razma766's Blog

Here is a letter I recently sent to the Midland Daily News:

Bruce Harris, in his recent letter, draws parallels between the “modern Tea Party guys” and the “original Tea Party guys” (“Tea Party history,” April 12).

First, he claims that “[the Tea Party activists] were driven to act by respectable merchant Bostonians whose tea smuggling income (dodging earlier excises) was about to die at the hands of the East India Company, which could undercut their rates.” Merchants smuggled tea because the British Parliament had made it illegal for the colonists to purchase tea from any source other than Great Britain. Additionally, the East India Company was only able to “undercut rates” because of government subsidies that were funded by increased taxes on the colonies. The Boston Tea Party was a revolt against government oppression and taxation, not a revolt to help smugglers (who wouldn’t even exist in the absence of the East India Company’s government monopoly).

Bruce’s second and final claim is that “after the Tea Party, the British put an embargo on the city, depriving the citizens of any tea, except that smuggled at exorbitant rates.” This analysis is akin to claiming that the American Revolutionary War resulted in an increase in the price of ammunition. Although the price of ammunition may have increased during the American Revolutionary War, the war itself was about American independence, not fluctuations in the price of ammunition.

Kurt Bouwhuis

Here is a letter I recently sent to the Midland Daily News:

Joe Manelis, in reference to the Tea Party’s dislike of further government intervention in health care, claims that “this ultra right wing of the Republican party appears to be on a course that is both dangerous and UNAMERICAN” (“Loyalty to country, not a cause,” April 11).

Nonsense.

If the Tea Party movement is both dangerous and UNAMERICAN, then so is the United States Declaration of Independence, which contains the following passage: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Kurt Bouwhuis

Kurt Bouwhuis, Mackinac Center Intern

CPI – All Urban Consumers: Medical Care Costs

Source: From BLS at http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?cu (Check the two medical care boxes and then click retrieve data)

Next, compare this graph with the following timeline provided by PBS, which shows any significant changes in government policy that have traceable effects on the medical care industry: http://www.pbs.org/healthcarecrisis/history.htm

Finally, draw your own conclusion.

Enjoy!

Here is a letter I recently sent to the Midland Daily News:

James Benjamin's entire letter went as follows: “The solution is simple: Medicare for all; keep your private insurance if you want” (“Simple Solutions,” February 17).

Society is a complex outcome that emerges as a result of individuals interacting with one another. No single individual consciously plans its course. As a result, no one fully understands this complex outcome we call society. Government interventions into the society must, therefore, create unintended consequences that no individual is capable of foreseeing. Simply providing Medicare to all will necessarily generate more outcomes than just free health care for everyone.

Nobel Laureate economist F.A. Hayek, in his Nobel Prize Lecture The Pretense of Knowledge, clearly articulated this point in his concluding paragraph: "The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society - a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals."

Kurt Bouwhuis