The Objective Standard Blog

Archive for July 2009

Friday, July 31, 2009

Why Are We Moving Toward Socialized Medicine? by Yaron Brook

Posted by ARC Media at 12:05 pm

Government intervention in medicine is wrecking American health care. Nearly half of all spending on health care in America is already government spending. Yet President Obama’s “reforms” will only expand that intervention.

Prior to the government’s entrance into medicine, health care was regarded as a product to be traded voluntarily on a free market—no different from food, clothing, or any other important good or service. Medical providers competed to provide the best quality services at the lowest possible prices. Virtually all Americans could afford basic health care, while those few who could not were able to rely on abundant private charity.

Had this freedom been allowed to endure, Americans’ rising productivity would have afforded them better and better health care, just as, today, we buy better and more varied food and clothing than people did a century ago. There would be no crisis of affordability, as there isn’t for food or clothing.

But by the time Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in 1965, this view of health care as an economic product—for which each individual must assume responsibility—had given way to a view of health care as a “right,” an unearned “entitlement,” to be provided at others’ expense.

This entitlement mentality fueled the rise of our current third-party-payer system, a blend of government programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, together with government-controlled employer-based health insurance (itself spawned by perverse tax incentives during the wage and price controls of World War II).

The resulting system aimed to relieve the individual of the “burden” of paying for his own health care by coercively imposing its costs on his neighbors. Today, for every dollar’s worth of hospital care a patient consumes, that patient pays only about 3 cents out of pocket; the rest is paid by third-party coverage. And for the health care system as a whole, patients pay only about 14 percent.

Shifting the responsibility for health care costs away from the individuals who accrue them led to an explosion in spending. In a system in which someone else is footing the bill, consumers, encouraged to regard health care as a “right,” demand medical services without having to consider their real price. When, through the 1970s and 1980s, this artificially inflated consumer demand sent expenditures soaring out of control, the government cracked down by enacting further coercive measures: price controls on medical services, cuts to medical benefits, and a crushing burden of regulations on every aspect of the health care system.

As each new intervention further distorted the health care market, driving up costs and lowering quality, belligerent voices demanded still further interventions to preserve the “right” to health care: from regulations mandating various forms of insurance coverage to Bush’s massive prescription drug bill.

The solution to this ongoing crisis is to recognize that the very idea of a “right” to health care is a perversion. There can be no such thing as a “right” to products or services created by the effort of others, and this most definitely includes medical products and services. Rights, as the Founders conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but to freedoms of action.

You are free to see a doctor and pay him for his services—no one may forcibly prevent you from doing so. But you do not have a “right” to force the doctor to treat you without charge or to force others to pay for your treatment. The rights of some cannot require the coercion and sacrifice of others.

Real and lasting solutions to our health care problems require a rejection of the entitlement mentality in favor of a proper conception of rights. This would provide the moral basis for breaking the regulatory chains stifling the medical industry; for lifting the tax and regulatory incentives fueling our dysfunctional, employer-based insurance system; for inaugurating a gradual phase-out of all government health care programs, especially Medicare and Medicaid; and for restoring a true free market in medical care.

Such sweeping reforms would unleash the power of capitalism in the medical industry. They would provide the freedom for entrepreneurs motivated by profit to compete with each other to offer the best quality medical services at the lowest prices, driving innovation and bringing affordable medical care, once again, into the reach of all Americans.

Yaron Brook is the president of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. The Ayn Rand Center is a division of the Ayn Rand Institute and promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

Copyright © 2009 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.

Posted in: Business and Economics, Healthcare, Individual Rights and Law

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Jewish Settlements and Israeli Law

Posted by John David Lewis at 12:57 pm

We are hearing a lot now about Israel’s creation of “Jewish” settlements on “Palestinian land.” These settlements are created, we are often told, to extend the “apartheid state” of Israel by squeezing out the local populations and establishing a superior Jewish ruling class. Typical here is CBS News anchor Bob Simon, who in January of 2009 described Israel as an “apartheid state.”

To understand this, it is instructive to read an Israeli Supreme Court ruling, the Decision on Katzir, dated March 8, 2000, which applies directly to the issue of land, and to the rights of Arabs under Israeli law.

A Jewish group, the Katzir Cooperative, which accepts only Jewish members, had received land from the Israeli government for a settlement in 1982. The group later tried to prevent an Arab couple from building a home in this settlement. The Arab couple sued. In the ruling, the Supreme Court summarized the basis of the suit as follows: “The Petitioners claim that the policy constitutes discrimination on the basis of religion or nationality and that such discrimination is prohibited by law with regard to State land.”

The Court heard the case, and ruled against the cooperative. This section from the ruling is direct and clear about the applicable principle:

The Court examined the question of whether the refusal to allow the petitioners to build their home in Kaztir constituted impermissible discrimination. The Court’s examination proceeded in two stages. First, the Court examined whether the State may allocate land directly to its citizens on the basis of religion or nationality. The answer is no. As a general rule, the principle of equality prohibits the State from distinguishing between its citizens on the basis of religion or nationality. The principle also applies to the allocation of State land. This conclusion is derived both from the values of Israel as a Democratic state and from the values of Israel as a Jewish state. The Jewish character of the State does not permit Israel to discriminate between its citizens. In Israel, Jews and non-Jews are citizens with equal rights and responsibilities. The State engages in impermissible discrimination even it if is also willing to allocate State land for the purpose of establishing an exclusively Arab settlement, as long as it permits a group of Jews, without distinguishing characteristics to establish an exclusively Jewish settlement on State land ("separate is inherently unequal").

Next, the Court examined whether the State may allocate land to the Jewish Agency knowing that the Agency will only permit Jews to use the land. The answer is no. Where one may not discriminate directly, one may not discriminate indirectly. If the State, through its own actions, may not discriminate on the basis of religion or nationality, it may not facilitate such discrimination by a third party. It does not change matters that the third party is the Jewish Agency. Even if the Jewish Agency may distinguish between Jews and non-Jews, it may not do so in the allocation of State land.

On principle Israeli law is not religious; it is secular. Many of the settlements are Jewish, and we might assume that establishing Jewish enclaves in the Jewish state would be encouraged. But the law gives them no privileged status. The Jewish state is not akin to the Islamic state of Iran—in which clerics rule—or to that of Saudi Arabia, in which an ancient religious text is the law of the land. In Israel, all are equal in principle before the law. While under Israeli control, Jerusalem is an open city. People of all religions—and of no religion—can walk around freely, protected by Israeli law.

There is an important limitation here. Many of the areas that Israel was forced to take in self-defense, following the 1967 and 1973 attacks, are under military law, because Israel’s enemies have not ended the war, and because these areas have not been formally annexed. The source of this problem is the Arab leadership, who refused to accept an Arabic state next to Israel, as called for in the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, November 29, 1947, and rather declared war on Israel. Unremitting suicide attacks were the source of the later separation wall.  But this is all the more reason to end the war, eliminate the ambiguity, and extend Israeli law—and its principle of non-religious discrimination—fully into those areas.

Palestinian opposition to Jewish towns—as well as the ruling of the Israeli court—demonstrate where the commitment to apartheid lies, and it is not in Israel. Palestinian leaders do not thank Israel for its instructive example in separating politics from religion, while pressing to instill such principles in their own society. They rather condemn Israel, and demand its withdrawal under threat of force.

(The author thanks Boaz Arad for his assistance.)

Posted in: Foreign Policy and War, Religion

Friday, July 24, 2009

Ayn Rand Institute Announces $2 Million Fundraising Campaign—the Atlas Shrugged Initiative

Posted by ARI Media at 9:00 pm

Ayn Rand Institute Announces $2 Million Fundraising Campaign—the Atlas Shrugged Initiative

IRVINE, CA, July 24, 2009—The Ayn Rand Institute has announced a $2 million fundraising campaign—the Atlas Shrugged Initiative—in an unprecedented effort to increase readership of Ayn Rand’s best-known novel, Atlas Shrugged.

The impetus behind the Atlas Shrugged Initiative, explains ARI President and Executive Director Yaron Brook, is the fact that “At no time in history has there been greater public interest in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. And its message has never been more urgent.

“The torrent of destructive, statist policies emanating from Washington represents both a crisis—and an opportunity. Through the Atlas Shrugged Initiative, we intend to capitalize on the soaring grassroots interest in Ayn Rand and her ideas.”

Adds Dr. Brook, “The Atlas Shrugged Initiative is off to an outstanding start. A very generous benefactor has already offered to match every dollar donated to this Initiative—up to a total of $500,000—and as a result of early and substantial funding, the bookstore promotions that are a key component of the Initiative are already well underway.”

Key elements of the Atlas Shrugged Initiative include significant bookstore promotions of the novel; an expansion of ARI’s web-based efforts to spur readership of Atlas Shrugged; expansion of ARI’s long-running educational programs for high school and college students; and targeted outreach to pro-liberty, pro-capitalist activists around the nation.

Visit the Ayn Rand Institute’s Atlas Shrugged Initiative campaign page to learn more or to support this campaign.

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Dr. Yaron Brook is available for interviews. To interview Dr. Brook or book him for your show, please e-mail media@aynrand.org.

For more articles by Yaron Brook, and his bio, click here.

Copyright © 2009 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.

Posted in: Announcements, Ayn Rand and Objectivism