Medical Care, Insurance, and Socialized Medicine

I've just now made a new index for Medical Care, Insurance, and Socialized Medicine. I don't know why I've not had this long ago.

The first (new) entry is Paul Krugman's "Health Care Confidential" artical from the New York Times, as quoted by Brad DeLong. It pretty much thrashes the libertarian-preferred idea that markets do it best. And it does it with the bane of ideology: real world facts.

If anybody would like to suggest the best sites that oppose the market-oriented provision of health care, I'd like to add some.

Spying on our own people.

Why is it that I haven't seen people pointing out that every major dictatorship of the past Century or so has has their power cemented by extensive, unsupervised, secret spying on their own people? The Soviet Union. East Germany. Every other communist party you can name. Saddam. Pinochet. Hitler.

Why is it that I haven't seen people pointing out how bad it was when J. Edgar Hoover was spying on Americans, and how it gave him incredible power to blackmail and otherwise destroy leaders and members of legitimate organizations for his own political purposes?

Where are the conservatives, who you'd think would want to preserve freedoms? Where are the liberals, who'd also want to preserve freedoms, but also would be the first ones victimized by radicals with such power?

Idiotarian = Sexcrime

Yesterday, I started thinking about the term idiotarian. Basically, it's a term of hatred, like sexcrime, newspeak for "our enemy", or "them, not us". Despite attempts at a defining FAQ, it resists more precise definition. Users revel in their childish power to denounce, much as others did with "commie" or "doodyhead". Usually attempts to justify such terms illustrate how the authors are accusing others of their own sins.

So, I've added a new entry to my "Make Or Break Views Of Libertarianism" page.

Why We Fight: An Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (2.0)

Eric Raymond, Open Source self-promoter and self-appointed libertarian savior, seeks new levels of pomposity and foolishness He declares that people who don't worship his views are his poopeyhead enemies.

Anybody who can accurately count the strawmen gets an honorable mention.

Mechanism, Not Policy: Creation Of The Second Invisible Hand

Here's my new year's offering, my first substantial writing in a while.

Mechanism, Not Policy: Creation Of The Second Invisible Hand

It was triggered by a discussion with Nick Szabo at his blog Unenumerated: Negative rights and the United States Constitution. Nick was arriving at conclusions by methodologies that I considered weak at best.

As I've often been challenged by libertarian interpretations of the constitution, I thought it was about time that I attempted to write down my own thinking as to how to interpret it. My idea is rather idiosyncratic, and sure to annoy pretty much everybody if they take it seriously enough.

This is a first version. As I've never really discussed it with anybody before, I'm sure I'll get lots to think about from criticisms and eventually fix problems in it.