Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Ruthless authoritarianism

As evidenced by the 2010 Health Care Summit, the governing philosophy of the current Administration is one of paternalistic authoritarianism.  After giving the semblance  of listening to different perspectives, progressive policy makers conclude that health care is too important to leave to individual decision making and requires a top-down approach from the central government. As [...]

John Mackey on the Fed and bailouts

The Wall Street Journal features an interesting interview with Whole Foods CEO John Mackey:
there’s one other institution John Mackey thinks needs a makeover—and that’s government. He describes what the Federal Reserve has done with massive money creation as “debauchery of the currency.” He thinks the bailouts were a travesty. ..”I don’t think anybody’s too big [...]

The Whole Foods boycott and modern liberalism

Commenting on the call for a boycott of Whole Foods by liberal activists, Donald J. Boudreaux draws attention to the double standard of modern liberals when it concerns voting with one’s dollars:
How hypocritical. Persons who seek greater government control over health care proudly exercise their ability to vote with their dollars to avoid patronizing a [...]

Government-run health care by another name

The co-ops that are being proposed to bring more choice and competition to health care are just the “public option” by another name and will drive private insurers out of business. As Michael T. Tanner writes for the Cato Institute:
If a “co-op” is run by the federal government under rules imposed by the federal government [...]

Progressives discover scarcity

In a witty post about government rationing versus market “rationing” Megan Mcardle notes that:

there is also a real difference between having something rationed by a process and having it rationed by a person…Using the government’s coercive power to decide the price of something, or who ought to get it, is qualitatively different from the same [...]

Medicaid socialism in Oregon

From the Independent Institute Patient Power website:

Theodore Dalrymple on rights and moral imagination

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels) makes the following observation:

When the supposed right to health care is widely recognized, as in the United Kingdom, it tends to reduce moral imagination. Whenever I deny the existence of a right to health care to a Briton who asserts it, he replies, “So you [...]

Health care as a right?

To understand the background of the recent debates on health care it is instructive to look at how this issue  is being approached in “progressive” states like Oregon. Last year a Constitutional Amendment was discussed  which would declare access to health care in Oregon to be a “fundamental right.” But what is so progressive [...]