Speaking at the University of Michigan, President Obama said:

But we can’t expect to solve our problems if all we do is tear each other down. (Applause.) You can disagree with a certain policy without demonizing the person who espouses it. You can question somebody’s views and their judgment without questioning their motives or their patriotism. (Applause.) Throwing around phrases like “socialists” and “Soviet-style takeover” and “fascist” and “right-wing nut” — (laughter) — that may grab headlines, but it also has the effect of comparing our government, our political opponents, to authoritarian, even murderous regimes.

Now, we’ve seen this kind of politics in the past. It’s been practiced by both fringes of the ideological spectrum, by the left and the right, since our nation’s birth. But it’s starting to creep into the center of our discourse. And the problem with it is not the hurt feelings or the bruised egos of the public officials who are criticized. Remember, they signed up for it. Michelle always reminds me of that. (Laughter.) The problem is that this kind of vilification and over-the-top rhetoric closes the door to the possibility of compromise. It undermines democratic deliberation. It prevents learning –- since, after all, why should we listen to a “fascist,” or a “socialist,” or a “right-wing nut,” or a left-wing nut”?

Funny. This is the same guy who’s spent a year demonizing anyone who he thinks is a threat to his agenda.

Perhaps he should think about the whole “be the change you want to see” thing a little.

Megan McArdle posted a video of a narcotics SWAT raid on a home suspected of possessing marijuana.

The video is upsetting. There are no graphic images, but it is clear what happened.

The SWAT team raided the home and shot and killed the family’s two dogs, apparently a pit bull and a corgi. They did this in front of the family’s young children. They found a small amount of marijuana, enough just for a misdemeanor charge.

The police here were doing their job. They were ordered to raid the house, and they did. Dogs are sometimes shot during house raids because they can be a threat to the officers. My anger, and your anger, should not be directed at the officers involved here.

This is what our nation’s drug policy is doing. This is what it creates. It leads to stuff like this. No matter your position on whether people should use drugs, it is absolutely ridiculous to support a ban on their use. It turns something that is relatively minor, smoking marijuana, into a crime worthy of a SWAT police raid. It gives drug dealers and drug cartels their business. It pushes people who need help with an addiction into the dark crevices of society, where real criminals are.

Russell Roberts, professor of economics at George Mason University, wrote a fantastic paper on the causes of the financial crisis.

The most culpable policy has been the systematic encouragement of imprudent borrowing and lending. That encouragement came not from capitalism or markets, but from crony capitalism, the mutual aid society where Washington takes care of Wall Street and Wall Street returns the favor.9 Over the last three decades, public policy has systematically reduced the risk of making bad loans to risky investors. Over the last three decades, when large financial institutions have gotten into trouble, the government has almost always rescued their bondholders and creditors. These policies have created incentives both to borrow and to lend recklessly.

Phillip Swagel:

Imagine if the Troubled Asset Relief Program was to end up with a profit—not just recouping the money put into firms over the past two years but actually making a return for taxpayers. No one would suggest that the TARP is then somehow not a bailout. Recouping funds after the fact might be a good way to protect taxpayers, but it is preposterous to claim that this makes the Dodd bill anything other than a bailout. The ability of the government to put money into a failing firm and make payments to counterparties at its discretion is what makes the Dodd proposal a permanent bailout authority, not the issue of who pays after the fact.

Jeffrey Miron provides explains why he believes rights are important:

Indeed, what libertarians really mean when they say thinks [sic] like “individual have invioble [sic] rights” is that if a society respects particular individual rights (such as ownership of one’s property and person), then other good things happen. Powell’s point 1 is just a short-hand for this claim.

But if the argument for libertarian policies is that some “rights” have better consequences than others, why not eliminate the middle man and just discuss consequences directly?

That’s absolutely false. Protecting natural rights, e.g. the right to life, liberty and property, certainly does create other benefits, but natural rights are not justified because of the benefits they create, but because they are ends unto themselves.

Miron confuses negative rights with positive rights, and this is instructive of why he thinks rights are only justified by the benefits they create. A negative right is one where I am guaranteed that something will not be done to me, while a positive right is one where I am guaranteed something will be done for me.

The right to life, liberty and property are negative rights. My right to life does not mean you, or society, must insure I am alive, but rather that you will not threaten my life. It merely demands others refrain from doing something that will physically harm me. It constrains your actions, to use Robert Nozick’s term, rather than forces you to do something.

Positive rights work just the opposite; rather than guaranteeing something will not be done to me, positive rights guarantee I will receive something. The right to an education or health care are all examples of this: something is provided to me.

It is important to understand the difference between these two kinds of rights because only negative rights are moral. Enforcing negative rights violates no one’s rights. Positive rights, however, intrinsically violate someone else’s negative right to life, liberty or property.

If I have an absolute right to health care, then someone must provide that service for me. Some doctor must work on me. But since my right to their service is absolute, they have no choice in the matter. If they do not want to provide me their service, then the government will force them to. This violates their right to liberty, and amounts to slavery: they have no choice but to work for me.

All positive rights, if taken seriously, are a violation of negative rights. And now we can see Miron’s error: natural rights need no justification, because they result from the nature of humanity. We are each individuals, distinct, inviolable, and an end unto ourselves. The right to life, liberty and property protect this. They protect us from being treated as tools for someone else’s benefits. They insure that we are treated as human beings.

Positive rights, however, do not. They do treat individuals as tools. Miron does not understand the difference.

Senator Harkin said he will move on legislation to control insurance rate premiums:

Fearing that health insurance premiums may shoot up in the next few years, Senate Democrats laid a foundation on Tuesday for federal regulation of rates, four weeks after President Obama signed a law intended to rein in soaring health costs.

The proposal he likes is for the Health and Human Services secretary to block any rate increases she finds “unreasonable.”

Why do they need to approve rate increases if their health care reform will reduce costs, as they said it would?

Why aren’t they trying to address the actual reasons for insurance rate increases, which are increases in health care costs?

Well, Feinstein answers that for us.

Mrs. Feinstein said her bill would close what she described as “an enormous loophole” in the new law. And she said health insurance should be regulated like a public utility.

“Water and power are essential for life,” Mrs. Feinstein said. “So they are heavily regulated, and rate increases must be approved. Health insurance is also vital for life. It too should be strictly regulated so that people can afford this basic need.”

It’s about control. Period. Nothing more, nothing less.

An NBC reporter asks an African-American at a tea party rally whether he feels uncomfortable because there aren’t a lot of African-Americans.

His answer is quite instructive.

And, by the way, what a ridiculous question. The assumption is that we can’t feel comfortable unless we’re surrounded by people of our same race. If you want to talk about racism, there you go.

The Obama administration will issue new rules requiring hospitals receiving Medicare or Medicaid funds to allow same-sex couples the same visitation rights as family members:

The White House announced the rule changes, which will also make it easier for gay men and lesbians to make medical decisions on behalf of their partners, in a memorandum released Thursday night. In it, the president said the new rules would affect any hospital that participates in Medicare or Medicaid, the government programs to cover the elderly and the poor.

The change doesn’t just pertain to same-sex couples; rather, it allows patients to designate visitors and who can make medical decisions for them if they are incapacitated.

It’s a good change. There’s no reason a partner in a same-sex relationship should be barred from visiting their partner in the hospital merely because the law doesn’t recognize their relationship.

If we are going to have Medicare and Medicaid, this is a perfectly valid and just rule.

Consumers in Massachusetts are gaming mandated health insurance:

Baker’s data showed that about 40 percent of the consumers who purchased insurance from Harvard Pilgrim on the open market kept the insurance fewer than five months, and they incurred, on average, $2,400 a month in medical expenses — about six times higher than the monthly spending of other consumers.

Besides the mandate violating individual rights (just a small issue), the largest problem with banning discrimination against those with preexisting conditions and requiring individuals to purchase health insurance is exactly what’s happening in Massachusetts: the mandate can be taken advantage of at the expense of insurers. Effectively, individuals are using laws that require insurers to cover them to force insurers to pay for expensive procedures, then are dropping coverage so they don’t have to pay premiums.

A much simpler solution would be to make catastrophic plans easily available, reduce health care costs through reform, provide individuals the same tax advantages on health care costs that employers enjoy, and subsidize those with preexisting conditions. But the mandate is the path Democrats insisted upon, and now we’ll have to deal with the consequences.

Former acting CBO director Donald B. Marron has a fabulous look at why why our public debt is so dangerous, and what should be done about it:

First, once our economy is back on its feet, prolonged deficits and mounting debt will inevitably undermine economic growth. Americans simply do not save enough both to lend the government everything it needs to finance persistent deficits and to continue investing in the growth of the private sector. Future government borrowing will therefore require either more borrowing from abroad or significantly less domestic investment. If we reduce our domestic investment — building fewer factories, cutting back on research and development, and generating fewer innovations — our nation’s future earnings prospects will dim, and our future living standards will suffer. And while borrowing more from foreign lenders enables us to afford more investment today, that money (plus substantial interest) will eventually have to be repaid. As a result, more of our future income will have to be sent overseas — and again, our living standards will decline. Sometimes economics can be painfully simple: The more money we borrow now, the less we will have in the future.

Read the entire thing. We must reduce our debt to sustainable levels, and that means a significant reduction in spending and, unfortunately, tax increases.

This is precisely why the healthcare reform passed is so monumentally dangerous: our current spending and debt is unsustainable, yet we’ve decided to (1) tack on $100-200 billion in new spending a year, and (2) use up valuable means of cutting the budget.

The Obama administration believes companies reporting write downs due to healthcare reform are doing so to hurt the administration:

So the wave of corporate writedowns—led by AT&T’s $1 billion—isn’t caused by ObamaCare after all. The White House claims CEOs are reducing the value of their companies and returns for shareholders merely out of political pique.

A White House staffer told the American Spectator that “These are Republican CEOs who are trying to embarrass the President and Democrats in general. Where do you hear about this stuff? The Wall Street Journal editorial page and conservative Web sites. No one else picked up on this but you guys. It’s BS.”

Just to make it clear this isn’t the belief of some errant staffer, administration officials made similar comments over the weekend:

The White House had no immediate comment on the matter, but administration officials said they believe the announcements are meant to underscore the businesses’ displeasure with the law.

This administration has reached, and crossed, a dangerous line: they are entering into paranoia. They believe that anything that’s inconvenient to them isn’t because they screwed up somehow–but rather because there are people out to get them.

This is a clear-cut issue: companies must recognize charges due to a change by the healthcare reform bill.

Some background: when President Bush and Congress added a prescription-drug benefit to Medicare, they provided a subsidy for companies that continued to provide their own prescription drug benefit for employees. The government would subsidize, tax-free, 28 percent of each employee’s health benefit. In addition, companies could deduct the full cost of the benefit from their taxes, so the subsidy was worth more than the 28 percent. This was done because the government didn’t want companies to dump their employees on the Medicare plan–in other words, because it was cheaper for the government to subsidize private-provided prescription drug benefit.

The Democrats’ healthcare reform changed the law so companies cannot deduct the subsidy from their taxes. This is arguably a good change (although not during a recession), but that’s debatable. Either way, it doesn’t concern us.¹

Companies, in accordance with GAAP, have recognized costs resulting from this change in law. That’s what Caterpillar’s $100 million and AT&T’s $1 billion charges are. That is how much the change in law will cost them over time.

Democrats, and particularly Henry Waxman and the administration, have crossed the line in characterizing these SEC filings as politically motivated. Here’s the reality: those companies are required by law to recognize it. The only politically-motivated part of this story are Waxman’s hearings and the administration’s claims.

It shows a disturbing disconnect from reality, willful or not, on the part of the White House and Congressional Democrats. Anything that makes them look bad is taken as an attack, a conspiracy against them.

That’s the kind of thinking, coincidentally, that Nixon employed. That’s dangerous.

1. One note, though. Democrats have characterized this change as closing a “loophole.” It should be clear this wasn’t a loophole at all, but intentional policy to reduce the cost for companies providing prescription drug benefits to their employees. The Democrats’ rhetoric is disingenuous. ↩

Obama posed the mandate during the campaign, and described it as a “philosophical” disagreement between Clinton and himself:

So we’ve got a lot of similarities in our plan. We’ve got a philosophical difference, which we’ve debated repeatedly, and that is that Senator Clinton believes the only way to achieve universal health care is to force everybody to purchase it.

And my belief is, the reason that people don’t have it is not because they don’t want it but because they can’t afford it.

It seems, though, that for Obama, principles are to be discarded when they become inconvenient.

Megan McArdle on healthcare reform gaming the CBO:

So what you get is a piece of legislation where the actual cost/deficit reducing provisions aren’t politically or even economically realistic (there’s reason to be somewhat skeptical that you can simply mandate an across-the-board reduction in the rate of cost growth for various providers, while expanding coverage, as this bill does).  They don’t have to be.  They get you the score that allows you to tell folks that you’re reducing the deficit, even though you know that many of them may have to be undone later.

That’s what I mean by gaming the system:  you pass politically unrealistic laws, which all the relevant interest groups expect to revisit before they take effect, solely in order to get a number.  And then you use the number to sell the bill.

A conversation with Gay Becker:

Mr. Becker places his hands behind his head. Once again, he reflects, then smiles wryly. “Of course that doesn’t mean there isn’t any systematic bias toward bad policy,” he says. “There’s one bias that we’re up against all the time: Markets are hard to appreciate.”

Caterpillar, Deere, AT&T and Verizon have announced substantial ($100 million to $1 billion) writedowns due to healthcare bill.

In response, Democrats are hauling their CEOs before Congress:

Almost immediately, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman of California and Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan, chairman of the Oversight and Investigations panel, announced plans to hold an April 21 hearing on “claims by Caterpillar, Verizon, and Deere that provisions in the new health care reform law could adversely affect their company’s ability to provide health insurance to their employees. These assertions appear to conflict with independent analyses, which show that the new law will expand coverage and bring down costs.”

This is now the America we live in: when companies follow the law and announce increased costs, they are called before Congress so they (and all other companies) can be intimidated, because this reality is inconvenient for the government.

Change.