Category: free trade & free markets

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free trade & free markets too much government

Obamacare Results Already In

A reader named Gert, commenting at National Review Online, repeats a notion heard often enough to become cliché.

Gert suggests that to debate Obamacare is “terribly premature. We just don’t have the data to know how it’s working yet.” Give it a chance to play out a bit more. Meantime, forget mere “anecdotes,” like those told by the millions who have lost their insurance despite the president’s repeated assurance that if they liked their coverage, they could keep it, “Period.”

Such advisors speak as if Obamacaresque interference in medicine were a species of interventionism utterly unlike anything before.Will and Ariel Durant's History of Western Civilization

But Obamacare is a type of thing; if we know that this type of thing is destructive by its nature, we can expect Obamacare to also be so. We know enough already — from history, economics, philosophy, psychology — to know that persons free to make their own judgments and act on them peacefully are better off than persons whose every move is mandated or banned.

What enables human beings to produce wealth, solutions, and alternatives in any realm is freedom. With responsibility. Freedom to act and to profit from our actions by choosing, as producers, what goods to provide others; by choosing, as consumers, the products that best suit our needs and circumstances. And to reap the rewards of success, and learn from our failures.

To continue to destroy this freedom in the name of collecting more data is wrong-headed. If the history of mankind so far doesn’t provide enough info to convince someone of the value of liberty, what will?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets too much government

Startling Subsidy Success

“Moving on from unfulfilling jobs, thanks to health-care law,” was the gleeful headline* on the story spoon-fed to The Washington Post by Families USA, a pro-Obamacare group that maintains a “database of people who have benefitted” from the law (a pretty easy gig, no doubt).

Polly Lower quit her job and says, “It was wonderful.” She didn’t want the job anymore, because she went from “doing payroll, which she liked, to working on her boss’s schedule, which she loathed.”

Take this job and . . .

Eddie Gonzales-Novoa left a job making $88,000 annually, because he wanted to help a cancer-surviving relative start a website for others battling the disease. Now he makes very little, but has more rewarding employment.

Well, if they can afford not to work or to make less in order to do what they want, good for them!

But, if you pay taxes (anyone?), it might not be so good for you. Under the Affordable Care Act, both Eddie and Polly are getting their health insurance subsidized by the taxpayers.

Gonzalez-Novoa’s job change is easy to sympathize with, but why should “the taxpayers” pay for the bill? Might not they have similar dreams of their own to finance?

Lower not only didn’t like her job, she was better off without one — so she receives even more in Obamacare subsidies. She told the Washington Post that she has “adjusted well” to not working.

Sadly, the Post offered no report on how well the taxpayers are adjusting to continuing to work to pay these new subsidies to others.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Print headline was different than online headline.

Categories
Accountability free trade & free markets ideological culture

The Visible Hand Drops the Ball

One of the great things about the Obamacare fiasco is that we get to revisit many of the left’s talking points for the last half-century and more — and hand the points right back, underlined.

How many times have we heard about market failure? A relentless litany.

Today’s topic? Government failure.

How many times have we been told that markets aren’t as important as we think, since what really matters is managerial know-how? The “visible hand” and all that. It was a book, if not a movie. And its basic message was that a few college-grad experts — highly trained technocrats, all — mattered more than competition. Government experts have the information. They have the skills. The techniques are known. Don’t give us any of that “free market” mumbo-jumbo, they say.

And yet, while the federal government’s efforts to build a usable healthcare.gov website proved feckless, lame and wildly expensive, Obamacare’s increasingly unbelievable proponents kept the patter going. Some states were doing just fine, they offered. Maryland, for instance.

Well, no.

The Old Line State has had just as much trouble in its new line of pushing online medical insurance policies as other governments. Biggest problem? You mean, other than not being able to put up a usable website on schedule? Or getting only four people signed up on launch day?

The Washington Post informs us that state officials ignored warnings that “no one was ultimately accountable for the $170 million project and that the state lacked a plausible plan” for its scheduled launch.

The evidence is in. Want a new market “exchange”? Don’t turn to government.

Rely, instead, on folks competing in the real market.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets too much government

Planners Cover Up Waste

You know that politicians waste money. You guess that they waste a lot of time.

But did you know they deliberately waste our time?

Transportation scholar Randal O’Toole regales us with the fix that California’s overlords have put themselves in. Merely assuming that dense city living decreases commuting, California’s legislators cooked up a law requiring local governments to increase population density.

But it turns out “transportation models reveal that increased densities actually increase congestion, as measured by ‘level of service,’ which,” O’Toole informs us, “measures traffic as a percent of a roadway’s capacity and which in turn can be used to estimate the hours of delay people suffer.”

So what to do? Golden State’s august solons have exempted cities and municipalities from calculating and disclosing the bad effects of their own legislation. They offer other standards, all of which, O’Toole explains, demonstrate only “that planners and planning enthusiasts in the legislature don’t like the results of their own plans, so they simply want to ignore them.”

The gist of the new standards of “regulation”? “[T]hey ignore the impact on people’s time and lives: if densification reduces per capita vehicle miles traveled by 1 percent, planners will regard it as a victory even if the other 99 percent of travel is slowed by millions of hours per year.”

It’s quite apparent that politicians are willing to sacrifice our time to get what they — not we — want. Time is not money. Time is more important than money.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Pro Bono

U2 singer Paul David Hewson, best known by his stage name Bono, has come to recognize that capitalism is crucial in lifting people out of poverty in any permanent way.

He now calls institutionalized charity like foreign aid only a “stopgap,” not a basic cure for poverty — an understanding perhaps still too generous, since such aid can prevent needed economic and other reforms and thus help entrench poverty.

In any case, for decades Bono has both raised money from individuals for international charity and chastised government officials whose policies seemed too stingy (in spending other people’s money). Now he is surprised to be touting the pivotal virtues of money-making and entrepreneurship.

“Rock star preaches capitalism. Wow. Sometimes I hear myself and I just can’t believe it. But commerce is real. That’s what you’re about here. It’s real. Aid is just a stopgap. Commerce — entrepreneurial capitalism — takes more people out of poverty than aid. Of course we know that.” (See a clip of these words.)

The rock star’s epiphany came after a TED talk a few years ago by George Ayittey, in which the speaker “made a special effort to rip into the foreign aid establishment,” knowing that Bono was in the audience. When the star came up after the talk to express his disagreement, Ayittey gave him a copy of his ideology-changing book Africa Unchained: The Blueprint for Development.

Perspectives unchained by myth and politics are a good idea too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets insider corruption

Copper Tubes in Alabama

You’ve gotta be somewhere, so you might as well choose where that somewhere is in a non-random fashion.

That seems to be the rule.

One consequences of this is that we now have local government officials and functionaries jet-setting the world promoting their towns, counties, cities . . . their hills and their dales.

A fascinating report from The Economist tells how the mayor of Thomasville, Alabama, came to sit in a north China pipe-factory canteen talking up his town. “Sheldon Day was there to drum up investment,” the report explains. “Two years ago he convinced another Chinese company, which makes copper tubes, to build its first American factory in the county next door. The plant will create around 300 jobs when it opens next year. Mr Day wants more.”

It’s a charming tale, even if “the battle for Chinese attention” be “fierce.” And risky:

The mayor of Farmer City, Illinois, cancelled his plans after residents expressed anger at the idea of using city money to woo foreign businesses. Chad Auer, a mayor in a right-wing bit of Colorado, had to take to YouTube to explain that when Richard Nixon went to China in 1972, it turned out to be worth his while.

Nixonian prudence aside, there’s an even darker aspect to this practice: Bending over backwards to entice businesses to an area . . . at the expense of existing businesses, residents, and any concept of equality before the law.

I refer, of course, to “tax incentives,” loopholes, tax credits, regulatory workarounds, and the like.

Fine, you pillars of society, going off promoting your town — so long as no special deals are made.

But make special enticements, and you morph from “seller” of community to “sell-out.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

You Ignorant Fool

About the title  —  that’s the FDA talking, not me. It’s their apparent attitude toward people who dare learn about their genes.

For $99, 23andMe analyzes your saliva and tells you about your DNA. Their site includes plenty of caveats about the possible emotional impact of the information, the possibility of errors, the limits of what one can infer about health tendencies, the advisability of taking no remedial action without further testing and consultation.

Nevertheless, the FDA has sent a WARNING LETTER to 23andMe co-founder and CEO Ann Wojcicki expressing concern that customers may, for example, rush to have dangerous prophylactic surgery like breast removal if they learn about some genetic risk factor. The company must stop marketing its product until it satisfies FDA regarding false positives, recipients with no common sense, etc. Otherwise, the agency just may have to seize 23andMe and impose penalties.

Yet, as Harry Binswanger notes, “A false positive does not force you to obey it.”

Wojcicki has now spoken up about the FDA’s letter, allowing that 23andMe is “behind schedule” in providing FDA with information, calling the bullying agency a “very important partner,” and in general speaking very carefully while stressing that new technology is not per se a bad thing.

What she doesn’t say is that any FDA interference with our ability to buy and evaluate information about our DNA, and Wojcicki’s right to discover and sell it to us, would be a very bad thing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

The Woman Who

The good news? Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke is getting the boot. The bad news? His replacement looks no better.

Last Thursday, the Senate Banking committee voted to place Janet Yellen as head of the Federal Reserve. The full body of august solons is expected to confirm this nomination, electing her as head honcho and chief cook (kook?) at the nation’s quasi-private/quasi-public central bank.

I am sure there are folks who look on this passing of the baton with a sort of patriotic piety. I know there are Democrats who rejoice in a banker referred to by Reuters as “a monetary policy dove who puts more weight on driving down high unemployment than the risk this will ignite future inflation. . . .”

Of course, the Fed has already pumped trillions into the system. A burgeoning employment boom has not resulted. To say the least.

Reviewing the current situation, and the likely appointment, economist Gerarld P. O’Driscoll, Jr., reminds us of the big truth about those who push at the Veil of Money: “the Fed is not capable of stimulating job creation, at least not in a sustained way over time.” What the Fed has succeeded in doing, in recent years, is prop up our benighted federal government’s continuing crisis of over-spending: “Congress and the president have been spared a fiscal crisis, and thus repeatedly punted on fiscal reform.”

Problem is, no one really believes debt accumulation or monetary back-up make for a sustainable policy: at some point, O’Driscoll tells us, rising interest rates will “precipitate a crisis.”

I wouldn’t want to be in charge at the Fed when that happens.

So, some sympathy for Ms. Yellen.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets too much government

The Freedom Cure

To solve our problems, we need the freedom — to plan, to create, to market and profit. We need the freedom to use the capital we gain by solving problems — whether the capital comes in the form of money, knowledge, or reputation — to solve other problems.

That’s as true in medical industry as in any other productive endeavor. But medical freedom is shrinking thanks to taxes and regulations imposed by Obamacare and numerous previous interventions.

Consider the many life-saving gadgets and drugs that we now take for granted. Medical doctor Paul Hsieh observes that creating these does not happen automatically. Even slightly higher taxes or tighter regulations “can mean the difference between a product coming to market— or being abandoned as not worth the effort.” We know how existing devices save lives. What we don’t know is what lives will by lost for lack of inventions that never maker it to market but, in a freer political environment, would have. It is the difference between what Bastiat called “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen.”

How can we ensure the largest possible field for the invention and propagation of life-saving technology, like genetically cased medicine or 3D-printed body parts? For starters, get rid of new taxes on medical devices and eliminate FDA regulations. Chuck the whole apparatus of Obamacare. Then enact ever-more fundamental market reforms until patients, doctors, drug and device companies use their judgment completely unimpeded.

The debate about freedom in medicine shouldn’t be just about whether you will be allowed (!) to “keep your doctor.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Corn Subsidies Fail Big

America has a problem: obstinate politicians, the Obstinacy in Chief, especially.

Almost any policy high-lighted at some point in the last few years could serve as an illustration of this point, but let’s choose the once-popular “green” pro-ethanol policies.

George W. Bush pushed ethanol, and Barack Obama doubled-down on the subsidy, making it a centerpiece for his low carbon-footprint notion.

It has not worked.

What it has done is create what environmentalists are now calling “an ecological disaster.”

How?

It created a land rush that swallowed vast tracts of land sporting alternate uses, including millions of acres of conservation land, including wetlands. And the huge amounts of insecticide and fertilizer used in the effort have poisoned wells and water supplies as well as rivers and the Gulf of Mexico.

All to plant more corn than the market demands.

But is it doing what the government wants, and Obama demanded — the whole reason for this goofy program after all?

“The government’s predictions of the benefits have proven so inaccurate,” write Dina Cappiello and Matt Apuzzo for the Associated Press, “that independent scientists question whether it will ever achieve its central environmental goal: reducing greenhouse gases. That makes the hidden costs even more significant.”

Over-production, higher costs, externalized burdens — typical for a government subsidy. But what can we do about it?

In early 19th century Britain, Richard Cobden and John Bright started the Anti-Corn Law League, which successfully opposed the biggest protectionist program of the age. We could use another such vital force, this time to oppose the idiotic subsidies that raise food prices internationally as well as wreak havoc on land in the Mid-West.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.