Blog Comments

Like many people, I have been reading various commentaries, stories and blogs about this week's Supreme Court oral arguments on ObamaCare. For the most part these stories and blogs are well reasoned, whichever side of the argument they support. The comments attached to these stories and blogs are another thing altogether. The amount of unreasoned, emotional, ideologically-driven vitriol to be found in these comments is amazing.

Of course, comment writers are self-selected, so they hardly represent the population as a whole. Most people, myself included, hardly ever write a comment to an article or blog. Still, it is a reminder that many in the general population don't care about reasoned arguments, or facts, or apparently even about the exact wording of the Constitution. Whatever their ideological bias (and both sides seem to be represented about equally), their reactions (on both sides) are knee-jerk emotional and ideological reactions, not thoughtful ones.

This raises again the perennial question of whether a democracy can survive if most of the voters are illogical, emotional, and uneducated about the issues.

Is a single-payer health care plan the solution?

Now that the ill-conceived ObamaCare health care law is in danger of being gutted by the Supreme Court, some liberals are back to proposing a single-payer (government run) health care plan for the nation, as a way of getting all American’s covered. What about that idea?

First of all, there are some realities (not discussed much by politicians) about health care.

(1) There is no possible way the nation can afford to give the very best state-of-the-art medical care to every citizen. Advanced medical care is very expensive, and we have a lot of people in the country. So one way or another any government plan is going to have to make painful decisions, ration some treatments, and deny some people expensive care (the “death panel” scare). In the private market, this is done by economics. If one can’t afford the treatment, or at least the insurance that would cover the treatment, one forgoes it. What are the political ramifications of a government bureaucrat making those decisions for a person?

(2) Cost control by capping hospital and physician payments will simply result in fewer physicians, and perhaps fewer hospitals, even while they have more people to service. Just as rent control causes scarcity of rental properties (for reasons obvious to everyone except the politicians who impose them), and price controls cause scarcity of the product, so capping physician incomes will simply reduce the incentive for people to undergo the arduous and expensive training needed to become a physician.

(3) In no other area has government control of an activity ever proved more efficient than market controls. There are obvious reasons for this – government agencies lack completely the competitive market forces that keep private endeavors lean and cost-competitive, and make them attend to the needs of their clients. Hence government agencies always become bloated and expensive, and relatively inefficient in delivering the services they are supposed to deliver, and relatively unresponsive to their clients. Why would a government health care agency be any different?

(4) This is not a new experiment. Europe has many examples of government-run health care programs, and so one can simply look at how they have done. In general, they have not done as well. In a few areas they seem better than our system, but in many areas they are far worse. Do we really want to have a system where the waiting list to see a (government) doctor is measured in months? A 2006 British study showed that on average British women diagnosed with breast cancer waited 122 days to begin treatment – and that was for a diagnosed disease.

A 2009 British study reported:

Long wait times have become second nature, despite dangerous consequences. In the period between 2001 and 2006, the United Kingdom saw the median wait time increase from 44 to 51 days for hospital admission after the decision to admit had been made. In 2004, according to a BBC report, waiting times in Scotland and England were 8 months for cataract surgery, 11 months for hip surgery, 12 months for knee replacement, 5 months for repairing a slipped disk, and 5 months for hernia operations. In 2007, in 42% of the localities surveyed, hospitals had to turn women in childbirth away because their maternity wards were full.

In the face of these facts, it is clear that a government-run single-payer system is going to have problems, and while it may increase the number of people nominally covered, it is going to reduce the quality of care for everyone. (as one wag said, socialism allows everyone to share the misery equally). And it may bankrupt the government, if Medicare hasn’t already done that.

I’m certainly not clear what the solution ought to be. The assumption that everyone in the nation “deserves” the best health care is clearly flawed. We don’t argue that everyone in the nation “deserves” the grandest possible house or car, or that every child in the nation “deserves” to go to Harvard or Yale or MIT. Those arguments are clearly absurd. So why isn’t the argument that everyone “deserves” the best health care equally absurd? Perhaps people “deserve” the level of health care (or health insurance) they are willing and able to pay for. If they can’t pay for what they really want, it is probably because of other life choices they have made – to spend their money elsewhere, to not get advanced education, to not take a high-paying and high pressure job, etc. etc.(Yes, yes, I know that liberals will immediately argue that some people simply couldn’t do those things because of their abilities and circumstances – true, but irrelevant in the real world, which is at bottom a competitive world.)

Perhaps there is some “minimum” level of health care that ought to be available from the government to everyone, but beyond that people can choose (or not) to pay for or buy insurance for better and more complete treatment. That is more or less how Medicare works now, but the Medicare “minimum” level is pretty high, probably higher than the nation can afford in the long term.

In any case, it ought to be evident that the “single-payer” government system of which some liberals are so ideologically enamored is not likely to be the solution, and may indeed make the situation much worse.

Recommended: The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy

Vladislav Inozemtsev has a fascinating piece in The March/April 2012 issue of The American Interest, The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: The main threats to democracy lie within liberal societies themselves. This is not an oversimplified "waiting room reading" piece. It will take work to follow his argument, but it is worth the work.

In essence, Inozemtsev argues that democracy works so long as (a) majorities can change, so that those who are in the minority at one point can reasonably expect to be in the majority at other points (otherwise it simply becomes the tyranny of a permanent majority), and (b) everyone sees themselves as members of a single national group. As soon as these conditions cease to hold, democracy is in trouble. So one of the things that most threatens our current democracies, according to Inozemtsev, is the liberal support of multiculturalism, which leads to groups thinking of themselves as separate "tribes" (or in the case of immigrants, helps them maintain an identity separate from the common national identity and inhibits their assimilating into the common culture). Thus instead of all of us simply being Americans, some groups have been encouraged to grow or maintain separate identities as "African-Americans" or "Hispanic-Americans" or "Asian-Americans" or.......

His arguments, as I said, take some work to follow, but his points are worth considering and thinking about. Many European nations are having serious troubles because they have been culturally resistant to assimilating immigrants from other cultures, with the result that they harbor within their boarders large "ghettos" of unassimilated foreigners who do not share the same cultural or political views as the rest of the nation. And of course there are always political leaders willing to use "multiculturalism" as a means to build and maintain their own political power base within such a separated group, and therefor to continue to encourage the culture separateness of their group.

Recommended: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

In 1994 Charles Murray, with the late Richard Herrnstein , wrote “the Bell Curve”, a book widely derided by the politically correct for a simple statement of fact about racial differences in intelligence scores (not surprising, since such tests are culture biased). That missed their essential point, which was that forces were already at work in America to vacuum “the best and brightest” out of all classes of society and isolate them as an intellectual elite. Murray’s latest book looks at how that process has progressed over the period 1960 to 2010, as America has increasingly split into a highly educated, highly paid class of “knowledge workers” on the one hand, and everyone else on the other hand (the 99% of recent protests). Increasingly the highly educated, highly paid knowledge workers work together, live together in separate communities, intermarry, have children who are similarly educated and who intermarry, and in general are both culturally and genetically drifting away from the rest of the nation.

This split has had good effects (the vitality of Silicon Valley, and the increasing world competitiveness of America in the technology fields) and bad effects (the breakdown of critical social values in the rest of the nation), and Murray explores these. In particular, he worries that the elite class, out of liberal ecumenical political correctness ("who am I to tell other people how to live"), has ceased to promulgate key social values (like the work ethic) to the rest of the nation, with disastrous consequences.

This is not a question of something that social policy should fix – it probably can’t fix it. It is more a case of seeing where the nation is going, and thinking about the natural consequences of this shift. Well worth reading.

Reductio ad Absurdum

The Oklahoma State legislature is about to pass a law declaring "personhood" from the moment of conception, thereby making it legally a crime to harm, in any way, a fetus of any age, including apparently even at the 1-cell stage. This is, of course, simply a way for abortion foes to try once again to make abortion illegal, so that women who want to end an unwanted pregnancy will again have to go to dangerous back-alley abortionists. Never mind that a large majority of the nation supports the legal right of women to end an unwanted pregnancy.

In Oklahoma, if this law passes, a mother can presumably be jailed for child abuse or even murder if she smokes, drinks, takes drugs, engages in any sport or activity that might lead to a miscarriage, etc., etc, etc.

The Catholic Church has held this position for centuries, arguing even further that to interfere with natural conception (birth control) is to prevent a sacred life from coming into being. Expand this argument logically, and it should be a sin for any man to pass a fertile woman without inseminating her, because to do otherwise is to not allow a potential "sacred life" to come into being. And a celibate priesthood is the worst offender of all, preventing all those "potential sacred lives" from coming into being. Clearly this line of reasoning is absurd.

In fact, there is no "magic" moment when a single cell becomes a human; it is, as most things in nature are, a long, slow, complex process taking years in which the initial cell becomes "more and more" human each day, rather than there being any magic moment before which it is just tissue and after which it is suddenly human. So to arbitrarily declare, whether by religious dogma or legislative fiat, that some particular moment is the transition is absurd.

Of course logical argument really has little to do with this issue; it is really an unthinking emotional issue. Just as people can get all worked up about clubbing baby seals to death (because they are cute), but don't seem at all worried about poisoning the rats in their house (they aren't cute), so people will put their money and energy into the fight to save unborn fetuses, even while the world is awash in full human beings who are starving to death (but babies are cute, and starving, emaciated adults in Africa aren't).

At root, this is really yet another issue about controlling women. No one is worried about all the wasted male sperm that "might have been sacred humans". Nor is it the males who have to pay most of the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy. Still, one should never underestimate the absurdities than can be perpetrated by emotion and ideology.

Does A Candidate’s Religion Matter?

There is a good deal of quiet unease about Mitt Romney being a Mormon, and what that would mean if he became president, just as there was a good deal of unease when Jack Kennedy, a Catholic, ran for president. And certainly, if a Muslim ran for American president in today’s world, there would be a good deal of unease about that as well. Moreover, an avowed atheist probably could not win the nomination in either party, and almost certainly not the presidency

Leave aside the obvious point that many – perhaps most – politicians are probably nowhere near as religious as they pretend to be to the voting public, the question still remains whether a candidate’s religious beliefs are valid topics for public discussion and examination during an election.

We in America follow an interesting double standard in regard to discussions about other people’s religions. On the one hand it is generally considered impolite, insensitive, and politically incorrect to subject someone else’s religion to critical examination. On the other hand much of the nation seems to have no hesitation at all in supporting and participating in missionary efforts to spread their own peculiar version of religion to others around the world. Seventh-Day Adventists and Mormons go door to door across the nation every day, and almost all mainstream Christian denominations support missionaries around the world. Yet as I have noted before, any missionaries’ basic message is “whatever you have believed up until now is wrong – I have the truth”.

Now it is clear that religious leaders in many religions would like to use their influence on political leaders to impose their religious beliefs on everyone. In places like the Middle East it is easy to see that they succeed. In our country, Catholic bishops have tried and still try to force or persuade Catholic politicians to support the church view on issues like abortion and gay marriage, though their success has been mixed at best. More conservative evangelical Protestants have also tried to use their influence on social issues that matter to them, including abortion and gay marriage..

Give that is the case, it seems to me it is relevant for voters to ask what issues a candidate’s religious views are likely to affect. I certainly take that into account when considering any of the Christian religious right candidates. I would certainly consider that if a very devout Muslim or an ultra-orthodox Jew were running for office. So why should Mitt Romney’s Mormonism get a pass?

Now there is the question of just what Mormon views a Mormon president might be inclined to impose on the rest of the nation. No doubt he would seek to protect the Mormon Church’s vast wealth and holdings from taxation or any intrusive federal inspection or control, probably in the context of defending all religions from such intrusions, but is that any different than what a Catholic or Protestant or Jewish president would do for their religions?

Certainly some of the Mormon dogma is absurd, but is it any more absurd than some of the Christian or Jewish or Hindu or Muslim or…or….dogma? I don’t think so. All organized religions seem to accumulate absurd dogma that the faithful are nevertheless supposed to believe, or at least pretend in public to believe. (The followers of any of these religions can clearly see the absurdities in the other religions, but strangely seem blind to equal absurdities in their own beliefs). In that respect Mormonism is no different than the rest of the organized religions.

There is some discomfort with some Mormon practices, such as the absolute (theological) domination men have over women, but is that really any different than Catholic or Jewish or Muslim (theological) domination of men over women? Or than the suppression of women implied in some of the Protestant religious right movements under the “family values” rubric (which seem in practice to mean “women’s place is in the home ONLY”)?

Looked at dispassionately, I see little in the likely policies of a Mormon president that would be all that different from the policies one might expect from a Protestant or Catholic or Jewish president. But it certainly seems to me valid to explore and publically discuss a candidate’s religious views, and how they might affect her or his policies in office, whatever the religion.

Recommended: Has College Become Too Easy

Clarence Page has an interesting short piece in the Chicago Tribune today entitled Has college Become Too Easy?. He references a recent study that shows that a significant proportion of college students make no significant gain in their critical thinking or communication skills over four years of college. Considering what those four years of college probably cost, one wonders why people keep sending their children to college.

A proposed undergraduate science/engineering curriculum

I have suggested to several people lately that American undergraduate education is, in general, not worth what it costs. It’s not that a college degree doesn’t open up better job opportunities – it obviously does. It is that much of the education one gets during those undergraduate years (at $30,000 - $50,000 or more a year) is of little practical use in either life or the workplace. And, in fact, I would argue that the real reason for all those required “distribution credits” isn’t really to “broaden the liberal education”, but instead to assure adequate enrollment in less poplar subjects and courses, and keep students in college longer (producing more income for the college). I note that in Europe an undergraduate degree only takes six semesters.

I have argued that at least for the sciences and advanced engineering, probably something like four semesters would be adequate to prepare people to enter graduate school, if those four semesters were packed with practical subjects. So what “practical” undergraduate subjects would I include in those four semesters? Of course they would continue to take science or engineering courses, but here is a suggested list to of additional subjects to add to their undergraduate curriculum:

(1) Continuing math, with particular attention to probability and statistics. Most people, including even some “statisticians” don’t really understand probability and statistics. Certainly most gamblers don’t, most lottery ticket buyers don’t, most investors don’t and most journalists don’t. That is why there are “lies, damn lies, and statistics”, and why statistical measures are so often completely misunderstood and misused in popular and political writing and argument, and even by some otherwise very competent scientists.

(2) Technical writing. Most Americans are abysmal at writing, and this is especially true of engineers and scientists, for whom nevertheless clear, concise, organized, accurate, readable writing is very important.

(3) Basic civil law. Everybody with a college education ought to understand how to read and understand a contract or a mortgage, make a will, form a simple corporation, write a note, etc, and what to expect (and not expect) from a lawyer.

(4) Run a meeting. It is amazing how few people can organize and run an efficient meeting, with a clear objective, tight management of time, effective capture and assignment of actions and issues to be worked after the meeting, etc. That is why meetings so often are such a long, drawn-out waste of time. But this is a trainable skill, of immense value in the workplace. Moreover, even if one is only a participant in a meeting, rather than its leader, one can help improve an ineffective meeting if one understands the dynamics of meetings.

(5) Management A - people. At some point many of these graduates will need to manage people, either in their own company or in a corporation. They need to learn how to mentor people, assess them realistically, understand them in the workplace context, use their strengths and cover for their weaknesses, encourage them, help them work in teams, and even occasionally discipline them. And indeed even when not managers they need to learn to work effectively with others, and interact effectively with their own manager. This is a trainable skill that so very few people seem to have.

(6) Management B - projects. The course above is about how to manage people effectively and get the best out of them. This course focuses instead on the mechanics of management, the issues a good manager needs to attend to: budgeting and budget tracking, scheduling and schedule tracking, employee development, time management, action capture and tracking, etc.

(7) The sociology of corporations and businesses– A course to prepare people to function within the corporate culture, to understand office politics, to gain some basic skills in how to successfully advance a point of view or a proposed project within an organization, what really matters to the corporate structure and how to leverage that, how corporations decide whom to promote, etc, etc. I have never seen such a course, but I can see what ought to be the content, and I can see how immensely useful it would be to newly-graduated college students who are so naïve about how things really work.

(8) A course on becoming an entrepreneur. How to strike out on one’s own as a contract specialist, or form a new company. What needs to be done, where to find financing, how to build an effective business case, what the legal issues are, where to find talent, how new companies typically fail and how to avoid that, etc, etc. This would be a fascinating course to assemble, and ideally would include talks by real successful (and perhaps unsuccessful as well) entrepreneurs on how they did it and what they overcame.

This post focuses on science and engineering education. Clearly other fields might have other requirements, though in fact many of the topics I have suggested would be of use to almost anyone entering the world of work.

This video clip from a recent hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee about the administration's 2013 budget is quite revealing. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius clearly either doesn't know what is happening, or is trying her best to avoid making admissions about the ballooning costs of ObamaCare that she knows would be damaging to the administration.

Whitening Teeth and Freedom

I was applying Listerine teeth whitening strips to my teeth this morning (don’t ask why) and thinking about how our teeth yellow so slowly as we age that one doesn’t realize it is happening. And using over-the-counter teeth whitening strips the effect is reversed so slowly that one can’t really notice any difference day-to-day, though in the end the teeth are, in fact, significantly whiter.

It occurred to me that the same is true of our freedoms and civil liberties in this nation. I was reading a piece on the web that argued that the ObamaCare individual mandate (that REQUIRES everyone to buy health insurance) is indeed constitutional, and detailed convincingly all the court precedents that support this. In fact, the interstate commerce clause of the constitution has been stretched and stretched again over the decades, by one small extension after another, until it really does (based on legal precedent) allow Congress to REQUIRE American citizens to do just about anything. Like teeth yellowing, it has happened so slowly that few noticed and even fewer objected.

Think about it. We now torture (water-board) prisoners (though the justice department argues it is legal). We now execute Americans and others with missiles from the air, without trials and without declaring war (though the justice department argues it is legal). We now confiscate property (houses, cars, property) associated with drug running, even if the property belongs to someone else who was unaware of the criminal activity (though the justice department argues this is legal). We now bomb countries like Libya without a Congressional declaration of war (though the administration argues this is legal). We incarcerate prisoners at Guantanamo for decades without trial (though the Justice department argues this is legal). Our phones and emails can be tapped, and we can be followed with GPS devices attached to our cars and phones on the basis of warrants issued by secret star chamber proceedings, or in some cases no warrants at all. What happened to the “illegal search and seizure” clause of the Constitution?

How did we get here? 50 or 100 years ago these actions would have been unthinkable to the American public, yet now it goes on with only a few grumbles from a few fringe complainers. For the most part we quietly accept it, as we will no doubt quietly accept the ObamaCare mandate, if the Supreme Court doesn’t overturn it this fall.

It seems to me that like teeth yellowing, we have allowed American civil liberties to be eroded decade after decades, each step so small we hardly noticed, each step justified by eminently reasonable arguments and supported by judicial review, until we have arrived at such an invasion of personal liberty that the next small step (like the ObamaCare individual mandate) hardly matters.

I find this an alarming thought, and it has made me look again at the “extreme” views of libertarians like Ron Paul. Maybe his views on liberty aren’t so extreme after all. Maybe what is really extreme is the degree to which we have allowed ourselves to be brainwashed, one tiny reasonable step after another, into accepting one government curtailment after another on our Constitutional liberties and rights for freedom. Maybe it is the “reasonable”, “mainstream”, commonly-accepted, widely-held political views of our nation that have become extreme.

Recommends: Life of the Party

Ryan Lizza has a thoughtful piece in the New Yorker entitled Life of the Party: Can the G.O.P. save itself? It is an interesting exploration of how the nominating process has evolved over recent decades, and the problems that evolution has created.

As near as I can tell, the Republican Party is hell-bent on become a fringe party. Its current base is certainly energetic, but hardly large enough to give it a majority in a Presidential election, or even give it control of Congress. Yet the party seems more and more determined to exclude anyone who doesn't agree absolutely with all of its social and political views. That seems to me a recipe for disaster.

Here we have a party who simultaneously argues that government interferes too much in our lives, and yet wants government to enforce on everyone all sorts of (their own) social and religious positions. Here we have a party periodically horrified about the possibility that someone might impose Sharia law on all Americans, yet perfectly willing to impose Christian principles on all Americans. Here we have a party outraged by the growing Federal debt, yet unwilling to do anything effective (raise taxes, cut subsidies, reduce entitlements) about the problem.

Of course, if the state of the Republican party weren't worrying enough, the Democratic Party is just as nutty and out-of-touch on other issues, but at least it doesn't seem to be (currently) self-destructing.

Recommended: Mormon ritual is no threat to Jews

There has been some fuss recently around the revelation that some Mormon church has “baptized by proxy” Anne Frank and a few other Holocaust victims. I think the article Mormon ritual is no threat to Jews is right on.

I have in my time been blessed by a Hindu priest and prayed for by Catholic friends, though I am neither Hindu nor Catholic. I hardly feel offended; indeed I very much appreciate the supportive thoughts that were behind these blessings and prayers. I don’t think such actions impinged on any way on my own religion or my own culture.

When I enter a synagogue for a bar mitzvah or a wedding I put on a yarmulke as a sign of respect for that religion, if I enter a mosque I take off my shoes as a sign of respect for that religion, though I am neither Jewish nor Muslim. It is just good manners. It doesn’t mean that I accept their theology, just that I respect their culture.

If Mormons want to baptize people who are already dead, I hardly think it is a matter for great outrage. In fact, I really don’t think it matters one bit to the people who are dead. It might be a bit insensitive to the living for the Mormons to presume to “save” people of other faiths (implying that their own faith isn’t good enough), but it hardly warrants a great deal of fuss. And in fact most monotheistic religions are guilty of thinking that theirs is the only “true” religion, and all others are in error, so the Mormons are hardly alone in this intolerance.

Recommended: Russia's Shifting Political Landscape

I highly recommend STRATFOR's recent 4-part series on Russia's Shifting Political Landscape.. (here are links to Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4).

There is a tendency in the American press to dismiss Putin as just a ex-KGB thug, arranging for rigged elections, but that is far too simplistic. In fact Putin is a talented and adroit political operative walking a knife-edge line between various factions in the Kremlin. He is not an all-powerful dictator like Stalin was; he has to balance opposing forces within his own administration, not unlike Obama in American politics. This series gives a good assessment of the forces and issues he faces, and how he is going about keeping things working and keeping his influence.

Recommended: The World America Made

Robert Kagan's new 2012 book The World America Made is well worth reading. He argues that the world is the way it is today (largely democratic, largely liberal, largely at peace) because of America, and that if America were to "disappear" as a world power, the world would be much different (and probably much worse) than it is today. He remarks on the unusual fact that the world as a whole generally accepts, and even welcomes, America's overwhelming military power as a stabilizing force in the world, whereas historically the rise of a superpower has generally instigated vigorous efforts by other nations to build a countervailing or balancing force opposing it (the "balance of power" tactic followed in Europe for much of its history).

Of course America makes mistakes, and Americans are generally uncomfortable with the position as "the world's policeman". And of course there is always a highly vocal minority that thinks everything America does is bad or evil. But on balance, Kagan argues, the world is far better off for the relative stability America provides, and for the liberal social values it models. He makes a convincing case for this position, and it is well worth reading.