Alan Boyle has a longish piece on what the place is all about.
The Arbitrary Health-Care Mandate
“My whim is my command“:
…the sudden demand that businesses stop adjusting for regulatory policy is nearly the height of hypocrisy for this administration, which has repeatedly offered short-term gimmicky tax credits for business decisions that boost its policies, including an ill-considered credit for hiring that ended up costing taxpayers millions for hiring decisions that would have been made anyway. Suddenly, the Obama administration has to take action outside of the law because employers respond to regulatory signals more predictably than one-off credits.
In other words, it’s a demonstration of arbitrary power, of precisely the kind predicted by Hayek. And it’s no longer just opponents of the ACA noticing.
At National Journal, Major Garrett blasted the latest unilateral changes in enforcing statutory law by noting, “The Affordable Care Act means what it says and says what it means. Until it doesn’t. … [T]he arbitrary is the norm.”
The editorial board at The Washington Post blasted Obama for his “increasingly cavalier approach to picking and choosing how to enforce this law. “ Garrett’s colleague Ron Fournier and the Daily Beast’s Kirsten Powers both declared their patience at an end to the arbitrary changes and continuing incompetence from the Obama administration – and all of these people support the law in principle.
The attempt to create a command economy in the health-insurance market has failed, in the same manner that Hayek predicted, and resulted in the same arbitrary use of power to attempt to compensate for those failures. The demand for businesses to “self-attest” that they aren’t following standard business principles foreshadows the later stages of unreality that will take from F. A. Hayek to George Orwell on a long enough continuum.
This is what tyranny looks like.
[Update a while later]
“Obama is legislating without the legislative branch. This is corrosive of self-government, counter to our constitutional system and contemptuous of the rule of law.”
Nothing new for him.
The Phony IRS Scandal
Every 501(c)4 audited by the IRS was a conservative one.
Just a coinkydinky, I’m sure.
My Twitter Battle With Anil Dash
I had one of the dumbest back and forths of my life last night, in response to this post.
I simply pointed out that he was being sexist, which quickly devolved into non sequiturs and straw men, and ultimately resulted in my being accused of lying and being “threatened and insecure.” It was pretty funny, actually.
[Update a while later]
This seems related somehow: thoughts on the sexism (and other “isms”) of Robert Heinlein and Orson Scott Card:
With Resnick and Malzberg the backlash was faster and louder and even a lot of their number thought (privately) that they were off their rocker. With Card, I think only the choir thinks he’s “a fascist.”
And with Larry… There is no word for this. It’s like a Chihuahua trying to hold onto a car by the back bumper. They have not only bit off more than they can chew, they’ve bit off more than they can… bite. In tactical terms it’s getting involved in a landwar in Asia or going up against a Sicilian when death is on the line.
But wait, there’s more. The other reason they’re getting crazier and crazier and trying to enforce group conformity more and more is that they are no longer in possession of the bully pulpit. It used to be due to quirks of distribution and culture in NYC that got get bought and properly distributed you had to be a darling with a “not Baen” house. Oh, Baen had bestsellers, but they were more a midlist house.
So advances with other houses were bigger, and prestige was immeasurably higher.
Well… The times they are achanging. The collapse of the chains; amazon; the internet where people can find out about books that were publishing put paid to the cozy gentleman’s arrangement of yore. Even when these people are getting published, their advances are smaller, and they have to compete with all the great unwashed for sales. They no longer feel their own specialness.
Yup.
Cis-Lunar Space
I think that to the degree people think of that phrase at all, they assume it’s in the vicinity of the earth-moon system, but technically, of the Lagrange points, only L-1 is part of it. L-2 is in trans-lunar space, and I’m not sure how you’d characterize Ls 3, 4 and 5. The thought was prompted by this post on transgendered and cisgendered people.
Whole Milk
Helps you lose weight.
The notion that you should drink reduced-fat milk is based on two theories that have zero scientific basis — that calories per se make you fat, and that saturated fat is bad for your heart. They’re both nonsense.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The author still gets that part wrong:
Whole-milk dairy products are relatively high in saturated fat. And eating too much saturated fat can increase the risk of heart disease. So many experts would agree that adults with high cholesterol should continue to limit dairy fat.
I repeat, there is zero empirical evidence that saturated fat increases the risk of coronary disease. It is based on the flawed theory that high cholesterol causes heart disease and that eating cholesterol increases your cholesterol. Again, neither is true.
The Coming Pilot Shortage
…is made in Congress.
This Lawless Administration
…gets slapped down in court again.
National Review
No, it is not doomed:
By the likes of The Week, Salon, and Politico in quick succession, we are said to be in “deep trouble,” likely “doomed,” facing a “wipe out.”
This is in part a tale of lazy reporting and even headline cribbing.
None of the writers of these articles ever called National Review. They didn’t ask what our chances in court were, or even bother to get basic facts about the case right. Damon Linker of The Week, the one who got this meme rolling, made rudimentary mistakes without trying to check them, and then lectured us about journalistic standards.
You’d think people who write about media and the law would know, instinctively, to consider this factor: libel insurance.
You’d think that, until you realize that they’re leftist hacks, and idiots.
Why Republicans Are The Stupid Party
The plainness of the usurpation of power on the part of this administration is obvious, and one wonders how many Democrats — some of whom surely have respect for the rule of law — will continue to abide it. Would any Democrat want a Republican president to view the law — or the scope of executive power to “adjust,” “peel back,” or ignore the law — in this way?
The account, however, also highlights problems on the other side of the aisle. It says, “GOP lawmakers, who oppose the law, seized on the delay to argue the administration should relax other key provisions, including the requirement that individuals carry coverage or pay a penalty, which has been in effect since the beginning of this year.” The New York Times provides an almost identical account: “Republicans denounced the unilateral move as a violation of the law and called on the White House to throw out all of the Affordable Care Act’s coverage mandates.”
This is exactly the wrong response. Republican lawmakers should be insisting that the Obama administration execute the law as written — and should start holding high-profile hearings in the House to have administration officials explain why they don’t think they need to execute the law as written, while having constitutional experts explain why they do. Secondarily, Republicans should insist that the Democratic Senate pass, and Obama sign, actual changes to the law itself — which have already been passed by the House with a fair amount of Democratic support — to delay the individual mandate alongside the employer mandate that the business lobbyists are so “pleasantly astounded” they were able to get delayed in clear violation of the written law itself.
Yes. The Republicans need to continue to insist that the administration follow the law, not just on principle, but to force the Democrats to lie in the bed they unilaterally made. If the Dems want to fix the law, they need to change the law, with both houses of Congress, not “adjust” it.
[Update a few minutes later]
…it is hard to figure out just where the Obama administration is going with all of this.
For employers with more than 50 workers this is a delay not a fix. Employers will only now up the pressure to change the law completely, knowing they have the administration on the political run over these issues. And, small employers will still have to comply with the very costly minimum benefit mandates––really the biggest complaint they have had. Just exactly what is the Obama administration accomplishing with a delay?
What will the administration back off on next? Given the very small exchange enrollment so far coming from the ranks of the uninsured, will they next postpone or eliminate the individual mandate?
No one has been more critical of the various requirements in Obamacare that I have.
But to make an insurance system work you have to have a set of consistent and consistently applied rules. You can’t have some people choosing to be out today and in tomorrow. You can’t have a system where insurers price products based upon one set of conditions and then you keep backing off on the conditions consumers and employers have to follow.
The administration really has three options:
- Full speed ahead––enforce all of the original rules. Just take the political heat believing you have crafted a system that will work. This is what they have been telling us for almost four years now!
- Do a comprehensive and rational fix that provides for a modified system for everyone learning from the mistakes that were made.
- Let it unravel one step at a time caving in to every constituency that threatens a vulnerable Democratic Senator and end up with a worse mess.
Looks to me like they are on track for number three. Ironically, I don’t think these delays will do the Democrats one bit of good for their vulnerable Senators. These aren’t permanent fixes and these concessions will just reinvigorate the people complaining that their cause is justified.
Yes. They’re panicking. And because they’re incompetent, they’re just flailing and playing it by ear at this point, even though they’re completely tone deaf.
[Update a few minutes later]
Adding irrationality to lawlessness:
The officers’ responsibility is to the owners of the company, the shareholders. The business exists to create value, not to provide employment – employing workers is a function of the value added to the enterprise, not the need to create a more favorable election environment for the statist political party. Corporate officers who overlooked material tax consequences would be unfit to be corporate officers.
What is illegal and irrational is not a company’s commonsense deliberation over its costs, it is Obama’s edict. And look what attends this one: criminal prosecution if Obama’s Justice Department decides the business has falsely certified that its staffing decision was not motivated by Obamacare.
Think about that for a second. The waiver is illegal. It flouts the language of the Obamacare statute, under which the employer mandate is required already to have been implemented by now. There is nothing in the law that empowers Obama to waive the mandate, much less to attach lawless conditions to such a lawless waiver. A business that seeks the waiver and fails to pay the mandated tax (in lieu of providing the required coverage) is in violation of federal statutory law, regardless of its compliance with Obama’s outlaw edict. The payments required by the statute, after all, are owed to the public, not to Obama – he’s got no authority to deprive the government of these funds just because it would harm Democrats to collect them.
Yet, Obama proclaims his illegal waiver with impunity – Congress apparently unwilling to stop him. You, on the other hand, will be prosecuted for breaking the “law” if you do not comply to Obama’s satisfaction with the illegal and irrational condition he has unilaterally placed on his illegal waiver.
This is tyranny, plain and simple.