Why defend Free Markets and Capitalism?

Capitalism is a system of exploitation of the poor by the rich; a means of grinding minorities, women, indigenous people, the proletariat and gays into the dirt for the benefit of the multinational corporations’ old-boy networks; a corrupt edifice that thrives on misery, disease, starvation and warfare.
Right?
The remarkable thing about this point of view is not so much that hardcore Marxist / Leninist / Stalinist / Maoist / Castroist / Pol Potist / Van Jonesist / Chavistas / take-your-pick-leftist still believe it after a century of colossal socialist crimes and failures, but how many seemingly nice, reasonable people advocate policies that implicitly acknowledge it to be ‘true’. We must tax the rich lest the poor starve. We must unionize workers in all sectors to prevent exploitation and secure social justice. The government must provide food, clothing, shelter and health care to all. Businessmen are greedy. Profit is a four-letter word. Corporations – especially insurance companies – are evil. Judeo-Christian civilization is an intolerant, barbaric relic that needs to be consigned to the ash heap of history.
Right.
Capitalism as we (almost) know it has only been around for little more than as long as the United States of America. Prior to 250 years ago (a blink of the eye in human history), the dominant social systems were feudalism and mercantilism, and the average income for 90+ percent of the world’s population was roughly equivalent to what we would call one dollar per day. The world’s population was several times less than today and it didn’t grow in spite of high birth rates, because lack of food, malnutrition, poor sanitation, inadequate clothing and shelter, barbaric medical practices, infectious disease and back-breaking labor killed a huge percentage of children before they had a chance to mature, be fruitful and multiply. Life expectancy was half or less what it is today.
What changed? The productivity of labor increased with the gradual accumulation of capital, technological innovation, division of labor and most importantly, the liberty of the not-politically-connected classes to engage in business and keep the fruits of their labor. Britain led the way in the late 18th century and the United States eventually took the lead in the 19th. France, Spain and Rwanda trailed behind.
The improvement in the standard of living of the most wretchedly poor in England in one generation was so dramatic that it required Adam Smith’s magnum opus ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’ (‘The Wealth of Nations’ for short) to explain it. This book, published in Scotland in the birth year of the United States – 1776 – was the founding document of modern economic science. The phenomena it described were the first shoots of modern capitalism.
There existed rich people before capitalism; kings, noblemen, military leaders, landowners etc. The earliest effects of the creation of small mass manufactures for, by and of the poor were that ‘those who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged’ in Smith’s words. The eventual effect of the advanced development of capitalism is that people we call ‘poor’ in our society today have at their disposal a cornucopia of products and services that would make the Sun King Louis the Fourteenth of France choke on his camembert. A person of modest means today can walk into a superstore a short distance from his or her home and choose among 60,000 products from around the world, at affordable prices. People live longer and healthier than ever. This is the miracle of capitalism.
It didn’t happen because of child labor laws, because of the union movement, because of environmental legislation or any of the other interventions that ‘progressives’ insist were indispensable to protect us from the brutal greed of the capitalist pigs, or even to save us from ourselves. The nations that have the strongest pro-union legal environments, the cushiest state social safety nets, the most secure public pensions, do not have the highest standards of living; in fact as I write this in 2010 those very nations are rapidly descending into bankruptcy and social chaos.
Before wealth can be distributed, tamed and managed, it must be produced. And before it can be produced, someone has to store up some capital and take a chance on some productive project that may or may not succeed. Anything that raises the cost or risk of such projects, or threatens to take away the reward should the project succeed, reduces the likelihood of such projects being launched in the first place, thus reducing overall prosperity for all of us over time.
And that is why life, liberty and private property rights must be defended above all Santa Claus notions of what the state is supposed to provide for us.

Obamacare: Is this what you thought you were getting?

Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives who shepherded the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act through her chamber in 2009 and 2010, once famously said that we need to pass the bill so that we can find out what’s in it. Fair enough; now that it has passed, here’s a sample of what’s in it:

·         The HHS now has authority over all physicians and their decisions, even if they are treating patients in private practice and/or under private insurance plans having nothing to do with Medicare or Medicaid.

·         Citizens who fail to enroll in a health insurance plan approved by the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will be fined: $285 in 2014; $975 in 2015; $2,085 in 2016. Your current plan may not qualify for approval, especially if it is a low-premium, high-deductible plan. See Section 1501 of the law.

·         The IRS will withhold income tax refunds from taxpayers who fail to prove that they are enrolled in an HHS-approved plan.

·         Employers of 50 or more full-time employees must provide an HHS-approved health plan or pay a fine of $2000 for each employee beyond the thirtieth.

·         $716 billion will be siphoned out of Medicare to pay for Obamacare.

·         Capital gains taxes (like the one that hits you when you sell your house after a lifetime of paying your mortgage on time) go up 3.8 percent on gains over $200,000.

·         A 40% tax on high-end ‘Cadillac’ health care plans. 

·         No more low-premium, high-deductible plans allowed. Mini-Med plans such as the ones offered by McDonald’s to entry-level workers, are now history.

·         New limits on tax deductions for medical expenses. The threshold is now 10 percent of your income instead of 7.5 percent.

·         The law creates the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB. The Board’s decisions may only be overruled by Congress with a 60 percent supermajority in the Senate. Until the board is seated, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (Kathleen Sibelius) wields the board’s authority.

·         You will have to tell your boss how much money your spouse and children earn. Your employer is required by law to collect information about your total household income in order to classify you in the right ‘affordability’ category.

·         Tax-free contributions to Flexible Spending Accounts or FSAs are capped at $2,500. Likewise, the use of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) is restricted and deductibles are capped at $2,000 for individuals, $4,000 for families. These accounts may no longer be used to pay for over-the-counter drugs. Tax penalties for non-allowable purchases made through these accounts increase from 10 to 20 percent.

·         The Medicare Part A payroll tax is hiked for taxpayers (like job-creating small business owners) who earn more than $200,000 individually or $250,000 as a couple.

·         Funding for Medicare Advantage is to be cut 27%. Each of its 7 million currently covered seniors will get on average $3,700 less allowance per year.

·         Spending to staff the government health care bureaucracy is expected to more than double to over $70 billion by the year 2020.

·         Waivers: 1600 (and counting) special privileges of exemption from compliance with Obamacare’s mandates have been awarded disproportionately to unions and groups that supported Obama’s political agenda. The waivers weren’t written in the law, but they have become part of the policy implementation since the law passed. So finding out what’s in it includes finding out that privileges, prejudices and enforcement will be arbitrary and based on political favoritism. 

·         People who don’t get health coverage from their employer or from traditional government programs like Medicare and Medicaid are expected to shop for it at subsidized rates on ‘exchanges’ sponsored by the law, starting in 2014. Half of the states have so far refused to do the federal government’s bidding, so presumably the federal government will set up them on its own in those states. Companies that offer health insurance to their employees will nevertheless be fined for failing to provide adequately if their employees opt for shopping on the exchanges.

·         …and a whole lot of other stuff contained in its 2,500+ pages that none of the congressmen who voted on it read in its entirety.

Even though the law itself is comprised of over 2,500 pages of legalese, administrative departments like HHS still have the task of interpreting the law and writing the derived regulations that companies, individuals, patients and doctors are supposed to comply with. That will multiply the volume several times over.

Many of the nicest people you will ever meet supported the bill with the best of intentions, including most of this author’s family and social circle. But if every senator and representative in Congress – and the citizens who voted for them – had known that all of the above was in the bill, would it have passed?

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This article is excerpted from ‘Pull the Plug on Obamacare’, available in Kindle and paperback editions from Amazon.com.

Coming Soon to America: A Two-Tiered, Canadian-Style Health Care System

"In the other system, waiting times will grow for almost everything—to get appointments with physicians, to get tests, to obtain elective surgery, etc. Patients may find that they don’t have access to the best doctors or the best hospitals. They may find that the facility where they are treated does not have the latest technology. In terms of waiting times and bureaucratic hassles, health care for these patients may come to resemble the Canadian system. It may become even worse than the Canadian system."

Read the complete article by John C Goodman at The Independent Institute.

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More health reform information on the Obamacare page.

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What are the rich good for?

Why do we allow rich people to control such a disproportiate share of the wealth of our nation? Shouldn’t we tax all income in excess of $100,000 at 100% and confiscate all wealth in excess of $1 million in order to distribute it to more deserving people and promote the general (as opposed to the selfish) welfare?
Let’s try to answer that question by starting with another question, to wit: What do rich people do with their money?
Well, first of course, they buy lots of Dom Perignon champagne, by the case, the tank or the acre-foot; after all, they have to bathe in something. But after buying enough Dom Perignon to maintain adequate hygiene, enough private jets to have access to adequate shopping and enough mansions to get an adequate night’s sleep, even the richest among us come to a point where they have to do something to replenish the coffers, lest the good times come to an abrupt end. In a feudal system, the solution is simple; exact more tribute from the serfs that you own. In a crony-capitalist system, you may exact more favorable legislation, ‘loans’ and grants from the politicians that you own. But in a system where the lowliest of citizens has private property rights and is protected by a Bill of Rights, the meddling with which is further constrained by a Constitution, the problem is a bit more complicated. A rich person who wants to stay rich in a free, capitalist market is obliged to undertake some project that can turn an honest profit.
And so rich people tend to do a lot of investing and speculating in greater proportion to the rest of us who work for a living. The rich person buys stocks, bonds, mutual funds, puts, calls, offshore trusts and other instruments and generally bets on which way the market is likely to go, or which companies are doing the best job of meeting the most urgent needs of consumers, while keeping employees and other stockholders reasonably satisfied. In short, the rich person (or any other person, for that matter) who wishes to stay (or become) rich in an uncorrupted, free-market capitalist society, is obliged to perform a socially useful service, or lose his/her wealth and status to those who do it better. He or she must put some portion of his or her wealth at risk of loss, with no guarantee of success or profits, the immediate consequences of which is the hiring of employees at wages and conditions sufficient to persuade them to forego other alternatives, and the production of products and services that meet someone’s urgent needs.
The fact is, the original question is wrong. We do not have permanent classes of rich and poor people in the United States, as is the case in many other parts of the world, sometimes by law. No other country in the history of the world has had such social mobility as the United States. American individuals pegged in various categories or percentage rankings in terms of their wealth or income, move in and out of those levels over the course of their lives. People tend to earn less money when they are young than when they are experienced. People of modest means who sell a house after 30 years of making mortgage payments may have a one-year blip on their income radar that makes them look ‘rich’ on one year’s tax return. But one-time blips are a far cry from permanent status. Quote Thomas Sowell: “More than half the people in the top one percent in income in 1996 were no longer at that level in 2005. Among those in the top one-hundredth of one percent in income in 1996, three quarters were no longer at that level in 2005”. Wealth (and poverty) categories and individual people are entirely different things, though the one frequently gets talked about as if it were the other. Which suggests that there is no economic or moral justification for targeting the ‘rich’ for special attention, higher tax rates or other discrimination and control. Citizen-voters should be as suspicious of legislative initiatives to soak the rich as they are of those which shield establish interests from competition, i.e. protect the rich as they are.
The ‘rich’ don’t exist as they are portrayed in the media and by the political Left, and don’t control anything permanently. And in a free society under the constitutional rule of law, that is as it should be.

Lump-sum Health Plans? Why not Lump-Sum Grocery Plans?

Reader W.J. writes: “You may talk about it in your book but I have not finished it. Are lump sum payments for bundled services an effective means of reducing Medicare costs (in comparison to the fee for service model) and if so, do the Medicare cuts in Obamacare adequately accomplish this goal? Or will they have the effect of undercutting incentives to providers no matter how they might be implemented?”

W.J., the problem with a lump sum payment plan can be illustrated with a simple analogy: why not a lump-sum grocery plan? Why don’t you give $6,000 to the grocery store at the beginning of the year, and then they are required to provide you with whatever groceries you need for the entire year?

Right away the arguments over what you really ‘need’ break out; the supplier’s and the customer’s day-to-day interests become diametrically opposed.  The customer wants the finest cuts of meat, plus caviar and champagne every day, whereas the store will do whatever it can to deny you anything more than the bare minimum required to keep you from starving. The supplier has every incentive to cut corners, neglect quality and and reduce quantity provided. The store can’t afford to go bankrupt honoring its commitments.

Which is why no grocery store or chain offers such a plan in the market.

If the government were to decree that all grocery stores must offer prepaid food plans, then the grocers would collectively spend millions of dollars negotiating with politicians and government agencies for exemptions and permission to limit what must be covered under The Plan.

Lump sum payments for bundled medical services will indeed have the effect of giving ACOs (Accountable Care Organizations) the incentive to provide the least care possible. Moreover, some providers will go out of business when they find that a small number of chronic or seriously ill patients that they were forced to accept are consuming so much of the provider’s resources that they are taking losses consistently over the long term. This will lead to shortages of provider organizations and services.

In a free market, prices inform the consumer of the relative scarcity of the things he wants so that (s)he can allocate his/her money as he judges fitting; the grocery store or any other supplier has every incentive to please the customer, even the low-income customer (see: Wal-Mart). Every customer’s shopping basket contains a different mix of products in it in accordance with that customer’s needs, wants, priorities and resources. But when it is not the customer’s money being spent due to government ‘planning’, then conflicts are maximized, politics get corrupted and the economy cannot function efficiently; it ends up costing more to the economy as a whole to feed a family than before the government created The Plan.

There is no economic model that can achieve better results than the free market, where knowledge is distributed, information is optimized through the price system and people cooperate voluntarily for mutual benefit. It is the trillion-dollar government interference in the health care market of the past 40 years that has created the crisis.

If the political reality is that government is taking money from taxpayers for the ostensible purpose of promoting the general welfare, then whatever money thus spent should be put directly into the hands of the consumers who have the most direct interest in the outcome: patients in the case of health care, parents (via vouchers) in the case of education. No strings, conditions or features of products or services to be covered or included should be dicated by politicians who lack both the general expertise and the specific knowledge to be in the position to make better decisions than the millions of free citizen actors in market, each of whom has specific, individual needs.

As I wrote on page 69 of ‘Pull the Plug on Obamacare’, only 13% of health care dollars spent in America are currently under the direct control of patients. The closer that comes to 100%, the better off we will all be.

Advice to Young, Unemployed Workers

Even if it weren’t for the economic stagnation, you would already be facing a tough market. That’s because you are showing up at the job marketplace nearly empty-handed. Our society long ago decided it was better for you to sit in desks for 16 years than to gain any real work experience in the marketplace that is likely to hire you later.
Here’s the root of the problem: People have been lying to you all your life.

Read the full article by Jeffrey A. Tucker at The Freeman.

Unemployed College Grads of the World, Unite!

The debate rages as to just how bad the unemployment situation in the USA is today, especially for that sector which is considered the greatest hope for America’s future, recent college graduates. The rate of unemployment among this group is higher than the historical norm, as it is for the population in general, and the labor force participation rate is lower than normal. Some commentators are quick to point out that the situation is still better for 25 year-old college grads than it is for 25 year-olds without a college degree, so college is still a good investment. On the other hand, one of the most alarming statistics is that, according to Goldman Sachs economist Jan Hatzius, “The labor force participation rates of college graduates have actually fallen by more than those of workers without a high school education…the growth in the absolute number of employed college graduates has been nowhere near enough to offset the increase in the size of the college-educated population.”
Regardless of anyone’s opinion of gloom and doom vs. nothing to see here, as the saying goes, if you’re one of the 8.8 percent, the rate is 100 percent for you.
Which may be the first serious reality check yet of your life, if you’ve gone from being a grade school pupil to a high school student to a university scholar, getting A’s for participation, with no serious adult responsibility yet beyond showing proper ID to obtain the requisite beverages for the homecoming rave. So this might be a good time to take off the rose-colored glasses, sober up and take a serious look at the context, that is, the greater world of which you have heretofore been a highly protected part, and consider whether you have a clue how it really works. You’ve voted three or four times already. So, welcome to The Establishment! If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the (your own) problem.
Because voting has consequences. It results in officials of one party or the other and their allies in various government bureaucracies having their prestige enhanced, which results in policies, rules, regulations, taxes, penalties and punishments being implemented, which in turn, among other things, help or hinder the functioning of the economy, including that heartbeat that sustains your economic life, jobs.
So consider what you believe about why this is happening to you and why you believe it, how you came to believe it. In all likelihood you have been ‘educated’ for sixteen or more straight years almost exclusively by operatives of a single, well-organized, multi-colored but severely conformist faction of the political class. Your teachers were obedient soldiers of the most powerful public employee union in the country. They were mandated to pay union dues used for political activism and advocacy purposes whether they joined the union as card-carrying members or not. They taught you that multiculturalism is good, that capitalism causes pollution and global warming (or ‘climate change’ a more convenient term for blaming carbon for whatever happens), that the Founding Fathers were sexist, racist slaveholders and that Republicans are rich men whose skin is so pale from spending so much time wearing white sheets. Your professors were leftist and/or marxists (or at least ‘progressives’) who taught you that the Constitution is a ‘Living Document’ if they were in a good mood, or a ‘barbarous relic’ that interfered with getting anything good done if they were less so; that Bush Lied, People Died; that we went into Iraq for oil; that 9/11 was an inside job; that FoxNews isn’t a legitimate house of journalism, that greedy bankers caused the financial crisis of 2007-08, and that the American health care system ranks 37th in the world. Very few of your teachers and professors have worked much of their professional lives outside of academia or government employment, which is to say, they rarely had to satisfy customers who were free to take their business (and their money) elsewhere. They celebrated diversity in skin color and sexual orientation, but never in ideology; conservative and Republican ideas were strictly beyond the pale, to be censored, suppressed, excluded or shouted down. To stay informed on current events and politics you watched CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC and MTV.
Outrageous, unfair, biased, exaggerated right-wing nonsense, you say? Okay try this then: Do you know who Fredrick Bastiat is? How about Friederich Hayek? Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell? Have you read The Federalist Papers, The Law, The Wealth of Nations, Free To Choose or Basic Economics? Do you know why we have a First Amendment?
If not, then unfortunately, you are virtually clueless about how your country, the most prosperous, free and just that has ever existed on Planet Earth, came to be or how it works. (And if you don’t think America is free and just -- another popular theme among your leftist professors -- then why are so many millions of poor people willing to kill themselves for the chance to come here, above all other places? Why do we even have an illegal alien problem to talk about?)
The point is, your ignorance has consequences, for yourself and for the larger society. If you don’t understand how economics works, even if you were an economics major, then you will vote for the Law to Banish Poverty For All Time because it promises to banish poverty for all time (who could be against that?), never mind that legislatures and kings have attempted to banish poverty for all time many times over in many countries including this one before, and almost every such program they implemented resulted in worse poverty after than before the Law to Banish Poverty For All Time.
So, in the spirit of Hillary Clinton, your time of rude reality check is an opportunity for a reset. It’s time to take a step back and consider everything that you didn’t learn in college, because it was omitted or explicitly banished as evil, politically incorrect, or right-wing propaganda.
Your journey begins here, at HHCapitalism.com, on the Books page. The Number One best common-sense book on economics for average Joe citizens (and for economics majors who long ago lost their common sense in a tangled web of mathematical formulas, graphs and equations dealing with aggregate categories having little to do with flesh-and-blood human beings coming to terms with scarce resources that have alternative uses) is Basic Economics, by Thomas Sowell. I have in the past proposed a constitutional amendment requiring all holders of public office to know the content of this book as a condition of their holding office. See It's the Constitution, Stupid! Read just one chapter of this book, and your life of ignorance and of supporting policies that have no more chance of achieving their expressed goals than the Law to Ensure Full Employment to All College Graduates for All Time will never be the same.
Trust me. I’m an ex-liberal socialist progressive Democrat from Berkeley.

Big Hospitals’ Obamacare Deal Betrays Seniors and the Poor

During their closed-room dealings with the Obama Administration, the hospital industry’s lobbyists agreed to support Obamacare—provided that the law placed restrictions on physician-owned “specialty” hospitals, noted WSJ. These innovative specialty hospitals frequently have quality outcomes better than most traditional facilities, but no matter—the big hospital lobbyists wanted to eliminate a source of competition. So Obamacare prohibits new physician-owned hospitals from receiving Medicare payments — and prohibits most existing facilities from expanding if they wish to keep treating Medicare patients.
Read the complete article by Christopher Jacobs at The Heritage Foundation.

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More health reform information on the Obamacare page.

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Snowe: President thought opposition to health law would eventually fade away

President Obama believed that opposition to his healthcare reform law would fade after the 2010 election, according to former Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). Obama courted Snowe’s support in an attempt to make the bill bipartisan. He assured her GOP opposition to the law would be short-lived, she said.
Read the complete article by Alexander Bolton at TheHill.com.

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More health reform information on the Obamacare page.

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Small Business Owners File Lawsuit Against IRS Over Obamacare “Power Grab”

Small business owners in states that did not establish healthcare exchanges in advance of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act will be harshly impacted by a recent rule enacted by the Internal Revenue Service. Some small business owners have filed a lawsuit in Federal court over it.
Read the full article by Joshua Sophy at SmallBizTrends.com.

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More health reform information on the Obamacare page.

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This Week’s Reasons to Repeal Obamacare

It has been over three years since Obamacare became law. This week, the House voted again to completely repeal it.
There are plenty of reasons to repeal Obamacare, especially before its most egregious provisions begin next year, and just this week a few more were added to the list.
Read the full article by Alyene Senger at The Heritage Foundation.

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More health reform information on the Obamacare page.

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Lawsuits Against IRS May Exempt Millions from Obamacare

In more than half the country, the implementation of ObamaCare has been premised on a patently illegal regulation—a lawless “quick fix” designed by the Administration to circumvent the fact that roughly two-thirds of the states have effectively chosen to “opt out” of the Affordable Care Act’s intrusive mandates. A new lawsuit, recently filed by us in federal district court in D.C., will expose that flaw in ObamaCare’s very foundation.
Read the compete article by Mike Carvin and Sam Kazman at Forbes.com.

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More health reform information on the Obamacare page.

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More evidence MedObamacaid is no better than no insurance at all

Within the White House, within the Democratic chambers in Congress and among the (overwhelmingly liberal) health policy community there was considerable anguish last week. The reason: a new study finds that (as far as physical health is concerned) there is no difference between being in Medicaid and being uninsured.
Read the compete article by John C. Goodman at The Independent Institute.

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More health reform information on the Obamacare page.

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Rising health spending was always a fraudulent premise for Obamacare

Readers of Pull the Plug on Obamacare are not surprised by recent reports that health care spending in America is rising only at a modest rate. It was already so for three or more years prior to passage of the ACA, and gave lie to the claim that we had to pass Obamacare to rein in out-of-control spending (as if any recent administration has a good track record on that count).
Quoting the book published this past February, in the chapter 'Obamacare Mis-diagnoses the Problems': Prior to passage of the ACA, health expenditures in the USA had been growing at their lowest rate in 40 years. In 1970, the growth rate was 10.5%; in 1980, 13%; in 1990, 11%. In 2007, 2008 and 2009 the numbers were, respectively, 6.1%, 4.7% and 3.8%. Health care cost inflation was declining, not exploding, not in crisis.
It is Obamacare that is threatening to cause health spending to explode beyond anything 'affordable'. It's time to pull the plug while we still can.
See also:

• Sally Pipes: ObamaCare Doesn't Deserve Credit For Health Cost Slowdown
• The Wall Street Journal: The Health Spending Decline

Obamacare's Big Brother Database on Your Family

In order to determine eligibilty for health insurance subsidies, the new exchange has to bring together information about you and your family from the Treasury Department and the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, as well as your Social Security number — all coordinated by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Read the compete article by Stephen T. Parente and Paul Howard at USA Today.

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More health reform information on the Obamacare page.

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Poll: 61% of College-Age Students Want Government to Stay Out of Their Lives

While the mainstream media and our leaders in Washington want you to believe that the economy is getting better, thanks to more spending, higher taxes, and more regulation, six million people have dropped out of the work force since the recession began in 2008. Young Americans, especially, have it bad.


About 45 percent of 18 to 34-year olds are unemployed according to a recent poll by Demos, a public policy firm. I still know of college classmates who have yet to find meaningful jobs or are severely underemployed almost four years after graduation. However, a recent poll on young people's views of limited government, free markets, and economic liberty suggests some may be waking up to the conclusion that government, over-regulation, and more spending will not turn our futures around.

Read the complete article by Adam Tragone at CNSNews.com.

Obamacare Self-Destructing

Ezekiel Emanuel, a noted oncologist, has helped advise the Obama administration in its effort to create an economic system larger than France’s economy to distribute health care services to over 300 million people. Together, those facts encapsulate the essence of our federal government: hopelessly overextended, devoid of caution and chock full of hubris. If that isn’t succinct enough to signal the coming disaster that will be Obamacare, then Emanuel’s recent column in the Wall Street Journal should tip the balance.
Read the compete article by Yates Walker at The Daily Caller.

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More health reform information on the Obamacare page.

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Drug company that supported Obamacare now says rebate plan could be ‘catastrophic’

Eli Lilly CEO John Lechleiter, who previously lobbied on behalf of Obamacare, said that one of President Obama’s costly new health-care reforms would have “catastrophic” consequences for innovation and that he plans to fight against it.
Read the compete article by Patrick Howley at The Daily Caller.

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More health reform information on the Obamacare page.

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The Heritage Foundation Case Against Obamacare

The unmistakable conclusion of this series is that Obamacare must be fully repealed. Congress cannot build sound market-based health care reform on the flawed foundation of this health care law. Until it can be repealed, Congress must employ its full powers authorized by the Constitution to:

• De-fund the new law’s critical aspects
• Block any further provisions from going into effect
• Engage in aggressive oversight of Obamacare – its regulations and implementation.

Read the compete article at The Heritage Foundation.

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More health reform information on the Obamacare page.

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How Government Killed the Medical Profession

Government interventions over the past four decades have yielded a cascade of perverse incentives, bureaucratic diktats, and economic pressures that together are forcing doctors to sacrifice their independent professional medical judgment, and their integrity. The consequence is clear: Many doctors from my generation are exiting the field. Others are seeing their private practices threatened with bankruptcy, or are giving up their autonomy for the life of a shift-working hospital employee. Governments and hospital administrators hold all the power, while doctors—and worse still, patients—hold none.
Read the compete article by Jeffrey A. Singer at The Cato Institute.

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More health reform information on the Obamacare page.

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Obamacare is Deconstructing the Labor Market

The job report reveals (for those who bother to look) that Obamacare is deconstructing the labor market. The incentives are in place to move workers into the under 30 hour or temporary category . The cost of providing an approved policy will likely be well above the $2,000 tax imposed. Employers have a huge incentive to purge their businesses of scheduled workers with 30+ hour schedules, in order to avoid being classified as full-time in 2014. McKinsey surveys (so far) estimate that 30% of employees will drop coverage all together.
Read the compete article by Russ Winter at The Wall Street Examiner.

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More health reform information on the Obamacare page.

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A Question for Medicaid Deniers

The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment found zero evidence that expanding Medicaid to the most vulnerable people targeted by ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion improves their physical health.
The only unethical thing would be to keep spending trillions on this program without knowing whether it’s even effective (much less cost-effective).
Read the compete article by Michael F Cannon at The Cato Institute.

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More health reform information on the Obamacare page.

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Even Kaiser admits Obamacare's popularity is sinking

Kaiser, the most reliably pro-Obamacare of all of the Obamacare polling outfits, says that the overhaul’s popularity has dropped dramatically from the time of its passage, to only 35 percent favorable. And given how unpopular Obamacare was at the time of its passage — when the Democrats rammed it through against the clear will of the American people and without a single Republican vote — that’s saying something.
Read the full article by Jeffrey H Anderson at The Weekly Standard.

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More health reform information on the Obamacare page.

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Is Profit a Dirty Word at Business School?

In this crazy world of expanding government, creeping socialism and leftist indoctrination in our schools and universities, we can take solace in the fact that we still have some of the best pro-capitalism business schools in the world, turning out entrepreneurial graduates ready to take on the challenges of global markets, right?
Maybe. Then again, what is "social entrepreneurship" being pioneered at USC and elsewhere? A little econ with a lot of learning how to run public-private partnerships like 'green' ventures.
So our next crop of biz school graduates will be unemployable, except at Solyndra? Well, thank God at least they would never tarnish their integrity by working for an actual for-profit (four-letter word) company!
Do these sophomores have any idea what profit and loss are, what they mean, their role in allocating scarce resources that have alternative uses, their indispensibility in determining what is 'socially responsible'? Just something to protest against, it seems.
Very well then, let's take a journey back to an article posted here six years ago, apparently just as a propos today as is was then: Human Needs Before Profits!"