A message from Ron Paul (May 29) urging you to support The Private Option Health Care Act:
Dear Friend of Liberty,
Unlike the statists in Washington, the freedom movement
understands that our health care is too important to be left to
the whims of politicians and bureaucrats. Continue reading
Roderick Long on what sort of equality libertarianism entails:
“But if neither legal equality nor equality of liberty is sufficient for a free society as we understand it, in what sense can it be from our equal creation that we derive our right to liberty?
For the answer to this question we must turn from Jefferson to Jefferson’s source, John Locke, who tells us exactly what “equality” in the libertarian sense is: namely, a conditionwherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection….[3] Continue reading
The Feds now claim the right to tell you what kind of food you can put in your mouth.
From World Net Daily:
“Attorneys for the federal government have argued in a lawsuit pending in federal court in Iowa that individuals have no “fundamental right” to obtain what food they choose.
The brief was filed April 26 in support of a motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund over the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s ban on the interstate sale of raw milk. Continue reading
A healthy put down by libertarian blogger Last Ditch of one of the most offensive arguments being made about libertarians, in this instance, a crack by environmentalist George Monbiot, a writer I often enjoy when he’s talking about something he knows i.e., not economics.
“This may just be the most offensive piece of twaddle the Guardian has ever published. From a newspaper that enjoys the services of Polly Toynbee, that is a big claim. Monbiot delights sneeringly in the hypocrisy of Matt Ridley, who went cap in hand to the Bank of England on behalf of Northern Rock’s depositors. This, despite having written articles railing “…against taxes, subsidies, bailouts and government regulation…” Continue reading
The Washington Post reports:
“Massachusetts officials on Wednesday announced plans to move millions of dollars in state investments out of some of the nation’s biggest banks to protest credit card interest rates.
State Treasurer Timothy Cahill said the state has removed Bank of America, Citi and Wells Fargo from a list of institutions approved for new state investments. Massachusetts, which is the only state to make such a move, is also beginning to divest $243 million in funds held at those banks, though the process could take up to six months.
“We want to bring some fairness into the issue,” said Cahill, who is running for governor. “I don’t think what we’re asking is . . . out of line.”
This is a brief excerpt from a live interview with legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright (June 18, 1957), when he was ninety. The audio isn’t very clear, so I’ve provided a transcript. The words are pungent and speak succinctly to the task of weaning people from dependence on the state:
“Education has been unrealistic.
Education has not seen the nature of the thing we needed as a people.
Education has not provided enlightenment. It’s provided conditioning
By way of books, by way of what has been, by way of the past,
By the habituation of the human species to date.
And it hasn’t taken the views of the men who are capable of looking beyond
and seeing what the nature of the thing was.
What is the nature of this thing we’re in.
Now that’s the grace(?) of seeing in, not seeing at.
And all education today is a seeing at.”
Kevin Carson at The Center for a Stateless Society has a long, fascinating paper, “The Health Care Crisis: A Crisis of Artificial Scarcity,”about different new initiatives in providing health services that bypass the high expenses of the current delivery system. One example he cites:
“A New York doctor is offering flat-rate health care for the uninsured for $79 a month, but he has run afoul of state insurance regulations in a case that challenges the established norms of the U.S. health system….
Dr. John Muney, president of AMG Medical Group, said he started the program in September after noticing that many of his patients were losing their jobs, and therefore, their health insurance coverage.About 500 people have registered for Muney’s $79-a-month plan, accounting for 15 percent of patients at the practice, which has offices in each of New York’s five boroughs. The monthly $79 fee… covers unlimited preventive visits and onsite medical services such as minor surgery, physical therapy, lab work and gynecological care. Ilana Clay, a 28-year-old who works in marketing for a jewelry firm, said she signed up in March because she could not afford her employer’s health insurance, which would have cost around $300 a month. “I hadn’t been to a doctor in a couple of years at that point,” she told Reuters. She had a scar removed in a quick onsite procedure that was covered by the plan. Muney said another patient came in with a tumor on her finger: “Somebody else asked $3,000 to remove it. The first visit, we were able to remove it, 15 minutes it took us.”
So far the program has not turned a profit, but Muney said he estimates that it could be profitable with 4,000 patients. In the meantime, he said, his motive is to give something back and provide a model of how healthcare can be more efficient.“Our healthcare system lends itself to abuse, fraud and waste,” he said, adding that bypassing insurers saved on administrative costs, which he said were about 25 percent of the price of care. “With this model, we’re bypassing all that.”
Muney said he received initial complaints from state insurance authorities in November. “The law says you can do preventive checkups unlimited, but if they come for sick visits you have to charge your overhead costs,” he told Reuters.
In February he received a letter instructing him that he must charge that minimum cost, which he calculates at $33 a visit—a price he says will deter people from signing up. Troy Oechsner, deputy superintendent of the state insurance department, said the rules were designed to protect consumers.
“Our concern is … making sure that consumers can rely on any promises made to them and that they will get the services they paid for when they need them,” he said. Protecting consumers by making them pay $33 per visit instead of $10. As Cool Hand Luke would say, “Wish you’d stop being so good to me, Cap’n.”
Muney’s comments on the savings from bypassing insurance, by the way, are suggestive of the
ways that reforms in delivery of service—say, by incorporating finance into the cooperative organization of service—may also be a solution to the insurance crisis. The provision of most primary care through such member-financed setups with no insurance paperwork cost, no incentive to pile on additional services, and strong incentives to minimize overhead given the inability to profit from 10,000% markups for supplies and drugs, may well be the future of medicine. Absent the perverse incentives and high overhead that prevail in bureaucratic hospitals, it’s really not surprising Muney can do it for $79.”
The head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Cardinal Peter Turkson, has moved away from his predecessor’s support for developing genetically modified food to alleviate hunger in poor countries. Instead, he argues that adoption of the “precautionary principle” is warranted:
“There are a lot of claims that are disputed (like) that GMOs never call for the use of pesticides or insecticides or anything because they are resistant,” he said. Such claims have been challenged, he said, and some say “at a certain point (these crops) require insecticides whose chemicals break up later in the soil and render the soil less fertile.”
Given the disputed claims and doubts, “I think that we should go easy and probably satisfy all of these objections to the full satisfaction of those who raise these objections,” he said.
Because of the companies’ control over the patented seeds, “what is meant to alleviate hunger and poverty may actually in the hands of some people become really weapons of infliction of poverty and hunger,” Cardinal Turkson said.
Previously, opponents of GM carried the burden of proving that some harm was being inflicted. Under the PP, companies that planned on introducing genetic changes into an organism would have to bear the burden of proving that it was safe.
While this might seem counter-libertarian, I would argue it is not.
1. Since changes in genetics are impossible to regulate post facto, they cannot be subject to the usual economic arguments available to libertarians. The potential devastation is so irreparable that the principle of liberty demands that the bar be raised ahead of the event.
2. Biotechnology as an industry is concentrated in so few and such large companies, that free market conditions do not prevail at all in other respects. The companies owe their position in the market to their influence on government regulations and laws, to begin with. That suggests that there will be little in the way of normal market forces to check their natural profit-seeking from turning into rent-seeking based on preferential treatment, captive markets/monopoly, and government enforcement. PP is simply a thoughtful mechanism to prevent profit from careening into plunder.
Bottom line, PP prevents looting or theft.
That makes it libertarian.
I’ve seen some libertarians describe their ethic as, “Do what you will…but pay the price.”
Frankly, that is not a prescription at all. It simply describes consequences.
In ethical paganism, this would be considered incomplete, as the conclusion of the famous Wiccan Rede demonstrates:
“Where the rippling waters go, cast a stone, the truth you’ll know.
When you have and hold a need, harken not to others greed.With a fool no season spend, or be counted as his friend.
Merry Meet and Merry Part, bright the cheeks and warm the heart.Mind the Three-fold Laws you should, three times bad and three times good.
When misfortune is enow, wear the star upon your brow.Be true in love this you must do, unless your love is false to you.
These Eight words the Rede fulfill:
“An Ye Harm None, Do What Ye Will”
An Ye Harm None.
The simple omission of this phrase has tragic consequences for people’s understanding of ethical practice. Worse yet, they enter a path of solipsism, narcissism, and even criminality, under the delusion that they’ve discovered a new moral law.
Of course, what constitutes harm is debatable….
An odd little story today about well-regarded online bank and metals vendor, Everbank, that I came across at Cryptogon.
Apparently, they unilaterally changed the terms and conditions of their ‘metals select’ program recently. Everbank president, Frank Trotter, responded in a letter to Cryptogon author, Kevin Flaherty, that the changes were subsequently deleted. Still, if you’re a client, you might want to be on top of that. From all I’ve heard, they’re a reliable bank, but banks change hands and terms very frequently these days (for eg. BrownCo to Harris Direct to E-trade).