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It should be noted that the horribly flawed rollout of the Affordable Care Act exchanges only makes this 'worst-case scenario' more likely. Again, the fundamental concern is that too few young and healthy people will sign up for the exchange. Because the exchanges are designed to use healthier people to subsidize the cost of sick people, if too few healthy people sign up the exchanges will not be able to offer cheaper insurance to people trying to sign up with preexisting conditions. As I mentioned before, the individual mandate is an attempt to get more healthy people to sign up, by fining them if they do not, but the low penalty is likely to be ineffective, especially if insurance in the marketplaces is very expensive. Now we are seeing a disastrous rollout of the ACA's central website, which goes far beyond a few small glitches. Millions of people have tried to sign up, and nearly all of them have been unable to, even with hours and hours of effort. President Obama gave a speech on it in the rose garden, where he trotted out someone from Delaware who managed to sign up for the exchanges after only 7 hours (!) on the computer and on the phone, and she was undoubtedly one of the luckier ones. So what does this mean for the ACA system as a whole? Well, it should first be noted that this is a much bigger deal than simply a malfunctioning website. For the majority of people, the website is the only way that they have to get on the exchanges and sign up for insurance. To draw some comparisons to private businesses, the ACA exchanges are designed more like Amazon than Barnes & Noble. If Barnes & Noble's website goes down, that hurts their business for sure, but people can still come into the physical stores and buy books, coffee, etc. B&N's website is nice, but it isn't synonymous with their entire company. Amazon, on the other hand, is its website in a very real sense. That is really the only way that consumers have to purchase things from the company, and if it is down, the company is down. That seems to be the current status of the ACA exchanges. Furthermore, it looks like the fixes are going to be a long time in coming. Even if the interface between consumers and the exchanges is fixed relatively quickly, it looks like the communication between the exchanges and the insurance companies themselves is also a disaster, and this problem is likely to get worse, not better, as the customer interface improves and more people successfully sign up. The scope of the problems is detailed here; here is a key excerpt: The final result of all this is that the cost of signing up for insurance in terms of time and frustration is much higher than anyone expected, and will be quite high for quite some time. The people most willing to pay that cost will, of course, be people who really need the insurance, while people who are most likely to give up in frustration will be healthier people who will just decide to wait until the exchanges are working properly. Many of these people will also probably assume that the individual mandate penalty will be delayed for at least a year; after all, how can the government charge you a penalty for not buying insurance when you can't buy insurance from their malfunctioning website? The result will be that, once the exchanges get up and running normally, and insurers have sorted out everyone that's signed up so far and their expected cost, they will have to set very high premiums, because the people that waded through the site headaches to buy insurance were mainly the high-cost, sicker individuals. These high premiums will prevent many healthier people, who decided to wait, from signing up at this point, and many of the people needed to subsidize the system simply will not sign up at all. Thus, all of this makes the negative outcome that I talked about above more likely to occur.

Thirty years after Lithuania declared its independence from the Soviet Union, Russia maintains considerable influence over the nation by controlling much of its energy. OJSC Gazprom, of which the Russian government is majority shareholder, provides Lithuania’s natural gas—which amounts to half of the country’s energy consumption. In an effort to decrease its dependency on Russian gas, the Lithuanian government decided to sell the “rights” to explore Lithuania for shale gas—a project that would require the American-developed technologies of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking). Chevron Corporation was the only company willing to invest the ten of millions of dollars and import the cutting-edge technology and skilled employees necessary to undertake the project. And, last month, the Lithuanian Government announced to great fanfare that it had accepted Chevron’s bid. But Chevron recently announced that it will not move forward: Significant changes to the fiscal, legislative and regulatory climate in Lithuania have substantially impacted the operational and commercial basis of the investment decision since the company submitted its bid in January 2013. Among its reasons for backing out, Chevron cited Lithuania’s new environmental approval procedures and threats to dramatically increase taxes on energy production. In response, Birute Vesait, Lithuania’s “minister of economy,” said, “Sure, the parliament has put a too tight muzzle on the nose.” Chevron was willing to deliver a vital solution to the Lithuanians’ dire situation—a solution that requires knowledge and technology that few people on this planet have. But rather than provide Chevron with a legal environment sufficiently stable to make the project financially feasible, the Lithuanian government chose to treat the productive men and women of Chevron as dogs to be muzzled. So the Lithuanians will continue to depend on the puppies in the Russian government for their energy needs. This episode of Statist Is as Statist Does offers a sober reminder that producers can function only when left sufficiently free to act on their judgment and to keep and use the fruits of their efforts. It is a lesson that not only Lithuanians but also Americans—who benefit enormously from energy produced by frackers—would do well to learn or remember. Like this post? Join our mailing list to receive our weekly digest. And for in-depth commentary from an Objectivist perspective, subscribe to our quarterly journal, The Objective Standard. Related: Energy at the Speed of Thought: The Original Alternative Energy Market American Frackers May Soon Power Japan, Too Creative Commons Image: Jonathan McIntosh Link to Original

I have no idea, but one could track down the references listed on the wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_taxation