The McKinney Pool Party Fracas — The rest of the story (Guest blog)

A guest blog by Daniel Artz

Where is Paul Harvey when we REALLY need an honest journalist to tell "the rest of the story?" Nowhere to be found among modern "journalists!"

I keep reading the stories and viewing the videos of the McKinney Pool Party Fracas that is threatening to become the North Texas version of Ferguson or Baltimore, with Black teens now staging protests both at the residential subdivision where the fighting/mob scene started, and at the McKinney Police Department, calling for the firing (or worse) of the police officer shown on video kneeling on the back of a Black teenage girl in order to subdue her.

BUT there are almost NO media sources which tell the whole story; it is in their interest to keep feeding the race frenzy.

Here is a brief synopsis of the genesis of the event. This all happened at Craig Ranch, a majority white but broadly integrated neighborhood in McKinney — there are hundreds of Black residents of Craig Ranch, including Tatyana Rhodes, a 20-year old self-styled "Party Organizer" who lives with her mother at Craig Ranch. Craig Ranch has a public park adjacent to a private pool club which is owned and operated by the Home Owners' Association. While the Park is open to the public, the private pool area is NOT — it is open to residents of the neighborhood, and admission is by ID only. Residents may arrange with the HOA to host a private pool party, limited to 20 guests, but may NOT exclude residents from the pool area, and must pay a fee and make advance arrangements to host such a pool party.

Several days, maybe a week or more, before June 5, Tatyana Rhodes was advertising through Social Media — on Facebook, on Twitter, through Instagram — a "Cookout and Pool Party" at the public park in Craig Ranch. She had hired a DJ, arranged for tables, power for the Sound System, etc., BUT SHE MADE NO ARRANGEMENTS WITH THE HOA FOR ANY POOL PARTY AT THE PRIVATE POOL AREA.

The DJ set up and started playing in the mid-afternoon, and a large crowd of teens, mostly Black, many residents of Craig Ranch but also many non-residents from outside the neighborhood, showed up for the party; the estimates I have seen are 200 or more. At the same time, there were residents of Craig Ranch, including families with children, using the pool club. There were complaints about the music — loud, mostly Rap and Hip-Hop, many songs with very vulgar lyrics (a lot of F-bombs) that bothered many of the parents who had taken their children for a swim. When the party-goers who were not residents of Craig Ranch were denied entry to the pool, many started climbing over the chain link fence to get into the pool. A private security guard at the pool club tried to stop several, and was assaulted by a group of pool-area trespassers. More and more party-goers invaded the private pool area, forcing out residents who were rightfully in the pool area, assaulting a white Craig Ranch mother who was at the pool with her 3 children, and the police were called.

One officer showed up, the party crowd was unruly and refused to comply with police demands to leave the pool area. Back up was requested, and eventually nine officers in total showed up. There were fights between party-goers and local residents, a large crowd of unruly teens (mostly Black), and most were refusing to comply with police demands. That 10-second video of the police officer kneeling on the back of that Black teen-aged girl does NOT show what happened beforehand, when the girl was defying police demands, confronting the police, shouting epithets, etc., nor does it show how she responded with violence and assaulting the officer when the policeman tried less intrusive methods of restraining her.

This is not a race thing — it's a culture thing. The culture of the ghetto, where loud vulgar language is the accepted method of communication, where respect for property and the rights of others is considered "uncool," where physical assault is an acceptable response for any real or imagined offense, and where the only imperative is to do what you want, regardless of its impact on others. So now it's going to turn into a racial demand for "justice." Well, real justice would mean arresting every last one of the teens who thought it was a good idea to jump the fence into a private pool area they had no right to be in and charge them with criminal trespass. Real justice would mean the HOA sues Tatyana Rhodes for making an offer of a "Pool Party" when she had no right to open up the pool to party-goers, and putting a lien on her mother's house in Craig Ranch for the penalties assessed. Real justice would involve charging that little teen-aged brat who had to be subdued by the police with resisting arrest and assault of a police officer. Then lock all of the agitators and rioters up for a long, long time. But I'm pretty sure that is NOT what the current protestors believe is "justice."

Reasoned debate is impossible without a common understanding of terms. So long as the race baiters think that "justice" means that a raucous group of ill-mannered and bad-tempered teens should be allowed to run free, trampling on the rights of others, there will be a great many people opposing that particular brand of "justice."

Daniel Artz resides in Sunnyvale, Texas.

Guest blog: Does single payer health care work? No!

A guest blog by Daniel Artz

For those of who think that Single Payer is the solution to America's health care system, here is how Government run single payer health care works. Surprise — it DOESN'T!

Fox News: New VA scandals call into question agency's ability to clean house

Bruce’s response: So you must support Obamacare, which is specifically not single payer.

Daniel: Obamacare may not be the stupidest thing Congress has ever done, but it certainly makes the top ten. And yes, I agree that the American health care system was fundamentally broken BEFORE Obamacare was enacted, but Congress never spent one millisecond on the all important question of WHY. Instead, it simply assumed that the problems with health care were the result of "market failure."

But America hasn't had anything resembling a free market in health care in more than 60 years. It took more than 6 decades of misguided and ill-advised government policy to make health care the wreck that it was, and there is a LOT of blame to go around. The States bear at least part of the blame, with intrusive regulations of the insurance industry and barriers to entry for medical professionals designed and enforced by — who else — medical professionals. Then there are barriers to entry for hospitals and clinics with "certificate of public necessity" requirements and regulations that require unnecessary capital investments that make small hospitals uneconomic.

But the Federal Government created the lion's share of the problems, first when it decided to make employer-paid health insurance a tax-free benefit. This created some very adverse incentives for overuse of medical services. Then we added Medicare and Medicaid, currently accounting for nearly 40% of all demand for medical care, where reimbursements are set not based on demand and supply, but on legislative fiat. And every time Congress discovered that Medicare and Medicaid were going well over budget, it decided to "fix" the problem by reducing reimbursement rates, completely oblivious to the impact that would have on private-payor pricing.

By 2010, reimbursement rates for both Medicare and Medicaid were less than 80% cost of service, meaning that health care providers could ONLY stay solvent by either fraudulently billing in the Government programs, or jacking up pricing way above cost-of-service rates for private payors. Most medical care providers did both.

There were a LOT of other really stupid government policies that helped drive health care costs sky-high, including the bureaucratic cesspool that the FDA has become, driving costs of pharmaceutical products through the roof, and the completely idiotic Medicare Part D that Bush pushed through Congress (President Barack Obama is an incompetent boob, but George W. Bush was no shining light either). So, the health care system was a mess before Obamacare, but the mess was created NOT by "market failure,” but rather by Government failure.

So, in an ill-advised attempt to "solve" a problem largely created by inane government policies, Congress (without a SINGLE vote from a Republican, mind you) decided to double down on stupidity and pass Obamacare. If you take even 30 seconds to think through the premises of Obamacare, you'll see that it can NEVER work as intended. It defies the basic laws of supply and demand. First, the assumption that Obamacare will reduce health care costs by adding 30 million new insureds to the market without doing anything at all about supply of health care providers — does that make any sense at all?

If I told you that Government was going to fund a program to buy free milk, at the rate of a gallon a week, for 30 million Americans who had previously been unable to get milk, do you think that program (adding demand for an additional 1.5 Billion gallons of milk every year) will drive prices for milk up or down? If you foolishly guessed that it would drive prices down, Congratulations, you are foolish enough to be a Democratic Congressman!

Then we get to the whole issue of health insurance. Don't get me wrong, I think health insurance is a good idea, but ONLY for medical care which falls within the essential rationale for insurance — i.e., low risk, high cost events. When you start requiring that insurance cover routine and elective procedures, like annual physicals, contraception, vaccinations, etc., you are grossly misusing insurance, creating very adverse economic incentives, and driving up the costs of BOTH the insurance AND the routine medical care.

Then we get to the "community rating" provisions of Obamacare. Those requirements have NOTHING to do with the efficient and affordable provision of health insurance; they serve only one purpose - to force young, healthy Americans to subsidize older, generally wealthier Americans, a highly regressive intergenerational wealth redistribution scheme. Insane. No, I most definitely do NOT support Obamacare. I think it demonstrates the economic illiteracy and moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party.

Daniel Artz resides in Sunnyvale, Texas.