I May Be A Liberal But ...

While I do spend most of my days hugging trees like many liberals, there are times when I stray from the party line. Thus this will be an irregular series where I mention some dumb things on the left. Lest you thing I'm ever switching teams, go back and read some of the transcripts from the Sotomayor hearing. The Republican party would need to completely and fundamentally change for me to ever vote that party line. Step #1 would be - Stop being racist to Supreme Court nominees.



* Trial Lawyers - The Dems get a loooooot of money from trial lawyers. But the amazing proliferation of malpractice suits created by these lawyer tends to hurt many of the folks who the Democrats claim to represent. First off, it has a pretty big negative effect on the number of doctors and their field of focus. JStone mentioned to me that back in his home county there were basically no pediatricians because of the high cost of malpractice insurance. Thus he became a man (through choice of primary physician) at the age of 4. Also, the sheer amount of frivolous lawsuits and wacko payouts inevitably come back around and wind up costing jobs to companies that have to bend over backwards.

Now - there are a lot of evil and stupid companies, and their are some incompetent doctors. But if you go in for heart surgery and have some complications, part of the reason is HEART SURGERY IS DIFFICULT! If it was easy everyone would be doing it and the world would be a pretty different place.

* Farm Subsidies - Now both parties are guilty of this but it's still a bummer that the Dems don't do much to stop this. The way the US farm system is set up is incredibly unfortunate. It's 2009 and you still have plenty of people being paid money not to grow crops (it was funny in Catch-22 but at this point it's just sad) and you have large subsidies going to huge corporations who have turned our food cycle into efficiency over health. We already have more than enough calories to feed everyone, but we need to start getting better calories. Ready anything by Michael Pollan or Fast Food Nation for a better explanation of what's going on.