Thoughts, essays, and writings on Liberty. Written by the heirs of Patrick Henry.

May 5, 2012

The Life of Julia… who really wins?

President Obama’s campaign has put together “The Life of Julia“, following a woman from cradle to grave to show how she benefits from the enlightened benificence of President Barack Obama. The reality, though, is rather different. Let’s look now at “The Life of Julia”:

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April 4, 2012

How far we have fallen…

Reading the point/counterpoint posts on the question of how the supreme court would decide on Obamacares constitutionality, was quite disturbing to me in several ways. On the one hand I was heartened, because clearly both Brad and Doug are sane and rational folks with a reasonably solid background in both law and politics, and a [...]

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April 3, 2012

Point: How The Supreme Court Will Find The Individual Mandate Constitutional

This is part of The Liberty Papers’ continuing Point/Counterpoint series, where two contributors (or a contributor and a guest) argue competing sides of an issue. In this installment, I will argue that the Supreme Court has a realistic defensible argument to find the Individual Mandate in ObamaCare Constitutional. Tomorrow, Doug Mataconis will respond with a [...]

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March 29, 2012

Remy: Health Care Mandates vs Pizza Toppings

I have argued that one of the reasons health insurance is so expensive, whether under ObamaCare or under the system we have now, is that some coverages are mandated whether the health care consumer wants/needs it or not. In the video below, Remy makes the same point but way more cleverly and humorously than I [...]

Posted By: Stephen Littau @ 11:08 am || Permalink || Comments Off || TrackBack URI || Categories: Economics,Healthcare,Humor,Multimedia,Theory and Ideas
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March 22, 2012

Signs of Intelligent Life in the Colorado Senate

Several members of the Colorado Senate introduced a bill yesterday that would reduce drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor, favoring drug treatment programs over incarceration in state prisons. Lynn Bartels reporting for The Denver Post writes: Senate Bill 2012-163 deals with drug offenders who primarily are users and addicts rather than dealers, and [...]

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February 20, 2012

Should We Force Women To Bear Disabled Children?

Rick Santorum believes that the Obama administration is in favor of some Gattaca-like dystopia, I suppose: “One of the things that you don’t know about ObamaCare in one of the mandates is they require free prenatal testing,” Santorum began telling about 400 people here. “Why? Because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and, [...]

Posted By: Brad Warbiany @ 5:02 pm || Permalink || Comments (12) || TrackBack URI || Categories: Abortion,Healthcare
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Katy Bar the Door: Social Conservatives Want in Your Bedroom Too

Last week, I wrote a post about how the Left wants in the bedrooms of the people by mandating health insurance coverage for contraceptives. On the other extreme, we have Rick “every sperm is sacred” Santorum talking about the “dangers of contraceptives” and how non-procreative sex is somehow bad for society (as if concerns about [...]

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February 14, 2012

Either You Want Government Out of Your Bedroom or You Don’t

One way we libertarians often describe ourselves are individuals who don’t want the government in our bedroom or our boardrooms. Those on the Left typically agree with the former while disagreeing with the latter while those on the Right typically believe the reverse. Yet when it comes to the federal government mandating that all health [...]

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December 2, 2011

Institute for Justice’s Bone Marrow Donor Compensation Legal Challenge Prevails

Here’s a follow up to a story I linked back in 2009 concerning the Institute for Justice’s legal challenge to the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 and the act’s applicability to bone marrow transplants. This is very good news for the roughly 3,000 Americans who die every year while waiting to find a bone [...]

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August 24, 2011

Quote Of The Day

From a commenter over at Kevin Drum’s place. The discussion was about problems with the American educational system: Yep. And as the posts by Aaron Carroll and Austin Frakt have shown over the last year (link below) the same is true of our health care system. We’ve gone through a 30+ year binge of hypercapitalism, [...]

Posted By: Brad Warbiany @ 8:04 am || Permalink || Comments (4) || TrackBack URI || Categories: Education,Healthcare,Quote of the Day
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July 21, 2011

Guest Post: A Five-Part Plan For Fixing America’s Health Care System

Today’s post was written by regular commenter Dr. Gregory Tetrault (aka “Dr. T”). Dr. Tetrault is a clinical pathologist who has directed four different medical laboratories since 1989. He was an Associate Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Tennessee Medical Center until 2009. His plan below is, IMHO, a realistic way [...]

Posted By: Guest Poster @ 10:09 am || Permalink || Comments (12) || TrackBack URI || Categories: Guest Blogging,Healthcare
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July 19, 2011

Quote of the Day: Wet Blanket Edition

President Obama and his sycophant Keynesian friends in the MSM can’t quite figure out why his policies haven’t improved the economy. Maybe President Obama should listen to an actual job creator, Steve Wynn to get some clue about why businesses aren’t expanding. Here is an excerpt from Wynn from a recent conference call where he [...]

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June 28, 2011

Will Individualized Medicine Increase Health Inequality?

Ezra Klein has a rather thought-provoking post today about human genome sequencing and its ability to allow doctors to better-tailor treatment to the specific needs of an individual patient. It presents a phenomenal opportunity to both make medicine more effective, and IMHO to make it cheaper by spending less time and energy on substandard treatments. [...]

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June 27, 2011

Wrangling Long-Term Costs

Ezra Klein, on education & health care costs: I’m not going to end this post with some wan paragraph explaining how to transform these two industries into something closer to their potential. My ideas on health-care reform are available elsewhere on the blog and I don’t know enough about education to say anything worthwhile. But [...]

Posted By: Brad Warbiany @ 2:01 pm || Permalink || Comments Off || TrackBack URI || Categories: Education,Government Incompetence,Government Waste,Healthcare
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May 31, 2011

Gov. Johnson Takes on Hannity

Former New Mexico Gov. Gary “Veto” Johnson made a recent appearance on Hannity last week (see video below). I have to say I was pleasantly surprised both with how Sean Hannity conducted the interview and how Gov. Johnson responded. I haven’t really watched Hannity since before the “& Colmes” was dropped a few years ago; [...]

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March 20, 2011

Quote of the Day – Eyes wide shut?

In making the case for open and obvious centralized rationing, advocates claim that “we” must ration with “our” eyes open. From Beth Haynes at PJM: That’s why Medicare needs the Independent Payment Advisory Board. Setting a cap on spending is the first step of rationing. The next is deciding who gets what medical care. “Limited [...]

Posted By: Quincy @ 10:53 am || Permalink || Comments (1) || TrackBack URI || Categories: Economics,Healthcare,Hubris
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February 1, 2011

Quote of the Day: Mandating Change Edition

In 2008, a U.S. senator made a very good point in arguing against government mandates for individuals to purchase health insurance: “[I]f a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house.” Who was the senator who said this? Answer below the fold.

Posted By: Stephen Littau @ 11:57 am || Permalink || Comments Off || TrackBack URI || Categories: Democrats,Election '08,Healthcare,History,Legal,Politics,Quote of the Day,Theory and Ideas
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December 30, 2010

Open Thread: Successes and Setbacks for Liberty in 2010/Hopes for 2011

Was 2010 a good year or bad year for liberty and why? Like most of you will likely respond, 2010 was very much a mixed bag IMHO. On the positive side, the mandate section of ObamaCare was found unconstitutional, the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was repealed, Wikileaks exposed the federal government for the [...]

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December 17, 2010

Cuba banned Michael Moore’s “Sicko” for fear of public backlash

The latest revelation from Wikileaks shows that Michael Moore may have been a bit too good at making agitprop even for Cuban authorities to handle: US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks show that the government of Cuba banned Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary, Sicko, “because it painted such a ‘mythically’ favourable picture of Cuba’s healthcare system [...]

Posted By: TomStrong @ 9:38 pm || Permalink || Comments (3) || TrackBack URI || Categories: Civil Liberties,Healthcare,The Welfare State
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October 12, 2010

Government-Run Amputation Panels

For some time, we’ve been using words and sometimes charts or graphs to describe the multitude of problems with government-run health care systems. The Greeks have finally allowed us to put a face to the issue. Well, perhaps a few extremities lower. From the Daily Caller: This Saturday, one of Greece’s most respected newspapers, To [...]

Posted By: Stephen Gordon @ 8:18 pm || Permalink || Comments (3) || TrackBack URI || Categories: Healthcare
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