Tyler Cowen

Around the Web: ObamaCare Edition

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics , , , , , , ,

Over at the Independent Institute’s blog, the Beacon, Melancton Smith worries about SCOTUS’s ruling and how it will be viewed by tax-hungry politicians:

Roberts is correct that Congress often uses the taxing power to influence conduct, but all the examples that he gives (taxes on imported goods, cigarette taxes, etc.), focus on discouraging conduct not compelling conduct. He cites no example of where Congress taxes someone for not doing something. I realize that this is a fine distinction I am making, but in my view Congress does more violence to the dignity of the individual by taxing him for not buying insurance than taxing him for buying a pack of smokes.

Yes, the taxing power is not equal to the full regulatory power of the government brought on by use of the Commerce Clause, but I fear that the Court has given power hungry legislators a road map of how to augment federal power using the tax power.

Yes, it’s true that the ruling on ObamaCare has given legislators a clear path to using the tax power, but this is precisely why the ruling is going to be good for federalism in the long run. Americans are notoriously stubborn when it comes to taxes (and I wouldn’t have it any other way baby!) and this new ruling is essentially forcing legislators to tax people directly rather than in the roundabout way (through the Commerce Clause) that has been done since the fascistic New Deal-era. Continue reading →

The Future of ObamaCare: Massachusetts Edition

Brandon Christensen Politics , , , , ,

I apologize for the lack of activity on this blog lately. School is either just out or finishing up, so I’m sure blogging will pick up in a few days or so.

Anyway, I found this article via Twitter the other day. It’s about the debate going on in Massachusetts about RomneyCare and how to control the costs that are spiraling out of control. Unfortunately, the article is a bit skinny on details and I am sure the debate is focused on keeping the status quo or giving the government an even greater role in health care markets, but I found this line from a state representative (and Democrat) to be most informing:

“The market is most certainly not working. The market is absolutely broken. Health care costs have been rising at 6.7-8% annually over the past decade.”

Yikes. I have a question: if you break a man’s legs and then tell him to run a five-minute mile, will he succeed? The rising costs, of course, are the real problem here, and one that won’t be fixed by introducing more incentives to keep prices both ambiguous and in some cases arbitrary.

RomneyCare, for those of you who don’t know (on this blog? yeah right!) has served as the blueprint for ObamaCare and it involves a nasty combination of forcing people to buy to buy insurance and subsidizing those who do not (or cannot due to the predictable price increase of insurance after the mandate went into effect).

There is no doubt in my mind that actual market-based solutions were proposed in the debates. Here are a couple via economist Tyler Cowen: Continue reading →

A Few Good Debates

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I have often thought that debating other people is just as good (if not better) for learning about other how other people think (and imagine things) as reading a book on a subject.  In this spirit, I thought it’d be cool to point out some of the great debates I’ve had a pleasure of being a part of either though participation or simply as an observer.

Cato Unbound is by far the best place to go if you want to get a good, scholarly, but still colloquial, debate on a topic.  This month’s lead essay is on ‘Bleeding Heart Libertarianism’ and features responses from a number of prominent academics.  I highly recommend taking some time to read through the whole symposium.

Over at the blog Coordination Problem, economist Steve Horwitz takes a grad student (Daniel Kuehn) out for a beating in the proverbial woodshed in the ‘comments’ section.

Again in the ‘comments’ section, I take Jacques Delacroix to school on matters of foreign policy and the law.

And at MarginalRevolution, co-bloggers Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok go at it on banking institutions.  Here is Part 1 (by TC), Part 2 (AT), Part 3 (TC), and Part 4 (AT).

All of these are tough reads with lots of top scholars debating big ideas (save for me, though Jacques is a world-renowned scholar on international trade and development), so you might want to come back to this post and click around a little bit at a time.  All of the debates are highly, highly recommended.

Oh, and the Mises Institute has their new blog up and running (it’s very good): The Circle Bastiat

Native American Sovereignty

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I have been a proponent of abolishing, outright, the Bureau of Indian Affairs for a long time. In its place, I would either grant the Indian tribes full-fledged sovereignty with reparations for stolen property, or would grant the reservations statehood into the union of the United States federal republic.

If you’ll notice, this proposal goes hand-in-hand with my other writings on decentralizing political power in other various parts of the world, and I think that the issue of sovereignty for Native Americans goes along nicely with this theme.  Tyler Cowen recently directed me to a piece in the Economist that writes about just this topic, so I am not nearly as idealistic and young as some of you might think.

I think this decentralized process is happening for a reason, and that the reason is overwhelmingly good: the world’s markets are becoming increasingly integrated, and as a result, political power is becoming increasingly irrelevant except on a largely local or regional scale.

If we want to avoid the mistakes of the past, including slavery and horrific, large-scale wars, then we would do well to realize and affirm that decentralized governance and integrated markets are extremely beneficial to mankind. In affirming this, we would likewise do well to recognize that when people want more autonomy in governance we should grant it to them, especially in cases where post-colonial states exist. States themselves are largely illegitimate, and the post-colonial ones are the most guilty of this crime. There is no reason to pretend that we have to respect the sovereignty of post-colonial states ruled by dictators, and every reason to respect the wishes of large swathes of the people in these post-colonial states for more political autonomy. Continue reading →