Right-Wingers for Government Health Insurance?
Jeff Tucker alerts us to this Paul Craig Roberts piece where he declares:
What the US needs is a single-payer not-for-profit health system that pays doctors and nurses sufficiently that they will undertake the arduous training and accept the stress and risks of dealing with illness and diseases.
Now maybe you think I’m taking PCR out of context. Here’s more:
A private health care system worked in the days before expensive medical technology, malpractice suits, high costs of bureaucracy associated with third-party payers and heavy investment in combating fraud, and pressure on insurance companies from Wall Street to improve “shareholder returns.”
Despite the rise in premiums, payments to health care providers, such as doctors, appear to be falling along with coverage to policy holders. The system is no longer functional and no longer makes sense. Health care has become an incidental rather than primary purpose of the health care system. Health care plays second fiddle to insurance company profits and salaries to bureaucrats engaged in fraud prevention and discovery. There is no point in denying coverage to one-sixth of the population in the name of saving a nonexistent private free market health care system.
The only way to reduce the cost of health care is to take the profit and paperwork out of health care.
To be perfectly honest, I have no idea what PCR is actually saying in this article. Is he “for” government health insurance / care? I don’t know. I can’t see how you’re going to get a single-payer without some serious coercion from the feds, but naturally PCR doesn’t focus too much on that; he just explains why everybody else opining on this topic is immoral and/or dumb. His arguments in this piece are similar to the debates we had over outsourcing.
Bob: Yes Dr. Roberts, I get it, you don’t think Ricardo’s argument about comparative advantage still holds in a world with mobile capital. OK, so are you saying you are for tariffs or capital controls?
PCR: No I never said that.
Bob: OK then what are you saying?
PCR: I’m saying Bush is in bed with multinational corporations who are screwing workers in the name of profits.
Bob: Okaaay, but is your newfound thinking on free trade causing you to change any of your policy recommendations? Now that the standard argument for free trade is shattered, what do you want to do about it?
PCR: I want to keep writing articles explaining how evil George Bush is, and how stupid libertarians are for thinking we have free trade.
And check out this:
"What Should I Read to Learn Austro-libertarianism?" bask
(This is not a “bleg,” since I am not begging, I am asking.)
I get emails all the time from people saying they have just stumbled onto Austrian economics and/or libertarianism (in the Rothbardian tradition), and they want to know where to begin. They adore my writings, of course, but what’s the next level of fanaticism?
So in the comments let me know what you think the best gateway drugs are in this arena. E.g. I know some people say, “It all started with Ayn Rand,” whereas for me that wouldn’t have worked at all. (I’m not ripping Rand, I’m just saying there’s no way I would have agreed to read a humongous novel that someone handed to me if I weren’t already a fan of the worldview.)
Remember How I Said I Understood Why Liberals Thought They Were More Intellectual Than Conservatives?
Pete Boettke gives us this blast from the past:
Make sure you watch to see who is loudly cheering at the end of the clip.
Excellent Cochrane/Zingales Article on Lehman and Paulson
I can forgive John Cochrane his excesses in defense of neoclassical financial models because he and Zingales did a wonderful job showing that the financial panic in September 2008 was most likely not caused by the collapse of Lehman. On the contrary, it was Paulson’s saber rattling that spooked investors:
The nearby chart shows that the main risk indicators only took off after Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s TARP speeches to Congress on Sept. 23 and 24—not after the Lehman failure.
On Sept. 22, bank credit-default swap (CDS) spreads were at the same level as on Sept. 12. (CDS spreads are the cost of buying insurance against default.) On Sept. 19, the S&P 500 closed above its Sept. 12 level. The Libor-OIS spread—which captures the perceived riskiness of short-term interbank lending—rose only 18 points the day of Lehman’s collapse, while it shot up more than 60 points from Sept. 23 to Sept. 25, after the TARP testimony. (Libor—the London Interbank Offer Rate—is the rate at which banks can borrow unsecured for three months.)
Why? In effect, these speeches amounted to “The financial system is about to collapse. We can’t tell you why. We need $700 billion. We can’t tell you what we’re going to do with it.” That’s a pretty good way to start a financial crisis.
And here’s the chart which is rather suggestive:
Orwell Lives! The WSJ Takes Inflation Spinning to New Low
Well shoot, the punchline isn’t nearly as effective if I can’t link you to the actual headline, but I swear in today’s A-section of the Wall Street Journal, there was a story (it was on the right column of a left-handed page) with the following title:
I threw out the paper and now I can’t find the story on Google…
So let’s recap what’s happened with the doublethink on inflation. Originally, inflation referred to an expansion in the money and/or credit supply. (Depending on the economist, the precise definition differed. E.g. some would say, “Expansion of bank credit above the influx of actual gold,” or some would say, “An expansion of the stock of money higher than the expansion of demand to hold money.”) But the point was, inflation referred to the increase in units of money chasing goods.
Then in the first half of the 20th century, the definition morphed so that inflation came to mean “rising prices.” I don’t think this was a coincidence; it’s obvious that the central bank is causing inflation when the very term means, “The supply of money.” But if we’re instead referring to rising prices, why, just about anybody could be responsible! It might be Arab oil tycoons, or union bosses, or greedy businessmen. How can the poor Fed officials, in their mission to preserve the value of the dollar, be expected to match wits with the likes of those rascals?!
But now we see–what with the news reports saying that last month’s CPI rose a “tame” 0.4%–that apparently the definition has changed once again. Now, inflation means “the expected rise in prices–with energy and food prices taken out, where necessary–over the next few years.” So even if prices just jumped up at an annualized rate of 4.9% last month, inflation is still “tame” because hey, unemployment’s high and we all know, you can’t have stagflation. That’s impossible.
I Don’t Vote, Not Even for Ron Paul
In a previous post, I mentioned that I didn’t vote for Ron Paul in the election. A few people expressed surprise in the comments. So I should clarify that I didn’t vote for RP, because I don’t vote (in political elections), period. My reasoning is pretty simple: My vote won’t make a difference in any remotely plausible scenario, and so there’s no reason to vote as a “pragmatic” measure. (It might be justified to torture a guy who has planted a hidden bomb, but it’s definitely NOT justified to torture a guy who had nothing to do with planting a hidden bomb just because you’re worried.)
And to the obvious retort, “What if everyone acted like you?” I respond: That would be awesome. I hope everyone does. That’s why I spend so much time writing, after all, to get people to see why our current system is insane and evil. If only the candidates’ moms voted in the next presidential election, the welfare-warfare state would collapse pretty quickly.
Here’s an article on voting that I wrote after attending my brother-in-law’s high school graduation and listening to the motivational speaker tell the kids to help their country by always voting. Really, if you actually analyze the arguments for voting, you’ll see they’re shockingly bad.
Those Who Are Ignorant of Monetary History Are Condemned…?
I don’t endorse everything he says on monetary economics, but Robert Wenzel certainly makes a good point that the Fed chief is being coy with the economy. I am in a hurry so I can’t save the graphic to my blog server etc., but check out this FRED chart. It shows non-seasonally adjusted M2. Notice that it was flat in 2008 from about March onward, and then only shot up like a rocket in September after the financial crisis hit.
If you can tell the difference between the March 2008 – September 2008 squiggles, versus the March 2009 – September 2009 squiggles, than you have better eyes than I do.
Should the Fed Be Abolished?
I didn’t vote for Ron Paul, but I did vote in the poll at the end of this CNBC article reviewing RP’s new book, End the Fed. As of my vote, 83% agreed that the Fed should be abolished.
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