SubscribeWhat part of libertarianism is "far right"? I didn't think it fit so neatly onto a one-dimensional graph.Oh, it is a one-dimensional graph, but it's just a circle. Immediately next to the far-right libertarians are the anarchists, who are far-left. Very confusing.
I wouldn't vote for him, but I donated some money. We need at least one honest to god anti-war voice in this campaign.
if he's not a racist, he's such an incompetent moron that he can't even keep the publication that bears his name (and which was renamed from the "Ron Paul Political Report" to the "Ron Paul Survival Report" to appeal to the racist, right-wing militia crowd in the 90's) from publishing racist trash. Furthermore, when the issue came up when he was running for the House in '94 as part of the realignment, he failed to recall this phantom ghostwriter; this spectral employee only came into being with Ron Paul's recent surge of popularity.This brings us to Ron Paul. Paul is an outsider candidate who says many of the right things. He correctly identifies the fundamental immorality of the war of aggression against Iraq. No Democrat has done this! It has taken a Republican to say the simple words. He speaks against the current economic system, which is popular, although he endorses a reversion to the 18th century, which will not work -- that hardly matters. What is significant is that he is against the state.
Seriously, if you want to attack the man then go after his congressional record.
Gisele Bundchen Doesn't Want to Be Paid in Dollars.
Supermodel Bundchen Joins Hedge Funds Dumping Dollars.
The classic argument in favor of separate national currencies, with fluctuating relative values, was made by none other than Milton Friedman. (One appealing aspect of this particular debate is that it cuts across the usual ideological lines. European socialists like unified currencies, so does the Cato Institute. American liberals like floating exchange rates, so do Thatcherites.) Friedman started from a more or less undeniable observation: Sometimes changing market conditions force broad changes in the ratios of national price levels. For example, right now the Irish economy is booming and the German economy's sputtering. Clearly, prices and wages in Ireland need to rise compared with those in Germany. Now, you could simply rely on supply and demand to do the job, producing inflation in Ireland and deflation in Germany. But even a free-marketeer such as Friedman realized that this is asking a lot of markets and that it would be much easier to keep German prices stable in German currency, Irish prices stable in Irish currency, and let the exchange rate between the two currencies do the adjusting.I saw this first-hand when I was in Britain in 1992. The pound was tied to the Deutschmark through the "crawling peg" of the ERM; because the German economy was booming, interest rates were high, and this led to unemployment rates over 10% in Britain. Britain was forced to break the peg in September 1992 (as a result of George Soros's speculative attack), after which the pound dropped, the economy recovered, and unemployment steadily dropped.
Friedman offered a brilliant analogy. He likened exchange rate adjustment to the act of setting clocks forward in the spring. A truly devout free-market believer should--if he is consistent--decry this as unwarranted government interference. Why not leave people free to choose--to start the working day earlier if and only if they feel like it? But in reality there is a coordination problem. It is hard for any one business to shift its work schedule unless everyone else does the same. As a result, it turns out to be much easier to achieve the desired time shift by leaving the schedules unchanged but resetting the clocks. In the same way, Friedman argued, a country whose wages and prices are too high compared with those abroad will find it much easier to make the necessary adjustment via a change in the value of its currency than through thousands of changes in individual prices.
So there is a trade-off. You don't want too many currencies--you wouldn't want to have separate dollars for Brooklyn and Queens. But when two countries are subject to strong "asymmetric shocks"--which is econospeak for saying that if they shared a common currency one would sometimes be in a boom while the other was in a slump and vice versa--there is a good case for their having separate currencies whose relative values are allowed to fluctuate.
While some modern nations have chosen, with reasonable justification, to renounce their monetary autonomy in favor of some external standard, the standard they choose these days is always the currency of another, presumably more responsible, nation. Argentina seeks salvation from the dollar; Italy from the deutsche mark. But the men and women who run the Fed, and even those who run the German Bundesbank, are mere mortals, who may yet succumb to the temptations of the printing press. Why not ensure monetary virtue by trusting not in the wisdom of men but in an objective standard? Why not emulate our great-grandfathers and tie our currencies to gold?
Very few economists think this would be a good idea. The argument against it is one of pragmatism, not principle. First, a gold standard would have all the disadvantages of any system of rigidly fixed exchange rates--and even economists who are enthusiastic about a common European currency generally think that fixing the European currency to the dollar or yen would be going too far. Second, and crucially, gold is not a stable standard when measured in terms of other goods and services. On the contrary, it is a commodity whose price is constantly buffeted by shifts in supply and demand that have nothing to do with the needs of the world economy--by changes, for example, in dentistry.
The United States abandoned its policy of stabilizing gold prices back in 1971. Since then the price of gold has increased roughly tenfold, while consumer prices have increased about 250 percent. If we had tried to keep the price of gold from rising, this would have required a massive decline in the prices of practically everything else--deflation on a scale not seen since the Depression.
I believe our founding fathers had it right when they argued for peace and commerce between nations, and against entangling political and military alliances. In other words, noninterventionism.However, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. pointed out, the Founders were aware that US security depended on the balance of power in Europe.
Noninterventionism is not isolationism. Nonintervention simply means America does not interfere militarily, financially, or covertly in the internal affairs of other nations. It does not mean that we isolate ourselves; on the contrary, our founders advocated open trade, travel, communication, and diplomacy with other nations.
Thomas Jefferson summed up the noninterventionist foreign policy position perfectly in his 1801 inaugural address: "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations--entangling alliances with none." Washington similarly urged that we must, "Act for ourselves and not for others," by forming an "American character wholly free of foreign attachments."
It cannot be to our interest," even the peace-loving and France-loving Jefferson wrote as Napoleon bestrode the Continent, "that all Europe should be reduced to a single monarchy." America would be forever endangered, Jefferson said, should "the whole force of Europe [be] wielded by a single hand."The same can be said of the Second World War (although the US didn't enter the war directly until Pearl Harbor) and the Cold War.
But no such threat arose in the century after Waterloo, and two wide oceans offered protection from incursions on the Western Hemisphere, so through the nineteenth century isolationist habits and attitudes hardened.
Then came the First World War. Once again, as in the time of Napoleon, the prospect arose of a single hand wielding the force of Europe. Maintaining the balance of power in Europe would protect America, as it had long protected Great Britain. The United States entered the Great War in its own national interest.
Today, standing at the end rather than the beginning of this half-century, some of us see certain fundamental elements on which we suspect that American security has rested. We can see that our security has been dependent throughout much of our history on the position of Britain; that Canada, in particular, has been a useful and indispensable hostage to good relations between our country and the British Empire; and that Britain's position, in turn, has depended on the maintenance of a balance of power on the European Continent. Thus it was essential to us, as it was to Britain, that no single Continental land power should come to dominate the entire Eurasian land mass. Our interest has lain rather in the maintenance of some sort of stable balance among the powers of the interior, in order that none of them should effect the subjugation of the others, conquer the seafaring fringes of the land mass, become a great sea power as well as land power, shatter the position of England, and enter--as in these circumstances it certainly would--on an overseas expansion hostile to ourselves and supported by the immense resources of the interior of Europe and Asia. Seeing these things, we can understand that we have had a stake in the prosperity and independence of the peripheral powers of Europe and Asia: those countries whose gazes were oriented outward, across the seas, rather than inward to the conquest of power on land.Both the idea of returning to the gold standard and the idea of noninterventionism abroad seem overly simplistic to me. (Although noninterventionism would certainly be preferable to Bush's foreign policy.)
Now we see these things, or think we see them. But they were scarcely yet visible to the Americans of 1898, for those Americans had forgotten a great deal that had been known to their forefathers of a hundred years before. They had become so accustomed to their security that they had forgotten that it had any foundations at all outside our continent. They mistook our sheltered position behind the British fleet and British Continental diplomacy for the results of superior American wisdom and virtue in refraining from interfering in the sordid differences of the Old World. And they were oblivious to the first portents of the changes that were destined to shatter that pattern of security in the course of the ensuing half-century.
Federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid is expected to total 4.6% of the gross domestic product (GDP) this year, and the Congressional Budget Office projects that without changes in laws, such spending will reach 5.9% of the GDP by 2017 — an increase of nearly 30% in 10 years....Note that private health care spending (about half of total health care spending in the US) is also increasing rapidly, for much the same reasons: Fee-for-service reimbursements encourage providers to deliver each service efficiently but also create an incentive to supply additional or more expensive services.
Beyond 2017, these trends are poised to accelerate — driven primarily by rising costs per enrollee for health care. Over the past four decades, costs per beneficiary for Medicare and Medicaid have increased about 2.5 percentage points faster per year than per capita GDP. If costs continued to grow at the same rate over the next four decades, federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid would reach about 20% of the GDP by 2050 — roughly the same share of the economy that the entire federal budget accounts for today. If, instead, costs per enrollee tracked the growth of the GDP per capita, spending on Medicare and Medicaid would reach about 7% of the GDP by 2050, owing to demographic changes alone. In other words, of the 15-percentage-point increase that would occur if historical trends continued, less than one fifth would be due to aging.
When an insurer pays the bills, doctors and patients have every incentive to pursue any procedure that may yield a medical benefit, regardless of cost. This in turn makes insurance very expensive, prohibitively so for many people.And the result?
But there's a mystery here. Most people are insured privately, not by the government. Why don't private insurers offer "plain vanilla" plans tailored to those who cannot afford the current, expensive plans, or who would prefer to have a little less health care and pay smaller premiums? In principle, one might think, all that an insurer would have to do is impose some limits either on the kinds of procedures a policy will pay for or the maximum amount it will cover. Why doesn't the marketplace just say no to high medical costs?
There seem to be two answers. First is that while we have a lot of doctors in this country, we have even more lawyers....
There may be a second, more honorable reason why we can't say no. ... An ethos of saving life, of doing the best for the patient--no matter how diluted by the fact that doctors are no more saintly than anyone else--is very difficult to reconcile with a system that explicitly provides radically different levels of care to different people. It is of course true that a billionaire will often manage to get treatments the rest of us don't, but that's very different from imagining a system that explicitly pulls the plug on people with $2,000 policies while keeping the machinery going for those who paid $5,000....
Does this mean that all Americans receive too much health care? No, because there is a paradox of the system. We will spend virtually unlimited amounts on insured patients, but not everyone is insured. And since insurance becomes increasingly expensive as it is called upon to pay for ever more sophisticated medicine, a growing number of people are unable to afford that insurance--a terrifying position, given the potential costs of medical care. The paradox is that because it tends to make health insurance more costly, improved medical technology actually tends to drive people out of our health care system. It's even possible that medical innovation actually worsens the nation's overall health, because the fancy new treatments do less good than the harm done when people who can no longer afford insurance are priced out of the system.The US spends about 16% of GDP on health care (half public, half private); about 16% of Americans and 11% of American children are uninsured. Canada spends about 10.5% (70% public, 30% private), insures everyone, and gets better results in terms of public health.
Start with the basic fact: the great majority of Americans are covered by some form of health insurance. Older people are covered by Medicare; poor people by Medicaid; and most others by some form of private insurance, usually provided by their employers. Insurance doesn't cover everything, but it does cover most big expenses. So when a patient and a doctor discuss a possible test or treatment, they know that a third party will pay the bill.So you have "administrative rationing" (e.g. HMOs refusing to pay for particular treatments) in the private system as well.
Now suppose that in this situation there is a test or treatment that is very expensive but that might help a patient. A patient who was paying for his own health care might decide not to proceed, figuring that the money involved would add more to his future quality of life--or, if one wants to be grim about it, to that of his heirs--than the likely benefits of the procedure. But since he doesn't pay for it, he tells his doctor to go ahead. That is, the system does not make any trade-offs between medical gain and economic loss. In the jargon of medical economists, treatment is always pushed to the "flat of the curve": the point at which further expenditure brings no medical benefit, which may be well beyond the point at which a patient whose own money was at stake might decide that the medical benefits were not worth the cost.
The tendency to push treatment to its medical limits, irrespective of cost, has become increasingly expensive over time, thanks to the development of ever more sophisticated medical technologies. Once upon a time, there was only so much that even the rich could spend on medical care: aside from a few surgical procedures and some good advice on public sanitation, as recently as 1940 doctors had little to offer except a consoling bedside manner. Today we have an extraordinary array of possible tests and therapies: CAT scans and MRIs, radiation and chemotherapy, double and triple bypasses. These new techniques save many lives, and make many other lives more comfortable, but they do so at an often enormous price. The flat of the curve moves ever further to the right: we find more and more medically useful ways to spend more and more money on health care.
I feel that we are greatly overextended. We claim to be able to do more than we really can do for other people. We should limit our contributions, and let others take the initiative.Kennan also suggested (in Around the Cragged Hill, 1993) that the US strengthen the UN--if the US withdraws from a more active role to focus on addressing its critical domestic problems, it'd be helpful to have the UN take over.
I'm close to the isolationists, but not entirely, because I've always recognized that those alliances to which we belong and which the Senate has approved as provided for by the Constitution, we must remain faithful to those. That includes the original NATO alliance, our alliance with Japan. Our complicated relations with Latin America contain elements of long-term assurances, in the Monroe Doctrine sense.
Beyond that, when other countries come to us asking for help, we should ask, "Why do you need it?" and "Why should we provide it?"
To the extent that we can resign some of our responsibilities, particularly in peacekeeping matters, to the UN (which is probably where some of them belong anyway), it can ease the shift toward a less ambitious and more self-effacing American policy.As I understand it, Ron Paul is advocating withdrawing from all existing alliances, including NATO and the US-Japan alliance; and wants to withdraw from the UN.
« Older The Heeb 100... | Voice Thread... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by 29 at 2:18 PM on November 5, 2007 [2 favorites has favorites]