Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: United States

  • Individual Run Health Insurance

    Responsibility is a necessary component of our existence. If we value something (anything), we will have to take care of it. If you own a car you need to make sure it receives regular oil changes and other maintenance. Yet people seem to be more proactive about inanimate objects like their car then they are about their own bodies and health.

    If you want to get something fixed on your car, you probably take it someplace to get repaired. You might also get multiple quotes on getting it repaired. You talk to friends and family about a good repair shop. And ultimately you make a decision based on all of these factors. What’s wrong with doing the same thing for your health?

    Those of us with Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) already do this, but when we call a doctor’s office (before going) and ask how much an office visit costs, most people are thrown aback. They get confused and ask, “Do you have health insurance?” We say “Yes, it is an HSA, but we still have to pay out of pocket up to a certain amount, and we want to get the best value possible.” Most of them (when they look for it) actually have this information. And most clinics are pretty inexpensive. The last clinic I went to was $90 plus a $20 prescription for a generic. Upon arriving at the office they actually asked me before doing any tests because they know that as the consumer I don’t want to be charged unnecessarily. And when the doctor only talked to me for fifteen minutes, I didn’t expect to see a charge for a two-hour consultation.

    Well, unfortunately if health-care legislation goes through, you won’t have the freedom to shop around at all. The government will charge you a percentage of your income to cover everyone’s insurance costs. That $90 visit is looking pretty good when compared to two or even 5 percent pulled out of your income. The only doctors you will be able to choose from will be selected by the government. And even if you can find a decent one, the best doctors will have closed down to find other, more profitable careers (or will have moved to freer countries).

    HSAs are one of the only steps in the direction toward individual responsibility. I’m surprised that there isn’t more discussion about consumer driven health-care initiatives in the health-care debate. Consumer driven plans mean that the consumer has the authority, not the government. It also means that people have to take responsibility for their own and their family’s health. It means that if they are irresponsible there will be serious repercussions, which in itself should be their primary motivator. If the government’s doctors are worse than our current physicians (and they will be), you are essentially putting yourself, your family and literally everyone you know at a higher health risk.

    But universal health care sounds pretty good, right? The names they throw around cast government run health care in a positive and almost otopian light: everyone gets health care. It is universal. Health care is a human right and the government is going to make sure you get it. People think that they are getting something for nothing, that this universal health care is a kind of free perk for being an American citizen. But we will pay for the health care in the form of higher taxes on our employers, income, property and purchases.

    If our employers are taxed more, they will pay us less. When a business has to pay effectively 120 percent of your wage (which they currently do) and you only take home 80 percent of it (which is also currently the case), there is a 40 percent gap that goes to Uncle Sam. This gap will widen as the size of government increases. They have to get their money from somewhere and 40 percent turns into 50 percent, 60 percent and so on. On top of that, you get taxed on your purchases (sales tax) and your property if you own any (property tax). We have seen how effective the government is at running things (they aren’t), yet people seem to be okay with adding another “health care” tax to businesses and individuals that will give the government more work to do.

    Then there are the extremists who say that health care is a human right. I would argue that we have the right to the pursuit of health care and health in general. Because the truth is, ideology doesn’t mean much to Mother Nature. Cancer, viruses and bacteria don’t discriminate, to say otherwise is delusional. And probably the best reason to prevent this from going through? The politicians that are debating this important issue won’t even be affected by it. You better believe they will continue to get the best health care on the public’s dime. They will certainly include special exceptions that allow them to get superior health care while the rest of us plebeians are stuck with a bureaucratic nightmare.

    A few technical details about HSAs: With an HSA, you still have a private health insurance plan called a High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP), but instead of a deductible, coinsurance and copays you just have a flat deductible. Meaning every year the maximum you ever pay out of pocket is that deductible. It is simple and it gives the consumer the power.

    The HSA is really a second component, even though everyone always talks about HSAs as an all inclusive thing. It is literally a special kind of savings account that you have to apply for after you have a HDHP. All of the money you put into the HSA is tax deductible but you can only use the money for health related expenses. And you are limited as to how much you can deposit per year. But you can also use the money to make investments for retirement and the interest accumulates tax free!

  • The Fallacies of Nuclear Power

    Nuclear power plants currently generate over 20 percent of the power in the United States. In other countries, like France, they power upward of 80 percent. There have been 884 coal mining related deaths since 1980 in the United States alone. Even wind turbines cause more deaths than the nuclear power industry, amounting to a total of sixty deaths (PDF) since the 1970s.

    In one case you have an industry that is guaranteed to cause death and severely lower the life expectancy of those involved. In the second, you have an alternative technology with a large number of accidental deaths. Third, you have a proven technology with a solid history of little to no problems and much fewer deaths. You do, however, have a word that can also be associated with powerful weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear as a word tends to scare people. We think of bomb drills and nuclear holocaust. But it’s really just a word like any other. Nuclear power need not be feared like the red death!

    This quote is from Greenpeace’s website. I decided to break up the summary against nuclear power into section to better analyze it:

    Despite what the nuclear industry tells us, building enough nuclear power stations to make a meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would cost trillions of dollars

    Building a nuclear power plant costs more than building a wind farm or a collection of solar panels, but the ratio of wattage output of a plant isn’t comparable on a per watt basis. Where did they get “trillions of dollars”? I’m at a loss about where to begin with that one. And besides, the implementation of nuclear power plants will decrease the need for old fossil fuel burning plants that output tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases. I personally could care less about greenhouse gas emissions, but since they do I’m surprised they forgot to mention that.

    Create tens of thousands of tons of lethal high level radioactive waste […]

    If disposed of properly, Mother Nature and radioactive half life do all the work for us. You just need a place to put the waste.

    I personally think we should launch it into space, but a more cost effective solution would be to use a massive mountain in a desert where you don’t have to worry about water runoff or a nearby population. In fact, such a site already exists, Yucca Mountain, although the project has recently been shut down. Which makes no sense considering instead of being stored in the best possible location, it will now be stored in higher risk locations, but I digress.

    […] contribute to further proliferation of nuclear weapons materials, and result in a Chernobyl-scale accident once every decade.

    The plants in operation today aren’t even remotely in the same class as the plant in Chernobyl, at least in the United States. And that is including the oldest plants in operation! And since they have been in operation for forty years (that would be four decades for all you non math folk), and there hasn’t been one Chernobyl scale accident, I would have to disagree.

    For Three Mile Island fans, there were no casualties and the radiation amounted to that of an X-Ray you would receive at the doctor’s. Did I already mention that if these organizations had left the industry alone, we wouldn’t have any older plants to deal with anyway? And we would already be off of foreign oil and fossil fuels? And our air would be cleaner?

    Perhaps most significantly, it will squander the resources necessary to implement meaningful climate change solutions.

    By resources I assume they mean money? I don’t understand that logic at all, considering it will be more expensive to create the same amount of energy with wind and solar, not to mention the existing loss in tax revenue due to the tax credits that have existed for quite some time.

    That said, I’m not against other technologies. In fact I love technology and new ideas. I love entrepreneurship. I do’’t love intangible promises from new technologies. Sure, a breakthrough could happen in solar and wind power that makes them the clear choice. But the same could happen in nuclear or even coal power too! In the short term, I would place my money on nuclear and get us off of reliance of foreign oil, something that inherently undermines our position in all things foreign policy and affects us in a tangible way every day.

  • The Decline of States’ Rights

    With a population of over three hundred million people and an increasingly diverse set of principles and opinions, the United States has a growth problem.

    The Founding Fathers predicted this issue and emphasized the importance of local governments. Their logic: that people with similar principles will congregate in similar areas. As members of the overall country, the process is made simple and requires no special passport or application. Smaller communities can take a stand on issues of importance and make an exception for their jurisdiction.

    The individual state, as originally intended as the largest of these communities, has now been subverted by an even larger national one. We are increasingly merging into the United State as opposed to a collection of United States. Just saying the “United State” sends 1984 chills down my spine.

    Here’s the problem; the federal government is growing. Just look at the latest bailout bill, national health-care legislation or TARP funds. It doesn’t end there either; just a few days ago another smaller $15 billion dollar billion “jobs bill” was passed.

    Do you believe in socialized medicine? You have a right to that belief, but why forces it on every other state instead of making it a priority in your own? Massachusetts attempted health-care reform and it didn’t work out too well. But they have a much better chance of successfully overhauling their system because they have a population of 6.5 million compared to three hundred million. Do you trust the government to efficiently run a project of that size?

    Then there is the issue of majority opinion. Even if they manage a 51 percent majority consensus on an issue like health care (which is impossible), wouldn’t you rather have a larger percentage? If every state had a different health-care initiative, people could rally more successfully for what they want. Why not take it a step further and bring it down to counties and cities. There would be less need to compromise on crucial issues and more chance of a higher ratio of majority acceptance. And best of all, your opinion and your voice are (literally) much more likely to be heard and appreciated.

    Look at your local proposals for the last few years; individual states and communities can actually make decisions with greater than a 60 percent popular vote! How likely is that on the national scale? In the local scenario you would have the freedom to go or move to another city, county or state if you really cared enough about certain issues. And you wouldn’t have to change your citizenship.

  • Will the Looted Just Shrug?

    The statist reaction to Republican senator Jim Bunning’s temporary block of a welfare bill shows what the welfare state has done to the American people.

    Everyone knows that federal spending is out of control. The feds are spending $1.4 trillion more than what they’re collecting in taxes. And that’s just for this year.

    Where are they getting the difference? They’re borrowing it, adding to the massive and ever-growing debt of the federal government. How is that debt going to be paid off? By American taxpayers. Your individual, average share as of right now is about $40,000. It’s growing every day because the feds are running up your credit card, which has no limit.

    So, Bunning blocks a welfare bill on the ground that the federal government shouldn’t be borrowing any more money. If it can’t afford to be providing the welfare, Bunning said, then it shouldn’t be spending more money.

    The statist crowd went ballistic. The attacks were the standard ones whenever anyone objects to any welfare state scheme: “He’s selfish, self-centered, and greedy. He hates the poor and loves the rich. He’s just grandstanding. The bill is only a small percentage of total spending and so it doesn’t make any difference in the larger scheme of things.”

    But the statist reaction to Bunning’s move goes much deeper than that and is a perfect reflection of what the socialistic welfare state has done to the American people. Having been born and raised under the welfare state, American recipients of welfare largess, including those on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment, education grants, mortgage guarantees, and bailout and stimulus monies, honestly believe that they are entitled to continue receiving it for as long as they “need” the money.

    That’s why they call much of this junk an “entitlement.” What the entitlement crowd is saying is: “I am entitled to your money because I want it and I need it. If you object, my statist associates and I will go on the attack against you and expose you for being a vicious, no-good, selfish hater of the poor and lover of the rich.”

    This is what the welfare state has done to America. It has produced a real war among the American people — between those who produce and own their wealth and those who are trying to get their hands on other people’s money through the force of the state. The nineteenth century French legislator Frederic Bastiat put it well when he indicated that under the welfare state, the government becomes a great fiction by which some people try to live at the expense of other people.

    Almost as bad has been what the welfare state has done to the mindsets of the American people. It has made so many Americans dependent on the government, not just financially but also emotionally and psychologically. People are on the dole have convinced themselves that they could never survive without their dole. And they absolutely freak out whenever someone talks about ending their dole. Even worse, they look upon the government as their daddy or, even worse, as a beloved deity.

    What is happening, not only here in the United States but in Greece, Portugal, Spain, England, and other welfare state countries, is that there isn’t enough wealth among the taxpayers to plunder to fund the massive, ever-growing number of people on the dole.

    Meanwhile, panicky over the potential crack up of the welfare state, liberals are blaming the economic woes on “freedom, deregulation, greed, the bankers, and free enterprise,” and they’re proposing their standard statist solution — more socialism and Keynesianism. They’re saying that the feds should just keep spending, spending, and spending, no matter how much they have to borrow or inflate to do so. The notion is that more spending will put unemployed people back to work, whose taxes can then fund the voracious and ever-growing wants of the parasitic sector of society.

    But as we libertarians have been saying for decades, ultimately the welfare state house of cards is going to crack apart, just as it did in Cuba and the Soviet Union. God has created a consistent universe, one in which immoral means will beget bad ends. The crack up has obviously already begun in such heavy-duty welfare state countries as Greece, Portugal, Spain, and England, where the base of wealth to plunder and loot is more limited than it is in the United States.

    But even here in the United States there is a limit to how much socialism the private sector can bear. And don’t forget: there is always the possibility that those who are being plundered and looted might just decide to go on strike, refusing to produce any more wealth and just “shrugging.”

    This story first appeared on Hornberger’s Blog, The Future of Freedom Foundation, March 4, 2010.

  • The Summit of Fantasy

    The president’s summit on health care revealed major schisms between public policy and reality. Those who feel that they must keep repeating to Americans that their health care is “broken” overlook a more fundamental problem.

    Most Americans, based on a lifetime of experience, don’t think the medicine practiced by their own physician is broken. So they don’t believe surveys conducted by the United Nations claiming health care is better in other countries. But more importantly, most Americans — 86 percent, in a recent CNN survey — indicate that they think government is broken. So whatever they think of their medical care, they are unlikely to think that a broken government can fix it.

    Yet, at the summit, the president and majority leaders behaved as if medical care would be best improved by a hundred or so new government agencies, boards and commissions to micro-manage most health-care decisions — from requiring physicians to administer patient treatments dictated by government protocols to requiring medical equipment manufacturers to pay fees for daring to invent new technologies.

    Additionally, prior to the summit the president had to propose the creation of a new “Health Insurance Rate Authority” to tell insurance companies what premiums they can charge after fifty states already tell them the same thing. (No thought was given to how eliminating some agencies would improve costs.)

    Not since Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged has anyone thought up more wasteful and destructive government agencies to control every aspect of the economy and our daily lives. At least Atlas Shrugged was fiction. Or in 1957 it was.

    Fiscal fantasy from the Senate, House of Representatives, and now from the White House, is evident with the claim that spending one or two trillion dollars (depending on how you don’t count it) will reduce the deficit. Of course the only way that this largest increase ever in the size and cost of government could reduce the deficit is by the largest tax increase in history. Americans don’t think that huge increases in the size of government are the best way to reduce deficits.

    The most amusing departure from reality was the idea that the president can proceed (and risk the political consequences) without bipartisan support. That assertion is nothing new — nothing has been bipartisan in Congress in the past year, not the bills passed by the Senate and House, nor the president’s recent proposals. That bipartisan ship sailed long ago. But the reality is that the president has not been able to proceed with Democratic support, which is more precarious than ever in the House of Representatives. When you have a large majority in the House — which requires only a simple majority to pass any bill — you cannot blame the Republicans if you fail. But they hope to force everything through, ignoring the meaning of recent elections as well as the next one.

    This failure to recognize realities has two major causes, both of which eliminate real and appropriate reform of health care. The first is ideological. Many in the majority cannot conceal their contempt for insurances companies, physicians as “profiteers,” drug companies (whose profits pay for new medications), for all business activity as such. Better no medical care than medical care fueled by a return on investment.

    The second cause is feeding the spoils systems of politicians who push for growth in government as the primary objective, for which health care is only the excuse. More government is good, but more specific pay-offs to your own political clients is better.

    The president’s summit was a perfect case of form without substance. But it did cast light on the root of our problems in health care.

  • A Government by the People

    Just a few days ago, President Barack Obama and his staff announced their Open Government Directive. In a memo, beginning with the lines, “My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government,” the White House announced its intentions to work toward a form of “collaborative democracy,” in which citizens would be able to input their ideas and contributions toward governance.

    With programs like Peer-to-Patent already around, collaborative government seems closer than ever. Its tool? The Internet. Or, the “tubes,” as disgraced former senator Ted Stevens referred to them.

    The directive lays out a specific timetable that can be found online and that orders all executive departments to create “open government” websites within ninety days of December 8, 2009.

    It seems quite clear that this is a major change in how citizens will be able to deal with government. What is the nature of the change? As Clay Shirky tells us, “the impulse to share important information is a basic one, but its manifestations have often been clunky.” (more…)

  • Sino-American Naval Conflict of 2015

    A recent post on The Best Defense grabbed my attention. It gives a quick review of an issue of Orbis magazine’s article by Commander James Kraska, a professor at the United States Naval War College, who sets out a hypothetical conflict in which China sinks the USS George Washington.

    The writer has this to say about it:

    I usually like this sort of article that attempts to look back from a possible future event and explain how we got there. But I didn’t find this article … particularly persuasive.

    Commander Kraska points to current counterinsurgency operations as a weakness for the United States Navy and says that they are taking their “eye off the ball” and not focusing on the Navy’s primary role: protecting the United States from blue-water threats and safeguarding American interests abroad. (more…)

  • Participation — Why Bother?

    Participate? Why? You’ve got enough people in your movement that I shouldn’t have to participate. I don’t need to join your group, you guys will do the work for m–

    A free glossy magazine? Group potlucks? A tote bag with a logo on it? Why didn’t you say so?! I’m in!

    The above is just one illustration of how leaders of informal political processes mobilize people; by offering selective benefits (as Mancur Olsen and many others suggest), a group can gain members, money, and thus power. Because public goods are, by definition, public and usable by all, they have the opportunity to fall victim to the tragedy of the commons–overuse by selfish (or perhaps rational-thinking?) individuals.

    Indeed, Olsen and many others wonder why Joe the UPS Delivery Man Who Never Comes On Time and Jane the Part-Time Working Mother Who Is Completing Her Master’s Degree At Night School bother to participate in informal processes at all — why fight for something that other people can fight for for you? (more…)

  • Five Hundred Is Not Enough?

    As we’ve been recently been informed by the various media, Gordon Brown, the prime minister, has pledged five hundred new (presumably) combat-role servicemen to Operation Herrick — the British mission in Afghanistan. Five hundred would boost the British presence to a total of 9,500 service personnel from all the services including the Royal Air Force and the large Royal Navy training body. Within your humble correspondent’s lifetime, Britain deployed whole divisions to operational theatres such as Northern Ireland, where three brigades numbering several thousand kept the police in support of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. A task force of 9,500 does little to compare to the 68,000 American service personnel in “Afghan.”

    American defense spending is a staggering 41 percent of the global total. Its armed forces population is so large that the United States Marine Corps is bigger than the entire British Army and due to its all-arms nature, considerably more effective. At a time when American military expenditure dwarfs the whole of the British economy, it is hardly surprising that there is some difference in capability here.

    Therefore it is curious that the British media remain shocked that British forces get little mention in American strategic and military dialogue about the region. What is more surprising is that American commentators and possibly even politicos expect a greater contribution from the British Armed Forces.

    The briefest of glances at the history of the services from 1945 onward will provide anyone with the knowledge that defense cuts by both parties across all successive governments have neutered the operational capabilities of state. The possibility of fighting the Falklands War in 1982 was small enough, now it would be next to impossible. With the end of the Cold War and the subduing of the Troubles in the Province, further cuts and reductions seem not only economic but dare I say it sensible, certainly in the Army. That this hasn’t been taken on board by our erstwhile journalists is probably due to the myth of the special relationship, on which I have spoken on in the (scarcely) public domain before.

    What is certain is that until required reforms in the British Armed Forces are implemented, five hundred troops is about as much as can be deployed with political constraints, and without them there wouldn’t be that much more.

  • Why Do We Bowl?

    Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

    In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam suggests that we act politically because of a shared trust and sense of community. Other political scientists (such as Benedict Anderson) believe that cultural cleavages are what drive us to act. Still others (Lipset, Almond, Verba) think that a shared tradition and shared cultural norms are what drive our political activity. These culturalist schools of political science all have merits and all can explain some past forms of political motivations.

    Putnam’s idea of shared trust (“social capital”) and sense of community can explain a lot and is closely related to those who believe in a shared tradition and cultural norms as motivational factors. (more…)

  • Brain Dead Conservatism

    In The Washington Post, Steven Hayward lays out his argument that conservatism has become a brain-dead movement:

    Consider the “tea party” phenomenon. Though authentic and laudatory, it is unfocused, lacking the connection to a concrete ideology that characterized the tax revolt of the 1970s, which was joined at the hip with insurgent supply-side economics. Meanwhile, the “birthers” have become the “grassy knollers” of the right; their obsession with Obama’s origins is reviving frivolous paranoia as the face of conservatism. (Does anyone really think that if evidence existed of Obama’s putative foreign birth, Hillary Rodham Clinton wouldn’t have found it 18 months ago?) (more…)

  • What We Call the News

    This title stolen from JibJab’s song of the same title found here.

    In talking about the information networks of the twenty-first century, one cannot omit the rise of the Internet and the revitalization of conversational media.

    As lecturer Alex Whalen has told us, in the first era of the American newspaper, conversation was key; the back page of every newspaper was left blank for people to leave their comments. These newspapers were passed from person to person and the conversation was looked upon by the founders as vital to a republic.

    Indeed, in the words of Jack Anderson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist:

    Thomas Jefferson… He advocated and supported a free press and yet Thomas Jefferson was savaged by the press. He was excoriated by the press. He was abused more by the press than Bill Clinton or Richard Nixon or anybody that we have had in recent times. Thomas Jefferson was savaged by the press. Excoriated. And he was human. He didn’t like it. He went nose to nose with a couple of editors in Philadelphia. He said to one Philadelphia paper: “Nothing in this paper is true, with the possible exception of the advertising, and I question that.” And yet that wise Thomas Jefferson, in a moment of truth, said, “If I had to choose between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.” After all he had been through, he was wise enough to understand. And there is no one here that has been through as much as Thomas Jefferson.

    But now, with information almost instantly available to us from more sources than we have ever had available to us before, what effect will this conversation have?

    For a little less than a century, we have been completely reliant on one-way media — television, newsreels, radio — that turn the general public into passive consumers of information.

    Now, with tools like this blog and the newly-added comment sections on the websites of major news outlets, as well as online forums and Twitter, conversation is making news interactive again, much like in colonial times. (more…)