Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, like many nominees, has come under fire for the things she has said.

In defending her judicial philosophy that she would hope that a ‘wise Latina’ would make a better judgment than a white male, Judge Sotomayor pointed to a remark that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor had made: that a wise woman and wise man should be able to come to the same conclusion. Judge Sotomayor, contrasting their respective statements, concluded that Justice O’Connor could not have meant what she said.

Judge Sotomayor also defended these and other of her remarks by claiming that she was ‘misunderstood’.

Let’s review: a justice is required to take the words of another, apply them to a set of facts, and issue a ruling that explains the application of words to facts.

In Judge Sotomayor we have a Supreme Court nominee in whom are combined first, the presumptive ability to discern what a Supreme Court Justice could not have meant by her plain words, and second, the almost unbelievable inability to make herself ‘understood’.

In promoting his ambitious reprise of Hillary Care, President Barack Obama addressed the concerns some Americans have expressed regarding the government panel responsible for deciding what treatment would be granted under government health care.

Obama pointed out that the market system has its own “panel of experts” in the insurance officials who approve payment, and that his “experts” are better. Obama was asked why people should be willing to abandon the market’s experts for government experts, exchanging the devil they know for the devil they don’t know.

According to Obama, the current system utilizes health care dispensers who are governed by the “profit motive,” while government health care dispensers under the government system are governed instead by how to “get the most bang for the health-care buck.”

Despite all the utopian haranguing, this is, it seems, a distinction without a difference.

That is, if market health insurers are seeking a “profit motive” in attempting to serve its customers while keeping costs as low as possible, this seems remarkably similar to Obama’s omniscient, beneficent panel attempting to keep government health care costs as low as possible.

The real difference in the two schemes is something Obama and universal care proponents don’t wish to acknowledge: that the “profit motive” inherently includes the profiteer’s realization that he must also please his customers, or those customers will find another insurer.

Getting “the most for the health-care buck” under Obama-care revolves around the government attempting to keep costs low (so that the ‘savings — read, ‘profit’, can be spent on bridges to nowhere). The government — in contrast with those ‘evil’ profiteers — does not need to concern itself with satisfying its customers, as our experience with the United States Postal Service should confirm.

Do we really want the same people who mangle our magazines and crush our FRAGILE boxes to determine when and how we should receive a proctology exam?

Is good health care a moral good? Sure. Is health insurance the only way to deliver good health care? No. Is government the better option? No. Government only does a few things well, and attempting to be a market player in the delivery of goods and services is not one of them.

>In an article entitled “$100 mill. pulled from Rainy Day Fund”, it is reported that the cash-strapped State of Alabama is delaying sending out tax refund checks because public education is in proration and there is an anticipated shortfall of funds.

WFSA anchorman Bob Howell described the situation aptly in suggesting that taxpayers aren’t getting their refunds yet because education is a higher priority.

Apparently, per the article, “By state law the education system has to be funded before refunds are sent out.”

Let’s review some facts:

· There is a “Rainy Day Fund” for education from which $100 million has been pulled.
· There is apparently much more left in the “Rainy Day Fund.”
· Tax refunds are the money that the State has OVER-COLLECTED from taxpayers.
· OVER-COLLECTED taxes do not belong to the State.

I don’t know about you, but I would suspect that the average taxpayer who is due a “refund” doesn’t have the luxury of a “Rainy Day Fund” from which to operate when money is tight.

By the way, a tax “refund” is no such thing. It is, actually, a “return” of money that never belonged to the State and shouldn’t have been taken out of the taxpayers’ pocket. But Orwellian language manipulation is at work when the document taxpayers send to the government to report how much money they made is referred to as a “tax return”, giving the impression that taxpayers are giving something back to the government, while the government’s return of the taxpayers’ money – which it never should have had – is deemed a “refund”. Go figure.

Conceivably, then, if someone in Alabama state government decides that education had not been properly funded, no taxpayer will receive his “refund.”

There are many indications that public education has taken on a level of importance in our society wholly incommensurate with its actual worth: bloated bureaucracy, teachers’ unions in lock-step with liberal apparatchiks, poor graduation rates, totalitarian control over content. But delayed “refunds” should reveal just how subservient society has become to public education.

Don’t misunderstand. I don’t advocate educational anarchy. But public education is supposed to be a servant of the people. Government is supposed to be a servant of the people. They are not supposed to collude together in thievery against the taxpayer.