One of the often heard arguments for government health care is that the U.S. spends twice as much as other rich countries on health care and gets worse results. Try this thought experiment: Right now government (federal and state) payments already account for nearly 50 percent of all health care expenditures in the U.S. So if the goal of health care reform is to cut in half what we’re currently spending, why not simply outlaw all private insurance and out of pocket expenditures? Problem solved, right?
Are you kidding me?
Note, some of this is not contained in the article, as I had to look through a few different sources. This article had some pretty diagrams to make the whole vomit-bucket look a little more desirable.
The investor in this new mortgage backed security faces only interest risk. The credit risk is absorbed by the MCGEs, who will replace Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The MCGEs can guarantee that they absorb the credit risk through—I kid you not—bond insurance and credit default swaps. They won’t get too big to fail because a competent regulator will make sure that never happens. What’s best is that somehow moral hazard will be avoided despite an explicit government guarantee. Also, despite the explicit government guarantee, this will somehow be accomplished “without putting taxpayer money at risk.”
Seriously, did someone put all of the keywords they could find on this economic crisis into a blender and then propose the result as the solution?
(I admit that I found it a little humorous that this article was written by a guy named McGee, given the proposed pronunciation of the agencies’ acronym)
The genome sequencing company Illumina has just delivered the results of a complete human genome sequencing to a customer.
The bottom line is this: A variant of a gene (an “allele”) that confers a trait that results in group-level or species-level survival or reproduction at the expense of the individual will have lower fitness than an allele that instead confers a trait that results in individual survival or reproduction.
“
| — | Greg Laden |
How do you have a critical political or economic discussion (with the non-educated) when so many people confuse the meanings of important words?
People really seem to confuse the words “Communism”, “Socialism”, and “Fascism”. What people are often calling “Communism” is actually “Socialism”. What people are often calling “Socialism” is actually “Fascism”. And people make it difficult to even use the word “Fascism” (even when it is correct to do so) because many people think it means racism and genocide, even though it has nothing to do with those things.
People think what we had prior to the economic collapse was a “free market”, and are damning “free markets” for the economic collapse. This is nonsense, because what we had prior to the economic collapse was NOT a free market. In fact, free markets fans have been complaining about the type of market we’ve had and were even warning that it would lead to an economic collapse!
And too many people think that entitlements are a type of freedom. Saying “freedom to” is as nonsensical as saying “entitled from”. It’s “freedom from” and “entitled to”; don’t conflate the two!
The whole situation is reminiscent of “Newspeak” from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. That the language has been “modified” so that critical discussion becomes extremely difficult if not impossible.
Ron Paul at the John Birch Society, Houston
(H/T Lew Rockwell and Brian D. Kohl)
At this moment, let’s not bother arguing whether the Insurance Companies are really the problem with the health care industry or not. Let’s just assume it to be true for the sake of argument. Let’s just accept the goal of having the cost of health care reduced via the Insurance Companies. Let us accept the claim that there not being enough competition between the Insurance Companies is the problem. Let us accept what people have been saying, that the best way to solve this problem is by “more competition”.
In fact, Economics tells us that the more competition you have, the lower the cost to the consumer tends to be. (Which is what we are saying we want.)
So then, why oh why are people saying that the “best” way of getting “more competition” is by having a government run “option”? (Many politicians like to call the government run “option” the “public option”.) Because that’s not the best way to get more competition!
A government run “option” (or what they like to call the “public option”) is only one new competitor. Wouldn’t 10 new competitors be better? Wouldn’t 20 new competitors be amazing? Wouldn’t 50 new competitors be spectacular?
And a government run “option” (or what they like to call the “public option”) will be subsidized by taxed dollars. Which is one of the big complaints some people have against it. If we could have “more competition” without subsidization by tax dollars, wouldn’t that be better?
If our goal is really to reduce cost via the Insurance Companies, then wouldn’t having more competitors be a better way of accomplishing that goal? And if we could get more competition while not having any subsidizing by tax dollars, wouldn’t that be best?
So if that’s the case, then why not get rid of the laws the government has in place that has created this government enforced oligopoly of Insurance Companies, which is retarding competition. Why not get rid of the laws the government has in place that discourages new Insurance Companies from being created and competing? (They like to call these government laws “regulation”. A euphemism. Actually most people today don’t know what “regulation” actually means, and don’t realize that calling these things “regulation” was euphemism for what it really was. Was a euphemism because it was considered offensive to call it: rigging.)
Would that not be better? You’d get the competition that people want. While not having subsidizing by tax dollars.
The Inductivist did a little digging into World Values Survey and looked into the level of trust in “Islamic Counties”. Here’s the list he got….
Iran 65.3
Saudi Arabia 53.0
Indonesia 51.6
Iraq 47.6
Egypt 37.9
Pakistan 27.9
Morocco 23.5
Bangladesh 22.2
Azerbaijan 20.5
Turkey 12.6
Algeria 11.2
A word of caution. These are self-reported values. But if there is truth to them, this does have economic significance if you’ve read Francis Fukuyama’s book: “Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity”.
I’m not surprised that the values are all over the place. There isn’t a monolithic “Muslim world”. And there isn’t a single monolithic “Muslim culture”. There are a number of different cultures in which Islam has a major influence.
