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A couple Edison quotes, plus a few quotes from others, offer some insight into opinion polls:

""Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think." Thomas Edison
"There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking." Thomas Edison
"Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think."- George Bernard Shaw
"Only very few men have the gift of thinking new and original ideas and of changing the traditional body of creeds and doctrines. Common man does not speculate about the great problems. With regard to them he relies upon other people's authority, he behaves as "every decent fellow must behave," he is like a sheep in the herd. It is precisely this intellectual inertia that characterizes a man as a common man. Yet the common man does choose. He chooses to adopt traditional patterns or patterns adopted by other people because he is convinced that this procedure is best fitted to achieve his own welfare. And he is ready to change his ideology and consequently his mode of action whenever he becomes convinced that this would better serve his own interests." Ludwig Von Mises

Are the 3-10% of people who think they think members of the media and/or faculty members of institutions of higher learning? Where do the members of Congress fit? How many Democrats actually think?

I have heard a retired physician estimate that eighty percent of all health care delivered in the United States could be categorized as non-essential for life-saving or even purposes of health maintaining. The idea being that just because people want something, does not make it essential or life improving.

I have heard an emergency room physician make a similar statement. Eighty percent of the cases he saw in the ER could be managed on a non-emergent out-patient clinic type visit. Worse, a large portion of the true emergencies were alcohol or other drug related incidents.

Where in the Constitution does Congress have the authority to establish Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid? Does the word insurance appear at all? Which clause of the Constitution grants Congress the power to insure banks? Other parts of the Constitution seem to deny these kinds of power to Congress:

"A republic if you can keep it....When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." Benjamin Franklin
"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." John Adams, Second President
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them." Thomas Jefferson
"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, Fourth President, 1792
"I must question the constitutionality and propriety of the Federal Government assuming to enter into a novel and vast field of legislation, namely, that of providing for the care and support of all those who by any form of calamity become fit objects of public philanthropy ... I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States. To do so would, in my judgment, be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive of the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded." Franklin Pierce, 14th President 1854
"I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit." Grover Cleveland, 22nd President 1887