iftttwall

Two weeks ago, Barack Obama
announced that he was sending “up to 300” troops to Iraq. Now
The New York Times
reports that the number has grown:

Obama
administration officials said that about 200 more troops had been
sent to protect the American Embassy in Baghdad and the Baghdad
airport. The additional troops, who arrived on Sunday, will operate
helicopters and drones to “bolster airfield and route security,”
Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said in a
statement.

In addition to those forces, another 100 troops who the Pentagon
had previously said would be sent to Iraq are headed to Baghdad to
help with security and logistics. The moves will raise the total
number of American troops deployed to Iraq for security and
advisory missions to about 750.

As though to complete the bitter taste of 2003, the paper adds
that, as Iraq’s political parties prepare to choose new leaders,
one “prominently mentioned” candidate for prime minister is
Ahmed
Chalabi.

David Brooks, he of New York Times
establishment thinking fame, takes a moment today
to marvel at the success of the sharing economy as people and
companies build networks of trust and commerce using modern
tools.

I’m one of those people who thought Airbnb would never work. I
thought people would never rent out space in their homes to near
strangers. But I was clearly wrong. Eleven million travelers have
stayed in Airbnb destinations, according to data shared by the
company. Roughly 550,000 homes are now being shared by hosts.
Airbnb is more popular in Europe than it is even in the United
States. Paris is the largest destination city.

And Airbnb is only a piece of the peer-to-peer economy. People
are renting out their cars to people they don’t know, dropping off
their pets with people they don’t know, renting power tools to
people they don’t know.

He noodles a bit about the effects of middle-class stagnation,
and the innovative power set in motion now that “millions of people
have finished college with a hunger for travel and local contact,
but without much money.”

Eventually, even though he doesn’t use the term, he comes back
to spontaneous
order, with people using the tools available to them within the
culture in which they live to create new structures and
connections.

And the big thing I underestimated was the transformation of
social trust. In primitive economies, people traded mostly with
members of their village and community. Trust was face to face.
Then, in the mass economy we’ve been used to, people bought from
large and stable corporate brands, whose behavior was made more
reliable by government regulation.

But now there is a new trust calculus, powered by both social
and economic forces. …

Companies like Airbnb establish trust through ratings
mechanisms. Their clients are already adept at evaluating each
other on the basis of each other’s Facebook pages. People in the
Airbnb economy don’t have the option of trusting each other on the
basis of institutional affiliations, so they do it on the basis of
online signaling and peer evaluations. Online ratings follow you
everywhere, so people have an incentive to act in ways that will
buff their online reputation.

Well, yes. People make new and interesting connections as the
world around them evolves. These connections aren’t centrally
planned or enforced from above—they evolve to meet people’s needs
(and fade away if they don’t).

Brooks notes that many of the new sharing economy companies are
making their peace with city governments and other local
authorities. But, so far, this has largely involved a hands-off
policy by officials who don’t know what to make of the
development.

most city governments don’t seem inclined to demand tight
regulations and oversight. Centralized agencies don’t know what to
make of decentralized trust networks. …

As mechanisms to establish private trust become more efficient,
government plays a smaller role.

Fancy that. Actually, Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson did

fancy that, in 1767.

Men, in general, are sufficiently disposed to occupy themselves
in forming projects and schemes: But he who would scheme and
project for others, will find an opponent in every person who is
disposed to scheme for himself. Like the winds that come we know
not whence, and blow whithersoever they list, the forms of society
are derived from an obscure and distant origin; they arise, long
before the date of philosophy, from the instincts, not from the
speculations of men. The crowd of mankind, are directed in their
establishments and measures, by the circumstances in which they are
placed; and seldom are turned from their way, to follow the plan of
any single projector.

Last month,
Jim Epstein suggested that the “sharing economy” gave liberals
cover to do what people have always done: organize their affairs
without the dead hand of the state.

The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn has an
interesting post up arguing that the Supreme Court’s Hobby
Lobby ruling suggests that the way to deal with the constitutional
and ethical issues raised by Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate is
to implement — this will come as a complete
surprise to H&R readers so wait for it — single payer!

He notes:

The fundamental problem here is the way the U.S. has decided to
provide its new entitlement to health insurance. In many
other countries, the government takes on this responsibility
directly, by creating its own insurance program or regulating
insurers as if they were public utilities…

Health care is full of decisions that raise complicated ethical
questions on which, inevitably, religious beliefs can dictate
certain views. It’s not just whether to use certain forms of
contraception. It’s also whether to use stem cell therapy, how to
treat the end of life, and whether to take blood transfusions. The
question is not whether the owners of closely owned corporation
have a right to their religious views. Of course they do. The
question is whether those views should affect the provision of a
public program, enacted in part to promote public health
as defined by public health professionals…

It’s worth remembering that, strictly speaking, the Obamacare
mandate doesn’t “force” employers to pay directly for coverage of
contraception or any other medical service. The law simply requires
that employers bear the burden of medical expenses, broadly
defined. They can do so by paying a fee to the government or, if
they choose, they can decide to provide insurance on their own. The
only caveat is that, if they decide they want to provide insurance,
the policies must conform to certain regulations—among them,
coverage of so-called essential benefits. And the federal
government, relying on the (very sound) judgment of public health
professionals, has decided that contraception belongs to that
list.

The obvious solution to this dilemma is to take health insurance
away from employers altogether… And, over the long run, it’s easy
enough to imagine a world in which employers were truly out of the
health insurance business altogether—a world in which all people
got health insurance directly from the government or tightly
regulated insurers.

(Emphasis added.)

A few thoughts.

One: By calling Obamacare a “new entitlement” and a “public
program” he has basically accepted that the program constitutes a
de facto government takeover of one-sixth of the economy, a
conclusion that liberals have generally resisted. Leftists, notes
Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon, have been trying to convince
Americans that Obamacare is not a step in the direction of
socialized medicine as opponents claim because it uses private
insurance and relies on market forces to deliver coverage. Cohn’s
candor is both refreshing and clarifying, so thanks, Jonathan, for
that.

Two: Cohn claims that Obamacare offers employers a choice to
provide contraceptive coverage: Either spring for employee
insurance that includes all the 20 FDA-approved contraceptives (as
opposed to only the 16 that were consistent with Hobby Lobby’s
religious tenets) or hand the money over to the government to
purchase such coverage.

This is bizarre because he is basically inviting even more
employers to dump their employees on to Obamacare’s exchanges,
turning President Obama’s promise that “anyone who likes their
current insurance can keep it” into even
more of a lie.

Furthermore, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act says that the
government has to achieve its ends in a way that least burdens
religious rights. Cohn is saying because Obamacare gives employers
an option to offer contraceptive coverage or pay the government to
do so, it is, strictly speaking, not a mandate. OK. Call it a
regulation. Or a Buddhist chant. Or whatever. But would re-defining
the mandate as something else satisfy RFRA’s stipulation?

I don’t think so. The mandate, as Justice Alito noted in his
ruling, would have cost Hobby Lobby $475 million in fines.
 And what would Cohn’s regulatory option cost?  According
to Kaiser Health News, roughly $26 million in penalties. But this
does not include the health care tax exemption that Hobby Lobby
would lose — putting it at a considerable disadvantage vis-à-vis
its non-religious competitors.

To paraphrase Justice Alito, if this doesn’t burden religious
rights, then what does, especially when there is at least one less
intrusive way: Make oral contraceptives available over the counter,
as I previously argued
here?

Three: Cohn contends that replacing Obamacare and its reliance
on employer-sponsored coverage toward a Medicare-style single-payer
system would avoid such knotty constitutional and ethical issues.
Perhaps.

But so would fixing our idiotic tax code and handing individuals
who pay out-of-pocket for coverage the same tax exemptions as their
employers. Individuals would be able to buy their own coverage with
their own money as per their own religious convictions without
forcing anyone to violate theirs. This still doesn’t preclude libs
from playing their brother’s keeper — as Cohn says we all should be
doing — and demanding generous subsidies for those for whom the tax
credits alone don’t get “acceptable” coverage.

But giving patients some modicum of control of their health care
dollars would also unleash market forces to lower soaring costs
without resorting to price controls or rationing (and the first one
who says
markets ration too — just by price — will have to pay for my
nose job!) or
lopping off five years from the life of cancer patients or
creating a giant Rube Goldberg contraption to manage all the
perverse incentives of single-payer.

I understand — though disagree — with the liberal end of
universal coverage. But what I’ve never understood is why they want
to employ the least efficient and most heavy-handed means that
violate the Constitution and erode freedoms to achieve it.

(For more on “repealing and replacing” Obamacare with a free
market system that contains tax parity for individuals, deals with
the pre-existing condition issue and other liberal objections, read
this excellent National Journal
piece by Jim Capretta and Robert Moffit.)

Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in favor of
Hobby Lobby has been portrayed as a
blow to Obamacare, because it allows closely held corporations
to opt out of some of the contraception coverage requirements
imposed as part of the health law. That’s not wrong, exactly, but
it overstates the case, because it’s not a very significant setback
for the law.

That’s because the contraception was never essential to
Obamacare as conceived by its legislative authors. Indeed, as
Ramesh Ponnuru
notes at National Review, it was so
inessential to the law that it wasn’t included in the actual
legislation. Instead, the mandate was put in place by the Obama
administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as
part of the law’s essential benefits rule, which left an awful lot
of discretion to regulators.

It’s possible, in fact, that the law would not have passed had
it explicitly included a contraception mandate. Remember that
several Catholic Democrats, led by Rep. Bart Stupak, were among the
final holdouts to agree to vote for the bill, which had already
been passed in the Senate. Their votes were, by most accounts,
crucial to its passage, and they
agreed to vote for the bill only after making a deal with the
White House that would prohibit federal funding to be used for
abortions.

Two years later, Stupak
said that he believed the HHS mandate violated the White House
deal, as well as existing law, because it allowed for federal
funding of abortifacients. It’s obviously impossible to be certain
about how things might have turned out in a counterfactual like
this, but it’s certainly easy to imagine that if the mandate had
been in place prior to the law’s passage in the House, it would not
have garnered the support of Stupak and his fellow Catholic
Democrats—and would have died in the House as a result.

That is not to say that the decision isn’t important in other
ways. But as a blow to Obamacare it doesn’t pack much of a
punch. 

• Democrats think they have a winner in
  running against the
  Supreme Court this November.
• President Obama told Congress he would be sending about 200
  more troops to
  Iraq. The Council of
  Representatives, Iraq’s parliament, will meet for its first
  session since elections in April, while the Islamic State in Iraq
  and Syria is showing off scud missiles in its possession in
  Syria.
• The bodies of three Israeli teenagers kidnapped in June were
  found north of
  Hebron. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the
  perpetrators “animals” and said Hamas would pay.
• The president of
  Ukraine said he was abandoning a unilateral ceasefire with
  pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country and sending the
  military back in.
• The ruling coalition in
  Japan plans on reinterpreting the country’s constitution to
  permit a larger role for the military.
• Google announced it was shutting down
  Orkut, a social networking site popular in Brazil and
  India.

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