January 14 is New Year’s Day according to the old, Julian Calendar. On January 14, 1514, Pope Leo X issued a papal bull against slavery. On the same date in 1639, the first written constitution to create a government, the “Fundamental Orders,” was adopted in Connecticut.
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.
Science is neither a single tradition, nor the best tradition there is, except for people who have become accustomed to its presence, its benefits and its disadvantages. In a democracy it should be separated from the state just as churches are now separated from the state.
Is taking bread from the mouths of those who labor to feed the appetites of able-bodied adults who decline to work your idea of economic justice?
Or of injustice?
A recent Cato Institute study by Michael Tanner and Charles Hughes found that welfare benefits exceed the minimum wage for workers in 35 states. In 15 states, welfare benefits top $31,200 annually — equivalent to the $15 an hour minimum wage that SEIU and other unions are promoting for fast-food workers.
In short, at the lowest rungs of the economy, one can make more money not working.
The Washington Post’s Charles Lane advances another aspect of economic justice in a recent column suggesting that while some wealth is merited, the bulk of the wealth swirling about in the nation’s capital is not earned, but wrested from a system where insider politics meets crony capitalism.
And Lane notes that “too many of our public institutions — from Congress to big-city school systems — have been captured by rent-seeking interest groups,” warning broadly that, “Various societies have grown free and prosperous by many different methods; dividing up existing wealth according to political connections is not one of them.”
Yesterday at Townhall, I embraced the idea of economic justice, calling for a healthy dose of it, namely:
That’s economic justice.
Not futzing about trying to make us “equal,” but making the basic rules equitable.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The progress of science, of good science, depends on novel ideas and on intellectual freedom: science has very often been advanced by outsiders (remember that Bohr and Einstein regarded themselves as outsiders).
Ah, it’s a hot topic, because the President wishes it so — because, above all else, he must deflect attention from his failures regarding Obamacare and everything else. So of course it deserves our attention.
Maybe even embracing! Click on over to Townhall; return here for some more links to click, for background.
William Binney interviewed by Nick Gillespie:
On January 10, 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense.
Political donors often prefer to remain anonymous.
It’s not just shyness. Anonymity can protect you from unscrupulous political opponents. The higher your profile — especially if you’re persuasive, or your story contradicts some treasured “narrative” — the higher your risk may be.
At Breitbart.com, Mike Flynn writes that “non-disclosure of donors” is a shield inherited from “the civil rights struggle, when the government sought to protect donors from intimidation by groups like the KKK.” Nowadays, sundry leftist groups and government officials seem to be the premier intimidators.
Character assassination is just one hazard. Flynn discusses what happened, for example, to cancer patient Bill Elliot and insurance broker Steven Tucker. Elliot spoke publicly about how his coverage had been dropped thanks to Obamacare. Tucker, who helped Elliott get a new policy, also talked to the media about the situation. In short order, both men got notices from the IRS of impending audits.
Then there are the assaults on businessmen like the Koch brothers and Frank VanderSloot (whose case I’ve talked about before). VanderSloot was targeted by the IRS, the Department of Labor and a U.S. Senate office soon after the 2012 Obama campaign published a hit list of “bad” political donors — i.e., major contributors to the Romney campaign.
In light of such realities, it’s fine that espousers of political causes are sometimes pseudonymous, and that donors to them are sometimes anonymous. Every law-abiding individual has an inalienable right to make of himself a harder target.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.