Freedom Line Blog

God bless residents of the Pacific Northwest for casting rightful suspicion on ObamaCare’s state-based, federally-directed, health insurance exchanges:

Focus groups in Oregon expressed emotions about buying coverage that included “skepticism” and “frustration,” and some individuals and small businesses used “black hole” and other less-kind terms to refer to insurance, brand design firm Sandstrom Partners told the Oregon Health Insurance Exchange in a presentation made available by the exchange.

The word exchange “raises some suspicions of loopholes and fine print” and “implies current coverage may needed to be traded for something else,” wrote communications company GMMB in a presentation to the Washington State Health Benefit Exchange. Part of the problem, GMMB said, was that the word was “perceived as a verb and unfamiliar as a noun” and reminded people of the New York Stock Exchange or military exchange stores.

…

Washington state is leaning toward calling its program Washington HealthLink, as long as it doesn’t conflict with existing trademarks, and plans to use green and blue in its logo design because the colors are considered to be reassuring, said Michael Marchand, the state’s exchange director. The exchange’s board of directors will make the final decision on the name, he said.

Focus group participants had also been asked to consider HealthChoice but it “makes some wonder if Washington State is making the choice for them,” consultants and the exchange board concluded.

The Wall Street Journal article from which these excerpts are culled goes on to detail other stories of states trying to brand government-created “marketplaces” as something other than a first big step to government-run health care, but you get the point.

No matter what you call an ObamaCare exchange, it’s still an entry point for socialized medicine.

With regard to my column this morning, Newsbusters helps make my case. Blogging for the WashPost, Jennifer Rubin also hits the “good government” moral thermometers who suddenly can’t be found. Media cretins make me sick.

A piece by Amy Chozick in the New York Times this week has to be read to be believed (ok, you’ll read it and you still won’t believe it). Proving that there is absolutely nothing for the media to do in August, Chozick was commissioned to write a piece on President Obama’s relationship with the press, including the Commander-in-Chief’s critical exegesis of the fourth estate. The results are predictably hilarious:

The news media have played a crucial role in Mr. Obama’s career, helping to make him a national star not long after he had been an anonymous state legislator. As president, however, he has come to believe the news media have had a role in frustrating his ambitions to change the terms of the country’s political discussion. He particularly believes that Democrats do not receive enough credit for their willingness to accept cuts in Medicare and Social Security, while Republicans oppose almost any tax increase to reduce the deficit.

Privately and publicly, Mr. Obama has articulated what he sees as two overarching problems: coverage that focuses on political winners and losers rather than substance; and a “false balance,” in which two opposing sides are given equal weight regardless of the facts.

Mr. Obama’s assessments overlap with common critiques from academics and journalism pundits, but when coming from a sitting president the appraisal is hardly objective, the experts say.

Basically, you can close your eyes, point to any sentence at random, and prepare to guffaw.

There’s a lot of awfully stupid analysis here (both the Times and Obama’s). Maybe one of the reasons, for instance, that Democrats’ supposed willingness to rein in entitlements goes unpraised is because there have been some tells that it’s less than sincere — like the occasional fit of the vapors that finds liberals essentially accusing Paul Ryan of going from hospital to hospital unplugging life support machines.

There’s also the Times’ eager embrace of the unquestioned wisdom of (unnamed) “academics and journalism pundits” (FYI, that last one’s not a real job), a not-too-subtle hint that Obama’s frustration, poor soul, is shared by Really Smart People everywhere.

The aspect that I find most telling, however, is the president’s frustration with “false balance,” which it’s hard to interpret any other way than an irritation that the press doesn’t accept his side of the argument as gospel. This is of a piece with what he told the American Society of News Editors at a speech back in April:

“As all of you are doing your reporting, I think it’s important to remember that the positions that I am taking now on the budget and a host of other issues — if we had been having this discussion 20 years ago or even 15 years ago — would’ve been considered squarely centrist positions,” he said in response to a question about Republicans’ criticisms of his spending priorities. “What’s changed is the center of the Republican party and that’s certainly true with the budget.”

…

“This bears on your reporting,” he said Tuesday. “I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing, then they’re equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. And an equivalence is presented, which I think reinforces peoples’ cynicism about Washington in general. This is not one of those situations where there’s an equivalency.”

For what it’s worth, I actually agree with Obama on “the truth lies in the middle” trope. There are occasions when that’s true, but most times that you hear someone express that sentiment it’s a sign that they’ve put their brain on cruise control and resigned themselves to communicating exclusively through cliches. What’s the midpoint between the death penalty being legal or illegal? What’s the midpoint between going to war with Iran or not going to war with Iran? No one actually lives by “moderation in all things” (“So it’s okay if I just participate in occasional arson?”), but everyone talks that way. That mindset creates especially acute problems in public policy, where splitting the baby almost always yields bad results.

There are two problems, though, with Obama’s analysis. The first is that the only corrective for “false equivalence” is a more ideological press, which presents issues from unapologetic (and admitted) liberal and conservative viewpoints. That’s where we are today and, while there’s plenty of chaff as a result, I’m inclined to think it’s far preferable to an overwhelmingly liberal media trying to create the illusion of objectivity. But that’s not what Obama wants. He’s clearly longing for the days when ‘media’ was a de facto singular noun and those who disagreed with him would have been pilloried as unreasonable without much push back.

The second problem is that Obama himself ascended to office on the basis of little more than ‘false equivalance’. If you’d like to give your brain the equivalent of diabetic shock, go back and read his treacly 2006 best-seller, “The Audacity of Hope,” where nearly every issue discussed is framed with a “on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand” device (he’s sandbagging you, of course — every question is resolved, ostensibly by inches, in favor of liberalism.)

So do I think Barack Obama knows bad writing? Yes. Because he’s practiced it.

In the New York Post. Read it here.

Politico reports that in a campaign speech in Colorado today President Barack Obama framed his Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) this way:

“Let me tell you something, Denver, I don’t think your boss should get to control the health care that you get,” Obama told the crowd at a campaign stop in Colorado. “I don’t think insurance companies should control the care that you get. I don’t think politicians should control the care that you get. I think there’s one person to make these decisions on health care and that is you.”

What the President neglected to mention is that instead of employers, insurance companies, and politicians – and despite his comments about individuals – the constituency he really favors making health care decisions is the federal bureaucracy.

ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion is intended to capture millions of Americans newly eligible for government coverage that will be – at least initially – cheaper than their current private provider.  The state-based, but federally-directed, health care exchanges are really just Trojan horse structures allowing HHS to seize control of the states’ traditional role in regulating health insurance whenever a state defies a federal prerogative.

And let’s not forget that the Independent Payment Advisory Board is empowered to act as a backdoor ration board, setting price caps on medical reimbursements that will distort the market and cause shortages.  In socialized systems like Britain and Canada long waiting times are the norm, as are denials of procedures in favor of pain management.

All of these elements – Medicaid expansion, federally managed health exchanges, and IPAB – empower one group: unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats.  To claim as the President does that private individuals will be the ones calling the shots on health care decisions is either foolish or deceptive, and I don’t think the man is lacking in smarts.

“I do believe in intellectual property. I do believe you have a right to your property.”

So said Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) in response to a question following his remarks during an event last week at the Heritage Foundation titled, “Will the Real Internet Freedom Please Stand Up?”

In Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, our nation’s Founders specifically provided for the protection of intellectual property (IP) in order “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”  While the fundamental concept of providing artisans, authors and inventors exclusive right to their respective works and discoveries has remained relatively uncontroversial for most of the nation’s history, recent debates regarding what to do about widespread infringement over the Internet have caused some to diminish IP protection by setting it aside as merely some abstract, disposable ideal.

That mindset is dangerous, both in theory and in practice.

First and foremost, intellectual property is vital to free enterprise and drives economic growth. According to a recent study by the Global Intellectual Property Center, IP-intensive industries currently employ more than 55 million Americans and account for 74% of all U.S. exports and $5.8 trillion in GDP.  Without strong IP protections, the incentive to innovate is removed, drying up investment, stalling growth and progress, and thus undercutting the entire economy.

Little if any incentive would exist for an author to write the next great novel, Hollywood to produce the next cinema blockbuster or a pharmaceutical company to develop a cure for cancer if none of them are able to benefit economically from their works.

Moreover, when the importance of IP is diminished or dismissed altogether, its protection is afforded different levels of enforcement not on par with that of physical property.  But the concept of property should not be rooted in its physical existence.  Owning property is a contract that provides the title-holder specific rights that lead to economic benefits, not simply a plot of land. In that way, intellectual property is no different than any other form of property. 

Senator Paul gets it. In his remarks – previewed as “what could be the most significant talk on Internet freedom this year” by the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Bluey – Paul declared, “There are some libertarians who don’t believe in copyright. I am not one of them. I think you have to protect intellectual property.”

Senator Paul’s comments reveal that not only do some libertarians get IP wrong, but that all property needs protection and enforcement thereof. As evidenced by over 200 years of practice, patent, trademark and copyright protections promote the general welfare and lead to great economic advantages by driving innovation and developing capital. The end result comes in the form of countless benefits from millions of IP-intensive jobs, billions in exports and trillions in GDP spilling over to the rest of society.

Property, including intellectual property, is preeminent and deserves strong protections.

Yes, you read that right. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who, let’s be honest, is the most irritating politician in America) has an ingenious campaign strategy for Barack Obama that’s totally going to spellbind the room at his next cocktail and caviar soiree. From a phone interview Bloomberg gave to the Huffington Post:

“What Obama should do is say he’s going to veto any change to the end of the expiration of the Bush era tax cuts for everybody, and I feel very strongly about the everybody because you don’t want to split the country — that’s not what America is all about,” said Bloomberg.

“Obama would win this election going away if he’d stand up and say, ‘I’m gonna do this,’ and then turn to Republicans and say, ‘You know, you didn’t want any more revenues … I just outfoxed you. Now work with me on cutting expenses, and we’ll actually balance the budget in 10 years, and we’ll do it responsibly.'”

Bloomberg here reminds me a bit of Walter Mondale, who thought it was utter genius to declare in his 1984 acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention that he would raise taxes (Newt Gingrich, who was part of a Republican rapid response team during that convention, has noted that his group decided to pack up and go home after Mondale’s declaration, figuring they couldn’t damage him any worse than he had himself). Mondale’s theory was that both he and Reagan would end up hiking taxes, but that voters would give him points for being honest about it (for a thorough understanding of the truth of Reagan’s tax record, by the way, this Matt Lewis piece is indispensable). Later, after losing 49 states in the Electoral College, he probably thought better of that.

Here’s the foundational error in both cases: the tax argument is about substance, not style. Mondale thought he’d be rewarded for being honest about the fact that he was going to take more money away from the American people. But we don’t generally reward honesty when it’s a truthful admission of nefarious intent. Similarly, Bloomberg seems to think that “unity” is more important than tax rates, and that the American people will reward Obama if he makes clear that he’s going to put the screws to all of them with equal force. But, to paraphrase Obama from 2008, no one much cares what shade of lipstick you apply to a pig. The equal distribution of suffering is not a compelling campaign rationale (although it might be the most honest slogan Obama could devise).

There’s another irony at work here, of course: if Bloomberg thinks that tax rates should be harmonized in order to avoid “splitting the country,” the most logical step he could take would be to promote a flat tax. But that probably wouldn’t fly at the open-bar receptions of the Upper East Side.

Besides her Sarah Palin-esque rise to prominence as South Carolina’s Governor – and the fear that she’s too green to be Romney’s vice president – there’s another, more salient reason Nikki Haley isn’t being talked about as Mitt’s running mate: she’s using Barack Obama’s stimulus formula and getting worse results.

According to The Daily Caller, since becoming governor in 2011, Haley has tried to dole out more than $70 million in tax incentives and grants to businesses as a way to create jobs in South Carolina.  Still, the state’s unemployment rate sits at 9.1 percent, much higher than the 8.3 percent national average.

Some Palmetto State conservatives have had enough, including Harry Kibler, a Tea Party member and founder of RINO [Republican In Name Only] Hunt:

“She basically is running all over the state trying to make sweetheart deals with corporations to entice them to move to South Carolina and start business here,” said Harry Kibler, a tea party activist and founder of the conservative group RINO Hunt.

“I have a heartfelt philosophy that if we get government intrusion out of the business culture in South Carolina, that business will move here on its own,” Kibler told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

…

“The governor seems to think that the only people in South Carolina that create jobs is the state legislature and the government,” RINO Hunt’s Kibler countered. “Make South Carolina the freest state or the cheapest state to do business — for all business — and business will naturally be attracted to South Carolina.”

Don’t expect Mitt Romney to invite that kind of criticism from the Right by picking Nikki Haley as his vice president.

Check out a fascinating new public school in Salt Lake City called Innovations High School.  A first-of-its-kind program, Innovations allows public school students to sample every type of educational model currently available.  According to a story in the Salt Lake Tribune, kids in grades 9 – 12 can blend online and in-classroom learning, choosing courses in traditional subjects as well as technical programs from community colleges.

The purpose of Innovations is to give students and their parents more flexibility when it comes to progressing through coursework.  The personalized nature of the Innovations experience also lets kids get exposure to well-paying career options they might otherwise miss in a more structured high school program.

I apologize if my summary sounds like a paid advertisement –it isn’t – but the flexibility seemingly provided by an Innovations education makes too much sense to be ignored.  Too many kids aren’t allowed to fit their education around their interests and abilities.  The result is often a one-size-fits-all widget system that pumps out graduates who know a little (or in many cases very little) about many things, but have no depth or experience in anything.

It should be noted that Innovations is not a charter school.  Rather, it’s a project by school administrators to use the changes wrought on education by technology to create new opportunities for local students currently in public, private, and home school situations.  If quality and flexibility are the norm, then Innovations might represent one area where traditional public schools can entice high-performing students back onto campus.

H/T: Governing.com

Last week, I posted here about the fact that the growing crisis in the supply of American doctors is driven partially by structural deficiencies in Medicare. A new piece out today in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) illuminates another key part of the puzzle: the growing tendency of doctors to refuse new patients under Medicaid — the vehicle that the Obama Administration intends to use to insure millions more Americans under Obamacare:

Some 31% of physicians in a sample of 4,326 said they wouldn’t accept Medicaid beneficiaries, economist Sandra Decker of the National Center for Health Statistics reported in an article in the journal Health Affairs published Monday. Most of the doctors cited the low reimbursement from Medicaid.

…

The health law passed by Democrats in March 2010 was supposed to expand coverage to around 16 million low-income people by signing them up for Medicaid. The Supreme Court decision in June effectively gave states the chance to opt out of the expansion. It isn’t yet clear how many will do so, although it’s likely to be a hot political issue. Either way, the coverage gained by low-income Americans could be less useful if they are unable to find a doctor to see them.

There are problems at the macro level too. Consider what Democratic(!) governors have been saying about the Medicaid expansion. Kentucky’s Steve Beshear has said “I have no idea how we’re going to pay for it.” California’s Jerry Brown has called it “devastating.” And Montana’s Brian Schweitzer — a man often touted by Democrats as a potential presidential candidate — has warned, ” I’m going to have to double my patient load and run the risk of bankrupting Montana.”

As Thomas Sowell is fond of saying, one of the hallmarks of liberalism is judging intent rather than outcomes when it comes to public policy. Thus do we get decades-long wars on poverty that do next to nothing for the impoverished, and stimulus programs of which it is always claimed that they would have worked if they only been a little bit bigger.

I’m not sure the abject failures of Obamacare will get a free pass based on good intent though. Theses sorts of consequences — patients unable to find doctors, states teetering on the verge of bankruptcy — are nearly impossible to ignore … no matter how desperately the White House will try.

Yesterday, the Center for Individual Freedom (“CFIF”) launched a State Sovereignty Project devoted to persuading all 50 states to aggressively exercise their authority to serve as a check on the ever-growing and often extra-constitutional power of the federal government.

The project, which builds on CFIF’s existing work over the last several years in this area, focuses a grassroots-driven approach to encourage governmental authorities closest to the people – governors, state and local legislatures, state attorneys general and other state constitutional officers – to reclaim and exercise the structural powers granted to them by the U.S. Constitution as a bulwark against federal encroachments on state sovereignty and erosion of the individual liberties of the people they serve.  Specifically, CFIF will employ and enhance its numerous forms of paid advertising, earned media, social media and editorial materials, among other methods, as part of an ongoing broad education effort to promote localized grassroots activism.

Read the press release here.

Below is a sampling of CFIF’s recent work in support of the project’s goals:

• Supreme Court: Diminished Standing
• Podcast: Florida Secretary of State Defends Effort to Crack Down on Voter Fraud
• Conservative Governors Are Right to Resist Medicaid Expansion
• Governors Leading Nationwide Charge on Education Reform
• Obama Team Hijacks Schools’ Core Standards
• Podcast: Reining In Regulatory Power Grabs
• For Voting Rights, Don’t Keep Section 5 Alive
• Podcast: SCOTUS and Arizona’s Illegal Immigration Law
• Podcast: The Administration’s Education Power Grab

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

There’s no exercise of government power quite as nauseating when seen up close as a relatively small industry’s attempts to team up with government and either (A) shake down or (B) close down a rival who has built a better mousetrap. In his book “Government’s End: Why Washington Stopped Working” (one of the best political reads of the past few decades, by the way) — a volume dedicated to this trend — Jonathan Rauch describes how Washington D.C. bike messengers, for instance, lobbied heavily against the use of fax machines in the nation’s capital, for no other reason than that they were bad for business (a stand reminiscent of Frederic Bastiat’s famous satirical letter to the French Parliament in which it was claimed that candlemakers were suffering unfair competition from the sun).

This trend is rearing its ugly head again in Washington D.C., where city government is trying to crack down on Uber, one of the great innovations of the smart phone era. Uber is a private car service operating in a handful of major cities that allows you to instantly request a sedan from your smart phone, have it arrive in minutes, and then have all of the billing (including the tip) taken care of straight from your credit card. Uber eliminates all of the inconveniences of the taxi experience (your humble correspondent, for instance, recently waited 45 minutes for a cab in Silicon Valley after being told by dispatchers that it was five minutes away) and usually does so at a cheaper price. And of course, D.C. can’t have that! From the Daily Caller:

Members of the Washington, D.C. City Council haven’t given up on their efforts to bring the efficient and reliable luxury sedan-on-call service, Uber, under the authority of the company’s competitors in the taxicab industry.

Council members previously tried to establish a price floor for the company. More recently, at a July 10 meeting, a number of City Council members voted to bring the sedan service under the authority of the D.C. Taxicab Commission, a regulatory body strongly influenced by the taxi industry.

…

“I was opposed to them not being regulated, period,” councilman and former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry told The Daily Caller. “This was a compromise. I think if it’s not a regulated service, it really has an impact on the D.C. taxi industry.”

Of course it has an impact! That’s generally what happens when someone decides to build a company that can deliver a better product at a lower price.

Let’s hope Uber can resist the legislative strong-arming. At least they have this going for them: there are few inadvertent blessings as sweet as having Marion Barry be your chief antagonist.

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.”  Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 (CDT)/5:00 pm (EDT):  Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment: Obama’s Anti-Business Remarks;

4:30 (CDT)/5:30 pm (EDT): Congresswoman Nan Hayworth, M.D. (R-NY): Tax Reform;

5:00 (CDT)/6:00 pm (EDT): Matt Patterson, Senior Fellow, Competitive Enterprise Institute: Jobs, Food Stamps and Global Warming; and

5:30 (CDT)/6:30 pm (EDT):  Bryan Goettel, US Chamber of Commerce, Hiring our Heroes: Veterans Employment Programs.

Listen live on the Internet here.  Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

By the way, many congratulations to NASA for the successful landing of Curiosity.

Yuval Levin has an incredibly important piece at today’s NRO about how the Obamites are working to destroy the mediating institutions of civil society.

When pressed to defend its constriction of the rights of religious institutions, the administration recast the basic definition and purpose of such institutions. The final HHS rule defined a religious employer exceedingly narrowly, as an institution that primarily serves and employs people of its own faith and has as its basic purpose the inculcation of the beliefs of that faith. This leaves no room for most religiously based institutions of civil society — no room for hospitals, for schools and universities, for soup kitchens and homeless shelters, for adoption agencies and legal-aid clinics. Religious institutions may preach to the choir, but otherwise they may not play any role in society. Especially when they disagree with those in power, they must be cleared out of the space between the individual and the state. Indeed, the president and his administration don’t seem to have much use for that space at all. Even the family, which naturally stands between the individual and the community, is not essential. … Edmund Burke, Paine’s great nemesis, argued that such mediating structures also express in their very forms the actual shape of our society — evolved over time out of affectionate sentiments, practical needs, and common aspirations. “We begin our public affections in our families,” Burke wrote. “We pass on to our neighborhoods, and our habitual provincial connections. These are inns and resting-places. Such divisions of our country as have been formed by habit, and not by a sudden jerk of authority, were so many little images of the great country in which the heart found something which it could fill.” To sweep them away and leave only the citizen and the state would rob society of its sources of warmth, loyalty, and affinity, and of the most effective means of enacting significant social improvements….

The Left’s disdain for civil society is thus driven above all not by a desire to empower the state without limit, but by a deeply held concern that the mediating institutions in society — emphatically including the family, the church, and private enterprise — are instruments of prejudice, selfishness, backwardness, and resistance to change, and that in order to establish our national life on more rational grounds, the government needs to weaken and counteract them.

The Right’s high regard for civil society, meanwhile, is driven above all not by a disdain for government but by a deeply held belief in the importance of our diverse and evolved societal forms, without which we could not hope to secure our liberty. Conservatives seek mechanisms and institutions to bring implicit social knowledge to bear on our troubles, while progressives seek the authority and power to bring explicit technical knowledge to bear on them.

This president and those of his ilk who are acting in increasingly authoritarian ways are, in short, deliberately trying to destroy the very institutions, and the space for voluntary individual action both within and apart from those institutions, that most Americans have always believed were the very heart of the American idea. The president’s mission, whether he knows it or not, is a species of evil. It must not be allowed to succeed.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

In an interview with the Center for Individual Freedom (“CFIF”), Competitive Enterprise Institute (“CEI”) Transportation Analyst Marc Scribner discusses the legal challenge to compel the Transportation Security Administration (“TSA”) to comply with a year-old court order to give the public an opportunity to comment on the agency’s use of full-body scanners on airports.

CFIF joined CEI’s amici brief.

Listen to the interview with Mr. Scribner here.

In an interview with CFIF, Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner defends his state’s efforts to purge the rolls of ineligible voters and discusses the recent decision by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to grant the state access to the SAVE database.

Listen to the interview here.