Following my and Dan’s blog posts last week on the continuing lining of Big Sugar’s pockets at consumers’ expense, the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have written editorials on the scam. I commend both of them to you, although I could have done without the WaPo’s moralizing on the “social benefits” of high sugar prices.

One of the most disturbing things about the current health care debate is that some Republicans are positioning themselves as defenders of Big Government Medicare and against efforts to trim the program’s costs.

Yet the taxpayer costs of Medicare are expected to more than double over the next decade (from $425 billion in 2009 to $871 billion in 2019), and the program will consume an increasing share of the nation’s economy for decades to come unless there are serious cuts and reforms. Even the Obama administration talks about “bending the cost curve” to slow the program’s growth.

Yet Republican National Committee chairman, Michael Steele, takes to the Washington Post today to defend Medicare against any cuts, while at the same time criticizing the Democrats as “left-wing ideologues:”

• “Under the Democrats’ plan, senior citizens will pay a steeper price and will have their treatment options reduced or rationed.”
• “Republicans want reform that should first, do no harm, especially to our seniors.”
• “We also believe that any health-care reform should be fully paid for, but not funded on the backs of our nation’s senior citizens.”
• “First, we need to protect Medicare and not cut it in the name of ‘health-insurance reform.’ ”
• “Reversing course and joining Republicans in support of health care for our nation’s senior citizens is a good place to start.”

Steele uses the mushy statist phrasing “our seniors” repeatedly, as if the government owns this group of people, and that they should have no responsibility for their own lives.

Fiscal conservatives, who have come out in droves to tea party protests and health care meetings this year, are angry at both parties for the government’s massive spending and debt binge in recent years. Mr. Steele has now informed these folks loud and clear that the Republican Party is not interested in restraining government; it is not interested in cutting the program that creates the single biggest threat to taxpayers in coming years. For apparently crass political reasons, Steele defends “our seniors,” but at the expense of massive tax hikes on “our children” if entitlement programs are not cut.

The Boston Globe reports that Massachusetts now has the highest insurance premiums in the nation. The average family premium for plans offered by employers in Massachusetts was $13,788 in 2008, 40 percent higher than in 2003. Over the same period, premiums nationwide rose an average of 33 percent. And, according to the Commonwealth Fund, an annual family premium in Massachusetts is expected to hit $26,730 by 2020. Meanwhile CNN hails Romneycare as the model for the nation…

At last week’s Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Stockholm, Deirdre McCloskey argued that it was important for society to affirm entrepreneurship. How right she is.

The economic benefits of the new technologies and processes constantly created by people with new economic ideas is obvious. But the social benefits of such inventions also are enormous.

Consider James C. Marsters, who helped end the isolation of the deaf around the world. The Wall Street Journal reported on his death:

As an orthodontist, a licensed pilot and a sometime-professional magician, James C. Marsters mastered fields challenging for anyone, even more so for a profoundly deaf person such as himself.

His greatest feat was to conjure the text telephone, or TTY, which for the first time gave deaf people independent access to the telephone via teletype machines. It was the first in a string of technologies that help deaf people communicate.

Mr. Marsters, who died July 28 at 85 years old, defied the isolation many deaf people of his generation experienced. He willed himself into the mainstream long before there were technologies and programs to help deaf people do so.

People like Marsters exemplify how the market encourages people to do good while doing well. Markets are not perfect, nor are the entrepreneurs who drive them. But then, human beings are not perfect. However, human liberty — in the form of economic freedom in this context — is the best environment in which to foster a society that is both prosperous and good.

The U.S. is looking increasingly friendless in Afghanistan. Our allies are searching for the exits.

For instance, the Conservative Party defense spokesman, Liam Fox, long a strong advocate of close trans-Atlantic ties, is pushing to bring home his nation’s troops:

Liam Fox, the Tory defence spokesman, is calling for Britain to shorten its deployment in Afghanistan by setting clear targets for military success and sending more troops to train the Afghan army.

His words will be seen as moving towards a more populist emphasis on disentangling the UK from a conflict which increasingly lacks public support, as Cameron condemns the ‘scandal’ of UK helicopter shortage in Afghanistan.

The German Foreign Minister and Social Democratic candidate for Chancellor Frank-Walter Steinmeier said much the same thing:

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who is bidding to oust Angela Merkel as chancellor of Germany in an election next month, said he wanted a timetable for a military pull-out from Afghanistan. Steinmeier, a member of the Social Democrats (SPD) who share power with Merkel’s conservatives, said once it became clear who would lead Afghanistan after last Thursday’s election there, talks should begin over how long foreign troops should stay.

So have the Free Democrats, the most “liberal” (in a good sense) of the leading German parties. If the FDP sustains its current level of support, it is likely to join Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU in the next coalition and take the foreign ministry post. Reports the New York Times:

“The next government must formulate a precise plan that spells out how a pull-out of the German Army over the coming years would look,” Jürgen Koppelin, a federal legislator and defense expert for the Free Democrats, said in a newspaper interview Wednesday. “Our soldiers in Afghanistan and their families need to know that the mission will end.”

By raising the issue now, the Free Democrats may be trying to show their foreign policy credentials, particularly since they hope to take over the Foreign Ministry if they win enough votes to form the next coalition with Mrs. Merkel, who is favored to retain the chancellery. So far, foreign policy issues have played no role in this campaign, which has yet to get going in force.

Obviously, the U.S. needs to be planning the military end-game as well. Otherwise, as Malou Innocent has warned, American troops could be fighting for years or even decades to come — and with few or even no allies.

Economics has been called the dismal science, and recognizing that politicians are economic actors leads to the conclusion in this good article: Would You Ask Turkeys to Mandate Thanksgiving? The Dismal Politics of Legislative Transparency

The mayor of Stockholm gave some brief remarks at the closing dinner of the Mont Pelerin Society meeting and mentioned that the number of students in private schools had skyrocketed after the implementation of Sweden’s school choice program. Intrigued, I emailed the folks at one of the nation’s research organizations to ask for some details.

The figures are impressive. The number of students attending private high schools has jumped from 1.7 percent in 1992 to 19.5 percent in 2008. Not surprisingly, the quality of education is high. Indeed, researchers have looked at the data and concluded, “Our findings support the hypothesis that school results in public schools improve due to competition.”