It's disheartening to see that the top priority of the new Environment Minister is to defend the tar sands at all costs, and almost as disheartening to see him getting talking points from Ezra Levant:
Mr. Levant, a onetime aide to Stockwell Day, has helped popularize the argument that oil-sands petroleum is ethically superior to petroleum produced by countries such as Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Iran – all nations that also sell crude to the U.S. market or Asian markets.
Mr. Levant is correct that, all other things being equal, we should support Canadian democracy over the despotic OPEC regimes. But Canada's superior governance does not make tar sands "ethical," for you can't define ethical in purely geopolitical terms and ignore environmental consequences. The tar sands are unsustainable because of their energy intensiveness (input to output ratio), water requirements, tailing ponds and pollution in the Athabasca River. One of Canada's great resources is it's vast natural beauty, and that's being seriously blighted by the tar sands.
Moreover, Levant (and Kent) are presenting a false choice between despotic oil and dirty oil. There are many other energy options more deserving of the "ethical" label.
This post by Charlotte Hays is really one of the dumbest things I've seen on National Review in ages.
The blizzard is definitely a force for conservatism, and not only because it has had the global-warming crowd scrambling for explanations. The blizzard reveals something basic: Liberals in government want to tell us what to eat, counsel us about how and when to die, and in general attempt to engineer our lives. But when reality knocks, they can’t do the basic stuff such as clearing the streets so that newborns don’t die in bloody apartment-building lobbies.
Using the inefficiencies of the New York City snow-clearing system to discredit liberalism is...a stretch, to say the least. And note that she's really asking for better service, not the elimination of service.
But I also love the little flash of global-warming ignorance. Every Winter brings the spectacle of some right-wing dim bulb noticing snow falling and declaring that global warming is a myth. Those people can't tell the difference between weather and climate or between local phenomena and global phenomena. But nonetheless they get writing gigs for the most prestigious conservative publication.
Tyler Cowen has received a lot of attention for this post on inequality in which he attempts to discern the inequality that matters from inequality that doesn't (or inequality that is unacceptable vs. inequality that is). I'm still chewing on it, but I wanted to address his first point, which is that that "the income of personal well-being" has markedly improved over the past century.
First, the inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well. Bill Gates is much, much richer than I am, yet it is not obvious that he is much happier if, indeed, he is happier at all. I have access to penicillin, air travel, good cheap food, the Internet and virtually all of the technical innovations that Gates does...
Compare these circumstances to those of 1911, a century ago. Even in the wealthier countries, the average person had little formal education, worked six days a week or more, often at hard physical labor, never took vacations, and could not access most of the world’s culture. The living standards of Carnegie and Rockefeller towered above those of typical Americans, not just in terms of money but also in terms of comfort.
I think that's basically true. But there are a couple of major caveats. First of all, I think he over-reaches here:
Like the vast majority of Americans, I have access to some important new pharmaceuticals, such as statins to protect against heart disease. To be sure, Gates receives the very best care from the world’s top doctors, but our health outcomes are in the same ballpark.
Health care is, in fact, one of the very things that separates a person like Bill Gates from the average American, which is why health care reform has been so important. An average middle class American may enjoy many of life's finer things just like Gates does, but being hit by a major illness can mean bankruptcy and ruin. Gates obviously isn't faced with that problem.
The second caveat is that much of the decrease in the inequality of personal well-being is artificial; millions of Americans can only experience those finer things by hugely over-extending themselves and going into debt.
Having said all that, I'm happier being an average Joe today than an average Joe in 1901.
We're shopping for child car seats right now, and so I was reading this article with interest. I was stunned by this figure:
The push for car-seat changes is also prompted by data showing the use of child restraints cuts car-collision deaths dramatically. Between 1993 and 2006, the number of child passengers who died in motor-vehicle accidents dropped by 50 per cent, according to Transport Canada, which attributes the decline to improved design and greater use of child restraints.
Deaths dropped by 50 percent in that time period due simply to improved designs. And what spurred the improved designs? Incredibly restrictive government regulations. Basically, if you live in the US or Canada, it's impossible to buy a crappy child car seat in a store. They differ in features and some are more basic than others, but they all have to pass the same rigorous tests. This is a great example of the positive role government can play in our lives.
That might seem like an obvious thing to say, but it poses a big problem for libertarianism. Extreme libertarians submit that the only justifiable role for government is to provide security and enforce contracts. Anything else begins to impinge on individual freedom. What might their response to this car seat story be? It would go something like this: the government has no right to prevent me from buying a crappy, unsafe car seat if I wish to. That's a decision for each individual to make according to their conscience. Let the market take care of it. If there is demand for cheap, unsafe car seats, then we should let manufacturers supply them. The government shouldn't be intervening in markets and in people's free choices.
I think pure libertarianism is not more popular because of scenarios like this, where most people recognize that there is a serious moral problem in respecting the free choice of a few individuals at the cost of thousands of lives. Quite a few people call themselves libertarians, but I think there are very few people who don't have at least a few pet causes that they think merit government intervention or regulation. In my experience, most people who call themselves libertarians are in fact conservatives who resent the government's role in a few areas but promote it in many others.
A libertarian might now respond to the car seat discussion by clarifying that an individual should be free to act as they wish only as long as they are not harming others, and that in this case harm (or potential harm) is clearly being done and so government intervention is justified. So what about cases where there is no obvious victim or harm being done? Helmet laws are a useful case. Why should cyclists be forced to wear helmets? If a car hits them, they are probably the only ones who are going to be hurt. Shouldn't they be free to make that choice if they aren't concerned with their safety? One rebuttal is that riding without a helmet isn't really a victimless crime; any injuries sustained tend to drive up medical and insurance costs for everyone. But let's pretend that that's not true and that the cyclist really is the only victim of their refusal to wear a helmet. Are the regulations wrong in that case? These discussions tend to boil down to a matter of self-ownership. Do we own ourselves? The obvious immediate answer seems to be yes, but consideration of the types of scenarios offered by Michael Sandel might make us reconsider:
Should a person be free to donate an organ even if it means they will certainly die? Should someone be free to offer their life and body to a cannibalistic killer? (Believe it or not, these aren't hypotheticals but real-life scenarios) In a future post I'll try to summarize Sandel's discussion in more depth. But suffice it to say that there are many scenarios which strongly question our intuitive belief that we completely own ourselves. It remains to be seen whether that will shake anybody's beliefs about helmet laws, but it is something that needs to be addressed by pure libertarians.
Finally, a core weakness of libertarianism is that it has a very narrow conception of liberty (essentially just negative liberty). There's a lot more to liberty than being left alone.
A few days ago, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that the individual mandate in the health reforms of the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. This got a lot of hyperbolic press proclaiming the imminent end of "Obamacare." In truth, it's not nearly as critical a ruling as all that. For one thing, the ruling itself separated the individual mandate from the rest of the Affordable Care Act, meaning that even if the mandate were struck down the rest would still survive. Furthermore, the judge refused to grant an injunction preventing the implementation of the health reforms.
We also have to look at the context of the ruling. This is actually the third ruling on the individual mandate, and the first two both found the mandate to be constitutional. It's maybe a sad commentary on the US judicial system that these rulings have been completely partisan. The two judges who ruled in favor of the mandate were appointed by Clinton and the judge who ruled against was appointed by George W. Bush - so much for apolitical judges calling balls and strikes. Anyway, all of these rulings are just stepping stones on the way to the Supreme Court.
So what will happen at the Supreme Court? Who knows. It's famously stacked with several activist Republicans including Scalia, Alito, and Roberts, but I think even they would be very hesitant to hand down a ruling that would dramatically reinterpret and narrow the ability of the federal government to regulate economic activity.
But what if they do declare the mandate unconstitutional? The rest of the health reforms would still be in place. And here's the key problem: the health reforms do not work without the mandate. If you prohibit insurance companies from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions, and you don't require people to have insurance, then people will simply wait until they get sick and then get insurance. That obviously is not a sustainable system. And, as this article points out, it "is not an insurance system at all. It’s free-riding." So the mandate would be replaced with something very similar to the mandate. Ideas are already circulating should that come to pass.
So the takeaway point is that, even in the worst case scenario, this does not signal the end of the Affordable Care Act.
There's a lot of justified anger and cynicism regarding Peter Orzag's move from the White House to Citigroup. A move like this tends to reinforce what people see as a cosy relationship between government and the banking sector, and it seems like we would be well-served by limits on how quickly a person could move from one to the other. But this analysis by Will Wilkinson struck me as wrong-headed:
Progressives laudably seek to oppose injustice by deploying government power as a countervailing force against the imagined opressive and exploitative tendencies of market institutions. Yet it seems that time and again market institutions find ways to use the government's regulatory and insurer-of-last-resort functions as countervailing forces against their competitors and, in the end, against the very public these functions were meant to protect.
We are constantly exploited by the tools meant to foil our exploitation. For a progressive to acknowledge as much is tantamount to abandoning progressivism. So it's no surprise that progressives would rather worry over trivialities such as campaign finance reform than dwell on the paradoxes of political power.
I think the first paragraph is basically correct, and it's the second that I take issue with. Acknowledging that market institutions exploit public institutions and their regulatory functions is not "tantamount to abandoning progressivism" any more than acknowledging that pure unchecked market capitalism can be destabilizing and destructive requires a free market advocate to completely abandon the idea. It's like saying that because the system can be gamed, then the entire system should be scrapped. Chait offers several rebuttals, including this one:
As Wilkinson semi-concedes later on in his item, it's not really true that "Well-connected wonks can get rich on Wall Street only because Washington power is now so unconstrained." It's impossible to create a government weak enough that having deep knowledge of government will not be a marketable commodity. Given that fact, the only answer is to create social norms and regulatory barriers to minimize excessive special interest as best as possible.
Wilkinson's post is interesting and much more than a bash on progressivism; he even walks back that original statement. He's asking the right questions:
Maybe it's true that markets hum along smoothly only with relatively active government intervention and it's also true that relatively active government intervention is eventually inevitably co-opted, exacerbating rather than mitigating capitalism's injustices. Perhaps the best we can hope ever to achieve is a fleeting state of grace when fundamentally unstable forces are temporarily held in balance by an evanescent combination of complementary cultural currents. This is increasingly my fear: that there is no principled alternative to muddling through; that every ideologue's op-ed is wrong, except the ones serendipitously right. But muddle we must.
So what is to be done about the structural injustice spotlighted by Peter Orszag's passage through the revolving golden door? How exactly do we tweak the unjust structure? If the system is rigged, how exactly do we unrig it? In which direction can we muddle without making matters worse?
So, George Soros donated 1 million dollars to Media Matters. If you don't know who George Soros is, he's a billionaire philanthropist who often supports liberal causes (among many other philanthropic ventures). But if you are a follower of Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter then I can guarantee you know who Soros is, because to them he's like the liberal anti-Christ. And today the crazy right-wing attacks on Soros began again.
Limbaugh accused Media Matters of accepting "foreign money", a strange accusation given that Soros is an American citizen and has been for 50 years. Glenn Beck, bless him, apparently thinks that Soros has a contract out on his life. Seriously.
But there's one disgusting conspiracy theory that keeps raising its head, promoted by people like Coulter, Limbaugh and Ezra Levant: the idea that Soros was a Nazi collaborator, a Nazi sympathizer or a traitor to his people (Soros is Jewish). Here's the actual story. As a Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Hungary, Soros' life was in danger and his father arranged for him to essentially be adopted by an employee of the Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture as a way to keep George safe. George lived with this person and posed as a godson, hiding his Jewish identity in order to survive. Hiding his Jewishness in order to survive the Nazi regime does not make him a collaborator or a sympathizer or a traitor. One would think this doesn't need saying, but people like Coulter and Levant will apparently say anything to further their partisan politics.
Here's a question. Should we demonize the Jews who were saved by Oskar Schindler because they were protected by a Nazi while others around them were killed? Of course not. Why would we demonize and slander Soros for taking protection that was offered him as a child? Apparently because he is a liberal who supports liberal causes. That makes him open game for the right-wing set.
I know it's easy to no longer even be shocked when right-wing hacks like O'Reilly, Beck, Coulter and Levant say something hyperbolic and wrong, but I hope we all have enough decency left to recognize this as shocking, bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, even for the GOP Fox News set.
Remember when President Reagan sold all those weapons to Iran and then funneled the proceeds to a Latin American paramilitary group? Good times. It's been on my mind for a couple of reasons. First, Reagan has been absolutely lionized by the right, especially since his death. And it seems that this shameful episode has been completely white-washed. When the Iran-Contra hearings were taking place I was just old enough to begin to have an awareness of politics and political figures. I remember seeing him on the TV every day, saying "I don't recall, I don't recall" and I was absolutely bewildered that you could just lie and get away with it. I didn't have any concept of left-wing and right-wing, or even Democrat and Republican. It was just the audacity of him pretending not to know anything about it that struck me. I was so incredulous that I remember asking my folks about it - "You can just lie and get away with it?" Maybe this first impression of Reagan is one reason why I've never been able to idolize him.
A second reason it's on my mind is that I was imagining what the reaction would be if Obama had authorized such acts. A little thought-experiment for right-wingers: if you woke up tomorrow morning and read that Obama had sold weapons to Iran and funneled the proceeds to a left-wing paramilitary group in Latin America (say, FARC), what would your reaction be?
A favorite tactic of Republicans opposed to healthcare reform is to find a few scare stories from Canada and the UK to try to put the fear of change into the American people. Nevermind that it's easier to find healthcare horror stories from the US. The fact is that Canadians and Britons like their healthcare and don't particularly appreciate having it misrepresented, even if they do see ways that it could be improved. In the Globe and Mail today, a Canadian economist and a former health policy adviser succinctly lay out the reasons why the Canadian system is better. Here's the gist:
So to sum up. We live longer than the Americans do. We are less likely to die at or soon after birth than the Americans are. All Canadians have medical insurance, whereas a huge number of Americans don't. And we pay less as a society for health care than they do in the United States. Four numbers paint a stark picture. And when you strip away the anti-medicare ideological rants and falsehoods on display in Washington, Canada's approach to health insurance would probably sound pretty good to many Americans.
I don't see how anyone could look at these facts and conclude that the US system is better.
This TNR piece by Jonathan Chait is excellent. He gives an overview of Rand's background and beliefs, including some very unusual details about her and her original followers, then procedes to eviscerate her political philosophy. It gets especially good near the end.
The economic right may believe religiously in their moral view of wealth, but we do not have to respect it as we might respect religious faith. For it does not transcend--perhaps no religion should transcend--empirical scrutiny. On the contrary, this conservative view, the Randian inversion of the Marxist worldview, rests upon a series of propositions that can be falsified by data.
He then goes on to show exactly how the Randian worldview fails. This reminds me just how good Chait can be.
We apparently live in an age where any outlandish lie about Obama and the Democrats can gain media traction. Here's one now! So I decided to come up with some outlandish lies about Republicans just to see if I could get them to catch on. Keep in mind, these are all lies written by a treacherous liberal. You shouldn't believe them...but you will! So here's a peek at the upcoming Republican policy platform:
The GOP will take your children away and force them to live in a moon colony. How will you feel when you see your kids flying away on a moon rocket? I bet you'll feel bad.
The GOP will force old people to work on cactus plantations in the desert southwest. Something about that just doesn't sit right with me.
You know that favorite TV show of yours? The Republicans want to cancel it.
The Republican health plan requires all Americans to take Dr. Sanjay Gupta as their personal physician. Sorry, that doesn't sound like the land of freedom to me.
The GOP will require all domestic pets to be added to a communal soup pot.
Every morning the Republican leadership gathers and prays - for you to die!!
An old man and his grandson were walking along a dirt road, fishing poles resting against their shoulders, the early morning quiet but for their laughter. Just then Republican Senator Chuck Grassley stepped out of the bushes and snapped their fishing poles in half with a derisive sneer. Then he threw the shredded remnants of a health reform bill in their faces. That just seems way beyond the pale.
The GOP will require each family to have at least one child named "Mega-Dittos." That child will, of course, be sent to the moon.
Despite the detailed and heated health care debate, I haven't read much discussion of what insurance is and why we have it. It's worth discussing briefly, as it gets at some of the fundamental need for reform.
Insurance in theory is a pretty great idea. When you pay your periodic fire insurance bill, you're basically paying for a portion of all the fire damage that occurred during that time period, in the understanding that if you ever suffer fire damage then you too will be covered. That's a really rough sketch of the idea, but it's basically about looking after each other and your own self-interest.
This works fine, in theory, until the people controlling the inflow and outflow of money realize that they're sitting on a huge pot of money that can be played with and invested, and that their profits can be maximized by increasing the in-payments, restricting any out-payments and denying coverage to anyone who looks risky. Suddenly they've gone from being a simple conduit between participants in the insurance program to being a self-interested, profit-maximizing entity.
Now, here's the thing: it's possible to have a perfectly good functioning insurance system without having a bloated middleman skimming billions of dollars for profit and denying coverage to millions of people. This morning I followed an Atrios link to this post by John Cole:
Hell, I can’t, for the life of me, figure out what value the insurance companies add at all. Seems like all they do is skim money off the top, add layers of paperwork, and then screw people when they get a serious illness.
This is precisely the function of private insurers, and there's no need for it. You could have a non-profit co-op or a public option for providing insurance. I've never heard a single good reason why it's better to have a huge, bureaucratic, profit-driven corporation that looks after only its own bottom line and sabotages the purpose of insurance in the first place.
Depressing stat of the day: 45% of Americans believe the death panel lies emanating from Palin & Co. There's a quote often attributed to Twain: "A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
I've noticed that many opponents of health care reform seem to deeply misunderstand what is actually being proposed, so figured it might do both proponents and opponents some good to lay out in simple terms exactly what reformers would like to see.
First of all, no one would force you to give up your health insurance. Much of the anger out there seems to be based on a fear of not having that freedom of choice. If you like your current policy, you can keep it. You can buy all the private insurance you want - knock yourself out! What is being proposed is that people who cannot afford or cannot attain private insurance, e.g. because of exorbitant costs, a pre-existing condition, a fixed income, or whatever other reason, would have recourse to a public option. That is, they could purchase an insurance policy from the government. The government's role is that of an "insurer of last resort." The government isn't going to be running the healthcare industry, they are simply going to be offering insurance to those who need it, much like extended Medicare (a very popular *government* scheme).
Second, there would be an individual mandate saying that people have to have health insurance. This seems to be another source of anger out there, with protesters suggesting that it's wrong to force insurance on people. In fact, it's not unusual and not unprecedented - we already do this with auto insurance. If you drive a car, you are required to have a minimum of liability insurance in case you are in an accident. Similarly, people would be required to have health insurance to avoid cases where an uninsured person gets sick and ends up in the emergency room where taxpayers are liable to pick up the tab.
The third idea is that insurance companies would be prohibited from charging different premiums, or denying coverage, based on your medical history or perceived risk. This is sometimes called "community rating." This relates to the first point above in that it would lower the access bar for many people to acquire a private policy. It would also greatly lower administrative costs of insurers because they have huge bloated bureaucracies dedicated to weeding out and denying risky applicants. This last point is important - people assume that a government plan would be bureaucratic and unwieldy compared with private plans, but it's quite the opposite.
Those are the keys ideas, believe it or not: a public option, an individual mandate, and community rating. Simple as that. No death panels, no internment camps. Hopefully you'll find these notes useful in talking to people about health reform. I'll post some more points and arguments soon.
Here's one reason to be optimistic that health reform will be passed. The American Medical Association and the pharmaceutical industry have thrown their mighty weight behind the cause. Every attempt at health reform in the post-war period has been stymied by the opposition of the AMA, so this is huge if they truly are on side. This has obviously made people nervous about what exactly is being compromised on to curry their favor, and with good reason. But I agree with Paul Begala that a solid foundation of reform is the critical thing right now. Some compromises will be necessary. I disagree with Begala in that I think a public option and individual mandate are the bare minimum to begin with, but we can't expect the ideal set of reforms to all come in one fell swoop.
