Category Archives: regulation

Big Brother

Posted on by
Reply

Three guys, two of whom parachuted from the top of 1 World Trade Center and the third a ground-based accomplice, have been arrested for the stunt.  They’re being charged with felony burglary, reckless endangerment, and jumping from a structure, with the last two being misdemeanors.

Yeah—jumping from a structure.

The burglary and reckless endangerment beefs, ordinarily, would be serious charges, and their legitimacy are what trials are for.  But jumping from a structure?  Really?  That’s just Big Brother, Government, making a law simply because it can.

On looking into the particulars, though, things don’t seem to get any more legitimate.  To the extent that the reckless endangerment was limited to the jumpers endangering themselves, Big Government has no legitimate interest.  Endangering the public, though?  The jump was at 0300.  Even in New York City, even around the Trade Center, how much public was there to be endangered?

Even the burglary rap, in this case, seems excessive.  This particular charge

entails being in a building illegally with an intent to commit another crime—in this case, breaking a 2008 city law against parachuting off buildings more than 50 feet tall[.]

They’re not even charging these guys with any attempt to steal something, which is what we usually think of when we think “burglary.”  Big Government is only using this charge to punch up the “seriousness” of their case.

Birth Control “Mandate”

Posted on by
1

In the Twitter to-do surrounding the Supreme Court’s hearing two cases related to this, Planned Parenthood linked to one of their favorite posters, reproduced just below.  The poster is so mendacious, it cries out for a post in point-by-point response.

1. 99% still can—and 99% already were, long before Obamacare came up.  Neither case before the Court has anything to do with women’s access, only whether employers, or insurers, must cover birth control in every plan offered.  And it’s always been cheap, too, including for guys (why aren’t condoms mandated, by the way?  Whatever happened to equality of the sexes?).  WalMart, for instance sells birth control pills for as little as $4/mo.  The doctor’s appointment to get the prescription still is extra.  WalMart sells condoms for as little as $15 for three dozen.  No doctor’s appointment required.

2. Birth control for health reasons isn’t birth control; it’s medicinal use for treating an illness or other condition unrelated to pregnancy.  As a medicine, it’s already covered in other aspects of a health plan.  If it isn’t, that would be a legitimate gripe, but it would be legitimate only between customers and plan purveyors.  It would remain no business of government.

3. 27 million women still can; this is wholly unrelated to any question of the legitimacy of a contraceptive coverage mandate.  See #1 above.

4. 70%?  That depends on who’s polling.  Of course there’s a bias involved: who doesn’t like free stuff?  Especially when they’re not the ones paying to make it “free.”

5. Who, indeed, are the plaintiffs?  Two families with deeply held religious beliefs who live their religion in their business operations, too—like charity toward all, family nurturing practices vis-à-vis their employees, and so on.  What products they offer to sell matters to this debate how, exactly?

6. Slippery Slope?  This is a cynically offered straw man.  No one is regulating women’s access to birth control here except the government.  No one is looking to regulate access to vaccines, transfusion, etc—except, perhaps government as it attempts to start down this slope.  The only thing the plaintiffs in these two cases want to do is to not be regulated in this arena.  As to access itself, see #1 and #3 above.

7. First time for whom, actually?  Businesses always before have had the choice to offer health coverage plans (back when they actually resembled insurance policies and not Obamacare’s mandated health welfare plans).  Now it’s government that wants, for the first time, to eliminate that right to choose.  And, of course, with this point, Planned Parenthood ignores the fact that in opposing the plaintiffs, they’re seeking nakedly to impose their own personal beliefs on others.  This whole argument also cynically elides the fact that it’s a market choice, not business’ or government’s, that determines what gets included in a health coverage plan.  At least in a free country.

As to the Twitter hashtag #Notmybossbusiness, indeed it’s not.  The employer has no business providing birth control to his employees, “free,” or otherwise.  The use of birth control is a personal choice, not an employer’s.

How Can We Trust This Program?

Posted on by
Reply

ObamaMart’s back end has yet another “glitch,” this time one that impacts whether a potential Obamacare health welfare plan buyer gets the subsidy the Obama administration says is due him.

The Philadelphia Inquirer found this one in its own explorations for a story on the various income scenarios that would draw a Federal subsidy.

Incorrect poverty-level guidelines are automatically telling what could be tens of thousands of eligible people they do not qualify for subsidized insurance.

The error in the federal marketplace primarily affects households with incomes just above the poverty line in states like Pennsylvania that have not expanded Medicaid.  The mistake raises the price of their insurance by thousands of dollars, making insurance so unaffordable many may just give up and go without.

It appears, for now, to be a mistake limited to ObamaMart’s window shopping tool and not the part of the back end that calculates whether there will be a subsidy at all, and if so the subsidy actually to be paid a buyer who actually buys and pays the premium.  The error seems to be centered on the tool’s use of the 2014 Federal Poverty Guideline, rather than the Obamacare-mandated 2013 levels.

This particular error is easy to correct, but it shouldn’t have occurred at all—apparently nobody at CMS cared enough even to check the simple things, like this one, before they decided it would be a good idea to foist this Web site off onto the public.  And apparently nobody at CMS has cared enough to go look in the months since it’s become so embarrassingly well-known what a failure ObamaMart is (quite apart from the disaster that is the underlying Obamacare).

That it was discovered not by ObamaMart’s CMS developers or testers but by someone in the private sector is illustrative of the level of seriousness with which Obama, his HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, or anyone else in HHS or Treasury or the IRS has (not) taken this program.

In the end, though, this “glitch” demonstrates a larger problem: no matter the good intentions, no matter the strength of the consensus that a program is a good idea, Government is simply no good at doing this sort of thing.  The tasks must be left to private enterprise operating in a free market economy.

Indeed, that’s where the needs will be best identified, and producers, sellers, and buyers will coalesce to provide the most efficient implementation.  Or not, if the market—us private citizens—don’t agree that the need exists at plausible prices.

Another Federal Judge

Posted on by
Reply

…gets it right.  US District Judge Eric Melgren has ruled that Kansas and Arizona can, indeed, require proof of citizenship as a criterion for registering to vote in Federal elections: American elections are for American citizens only.  The second clause of the 14th Amendment is pretty clear on this.

Melgren ruled, in part,

Because the Court finds that Congress has not preempted state laws requiring proof of citizenship through the National Voter Registration Act, the Court finds the decision of the EAC denying the states’ requests to be unlawful and in excess of its statutory authority.  Since the Court’s decision turns on the plain statutory language, the Court need not resolve the question of whether the Constitution permits the EAC, or Congress, to disregard the states’ own determination of what they require to satisfactorily determine citizenship.

As the Kansas City Star pointed out,

Nationally, voting rights experts contend that the court’s ruling—if it survives on near-certain appeals—could open the door for more states to enact laws requiring voters to produce documents proving their citizenship.

One can certainly hope so.  Like I said: American elections are for American citizens only.

Melgren also noted

The Constitution gives each state exclusive authority to determine the qualifications of voters for state and federal elections.  Article I, section 2, clause 1—often called the Qualifications Clause—provides that the voters for the US House of Representatives in each state shall have the same qualifications required for voters of the largest branch of the state legislature.  The Seventeenth Amendment adopts the same requirement for voters for the US Senate.  The US Supreme Court has read these provisions to conclude that the states, not Congress, set the voter qualifications for federal elections.

Melgren went on to note that the same Clause also grants Congress the power to overrule the States’ rules statutorily—and that the Congress has not done so.  We can look forward to further Democratic Party efforts to sully our elections by attempting to get Congress to force the States to accept anyone as voter, citizen or not.

Melgren’s ruling can be read here.

Rookie Gaffe?

Posted on by
Reply

That’s what Paul Edelstein of IHS Global Insight thinks, according to The Wall Street Journal.  In the Fed’s post-FOMC presser last Wednesday, Fed President Janet Yellen suggested that interest-rate increases might start beginning roughly six months after the Fed’s QEx (which is in the process of being…tapered) ends or as soon as this fall.  Edelstein had this to say as the stock market reacted negatively to Yellen’s remarks:

This could have been a rookie gaffe on Yellen’s part.  This was, after all, her first press conference.

Or, it’s possible that Yellen knew what she was doing, and she said what she said with carefully chosen words.

It’s also possible that Yellen knew another thing that Edelstein and his ilk seem to have conveniently forgotten: the Fed exists to stabilize the economy’s price behavior and to work toward full employment, however that’s defined.  In particular, the Fed does not at all exist to prop up stock prices for the benefit of investors like Edelstein, or me.  Our performance—work with me on this, it seems to be a lost concept for many—is on us; it’s a part of our personal responsibility.

And we had to know that QEx would end, we do know that is ending, and we should know that it’s on us to deal with the inflation that will result on OEx’s completion.  The Fed has no obligation—it cannot have this obligation in a free market economy—to inure us from the outcomes of our decisions.