Self-defense is a fundamental human right. Now the Supreme Court has affirmed what most Coloradans have long held and what our state’s constitution also strongly protects: the individual’s right to own a gun.

The June 26 ruling on District of Columbia v. Heller overturns Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban and requirement that guns be kept inoperable in the home. Gone is the fantasy that the Second Amendment protects only state militias.

Ari has additional comments on it at FreeColorado.com.

…tens of thousands of people who lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina and are still living in federally owned trailers will be forced to find a new place to live. After nearly three years, the federal government’s temporary housing is coming to an end.

These folks are not going to have an easy time of it, because affordable housing in the Gulf Coast region is scarce. The problem has persisted despite billions in government aid – and the efforts of large private developers – because of a shortage of skilled laborers and sky-high insurance rates.

Yet now there is hope, in the person of John Sawyer. Not only does this 64-year-old Bostonian believe he can build houses people can afford to buy and insure; he says they will withstand the next big storm. And, by the way, he intends to makes a tidy profit. …

Virtually no one else has been able to do so, it should be noted, even with existing tax incentives and other programs. The Mississippi Development Authority (MDA) is preparing its latest attempt to tackle the problem by allocating $350 million in federal money to developers to build “affordable homes.”

But according to MDA officials, these developers will import many of their workers. Inevitably, this will drive up the cost of construction. And it seems unlikely that any of them will be building the cement fortress that has elated insurance broker Sneed. In short, insurance rates will be high. MDA officials suggest that their subsidies will make these homes cheaper to buy and this will enable homeowners to fork out more for insurance.

One consortium of well-respected, nonprofit developers, which includes Enterprise Corporation of the Delta and Enterprise Community Partners, has already run into problems. In the wake of Katrina, they used both local and imported labor to build modular homes along the Mississippi coast. The cost to buyers ranged between $83 and $115 per square foot.

The houses were made of wood (not concrete), which is probably one reason they cost between $3,000 and $5,000 a year to insure. Recently, this same outfit applied for an MDA loan to develop a 1,100 acre property in Biloxi, Miss. But several officials involved in the project told me that the deal may fall apart, largely because of the cost of labor and insurance.

HT, my mother-in-law (as of this autumn, formally).

Re: “Who has your health at heart?” May 22 guest commentary.

AFL-CIO executives John Sweeney and Mike Cerbo perpetuate the big lie behind politician-controlled medicine: that the free market is not working and that costs have been spiraling out of control because of markets.

But costs have been increasing precisely because of the employer-based insurance they espouse, which is a consequence of a biased and non-free-market tax code. It favors employer-based insurance and penalizes other types of medical insurance.

We consume medical care like a business traveler dining on the company’s expense account: Since someone else pays the bill (insurers), patients need not shop around, so providers don’t compete on price. Why?

Tax-discounted insurance encourages us to buy more costly insurance than we probably need, hence penalizing saving for future medical expenses. Our “insurance” has become prepaid health care.

Employer-based insurance also coddles insurance companies, which have little incentive to please consumers. They know we’re essentially locked to our employer and the costly insurance plans they offer. To buy a competitor’s product, we must change jobs or pay a stiff tax penalty.

The AFL-CIO should be ashamed of promoting self-serving policies that both empower labor unions and result in expensive medical care and insurance.

For a way out of this policy mess, see Michael Cannon’s piece on Large HSAs here and here. He compares it with McCain’s plan here.

If you can name it, presidents are responsible for it. The name for this is infantilization. “The average American,” said President Richard Nixon, “is just like the child in the family—you give him some responsibility and he is going to amount to something.” Vice President Al Gore said the government should act like “grandparents in the sense that grandparents perform a nurturing role.”

Such demented talk encourages presidential candidates to make delusional promises—energy independence in eight years (Mike Huckabee), “an excellent teacher in every classroom” and “every school an outstanding school” (John Edwards, who presumably knows how every school can stand out when all are outstanding), a “perfect” nation (see above) and so on.

The last presidential candidate to talk sense about the office was fictional. In an episode of NBC’s “The West Wing,” the Republican candidate, who was not the hero, was asked, “How many jobs will you create?” “None,” he replied, adding: “Entrepreneurs create jobs. Business creates jobs. The president’s job is to get out of the way.”

An occupational hazard of the inflated presidency is a hazard to the nation. It is what Healy (borrowing a term from psychiatry) calls Acquired Situational Narcissism. As repositories of absurd expectations, and surrounded by sycophants, presidents become deranged. Inevitably, the inflation of expectations causes what Healy calls an “arc of disillusionment” that diminishes one president after another.

For a summary of the book, see Healy’s article in Reason magazine.

The real issue is that Messrs. Obama and McCain are telling us Americans that our normal lives are not good enough, that pursuing our own happiness is “self-indulgence,” that building a business is “chasing after our money culture,” that working to provide a better life for our families is a “narrow concern.”

They’re wrong. Every human life counts. Your life counts. You have a right to live it as you choose, to follow your bliss. You have a right to seek satisfaction in accomplishment. And if you chase after the almighty dollar, you just might find that you are led, as if by an invisible hand, to do things that improve the lives of others.

The article is here.

Darla Stuart (Speakout April 22) writes that since “Colorado’s citizens and businesses deserve to know the real cost of the health-care insurance,” politicians should force insurance companies to provide “transparency.” But we really deserve to know how politicians have inflated insurance costs in the first place.

Tax policy encourages employer-based insurance, which essentially chains us to one insurer. Shielded from competition, insurers need not compete on price very much.

State-level bureaucrats succumb to special interests by burdening small-group policies with many benefits we do not need. The Congressional Budget Office reports that such mandated benefits increase premiums by at least six percent [p. 16, 20], and possibly more than ten. It also reports that community rating laws increase premiums by nine percent [p. 16].

What’s becoming increasingly transparent is where allegedly well-intentioned controls like House Bill 1389 will lead: politician-controlled health care and insurance where bureaucrats make decisions that rightfully belong to you and your physician.

I suggest she read the Constitution she swore to uphold, think a bit about property rights, and watch this video by John Stossel. My favorite part is the graph showing that tax revenue from the tax on gasoline exceeds oil company profits.

“Suburban teenagers might have trouble finding summer employment, but some businesses say they fear they’ll have even fewer work opportunities next year.

If an Illinois proposal to make the teenage minimum wage equal to adults’ pay becomes law, teen-friendly businesses may slice hours or give their 15- to-17-year-old workers the boot.” …

York Theatre in Elmhurst also would be forced to downsize its 40-person staff of mostly high-schoolers if the higher wages became law.

“Being a family-run company, there’s not a whole lot in the budget for payroll,” said Trevor Murakami, general manager of York Theatre.

See also this editorial in the Investors Business Daily:

As a basic point of economics, it’s a given that anytime you raise the cost of anything, you will use less of it. As such, the minimum wage hike that took effect in Massachusetts this year has been a job-killer for thousands of untrained youths, many of them minorities.

We’re not the only ones to see this, by the way.

Economists David Tuerck and Paul Bachman at The Beacon Hill Institute did the math. They figured a hike in the minimum wage in Massachusetts from $6.75 an hour to $8.25 an hour (the level to which it originally was supposed to rise) would cost 26,970 jobs and subtract $371 million in wages across the state.

If you adjust that by knocking off a couple thousand of those jobs and a few million in wages, you get a good idea of what Massachusetts is paying to have the highest minimum wage in the nation — one that is 37% above the federal minimum of $5.85.

It’s the same everywhere, nationwide or by state: Hiking the minimum wage sounds generous and decent, but in fact hurts small businesses and workers alike, squeezing profits, destroying jobs and forcing businesses to pare back their paid benefits.

It’s not just Massachusetts. The U.S. also is facing this problem. The U.S. minimum wage will be hiked to $6.55 an hour this July. But hold the applause please. The National Federation of Independent Business reckons it will kill some 217,000 jobs.

Faced with a mandatory hike in their wage costs, small businesses have a choice: either fire workers, raise prices or do both. Just letting people go often is easiest.

Small wonder that teens — often at the bottom of the labor ladder, and with the least to offer in terms of productivity, training and education — are the first fired and the last hired.

Want to end Massachusetts’ teen job meltdown? Can the minimum wage, and watch teen employment soar.

Consider what Arthur Brooks wrote in his recent post at the Freakonimics blog:

In my book I argue that conservatives are more optimistic about the future than liberals are, and believe in each individual’s ability to get ahead on the basis of achievement.Liberals are more likely to see themselves and others as victims of circumstance and oppression, and doubt whether individuals can climb without governmental help.

Via Arnold Kling at EconLog.