Will #Obamacare FORCE Doctors to see Patients they don’t want, for Wages they don’t like?

Let’s say that you just had an auto accident. Admittedly NOT a pleasant thought around the holidays, but play along with me for a moment.

Perhaps you skidded into a tree, or maybe it was a hit-&-run. You’re not hurt, but your car is decidedly worse-off for the experience. Now, there’s a particular auto body shop which you trust implicitly, and you want them to repair your car.

With me so far?

Here’s the rub: your insurance company informs you that this body shop’s rates are far in excess of the market average in your area, and you’ll need to either (A) pay the difference between what the insurance company has agreed to cover and what the body shop is charging, or (B) find another body shop.

This isn’t an unusual scenario: in my career, I easily saw it hundreds of times. One option that I NEVER saw, however, was the government considering a mandate which FORCED a body shop owner to fix my car at the insurance company’s rate.

I never saw it because it would be ridiculous, and would make a mockery of a free market and private business. Who’d ever want to start a body shop, knowing that the State could essentially order you to work against your will, for a price that you felt was too low? Some folks, maybe, but certainly not the truly talented ones.

Those shop owners, when faced with such a tyrannical option, would themselves opt out and find a different profession altogether. Count on it.

Welcome to Obamacare, everyone:

10 Films That Portray Capitalists as Heroes

Have you noticed how movies normally depict capitalists, executives or business owners?

Whether it’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End with the bizarre portrayal of the head of the East India Trading Company, or the main character in There Will Be Blood, business men (and women) are rarely shown sympathetically, often cast as the default villain.

Honestly, it might seem as if all corporate and/or entrepreneurial movie roles are written to be inherently evil, guilty of the sin of simply being in business.

Thankfully, that’s not always the case, and I’d like to share with you 10 films which actually celebrate hard-working entrepreneurs, and show believers in the free market as heroes.

Private sector vs. Gov’t: “The World that Works vs. the World that Fails”

When you mention the name Newt Gingrich, most people will have an immediate reaction: “he’s a genius”, “he’s an idiot”, “he’s a visionary”, “he’s a monster”, etc,..  There are a comparative few public personalities who conjure up such a diverse yet instantaneous response from so much of the country.

I’m more in the “visionary” camp, because Newt was always pushing and proposing so many ideas, so often, that he basically needed an editor to categorize them:

“Newt has 10 ideas a day,” former Republican Congressman and Gingrich Scott Klug told the WSJ last week. “Two of them are good, six are weird and two very weird.”

No great sin, that. But it’s an inarguable fact that Newt was uniquely effective at explaining his ideas in ways that everyone could grasp. He may be a highly imperfect politician and an even more imperfect man, but I maintain he still has a place in future Administrations, even in a simple adviser role… because of his ideas.

The Incandescent Light Bulb ban, …and the ACTUAL Dim Bulbs behind the whole mess

I went to the store last weekend to buy some replacement 100-watt light bulbs….and I couldn’t find any.

Now, they had puh-lenty of bulbs: the squiggly, wiggly ones, along with several other shapes I’d never seen before. Plus, they also had a modest section of the normal incandescent 60- and 75-watt bulbs, but no 100’s.

And then I recalled, again, the Great Light Bulb Debacle®.

If you need a refresher on this subject, or if you’d just appreciate a fresh excuse to grind some of the enamel off your teeth, here you go (h/t the Washington Times):