Author: Redactor

Categories
First Amendment rights too much government

The First Casualty of Health Care Reform

The first casualty of war is truth. The first casualty of health care reform? Free speech. 

While most health care insurers have gone along with reform proposals, even helping write the bills, a few insurance companies fall outside the insiders’ perimeter, fearful of more regulation. The regulatory environment is already oppressive, after all — though, for the insurance industry these regs come mainly from the states.

So, we now learn, at least one medical insurance provider, Humana, sent out a special letter to policyholders who also participate in the Medicare Advantage program, advising them of what the effects of new reforms on their coverage would likely be. 

What happened next?

If you guessed “gag order,” you got it.

After Humana’s expression of First Amendment rights, the Department of Health and Human Services told all insurers participating in Medicare Advantage to zip it, stifle themselves, express their thoughts in no way about any proposed reform to their policyholders — even if all such expression amounts to is a list of facts. 

Penalties include both fines and jail time.

Yes, folks, this is what unlimited government means. Increase government’s role and “hasta la vista” to some very basic freedoms. 

Just as government micromanagement of markets leads to shortages and rising prices, so increased government has predictable consequences. We pay for big government in lost freedom as well as dollars.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights property rights too much government

California Crackdowns

A government agency practicing extortion … who’d’a thunk it?

In 1987, the California Coastal Commission lost a Supreme Court case about its attempt to demand beach access from property owners in exchange for building permits. One justice said it was practicing extortion.

Nevertheless, the agency still dictates what land owners must do to receive permits — which are required even to move piles of dirt around. In one instance, the unelected Commission ordered that most of an owner’s land be given over to farming. The Pacific Legal Foundation is fighting this insanity in court.

Richard Oshen decided to produce a documentary about the CCC after friends told him how it was interfering with their own property. The agency had even gone so far as to prohibit them from tape recording its inspection of their land.

Oshen spent years conducting interviews. He even managed to film a conversation with CCC head Peter Douglas in which Douglas downplayed the agency’s dictatorial powers. But Reason magazine reports that Douglas now wants to revoke the permission he gave to use that interview. He’s also demanding to see a pre-​release version of the movie — either to try to prevent its release or just on general principles of harassing critics of tyranny.

I’ve reported on the commission before. It behaves as a kind of environmentalist mafia operating under color of law — and clearly the CCC is no fan of free speech.

Let’s hope that Douglas fails, Oshen succeeds, and California land owners get a reprieve.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall insider corruption tax policy

Ballot Box News

With all that’s going on in Washington, don’t forget: There’s a lot happening on state and local ballots. Consider these recent newsline items from Ballot Box News:

Miami-​Dade County Mayor Carlos Alvarez is under fire for giving big-​ticket raises to favored insiders while calling for steep budget cuts. A day after a poll found that 58 percent of registered voters favor the recall of Alvarez, another local mayor filed a lawsuit to undo controversial requirements that make it much more difficult to recall sitting politicians.

There’s a link to the rest of the story at the Miami Herald

.Republican lawmakers are lining up against a citizen initiative effort to impose stringent ethics guidelines on the Utah Legislature. Complained the state senate’s majority leader, “If there are people out there who have political intentions they will use this as a club time and time again.” 

Uh, sir, that would be the idea. Without people clubbing politicians on ethics, how can we root out corruption in politics? Can we trust you to do it, based on your good word as an incumbent?

Full story in The Salt Lake Tribune.

We’re told California’s cash-​strapped state government would be virtually wallowing in piles of cash if a proposed wealth tax makes it to the ballot. And is approved by voters. And survives legal challenge. I don’t support it. Tax-​the-​rich schemes are unjust, and don’t work.

But I do support BallotBoxNews​.com, where you can find out more about this proposed tax, and many other hot-​button issues.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
term limits

Tupperware Really Locks You In

Plastics: yesterday’s future, today’s convenience.

Reading a report from Jefferson City, Missouri, I learned that I already knew something that the politicians in Missouri didn’t: The difference between polystyrene and polypropylene.

Polystyrene, when expanded, makes that wonderful white stuff we usually call “Styrofoam.” Polypropylene makes dishwasher-​safe stuff like Tupperware.

Anyway, the solons of the great state of Missouri, concerned about floating debris from abandoned foam coolers on the state’s waterways, banned the wrong plastic. Instead of polystyrene, they banned polypropylene.

So now, slobs who leave their beer coolers out on the river still run free (along with responsible styrofoam users), while tidy folk who take Tupperware to the river could be nabbed and put in jail for a year.

It appears an innocent mistake. Lawmakers, trying to avoid brand names, wanted to get technical. They were just incompetent. Opponents of term limits might blame Missouri’s term-​limited, less-​than-​exhaustively experienced reps. But everyone knows that this happens as much or more with the most calcified legislators.

Anyone could make the mistake, really. For the life of me, it’s simply a fluke that I remember the difference between the two poly-​substances. Maybe it was because I once knew a girl named Polly.

In any case, the goofy law will not be enforced. It will almost certainly be amended in the next session.

And Missourians will remain free to pop and seal their Tupperware lids even at the river.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies too much government

Drop Out of the Bucket

Does $40.3 million seem like a lot of money to you? It does to me.

But to the Social Security Administration? It’s a drop in the bucket.

Or, a drop out of the bucket.

You see, while the federal government is scheduled to soon reinstate the estate tax on the wealth of deceased people, we now learn that it has also been giving money to the dearly departed.

Yes, an internal audit of the Social Security Administration revealed that it paid out more than $40 million to over six thousand dead people.

These benefits were given out weeks, months, years after receiving death certificates. The bureaucracy had been duly notified. And yet it went blithely on, continuing to send monthly checks.

Bureaucratic error. Hey, we all make mistakes. But it’s worth noting that this was an internal audit. Who knows what we’d catch if it were an external audit, with teeth?

Lately, the federal government has been talking over car companies and banks. Now the president and Congress plan to take control of the medical sector of our economy. They tell us they’ll cut medical costs by cutting waste. Yeah, right.

On a cheerier note, we needn’t fear the institution of those so-​called “death panels” to cut costs. The way the feds work, there’d be no savings — they’d still be paying for care long after the patients were dead and gone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies

They Lie!

Honor amongst thieves. It’s a great literary concept, explored in The Glass Key and Miller’s Crossing. In real life, actual thieves, when organized, can’t go to the police for adjudication. So the old, tribal concept of “honor” often serves.

It sure serves Congress. Mark Twain quipped that “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” Very funny — but you don’t need statistics. All you need is the Constitution and the latest issue of the Congressional Record.

Still, Congress has its honor. Even the lies of any particular politician are not supposed to be called out by another politician. Fellow pols are supposed to say “The Honorable So-​and-​So surely errs” — not “lies.”

And legislators are certainly not supposed to interrupt a president’s speech before Congress to shout “You lie!” Hear that, Mr. Wilson? How indecent of you! How … dishonorable.

But never once in mainstream reporting on Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” challenge did I hear anyone actually address the alleged fact of the challenge: did the president lie? 

Well, I don’t like to use that word, but he was talking about health care reform. You could almost blindfold yourself and throw a dart at reform rhetoric and still hit a whopper with each throw. 

That people were more disturbed by the outburst than the likelihood of lying says a whole lot about politics today.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.