Category Archives: Political Economy

UPDATE III: HealthCare.gov : ‘Please Wait. We Have A Lot Of Visitors …’ (His Proctology)

Barack Obama, Glenn Beck, Government, Healthcare, Political Economy, Socialism, Technology

The message that greeted future patients who logged on to HealthCare.gov was, “Please wait. we have a lot of visitors on our site right now and we’re working to make your experience here better. Please wait here until we send you to the login page. Thanks for your patience.”

The message @ HealthCare.gov is a good metaphor for what will unfold under Obama Care: long lines precipitated by the inevitable inability of centrally planned exchanges to bring supply and demand into balance.

The Affordable Health Care Act’s motto will become, “Please wait, we have a lot of patients, and not enough of your money and everything else needed—doctors, supplies, equipment—to treat them.”

Obama, however, compared the inauguration of Obamacare—the website practically crashed, as will The Plan—to the bumpy “launch of iOS 7, the new mobile operating system released by Apple on September 18th.”

Obama was referencing a bug that came with the launch of iOS 7, the new mobile operating system released by Apple on September 18th. The bug allowed anyone to bypass an iPhone’s lockscreen and access their personal information and content. Apple released a patch for it a few days later.
“I don’t remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads or threatening to shut down the company if they didn’t,” Obama added. “That’s not how we do things in America. We don’t actively root for failure.” According to Obama, issues with the site have been caused by a heavy influx of new users and general launch bugs. Wait times on both the site and hotline have been longer than expected.

(HuffPo)

What an Ass With Ears (although Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld also failed to zero-in on why the comparison was so stupid, saying instead that the one item was a neat product that everybody wanted; the other not so much).

Nobody is forced by law to purchase or subsidize an iPhone or an iPad, or any other product produced by Apple.

UPDATED: Glenn Beck and his very funny team went to Healthcare.gov to see what gives. Not much:

When Glenn attempted to access the site, he was promptly greeted with the Internet equivalent of a “hold button.”

“I’m here, and I don’t know if you can get a shot of this… but I just went to Healthcare.gov and I’m on this exciting page right now: ‘Health insurance marketplace, please wait. We have a lot of visitors on our site right now and we’re working to make your experience here better. Please wait here until we send you to the login page. Thanks for your patience.’”

Below is a screenshot of the message:

“The government is the only business that has actually come up with a ‘hold’ button on the Internet,” Glenn said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. We’ve got a hold button. Hope you don’t have anything really wrong with you. So I’m just waiting now. They have a lot of visitors on their site right now and they’re working to make your experience better.”

“We appreciate your patience. You are Number 477,326 in line,” Pat quipped. “Please continue to wait, as you will be taken in the order in which you arrived. Thank you for your patience.”
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After being completely kicked off the site and told to “try again later,” Glenn finally reached the log-in page on Healthcare.gov.

“I just got a login. Oh my goodness. I refreshed. I tried again later, and it just… ‘New to healthcare.gov? Create an account. Log in.’ I think, well, I am new to healthcare.gov. So I should create accounts.”

Stu, meanwhile, was not quite as lucky.

“I was trying to log in as well. I just got a new message,” Stu said. “Would you like me to share it with you because it’s important for your healthcare. It’s ‘???.ee.shared.header.learn???’ followed by ‘ffeee.shared.header.getinsurance???’. That’s what came up on the screen when I refreshed. That is good. I feel healthier already.”

Pat was somehow able to avoid the ‘question mark, question mark, question mark’ error, but his experience was not anymore pleasant. “Now, this says ‘Get ready for the Marketplace.’ I’m at that page. It’s asking me a question, and I fit into none of these categories,” Pat lamented. “‘Do you want information on any of the following situations? This will help us provide material about coverage options.’ ‘Dependent under 18:’ No. ‘Self?employed:’ No. ‘Low?income coverage options:’ No. ‘Disability:’ No. ‘Pregnancy:’ No. ‘Veteran:’ No. ‘American Indian or Alaskan native:’ No. ‘Preexisting conditions covered’ and so there’s either yes or no, and those are the only options. I can’t click anywhere except ‘go back.’”

“Hold on. We’re trying to make your healthcare experience even better. Stand by,” Glenn joked. “Question mark, question mark, question mark.”

Very funny.

UPDATE II: “Worse Is the New Normal” by Mark Steyn:

So, as in banking and housing and college tuition and so many other areas of endeavor, Washington is engaging in a kind of under-the-counter nationalization, in which the husk of a nominally private industry is conscripted to enforce government rules — and ruthlessly so …

UPDATE III: “100 Unintended Consequences of Obamacare,” Trader Joe’s is at #80:

Even though it has previously provided health-care coverage for its part-time employees, an uncommon practice in the industry, next year Trader Joe’s will give employees who work less than 30 hours a week $500 to purchase a plan in the upcoming Obamacare exchanges. With federal subsidies and possible earnings from other employment, the company said, workers can find coverage that will be just as good. One employee described her soon-to-be lost coverage as “one of the best parts about the job,” and her reaction to hearing it would be dumped was “pure panic, followed quickly by anger.”

I’ve been paying higher deductibles and co-pays and know full well why this has come about. There is no free lunch. Perhaps, like Michelle Malkin, I too will lose my healthcare coverage. Nevertheless, I feel nothing but glee at any discomfort experienced by those who voted for Obama and lectured us about the glories of his proctology.

Our Parallel Economic Universe

Crime, Economy, Objectivism, Political Economy, Politics, Propaganda, Reason

Financier Peter Schiff’s findings of fact in Florida V. George Zimmerman are much like mine in “The Colosseum of Courtroom Cretins,” where it was noted that “Idiocracy elite lacks the ability to separate the political constructs to which it is wedded (racism) from the facts of a case brought in a court of law.”

Or, as Mr. Schiff puts it in “Print the Legend”: “preconceived emotional commitments to a narrative [consistently trumped] demonstrable facts.”

Schiff goes on to compare the parallel reality constructed in the response to the Zimmerman acquittal and the fiction of our economic indices:

“The vast majority of observers continue to subscribe to the dominant narrative that our economy is improving, the Fed’s Quantitative Easing programs are responsible, and that the debt we are currently accumulating is not a long-term problem.”

“The current administration, the media, Wall Street, and the Fed itself, are particularly committed to this narrative. After all, we have been pursuing these policies for more than five years, and many of these parties have a particular emotional and pecuniary investment in a positive outcome. It would be difficult for them now to admit that their preferred cures have not only been ineffective, but harmful. As a result, they will continue to advocate for the current policies until they get the answers they expect.”

“Not only do their underlying assumptions defy economic law and objective rationality, but they are also at odds with the evidence that continues to arrive. The data makes it clear that while asset prices (stocks, bonds, and real estate), are currently being inflated by an activist monetary policy, the real economy continues to stagnate. What supports do exist are based solely on government intervention. Yet they nevertheless discuss a potential Fed exit strategy as if the economy were in a position to make such a transition without bringing on an even more severe recession than the last. In this light, the failure of QEI to produce a real recovery led directly to QEII, and so on to QE Infinity. We are unwilling to challenge our initial assumptions about what is really wrong with our economy and how to fix it.”

“To get a sense of justice and emotional clarity over the death of Trayvon Martin, many cling to the image of a saintly youth and ignore the more difficult reality of a troubled teen picking a fight with an inept neighborhood watchman. Accepting this reality does not lead to a conclusion that Trayvon deserved to die, but it denies the self-justifying conclusions that keep race relations dysfunctional. It also allows us to ignore more troubling and far more common tragedies like the one that befell 18 year old Jett Higham, another African American youth who lost his life in a nighttime run to a local convenience store. The media decided that this tragedy was a non-story, as his killers were also African Americans teens.” [Emphasis added.]

Sarah Hall Ingram’s Secret Admirer In the Halls of Power

Government, Healthcare, Hillary Clinton, Political Economy, Politics, Taxation, The State

Someone quite influential thought very highly of “Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS executive in charge of the tax exempt division in 2010 when it began targeting conservative Tea Party, evangelical and pro-Israel groups for harassment” (Washington Examiner).

Hall Ingram “got more than $100,000 in bonuses between 2009 and 2012.”

The 2010, 2011 and 2012 bonuses were awarded during the period when IRS harassment of the conservative groups was most intense. … Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., described the Ingram awards as “stunning, just stunning.”

“Bonuses as large as those awarded to Ingram typically require presidential approval, according to federal personnel regulations.”

All government-controlled systems (healthcare, for example) are pits of perverse incentives. It’s hard to get kinkier than to make failure tantamount to success. On the other hand, Hall Ingram is a political success; she has served her political masters well and will be rewarded forever after.

If forced to retire, Sarah Hall Ingram will probably get press with the president, as Hillary Clinton did before she slunk away from her post at Foggy Bottom, due to her dereliction in Benghazi.

Savers: You’re The Bank’s Bitch

Business, Constitution, Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Political Economy, Private Property, The State

Lawrence E. Rafferty, guest blogger on Professor Jonathan Turley’s blog, confirms what those of us who cleave to the Austrian school of economics already know: The workings of fractional reserve banking guarantee one thing only: Your deposits are not your own.

Booster to the banks Stuart Varney, of Fox Business, stressed today that he believes with all his heart that the US Congress [the same intemperate group that has helped accrue the US government’s 17 trillion dollar debt] will protect the private property of American depositors from the state-sanctioned theft suffered by Cypriot savers.

Rafferty sunders the Varney pie-in-the-sky, revealing that,

“A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making; that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland (discussed earlier here); and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds. ” NationofChange
The above article explains that most of us do not realize that when you deposit money in a bank, that it becomes the property of the bank and we become unsecured creditors of the bank! “Although few depositors realize it, legally the bank owns the depositor’s funds as soon as they are put in the bank. Our money becomes the bank’s, and we become unsecured creditors holding IOUs or promises to pay. (See here and here.) But until now the bank has been obligated to pay the money back on demand in the form of cash. Under the FDIC-BOE plan, our IOUs will be converted into “bank equity.” The bank will get the money and we will get stock in the bank. With any luck we may be able to sell the stock to someone else, but when and at what price?” NationofChange
If I deposit $1,000 dollars in my local bank, I trust that the funds are safe and protected by FDIC insurance and that even if the bank fails, I will get my money back. Under the plan listed above, we may not even be able to fall back on the FDIC insurance coverage. The FDIC-Bank of England plan would supersede our FDIC coverage and we would be relegated to become a “shareholder” in the failing bank or its successor entity. Let me see if I understand this scheme. The bank who is failing due to mismanagement or due to risky investments could steal my funds and force me to accept stock in a company led by poor businessmen with an even poorer business record! If you are brave enough, check out the full FDIC-Bank of England plan here.
Cyprus wasn’t the only place where a bankster grab of deposits was put into place or is being discussed. It is being discussed in New Zealand as well. “New Zealand has a similar directive, discussed in my last article here, indicating that this isn’t just an emergency measure for troubled Eurozone countries. New Zealand’s Voxy reported on March 19th:

Read Rafferty’s complete report.

Yippee! For your “hard earned deposits,” you’ll receive shares in a bankrupt, banking institution.

As Lew Rockwell put it recently, the most patriotic thing one can do is to partake in a run on the bank.

Before the fact, of course.

Moreover, and as I’ve long argued, thanks in no small part to Congress, various global agreements, mediated by a global bureaucracy—these embroil individual Americans absent their consent—have usurped the US Constitution and the power of Congress.

International treaties are often nothing more treason tarted up.