Watch this video. Jon Stewart skewers Fox and CNN for their willful exclusion of Ron Paul from their coverage. It’s too good to not pass on!

Warning, the images in this video are not suitable for children or the faint of heart. Real images of stoning, genital mutilation and honor killings are shown so be prepared. While I’m actually opposed to our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I also think that we shouldn’t kid ourselves about what the Islamic faith is about. The treatment of women depicted in this video is supported by mainstream Islamic doctrine – these are not “radicals” – these are mainstream  Imams in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and elsewhere upholding these practices. Why should we be tolerant of this? I’m not tolerant of a religion that oppresses women so horribly, are you? Shar’ia is not just religious – it is also a governing structure for society, hence it is not comparable to other religions we “tolerate” in the U.S. Political Islam is a movement that seeks to expand the Muslim world and Shar’ia along with it. Are you actually prepared to say that this belief system is an alternate way of life that we should accept? I’m not, it’s pre-modern and horrific in its very nature – no thanks. No tolerance here for this repressive, violent, authoritarian and totalitarian belief system – how about you?  If you are “tolerant” of it, well perhaps you should watch this video again…

I love this video! It uses the hip-hop genre, in a kind of ‘battle’ set up between Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek. Each present their theory and you are left to choose (but i guess it’s  biased towards Hayek). I you ever really wanted to know the difference between free market economics and Keynesianism – but were afraid to ask, this is perfect for you. Click and enjoy.

For those of you who don’t know, Libertarians are in principled alignment with the so called ‘Austrian School of Economics’ and F. A. Hayek was an Austrian School Economist who made major contributions to our understanding of free enterprise. Okay, bye for now – I hope you all like this.

Technorati Tags: Hayek, Keynes

I just saw an interview with J. Craig Venter, famous for his participation in the human genome project and now CEO of Synthetic Genomics, in which he stated that he is creating a microbe which eats C02 and creates hydrocarbon fuel. That’s right, you heard me correctly. Using genetic engineering, they essentially assemble this little bug and it does this biologically. HOLY *^&%!

The interview is incredibly telling. Venter describes how this work is feasible and scalable, and how energy companies are investing to develop it as commercially viable. He describes how the resultant fuel would be usable in current combustion engines with no modifications. As I listened, I began to get angry though. First, you’ll note the questioner’s insistent tone when asking has about whether the current inaction in Washington, DC is hurting him and his obvious disappointment at Venter’s answer, which is essentially that he doesn’t need any help from the government. I can almost hear the gasps from AGW fetishists who believe the AGW is more evidence of the flawed nature of capitalism.

I then went to the web to research this topic and found myself a bit stymied. The green type of sites reporting on this interview focused on one comment, taken utterly out of context, in which Venter says that without scale, the companies working on this are ‘just playing’. They completely downplay the fact that he claims he has the funding to move ahead already from private industry, including 600 million usd from Exxon Mobil. There was very little other reporting on this topic. Can you believe that? I think that this is due to the fact that Venter isn’t singing from the AGW hymn book about needing to completely change our societies, economies and lives in order to survive. Rather, he proposes a solution that negates fossil fuel dependency and consumes vast quantities of C02 in one fell swoop, a solution that is at once breathtakingly elegant and simple, and that works with our existing industrial infrastructure.

Wow. Okay, I don’t want to get too excited because obviously this has a ways to go. But if he’s right, and look for yourself, he’s not claiming this is some whacked out idea, no, he has the science down pat and he’s a legitimate, credible serious person. He’s already rolling out a significant pilot program. So this isn’t just some hope – it’s real and viable. Do you realize what this means? First, all govt spending on ‘Green Everything’ is unnecessary. Worst case, from a public policy standpoint, we might want to put a carbon tax in place (I love the revenue neutral idea being proposed, btw, if we have to have one at all) to create stronger incentives to adopt it, although I don’t think it’s needed. But that’s it. We are done. No more IPCC, no more green proselytizing from every progressive political hack – no more teaching our children that doomsday is coming! We can stop giving vast sums of money to oil producing countries that prop up their evil regimes with petro-dollars. Okay, you get the picture.

My biggest question is why this isn’t leading every newscast in the world? Answer: Because the AGW issue is so politicized that it’s no longer about the environment. They simply couldn’t take it if their crisis was actually solved by the free market, not government, and all of their rent-seeking, anti-capitalist garbage was invalidated. Check it out – tell your friends, this could be the ‘game changer’ we’ve all been hoping for.

Technorati Tags: capitalism, global warming

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Video Tags: afghanistan, taliban

Technorati Tags: afghanistan, taliban

]]> http://libertariancomment.com/inside-afghanistan-fighting-alongside-stoned-afghan-soldiers/feed/ 0 http://libertariancomment.com/obamas-policy-fethishist-administration-exposed/ http://libertariancomment.com/obamas-policy-fethishist-administration-exposed/#comments Fri, 04 Dec 2009 20:52:22 +0000 Glenn http://libertariancomment.com/?p=157

Click here to see a truly funny send-up of the Obama  cabinet based on their lack of public sector experience. I apologize in advance as it’s fairly offensive to those of you on the left, but I think it’s so funny that it’s worth watching. For a more balanced view on Obama’s faith in social science (the word ‘science’ having as much validity as say “Christian Science” or “Scientology”), see my article http://libertariancomment.com/why-obama-thinks-the-right-is-crazy/

Technorati Tags: obama cabinet, pjtv, policy addicts

Is it me, or has the Daily Show/Colbert Show devolved into a propaganda tool for the Obama administration? I watched Colbert again lambaste the insurance industry last night, this time focusing on pre-existing conditions. What he – and most Americans – doesn’t know about how the health insurance industry works (or doesn’t, really) in the U.S., could fill a phone book.It’s particularly galling coming from Colbert and Stewart, given the snarky, ‘we’re the smart guys’ posture they take. On this issue, they demonstrate complete ignorance and are fanning populist flames with vicious rhetoric.

Let’s start with some basics. First, how does insurance, in  particular health insurance, work? Answer, a pool of people pay a premium to a company that will pay claims for health care services covered under a policy they’ve purchased. The assumption is that some people will use less than they pay for and some people more, and the process that comes up with the pricing and the composition of the pool of insured is based on actuarial analysis which is the study of the probability of events occurring and the cost scenarios that might emerge. This is pretty straightforward yes?

Okay, what about in the real world, how does it work if you are an insurance company in the U.S.? First of all, policies are designed with something less than the entire population of the U.S.  as the pool for a given product. Why is this? First the government requires that insurance companies operate state by state, so each policy is designed for a given state boundary. Second, you don’t have to buy health insurance, so it can build a pool of voluntary participants. Okay, so armed with your actuarial analysis, you then submit the proposed policy to your state insurance commissioner. In this submission are all the rules governing underwriting, which are the criteria for acceptance into a given risk pool. This includes the rules about pre-existing conditions. See, if too many sick people are in the pool, then the cost goes up for everyone. The insurer also projects a profit on the policy (pretty low as the health insurance is not a very profitable industry by any measure) and the state insurance commissioner evaluates the policy against all the rules in his state. Eventually, after modification and discussion, it’s approved and voila you have insurance.

My point is twofold. First, their is no magic – if you have too many sick people in a pool the pool doesn’t work. Second, all of these rules are already approved by the government. To somehow insinuate that this is inappropriate, unfair or abusive is to really just nonsense. Now, some states have “must issue” rules – and guess what? Coverage costs go through the roof? You know why? Because too many sick people apply and many healthy don’t – driving up the cost of insurance.

The bottom line is that the current health insurance system works exactly the way the government has made it work – I mean it’s regulated to death already and that’s a big part of the problem. Larger pools would make this much easier to manage, and, as well, some questions need to be asked about whether we need a mandate for coverage to ensure that enough healthy people participate to make it work. When Washington state had it’s “must issue” law in force, but no mandate, it had situations like the pregnant mother who wrote the state commissioner about how happy she was about getting insured while she was pregnant, and that she would sign up for insurance next time she got pregnant – exactly the behavior that drives up costs.

The issue of the mandate is a sticky one for a Libertarian. In a Libertarian world there would be no such need for govt involvement at all because the consequences of not having health insurance would be severe – no care or a serious encumbrance of your future earnings. But in the world we live in, we already mandate that a provider cannot refuse life saving treatment based on ability to pay, so everyone actually already operates with a government mandated catastrophic policy, we just haven’t funded it in a logical way. Do you get this? Therefore, if we are going to have this treatment mandate, then we have to have an insurance mandate. Btw, this mandate was put in place by Reagan – so those of you who love him so, chalk him up as taking a big step to state run health care.

Finally, the biggest problem in health care isn’t the insurance companies, it’s the cost of care. Anyone who actually knows where the money goes knows that the profits of the health care industry are small (3.3% on avg)  and that the real problem is the price of  and rising demand for care. A market based system has a chance of creating the right incentives, competition and pressures to bring delivery costs down: a government planned and managed system will only guarantee rationing if caps are put on costs, which is the current plan. Btw, none of this thinking is ideological – it’s fact based, but requires thoughtful reflection on how insurance actually works. If only someone would have the guts to speak up against everyone who is bashing the insurance industry, and explain to the policy makers and the American people that there is no magic pixie dust that the government can sprinkle to “give” everyone health care. It has to be paid for somehow and the only question is will we continue to let government continue to screw it up or will we actually give the free market a try? It looks like the former to me, but don’t think that after watching Colbert go on about it that you know a damn thing about the real problems we face.