Welcome to Post Office Health Care

America’s health-care system has problems — all traceable to government intervention — but it could be worse. And if the so-called reform emerging in Congress is enacted, it will be worse.

The nub of the plan is that everyone must have health insurance and that all but the smallest employers should provide it. If someone doesn’t have coverage, he’ll be penalized. Low-income people will be subsidized by the taxpayers. Government will determine what’s covered, which will set off a lobbying frenzy by providers of “indispensable” services and products. (This already goes on in the states, where “mandated benefits” include coverage for drug and alcoholism treatment, in vitro fertilization, and other less-than-widely-used services.) So people will be forced to have coverage they may not want.

Insurers will not be able to deny coverage or charge higher premiums to people already ill, that is, with so-called pre-existing conditions. The mandate to insure everyone and charge the same price regardless of health means that some will be forced to subsidize others. People of whatever income level whose insurance premiums would have been lower without the mandate will have to spend more because risk-based premiums will be illegal. That is not insurance; it’s welfare. (Read more from campaignforliberty.com)

WSJ: “$26 Software Is Used to Breach Key Weapons in Iraq; Iranian Backing Suspected”

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations. (Read more from online.wsj.com)

My bullshit meter just went off the charts.

See also:
Iraqi Drones May Target U.S. Cities
Monday, February 24, 2003

Europe Also Inflating — beware the red herring

Hey guys. Pay attention to this. The talking heads on Television will probably try to spin stories like this one to disguise the demise of the dollar. Europe’s inflationary policies do not help us, but they serve as a red herring for the propagandists.

The euro tumbled as debt woes spread around the euro zone from Greece, where pledges of austerity and fiscal rigor failed to stem growing fears that the Continent’s economic recovery could be derailed.

The euro fell as low as $1.4505 on Tuesday, its lowest level since early October. New worries about Austrian banking also roiled markets, with rumors of trouble at an Austrian lender with shaky investments in Eastern Europe following Monday’s surprise nationalization of another Austrian bank at the behest of the European Central Bank. (Read more from online.wsj.com)

Patrick Barron’s comments:

The Fed and the ECB are trying the old “beggar thy neighbor” policy, whereby each tries to cheapen its own currency in order to spur exports to its neighbor. Great plan. Now both currencies can crash together. Misery loves company, I guess.

The Christmas Congress

From a Campaign for Liberty email:

Dear Friend of Liberty,

While Americans busy themselves with holiday preparations, the weeks surrounding Congress’ Christmas break can often be the most dangerous time for our freedoms.

After all, we were given the “gift” of our Federal Reserve System just a couple of days before Christmas in 1913.

Part of the legislation being considered before Congress adjourns this year is the $636 billion Defense Appropriations bill.

It’s bad enough that this Congress, which was elected by a country tired of our endless nation-building, is about to vote to keep overextending our military and involving it in unconstitutional interventions, but lawmakers are seeking to include much more than defense items in this appropriations package.

According to the latest reports, legislators may attempt to tack on language forcing monopoly bargaining on every policeman, firefighter, and emergency medical technician (EMT) in the country, as well as extending the PATRIOT Act.

Some in Congress want to add H.R. 413 and S. 1611, the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act of 2009, to the House and Senate appropriations bills.

H.R. 413 and S. 1611 would override state labor laws, increase the power of the federal government to intervene in local arrangements, and continue to strip away the decision-making power of non-unionized workers.

And reports indicate that lawmakers are looking to include a temporary extension of some of the PATRIOT Act’s provisions that are set to expire at the end of the year. These representatives argue that they need more time to debate revisions to the Act.

When it comes to the PATRIOT Act, there’s only one course of action that needs to be taken – once again respecting our civil liberties by immediately repealing the entire bill.

In addition to the massive appropriations legislation, lawmakers could also vote as soon as Wednesday on raising the debt limit on the federal government’s credit card by as much as $2 trillion.

It is long past time Congress began paying down its debts instead of firing up the printing presses. Real change means facing reality and rejecting any further attempts from both major parties to add to our debt.

The TSA security leak

EARLIER this year, America’s Transportation Security Administration, the agency responsible for airport security, published an improperly redacted version of its operating manual on the internet. . . .

Here’s the Post’s summary of what got leaked:

The 93-page TSA operating manual details procedures for screening passengers and checked baggage, such as technical settings used by X-ray machines and explosives detectors. It also includes pictures of credentials used by members of Congress, CIA employees and federal air marshals, and it identifies 12 countries whose passport holders are automatically subjected to added scrutiny.

. . . .

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow explains:

Unfortunately, the security geniuses at the DHS don’t know that drawing black blocks over the words you want to eliminate from your PDF doesn’t actually make the words go away, and can be defeated by nefarious al Qaeda operatives through a complex technique known as ctrl-a/ctrl-c/ctrl-v. Thankfully, only the most elite terrorists would be capable of matching wits with the technology brilliance on display at the agency charged with defending our nation’s skies by ensuring that imaginary hair-gel bombs are kept off of airplanes.
(Read more from economist.com)

Awash in Unwanted Ethanol

Two years ago, Congress ordered the nation’s gasoline refiners to do something that is turning out to be mathematically impossible.

To please the farm lobby and to help wean the nation off oil, Congress mandated that refiners blend a rising volume of ethanol and other biofuels into gasoline. They are supposed to use at least 15 billion gallons of biofuels by 2012, up from less than seven billion gallons in 2007.
(Read more from nytimes.com)

Text book case of the failures of central planning.

***

Response from my teacher, Austrian Economist, Patrick Barron.

Dear Sirs:
There are several fallacious concepts that drove the ethanol mandates. Number one is that it is in the best interest of the U.S. to become more energy independent. There is no reason, either economic or otherwise, that requires that the U.S. government deny its citizens access to the cheapest form of energy available anywhere in the world, which includes, of course, many unexploited regions within our own borders. Furthermore, it is unconscionable that the government so blatantly penalize the vast majority of its citizens for the undeserved benefit of the farm lobby by using its power of compulsion and coercion to force us to use an inferior (ethanol delivers only three-fourths of the energy value of gasoline) and harmful fuel (as explained by Mr. Wald in his informative article). Scrap the ethanol mandates, allow drilling and refining anywhere in the U.S., and you will find that the so-called energy problem goes away.

Requiem for Samuelson by Dr. Yuri Maltsev

Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009), first American Nobel Prize laureate (1970) has died, at the age of 94.

I was lucky to meet him at the M.I.T on the glorious day of November 9, 1989, the day of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the day that symbolized the end of the world system of the communist slavery.

We are all advised against speaking ill of the dead. I shall not. Paul Samuelson was a witty, humorous and very friendly and pleasant man. He was the only one I knew that rivaled Murray Rothbard in the elegance of wearing bow ties.

When I was learning economics in the USSR in the 1970s Samuelson was the only Western economist whose textbook was translated into Russian. I remember his famous graph depicting dynamics of per capita GNP in the Soviet Union and the United States according to which the USSR would surpass the US in the standard of living by 1990. He frankly admitted to me that that was mistake. “Who could know that it was all fake?”

His “Economics” was the most widely used college textbooks in the history of the world. First published in 1948, it was translated into 22 languages, and was selling over 50,000 copies a year making his author the richest economist after Ricardo.

. . . .

Robert M. Solow, a fellow Nobel laureate and colleague of Samuelson’s at M.I.T. pointed out that when economists “sit down with a piece of paper to calculate or analyze something, you would have to say that no one was more important in providing the tools they use and the ideas that they employ than Paul Samuelson”.

Samuelson was fully aware of his world-wide influence. He declared that “I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws — or crafts its advanced treatises — if I can write its economics textbooks”.

In his textbook he praised central planning and predicted the future higher standard of living in the communist world. Murray Rothbard reviewed the book in the following words:

“Samuelson’s Economics differs from its rivals largely in being bigger, more indigestible, and filled with the flip and unsupported wisecracks with which Samuelson is wont to dismiss deviant economic views.”

Paul Samuelson’s legacy is overwhelming – he will not write any more textbooks, but he will still command thoughts and deeds of academics and government officials. As Paul Krugman, his best and brightest student and admirer wrote: “It’s hard to convey the full extent of Samuelson’s greatness. Most economists would love to have written even one seminal paper — a paper that fundamentally changes the way people think about some issue. Samuelson wrote dozens: from international trade to finance to growth theory to speculation to well, just about everything, underlying much of what we know is a key Samuelson paper that set the agenda for generations of scholars. . . .” (Read more from blog.mises.org)