Monthly Archives: October 2013

UPDATED: Why Government ‘Care’ Will Never, Ever Work

Free Markets, Government, Healthcare, Objectivism, Private Property, Republicans

“Why Government ‘Care’ Will Never, Ever Work” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

At every opportunity, Jedediah Bila, a regular among the pig-ignorant panelists paraded on the Fox News and Business channels, parroted Bill O’Reilly’s “not ready for prime time” line. The premise of that fatuity is that given time, Obamacare could be readied for prime time.

A “scandal” bleated another cipher in a skirt—a Republican, naturally—about the error-riddled Obamacare website, when she should have been explaining that HealthCare.gov not working is no more a “scandal” than waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid, perpetrated by program administrators, program recipients, elected and unelected officials alike.

Failure and fraud is business as usual in government.

Liberals are incapable of grasping economic truths. That goes without saying. But why are “conservatives” every bit as dumb about the dynamics in a nationalized enterprise as opposed to the workings of a market society? Republicans appear incapable of articulating why it is that centrally planned systems fail.

The gold standard for stupid is this Republican riff: “Government would work much better if it were run like a business.” It is in violation of the Law of Identity. A is A. Things are what they are. Government is government; it is not business. The task of a rational man, advised Ayn Rand, is to perceive reality, not to create or invent it.

Rep. Fred Upton does Jedediah Bila one better. “Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars [have been] spent for a system that still does not work,” complained the Republican from Michigan.

Wrong. Government spends trillions of taxpayer dollars on systems that don’t work (the military included). That’s what government does by definition; by virtue of being government.

The problem is not so much the 55 contractors involved in designing Barack Obama’s signature Web portal, but the Central Planning Board that selected inept coders—and the kinky incentives to which any federal agency in charge will subject any and all contractors under its control.

The same web developers generally do a great job on each of our personal computers; in other words, when handling private property. If they don’t …

Read the complete column. “Why Government ‘Care’ Will Never, Ever Work” is now on WND.

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UPDATE (10/24): To add to the litany in “Why Government ‘Care’ Will Never, Ever Work,” show me a company in the private sector (which is not the recipient of government handouts) that is shielded from bankruptcy. An audit would reveal that most government departments, the Obamacare bureaucracy included, are insolvent. Yet the fact that the taxpayer is forced to bankroll them indefinitely with tax dollars, immunizes these systems against all forms of accountability, fiscal and other.

You have to be a dimwit to want care from such an establishment.

UPDATED: Philip Chism, Killer Kid (Allegedly)

Crime, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Race, Racism, Reason

“He wasn’t violent at all. He was really the opposite of agressive [sic].” Predictably, that’s how a classmate has described a black, 14-year-old, who murdered his white math teacher, near Boston, Massachusetts.

Philip Chism, the alleged killer, was clearly aggressive enough to kill.

The other options the idiocracy will opt for—they set the parameters of the debate on crime—are 1) racism. The white teacher’s or the white kids’, but never the black student’s. When blacks take the life of a white, it is never taken as a sign of racial hatred.

2) An “illness.” From “EVIL, NOT ILL”:

the tele-experts, understandably self-serving, … work to place bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, making it amenable to their “therapeutic” interventions. … conjuring so-called mental diseases either to control contrarians or to exculpate criminals. To listen to the nation’s psychiatric gurus is to come to believe that crimes are caused, not committed. Perpetrators don’t do the crime, but are driven to their dirty deeds by a confluence of uncontrollable factors, victims of societal forces or organic brain disease.

The paradox at the heart of this root-causes fraud is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only after bad deeds have been committed. Good deeds have no need of mitigating circumstances.

This mode of thinking amounts to backward logic. It’s logically fallacious.

Poor Colleen Ritzer was only 24. This beloved teacher had “graduated magna cum laude from Assumption College in Massachusetts with a math degree.”

UPDATE (Oct. 24): “A law-enforcement source said authorities believe Chism attacked Ritzer with a box cutter. The source said the boy was seen on school security video pushing a large recycling bin, which authorities believe he used to take her body outside.”

More.

ObamaCare ‘Settled Law’? More Like Legislative Sleight Of Hand

Constitution, Democrats, Healthcare, Law

The “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” or whatever Obamacare’s undercover name was when it was smuggled into the books, was passed using legislative sleight of hand. Alluding to the broad consensus that gives law imprimatur, I quipped in “What If The Media Were Moral?” that Obamacare (unlike the Constitution) was not the law of the land.

More about the concept from Gerard Magliocca (in the WaPo):

The Affordable Care Act is not settled law because the public remains deeply divided over it: More than half of Americans are opposed. But even more critically, congressional Republicans have withheld their stamp of approval. Many Republican lawmakers refuse even to call it a law; they keep referring to it as a “bill.”

Republicans offer several explanations for their rejection of the act’s validity. Most often, they note that the law was passed entirely with Democratic votes. This is in contrast to other major legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was enacted with overwhelming bipartisan support and thus became settled much more quickly.

Republicans also cite the unusual procedures used to pass the health-care act — most notably, the budget reconciliation process that avoided a filibuster while moving the final legislation through the Senate. This tactic left many Senate Republicans feeling cheated.

Felt cheated? They were cheated. Via Michelle Malkin: The “procedural maneuver called ‘reconciliation,’ used to pass Obamacare, allows a bill to pass with 51 votes instead of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster. It is not intended for comprehensive and contentious pieces of legislation.

More from Prof. George Reisman on the House:

In 2010, a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, without a single Republican vote, passed “ObamaCare” by a margin of 219 to 212. In a staggering act of misfeasance, hardly a single member had read, let alone studied, the 1,900 page law (2,700 pages according to some authorities), which had been dumped into the House only days earlier. The 219 members of that House who voted for ObamaCare were willing to impose massive, and massively expensive, legislation on the American people without any real idea of what they were doing. Had those members been members of the board of directors of a private corporation, their complete and utter lack of due diligence would almost certainly have exposed them to enormous law suits and, quite possibly, criminal penalties.

1-800-ObamaCare-Political con

Barack Obama, Free Markets, Government, Healthcare, Private Property

Wall Street Journal: “In an era where Google is making self-driving cars and Amazon offers next-day delivery for just about anything, the White House plunged ahead with a system it knew to be defective and is relying on the technology of the 19th century as the fall-back.”

As if government can ever be a source of innovation in delivering consumer products and services. Only in a profit-and-loss system, which in turn is predicated on the presence of private property, can consumers get what they want.

“Remember when Mr. Obama said you could keep your policy if you liked it?”

Insurance companies are also already sending out notices to millions of consumers cancelling individual policies because they are non-compliant with ObamaCare’s new mandates. Kaiser Health News, usually a cheerleader for the law, reports that “Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state.” Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people, Highmark in Pittsburgh is dropping about 20% of its individual market customers, and Independence Blue Cross of Philadelphia is dropping about 45%.

MORE.