journal . Ben Sommer

So says pundit Malcolm Gladwell:

"I woke up one day and realized what much smarter people than me (Adam Gopnik) realized a long time ago, which is that the idea of employer-based health care is just plain stupid"

No, in fact it is a natural, and one might say ingenious, outcome of past events. A history lesson:

Employer-provided health care in the US dates from the 1940s and war-time federal wage controls - laws forbidding paying "too much" to workers. In an effort to circumvent these laws, employers enticed workers by pairing wages with health care, which was then tax-free.

And now a lesson in political economy:

Government intervention (in the labor market) leads to unintended consequences (employers bending over backward to pay workers their worth) that then lead to further interventions (some states now requiring employers to cover workers). Ludwig von Mises (http://www.mises.org) proved the logic of this over 60 years ago and still, few understand it. And those who do (beaurocrats, _muckrackers_) don't care.

If you still think socialist health care is great idea, look in the mirror and tell yourself this is what you want:

"The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom". ~L. Mises

I believe Canada is now in the first stage, imprisoning anyone offering private health care. More to come.

I remember thinking "Oh bullshit, he'll never get away with that" - when Der Fuhrer first talked about Iraqnam. If you thought the same thing then, and are now incredulous about yet another war - think again. Write a letter to your congressperson or newspaper, or say a prayer or something - anything to keep the bombs off the babies.

I've been reading Ludwig von Mises' Human Action. Its amazing - a monster work (1000+ pages). Almost every paragraph has something to expand the brain.

This snippet below, about the Nazis and their ideological system, is from a section called "The Fight Against Error". Here Mises talks about the danger of tarring one's ideological opponents as morally or psychologically deficient - something I love to do :)

The danger lies in the fact that, for most of us, many of our political ideas rest on the same unexamined fallacies. According to Mises, these were socialism and nationalism. The upshot is that, unless we can cast out the splinter in our own eyes, we'd do better not to note the beam in anothers'.

That word "autarky" particularly sticks out, with all the recent talk about "national energy self-sufficiency". I wonder what they'd all say if they knew they were reciting out of the Nazi playbook?