Perhaps the difference that most fundamentally separates true liberals and libertarians from others is that, to one degree or another, true liberals and libertarians are, unlike non-liberals and non-libertarians, dutiful sons and daughters of the Scottish Enlightenment. And one of the great lessons of that remarkable intellectual movement is the refinement of the understanding that state and society are not the same thing. Society is not created by the state, and the state’s activities not only do not define those of society but often diminish society’s activities.

Professor Don Boudreaux says this in the course of pointing out that FDR did much to destroy the private market for unemployment insurance. Prior to governments providing “free” unemployment insurance, many religious organizations, charities, businesses, and private societies provided it. People helping each other, reaching out, lending a hand to a neighbor in need. All of that was blown away and destroyed once the federal and state governments started providing unemployment insurance.

I found out today that it is possible to buy supplemental unemployment insurance to augment what the government provides. That’s welcome news but it’s a far cry from the vibrant assistance provided by society prior to the government’s take over.

Government has not brought us closer together by providing services that the private sector used to provide. Instead, it has pushed us further apart and made us less reliant on each other. That’s the exact opposite of the brotherly love and caring that President Obama constantly claims to want.

If you want a close knit society of caring people that look out for each other—slash government spending and get government out of the business of replacing society with bureaucracy.

“As I believe this committee will be recommending, abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their present form and coming up with a new whole system of housing finance [is in order],” House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D, Mass.) said at a hearing.

This is the same Congressman Frank that previously refused to believe that anything could possibly be wrong with Fannie and Freddie.

“These two entities–Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. “The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

And this is the same Fannie and Freddie that the government is bailing out, with no limits whatsoever on the losses to the American taxpayer.

The Obama administration’s decision to cover an unlimited amount of losses at the mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the next three years stirred controversy over the holiday.

The Treasury announced Thursday it was removing the caps that limited the amount of available capital to the companies to $200 billion each.

Unlimited access to bailout funds through 2012 was “necessary for preserving the continued strength and stability of the mortgage market,” the Treasury said. Fannie and Freddie purchase or guarantee most U.S. home mortgages and have run up huge losses stemming from the worst wave of defaults since the 1930s.

Of course, this is Barney Frank we’re talking about here. I shudder to think about what he has in mind to replace Fannie and Freddie. Whatever it is, be sure that you’ll be paying for it, not him. You’ll probably be paying a lot.

John Goodman summarized the findings this way:

Premiums for individuals and families purchasing coverage on their own will go up 54%. Premiums for small businesses will go up 20%. Both numbers are over 5 years and both numbers exclude the impact of medical inflation.

I skimmed through the study and it looks pretty interesting. The study points out that reform won’t work unless everyone is forced to purchase insurance.

The key implication of our analysis is simple: For these types of insurance reforms to be successful and sustainable, it is imperative to get broad participation. Young and healthy people need to be part of the insurance pool, and people cannot defer buying insurance until they are sick or at high risk. This is true no matter who is paying the premiums—individuals, employers, or the government.

The study then goes on to indicate that the current bill likely will allow people to free-ride, with bad results. They’re basing their conclusions on several states’ experiments with healthcare reform.

• New York and Vermont: Average premiums in the individual market today are about 60% higher than the national average

• New Jersey: Reform caused much higher premiums forcing thousands of individuals to drop coverage. The individual market decreased from 157,000 people in 1993 to 88,000 in 2007

• Maine: Individual market enrollment in Maine dropped from 90,000 to 41,000 between 1993 and 2007 following the state’s reforms.

Even in Massachusetts, there is evidence that individuals are selectively jumping in and out of the market when they need healthcare. Data from health insurers in Massachusetts indicate that the number of peopl ein the individual market with coverage of less than 12 months has doubled post reform. These individuals have a significantly higher claims to premium ration when compared to those who had coverage for more than 12 months but let it lapse or those that are active.

Without strong penalties, similar types of behavior are likely to emerge in the reformed individual market—resulting in significantly higher premiums for the insured.

This is one of the reasons why I believe that the “reform” bills will just make American healthcare worse than it already is.

Do you have a right to health care? Yes. And no. My answer ultimately depends on what you mean by a “right” to health care.

Rights come in two varieties: negative and positive. A negative right can be thought of as the right to be left alone. It’s the right to do something without the fear that someone else will restrain you. A positive right can be thought of as the right to be served. While a negative right requires only that someone leave you in peace, a positive right requires that someone actively do something for you.

I believe you have the right to work with the doctor of your choice — whether or not that doctor has been credentialed by a government.

I believe you have the right to take the drugs of your choice — whether or not those drugs have been approved by a government panel of experts. I believe you have the right to take experimental cancer drugs, especially as a last ditch attempt to save your life. I believe you have the right to take marijuana to treat pain, to build appetite, and to relax.

I believe you have the right to buy insurance from any company, located in any state, covering any combination of conditions. I belive you shouldn’t be limited to only the health insurance that covers a government approved list of condition from a government approved list of companies.

I believe in a strong negative right to health care. That’s something that doesn’t really exist in America today. Right now, you are not free to receive health care from anyone you trust, you are not free to take the drugs of your choice, and you are not free to buy whatever health care you desire. I am in favor of more freedom in health care. I believe you have a right to consume health care as you see fit, even if the majority of people around you disagree with your decisions. That’s freedom.

I don’t believe you have a right to force someone else to pay for treatment, medications, or medical supplies. I don’t believe you have a right to force a doctor to work with you. It’s one thing if you and the doctor can come to a mutual agreement regarding pay and hours of availability. It’s something else entirely to require a doctor to treat you at a price of your choosing (not his) and at a time of your choosing (not his). I don’t believe you have a positive right to health care.

To be blunt, I don’t believe you have a right to turn doctors into slaves (by requiring them to treat for free or at a steep discount) or a right to turn your fellow citizens into slaves (by requiring them to work in order to pay the bills for your health care).

The current discussion of health care rights revolves almost entirely around positive rights — getting someone else to pay for our health care. It includes an “exchange” that would strictly limit the options available. It includes subsidies forcibly taken from some people through taxes and used to pay for someone else’s health care.

It includes a requirement for insurance companies to charge everyone the same price for health care. This practice, known as community rating, allows sicker people to pay less than the cost of their care and requires healthier people to pay more. In effect, community rating is a subsidy to the sick courtesy of the healthy. Community rated health care is a very bad deal for young, healthy individuals. So the current discussion revolves around a health care mandate. Most of the plans under consideration would require young people to purchase something that’s a bad deal. They would be required to do this solely to provide a good deal to sick people and the elderly.

Claiming a positive right to health care is nothing more nor less than the claiming the right to enslave your fellow man. I don’t believe you have that right.

HPW follows health insurance markets globally, and is projecting that total covered lives will exceed one billion by 2012. Single-payer systems are declining world-wide because they are primarily based in countries which have static or declining populations, while private insurance is growing rapidly in countries with the fastest population growth.

Most of this is coming from developing countries which are for the first time ever building out a health financing system, choosing to encourage private health insurance over single-payer on five continents. Examples include China, Columbia, South Africa, Mexico, India, Australia and most of eastern Europe. Most of these countries considered and rejected a single-payer system in favor of a private insurance system, and more than a dozen more are following suit in the same regions.

Private insurance is the chosen system for several reasons. In developing countries in eastern Europe there is a strong aversion to the former Soviet-style model, and western European global insurers like Allianz and Vienna Insurance Group have actually acquired the entire single payer system from the government and turned it private.

Cool.

Health insurers often act like monopolies — like a cable company or the Department of Motor Vehicles — because they resemble monopolies. Consumers, instead of being able to choose freely among insurers, are restricted to the plans their employer offers. So insurers are spared the rigors of true competition, and they end up with high costs and spotty service.

But then, discussing the Wyden-Bennett bill, he makes less sense.

In the simplest version, families would receive a voucher worth as much as their employer spends on their health insurance. They would then buy an insurance plan on an “exchange” where insurers would compete for their business. The government would regulate this exchange. Insurers would be required to offer basic benefits, and insurers that attracted a sicker group of patients would be subsidized by those that attracted a healthier group.

The immediate advantage would be that people could choose a plan that fit their own preferences, rather than having to accept a plan chosen by human resources. You would be able to carry your plan from one job to the next — or hold onto it if you found yourself unemployed. You would never have to switch doctors because your employer switched insurance plans.

The problem with this idea is that it really doesn’t offer much choice. Insurance companies are still protected from competition by the friendly confines of a government controlled “exchange”. True choice would consist of an open market place where any entrepreneur can offer any product to any interested consumer. The success or failure of the product would depend on one all important criteria: whether or not consumers saw any value in it. Insurers would no longer be able to foist their plans on consumers who don’t want them. And entrepreneurs would be free to introduce radical, new products that threaten the current insurance companies.

That kind of free choice wouldn’t exist under an insurance “exchange”. Each new product would have to be carefully weighed and analyzed by government bureaucrats. Nothing new would be approved unless they determined that it was worthwhile and useful. Existing insurance companies would have a hand in writing the regulations and only products that conform to the current status-quo would be allowed in. Anything that threatens that status-quo would be barred from the “exchange” and never offered to consumers. The end result would be akin to Ford’s infamous statement that consumers could buy any color car they wanted — as long as it was black.

Instead of fostering innovation and creativity in health care, the Wyden-Bennett bill would take the current “insurance” industry and lock it in cement. Consumers would continue to be forced to buy health insurance not health care and bureaucrats would continue to dicatate how, when, and where their health care dollars can be spent.

All of this makes me happy to hear that Wyden-Bennett doesn’t have much support in the Senate.

John Goodman points to a recent story and then offers an alternative.

Is there a better way? Yes. It’s called casualty insurance — similar to the kind of insurance most people have on their homes and automobiles. In the case of a catastrophic illness, the insurer makes a lump sum available — ideally enough to cover all reasonable care. But when there are differences of opinion, patients can add their own funds to the insurer’s payment and buy any type of care from any provider. For Medicaid, additional funds could be provided by private charity (which is what is happening anyway for Dr. Pollard’s patients).

This is not a small change from the current system. It is a huge change. It would lead to a real market for catastrophic care in which patients and their families become real, empowered buyers. Providers would compete for patients based on price and, therefore, on quality. Doctors would be free to act as the agents of their patients rather than agents of third-party-payer bureaucracies.

Why would you want to hand control over your health care over to a bureaucracy? And why would you believe that a government bureaucracy would run more smoothly — and treat you more fairly — than a private bureaucracy?

Book dealers armed with handheld ISBN scanners are threatening to take over the used book sales run by volunteer fundraising groups for the Madison Public Library system, Morris said.

The scanners tell them how many copies of a title are in circulation and what it generally sells for — powerful information to have if your aim is to find cheaply priced books that can be sold online for much more than you paid.

“You see them just literally hunched over … shelves of books,” Morris said, blocking book lovers like him from perusing the titles and maybe picking up a bargain they actually intend to read.

Thomas Boykoff, president of the board of directors for the Central Library Friends group, and Margaret Rentmeesters, who manages the book store at the library, acknowledge that the book dealers have become more common at book sales over the last two or three years.

But profit sometimes motivates unpleasant behavior.

“They sort of claim an area,” Boykoff said, “Some of them just don’t give a damn.”

How horrible! How, how … profit-driven! How evil! Or is it?

I love reading, but I just don’t have time to get out to library book sales. While I wish I could, the timing just never quite works out.

Thankfully, there are people out there willing to trade their time for my money. They’ll pore over the stacks, weeding through the books that no one wants, to find the books that someone wants. Then they’ll list these books on Amazon.com, Half.com, Alibris, Deal Oz, AbeBooks, Powell’s Books or other similiar sites. I can browse the online sites, find what I want, and have it delivered directly to my door.

These book sellers are no nuisance. They’re a blessing and I’m grateful for them.