Robert Tracinski skewers some libertarians for the socialism in their heads, but still misses why it's there

Here, chalking it all up to "unexamined collectivist assumptions" and mistakenly allowing "a little dominion of socialism over their thinking" and the left "trying to preserve that territory they own in your head" through various schemes like the estate tax.

In other words, they're insufficiently indoctrinated. You know, like all those intractable Russians who were sent to the Gulag for nothing more than mistakenly expressing incorrect thoughts.

It never dawns on Tracinski that ideology is a coin with socialism on the one side and libertarianism on the other.

The article is amusing because the "conservatives" he skewers for being insufficiently libertarian are or were aligned with the left and leftism: Charles Murray (former labor unionist, six years in the Peace Corps, "rebel"), Ronald Reagan ("I didn't leave the Democratic Party . . ."), Stuart Butler of health mandate infamy (Brookings), Milton Friedman (FDR functionary) and Megan McArdle (self-described former "ultraliberal").

With the example of McArdle on the estate tax before him, one might have hoped that Tracinski had stumbled into the origin of the socialism in our heads, but no, "there is no such collective entity as 'society.'"

The man wishing to leave his estate to that little society called his family might have begged to differ.

Libertarian Megan McArdle is a miserable cretin, a female Henry F. Potter

Libertarian Megan McArdle's got hers, tough nuggies to you if you don't. What a miserable cretin she is.

Here:

"Whatever mistakes we made 20 years ago, we’re stuck with them now. ... I’m not stuck with them; I have a stable job, a lovely if somewhat decrepit row home in our nation’s capital, and a marvelously cheap smartphone manufactured in China. It’s someone else who got stuck with the decisions the elites made . . .."

Mr. Potter: [to George Bailey] Look at you. You used to be so cocky. You were going to go out and conquer the world. You once called me "a warped, frustrated, old man"! What are you but a warped, frustrated young man? A miserable little clerk crawling in here on your hands and knees and begging for help. No securities, no stocks, no bonds, nothin' but a miserable little $500 equity in a life insurance policy. 

Most Of The Free-Rider Problem Is An EMTALA Problem, Not A General Healthcare Problem

Maybe a guy who can't count shouldn't mess with your health insurance.

One good estimate of the cost of uncompensated hospital and doctor care in 2008 was just $43 billion, or 5.7% of a hospital care economy of $750 billion that year. But total spending on health care is much higher than that. For example, for 2011 the total size of the healthcare economy has been estimated at $2.7 trillion.

Consistent with that, Megan McArdle recently cites an Urban Institute estimate here for the following year, 2009, showing costs of all uncompensated care, not just for hospitals and doctors, at $62 billion, saying "this is a relatively small amount of overall health spending ... in the trillions."

She's right. $62 billion is just 2.3% of a $2.7 trillion healthcare economy.

The spread between those two numbers for 2008 and 2009 is $19 billion. Assuming a 4% increase in the costs of the hospital/doctor portion only from 2008 to 2009, the spread declines to $17 billion. That's the non-hospital side of the free-rider problem in 2009, less than 1% of all healthcare spending in 2011. Passing ObamaCare to fix that is like firing a bazooka to kill a gnat.

Clearly the bulk of the free-rider problem has been in the hospitals, which will continue to experience problems with uncompensated care despite Obama's Affordable Care Act.

That problem exists because of Ronald Reagan's 1986 signature on EMTALA, requiring hospitals to provide care regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay. It drove up visits to emergency rooms over 26% in the first 15 years, and uncompensated cost totals over 600% since 1983, when they were just $6 billion compared with over $45 billion today. Those costs have been paid by all of us over time in a variety of ways, not the least of which have been increased healthcare insurance premiums, higher taxes, and longer waits in fewer available ERs.

While we're at it trying to overturn ObamaCare, EMTALA should be scrapped with it.

Libertarian Megan McArdle Makes Me Want To Puke

Because she thinks there is anything which can make abortion humane, here:

"I knew about the Gosnell case, and I wish I had followed it more closely, even though I'd rather not.  In fact, those of us who are pro-choice should be especially interested.  The whole point of legal abortion is to prevent what happened in Philadelphia: to make it safer and more humane.  Somehow that ideal went terribly, horribly awry.  We should demand to know why."

Abortion at any stage is the brutal murder of another human being, the mark of an unrefined, barbarous people, and our country is full of them. To exercise humanity in this situation would be to sterilize every woman who comes into an abortion clinic, and every man who put her there. They should have no right ever again to inflict such pain and injustice on another utterly defenseless human being.

Naked Capitalism Knows A Rival Ideology When It Sees One

It's an amusing attack on the libertarian ideologue Megan McArdle by the anarchist communist ideologue Yves Smith, here, at Naked Capitalism, if you think of it as a cat fight.

The comments are so disturbing to "Strelnikov" (appropriately continuing to use the pseudonym "Yves") that she's thinking of closing down free speech in the comments section for her "shaming" posts only. Call it perestroika.

(image source)

Who Will Buy Your Crappy Ass-et: Megan McArdle, or Jesus?

Have you lost your soul? Were you just your job? Are you fit for nothing now, a drag on society, a problem that can't be solved?

Megan McArdle thinks so, and her barren, soulless assumptions lead straight to war, to the gulag, and to the ovens where the unproductive assets of humanity can be "soaked up." In the language of the dismal economist, liquidated:

"Human capital is like almost any other form of capital: it is a depreciating asset. The longer you stay out of the workforce, the less valuable you are to potential employers. You lose market intelligence and industry connections. Your technical knowledge and skills atrophy.

"I was unemployed for basically two years between . . . 2001 . . . and . . . 2003. ... I felt the isolation and the desperate fear of everyone who doesn't have a 'real job', the people who don't know how they're going to earn enough over the next forty years to keep body and soul together.  I experienced real despair for the first time in my life. And it changed me, permanently.

"... What really matters is how it changed my outlook on the world. I became afraid then in a way that has never really left me. I obsess about economic security.  I catastrophize small setbacks. ...

"There was also the crushing sense of isolation, and failure. ...

"[M]illions of people, staring into the abyss of an empty future.  We don't know how to re-employ them. The last time this happened, in the Great Depression, World War II eventually came along and soaked up everyone in the labor force who could breathe and carry a toolbag.  I hope to God we're not going to do that again, so what are we going to do with all these people?

-- Megan McArdle, here

Such is the way of death. Many are they who walk in it. But there is a way where there is no fear, where everyone is valued, not for what they do, but for who they are, for whom the future is full because God inhabits it: 

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, [shall he] not much more [clothe] you, O ye of little faith?

Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?

(For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day [is] the evil thereof.

-- Matthew 6:25-34

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

-- Mark 8:35-36

Come unto me, all [ye] that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

-- Matthew 11:28

Unemployed? To Megan McArdle You're Just A Depreciating Asset

Here:

"Human capital is like almost any other form of capital: it is a depreciating asset."

In other words, your worth as a human being is purely economic.

Megan may have a job, but it masks a poverty of soul which lies at the heart of America's problems, where everything is fungible, including your house, and now you.

Want a vacation? Write a check on your HELOC account. Pregnancy inconvenient for your career? End it. Old people cost too much to take care of? Withhold food and water. 14 million unemployed?

"[W]hat are we going to do with all these people?"

Why, liquidate them, of course, like any other asset.

Anyone who will do anything for a job will do . . . anything.

Save your self. 

ObamaCare's High Risk Pools Flop, Only 18,000 Sign Up as of March

So says Megan McArdle here:

I've predicted that lots of parts of Obamacare will not work the way they're expected to.  But here's one I wouldn't have predicted: the high-risk pools, which were meant to tide people over until 2013, have signed up just 18,000 people as of March.

There were supposed to be millions of people who were uninsurable because of pre-existing conditions.  We heard lengthy testimony about their terrible plight.  I don't think it's too strong to say that this fear . . . was one of the main reasons offered for the health care overhaul.

Which just goes to show you that fear is a lousy reason to do anything, except run like hell from a bureaucrat wielding a butcher knife against your way of life.

The budgeted amount for the program was $5 billion to cover about 200,000 enrollees until ObamaCare kicks in in 2014, even though the Medicare actuary predicted there would be 400,000 enrollees (doesn't this tell us that we ought to wonder about everything else the Medicare actuary predicts?).

Now they're changing the rules to make it easier and cheaper to sign up for the high risk pools so the regime can say the program is a success.