A classic health care protest:

Read about it in David Hyman’s book, Medicare Meets Mephistopheles.

At his town meeting in New Hampshire, President Obama urged people not to listen to those who seek to “scare and mislead the American people.” Meanwhile, his new White House website “Reality Check” — your tax dollars at work, folks, on political propaganda — warns supporters that “the road ahead will surely reveal more aggressive efforts from defenders of the status quo to confuse and scare Americans with half-truths and outright lies.”

I immediately thought of former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s notorious declaration in December 2001: “to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.”

Presidents and their teams don’t like criticism. They have total access to the media — primetime, nationally televised speeches and press conferences, weekly radio addresses, websites, massive party and political organizations, journalists at their beck and call. Their every passing comment is news. Their speeches dominate the headlines. They set the agenda, whether it’s the Patriot Act or health care bills. And yet they can’t abide criticism.

And when the criticism is effective, they lash out. They denounce their opponents for seeking to “scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberties” or “confuse and scare Americans with half-truths and outright lies.” (Quick: which one of those was 2001, and which was 2009?)

But the fact is that the Bush administration’s actions after 9/11 really did result in a loss of liberty, and the Obama administration’s plans for our health care really should scare Americans. And libertarians have been, and will continue to be, in the forefront of Americans resisting intrusions on liberty by administrations from both parties. They won’t be dissuaded by Nixonian claims that dissent and criticism are divisive and damaging to national unity.

Today’s Wall Street Journal editorializes against the price controls that President Obama would impose on health insurance, noting that such controls have proven a disaster in the states that impose them.

The Journal offers an alternative way of covering people with high-cost conditions:

University of Chicago economist John Cochrane also argues that in a more rational individual insurance market, people could insure not merely against medical expenses but also against changes in health status. This kind of insurance would cover the risk of premiums rising as you get older and your health condition changes.

In turn, that would free insurers to compete for the business of all patients, including those with pre-existing conditions, because then they could charge enough to cover the costs—instead of passing them to others.

You can read about Cochrane’s approach in his February 2009 Cato Institute policy analysis, “Health-Status Insurance: How Markets Can Provide Health Security.”

The Obama administration’s pay czar is busily making plans for America’s financial companies:

Kenneth R. Feinberg has the unprecedented task of deciding executive compensation at seven companies that received large government bailouts. His meetings with American International Group, Citigroup, Bank of America, General Motors, Chrysler, Chrysler Financial and GMAC have been conducted in secret, with neither Feinberg nor the companies willing to say much in public.…

Feinberg, who has sole discretion to set compensation for the top 25 employees of each of those companies, has 60 days to make a determination after the proposals are complete. Under the administration’s initiative to curb excessive pay practices, each of the seven companies must also receive his approval for how it pays the rest of its 100 most highly compensated executives and employees. The companies must submit pay plans for these employees by Oct. 12.…

During the videoconference with AIG employees, Feinberg mostly avoided giving them detailed answers to their questions. Many of the employees left frustrated because he gave them no sense of whether he would seek to modify contracts that promise them upcoming bonuses, said people familiar with the session.…

Senior Treasury Department officials say they do not want Feinberg to set precise prescriptions for how companies compensate employees. Instead, his task is to evaluate pay according to several principles. For instance, does an employee’s compensation reward short-term, risky business behavior? Or, on the contrary, is the compensation tied to longer-term performance goals? Does it allow the company to remain competitive and recruit top talent?

Note also: “Mr. Feinberg’s decisions won’t be subject to appeal.”

Classical liberals often talk about “the rule of law, not the rule of men.” This isn’t even “the rule of men,” it’s the rule of one man. Let us hope that Kenneth Feinberg is a wise, merciful, and incorruptible ruler.

NOTE: I recognize that Feinberg’s authority extends only to companies that have received large government bailouts, and there’s a certainly a case to be made that if companies take taxpayers’ money, they can darn well live with government salaries. But it’s just that kind of political intrusiveness — along with demanding that auto firms keep all their dealerships, or make “green” cars, or build their cars in this country, or whatever — that makes government-run or ‑dominated companies inefficient. So as Gary Becker says, it’s a “fatal conceit” to assume that Kenneth Feinberg knows better than the market how much top talent should be paid. And some of the people who support the idea of a “pay czar” want his authority to extend beyond the government-supported companies.

Following up on Chris Edwards’ comments, Alan Blinder of Princeton writes in the Washington Post that the stimulus is working and “we need to stay the course.”

But Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago writes in the New York Post that 90 percent of the stimulus money hasn’t been spent yet, so we could still stop it before it does too much harm:

The best case scenario for the stimulus law gives us results that are miniscule compared with the costs. In the worst case scenario, we actually pay money to further harm an already struggling economy.…

It would have been designed better if money had stayed with the taxpayers instead of funneling through dozens of federal agencies — an option that is still available. Otherwise, we are looking at heavy taxes — and further economic damage — down the road to pay for all the borrowing.

Mulligan wrote earlier in the New York Times that “The economy has gotten worse than the Obama administration had predicted it would be even if Congress had spent nothing on ‘fiscal stimulus.’ ” Mulligan provides more details at his blog stopthe​fis​cal​stim​u​lus​.com.

Meanwhile, Mario Rizzo of New York University asks

what is the mechanism by which about $70 billion in extra spending (this is the amount of the total stimulus package now spent) reduces the rate of increase in unemployment and reduces the rate of decrease in output in a $14 trillion economy? If my advanced arithmetic is correct this is ½ of 1 percent of the GDP. What kind of Super Multiplier is that?

He goes on to point out that unemployment is now higher than the administration predicted just a few months ago it would be if we didn’t pass the stimulus. So how can we believe today’s econometric claims about the good effects of the so-called stimulus?

Urban planners want to shape our cities. And they want our cities to shape you. That’s the conclusion of Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randal O’Toole. He argues that the rationales for most urban planning collapses upon examination.

O’Toole — author of the forthcoming Cato book Gridlock — spoke at Cato University at Rancho Bernardo, California.

Several people today have sent me the article in the Daily Mail (UK) discussing the twelve-minute hack on a UK identity card. Security consultant/​hacker Adam Laurie was apparently able to rewrite the data on the card in very short order.

This would imply that making a more secure card is an improvement. But more security in a national ID card almost inevitably means less security for the individual in terms of privacy and autonomy.

We don’t want a highly secure national ID card. We want a diverse and competitive identity and credentialing system. In such a system, governments may serve as identity providers. But that is not necessary and, given their powers, not desirable.