Recall the California (and others) foolishness in banning plastic straws. Now there’s a company, FinalStraw, that makes metal straws. They’re steel. They’re collapsible. And they come with a carrying case.
What’s next—”cigarette” holders for vapers?
Some people’s children. Jeez.
A step has been taken to mitigate the destructiveness of Obamacare. A new rule has been promulgated by the Trump administration that will
allow for the proliferation of cheaper, less-comprehensive health plans that have been restricted by the former Obama administration.
Under the rule, actual health insurance plans will be allowed that cover a range of health-related matters that more closely align with a customer’s interests. These plans also will be good for a year and be renewable for a total of three years, a drastic improvement over Obamacare’s limit of 90 days. A further improvement of this rule:
The plans don’t have to cover people with pre-existing conditions, and insurers can charge higher premiums based on a consumer’s health status.
This is a good interim step, but more is necessary. One additional step should be the elimination of the time limit on the duration/renewability of these plans. What should be available in the health insurance market place should be a market decision—a decision of the buyers and sellers. Government has nothing legitimate to say in this arena.
New York has them.
A 7-yr-old in New York tried to sell lemonade from his stand last week, and he was shut down by the State’s Health Department. He didn’t have the required business license, you see.
Up stepped Governor Andrew Cuomo (D), who offered to pony up for the boy’s license next year. As if a child needs one. However, as the WSJ put it regarding this Progressive-Democrat version of largesse,
will [Cuomo] pay for every child in New York caught up in illicit lemonade sales?
And
New York can’t keep the subways from breaking down, its public housing has a lead-poisoning scandal, and Mr Cuomo’s crony capitalists who received state subsidies were recently convicted of corruption. But the Health Department is crackerjack at treating a 7-year-old selling lemonade like he’s dumping waste in our drinking water.
New York: an equal opportunity failure inducer.
John Cochrane correctly decried the costs of health care in today’s economy, but he has the wrong solution.
Why is paying for health care such a mess in America? Why is it so hard to fix? Cross-subsidies are the original sin.
No, cross-subsidies, “sinful” as they are, are not the original sin. The original sin is government involvement at all in the form of any sort of subsidy. Far from the subheadline’s claim that “honest subsidies” (eliding the oxymoronic nature of that label) would encourage competition and innovation, they’d do the opposite, as all subsidies do: they’d suppress competition and innovation by giving the government-favored recipients a government-mandated advantage over their government disfavored competitors, freeing the one from competition’s pressures to innovate and reducing the other’s access to resources needed to innovate—and stifling competition’s engine, the need to innovate to stay ahead of rivals.
Certainly, they can be. And tariffs, for a long time, were intended to protect domestic industry from foreign competition as well as being a major source of income for a nation. Our own nation was a skilled practitioner of the tariff arts for our first 125+ years and again during the Great Depression and the aftermath.
And that’s the line the Koch brothers are taking with regard to President Donald Trump’s tariff impositions.
The urge to protect ourselves from change has doomed many countries throughout history. This protectionist mind-set has destroyed countless businesses.
That’s also the line Trump says out loud, often, when he talks about tariffs. As the old saw goes, though, actions speak louder than words, and it’s useful also to consult the actions Trump has taken vis-à-vis tariffs. Those actions include the following:
Tariffs also are a tool of national policy and have little necessarily to do with protectionism.
