The House of Representatives has already passed its health-care bill and now the Senate is preparing to vote on its own. Should it pass, the largest new entitlement program since the New Deal will be a reconciliation process and a Presidents signature away from being...
POLITICS
Excused Horrors: Not Nazi, But Stalinist and Maoist
Between 1917 and 1983, Stalin and his successors murdered, or were otherwise responsible for the deaths of, 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, Mao Tsetung and his successors were responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese.
Bowing to "World Opinion": On Obama, Terrorism and The Geneva Convention
In the string of amazing decisions made during the first year of the Obama administration, nothing seems more like sheer insanity than the decision to try foreign terrorists, who have committed acts of war against the United States, in federal court, as if they were...
Imagine If Obama Said This About Iran….
Thirty years after the hostage crisis, Iranians are bravely challenging their government. Despite the theocracys attempt to crush these protests, Iranians have once again taken to the streets. Imagine what might happenthe potential benefit to us and to Iranif instead...
Constitutional Contempt
At Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Oct. 29th press conference, a CNS News reporter asked, “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?” Speaker Pelosi responded,...
Random Thoughts: November 2009
Random thoughts on the passing scene: If politicians stopped meddling with things they don’t understand, there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either...
Economic Myths and Irrelevancy
Steve H. Hanke is a Professor of Applied Economics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., and writes frequently for Globe Asia and Forbes magazine. Professor Hanke starts off his “Hu versus...
The "Costs" of Medical Care: Part IV
What is so wrong with the current medical system in the United States that we are being urged to rush headlong into a new government system that we are not even supposed to understand, because this legislation is to be rushed through Congress before even the Senators...
The "Costs" of Medical Care: Part II
Although it is cheaper to buy a pint of milk than to buy a quart of milk, nobody considers that to be lowering the price of milk. Although it is cheaper to buy a lower quality of all sorts of goods than to buy a higher quality, nobody thinks of that as lowering the...
The "Costs" of Medical Care: Part III
One of the strongest talking points of those who want a government-run medical care system is that we simply cannot afford the high and rising costs of medical care under the current system. First of...
The "Costs" of Medical Care
We are incessantly being told that the cost of medical care is “too high”– either absolutely or as a growing percentage of our incomes. But nothing that is being proposed by the government is likely to lower those costs, and much that is being...
Solving Whose Problem?
No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems– of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is...
American Idea
Americans are harder workers, more philanthropic, individualistic, self-reliant, anti-government than people in most other countries. We’ve turned what was an 18th-century Third World nation into the freest and most prosperous nation in mankind’s entire...
Maoist in the White House
Anita Dunn, is described by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as “one of the major decision makers of the Obama campaign” and as one of Obama’s “four top advisers (along with David Axelrod, David Plouffe, and Robert Gibbs).” She currently...
The Nobel Peace Prize and Mr. Obama's Intentions
Americans are well aware that these are troubling times. Things have been turned upside down. We are told that obeying government edicts constitutes “freedom.” We are told that government health and insurance plans are “competition.” We are...
Elites and Tyrants: The Fruits of “Social Justice”
Rep. Diane Watson said, in praising Cuba’s health care system, “You can think whatever you want to about Fidel Castro, but he was one of the brightest leaders I have ever met.” W.E.B. Dubois, writing in the National Guardian (1953) said,...
Random Thoughts: October 2009
Random thoughts on the passing scene: Upon learning that the Constitution requires a president to be a natural born citizen, a college student said: “What makes a natural born citizen any more qualified than one born by C-section?” Airlines that keep...
A Letter from a Child
Recent videos of American children in school singing songs of praise for Barack Obama were a little much, especially for those of us old enough to remember pictures of children singing the praises of dictators like Hitler, Stalin and Mao. But you don’t need a...
Is Disagreement with Obama Racism?
White bigots are no longer respected among whites and I look forward to the day when black bigots are no longer respected among blacks.
The Brainy Bunch
Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem. It was, after all, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brilliant “brains trust” advisers...
Water and Health Care: A Parallel
From the time I arrived on Albuquerque, New Mexico’s West Side some 14 years ago, I was impressed with New Mexico Utilities, the private enterprise that supplied our water. They did a superior job of keeping our water clean, fresh tasting and odor-free. They...
Michael Moore’s New Film “Capitalism: A Love Story”
Michael Moore’s new film, “Capitalism: A Love Story” will be released next month. I’ve neither seen nor read reviews of the film, except for a short piece in the London Telegraph (9/6/09) titled “Michael Moore film calls capitalism...
Choosing The Right College
There is so much for high school seniors and their parents to know about colleges that they not only need to get a lot of information but also need to make sure it is the right kind of information. A number of college guides have useful information but, unfortunately,...
The Underdogs
It is a good reflection on Americans that they tend to be on the side of the underdog. But it is often hard to tell who is in fact the underdog, or why. Many years ago, there was a big, lumbering catcher named Ernie Lombardi whose slowness afoot was legendary. Someone...
Obama’s Betrayal of Education
Instead of President Obama addressing school students across the nation, he might have accomplished more by focusing his attention on the educational rot in schools in the nation’s capital. The American Legislative Exchange Council recently came out with their...
Report from the 9/11 and 9/12/2009 Washington Protests
When speaking about rights, don’t water down the principle.
Health Insurance Fables for Adults
Many years ago, as a small child, I was told one of those old-fashioned fables for children. It was about a dog with a bone in his mouth, who was walking on a log across a stream. The dog looked down into the water and saw his reflection. He thought it was another dog...
The Market Does Not Ration Health Care: Politically-Controlled Insurance and Rationing (Part 2)
The Harm of Conflating Price Distribution with Rationing Whether price distribution counts as a type of rationing is not merely some semantic dispute. Conflating price distribution with political rationing obliterates the crucial distinctions between the two. A system...
The Market Does Not Ration Health Care: Voluntary Exchange Is Not Rationing (Part 1)
That the political health “reform” endorsed by Barack Obama and his supporters would entail rationing is indisputable. It is simply impossible to expand subsidized care and contain costs without rationing. For more on this point, see my article in the...
Our Self-Crippled War
In Washington’s “compassionate” war, we give the enemy every advantage–and then compel our soldiers to fight with their hands tied . . . ever tighter.
Obama’s Big Speech for Socialized Medicine
The Great Prevaricator spoke again on Wednesday, attempting to return us to tribal morality and tribal medicine. The speech was smoothly delivered, but extremely evasive and dishonest. For instance, just as one small thing, I came away from the speech thinking he was...
Shrugging Off Government Health Care
Nearly a century ago, the Federal Reserve Board was created to eliminate the supposed economic problems of a free market. A century of inflation, recessions, one or two depressions, huge expansion in government debt, and wild swings in unemployment tells us the system...
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