers over.

Another hallmark of these ideal nude statues, is the small size of their penises. It is as if the sculptor got so tired after chiseling these powerful bodies, that he didn’t bother spending time on their private parts. But in fact, small penises were considered classy in those days. A sign of moderation and self-control, virtues that formed the Romans’ view of ideal masculinity. Isn’t that refreshing? Aristophanes summed up the ideal traits of his male peers as “a gleaming chest, bright skin, broad shoulders, tiny tongue, strong buttocks, and a little prick.” Heroes, gods and nude athletes had small penises. Erect, large penises were reserved for Satyrs and various other non-ideal men, men of the lower class. Read more...

Boys will be Boy and Girls will Self-Objectify

by Madeleine Kando

Today was the lengthy Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which both the accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and the accused, Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh give testimony about Ford’s sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh.

What makes a high schooler think that he has the right to lure a girl into a bedroom, lock the door, turn up the music and, as his inebriated buddy eggs him on, tries to take off her clothes and have intercourse with her against her will?

Some commentators reacted to the Kavanaugh case with the old ‘Boys will be boys’ excuse. Really? Boys might be rough or break things, but as far as I know, the definition does not include trying to rape a girl.

Kavanaugh’s nauseating actions, if they are true, are the result of what some of Kavanaugh’s high school peers described as ‘a widespread culture of sexual objectification of women’ at the all-male prep school that Kavanaugh attended. But before you can sexually objectify a person, don’t you need to objectify her first, to treat her like an object?

Objectification *

According to my favorite philosopher, Dr. Martha Nussbaum, there are several ways to treat a person as a thing:

The first type Nussbaum calls ‘instrumentality’, i.e. treating a person as a tool for someone else’s purpose. The second type is called ‘inertness’ , which means that a person lacks autonomy and self-determination, so you can do what you want with her, like one of those sex dolls. Another way to objectify is to treat someone as interchangeable with someone else of the same type, like models on a runway. Read more...

To Cut or not to Cut: the Circumcision Debate

by Madeleine Kando

Thank God I am not a man, especially a Jewish man. And thank God I wasn’t born in the United States as a man, or I would have joined the millions who have undergone a medical procedure that irreversibly alters the body for the rest of one’s life, without personal consent. It’s called circumcision.

A few days ago a friend told me about a researcher at Harvard University who was fired as a result of a show he performed called Sex; Circumcision: An American Love Story. It is a gripping, 2 hour long explosion of anger by a young American male who went under the knife as an infant. Eric Clopper is Jewish, but that doesn’t mean much in a country where as recently as 2010, 77% of baby boys were routinely circumcised as part of the delivery process.

Since then I haven’t done much else with my time than learn about circumcision and what it really is. What is it’s history? Why is it so prevalent in America and not in Europe?

I have to admit that I now know more about male genitalia than I do about my own equipment, so at the risk of sounding presumptuous, I will share with you what I have learnt.

The word ‘circumcision’ comes from the Latin circumcisus, past participle of circumcidere "to cut round, to cut off". What exactly gets cut off, you may ask, when circumcising an infant in America in 2018?
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Abortion: A Sad State of Affairs

by Madeleine Kando

The majority of countries in the world do not allow abortions on demand. Only 32% have laws that permit abortion if the woman wants it. The United States is one of the 63 countries where this is legal.

The majority of countries in the world do not allow abortions on socio/economic grounds. They force women to bear children that they cannot support or that for some other socio/economic reason they do not want.

Half of all countries do not allow abortions in case of rape or incest.

A little under half of all world countries do not allow abortions when it endangers the mental or physical health of the woman. It is only when the woman’s life is in danger that abortion is legal in 96% of world countries. Still, some countries don’t even allow it in those cases.

Approximately 25% of the world's population lives in countries with highly restrictive abortion laws, which either completely ban abortion, or allow it only to save the mother's life. That means that hundreds of millions of women on earth are denied control over their own bodies.

This category of countries includes most countries in Latin America and the Middle East, approximately half of the countries of Africa, seven countries in the Asia-Pacific region, and two countries (Malta and Ireland) in Europe. Read more...

Cults and the Dangers of Spirituality

by Madeleine Kando

Let’s face it: we live in a world of opposites: night and day, warm and cold, life and death, joy and suffering. But many of us are searching for a way to combine the two into one ‘Whole’, thinking that this might make us more complete, happier, less prone to suffering. That is the goal of ‘Enlightenment’.

In ‘The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power’, Diana Alstad and Joel Kramer examine the age-old traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism and conclude that these 3,000-year-old religions have been a total failure. We are not less selfish and divisive today as we were when it was founded in northeastern India by Prince Siddharta in the 6th century B.C. India is the most internally divided culture in the world with its Caste system. The ‘Oneness’ framework, which says that ‘division’ and ‘difference’ is but an illusion, gives the haves a reason to justify the misery surrounding them and is used by the have-nots as a way to cope with an unbearable situation.

The usual reasons for this failure are placed at the foot of the ‘seeker’. Humanity has not done enough soul searching and is not ready for true bliss. But what if the reason for its failure is because this ‘Oneness’ framework is impossible to achieve? Read more...

Enlightenment Now: A Book Review

by Madeleine Kando

Every morning I get the New York Times’ ‘morning briefing’ in my inbox, waiting there patiently, until I have had my first cup of coffee and am as ready as I can be, to brace the calamities of the day’s news.

Some of today’s headlines read: Trump imposes tariffs on steel and aluminium imports. Hope Hicks resigns after testifying for 8 hours before the House Intelligence Committee. Nepotism rampant in the White House. Freezing temperatures caused by a weakening polar vortex are battering Europe. Putin is threatening Western nations with a new generation of nuclear weapons.

And those are just the main points. It doesn’t say how many people were shot, how many children didn’t have enough to eat, how long Medicare will survive or whether access to birth control will be made more difficult.

The only thing that gives me hope, is that we, the people can still disagree, gripe, bitch, whine and kick up a fuss about how we are governed. but does that make an iota of difference? Does it decrease poverty, crime and corruption? Does it make us progress?

In ‘Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress’, psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker, shows that we are, indeed, making progress, regardless of what the New York Times tells us.

Pinker's clear intention is to take the wind out of every imaginable argument against the case for human progress. To me, reading this book felt like a breath of fresh air. Is he too optimistic? Many people think so, including social philosopher John Gray, whom Pinker calls a progressophobe.
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It's the Guns

by Madeleine Kando

Source: What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer

leave comment here Read more...

The Insanity of the Republican Party and the Individual Mandate

by Madeleine Kando

Republican lawmakers are now adding a ‘repeal of the individual mandate’ clause to their proposed tax bill. For those of you who don’t know what that is, the individual mandate says that every American taxpayer is required to have health insurance. Just like everyone has to have car insurance. If you don’t have health insurance you get a fine.

It is one of the legs of the so-called ‘three legged stool’ of Obamacare. It is ‘unpopular’ because healthy people are forced to spend money on insurance they think they don’t need.

By including the repeal clause in their tax bill, the republicans tell us that it can reduce the deficit by $318 billion. How can NOT paying a tax penalty reduce the deficit? Because if people are not mandated to buy insurance, less of them will apply for subsidies and special government funded programs. 13 million people will be without insurance, a big saving for the government. Read more...