Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary

Is This A Good Idea?

5 Comments

I hadn’t realized that there was a website called gop.gov. I thought that the .gov top-level domain was for official government sites. To have one for Republicans seems to be mixing party and government. Of course, I think that parties (and particularly the major ones) are far too privileged in general, given that they are unmentioned in the Constitution.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

A Healthcare Alternative

18 Comments

From CEI:

1. Modify tax policy to eliminate the disincentives for individual purchase of health insurance and health care.
2. Eliminate regulatory barriers that prevent small businesses from cooperatively pooling and self-insuring their health risks by liberalizing the rules that govern voluntary health-care purchasing cooperatives.
3. Eliminate laws that prevent interstate purchase of health insurance by individuals and businesses.
4. Eliminate rules that prevent individuals and group purchasers from tailoring health insurance plans to their needs, including federal and state benefit mandates and community rating requirements.
5. Eliminate artificial restrictions on the supply of health-care services and products, such as the overregulation of drugs and medical devices, as well as state and federal restrictions on who may provide medical services and how they must be delivered.
6. Improve the availability of provider and procedure-specific cost and quality data for use by individual health consumers.
7. Reform the jackpot malpractice liability system that delivers windfall punitive damage awards to small numbers of injured patients while it raises malpractice insurance costs for doctors and incentivizes the practice of defensive medicine.

Never happen. Makes too much sense.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“A Monstrous Column”

7 Comments

…from Tom Friedman.

More thoughts from Jay Nordlinger:

Yes, the Chinese Communists are very good at “taking things away from people.” Always have been. You might even say that taking things away from people is their specialty. Sometimes it’s their lives — people’s lives. Especially if those people are democrats who speak up for a better life.

Three times, ladies and gentlemen. Three times has Thomas L. Friedman won the Pulitzer Prize. Think about his statement that “I cannot help but feel a tinge of jealousy,” realize the context in which he is making it, and shudder.

In some ways, Tom Friedman is this generation’s Walter Duranty. And the Times has apparently learned nothing from that experience.

[Update a while later]

That didn’t take long. A Fire-Tom-Friedman blog.