Monthly Archives: June 2017

Universal Basic Income

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Emeritus Professor Richard Wallace, of Wofford College, is enamored of Mark Zuckerberg’s universal basic income proposal.

Here’s the quick and dirty of the thing, beginning with a quote from Wallace’s letter.

The strongest arguments for universal income center on its elimination of work disincentives by the unconditional nature of such grants.

Leave aside the fact that free money is its own disincentive to work. A UBI will only increase demand—all that seemingly added money with which to buy stuff from necessities to goodies—without increasing supply. The resulting price inflation will very quickly reduce the buying power of the UBI to the same level that the current poverty-ridden man possesses. A UBI will not make anyone better off.

On the other hand, it will make everyone, including the poverty-ridden man this is intended to help, worse off: the UBI will come out of the pockets of everyone in the form of current taxes, future taxes to pay the borrowings, and/or devalued dollars. This will reduce monies for investment and innovation, truncating economic growth and reducing economic mobility.  The latter will act to confine the poverty-ridden man to his poverty.

“Pre-Crime”

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Another word for Government’s prior restraint of private citizens, a word used by Holman Jenkins in his Friday op-ed to disguise this assault on our freedoms.

Let’s face it, with big data, with impersonal algorithms that could track every earthly resident’s web activity, travels, purchases and electronic interactions with the world, it might be quite possible to know whose life and personality are disintegrating, who might seek to resolve the impasse by going on murder binge.

Jenkins saw this favorably as the basis of a “pre-crime” era of law enforcement, however pessimistically he also saw it as coming to pass anytime soon.  I see that unlikelihood less sanguinely, but to the extent it’s slow to come or doesn’t come at all, that’s a good thing.

Then Jenkins closed his piece with this:

The more the average citizen can understand and recognize the pattern, the more such incidents likely will be avoided without us even knowing it.

Indeed, and yet Jenkins completely ignored the implication of this. We don’t need Big Brother looking over our shoulder everywhere we are, in the real world or the virtual world of social interactions, nor do we need a Hoover-esque FBI peering in through our windows, real or virtual, nor can we support any other excuse for Government extend its regulation of our lives through this new version of prior restraint.

What we need is a return to a sense of community, where private citizens look out for each other at the local level. Local problems dealt with locally are much less likely to become national problems. And even those don’t require the assault on liberty that is prior restraint, which can only be done from politicians’ definitions of alleged need for the prior.

“Melting Snowflakes”

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The Washington Post wrote about some a bit over a week ago—maybe is one itself.  Citing Ben Rhodes, “a foreign policy aide to former president Barack Obama” on the Cuba situation:

“[P]ersonally, part of what makes it difficult [to accept] is that we were six years into the administration and spent a year and a half of exhaustive negotiations before announcing” the Cuba opening….

And the poor dear didn’t even get a participation ribbon.  He went on:

They seemed to do this in such a slipshod way. Years of work and painstaking negotiations are countered by what feels like very minimal work and thought.

Or, the Trump administration did things at the speed of business instead of the speed of bureaucratic politicians, and maybe his staff have been working this out since the election.

Wendy Cutler, former Acting Deputy US Trade Ambassador on Trump’s walking away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal:

I felt short of breath and like there was a dagger in my heart[.]

Frankly, I agree that Trump was wrong to walk away from the TPP, but dramatically overwrought?  No, I claim to be an adult.

She, too, had to go on about her (and others’, she claims) angst:

When I give speeches, a lot of Asian colleagues are stunned.  They cannot come to terms with how quickly this happened.

Yeah, there’s that speed of business, again.  And perhaps preparation that actually began before 20 Jan.

Kristin Tate, on a recent Fox & Friends segment, has the right of it:

It’s pathetic that The Washington Post would spend time and resources on a story about melting snowflakes while there are so many critical issues that are worthy of coverage[.]

Or, she’s being generous in the level of credit she gives the paper.  WaPo, after all, has remade itself as a tabloid, in the mold of the National Enquirer or the Globe; many of us no longer expect journalism out of this organization.

Another Refusal to Engage

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…rather, another decision by the Progressive-Democrats in Congress to turn their backs and obstruct.  In follow-up to the March meeting between the Congressional Black Caucus and President Donald Trump, Trump invited the CBC to another meeting.  The CBC refused.

CBC Chairman Congressman Cedric Richmond (D, LA) wrote in a letter to Trump that proposals in the president’s budget would “not only devastate the communities that we represent, but also many of the communities that supported your candidacy.”

Richmond listed some of those proposals which include reductions to funding for Pell Grants, repealing and replacing Obamacare, and so on.  Reasonable men can debate the merits of these proposals, and here would have been an excellent opportunity for those who disagree with them to do just that.

But the CBC refused to talk.  Instead, they disparaged the meeting as nothing more than “a social gathering.”  In refusing to debate the questions, all the CBC has left is obstruction.

On the other hand, I could simply rail at the apparent racism inherent in a group of black Congressmen refusing to meet with a white President.  However, I’m not of the Left; I’m a conservative writer, so I won’t engage in the racism of manufacturing a racist beef where no grounds exist.

Medicaid-Receiving Companies Object to the Senate Bill

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The Senate is proposing an overhaul of Obamacare and an improvement to the health coverage providing industry, and one of those improvements is a rollback of the Obamacare expansion of Medicaid and an eventual capping of Federal funds transfers to the States’ Medicaid programs.  There are objections to this.

The primary objections are from insurers and hospitals, et al., who get a significant fraction of their income from the guarantees of Medicaid payments; they don’t want to have to compete in the open market.  They prefer the supposed safety of that guaranteed income, paltry though it is, especially compared to the income available from a free market, and they don’t care what that “safety” costs those who must pay for it.

The States themselves, for instance, in addition to financing their own Medicaid programs, are required to contribute to other States’ Medicaid programs through those Federal tax transfers, and by extension they’re forced to contribute to other States’ spending decisions generally.

Let Medicaid be the State-run program it was intended to be. Keeping the monies that would otherwise be transferred to other States would both leave more money for funding a State’s own program and force each State to become more fiscally responsible, instead of exercising a claim on other States’ money.  That fiscal responsibility also will contribute to the rising prosperity of freer market.

And let the health care providers and coverage providers compete for income from that much larger market.