Obamacare is still around, even though President Obama isn’t talking about it much. Here are four health care scholars reminding us what’s wrong with it, why we shouldn’t necessarily assume the Supreme Court will strike down the whole law, and what should replace it:

For an opportunity to learn more about liberty by dabbling across disciplines, consider applying to the first ever Legatum Summer School. Here’s the program’s description:

The first Legatum Summer School will take place in northern Italy, from 30 July – 5 August, 2012.

The Legatum Summer School seeks to promote a deeper understanding of the role liberty and responsibility play as the basis of prosperity in a changing, increasingly complex world. Through a prism of history, culture, arts, and science, Legatum’s world class faculty will engage participants in a conversation about today’s global economic and political challenges. This year’s week-long programme explores the question: “Why do Civilizations flourish – and fail?”

Summer School faculty includes the best-selling writer and chair of business journalism at Columbia University Sylvia Nasar (author, “A Beautiful Mind”); historian Wang Gungwu of the National University of Singapore; political commentator and Brookings Institution scholar Robert Kagan; renowned curator, art historian and Director of the Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.) Dorothy Kosinski; and neuroscience expert Iain McGilchrist, amongst others.

Legatum is looking for “early to mid-career professionals of accomplishment and promise (up to 40 years of age) who have a proven track record of thinking creatively, locally and globally.” The deadline for applying is Sunday, February 19, 2012.

The prospectus for Facebook’s initial public offering this week is a testament to how the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley law hampers economic growth, says John Berlau (“Facebook Filing Blasts Obama-Bush Overregulation of Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank,” OpenMarket.org, February2, 2012). The prospectus warns investors that the “requirements of being a public company may strain our resources and divert management’s attention”:

As a public company, we will be subject to the reporting requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (Exchange Act), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Dodd-Frank Act, … and other applicable securities rules and regulations. Compliance with these rules and regulations will increase our legal and financial compliance costs, make some activities more difficult, time-consuming, or costly, and increase demand on our systems and resources.

These days, points out Berlau, you need to be a big company in order to handle the reporting burdens of going public:

AOL founder Steve Case, a member of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, recently noted in a Washington Post op-ed, “Initial public offerings of less than $50 million were 80 percent of IPOs in the 1990s but just 20 percent in the 2000s.”

But, says Berlau, when a bigger company goes public it’s more likely doing so in order to realize value for existing investors and to make that value liquid, rather than to raise funds for future growth. That’s how Facebook founder Marc Zuckerberg characterized his company’s IPO. The result of these regulations, in other words, is that the next Facebook or Google or Home Depot is being snuffed out before it has a chance.

Some upcoming events you might want to take in:

Matt Welch and Jonah Goldberg will debate whether libertarians are part of the conservative movement. Welch v. Goldberg will begin at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, February 8, at the American Enterprise Institute.

Tom Grace will discuss his revelation that novels cannot have overtly conservative protagonists—not if they are to be published by a major imprint, anyway. Grace will be at The Heritage Foundation at noon on Wednesday, February 8 to talk about the reception his sixth novel, The Liberty Intrigue, received from the publishing industry.

Those who’ve done good for the cause of liberty will be recognized at the annual Weyrich Awards Dinner. The dinner, named in honor of conservative organizer par excellence Paul Weyrich, will begin at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, February 8, at the Marriot Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin, authors of Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution, will talk about the resurgence of interest in the constitutional constraints on government, how they started one of the leading groups in Tea Party movement, and where they see the movement headed. Hosted by the Cato Institute, Meckler and Martin will speak at noon on Thursday, February 16 at the Mount Vernon Place, Undercroft Auditorium in Washington, D.C.

Ordinary citizens are a lot more competent using guns to defend themselves than proponents of gun control give them credit for. That’s the takeaway from a new Cato Institute analysis of 4,699 news reports of Americans using guns in self defense gathered from 2003 to 2011. And that figure probably understates the number of times guns were used successfully in self defense. “After all, ‘Man Scares away Burglar, No Shots Fired’ is not particularly newsworthy,” note authors Clayton Cramer and David Burnett. 

According to Cramer and Burnett’s tally, in 154 of those stories a woman defended herself, including 25 instances in which a rape was prevented; and in 201 of those stories a senior citizen defended himself. Among the nearly 5,000 stories, Cramer and Burnett identified only five accidental shootings, 210 instances of a defender being shot but not killed, and a further 36 cases of a defender being killed. Perhaps most surprising:

In 227 incidents, a criminal’s gun was taken away from him by the victim. This does not necessarily mean that the vic­tim shot the criminal, but it does mean that the victim successfully disarmed the crimi­nal and then threatened the criminal with it in order to make him leave, or make him remain on the scene until the police could arrive. Often, these were situations where the victim, at the start of the attack, did not have a gun. […]

By comparison, the data set contains only 11 stories out of 4,699 where a criminal took a gun away from a defender […] .

Cramer and Burnett’s report is “Tough Targets: When Criminals Face Armed Resistance from Citizens.”

Some recent health insurance data, noted by John Graham of the Pacific Research Institute, tells a story (“If Health Spending Is Increasing Slower, Why Are Premiums Rising Faster,” January 2012). As one might expect when economic growth is slow, private health care spending has not increased as fast lately:

[T]he annual rate of increase in spending by private health insurance was 7.8 percent in 2007. It has dropped by more than two thirds to an annual increase of just 2.4 percent in 2010, according to data analysed by the federal government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

At first, health insurance premiums followed suit. The net cost of health insurance declined by 1.4 percent in 2008 and by 2.2 percent in 2009. Since Obamacare passed in early 2010, however, health insurance premiums and insurance company profits have spiked:

The “net cost of health insurance” jumped by 8.4 percent in 2010 […] . CMS’ analysts conclude that “for the first time in seven years, growth in total private health insurance premiums exceeded growth in total benefits” in 2010. […]

According to an analysis by Bloomberg Government, average operating profit margins for four of the largest insurers (UnitedHealth Group, Aetna, Cigna, and Humana) increased to 8.24 percent in the 18 months after the law was signed, versus 6.88 percent in the 18 months before the law was signed.

It’s almost enough to make you think Obamacare isn’t working the way its supporters wanted it to. Didn’t they say the problem with health insurance was greedy insurance companies making too much profit?

Federal workers get paid about 16 percent more in total compensation than comparable private-sector workers, according to a new study by the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO study compared federal civilian employees to private sector workers who resembled them in education level, work experience, and other observable characteristics. The CBO’s approach is broadly consistent with that taken by Jason Richwine of The Heritage Foundation and Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute.

The CBO found federal workers receive a 2 percent pay premium and a 48 percent premium in benefits. Total federal employee compensation runs around $200 billion per year, and saving 16 percent of that would amount to a 10-year savings of about $390 billion, notes Biggs.

In their own research published last year, Richwine and Biggs found a 61 percent premium in total compensation for federal workers. They found a larger premium in part because their calculation includes the value of greater job security that comes with federal employment. That factor alone, they estimate, is worth about 17 percent of pay.

Read More:
“Comparing the Compensation of Federal and Private-Sector Employees,” The Congressional Budget Office, January 2012.
“Comparing Federal and Private Sector Compensation,” by Jason Richwine and Andrew Biggs, American Enterprise Institute, June 2011.
“Same Worker, Higher Wage: A Study of Workers Who Switch from Private to Federal Employment,” by Jason Richwine, The Heritage Foundation, June 15, 2011.

Unless you work for a church, you’re probably going to pay for other people’s abortions, and even if you work for a religious non-profit, you’ll probably have to pay for them, too. On January 20, the Department of Health and Human Services, using its authority under Obamacare, announced that abortion must be covered without copays by most health insurance plans. That edict, as in the interim rule the agency announced last August, exempts insurance offered to employees by churches and church-run schools, but does not exempt insurance offered by religiously affiliated non-profits, such as Catholic hospitals.

The final rule did, however, give religious non-profits an extra year to figure out how to comply with the coverage requirement. James Capretta predicts this just means an extra year until these nonprofits’ workers are dumped into the public exchanges (“A Clash of Conscience,” National Review, January 30, 2012):

[L]arge Catholic institutions all over the country will be forced to stop offering health coverage to their workers, because continuing to do so will be incompatible with their mission. And when they drop that coverage, they will be forced by Obamacare to pay huge fines to the federal government ($2,000 per worker at the outset). For a Catholic institution with 5,000 employees, that’s $10 million that won’t go toward helping the poor, taking care of patients, or educating future leaders.

Giving parents a choice of their children’s schools leads to better educational outcomes—a handy thing to know since this is National School Choice Week. Rachel Sheffield rounds up some of the evidence (“National School Choice Week: How School Choice Benefits Students, The Foundry, January 26, 2012):

A 2010 gold-standard evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (DCOSP)—a voucher program for low-income children in Washington, D.C.—revealed that over 90 percent of DCOSP students graduated from high school, compared to just 70 percent of their peers with similar characteristics who remained in D.C. public schools. Similarly, students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program who participated for all four of their high school years had a 94 percent graduation rate, compared to a 75 percent graduation rate of their peers who attended four-years of public high school. […]

In addition to positive student outcomes, parents are more satisfied with their children’s schools when they have a choice. For example, 93 percent of parents whose children participated in the McKay Scholarship Program—a program for special-needs students in Florida—reported that they were satisfied with their children’s schools, compared to only 33 percent of parents whose special-needs children were enrolled in public schools. Parents of DCOSP students as well as parents with children in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and those whose children attend charter schools also report high levels of satisfaction with their children’s schools.

The competition from choice schools helps improve public schools, too, notes Sheffield:

Researchers found, for example, that as more private schools participated in Florida’s McKay Scholarship Program, the reading and math achievement of special-needs students in nearby public schools increased significantly.

See also: “A Win-Win Solution: The Empirical Evidence on School Vouchers,” by Greg Forster, The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, March 2011.

You can now find out how good your pension benefits would be if you worked for state government. Just visit CalculateYourPublicPension.com, which calculates the pension you would earn if you were a public employee in Florida, Illinois, Maine, New Jersey, or New York.

Becoming a right-to-work state—i.e., not compelling workers to give money to unions in order to work—will help Indiana’s economy grow, reports Paul Kersey (“What a Right-to-Work Law Will Mean for Indiana,” Mackinac Center for Public Policy, January 19, 2011):  

From 2000 to 2010, employment in right-to-work states increased 2.3 percent, compared to a 4.0 percent decline in non-right-to-work states. Indiana saw employment decrease 6.9 percent over the same period. That means Indiana lost roughly 207,000 jobs over the past 10 years. In contrast, 1.2 million jobs were created in right-to-work states.

And, notes Kersey:

A study by the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center found that in 2009, after adjusting for the cost of living, annual per-capita disposable income was $35,543 in right-to-work states, compared to $33,389 in non-right-to-work states. That equates to a $2,154 premium each year for those living in right-to-work states.

The Indiana House passed right-to-work legislation on Tuesday. An identical bill has already passed the state Senate. If Gov. Mitch Daniels signs the bill into law, which he is expected to do, Indiana will become the 23rd right-to-work state.

One plan for reducing economic inequality would be to let rich people fail while letting poor people become rich. Robert Lawson explains:

The idea that conservative donors become academic thought police when they fund university academic centers is severely misguided, explains Scott Walter in a recent article at Philanthropy Daily (“Are Donors Dangerous?” January 18, 2012).

Walter makes the case that this conservative philanthropy adds to rather than subtracts from the academic conversation. A prime example, he says, was the John M. Olin Foundation’s efforts to start law-and-economics centers at Harvard, Georgetown, Stanford, Yale, the University of Chicago, and other law schools. At Stanford, says Walter, the Olin Foundation worked with law school dean Paul Brest, “a serious scholar in his own right who has never been accused of having conservative views” and who “has praised the law-and-economics donors and urged other funders, regardless of their political views, to learn from them.”

Brest saw firsthand how the donors, grantees, and other scholars functioned, but he voices no concern over threats to academic freedom or integrity. I know from him and the funders involved that both sides, despite their differing views, got along well and knew that their opposite numbers were keen to maintain the highest academic standards.

Of course, one part of high academic standards is vigorous debate that leads to evolving views – something that the law-and-economics donors, far from quashing, have helped foster. Brest notes, for example, that “in recent years, the law and economics paradigm has been challenged by research in behavioral economics,” which means that even a successful academic movement never achieves a permanent victory, but rather spurs further academic work. Real scholars welcome that.

The critics who worry about Koch money seem not to worry at all that George Soros is using his billions to start academic centers devoted to fighting “market fundamentalism.” For them, “more academic freedom” seems to be just a synonym for “fewer conservative ideas.”

Wyoming has the best state tax business climate in the country, according to the Tax Foundation’s new 2012 State Business Tax Climate Index. The rest of the top 10 are South Dakota, Nevada, Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, Washington, Montana, Texas, and Utah.

Seven of these top ten states do without one or more of the major types of taxes: individual income tax, corporate tax, or sales tax. The index authors note that this gives these states a major competitive advantage in attracting and keeping business. The bottom ten states are Iowa, Maryland, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Vermont, California, New York, and New Jersey.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s reforms of public employee pensions and collective bargaining are working, reports Christian Schneider:

Before the reform, many districts’ annual union contracts required them to buy health insurance from WEA Trust, a nonprofit affiliated with the state’s largest teachers’ union. Once the reform limited collective bargaining to wage negotiations, districts could eliminate that requirement from their contracts and start bidding for health care on the open market. When the Appleton School District put its health-insurance contract up for bid, for instance, WEA Trust suddenly lowered its rates and promised to match any competitor’s price. Appleton will save $3 million during the current school year.

Appleton isn’t alone. According to a report by the MacIver Institute, as of September 1, “at least 25 school districts in the Badger State had reported switching health care providers/plans or opening insurance bidding to outside companies.” The institute calculates that these steps will save the districts $211.45 per student. If the state’s other 250 districts currently served by WEA Trust follow suit, the savings statewide could reach hundreds of millions of dollars.

At the outset of the public-union standoff, educators had made dire predictions that Walker’s reforms would force schools to fire teachers. […] Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad predicted that 289 teachers in his district would be laid off. Walker insisted that his reforms were actually a job-retention program […] . So far, Nerad’s district has laid off no teachers at all, a pattern that has held in many of the state’s other large school districts. […]

Thanks to Walker’s collective-bargaining reforms, the Brown Deer school district in suburban Milwaukee can implement a performance-pay system for its best teachers—a step that could improve educational outcomes.

More: “It’s Working in Walker’s Wisconsin,” City Journal, Winter 2012.

Tuesday was the 1,000th day since the U.S. Senate passed an annual budget—which is supposed to happen more or less annually. There’s lots of other stuff that can get done in 1,000 days:

To put the widget above on your Web site, copy this code:

<iframe frameBorder="0" src="http://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/2012/Countdown/senate-counter.html" width="285px" height="250px" scrolling="no"></iframe>

George Bush’s tax cuts didn’t increase income inequality, but it appears Bill Clinton’s tax increases did. Looking closely at the so-called Gini co-efficient, a common measure of income inequality, confounds the liberal story line, as William McBride explains:

It must be acknowledged that the Gini coefficient has an underlying upward trend between 1986 and 2000. The steepest increase follows the 1986 tax reform, which dramatically lowered the top marginal rate on ordinary income […], and began a long trend of business income moving from the corporate code to the personal code in the form of pass-through entities such as partnerships and S-corporations. This alone might explain much of the measured increase in income inequality over this period. However, Clinton raised the top marginal rate in 1993 to 39.6 percent, and this also ushered in a long period of increasing income inequality. The Gini coefficient went from 0.498 in 1993 to 0.555 in 2000 – an increase of 12 percent.

In contrast, the period since 2000 has exhibited no underlying trend in income inequality, but rather dramatic fluctuations resulting from the business cycle. […] Income inequality at the beginning and end of the Bush years was virtually unchanged, with the Gini coefficient going from 0.555 in 2000 to 0.557 in 2008. In 2009 the Gini coefficient fell further, to 0.535, for a 4 percent drop since 2000. There is therefore no evidence that the Bush tax cuts in either the top marginal rate or capital gains rate had any long term effect on inequality.

For more on what measures of income inequality show, see McBride’s post, “Income Inequality Went Up 12 Percent Under Clinton, Zero under Bush,” Tax Foundation, January 20, 2012.

This week is national school choice week. If you agree that parents should have the right to choose the school that’s best for their child, go sign the petition at NationalSchoolChoiceWeek.com.

The Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council have teamed up to launch the Your Money, Your Values, Your Vote 2012 National Tour. It involves a colorful bus, we hear.

Heritage and FRC are touring the country to help save the American Dream. At each stop, citizens can come out to meet the bus; talk about the issues; register to vote; learn more about the Heritage budget plan, Saving the American Dream; and learn about defending life, marriage, and religious liberty.

You can follow the tour and check the schedule at www.valuesbus.com/.

If your library of liberty is missing something, check out the Liberty Fund’s Spring/Summer 2012 book catalog, which was just published. You’ll find Buchanan, Hayek, Mises, Rogge, Seldon, Tocqueville, plus many of the Founders here at great prices.