Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

Doctoring Malady

medicine, healthcare, medical care, hospital, doctors

There is a doctor shortage. Economists who study such issues project that the shortfall will continue to grow.

That is, the pool of available professionals for advanced and general practice medicine is shrinking relative to demand.

A report last year at Definitive Healthcare provides a list of reasons:

  1. Shifts in physician and patient populations
  2. Most healthcare workers prefer not to work in rural hospitals 
  3. Medical school and residency programs are limited 
  4. Healthcare workers are burnt out 

What wasn’t mentioned? The COVID response debacle. When an elephant makes a deposit on the waiting room floor, don’t ignore it.

But, instead, the list of causes and cures was predictable: “too many administrative tasks” (need more assistants, or at least AI?); “poor work-life balance” (but that’s always been the case); “insufficient salary” (you could see that one coming a mile away, right?).

A study published in March, “The Complexities of Physician Supply and Demand: Projections From 2021 to 2036,” prepared for the Association of American Medical Colleges, dips its timid toes in that topic, but says little of significance. 

And as I scrolled through a report on the study, I thought: this is none of my business. Just as it’s none of my business to fret much about the supply and demand for toilet tissue or garbage trucks. This is all supposed to be taken care of by “the market.” 

Trouble is, we do not have a free market in medical care. We have an over-regulated, vastly subsidized healthcare system.

The key to the future supply of doctors is getting the government out of doctors’ business. Hesitating to turn that key, or saying that government “must do more,” merely makes the malady worse.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Philip K. Dick

If you think this world is bad, you should see some of the others.

Philip K. Dick, the title of a 1977 speech published in the collection The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick. Often improved by swapping out “world” with “universe,” but this seems not to be authentic.
Categories
Today

Declarations

On June 11, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman to draft a declaration of independence from Great Britain.

On the same date in 1963, Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, doused himself with gasoline and set himself aflame in a busy Saigon intersection as a protest against South Vietnam’s lack of religious freedom.

Categories
crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

Doxxing Dissent

free speech, First Amendment, anonymous, anonymity, freedom

California lawmaker Steve Padilla is apparently indifferent to the speech-enabling virtues of anonymity. The state senator (18th District) has no problem violating the First Amendment rights of persons who conceal their identity the better to speak out.

Padilla is proposing legislation, SB1228, to compel social media companies to compel social media “influencers” who’d rather remain anonymous to identify themselves. A company that fails to comply would risk being penalized.

And I hear it often: why anonymity? Folks should own up to their speech!

But many people have good reasons for remaining anonymous when they publish their views. One is to protect themselves from harassment by private parties. Another is to protect themselves from harassment, or worse, by governments.

Tiffany Donnelly of the Institute for Free Speech observes that the United States has a long history of anonymous political speech.

Investigative journalism “often relies on anonymous sources. Americans use social media to express political opinions that might cause them to lose their jobs. Political dissidents who fled to the U.S. to escape tyrannical governments use social media to speak out against those repressive regimes.”

Once social media companies collect the ID data, then what?

Perhaps the information is supposed to just sit in the companies’ computers. But once it becomes known that certain anonymous but controversial writers are being forced to supply personal information, this information becomes a target — for hackers, state governments hiring hackers, disgruntled moderators who may decide to “out” the commentators they dislike.

The bill won’t stop “misinformation,” but it will discourage discourse. 

Specifically, dissent.

It’s this bill that should be stopped.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Arthur C. Clarke

There was no substitute for reality; one should be aware of imitations.

Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise (1979).
Categories
obituary

David Boaz, 1953–2024

David Boaz was a friend and mentor to many. We now learn, to our sadness, of his death on Friday.

Who was David Boaz? Here is the bare bones of his public identity, from Wikipedia, first paragraph:

David Douglas Boaz (/ˈboʊ.æz/; August 29, 1953 – June 7, 2024) was an American author, philosopher and editor. He was a distinguished senior fellow and the executive vice president of the Cato Institute, an American libertarian think tank.

To discriminating readers, Mr. Boaz was the author and editor of a number of books on individual liberty, including:

  • Libertarianism: A Primer, Free Press 1997.
  • The Libertarian Reader, Editor, Free Press 1997.
  • The Politics of Freedom: Taking on The Left, The Right and Threats to Our Liberties, 2008.
  • The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom, Simon & Schuster, 2015.

Brian Doherty, author of Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (2007), published, at Reason, probably the most comprehensive obituary yesterday. After several paragraphs telling of Mr. Boaz’s early history with Young Americans for Freedom, the 1980 Clark for President campaign, his work at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Doherty focuses on the key position from which David Boaz affected American political culture:

Boaz began working at the Cato Institute when it moved to D.C. in 1981, where he became executive vice president and stayed until his retirement in 2023. He was Cato’s leading editorial voice for decades, setting the tone for what was among the most well-financed and widely distributed institutional voices for libertarian advocacy. Cato, with Boaz’s guidance, provided a stream of measured, bourgeois outreach policy radicalism intended to appeal to a wide-ranging audience of normal Americans, not just those marinated in specifically libertarian movement heroes, styles, and concerns.

David Boaz was, above and apart from his work at Cato, a respected individual: friend, mentor, citizen . . . and unwavering enemy of tyranny.

Categories
Thought

Brian Aldiss

Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.

Brian Aldiss, “Apéritif” in Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith’s (1990).
Categories
Today

John & José

On May 9, 1800, abolitionist hero and revolutionary (and, depending upon your point of view and certain definitions, insurrectionist, perhaps even terrorist) John Brown was born.

In 1883 on this date, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset was born. He is most famous for his book The Revolt of the Masses.

Categories
FYI Update

The Curtilage? What’s That?

property, rights, invasion, civil rights

On Thursday, Paul Jacob discussed a Tennessee case where the prospects look good: “Unconstitutional searches of private property by a renegade Tennessee government agency may be coming to an end.” Specifically, “Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency employees have no right to ignore No Trespassing signs on private land — not even to enter it, let alone install cameras there in search of a crime.”

Government agents had trampled on private land thinking they needed no permission at all. They thought it was somehow American and hunky dory to even sneak onto private land and set up surveillance systems, the better to catch the land owner doing something “wrong.”

But the reader may have been asking the burning question: what the heck is going on here? How could governments just blithely ignore one of the core American principles of law, the limitation on government not to spy on us and trespass on our property?

Well, something called “the Open Fields Doctrine” is at play here.

In “Good Fences? Good Luck,” Joshua Windham and David Warren (Regulation, Spring 2024) explain how a 1924 Supreme Court case upheld a warrantless search of private property on the grounds that “the special protection accorded by the Fourth Amendment to the people in their ‘persons, houses, papers and effects’ is not extended to the open fields.”

But it gets worse, for “the term ‘open fields’ is a misnomer. The doctrine isn’t limited to fields or other open areas. Instead, it applies to all private land except for the small but ill‐​defined ring immediately surrounding the home, called the ‘curtilage.’”

Even under a generous definition of curtilage, only about 4 percent of all private land qualifies for Fourth Amendment protection under current law. In other words, nearly 96 percent of all private land in the country — about 1.2 billion acres — is exposed to warrantless searches.

The whole paper is worth reading, for it provides big clues about how government employees — including judges — concoct ways to get around our basic rights. Is there anything they won’t push to expand their power?

Categories
Thought

Arthur C. Clarke

Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.

Arthur C. Clarke, “Maelstrom II” (1965).