We mourn the death of Herman Cain with real sadness. He was charming, wise, and brilliant. A mathematician, an astute businessman, and a politician with loads of “charisma”. His passing is a serious loss to the conservative side, our side, of the ever-widening political divide.

Professor Walter Williams explains why Obamacare is illegal:

Obamacare is also immoral.

Leftists, their faces shining with virtue, love to say that everyone should have a right to health care.

But no one can have a “right” that puts an obligation on someone else.

Herman Cain writes at Breitbart:

Maybe it’s just as well that state-run ObamaCare exchanges are collapsing under the weight of their own economic implausibility. If they were able to successfully provide people with decent health insurance coverage, there wouldn’t be enough doctors to provide the services anyway. ObamaCare strikes again!

That’s what we learned …  in a report [published April 5, 2016] from the American Association of Medical Colleges. While the government is trying to manipulate people into increasing their utilization of health care services, the economic illogic of ObamaCare is creating a disincentive for people to become doctors. So you’ll have more people demanding more services, and fewer doctors available to provide them. …

Being a doctor can still be a very nice living, but the government never fails to find new ways to complicate that. Once you get through medical school and finally retire the debt you incurred there, and once you get through a residency that often sees you working insane hours for surprisingly little money, you might have the chance to start a lucrative practice. But there are problems.

Medicaid reimbursement rates hardly allow doctors to make any money at all treating Medicaid patients, and most of the people who have gotten “covered” under ObamaCare really just enrolled in expanded Medicaid.

So you’ve got more patients than ever seeking medical care from doctors who will be asked to provide the services for next to nothing.

Meanwhile, the bureaucratic paper-pushing they have to do to comply with all the federal government’s requirements grows on a constant basis. So they’re working more hours, but spending less of that time actually treating patients, and making less money on average for the patients they do see.

This is where I might ask, “Why would anyone want to become a doctor?”

There is an old British saying … “Cometh the hour, cometh the man.” The idea, of course, is that when a crisis arises, a leader will also arise to show the way out of it.

So Andrew Klavan writes at PajamasMedia, in an article titled Mitt Romney versus The End of Western Civilization.

He goes on:

But those of us who feel the upcoming presidential election represents a crossroads of sorts are starting to find this faith in providential leadership somewhat shaken. We’re starting to think that if the man is cometh-ing he better hurry-eth up and geth here already.

Because Mitt Romney ain’t the guy. While he may win the Republican presidential nomination by default — and while he may indeed win the presidency due to desperation — it is clear from every word he says that he understands neither the peril nor the needs of the present moment. …

The professionals and money guys in the Republican establishment don’t seem to mind that. As always, they feel that they are the old pros who take care of the all-important business of electability while we children in the base worry about such nonsense as principle and the preservation of the republic. It’s these establishment types who have traditionally delivered the truly electable choices like Bob Dole and John McCain while staunchly protecting us from extremists like Ronald Reagan. On Fox News’ Journal Editorial Report this weekend, the Wall Street Journal‘s Dorothy Rabinowitz … seemed to give voice to that establishment opinion when she said that “reason is going to have to prevail” among conservatives and that they’ll ultimately have to abandon the likes of Herman Cain and “all of the alternatives that are warming their little hearts, that they’re playing with,” and learn to live with Romney as their guy.

And I fear she — and all those she speaks for — may be right. …  Cain seems like a terrific fellow but he has no foreign policy knowledge and his 9-9-9 plan is a mistake — a new tax that will never go away and will grow bigger than he imagines. Michele Bachman is wonderful on the economy, but her social policy is ill-informed and out-of-date. Perry can’t think on his feet, Huntsman’s a bore, and Ron Paul is a better cult leader than candidate. So far, Romney is, in fact, the best candidate actually in the race. I’m sorry, but there is something to be said for realism when you’re dealing with, you know, reality.

But he’s still not the guy. And just for the record, just to explain, the problem is not that he’s a moderate per se. It’s not that he has changed his mind from time to time. It’s not even his failure to renounce Romneycare, so similar to the disastrous Obamacare. … The problem is that Romney doesn’t understand that we — America — the west — are in crisis: a crisis of debt, a crisis of confidence, a crisis of identity and ignorance wherein journalists, professors, politicians, and priests have become one with the moral idiots occupying Wall Street.

Go on Romney’s website. Look at his proposals. There’s nothing wrong with them, for the most part. They seem intended to repeal the Obama administration and set us back on the path we were on before. That would be fine if Obama were the cause of the crisis, but he’s the symptom of the crisis, its incarnation as it were. Obama and his ideas are the creation of 40 years of moral error and political failure drip-drip-dripped into the consciousness of the country through our schools, news media, and culture. He could never have won our highest office if the electorate had not been bred by that error to foolishness, and then spurred to an act of panicked stupidity by a crisis that had already come.

It’s not Obama’s presidency that needs to be repealed — not just Obama’s presidency — but all the ideas that made Obama’s presidency possible.

To do that, we need a man not just of policies but of vision, not just of proposals but of high ideals. A mere Romney might — might — take us back from the brink to which Obama has sped us, but that would only delay the fatal catastrophe. Worse, it would perforce recreate the exact same set of circumstances that got us into this mess in the first place.

Could Romney be made to understand the nature and depth of the crisis that Western civilization is in? If he could be made to understand it, would he then see how to save it? And if he saw how, would he have the cunning and mettle to do it?

If not – and we agree with Klavan that Romney is “not the guy”, that he doesn’t have it in him  – is there a man or woman anywhere in America who could and would? Who has the depth and completeness of understanding, the power of leadership, the moral strength, the resourcefulness? Is there a potential political giant, greater than has ever existed before, waiting in the wings?

Failing such a genius, it seems we’ll have to make do with a Romney.

In Britain the number you dial for emergency services – “police, fire, ambulance” – is 999. In America there is an economic emergency for which help could come from Herman Cain’s 999 plan: 9% tax on business profits, 9% tax on personal income, 9% national sales tax.

We think Herman Cain is impressively rational (although he is a Baptist) and by far the most likable of the Republican candidates for the presidency. The policies he advocates are firmly conservative. Only on foreign affairs he has been weak, obviously under-informed; but he’s doing what he knows he must about that, starting with a recent visit to Israel.

This is from American Thinker:

Generations of career politicians … have bankrupted our country in a slow side toward socialism and the withering of our liberty.

Patriots are clamoring for an individual who, as president, can calmly and confidently reorient this country to the Constitution and fiscal sanity. We the People must nominate the next Republican nominee, even (especially) if it means making an end run around the party establishment to put forth someone who is not of Washington, nor political moderation. We must eliminate candidates who have had a part — large or small — in contributing to the current crisis. That means no Romney, no Huckabee, no Gingrich, no Palin. The boldest statement that can be made is to elect a private citizen president.

Not for Cain is the dialect of programmed candidates controlled by Republican Party hacks or “up-and-coming political stars.” … Cain does not require handlers and consultants. No political consultant would ever tell a candidate to answer a question, to which he cannot truly give an informed answer, as Cain did on a question of national security, “I don’t know all the facts.” … Cain speaks with total self-confidence born of ability and achievement, not the unearned laurels of sycophants.

Cain speaks blunt truths about how far we have fallen from our charters and the necessity to restore them and revere them again. As he recently [said] when refusing to walk back comments about a ban on Muslims in a Cain administration, he only wants “true patriots” around him, committed and dedicated to the Constitution, the Declaration, and the laws of this country. What else matters?

Cain has proven himself again and again as an executive (which, lest anyone forget, is the office he is seeking), willing to begin at ground level and rising to save a company from bankruptcy. He is a scholar, a mathematician (bachelors from Morehouse), and computer scientist (masters from Purdue) who speaks logically and plainly.

We would like to know what our American readers think of Cain as a prospective president; and whether our foreign readers have taken notice of him, and if so what their impressions are.