How I removed squatters in less than a day.
from Outside the Box with Flash Shelton, from more than a year ago.
Hard to excerpt. The guy tells how he creatively and non-violently (and even somewhat humanely) got squatters out of his house so that he could put it on the market.
The Best Medicine in the World?
by Leonidas Zelmanovitz, Law & Liberty, January 1, 2025.
Excerpt:
Therefore, I hurried to consult a specialist to arrange for surgery to solve the problem definitively. He graciously received me the next day. After discussing the best procedure for my case, to my disbelief, he told me he was only able to schedule an appointment with a surgeon no earlier than three weeks later. The surgeon would then tell me how many weeks or months it would take him to schedule the surgery. Only after I insisted did the specialist give me an antibiotic to prevent an infection.
By then, I realized that according to the “protocols” followed in the United States for similar cases, once the emergency has passed, the procedure to address the problem is considered an “elective” one. So, no priority is given to people in my situation—at least in the United States. When I called my old doctor in Brazil, he was able to perform the same procedure the American recommended the following Sunday.
I do not question the technical skills or common decency of the professionals I interacted with in the United States—the service I got at the ER was fast and skillful, solving an issue that could have quickly escalated to a life-threatening condition. Nonetheless, there is no question that I got better and timely treatment in Brazil at a fraction of the cost of performing the same procedure here in the US. The question then is, why is that so?
Can We Have Health Care Without Health Insurance Companies?
by John C. Goodman, Forbes, December 29, 2024.
Excerpt:
An important tool private insurers use to avoid unnecessary spending and inappropriate care is to require preauthorization for a particular drug, therapy, or procedure. Doctors tend to regard these procedures as burdensome and irksome. Yet only 7.4% of requests by patients in Medicare Advantage and Medicaid managed care plans are denied. Moreover, in the vast majority of appeals (83.2%), the initial denials are overturned.
If you follow the health policy literature, you might be led to believe that the denial rate is a special problem in Medicare Advantage. In fact, the denial rate in Medicaid is twice that of the Medicare Advantage rate.
Some policymakers have decided to take aim at the use of AI in generating denials. At the same time, some doctors are using AI to file their appeals—greatly reducing the time to file and increasing the success rate. Yet both trends should be applauded if the desire is to make the entire process more efficient.
Overall, our health insurance system can be improved, and scholars associated with the Goodman Institute have proposed many ways to do that. But we cannot have a system that works well without companies that perform the functions health insurers are performing today.
Green Electricity Costs a Bundle
by Bjorn Lomborg, Wall Street Journal, January 1, 2025.
Excerpt:
As nations use more and more supposedly cheap solar and wind power, a strange thing happens: Our power bills get more expensive. This exposes the environmentalist lie that renewables have already outmatched fossil fuels and that the “green transition” is irreversible even under a second Trump administration.
The claim that green energy is cheaper relies on bogus math that measures the cost of electricity only when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. Modern societies need around-the-clock power, requiring backup, often powered by fossil fuels. That means we’re paying for two power systems: renewables and backup. Moreover, as fossil fuels are used less, those power sources need to earn their capital costs back in fewer hours, leading to even more expensive power.
READER COMMENTS
Craig
Jan 5 2025 at 12:53pm
Perhaps squat on the squatters? But I digress, the solution to the squatting issue is to record leases. Historically NJ used to record leases actually. Let’s say we have a dispute about a car and I say its my car and you say its your car, well if the police show up they can look up the plate/VIN and title will be in somebody’s name and the police, in the here and now, can defer to the title and if there really was some reason the other party should have possession that party can go to court. The problem with squatters is that tenants actually do have rights so if I call the police that you are a squatter and you tell the police that you are a lawful tenant, the police don’t know so they throw their hands up and tell you to go to court, ie that it is a civil matter and the owner has to go through an arduous eviction proceeding. If leases were recorded, well the police could look up the record to see if there is a lease on record, like the car title and if there is none, they can summarily dispossess the squatter and if the squatter really is a lawful tenant and was taken advantage of, well then that person can go to court and get a judgment for a wrongful eviction.
But at the end of the day as it stands today when the police show up they have no real way of knowing if the owner is the owner being squatted on or if the landlord is lying to try to get a lawful tenant unlawfully evicted.
David Henderson
Jan 5 2025 at 1:07pm
Interesting thought.
Is that something one can do in, say, California now, or does the government need to do something to set it up?
Craig
Jan 5 2025 at 1:20pm
I don’t see why not not the least of which is the technology makes recording that much easier to do. Right now today deeds are recorded, car titles are recorded, there’s no hurdle to recording leases. As an interesting historical anecdote, I think Jim Glass might appreciate this one, in one case in Morris County, NJ I found a 99 year lease recorded in the 1950s in East Hanover, NJ on Rt 10 (major artery), and the lease was quoted at 1950s prices so while paying the lease is itself a liability, the fact is that the lease amount was so low that it was a kind of asset because one could just turn around and sublease it for a relatively major profit. At the end of the day my client didn’t really want the lease but took a sum of money.
David Henderson
Jan 5 2025 at 2:40pm
I just saw your response to my question. In other words, you can’t just do it on your own. You need a cooperating government.
steve
Jan 6 2025 at 10:33am
You dont necessarily need a cooperating government but you do need a way for the police to quickly determine who has a valid lease. I checked with my son, the computer nerd, and he said he or almost any of this friends could draw up an official looking lease on the net in a few minutes. If the police have someplace to call or go online to confirm the lease or find out it is false they can boot the people. That doesnt have to be a government agency but the squatting thing isn’t actually all that common so not sure how someone would make money doing it. Also, it would only take a few minutes longer to make up a fake agency for the police to check with though I doubt the average squatter has the skills to do that.
Steve
robc
Jan 7 2025 at 2:20pm
In some countries with larger trust issues, I have heard there have been efforts to track deeds via a blockchain.
I saw a presentation at a conference a few years back with a perfect flowchart on when to use blockchain:
Can you use a database?
Yes: Use a database.
No: Use blockchain.
In the US, trust would be high enough that a government database would work. But a private lease blockchain would also work, if there was a business reason to create one.
David Henderson
Jan 5 2025 at 2:39pm
Also, what if you’re not leasing it out? Then you can’t register a lease.
Craig
Jan 5 2025 at 3:11pm
War game that though. You would be the deed owner of the property and so when a dispute happens the owner would say, “I am the owner” and the police can verify that by looking up the deed. The squatter would say, “Ok, maybe he is the owner, but I am a lawful tenant.” and the police would try to look up some kind of lease and there would be none and so the police could defer to the deed and summarily dispossess or otherwise evict the squatter.
Now for sure there can be circumstances where an owner can lease a premises, fail to record the lease and try to take advantage of the situation at which point that tenant can go to court.. Of course tenants would have incentive to secure their tenancy by ensuring the lease is recorded.
Nevertheless it doesn’t matter what the underlying dispute is, it could be who owns a property, who owns a car, but bottom line when the police initially show up the only things they can look up are public records but for which they are in a he said/she said situation and they’re not in a position to determine one way or the other.
There are some things that are just so very important that we don’t just memorialize these events with a writing, we memorialize them by creating public records, births/deaths/marriages/auto titles and of course land transfers and land transfers includes the other sticks of that property bundle including mortgages which absolutely ARE recorded by the way, but historically NJ did leases.
Ahmed Fares
Jan 5 2025 at 10:00pm
On green energy, Noah Smith wrote about the same problem of using nuclear as solar backup power during the winter (italics in the original).
In which I rebut Nate Silver on the economy and Matt Yglesias on nuclear
Mactoul
Jan 5 2025 at 11:50pm
In America, one may defend one’s property against an intruder even by using deadly violence. But the same procedure may not be employed against a squatter. Curious!
Come to think of it, this dependence on State to protect and secure one’s property tends to be neglected and taken for granted. That courts of law and legal machinery will be present and act to execute one’s will postmortem is just one of manifold things necessary for perfect enjoyment of private property.
I wonder how libertarians of anarchist inclinations have given thought of how these things would be carried out when State is no more.
These services that the state provides also argues against a kind of Open Borders that treats political borders as nothing but private property as sacrosanct. In real world, it is the existence of political borders and the State behind it that secures the sanctity of private borders. Lose one thing and the other thing is also lost.
steve
Jan 6 2025 at 10:26am
The lawyer piece on health care is slightly interesting though confusing since it’s not clear what device and procedure he has. Anyway, lots of medicine follows guidelines and protocols based upon best evidence. If his emergency was over and the rest of his care was elective then that likely means that best practice is that follow up care needs to take place in some measure of time, say 2-3 months. For some reason he wanted it done right away even though that wasnt needed. It sounds like he called a doctor in Brazil with whom he had a prior relationship and they squeezed him in earlier. That often happens in the US too, especially if you are important or have money, which seems likely with the guy writing that piece though maybe the US doctors didnt realize how rich or important he is.
As to Brazil in general, IIRC it rates about 120th out of about 190 in world health care rankings. Recent paper at link if interested. It has a public health system with long wait times for any kind of specialty care, but its public health outreach has been very good. Maternal mortality numbers are first world quality and infectious disease is way down. (Let’s hope they dont elect another Trump wannabe and put in an RFK.) They have a separate private system which is faster but costs more. So just like the US and most fo the rest of the world, you can get faster, maybe better care if you have more money.
The rest of his piece is just a long rant, not especially serious. Doesnt sound like he knows much about health care but because he is a lawyer and an economist he must be right.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10231901/
Steve
Roger McKinney
Jan 6 2025 at 12:00pm
Healthcare insurance was a bad idea from the beginning and insurance companies knew it. Businesses coerced them into it to get around wage controls by offering health insurance to desired employees.
The original policies were limited to hospitalization, or catastrophic insurance, which isn’t a bad idea. But state governments ruined it by continually requiring companies cover more procedures until we have the current mess.
The best system was the mutual aid societies of the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as the Mssons, Odd Fellows, Knights of Columbus, etc. The societies would contract with physicians to provide specific care for members for a fixed fee. Members paid dues that covered those fees.
The system only worked because the AMA didn’t yet have a monopoly on medical education so there were many schools turning out lots of doctors who competed on price as well as quality.
The major problem with healthcare today is the AMA monopoly that creates an artificial shortage of doctors.
steve
Jan 6 2025 at 12:27pm
I am reading Chapin’s book that Kevin recommended. It is surprisingly void of numbers and statistics so far though maybe those appear later in the book. However, there are sources with actual numbers and data which suggest that many of her claims, especially about mutual aid societies are suspect. For example if you look at the numbers and kinds of physicians they employed they had relatively few specialists, especially surgical. Their physicians tended to be much younger. They also didnt really cover a very large percentage of the population. Hard to assess but maybe 20% and they often didnt cover families, just the male worker.
Steve
Roger McKinney
Jan 7 2025 at 11:16am
Try David T. Beito’s book
From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967
It’s been a while since I read it, but I recal he claims that in the 1920s mutual aid societies covered most people. But yes, they tended to cover basic care. A few covered hospitals.
But specialists and hospitals were much cheaper then before the AMA was granted a monopoly because they competed on price and there was an abundant supply. The only reason for the existence of the AMA is to create an artificial shortage of doctors.
nobody.really
Jan 8 2025 at 3:08am
I didn’t read beyond the pay wall. But how often has someone here cautioned us against reasoning from a price change?
One obvious reason that electricity bills grow is that demand is growing and we have depleted economies of scale. So with or without reliance on solar and wind energy, we should expect increasing prices.
In fairness, the author correctly observes that people praise wind and solar generators for cheap ENERGY—but we don’t merely want cheap energy; we also want reliable POWER, which has not been the forte of wind and solar generators. Indeed, I think Germany adopted policies (“feed-in tariffs”) that subsidized solar panels. Electric utilities must design their systems to meet peak demand. Because Germans use electricity for heating, their peak demand occurs in the middle of a winter night—when solar panels are useless. Under this scenario, the author has a point: Solar panels would help reduce fuel consumption during daylight hours, but would do nothing to reduce the need for backup generators. And under conventional rate regulation, the cost of those back-up generators would still need to be recovered from ratepayers, regardless of how rarely the generators operated.
That said….
1: In general, it’s cheaper to build more transmission capacity than more generation. After all, the wind is always blowing SOMEWHERE. If you have fleet of wind turbines disbursed throughout a multi-state grid, collectively they become a reliable source of power, not just energy.
2: No, few people would build a coal, gas, or nuclear plant merely to run seasonally. But Western nations have a lot of existing plants that are facing retirement. Utilities might elect to operate these aging plants seasonally rather than retire them. True, this kind of operation may impose greater wear on the plants—but if we’re talking about plants that were going to be retired anyway, what harm in depreciating them down a bit more before retirement?
3: Research on energy storage proceeds apace. When it becomes economical to store energy generated when the sun shines and the wind blows, all the prior investments in solar and wind power will be vindicated.
Finally, note that developers of data centers (for artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency mining, etc.) favor buying up sources of renewable energy to power their operations. Why do these tech geniuses favor renewable sources specifically? They seem to think that renewables are the future—for whatever reason.
David Henderson
Jan 8 2025 at 2:49pm
You write:
Very often. But I’m not sure why you asked the question since the passage you quoted didn’t reason from a price change.