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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (747055)	10/16/2013 3:34:09 PM
From: RetiredNow	3 Recommendations Recommended By Tenchusatsu TideGlider TimF Read Replies (7) \| Respond to of 1579131

I got banned from the Obama thread, so I'm posting to you here. I am assuming that the folks who run this thread aren't into censorship, like they are on the Dictatorship Obama site. ------------ The Obamacare Rollout Debacle Is A Hayekian 'Teaching Moment' forbes.com By Steven Hayward The necessity of re-learning fundamental truths at regular intervals should not surprise beings whose moral history begins with succumbing to the false temptation of the serpent before the Tree of Knowledge that “ye shall be as gods.” The debacle of the rollout of Obamacare is yet another moment for re-learning the fundamental truth about how little we know about what we think we can control. That last phrase comes from F.A. Hayek, of course. Hayek died in 1992, on the cusp of the World Wide Web and the explosion of the Internet, which has transformed our economy and our individual lives profoundly. In one of his last interviews with Forbesmagazine shortly before his death, Hayek was asked whether the rapid advances in technology and computing power made economic management—planning and regulation—more feasible. Hayek was emphatic that no matter how big and how fast our computing power got, it did not change the fundamental defect of all centralized economic control: the problem is not simply mastering or processing a large amount of raw data. Information and circumstances change too quickly. More fundamentally, the data necessary for centralized decision-making is not available at all. Right now the planners and architects of Obamacare are blaming the dysfunction of its launch on software “glitches” that will, eventually, be ironed out. The problem is one of server “bottlenecks,” bad software code, and the lack of adequate testing. The success of massive data handling in the private sector by Google, Amazon, and Facebook should give us confidence, the optimists argue, that all will be well with another few months and another few hundred million dollars on top of the roughly $600 million spent already on the online portals. Donald Berwick, a former administrator for Medicare and Medicaid, offered up the favorite bureaucratic excuse to the New York Times: “We did not have enough money.” Is it a mere coincidence that the National Security Agency is having similar difficulties with its massive new data gathering and analysis center in Utah? These dual data debacles have more in common than is contained in the usual dichotomy of public sector incompetence versus private sector incentive and focus. In other words, it is superficial to say that if only Steve Jobs or Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos were in charge of these enterprises they’d work better. It’s possible that with enough code and enough server farms the Obamacare exchanges may eventually work more “smoothly” in the sense that someone can get all the way through to the end and actually end up with health insurance. The essential failure of the whole enterprise is already evident, however, and will only get worse. The large subsidies required to prompt many uninsured people to enroll will further skew the real costs—and price signals—that genuinely functioning markets require as feedback information. The Byzantine world of health care prices today—good luck finding out what a hospital procedure actually costs—will grow steadily worse under the new world of Obamacare. I have called what is happening a great “re-learning” of Hayek’s lesson about why attempts to command complex economic phenomena are inherently doomed to fail, but most liberals never learned this lesson in the first place. The increasing difficulties of Obamacare will be taken as proof that we need to go all the way to single-payer health care. Sen. Harry Reid has already suggested that the patchwork scheme that is Obamacare is just a halfway house on the way to single-payer, as did a little known Illinois state senator named Barack Obama more than a decade ago. For liberals, failure is just another reason for expanding regulatory reach further—a variation of “never let a good crisis go to waste.” This has been the story of roughly the last hundred years for the most part. With only a few limited exceptions (like transportation and energy deregulation), the patterns has been for government failures to beget new government failures—a pattern that has become known as the “ratchet effect.” The great question of Obamacare is whether we’ve finally reached the point at which the ratchet wrench of ever-bigger government will snap. Steven F. Hayward is the visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He writes daily at Powerlineblog.com.

To: tejek who wrote (747055)	10/16/2013 3:38:08 PM
From: RetiredNow	Respond to of 1579131

Socialism, Communism, Marxism, Crony-Capitalsm, Fascism: What do they all have in common? They want to steal your money to give to someone else. Welcome to Europe and the US in the 21st century. ---------------------- The International Monetary Fund Lays The Groundwork For Global Wealth Confiscation forbes.com The International Monetary Fund (IMF) quietly dropped a bomb in its October Fiscal Monitor Report. Titled “Taxing Times,” the report paints a dire picture for advanced economies with high debts that fail to aggressively “mobilize domestic revenue.” It goes on to build a case for drastic measures and recommends a series of escalating income and consumption tax increases culminating in the direct confiscation of assets. Yes, you read that right. But don’t take it from me. The report itself says: “The sharp deterioration of the public finances in many countries has revived interest in a “capital levy”— a one-off tax on private wealth—as an exceptional measure to restore debt sustainability. The appeal is that such a tax, if it is implemented before avoidance is possible and there is a belief that it will never be repeated, does not distort behavior (and may be seen by some as fair). … The conditions for success are strong, but also need to be weighed against the risks of the alternatives, which include repudiating public debt or inflating it away. … The tax rates needed to bring down public debt to precrisis levels, moreover, are sizable: reducing debt ratios to end-2007 levels would require (for a sample of 15 euro area countries) a tax rate of about 10 percent on households with positive net wealth. (page 49)” Note three takeaways. First, IMF economists know there are not enough rich people to fund today’s governments even if 100 percent of the assets of the 1 percent were expropriated. That means that all households with positive net wealth—everyone with retirement savings or home equity—would have their assets plundered under the IMF’s formulation. Second, such a repudiation of private property will not pay off Western governments’ debts or fund budgets going forward. It will merely “restore debt sustainability,” allowing free-spending sovereigns to keep tapping the bond markets until the next crisis comes along—for which stronger measures will be required, of course. Third, should politicians fail to muster the courage to engage in this kind of wholesale robbery, the only alternative scenario the IMF posits is public debt repudiation and hyperinflation. Structural reform proposals for the Ponzi-scheme entitlement programs that are bankrupting us are nowhere to be seen. If ever there were a roadmap for prompting massive capital flight and emigration of productive citizens toward capitalism’s nascent frontiers in Asia, this is it. “The IMF justifies its tax increases by highlighting trends in income inequality along with a claimed decline in the progressivity of most income tax regimes. Using “perceived equity” (otherwise known as “envy”) as the key metric motivating tax policy, the report intentionally conflates tax rates with tax revenue, lamenting a decline in the top marginal income tax rates paid by the highest earners. Never mind that these high earners have been forking over more money, a higher percentage of their gross income, and a larger share of aggregate national tax revenue in recent years. It also ignores the Laffer Curve effects that are clearly visible in the data. As for incentive, the report pays no heed to the idea that wealth and income can only be taxed if someone is motivated to create it.” The report’s most chilling aspect is the clinical manner in which it discusses how to restrict the mobility of the rich, along with the inconvenience of factoring in their “well being.” Again, to quote the report: “Financial wealth is mobile, and so, ultimately, are people. … There may be a case for taxing different forms of wealth differently according to their mobility … Substantial progress likely requires enhanced international cooperation to make it harder for the very well-off to evade taxation by placing funds elsewhere. “A revenue-maximizing approach to taxing the rich effectively puts a weight of zero on their well-being—contentious, to say the least. What then if some weight is indeed attached to the well-being of the richest? Figure 19 provides a way to think about the trade-off between equity and efficiency considerations in setting the top marginal rate in that case. … If one attaches less weight to those with the highest incomes, the vote would be to increase the top marginal rate.” Yes, this is where the bankruptcy of the modern entitlement state is taking us—capital controls and exit restrictions so the proverbial four wolves and a lamb can vote on what’s for dinner. That’s the only way to keep citizens worried about ending up on the menu from voting with their feet. Again, straight from the report: “There is a surprisingly large amount of experience to draw on, as such levies were widely adopted in Europe after World War I.” And we all know how well that worked out.