Daniel Almond, a three-tour veteran of Iraq, is ready to “muster outside D.C.” on Monday with several dozen other self-proclaimed patriots, all of them armed. They intend to make history as the first people to take their guns to a demonstration in a national park, and the Virginia rally is deliberately being held just a few miles from the Capitol and the White House.

Almond plans to have his pistol loaded and openly carried, his rifle unloaded and slung to the rear, a bandoleer of magazines containing ammunition draped over his polo-shirted shoulder. The Atlanta area real estate agent organized the rally because he is upset about health-care reform, climate control, bank bailouts, drug laws [bold added] and what he sees as President Obama’s insistence on and the Democratic Congress’s capitulation to a “totalitarian socialism” that tramples individual rights.

The interesting fact is that Almond includes drug laws in his list of objectionable policies. Perhaps he is a consistent libertarian?

FORT HANCOCK, Tex. — The giant rusty fence of metal bars along the border here, built in recent years to keep illegal immigrants from crossing into the United States, has a new nickname among local residents: Jurassic Park Gate, a nod to the barrier in a 1993 movie that kept dangerous dinosaurs at bay in a theme park.

On the other side, a brutal war between drug gangs has forced dozens of fearful families from the Mexican town of El Porvenir to come to the border seeking political asylum, and scores of other Mexicans have used special visas known as border-crossing cards to flee into the United States. They say drug gangs have laid waste to their town, burning down houses and killing people in the street.

This violence results from U.S. drug prohibition: if we legalized, Mexico would follow suit and the violence would end.

Even if legalization would increase drug addiction, is a policy that allows people to harm themselves really worse than a policy that imposes substantial harm on innocents?

The standard libertarian perspective holds that such policies are just theft dressed up as benevolence.

Perhaps, but consider the following.

The standard argument for government provision of national defense is that purely private provision will be insufficient because national defense is a “public good.” If a private group fields an army that protects the country from invasion, everyone benefits, so few people will voluntarily pay for this good and instead free-ride on others.

The same reasoning applies in the context of poverty. Almost everyone would be happier knowing that fewer people are starving to death. Some people might help the poor out of altruism, but many others will free-ride. Purely private provision might therefore be insufficient relative to most people’s optimum. That is, alleviation of poverty is also a public good.

Does this reasoning imply libertarians should support anti-poverty programs? Many libertarians, I suspect, will resist that conclusion. The question is why.

One posssible answer is that libertarians do not think about policies in the “consequentialist” way I have outlined; instead they think about “rights.” These libertarians see government provision of national defense as protecting property rights and anti-poverty spending as infringing those rights.

That is an understandable position, but I do not find it dispositive. National defense is expensive, so it requires taxation and the implied takings of property. Real world national defense, moreover, is routinely used to infringe property rights when one country attacks another.

A different anwer is that anti-poverty progrmas have unintended side effects, such as breeding a culture of poverty.  True, but government provision of national defense has unwanted side-effects, such as invasions and occupations not justified by self-defense.

A third answer is that libertarians do not necessarily object to all anti-poverty programs; what they really object to is the structure and magnitude of such programs in modern economies.

Imagine, therefore, that government redistribution consists solely of a negative income tax. Every person aged 18 and over receives a guaranteed payment from the government, with any income taxed at some moderate rate. But the NIT is be the only policy that aims to redistribute: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, rent control, minimum wages, progressive income taxation, and so on do not exist. 

And, the guaranteed minimum under the NIT is small: say, $1,000 per adult per year.

Under these assumptions, would libertarians still object to anti-poverty spending?

Should they?

President Obama mandated Thursday that nearly all hospitals extend visitation rights to the partners of gay men and lesbians and respect patients’ choices about who may make critical health-care decisions for them, perhaps the most significant step so far in his efforts to expand the rights of gay Americans.

The president directed the Department of Health and Human Services to prohibit discrimination in hospital visitation in a memo that was e-mailed to reporters Thursday night while he was at a fundraiser in Miami.

Administration officials and gay activists, who have been quietly working together on the issue, said the new rule will affect any hospital that receives Medicare or Medicaid funding, a move that covers the vast majority of the nation’s health-care institutions. Obama’s order will start a rule-making process at HHS that could take several months, officials said.

The concern this story raises is not the visitation rights for partners of gay men and women; I share President Obama’s discomfort with current practice, and I would like to see hospitals change their policies.

But I find it frightening that a president can, at the stroke of a pen, dictate policy at practically every hospital in the country. This is possible because of federal funding of health care via Medicaid and Medicare.

Once this power exists, it can be exercised in ways that supporters of the President’s recent decision might not like. What, for example, prevents a future president from decreeing that hospitals with federal funding cannot provide abortions?

The U.S. has joined German and Russian authorities in investigating whether Hewlett-Packard Co. executives paid millions of dollars in bribes to Russian officials to win a contract in Russia, according to people familiar with the matter.

The U.S. Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating whether H-P committed any violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, these people said, as part of a widening probe into the company’s activities. The law bars American companies from bribing foreign-government officials anywhere in the world.

I do not see a good argument for this law. It puts U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage, and it probably hurt the residents of countries where bribery is standard practice. Bribesry allows U.S. companies to circumvent regulation that protects incumbents, so bribery is likely to generate increased competition, greater investment, and higher wages.

See also Tyler Cowen on this issue in the context of economic development in Haiti.

The cartoon raises an interesting question: should libertarians accepts benefits from government policies they oppose?

Should libertarians, for example, take the home-mortgage interest deduction, collect Social Security benefits, or work as vice cops?

It would be virtually impossible, of course, for a libertarian to avoid all government largesse. That would require, among other things, refusing to watch or even read about professional sports, since most stadiums receive government funding. 

But libertarians could, if they wished, reduce their receipt of government favors substantially. 

Should they? And where should they draw the line?

Thanks to my former student, Tom Lawless, for the pointing out the cartoon.

One argument for legalizing drugs, even if one opposes recreational drug use, is that many drugs have significant medicinal benefits. The best-known examples are marijuana, which appears to be efficiacious for treating or relieving many conditions, and opiates, which are highly effective at relieving pain.

Still a third example may be the use of hallucingens to treat mental illness:

As a retired clinical psychologist, Clark Martin was well acquainted with traditional treatments for depression, but his own case seemed untreatable as he struggled through chemotherapy and other grueling regimens for kidney cancer. Counseling seemed futile to him. So did the antidepressant pills he tried.

Nothing had any lasting effect until, at the age of 65, he had his first psychedelic experience. He left his home in Vancouver, Wash., to take part in an experiment at Johns Hopkins medical school involving psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient found in certain mushrooms.

The story, by the libertarian science-writer Jon Tierney, has lots more of interest.

John Ford, a loyal reader who is an MD, submitted an op-ed to JAMA recently on the shortgage of primary care physicians. He received this comment from one reviewer:

If [the author of the op-ed] is suggesting that patients should pay more of their health care “out of pocket” I must object strenuously. Americans already spend a very substantial portion of their income for out of pocket medical expenditures. A 1995 Medicare survey indicated that Medicare beneficiaries spent 19% of their total income on out of pocket medical expenditures. No suggestion to “resurrect primary care” should come at the expense of the patient. (emphasis added)

The last sentence sums up a key part of the health care debate. Advocates of government subsidy do not want patients to bear the costs of their health care decisions. Opponents of subsidy believe the only way to restrain expenditure is for patients to bear at least some of these costs. Both views are consistent with the objectives of their proponents. The advocates of subsidy care mainly about redistribution. The opponents care mainly about efficiency.

By the way, check out this graph from John. It is easy to understand why health care expenditure is growing; fewer and fewer patients face meaningful incentives to economize.

Audiences for many programmes on S4C, Channel 4 for Wales, were so low that they failed to register.

S4C, which gets more than £100m of subsidy from taxpayers, officially attracted zero viewers on 196 out of its 890 programmes.

Read more here.

When it comes to health care, Mitt Romney is hoping to have it both ways, even as he accuses the White House of doing the same.

In the weeks since President Obama and the Democratic Congress enacted their health care overhaul, Mr. Romney, the once and presumably future candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has confronted an issue that is alternately viewed as a strength and a vulnerability.

As he promotes himself as a problem-solving pragmatist, Mr. Romney can justifiably point to the landmark universal coverage law in Massachusetts that he, as governor, proposed in 2006. But as he appeals to conservative activists and Republican primary voters, he is trying to draw nuanced distinctions between his Massachusetts law and the federal legislation that shares many of its fundamental elements, including a requirement that people have insurance.

The core of his argument is a federalist assertion that the new law usurps powers that properly reside with the states.

Romney’s position is probably not going to appease conservatives or prevent his being characterized as inconsistent, but he raises a good point regarding state versus federal policies.

Even beyond any constitutional constraints on federal policy, it makes sense to leave most policies to the states.

If one state adopts a bad policy, residents who oppose it can move elsewhere. That implies some restraint on policy, since states that impose excessive regulation or redistribution might drive away productive businesses and residents.

Advocates of regulation and redistribution, of course, claim that unless these policies are imposed nationally, states will engage in a race-to-the-bottom in which each avoids allegedly desirable policy out of fear of such out-migration.

The evidence, however, shows that states routinely adopt far more redistribution and regulation than required by the federal government; MassCare is one example. Others include higher minimum wages or welfare benefits and stronger than mandated environmental regulation.

In addition, the possibility that excessive policies will drive people away is a useful counterbalance to any tendency toward government overexpanstion. My view is that various interests groups push most policies far beyond the ideal balance. Leaving policy to the states provide some counter to this tendency.