Recommended Reading – Tuesday, April 3rd

Apr 3, 2012 by Jason

Public Debt Is The Prince of Policy Problems (National Post)

“Politicians spend money they do not possess and can get only by borrowing, leaving the citizens and their descendants to repay it. And for this we call the politicians warm-hearted, kind, farsighted and generous. Politicians who do not follow this practice are widely condemned as misers.

The Progressive Conservative leader in the Ontario legislature, Tim Hudak, remarked last week that in government “You can only spend what you have.” That’s not true, of course. Governments routinely spend far more than they have — they spend what they have, what they hope to have, and also what they (or their successors) might conceivably have on some happy day in the future. For this they receive thanks.

Hudak also said, “We just can’t keep piling up deficits.” That’s true now, apparently, but most governments in most democracies have, for the last few generations, believed just the opposite. That’s why we’re suffering.”  (Click here for to read more)

Canada’s red-ink budgets: 45 of the last 65 years  (Fraser Institute)

“Ever since the last recession, Canadians have been informed by pundits and the political class that stimulus spending—perhaps better labelled as “binge” spending—was critical to Canada’s economic recovery.

But extra government spending had little to do with Canada’s exit out of the recession. The recession ended in mid-2009; it was only about then that federal and provincial governments started spending extra (borrowed) stimulus cash.

To credit stimulus spending for the end to Canada’s recession, one must argue that extra dollars mostly spent after June 2009 somehow magically rescued the Canadian economy before June 2009. Right. Only if one believes in budgetary time travel.

All the borrowed money did have this effect: it added to the large federal debt mountain already in place. The federal debt will hit $614 billion in 2015, up from $457 billion in 2008. Such debt resulted from the decades-long practice by governments to transfer wealth from future generations—by chronic borrowing—to pay for current needs and wants.  To wit, it is in that context that the 2012 federal budget should be placed and graded.”  (Click here to read more)

The Coming Medical Ethics Crisis  (Cato Institute)

“For the past several years, the medical profession has been undergoing a disturbing transformation. The process was begun by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in an effort to control exploding Medicare costs, and was accelerated by the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. As a surgeon in practice for over 30 years, I have witnessed this transformation firsthand. I fear that my profession will soon abandon its traditional code of ethics and adopt one more suited to veterinarians.

For centuries, my predecessors and I have been inculcated with what has come to be called the “Hippocratic Ethic.” This tradition holds that I am ethically required to use the best of my knowledge to recommend to my patient what I consider to be in my patient’s best interests — without regard to the interests of the third-party payer, or the government, or anyone else.

But gradually the medical profession has been forced to give up this approach for what I like to call a “veterinary ethic,” one that places the interests of the payer (or owner) ahead of the patient. For example, when a pet owner is told by a veterinarian that the pet has a very serious medical condition requiring extremely costly surgery or other therapy, the veterinarian presents the pet’s owner with one or more options — from attempt at cure, to palliation, to euthanasia — with the associated costs, and then follows the wishes of the owner.”   (Click here to read more)

The Biggest Carbon Bomb is Disinformation (Frontier Centre for Public Policy)

“Donna LaFromboise, William Kay and others have exposed environmentalists and the IPCC global warming scam. These “scientists” cited their own unpublished and non-peer reviewed ‘research’, and acted as their own ‘editors.’ It has become clear that the biggest ‘carbon bomb’ is disinformation.

And look out if you publicly disagree with AGW!  SLAPP suit coming your way to silence you – Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.

Disinformation and public myth-making has left people believing that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a pollutant. Or that carbon dioxide exists in overwhelming volume.”   (Click here to read more)

Are We Oppressed By Technology  (The Daily Reckoning)

“To really engage life to its fullest today means being willing to embrace the new without fear. It means realizing that we have more mental and emotional resources to take on new challenges. If we can marshal those and face these challenges with courage and conviction, we nearly always find that our lives become more fulfilling and happy.

The biggest canard out there is that the digital age has reduced human contact. It has vastly expanded it. We can keep up with anyone anywhere. We make new friends in a fraction of the time. That sense of isolation that so many feel is evaporating by the day. Just think of it: We can move to a new region or country and find ourselves surrounded by communities of interest in a tiny fraction of the time it used to take us.

As a result, digital media have made the world more social, more engaging, more connected with anything and everything than ever before. This isn’t a scary science fiction world in which the machines are running us; instead, the machines are serving us and permitting us to live better lives than were never before possible. Through technology, millions and billions have been liberated from a static state of existence and been granted a bright outlook and hope.”  (Click here to read more)

read more

Recommended Reading – Saturday, March 31st

Mar 31, 2012 by Jason

Time To Reform The Canada Health Act  (Fraser Institute)

“The primary problem with our health care system has never been a lack of spending or inappropriate levels of cash transfers from the federal government. Rather, it’s federal legislation that discourages the provinces from experimenting with policies that have been implemented in other developed nations with universal access health care.

This discouragement stems from federal legislation that threatens the provinces with potential reductions in federal transfers for health care if the provinces do not follow the rules, regulations, and federal interpretations of the Canada Health Act. 

While the Canada Health Act requires the provinces to provide universal health coverage and portability across the country, it disallows a variety of policies that are being used in other countries that provide universal health care to deliver better care at lower costs. “  (Click here for the rest of the article)

Who Is Most Likely To Resist Totalitarianism?  (Independent Institute)

“I have devoted much of my scholarship over the years to studies of the state—its nature, its growth, and its relationships with other aspects of social life. I have been struck repeatedly by a certain fact about episodes of sudden or extraordinary expansion of the state: when push came to shove, those who resisted—often to the death—tended to be people of faith. In U.S. history they included primarily Anabaptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other marginalized Protestant sects. In Nazi Germany, many of the regime’s opponents were Roman Catholics, as were the opponents in Poland under Communist rule. Atheists as a class did not distinguish themselves as resisters of tyranny or totalitarianism, although some individual atheists did resist. Of course, some of the most horrible regimes—the USSR, Communist China, Kampuchea, North Korea—rested on atheism as an integral part of the regime’s official line, and in Germany the Nazis virtually nationalized many of the Protestant churches.”  (Click here for the rest of the article)

Elections Are Our Hunger Games (Whiskey and Gunpowder)

“And just as in The Hunger Games, democracy manufactures discord where none would exist in society. People don’t care if the person who sells them a cup of coffee in the morning is Mormon or Catholic, white or black, single or married, gay or straight, young or old, native or immigrant, drinker or teetotaler or anything else.

None of this matters in the course of life’s normal dealings with people. Through trade and cooperation, everyone helps everyone else achieve life aspirations. If someone different from you is your neighbor, you do your best to get along anyway. Whether at church, shopping, at the gym or health club, or just casually on the street, we work to find ways to be civil and cooperate.

But invite these same people into the political ring, and they become enemies. Why? Politics is not cooperative like the market; it is exploitative. The system is set up to threaten the identity and choices of others. Everyone must fight to survive and conquer. They must kill their opponents or be killed. So coalitions form, and constantly shifting alliances take shape. This is the world that the state — through its election machinery — throws us all into. It is our national sport. We cheer our guy and hope for the political death of the other guy.”  (Click here for the rest of the article)

Sugar Taxes Are Unfair and Unhealthy  (Cato Institute)

“If the regulatory discussion about sugar is going to be based on science, rather than science fiction, it needs to move beyond kicking the soda can.

Conventional wisdom says draconian regulation—specifically, a high tax—on sugary drinks and snacks reduces unhealthy consumption, and thereby improves public health. There are many reasons, however, why high sugar taxes are at best unsuccessful, and at worst economically and socially harmful.

Research finds that higher prices don’t reduce soda consumption, for example. No scientific studies demonstrate a difference either in aggregate soda consumption or in child and adolescent Body Mass Index between the two thirds of states with soda taxes and those without such taxes.

The study that did find taxes might lead to a moderate reduction in soda consumption also found this had no effect on adolescent obesity, as the reduction was completely offset by increases in consumption of other calorific drinks.” (Click here for the rest of the article)

read more

Recommended Reading – Tuesday, March 27th

Mar 27, 2012 by Jason

Alberta’s Public Sector Unions Versus Alberta Prosperity (Fraser Institute)

“If Albertans employed in the energy sector ever wonder why some people underestimate the vast contributions made by the oil and gas industry to Alberta’s prosperity, a new ad from the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL) provides a clue.

In a recent newsletter sent to Alberta’s nurses, the province’s umbrella organization for unions published a one-page ad that portrays a balding energy company executive sitting at a hefty desk with his large whisky carafe beside him. The Dickens-like figure intones, “Your provincial government would rather underfund its own education and health care systems than charge me and my energy company an extra penny in taxes or royalties.”

The ad and its accompanying website are a mishmash of error-prone assertions. Here’s one in particular: that “Albertans are being forced to give up the basics.” Health care and education are mentioned as specifically underfunded.

Time for a fact check: On health care, in 2011, Alberta’s public expenditures amounted to $4,528 per capita, second only to Newfoundland (at $5,077). The national average last year was $3,778. ” (Click here for the rest of the article)

Warming Up to Environmentalism  (Whiskey and Gunpowder)

“I’m starting to rethink the whole environmental craze in the culture, which is about as inescapable as pop music and jeans. It was born some 50 years ago and it has spread like a cancer ever since.

It’s always annoyed me that its most consistent dogma, pushed without evidence or argument, is that commerce, and all that is associated with commerce except on the smallest possible scale, is always and everywhere destructive to animals, plants, earth, air, water and (when they finally get around to this point) human health. So therefore, we should somehow eschew commerce, by hook or crook, in favor of some variant of asceticism.

This is, obviously, rubbish. Commerce is the heartbeat of civilization, the thing that makes possible prosperity, shelter, clothing, long lives, good lives, health, high and low culture, learning and every manner of fun. Without commerce, we lose all that we love and we are ground down to a primitive state of being, gathering and hunting and fighting for survival against the elements.”  (Click here for the rest of the article)

Affluence and Fortune (National Review)

“In his “Economic Scene” column in the New York Times last week, Eduardo Porter wrote, “The United States does less than other rich countries to transfer income from the affluent to the less fortunate.”

Think about that sentence for a moment. It ends oddly. Logic dictates that it should have said, “transfer income from the affluent to the less affluent,” not the less fortunate.

But for Mr. Porter, as for the Left generally, those who are not affluent are not merely “less affluent,” they are “less fortunate.”

Why is this? Why is the leftist division almost always between the “affluent” and the “less fortunate” or between the “more fortunate” and the “less fortunate?”  (Click here for the rest of the article)

On The Watch For Religious Perecutors  (Cato Institute)

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, said Thomas Jefferson, and that includes religious freedom. Religious persecution is tragically common abroad.

While members of all faiths are sometimes at risk somewhere, Christians are constantly victimized almost everywhere. And in many of these cases the threat is violence, imprisonment, and even death. Martyrdom apparently is more common today than during Roman times.

The California-based group Open Doors has released its latestWorld Watch List of the 50 worst persecutors of Christians around the globe. A Baker’s Dozen are communist or former communist states, led by North Korea. An incredible 38 are Muslim, including several of Washington’s allies. (Seven are both communist/former communist and Islamic, truly a toxic combination.) The other six are a potpourri — Hindu India, Buddhist Burma and Bhutan, conflict-ridden Colombia, and Eritrea and Ethiopia, which are both repressive and religiously divided.

Topping the World Watch List is the so-called Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which leads any parade of the world’s repressive, impoverished, or just plain awful places. Explains Open Doors: “Defiantly Communist in the Stalinist style, a bizarre quasi-religion was built around the founder of the country, Kim Il Sung. Anyone with ‘another god’ is automatically persecuted, which is why the 200,000-400,000 Christians in this country must remain deeply underground.” At least a quarter of them may be confined to labor camps.”  (Click here for the rest of the article)

Beware of the Mob (Victor Davis Hanson)

“Democracies are in general prone to fits of the mob. Just read the Thucydidean account of the debate of Mytilene. Or watch a 1950s Western as the lynch party heads for the town jail. Fear of democratically sanctioned madness is why the Founders came up not just with classical tripartite government to check and limit power between the judicial, legislative, and executive branches, but also now generally disdained notions of allowing states to impose property qualifications for voting, the Electoral College, two senators guaranteed per state regardless of population, and senators originally selected without direct votes.

They were not concerned that under Athenian-style democracy the proverbial “people” and their populist Rottweilers in government and the press could not check the power of capital and birth, but were worried, as Juvenal later quipped, over who would police the police. So there had to be checks on the mob as well — a fickle and unpredictable force as we saw in the last eight years.”  (Click here for the rest of the article)

 

 

 

read more

Recommended Reading- Thursday, March 22nd

Mar 22, 2012 by Jason

I’m Smarter Than Everyone Else (Foundation for Economic Education)

“It’s a sickness,” said a friend of mine who until recently was an elected official in our city. “It sets in after you’re elected the first time, or maybe even when you’re running for office.” That sickness is “thinking you’re smarter than everyone else.”

My friend made this statement after reading in our local paper that a newly elected  member of the city council had questioned an entrepreneur’s decision to open a new outdoor multi-unit storage facility in our town. The councilman, a Republican, said that according to his “investigation,” the facility is not needed in that neighborhood.

The extent of the councilman’s “investigation” was to ask the owners of nearby storage facilities how business was going. Since none was at 100 or even 90 percent capacity, the councilman reasoned that another facility would be a waste of resources in that part of town.

Just two months into his first term, this councilman had already caught the “sickness” of believing he knows best.”  (Click here for the rest of the article)

read more

Recommended Reading – Tuesday, March 20th

Mar 20, 2012 by Jason

Bureaucrats Are Our Future  (The Gods of the Copybook Headings)

“So why use educational methods so complicated even a math professor can’t understand them? So it will be easier for the kids to learn math. I’m not making this up. That is the actual explanation given by the educrats in this story. Rather than using tried and tested teaching methods, public schools across North America are allowing students to be “free to use whatever works best for them.” Yet by definition students don’t know what works. That’s why they’re students.

This is more than a debate over teaching. In a competitive market place schools and teachers would be free to experiment and see what method, or combination of methods, would be most effective at imparting basic numeracy skills. Public education being a near government monopoly this isn’t really an option. Even methods that have proven to work for decades are cast aside for fashionable dogma.”  (Click here for the rest of the article)

Education’s Missing Apple: The Free Enterprise Solution? (Cato Institute)

“We already have successful models for helping low-income students. What is missing is the means to bring those successes to schools all over the country. In every other field, it is routine for the top services and products to reach mass audiences, but there is no Google of education, no Starbucks, no Apple. Why not?

Almost 20 years ago, I decided to leave a career in computer software engineering to search for the answer. It’s a search that took me back to the origins of formal schooling in ancient Greece, and forward through a dozen historical times and places.

So striking was the pattern I saw emerge from the hum of the centuries that I sought to test it against a completely new set of data — the modern scientific research comparing different kinds of school systems. The consensus that arises from that research is much the same. The more education is organized and funded the way other fields are organized and funded, the more it enjoys the scaling-up of excellence that we’ve come to expect.

The same free enterprise system that has given us Google, Starbucks, and Apple works in education, too — if we let it. This system works for businesses through several key conditions: freedom to innovate, consumer choice, competition between providers, price signals, and the ability to distribute profits to investors.”  (Click here for the rest of the article)

Is School Like Jail (The Daily Reckoning)

“The people in my community love their public schools. So too it is in most of the country. If only they knew the costs, and I don’t mean just the financial costs, which are two and three times those of private schools. I also mean the opportunity costs: If only people knew what they were missing!

Imagine education wholly managed by the market economy. The variety! The choice! The innovation! All the features we’ve come to expect in so many areas of life — groceries, software, clothing, music — would also pertain to education. But as it is, the market for education is hobbled, truncated, frozen and regimented, and tragically, we’ve all gotten used to it.

The longer people live with educational socialism, the more they adapt to its inefficiencies, deprivations and even indignities. So it is with American public schools. Many people love them, but it’s like the “Stockholm Syndrome”: We’ve come to have a special appreciation for our captors and masters because we see no way out.”  (Click here for the rest of the article)

The Liberal Assault on Liberalism  (Victor Davis Hanson)

“Conservatives are put into awkward positions of critiquing liberal ideas on grounds that they are impractical, unworkable, or counterproductive. Yet rarely, at least outside the religious sphere, do they identify the progressive as often immoral. And the unfortunate result is that they have often ceded moral claims to supposedly dreamy, utopian, and well-meaning progressives, when in fact the latter increasingly have little moral ground to stand upon.

Take a few contemporary controversies.

Radical environmentalism. When “conservation” sometime in the 1970s was redefined as “environmentalism,” the morality of the entire issue likewise changed. Most Americans had wanted clean air and water; and they were willing to pay to curb pollutants and drive more expensive, but cleaner, cars. They had no desire to see condors die off or kit foxes disappear.

But at some point, the green creed began to dictate that all species were equal to humans. Soon concern for a tiny frog or worm trumped a needed project — a dam, an irrigation canal, an oil well, or a mine — designed to alleviate human suffering. Here I am not talking about large-scale species annihilation, but rather taking a truth about wishing to protect a natural habitat and perverting it into elevating concerns for insects, amphibians, and small fish over people’s elemental struggles to exist and prosper.” (Click here for the rest of the article)

read more

Recommended Reading – Thursday March 14th, 2012

Mar 15, 2012 by Jason

Chalk Talk: Growing Government Pay and Pension Gap (Canadian Taxpayers Federation)

“The gap between the average government worker’s pay and benefits and everyone else has gotten out of hand. Over the past decade, government employees have seen high wage growth and more government employees have workplace pensions. Meanwhile, everyone else has seen slower wage growth and fewer people have workplace pensions. No one expects a government employee to work for peanuts, but the gap has gotten out of control.”  (Click here for more)

Stopping Teachers’ Strikes Permanently  (Fraser Institute)

“In the private sector, the ability of unions to extract benefits for their members through strikes is limited by market forces.  If union demands are excessive, employers go bankrupt and the workers lose their jobs.

However, in the public sector, unions face no such limits.  Politicians typically put up some resistance to union demands, but in the end give in and raise taxes to pay for the increased costs. Small tax increases do less electoral damage than do public sector strikes.

As a result of this game, public sector union members now enjoy compensation levels much above those for comparable private sector work. But the game is now over. Deficits are unsustainable, debt has become excessive, and the public opposes higher taxes. Politicians everywhere are looking for ways to deal with this new reality.”  (Click here for the rest of the article)

Nary a conservative budget in sight  (Fraser Institute)

“Sitting down with my morning cup of coffee and Saturday’s National Post, I was delighted to read Andrew Coyne’s scathing criticism of the federal Conservatives’ record in office, based on comments he was to make at this year’s Manning Networking Conference (Is there a conservative in the House?, March 10).

“Where has conservatism gone?” Coyne asked. Unfortunately, Post readers didn’t have to look far for the answer – the adjacent page to be precise.

There we read that B.C. Premier Christy Clark, who also spoke at the conference, was introduced with glowing praise as having delivered the “most conservative provincial budget in the country.” This noteworthy “praise” originally came from Gary Mason of The Globe and Mail, who appropriately finished his sentence with “at the moment.”

You see, to date only two provincial budgets have been delivered, Alberta’s and British Columbia’s. Neither deserves a “conservative” label. ”   (Click here for the rest of the article)

Economics of the Timeline  (Whiskey and Gunpowder)

“If we want a car today and don’t want to defer our consumption for a year or two down the line, we have to pay someone else who has deferred that consumption to loan us saved money. If we are starting a business and think its near-term profits are going to be higher than the expected interest charges, we make the deal. If we save money and make it available to others to use, we expect a reward in the form of interest.

The interest rate is supposed to signal to investors how to handle time commitments. A low rate of interest is supposed to signal vast savings available in a society that has deferred consumption and planned for the future. A high rate of interest suggests a relative scarcity of savings and a scramble to use what is available. In this way, interest rates carefully sync present and future.”  (Click here for the rest of the article)

 

read more

Recommended Reading – Tuesday March 13th, 2012

Mar

Related searches:
public article health people institute
gipoco.com is neither affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site.