News from the North tends to undermine the idea, part of the case for ObamaCare, that universal health coverage will lead to cost savings. Reuters has a report from Canada:

A few provinces are also experimenting with private funding for procedures such as hip, knee and cataract surgery. It's likely just a start as the provinces, responsible for delivering healthcare, cope with the demands of a retiring baby-boom generation....

Healthcare in Canada is delivered through a publicly funded system, which covers all "medically necessary" hospital and physician care and curbs the role of private medicine. It ate up about 40 percent of provincial budgets, or some C$183 billion ($174 billion) last year.

Spending has been rising 6 percent a year under a deal that added C$41.3 billion of federal funding over 10 years....Ontario says healthcare could eat up 70 percent of its budget in 12 years, if all these costs are left unchecked.

Thanks to reader-participant-watchdog-community member-content co-creator F. for sending the link.

"I don't want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers myself," Apple's Steve Jobs said. "Anything that we can do to help the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal find new ways of expression so they can afford to get paid, so they can afford to keep their editorial operations intact, I'm all for it."

Imagine if when Apple was founded, some rich and powerful business executive had said, "I don't want to see us descend into a nation of personal computer users myself...Anything that we can do to help IBM, Digital, Wang and Burroughs keep getting paid, so they can afford to keep their research and development operations and salesforces intact, I'm all for it."

John Stossel on Rand Paul and the Civil Rights Act of 1964:

I just don't trust government to decide what discrimination is acceptable. Its clumsy fist cannot deter private nonviolent racism without stomping on the rights of individuals. Today, because of government antidiscrimination policy, all-women gyms are sued and forced to admit men, a gay softball team is told it may not reject bisexuals and a Christian wedding photographer is fined thousands of dollars for refusing to take photos of a homosexual wedding.

I'll say it again: Racial discrimination is bad. But we have ways besides government to end it. The free market often punishes racists. Today, a business that doesn't hire blacks loses customers and good employees. It will atrophy, while its more inclusive competitors thrive.

Walter Williams:

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent editorial.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein (no softy on counterterrorism as a general matter, notwithstanding the libertarian label) says in a new in a new Forbes column that when it comes to the constitutional right of habeas corpus, the Obama administration is in court defending "the misguided policies of the Bush administration."

The New York Post has a story about NBC/Universal chief Jeff Zucker's pay: "Zucker is paid a base salary of $6.3 million with a minimum bonus of $1.5 million and a possible performance bonus of between $2 million and $4.5 million." Only a corporate tax lawyer could explain how "a base salary of $6.3 million with a minimum bonus of $1.5 million" is different from what a non-tax-lawyer would call "a base salary of $7.8 million." The Post article doesn't even try. In the middle of the financial crisis, GE, remember, got approval from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's Temporary Liquidity Guaranty Program to issue up to $139 billion in debt backed by a government guaranty.

The Associated Press uses the passive voice trick at the end of a news article previewing a speech by President Obama about the economy: "The nation's unemployment rate is expected to hover near 10 percent through the end of year."

Is expected by whom? By the editors and reporters at the Associated Press?

As with corporate earnings, the expectations game often substitutes for reality. If unemployment goes down to 8.5%, is that a big victory, even though it's higher than it was for much of the Bush administration? How can anyone know in June what the unemployment rate will be in November or December? There could be an unexpectedly strong recovery and the jobless rate could decline to 7% or less. Or there could be a double-dip recession and the jobless rate could rise to 12% or more. People may expect current conditions to continue, the same way they expected GM to remain profitable, but just because things are a certain way now doesn't mean they will be that way in three or six months.

Steven Rattner and the state-pension-industrial-complex he engaged with are not my cup of tea, but even so, the idea that the Securities and Exchange Commission wants to bar him from working in the securities industry for three years seems excessive. Who's being protected? Any potential Rattner client already knows about the movie "Chooch" and its connections to Mr. Rattner and the New York State pension fund; if Mayor Bloomberg or any other qualified investor wants to hire Mr. Rattner after that episode, why should the SEC stand in their way?

One of the themes around here is the way that narratives can get reinforced by the press and become conventional wisdom, even if they aren't true. So, even though it's a bit far afield from our usual topic around here, it's worth having a quick look at some of the press reaction to the Israel-Gaza flotilla story, just because it's in the news and attracting a lot of attention. What really struck me today was the vehemence and uniformity of the support for Israel among some of the right-of-center radio and television personalities.

From Rush Limbaugh's "Rush in a Hurry" email newsletter: Mr. Limbaugh: "This flotilla's purpose was to provoke Israel. The people on those boats had their PR campaign ready to go before the flotilla even set sail from Turkey. They knew exactly what to say. They knew exactly what was going to happen when they challenged the Israeli blockade. This is not about a nuclear-free Middle East. What we're looking at here is another all-out assault aimed at an Israel-free Middle East."

From Sean Hannity's "Hannity Headlines" email newsletter:

The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council today released its 2010 list of "Distressed nonmetropolitan middle-income geographies" and "underserved nonmetropolitan middle-income geographies." Of the six Massachusetts Census tracts to make the list, two were on Nantucket and four were in Duke's County, which is Martha's Vineyard and the Elizabeth Islands. Banks can get special Community Reinvestment Act credit for lending there.

An earlier post noted, as an example of government jobs paying more than private sector jobs, "a former editor of the New Republic, Peter Beinart, who, in his role as an associate professor at the City University of New York -- not a full professor, mind you, an associate professor -- is taking home from the taxpayers of New York, according to the useful Manhattan Institute-sponsored Web site SeeThroughNy, the tidy sum of $143,235 a year. That is, according to the latest survey from the American Association of University Professors, more than $30,000 a year more than an average associate professor at Harvard, which has an endowment of billions of dollars."

The Federal Trade Commission has posted a staff-generated discussion paper (pdf) on the news business, including a proposal to give news organizations antitrust exemptions that would allow them to "agree jointly to erect pay walls so that consumers must pay for access to online content" and "agree jointly on a mechanism to require news aggregators and others to pay for the use of online content, perhaps through the use of copyright licenses." Another proposal: "indirect and direct government support." Options include "establish a 'journalism' division of AmeriCorps," the federal national service program, "a tax credit to news organizations for every journalist they employ," "citizenship news vouchers" that would give every American tax money to allocate to non-profit news organizations of their choice, and "grants to universities to conduct investigative journalism."

Dominick Armentano, writing in the Hartford Business Journal: "what talking heads are calling 'capitalism' is actually 'crony capitalism'.... it is crony capitalism that is responsible for most of our current economic difficulties."

Thanks to reader-participant-community member-content-co-creator S. for sending the link.

Bill Clinton's labor secretary, Robert Reich, is suggesting that the Obama administration "put BP under temporary receivership." Mr. Reich: "If the government can take over giant global insurer AIG and the auto giant General Motors and replace their CEOs, in order to keep them financially solvent, it should be able to put BP's North American operations into temporary receivership in order to stop one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history." Link via Mike Allen's Politico Playbook.

Forbes publishes a column calling for an increase in the "carried interest" tax of managers of venture capital, real estate, private equity, hedge fund, and oil and gas partnerships.

The lobbyists are howling that raising taxes on investment managers' profit shares will discourage investment.

Oh, but private equity saved Dunkin' Donuts! This argument is a derivative of the old, discredited supply-side argument that investment will be fostered by greater rewards for the winners, except that these taxpayers are merely the managers of the winners.