The Razor

The barking drifts into my dream where it’s incorporated into the plot, but as it lasts I know something in real life is wrong and I force myself to awaken. I come out of my sleep grudgingly, and check the time: 3:30am. The barking is louder now, almost frenzied, and I can tell the dogs are excited. I am no Doctor Doolittle, but spend time with your animals and pay enough attention to them and you’ll understand how they communicate. Whatever it is that has them riled up is new, but has them scared. I dress and grab a high-power flashlight and open the gun safe. Bears are known in these parts and one was sighted on the property next to mine, so I grab the .223. I have no intention of shooting a bear if I come upon one, but I choose the tool necessary in case I need to protect myself or the dogs.

The night is clear and moonless, and all the constellations in the sky are the ones I’ll be seeing next season at a more opportune viewing time. I click the flashlight and scan. “Blue” the pack coward, the one I rescued and intended to become the guard of the pack, is at the edge of the clearing leading into the woods barking wildly. She runs back towards me, obviously relieved to see me, then runs forward in a vain attempt to prove she’s fierce. She’s not but I love her anyway. I call to the dogs, and shine the light forward. The beagle appears, her eyes catching the light and glowing somewhat demonically. A demonic beagle. Not exactly the hellhound of ancient mythology, and I’d appreciate the irony if my heart wasn’t throbbing in my ears and I wasn’t scared to the point where each step became like trudging through sand. Hearing my arrival the frenzy of the pack reaches a crescendo. Now the dogs want to show their bravery and I’m worried that they are going to do something stupid and get hurt. A dog is no match for a bear’s claw which can gut it from nose to tail with a single swipe. I push through the underbrush, thorns catching my jeans and cutting my arms as I hold the flashlight in one hand and the rifle in the other. I begin to regret my choice of weapon. A .223 round has too much velocity and will pass through an animal and put me at risk of hitting one of my own dogs. Perhaps the .12 gauge with buckshot would have been the wiser choice. But what do I know about guns; I grew up in the suburbs and even at the age of 12 my mother forbade buying a toy gun from the local Ben Franklin that shot pea sized rubber balls a whole 5 yards for fear I’d hurt myself with it. I’m learning as I go along.

Self doubt mixes with fear as the barking grows louder, but at least the adrenaline dulls the pain from the thorny vines. I push forward and catch in the light the stray shepherd I feed but who will not let us touch. He’s perhaps the toughest dog of the pack, and by far the wiliest given that he freely roams the surrounding area. But he defers to the dog I believe is his sister, a shepherd chow mix I rescued at the nearby bridge, and the pack alpha, a lab/border collie mix who used to be too scared to go into our backyard to pee in the suburbs at night without the Wife or me being with her. They are dancing and barking around the base of a tree, leaping up in a vain attempt to catch what shelters in its limbs above them. I raise the light expecting to see a huge brown mass of fur.

And find a snarling mouth full of sharp teeth in a long grey snout followed by a loud cat-like hiss.

A possum. The dogs treed a possum. All this over a possum? Possums may not look particularly dangerous when they are squished on the side of the road, but when they are up close to your face, those sharp teeth and claws are pretty scary, so scary in fact that hillbillies in these parts are known to get drunk and catch them by hand for fun. I thought this was a myth until a mid-level told the Wife about finding her husband covered in scratches one night with a can of beer in one hand and a possum by the tail in the other, grinning proudly. Different strokes for different folks I suppose.

Well my pack isn’t exactly the smartest and they are still learning the woods, and honestly I’m too relieved and tired to care. I don’t have to shoot anything, and no one, including the possum, is going to get hurt this morning. I call to the dogs and convince them one by one to leave the tree, and follow me back into the house. Eventually there’s just the shepherd, and he’s got better things to do than mess with a possum, so he’s the last to follow me back to the house where he stops at the edge of the driveway.

It’s now 4:00am, and the dogs are still excited, running around inside the house and barking as if they had won a great battle. And perhaps they had in their own little doggie minds; I was too tired to convince them otherwise. I locked the gun back up, undressed and returned to bed, assured that something even as small as a possum would not escape notice by my pack. It’s not the best alarm system in the world, and heaven knows it’s not cheap given the cost of dog food and vet bills, but it works.

The household is in grief over the death of our alpha dog, a chihuahua we rescued almost six years ago. He was old and epileptic when we found him, but he packed a lot of personality in that little body of his. He was loyal to everyone but like most chi’s he devoted most of his time to a single individual, and for us that was the Wife, usually sleeping behind behind her knees. He was extremely active and playful, running with us as we walked the upper field in the cold air yesterday evening. He was fearless, and crept off into the night while we weren’t looking after dinner, traveling an eighth of a mile for reasons unknown in the cold and dark to the road where he was hit by a car. I found him laying beside the road, alive but severely injured. A hair-raising drive to the emergency vet was for naught, and we had to put him to sleep.

2012 was a year of brutality. It started for us with the execution style slaying of a man nearby, followed by the killing of a rescued dog that had somehow had slipped our protection and was leapt upon by some of my upper-ranking females and died at the vet. The Wife’s sister was found dead in a Las Vegas parking lot. And now this. Friends have also suffered similar tragedies this year with pets and loved ones. Then there’s the local tragedy where a woman moved into a home and ran a portable generator in the house, killing her two children and almost dying herself. Expanding outward there is Sandy Hook of course and Aurora, and abroad the horrors of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mali and Syria. The Buddha taught that Life means suffering, and for some reason 2012 demanded more suffering both great and small than most years. I am amazed, stunned, horrified, disappointed and disgusted with the world, and I only wish the New Age Doomers had been right about the Apocalypse last week.

With my last breath of the year I am left speechless except to say, “2012: F*** You.”

By the time most of you read this the outcome of tomorrow’s election will be known. Regardless of who wins America’s health care system is still a wreck and closer than ever to the river catching fire point of no return where revolutionary change is inevitable – and even welcomed by some including me.

Recently a local non-profit hospital announced changes to its health insurance plan as it has every fall for years. With each announcement its employees inevitably pay higher premiums for a higher deductible that covers less. It’s a situation that employees in the private sector are familiar with, at least those that work for companies that are large enough to provide access* to health insurance.

To set the stage of the current benefit situation requires a quick review of recent history. Earlier in the past decade the hospital underwent expansion, adding scores of beds and a complete revamping of the ER. It also went on spending spree, buying up private practices and recruiting doctors to the area to open new ones. I’m not sure what drove this expansion. The hospital sits in one of the poorest areas of North Carolina that has for decades suffered high unemployment and increased dependence on government programs such as Medicaid at a time when payments to providers by Medicaid have been cut. Word was that there was a generation of doctors planning to retire, and that may have influenced the hospital’s plans. But the declining stock market and insurance reimbursement cuts meant that many of those physicians are still practicing today because they can’t afford to retire. In addition, the hospital competes with other rural regional hospitals less than 30 minutes away, plus the cancer, pediatrics and state-of-the-art trauma centers at Wake Forest and Baptist in Winston-Salem less than an hour away. The result of this expansion is a massive overhang of debt, a tiny patient census, plus the massive drain caused by too many providers chasing a decreasing pool of privately insured patients.

The HR department had assembled some of the hospital staff for a benefits presentation. As the changes sunk in the audience turned hostile, shouting at the presenters and demanding that the plan be rescinded. The HR representative took the podium and reportedly said, “Y’all are lucky we provide health insurance at all.”

She had a point. Starting in 2014 the hospital could opt out of providing access to health insurance and pay a penalty for each employee. I’ve looked around to determine what that penalty is (it’s $2k for small business owners for 50 employees or less but I haven’t been able to find it for companies with more than 50 employees), but if the cost of providing access is less than that penalty the hospital could save money by paying the penalty rather than offering access to insurance. Paying the penalty would not only save it the costs of subsidizing  insurance, it would also reduce administration expenses because administering the payment of a variable health insurance payment every paycheck is a lot more expensive than simply paying a flat penalty once a year to the IRS. Knowing what I know about back-office operations of large companies, the cost of administering health care is likely a significant chunk of that $2000 penalty per employee, so such a fine would have to be double or perhaps triple the small business tax for it to deter ending health coverage and dumping employees into the public pool.** If I were the CEO of the hospital it’s an option I’d consider as many CEOs of companies are doing. Expect this number to rise over the coming months before the provisions go into effect in 2014.

In an economically depressed area the hospital, being the area’s largest employer has the economic upper hand when it comes to lower-skill staff. But the same is not true of its physician assistants, primary care doctors and highly trained specialists. These people are also employees and notice when their insurance premiums go up, but have a much more mobile, in-demand skill-set than medical assistants, orderlies and the like. Working in a rural setting isn’t very popular among these groups to begin with, which is why rural doctors are supposed to earn more than their urban and suburban peers. When that premium disappears, these highly-trained professionals will disappear too, voting with their feet and moving to more lucrative positions elsewhere. Doctors are human; they get sick and need treatment, and when their co-pays on medicine rise to $50 per prescription per month, they notice it. Rural charm only goes so far and unfortunately can’t be used to pay down $300k of student loans. Doctors aren’t happy with the current system as providers, and when they aren’t happy as patients either you know the system is screwed.

But people have been predicting the doom of the American health care system for at least 20 years since the HMOs appeared on the scene and were supposed to reign in costs, and we all know how well that worked. I have opposed Obamacare since its inception, but the more I examine the legislation the more I believe that it may in the end be “good” for the American economy in the longer term by bringing about the end of the American health system as we know it and allowing us to start from scratch.

The Paranoid wing of the Obamacare Opposition believes this is what Obama intended all along, that expanding Medicaid while cutting reimbursements to doctors and at the same time driving companies out of providing access to health insurance the President would wreck the system to the point where people would be clamoring for a federal government takeover of Medicine. It’s not a bad idea if it wasn’t for the fact that a) it requires a complex game-plan built using information that could only be predicted in retrospect (had Ted Kennedy not died chances are Obamacare would have been much more socialist), and b) the government is broke bailing out Obama’s well-connected friends the rest of the Economy that the only way to do it is it to kick Zimbabwe off their printing presses and print dollars like the North Korean Army on a methamphetamine binge. Far more likely that Obama handed the task to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid so that he could play golf and read glowing pieces on his greatness in Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, and that the Democrats made sausage out of their hopes and dreams distilled from liberal utopias in the states of New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and California. Since these states are all now circling the drain financially a federal government takeover of the health care system is impossible. It’s a shame because laissez-faire libertarian I may be, I have in the past argued for socialized medicine. The citizens of Japan paid for the birth of the Kid, and since they nearly shot my father dead in a foxhole in the Philippines during the War I’ll consider us even. The Dean’s World’s archives are scrambled so all traces of these arguments are wiped out, but I still believe that prior to the massive federal takeover of the economy caused by the financial meltdown in 2008-09 a sound argument could have been made for socialized medicine. Not so today, and definitely not by me.

Obamacare has forced us to the end of the American health care disaster. Employers will soon quit the insurance access business, forcing people to purchase insurance from the government. For the first time they will know how much they are being paid by their employers since their benefits package won’t contain more than a few worthless baubles and trinkets. Transparency is good. As a contract worker I know exactly what my skill-set is worth, something that a full time employee does not. I can then make decisions about my future that are grounded in reality. Obamacare will expand the rolls of Medicaid, forcing millions into a program that providers lose money on. At my dentist’s office I was paying my bill when the phone rang. The receptionist picked up the phone, listned then told the caller that the office no longer accepted Medicaid patients. There was another pause and the receptionist recommended the caller contact the county health department. The experience of the caller will not be atypical as health care providers “go John Galt” rather than lose money by treating Medicaid patients. This will increase the burden on the states who will then go cap-in-hand to the federal government which is $16 trillion in the hole. By 2014 when Obamacare goes completely into effect it will probably be closer to $24 trillion. Those printing plates at the Fed better be made of titanium because they’re going to be getting a workout. Maybe they can hire the North Koreans to help. Of course by then the Norks will have moved on to printing something of value, like yuan.

The collapse of the American health care system will be nasty, brutish and hopefully short, and we will have President Obama to thank for it. What comes afterward is anybody’s guess but whatever does it has to be better than this mess we are in. For that no matter what happens tomorrow, Obamacare opponents like me will owe President Obama a debt of gratitude as we man the barricades and hoist the flag of revolution over the land.

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*Let’s get something straight: Hardly any employers provide free health insurance these days. What they provide is access to group plans which they subsidize to a degree, something that mystifies my European readership (all 3 of them). The tie between access to health care and employment puzzles me too. Why the tie? Why aren’t we tying car insurance or life insurance to employment too?

** It just dawned on me that the cost of the penalty to avoid providing insurance will factor into the benefits offered the employee. Having worked for businesses large and small, I know a thing or two about how jobs are created. When a company decides to hire, it sets a budget for hiring that employee. That budget will include salary and the cost of all benefits. So if a firm budgets $50k for a position, the highest offer it will make to the employee will be Salary + Penalty=$50k or for a small business, $48k + $2K=$50k. So in essence the employee pays the penalty by not receiving the full $50k s/he would if Obamacare not been enacted. Existing employees may also face the prospect of not only having their insurance dropped, but having to pay the resulting penalty themselves. Irony… Mmmm…

Small towns have long memories. In the early morning hours of October 5, 1996 Jonesville Police Sgt. Gregory Martin pulled over a red pickup on Interstate 77 just south of highway 67. Moments later he radioed that he needed assistance. Minutes later a North Carolina highway patrolman arrived at the scene and found Martin dead of gunshot wounds to his head.

Jonesville isn’t the most picturesque American small towns. Like many it sprung up in the late 1800s as textile mills grew around the area. It was a gritty, working town dependent on the mills that never developed any of the charm the way the neighboring town Elkin across the Yadkin river did. So when the mills closed they left a void that Jonesville, like so many economically depressed rural small towns in America, has struggled to fill. Still it survives, and at times manages even to thrive. It’s location on I-77 has contributed to the development of hotels and restaurants, and it benefits from the growing tourist trade at the nearby vineyards in Yadkin, Wilkes and Surry counties. It has a long way to go before it becomes a tourist trap, but the locals are optimistic for the future.

Since his death newly printed wanted posters hang in establishments around the area, and the memory of that event 16 years ago is passed to newcomers like me who share in the town’s grief and determination to see justice done. But 16 years is a very long time when most murder cases are solved within the first two days, so I didn’t think the news crew from Winston-Salem 40 miles away standing outside police headquarters had anything to do with Sgt. Martin’s death when I drove by.

My mind was occupied by another local tragedy, the deaths of two children from carbon monoxide poisoning in Elkin. The mother had just rented a small A-frame across the street from the middle school, and the power had not been turned on yet. Evidently she fired up a gasoline generator in the kitchen to run the refrigerator on the first night of their stay in the house. Six hours later the children were found dead in their beds, their mother collapsed in a hallway. She was taken to the local hospital and then flown to Duke where she is likely to survive. I’m not sure I would want to if I was her, though. People in the town of 3,000 new her and the children, and people talked as they are prone to do. The woman’s lapse in judgement wasn’t her first, but it was by far her worst, and her children paid the price. When I passed by the home the next morning candles burned at a make-shift memorial on a porch littered with flowers and stuffed animals.

Three years living here has changed me in many ways, and one way has been my appreciation for Life. Granted I have always “felt” things more than is healthy; I believe my struggle with alcoholism was partly an attempt to medicate my oversensitivity to outside events for example. But when you live with a few thousand people, you find that when things happen it impacts you personally. If you don’t know the victims directly, you know someone who does. Gossip remains the CNN or FoxNews of rural life, providing details that you will never hear in a newscast or read in a newspaper. I came here in a self-imposed exile to escape some of the pain of the world, but have found it impossible; it hurts even more when you’ve driven by the house countless times where children have died and thought it always looked sad and ramshackle before this event. Now I just want to see it disappear.

So when the news arrives that the authorities may have caught Sgt. Martin’s killer, it brings relief and a little something else. Call it faith in the justice system or karma, whatever, but the fact that the Arm of the Law is long enough to reach across 16 years and nab a killer of a small town cop makes me smile. There is yet another unsolved murder that haunts the area, and the possible capture of Sgt. Martin’s killer gives me hope it too will someday be solved and the killers brought to justice.

Over the weekend I attended an open house at an organic farm specializing in making goat cheese. Since I live on a large inactive farm I’m interested in learning about all aspects of small scale farming, and having grown up in the St. Louis suburbs there’s much to study. As I have learned more about growing things, I’ve come to appreciate organic methods that minimize or eliminate chemicals and work with the forces present in nature in order to grow food. Don’t get me wrong: Mother Nature will starve you to death and dine on your bones if you let her, but there are strategies such as avoiding monoculture plantings and pesticides that whack beneficial insects as well as pests that are worth pursuing for a hobby farmer such as myself. Additionally I’m becoming more aware of the sourcing of my food, recognizing that we have completely lost the ability to eat what’s in season when at the local supermarket we can buy strawberries in November and whole ear corn in January. I live among farmers, and I have seen the gradual creep of large agribusiness and the depopulation of rural America. Neither are good omens for our nation’s future, and though they may be inevitable, I’ll be damned if I contribute to the process. So I’m gradually buying more locally, and the trip to the farm open house was a way to get some ideas on my new lifestyle.

When we arrived the place was hopping, with young men directing people to park on a newly-mowed hay field. We parked, and as I walked past the cars I automatically scanned the bumper stickers, a bit of a habit of mine. The first one I saw as expected was an Obama ‘08 sticker, but the next one I saw surprised me: a Gadsden flag of the Tea Party along with a sticker that read “God Bless Our Military, Especially Our Snipers.” North Carolina is much bluer than I expected when I moved down here, and I’ve learned that while I might live in a predominantly conservative part of the state it is full to the brim with people of all political philosophies and walks of life.

All were represented at the organic farm. There were gay couples and old hippies, as well as clean-cut military men and their families, their kids petting goats and chasing free range chickens. A man dressed in a checked shirt beneath blue overalls stood alongside a young woman with more piercings than a rural stop sign, listening to one of the founders of the farm talk about its history and how it has grown over the years. Hispanics mingled with blacks who in turn stood in line with monied white suburbanites and their kids to take a turn at the pottery wheel and throw their own pot. Smiles were everywhere, and the place seemed as alive as the show hive of bees that stood on saw horses in the middle of a vegetable patch.

I was an odd child growing up. Some of my first memories are not of clowns or birthdays but of political events. I watched Nixon’s visit to Beijing broadcast on network TV in 1972. Two years later I rushed home from school and flipped on the Watergate hearings instead of game shows or cartoons. I grew up living and loving politics, and had I been born with a more gregarious personality I would have pursued a career in it. Instead I was socially inept, perhaps even autistic, so politics could never be more than a spectator sport for me, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying it.

But I’ve lost that joy. It has been years since I felt something other than doom and dread about politics, and the organic farm reminded me why.

We are divided, almost atomized these days. It has been years since we felt unity, the last time being the unity of grief by the 9-11 attacks. Since then our leaders have failed us. President Bush famously promised to be a “uniter not a divider”, but then went and did what he wanted to do in Iraq and in the biggest failure of his administration, presided over an explosion of government and spending. The Department of Homeland Security wasn’t a Clinton creation, it was a Bush one after all. While I agreed with his policies in Iraq at the time, Bush failed to support his actions at home against his critics. He just did what he wanted because he knew it was right, but didn’t even try to convince people otherwise.

Obama hasn’t even attempted to unite us. He took office reminding Republicans that he won and has governed accordingly, ramming through his signature health care legislation without a single Republican vote. A year later Americans clipped his power by taking away the House from the Democrats and ending their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, but Obama didn’t miss a beat. Instead of moving to the center and working with the opposition to get legislation passed, he went to the extreme, and decided to wait things out to the next election, blaming the GOP and his Republican predecessor for the fruits of his own failure to lead.

Leadership in a democracy requires skills in the art of compromise. It’s hard to imagine but Ronald Reagan whom even Obama himself has claimed for his own never had a friendly majority in the House during his 8 years yet managed to pass budgets and legislation with bipartisan support with no less a political mastermind like Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. We have yet to have a single budget from the president even during the 2 years his own party held both the House and Senate.

In fairness to Obama he never was much of a leader. His career reflects the Peter Principle more than the exercising of leadership skills to make it to the top, always having a mentor in higher position who can push him further up the political ladder. Unfortunately Obama now finds himself at the top with no mentor other than his usual billionaire friends like George Judenrat Soros and Warren Buffet. While these men may support him with their financial acumen and deep pockets, there is no one above Obama that can protect him anymore so he must rely on his skills. The problem is that the process that led to his ascension to the highest office in the land avoided cultivating those skills.

George W. Bush had a similar rise through the ranks, although based on his name rather than mentors. Samuel P. Bush, George W’s great-grandfather, built a successful career as an industrialist and dabbled in politics during World War I. His son Prescott continued the path of mixing success in business with politics that lead to George Bush’s ascendance to the presidency in 1988. While George W. Bush showed the ability of a leader to make difficult decisions such as to attack Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, an upbringing where his name alone opened doors and convinced people made it unlikely that he would develop other leadership skills such as the ability to convince others and charm one’s opponents.

The last president that had such leadership skills? Bill Clinton. Clinton is a self-made man and rose through the political ranks solely on his wit and charm. During his 8 years in office Clinton was able to pass budgets and bipartisan legislation with die-hard partisans such as Newt Gingrich. Clinton understood how to work with Congress, and his domestic policy record proves it (on the other hand his foreign policy record was in retrospect a disaster, consciously ignoring the threat posed by al Qaeda even though numerous terrorist attacks occurred on his watch.)

We have gone 11 years with weak leadership and our nation has suffered. You can’t compromise with someone you call a racist. You can’t cut deals with a party you demonize as misogynistic and homophobic. Leadership doesn’t pit one group of people against another; it fuses them together in a shared purpose.

A true leader does more than call his opponents names and make grand promises in eloquently delivered speeches from teleprompters. He inspires but also delivers on his promises. He doesn’t hold grudges but also makes it clear that he will not be played the fool. He understands the responsibility that comes with his position and serves all the people, not just those who voted for him. Most importantly he appreciates and respects the ideals that bind us together as a people and a nation, recognizing that while we might disagree vehemently on issues big and small, we are all bound by the love of freedom and hope for a better future for our children and our country.

While it is clear that leader is not Obama, neither is it clear that it is Romney. But I do wish that both men could have taken a moment from their politicking to talk to the farmer selling hand raised beef, watched the Montagnard women weaving brightly colored fabrics, and tasted the red pepper goat cheese. Perhaps they would have understood that if we could put aside our differences at a goat farm founded by a woman driving around with two goats in the front seat of her Toyota looking for a farm in North Carolina, we are a people ready to be led, and who deserve a good leader.

As a parent of a teenager and an intellectual who somehow managed to avoid Academia, I’ve  followed the higher education bubble stories carefully. Glenn Reynolds has written and linked extensively on the subject, and Virginia Postrel places the blame on federal student aid. While I completely agree with Reynolds that the trades have gotten ignored in favor of college and university educations, I’ve noticed that he and others working to improve the image of the trades in the minds of young people are ignoring one important issue: the impact of illegal immigration on blue collar jobs.

Having moved to the rural South I have spent the past two years renovating our home. This task has put me into contact with numerous plumbers, electricians, carpenters, roofers, and handymen. All of them have been born and raised here, and none of them would recommend the trades to young people interested in making a living because of illegal immigration. I wrote about my early experiences with talking to these men here.

They are especially bitter when it comes to illegal immigration. Mexicans have flooded into North Carolina and driven down wages for skilled and semi-skilled workers. They are constantly underbid by contractors employing illegals at a fraction of the going hourly rate.

These men face the competition of teams of illegals everyday. They are locked out of larger jobs that hire a single contractor employing teams of illegals instead of American citizen subcontractors. When skilled Mexican tradesmen are paid minimum wage (or less), it’s difficult for those who hire sheetrock hangers and carpenters at the going rate ($15-$25/hr in these parts by my estimate) to compete. The success of these illegal teams has led to their usage on ever smaller jobs, the meat and potatoes of general contractors, leaving only the smallest jobs for the local contractors to compete against each other for. These usually have low margins and being small are difficult to make a living doing when traveling and buying supplies is included.

Long time readers will know that although conservative and free market oriented, I am no Ayn Rand disciple. The older I become the more I suspect that, as Neal Stephenson predicted in the cyberpunk classic Snow Crash, globalization has smeared things out into a worldwide layer of “what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider prosperity.” With New Economy industries employing fewer workers than the factory jobs they replace, those with college degrees are finding themselves without job security. Companies are offshoring everything they can, and it is only a matter of time before automation begins to nibble away at the creative jobs previously considered “safe” from either of these forces. It isn’t clear what jobs will replace them.

In a prior incarnation I actively fought offshoring and labor dumping by the government through its policies of lax immigration designed to flood the domestic market with cheap labor. I learned that the government uses technical visas like the H-1b and J-2 to allow skilled foreigners to lower the cost of labor and price out domestic white collar workers. Because these workers are compensated in part by the prospect of working in America – and in the case of the H-1b, with the potential reward of a green card three to seven years after their arrival – they could be paid a lower salary than equivalently skilled American workers. In effect the H-1b visa holders are subsidized by the American government: they receive a salary plus a visa that doesn’t cost the government anything but which they accept in lieu of cash. Their employers get cheaper labor that boosts their bottom-lines and grants them the flexibility of underbidding firms that only employ citizens or green card holders. This forces competing firms to either hire foreign labor or go out of business.

The case is the same with blue collar workers. Illegal immigrants come to the United States accept lower wages because they are receiving a government subsidy in the form of future citizenship. The likelihood of being found out or deported by the federal government is miniscule, especially at a time when the federal government is actively fighting efforts to tighten border controls and demands to increase arrests and deportations of illegal citizens. Again, this subsidy doesn’t cost the government anything, yet it provides a reward that is almost as good as cash to illegals who are paid under the table.

But there is a cost to this meddling by the federal government in the labor market: higher unemployment and the social costs that attend it such as increased criminality, alcohol and drug abuse, and the breakdown of the family. But these social costs don’t appear in the statistics – just as the illegal immigrants don’t either – and are ignored whenever talk turns to economics.

If white collar jobs are threatened by offshoring, the trades are threatened by illegal immigration and all jobs are threatened by automation, is the American worker and the economic system that is based on him or her doomed? Some believe that the changes over the next several decades could spell the end of work as we know it, as something that is viewed with dread and a sense of fatalistic duty changed into a system whereby each person pursues creative talents that will be in demand and that require imagination and perspective that computers and perhaps even foreigners won’t know how to do. One wag characterized it as everyone planning everyone else’s weddings – an updated and more positive prediction that we would all someday be slinging hamburgers to one another after manufacturing’s demise.

I’m not so sure. Perhaps such a future beckons, but in the meantime I would prefer that the government stop meddling in the labor market by increasing the porosity of America’s borders with the world. Sealing the border with Mexico would be a good place to start. A free market pool of labor is supposed to be a compromise between two competing forces: employers and employees. Labor dumping through lax immigration and “open border” policies undermine that compromise, allowing employers to dictate what they are willing to pay for a given skillset while being protected from a tight labor market by government policy. Employees have no redress other than to change jobs or if they are old enough, retire. If the government stopped interfering in the market to favor one side over the other, the domestic labor market would begin to function as a free market instead of an overly regulated, skewed one. If plumbers are in demand, their salaries will rise and people will start considering them (as Glenn Reynolds, Virginia Postrel and others suggest). Similarly, if java programmers are in demand, their salaries should rise to the point where colleges and IT bootcamps pump out java programmers to fill the demand. In both cases supply of workers would eventually overshoot demand (because companies by their very nature strive to become more efficient), and these salaries would stabilize and eventually decline.

Until that happens, white collar and blue collar workers, skilled and unskilled, educated and trained will have to always look over their shoulders afraid of the boss’s unexpected call for a personal meeting at the end of the day on Friday. Whether the boss’s collar is clean or dirty won’t matter as long as the government continues kicking up waves in the labor pool.

Update: The Financial Time reports on the difficulties employers have with finding skilled employees. This is a myth that is trotted out whenever employers want skilled workers but don’t want to pay what those skills demand. It also reflects laziness on the part of the employer. For example it begins quoting Drew Greenblatt from Marlin Steel Wire Products complaining about the inability to find three sheet metal setup operators for $80k in salary and overtime.

The article doesn’t say what the going rate is for sheet metal setup operators in the area. While $80k may sound like a reasonable salary to most people, Mr. Greenblatt obviously needs to pay more to fill the position. Either he is underpaying or the job is so esoteric and rare that no one does it so he will have to train someone. If the latter, why doesn’t he approach a sheet metal setup operator working for his competition and offer them a higher salary than they are making? That’s the way the free market is supposed to work.

The article offers support to this conclusion:

Without in-house training programmes, companies have often been left looking for staff with specific skills. “A generation ago, employers would hire and train employees. Now, they demand trained workers,” says Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school.

“The skills gap is largely a figment of companies’ imagination,” says Mr Cappelli. “They cannot find workers to do the very specific tasks they want done. That is different from not being able to find capable workers.”

It is an undeniable fact of life that mountains are always beautiful. Dr. Wife’s beeper had gone off at the Waffle House so she made a quick cell phone call. Instead of leisurely finishing off our breakfast served by a harried elderly waitress, we headed up the two lane state highway through the foothills and up the Blue Ridge mountains to the hamlet of Sparta where a woman’s death certificate waited to be signed.

She had been a woman in her early 60’s from France who had met a GI and returned with him to the county in North Carolina where he had been born. There she settled down to raise her children and later, her grandchildren. Her husband had passed away years ago, leaving her alone in her small cottage nestled in a mountain valley. After the decades spent living in the United States she had never managed to rid herself of her French accent, which, when added to the southern accent she naturally became accustomed to through the years, made her speak English with an Acadian or Cajun-sounding accent. Dr. Wife loved the way she spoke.

Dr. Wife met her patient for the first time in July after she came to her with back pain in her tailbone. While talking with the woman, Dr. Wife became suspicious that the pain was more than a bruise or muscle strain as had been diagnosed elsewhere. Such pain doesn’t linger or worsen over a period of months as the pain had for her patient, so she ordered a CT scan. At first the woman’s insurance company refused to cover the procedure, forcing Dr. Wife to justify the procedure in a lengthy phone call with the insurance company. It relented and the procedure was done.

The CT scan was clear: her body was filled with cancer. It cancer had begun in the lung and metastasized to the liver and later to the bottom of the spine. In fact it had eaten away a large hole in the woman’s coccyx, and the Wife was furious because the woman must have been in terrible pain. People in the mountains are different, she says; they don’t come to the doctor unless they are extremely sick and they never ask for medication even when they are in pain. Life in the mountains is beautiful, but it is far from easy, so the people that remain there are hardier than most. They are extremely tough mountain folk that have lived there for generations, and even though her patient had been born in Europe, she had arrived and over time gradually become one of them.

After signing the death certificate at the funeral home, we stopped by her home. A “Slow – Funeral” sign greeted us as we neared it, and a large cross made from white carnations hung on the porch. There a few weeks ago the woman had stood with the Wife, telling her “I am going to beat this.” But Dr. Wife knew that this cancer wasn’t beatable. I pulled up, parking alongside several other cars parked on the grass off the road. I stayed in the car with our dogs as the Wife went inside. Over the past few weeks she had grown close to the family, giving the eldest son our home phone number so that he could call with any question or concerns about his mother.

Bird feeders the woman had bought and filled hung empty of seed beneath trees losing their leaves. Little kitschy figurines of a smiling panda and fat frog stood in a garden that she had once tended, with the first weeds that had taken advantage of her weakness from chemo appearing in soil she would never touch again. Several wind chimes hung from the roof of the porch, motionless in the unusually still mountain air.

From diagnosis to death? 8 weeks.

Like many living in the mountains, she was a heavy smoker and it no doubt contributed to if not outright caused her cancer. Some might be tempted to blame the woman for her own death. After all she chose to smoke. But she didn’t choose to die. I often wonder if the excuses we make blaming the victims for their own deaths aren’t just emotional survival mechanisms to keep us from feeling. A woman is killed by her ex-husband? She should have divorced him sooner or gotten a restraining order. A cop is shot during a routine traffic stop? He knew the risks. I suppose it’s natural to develop this inner voice to keep Death at arms length and avoid being overwhelmed by emotions, but I question whether over time that distancing is healthy. Perhaps a little empathy in our lives isn’t a bad thing. If we feel we can motivate ourselves into action which in turn can lead to Death being cheated every once in a while.

With a hug from the eldest son, the Wife arrives back in the car. She raises a long strand of a wind chime with handmade brass chimes and carved wooden clappers. “She wanted me to have this,” she says, explaining that the woman knew we had once lived in Japan where the wind chime was made. It hangs on our front porch, and I hear it lightly singing in the wind that comes off the mountains the French woman called home.

I recently heard of a business that is employing illegals and paying them sub-minimum wage. The owners even make them work everyday except one a month and threaten to fire them if they sit down or take a break at any time during the day. It’s an agricultural based business, and like many in rural America it is dependent on cheap labor. As far as I know it doesn’t force the people to work there (I’ve heard that at least one employee quit because of the working conditions and pay), but this information posed a dilemma to me, one that challenged my populist and libertarian instincts.

What is the ethical thing to do? Call ICE? Doing this would guarantee the illegals and their families would get deported. Now I may be a registered Re-thuglican, but I’m not heartless. The vast majority of illegals working here are hard working, honest folk (except for their complete disregard for America’s immigration laws), and alerting Immigration would hurt the workers more than their employer, who would most likely get a small fine if they received any punishment at all. The enterprise is based in one of the poorest counties in the state, and they do employ citizens (although they don’t treat them any better than the illegals.)

Should I do nothing and allow “slavery” to rise again in the South? Funny how that word gets abused almost as much as the “H” word (“Holocaust”) does. This isn’t slavery. Before the Civil War slaves could not leave their jobs; doing so could result in severe punishment and often their death. This business isn’t holding any of its workers behind barbed wire. Each is free to leave, and many do – usually involuntarily when the supervisor fires them. They are then replaced by others. In this area there are tens of thousands of illegals working the tobacco and corn fields with more flooding in daily.

And that’s the problem. Those of us who want to close the border to illegal immigration are often viewed as heartless, even un-American for our views. But those who support open borders and lax immigration rules never discuss who their policies hurt the most: the immigrants already here.

Consider that a worker at the agribusiness is fed up with working 29-30 days a month for $25 a day. His competition isn’t an American citizen; it is another illegal immigrant, perhaps a newly arrived one desperate for any type of wage to survive. If that person was still on the other side of the border, there would be much less competition for his job and the agribusiness would be forced to either improve his wages and working conditions, become more efficient and productive, or go out of business. But lax immigration would mean the continuation of a steady stream of workers willing to replace him, thereby guaranteeing a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions.

This is Adam Smith’s invisible hand at work, and indicative of how progressives who support “immigrants rights” often pave the road to hell with their good intentions. In order to improve the lot of the workers at the agribusiness, a call to ICE won’t do – unless it’s to demand they do their job to secure the border. In fairness to them, it’s not possible because the politics of the issue prevent them from doing that job. Preventing the agribusiness from checking documentation and immigration status of their employees will not help the workers, nor will any laws as long as the supply of workers from abroad continues. “Guest worker programs” may seem good in theory, but the fact that such programs guarantee wages and working conditions (and increase business expenses due to maintenance of records) will always make the option to hire illegal immigrants more attractive. Those guest workers would then find themselves in the same predicament that many low-skilled American citizens find themselves today: not skilled enough to demand better paying jobs, but more expensive than illegal immigrants.

The Left likes to lay claim to the issue of illegal immigration in the hope that the immigrants will follow in the footsteps of those newly arrived in the past who built the Democratic patronage machines in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere. I suspect that their interests would decline if the illegal immigrants voted Republican after becoming citizens. It’s not a stretch: socially, Mexican families are much more conservative than typical Democratic households and have more in common with Republicans on issues such as gay marriage and abortion.

In order for the lot of such workers to improve, demand has to increase for their work and the only way that is going to happen is for everyone in the USA to start farms to boost demand for their labor or for the supply of labor from abroad to be cut off. Once shut off, workers will be able to demand higher wages and better working conditions because they could not be replaced so easily.

Over 120 years ago a big chunk of my ancestors arrived from Eastern Europe and did manual labor. Back then there were no minimum wages, no OSHA or other such regulation, yet they did okay. While they arrived legally, I don’t completely begrudge the illegals for wanting to improve the lot the way my ancestors did. But I don’t want them to be treated badly either. Anyone who wants to improve the lives of farm laborers should support closing the border. It’s the only viable solution to improve the lot of illegal immigrants and to force outfits like the one I’ve heard about to treat their employees better.

This originated as a reply to a comment on this thread, but it’s worth promoting. Here is the original comment by Layton Lang:

Your article is somewhat off base. First you are describing an industry that does not follow typical free- market cycles. This industry is heavily subsidized (Government 50%) by the government and private insurance companies. Second, the government has been steering financial incentives to primary care physicians in the form of higher payments. Many of the E/M billing codes , primary care physicians bill have experienced rate increases as opposed to specialty billing codes being reduced. Third, many of the physicians are not strapped with debt coming out of school because hospitals pay off their education obligations when they hire them (employment package).
Moreover, I do agree with your comparison to the IT field. This is exactly what is happening in the medical industry today. The deficit of primary physician graduating from medical school is being corrected by foreign born- foreign trained physicians, use of mid-level providers, physicians learning to be increasingly productive in seeing more patients, and patients being treated in foreign markets through medical tourism. In sum, the healthcare field will continue to adapt to the changes in physician labor just like the IT sector did. All of the rhetoric about physician shortages is untrue. The basic issue is that the physicians are not geographically distributed across the country evenly.
Consequently, in the urban markets, the surplus of physicians is so great, it is the number one reason the country is experiencing high healthcare inflation. Physicians competing for fewer patients cause them to over treat patients to increase net income margins per visit.

Layton
You are correct that the industry does not follow typical free market cycles. There are three tiers of payment: Medicaid, Medicare and Private Pay (private insurance). According to this link, Medicaid reimbursement compared to Medicare varies from 36% in New York to 140% in Alaska for primary care. Medicare also determines what private insurers pay because insurance companies base physician payments on Medicare calculations (the resource based relative value scale (RVU)) using a base unit set by Congress. In effect Medicare sets reimbursement rates for both Medicaid and private insurance.

This base unit has been criticized for favoring specialty procedures over primary care. While the proposed Affordable Care Act (known lovingly here as Obamacare) promises to increase Medicaid reimbursement rates up to Medicare rates, it does not specify changes to the RVU that favors specialty codes over primary health codes, nor does it rule out lowering Medicare payments to “lower the bar” to allow medicaid to reach parity. Since Obamacare promises to trim physician reimbursement (Medicare Part B) by $187 billion over the first 10 years, Medicare will be cut and I suspect the “bar lowered.” Obamacare sweetened the deal (although it didn’t have to – the AMA supported the legislation) by allowing temporary rate increases reimbursements to primary care physicians, but a 10% increase only means bumping New York to 40% of Medicare – and private payers still trump all. Neither will it buck the trend of declining reimbursements across for all physicians.

My Wife is a primary care physician in an area designated as HPSA. She has received a very generous debt repayment package by all standards. But this package is taxable and lasts for 5 years – roughly a third of the time it will take to pay off her loans. Debt repayment is not the same as debt forgiveness; the principle decreases with forgiveness – not so with repayment – so repayment is the norm. The only groups that provide debt forgiveness are the Indian Health Service and the US Military, and IHS opportunities are limited. Is the debt manageable? Perhaps but it does what debt always does: it limits options. My wife would like to volunteer her services for more than the 3 weeks vacation she gets per year, but cannot afford to due to the debt.

I worry about the use of midlevels. I have heard stories of nurses making decisions about care and medications that would make a malpractice attorney salivate. 90% of the time the midlevels get away with it, but 10% of time an error is made and someone suffers. Of that 10% a only a tiny sliver becomes a malpractice case, but my guess is that the number of these cases will grow as health care providers push more work onto the shoulders of midlevels. Having received spaghetti code from India that took my team months to unscramble, eating the cost of the predicted savings of sending the code abroad and then some, I shiver when I consider what would happen if my son was treated by a lightly-trained RN or PA. No one is killed by bad code, but people die from bad medical decisions.

While the medical field can learn much from IT in terms of technology, the fields are inherently different. Software can be designed using best practices. It can be tested empirically. When it fails it can be redesigned. Medicine cannot be done in the same way. No two patients are alike; the human body is much more complex than any System designed by a team of software engineers. And while 99% of the time an upset stomach is just that, 1% of the time it could be indicative of Barrett’s Esophagus, which untreated can lead to lethal esophageal cancer.

The rest of what you say should work in theory – that the better compensation in health professional shortage areas should draw physicians away from the cities where the reimbursements are lower, but after 2 years here I can see that this is not the case. The main problem is that these HPSA areas have a higher Medicaid percentage than the urban areas, and physician practices have a higher Medicaid mix than their urban counterparts.

According to a 2003 report in JAMA, (I’d kill for a more recent statistic) family care physicians work an average of 52.3 hours per week for an average salary of $135,000. That translates into $54.66 per hour – compared to orthopedic surgeons who pull in $121.06 or dermatologists who make $105.59. And there is never an after hours derm emergency. Add in the fact that rural life isn’t desirable for most young people, and it will take pumping a lot more money into the system to encourage residents to pursue primary care in rural areas.

After killing thousands in the quake and tsunami that hit Japan, and racking up a death toll approaching a thousand here in the States with tornadoes and a flooding Mississippi, I think it’s time we struck back at Mother Nature. If I could I’d like nothing more than to open up the nastiest strip mine this planet has ever seen, fill it with the rarest timber from the Amazonian rainforest, then douse it with oil produced from the dirtiest tar sands in Alberta and set it on fire by rubbing the Lorax’s kiln-dried bones together. Later we could douse the embers with radioactive water from the Fukushima power plant.

Mother Nature has been kicking our ass this year. I think it’s time we punched back.

Farmers complain a lot. Having grown up in the midwestern suburbs with Roundup and Lorsban commercials on the local TV channels I was close enough to hear their grumblings but far enough away not to care. As you might expect living on a farm has changed that.

At first the rains were welcome. The area I live in had been under a significant drought until the year I moved in, and of the two too much rain is preferred over too little when you can’t turn on the hose and water 100 acres of corn. In early spring much of the water soaked the earth, rebuilding its moisture content and recharging the ground water that our wells tap.

But it has been raining almost every day now for a week. The ground is saturated. Corn and tobacco seedlings are washing out of their furrows. The land is so muddy that it’s hard to move across it in a tractor without tearing it up. It’s so wet that I can’t even sow a few rows of Silver Queen corn for our dinner table. Evidently I’m not the only one unable to plant. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that farmers are holding back planting because of the rains, boosting the prices of wheat, corn and soybeans.

One night last June I was driving into town to pick up the Kid. It was dark, with the heavy black storm clouds that characterize Summer here in the South blocking starlight and keeping the full moon from doing anything more than glow dully in the eastern sky. As I drove across the concrete bridge that crosses a not inconsequential river, something caught my headlight nestled against the wall midway across the span. It could have been a raccoon but it wasn’t. I stopped the car on the bridge and got out.

I called out soothingly as I walked towards the shadow huddled against the concrete. It came to my feet. I wasn’t exactly sure what breed it was because I couldn’t see much, but it was a dog and judging by the wagging shadow of a tail I knew that it was happy to see me. I reached underneath it to pick it up, and felt bulges of flesh that shouldn’t have been there. A twinge of panic raced down my spine. Had it been hit already? As I walked back to the car I felt the coat and didn’t feel the sickening stickiness of blood. As I felt her belly and the large orange-sized irregularly shaped lumps on it I knew what it was.

I had grown up around dogs – mostly poodles with the occasional large breed like a collie or setter. For some reason my parents never got the dogs spayed or neutered even though they never bred them. Most lived long, but when they died breast cancer often took the unspayed females.  I had been a little boy when I had last felt the outward manifestation of breast cancer in a dog, but the knowledge was there. By the time I got her in the car and held her up to the overhead light I had diagnosed her.

How had she ended up in the middle of that bridge? The bridge is a favorite spot for dumping animals, and her owner didn’t have the guts to take her to a vet or even to  put her down “Ol Yeller” style. I suppose they thought they were doing her a favor, but one didn’t need to be psychic to foresee her likely being hit by a car, starving to death or set upon by coyotes.

We have named her Brigette, of course. She is an old beagle with broken teeth and a belly full of  cancer. She has suffered such cruelty at the hands of one human being that I don’t quite understand why she wants the company of another, but she does. On walks she is at my feet and does her best to keep up with my pack of rescued misfits. She doesn’t whine. When I come home she stands on the deck to greet me. I swear the dog smiles.

I had the tumors removed soon after I found her, but another is back. She’s starting to slide downhill; there is urine in her blood and she’s had some small seizures, but her last year has been a warm one. I give her food and medical care, she gives me love. It’s not a bad trade off in the scheme of things.

Since moving here less than two years ago we have rescued 8 dogs and 4 cats. I’ve found homes for two of the dogs; one even went to the realtor who helped us buy the property. The rest have joined my pack where they are sterilized, vaccinated, cleaned up and treated with care. The area is a notorious animal dumping ground. I’ve heard it said that people abandon their pets near my property because there used to be a dog food factory nearby, or that a kind-hearted vet lived across the river. I’ve heard it said that people are dumping their pets because they can’t afford them due to the bad economy, yet somehow the rural poor manage to have satellite dishes on their mobile homes, big screen TVs in their living rooms and cell phones in their pockets. I’ve seen truly poor people in Africa; the problem here isn’t poverty it’s priorities.

The governor recently signed another animal abuse bill into law.  This state does not need any more laws; it needs people believing in them and following them. We are not going to legislate a solution to animal abuse or animal overpopulation. In the remote areas where I live people come here to escape the heavy hands of the law. No one who loves animals and lives out here believes the bill will do any good.

Animal cruelty and animal overpopulation are not legal problems, they are moral ones. The river that I crossed that night is a favorite for baptisms because it is wide and shallow, and there are more baptist churches in my county than fast food joints or liquor stores. I’d like to see a preacher give a rousing sermon on the evils of animal cruelty but being a non-believer in these parts, and a Yankee one at that, doesn’t give my hopes much weight. The last thing the locals want is to be lectured by another outsider and so I’m stuck waiting for Jesus to lead the Baptists to a place where animals are treated humanely and responsibly.

Last weekend I spotted a female Rottweiler standing in the middle of the road that runs through my property. According to the locals at the general store somebody pulled up, laid out a blanket, and left the female along with another dog. I tried to coax her even though the last thing I need is another dog, but she ran off. Unlike Brigette she’s not ready to trust another human.

I can’t say I blame her. I have a hard time trusting them myself.

I just finished calculating my taxes, and normally I don’t think too much about it. But this year is different. As a self-described patriot who supports the Global War on Terrorism, I have to accept that such a war needs someone to pay for it and as an American that someone has to be me. I imagine that the money the Wife earns doing paperwork or tending to a Medicaid patient or that I earn sitting in a meeting taking notes about some esoteric IT topic that few outside the room would understand or think important goes to buy body armor for US Army soldiers, bullets for Marine corps snipers or fuel for UAVs that send jihadis to their beloved 72 virgins. I also imagine the money we earn going to protect National and State Parks, or to pay for search and rescue training by the Coast Guard. Although I am viewed as an anti-government extremist by many on the Left, there is much that the federal government does that I have no problem paying for.

But this year is very different. Last year was the first full tax year spent living in North Carolina. North Carolina is a state with an above median state income tax along with a 7.75%/2.0% sales. The taxes that I just completed do not include this sales tax – which is a substantial hit on our household finances given that at this stage our family consumes almost as much as it takes in thanks to outgrown sneakers, a mortgage payment on a farm, and 35 lb bags of dog food for our mutt-ly crew.

The cost of gasoline hits us especially hard. While my wife and I drive economical cars living in a rural area requires a lot of driving. The Wife also makes house calls; she isn’t reimbursed for her time or for gas but she believes that it is part of her job regardless. I’d estimate that our fuel costs have gone up $1,500 or so over the past year and notice that gas at the local pumps jumped a dime again this morning. Rising transportation costs have been hidden in our grocery bill. I’ve found that many of the staple products that I buy like pasta, cereal and peanut butter now come in smaller containers, no doubt thanks to the rising cost of diesel fuel. It seemed to me that during the Bush administration, whenever a gallon of gas rose a nickel there was a New York Times article on the cozy relationship between the Bush family and the oil companies. Under the Obama administration the price of a gallon of gasoline has risen 67% and the mainstream media has uttered not a peep.

Even though I have a political science degree under my belt I’m not a complete idiot. I recognize that this isn’t Venezuela: Obama can’t order gas prices down the way Hugo Chavez can. However his policies of limiting drilling and more importantly, running huge deficits that can only be handled by printing money forces investors into commodities like oil – driving the prices up. The price of oil is calculated in dollars, and as the dollar weakens thanks to the feds spending more than it takes in, the price of oil and other commodities like gold, wheat, and copper – rise. And that’s exactly what has been happening and why Obama doesn’t get the same pass that President Bush got in 2006 (or that this article gives Obama).

It’s also tough to cut the check for the difference between the amount withheld from our paychecks and the amount we owe because of the sense of entitlement held by public servants. The recent fight in Wisconsin over the restrictions to collectively bargain that limited the practice to inflation rate wage increases is fresh in my mind. The behavior of the teachers especially was appalling and embarrassing to a former TESL teacher like me. Without getting into specifics (this is the Internet after all) let’s just say that our total tax bill this year could pay an entire year’s salary for a low-level public servant. Not a teacher (we don’t pay that much in taxes) but say, for one of those cheery people that meet you at the DMV.

Meanwhile I drive a 11 year old Honda with 150,000 miles, my family has catastrophic medical insurance that still runs me $4k/year and covers nothing, we are hundreds of thousands of (taxable) dollars in debt thanks to medical school, and I have avoided the dentist since the Wife left residency because we don’t have dental and about the only thing I inherited from the Irish side of my family besides alcoholism is bad teeth.

Speaking of teeth, the fact that my family (2010 income: $—-) paid tens of thousands of dollars more in taxes than General Electric (2010 income: $10.8 billion) is a big roundhouse kick in them. I’m still waiting for my invitation from the Obama administration to head the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, since I funded government operations more than GE CEO Jeff Immelt did, but so far nothing. Maybe the email has been marked as spam in the Yahoo! mail account that I haven’t used since the 90’s.

Immelt might say “Scott, GE employed hundreds of thousands of workers so it shouldn’t pay taxes.” And I would reply, “Jeffrey, under your ‘leadership’ GE cut 30,000 jobs in the United States. Under my ‘leadership’ my family helped create jobs in one of the poorest counties in North Carolina by hiring local carpenters, an electrician and a plumber to fix up our house. Which is better for America?” And not only did that, but bought fuel for planes to bomb Libyans and hired public servants who are overpaid and hate their jobs.

Wait a minute…

Which brings me to our support of the “freedom fighters” in Libya. If ever there was such a thing as a politically correct military operation, the US/NATO operation in Libya is it. Only the likes of “the rather crazed Susan Rice” and Samantha “Israel is guilty of war crimes” Power could think up an operation that would send military support and arms to the same folks in Africa we were hunting down and killing in Asia. So the hours the Wife and I spend working will buy surface to air missiles that Obama’s Valkyries will hand to wide-eyed fanatics who will use them to shoot down American or Israeli civilian jet liners.

Perhaps Ms’ Rice, Power and Clinton should read the Koran to understand why we shouldn’t give weapons to Muslims (as if arming the mujahadin in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in the 1980s weren’t good enough lessons). “O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and Christians for your friends and protectors: They are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them (for friendship) is of them.” (Koran, 5:51) Since the Koran is the word of God, God is making it clear in no uncertain terms that Muslims cannot befriend non-Muslims without leaving their faith. Oh, and by the way, for the “Islam is just like any other religion” crowd: the punishment for leaving Islam is death. When I left the Catholic Church, I didn’t have to worry about being kidnapped by a Knights of Columbus member and having my head chopped off.

In fact the only circumstance it is allowed is when such friendship is used for deceit, as in the case where Muhammed orders Muhammad bin Maslama to kill a Jewish poet who wrote insulting verses about Muslim women. “Then allow me to say a (false) thing so that I may deceive him,” bin Maslama asked Muhammed. “You may say it.” (Muhammed Ibn Ismaiel Al-Bukhari, Shih al-Bukhari: The Translation of the Meanings, vol 5, book 64, no. 4037). If that isn’t clear to the Harvard Kennedy School professor, perhaps Muhammad’s statement that “War is deceit,” (Hadith, 4:269) will bring some clarity to the matter of Libya.

I have handed a terrific sum of money to my government. It is the result of months of hard work done by my wife and I at the pinnacle of our earning power. It’s the most it will ever get; it’s all downhill from here. She’s taken a lower-paying job and I’ll probably be unemployed by the Fall. I don’t resent the taxes themselves, but in 2011 I do begrudge a government that in its attitude and endeavors clearly doesn’t appreciate our sacrifice.

The dogs have settled down in their crates, except the smaller ones that suspiciously eye the Wife as she packs for her trip to Africa tomorrow. Our little one is out flexing his not so little wings at an overnight chaperoned party, and I try not to let my worries for both take over. It seems that so little was accomplished this year, but it’s an illusion.

The other day the Kid was standing next to me as we shot skeet and I felt instinctively that another man stood beside me. It frightened me in one way and relieved me in another. I could no longer protect him from the world as I had when he was an infant, yet at the exact same time I felt the relief of knowing that I had somehow – no, we had somehow – helped craft the infant from 14 years ago into the beginnings of a good man. We had successfully laid the foundation upon which the Kid would build his life, and there is great relief knowing that when all was said and done, we hadn’t done badly. It would soon be up to him to decide the type of building he would set upon that foundation.

As for the Wife, over the past year I have watched her mature into a fine doctor. All the years of rides to school, pick ups from dodgy rail stations, dried tears after tests, encouragement and dogged determination had resulted in a doctor who could hold her own against the best in her field. We have come a long way from the Scripps Clinic parking lot in San Diego via the winding streets of Ponto-cho in Kyoto and the dusty trails of the Mahale Mountains.

So tonight I will stand in the cold with a handful of fireworks to welcome in the New Year in the way that I choose, filling the cloudy sky above my little patch of heaven with color and light. Chasing away the demons and welcoming the animal spirits of the New Year as the Chinese have done for a millennium.

It was almost a hundred degrees outside when the call from the nursing home came. We had been running errands in the heat that had piled up all week and needed to be run before the next week had begun, and had no sooner shut the front door behind us when the phone rang. The Wife took the call on the porch to get a better signal, and I wasn’t surprised when she came back inside and said that she had to go up the mountain.

Mr. Hendrick* was a retired Naval officer and a chemical engineer. As the cancer spread through his body he and his wife decided to move South so that he could face his final days surrounded by the beauty and serenity of the Blue Ridge mountains.

But Death isn’t a romantic, and when his days dwindled Mr. Hendrick changed his mind: He wanted to live after all and wanted all means necessary employed to save him. The mountains might be a peaceful place to die, but it doesn’t have the machinery, medicines and skills necessary to battle cancer in what is always a losing war. So his doctors sent him to the teaching hospitals of Winston-Salem, an hour and a half away, that had the means necessary to help him in his battle.

Once there, Mr. Hendrick did another about-face; he refused treatment. One by one Mr. Hendrick dismissed the specialists that had been assigned to assist him. Having nothing left to offer him, and with his wife unable to care for him as she began battling her own losing war against dementia, he was sent to a nursing home near his home in the mountains.

My wife, his family doctor, met him there. His son drove down from the North to try to talk some sense into his father. A doctor by trade, he was familiar with his father’s prognosis and wanted him to die with the dignity that he deserved. But Mr. Hendrick refused his counsel to be made a DNR. “I will not have that purple sticker next to my name,” he fumed. Mr. Hendrick directed the staff to make all attempts to save him in the event of a crisis, and the staff had no choice but to follow his wishes.

The next day everything changed. Evidently his son had been successful and Mr. Hendrick decided to accept the inevitable. He was placed on hospice, and my wife hoped that he would enjoy his final days in comfort.

Then the phone call came this afternoon. The son had left and returned to the North. Mr. Hendrick’s breathing was becoming more rapid and his oxygen sats were falling; but his wife was already packing up his things. “How long is this going to take?” she asked the nurses.

My wife loves the elderly, and they love her. She loves listening to them whereas it seems most are too busy to do so. This makes it a challenge to practice medicine when insurance companies expect you spend only a handful of minutes treating a patient and more unpaid time writing up in detail what was done.

“No one deserves to die like this,” she said. “I have to go back up the mountain.”

She thought I was annoyed by her decision, but it didn’t bother me in the least. A man dies only once, and he deserves to do it with dignity and care. I kissed her goodbye and sent her on her way.
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*Not his real name and details of his identity were kept from me to protect a dying man’s privacy.
Update: Mr. Hendrick passed peacefully the following morning.