Wouldn't be my first pick.
"According to H.L. Mencken – a first-hand, careful, and clear-eyed observer of the now-sainted Rough Rider – “Roosevelt, for all his fluent mastery of democratic counter-words, democratic gestures and all the rest of the armamentarium of the mob-master, had no such faith in his heart of hearts. He didn’t believe in democracy; he believed simply in government. His remedy for all the great pangs and longings of existence was not a dispersion of authority, but a hard concentration of authority. He was not in favor of unlimited experiment; he was in favor of a rigid control from above, a despotism of inspired prophets and policemen.”*"
http://cafehayek.com/2010/04/teddy-obama.html
Monday, April 5, 2010
Classic Quotes, Covey
"We judge others by their actions, we judge ourselves by our intentions." Steven R. Covey
Coulter on Cell Phones and Health Care
"The Democrats compare their new health care bill to entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid. But those are welfare, not health care. They may go to deserving welfare recipients, but they are a government-enforced gift from the young to the old (Medicare), and from the middle class to the poor (Medicaid).
There's no reason why most Americans shouldn't be able to buy our own medical insurance the same way we buy our own cell phones, hair care and cars.
And just incidentally, Medicare and Medicaid are projected to go bankrupt slightly before the United States of America is projected to go bankrupt. So turning all of health care into a larger Medicare program may need a little more thinking through.
The reason nearly everyone in the universe has a cell phone is that President Reagan did to telephones the exact opposite of what the Democrats have just done with health care.
Before Reagan came into office, we had one phone company, ridiculously expensive rates and one phone model. Reagan split up AT&T, deregulated phone service and gave America a competitive market in phones. The rest is history.
If you can grasp how inexpensive cell phones in a rainbow of colors and wonders like the iPhone could never have been created under a National Cell Phone Reform Act, you can understand what a disaster ObamaCare is going to be for health care in America."
There's no reason why most Americans shouldn't be able to buy our own medical insurance the same way we buy our own cell phones, hair care and cars.
And just incidentally, Medicare and Medicaid are projected to go bankrupt slightly before the United States of America is projected to go bankrupt. So turning all of health care into a larger Medicare program may need a little more thinking through.
The reason nearly everyone in the universe has a cell phone is that President Reagan did to telephones the exact opposite of what the Democrats have just done with health care.
Before Reagan came into office, we had one phone company, ridiculously expensive rates and one phone model. Reagan split up AT&T, deregulated phone service and gave America a competitive market in phones. The rest is history.
If you can grasp how inexpensive cell phones in a rainbow of colors and wonders like the iPhone could never have been created under a National Cell Phone Reform Act, you can understand what a disaster ObamaCare is going to be for health care in America."
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Classic Quotes, Lombardi
"Some of us will do our jobs well and some will not, but we will all be judged by only one thing: The result."
- Vince Lombardi
- Vince Lombardi
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Torturous Topic
"If these Democrats really want to make it clear that any future U.S. interrogators who use brutal techniques should be prosecuted, then they should propose tough, clear new legislative language -- and take the political heat for it. Failure to do that will suggest that their attacks on Bush "torture" are driven more by political opportunism than by fidelity to law or human rights.
Let's compare Holder's January 15, 2009, Senate confirmation testimony and subsequent answers to written questions about waterboarding with relevant portions of the Margolis memo.
Holder: "If you look at the history of the use of that technique, used by the Khmer Rouge, used in the [Spanish] Inquisition, used by the Japanese, and prosecuted by us as war crimes -- we prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam... waterboarding is torture.... It is clear, and has historically been uncontroversial, that waterboarding is a form of torture."
Margolis: The "historical examples of 'water torture' " used by the OPR to condemn Bybee and Yoo, including those cited by Holder, "are distinguishable from the [CIA's] proposed technique and were not analyzed under language similar to the torture statute."
In other words, Holder's historical examples prove nothing. They cited tortures far more brutal than the technique that the CIA proposed in 2002. They also involved laws that predated the 1994 legislation and imposed broader criminal prohibitions.
And, as Margolis could have added, those not-very-relevant examples have been almost the only scrap of legal analysis that Holder has ever offered to support his condemnations of the CIA's waterboarding."
http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/or_20100227_6073.php
Let's compare Holder's January 15, 2009, Senate confirmation testimony and subsequent answers to written questions about waterboarding with relevant portions of the Margolis memo.
Holder: "If you look at the history of the use of that technique, used by the Khmer Rouge, used in the [Spanish] Inquisition, used by the Japanese, and prosecuted by us as war crimes -- we prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam... waterboarding is torture.... It is clear, and has historically been uncontroversial, that waterboarding is a form of torture."
Margolis: The "historical examples of 'water torture' " used by the OPR to condemn Bybee and Yoo, including those cited by Holder, "are distinguishable from the [CIA's] proposed technique and were not analyzed under language similar to the torture statute."
In other words, Holder's historical examples prove nothing. They cited tortures far more brutal than the technique that the CIA proposed in 2002. They also involved laws that predated the 1994 legislation and imposed broader criminal prohibitions.
And, as Margolis could have added, those not-very-relevant examples have been almost the only scrap of legal analysis that Holder has ever offered to support his condemnations of the CIA's waterboarding."
http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/or_20100227_6073.php
Friday, April 2, 2010
Price Tags and Health Care
http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2010/03/02/could-price-tags-save-american-health-care/
Should have been one of the critical elements in real health care reform - re-establish the price/quality relationships so that consumers can choose well.
Should have been one of the critical elements in real health care reform - re-establish the price/quality relationships so that consumers can choose well.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Stimulating Thoughts and Analysis of Stimulus
Posted: 08 Mar 2010 07:43 PM PST
Menzie Chinn invokes <http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2010/03/whom_are_you_go.html> the CBO "estimates" to argue against those who say the stimulus didn't work. Did the stimulus help turn the economy around and create jobs? I'm skeptical on logical grounds but I confess that I do not have strong empirical evidence on my side.
But those who defend the stimulus have no empirical support either. The CBO "estimates" are not an analysis of what the stimulus actually did but rather what some predicted it would do. They have done NO independent non-partisan analysis of what actually happened.
Here is all you need to know about what the CBO actually did that Chinn and others cite:
CBO's current estimates differ only slightly from those CBO prepared in March 2009. At that time, CBO projected that in the third quarter of 2009, U.S. employment would be higher by 600,000 to 1.5 million people with ARRA than it would be without the law, and real GDP would be 1.1 percent to 3.0 percent higher. CBO's new estimates reflect small revisions to earlier projections of the timing and magnitude of changes to spending and revenues under ARRA.
And:
CBO has also examined incoming data on output and employment during the period since ARRA's enactment. However, those data are not as helpful in determining ARRA's economic effects as might be supposed, because isolating the effects would require knowing what path the economy would have taken in the absence of the law. Because that path cannot be observed, the new data add only limited information about ARRA's impact.
And the best part:
Economic output and employment in the spring and summer of 2009 were lower than CBO had projected at the beginning of the year. But in CBO's judgment, that outcome reflects greater-than-projected weakness in the underlying economy rather than lower-than-expected effects of ARRA.
As I wrote here <http://cafehayek.com/2010/02/the-great-stimulus-hoax.html> , that is one interpretation. The other is that the model doesn't work very well.
Menzie Chinn invokes <http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2010/03/whom_are_you_go.html> the CBO "estimates" to argue against those who say the stimulus didn't work. Did the stimulus help turn the economy around and create jobs? I'm skeptical on logical grounds but I confess that I do not have strong empirical evidence on my side.
But those who defend the stimulus have no empirical support either. The CBO "estimates" are not an analysis of what the stimulus actually did but rather what some predicted it would do. They have done NO independent non-partisan analysis of what actually happened.
Here is all you need to know about what the CBO actually did that Chinn and others cite:
CBO's current estimates differ only slightly from those CBO prepared in March 2009. At that time, CBO projected that in the third quarter of 2009, U.S. employment would be higher by 600,000 to 1.5 million people with ARRA than it would be without the law, and real GDP would be 1.1 percent to 3.0 percent higher. CBO's new estimates reflect small revisions to earlier projections of the timing and magnitude of changes to spending and revenues under ARRA.
And:
CBO has also examined incoming data on output and employment during the period since ARRA's enactment. However, those data are not as helpful in determining ARRA's economic effects as might be supposed, because isolating the effects would require knowing what path the economy would have taken in the absence of the law. Because that path cannot be observed, the new data add only limited information about ARRA's impact.
And the best part:
Economic output and employment in the spring and summer of 2009 were lower than CBO had projected at the beginning of the year. But in CBO's judgment, that outcome reflects greater-than-projected weakness in the underlying economy rather than lower-than-expected effects of ARRA.
As I wrote here <http://cafehayek.com/2010/02/the-great-stimulus-hoax.html> , that is one interpretation. The other is that the model doesn't work very well.
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