Atlas Shrugged Monologue - Money is the Root of All Evil

An exerpt from Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged", the monologue of Francisco d'Aconia speaking of the root of all evil....money. Setting the scene, he's speaking to a group of people that can be described as the modern progressive of today.  Mind you, this book was written in 1957. It's a bit long, but worth the read.

Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, "Don't let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil – and he's the typical product of money."


Rearden did not think that Francisco could have heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile.

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Aconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions – and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made – before it can be looted or mooched – made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except by the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss – the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery – that you must offer them values, not wounds – that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best your money can find. And when men live by trade – with reason, not force, as their final arbiter – it is the best product that wins, the best performance, then man of best judgment and highest ability – and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality – the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth – the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve that mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Money is your means of survival. The verdict which you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is the loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money – and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another – their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride, or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich – will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt – and of his life, as he deserves.

"Then you will see the rise of the double standard – the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money – the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law – men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims – then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it becomes, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are.

"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood – money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves – slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers – as industrialists.

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money – and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being – the self-made man – the American industrialist.

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose – because it contains all the others – the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money'. No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity – to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide – as, I think, he will.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns – or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other – and your time is running out."

Couple of Links to Check Out II

• Its a shame.  The Democrats rushed through Healthcare Reform, while not knowing what was in the bill.  Months later we find that there is a 1099 provision that will cost businesses.  Now the GOP failed to vote to repeal the measure.
• More on the Illegal Immigration debate, there was a law passed during the Clinton era that may throw away the Fed's pre-emption argument.
• Why did Palin say it like that?  Sometimes it's better to say nothing at all
• Social Security's a time bomb,  time for you to create your shelter young ones
• This is great news.  Muslim leaders are getting together to denounce Jihad.  Now if only all groups would denounce their fringe elements....
• Who are the 47% of Americans that didn't pay income taxes in 2009?
• Sen. Linday Graham is looking to create an amendment that addresses the anchor-baby problem

Zo's Illegal Immigration Rant

While I'm disappointed in the Judge's ruling, I can't say that she's wrong. Turns out it's only illegal to be here if you are caught in the act of crossing the border without proper documentation. Once you make it over, it drops to a civil issue and is no longer criminal. I can't believe the geniuses that wrote the law in the first place....My suggestion, first secure the border. Then enforce the law AFTER excluding the 14th amendment provision that allows the children of illegals to become citizens, and modernize the pathway to citizenship. Both Republicans and Democrats are at fault for letting it get to this point since the years of Nixon. 

Anyhow, Zo give's his piece:



I will be doing research in the coming days about our Immigration system.  Be on the lookout.

EPA Puts ‘Environmental Justice’ Front and Center in Its Rulemaking Process

Justice is suppose to be blind right? The environment affects everyone does it not? To every color, sexual preference, etc.....except for you social status.  “Achieving environmental justice is an Agency priority and should be factored into every decision,” the 55-page document reads.  From CNS:

The EPA defines environmental justice as the “fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, particularly minority, low-income, and indigenous populations, and tribes, in the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.”

The guide states that from now on -- in the process of developing rules, policy statements, risk assessments, and other regulatory actions -- EPA managers and staffers must first ask themselves, “Does this action involve a topic that is likely to be of particular interest to or have particular impact upon minority, low-income, or indigenous populations, or tribes?”
If the answer is yes, the rule-writers must reach out to the affected minority and/or low-income communities. One section of the guide explains how EPA rule-writers may have to make “special efforts” to connect with people who may be uneducated or non-English-speaking.
“It will likely be necessary to tailor outreach materials to be concise, understandable, and readily accessible to the communities you are trying to reach,” the guide says.

My opinion:  Why even consider this?  The entire notion of "social justice" smacks in the face of your rights as a person.  Worrying about the social ramifications of particular groups only hinders the system with bureaucratic red tape, by always making sure that every individual is just as equally affected as another.  Progression in the name of social justice, must take a back seat to the progression of common sense.

FBI to access our Internet data w/o probable cause?

The new rule wouldn’t reach the content of e-mail messages, but it would let them find out whom you’re e-mailing, when you’re e-mailing, and, er, “possibly” which websites you’re looking at and which Google searches you’re running.

Senior administration officials said the proposal was prompted by a desire to overcome concerns and resistance from Internet and other companies that the existing statute did not allow them to provide such data without a court-approved order. “The statute as written causes confusion and the potential for unnecessary litigation,” Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said. “This clarification will not allow the government to obtain or collect new categories of information, but it seeks to clarify what Congress intended when the statute was amended in 1993.”…

Administration officials noted that the act specifies in one clause that Internet and other companies have a duty to provide electronic communication transactional records to the FBI in response to a national security letter.
But the next clause specifies only four categories of basic subscriber data that the FBI may seek: name, address, length of service and toll billing records. There is no reference to electronic communication transactional records.
The officials said the transactional information at issue, which does not include Internet search queries, is the functional equivalent of telephone toll billing records, which the FBI can obtain without court authorization. Learning the e-mail addresses to which an Internet user sends messages, they said, is no different than obtaining a list of numbers called by a telephone user.

They can be more revealing, of course: A call made to a pay phone won’t identify who’s on the other end of the line whereas an e-mail sent to an address that contains someone’s name tells you right away whom it’s meant for. But of course, the opposite scenario’s also possible: A call made to someone’s home phone or cell phone points to the identity of the recipient whereas a message sent to an e-mail address with no identifying info in the address reveals little at first glance about who owns it. Exit question: Should e-mail identifiers be given greater protection? And if so, is that simply in order to draw a line on the slope before the feds slip any further downward?

Must read from CBO Director's blog: cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=1249

Couple of Links to Check Out

• Chevy Volt...is it worth it?
• By this time last year 64 banks had been taken over by the FDIC...this year so far, it's 103
• After today's ruling for Arizona, you wouldn't expect this.  Feds to enforce a fingerprint database for Mortage Brokers.  Priorities I guess.
• Sign of the times...a teacher in Philly is fired for doing the right thing
• The Securities and Exchange Commission is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act thanks to the Financial Regulation Bill.  So much for transparency]
• Thanks to nature, the oil slick in the Gulf is "disappearing" rapidly.  We can stop the hysterics now.

Sorry for not posting tonight. Will double post tomorrow to make up for this

Paul Ryan explains Economic Plan to Chris Matthews

The GOP has failed to adhere to the conservative points they've preached and we dealing with the results of that. (Why do you think people don't trust them?) Ryan's plan revolves about what the GOP lacked, faith in those very principles and ideas that every individual citizen inherently knows when faced with a personal financial crisis. Ignore the party affiliation and take a look at what he's come up with.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Totally owned Matthews.  I'll give it to him, he's the one member of the GOP that I trust, period and to have the balls to go onto MSNBC and handle their hosts.  Matthew's interested in playing gotcha with the GOP’s fiscal genius to make it look like Ryan lacks the political courage to endorse deep, specific cuts to programs like Medicare and Social Security. That’s why he’s quick to scoff when PR touts a way to trim $4.8 trillion from the budget; Matthews hears it initially as $4.8 billion because he’s eager to accuse the Republican of not being serious. Matthews wonders aloud why Ryan isn’t talking about cutting nondiscretionary spending and forgets that he hadn’t asked him about that. 
Apparently MSNBC does a bang up job of reporting on the news.  This isn't an example of it.

How the Government is Funded

The government does not “create” wealth or print money. It takes loans out from its bank. Contrary to popular belief, it’s the Federal Reserve that retains the ability to print money for the United States and is completely separate from the orders of our government. Kind of like how you can’t tell your bank what to do when you are the one asking for a loan. For every dollar printed by the Reserve, our government must pay that back plus interest. When a request is made for more money (printing money) the value of our dollar decreases for every new dollar printed.  (Remember that for later)

Since the government doesn’t make money, how does it pay for the loan? The United States Government obtains its money from 2 sources:

1. Intergovernmental Loans : The following countries own 40% total of our debt through loans (not including interest):
• China (30.7%)
• Japan (20.5%)
• UK (6.2%)
• Foreign Oil (5.8%)
• Brazil (4.6%)
• Russia (3.2%)
2. Public Debt: 60% of our debt is paid for by individual Americans through taxation. Methods of taxation on individuals include:
• Federal Income: the U.S. uses citizenship in addition to residency in determining whether a person's income is subject to U.S. taxation.
• Payroll: taxes taken from every paycheck of every person in the U.S.
• Social Security
• Medicare
• Unemployment
• Corporate Income
• Transfer: Otherwise known as the “death” tax
• Gift: levied on wealth transfers during the transferor's life
• Estate: levied on transfers made after the transferor's death.
• Generation Skipping Transfer: levied on transfers made during life or after death to individuals removed by more than one generation from the transferor, for example, from a grandmother to a grandson
• Excise: Social “sin” tax on items/services like gasoline, tobacco, firearms, airfare and alcohol, tanning, etc

Realistically, the only income that the government does have to pay for the loans through the Federal Reserve and Intergovernmental Loans is through taxation. So the bottom line is that the money comes from us as individual citizens. Hopefully I didn’t lose you.

So let’s break down the different taxes that affect the middle and lower classes, since that’s most of the general public. Side note: currently, 49% of the general public does not pay income tax because they don’t make more than the poverty level. That being said, the average person and business will pay a payroll tax (if they are receiving any paychecks) and excise taxes. What most of the general public doesn’t know (and most politicians and public figures don’t want you to know) is that we are also paying corporate taxes as well. I’ve explained this in my economic model for a business; you can review that at any time.  Businesses are another way for the government to tax the public without directly saying they are taxing the public.

Everytime a politician explains that they will raise the taxes from Corporations, they are in effect, raising taxes on the public as a whole.  Especially if the Company provides a service or product that most of us use, like oil for example.  From the economic business model, we know that a tax is treated like an expense, which means that a business has to compensate for that loss in some way.  Employment, stocks, job benefits and the cost of goods are the choices businesses have to adjust as a result of the added expense. 

Part of the reason why the price of goods go up is because taxes are raised. If any of a companies expenses can't be cut, usually the price of their service does to make up that loss. In addition, when money is printed, the devaluing of the dollar also raises the price of goods since it takes more money to equal the "true" value of a dollar. The consumer, or individual, ends up paying.  Since we make up the majority of the country, its the middle and lower classes paying.

So, in short, our government makes money by taking money from the people they serve.  Businesess are essentially tax collectors by transferring the money they collect from the public to pay the government.  Add the excise taxes and we're footing the bill.  Adding government programs without streamlining or fixing the ones we have, means a new tax.  More funding for broken systems means a new tax.  As the deficit increases, and talk of raising taxes on businesses come up, you now know what that means.

Mind you, I covered the Federal level; remember the State taxes you as well.

Ryan suggests GOP playing politics by not discussing Roadmap

Simply put, the GOP is acting stupidly. A commitment is needed to fix the system for the public and private sectors.  Examples of successful conservative principles working?  Look no further than NJ, VA, Germany, etc. Listen to this guy explain economics:



For more information about Paul Ryan's Roadmap for America, visit the website.  The guy has planned out economic policies for just about everything.....and it makes sense!

Britain's dropping Government Healthcare....while we move forward (UPDATE)

After many opponents in the US have pointed out the problems with burdening taxpayers, complicating the system, and red tape slowing down service and choices.  Or that the IRS announced that they did not have the resources to enforce the Healthcare mandate, or the Government dumping high risk patients due to the limited budget in the healthcare bill who would've seen this coming:

Even as the new coalition government said it would make enormous cuts in the public sector, it initially promised to leave health care alone. But in one of its most surprising moves so far, it has done the opposite, proposing what would be the most radical reorganization of the National Health Service, as the system is called, since its inception in 1948.

Practical details of the plan are still sketchy. But its aim is clear: to shift control of England’s $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level. Under the plan, $100 billion to $125 billion a year would be meted out to general practitioners, who would use the money to buy services from hospitals and other health care providers.
The plan would also shrink the bureaucratic apparatus, in keeping with the government’s goal to effect $30 billion in “efficiency savings” in the health budget by 2014 and to reduce administrative costs by 45 percent. Tens of thousands of jobs would be lost because layers of bureaucracy would be abolished.
In a document, or white paper, outlining the plan, the government admitted that the changes would “cause significant disruption and loss of jobs.” But it said: “The current architecture of the health system has developed piecemeal, involves duplication and is unwieldy. Liberating the N.H.S., and putting power in the hands of patients and clinicians, means we will be able to effect a radical simplification, and remove layers of management.” (emphasis mine)

It's been said that the centralization of any private industry results in less choice, bureaucratic red tape and wasteful spending.  The private sector does provide choices and at competitive rates.  The UK seems to realize that very simple thing when their government realizes that it has to make difficult cuts in their budget as a result of the downturn in the economy. 

That's the UK.  The real question is if the Democrats here realize that before we go through another crisis in the future.

(Update) I was a bit premature in my assessment.  via Ed from Hotair

This plan does not transform the NHS into anything else but a single-payer system. English citizens still have to get their health care from the government. However, the plan removes the rationing boards that have clogged the decision-making process and allows GPs and their patients to decide on the best course of treatment.

While that sounds great, it’s a recipe for disaster. In a closed system like single-payer, the resources are necessarily limited. This will increase demand while doing nothing to increase resources, which will create a deficit bomb bigger than anything already at NHS. That’s probably why another shoe dropped yesterday at NHS:

An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has uncovered widespread cuts planned across the NHS, many of which have already been agreed by senior health service officials. They include:

* Restrictions on some of the most basic and common operations, including hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery and orthodontic procedures.
* Plans to cut hundreds of thousands of pounds from budgets for the terminally ill, with dying cancer patients to be told to manage their own symptoms if their condition worsens at evenings or weekends.
* The closure of nursing homes for the elderly.
* A reduction in acute hospital beds, including those for the mentally ill, with targets to discourage GPs from sending patients to hospitals and reduce the number of people using accident and emergency departments.
* Tighter rationing of NHS funding for IVF treatment, and for surgery for obesity.
* Thousands of job losses at NHS hospitals, including 500 staff to go at a trust where cancer patients recently suffered delays in diagnosis and treatment because of staff shortages.
* Cost-cutting programmes in paediatric and maternity services, care of the elderly and services that provide respite breaks to long-term carers.

Dr. Donald Berwick proclaimed NHS a “treasure,” a comment that Republicans in Congress wanted to explore in Berwick’s confirmation hearing. What would Berwick do under the pressures at NHS today, if such a crisis hit Medicare and Medicaid? It’s no secret that both are facing these kinds of cost and resource issues. Simply demanding more money won’t work, as the UK has discovered after sixty years of single-payer health care.

The best way to get pricing and cost equilibrium in the health-care market is to use competition and free-market economics. That doesn’t mean the status quo ante ObamaCare, but an elimination of tax credits that favor third-party payers for routine care and the promotion of HSAs and full retail clinic pricing. Until that happens, the governmental burdens will continue to create artificial shortages, and will mean higher costs, more government intrusion in our lives, and less accountability.