H1N1- how distributism can help vaccine production

60 Minutes this Sunday will be reporting on how the CDC has put all it's eggs in one basket, so to speak with H1N1 vaccine production centralized in one small town in Pennsylvania. They knew that production was going to be a problem as early as August 25th, and in fact only ordered 40 million vaccinations for a country of 300 million people.

Why the heck are we counting on ONE small factory in PA to produce enough vaccine for the entire nation? Especially after the first batch came out slow?

There should be a flu vaccine factory in every state in the union- this would reduce shipping cost (flu vaccines need to be refrigerated) AND enable us to ramp up production from 0 to 300 million in a month to keep up with new mutations and pandemics, which are only going to get worse now that Tamiflu is common.

Are Reagan Catholics really Marxists in disguise?

I just had to respond to this Inside Catholic Blog Posting on boomer Catholics. She's absolutely right, as far as it goes. But look at this description of the atheist Marxist agenda:

Communism spreads its errors into new societies with a three-phase movement. First, its covert agents use anti-government and anti-Church propaganda to spread social discontent in the targeted nation or population. The agents aim to promote anti-government revolution, either violent or non-violent, which makes possible their ultimate goal: the complete communist takeover of governmental power.

Does that sound like the modern left to you? It doesn't to me. It sounds like the very Reganites who hide behind small government propaganda (anti-government propaganda) and a disordered form of subsidarity known as individualism (anti-Church propaganda, at least for the traditional church teaching of the communion of saints and the idea we're all in this TOGETHER, not separately- subsidarity must be balanced with solidarity), and in the separation of taxes from services received, promote anti-government revolution.

And before you think I'm leaning on the GOP too much- along comes the New Democrats under Obama and Clinton to finish the revolution by decreeing Wall Street to be party members and all the rest of us to be pond scum, unworthy of their great bailouts and horribly unjust trade progroms.

Well, been kicked off another blog

This time, Inside Catholic, for apparently some people thinking I post too much, dominate the conversation (well, I do, I sharpened my online debating skills long ago in the great Usenet flame wars- is it my problem many people fail to keep up with me?), but get this, the biggest complaint they had against me was how often I quoted from Papal encyclicals and the Magisterium.

For a blog called Inside Catholic, I find that *slightly* ironic.

And another month later: Distributionism and Subsidarity in Taxation

I guess I'm running out of truly crazy ideas that fit. In reality, I've been posting more on other people's blogs.

One of those is Inside Catholic- a spinoff of Crisis Magazine, it's a place to discuss politics and economics and religion from a Catholic point of view. Recently, this post on the Flat Sales Tax got me thinking: what would a truly distributionist American economic system look like?

Well, as I've written before, the first thing we'd need to do is repeal Article I, Section 10 of the US Constitution. Allow states to create and manage local economic systems. This would grant a new level of freedom to individuals and government, and create a big headache for big business! But it would certainly be distributism.

But then, how would we fund the Common Defense and promotion of the General Welfare? Here's my thought- we do it the same way we currently apportion the government. We take the current federal budget, and divide it by the number of House of Representative Congressional Districts. Each state, then, is given the right to figure out the taxes to fill this bill. The neat part? No more IRS, just like the flat taxers want- but more populous states get higher tax bills, and smaller, less populous states get lower tax bills, in proportion to their population.

I am assuming that eventually, there will be evolutionary change and economic winners and losers in any distributionist experiment; states that balance their taxes, trade, and money supply the most successfully will draw population to them, states that fail to balance the money supply, taxes, and trade successfully will lose population. This way, the federal government gets to share in the wealth of the success of distributionism.