RUSH: Let’s go to the phones. I’m gonna get a phone call here in the first hour and we’ll start in Bishop, California, with Wesley.
Wesley, great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you doing today?
RUSH: I’m great. Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Good. I just want to say it’s a real honor for me to be able to be on your show today. It’s always kind of been my dream. (chuckles)
RUSH: Well, I’m fully aware of that. Thank you very much.
CALLER: I’ve been listening to you since I was in diapers. I’m 17 years old, and I’ve been taking your guys’ Hillsdale economics course that you’ve been advertising.
RUSH: Wait a sec. Wait, wait. You are 17?
CALLER: Yes, sir. I’m 17.
RUSH: That’s cool. You sound older than that, so that’s why I sound surprised. That’s cool. That’s great news.
CALLER: Yes. Thank you, sir. I’m homeschooled, and I’m taking your Hillsdale economics course on the website, and I’m really enjoying it. So I just want to say thank you guys for advertising that. I just wanted to mention, I want to share with you something that I learned in our last lesson. Lecture six, Dr. Wolfram was talking about the pencil industry, and he told this story. He said, “The story goes like this. Once upon a time in the government someone was charged in making sure that everybody had enough pencils. So he was put up on Capitol Hill, and they said, ‘All right, you’re in charge of…'”
RUSH: Hold it just a second. Everybody had enough what?
CALLER: Pencils.
RUSH: Pencils. Okay.
CALLER: Yes. It is an interesting story, so just bear with me for a sec. Anyway, so, this person goes up on Capitol Hill, and he was told, “You need to find out every business in the United States and how many pencils they need, and you have to keep them supplied with pencils every single day of the year, and you have to find out that they have the right amount of pencils, and you also have to allocate resources to give everybody these pencils.”
That person couldn’t do it for a single day because obviously there’s however many million people in the United States, and he couldn’t even possibly go around to find out how many businesses need pencils, how many people need pencils and make sure enough pencils are not a shortage of pencils. And he tied that into the Obamacare, how they’re trying to go to a central planner, how it’s not gonna work because there is a huge lack of information of who needs health care, why they need health care, that there’s enough resources of health care —
RUSH: Wesley, let me stop you there because I’ve got a limited amount of time to respond to what you’ve said.
You’ve got a great thing going here. First off, folks, he took the Hillsdale College on-demand, online course, Economics 101, which is free. He signed up, and there’s one lecture a week. There were 10 of them. He’s describing one of the lectures given by Professor Wolfram. Professor Wolfram was illustrating how it would be impossible for the federal government to guarantee that everybody in the country who used pencils had them when they needed ’em in the correct amount every day, was simply too massive a project.
He couldn’t collect all the data. He couldn’t coordinate it. It was an impossible project. The point here that Wesley is making — or is going to be make, I’m sure, that I had to take over here as the highly trained specialist because time is not very much — is that, A, the government will never be able to replace the private sector because it cannot do what the private sector does. Because the private sector works on supply and demand, not central planning based on past reports of what people had, used, want, and need.
The second thing is: If they can’t provide everybody with as simple a little item as a pencil, how in the world are they gonna provide them health care that works for everybody? Wesley, Professor Wolfram was exactly right. Here’s the problem: Obamacare is not designed to work. Obamacare is not designed to make health care cheaper, more affordable, more available.
Obamacare is designed for one reason, and that is to give the government control over people’s health care. Whether they end up getting it or not, it’s the idea that the government now controls people’s health, because that will allow them to control virtually every other aspect of their lives, pure and simple. It isn’t designed to work because your prof said it can’t.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: It never works, folks. Liberalism never works. It doesn’t work for blacks, it doesn’t work for whites, it doesn’t work for the poor, it doesn’t work for anybody. Socialism, liberalism, communism, Obamaism, it never will work. The thing is, it really isn’t designed to. Not with these people.