Lions and Eagles

I've had this idea rolling around in my head on the economic effects of health insurance coverage mandates. It started in my mind over contraceptives, but could be applied to just about anything, from prescriptions to doctor visits. My wife had an economics teacher who told her, "If you don't know about supply and demand, you will fail!" You have to understand supply and demand. Quick Micro Econ 101 review. Look at the graph over here. If you've taken an econ class, you should have seen variations on this again and again. The blue line shows that as price goes up, the number of people willing to jump in and buy goes down, and vice versa. Red line shows that when price goes up, sellers are more excited about selling. Somewhere in the middle, the quantity of product that buyers want to buy meets up with the quantity that sellers want to sell, and there we have what we call market equilibrium. That market equilibrium price is what you will pay without insur...

I recently ran across an article by a Presbyterian minister on 10 political things one supposedly cannot do while following Jesus. While I respect the author's viewpoints and even praise some of his motivations, I did personally find the article to be very heavily weighted towards one side of the political aisle. In order to offer a counterbalance, I thought I might offer my own list of 10 more political things, as seen from a different perspective. This will get long, but I'll ask you to bear with me. I feel it's very important to be clear not only with what I am saying, but also with what I am very specifically not saying. 10) Allow public expressions of faith to be silenced If you have good news, the best news in the world, do you not want to share it? If the news you have may save countless lives, are you not obligated to share it? The Gospel is Good News. Indeed, we have a Great Commission from our Lord himself to spread his News to every tribe, every tongue, every...

I realize I may be doing a bit of troll-feeding here, but I saw this image on a friend's Facebook page, and just couldn't resist the challenge. This is a sign from an anti-Tea Party rally. I believe that I can prove every point on this sign to be wrong, for both Jesus and Obama. As a disclaimer, I am not an official member of any Tea Party organization, but I have attended several Tea Party events, and I do consider myself to be a supporter of Tea Party values. Just for fun, I'll go in reverse order: Free Healthcare? Healthcare is provided by doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals, who diagnose your illness, and  take care of you while you get better, or until you die, whichever comes first. Depending on how sick you are, this can be very expensive. Jesus never offered healthcare. He offers healing. Jesus's healing is this: "The blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and ...

My letter to the editor sparked some interesting debate and comments. Mostly encouragements, good to hear. There were a few folks who didn't necessarily disagree, but who think that we'll never get people to be personally responsible for themselves on a large enough scale to ever solve the problem.What can I say? If you start with a low expectation of people, they'll satisfy that expectation. It's like the epidemic of low expectations in majority-black schools these days: If you tell students that they can't learn, then they won't try, and if they don't try, they won't learn. Likewise, if you create policy based on the expectation that people won't try to plan for their own future, you'll make it harder on people who actually do plan for their own futures. On the other hand, if we expect that there will be people who are responsible, and that there will be people who are charitable to those in need, then we might actually get people who are ...