As briefing continues in the Virginia and Florida (+ 19 other states) cases — next hearings will be in October and September, respectively — I wanted to highlight the filing of another serious lawsuit, which I’d mentioned previously in a roundup of legal action. Our friends at the Goldwater Institute have filed a challenge on behalf of a small-business owner, three congressmen (Reps. Jeff Flake, Trent Franks, and John Shadegg, all Republicans of Arizona), and 29 Arizona state legislators. This new lawsuit, known as Coons v. Geithner, argues that the federal health care bill exceeds Congress’s powers, violates individual rights, interferes with the authority of states, and violates the separation of powers by setting up a new bureaucracy without meaningful congressional oversight or judicial review. The legal team is led by experienced constitutional litigator Clint Bolick (whose excellent book David’s Hammer Cato published a few years ago). You can read the press release here, find out more about the lawsuit here, and download the complaint here.

A former Heritage Foundation colleague has returned to youtube​.com with a video asking taxpayers whether examples of government waste are true or false.

Over at Downsizing Government, we focused on the following issues this week:

• Central planners at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are “confounded” by tight sugar supplies. Hayek would be shocked.
• Department of Housing and Urban Development officials continue the agency’s legacy of engaging in politics.
• President Obama says he wants to “invest in our people without leaving them a mountain of debt.” Maybe he meant to say that he wants to “spend other people’s money and leave them with a mountain of debt”?
• Meet the privileged class: federal civilian employees.
• The federal government is a lucrative “industry.”

A Pew Internet and American Life poll out this week finds: “By a 53%-41% margin, Americans say they do not believe that the spread of affordable broadband should be a major government priority.” Non-Internet users are less likely than Internet users to say the government should prioritize spreading access to high-speed connections.

The federal government spent $7.2 billion in “stimulus” money on the premise that the federal government is supposed to do this kind of thing. And the Federal Communications Commission’s “National Broadband Plan” is premised on the idea that there is supposed to be a national broadband plan. It isn’t, and there’s not.

Much as I love using the Internet for work, entertainment, and social connection, I recognize that people can live perfectly happy lives without it. The invention and growth of the Internet should always be seen as having opened new avenues for people, not as having created a national communications medium in which participation is required to live a full life. Social engineers, stand down: people will use the Internet if they want it, and they won’t if they don’t.

Kudos to the Financial Times (subscription may be required) for figuring out what most other journalists and editorial writers haven’t seemed to grasp concerning Robert Gates’s economy initiative at the Pentagon.

[H]is aim is not to cut the overall budget radically; it is merely to achieve savings in the military bureaucracy and thus, against a background of broader fiscal constraint, protect spending on new weapons and other outlays. (my emphasis)

The reforms in and of themselves are “commendable,” the FT notes, but they don’t amount to very much in the grand scheme, and they therefore do not go nearly far enough. Indeed, as I and others have noted, U.S. military spending will continue to rise if Bob Gates gets his way. This isn’t good enough.

The FT editors agree:

The US needs a much more searching review of its military spending, one that aims to do more than merely curb its growth.

Anyone interested in a comprehensive proposal (three, actually) for substantially reducing U.S. military spending by revisiting the roles, responsibilities, and missions that are currently assigned to Gates’s department can find it here.

A front-page story in today’s New York Times begins:

Michael R. Bloomberg is a former Wall Street mogul with a passion for the rights of a private property owner.

The story is about the not-really-at-Ground-Zero mosque, of course.

Bloomberg has a passion for property rights — except when the property owner wants to allow smoking on his own property or just wants to keep the property he owns even if a richer person wants it.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R‑WI) ably defends his “Roadmap for America’s Future” in today’s Washington Post. He doesn’t mention Paul Krugman’s attacks thereon, nor should he. (To read why, consult The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle and Ted Gayer of the Tax Policy Center.)

I haven’t officially weighed in on the health-care aspects of the Roadmap, but hope to do so in the near future. For the moment, I’ll use Ryan’s oped to stress a distinction that is crucial to thinking clearly about health care costs.

Ryan writes of the dangers of an un-reformed Medicare program (emphasis added):

Under an ever-expansive, all-consuming central government, costs will be contained with Washington’s heavy hand imposing price controls, slashing benefits and arbitrarily rationing seniors’ care.

While those forms of government rationing may reduce spending, that’s not the same as reducing costs. On the contrary, those rationing measures may increase health care costs.

Suppose Medicare set its prices for hip and knee replacements so low that no medical-device manufacturer would provide the hardware and no surgeon would perform the procedures. Medicare spending on hip and knee replacements would fall. But costs may rise: more seniors would be walking around — or not walking around — in severe pain. Pain and reduced mobility are costs, even if they don’t show up in the federal budget or household budgets. (Indeed, those costs would be so severe that overall Medicare spending could rise as seniors bought more wheelchairs, sought treatment for pressure sores, etc.). This is the main reason conservatives criticize Canada’s Medicare system and the British National Health Service: reducing health care spending often increases costs.

I therefore request universal compliance with Cannon’s First Rule of Economic Literacy: Never say costs when you mean spending.