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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Howard Hyde</title>
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		<title>Post-Obamacare Reform</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/howard-hyde/post-obamacare-reform/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=post-obamacare-reform</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/howard-hyde/post-obamacare-reform/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Feb 2014 05:25:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[alternatives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Insurance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219219</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The time is overdue to get alternatives into the public consciousness.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/failure.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-219265" alt="failure" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/failure-450x268.jpg" width="450" height="268" /></a>For all of the daily noise about the latest casualties of the Obamacare train wreck (Senator and Obamacare author Max Baucus’ term), from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicting major long-term damage to employment markets to the President’s illegal delay of the black-letter provisions of the employer mandate, there is very little public discussion of what to do about all of it. The time is overdue to get alternatives into the public consciousness.</p>
<p>Obama and the Democrats love to say that Republicans never offered any alternatives to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.  They pretend to ignore the proposed Patient&#8217;s Choice Act of 2009, the Empowering Patients First Act of 2009, the Patient Option Act of 2013, the American Health Care Reform Act of 2013, and now the Burr-Coburn-Hatch plan, a.k.a the Patient Choice, Affordability, Responsibility, and Empowerment Act, a.k.a. the Patient CARE Act (PCA), to name a few. They get away with this feigned justifiable ignorance because they know that the dominant media will hardly give those proposals any ink, tweets or air time, even to let the public know that they exist.</p>
<p>There are plenty of options for healthcare reform besides the ACA, as even Obama tacitly acknowledges every time he issues another royal decree in contradiction to the law’s (rare moments of) plain, unambiguous language; and we will have to discuss them in order to repair the damage left behind by this law and renew the world’s best medical system. Let’s first take a look at what is perhaps more important than the individual proposals themselves: the principles upon which reform should be based.</p>
<p><b>Principle Number One: Incremental (as opposed to comprehensive, all-or-nothing, take-it-or-leave-it) reform</b>. Each policy should be a net positive in and of itself, a move in the right direction rather than a costly kludge that has to be offset somewhere else in the tangled web of taxes, fees, accounting gimmicks and legalese.</p>
<p>One of the biggest problems with Obamacare, as with the immigration reform and too many other bills besides, is their sheer size and scope. No one can read it apart from a handful of unaccountable ‘experts’ to whom we are supposed to surrender our common sense, our money and our liberty. We’re still learning, four years later, what’s in the Obamacare ‘law’.  And then when we do look at individual elements, whether actually in the law or made up after the fact, they are almost all negative: taxes, penalties, prohibitions, exemptions, delays, arbitrary and capricious power granted to unaccountable officers and boards, cost shifting (or it is SHAFTing?) to those least able to protect their interests by hiring lobbyists.</p>
<p>An important aspect of the policy proposals that I list below is that each of them can be taken on its own as a stand-alone bill, to be proposed, debated in the light of day, and voted up or down more or less independently of the others. If one seems less important or less urgent than others, we don’t have to get bogged down; we can come back to it later while we pass the low-hanging fruit. Let the political horse-trading be expressed by the ordering and prioritizing of policies in separate bills, rather than in Cornhusker Kickbacks buried in the omnibus bill cooked in the smoke-filled back room.</p>
<p><b>Principle Number Two: Empower consumers, patients, families, physicians, insurance companies, counties and states &#8212; in that order &#8212; not the federal government and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).</b> At this point in our big-government evolution, solutions consist largely of divesting power from Washington and returning it as far as possible to the individual citizen.</p>
<p><b>Principle Number Three</b>: <b>Free markets. </b>Private property and limited interference from government results in the best products at the lowest prices for the largest number of people. Think iPhone; apply to health care. We need a market environment for healthcare that is just as free and dynamic and innovative as that for computers and orange juice and mutual funds and automobiles and beer. Consider that the reason we have such contention over immigration policy is that America, because of Capitalism, has become the most attractive place in the world for people to live and work. The US healthcare system, for all its warts, was until 2010 the best in the world because it was the freest.</p>
<p><b>Principle Number Four</b>: <b>Use the ‘Bush/Romney Standard’</b>: That is, we should not give any powers to Barack or Bill or Hillary that we wouldn’t be equally eager to give to President Bush or President Romney, to say nothing of President Cruz. You wouldn’t let them raid Medicare to the tune of $760 billion or make the rules up as they go along.</p>
<p>Discretionary powers should be clearly and explicitly enumerated, and those not so enumerated must be assumed not to exist; in other words to require the legislation and/or approval of the people’s representatives in Congress.</p>
<p><b>Principle Number Five: Get out of the way of the unmatched generosity of the American people to help each other.</b></p>
<p>Private, voluntary charity is not a failure; it is a blessing to be honored and cultivated. Americans donate more of their time, talent and treasure than any other nation, through their churches, synagogues, non-profits and other voluntary organizations. They serve the poor and the disadvantaged that they know personally, without need for nor interference from bureaucratic codes and protocols. They do this without demanding salaries, benefits, job security and unfunded defined-benefit pensions that are demanded by our public employee unions who run our government programs.  Voluntary giving is many times more effective and efficient than government-run poor relief and creates no burden on the economy or public finances. It is an important and integral part of the solution for which we make no apologies.</p>
<p><b>Principle Number Six</b>: <b>Envy is not a principle</b>.</p>
<p>With these principles in mind then, the specific policy proposals include but are not limited to the following:</p>
<p><b>Promote competition </b>among insurance companies across state lines without interference or dictation from state insurance commissioners. If we can buy oranges from Florida, mutual funds from Tokyo and wine from France we should be able to buy financial products like insurance from whomever gives us the best deal. As I have written before, those products are relatively freely sold in highly competitive markets across not just state lines but national borders. Health insurance, on the other hand, for decades prior to Obamacare, has been sold in severely and increasingly constrained markets, dictated to by 50 different state insurance commissioners, each with his own favorite list of mandatory coverage provisions. Competition and innovation have been crushed under the jackboot of bureaucracy and compliance. Patient-consumer choice has been reduced. If any plans are &#8220;sub-standard&#8221;, &#8220;lousy&#8221;, “cut-rate” or &#8220;bottom-feeding&#8221;, as Obama and his supporters like to say, that’s why.</p>
<p>In a truly free market, many more people than today would be able to find a plan that works for them at the intersection of their needs and their means, with consumer reports, reviews on social media and word-of-mouth from friends and family members to guide them. Companies that offer products and services in free markets live and die by their reputations. In the era of Facebook and Twitter, no insurance company could survive if a significant number of its customers assessed its products and services as &#8220;sub-standard&#8221;, &#8220;lousy&#8221;, or &#8220;bottom-feeding&#8221;. We need competition, not control, to bend the cost curve downward.</p>
<p><b>Eliminate the mandates </b>and let consumers negotiate with insurance companies for the features they consider essential (or not).<b> </b></p>
<p>In particular, re-open the market permanently to low-premium, high-deductible catastrophic coverage plans which are the baseline standard for all true &#8216;insurance&#8217;.</p>
<p>Not everyone needs coverage for maternity services, contraception, fertility treatments, quitting smoking, acupuncture, hair plugs, chiropractic, naturopathy or massage therapy. But by mandating these services and more, regulation drives up the cost of plans unnecessarily while potentially denying consumers access to things they need and want more urgently, like better customer service, lower prices, coverage for other conditions not mentioned in Obamacare or greater catastrophic coverage – or just more insurance companies willing and able to participate in the market.</p>
<p>Mandates are a dead weight on the economy, causing costs to rise unnecessarily, making us all (especially us 99%) poorer.  In 2012, the 6 most expensive states (average family premium per enrolled employee for employer-based health insurance) had premiums on average 28% higher than the 6 least expensive states ($17,167 vs. $13,387) and 43% more mandates (48 vs. 34) [Sources: Kaiser Family Foundation and Council for Affordable Health Insurance].</p>
<p>If the consumers want something covered, they will demand it anyway by their buying and not buying, preferring the offerings of one company and plan over those of others. If consumers don’t want it, it’s an extra unnecessary expense, no different economically or in terms of moral hazard than compelling non-smokers to buy cigarettes; might as well smoke ‘em if they’re ‘free’. Either way, the army of bureaucrats needed to enforce the mandate, with their guaranteed salaries, iron-clad job security and (unfunded) defined-benefit pension plans – not to mention health care – must be paid for somehow (hello taxpayer and grandchildren). Mandates are taxes dishonestly imposed. We should have no taxation without honest representation.</p>
<p><b>Repeal the medical device tax</b>, the Medicare tax, the new 2014 tax on small-business and individual-market health insurance premiums and all the other taxes that only serve to destroy innovation and make healthcare more expensive to everyone now and forever.</p>
<p><b>Promote Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and Flexible Spending Accounts(FSAs).</b> These help people pay for medical expenses with pretax dollars and encourage people to spend health care $$ wisely.</p>
<p>No one spends other people’s money more wisely than they spend their own.  The cost curve will be bent downward to the degree that resources and decision-making power are pushed back to the people to whom it makes the greatest personal difference.</p>
<p><b>Reform the tort liability legal casino</b> so that doctors don&#8217;t have to spend a hundred thousand dollars apiece fighting frivolous lawsuits (which 90% of malpractice suits are found to be). Doctors should only order costly and/or hazardous tests if they are in the patient’s best interest, not because they need to triple-cover their own legal backsides.</p>
<p>Texas put a cap of $250,000 on non-economic damages in 2003 and reduced the number of cases by over 80%, and the number of physicians attracted to practice in the state increased 18% in four years.</p>
<p>Implementing ‘loser-pays’ laws, in which any plaintiff filing a claim found to be baseless must pay the legal costs of the defendant, would bring restraint to this out-of-control arena of legalized extortion.</p>
<p><b>Make all health plans and medical expenses tax-deductible from the first dollar</b>. Level the playing field between individuals and employers, because World War II is over and we thought we won.</p>
<p>Our current model of employer-provided health insurance dates from WWII when wage and price controls led employers to resort to non-wage benefits to attract workers (now where’s a great law like that when we need one? – MAXimum wage laws!). There is no moral or economic justification for letting one group of Americans deduct medical expenses from taxable income and others not.</p>
<p><b>Allow physicians to take a tax deduction or credit for services rendered pro bono</b> (serving the poor and/or uninsured), without micromanaging their work. If we want the poor to be served, encourage it.</p>
<p><b>Eliminate government subsidies</b> for unhealthy products like sugar, corn syrup and tobacco (yes, you read that right; in spite of all the government anti-smoking campaigns, tobacco growers received $1.3 billion in subsidies between 1995 and 2011).</p>
<p><b>Abolish the IPAB</b>. This is the Independent Payment Advisory Board, created by the ACA. Its members are as unaccountable as members of the Fed – the Federal Reserve Banking system – and all they can do is issues price control edicts and deny care.  There’s a reason they are called the ‘death panel’.</p>
<p><b>Reform Medicaid</b> according to the terms of its own mission.</p>
<p>If you ask the average intelligent Joe what Obamacare was supposed to accomplish, he might reasonably answer, provide health coverage for the very poor, uninsured and uninsurable. Well guess what? That’s what Medicaid was supposed to do! Only problem is, it’s a failure. A recent study demonstrated that people with no insurance at all had better health outcomes than those covered by Medicaid.  If we insist upon helping the poor through a federal government program, then let’s fix the program that has been targeted at the poor for almost 50 years.</p>
<p>Medicaid does best in the states where it is block-granted rather than micromanaged by the Feds. And States that take the money and buy insurance for the poor do even better.</p>
<p>Finally, <b>Honor the Medical License</b>.</p>
<p>There is a reason we confer licenses of different degrees of authority and responsibility upon people who have dedicated decades of their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to medical education, training, internships, residencies and professional practices.  In economic terms, it is a cost saving mechanism. We do it precisely because no matter how well the website works or how brilliant our genius leaders in Washington and their cadre of lawyers are, there is no way that they can know everything about medicine and every patient in the country. We need trained professionals that we can trust to make the correct judgments in the field better than anyone else possibly can, regardless of what the computers and MBA’s flowcharts say.</p>
<p>The Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman was opposed to government licensure of physicians.  Most physicians and many right-thinking people consider that view to be ludicrous; of course we need a recognition of the highest levels of professionalism; otherwise, who will protect us from charlatans and quacks? But the  government seems increasingly uninterested in using licensure as a way of delegating and trusting, and more as a sucker’s game; a means to controlling, micromanaging and manipulating. It&#8217;s about power, not about doing the right thing.</p>
<p>Traditionally in America, doctors have been self-employed, running their own practices and referring within a circle of reputable colleagues.  But the overwhelming trend now is herding the majority of doctors into employee roles at big hospital corporations and Accountable Care Organizations or ACOs (anyone on the anti-corporate Left paying attention?). A provision of the ACA actually prohibits doctors from pooling their resources to be owner-investors in new hospitals. Lawyers and hedge-fund managers are welcome, but physicians need not apply.</p>
<p>In other words, those with the most knowledge of medicine in general and their own patients in particular are being stripped of their power by those with the most ambition and the most Harvard Law degrees.  This is not an improvement for the American health care system or for patients.</p>
<p>We must eliminate the mandates that require doctors to suppress their own professional experience and judgment to comply with cookie-cutter protocols, Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) and codes dictated by Washington bureaucrats who are without any medical training or knowledge of the individual patient.</p>
<p>Right now as you are reading this, individual doctors and patients, churches, citizens, foundations and insurance companies are finding the solutions all across this great country of ours.  That is the solution, not Washington D.C.</p>
<p><b>Conclusion</b></p>
<p>Obamacare is  now a dead letter.  If its 2,700 pages of ‘law’ and 20,000 pages of regulation do not mean what they say but only what Obama or Sibelius say that they say depending upon their transient mood and the shifting political winds of the moment, then it means nothing and doesn’t even have to be formally repealed in order to be gotten past. We can ignore it and move on. The task for us, citizens and our representatives, is to construct an alternative system, one brick at a time, major priorities early, improving with each increment, without Rube Goldberg contradictory constructions, violations of the sovereignty of the individual and of the patient-doctor relationship, or massive and dangerous concentration of centralized power. The greatest health care system the world has ever known can yet be greater than it ever was.</p>
<p>It begins with We the People. It begins with liberty.</p>
<p><strong>Howard Hyde is author of ‘<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939">Pull the Plug on Obamacare</a>’, available in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-ebook/dp/B00BNXX4F6">Kindle</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939">paperback</a> editions from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939">Amazon.com</a>. He edits the website <a href="http://www.hhcapitalism.com/">www.hhcapitalism.com</a>. Email: <a href="mailto:HHCapitalism@gmail.com">HHCapitalism@gmail.com. </a>Follow on Twitter: @HowardHyde.</strong></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>The Unaffordable Mandate Act</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-hyde/the-unaffordable-mandate-act/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-unaffordable-mandate-act</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-hyde/the-unaffordable-mandate-act/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 10 Dec 2013 05:10:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[choice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[health plan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212671</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The key word is choice.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/obamacare99.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-212674" alt="obamacare99" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/obamacare99-450x337.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a>&#8220;If you like your (sub-standard, lousy, bottom-feeding) health plan, you can keep it, period. No matter what. Unless it changed. Unless we change the rules. Unless you can&#8217;t.&#8221;</p>
<p>Right. We all heard that loud and clear, twenty-how-many times in 2009 and 2010. Those Republicans (and non-political citizens, and union members&#8230;and Democrats) who are shocked by the millions of policy cancellations forcing people into dysfunctional government exchanges need to just get over their misunderstanding of the president’s unequivocal words (no doubt taken out of context) and talk about the real issue. What really matters is how sub-standard, lousy and bottom-feeding the old plans were and how much better the plans offered on the exchanges are… going to be, once a few minor bugs are ironed out of the crony outsourced half-billion-dollar no-bid dot-com/dot-gov product.</p>
<p>Stage-4 cancer patient Edie Sundby, whose United Healthcare plan has paid over $1 million without hassle but which has now been cancelled due to non-compliance with the ACA, leaving her without recourse to continue treatment from the three medical centers in two states that have kept her alive for the past seven years, might disagree. So might millions of others.</p>
<p>But let’s take them at their words: &#8220;Sub-standard&#8221;, &#8220;lousy&#8221;, &#8220;bottom-feeding&#8221;. Are they talking about iPhones? Toyotas? Oranges? Mutual funds? French Wine? No, these products are relatively freely sold in highly competitive markets across not just state lines but national borders. Nokia (Finland) has to be better at making cell phones than Apple (California) or it will lose customers and could get acquired by Microsoft (oh, wait &#8212; that really did happen). Florida oranges dominate the juice market, even in California. French wine makers cannot rest on their laurels in a world market that includes California.</p>
<p>Health insurance, on the other hand, for decades prior to Obamacare, has been offered in severely and increasingly constrained markets, forced to comply with the dicates of 50 different state insurance commissioners, each with their own favored list of mandatory coverage provisions. Competition is limited; bureacracy and compliance are king. Patient/consumer choice is reduced. If any plans are &#8220;sub-standard&#8221;, &#8220;lousy&#8221;, or &#8220;bottom-feeding&#8221;, that’s the reason why; serving regulators is not the same thing as serving customers.</p>
<p>Not everyone needs or wants pre-paid maternity services, contraception, fertility treatments, quitting smoking, acupuncture, chiropractic, naturopathy or massage therapy. The top priority of insurance has always been and of necessity must be: protection against health and financial catastrophe, something that Obamacare is rapidly banishing from the market. Hair plugs don&#8217;t qualify for that definition (I know I&#8217;ll get hate mail for that).</p>
<p>People who want additional non-catastrophic services could have the choice to pay for them directly without having their costs added to their insurance premiums. But by mandating these services and more, state insurance commissioners and now Obamacare drive up the cost of plans unnecessarily while potentially denying consumers access to things they need and want more urgently, like better customer service, lower prices, more choices of doctors – or just more insurance companies willing and able to participate in the market and compete for the patient/consumer’s dollar.</p>
<p>The key word is choice.  Mandates are the choice killer that drive competitors out of the market.</p>
<p>Mandates, whether pre- or post-Obamacare are a dead weight on the economy, forcing costs to rise unnecessarily, making us all (especially us 99%) poorer.  In 2012, the 6 most expensive states (average family premium per enrolled employee for employer-based health insurance) had premiums on average 28% higher than the 6 least expensive states ($17,167 vs. $13,387) and 43% more mandates (48 vs. 34) [Sources: Kaiser Family Foundation and Council for Affordable Health Insurance].</p>
<p>In a free market, if the consumers want the coverage, they will demand it anyway and the mandate is superfluous except to enable the rooster (government) to take credit for the sunrise. If consumers don’t want it, it’s an extra unnecessary expense, no different economically or in terms of moral hazard than compelling non-smokers to buy cigarettes; might as well smoke ‘em if they’re ‘free’. Either way, the army of bureaucrats needed to enforce the mandates, with their guaranteed salaries, iron-clad job security and (unfunded) defined-benefit pension plans – not to mention health care – must be paid for somehow (hello taxpayer and grandchildren). Mandates are just one more way that politicians can pretend to be Santa Claus to some, buying votes along the way, while imposing hidden costs on the less well-organized and connected.</p>
<p>In a free market, instead of having just a handful of insurance companies and plans available, toeing the line to the extensive rules and regulations of the particular state government, consumers would be able to choose among dozens of providers from any state in the union. And for that matter, from any nation on Earth: insurance is a <i>financial</i> product, and the British, Japanese, Singaporeans and Swiss are rumored to have some financial skills. Many more people than today would be able to find a plan that works for them at the intersection of their needs and their means, with consumer reports, reviews in traditional and social media, and word-of-mouth from friends and family members to guide them. Insurance companies, operating under uniform and stable rule of law and under no mandates other than what consumers demand, with neither subsidies nor presumptions of guilt, like companies in any other industry competing in open markets, live and die by their reputations. In the era of Facebook and Twitter, no insurance company could survive if a significant number of its customers assessed its products and services as &#8220;sub-standard&#8221;, &#8220;lousy&#8221;, or &#8220;bottom-feeding&#8221;, unless it operated within a government-protected so-called “exchange”.</p>
<p>Which is why real reform that actually has the chance of bending the cost curve downward for consumers must increase competition among a multitude of providers, nationally and internationally, rather than herding wholesale swaths of the population into increasingly restrictive regulatory corals at Healthcare.gov.</p>
<p>The President’s and his supporter’s sales pitch seems to have shifted to “If you like your health plan, you can change the subject.” But harping on the failings of the status quo ante is an indictment of government intervention, not of free-market capitalism.  We’re going to have to move in the direction of the latter if we ever hope to achieve anything super-standard, un-lousy or top-feeding.</p>
<p><em>Howard Hyde is author of ‘<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939">Pull the Plug on Obamacare</a>’, available on Amazon.com in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939">Paperback</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-ebook/dp/B00BNXX4F6">Kindle</a> editions.  He is editor of the website <a href="http://www.hhcapitalism.com/">www.HHCapitalism.com</a>. He may be reached at <a href="mailto:HHCapitalism@gmail.com">HHCapitalism@gmail.com</a>, and/or follow on Twitter @HowardHyde.</em></p>
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		<title>Why Is the Pay So Lousy?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-hyde/why-is-the-pay-so-lousy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-is-the-pay-so-lousy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-hyde/why-is-the-pay-so-lousy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 12 Nov 2013 04:10:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pay]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wages]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=210241</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The make-or-break elements of a prosperous economy.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/small-wages.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-210247" alt="small-wages" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/small-wages-450x279.jpg" width="315" height="195" /></a>Even if you’re lucky enough to have a job in the Sarbanes-Oxley-Dodd-Frank-Bernanke-Sebelius-Obamacare economy, and even if you’ve beaten the 31-year record and are still part of the 62.8% of American adults who are working even though job creation in October was less than the increase in the adult population (204,000 vs. 213,000), and even if your weekly hours haven’t been cut to 29 or your health plan outlawed because it was, in the words of New Jersey Congressman Frank Pallone, &#8220;lousy,&#8221; you still might be wondering what happened to your raise.</p>
<p>I have some bad news.  You don’t get paid much more because of how difficult your back-breaking labor is. You don’t get a raise because you’re so much smarter than everyone else in the world. You don’t see an increase in your wealth just because you have an Ivy League degree.</p>
<p>You get paid more because of the quantity and quality of accumulated capital that is invested in your work.</p>
<p>Let’s take a step back for a moment. When we talk about pay, we really mean the stuff – food, clothing, shelter, Newcastle Brown Ale, iPhones, superbowl tickets – that the wages that you receive can buy.  It is futile to earn more money if the value of the money is collapsing due to inflation (that is, the price of everything is going up faster than your wages), or less stuff is being produced, leading to higher prices for everything that is still being produced. You could earn a billion deutschmarks an hour, but if that amount of money will only buy a single egg, as it did at one point during the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany in 1923, then you’re not rich. If, on the other hand, entrepreneurial capitalism, with its division of labor, improvements in technology and automation and visionary leadership, is having the result that less labor is required in almost every industry to produce stuff than what was required before, then prices of stuff that wage earners buy will fall relative to the wages they receive.  At the end of the day, it’s not rising wages that counts so much as <i>the falling prices of the stuff people buy with their wages</i>.</p>
<p>If you take almost any professional, whether a plumber, a gardener, a computer programmer or a doctor, and transplant him or her from an advanced country like the United States to work in a second-tier or Third-World country, that professional will earn less than – perhaps only a fraction of – the pay he or she earned in the First World. In some cases, the relative loss of income may be offset by some elements of a lower cost of living, but that effect is limited; ultimately the material quality of life will be much lower.</p>
<p>Why is that?  The professional is just as smart in Mexico or Rwanda as (s)he was in Germany or Singapore. But (s)he has less capital to work with. Just as a worker with a bulldozer is more productive than a worker with a shovel, all professionals depend on a developed infrastructure, state-of-the-art machinery, computers, technological instruments, information and transportation systems, communications networks and more to get their work done in the most productive way. Every worker in the First World sits on top of a gold mine of capital accumulated from prior generations, which he or she had no hand in building, to make his or her work that much more productive and valuable.</p>
<p>The capital that undergirds the economy takes many forms, from the obvious and tangible assets of land, factories and machines, to the less-obvious and intangible ones of management methodologies, technological processes and know-how, advanced and uncorrupted legal systems and private property rights.</p>
<p>Those last two are the make-or-break elements of a prosperous economy. Because if private property is not respected and defended, and/or if contracts are not enforced, and/or if the justice, tax and/or regulatory systems are corrupt, capricious and arbitrary, then the formation and deployment of capital will be retarded or destroyed no matter how many physical and intellectual resources are available. If you don’t believe this American on this point, ask the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, author of &#8220;The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else,&#8221; who documented all of the &#8220;dead&#8221; capital that exists in the Third World, due to the lack of a system of recognition of ownership, in order to unleash its power to create wealth for all.</p>
<p>This point cannot be stressed enough: Physical assets like coal, oil, gas, timber, minerals etc. are worthless without a system of private property and prices in which unarmed, unprivileged and unpersecuted non-government entrepreneurs, large- and small-scale, may operate.  The world is full of resource-rich countries, from Mexico to Nigeria and from Venezuela to Russia, which pathetically under-perform other nations like Japan, Switzerland and Singapore, which have no such endowments but which have well-developed legal systems of private property recognition and contract enforcement.  Russia, with its 13 time zones and vast natural resources, has a per-capital standard of living that ranks roughly 50<sup>th</sup> in the world.</p>
<p>So if you are not seeing an improvement in the purchasing power of your wages or the material standard of living over time, and the same thing is happening to millions of people just like you (a.k.a. your cohort), and there isn’t a major war on, chances are that intangible capital is faltering. And that in turn is probably due to attitudes and policies promulgated by politicians complaining that the &#8220;rich&#8221; aren’t paying their fair share of taxes, closing off natural resources to development, and slapping so much regulation on businesses that they spend ever more time and energy on compliance instead of innovation, effectively working for the government instead of for their customers. That has been the trend in the United States since 2001 with Sarbanes-Oxley, accelerating since 2009 with Dodd-Frank and the Pelosi-Reid regulatory apparatus.  Obamacare, with its effective abolition of voluntary cooperation between employers, employees, patients, doctors and insurance companies, is the single most destructive factor in this picture today.</p>
<p>High and rising wages depend on the quantity and quality of liberated capital invested in the labor. Whether you are a banker or a tree surgeon (and when I say banker I mean it in the traditional sense of a trusted conservative steward of customers’ money as opposed to a politically-connected financial manipulator), the respect and defense of capital and private property matters to you, and you need to participate actively in the civic society for the furtherance of that respect and defense.</p>
<p><em>Howard Hyde is author of &#8220;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939">Pull the Plug on Obamacare</a>,&#8221; available in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-ebook/dp/B00BNXX4F6">Kindle</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939">paperback</a> editions from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939">Amazon.com</a>. He edits the website <a href="http://www.hhcapitalism.com/">www.hhcapitalism.com</a>. Email: <a href="mailto:HHCapitalism@gmail.com">HHCapitalism@gmail.com.</a> Follow on Twitter: @HowardHyde.</em></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Health Care Solutions: Patients in Command</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-hyde/health-care-solutions-patients-in-command/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=health-care-solutions-patients-in-command</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 21 Aug 2013 04:15:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[expensive]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health Care]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[patients]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=201205</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What if America truly had a free medical market? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/doctor_visit.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-201255" alt="10018 Medicine, Lackner, ECMC" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/doctor_visit.jpg" width="279" height="211" /></a>In a scene from the movie &#8220;Monty Python’s Meaning of Life,&#8221; a pregnant woman in labor is seen being wheeled down hospital corridors at freeway speeds, with the bumpers of the gurney crashing through swinging fire doors inches from the top of her head until the delivery room is reached, where an excess of necessary and unnecessary equipment momentarily obscures the location of the patient. While the doctors and nurses prep for the procedure, a crowd of ostensibly qualified strangers (but not the patient’s husband) are invited to observe from a strategic viewpoint. The woman asks, “what do I do?” to which John Cleese’s doctor replies “Nothing darling, you’re NOT QUALIFIED!”</p>
<p>Which is about how our discussions of the controversies of health care reform, health management, Accountable Care Organizations, Scope of Practice Expansion, etc. go.  The patient is rarely consulted for an opinion, much less approval.</p>
<p>And why should patients be consulted?  They’re not experts, like doctors and nurses, or more to the point, like the MBAs, executives and employees of federal departments who exercise the power. Even more to the point, the patients aren’t the ones paying, at least not directly.</p>
<p>American patient-consumers are not permitted to control how their insurance premium dollars and medical expenditures are spent without interference from government.  There is one set of (tax) rules for employees who may get a health plan through an employer, and another set of rules for people purchasing plans individually. With few exceptions, Americans who are not in an employer/employee relationship are not at liberty to freely associate under the First Ammendment for purposes of creating health insurance pools.  Farmers, ranchers and other self-employed individuals are forced to fend for themselves alone.</p>
<p>Unlike the normal rules of freedom of commerce whereby any American may buy or sell from or to anyone in any state or country, in health insurance there is one elaborate and rigid set of rules for Californians, another set for New Yorkers, another for Mississippians and so on. Consumers and medical insurance companies are not free to negotiate on mutally agreeable terms as they are (relatively) with auto, home, earthquake, fire or flood insurance. In essence, the consumer’s money is not his or her own but the government’s, to be directed as the elected representatives and unelected administrators and czars determine.</p>
<p>Is it any mystery, then, that costs are out of control and billing patterns and practices are irrational, even diabolical?  The people who have the greatest stake in the game – the patients – are hardly consulted in how much they are willing and able to spend on what.</p>
<p>Most of us, if presented with a choice of a BMW 740iL luxury performance sedan or a KIA Forte, would prefer the BMW. But not all of us can afford a BMW, while the KIA is perfectly adequate for getting from Point A to Point B. How many BMWs and KIAs get produced and sold, and to whom, depends upon the resources and preferences of millions of individuals acting on their own account and commanding their own resources, which, at least in the West and to the degree that the free market is permitted to function, are substantial. There is no runaway inflation or gross imbalances of supply and demand of automobiles, bicycles, flat-screen TVs, personal computing devices, clothing or a thousand other products and categories where the footprint of government, regulation and taxation treads relatively lightly. People of the most modest means today have a cornucopia of products and services from around the world available to them at affordable prices, thanks to capitalism. No king, or emperor, or even secretary general of the Supreme Soviet ever enjoyed such abundance even 50 years ago.</p>
<p>What if there existed in the USA a truly free market in health insurance and and health care services, that is, what if the government did not interfere in favoring and then dis-favoring employer-provided insurance? What if the government did not mandate what benefits had to be included in insurance plans; did not interfere with interstate commerce in financial products, thereby limiting consumer choices; did not monopolize medical residencies through Medicare and Congress (number of residencies frozen since 1997 in spite of growth and need for more doctors); did not monopolize medical services to the elderly and then cut reimbursements to a level that makes it a losing proposition to many doctors to accept Medicare patients; did not deliberately put Health Savings Accounts and Flexible Spending Accounts at a disadvantage relative to Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) and Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs); and a thousand other interventions, prohibitions, taxes, favoritism, prejudices, fines, penalties and taxes? Then patients and their families would be in far greater command of their own resources and of those being spent on their behalf. Then they, through their choosing and rejecting, spending and withholding, could sort out which of the brilliant ideas of the experts truly have merit, which are nice tries and which are losers.  They could and would determine whether mid-level providers may substitute for fully-licensed physicians in the operating room, and whether compliance with evidence-based protocols enforced by bureaucrats and computers or hard-earned professional experience and judgment should govern physician behavior. They will fine-tune to what degrees medicine is a scientific discipline, a production process to be administered, or an art.</p>
<p>The mess that we are in with Medicare (looted), Medicaid (failed; statistically better to have no insurance at all than to be enrolled) and now Obamacare (train wreck, according to one of its prominent sponsors) underscores the perils of &#8220;solving problems&#8221; instead of pursuing opportunities. Controlling costs by denying treatments and steering patients away from the most trained and qualified professionals, rationing, death panels, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) etc. all &#8220;solve problems.&#8221; On the other hand, our dedicated physicians, nurses, specialists, pharmaceutical research, and medical art, science, creativity and innovation, along with patients in command of the resources that are to be spent on their behalf, are our opportunities.  Freedom, voluntary cooperation, liberty of contract and the generosity of American neighbors and friends – unmatched anywhere in the world – are our opportunities. If we Americans will pursue those, we will once again pull ahead in our lead as the world’s foremost medical innovator and most responsive to the needs of the patient, as we have been for at least 50 years.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Sen. Feinstein: Big Brother Knows Best</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-hyde/eat-it-its-good-for-you-says-big-brother-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=eat-it-its-good-for-you-says-big-brother-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Jul 2013 04:04:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Affordable Care Act]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Diane Feinstein]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=195239</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The lawmaker's delusional response to a "Repeal Obamacare" petition.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/SenFeinstein.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-195242" alt="SenFeinstein" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/SenFeinstein-450x337.png" width="315" height="236" /></a>Pity the poor citizen of a totalitarian country who appeals to his government for redress of a grievance. The act of challenging the wisdom of those in power by signing a petition has frequently resulted in secret police kicking down doors in the middle of the night to haul the hapless sap off to Siberia or worse.</p>
<p>Thank God that can’t happen in this country (yet). The worst that can happen to you for opening your mouth here is to have your intelligence insulted by a form letter from your senator. Savor this excerpt from Diane Feinstein:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>Thank you for contacting me to express your support for repealing the recent health reform law. I appreciate hearing from you and welcome the opportunity to respond.</i></p>
<p><i>In 2010, President Obama signed health reform legislation known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law. The ACA will help drive down health care costs for families, reduce the federal deficit, and take significant steps toward ensuring Americans have access to affordable insurance options regardless of their income level or health status. I support the ACA … The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly analyzed the fiscal impacts of the Affordable Care Act and found each time that the Affordable Care Act will save the federal government more than $100 billion over a ten year period.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>One wonders how long it has been since this form letter was last edited. We understand why she doesn’t mention Senator Max Baucus’s comments about the coming “train wreck.” Maybe that’s in <i>his</i> form letter. Does Harry Reid’s form letter state emphatically that Senators and Congresspersons are not exempt from the Obamacare exchanges and in fact can’t wait to sign up?</p>
<p>Usually when a for-profit company tries to sell me something, like a car, a refrigerator or or satelite TV service, I can expect to have a choice to buy or not to buy from the company or its competitors, maybe even a ‘no obligation free trial’ for 30 days. But Obama and Ms. Feinstein are making us an offer we can’t refuse, attempting to sweeten it with claims which few people outside of marijuana-obsessed California (three of four propositions on the recent ballot dealt with regulation of pot) believe anymore. Who, Left or Right, still believes that the most massive expansion ever attempted of one failed entitlement program (Medicaid, which as it turns out is worse for its clients than no insurance at all) funded in large part by cannibalizing another bankrupt entitlement program ($716 billion from Medicare) will reduce the federal deficit while providing never-before-seen benefits to 50 million people? The same CBO that Senator Feinstein cites to bolster her case has found that ten years from now, we may expect that 30 million people in the USA will still be without health insurance. Smashing success.</p>
<p>The senator continues:</p>
<blockquote><p>The Supreme Court, in a majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, found that the Act&#8217;s centerpiece requirement to purchase health insurance or face a financial penalty is constitutional as an exercise of Congress&#8217; power to use tax laws to influence individual behavior. As the Chief Justice said, such uses of the tax code &#8220;are nothing new&#8221; and would include provisions that encourage people to quit smoking or to be more energy efficient[.]</p></blockquote>
<p>She does have a talent for rubbing our conservative noses in our own dirt by reminding us that the deciding vote for upholding the PPACA came from a Bush appointee to the Supreme Court. That was painful enough.  But she goes a step further, claiming constitutional sanction for social engineering: “an exercise of Congress&#8217; power to use tax laws to influence individual behavior… include provisions that encourage people to quit smoking or to be more energy efficient.” Really? When did paying for the necessary and proper expenses of government expand to saving us from ourselves, via tobacco, killer lightbulbs and Big Gulp sodas?</p>
<p>Energy efficient? Energy costs money; energy is money. Yet our overlords believe we cannot be trusted even to be efficient with our own money, as if we could spend as much as we want with no consequence to ourselves individually, but with disastrous consequences collectively, and therefore the government must intervene. Who is more likely to spends as if there’s no tomorrow, individuals spending their own money or government spending other people’s?</p>
<p>But we still don’t live in a totalitarian state, right? The targeting of conservative and Tea-Party/Patriot groups was the work of a few rogue agents in a provincial office. No cause for alarm? Try this: try opting out. Try NOT participating in the Obamacare exchanges. Try not paying your income taxes, the taxes on your medical devices (still in force despite a symbolic Senate vote including 33 Democrats for repeal), or the hospital insurance portion of the payroll tax. See how long it takes before you face men with guns, having no gun of your own with which to hold them off.</p>
<p>We are losing our constitutional liberties and heading toward Big-Brother totalitarianism at a faster rate than at any time in the history of the United States of America, for the sake of social programs that are rammed down our throats on fraudulent premises and which can never fulfill their marketed promises. The good news is that citizens are waking up and Democrat sponsors are running for the exits. But it won’t be over until form letters like this one are universally recognized as a grotesque joke from a sicko period in our (ash heap of) history.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Confronting Pelosi’s Obamacare Propaganda &#8216;Toolkit&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-hyde/confronting-pelosis-obamacare-propaganda-toolkit/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=confronting-pelosis-obamacare-propaganda-toolkit</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 04 Jun 2013 04:49:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[choice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Pelosi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tool kit]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=191831</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The more Americans learn about the law, the more they hate it. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/pelosi.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-191835" alt="pelosi" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/pelosi.jpg" width="299" height="225" /></a>Nancy Pelosi, Democratic congresswoman and House Minority Leader, has published a 78-page &#8220;toolkit&#8221; to help supporters of Obamacare sell the law to the public. Colleagues and fellow travelers are exhorted to focus especially on the elderly, young people and women.</p>
<p>Maybe they should focus especially on… <i>Democrats</i>. It is the rank and file of the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers International and the SEIU United Healthcare Workers of New York who are getting murdered by the real-world effects of the law, losing plans that were working before and petitioning for redress (and in the case of the not-so right-wing Roofers, outright repeal of the law).</p>
<p>The fact is that the more that people, including Democrats, learn about the law, the less they like it. Many sincere citizens thought they were just doing the right thing by their fellow man, especially the poor, by supporting universal healthcare, and they assumed there would be no cost to themselves, as promised by Obama. But they are waking up to the fact that Medicaid is the model for Obamacare, that Medicaid has been exposed as statistically no more beneficial than no insurance at all, and that <i>everyone,</i> themselves included, is now to be herded into a Medicaid-type plan designed by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and enforced via increasingly frequent encounters with that most beloved and trusted of agencies, the IRS. Seeing what is coming, alarmed citizens are having second thoughts; Democratic senators are voting with Republicans to repeal parts of the law (like the medical device tax) when they aren’t outright stampeding for the exits shouting, “Train wreck!”</p>
<p>Among the talking points are: “If you like your doctor, you can choose to keep your doctor.” Notice the weasel-word difference – the legalistic plausible deniability – from the original promise? Yes, you can <i>choose</i>, but if your doctor chooses otherwise (such as to retire early, as 80% of physicians are contemplating) because of the burdens put on him/her by the law, or if he or she is no longer in practice as before because the law has forced him/her out of business and into an employee role in a corporation, your &#8220;choice&#8221; will have no meaning.</p>
<p>As it happens, this author published in February a 100-page toolkit (I called it a pamphlet, but in the spirit of bipartisanship and compromise, &#8220;toolkit&#8221; will do) to help citizens, including Republicans, to refute the arguments of Obamacare’s hucksters. Here are some of the key issues that were pointed out:</p>
<ul>
<li>The PPACA was sold under false premises, such as that there were 50 million Americans without health care and that America lags behind other more enlightened nations.</li>
<li>It is destructive: of liberty, of the privacy and sanctity of the patient-family-physician trust relationship, of public finance, of your ability to keep the plan or the doctor that you like, of the economy and employment, and just about anything else it touches.</li>
<li>It cannot and will not work, because it contradicts fundamental laws of economics, liberty and constitutional government.</li>
<li>And we have plenty of positive alternatives previously proposed by Sally Pipes, Betsy McCaughey, John C. Goodman, Michael F. Cannon, Milton Friedman and many others, even if the Republican Party hasn’t been particularly articulate.</li>
</ul>
<p>Of course it’s doubtful how effective such pamphlets written by mere citizens (without non-profit status) can be in the face of a publicly-funded propaganda machine backed by almost unlimited resources (how many more times bigger than the Pentagon’s budget is the HHS budget again?). After all, all the opponents of Obamacare have on their side are facts, logic, history, economic science and the Constitution, without pandering to mascots. Pelosi and her fellow travellers have at least three trump cards in their hand: unbeatable organization, the irresistible emotional tug of the sob story, and (they hope) the enduring belief on the part of a large swath of the voting population that there really is a Santa Claus, and his name is Uncle Sam.</p>
<p><strong>Howard Hyde is author of &#8220;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939">Pull the Plug on Obamacare</a>,&#8221; available in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-ebook/dp/B00BNXX4F6">Kindle</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939">paperback</a> editions from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939">Amazon.com</a>. More information, bibliography, table of contents and notes are available at his website: <a href="http://www.hhcapitalism.com/p/obamacare.html">http://www.hhcapitalism.com/p/obamacare.html</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>How Dare We Claim America Is #1 in Health Care?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-hyde/how-dare-we-claim-america-is-1-in-health-care/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-dare-we-claim-america-is-1-in-health-care</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:20:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cancer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[outcomes]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=182131</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[With or without insurance, the U.S. is the best place to fall ill -- for now. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-hyde/how-dare-we-claim-america-is-1-in-health-care/mri/" rel="attachment wp-att-182203"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-182203" title="mri" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/mri-381x350.jpg" alt="" width="267" height="245" /></a>It outrages some that conservatives and Republicans claim that the USA&#8217;s health care system is the best in the world and that the proper goal of reform is to continue to extend our lead, not &#8220;catch up&#8221; with more &#8220;enlightened&#8221; countries that have universal, government-directed health care systems. This assertion has been vigorously challenged by individuals citing anecdotal evidence and presumably scientific studies, such as the World Health Organization’s World Health Report 2000, which served as one of the key justifications for Obamacare. The WHO study specifically ranked the USA 37<sup>th</sup> of 191 industrial nations.</p>
<p>Yet <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Obamacare-Sally-Pipes/dp/1596986360">Sally Pipes</a> of the <a href="http://pacificresearch.org/">Pacific Research Institute</a>, <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-worst-study-ever/">Scott Atlas</a> of the <a href="http://www.hoover.org/fellows/10107">Hoover Institution</a> and many others have meticulously gathered and crunched data demonstrating that, at least prior to the current administration, the best country in the world to find yourself diagnosed with cancer or in need of a knee replacement operation or MRI exam, is the USA. This holds equally true for Saudi princes as for individuals without insurance.  In fact, the ultimate irony is that patients without insurance undergoing treatment for serious conditions have better outcomes on average than those covered by Medicaid. The government-run medical program with the worst record is being aggressively expanded by force and by bribery to be the default system for the majority of Americans.</p>
<p>Among 16 types of cancer, the U.S. men&#8217;s 5-year survival rate is 66% and the U.S. women&#8217;s survival rate is 63%, versus 47% and 56% respectively for European men and women. The USA has 81 Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine in the past half century compared to 67 for the rest of the world combined. Your risk of death on the operating table is 4 times higher in Britain that it is in the USA. Canadians wait 9 months on average for orthopedic surgery like knee and hip replacements.</p>
<p>But we’re number 37?</p>
<p>Yes, of course we are, if your criteria for the ranking is how well we conform to a politically-correct ideal of universal, government-run health care. If such hard, scientific and uncorruptible measures as &#8220;financial fairness&#8221; and &#8220;equality&#8221; as reported by the &#8220;impressions&#8221; of WHO staff members are your guide, then the USA falls short of the glory of Eternal Truth. That turns out to be the true nature of the WHO study, as exposed by Pipes, Atlas and others.</p>
<p>But if you’re looking for actual outcomes, with or without insurance, sorry, America is #1.</p>
<p>Or has been. As Obamacare forces us into conformity with socialist ideals, our outcomes may well place us 37<sup>th</sup> or worse among industrialized nations, in which case the anecdotes alluded to earlier will become increasingly common. We have already embarked upon that path since ratification. The only question remaining is why Republican office holders seem now so eager to pre-emptively surrender what power they have remaining to stop it.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Obamacare: It’s Christmas Eve, 1776</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-hyde/obamacare-its-christmas-eve-1776/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacare-its-christmas-eve-1776</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 04 Mar 2013 04:09:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=179867</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why we cannot concede defeat on Obamacare -- and how and why it must be rolled back. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-hyde/obamacare-its-christmas-eve-1776/obamacare-6/" rel="attachment wp-att-179901"><img class="wp-image-179901 alignleft" title="ObamaCare" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ObamaCare.jpg" alt="" width="325" height="262" /></a>In December 1776, the American revolutionary War for Independence was over, and the colonies had lost. Almost before the ink had dried on the Declaration of Independence of July 4 that year, the British general William Howe attacked New York, driving George Washington and the Continental Army into humiliating retreat. General Howe then pressed his advantage relentlessly through the fall. By December, it was all but finished. As the freezing temperatures and snow arrived, the confident British army demobilized for winter camp.</p>
<p>Further resistance by the rebels may have seemed pointless. Many Americans at that time may have thought that governance by a distant king was so prevalent on all other continents that there was no hope for independence from England.</p>
<p>But then the damndest thing happened: Washington didn’t close shop for the winter like a gentleman, but on December 26 boldly launched a surprise attack on the British and Hessian mercenaries at Trenton, New Jersey, killing 21, wounding 90 and capturing 900, at a cost of four American wounded and not a single dead. The Revolution was not over after all. The United States of America might yet be more than a footnote to a forgotten rebellion.</p>
<p>Many Americans believe that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, known variously as the P.P.A.C.A., the A.C.A. or Obamacare, is a done deal and something we just have to accept and learn to live with. Congress passed the law, the Supreme Court upheld it and Obama was re-elected along with a Democratic majority in the Senate. But a massively ambitious piece of legislation, based on mistaken premises, which can never fulfill its advertised promises and which is the crowning threat to the American constitutional civilization and economy since the American Revolution, cannot be surrendered to. The fact is, a growing majority of American citizens and legislators are already opposed to it. And as more and more supporters of Obamacare discover that they are personally among the millions whose access to affordable health care is being made worse by it, disenchantment will continue to grow.</p>
<p>My new pamphlet, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939" target="_blank">Pull the Plug on Obamacare</a>, is all about why we cannot concede defeat, why Obamacare must be rolled back, and what to replace it with. Whether you are a patient, a doctor, a legislator, a committed activist or just a middle-of-the-road guy or gal who can’t understand what all the fuss is about, this plain-spoken, slightly irreverent citizen pamphlet will give you the intellectual ammunition necessary to understand America’s predicament, defend your rights, and discuss solutions with your neighbors and your representatives.</p>
<p>We owe it to those Christmas 1776 patriots who gave us the incomparable gift that is the United States of America, and to future generations, who will read in the history books about us, our wisdom or our folly, our courage or our cowardice, as they either enjoy the estate we bequeath them, or struggle to pay the debts we put on their credit card.</p>
<p><em>Howard Hyde is author of the pamphlet ‘<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939" target="_blank">Pull the Plug on Obamacare</a>’, available at <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939">Amazon.com</a>, from which this article is excerpted. He writes a blog on free-market economics at <a href="www.HHCapitalism.com">www.HHCapitalism.com</a>.</em></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Supporters of Obamacare Admit It Hurts the Poor</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/howard-hyde/supporters-of-obamacare-admit-it-hurts-the-poor/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=supporters-of-obamacare-admit-it-hurts-the-poor</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 29 Nov 2012 04:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=167031</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The laws of economics take hold. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/howard-hyde/supporters-of-obamacare-admit-it-hurts-the-poor/supreme-court-health-care32712-1jpg-977994d4a8539545-620x437/" rel="attachment wp-att-167123"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-167123" title="supreme-court-health-care32712-1jpg-977994d4a8539545-620x437" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/supreme-court-health-care32712-1jpg-977994d4a8539545-620x437-450x340.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="204" /></a>Some supporters of Obamacare are honest enough to admit a few of its warts. Would that they would take those admissions to their logical conclusions.</p>
<p>David Gamage is an assistant professor of Law at UC Berkeley who has worked on the tax provisions of Obamacare for the Treasury Department. In an October 30 article in the Wall Street Journal (&#8220;<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203335504578086702676417058.html">ObamaCare&#8217;s Costs to the Working Class</a>&#8220;), he expresses sincere concern over the presumably unintended consequences of the Obamacare law as written. Instead of repenting of his support for the law however, he advocates &#8220;further reform,&#8221; failing which dire consequences will ensue. What needs to be understood by ordinary citizens who are not privileged enough to be paid by the government to help the government command other people&#8217;s lives and money is that these consequences are predictable, were predicted, and that this is only the beginning of a vicious downward spiral.</p>
<p>The term &#8220;perverse incentive&#8221; appears seven times in Professor Gamage&#8217;s article. Accepting a higher-paid job could cost a citizen more on net balance than it is worth due to the loss of health-care subsidies. Employers now have every incentive to make as much of their workforce part-time (and thereby ineligible for health insurance benefits) as possible. &#8220;ObamaCare&#8217;s new subsidies may also create penalties for marriage and incentives for divorce.&#8221; People who have access to affordable individual coverage but NOT affordable family coverage through their employers will be disqualified from receiving family coverage from the Obamacare plan. And so on and on.</p>
<p>Yet he explicitly rejects any suggestion that the law is a lemon at best and that we should go back to the drawing board. Indeed, he opens with &#8220;It is time to move past the debate over whether ObamaCare was a good or a bad idea.&#8221; Really?</p>
<p>The second most-repeated phrase in the article is &#8220;further reforms&#8221; (which even appears once in the same sentence with the other winner, &#8216;&#8221;perverse incentives&#8221;):  &#8220;Without further reforms, the law will create unnecessary costs for working-class Americans.&#8221; &#8220;Without further reforms, many employers and employees will jointly benefit if employers make low-income employees part-timers rather than offering them health insurance.&#8221; &#8220;Even if these perverse incentives affect only a limited number of individuals, lawmakers should still strive to mitigate them through further reforms.&#8221; &#8220;Hence, whether we want to ‘repeal and replace’ ObamaCare, or ‘improve ObamaCare through further reforms,’ is merely a question of semantics.&#8221;</p>
<p>But &#8220;further reforms&#8221; is not a solution; it is merely continuing down the path to worse problems in response to problems created by the original legislation. Are we really supposed to believe that a 2,700-page bill and 10,000+ pages of derived regulations are fundamentally sound but merely insufficient, that we emphatically need more, more, further, further, further rules and regulations? Do we believe that more meddling and fiddling about to fix the first unintended consequences will have no unintended consequences of their own?</p>
<p>Government interventions in the market always create worse problems than the unsatisfactory original conditions they intend to solve. Maximum-price controls on milk to help poor mothers feed their babies lead to shortages of milk (and/or surpluses of butter, yoghurt and cheese) as marginal producers are unable to recoup their costs and go out of business and more people clamor for the lower-priced product, which leads the government to control the price of cattle feed in hopes of lowering dairy production costs, which leads to a shortage of cattle feed and an increase in the percentage of cows slaughtered for meat instead of being kept as milk producers.  It&#8217;s called Econ 101.</p>
<p>The only surprise in any of this is that people capable of passing the bar exam are unable to comprehend it.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>What Do Young People Believe?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/howard-hyde/what-do-young-people-believe/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-do-young-people-believe</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 13 Nov 2012 04:04:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=164929</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Is there hope for the next generation? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/howard-hyde/what-do-young-people-believe/soboroff9e-1-web/" rel="attachment wp-att-164930"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-164930" title="soboroff9e-1-web" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/soboroff9e-1-web-450x350.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="245" /></a>One of the most remarkable impressions  of election night was seeing, in places like Times Square and the Obama campaign stadium in Chicago, crowds of young people, cheering, laughing, dancing, crying with joy over the result. Since these are the people who will have to live with the consequences of this election the longest, it is worth asking: what is it exactly that they are cheering? What do they believe?</p>
<p>They must believe that their future is bright, that it has been saved from the ravages of the evil, uncaring, racist and homophobic Republicans with that rich, white vulture of the weird cult at the top of the ticket.  Their free education, free student &#8220;loans,&#8221; and free health care including contraception and abortion services are now secure. The fact that so many college graduates can&#8217;t find work today is George Bush&#8217;s fault, and that circumstance will soon be resolved by the wise policies of the revitalized Obama administration.</p>
<p>What do they believe about Republicans? They must believe that the 48% of Americans &#8212; half the country &#8212; hate women, gays and minorities, would force all women to have invasive ultrasounds, gays to be burned next to witches, and blacks sent to the back of the bus if not back to the cotton fields as chattel slaves. They must believe that Paul Ryan wishes to commit a Texas (or is it Wisconsin?) chainsaw massacre upon the entitlement programs that they are counting on and that those programs will now be solvent with no sacrifice required on their part.</p>
<p>What do they believe about America&#8217;s role in the world? They must believe that a foreign policy of apologizing for American Imperialism, bowing to Saudi kings, supplicating for a &#8220;reset&#8221; of relations with Russia, leading in reverse gear in Benghazi and throwing Israel under the bus, is completely adequate to the challenges of Iran&#8217;s nuclear ambitions, China&#8217;s expanding Pacific navy, the global Jihad network and the rest of geopolitics for the next four if not forty years, as long as we don&#8217;t have a warmongering president with an itchy trigger finger looking for another Iraq to invade unnecessarily. They must believe that it is a good thing for Obama to have greater &#8220;flexibility&#8221; with Russia, Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood in his second term. And they have to believe that the United Nations is a greater force for good in the world than America, and that America&#8217;s exceptionalism should be subordinated to the international &#8220;community.&#8221;</p>
<p>What do they believe about the economic issues? What little economics they have been spoon-fed in our schools and universities must be of the pseudo-Keynesian variety, whereby all good things come from the government and nothing good comes from greedy capitalist one-percenters. The fact that the federal government consumes a higher percentage of GDP today than at any time since World War II is not seen as a problem, because government tax revenue and spending is what brings about prosperity. They must believe that it was the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that bankrupted the nation; that fat-cat pure-capitalist bankers caused the financial crisis by redlining minority communities; that increased social spending such as on Obamacare has a positive multiplier effect on the economy. They must believe that entitlements and unfunded defined-benefit pension liabilities for unionized government employees are sacrosanct contracts that must be honored above any rights accorded to private-sector taxpayers yet to be born; that the federal budget deficit and the national debt are abstractions, old tin cans that may be kicked down the dirt road. They have to believe that there are fifty million people in America without access to health care who will now get it free of charge with no impact on the already-insured, on unemployment, on public finances or any other sector of the economy; that high-earning individuals and successful small businesses pay little or no taxes; that businessmen get fat in their sleep. They must believe that corporations are chauvanistic to the point of utter stupidity, preferring to hire and pay men 30% more for the same work that women willing to work for 30% less are perfectly capable in every way of doing, in spite of being driven by greed and greed alone. Any budget shortfalls can always be made up by raising taxes just one more time on the rich; after all, the 1 percent of income earners that now pays 40 percent of the taxes can always afford to pay a little more, with no harm to economic growth or unemployment.</p>
<p>It is difficult to tell what they believe about socialism, communism and capitalism, because it is doubtful they have any real understanding of the significance of those words, what are the histories of the nations that have attempted to implement them, and of the peoples who have lived under them. If they possess any understanding at all of what socialism is, they will deny that they are socialists while agreeing with at least 90% of the principles that animate European political parties that have no qualms about using the word in their names; and they will zealously strive to implement the same policies here under the labels of Hope, Change, Fairness, Justice and Forward.</p>
<p>Or perhaps they are not terribly concerned with any of these things, because espousing a purely self-interested point of view they have the expectation of being on the inside, of having government careers and/or belonging to unions whose power will insulate them from any crises; that their salaries, job security and pensions will be protected from any general economic conditions as long as they can hold off attacks by barbarians like Scott Walker and Chris Christie. They do not blame the United Auto Workers for the economic devastation of Detroit and the industrial Midwest, but celebrate its clout in the auto bailout. They do not blame collective bargaining on the part of employees whose salaries are paid by taxpayers for the bankruptcy of Michigan, New Jersey, California and cities across the fruited plain. Or they don&#8217;t care, because the point is not do what&#8217;s right but to get what one can, to work the system for one&#8217;s own and one&#8217;s (preferably protected) group&#8217;s benefit.</p>
<p>These cheering, sunny-faced young people will be left to deal with the real-world consequences of these beliefs and policies on their own for thirty years after this author and his cohort are gone.  May God help them.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Why ObamaCare Will Fail</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/howard-hyde/why-obamacare-will-fail/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-obamacare-will-fail</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Oct 2012 04:15:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=163216</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Magnifying and multiplying the failures of prior interventions]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/howard-hyde/why-obamacare-will-fail/obamacare-5/" rel="attachment wp-att-163279"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-163279" title="obamacare" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/obamacare.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="230" /></a>Medicare, when proposed in 1965 was expected to cost $12 billion by 1990; it cost $90 billion in that year &#8212; seven and a half times more than expected (or more accurately, sold to the public). Medicaid was projected to cost $238 million per year. In its first year, the actual invoice came in at $1 billion &#8212; four times greater than advertised. The hospitalization program was supposed to cost $1 billion by 1987; instead the tab was $17 billion that year. The program has been expanded to the point of being 37 times more costly (inflation-adjusted) than originally sold.</p>
<p>Yet we are supposed to believe that we have an unfettered virgin market in health care ruled by the law of the jungle, that insufficient regulation is causing all of the problems and that the only rational solution is for the federal government to take command of a sixth or more of the entire US economy; a brand new, original idea.</p>
<p>Obamacare, being the most ambitious social entitlement program ever conceived, much less attempted in the US, will only magnify and multiply the failures of prior interventions.</p>
<p>The failures of Medicare, Medicaid and socialized health care systems around the world are not accidents, rounding errors or bad luck of unanticipated complications. Rather, they are the inevitable, predicable result of forceful interference in the voluntary cooperation of free citizens. Obamacare will fail for the same reason that the Soviet Union failed: command-and-control economies cannot function rationally.</p>
<p>When President Ronald Reagan famously declared “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” in 1987, few people believed that the concrete and razor-wire barrier separating the communist East from the free West Berlin, Germany, would in fact be demolished, liberating the citizen-inmates not only of the eastern sector of Berlin, but of most of Eastern Europe and Russia itself just 2 years later. But Reagan understood that a system conceived in the denial of individual liberty as both the fundamental moral principle of civilization and as the only rational basis for functioning economics, was doomed to collapse under its own weight.  He understood this in part because the downfall of the Soviet system had been predicted a few years earlier … in 1922.</p>
<p>Ludwig von Mises, the Austrian (later American) economist, demonstrated that socialism could never fulfill its promise no matter what variation was attempted nor how wise and virtuous the men running it.  In his book &#8220;Socialism&#8221; he demonstrated logically that every wage and price control, every tariff, tax, privilege, prejudice, manipulation and regulation that does <em>not</em> derive from government’s legitimate need to prevent and punish murder, robbery, assault, fraud, theft, rape, persecution and conspiracy distorts and destroys information necessary for rational economic planning and action. If some collective entity like the state owns or otherwise controls capital goods, land, natural resources, factories, machinery, services, licensing etc. then there is no market for these goods. There is no buying and selling, no bargaining and haggling, no competition to compel lower prices, higher quality, better service and the division of labor where each finds the role they are best suited to, and no supply and demand.</p>
<p>If there is no market then there are no prices in the real sense of the word.  Prices constitute the indispensable information system for signaling the needs and scarcities in an economy, and the cost of available alternatives. There are a hundred different ways to build a building, and dozens of alternative materials and techniques for each component. Which combination is the most economical? Who knows? Without prices, there is no way of knowing. There is no other metric that can adequately substitute for market prices. Economic planning cannot function without these numbers.</p>
<p>That is why socialism fails every time it is tried: Economic calculation is impossible under socialism.</p>
<p>And then there’s the bureaucracy, which von Mises also wrote about. With no markets there is no competition, neither incentive nor reward for better customer service or to provide a higher quality product at a lower price. The entire economy becomes like a giant Post Office or Department of Motor Vehicles, with self-serving, inner-directed bureaucracies with languages and cultures of their own, foreign to the rest of us, with iron-clad privileges, job security and pensions that do not vary with how well or poorly they serve willing customers.</p>
<p>As applied to the health care market, those same principles apply.  The more the government commands and controls services, insurance, physicians and other health professionals, drugs/pharmaceuticals, equipment like MRI machines, devices like defibrillators etc. then the less flexible and innovative is the market for these. There is: less buying and selling between parties commanding their own resources on their own account and for their own benefit, less bargaining and haggling (apart from government bullying from its position of monopoly power, as in price controls shrinking Medicare payment schedules etc.), less competition to compel lower prices, higher quality, better service and the division of labor and less operation of supply and demand.</p>
<p>Furthermore, this system leads to: the abolition of profit and loss, whether for providers, insurers or patients as legitimate regulators of behavior or scorecards of success or failure; a reduced scope of the operation of prices, therefore a breakdown of the indispensable economic information system of abundance, scarcity and alternatives; reduced possibility to recover research and development costs of breakthrough drugs (why bet billions when success makes you a target?). Shortages, waiting lists and government-imposed rationing of services, doctors, medicines etc. are the inevitable results.</p>
<p>With the market-based economic model suppressed, the only alternative is bureaucratic management based on politically-derived values. The opinions, concerns and desires of physicians, patients and families take a back seat to functionaries who are completely removed from personal economic or emotional involvement in the patient’s case. What matters to him is that he faithfully executes the rules dictated to him by the dominant political party and union bosses.</p>
<p>&#8220;Progressive&#8221; politicians love to feed on people’s resentment of &#8220;faceless&#8221; bureaucrats at private insurance companies as evidence of the failure of the free market. But when there is only one insurance company left, the government, with the right to tax you rather than face its own bankruptcy no matter how poorly it is run, people aren’t going to love that insurance company more than the few nominally private ones we have now. Even if private insurance companies survive ObamaCare, they will be taking their orders from the bureaucracy and the czars, not from patients, families and physicians.</p>
<p>Socialized medicine is not a new idea.  It has been tried again and again in many advance countries yet has never achieved results to compare with the relatively free United States. ObamaCare, the biggest such initiative of them all, will be the biggest failure. The most passionate sincere supporters of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will be the most disappointed.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>It’s the Over-Regulation, Stupid!</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/howard-hyde/it%e2%80%99s-the-over-regulation-stupid/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=it%25e2%2580%2599s-the-over-regulation-stupid</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Dec 2010 04:00:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=77893</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Welcome to the Left's blindness to its own interventionist addictions.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Foreclosure.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-78099" title="Foreclosure" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Foreclosure.gif" alt="" width="375" height="265" /></a></p>
<p>Consider one of the points made by the editor of a major publication of the Left (The Nation) recently writing in a major publication of the Right (the Wall Street Journal Editorial page, November 5: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703506904575592900976030696.html">An Undeserved Win for the GOP</a>) analyzing the Republican victory in the November 2010 mid-term election:</p>
<blockquote><p>“By rescuing the big banks and failing to place demands on them, the White House economic team, led by Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, ceded populist energy to the tea party.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Katrina vanden Heuvel is correct that many voters are opposed to the notion, begun under the Bush administration, of ‘too big to fail’ which leads to bailouts for the biggest established firms at the expense of everyone else (including smaller, more dynamic and innovative companies that might deliver better overall value to the public). But what does she mean by ‘failing to place demands on them’? Is she blind to the fact that the government has been increasingly (and inappropriately) over-regulating banks for decades now?</p>
<p>The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 gave the federal government an unprecedented foothold in micromanaging the business practices of lenders, telling them to whom they should lend, how much and on what terms. In the 1990’s the power of this act were amplified, with banks having to establish racial and ethnic quotas, both in their lending and in their hiring practices, and ask permission before merging or opening new branches. In 1993 the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) began suing banks over race-based statistical disparities. Banks were damned if they did (‘predatory lending’) and if they didn’t (‘redlining’, ‘disparate impact’). Above all, they were encouraged, as a Mafioso understands that term, to discard centuries of prudent lending standards and due diligence in favor of ‘affordable housing’ – a.k.a. sub-prime mortgages, ‘liar loans’ and flipping the risk to Fannie Mae, Fredie Mac and by extension, you and me the taxpayers.</p>
<p>All of this doesn’t qualify as ‘placing no demands’, and in fact contributed mightily to the mortgage market meltdown.</p>
<p>What demands would Ms. vanden Heuvel make on the banks? She answers that a few paragraphs later:</p>
<p>“If, as University of Massachusetts economist Robert Pollin and others argue, the single most important reason for the failure of economic recovery is that private credit markets are locked up, especially for small businesses, then the federal government could help by expanding existing federal loan guarantees by $300 billion. Meanwhile, excess cash reserves held by banks—now estimated at an unprecedented $1.1 trillion in Federal Reserve accounts—should be taxed an initial 1%-2%. Mr. Pollin estimates that this combination could generate about three million new jobs if it succeeds in pumping about $300 billion into productive investments. This plan should get bipartisan support.”</p>
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		<title>The Madness of a Twisted Faith</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/howard-hyde/the-madness-of-a-twisted-faith/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-madness-of-a-twisted-faith</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Nov 2010 04:05:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=77294</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Katrina vanden Heuvel reminds us of the Left's sad economic illiteracy.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/vandel.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-77301" title="vandel" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/vandel.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="302" /></a></p>
<p>Those of us who let our subscription to The Nation lapse 20 years ago would do well to read that magazine’s editor Katrina vanden Heuvel’s article ‘An Undeserved Win for the GOP’, published in the Wall Street Journal, Friday, November 5. It’s a refreshing reminder of all of the economic illiteracy that the Left is capable of.</p>
<p>No one on the right believes that the November 2010 election represented a triumph for the establishment country-club Republican Party (which Ronald Reagan himself defeated in 1980).  It was a revolt by independents, Tea Partiers and other citizens who are outraged at the out-of-control spending, mounting public debt and chronically high unemployment.</p>
<p>We can concede vanden Heuvel’s assertion that “The election was fundamentally about one thing—the rotten economy.” But the awakened voters perceived the Democrats – dominating both houses of Congress and the White House – as responsible for prolonging and amplifying the problems, and of being hostages to the socialist Left. Not being resigned to achieving only third-party irrelevancy, these voters put the Republicans on notice that they would get a second chance, provided they return to the principles they had slothfully abandoned when the perks of power became too comfortable to bear.</p>
<p>Given the limits of space, it will be impossible to do justice to the dissection of this dead frog in a single article. So let’s consider just one gem for now:</p>
<blockquote><p>“For 30 years, these Americans have seen their incomes stagnate as the top 1% accrued a staggering percentage of the nation&#8217;s wealth.”</p></blockquote>
<p>This kind of platitude would have impressed some of us into indignation when we were 17, but an adult may fairly ask: what does that even mean?</p>
<p>‘For 30 years’ is a period during which the parties in power in the executive and legislative branches of our constitutionally divided government were exchanged several times and government spending as a percentage of GDP grew from 34% to 44% (7 of those points in the last 2 years alone – who’s responsible for that?).</p>
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		<title>Is There Hope for Califrancia?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/howard-hyde/is-there-hope-for-califrancia/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=is-there-hope-for-califrancia</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Nov 2010 04:25:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=76262</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the Left's relief in California might be very short-lived.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/cali.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-76265" title="cali" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/cali.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="278" /></a></p>
<p>Progressives, liberals and/or Democrats in California may be breathing a sigh of relief, having dodged a bullet on November 2nd, preserving their control over the Sacramento mansion and their representation in the halls of D.C. Almost the entire county got washed clean with the anti-Obama-Reid-Pelosi tea-party backlash, but apparently since even tsunamis can’t travel across continents, so this one evaporated in the deserts to our east before it could reach our shores.</p>
<p>The relief will be short-lived. Yes, they have the power, but it is the illusory power of a Doctor Frankenstein over his monster. The Golden State is still bankrupt to the tune of $500 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and $70 billion in general obligations, hemorrhaging cash and productive citizens, and sporting one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation. The reflexive policy mix of the progressives to resolve these issues – higher taxes, more regulation of politically unfavored entrepreneurs, politically correct environmental programs, larcenous public employee pension benefits – will only make it worse. We are driving toward a day of reckoning that only Greece could envy, and we just dropped a brick on the accelerator.</p>
<p>Economic environments such as states compete for talent, capital and tax revenue the same way commercial businesses compete for customers and sales revenue. Lose your customer base, go bankrupt. Beyond a certain point, the closer any tax rate gets to 100%, the less the activity being taxed continues to be engaged in, resulting in lower overall revenue; that’s the Laffer Curve. Ignore this ‘mere theory’ at your peril.</p>
<p>California is one of the most beautiful, richly naturally endowed places in the world, with an unmatched offering of beaches, mountains, harbors, fertile soil, lakes, and redwood, pine and sequoia forests. Yet increasing numbers of productive people find it more tolerable to live in the barren deserts of Arizona and Nevada than subject themselves to the lordship of Sacramento’s political class.</p>
<p>A generation ago, California boasted the 6<sup>th</sup> most productive economy in the world, as compared to other nation states; now we’re number 8 and headed lower. Those who think California has some kind of birthright to economic glory that can never end should study Argentina: 100 years ago number 10 in the world but for at least the past 50 years, an unstable basket case.</p>
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