Late-night TV host John Oliver recently caused a stir by attacking debt collectors in a clever way. He set up his own collection agency, bought $15 million of medical bad debt, and then forgave it all. This was all done on TV, to the cheers of his audience.

Oliver claimed to have outdone Oprah Winfrey, who once gave a car to each person in her studio audience. Oprah’s car giveaway cost $8 million, just over half of Oliver’s buyout. So, Oliver wins the charitable ego competition, right?

Nope. Oliver did not forgive $15 million of medical debt. That was the face amount of the accounts receivable. He bought them for about half a cent on the dollar, or about $60,000 total. The lesson of Oliver’s stunt is that medical accounts receivable are very hard to collect. That is why they trade so cheaply in the secondary debt market.

Oliver said the portfolio comprised about 9,000 deadbeat patients. So, the average debt was $1,667 (although, I am sure there was a large variance around the mean).

Seven of ten hospitals report they collect less than one-third of patients’ fees at the time of service. No wonder they have so much trouble collecting. Then, they futilely sic debt collectors on patients whom they know are unlikely to pay. It causes a lot of pain for little benefit. As I discussed previously, Medicare regulations force providers to perform this pantomime, instead of writing off charitable care efficiently and effectively.

The real lesson of John Oliver’s stunt is that government regulations make it nearly impossible for patients to discharge their debts in an orderly and responsible way.

1. In what way(s) have I violated your natural rights?

2. If I have not violated your natural rights (as I believe to be the case), thereby prompting you to retaliate against me in defense of them, why are you violating my natural rights in such a great variety of ways?

3. If you regard natural rights as intellectually incoherent—as Jeremy Bentham pronounced them, nonsense upon stilts—what justification, if any, do you have for your unprovoked abuse, punishment, and plunder of me and countless others subject to the exercise of your power?

4. If you have no morally defensible justification, but are simply plundering and bullying me and others to gratify your own ravenous greed and unprincipled maliciousness or, perhaps, in the service of an intellectually bankrupt notion such as the aggregate utility or welfare of society, will you be surprised if I and others respond to you as we would to the attack of a wild animal?

Between 12% and 20% of women are sexually assaulted while in college; between 3% and 10% might be raped or experience attempted rape.

Perhaps the most striking void left in the aftermath of the Brock Turner sexual assault trial—the Stanford rape case—is the utter lack of resolution for the victim and the degree to which the human harm created by his actions has gone unaddressed.

This is extraordinary given the apparent success of the case. Fewer than 10% of cases referred to prosecutors secure a conviction on the underlying assault or rape charge. The jury saw through the manipulations and smoke screens deployed by the defense attorneys, weighed the evidence, and found that Turner had committed three felonies, including attempted rape, beyond a reasonable doubt. This case should have been a poster child for the anti-sexual assault movement.

Instead, the case has ignited a firestorm of controversy, in no small part because of the power of the victim impact statement. Turner doesn’t “get it,” she writes, referring to the defendant’s comments that seem to deflect responsibility and his focus on intent, rather than the harm he created. The victim wasn’t “hurt,” she was emotionally and psychologically devastated. Turner still doesn’t understand the depth of the damage his actions caused to another human being.

The best measurement of people who lack health insurance, the National Health Interview Survey published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has released early estimates of health insurance for all fifty states and the District of Columbia in 2015. There are two things to note.

First: About 70 percent of residents, age 18 to through 64, had “health insurance” in 2015, which is the same rate as persisted until 2006. Obamacare has not achieved a breakthrough in coverage. It has just restored us to where we were less than a decade ago.

What has also happened is a significant change from private coverage to government welfare (primarily Medicaid). The shift has been about five percentage points since 2006, and ten percentage points since 1997. (That is, there was no net change in coverage before the Great Recession, but there was crowding out of private coverage in favor of welfare.)

We are already anticipating double-digit premium hikes for Obamacare plans in 2017, based on insurance filings in a sufficient number of states to show the trend.

Obamacare’s defenders point out two limits to these leading indicators. First, they are requested, not approved rate hikes. Second, Obamacare beneficiaries can trade down. A person whose plan raises premiums by double digits can switch to a plan with a lesser increase. Both criticisms are fair.

Nevertheless, now that the dust has settled on 2016, and all the data on this year’s enrollment analyzed, we can confirm from two pro-Obamacare sources that premiums in Obamacare’s exchange plans increased by an average of eight percent from 2015 to 2016. General measures of price changes, such as Consumer Price Inflation, were effectively flat over the period. That is, the eight percent Obamacare premium hike was a real, not nominal, price hike.

In April, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services reported:

Two-thirds (67 percent) of HealthCare.gov consumers selected a new plan in 2016: all new consumers, plus 43 percent of returning consumers. Taking into account shopping, the increase in the average premium was 8 percent between 2015 and 2016.

One of my first lessons in economics and politics came from an unlikely place—vacation Bible school.

I must have been about six or seven. For a week, I went to church to learn with other children my age about our faith and the Church.

Throughout the week we had the opportunity to earn stickers. For things like good behavior, helping the teachers, participating, and playing games, we received small happy face stickers. At the end of the week, we could “spend” these stickers at their store—exchanging what we’d earned for trinkets. (It’s amazing what a second grader will do for a plastic slinky.)

I remember the day all my work was going to pay off. I’d accumulated a good amount of stickers and I was so ready to use what I’d worked for to get what I wanted.

Then came the catch.

In a country based on the principle of liberty, should we really contemplate depriving people of freedom because they sometimes don’t make choices experts think are best for them?  My title really understates the liberty-depriving philosophy of the nanny state.  More accurately, it is: Some people make what we think are bad choices, so we are going to deprive everyone of liberty.

I’m thinking about this after reading Harvard Professor John Y. Campbell’s article in the May 2016 issue of the American Economic Review titled “Restoring Rational Choice: The Challenge of Rational Consumer Regulation.”  Campbell reviews several bad financial decisions consumers tend to make, such as not refinancing their mortgages when it is financially beneficial to do so, and ultimately concludes, “The complexity of twenty-first century financial arrangements poses a daunting challenge to households managing their financial affairs” so “household financial mistakes create a new rationale for intervention in the economy.”  People make financial decisions that Professor Campbell thinks are mistakes, so he wants government to intervene.

I have just finished reading Living Economics: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, a wonderful collection of essays by Peter Boettke. (It was published in 2012, but I move slowly these days.) The essays were written over a span of some twenty years or so, most of them in the first decade of the present century or soon thereafter. Several have a co-author or two; the co-authors include Christopher Coyne, Peter Leeson, David Prychitko, Steven Horwitz, and Frederic Sautet. I read the book from cover to cover and enjoyed it from start to finish.

Broadly speaking, the essays deal with how to teach—and learn—economics, but Pete and his co-authors approach this overarching topic in a variety of ways and usually in a substantive rather than merely hortatory manner. It will be a rare graduate student—or even a practicing professional economist—who cannot learn a great deal from the book. Pete writes clearly and well and has a deep knowledge of the history of economics. His excitement for teaching and learning shines forth on nearly every page. He has a true intellectual’s outlook, which means that he is constantly looking at anyone’s writing with the question in mind, What can I learn from this exposition? He has great willingness to set aside, at least for the moment, opportunities to criticize a scholar’s work, focusing instead on the work’s positive, worthwhile aspects.

Pete has excellent judgment about what is right and wrong with the economics profession today. And he exudes confidence that young economists can go forth successfully to practice and teach what he calls mainline economics—the basic elements of economic  understanding that extend from Aquinas, the School of Salamanca, and Adam Smith to Menger, Mises, Hayek, Buchanan, and the New Institutional School. Although Pete is a great champion of Austrian economics, his vision is much broader than that of the typical Austrian, which in my view is a good thing.

So, my advice is that you buy the book, read it, learn from it, keep it handy for future reference, and take its solid advice to heart. You’ll know more and better economics if you do.

The A-Bomb Dome at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

Bestselling dystopian young-adult (YA) literature has inspired some of the biggest films of recent years. Many of these books, including The Hunger Games, the Divergent series, and the more modestly performing Fifth Wave, have been set in the aftermath of global war, geo-political events that bring human societies to near annihilation. While these stories are fictional, the reality of the setting is not as far fetched as many readers might think. A recent trip the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park was a sobering reminder of how close these dystopian futures might actually be in the wake of modern warfare.

Few of these YA authors, whether it’s the authoritarian hegemony of the Capital District in The Hunger Games or the class-based hierarchies embedded in the faction system governing Chicago in Divergent, seem to acknowledge how events leading to their dystopian worlds are remarkably easy to recreate in the real world and how dangerously close we have come to doing this. A simple look at the after effects of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are perhaps our best examples. My visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park perhaps did more than any of my reading or self-education on the effects of war to translate fears and worries about nuclear war into a understanding of its horrific reality.

Question: In what way do the atrocities committed by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army in China in 1937-38, especially those included under the rubric of “the Rape of Nanking,” justify the U.S. government’s atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945?

Answer: In no way whatsoever.

Question: Why then do so many of the Americans who defend the atomic bombings bring up the Rape of Nanking as part of their argument?

Hypothesis: They do so because their thinking is completely collectivistic. They think: “The Japanese committed atrocities in Nanking; therefore it is only just that the Japanese suffered the retribution of having atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Comment: This argumentation, by making “the Japanese” the alleged moral agent that committed a wrongful act and therefore deserved to be punished for it, lumps every Japanese person, regardless of actual individual culpability, into a moral category that is nothing but a meaningless abstraction divorced from a recognition of which specific individuals committed wrongs and therefore might justly have been punished for those wrongs. An attempt to justify killing, wounding, and destroying the homes of, in particular, scores of thousands of babies, children, women, old people, and others who had nothing to do with the crimes committed in Nanking — nor any responsibility for the war in general — substitutes tribal savagery for defensible moral thinking.