Dec
8
2025

Perhaps the Best Paragraph of the Year

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

From the WSJ in a recent editorial: The Great Entitlement State Grift. (WSJ gifted link)

Democrats won’t acknowledge fraud because they want more Americans on the dole. Welfare is central to their political business model. Republicans who make this scandal about immigration are missing the point—and missing an opportunity to educate Americans about the entitlement state grift.

That political ecology is also apparent in Democrats' demands to extend those hallowed Obamacare "tax credits", no questions asked.

A straight-news report from Politico has a predictable "Republicans pounce" headline: Obamacare fraud report has Republicans crying foul. But the plain facts are pretty damning:

A federal watchdog dropped what a top House Republican called “a bombshell” Wednesday, revealing how easy it is for fraudsters to extract Obamacare payments by setting up health insurance accounts for people who do not exist.

The Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, said it had set up 24 fake accounts during the 2024 and 2025 plan years and that 22 had slipped through. The fake accounts in 2025 cost the government more than $10,000 per month in subsidies.

Republicans have long complained that a Democratic Congress’ move in 2021 to increase subsidies for health insurance bought on the Obamacare marketplace, and to make plans free for many low-income people, had allowed fraud to run rampant. Now they say the GAO report reaffirms their opposition to extending the enhanced subsidies expiring at the end of the month that have thrown Capitol Hill into turmoil.

Exercise for the reader: if you object to the WSJ's allegation that "Democrats won't acknowledge fraud"… please try to find a Democrat acknowledging the GAO report.

Also of note:

  • I'm not an Objectivist, but… Robby Soave finds some prescience within it: Ayn Rand denounced FCC censorship 60 years ago.

    In 1962, Rand penned a prophetic warning about the public interest standard, which then–FCC Chair Newton N. Minow was citing to justify pressuring television companies to create more educational programming. Minow famously railed against a supposedly "vast wasteland" of shoddy television shows, and he claimed that the FCC's charter empowered him to push for editorial changes to the medium that would align with his view of the public interest.

    "You must provide a wider range of choices, more diversity, more alternatives," said Minow in his well-remembered 1961 speech. "It is not enough to cater to the nation's whims; you must also serve the nation's needs."

    Minow repeatedly claimed that he was not in favor of government censorship and was not trying to tell broadcasters what they could and could not say. Rather, he charged them to make nebulous and ill-defined improvements to the product that he believed would be better appreciated by the American public—i.e., the public interest.

    In her March 1962 essay "Have Gun, Will Nudge," Rand argued that this was censorship by another name. "It is true, as Mr. Minow assures us, that he does not propose to establish censorship; what he proposes is much worse," she wrote. Unlike explicit bans on speech, Rand warned, the modern method of censorship "neither forbids nor permits anything; it never defines or specifies; it merely delivers men's lives, fortunes, careers, ambitions into the arbitrary power of a bureaucrat who can reward or punish at whim."

    I was only 11 years old in 1962, and had no blog back then anyway, so I was unaware of Ayn's abolishment advocacy. But in 2007, when this blog not quite two years old, I linked approvingly to Jack Shafer's Slate article which advocated killing the FCC. It's an idea whose time has come is long past.

  • Clear eyes at the Boston Globe. They belong to Jeff Jacoby, who informs his readers The 'two-state solution' is an article of faith, not a path to peace.

    AFTER Pope Leo XIV met with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last month, he reiterated what has become one of the most familiar refrains in international diplomacy: The "only solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he told reporters, is the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

    The pope has said as much before, as have other popes before him and an endless array of presidents, secretaries of state, prime ministers, foreign ministries, UN officials, international organizations, think tanks, academic luminaries, and prominent journalists.

    But political doctrines, unlike articles of faith, are supposed to be judged by how they work in the real world. And the doctrine of the "two-state solution" has been tested repeatedly for nearly a century — and it has failed every time.

    Jeff goes through the history and its legacy of continued, deadly, pointlessness.

Recently on the book blog: