How Can You Oppose Health Care for Children?

Congress has again passed an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), only to have it vetoed again. That has given its backers yet another chance to proclaim how much they care for children and rehash attacks against Bush, as when Lois Capps (D-CA) called it “denying vital healthcare to some of the most vulnerable in our society,” and promise to try again next year. Unfortunately, however, their assertions are less than convincing.

Proponents begin by criticizing Bush’s veto because of his previous fiscal profligacy. So critics attack him for spending too much (for policies they usually would spend even more on), then use that to criticize him for spending too little. Unfortunately, while his administration certainly can be criticized for its rapid growth in spending, that is not an argument for him to continue that pattern.

The slow, systematic destruction of the dollar’s purchasing power

It’s interesting to look the producer price index and consider how extreme and relentless are price increases over time, and it strikes me that the lack of public outcry about this must represent some sort of price-trend acculturation that has taken place. We have come to expect it, the way we expect government to rob us of 30-40% of our income through one means or another.

The dollar: the true passenger bill of rights

OK, air travel can be a mess. There is nothing so frustrating as delays, especially delays on the tarmac. To some, this is a reason to have government create and enforce a so-called passenger bill of rights. In fact, New York is just days away from being the first state to have such positive rights enforced by the power of law. That said, we already have a passenger bill of rights: the dollar. You see, if you are willing to pay the price, you can have aircraft on standby ready to hustle you to your destination, 24/7.

Victims on Trial: The Everyday Business of Courts

In a courtroom packed with purported criminals, not even one of the people who appeared before the judge was a danger to society. Nearly all were in for victimless crimes. The two who had perpetrated actual crimes — petty theft from Wal-Mart and the local mall — could have easily been dealt with without involving the state. So far as I could tell, the place could have been emptied out completely and our little community would have been no worse off, and massive human suffering could have been avoided. But that’s not the way it works. These people, overwhelmingly black and poor but dressed very nicely in the hope of impressing the master, found themselves entangled in the web and thereby elicited the glare and killer instinct of the spider. How painful it was to watch and not be able to do anything about it.

The Corporate Form, Limited Liability, and the State

A common complaint of anticorporate libertarians and self-described anarchists is that corporations are creatures of the state. The limited-liability feature of the corporate form, they claim, and the ability of corporations to raise large amounts of capital are state-granted privileges. Two important replies to such claims must make their way into cultural awareness: (1) we need corporations if we want any decent standard of living; and (2) these corporate powers would exist without the state.
Subscribe to