The Safe and Secure Internet Gambling Initiative is running this ad on the web:
Good point, as Cato has noted several times. But let’s see … alcohol, internet gambling — can you think of any other area where prohibition hasn’t worked?
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You know things aren’t going well in Massachusetts when supporters of RomneyCare write “there’s some evidence that the reforms signed into law by Mitt Romney in 2006 are struggling.” That’s how The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein puts it in a post defending RomneyCare. The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn offers a similar defense.
Klein mentions only a few of the difficulties confronting Massachusetts. Here are a few more:
Nevertheless, the Klein/Cohn thesis is basically that costs have been climbing and employers have been dropping/curtailing health benefits for decades. So you can’t blame that stuff on RomneyCare. We should instead be thankful that Massachusetts enacted a new raft of government price controls, mandates, and subsidies to protect residents from those features of “the American health-care system.”
The only problem is that “the American health-care system” is the product of the old raft of government price & exchange controls, mandates, and subsidies. The largest purchaser of medical care in the country (and the world) is Medicare. Medicaid is second. The Left complains so much about fee-for-service medicine fueling rising health care costs and reducing quality, you’d never know that their beloved Medicare program is the primary reason for its dominance. Likewise, the reason why employers are dropping and curtailing coverage is that the government turned the private health insurance market into an unsustainable employment-based system that is doomed to unravel. Cohn’s book documents the inhumanity of that system so well, you’d think it would sour him on the sort of centralized planning that created it. I could go on…
RomneyCare and its progeny ObamaCare are attempts by the Left’s central planners to clean up their own mess. If Klein and Cohn want to defend those laws, pointing to the damage already caused by their economic policies won’t do the trick. They need to explain why government price & exchange controls, mandates, and subsidies will produce something other than what they have always produced.
My friend and Cato media fellow Radley Balko is currently participating in an online debate on the Economist website, the motion being that “This house believes there should be no legal restrictions on gambling.” Radley is, of course, defending the motion. The first round of arguments is up and voting (and commenting) is open.
Radley was leading by a landslide this morning, but there has been a curious development. Reports Radley:
Interesting. Support from my side went from 85% to 46% in a little over three hours, during which no new arguments were posted. Wondering if a Baptist convention just let out.
The debaters will close their arguments on Wednesday, with the winner announced Friday. Please show your support for civil liberties and for Radley by voting.
Also, the Economist had a terrific special report on gambling last week. Their leader article made a good case for legalizing online gambling in America, but curiously (for a newspaper proudly associated with the free trade cause) did not mention the compelling trade-related reasons to allow Americans to gamble freely online.
As Massachusetts nears decision time on adopting national education standards, the Boston Herald takes state leaders to task for their support of the Common Core standards, which some analysts say are inferior to current state standards. But fear not, says Education Secretary Paul Reville. If the national standards are inferior, the Bay State can change them. “We will continue to be in the driver’s seat.”
If only national standardizers — many of whom truly want high standards and tough accountability — would look a little further than the ends of their beaks.
Here’s the reality: Massachusetts will not be in the drivers seat in the future. Indeed, states aren’t in the driver’s seat right now, because it is federal money that is steering the car, and many more DC ducats will likely be connected to national standards when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is eventually reauthorized. And this is hardly new or novel — the feds have forced “voluntary” compliance with its education dictates for decades by holding taxpayer dollars hostage.
With that in mind, let’s stop focusing on whether the Common Core standards right now are good, bad, or indifferent, and talk about their future prospects, which is what really matters. Oh, wait: Most national standardizers avoid that discussion like the plague because they know that the overwhelming odds are the standards will end up either dismal, or at best just unenforced. Why? Because the same political forces that have smushed centralized standards and accountability in almost every state — the teacher unions, administrator associations, self-serving politicians, etc. — will just do their dirty work at the federal rather than state level. Indeed, those groups will still be the most motivated and effectively organized to control education politics, but they will have the added benefit of one-stop shopping!
The tragic flaw in the thinking of many national-standards supporters is not the desire to create high bars for students to clear, but the utter delusion, or maybe just myopia, that allows them to assume that they will control the standards in a monopoly over which, by its very nature, they almost never hold the reins. It’s fantastical thinking that would actually be pitiable were it not for the fact that, to realize their delusional dreams, they have take us all down with them.
Elana Kagan has just sailed through the Senate Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote (except Lindsey Graham, of course, who maintained his respectable but — to my mind — overly deferential “elections have consequences” line). This vote comes as no surprise to anyone who’s been keeping half an eye on the Kagan nomination. The only senator whose position wasn’t obvious after the confirmation hearings was Arlen Specter, who continued his self-serving ways in criticizing the nominee for the majority of an op-ed before announcing that her approval for televised Supreme Court hearings and Thurgood Marshall constituted “just enough” to win his vote. (This is clearly an attempt to curry favor with the administration and become an envoy to Syria—call it a conversion on the road to Damascus.)
The statements made by those opposing Kagan show that this opposition is based not on petty partisanship or the politics of personal destruction but on principled concerns over the nominee’s being a rubberstamp for any assertion of congressional authority. Senator Hatch particularly stands out as someone who’s struggled with the choice before him and honorably decided that Elena Kagan was a bridge too far. Senator Coburn also continued the sound line of reasoning that led his “fruit-and-vegetable” questioning to be the highlight of the confirmation hearings.
Kagan is eminently qualified but it is not at all clear that she sees any constitutional limits on government power.
That would be the message if a bill introduced in Congress this week were to pass. H.R. 5777 is the “Building Effective Strategies To Promote Responsibility Accountability Choice Transparency Innovation Consumer Expectations and Safeguards Act” or the “BEST PRACTICES Act.” If acronyms were a basis for judging legislation, it should be widely hailed as a masterwork.
But its substance is concerning, to say the least. The bill’s scope is massive: Just about every person or business that systematically collects information would be subject to a new federal regulatory regime governing information practices. By systematic, I mean: If you get a lot of emails or run a website that collects IP addresses (and they all do), you’re governed by the bill.
There’s one exception to that: The bill specifically exempts the government. What chutzpah our government has to point the finger at us while its sprawling administrative data collection and surveillance infrastructure spiral out of control.
Reviewing the bill, I found it interesting to consider what you get when you take a variety of today’s information “best practices” and put them into law. Basically, you freeze in place how things work today. You radically simplify and channel all kinds of information practices that would otherwise multiply and variegate.
I spoke about this yesterday with CNet News’ Declan McCullagh:
Harper says it reminds him of James C. Scott’s book, “Seeing Like A State.” Governments and big corporations “radically simplify what they oversee to make it governable,” he said. “In things like forestry and agriculture, this has had devastating environmental effects because ecosystems don’t function when you eliminate the thousands of ‘illegible’ relationships and interactions. This is Seeing Like a State for the information economy.”
Give people remedies when they’re harmed by information practices, and then leave well enough alone. There’s no place for a list of “must-do’s” and “can’t-do’s” that choke our nascent information economy—especially not coming from a government that doesn’t practice what it preaches.
A major problem with America’s health care system, both before and after Obamacare, is the fact that consumers very rarely spend their own money when obtaining health care. Known as third-party payer, this problem exists in part because government directly finances almost 50 percent of health care expenditures. But even a majority of supposedly private health care spending is financed by employer-provided policies that are heavily distorted by a preference in the tax code that encourages insurance payments even for routine expenses. According to government data, only 12 percent of health care costs are financed directly by consumers. And since consumers almost always are buying health care with somebody else’s money, it should come as no surprise that this system results in rising costs and inefficiency. This is why repealing Obamacare is just the first step that is needed if policymakers genuinely want to restore a free market health care system (all of which is explained in this 4‑minute video).
Unfortunately, many people think that market forces don’t work in the health care system and that costs will always rise faster than prices for other goods and services. There are a few examples showing that this is not true, and proponents of liberalization usually cite cosmetic surgery and laser-eye surgery as examples of treatments that generally are financed by out-of-pocket payments. Not surprisingly, prices for these treatments have been quite stable — particularly when increases in quality are added to the equation.
I just ran across another example, and this one could be important since it may resonate with those who normally are very suspicious of free markets. As the chart from the Alan Guttmacher Institute shows, the price of an abortion has been remarkably stable over the past 20-plus years. Let’s connect the dots to make everything clear. Abortions generally are financed by out-of-pocket payments. People therefore have an incentive to shop carefully and get good value since they are spending their own money. And because market forces are allowed, the cost of abortions is stable. The logical conclusion to draw from this, of course, is that allowing market forces for other medical services will generate the same positive results in terms of cost and efficiency.
None of this analysis, by the way, implies that abortion is good or bad, or that it should be legal or illegal. The only lesson to be learned is that market forces control costs and promote efficiency and that more government spending and intervention exacerbate the third-party payer crisis.