A Nod To The Gods

Watching European news broadcasts right now is like an insane demotic inversion of the Emperor’s new clothes. “To a fool these thousands of fit young Muslim men appear well dressed and well fed. But a wise man such as Your Majesty can easily see that they are desperate starving refugees in rags.” And so as the trains pull in to German railway stations to disgorge men who meet no known definition of “refugees” they are greeted on the platform by volunteers offering food and second-hand clothes. The cameras do their best to alight on a telegenic moppet or a covered woman, but, even when they do, you notice that they’re surrounded by a sea of confident vigorous males – who, according to the UN, make up 75 per cent of the “refugees”.

That would be an unusual demographic distortion in most emergency situations. If 75 per cent of the Titanic’s survivors had been men who’d left their women and children back on the ship, there might have been a few disapproving comments. But not here. And why complain that the Syrian refugees aren’t really “refugees”? After all, they’re not Syrian either. Only one in five of the arriving migrants are Syrians fleeing the implosion of their country. Here….

That’s a huge assumption Obama knows how to actually play chess, should be a checker board in front of him.

h/t Happy Acres for image

For decades, government encouraged us to pay for health care—even routine procedures—with insurance. But insurance is designed for large, rare expenditures, like your house catching fire or a heart attack.

When everything from head colds to backaches is paid for through insurance, neither the customer nor service provider pays much attention to what anything costs. I’m on Medicare now. I’m amazed that when I go to a doctor, no one even mentions price.

If we paid for everything that way—clothing, groceries, computers—everything would cost much more. No one would know when to shop around, when they were getting a great deal, or when to say: enough.

The more we enshrine the idea that “everyone must have health insurance,” the more big insurance companies can raise prices without worrying about customers fleeing. Forced government insurance steers everyone into a few big plans instead of letting individuals make decisions that foster competition. Hospitals and insurance companies are the ones really being helped.

It shouldn’t surprise us when big companies start out opposing regulation but then announce that they wholeheartedly support government’s latest “reform.”

By the time legislation is passed, the major players in the industry have had a role in writing the laws, ensuring that they are guaranteed a profit. here….

Too late.