Pelosi's finest hour is our nightmare

The health care bill that Pelosi and company approved yesterday is estimated to cost $1 trillion over the next decade. The actual costs, of course, will be far higher, assuming the country is still around in 10 years. The bill passed 220-215. One Republican, John Cao of Louisiana, backed the plan, while 39 Democrats opposed it. According to Bloomberg,

Lawmakers hailed the step as a historic follow-on to the 1965 creation of the Medicare program for the elderly and disabled. They said the bill would cover 36 million uninsured Americans and curb costs. New rules would prevent insurers from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions, and seniors would get help obtaining preventive care and medicine.

And I promise you, it will work as well as every other government program.

There is still some hope. The in-fighting in Congress could conceivably kill any kind of health care legislation.

The spotlight now moves to the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid is struggling to get the votes to even begin debate on his version. Once the Senate passes a bill, lawmakers from each chamber would work together on a compromise for a new round of votes, a process likely to take months.

Reid last week wouldn’t commit to meeting Obama’s goal of signing a health-care bill into law by the end of the year. Already, it has been almost four months since four of the five congressional committees assigned to work on health care passed their versions of bills.

And House leaders can’t be sure of retaining all the votes they won last night. The bill passed over the objections of Democrats who favor abortion rights after an amendment put restrictions on the use of federal funds for the procedure for people using new insurance purchasing exchanges. Some Democrats said they wouldn’t back final legislation with the provision.

Then there's always secession or nullification. On nullification, Wikipedia says:

Nullification is a legal theory that a U.S. State has the right to nullify, or invalidate, any federal law which that state has deemed unconstitutional. . . .

One of the earliest and most famous examples is to be found in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, a protest against the Alien and Sedition Acts. In these resolutions, authors Thomas Jefferson and James Madison argued that the states are the ultimate interpreters of the Constitution and can "interpose" to protect state citizens from the operation of unconstitutional national laws.

Is the provision of health care a constitutionally-assigned task to the government? No, it isn't; therefore, the states could nullify any bill passed on those grounds. Trying to slip it in on the back of the General Welfare clause makes a mockery of the idea of limited government (which in truth doesn't work, but that's another issue) and the Constitution itself.

Secession is appealing, but I think most people would find it hard to break ranks with the country they've grown up with. They would need something better, and since most people don't accept the libertarian philosophy of nonaggression in government, their idea of "better" would be loaded with problems, if they had any ideas at all.

But what about health care reform? If government shouldn't attempt it, who should? Here is an answer that deserves close attention.

Dumb and getting dumber

Professor of Economics Walter Williams writes:

the longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers. In recent cross-country comparisons of fourth grade reading, math, and science, US students scored in the top quarter or top half of advanced nations. By age 15 these rankings drop to the bottom half. In other words, American students are farthest behind just as they are about to enter higher education or the workforce." That's a sobering thought. The longer kids are in school and the more money we spend on them, the further behind they get.

His solution? Unrestricted competition.

Public education has become a highly centralized government-backed monopoly and we shouldn't be surprised by the results. It's a no-brainer that the areas of our lives with the greatest innovation, tailoring of services to individual wants and falling prices are the areas where there is ruthless competition such as computers, food, telephone and clothing industries, and delivery companies such as UPS, Federal Express and electronic bill payments that have begun to undermine the postal monopoly in first-class mail.

Millions continue to starve in East Africa

The most popular villains said to be causing the pitiful conditions of these poor people are said to be either an insufficient amount of foreign aid or climate change. Julian Morris, Executive Director of International Policy Network, has a more radical theory. In a word, government. In his words, " it was and is the result of policies in the affected countries that inhibit freedom and incentives to trade, own land, and invest in diverse, prosperity-enhancing economic activities."

Subsistence farming dominated life before about 1800.

first in England and soon in many other parts of the world, people began to rise above subsistence. They specialized more narrowly than before in the production of certain goods and they traded with others who also specialized. This led to increased output, as specialists were able to produce more than generalists. Competition in the supply of goods drove innovation, which led to further increases in output. Agricultural production rose dramatically and famine declined. . . .

Since the 1920s, global deaths from drought-related famines have fallen by 99.9%. The reason? Continued specialization and trade, which has skyrocketed the amount of food produced per capita, and has enabled people in drought-prone regions to diversify and become less vulnerable.

In places where trade is restricted, people are forced to remain subsistence farmers. So, when drought occurs, the majority suffer and many die.

Pelosi's Magnum Opus

David Harsanyi, a columnist for the Denver Post and author of Nanny State, refers to Pelosi's Health Care Package appropriately as Masterfleece Theater. It provides Americans with over 1,900 pages of lawyer-speak.

So curl up by a fire with a fifth of whiskey, and just dive in.

But drink quickly. In the new world, your insurance choices will be tethered to decisions made by people with Orwellian titles (1984 is only 268 pages!), such as the "Health Choices Commissioner" and "Inspector General for the Health Choices Administration."

You will, of course, need to be plastered to buy Pelosi's fantastical proposition that 450,000 words of new regulations, rules, mandates, penalties, price controls, taxes, and bureaucracy would have the transformative power to "provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending."

It's going to take some time to deconstruct this lengthy masterpiece, but as you flip through the pages of the House bill, you will notice the word "regulation" appears 181 times. "Tax" is there 214 times. "Fees," 103 times. As we all know, nothing says "affordability" like higher taxes and fees.

Ron Paul on Afghanistan, H1N1, Iran, and other issues

As interviewed on Russia Today.

Migrating to a new Mac from an old one

Here are two problems I ran into that weren't resolved with Migration Assistant. Both solutions worked. I had my old G4 iMac on the same network as my new Mac laptop so I could access files as I needed them.

1. When running iMovie for the first time, I noticed it had no music resources, even though iTunes was running okay. Why couldn't iMovie access iTunes and get the list of songs? After a web search I found this item from Apple support:

Under some circumstances, you may not see the iTunes Library in other iLife applications (iMovie, iPhoto, and iDVD).

Products Affected
iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iTunes

Symptom

• When selecting audio for a slideshow in iPhoto, the option to choose music from iTunes is not available. The pop-up menu says "iTunes not found".
• When selecting audio in iMovie, the option to choose music from iTunes is not available. The pop-up menu says "iTunes not found".
• When you click the Audio button in iDVD the message "Launch iTunes or later to populate this list" appears.

Solution

1. Run Software Update to make sure QuickTime, Mac OS X and your iLife applications to up to date.
2. Make sure that iTunes has been opened at least once.
3. The iTunes Music Library.xml file may be unusable. Try recreating the XML file used to populate the music listing. Follow these steps:
4. Quit iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and iTunes.
5. Click the Finder icon in the Dock.
6. Choose Go > Go to Folder
7. Depending where your iTunes Music Library is, enter ~/Documents/iTunes or ~/Music/iTunes and click Go.
8. Locate the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file and drag it to the Desktop.
9. Open iTunes.
10. Create a new playlist by choosing File > New Playlist.
11. Quit iTunes.

2. When running iWeb the first time I couldn't access my existing website. Again, a Google search uncovered the following discussion from Apple:

If you still have your old Mac, the file is here:

~/Library/Application Support/iWeb/

Where ~ is your Home Directory.

Move the file to the same location on your new Mac.

How the state ruins health care

Thomas DiLorenzo has a helpful article on Mises.org this weekend, American Healthcare Fascialism. ("Fascialism is a term he invented to reflect the combination of economic fascism and socialism on a given social phenomenon.) The healthcare industry today is the result of a century of socialist and fascist interventions, yet most people consider it a free market entity suffering from inadequate government intervention.

At the beginning of the 20th century, 90 percent of all hospitals were private, for-profit organizations. Then states and local governments began intervening in the hospital industry, so that by the 1990s only about 10 percent of hospitals were private, and even most of those received subsidies of some kind. With the subsidies come "reams of regulation, making them fascist by definition."

Milton Friedman published an essay on the hospital industry called "Input and Output in Medical Care" (Hoover Institution, 1992), in which he shows that government takeover of the hospital industry is a case study in the economics of bureaucracy: "According to Friedman, as governments took over an ever-larger share of the hospital industry (being exempt from antitrust laws), hospital personnel per occupied hospital bed quintupled, as cost per bed rose tenfold."

The healthcare industry follows a simple rule: Healthcare socialism has failed; therefore, we need more healthcare socialism.

After discussing the failures and corruption of Medicare, Medicaid, the AMA, and the FDA, along with so-called "certificate of need" (CON) regulation, in which area hospitals have the power to decide whether there is a need for more hospitals, DiLorenzo concludes:

The only sensible approach to healthcare "reform" would be massive privatization of America's socialized hospitals, combined with deregulation of the medical professions to introduce more competition, and deregulation of the health-insurance industry. Free-market competition would produce medical "miracles" the likes of which have never been seen, while dramatically lowering the cost of healthcare, just as it has done in every other industry where it is allowed to exist to any large degree.

This is not likely to happen in the United States, which at the moment seems hell-bent on descending into the abyss of socialism. Once some states begin seceding from the new American fascialistic state, however, there will be opportunities to restore healthcare freedom within them.