And in today’s Cover Story, courtesy of NRO, Jonah Goldberg details the duplicity behind the latest strain of Progressive Derangement Syndrome:
Leland Yee, the Kochs, and the press
Leland Yee, a Democratic state senator and candidate for secretary of state in California, has been a longtime champion of gun control. This week he was arrested on numerous charges, including conspiracy to deal firearms without a license and conspiracy to illegally transport firearms. Yee, a prominent foe of assault weapons, allegedly took bribes to set up a meeting between an undercover agent and an international arms dealer to broker the sale of automatic weapons and shoulder-fired missiles. A lengthy FBI affidavit also describes Yee’s ties to a Chinese triad and his desire to help out Islamist militants.
In short, the story makes for what journalists call “good copy.”
And yet, so far no reporter has raised the possibility that Yee supported tighter restrictions on guns in order to keep gun prices high and his own services in demand. Economist Bruce Yandle popularized the idea of the “Bootleggers and Baptists” coalition. The apocryphal Baptists want to ban alcohol. Bootleggers don’t make much money when liquor can be bought legally at a grocery store or bar. So the bootleggers bankroll the Baptists’ effort to ban booze.
Now I sincerely doubt that Yee was that clever. The more likely explanation is that he believes in gun control and he’s a greedy hypocrite (and maybe not too bright either). The fact that gun-control policies are to his advantage is just a happy coincidence. What’s interesting — and vexing — to me is that this sort of analysis is all the rage when it comes to conservatives and Republicans, and utterly incomprehensible to most journalists when it comes to liberals and Democrats.
Consider the Koch brothers, the billionaire businessmen and philanthropists. The Democratic Party raises vast sums off demonizing the Koch brothers. (Slate’s David Weigel reports that fundraising e-mails mentioning the Kochs raised roughly three times as much as those that didn’t mention them.) This explains why Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid calls the Kochs “un-American” and liars every chance he gets.
Meanwhile, many media outlets are all too willing to take their cues from Democratic talking points. For instance, The Washington Post recently ran a shockingly shabby story insinuating that the Kochs have a lot to gain from the Keystone pipeline. The story was utterly debunked by John Hinderaker of the website Powerline. (The Kochs have no stake in the pipeline, and even if they did, so what?) But the Post’s piece was typical of the media’s fascination with the idea that the Kochs’ political activities are simply cover for their desire to maximize profits.
Here’s the problem. The profit motives of the Koch brothers are by far the least interesting thing about them. Charles and David Koch are worth about $40 billion — apiece! Could they make even more money in a more libertarian America? Who knows? But let’s say yes. The idea that they are going to all of this bother just to be worth $50 billion instead of $40 billion is pretty silly when you think about it.
Profit maximization hardly explains why they’ve given hundreds of millions of dollars to cancer research, hospitals, and the arts. And profit lust probably has little to do with why Charles Koch co-founded the nonprofit libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute, either. It certainly doesn’t explain why Charles Koch wrote a book on “market-based management.” (Koch’s time is more valuable seeking something other than book royalties, of which I’m sure there were few, if any.) Maybe there’s a profit motive lurking somewhere in the millions that the Kochs have spent helping GOP politicians, but there are far cheaper and smarter ways for billionaires to buy laws and regulations to their liking.
I have no problem with journalistic skepticism or the search for ulterior motives. I just object to the idea that only Republicans might have them.
Al Gore reportedly left government with a net worth of less than $2 million; he’s now worth more than $200 million, in part by profiting from climate policies he lobbies for. Gore surely believes in those policies, but why does he get the benefit of the doubt? GE spent millions on politics in exchange for “green energy” policies that generate billions in profits that wouldn’t exist in a free market. Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon recently chronicled how George Soros and new liberal golden-boy fat cat Tom Steyer have financial interests at stake in their own preferred public policies. And yet they get glowing treatment from the press as idealists sacrificing profit for principles.
The irony is that it’d be in the media’s business interest to report on the seedy underbelly of liberal politics, too. But they don’t, because they actually do put their liberal principles before profits.
Speaking of Progressives putting political principles before practical policies, Team Tick-Tock finally offers a meaningful response to Putin’s provocations:
To borrow a phrase from the immortal Peter Venkman…
In a related edition of Afterburner, Bill Whittle relates how the United States could, absent the influence of the evil Environazis, render Putin as impotent as OPEC:
In other words…
…elect more Conservatives; not “Republicans”, but Conservatives!
Next up, writing at The Lid, Jeff Dunetz offers an insightful look into the tortured, twisted mind of the 2nd-worst President in U.S. history:
Jimmy Carter’s Obsessive Hatred Of Menachem Begin Guides His Hatred of Israel
The Peanut President, Jimmy Carter is in the news today, because he told Andrea Mitchell that President Obama doesn’t consult with him. The former president said he thinks the reason is that he and Obama have differing points of view on the Israel-Palestinian situation. “I can understand this is a sensitive issue,” Carter said. “I can live with it.” (Just not too long, Jimmy!)
Actually Carter hates Israel and it stems from the fact that Jimmy Carter is obsessively fostering hatred for a Ghost. You see he hates Israel because he hates Menachem Begin. Carter feels that Begin cost him the 1980 election and also cost him the opportunity to be known as the greatest peacemaker ever in the history of the world.
Carter says the reason Israel still will not leave the disputed territories is the legacy of the late Israeli Prime Minister. The intransigence of Begin and his successors, Carter believes, was compounded by a failure of U.S. political leaders to pressure the Israeli government to correct its policy. Hey Jimbo! Give the guy a break he passed away a long time ago….get over it !!!!.
Ken Stein, former head of the Carter center, someone who helped Carter with his book, The Blood of Abraham, gives us insight into Carter’s heart and why he hates Israel so much:
Carter’s animosity toward Begin has grown with time. He blames Begin for refusing to negotiate over the West Bank. Not only did this deny Carter a more complete peace deal, but, Carter believes, it also institutionalized itself in Israeli policymaking, worsening the Palestinians’ plight. Since Begin took office on May 17, 1977, ending the Labor movement’s hegemony in Israeli political life, Carter has repeatedly blasted Israeli prime ministers for what he terms the creation of a “horrible” and “terrible” state of affairs for the Palestinians in areas of east Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.
Skepticism of Carter’s intentions may have convinced Begin to take a harder line about the West Bank, which, in line with biblical terminology, he called Judea and Samaria. During his tenure as prime minister, Begin forbade the negotiation agenda to include the West Bank and those portions of Jerusalem that the Israeli government annexed after the 1967 Six-Day war. This refusal to negotiate became Carter’s core disagreement with Begin. Carter realized that with Begin adamant against further concessions, he had no tangible item to offer to the Palestinians or other Arab leaders to reach a broader peace agreement. With Begin not offering a fallback position, Carter could not initiate a conclusive Israeli-Palestinian negotiating process. He never forgave Begin….
…A point he[Carter] has repeatedly made when speaking to my students, his animus toward the late Israeli leader is limitless. This became evident when we were writing The Blood of Abraham, and Carter insisted on asserting that Begin “wanted to expand Israeli borders to both sides of the Jordan River.” In fact, this is anachronistic. True, this had been Begin’s view prior to Israel’s independence in 1948, but it was not, as Carter implied, Begin’s position after his twenty-nine years in the Knesset (parliament) or during his premiership. During chapter editing, I brought the error to Carter’s attention. He declined to correct it.
The Negotiations with Egypt was really two against one: During the difficult negotiations between Egypt and Israel, Carter and his advisers tried to get Sadat to engage in a collusive scheme. They would encourage Sadat to make “deliberately exaggerated” demands. The White House would then intervene to “compel” Cairo to scale back its demands in exchange for Israeli concessions. Then-national security advisor Brzezinski explained that Washington would “apply maximum leverage on Israel to accommodate,by keeping the West Bank’s political future on the table for future negotiations. That Carter risked possible Israeli-Egyptian peace in an effort to extract greater concessions from Begin underscores the tension in their relationship. Carter also blames difficulties with Begin for undermining his re-election. In early 1980, with the critical New York Democratic primary looming, Mondale urged Carter to repudiate the U.S. vote for U.N. Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 465,which had condemned Israeli settlement activity. According to Brzezinski:
Jewish voters swung heavily over to Senator [Edward] Kennedy, ensuring Carter’s defeat. The set-back prolonged the Carter-Kennedy contest. Sadat did not want a final showdown on the Palestinian problem prior to the return of the Sinai to Egypt. Without pressure from Sadat, our own incentive to push Israel hard was much decreased. Begin proved himself to be a skilled manipulator … adroit at delaying tactics and in diversionary public appeals … by mid-June it was clear even to Mondale that Begin wanted Carter defeated.
Such is Jimmy Carter’s sick hatred of Menachem Began. The man has been dead for over 20 years and Cater allows his hatred to stew, affect is decision making and become an advocate for Hamas and terrorism worldwide.
Carter reminds me of Herbert Lom in the old Pink Panther movies, he played Clouseau’s Boss who hated the Peter Sellers character so much that he kept trying to kill him. Lom’s character keeps hurting himself in his attempts and eventually winds up insane, just like the Peanut President.
And since we’re on the subject of tortured, twisted minds, one’s the subject of a recent column by James Taranto entitled…
Ezekiel’s Prophesy
If he’s right, ObamaCare’s biggest disruptions are yet to come.
Ezekiel Emanuel, Rahm’s elder brother, is a physician who helped design ObamaCare and has been one of its most intense champions. So you may be surprised to learn that in his new book, “Reinventing American Health Care,” he predicts that tens of millions more Americans will lose their medical plans in the coming decade. (Surprised?!? Hells Bells, that’s exactly their plan!)
In its “You’re the Boss” small-business blog, the New York Times quotes his prediction that by 2025, “fewer than 20 percent of workers in the private sector will receive traditional employer-sponsored health insurance.” As of March 2013 such benefits were available to 85% of full-time private-sector workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If Emanuel is right–and especially if, as he implies, ObamaCare was designed to produce such an outcome–the president’s repeated pledge that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” was a far more widespread fraud than has yet been realized.
In the next two to three years, Emanuel predicts, “a few big, blue-chip companies will announce their intention to stop providing health insurance. Instead, they will raise salaries substantially or offer large, defined contributions to their workers. Then the floodgates will open.” Small businesses will be even more eager to drop coverage.
The main reason Emanuel expects this result is the so-called Cadillac tax, which takes effect in 2018 and has nothing to do with the bailout of General Motors. Rather, it is a levy on what the Times calls “especially generous health plans.”
Yet one cannot say ObamaCare was designed with the clear purpose of discouraging employer coverage. (Really? We would respectfully beg to differ.) It leaves in place the tax exemption for such plans, which Emanuel understatedly acknowledges, in the Times’s words, “is a big obstacle to this vision.” It also imposes a fine on companies with more than 50 employees that don’t insure enough of them. Although the fine for not insuring a worker is considerably less than the cost of insuring one, it’s still an incentive to continue coverage.
There are plenty of reasonable criticisms of the prevailing practice of employer health insurance. The tax exemption that makes it such a popular benefit is an artifact of World War II wage controls. It puts the self-employed at a disadvantage, because they may deduct health-insurance costs only in years when they turn a profit, and only from income (not payroll) taxes. It discourages cost-conscious consumption of medical services by insulating employees from the cost not only of services but of insurance. It constrains individual choices in the labor market, since leaving or losing a job can mean the additional blow of losing insurance or having to pay expensive Cobra premiums.
The trouble with Emanuel’s vision, though, is that if it comes true, it will undermine the ObamaCare goal of insuring more Americans. (Not if The Dear Misleader’s true intention was paving the way for single-payer, government-run health “care”.) That isn’t just a prediction but an arithmetic truism. No previously uninsured person will end up insured as a result of employers’ dumping plans. Some but not all will buy insurance in the individual marketplace.
Emanuel seems optimistic that most will. He tells the Times in an interview: “If you have good options in the exchange, and a lot of competition to keep prices down, I think a good marketplace could work well.” That’s what clinicians call “an enlarged ‘if.’ “
In marketing to consumers who are thrown off company plans, officials and insurance companies will face the same problems as they do with the previously uninsured: ObamaCare’s mandates drive costs up for everyone; its price controls ensure that young people, especially young men, are overcharged relative to their risk profile; the narrow networks created for cost-cutting purposes diminish the quality of the product; and young, healthy people often have illusions of immortality and thus have little interest in health insurance.
For all the objections to employer-sponsored health insurance, it deals very effectively with some of these problems. By insuring its workforce as a group–younger and older employees, those in good as well as faltering health–it avoids adverse selection. Since the company picks up most of the premium, the employee has the illusion that the insurance isn’t costing him much–which is a virtue if the overriding goal is to make sure as many people are insured as possible.
It also overcomes the apathy problem. The Atlantic’s Olga Khazan has an article titled “How to Make Your Friends Buy Insurance” in which she attempts to apply the findings of behavioral economics to the problem of persuading reluctant consumers to buy ObamaCare policies. One of her suggestions: “Sign them up automatically.”
The insight behind this proposal is a useful one: that “opt-out” systems are more effective than “opt-in” ones. If you have to check a box on your driver’s license application to become an organ donor, chances are you won’t. If you have to check a box not to become an organ donor, chances are you also won’t. So the better way to get organ donors is to make “yes” the default choice. Similarly, Khazan cites a study of 401(k) plans, which found that “enrollment spikes from 30 percent to 90 percent when employees are signed up automatically, and then given the option to cancel.”
“But aside from certain Medicaid patients,” she writes, “there’s no auto-enrollment in Obamacare,” That’s because the idea of “auto-enrollment in ObamaCare” is completely fanciful. Americans find the mandate to purchase insurance vexatious enough, and the Supreme Court’s recasting it as a tax doesn’t seem to have made it any easier to swallow. Would anyone find it acceptable for the government to authorize insurance companies to “auto-enroll” customers? (No, but since a significant majority of Americans find the Unaffordable Care Act itself unacceptable, it’s evident Dimocrats don’t care what anyone thinks.)
Imagine getting a bill from an insurance company for the first month’s premium on a medical plan you never ordered. Even if you had the option to cancel, you’d have every right to be furious at a business practice that in any other context would be viewed as fraudulent.
But employer-sponsored health insurance does have what amounts to auto-enrollment. You go to the human resources office on your first day of work, and you get a package of paperwork (at least that’s how it worked the last time we started a new job; perhaps it’s gone online since then), and it includes a form to select your health plan. Hardly anybody minds, because you’re not “buying a product,” you’re “signing up for a benefit.” It’s behavioral economics at work, in more ways than one.
If Emanuel is right and large numbers of workers are dropped from employer-sponsored medical plans, does he really think the 27-year-old who got the HR nudge onto the plan is as likely to buy an ObamaCare policy as his 60-year-old colleague with diabetes or a heart condition?
Over at the Puffington Host, Robert Kuttner worries that “Emanuel could well be right.” He also doubts whether companies would make up for the lost benefits by offering raises, which “in the real world, corporations are loath to grant.” The one bright side, from his standpoint, is that “the long-term effect could be more demands from Americans for a comprehensive single-payer system”–i.e., a government monopsony on medical services, as in Canada. By Kuttner’s lights “that would be swell,” but he acknowledges that as a political matter it’s far from a sure thing.
It’s also quite possible that Ezekiel’s prophesy will prove incorrect. The high cost and low quality of ObamaCare policies may cause employees to value their company plans even more than they do now. That in turn could make the “Cadillac tax” one of the most politically vulnerable ObamaCare components.
We love Taranto’s commentaries, but as evidenced by our thoughts inserted above, we sometimes believe he grants the benefit of the doubt to those deserving only of the slack immediately preceding the tightening of a noose at the end of a short drop.
Whatever The Obamao’s actual motives in creating the Unaffordable Care Act, actually helping the “uninsured” was never among them.
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with yet another sign the Progressive Apocalypse is upon us:
Abortion – the “life-sustaining act” of the ages. That’s the theme behind an exhibit currently on display at the University of Michigan dedicated to defending and glamorizing the history of abortion. “4000 Years for Choice is an exhibition of posters about the age-old practices of abortion and contraception as a means to reclaim reproductive freedom as a deeply personal and life-sustaining act existing throughout all of human history,” states a university webpage describing the exhibit.
The exhibit will be showcased through May 29 in the main lobby of the Lane Hall women’s studies building on campus. The exhibit consists of dozens of brightly colored posters with bold words, phrases and documentation meant to highlight and celebrate all the ways in which women over the millennia have performed abortions.
Which brings to mind Galatians 6:7: Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. And as the prophet Hosea noted, having sown the wind, they will reap the whirlwind.
Oh…and on The Lighter Side:
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