URLs du Jour — 2013-11-30

Government Health Care

  • A useful reminder from Patterico; file it under This is who they are; this is what they do.

    Cancer Patient Loses Coverage, Blames ObamaCare . . . Gets Audited

    Also being audited: the health insurance broker who managed to get the patient's coverage restored.

    The IRS would no doubt deny any cause-and-effect here. But they have an established lack of credibility on such matters.

  • I find myself in total agreement with the blogger "Lexington Green" at America 3.0: the IRS can only be trusted to invade people's privacy and abuse their liberties:

    The IRS is structurally and inevitably a pathological organization that is destructive of our liberty. The people who work there, without regard to their personal morals, face pernicious incentives. That is one of the most poisonous things about bureaucracy. Ordinary, decent people end up participating in destructive policies and processes with no personal malice and even with little or no personal fault.

    The power the IRS possesses, like every power granted to government, will be abused. And the IRS possesses enormous power, and the temptation to abuse that power will prevail, inevitably and frequently and destructively.

    I have little patience with soi-disant "civil libertarians" who are outraged by NSA snooping disclosures but have never had anything to say about the other three-letter agency whose everyday workings are (as LG says) "an affront to the letter and spirit of the Fourth Amendment."

  • Which reminds me. In case you're not a reader of Pun Salad's book items, more serious recent reads include America 3.0 by James C. Bennett and Michael J. Lotus (also the proprietors of the blog referenced in the item above); Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism by Richard Epstein; The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory by Jesse Walker; and (less political) The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel.