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23 Dec 09
Obamacare: No Exit
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The plan before the Senate creates a set of 50 state-based insurance "exchanges" that are established as markets for health plans. Consumers must buy policies from their employers or through the exchanges--but, either way, their choice of coverage is limited to one of four basic insurance plans that the government sanctions.
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While these four plans vary from low- to high-cost options, the benefits offered under them are pretty much the same. The difference between the cheaper and pricier plans is mostly the amount of cost sharing (e.g., you pay less for insurance if your co-pays are higher).
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FTC's Dismal History Of Antitrust Attacks
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antitrust does not exist to promote business and price competition.
There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lumpectomy: The folly of a "right to health care"
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While liberty rights such as freedom of speech or freedom of
contract require others to refrain from acting in certain ways,
“welfare rights” such as the purported entitlement to health care
(or to food, clothing, or shelter) require others to perform
certain actions. They represent a legally enforceable claim on
other people’s resources. Taxpayers must cover the cost of
subsidies; insurers and medical professionals must provide their
services on terms dictated by the government.A right to health care thus requires the government to infringe
on people’s liberty rights by commandeering their talents, labor,
and earnings.
The terror and triumph of free markets
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Only 8 of top global 25 companies in 1999 are still in top 25 in 2009, and some of them have shed a lot of market cap.
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The consumer is king: in 2009, the consumer wants iPhones in their Xmas stocking and not whatever Worldcom had been pretending to be producing. The radical uncertainty of how to please consumers is an argument FOR free markets
22 Dec 09
Another reason not to buy a GM car
This is what it looks like when the federal government is "not in the business of running a car company."
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Starting Jan. 4, General Motors Co. plans to do something unprecedented in the U.S. car industry: It will run its assembly line here around the clock on a permanent basis.
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Car-assembly lines need too much scheduled maintenance and restocking for such intensive production to make sense, many industry experts say.
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Health Care Industry Lobbyists Fight President Obama's Health Care Legislation All the Way to the Bank
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If Congress decides to step in
and impose massive, complex rule changes on an industry, it seems
inevitable — not to mention reasonable and understandable — that
the industry is going to want, and make every effort, to provide
its input and perspective on how those changes will affect its
livelihood. -
Perhaps liberals might say that one-time spikes like this are to
be expected, and that after legislation takes effect, spending will
come down. Problem is, the more you get government involved in an
industry, the harder it is to ever unlink the two. - 1 more annotations...
The States’ Failed Experiments: The major provisions of ObamaCare have already been tried. And they don’t look good
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Like participants in a
national science fair, state governments have tested variants on
most of the major health care reforms Congress is considering. The
results include dramatically higher premiums in the individual
market, spiraling public costs, and reduced access to care. -
Despite these state-level failures, President Barack Obama and
congressional Democrats are pushing a slate of similar reforms.
Unlike most high school science fair participants, they seem
unaware that the point of doing experiments is to identify what
actually works. Instead, they’ve identified what doesn’t—and
decided to do it again.
What Price Deadbeat?
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The chart above, from the Third Quarter Mortgage Metrics Report
[pdf], shows,
for the first
time since redefaults have been tracked in a systematic way,
substantial evidence that very steep reductions in principal can
keep bad borrowers in artificially inflated homes.
Did Progressives Even Know What Was In the Health Care Reform Bill?
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And as lefty
opposition to the bill has intensified, something incredibly
frustrating has happened: progressive criticism has come to mirror
the criticism that's come from market-oriented skeptics. -
What does this mean? I see two possibilities: The most likely is
that progressives are latching on to these criticisms because
they're now so angry that they're ready to do anything to kill the
bill — including admit what they had to have known all along, which
is that these criticisms actually have a lot of merit.The second, while less likely, is more disturbing: Many
progressives who backed this bill throughout the year had no idea
what was in it. They hated Republicans, heard endless
public-option hosannas from their leaders, and believed they'd
found a way to start the move toward single payer.
The Case Against Iran Sanctions
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economic sanctions rarely achieve their stated goals and almost always
harm innocent people. -
When governments impose sanctions on people in another country, the main goal
of the officials who favor the policy is to harm the person or people in charge
of that country’s government so that they will change their policies. That’s
the goal. What they do to achieve it is intentionally harm many innocent
people in those countries, in this case by trying to reduce their supply of
gasoline. - 2 more annotations...
Obama shadow boxes with 'enemies' of health plan
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Who were these "well-financed forces" and profiting "opponents of ... reform"?
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The Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America, the largest industry lobbying group in the country, is shelling out $12 million for pro-"reform" ads this summer and fall. Obama has bragged that "even the pharmaceutical industry" is on board.
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Kern County's Monstrous D.A.: Farewell to Ed Jagels, a man who put 25 innocent "child abusers" in prison.
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Perhaps the most troubling thing about Ed Jagels' career is that
not only have the legal and political systems in California never
sanctioned him for his monstrous behavior, he's been regularly
rewarded for it. He has served as both president and director of
the powerful California District Attorneys Association (CDAA), and
on a number of blue ribbon panels charged with advising state
officials on crime policy. Upon Jagels' retirement announcement,
Scott Thorpe, the current head of the CDAA,
told the Associated Press that Jagels is a "prosecutor's
prosecutor," a remarkable and revealing statement of that
organization's commitment to justice.
George W. Bush: Biggest Spender Since LBJ
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Figure 1 shows the average increase in total spending under recent presidents. Bush II was the biggest spender since LBJ. His spending increases were far larger than the three prior presidents.
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Bush II was instrumental in adding the Medicare drug benefit, which by 2009 was adding more than $60 billion a year to federal spending.
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20 Dec 09
A Tale of Two Libertarianisms: A new book of unpublished critiques by Murray Rothbard reveals a divide in the larger libertarian project
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The uneasy relationship between Rothbard and Hayek is echoed to
this day, with such modern Hayekian libertarians as
Virginia Postrel (former editor of Reason magazine)
and
Will Wilkinson lamenting the conflation of their thought with
Rothbard-style beliefs. All sorts of intra-libertarian squabbles
follow along the same rough lines of the no-compromise,
anti-statist Rothbardians versus the more classical liberal,
utilitarian, fallibilist, prudential Hayekians. The differences in
ultimate political ends are often also reflected in differences in
tone and willingness to engage—as opposed to rail against—the
standard bastions of mainstream power and influence.
18 Dec 09
Haley Barbour's Bizarre Pardon Record
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The governor of Mississippi has simultaneously ignored increasing evidence that there may be a disturbingly high number of innocent people in prison in Mississippi and handed out pardons to the convicted murderers who just happen to do work on his house.
Five Reasons for Optimism: As awful as the times may seem, they also contain seeds of hope
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But there have been
countervailing currents as well, broad trends that began before the
dawn of the decade and have continued, even accelerated, in the
time since then. They haven't undone the awfulness oozing from the
District of Columbia, and some of them may yet be reversed. But
taken together they offer a more balanced image of the world, one
with better prospects for peace, prosperity, and freedom than you'd
expect if your only source of news was the Congressional
Record. -
1. A surge in nonviolence.
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Report: Democratic districts received nearly twice the amount of stimulus funds as GOP districts
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“You would think that if the stimulus money was actually spent to create jobs, there would be more stimulus money spent in high unemployment states,” said Veronique de Rugy, a scholar at the Mercatus Center who produced the analysis. "But we don't find any correlation."
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“We find no correlation between economic indicators and stimulus funding. Preliminary results find no statistically significant effect of unemployment, median income or mean income on stimulus funds allocation,” said the report.
17 Dec 09
U.S. National Debt Tops Debt Limit
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The ceiling was set at $12.104 trillion dollars. The latest posting by Treasury shows the National Debt at nearly $12.135 trillion.
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The Debt Limit has been raised about a hundred times since 1940, when it was $49 billion - about five days worth of federal spending now.
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Penny Wong jeered, Hugo Chavez cheered
The climate change debate is conventionally portrayed as between disinterested scientists and thoughtful laymen on one side; and ideologues, selfish consumers, and greedy businessmen on the other side. Actually, both sides contain people with agendas, as this article shows.
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When he said there was a “silent and terrible ghost in the room” and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening.
But then he wound up to his grand conclusion – 20 minutes after his 5 minute speaking time was supposed to have ended and after quoting everyone from Karl Marx to Jesus Christ - “our revolution seeks to help all people…socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell....let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.” He won a standing ovation.
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