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Ted Nugent: Independence is a beautiful thing; dependency isn't

By Ted Nugent, Texas Wildman

Sunday, May 20, 2007

You only deserve what you earn. No one owes you a thing.

Amazingly, many Americans are dumbfounded and utterly confused over these simple truisms.

Because of the culture of entitlement many Americans have embraced since the mid-1960s, we have created generations of Americans addicted to the government handout machine.

They are ballast in this experiment in self-government, solidly in the liability column simply because they choose to be.

Even more amazing are the politicians who would further want to entrench into our cultural and economic fabric the very system that has stripped people of their work ethic, pride and self-esteem.

The pathetic so-called Great Society of President Johnson didn't eliminate poverty as he claimed it would. Rather, it destroyed individuals, families, businesses and entire communities while flushing hundreds of billions of hard-earned tax dollars down the drain.

Only a hapless idiot or bottom-feeding politician trolling for votes would dare advocate more destruction through more bloated and ineffective government programs. Yet they do, calling for universal health care for all Americans, including many who obviously don't care about their health.

Nothing is free. Nothing. Someone has to pay for universal health care. That someone is you, the taxpayer. Call the newspaper and leave a message for me if you believe you are not taxed enough.

It sickens me when I hear a disconnected, soulless political advocate make the socialist claim that because America is a wealthy country we should redistribute earned income from the hardest of workers to pay for the health care of Americans who cannot afford health insurance or who choose to spend their money on other things.

The latter opt for things like blingbling, custom wheels, fashionable attire, I-pods, stereos, cable TV, deadly fast food, movies, pets, tobacco, alcohol, drugs, meth and hair-dos, ad nauseaum.

Of course, with such expenses they can't make ends meet. They think waste and gluttony are their rights. God help us all.

All Americans should benefit from our capitalistic health care system. Our health care system is envied around the world because it has been fueled by profit.

If you want better health care, more effective treatments and better high-octane medicine, make it more profitable for the companies that produce and provide it.

Up by their bootstraps

Americans addicted to the welfare state need to take stock in their own lives and pull themselves up by their bootstraps just as their forefathers did.

If one job doesn't pay the bills, work two jobs. If you want health insurance and don't believe you can afford it, disconnect the cable television, quit smoking and drinking, get rid of cell phones, don't eat at restaurants or go to the movies, sell your bling, get rid of your pets, etc.

You will be amazed at what you can afford if you prioritize. Only the guilty need feel guilty.

In conjunction with Americans taking stock of their own lives, our politicians should pass tough tort reform that will limit how much damage manipulative legal sharks can continue to do to our health care system.

Lawyers, not doctors and others in the health care industry, are to blame for the high cost of health insurance.

I fully believe that 99 percent of Americans who do not have health insurance could do much in their own lives to pay for it if they cut out the excess and actually cared about their health.

Taxing hard-working Americans even more to pay for the health care of careless others ultimately will erode the high standard of health care Americans enjoy.

Socialized medicine sucks. Those who advocate socialized medicine suck even more.

Pay your own way. It's the American way.

Ted Nugent is a Waco-based musician and television show host.

Two thumbs up!

Awful clinics,
dog food,
doctors, that don't care,
long queues of losers, that wish to be excused from work more then to be healed.
Those are just few beauties of socialized medicine. Tried this out on my own hide before getting a decent insurance.

I guess it's country dependant.

And as such depends on what the people there want.

Here in the Netherlands it's fair to say we've got a more solid system than in the US.

And there are even better performing healthcare systems around like in Belgium. And i think a few Scandinavian countries too though i lack experience with them.


To discard the whole idea, based upon the failing of a system in a country where the support has been questionable for a long time, is unreasonable.

One should instead question the support and sustained effort to maintain that system and improve on it as it's possible to make it work.

Here's an interesting read on the topic.

http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf

Raindrop wrote:To discard the whole idea, based upon the failing of a system in a country where the support has been questionable for a long time, is unreasonable.

I do not discard idea of socialized medicine, because it is impractical. I discard because it is immoral.

Here's an interesting read: http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page= ... e&id=13873
["Health Care Is Not A Right" by Leonard Peikoff]

Olek, Leonard Peikoff bases the early part of his statement on the US Declaration of Independence.

• “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

From the rights Peikoff builds a morality, but from what greater power do these rights emanate? From self-evidence? From God? Is this an exhaustive list of the rights? What the heck does Liberty mean anyway?

If you look up the declaration of independence, you will find at the beginning, a part describing natural laws. These are laws that were based on nature. If you know much about the way Jefferson believed, then you will know that, by natural laws, he meant, rights gotten from nature using reason.

Jefferson, and many others basically believed in what Thomas Aquinas believed -- that is, that everything that exist, including God, can be proven with the use of reason and logic.

So to answer your question, he basically believed in much of what Ayn Rand has proven explicitly. His views were based on the nature of man, viewed with the looking glass of reason, and the hands of logic to operate it. Jefferson's biggest flaw, though, was that he never explained much of his philosophy explicitly. Here is a quote from Wikipedia that should clear up some some questions you had:

Jefferson believed that each individual has "certain inalienable rights". That is, these rights exist with or without government; man cannot create, take, or give them away. It is the right of "liberty" on which Jefferson is most notable for expounding. He defines it by saying "rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law', because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual."[14] Hence, for Jefferson, though government cannot create a right to liberty, it can indeed violate it. And the limit of an individual's rightful liberty is not what law says it is but is simply a matter of stopping short of prohibiting other individuals from having the same liberty. A proper government, for Jefferson, is one that not only prohibits individuals in society from infringing on the liberty of other individuals, but also restrains itself from diminishing individual liberty.

While Jefferson did have some strange decisions, his view on individual rights and liberty were right on the bulls-eye.

musashi wrote:From the rights Peikoff builds a morality, but from what greater power do these rights emanate? From self-evidence? From God? Is this an exhaustive list of the rights? What the heck does Liberty mean anyway?

The answers to your questions can be found in OPAR: http://www.peikoff.com/opar/home.htm
and such articles by Ayn Rand as "Man's Rights" in the book "Virtue of Selfishness."

I can give you a brief answers to your questions. For details consult above books and articles.

musashi wrote:From the rights Peikoff builds a morality, but from what greater power do these rights emanate?

Peikoff does not build his argument from the Declaration. He only uses it as a common reference that is known by many.

musashi wrote:From self-evidence? From God?

No, individual rights come from reality and the nature of man.

musashi wrote:Is this an exhaustive list of the rights?

Yes, they show the base of all rights - the right to life. Others are only logical consequences. See above mentioned articles for more details.

musashi wrote:What the heck does Liberty mean anyway?

I assume you are asking what is a right?

This is answered by Ayn Rand in "Man's Rights."

Here is a short snippet from that article:

From 'Man's Rights' by Ayn Rand wrote: "Rights" are a moral concept - the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual's actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others - the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context - the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

[Italics are Ayn Rand's.]