by Bob Barr | Jan 17, 2025 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller It needs to be said loud and clear: murder is not a “policy choice.” Grotesquely, however, socialized medicine advocates are taking advantage of the December 4th slaying in New York City of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson to press their policy agenda. A Generation Lab poll released last week found that 50% of college students — a demographic largely conditioned by social media — viewed accused killer Luigi Mangione either “extremely” or “somewhat” favorably. Only 19% thought the same of Thompson. In the background of such disinformation are such books as “Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans,” by Wendell Potter, Cigna’s former Vice President of Corporate Communications. In 2024, Cigna was the sixth-largest health insurance company in America, with $195 billion in revenue. Among other things, the book instructed health executives how to survive an “ambush” interview by leftwing documentary propagandist Michael Moore, whose 2007 film “Sicko” praised Fidel Castro’s communist medical system, and itself became a major impetus for the 2010 passage of the increasingly troubled Obamacare system. As Peter Suderman wrote last month in Reason Magazine, Obamacare’s high costs to participants hit hard because “it required coverage of a slew of federally mandated essential health benefits, regardless of whether those benefits were needed or wanted.” Then, a spendthrift Congress (one of many) uncapped benefit subsidies in 2021 with the “American Rescue Plan Act” during the COVID-19 pandemic, and again in 2022 with the “Inflation Reduction Act.” Those actions allowed “households making up to $350,000 a year in some cases, to obtain subsidized coverage, at a cost of about $30 billion to $40 billion annually.”...
by Bob Barr | Dec 26, 2024 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Writer Greg Steinmetz titled his 2015 book chronicling the life of Sixteenth Century German financier Jacob Fugger, “The Richest Man Who Ever Lived.” Whether a biography centuries from now will describe Elon Musk in similarly grandiose terms, as his contemporaries we will never know. Suffice to say, however, that this richest of men in this first quarter of the 21st Century will have left his mark as one of the era’s most influential individuals. Elon Musk actually shares much in common with Jacob Fugger, notwithstanding their very different geopolitical worlds. Both Fugger and Musk are risk-takers. Both are bold and self-assured. As noted by Fugger’s biographer, the German money lender was bold to the point of being imperious. Even more to the point perhaps, while Fugger is described by Steinmetz as one of the true architects of modern capitalism, Musk is one its most apt students, having parlayed a sound upbringing in South Africa into a business empire the components of which touch virtually every sector of government and business around the world (and beyond); including most notably the social media giant X (formerly Twitter), Tesla as the world’s preeminent proponent of electric-powered vehicles, and SpaceX which is leading the long-overdue revitalization of America’s space effort. Fugger in his time was despised by components of what we would today accurately describe as The Establishment, especially the then-massively powerful Roman Catholic Church. In fact, Fugger’s exercise of his financial prowess and power brought the Pope to his knees and forced the Church to reverse centuries of dogma and permit what had previously been officially taboo – charging interest for loans. In...
by Bob Barr | Dec 19, 2024 | Townhall Article |
Townhall Verbally attack, or simply criticize in public transgenderism or the gay lifestyle, and you are roundly condemned as trans-phobic or homo-phobic. The term “pro-choice” is the favored moniker to describe those who favor legalized abortion rather than “pro-abortion.” Those who are opposed to abortion, whether on religious, moral, or political grounds, are demeaned as “anti-choice.” Thus is contemporary left-wing culture consumed with staking out their territory as guardians of lifestyles. Mass murders involving firearms become not examples of the need for culture control to identify and resolve cultural behaviors leading to the devaluation of life, but to the simplistic call for instrument control, that is, gun control. Virtually every incident involving gun violence, including most recently the December 16th shooting at a Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin, is headlined by President Biden as illustrating the need for “gun control” not as a call to protect “life.” This month, in perhaps the clearest yet personification of the Left’s disregard for principles of life, the alleged murderer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson is hailed as a true man of the people, a heroic persona even, deified to a degree Bonnie and Clyde could only hope to have aspired during their brief crime spree across America’s heartland during the bleak days of the Great Depression. Luigi Mangione is seen through this lens of his expanding social media savvy fans as “radiant,” an “American hero,” and a modern-day “Robin Hood” – a video sensation even as he is led in shackles into a jail facility in Pennsylvania while he awaits extradition to New York where the cold-blooded murder took place with Mangione allegedly shooting his...
