PAJAMAS MEDIA HEALTH CARE FORUM – THE VIDEOS

Pajamas Media TV has produced a series of short (8-10 min) videos on the healthcare debate now before Congress. In no particular order, here they are:

- How to defeat Obama’s healthcare program.

- A prescription for reform.

- What’s in the healthcare bill?

- A single-payer advocate’s view.

- Will healthcare reform impact people with rare diseases?

- Is healthcare a right?

They're well worth watching - thoughtful, and well done. In particular, I'd recommend the single-payer advocate video. Even though she starts poorly (in my view), it is much more interesting when the subject turns to overhead (administrative) costs.

RUNNING A STATE THE RIGHT WAY

Glenn Reynolds (of Instapundit) talks to Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. It's long, but worthwhile.

DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO

It’s much easier to raise taxes if you don’t pay them.

Taxes are for little people.

A RATIONALE FOR SMALL GOVERNMENT

Mark Steyn: [B]ig government more or less guarantees rule by creeps and misfits. It's just a question of how well they disguise it.

Government of the weird, by the weird, for the weird ...

TAKE THAT BOTTOM RUNG OFF THE LADDER

Welcome to the latest chapter of America's minimum-wage folly.

Those who press for a higher minimum wage often claim that making entry-level jobs more expensive won't reduce the number of entry-level jobs. Were the government to compel a 41 percent increase in the price of gasoline or movie tickets or steel, every rational observer would expect a drop in the demand for gasoline, movie tickets, or steel. Yet when it comes to the minimum wage, politicians and journalists somehow persuade themselves that making workers more expensive won't reduce the demand for workers.

The laws of supply and demand are not optional. Try as it might, Congress simply can't repeal them.

Minimum-wage laws don't make low- and unskilled Americans more productive, more experienced, or more desirable. They merely make them more expensive.

THE FINAL WORD ON "GATES-GATE"

Sometimes it isn't racism.

A black president, a black governor and a black mayor all agree with a black Harvard professor that he was racially profiled by a white-Latino-black police team headed by a cop who teaches courses in how to avoid racial profiling.

In the 1960s, the great English satirist Peter Simple invented the Prejudometer, which simply by being pointed at any individual could calculate degrees of racism to the nearest prejudon, "the internationally recognized scientific unit of racial prejudice."

Mr. Gates seems to go around with his Prejudometer permanently cranked up to 11.

It's arrogance - and stupidity.

THE WEST’S PROBLEM

Why poor countries won’t commit to binding emissions cuts.

[T]here is a perfectly good reason developing countries are unwilling to act on climate change: What they are being asked to do is more awful than climate change’s implications–even if one accepts all the alarmist predictions.

Rather than engage with the issues, eco-pundits are grasping for all kinds of fanciful pseudo-scientific theories to explain why the idea of binding emissions cuts are leaving the rest of the world cold. But this psychologizing only exposes the inability of climate activists to take seriously the rational case for inaction.

[T]he choice for developing countries is between mass death due to the consequences of an overheated planet sometime in the distant future, and mass suicide due to imposed instant starvation right now. Is it any surprise that they are reluctant to jump on the global-warming bandwagon?

If and when climate change promises to claim more casualties than poverty and starvation, the world will begin heeding the eco-warrior calls. Until then, global warming is eco-warrior hot air.

Via Instapundit.