That was my response to a comment from talk radio host Brian Wilson, about 14 minutes into this podcast, on the White House’s Snitch Project. Of course, the conversation leading up to that is well worth 14 minutes.

After a morning workout and attending Mass this Sunday, I read El Mercurio (Chile’s paper of record) online. Although I seldom read Chilean newspapers blogs (too many attacks and too much dirt), I did so that morning because I was impressed by the indignation expressed by my friend Luis Larraín in his Sunday blog (titled “Canallas” – Shameless). I had named Larraín Superintendent of Social Security when he was 25 years old. At that time I was 30 and Secretary of Labor and Social Security.

With astonishment I discovered that a certain “Mr. Murillo”, in the comment number 10 on the blog (which I copied immediately, and backed up electronically), explicitly attacked another commenter, Mr. José Fregoso Edelstein, by saying that his previous comment was due to the fact that he is from a “bad race” because he is Jewish.

I immediately logged in to Twitter and posted a ‘tweet’ demanding El Mercurio delete the blog comment, because it is a terrible insult directed at a group of people that have suffered indescribable horrors, not only in the 20th Century, but throughout history. I would have done the same thing if the insult was directed at Palestinians, Lebanese, Croatians, or any other racial/​religious/​national group.

However, I found an unexpected surprise. Instead of receiving immediate support for an action I thought just and reasonable, several people on Twitter attacked Jews, and me for defending them (one wrote, “You have used your enormous prestige in Chile to become “a shield for the Jews”). They also accused me of “encouraging censorship”, suggesting a “media dictatorship”, etc.… I replied inmediately in Twitter to the least offensive ones. Fifteen minutes later I received a ‘tweet’ from an editor at El Mercurio, saying that they had seen my complaint in Twitter and that they were studying the situation. With another tweet I insisted on immediate deletion of the comment. Twenty minutes later the newspaper editors deleted the offensive comment number 10. I want to emphasize that the editorial mistake, even this grievous one, does not compromise the newspaper El Mercurio as a whole, and its fast action in regard to the issue speaks to the newspaper’s chief editor’s integrity. It was an extraordinary triumph of the fast boat Twitter over the “media carrier” in Chile, another demonstration of the liberating potential of the wonderful new technologies being developed in the land of the free and the brave.

What left me very worried, and the reason I wrote this, is having detected a worrisome anti-Semitic sentiment among my fellow countrymen. Is this unjust anti-Semitic sentiment widespread, though hidden, in Chile, or was this only a “black swan?” I declare myself in a state of alert. We are building a free and good country. There should be no place whatsoever for the language of hate and the discrimination of minorities. As the great Albert Einstein said: “The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”

Last week, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R) penned a wonderfully misleading oped for USA Today. In response, I submitted this poor, unsuccessful letter to the editor:

If Massachusetts were covering the uninsured for less than $800 a pop, as former Gov. Mitt Romney suggests [“Mr. President, What’s the Rush?”, July 30], then the health reforms he signed in 2006 would truly be a model for the nation. Yet data from the very watchdog organization Romney cites (the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation) indicate something different.

The Massachusetts reforms cost more than five times what Romney claims, because the state pushed more than 80 percent of the cost off-budget, and onto private individuals and the federal government. In fact, “RomneyCare” covers a family of four at a cost of at least $27,000 – more than twice the average cost of employer-sponsored coverage ($12,680).

Romney is correct that President Barack Obama has the wrong prescription for health reform. But that’s because Obama’s approach is Romney’s approach. Like Romney, Obama would have government force people to purchase health insurance; control the content, terms, and price of “private” health insurance policies; expand Medicaid; and create new government subsidies and bureaucracies. Like Romney, Obama would push most of the cost off-budget by imposing mandates on states and private individuals – which constitutes a huge tax increase on the middle class.

ObamaCare, like RomneyCare, is socialized medicine with a private façade.

Kaiser Health News has launched a new “Ad Audit” series that critiques the TV ads that various groups are airing both to promote or hinder the health care reforms moving through Congress. KHN correspondent Jordan Rau makes two solid contributions to the series. Two other audits leave something to be desired, however, while a fifth audit is just…well, you decide.

One lackluster audit examines an ad by the health-insurance lobby, AHIP. KHN dings AHIP for making bland statements in support of “bipartisan reforms” and “universal coverage” without offering “policy specifics about what these statements mean.” But the AHIP ad does make two policy statements that are susceptible to analysis:

If everyone’s covered, we can make health care as affordable as possible. And the words “pre-existing condition” become a thing of the past.

How is covering everybody supposed to make health care more affordable? Might there be a downside to requiring insurers to cover pre-existing conditions? KHN provides no analysis of the former statement. And rather than analyze the latter, KHN offers a spat between a left-leaning analyst and an AHIP lobbyist (I suppose that’s considered a balanced discussion) over whether AHIP’s proposed price controls go far enough.

Another lackluster audit examines an ad by Healthy Economy Now, a coalition comprised of “the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), AARP, the American Medical Association, the Advanced Medical Technology Association, Business Roundtable, Families USA and the Service Employees International Union.” This ad also provides fertile ground for analysis:

If we don’t act, medical bills will wipe out their savings…she’ll be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition and he won’t get the chemotherapy he needs…health care costs will rise 70 percent…But we can act. The president and Congress have a plan to lower your costs and stop denials for pre-existing conditions.

Medical bills are wiping out many people’s savings — but would the Democrats’ legislation put an end to that? Again, are there any trade-offs involved in forcing insurers to cover pre-existing conditions? Might insurers stint on things like chemo because that would spur cancer patients to switch to other insurers (where they would bring down the competition’s bottom line)? Would health care costs grow more or less rapidly under the Democrats’ reforms? What does the Congressional Budget Office have to say? In place of such useful analysis, KHN merely reports that the ads are meant to influence the Blue Dogs, who had been holding up the Democrats’ health plans. (Of course, that in itself is interesting: why are these disparate groups so unified in their desire to see the Democrats’ reforms enacted? It’s a wonderful opportunity to test out the “bootleggers and Baptists” theory of regulation. But KHN…not interested.)

Yet the worst “audit” has to be KHN’s treatment of an ad by the group Conservatives for Patients’ Rights. KHN provides all the reasons that people should be suspicious of the ad and its sponsors: CPR was founded by a rich guy, who was ousted from his former gig as a hospital CEO amid fraud investigations, and who hired the “Swift Boat” crew to do his PR. Fair enough.

KHN goes off the rails, however, when it critiques the ad’s content. The ad states:

Some of Congress’ health care plans could squeeze you four ways. It could raise taxes by $600 billion—even taxing soda. It could add a trillion to the federal deficit. New rules could hike your health insurance premiums 95 percent. You still might end up on their government-run health plan.

KHN reports, “the facts are largely taken out of context, come from biased industry groups or have been discredited.”

KHN quotes the Urban Institute’s John Holahan as saying, “There’s absolutely nothing here that’s right. It’s unbelievable.” But regarding the $600-billion figure, KHN then writes, “Holahan says that number could turn out to be right, but it likely will be less.” Well, which is it? CPR says the tax hike could reach $600 billion. Holahan says it could, too. So how is it that CPR’s claim is absolutely, unbelievably not right? How could KHN not notice that contradiction?

“And,” KHN ads, “a soda tax is just one of many proposed revenue-raisers, including a cap on the tax deductibility of insurance premiums, a tax on the wealthy and an alcohol tax.” So what? Does that make the soda-tax claim untrue? Or even misleading?

KHN then challenges CPR’s “could add a trillion to the federal deficit” claim again by quoting Holahan:

It’s almost impossible to both say that you’re going to raise taxes by $600 billion and increase the deficit by $1 trillion—that means there’s no savings at all anywhere. That can’t be right.

First, that’s not what the ad claims. The ad claims only that either could happen. Second, given the difficulties that Democrats are having in paying for their reforms, and the tendency of government health programs to exceed spending projections, it’s not that unreasonable to think that both could happen.

Regarding the “could hike your health insurance premiums 95 percent” claim, KHN quotes Holahan as saying, “premiums are ‘almost guaranteed’ to grow 95% over a 10 year period” anyway. CPR’s claim has to do with the effects of imposing price controls on health insurance premiums (i.e., banning exclusions for pre-existing conditions), which would increase premiums for the healthy. Holahan does not refute CPR’s claim so much as confuse that effect with overall premium growth. In fact, price controls could very well increase healthy people’s premiums by 95 percent, and then overall premium growth could cause those premiums to rise another 95 percent over the next 10 years.

This is getting exhausting, so I’ll wrap up by noting that KHN’s refutation of CPR’s “You still might end up on their government-run health plan” claim was also a non-refutation. After insinuating that the Lewin study CPR cites is either biased, discredited, or both, KHN merely notes that the study produced multiple estimates of how many Americans would end up in a new government program. Oh, and different ways of creating a new program will influence that number. Well, no duh. And how on Earth does that impugn CPR’s claim?

KHN was not the only one asleep at the switch here. My friend Jonathan Cohn also missed the contradictions, shell games, and non sequiturs in this audit when he uncritically blogged about it over at The New Republic.

To sum up the situation, I can’t improve on Cohn’s closing line: “Sadly, it’s pretty typical of what we’ll be seeing and hearing…over the next few weeks.”

Lobbying expenditures are up in the second quarter of the Obama administration, reports the Center for Responsive Politics. Well-connected Democratic lobbyists like former House majority leader Richard Gephardt and Tony Podesta, the brother of Obama transition director John Podesta, did especially well. Given the administration’s focus on nationalizing health care and energy, it’s no surprise that health care and energy companies were the biggest spenders. Businesses don’t have unified interests, of course; some health care companies and industry sectors lobby against a government-run insurance plan while they support a federal mandate that every American purchase health insurance. Other firms may just work to get their own members onto the gravy train.

As Craig Holman of the Nader-founded Public Citizen told Marketplace Radio the last time such a report was issued, “the amount spent on lobbying … is related entirely to how much the federal government intervenes in the private economy.”

Marketplace’s Ronni Radbill noted then, “In other words, the more active the government, the more the private sector will spend to have its say…. With the White House injecting billions of dollars into the economy, lobbyists say interest groups are paying a lot more attention to Washington than they have in a very long time.”

Of course, this is not a new story. I pointed out in the Wall Street Journal in 1983 that Hayek had told us what to expect back in 1944:

If more money can be made by investing in Washington than by drilling another oil well, money will be spent there.

Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek explained the process 40 years ago in his prophetic book The Road to Serfdom: “As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power.”

In a graphic on page A6 of the February 13 edition, not available online, the Washington Post reported that “A Washington Post analysis found that more than 90 organizations hired lobbyists to specifically influence provisions of the massive stimulus bill.” The graphic showed that the number of newly registered lobbying clients had peaked on the day after Obama’s inauguration and continued to grow as the bill worked its way through both houses of Congress. More on the frenzied efforts to get a piece of the taxpayers’ money in the spending bill here and here.

And the beat goes on: The congressional newspaper The Hill reports, “Lobbyists lining up for shot at climate bill.”

And that of course is why Patrick Appel reports at the Andrew Sullivan blog that Washington is the hottest city for job-seekers these days.

If you want money flowing to the companies with good lobbyists and powerful congressmen, then all these spending and regulatory bills may accomplish something. But we should all recognize that we’re taking money out of the competitive, individually directed part of society and turning it over to the politically controlled sector. Politicians rather than consumers will pick winners and losers.

Just as important, businesses will devote their time, money, and brainpower to influencing decisions made in Washington rather than to developing better products and delivering them to consumers. The tragedy is that the most important factor in America’s economic future — in raising everyone’s standard of living — is not land, or money, or computers; it’s human talent. And an increasing part of the human talent at America’s companies is being diverted from productive activity to protecting the company from political predation. With every spending program and every new regulation, the parasite economy sucks in another productive enterprise. Do we really want the best brains at companies from General Motors and General Electric (this quarter’s biggest lobbyist) to Google and Goldman Sachs focused on working Washington rather than serving consumers?

Here’s a poor, unsuccessful letter to the editor I sent to The Washington Post:

“Like Car Insurance, Health Coverage May Be Mandated” [July 22, page A1] paints a misleading picture of proposals to require Americans to purchase health insurance – i.e., an “individual mandate.”

First, the article lacks balance. It cites three politicians who support an individual mandate but none who oppose it, a group that includes a majority of Republicans. The article claims an individual mandate “has its roots in the conservative philosophy of self-reliance,” even though most conservatives, including the movement’s flagship magazine National Review, oppose the idea. The closest the article comes to offering an opposing perspective is one conservative who has supported an individual mandate in the past and may yet again, just not yet.

Second, the article makes the demonstrably inaccurate claims that an individual mandate “lowers overall costs” and “help[s] keep premiums down” by adding more young and healthy people to the insurance market. Forcing healthy people to purchase insurance does not affect premiums for sicker purchasers, because insurers set premiums according to each purchaser’s health risk. The article confuses a mandate with price controls, which force low risks to pay more so that high risks can pay less.

Finally, if an individual mandate reduced overall costs, then health care spending would be falling in Massachusetts, which enacted the nation’s only individual mandate in 2006. Instead, overall health spending is rising, and the rate of growth has accelerated under the mandate. Rising health spending implies rising health insurance premiums, which has also been the Massachusetts experience.

At the Politico I write: