I watched President Obama's immigration speech today and found myself in almost 100% agreement with the ends that he wants to achieve. We do need to normalize what has become a black labor market. It hurts our society to have millions of people living in the shadows. We do benefit from the enthusiasm of energetic immigrants. We have to accept that the border failures of the past are water over the bridge and that we are never going to deport 10 million illegal immigrants. The President's goal to end the shadow labor economy is justifiable and honorable.
But the ends do not always justify the means. President Obama's action creates a new precedent that the executive branch can write law unilaterally. He violates the separation of powers. He damages the Constitution. The Constitution is the instrument that made the United States the kind of place that immigrants would want to come to. Thus, the President achieves certain "ends" at very high cost. Very few circumstances justify undermining our Constitution. It is a sad day when our president breaks the oath he took to defend the Constitution of the United States by defying the very law it sets forth. The President's plan is to create his own path to normalization. It would create precedents that Congress would have to deal with. He is increasing the emphasis on "anchor babies" as the way to get into the U.S. He is choosing who gets lenient treatment and how. This is the purview of Congress, not the President.
The president is also not being forthright about the legitimate concerns that have prevented bipartisan legislation from being passed during his term. They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. If we do nothing substantive about how we patrol our borders, we'll just have another 10 million illegal immigrants 5 years from now. We need major border security initiatives to accompany major changes in legal status. As Charles Krauthammer said, Americans want to embrace hard-working illegal immigrants--as long as we know that "this is the last cohort" who will come in illegally.
A nation without borders is not a nation. When Rome ceased to defend its borders, it fell. When the native Americans allowed Europeans to overrun them, their nations were marginalized. Borders matter. Period.
I know it is hard to believe, but bipartisan solutions do in fact exist. They take time, energy, and humility. Humility is not an attribute I have seen in President Obama. We need leadership, not gamesmanship. And whatever we do, The Constitution DOES matter.
Friday, November 21, 2014
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Thoughts from F.A. Hayek: The Road to Serfdom
I recently read "The Road to Serfdom" by F.A. Hayek, first published in 1944. I really liked the book. Hayek has great insight into human nature and social organization. The main theme of his book is that an overly powerful state will eventually make its citizen's slaves to a set of values chosen by the bureaucratic elite. Nazi Germany is exhibit A. Hayek grew up in Austria and knew the history of Germany's socialism first hand. He shows that Germany's National Socialism was the natural conclusion to the expanding power of the state promoted by earlier socialists.
Hayek also provides a history lesson of the term "liberalism". Because the United States began its existence based on liberal ideas of freedom and self government, the word "conservative" has taken on a strange meaning for Americans. To be conservative in the U.S. is to uphold that original liberalism. Hayek, being from Europe, where the liberal ideas never reached their fullest expression, was striving for that liberalism. Hayek took issue with the fact that in America, statism (the movement to increase the influence of the state) was mischaracterized as liberalism. (Hayek later wrote this 1960 essay: Why I am not a Conservative, an interesting look at political brand names.)
I'd like to share some of my favorite passages from the book. Hayek was inspired by Tocqueville. He uses this quote early in the book:
Hayek makes the distinction between arbitrary rule and the Rule of Law. Arbitrary rule becomes necessary when the state attempts to plan the entire economy, because lawmakers cannot foresee all the minutia involved. The movement toward arbitrary rule is exemplified in the U.S. by the tendency to turn over ever more power to unelected alphabet-soup agencies run by the executive branch.
The book also touches on themes that are probably agreed upon by everyone. Nobody tired of negative campaign advertising will take issue with this:
And if you've ever uttered the phrase "Absolute power corrupts absolutely", this should ring true to you:
Hayek's one line summary of what created Nazism:
Hayek also covers the tendency of statists to believe that their planning is justified by scientific evidence or intellectual superiority. He felt that scientists helped enable the rise of Nazism.
Hayek also provides a history lesson of the term "liberalism". Because the United States began its existence based on liberal ideas of freedom and self government, the word "conservative" has taken on a strange meaning for Americans. To be conservative in the U.S. is to uphold that original liberalism. Hayek, being from Europe, where the liberal ideas never reached their fullest expression, was striving for that liberalism. Hayek took issue with the fact that in America, statism (the movement to increase the influence of the state) was mischaracterized as liberalism. (Hayek later wrote this 1960 essay: Why I am not a Conservative, an interesting look at political brand names.)
I'd like to share some of my favorite passages from the book. Hayek was inspired by Tocqueville. He uses this quote early in the book:
"Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality of liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." (Ch 2, Pg 77)Hayek noticed that socialists took the liberal idea of freedom and corrupted it into the idea of "freedom from want". He said:
"What the [socialist] promise [of freedom] really amounted to was that the great existing disparities in the range of choice of different people were to disappear. The demand for the new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for an equal distribution of wealth. But the new name gave the socialists something in common with the liberals and they exploited it to the full....what was promised to us as the Road to Freedom was in fact the High Road to Servitude".Hayek saw that when bureaucrats plan the economy, they subvert the efficient transmission of price information. This inevitably leads to less efficiency and to distortions such as we see with our health care system.
"The important point here is that the price system will fulfill this function only if competition prevails, that is, if the individual producer has to adapt himself to price changes and cannot control them. The more complicated the whole [economic system], the more dependent we become on that division of knowledge between individuals whose separate efforts are coordinated by the impersonal mechanism for transmitting the relevant information known by us as the price system." (Ch 4, Pg 95)Hayek demonstrated that economic planners cannot foresee all the unintended consequences of their plans, no matter how gifted they may be intellectually.
"We all find it difficult to bear to see things left undone which everybody must admit are both desirable and possible. That these things cannot all be done at the same time, that any one of them can be achieved only at the sacrifice of others, can be seen only by taking into account factors which fall outside any specialism...which lie outside our immediate interest and for which, for that reason, we care less." (Ch 4, Pg 98, italics added)He is adept at showing that simply because a nation is democratic, it is not necessarily free from arbitrary use of power.
"There is no justification for the belief that, so long as power is conferred by democratic procedure, it cannot be arbitrary; the contrast suggested by this statement is altogether false: it is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary." (Ch 5: Planning and Democracy, Pg 111)I think Hayek's most important contribution is in the area of values and state morality. He shows that governments that plan the economy also control morality. That is, the rulers push their values and their quest for certain ends onto all people. We recently saw how certain views on contraception were pushed onto Americans by arbitrary rule makers empowered by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).
[The government] must, of necessity, take sides, impose its valuations upon people and, instead of assisting them in the advancement of their own ends, choose the ends for them. As soon as [an interest-promoting] law is made, it ceases to be a mere instrument to be used by the people and becomes instead an instrument used by the lawgiver upon the people and for his ends. The state ceases to be a piece of utiltarian machinery intended to help individuals in the fullest development of their individual pesonality and becomes a "moral" institution which imposes on its members its views on all moral questions, whether these views be moral or highly immoral. In this sense the Nazi or any other collectivist state is "moral," while the liberal state is not. (Ch 6: Planning and the Rule of Law, Pg 117)
"And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower--in short, what men should believe and strive for." (Ch 7: Economic Control and Totalitarianism, Pg 127)
"To undertake the direction of the economic life of people with widely divergent ideals and values is to assume responsibilities which commit one to the use of force; it is to assume a position where the best intentions cannot prevent one from being forced to act in a way which to some of those affected must appear highly immoral." (Ch 15: Prospects for International Order, Pg 116)In my view, the moral nature of state planning makes statism a secular religion. Only, it is a religion that is forced on others via the ballot box rather than by persuasion.
Hayek makes the distinction between arbitrary rule and the Rule of Law. Arbitrary rule becomes necessary when the state attempts to plan the entire economy, because lawmakers cannot foresee all the minutia involved. The movement toward arbitrary rule is exemplified in the U.S. by the tendency to turn over ever more power to unelected alphabet-soup agencies run by the executive branch.
"It is the Rule of Law, in the sense of the rule of formal law, the absence of legal privileges of particular people designated by authority, which safeguards that equality before the law which is the opposite of arbitrary government...It may even be said the for the Rule of Law to be effective it is more important that there should be a rule applied always without exceptions than what this rule is.Often the content of the rule is indeed of minor importance, provided that the same rule is universally enforced." (Ch. 6 Pg. 117)
"By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may setup the most complete despotism imaginable." (Pg. 119)
The book also touches on themes that are probably agreed upon by everyone. Nobody tired of negative campaign advertising will take issue with this:
"It seems to be almost a law of nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program--on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off, than on any positive task. The contrast between the "we" and the "they," the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action." (Ch. 10, Why the Worst Get On Top, Pg 160)
"If the members of one's group cannot all be personally known, they must at least be of the same kind as those around us, think and talk in the same way and about the same kinds of things, in order that we may identify ourselves with them. Collectivism on a world scale seems to be unthinkable--except in the service of a small ruling elite." (Pg 161)
And if you've ever uttered the phrase "Absolute power corrupts absolutely", this should ring true to you:
"To split or decentralize power is necessarily to reduce the absolute amount of power, and the competitive system is the only system designed to minimize by decentralizing the power exercised by man over man...
Economic power, while it can be an instrument of coercion, is, in the hands of private individuals, never exclusive or complete power, never power over the whole life of a person. But centralized as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery." (Pg 166)
Hayek's one line summary of what created Nazism:
"It was the union of the anti-capitalist forces of the Right and of the Left, the fusion of radical and conservative socialism, which drove out from Germany everything that was liberal." (Ch. 12 The Socialist Roots of Naziism, pg 182)
Hayek also covers the tendency of statists to believe that their planning is justified by scientific evidence or intellectual superiority. He felt that scientists helped enable the rise of Nazism.
"The influence of these scientist-politicians was of late years not often on the side of liberty: the 'intolerance of reason' so frequently conspicuous in the scientific specialist, the impatience with the ways of the ordinary man so characteristic of the expert, and the contempt for anything which was not consciously organized by superior minds according to a scientific blueprint were phenomena familiar in German public life for generations before they became of significant in England...It is well known that particularly the scientists and engineers, who had so loudly claimed to be the leaders on the march to a new and better world, submitted more readily than almost any other class to the new tyranny [of National Socialism]." (Ch 13:The Totalitarians In Our Midst)He felt that scientists have a tendency toward statism because they believe people obey scientific laws the same way inanimate objects do:
"Those who argue that we have to an astounding degree learned to master the forces of nature...[are mistaken when they] argue that we must learn to master the forces of society in the same manner in which we have learned to master the forces of nature. This is not only the path to totalitarianism but the path to the destruction of our civilization and a certain way to block future progress. Those who demand it show by their very demands they they have not yet comprehended the extent to which the mere preservation of what we have so far achieved depends on the coordination of individual efforts by impersonal forces." (Ch 14 Material Conditions and Ideal Ends, Pg 212)Hayek understood human society. It is true that the rise of Eurosocialism has yet to create a repeat of Nazi Germany. But to a degree, every one of Hayek's observations has been born out again and again. Canadians face penalties for bypassing state health care. Green-lobby scientists push for greater government control of energy use around the world. Americans are being told when and how much health insurance to buy. Expanding governments have distorted housing markets, healthcare markets, and debt markets. Regulatory barriers impede business creation and reduce competition. Interest groups control the tax code for special treatment. Hayek's work foresaw all of this. Hayek has something to teach us about our contemporary political and economic challenges.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Why Gay Marriage Is Not an Inalienable Right
I'd like to preface this discussion first by saying that I sincerely wish happiness and peace to everyone, especially my gay friends and fellow citizens. My thoughts here were provoked by a concern over the fact that rights-based arguments that fail to draw a distinction between inalienable rights and vested rights are endangering our freedom. The LGBT community (hereafter just "gay") should be equally concerned about the direction this country is taking with regard to inalienable rights. Neither gays nor natural family advocates should have to worry that government will infringe on their inalienable rights. What follows is my attempt to revive a proper view of rights and see how we can best meet everyone's needs fairly.
I'm amazed that people can get away with the rights-based argument for gay marriage. It is an astounding misunderstanding of individual rights. Gays have the inalienable right to do what they want with other like minded adults. But marriage is an institution that implies the blessing of others. You cannot demand that other people give you their blessing. It is their individual right to give it or withhold it.
The judge who overruled California's Prop 8 today relied on the argument that "Proposition 8 singles out gays and lesbians and legitimates their unequal treatment" and "[it] was premised on the belief that same-sex couples simply are not as good as opposite-sex couples".
In 1983, Martin Luther King Jr. Day became a national holiday. This was a great honor for a great man. The creation of this holiday cost the federal government an extra day of holiday pay to every federal worker. Doesn't MLK Day discriminate against all other great Americans who were denied the honor of having a day named for them? I guess all these other Americans "aren't as good" as Mr. King. That is a glass-half-empty argument that should be rejected.
When people democratically decide to bestow an honor on someone or a group of people (such as 9/11 workers) it is not a disparagement of the rights of anyone else. And honors such as these are not rights! You cannot demand that somebody else think well of you.
Gay marriage which is forced onto a people undemocratically is a violation of their right to honor whom they will. Take away the economic benefits (which shouldn't be that much anyway in a limited government society) and marriage is nothing but a blessing of your peers. You cannot demand that blessing, it has to be given freely. I have the right to band together with like-minded individuals to give my blessings to whom I may. Government is one way in which people band together.
The fact is, there is only one pairing of human beings that has a perpetual risk of bringing new people into the world: heterosexual unions. Gay unions might have kids from prior marriages or from adoption, but they never have to run the risk of pregnancy planned or otherwise. This special character of heterosexual union makes it fundamentally different than gay union no matter what activist judges may believe. We can give the emperor a new set of clothes, but nobody will be fooled. If some people want to give their blessing to couples who will be creating new members of society, that is their right. Gays can ask for a similar blessing, but it is not an inalienable right to receive it.
If Gays really believed in inalienable rights they would demand that the government stop giving preferential treatment to anyone. Asking that they receive preferential treatment on par with heterosexuals still leaves huge unfairness gaps. What about single parents? What about Catholic Nuns? Shouldn't they have a life partner that can make decisions for them when they are incapacitated? How about two celibate males who live together as friends and are soul-buddies? Why are they "singled out" for discriminatory exclusion from marriage and all the appertaining benefits? You know I'm right. If there is anything that needs to be fixed it is first, we shouldn't be doling out benefits at tax payer expense to any special groups. Second, if we need to fix the law to enable significant-other visitation rights, power of attorney rights, etc. all we need is a "life partner" law. It wouldn't be marriage, it would just be a special legal instrument to fulfill a broad need. Third, marriage should be left to the private sector.
Life partner laws, private marriage, inalienable rights. Problem solved.
I'm amazed that people can get away with the rights-based argument for gay marriage. It is an astounding misunderstanding of individual rights. Gays have the inalienable right to do what they want with other like minded adults. But marriage is an institution that implies the blessing of others. You cannot demand that other people give you their blessing. It is their individual right to give it or withhold it.
The judge who overruled California's Prop 8 today relied on the argument that "Proposition 8 singles out gays and lesbians and legitimates their unequal treatment" and "[it] was premised on the belief that same-sex couples simply are not as good as opposite-sex couples".
In 1983, Martin Luther King Jr. Day became a national holiday. This was a great honor for a great man. The creation of this holiday cost the federal government an extra day of holiday pay to every federal worker. Doesn't MLK Day discriminate against all other great Americans who were denied the honor of having a day named for them? I guess all these other Americans "aren't as good" as Mr. King. That is a glass-half-empty argument that should be rejected.
When people democratically decide to bestow an honor on someone or a group of people (such as 9/11 workers) it is not a disparagement of the rights of anyone else. And honors such as these are not rights! You cannot demand that somebody else think well of you.
Gay marriage which is forced onto a people undemocratically is a violation of their right to honor whom they will. Take away the economic benefits (which shouldn't be that much anyway in a limited government society) and marriage is nothing but a blessing of your peers. You cannot demand that blessing, it has to be given freely. I have the right to band together with like-minded individuals to give my blessings to whom I may. Government is one way in which people band together.
The fact is, there is only one pairing of human beings that has a perpetual risk of bringing new people into the world: heterosexual unions. Gay unions might have kids from prior marriages or from adoption, but they never have to run the risk of pregnancy planned or otherwise. This special character of heterosexual union makes it fundamentally different than gay union no matter what activist judges may believe. We can give the emperor a new set of clothes, but nobody will be fooled. If some people want to give their blessing to couples who will be creating new members of society, that is their right. Gays can ask for a similar blessing, but it is not an inalienable right to receive it.
If Gays really believed in inalienable rights they would demand that the government stop giving preferential treatment to anyone. Asking that they receive preferential treatment on par with heterosexuals still leaves huge unfairness gaps. What about single parents? What about Catholic Nuns? Shouldn't they have a life partner that can make decisions for them when they are incapacitated? How about two celibate males who live together as friends and are soul-buddies? Why are they "singled out" for discriminatory exclusion from marriage and all the appertaining benefits? You know I'm right. If there is anything that needs to be fixed it is first, we shouldn't be doling out benefits at tax payer expense to any special groups. Second, if we need to fix the law to enable significant-other visitation rights, power of attorney rights, etc. all we need is a "life partner" law. It wouldn't be marriage, it would just be a special legal instrument to fulfill a broad need. Third, marriage should be left to the private sector.
Life partner laws, private marriage, inalienable rights. Problem solved.
Monday, April 12, 2010
IOUSA
This movie is essential viewing for all voting citizens. Schedule 30 minutes to be educated about the looming debt crisis. This is a bipartisan movie which was created largely in response to the Bush years.
The graphical demonstration of historical debt and the social security time bomb is very illuminating. One bone I have to pick is the simplistic description of the 80's as " unprecedented" in peace time spending. The fact is, it is okay to go in debt if you get a return on investment. WWII: great return on investment. Winning the cold war and creating 20 years of prosperity? Great return on investment. So President Bush, to me, is at fault for wasting the Reagan dividend. He gave us TSA, earmarks, and Medicare part D. I agreed with Operation Iraq Freedom, but we should have been making harder choices at home.
The other bone to pick with this movie is the lack of dynamic tax modeling. The 2003 Bush tax cuts are largely misunderstood. Those tax cuts created more revenue for the government. It turns out that when you reduce penalties to wealth generation, more of it gets generated. Kind of like how McDonalds makes more selling Big Macs for 2.99 as opposed to 4.99. So I say "yea!" for the tax cuts, but why squander this excellent tax lesson on expanding government?
My RX for the national debt is simple: the FairTax along with a balanced budget amendment. Raising taxes on the rich is the wrong answer. If anything we need a flatter tax with less deductions and credits and one which includes all voting citizens not just the top 50% of tax payers.
The graphical demonstration of historical debt and the social security time bomb is very illuminating. One bone I have to pick is the simplistic description of the 80's as " unprecedented" in peace time spending. The fact is, it is okay to go in debt if you get a return on investment. WWII: great return on investment. Winning the cold war and creating 20 years of prosperity? Great return on investment. So President Bush, to me, is at fault for wasting the Reagan dividend. He gave us TSA, earmarks, and Medicare part D. I agreed with Operation Iraq Freedom, but we should have been making harder choices at home.
The other bone to pick with this movie is the lack of dynamic tax modeling. The 2003 Bush tax cuts are largely misunderstood. Those tax cuts created more revenue for the government. It turns out that when you reduce penalties to wealth generation, more of it gets generated. Kind of like how McDonalds makes more selling Big Macs for 2.99 as opposed to 4.99. So I say "yea!" for the tax cuts, but why squander this excellent tax lesson on expanding government?
My RX for the national debt is simple: the FairTax along with a balanced budget amendment. Raising taxes on the rich is the wrong answer. If anything we need a flatter tax with less deductions and credits and one which includes all voting citizens not just the top 50% of tax payers.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Gun-point analogy doesn't hold water
(This is my rebuttal to BadTux's explanation of why health costs defy free market forces. There it is argued that inelastic demand allows health providers to hold patients hostage for any amount they want to charge)
BadTux, at least your honest that Obamacare IS the takeover of the insurance industry that Obama refuses to admit. He got this through by hook and by crook. IF we wanted to make the insurance companies into a public utility, it should have been sold to the American people that way, not as a trojan horse. BTW, I agree with you that single payer is more efficient than Obamacare as it now stands.
I flatly reject your points numbered 2 and 3. I have two points to make about your argument #2 (I'll label mine using letters) A. Your point about inelasticity of demand could be applied to food. Why don't farmers hold us all at sickle-point for all our money because we'd die if we didn't eat? Because supply is not inelastic (at steady state and when natural resources are not a limiter). The more people are willing to pay, the more supply springs into existence until an equilibrium is reached where prices cannot rise further. (The price is where the supply and demand curves intersect.) And there are ways to create the conditions for a steeper supply curve. Like in France where they subsidize medical training.
But you're gonna say supply is inelastic when it comes to highly trained doctors who can perform transplants or rare treatments. Nope. It is only temporarily inelastic as doctors cannot be trained overnight. The only way the gun-point scenario can exist is if doctors operate as a cartel. And I agree the do! So what do labor cartels do to inflate wages? This is classic Adam Smith BTW: they raise barriers to entry! Yes, American doctors raise barriers to entry into their profession. Obamacare does nothing to help with this. The way to ensure that the cartel cannot hold people at gun point is to break the cartel. This means creating more paraprofessionals that require fewer years of training, it means relaxing accreditation rules to allow more medical schools. It means allowing pharmacists to prescribe drugs, optometrists to perform laser eye surgery, etc. etc. It means allowing tradeoffs wherein inexperienced doctors are allowed to perform heart surgery if the patient is willing to accept the risk (and benefits in terms of cost). There are so many ways to solve the inelasticity of supply and Obamacare does none of it. Badtux, have you read my post Freedom-based Vision of Health Care?
Okay point B) to your point 2. The heart surgery example is not what I was speaking of when I said we should eliminate all middlemen. That is an example where insurance is well suited. We do have middlemen for high stakes items. But we don't need middlemen for routine maintenance. You maintain your automobile without insurance don't you? You only see the insurance company for an accident. As pointed out recently by David Goldhill in the Atlantic, there is no reason whatsoever why people shouldn't be able to budget for and pay directly for 90% of the healthcare they will need during their life. Especially things like pregnancies, vaccinations, eye exams, etc. Why in the name of Pete do we need to buy insurance for anything but a catastrophe? How much do you think food would cost if we had a food insurance system with a bureaucracy to pay for it? Even if your inelasticity argument carried weight for heart surgery, it wouldn't for 90% of the reasons why we see a doctor. Obamacare takes over the 90% that is non-catastrophic. In fact he abhors the concept of catastrophic only insurance (insurance was invented for catastrophes)
Now point C) to your point 3. Do you mean to say that the writers of the constitution meant that the tax code should be used to influence (socially engineer) individual behavior? Please! How much have you studied the constitution? I've read the Federalist papers and Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton, the original protagonist of both taxation and the welfare clause. The power of taxation was to fund the federal government not to manipulate people! The revenue was to enable the government to perform its enumerated powers, which for Hamilton and Madison meant mostly national defense. Manipulating people was not the primary motivation. (that the Whiskey tax might reduce liquor consumption as a side benefit was completely adjunct to raising revenue) And for the record, I don't support the home interest deduction either. I've always been consistently against using the tax code to micromanage people. In fact, the only good solution is the FairTax.
In a followup, you said the fact that uninsured who have no middleman and who get charged exorbitantly are proof the we need middlemen to fix prices. This again harks back to my catastrophic versus routine care point. We do need middlemen for catastrophes. But we'll all benefit when we eliminate middlemen for 90% of non-catastrophic care especially the uninsured who benefit from lower prices more than any of us. The exorbitant fees (which are usually negotiated down even for the uninsured as pointed out in the article) are a reflection of a bureaucratic 2-middleman system that discourages price transparency. They have all the incentive in the world to hide the true price of care because demand is not checked by price but by bureaucratic wrangling. Obamacare just enshrines this system into place while trying to cover the uninsured in a way that will ensure that the true price of medicine is never found and thus, capital will never flow to where a free people would want it to go.
BadTux, at least your honest that Obamacare IS the takeover of the insurance industry that Obama refuses to admit. He got this through by hook and by crook. IF we wanted to make the insurance companies into a public utility, it should have been sold to the American people that way, not as a trojan horse. BTW, I agree with you that single payer is more efficient than Obamacare as it now stands.
I flatly reject your points numbered 2 and 3. I have two points to make about your argument #2 (I'll label mine using letters) A. Your point about inelasticity of demand could be applied to food. Why don't farmers hold us all at sickle-point for all our money because we'd die if we didn't eat? Because supply is not inelastic (at steady state and when natural resources are not a limiter). The more people are willing to pay, the more supply springs into existence until an equilibrium is reached where prices cannot rise further. (The price is where the supply and demand curves intersect.) And there are ways to create the conditions for a steeper supply curve. Like in France where they subsidize medical training.
But you're gonna say supply is inelastic when it comes to highly trained doctors who can perform transplants or rare treatments. Nope. It is only temporarily inelastic as doctors cannot be trained overnight. The only way the gun-point scenario can exist is if doctors operate as a cartel. And I agree the do! So what do labor cartels do to inflate wages? This is classic Adam Smith BTW: they raise barriers to entry! Yes, American doctors raise barriers to entry into their profession. Obamacare does nothing to help with this. The way to ensure that the cartel cannot hold people at gun point is to break the cartel. This means creating more paraprofessionals that require fewer years of training, it means relaxing accreditation rules to allow more medical schools. It means allowing pharmacists to prescribe drugs, optometrists to perform laser eye surgery, etc. etc. It means allowing tradeoffs wherein inexperienced doctors are allowed to perform heart surgery if the patient is willing to accept the risk (and benefits in terms of cost). There are so many ways to solve the inelasticity of supply and Obamacare does none of it. Badtux, have you read my post Freedom-based Vision of Health Care?
Okay point B) to your point 2. The heart surgery example is not what I was speaking of when I said we should eliminate all middlemen. That is an example where insurance is well suited. We do have middlemen for high stakes items. But we don't need middlemen for routine maintenance. You maintain your automobile without insurance don't you? You only see the insurance company for an accident. As pointed out recently by David Goldhill in the Atlantic, there is no reason whatsoever why people shouldn't be able to budget for and pay directly for 90% of the healthcare they will need during their life. Especially things like pregnancies, vaccinations, eye exams, etc. Why in the name of Pete do we need to buy insurance for anything but a catastrophe? How much do you think food would cost if we had a food insurance system with a bureaucracy to pay for it? Even if your inelasticity argument carried weight for heart surgery, it wouldn't for 90% of the reasons why we see a doctor. Obamacare takes over the 90% that is non-catastrophic. In fact he abhors the concept of catastrophic only insurance (insurance was invented for catastrophes)
Now point C) to your point 3. Do you mean to say that the writers of the constitution meant that the tax code should be used to influence (socially engineer) individual behavior? Please! How much have you studied the constitution? I've read the Federalist papers and Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton, the original protagonist of both taxation and the welfare clause. The power of taxation was to fund the federal government not to manipulate people! The revenue was to enable the government to perform its enumerated powers, which for Hamilton and Madison meant mostly national defense. Manipulating people was not the primary motivation. (that the Whiskey tax might reduce liquor consumption as a side benefit was completely adjunct to raising revenue) And for the record, I don't support the home interest deduction either. I've always been consistently against using the tax code to micromanage people. In fact, the only good solution is the FairTax.
In a followup, you said the fact that uninsured who have no middleman and who get charged exorbitantly are proof the we need middlemen to fix prices. This again harks back to my catastrophic versus routine care point. We do need middlemen for catastrophes. But we'll all benefit when we eliminate middlemen for 90% of non-catastrophic care especially the uninsured who benefit from lower prices more than any of us. The exorbitant fees (which are usually negotiated down even for the uninsured as pointed out in the article) are a reflection of a bureaucratic 2-middleman system that discourages price transparency. They have all the incentive in the world to hide the true price of care because demand is not checked by price but by bureaucratic wrangling. Obamacare just enshrines this system into place while trying to cover the uninsured in a way that will ensure that the true price of medicine is never found and thus, capital will never flow to where a free people would want it to go.
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