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POPSFraming your Health Notice that the discount mentioned here for not having a gun is the same thing as a penalty. The difference is only a matter of framing. You have to have health insurance and if you don't have a gun it will be 30% cheaper. If you go out and buy a gun you will have to pay 30% more. The difference comes in what you assume as the starting point, gun ownership or not, but the incentive effect is the same: have a gun, pay more.
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POPSThe Predator Insurance Company The breathless tone of statements like the one below seem to suggest it is news that insurance companies want to make money. The reason we would rely on insurance companies whose business model is to "target coverage on the healthy and delay payments to the sick" is that the people buying insurance have the opposite incentives and we think that both parties in a free market will set the price at the most efficient level, the level that reflects the actual scarcity value of the goods and services being traded. It is like saying why let the prices of shares be set by stock brokers since they just want buy low and sell high? Because the people selling them have the opposite incentives and we think the price that results from their exchange will best reflect the underlying values of the goods involved.
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POPSThanks, Obama Rich Lowry cites Hawthorne in explaining how Obama has revived the Republican party. Maybe Obama can work this into his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize which, after all, he has to be able to point to some concrete accomplishment to be able to accept the prize.
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POPSthe giant hole What this argument leaves out is Fannie and Freddie. The evil and greedy bankers (curiously intent on making loans that could not be repaid) were able to sell these loans to Fannie and Freddie. If there had not been these quasi-governmental corporations backing them they would not have been making loans and they would never have been capitalized. It may be true that there was a "giant hole" in the safety net, but the truck that drove through it was financed by the government's own creatures.
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POPSAre we worth Are we worthy of his oneness? Can we be mature enough to wait until the world stops laughing and starts to actually do something to help us? Notice that when it comes to taking about what Obama's concessions have actually gotten us he comes up with rather slim pickings. Russia and China "agreed to toughening sanction"? Really? I heard they said they would think about it. Given that Iran has been stiffing the international community for a couple of decades on this issue that they would have had enough time to think about it by now.
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POPSSaul Alinsky froze my ass So it turns out that the reason I had to take a bus to U of C all those years was because Saul Alinsky's Woodawn Organization opposed and had torn down an L-stop to the neighborhood? He is lucky he is dead now.
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POPSoriginalism vs. policy judgments good point being made here. Breyer's thinking depends on estimate of a policy's outcome, something he piously refused to consider when thinking about other rights. .
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POPSTough some onerous restrictions--having a job?
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POPSyahoo gun lobby doesn't need the Republicans. the clips are in reversed order
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POPSLiterally A great example of the Gray Lady's stuffiness. This is why you should read British Newspapers.
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