if you're white.

For what it's worth: from what I've seen and heard over the years, overall the Sacramento cops ain't that bad, either. Not quite as laid-back as "Reno 911", but there are similarities.

I don't hate the players. I just hate some of the games.

I have this recently favorite tv show out of Canada these days, called Trailer Park Boys. The off-the-cuff acting, faux pas that give American censors headaches, and ad-libbing of lines complete with a low budget is both a treat and a diversionary escape from the ever-dire or mindless topics of American programs. One of the funniest parts, to me, is what often seems like the intentional contrast between Canadian and American police forces. The main characters get into well-meaning legal trouble with the police often, but I can never help but look with amazement at the live and let live philosophy of the police, the first names basis with citizens, or the occasional look-the-other-way-for-the-greater-good tactics the police so often display.

Now I know it's only a tv show, but this is what I imagine American police used to be like back in the days of walking the beat 60 or 70 years ago(minus the racism and all the other shortcomings of the day), and when the us vs. them view between police and residents was tempered by the idea that they were all on the same side and members of the communities they patrolled. Any time I've been to Canada, I've noticed both the happy lack of visible in-your-face police presence, and the lack of the macho authoritarian attitude when I do encounter them. It may not be exactly as it is on my comedy program, but I can instantly tell it is far less oppressive, and that the people feel more of a kinship with them instead of fear or hostility.

I understand the US has a far more sordid history of violence and jilted population segments, but I also believe that when law enforcement (just like internal rules enforcement at events) feel to be on your side and not simply out to nail you for something, it tends to make people try harder to get along. Seriously breaking the law becomes something you feel ashamed about, because you've let others down. If Canadian police are socialized, all I am trying to say is that we could probably learn a lot from their approach. Or at least a little.

If you prize freedom over security as much as you claim, then it should logically follow that you have no insurance plan at all.

Consider the conditions of a private medical plan:

you have to forthrightly apprise them of every medical condition that you have, or that is found in your immediate family history;

learning that data, they can do with it what they please, including the options of escalating your rates far above the base for your age group, or even refusing you entirely;

if accepted, in order to receive their benefits, you most often are required to use a physician linked to their health care provider network, even if it means severing a pre-existing relationship with your previously self-chosen family physician;

the decisions on eligibility for compensation for tests or medical procedures is ultimately determined by the private insurance company- not by either yourself or your physician;

you may be subject to a retroactive disqualification of your health care coverage if the private insurance company determines that you had a medical condition that you did not disclose on your eligibility form, even if it has nothing to do with a given treatment bill for a major medical expense (and you won't even get your previously paid premiums back);

if you receive insurance from your employer at a cheap group rate, be advised that 1) those rates are typically around 1/2 to 1/3 what you would pay for equivalent coverage in an individual plan, and 2) those group health benefits are being discontinued by employers in droves, with nearly 20% of employers considering dropping health coverage for their employees- a 5-fold increase over just a year ago;

if you allow so little as a one-day lapse in your payments, you are disqualified, and need to re-apply, most often to find your new rate is higher than your previous one;

I could go on. But I'll stop there.

Does that sound like "freedom" to you? Not to me, it doesn't. It doesn't even sound much like "security."

There are those who would give up freedom for security, and I consider those individuals unwise. Then there are those that force others to give up freedom for their own security, and I consider those individuals self-centered. The question is not whether or not we would be better off with national health care, the question is whether or not those that want national health care have a right to force it on those who do not.

As for the analogy - police (and military) provide us with greater net freedom by protecting us from those who would steal our freedoms from us. If you don't believe this try living "free" in a high-crime neighborhood.

You write with all the tedious pedantry of a neoliberal economist and your itinerary of travels tends to further my suspicions.

If your fatuous Economics 101 were permitted to define "The Public Good" for the rest of us, we could simply dispense with the idea of democracy altogether, could we not? This is the concealed logic behind your bluntly assinine proposition that the entire universe of philisophical discourse, human history and Political Science folds somehow imperceptively into a binary opposition between the crackpot theories of General Pinochet frontman Milton Friedman and who did you say?

The only places where the fascist doctrines of Neoliberal economics you advocate are possible are ultimately in military dictatorships, under marshal law.

Why don't you just come right out and say it... Capitalism would work if we could only we would liberate it from the rule of law and the will of the mob. This "free market" is a mythological beast and you like to defend police power as its corrolary because the application of fear and the threat of brute force are the only way to keep the children from crying out, "the king has no clothes."

We fill prisons so that prices may go free, no?