How Many Nurses Can Fit…?

We had a disturbing survey call the other night, all about nurses and how many patients each nurse should be caring for at one time. The Massachusetts Nurses Association has obtained enough signatures to place a ballot question for the November, 2018 election.

The gist of the question is whether the Commonwealth of Massachusetts shall create or expand an agency that monitors nursing staffing levels in order to enforce certain ratios of nurses to patients. The mechanism of enforcement would be $25,000 fines for each instance of “failing” to maintain nursing levels that are satisfactory to nurses(!).

Arguments in favor run the gamut of every negative consequence of inadequate nursing levels. Further strictures in the proposed law demand that nurse staffing levels be brought into conformity with the nurse-association-prescribed nurse-patients ratios without reducing other staffing levels as for maintenance or food-service departments. This, naturally, would increase hospital costs per patient-hour and of health care generally. Still, the over-arching deep concern for everything patient-related causes the M. N. A. to forge ahead despite the cost implications.

Some of the nurses’ arguments are valid. Patient outcomes are better with adequate nursing attentiveness. Sometimes this means simple numbers of nurses, but not always. Poor outcomes often result from poor administration or administrative requirements – requirements that sheer numbers won’t correct.

This is essentially a pro-union effort at the ballot box, sponsored by about 25% of nurses, hoping to increase the numbers of nurses (and union dues-paying members), but it threatens exactly what they hope to “improve.” First, if it passes and hospitals are forced to add nurses, the average pay is going to decline. This is not hard to understand. The only alternative to that likely outcome is the threat of nurses’ strikes for higher pay, and this is, like all union initiatives, the fundamental bargain – read: threat.

Neither care quality nor care cost will come in to alignment with patient desires until patients, themselves, return to the position of customer. Customers do some research on what they are going to buy. They are able to check out Consumer Reports, for example, where experts have done the research for them. They can visit different sources for the same products and services before choosing one to buy from.

In truth, people know more about their next car or flat-screen television than they do about their next medical procedure, the likely providers involved or even about their own doctor(!), never mind the amount of nursing attention they might receive. Maybe if patients – or a trusted advisor – knew enough about health providers and institutions to make rational judgments about which provides the best balance of nursing care, cost and outcomes, cost would come down, nurses would not be overworked and patients would be best served.

Asking the government and its politicians to make and enforce more rules about how to make patients well (ostensibly) is not an answer or even a good question. Restore the concept of “customer” to potential patients, in place of “entitled victim.”

As for nurses, the last thing we need is for skilled professionals to be relegated to average “service-unit” status for bargaining purposes, leaving neither room for excellence nor sanctions for failure.

Conservational Conservatism

Real conservatives are also conservationists.  Liberals, of course, will scoff at this, but Prudence tells us that this is a logical relationship.  The nature of true conservancy can illuminate the right thinking of true conservatives.

Those who fight for conservation of nature have drawn political lines mainly along economic – often anti-economic – lines.  The in-group of conservationists tends to view all those who are not as rabid about conservation as they as somewhat backward, perhaps rapacious exploiters who care about only profit… even if it will “destroy” our home planet.  Planetary destruction is a tall order, but humans have been quite industrious about modifying our environments, plural, although the greatest, planet-wide climatological changes have occurred with no human input whatsoever.  Still, our increasing need for energy has changed the lower atmosphere, at least, making humans ever more suspect.

As defined by conservationists, conservatives are all greedy, overweight and driven by profits; very conservative people, however, see such people as enemies of honest capitalism similar to their being enemies of conservation.  Real conservatives are not in favor of unregulated, monopoly capitalism, like that which results from close connections to politicians and their overreaching governance.

Real conservatism is not reactionary, but it does desire to conserve good philosophies and, with them, the best of ethics for organizing and governing our society.  This also means conserving the best of our culture, not plural.  It is, viewed without hate, not all bad.

Some conservationists would sacrifice human civilization to preserve a pristine habitat for every other form of life, or at least, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants wouldn’t be missed, especially if snail-darters would then thrive.  Once enthralled by being smarter and more sensitive than everyone else, rabid conservationists tend to ally with others who are equally so convinced.  Political power follows.  Now, the very overreaching government that makes so-called capitalism an enemy of vast majorities, is seen as the one force needed to assure adherence to their beliefs – whether conservationist, abortionist or racist (anti-white).

True conservatives can discern which of these causes should be opposed and which are worth working with.  We oppose abortion-on-demand and racism of all colors.  We believe in non-wastefulness, non-pollution, and clean environments.  We tend to be religious and we do NOT seek for the government(s) to enforce our beliefs, but to protect them.  We oppose globalized, monopolistic crony-capitalism since it tends toward organized theft of both wealth and sovereignty.  We trust individuals to perfect themselves, yet we insist on firm application of laws and sanctions for wrongdoing… for everyone.

Conservatives believe in balance and in courtesy toward all.  We tend to accept others as good or, at least, right-motivated until proven wrong.  To true conservatives, what someone feels is not nearly as important as what one DOES.  That is, anyone who is willing to ACT like an American, including respect for our laws and for other people, is welcome to live in America.  It’s fairly simple.  Respect for other people includes respect for their environment – everyone’s environment, while enabling economic opportunity and private property rights that make it possible for individuals to be FREE to the greatest degree possible… FROM GOVERNMENT.

The most passionate conservationists are well-advised to be conservatives, as well, and to recognize human nature as individual and not monolithic.  Conservationists seem to have fallen into encouragement of a police state that will enforce conservation as they see it; conservation that pits its desired ends AGAINST people, requiring, therefore, government to force compliance with conservationists’ corner on a part of science.  This ignores other parts of science, particularly that of human nature, yielding a somewhat fascist liberalism that has rendered America a rich-appearing debtor, barely able to afford conservation or even self-defense.

The success of the American experiment will be recognized in the shrinkage of government, not its growth, and in its honesty of education, not its bias.

Racial Fascism

There is an extraordinary dichotomy playing out amidst a mix of misunderstandings, hatreds and pure ignorance across the United States.  It is fueled by the ignorance and connivance of a predatory press as well as the instantaneous sharing of ignorance and hate over the internet.  It is instructive to diagnose how America became so stupid as to threaten its own existence with so much energy.  There are people and institutions worthy of being blamed for their role in the descent to our current condition.

The highest profile is held by president Trump, of course.  He has drawn fire, as it were, from several stripes of Democrats and other leftists of varied antagonisms, toward himself, individually, and toward the United States collectively… and comprehensively.  America- haters love the current circumstance.  Trump is ultra-sensitive to criticism and literally hurts himself to get even.  It is sad that that kind of give-and-take hurts his agenda – which Prudence indicates the nation needs to see enacted.

In his defense, Trump has been attacked with largely meaningless, deliberately misconstrued charges, along with the handful of real criticisms.  The whole process started out making lots of supporters angry, but now the attacks have devolved into calls for impeachment on amorphous, hate-based charges.  These are dangerous to the president and to the country, but the hatred – not political opposition, but hatred – actively encourages more virulent enemies like George Soros and his forces – like Antifa and Black Lives Matter.  They think they’re winning.  What they are winning is ill-defined.

The conflict in Charlottesville, Virginia is widely – and wildly – misunderstood, even after weeks of angst and anguish.  We are supposed to believe that it’s about the offensiveness of statues, as though the history represented by those statues were about to repeat itself with chains and slave auctions, given the pudding-like mentality of white people.  The lessons of history are best to be learned, Prudence instructs, not buried.

But there are certain elements of anti-white fervor who must have fresh targets on a regular basis.  A pudding-like press and equally useless politicians latch on to that pious hatred and feed the demands for removal of “symbols of slavery” as if removing the statue of military genius and anti-slavery southerner, Robert E. Lee, would place a strong brick in the wall against slavery’s breaking out again!  Where are the adults?  Where was education?

The new jack-booted thugs, “Antifa,” really care not a whit about Robert E. Lee, or Stonewall Jackson or even Jefferson Davis.  They are paid, literally, to break heads.  Screaming about anti-fascism while executing fascism better than anyone since 1945 may fire up the pudding-heads in the left-wing media – print and broadcast – but it doesn’t make anything “Antifa” says or does true or honest.  “Black Lives Matter” is nearly as debauched.  They, too, have seized upon a flaming hot button that delivers money and power into their hands – police killings of blacks, some of whom are innocent and whose badged killers deserve jail time.  The deaths of thousands of other blacks in inner cities, mostly drug and gang-related, has no commensurate value.  Making themselves enemies of local police is not helpful, but, sadly, rational to “BLM.”  What is the end-game?

One would think that there might be different judgments directed toward people who are paid to hate, as many of the “Antifa” are – paid, that is, by George Soros-connected “organizations.”  Soros, when not cooperating with real Nazi’s during WW II, has made his disdain for the American experiment quite clear.  He hates the ideas of America.  He hates individual sovereignty.  He pays his thugs not to defend ANY of the purported causes they shout about, but to generate discord.  Even in Charlottesville, slowly being revealed as “staged” in large part, the result that was sought by Soros and other enemies of freedom, has manifested:  widespread belief that many Whites are racists with KKK and, illogically, Neo-Nazi beliefs.

This media-touted “meme” of widespread racism is the ideal “lever” by which anti-freedomists  can and have manipulated public policy (such as removing statues – not out of understanding but out of fear) to change the culture of a nation.  Combined with left-dominated public education that is sympathetic to everything being “wrong” with America, purpose-driven forces opposed to our sovereignty, nationality and freedom are dividing us from our heritage, our history and our future as a free people.

Photos show that fighters for both sides in Charlottsville arrived on the same buses.