Thankful for Property
By John Stossel - November 27, 2013
Had today's politicians and opinion-makers been in power four centuries ago, Americans might celebrate "Starvation Day" this week, not Thanksgiving.
The Pilgrims started out with communal property rules. When they first settled at Plymouth, they were told:
"Share everything, share the work, and we'll share the harvest."
The colony's contract said their new settlement was to be a "common." Everyone was to receive necessities out of the common stock. There was to be little individual property.
That wasn't the only thing about the Plymouth Colony that sounds like it was from Karl Marx: Its labor was to be organized according to the different capabilities of the settlers. People would produce according to their abilities and consume according to their needs. That sure sounds fair.
They nearly starved and created what economists call the "tragedy of the commons."
If people can access the same stuff by working less, they will. Plymouth settlers faked illness instead of working the common property. The harvest was meager, and for two years, there was famine. But then, after the colony's governor, William Bradford, wrote that they should "set corn every man for his own particular," they dropped the commons idea. He assigned to every family a parcel of land to treat as its own.
The results were dramatic. Much more corn was planted. Instead of famine, there was plenty. Thanks to private property, they got food -- and thanks to it, we have food today.
This doesn't mean Pilgrims themselves saw the broader economic implications of what they'd been through. "I don't think they were celebrating Thanksgiving because they'd realized that capitalism works and communal property is a failure," says economist Russ Roberts. "I think there were just happy to be alive."
I wish people understood. This idea that happiness and equality lie in banding together and doing things as a commune is appealing. It's the principle behind the Soviet Union, Medicare, the Vietnam War, Obamacare and so on. Some communal central planning is helpful, but too much is dangerous. The Pilgrims weren't the first settlers on the East Coast of the New World to make this mistake.
Just a few years before, the colony of Jamestown was almost wiped out by the same idea.
Historian Edmund S. Morgan, in "American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia," describes what happened in 1609-1610: "There are 500 people in the colony now. And they are starving. They scour the woods listlessly for nuts, roots and berries. And they offer the only authentic examples of cannibalism witnessed in Virginia. One provident man chops up his wife and salts down the pieces. Others dig up graves to eat the corpses. By spring only sixty are left alive."
After that season, the colony was abandoned for years.
The lesson that a commons is often undesirable is all around us. What image comes to mind if I write "public toilet"? Consider traffic congestion and poor upkeep of many publicly owned roads. But most people don't understand that the solution is private property.
When natural resources, such as fish and trees, dwindle, the first impulse is to say, "Stop capitalism. Make those things public property." But they already are public -- that's the problem.
If no one owns the fishing rights to a given part of the ocean -- or the exclusive, long-term logging rights to part of the forest -- people have an incentive to get there first and take all they can before the next guy does. Resources are overused instead of conserved. We don't maintain others' property the way we maintain our own.
Colonists in Plymouth nearly starved because they didn't understand that. In Jamestown, some were driven to cannibalism.
But no one starves when ranchers are allowed to own land and cattle. Or turkeys.
Private ownership does good things. Be thankful for it this week
27 November, 2013
Hobby Lobby - Corporations as People
You may have heard that Hobby Lobby (privately held) has objected to aspects of Obamacare that they feel violate their religious beliefs. Lower courts have been split (3-2 in favor of Hobby Lobby), and the case will now be heard by the Supreme Court. This opinion piece was on CNN today the link and full text (my comments in red) are below):
http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/26/opinion/wydra-supreme-court-obamacare/index.html
Editor's note: Elizabeth B. Wydra is chief counsel for the Constitutional Accountability Center, a public-interest law firm, think tank and action center. She regularly participates in Supreme Court litigation.
(CNN) -- Once again, Obamacare has made its way back before the Supreme Court.
The high court decided Tuesday to review two challenges by for-profit corporations and their religious owners over comprehensive contraception coverage required by the Affordable Care Act. And if the justices follow more than 200 years of constitutional law and history on what it means to enjoy the free exercise of religion in America, the court should yet again hand a victory to the act.
It had little choice but to agree to hear the cases this term.
Using unprecedented legal reasoning, three federal circuit courts of appeals have ruled that secular, for-profit business corporations and/or the individuals who own them have a valid claim that the mandate to provide no-cost, FDA-approved contraception in their employer-sponsored health plan violates their asserted right to the free exercise of religion.
Two other federal circuit courts of appeals have rejected these claims; the Supreme Court frequently steps in to resolve such disagreements among the federal courts of appeals.
Unless the Supreme Court reverses these radical decisions, the consequences could reach far beyond the Affordable Care Act, making this particular roadblock for Obamacare more problematic in the long term than the well-publicized problems associated with the health exchange website's rollout.
By accepting the religious free-exercise claims, these three federal courts have turned first principles of religious freedom, as well as fundamental tenets of corporate law, on their head.
From the nation's founding until today, the Constitution's protection of religious liberty has been seen as a personal right, inextricably linked to the human capacity to express devotion to a God and act on the basis of reason and conscience.
Business corporations, quite properly, have never shared in this fundamental constitutional tradition for the obvious reason that a business corporation lacks the basic human capacities -- reason, dignity and conscience -- at the core of the right to free exercise of religion. Obviously not "persons" in the usual sense of the word, these corporations are also not religious organizations, which have historically received some constitutional protection and are, in fact, given exemptions from the contraception mandate.
(CNN) -- Once again, Obamacare has made its way back before the Supreme Court.
The high court decided Tuesday to review two challenges by for-profit corporations and their religious owners over comprehensive contraception coverage required by the Affordable Care Act. And if the justices follow more than 200 years of constitutional law and history on what it means to enjoy the free exercise of religion in America, the court should yet again hand a victory to the act.
It had little choice but to agree to hear the cases this term.
Using unprecedented legal reasoning, three federal circuit courts of appeals have ruled that secular, for-profit business corporations and/or the individuals who own them have a valid claim that the mandate to provide no-cost, FDA-approved contraception in their employer-sponsored health plan violates their asserted right to the free exercise of religion.
Two other federal circuit courts of appeals have rejected these claims; the Supreme Court frequently steps in to resolve such disagreements among the federal courts of appeals.
Unless the Supreme Court reverses these radical decisions, the consequences could reach far beyond the Affordable Care Act, making this particular roadblock for Obamacare more problematic in the long term than the well-publicized problems associated with the health exchange website's rollout.
By accepting the religious free-exercise claims, these three federal courts have turned first principles of religious freedom, as well as fundamental tenets of corporate law, on their head.
From the nation's founding until today, the Constitution's protection of religious liberty has been seen as a personal right, inextricably linked to the human capacity to express devotion to a God and act on the basis of reason and conscience.
Business corporations, quite properly, have never shared in this fundamental constitutional tradition for the obvious reason that a business corporation lacks the basic human capacities -- reason, dignity and conscience -- at the core of the right to free exercise of religion. Obviously not "persons" in the usual sense of the word, these corporations are also not religious organizations, which have historically received some constitutional protection and are, in fact, given exemptions from the contraception mandate.
The author needs to check her constitutional history - as far back as 1888(!) (Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania) the Supreme court ruled "Under the designation of 'person' there is no doubt that a private corporation is included [in the Fourteenth Amendment]. Such corporations are merely associations of individuals united for a special purpose and permitted to do business under a particular name and have a succession of members without dissolution."
These businesses do not hire employees on the basis of their religion and their employees are not required to share the religious beliefs personally held by the corporation's owners. This is particularly misleading, as "discriminating" during hiring is illegal - that's why these business do not hire employees based on their religion or personally held beliefs" Meanwhile, speak out against the personally held belief in Diversity in corporate America do and see how long you last. In all of American history, secular, for-profit corporations have never been understood to "exercise" religion -- have you ever seen Exxon Mobil in the pew next to you at church? -- and have never been protected by the right to free exercise. Again, the author seems to struggle to understand the difference between public and private companies. Seeing as she isn't stupid, I have to believe she is overlooking this distinction purposely.
To be sure, the devout individual business owners behind the corporations in these challenges have their own personal rights to exercise their religion, but those rights have nothing to do with Obamacare's contraception coverage requirement. Why? Because federal law does not require the individuals who own the company to personally provide health care coverage or to satisfy any other legal obligation of the corporation. The law places requirements only on the corporate entity. Classic misunderstanding here - there is no such thing as the "corporation" paying. The corporation is owned by individuals - it is these individuals who pay for all costs and reap all profits.
To conflate the corporations in these cases with their owners violates basic principles of corporate law.
When business owners create a corporation as the means of carrying out their business, they create a distinct legal entity with rights, obligations, privileges and liabilities that are different from the individuals who set up the corporation. This generally works to the benefit of the individual owners, which is why people choose to incorporate in the first place. And it means that certain rights specific to individuals do not carry over to the corporate form.
For example, the Supreme Court has held that an individual acting in his personal capacity has the right to "plead the Fifth" and refuse to turn over documents that could incriminate him, but that same individual acting in his official capacity as a corporate owner has no such right against self-incrimination. Like the right to the free exercise of religion, the right against self-incrimination has always been understood to be a personal right of freedom and conscience that artificial corporate entities simply do not share. These two paragraphs are the strongest sections of her argument, but I suspect she again is failing to distinguish between public and private corporations, as well as criminal vs. civil proceedings.
A business owner simply does not have the right to move back and forth freely between individual and corporate status to obtain all the advantages and avoid any of the disadvantages of the respective forms.
Whether you have cheered the misfortunes Obamacare has suffered over the past month or bemoaned them, the distortion of basic principles of corporate law and free exercise jurisprudence by the three federal courts that have endorsed the corporate challenges to the ACA's contraception mandate should be troubling.
The Supreme Court, as always, will have the final say.
If the justices follow more than 200 years of constitutional law and history, not to mention basic principles of corporate law, the court should hand another victory to Obamacare.
I'm sure the administration -- and more importantly, the women and their families who risk losing important health benefits to which they are legally entitled -- would welcome the win.
These businesses do not hire employees on the basis of their religion and their employees are not required to share the religious beliefs personally held by the corporation's owners. This is particularly misleading, as "discriminating" during hiring is illegal - that's why these business do not hire employees based on their religion or personally held beliefs" Meanwhile, speak out against the personally held belief in Diversity in corporate America do and see how long you last. In all of American history, secular, for-profit corporations have never been understood to "exercise" religion -- have you ever seen Exxon Mobil in the pew next to you at church? -- and have never been protected by the right to free exercise. Again, the author seems to struggle to understand the difference between public and private companies. Seeing as she isn't stupid, I have to believe she is overlooking this distinction purposely.
To be sure, the devout individual business owners behind the corporations in these challenges have their own personal rights to exercise their religion, but those rights have nothing to do with Obamacare's contraception coverage requirement. Why? Because federal law does not require the individuals who own the company to personally provide health care coverage or to satisfy any other legal obligation of the corporation. The law places requirements only on the corporate entity. Classic misunderstanding here - there is no such thing as the "corporation" paying. The corporation is owned by individuals - it is these individuals who pay for all costs and reap all profits.
To conflate the corporations in these cases with their owners violates basic principles of corporate law.
When business owners create a corporation as the means of carrying out their business, they create a distinct legal entity with rights, obligations, privileges and liabilities that are different from the individuals who set up the corporation. This generally works to the benefit of the individual owners, which is why people choose to incorporate in the first place. And it means that certain rights specific to individuals do not carry over to the corporate form.
For example, the Supreme Court has held that an individual acting in his personal capacity has the right to "plead the Fifth" and refuse to turn over documents that could incriminate him, but that same individual acting in his official capacity as a corporate owner has no such right against self-incrimination. Like the right to the free exercise of religion, the right against self-incrimination has always been understood to be a personal right of freedom and conscience that artificial corporate entities simply do not share. These two paragraphs are the strongest sections of her argument, but I suspect she again is failing to distinguish between public and private corporations, as well as criminal vs. civil proceedings.
A business owner simply does not have the right to move back and forth freely between individual and corporate status to obtain all the advantages and avoid any of the disadvantages of the respective forms.
Whether you have cheered the misfortunes Obamacare has suffered over the past month or bemoaned them, the distortion of basic principles of corporate law and free exercise jurisprudence by the three federal courts that have endorsed the corporate challenges to the ACA's contraception mandate should be troubling.
The Supreme Court, as always, will have the final say.
If the justices follow more than 200 years of constitutional law and history, not to mention basic principles of corporate law, the court should hand another victory to Obamacare.
I'm sure the administration -- and more importantly, the women and their families who risk losing important health benefits to which they are legally entitled -- would welcome the win.
01 November, 2013
Obamacare laid bare
Obamacare laid bare
By Charles Krauthammer, Published: October 31
Every disaster has its moment of clarity. Physicist Richard Feynman dunks an O-ring into ice water and everyone understands instantly why the shuttle Challenger exploded. This week, the Obamacare O-ring froze for all the world to see: Hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters went out to people who had been assured a dozen times by the president that “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.”
The cancellations lay bare three pillars of Obamacare: (a) mendacity, (b) paternalism and (c) subterfuge.
(a) Those letters are irrefutable evidence that President Obama’s repeated you-keep-your-coverage claim was false. Why were they sent out? Because Obamacare renders illegal (with exceedingly narrow “grandfathered” exceptions) the continuation of any insurance plan deemed by Washington regulators not to meet their arbitrary standards for adequacy. Example: No maternity care? You are terminated.
So a law designed to cover the uninsured is now throwing far more people off their insurance than it can possibly be signing up on the nonfunctioning insurance exchanges. Indeed, most of the 19 million people with individual insurance will have to find new and likely more expensive coverage. And that doesn’t even include the additional millions who are sure to lose their employer-provided coverage. That’s a lot of people. That’s a pretty big lie.
But perhaps Obama didn’t know. Maybe the bystander president was as surprised by this as he claims to have been by the IRS scandal, the Associated Press and James Rosen phone logs, the failure of the Obamacare Web site, the premeditation of the Benghazi attacks, the tapping of Angela Merkel’s phone — i.e., the workings of the federal government of which he is the nominal head.
I’m skeptical. It’s not as if the Obamacare plan-dropping is an obscure regulation. It’s at the heart of Obama’s idea of federally regulated and standardized national health insurance.
Still, how could he imagine getting away with a claim sure to be exposed as factually false?
The same way he maintained for two weeks that false narrative about Benghazi. He figured he’d get away with it.
And he did. Simple formula: Delay, stonewall and wait for a supine and protective press to turn spectacularly incurious.
Look at how the New York Times covered his “keep your plan” whopper — buried on page 17 with a headline calling the cancellations a “prime target.” As if this is a partisan issue and not a brazen falsehood clear to any outside observer — say, The Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler, who gave the president’s claim four Pinocchios. Noses don’t come any longer.
(b) Beyond mendacity, there is liberal paternalism, of which these forced cancellations are a classic case. We canceled your plan, explained presidential spokesman Jay Carney, because it was substandard. We have a better idea.
Translation: Sure, you freely chose the policy, paid for the policy, renewed the policy, liked the policy. But you’re too primitive to know what you need. We do. Your policy is hereby canceled.
Because what you really need is what our experts have determined must be in every plan. So a couple in their 60s must buy maternity care. A teetotaler must buy substance abuse treatment. And a healthy 28-year-old with perfectly appropriate catastrophic insurance must pay for bells and whistles for which he has no use.
It’s Halloween. There is a knock at your door. You hear: “We’re the government and we’re here to help.”
You hide.
(c) As for subterfuge, these required bells and whistles aren’t just there to festoon the health-care Christmas tree with voter-pleasing freebies. The planners knew all along that if you force insurance buyers to overpay for stuff they don’t need, that money can subsidize other people.
Obamacare is the largest transfer of wealth in recent American history. But you can’t say that openly lest you lose elections. So you do it by subterfuge: hidden taxes, penalties, mandates and coverage requirements that yield a surplus of overpayments.
So that your president can promise to cover 30 million uninsured without costing the government a dime. Which from the beginning was the biggest falsehood of them all. And yet the free lunch is the essence of modern liberalism. Free mammograms, free preventative care, free contraceptives for Sandra Fluke. Come and get it.
And then when you find your policy canceled, your premium raised and your deductible outrageously increased, you’ve learned the real meaning of “free” in the liberal lexicon: something paid for by your neighbor — best, by subterfuge.
By Charles Krauthammer, Published: October 31
Every disaster has its moment of clarity. Physicist Richard Feynman dunks an O-ring into ice water and everyone understands instantly why the shuttle Challenger exploded. This week, the Obamacare O-ring froze for all the world to see: Hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters went out to people who had been assured a dozen times by the president that “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.”
The cancellations lay bare three pillars of Obamacare: (a) mendacity, (b) paternalism and (c) subterfuge.
(a) Those letters are irrefutable evidence that President Obama’s repeated you-keep-your-coverage claim was false. Why were they sent out? Because Obamacare renders illegal (with exceedingly narrow “grandfathered” exceptions) the continuation of any insurance plan deemed by Washington regulators not to meet their arbitrary standards for adequacy. Example: No maternity care? You are terminated.
So a law designed to cover the uninsured is now throwing far more people off their insurance than it can possibly be signing up on the nonfunctioning insurance exchanges. Indeed, most of the 19 million people with individual insurance will have to find new and likely more expensive coverage. And that doesn’t even include the additional millions who are sure to lose their employer-provided coverage. That’s a lot of people. That’s a pretty big lie.
But perhaps Obama didn’t know. Maybe the bystander president was as surprised by this as he claims to have been by the IRS scandal, the Associated Press and James Rosen phone logs, the failure of the Obamacare Web site, the premeditation of the Benghazi attacks, the tapping of Angela Merkel’s phone — i.e., the workings of the federal government of which he is the nominal head.
I’m skeptical. It’s not as if the Obamacare plan-dropping is an obscure regulation. It’s at the heart of Obama’s idea of federally regulated and standardized national health insurance.
Still, how could he imagine getting away with a claim sure to be exposed as factually false?
The same way he maintained for two weeks that false narrative about Benghazi. He figured he’d get away with it.
And he did. Simple formula: Delay, stonewall and wait for a supine and protective press to turn spectacularly incurious.
Look at how the New York Times covered his “keep your plan” whopper — buried on page 17 with a headline calling the cancellations a “prime target.” As if this is a partisan issue and not a brazen falsehood clear to any outside observer — say, The Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler, who gave the president’s claim four Pinocchios. Noses don’t come any longer.
(b) Beyond mendacity, there is liberal paternalism, of which these forced cancellations are a classic case. We canceled your plan, explained presidential spokesman Jay Carney, because it was substandard. We have a better idea.
Translation: Sure, you freely chose the policy, paid for the policy, renewed the policy, liked the policy. But you’re too primitive to know what you need. We do. Your policy is hereby canceled.
Because what you really need is what our experts have determined must be in every plan. So a couple in their 60s must buy maternity care. A teetotaler must buy substance abuse treatment. And a healthy 28-year-old with perfectly appropriate catastrophic insurance must pay for bells and whistles for which he has no use.
It’s Halloween. There is a knock at your door. You hear: “We’re the government and we’re here to help.”
You hide.
(c) As for subterfuge, these required bells and whistles aren’t just there to festoon the health-care Christmas tree with voter-pleasing freebies. The planners knew all along that if you force insurance buyers to overpay for stuff they don’t need, that money can subsidize other people.
Obamacare is the largest transfer of wealth in recent American history. But you can’t say that openly lest you lose elections. So you do it by subterfuge: hidden taxes, penalties, mandates and coverage requirements that yield a surplus of overpayments.
So that your president can promise to cover 30 million uninsured without costing the government a dime. Which from the beginning was the biggest falsehood of them all. And yet the free lunch is the essence of modern liberalism. Free mammograms, free preventative care, free contraceptives for Sandra Fluke. Come and get it.
And then when you find your policy canceled, your premium raised and your deductible outrageously increased, you’ve learned the real meaning of “free” in the liberal lexicon: something paid for by your neighbor — best, by subterfuge.
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