We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Thomas Sowell has an excellent column today laying out in lucid terms the economic ignorance behind current proposals to reform health care in the US.
An OECD study shows that the percentage of patients waiting more than 4 months for elective surgery in English-speaking countries is in single digits only in the United States, where we “lack” the “benefits” of a government-run medical system. In Canada 27 percent of patients wait more than 4 months and in Britain 38 percent. Elective surgery includes some heart surgery.
Shortages where the government sets prices have been common in countries around the world, for centuries on end, whether these shortages have taken the form of waiting lists, black markets, or other ways of coping with the fact that what people demand at an artificially low price exceeds what other people will supply at such prices.
. . . .
Americans, who produce a wholly disproportionate share of the world’s new life-saving drugs, are being asked to imitate price control policies in countries where such policies have dried up the costly research behind such discoveries.
. . . .
Politicians who claim to be able to “bring down the cost of health care” are talking about bringing down the prices charged. But prices are not costs. Prices are what pay for costs.
No matter how much lower the government sets the prices paid to doctors, hospitals, or pharmaceutical drug manufacturers, none of this reduces the costs in the slightest.
Evidently, most of our policymakers and “thought leaders” are so gobsmackingly stupid that they cannot retain elementary economics and history in their pointy heads, and by all accounts honestly believe such gibberish as “price controls lower costs.”
No matter how many times socialistic policies crash and burn, no matter how many times market-based systems beat the pants off of top-down autocratically controlled systems, the “liberal” elites in government, academia, and the media in the US return time and time again to shopworn socialist prescriptions.
Like a dog to its vomit.
Via the inevitable and ubiquitous Instapundit, a new blog by Clayton Cramer devoted to chronicling the use of firearms in self-defense.
What? Why does Clayton need two blogs? Because I started to keep track of civilian uses of guns for self-defense–and there were so many of them that it was hard to find them in my normal blog. So, here’s where they are going to go in the future!
What sort of entries will go here? Just summaries and links to articles about civilians engaged in defensive uses of guns.
It seems likely that we will soon see a resolution of the government’s prosecution of Martha Stewart. Aside from the leaks from the negotiations regarding a possible plea deal, the most reliable of all possible omens has been sighted: Barbara Walters will conduct one of her patented powder-puff interviews with Martha.
From day one, I have been saying, based on my rusty recollections of securities law, that the feds have no case for insider trading against Martha because she is not an insider. I was delighted to read this article confirming my suspicion that the whole Martha Stewart thing has been an abuse of power by headline hungry New York lawyers and DC regulators.
You have regulators continuing to apply a legal theory on insider trading that has been repeatedly rejected by the courts, and which is ungrounded from any public policy other than class envy. You have prosecutors skipping over a whole raft of more culpable people to target Martha because they know they will get better headlines from attacking her.
It is interesting to note that, even under their rejected and discredited overbroad theory of insider trading, the feds were unable to put together a case against Martha, and are not pursuing insider trading charges.
What, then, is Martha being charged with?
The most serious criminal charge against her is not perjury or insider trading but securities fraud, based on the fact that she denied to the press, personally and through her lawyers, that she had engaged in insider trading. This was done, the feds say, not for the purpose of clearing her name, but only to prop up the stock price of her own publicly traded company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. In other words, her crime is claiming to be innocent of a crime with which she was never charged.
The whole disgusting saga reads like a textbook example of abuse of power by regulators and prosecutors.
I suspect the constant trench warfare in American politics over abortion is somewhat mystifying to our overseas observers, and I think abortion poses some real philosophical problems for libertarians stemming from the unanswerable question of when a “fetus” becomes a “person.” Those issues aside, this David Frum blog entry is full of wisdom, not only on abortion, but on the dangers of ideological absolutism in matters political and social.
Now let me say right off: I am not pro-life. I think abortion ought to be legal for the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy and available to protect the health of the mother during the weeks thereafter. I don’t see this as a matter of fundamental human rights, so much as one of accommodating reality. I can’t defend Roe v. Wade as a legal decision, and I would be very glad to see abortion become much more rare than it now, but if the law attempts to suppress abortion entirely, it is the law that will fail, rather than abortion that will disappear. Please don’t email me about this: I have thought about this issue just as hard as you have, and I’m not going to change my mind.
But precisely because I believe in accommodating the realities of abortion, I think those on the pro-abortion side need to acknowledge that the no-concessions approach of the organized abortion lobby is catastrophically mistaken. Abortion rights would be much more secure if they were confined within reasonable limits that squared better with the conscience of the nation.
→ Continue reading: Accommodating reality
It may be a little thing, but I’ll take my good news where I can get it.
A Williamson County judge has dismissed a Franklin police citation against a man who warned other drivers of a speed trap.
He flashed his lights at them.
County Judge Russ Heldman yesterday ruled Walker was right about the citation violating his free speech guarantees.
The Franklin city police chief has now written a memo to officers, telling them not to cite drivers for flashing their lights in warning.
For his part, Walker is pleased to win his case, but says he’ll flash only his brights next time. He says the only way Marlowe knew he was flashing his lights was because his tail lights were going on and off.
Fight the power, brother!
Finally, a decent update on how the reconstruction is going in Iraq. It is astonishing that all the thousands of words that spew forth on a daily basis concerning the Iraqi situation manage to impart virtually no useful information. The Economist has a very nice overview of the reconstruction work in Iraq that paints a realistic and encouraging picture.
For many Iraqis, living standards have already risen a lot. Boosted by government make-work programmes, day labourers are getting double their pre-war wages. A university dean’s pay has gone up fourfold, a policeman’s by a factor of ten.
Stacks of such goods now crowd the pavements of Baghdad’s main shopping streets, shaded by ranks of bright new billboards. Prime commercial property, says a real estate broker in the Karada district, easily fetches $1,000 a square metre, four times the level this time last year.
The southern capital, Basra, for example, got only two-to-four hours of electricity a day before the war—and now has a power surplus. Baghdad still works to a regime of three-hours-on/three-hours-off, but the country as a whole is producing as much power as before the war. By spring it will be up by 25%. Within three years, if America sticks to its plan of sinking $5 billion-plus into the sector, power output should have more than doubled.
→ Continue reading: Iraq update
Increasingly, in my discussions about public policy matters, I find myself advancing the apparently novel notion that:
You tend to get more of what you reward, and less of what you punish.
When discussing my views with devotees of various social welfare schemes, this idea is met with reactions ranging from blank incomprehension to spitting rage at my cold-heartedness. Yet, to me, it seems the most self-evident common sense.
Most social welfare schemes reward certain behaviors, and almost invariably result in an increase in those behaviors.
Two examples (more can doubtless be supplied by the commentariat):
- One of the centerpieces of the expansion of the welfare state was payments to single mothers, often on a piecework basis (the more babies, the more bucks). Lo and behold, an enormous increase in single motherhood ensued.
- Wisconsin recently adopted a new health insurance scheme for the uninsured working poor. As a result, many employers have dropped their insurance benefits, reasoning that their employees can get coverage from the state, so why should they pay for it? Effectively, the new scheme removes the competitive disadvantage of employers who did not offer insurance, thus rewarding such employers and increasing their number.
Yet proponents of these social welfare schemes never cease to be amazed that their schemes do not seem to be alleviating the “problem” they are supposed to address, and indeed the problem often grows worse! Leading to a demand for more of the subsidies that feed the problem, of course.
On the flip side, I recently saw how the punishment meted out by the regulatory state gives predictable results. The regulatory state, of course, punishes economic activity by adding to its cost and by adding the risk of enforcement action.
The repair and service department at the Subaru dealership in downtown Madison is incredibly decrepit and run down, even though Subarus sell like hotcakes in Madison and the place is always busy. I mentioned this to the manager, and he told me that they had not done any work on the place in many years, even though it cost them business and made it hard to keep good workers. Reason was, any renovation would trigger a raft of regulations that would require environmental testing, remediation, handicap access, sound reduction, etc. ad nauseum, which would cost more than the dealership is worth.
Taxation, of course, is another punishment meted out by the state, again with predictable results. It is not unusual to hear young people say that one of the reasons they don’t get married is because, under the US tax code, their tax burden will go up if they do. Examples, I am sure, can be multiplied ad infinitum.
The odd thing is, through the regulatory and welfare states, we seem to be subsidizing the behaviors that we don’t want, and punishing the behaviors we do want. The increase in (subsidized) irresponsibility, and the decrease in (penalized) productivity, may be unintended, but are hardly unforeseeable, and indeed are inevitable.
Puff Daddy, or P. Diddy, or whatever, has a clothing line that he was shocked, shocked! to discover was being made in a “sweatshop” in the Honduras. Clearly, this was intolerable, so Puff did the only (politically) correct thing, and said he would terminate the contract if conditions at the factory were substandard.
So lemme get this straight. To show his solidarity with the oppressed Honduran workers making 90 cents an hour, he threatens to fire them all. I understand that this makes Puff feel better, but how is it supposed to help the workers?
To make it worse, Puff’s sweatshop was actually paying well above the Honduran average wage. I’m not quite clear on how moving a relatively high-wage job from a poor country to a more developed country with a higher-wage workforce is supposed to advance social justice, but obviously the Puffster’s grasp of ethical ephemera exceeds my own.
Bruce Bartlett has an interesting perspective at National Review Online on when and how the next round of tax increases will be foisted on the American public. First, he reviews the legacy of that famous tax-cutting President, Ronald Reagan.
The year 1988 appears to be the only year of the Reagan presidency, other than the first, in which taxes were not raised legislatively. Of course, previous tax increases remained in effect. According to a table in the 1990 budget, the net effect of all these tax increases was to raise taxes by $164 billion in 1992, or 2.6 percent of GDP. This is equivalent to almost $300 billion in today’s economy.
Then, he looks at how past tax increases have been foisted on the US.
But when all the political and economic elites of this country gang up on a president to raise taxes, history shows that they always get what they want. Indeed, they were even able to get Bush’s father to raise taxes in 1990, even though his political advisers knew that it would likely lead to his defeat in 1992, which it did.
How do the elites break down presidential resistance to tax increases? They do so by promising the moon. Tax increases, they say, will lead to huge reductions in interest rates, which will power economic growth and reduce unemployment. The rich only pay them anyway, which makes the president look like a populist. And tax increases are the price that must be paid to get spending cuts.
This last point is especially laughable.
Actually, all the points are laughable, but the last one is the worst. Giving someone who is overspending a big raise is the best way to cut back on their spending, right? How dumb do they think we voters are?
Pretty dumb, obviously. Too bad the voters as a class don’t do anything to prove them wrong, like voting the duplicitous bastards out.
The article ends by noting that:
It will be interesting to see how Bush reacts when his staff tells him that taxes need to be raised.
Very interesting indeed. President Bush has shown no spine whatsoever on domestic issues, with the sole exception of his tax cut. I will predict that he stood up for his tax cut because his father lost his reelection bid due to a tax increase. After next year’s election, when he is in his final term (assuming he wins), I don’t see any reason to believe that President Bush will resist the pressure for a tax increase.
Interesting story out of Oregon on their state health insurance scheme. Much to the relief of Oregon taxpayers, no doubt, some 40,000 people have dropped out of the Oregon Health Plan program, which provides state-subsidized health insurance.
The reason they dropped out? I don’t know, really, but it is interesting that the newspaper casts the story entirely in terms of the poor folk being dropped from the program. I say the participants dropped out because they apparently chose not to pay the premiums, which are as low as $6.00 per month. The response of “advocates” for the poor is just priceless.
Advocates for the poor say the premiums are too expensive for some people and the government may have overestimated the ability of people to mail a check.
“It’s an enormous barrier,” said Ellen Pinney, director of the Oregon Health Action Committee. “Let alone the $6, there is the whole issue of writing a check or getting a money order, putting it in an envelope with a stamp and putting it in the mail to this place in Portland that must receive it by the due date.”
$6.00 a month too expensive? Give me a break. This sounds to me like a classic example of “I can’t afford it” as code for “I have other things I would rather spend the money on.” If you forego a single trip per month to McDonald’s, you will save enough to pay a $6.00 monthly premium.
Really, though, the notion that poor people are incapable of mailing a check has got to be the last word in condescension and infantilization. Believe me, anyone who can fill out the paperwork to qualify for Medicaid or other state-paid health insurance (or find someone to do it for them) is capable of writing a check or getting a money order and putting it in the mail.
I’m not sure what larger point this story illustrates, to tell you the truth. Perhaps the corrosive effect of the welfare state on its recipients. Perhaps that, if you support the welfare state, sooner or later you will start to sound like a total ninny.
Thanks to OpinionJournal for the link.
Herewith inaugurating a look at the “Annals of Bureaucracy”, a sad tale, via our friends at Hit & Run, of the government school bureaucracy in action.
Applications and letters of interest from idealistic teachers continue to pour into inner-city school systems across the country, and many candidates, like Cochran, are being ignored or contacted much too late to do any good, according to an unusually detailed study by the nonprofit New Teacher Project.
A new report on the study, “Missed Opportunities: How We Keep High-Quality Teachers Out of Urban Schools,” concludes that those school systems alienate many talented applicants because of rules that protect teachers already on staff and because of slow-moving bureaucracies and budgeting delays.
“As a result, urban districts lose the very candidates they need in their classrooms . . . and millions of disadvantaged students in America’s cities pay the price with lower-quality teachers than their suburban peers,” wrote researchers Jessica Levin and Meredith Quinn, who were given rare access to the inner workings of school districts in four U.S. cities.
It was standard procedure to let impressive applications sit in file drawers for months, the researchers found, while the candidates, needing to get their lives in order, secured work elsewhere. One district, for example, received 4,000 applications for 200 slots but was slow to offer jobs and lost out on top candidates.
It goes on and on, enumerating the ways unions, administrators, and legislators all contribute to a system that seems designed to insure that the best teachers do not get anywhere near the neediest kids.
President Bush just nominated a judge for elevation to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals that I think I can really get behind. The DC Court is arguably the “first among equals” of the federal appellate courts that function one level below the US Supreme Court. Judge Janice Brown has had some very interesting things to say that I think many of a libertarian bent will find appealing:
In Santa Monica Beach, Ltd. v. Superior Court (1999), for instance, she dissented from a decision upholding a rent control ordinance, declaring that “[a]rbitrary government actions which infringe property interests cannot be saved from constitutional infirmity by the beneficial purposes of the regulators.”
In a dissent in San Remo Hotel v. City and County of San Francisco (2002), which upheld the city’s sweeping property restrictions, Justice Brown expanded on that theme. “Theft is still theft even when the government approves of the thievery,” she declared. “The right to express one’s individuality and essential human dignity through the free use of property is just as important as the right to do so through speech, the press, or the free exercise of religion.”
She is, of course, rabidly opposed by the Democrats and by some “social” conservatives. Unless Bush is willing to go to the mattresses for her, she will likely be filibustered by the Senate Democrats and denied a seat on the DC Court. Still, the nomination is good news.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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