If you want to really know what your friends and family think of you
—die broke, and then see who shows up for the funeral.
Gregory Nunn
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Religious Liberty Elsewhere In the World
Gruber, the Father of ObamaCare, Admits the Democrats Misled Gullible Voters And Used Kaleidoscope Accounting in Passing ObamaCare
"This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO [Congressional Budget Office] scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed… Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass....Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not."Let me explain what this MIT economics professor, who earned $400K in related consulting, means by the CBO quote. A mandate means a certain redistribution of wealth from healthy people to sicker people. This is done not by explicitly taxing people but by forcing them to pay the higher costs in the form of increased premiums. Technically the money doesn't touch the government's hands but by requiring insurance companies to cover higher risks below cost and allowing them to make it up on healthier risks, the companies are effectively implementing a hidden tax under the authority of the government. Gruber is basically saying if the government wasn't playing this shell game, it would have to directly subsidize higher-risk healthcare through taxes, say on healthcare premiums, which the CBO would have had to score. So the Democrats were deliberately hiding the true cost burden of ObamaCare, which Gruber thinks is OK because the end justifies the means.
Facebook Corner
(Mercatus Center). Brent Skorup explains why it would be a mistake to apply Title II’s stultifying provisions to one of the few bright spots in U.S. economy—technology and Internet services http://bit.ly/1yrihpl
Of course, the naive Statist trolls believe the Trojan horse "net neutrality" concept trotted out to justify the beachhead of empire-building bureaucracy and censors. It was only a relatively unfettered free market in high tech which resulted in high, robust growth; the fascists want to replace it with government inertia, cronyism and corruption.
(Jeffrey Tucker). I'm going to save you hundreds of hours of reading time by summarizing the next three dozen academic books attacking the market economy.
1. Big private corporations are bad because they manipulate the political system for their own benefit.
2. Capitalism is what gives us big corporations.
3. Therefore capitalism has to go.
And the rebuttal: instead of getting rid of freedom and wealth, let's get rid of the political system. Problem solved.
#2 is factually dubious. Incorporation is enabled by state government legislation, lobbied into existence by the wealthy. It is not a free market phenomenon, but a creature of the State.
The major point, though, is we could basically insure against relevant liabilities, not unlike most of us don't carry, say, $100-300K against bodily injury/property damage liability related to driving behavior. I'm tired of the economically illiterate, anti-capitalist corporate bashing, babbling about oligarchies and plutocrats. Corporations are voluntary associations of people. As Tucker points out, the way you limit corruption is by limiting the State.
(Reason). To get a handle on how to strike the proper balance between public health and personal liberty, we asked four leading experts in the areas of law, health, science, and privacy to offer their recommendations for how U.S. medical and governmental officials should respond to the next domestic case of Ebola.
Isn't it ironic how the same people who denounce "isolation" when it comes to minding out own business in global affairs think Isolation of innocent, uninfected natives or volunteer medical people in West Africa are considered guilty of Ebola infection unless proven otherwise, fearmongering run amok?
Washington Post recently noted that daily new diagnoses in Liberia are down some 75% since September, with many relevant facilities running half-full, even as the US builds more facilities. This doesn't mean that you can't have an uptick, say, as the rainy season subsides, but it seems that some general tactics against the disease are working,
Whereas the Reason pieces are highly reasonable and scientifically based, I can't say the same for most of the comments below. Yes, just as libertarians can agree on a privatized form of common defense, the same can hold true for the risk of contagion. A key distinction is undue reliance on day late and a dollar short, incompetent Statist implementation vs. the principle of Subsidiarity.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Nate Beeler via Townhall |
Linda Ronstadt, Glen Campbell, Joe Cocker, "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress". If you are a familiar blog reader, you know this is one of my favorite all-time songs, in my opinion Jimmy Webb's best. I first heard the song on a mid-1970's Campbell hits compilation. I was unfamiliar with the song, but it stood out the very first time I heard it, and I still prefer Campbell's interpretation of what's turned out to be a modern pop standard with almost every decent vocalist covering it. I'm also including covers from two of my other favorite singers. I happened upon Cocker's version; it's very good, but frankly I thought he might wring more blue-eyed soul angst out of the climactic verses ("I fell out of her eyes...") But he was very respectful to the gorgeous melody; less is more...
