Benjamin Zycher
Agriculture
The Wages of Hubris
The latest gambit was the “compromise” between the moderate Left and the hard Left to expand Medicaid upward from the bottom and Medicare downward from the top, squeezing the private-sector middle almost out of existence. Much ballyhooed a week ago, it appears that this plan will collapse of its own ...
Commentary
PhRMA Is Shocked About GosHealth
The comedy highlight, of course, is the plaintive cry about “killing tens of thousands of jobs in our industry.” Did PhRMA believe that the $80 billion deal would have increased such employment? Did it not occur to them that the $80 billion inevitably would come to be an opening bid? ...
Commentary
Enemies of the People
And so we have, yet again, a perfect illustration of the truism that socialism would work perfectly if only there were no people. Since we do have people, with all their self-interested motives and unwillingness to bend their inherent nature to ideological demands, socialism in practice encounters problems, known as ...
Commentary
Stupak Amendment
The goal here—the only goal—is to stop health-care socialism. Period. Giving the pro-life Democrats a reason to vote for it—passage of the Stupak amendment—seems to me to be madness. And suppose that it passes and the Senate passes its own version of health care “reform,” after which Waxman and Pelosi ...
Commentary
Six Years of Farce
So there we have it. Freebies for me, higher taxes for thee. You can take the guy out of Hollywood, but you can’t . . . This blog post originally appeared on National Review’s “Critical Condition.”
Commentary
Centrism Defined
It will be interesting to see how the CBO scores whatever bill emerges on the Senate floor if it contains this little bag of Halloween treats. In any event, two points: First, am I wrong to think that the prospects of health-care socialism in the Senate are a good deal ...
Commentary
How the Beltway Bandits See the World
The Beltway bandits may know how to steal from the private sector — that is, from ordinary people making far less than the $250,000 benchmark made famous during the 2008 campaign — but that does not obscure their own brand of dumb, which inexorably comes to the surface from time ...
Commentary
They Just Don’t Learn
First they started cutting “deals” with the Beltway thieves, arrangements that from the very beginning were obviously unenforceable and that powerful interests had every incentive to violate. (See my earlier comments about that expedition to the galaxy Stupid here, here, and here.) And the hits just keep on comin’. PR ...
Commentary
Insurance ‘Reform’ Equals Single-Payer
Nope. It’s all a surprise. Here’s another: Political pressures to weaken the individual mandate, supposedly the quid pro quo for nonexclusion of insurance applicants with pre-existing conditions, are and will remain irresistible, for two reasons. First, the individual mandate is necessary to preserve the private insurance sector if all applicants ...
Commentary
Taxing Baucus
Those numbers are phony for any number of reasons, but notice that the “deficit reduction” is the net result of $518 billion in increased spending from expanded insurance coverage, $404 billion in reduced spending from “other provisions affecting direct spending,” and $196 billion in increased revenues. The $404 billion “does ...
The Wages of Hubris
The latest gambit was the “compromise” between the moderate Left and the hard Left to expand Medicaid upward from the bottom and Medicare downward from the top, squeezing the private-sector middle almost out of existence. Much ballyhooed a week ago, it appears that this plan will collapse of its own ...
PhRMA Is Shocked About GosHealth
The comedy highlight, of course, is the plaintive cry about “killing tens of thousands of jobs in our industry.” Did PhRMA believe that the $80 billion deal would have increased such employment? Did it not occur to them that the $80 billion inevitably would come to be an opening bid? ...
Enemies of the People
And so we have, yet again, a perfect illustration of the truism that socialism would work perfectly if only there were no people. Since we do have people, with all their self-interested motives and unwillingness to bend their inherent nature to ideological demands, socialism in practice encounters problems, known as ...
Stupak Amendment
The goal here—the only goal—is to stop health-care socialism. Period. Giving the pro-life Democrats a reason to vote for it—passage of the Stupak amendment—seems to me to be madness. And suppose that it passes and the Senate passes its own version of health care “reform,” after which Waxman and Pelosi ...
Six Years of Farce
So there we have it. Freebies for me, higher taxes for thee. You can take the guy out of Hollywood, but you can’t . . . This blog post originally appeared on National Review’s “Critical Condition.”
Centrism Defined
It will be interesting to see how the CBO scores whatever bill emerges on the Senate floor if it contains this little bag of Halloween treats. In any event, two points: First, am I wrong to think that the prospects of health-care socialism in the Senate are a good deal ...
How the Beltway Bandits See the World
The Beltway bandits may know how to steal from the private sector — that is, from ordinary people making far less than the $250,000 benchmark made famous during the 2008 campaign — but that does not obscure their own brand of dumb, which inexorably comes to the surface from time ...
They Just Don’t Learn
First they started cutting “deals” with the Beltway thieves, arrangements that from the very beginning were obviously unenforceable and that powerful interests had every incentive to violate. (See my earlier comments about that expedition to the galaxy Stupid here, here, and here.) And the hits just keep on comin’. PR ...
Insurance ‘Reform’ Equals Single-Payer
Nope. It’s all a surprise. Here’s another: Political pressures to weaken the individual mandate, supposedly the quid pro quo for nonexclusion of insurance applicants with pre-existing conditions, are and will remain irresistible, for two reasons. First, the individual mandate is necessary to preserve the private insurance sector if all applicants ...
Taxing Baucus
Those numbers are phony for any number of reasons, but notice that the “deficit reduction” is the net result of $518 billion in increased spending from expanded insurance coverage, $404 billion in reduced spending from “other provisions affecting direct spending,” and $196 billion in increased revenues. The $404 billion “does ...
