Miscellany: 10/12/13

Quote of the Day
Individually, we are one drop.
Together, we are an ocean.
Ryunosuke Satoro

Pro-Liberty Thought of the Day

The Oxymoronic "Affordable Care Act"
...
This excerpt is from the LA Business Journal:

The Anthem Blue Cross representative could not have been more helpful earlier this year in pointing me to a new health insurance plan, one which lowered the monthly premium for my family of five yet maintained an adequate level of coverage for us. Most importantly, the new higher-deductible plan saved us a couple of hundred dollars a month in premium costs....The [$666 monthly premium] plan, and every other Anthem policy available to individuals in California for that matter, did not meet federal requirements under the Affordable Care Act...The [ACA California exchange] bronze plan options, which feature the lowest premiums and highest deductibles, for example, were disappointing and hardly affordable. For starters, the bronze offerings included just three carriers, including two HMO providers and our current carrier, Anthem. I was stunned by the $900 monthly premium, not to mention higher out-of pocket costs.  Our doctor office co-payment would double from $30 under our current policy to $60 under the Obamacare policy, and in the event of a trip to an emergency room, our co-pay would triple from $100 to $300.  The new normal at our house could mean living without health insurance, which would result in penalties at tax time .We’ll stash a few bucks in a health savings account and pay as we go to the doctor. If, heaven forbid, my wife or I receive a cancer diagnosis, we’ll go straight to the exchange since carriers will be prohibited from denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions. How’s that for a perverse incentive created by a flawed law? And the more we learn about the Affordable Care Act, the less affordable it becomes.

This comes from a (conservative blogger) Michelle Malkin reader:

I live in New Jersey, but work for a small company based out of Massachusetts. For years, we were all insured through the company from a plan that originated in Massachusetts. However, as soon as Obamacare was passed, we were "audited" by the insurance company, and it turns out only 50 percent of our company is based in Massachusetts, and therefore we did not qualify as a company under the law. Apparently, you need 51 percent based in the state. About five days prior to our insurance policy renewal, we were told we could not (renew).

On Oct. 1, I tried to get into the exchange for New Jersey that is run by the federal government. I earn too much for a subsidy, but I wanted to see what my options were and how much more this was going to cost.

I created an account and tried for four days to get in. Each time it said my password was invalid. I tried to use the "forgot password" option so they could send me a link to reset. When I got the link, the system kept saying that it didn't recognize my user account. When I tried to re-create the user account, it told me that one already existed. I called the number several times, and they all told me the same thing: Try back later. The glitches are being worked out.

I (then) created a new account under (my wife's) name. After several attempts, I was able to get in. Over the weekend, I spent at least four hours trying to fill out the application. Each time, the website crashed. When I got back to work on Monday, I tried one more time. Lo and behold, the application was submitted.

According to the government, I'm not eligible for any private plans. I received a notice that my entire family is only eligible for Medicaid! I make a decent salary. I'm not eligible for a subsidy, let alone Medicaid.

This morning my wife received a call. Apparently, it was the exchange. She explained to them that we are not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid. 

Horizon Blue Cross does offer a similar plan (to the one being canceled) for about the same, but the problem is that my children's pediatricians are not in it (so much for keeping your doctors). The only plans that the doctors take involve a 40 percent deductible with higher co-pays. So now I have fewer options and not more. There is another new company offering coverage where I am, but it has zero out-of-network benefits and a smaller network. Either way, everything is changing for me with higher costs.

Milton Friedman and other libertarian-conservatives, including yours truly, have discussed cash, charity, and catastrophic insurance. Here's a short discussion from AAPS, a more free-market physician group I've previously referenced and praised in the blog:



Finally, Cato Institute did one of its events to discuss an author's liherty-related book, in this case, David Goldhill's Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father — and How We Can Fix It. (Just a warning to readers: I'm embedding it here for reader convenience, but the video is over an hour long.) Goldhill is a businessman, ironically a lifelong Democrat, whom believes ObamaCare merely exacerbates the dysfunctional  health care sector over the last few decades. (So help me if I hear another government policy analyst try to argue that the healthcare industry is "special" and free market principles don't work or are irrelevant... We have creative accounting all over the place with "free" services and products, cross-group subsidies, government mandates requiring vendors to issue below-cost policies, etc We have the infamous hospital chargemaster, the mysterious price list, which notoriously lacks transparency. The bottom line is the Democrats have been been promoting all the freebies in the plan, but we know that providers and vendors aren't donating their time and materials for free. It all gets made up somehow, maybe, e.g., higher office visit rates, etc. But a key point Goldhill is making is that such an opaque system is intrinsically harder to manage from a business aspect. Michael Cannon, one of Cato's health guru analysts, is profoundly skeptical even of the idea of government-run catastrophic care, on a slippery-slope basis of governmental domestic empire-building (and where you draw the lines, e.g., needs-based eligibility). I'm somewhat empathetic to this point of view, although I worry about how we handle things like the availability of treatment for genetic disorders. where costs can be prohibitive and events are not really random. (Consider, for instance, things like sickle-cell anemia, breast cancer, diabetes, etc.)



Facebook Corner

Viz LFC

 If Society is God, then I'm an atheist.

Via LFC

 This reminds me of an incident in Houston. I was waiting for traffic to clear to make a right on Westheimer (a very busy street) from a side street bordering a strip mall. For some odd reason, some businessman was sitting in his car in the inbound lane to my left. He never looked in my direction the 2-3 minutes we were waiting for a break in traffic. As soon as there was a break, he clipped my lane--really drove into my left fender. We get out of our cars, his right front bumper is embedded in my fender, and the dirtbag asked if my left fender was crumpled before the accident (expletive deleted). His insurance company rejected the claim he initiated, based on a minor error I made in the report referencing the side street. My insurance company wouldn't get involved because the accident wasn't my fault. I eventually got the other insurance company to pay off, but I had to trick the other driver to admit in writing he hit my car. (He claimed he was in the outgoing lane and I had suddenly pulled up next to him straddling the curb, and he had no alternative but to hit my car.) 

My position on handling pre-existing conditions is if the government wants to subsidize premiums for high risk insured, they should do so directly, not essentially abuse regulation to impose a de facto tax on other plan participants. Guaranteed issue by regulation of private plans, i.e., forcing insurers to issue below-cost policies, is morally corrupt and legal plunder.

Via LFC

 Doesn't that cover just about all government spending?

Via LFC

Somehow the population of squirrels thrives without government intervention against nut hoarding... [Humorous note: I think the picture is of a chipmunk, not a squirrel; see the Onion piece below. I think the original post described it as a squirrel. But the general concept remains the same. The economist, of course, is Keynes. Keynesians believe that savings cuts consumption,  hurting the economy. More classical economists argue that lower prices in a downturn can trigger demand.]

via LFC

 Disagree.I do think the political process is morally corruptible and biases towards counterproductive activist/interventionist policy. As the Demagogue-in-Chief is fond of saying, "We can't afford to do nothing." The press and historians lionize activist policy and do a poor job discussing opportunity costs. I do think conservatives often don't see the inconsistency in supporting the Big Defense military-industrial complex, and too many trust the government on law-and-order issues in conflict with individual rights. But only one party has driven the positive rights agenda; the other side has to play defense against government scope creep.

Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Michael Ramirez and Townhall

Political Humor




You see the moral hazard of trusting the government to squirrel away real assets for their golden years instead of IOU's in past government spending sprees....

Musical Interlude: Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, "You Really Got a Hold on Me"

Miscellany: 10/11/13

Quote of the Day
Concern should drive us into action
 and not into a depression. 
No man is frëe who cannot control himself.
Pythagoras

Barack Obama, Former Lecturer of Constitution Law
(His Ex-Students Deserve a Full Refund):
Yet Another Lawless Edict

Washpo in 2011 reported that Obama issued an executive order authorizing indefinite detention of Gitmo prisoners (HT Lew Rockwell). You remember Gitmo, right? In 2008  the future Nobel Peace Prize winner campaigned on shuttering Gitmo....Holding someone without charges? Under what constitutional, never mind international  principle?

America's Most Unwanted: 
Statist Plunderers Living Large Off the Public Dole

Can you name all these professional political parasites? Unfortunately, I can...

Thomas Jefferson is rolling over in his grave from how the plunderers have perverted the party he created:

Courtesy of Patriot Post

Pro-Liberty Thought of the Day

Courtesy of LFC on FB

Images of the Day

Courtesy of the Bastiat Institute on FB

And Walter Williams channeling Bastiat's concept of legalized plunder:

Via LFC on FB

Courtesy of Jeffrey Tucker vi Bastiat Institute on FB

The Obamian Prophecy of FY2013 Doomsday on Sequestration

(Comment on FB:  The failed Obamaian prophecy of FY2013 doom on sequestration has undermined the credibility of self-serving "progressive" Chicken Little's.)

Here's an extract of how various agencies actually handled the sequestration (via the Economic Freedom blog):

• the FDA chose to trim down travel, training, and conference costs, instead, and inspections resumed.
• The FBI cut $227 million in expired funds (money that could not be spent on new projects without congressional approval), instead, keeping the 2,285 FBI personnel, including 775 agents, fully-employed as well as keeping all FBI offices open.
• the U.S. Coast Guard reduced operations by 25 percent by letting officers choose which missions are the most important to American safety and cutting public relations stunts such as fly-bys at sport games.

Facebook Corner

From LFC:

Help! I am having some issues reconciling some of my thoughts here. Question is, in a free market private economy what would happen to those who choose not to or who cannot purchase private insurance? I realize that charity could account for some of the resolution as well as the improvement of the economy in a more favorable environment however I am having trouble imagining a scenario where some intervention is not needed.
Keep in mind that the concept of true insurance is to handle catastrophic conditions, like cancer. We also have perverse public policy where employer-based insurance is tax-exempted, but individually-procured insurance is paid from after-tax dollars, which is a violation of equal protection principles. Dysfunctional government regulations discourage insurance, e.g., by forcing younger people to cross-subsidize older people or older couples having to subsidize pregnancy expenses. The fact of the matter is before government mandates, we had market solutions to these problems; for example, doctors often discounted or donated services to people on fixed or limited income. The one exception I consider a legitimate concern would be something like guaranteeing or reinsuring emergency or catastrophic care, which are relatively low frequency and which costs can be spread across the population, e.g., as a consumption tax.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in a free market, insurance cannot be mandatory and that will lead to medical expenses getting cheaper?
First, realize that "health insurance" has come to mean bundled health services with an assortment of "use it because you already paid for it" bundled medical products and services. In addition, you have obfuscating of costs--for many people, say under company plans that are pre-tax, they only "see" their gross wage deduction (if any) and any relevant deductibles and co-pays. The effect is that the insured only see a fraction of the real cost; now enter the familiar law of supply and demand. The smaller prices drive demand, but keep in mind we are dealing with relatively scarce resources. This is driving part of the inflation, one which can mediated by free market reforms in public policy. Inflation to some extent is also being exacerbated with an aging, longer-living population which is directly related to health sector demand. We can't control that, but we can free the health care industry to devise real market-based solutions. Government regulations, compliance costs, etc., also add to unnecessary costs. For a simple example, suppose the government mandates an overnight stay for something that could be handled on an outpatient basis.

From the Milton Friedman group: How would you classify Milton Friedman in this chart?
I criticized this chart when it appeared in an earlier group, e.g., social security, Medicare, etc. did not spawn from the Old or New Right but from the modern/social liberal (vs. classic liberal) tradition. Most of us in the minarchist group, and yes, Friedman is in the group, are somewhat more reformist and pragmatic. I think, for instance, most of us would want to see more of a free market in education and banking, but we face obstacles. Look at the fact last session the Senate killed a simple measure to audit the Fed, never mind end it. So, yes, Friedman wanted voucher policies, not in the sense he believed in government taxing for schools, but in a way allowing taxpayers more control over their taxed dollars to promote school competition vs. the monopolistic public school system.

Competition produces customer service. The government is, by definition, a monopoly. You never see signs like this in mall parking lots. Any private business that imposed such insane bureaucracy would be committing suicide. Everything government touches becomes an expensive, shoddy joke. "Bureaucratic management is management of affairs which cannot be checked by economic calculation." - Mises (LFC)

This was posted on Bastiat Institute:

 Police in American Fork, Utah, have issued an abandoned-vehicle ticket to a Barbie Jeep owned by two young girls.

The toy was left overnight on the sidewalk next to the family’s driveway, and when the father of the two girls who left it there woke up, he found it parked behind his SUV — with an abandoned vehicle ticket on it

(progressive troll) this picture of signs is your best case against government?

The picture is an unintended parody of Statist rule-making obsession. It's not even reasonable for a driver to read the work of control freak busybodies. One of my favorite examples is I had to be back on the interstate in the Milwaukee suburbs. I thought I had a reservation at a hotel just off the interstate, but I found that my reservation had been cancelled. The hotel outlet was just past the interstate left turn entry, so I had to go under the highway and double-back to an entrance from the other direction. This was at 11 PM and there was no traffic in the other direction. I got into the left turn lane for the first intersection past the highway; I didn't see any no U-turn sign, but sitting at the intersection was a police car (it turns out the local police station was a block away), and I found myself pulled to the side of the interstate ramp (I thought he was trying to get past me, but he pulled in behind me.) I managed to get off with a warning, but he made it clear if I got flagged down a second time, my ass would be in jail. (I ended up driving like a granny until Milwaukee was in my rear view.) This was totally unnecessary "rules are rules", "ignorance of the law is no excuse" and so many rules and regulations get promulgated, no person can escape a "white glove" test, and you can lose your liberty arbitrarily through an abuse of authority.

Political Humor

The other day California's health insurance exchange said that over 5 million people went to their website on the first day of Obamacare. It turns out they were off by 4.4 million. It got only 645,000 hits. It turns out those were from the same guy just trying to log on over and over. - Jay Leno

[And you thought the Indian call center operators were hard to understand before ObamaCare...]

Today the Nobel Prize for literature went to Alice Munro, regarded as the "master of the short story." The Nobel Prize in literature is very important because the winner is guaranteed huge sales and interviews that will be talked about for years. No, wait, that's Oprah's Book Club. -  Craig Ferguson

[Harry Reid lost... He was nominated as the "master of long legislation"...]

Terms of Engagement

Note: I recently talked about a Cato Institute event where the author discussed his book; highly recommended.



Political Cartoon

Courtesy of the artist and LFC on FB

Musical Interlude: Motown

Stevie Wonder, "Uptight (Everything's Alright)"

Miscellany: 10/10/13

Quote of the Day
You are not superior just because you see the world in an odious light.
Vicomte de Chateaubriand

Guest Quotation of the Day

For unlike the rest of us, government sells no productive good or service and therefore earns nothing. It can only get money by looting our resources through taxes, or through the hidden tax of legalized counterfeiting known as “inflation.”...The government gets the money by tax-coercion; and the public creditors, far from being innocents, know full well that their proceeds will come out of that selfsame coercion. In short, public creditors are willing to hand over money to the government now in order to receive a share of tax loot in the future...Both parties, therefore, are making agreements about other people’s property, and both deserve the back of our hand .- Murray Rothbard

Pro-Liberty Thought of the Day

Courtesy of LFC  on FB

My Favorite Dan Hill Song

I always knew, this time would come
still I'm not ready, is anyone?
As a child I believed daddies lived on and on
I guess I was wrong.

Daddy your love for my mother, your wife,
moves me more deeply than all else in my life.
In the hospital bed, she holds you 'till dawn
loves all that lives on

As a child I believed daddies lived on and on
perhaps I wasn't wrong.



The GOP and Spending: Hypocrites?

This includes the trite observation that Republicans are little more than Big Spenders Lite, that Washington is just one big Kabuki dance, maybe a $200B difference off a $3.7T budget. If you read the above-cited Rothbard piece, he talks about Republications crying over being asked to approve the first trillion dollar debt ceiling; they had hoped that Reagan would have pushed hard for a balanced budget, making raises in the debt ceiling unnecessary. He doesn't quite put it in these terms, but once you've lost your virginity, it's easier to rationalize subsequent indiscretions. They tried to rationalize it, of course: deficits don't matter, we owe it to ourselves, and similar nonsense.

I tend to be more empathetic; in fact,in a recent FB post, I started off telling commentators to knock off the GOP bashing; I mean comparing the GOP to the Dems on spending is like comparing the minimally sexually active young adult to a whore. Few of the programs were GOP initiatives, and voting to cut spending is like handing your next election populist opponent a gift issue. I want the GOP to talk about various proposals forwarded by tax and spending watchdog groups, agency resource sharing, across-the-board spending cuts,  business process reengineering, asset sales, privatization efforts--in short, anything cities and states have been doing to close budget gaps. You are not going to close a $700B deficit by just attacking Big Bird... I understand the GOP is wary of facing MediScare campaigns, etc., but I think the public will be supportive of bold action. I think the Demagogue-in-Chief is paying a political price for his handling of this, down to 37% approval in a recent poll.




This Will Anger Sarah Palin: The Obama Shutdown is Hurting Joe Six-Pack...

From the AP (HT ABC and Bastiat Institute):

The shutdown has closed an obscure agency [the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, or TTB, a little-known arm of the Treasury Department] that quietly approves new breweries, recipes and labels], which could create huge delays throughout the rapidly growing craft industry, whose customers expect a constant supply of inventive and seasonal beers. Mike Brenner is trying to open a craft brewery in Milwaukee by December. His application to include a tasting room is now on hold, as are his plans to file paperwork for four labels over the next few weeks.

On the Reading List

There are actually a couple of podcast items I like and recommend;

• "Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution’s Promise of Limited Government": I want to read this book. Cato Institute often offers authors of certain liberty-related books a platform to give a related talk and invites one or more discussants to review it. I found Clark Neily, an Institute for Justice attorney (I heart Institute for Justice)  a compelling speaker. I draw your attention to his indirect reference to Footnote 4, or as I call it "the Footnote From Hell"; he makes reference "fake judging", how in many circumstances, judges will become de facto government legislative advocates in finding a rational basis in dubious laws. He points out that the government is given ludicrous wide discretion (he makes a good example of the atrocious Kelo decision and the sophistic gymnastics to reinterpret the Fifth Amendment) and how it's easier for the legislature, say, to ban a product than challenge the messaging on the same product, a patently absurd outcome.
• Tom Woods Show, episode 11.  I'm no Lincoln fan. I've cited a couple of talks by economist DiLorenzo. Woods, a historian with a similar Austrian School perspective, says that of the thousands of pages he's written, only a few have been about Lincoln. He is responding to a reader whom found herself rebuked by her condescending Lincoln-loving pastor. Woods does an epic rant here with a multi-point indictment of Lincoln and points out the smears of the conventional Lincoln apologists on Lincoln critics, often libertarians, as suspect Confederacy sympathizers. Libertarians, of course, see slavery as a violation of the unalienable right of liberty but felt that the institution would have gone away as it did in England and Brazil, without killing thousands of fellow American citizens, atrocities against innocent civilians, or ignoring the Bill of Rights.

Facebook Corner

Via LFC on FB

The chart is too simplistic. I'm more in the minarchist camp, but minarchists generally don't believe in unrestricted powers (e.g., military) or exclude voluntary elements (e.g., vs. conscription, for privatized marriage, etc.) Also, positive rights, like health, education, welfare, and old-age entitlements are the outgrowth of modern/social liberalism. Might I suggest an alternative where you have a rights continuum from negative to positive rights versus locus of control from individual to collective? You could have a collective constraints hierarchy from basic safety (law and order) to economic regulation.

Since questions seem to be popular lately, I'd like to pose one of my own. Was the Great Depression caused by excessive economic growth of the Roaring 20's, and the failure of the Fed to reign it in? Much like Alan Greenspan used the Fed to put the brakes on the economy in the mid-90's? I'm a college student, and I've been getting every library book on economics and libertarianism I can. Thanks in advance. (LFC group question)

There's so such thing as "excessive" economic growth (maybe bad monetary policy). Most of us agree that American banks were hobbled by dysfunctional regulations that constrained, say, diversifying their customer base across state lines. We had numerous panic and depressions that were relatively short-lived before the Fed (turning 100 this year). Also Canadians before 1935, with a more deregulated banking system, did not have the nature and extent of bank failures that we did. My understanding (I'm not an economics historian) is the Fed engaged in errors of commission and omission, so monetary policy had a lot to do with it, but Hoover and FDR's economic policies, exacerbating regime uncertainty among other things, also hampered recovery

LFC on FB

Voting for positive rights basically promotes morally corrupt undue subjugation of the individual to the collective and often obstructs or discourages voluntary acts of charity. As taxpayer Scrooge noted in A Christmas Carol, "Are there no workhouses? Prisons", i.e.,I've done my part--I've paid my taxes. As if force-based, monopolistic "charity" is a substitute for the more competitive private-market charities!

This year for Halloween I'm going as IRS commissar Sarah Hall Ingram! - Matt Drudge

Dan O'Brien Looks like she went as Ben Franklin for Halloween
A penny saved is a penny taxed.

Is Keynesianism the only school of economics with an answer to long term unemployment? (submitted via LFC on FB)

Loaded question, like did you kill your mother with an ax? Keynesian economics offers no answer to long-term unemployment. We promote employment by eliminating barriers to entry to the labor market, like wage controls, occupational licenses, benefit mandates, etc., and by promoting economic growth through a limited tax/regulatory burden, less regime uncertainty, etc. In short, promote free markets and free trade .

Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Michael Ramirez and Townhall

Musical Interlude: Motown

Barrett Strong, "Money"

Miscellany: 10/09/13

Quote of the Day
Books, the children of the brain.
Jonathan Swift

Guest Quotation of the Day
I Stand Corrected: Ponzi Scheme by Legal Plunder

“For those who unfairly lump Social Security in with Bernie Madoff, in all fairness, you should point out the difference. No one was ever legally required to pay money to Madoff.” - Addison Wiggin (via Bastiat Institute on FB)

Pro-Liberty Thought of the Day

Via LFC on FB

Image of the Day

Via LFC on FB

FB comment to other commentators saying what about big-spending Republicans:
Stop the GOP bashing! I'm not a GOP shill, but it would more like "Petty Theft Nation". It wasn't the GOP whom got us into 4 major wars last century, invented the Ponzi scheme entitlements, is responsible for more than doubling publicly-held debt, etc. Let us recall that the only recent years we had a balanced budget were under GOP-controlled Congresses They did lose their way under Bush, whom refused to veto budgets and ran against nation-building

LOOK! A street sweeper!
Obama just created a new unionized job!
"Teacher says every time a window breaks, a worker gets a job, thanks to Obama."

Via LPC and Bastiat Institute

No, This is Bernanke money:

And this is Yellen money (equal in purchasing power)

Via Bastiat Institute on FB
Something Yellen will never say in her lifetime: STOP THE PRESSES!

How "Progressives" Bankrupted Detroit



Privatize National Park Management

I have some reservations over micromanaging things like admission fees; a vendor has to charge enough to recover costs and an the same time fund improvements. An operator has a vested interest in keeping access affordable and I could see admissions being kept low to attract volumes, keeping in mind revenues through related operations, say, BNB's, restaurants, souvenir shops, etc.



Stupid Government Tricks:
The War on Drugs: Manipulating Special-Need Students
Beyond Heartless

An autistic boy's new, only high school friend turned out to be an undercover narc whom manipulated him into procuring a joint for him...



Facebook Corner

LFC: (on story "Bill introduced blocking Congressional pay during shutdown")

A Democrat introduced this measure. Can I see a show of hands of people whom think Democrats have read and/or understand the Constitution? Based on his actions in office, I'm not convinced that Obama does...

According to the 27th Amendment, a bill adjusting Congressional pay can't even be voted on until after an election (presumably a lame-duck session where outgoing members would have little to gain by voting themselves a raise and members or candidates could be held responsible by the electorate for their position on the bill or the early days of the next session as the bill in question is refiled.)

But assuming the bill is consistent with the Constitution:
I think this is populist nonsense.First, I don't want to send a message that only rich people can afford to serve in Congress. Second, according to Open Secrets, the average member has a net worth ranging from $6M to $12M; do you think they need the next paycheck or two? Third, not every member is equally responsible; those in leadership have greater say. But finally, if you are going to punish Congress, what about the fact we have a $17T debt, another $80T in unfunded liabilities, and $1.8T in regulatory drag on the economy?

LPC: John McCain: The GOP should be 'embarrassed' about the shutdown!
After 30 years in Congress, he has been part of the problem, not the solution, of a spendthrift government gone wild, unprecedented regulatory empire-building, unending ineffective, unnecessary, costly foreign interventions, and enslavement of younger generations to Ponzi scheme entitlements and an unsustainable, economy-sapping national debt. That's what you should be ashamed of, John: the legacy of your career.

Political Cartoon

A golden oldie by Henry Payne via Mark Perry of Carpe Diem

Musical Interlude: Motown

Jackson 5, "I Want You Back"



Abused Not By a Significant Other But By Police After Apprehension

There but for the grace of God... Unconscionable violence by a so-called public safety officer in the Florida panhandle. Big man, in the presence of other (chivalrous?) male officers, going nuclear on an outnumbered, defenseless, smaller woman (alleged DUI involving a car accident/property damage).

Via PoliceMisconduct.net (HT Cato Institute and Huff Po)

Miscellany: 10/08/13

Quote of the Day
Every man, 
however obscure,
 however far removed from the general recognition, 
is one of a group of men impressible for good, 
and impressible for evil, 
and it is in the nature of things that he cannot really improve himself 
without in some degree improving other men.
Charles Dickens

Obama Was Spot On--in 2006

Courtesy of LFC on FB

Pro-Liberty Thought of the Day

Via Bastiat Institute on FB

Via LFC on FB

Abuse of Liberty Under the Obama Government Shutdown:
An Act of Terror Against Elderly Visitors to Parks

From the Newburyport Daily News (HT LFC on FB)

Vaillancourt was one of thousands of people who found themselves in a national park as the federal government shutdown went into effect on Oct. 1. For many hours her tour group, which included senior citizen visitors from Japan, Australia, Canada and the United States, were locked in a Yellowstone National Park hotel under armed guard.

The tourists were treated harshly by armed park employees, she said, so much so that some of the foreign tourists with limited English skills thought they were under arrest.

When finally allowed to leave, the bus was not allowed to halt at all along the 2.5-hour trip out of the park, not even to stop at private bathrooms that were open along the route.

Welcome to Barack Obama's America and legal thuggery. If it was in my power, I would terminate those rangers so fast, their standard-issue Obama bobbleheads would spin... There is no excuse for this behavior--armed guard over non-violent visitors? Not even letting people go to the bathroom? What kind of collective incivility is this crap? What is wrong with these rangers, so devoid of common sense? Who are they trying to impress, the American taxpayers whom pay their salaries, or the Deadbeat-in-Chief?

It Reminds You of the Berlin Wall, Doesn't It?
Designed to Keep the West From Immigrating to the Workers' Paradise...

Via LFC on FB

Chart of the Day: Just a Reminder: SSDI is the First Entitlement Scheduled to Exhaust Reserves--Soon; Barack "Take No Position" Obama, As Usual, Leads From Behind

Courtesy of Cato Institute

Grassley Earns Bad Elephant of the Year Nomination, Klobucher for JOTY

I didn't see this story until Mark Perry of Carpe Diem covered a related WSJ piece on the two Senators' demanding FTC investigation of alleged anti-competitive practices of the favorite Dem scapegoat, the domestic oil industry. Not even Big Banks reach the crony capitalistic excesses of Big Green Energy, which gets ethanol mandates, subsidies and protectionist tariffs. It takes chutzpah for these hypocritical anti-competitive special-interest politicians to engage in such spurious nonsense. Even the environmental patron saint of the Democratic Party, Al Gore, admits that corn-based ethanol is bad public policy. Grassley, no doubt, is looking out for the corn growers in his state; whether Klobucher is motivated by the Dems' anti-fossil fuel agenda or anti-corporate populism, I don't really care; this is an abuse of dubious regulatory authority.

Pelosi and 7 Other Congressional Democrats Arrested;
Charges Don't Include Intergenerational Plunder...

The others Dems included several pieces of work, including Rangel and Ellison. This was an intentional effort to draw media attention to immigration reform. This blog promotes more authentic immigration reform which goes beyond pandering to unauthorized Latino residents for political purposes; it deregulates Statist restrictions in businesses contracting voluntary labor or other resources across borders. I want a more deregulated immigration process like the one that existing before counterproductive, labor-protectionist restrictions were implemented in the 1920's and thereafter. I have written several segments supporting legalization of unauthorized Latino residents in good standing. What I don't like is chronic violations of the rule of law by this lawless Obama Administration, which abuses prosecutorial discretion and executive orders to sidestep bipartisan compromise.

Chalk up a group nomination for JOTY; I don't like manipulative, politically self-serving protests.

It's Yellen! Thumbs DOWN!
Breaking Though the Glass Ceiling at the Fed
But It's the Dollar That's Really Broken

The gold-backed dollar once stood tall
The irredeemable dollar has had a great fall
And all of Yellen's policies
And all the Fed's men
Cannot make a strong dollar
Together again.

Familiar readers know I called this one long before Summers made it obvious by withdrawing his name from consideration. I hope Sen. Rand Paul is a chip off the old block (his dad Ron) and does not let this become a coronation. I consider Yellen part of the Fed problem, not the solution.

You see a lot of polemical pieces out there already, anticipating objections,  insisting Yellen is no inflation dove; to cite Obama's favorite saying, "You can put lipstick on a pig, but..." The elephant in the room is dysfunctional activist, manipulative monetary policy, which is a mortal sin against free market principles. But let me quote from the Gray Lady:

But [in July 1996] the Fed’s powerful chairman, Alan Greenspan, saw a chance for the first time in decades to drive annual inflation all the way down to zero. Janet L. Yellen, then a relatively new and little-known Fed governor, talked Mr. Greenspan to a standstill that day, arguing that a little inflation was a good thing. She marshaled academic research that showed it would reduce the depth and frequency of recessions, articulating a view that has prevailed at the Fed. And as the Fed’s vice chairwoman since 2010, Ms. Yellen has played a leading role in cementing the central bank’s commitment to keep prices rising about 2 percent each year.

Ah, yes, easy money policies that have resulting in multiple bubbles, all during Yellen's tenure...

Simon Says...  The Chinese Say

"The executive branch of the U.S. government has to take decisive and credible steps to avoid a default on its Treasury bonds," said [Chinese Vice Finance Minister] Zhu Guangyao in a statement yesterday. " “It is important for the US economy as well as the global economy... We hope the United States fully understands the lessons of history," Mr. Zhu sternly cautioned. China is "naturally concerned about developments in the U.S. fiscal cliff."

It's embarrassing that a Communist has to lecture a social liberal like Obama on fiscal policy...

Courtesy of Agora Inc.

ObamaCare Roundup

From CNN:

As the [HHS Secretary Sebelius] sat down to begin the segment, Stewart opened a laptop on his desk. “I’m going to attempt to download every movie ever made, and you’re going to try to sign up for Obamacare, and we’ll see which happens first.”

[Sebelius lipsynced a Beatles' tune:
]

When asked how many individuals had signed up for insurance so far, Sebelius admitted, “I can’t tell you, because I don’t know ... we will be giving monthly reports.”

“If I’m an individual that doesn’t want this, it would be hard for me to look at a big business getting a waiver," Stewart said. "I would feel like you are favoring big business because they lobbied you ... but you’re not allowing individuals that same courtesy.”

After pressing her further on the issue to no avail, a somewhat exasperated Stewart finally smiled and asked, “Am I a stupid man?”

Let's be clear; Stewart does not favor health care reforms restoring economic liberty to the sector; he favors an even more Draconian megalomaniac solution, single-payer. But especially note Sebelius' disingenuous, defensive, pathetic response. Now every weekend film producers know how well their latest blockbuster films have done, without waiting for monthly batch reports of theater receipts; we know fairly quickly how Black Friday sales receipts add up. But somehow this engineering feat of wonder of the ObamaCare exchange application systems can't give fairly simple, predictable questions like Stewart asked; I bet even a class of college students whom have never taken an economics course would have asked that question. The fact that she had to dodge simple questions speaks volumes about the program as a whole.

From Libertarian Republic:

When [ACA supporters] Cindy Vinson and Tom Waschura] received their bills for medical insurance last week, they noticed their policies were replaced with more expensive versions in order to conform to the new health care law. Vinson now pays $1,800 more a year while Waschura will pay $10,000 more a year for his family of four. Needless to say they weren’t too happy.

“I was laughing at Boehner — until the mail came today,” Vinson said. ”I really don’t like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family’s pocket each year, that’s otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy. I’m not against Obamacare,” Waschura said. “It’s just the initial shock. I’m holding out hope that there will be a correction over a handful of years.”

So much for the oxymoronic "Affordable Care Act". When healthcare was traditionally regulated by state, it was more difficult for special-interests to attach costly new mandates--they had to win over dozens of states. What we libertarian-conservatives wanted to do was to provide more of competitive marketplace across states where policyholders could shop for "just the basics" healthcare policies; since the mandates would add costs, putting in-state insurers at a competitive disadvantage, and you would see states scaling back these mandates. Democrats understand this concept, which they've derided as a "race to the bottom".

When you centralize something, you're doing the exact opposite of the engineering principle of compartmentalization: "general technique of separating two or more parts of a system to prevent malfunctions from spreading between or among them." Take, for instance, a rudimentary ship; if the boat experienced a leak, the whole ship could sink. But imagine you could plug or at least contain the leak in one sealed compartment of the vessel. By centralizing the rules, regulations, and mandates of healthcare policies, the federal government, as always, simplified life for the corrupt, influence-seeking special interests. (Just a minor example: I'm sure psychologists would benefit from any mandates covering their services.) You have a single point of contact. On the other hand, RomneyCare might have worked in Massachusetts with less than 10% uninsured, but it was less of an option in Texas with a much larger population and perhaps triple the uninsured rate. If RomneyCare was such a wonderful thing, we might see Texans relocate to Massachusetts; Texas might reform its insurance market to be more competitive. That's the beauty of a free market. The Democrats don't want or trust a free market; they want to demonize health insurers as corrupted by the profit motive. Apple makes much higher margins than any health insurer, but no one demonizes Apple for being profitable. The complaints I've heard have more to do with things like lifetime caps on catastrophic expenses. I might be willing to consider a case for catastrophic coverage, but I don't want government covering ordinary  out-of-pocket medical expenses like doctor visits or birth control; I don't want the feds micromanaging my doctor. It makes no sense for a health insurer to mark up a package of Bandaids, which I can easily shop for on my own. If my doctor doesn't think an issue requires an expensive overnight stay in a hospital, I don't want the feds second-guessing him.

So it's not surprising, along with cross-subsiding people in poor healrh, that the ACA is not so "affordable". The other is really an informal type of punitive redistributive taxation on healthier and/or younger people.  It would be better if the government was more honest and direct with taxation.

Facebook Corner

LPC: What does capitalism mean to you? Why do you support it?

It empowers individuals and their free associations to contribute to the wealth of nations. The market rewards mutually beneficial exchanges, while holding principals accountable for unsatisfactory endeavors.

Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Gary McCoy and Townhall

Musical Interlude: Motown

Jr. Walker and the All-Stars, "Shotgun"

Miscellany: 10/07/13

Quote of the Day
Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them; 
but do not let them master you. Let them teach you

•  patience, 
• sweetness, 
• insight.

Helen Keller

Confusion Over Crony Capitalism

A few posts back I warned about Greenbackers infiltrating the Tea Party movement. Among other things, Greenbackers demonize the institution of banking. Within the libertarians there's a split between left-libertarians and right-libertarians A comprehensive distinction beyond the scope of this segment; suffice it to say in perhaps an oversimplified fashion that left-libertarians tend to have a more nuanced take on property ownership and they tend to distrust scale regardless of its source, government or business; a number are anarchists, believing even things like defense and justice can be privately sourced. Right-libertarians are more likely minarchists, we focus on a limited set of State powers. We are not as much worried about scale or bigness in the private sector (for example, we see economies of scale can be a good thing that benefit consumers, and we don't believe in punishing economic success). We do worry about the scale of government because it constrains economic growth; yes, we worry about any corrupt relationship between business and government, i.e., crony capitalism. For instance, a special interest can advocate higher regulations, the costs of which a big business can spread more easily than smaller competitors. But not all economically successful companies seek to impair competitors through force (regulation) through government..

We want to eliminate the possibility of corruption by design. For example, the left is obsessed with lobbyists and/or campaign finance, but part of the reason for lobbyists is because they can influence legislation for their own interests. If there was a policy against special-interest tax gimmicks, or if we abolished seniority rules for committee leadership or imposed limited terms for public office, many perceived abuses would melt away.Instead, left-wingers are addicted to vicious cycles of regulation, absolutely clueless their own policies are contributing to the problem.

Take banks; if they had to worry about depositors concerned about risking investments affecting the security of their deposits, But when nearly every bank has a deposit guarantee, it is a lot easier for banks to take on risky business, and bank customers don't need to shop around for safe banks. They know the government has their back. You can argue all you want about those nefarious banks, but it would be better off if customers were vested in bank selection (beyond, which one has an ATM closest to my house or do I get a premium for opening an account). That's why I say government is part of the problem.

(We see a similar thing with health insurance the use it or lose it mentality. For example, I'm entitled to a "free" office visit; if I had to pay for the visit out of my own pocket, I might not go. The problem is that this type behavior exacerbates cost pressures. The answer is to treat consumers like adults and vest them in the transaction.)

In any event I was on a libertarian GOP website I've occasionally referenced in other posts. This one editor started discussing Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, and others as "left-libertarian". I posted the following comment:

Apparently being a "left-libertarian" to the editor means anyone whom doesn't share his foreign interventionist perspective--he also classifies reason.com, etc. Left-libertarians are more like left-wing activists skeptical of big government (and big anything, especially business), more anarchist than minarchist. Ron Paul, Rockwell, and others (including me) simply are more consistent, like the Old Right prior to the 1950's. We  don't believe in Big Defense but aren't anti-military; we are more reformist. Now clearly if Ulbricht intended to kill another person, it violates our common belief in the unalienable right to live. It is no reflection on Paul's libertarian-conservative positions. (For a more appropriate discussions of left-libertarisns, see, e.g., leftlibertarian.org.)

Over the weekend, someone had responded to one of my FB comments and about a third way through his diatribe, he started ranting on corporations. I think Ron Paul contributes to the problem by using the term 'corporatism' to describe crony capitalism or corrupt relationships between business and government. Ron Paul went over the concept in one of his weekly podcasts. and explicitly pointed to a couple of large IT corporations which did not rely on government favors to achieve economic success. It suddenly dawned on me the respondent was either a left-libertarian or a progressive troll.

Tyranny of the White House

How aware are you of this story via MyGovCost:

When the Obama administration acted to furlough 815,239 federal government employees as part of the partial shutdown of the U.S. government in the absence of having passed a budget or a continuing resolution to continue funding government operations, just under half of that number, 400,000, came from the Department of Defense’s civilian labor force. 

With the passage of the “Pay Our Military Act”, the Obama administration should never have targeted so many of these not so non-essential government workers with furlough notices. Many of the furloughed defense employees work in repair and maintenance functions that directly support military activities and operations, while many others inspect work done by defense contractors, ensuring that work meets required specifications.

That the Obama administration acted to furlough so many of these employees, in spite of the law that President Obama signed just days ago, speaks to its desire to inflict as much pain as possible upon the U.S. economy to achieve its political aims.

It's bad enough that the Tyrant-in-Chief does find the manpower to bar disabled vets from memorials on public property that they risked their lives and health for or that residents on leased federal land are evicted from their homes and businesses

ObamaCare Roundup

Some copies of user comments on an ObamaCare FB page, via an investment newsletter:








From Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt from National Review:

Last week we heard from NR Cruiser Bruce Webster, whose professional work is in analyzing large organizations, large projects, and complicated IT projects..

News reports I've seen since then indicate that its problems are systemic and not merely due to web traffic (cf. the reports that 99% of the 'applications' being forwarded to insurance companies are incomplete or corrupted). And, really, 7 million visitors in two days is pretty light-weight compared to a lot of commercial websites these days.

Having done detailed reviews of troubled IT projects, including ones bigger than this (I spent three months leading a review a major re-engineering project at Fannie Mae that had taken 4 years and $500 million and wasn't even close to going into production), I suspect the issues here aren't going to go away with a few overnight bug-fixing sessions. My prediction -- with caveats that I've been wrong before -- is that sometime this week, HHS will take Healthcare.gov down completely (at least, the 'Apply Now!' portion; they can leave the 'Learn More' portion up), and it will be offline until at least November. (Here are a few other recent posts on my professional blogs -- neither written with Healthcare.gov in mind -- that nevertheless may have some bearing on its current problems: here and here.)
At least, that's what they would do if they were smart, but if they were smart, they wouldn't have gone live with the current system in its current condition. 

The Washington Post's Sarah Kliff talks to Jyoti Bansal, the founder of AppDynamics, an application management company, that handles software for companies like NetFlix.

S.K: The Obama administration has said that all these problems are happening because of overwhelming traffic. How good of an explanation is that?

JB: That seems like not a very good excuse to me. In sites like these there's a very standard approach to capacity planning. You start with some basic math. Like, in this case, you look at all the federal states and how many uninsured people they have. Out of those you think, maybe 10 percent would log in in the first day. But you model for the worst case, and that's how you come up with your peak of how many people could try to do the same thing at the same time.

Before you launch you run a lot of load testing with twice the load of the peak, so you can go through and remove glitches. [See my (RAG) FB discussion below.] I'm a very very big supporter of the health-care act, but I don't buy the argument that the load was too unexpected.

A clipping from an ObamaCare website (would you apply for a job with the understand "we do not have benefits or pay information available at this time?)

T"he marketplace opened Oct. 1 to help you apply for tax credits and apply for eligibility to use the marketplace. We do not have the benefit or rate detail at this time, but we hope to have these in the coming weeks. Once the information is available online, you'll be able to shop, compare and select plans through our portal. We apologize for the inconvenience."

I had mentioned in a recent post a Facebook thread started by an IT professional relative the day after the grand opening. This particular statement made me cringe:

"As a computer person, I can tell you that there are few, if any, websites or networks that could handle the President and every news channel telling tens of millions of people to "go check out this website today."

There are technical solutions to the problems [relative] is discussing. Among other things, the workload can be distributed (by hardware and/or software) among large numbers of middle-tier servers. How do you think web businesses manage to handle their user loads, when outages can mean losing millions of dollars? This is gross mismanagement by horrible IT management in the public sector, and I've had to deal with some of these bozos. [relative] is right in the sense that these thing happen in poorly designed systems, but these idiots have had 4 years to plan for accommodating yesterday. The problems [relative] discussed can be simulated--there are IT solutions for that. I know [relative] isn't trying to excuse these idiots; that people will wait until the last minute is also totally predictable. But let's be clear: there is no excuse for what happened. I have done lots of go-lives over the past 2 decades, and we drilled so many times that we never ran into these type issues

I talked about related technology: just to throw out a couple of name products used by former clients (no intent to exclude competitive vendors, but simply to exemplify for the unfamiliar reader): F5 Load Balancer and HP/Mercury Interactive LoadRunner:

 HP LoadRunner can simulate thousands of concurrent users to put the application through the rigors of real-life user loads, while collecting information from key infrastructure components (Web servers, database servers etc.)[2] The results can then be analyzed in detail, to explore the reasons for particular behavior. 

Facebook Corner

Some progressive troll left this propaganda image for the LFC group on FB:

We were invited to respond:

 First, as commented below, many of these were already highly regulated. Second, there are usually legal remedies for damage to people or property. Third, with respect to AIG, most libertarians object to the AIG bailout. Fourth, with respect to sweatshops, there are paternalistic comparisons made; no one is conscripted to work in a sweatshop, which have to offer sufficient compensation to attract voluntary workers. Minarchists usually recognize some minimal level of regulation--the problem is a diminishing marginal benefit to regulation. I regard the best regulation is transparency and a free press. More importantly, we need to flip the question on the often incompetent and ineffectual government regulators: who protects us from force-wielding government malpractice? Capitalism relies on voluntary transactions; An enterprise has a vested interest in its own survival to fulfill a customer's needs, to protect its reputation.

D'Accord

I came out strongly against the retroactive pay packagefor furloughed personnel  passed without dissent over the weekend. I have to admit that I was disappointed that I didn't see at least a protest vote by Amash or Massie.  I didn't see anyone else expressing similar thoughts; was I like the boy noticing the emperor was wearing no clothes. Never fear. A published comment from Lew Rockwell on Facebook is more strident on the issue:

"The Republican-controlled House has passed the 'Federal Employee Retroactive Pay Fairness Act' to provide 'for compensation of federal employees furloughed due to any lapse in appropriations that begins on or about October 1, 2013, for the period of such lapse in appropriations.'

The vote was 417-0. This means that every Republican in the House that voted (13 Republicans did not vote), voted for the bill. Forget all their talk about fiscal conservatism, reining in government spending, eliminating unnecessary government programs and agencies, limited government, etc., etc., etc. The Republican Party is pure evil (just like the Democratic Party). It cannot be reformed. It cannot be taken over. It cannot be made libertarian. It cannot be restored. It should be abandoned. There is no difference between the parties when it comes to our life, liberty, and property.

No, I have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for overpaid, underworked, and unnecessary federal workers, 95 percent of whom help carry out unconstitutional activities of the federal government," says Laurence Vance.

I think this was all about politics. I think the GOP is trying to anticipate and preempt predictable Dem responses: I think that's clear from the flurry of the piecemeal funding proposals being passed. I understand why they are doing it, but I would rather that they do the right thing.

Political Humor



Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Eric Allie and Townhall

Musical Interlude: Motown

Smokey Robinaon & the Miracles, "Tears of a Clown"