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Here. An excerpt:
He has been narrow, not broad. He has been partial, not post-partisan. He has been ideological, not pragmatic. No number of “eloquent” speeches can alter these facts. This is why his major initiatives have failed, why his net job approval has dropped 50 points in 12 months, and why he is substantially weaker now than he was a year ago.
But that’s just the punch line. The intro is just as good.
Here:
Hayek contre Keynes – VOSTfr
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For the last year or so I’ve been thinking about trade in a new way, a mix of Smith and Ricardo, an idea I first heard from Jim Buchanan and enhanced by conversations with Don Boudreaux and Mike Munger. In this week’s EconTalk, I lay out the idea. Hope you like it.
Here’s the best line that I’ve read in a long, long time:
Today’s tax system was shaped by sadists who were trying to be nice.
It’s penned by George Will, and appears in his column in today’s Washington Post. The entire column is worth reading, as it very nicely summarizes Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan for restoring at least some sanity to Uncle Sam’s fiscal looney bin.
Today’s Washington Examiner has this short but wonderful interview with my dear friend Tom Palmer. Here’s the final question and answer:
At your core, what is one of your defining beliefs?
I believe that the individual human life matters. I believe that human freedom is a constituent element of a good life — of human happiness — and is, consequently, intrinsically valuable.
Below the fold. TY to Alois Lang. I encourage you to create a subtitled version. Read the full post →
Thanks to Andrew Garland for this link, which provides details about Melanie Shouse, the St. Louis woman who once worked for the Obama campaign and who died last week of breast cancer.
Contrary to the implication that I drew in my previous post, Mr. Obama did not know Ms. Shouse, so I was off-base to suggest that perhaps he should have personally paid for her medical care.
Ms. Shouse should have paid for it.
All the available evidence suggests that she could have afforded to do so. First, — and contrary to what Mr. Obama said — Ms. Shouse did have health-insurance. It was a catastrophic-coverage policy. That is, annually her insurance paid nothing until her medical expenses hit $5,000.
So the most that she could have been out of pocket each year is $5,000.
That’s not a small sum of money, but nor is it a sum out of reach for most Americans.
Second, Ms. Shouse and her boyfriend, for 12 years, owned their own small business. I have no idea how profitable it was, or is, but because they’d been in business for 12 years I infer that it did not leave them anywhere close to destitution.
Ms. Shouse also found time to volunteer to work for Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign. This is time that she could have instead spent working at a job that paid her extra income. But, as reported, she chose to contribute, free of charge, some of her time to a political campaign.
It’s quite possible that the value of the hours that Ms. Shouse contributed to Mr. Obama’s campaign exceeded the cost she would have incurred had she gone to the MD when she discovered a lump in her breast.
Third, Ms. Shouse knew that she had a lump in her breast and she knew that such a thing put her life in severe jeopardy. Yet she chose not to spend up to a maximum of $5,000 annually (and likely less) to check this malady out with a physician.
Yes, she excused her failure to see a physician because, allegedly, she couldn’t afford it — that is, allegedly she couldn’t afford to pay up to $5,000 annually to save her life!
Her allegation is not believable. Again, there’s no evidence that she was destitute. She was wealthy enough to donate that most valuable of commodities — time — to a political campaign. And her total, out-of-pocket annual expenses had she chosen to visit a physician when she discovered the lump in her breast would likely have been far lower than $5,000.
Fourth, she chose to buy a catastrophic-coverage policy, probably because the higher costs of policies with lower deductibles were not worthwhile for her to pay. Given her choice, surely she and her boyfriend knew — or ought to have known — that each year there is a good chance that one or the other or both of them will require routine (that is, non-catastrophic) medical care. Could they not have saved a small sum of money each year to cover this obvious likelihood?
Here’s the bottom line: Ms. Shouse chose not to pay for medical attention when such attention might well have saved her life. If she was unwilling to pay no more than $5,000 annually to save her own life, why should the rest of us be forced to pay for what she, obviously, judged not to be a worthwhile expense for her herself to incur?
Here’s a letter that I sent to the New York Times:
You open your report on the President’s continued push for health-care reform with the following account: “For a moment, President Obama’s pledge to keep fighting for major health care legislation got personal on Thursday night as he told supporters at a fund-raiser about a former campaign worker in St. Louis without health insurance who had died of breast cancer. ‘She insisted she is going to be buried in an Obama T-shirt,’ he said…. ‘How can I say to her, ‘You know what, we’re giving up’’? ” (“Democrats Ask, Can Health Care Bill Be Saved?” Feb. 5).
What have we here? A politically successful multimillionaire stands idly by as an employee – who seems also to have been Mr. Obama’s personal acquaintance – dies because she cannot afford proper medical care. Then Mr. Obama deploys this tale of woe not to apologize for, or to criticize, his own refusal to help a friend but, instead, to criticize millions of other people who never met this woman for their refusal to be forced into ponying up for her health insurance.
A truly ethical person voluntarily sacrifices from his own purse to help others when appropriate. And he never pretends that he fulfills his ethical duties by calling upon the state to compel people to do what he himself refuses to do voluntarily.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
As Dave Schmidtz points out to me in the e-mail that he sent alerting me to this report, the entire story has a distinct air of unbelievability about it. It’s likely untrue – a fact that raises a whole ‘nother set of issues.
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