“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master– that’s all.”

God bless Lewis Carroll.

Nope, Mouse. Lefties are not only completely incapable of anticipating the most obvious consequence of an ill-considered policy or action, they are equally incapable of accepting that consequence as the outcome of the bad policy or action when it actually occurs. These utter morons go around pushing glasses off of tables and in between stomping and screaming and gnashing teeth and blaming others for all the glass on the floor, can go an entire lifetime and never figure out that pushing glasses off of tables inevitably results in broken glasses on the floor. They have become that bad, and are getting more insane by exponentially increasing levels.

There is nothing that will be at more of a disadvantage than a typical urban lefty by the reality that ensues should they achieve their endgame of dissolving Western civilization into a violent, lawless, broken, tribal dystopia in which one of the most dangerous contingents are members of a seventh century religion of murder and conquest. Not only do they not have any skills that involve building, growing, making, fixing or self-defense, no one they know does. Urban lefties don’t know anything about stuff like that. Yet, they throw screaming tantrums for every minute of delay in getting there.

Perhaps everything Blackman and Margulies and Bybee are saying is right as a matter of law in the regular order, but there’s an unexpressed legal principle functionally at work here: That President Trump is a crazy person whose oath of office large numbers of judges simply don’t trust and to whom, therefore, a whole lot of normal rules of judicial conduct do not apply.

https://lawfareblog.com/revolt-judges-what-happens-when-judiciary-doesnt-trust-presidents-oath

If these judges really are mindreading Trump, finding him insincere and basing their decisions upon that, something is very wrong and quite dangerous.

08/14/2009Hans-Hermann Hoppe
It’s true that the US health-care system is a mess, but this demonstrates not market but government failure. To cure the problem requires not different or more government regulations and bureaucracies, as self-serving politicians want us to believe, but the elimination of all existing government controls.

It’s time to get serious about health-care reform. Tax credits, vouchers, and privatization will go a long way toward decentralizing the system and removing unnecessary burdens from business. But four additional steps must also be taken:

Only these four steps, although drastic, will restore a fully free market in medical provision. Until they are adopted, the industry will have serious problems, and so will we, its consumers.

Eliminate all licensing requirements for medical schools, hospitals, pharmacies, and medical doctors and other health-care personnel. Their supply would almost instantly increase, prices would fall, and a greater variety of health-care services would appear on the market.
Competing voluntary accreditation agencies would take the place of compulsory government licensing – if health-care providers believe that such accreditation would enhance their own reputation, and that their consumers care about reputation, and are willing to pay for it.

Because consumers would no longer be duped into believing that there is such a thing as a “national standard” of health care, they would increase their search costs and make more discriminating health-care choices.

Eliminate all government restrictions on the production and sale of pharmaceutical products and medical devices. This means no more Food and Drug Administration, which presently hinders innovation and increases costs.

Costs and prices would fall, and a wider variety of better products would reach the market sooner. The market would force consumers to act in accordance with their own – rather than the government’s – risk assessment. And competing drug and device manufacturers and sellers, to safeguard against product liability suits as much as to attract customers, would provide increasingly better product descriptions and guarantees.

Deregulate the health-insurance industry. Private enterprise can offer insurance against events over whose outcome the insured possesses no control. One cannot insure oneself against suicide or bankruptcy, for example, because it is in one’s own hands to bring these events about.

Because a person’s health, or lack of it, lies increasingly within his own control, many, if not most health risks, are actually uninsurable. “Insurance” against risks whose likelihood an individual can systematically influence falls within that person’s own responsibility.

All insurance, moreover, involves the pooling of individual risks. It implies that insurers pay more to some and less to others. But no one knows in advance, and with certainty, who the “winners” and “losers” will be. “Winners” and “losers” are distributed randomly, and the resulting income redistribution is unsystematic. If “winners” or “losers” could be systematically predicted, “losers” would not want to pool their risk with “winners,” but with other “losers,” because this would lower their insurance costs. I would not want to pool my personal accident risks with those of professional football players, for instance, but exclusively with those of people in circumstances similar to my own, at lower costs.

Because of legal restrictions on the health insurers’ right of refusal – to exclude any individual risk as uninsurable – the present health-insurance system is only partly concerned with insurance. The industry cannot discriminate freely among different groups’ risks.

As a result, health insurers cover a multitude of uninsurable risks, alongside, and pooled with, genuine insurance risks. They do not discriminate among various groups of people which pose significantly different insurance risks. The industry thus runs a system of income redistribution – benefiting irresponsible actors and high-risk groups at the expense of responsible individuals and low-risk groups. Accordingly, the industry’s prices are high and ballooning.

To deregulate the industry means to restore it to unrestricted freedom of contract: to allow a health insurer to offer any contract whatsoever, to include or exclude any risk, and to discriminate among any groups of individuals. Uninsurable risks would lose coverage, the variety of insurance policies for the remaining coverage would increase, and price differentials would reflect genuine insurance risks. On average, prices would drastically fall. And the reform would restore individual responsibility in health care.

Eliminate all subsidies to the sick or unhealthy. Subsidies create more of whatever is being subsidized. Subsidies for the ill and diseased promote carelessness, indigence, and dependency. If we eliminate such subsidies, we would strengthen the will to live healthy lives and to work for a living. In the first instance, that means abolishing Medicare and Medicaid.

https://mises.org/library/four-step-healthcare-solution

So according to libertarian theory this is a solution to apply free markets to health care. Anyone think this is a good idea?

The alternative is to debate how much regulation is enough and what is necessary to regulate.

And when the market is priced above peoples ability to pay, what to subsidize and how much.

It involves a frog-like alien race whose legal system includes the possibility of lawyers having to fight to the death in the CourtArena.

When I’m in a bad mood that sounds like a good idea.

You write “Pence is another Bush.”

Now, I happen to agree with you that Pence isn’t a fighter. But he is far FAR more conservative than either Bush I or Bush II ever were.

Do you know much about Pence, prior to his being picked by Trump as Veep? Take a look.

I fail to see a resemblance to the Bushes.

Some of the Supreme Court decisions during the FDR years were made while FDR was basically threatening the court. Those stand as sacrosanct, although without FDR holding a metaphorical gun to their collective heads, they probably would have ruled a different way.