This morning, Natoma Canfield helped us launch this Tumblr by telling her story of writing a letter to President Obama about her struggle with the health insurance system as a cancer survivor. Read Natoma’s original letter from 2009. The President carried her story with him each day during the debate over the Affordable Care Act. Her letter now hangs framed outside the Oval Office.
This new Tumblr will feature letters like Natoma’s that Americans have written to President Obama, some of the letters he reads every night, and some of the ways letters from across the country influence our work here at the White House.
Today, the whitehouse is launching a new Tumblr account called “Letters to President Obama,” where we’ll highlight letters that Americans have written to the President. Follow along here.
Below, Natoma Canfield – a cancer survivor from Ohio – shares what happened when she wrote the President a letter encouraging him to “stay focused” in his efforts to reform America’s health care system.
I wish to conduct my life without government interference of any kind. I do not need government. Government is a mere millstone around my mighty neck.
I am quite capable of drilling wells for water, hacking my way through dense woods without need of government roads and I know poison ivy on sight.
Do I require a government to tell me how to kill, skin and eat a deer? No, I do not! Nor how to chew that deer’s skin to tenderness so that I may make a perfectly acceptable set of buckskins to cover my nakedness.
No government need regulate my speech, my sight, my hearing, or the function of my bowels. I am alone on a promontory, unique and very much a man.
This is a fairly good description of libertarians and Objectivists.
One of the best blog comments I’ve seen
I wish to conduct my life without government interference of any kind. I do not need government. Government is a mere millstone around my mighty neck.
I am quite capable of drilling wells for water, hacking my way through dense woods without need of government roads and I know poison ivy on sight.
Do I require a government to tell me how to kill, skin and eat a deer? No, I do not! Nor how to chew that deer’s skin to tenderness so that I may make a perfectly acceptable set of buckskins to cover my nakedness.
No government need regulate my speech, my sight, my hearing, or the function of my bowels. I am alone on a promontory, unique and very much a man.
Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic, not a historical, science. Its scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances of the concrete acts. Its cognition is purely formal and general without reference to the material content and the particular features of the actual case. It aims at knowledge valid for all instances in which the conditions exactly correspond to those implied in its assumptions and inferences. Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts. They are both logically and temporally antecedent to any comprehension of historical facts (Von Mises, 32).
