Portrait of a Hack Enfant Terrible: Dylan Meisner

[Strelnikov]

If you live in America, you need to watch out for this Op-Ed hack in five years or so - he is so utterly terrible you know he will wind up working for CATO or Hertiage or The National Review. Meisner is a frosh at San Diego State, and yet he is allowed to write dumb columns like this:

Americans don’t want for Medicare for All

This plan, originally popularized by self-described Democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VM) is unpopular, unaffordable and unfair to American citizens.

by Dylan Meisner, Staff Writer
March 6, 2019

Heading into the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, one policy proposal that seems to be getting an inordinate amount of attention is the proposed expansion of Medicare to all Americans, or Medicare for all.

This plan, originally popularized by self-described Democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I- VM) is unpopular, unaffordable and unfair to American citizens.

One popular refrain from its proponents is the support it enjoys in public opinion polls.

For example, a recent Reuters–Ipsos survey found it enjoys 75 percent approval among Americans, with 85 percent of Democrats saying they support the policy as well as 52 percent of Republicans.

But these polls are grossly misleading, as the respondents lacked crucial information as to the implications of the policy.

When Americans are told taxes would need to be raised for this plan, the support for Medicare for all drops.

When informed Medicare for all would lead to increased taxes (as are experienced by every country with nationalized healthcare), support dropped to 37 percent, according to a recent survey by the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

The same poll also found when respondents were informed it would lead to an increase in wait times (another common side effect), support plummeted to 26 percent.

Medicare for all is also comically unaffordable.

According to a study by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, the program is estimated to cost $32.6 trillion (yes, with a “t”) over the next 10 years.

For context, the already bloated federal budget is $4 trillion per year, meaning this policy would nearly double the federal budget.

The cost of this program would require a tax increase on all Americans, not just the “top one percent” of income earners Senator Sanders loves to conspiratorially demonize.

This program is unfair to the American people because it would eliminate their ability to choose their healthcare plan or coverage.

The Scandinavian healthcare models Bernie blabs on about whenever a camera is in front of him all lack any options for consumers, only offering generic, government-run coverage replete with rationing and long wait times.

It is no secret, however, that America’s current state of healthcare is awful.

While we lead the world in innovation, we rank abysmally low in the world rankings for coverage.

The Affordable Care Act bears the brunt of the blame for this fact, as the combination of an individual mandate and massive subsidies have lead to a grossly inefficient system.

Given the innovative nature of the American medical industry in spite of massive government regulation, there seems to be a simple fix.

We should unleash the beast that is the American free enterprise system, that combined with unfettered medical innovation would lead to cheaper and more comprehensive coverage.

Whether or not an individual mandate should exist is a fair argument.

For those who insist on that policy, Switzerland is the perfect example of how to run such a system.

The Swiss have a largely libertarian system (besides the individual mandate) with innovation and competition abound with little rules and regulation.

Healthcare is not a right, despite Bernie Sanders’ impassioned claims.

Americans have a right to speak freely, and this is a right against the government silencing us.

We have the right to keep and bears arms, and this is a right against the government disarming the citizenry.

We have a right to a free and fair trial before the collective may strip us of our life, liberty or property.

We have a right to not be discriminated against by the government on the basis of immutable characteristics.

We do not have a right to demand that a doctor treat us.

And we certainly do not have a right to demand that our neighbors be forced to subsidize our bad health via taxes at the point of government gun.

Bernie Sanders and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are actively undermining the classically liberal definition of rights as laid out by John Locke.

Rights are abilities humans innately possess that are given by God, would be present in a state of nature, are not to be impeded by government.

Rights are not affirmative goods or services to be demanded of others.

Dylan Meisner is a freshman studying political science. You can follow him on Twitter @DylMeisner.

***

Did I mention the kid is a Trumpkin? Well, he is:

Socialism isn’t good for society

Socialism and other Marxist experiments in government were the true tragedies of the 20th century, and as such should be regarded as the intellectual rubbish that they are.

by Dylan Meisner, Contributor
February 13, 2019

In his second State of the Union address, President Donald Trump’s finest moment came toward the end.

“Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. … Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country,” the president said.

“We are born free, and we will remain free.”

This statement is eminently true.

Socialism and other Marxist experiments in government were the true tragedies of the 20th century, and as such should be regarded as the intellectual rubbish that they are.

From the genocidal Pol Pot in Cambodia to the current regimes in North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela who show no respect for basic human rights, to the mass killings perpetrated by Stalin and Lenin in Communist Russia, Marxist ideas in government have proven to be the most deadly in modern history.

The lies of Karl Marx have clearly been and are continually used to exploit the lives of citizens worldwide. [Describing how capitalism works is a lie, Mr. Meisner?]

The body count of Marxist governments in the 20th century is estimated to be north of 110 million according to lauded political scientist and historian R.J. Rummel. [Rummel is a crank on the heavily-conservative Victims of Communism Foundation board - his numbers come from the highly-contentious "Black Book of Communism" from the early 1990s. Soviet/Russian studies historians roll their eyes at these people.]

And yet, even Rummel himself acknowledges that his number probably undershoots the true count, as no one was ever able to count the number of bodies in Soviet gulags and killing fields- there were just too many.

Today, millions of Uighur [sic - S.] Muslims are undergoing a current genocide and “re-education camps” in modern Marxist China.

And yet many congressional Democrats seem to be warming to the ideas of socialism. Whether it is Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MI) backing the legitimacy of the totalitarian Maduro regime in Venezuela, or Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) calling for a full-scale nationalization of 1/6th of the American economy, the Democratic Party has appeared to abort its tenets of old-school liberalism for the deadly leftism that defined the tragedies of last century.

When one points out the 110 million ghosts of Socialism past, its modern propagators will invoke the no true Scotsman fallacy, claiming “that wasn’t true socialism, true socialism has never been tried.”

And when pressed to come up with examples of functional socialist countries, they bring up the modest success stories of Scandinavian countries who manage to provide free state college, healthcare and other amenities to their citizens.

What they will fail to mention are the blood-and-soil nativist immigration policies of these countries, combined with the extraordinarily low corporate tax rates and extremely high middle-class tax policies- all of which run counter to their own proposed policies for America.

President Trump’s own administration has its own problems with regards to quasi-socialist governance to deal with.

Trump and the Republicans failed, despite holding both the legislature and executive branches for two years, to address the entitlement programs that are the driving force behind our nation’s debt and deficit.

Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare take up over 40 percent of the federal budget alone, and President Trump has made it clear that he will not touch that spending.

Republicans claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility and limited government, but how can they make this claim as they run up the deficit and seek to enact trade barriers that undermine free trade with President Trump’s proposed tariff policies?

President Trump is correct to mock those who promote socialism, a set of economic ideas that have been proven time and again to be deadly and counterproductive.

But the true focus of the Trump administration should be to look within and fix its own policies.

Dylan Meisner is a freshman studying political science. You can follow him on Twitter @DylMeisner

***

This one got a response from some wayward crank looking for the San Diego Reader website, or is this a relative of Meisner's?:

ERIN A FREEMAN on February 13th, 2019 8:34 am

I think this is well-written. Strange to see any arguments against the left come out of a college campus anymore – I like it! Gives me hope there are still free-thinkers running about rather than everyone blindly following either side.

***
This link shows you what he looks like (it ain't pretty): https://twitter.com/dylmeisner

Some of his dumb tweets:


Dylan Meisner
Mar 4

volunteerism > government coercion.
that is my political philosophy.


Dylan Meisner
3h3 hours ago

Call me crazy- but the anti-Semitism of some Tiki torch wielding loser hick nobodies is just as scary as that of the new Fresh Faced (TM) social Democrats.
0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes

And he retweets Ben Schapiro (permavirgin even though he has a wife and daughter, head of the Daily Wire, a copy of the Daily Caller) and other conserva-hacks. Plus he has a space on the Muck Rack aggregator/re-poster site: https://muckrack.com/dylan-meisner
***

Why bring him up? I saw this stuff during the early 2000s on the (long-defunct) Campus Nonsense aggregator, and he reminds me of Russel Henderson of the VT Reactionary Blogspot site: young, dumb, joined the Army but never served in Iraq. Went to school at UV in Burlington, Vermont and endlessly bitched that he went to a Blue State college but could never admit that places like Liberty University or Pensacola Christian College or Hyles-Anderson were intellectual ghettos. Part of the hyper-corrupt UV College GOP ("Young Republicans") that had to be completely purged, sanctioned by the university for a period, and is only now in the last few years trying to get beyond the size of a standard Monopoly game. Of course everybody who had a blog on Campus Nonsense is either an (underemployed) lawyer, some kind of sleazy salesman, or a homemaker. As with Islamic jihadists, it's sad to see young people adopt the old man con-game of US conservativism, especially now that an open scam-artist like Donald Trump "runs" the joint. Being a GOPster is for oold people, ex-Navy lifers who spent 1966 to '68 in a PBR and ended their career in 1984 after serving on a second-string destroyer, dudes who remember a world before everybody had multiple telephones in a house, and they liked it that way, dagnabbit!

[ericbarbour]

Mr. Meisner will have a long career in the right. He's already an expert at mechanically vomiting talking points and sniping.

"Marxist ideas in government have proven to be the most deadly in modern history" my ass. Genocide is one of mankind's most popular spectator sports.