“When a politician declares a “right” in a scarce good, it indicates either that he is a simpleton or that he believes you to be, and one’s as good as the other, that being another defect in democracy.”
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The health care problem, like so many others, is the result of making an economic problem a political problem. Our elected officials make promises in exchange for votes and power without paying for them. They hide the cost in cross subsidies, mandates, regulation, demonization, and wishful thinking.
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from Scott Atlas at The Wall Street Journal, The Health Reform That Hasn’t Been Tried Third, introduce the right incentives into the tax code. Today employees aren’t taxed on the value of their health benefits—and there is no limit to that exclusion.
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from Scott Atlas at The Wall Street Journal, The Health Reform That Hasn’t Been Tried First, equip consumers to consider prices. Critics always claim this is unrealistic: Are you supposed to shop around from the back of the ambulance? But emergency care
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from Kevin Williamson in National Review, Plans, Trains, and Automobiles Trains are the preferred mode of transit if your ideal is central planning. Automobiles are the preferred mode of transit if your ideal is spontaneous order. It is in the nature
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from John Cochrane at The Hill, Here’s what healthcare looks like in a perfect world: It’s wiser to start with a vision of the destination. In an ideal America, health insurance is individual, portable, and guaranteed renewable. It includes the right
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Kevin Williamson’s Welcome to the Paradise of the Real was written over two years ago and I still refer it to readers.Sneaky Inflation is equal to that piece in bringing sound economic thought to bear on current issues with an engaging style. Both
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Henry Hazlitt wrote Economics in One Lesson in 1946 and it is still a classic. Hazlitt was a reporter, not a credentialed economist and he brought the dry concepts of economics to the lay reader. Kevin Williamson, a journalist as
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from Tony Snow at Jewish World Review, Queen Tut: Later, after solving the tonsorial riddle, she stepped forward as Hillary the Conquering Liberal. In 1994, she set out to redesign the American health-care system and convened a panel that drafted
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Robert Graboyes writes Why We Need to Liberate America’s Health Care Excerpts: Since World War II, the health care debate has been a struggle of left versus right. The left has tended to favor federal solutions, plus increased public provision
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From Springer’s Blog, The Fine Art of Grubering excerpt: If cynicism and moral bankruptcy were Olympic sports, Jonathan Gruber would have at least two golds locked up. If there was a Hall of Fame for a sport called “Contempt for
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From Commentary, Obamacare Lies and Democracy Excerpt: In a sense, Gruber’s statement doesn’t exactly break new ground. After all, if then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could say that ObamaCare had to be passed before its contents could be understood, it’s not
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“As with the Connecticut parking spaces, we have through the entitlements (and through the tax preferences given to employer-based medical benefits) done a great deal to encourage the consumption of health-care services while doing nothing to encourage the production of
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“There are many volumes to be written on the history of what went wrong with American health care, but here is a short and very simplified version: The Roosevelt administration began imposing central planning on broad swathes of the U.S.
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Book Review: ‘The Big Fat Surprise’ by Nina Teicholz What if the government’s crusade against fat fed the spread of obesity by encouraging us to abstain from foods that satiate us efficiently? from The Wall Street Journal by Trevor Butterworth
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“Strange that I can get an exact price on an iPhone, a Honda Civic, or a pizza, but not on something as essential to my well-being as health care. There are almost no consumer prices in health care. Because there
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Jeffery Singer writes in Reason Online, Health Care’s Third-Party Spending Trap: Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman, in his masterpiece “Free to Choose,” wrote of four ways to spend money: Category I—You spend your money on something for yourself. Here you are
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It seems that if there is one area that the voters can agree on it would be that those who make the laws should have to obey them. It is a violation of a fundamental American principle that we should
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A common refrain of those who support greater government control of health care is that free market capitalism just does not work in health care policy. It is like saying that the fundamental laws of economics do not apply. But
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The editors of the Wall Street Journal write An Economy Built to Stall- With a third slowdown in three years, maybe the problem is the policies. 6/12/2012 Excerpt: Maybe Milton Friedman was right that “temporary, targeted” tax cuts don’t change
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Degrading American Democracy
From Commentary, Obamacare Lies and Democracy Excerpt: In a sense, Gruber’s statement doesn’t exactly break new ground. After all, if then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could say that ObamaCare had to be passed before its contents could be understood, it’s not