Tomorrow evening economist Victor Claar will be leading an Acton on Tap where he will talk about fair trade. As a Christian and an economist, Claar brings a unique perspective to the discussion. He will be asking a number of key questions including: Is fair trade truly the best way to help the poor, and, if not, then what can we do instead?

Read more on Fair Trade: Are Good Intentions Enough?…

First posted on the PowerBlog by Brittany Hunter, and picked up by a number of other prominent blogs, the “How Not to Help the Poor” Acton video short has collected over eight thousand YouTube hits. The video has only been on the YouTube site for just over a couple of weeks. The clip is from the Acton Institute’s Effective Stewardship Curriculum titled “Fellow Man.”

Read more on Update: Acton Video Short Gathers Attention…

Don Surber thinks so, and it’s hard to argue his point when you see stories like this:

Sorry about the wait for that angioplasty…

More than 400 Canadians in the full throes of a heart attack or other cardiac emergency have been sent to the United States because no hospital can provide the lifesaving care they require here.

Most of the heart patients who have been sent south since 2003 typically show up in Ontario hospitals, where they are given clot-busting drugs. If those drugs fail to open their clogged arteries, the scramble to locate angioplasty in the United States begins…

…While other provinces have sent patients out of country – British Columbia has sent 75 pregnant women or their babies to Washington State since February, 2007 – nowhere is the problem as acute as in Ontario.

At least 188 neurosurgery patients and 421 emergency cardiac patients have been sent to the United States from Ontario since the 2003-2004 fiscal year to Feb. 21 this year. Add to that 25 women with high-risk pregnancies sent south of the border in 2007.

Although Queen’s Park says it is ensuring patients receive emergency care when they need it, Progressive Conservative health critic Elizabeth Witmer says it reflects poor planning.

That is particularly the case with neurosurgery, she said, noting that four reports since 2003 have predicted a looming shortage.

“This province and the number of people going outside for care – it’s increasing in every area,” Ms. Witmer said.

“I definitely believe that it is very bad planning. …We’re simply unable to meet the demand, but we don’t even know what the demand is.”

Read that last line again: “We’re simply unable to meet the demand, but we don’t even know what the demand is.”

Well, that’s a confidence builder.

The Canadian system is supposedly one of the main models upon which the coming American health care revolution will be based. And yet this wondrous Canadian system seems to be more and more incapable of providing relatively common medical procedures to Canadian citizens, even in Canada’s most populous province. Because the system is controlled by a bureaucracy, it doesn’t respond to market pressures (goodness knows that most of the time, bureaucracies barely respond to political pressure) and in fact can’t even figure out what the market is demanding. All of this results in the Canadian government relying on the supposedly inferior US system to provide lifesaving care in many instances. No wonder 3 out of 4 Canadians live within easy driving distance of the US border.

So what happens if we decide to go down the path toward single-payer health care in the US? You’d have to be a fool to think that we could try the same thing that the Europeans and Canadians have done and get different results. No, in the long run, we’ll experience the same sorts of inefficiencies, quality and supply problems that plague the government systems, and yes, more Canadians will die, because the safety net that currently exists for the Canadian system here in the United States will be gone.

More: Check out the video after the jump… Read more on Will Socialized Health Care in the US Kill Canadians?…

As a person with a strong family history of cancer, this story warmed my heart. Oh wait, did I say “warmed my heart”? What I meant to say was “chilled me to the bone“:

Read more on Socialized Medicine Just Keeps Getting More Glorious…

Via The New Editor, a restatement of a basic economic rule that we all need to remember as government in America swings back to the left. Clive Crook, in the course of reviewing Robin Williams’ Man of the Year, notes the potential unintended consequences if an anti-business mood overtakes our representatives:

Read more on A Fallacious – And Damaging – Premise…