Get Ready for the Health Czar
I have not vetted this stuff–i.e. I haven’t gone and checked to see if the language really is in the bill–but Betsy McCaughey has dug up some some truly chilling “reforms” to the medical industry that are currently in the “stimulus” bill. Ahh, we get mugged a trillion dollars in order to pay for the socialization of our health care. Woo hoo!
Like I said, I haven’t gone and verified that McCaughey is accurately representing the provisions, but here’s her take:
One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”
Tom Woods Is Building An Army
Check it out; there are 276 volunteers when I checked. I told Tom he should start eating locusts and honey but his doctor advised against it.
The Daily Capitalist
A fairly new blog. I haven’t had a chance to read much of it, but the banner at the top is awesome.
St. Louis Fed Sends Data to the Memory Hole?
If anyone has a reasonable explanation for this, I would love to hear it. Until then, this is fueling my conspiracy theory view of the world…
For my Daily Reckoning article, I included the below graph:
Someone wanted to put it in a PowerPoint presentation, and so I emailed her the original source at FRED. But then she asked how I got it to go back so far, because right now this is what comes up:
Those are the same data series; you can check the title at the top of each chart. And yet, when I looked at the series in December, they had the information going back to 1929. Today, if you check the series info, it only goes back to 1959.
Any thoughts? Like I said, if I were a conspiracy theorist, I would think the Fed is trying to hide just how unprecedented all this stuff is. Maybe they didn’t appreciate Glenn Beck’s antics the other week?
Two Fallacies Typical in Policy Discourse
* Roy Cordato debunks the whole “making our children pay for it” fallacy regarding government debt. Note: there is more to the story, and I deal with this in the PIG to Capitalism, but Roy is right in the limited space he devotes to the topic.
* I meant to blog about this months ago when it came out in Nature (or Science, I forget). Anyway, these guys argue that “miles per gallon” is a misleading metric and “gallons per mile” would be a much more sensible target for policymakers:
MPG tricks people’s perceptions. Replacing a car that gets 14 MPG with a car that gets 17 MPG saves as much gas for a given distance as replacing a car that gets 33 MPG with a car that gets 50 MPG (about 100 gallons per 10,000 miles). MPG obscures the value of removing the most inefficient cars. A 14 to 20 MPG improvement saves twice as much gas as a 33 to 50 MPG improvement.
"Are We All Austrians Now?"
So asks von Pepe. The first oddity he noticed was Arnold Kling’s discussion of James Hamilton’s work stressing “technological frictions.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like he’s stressing the capital heterogeneity of the Austrian school.
And then today John Taylor has an extremely ABCTish op ed in the WSJ.
I realize the important thing is that these ideas are getting out there, with or without the Mises branding. But still, it’s a bit annoying when mainstream economists are “discovering” things that Mises wrote in 1920. I felt the same way back when everyone was going nuts over how awesome Douglass North was for “discovering” the importance of property rights.
Tom Woods and Burt Folsom on Glenn Beck
Woo hoo! I am friends with Tom via Mises Institute and Burt via Hillsdale College. I relied heavily on Burt’s book for my own (forthcoming) book on the Depression, and although I haven’t read it yet, I’m sure Tom’s book is awesome.
The Merciful God of the "Old Testament"
I’m putting that in quotation marks because our theology teacher (in my Catholic high school) once told us, “Don’t call it that in front of a Jewish person!” But I asked my Jewish neighbor one time if he would be insulted and he said no.
In church today the (assistant) pastor was going through various passages where the Lord says that He will take people’s sins and hurl them into the sea, He will wipe them from His memory, etc. etc. And then the pastor said something that resonated with me: “Everyone, notice that these passages are all from the Old Testament, you know, when God was really mean before Jesus came along and changed His mind?”
I thought that was funny because I used to think like that when I was younger. I thought the God depicted in the Old Testament was vindictive and had a really short fuse. In contrast, Jesus seemed like a really nice guy.
Well, there is really no way to reconcile those opinions with Scripture. If I had held on to those childhood beliefs, I might as well have made up my own religion, because the Bible clearly says, for example, that the Lord of the Old Testament is slow to anger, is merciful, etc.
But beyond that, you have the testimony of Jesus Himself. In other words, it is rather ridiculous to think, “Jesus is a really nice guy, and I respect his moral code, but man oh man, I can’t endorse what that psycho being did back in the day!”
The reason you can’t say that, is that Jesus Himself revered “that psycho” and said none but Him was good. So you can’t endorse Jesus’ moral code if you think the God of the Israelites was often out of line.
Anyway, I will close this post with something that shocked me when I first realized it (several years ago). I had thought that Jesus was a great synthesizer and innovator, because (I thought) He took what was good in Judaism and saved it, while throwing out all the “crazy” stuff. In particular, I thought that Jesus invented the greatest commandments, to love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. I thought Jesus was the Einstein of theology, as it were, giving a deeper set of principles that yielded the specific conclusions of the more cumbersome set of rules handed down by Moses.
But there was just one flaw with my neat little theory: Those two specific commands appear explicitly in the Old Testament:
Deuteronomy 6:5==> Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.
Leviticus 19:18==>Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.
During one of these Sunday “religious” posts I do intend to address the burning question: How the heck could a loving, merciful God have ordered the Israelites to slaughter the children of their enemies?! But I am letting it percolate.
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