Fox News Reacts to Ron Paul’s CPAC Victory
As Ariel Goldring said at Free Market Mojo, “Fox News reminds us that libertarians are not conservatives”.
Liberty Reads for February 24, 2010
Conservatives Should Oppose the War on Terror
All Hail The Great Conservative Leader Bob McDonnell
Here is a little rant I have been going on today:
I remember well all the supposed “Conservatives” that informed me that by not voting for McDonnell, I was somehow supporting Creigh Deeds. I expect every one of you that told me that to come and apologize. It appears, as I had always expected, that a vote for Bob McDonnell was a vote for Creigh Deeds and a Big Government statist.
According to the Washington Examiner, the charlatan that is Bob McDonnell has requested more Stimulus funds to help pay for Medicaid. While I have already heard some surprise from some of his loyal followers, I can’t say that this is too terribly shocking. Throughout his campaign, his solutions to all the problems he found in Virginia could be solved by Government interference of some sort.
On Tuesday during a visit to Capitol Hill, McDonnell told reporters from the Examiner that “if the federal government is willing to help us for a short period of time, that would be fine.” Just how long is this “short period of time” Bob? Also, what strings will come attached to such aid? And, why should taxpayers from other states bail Virginia out?
It looks like Bob McDonnell is just another politician who says one thing and does another.
Liberty Reads for February 23, 2010
Government Stimulus, One Year Later
Another Way To Look at the Stimulus’ Effect on Private Employers
The Failure of Anti-Money Laundering Laws
From Dan Mitchell at Cato:
Did the Government Poison Alcohol During Prohibition?
According to a recent article from Slate, the U.S. Government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition. While it is unlikely that they poisoned this with the intention of killing people, they did intend on deterring people from drinking alcohol. Truthers will probably point to a story like this claiming that Government is in fact seeking to harm it’s citizens in some effort to control them. While I believe that Government cannot coordinate itself well enough to pull off some grand scheme as the Truthers would allege, it is evident that Government does do things to change the behavior of the governed.
It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.
Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.
Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
Health Care Profits: Wait, What Are Profits?
The common argument for the government to do anything all comes back to the concept of profit. Private businesses invest in “profitable” ventures to make money. The basic argument for government is that it is not the job of the government to profit off of the people. Therefore, if you eliminate profit then you save everyone money.
Most people have argued this about the current health care costs, but Mark Perry over at Carpe Diem shows that the argument is weak, at best:
“Update data are now available for Q4 of 2009, and the Health Care Plan industry (includes Humana, Aetna, WellPoint, Magellan, UnitedhealthGroup, etc.), and the health insurance industry slipped to #88 with a profit margin of 3.4%. Actually, that industry profit margin was boosted by WellPoint’s 18% profit margin for Q4 2009, which was due largely to a one-time sale of its Pharmacy Benefit Management division. Without that sale, WellPoint’s profit margin would have been only 3.9%, the industry average profit margin would have been closer to 3%, and the ranking for the industry would have fallen a few places down to #92.
…
So even if we could strip away 100% of the health insurance industry’s profits, it would only save patients between $100 and 200 per year in health insurance costs.”
But the real question is what is profit and what happens if we were to eliminate them?
