Category Archives: Private Property

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.

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.

BACKWARD Zuckerberg : We Subsidize His DREAMERS

IMMIGRATION, Paleolibertarianism, Private Property, Taxation, Technology

There is a very good reason Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg can promise the world to “young undocumented immigrants,” or “Dreamers,” pretend that by lobbying to let them stay in the USA, he is tapping into endless possibilities; make like they’re God’s gift to the American high-tech industry (when they’re not), and generally carry on like a filthy rich d-ck: the objects of his affection—young, illegal immigrants—are subsidized by the American taxpayer.

Legalization of low-skilled or no-skilled migrants (such as Zuckerberg’s “Dreamers”) amounts to a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to big business via big government.

As Hans-Hermann Hoppe has written, “”[E]mployers under democratic Welfare State conditions are permitted by state law to externalize their employment costs on others” and will “tend to import increasingly low-skilled and low value-productive immigrants, regardless of their effect on all-around communal property values.”

Here, the rightful owners of public property (taxpayers) do not get to vet the newcomers—the state and big business do. Yet when faced with such economic fascism (government-business collusion), open-border libertarians exalt business’ every move.

“His tentative grasp of property leads the leftist libertarian to forget that public property is property funded by taxpayers through expropriated taxes. It belongs to taxpayers. Yet at least a million additional immigrants a year are allowed the free use of these taxpayer-supported amenities. Every new arrival avails himself of public works such as roads, hospitals, parks, libraries, schools and welfare.
In the absence of a state, or in the presence of a limited government where almost all land is privately owned, migration would be a very restricted affair. It would depend on the graces of private property owners. A newcomer may be invited over by a propertied person, who would shoulder the costs. If he wishes to venture beyond the invited sphere, the newcomer would seek consent from the private property owners with whom he wishes to interface. The more the status of property approaches the libertarian ideal, the less free migration would be.” (From “LOVE-IN AT THE BORDERS”)

Train The Cameras On Police And First Responders

Crime, Economy, Fascism, Free Markets, Government, Law, Private Property, The State

Police and state-employed firefighters must be tethered electronically by video cams. The cameras worn on the helmets of weaponized government workers—they have enormous license to use their weapons—serve to keep them accountable. Business (say, free-market firefighters hired by an insurer) already polices its workforce, as it is in the business of pleasing, not killing, those it serves. Preventing fraud and abuse on the job is integral* to the job. (Guess why.) When will people get that the incentives that are at work in private property are missing from state-run systems?

Twelve or so minutes into “The Five” on Fox News, a heated airhead debate ensued over the suggestion of removing cameras from the helmets of cops and first responders. Airhead Bob Beckel said cameras must go. Kimberly Guilfoyle (not an airhead, but a bona fide statist) agreed. Poor Dana Ditz. She got it right but by default. She wants to give the boys in blue all the power in the world “to protect us.” Because Dana Ditz can’t reverse a situation in her not-so-nimble mind, she failed to see that cops filming also means cops being filmed, and abuses more likely exposed. (* Today, our Dana discovered the word “integral.” But in pronouncing it, she placed the emphasis incorrectly on the second syllable. Here’s the right way to say “integral.”)

Remember the only victim of the Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash, last month? She was killed not by the crash, but by our brave first responders.

FSGate:

The San Francisco Fire Department supervisors who took charge of the Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash scene were not alerted by firefighters that a 16-year-old passenger had been found near the plane, leaving them powerless to prevent the girl from being run over by a rig after she was covered by fire-retardant foam, footage of the incident shows.

In the case of state employees, the incentive is absent to be really, really, really careful. After all, responsibility for damages and deaths is collectivized; taxpayers pick up the tab; lawmakers enact laws that shield the perp from responsibility, even protecting identities. (That’s why I say name and shame the pimps at TSA.)

Film them. The many good cops won’t mind