Is America’s Government Leadership Mentally Ill?

[handy]

Great short essay. (emphasis mine)

https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog...-mentally-ill/


Is America’s Government Leadership Mentally Ill?
Michael S. Rozeff


Is America’s government led by mentally ill persons? They say they are. Obama has said “If you are one of the 45 million Americans with a mental illness, you’re covered.” If 45 million Americans are mentally ill, that’s almost 1 person in 7. The government leadership consists of a sample from a population of Americans numbering 325 million of whom 1 in 7 are mentally ill. There are no filters that prevent many of these people in the sample from having a good many mental illnesses that are in Obama’s estimated count. His definition lets in sociopaths and personality disorders, megalomaniacs, paranoids, obsessive-compulsives, manic-depressives, depression, eating disorders, and so on. It doesn’t just include maniacs, schizophrenics and criminally insane, although just about anyone who doesn’t have a criminal record can attain office, and even some who do. One does not say that 1 in 7 is mentally ill without having a very broad definition indeed.
How many people are in the government leadership, which is a sample out of this 325 million? Let’s say there are 500. What are the odds of taking a random sample of 500 from a population of 325 million and not having that sample exhibit approximately the same measure of 1 in 7 being mentally ill? This is a problem in statistics. To answer this question, I went to this web site. I entered a sample size of 500, a proportion of 14 percent, a population of 325,000,000 and a 95% confidence interval. The calculator told me I’d have a 3% sampling error. This means that in repeated sampling, I am very sure that such samples of 500 will contain anywhere from 11 to 17% people who are mentally ill. (If I remove below-age people from the 325 million, making the population 160,000,000, I still get about 3%. With a sample size of 500, the sampling error is rather insensitive to changes in the size of the population.)

So, why should you ever want a government under these conditions? Why should you ever want to elect people — as part of a blind social process — to lead when a rather large proportion are going to be mentally ill (by their own criterion)? You don’t know who most of them are or what they will vote for. They have enormous power. The entire process and system makes very little sense. Having other people govern you (in any sense of the term) only makes some sense if you can monitor them efficiently so that you can dump them if they are not properly performing what you consider to be the proper governance functions.

If we allow for the reasonable supposition that government attracts sociopaths and aggressive persons into its ranks in greater than average numbers, then the 1 in 7 estimate becomes a lower bound for people in government leadership who either are mentally ill or, without being mentally ill, have no intention of serving anyone in justice or acting in a moral and upright fashion. This assumption is reasonable because government uses power to do so many coercive things that violate the morality that most individuals follow. Those who want to impose their whims, values and beliefs on others, using force and threat of force, are therefore more likely to be attracted into government.

9:31 am CDT on October 31, 2013
Email Michael S. Rozeff

[podfish]

let's not demonize mental illness. It's, uh, an illness. In part of your body. It can be transitory, and shouldn't be considered something on a par with demonic possession rather than with, say, a bad flu. Lots of illnesses affect mood and decision-making capability, but if they don't have respiratory, digestive, or muscular effects we seem to have trouble keeping our perspective on them.

Is America’s government led by mentally ill persons? They say they are. Obama has said “If you are one of the 45 million Americans with a mental illness, you’re covered.” If 45 million Americans are mentally ill, that’s almost 1 person in 7. The government leadership consists of a sample from a population of Americans numbering 325 million of whom 1 in 7 are mentally ill.

[Aldo El Hefe]

The reason that Obama said this has a lot to do with the creation of the ACA by the insurance corporations and the extra new coverage now built into commercial private healthcare insurance policies now being sold to the masses.
Many people are completely unaware of the "reform-ulation" of healthcare insurance policies created by the ACA and why the dramatic price increases are necessary.

In example: since the private insurance corporations now have to cover individuals with pre-existing conditions, (the people that really need on-going medical coverage) when before they could refuse to write policies to this group, and only accepted money from people who were healthy and would not be expected to need any medical care, guess what, part of the new insurance rates treat everyone as if the have a pre-existing condition to share the profit losses of covering people that need coverage.
And now, single males are now covered for maternity, and sex changes if they are unhappy with their natural born sexuality and abortions if these single males cannot afford to raise their children.
But the most important change by far was designed by the pharmaceutical corporations to provide mental health services and cover the variety of pharmaceutical drugs sold to cure the conceived mental conditions with psychiatric "drug therapy".
The pharmaceutical corporations goal is to have 90% of the population on pharmaceutical drugs, and right now probably 45% of people in the U.S. are already on some type of anti-depressant.
The "creators" of the ACA realize that in this sputtering economy, many people will not be able to afford $900 per month for psychiatric drugs, so they designed a brilliant plan that would provide these drugs with insurance plans that would "spread the cost" to every consumer of private profiteering healthcare insurance plans, whether the individual take drugs or not. That is what Obama is talking about when he said "you're covered".
I'm not saying that mental illness does not exist, but what I'm saying is that many so called mental illnesses are invented for the sole purpose of selling harmful (read the side affects on commercials) and extremely expensive psychotropic pharmaceutical drugs. The pharmaceutical industry is a multi-billion dollar per year industry, and if they want to continue to thrive, they needed the ACA to perpetuate their profits.

let's not demonize mental illness. It's, uh, an illness. In part of your body. It can be transitory, and shouldn't be considered something on a par with demonic possession rather than with, say, a bad flu. Lots of illnesses affect mood and decision-making capability, but if they don't have respiratory, digestive, or muscular effects we seem to have trouble keeping our perspective on them.

[podfish]

I'm not saying that mental illness does not exist, but what I'm saying is that many so called mental illnesses are invented for the sole purpose of selling harmful (read the side affects on commercials) and extremely expensive psychotropic pharmaceutical drugs. The pharmaceutical industry is a multi-billion dollar per year industry, and if they want to continue to thrive, they needed the ACA to perpetuate their profits.

it's quite a reach to extrapolate from the admittedly non-altruistic pharma industry to your claim.
The idea that 'mental illnesses are invented' is taking cynicism to ridiculous extremes. 'Exaggerated' maybe, controversial certainly, but the implication that there are corporate evildoers intentionally creating imaginary syndromes from whole cloth is unwarranted. It's obvious that the existing insurance and pharma industries were protected under the ACA; look at Harry and Louise's history to figure out why. So there are distortions in the new programs that make little sense. The program will be a success if ways are found to reign in the excesses of the free-market providers who dominate a system inherently unsuited for free-market principles. Nitpicking about details (what 'single males are covered for maternity' was supposed to mean...) is pretty much besides the point.