McHenry County Board...hint..vote for us

The timing is very interesting. In today's Northwest Herald we are being told about how the County Board is maybe going to consider reducing or holding the real estate taxes at the current level for the 2012 tax year. Well that is a year late a couple of thousand dollars too late. Remember that at election time and vote them all out...bye-bye.

Memorial Day...2012

I was born in September 1943; the war in Europe and the Pacific was still going on and as a newborn I was sparred the horror of the carnage and death that war brings. My father, Ted and my uncle John both served in the south pacific. My father in the Navy on a LST (landing ship transport) and my uncle with the Marines. Thank God both returned home after the war ended without any physical injuries. Neither of them talked much about the war but carried their experiences within them. Both, now, have passed away but are not forgotten. My wife, a year younger than I, lost an uncle who was in the Army fighting in the south pacific...where his final resting place is no one knows...his name was Lawrence (Larry) Spillan, a young man just starting his life. Where his life may have taken him, if he had survived, no one knows.

Many years latter I served in the Navy as a physician and orthopedic surgeon; this was for several years during the Viet Nam War. During this period I was married to Kristina (Tina) and we had four children. I never was sent in "harms way' but I did see the carnage and at times the death that war brings. I cared for the wounded young marines and navy personnel who were returned to the States via Medivac flights. I don't remember names but remember the many devastated bodies and lives that would be forever changed. These are some of the memories that I carry today.

Thank you to all who served our country, in the past, and to all currently serving in any capacity today. God bless the United States of American and all the individuals who have protected her over the decades.

Has Congress Failed Us

Has the Congress and the Obama Administration failed us and brought us to a scenario described by F. A. Hayek in Chapter 5, page 107, paragraph 2 of The Road to Serfdom.

The delegation of particular technical tasks to separate bodies, while a regular feature, is yet only the first step in the process whereby a democracy which embarks on planning progressively relinquishes its powers. The expedient of delegation cannot really remove the causes which make all the advocates of comprehensive planning so impatient with the impotence of democracy. The delegation of particular powers to separate agencies creates a new obstacle to the achievement of a single coordinated plan. Even if, by this expedient, a democracy should succeed in planning every sector of economic activity, it would still have to face the problem of integrating these separate plans into a unitary whole. Many separate plans do not make a planned whole - in fact, as the planners ought to be first to admit, they may be worse than no plan."

Advice to Pres. Obama...from the past

"The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted to no council and senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it." - Adam Smith

From (Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, vol. 1 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, op. cit., book 4, chapter 2, p. 456. - Ed.)