My name is
David Robins:
Christian, lead developer (resume), writer, photographer, runner,
libertarian (voluntaryist),
and student.
This is also my son David Geoffrey Robins' site.
Obamanomics: I can't believe it's not socialism
Political ·Tuesday January 27, 2009 @ 23:00 EST (link)
Today on my way to lunch I passed a homeless guy with a sign the read "Vote Obama, I need the money." I laughed.
Once in the restaurant my server had on a "Obama 08" tie, again I laughed--just imagine the coincidence.
When the bill came I decided not to tip the server and explained to him that I was exploring the Obama redistribution of wealth concept. He stood there in disbelief while I told him that I was going to redistribute his tip to someone who I deemed more in need--the homeless guy outside. The server angrily stormed from my sight.
I went outside, gave the homeless guy $10 and told him to thank the server inside as I decided he could use the money more. The homeless guy was grateful.
At the end of my rather unscientific redistribution experiment I realized the homeless guy was grateful for the money he did not earn, but the waiter was pretty angry that I gave away the money he did earn even though the actual recipient deserved money more.
I guess redistribution of wealth is an easier thing to swallow in concept than in practical application.
Books finished: The New Case Against Immigration.
F# and Mono
News, Technical, School ·Tuesday January 27, 2009 @ 19:56 EST (link)
20090123: Finally set up new UPS (APC ES 550VA/330W), and plugged the portable HD (500 Gb USB/Firewire/eSATA external disk that I got way back when I got my new server from HDNW) into it. Next time I need to reboot the various machines in here, I'll move them over to the UPS (it needs time to charge the battery anyway). Our (also APC) UPC in the other room (by the Myth box and the TV) is indicating (by a shrill tone… a very shrill tone) that the battery is dead, but we've had it less than a month; I need to check if their warranty will replace it. The HD was auto-detected immediately (I plugged it into minas-tirith, the server; it may live there or on the new machine, so long as it's somewhere it can be shared to the machines in the network.
20090124: Honey's friend Meghan was here (1500-2200); she wanted me to help her with math (functions and graphs), then we got pizza and watched Scrubs.
Later on I was replacing light bulbs downstairs (two had burned out, one from each light, making the rec. room rather dim): one was fine, but the other seemed to have shorted and somehow consumed itself; the glass part of the bulb came off, and I had to get the rest out of the socket (couldn't use the potato trick, it was too deep) using needle-nosed pliers and a couple of screwdrivers, first unbolting the socket from a fixed bar for easier access. Not fun holding my hands up that long. Then we got to pick up all the bits of metal and rust that had fallen down.
20090125: Installed mono (open source .NET platform) and F# (as I've said before, Ocaml but with libraries).
The only thing I needed to change to compile my first class assignment (mono <path to fscp.exe from F# archive> hw1.ml) was to rename the member function, since member is a keyword in F#. I got a few warnings, even with the --ml-compatibility switch: FS0044 (it didn't like s.[0] since the type of s was unknown; declaring (s : string) fixed it). Warnings that I got without the compatibility switch were to use <> instead of != and KeyNotFoundException instead of Not_found. For the second assignment, code using Some Type arg needed parenthesizing as Some (Type arg).
I couldn't get the interactive shell (fsi.exe) to work; it started and gave me a prompt, but then after a keypress or timeout complained about missing gdiplus.dll. I don't want to install libgdiplus on that machine because it requires X, which is silly on a headless machine. I figured I could start it with the --no-gui option and it wouldn't demand any GUI libraries. It seemed a tad slow; definitely slower than OCaml. Online benchmarks bear that up: Mono has a ways to go to catch up with .NET—but it'll get there.
20090127: Bought some AR cleaning supplies at Wade's (chamber brush, barrel brush, bore snake, bore guide). I should have all I need now.
Books finished: A Random Walk Down Wall Street.DVDs finished: Children Of The Corn 7: Revelation.
Microsoft lays off 5000; Senator Grassley looks out for U. S. citizens
News, Work ·Thursday January 22, 2009 @ 22:47 EST (link)
H-1B and other work visa programs were never intended to replace qualified American workers. Certainly, these work visa programs were never intended to allow a company to retain foreign guest workers rather than similarly qualified American workers, when that company cuts jobs during an economic downturn.
—from Senator Grassley's letter to Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft
20090120: Cleaned guns (Glock and EMP).
20090121: Measured my AR-15: it's 32" (need to know so I know what size nylon case to get).
20090122: Microsoft layoffs this week; 5000 people in research and development, marketing, sales, finance, legal and corporate affairs, human resources, and information technology (I believe that means IT as in support, and does not include development, but it could be the layman's definition of IT meaning "anything to do with computers"); 1400 already, another 3600 to come. Senator Grassley (R-IA) wrote this letter to Steve Ballmer demanding answers about the breakdown of firings by area and more importantly by immigration status: the senator is correct in saying that H-1Bs should go before citizens (and lawful permanent residents, a.k.a. "green card" holders). Clearly the company no longer needs foreign workers to fill jobs; therefore it can get rid of them first—and stop asking for the limits to be raised. (Coincidentally, Microsoft subsequently shelved plans for a data center in Iowa: retribution?)
Some quotes from the Slashdot article; Mini-Microsoft also has some entries:
We are in the midst of a major economic crisis, and the more Americans who lose their jobs, the worse it is going to get. If a foreign national loses his job and goes back to his country, then his country will take care of him. The US government needs to focus on the US and US citizens right now, and not allow the needs of H1B guests to trump the needs of Americans.
The whole purpose of the H1B program was to bring foreign nationals into the country to work because the company said there weren't enough Americans who could fill the positions. However, if a company is now downsizing then it make sense that if you have a technical position that you need less people for, that the guest workers should be the first ones to be downsized. Logically, you can't claim not being able to find people to fill a position if you just laid off two people qualified for the position.
The book I'm currently reading is apropos (Mark Krikorian's The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal). Certainly nations can afford to be generous in good times, to share their wealth with people from nations less free and less ambitious (although I'd argue that the U.S. government never has any business giving away Americans' money to foreign interests, whether called foreign aid or visa programs, but it hurts less when things are good). The government must look out for its citizens: it must allow in only labor (skilled and unskilled) that is not (at any price) available locally, rather than admitting deluges of foreigners who are so grateful to be in a free and first world nation that they will cheerfully live twenty to an apartment and accept half pay, subsisting off the generosity of the entitlements the American people have voted themselves and dragging down the standard of living for all.
Socialist States of America
News ·Tuesday January 20, 2009 @ 13:35 EST (link)
So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause.
—Queen Amidala, Revenge of the Sith
When the New Republic of America breaks off from this socialist one, my wife and I will join it; and no lily-livered liberals will force us to stay in their redistributionist disaster.
The curious case of the lost network jack
News, Technical, Guns, School ·Monday January 19, 2009 @ 23:41 EST (link)
20090112: Bought a used computer (Celeron 2.4 MHz, Windows XP pro) from a guy at work for $100; carried it from his building (16) back to mine (36) so I wouldn't lose my parking spot. I set it up upstairs in the spare bedroom with the used Ikea desk I got a while back. At this point, we discovered the network (Ethernet) jack that used to be there was gone; apparently the contractors had covered it over when making the windstorm repairs in 2006.
20090114: Called our contractor about the lost network jack and he promised to send someone out.
Picked up AR-15 (no CPL, no "what country", since I put "U.K (ENGLAND)" instead of just "U.K" this time) at Cash Company; returned library books. Put the AR-15 together; trivial, just two pins to join the upper and lower. I'll pick up some ammo and cleaning tools at the WAC show this weekend.
20080115: Setting up a carpool to the WAC show, and a lunch meetup (which never panned out—two of us were there, with a sign even, and me wearing my Glock shirt as I had told people). Bought two polymer AR-15 mags from a guy here (on the msgun list) for $25 (total).
20090116: Watched pilot episode of Homeland Security USA. Pretty good; I suspect that for reasons of political correctness, Mexican criminals will be underrepresented, but at least they were included (kind of hard not to with the rampant immigration crimes in the south).
20090117: Puyallup gun show. Picked up a cleaning rod (Dewey 30"), some .223 ammo (500 rounds of Wolf and 100 rounds of reloaded brass). I need to get some brushes and a bore snake; will probably get them at a local place like Wade's, even though they're expensive for larger items.
20090118: Went shooting (at SVRC) for the first time in a while; shot my Glock and EMP, but not the new rifle yet, although I did talk to someone about procedure, how to set up, etc. The club provides iron target stands, which is nice, and there are holes out on the field where they can be inserted; bring your own cardboard backing and targets, same as the pistol pit. When I got back, Honey told me she'd noticed some mole hills in the back yard; argh. I wish it was legal to shoot them (it's too close to another house), although it'd probably be hard to catch them in the act anyway.
20090119: As promised last week, the contractor that handled the windstorm damage in 2006 (Jim Cameron, a generally good guy), sent an electrician to restore the network jack. Nice guy; didn't take too long for him to discover the network cable behind the phone jack in the room, and convert it to a phone-and-network jack. Plugging in the computer immediately netted it a network address via DHCP (from the downstairs server), and all was well. Thanks, Jim! (Because of that, I worked from home today.)
I'm working on assignment 2 for my class, which was recently posted; this one was easier than the first; I'm already finished (took maybe an hour, including the extras described below). Part of it is an interpreter and translator for a small subset of Logo , which produces a list of points visited from a script; I wrote further code to use ImageMagick to generate an image from the points visited (for fun, and as a verification).
We wanted to re-record a program (Dharma and Greg) on the Myth box without going through all the old ones individually; it wasn't too difficult: just find the show in the oldrecorded table (in MythTV's MySQL database, called mythconverg), and set the duplicate column to 0 (meaning allow record again), e.g. update oldrecorded set duplicate = 0 where title = 'Dharma & Greg'.
Review: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle
Political ·Sunday January 18, 2009 @ 23:47 EST (link)
I finished Sinclair's The Jungle today; basically it's a sob story about a family of Lithuanian immigrants who get ripped off by several people who lie and take advantage of their ignorance and inability to read English; everyone dies but one man, who eventually becomes a tramp and survives as a thief, before finally returning to corrupt Chicago to see the light of socialism in the last few chapters (it has a very "tacked on" feel).
It persuasively argues that unfettered capitalism is bad, but it doesn't succeed in arguing that socialism is the only, best, or even a cure. There are many forms of government that would innately oppose corruption, and many groups of rulers that would oppose it despite the government in which they participated. Libertarianism, which has at its foundation non-aggression, is superior to most, given that it also preserves the individual. To begin with I thought it far different than Skinner's Walden Two, but it's really two sides of the same coin: both want to form an oligarchy to dictate to and steal from the population.
Clearly, at the stockyards, the supply (of labor) vastly exceeded the demand. Basic economics says that this will push prices (wages) down. Immigration should have been restricted. The Lithuanian families that the book centers around should never have been allowed into the country, especially since they had no claim of asylum (which is frequently abused, anyway).
The wedding in the book is a Lithuanian tradition, part of which involves the attendees, who benefit from food and drink, contributing to the wedding after dancing with the bride. Many leave early without paying anything. I'm not sure if this is meant to be a metaphor for anything, but under capitalism, you pay for what you use. Neither people's dishonesty nor non-adherence to old customs is the fault of capitalism. Not all traditions from the old world are helpful; many traditions from the third world are downright deleterious: that of having too many children, for example (fine enough in the old world when half would die off and the other half would work in the fields, but a liability in the new, except now, of course, when living beyond your means is a meal ticket).
Regarding the fraud perpetrated by the real estate salesman (claiming the house was new, etc.): libertarianism would regard that as aggression, and as such the government would legitimately step in to punish the aggressor (e.g. perhaps releasing the family from the contract if they so chose, allowing them to leave or renegotiate; they might elect to stay, but they would have at least some chance of negotiation, since although the house market there was a regular revolving door, occupancy was quite low when they got there; on the other hand, since the company was making 3x what they paid, perhaps they could afford to wait). The real estate company would also be liable for damages due to the fraud, although they'd likely vanish and reappear under a new name the next day: libertarianism tends to frown on giving person status to corporations for this very reason (this blog an explanation of why they conflict) and might hold the owners personally liable.
It's pretty much analogous to the current mortgage crisis where people are being foreclosed on because, well, a fry cook can't afford a $500,000 house, no matter how you cook the books or how much the government threatens banks. Read the fine print, and if you can't, don't close the deal. While personally attractive (since it keeps up the value of my house), any sort of bailout for people being foreclosed on (and companies going out of business) is morally bankrupt: they entered a contract, and the government should not be either giving away responsible people's money to save the irresponsible or altering a mutually agreed-upon deal.
Regarding the horrible working conditions in the fertilizer plant: should the government be regulating these conditions? The company is not aggressing against the employee; the employee has the choice not to work there. But that answer is of course altogether too facile: most jobs in the stockyards were replete with horrible known health hazards (known to everyone, "common knowledge" even). Does that mean that the act of offering the job is aggressive and thus must be stopped by government? If so, it's a slippery slope: police work is dangerous too. Perhaps then the criteria has to be that a job can be offered only if the company stops any preventable harm: but how far does that go? Police don't drive in tanks, but a tank could save their lives against a rampaging drunk driver or gunman. Where, objectively and systematically (that is, fairly) is the line drawn?
Antanas, Kristoferas, Ona and her baby all die from what are probably easily prevented diseases (due the poor conditions and lack of care). Socialists will tell you they should have been protected by free (i.e. others pay for it) healthcare, and by government-mandated safety standards. We addressed the safety standards in part above (providing an unsafe job can be considered an aggressive act); also, industry tends to regulate itself, but it also tends to manipulative monopolies while in its infancy. It seems that if it were not for those that cheated them and thus aggressed against them, the family would have been well enough off to own their house and be in reasonable if not excellent health, with the money to afford a doctor when necessary (but nobody would be
picking their pockets to provide for those poorer than them).
Regarding corruption: the less power government has, the less chance it
has to corrupt (no power, no corruption). A libertarian government is a
small and well-heeled one, servant to its citizens in more than just name. As I've said: the book argues well against unfettered capitalism and corruption, but any nation of laws would abominate the aggression in the book, and a libertarian one would also leave them free to profit from their labors.
Written in 1906, it naively touts socialism before the disastrous regimes ushered in by the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler's National Socialists, and Mao's Cultural Revolution, all of which formed the same oligarchy, which, being were more equal than others, plundered their nation's wealth and left only crumbs for the working person, who is inspired by the system to mediocrity and graft. Skinner's vision seems more gentle, until you read about how he envisions forcing the surrounding population into his socialist utopia "for their own good" (the usual mantra of the dictator). As a voluntary society, formed by contract, it would be welcomed within a libertarian realm, just as any voluntarily formed city-state; as a tyrannical dictatorship, no matter how much velvet on the iron glove, never.
Books finished: The Jungle.
My AR-15 has shipped; server-side mail filtering
News, Technical, Guns, School ·Sunday January 11, 2009 @ 20:14 EST (link)
Democrats made fun of Reagan because he was an actor. And now they roll out a comedian. Figures—to them government is nothing but a joke masquerading as a punchline pretending to be funny.
—KM in CLAMS, on Al Franken putatively beating Norm Coleman in the MN senate race.
20090104: Tried to get up the driveway at 0630 with both cars, no dice. Worked from home.
20090105: My AR-15 is in (Rock River Arms Elite CAR A4)! Pete at AR15sales.com had said not to expect it until February, so it's early (still a long wait, since November). It should arrive at my FFL soon, and then I can take it to the range to sight it in. To do: buy ammo and appropriate cleaning supplies (probably at the next WAC gun show). Still snowed in today.
20090106: Honey had her arm cast (broke her wrist falling on the ice getting the mail last week). Blue cast, can't hardly do anything with that hand or arm, on for six weeks, doctor wants to re-examine in four.
20090107: 124th flooded (snow then a flood, what lovely weather); I left work early (1530); Woodinville-Duvall (the other road into Duvall) was moving at a snail's pace (idiots… it's a straight road, how hard is it to get some volume through?) Woodinville-Duvall closed later that night: the Island Nation of Duvall had severed ties with the mainland.
My new monitor (Acer x223w, 22", 1680x1050) arrived today (Costco special); it's gorgeous. I can easily view 3x3 candle charts in thinkorswim's trading application; Internet Explorer was fuzzy until I turned off ClearType (it's really fugly on an LCD monitor). This is my first LCD monitor; it's very nice, quite slim, had to put a box under it to make it high enough, but works fine with my laptop (new computer should be arriving soon; I think the laptop's graphics unit may be a bit slow for the screen size; there's some flickering; if it persists with the new machine too, I'll return the monitor).
20090108: Regarding the current flood that has cut off the Isand Nation of Duvall from the rest of the world (a 10-year flood that's been happening every few years now), someone on the Microsoft Duvall employees mailing list commented:
I gotta say, the year 2016 is underwhelming so far. Still no flying cars or FIOS.
(FIOS = fiber optic networking, a running joke because our local cable Internet provider, Broadstripe, sucks badly, and Verizon, the DSL provider, keeps promising FIOS and we see people laying cable, but they have yet to deliver). Went to the library to pick up some more books.
It's about 1700, and the noisy neighborhood kids are standing on one of the remaining piles of snow—right outside our place, love it—and yahooing (like Swift's Yahoos).
Due to the flooding I missed my first class of my current University of Washignton PMP course (CSE P 505, programming languages), but I finished homework 1; programming for the course is in the functional language Caml (using the OCaml implementation).
20090109: Still cut off; Woodinville-Duvall is a mess even with the floodwater gone: a section of road came up in chunks, and it's impassable; repairs are expected to be completed Sunday. The WA-203 to Monroe is still closed (Carnation is open), and a big chunk of WA-202 washed away (which is unfortunate since it's near SVRC, my range, and the detour adds 10 miles). Watched Thursday's lecture; this course is recorded (might as well since they have to stream it to Microsoft anyway).
(Helped my father-in-law Doug with a trojan, VirusRemover2008; took a while to talk him through killing VRM2008.exe in the task manager then installing Spybot S&D.)
20090110: Moved "The Rebel Rec" (site for Mullens highschool alumni in WV, Honey and her parents' friends) from MSN Groups to Multiply. Multiply is more of a blog than a forum, so it's not great, but perhaps it won't have the issues with allowing emails direct to the group and keeping all the headers and footers.
I'm playing with using procmail to file local mail into folders (server-side; I used to have my client, KMail do it, but now I mainly use mutt, and client-side filtering is suboptimal anyway). Looking around, I found something better (clearer, more powerful, easier to use) than procmail: maildrop, a mail delivery agent with a filtering language. It looks like setting | maildrop in my local .qmail file and writing a .mailfilter file is all that's necessary to set it up.
20090111: 20080111: Woodinville-Duvall re-opened (the floods receded Friday, but a huge chunk of the surface of the road had been torn up, so this was actually pretty quick work). WA-202 is still closed between WA-203 and 356th SE on the way to the range.
Books finished: Invasion, Intermarket Analysis.
The Anti-Theft Amendment
Political ·Saturday January 10, 2009 @ 16:51 EST (link)
I started by asking myself: how would congress work if it didn't have power to tax? They'd have to persuade people to opt-in; this is easy to see how it works with e.g. healthcare, but less easy with infrastructure that everyone uses.
Representatives should be empowered solely to put together proposals which people can opt into, and perhaps to make laws, although only against malum in se crimes, i.e. those that cause harm (to people or property), handle national defense, and borders. This should work at all levels, so e.g. at the municipal or county levels, representatives would have to persuade people to opt in to support e.g. schools and libraries (with people able to change their election either at any time or at least yearly).
Regarding infrastructure: roads, e.g. Interstates at the state level, possibly even at the federal level (although that's dubious since things should be as granular as reasonably possible and it doesn't do a Washingtonian any good if New York highways are improved; if he uses goods transported on those highways, the price of the good should include the cost of transportation which should include route maintenance) etc. should be counted as opted into if used. Until all roads can be made toll (possibly with computer tracking), this means people that drive will contribute a share of their city, county, state, and federal road taxes, ideally by use (gasoline tax distributed to each depending on number of drivers and roads).
Opting in by use needs to be very narrowly restricted, i.e., a politician can't claim that people have opted-in by use by taking no action (e.g. they shouldn't be able to claim someone's opted into welfare payments just by existing, or even by working, but driving on roads is sufficient to opt into their upkeep, although not necessarily building new ones or upgrading).
How would the actual voting on proposals work? Perhaps by default, people's choice is allocated to their representative (later, these representatives will go away, replaced by delegates: anyone can delegate their choice to anyone else, again, changeable either at any time or yearly). A proposal comes with an associated (hard) cost or cost range; the first vote is support; the second is to fund it (after figuring out how many people are supporting it). Perhaps people commit to a range of funding, and then after the first vote an algorithm is used to determine who's in?
I've been exploring some ideas that could fix the corruption of government and I think I've hit upon an axiomatic (and short) amendment, one that, if enacted would stem the corruption almost immediately.
No tax shall be levied without direct consent of the taxed (with annual opt-out).
I'm still trying to work this idea out exactly. I think use should constitute consent (you drive on a road, you've consented to pay your part of its upkeep; you send your kids to school, you've consented to pay your part from property taxes, etc.). It's very much a thought experiment; it'd be virtually impossible to pass it (and it was virtually impossible for a ragtag bunch of colonists to defeat the British army and navy). I think it would have been impractical for most of the life of the Republic, due to communication difficulties, but with today's technology it's an idea whose time is near.
At the core of the idea is that instead of politicians introducing a bill and its passing giving them the right to appropriate funds, rather, after the bill passes, it goes to the population to be funded. As now, people can delegate their support to others, or they can elect for themselves. The benefit here is that it allows people to opt out of government programs they don't use (but they can choose to opt in even so: even if I don't visit any national parks this year, I can still decide they're valuable and to pay some money to support them). (It's a bit like company benefits, with annual election and renewal.)
There's definitely more fine-tuning needed for the raw idea, and as a legal proposal it'd need more ironclad language to prevent abuse (cf. the abuse of the "general welfare" clause). Do people "use" national government; and if so, does that mean that a congressperson can charge any excesses to the population (as now), hire as large a staff as they like for whatever amount they wish, lease a private jet, etc. and bill the taxpayer? Representatives deserve a salary, decided by the people, and after that the public should have to give direct consent for expenses incurred.
Books finished: No Exit, and Three Other Plays.DVDs finished: M*A*S*H: Season Three, Children Of The Corn 666: Isaac's Return, Friends: The Complete Third Season.
S&P rally?
News, Trading ·Saturday January 3, 2009 @ 22:11 EST (link)
20090101: Finally got mail; parents sent Christmas card and Turkish delight; also got some cards from Graham and Wendy Martin and Chris and Vanessa, and Honey got some from people back in WV. Called my parents to thank them.
20090102: Went out to get a new tire (Les Schwab, Redmond); it cost about $150. Went to BCC to get the last of Honey's books while they were changing the tire; stopped at the library on the way home (four more books, returned three, yelled at them for having a fine on my account for a book I returned weeks ago). Got Honey some pepper spray at Wade's.
20090103: I'm a manager at the Rebel Rec (partly because of people quitting, partly because I'll be the moving it to a new location in February (Multiply), when MSN Groups shuts down.
It could just be the start of the year (around the holidays, when the amateurs play and the pros stay away), but looking at a monthly chart of the S&P (SPX), it appears that in the latter half of 2007 it hit the same resistance area as in most of 2000 (around 1550), and that we're now bouncing off support established in late 2002 through early 2003, which may mean a bullish turn, although it's far too early to tell. Support and resistance are about psychology, so if enough people believe (and act), it will happen.
(Switching back to a diurnal cycle, which means staying up most of the night and day today.)
Finished Walden Two; interesting. The idea of behavioral science making better behavioral scientists (among other professions, of course) is interesting, like bootstrapping a compiler or the robots of Code of the Lifemaker, as the comparison of freedom in a planned community to freedom given predestination. Seems plausible, but I'd like to see it. Some of the foundations are compatible with libertarianism, but then they veer into socialism and handwave about conditioning people to like it. The best thing about the version presented in the book is that it's opt-in.
Books finished: A Beginner's Guide To Day Trading Online, The Immigration Solution, Walden Two.DVDs finished: Children Of The Corn 3: Urban Harvest, Transporter 2, Children Of The Corn 4: The Gathering, Children Of The Corn 5: Fields Of Terror, Disturbia.
Free market health insurance
Political ·Wednesday December 31, 2008 @ 04:00 EST (link)
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
—Thomas Jefferson
The key word is "IF". Unfortunately, President-Elect [Obama] was elected under the pretense of taking care of them.
—KM on CLAMS
Interesting New York Times letter to the editor and especially the FAQ on free market health insurance, wherein Dr. Paul Hsieh of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (FIRM) explains how the solution to skyrocketing healthcare costs is not more government control (and theft) but a free market; from his letter:
The skyrocketing costs of health insurance are the result of onerous government regulations, such as mandatory benefits.
Many states require insurance plans to include benefits like chiropractor care or in vitro fertilization. Such mandatory benefits raise insurance costs by about 20 percent to 50 percent, according to the Council for Affordable Health Insurance.
More fundamentally, mandated benefits violate an individualÂs right to contract freely with insurers and providers according to his rational judgment for his best interest. Instead, a bureaucrat decides how the individual must spend his own money.
Eliminating these mandates would make health insurance available to millions of Americans who desperately want it but cannot now afford it.
The proper solution to the health insurance crisis is not more government, but a free market.
His FAQ answers some common questions, such as:
Read it, read it now, and then tell me that you can, with a clean conscience, support such socialist mandates as "universal healthcare", no matter how it's suger-coated.
Books finished: Beyond Technical Analysis.
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