|
|
Shari Roan of the Los Angeles Times reports that
[t]he cancer drug Avastin should not be used to treat breast cancer that has spread to other organs because it doesn’t help patients enough to justify its risky side effects, the Food and Drug Administration ruled Friday.
It must be comforting to some to know that super-smart Ph.D.’s in a DC office somewhere have made this choice for every American in the entire country who might be faced with a personal decision to use Avastin or not.
But I have another crazy, libertarian idea: Let each individual facing such a decision personally weigh the pros and cons of the drug, in consultation with their doctor, family and confidants, and make their own decision.
Crazy talk, I know.
Denver Post Editorial Writer Alicia Caldwell has an article on the effects of the Colorado legislature’s regulation of payday lenders. (See “Hiding behind a tribe.“)
Last legislative session, the General Assembly all but put the payday lenders out of business in Colorado with new regulations. Our elected representatives decided these lenders were “predatory” and taking unfair advantage of their customers.
Ignoring, of course, that none of the payday victims customers were forced to use the payday lenders nor lied to or defrauded in any way. In short, the benevolent know-it-all legislature substituted its judgment for that of people that voluntarily used a service. The legislature decided that those poor, uneducated dumbass poor people using the service were too dang stupid to be allowed to make their own decisions and needed their betters to protect themselves from their own stupidity.
Ain’t government grand.
Now, it appears, some Indian tribes have the void and gotten into the payday loan business. Indian tribes, as sovereign nations, are not subject to state regulations. Republican Colorado Attorney General John Suthers is aghast*. He believes the Indian tribes have teamed up with payday lenders and are committing a ruse to avoid state regulation.
So what?
The entire scenario demonstrates the abject absurdity of state attempts to control markets. When there is a demand for a service, people will have that demand met, regardless of state regulation.
The government should not spend a dime restricting voluntary transactions between adults. I know, that simple proposition makes me a crazy radical, well outside the norm of modern political thought.
Thank god.
=======
*Aren’t Republicans supposed to believe in free markets and less regulation? It is a rhetorical question. Of course they don’t. Not unless it’s politically expedient.
According to David Gergen,
“…The Economist estimates that the federal government now employs a quarter of a million people to write and enforce regulations.”
We would be better served if we paid those people to stay at home. At least they would not be impeding those actually producing things.
Thousands stood up at Tea Parties across Colorado on Thursday to send a message to our elected officials that November is Coming. Unfortunately, President Obama is not going to wait to push his big government agenda,
Hi, this is David Williams, Denver Director of Americans for Prosperity. Join me on Monday in Denver on the West Steps of the Capitol at 5:00pm to learn about the intrusive global warming regulations that the administration is trying to force on the American people through the EPA…without a vote of Congress.
Bring out your family and friends for great speakers and dinner and send Senator Bennet a message: Stop the EPA Power grab or we will hold you responsible for the lost Colorado jobs and higher prices!
Press 1 now to let us know you’re attending this free event tomorrow night in Denver. Or Go to regulation reality dot com to register. That’s regulation reality dot com.
Paid for By Americans for Prosperity
The Denver Post has a front page story today concerning housing foreclosures. It features a sad story about a man in the Vail Valley who is losing his house. (See “‘Big boy’ mess rolling downhill, hitting locals“).
The man, Harry Cessna, says
“I sat here — happy and content in my little home — and watched all these big boys play with money, and I saw how greedy everyone got, selling and going bigger and selling and going bigger. Now I’m getting punished along with the rest of them.”
I feel for Mr. Cessna. However, the “big boys” playing with money has nothing to do with his foreclosure. As the Post reports,
Harry Cessna admits he has struggled to make payments on the modular home he bought in Gypsum in 1989 with his soon-to-be wife.
He was late a couple of times as he helped his wife fight cancer for two years, a battle she lost in 2007. Without her salary, Cessna, a house painter, could barely make payments on the acre-lot home bought for $55,000.
The story is very sad and Mr. Cessna deserves our sympathy. But he is losing his house because he lost his wife’s income and he could no longer afford the payment on his mortgage. Evil fat cat greedy “big boys” in loud pinstriped suits lighting cigars with $100 bills did not have a thing to do with it.
Anecdotes and personal stories sell newspapers. They do very little to address the country’s economic problems, which stem from well-documented government intervention in, among other things, the housing market.
This will drive up the cost of cars. The government admits new cars in 2016 will cost $926 more under these new standards than they would otherwise.
If they admit to an increase of $926, you can bet the increase will be substantially more. Rich people will just write a check for the difference. Poor people will not. They can not. The government says “no big deal.” The new standards will actually save you money.
According to the government, we will all save $3000 in gas money over the life of the car. If this were true, government force would not be required.
Whenever the government says force is necessary for people to save money, they are spewing nonsense. They do not care about saving you money. They care about control over what you can buy.
They know better than you. You are too stupid to know that you can save money. Therefore, the government must pass a law requiring you to save money.
It is absurd on its face. It is tripe. And too many of us say, “Thanks, oh benevolent state, for the tripe. It is so tasty.”
Excellent. This is a small, but important, bit of civil disobedience. 155,000 Denver residents are in defiance of an attempt by the city government to regulate private behavior.
People realize there is no need for the government, city or otherwise, to grant you permission to own a dog. People realize there is no need for the government, city or otherwise, to have your dog on an official list of approved pets. People realize there is no need for the government, city or otherwise, to take your money for official sanction to own a pet.
It is up to us to apply this principle to other areas where government intrudes on our private lives. It is up to us to spread the gospel of freedom. It is up to us to preach that life works without government involvement.
That life works without government involvement seems to be a foreign concept to many Americans. And that is sad.
Let’s get happy. Let’s fight government intrusion into our private lives at every level.
There is a problem with the over prescripion of medical marijuana in Colorado. Fortunately, the solution to the problem already exists.
The pro-big government statists in both major parties, however, can not let the “crisis” go to waste. The boom of medical marijuana providers in Colorado gives the statists another opportunity to create another layer of government bureaucracy and government control over individuals and the doctor/patient relationship.
For instance, Christian Thurstone, a “board-certified child/adoscent and addictions psychiatrist” laments the abuses of our state’s medical marijuana process ( see “Medical Marijuana and Teenagers, Smoke and Mirrors,”) in today’s Denver Post.
He complains that
In the last three months, I have seen more than a dozen young people — all between the ages of 18 and 25 and with histories of substance abuse — who received from other doctors what are essentially permission slips to smoke pot.
That presents a problem. It must be addressed.
However, Dr. Thurstone loses some credibility when he declares “Now, almost every day, a kid asks me, ‘Doc, how can marijuana be bad? It’s a medicine.’”
The good doctor is exasperated that he has to answer this question, as if the kid has a good point he can not refute.
That is an absurd conclusion. The kid does not have a good point. The doctor should tell the kid that valium, vicodin and oxycontin are medicine, too, and the kid should not be doing those things either, unless he has a medical need for them.
Of course, to answer in such a way is place marijuana on the same legitimate medicinal grounds as these prescription drugs. Dr. Thurstone does not wish to do this, and his bias is apparent.
(Of course, valium, vicodin and oxycontin are all more addictive and dangerous than marijuana, but let’s not confuse the issue with clarity).
Dr. Thurstone has a higher opinion of his ability to determine if patients need medical marijuana than his fellow MDs. He disagrees with many of them.
He probably has a point. But let’s not pretend that this is a new situation. Unethical MDs have wrongfully prescribed all kinds of medicine ever since the first prescription pad was printed.
Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson’s doctors immediately come to mind.
The problem is not medical marijuana. The problem is its inappropriate prescription by licensed medical professionals. There already exists a way to deal with incompetent and/or unethical doctors.
Anyone, even other doctors like Thurstone, can file a complaint with the Colorado Board of Medical Examiners if one believes a medical doctor is acting in an unethical manner. The checklist of potential complaints includes “overprescribing of medications.” It seems like Dr. Thurstone is in dire search of a solution that already exists, and it’s as obvious as a bong at a baptism.
It appears that the good doc’s real problem is that medical marijuana exists at all.
If one believes that a medical doctor is overprescribing a medicine, any medicine, report him to the board that already exists. There is no need to lobby the legislature for more government intrusion into citizens’ lives.
Physician, heal thyself. And leave the legislature out of it.
The bill, among other things,
hands regulators broad new powers likely to impact everyone from the average mortgage applicant to multibillion-dollar financial houses that lord over the global economy.
Among its most applauded — and controversial — components, the 1,279-page bill would create an entirely new regulatory agency, the Financial Services Oversight Council. Its charge would be to protect consumers and give regulators the power to pre-emptively dismantle companies if they conclude those firms threaten the economy.
The premise of such regulation is based on a fanciful idea. Those in favor of regulation such as this believe that government functionaries have some idea how to successfully manage an industry, or at least some portion of it.
This premise has no basis in fact. Even if one believes that Wall Street firms and bankers are evil and must be reigned in, this regulation does not solve the problem.
It merely substitutes the evil bankers with evil, and incompetent, bureaucrats.
More regulation is not the answer. More regulation results in more rules. More rules means more time and money must be spent in complying with those rules. It provides incentives for those that can find loopholes in the rules. It costs money to enforce the rules.
Society eventually ends up spending more time and resources arguing about commas, definitions and exceptions to arbitrary regulations than to actually solving the perceived problem.
The problem can be solved with one rule, and it is already in place:
Do not commit fraud.
All people, even Wall Street Bankers, should be able to engage in any voluntary transaction with any other person as long as no fraud is perpetrated.
This simple rule, however, does not allow politicians to control anything. They do not get to create new agencies. They do not get to hire new regulators. They do not get to pay off political debt. Nor do they solve the problem.
But it is not about solving the problem. It is about control. And the House bill gives Congress plenty of that.
|
Help Liberty on the Rocks (Denver) Grow. Donate Today!
Get Happy Hour Reminders!
|
