James Madison on the health care bill

Obviously, James Madison never wrote about the health care bill. But given that the current bill is 1,990 pages long and few of the representatives voting on it have actually read it, he seems remarkably prescient:

"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they can not be read, or so incoherent that they can not be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow."

From The Federalist Papers

Cheaper health care without higher taxes

The problem with the government trying to "fix" healthcare is that it's the government that broke it in the first place. And they are trying to fix it by doing more of what they did to break it.

It's true that many Americans can't find affordable health insurance. But it's largely because of government-imposed barriers that keep the cost of insurance so high.

Here are a few ways we can provide lower-cost insurance without raising taxes:

1) Allow the purchase of health insurance across state lines. According to the University of Minnesota, 12 million more Americans would be able to buy coverage if this simple solution was enacted. Excessive state regulations artificially increase the cost of health insurance by requiring companies to provide coverage for such things as fertility treatments and massage therapy. Let's allow people to shop for the coverage they really need!

2) Let people take the cash their employer uses to purchase health care and shop for a plan on their own. Currently, employer-provided health insurance is not taxed. But if you opt out of your employer-provided coverage and shop for your own, you pay for it with after-tax dollars. If people could shop for the best deals, insurance companies would be forced to innovate and control costs (or lose market share to companies that do).

Those two ideas are just a start. They wouldn't cost a dime and would allow lower costs for those who have health insurance, and would allow more people to afford insurance.

Surviving the end of the world

The movie 2012 is opening Friday. According to the film's website, it's "an epic adventure about a global cataclysm that brings an end to the world and tells of the heroic struggle of the survivors."

Am I the only one who sees a glaring problem with that sentence?

I mean, if there are survivors, it's not exactly the end of the world, is it?

I love a good post-apocalyptic story. I even enjoyed The Postman, although the book was better than the movie. (I mean, Tom Petty as the mayor of the city in the treetops? What were they thinking?) But I think I'll skip this one. If the promo materials are that bad, how good can the movie be? And that goes double for any movie with Woody Harrelson in it.

Dads make us human

Robin Nixon, writing in LiveScience, says fathers are the key to making us human.

Some 95 percent of male mammals have little to no interaction with their children. Homo sapiens are one of the most notable exceptions, leading some scientists to think fatherhood is an important part of what makes us human.

Most theories for the family involvement of fathers invoke the familiar "Man the Hunter" characterization, in which dad protects and provides for his young.

While fathers do play key roles in securing the physical health of their children, they also can be important for the optimum development of psychological and emotional traits considered to be primarily human, such as empathy, emotional control and the ability to navigate complex social relationships.

Are Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives?

Jason Richwine points out a peer-reviewed study that indicates they are.

Lazar Stankov, a visiting professor at Singapore’s National Institute of Education, published “Conservatism and Cognitive Ability” earlier this year in the peer-reviewed journal Intelligence. Here is a quote from the article’s abstract:

Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated … At the individual level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with SAT, vocabulary, and analogy test scores. At the national level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with measures of education … and performance on mathematics and reading assessments.

But there are a couple of caveats worth noting: First, by “conservatism” Stankov does not necessarily mean people who favor free market economics. He has in mind a kind of traditionalism probably best described as social conservatism. The second caveat is that social conservatives do not always vote for conservative candidates. Most black Americans, for example, clearly exhibit “the Conservative syndrome” as Stankov defined it—70 percent voted to abolish gay marriage in California—but they routinely give about 90 percent of their votes to the Democratic Party.

The Obama Effect

From Gallup:

"Among blacks, optimism about an eventual solution to race-relations problems has decreased since last summer, from 50% to 42%. In fact, the current 42% is essentially the same percentage that Gallup measured among blacks on several previous occasions."

Congress is holding hearings..

to investigate the NFL. Specifically, the House Judiciary Committee is asking questions about brain damage among NFL players and former players.

Will someone please explain to me why the Judiciary Committee is wasting their time on this?