The Congress shall have Power [...] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; [...]

Also see Amendment IX:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

and Amendment X:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The Tea Party, to the extent they speak with one voice, appears to believe that the power of the Federal government is limited to what the US Constitution grants them.

So, there's nothing inconsistent with a Tea Party leader benefiting from patents which are granted by the Federal government.

Congratulations for proving why discussion with left-wingers is a waste of time.

"We can surely agree some viewpoints are not valid, for instance any that seeks to deprive someone of human rights"

A construct fundamentally built around a kilometre tall statue of "Begging the Question". Although orgasmicly pleasing and with enormous scope for smugness and righteousness, the avenue where you define something as a human right and pretend anyone who disagrees wants to "deprive someone of human rights" is not defensible. The question that is begged is what is a human right in the first place. If something never was a human right, then it cannot be deprived. The framing "depriving someone of human rights" is hence fundamentally dishonest and destructive for a discussion.

"authorizes war crimes as a matter of course"

Again begging the question of what a war crime is. In my country the Socialist Left party voted for the bombing of Serbia, which didn't have UN backing and only became "legalized" through a far-fetched interpretation of other Security Council resolutions as somehow authorising warfare by implication by not saying what would happen if peace didn't develop.

"Also who think voluntary money paid to support society is theft"

Again begging the question.

My personal attitude is that left-wingers make a good discussion impossible. That comes down to a particular broad concept of what a good discussion is, and a notion of what can be done to destroy such a discussion.

You can afford more than $1000/month? I spent time as a consultant and sans an employer that was the quoted figure to cover one 20-something with no medical issues around five years ago. I couldn't afford it and neither could most people in my area. Lots of people think they can because their employer foots 80% or more of their medical insurance bill.

Way to fail at current events. It was pretty clear what the tea party wanted when it started. They wanted the government to stop wasting tax dollars bailing out banks. If you had been paying attention, you'd see that they pretty much want the same thing the occupy protesters want. The only real difference was the tea party is made up of people who don't believe you have to destroy property, rape people, and violate others' rights to make a point.

Please tell me you're being sarcastic. If not, start here [mediamatters.org]. The Tea Party was created by Republican strategist Dick Armey and promoted relentlessly by Fox News- it was never intended to be grass roots. Amusingly, it's actually grown some legitimate roots since and has proved more difficult to control than the establishment would like.

That is putting it mildly, he was an elephant electrocuting asshole. He would make Steve Jobs look like a good guy in comparison.

Voting for someone just "because he's an engineer" is as bad a reason as "because he's an actor".

Example: Cliff Stearns from Florida. He's an electrical engineer. Great, huh? Well, he was also the driving force behind all of the recent lies/attacks on Planned Parenthood, and is strongly against net neutrality (thanks to his biggest corporate backers, AT&T and Comcast). If you don't care about either of those things, then I guess he's a great candidate, otherwise, same old crap...

The Republican party has been trying to create this very crisis since the 1980's. Read what people like Stockman have written, when they (quickly) realized that trickle-down didn't actually work they decided to run up the debt so they could use it as an excuse to dismantle social programs they didn't like.

Glad you brought that up. Debt/GDP is about where it was at the end of WWII. What differs now is the will to respond. That generation tightened their belts and raised taxes as high as in the 90% range for top tax brackets. When enough debt had been retired in the early 60's, Kennedy dropped the top rates and people decided we could still afford to improve the safety net with medicaid/medicare and improved welfare benefits. The debt/GDP ratio declined quite consistently under both Republican and Democrat administrations until Reagan came along. Under Reaganomics, debt/GDP skyrocketed until the Clinton years. Prior presidencies reduced debt/GDP by growing the denominator, Clinton's budgets worked on both numerator and denominator - he actually had surpluses in the budget for the first time since Nixon. If W had not been elected, we were scheduled to retire the debt in its entirety during this decade. W came into office, saw the surplus, and gave nice tax rebates to the wealthiest Americans, putting us back into red ink. He then took us into a very technological (read: expensive) war, and for the first time in American history, refused to raise taxes even to support the war effort. Debt/GDP skyrocketed. Then we hit the banking crisis and triggered a recession, and debt/GDP grew even more. And you know what? The right was strangely silent until Obama took office facing the accumulated debt of his predecessor, the worst economic conditions since the 1930's. Given the Nancy Reagan Chorus in Congress - "Just say 'No!' - he's done remarkably well.

We've had this level of debt/GDP before, and we survived it. I'm not going to claim it's a good thing, but it's not the disaster the right would like to paint it as. We've paid it down before, we can do it again. But as we pay it down, remember that the overwhelming bulk of it was accumulated by three administrations -- Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II.

Given all of the above, I'd have to say you are. You're certainly not dealing in facts.

Allow me to jump in with a different perspective.

Everyone needs normal health care, and a few will at some point require catastrophic care for an unusual condition. In the first case, there is no mutual benefit to spreading out the costs; all you've done is add overhead. In the second case, rationally-priced insurance should result in the same average cost for everyone, barring significant individual health risks. If that basic catastrophic insurance is currently over-priced compared to the cost of providing the care, try a non-profit insurance co-op. There is no need for the government to get involved.

If the problem is that the cost of providing health care is too high, driving high insurance costs, then we need to look at a whole different set of issues. Perhaps care providers are being forced to accept too much of the risk involved in medical advise and treatment (suggesting tort reform), or we're systematically over-paying (and need more competition), or perhaps we're simply expecting more health care than we can really afford. There are lots of expensive procedures available these days which simply weren't available in the past. If one takes for granted that every option will be attempted, of course the costs will rise—there are more options to try. We need to learn that a procedure which one can't afford (after considering available insurance, charity and loans) isn't an option. The science of medicine may advance, but at some point there has to be a limit on medical expenditures.

The lower graph is the debt/gdp ratio [wikipedia.org]. As parent points out, growth is mostly in the last three Republican administrations. Also note that Obama wasn't sworn in until 2009, and the huge increase at the right began before Obama took office. In other words, it's the recession rather than the stimulus package.

You're missing the point, I think. If you have a "normal" insurance plan, they cover your checkups and medications because they know it saves them money if you deal with your cholesterol before it gives you a $50k heart attack. If you have one of those high-deductible plans (the kind of healthcare you describe), they sign up young folks unlikely to develop chronic medical conditions and just screw them over on the doctor visits, but it doesn't cost them much money if the person skips the doctor visit because a 25 year old guy isn't likely to get a heart attack or a stroke or something in the next 20 years, but they can take his money in the meantime.

I do EMS, so the healthcare debate seems incredibly stupid to me. Let me paint you a scenario - somebody calls from the bad part of town with severe chest pain, difficulty breathing, etc - the paramedics come and see a nasty AMI (heart attack) in progress, he codes in the rig, they work on him, we get him to the hospital where they get a pulse back and he end up OK - at great cost. But he can't pay for it, at all - everybody knows it, but the hospital can't turn him away by law. So he walks out of there, they hound him for a few months and give it up as a lost cause. They figure they'll make it back by tacking a bit onto every visit, procedure, test, etc - which raises costs on the people who have insurance or otherwise can pay. Higher costs to the insurance company become higher costs to the subscriber, so the people on the edge of being able to afford their plan no longer can. Some of them have heart attacks they can't afford... and it goes on.

This isn't a hypothetical. I've had literally dozens of people who follow this exact story. We've already decided on universal healthcare - anyone can walk into an ER and get treated - but we've done it in literally the worst possible way. I'd rather pay for that guy's Lipitor and checkups for 10 years than for his one heart attack.

You can construct the same story for almost anything, from pregnancy (prenatal care substantially reduces complications and hence costs) to asthma (inhalers vs. needing an emergency intubation). Emergent care is the most expensive way to do anything, both because of the complexity of emergency medicine, and the fact that it needs to be much worse to qualify as an emergency. But it's the only way we let the disadvantaged get "treatment"

And that's the other problem with Libertarians/Tea Partiers: they have no clue what things cost or how politics work. Their ideas on cost are so unrealistic that they might as well campaign on funding the military, the legal system, and the public works via unicorn farts. Their ideas on politics are based on "I've got mine, fuck you", which makes cooperation impossible.

And the final problem with Libertarians/Tea Partiers is that they think that there is exactly one interpretation to the Constitution: theirs. They miss the delicious irony of complaining about people not understanding the Constitution, when there is no way for the English language to be specific enough that a 1 page document can provide an exact to every political problem.