Monthly Archives: January 2013

A PRC Takeover

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Examiner.com has the tale.

Taiwan’s most popular and independent media organization, Next Media, is about to be sold to China-based tycoon Tsai Eng-Meng, in a deal which would give him and his company (Want Want China Times Group) control of 50% of Taiwan’s entire print news industry.

This would be an ordinary monopolist action by a Republic of China citizen, whose outcome would be subject to RoC law.

However.

The $600 million takeover is not so much a business deal as it is a proxy invasion of Taiwan’s independent press by the Chinese Communist Party.  Eng-Meng, who is Taiwanese himself and holds large financial stakes in China, has been a vocal supporter of unification between communist China and democratic Taiwan.  He is also an ally of Beijing’s communist government.

Objections are flowing, and they center on

the fact that Eng-Meng already has a record of using his existing media empire to promote pro-Beijing bias and censorship in [the RoC].

And

The free people of [the RoC] may be about to lose control over their own press to the Chinese Communist Party, without a shot even being fired.

If that sounds apocryphal, consider that the PRC has had a primary goal of conquering the island nation ever since the Communists won their civil war and the losing side escaped to Taiwan.  This is another step in reaching that goal.

Progressive Policies and the Poor

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Thomas Sowell, writing in the National Review, had some thoughts on the impact of modern Liberalism on the welfare of blacks in the US.  I think they apply to all minorities, to whites, to our poor generally.

Severe restrictions on building housing in San Francisco have driven rents and home prices so high that blacks and other people with low or moderate incomes have been driven out of the city. The same thing has happened in a number of other California communities dominated by liberals.

And

Liberals try to show their concern for the poor by raising the minimum wage.  Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum-wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment….

And

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.  Most black children grew up in homes with two parents during all that time, but most grow up with only one parent today.

And

Liberals have pushed affirmative action, supposedly for the benefit of blacks and other minorities.  But two recent factual studies show that affirmative action in college admissions has led to black students with every qualification for success being artificially turned into failures by being mismatched with colleges for the sake of racial body count.

Sowell summarizes the matter starkly:

In all these cases, and many others, liberals take positions that make them look good and feel good—and show very little interest in the actual consequences for others, even when liberal policies are leaving havoc in their wake.

The party of Jim Crow may be attempting to correct its past.  It is, in fact, failing miserably.  Modern Liberals give so little thought to the 50 years of empirical evidence defining the consequences of their actions that I have to conclude that they’re well aware of those consequences.  One of those consequences, flowing from the poverty enforced maintained by their actions, is the continued dependency of our poor on the largesse of the Modern Liberals in government.

That’s not just petty ego stroke, that’s political power.

Obamacare and Insurance Costs

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Here are some of those costs.

No less a light than The New York Times reports that

…health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.  Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.  In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22%, Anthem Blue Cross 26%, and Blue Shield of California 20% for some of those policy holders.

OpenMarket notes that

Obamacare resulted in hikes of 41%-47% in health insurance premiums for some policyholders in Connecticut.  …in other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20% for some policy holders.

Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, writing in Huff Post Business, says

Your medical plan is facing an unexpected expense, so you probably are, too.  It’s a new, $63-per-head fee to cushion the cost of covering people with pre-existing conditions under President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.  The charge, buried in a recent regulation, works out to tens of millions of dollars for the largest companies….

On top of this, The Washington Post reminds us that President Barack Obama slid into his Obamacare a 3.5% surtax on those insurers that participate in Obamacare’s Federal health insurance exchanges.  Of course, this fee will be passed through to their customers in the form of higher health insurance premiums.

There are causes for these sharp increases, as we might expect.  Merrill Matthews and Mark Litow, in The Wall Street Journal, have some ideas on this.  They point out, for instance, some costs that Obamacare imposes, willy-nilly, on insurers—transforming them from companies that accept risk for a fee into Federally mandated, privately funded welfare programs:

Central to ObamaCare are requirements that health insurers (1) accept everyone who applies (guaranteed issue), (2) cannot charge more based on serious medical conditions (modified community rating), and (3) include numerous coverage mandates that force insurance to pay for many often uncovered medical conditions.

There is no risk-based fee allowed here.  Just take all comers, and don’t “overcharge” them—HHS’ definition of “overcharge.”  Folks won’t need to buy insurance until they’re actually sick—the risk has been realized—but the insurers won’t be able to charge a premium commensurate with the empirical fact of illness; they can only charge the premium in effect for a low risk, healthy population that hasn’t gotten sick yet.

Matthews and Litow also note that this outcome was well-known long before Obamacare was dreamed up post-2008:

Eight states—New Jersey, New York, Maine, New Hampshire, Washington, Kentucky, Vermont and Massachusetts—enacted guaranteed issue and community rating in the mid-1990s and wrecked their individual (i.e., non-group) health-insurance markets.  Premiums increased so much that Kentucky largely repealed its law in 2000 and some of the other states eventually modified their community-rating provisions.

They also note that, based on empirical evidence—i.e., facts already known to the authors of Obamacare—states with currently low insurance rates will be the most punished by Obamacare:

We compared the average premiums in states that already have ObamaCare-like provisions in their laws and found that consumers in New Jersey, New York, and Vermont already pay well over twice what citizens in many other states pay.  Consumers in Maine and Massachusetts aren’t far behind.  Those states will likely see a small increase.

By contrast, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Wyoming, and Virginia will likely see the largest increases—somewhere between 65% and 100% [a different estimate than the lower one of OpenMarket].  Another 18 states, including Texas and Michigan, could see their rates rise between 35% and 65%.

Finally,

Although President Obama repeatedly claimed that health-insurance premiums for a family would be $2,500 lower by the end of his first term, they are actually about $3,000 higher—a spread of about $5,500 per family.

It’s the Progressive New Math, from the Orwell School of High Finance: cost increases are premium cuts.

Lies and Gun Control

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The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence released this video, cynically and dishonestly omitting a key phrase from Congressman John Barrow’s (D, GA) campaign ad: “to stop a lynching.”  Here’s Barrow’s original campaign ad.  Play them both to completion, and you can see further cynical editing and distortion of Barrow’s actual position.

Asked about the editing, CSGV spokesman Ladd Everitt said this:

We didn’t have time to run his entire campaign ad[.]

But they did have time to lie.

Here’s another…misleading…claim, this time by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA).

Feinstein points to two studies by criminology professors Chris Koper and Jeff Roth for the National Institute of Justice to back up her contention that the ban reduced crime.  She claims that their first study in 1997 showed that the ban decreased “total gun murders.”

However,

…the authors wrote [about the ’97 study]: “the evidence is not strong enough for us to conclude that there was any meaningful effect (i.e., that the effect was different from zero).”

Moreover,

Messrs. Koper and Roth suggested that after the ban had been in effect for more years it might be possible to find a benefit.  Seven years later, in 2004, they published a follow-up study for the National Institute of Justice with fellow criminologist Dan Woods that concluded, “we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence.  And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence.”

Never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn, eh?

How very Progressive of these two.

Digital Democracy and Intellectual Property Rights

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Aaron Swartz was a freedom of the Internet activist and an alleged hacker who was being prosecuted under an accusation of having hacked into an MIT JSTOR repository and downloading millions of copyrighted documents and making them freely available.  During pre-trial plea bargain negotiations, he committed suicide.  His suicide has put a spotlight on a serious debate, this one between intellectual property and digital democracy.

This debate flows from a false dichotomy.  Digital democracy demands the existence of intellectual property (rights), for without intellectual property rights, there can be no (digital) democracy—there can be only the rule of the stronger over the weaker, or the richer over the poorer.

Our own social compact recognizes the importance of this.  Article I, Section 8 says

The Congress shall have Power…To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries[.]

Without such protections, there can be little incentive to invent at all, physically or intellectually, since the work can be taken by anyone with the physical or financial means to do so and made freely available—or for a fee of the taker’s choosing and payable only to the taker—thereby denying the inventor the ability to recoup even his development costs, much less to earn a living from his work.  Moreover, those inventions that can have significant financial value in a market and so will be developed anyway will, without such protections, be developed only in secret, at the attendant slow pace, and then only made available at high cost to well-off buyers—since once made available at all, the secret will be public and the mechanism of the invention freely available.  In short, the wherewithal to innovate will not exist for the common man, being only available to the strongest or the richest, and so innovation will occur only glacially and secretively, or not at all.

It is, further, the protection of property rights, intellectual or any other, that gives a man the wherewithal to improve his own lot in life, to increase his own prospects and prosperity, to satisfy his duty to family, friends, and neighbors.  It is the (temporary) monopoly control over his invention that enables the inventor to recoup his costs and subsequently to earn his living from that work.

On a practical level, it’s expensive to feed, digitize, and organize, for instance, JSTOR’s millions of files; accordingly, JSTOR charges subscription fees to recoup those costs.  Were Swartz and his fellows allowed to proceed with such hacks, innovations like JSTOR might not even exist to be attacked.

Reasonable men can argue about how long a man’s monopoly protection of his invention should last, but that he should enjoy that sole control over his invention and its issue for some period should be beyond dispute.