Bert Ely on Incentives vs. Regulation

I always find financial consultant Bert Ely, who I met many times years ago at conferences, worthwhile to listen to. He either makes very good points or asks very insightful questions, or both. Here is a good video interview of him from The Economist magazine, on some aspects of the current financial mess, the recession, and so on, and an important highlight is his stress on the difference between incentives vs. regulation.

Sally Pipes on Canada's Health Care System

I know I've been blogging about this a bit lately, but here is another good video on the healthcare debate: another one noting flaws in the Canadian model. This is a video of part of a talk that Sally Pipes gave at a Cato event recently. She manages to pack a lot into less than eight minutes, noting several stories of the common issue of rationing services, and the stunning hypocrisy of the government leaders in Canada who make use of the "escape valve": coming to the US for services. Something to keep in mind if the US goes down a path that is patterned, in relevant respects, on the Canadian model: what will our escape valve be?

Don't Wash Those Vegetables, or the Government Will Get You!

Read this ridiculous posting for another story of government regulation's strangling business -- this time your loveable local farmer who sells veggies at a farmer's market. Apparently they aren't allowed to wash the vegetables, even if they don't label or package them in any way that indicates they have been washed. They must be sold dirty, as dirty as they came from the field. Wow.

Undercover Video Exposing Government Health Care in Canada

I've seen lots of videos and read lots of articles that criticize the government-run health-care in Canada. There are of course many who praise that system too, including of course many in our government who are urging the US to move more towards a system like Canada. So the average person can be left wondering who to believe in light of such contradictory reports.

But this video, Crowder on Canada, is one of the best I've seen on the subject. The host is a bit annoying in that he is trying so hard to be entertaining. But the value of the video comes from the "undercover" camera segments, in actual government health care facilities in Canada. Plus some of the things that the government employees, and others, have to say, is also quite damning.

I urge everyone to see this video!

Brain Damage: Pink Floyd Podcast

Lately I've been listening to some great Pink Floyd podcasts, from Brain Damage, a bi-weekly radio show / podcast. At that site you can download invididual clips, or I found it easy to subscribe to this podcast in iTunes via the link provided at the Brain Damage page at Podcast Alley.

What this radio show / podcast provides various with each approximately two-hour episode. Some are recent recordings from live David Gilmour events, others are classic concerts from the 1970s or whatnot. I've enjoyed hearing such things over the years, especially from the early to mid 1970s, as some of their live concerts from that period were awesome, and different enough from the studio recordings to make listening to each a unique experience.

On Health Insurance and Health Care: Some Alternative Perspectives on Reform

The majority of stories in the media these days are naturally reporting, and often times cheerleading, the Obama administration and the Democrat-led congress in their march towards "health insurance/care" reform. Given their control in Washington, aspects of their plan seem inevitable at this point, even while they still debate some of the finer points and negotiate on some details.

In this posting I am going to provide a collection of links to criticisms of this direction, warnings of what is likely to happen if anything akin to what is being proposed are made law. These don't get even a fraction of the media coverage that the plans of the political left do, since they amount to calls for truly free-market reforms -- things that the left despises. So I've been saving up links for a few months, and now want to share them with you as an archive of good material. Several years from now, when most everyone has health coverage, but health care costs are skyrocketing, health care rationing is a reality, health care innovations are in decline, health care trips abroad are increasingly popular, and health freedoms and rights are finally recognized as having been seriously limited by the "reforms of 2009/2010"... you won't be able to think back and say silly things like "Well, the system was broken, we had to do something, and there were no other ideas out there from Republicans or libertarians or Objectivists or anyone else, so we all jumped on the only reform bandwagon in town."

Here are some links to alternative, free-market viewpoints, criticisms of both proposed plans and government plans in states, Canada, Europe, and more. Not meant to be comprehensive, just some highlights from what I've read in the past several months.

• Health Care Reform vs. Universal Health Care (Paul Hsieh, M.D.)
• National Health Preview: The Massachusetts debacle, coming soon to your neighborhood (WSJ)
• Mandatory Health Insurance: Wrong for Massachusetts, Wrong for America (The Objective Standard)
• When Doctors Opt Out: We already know what government-run health care looks like (WSJ)
• The 'Public Plan' Would Be the Only Plan (WSJ)
• Don't Doc American Health Care (Steve Forbes)
• Competition Would Save Medicine, Too (John Stossel)

And then here are more items, all brought my way by We Stand FIRM (Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine), where Paul Hsieh, M.D., provides outstanding analysis and commentary along with the links (original sources he comments on given in parentheses below):

• How US Health Care Stacks Up (IBD)
• Four Myths About Universal Coverage (University of Illinois law professor David Hyman)
• Canadian Cost Controls (Financial Post)
• Gratzer on Socialism and Cancer (David Gratzer, M.D., in The New Atlantic)
• Rhoads: Force is not Competition
• Pipes on Canada (Washington Examiner)
• More Waiting in Massachusetts (Boston Globe)
• Schwartz on MassHealth
• Medicare is Unsustainable
• How ObamaCare Will Affect Your Doctor (WSJ)

Granted, these are all short articles and opinion pieces -- they are not 500-page legislative documents that propose entire health insurance and health care reform packages. But numerous free-market think tanks and advocacy groups have documented such overall reform plans for years (they just aren't of any interest to the majority of leaders in Washington). My purpose in providing this collection of links was just to inform readers of that good alternative thinking does exist in this arena.

No Matter Who Is President, the Stonings Will Continue

Several friends posted or sent this link to me, and I've finally gotten to reading it: No Matter Who is President of Iran, They Would Stone Me, by Lila Ghobady, an exiled Iranian writer-journalist and filmmaker living in Canada since 2002. This is a very powerful essay, one that makes quite clear the limits of the "revolution" that was simmering in the wake of the recent Iranian political leadership (s)election.

22 Ridiculous Competitions

Check this out: Most Ridiculous Competitions, from Sports Illustrated's SI Vault area. Browse through their gallery of 22 of the most ridiculous competitions ever. If I saw some of these photos out of this context, I might have assumed they were photoshopped. Instead, I really believe each of these creative events took place. Good stuff!

Gary Taubes on Why We Gain Weight

I've been meaning to watch this lecture by Gary Taubes for a month now, and tonight I finally did: Why we gain weight: Adiposity 101 and the Alternative Hypothesis of Obesity.

It is just over an hour long, but well worth it: he gives a wealth of info including some great slides, and injects a bit of humor too. It gets a bit heavy at some points, but that is understandable as he is talking to people in the medical profession. It definitely helps if you've already read his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories -- which I also highly recommend. In fact, if you have read his book then this lecture is really more of a review, as I didn't notice anything significantly new here that isn't covered in the book. (If you'd prefer something a bit easier to get started on this path, something that is a bit more accessible to the non-professional, then as I've said before the book I recommend is The Protein Power Lifeplan by Drs. Eades and Eades.)

On Common Myths About the Great Depression

I recently finished reading Meltdown, by Thomas Woods 2009). This is a book that I highly recommend if you are interested in understanding the current financial mess and how we got here. Not only is it clearly written, but it is a joy to read because of the author's sense of humor and the book's length of well under 200 pages. The subtitle describes nicely what it covers: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse.

One topic that helps Mr. Woods in telling the full story, but that isn't captured explicitly in that subtitle, is his chapter 5, "Great Myths About the Great Depression". In this chapter Woods begins by giving some history that led up to the Great Depression, and he notes the following as myths:

• Herbert Hoover was a pro-capitalist, laissez-faire guy. This is what is commonly taught to us in school, but it couldn't be more wrong. The difference between Hoover and FDR is not at all the night-and-day that it is commonly protray as.
• FDR's New Deal was a bold new direction. Not really, it was more a series of extrapolations from what Hoover had already been doing, e.g., he expanded Hoover's public works initiatives, raised taxes furhter, and took Hoover's efforts to prop up wages and prices and institutionalized them, for instance by destroying crops and imposing acreage reduction requirements on farmers.
• If only FDR had done even more government spending, we'd have gotten out of the depression sooner. As Woods writes, the claim is that "if still more resources could have been seized from the private economy and spent on arbitrary projects, prosperity would have been restored." Along the way Woods debunks specific claims about the 1937-38 "depression within the depression".
• "What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II." (That is a direct quote from Paul Krugman.) Woods demolishes this myth, see pages 103-106.

I'll also note a good article from the WSJ on Nov. 4, 2008, titled "Five Myths About the Great Depression", by Andrew Wilson. The one's Wilson talks about are:

• Herbert Hoover, elected president in 1928, was a doctrinaire, laissez-faire, look-the-other way Republican who clung to the idea that markets were basically self-correcting.
• The stock market crash in October 1929 precipitated the Great Depression.
• Where the market had failed, the government stepped in to protect ordinary people.
• Greed caused the stock market to overshoot and then crash.
• Enlightened government pulled the nation out of the worst downturn in its history and came to the rescue of capitalism through rigorous regulation and government oversight.

Read this article for the details on each point. But more importantly, get Meltdown and learn what the biggest culprits were for the current financial mess, why what the Bush and Obama administrations (and their Congresses) are doing will not help, and what should be done instead to really help and keep major recessions like this from ever happening again.

Health Care Reform: Real Ideas for a Free Market Alternative

Michael Tanner wrote Sunday in the LA Times a good article that provides several free-market steps that could be taken to reform our healthcare system. His article is available at the Cato website and is titled: Obama Doesn't Have the Only Prescription for Healthcare Reform.

The two major things he supports are:

• Change the tax code to move us away from employer-based health insurance to individual-controlled health insurance. This makes the insurance "portable", and stops hiding the real costs of healthcare from consumers.
• Allow us to purchase out-of-state insurance. He gives a good example that compares the cost of insurance in NJ vs. Kentucky, with the former being more expensive due to mandates and regulations. Making this change would allow people to, in effect, "purchase the regulations" of the state that fit their needs best. This change would encourage competition between companies in different states, and even between politicians in each state.

A third item he supports is to encourage greater competition in who provides healthcare -- by rethinking the licensing laws. He writes: "Nurse practitioners, physician assistants, midwives and other non-physician practitioners should have far greater ability to treat patients. We also should be encouraging such innovations in delivery as medical clinics in retail outlets."

Tanner concludes with:

The choice facing us now is not between Obama's plan for healthcare micromanaged by the government or doing nothing. Rather, it is a choice between government control, regulation and rationing on one hand, and free markets, choice and competition on the other. That is the real healthcare debate.

Triple Crown Winner in the NL in 2009?

For readers interested in baseball, I've written another posting at Seamheads.com, titled: Triple Crown Winner in the NL in 2009?

On Paul Krugman and the Austrian School

Many people hold NY Times columnist Paul Krugman in high regard. I assume this is especially true since he recently won the Nobel in economics. Of course, he won that award for work he did quite a while ago and not in areas he most typically opines and prescribes policy in his columns and TV interviews. And of course there are numerous other nobel-winning economists who disagree with many of Krugman's views and policy prescriptions.

Based on what I've read from him, I don't hold Krugman in high regard at all. In fact, quite the opposite: while I haven't read all of his columns, I can't recall one where I didn't find at least one important claim in that I didn't disagree with strongly, let alone find myself screaming "no, no... NO!"

I recommend you (especially if you are a Krugman fan or disciple) read the following short item titled Paul Krugman's inconvenient track record. It presents an interesting twist to the claim that Mr. Krugman foresaw the housing bubble. It seems he didn't so much foresee it, as he did in a sense recommend it.

The professional economists who most accurately -- and for the right causal reasons -- predicted not only the housing bubble buts its necessary collapse and various other related isseus that have arisen in the past year, are the contemporary exponents of the so-called Austrian School of economics. This is the school founded by the likes of Carl Menger and Eugene von Bohm-Bawerk, but then made a bit more well-known by the likes of Ludwig von Mises and especially Friedrich Hayek (himself a economics Nobel winner, by the way).

Along with various libertarian and Objectivists writers, it is Austrian School proponents like Peter Schiff and others who understood the primary causal factors (the Fed policy of easy money, the existence and actions of Fannie May and Freddie Mac, and so on) that led up to the housing bubble and the many consequences since its collapse. It was they who correctly predicted it ahead of time (with dire warnings), and it is they who are accurately providing the best economic ex-post-facto analysis today. Alas, they continue to be marginalized for a variety of ideological and other reasons.

How many more boom-bust cycles will we have to go through, how much more (sometimes) well-intentioned but wrong-headed government interferences in the economy will we have to witness, and how much more damage to our rights and freedoms will we have to endure... before more people will start to listen?

On What Obama Should Say To Iran

I'm a few days behind in sharing this link, but it is still very worth reading: What Obama Should Say To Iran, by Debi Ghate.