UPDATED: The President’s Nose-Growth Problem

Barack Obama, Healthcare

The president’s proboscis grew a bit more today. Michelle Obama must be glad “Barack,” as she calls him, has a “Cadillac” health-care plan,” unlike his subjects, who are, shall we say, between plans. This allergy he suffers can develop into a serious condition. I’m talking about Obama’s allergy to truth.

In his December 20 news conference, President Obama said that “Since October 1st, more than 1 million Americans have selected new health insurance plans through the federal and state marketplaces, so all told, millions of Americans, despite the problems with the website, are now poised to be covered by quality affordable health insurance come New Year’s Day. …”

US media is so crappy, a correction is hard to come by, other than on FoxNews.com:

In claiming “millions” would be covered on Jan. 1, [Obama] was also likely factoring in the estimated 3.9 million people who the administration says have qualified for coverage under expanded Medicaid.
An estimated 4 million people, however, have seen their policies canceled. …

… In response to people losing their insurance plans due to ObamaCare’s new standards, the administration announced Thursday that those who lost their coverage could skirt the law’s individual mandate — and could opt to purchase bare-bones policies if they want. Those so-called “catastrophic” coverage plans were previously available only to people under 30, but the administration is now opening them up to people who got cancellation notices. …

…”The health law is like a Jenga game — the administration keeps yanking out pieces, and ultimately nothing can keep it from collapsing,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., said in response. As Republican lawmakers jeered at the news, insurance industry representatives warned that the latest decision could further disrupt the market. …

MORE.

UPDATE (12/21): HE CAN NO LONGER FAKE SUCCESS. “Mr. Obama is doing through executive fiat what Republicans shut down the government to get him to do.” Good article at the Wall Street Journal:

… the White House keeps treating the Affordable Care Act’s text as a mere suggestion subject to day-to-day revision. Its latest political retrofit is the most brazen: President Obama is partly suspending the individual mandate.
Individuals whose health plans were canceled will now automatically qualify for a “hardship exemption” from the mandate. If they can’t or don’t sign up for a new plan, they don’t have to pay the tax. They can also get a special category of ObamaCare insurance designed for people under age 30.
***

So merry Christmas. If ObamaCare’s benefit and income redistribution requirements made your old, cheaper, better health plan illegal, you now have the option of going without coverage without the government taking your money as punishment. You can also claim the tautological consolation of an ObamaCare hardship exemption due to ObamaCare itself. …

… What an incredible political turnabout. Mr. Obama and HHS used to insist that the new plans are better and less expensive after subsidies than the old “substandard” insurance. Now they’re conceding that at least some people should be free to choose less costly plans if they prefer—or no plan—and ObamaCare’s all-you-can-eat benefits rules aren’t necessary for quality health coverage after all.

… the exemptions … belong to [BHO’s] larger pattern of suspending the law on his own administrative whim. Earlier this month he ordered insurers to backdate policies to compensate for the federal exchange meltdown, and before that HHS declared that it would not enforce for a year the mandates responsible for policy cancellations. Mr. Obama’s team has also by fiat abandoned the small-business exchanges, delayed the employer mandate and scaled back income verification.

“The basic structure of that law is working, despite all the problems,” Mr. Obama added. His make-it-up-as-he-goes improvisation will continue, because the law is failing.

MORE.

Beware Of Little Men With Big-Man Mania

Africa, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, South-Africa, The West

Big-man mania: All those effete Anglo-American, left-liberals (and lite libertarians) suffer from it. I call it the homo-eroticism of left-liberalism. The great Dan Roodt, South Africa’s finest polemicist, suspects “all this talk of ‘Madiba magic’ might be code for some supernatural, Harry Potter-like influence.” He writes:

…I have often thought that Mandela had bewitched a good portion of the Anglo-American ruling class that in turn infected the stupid Europeans who are progressively losing the capacity for independent thought. All this talk of “Madiba magic” might be code for some supernatural, Harry Potter-like influence.

As everone knows, some forms of muti are taken as a cure for an evil spell, while others are used precisely to bewitch the victim. A black man who has designs on a woman who is rejecting him could buy some muti from a sangoma to ensure that she falls in love with him.

In Europe, Nietzsche and others wrote about the “twilight of the idols”. However, in Africa the idols are thriving, with the messianic Mandela being the biggest idol of them all. It seems only a few cantankerous Christians still refuse to bow to him, but not the Clintons, the king of the Netherlands or Barack Obama. Even George W. Bush came as a pilgrim to South Africa this week.

During his speech at Soccer City on the outskirts of black Soweto, Obama cast himself in the role of Mandela’s understudy, a humble disciple to the famous Xhosa.

I suppose in the days of the Roman Empire, people were also nonplussed about the seemingly inexorable rise of a strange new cult, Christianity. In the face of global grief over Mandela’s “exchanging the temporary for the eternal”, as the local Afrikaans saying goes, most mainstream conservatives have joined in eulogizing Mandela. British PM David Cameron, who had wanted to “hang Mandela”, together with other Young Conservatives, reacted to Mandela’s death with …

… How do we explain such empathy, nay admiration, for a card-carrying member of the South African Communist Party in so-called Western conservative leaders? After all, I cannot recall similar expressions of sorrow when Georges Marchais of the French Communist Party or the East German stalwart, Erich Honecker, expired in 1997 and 1994, respectively.

The answer is that, unlike the venerable European leftists Marchais and Honecker, who had also waged a life-long struggle against fascism and racism – both leaders were among Mandela’s staunchest allies – Comrade Mandela assuages white guilt. …

READ “Mandela: muti for white guilt”

UPDATED: Apartheid South Africa: Reality Vs. Libertarian Fantasy

Free Markets, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, Private Property, South-Africa

“Apartheid South Africa: Reality Vs. Libertarian Fantasy” is the new essay, now on WND. It tackles the “economic reductionism, typical of the impoverished analysis of South Africa, offered so authoritatively by libertarian economists stateside.” Excerpted below are two sections therefrom:

… LITE LIBERTARIANISM VS. THE RIGHT KIND

Herein lies the difference between the paleolibertarian analysis and what this column has termed the lite libertarian one, philosopher Hans-Hermann Hope being the finest example of the former. The rest fall into the latter, lite category.

A crucial difference between lite libertarians and the Right kind is that to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional–a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values.

Conversely, the paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure. “The pursuit of the … paleolibertarian ideal,” explained Catholic philosopher Jack Kerwick, Ph.D., “is the pursuit of an ideal of liberty brought down from the clouds to the nit and the grit of the history and culture from which it emerged.” …

… FREEDOM VS. EGALITARIANISM

Contra the economic reductionism of the lite libertarian, free-market capitalism is a necessary but insufficient condition to sustain freedom in a country of South Africa’s complexion.

The truth absent from the phantasmagorical formulations critiqued is this: Economic freedom does not necessarily reduce so-called wealth inequality. Inegalitarainism is a feature of a free economy. If history is anything to go by, certain minorities will achieve prosperity from poverty, no matter how gravely the state and society impede them. Jews did it in Europe. Levantines and Indians in Africa and the Middle-East. Chinese in southeast Asia and everywhere else they go. Europeans in South Africa.

Moreover, “While all people want safety and sustenance for themselves, not everyone is prepared to allow those whom they dislike and envy to peacefully pursue the same.” (P. 4.) Free-market capitalism is not enough to safeguard ordered liberty in racially riven societies like South Africa, where the majority will always covet the possessions of immensely wealthier minorities and associate these riches with racial privilege.

Ultimately, the rights to life, liberty and private property will forever be imperiled in a country whose constitution has a clause devoted to “Limitation of Rights,” and where redistributive “justice” is a constitutional article of faith. (P. 101)

This, paleolibertarians (all three of us) know too well.

In “The Cannibal” chapter entitled “Saving South Africans S.O.S.,” secession is explored as one solution, it being a species of the private-law society delineated by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Hoppe, of course, has never been afraid to speak to the “unequal civilizing potential” (in James Burnham’s coinage) of different people and peoples. …

Read the complete essay. “Apartheid South Africa: Reality Vs. Libertarian Fantasy” is now on WND.

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UPDATE (12/22): INTERESTING DISCUSSION @ PRAGG.ORG, to which I have replied.