Calling John Galt

One of the key reasons I prefer my government small comes down to a simple axiom:

The smaller and less-powerful a government is, the less likely it is to become a target for lobbying and influence-peddling.

Businesses and industries often use the power of the state to enforce limits on competition. Often these limiting factors come in the form of regulation or unnecessary licensing. And because the real intent of these regulations is protectionist in nature, it is easy to ignore thoughts of the unintended consequences.

Such as the case of a Michigan woman, who is openly flouting the law by watching the neighbor kids at the bus stop:

photo: Grand Rapids Press

Lisa Snyder of Middleville says her neighborhood school bus stop is right in front of her home. It arrives after her neighbors need to be at work, so she watches three of their children for 15-40 minutes until the bus comes.

The Department of Human Services received a complaint that Snyder was operating an illegal child care home. DHS contacted Snyder and told her to get licensed, stop watching her neighbors’ kids, or face the consequences.

One lawmaker is already trying to craft an exception, which comes a little late for Snyder, who claims she’s been ordered to pay a $1,000 fine and faces up to 90 days in jail. Nice move, but somewhat too-little-too-late.

Oh… and how exactly did these intrepid investigators strike fear into the heart of Snyder, the “illegal daycare kingpin?”

A neighbor filed a complaint.

Think about that for a moment. A law-abiding citizen turned in a neighbor over something that was technically illegal, but shouldn’t have been.

So how hard was it supposed to be for people to turn in “suspect” information about health-care proposals to whitehouse.gov? (where opinions could get you on a list sanctioned by the executive branch.)

I feel a chill.

Will the last free-market enthusiast in the media turn off the light on the way out?

Wait!  Not so fast!  There is hope!

From Slate:

When President Barack Obama told the Toledo Blade last week that he hoped that the faltering newspaper industry would recover because “fact-based” and “investigative reporting” are “absolutely critical to the health of our democracy,” even some of the cynical bastards who staff the nation’s dailies swooned.

Of course, the president didn’t pay anything more than lip service to the newspapers. He remained, in the Blade’s words, “noncommittal” about the bills, including one by Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin, D-Md., introduced early this year that would allow newspapers to reorganize themselves as nonprofits. “I haven’t seen detailed proposals yet, but I’ll be happy to look at them,” Obama said.

The good news is there are journalists, like Jack Shafer (author of the Slate piece), who see this as a threat:

Here’s hoping that the White House’s detailed-proposals czar keeps the Cardin bill out of Obama’s hands. The last thing newspapers need is the sort of help from the government that turns them into NPR, endlessly begging for contributions, pursuing wealthy philanthropists, and standing in line for government handouts.

Shafer also quotes from Donald Kimelman from the Boston Globe:

Why should the tax laws give an advantage to newspapers over other kinds of media? How will the recipients of philanthropic dollars avoid having their news agendas distorted by donor preferences? Would the crutch of donor support hinder the search for new commercial revenue necessary for news organizations’ long-term viability?

Of particular interest is the recognition that the newspaper industry has already suffered from the Unintended Consequences of other interventions.

I haven’t done this piece justice… so please click through and read it for yourself.

Here’s to the hope that journalists can turn use these same notions to be just as critical of other bailout and spending plans, that have their own Unintended Consequences.

“We’re in this situation because we, as a country, had been spending above our means.”

That was Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, in his “first morning-show interview” on Good Morning America. (It’s as close a direct transcription as I could muster without a DVR, and will be adjusted accordingly.)

UPDATE: Actual transcript:

We got into this because we borrowed too much. We lived beyond our means. Both as a country, many businesses did it, many families did it. Obviously, the financial sector did that. And part of what’s going to make this so hard to get out of this is we have to go back to a point where we’re saving more.

Had *I* been the interviewer, I would have been inclined to ask the Secretary:

When you say “we as a country,” what you really meant to say was “government, and the politicians who spent money they didn’t have in an effort to buy our votes,” right?

For the many Americans who simply can’t afford health insurance…

No American should have to choose between health insurance and getting drunk.

Do it for the children.

From Brattleboro, Vermont:

ROCKINGHAM — The Rockingham School District will have to borrow $600,000 to make payroll because the Windham Northeast Supervisory Union business office failed to get information to the Department of Education in time.

So the system is going to eat some interest penalties because it didn’t get paperwork finished on deadline. So, what exactly were employees in Rockingham doing that might have contributed to their delay?

The business office has been asking for more help for months, Allbee said, and she said the office got behind while waiting for the authority to bring an extra hand into the finance department.

The Rockingham School District approved the use of stimulus money to handle the extra work caused by the complicated stimulus process.

So, they have so much paperwork involved in using Stimulus money, they have to dip into Stimulus funds to pay for the paperwork – the volume of which prevented them from getting their mandatory statistical report to the state in time to qualify for the release of tax dollars.

I thought the whole point of Stimulus was to put a bunch of people out in a field digging holes; not pulling legitimate ditch-diggers away from ditches to dig additional holes elsewhere.

Stimulus – it’s not just for breakfast anymore.

John Stossel is leaving ABC News at the end of the month to join Fox News and the Fox Business Network.

28 years is a long time to stay in one place, so it may just be a new opportunity and nothing more sinister than that.

It’s been fascinating to watch his evolution as a journalist. He started as a decidedly anti-business consumer crusader, but had a self-described epiphany that government is a monopoly in and of itself – and it often more dangerous to citizens than the businesses we’re supposed to hate.

In the last few years, Stossel has openly cited F.A. Hayek and others on matters of economics, free markets and liberty.

However, I personally am not happy to hear of his switch. Here’s what I wrote in the comments:

John, I am disturbed.

I’m a big fan of yours, and considered it a high honor when the radio hosts here in town referred to ME as “The John Stossel of Birmingham.”

I remember the old John, and the transformation to the new John – who was simply the same John with the honesty to challenge his assumptions and live with the consequences.

I am not disturbed for you, but rather for ABC. For me, it meant a LOT that they would let you do your own thing, it was a sign of integrity that other networks did not seem to have evidence to back up.

In a month, the closest thing ABC News will have to a calls-it-as-he-sees-it presence is Jake Tapper, who calls things about as even-handedly as any high-profile political journalist in this generation. But there will be no contrarian, no voice of conscience challenging the assumptions of the group-think rampant in so many newsrooms.

You gave ABC credibility they will not be able to showcase in any other manner. And your departure to Fox will only reinforce a set of prejudices and idiotic notions for the very people who need to listen the most.

I wish you the best, and will watch with interest. But I can’t help think of the nay-sayers and gain-sayers who will never be exposed to your talent for humanizing the effects of an inhuman leviathan. The street preacher has left the neighborhood for the safety of an altar where he will be gladly received — but who will save the unwashed and the lost?

You can read the Bloomberg article for yourself:

Cardiologists Crying Foul Over Obama Medicare Cuts

I want to draw your attention to these excerpts:

Obama and his allies in Congress are pushing to extend coverage to the 46 million Americans without health insurance, at a potential cost of $1 trillion over a decade. The separate Medicare proposal, announced July 1, slashes projected spending for care by cardiologists and oncologists by more than 10 percent each, while paying family doctors 8 percent more and nurses an additional 7 percent.

The cuts would be “impossible” for some small-town cardiologists who rely on Medicare patients, said Zia Roshandel, a heart doctor in Culpeper, Virginia. The town of 10,000 people is about 60 miles southwest of Washington.

Roshandel and two partners see perhaps 50 patients a day at his practice, the local hospital and a community clinic for the indigent, the 40-year-old said in a telephone interview. Medicare accounts for two-thirds of their clientele, he said.

Already squeezed by government and private insurers, Roshandel said he has cut office hours, forgone paychecks and shifted his 12 workers to a high-deductible insurance plan over the past two years. The latest proposal would push him out of private practice altogether, most likely to a hospital in a larger community less reliant on Medicare, he said.

And here’s the rub of single-government-payer. One-size-fits-all is doomed to fail, because there is no universal intelligence or bureaucrat that can properly allocate resources with the same efficiencies as a free market. In this case, the doctor will have to pick up and leave his patients behind, because the system rewards his being part of a larger collective practice in a bigger community.

That also ignores the other conundrum of the healthcare debate: if you do succeed in shifting resources to preventative care, you simply create a larger population of people who will eventually succumb to heart disease and cancer. Unless you decide to ration, restricting access to only the young…

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid might not want to make enemies with his local newspaper.

Reid told the advertising manager of the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he was rooting for the paper to die. (Actually, the direct quote was “I hope you go out of business.”)

They might start digging around into his past, like this doozy about taxes being voluntary.

Maybe Harry just has problems with any entity that asks questions he doesn’t like.

Whitehouse.gov has “pulled” its effort to get neighbors to snitch on each other for sharing “misinformation” about healthcare reform. From a post called “An Update on Reality Check“:

Since the White House’s Reality Check site launched, we’ve seen incredible response from individuals eager to get the facts about health insurance reform and pass them along to family and friends.

An ironic development is that the launch of an online program meant to provide facts about health insurance reform has itself become the target of fear-mongering and online rumors that are the tactics of choice for the defenders of the status quo.

So let’s clear up two issues that have come to our attention.

I would hope that those two issues might include the notion of asking people to turn in American citizens who have done nothing but exercise their freedom of speech. I would pray that complaining about the collection of data that could be construed as an “enemies list” (and certainly would be if the previous administration was still in place) would be called something other than fear-mongering.

I was wrong. The apologies are for:

1. Inadvertently adding people to the President’s e-mail blast list, and
2. .

Oh, wait. There was no second issue!

Seriously, read the post in its entirety, and tell me what the two issues were. It seems to be clear that one had to do with the integrity and security of the e-mail blast list. But was there an apology for making it “appear” as though they were asking for “dirt” on others? Nada.

In fact, the first apology also shifts blame! Look at this:

It has come to our attention that some people may have been subscribed to our email lists without their knowledge –- likely as a result of efforts by outside groups of all political stripes

What the hell? Apparently, it was the Astroturf lobbyists for the insurance industry who are to blame, for putting themselves on the list and being too dumb to realize they might get emails from the White House Reality Check Team!

Instead, here are some self-serving back-slaps about just how awesome this whole administration-led community organizing effort truly is:

• we’ve seen incredible response from individuals eager to get the facts about health insurance reform
• However, it’s clear that a lot of Americans appreciate getting updates from the White House and that number continues to grow.
• Despite reports by some bloggers and others in the media that have invoked a variety of sinister conspiracy theories, more people signed up for updates last week than during the entire month of July.
• we’ve seen incredible response from website visitors who are using the tools provided on the site to share videos and other content with friends and family.
• The Reality Check website exists to inform public debate about health insurance reform – not stifle it.

The last one is rather funny, because the site is not about hosting or fostering a debate. Those running the site made up their minds a long time ago, and have no interest in other opinions.

The one about “more people signed up for updates last week than in the month of July” is hilarious, because the infamous flag@whitehouse.gov email address was launched August 4.

Hey… what about that email address? If you send anything to it now, it will bounce back to you. However, there is now this nifty contact form on the page, which is the same sort of webform that one would use to create a back-end email, but legally it is not an email.

So, what was missing?

• An acknowledgment that it was an abuse of power to ask citizens to report each others’ activities to the Oval Office
• An apology for same
• A pledge to find some means of discarding that data, within the law
• Any culpability whatsoever.

Arrogance?