Salutary Neglect

The gun control debate is perhaps one of the best examples of the total disconnect between right and left. The two sides of this debate aren’t speaking the same language at all. Lefties don’t understand the cultural and historical significance of gun ownership to some Americans and righties usually don’t understand the terror of urban gun violence and arbitrary, preventable mass shootings. This debate also suffers from its emotional nature to all stakeholders. This piece will hopefully help contextualize the debate so that supporters and opponents of gun control can have meaningful discourse.

If you’re like most people, you haven’t read the Second Amendment. I’ve never seen a more vigorous or ubiquitous debate about something that the participants haven’t actually seen. Without further ado, here’s the text of the Second Amendment:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” (more…)

2015 was a great year for confirmation bias. As a society we’ve gotten much better at limiting our exposure to dissenting views. We belong to Facebook groups with other like-minded people. Media outlets on both the left and right have gotten better at showcasing the viewpoints that their audience wants to hear. This has had a negative impact on political discourse by increasing party loyalty and further divorcing politics from policy. 

We view those with whom we disagree with increasing otherness. Democrats see and alien race in Republicans. Right wingers are monsters who want to take rights away from anyone who isn’t a white man. Republicans see Democrats as dangerously naive socialists, weak on foreign policy and hell-bent on taking more and more from honest, hardworking Americans. (more…)

In the wake of a Republican electoral takeover, the political Right just got more good news. The Supreme Court decided to take up King v. Burwell, the latest legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act. Understanding this challenge to the law requires understanding of the complex architecture of the ACA, so here goes.

To expand coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, a major goal of the ACA, Congress did three things. First, it forbade insurers from turning down those seeking insurance who had a pre-existing condition; this is called guaranteed issue. But to ensure that people didn’t game the system and just enroll for insurance when they got sick and needed care (which was my plan once I found out about the ACA), they created the individual mandate, requiring United States citizens to have health insurance at all times. This mandate was declared unconstitutional in a prior Supreme Court challenge to the law, but it survived by being construed as a tax. (more…)