Oppose Obamacare!

If you care about freedom, I strongly urge you to call Congress now and oppose the Obama Healthcare proposals.

The problem with healthcare today is too much government, not too little. I want healthcare reform, not the status quo. But no one is talking about the meaningful steps I think are required:

Patients should have the option to get basic medical care and prescriptions for medications directly from Physician’s Assistances, Nurses, Nurse Practitioners, etc. But government has created and preserved a monopoly for medical doctors. As a consequence, MD's can and do extract what economists call “monopoly rents”, fees higher than a real free market would allow.

The Food and Drug Administration should be abolished. The protracted FDA approval cycle kills unseen thousands while life-saving drugs await official approval, an unquantifiable “opportunity cost.” In place of the FDA would spring up multiple free-enterprise ratings businesses (imagine JD Powers or the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, but applied to pharmaceuticals), providing guidance but leaving consumers and care providers free to assess risks and benefits. At present, we are forbidden from accessing lifesaving drugs that could extend our lives and our quality of life.

The court system should allow and respect a legal contract between patient and care provider that limits liability and constrains legal recourse to independent binding arbitration. This would remove the unsustainable costs of baseless medical lawsuits that drive malpractice insurance rates into the stratosphere and make healthcare unaffordable for many.

We need to change the tax treatment of health insurance. The current system excludes the value of employer-provided insurance from a worker’s taxable income, but an individual purchasing health insurance on their own must use after-tax dollars. This is unfair. Every worker should receive a standard deduction, a tax credit, or, tax-free Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) for the purchase of health insurance, regardless of whether they get it from their employer or on their own.

Americans should be allowed to purchase health insurance across state lines. One study estimated that that adjustment alone could cover 17 million uninsured Americans without costing taxpayers a dime.

The problems with healthcare today are due to the fact that we already have socialized medicine to a large degree. We haven’t left freedom and meaningful choice to the consumer. As a consequence, innovation is stifled, costs are high, and the many are harmed because the price of care is out of reach. We then impose an unfair and unwise burden on hospitals to provide (very expensive) care to the uninsured; the hospitals, of course, are subsidized by the state, and ultimately by the taxpayer. We’re already taxed enough; the average American works nearly 1/3 of every year solely to pay taxes.

Now we're proposing extending the taxpayer burden further by socializing heathcare (about 15% of the US economy!) and distributing the costs. That will not contain costs; rather it will increase costs as demand expands. For proof, look at Medicare, which has an unfunded liability exceeding $55 trillion! As demand increases and costs skyrocket, the ultimate result must be government rationing of healthcare - the state will decide who lives and who dies.

It would be far better to restore a true free market to heath care so we all enjoy the benefits of low cost and high quality that true competition brings. Are there risks that come with the benefits in allowing real choice? Yes. But they are risks that a free people should be free to take. We haven’t politicians with the courage to say any of this. They need your help to find that courage. Call them. Now. Your children will thank you.

Save Our Republic

Benjamin Franklin, once asked what he had given us, replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Sadly, we’re letting our Republic slip away.Once more, Washington is squandering trillions of our children’s dollars in a sorry attempt to borrow our way to prosperity. Spending to cure a fiscal crisis is like drinking to cure alcoholism. It makes no sense!

President Obama said, “There is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy.” On the contrary! I disagree. Hundreds of scholars, economists and Nobel laureates disagree. Surveys say more than half of Americans disagree and believe that “stimulus” packages will make things worse. History warns us to be leery of powerful, charismatic men who permit no disagreement.

If governments were able to allocate resources better than the free markets, then planned economies like those of the Soviet Union should have been the envy of the world. They were not. If government spending were able jump start an economy, it should have fixed Japan ’s “lost decade” in the 1990’s. It did not. Hoover and FDR increased government spending in the 1930’s by 45% in the hope of ending the Depression. It did not. Only the distraction of a World War broke that cycle, something I hope is too horrifying to contemplate in the present day.

This is a political question, but it is not an issue of Democrat vs. Republican. Both parties are culpable here, and have been for over a hundred years. More government is not the solution, it is the problem. Government spending is out of control. Our hard money has become a fiat currency, backed only by the fickle policies of the Federal Reserve. Inflation is a fact of life. The burdens of taxation stymie prosperity. Absurd regulations hobble commerce. Legislation incents banks to make bad loans, and then rewards their failures at the expense of the guiltless.

If you asked most people today to describe the American form of government, the word they would use is “democracy”. And they would be wrong. The word “democracy” is not in the Declaration or the Constitution. We are a Republic. In the American system, the rights of the individual are protected from mob rule by the Constitution. The founders knew that mere “democracy” was two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.

But sadly, we are devolving from a republic into a democracy. Interest groups lobby successfully to feed from the public trough. Taxes increase. Already today, most of us lose, in taxes, a third to half of what we earn. With Constitutional checks unenforced, this trend is unsustainable. At some point, dependence on government exceeds contributions to it. Democracies are unstable and devolve into oligarchies. This has been true forever. It is the reason Rome fell. It is our fate, unless we act.

President Obama’s slogan is correct, it is time for “Change”. But we need real change. We must get Washington to remove impediments to work, savings, investment and production. Return to hard currency. Lower tax rates. Reduce the burden of government. You and I must do this. Now! Contact your Senators and your Representative. Tell them! Tell your friends to do the same! If we take these actions, traditionally hard-working Americans will erase the current recession. If we do anything else, we are only fiddling while Rome burns.

AIG, Misdirection and the Politics of Envy

It is tempting to get caught up in the bashing of corporate greed that has been the drumbeat of the political class for the last two weeks. Politicians love persecuting business and playing on the politics of envy. It draws attention away from their own culpability. After all, who, mere weeks ago, crafted the legislation awarding AIG all those billions with no apparent strings attached? Oops!

But before we join the chorus of business bashing, we should take a look at the issue in a more analytic and dispassionate way. AIG's bailout cost $150B. AIG's "outrageous" bonuses totaled $168M.

Here's the pie chart. The total bailout is shown in blue. The total bonus is shown in red... except you can't see the color because the pie slice is less than a pixel in width! This is much ado about nothing. Nothing more than a convenient distraction for politicians who would rather debate minutiae than substance.

We should be questioning politicians, who, with no Constitutional justification, no grasp of basic economics, and no common sense, have squandered our children's future.You and I might agree that, were we running AIG, nobody would get a bonus. But then again, if the politicians worked for us, we'd be obligated to fire them! Come to think of it, they do, and we should!