Demanding Collective Action

Posted on January 22, 2013 by alsanblog

In his second inaugural speech, President Obama calls for “collective action” on the part of the American people, claiming that:

For the American people can no more meet the demands of today’s world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation and one people.

So who does Obama think he’s kidding? The need for collective action and government is obvious to, oh, pretty much everybody in this country. We live in a highly interdependent society where individuals act collectively all the time.

Millions of people work together in things called “corporations” through which they collectively produce a myriad of products in large quantities that millions of other people need and want. And millions of people interact through things called “insurance com-panies” for the purpose of sharing the risk of large, unpredictable healthcare costs. Indeed, the collective activity conducted through voluntary cooperative associations in the U.S. is practically unlimited.

The question is not one of acting collectively or acting alone, but whether we want to regulate our collective action through decentralized institutions (e.g., markets, compe-tition, and self-government on the state level) or through a centralized authority that places 315 million citizens squarely under its thumb.

When Obama demands collective action by the American people, he is not calling for collective action to replace individual action. Rather, Obama is only knocking down a straw man to misrepresent the facts as he stubbornly clings to his vision of Big Govern-ment. And cling to it he will, despite all the historical evidence showing that his vision of centralized government means less freedom, stagnation, and eventual decline for all of us.

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Still Attacking Federal Employees

Posted on January 19, 2013 by alsanblog

Federal workers have been subject to a pay freeze for the last two years, but that’s apparently not good enough for Republicans in Congress, who now look to introduce legislation to prevent Obama’s plan to give employees a pay raise of, wait for it, 0.5%. According to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, such a pay raise would make out-of-control spending even worse, and he insists that “we simply can’t afford it.”

Let’s see, the pay raise would cost $11 billion over a ten-year period or about $1.1 billion annually out of a federal budget that calls for approximately $3.6 trillion of spending. So the savings here if the pay increase is prevented would be less than one-third of one-tenth of 1% of overall spending. This amount doesn’t even begin to rise to the level of a rounding error. With legislation like this, the Republicans seem to be as incoherent and whacked as the liberals.

But then again, the Republicans’ actions make perfect sense if budgetary concerns are a pretext for punishing government employees, who tend to support Democratic candidates and some of whom (only about one-third) join unions that contribute to Democratic campaigns. In fact, retaliation and punishment is about all that makes sense given the ridiculous level of “savings” claimed by Republicans.

Discriminating against employees on the basis of political views or political affiliation is a “prohibited personnel practice” if practiced by managers in the executive branch of the federal government. But Cantor and the other Republicans who continually attack federal employees work in the legislative branch, so they get a free pass. But we can still conclude that their obsession to retaliate and punish is nothing short of disgraceful.

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Defragmenting Healthcare

Posted on January 12, 2013 by alsanblog

Einer Elhauge, a healthcare expert at Harvard University, argues that we can lower healthcare costs and cut the deficit by “defragmenting” the system, by which he means replacing small group physician practices with large companies that combine hospitals and salaried physi-cians, similar to the HMO concept, but with fewer restrictions on integration. According to Elhauge, such integrated entities would operate more efficiently than small practices to coordinate patient care, improve quality, and dramatically reduce costs.

Large integrated organizations may indeed generate efficiencies, although liberals like Elhauge may be overstating the potential benefits, perhaps due to wishful thinking. But increased efficiency by providers will not, by itself, solve the cost problem. To lower costs, it would also be necessary to insure that these entities operate in competitive markets because any savings resulting from efficiencies would not be passed along to consumers, in the form of lower prices, in the absence of competition.

Of course, any government can contain costs without relying on markets and competition. It’s just a matter of implementing price controls and restricting access to care. But then what do we get? The historical evidence (as well as theory) shows that central control and planning leads to low quality, stagnation, and eventual decline. In healthcare, this would affect almost 20% of the economy. And the European experience, with apparently lower costs, doesn’t prove otherwise.

Because centrally planned economies do not work very well, the quality of healthcare in European countries with highly centralized systems most likely is not very good. If it seems that quality is high, then we have to suspect the reason is something other than central planning. For example, we might wonder if the quality could be due to free-riding on American innovation and the cost-shifting implied by this. If America goes the way of Europe, however, there will be no one left to shift costs to, and again, we can say hello to stagnation and eventual decline.

So Elhauge is only giving us half the story on controlling healthcare costs, which is very strange in so far as Elhauge, in addition to healthcare, is an expert in antitrust law. The WSJ has reported on the wave of consolidations in the healthcare industry due to Obamacare, yet Elhauge is silent on the prospect that our large, integrated, efficient healthcare companies might turn out to be monopolists in their respective geographic markets. But then again, maybe that’s not an issue for liberals:  after all, a small number of large companies would be easier for the central government to control.

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Brave Liberals

Posted on January 9, 2013 by alsanblog

So now Quentin Tarantino has a new movie, “Django Unchained,” which features depictions of slavery in the U.S. In interviews, Tarantino claims that the truth about slavery was a thousand times worse than that portrayed in the movie. But what’s the point of these depictions about an institution that ended almost 150 years ago? Do liberals actually believe that America is on the verge of returning to slavery, and that they are some sort of heroes fighting a constant battle to prevent it?

If the truth of slavery is of interest to Tarantino, maybe he could address the slavery that is actually alive and well today, not 150 years ago, in places like the Mideast and South Asia. The misogynists in those regions oppress and enslave women that, in the aggregate, creates more misery than anything experienced in America 150 years ago. Perhaps Tarantino’s next movie will be “Dwomen Unchained” featuring women getting revenge on their misogynist masters, but we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for that to happen.

It seems that liberals don’t really object to slavery, but only to a certain kind of slavery:  that which is practiced by white males of European ancestry. If the slave owner happens to be anybody else, liberals give the slave owners a free pass. For example, the Washington Post is always ready to publish photos, without any negative comment, of Middle Eastern women, covered from head to toe, as if women in such clothing is perfectly normal

And liberals ranging from Howard Zinn (“A People’s History of the United States“) to Steven Spielberg (“Amistad“) bend over backwards to soften their descriptions of the slavery enforced by non-whites. In fact, for these guys, such slavery is hardly slavery at all. Rather, it’s more like the old Seinfeld episode about the sitcom idea where Jerry gets into an accident and the other guy doesn’t have insurance, so the judge decrees that the other guy become Jerry’s butler.

But maybe liberals are bothered by non-white slavery, in which case their indifference is due to something else, perhaps lack of courage. It would take real courage for Hollywood liberals to stand up against the slavery that exists today in the world (after all, they might end up like Theo Van Gogh). Better to take the cowardly approach and focus instead on the much easier target of ancient American history. Long dead slave owners don’t present much of a threat to our liberal heroes as they strike their poses and pretend to care.

Depicting America’s slave owning past not only is safer for liberals, but provides another way for them to insult anyone who opposes the liberal “vision,” by yet again calling the opposition racists. Let’s see, the syllogism goes something like this:  the South’s slavery 150 years ago was racist, red states (which are conservative) tend to be located in the South, therefore conservatives today are racists. Such is the reasoning of liberals.

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Cyclists Are The New 1%

Posted on January 8, 2013 by alsanblog

For some time, the Washington D.C. area has ranked either first or second in the country for the worst traffic congestion, so of course the liberals in charge have worked hard to create even greater congestion by building the nation’s “largest, most successful bike-share program.” Although commuting by bicycle is far from anything that even remotely resembles mass transit, liberals spare no expense in creating bike-share programs, marking off bicycle lanes, allowing bicycles full use of traffic lanes, and even closing streets entirely to cars in favor of bicycles.

And all this to allow a sliver of a fraction of the population to go about as if we live in Saigon, circa 1940, to the detriment of the vast majority. It’s especially funny how the D.C. liberals look to Copenhagen for advice on creating a biking culture. Copenhagen is the place that for all practical purposes forces its citizens to ride bicycles, even in the winter. But not to worry, the benevolent rulers of Copenhagen give preference to snow removal of the bicycle lanes. Many of Copenhagen’s riders claim that they like riding in the winter, but this is unlikely as anyone who lives in a cold climate knows very well that the number of cyclists drops dramatically in the cold weather.

Cyclists are the commuting version of the 1%, and the continuing efforts of liberal authoritarians to force cycling down the throats of its citizens is another example of what liberals do best:  lower the quality of life for everyone.

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Giving Up The Constitution

Posted on January 5, 2013 by alsanblog

Writing in the NY Times, Louis Seidman, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University, suggests that we give up on the Constitution, because according to him, our “insistence on obedience to the Constitution” is the cause of our “broken” government. Seidman claims that obsession with the Constitution “saddles us with a dysfunctional political system,” which keeps us from “debating the merits of divisive issues” and inflames public discourse.

Seidman doesn’t really make much of an effort to explain what he means and why debating the Constitution and the structure of government prevents us from debating the merits of other issues. Indeed, the article is largely substance-free and incoherent, although Seidman manages to gratuitously insult James Madison and the other architects of our government. It seems that his article is nothing more than another effort by liberals to cast conservatives as obstructionists responsible for political gridlock, but this time dressed up in semi-scholarly language, as if that makes it legitimate.

According to Seidman, America has a long history of constitutional disobedience which he claims has helped the country to “grow and prosper.” And so Seidman imagines that lawlessness equals prosperity and that ignoring the Constitution is the way to go. He claims that the “deep-seated fear” [on the part of conservatives] that such disobedience would unravel our social fabric is mere “superstition.”

Seidman is right that America has ignored the Constitution, but rather than helping the country grow and prosper, it has only created the divisiveness that we see today. Seidman’s proposed remedy is actually the cause of today’s problems:  Government is broken not because we continue to blindly follow the Constitution or talk about following it, but because, beginning in the 1930s, we actually have ignored it, resulting in the loss of self-government.

Over a period of decades, we have transformed the original structure of the federal government in a fundamental way, from one based on decentralization to one based on centralized authority. And as healthcare, which is a local activity that accounts for almost 20% of the economy, comes under centralized control, the transformation will be almost complete. Seidman seems to be completely oblivious to this movement, and mistakenly identifies calls to adhere to the Constitution as the problem instead of the result of having ignored it.

Under the original decentralized structure of our government, states retained the right to legislate for the general welfare within their separate jurisdictions, but came together for certain, dare I say, enumerated purposes despite the divisiveness that existed among them (e.g., with respect to slavery). Decentralization ultimately didn’t prevent civil war over slavery, but slavery represents a special case. The morality of today’s issues and the divisiveness arising from them don’t compare to slavery.

We could therefore expect that a return to a decentralized structure of government would reduce the political divisiveness in this country, assuming that liberals could respect the idea of self-government and self-determination within the states, which may be an unrealistic assumption. Even if the states enjoyed more power, the arrogance of liberals and their desire to put everyone under their thumb may lead leaders in some states to intervene in the affairs of other states (e.g., if taxing and spending levels are deemed insufficient).

Seidman apparently likes parts of the Constitution, but it’s hard to say why as he seems to lack any kind of organizing principle. He’s no James Madison, that’s for sure. The fact that someone like Seidman teaches at a prestigious university is remarkable. With professors like this, it’s easy to understand the muddled thinking of Georgetown law grads such as Sandra Fluke – you know, the darling of the liberals who demands that the rest of us pay for her contraception.

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Liberals Still At It

Posted on January 2, 2013 by alsanblog

Boy, a person might think that liberals would take a break, at least during the holidays, from their muddled thinking, hypocrisy, and outright nastiness, but no such luck. For starters, the state of Colorado is busy drafting rules to require dog daycare and boarding facilities that are pool-equipped to provide each dog with a “personal flotation device” while in the water. But not just life jackets:  the proposed rules would also require a lifeguard on duty to watch over the doggies, and the bottom of the pool must be “clearly visible” through the water to insure an appropriate level of sanitation.

The rules, however, are still in their early stages. Indeed, the state may already be rethinking part of the rules. Kate Anderson, who is the program manager for the Pet Animal Care Facilities Program within Colorado’s Department of Agriculture, suggests that the state may not require both life jackets and lifeguards. Rather, the state may adopt an “either/or” approach as the rule-making process continues, which may take up to a year to complete. No doubt the liberals think of themselves as the font of reason by agreeing to an either/or approach, but in fact, the entire endeavor is absurd in the first place.

The fact that the rule-making will take up to a year shows that Colorado’s liberals are combining absurdity with incompetence – not a pretty sight. One of the solutions to the political divisiveness in America would be to reduce the power of the central government in favor of more self-government and self-determination by citizens in the various states. The Colorado example, however, shows that the liberal problem would still exist at the state level. But some states still respect the concept of freedom and so people who feel oppressed would have some options.

Elsewhere, the liberals at the Journal News of White Plains, NY thought that it would be wonderful to post a map with the names and addresses of all handgun permit owners in Westchester and Rockland counties, apparently in response to the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. This is a very nasty strategy that liberals especially love:  for example, in California, they posted the names and addresses (with maps) of citizens who supported the 2008 state referendum that banned gay marriage. Of course, the goal with posting names is to intimidate those who disagree with one or more aspects of the liberal “vision.” It’s the cyber equivalent of the thuggery practiced by authoritarian regimes in places such as Venezuela. In this instance, though, bloggers have struck back by posting the names and addresses of the newspapers’ employees (hah).

Not to be outdone, left-winger Michael Moore decided to use the shooting at Sandy Hook to insult half the people in this country by calling them racist. Even though race is obviously not a factor in the various mass shootings that we’ve seen, Moore nevertheless somehow concludes, in his twisted and incoherent mind, that racism is the cause. Liberals and left-wingers never tire of labeling as racist those who oppose their views, even after the election is long over and Obama has prevailed for a second term. One would think that Moore, working in a creative industry as he does, would be able to come up with a more original insult.

Apparently spurred by the shootings at Sandy Hook, a number of Hollywood liberals recorded a message encouraging viewers to “Demand a Plan” for ending gun violence. Someone else then responded to this message by posting a video that juxtaposed the serious, somber call by each celebrity to end the violence with a film clip of the same celebrity acting in a scene depicting the most outrageous gun violence. The response was very effective at illustrating the hypocrisy of Hollywood liberals.

The Hollywood hypocrisy is so astounding that one can only wonder what these celebrities were thinking, or if, in fact, they’re even capable of rational thought. Until these liberals call for ending Hollywood’s culture of violence, refuse to accept parts in films with gratuitous, graphic violence, and donate a significant portion of what they earned from such films, then we shouldn’t pay any attention to them at all. Rather, as the creator of the response video suggests, we should perhaps demand that such celebrities go f*** themselves.

Finally, more nastiness comes from the authoritarians in Russia who passed a law prohibiting Americans from adopting Russian children, in retaliation against U.S. sanctions targeting Russian human rights abusers. This loathsome action will harm Russian children who would otherwise be adopted by Americans and arguably, in the aggregate, exceeds the destruction wrought at Sandy Hook. So much for the “reset” of relations with Russia, but then, what should we expect? After all, taking the lead for the U.S. in the reset with Russia was the same Hillary Clinton who only pretended to take responsibility for the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi.

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Misrepresenting Medicare

Posted on December 12, 2012 by alsanblog

Liberals seem to be reading from the same broken script with respect to Medicare costs. First, Ruth Marcus and Ezra Klein claim that Medicare costs are “lower than those of private insur-ers” (here and here) and now Matthew Yglesias claims that every dollar the federal govern-ment saves by moving people off Medicare (by raising the eligibility age) would be “offset by about two dollars of increased spending elsewhere in the system.” Liberals apparently are making these claims to create the impression that the federal government somehow operates healthcare more effectively and efficiently than the private sector.

But these claims are hogwash:  total healthcare costs in the system will not significantly change should people be required to work an additional year or two before becoming eligible for Medicare. The source of payment doesn’t affect the total amount paid for healthcare. The same doctors and hospitals who treat Medicare patients also treat privately insured patients and these providers treat each group in exactly the same way. Providers don’t suddenly become less efficient when working with private patients. Also, most healthcare spending is concentrated in the last six months of life and increasing the eligibility age of Medicare a year or two has no impact on this.

The government’s Medicare costs may appear to be lower than the private sector because the government arbitrarily fixes the price at a low level. Providers accept these prices and then proceed to offset them by “shifting” their costs to the private sector, so that employers and employees covered by private insurance pay more than they otherwise would. The higher private sector prices are properly viewed as a hidden tax on private health insurance which then allows government to keep Medicare payments at artificially low levels. Yet this fact doesn’t seem to make it into the liberal propaganda.

Rather, liberals continue to mislead on this point in order to confuse readers and help bring about the liberal “vision” of healthcare (i.e., a vision that places 315 million people under the thumb of the central government). The liberal vision is nothing more than central planning, complete with price controls (for almost 20% of the economy) and restrictions on access to care. Based upon historical evidence, centralized approaches never outperform decentralized approaches (e.g., that rely on markets and competition), and centralization is guaranteed to lead to low quality, stagnation, and eventual decline of the entire industry. Quite the vision, indeed.

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Medicare Eligibility Age

Posted on December 8, 2012 by alsanblog

It’s always bizarre to see liberals like Matthew Yglesias ignore the historical evidence and argue that central government, with its central planning and price controls, will do a better job at managing the economy than a system organized around markets and competition. Yet here he is again, advocating more central control over the almost 20% of the economy that we call “healthcare,” this time singing the praises of Medicare and how our wonderful, benevolent central government gives Medicare recipients such great prices because of its bulk purchasing power.

Sorry, but the purchasing power argument isn’t convincing.  Medicare prices are lower than prices under private insurance plans because the central government simply fixes prices at low levels. Providers accept these low prices knowing they can turn around and “shift” their costs to the private plans to make up the shortfall. Yglesias doesn’t seem to realize that when the private sector no longer exists, there will be no one left to shift the costs to, and at that point, if he thinks that federal bureaucrats will manage 20% of the economy more efficiently and innovatively than a competitive market, then he’s hopelessly confused.

But that doesn’t stop Yglesias from advocating that we should lower the retirement age, maybe even to zero. Yglesias also suggest that another more viable idea would be to bring back the so-called “public option” concept that Congress rejected when it passed ObamaCare. This is the idea that Barney Frank explained would serve as a stepping stone for liberals to eventually bring about a single payer healthcare system in this country. No matter how you look at it, Yglesias is bent on extending direct government control over 315 million people located across the country (for what is, in fact, a local activity)

It would be better for America to reject the liberal “vision,” and instead organize healthcare around a system based on markets and competition among insurers, providers, medical device manufacturers, etc. Not all healthcare markets today are necessarily competitive, but that only means we need better enforcement of the antitrust laws. Any two-bit government can implement price controls and restrict access to healthcare to “control” costs. But then the question becomes what would we have when all is said and done. People should realize that the plans of liberals like Yglesias would give us nothing more than low quality, stagnation, and eventual decline.

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Spending Is The Problem

Posted on December 6, 2012 by alsanblog

In his latest column, George Will cites to an article by economist, Jeffrey Dorfman, in which Dorfman refers to some interesting facts about the deficit. In the last year of the Clinton administration, which was the last time the budget was balanced, Dorfman points out that spending was $1.94 trillion and revenues were $2.10 trillion. If we had continued with the Clinton budget, adjusting for population growth and inflation, today’s equivalents would be $2.77 trillion in spending and $3.0 trillion in revenues.

But federal spending today is actually $3.76 trillion, which is $987 billion higher than the Clinton-era projection, while revenues are slightly lower, coming in at $2.67 trillion. Liberals today claim that the deficit problem is lack of revenue, but as Dorfman concludes, these numbers seem to be pretty good proof that spending is the real culprit. The fiscal cliff would replace the missing revenues, but we would still have a significant deficit due to the out-of-control spending. On many occasions, Obama has called for a return to Clinton-era tax levels, but he really needs to return to Clinton-era spending levels.

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