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Aug. 24, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:29
August 24, 2007, Friday, Hour #3
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That is absolutely right, Johnny Donovan.
Ladies adore me.
Matter of fact, guys, sometimes I feel very sorry for Mrs. Williams.
We walk along the street and I see women passing there by just rolling their eyes at her and saying, well, why not me, anyway?
But let's get down to some seriousness here.
Now, the next election, or actually going on right now, is this whole hullabaloo about healthcare.
And people want socialized medicine.
They say, we want a single-payer system in America.
We want it like Canada's or New Zealand or London or United Kingdom, Britain.
Well, before you settle for the system, you have to say, well, you know, that idea, you have to say, well, how are those systems doing?
Would we like that in America?
Are we Americans any different from these other people around the world where we would not fall into the same trap?
Let me just kind of give you some, just a little bit.
In Britain, and I want you people who support a single-payer health care system to call in and say, yes, we want this in America.
In Britain, about 1 million people are waiting to be admitted to the hospitals at any time.
In Canada, more than 876,000 people are waiting for treatments of all types.
In New Zealand, the number of people on waiting lists for surgery and other treatments is more than 90,000, more than 90,000.
Now, the lengthy waits are not trivial.
For example, in Britain, the delays for colon cancer treatment are so long that 20% of the cases that are considered curable at the time that the person is diagnosed as having colon cancer are incurable by the time of the treatment.
Last year, a lawsuit was filed against 12 Quebec hospitals on behalf of 10,000 breast cancer patients who had to wait more than eight weeks for radiation therapy.
Going again to Britain.
British scientists, they helped develop kidney dialysis during the 1960s.
Yet today, Britons use dialysis at one-third the rate that Americans do.
If you need a coronary bypass in Britain, you are five times more likely to get it in the United States than in Britain or Canada.
And in Canada, you're, let me go back, I read it wrong.
If you need a coronary bypass, you're five times more likely to get it in the United States than in Canada.
And you're eight times more likely to get it than in Britain.
Here's a story put out by actually is a very, very good group of doctors.
It's called the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.
It's a free market outfit among doctors.
And they have in their newsletter, and they say that Ontario is being sued by Leslie McCreeth for the right to opt out of its government-run medical care system, which wanted to keep him waiting a year for diagnosis and treatment of a malignant brain tumor.
That was reported in the Wall Street Journal June 28th this year.
Now, in Canada, the new Democratic Party leader, Jack Layton, and three former Canadian prime ministers, they get private treatment.
So, here's one of the things that if we're pushing for this single-payer system, you know, what I would like to see added to the bill, if we get it, or when they start talking about it, is something in there that says that politicians are required to use the same health care services that the rest of the people would have to use.
And if you had such a stipulation in the bill, I bet you would not have politicians supporting the bill if they knew that they would be subject to the same kind of treatment as everybody else.
Now, a lot of people push for this single-payer system because they say health care is a right.
Well, I don't know what kind of right it is.
That is, if you say that health care is a right, well, what do you really mean?
Well, first of all, you have to recognize is that government has no resource of its very own.
What I mean by that, that the money being spent by politicians coming out of Washington or out of your state capitol, it doesn't represent congressmen, senators, and state legislatures reaching in their own pockets to send the money out.
Moreover, there's no tooth fairy or Santa Claus giving them the money.
So, when you recognize that government has no resources of its very own, you have to also recognize that the only way for the government to give one American citizen $1 is to first take it from some other American.
Okay, so if you say that health care is a right, well, then what you're also saying is that, or that does not differ from the statement that one person has the right to live at the expense of another person.
Now, when we talk about rights, typically we're talking about something that exists simultaneously among people.
For example, let's take my right to free speech.
Now, that's a legitimate right.
That is, my right to free speech does not impose any obligation on anyone else except that of non-interference.
My right to free travel does not impose an obligation on anybody else except that of that they should not interfere with me.
Now, if we were to look at free speech rights the same way and travel rights the same way people are talking about healthcare, well, my free speech right,
my right to free speech would require that I take the money from some other American to be able to have a microphone, to be able to have An auditorium or my right to travel would mean that some other American would have to pay my airfare and my hotel accommodations.
Well, I'm sure that the average person would say, Williams, yeah, you have a right to free speech, you have right to travel, but you don't have the right to do so at my expense.
Now, when somebody has a right to something that they did not earn, that is, if you tell me, if you tell somebody, well, he has a right to health care, even though he cannot afford it, when you say that, when you say a person has a right to something that he did not earn, that must mean that someone else does not have a right to something that he did earn.
Now, I want somebody to call in and tell me where do they see the justice in that, where do they see the fairness in that.
That is, where you tell one person that he has a right to something that he did not earn, and in order for him to exercise that right, it requires someone else not to have a right to something that he did earn.
Now, don't get me wrong, folks.
I believe in helping our fellow man in need, but I believe that reaching into one's own pockets to help your fellow man in need is praiseworthy and laudable.
I think that reaching into somebody else's pockets to help your fellow man in need, I think that is despicable and worthy of condemnation.
And I would like for someone to tell me how reaching into somebody else's pocket to help his fellow man in need is laudable or something that moral people should support.
We'll be back with your calls after this.
Walter E. Williams holding a fort for Rush while he's vacationing.
And you can be on with us by calling 800-282-2882.
And let's go to the phones to Joe in Bedford, Indiana.
Welcome to the show.
Thanks for taking my call, Dr. Williams.
Got two questions for you.
Now, given that you have your sweetheart in tow and under control, are you the guy that has taken Rush Bob on as a project, taken him to the barn and taught him how to deal with women?
Now, the second thing I'd like to know, I'd love to know what you got your wife for Christmas this past Christmas.
Well, I had a hard time finding a Christmas gift because I always buy something practical, as everybody knows.
And one of my strategies is to, and I recommend this to all men out there, is to look around the house and find out something that you're going to have to buy anyway and get that.
Well, I didn't quite do that this Christmas.
Mrs. Williams, of course, you know, we've been married 48 years and we're not spring chickens and she's getting older.
And so, and I like my shoes shine really, really good, like they do in the army.
I see your face in them.
And so I got an electric shoe shine brush.
And so that, you know, that helps her a lot.
And actually, she's done a very, very good job with that.
And so that was the gift for last Christmas.
Now, in terms of Rush, Rush does not pay me enough because he only pays me the minimum wage for doing this show.
And so all the side benefits in terms of wife raising and how to handle women, I just cannot let it do it.
I'd let it go for $5.85 an hour.
So as soon as Rush ups my pay, I can give him some advice.
But I can give some advice to all you men out there.
And it has to do with wife raising.
Just go to my site.
It's walterewilliams.com and click on miscellaneous and you'll see a good wife's guide there.
And it'll give your wife or your lady many, many tips on how to, you know, the correct way to behave with respect to her husband.
But thanks a lot for calling in, and let's go to Atlanta, Georgia, and welcome Larry to the show.
Welcome, Larry.
Larry, are you there?
Touch that business about the women.
I'm going to stay away from that.
I wanted to take you up on your challenge of telling you the error of your ways on the allocation of this right.
Okay.
So you're going to say, you're going to show us how one person has the right to live at the expense of another person.
No, I'm going to ask you to drop all thought of having one person against the other.
Health care is not a right.
Healthcare in this country, as it is practiced, is an asset.
And as such, it belongs to the people.
Now, let me explain why I say that.
Wait, Can I explain why I say that?
No, just help me in the steps because I'm going to let you explain.
Just help me in the steps.
So where does the government get the money to provide this asset, as you're calling it?
I don't know, but they come up with it.
And here's how I know.
Okay.
When you go to these colleges, when you go to these research centers, and you go to all these different places where they're doing heavy research into taking the fly crap out of the pepper, they come up with some process.
They come up with some machine.
They come up with some theory, some patent that's very expensive.
You take, for instance, these machines that can look into your body and see things.
This is not an independently developed machine.
This is a machine that was developed in a laboratory at governmental expense.
So when this governmental expense gets put into a patent, these patents go out into the world here, and people buy into these, take these patents and put this machine out to public use or for private use.
And so just the machine, just the research, blah, blah, blah, and on down the line, I say the bulk of the heavy lifting or the heavy money in healthcare is a public asset.
And you do not diminish one person by giving something to him by taking it away from another.
Oh, you don't?
I say that because you need it.
You need it.
What do you think about public sewers?
Why are they there?
Why do we have public water supply?
Wait, I benefit from a public sewer, and so I'm obligated to pay.
But I don't benefit at all from your leg being fixed.
I don't give a hoot about your broken leg.
But I do.
But I don't.
Why should I pay for it?
I don't care about whether or not you have clean drinking water, but you have it.
Oh, wait, wait, wait.
You're talking about something different.
What are we talking about?
We're talking about a publicly supplied asset that is paid for by general taxation.
Well, suppose I don't benefit from it.
Then it's not that you don't have it.
You wish to drink the water if you want to buy a bottle of water.
That's your right.
Wait, wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
I do not benefit from certain things being done by the government, so why should I pay?
Then why do you take advantage, sir, of the MRIs, the scan machines, which were eventually paid $4,000?
Well, that's not given.
I pay for that.
You only have to something a little more basic.
Government should not be in the business of research anyway.
Well, thank you very much.
Now, you get the government out of research.
I'll get some of my tax money back, and I'll be able to go out and get a pair of people.
Well, that'll be wonderful, and I will buy you a drink.
Let's go to Sean in Salt Lake City.
Professor Williams, I just wanted to bring up, you know, nobody's entitled to health care.
And I think you just made a great argument with your last caller.
Just like nobody deserves the right to have car insurance or life insurance.
You know, that is your own, that's your very own responsibility.
Earlier in the week, Rush mentioned he was talking about the state's CHIP programs that provide health care to young children and how it's actually an entitlement that's being given out now to the middle class.
I think the cutoff is about $80,000.
Well, if you're making $80,000, you better be able to pay for your kids when they go to the doctor.
I would think so.
But getting back to your point of who deserves what, I think you're going to get phone calls within this discussion about people that are going to argue, well, why does big insurance and white is big pharmacy?
Why do they think they deserve so much money?
Money from whom?
They deserve my money if they're selling me a product.
Well, exactly.
And as much as we always hate our insurance premium, I was talking with my dad this morning, complaining about his insurance premium.
Well, as much as we hate those premiums, as much as we hate to pay car insurance and everything else, we are.
We're being given a service.
But we also need to remember, even within big pharmacy, within this country, we're paying for all that research that is being done by private companies.
And then also what we're paying for when we buy drugs, we're paying for a very, very costly food and drug administration procedure whereby they don't want to make any errors, so they make it very, very costly.
I think that on the average, it costs close to a billion dollars to get a drug on the market.
And that's just insane.
Yeah, it is.
And it's something that you said a little bit earlier that I was very interested in.
And that is, if we want to help people, don't misunderstand me.
I want to help my fellow man.
But I believe that charity is noble, whereby theft, legal or illegal, is despicable.
That is, and taking what belongs to one person and giving it to another is nothing but theft, whether it's legal or illegal form.
We'll be back with more of your calls after this.
And I'm Dr. Walt Williams.
We're back with Open Line Friday, and this is Walt Williams sitting in for Rush.
And let's go back to the phones and welcome Mike from Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Hello, Dr. Williams.
Welcome.
You are my favorite fill-in for Rush, I might add.
Well, thank you.
I'll pass on that programming note.
Okay.
I was calling in regards to the last caller where he was talking about the government had been the creator of almost all the diagnostics that we have.
That's not right.
Well, the fact of the matter, the government probably spends the most money, but as far as actual progress or developments in almost any field, they're producing less than 1% of any total discovery that's ever been made.
That's right.
And matter of fact, what I would propose that is if the government, if the government should be doing this anyway, if the government wants to find out how to do something, just issue a prize.
It's a great encouragement, you know, whether it be through tax breaks or through some sort of subsidy to encourage that.
The financial pressure of doing well by being rewarded with some type of cash incentive is a great prospect for any business.
You're absolutely right.
And thanks a lot for calling in.
Let's get another call.
Art from Shepherd, Montana.
Hi, Dr. Williams.
I'd like to give economic reasons why Hillary Care will destroy the health system in this country.
First place.
Destroy it as we know it.
Probably even worse than that, because for a doctor to get out of college, he's going to have a $200,000 debt.
To set himself up in practice, he's going to have somewhere between $200,000 and $500,000 of additional expenses there, which means that he has, just to start out, he has, just for interest alone, he has $40,000 a year.
Then if you're in something like OBGYN, which is the only one I hear the numbers on, every year malpractice is going up $100,000, which means you have to charge an additional $50 an hour or get at least one more patient in per hour.
And malpractice for OBGYN is not as high as the anesthesiologists, I think.
Right.
And then another thing is that because you have so many lawsuits, also the hospital system has to have it.
And therefore, they have, every one of them has every piece of equipment from a CAT scan to an MRI.
You name the piece of equipment.
Every major hospital has it because they want to avoid being sued.
Yeah, they call it defensive medicine.
Yeah, and then you take a state, I'll use Montana as an example.
Now, we have 900,000 people plus in this state, which works out to about 6% per square mile.
And eastern Montana is really, really lighter than that.
And you absolutely cannot have Hillary care ends up in like this.
And then another thing is, we haven't been, we've only been producing about 40% of our own doctors.
60% have been coming from overseas.
They've gone, been willing to go through additional training and everything else in order to get up to you.
I imagine some are from Canada.
Right.
And Britain and Europe and Japan and India.
They go through the additional training.
Well, if we get the same system that they have there, what's the point in coming?
What's the point in trying to go through all the citizenship process and everything else and getting qualified?
They can practice back in their own country.
You're right.
And it's something interesting that people ought to know.
I get a lot of mail from Canadians because one of my columns is carried in Canada.
And one newspaper is carried a couple of my columns.
And a couple newspapers carry my columns in Canada.
And some of the people have sent me letters saying, well, don't have the single-payer system in the United States for where would Canadians go for their health care?
I've heard that before.
Like those people that had that quadruplets, I think they came down to South Dakota.
I heard it was reported it was Montana, but they came down to South Dakota to have their quadruplets because Canada could not handle multiple births.
That's right.
And if they had been listening to who's the sicker and sicker, who am I trying to think of?
Moore.
Yeah.
They would have gone to Cuba.
Right.
Why stop?
You have to import a Spanish doctor to take care of Canada.
That's right.
Well, thanks a lot for calling in.
And let's go to Durham, North Carolina, and welcome Gordon to the show.
How are you doing, Dr. Williams?
Okay.
Dr. Williams, I do agree with you that health care is not a right, but I have two issues that I want to bring up.
Number one is that you made the statement that people have to earn their right, but you didn't earn the right of free speech.
I didn't say that.
You said people have to earn their right.
No, no, I said, no, no, wait, wait.
I was proposing that whatever people, if you benefit from something, you ought to pay for it.
No, no, you made the statement explicitly that people have a right.
They have to earn it.
And you didn't earn free speech from our forefathers.
Okay, let's assume that I said that, which I did not.
Yes, you did, sir.
But that's all right.
Okay, good.
We won't belabor that part.
My thing is that even though health care is not a right, the United States is the greatest country on the face of the earth, probably in the history of civilization.
And it seems like to me that it's a shame that we are arguing over whether we're going to take care of all our citizens or not.
You know, when we have the money, we got more money.
People got more money.
And yeah, they earned it, but they got more money than we ever had before.
And we're quibbling over whether all our citizens should have health care.
Well, I'm not quibbling over that.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Wait, wait, wait.
Hold a sec.
Hold a second.
I'm quibbling about my money going to them.
Now, if you want to send your money, that's okay.
But I don't.
I don't have a problem sending my money, sir.
But you're saying yes, but wait, you want to get around the world to wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Hold a sec.
What you want to do, you want to force me, Walter Williams, to give my money to take care of somebody.
No, no, no.
See, this is one of the problems I have with socialism.
That is, if people want to be socialists or communists, I have no problem with that, but let them go do their communist thing and leave me alone.
No, but that's not what I'm saying.
Don't misconstrue what I'm saying.
I'm saying that this country has the ability to do all kinds of things.
We wage war all around the world.
We spend millions and billions of dollars to tear down stuff.
We spent millions of dollars to Holland.
We spent billions of dollars to support Saddam Hussein, and then we spent billions of dollars to knock him out of office.
But we can't spend money to take care of our own citizens in the United States.
You don't want to pay for it.
That's fine.
But somebody needs to pay for it.
Okay, you pay for it.
I'll pay for it.
Okay.
I think you're a generous person, Gordon.
But thanks for letting us know.
Let's go to week.
Can we take one more before the break?
Let's go to Jim in Palisade, Colorado.
Mr. Williams, what an honor to speak to you.
Maybe you can help me understand something.
I have heard recently that the economy being robust is actually bogus because we're buying, borrowing millions of dollars from foreign countries like China to shore the economy up.
And also, could you comment about the effect foreign money buying American assets and land has?
Oh, well, you know, back during the 80s, when everybody saw Japan as the great power, Japan, Japanese were coming in.
I don't know whether they were talking about buying the Rockefeller Center.
They're talking about, yeah, they bought the Rockefeller Center and talking about buying Disneyland.
And so I was saying that people are concerned about that.
I say, okay, the Chinese, let's say, or the Japanese buy the Rockefeller Center, when they get mad with us, are they going to take it back home?
So what?
I mean, see, my view on things is that it doesn't matter so much who owns something, but who has the rights to use it.
And then I was telling people, I said, now, if the Japanese bought Disney or they bought whatever MGM or movie theaters, filmmakers in Hollywood, do you think that they would go out and start making Japanese movies?
Do you?
Probably not.
They probably make the same old movies that we've been seeing because I think the worst movie in the world is a Japanese movie.
So I don't worry about that.
And I think that if foreigners are willing to invest in United States, put their money in the United States, isn't that a wonderful thing?
You don't find people rushing to put their money in Zaire, do you?
No.
I think that it shows that the world has confidence in us.
They know that we have a rule of law.
We have relatively high respect for private property rights.
And the rest of the world sees that as wonderful.
And then a lot of people say, well, look, Chinese hold a lot of debt.
Suppose they start selling, they blackmail us by saying, oh, we're going to unload our debt.
Well, I don't think the Chinese are stupid.
That is, if all these countries start trying to cash in their bonds or their treasury notes, it would drive the price down and they would make a huge loss.
So I doubt whether they're going to do that unless they look at getting even more important than their own personal welfare.
Thanks for the call.
We'll be back with your calls after this.
We're back, Walter Williams, holding forth in the declining minutes of the show.
There's another story here.
It says, drill sergeant faces, he's in the Marines, he's a Marine drill instructor.
He's been charged with 225 criminal counts connected to abusing recruits.
That's what a Marine spokesman said.
In one incident, Sergeant Glass allegedly ordered a recruit to jump headfirst into a trash can and then pushed him further in the container.
And he's done other things to recruits.
But, however, the Marines said in their press release that no member of his platoon was seriously injured.
I guess, you know, Army does all kinds of things to bring out the toughness.
And, man, I remember when I was in the Army, this is in 1959, I was drafted.
People call it a draft.
I like to call it my labor services were confiscated by the Army.
But anyway, we had marches, long marches, carrying anywhere at least 50 pounds and up, and sometimes 15, 20 mile marches.
And the chow truck where we ate was at a certain location that we were supposed to be by, let's say, lunchtime.
And if we weren't there, the chow truck was just going to stay for an hour, and then he'd move on.
And if you did not keep up the pace, you would be out of lunch.
And then I remember in basic training, this is at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, they used to have the guys who were fat.
They had a whole string of guys.
They had them running up the hill Early in the morning before anybody else got up running, try to take some of that fat off of them.
But you know what has happened to the military in our country to, even though we have great fighting men, I believe that there's been a lot of feminization of our military.
That is, the sergeants and leaders are not allowed to do things that they used to do yesterday.
But I don't know.
I'd have to look into this a little more and see whether I would bring charges against this sergeant.
Let's go to the phones to Dallas, Texas, and welcome Steve to the show.
Welcome to show.
Thank you, Dr. Williams.
This is indeed an honor.
You are the great teacher.
Well, thank you.
I have a question.
I heard the other day that someone said that FDR and the New Deal had more to do with causing the Depression than anything else.
Can you enlighten me on that, or do you agree with that?
Well, I think his New Deal legislation exacerbated the Depression.
But many economists, and if you wanted to read them, it's a very thick, heavy book.
It's written by Milton Friedman and Anna Swartz.
It's called The Monetary History of the United States.
And they point out that the Federal Reserve Bank was tightening money when it should not have been, and it was increasing the money supply when it should not have been.
Then there was the Smoot-Hawley Act, I believe, of 1929 that is very, very restrictive tariffs on foreign goods.
And the Smoot-Hawley Act kind of exported some of our business cycle, our downturn in the business cycle to other parts of the world.
But clearly, the Great Depression was a government phenomena.
And the efforts by Roosevelt during the Depression, setting minimum prices in the name of fighting the Depression, in setting all kinds of regulations, burning crops and killing pigs and pouring milk in order to raise the prices, these kinds of actions just made a relatively small downturn worse.
So that is absolutely unemployment was still high.
There's an excellent book.
It's called FDR's Follies.
And you can check on Amazon.com and you can probably come up with it.
And it goes through quite extensively what the problems during the federal Franklin Delano Roosevelt regime.
We're going to take a break and we'll be back after this.
Walter Williams, fitting in the last segment of the last day of the week.
And let's go to David in Penn Valley, California.
Welcome to show, David.
Hi, Dr. Williams.
It's a pleasure to talk to you, but I do take issue with your characterization of the single-payer health care system.
I don't see it as a case of money going out of your pocket to benefit someone else's health care needs.
I see it as an instance in which everybody contributes to a public pool so that the money is there to supply everyone with a benefit as needed.
That's something private insurance doesn't do.
Well, private insurance excludes a lot of people from their coverage.
Wait, I don't benefit, I, Walter Williams, I don't benefit from, let's say, if you have a broken leg getting it fixed.
The same works in verse.
In reverse, you don't Benefit from my having a broken leg fixed.
Yes, but if you have insurance, you're paying for other people's broken legs now because you're paying into a pool.
What I'm saying is that the insurance...
Well, that's a voluntary, isn't it?
I mean, they...
Unless you're prepared to pay $200,000 next time...
Wait, wait, wait.
Wait a minute.
No, but the point is that I volunteer to be in it, right?
If you don't volunteer to have insurance, then you become a burden on society.
Oh, no, no, no.
Then other people will become a person.
Oh, wait, wait, wait.
No, that's the problem of socialism when you say I'm a burden on society because no person should be forced to take care of me.
But the point is, some people don't have a choice.
They cannot afford to pay $200,000 for $20 for chemotherapy therapy, so they have to pay.
Well, we're up against the clock.
I would like to show you where you're wrong, but we're up against the clock.
And I have to get home.
And I had to call Mrs. Williams to tell her to turn the air conditioner back on and have my wine sitting out there.
And so we're up against the clock, but a rush will be back when.
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