Michael F. Cannon writes in Townhall:

The Obama administration’s offer to drop a Medicare-like health insurance option for Americans under age 65 is neither a surprise nor a comfort, because it does nothing to change the administration’s dangerous plan for health reform. Rather, it is a tactic designed to change the debate – one that fits nicely within the administration’s broader strategy of deception.

On Sunday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that a new government program modeled on Medicare is “not the essential element” of reform, and that the president is open to a government-chartered “co-operative.”

It was inevitable that the administration would back away from a new Medicare-like program, the demands of left-wing House Democrats notwithstanding. For weeks, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) has been telling the world that such a program would never pass the Senate: “There are not the votes in the Senate for the ‘public option,'” Conrad recently told Fox News Sunday. “There never have been.” The only question was when the president would distance himself from the idea.

President Obama chose this moment because he is losing the debate on health reform, and he needs to change the subject. The administration no doubt hopes that the conversation will be about how the president has moderated his approach to health reform.

One problem: this offer doesn’t make the president’s health plan any more moderate. It is an empty gesture, because the administration can now push for Sen. Conrad’s “co-op” proposal as a substitute. And a government-chartered health care “co-operative” is simply another government health program.

The definition of a cooperative is a health plan governed by its enrollees. Since a government chartered co-op won’t have any enrollees at first, it will be governed by—guess who?—the Secretary of Health and Human Services, just like any other government program.

In June, Sebelius told Bloomberg.com, “You could theoretically design a co-op plan that had the same attributes as a public plan.” In July, President Obama himself told Time magazine, “I think in theory you can imagine a co-operative meeting that definition” of a “public option.”

On a practical level, it makes no difference whether a new program adopts a “co-operative” model or any other. The government possesses so many tools for subsidizing its own program and increasing costs for private insurers—and has such a long history of subsidizing and protecting favored enterprises—that unfair advantages are inevitable.

So even if Democrats promise that someday the new program will become a co-op, what they mean is: “We’re going to create that new government health program, just as we intended all along. But we will turn it over to the members in, oh, five years or so. We promise.”

That makes Sebelius’s announcement yet another cynical ploy to achieve health reform by deceiving the public.

President Obama keeps saying you’ll be able to keep your current health plan, even though the Congressional Budget Office says that isn’t true. The president says a new government program wouldn’t drive private insurers out of business, even though his allies expect it to do just that. He says he wants choice and competition, yet proposes insurance regulations that would drive most private plans out of existence. He doesn’t want the government to take over the health sector, just like he didn’t want to take over General Motors. The administration pretends to distance itself from a new government program by embracing…another new government program.

From The Washington Times:

The House-passed climate change bill, if enacted, would expand the federal government so much that it would take billions of dollars and thousands of new employees to implement.

Now-obscure federal agencies such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would have to become mini-behemoths in order to handle their expanded responsibilities. Congress would have to appropriate billions of dollars for more bureaucrats, much of which is not reflected in the House bill…

The [Commodities Futures Trading] commission, which would police the new futures market for allowances, apparently would need to expand its work force by at least 31 percent initially to fulfill its obligations under the bill. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which would oversee the day-to-day trading of allowances, has estimated that it would have to expand by 20 percent or 30 percent.

The Environmental Protection Agency, which would oversee pollution regulation, also would balloon in size…

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the government’s expansion would cost $8 billion over a 10-year period. For the bill to operate effectively, nearly 1,500 regulations and mandates would have to be approved for at least 21 federal agencies. The rule-making process alone would take years.

And all to avert an imaginary disaster?

From an article by Alan Oxley in Investor’s Business Daily:

Environmental NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) Greenpeace and Worldwide Fund for Nature have just released the “NGO Climate Change Treaty.” It’s their wish list for terms of a treaty to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol, and they’re pushing it this week at a U.N. meeting in Bonn, Germany.

Environmental activists have always believed governments should put the environment ahead of every other issue, including economic growth. The NGO Treaty is a blueprint for this.

In addition to soliciting the same sort of tough emissions targets they’ve demanded in the past, this latest document maps out a strict plan to restructure the global economy into their “Brave New World.” Yet it reads like an old Soviet 20-year plan.

The negotiators who inked the original Kyoto treaty envisaged that the agreement would create an open global market for emissions trading which would efficiently distribute the cost of reducing emissions among the world’s economies.

Under the NGO plan, a form of global government supplants national sovereignty, and a central committee of international officials allocates the proceeds from the sale of carbon emission, not the market. The activists lay out, in no uncertain terms, just who should bear the costs and how high those costs should be.

Worldwide Fund for Nature and Greenpeace also want industry in developed nations to pay $160 billion every year for the first five years. Their Treaty creates a “Committee” of backroom officials selected from parties to the Treaty which approves a plan by each member to reduce emissions.

If the plans are deemed unacceptable, countries would be forced to go before two other regulating bodies (the Facilitation Branch and then the Compliance Branch) to “correct” their strategies or be penalized for not doing so.

Charles Krauthammer writes:

Think of it this way. Assume that a screening test for disease X costs $500 and finding it early averts $10,000 of costly treatment at a later stage. Are you saving money? Well, if one in 10 of those who are screened tests positive, society is saving $5,000. But if only one in 100 would get that disease, society is shelling out $40,000 more than it would without the preventive care.

That’s a hypothetical case. What’s the real-life actuality in the United States today? A study in the journal Circulation found that for cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, “if all the recommended prevention activities were applied with 100 percent success,” the prevention would cost almost 10 times as much as the savings, increasing the country’s total medical bill by 162 percent. Elmendorf additionally cites a definitive assessment in the New England Journal of Medicine that reviewed hundreds of studies on preventive care and found that more than 80 percent of preventive measures added to medical costs.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be preventing illness. Of course we should. But in medicine, as in life, there is no free lunch. The idea that prevention is somehow intrinsically economically different from treatment — that treatment increases costs and prevention lowers them — is simply nonsense.

Prevention is a wondrous good, but in the aggregate it costs society money. Nothing wrong with that. That’s the whole premise of medicine: Treating a heart attack or setting a broken leg also costs society. But we do it because it alleviates human suffering. Preventing a heart attack with statins or breast cancer with mammograms is costly. But we do it because it reduces human suffering.

However, prevention is not, as so widely advertised, healing on the cheap. It is not the magic bullet for health care costs.

You will hear some variation of that claim a hundred times in the coming health care debate. Whenever you do, remember: It’s nonsense — empirically demonstrable and CBO-certified.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, demands world-wide redistribution of wealth and the curbing of economic activity in order to ‘save the planet’ from poverty, hunger, disease, and insecurity. This must be done within four months he says, or  else…

We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet.

Any agreement must be fair, effective, equitable and comprehensive, and based on science. And it must help vulnerable nations adapt to climate change…

The science is clear… What is needed is the political will. We have the capacity. We have finance. We have the technology. The largest lacking is political will. That is why I will convey some meetings focused on climate change. I have invited all the leaders of the world … Two years ago, only a handful of world leaders could talk about climate change. Today, leaders of all the world, all the countries on every continent are aware of the threats we face now. This is great progress, for we need leadership of the very highest order. Awareness is the first step. The challenge now is to act. Since my first day as Secretary-General, I have spoken out about the grave climate change threat. My words, at times, have been blunt. When the leaders of the G-8 agreed in July to keep the global temperature increase within two degrees centigrade by the year 2050, that was welcomed and I welcome that statement. But I also said again, it was not enough. But leaders have agreed to cut green house gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. That is welcomed again. But that must be accompanied by the ambitious mid-term target by 2020 as science tells us to do. There I said, while I applaud their commitment, that is not enough. I called for matching these long-term goals with ambitious mid-term emission reduction targets.

Let me be clear about what we need to do.

There are four points [of] very important key political issues.

First industrialized countries must lead by committing to binding mid-term reduction targets on the order of 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 levels. Unfortunately, the mid-term emission targets announced so far are not close enough to this range…

Second, developing countries need to take nationally appropriate mitigation actions in order to reduce the growth in their emissions substantially below business as usual…

Third, developed countries must provide sufficient, measurable, reportable and verifiable financial and technological support to developing countries… Significant resources will be needed from both public and private sources. Developing countries, especially the most vulnerable, will collectively need billions of dollars in public financing for adaptation. I am talking here about new money – not re-packaged Official Development Assistance…

Fourth, we need an equitable and accountable mechanism for distributing these financial and technological resources, taking into account the views of all countries in decision-making.

Accomplishing all of this requires tough decisions. It will take flexibility and hard work to negotiate the most difficult issues. Trust between developed and developing countries is essential. When governments succeed in sealing a deal in Copenhagen, we will have shown the spirit of international solidarity. We will have shown leadership – political will…

Roll on, Copenhagen. Only, while they’re at it, why don’t they agree to make gold out of moonbeams? The science is clear.

Some years ago the Marxist-Leninists councillors who ruled the London Borough of Islington came up with an idea for getting rid of the rats that infested alleys, sewers, yards, dustbins, and the darker corners of unmodernized houses: they would pay the sum of one pound  for every dead rat brought to a certain council address. In  the wink of an eye, thousands of basements, garages, garden-sheds and even corners of kitchens and living-rooms were turned into rat-farms. Barrow-loads, car-loads, truckloads of dead rats were delivered day after day to the collection point. It took the brilliant brains of the council chamber weeks to realize what was happening and withdraw the offer.  They had not suspected that the spirit of free enterprise was still alive in the red borough.

This weekend in the pleasant American town where we sit and blog, signs are appearing on the windshields of hundreds – perhaps thousands – of older cars parked in the streets, in driveways, and even in open garages. They are offers to buy the vehicles. If the owners haven’t had the sense to exchange them for $4,500 and a new car under the Democrats’ cash-for-clunkers scheme, there are those who will.

It’s fun to watch the left encouraging entrepreneurship out of sheer stupidity.

Robert Murphy, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, writes in Townhall on the cash-for-clunkers scheme:

Every dollar the government spends comes from either taxes, borrowing, or inflation. In all cases, the citizens are ultimately paying for it. You don’t make the country wealthier by taking money from some citizens and giving it to others so that they can buy a car that’s too expensive for their budget…

It is because of government meddling that this recession has been so long and so painful. It is no coincidence that the two periods of the biggest power grabs in Washington—the 1930s and right now—coincided with the worst economies in U.S. history. Having the feds borrow a few more billion, to pay people to buy cars, does nothing to alleviate the underlying problems. The economy can’t return to normal when every business decision needs to consider what politicians might announce next week…

The cash-for-clunkers plan is a giant waste of tax dollars. It further distorts the economy, making industry even more vulnerable to the changing whims of D.C. politicians. To add insult to injury, the alleged environmental benefits are minimal. The only virtue of the program is that it steers billions of dollars into the pockets of those with friends in high places.

Here’s more on the subject of how state interference in the economy kills innovation.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Here’s a stumper: In the Treasury financial reform proposal, who comes in for more regulatory retooling: Fannie Mae, or your average 14-man venture capital shop? If you said venture capital, you understand why one of America’s greatest competitive advantages is now at risk in Washington.

 As part of their regulatory redesign, Team Obama and Congress still don’t have a plan for reforming the giant taxpayer-backed institutions like Fannie that caused the credit crisis. Yet they’re moving to rewrite the rules for investing in tiny technology companies that had nothing to do with the meltdown. Under the proposed rules, venture firms will be declared systemic risks until they can prove themselves innocent. The typical venture capital (VC) firm has nine principals plus five support staff and doesn’t use leverage. Yet Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wants VCs to be regulated as investment advisers by the Securities and Exchange Commission…

Venture firms were invented in the 1960s to fund the California semiconductor companies that would change the world but needed investors willing and able to take a flying leap into the unknown. Under the Silicon Valley model that has since spread around the country, experienced technology executives at VC firms inject advice and cash into young businesses.

 Neither too big nor too interconnected to get a taxpayer bailout, VCs are nonetheless critical to America’s ability to stage an economic rebound. While early-stage venture investments are tiny by Wall Street standards—often $3 million or less—they are a big part of the reason the United States has for decades grown faster than other industrialized economies. Companies once backed with venture capital now generate more than 20% of U.S. gross domestic product. Looking forward, will America be better off if venture investors are justifying themselves to Washington regulators, or evaluating new software platforms?…

Treasury’s position is that if it doesn’t drag VC firms into the bureaucratic swamp, then high-rolling hedge funds playing with borrowed money will present themselves as venture funds to avoid regulation. Yet any firm calling itself a VC is already subject to the antifraud provisions of federal securities laws. VCs also have to describe the funds they raise in annual Form D filings with the SEC. Washington could let the SEC address any concerns simply by adding three questions to the form: Do you use leverage? Do you trade equities or debt? Do you trade derivatives? Anyone answering “no” to all three would be free to go find the next Microsoft.

 The reality is that the venture industry is already shrinking, for market and political reasons. Too many funds chasing too few ideas after the dot-com boom have limited returns. And thanks in part to earlier VC investments, cheap tech tools are allowing some Web entrepreneurs to bootstrap their businesses without having to sell pieces to VCs.

As for the politics, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance costs, Eliot Spitzer’s stock-analyst settlement and the economic downturn have created an historic drought in venture-backed companies going public. This week Dow Jones VentureWire warned readers not to expect more such companies going public “anytime soon.” It boggles the mind that Washington would enact new policies sure to prolong this drought and strike at the heart of American innovation.

Walter E. Williams, one of the rare writers who think freshly, clearly, and profoundly, writes:

The first thing we should acknowledge is that we live in a world of harms. Harm is reciprocal. For example, if the government stopped Hewlett-Packard and Texas Instruments from harming Keuffel & Esser and Pickett , or stopped General Electric from harming ice producers, by denying them the right to manufacture calculators and refrigerators, they would have been harmed, plus the billions of consumers who benefited from calculators and refrigerators. There is no scientific or intelligent way to determine which person’s harm is more important than the other. That means things are more complicated than saying that one person has no rights to harm another. We must ask which harms are to be permitted in a free society and are not to be permitted. For example, it’s generally deemed acceptable for me to harm you by momentarily disturbing your peace and quiet by driving a motorcycle past your house. It’s deemed unacceptable for me to harm you by tossing a brick through your window.

In a free society, many conflicting harms are settled through the institution of private property rights. Private property rights have to do with rights belonging to the person deemed owner of property to keep, acquire, use and dispose of property as he deems fit so long as he does not violate similar rights of another. Let’s say that you are offended, possibly harmed, by bars that play vulgar rap music and permit smoking. If you could use government to outlaw rap music and smoking in bars, you would be benefited and people who enjoyed rap music and smoking would be harmed. Again, there is no scientific or intelligent way to determine whose harm is more important. In a free society, the question of who has the right to harm whom, by permitting rap music and smoking, is answered by the property rights question: Who owns the bar? In a socialistic society, such conflicting harms are resolved through government intimidation and coercion.

What about the right to harm oneself, such as the potential harm that can come from not wearing a seatbelt. That, too, is a property rights question. If you own yourself, you have the right to take chances with your own life. Some might argue that if you’re not wearing a seatbelt and wind up a vegetable, society has to take care of you; therefore, the fascist threat “click it or ticket.” Becoming a burden on society is not a problem of liberty and private property. It’s a problem of socialism where one person is forced to take care of someone else. That being the case, the government, in the name of reducing health care costs, assumes part ownership of you and as such assumes a right to control many aspects of your life. That Americans have joyfully given up self-ownership is both tragic and sad.

Barack Obama declared himself, in Berlin, to be a ‘citizen of the world’. It was not a mere rhetorical flourish. He has a globalist agenda under which the US will enter into a series of treaties that would subject America to foreign rule over its wealth (redistributing it world-wide), its trade, its laws, its use of energy, and even its defense.

The United Nations, that ghastly powerhouse of corruption, hypocrisy, and injustice, is envisaged as the nascent institution of world government.

Liberal left opinion tends to be against the nation state. It is the opinion of approximately half the voters in the Western world. Half the people of the free West apparently want to destroy their nations, and are literally doing so. They may explain their hatred of the nation state by reference to ‘colonialism’, as if in many cases colonies were not more prosperous, just, and free than the independent tyrannies they have become. Or they may say that the wars and massacres in the last century resulted from ‘nationalism’ so the nation must go; but their thinking would not be right, because the wars and massacres were the work of dictators, not democratic states of which the strongest opposed and defeated the aggressors.

Whatever their explanations, they have launched a movement for the suicide of Western nations.

All over the Western world men and women in national and international assemblies, ministries, academies, councils and committees devote themselves to the business of putting an end to their national identities. Patriotism to them is utterly absurd. Any manifestation of pride in their nation’s history, culture, traditions, institutions, even law, embarrasses if it doesn’t outrage them. In all the countries of Europe, and now under Obama’s leadership in the United States, they work towards their goal.

The very idea of the nation state they consider to be an anachronism; a nasty thing of the past much to be regretted. The more powerful and glorious the past, the more regretful they are. Filled with remorse for what their forefathers achieved, they will apologize to any foreigner who’ll listen to them. However hard their independence as a nation was won, their system of government developed, their individual freedom wrested from the fist of tyranny, they count it all worth nothing. Obama, whose ignorance of history should but doesn’t embarrass him, routinely apologizes for America to appalling little despotisms, and to countries that have survived as comparatively free nations only because America saved them from conquest by tyrannical powers.

National borders between European countries are already as good as gone. The EU plans to have ‘regions’ which will cross the borders of those outdated old nation states and replace them for the convenience of the central administration. American liberals – how many nobody knows – apparently look to this development across the Atlantic as a model to be emulated.

What will be lost if the nation state is lost?

For the most part, our countries have been identical with our nationalities. Our nationalities give us the inestimable gifts of an historical significance and a hopeful destiny beyond our individual lives; a meaning, a kind of immortality, a role in a drama, which, whether we are leading or bit-part players, involves us all. Just by existing as people of this or that country we may feel ourselves to be part of an endless story. Our nation is our greater self, the ‘we’ that is a greatness for every ‘I’, whether the ‘I’ be small or grand in personal achievement.  For many it is worth fighting and dying for. But now the story may end after all. For though it is possible for a nation to live on after its state is destroyed (the Jews did), the likelihood is that it will not. How many nations have disappeared from history with the loss of their settled, coherent, self-protected territory?  Top of the head guess – too many to count.

What else can endow us by birthright or adoption with that powerful plural identity which we seem to need and glory in? How will we fare as individuals without the nation state?  It places us in the scheme of things. It gives us a ‘local habitation and a name’. It defines us for ourselves and for others, clothing us in connotations derived from a certain history to intimate a special character. We inherit its language, which shapes our thoughts. It sets many of our goals, provides the chances for achieving them, holds a place for us, notes and records our existence. It protects us from foreign enemies and domestic assailants. It makes demands of us that we can fulfill with pride and delight, or chafe against. It provides the causes we may strive for or oppose. It is our home, our stage, our shelter, our fortress, our field, our base. Personified, it is our guardian, our teacher, our judge, and our avenger.

The nation state makes and enforces the rules that, at their best, allow us to live in freedom. It was one of the great steps forward of mankind when the city-states of ancient Greece embraced as citizens all those who would live in them not because they sprang from that particular soil but because they would accept a common law. The tribe was superseded by the state. (The great Spanish conservative Ortega y Gasset called it citizenship by virtue of  ius rather than rus – a commonality of law rather than of native soil.)  The citizens could have been born elsewhere, and could remain individual in their tastes and choices, but owed a common duty and allegiance to the state.  The United States of America is the greatest development of that splendid idea.

The European Union may have been intended by some of its enthusiastic founders to be a bigger nation-state itself in which people could live their individual lives as they chose provided only that they obeyed the laws that they themselves would have a hand in making through the democratic process. But it hasn’t worked out like that, and there is cause to doubt that it was ever really meant to. There were other purposes in the minds of its creators: Germany needed to dissolve its guilt for the Holocaust in the ocean of Europe; France hoped to be the hegemonic power in a union populous and rich enough to rival the United States.

In fact the EU is not a democracy. Representatives are elected to a European parliament, but that body is not a legislature and has little power to affect its laws. Tasked with homogenizing peoples who have different histories, languages, traditions, tastes and temperaments, an unelected bureaucracy rules. It is an authoritarian Kafkaesque Castle. Already a police-state-lite, the EU is on the road to totalitarianism.

True, it may not survive long enough to become as bad as the late Soviet Union because a Muslim majority will in all probability turn it in another direction. But there’s little comfort in that thought for those who have always preferred the old national independence to the new Europe with its Babel of tongues, its shameless corruption, its politically correct restrictions on freedom. If a Caliphate should be established by the emerging Muslim majority, freedom will not be merely restricted, it will be destroyed, erased from the book.

Politically correct opinion may like the prospect of the Caliphate because Islam aims to dominate the whole world and will wage jihad until it does, and then the dream of World Government will be realized.

But where, without the protection of the nation state, will the rest of us find shelter?

Jillian Becker   August 2, 2009