Greece’s fiscal disarray is a visible manifestation of Europe’s future, but the most appropriate symbol of what’s wrong with the continent comes from Brussels, where there are three “presidents” fighting over the right to represent Europe at international gatherings. The contestants include the President of the European Commission, the President of the European Council, and the European Union President (which rotates every six months among different national leaders).

While these three personalities fight over who gets to sit where and shake hands first, the real problem is that they all agree that government should be bigger, taxes should be higher, and power should be more centralized as part of the effort to create a superstate in Brussels. Inside this gilded cage, insulated from actual voters, Europe’s technocratic elite is content to enjoy a parasitical existence while the welfare states of member nations slowly but surely collapse and lead to social chaos. Here’s an excerpt from the UK-based Express about the fight between the the philosophical descendants of Louis XVI. Or would Nero be a better analogy? How about the Three Stooges? Well, you get the idea:

Promises by EU leaders that the Lisbon Treaty would herald a new era of clarity have been shattered after attempts to settle a major internal power feud resulted in a typical Brussels fudge. Bureaucrats have decided to send not just one president and his entourage to global summits but a tax-draining three. Only four months after the fanfare of Herman Van Rompuy’s appointment as European Council president, his most jealous and powerful rival in Brussels has persuaded allies to allow him to muscle in too. José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, has succeeded in his demands that he should also go to diplomatic summits, such as the G20, after insisting only he has the expertise to deal with specific policy matters. At certain summits there will even be a third representative – the leader of the country holding the EU’s rotating presidency. This seems to justify criticism that the Lisbon Treaty would add to the EU’s murky waters and not be a move towards transparency. …Since the Lisbon Treaty came into force at the end of last year, arguments have raged in Brussels over which department does what. Mr Van Rompuy, the former Belgian prime minister dismissed last month by Ukip MEP Nigel Farage as a “damp rag” and a “low-grade bank clerk”, is the permanent president of the European Council.

The answer may not be so obvious. I’ll explore that issue at a Cato Institute policy forum this Thursday with two leading authorities on the subject: John Ayanian of Harvard Medical School and David Meltzer of the University of Chicago.

The forum is titled, “Would Universal Coverage Improve Health?” and will be held at 4pm this Thursday at the Cato Institute. Click the link for details.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D‑MI) was asked on Friday where in the Constitution Congress gets the power to force people to buy health insurance. He said, “Under several clauses, the good and welfare clause and a couple others.”

As it happens, there is no “good and welfare clause” — which Conyers should know, as both judiciary chairman and a lawyer. But even if you excuse his casual use of constitutional language, what he probably means — the General Welfare Clause of Article I, Section 8 — is not a better answer. What that clause does is limit Congress’s use of the powers enumerated elsewhere in that section to legislation that promotes “the general welfare.” (So earmarks are arguably unconstitutional, though you can make a colorable argument that, when considering a pork bill as a whole, with all parts of the country getting something, that monstrosity is collectively in “the general welfare” — maybe.) In any event, the General Welfare Clause doesn’t give Congress any additional powers — and I’d be curious to know what the other “several clauses” are.

Conyers also noted that, “All the scholars, the constitutional scholars that I know … they all say that there’s nothing unconstitutional in this bill and if there were, I would have tried to correct it if I thought there were.” Well, Mr. Conyers, to start let me introduce you to three constitutional scholars — not fringe right-wing kooks or anything like that, but respected people who publish widely — who think Obamacare is unconstitutional. Now will you try to “correct” the bill?

Here’s video of Conyers’s full remarks on the subject (h/​t Jon Blanks):

And for a survey of the various constitutional issues attending Obamacare, see Randy Barnett’s oped from Sunday’s Washington Post.

A column I wrote in 2002 seems more relevant than ever. Some excerpts:

Health care is cheap: Eat less fat and more veggies, take a daily walk, quit smoking, and drink a little wine with some nuts. Fail to take care of yourself, and the long-term results can be costly — like the results of never changing the oil in your car and never replacing the tires. New diagnostic and surgical technologies involve expensive equipment and skills. Even so, insurance for gigantic medical expenses is also cheap. My policy pays nothing unless annual medical bills top $2,000. Most people call that “catastrophic” insurance. I call it real insurance.

Insurance for accidental damage to cars and homes is real insurance — something to protect against emergencies, not routine expenses. We do not expect an insurance company to pay for tires and gasoline, or to pay for home painting and termite inspections. When families make their own choices and pay for them, they choose insurance only for catastrophic expenses — the car becoming a total wreck, the house burnt to the ground or the breadwinner dropping dead. If we never collect a dime from such genuine insurance, we consider ourselves lucky.

With health insurance, by contrast, we all want somebody else to pay. Each of us expects to pay less for health insurance than the insurance companies pay to hospitals, doctors and pharmacies. Sadly, that does not add up.

More than a fourth of the U.S. population already has federally subsidized health care through Medicare, Medicaid and military health benefits. If that percentage ever reached 100 percent, as some politicians promise, we might finally begin to wonder how it is possible for everybody to subsidize everybody else.

If you subsidize something, people want more of it. That increase in demand translates into a market in which prices can more easily be raised.

• Estimates of the health care overhaul’s real cost over 10 years run as high as $3.5 trillion, including $600 billion in new taxes from the start.

• Will claims that the health care overhaul is unconstitutional get anywhere? Here is your guide to the possible legal challenges to the new law.

• Put this in the “things you missed during the health care debate” file: A panel of educators assembled by 48 state governors and school superintendents just released a uniform set of math and reading standards for the nation’s students.

• Podcast: “The Price of Obamacare” featuring Michael F. Cannon.

Brilliant column from William Jackson on GCN​.com debunking “cyberwar”:

“The United States is fighting a cyberwar today and we are losing it,” former National Security Agency chief and national intelligence director Mike McConnell wrote in a recent op-ed column in the Washington Post. “It’s that simple.”

It is neither simple nor true. Failure to distinguish between real acts of war and other malicious behavior not only increases the risks of war, but also distracts us from more immediate threats such as online crime.

The habit of threat inflation is harmful to the country. Jackson’s welcome take on “cyber” threats earns an accolade I rarely give out: Read the whole thing.

Today Politico Arena asks:

Should Republican leaders be doing more to reign in the rhetoric?

My response:

One hesitates to weigh in on this mud-slinging for fear of getting muddy oneself. But neither should commentary on Republican and tea-party reaction to Sunday’s House vote be left to the suddenly self-righteous Democratic left: After all, it’s their appalling disregard for democratic principles and processes that gave rise to the weekend’s demonstrations and outbursts. So a few points are in order, simply to put things in perspective.

First, let’s not leap to factual conclusions. Last evening the Lehrer News Hour reported (along with Politico this morning) that Rep. Randy Neugebauer shouted “baby killer” as Rep. Bart Stupak was speaking Sunday night. Yet NPR reported that Neugebauer actually shouted “It’s a baby killer” — referring to the bill, not to Stupak. Neither version is acceptable, but there is a difference. Likewise, claims about protesters’ taunts should be treated cautiously as well, especially since they’ve been denied, and as yet no footage has emerged to support them. Yet we see here at the Arena this morning that Harvard’s Theda Skocpol is writing, without a shred of evidence, that “Quite a few Republican public officials are even flirting with threats of violence against political figures they oppose.” So let’s not pretend that the right has a corner on irresponsibility.

Second, even if the claims about protesters’ taunts prove to be true, how is that a warrant for condemning the entire tea-party movement, or the Republican party, as many on the left are doing? No broad political movement can control its every “member.” Yet we find people like House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn saying that GOP leaders “ought to be ashamed of themselves for bringing these people here to Washington.” Perhaps Rep. Clyburn has forgotten that we still have the right to protest. That’s what the first tea party was about. And let’s remember that George Washington had to wade into the “mob” from time to time to keep order.

And that brings me to a final point. The symbolism of the Democratic left’s hostility to the “tea baggers” should not go unnoticed. The tea party movement’s roots are in the American Revolution. These ordinary Americans are protesting the Washington “Establishment” — which presently is the Democratic juggernaut — much as American Patriots were protesting the oppressive British Establishment that was “eating out their substance” with “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” The Democratic left should think long and hard about those parallels. The times they are a‑changin’.