As Niels Bohr remarked, "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."  Here's a 1968 howler from the Durants' The Lessons of History:

In the United States the lower birth rate of the Anglo-Saxons has lessened their economic and political power; and the higher birth rate of Roman Catholic families suggest that by the year 2000 the Roman Catholic Church will be the dominant force in national as well as in municipal or state governments.  A similar process is helping restore Catholicism in France, Switzerland, and Germany; the lands of Voltaire, Calvin, and Luther may soon return to the papal fold.

Gene Expression's Razib would not be surprised...

In today's Wall Street Journal, Hoover's Peter Robinson reports on an interview with Gary Becker. Becker is not only one of the world's finest economist, but also one of nicest people I've ever gotten to know. His warmth and benevolence come across in the interview, as they have in every conversation I've ever had with him.

Two good paragraphs about health care:

Drafting a good bill would have been easy, he continues. Health savings accounts could have been expanded. Consumers could have been permitted to purchase insurance across state lines, which would have increased competition among insurers. The tax deductibility of health-care spending could have been extended from employers to individuals, giving the same tax treatment to all consumers. And incentives could have been put in place to prompt consumers to pay a larger portion of their health-care costs out of their own pockets.

"Here in the United States," Mr. Becker says, "we spend about 17% of our GDP on health care, but out-of-pocket expenses make up only about 12% of total health-care spending. In Switzerland, where they spend only 11% of GDP on health care, their out-of-pocket expenses equal about 31% of total spending. The difference between 12% and 31% is huge. Once people begin spending substantial sums from their own pockets, they become willing to shop around. Ordinary market incentives begin to operate. A good bill would have encouraged that."

And the last two lines:

"When I think of my children and grandchildren," he says, "yes, they'll have to fight. Liberty can't be had on the cheap. But it's not a hopeless fight. It's not a hopeless fight by any means. I remain basically an optimist."

The main recurring question in the comments on the Separation of Health and State Debate: What do we owe the deserving sick?

Garett Harmon writes:

Specifically, I feel like you sort of sidestepped the issue of what to do about people that require healthcare through no fault of their own. I know that personal responsibility plays a big role, but I didn't get a clear idea of what you thought should happen to people who were born with disabilities.

Josh K asks:

It seemed to me like the crux of the debate was whether or not we, as wealthy able bodied people, have any moral obligation to those who are less fortunate than ourselves. Do you think we have a duty to the deserving poor? Why or why not?

Like David Balan (much to my surprise), I think that the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor is important.  Forcing people to help the undeserving poor seems clearly wrong to me.  Forcing people to help the deserving poor is a harder case.

In the end, though, my attack on what I call the Family Analogy undermines any legally enforceable obligation to help strangers, regardless of how deserving they are.  If it should be legally permissible to turn your back on the parents who gave you life, then it should be legally permissible to turn your back on complete strangers, however awful and undeserved their plight.  It might be wrong to refuse to help, but you're within your rights to do so.

Another way of thinking about it: If someone is sick and/or indigent due to their own irresponsible behavior, it's fair to turn them down with, "I'm sorry you're in trouble, but it's really your own fault."  If someone is sick and/or indigent despite exemplary behavior, it's fair to turn them down with, "It's terrible that you're in trouble through no fault of your own.  But you're not in trouble through any fault of mine, either."

Nathan Goldschlag asks:

I asked a question to you Bryan, and I do not think I had articulated my point or question well. I had asked about what social safety net you may support, if any, and how you feel about the roll of altruism.

What I was really getting at was whether or not you believe in ANY involuntary contribution via the use of force to support the destitute. If not, do you believe that your view is in any way dependent upon altruism filling the gap, and that many of the destitute will in the end be taken care of by the voluntary contributions of the community?

Few moral principles can be known with complete certainty.  Whatever you think about involuntary charity, however, it's got to be less justified as voluntary charity becomes more abundant.  Using coercion when there's no other way to get the job done is less objectionable than using coercion when there are other ways to get the job done.

Nathan adds:

Do you subscribe to the idea that the welfare state crowds out private charity in a large way?

I do, but I've got to admit that private charity hasn't done much to eliminate dire poverty in the Third World - and I can't blame the largely non-existent international welfare state for the problem.  Private charity is a realistic substitute for our welfare state, but not a realistic solution for global poverty.

I need to stop this. I don't want to turn into the Paul Krugman of the right.

You objected, reasonably, to my attempt to characterize what you might have said about a hypothetical debt-reduction thesis issued by a Republican. Could you state your position on my substantive point, which I will repeat here:

Relative to current law, I am willing to grant that the legislation will reduce the deficit (assuming no glitches, such as failure to project expenses properly or failure to follow through on promised benefit cuts). It does so by cutting future Medicare benefits by X, and then using a little bit less than X to pay for new subsidies. But in order to actually have a budget that does not collapse by 2030, we have to cut future Medicare benefits by much, much, more than X, and not use the cuts to pay for anything else.

Is that point correct? If so, does the argument that this legislation will reduce the deficit strike you as misleading in any way?

I have written,

As difficult and painful it may seem in the short run, it probably would be better to work through the foreclosure process and let prices adjust to levels that bring supply and demand into balance in the housing market than to prolong the state of imbalance and uncertainty by trying to prevent foreclosures.

October 6, 2008

What we need is an honest housing market, with legitimate owners, legitimate renters and prices that balance supply and demand. Loan modifications undermine the honesty of the market. They delay the necessary adjustments. With foreclosures, it might take two years for the housing market to find a bottom. With loan mods, it will take at least ten years.

That is from December 10, 2008

If policy makers had done nothing about the foreclosure crisis, it would be mostly behind us. Instead, it is mostly in front of us.

That is from November 30, 2009.

Concerning the latest attempt to intervene to prevent foreclosures, what more can I possibly add?

Ben Stein writes:

But among the glorying, there was little or no mention of my former boss, Richard M. Nixon, and this was a monstrous wrong, one of an innumerable number of wrongs directed at Mr. Nixon. The flat truth is that in February of 1974, with the hounds of hell baying at him about Watergate, with a national trial by shortage underway after The Arab Oil Embargo, with the economy in extremely rocky shape, and with large Democrat majorities in both houses of Congress, Republican Richard M. Nixon submitted to Congress a national health care bill in many ways more comprehensive than what Mr. Obama achieved.

Mr. Nixon's health care plan, sent up to Congress in early February 1974, would have covered all employed persons by giving combined state and federal subsidies to employers. It would have covered the poor and the unemployed by much larger subsidies. It would have encouraged health maintenance organizations. It would have banned exclusions for pre-existing conditions and not allowed limits on spending for each insured. I know a bit about this because I, your humble servant, as a 29 year old speech writer, wrote the message to congress sending up the bill.

How is this good news? Simple. We almost got this same lousy plan 36 years ago. In my more pessimistic moments, I think that the best I have done is help hold off further bad things that will ultimately pass. This Stein article reminds us that this bad thing was held off for 36 years. So my glass-half-full perspective is that 36 years was a nice long time to be free of this further government oppression. It's roughly the whole of my adult life.

If memory serves, one of the biggest sticking points between Nixon and Ted Kennedy, which they never managed to resolve, was over what percent of the payroll tax would be on employers and what percent on employees. Those who understand the economics of tax incidence will appreciate that irony, at least for the long run when wages can adjust. In fact, when I taught tax incidence in the late 1970s, I used this as an example.

Two comments, though, about Ben Stein's treating Nixon as a helpless waif wronged by others. First, "the hounds of hell" of Watergate wouldn't have been baying at Nixon had he not covered up Watergate or, at least, wouldn't have been baying nearly as loud. As Jim Carrey says in "Liar, Liar," when his criminal client who is caught for stealing asks what he should do, "Quit breaking the law, a**hole."

Second, Ben surely knows--his father Herb, my boss, did--that the OPEC-engineered reduction in oil supplies could not have cause a shortage without Nixon having imposed price controls. As I wrote in a 1990 Wall Street Journal article:

As long as the government avoids imposing price controls, any cutback in supplies that Saddam causes will translate into higher prices, not shortages. That is the lesson learned from the 1970s. Countries like the U.S. that impose price controls caused Soviet-style queues. Countries like Switzerland that avoided price controls made it through the 1970s with no lines.

HT to Anthony Gregory

David Leonhardt writes

By definition, the next period of financial excess will appear to have recent history on its side. Asset prices will have been rising, and whatever new financial instrument that comes along will look as if it is safe. "When things are going well," Paul A. Volcker, the former Fed chairman, says, "it's very hard to conduct a disciplined regulation, because everyone's against you." Sure enough, both Bernanke and Geithner, along with dozens of other regulators, overlooked many signs of excess over the past decade.

The essence of Leonhardt's article is a sympathetic portrayal of Treasury Secretary Geithner.

He warned that periods of calm often led to unanticipated crises and that once confidence started to slip, it could quickly vanish. Intellectually, he understood how things could go wrong.

What he missed, however, was the fact that things were going wrong in some of the very institutions he was overseeing. "Financial innovation has improved the capacity to measure and manage risk," Geithner said in a speech at a Fed conference in Georgia in May 2007. Large firms, he added, "are generally stronger in terms of capital relative to risk." Bernanke, who may have years as Fed chairman ahead of him, made statements that look even worse in retrospect.

The basic message of the article is that human nature makes regulation procyclical, meaning that regulators naturally loosen up in good times and tighten up after a crash. The challenge is to come up with a time-consistent regulatory regime.

One time-consistency problem is making credible commitments not to bail out failed banks. You promise not to bail them out, but when the crunch comes the incentive of policy makers is to bail them out. It is exactly like paying ransom to a kidnapper. To discourage kidnapping, you want to have a policy of never paying ransom. But when the kidnapping occurs, your incentive is to pay the ransom "this time," because you cannot tolerate the consequences if you do not.

The other time-consistency problem, which Leonhardt's article brings into focus, is that you need to make credible commitments to keep rules in place when times are good. So now, when we've just had a crash and nobody is in a mood to take risks, it may be relatively easy to enact regulations that limit risk-taking. But as time moves forward and banks become willing to extend credit more readily and undertake innovative financing methods, the commitment to today's regulatory regime is going to break down.

Not exactly. My op-ed was placed here, where it probably will get fewer readers than this blog post.

The public probably does not understand this budgetary legerdemain, but their instinct is to distrust Congress. In this case, the populist instinct is valid, and the elitist contempt for ordinary citizens is quite unjustified.

In fact, I believe that the elites have so mistreated the American people that we should declare that a state of war exists between America and Washington. Our goals in this war must go well beyond the repeal of this year's health care legislation.

Glenn Reynolds would correct me to say that they are not an elite--they are just a ruling class.

I wrote this before the memo got sent around telling everybody to tone down the militant, extremist rhetoric. Regardless, I do not intend to comply.

My back yard is empty, but that does not give Netanyahu the right to put up an apartment complex on it.

This is from Juan Cole's article, "Top Ten Reasons East Jerusalem does not belong to Jewish-Israelis." The whole thing is worth reading, as is much of Cole's work. I don't vouch for its accuracy because I'm not informed enough. But the few times I've read about it and the one forum I attended at which the issue was discussed, run by Dan Klein at Santa Clara University in Spring 2002, seem consistent with the general tenor of his article. The person who laid out some of the same things was Jeff Hummel, a very careful historian as well as economist.

As we approach Passover in 2010, many people are unemployed. But in a free society, government does not create jobs.

Pharoah created jobs for us. Moses led us away from those jobs. Even though those jobs helped to complete public infrastructure. Even though they were green jobs, where we used our muscles and our backs instead of fossil fuels.

Moses could have been part of the ruling class in Egypt. He chose freedom instead. Those of us who followed Moses also chose freedom. Freedom brings risks. But we preferred the risks of freedom to the security of bondage.

Do not confuse government with G-d. Government cannot miraculously provide us with manna--or health care. When we look at government, we should not see G-d. We should see Pharoah. Government-worship is Pharoah-worship.

Passover is known as the festival of freedom. To live in the Jerusalem of a free society, we have to leave the Egypt of the reach of government.

My talk in North Carolina. During the Q&A, I get attacked from the right.

Michael Elsby, Bart Hobijn, and Ayseful Sahin discuss what is happening the labor market in the current recession. Recommended.

Anne Applebaum argues that now that health care legislation has passed, opposition to it will lose the center. She counsels Republicans not to wind up looking angry and arrogant by fighting a lost cause against the legislation. She joins David Frum in what I would call the surrender caucus. My op-ed that probably will never see the light of day makes the opposite case.

Peter Boone and Simon Johnson on whether Canadian's concentrated banking system refutes the argument against breaking up big banks.

Finally, Niklas Blanchard takes some artistic license with our name.

I had a blast at the Separation of Health and State Debate.  If you didn't attend, video will be posted in the near future.  If you did attend, I'd like to hear your reactions - and the best questions that weren't asked.  Who knows, maybe David Balan will join in the comments, too...

I enjoyed this dialog between Glenn Reynolds and Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg argues that conservatives are legitimately skeptical of mass movements, but that as things have evolved, the tea party is looking better and better.

This echoes my own evolution. I started out highly skeptical about it, but I have come around to where I think of the tea party movement as the last best hope for America. If they fail to elect a Congress and a President who truly are committed to shrinking deficits and shrinking the government, then those of us with a libertarian bent will be reduced to dreaming about seasteads or somesuch.

I was intellectually prepared for the outcome on health care reform. I was thinking all along that it would be a "dessert now, spinach later" bill. I was thinking all along that it was impossible for Democrats not to pass a bill, given their majorities in Congress.

But when it finally happened I admit that I felt a great deal of frustration and rage. I wrote an op-ed expressing that, which I'm guessing will never see the light of day. If it does, I will link to it in a subsequent post.

On March 22, on a radio talk show, Detroit-area Congressman John Dingell stated that it would take a long time to get the regulations together to implement Obamacare because, in his words, "it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people." You can listen to it here. It's at about the 35-to-45 second point.

That reminds me of what I wrote about an even more extreme government-controlled system, the one the Canadian government adopted a few years before I left Canada. Here's what I wrote in The Joy of Freedom: An Economist's Odyssey in 2001:

It's hard to say that the Canadian government guarantees health care, at least in the usual sense of the word "guarantee." In fact, what the government really guarantees is that if you get health care, you won't be allowed to pay for it, and it is this guarantee that makes you have to wait to get it. The government also guarantees something else: If health care providers try to set up their own clinics and charge willing patients for medical care, the government will shut them down. When I tell this to advocates of the Canadian-style health care system, some are often unwilling to part with their belief in socialized medicine. I find this strange because I believe them when they say that their motive for advocating socialized medicine is to have everyone covered. Yet, many advocates of socialized medicine seem to prefer that everyone be forced into a rationing system rather than have the government provide some basic minimum and let patients and providers who want to opt out of the system do so. So, what started out as a belief in a right to health care ended up as a belief in preventing people from getting health care. Thus my conclusion that it's not about rights at all, but about power.

HT to Mark Carbonaro.

As Bryan points out, the incentives in the new health care legislation should discourage people from getting health insurance and discourage employers from providing health insurance. The intent of the legislation is to reduce the number of people who are uninsured.

As of now, a rational individual would not choose to obtain health insurance, and a rational new business would not offer health insurance. In both cases, that is because the legislation has made it illegal for health insurers to discriminate against people on the basis of health status. So the cost of obtaining health insurance while you are healthy will stay high--in fact, market forces should send it higher--while the cost of remaining uninsured has dropped dramatically.

Is it time to bet that there will be more Americans uninsured two years from now than there are today? Or will the law produce results that are consistent with intentions, regardless of incentives?

Tyler Cowen cited David Frum's analysis of the Congressional Republicans' "mistakes" in the recent health care debate, saying he was "right on the mark."

I occasionally like to beat on Republicans too. They aren't called the "stupid party" for nothing. When asked on a radio interview on Monday how the Republicans could screw up in the November midterms, I answered that it would be by passionately defending two bad wars rather than being the antiwar party they were in the mid to late 1990s.

But I found Frum's analysis underwhelming. While I think the Republicans generally do a bad job of making a case, almost as badly as the Democrats do, I think they were above their average in the latest debate. I wasn't thrilled by their newfound passion for socialized medicine for the elderly, aka, Medicare, but that very big caveat aside, I thought people like Paul Ryan did an excellent job.

When I have done op/eds for the Wall Street Journal, two of the editors I liked to deal with were David Frum and Tunku Varadarajan. David did a nice job of shortening my 1990 article in which I showed how implausible was the Bush/Baker/Kissinger case for war on Iraq because of Iraq's effect on world oil supplies. (Although the title he gave it made no sense and, in fact, undercut my article's message.)

But David makes a poor argument and Tunku calls him out particularly effectively. The whole thing is worth reading, but here's one excerpt:

If the GOP had done what David wishes, what would they have left to play for politically? How could they ever claim to stand for limited government again? They did enough damage to that with Medicare drugs and all the spending in the last decade. If they'd sold out here in the interest of "bipartisanship" or "polite conservatism," what would be left to distinguish them from the competition? Obama was never going to give them more than token gestures of support in any bill, anyway. He wanted an ideological bill, whose centerpiece is regulation and wealth redistribution, and he got it.

Of course, with or without their cooperation on this bill, the Republicans will have trouble, as they have always had, standing for limited government. Think bailouts, torture, nationalizing airport security, surveillance on Americans, supporting two wars of aggression, the USA PATRIOT Act, and the drug war, to name a few. But when I find someone willing to ally on holding back government, I treat him as an ally.

Tunku also goes on to "psychologize," that is, explain David's behavior. I generally don't like people doing this, even when it's to people I disagree with, but it fits everything I know about David Frum's career path.

This paper by Jagadeesh Gokhale, which I blogged about when it first came out last year, argued that the European welfare states were not sustainable. He wrote,

Generally speaking, older members of the European Union -- including Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Finland -- have high FIs compared to GDP.

FI = fiscal imbalance. The largest imbalances as a present value of future GDP were in Malta, Greece, Portugal, and Italy. But other European countries are not far behind. Germany, the supposed responsible state, has one of the largest fiscal imbalances.

Fiscal imbalance is a very long-term measure of sustainability. The low fertility rate in Europe is one of the biggest factors making their welfare states unsustainable.

What is striking about Greece relative to other European countries is not the differences but the similarities. It just happened that Greece is the first country where the crisis hit.

Within ten years, it is more likely that the U.S. will have a European-style welfare system than it is that the European welfare systems will still be intact.

Why is employer-provided health insurance so prevalent?  Economists usually point to the tax code.  Cash is taxed; health benefits aren't.  One interesting side effect of Obamacare is that it's going to put the standard view to the test.

How so?  If preliminary summaries of Obamacare are true, it looks like individual health insurance will soon be a better deal than employer-provided health insurance.  In the individual market, you can now wait until you're really sick to buy insurance: "Heads I win, tails I break even."  Firms won't have that gimme - and it seems more valuable than premiums' tax deductibility.  Admittedly, Obamacare imposes a small penalty on individuals who don't buy insurance, and a moderate penalty on firms that don't provide it.  But it still seems like it will be in the financial self-interest of many firms and their workers to get rid of insurance, and split the (cash savings minus penalties).

I seriously doubt that prominent institutions like GMU or Microsoft will take advantage of this golden opportunity during the next few years.   The outcry would be too great, and they care about their image.  But if most lower-profile employers take the bait, the stigma might melt away.

The big question, then, is: Will lower-profile employers stop insuring their workers?  Financially it seems like it makes sense (though the legislation is complicated enough that I could be mistaken).  If you buy into Robin Hanson's "showing that you care" model of health altruism, however, you've got to think twice.  People still get married despite the tax disadvantages; apparently people will pay thousands of dollars every year to avoid hurting each others' feelings.  Will employers and employees make a comparable choice - to leave thousands of dollars on the table every year to show how much they mean to each other?

Here's my opening statement for today's Separation of Health and State Debate.  Hope to see you there!

---

Why We Should Separate Health and State

Government already plays such a large role in health care that it may be hard to understand what "separation of health and state" means.  Let me be clear: In my ideal world, we wouldn't just abolish Obamacare.  We'd abolish Medicare, Medicaid, regulation of health insurance, medical licensing, and the Food and Drug Administration... for starters.  Unlike many opponents of the latest legislation, I'm not saying, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare." 

Needless to say, my position is unpopular.  You might even think I'm a villain for holding it.  So just to play into your fears, I'll begin by quoting Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.  In this scene, Penny is telling Dr. Horrible about her last date - never realizing that Dr. Horrible is secretly in love with her.  

Penny: But, he turned out to be totally sweet. Sometimes people are layered like that. There's something totally different underneath than what's on the surface.
Dr. Horrible: And sometimes there's a third, even deeper level, and that one is the same as the top surface one.  Like with pie.

 
This scene perfectly captures what I'm going to tell you about health care.  On the surface, a free market in health care seems like the best approach.  When you look a little deeper, the free-market approach seems naive and dangerous.  When you look deeper still, however, the free market approach turns out to be the best after all.

Why does a free market in health care look good on the surface?  The same reason a free market in almost anything looks good on the surface.  On the free market, firms strive to satisfy the customer, and constantly look for new and improved ways of doing business.  Why?  The profit motive: Firms that make customers happy prosper, and firms that don't go out of business. 

In the health sector, however, most people - including economists! - think that free-market logic fails.  The main complaints:

• High cost.  Health care is ridiculously expensive.
• Externalities.  My health depends on your health, and vice versa.
• Moral hazard.  Health insurance encourages unhealthy lifestyles and risky behavior.
• Adverse selection.  People with bad health are more likely to buy insurance, which raises rates, which makes healthy people even less likely to buy insurance.
• Consumer ignorance and irrationality.  People don't know much about health, and it's costly to learn.  Even worse: They make systematic mistakes, and blindly trust medical authorities. 

On closer look, however, it's the complaints that fail, not the market.  Some are false or greatly exaggerated; others blame the market for problems caused by regulation; some are true, but preferable to the alternative.  The problems with the problems:

• High cost.  A mountain of regulation makes health care and health insurance a lot more expensive than they'd be on the free market.  Examples: Medical licensing greatly increases the cost of doctors, many of whom are overqualified for the work they actually do.  Regulation makes it hard to sell catastrophic and other low-cost insurance policies.
• Externalities.  This is largely bait-and-switch.  Only a tiny fraction of modern health care treats contagious disease.
• Moral hazard.  Insurance encourages unhealthy lifestyles and risky behavior if everyone pays the same rates.  But in a free market, insurers would charge riskier customers higher rates.  So why don't they?  Because regulators often tie their hands in the interest of "fairness." 
• Adverse selection.  The least healthy people buy the most insurance if everyone pays equal rates.  But again, the free-market solution is to charge riskier customers higher rates.  Governments habitually create adverse selection problems by trying to equalize rates, banning pre-existing conditions clauses, and so on.
• Consumer ignorance and irrationality.  If consumer ignorance were the problem, government could easily solve it with a good website.  What about the deeper problems of systematic error and blind trust?  They're both very real, but argue against government involvement.  If you take any decent health econ class, you'll hear about a pile of research showing that we greatly overestimate the health benefits of medicine - and put too much trust in medical authorities.  The government's response:  Encourage us to use more medicine, and remove financial incentives to second-guess the experts.  Real smart. 

If you're paying attention, you might notice that I've suggested some economically sensible role for government.  What's wrong with government programs to fight contagious disease, fund a health information website, or study the effectiveness of different treatments?  My answer: When you give government an inch, it takes a mile.  Government involvement in health care started with small measures like vaccinations.  Now it's over 20% of the budget, and rising fast.  Government involvement in health care is too dangerous to allow in any form.  We need to just pull the plug.

But wouldn't that be unjust to the poor?  Even if free-market health care is a lot cheaper, there will still be some Americans who can't afford it.  Many people think that a just society should proudly protect its weakest members - just like a family would. 

I could object that the "society as a family" analogy is oppressive, even totalitarian.  But I'm happy to accept it for the sake of argument.  Notice: Within the family, you are only legally obligated to care for your minor children and your spouse.  You are not legally obligated to take care of your siblings, your nephews and nieces, or even the parents who gave you life!  Almost everyone agrees with this approach.  So: If you don't think it's just to legally compel people to support the parents who gave them life, why in the world would it be just to legally compel people to support complete strangers?

It gets worse: Exaggerated notions of how much we owe our countrymen are a major rationalization for treating foreigners unjustly.  Billions of people around the world earn a dollar or two a day.  Haitians, for example, would be delighted to take a low-skilled job in the United States - even without health care.  But a leading argument against letting immigrants come is that they're already "bankrupting our health care system."  We're so obsessed with helping relatively poor Americans that we're willing to deny absolutely poor foreigners the basic human right to sell their labor to willing U.S. buyers.  That's evil enough to appall Dr. Horrible himself.