Yesterday the health care exchanges were opened for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), with various reviews, but acknowledged “glitches” that left many unable to sign up.  MSNBC anchor tried and failed after 30+ minutes, including time on the phone that never got her into the system: Republicans naturally trumpeted this as another indicator that this […]

The old saying is “Another day, another dollar” and it certainly applies to the Federal workforce here in DC, only without any official work (some would say, there is no difference between now and before).  I have gained some interesting insights (maybe just observations–I need to be modest here) about the Federal government, including Congress, […]

We will occasionally (but not daily) have a quote for the day.  So as an inaugural quote, I offer up this gem from 2nd edition of Ludwig Von Mises’ classic work, Socialism on page 9: “It is true that Socialism is today an article of faith for many, perhaps for most of its adherents.  But […]

Quinnipiac University’s most recent polling results suggest Republicans will struggle to convince the American people the government shutdown is a good idea. Key findings include: Americans oppose, 72-22%, the government shutdown in order to de-fund or delay Obamacare Republican voters support the shutdown narrowly (49-44%), while Democrats (90-6%) and Independents (74-19%) oppose it overwhelmingly In a […]

There is something viscerally satisfying about the possibility of a government shut down. Consider the stated and implied conservative motivations: We need to show people they can survive without their daily suckling from the federal teat We need to inculcate a new sense of independence, a re-emergence of the homesteading spirit that once defined our […]

Much is being made of Ted Cruz’s quixotic pursuit of killing Obamacare.  Even those that generally are supportive of economic liberty and hostile to Obamacare did not support the Cruz effort, such as the editorial page of the WSJ.  The conventional wisdom by these elites is that Obamacare can’t be stopped this way, but there […]

The jury is still partly out on the immediate fate of the Affordable Care Act.  After the heroic filibuster of Ted Cruz, the Senate ended debate and voted overwhelmingly to re-insert the funding language for “Obamacare” into the overall spending bill.  The vote was 79-19, so there were many Republicans voting with all of the […]

There was an interesting article here by Peter Gumbel http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/09/25/with-unemployment-high-france-forces-stores-to-close-early/ earlier this week on what France is doing in the face of high unemployment.  Before you read, remember this is France, since the nineteenth century, one of the most socialist (small “c”) nations in Europe, allowing for brief intervals of sanity.  It appears that Parisian officlals–the only […]

Economics is often thought of as a quasi-hard science;   a field where number crunching and rationality yield positive and true results.  While Ph.D.s in the field acknowledge that it is often hard to account for all the variables, in the past they would argue that if it were possible to account for all factors, a  mathematical […]

Gallup recently released polling data that suggests Americans are becoming more concerned with government’s power. The figure above shows the steady increase in the percent of respondents who see a problem and a similar decline in those who see government as having just the right amount of power. Notice, also, the relatively unchanged number of […]