Category Archives: rights

The Romney-Ryan Medicare Plan

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What is it, exactly, and how does it work?  The plan is a means of restoring responsibility for health insurance spending to the individuals seeking the coverage—which also removes that (usurped) responsibility from the Federal government.  The Wall Street Journal provided a summary earlier this week of how this gets accomplished.

  • Private insurers, and Traditional Medicare, would bid for the business of each individual senior citizen (oh, the ignominy: Big Government having to mingle with—to compete with—the hoi polloi) in a region for the year.
  • Each senior citizen would receive from the government a payment equal to the second-lowest bid in that region.
  • Each senior citizen then would spend that payment on the health coverage of that person’s choice.
    • If the senior citizen chose the cheapest policy, he would pocket the difference.
    • If the senior citizen chose the second cheapest, he would break even.
    • If the senior citizen chose a more expensive policy, he would pay the increment out of his own resources.

Hmm….  Choice—what’s up with that?  Can we trust our senior citizens to behave responsibly?  Even push actual competition among the vendors?  Some plainly say, “No!  We do not trust these people.”  It’s why they oppose the plan.

As the WSJ also points out, there’s real world, empirical evidence that base competition works: it has…in Medicare Advantage.  This program already requires vendors to bid against Traditional Medicare.  As recently as 2009, the year for which data are readily available, the lowest and second lowest bids—for the same coverage—were, respectively, 87% and 91% of the government’s Medicare charge.

Where, then, are the extra $6,400 that our seniors are supposed to be socked with paying under the Romney-Ryan plan about which Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is on about so much?  He and his are using an obsolete CBO report about an obsolete Ryan proposal that doesn’t exist today and that has nothing to do with the Romney-Ryan plan.  Moreover, CBO conceded at the time that its analysis was suspect because it did not consider the effects of competition: their results

depend on the evolution of the health care and health insurance systems over time, which is hard to predict.

More damning—to the CBO analysis here and to its analyses generally—CBO has admitted its inability to score the Romney-Ryan Medicare plan because it

does not have the capability at this time to estimate such effects[.]

There goes Obama, again—stuck in a past that never existed.  And trying to change the subject again.

Foreign Law in US Courts

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog recently ran a piece about the legitimacy of using of foreign law in American courts.  The piece drew heavily from an article on the Volokh Conspiracy, but I want to talk about the concept, rather than the particular case (which Eugene Volokh also used for a concept discussion).

The particular case began with a man and woman who married in Pakistan.  Later, still in Pakistan, the man divorced the woman in a religious ceremony, but neither followed through with a secular divorce.  The woman then remarried while still in Pakistan, and after that, the new couple moved to the US, where they had another marriage ceremony.  This marriage, though, also failed, and the two separated.  The woman had never told her second husband about her first marriage, but in the course of his own divorce preparation investigation, he discovered that first marriage, the religious divorce, and the lack of a secular divorce.  He filed for annulment, rather than divorce, arguing that the woman from whom he was seeking an end to marriage had committed bigamy.  The woman filed for divorce, rather than annulment, insisting that the religious divorce was sufficient to have ended that first marriage.

A trial court, after consulting Pakistani law—which controlled both the secular and the religious marriage and divorce concerning that first marriage—granted the annulment, and a state appellate court affirmed.  Volokh and the Law Blog both say that this use of foreign law in a domestic court was legitimate.  I agree for the narrow kind of case this represents.

The acts in this case, which created the status of each person on which the other relied, were wholly completed within that foreign jurisdiction.  Whether each person could rely on that status, then, needs to consider the law under which that status originated.

But this is a narrow situation.  It cannot apply, for instance, where acts are completed in the US.  This must rule out, for instance, the use of Sharia law to determine whether allegations of spousal abuse in a household in the US are accurate.  This must rule out any legitimacy of any defense of the form “That’s the way we do it in the Old Country.”  Actors in the US are not in the Old Country.

It must also rule out some areas where the actors in the US are acknowledged by all relevant parties to have broken the Old Country’s laws and then come here.  This is what political asylum is for.  A divorce vs annulment question has nothing to do with asylum.  Breaking an Old Country law in defense of the inalienable rights—and associated individual freedoms—that we acknowledge as possessed by all human beings is an area where the foreign law must be held irrelevant.

Some Thoughts on Poverty and Obligation

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Anthony Davies and Kristina Antolin had these thoughts in a Saturday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Wealth and poverty are catalysts for bringing the rich and the poor together in community, and community is the hallmark of the church’s mission on Earth. Government is not community. Government is one of community’s tools, a coercive one we use when it is necessary to force people to behave in ways they would not otherwise behave voluntarily.

But that word—voluntarily—is key, and it’s where Mr. Ryan’s religious detractors go awry: Charity can only be charity when it is voluntary. Coerced acts, no matter how beneficial or well-intentioned, cannot be moral. If we force people to give to the poor, we have stripped away the moral component, reducing charity to mere income redistribution.

All people have the moral obligation to care for those who are less fortunate. But replacing morality with legality is the first step in replacing church, religion and conscience with government, politics and majority vote. Coercing people to feed the poor simply substitutes moral poverty for material poverty.

What they said.

Which Party is the More Worthy?

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One party trusts Americans to make our own decisions, to see to our own prosperity, to honor our own obligations.  This party wants to see a smaller government that is less intrusive into our business’ and our private affairs, wants to reform, and so to preserve the principles underlying, Social Security and Medicare—including privatizing significant portions of them, trusting us to make our own decisions wisely—wants to foster an economic environment that restores our equality of opportunity so that, in the Theodore Roosevelt’s words, each American can “show the best that there is in him.”

The other party says we Americans are not able to make the right decisions; we need government to see to our prosperity for us, to assume responsibility in our place.  This is the party of affirmative action, insisting that some of us must be carefully sheltered and nurtured (and based on the color of our skin and not on the content of our character) because the best that there is in us just isn’t good enough.  This is the party of wealth redistribution because some Americans are inherently incapable of working toward our own, in John Adams’ terms, “safety and happiness;” we cannot make wise decisions on our own accord.  This is the party that says government must take our wealth and redistribute it in particular ways to particular groups of us because the party does not believe we can—or will—honor our own duty to take care of those around us who are less fortunate.

The New Jim Crow?

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I’ve written about racism and religious bigotry here, here, and here.

Now I want to take a broader view.  We’ve had, in quick succession in the last very few years, the following.

President Obama’s Health and Human Services mandates that businesses and insurers to provide, at no cost to the insurees, health insurance coverage for contraceptives and abortifacients, without regard for the religious beliefs of the businesses or insurers.  This mandate also requires Americans to buy such health insurance coverage (even though these added items are to be provided at no additional cost), regardless of the religious beliefs of these individual Americans—or to accept the coverage from their employers.  There is an “exemption” that allows businesses to put this off onto their insurers, but this cynically ignores, among others, those entities who self-insure.

Virginia State Senator Louise Lucas (D), says that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is appealing to racists who do not want a black man in the White House.

I absolutely believe it’s all about race, and for the first time in my life I’ve been able to convince my children, finally, that racism is alive and well[.]

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) suggesting that Republicans are simply manipulating American Jews for political gain.

HUNT: That’s why some of the Republican Jewish supporters are really active.

PELOSI: Well, that’s how they’re being exploited. And they’re smart people. They follow these issues.

Unions, in one overt case, are attempting to keep black children down on the plantation, at least in Louisiana.

[L]awyers for the Louisiana Association of Educators, one of the state’s two major teachers unions, threatened private and parochial schools with lawsuits if the schools accept students participating in a new school choice initiative that starts this year.

The Maryland State Board of Education has established a policy of race-based discipline, regardless of the nature of the misbehavior.

President Obama’s Department of Justice, shortly after Obama took office, dismissed a civil case against New Black Panther members, accused of voter intimidation against white voters, after the case had been won by default through the non-appearance of the defendants.

The Freedom from Religion Foundation is threatening Steubenville, OH, with civil suit if the city doesn’t remove a cross from the city’s logo—a logo that

includes several local landmarks, including the Franciscan University’s Christ the King Chapel

which, oh by the way, has a cross on it.

The ACLU has been attacking America’s fallen soldiers and their families for years, using, for instance, the Mt Soledad Veterans Memorial Cross as a vehicle.  The ACLU wants the military decoration—the cross—removed.  Worse, the Obama administration now is attempting to “negotiate” a settlement with the ACLU without including the central party to the controversy, the Mount Soledad Memorial Association, in the talks.

US District Judge Fred Biery, in response to a complaint from a single family, blocked a Texas school district’s “invocation” and “benediction” and banned any prayer at the ceremony altogether, even threatening the valedictorian with jail if she mentioned God in her speech.

The Obama administration’s Department of Veterans Affairs  demanded that the pastor presiding over a private funeral at the Houston National Cemetery not make religious references in his prayers at the soldier’s burial.

Progressive leaders also attack conservative women.  Bill Maher said this of Governor Sarah Palin:

Did you hear this—Sarah Palin finally heard what happened in Japan and she’s demanding that we invade ‘Tsunami,’” Maher said. “I mean she said, ‘These ‘Tsunamians’ will not get away with this.’ Oh speaking of dumb twats, did you—

And we get this about Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R, MN):

Michele Bachmann says certain things that sound crazy to the general public.  But to anybody raised in the environment of the evangelical right wing, what she says makes perfect sense.

The list goes on.  Are we seeing, now, a resurgence of the attitudes of Jim Crow, but with a different, broader, more unfocused set of bigotries?