Category Archives: Individual Rights

Dr. Paul Continues To Cast Pearls Before Swine

Healthcare, Individual Rights, Regulation, Republicans, Ron Paul, Socialism, The Courts, The State

Responding to Justice Roberts’ smart-alec SCOTUS decision in the matter of “The Affordable Care Act,” Ron Paul said this:

“Today we should remember that virtually everything government does is a ‘mandate.’ The issue is not whether Congress can compel commerce by forcing you to buy insurance, or simply compel you to pay a tax if you don’t,” said the Texas Republican. “The issue is that this compulsion implies the use of government force against those who refuse. The fundamental hallmark of a free society should be the rejection of force. In a free society, therefore, individuals could opt out of “Obamacare” without paying a government tribute.”

“Those of us in Congress who believe in individual liberty must work tirelessly to repeal this national health care law and reduce federal involvement in healthcare generally. Obamacare can only increase third party interference in the doctor-patient relationship, increase costs, and reduce the quality of care … Only free market medicine can restore the critical independence of doctors, reduce costs through real competition and price sensitivity, and eliminate enormous paperwork burdens. Americans will opt out of Obamacare with or without Congress, but we can seize the opportunity today by crafting the legal framework to allow them to do so.”

As you read through Dr. Paul’s diagnosis and prescription, of Jun 27, 2012, remember that conservatives in power support third-party health-care distortions in almost all their permutations:

I recently discussed absurd legal arguments by Obamacare advocates that Congress can compel the purchase of health insurance, and the dismal record of federal courts applying so-called “judicial review” in protecting liberty. It is obvious that Obamacare’s legal apologists either are wholly ignorant of constitutional principles, or wholly lawless in their blatant disregard for those principles.
Likewise, supporters of Obamacare are willfully ignorant of basic economics. The fundamental problem with health care costs in America is that the doctor-patient relationship has been profoundly altered by third-party interference. Third parties, either government agencies themselves or nominally private insurance companies virtually forced upon us by government policies, have not only destroyed doctor-patient confidentiality. They also inescapably drive up costs because basic market disciplines — supply and demand, price sensitivity, and profit signals — are destroyed.
Obamacare, via its insurance mandate, is more of the same misdiagnosis.
Gabriel Vidal, chief operating officer of a U.S. hospital system, sees this problem squarely in his daily work. As he explains, Obamacare will only make matters worse because it fails to recognize that “costs are out of control because they do not reflect prices created by the voluntary exchange between patients and providers”» like every well-functioning industry.”
Instead, “health costs reflect the distortions that government regulators have introduced through reimbursement mechanisms created by command-and-control bureaucracies at federal and state levels,” he continues. “But it is theoretically and practically impossible for a bureaucrat — no matter how accurate the cost data, how well-intentioned and how sophisticated his computer program — to come up with the correct and just price. The (doctor-patient) relationship”» has been corrupted by the intrusion of government and its intermediaries (HMOs, for example) to such an extent that we can no longer speak of a relationship that can produce meaningful pricing information.

Anticipating A Turn of The Health-Care Screw

Federalism, Healthcare, Individual Rights, Law, The Courts

Nothing short of a total repeal of Obama care will do, because such a repeal will amount to nothing more than a “do no more harm” injunction. However, even in the unlikely event that the SCOTUS deals a set back to Obama’s politburo of proctologists in the waiting, and repeals the hulking bill–we are still screwed, as we currently labor under a costly, unwieldy “patchwork of indemnity insurance arrangements, managed care, private payment, and charity.” Free market incentives are not exactly robust in the current Third-Party system.

Until tomorrow, Amy Howe anticipates the health-care decision, “In Plain English,” at the SCOTUS Blog:

Once the Court does turn to health care, there are four questions before it. Three of those questions revolve around the “minimum coverage” provision, popularly known as the “individual mandate.” Of course, the question keeping the White House, Congress, and everyone else in the country on pins and needles is whether the mandate – which would require virtually all Americans to buy health insurance by 2014 or pay a penalty – is constitutional: can Congress, using its power under the Constitution to regulate commerce between the states, make people buy health insurance? (More detailed Plain English discussions of the substantive issues in the case, including the individual mandate, are available at this link.)

But before the Court can decide whether the mandate is constitutional, it must first decide whether it can even rule on this question at all. The potential obstacle to the Court’s review of the mandate is the Anti-Injunction Act (AIA), an 1867 law that prohibits lawsuits to challenge a tax until the tax has actually gone into effect and needs to be paid. At least one lower court has concluded (and the federal government once even argued) that the “penalty” which would be imposed on someone who doesn’t buy health insurance under the mandate is a “tax”; therefore, this line of reasoning goes, someone who believes that the mandate is unconstitutional cannot bring a lawsuit making that argument until after the mandate actually goes into effect in 2014.

If the AIA applies to the lawsuit over the mandate, then the Court cannot consider the challenge to the mandate even if both the federal government and the states challenging the law want the Supreme Court to decide the case. So if at least five of the nine members of the Court were to conclude that the AIA does apply to the mandate, that would be the end of the matter. The Court would not discuss, much less rule on, whether the mandate is constitutional, nor would there be any reason for the Court to weigh in on what parts of the law, if any, can survive if the law is unconstitutional – the “severability” question. Instead, the Court would skip straight to the fourth and final question, dealing with the constitutionality of a provision that expands eligibility for Medicaid, the state-federal partnership that provides health care to the poor.

What the Court will in fact decide about the AIA obviously remains to be seen tomorrow. After the oral argument in March, most Court watchers believed that the Court would not regard the AIA as a bar to reviewing the mandate. But if that issue went the other way, that decision would postpone a decision on the mandate until well after the presidential election – which might be an appealing option both for political reasons and if the Court is having a hard time coming up with a majority to resolve the mandate issue.

At least for tomorrow, all that anyone will really be interested in with regard to the AIA is the Court’s bottom line: can it review the mandate issue or not? If it agrees with both sides that it can, all eyes will then turn to that constitutional question. Most Americans care about the bottom line: is the mandate constitutional? Even if the Justices disagree on the reasoning, the mandate would still survive.

If the mandate does survive, then the Court’s work is almost done; all that would be left would be the Medicaid issue, which we will discuss in a moment. But if at least five Justices vote to strike down the mandate, then the Court will have to decide what other parts of the law, if any, fall with it. On this “severability” question, the Court will again have several options. It could allow all of the rest of the ACA to stay in place; it could conclude that the rest of the law must go too (as the states have argued); or it could settle on a middle ground – for example, as the federal government argued, by striking down the provisions that are inextricably linked to the mandate but allowing the others to go into effect.

Finally, as long as the Court doesn’t conclude that the entire ACA must fall, it will have to resolve one more issue: does another provision of the Act violate the Constitution because it effectively coerces the states, requiring them to comply with the ACA’s expanded Medicaid eligibility requirements or risk losing all of the money that they receive for Medicaid from the federal government? The lower court agreed with the federal government that it does not, and the Justices seemed to be leaning that way at oral argument. But as we saw on Monday when the Court announced its decision in the Arizona case, the oral argument is not always a foolproof predictor of how the opinion will turn out.

So check back tomorrow; we’ll have our first reporting on the decision as soon as it is announced, and then we’ll break it down into Plain English as soon as possible after that.

Your Republican Reptile In Action

Ethics, Etiquette, Individual Rights, Internet, Private Property, Republicans, Ron Paul, The State

Fredrick Ray Hartman, a DC-based statist Republican, in the employ of the government, had petitioned me for Facebook Friendship (not the other way around).

On getting notice of my Facebook Policy, he writes furiously:

“don’t send people [note the royal plural] a copy of facebook policies again…you are being deleted…..i was your friend ditto… removing you from my friends list…..i tried to friend you from another wall and you had the gull [sic] to respond with a facebook policy note….you don’t know your friends i guess…..good luck”

Your Republican politician (or aspiring overlord) in action.

And OMG! What will I do without these Republican faithful “pals” of mine, of whom I have none, as they deserted me on September 19, 2002, when I wrote this op-ed for the Globe & Mail, one of Canada’s national newspapers.

Let me remind Hartman and his ilk (statist, power-hungry Republicans, whom we libertarians disavow) that he was the one to petition me for Facebook Friendship, not the other way around. This statist and I (a long-time paleolibertarian) have nothing in common.

This conduct is a taste of what you should expect from your reptilian Republican in office, should you demand that he comply with YOUR rules, enacted on your turf, or property.

This is the chance of all like-minded Republicans on this Wall to join Fredrick Ray Hartman; Unfriend me please.

Ron Paul for president.

Obama’s Parasite Economy

Economy, Government, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Natural Law, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Private Property, The State

The Free Dictionary teaches that a host is “an animal or plant on which or in which another organism lives.” This is precisely the nature of the relationship between the private, productive sector, and the public, unproductive sector. The last lives at the pleasure of the first; or lives off the first.

In the brouhaha over Barack Obama’s “The Private Sector is Doing Fine” comment, nobody is asking, Who’s property is it anyway? And why would a system (“The Economy”) do better when the number of parasites (people whose spending is financed as a result of coercive transfers of wealth from the private sector) it carries continues to grow (or to stagnate)?

The public sector consumes wealth—it doesn’t produce it.

Reason Magazine, representing as it does a variant of what I call “Libertarianism Lite,” focuses elsewhere.

Based on charts he generated at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ website, Reason’s Nick Gillespie notes that, “As it stands, the number of private-sector employees is about equal to what it was in 2005. And in 2000, which is really appalling. … The current number of government workers is about what it was in 2006.”

In the rest of the post, Gillespie does his utmost to clarify what BHO really meant when he said that,

The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government. Oftentimes cuts initiated by, you know, Governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don’t have the same kind of flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in.