Category: free trade & free markets

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free trade & free markets too much government

The Hewitt-Romney Rationalization

Those who insist that RomneyCare isn’t as bad as ObamaCare need a reality check.

Both impose new price controls; both impose new taxpayer-funded subsidies; both force people to buy health insurance; both massively expand government interference in our lives.

Former Governor Mitt Romney seemed to acknowledge the similarities when he suggested, shortly after Obamacare had passed, that he’d “be happy to take credit” for the president’s accomplishment. Now, though, with the glaring parallels so politically inconvenient, he pretends that parsecs of distance separate the two plans.

RomneyCare apologist Hugh Hewitt says that RomneyCare’s mandate forcing people to buy health insurance offends only “a handful of libertarian purists.” (Which I’d submit is far better than being a pure socialist or even a half-and-half socialist.) According to Hewitt, if we have no great objection to, say, smog-emission mandates, what’s the big deal about being compelled to buy a product?! Anyway, he adds, states have the right to impose such mandates, whereas the federal government is constitutionally barred from doing so.

Regardless of how we assess particular attempts to combat pollution, pollution at least conceivably violates the rights of others. Your not buying something does not violate anybody else’s rights; being compelled to buy something does violate somebody’s rights — yours.

Sure, RomneyCare affects “only” 6.5 million people, whereas ObamaCare affects some 300 million. But expanding governmental interference in the medical industry and into the lives of everyone is, either way, destructive and immoral.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling free trade & free markets individual achievement

Entrée “Preneurial”

Today is Memorial Day, but the larger season is one of graduations, from college and high school and even lower grades. It’s fitting, then, to take a step back and consider the philanthropy of Peter Thiel, who is working on a different course.

Thiel, PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor, made headlines last year as he began his anti-scholarship program, “20 Under 20.” He is giving $100,000 to 20 young people under 21, but on one condition — that they not go to college.

Instead, his bequests amount to angel seed money for young go-getters to do something original, entrepreneurial.

Now, Thiel has announced his first 20 recipients. An AP story by Marcus Wohlsen leads with the circumstances of one recipient, Nick Cammarata, a young genius programmer. Cammarata wasn’t one of those grade A students. Instead of studying hard, he did what he liked, including reading books on subjects he was interested in. And programming, which got him attention outside his school and town.

Like other recipients of the Thiel hundred grand grant, he plans to parlay the money into a hopeful tech project.

The article dutifully quotes skeptics of Thiel’s program, and mentions the oft-quoted statistic that workers with college degrees have been laid off at a lower rate than non-degreed workers.

But this misses the main point of Thiel’s intent. He’s not interested in making “workers.” He’s interested in creating entrepreneurs. The people who hire workers.

A very different goal.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Fly Him to the Moon

Some astronomers think of the Earth-Moon system as a “double planet,” our moon being so big and all. Undoubtedly, the Moon has been important for life on this planet, what with the amazing working of tidal effects — it may have even scooped up asteroids and other inter-planetary detritus, protecting our biosphere.

So “liking” the Moon, or wanting to know more about it, is not lunacy. (That “lunacy” derives from “Luna,” our natural satellite’s Latin name, is irrelevant. Really.) But sticking to the Bush-era “Constellation program,” a hopelessly expensive shoot-man-to-the-Moon-again project, long after it proved an idiotic waste of money, is lunatic. One of the great things about dropping the program has been witnessing Barack Obama talk up private enterprise in space. It’s always gratifying to hear the president speak something other than warmed-over socialism.

Enter Sen. Richard Shelby, of Alabama. He calls Obama’s plan to rely increasingly on private enterprise to send stuff into space “a welfare program for the commercial space industry.”

So, is this Republican stalwart thereby a strict free-marketeer, a laissez-faire “no subsidy” man?

No. His “Shelby provision” tacked onto an emergency military spending bill, last year, kept Constellation funding (but not the project itself) going to the tune of $1.4 million. Per day.

And it turns out that one of NASA’s main Constellation contractors hails from his home state, and contributes mightily to Shelby’s campaign coffers.

Worse than lunacy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets too much government

Backbreaking Spending

Pennsylvania’s Republican governor, Tom Corbett, went into back surgery last week. The Pennsylvanians who voted him into office may be hoping he’s getting a backbone installed. But no such luck: Doctors call his treatment “routine.”

Too bad, for Corbett needs something to help him stick to his campaign promise of  “saying no” to spending.

Since taking office Corbett has  radically increased the salaries of his executive staff as well as stuck the state with another big sports stadium project.

Just what a cash-strapped state needs!

There’s a huge philosophical problem with forcing some folks (say, opera buffs) to pay for the entertainments of other folks (say, my fellow sports fans). It’s just not right. (It’s wrong the other way ’round, too.)

It’s also silly economics. And increasingly unpopular. People are “stadium fatigued,” according to Chris Friend in The Philly Post. Worse yet, the particular minor league stadium Corbett just pushed will accrue benefits chiefly to the New York Yankees, not the Philadelphia Phillies (or even the Pittsburgh Pirates). It’s a bizarre project, when you think about the cui bono of it.

Finally, when you think of who pays, the stadium’s $20 million price tag marks only a fraction of the cost, since the bond for that figure will balloon over time, with interest due.

Paid for by Pennsylvania taxpayers.

I love sports. I look forward to the day when the industry is as self-sufficient as it ought to be, and people like Corbett have the spines to stay out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

RomneyScare

As a candidate for the presidency, Mitt Romney has a number of things going for him. He’s rich, handsome, and has a funny first name.

Perhaps more importantly, he’s neither Donald Trump nor Newt Gingrich.

But still, he does have a niggly problem: His experience. He was the Massachusetts governor who signed a medical care reform law that provided the blueprint for the Democrats’ national version, now known (un)popularly as “ObamaCare.”

One of the best reasons to vote “Republican” next year would be to oust the politician who gave us such a bad bill. But, on matters of “health care,” Romney comes off as nothing less than the generic knock-off of Obama.

The Wall Street Journal recently published a critique of Romney’s Massachusetts fix, highlighting its “technocratic” (decidedly not “market-based”) nature, individual mandate, and consequent necessary government mandate to subsidize the uninsurable. Plus, of course, its spectacular lack of cost containment.

The one thing in the reform’s favor is that the ranks of those covered by medical insurance has grown.

But that the state’s pre-reform, utility-like regulation of the insurance industry had priced so many out of the market? That somehow doesn’t get addressed — most certainly not by the program’s defenders or by Romney himself. Or many others. Pity.

Mitt gave a major speech last night, defending his “RomneyCare,” saying that his position “is not going to satisfy everybody.”

How can it satisfy anyone but big-government partisans?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets tax policy

An Attack on Private Pensions

We all know that America’s socialized pension system is, barring major reforms, doomed to undergo major default. But Americans should be nervous about their private pension funds and accounts, too.

Over at PensionTsunami.com, the folks at California Public Policy Center have their ears to the ground, listening for rumblings of the next market collapses, a huge bubble bursting in multiple forms of pension systems. A link from that site led me to a Bloomberg article, about Ireland’s bizarro response to that country’s downturn.

And the ominous portent it presents.

You see, Ireland’s politicians are so convinced that they have to “do something,” something big, to jumpstart the economy out of its current depression, that they’ve decided to levy a tax against pensions — a special tax designed to raise 470 million euros a year for four years, to pay for a massive new jobs program.

Forget that government jobs programs rarely do much good. Forget that it’s not government investment which accounts for market progress, but private investment, and that people will invest when they feel secure enough about the future to do so.

Forget that robbing people of their savings for the future tends to make investors less secure, less likely to invest — and thus put the economy in a bigger, longer-run fix.

Remember, instead, that to a politician nothing is sacred, nothing is out of bounds for a tax or control.

And that this kind of dangerous public thievery could happen here.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Free Markets: Poison or Cure?

Most foes of Obamacare support reform, but reform that liberalizes, rather than further burdening, the health care industry. Individuals have a right to liberty, and free markets prove inherently better than rule-bound bureaucracies at providing goods and services. Yes, even medicine.

At least one health-care commissar admits this superiority . . . but then promptly suppresses that knowledge.

Donald Berwick, President Obama’s Medicare czar, opines in the Wall Street Journal that the “right way” to bring down health care costs is by improving health care.

“Computers, cars, TVs and telephones today do more than they ever have, and the cost of these products has consistently dropped,” says Berwick. “The companies that make computers and microwaves didn’t get there by cutting what they offer: They achieved success by making their products better and more efficient.”

They did, eh? And did profit incentives, competition, and the coordinating functions of prices that are characteristic of market processes have anything to do with it? Are the firms that sell these improved products mere departments of the government — or profit-seeking companies obliged to satisfy consumers or go out of business?

Berwick points to one of the least subsidized and regulated sectors of modern life, and yet the idea of a freer market for health-care products and services doesn’t occur to him. The key to emulating freer, more successful industries, he burbles, is to further hamper an already hobbled medical market.

It’s like saying we’ll cure a guy with pneumonia by also giving him emphysema.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Competition Works Even With Limited Info

Few of us understand all our options when we shop for homeowners’ insurance.

The New York Times’s Paul Krugman riffed on this, arguing that “When people call for ‘consumer choice’ in health care, what this mainly comes down to isn’t comparison shopping on actual care . . . but rather comparison shopping on insurance policies. And that’s basically impossible even for home insurance, which is a lot simpler than medical insurance.”

Krugman calls a free market in medical insurance “fantasy.”

Yet the illusions involved in buying insurance also apply to non-market medical coverage.

Consider: Most people with low-price insurance like their coverage at least so long as they don’t have to make many claims against it. That’s because insurance is one of those things you buy hoping not to have an occasion to require it.

Something similar happens in single-payer medicine. Some Europeans (especially the young and healthy) praise their state systems that cost them next to nothing out of pocket, patching up their scrapes, mending their bones “for free.”

But wait till they are old and really sick, and on a multiple-month waiting list for an MRI or cancer treatment. Rationing-by-waiting can be a killer.

Bottom-line this: In a competitive insurance market, on learning of poor performance by your carrier, you can drop your insurer like a hot potato. In single-payer systems, you’re stuck. In line. Hoping not to get something too taxing on the system.

But you do have a choice in coffins.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets media and media people national politics & policies

What’s Going Up

When it comes to government policy and the politics that supports it, why people advocate what they advocate can get complicated.

It’s obvious that people don’t always vote their wallets, their narrowly perceived “self interest.” But it’s just as obvious that even the biggest advocates of “sacrifice” and “public spirit” often come off as greedy and narrowly pandering to at least some interests.

And then there’s the issue of fuel to throw on the fire of ideology.

Gasoline, especially, leads to some bizarre expressions of opinion.

When gas prices rise, people talk “conspiracy.” Chris Cuomo makes the case that “speculators” drive fuel prices up — though I notice that neither he nor his guest seemed much inclined to use actual economic analysis to explain anything. “The facts” Cuomo makes much of are embarrassingly superficial.

Two U.S. senators now push for regulators to “apply the breaks” on speculators. Current prices are, as one of them puts it, “unwarranted.”

In past decades, I remember some prominent politicians talk about adding huge taxes to gas, “just like in Europe,” to discourage consumption and “encourage green energy” and thereby “save the planet.”

I don’t hear those notions often, anymore. Could it be that none of us wants to pay more, so when gas prices rise, we forget our ideologies and other fine notions and just yearn (or scream) for cheaper gas?

Not exactly a rational attitude towards policy. But maybe not that mysterious, either.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly free trade & free markets

Expensive Cheap Energy

What is “green” energy?

There are two types. First, there’s photosynthesis.

Green plants sustain themselves through photosynthesis, creating energy for their own growth from the light of the sun. We harvest that energy pretty efficiently, with a reaper after most of the hard work has already been done. The sun is a great partner in this cost-effective form of “green” energy, as are carbon dioxide, water, soil minerals and harvesting equipment.

Then you’ve got your feel-good, ideologically motivated “green” energy, which needn’t be cost-effective at all! No matter how expensive creating this energy might actually be, the only thing that counts is whether participants in the process can declare that they are “saving the environment.” What difference, then, does it make whether far more money, and energy, is lost than gained thereby?

Such seems to be the notion behind the University of North Texas’s decision to install 36 “elliptical” exercise machines to turn the school into what the manufacturer, ReRev, calls “the largest human power plant in the world.”

The machines reportedly cost the school $20,000 and presumably required energy to build, pack, ship. But the machines also convert energy exerted during exercise to electricity at the rate of one kilowatt-hour every two days. A kilowatt-hour costs on average about ten cents in the North Texas area. So the cycling produces less than a penny of energy per hour.

But hey, at least it’s a workout.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.