Category: free trade & free markets

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free trade & free markets too much government

Getting Jobbed on Jobs

There’s lots of talk these days about jobs. Many kinds of jobs.

First, there’s the snow job. The best known version of this is that avalanche of an idea that our federal government will “fix” the economy by creating or saving millions of jobs.

“Saving” jobs? Folks in Washington want to take credit for every one of us who happen not to get fired during their reign.

Not that the idea of politicians “creating” jobs makes much sense, either. I certainly don’t want people to be unemployed. But color me skeptical about the ways that politicians go about creating jobs — and the types of jobs thus created.

Spending trillions of dollars to stimulate the economy will indeed produce some jobs. It would be difficult to spend that much money without creating some work for somebody.

But there is a big difference between creating a job where someone produces a product or provides a service that then turns a profit and conjuring up make-work tasks by handing tax dollars over to some scheme that everyone realizes couldn’t sustain itself in a competitive marketplace.

If we want our economy to rebound — if we aim to rebuild our wealth — then we need productive jobs. Yes, jobs that employees have because of their productivity. Not jobs produced by politicians plunging us deeper into debt and grinding us down further into inefficiency.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

The Big “Single-Payer” Lie

Scan the history of government programs. The scope and costs usually grow much larger than originally projected.

Moreover, ham-fisted government intervention distorts markets, causing shortages or excesses of supply, leading to high prices for goods that should be cheap, and so on.

When the problems pile up one can either repeal the controls or heap on more controls.

Guess which “solution” politicians tend to prefer.

Regarding medical care, the politicians’ answer to decades of government bungling is more bungling: regulation, subsidies, rationing, mandates and a new “public option” in health insurance to squeeze out private plans.

President Obama and other public option advocates promise, on stacks of Bibles, that this is not “somehow a Trojan horse for a single-payer system.”

But they’re lying. Go to YouTube. Watch the videos of Obama and congressmen explicitly admitting their goal of a single-payer system. Just two years ago, Obama was saying, “But I don’t think we’re gonna be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s gonna be potentially some transition process. . . .”

That’s how we lose our freedoms. Not all at once, but a slice at a time.

Oh, and about employer-provided medical insurance. That’s a clumsy institution that exists because of World War II wage controls. We do have to transition out of that system. But we should “transition” towards more freedom, not less.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Medical Insurance to the Max

Get everybody into a medical insurance plan, fast! But how?

Lots of “universal coverage” talk assumes that most uninsured folks are “too poor.” But look, most young people don’t buy insurance because they are healthy. And I know oldsters who have gone through life without medical insurance. When they’ve needed a shot, or a few stitches, they’ve visited the doctor and paid the bill.

Becky Akers, writing in The Christian Science Monitor, wants to know why everyone wants to force her to buy something she thinks makes no financial sense.

Ms. Akers admits that, though she is healthy and without insurance, she could get run over by a bus. But she bets she can cover most medical needs out of her savings and income.

Supporters of government managed medicine judge this irresponsible.

And yet, many of these critics are the same folks who insist that catastrophic medical insurance — the kind that is inexpensive because of huge deductibles — cover everybody, regardless of pre-existing conditions. But this turns insurance into a transfer program, workable only with high prices. Add full coverage rather than catastrophic, and medical insurance skyrockets beyond most people’s pay grade.

Yet if politicians would just stop tinkering with insurance, medical prices would come down for everyone, as Akers suggests . . . including, even the uninsurable, who would still require aid other than insurance.

If you are already sick, it’s too late to insure against sickness.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Health Rations and You

Want a laugh? To keep you from crying at what President Obama and the Congress are trying to do to health care in this country?

Over the decades, the federal government’s involvement in health care has been making it harder and harder for doctors and patients to make independent, sensible decisions about care.

Many advocates of “reform” deny the destructive consequences of past “reform” and insist that the only way to solve our problems is, in effect, to make them worse: Get government even more involved, tie the bureaucratic noose even tighter around the necks of patients and doctors.

Despite all the problems in the health care industry, we often still get great care because of the freedom that still exists. But what if advocates of Obamacare get their way and government takes over? Well, that’s the scenario satirized in a new two-minute video produced by the Sam Adams Alliance, all about “Health Rations and You.”

It adopts the black-and-white style of a 1950s-era educational film. “Health rationing. What is it? What does it mean for you?” And it’s all about how the Health Administration Bureau will give you nothing but “the best” medical care.

The video is funny. Memorable. Getting a lot of hits on YouTube. And it just might help stop this socialist monster in its tracks. Give it a look-see, and pass it on.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Slavery Is Not Freedom

There is one fact about the health care “reform” legislation being debated in Washington, DC, that is unavoidable. The fact that it is coercive.

Governments coerce. It would be great if governmental force were used only to combat criminals, not also to tell us how to live our lives. But, alas, this is not the case.

If the proposed health care legislation is passed, it will result in new orders from the federal government that everyone must obey. Everyone: Doctors; employers; patients; taxpayers. One mandate would force you to sign up for health insurance if you currently lack it. Refuse, and you’ll pay a penalty. Unless you qualify for a “hardship exemption.”

Do we all know what this means? A Washington Post report claims that the notion of penalizing Americans who decline to sign up for health insurance “has its roots in the conservative philosophy of self-reliance.” Because, presumably, the best way to encourage self-reliance is to point a gun at people and tell them what to do “for their own good.”

This is worse than messy thinking. It is the opposite of the truth. Self-reliance is a matter of making choices. It implies the freedom to make choices. Self-reliance has nothing to do with Big Brother ordering you about as if your own thinking, values, and circumstances were irrelevant. And self-reliance has nothing to do with the current health care debate in Washington.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

A Doc Drops Out

Doctor Alan Dappen wasn’t going to take it any more. So he got out.

Eight years ago, he decided that his office would no longer accept Medicare payments. Why? As he tells his patients, “We can’t afford to.” Medicare won’t pay for consultations by phone or email, won’t cover the full cost of a house call, and “barely pays for an office visit.”

Then there’s the regulatory burden. Dappen can’t understand a lot of the regulations. Further, as far as he can tell the folks enforcing them don’t understand many of them either. Yet the bureaucrats can audit a doctor’s paperwork and impose huge fines based on these unclear regs.

Medicare-mired physicians would be more effective if only they didn’t have to worry about complying with arbitrary regulatory dictates all the time. These rules make it harder for doctors to do their jobs. So Dr. Dappen took the risky but more satisfying path of operating in an unhampered market. And, of course, he invited his patients to join him.

Today, in the name of mandatory universal health coverage, the Obama administration wants even more restrictions on medical freedom. Shouldn’t we consider the consequences on the decision-making ability of doctors and patients of current coercive micromanagement when assessing the viability of yet newer coercive schemes?

Dr. Dappen figures he is better off with freedom. You and I are too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets U.S. Constitution

Fighting for a Fair Shake

Ben Vargas wasn’t trying to be the odd man out when he chose to fight for what was right. That’s just how it happened. And he got clobbered for it.

Several years ago, Lieutenant Vargas was the only Hispanic among eighteen mostly white plaintiffs in a reverse discrimination case, Ricci v. DeStefano, just decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 2003, 56 members of a New Haven, Connecticut, fire department passed a test for promotion. Fifteen of them were black or Hispanic. When city officials learned that only two of the 15 would be immediately eligible for promotion based on those scores, they threw out the results.

New Haven officials didn’t initially claim the test was unfair. They admitted fearing a lawsuit. But one should think twice — thrice, a thousand times — about acting unjustly in hopes of heading off injustice by others.

After Vargas — one of the two minority test-takers who scored very well — joined a lawsuit against the city, he was shunned by many colleagues. Once even got punched in the face. But he tells the New York Times he has no regrets, considering the kind of world he wants his children to grow up in.

Ben Vargas says, “I want them to have a fair shake, to get a job on their merits and not because they’re Hispanic or they fill a quota.”

Funny, isn’t that what good parents, of all races and ethnicities, want for their children?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

Thou Shalt Not Mess Up Health Care

Last year, in Arizona, a narrow defeat for Proposition 101, the Freedom of Choice in Health Care Initiative, didn’t leave its core ideas dead, or even zombie-like.

The measure’s defeat by a mere 8,111 votes didn’t seem insurmountable. After all, opponents of the measure had made hysterical claims against it, and the thinking among supporters quickly became: A little more education.

A few weeks ago, the Arizona legislature repackaged the measure’s basic ideas as the Arizona Health Insurance Reform Amendment and set it for a vote of the people next November.

The new measure accommodates some worries and criticism of the previous measure. But the core message remains. The first plank states that “a law or rule shall not compel, directly or indirectly, any person, employer or health care provider to participate in any health care system.”

The second plank says that no one shall be fined for paying — or accepting payments — for otherwise lawful health care services.

There are a lot of politicians out there, right now, who insist that “fixing health care” means “increasing government,” including pushing and shoving people into plans, or regulating the manner of payments so to encourage the use of government plans.

If this Arizona measure passes, or similar measures in other states do, a new idea will enter the national health care debate: Freedom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Stress Test for the Fed?

A bill proposed by Congressman Ron Paul would shine a light on the mysterious goings-on at the Federal Reserve.

The Fed has been sopping up many billions in toxic assets, creating money hocus-pocus, loaning vast fortunes to central banks in other countries, and in general behaving as if its actions cannot have bad consequences.

HR 1207, introduced in February, would authorize the GAO to audit the Fed’s various funding facilities, used with such abandon over the last year. Look under the hood, see what’s going on in nitty-gritty detail.

Doesn’t sound very radical. But the Fed is accustomed to being “independent,” i.e., unaccountable. Yet as Jim Grant, editor of a publication that monitors interest rates, has observed, if the Fed had to accept the auditing it requires of others, it would be regarded as insolvent.

Except, of course, for that whole create-money-out-of-thin-air thing.

President Obama, a.k.a. Mr. Transparency, has said zilch to support the bill. Still, with over 150 Republicans and over 50 Democrats cosponsoring the legislation, it now has enough votes to pass if congressional leadership allows a vote.

An audit with a negative outcome would not force the Fed to shut down.

But it would provide more ammo for those interested in slowing or stopping fiscal insanity.

And that, too, should be bipartisan. Transpartisan. Universal.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

He Should Have Pleaded the Fifth

Economists tell tales.

The best are those that make it easier for us to understand very complicated ideas. Paul Krugman, a Nobel Laureate, wrote one such tale years ago, an essay called “Ricardo’s Difficult Idea.” It explains something economist David Ricardo discovered nearly 200 years ago: When nations trade they both become better off even when some people seem to suffer.

Since that essay Krugman has been telling tales for the New York Times. Not all have been as wholesome.

Krugman appears to be one of those court wizard economists who believe they — that is, the government — can fine-tune the economy. In his August 2, 2002 column he says that “[t]o fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that . . . Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.”

Yes, back in 2002 Krugman supported the Fed’s super-low interest rates, and predicted the outcome: A housing bubble.

Which has burst.

Since then, Krugman’s readers have looked for someone to blame. Well, Krugman’s own words give us all we need to incriminate his own very self . . . and his fellow court wizards.

Familiar story: Self-aggrandizing experts aim to fix things, and put us all in a fix. The case against government management of the economy just got even stronger.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.