jeffery d

Principle #1: Choose, control, and carry your own health insurance.

Portability

Equal Tax Relief

Choice of Providers

Encouraging Personal Savings

Coverage for Pre-Existing Conditions

Principle #2: Let free markets provide the insurance and health care services that people want.

Cross-State Purchasing

Pooling Mechanisms

Medicare Private Contracting

Medicare Reform

Consumer Choice and Competition

Principle #3: Encourage employers to provide a portable health insurance benefit.

Defined Contribution

Principle #4: Assist those who need help through civil society, the free market, and states.

State Innovation

Medicaid Premium Assistance

Medicaid Reforms

Reducing Fraud

Removing Barriers to Care

Reforming Scope-of-Practice and Certificate of Need

Principle #5: Protect the right of conscience and unborn children.

Rights of Conscience

Permanent Prohibition on Taxpayer-Funded Abortion

A New Vision for Health Reform

Obama care moves American health care in the wrong direction. Not only does the law raise health costs rather than lowering them, but it creates new bureaucracies that will erode the doctor–patient relationship.The trillions of dollars in new spending for Obama care will place a massive fiscal burden on future generations of taxpayers. For these reasons and more, Congress should repeal the law in its entirety.

Once this has been done, policymakers should then advance health reforms that move toward patient-centered, market-based health care. Such reforms would promote personal choice and ownership of health insurance; enable the free market to respond to consumer demands; encourage portability of coverage for workers; help civil society, the free markets, and the states to assist those in need; and protect the rights of faith, conscience, and life.

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/10/a...

America recognizes that lawful immigration provides economic and cultural benefits both to America and to lawful immigrants

2 America also recognizes that unlawful immigration presents challenges to America’s ability to protect its borders and preserve its sovereignty.

3 Congress should pursue a measured set of approaches tailored to a wide variety of immigration issues, rather than comprehensive, all-or-nothing, and one-size-fits-all legislation.

4 Congress should not adopt failed policies of the past, such as amnesty, which discourages respect for the law, treats law-breakers better than law-followers, and encourages future unlawful immigration.

5 When Congress implements step-by-step the proper policies, America will move closer to having the economic and cultural benefits and rewards of lawful immigration, without the burdens and challenges of unlawful immigration

In the founding, God was conceived in one of two ways. Christians and Jews believed in the God of the Bible as the author of liberty but also as the author of the moral law by which human beings are guided toward their duties and, ultimately, toward their happiness. Nonbelievers (Washington called them "mere politicians" in his Farewell Address) thought of God merely as a creative principle or force behind the natural order of things.

Both sides agreed that there is a God of nature who endows men with natural rights and assigns them duties under the law of nature. Believers added that the God of nature is also the God of the Bible, while secular thinkers denied that God was anything more than the God of nature. Everyone saw liberty as a "sacred cause."

At least some of the Progressives redefined God as human freedom achieved through the right political organization. Or else God was simply rejected as a myth. For Hegel, whose philosophy strongly influenced the Progressives, "the state is the divine idea as it exists on earth." John Burgess, a prominent Progressive political scientist, wrote that the purpose of the state is the "perfection of humanity, the civilization of the world; the perfect development of the human reason and its attainment to universal command over individualism; the apotheosis of man" (man becoming God). Progressive-Era theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch redefined Christianity as the social gospel of progress.

For the Founders, thinking about government began with the recognition that what man is given by nature -- his capacity for reason and the moral law discovered by reason -- is, in the most important respect, more valuable than anything government can give him. Not that nature provides him with his needs. In fact, the Founders thought that civilization is indispensable for human well-being. Although government can be a threat to liberty, government is also necessary for the security of liberty. As Madison wrote, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." But since men are not angels, without government, human beings would live in "a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger." In the Founders' view, nature does give human beings the most valuable things: their bodies and minds. These are the basis of their talents, which they achieve by cultivating these natural gifts but which would be impossible without those gifts.

For the Founders, then, the individual's existence and freedom in this crucial respect are not a gift of government. They are a gift of God and nature. Government is therefore always and fundamentally in the service of the individual, not the other way around. The purpose of government, then, is to enforce the natural law for the members of the political community by securing the people's natural rights. It does so by preserving their lives and liberties against the violence of others. In the founding, the liberty to be secured by government is not freedom from necessity or poverty. It is freedom from the despotic and predatory domination of some human beings over others.

Government's main duty for the Founders is to secure that freedom -- at home through the making and enforcement of criminal and civil law, abroad through a strong national defense. The protection of life and liberty is achieved through vigorous prosecutions of crime against person and property or through civil suits for recovery of damages, these cases being decided by a jury of one's peers.

The Progressives regarded the Founders' scheme as defective because it took too benign a view of nature. As Dewey remarked, they thought that the individual was ready-made by nature. The Founders' supposed failure to recognize the crucial role of society led the Progressives to disparage the Founders' insistence on limited government. The Progressive goal of politics is freedom, now understood as freedom from the limits imposed by nature and necessity. They rejected the Founders' conception of freedom as useful for self-preservation for the sake of the individual pursuit of happiness. For the Progressives, freedom is redefined as the fulfillment of human capacities, which becomes the primary task of the state.

To this end, Dewey writes, "the state has the responsibility for creating institutions under which individuals can effectively realize the potentialities that are theirs." So although "it is true that social arrangements, laws, institutions are made for man, rather than that man is made for them," these laws and institutions "are not means for obtaining something for individuals, not even happiness. They are means of creating individuals…. Individuality in a social and moral sense is something to be wrought out." "Creating individuals" versus "protecting individuals": this sums up the difference between the Founders' and the Progressives' conception of what government is for.

I just bought my daughter a Ipod shuffle for her 9th birthday. I have no clue how to get it setup. I went by the directions and nothing. It says to go to www.itunes/downloads. Then to connect cable to Ipod shuffle and to a USB 2.0 port on my computer. It says thanks for downloading but I can't do anything. Nothing pops up to setup the Ipod.

How is the founder’s understanding of rights different from contemporary conceptions of rights?