Astrosmash is what would happen if Space Invaders had sex with Asteroids. It’s fast-paced, frantic, and well made.

The game’s premise has you guiding a cannon left and right along the bottom of the screen as asteroids fall down at you. When you shoot one, it splinters into smaller ones which you also have to shoot. The game starts out pretty slow, but within a few rounds you’ll have more asteroids than you know what to do with. And they don’t just come straight down, but at all angles. You have your fire buttons on the side of the controller and you move with the directional disc. On the keypad, you have the use of four buttons. One is an auto-fire, which is useful because the Intellivision controller doesn’t lend itself well to rapid fire situations. Another button cancels the auto-fire and sets you back to using the side buttons. You’ve also got hyper space, which will warp you to another part of the screen to get you out of immediate danger. The last button is a pause button. Overall, the game plays very well. You earn extra lives as you go along, and if you’re good you can play for quite some time. The controls are responsive and everything works great.

Astrosmash on the Intellivision looks better than pretty much anything the 2600 churned out. Everything is pretty clear and colorful. The sound effects are also pretty good. The game is set against a starry backdrop, which changes color every so often (this is because older TV were susceptible to burn-in).

Overall, Astrosmash is an outstanding game. I am of the opinion that if it had come out in the arcades first, it would be remembered as a classic on the level of a Galaga or Asteroids. Astrosmash was ported to Atari 2600 under a different name, but it was unremarkable and since it didn’t have the name recognition it went largely unnoticed.

Bottom line: is it worth it to track down an Intellivision just to play Astrosmash? Probably not. But if you own an Intellivision or come across one for a good price, there’s no reason at all not to pick up Astrosmash.

Final score: 9.5/10

Comrade Obama, his staff, and his supporters always seem to cry out when you refer to his health care plan as “centralized health care” or “universal health care”. Well, technically, they’re right. It’s just government insurance. But it amounts to the same thing, and I’m going to explain both why it is the same and why it will not work.

The most obvious thing to note is that this is funded by we, the taxpayers. I’m paying for someone else’s health care whether I like it or not, even though I already pay for my own insurance from a private company. It’s a form of welfare, which is immoral.

Now, let’s get into the basic laws of economics and politics. When the government starts a new program like this, it’s going to cost money. So they’re going to raise taxes. And in an effort to make sure these new tax dollars are spent wisely, regulations are going to accompany these tax hikes. The effects of these regulations and tax hikes are many. First, the average consumer has less money in his pocket because he is paying more taxes. Second, private hospitals and private insurance companies are going to have to raise their prices and lay off employees to keep their profit margins the same. Some will even go out of business. So because the consumer has less money and insurance costs more, Joe Sixpack won’t be able to afford private insurance. So he either has to settle for the government insurance, or he has to go without. And with more people going to government insurance, supply of private insurance goes down because companies are going out of business. As supply does down, it creates a shortage. The laws of economics state that as supply decreases, demand increases. With low supply and high demand, prices increase further. Eventually, no one at all will be able to afford private insurance. Everyone will have to use “free” government insurance, and in order to keep up the government will again have to raise taxes or simply let people die. Probably a little of both. Higher taxes begin to affect other industries, and the cycle repeats itself. Higher taxes create unemployment, which encourages reliance on the government, which results in even higher taxes. The end result is the average working man having less money and less purchasing power.

And since the government will have no competition in the health care market, there is no one to keep them in check. Quality will deteriorate, costs will skyrocket, taxes will skyrocket, doctor shortages will come about, and waiting times will shoot through the roof. Stop and think about your local, government hospital. It’s usually _____ General (Denver General, here in Denver). I don’t know how it is where you live, but in Denver the General hospital is where you go when you have no other options. It is the worst hospital in the state. But under Obama’s plan, all hospitals will suck that bad.

The only way we’re going to dodge this bullet is if Obama fails to raise taxes enough to pay for it, which may happen. But don’t be fooled; the government has no business in our health care.

As we all know, inflation is the devaluation of the current medium of exchange. This means the loss of purchasing power of all current income and income saved from the past, such as savings, bonds, etc….

So when higher inflation begins, what would compel a person to continue holding this degrading wealth? I mean, once people realize that inflation will not stop anytime soon, they will see the value of their wealth degrading rapidly.

So what will people do?

The answer of course is spend. They will do anything in their power to get rid of their fiat money which is losing its value, and use it to buy things or invest in things which cannot be inflated at the whim of the government.

So what result will this have?

There are two problems I will mention. The first is something I will mention briefly because it is not the purpose of this article. It is the building of bubbles and false employment.

As people rush to ditch their degrading wealth, they will spend it on everything. They will invest it in areas which they normally would not invest in. They will buy things they don’t need. They will buy commodities.They will invest in unprofitable sectors, etc… Pretty much anything with real value and real practical uses. It is basically the same idea as the FED artificially lowering the interest rates. So this of course breeds false employment, malinvestments, etc…

So this leads me to my second point, the increased demand. As I mentioned before, people will consume much more when they expect continuous inflation. So the demand for goods and services will rapidly increase, but the potential output of the economy will not change (The only factors which can change the potential GDP or natural output are an increase in the labor force and/or technological advances).

Since the demand is increasing at such a high rate, the price level will also increase. More people will be borrowing from banks to consume, the marginal propensity to consume will increase, but the potential output will not increase.

And as I mentioned, people will be borrowing more from banks. Since banks loan out 90% of their reserves, this expands the money supply even farther. The exact formula is (1/.1)*deposits. This further expansion of the money supply results in more inflation. The excess inflation results in more consumption. Yet through all of this, productive capabilities will not increase, which also contributes to higher prices.

So the result is the inflationary spiral, which will continue until the whole system collapses or the government props up the prices and convinces consumers there will be no further inflation (which is impossible because inflation never stops in a fractional reserve system).

While people say the free market system is unrealistic, I would refute that by saying it is much more realistic than our current system which will inevitably bring economic collapse.