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Today’s Pickings From the Webvine is a don’t miss collection of blog posts focused on one of the major defects of the left vision of governance. The occasion for this was granting of exemptions to Obamacare by Kathleen Sebelius of HHS. A number of our favorites; Streetwise Professor, W. W. in Democracy in America Blog, Jennifer Rubin, Yuval Levin, Ed Morrissey, Peter Wehner, WSJ editors, have cogent thoughts. One blogger pulled up this from Federalist Paper 62; “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.”
Read Pickings and remember why it is we fight against these people in Washington.
If you thought government was out of control before, just wait. Craig Pirrong explains how Congress’ gifts of discretionary control to federal agencies means we are going to be ruled by thousands of bureaucrats and their whims.
HHS Czarina–I mean Secretary–Kathleen Sebelius has deigned to grant waivers from Obamacare mandates to big companies like McDonalds and Jack in the Box, and some big unions. Get ready for this Brave New World, and not just in health care.
…In the terms of the economics literature, Obamacare, Frank-n-Dodd, etc., are incomplete contracts that do not specify actions in all eventualities. Instead, they largely create governance mechanisms and delegate residual control rights. In the event, the rights of control are delegated to political appointees and staffers at Federal cabinet departments and agencies.
These control rights determine bargaining power. And what that means is that in health care and finance–meaning, in just about every economic activity, because virtually every business intersects these sectors–virtually everything will be a negotiation between the government and those in its thrall–meaning the rest of us. (The word thrall in its noun form, by the way, is a synonym for” serf.”) These control rights also determine the allocation of the bargaining surplus–who gets the goodies, and who gets screwed. …
…This corporatist, highly personalized, transactional system (all words that describe the current Russian government, by the way), will condemn the US to years of stagnation. They will be a drag on growth, and provide an incentive for able individuals to devote their talents to negotiating for rents with their governmental overlords, rather than thinking of and implementing new ways to create things that people value. …
The Economist’s Democracy in America Blog has W.W. discussing Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and the crucial importance of limiting government power with clearly stated laws.
…Hayek draws out the difference between “a free country” and “a country under arbitrary government”. A country counts as free only if its government is bound by the rule of law, which, according to Hayek, “means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand”. Typically, these rules, once fixed, are written down and then published through official state organs. The idea is that politically-determined rules need to be relatively fixed and publicly known in order to create a stable and certain framework in which individual planning and complex social coordination can flourish. The goal of replacing arbitrary government with the rule of law implies for Hayek, among other things, that executive discretion ought to be reduced “as much as possible”. …
…For Hayek, the rule of law means that these constraining rules must not play favourites, but rather must embody ideals of impartiality, generality, and equality before the law. Hayek’s proposal for a generality or non-discrimination amendment to the constitution (defended here by James Buchanan) nicely illustrates what he took to be the practical upshot of his ideal of the rule of law. …
Jennifer Rubin weighs in on how giving government officials’ arbitrary latitude to decide how rules will be enforced greatly increases government power, and greatly increases the amount of resources used to curry the favor of bureaucratic tyrants, rather than producing something of worth in the economy.
…This is one more example of the pattern we have seen since the closing weeks of the Bush administration. As the bailouts and mind-numbingly complex legislation multiplies, the private sector becomes rife with rent-seekers, looking to spin the dials and eke out some preferential treatment from the heavy hand of government. CEOs are chosen for their political and PR skills, not their prowess as wealth creators. Business judgment is clouded and distorted as businessmen must look over their shoulders to avoid the wrath of bureaucrats and elected officials.
The fact that these judgments are unmoored to any fixed rules and depend on the whim of government officials makes it all the worse. If the rules are unclear and the name of the game is about access, the opportunities for corruption multiply. In fact, it’s hard to tell what corruption is. …
Yuval Levin brings our attention to a slippery slope that increases government power and corruption, and weakens the economy and innovation.
One of the problems with massive, complicated government regulations is that they create a lot of room for regulator discretion, and therefore a lot of room for unequal treatment of different players in the market. Many opponents of Obamacare argued before the legislation was enacted that it would do just that throughout the healthcare sector—would empower the federal government to pick favorites rather than allowing for simple uniform rules that enable the kind of competition and consumer choice that can actually help control costs.
We can already see this happening in practice, even long before most of Obamacare’s most significant rules and regulations go into effect. The Department of Health and Human Services announced yesterday that 30 corporations (including McDonald’s, Jack in the Box, and a New York teachers’ union) would receive exemptions from a rule that would have required them to raise the minimum annual benefit in their employee insurance plans.
The exemptions themselves are good news, since the rule would have forced these companies to drop their employee coverage, leaving almost a million workers without the insurance they had before Obamacare. But it means that these companies now need permission from the administration to offer their employees a benefit they have offered for years. And of course, many other companies—those without the lobbying operation of a company the size of McDonald’s, or without the access to liberal policymakers that a NY teachers’ union has—can’t get the same permission, and so can’t compete on a level playing field, or offer coverage that might entice the best qualified people to work for them. This kind of government by whim, and not by law, is the essence of the regulatory state. We are about to see a whole lot more of it—unless the health-care law enacted in March is repealed.
Ed Morrissey blogs about big government helping out big business, while everyone else with less power gets Obamacare expenses. He makes a good point of the arrogance of lawmakers, with little to no experience in the real world, thinking that they know how to run a segment of the economy better than everyone else.
…First, let’s point out that the law turned out to be unworkable, almost before it even got started. Dictating percentages for administration costs in insurance plans isn’t the job of the federal government anyway, but more to the point, that issue is obviously not determinative in value to the consumer — as these waivers proved. This shows what happens when people with no experience in an industry decide that they can construct it better than the market has structured itself.
The proper action would have been to repeal at least this portion of the law in order to give a level playing field to everyone. By granting a few dozen waivers at the outset, though, the White House has amplified the uncertainty and arbitrariness in ObamaCare even further. At least insurers and employers had a figure that they could use for planning. Now there is no standard at all, except for whatever Kathleen Sebelius decides she likes — and whom she wants to favor.
The Rule of Law depends on an environment with clear regulation and unbiased enforcement. From the start, ObamaCare lacked any clarity in regulation. Congress filled the bill with the phrase “The Secretary shall determine” in place of establishing rules and regulations for the massive regulatory regime Congress created. Now, the White House has added arbitrary enforcement to uncertain regulation and opaque processes. This is not the Rule of Law, but the Whim of Autocracy.
Peter Wehner also comments on the fallout from implementing the monstrous legislative mess that Congress passed.
In interpreting a key Department of Health and Human Services announcement, the New York Times reported that so far, 30 insurers, employers, and union plans, responsible for covering about one million people, have been given one-year waivers by the government on the new rules that phase out annual limits on coverage for limited-benefit plans, also known as “mini-meds.” In the words of the Times, “the waivers have been issued in the last several weeks as part of a broader strategic effort to stave off threats by some health insurers to abandon markets, drop out of the business altogether or refuse to sell certain policies.”
This action highlights one of the great dangers of ObamaCare, which is that every health-care decision now has to run through the federal government. Private companies have to bow before its throne, asking for waivers and massively complicating their own lives. The federal government is now in a much stronger position to pick winners and losers and rig the game. …
…The waivers are also the Obama administration’s attempt to minimize the negative impact of ObamaCare less than a month before the midterm election. It’s now clear that the new health-care law was very poorly constructed and is having enormous implementation problems. To issue waivers to undo the damaging effects of a new law is a very bad sign. No wonder so few Democratic candidates are running on their support for ObamaCare – and why so many Republican candidates are running hard against it. …
Clayton Cramer’s Blog has excellent quotes from the Federalist Papers on some of the problems our recent lawmakers have created for our nation.
Ask the authors of Federalist 62. First, the problem of the health care reform bill that came to 2700 pages:
“It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?”
…And why employers are reluctant to hire right now:
“In another point of view, great injury results from an unstable government. The want of confidence in the public councils damps every useful undertaking, the success and profit of which may depend on a continuance of existing arrangements. What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not but that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed? What farmer or manufacturer will lay himself out for the encouragement given to any particular cultivation or establishment, when he can have no assurance that his preparatory labors and advances will not render him a victim to an inconstant government? In a word, no great improvement or laudable enterprise can go forward which requires the auspices of a steady system of national policy. …”
The WSJ editors comment on the foreclosure moratorium.
…Yes, the same crew… that ran roughshod over its own transparency rules—not to mention the established customs of the House and Senate—to restructure American medicine is now appalled that some paperwork at private businesses may have been incorrectly processed. To be clear, bank employees appear guilty of sloppy work, and problems in the back office should be corrected, but freezing activity in a $2.8 trillion financial market is the last thing this economy needs and is in no way proportional to the problems reported so far.
Now President Obama is refusing to sign a previously noncontroversial measure to have states recognize notarized documents from other states. Among other things, the bill would have streamlined the process of moving people out of homes they can’t afford and therefore would have helped to allow housing markets to clear and begin to heal. …
If evidence emerges of policies or actions that wrongly threw people out of their homes, by all means investigate and prosecute violations of law. But allowing people to live in homes without paying for them is not cost-free. That cost will be borne directly by investors in mortgage-backed securities and mortgage servicing companies, and ultimately by American taxpayers, who now stand behind 90% of new mortgages, thanks to guarantees by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration.
The bigger damage here is to the housing market, which desperately needs to find a bottom by clearing excess inventory and working through foreclosures as rapidly as possible. The moratoriums further politicize the housing market and further delay a housing recovery. In an economy and a financial system engulfed in Washington-created uncertainty, the political class has decided to create still more.
Thomas Sowell looks at Jerry Brown’s previous record and other issues in the California gubernatorial race.
…One appointment by Governor Jerry Brown ought to tell us a lot about his ideology. His most famous– or infamous– appointment was making Rose Bird chief justice of the California supreme court.
She over-ruled 64 consecutive death penalty verdicts and upheld none. Apparently no judge or jury could ever give a murderer a trial perfect enough to suit Rose Bird.
To hear Rose Bird and her supporters tell it, she was just “upholding the law.” But, fortunately, the California voters saw right through that pretense, and realized that she was doing just the opposite– imposing her own personal opposition to the death penalty in the guise of interpreting the law. No California chief justice appointee had ever been voted off the bench by the voters before Rose Bird, but she was roundly defeated when 67 percent of the voters voted against her in a confirmation election required by California law.
Two of her like-mind colleagues on the California supreme court were likewise voted off the bench. They, too, were appointed by Governor Jerry Brown.
The question is not whether you are for or against the death penalty. If you don’t like the death penalty, you can vote to repeal it. But it is not the job of judges to deprive the voters of their right to choose the laws they want to live under.
This is part of a much larger arrogant political ideology, in which anointed elites impose their own notions, in utter disregard of the laws passed by the people’s elected representatives. …
Thomas Sowell has more commentary on the coming elections.
Some of the longest-serving members of Congress, whose party has overwhelming majorities in both houses, are having far closer election races than they are used to. These include Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, not to mention 18-year veteran Senator Barbara Boxer.
…Usually, the incumbents can talk about their “experience.” But experience at what? Deception? Earmarks? Reckless spending? …
…The big question for the election next month is whether the voters keep their eye on the ball and judge candidates by what policies they advocate or whether they can be thrown off the track by red herrings.
We have already seen in 2008 what can happen when voters fail to pay attention to a presidential candidate’s track record, and let themselves be dazzled by rhetoric, symbolism and media hype. We are losing not only our jobs but our country— and this could be our last chance to stop the Obama-Pelosi-Reid juggernaut.
David Warren takes us down memory lane with Penguin Books.
They look so frail, now — this “parcel of Penguins” that has resurfaced from my own distant past. They are from a time less than half a century ago, yet to a person who has lived the intervening years, they may come as archaeological relics.
I am referring, of course, to paperback books, not birds from Antarctica. The collective noun provides a happy play on words, for I believe “parcel of penguins” is correct for the birds — as opposed to a rookery, crèche, or huddle of them. Every child of the English language discovers, or ought to have his moment of discovering this wonderful world, in which we speak of a “siege of bitterns,” a “clattering of jackdaws,” a “musket of lyrebirds,” a “gaggle of geese.” And in case one has forgotten, today we have Wikipedia.
A “parcel of penguins” is quite literally what one used to receive, through the post, when far away from home. They were printed on paper not only cheap, but light; they were 7-1/8 by 4-3/8 inches strictly (a Golden Section); they tied together in a nice secure block. And no gift from home could be more welcome.
I have spoken with a man who was raised under Communism, in Hungary. He spoke of the thrill when a parcel of Penguins made its way to him, through the Iron Curtain. In another case, I recall such a parcel travelling into the mountains of Nepal, as birds not flightless. …