Government's Folly

I was recently sent the following CNN article at http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/08/17/potter.health.insurance/index.html.

I totally agree with that guy on CNN that the insurance companies are bad. But, as usual, that guy only gives us the false choice between the current system where the government spends 50 cents of every dollar spent in the health care system and a new system where the government will spend an even bigger chunk on health care. Where the insurance companies, along with the doctors, do their best to get government to legislate and regulate as much competition out of the health industry as possible, and in doing so drive the cost very high. I pointed out to people the other day that adjusting for inflation, it cost about $250 to have a baby in the 1950s but over $10,000 today http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly09/healthcare07-09.html.  Once upon a time people could afford to have health care without insurance, and if they did have insurance they only had it for catastrophic events. Doctors and hospitals could afford to treat people that could not afford health care at a reduced or free cost, but now, because of all the money hospitals and private practice offices have to pay to comply with regulations. Even if the government regulations were perfect, which I doubt since they are written by politicians that don’t know anything about medicine, these companies still have to hire extra people (including lawyers) to fill out paper work, and make sure the company complies with the regulations. Not to mention the high initial cost to comply with regulations on doctors, hospitals and insurance companies, that make it incredibly hard for somebody to start a competing company.

Let us look at the system Obama was proposing. He wanted the public option. (Now he wants a co-op, which I believe will have the same effect.) Since the government has unlimited resources that it steals from us, it will be impossible for insurance companies to compete with it. Any companies that do survive will be premium companies that mostly service the families of politicians, just like the private (non-religious) schools that manage to compete with the public school systems.

This will also motivate doctors to find other work. It is already hard enough for doctors to deal with medicare and medicaid. They pay the lowest fees and they take the longest to pay. Many would go out of business if all of their patients had one of those two programs. What makes anybody think that this co-op will be any better?

One of the biggest things that will force insurance companies out of business is the pre-existing conditions part of this plan. I know it sounds horrible that you would deny somebody insurance if they have a disease already, but the point of insurance is that you have it in case you get sick, not only after you get sick. This will have two effects. First, like regulations in many states that require all insurance in that state to cover some conditions, it will drive up the premiums. Because you have to buy insurance in your own state, the states with more requirements will have the highest insurance. That is why it is very expensive to have insurance in New York compared to Wyoming. The second effect this requirement will have is that people will not get insurance until they get sick. This will send the insurance companies out of business left and right.

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by Jeff Snyder
by Jeff Snyder
Recently by Jeff Snyder: Plastic People

J.H. Huebert had an excellent article last Friday about the US attempts to force the Swiss bank, UBS, to divulge information about US account holders to the IRS. These efforts are nothing less than an attack on Switzerland’s sovereignty in the form of its ability to establish and maintain its own banking laws.

This is the kind of arcane financial news that is easy to disregard. When people hear “Swiss bank accounts,” they may brush off the attacks as the problems of the ultra rich. If only we were so “unfortunate” to have this kind of problem to worry about, right? Unfortunately, however, I think we do. I believe that there is far more to this than a temporary, one-time money grab by the IRS from tax evaders. I believe this is also very bad news even for us “wage slaves.”

The day Mr. Huebert’s article appeared, the Justice Department announced that the US and Switzerland had reached an agreement in principle to settle the US lawsuit against UBS AG seeking the names of 52,000 account holders. No details of the agreement were released but, given the amount of leverage that the US can bring to bear on UBS’s operations in the United States, it would be astounding if UBS had not agreed to some major accommodation to US demands.

Let’s go back and supply a little context about how we get to this issue in the first place.

Like most countries, the US taxes its residents on income that they earn outside of the US. Unlike most countries, the US also taxes its nonresident citizens on their worldwide income. Solely by virtue of being born here, the US claims lifelong rights to your earning stream even if you take up permanent residency in another country. As a result, the US is constantly seeking ways, through treaties, laws or, now we see, international strong arm measures, to track the international financial transactions of its citizens, whether in the name of preventing drug trafficking, money laundering, tax evasion or other crimes.

US taxpayers are required to report, and pay taxes, on interest or other earnings derived from foreign accounts. Unlike US banks, which will send you and the IRS a Form 1099 each year, foreign banks do not have an obligation to report your earnings to the IRS. Accordingly, the IRS is keenly interested in finding out from you whether or not you have any such foreign accounts.

Schedule B to Form 1040 (used for reporting interest and dividends) asks, “At any time during (the previous year), did you have an interest in or a signatory or other authority over a financial account in a foreign country, such as a bank account, securities account, or other financial account?” As described by the law firm of Bove & Langa in an on-line article about this matter, the answer to this question has serious potential consequences:

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by J. H. Huebert
by J. H. Huebert
Recently by J. H. Huebert: Ron Paul’s Manifesto Against ‘False Choice’

First we attacked Afghanistan. Then we attacked Iraq. Now the U.S. has it sights set on Switzerland.

Peaceful, neutral Switzerland? That’s right. What’s the crime? It’s not sponsoring terrorism or harboring weapons of mass destruction. No, in the eyes of the U.S. government, Switzerland has done far worse: it’s kept money out of the hands of the Internal Revenue Service, money to which the IRS may not even be entitled under any law anywhere.

The U.S. and Switzerland are headed for a diplomatic showdown as the IRS demands that Swiss bank UBS turn over the names of 52,000 U.S. clients in the mere hope of exposing them as tax evaders, prosecuting them and taking their cash.

The IRS has already succeeded in going after one prominent user of UBS’s services: Igor Olenicoff. The billionaire, who has a home in Laguna Beach’s Emerald Bay, pleaded guilty in December 2007 to filing a false tax return, then sued UBS, contending bank advisers’ advice landed him in trouble.

Now the IRS wants more: that list of names. But the Swiss government has so far stood its ground. It understandably doesn’t want to let the IRS do this because of Switzerland’s longstanding strict banking-secrecy laws, which provide criminal penalties for disclosing client information. Plus, the Swiss have this crazy notion that their own laws – not ours – should apply in their own country.

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Tuesday, November 14, 2006
The Gun in the Room

by Stefan Molyneux

“Put down the gun, then we’ll talk.”

One of the most difficult – and essential – challenges faced by libertarians is
the constant need to point out “the gun in the room.” In political debates, it
can be very hard to cut through the endless windy abstractions that are used to
cover up the basic fact that the government uses guns to force people to do
what they do not want to do, or prevent them from doing what they do want to
do. Listening to non-libertarians, I often wish I had a “euphemism umbrella” to
ward off the continual oily drizzle of words and phrases designed to obscure
the simple reality of state violence. We hear nonstop nonsense about the
“social good,” the “redistribution of income,” the “education of children” and
so on – endless attempts to bury the naked barrel of the state in a mountain of
syrupy metaphors.

It is a wearying but essential task to keep reminding people that the state is
nothing but an agency of violence. When someone talks about “the welfare state
helping the poor,” we must point out the gun in the room. When someone opposes
the decriminalization of marijuana, we must point out the gun in the room. When
someone supports the reduction of taxes, we must point out the gun in the room
- even if one bullet has been taken out.

So much political language is designed to obscure the simple reality of state
violence that libertarianism sometimes has to sound like a broken record. We
must, however, continue to peel back the euphemisms to reveal the
socially-sanctioned brutality at the root of some of our most embedded social
institutions.

I was recently involved in a debate with a woman about public schools.
Naturally, she came up with reason after reason as to why public schools were
beneficial, how wonderful they were for underprivileged children, how essential
they were for social stability etc etc. Each of these points – and many more -
could have consumed hour upon hour of back and forth, and would have required
extensive research and complicated philosophical reasoning. But there was
really no need for any of that – all I had to do was keep saying:

“The issue is not whether public schools are good or bad, but rather whether I
am allowed to disagree with you without getting shot.”

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by Karen De Coster
by Karen De Coster
Recently by Karen De Coster: The Tyranny of Weight Control

You don’t have to be a dedicated libertarian, an anarchist, a front porch radical, an anti-government adherent, or a tea party insurgent to take exception to the government’s coercive political process that seeks to master you and crush your independence. All you have to do is recognize how the political system functions and determine the legitimacy of its tactics by applying some really basic analysis and concepts.

For instance, let’s say I want you to stop smoking. I don’t like cigarettes, and I personally believe that smoking is an unpleasant and injurious habit. As a non-coercive individual, I may sit with you and explain why I think you should not smoke, and hopefully, I will use facts, or even opinions, to try and persuade you toward my view. Whether I am critical, or gentle, or even unkind, I am peacefully trying to influence your judgment on the matter. I have not used threats of punishment under the force of law, nor have I assembled a gang of armed bandits behind me to impose my views on you. If, on the other hand, you ask me to leave you alone, I’ll abide and retreat from your presence because anything less would be harassment, or aggression against your person. Voluntary human interactions that entail persuasion are rather simple in structure and are subject to some very necessary rules that shun aggression or force.

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The following documents the horrors that the US government (and British government for that matter) is capable of.

A few days ago a man who could have caused my death died of cancer at the ripe age of 86. He never faced a War Crimes Tribunal. He should have, and in a just world he would have. His name was Lord Aldington, and only now did I learn he was responsible for the sheer terror my decimated family of four – grandmother, mother, younger sister and I – experienced in the brutal summer of 1945 while trapped by the Red Army in the vicinity of Berlin.

Below is a article on “Operation Keelhaul” and the man accused of having masterminded it. The article was written by one Srdja Trifkovic. (Dr. Rimland’s comments are ‘Zundelsite’).

By Srdja Trifkovic www.rockfordinstitute.org/NewsST121900.htm 12-19-00 (Dr. Rimland’s comments are ‘Zundelsite’).

Trifkovic: Lord Aldington, 86, a former British trade minister and Conservative Party vice chairman who filed one of Britain’s most famous libel cases against a man who labeled him a war criminal, died of cancer Dec. 8 at his home in Kent, southern England. In 1989, Lord Aldington was awarded $2.2 million in damages after winning a libel suit against historian Count Nikolai Tolstoy, a distant relative of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who had written a pamphlet accusing Lord Aldington of war crimes.

Zundelsite: Censoring history by way of libel actions is unfortunately the method the rich and well-connected use against their pesky critics.

Trifkovic: As a British army officer in Austria at the end of World War II, Lord Aldington — then known by his given name, Toby Low — oversaw the repatriation of thousands of Cossack and Yugoslav refugees [ Ed. ... and, of course, the ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union and the Baltic states] . Many were subsequently killed or interned in prison camps.
At the libel trial, Lord Aldington agreed that the refugees’ fate was “ghastly” but said he had not known that many faced execution if returned to their homelands (The Washington Post, December 9, 2000).

Zundelsite: To assume that a high-ranking British Army officer in the field, whose unit daily interrogated refugees and prisoners-of-war, all of whom had either fled from, fought against, or at one time were part of Stalin’s army, is stretching credulity a bit too far. Only a fellow Lodge or Club member sitting as judge on a bench in London could be hypocritical enough to seem to believe such an answer.

Trifkovic: An obituary sometimes begs a thousand words – well worth doing in this case, especially since it’s been over a decade since we wrote about Aldington, Tolstoy, and one of the greatest untold tragedies of World War II. Zundelsite: The tragedy was not untold. There were millions of people affected by it, and detailed accounts have long been written about it. Only the British, and to a lesser degree, the American power elite suppressed it, because their clique had formulated and approved these vicious pro-Communist policies in Teheran and Yalta. They are co-guilty of what happened. They share in the responsibility for these atrocities.

Trifkovic: This is a story of heinous crimes that went unpunished and of establishment conspiracies to cover them up, of a miscarriage of justice, of one man’s quixotic efforts to tell the truth and another’s quiet campaign to keep it suppressed.

Zundelsite: Is it really “quixotic” to expose the deliberate murder of millions? At least there is now an admission that one man – not to mention his network of accomplices – tried to suppress this crime.

Trifkovic: The story starts at Yalta in February 1945, when the return of all Soviet citizens who found themselves in the Allied zone was demanded by Stalin — and was duly agreed to by Churchill and FDR. Accordingly, hundreds of thousands of Soviet POWs liberated by the Allies were sent back home, regardless of their wishes, and regardless of what Stalin had in store for them.

Zundelsite: What does that make Churchill and Roosevelt? Knowing and willing accomplices who had for years been briefed about Soviet war aims and the policies of Stalin and the behavior of his secret police and murderous Red Army. Yet they agreed to hand these people over!

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You might have seen this program called Cars, or Cash for Clunkers on TV. Basically the idea is the government will give you several thousand dollars for low gas mileage cars. It will give you more money if you buy a high gas mileage car. That several thousand dollars is more than a lot of old cars are worth. Basically the government is stealing your money to give a few people with beaters more money than they deserve.

“This application provides access to the DOT CARS system. When logged into the CARS system, your computer is considered a Federal computer system, and is the property of the U.S. Government. Any or all uses of this system and all files on this system may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected, and disclosed to authorized CARS, DOT and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of other agencies, both domestic and foreign.” (Emphasis mine)

That is plain fucking scary.

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AN OBAMA OFFICIAL’S FRIGHTENING BOOK ABOUT CURBING FREE SPEECH ONLINE

Last updated: 12:09 pm
July 11, 2009
Posted: 12:05 pm
July 11, 2009

When it comes to the First Amendment, Team Obama believes in Global Chilling.

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor who has been appointed to a shadowy post that will grant him powers that are merely mind-boggling, explicitly supports using the courts to impose a “chilling effect” on speech that might hurt someone’s feelings. He thinks that the bloggers have been rampaging out of control and that new laws need to be written to corral them.

Advance copies of Sunstein’s new book, “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done,” have gone out to reviewers ahead of its September publication date, but considering the prominence with which Sunstein is about to be endowed, his worrying views are fair game now. Sunstein is President Obama’s choice to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. It’s the bland titles that should scare you the most.

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A Conversation With Doug Casey
A Conversation With Doug Casey

Q: Doug, I hear you’ve been reading the obits recently – what’s on your mind?

Doug: Yes, I couldn’t help but note the long and generally favorable obits on Robert “the Strange” McNamara, at age 93. The obituaries ranged from glowingly positive to, at worst that I read, neutral. I was shocked and disgusted by these things. I considered the man to be a classic sociopath and a war criminal, among other things. He was one of the worst human beings ever to have lived.

Q: Don’t pull your punches, Doug…

Doug: Well, I have to say that I take his death a little personally. In life, I find that the things I regret most are not the things that I’ve done – although there are some of those – but more than that, it’s the things that I haven’t done. And one of the things I regret having not done was back in about 1995, when McNamara gave a speech at the Aspen Institute, promoting his book. I wanted very much to ask him a question. Usually, I’m pretty bold about these things, but this time, I just didn’t do it.

The question I wanted to ask him was this: “Mr. McNamara, how is it that after nearly destroying the Ford Motor Corporation, then destroying Viet Nam and almost destroying the United States, and then going on to be the president of the World Bank, where you made great strides towards destroying the world economy, how is it possible that today you can be held in high regard and stand up in front of this audience without being pelted with rotten fruit and vegetables?”

Q: So what happened? Did he leave before anyone could ask questions?

Doug: One of the few things I can say in McNamara’s favor is that he actually took questions. I believe I could have gotten a chance to ask my question. I honestly don’t remember why I didn’t do it. It was just one of those moments in which I didn’t do what I almost always do, which is to confront these people whenever I have the opportunity.

McNamara was actually an anti-libertarian in many ways. You know, he started his career as a statistical analyst evaluating the success of bombing raids in Germany and especially in Japan. He was a big promoter of raids on civilian population centers, like the carpet-bombing of Tokyo, in which 100,000 people died in one night, and it really served no useful purpose at all.

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Happy Independence Day.

Remember to declare your independence from the state.

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