The party has run out of booze

Germany Backtracks On Last Week's Summit

by Tyler Durden

Those curious why peripheral European bond yields have once again resumed their levitation creep higher, it is because not only did yesterday the key Merkel coalition partner, CSU, threaten to leave Germany's ruling party hanging "if further euro zone states secure bailouts, saying there were limits to how far his party was prepared to go", but today we have gotten even more furious backtracking on Mario Monti's history "success" less than a week earlier, after on one hand German opposition SPD has said it opposed Direct ESM aid to banks, but more importantly, the German Finance Ministry itself said that the entire bailout timeline is now in question, saying that it "remains unclear if Eurozone finance ministers will decide on Spain's request for banking sector aid at their next monthly meeting on July 9." The ministry also added that a decision could only come once the report on Spain by the troika - the European Commission, the ECB and the IMF - had been finalized. In other words, that much maligned Troika, which Monti had supposedly exorcised from intervening in the economies of Spain and Italy, will, after all be very much present, which also means that all the media spin about last week's "gamechanging" and unconditional bailout summit resolution, has been for nothing, in line with all the skeptical expectations.

Αn old-fashioned model

Two different stories

by RUSS ROBERTS 

Robert Samuelson has an interesting narrative in the Washington Post. He argues that the prosperity of the last 30 years was driven by consumer spending, consumer spending that came from a false sense of wealth as housing prices rose artificially high due to an expansion of credit:

We live in a world of broken models. To understand why world leaders can’t easily fix the sputtering global economy, you have to realize that the economic models on which the United States, Europe and China relied are collapsing. The models differ, but the breakdowns are occurring simultaneously and feed on each other. The result is that the global recovery flags, while pessimism and uncertainty mount.

An American Declaration of Independence From Big Government

 "We hold these truths to be self-evident ..."

by Richard Ebeling

The Declaration of Independence, signed by members of the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, is the founding document of the American experiment in free government. What is too often forgotten is that what the Founding Fathers argued against in the Declaration was the heavy and intrusive hand of big government.

Most Americans easily recall those eloquent words with which the Founding Fathers expressed the basis of their claim for independence from Great Britain in 1776:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Lamenting The Lost Legacy Of Independence Day

May providence have mercy on our nation, lest we end up getting what we deserve

By By Bill Frezza

Why do we still celebrate Independence Day? Is it a lingering habit, a mindless bit of nostalgia, a time to indulge in fireworks and barbecues, devoid of any deeper meaning? Can anyone honestly argue that our nation still honors the values, or practices the principles, for which our Founders fought?

Today, most Americans have been trained to be embarrassed by the “extremist” individualist ethos that made the protection of liberty the primary purpose of government. They have been taught to apologize for the shortcomings of the “rich white men” who led the revolution. A majority of Americans now subscribe to an expansive view of government as both great provider and beneficent leveler. Its primary purpose is to redress unequal or unhappy outcomes, regardless of their source, through wealth redistribution on a scale so vast that it mocks the concept “private property.”

The American way to Utopia

The Sovietization Of American Medicine

By Leonid Poretsky

For me, the expanded reach of an already bloated central government brings back bad memories of being a physician in the Soviet Union, which collapsed under the weight of its own bureaucratic inefficiencies two decades ago. I was among the many Soviets cheering for its demise. Now I worry that some of the most ruinous traits of the Soviet system are taking hold of American medicine.

I am not alone. Many opponents of “Obamacare” almost viscerally condemn what they call an unprecedented federal power-grab into personal healthcare. “What makes this so pernicious,” Paul D. Clements, a lawyer for the 26 states opposing the law argued in court, “is that the Federal Government knows that the citizenry is not going to take lightly the idea that there are huge, new Federal bureaucracies popping up across the country.”

Mr. Clements is correct. But perhaps even he does not fully fathom the degree to which Washington has already imposed its will on health-care delivery. American medicine, I fear, is falling increasingly under the control of a centralized health-care politburo that dictates how physicians diagnose, treat and monitor their patients.

Dear Person Seeking a Job : Why I Can't Hire You

Free Trip to Cabo

Potential employers have to respond to the incentives and disincentives that exist in today's world, and those do not favor conventional permanent employees.

by Charles Hugh-Smith

I know you're hard-working, motivated, tech-savvy and willing to learn. The reason I can't hire you has nothing to do with your work ethic or skills; it's the high-cost Status Quo, and the many perverse consequences of maintaining a failing Status Quo.

The sad truth is that it's costly and risky to hire anyone to do anything, and "bankable projects" that might generate profit/require more labor are few and far between. The overhead costs for employees have skyrocketed. So even though the wages employees see on their paychecks have stagnated, the total compensation costs the employer pays have risen substantially.

Thirty years ago the overhead costs were considerably less, adjusted for inflation, and there weren't billboards advertising a free trip to Cabo if you sued your employer. (I just saw an advert placed by a legal firm while riding a BART train that solicited employees to sue their employers, with the incentive being "free money" for a vacation to Cabo.)

Did Merkel Win or Lose?

Everyone on the euro Titanic was relieved that the ship's sinking could once again be postponed

by Pater Tenebrarum

It was interesting to read two articles in German news magazine 'Der Spiegel' that appeared to take completely opposing views on this particular matter.

One article considered her the clear loser of the summit, suffering a 'painful defeat'. 

“It is a painful defeat for Merkel. With the German parliament set to approve the ESM and the fiscal pact on Friday evening, Merkel had been eager to avoid making concessions to the southern Europeans. On the eve of the summit, the chancellor's advisers had ruled out the possibility of easing the rules governing access to the ESM. In particular, Merkel considered IMF oversight of aid recipients to be non-negotiable.

Now, however, she will travel in defeat back to Berlin, where she is scheduled to address the German parliament in the afternoon. Merkel's confidants began trying to put a positive spin on the summit results early on Friday morning. The chancellor had pushed through her maxim of "no liability without oversight," said Hermann Gröhe, general secretary of Merkel's Christian Democrats, in an interview on German breakfast television. Direct ESM aid to banks will only be allowed, he said, once the oversight authority is established at the ECB.

The EU is Out of Money. End of Story.

And Neither the Fed Nor the ECB Can "Print" To Save the Day

By Graham Summers

While various media outlets and “analysts” try to claim that the EU summit was somehow a success and that Europe’s issues are solved, the fact remains that Europe is out of money.  And I mean TOTALLY out of money.

I realize this flies in the face of what 99% of analysts are claiming. But this is a proven fact. Of the various entities that could hold the EU together (the ECB, the IMF, Germany, and the two bailout funds: the EFSF and the ESM) none and I mean NONE of them actually have the capital to do it.

I am continually bombarded with emails from people saying, "well, if things get bad the Fed or ECB will just print and everything is solved."

This is beyond wrong. It is just groupthink based on the idea that the Fed has intervened ever since the Great Crisis began in 2008 (ZeroHedge recently ran an article showing that the Fed has intervened in over two thirds of the months since the Crisis began).

Gradus ad Narcissum

"How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" "Practice."

By Mark Steyn

It's an old line, and perhaps an obsolescent one. I can't recall the last time I heard anyone use it. Americans don't seem to want to get to Carnegie Hall, not if American Idol is auditioning round the block. And practice is one of those things, like math, the education system seems to have ceded to the Asians. These days, China not only makes most of the pianos, but plays them. David Goldman (the Internet's "Spengler") likes to point out the correlation between the study of Western classical music and success in science. "There's a difference," he writes, "between an engineer and an engineer who plays Bach." Whenever he makes his case, even those of a conservative disposition fill up the comments section with objections: There's nothing wrong with an engineer who likes rock-'n'-roll, or country, or thrash metal or gangsta rap or grunge . . .

Obamacare Is Not Constitutional

The American people can correct the Supreme Court’s mistake

By Sen. Rand Paul

Political observers have described the 2010 Tea Party wave as an extraordinary assemblage of liberty-minded Americans who rallied around the Constitution in order to reclaim their country. One of the galvanizing forces was the passage of Obamacare — the national government’s takeover of our health care. Millions of Americans were enraged by this and other aspects of the Obama administration’s destructive political agenda, and they were sick and tired of their representatives’ failure to do anything to stop it. The 2010 wave election was a direct consequence of Obama’s unconstitutional ideals and czar-like power. And now, with the announcement of the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Obamacare, it is my belief that the American people will be motivated to reorder our political priorities as they did in 2010.

Walking to America

A Fourth of July remembrance of one boy's journey to the land of his dreams

By Jeffrey Lord 

Schmuel knew.

Schmuel was Schmuel Gelbfisz, born in Warsaw, Poland, in July 1879.

He was the eldest child of Hannah and Aaron Gelbfisz, who were Hasidic Jews. The family had lived in Poland for generations. Schmuel was the oldest of six children.

Two years after Schmuel was born, the Russian Czar Alexander II was assassinated and the blame was laid -- falsely -- to Jews. The Russian pogroms began. Tens of thousands of Jews fled to Warsaw, then an outpost of the Russian Empire. While this provided a safe haven of sorts, pretty soon the wave of anti-Semitism that had so murderously swamped Russia itself spread to the Russian-ruled Poland. Polish Jews were subjected to violence, to restrictive laws and higher taxes specifically targeted at Jews.

Judicial Betrayal

Conscience can be an implacable and inescapable punisher

By Thomas Sowell 

Betrayal is hard to take, whether in our personal lives or in the political life of the nation. Yet there are people in Washington -- too often, Republicans -- who start living in the Beltway atmosphere, and start forgetting those hundreds of millions of Americans beyond the Beltway who trusted them to do right by them, to use their wisdom instead of their cleverness.

President Bush 41 epitomized these betrayals when he broke his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge. He paid the price when he quickly went from high approval ratings as president to someone defeated for reelection by a little known governor from Arkansas.

Chief Justice John Roberts need fear no such fate because he has lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court. But conscience can be a more implacable and inescapable punisher -- and should be.

The eleventh commandment

Israel’s Emergence As Energy Superpower Making Waves

By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously lamented that Moses led the children of Israel for forty years of wandering in the desert until he found the only place in the Middle East where there wasn’t any oil.

But could Moses have been smarter than believed? Apparently the Canadians and the Russians think so, as both countries are moving to step up energy relations with a tiny nation whose total energy reserves some experts now think could rival or even surpass the fabled oil wealth of Saudi Arabia.

Actual production is still miniscule, but evidence is accumulating that the Promised Land, from a natural resource point of view, could be an El Dorado: inch for inch the most valuable and energy rich country anywhere in the world. If this turns out to be true, a lot of things are going to change, and some of those changes are already underway.

Israel and Canada have just signed an agreement to cooperate on the exploration and development of what, apparently, could be vast shale oil reserves beneath the Jewish state.

Detroit Has Run Out of Other People's Money

If there is a cure for Motown's fiscal woes, it's bankruptcy

By Shikha Dalmia

A sigh of relief swept through Detroit recently after a judge threw out a legal challenge to the “consent agreement” the city just signed with the state to clean its books and avoid bankruptcy. The lawsuit, filed by the city’s megalomaniacal legal counsel, represented a level of overreach ridiculous even by Detroit’s lofty standards. But in the tragicomedy that is Detroit, it would have been better if it had succeeded and expedited Motown’s rendezvous with bankruptcy.

If there is any solution to Detroit’s fiscal mess, it may lie in the legal, not political, arena.

Fiscal deficits have been a fact of life in Detroit for decades as residents and industry fled its high taxes, high crime, shoddy schools and erratic trash services, thus eroding its tax base. Now, however, Detroit is flat broke, with a $265 million deficit that it has run out of gimmicks to fix.

Incinerating America’s West

The purpose of the green prosecution is not to protect nature, but to put shackles on humankind

By Robert Zubrin 

As I write these lines, vast wildfires are sweeping through my home state of Colorado and other areas of the American west. Last week, two of my employees had to leave work early to rush home to evacuate their families from imminent danger. Hundreds of houses have already been destroyed, and thousands of acres of trees incinerated, and unknown myriads of wild animals burned alive.

This disaster was predictable, and promises to get worse. Over the past decade, from British Columbia to New Mexico, the world’s most rapid deforestation has been underway in the North American west, with an average of nearly six million acres of forest lost per year — roughly double the three million acres per year rate in Brazil. The culprits here, however, have not been humans, but Western Pine Beetles, whose epidemic spread has turned over 60 million acres of formerly evergreen pine forests into dead red tinder, dry ammunition awaiting any spark to flare into catastrophe.

On Equality and Inequality

Equality, Natural Rights and Killing Fields

By Ludwig von Mises

Different and Unequal

The doctrine of natural law that inspired the 18th century declarations of the rights of man did not imply the obviously fallacious proposition that all men are biologically equal. It proclaimed that all men are born equal in rights and that this equality cannot be abrogated by any man-made law, that it is inalienable or, more precisely, imprescriptible. Only the deadly foes of individual liberty and self-determination, the champions of totalitarianism, interpreted the principle of equality before the law as derived from an alleged psychical and physiological equality of all men.

The French declaration of the rights of the man and the citizen of November 3, 1789, had pronounced that all men are born and remain equal in rights. But, on the eve of the inauguration of the regime of terror, the new declaration that preceded the Constitution of June 24, 1793, proclaimed that all men are equal "par la nature." From then on this thesis, although manifestly contradicting biological experience, remained one of the dogmas of "leftism." Thus we read in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences that "at birth human infants, regardless of their heredity, are as equal as Fords."[1]

Angela Merkel is Playing You For Fools

Taking Germany out of the picture

By Raoul Ilargi

Oh, come on, leave the girl alone already. First off, all those people talking about a solution for the eurozone need to finally understand there ain't no such thing. And whatever slim chance of a solution the most optimistic - delusional - among them may be so desperate to cling on to, at least they should recognize that Angela doesn't hold the keys to the city. She herself knows it: she's just another gal knocking at the gates, even if she's dressed as the empress.

A thought experiment: how would you solve the euro crisis if Germany were not part of the equation? If you would have to put the de facto German contribution to the puzzle at zero, neutral? What would you be left with then, and what steps would have to be taken to come to a solution? If the sole remaining big players were, let's see, France, Spain and Italy?

That changes the picture, doesn't it? Take Germany out and all you're left with is pretty much roadkill. Plus a motley crue of comparatively small barely breathing rodents like Holland, Finland and Austria.

Two Ways, But Where To?

Electoral fear may be the only medicine

By Anthony de Jasay

Having for a pulpit a regular column in the New York Times, Paul Krugman speaks to us as one who is really sure about what is what. He is also thoroughly exasperated by the pigheaded blindness of those of us who have their hands on the levers of policy and are responsible for the astronomical waste and needless pain inflicted on the economies on both sides of the Atlantic and especially on the Eurozone. His thesis is that we are actually in a state of genuine depression, involving a loss of potential output that hardly bears thinking about. The depression is of our own making and is unnecessary, serving no purpose. It ought to be and could be terminated forthwith.

When Push Comes to Shove ...

Roberts switched views to uphold health care law

By Jan Crawford

(CBS News) Chief Justice John Roberts initially sided with the Supreme Court's four conservative justices to strike down the heart of President Obama's health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, but later changed his position and formed an alliance with liberals to uphold the bulk of the law, according to two sources with specific knowledge of the deliberations.

Roberts then withstood a month-long, desperate campaign to bring him back to his original position, the sources said. Ironically, Justice Anthony Kennedy - believed by many conservatives to be the justice most likely to defect and vote for the law - led the effort to try to bring Roberts back to the fold.

"He was relentless," one source said of Kennedy's efforts. "He was very engaged in this."

But this time, Roberts held firm. And so the conservatives handed him their own message which, as one justice put it, essentially translated into, "You're on your own."

Go figure, the poorest place in Europe is run by Communists

Next stop, Greece

By Simon Black

Ah Moldova… the poorest country in Europe, which just so happens to have had a Communist party majority in its parliament since 1998.

These two points are not unrelated.

Despite having achieved its independence from the Soviet Union over 20 years ago, the state is still a major part of the Moldovan economy…from setting prices and wages to media, healthcare, agricultural production, air transport, and electricity.

Under such management, it’s no wonder, for example, that Moldova has to import 75% of its electricity. It is the exact opposite of self-sustaining.

The government does a reasonable job of chasing away foreigners as well.

It's Never Been Better

As a Share of Household Spending, U.S. Has Most Affordable Food in World 

by Mark Perry

We hear reports all the time that real household incomes are stagnant or falling, the middle class is disappearing, household wealth has declined, and income inequality is rising.  All of those reports might make one think that the standard of living for the average American is bad and getting worse.  But here's one basic measure of a country's standard of living that shows Americans are better off than their consumer counterparts anywhere in the world: The share of household consumption expenditure on food consumed at home, see table below (USDA data here).  

Relative to our total household spending, Americans have the cheapest food on the planet - only 6.6% of the average household budget goes to food consumed at home.  European countries like Spain, France and Norway spend twice that amount on food as a share of total expenditures, and consumers in countries like Turkey, China and Mexico spend three times as much of their budgets on food as Americans.  

Oh, How the Mighty are Falling

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells"

By Mark Grant

While the markets look at what took place at the last Summit and rally; just wait, it won’t last long. The markets are getting mislead, one more time, by the spin that Europe places on events; by the focus that the giant European propaganda machine spits out from various sources again and again and again. You may recall, in the not too distant past, how the firewall was the thing, how the money needed to be bigger and how we were all led to believe that this giant, massive wall of Euros would protect the core nations of Europe. These nations included Spain and Italy without question and now the first mighty oak has fallen as Spain stepped up to the plate and swung the begging bat.

Saving everybody's face

The real victor in Brussels was Merkel

By Wolfgang Münchau

Mario Monti faced down the German chancellor and won the battle. He will survive a few more weeks or months in politics. It was clever of him to threaten a veto on something Angela Merkel badly needed. He had her in the corner. It was an example of classic EU diplomacy.

But this was only the foreground spectacle. If you look behind the curtain, you will find that, for Italy at least, nothing has changed at all. The European Stability Mechanism was already able to purchase Italian bonds in the open market. The instrument was there, but not used. The agreed changes are subtle. Italy must still sign a memorandum of understanding, and subject itself to the troika – the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission.

A New Health Care System

What can go wrong ?

Learning To Laugh At the State

The state, with all of its coercive power, can’t take that away

by James Miller

I’ll be the first to admit the incredible aggravation I feel whenever liberty is trampled upon by the state’s obedient minions.  Everywhere you look, government has its gun cocked back and ready to fire at any deviation from its violently imposed rules of order.  A four year old can’t even open a lemonade stand without first bowing down and receiving a permit from bureaucrats obsessed with micromanaging private life.  The state’s stranglehold on freedom is as horrendous as it is disheartening.

The worst part is that the trend shows no signs of slowing down, let alone reversing.  Politicians are always developing some harebrained scheme to mold society in such a way to circumvent the individual in favor of total dictation.  If it isn’t politicians, then it’s an army of unelected bureaucrats acting as mini-dictators.  As the late Swedish economist Gustav Cassel once lectured:

Is this 1936?

But while the Justices continued to dance in 1936, the music had died

By David Bernstein

Before the ACA decision was announced, many liberal pundits warned that the Supreme Court was on the verge of repeating its mistake in 1936, when the Court revealed that retained a 5-4 majority hostile to broad regulation of economic activity.  These pundits suggested that if the modern Court invalidated the ACA, it would be repeating the mistake of its conservative New Deal-era predecessor.  The Court would then face a backlash of the sort that led to FDR’s Court-packing plan, and ultimately to the famous “switch in time that saved nine.”

Egypt Holds Its Breath

The junta certainly has no intention of abandoning its vast economic empire

by Omar Ashour

“You are the authority, above any other authority. You are the protectors, whoever seeks protection away from you is a fool...and the army and the police are hearing me,” said Egypt’s president-elect, Mohamed Morsi, to hundreds of thousands in Tahrir Square. A man imprisoned following the “Friday of Rage” (January 28, 2011) took the presidential oath in Tahrir on a “Friday of Power Transfer” (June 29, 2012).

But he almost did not.

Ten days earlier, on June 19, I was with a group of former Egyptian MPs in Tahrir Square. One received a phone call informing him that a senior Muslim Brotherhood leader was coming to announce that the group was being blackmailed: either accept the constitutional addendum decreed by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which practically eviscerated the presidency, or the presidential election’s outcome would not be decided in the Brothers’ favor. An hour later, the senior figure had not shown up. “The talks were about to collapse, but they resumed,” said the former MP. “Hold your breath.”

The Origin Of Money

Who should create the monetary medium?

by John Aziz

Markets are true democracies. The allocation of resources, capital and labour is achieved through the mechanism of spending, and so based on spending preferences. As money flows through the economy the popular grows and the unpopular shrinks.  Producers receive a signal to produce more or less based on spending preferences. Markets distribute power according to demand and productivity; the more you earn, the more power you accumulate to allocate resources, capital and labour. As the power to allocate resources (i.e. money) is widely desired, markets encourage the development of skills, talents and ideas.

Planned economies have a track record of failure, in my view because they do not have this democratic dimension. The state may claim to be “scientific”, but as Hayek conclusively illustrated, the lack of any real feedback mechanism has always led planned economies into hideous misallocations of resources, the most egregious example being the collectivisation of agriculture in both Maoist China and Soviet Russia that led to mass starvation and millions of deaths. The market’s resource allocation system is a complex, multi-dimensional process that blends together the skills, knowledge, and ideas of society, and for which there is no substitute. Socialism might claim to represent the wider interests of society, but in adopting a system based on economic planning, the wider interests and desires of society and the democratic market process are ignored.

This complex process begins with the designation of money, which is why the choice of the monetary medium is critical.

Like all democracies, markets can be corrupted.

Whoever creates the money holds a position of great power — the choice of how to allocate resources is in their hands. They choose who gets the money, and for what, and when. And they do this again and again and again. 

Chief Justice Roberts and His Apologists

Some conservatives see a silver lining in the ObamaCare ruling. But it's exactly the big-government disaster it appears to be

By JOHN YOO

White House judge-pickers sometimes ask prospective nominees about their favorite Supreme Court justice. The answers can reveal a potential judge's ideological leanings without resorting to litmus tests. Republican presidential candidates similarly promise to appoint more judges like so-and-so to reassure the conservative base.

Since his appointment to the high court in 2005, the most popular answer was Chief Justice John Roberts. But that won't remain true after his ruling on Thursday in NFIB v. Sebelius, which upheld President Barack Obama's signature health-care law.

Justice Roberts served in the Reagan Justice Department and as a White House lawyer before his appointment to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and then to the Supreme Court by President George W. Bush. Yet he joined with the court's liberal wing to bless the greatest expansion of federal power in decades.

Germany Cries: "Europe Is Coming For Our Money"

Greece Promptly Obliges

by Tyler durden

"Greece is an exception in the Euro Zone" - Angela Merkel, December 9, 2011

"Exception from ESM Seniority only applies to Spanish aid" - Angela Merkel, June 29, 2012

It took about a year, but finally Germany, with a little assistance from Merkel on Friday morning, has figured it out. And is now blasting it on the front pages of its various newpapers:

Europe is coming for our money!

What else does Die Welt say:

When economic historians in a few years determine the turning point at which the euro zone turned into a debt community, they may refer to the last Thursday night. In those dramatic hours when Angela Merkel after massive pressure from Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy buckled - and agreed to an agreement whose scope is now very difficult to estimate.

Government Medical "Insurance"

Everyone has the right to free medical care, but there is, in effect, no medicine and no care

by Murray N. Rothbard

One of Ludwig von Mises's keenest insights was on the cumulative tendency of government intervention. The government, in its wisdom, perceives a problem (and Lord knows, there are always problems!). The government then intervenes to "solve" that problem. But lo and behold! instead of solving the initial problem, the intervention creates two or three further problems, which the government feels it must intervene to heal, and so on toward socialism.

No industry provides a more dramatic illustration of this malignant process than medical care. We stand at the seemingly inexorable brink of fully socialized medicine, or what is euphemistically called "national health insurance." Physician and hospital prices are high and are always rising rapidly, far beyond general inflation. As a result, the medically uninsured can scarcely pay at all, so that those who are not certifiable claimants for charity or Medicaid are bereft. Hence, the call for national health insurance.

But why are rates high and increasing rapidly? The answer is the very existence of healthcare insurance, which was established or subsidized or promoted by the government to help ease the previous burden of medical care. Medicare, Blue Cross, etc., are also very peculiar forms of "insurance."

Laissez-Faire Learning

The Emperor is still naked

by David Greenwald

As a teacher in a public high school, I am daily confronted with the lamentable realities of state-monopoly education. Student apathy, methodological stagnation, bureaucratic inefficiency, textbook-publishing cartels, obsessive preoccupation with grades, coercive relationships, and rigid, sanitized curricula are just a few of the more obvious problems, attended by the cold-shower disillusionment and gradual burnout among teachers to which they almost invariably lead.

While outcomes such as these are certainly tragic, the process that produces them is not exactly the stuff of Greek theater. There is no climactic battle, no cathartic denouement, no salvific moral lesson to be taken home when the curtain falls, and seldom are there any readily identifiable heroes or villains. It is not a single, epic calamity but a thousand trivial defeats a day, each too mundane and too quickly obscured by its successor to be considered noteworthy. Like a bad movie, public education somehow manages to be both tragic and boring. It is only its cumulative result that would have impressed Sophocles.