Category: national politics & policies

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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.

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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.

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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.

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ideological culture national politics & policies

Blame for the Shutdown

A fascinating short account of what a “government shutdown” means, courtesy of the BBC, wraps up in an odd way: “If the U.S. government shuts down after 8 April, it will mostly be because Republicans believe that the government is too costly and inefficient.”

Really?

It’s not because Congress can’t balance budgets? It’s not because last year’s Democratic-controlled Congress couldn’t even cook up an unbalanced budget, instead relying on a series of makeshift “continuing resolutions”?

Why blame Republicans’ general view of government services, and not the political process described at the beginning of the report?

Well, the BBC’s Katie Connolly was stretching the truth so to get to a series of “ironies.” Government shutdowns are expensive, she writes. Inefficient.

Sure, sure. But if the government does indeed shut down because of a budget impasse, I don’t see that the “irony” of a shutdown accrues as blame only to Republicans.

Indeed, it seems a bit like flailing around, looking for usual suspects — not real culprits.

But if you want a reach. . . .

Politicians often pay homage to John Maynard Keynes to excuse their spending far over revenue. Stimulus and all that. Keynesianism: Politicians love it, because they love to over-spend.

But Keynes also said that governments should run at surplus during good times. Somehow the Rs and Ds in Washington never bring that up.

So blame the Ks.

The Keynesians allowed the misuse of their master’s nostrums, which put us where we are today.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies responsibility too much government

The Trademark of Irresponsible Politicians

Who doesn’t agree with President Obama? “We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences,” he said when introducing his budget in February.

But who believes he’s serious? He went on to say that we must not treat “the hard-earned tax money of the American people . . . like Monopoly money.” Yet, by spending at hyper-deficit levels and offering no reasonable plan to balance the budget, he demonstrates a preference to play Monopoly™, not Responsibility®.

Now, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has a plan. He spelled it out Tuesday, giving it a hopeful moniker, “The Path to Prosperity.”

“Prosperity’s Around the Corner” was already taken in the noösphere.

The most salient feature of the plan, though, is that it designed to take its own sweet time. The budget wouldn’t balance next year. Or the year after. Or even in five, like Sen. Rand Paul’s much better plan.

Besides, today’s Congress can’t control itself must less control future Congresses. That’s the trouble with all these procrastinating plans.

Remember, even Rand Paul thinks his plan takes too long and doesn’t go far enough.

Of course, Obama dislikes Ryan’s plan. The new White House press secretary offers, “The President believes there is a more balanced way to put America on a path to prosperity.”

But he won’t share it with us. Obama and congressional Democrats are playing the oldest game in the book: All talk but no responsibility.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

America’s Dirty Nuclear Secret

Before Cherynobl, we could sort of dismiss nuclear power’s danger. Afterwards, we could still say “Well, that’s the Soviets, for you.”

Now, with the ongoing Fukushima Dai-ichi disaster, the extent of what can go wrong is becoming horrifically clear, especially now that it looks like merely gaining control of the worst-off reactor could take months, not days.

It rightly makes us worry about the whole industry.

It’s a pity, too, because nuclear power concentrates its costs (spent fuel in containers) while providing enormous marketable benefits. Burning coal, on the other hand, disperses its “costs” in the form of pollution. Nuclear power would seem to be a perfect market solution.

But a “meltdown” — or just losing control of a fission process — concentrates harms in a manner hard to ignore or justify.

We hear that new nuclear tech is in development, and might become quite safe. But the promised extra-safe variety is not yet online anywhere, yet.

Why?

Could it be because government protects the currently unsafe technology? America’s nuclear power is protected from the rigors of risk as assessed by the cold, calculating insurance industry under 1957’s Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act, which shifts risk from investors to taxpayers in case of catastrophe.

Perhaps if that were repealed, better nuclear tech would emerge faster.

As it is, our old nuclear tech awaits a rare convergence of disastrous factors, like a major earthquake plus human error, or terrorism plus x.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies

One Industry’s Boom Time

The current economic slump lumbers along, but one industry is booming: Health-care lobbying.

Over 180 groups have registered to help shape the new health care law, prompting CNNMoney to explain that “President Obama’s drive for health care reform has been a years-long boon for lobbyists”:

Over 2009 and 2010, $1.06 billion was spent on lobbying, with more than $500 million spent on lobbying the issue in each year. . . . In addition, lobbyists for 1,251 organizations disclosed that they worked on health care reform in 2009 and 2010. . . . The number of individual lobbyists who reported working on health related legislation last year hit 3,154. . . .

Bad or good?

Well, it’s to be expected. The more the federal government involves itself in any domain of life, the more reactions to expect from those engaged in that domain. And it’s not just big business petitioning government for favors or forbearance or simply an ongoing “in.” Unions and associations and non-profits are onboard, too. After all, a simple line or even a word in a law can make or break a concern.

Besides, if our legislators insist on regulating every aspect of life, they’ll need all the help they can get. But since that “help” inevitably emanates from ever larger legions of back-slapping lobbyists huddling with glad-handing politicians, it’d be better if Congress left well enough alone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly ideological culture national politics & policies

Saving the World

Tonight, President Obama will address the nation — perchance to explain the parameters, if there be any, to our nation’s military intervention in Libya. Certainly, no one else in his administration has yet successfully done so, and not for lack of babbling on.

“The bottom line and the president’s view on this,” explained Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough on CNN, “is it’s important to bring the country along.” (Gee, thanks.) “Obviously the president, ah, is solely, ah, has this, ah, responsibility to deploy our troops overseas. . . .”

“We would welcome congressional support,” offered Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on ABC’s This Week, “but I don’t think that this kind of internationally authorized intervention . . . is the kind of unilateral action that either I or President Obama were speaking of several years ago.”

A long, long time ago, there were no “humanitarian bombing” campaigns. Had such a cause been proposed, it would have been called war. Our president would have had to not only phone a couple congressmen to chat them up, but actually secure their votes on a declaration of war.

As we wade into our third war in the Middle East, Defense Secretary Robert Gates says, “No, I don’t think it’s a vital interest for the United States.”

Whether you are a dove or a hawk, Republican or Democrat or sane, how is it working out for us that one man can so easily decide to embroil 300 million Americans in war?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment national politics & policies

The Next War to End

I don’t know if David Schubert is guilty. You don’t either. But it wouldn’t shock me if a jury convicted him, or if he pled out. You probably wouldn’t be surprised, either.

The fact that we aren’t shocked is what is shocking about the story.

You see, Schubert is the Nevada prosecutor who has handled many celebrity drug prosecutions — Paris Hilton, most famously. He has now been arrested for possession of cocaine.

Common story: The people in charge of prosecuting America’s ongoing War on Drugs are often drug users themselves. Many are “on the take” to drug gangs and warlords and kingpins. Or themselves embroiled in the drug trade.

The evidence for mass corruption, up and down the criminal justice system’s chain of command, is massive itself. It reminds me of the stories of Inquisitors themselves accused of heresy, in the Middle Ages. It’s a very old story.

And now it’s become a way of life in America. Corruption is endemic, and that says something about the drug war itself. About our drug laws.

Which could be repealed.

Did you know that Portugal has had great success decriminalizing pretty much all recreational drugs?

Last week, Rep. Ron Paul castigated House Republicans for overlooking America’s foreign wars as targets for cutting America’s overblown budget. I agree with him, but really: We should look close to home, too.

It is high time for a complete cease-fire in the costly War on Drugs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.