With Eric Singer, Richard Epstein, George Will, Seth Lipsky, and 13 state attorneys general all gearing up for a constitutional challenge to ObamaCare, a victory by Scott Brown in today's U.S. Senate special election in Massachusetts could point the way to an alternative strategy for opponents of the president's health-care overhaul. Instead of relying on a court challenge to strike down ObamaCare as unconstitutional, opponents could try to elect enough senators or congressmen to block or repeal a health care "reform" bill.

Now that the Wall Street Journal has run not just one but two op-ed pieces calling for more government spending to fix a physician shortage, the Boston Globe is waddling into the debate with an editorial on the "shortage of primary care doctors." As we said the last time around, "It shouldn't surprise anyone that a government effort to control the supply of physicians would cause a shortage. Genuinely free markets are dynamic and self-correcting; efforts by government central planners to control supply lead to shortages." In a free market, a shortage of primary care doctors would allow them to raise their prices, so they could make more money, which would lead to more people entering primary care, which would lead to an alleviation of the shortage, and perhaps even a decline in the price. You wouldn't need an act of Congress to alleviate a shortage, just some time. In the health care market, though, government already, before Obama-care, controls about 45% of health care spending, and had a lot of price-setting power. In addition, government licensing rules and professional associations bar doctors who did their residencies overseas from practicing in America. With government restrictions on both supply and price, it's no wonder there is a shortage. The government-imposed corrective measures the Globe advises to create more primary care doctors might well backfire and create a shortage of specialists.

The Senate race in Massachusetts will be the subject of several posts here today, but one point I want to make early and often is that one thing that the voters of Massachusetts are rebelling against is the idea that they must behave as the arrogant, unelected elites of the press tell them to. This was on display spectacularly in the interaction between the Republican candidate, Scott Brown, and Harvard Kennedy School professor David Gergen over "Teddy Kennedy's seat" in the debate. But the clip file (or what used to be called the clip file, before the Internet) is full of language that essentially deprives the voters of Massachusetts of the ability to think or act for themselves. Here are some highlights:

Daily Kos: "As we know, the Democratic primary for Senate in Massachusetts pretty much determines the ultimate winner, and that Democratic primary is today."

The founder of the mutual funds giant the Vanguard Group, John Bogle, has an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal calling for congressionally imposed "standards" that would "require the giant financial institutions of investment America to behave as owners of corporate America," including, "demanding the independence of directors from management (including the separation of the roles of chief executive and board chairman)." Funny, Mr. Bogle himself served as chairman and chief executive officer of Vanguard from 1974 to 1996, and the company did pretty darned well, thank you. More thoughts on the wisdom of separating these roles are here.

From the Washington Post over the weekend (via Heritage): "The poll also shows how much ground Obama has lost during his first year of trying to convince the public that more government is the answer to the country's problems. By 58 percent to 38 percent, Americans said they prefer smaller government and fewer services to larger government with more services. Since he won the Democratic nomination in June 2008, the margin between those favoring smaller over larger government has moved in Post-ABC polls from five points to 20 points."

So long as we're on the subject of NBC and General Electric, Mark Cuban's defense of Jeff Zucker against Maureen Dowd is worth a read, though the language gets a bit coarse.

Saturday Night Live's mockery of President Obama may be one good reason that GE is eager to sell NBC to Comcast, I've suggested. For a company that claims GE means "stimulus" and "government" to also own television channels that do political commentary can be a complicated thing. If the Republicans ever come back to power in Washington, and if GE still owned MSNBC, the Republicans might remember MSNBC on-air personality Ed Schultz's proclamation "if I lived in Massachusetts I'd try to vote 10 times. I don't know if they'd let me or not, but I'd try to. Yeah, that's right. I'd cheat to keep these bastards out. I would. 'Cause that's exactly what they are." Or his subsequent clarification, "I meant to say, if I could vote 20 times, that's what I'd do ...Let me be very clear – I'm not advocating voter fraud, I'm just telling you what I would do. That's how bad I want Scott Brown to lose!" Anyway, with those kinds of on-air comments, you wonder whether Timothy Geithner's on-the-record statement that the government would never let General Electric fail would continue to be operative indefinitely. So whatever other reasons there are for GE to sell MSNBC, insulating GE from the fallout from these sorts of flaps has got to be on the list.

Martha's Vineyard is one of the more left-wing bastions of Massachusetts, and the town of Chilmark is a left-wing bastion within the left-wing bastion. So it may tell something about the mood of the state -- and, for that matter, the country -- that the Vineyard Gazette is reporting that in today's election for U.S. Senate, Chilmark has decided to stick with its hand-cranked ballot box and paper ballots instead of following an unfunded federal mandate to spend $2,000 on an Automark machine and software to accomodate the single visually impaired voter in the town.

The Gazette reports that, "in the past, Chilmark registered voters with visual impairments have chosen to vote by absentee ballot. They also have the option of having an elected official, or another person of their choice, read the ballot for them, or they may simply opt for a large-print ballot."

Under the federally mandated system, the town instead buys a machine that "has a screen that magnifies ballot questions and digitizes the result. There is also an option to have the ballot questions read to the voter through headphones."

'Stop The Reverse Robin-Hood' is the headline of my op-ed piece in this morning's New York Daily News. Welcome Daily News readers! Please check out the rest of the site, sign up for the e-mail list or the RSS feed using the box or button on the righthand side, or browse the Reverse Robin-Hood section of the FutureOfCapitalism.com archives. Posting will resume at the regular frequency once the holiday weekend is over.

It's ironic that President Obama has turned to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to help lead relief efforts in Haiti. As president, both Clinton and Bush turned away Haitians who piled into boats seeking to immigrate to America.

David Brooks has a column today making the point that the horror in Haiti isn't just the earthquake but the underlying poverty, Mr. Brooks blames "progress-resistant cultural influences" such as "voodoo religion." But Haitians who manage to make it into America do just fine, making me doubt Mr. Brooks's point.

While the New York Times never misses an editorial opportunity to call for higher taxes, endorsing or proposing at least 13 tax increases in the past seven years, that doesn't mean the company thinks its own executives, even at money-losing newspapers, should actually have to pay themselves for the taxes they owe. The Boston Business Journal reports (link via Romenesko) that P. Steven Ainsley, who was publisher of the Times company's Boston Globe from 2006 to 2009, a period during which the paper claimed it was losing about $80 million a year, will walk away from the paper with "$1.4 million in payments and vested stock compensation" as well as "$2.7 million in retirement benefits." The best part, though, is that the Times will reimburse Mr. Ainsley "for all nondeductible home-loan interest paid in 2009" and will also provide "payments to cover any taxes stemming from the Times' interest-related reimbursements." Nice work if you can get it.

The stories about Veterans Administration health care keep flowing in to counteract New York Times Nobel laureate Paul Krugman's claim that the the VA system "manages to combine quality care with low costs." The latest is from Senator Grassley, who reports that "the wrong filter was used in dialysis machines at the V.A. Palo Alto Health Care System last year, putting 83 patients and possibly more who were treated using the contaminated machines at risk of being infected with hepatitis, HIV, or other infectious diseases." Says Mr. Grassley, "this is not the first incident of contaminated equipment in the VA health system. The Associated Press reported that in February 2009 the V.A. started notifying more than 11,000 patients treated at three VA medical centers to get their blood checked because they may have been exposed to infectious body fluids. It was discovered two months earlier that equipment used for colonoscopies at these three hospitals was not properly cleaned or sterilized."

The chairman of the FDIC, Sheila Bair, has some points worth excerpting in her testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission:

federal tax policy has long favored investment in owner-occupied housing and the consumption of housing services. The government-sponsored housing enterprises have also used the implicit backing of the government to lower the cost of mortgage credit and stimulate demand for housing and housing-linked debt. In political terms, these policies have proven to be highly popular. Who will stand up to say they are against homeownership? Yet, we have failed to recognize that there are both opportunity costs and downside risks associated with these policies. Policies that channel capital towards housing necessarily divert capital from other investments, such as plant and equipment, technology, and education—investments that are also necessary for long-term economic growth and improved standards of living.

The Congressional Budget Office and the Obama administration have a disagreement over whether Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be considered part of the federal budget. Guess who is on which side of the fight?

James Surowiecki on the administration's plan to tax banks: "There is one plausible argument for why the tax is not a good idea, namely that with the financial sector still shaky it's a mistake to be taking tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars out of it. There is, after all, something a little odd about the government planning to take billions in capital out of the banks less than a year after it insisted—appropriately—that the banks had to raise billions in capital if they wanted to stay in business....The problem is that this argument would hold a lot more water if the big banks weren't about to pay out tens of billions of dollars in bonuses to their employees, tens of billions of dollars that they could instead keep as retained earnings in order to bolster their core capital."