Glibertarians.com 2017 Archive

Category: Taxes

Civil War II: A Trump Impeachment?

It’s really amusing watching the MSM twist their panties in a wad trying to connect Trump to Russia. They’ve gotten the smallest amount of traction and the chants for Trump’s head have started. Besides the fact that the original Trump to Russia connection is based on innuendo and suggestion, the witch hunt has broadened out into a general search for any connection between Trump and the entire nation of Russia. Like a brain damaged chihuahua, the media chants “Russia! Russia! Russia!” hoping beyond hope that they will scare the GOP and Trump into submission. “We can finally control the renegade!” they think, as they piss away the last of their credibility.

Although people joke about “alternative facts,” it’s not a joke. There are two prevailing agendas across the country: 1) Trump is LITERALLY HITLER and A RUSSIAN MOLE AT THE SAME TIME!!! 2) Trump is DADDY and GOD-KING OF KEKISTAN, VANQUISHER OF THE SJWs and CUCKS!!! The left has their educational and media empire churning out outrage by the gallon. The right has their independent media matching the outrage of the left.

Antifa is smashing windows and folks like Based Stickman (who the fuck is Based Stickman and why is he called that??) are bashing Antifa heads in. People are primed to believe that the violence will do nothing but escalate.

I tend to be quite skeptical of claims that the next civil war is about to start. Like the Rapture, many people have predicted a civil war, only to be laughably wrong.

However, let’s travel through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of derp. A journey into a scandalous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead – your next stop, the Derplight Zone!

This is Donald. Donald is a normal man, somewhat spoiled, somewhat outspoken. Donald has been a real estate mogul for the last few decades, accumulating a vast amount of wealth and notoriety. Recently, Donald was chosen to be the sacrificial lamb of the GOP to allow Hillary Clinton to ascend to her rightful place as ~~Grand Master of the Lizard People~~ The First Female President of the United States. However, something went wrong. Horribly wrong. Donald had an energy that transfixed the public, and nobody could explain it. Donald became President.

Okay, I can’t keep the Twilight Zone schtick up, but let’s continue to investigate why this latest push to impeach could lead to a civil war. There is one big reason why: Trump’s election was an unexpected boon to a class of people that have felt trod over by the political elites for decades. People most fiercely defend unexpected gains, especially when it is threatened by their enemy. The Alt-Right has ascended and has labeled Trump as their knight in shining armor, here to wipe out the scourge of establishment politics and social justice. The Fascist Left has also ascended, using Hitlerian tactics while decrying Trump as literally Hitler. While an escalation of rhetoric isn’t a sure sign of war, it is a prerequisite.

The desperation seen on both sides is significantly more concerning. Antifa Nazis have normalized mob violence and intimidation as protest tactics, and Alt-Righters have responded in kind. This powder keg is gonna blow at some point, and we’re gonna get another Kent State. The question then becomes what happens in response to the deaths of 5 or 10 rioters (of either side). Everything in my mind and heart tells me that a crisis like that would boil up for a few weeks and slowly subside. However, what if it didn’t? What if it boiled up into a tempest?

I think it’s unlikely but possible that this could happen. Either Antifa is gonna beat some people to death, or the Alt-Righters are going to start shooting when Antifa gets violent in the wrong town. This could escalate to people seeking out the melee to contribute, which could escalate to large-scale violence between groups of people. . . also known as a battle. From there, things could snowball into nationwide insurrection.

Obviously, I find this quite improbable, but the increasing violence and radical rhetoric inspire some unlikely thoughts.

May 18, 2017
Completely Unwarranted Attack on the Single Land Tax (Land Value Tax) #2

We’ve had some really good back and forth in the prior articles about the SLT/LVT, so I’m gonna poke the hornet’s next one more time.

Rent, so much rent!!!

This time I’m taking aim at the claim from SLTers (and other economists) that a single land tax/land value tax is the “least bad” because it incurs no “deadweight loss.”

MASSIVE DISCLAIMER: I’m not an economist. My only formal exposure to economics was a AP micro in high school and 2 weeks of macro in college before I dropped the class. I’m prepared for somebody with knowledge in this subject matter to refute any and every premise/assertion/conclusion I make.

First, let’s define deadweight loss. In a broad sense, deadweight loss is a measure of certain inefficiencies caused by government intervention in a market. Focusing specifically on taxes, deadweight loss represents the benefit that would’ve been had by consumers in the perfect market that is foregone in the distorted market.

As a simple example, let’s say the perfect market would sell monocles for $1, and the government imposes a $3 luxury tax on monocles, raising their total cost to $4/monocle. There are a lot of people who would buy a monocle at $1, and a few glibertarians who would buy a monocle even at $4. Deadweight loss represents the economic benefit that the glibertarians who bought $4 monocles would have otherwise had with the $3 they ended up paying in tax.

Using a static model, it looks like this, pictographically:

Using this model, SLTers say that the SLT has no deadweight loss because there is a fixed supply of land (a vertical supply curve). You usually see a graph like this from them:

However, let’s think about what this means for a moment. It means that no matter the tax on the value of the land, the consumer does not lose economic benefit. This strikes me as incorrect. In fact, upon examining the above graph, it seems a bit… off. After looking at it for a bit, it appears that the demand curve has been moved in the no deadweight loss graph. It’s showing the equilibrium for a distorted market, not for a theoretical perfect market like in the top graph. Taking that into account here’s what the graph should look like (IMO):

Somebody please explain to me what I’m doing wrong here. When I, a lay person, am coming to a different conclusion than the likes of Milton Friedman, I’m worried that I’m missing something very simple.

However, just to hedge my argument a little bit, I think we need to re-examine this asymptotic economic model. Land is a somewhat unique object in that it cannot be produced. When looking at a supply curve, we’re more focused on production. Thinking about it for a moment, it seems really odd to say that, should the demand for land drop precipitously, land could go to at-or-near zero price. See, what I intuit is that some land isn’t marketable at a certain price. I think the vertical line is too simplistic and results in “technically right” answers that don’t reflect reality. The “not for sale” aspect isn’t being taken into account. Therefore, in adjusting the supply curve to reflect the marketable supply of land rather than the total supply, we get a graph that looks a bit more like the first one in this article:

March 24, 2017
In Defense of the Single Land Tax

Part 1: An Appeal to Authority

There’s a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise … and yet we need taxes. We have to recognize that we must not hope for a Utopia that is unattainable. I would like to see a great deal less government activity than we have now, but I do not believe that we can have a situation in which we don’t need government at all. We do need to provide for certain essential government functions — the national defense function, the police function, preserving law and order, maintaining a judiciary. So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago.

– Milton Friedman

Believe it or not, urban economics models actually do suggest that Georgist taxation would be the right approach at least to finance city growth. But I would just say: I don’t think you can raise nearly enough money to run a modern welfare state by taxing land

– Paul Krugman

Adam Smith, ya heathens.

Ground-rents seem, in this respect, a more proper subject of peculiar taxation than even the ordinary rent of land. The ordinary rent of land is, in many cases, owing partly at least to the attention and good management of the landlord. A very heavy tax might discourage too, much this attention and good management. Ground-rents, so far as they exceed the ordinary rent of land, are altogether owing to the good government of the sovereign, which, by protecting the industry either of the whole people, or of the inhabitants of some particular place, enables them to pay so much more than its real value for the ground which they build their houses upon; or to make to its owner so much more than compensation for the loss which he might sustain by this use of it. Nothing can be more reasonable than that a fund which owes its existence to the good government of the state should be taxed peculiarly, or should contribute something more than the greater part of other funds, towards the support of that government.

– Adam Smith

Pure land rent is in the nature of a ‘surplus’ which can be taxed heavily without distorting production incentives or efficiency. A land value tax can be called ‘the useful tax on measured land surplus’.

– Paul Samuelson

[T]axing economic rent has become the bête noir of neoliberal globalism. It is what property owners and rentiers fear most of all, as land, subsoil resources and natural monopolies far exceed industrial capital in magnitude. What appears in the statistics at first glance as “profit” turns out upon examination to be Ricardian or “economic” rent.

– Michael Hudson

Rent is that portion of the produce of the earth which is paid to the landlord for the use of the original and indestructible powers of the soil.

– David Ricardo

________

My thoughts (such as they are) will start with part 2, but a teaser with what some economists you might have heard of think seemed like a good place to start. Let the arguments begin!

March 12, 2017
Soak the Rich?

PJ O’Rourke said the problem with trying to soak the rich is that they can afford towels.

Exactly so. Let’s look at two examples. In 1990, in a fit of populism, the US passed a special tax on the purchase of yachts. These were the results:

1) The Government collected very little revenue from the tax.

2) The people who wanted yachts bought them anyway, although usually overseas to avoid the tax.

3) Many US yacht companies went bankrupt and were forced to lay off thousands of skilled craftsmen and other workers with good-paying jobs.

In attempting to punish the wealthy, the Government ended up screwing the middle class instead. This sort of backfire happens fairly frequently.

Lawmakers in Maryland, oblivious to what happened with the yacht tax, decided to put a special tax on millionaires in 2008. It was supposed to bring in an extra $106 million. Instead, the state lost $257 million.

Hey, only a person with the tiniest amount of common sense could have predicted that rich people would leave in order to avoid paying tens of thousands in taxes.

I’m going to write this in all caps because it needs to be:
HIGHER TAX RATES NEVER LEAD TO HIGHER REVENUES!

Never had, never will, never, ever, ever.

One would hope that such examples would illustrate the futile and counterproductive nature of luxury taxes. Alas, every leading progressive politician from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren rails against the rich. Amusingly enough, the last major attempt at soaking the rich, the Foreign Tax Account Compliance Act, was introduced by Democrat Charlie Rangel, who was censured for owing tens of thousands in back taxes for income he received from rent on overseas property.

He is so clueless he sponsored a law criminalizing the very thing he had been doing. That is truly a special kind of stupid.

But even stupider than that is trying to tax people who know the law, have a lot to lose, and are able to easily evade it.

March 11, 2017
Fair Share

Stick it to the fat cats, man.

Winston Churchill said that a nation that tries to tax itself into prosperity is like a man trying to fly by standing in a bucket and pulling the handle. These sort of statements show why he never gained a reputation for wit and remained a minor British politician.

Wealth is like a pie and everyone deserves a slice. Right now, a few rich people get most of it and everyone else gets what’s left. Some only get crumbs. The pie needs to be sliced more fairly. There is only so much money out there, so no one can get richer unless someone else gets poorer. This is why our bank accounts get smaller anytime someone wins the lottery. Right-wing nut jobs will tell you that poverty is caused by poor decisions and bad luck, but the truth is it is rich people who push down the poor. Life is better in countries like China and Cuba where the government takes control. That way the common people, not the rich, are in charge. Or just look at Zimbabwe, Africa’s most prosperous country. There, the government went even further. It printed lots of money and gave it to the poor, and everyone became rich because money is the same as wealth.

Taxing the rich is good for everybody. That’s why the most prosperous period in US history was the 1930s when the top tax rate was 77%. This why the period of FDR’s presidency is called The Great Prosperity. If the government needs more money, it should just raise taxes. The rich people will grumble, but they will pay up because rich people never, ever try to avoid paying taxes by earning less or hiding their money overseas. Also, every time the government raises taxes, the extra money is used to pay down the debt, which reduces the amount of money the government needs to create. This is why everything is cheaper now than 100 years ago and why old people always talk about how a dollar used to be worth a lot less.

Anyone who disagrees just doesn’t understand economics.

March 9, 2017
Property Taxes are the Single Worst Form of Taxation Ever Devised by Man

Sorry, we’ll just rent it to you and increase the monthly payment on an annual basis.

I could take a few different paths to back up my claim that property taxes are the most evil form of taxes, but I’ll stick with the angry rant. There is no topic that gets me hotter under the collar than property taxes, and I’m flummoxed when so-called libertarians are pro-property taxes. I’m not big into purity tests for libertarians, but I may just make an exception for the Georgists.

Instead of doing a comparative analysis of different types of taxes, I’m going to explain why land is no different than any other sort of personal property in the realm of justifying taxation, and I’m also going to explain why land is different from other property in the realm of personal liberty. Perhaps if I can be persuasive in showing that there is no good reason to single out real property for a possession tax and there is plenty of good reason to single out real property for protection from government, I can make a decent case for deep-sixing property taxes.

The Marxist Fallacy of Labor as Value

Cutting to the chase, the single most glaring flaw of Georgism is that it’s predicated on the labor theory of value. It ignores the value of capital, the value of ingenuity with regard to capital, and the value of taking on risk. In a simplistic Georgist view, we can somehow separate the value obtained through labor from the value inherent in a product. See, to the Georgist, sand is sand, and it’s owned by the community. If you bag it up and sell it, you’re only entitled to be compensated for the service of bagging it. If you melt it into glass, we somehow have to separate out the value of the sand from the value of the glass, and the value of the sand goes to the government to be used to the benefit of the community. Of course, like any other crypto-communist solution, the Georgist government is going to have to appoint omniscient superhumans to staff the boards and councils used to determine exactly how much of the $100 for the glass pane is for the communal sand and how much is for the transformation to glass. Nevermind the fact that the guy buying the pane of glass wouldn’t have even paid a penny for the untransformed sand. You know, because he needs a pane of glass, not a sandbox. Nevermind, also, the next-door neighbor who wouldn’t pay a penny for the pane of glass, but would pay $20 for the untransformed sand.

Tearing this down to its most basic, Georgist economics suffers from the same misconception as socialism, that there is a “true price” for a good, and that the “true price” reflects some “true input value” of capital and some “true transformative value” of the labor put into the capital.

Can’t Quite Describe It

Much like the ubiquitous water weenie, it’s near impossible to grab hold of the difference between land and land-derived goods in the Georgist philosophy. What makes land community owned but my coffee table mine? This is where the stupidity of the property tax shines through. See, if the coffee table is 100% mine, then I had to have, at some point, paid the community for the portion of natural resources (trees) that were used to build my table. Assuming that a sales tax was this theoretical payment, it still makes no sense that I must pay a yearly remittance on my land. The TOP MEN have decreed that 6% of my table was community owned, and I paid 6% tax to purchase the table. However, property tax is infinite taxation. It is countably infinite, but it is infinite nonetheless. If I were to own the land forever, I would pay property taxes forever. If it worked like the table, a property owner would be allowed to pay a one-time fee to the community for the value of the underlying natural resources (standard “there’s no such thing as true value” disclaimers apply), and then own the property sans encumbrance.

The fact that property tax is infinite taxation leads to one of two conclusions. Either 1) natural resources are infinitely valuable and labor sullies that infinite value (a premise that can be dismissed without discussion); or 2) something magical happens when you transform natural resources that makes them no longer property of the community. Even if we were to accept the second premise, it still does not explain why improved land is still subject to property tax. Like the water weenie, any coherent classification of what is subject to property tax seems to slip through our hands.

Property Ownership as Deprivation of the Community’s Right

The single most unconvincing portion of Georgism is this pervasive hostility to private ownership of natural resources. This concept that the “community” owns the land and all value inherent therein. This neo-feudalist idea that the modern Crown grants the modern peasant a tenancy on the land to make public good come from the land is antiquated and hostile to natural rights theory. It amazes me to see so many otherwise brilliant libertarian thinkers fall hook, line, and sinker for this magical thinking that bestows upon the government special rights and privileges made up wholecloth, rather than granted from its constituents. Basic application of the NAP says that 5 guys with guns and badges can’t do anything that 5 guys with guns and torches can’t do. Similarly, the “community” (or society or the government or whatever name we give a collection of people) does not have a claim to the property unless members of the community, in the aggregate, have at least that same claim to the property. If no other person has a legitimate claim to the property, then who could? God? Gaia? The government is ill equipped to adjudicate ownership conflicts between man and God (much good it would do, anyway).

I have found no convincing philosophical argument establishing a communal right to land. In fact, most Georgists seem to shift to a more utilitarian mode of argumentation when this comes up.

Property Taxes: the Original Penaltax

I see that my rant is running long and getting incoherent, so I’ll quickly wrap it up. Property taxes are a tax on inaction, much like the O-care penaltax. Broadening that out, if government were truly a product of a Social Contract, and that contract were to be said, with a straight face, to be voluntary, there would need to be some course of action able to be taken to openly reject said Social Contract. No action is more clearly a refutation of society and the Social Contract than hermitage, and the modern equivalent: homesteading. A self-confinement to one’s dwelling, self-sufficiency, nearly non-existent use of the community assets. One’s dwelling is their retreat from the “community.” Furthermore, it is a mandatory part of human existence. People can exist without incomes, without commerce, without vices. However, even the homeless have a cardboard box and a sleeping bag. To tax one’s dwelling is to reach into that last corner of their life untouched by the “community” and say “we still own you, even when you try to get away.”

Appeals to fairness be damned. Ones right to property ownership is not subject to some balancing test against the desires of the community. Either land can be owned outright, or we are slaves captured by a do-gooding master.

Sorry for the sloppy article. I may address property taxes as payment for community services in the comments, but needless to say, I think it is just petty rationalization. Selling one’s soul to the Devil isn’t less Hellish just because they got a few trinkets in return.

March 7, 2017
Do you really think we are going to pay for it?

Hold on, Mom. I’ll be there as fast as I can.

It has been said that the Y generation is the most selfish generation there ever was. The “Selfie” generation. Yet, this is one generation that is growing up to face one of the most burdensome public debt in history.

A few years ago, after she watched some sad sob story on some Canadian Bs Channel, my mother (boomer born in the 50’s) complained to me that old people were left alone and that none of their many children ever came to see them in their old people’s home. Now I do love my mom very much (she can still drain the life out of you with her first world problems), but yet my first thought was “Well… maybe they deserved it. Maybe they screwed up their children so bad that those children don’t care about them anymore.”

I kind of had the same thought yesterday when I watched this clip from Molyneux.

He makes references about Y generations kids still living in their parent’s basement, and that the reason they are stuck in their parents’s basement is because their parents had the good life while shoveling public debt down to their kids. Now their kids are stuck with the bill and can’t afford a basement by themselves anymore.

It led me to go back to my days working in finance and check how was the dear Regime des Rentes du Quebec going. (Quebec Social Security fund if you’d prefer).

Sad to see. I’m pretty sure it’s the same for all Social Security types of regimes around the Western World. Those Social Security schemes are going dry as we speak.

Denouncing this as a Ponzi Scheme is no news to any of the people hanging around here. I am well aware that you won’t need any new fainting couches.

But, knowing all we know about the snowflake generation, do the boomers still think that the Y generation, their kids, that always bring the tab to them, won’t bring the tab to them once the funds run off? Do you really think the Y are going to pay for it? The X might, but if the Y won’t, no one else will. What will you do then, at 80?

Now it’s the thing that makes me wonder the most about all the public debt accumulation. The boomers seem to think the younger generations will subsidize their lifestyle forever. I’m just a late X, early Y, and I have agreed in my life to play the card I was dealt with, but I can tell you one thing, I don’t think the Y will.

February 23, 2017
Tuesday Morning Link Fun

WARNING! STATISTS APPROACHING!

This will work out just fine, I am quite sure.

Bill Gates continues to prove he should stick to software.

DRONEZ!

Is Sweden burning?

Now go forth and do libertarian things!

February 21, 2017
Medical Mondays – “The Meaning of Fear…” (Part 1 of 2)

The thyroid. Parathyroid. Bilateral axillary. Breasts and the areolas. Almost the entirety of the abdomen – stomach, liver, spleen, intestines, and pancreas. Rectus & tranversus abdominis. External & internal obliques. Linea alba & umbilicus. Inguine. Rectum & anus. All of these within my domain and scope of practice. I am a general surgeon, FACS; qualified in bariatrics, robot assisted and minimally invasive surgery (MIS), and primary care with emphasis on underserved rural communities. I have also been on-call for ER surgical, and served as alternate house physician for a large, privately run, Independent & Assisted Living/Skilled Nursing retirement facility. I have practiced medicine for almost 17 years, including surgical residency. With the exceptions of two teenaged food service jobs and one (mercifully brief) stint as a rental car call center rep (“Try Harder”? Whatta crock!); medicine is what I know.

The uterus. Cervix. Fallopian tubes. Ovaries. Babies, intra and post partum. Colpus, internal and external. The kidneys. Ureters. Bladder. Testes. Urethra. My wife is also a physician; her scope of practice is just as vast, yet in very different areas. She is a dual specialised medical surgeon, trained and served at the behest of state and private medical agencies. She has been sent to many places in Eastern Europe and Asia, including cities in her ancestrally native Ukraine, Belarus, Russia (she was born in Kamchatka in Russia), and Chechnya, for medical missions (some of them in declared zones of conflict), and has practiced for a little over 13 years. Her childhood dream was to be a professional ballerina to see the world, and has worked entirely in the medical field. She was also the captain of her chess team during her medical training, and was a champion level competitor (a rather sore winner, she is; and, an exceptionally sore loser, to boot). Her father, a high ranking military officer, specifically encouraged her to study medicine as a way to serve her country without military enlistment.

The job of a physician is very simple: To diagnose and treat disease. Simple, yet so very complex. Made even more complex by the very people we strive to help, and often worsened by those ostensibly charged to help them on their behalf, moreso those in the public sector, but the private sector can be just as frustrating. What we hope to accomplish in this series is to pull back the curtain and give you an idea of what we do and our respective points of view with regard to practice and overall ethos that informs our respective approaches to care.

For example, I am of the firm belief that medical care is not an inherent, plenary, human right. Period. Full Stop. End of Story. I own my skills totally, and determine who and who does not receive them. This is, of course, subject to contract at the pleasure of an employer and/or third party payer, though I will inform them upfront that there are certain non-negotiable lines that simply won’t be crossed.

My wife, who for now shall be referred to as Zhena Groovova (Жена Грувова – literally, “wife of Groovus”), her views were and are informed by the fact she has witnessed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, The Orange Revolution in 1991 (Ukraine’s Independence), and, most recently, The Maidan Revolution and subsequent Donbass Invasion in 2014 (we had the poor fortune to witness that one firsthand in Donetsk, and will most likely include medical experiences from that time). She received almost all her training in Ukraine post-independence, as when it was part of the Soviet Union, the job of the country was to make planes and tanks, grow wheat, and educate doctors and train nurses (Soviet Command Economy). She believes that basic medical care access is an inherent, plenary, human right, though the physician determines the limits of his or her labour by right of education and station.

Suffice it to say, we do believe that, regardless of system, payment scheme, and even patient demands, we own our education and skills – there are ethical and personal lines we simply will not cross. Many of our anecdotes and reflections will stem directly from these competing philosophies.

That said, the types of things we’ll cover in Medical Mondays and Супер Среда (Super Wednesdays) are:

1. The lighter things, such as humorous patient anecdotes, medical education bloopers and blunders, and intra-office pranks (Of which there are legion; ever put SuperGlue on the Med Students’ pens and clipboards, or saran wrap the Charge Nurse’s desk?);

2. “A Day in The Life,” and other fly on the wall vignettes, providing answers to the oft wondered, “Why is everything taking so long,” “Do you ever go to the bathroom,” “With all the gross stuff you see, how do you even have a sex life?” “Are your kids your personal lab rats?” “How do you get along with other doctors?” “How much sex and sleaze goes on in a hospital?”;

3. More contemporary issues with regard to medical freedom, such as: records privacy in the digital age, licensure, billing, Charity Care, the roles of rising adjuncts like ARNPs, PAs, and Allied Health (like respiratory therapists, pharmacists, medical technologists, and paramedics/EMS), scope of practice, continuity of care, tele-medicine, robotics and autonomous bots, regulations, DNA and heredity, charting and dictation, “know-it-all-WebMD patients,” and other unique stressors for us that patients don’t ever see, and so much more from the doctor’s perspective;

4. The much more serious side of medicine, such as how we deal with: patient deaths; stillborn births; preemies; birth defects; performing a surgical abortion; going to jail for freedom of conscience and religion; assessing possible sexual assault & completing a rape kit; industry drug abuse; being sued; the worst and most gruesome ER cases; war injuries, crimes, and pathologies; when to remove, and removal of, life support; attending patient’s funerals; having the Jonathan Kent/”Superman” moment (“All these powers, why couldn’t we save them?”) and other extremely emotionally draining, personally destructive, and unpleasant aspects of medicine, where no one asks what we feel or think, how it affects us and our psyches, or has never even given it a first thought, forget a second one. “Prick us, do we not bleed”?

5) Solutions to the current medical care delivery woes, and how both technology and human conditions can improve it; conversely, addressing legal liability costs and concerns in this almost literal, Post Mendelian, “Brave New World.”

What we don’t want is some run of the mill malady/cure column extolling the virtues of folk remedies (though many work, actually), nor throwing abstracts in your face a la Pub Med Ninjas. The InnerToobz is already bursting at the seams with advice columns; if you are hoping for a column on which is better, Vick’s Vap-o-Rub v. Lamisil, for toe fungus, BORING! (FTR, Vick’s is cheaper, no side effects, OTC, and takes not much longer than Lamisil. Wash and dry your feet, apply Vick’s to the cuticle for about three weeks. Trim nails as needed. Works wonders for thick, cracking toenails, too. OK, we may throw in a few tips…)

The other thing we ask: Be respectful to us. We hope many of you will like us, some find us an absolute scream, know others will find us about the level of watching paint dry, know some will (and do already) hate us, and know most hate the systems as they are. If we see such comments such as, “PERMISSION SLIP!”, “CARTEL!”, “GUILD MAN!”, and other stuff we already know grinds your gears, we’re out, and we will take down our posts and comments with them.

OMWC and SP, and The Founders here, gave us this forum out of the goodness of their hearts to entertain and educate, not be punching bags and pinatas. We get enough legit abuse to last many lifetimes over. We are here for you, but won’t hesitate for a second to keep you at arm’s length – the time we spend with you, is the time we could be spending treating paying patients, making filthy doctor lucre, and spending time with our three children…

Our greatest fear, at this moment, is failing to meet your expectations.

*Hangs Up “Out” Shingles*

Be Well.

February 20, 2017