Quick Hitters

I've been following the health care debate on DailyKos and sometimes wonder what it would take to get through to the left. I saw the readers repeatedly argue that health care is a right. How is that? You have the right to someone else's labor?

Watched Rachel Maddow again, and this time she was supposedly showing how the evil Republicans have no health care plan. She ridiculed, without any meaningful explanation, a clip in which Sen David Vitter (R-LA) said that he supported re-importation of cheaper drugs because it would cause a collapse of Big Pharma's pricing scheme. Maddow fails to realize that the cheap drugs Canadians and other countries purchase are subsidized by the United States. Re-importation would allow us to capture some of those subsidies. This is actually a very reasonable idea. Since when are Democrats against lower prices on drugs for Americans anyway? This actually started out as a Democrat idea. Has MSNBC become so hyper-partisan that they can be baited into attacking anything a Republican says? The Daily Kooks picked up on this as well, but 100 comments down, I noticed that some commenters recovered their sanity and remembered why the Dems had proposed re-importation in the first place.

Lost my drivers license recently. The CA DMV says that I had to send away for a form to get a new one. I got the form a little over a week later. Can I just send it in? No, the DMV web site directed me to make an appointment to get my new license. When I query the web site for the next appointment at either San Diego location, I get this message:

Sorry, no appointment is available at this office. Please choose a different office

This message repeats as I spiral out from San Diego to every DMV office until I get to Coalinga. I am sure state and federal government will health insurance with this same vaunted efficiency of say, the DMV or the Post Office.

Alan Reynolds has an excellent article over at the Wall Street Journal arguing that the stimulus spending is not responsible for the recovery, if any, that is underway. Further, if we actually do spend the stimulus money, it will only worsen the recession based on empirical evidence. Only a tiny fraction has been spent. Historically, other countries, including our own, during the Depression, have been unable to spend their way to economic good times.