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09 Nov 09
The Right to Ignore the State (1851)
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Government being simply an agent employed in common by a number of individuals to secure to them certain advantages, the very nature of the connection implies that it is for each to say whether he will employ such an agent or not. If any one of them determines to ignore this mutual-safety confederation, nothing can be said except that he loses all claim to its good offices, and exposes himself to the danger of maltreatment—a thing he is quite at liberty to do if he likes. He cannot be coerced into political combination without a breach of the law of equal freedom; he can withdraw from it without committing any such breach; and he has therefore a right so to withdraw.
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Let men learn that a legislature is not “our God upon earth,” though, by the authority they ascribe to it, and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is.
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When Asked Where the Constitution Authorizes Congress to Order Americans To Buy Health Insurance, Pelosi Says: 'Are You Serious?'
I think the lesson here is that even written constitutions are not much of an obstacle to governments doing whatever they want.
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Pelosi then shook her head before taking a question from another reporter. Her press spokesman, Nadeam Elshami, then told CNSNews.com that asking the speaker of the House where the Constitution authorized Congress to mandated that individual Americans buy health insurance as not a "serious question."
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Elshami responded by sending CNSNews.com a Sept. 16 press release from the Speaker’s office entitled, “Health Insurance Reform, Daily Mythbuster: ‘Constitutionality of Health Insurance Reform.’” The press release states that Congress has “broad power to regulate activities that have an effect on interstate commerce. Congress has used this authority to regulate many aspects of American life, from labor relations to education to health care to agricultural production.”
06 Nov 09
New York Fed’s Secret Choice to Pay for Swaps Hits Taxpayers
The Federal Reserve, after conferring in secret with investment banks, agreed to cover all of their losses with taxpayer money. This is how government works in the real world.
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Habayeb, 37, was chief financial officer for the AIG
division that oversaw AIG Financial Products, the unit that had
sold the swaps to the banks. One of his goals was to persuade
the banks to accept discounts of as much as 40 cents on the
dollar, according to people familiar with the matter. -
After less than a week of private negotiations
with the banks, the New York Fed instructed AIG to pay them par,
or 100 cents on the dollar. The content of its deliberations has
never been made public.
The New York Fed’s decision to pay the banks in full cost
AIG -- and thus American taxpayers -- at least $13 billion.
That’s 40 percent of the $32.5 billion AIG paid to retire the
swaps. Under the agreement, the government and its taxpayers
became owners of the dubious CDOs, whose face value was $62
billion and for which AIG paid the market price of $29.6
billion. The CDOs were shunted into a Fed-run entity called
Maiden Lane III. - 1 more annotations...
05 Nov 09
Mandatory Savings? Requiring people to buy medical insurance will fuel health care inflation.
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What industry
wouldn’t welcome a law that forces everyone to buy its product?
But the insurers also argue that a mandate will help
control costs, and the president agrees. Judging from the
experience in Massachusetts, which imposed its own insurance
requirement in 2006, they’re both wrong. -
There are several reasons why mandatory insurance, contrary to
Obama’s promises, has been accompanied by rapidly escalating
costs. First, when you subsidize something, people tend to
consume more of it. - 2 more annotations...
Public option: Treatment worse than the disease
Jeffrey Miron strikes at the root of the arguments for government involvement in health insurance. Being poor sucks. Some people, <em>by accident of birth</em>, have higher costs of living or lower income than other people. Hardcore egalitarian statists believe the government should compensate the unfortunate at the expense of the fortunate, but they should recognize that not everyone agrees with their notion of fairness, and that their approach would degrade everyone's standards of living.
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Government should not subsidize health insurance -- for the uninsured, the poor, the elderly or anyone else -- or regulate health insurance markets.
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Subsidizing health insurance means that patients and doctors are insulated from the costs of health care, so they utilize too much -- often in the form of unnecessary tests or medical procedures whose value hasn't been proven. This excess demand, along with technological progress, means rapidly growing deficits, so governments limit reimbursements to health providers or ration care. This kills innovation and creates its own inequities. The taxes necessary to fund subsidies are a drag on economic growth.
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Financial Market Reform: Why new regulations must avoid moral hazards
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According to perceived wisdom, the root cause
of the 2008 financial crisis was excessive risk-taking, and
proper regulation can detect and prevent such excess in the
future. -
The Financial Crisis of 2008 did not occur because of
insufficient or ill-designed regulation. Rather, it resulted from
two misguided government policies.
The first was the attempt to promote homeownership. - 7 more annotations...
03 Nov 09
Public plan mirage
Robert Samuelson might also have mentioned that Medicare is insolvent in the face of retiring Baby Boomers.
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The public plan's low costs would be artificial. Its main advantage would be the congressionally mandated requirement that hospitals and doctors be reimbursed at rates at or near Medicare's.
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But health costs wouldn't subside; hospitals and doctors would offset the public plan's artificially low reimbursements by raising fees to private insurers, as already occurs with Medicare.
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FACT CHECK: Health insurer profits not so fat
Of course, established health insurers do enjoy some protection from competition, thanks mostly to state governments.
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Quick quiz: What do these enterprises have in common? Farm and construction machinery, Tupperware, the railroads, Hershey sweets, Yum food brands and Yahoo? Answer: They're all more profitable than the health insurance industry.
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Ledgers tell a different reality. Health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent, give or take a point or two. That's anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries, even some beleaguered ones.
02 Nov 09
The Welfare State Corrupts Absolutely
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Medical insurance has come to mean getting something for free. The receiver of a service need not ask how it is financed. It’s just taken care of. (Passive voice intentional.)
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What’s that? The government is promising to cap our out-of-pocket expenses, require coverage for preexisting illness and free preventative care, and extend the same deal to absolutely everyone? And this will have no negative consequences whatever, such as limits on what we can buy or enlargement of the budget deficit or higher taxes for the middle class — but it will actually save money? Oh thank you, government!
21 Oct 09
TARP watchdog: Full repayment 'unlikely'
I'm shocked.
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The auto industry, AIG and other struggling recipients of the government's $700 billion Wall Street bailout will make it "extremely unlikely" that taxpayers will receive a full return on their investments, says a new report by the Treasury Department's independent watchdog.
Myocardial Infractions: A government-commissioned report promotes smoking bans by tweaking the evidence.
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Since then 10 other studies have attributed substantial
short-term reductions in heart attacks to smoking bans, and last
week an Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee
endorsed their findings. But a closer look at the IOM
report, which was commissioned by the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, suggests its conclusions are
based on a desire to promote smoking bans rather than a
dispassionate examination of the evidence. -
The largest study of this issue,
which used nationwide data instead of looking
at cherry-picked communities, concluded that smoking bans in
the U.S. "are not associated with statistically significant
short-term declines in mortality or hospital admissions for
myocardial infarction." It also found that "large short-term
increases in myocardial infarction incidence following a
workplace ban are as common as the large decreases reported in
the published literature." - 2 more annotations...
In Health Care, Nobody Knows Anything: Two new industry studies reignite the debate about what makes health care so expensive.
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The president is right that we should always be skeptical of
studies that find in favor of the groups that sponsor them. And
these two insurance industry-sponsored studies do have their
flaws. But the finding that guaranteed issue and community rating
mandates increase insurance premium prices has been corroborated
by other academic researchers. -
Massachusetts, the one state that combines an
individual mandate, community rating, and guaranteed issue, now
has the highest premiums for family insurance plans in the
country. - 7 more annotations...
20 Oct 09
Yet another housing bailout on the way
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Administration officials unveiled a plan to aid state and local housing finance agencies, which provide mortgages to first-time and lower-income homebuyers and enable the development or rehabilitation of rental properties. Officials declined to put a pricetag on the program, but said there would be no cost to taxpayers.
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Under the initiative, the Treasury Department, along with Fannie Mae (FNM, Fortune 500) and Freddie Mac (FRE, Fortune 500), will purchase housing bonds issued by the finance agencies. This will give the groups the funding needed to make new loans. Also, the government will provide a temporary credit program to allow the agencies to refinance their existing bonds to more favorable terms.
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