Under the Government’s Wing
I’d forgotten it during the national debate about universal healthcare, but in processing old columns for my personal site, I came across this, from May 2005: Intrinsic human worth may not dominate the scales during other lifecycle stages for long, either. One indication of the slide is the British judiciary’s hearing arguments concerning a problem…
Nobody wants to argue against assisting people who are striving to improve their lives during hard times, but when journalists leverage the public trust for naked advocacy, they do readers a grave disservice. Providence Journal reporter Steve Peoples did just that in a front page story on expiring social services programs, last Saturday, and the…
Iain Murray offers a summary of the government’s entry into the insurance business (subscription required), which practice has appropriately spread like an uncontrolled fire: [Private fire insurer Nicholas] Barbon did more than promise to defray costs in the event of disaster. He formed a private fire brigade, staffed, as one observer put it, with “watermen…
Mass AG Marsha Martha Coakley is an ick. The fact that she facilitated the election of Scott Brown by running a lousy senate campaign does not ameliorate her sins, which extend, most recently, to an excuse for illegal immigration Technically, it’s not illegal to be illegal in Massachusetts which rivals “I didn’t inhale” for hair-splitting…
Funny, I hadn’t heard insufficient involvement of “disadvantaged groups” included among the contributing factors to our the economic crisis that supposedly necessitates a stronger government hand in the finance industry. And yet: Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, and Barack Obama insist that the new financial regulation bill pending a vote in the Senate is a necessity…
It is fundamental to the view of big-government advocates and outright statists that the role of government is to run the society. Not just those aspects (like policing) that require legitimate use of force or (like foreign affairs) that require a unified social face to present to outside entities or (like roads and infrastructure) that…
It appears that many residents’ car tax bills will offer an early illustration of the consequence of the big-spending stimulus pursued by Congress and the White House: A number of cars, which normally lose value each passing year, have increased in value this year as a result of several economic forces hitting the used car…
Do you need an example of the reason that it’s inadvisable for the ostensibly objective entity that regulates the marketplace to participate in its activities? Here’s a small one: Limits on the fees banks charge merchants who accept debit cards would not apply to government-issued cards, under a tentative House-Senate deal aimed at easing worries…
The behavior of both sides of the liberal-guilt–welfare axis might find some explanation in this line, drawn from a review of Arthur Brooks’s The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future by Matthew Continetti (subscription required): It is not inequality, Brooks writes, that makes people unhappy. It is…
Reading about the petering out of unemployment benefits, I have to admit some cynicism. The hand-scribed note in the border of my newspaper notes that people want jobs, but the federal government is giving them expensive and counterproductive healthcare “reform,” but it’s clear that a great number of our fellow citizens expect it all. But…