by Bob Barr | Jan 17, 2025 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller It needs to be said loud and clear: murder is not a “policy choice.” Grotesquely, however, socialized medicine advocates are taking advantage of the December 4th slaying in New York City of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson to press their policy agenda. A Generation Lab poll released last week found that 50% of college students — a demographic largely conditioned by social media — viewed accused killer Luigi Mangione either “extremely” or “somewhat” favorably. Only 19% thought the same of Thompson. In the background of such disinformation are such books as “Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans,” by Wendell Potter, Cigna’s former Vice President of Corporate Communications. In 2024, Cigna was the sixth-largest health insurance company in America, with $195 billion in revenue. Among other things, the book instructed health executives how to survive an “ambush” interview by leftwing documentary propagandist Michael Moore, whose 2007 film “Sicko” praised Fidel Castro’s communist medical system, and itself became a major impetus for the 2010 passage of the increasingly troubled Obamacare system. As Peter Suderman wrote last month in Reason Magazine, Obamacare’s high costs to participants hit hard because “it required coverage of a slew of federally mandated essential health benefits, regardless of whether those benefits were needed or wanted.” Then, a spendthrift Congress (one of many) uncapped benefit subsidies in 2021 with the “American Rescue Plan Act” during the COVID-19 pandemic, and again in 2022 with the “Inflation Reduction Act.” Those actions allowed “households making up to $350,000 a year in some cases, to obtain subsidized coverage, at a cost of about $30 billion to $40 billion annually.”...
by Bob Barr | Dec 26, 2024 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Writer Greg Steinmetz titled his 2015 book chronicling the life of Sixteenth Century German financier Jacob Fugger, “The Richest Man Who Ever Lived.” Whether a biography centuries from now will describe Elon Musk in similarly grandiose terms, as his contemporaries we will never know. Suffice to say, however, that this richest of men in this first quarter of the 21st Century will have left his mark as one of the era’s most influential individuals. Elon Musk actually shares much in common with Jacob Fugger, notwithstanding their very different geopolitical worlds. Both Fugger and Musk are risk-takers. Both are bold and self-assured. As noted by Fugger’s biographer, the German money lender was bold to the point of being imperious. Even more to the point perhaps, while Fugger is described by Steinmetz as one of the true architects of modern capitalism, Musk is one its most apt students, having parlayed a sound upbringing in South Africa into a business empire the components of which touch virtually every sector of government and business around the world (and beyond); including most notably the social media giant X (formerly Twitter), Tesla as the world’s preeminent proponent of electric-powered vehicles, and SpaceX which is leading the long-overdue revitalization of America’s space effort. Fugger in his time was despised by components of what we would today accurately describe as The Establishment, especially the then-massively powerful Roman Catholic Church. In fact, Fugger’s exercise of his financial prowess and power brought the Pope to his knees and forced the Church to reverse centuries of dogma and permit what had previously been officially taboo – charging interest for loans. In...
by Bob Barr | Dec 12, 2024 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller With President-elect Donald Trump’s recent nomination of Pam Bondi to serve as attorney general, and his naming of Gail Slater to head the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice, the groundwork has been laid to begin unshackling America’s marketplace, which has for decades been hampered by unnecessary regulations and — during the Biden Administration — subjected to out-and-out lawfare by the very Department of Justice supposed to protect the marketplace from anti-competitive forces. The question now is, how quickly can these abusive, economic lawfare practices be struck from the Department’s agenda and an originalist interpretation of the nation’s antitrust laws restored? The mission of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is to uphold federal law. The Department, however, cannot and has never carried out this mission in a vacuum. As a component of the executive branch of the federal government, it operates necessarily — and appropriately — according to the underlying policy preferences of the elected president. It bears reminding that Democrats lost the presidential election in November. Whether the losers like it or not, President-elect Trump has every right to choose individuals to occupy top positions at the Justice Department who will respect and implement the policies that clearly and openly were at the foundation of his Nov. 5 electoral victory. Moreover, Trump is fully empowered to populate the top echelons of the Department with men and women who – unlike his soon-to-be predecessor – actually respect the rule of law and who will not employ the powers of the Justice Department to undermine legal norms and the institutions our Founders so carefully crafted. For...
by Bob Barr | Nov 13, 2024 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller As with any national election, there are winners and losers. There are celebrations and there are postmortems. There is recrimination and there are congratulations. After their shellacking at the polls Nov. 5, Democrats unsurprisingly are pointing fingers, casting blame and channeling their anger; some already scheming for 2026 and 2028. Meanwhile, the one person most responsible for what still is unfolding as a historically significant election is doing exactly what he should be doing. Donald J. Trump is laying the groundwork to begin dismantling a federal government that has been allowed to grow into a morbidly obese and regulatory oppressive behemoth under successive Democrat and Republican administrations. Not since Ronald Reagan took on Uncle Sam in his first term has the left faced such a serious threat. What makes this go ‘round far different from Reagan’s 1980 drubbing of Jimmy Carter is the magnitude and multitude of attacks leveled at Trump before the election – a barrage no presidential candidate before him had endured. Sure, Reagan was attacked by the Democrat Party throughout the 1980 campaign, even as he had to fight off efforts by the GOP establishment that never really warmed to his anti-Washington rhetoric. But the campaign against Trump, which began even before Joe Biden was sworn into office Jan. 20, 2021, is something our country never previously had witnessed. To the horror and dismay of Democrats and many moderate Republicans, and against all odds, Trump still prevailed. Also unlike Reagan’s 1980 win (with his coattails ushering in a GOP majority in the Senate) — after which politics settled down into a “normal” transition — Trump’s opponents largely have...
by Bob Barr | Oct 17, 2024 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Former “Shark Tank” star Mark Cuban likes to position himself as a humanitarian. But it turns out he might be just another well-connected celebrity using his high-profile political connections to rig the marketplace in his favor. The healthcare scheme Cuban seems to have cooked up recently with Vice President Kamala Harris reveals his true motives. Cuban has aligned himself with Big Pharma in pushing for healthcare regulations that would advance his business interests. Hardly by coincidence, Harris announced Oct. 8th that she would do their bidding if elected president. The game plan concocted by Cuban and Big Pharma looks to unleash the power of the regulatory state against pharmacy benefit managers, known as “PBMs.” These are groups that businesses’ health plans hire as a way to lower drug costs for their employees. It happens also to be a strategy used by many government agencies. PBMs are effective because, combined, they manage the health plans for just about every business in the country, with 275 million Americans benefiting from their services. Their size and scale gives them significant leverage at the negotiating table with the drugmakers, leading to lower consumer drug costs. A study by the Coalition for Affordable Prescription Drugs found that the great majority of businesses are happy with their PBMs. This unsurprising finding is reflected in research by Casey Mulligan, who chaired former President Trump’s White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2018 to 2019. Mulligan’s research found that PBMs provide more than $145 billion in value every year. Why, then, are Big Pharma, Cuban and Harris pushing to regulate these companies? For Big Pharma, the answer is simple — its otherwise...
by Bob Barr | Sep 30, 2024 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller The year was 1917 — the Panama Canal had been opened a mere three years, the United States entered World War I in April and the Jones Act granted American citizenship to the citizens of Puerto Rico in March. 1917 was also the year that the U.S. Congress passed the little-noticed “Rum Cover-Over” as a way to help the new island Commonwealth of Puerto Rico develop much-needed infrastructure by transferring back to Puerto Rico federal excise taxes on rum produced there. We are now 117 years later, and what was designed as a temporary tax rebate to help the newly acquired and at the time largely undeveloped island of Puerto Rico get on its feet following the Spanish-American War, is still with us; illustrating the adage that “temporary” tax measures are rarely, if ever, truly temporary. In fact, the rum tax “cover over” was broadened in 1954 to include the U.S. Virgin Islands, to help fund infrastructure projects on those islands. These tax rebate projects in recent years do little, if anything, to assist either Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands build schools, roads or power plants. What the revenue measures have done, is to greatly benefit private distilleries, including Diageo and Bacardi, that produce rum in these Caribbean locales, including by subsidizing major expansion of such facilities. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good rum drink from time to time, but where is the economic justification in this year 2024, for the governments of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands to be benefitting from federal excise tax refunds that can total hundreds of millions...
