Categories
Thought

David Hume

Disputes with men, pertinaciously obstinate in their principles, are, of all others, the most irksome; except, perhaps, those with persons, entirely disingenuous, who really do not believe the opinions they defend, but engage in the controversy, from affectation, from a spirit of opposition, or from a desire of showing wit and ingenuity, superior to the rest of mankind. The same blind adherence to their own arguments is to be expected in both; the same contempt of their antagonists; and the same passionate vehemence, in inforcing sophistry and falsehood. And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.

Categories
media and media people national politics & policies too much government

The End—er, ACA—Is Near

First, NBC’s Nightly News anchor Brian Williams reported that the “website for the president’s new health care law is back up tonight after yet another technical problem over the weekend that prevented people from signing up for health insurance . . . yet again.” Then he went on, bemoaning, “For many middle-class Americans who buy their own health insurance, there could be another frustration and that is ‘sticker shock’ — after some learned they must buy new policies that cover more, but cost more as well.”

Couldn’t be. In pushing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), President Barack Obama had promised, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

And presumably “afford” your plan, too. (Well, there are good old-fashioned government subsidies!)

Williams then turned to correspondent Peter Alexander, who announced that the absolute catastrophe of the healthcare.gov website “is masking what is the real issue here, how much these plans will actually cost.”

At Forbes weeks ago, the headline to Avik Roy’s column suggested a connection: “Obamacare’s Website Is Crashing Because It Doesn’t Want You To Know How Costly Its Plans Are.”

A website that crashes to hide the cost of insurance the law demands you purchase seems far-fetched. Next they’ll claim the Administration somehow knew so many folks would lose their insurance policies.

Er, well, “That millions will lose or have to change their individual policies is not a surprise to the administration” noted Alexander.

Say, what?

NBC News found “buried in the 2010 Obamacare regulations language predicting that ‘A reasonable range for the percentage of individual policies that would terminate . . . is 40 percent to 67 percent.’”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
media and media people national politics & policies

Wacky Ways to MSNBC the World

Alex Wagner of MSNBC’s “Now with Alex Wagner” fame decided her fellow network hosts had fecklessly failed to exhaust the world’s reservoir of inane 30-second political pronouncements. So, her vignette informs us:

Minimum wage was mentioned in the State of the Union earlier this year and then it wasn’t brought back up again. This should be something we think about and talk about every single week. This is one of those building-block issues that should supersede almost anything else we have. Economic security is foundational to American success.

Where to start?

Perhaps, by wondering if any serious person really thinks the minimum wage is an issue so paramount in the economy that it “should supersede almost anything else we have.”

Er, “we have”? Who’s editing scripts over there?

But let’s cut to the chase: Ms. Wagner is arguing that “economic security” not only comes before “American success,” but is “foundational” to that success.

Hmmmm?

According to the great Wikipedia in cyberspace, “economic security” is “the condition of having stable income or other resources to support a standard of living now and in the foreseeable future.” So, does Wagner really mean to suggest that before Americans were able to achieve success, wealth, we already had guaranteed to us plenty of steady income to finance a fine and dandy standard of living for as far off into the future as we could foresee?

Americans worked hard for this wealth; it wasn’t legislated.

Economic “success” creates economic security, not the other way around.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Jean-Baptiste Say

The external commerce of all countries is inconsiderable, compared with the internal.

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links

Townhall: Who can you trust, Virginia?

Virginians hold their noses on the way to the polls, despite the fact that one candidate doesn’t stink at all. See this weekend’s Common Sense column over at Townhall, and come back here for more reading.

Categories
video

Video: The Spanish-American War

The war we tend to forget about, but the one that shaped America’s course for the next century:

http://youtu.be/taHAOlaY1a0

This is a good PBS documentary, and quite long, with some substance. Question for admirers of Teddy Roosevelt: Do you still rate him high after viewing this? Is love of war for adventure’s sake really that good a thing?

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

No Waiting for the Lies

From the beginning, Democrats urged us to reserve judgment about their beloved “Affordable Care Act.” Wait, they said, until enacted . . . “to find out what’s in it.”

Then they said: wait till we see how it works.

Now, they tell us to wait some more, while they figure out how to bring some competence to the “glitch”-ridden healthcare.gov.

Waiting was the thing some folks feared most. The closer the country got to socialized medicine, the more queues, lines, and waiting lists would get set up, as bureaucrats scrambled to prevent disastrous cost overruns. Hobbled with regulations and mandates and increased demand (without properly paying for said demand — such is the way of politicians’ promises), it was never unreasonable to expect that “death by waiting” would eventually become the integral feature (not a bug!) of the new system.

Still, in one thing, there was no wait. Though the president may have been lied to right up until healthcare.gov’s launch — misled about the testing and integrity of the IT system — there was at least one lie known from the beginning as a lie: that we could all keep our current insurance policies.

Considering the extent of Obamacare’s regulations, that was impossible. Only a small set of choices would be available to Americans. Most legacy policies just wouldn’t cut it, short a special waiver from Washington.

Now, hundreds of thousands of Americans are getting cancellation notices from their insurers. Others, more “lucky,” are being informed that their policies will be upgraded to the nearest Obamacare-acceptable alternative, at raised rates.

This is the Honest Truth about Obamacare: Obama lied; his staff lied; Congress lied.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Jean-Baptiste Say

The multiplication of a product commonly reduces its price: that reduction extends its consumption; and so its production, though become more rapid, nevertheless gives employment to more hands than before. It is beyond question that the manufacture of cotton now occupies more hands in England, France, and Germany than it did before the introduction of the machinery that has abridged and perfected this branch of manufacture in so remarkable a degree.

Categories
media and media people too much government

Detroit Ironies

Detroit, Michigan, is a failed city. In recognition of this, its government went to court yesterday to beg for bankruptcy status, and the protection that implies — mainly, the legal ability to force the re-prioritization of its $18 billion debt:

In his opening statement, attorney Bruce Bennett said he “could stand here for hours” to describe the “mountain of evidence” that shows Detroit is insolvent. Without relief, he added, 65 cents of every dollar . . . residents pay in taxes could be needed to address the problem, leaving little for everyday services for 700,000 residents.

There’s hardly anything hopeful about this story.

Recently, libertarians have noted that the people of the city have begun to band together, solving voluntarily and through community and market activity the deficit in services coming from city government. Fine, fine, but enough for a solution?

Still, for real drollery, consider the witless comment by MSNBC’s most witless socialist, Melissa Harris-Perry, that Detroit’s troubles are the result of what happens when government becomes “small enough to drown in a bathtub” (a witticism of my friend Grover Norquist). Hilarious, in that Detroit’s corrupt and spendthrift pols are anything but libertarian, and Detroit government anything but small.

The fact that Detroit can no longer competently enforce some of its own laws only shows the ultimate result of the policy of over-governance.

Despite what socialists and (perhaps) some libertarians may say, liberty is not “no government.” It’s the right amount of good government, defending rights and property from vandals, con men, thieves.

In Detroit, the vandals have been the government.

And a bankruptcy ruling would simply confirm that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Obamacare as Bad as Windows 8?

The spectacular failure of Healthcare.gov to sign people up for the much-promised easy-to-access “healthcare” plans, has now gone mainstream.

So, how bad is it?

Worse than Windows 8?

Just as I know of no one, personally, who has bought a medical coverage package through the new Obamacare system, I also know of no one, personally, who likes Windows 8 . . . at least, on a non-touchscreen computer.

So, are the disasters comparable?

Healthcare.gov fails to hook customers with insurers; Windows 8 fails to do basic o.s.-type tasks, like allow you to do your work.

Still, people are buying Windows 8 computers. Voluntarily. But sales are down, far enough that a number of manufacturers have been selling computers without operating systems installed. And Microsoft is offering discounts to manufacturers for including Windows 8.

Surely Microsoft will speed up the delivery of Windows 9, or at least some fix that makes Windows 8 more usable.

But what will the Obama Administration do?

There are a lot of expert Web technicians out there. For hire. Big companies — Amazon, Travelocity, Priceline — find them and manage to put together successful online trading services. So, surely if the government spends two or three times what businesses spend, it will get a workable system about half as good.

It’s what we expect from government.

Of course, Microsoft could fail, and isn’t too big to fail. But I expect it will survive, simply because of the possibility. The fear. The disincentive.

Those who believe in government über alles, however, forswear such incentives. Bad programs are expected to continue forever and ever.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.