This morning, I was reading the various websites and I came across an article by Roger Hedgecock from San Diego. He was talking about the legacy of the Democrat party and its relation to slavery. I wrote an article on this some months ago, but it is a good time to revisit the issue as reparations are being discussed.

Blacks have the feeling that this is as good a time as any for them to start receiving money from the rest of America in the form of reparations. Their argument is that they were held as slaves against their will for over a hundred years, they should be paid for their pain and suffering. It does not matter to them that there is not one current slaveholder in the United States and there is not one person who was a slave in the United States. They just see it as free money from Uncle Sam.

Since this is an issue, we need to look at the history of the United States and the history of the two current political parties. The Democrat Party was formed from the old Democrat-Republican party of Thomas Jefferson. That party believed in holding slaves and was strongest in the Southern states. The new Democrat party was also strongest in the Southern states and adopted a plank that specifically endorsed slavery as an institution in their first convention to nominate a President. This plank was officially part of their political platform up to and including 1860.

In the 1860 election, the Democrat Party split into two factions. One faction wanted slavery officially adopted as public policy. The second faction was less strident about the issue. The first faction was in the South and the second in the North. After Abraham Lincoln was elected, the first faction took the South out of the Union and started the Civil War. The second faction became the appeasement party. This appeasement sentiment became part of the lexicon of the party for the next 150+ years.

After the Civil War, the three amendments that officially recognized slaves as citizens, gave them the vote and made discrimination illegal were adopted over the objection of the Democrat party. The Democrat party made up rules and poll taxes to keep blacks from voting. Members of the Democrat Party formed the KKK to kill Republicans. At the time in the South, killing Republicans meant that you were killing blacks for the most part. At no time was there ever a Republican in the KKK. The KKK was exclusively reserved for Democrats. That is why the South was solidly in the Democrat column up until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was written by President Eisenhower near the end of his term of office. It was killed by the Democrat Congress while President Eisenhower was President. After President Kennedy, then President Johnson took office the bill was revived with a few minor changes. When the bill was finally adopted, there were not enough Democrat votes to pass the bill. It took an almost 100% vote from the Republicans to get the bill passed into law. Since then, blacks have seldom held leadership positions within the Democrat party.

Republicans on the other hand have always been abolitionist. They were formed in 1856 to stop slavery. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected as the first Republican President and he ended slavery by the end of the Civil War. Then, the Republicans worked tirelessly to end discrimination against blacks by passing Constitutional amendments and laws. Finally, the Democrats saw the handwriting on the wall and embraced anti-discrimination. They were the majority party by then and they hijacked the media’s perception of who led the fight. As a result, most people believe that the Republican Martin Luther King was a Democrat.

The Democrats fought long and hard to keep blacks as second class citizens. First they wanted them as slaves, and then they wanted to make them citizens without the protection of the law. They should be rewarded for all that hard work. If reparations are ever part of the American scene, heaven forbid, Democrats should be the ones to pay. Republicans should not have to pay. Also, how are they going to determine those who should pay reparations?

My mother’s family immigrated here in the 1910’s so they did not own slaves. They lived in California so they were not members of the KKK or any other discriminatory group. My father’s family has been here since the Mayflower. They lived mainly in Massachusetts, Ohio and California. None of them ever owned slaves. Some of them fought for the North in the Civil War. How can they claim that my family owes anyone reparations? We paid in blood for the freedom of the slaves. My ancestors were either in Sweden, Norway or the North. Those in the North were in the heart of abolitionist territory. I have a black son and a daughter that is probably half black. Do I have to pay them reparations?

Democrats on the other hand have an unbroken line back to the beginning of discrimination against blacks and other people of color that includes Hispanics and Asians. If reparations need to be paid, it should be paid by those that have a history of discrimination, Democrats. They should take the money from Democrats and give it to whoever the Congress says has been discriminated against. That would be the only fair way of doing it. My family paid in blood. Other Northern Republican families have paid in blood. Democrats stood on the sidelines and tried to keep blacks as slaves. The question is clear. The problem is that those that want reparations are Democrats. They would never vote to tax Democrats to pay to Democrats. They would want to tax Republicans to give to Democrats. They would consider that fair, even though that would be the most unfair tax of all.

Barack Obama is trying to force his health care plan down the throats of Americans with as little discussion about it as possible. He wants no information about the plan to get out. He is going around the country telling everyone that they will not notice any changes to their current health care plan if his plan is adopted. If that is the case, why do we even need his health care plan? He will say to cover everyone, but the plan being discussed in the Senate covers the same amount of people as the current system. In other words, there are 37 million uninsured under Obama’s plan and supposedly 46 million currently uninsured. That is hardly enough of a difference to make any radical changes in coverage.

The plan being discussed in the Senate has a big hidden problem. That problem is the “public option”. That is a government sponsored health insurance plan. If that is adopted, all employers will quickly drop their current health insurance coverage and adopt the “public option”. That would eventually put everyone under the “public option” and give America the single-payer system that Democrats covet. They covet the single-payer system because it gives the government a great deal of control over the citizens of the country.

The Democrats love to talk about the wonderful health plans of England, Canada and Australia. All of them have single-payer systems that are similar. All of them are now starting to allow private health care options because the single-payer systems they have cannot meet the demand. We do not need to follow after the plans that are failing. We should continue the plan that the single-payer systems are starting to emulate.

I spent two years in England between 1970 and 1972. England adopted the single-payer system shortly after World War II. At that time, England and America had health care that was roughly equivalent. By the time I was there in the early 1970’s, England had not progressed very much beyond the health care of the early 1960’s. I had a couple of opportunities to visit English doctors while I was there and was appalled at the shabby conditions that existed. The rooms the doctors used were larger than American doctors, but they were not stocked with enough medical equipment to supply the doctor. When I was there, the doctors were still all English. Now, the doctors are almost exclusively foreign born. That also goes for Canada and Australia.

The medical care is being rationed in England, Canada and Australia. Over Thanksgiving 2008, I visited Spokane, WA. While there, I read the local paper. It was reporting that Canadians were having babies in Washington because the hospitals in Canada had met their quota for the year and would not admit the women. I also have read about patients that have had to come to the United States from Canada to get medical care when needed. They were put on lists and would have died before they could have seen a doctor. In Australia hospitals limit specialists to a small number of surgeries per quarter. It does not matter how many patients need surgery, only that number of surgeries can be performed. That is the kind of thing we can look forward to under a single-payer system.

We have the best medical system in the world. There are problems that exist with our current system. Almost all of them are either directly or indirectly caused by government interference. The best way to reform the current system is to get government out of making requirements for medical insurance. That is just a scam to help their buddies in the health care delivery system. If everyone was allowed to choose their options, insurance would be cheaper. If we could take our policies from state to state, insurance would be cheaper. We could learn a lot from the car insurance system. If we modeled the health insurance system after the car insurance system, insurance would be cheaper and more people would be covered. There are other options that may be better. The one thing we cannot do is allow the government to compete with insurance companies or get into offering health insurance at all. That is a recipe for disaster.

We do need to make some reforms in our health care system. What we do not need to do is throw the baby out with the bath water. Tweaking the current system will deliver more good than any new system could possibly deliver. Changing our system to something else is not about delivering health care. It is about control over you, the citizen of this country. A “public option” is really a recipe for the government to step into your life and tell you how to live.

I prefer to live my life the way I choose. I am an American and was born to freedom. I was not born to be a slave. I will not be a slave to anyone. If you want to be a slave, support the “public option” and kiss your freedom good-bye. If you value your freedom at all, call your congressman and both Senators and tell them you want no part of the “public option”. Then, make sure they follow your lead. If they do not, work to defeat them in the next election. That is the only thing politicians understand. Make sure they know you are serious and they will listen to you.