Muda69

https://mises.org/wire/shrinkflation-inflations-sneaky-cousin-rise Yep, mostly caused by out of control government spending. This is the future we are leaving for our children and grandchildren.

Let's deny masks work, then mandate masks, then never differentiate between medical grade n95 masks & pieces of cloth, then mask only children for a bit, then reimpose universal mask mandates on vaccinated people and then ask why trust in institutions is crumbling. — Zach Weissmueller (@TheAbridgedZach) July 23, 2021

Why Progressives Will Never Accept Market-Based Medical Care https://mises.org/wire/why-progressives-will-never-accept-market-based-medical-care What this Oklahoma City clinic has done should be catching on everywhere and it should be celebrated in our body politic. Instead, as Dr. Smith points out, the medical establishment has done everything possible to shut it down and, if those in charge of other clinics and hospitals had their way, the Surgery Center of Oklahoma would meet the same fate as Tom Smith’s “Incredible Bread Machine.” Some of the rejection certainly falls into the “capture theory” category of regulatory economics. Other medical entities don’t like the competition and they use the apparatus of government to hamstring competing firms—all while using the “we’re protecting the consumer” rhetoric, which is textbook theory. Likewise, we also can see the “Baptists and bootleggers” theory of regulation at work. (Both Baptists and bootleggers want the liquor stores closed, but for very different reasons. The Baptists provide the high-sounding, “public interest” rhetoric, while the bootleggers don’t want the competition from legal entities.) No matter what theory we use to describe the opposition to free market medical care, we easily can characterize it by the following statement: medical care should not be inexpensive; it should be free. Anything less than “free” is morally and politically unacceptable. Whether one reads statements by Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or anyone else in the current pantheon of American progressivism, “free” medical care is at the heart of all their demands. I point out that no one—not even Krugman—believes that medical care is a “free” or nonscarce service. To state otherwise would be claiming that every single factor of production that goes into the development and delivery of medical care also would have to be nonscarce, from labor to every single component of every medical device used. Even people that claim that medical care is ”different” from other goods and services and does not adhere to standard laws of economics are not going to claim that every input that goes into medical care also should be free. Since progressives believe that “free” medical care actually is not free in the economic sense, we are left with their central doctrine: all medical care should be administered free of charge to recipients and all payments that go to providers of medical care and producers of goods used in medical services should come from sources other than the direct recipients of medical services. This is not so much an economic statement as it is a religious one. If there is one central religious belief that all progressives share it is the belief that no one who receives medical services should have to pay directly for them. The amount of the fee is irrelevant; anything more than zero is prima facie immoral. This doctrine is so central to American progressive beliefs that progressives will go to extraordinary lengths to defend any political regime that offers free medical care. All one needs to do is to find progressive support for every single Communist regime from the twentieth century—and that includes the madly genocidal regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia in the mid-1970s—because they have free healthcare. Even after the collapse of most Communist regimes thirty years ago, the lone holdouts like Cuba and North Korea have their amen corners. Nikole Hannah-Jones, before she came to the New York Times, wrote this for readers of her former employer, the Portland Oregonian, after a visit to Cuba in 2008: She continues: I recall reading the same worshipful language directed at Mao’s regime in China even during the disastrous Cultural Revolution and praise directed to the former USSR and its Eastern European satellites for their alleged “free” medical care for all. No matter how violent, how murderous, and how genocidal a political regime might be, if it offers “free” and universal medical care then nothing else matters. “Free” and universal medical care legitimizes all other excesses. The left-leaning Guardian provides a recent example of this principle. Given that progressives are willing to excuse political mass murder if the regime in question claims to offer “free” medical care to everyone, then they hardly will be convinced that a medical model like that of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma (SCO) is morally legitimate even when it provides quality services at a fraction of the cost of medical care under third-party payments. For example, even after acknowledging the success of the SCO, a self-described “libertarian” recently challenged its legitimacy, employing Kenneth Arrow’s famous 1963 paper in American Economic Review that claimed medical care was “different” than other goods and services and needed to be removed from the market system. For all of the praise heaped upon the paper, and for all of its positive acceptance by the elites of academic economics, the Arrow paper is a poster child for the informal fallacy of “begging the question.” Arrow begins with a conclusion and then “proves” his point—without proving anything at all. Likewise, progressives begin with the declaration that the only morally legitimate system of medical care is one in which no recipient of medical services pays directly, so even if the SCO were able to bring their prices down to a nickel per procedure, progressives still would object. Briefly put, the Arrow theme is that because there is much uncertainty in the field of medical care, markets in that field cannot be competitive, which means that by definition they are not optimal. He writes: “[W]hen the market fails to reach an optimal state, society will, to some extent at least, recognize the gap and nonmarket social institutions will rise attempting to bridge it.” There is much to criticize here and not enough space to do it, but suffice it to say that Arrow’s analysis, as faulty as it may be, provides the fig leaf for economists like Krugman to make his antimarket claims: The fact that the SCO can profitably perform surgeries at less than a tenth of what nearby hospitals would charge insurers is irrelevant to economists like Krugman, who forcefully dismiss such information on its face. Not only clinics like the SCO but also outfits like Epiphany Health Direct Primary Care in North Port, Florida, are able to provide quality healthcare at affordable prices, but mainstream economists simply can deny their existence—and get away with it. In fact, there are more than fourteen hundred such cash-only practices across the country, giving lie to Krugman’s claim that free markets make healthcare more expensive and less available. (Remember, in Krugman’s world, only the wealthy have access to medical care in a free market system. That most patients taking part in the medical version of free markets are not wealthy people does not change Krugman’s narrative.) In his 1963 paper, Arrow spoke for progressives when he conducted a flawed analysis meant to reach conclusions “proving” that the free market and healthcare were incompatible. He wrote: “It is the general consensus, clearly, that the laissez-faire solution for medicine is intolerable.” However, there is plenty of evidence today that laissez-faire medical care is not intolerable and that most medical procedures performed in a free market setting are well within the financial means of most people in this country. Medical care that truly is affordable certainly is not given a fair and honest hearing in this country. For politicians, the media, such a situation is anathema. They would rather see a contrived, high-cost system that wastes trillions of dollars in misallocated resources but is subsidized on the back end to give the appearance of being “affordable” and, more important, “equitable.” High-cost “free” medical care is morally superior to low-cost free market medical care, because, well, because it is. When such ground rules for debate exist, it is hard to be able to make a public argument. Economists like Krugman, who are able to martial media resources to shout down opposing arguments, will appear to carry the day, at least where the supposed debate is concerned, as will his allies in academe and in Congress and the legislatures. But economics is not based upon rhetoric but rather the real world of resources, production, and consumption. Just because Paul Krugman claims that by definition free market medical clinics cannot exist does not mean that thousands of people are not receiving the kind of care that Krugman, Arrow, and most of the economics profession claim to be impossible. Free market care does exist, and it provides, frankly, a moral choice against the lies the established elites are telling us.

https://www.cato.org/commentary/should-we-reform-supreme-court I agree with Mr. Shapiro. Reduce the size, scope, and power of the federal government by 25% across the board, and the impact of the SCOTUS will be reduced proportionally.

Elizabeth Warren Says People Are Struggling and Jeff Bezos Hasn't Pitched In Enough https://reason.com/2021/07/26/elizabeth-warren-says-people-are-struggling-and-jeff-bezos-hasnt-pitched-in-enough/ From the Warren vantage point, it's easy to capitalize on this moment to make the case for a wealth tax, an idea she's been fixated on for years. But taxing billionaires' fortunes will almost certainly fail. A tax on households with high net worths (over $50 million in assets, in Warren's template plan, with more for households of $1 billion or higher) would present a huge incentive for people to engage in capital flight, fleeing for greener pastures on far-away shores; taxing the same pot of money over and over will result in less money to tax over time; some assets that rich people store their wealth in are very difficult to assess; and, all these other matters aside, much of this wealth isn't actually liquid. I suppose Warren could look to France to see how they pulled it off—except they didn't. When France implemented a wealth tax, more than 40,000 millionaires fled the country over a 12-year period. The country ultimately dropped its wealth tax; Germany and Sweden did the same to theirs. Inequality arguments aside, Bezos should not be scapegoated for high costs of living that compel people to take on student debt and saddle them with high child care costs. Though politicians often address poverty via income-based approaches, they could take a cost-based approach instead. For example, they could try to eliminate the government-created muddled incentives that have encouraged so many colleges to jack up tuition while letting unqualified Americans take out tons of cheap loans to earn degrees that do not make them very much money. This is something that's within Warren's power to attempt to solve, not Bezos'. Warren seems to view wealth in America as a fixed pie. But companies like Amazon that deliver cheap goods to people who want them aren't responsible for people's malaise. In fact, Bezos' creation may be easing that malaise by delivering inexpensive products to people who are otherwise struggling to get by. Agreed.

U.S. Billionaire Wealth Would Fund Government For Just 6 Months: https://reason.com/video/2021/07/23/u-s-billionaire-wealth-would-fund-government-for-just-6-months/ Truth, yet socialists like Dante insists taxing ourselves out of debt is the answer.

The reelection of Mr. Biden or election of Ms. Harris in 2024.

Cleveland unveils new team name, logos: Cleveland Guardians https://www.coveringthecorner.com/2021/7/23/22590233/cleveland-unveils-new-team-name-logos-cleveland-guardians Ughh.

Why Is The CDC Quietly Abandoning The PCR Test For COVID? https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/why-cdc-quietly-abandoning-pcr-test-covid So, in summary, with regard to our current "casedemic", positive tests as they are counted today do not indicate a “case” of anything. They indicate that viral RNA was found in a nasal swab. It may be enough to make you sick, but according to the New York Times and their experts, probably won’t. And certainly not sufficient replication of the virus to make anyone else sick. But you will be sent home for ten days anyway, even if you never have a sniffle. And this is the number the media breathlessly reports... and is used to fearmonger mask mandates and lockdowns nationwide... In October we first exposed how PCR Tests have misled officials worldwide into insanely authoritative reactions. As PJMedia's Stacey Lennox wrote, the “casedemic" is the elevated number of cases we see nationwide because of a flaw in the PCR test. The number of times the sample is amplified, also called the cycle threshold (Ct), is too high. A month later, Dr. Pascal Sacré, explained in great detail how all current propaganda on the COVID-19 pandemic is based on an assumption that is considered obvious, true and no longer questioned: Positive RT-PCR test means being sick with COVID. This assumption is misleading. Very few people, including doctors, understand how a PCR test works. In mid-November, none other than he who should not be questioned - Dr. Anthony Fauci - admitted that the PCR Test's high Ct is misleading: So, if anyone raises this discussion as a "conspiracy", refer them to Dr.Fauci. In response to this and the actual "science", Florida's Department of Health (and signed off on by Florida's Republican Governor Ron deSantis), decided that for the first time in the history of the pandemic, a state will require that all labs in the state report the critical “cycle threshold” level of every COVID-19 test they perform. Then, in January, as Biden takes office, The FDA publicly admits it... First Fauci, then WHO, and then FDA all admit there is malarkey in the PCR Tests, but have - until now, done nothing about it... allowing the daily fearmongering of soaring "cases" to enable their most twisted 1984-esque controls. All of which brings us to today's announcement from The FDA, that it will be abandoning the PCR Test for COVID at the end of the year. The question one is forced to ask is simple - as with everything else that happens in the Healthcare-Industrial-Complex - cui bono? Is another provider of testing about to be enrichened? Or is it even more sinister than standard crony capitalism? Given the traditional winter spike in 'flu' cases and the PCR-Test-driven "casedemic" we experienced into the election and through the start of the Biden administration, one could be forgiven for suggesting that the last thing an already weakened Democratic Party, desperate to cling to control in DC, would be a dramatic re-emergence of the "deadly" virus (driven by the numerous false positives of the PCR Test as described in detail above) ahead of the Midterms? Killing off the PCR Test would go a long way to "solving" the "casedemic" and offer Biden and his pals a positive talking point for voters. Bingo. All politics.

Bringing Back Mask Mandates Is Pointless Signaling https://reason.com/2021/07/22/mask-mandates-joe-biden-covid-19-virtue-signaling/

Real football.

Restaurant tipping economic model is bad, and we’re missing the chance to end it https://www.indystar.com/story/opinion/columnists/james-briggs/2021/07/25/tipping-servers-bartenders-isnt-going-away-after-covid-pandemic/8073397002/ Yet another race to the bottom initiative by the socialist left, where mediocrity is celebrated as "equity".

Experts Warn Accurate News Articles Are Misinformation if They Support Conservative Views https://reason.com/2021/07/19/experts-warn-accurate-news-articles-are-misinformation-if-they-support-conservative-views/ This story provides a useful example of this phenomenon, though probably not the one Parks intends. The entire piece hinges on "Facebook engagement" data, which is just one of many measures of a story's impact; hilariously, it doesn't even indicate whether the piece was even read. It's a measure not just of who clicked a link, but who liked, shared, or commented on a Facebook post. That a Daily Wire post gets more Facebook engagement than a New York Times report does not mean more people actually read the Daily Wire post. The story appears right as the White House is calling for broad coordination between social media platforms to ban users that the government deems to be sources of vaccine misinformation. We've already seen where that approach leads. The U.S. government is not the final arbiter of what COVID-19 claims are accurate. We've already seen platforms, at government urging, classify theories that the virus may have leaked from a Chinese laboratory as misinformation and censor them. But it wasn't "misinformation." It was a theory that may well turn out to be accurate. There is plenty of genuine misinformation out there about COVID-19, but at this point the federal government has, for many Americans, blown the handling of this epidemic with fear-driven responses not backed up by science. As a result, large swathes of people are going to be suspicious about any White House statements about misinformation. Stories like this NPR report perpetuate the divide. Parks says The Daily Wire's stories "don't normally include falsehoods," but then lets Settle (who has a book to sell blaming social media for political polarization) say that sometimes the truth can "become a piece of misinformation." Parks does not go so far as to suggest that anybody in a position of power should do anything about The Daily Wire's success. But he does give Judd Legum, former Democratic campaigner and founder of the progressive website ThinkProgress, plenty of space to critique The Daily Wire's methods, which is a weird way of undermining his entire piece. A well-known progressive Democratic media analyst is concerned about a conservative media outlet's behavior? The polarization is coming from inside the house, Parks!

Federalizing Elections Doesn't Make Much Sense and Won't Save Democracy https://reason.com/2021/06/23/federalizing-elections-wont-save-democracy/ Agreed. Federal micromanagement is bad, an anathema to the federalism on which this great country was founded.

Whose character?

Please elaborate.

Joe Biden Talks Down Democracy https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/joe-biden-talks-down-democracy/

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/nancy-and-paul-pelosi-making-millions Sources who refused to be identified tried to convince the Times’ reporters that "Ms. Pelosi pushed back on Mr. Cook’s concerns about the bills.” But in doing so, they confirmed the rather crucial fact that Pelosi was having personal, private conversations with the CEO of a company in which she and her husband were heavily invested and off of which they were making millions of dollars in personal wealth. And Pelosi, according to the report, asked Cook what changes were needed to avoid harming Apple and other Silicon Valley giants. Can even the hardest-core Democratic partisan loyalist justify this blatant conflict of interest and self-dealing? Indeed, all five of the Pelosis’ most-traded stocks over the last two years just so happen to be the five Silicon Valley giants that would be most affected by pending legislation. Four of them — Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google — were all of the companies identified by the House Antitrust Subcommittee as being classic monopolies, while the fifth — Microsoft — has sent executives to repeatedly testify before Democratic-led House committees to defend Democrats’ pending bills. In other words, the Pelosis are trading stock most heavily in the exact companies whose future can be most shaped by the bills Pelosi and her lieutenants are negotiating and shepherding through Congress: Data compiled by HouseStockWatcher.com, 2020-2021 Beyond that, Google — one of the companies in which the Pelosis’ stock trades have made millions — is one of the top five donors to the House Speaker. The wealthy couple buys and sells in Google stock, making millions. She works on bills that directly affect the future trajectory of Google. And they lavish her campaign coffers with cash, a key source of her entrenched power. Multiple times over the last several years, serious questions have been raised about stock positions taken by the Pelosis that turned out to be immensely profitable under suspicious circumstances. Perhaps the most disturbing was a report from Bloomberg News last Wednesday and another from days earlier by Fox Business that documented how Pelosi's husband purchased highly risky options in Google, Apple and other tech companies back in February, 2020, right before the market began plunging due to the COVID epidemic and right before the House, led by his wife, was set to introduce new legislation to regulate those same tech companies. Yet even as the prices in several of those companies plummeted, Paul Pelosi held onto them, only to sell them last June at a massive profit. His option sales on Google alone netted more than $5 million for the couple. Bloomberg News report, July 7, 2021, on the riches reaped by Pelosi's husband in the sale of options in Google's parent corporation While the trades cannot be declared illegal unless it can be proven that either Pelosi acted on non-public information — in which case it would be the felony of insider trading — the ethical stench is obvious. Just as was true when numerous Senators from both parties sold stocks in COVID-related industries before the pandemic began — raising questions about whether they had advance knowledge of what was coming through classified briefings — watching Nancy Pelosi's wealth skyrocket by millions of dollars from trades in the very companies she is directly overseeing creates a sleazy appearance, to put that mildly. All of this is even more disturbing because, as Fox Business put it, “this is not the first time that investments made by Paul Pelosi have been made in close proximity to happenings in Congress.” Two of the most disturbing incidents: In response to media inquiries, Pelosi denied that she is involved in or even has knowledge of her husband's stock trading. There is, of course, no way to confirm or disprove that, but what is clear is that the vast wealth generated by those stock trades in companies Pelosi greatly affects — and about which she clearly has non-public information — directly enriches Pelosi herself. In March of last year — following the controversy over the COVID stock trades — a group of legislators including Representatives Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Joe Neguse (D-CO) introduced a bill called the Ban Conflicted Trading Act which would “prohibit Members of Congress and senior congressional staff from abusing their positions for personal financial gain through trading individual stocks and investments while in office or serving on corporate boards.” While AOC called on then-Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) to resign for having dumped stocks after receiving secret COVID briefings — at the same time that Fox News host Tucker Carlson said the same about Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) — she has yet to comment on the repeated stock transactions in which the Pelosis have enriched themselves through companies directly within the purview of Speaker Pelosi's legislative power. She did, however, issue a blanket denunciation back in March of last year — when the focus was on those two Senate Republicans — about this practice: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC Members of Congress should not be allowed to own individual stock. We are here to serve the public, not to profiteer. It’s shocking that it’s even been allowed up to this point. March 20th 2020 33,568 Retweets210,324 Likes One would think that one of the richest people in America would be satisfied with that level of wealth — more than anyone could spend in a lifetime — and would decide that she and her husband simply refrain from trading stocks and trying to get richer while she occupies one of the most powerful political positions in the country. But at least when it comes to Nancy Pelosi, you would be wrong. She craves not only greater and greater public political power but also even greater and greater personal wealth, even if her pursuit of it further erodes faith and trust in the U.S. political system. Corruption to the max. And she keeps get relected.

Postal Censorship and Surveillance: A Timeline https://reason.com/2021/07/15/postal-censorship-and-surveillance-a-timeline/

More Canadians leaving country for health care: Report https://torontosun.com/news/national/canadians-continue-to-leave-the-country-for-health-care-says-new-report When you have a national socialist healthcare system where hundreds of thousands of individuals every year choose to leave the country to receive medical care elsewhere then your system is a failure. Full stop.

You didn't read the mises.org article, did you?

"flee the country" means renouncing US citizenship. They own the money they have earned, not the state.

I guess if "achieving it's potential" equals long wait times for simple tests and procedures resulting in death then yes, you and other socialists would consider that a success. After all "everybody" now has access to "health care", right? Myself and other free market advocates consider it a failure.

It won't be enough. And will cause the likes of a Bezos or Gates to flee the country, along with their assets. As one of the comments to this story states:

Nice attempt at deflection, Dante. You know socialized medicine at a scale large enough to service a market the size of the USA would be a colossal failure. Hell, it doesn't work in Canada, a country with about 1/10 our population.