Life In The Oink Sector Revisited

Free Markets, Government, Private Property, South-Africa, The State

“Life In The Oink Sector” detailed the cost to the private economy of the ever-growing public sector, likening the public-private sector relationship to that of “parasite vs. host. The first is sucking the lifeblood of the second. The larger the parasite gets, the weaker the host will grow.”

Now John Stossel takes on the public sector “bankrupting America”:

“NY Transit Union boss, John Samuelsen argues, we are the richest country in the world and can afford it. Really?

Here are some of the facts;

Public pensions have unfunded liability of $1 trillion [1] to $3.5 trillion [2]

Federal workers take home twice pay and benefits [3] as private workers. Local and state workers also make more [4].

Total Pay Benefits

Private $59,909 $50,028 $9,881

Local/state $67,812 $52,051 $15,761

Federal $119,982 $79,197 $40,785

— Average TWU union worker makes $60K without overtime or benefits.

— 25% took 15 or more sick days. Average was 8 sick days.

— Fox average 3 sick days (same for men and women)

— No FOX employee took 15 days

Relative Danger of Jobs (Deaths per 100,000 workers)

— Fishing 128.9

–Logging 115.7

–Iron workers 46.4

–Farmers 39.5

–Firemen 3.8

–Transit workers 1.4

(Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, except Transit worker death, that is from interview with TWU Local100 President)

Some people argue that there’s no alternative to the government monopoly on municipal work, but Sandy Springs, Georgia, privatized most of it’s jobs in 2005. Now the city pays about ½ of what it used to pay. It enjoys a $14 million surplus, in addition to funding a $20 million reserve.”

[SNIP]

Incidentally, the most dangerous job—even more hazardous than fishing—is farming in South Africa. The mortality rate (due to murder) among Boers stands at 300 per 100,000.

It’s in my upcoming book (now lingering with the publisher).

Collapse Of The Child-Only Healthcare Market

Barack Obama, Healthcare, Regulation, Socialism, The State

Here is yet another unhappy installment in a BAB series of posts on the effects of the Obama healthscare, as these percolate throughout the economy.

This time it is “the collapse of the child-only market.” Reports the Wall Street Journal:

This week Democrats threw a six-month birthday party for ObamaCare—and the timing was only appropriate since it occurred at the same moment their reform annihilated a corner of the U.S. insurance market.

Democrats were celebrating the arrival of ObamaCare’s first regulatory wave, which was designed to land weeks before the election. These include mandated benefits like “free” preventive care (i.e., the cost is built into the premiums). Democrats think these “consumer protections” poll well, even though they’re already raising consumer rates across the country. But the most immediately destructive item turned out to be new rules governing private health coverage for children.

This week, almost every big insurance company in America—including Aetna, Cigna, UnitedHealth Group, WellPoint, Humana, Coventry, some Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliates and others—stopped writing “child-only” policies in the individual market. This is a niche product that parents typically buy when their employer health plan doesn’t cover dependents. The exact plans vary company to company and state to state, and the insurers will still offer family policies and make good on the child-only policies that they’ve already sold. But most won’t be writing new ones.

In other words, for-profit businesses are refusing to sell products that consumers want to buy. Exact data aren’t available, but the child-only market covers roughly a million kids a year.

The reason is a regulation that President Obama mentions every time he talks about health care, as he did recently in Falls Church, Virginia: “Children who have pre-existing conditions are going to be covered.” Insurers are now required to cover everyone under 19 when their parents apply for coverage, regardless of health status. The problem with this kind of “guaranteed issue” is that it encourages people, in this case parents, to wait until their kids are sick before seeking coverage.

This drives up premiums for the healthy, encouraging consumers in turn to drop coverage, and eventually it leads to what’s known as a “death spiral,” the industry term for an insurer with rapidly increasing costs as a result of population changes in its coverage pool. The child-only market is a particular death-spiral risk because it is so small and unstable, which explains why so many insurers left in a stroke.

MORE.

If we are to believe a new AP poll—and my thesis in “Statism Starts With YOU!”—Americans “who think the law should have done more outnumber those who think the government should stay out of health care by 2-to-1.”

The fatter the feds the happier Americans are.

UPDATED: U.S. Military Gone Gaga, Making Osama Smile

Feminism, Gender, Military

The following is from my new WND column, “U.S. Military Gone Gaga, Making Osama Smile”:

“In 2002, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, then Osama bin Laden’s spokesman, gave an interview to an Algerian newspaper in which he mocked the American campaign to dismantle al-Qaida, calling it a ‘Hollywood script.’

Back then, OBL and his aides had quite a bit to snicker about. The massive welfare-warfare machine that is the American military was preoccupied with a weighty, waste-management matter: incontinence and urinary tract infections among its women. The (malodorous) matter made news headlines across the US.

Our ascetic enemies are not encumbered by feminine plumbing problems. Al-Qaida maintains Esprit de corps among its men by confining the role the ladies perform in their outfit: Wahabbi women may combust for the cause; but they do not get to disable the ranks with feminine and feminist special pleading—OB/GYN and urinary tract requirements, sexual harassment lawsuits, out-of–wedlock pregnancies, and welfarism.

As if to confirm al-Qaida’s expressed contempt for the Empire’s army and soft recruits; the military proceeded, back then, to launch a Hollywood-like production proper. The Pentagon, no less, endorsed a VH1 series entitled ‘Military Diaries,’ a bit of ‘militarytainment’ that made Abu Ghaith’s reference to a “Hollywood script” impossible to dispute.

‘Military Diaries’ was touted as a ‘powerful firsthand look at our heroes, their stories and the music that gets them through.’ The viewer was treated to the thrusting pelvis and swaying breasts of a recruit by the name of Charlie, followed by Laurie, Danielle, Paul, and Jimmie, among others. These poster-girlie GIs wanted America to know that their ‘real duty was to provide humanitarian aid to the Afghans.’ They shared with us their dreams of being ‘self-help authors.’ And they imparted the joys of manning posts like ‘Diversity Awareness Officers’ or ‘Drug and Alcohol Counselors.’

The production sure put a ‘human face’ on our coed men and women of the armed forces. But it was a face that exuded mush, not mettle. And it was seen and savored by an enemy, to whom the ‘Promised Land’ is a military victory, not a spot on Oprah Winfrey’s concave couch (due to that lady’s mighty keister).

Cut to 2010. A politically powerful faction of the military-media-industrial-congressional complex is cobbling together another production to motivate OBL and his men. It features a pathetic pop tartlet called Lady Gaga, whose iconic status, in the absence of any artistic merit, tells you all you need to know about her fans.” …

Read the complete column, “U.S. Military Gone Gaga, Making Osama Smile”

Read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material and reviews. Get your copy (or copies) now!

UPDATE (Sept. 24): Please read John McClain’s lengthy missive in the Comments Section; it is a stirring account from a veteran about how females were foisted on men in the trenches, and the effects this tyranny has had on the moral of the men who do the heavy lifting.

UPDATE III: A Paltry Pledge To America

Constitution, Elections, Political Philosophy, Politics, Republicans

It was interesting to hear Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity, two oft-closeted establishment Republicans, use the pronoun “we” in discussing the Republicans and their “Pledge to America.” The Repbulicans are the team to which the two belong. Team Republican has issued a paltry pledge that did not displease La Coulter or Hannity.

The Preamble to The Pledge is quite nice, except that it seems sacrilegious for dirty dogs such as the Republicans to suddenly speak up about first principles they’ve seldom respected—original intent, the Tenth Amendment, etc.

“America is more than a country” states the pledge. Indeed. But it is also a community of souls once linked by a common history, heroes and traditions—a community rapidly being dissolved by central planners.

While the Republicans pay homage to the propositional nation (America as an idea), a cursory read tells me that their commitment to the flesh-and-blood American community remains pretty pitiful.

UPDATE I (Sept. 24): Have the Pledge makers promised to repeal “the new Paycheck Fairness Act passed by the House 256 to 162”? “The rise of the egalitarian society means the death of the free society,” writes Pat Buchanan in a brilliant column, “Equality or Freedom,” on pay parity being pursued by the Obama administration.

As I wrote when Obama signed a pay equity act:

If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, men would have long-since priced themselves out of the market. The fact that the wily entrepreneur doesn’t ditch men in favor of women suggests that different abilities and experience are at work, rather than a conspiracy to suppress women.

UPDATE II: The Pledge is festooned with huge, “patriotic” images. To me that’s very reassuring—as reassuring as the promise by these power-hungry creeps to “roll back government spending to prestimulus, pre-bailout levels, saving us at least $100 billion in the first year alone.” Wow, $100 billion in a debt of $110 trillion! Now that’s bold. Basically the Republicans, who still don’t get it, are promising to return to 2008-level spending.

Notice all the legally safe, adjectival ejaculate used by these cobra heads to qualify their promises: “common-sense limits on the growth of government.” You know that to the Coulter and Hannity Republican, limiting any accretion in the military-media-congressional-industrial complex is tantamount to treason. “National security” (minus borders) is a big stick with which they like to beat their Democratic opponents. It’s the only stick they have, given their statist record.

Indeed, the Republikeynesians will “impose a net hiring freeze on non-security federal employees and ensure that the public sector no longer grows at the expense of the private sector.”

Allow the military and the TSA bullies at the airports to grow their fiefdoms as they please.

Republicans are tinkering on the margins, as Ron Paul has suggested, with no commitment to say which departments will be eliminated; or to tackle the philosophy of government, etc.

UPDATE III: “Republicans are the drag queens of politics. Peel away the pules for family, faith and fetuses and one discovers either ‘neoconservative welfare-warfare statists or global social democrats,’ or national socialists of sorts, who fuse economic protectionism, populism and a support for the very welfare infrastructure that is at the root of the social rot they decry.”—ILANA MERCER

Except for one republican (for he is not a Republican). Run Ron, run.