Month: April 2006

Socialism can really help poor families

Having thought a little bit further about yesterday’s post on Virginia’s sales tax holiday, if the General Assembly really wants to help poor families, wouldn’t it make more sense to institute universal school uniforms throughout the Commonwealth? Include them in the cost of public education, so that every family gets uniforms for their school-aged children each year. Everyone in the community pays for the students to have them by paying their local taxes. As an added bonus, the poor kids don’t have to feel bad or have the rich kids destroy their self-esteem since everyone will wear the same thing. It would work.

Is this idea any more or less ridiculous than a sales tax holiday?

Should I include a “Heh”?

Arnold Kling writes in TCS Daily:

The alternative ideology that I would propose might be called transnational libertarianism. The ideal libertarian world would have no economic borders. There would be no problem of illegal immigration, because all forms of immigration would be legal.

If transnational libertarianism were to become sufficiently popular to emerge as the ideology that determines the world’s institutions, then governments would be local rather than national. Their main role would be to prevent outbreaks of violence among individuals or groups. In the nightclub of life, government would be the bouncer, not the owner or the manager or the dance instructor or the disk jockey.

I don’t imagine it happening in my lifetime, but I can hope. Read the whole thing.

What are you so nervous about? Everything’s cool.

I’ve never been a fan of the death penalty in America, and have expressed as much in the past. Living in Virginia, though, I get a good reminder of the revenge-seeking blood lust that often surrounds the application of the death penalty. I can only imagine what it’s like in Texas, but sometimes the state offers a glimpse:

A judge who halted an execution because the inmate was mentally ill has agreed to force the man to take anti-psychotic medication so he can be put to death.

The inmate, Steven Kenneth Staley, 43, has refused to take his medication. A jury decided he should be put to death for the killing of a Fort Worth restaurant manager during a botched robbery.

Do I really need to go on? A man is ruled too mentally ill to be executed, so the state should medicate him so that he can be aware of his execution? I can’t be the only person who finds this absurd.

I have no idea what Staley’s mental status was at the time he murdered the restaurant manager. I’ll assume he was found competent since he faces execution. So what difference does it make that he’s now mentally incompetent. If the death penalty is just, and acts as a deterrent, why should his current mental status matter?

In 1986, the Supreme Court held the Eighth Amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause bars states from executing prisoners who aren’t aware of the punishment they are about to face and don’t understand why they are facing it.

This case seems to be a stretch at interpreting that ruling. I can’t conclude any other reason than simple retribution. “You’re a murderer, you don’t know what’s about to happen, so we’re going to make you aware. You’ll suffer, God damnit.”

I don’t feel safer from that.

Update: More thoughts on the larger death penalty topic at Balloon Juice.

Politicians are stupid

Immigration policy may blow up in the collective faces of Republican leaders in Congress.

In the wake of this week’s massive demonstrations, many House Republicans are worried that a tough anti-illegal-immigration bill they thought would please their political base has earned them little benefit while becoming a lightning rod for the fast-growing national movement for immigrant rights.

House Republicans rushed through legislation just before Christmas that would build hundreds of miles of fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, require that businesses verify the legality of all employees’ status through a national database, fortify border patrols, and declare illegal immigrants and those who help them to be felons. After more lenient legislation failed in the Senate last week, the House-passed version burst into the public consciousness this week, as hundreds of thousands of protesters across the country turned out to denounce the bill.

It’s amazing that today’s Republican party, so intent on sending the U.S. military on jaunts around the planet can be so isolationist on immigration. I don’t think it’s surprising, though. Basing actions on principles isn’t particularly popular among Congressional leadership these days. Yet, the lack of foresight is still unnerving. These people are leading in charge of the country. Is it really so hard to turn this 20/20 hindsight into just a smidge of foresight?

“It was an ugly bill in most respects, the felony stuff, the wall and no amendments,” said Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who tried to add a guest-worker provision but was not allowed a vote. “The leadership saw this more as a statement than a policy, but I think in the end we would have been better off had we been more deliberative.”

Congress doesn’t seem to intent *cough*spending*cough* on governing with *cough*PATRIOT Act*cough* principles instead of *cough*same-sex marriage amendments*cough* majoritarian hatred and fear. Idiots. I hope they get what they deserve in November. I don’t have much hope, there, but I’ll hold tightly to the little I do have. It’s the only thing that gives me the warm-fuzzies Congress tries so hard to provide.

Lest we think Congressional Republicans are the only imbeciles, we get fun stuff like this:

Rep. Ted Strickland (D-Ohio), a supporter of the bill, was greeted by protesters and shouts of “Migration is not a crime” in February when he opened his Ohio gubernatorial campaign office in Cleveland. Now, he regrets his vote, campaign spokesman Jess Goode said.

Of course he regrets his vote now, when he sees the negative consequences. To Rep. Strickland, I suggest he learn that leading through polls and the advice of a few crazies who call his office complaining about all the damned for’ners hurting the economy isn’t leadership. Alas, he’s a politician. They never learn.

No more broccoli titles on this subject

Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is not changing my opinion of the recent mandatory health insurance law with his editorial in today’s Opinion Journal. There are many reasons, as every argument contradicts at least one other argument within the piece, but I want to highlight a few of the stupider justifications. First, this:

Another 40% of the uninsured were earning enough to buy insurance but had chosen not to do so. Why? Because it is expensive, and because they know that if they become seriously ill, they will get free or subsidized treatment at the hospital. By law, emergency care cannot be withheld. Why pay for something you can get free?

Okay, so logic tells us that Gov. Romney’s equation makes sense. But why draw the conclusion that we should then force health insurance? Why not reform free care? It’s not the politically nice think to do, but if someone earns enough and is irresponsible, why should we be nice. If the uninsured becomes seriously ill, treat them. Then bill them for the portion of the expense that they can afford. Admittedly, that’s a very rough sketch of what would be a large reform, but I only spent thirty seconds coming up with the basic idea. Imagine what we could all do if we thought it out further.

Gov. Romney continues, proving that he’s more willing to wield government’s coercive power than to adhere to limited government principles. He may be the successor to President Bush. Consider:

Of course, while it may be free for them, everyone else ends up paying the bill, either in higher insurance premiums or taxes. The solution we came up with was to make private health insurance much more affordable. Insurance reforms now permit policies with higher deductibles, higher copayments, coinsurance, provider networks and fewer mandated benefits like in vitro fertilization–and our insurers have committed to offer products nearly 50% less expensive. With private insurance finally affordable, I proposed that everyone must either purchase a product of their choice or demonstrate that they can pay for their own health care. It’s a personal responsibility principle.

Working to get government out of health insurance is good. Mandating that everyone purchase insurance is not following a personal responsibility principle. Such a principle would imply that the person acts on his own to make a wise choice for himself. Imposing such a requirement is simply infantilizing him. He should do this, but we know he won’t if we let him choose, so we’re going to make him. Ladies and gentleman, government philosophy circa 2006. It only gets worse from here.

Gov. Romney does address the libertarian argument.

Some of my libertarian friends balk at what looks like an individual mandate. But remember, someone has to pay for the health care that must, by law, be provided: Either the individual pays or the taxpayers pay. A free ride on government is not libertarian.

Government coercion isn’t libertarian, either, but I don’t expect Gov. Romney to understand that. Regardless, I’m a libertarian, and I’ve offered a solution to the free ride conundrum, however underdeveloped it is right now. I’m sure there are smarter libertarians who can give an answer that’s more fully formed. Gov. Romney should seek them out, unless he’s afraid of their limited government answer.

Another group of uninsured citizens in Massachusetts consisted of working people who make too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford health-care insurance. Here the answer is to provide a subsidy so they can purchase a private policy. The premium is based on ability to pay: One pays a higher amount, along a sliding scale, as one’s income is higher. The big question we faced, however, was where the money for the subsidy would come from. We didn’t want higher taxes; but we did have about $1 billion already in the system through a long-established uninsured-care fund that partially reimburses hospitals for free care. The fund is raised through an annual assessment on insurance providers and hospitals, plus contributions from the state and federal governments.

What part of that doesn’t involve receiving a free ride from the government? Please, enlighten me.

I could go on, but I’m going to smash my head into my keyboard to dull the pain. It’s okay, I have health insurance.

What, no day off for this holiday? Wouldn’t I spend more?

Virginia Governor Tim Kaine signed the tax holiday bill sent to him by the General Assembly. I wrote against it when it first came up, and my opinion is the same. It’s nothing more than politics playing to a small-minded crowd, both in the General Assembly and among the Virginia citizenry.

Regarding the specifics of what Gov. Kaine signed, this is absurd:

The sales tax holiday will occur on the first Friday/Saturday/Sunday in August. Consumers will not have to pay taxes on school supplies that cost $20 or less an item and on clothing and shoes that cost $100 or less an item. For that weekend, businesses also can choose to pay the tax on other items for their customers and advertise those items as tax-free, a practice normally illegal.

It may be a sales tax holiday for residents, but will it significantly increase sales? And will those sales offset computer system changes for retailers? Who qualifies for each retailer what meets the criteria and what doesn’t? I assume the increased sales will offset costs, but I’m guessing. Somehow, I suspect that’s what the General Assembly did when it proposed the change. We don’t get numbers to support claims. Instead, we get populist nonsense.

“The back-to-school sales tax holiday is relatively modest in its fiscal impact, but it will make a huge difference for working families with school-age children,” Kaine said.

It’s nothing major, but it helps poor people. That makes no sense. When I was a kid, we were poor enough that we fell into Gov. Kaine’s “poor people” category. There is no way a sales tax holiday would’ve helped significantly. I wasn’t getting expensive wardrobes and piles of supplies. I got the basics to cover what I’d outgrown or to fill in the gaps in my supplies where I’d used up all the pages in notebooks. How different are poor people today?

Of course, the bill’s sponsor betrayed Gov. Kaine’s logic, showing the both sides of the aisle can have ludicrous reasoning.

Sen. Ryan T. McDougle (R-Hanover), the bill’s Senate sponsor, said he believes the state actually will make money during the holiday because customers will respond to holiday ads and end up purchasing taxed items as well.

“This will draw people from other states to purchase goods in Virginia,” he said. “It’s good for families and parents and good for business.”

So, is it for poor people or is it to raise state revenue? If they’re poor, they’re not buying extras just because they saved a few pennies on sales tax. If it’s really meant to raise revenue, wouldn’t a regular sales tax cut work better, extending the greed fun all year?

Idiots, every one of them.

That’s what you owe and we’re not turning ourselves in until you pay!

This article does more to prove that health insurance should be divorced from employers.

Dell will announce Apr. 10 that it is becoming the largest U.S. employer to offer workers electronic health records that track their insurance claims and drug prescriptions, which the computer giant says is a key step toward letting its 26,000 staffers coordinate their own care in a bid to improve medical safety and contain costs.

CEO Kevin Rollins will announce the plan today at a health care forum in Nashville, Tenn., where Health and Human Services Secretary Michael O. Leavitt will be the keynote speaker. Dell has offered limited electronic health records since 2004, but the upgrade coming Apr. 20 adds the ability for the system to automatically capture new information about treatments and test results, rather than waiting for the employee to enter the data manually.

Imagine you’re a shareholder in Dell. Do you want your CEO spending his time focusing on how make Dell’s employee health plan administration more efficient (and speaking at health care conferences), or would you rather he spend his time making Dell’s computer manufacturing more efficient?

Further down in the article, we get this:

Backers of such plans believe this approach will let patients impose market discipline on health care by allowing them to refuse wasteful care. But they argue that employees need both electronic health records and access to market information about health-care costs and quality.
…

However, this free-market approach to health care reform has many skeptics. Service Employees International Union president, Andrew Stern, has argued that poor workers will often choose to forego medical care rather than bear more expenses.

I’ve never heard of Andrew Stern before this article, but I suspect he doesn’t much care for the same interpretation of “free-market” approach that I do. However, to address (the inaccuracy of) his point, a free-market approach doesn’t automatically screw the poor by forcing them to forego medical care to save a few dollars. A reasonable free-market solution will encourage people to forego unnecessary medical care. It should make health care more affordable by imposing strict action-consequence reality on health decisions/spending.

If a person breaks a bone or suffers a heart attack, they’re not going to forego medical care, regardless of how poor or rich. But that person might wear protective boots when riding that motorcycle or stop smoking before it destroys major organs. Conversely, if that person want to continue taking those risks, he will bear the cost burden. Fair doesn’t result in the poor getting something for nothing, which makes it unpalatable to the fear-mongers who sell class warfare as public policy, but it still enables the poor to get what they need.

France capitulates to the 19th Century

Bowing to pressure from students and unions unwilling or unable to comprehend simple economics, the French government withdrew the initiative that would’ve enabled employers to dismiss employees under 26 within a two year probationary period.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, the author of the law, announced he was backing down from the measure, saying that he believes both unions and businesses misunderstood his intentions. “I’m sorry about that,” he said in an announcement. Villepin said the upheaval over the law “reveals a social anxiety” in France and said the government will work with unions and businesses to “prepare for the future of our country.”

They didn’t misunderstand his intentions as much as they filtered those intentions through an ancient (and flawed) economic prism which said permanent employment is a right, regardless of merit or effort. Unfortunately for the prime minister, French unions are “preparing” for the future of France, which will include further unemployment, economic decay, and societal turmoil. Turning France away from that requires leadership. Anyone who would be the next president of France needs to understand that. Prime Minister Villepin is apparently not the one.

Is there an intelligence-accumulation allowance?

Ha-ha, the kidders at The Washington Post had me going yesterday with a fine satire on how to solve the obesity problem in America. Ha-ha. I almost got outraged. Read this. It’s seriously The Funny.

America is fat and getting fatter. Today 140 million American adults are overweight or obese. Their bodies carry 4 billion pounds of excess fat, the result of eating 14 trillion excess calories.

Numbers of this size belong in the domain of economists, not physicians. And therein lies the solution.

Medical and public health attempts to control obesity should continue, but it is time to add marketplace approaches. The first step is realizing that, nationally, weight gain is not a medical problem, it’s a pollution problem.

Okay, so that part doesn’t really lend itself to laughter. It’s a great ruse, though. Introduce comedy with a straight setup. Here, we’re going to discuss something grown-up and serious. Psyche. You laughed at the pratfall, didn’t you? Ha-ha, that’s a good one. The opening was worth getting to this:

Public policies have succeeded in reducing air pollution. They can teach us how to reduce calorie pollution. Tradable emission allowances, for example, establish markets where permits to emit air pollutants can be bought and sold. Market forces then provide incentives to reduce pollution emissions.

Wait a minute. Public policies? Have succeeded? This IS a joke, right? I’m getting a little nervous.

A specific example illustrates how tradable emission allowances could work. Suppose the calorie-emission allowance is set to 100 calories for each ounce of food emitted into the environment (i.e., sold). A four-ounce food item having more than 400 calories could not, therefore, be sold unless “calorie credits” were purchased to cover the excess calories. So a standard four-ounce stick of butter, containing 780 calories, could not enter the marketplace until the butter producer acquired 380 additional calorie-credits from someone having credits to sell.

On the other hand, the producer of a four-ounce block of frozen spinach would emit only 28 calories into the environment and could sell the unused 372 calorie-credits to the butter producer.

What? This isn’t a joke, is it? A marketplace for calories? I can only buy enough for what I should have? Who sets the values, since the “public policy” aspect almost guarantees that I’ll be treated like a child? You can have your dessert after you eat your spinach, Tony, but only if you have enough calorie credits left.

With such a program, high-density foods would become more expensive and low-density foods would become cheaper. Unlike a tax, the program could be designed so the net cost change to consumers was zero. Thus, consumers who alter their eating habits need pay no more to eat the same number of calories. The hope, which should be tested, is that the number of calories eaten would drop, owing to the difficulty of consuming large numbers of calories from low-density foods. This would then reduce food costs and, ultimately, health-care costs.

Ummm, I hate to burst the author’s little bubble of socialist blather, but free markets aren’t “designed”. They’re free to form to meet needs. Anything else is central planning. And that never works, at least not as well as a free market. So, essentially, a free market involves governmental babysitting of adults and their food consumption. Good thinking.

To avoid shocking the marketplace, the calorie-emission allowance could initially be set very high, say 190 calorie-credits per ounce. Reducing it slowly would give food producers time to adapt and to develop new products with lower energy densities.

And now we see why central planning never succeeds. Our plan should be designed to give food producers time to develop new products? Huh? “New products” in food means processed, pre-packaged. That’s what’s making us fat. How are food producers going to create new spinach? Hold on a minute, this is something like Weight Watchers, isn’t it. Deal-A-Meal? I’ll have to buy my food from the federal government, won’t I?

The industrial production of calories has been a boon to mankind. Famine has disappeared from much of the world. Efforts to control obesity must not threaten this spectacular achievement. But the current marketplace for calories is a classic failed market: The costs of being overweight are external to food prices.

The current marketplace for calories is a classic failed market? That’s nothing more than a propaganda slogan for the further infantilization of America into accepting more socialized public health. Horse hockey.

Economically, a calorie-emission trading program would have winners and losers. Some prospective losers would understand that change presents opportunity. They would welcome the program as an impetus to diversify and do the right thing for the public health. Potential losers having a narrower, self-serving vision might resist the program fiercely. We must hope that our political leaders, many of whom are sedentary, overweight and atherosclerotic, would have the courage and good health to face the barrage.

Prospective losers would suddenly see the light, eventually thanking those kind souls who forgave their wandering in the wilderness of poor food choices for so long. Everyone needs a savior. Thankfully, there are central planners interested in filling the need.

But, what if I really like stuffing mint chocolate chip ice cream and fried possum down my gullet? More so than good health or being slim? I have to sacrifice myself for the public health? I’d be a narrow-minded, self-serving glutton? I should hope that our political leaders act like the good parents that Karl Marx would want them to be? That’s fucking brilliant.

I think I’ll have cookies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner tomorrow.

Blinded by one part of a three-part equation

I’m sure Congress is quaking in its collective boots at President Bush’s latest threat:

President Bush said Friday he would use his power to veto spending bills if Congress does not cut the federal budget as he has asked.

In over five years in office, Bush has never vetoed any bill. But he said that restraining spending was crucial to cutting the deficit in half by 2009 as he has promised. “If necessary, I will enforce spending restraint through the exercise of the veto,” the president said.

Whew, that lightened my mood, washing the filth of warrantless wiretapping out of my immediate concern. Thankfully, the gut-busting continues:

“Our economy grows when the American people make the decisions about how to save, spend and invest their money,” he said. “To keep our economy creating jobs and opportunity, Congress needs to show its trust in the American people and make the tax relief permanent.”

Maybe President Bush should encourage the Congress to trust the American people in various endeavors where it not disobeys the Constitution treats citizens as immoral, incompetent children. It’s quaint, I know, but I think I’ll bring this quote back as the election year heats up and the Federal Marriage Amendment inevitably returns.