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I don’t have any opinion about whether your health insurance plan should cover the cost of birth control or whether it should let you get the stuff with no co-pays.

If that’s important to you, then you ought to choose a provider who offers it (assuming it’s popular enough for someone to offer it). If it’s not important to you or if you’re opposed to birth control, you should choose a provider that doesn’t offer it — since the lack of that cost to the provider will lower your premium.

Simple, right? It’s the market making choices about what people value and are willing to pay for.

But that’s not the way it is when the coercive state is involved. The latest example came today when the Obama administration announced that starting in just under 18 months, insurance companies will be required to cover birth control. Further, the companies won’t be allowed to charge a co-pay. Even if it’s unprofitable, companies will be paying for birth control for any customer who wants it.

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In Egypt, there’s a lot of conflict right now about what is going to take the place of the previous dictatorship. There’s a new constitution, but the real question is whether the Muslim majority will find a way to impose conservative religious rule. And for those who believe so passionately in democracy, shouldn’t that be good enough if it’s what the majority want?

It would be entirely too easy to just write about the (completely expected) irony of westerners believing that the people of Egypt wanted a secular free state — the way we understand it — when they were in the streets opposing Hosni Mubarak, only to see them impose another form of repressive rule. But that’s sort of like shooting fish in a barrel, so I’m going in another direction.

I’m going to suggest that those demanding a strict Islamic nation should be able to have their way. That might surprise you until I add that they should be able to set up their city/state/enclave and the people who want different systems should be able to set up somewhere else.

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It appears that Democrats and Republicans have reached a deal that’s going to let them happily lock arms and express solidarity in their resolve to “take care of The People.”

I’m disgusted, of course.

For decades, politicians of both parties have periodically gone on spending sprees that would make drunken sailors blush with embarrassment. While each accuses the other of irresponsibility — and each has charts and selective memory to prove its point — they’re both willing to spend when it’s politically expedient with whatever group they want support from.

Republican voters think it’s a sin to cut military spending. The fact that the United States spends more on war than the rest of the world combined doesn’t seem to faze them. The only thing that could make them happy is if every last square inch of the country were turned into a military base or weapons system (except their homes, of course).

Democratic voters think it’s a sin to cut social spending or spending that’s somehow, some way supposed to “help” people. Never mind the fact that every responsible, rational and fair piece of evidence shows that their economic approach to the world doesn’t work. (We’ve been fighting the War on Poverty since the ’60s. Is it time to declare victory and go home?)

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