Tag Archives: economics

Privacy

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Now Facebook wants to hook up with banks to collect our financial information and our shopping habits as revealed by our credit card charging history.

No. Not ever. Not with Facebook’s lack of concern for our privacy or our personal data.

Facebook said it wouldn’t use the bank data for ad-targeting purposes or share it with third parties.

Sure. I might know about some beachfront property for sale north of Santa Fe, too.

Any bank that hooks up with Facebook in any way loses my business altogether.  Full stop.

Department of YGTBSM Department

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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 Next Step

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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.

Equal Outcomes

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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.

Paying for Health Care

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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.