Ranger from the North

One of the big Democratic talking points has been that Obamacare’s ”slacker mandate” — its requirement that private insurers offering family-based coverage allow “adult children” to stay on their parents’ plans until they’re 26—has increased coverage by 3 million people.

It turns out that number is basically fraudulent, and comes from a two-page press release put out by an Obama-administration analyst. It involves giving Obamacare credit for (1) young adults on Medicaid and other government programs, for whom the under-26 mandate doesn’t apply; and (2) people who gained coverage due to the quasi-recovery from the Great Recession. As you can see in the below chart, coverage for young adults dipped in 2009 and 2010 during the recession, but then recovered. In fact, the proportion of young adults with private health coverage in 2008—60.5 percent—is exactly the same as in 2012.

I won’t bore you with the deep dive into these numbers I published over at Forbes, but my best estimate as to the true number of people who were newly covered due to the “slacker mandate” is at most 900,000. And it’s important to note that the slacker mandate isn’t free. It involves hiking premiums on everyone else with family-based coverage who doesn’t have “adult children.” That’s an effective tax increase of $160 to $480 a year on these other families.

A quick glance at the financial affairs of the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association suggest very strongly that the Left does not care much about the flow of money into political affairs. There is almost nothing to the Left’s argument in the Mc[C]utcheon case, only the naked desire to disadvantage minorities that must rely primarily on financial rather than numerical influence to advance their interests. That kind of vulgar and reactionary majoritarianism is why we have a First Amendment in the first place, and a Second Amendment, too.

The right to dispose of one’s own property and the right to seek redress of grievances against the government under which one lives do not come from the state or the law, and they are not negotiable. The Supreme Court here has not created a right; it has only made a concession to the law described in the Declaration of Independence, which is beyond any court’s power to revise. The government of these United States exists at the sufferance of the people, not the other way around. The only scandal here is that Americans have been reduced to begging before the Supreme Court in order to have their fundamental rights recognized by the government under which they live.

Most of them also think that we should stay out of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which is interesting: Given that what Americans apparently want is a police state with a flat tax, it’s a miracle that Putin isn’t outperforming Huckabee – Putin runs his police state on a flat tax of only 13 percent.

A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value. In a truly free society, any business that disrespects its customers will fail, and deserves to do so. The same should be true of any government that disrespects its citizens. The central belief and fatal conceit of the current administration is that you are incapable of running your own life, but those in power are capable of running it for you. This is the essence of big government and collectivism.

Far from trying to rig the system, I have spent decades opposing cronyism and all political favors, including mandates, subsidies and protective tariffs—even when we benefit from them. I believe that cronyism is nothing more than welfare for the rich and powerful, and should be abolished.

The difference between Eich and Obama is that. as far as we know, Eich didn’t lie to people’s faces about his views to further his own ambition.