Even as the American Medical Association continues their relentless assault against the medical market through restrictions on both provider and consumer, Canadians finally seem to be warming up to the idea that perhaps government doesn't do things best.
Democrats and even more Republicans are banging the CAFE drum once again, to my intense consternation as both a conservationist and a libertarian. Not only will CAFE prevent the transition to sustainable and environmenally friendly fuels, but it also has resulted in an increase in the sale of SUVs and light trucks.
An efficient market depends on the consumer being both informed and rational in his choices. This obviously requires familiarity with the performance of the product (success rate, side effects, etc.) as well as an understanding of how the drug works. This is a bit much to ask of your average consumer, considering all of the education and training required to make a doctor or a pharmacologist. It would be a textbook case of a highly inefficient market with a great degree of misallocation of resources. In other words, patients would go broke as they died while pursuing ineffective treatments.
Nurse-practitioners apparently shouldn't be allowed to practice autonomously. The American Medical Association thinks they need to be supervised (read: employed) by a doctor at all times.This amuses me given that there is a vast and growing shortage of doctors.
The American Medical Association has been proposing one protectionist or statist piece of legislation after the next, and while their motives are just as impure as ever when it comes to challenging the growth of retail-store healthcare services, as Dr. Thomas Davis points out, these retail-chain clinics aren't the free market supporter's wet dream that some would have us believe.
At its annual meeting in Chicago this week the American Medical Association made several completely statist and asinine policy proposals.Radley Balko jokingly refers to them as the American Meddling Association. And he's completely on point.
The American Medical Association is sticking their fingers in the statism pot and demanding that people carry a certain type of health insurance. I couldn't decide whether to laugh, cry, or break some skulls when I read the language used in the resolution: Personal responsibility through forced participation. It sounds like an oxymoron.
The so-called "Citizens' Health Care Working Group," created by the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, which Michael F. Cannon of the Cato Institute accurately labeled as a more or less leftist front group, is soliciting comments on its interim recommendations on how to fix American healthcare. They of course, don't mention any of the obvious solutions.
The basic problem of government healthcare is that no one feels the costs of their actions. Government isn't held accountable for lack of access. Consumers aren't held accountable for abuse of medical resources. And healthcare providers have no incentive either to enter the field or to maintain a high level of quality of care. This is your classic commons situation.What to do about it? Surely the free market is an abysmal failure in this regard; just look at how much we're spending for coverage, which half the time we can't use anyway, right?
I think we can all agree that no matter whether we're talking international politics, economics, or conservation, our dependence on oil is a bad thing. It's not enough to simply cut back on the habit. We've got to quit. And that's something we'll never do as long as we aren't pushed to. The more the price of oil affects the consumer, the faster we'll move away from it.
Environmental conservation and libertarianism aren't words frequently heard in the same sentence, unfortunately. Instead when we think conservation, we think hippies. Hippies, annoying rangers and other officials tell us we aren't allowed to play in the park anymore, build a house on our own property, or drive that gas guzzling sports car.
Karl Marx would love the popular moves among politicians in various state governments and the federal government to ban so-called "junk" food in schools, and to "put healthy food in" convenience stores and on the tables of those they define as poor. It's a very elitist and arrogant mindset that promotes this ideology, and it needs to be addressed.
Ultimately, the war supporters in Congress prevailed in the vote on the resolution. Still, the vote was significant because it places every member of Congress on the record as supporting or not supporting the unconstitutional, costly, violent occupation of a country that never attacked us. This vote should serve as an important reminder to the American people of where their representatives really stand when it comes to policing the world, empire building, and war.
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