When speaking about rights, don’t water down the principle.
POLITICS
The basic and crucial political issue of our age is: capitalism versus socialism, or freedom versus statism. For decades, this issue has been silenced, suppressed, evaded, and hidden under the foggy, undefined rubber-terms of “conservatism” and “liberalism” which had lost their original meaning and could be stretched to mean all things to all men. – AYN RAND
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...
Barack Obama: Seducer of the Young
A very brief but important article on the fundamental purpose of the health care bill is circulating and with which President Barack Obama and his cadre of communist and pinkish radicals, czars and advisors would agree with nods of approval, and which most Democrats...
Obama: Listening to a Liar, Part II
“Hubris-laden charlatans” was the way a recent e-mail from a reader characterized the Obama administration. That phrase seems especially appropriate for the Charlatan-in-Chief, Barack Obama, whose speech to a joint session of Congress was both a...
Washington’s Lies
President Obama and congressional supporters estimate that his health care plan will cost between $50 and $65 billion a year. Such cost estimates are lies whether they come from a Democratic president and Congress, or a Republican president and Congress. You say,...
Obama: Listening to a Liar, Part I
The most important thing about what anyone says are not the words themselves but the credibility of the person who says them. The words of convicted swindler Bernie Madoff were apparently quite convincing to many people who were regarded as knowledgeable and...
Inflation and Deficits: Politicians Cause Inflation
With the massive increases in federal spending, inflation is one of the risks that awaits us. To protect us from the political demagoguery that will accompany that inflation, let’s now decide what is and what is not inflation. One price or several prices rising...
Ayn Rand Answers
Rather belatedly, I’ve just finished reading Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of her Q & A, edited by Robert Mayhew. It’s a superb collection, and I want to re-read it soon. In reading it, I was wondering how impressed a non-Objectivist reader might...
Suicide of the West?
Britain’s release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi– the Libyan terrorist whose bomb blew up a plane over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, killing 270 people– is galling enough in itself. But it is even more profoundly troubling as a sign of a larger mood that...
The New War on Physicians
The debate on health care reform is starting to turn ugly. Those who want to increase government power to rule American medicine are adding physicians to their list of “enemies of the people.” We hear frequently that insurance companies and drug companies...
The Collapse of America? The Dire Message of Mr. David Walker
A person who is in the pay of the government is not always free to speak publicly about the most pressing issues he confronts. Administrators who are appointed to perform specific tasks are generally not free to contradict or even to challenge policies. They often...
What Obama’s Health Care Plan Will Be Like: The Undisclosed Danger of Government Health Care
Government health care is not concerned with patients. Politicians’ interest is primarily focused on the productive—in the U.S., about one-third the population. Government has no income other than what it confiscates from the productive. So, promises of...
The History of HMOs: What You–and Your Employer–Probably Don’t Know About Your Health Plan
The new year begins as employees begin a process called open enrollment–when many employees designate a health plan through their employer. Unfortunately, most are forced to enroll in a managed care plan, i.e., an HMO or PPO. That’s right: force actually...
Capitalism vs the Welfare State: The Next Vote
Let’s sort out some things. As a political and economic system, socialism is government ownership and management of the means of production and distribution of goods, the control of money, and the abolition of profit and private property. These ideas also...
Not Much: What Will They Learn in College?
When parents plunk down $20, $30, $40 and maybe $50 thousand this fall for a year’s worth of college room, board and tuition, it might be relevant to ask: What will their children learn in return? The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) ask that...
Summer of Socialized Medicine
Amid talk that the administration will re-name its plan for socialized medicine after the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy and re-package the national health care campaign as an American tribute to a 47-year veteran of the U.S. Senate who persistently opposed...
The Great Escape
Many of the issues of our times are hard to understand without understanding the vision of the world that they are part of. Whether the particular issue is education, economics or medical care, the preferred explanation tends to be an external explanation– that...
A Letter to Lee Scott, CEO of Wal-Mart on Wal-Mart’s Support of The Government Taking Over Health Care
Dear Mr. Scott, I was shocked to read that Wal-Mart’s supports socialized medicine. Having asked for a donation to our Tea Party Association here in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I was told that Wal-Mart’s policy is not to involve itself in political movements....
Suppose Car Insurance Was Considered to Be a ‘Right’
The major impetus behind the Democratic health care plans is not economic–it is moral. The claim that health care is a moral right has motivated enormous government coercions against the medical industry for nearly fifty years. But this moral claim has blinded...
The Obama Vision: Whose Medical Decisions?: Part IV
The serious, and sometimes chilling, provisions of the medical care legislation that President Obama has been trying to rush through Congress are important enough for all of us to stop and think, even though his political strategy from the outset has been to prevent...
Obama’s “Bait and Switch”: Whose Medical Decisions?: Part III
Amid all the controversies over medical care, no one seems to be asking a very basic question: Why does it take more than 1,000 pages of legislation to insure people who lack medical insurance? Despite incessant repetition of the fact that millions of Americans...
Is Racial Profiling Racist?
Harvard Professor Henry Gates’ arrest has given new life to the issue of racial profiling. We can think of profiling in general as a practice where people use an observable or known physical attribute as a proxy or estimator of some other unobservable or unknown...
Obamacare’s Phony Arguments: Whose Medical Decisions?: Part II
When famed bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he said: “Because that’s where the money is.” For the same reason, it is as predictable as the sunrise that medical care for the elderly will be cut back under a...
Obama Cronies vs. American Citizens: Whose Medical Decisions?: Part I
There was a time when rushing a thousand-page bill through Congress so fast that no one has time to read it would have provoked public outrage. But now, this has been attempted twice in the first 6 months of a new administration. The fact that they got away with it...
The Pelosi Terror: Guillotine The Rich
Nancy Pelosi wants government to take over health care. But there’s a snag. At present the yearly income level at which Americans will be slapped with an onerous tax increase, is set at $250,000. Pelosi’s own salary is presently $223,500 per annum, which...
On The White House “Disinformation” Campaign
The “disinformation” I’ve found has actually come from the White House…
The Health Care Bill: What HR 3200, “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009,” Says
What does the bill recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, HR3962, short-titled the Affordable Health Care for America Act, actually say about major health-care issues? I here pose a few commonsense questions, cite some relevant passages, and offer a few...
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