Unhealthy Propaganda

Barack Obama, Communism, Democrats, Economy, Free Markets, Government, Healthcare, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, The State

BELOW ARE SOME HIGHLIGHTS, interspersed with comments, from BO’s much-anticipated address to the two chambers—an address that was, overall, thin gruel. For those who’ve switch off to preserve their health, the text to the president’s speech on “the need to overhaul health care in the United States” is here. I provided a rights-based primer in a previous post, “Preparing For Unhealthy Propaganda.”

“I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.” [The historical president’s quest to continue to make history …]

“There are now more than thirty million American citizens who cannot get coverage.” [Not so. See “Destroying Healthcare For The Few Uninsured.”]

“Those who do have insurance have never had less security and stability than they do today. More and more Americans worry that if you move, lose your job, or change your job, you’ll lose your health insurance too.” [The answer is to create the conditions for jobs in the private economy, not to kneecap job creators, Chicago style.]

“Then there’s the problem of rising costs.” [The solution is A Free Market in Medical Care, which we lack.]

“There are those on the left who believe that the only way to fix the system is through a single-payer system like Canada’s, where we would severely restrict the private insurance market and have the government provide coverage for everyone. On the right, there are those who argue that we should end the employer-based system and leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own.”

“I have to say that there are arguments to be made for both approaches. But either one would represent a radical shift that would disrupt the health care most people currently have. Since health care represents one-sixth of our economy, I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn’t, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch. And that is precisely what those of you in Congress have tried to do over the past several months”

“The plan I’m announcing tonight would meet three basic goals:

It will provide more security and stability to those who have health insurance. It will provide insurance to those who don’t. And it will slow the growth of health care costs for our families, our businesses, and our government.” [Only in defiance of the laws of economics.]

“First, if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. Let me repeat this: nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.

What this plan will do is to make the insurance you have work better for you.

“Now, if you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans who don’t currently have health insurance, the second part of this plan will finally offer you quality, affordable choices. If you lose your job or change your job, you will be able to get coverage. If you strike out on your own and start a small business, you will be able to get coverage. We will do this by creating a new insurance exchange – a marketplace where individuals and small businesses will be able to shop for health insurance at competitive prices.” [About this “exchange” BO wants to breathe life into: what he’s describing is a phony “market place” brought about by flesh-and-blood central planners. If that were possible the Soviet Union would not have collapsed. Pray tell, where in the world—and in history—have command economists “designed” functioning, efficient, fair markets?]

“For those individuals and small businesses who still cannot afford the lower-priced insurance available in the exchange, we will provide tax credits, the size of which will be based on your need. And all insurance companies that want access to this new marketplace will have to abide by the consumer protections I already mentioned.”

COERCION KICKER: “individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance – just as most states require you to carry auto insurance. Likewise, businesses will be required to either offer their workers health care, or chip in to help cover the cost of their workers.” [BO forgot to mention that so-called Cadillac coverage amounting to $800,000 per annum will be taxed to the tune of 35 percent. Just saying.]

BO is nothing if not benevolent: “Now, I have no interest in putting insurance companies out of business.”

Can BO count?: “I have insisted that like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects. … based on Congressional Budget Office estimates, we believe that less than 5% of Americans would sign up.” [And this 5 percent will pay through premiums alone for a $900 billion plan over a decade? How on earth?]

“I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. Period. And to prove that I’m serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don’t materialize.” [What do they know, but the CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE disagrees, writing, on June 15, 2009, that “enacting the proposal would result in a net increase in federal budget deficits of about $1.0 trillion over the 2010–2019 period.” Where did these professional number crunchers go wrong?]

I’m getting tired of following this fanciful fairytale. So let me end my service to BAB readers with one more fabulous assertion by BO: “Most of these costs will be paid for with money already being spent – but spent badly – in the existing health care system. The plan will not add to our deficit.”

THE PREMISE OF THE ABOVE being that the government, which is responsible for the waste and fraud in Medicare, Medicaid and the VA system, will also be in charge of eliminating the same features of these state-run systems.

Preparing For Unhealthy Propaganda

BAB's A List, Communism, Economy, Healthcare, Individual Rights, Objectivism, Political Economy, Propaganda, Socialism

As valid today as it was when it was first written for the occasion of Hillary Healthcare, Dr. George Reisman’s 1994 essay, “THE REAL RIGHT TO MEDICAL CARE VERSUS SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, is a must read in anticipation of Obama’s obfuscating oratory tonight. As Dr. Reisman puts it, “It’s a demonstration that government intervention inspired by the philosophy of collectivism is the cause of America’s medical crisis and that a free market in medical care is the solution for the crisis.”

Begin with the premise undergirding the Obama argument:

“For over a century, virtually all proposals for economic or social reform have been based on the thoroughly mistaken philosophical and theoretical foundations of Marxism, and have aimed at the ultimate achievement of a socialist society, in the belief that socialism represented the most rational and moral system of mankind’s social organization. On the basis of this conviction, individual freedom was progressively restricted and the power of the state progressively enlarged. Individual freedom—laissez faire capitalism—was assumed to be a system of chaos and of the exploitation of the masses by the capitalists. The onslaught of the socialists (who in this country call themselves “liberals”)—the step-by-step achievement of their political agenda—encountered virtually no philosophical resistance. Not surprisingly, again and again, the “liberals” defeated their ill-equipped conservative adversaries, who at most could only delay their advance. The victories of the “liberals” were inevitable because it was a battle of men with the seeming vision of a better world that could be achieved by means of intelligent human effort based on a body of ideas (however mistaken those ideas were), against men who, while they valued the relatively free world they saw around them, had no significant philosophical or theoretical knowledge of how to defend it.”

Move on to an understanding of your rights. Who exactly is violating these immutable rights?

“… the right to medical care does not mean a right to medical care as such, but to the medical care one can buy from willing providers. One’s right to medical care is violated not when there is medical care that one cannot afford to buy, but when there is medical care that one could afford to buy if one were not prevented from doing so by the initiation of physical force. It is violated by medical licensing legislation and by every other form of legislation and regulation that artificially raises the cost of medical care and thereby prevents people from obtaining the medical care they otherwise could have obtained from willing providers. The precise nature of such legislation and regulation we shall see in detail, in due course.”

“This then is the concept of rights, and specifically of rights to things, that I uphold. One’s rights to things are rights only to things one can obtain in free trade, with the voluntary consent of those who are to provide them. All such rights are predicated upon full respect for the persons and property of others.”

The solution? A Free Market in Medical Care:

“To be successful, such reform must approach the problem of bringing down medical costs from two sides: on the one side, the reduction and ultimate total elimination of the artificial increase in demand for medical care fostered by the alleged need-based right to medical care and the collectivization of costs to pay for it. On the other side, the reduction and ultimate total elimination of the artificial increase in medical costs caused both by the alleged need-based right to medical care and by medical licensing. Everything that rolls back the artificial increase in demand for medical care will, of course, operate to reduce medical costs, but there also needs to be more direct action as well. This is necessary both in order to speed up the process of cost reduction and insofar as the artificial increase in demand for medical care has led to increased government intervention into medical care and to irrational standards of medical malpractice. These latter will not go away just by means of reducing the artificial increase in demand for medical care. Nor will medical licensing and its contribution to the high cost of medical care.”

“Approaching the matter from both sides will make possible a process of mutually self-reinforcing cumulative success in bringing down medical costs. That is, not only will the rollback of the artificial increase in the demand for medical care bring down the cost of medical care, but everything that serves directly to bring down the cost of medical care will make such rollback all the more likely.”

READ the entire piece.

Kennedy Reincarnated

Celebrity, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Propaganda, Pseudoscience

TED KENNEDY is back with a posse. “Beaches around Chatham, Mass., remain closed because of shark sightings made in the Cape Cod area before the busy holiday weekend. Reports of the sightings and closures — as well as the tagging by scientists of two great white sharks — make national news.”

In any event—and as I argued in “Animals Gone Wild”—“Steven Spielberg’s magnificent thriller Jaws is an infinitely better Guide For the Perplexed than the shark experts”:

The latter “insist that, if presented with a menu, sharks will choose fish over folks. (‘Too tough and chewy,’ confirmed a spokesfish for the shark community.)”

Dare I say that the alleged culinary preferences of sharks are because there are more fish in the sea than people? If the oceans were peopled more plentifully, sharks would adapt their refined taste buds to human flesh in a flash. A witness—a brave surfer who paddled to the rescue—confirmed that Sharky didn’t seem remotely put off, and was doing what powerful, flesh-eating animals with sharp teeth do: tucking in.

“Apparently, the bears and the sharks haven’t had the benefit of liberal expert propaganda.”

Dipstick Depression

Barack Obama, Communism, Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Free Markets, Regulation, Socialism

Following the deductive genius of Austrian economics, many of us have been warning that Obama’s policies are plunging the country into a depression. The best book on the topic, of course, is America’s Great Depression By Murray N. Rothbard. Now, in a study endorsed by Nobel laureate James Buchanan, economists Charles Rowley of George Mason University and Nathanael Smith of the Locke Institute contend that Obama’s “policies even have the potential to consign the US to a similar fate as Argentina, which suffered a painful and humiliating slide from first to Third World status last century.”

According to the British Telegraph, “There are ‘troubling similarities’ between the US President’s actions since taking office and those which in the 1930s sent the US and much of the world spiralling into the worst economic collapse in recorded history, says the new pamphlet, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs.”

“… the White House’s plans to pour hundreds of billions of dollars of cash into the economy will undermine it in the long run. They say that by employing deficit spending and increased state intervention President Obama will ultimately hamper the long-term growth potential of the US economy and may risk delaying full economic recovery by several years.

“The study represents a challenge to the widely held view that Keynesian fiscal policies helped the US recover from the Depression which started in the early 1930s. The authors say: ‘[Franklin D Roosevelt’s] interventionist policies and draconian tax increases delayed full economic recovery by several years by exacerbating a climate of pessimistic expectations that drove down private capital formation and household consumption to unprecedented lows.'”

The researchers err in their support for “the Federal Reserve’s moves to slash interest rates to just above zero and embark on quantitative easing, pumping cash directly into the system.” That goes against the grain of what the authors have contended.

Truly scary, but nothing that Austrians have not been bracing for, is the warning “that greater intervention could set the US back further. It is also not impossible that the US will experience the kind of economic collapse from first to Third World status experienced by Argentina under the national-socialist governance of Juan Peron.”

“The paper … recommends that the US return to a more laissez-faire economic system rather than intervening further in activity.” Dah!

Said James Buchanan: “We have learned some things from comparable experiences of the 1930s’ Great Depression, perhaps enough to reduce the severity of the current contraction. But we have made no progress toward putting limits on political leaders, who act out their natural proclivities without any basic understanding of what makes capitalism work.”

Read “Voodoo Child Talks Up A Storm,” and “The Commie Who Controls the Economy From the Grave.”