Dear Fans of South Puget Sound Libertarian,

Mark lost his long struggle with cancer this month. He is survived by Nancy, his beautiful Cajun Princess, and his and her children.

Mark’s greatest hope for this blog was that he would make his readers think about the proper role of government and the enduring values of liberty, freedom and true democracy. He was tickled that the blog gained a loyal following.

Henry Thoreau wrote, “Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.” We’ve found his blog to be thought-provoking, insightful and, occasionally, infuriatingly wrong. But that was the point. The discussions that ensued as we worked through the merits of his argument were always lively and gave to those of us privileged to know him, a chance to learn.

As a final tribute to Mark’s efforts over the last several years, we welcome your comments on how this blog has shaped your thinking.

On Mark’s behalf, thank you for reading.

Sincerely,

The Nameroff Family

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Amazingly, this article is from the LA Times, a generally leftie rag:

Who could forget the $5 billion in Obama administration stimulus money that was going to rapidly create nearly 90,000 green jobs across the country in these tough economic times and make so many thousands of homes all snuggy and warm and energy-efficient these very snowy days?

Well, a new report due out this morning will show the $5-billion program is so riddled with drafts that so far it’s weatherized only about 9,000 homes.

Based on the initial Obama-Biden program promise that it would create 87,000 new jobs its first year, that would be about 10 jobs for each home weatherized so far. Makes for pretty crowded doorways.

[snip]

The Energy folks did tell ABC they’ve so far spent 522-million Recovery Act dollars on the program. So, let’s see, about 9,100 homes divided into that chunk of stimulation change to believe in is — gee! — about $57,362 worth of very expensive weatherstripping for each home fixed up so far.

Seems believable for a federal program.

As Glenn Reynolds says, "Read the whole thing".

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Yep, we’re in a recession but the taxeaters need more money; ours. So the chief of the demagogues says, "Let’s raise your taxes by $605 million dollars". All the little demagogues in the legislature are sure to approve this horror and most of the little green demagogues running around in this state will approve it, too. After all, what the state does to us is more important than our own ideas and desires about how to use our own money. This tax hike is one in a long line of such hikes, coming along with wildly increased spending by the demagogues. It is economically insane and I hope it is the cause of marching in the streets and civil disobedience.

But it won’t be because of the extreme ignorance and passivity of the great majority of people. Disgusting.

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F rom the Christian Science Monitor:

President Obama’s plans to jump-start expansion of a stagnant nuclear power industry is likely to encounter some resistance – and the most formidable foe may well be Wall Street and cost-conscious fiscal watchdogs rather than environmentalists worried about storing radioactive waste.

For the dollars-and-cents crowd, the big issue is a simple one: Who will pay?

Their evaluation of Mr. Obama’s move, announced Tuesday, to back the construction of two nuclear reactors with $8.3 billion in federal loan guarantees is one of caution and skepticism. The same holds for his proposal to expand the budget for loan guarantees for nuclear power from $18.5 billion to more than $54 billion in fiscal year 2011.

“Our opposition is not based on the type of power being planned,” says Andrew Moylan, director of government affairs at the National Taxpayers Union, a federal spending watchdog. “It really is the fact that these guarantees could mean taxpayers losing big chunks of money, putting taxpayers on the hook for potentially very risky projects.”

[snip]

In 1974, President Richard Nixon announced Project Independence – a plan to build 1,000 nuclear stations. Of the 253 reactors eventually ordered by the US utility industry, 71 were canceled before construction began, according to a tally by the antinuclear group Beyond Nuclear. Of the remaining 182 projects to receive construction permits from government commissions, 50 were abandoned during construction, with billions of dollars in investment lost. Another 28 were shuttered before their 40-year licenses expired, Beyond Nuclear reported.

[snip]

Doug Koplow, president of the Boston energy consulting company Earth Track, says his analysis shows $178 billion in public subsidies for nuclear energy from 1947 to 1999.
…
Against that backdrop, the Government Accountability Office in 2008 reported that the average risk of default on Department of Energy loan guarantees for all energy projects (including nuclear and other power projects) was about 50 percent. More pointedly, the Congressional Budget Office in 2003 said the default risk for new nuclear reactors would be “very high – well above 50 percent.”

I’m all for nuclear power. The French get most of their electricity from nuclear plants. But this proposal by Obama not only makes the taxpayers bear the financial risk but chooses a "winner", Southern Company, from among those companies that could construct nuclear power plants. This is classic corporatism.

First, why should taxpayers bear the risk? Second, who is Obama to declare that taxpayers will bear the risk? He’s the president, not the economic controller of the United States. And third, how does Obama come to choose which company or companies will get subsidies while others do not? This exercise of raw, unchecked power isn’t in the constitution. It is simply a power grab by the president in his desire to run the economy of the country. The free market (what little is left of it) is simply ignored. Just because you might like something (such as nuclear power or space flight or medical care for all) does not mean that the government should provide that thing by forcibly taking money from some people (i.e., by taxes) in order to give it to other people to provide the thing you like. Many people think the president’s job is to run the economy. Read the constitution; it isn’t.

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Evan Bayh, 2 term senator from Indiana, says he won’t seek a 3rd term. Without the 17th Amendment and with term limits, this would not be a big story or even a noticeable event. But since the passage of the 17th Amendment, senators have careers in the senate and even pass their seat on to relatives. The senate is becoming something like the British house of lords where seats belong to the hereditary "nobility". Not that there’s anything noble at all about the US senate. But notice that the news reports all say that Bayh is "retiring". That certainly implies that the seat belonged to him. And, of course, the media go right along with this dynastic stuff. Maybe he’s retiring because he sees that his political party is in very bad shape in the coming midterm election. Or maybe he’s retiring because he couldn’t make it to the vice presidency or the presidency and sees the senate as an obstacle preventing him from acquiring still more political power.

RIP

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From the DailyMail Online Emphasis added):

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.

Yes, I will seize upon these admissions as evidence that there serious are flaws at the heart of the so-called science of climate change.

Yet the mainstream media and others with vast investments in going green or reputations at stake, will ignore these problems, especially the socialist control freaks. Just one small example from the sci.government Google group:

Cap & Trade & Climate Fascism In Cambridge Mass

Congestion pricing to reduce car travel. Elimination of curbside parking. A carbon tax “of some kind,” not to mention taxes on plastic and paper bags. Advocating vegetarianism and veganism, complete with “Meatless or Vegan Mondays.” Those are just some of the proposals put forth by the Cambridge Climate Congress, an entity created in May 2009 to respond to the “climate emergency” plaguing the Massachusetts city.

Going green will not be optional in Cambridge, Mass., if the Cambridge Climate Congress has its way. It will be mandatory.

Apparently, climate change is here to stay regardless of the evidence. The arrogance is jaw-dropping. Thinking that we puny humans can really effect the gigantic forces that operate to determine world climate or other geophysical processes, is mind-boggling. It seems there is a minimal gap (in the control freaks’ minds) between trying to create the new socialist man (which will fail) and trying to create the new socialist geophysics (which will also fail). That’s some gigantic bit of arrogance. Maybe next they’ll try to slow down plate tectonics and stop volcanism.

Update, February 15, 12:24 AM: Even better, see this Powerline post.

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They might be living in Chiie and not in Chile, according to the director of the national mint, Gregorio Iniguez, and the official in charge of minting coins, Pedro Urzua. Because here’s what happened under their command:

Yep, the name of the country got misspelled as CHIIE on the 50 peso coin and the bureaucracies of the Casa de la Moneda and the Chilean central bank didn’t catch it. Now there’s an efficient government bureaucracy.

Que lastima! Well, not really. No one got hurt. Gracias a Dios.

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From Business Week:

President Barack Obama said he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.

Obama, in a Feb. 9 Oval Office interview, said that a presidential commission on the budget needs to consider all options for reducing the deficit, including tax increases and cuts in spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

“The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table,” the president said in the interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions.”

Obama repeatedly vowed during the 2008 presidential election campaign that he would not raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000 and households earning less than $250,000 a year. When senior White House economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner suggested in August that the administration might be open to going back on that pledge, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs quickly reiterated the president’s promise.

In the interview, Obama said that putting preconditions on the agenda of a bipartisan advisory commission, which he said he would soon establish, would just undermine its purpose.

We shouldn’t get excited about this. Politicians always lie. Those who thought Obama was any different, have their heads in the sand or up some other part of their anatomy. They’re the same people who will believe promises at the next election and the next and the next . . .

Hope and Change? Not a chance.

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Unser führer now claims that:

Americans enjoy no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their–or at least their cell phones’–whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that “a customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records” that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.

In other words, the government claims that, if you have a cell phone, it has the legal power to track your movements, to know where you are, 24/7. And maybe it’ll send one of its mini-drones to see what you’re doing? A classic illustration of how the government decides on the extent of its own powers. It should be that the government has no reasonable expectation of being able to spy on us at its whim. We no longer have a republic and not even, the horror, a democracy.

What has happened to us? We were initially a free and peaceful country. The central government was hardly visible in our lives. We wanted peaceful trade with everyone and did not want to butt in to any country’s internal affairs. We didn’t want a standing army. No entangling alliances. Now, we have military bases all over the world. We aggressively intervene in many country’s internal affairs. We invade other countries at will and we thereby provoke violent attacks in return. Our governments, federal and local, have grown like gigantic, invasive weeds until there is virtually nothing we do that the government does not touch in some way. We have let this happen by buying into lies that have led us to be swindled economically and made us fearful by exaggerated claims of imminent, terrible dangers. We have voluntarily surrendered our rights to the government in order to save ourselves from trivial or imaginary threats. It has become a joke to say that America is a free country. We have become an imperialistic, militaristic police state, unfree at any level.

We will not change things until people are marching in the streets and engaging in civil disobedience, violent or non-violent.

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The American Psychiatric Association has announced on a web site that it now has a draft proposal of the next (5th) edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) , the psychiatrists’/psychologists’ "bible" of mental disorders. You can go there and comment.

Many of the disorders listed in the previous edition (see, for example, this post) are obvious nonsense. And remember that many states (and soon the feds) require that medical insurers cover "treatment" for these so-called disorders. One of the things that’s interesting is that the new diagnostic criteria will undergo 2 years of field testing. So, what does this mean? How do you field test a diagnosis? I thought you did clinical or lab testing before  you established that there is an illness. But this is nuts. Do you come back and say that X turns out not to be a disorder? I don’t get it.

Then there’s the trangender issue. From ABC News’s report:

People who consider themselves “transgendered” have long criticized DSM-IV and previous editions for labeling them with a mental disease when their problems, they believe, are purely somatic — that is, they have the wrong genitalia and hormonal balance.

At the APA’s annual meeting last May, members of the transgender community made a case for dropping gender identity disorder from DSM-V, but keeping some kind of “gender variance” diagnosis as a medical condition. Such an approach would eliminate the stigma of a psychiatric diagnosis while leaving a pathway for third-party (insurance) payment for gender transition treatments, they said.

Yep, gotta keep transgender in the DSM-5 for insurance purposes even though transgendered people say they don’t have a mental illness. This suggests that some (all?) so-called mental disorders are really decided upon for political reasons (see field testing the DSM, above).

And, of course, there’s the continuing issue of children who are bored with or hate the public schools and have difficulties with their parents or teachers. This is really funny. Again from ABC News:

Adding a new disorder in children, “temper dysregulation with dysphoria,” for persistent negative mood with bursts of rage (TDD).

[snip]

“About 40 percent to 60 percent of the cases [seen by child psychiatrists] will be children who are doing things that other people don’t want them to do,” he said. Many of these are children who are “stubborn and resistant and disobedient and moody.”

There is currently a recognized syndrome known as oppositional defiant disorder, but some children also display severe aggression and negative moods that go beyond mere stubbornness …

So, a kid is mentally ill if he does things that other people don’t want him to do. In other words, if he is independent minded, he’s sick. Yep, the state will love this.

And then (I’ll stop here) there’s this fantastic "discovery" by the shrinks in the new DSM-5:

Another innovation in DSM-V will be the extensive use of so-called dimensional assessments. Whereas DSM-IV relied heavily on present-absent symptom checklists, the new edition will include severity scales for symptoms such as anxiety or insomnia that may appear to larger or smaller degrees in many different mental illnesses.

They’ve discovered that there are degrees of severity in their disorders. It took them 4 revisions and years of "research" to come to this astounding conclusion.

Look forward to higher medical insurance premiums as more and more behavior that the state fears is diagnosed as mental illness. The question is: will the new socialist man that the state wants, compete with or complement the new psychiatric man that the shrinks want. Can you be the perfect slave if you’re mentally ill? For, after all, the shrinks say everyone is sick.

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You are probably aware that the Obama administration now says it is continuing the Bush policy of authorizing the CIA and the military to assassinate American citizens whom the president designates as terrorists. And you are probably aware of this:
 

 
Obviously, Obama, the constitutional law professor, has no use for the constitution. Once again, fear rules and the constitution gets tossed aside by the president who swears to uphold it. This is terrifying. We need to fear the loss of the legal system we cherish and not become so scared of possible terrorist acts that we will willingly tolerate the loss of our rights.

Hope and Change? Killing Americans just on the president’s say so, is probably the most terrifying act he can commit. How much scarier can it get?

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This time it’s the government’s War on Childhood Obesity. More bureaucracy, more regulations, more spending and more government jobs. We have the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the War on Afghanistan, the War on Iraq, the War on You-Name-It.

Yeesh!

Update, February 10, 10:13 AM: Oh, and the reason it’s a "war" is that Michelle Obama said that childhood obesity is a threat to national security. Really. Maybe Barack can order the parents of fat kids killed. Why not?

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Let me set aside my antipathy towards democracy for a bit and consider the question of who should be permitted to vote. Should everyone be allowed to vote or should the vote be denied to some groups of people? For example, should these groups be allowed to vote:

• Government employees, including military personnel
• People who receive money from government programs such as Social Security, Medicare and other welfare programs
• People who cannot pass a literacy test

Why shouldn’t government employees be allowed to vote? I think the answer is straightforward. They and their jobs are dependent upon taxation, or "spreading the wealth around", as our leader might say. That is, this group is dependent upon taking your money by threat of force and would always vote for candidates who favored taxation and the existence or expansion of government. These people are a special interest; i.e., themselves.

What about people who receive money from government programs? Same argument as above. They will always vote for those who will give them your money.

The literacy test requirement is a tougher criterion. First, there’s the silly charge by people like Rachel Maddow that testing for literacy is racist. She makes this charge because literacy tests in the South used to be used to keep blacks from voting. So, therefore, according to Maddowian logic, literacy testing of all  the potential voters would be racist. Figure that one out if you can. But, yes, there are problems with literacy testing. Some of them are: who would write the test, what should it contain, who would judge success or failure, and what happens to people who almost pass. Probably, it should be like an eye test; the one where you read letters that get smaller as you go down the chart. In the literacy test, reading a short, non-technical paragraph (in English, I think) would be sufficient. But what about the blind (who don’t use braille) and people who simply can’t or don’t read for their own special reasons? Not necessarily an easily solved problem set.

Some people think that only property owners should be allowed to vote or that you should get a number of votes depending on how wealthy you are; i.e., the richer you are the more votes you get. I dismiss both of these criteria now, because the law has gotten so far out of control that legislatures pass "laws" and the voters pass referenda that regulate personal behavior such as smoking. It would not be fair to have only property owners voting to take away your rights.

In my real view, all of the above is crap-and-nonsense because I believe that majoritarian democracy is fatally flawed in many respects, particularly where it comes to dealing with individual liberties. Also, this is a blog post and not a scholarly exercise concerning voting or democracy, obviously. I happened to watch Rachel Maddow (this was the 2nd or 3rd time; I almost never watch cable TV news programs) and I got annoyed by her total pro-progressive, pro-Obama point of view. Hence this post. I’ll stop now.

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From Jacob Hornberger:

Consider Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and military spending — the programs that everyone agrees are the root causes of out-of-control federal spending and soaring debt.

The statists always call for reform, reform, reform. The latest brilliant proposal, which the NYT [New York Times -- ed.] endorses, is a commission to study the problem, one that will inevitably conclude, “The system needs reform.”

Hope springs eternal for the statists. All that’s needed is more spending, higher taxes, and “reform,” and socialist-imperialist paradise will finally have arrived.

That’s just siren-song nonsense. What’s actually needed is a repeal of all socialist programs, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and all the rest, along with all the taxes that fund them.

Yes, you read that right — repeal, not reform — and immediate.

No, there will not be people dying in the streets. Instead there will be the greatest outburst of economic prosperity and vitality that people have ever witnessed, along with the greatest outpouring of voluntary charity. It just requires self-esteem, self-confidence, self-reliance, and an unswerving belief in one’s self, others, freedom, and God.

Moreover, it entails an immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, where U.S. troops continue to kill, maim, torture, incarcerate, kidnap, and destroy every day. Yes, you read that right — withdraw immediately. And not only from there, but also from Korea, Europe, Japan (where the Japanese people are demanding an end to the U.S. occupation of their country), Africa, Latin America, and everywhere else. Why, it’s even time to start closing military bases here in the United States. The Cold War ended long ago, and all the U.S. Empire has done since then is stir up trouble to keep the warfare largess flowing to the military-industrial complex.

Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s end the drug war too, immediately. What possible justification for spending money on this 35-year old failed, immoral, and destructive program could there be, except that it provides revenue (including bribes and asset forfeiture) for public officials and drug lords?

Only by restoring a genuinely free-market, limited-government republic to our land can we hope to restore morality, freedom, harmony, and prosperity to our land.

This is a recipe for a real revolution, one based on freedom. Neither the Democrats, the Republicans, the Tea Partiers or any other political group believes in freedom. I’m against all political parties including the Libertarian Party. I want to see the country de-politicized. That would require an end to the gigantic national state we now have and an end to the gigantic individual states, too. If we’re going to keep having governments, they need to be accessible and controllable locally. Therefore, they need to be small, like counties, and they need to be independent of control from above. The best case would be no government at all.

I know; dream on, Mark, you loon.

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As most of you know, cats are totally nuts. They’re very much alike, but each has its own unique, um, qualities. Here’s one dramatic case of cat screwballity:

But husbands or wives or friends or whatevers can also be "unique". Sometimes, for example, I come home to this:

Just kidding. Really. But, uh . . . hmm.

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Interesting that it’s a Brit, someone from a highly socialist country. Loverly. Rock on, Mr. Bloom!

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Got it? Here’s an entry on Google’s News page:

I particularly enjoy the use of the word, "unexpectedly". We’re seeing it all over the web as economists predict one thing and the prediction fails. They don’t agree on anything, but economics is a "science".

You simply cannot put any credence into government statistics. They will bend the numbers to make themselves look good. The media put the gov’s numbers on page 1. When the revision comes, it’s on page 10, if it’s anywhere.

What we really know is that unemployment is high and the number of unemployed, underemployed or those who have stopped looking for jobs is high. The situation is bad and now the stock market is finally seeing it.

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According to Bloomberg:

The U.S. may lose 824,000 jobs when the government releases its annual revision to employment data on Feb. 5, showing the labor market was in worse shape during the recession than known at the time.

They (Bloomberg) have some interesting graphs. Here’s one:

Yep. The giant bailouts and the government handouts have certainly worked to create millions of jobs. It all depends on who creates the data and/or who interprets it. 824,000 jobs. Wow! Follow Rockwell’s Law and, as a default position, never believe anything the government says.

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The US government’s policy (if that’s the correct word) towards China is a multi-headed set of contradictions.

On the one head, we want China to continue to finance our spending by lending us money to fight our imperial wars including money to finance our weapons program directed towards China itself.

On another head, we want China to provide explanations and assurances that their moves are purely defensive. Now that’s a total contradiction when the US has created hundreds of foreign military bases near China, and has aircraft carrier task forces in the Pacific. Both the foreign bases and the naval forces are there with the specific intention to threaten China. If China is surrounded by our military bases, how can we expect China to believe that our intentions are purely defensive. Suppose China had bases in Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. Would we accept assurances that such bases were purely defensive? I think not.

On another head of the US hydra, the US expects China to accept our arming of Taiwan. How would we feel if China sent weapons to, say, Puerto Rico, if Puerto Rico wanted to be even partially free from the US. China is certainly justified in seeing this as a direct military threat, something that the US government cannot understand (sure).

Another head of the US hydra is the Pentagon’s near total takeover of the foreign policy and justice system in the US. If you look at the Pentagons’ Quadrennial Defense Review Report, you can see this:

The role of the Department of Defense is to field, sustain, and employ the military capabilities needed to protect the United States and its allies and to advance our interests.

As a global power, the United States has a broad range of tools for advancing its national interests described above. Whenever possible, we seek to pursue those interests through cooperation, diplomacy, economic development and engagement, and the power of America’s ideas and values. When absolutely necessary, the United States and its allies have shown the willingness and ability to resort to force in defense of our interests and the common good.

Despite those who disregard the rules of the international system, the United States must remain a standard-bearer in the conduct of war. The United States will maintain and support international norms by upholding the Geneva Conventions and by providing detainees and prisoners of war the rights and protections afforded to them under international law.

This is astounding. The role of the DoD is to "advance our interests"? It is to defend our interests and the "common good"? And it is a standard-bearer (i.e., a moral  standard-bearer) in the conduct of war?

The military is supposed to protect us when someone attacks us. It is not supposed to be an agency that advances our national interests. The reason for that is that there are no such things as "our national interests". You may tell me that X is a national interest and I may disagree or say that, no, Y is a national interest. The point is that no person or group of persons can define what a national interest is. Yet we are forced to spend money on invasive actions around the world because some people in government think that such actions are in the national interest. At bottom, the notion of national interest is totalitarian.

Then to claim that the military is a moral standard-bearer in war, is simply a blatant joke. Just as an example, take the Guantánamo prison and its military tribunals. Torture, denial of rights, denial of due process, admission of hearsay evidence and evidence obtained through torture. How’s that for a moral standard-bearer?

China is faced with a multi-headed monster. It is supposed to bow to the dictates of the US imperial government. Even though it is a huge trading partner and a huge financial lender, the US blithely thinks China will go along with US threats because the US has a stronger military and has military bases around and near China, while China has no such bases around or near the US. What would you do in such a situation, if you were the Chinese government? You would arm yourself.

The US ultimately wants a war with China to settle the question of who is going to dominate the world. The US deliberately interprets Chinese actions as threatening and propagandizes us so that we will see China as an enemy. We do not need to do this. We can stop being an imperial power and enjoy peaceful trade with China and everyone else. We should close down our foreign military bases and turn towards peace, that word that everyone has forgotten.

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According to Sullivan, the pseudo-libertarian statist, if Hayek says something, then libertarians must believe it. The quote from Hayek:

Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision.

Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong… Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make the provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken,” – The Road To Serfdom (Chapter 9).

We’re supposed to believe that statement because Hayek made it. Sullivan says:

Finding a way to get insurance against the exigencies of human life, of which illness is a prime example, is not socialism. It’s insurance.

By which statement he means government should help people get medical  insurance.

The assumption here is that free market capitalism will not produce sufficient medical insurance opportunities and therefore the government must intervene.

First of all, what do we mean by medical insurance. When you insure your house or your car, you don’t take out a policy that pays for replacing a leaking faucet or changing the oil. You insure against major risks such as fire destroying your house or smashing your car into another car or a tree; things that will cost lots of money. That’s what insurance usually is. Medical insurance, these days, is mostly not against major risks such as cancer or heart disease which require large expenditures to treat. On the contrary, medical insurance covers just about everything from colds to brain surgery; i.e., from the trivial to the important. It’s not really insurance at all; it is a pre-paid treatment expense that, depending on the coverage, can cost thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per year, often with co-pays. So, for starters, there’s a huge difference between regular insurance and medical insurance.

Then there are the laws, mandates and legal restrictions put on medical insurance by governments, local and federal. For instance, the fact that most people get medical insurance through their jobs. Why is this? People get on-the-job medical insurance because they get a tax break from the government. In this type of insurance, the government prevents you from dealing directly with insurance companies to negotiate a contract that would suit you and it prevents you from going out of state to get insurance. Since you don’t get to decide, the prices go up because you can’t go somewhere else for insurance. The government has killed the free market in medical insurance. Then the government adds all sorts of mandates on insurance companies. Yesterday (January 29) the government implemented its law requiring that health insurance plans cover mental and physical illnesses to the same extent. Recall that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the psychologists bible, says that the following are mental disorders:

• Academic Problem
• Acculturation Problem
• Body Dysmorphic Disorder
• Borderline Intellectual Functioning
• Child or Adolescent Antisocial Behavior
• Conduct Disorder
• Disruptive Behavior Disorder
• Female Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder
• Histrionic Personality Disorder
• Identity Problem
• Male Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder
• Malingering
• Neglect of Child
• Oppositional Defiant Disorder
• Parent-Child Relational Problem
• Partner Relational Problem
• Phase of Life Problem
• Reading Disorder
• Religious or Spiritual Problem
• Sibling Relational Problem
• Stuttering
• Transvestic Fetishism

So, how much will insurance companies have to raise their premiums to pay for some noisy brat diagnosed as having Oppositional Defiant Disorder. His "treatment" will cost us hundreds or thousands of dollars, when a spanking is probably the most effective thing to do.

We all lose when government decides to takeover what is seen as a social problem. A free market in medical insurance would lower premiums, let people decide what kind of contract they want or whether they want one at all. There are lots of people who do not want a medical insurance policy for a variety of reasons. Moreover, in the days before HMOs and government mandates, people who could not afford treatment were not turned away by doctors or hospitals. The same could still happen. Nowadays, however, the first thing they ask you in the ER is whether you have medical insurance, can they see your card, and only then, what’s wrong with you.

So, just because Hayek has said something, doesn’t mean we must believe it, especially when his argument is weak or incorrect.

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