For David Lazarus, from Virginia Postrel, who seems happy to be back in LA. I’m envious.

I’m sorry to hear about Senator Kennedy’s bad news, and wish him and his family the best, but I and Dr. Hsieh have a question for him:

I wonder which country with morally superior “universal health care” he’ll go to for his treatment? Will it be Canada, the UK, or Cuba?

Both Barack and Michelle Obama have a collectivist mentality:

Jeff Dobbs, a little while back, saw Michelle Obama’s statement that “The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.”

…Barack Obama today: “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said.

Would an Obama Administration really mean an end to “eating as much as we want?”

There is an implicit assumption here that, in order for one person (or country) to have more, another must thereby have less. This is the view of a person who views wealth not as something that is created, but something that simply exists, and the only important issue is how to divvy it up. But no one in Zimbabwe is starving because I took food away from them and ate it myself. They are starving in former Rhodesia, and in North Korea, and other places, because the governments there, in thrall to greed and the poisonous ideology of collectivism, have destroyed the agricultural sector.

What are the Obamas going to take away from us to give to someone else? And how will they decide from whom to take it, and to whom to give it? And what means will they choose to do so?

And which countries’ approval are we seeking? Egypt, to whom we give billions a year in aid? France? Germany? The Europeans seemed to be well fed, last time I checked.

My mother, who used to tell me to clean my plate in the sixties because there were children starving in China, had her mother tell her to clean her plate during the depression because there were children starving in Europe. Who is it that Obama is asking (telling?) us to clean our plates (or better yet, put less on them) for? Will he set up rationing? Will Michelle be in charge of the rationing board and pie distribution?

Hungry stomachs want to know, before November.

The sad thing, of course, is that our agricultural policies, which actually increase the cost of our food (though we’re wealthy enough to afford it, at least until the Obamas take over), are also complicit in destroying the agricultural sector of many third-world countries, by providing foreign aid in the form of subsidized grain and depressing the price of food there, making farming a non-viable economic activity. What will Barack do about that?

[Update a few minutes later]

This doesn’t speak so much to their collectivism, but Charlotte Hays asks:

I loved Obama telling us how how “unacceptable” and “low class” it would be for us to to mention his wife’s anti-American remarks. How’s he gonna stop us? (I certainly hope he will have a tougher approach when negotiating with dictators!) And, come to think of it, this isn’t the first time Obama has said that anti-American “snippets” by a close associate were taken out of context. We get to decide if we think this is relevant, not the candidate.

Do we really want to be bossed around by these arrogant people and their double standards for four years?

[Update in the afternoon]

Rachel Lucas and her commenters aren’t very impressed by Obama’s Calvin-ball campaign rules.

So I just want to know what happens if Republican’s aren’t “careful.” Is he gonna give them karate? Write a strongly worded letter of disapproval?

If I were George Bush, and Congress overrode my veto of the criminally outrageous agriculture bill, I’d take Tim Carney’s suggestion, and have the Justice Department start investigating all those who vote to override for bribery. Republicans and Democrats alike.