Posted on by mikecronin2013

What is Your Right to Life?

Declaration Of Independence: Do Our Rights Come from God, the ...

By Mike Cronin

In this time of uncertainty, the great concern is that COVID-19 cases will overwhelm our hospitals with more patients than the system can handle. Therefore, we are admonished, or even compelled by executive order, to stay home, close our businesses, keep our distance, wear masks, and so forth.  This is supposed to “flatten the curve.” In other words, we are to forfeit our rights in order in order to slow down the spread of the virus, so that the hospital system can keep up, and thereby save lives.

Indeed, if “life” consists solely of beating hearts, breathing lungs, and the continuation of other biological processes, such measures may indeed be effective in keeping the body count down in the hospitals.

But human life is more than mere biological functioning. Shutting down the country may keep the COVID body count down, but the nation is no better-off because of it.  In fact, the closure of the economy is causing, and will continue to cause, untold destruction to lives, livelihoods, and indeed, the American way of life.

Consider: our Founders encoded the concept of individual rights into our national DNA when they wrote the Declaration of Independence. They said that we are endowed with the rights to “…life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and that the purpose of government is to “secure these rights.”

How can the government secure our rights by violating them? I submit that it cannot.  The old saying goes that the “road to hell is paved with good intentions.”  Well, the lockdown may have been well-intended, but it is quickly becoming apparent that the final destination will be hell to live with.  Stupidities and absurdities have already emerged before we’ve even reached the first mile-marker:

  • The police department that sent its unmasked officers to affront common sense and violate social distancing rules to arrest an isolated surfer (even as people were advised to seek exercise and get fresh air during their isolation) because the beach was closed.

Malibu surfer in handcuffs after enjoying empty, epic waves ...

  • The politicians who stand shoulder-to-shoulder during COVID-19 press conferences.

March 13 coronavirus press conference

  • The tone-deaf celebrities and politicians who, surrounded by more luxuries immediately to hand than most Americans will experience in their entire lives, offer well-meaning “public service announcements” about enriching ourselves while staying at home – in many cases without any means to pay for the mortgage or rent.
  • Mal-designation of some businesses as essential and others as non-essential – by politicians who don’t have any idea how an economy works. (e.g. The designation of veterinarians in Georgia as non-essential – as if pets’ lives aren’t essential to the morale of their owners, and as if vets are only for pets. What about working animals? Livestock?  Might not food and dairy ANIMALS need veterinary care? Should we now add Mad Cow disease to this mess?)
  • The COVID-19 relief bill that provides 15% more aid to hospitals per COVID-19-related death, thus incentivizing medical systems to declare every death to be COVID-19-related.
  • The politician who threatened to extend the lockdown to punish everyone if some individuals violate it.
  • The nosy Nelly who threatened to call the police to inform them her neighbor is violating the lockdown – when the neighbor was going to work at her job as a 911 dispatcher.
  • The nurse with mask-marks on her face charging lockdown protesters with being selfish because they might infect someone, thereby causing even more strain to the medical system.

That last point may not sound all that absurd to you, but consider what it means: For ~240 years or so, Americans have held their military in high esteem because some of its members (many of whom were drafted) have been maimed or killed defending our rights and freedoms.

Arlington National Cemetery – America's Largest Military Cemetery ...

There is a grass-roots campaign by medical providers to urge people to stay home.  Urging others to stay home is rational and violates no one’s rights. But it’s not enough for some; a few want to destroy those very same rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by using the coercive power of government to compel people to stay home –  because some doctors and nurses are getting marks on their faces from wearing masks all day.

These are the nurses on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic

Anyone who has ever worn a gas mask for an hour or two has had similar marks. Manual laborers and tradesmen get blisters, cuts, zaps, pokes, gouges, blunt trauma, chopped, and mangled. Ranchers walk in animal dung all day. Athletes get sprains, breaks, and concussions. I mean no disrespect to the medics enduring this battle; in fact, I salute you.  But it is a battle.  A few lesions go with the territory; earning them is no justification to curtail individual rights!

Posted on by mikecronin2013

A Hard Truth About Pay

By Mike Cronin

Some fields of human endeavor are inherently hard to learn. Medicine, for example. Becoming a doctor requires a person to study for eight or more years beyond the baccalaureate level and become an expert on the composition, functioning, and behavior of the human body. The sum of human knowledge on the subject increases greatly each year due to the efforts of scientists.  People who have acquired skill as a physician are relatively scarce, but because we all want to have our diseases cured and our injuries repaired, they are in high demand and they command high salaries.

On the other hand…some fields are made hard to enter by the members comprising them.  Consider: The Constitution of the United States is the ultimate law of the land.  It was written by well-educated men – in elegant prose that any reasonably literate reader can understand, even after two centuries of language drift.  It is about 17 pages long, and one need not become a lawyer to understand and apply it. Yet somehow that document can describe the limits and give operating instructions for three branches of government.   Now consider that the field of law grows every year. The vast majority of that growth is due to politicians making new laws, not by legal “scientists” discovering new truths.  And most of these new laws are written in “legalese,” which is often designed to be vague or confusing to the lay person.  Understanding modern law requires years of schooling not because it is inherently difficult, but because it is purposely made and kept so by legal practitioners. In other words, most of the difficulty in understanding law and becoming a lawyer is self-imposed by the field of law, not by the need to learn nature’s secrets.  Even so, the end result is a person who, like a doctor, has acquired a relatively rare ability set, so he or she can also command a high salary.

Some star athletes at the pinnacle of professional sports (specifically the NFL, MLB, and NBA in the US, and Soccer/”Futbol” throughout the world) get paid even more than doctors and lawyers – sometimes fantastically more.  Yet any able-bodied person can go out and play football, basketball, baseball, and soccer.  The difference is that the professional “star” athlete has a skill even more rare than medicine or law – the ability to entertain us and win championships.  Most professionals have to spend years at college to acquire the knowledge and skill to practice their trade; the star athlete had to be born with a greater degree of natural athleticism than the rest of us, and he had to learn his sport and hone his skills from elementary school through college. His career will likely be over by the time he gets to 40; the professionals in more intellectual and academic settings will just be hitting his or her stride by that point.

As difficult, or even deadly, as it is to be a teacher, or a first-responder, or a military member, or a tradesman, it is far easier to acquire the skills and knowledge to enter such professions  than it is to become a doctor, lawyer, or pro sports star.  And because they are easier fields to enter, there are lots more people qualified to enter them, and lots more people in them.  The skills, knowledge, and abilities just aren’t as rare, so the salary just isn’t as high.

We might like to think our priorities are all wrong because we pay people who put their lives at risk to protect us far less than pro athletes or entertainment stars. After all, isn’t protecting our lives more important than entertainment? Don’t teachers deserve more because they are preparing our children to be productive members of society? I think most of us would agree that our military and first-responders and teachers certainly deserve more. As a veteran, I certainly would have liked to earn more than I did, and I might have even deserved more than I got…but I didn’t get paid based on what I felt I deserved. But there is a hard, inescapable truth: No one really gets paid on the basis of what they “deserve” or on how difficult their job is. The real basis for pay is how rare and how in demand your knowledge skills, and abilities are. Those with the rarest, most in demand attributes will always be offered bigger salaries than the rest of us with more mundane skill sets.