Categories
free trade & free markets

Marketcare versus Obamacare

Hurray! Waiting for hours! Problems! Snags!

As a sign-up deadline approached, Obamacare administrators heralded the long lines people endured to apply for a permitted insurance policy. The lines supposedly proved Obamacare’s invulnerable popularity.

Had officials not been told about the new penalties for taxpayers who lack insurance? That millions have lost policies thanks to Obamacare and see no alternative but to wait in Obamacare lines? That sometimes people procrastinate . . . especially about doing things they dislike?

Do the persons foisting Obamacare on us not see, at least, that it reduces the alternatives of persons who don’t want it?

There’s a better way, and the evidence is not only historical.

Despite the accelerating decline of medical freedom, private initiatives that sweep aside bureaucratic status quos are still possible. One example is what Carmine Gallo calls “The Hospital Steve Jobs Would Have Built.” This is the Walnut Hill Medical Center’s reimagining of “health care and the patient experience.”

The vision for the Dallas center was inspired by Gallo’s book on how Apple builds customer loyalty — despite lacking power to financially penalize non-buyers of Apple products. Everything from what kind of person Walnut Hill hires and how new hires are trained to floor plans and decor is designed to make patients feel the opposite of being stuck in a veterans hospital or in an Obamacare waiting list.

What achievements and alternatives in medical care will we never see because of the choices and resources being destroyed by Obamacare?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Henry David Thoreau

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Categories
First Amendment rights judiciary national politics & policies

Limiting the Little Guy

Last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission correctly struck down limits on the total amount of money a person can contribute to all federal candidates and to political parties and PACs in a two-year election cycle.

After all, what part of “Congress shall make no law” provides the specific authority for Congress to limit what a person may give to a political party?  Or the number of candidates one may support?

But in his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer argued that, “Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard.”

“No matter what five Supreme Court justices say,” announced Public Citizen, “the First Amendment was never intended to provide a giant megaphone for the wealthiest to use to shout down the rest of us.”

I want the public to be heard, not shouted down.

Which is why it is not Breyer, but Justice Clarence Thomas who is right: this ruling didn’t go far enough. While justly removing the limits on the aggregate amount a wealthy person can contribute, the Court upheld the limit of $2,600 on what you or I can give to a single candidate.

The super-wealthy can spend millions in an independent expenditure for their preferred candidate. Fine. It’s their money. Yet, a person of more modest means doesn’t have the dough to launch an effective independent effort.

Instead, if you felt strongly enough, you could dip into savings or work a second job to afford to give, say, $3,000 or $4,000. Except that our campaign finance laws prevent it. This is the limit that affects the most people. Non-rich people.

Stop limiting the little guy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

H. L. Mencken

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

Categories
links

Townhall: A More Civilizing Education

Public schools are designed, in part, to solve a problem . . . that may not exist.

Click on over to Townhall.com, then come back here for a little more reading. Or a lot. It is up to you. It’s your education.

First, for links to the study, consult Wednesday’s Common Sense for links.

For a gimlet-eyed view of Horace Mann’s philosophy — peering behind the strata of praise heaped upon his reputation — try the work of education historian Joel Spring. In Educating the Worker-Citizen Spring: The Social, Economic and Political Foundations of Education, , Spring writes much of interest:

Mann’s arguments were based on his fears about how individuals would act, given the opportunity to elect their own governors. In calling for the teaching of a republican catechism, Mann was essentially saying that a republican society could function only if people acted the way he thought they should act. Or, stated another way, people could be free as long as they acted in a good manner and endeavored to do right. “Good” and “right” were to be defined by people like Horace Mann. (p. 13)

Much later in the book, Spring contrasts Mann’s idea of compulsory attendance and funding of public schools with the ideas from those on the opposite end of the spectrum, Milton Friedman being his primary example. What, he asks, about another area of possible government support, “free and compulsory eating?”

As [E. G.] West argues, it seems strange that contemporary governments provide free and compulsory education establishments but not free and compulsory eating establishments; there would seem to be more proof of the beneficial effects of diet than of the beneficial effects of schooling. . . . West’s illustration highlights the uniqueness of government-provided schooling in terms of other services provided by government. (p. 165)

E. G. West’s contributions to the economics of schooling and education reform are fascinating and important. You can learn a lot from reading West. But Spring seems more radical. His basic take? See chapter nine of the book I’ve been quoting from: “The major hindrance to the completion of the liberal revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been the rise and expansion of the modern school.”

Categories
ideological culture video

Video: Why George Will Changed His Mind on Contribution Disclosure

There’s a lot in this discussion, about the Mozilla CEO’s past political contribution and the hysterical and retributive boycott by advocates of gay marriage. But consider, especially, what George Will says:

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders obituary

The Lion of Woodinville

Mike Dunmire passed away last weekend. Mike helped me form the Liberty Initiative Fund, serving as an original board member. But he was best known as a key funder of Tim Eyman’s Washington State ballot initiatives.

Indeed, Eyman’s incredible success at the ballot box — I once called him “America’s Number One Freedom Fighter” — would not have been possible without Dunmire, who was happy to help: “I honestly think he is the only one who gets anything done, and the money could not be better spent.”

Dunmire loved the initiative process. When legislators considered adding a $100 fee for citizens to file a ballot measure, Dunmire eloquently objected:

This hundred dollars may not seem like very much. It will eliminate some people who have fringe ideas. But let me tell you once it was a fringe idea that the world was round. I don’t think we want to suppress these ideas, and I think that all this bill does is buy a tremendous amount of ill will. . . . You maybe will make $10,000 off of this, but you stick a finger in every citizen’s eye. . . .

A native of Woodinville, Washington, he balanced humility with wit, hard work with compassion. He once jokingly introduced himself as “the Woodinville Think Tank President” at a legislative hearing.

“Although starting out with very little, I’ve been fortunate,” Mike once wrote. “I live in the most beautiful state in the union, I have my health, a wife I love, and had a career that brought me financial success. I’ve supported many philanthropic efforts during my life. In recent years, I’ve supplemented my ‘normal’ charitable giving by supporting political efforts to hold government more accountable.”

Mike Dunmire remains alive in the hearts of all those he helped.

This is Common Sense. I’m glad I knew you, Mike.

Categories
Thought

Mohandes K. Gandhi

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Categories
government transparency ideological culture insider corruption obituary

One Cheer for an IRS Man?

I’m hesitating. But given the way many IRS honchos have too often behaved throughout the agency’s history, including today — yes, I’ll applaud Randolph Thrower for saying no to a President.

Thrower died in March at the age of 100 as the “IRS Chief Who Resisted Nixon.” He had headed the agency from 1969 to 1971, before getting fired for challenging the administration’s political hardball. Nixon henchman John Ehrlichman delivered the pink slip.

White House staffers were pressuring the IRS to audit various activists, journalists and congressmen. These were persons that Nixon felt deserved government harassment.

Too often, IRS officers have been all too eager to politicize tax procedures at the behest of those in power. Not Thrower. He may have been guilty of naïveté. When asking to meet with the President, he said he felt sure that Nixon knew nothing of the pressure coming from underlings and would repudiate “any suggestion of the introduction of political influence into the IRS.”

Thrower’s request for a meeting was denied. The record shows that Nixon soon demanded his removal and also that the next IRS commissioner be a “ruthless [s.o.b.].”

My problem with Randolph Thrower is his failure to say anything publicly about why he was fired. By speaking out, he might have prevented some of the evildoing the White House would perpetrate over the next several years.

He owed that much to his employer: us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Martin Luther King, Jr.

We aren’t engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying — We are saying that we are God’s children. And that we are God’s children, we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.