Amazing. The British Parliament bucks the establishment warmongering.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEV6ySlsAmk
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Public schools often get lousy report cards.
One big reason is that under the bureaucratically run government monopoly, teachers and administrators have no freedom to try fundamentally different approaches and be rewarded by consumers when they get it right. Educators must obey uniform and stifling standards.
Alas, too many of these public-school staffers are far from eager to shuck the mandatory mediocrity. They’re more worried about keeping their jobs and keeping captive their mis-taught and under-taught students. Such educrats oppose all policies — tax credits, vouchers, more autonomy for charter schools — that help students escape failing classrooms.
The educrats’ prejudice against educational freedom is being abetted by Obama’s “Justice” Department, suing to block school-choice policies in Louisiana on “civil rights” grounds. Obviously, no “civil right” is violated merely because a student attends a private school. But Obama’s lawyers want to make the issue about race regardless. Something about how it’s harder to maintain racial balance if too many children of a particular race leave public schools . . . even if fostering school choice makes it easier for all kids of whatever race to do so.
By Justice’s bogus standard of “justice,” then, actual justice — indeed, actual freedom and opportunity, even actual quality of education — must be shoved aside as irrelevant. What matters is only “racial balance,” no matter the injury to any student’s rights or well-being.
But preserving the jobs of educrats and preserving somebody’s idea of ideal demographics are not the purpose of going to school. The purpose is to learn.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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John Locke
The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom.
Could medical insurance — insurance for “health care” — itself act like a drug?
Are we addicts?
Third-party (“insurance”) payments sure are super-convenient. But their convenience comes at a cost: insurance (and other third-party payers) that remunerate doctors and hospitals directly is what’s driving much of the price inflation in this sector.
Automobile insurance policies overwhelmingly pay the insured, not the mechanics, and we have no automobile repair crisis.
This was related with utmost clarity by Jeffrey A. Singer in his recent Wall Street Journal commentary “The Man Who Was Treated for $17,000 Less.” A patient got an astoundingly better price for a surgery by simply setting aside his insurance program and paying in cash. Singer explains why:
- “Hospitals and other providers make their ‘list’ prices as high as possible when negotiating contracts with health plans and Medicare regulators. No one is ever expected to pay the list price.”
- “[M]ost people these days don’t have health ‘insurance.’ They have prepaid health plans. They pay premiums to take advantage of a pre-negotiated fee schedule arranged for and administered by a third party.”
- “It is the third-party payment system that interferes with true price competition, so ‘market clearing prices’ can’t develop.”
Singer reminds us that specialty services like Lasik eye surgery, which tend not to be covered by insurance policies, have improved in quality and gone down in price.
Alas, as he laments, the United States is “headed in the exact opposite direction” from a real, cost-reducing solution. To a nation addicted to third-party payers in medicine, Obamacare is nothing more than upping the dose of the same old drug.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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John Locke
The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.
We are indebted to a publisher of tax information called Tax Analysts for its efforts to make the Internal Revenue Service slightly more accountable.
The IRS finds itself beleaguered, sort of, by scandal — the fallout from their practice of impeding applications for tax-exempt status of Tea Party and other “patriot” and “constitutionalist” groups. But the agency doesn’t always cooperate with investigations of its conduct.
Using the Freedom of Information Act, Tax Analysts has sued the IRS to obtain all materials used since 2009 to train Cincinnati personnel in the art of handling applications for tax-exempt status.
Folks at the IRS had at first “agreed” to comply with the FOIA request for these instructions ─ which will shed light on what, exactly, employees have been told at various times about how to deal with applicants of various ideological hue. But the agency kept dithering, first telling Tax Analysts that it would supply the stuff pronto, then saying it needed more time; then saying the same when the next-named comply-by date arrived; etc., ad infinitum.
Like the ever-slowing competitor to Zeno’s tortoise, the IRS found it impossible to ever cross the finish line or actually supply any documents.
Yet these guys slap us with penalties if we’re late with the taxes. . . .
Well, Tax Analysts has seen the IRS’s delaying tactics before. So now the matter is in court. Sooner or later we shall learn whether the agency’s own written instructions counsel ideological discrimination, or these instructions are untainted by such but have been flouted by IRS officers.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Jorge Luis Borges
Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.
Which is better: helping the working poor through regulations on business, mandating employee benefits, and cushy hire-and-fire terms . . . or through higher unemployment benefits, assistance to families, or other direct aid?
Both yield unfortunate consequences.
Italy’s employment policies protect workers, on paper. Whatever the ostensible worker salary is in the country, the mandated benefits cost the employer more than twice as much.
This proved a problem for businessman Fabrizio Pedroni, whose factory near Medona hasn’t made a profit in five years. He blames high taxes, heavy regulatory burden, and low worker productivity. So, while his employees were off on holiday, he packed up his factory and shipped it to Poland.
Actually, the tail end of his move was stymied, for a while, by a hasty union blockade. Pedroni cited this as evidence for his need to bug out in secret. Had he announced the plan, the government would have just taken the property for the benefit of his employees. “I had three options — either close, move the factory, as many other businesses have done, or shoot myself in the head.”
Meanwhile, a new Cato study shows that in 16 of our United States, a “combination of food stamps, temporary cash grants, WIC, and housing assistance is worth a pre-tax value more than $30,000” to families that qualify. For some, it’s much easier to live well unemployed than employed.
No wonder unemployment persists. And economic recovery is so slow.
In both cases, programs to help everyday folks hurt them in the long run, undermining productivity, increasing dependence, and scuttling the source of progress: business enterprise.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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William Wilberforce
It is the true duty of every man to promote the happiness of his fellow creatures to the utmost of his power.
— William Wilberforce
Not everything in Dr. Obama’s garden is coming up roses.
Even erstwhile — or perhaps masochistic — supporters of the thorny “Obamacare” legislation have sought exemptions from its costs and mandates, or complained about its “unexpected” destructive impact.
The AFL-CIO, for example, laments that employers otherwise subject to Obamacare mandates need not provide health insurance for employees working less than a certain number of hours. To get below the threshold, some big employers are systematically slashing employee hours. This trend may “[destroy] the 40-hour work week.” Oops.
Also thanks to Obamacare, some health insurance coverage is being excised from existing compensation packages, such as coverage for employees’ spouses. United Parcel Service has just joined the ranks of employers lopping such benefits. The company says Obamacare’s costs and mandates are a big part of the reason.
Not so fast, UPS! Isn’t this a biased misreading of the situation, as some experts claim? Bear with me here. According to the New York Times, “Several health care experts . . . said they believed the company was motivated by a desire to hold down health care costs, rather than because of cost increases under the law.” See, it’s not that UPS is trying to lessen the impact of cost increases; they’re only trying to reduce costs.
“Apples and oranges” or “six of one/half dozen of the other”?
One may as well pretend that persons breaking out of jail seek freedom when in fact they are merely endeavoring to escape imprisonment.
Let us not confuse such starkly opposite things. Thank you, experts.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.