This is the June cover of Reason magazine (via). Res ipsa loquitur.
Worth a Thousand Words on the Unregulated Free MarketPost + Comments (149)
by $8 blue check mistermix| 149 Comments
This post is in: Glibertarianism
This is the June cover of Reason magazine (via). Res ipsa loquitur.
Worth a Thousand Words on the Unregulated Free MarketPost + Comments (149)
This post is in: Glibertarianism, Open Threads, #notintendedtobeafactualstatement
(Scott Meyer’s website)
Behold the bold glibertarian Free Staters, harrassing those who can’t fight back and demonstrating their unique sense of humor:
… Keene’s two parking officers, both women, are often videotaped by young adults known as “Robin Hooders.” They track the whereabouts of the officers by two-way radio, feed expired meters before $5 tickets can be written, and leave a business card saying that “we saved you from the king’s tariff.”
Welcome to Sherwood Forest, N.H., where these acts of charity have led to some donations and gratitude, but also to sidewalk tensions, harassment allegations and litigation. They are part of a broader effort by about two-dozen activists, most of them from someplace else, to unshackle Keene from the “violent monopoly” of government and its enforcers, including these parking officers who work in weather fair and foul…
But some local residents are speaking out in their stead by challenging the activists through a Facebook page with the unwieldy name of “Stop Free Keene!!!” One of its organizers, Andrea Parkhurst Whitcomb, is asking the relative newcomers a fundamental question: “Who asked you to come free us?”…
Back in 2003, a libertarian-leaning group called the Free State Project decided that this small state could be a liberty lover’s paradise if enough like-minded people settled here. (The movement, by the way, tends to attract white males, according to Carla Gericke, the group’s president, a white South African who has lived for many years in this country. “I’m the token African-American,” she joked.)
A dozen years in, the Free State Project is about three-quarters of the way toward achieving its goal of having 20,000 people commit to relocating to the state, after which it will “trigger the move.”…
Yeah, after a dozen years of bold talk on the internet, they admit they haven’t been able to persuade enough people to sign a pledge. The ‘Deport Justin Beiber’ WH-petition crowd beat that tally within days. If the Free State programmers had any forethought (insert your own joke here) the resolution counter is set not to register above 19,999, because if that trigger ever gets pulled it’s gonna be even more embarrassing trying to explain when NH’s population somehow fails to expand beyond the usual outflow of Masshole tax dodgers.
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Apart from easy targets, what’s on the agenda for the start of another week?
Monday Morning Open Thread: Low-Hanging FruitPost + Comments (146)
This post is in: Glibertarianism, Open Threads, #notintendedtobeafactualstatement
Confusion to our enemies! From Dave Weigel, my personal Speaker to Libertarians, “FreedomWorks President Denies All Those Stories About His Organization Collapsing”:
… If you’re a fan of awkward interviews… watch the Daily Caller‘s Jamie Weinstein grapple with calm and laconic FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe. The interview started with a discussion of Kibbe’s book, Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff, his third libertarian manifesto in four years. It continued as Weinstein pressed Kibbe on some movement gripes about FreedomWorks, which he took over fully after an acrimonious 2012 split with Dick Armey.
Kibbe’s response: a series of stone-faced denials. He expresses surprise that his latest book completely disappeared from the New York Times bestseller list after debuting at No. 2, and denies that any donors mass-purchased copies… And Kibbe flat-out denies a 2013 BuzzFeed scoop about FreedomWorks’ struggling fundraising campaigns…
That’s more than the organization said six months ago; when BuzzFeed had reached out for comment, FreedomWorks dismissed the “baseless attacks from salty former employees” without specifically rebutting anything…
More at the link. Maybe it’s just me, but Kibbe’s photo looks like it should be captioned THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES.
Late Night Open Thread: More Trouble At the Wingnut Wurlitzer FactoryPost + Comments (22)
by David Anderson| 83 Comments
This post is in: Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Glibertarianism, Kochsuckers, Republican Venality, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Assholes, Bring On The Meteor, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To, I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own, Jump! You Fuckers!
And the winner is: Michael Cannon as he discusses ways to game PPACA open enrollment restrictions:
the Affordable Care Act creates so many incentives for enrollees to drop their coverage that maintaining those enrollment numbers may start to resemble something like pushing millions of people up a greased poll.
For Obamacare to work, people must enroll and stay enrolled. An estimated 20 percent of those who signed up have yet to pay their first premium, and as many as 5 percent stopped paying after the first month. If too many drop out, premiums could climb until the exchanges collapse.
Got to love “health policy experts” commenting on the individual market who don’t know shit about the individual market. Traditionally the individual market is a very high churn market. Most people only go on the individual market until something “better” comes along. That something better is either employer sponsored insurance, government insurance such as CHIP, Medicare or Medicaid, or getting on someone else’s plan.
Obamacare even more dramatically reduces the downside of going uninsured. For example, suppose the day after you cancel your health insurance, you receive a serious diagnosis like diabetes, or cancer. Pre-Obamacare, you would not be able to buy coverage for that illness. Under Obamacare, however, insurers are required to cover you at the same premium they charged when you were healthy. You may have to wait until January for that coverage to take effect, but even so the downside risk of going uninsured is much smaller.
If you’re young and invincible, it is likely that you’ll need major medical care from an accident than a big diagnosis. I don’t know about you, but I don’t plan on getting into a car accident this afternoon or being shot by an asshole who was until a moment ago a “very responsible gun owner”(tm) who does not know how to unload his weapon before cleaning it. Even for a big diagnosis that does not require care this afternoon, Mr. Cannon’s “ideas” are asinine or fraud:
If you live in one of the 25 or so states implementing Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, you can get coverage immediately by reducing your income below 138 percent of the federal poverty level ($16,102 for a single adult). You can then restore your income when you enroll in an exchange plan in January — or even earlier, depending on how often your state verifies eligibility.
Impoverish your family (especially since his “advice” is for people who make too much for subsidies) instead of paying for insurance.
If you don’t live in a Medicaid-expansion state, you can move to one, as this Idaho family did.
Uproot your family and potentially commit fraud as some states have at least a thirty day period before residency is established. And it has been (thankfully) a while since I’ve moved, but I remember it to be a stressful and non-instaneous event. There is something about finding an apartment, signing a lease, and then getting the keys from a landlord. If I have a major diagnosis, this is time spent gaming the system where I am either not getting treated or I’m running up massive bills paying out of pocket.
The long form version of his “argument” has the sham marriage angle:
Newly married couples can enroll in an Exchange plan on their wedding day, with coverage starting on the first day of the following month, or even sooner. Happily married couples have been known get “Medicaid divorces” to qualify for Medicaid’s nursing-home coverage; we may soon see quickie “Obamacare marriages” formed solely to qualify people Exchange coverage. Websites could offer to arrange marriages between singles who share a sudden need for health insurance. Couples could divorce when they re-enroll in January.
Sure there is always the Vegas wedding route. However, if I remember correctly, marriage has a massive set (like 1,000 or more) of obligations, benefits, privileges and responsibilities bundled to that simple legal act. This only works if the sick person is single AND can trust the sham marriage partner. There is quite a lot of value of being the spouse of someone who has a good enough job and assets where they think it is cheaper to go naked than to get covered, and the divorce court judge would love to hear the explanation as to why alimony or support should not be given to the spouse as the marriage was intended to be just an open enrollment enabling sham. Before I met my wife, I had a long, beer fueled conversations with a college friend about being mutual back-ups/green card marriage partners if we were both single in our late 30s. That is a conversation worthy of college and good beer, not as a serious health policy.
The converse is also true — Obamacare divorces are a costly, and dramatic. A divorce, even if it is purely a sham, is time consuming. An individual receiving a diagnosis on Tuesday won’t be divorced on Friday and coverage won’t start anyways until at least the 1st of the following month anyways. There is a minimum 2.5 week gap between eligibility and coverage starts. In some cases, there is a 6 week gap.
Most states have a “cooling-off” period and even those that don’t, the courts don’t move that fast for amicable divorces. The Britney Spears 55 hour marriage before annullment due to diminished mental capacity and reduced decision making is not the norm. Furthermore, assuming there are either kids or common property involved AND the two people want to stay involved in each others lives, the non-marriage replication of rights and responsibilities through powers of attorneys, advanced directives, living wills etc is, as gay couples living in bigot states can attest, expensive, time consuming, and not guaranteed to work. So again, the divorce run-out period is time spent either not getting treated or running up massive out of pocket charges.
And then finally there is this gem:
Alternatively, you could fill the gap with …. the money you saved on premiums; credit cards; or by relying on friends, family, or the kindness of strangers.
The cheapest premium for a non-smoking 29 year old in one of the most expensive markets in the country (Southern Georgia) is $150/month for a Bronze plan. So going naked through-out your 20s and using Mr. Cannon’s “advice” saves an individual no more than $15,000 (as a 21 year old is cheaper to insure than a 29 year old). If that 29 year old lived in the cheapest markets in the country, their premiums would be 50% less. $15,000 is enough to get you in the door at a cancer center for the first round of treatment if you are paying out of pocket and are lucky. $7,500 in cash will be laughed at a major cancer center. And what is the probability that a 23 year old will put consistently put $1,000 a year into a HSA instead of spending it on rent, food, student loan debt or beer? Or the other option is to go into life crushing debt and beg to be considered the “deserving poor”
Mr. Cannon, you sir, are the Asshole of the Week.
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Glibertarianism, Open Threads, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing
Professional proponent of Failing Upward, Megan McArgleBargle (she’s not just the president — she’s also a client!) decided to review that new econ book all the kewl kolumnists are banging on about. Erstwhile Balloon Juice front-pager Freddie deBoer, at his own blog, has an excellent satire:
I apologize in advance, because I am going to talk about a piece that I have not yet read. To be clear, I do not intend to read Megan McArdle’s “Piketty’s Tax Hikes Won’t Help the Middle Class.” I’m afraid that I can’t wait to weigh in — not on the review itself, but on its topic. How much doesn’t inequality not actually not matter?
My first objection is to McArdle’s central argument, “Taxes are gay.” I find this offensive and wrongheaded. First, taxes are bi-curious at best. Second, using the word “gay” as an insult, even against an inanimate concept such as taxes, is not the way we do things here in the 21st century. Besides, the sexual proclivities of taxes are really neither here nor there when it comes to the pressing issue of securing government revenues in a fast-paced world. Even if, as McArdle argues, “taxes are a little light in the shoes, if you get my drift,” it’s unclear what else she proposes be done to raise funding for schools, roads, and emergency services…
I also find it unpersuasive when McArdle writes about the plight of the working poor. McArdle claims that the real issue for fast food workers is not their low wages, but rather “listening to the hippity-hop, dancing in public, and carrying on with the baggy clothes and the girls wearing trousers.” While I don’t doubt that culture plays a role in helping people escape poverty, this goes a bit too far. She also seems to underestimate how badly low wages hurt our most vulnerable. When McArdle argues that “your average McDonald’s worker should be satisfied, at the end of the day, to suck the disgusting gristle from the grease trap of the skillet that cooked the capitalist perfection that is the McRib, and consider themselves well paid,” I wonder who is really guilty of “class war.”…
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Apart from blogerrific nostalgia, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Open Thread: Megan McArdle, Still Wrong About EverythingPost + Comments (26)
by Betty Cracker| 167 Comments
This post is in: Election 2016, Glibertarianism, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, The Party of Fiscal Responsibility, Assholes, Schadenfreude
I’m not sure tribble-topped presidential aspirant Rand Paul recovers from this:
In a variety of campaign appearances that were captured on video, Paul repeatedly compared Reagan unfavorably to Carter on one of Paul’s top policy priorities: government spending. When Paul was a surrogate speaker for his father, then-Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), during the elder Paul’s 2008 presidential quest, his sales pitch included dumping on Reagan for failing to rein in federal budget deficits. Standing on the back of a truck and addressing the crowd at the Coalition of New Hampshire Taxpayers picnic in July 2007, Rand Paul complained about Reagan and praised his father for having opposed Reagan’s budget…”
David Corn’s Mother Jones article linked above includes six video clips of Baby Doc slagging on Reagan as a spendthrift as the younger Paul campaigned for his daddy. What Paul says about Reagan exploding the debt is all true, of course.
And it’s not wise to underestimate the Republican base’s capacity to ignore facts and focus on shiny objects: That’s how they came to deify the folksy, addled, debt-exploding Z-grade actor as an exemplar of fiscal rectitude in the first place.
But imagine the field day Paul’s primary opponents will have parading this heresy before the cameras at every debate. The message that Reagan actually was a profligate spendthrift won’t sink in, but the fact that Paul unfavorably compared Baby Jeebus Reagan to Satan’s Valet Carter sure will.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 76 Comments
This post is in: Glibertarianism
Nobody’s written about this but it seems pretty remarkable:
Amid raucous debate, Nevada Republican Party conventioneers on Saturday stripped opposition to gay marriage and abortion from the party platform and endorsed Gov. Brian Sandoval for governor in the June 10 primary despite misgivings by conservatives, his criticism of the process and his absence from the meeting.
They also endorsed Rand Paul for President, so apparently the Paulists packed the convention, though there’s no news of a platform plank endorsing the gold standard or warning against the Amero. Maybe they didn’t have a veto-proof majority.
You’d think a slow news cycle and a national media who enjoy political conflict and strife would generate some stories about this event, but I find little evidence that the portentous emanations from that august gathering have reached the ears of the beltway glitterati. Still, what an incoherent mess. First, let’s not forget that Rand and his daddy think that freedom from government ends where sex begins, since both of them oppose abortion and gay marriage. So how do the libertarians in the audience square their newfound views on those two subjects with their Paulian tendencies? Second, I hope those are scare quotes:
Republicans who sat on the platform committee said they decided not to deal with social issues this year because the U.S. Supreme Court and lower courts have weighed in and it doesn’t make sense for the party of “personal freedom” to have the government or the political party get involved in people’s personal lives.
Finally, I’m sure most of the candidates this convention endorsed, especially those running for federal office, want no part of this convention’s foolishness. For example, Senator Dean Heller switched his position to oppose abortion once he made it to Congress.
If any state Democratic convention showed the utter incoherence that the Nevada GOP showed this weekend, we wouldn’t be done hearing about it until Memorial Day, but apparently this one is going to be filed under IOKIYAR. Maybe we’ll hear a little more if the Wisconsin GOP votes to secede from the union, but my guess is that they’ll have to start sacrificing virgins before the national media points out the combination of crazy and clueless that’s running amok at state GOP conventions.