Commissar Sebelius To The Rescue!

The headline in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial reads: "Health insurers finally get some oversight."

The sub-head continues the theme:

"In the past, these companies ran wild with no accountability"

At least, according to Sec. of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, that is.

She must be right. There is no State Insurance Commissioner in every State of the Union. There aren't thousands of regulations dictating prices, terms of coverage, etc., etc. None of that existed until ObamaCare and the mighty Commissar Kathleen rode to the rescue of the proletariat. Missing her own irony, she lists several of them later in the editorial, including herself (as past commissioner in Kansas).

She begins:

In the last two weeks, my department has been accused of "thuggery" (this editorial page) and "Soviet tyranny" (Newt Gingrich). What prompted these accusations? The fact that we told health-insurance companies that, as required by law, we will review large premium increases and identify those that are unreasonable.

Nothing thuggish about violating the 4th and 5th Amendment protections of private property and voluntary trade, the sanctity of contract, et al, of course. But who needs them? It's comforting to know instead that my 'right' to health insurance is being protected by the pure and all-powerful Wizard of Health Care, no longer bound by any such quaint notions.

Can't these idiots at least go back to telling semi-plausible lies? They're making it far too easy on me.

RObama Hood Boasts of Looting the Rich, Poor, And Everyone In-Between

Naturally, the title reflects my take not his own on Obama's list of 'accomplishments':

When I talk to Democrats around the country, I tell them, “Guys, wake up here. We have accomplished an incredible amount in the most adverse circumstances imaginable.” I came in and had to prevent a Great Depression, restore the financial system so that it functions, and manage two wars.

In the midst of all that, I ended one of those wars, at least in terms of combat operations. We passed historic health care legislation, historic financial regulatory reform and a huge number of legislative victories that people don’t even notice.

We wrestled away billions of dollars of profit that were going to the banks and middlemen through the student-loan program, and now we have tens of billions of dollars that are going directly to students to help them pay for college. We expanded national service more than we ever have before. [emphasis added]

The Recovery Act alone represented the largest investment in research and development in our history, the largest investment in infrastructure since Dwight Eisenhower, the largest investment in education — and that was combined, by the way, with the kind of education reform that we hadn’t seen in this country in 30 years — and the largest investment in clean energy in our history.

As I've written before, Obama is right in a way to boast here; he hasn't lost a major battle yet. That aside, in any society more than half-awake, this list would be seen for what it is: a series of Constitutional rights violations that should see its perpetrator in jail.

How ironic, then, that hard-core Progressives are still whining that he hasn't done enough. They complain that ObamaCare contains no 'public option' (i.e. explicit socialized medicine), that some in the Administration are talking about 'fiscal austerity measures', etc. (Granted, it's only talk.) Goebbel's Stand-In Press Secretary Robert Gibbs spoke the truth for once when he recently called them crazy, that they wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than open communism. (My words, not his.)

As for the remaining sane members of society — and thankfully their numbers are larger than I'd previously thought — we're dissatisfied, too (albeit in a rather different direction). We'll have our say in about a month and be in a position to throw some serious sand in the juggernaut's gears. Still, optimistic caution is in order. As I wrote in that Teflon King piece:

Even with increased Republican resistance after November the trend is likely to continue, sad to say. Republican politicians are still morally weak when it comes to the vulnerability Democrats are expert at exploiting: politicians' faux concern for the welfare of 'the little guy'. Unless the Tea Party sentiments come to dominate the country, men like Boehner and McConnell will always cave in the clutch. They don't have the will or the background to consistently make a principled stand for the rights to private property, voluntary trade, or individual liberty.

After reading The Pledge, I'm sorry to have to say I was more right than I knew.

There are plenty more seriously laughable, and laughably depressing, comments in Obama's Rolling Stone interview, (such as The One laughing off Fox News — after excoriating them elsewhere — since he has "swore to uphold the Constitution, and part of that Constitution is a free press."). So, er, enjoy.

The Pledge to America Is Weak Tea

[W]hen loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels—and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.

Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual, pg 173.

I had planned to write a 'review' of the Republicans' Pledge to America. After slogging through the whole thing — puffed up by ridiculous photos of 'concerned' politicians meeting with 'ordinary' Americans — I found myself stumped.

It's a very mixed bag — a few good ideas here and there, surrounded by a lot of cream puff. Well-meaning goo, to be sure, but the sort of thing that could've been written by any centrist Democrat. (There are actually a few of them left, such as Idaho's Walt Minnick.)

If it was intended to appeal to the middle — and what Republican proposal does not? — it succeeded. If it was supposed to persuade anyone who sees what the real problems in America are today, it's off by a country mile.

It's a long-sight better than anything the Democrats promise, certainly. But, then, given that the Progressive-dominated Jackass party is only an explicit admission or two away from blatant Corporatism, it could hardly be worse.

Anyway, luckily, I've been saved the heinous pain of writing anything at length, which would require reading it again to pull out quotes. Andy McCarthy has saved me the trouble. I don't share quite his degree of outrage - possibly because my expectations for the Republicans in Congress were so low - but he does capture the gist of my views.

It's so seamlessly written I couldn't find many money quotes, but this will give you a flavor:

Worse, though, the pledge proposes its own irrational (but populist) health-care mandates: “We will make it illegal for an insurance company to deny coverage to someone on the basis of a pre-existing condition, eliminate annual and lifetime spending caps, and prevent insurers from dropping your coverage just because you get sick.”

As the Red State blogger Hogan pointedly asks, how is coercing a private insurer to cover people any better than coercing a private person to buy coverage? The constitutionality clause the Republicans write for that one ought to be interesting.

Furthermore, as Hogan adds, sick people can’t pay for health insurance — if insurers are mandated to cover them outside the terms of their policies, it will be necessary to force healthy people to pay the freight. That is, we’d be in cruise-control toward an individual mandate anyway.

HAPPY 2008!

Far from addressing entitlements and getting the government out of the health-care business, the pledge would leave the welfare state largely intact, content — once you flip past the preamble — to “rein in” but not stop the government’s growth. How? By vowing to roll out-of-control federal spending all the way back to...the out-of-control levels of 2008.

The biggest problem with The Pledge, as McCarthy points out at the outset, is whether anyone can believe any of the used dishwater promises its authors make about curbing the Leviathan's appetite. On that question, I am not immensely hopeful.

In the end, though clearly the mere existence of The Pledge is a consequence of pressure put on the GOP by the Tea Party movement, the response is a disappointingly weak brew.

Communists Represent the Middle Class?

Daniel Foster at NRO reports on a "confederacy of liberal groups" who plan to hold a rally in response to Glenn Beck's. They claim to represent "America’s embattled middle class.”

There are some mainstream left-leaning groups (the SEUI, the American Federation of Teachers, and others). What's more interesting, though, are the groups the confederacy fails to mention. It reveals this effort as just so much, very stale, communist bombast.

• Chicago Democratic Socialists of America
• Code Pink
• Committee of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
• Communist Party USA
• Democratic Socialists of America
• International Socialist Organization

Yawn... It's clear that Progressives are out of ammunition. That won't stop them from initiating kamikaze raids, of course, but they officially now got nothin'. When you align yourself with groups like this, you've lost the middle class for sure.

The Impact of Regulation, Quantified

One useful measure of the impact of irrational regulation is how long it takes to build large structures. Here are a few blasts from the past:

• Empire State Building: 410 days.
• The Pentagon: two years.
• Gateway Arch: two years.
• Golden Gate Bridge: four years.
• Hoover Dam: five years.
• Rockefeller Center (14 buildings): nine years (of which Radio City Music Hall was done in the first two years and 30 Rock in three).

Some of the additional time required today can be accounted for by increased valid safety measures and higher population in surrounding areas. But that's compensated for to some degree by better machinery and increased experience.

The net difference is attributable to nanny statist measures, Progressive/viro legal maneuvering, and politics. The difference is often not small. That's pretty obvious when you look at things like the former WTC site in Manhattan, which is still far from complete nine years later.

It's less obvious, but even more disturbing when you consider projects that are not even getting off the ground, such as the ten thousand new nuclear power plants the country needs.

Worst of all is the sheer destruction of useful projects torn down as a result of environmentalist activism, such as the many dams they boast of eliminating.

Time for a renaissance, one energized by the idea that Man the Builder is a noble creature, one who's earned the right to hold his head high. As a start, he should stop apologizing for transforming human existence from a life that was "nasty, brutish, and short" to something peaceful, comfortable, and oftimes dazzling. Then He can develop once again the pride that will motivate throwing off the shackles of the envious, the small, the anti-life.

Creative civil engineering isn't merely useful, it's glorious — and one because of the other.

"Lawless Legislators" Published at Pajamas Media

My article, Lawless Legislators, has been published at Pajamas Media. I hope you'll weigh in with your thoughts on the topic, there and here.


Thanks,

Jeff

No-Longer Great Britain: UK Totalitarianism In Training

Those wacky Brits just love their statism.

The UK’s tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, after which the government would deduct what it deems as the appropriate tax and pay the employees by bank transfer.

The proposal by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) stresses the need for employers to provide real-time information to the government so that it can monitor all payments and make a better assessment of whether the correct tax is being paid.

Currently employers withhold tax and pay the government, providing information at the end of the year, a system know as Pay as You Earn (PAYE). There is no option for those employees to refuse withholding and individually file a tax return at the end of the year.If the real-time information plan works, it further proposes that employers hand over employee salaries to the government first.

“The next step could be to use (real-time) information as the basis for centralizing the calculation and deduction of tax,” HMRC said in a July discussion paper.

So what's holding them back, some lingering respect for liberty, some vague collective memory of the Magna Carta? No, it's just that total confiscation is just too expensive:

"[T]he cost of implementing the new system would be "phenomenal," Bull pointed out."

If the Brits had any balls, they'd do what we did to their government 235 years ago. Then again, if the majority of Americans today had any balls, they'd do it to the American government. We'll see what the testosterone level is come this November.

[Hat Tip Jonah Goldberg at NRO.]