LTE: Healthcare Monopoly

The Editor for the Asheville Citizen-Times writes:

The argument here is convoluted at best. Opponents of a single-payer or other plan generally seem to hew to the line that the free market works best and should be left to work its wonders. However, in the next breath those opponents say a government-backed plan would put private insurers out of business. How that adds up — inefficient government bettering efficient capitalism — we have yet to decipher.

A universal health care plan will become a huge monopoly

Dear Editor, Asheville Citizen-Times,

In a recent AC-T editorial on health care ("We need serious debate on health care reform, not political theater," Jun 24, 2009), the writer claims to be unable to decipher how efficient capitalism can be bested by inefficient government. That, of course, does not mean that the question is undecipherable.

First, we do not have a free market in healthcare. This industry is heavily regulated. The problems we experience in healthcare derive from a long history of politically-driven government interference in that once-proud industry.

The truth is that the government, with its hands already in your pocket, competing with counterparts the private sector is the antithesis of competition. It is the direct negation of fair competition. It is in reality a pathway to coercive monopoly that ultimately squeezes private providers out of the market. Which, of course, is what this administration and the supporters of government-run healthcare want.

In 2003, Mr. Obama said, "I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal healthcare plan. But we may not get there immediately." And as Chicago Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said in April of 2009, “a public option will put the private insurance industry out of business and lead to single-payer.”

This is not how a free market competes, this is how the Mafia competes.

(NOTE: This letter was also published in the Asheville Daily Planet, June 1, 2009)

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That's Not Logical?
Neal Boortz | June 25, 2009
Did you catch this part of PrezBO's presser earlier this week? Some reporter asked him about his government health insurance pushing private health insurers out of business. Obama responds "If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care; if they tell us that they're offering a good deal, then why is it that the government, which they say can't run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That's not logical."

You're Not Buying This 'Competition' Nonsense, Are You?
Neal Boortz | June 29, 2009
Now we know just how ignorant Obama thinks the American people are. Answer: Dumb as rocks. All the president's men (and women) are out selling the asinine idea that Obama's government health insurance idea is going to put competition into the marketplace. This is an idea that one could only sell to a fool. Thanks to our system of government education, we are not suffering any shortage of fools.

Tax Credits for Education
Ayn Rand | 1973
No private concern can compete with a government institution for any length of time, and the injustice involved is obvious: it is a competition in which one contestant has unlimited funds, part of them taken from the other, and in which one contestant is forced to obey the rules arbitrarily set by the other. If any private schools survive, they will survive in name only (which is the typical policy of a fascist state): they are all but hog-tied by the government already.

Republican Theocrats

Gary writes: "If we don't come together, cast out the Rinos and Necons and talk some sense into the social conservatives, then I think we should give up on politics and look out for ourselves..."

I suspect by the term "social conservatives" you mean theocrats.

A theocrat does not believe in any separation of church and state. That is, they actively believe that the two ought to be merged. They believe, quite honestly by the way, that it is the propesr role of government to forceably impose their own peculiar faith-based religiou beliefs on all others in a pluralistic society. And all of this without a moment's thought that their precious favored religion could possibly fall into disfavor and be supplanted by another, equally offensive to them and their erstwhile critics.

In this belief they do not differ in any substantial moral sense from the Taliban or the proponents of Islamic Sharia Law. The fragility of their faith and inch-deep understanding of spirituality leads them to promote and institute coercive law and vacant, puritanical custom that will, in a sense, do their heavy lifting for them in the hopes that this brutal use of force will finally serve their aims in place of the heavier lifting required by rational persuasion and peaceful coexistence.

So long as the terms "conservative" and "theocrat" are synonymous, the Republican Party will flounder. As well they should. God willing.

Justice

BushBama

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End the Federal Reserve

When Texas Congressman and former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul speaks about transparency in the Federal Reserve, he sums up his argument with one simple question. Why not?

“Why in the world should this much power be given to a Federal Reserve that has the authority to create $1 trillion secretly?” Ron Paul asked a standing room-only crowd today at the Cato Institute.

Paul was on a panel of speakers, including Gilbert Schwartz, former associate general counsel to the Federal Reserve, to discuss a new bill that will audit the Fed for the first time in its history:



Read Chapter Two

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Cost of Government Health Care

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Think about this for a moment. Medicare is a huge, single-payer, government-run program. It ought to provide the perfect environment for experimentation. If more-efficient government management can slash health-care costs by addressing all these problems, why not start with Medicare? Let's see what "better management" looks like applied to Medicare before we roll it out to the rest of the country.

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Tammy Radio

Radio talk show host Tammy Bruce's latest weekend podcast is available for downloading. Tammy discusses the latest developments in Iran and her opinion of our tepid response. Here is a brief video from today: youtube.com

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Interventionism

Morgan writes: "According to the above mentioned talk show hosts, and many politicians, a free market has been defined as any market without government intervention, or even more dubiously, 'minimal' government intervention.

Many years ago I found myself in full dress military uniform, my ruck sack on my back, in a back alley off of 42nd street in New York City. I was cornered by 10-12 young men who essentially offered me my life for my money. According to the above definition, I was enjoying the fruits of a free market! There was no government intervention. Perfect!

I would not agree with the argument that being accosted by predatory criminals is a characteristic of a free market. The protection of individual rights is not a form of government intervention. In my view, that is the government's only proper purpose.

Also, it is my view that any market that is not governed by a rule of law that protects individual rights is free. Establishing an unregulated, laissez-faire (free) market with a strict governing rule of objective law, not men, within a framework of limited government that protects individual rights and economic liberty is not interventionism, it is capitalism.

I agree with George Reisman that, "interventionism is any act of government that both represents the initiation of physical force and, at the same time, stops short of imposing an all-round socialist economic system, in which production takes place entirely, or at least characteristically, at the initiative of the government."

Morgan writes: "From this we can safely conclude, knowing nothing else about the situation, that it [Haliburton no bids] was not a free market, there was no competition.

That does not necessarily mean that no competition existed, but that competition, if it existed, was barred by the buyer (government) in contravention of public will. The fact that this was the government (public money) excluding competition makes the difference. This sets up a coercive and involuntary arrangement between the buyer (government) and the owner (me).

In the private sector, competition can be excluded within a free market framework because, in such a case, my private economic liberty and voluntary choices are preserved. Private individuals exclude competition all the time. For example, you might hire your cousin for a plumbing job, denying a bid from a professional. I might have my car fixed under a shade tree. Or Hooters Restaurant might discriminate against men; and rightly so. These are choices voluntarily made using private resources (money, property) and the buyer takes a freely chosen risk in a competitive environment.

In a free, uncoerced and open market, I cannot be forced to open bids to competition. That would be a violation of my individual right to use and dispose of my private property as I see fit. In the public sector, however, as with the Haliburton example, the public was forced to exclude competition against its will, thus making that action a violation of my individual rights.

You had stated that, "an example of a 'minimal government intervention' would be the $100 billion no-bid contracts given to Cheney's buddies at Halliburton."

While I agree that this is indeed an example of an unfree market, it is not an example of a lack of government intervention; or hands-off. To the contrary, this is an example of government intervention in what should be a free market of open bids using our money. It is unfree precisely because of heavy government intervention.

Republican Party

Gary writes: "Anyone remember their history? A third party was born in 1854. Within 6 years that party elected its first President and the Whig party, (one of the two major parties) disappeared. It was a troubled time with massive divisions within the nation. We are in troubled times. The divisions are coming. Is the Republican Party and its candidates up to the challenge?"

Is the Republican Party and [are] its candidates up to the challenge?

In my view, no. Not from what I'm seeing.

The Republican Party remains a passive and fawning refuge for the theocratic right. If the party cannot reject the intellectually brittle religionists, who sincerely believe in no separation of church and state, and the unprincipled pragmatist who stand for everything and nothing, and embrace with conviction and action the classical liberal political principles of the founding fathers and the corresponding economic corollary of unregulated laissez-faire capitalism, then the party will continue to flounder and will instead rouse the urge for a new or forgotten party that has a more muscular proposition based on man's rights, limited government and economic liberty.

Oddly, the current political climate could not possibly be better for Republicans. With unprecedented growth of government control over the economy, unfathomable spending, debt, and inflation, and the generally-accepted promotion of the pernicious moral code of self-sacrifice for the collective, the party has been handed its one great redeeming point of distinction from the looters and thugs of the fascist Left.

But, alas, I see no advancing libertarian guard in the party. I see no signs that the Republican Party is "up to the challenge." I see only facile retrenchment and infantile, religious navel-gazing.

Say it ain't so Joe, say it ain't so.