Jun 06 2008

Events will trump policy in the end

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 12:28 pm

I commented here about short memory of the public, and the power of events to overwhelm policy and message.

This article argues that the “right” must craft a new message, a new set of outcomes, etc.

“While the factions of the GOP don’t all have to agree on each bit of policy, there has to be more than a process we tend to agree upon – we need an outcome that a Republican government is working toward. When we were in power, when we had the reins, we failed to achieve outcomes that Americans wanted, and thus, as Winston’s column notes, we were ‘fired’. Luckily, we still have a chance to prove why we should be hired again.”

It’s worth reading the whole thing, but:

I don’t think the woes of the right are about policy and politicians, at least not mainly. They are about events.

Republicans DID achieve outcomes during the Bush administration that Americans would have said they wanted in 2002. Americans would have said they wanted to prevent more terrorist attacks on US soil, they would have wanted a strongly growing economy to rebound from the effects of 9/11, etc. Americans got both of these things. A crafting of message that included both of those things in 2001 would have been perceived as a great success, for a few years, until it was overtaken by events that diverted the attention of the public.

But it was, after all, events that toppled the Republicans more than simple policy disagreements and message communication failure. Hard times in Iraq, high gas prices, specific scandals, economic woes, Katrina, etc. Yes, better policy in fighting the Iraq war might have reduced some the negative events. I don’t know what the Republicans could have done about high gasoline prices, short of persuading enough of congress to vote for drilling and refinery construction. It’s hard to survive personal scandals on the Right, simply because people expect more from the Right. And perhaps better managing of the message regarding the economy and Katrina would have helped… and it would have helped to send in about 100 helicopters dropping water and food in the first 12 hours, too. Still… no future oriented policy planner could have foreseen the fact of Katrina, and the success with which it would be manipulated to impugn Bush, and by extension, Republicans.

To put it simply, Republicans didn’t lose the debate on the merits, they lost the public trust for failure to respond to events that were difficult or impossible to predict, and for being the event, sometimes, particularly in overspending, earmarking, scandals, etc., none of which were ever a part of policy as such.

$6.00 gas (or $8.00!), another serious terrorist attack, obvious success in Iraq (so extreme even the MSM can’t ignore it), etc., will change things. And if the past is any guide, there will be events no one can foresee now, perhaps in categories we can’t anticipate. The politicians who appear to have the strongest responses to these are the ones the public will follow, regardless of previous policy/message management. Witness how the public did follow Bush for a few years, even though his stated previous policy had been to avoid nationbuilding, overuse of the military, etc. He sounded almost isolationist at times, and was singularly non-muscular in his response to the Chinese forcing down one of our military planes and holding the crew. But Bush’s new policy on terrorism, popular though it was at the time, did not insulate him from events, and his failure was in not responding to them correctly, not in his initial policy formulations.

The MSM can manage perception of events to a higher degree than we might wish, but they cannot insulate the political left from their effect permanently. The main “skill” strong Republican politicians need is the ability to respond to unexpected events from a principled understanding of their own policies. Policies planned years in advance, along with means of communicating them, are fine… but the lack of these is not what did in the Republican congress, nor what has torpedoed Bush’s ratings.

So I resist the notion that Republicans have to craft a new message, new policies, new perspectives, though perhaps we need to demand that the Republicans we elect be more faithful to the old ones. And a better job of communicating, including permanent engagement with an often hostile media, is critical. But it needs to be more about communicating facts and concepts, and less about buzz terms and “crafted messages”. We need a LOT more Tony Snows who believe it and sound like it, and a lot fewer Scott McClellans, who apparently didn’t believe it, which is why he so often didn‘t sound like it.

It only takes about a minute to explain to anyone why rent control produces shortages in housing. It’s as clear as two plus two equals four. Many issues are like this, but for some reason too many people on the Right feel like they must use the vocabulary of the left to defend themselves. They’re afraid to be seen as mean if they turn to the short-term beneficiaries of rent control and say, “Why are you so selfish?”

The Left cannot be outdone in the implementation of smoke and mirrors, but it can be countered with facts and consistently strong perspectives on them, fearlessly communicated by people who believe in them. A “crafted message” by people who don’t, and are trying to create something to engage the public superficially, just won’t do the job.

hat tip: Powerline

UPDATE: Remember when it looked like Clinton was a goner in 1995, after the Republican takeover of Congress? He was able to resuscitate himself by his response to the Oklahoma City bombing, which allowed him to play to his greatest political strengths. He did not win re-election on policy, or even message, exactly, but by being himself in response to an event that didn’t reveal his weaknesses, and emphasized his strengths.

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Jun 06 2008

Some changes

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 11:23 am

I'm still working on the formatting, etc., for the blog. I've made a few
changes. Let me know what you think!

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Jun 05 2008

World War II: the Bad War?

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 9:34 pm

Victor Davis Hanson, the well-known historian, has written an article at Real Clear Politics, regarding recent revisionist attempts to criticize how the Allies got into World War II, as well as how they fought it, attempts being made both from the left and the right to create, without quite saying so, some kind of moral equivalency between the Allies and the Axis.

Essentially, the argument is that if the Versailles agreement that ended WWI had been more “fair”, and if the Allies had not made unenforceable security guarantees to Poland, and more or less let Hitler have what he wanted, the war could have been avoided. After all, what interest did France or England have in defending Poland? Buchanan makes other, somewhat more subtle arguments, but they boil down to assessing Hitler as negotiable, or implying that the unfair resolution of WWI was the real culprit.

This all reduces down to an enormous exercise in Monday morning quarterbacking, combined with myopic hindsight (not 20/20, since those looking back in this way seem to be missing essential points).

Hanson’s take on this:

Buchanan and others, for example, fault the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I as too harsh on a defeated Germany and thus an understandable pretext for the rise of the Nazis, who played on German anger and fear.

Those accords may have been flawed, but they were far better than what Germany itself had offered France in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, or Russia after its collapse in 1917 — or what it had planned for Britain and France had it won the First World War. What ultimately led to World War II was neither Allied meanness to Germany between the two wars nor an unwillingness to understand the Nazis’ pain and anguish.

The mistake instead was not occupying all of imperial Germany after the first war in 1918-19. That way, the Allies would have demonstrated to the German people that their army was never “stabbed in the back” at home, as the Nazis later alleged, but instead defeated by an Allied army that was willing to stay on to foster German constitutional government and its reintegration within Europe. The Allies later did occupy Germany after World War II — and 60 years without war have followed.

Had Nicholson Baker been alive in 1942, I doubt he would have had better ideas of how to stop the Nazi and Japanese juggernauts that had ruined Eastern Europe, Russia and large parts of China and southeast Asia other than using the same clumsy tools our grandfathers were forced to employ to end fascist aggression.

A Nazi armored division or death camp stopped its murderous work not through reasoned appeal or self-reflection, but only when its fuel, supplies and manpower were cut off.

I am currently visiting military cemeteries in France, Luxembourg and Belgium, some of the most beautiful, solemn acres in Europe. The thousands of Americans lying beneath the rows of white crosses at Normandy Beach, at Hamm, Luxembourg, and at St. Avold in the Lorraine probably did not debate the Versailles Treaty or worry too much whether a B-17 took out a neighborhood when it tried to hit a German rail yard.

Instead, our soldiers were more worried that they had few options available to stop Nazi Germany and imperial Japan — other than their own innate courage. The dead in our cemeteries over here in Europe never bragged that they were eagerly fighting the “good” war, but rather only reluctantly finishing a necessary one that someone else had started.

They and those who sent them into the carnage of World War II knew Americans could do good without having to be perfect. In contrast, the present critics of the Allied cause enjoy the freedom and affluence that our forefathers gave us by fighting World War II while ignoring — or faulting — the intelligence and resolve that won it.

Read the whole thing.

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Jun 05 2008

History has still not ended

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 5:54 pm

There’s a lot of discussion here and there and other places about the future of the Republican party, and “conservatism” (not the same thing, of course). Some speak of the millennials as less interested in political parties, less ideological, etc. We hear that Reagan conservatism isn’t going to sell anymore, and that it isn’t just a matter of not having a great communicator anymore, but rather that the public just doesn’t see things like it did.

Almost universally, the analysis seems to involve the assumption of stability in events, in anticipation of only small changes from current circumstances, and it assumes the ability of politicians and the media to manage message to the general public. This gives extraordinary power to the message deliverers, of course, and the better message deliverers are expected to win most of the time. In sum, this approach assumes that politics is about politicians.

But it isn’t, in the end. It’s about events, most of which are beyond the immediate control of any given crop of politicians.

People’s memories are short. “We will never forget” has morphed into “maybe we weren’t in so much danger after all”. A decade ago, the left blocked drilling in Anwar and other places, because the oil wouldn’t come on line for a decade, and, “It won’t help us right now.” But the decade has passed, and I just filled my tank with regular gas at $4.35 per gallon, self-serve. If they’d drilled then it would have helped now. Most people don’t know that the two hottest years in the last century are 1934 and 1998 (1934 was the hottest, with a cooling period in between, and no one can claim the 1930s warming was due to CO2 emissions), and most people don’t know that we appear not to be warming up since 1998, but cooling, if anything.

But there are likely to be developments that totally change the dynamic of things, and to quote our second president, “Facts are stubborn things.”

When there is a major attack on US soil (inevitable, according to many serious observers), or possibly even on one of our allies, peoples’ attention will be re-focused. If there is any obvious link between the left’s less forceful approach to terrorists and their enablers (likely), there will be a re-energized right. Let’s be clear: if Islamicist extremists do the deed, and if the left has curtailed programs that might have detected or stopped the attack, or removed pressure that would have diverted the attackers’ attentions, or (shudder) if there is a nuclear attack carried out by anyone who got the materials to do it from an Islamic nation, the blowback will be enormous, and a very large price will be paid by the party that is identified in the public mind as having been asleep at the switch. Fool me once….

Does anyone think that Congress will be able to resist public demand for drilling when gasoline is $6.00 per gallon? If so, how about $8.00? $10.00? At some point, the dynamic changes. Sure, the left will try to pin the blame on the evil oil companies, and that miserable resource hog, the American driver. And that works for awhile, when people aren’t paying that much attention. But at some point, instead of just wondering why prices are so high in a vague sort of way, people are going to DEMAND to know. There will be debate, and the old answers will be trotted out, but inevitably someone is going to get peoples’ attention with the simple idea that as demand goes up and supply doesn’t, the prices will rise. Few people want to drive less.

So, I think drilling is going to happen. It’s just a matter of time, and public desperation. And the party that had a history of blocking it, and fights it to the end, is going to suffer, for awhile.

By the end of an Obama administration (two terms to 2016!), if we have not had a year hotter than 1998, it will be impossible to claim global warming is even real (with a straight face, anyway), let alone caused anthropogenically. (The activists have begun to suspect this… that’s why they’ve changed the scare-phrase to “climate change”, which works no matter what happens, since the climate always changes.) If the left has forced a very costly scheme to control carbon emissions in the meantime, and the economy has suffered because of it, gas prices are higher, etc., then the campaign slogan for the conservative candidate in 2016 could be, “WHAT global warming?”

None of this will stop Obama from getting elected this year, unless the terrorists are stupid enough to mount an attack on US soil before the election, or gas goes up to $6.00 per gallon immediately. I expect neither to happen immediately.

Unfortunately, I expect both during Obama’s presidency, though this is one time I’d love to be wrong.

The only (very cold) comfort will be that the winds of politics will probably change direction again… for awhile, at least. It will be too late to immediately undo Obama’s disastrous effect on the courts, the economy, and our national security… but it may bring an opportunity to staunch the bleeding, at least. Until, of course, the stupid Republicans who come to power in the reaction get complacent, fat and greedy, like the last crop that just lost Congress in 2006.

Pray for McCain to win, but the nation will weather an Obama administration, painfully.

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Jun 04 2008

Future Undetermined… Partly

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 10:10 pm

Greg Boyd is the author of God of the Possible, a book that introduces the “open view of God”, or “open theism”, or the “open view of the future”. Of these three expressions, I like the last one the most, although aspects of the others also make some sense.

In many ways, this entire approach is an attempt to be as literally faithful to scripture as it is possible and prudent to be. There are places where scripture is clearly metaphorical, poetic, and the like, but when there is no obvious reason to interpret scripture in those ways, then a “literal” approach is at least worth considering, i.e., maybe it means more or less what the words say in a simple understanding of the text.

So, to the meat of it, Boyd’s idea is that:

1) God knows all possible futures, but not every single detail of which of an infinite number of paths will actually occur. This is not a limitation on God’s knowledge in the sense of His ability to know what can be known, but is rather an observation about the nature of the universe which God created. God created the future to be largely unknowable, because that was the way He chose to make it possible for His creatures to make real choices that actually changed things.

2) God has predecided what certain features and events will be in the future that eventually happens (prophecy of specific events, “election” of certain people, “predestination”, etc.), but has not decided exactly how He will bring about those features and events, because he doesn’t yet know what humans will decide to do, which will affect how He will need to respond in order to bring about His intentions.

3) God actually responds to us. That is, God is not completely unchanging, but actually can be surprised, change His mind, actually feel emotion, etc. All those scriptures that seem to say exactly these things are not to be taken metaphorically, or interpreted as anthropomorphized texts, but rather mean what they say. God DOES have expectations about what humans will do, and is sometimes surprised when they do something else.

4) When a prophecy is made, the complete path from the time of the prophecy to its fulfillment is not usually specified, and is not part of the prophecy unless it IS so specified. So, most prophecies should be interpreted as God stating what He intends to bring about as an outcome, in the understanding that God, Who knows everything that can possibly happen, has already planned in advance for what He will do in response to each individual possibility, so that His decisions will come about. For example: Jesus’ betrayal was a necessary part of the prophesied plan for salvation, but the fact that Judas would do it was not. God, knowing humanity, knew that regardless of all human decisions up to the point of the betrayal, there would be someone around who was willing to do it. He knew this not in a mere probabilistic manner (i.e., humans are flawed, so someone will betray) but very specifically he knew WHICH human would do the betrayal in all possible future timelines, possibly including humans that never in fact existed, because the events required for them to be born never happened. And, he knew exactly what He would do to be sure that the betrayal (“committed to” by the person in whichever timeline actually happened) would be done in the necessary circumstances for His purposes to be served.

And so on. I find the entire idea very interesting, and while I haven’t really decided just what I think of it, it makes some very persuasive points, and does a reasonable job of resolving conflicts that are hard to resolve any other way without essentially interpreting some scriptures out of existence. I am waiting to see what others whom I respect might have to say about it, so that I can weigh their points pro and con.

A frequent criticism is that this view of God “limits” God by limiting His knowledge. However, the open view requires a God with an infinite number of possible futures all in mind, and with the power to bring about His purposes in any one of them, and therefore not dependent on simple decree, but with the power and knowledge to work His will in ANY of them, so that we can trust His promises, even though the exact path by which they will be carried out is not pre-determined. It is hardly credible to assert that the open view of God makes Him smaller or less powerful and knowing than earlier views expressed in Christian history.

This entire approach seems to do a better job of reconciling God’s knowledge with human freedom than any other I’ve seen, though I’m willing to be convinced otherwise, if someone has the goods.

The book is a short read, and there are other books on the topic: just do a google or amazon search for “open theism” or “open view of God”. Wikipedia also has some introductory material on “Open Theism“, including information about its critics.

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Jun 04 2008

Peter Schweizer: Conservatives more honest than liberals?

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 7:04 pm

A new book by Peter Schweitzer, “Makers and Takers: Why Conservatives Work Harder, Feel Happier, Have Closer Families, Take Fewer Drugs, Give More Generously, Value Honesty More, Are Less Materialistic and Envious, Whine Less … And Even Hug Their Children More Than Liberals”, asserts that conservatives are simply different, on average, in the values they live by, and not in ways that are particularly complementary to liberals. As with all books of this sort, it won’t do to apply statistical averages to individuals. We all know honest liberals and dishonest conservatives, and vice versa. Schweitzer’s point is the trend, and the norms. So the “I know some honest liberals” disclaimer is unnecessary, and does not really blunt the point.

In the Los Angeles Examiner online edition, Schweitzer says: “The honesty gap is also not a result of “bad people” becoming liberals and “good people” becoming conservatives. In my mind, a more likely explanation is bad ideas. Modern liberalism is infused with idea that truth is relative. Surveys consistently show this. And if truth is relative, it also must follow that honesty is subjective.”

Read the whole article, and notice the sources he quotes. These are not unsupported assertions, but peer-reviewed, prestigious journals, supplying his data.

I just ordered the book.

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Jun 04 2008

Stoopid flies live longer

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 8:07 am

Idiots with multifaceted eyes live longer: “Scientists Tadeusz Kawecki and Joep Burger at the University of Lausanne said Wednesday they had discovered a ‘negative correlation between an improvement in a fly’s mental capacity and its longevity’.”


I’ve wondered for some years now how it is that Robert Byrd has lasted so long in the Senate. Perhaps now I understand.

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Jun 03 2008

Healthcare for everyone sounds good, but….

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 11:34 pm

A young friend of mine (a graduate student in music) recently sent me an email, detailing his conversation with a friend on the virtues of government (universal) healthcare, and his sense of having inadequate answers to his friend’s points, even though my musician friend is generally conservative in his approach to most things.

Herewith, his questions, and my responses:

1. What would be the ideal solution for the healthcare situation?

This is the wrong question, if you believe that society has to look for a perfect solution in which everyone has all the healthcare they want or need. It is simply unattainable. I didn’t say hard, I didn’t say expensive, I said unattainable. Not a single society has managed it. What in the world makes anyone think we can? In Canada, people often die of cancer waiting for an MRI to diagnose it. Or, if they get the MRI, they die waiting for the surgery. Read here.

Do a Google search for various combinations of the words, “death, Canada, medical, wait, surgery, MRI” and any other words that come to mind. That’s how I found the link above. I didn’t know about it before beginning this post. It took about 25 seconds to find. There are others.

The choice is simply NOT between what we have now and perfection, because perfection (if defined in terms of the result that “everyone has all the healthcare they want or need at a price they don’t really notice”) is simply not available.

Let me put it another way: expensive cars tend to be safer. Many people died last year because they drove a cheap car. Some died because they rode a bike (couldn’t afford a car trip) and got hit BY a car, cheap or otherwise. What would happen if we decided, as a society, that everyone should have the same level of car safety, no matter what decisions they make personally about what they’re willing to buy?

You know, and so do I.

Right now, it is in line with the conservative principles of “Free Market” but it’s going terrible thus making this Universal Healthcare disaster look all the more appealing! Are things the way they should be?

No, things are not as they should be. The government has affected the way healthcare is distributed in the USA in several ways, some good, some bad, some indifferent. I’ll focus here on the bad, since we’re wondering how things “should” be.

First principles: when more of something desired is available at no apparent cost increase to the consumer, more of it will be used. When something desired costs the consumer in proportion to its use, less of it will be used than if the consumer pays no cost difference.

The first major way the federal government screwed up healthcare coverage was during World War II, as an unintended consequence of wage fixing in a limited labor market. Employers had to compete to find workers, because so many were off fighting the war, yet the government forbade them to raise wages, so they introduced the notion of “fringe benefits”, including health coverage. Since this coverage was pooled among all an employer’s workers, the net result for any given employee was a disconnect between how much health care they consumed and how much they paid for out of pocket. Providers of health care discovered they could charge a bit more without losing customers, because the cost was “spread around”, and wasn’t felt much by any given individual. That was the beginning of our current problem with prices.

When social security was created, there was no official “retirement” age. The age of 65 was chosen to begin benefits, because very few lived that long. It wasn’t going to cost much to fund, and everyone felt good about knowing someone’s grandma was getting money from the government (read, all of us). The result is that by the 1950s age 65 or so had become the EXPECTED retirement age. Yet, people were living longer and longer, and consuming more and more healthcare, during the period of time AFTER retirement when they no longer had “employer funded” healthcare. In any earlier time, more people would have worked longer, keeping their medical coverage if it was “employer funded”.

So, the combination of wage fixing/labor shortage leading to “employer funded” healthcare, and the effect of Social Security on retirement expectations combined with longer life spans, was that “more old people couldn’t afford healthcare”, whose prices had been steadily rising precisely because costs were hidden from the people actually consuming the healthcare, allowing providers to jack up prices a little at a time.

This led Congress to react by creating Medicare for the elderly (read, age 65, after employer health coverage stopped), which FURTHER insulated people from the effect of providers charging more. A hospital could get away with billing unnecessary charges, because no individual cared that much about controlling it. So could doctors. In fact, they could get away with setting fixed prices (HIGH ones) for particular procedures/tests, whether or not there was any direct relation between the expense of the test and the expertise and time it took to do. Have you seen those fixed prices in your automotive repair garage, “Brake jobs: $119 front disc”? Did you ever see a sign like that at the doctor’s office, or in the hospital? People USED to ask what something would cost, and providers USED to bargain with patients. These days, that happens precious little. Medicare really boosted the ability of providers to disconnect their pricing from consumer awareness and reaction, a guaranteed way to increase usage (demand), and therefore encourage prices to go even higher.

And when the standard Medicare price for, say, an xray became a certain amount, that amount became the FLOOR for pricing the same test for other patients who weren’t on Medicare. And so it went.

Now people live longer and longer, and retire sooner and sooner, and spend more and more time on government funded healthcare, and the predictable result is that ALL of our prices go up. We’ve increased demand, but not supply. It’s really pretty simple.

In addition, by regulating (FDA) the release of new medications so severely (and expensively), making it easy for patients to sue providers for outrageously out-of-proportion awards, and generally discouraging people from acting like actual consumers with choices based on price and need, we’ve seen a great deal of damage from government involvement in healthcare.

If not, what is the conservative solution to the absurd prices and difficulty in obtaining coverage for many?

Different consumers make different judgments about how much and what kind of healthcare they want to pay for. The common statistics about how many people are “uninsured” do not account for all the young, healthy adults with jobs sufficient to buy health coverage, but simply choose not to, in order to have a more luxurious lifestyle. It’s always a gamble, of course, but if a person is in their 20s and healthy, they may elect to buy a fancier car instead of health insurance they don’t expect to use much. Also, there will be young people in good health, just starting out, whose first job or two won’t offer health insurance as a benefit, but who will move up to a job that does.

These statistics also don’t account for other people who simply choose to take the gamble, preferring to buy lifestyle instead of insurance. The stats don’t account for people who are simply between jobs, with healthcare in each, but are currently uninsured, perhaps for a few weeks or months (and by the way, even though people often decide not to pay for it, coverage is available for such people, by federal law).

There are also people (including children in poor families) who cannot buy health insurance privately, but are currently covered under a federal or state program anyway. They are counted as “uninsured”, though the reality is different.

The BIG LIE is simple: it is that those millions who are currently uninsured are ALL people who can’t afford it now, and won’t be able to afford it next year. This is simply NOT the case. There is a group of “hardcore” uninsured adults who cannot afford to buy any level of health coverage, but it is far smaller than most people think.

I invite you to try to find true numbers that account for all these factors. It will be harder than you think, because the advocacy organizations who bandy about the stats don’t really want you to know. For example, they will say that some number, say, 45 million, were uninsured “sometime in 2005”. They don’t separate out the various groups I mentioned above, because it would RADICALLY change the numbers, and since it doesn’t help their case, they just don’t mention it. If you subtract illegal immigrants, young people who don’t need it or choose not to buy for reasons of their own, people who are between jobs at the point of measurement, etc., the number is around half of what they report. And a very large proportion of them are children who are covered by various existing government programs, but are still listed as “uninsured”.

So, does that mean ALL those people were without coverage ALL YEAR, and did not make economic decisions on their own, valuing other things over health insurance?

Of course, it does not.

2. In a debate on the universal healthcare issue with a staunch liberal, I was stumped when he cited the success of governmental control over such intities as Gas, Water, Electricity and the successful regulation of these utilities. He explained that we are all safe because the government sets standards concerning what can be in the water and how much of it etc. Is it good that the gov. is involved in these things?

Your friend is misinformed, or is distorting the situation, I’m not sure which, since I didn’t hear exactly what was said. I certainly agree that we need some reasonable set of standards for what constitutes safe drinking water. However, is there any reason to believe that private companies, suitably licensed, couldn’t do it as well? One of the characteristics of privately owned enterprises is competition, which includes a constantly improving product quality. Our water, however, is worse than it used to be in some ways, is it not? Regulation (and the stagnation it encourages [pun intended]) often means setting a lowest common denominator above which no improvement is likely.

What would happen if private water companies had to bid, maybe every 3-5 years, for the contract to put water into the public system? What if the criteria involved some combination of quality improvement and minimum price? And what motivation does ANYONE now working for or managing a public utility, with a guaranteed market and no competition, have to even adhere to current standards, let alone aspire to higher ones? Of course, they don’t do it REALLY badly, or they’d lose the gig… But they can be minimally sloppy about it all with no real consequence.

There is an extensive literature on privatization of public utilities, some pro, some con. Just type “public utility privatization” into Google. I think the pro position is winning on points. Britain (land of socialized medicine!) privatized many utilities under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. They actually improved on the US situation, with less regulation, and as a result there is actually some price competition and incentive to be more efficient.

3. Electricity was regulated in California until Enron people lobbied to degregulate and allow the free market to handle it. Then the Enron scandal was born and we are still paying the inflated Electricity prices today. What can we as Free Market advocates say about this? Or about the deregulation of the airline industry that is reported to be unsuccessful my some. Or the horrible gas prices of today?

It is a mistake to confuse simultaneity with cause and effect. It is a mistake to evaluate a reasonable policy by the results achieved when corrupt people implement it.

California was DUE an electricity crisis, with or without regulation, because it wasn’t building generation stations, but was increasing demand. The deregulation initiative was partly to try to allow the market some flexibility to deal with the fact the California simply wasn’t making enough electricity, and needed to get it from other states (trust me, I live here, and California wasn’t suddenly overcome at the state level with conservative economic sentiment… they were grasping at straws). But this is like using a generally good health strategy, such as eating right and getting exercise, to treat a serious disease that arose from previous BAD health habits. You will still be sick, and may get sicker, but if you blame your new health regimen for the disease, you’ll be seriously confused about cause and effect.

The reason California wasn’t building new generation stations was REGULATION, on many levels. It takes time for the market to undo the damage done by years of regulation. De-regulation is not a “quick fix”, it’s an overall good strategy for developing sufficient capacity and getting it where it needs to go.

Enron was a special case of corporate skullduggery combined with influence peddling and willful conspiracy on the part of certain government actors. Others have written about this in some detail, and I defer to them. There is a case to be made that Enron was unmasked in spite of regulation and government influence peddling, not because of it, and that de-regulation had nothing much to do with the timing of the debacle.

But, just to test the idea: if a large pharmaceutical company was found to be doing something illegal like deliberately cheapening its medications in a way that made them ineffective, and selling them as the original item, and cooking its books and lying about its financial status, and perjuring itself about its business practices, and lying about the scientific tests demonstrating the efficacy of its medications, would that be grounds for nationalizing all the OTHER pharmaceutical companies? That is essentially the argument being made by someone who says that the ENRON debacle proves we need to regulate the utilities and keep them in public hands.

We are still paying high electricity prices for several reasons: we haven’t built and gotten online enough plants in CA to keep up with demand, the price of oil to generate electricity continues to climb (along with everything else affected by the price of oil… Meaning almost everything, period.), and so on. But: as a percentage of my income, I pay less for electricity now than I did at the age of 25, per kilowatt hour (though I use more hours… And that’s part of my point; when demand goes up, supply has to go up, or prices will.). And we STILL do not have adequate competition in the generation/distribution business.

Similarly, we have high gas prices for very simple reasons: we have more people wanting oil (around the world and in the USA), but haven’t increased the supply, either of crude or refining capacity. We haven’t increased the supply of oil because Congress won’t let us drill on the north slope of Alaska (affecting about 1% of the “pristine tundra”), or off the coast of California, Oregon and Washington, or in the Gulf of Mexico, or for shale in the West, or develop coal to liquid technologies, or about twenty other things. And they’ve made sure that we have to burn oil to create electricity by making it essentially impossible to build a nuclear power plant.

Ask all the MILLIONS of people who have been able to fly (not just at lower prices, but fly, period) since airline deregulation, if they think the prices should have been kept artificially high, with no competition between the airlines.

Other factors

Without question, one contributor to costs in healthcare is the proliferation of new and expensive tests and procedures, many of which, though wonderful, are simply far beyond the scope of what medicine could do in some earlier era when medical care cost less. For these tests and procedures, it is even more critical that consumers know what they cost, and pay more to get them. But the current system tries to provide 21st century top flight care to everyone when most people still want to pay 1950s prices. One reason many procedures cost more than they used to is because the excess charge is used to fund the losses incurred by newer procedures whose cost cannot be fully passed on to the consumer and insurer. It’s hard to quantify how much this effect is, but it’s there, and won’t be solved by any amount of government intervention or regulation.

Medical science is going to advance. It is not beyond possibility that methods for extending life to a couple of centuries will be available in a few decades (I think I’m being conservative, actually). If those methods are very expensive, will the government decide that everyone must have them, regardless of cost? This is just not realistic. The economics of medical care can’t be ignored anymore than the economics of automobiles. We can’t all drive the safest car, and we can’t all get the best medical care, and that will be true essentially forever, or until such incredible advances in efficiency exist that medical care is a negligible part of the budget for almost anyone. After all, we CAN all drink the best cola beverage.

Conclusions

The bottom line for all of this: it’s very difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. The people have been misled about what it is reasonable to expect. They have been duped about the real cost of things. They are told the government is helping them, when nearly the exact opposite is the case, in terms of long term effect on the experiences of most people.

In very many ways, the government and regulation IS the problem in health care delivery. It is beyond me to explain why anyone would consider MORE of the same to be the solution, when it has created many of the problems in the first place.

We are going to have people who don’t get as much care as they need, or want. Period. The only question is whether they are “the uninsured” in our current system, or are on a waiting list in a nationalized system. But there will be people who don’t get the care they need when they need it, and people who get much more than they need, regardless of what system we adopt. The “uninsured”, in our system, at least have a chance of changing some of the aspects of their lives that have resulted in them being uninsured. People on a waiting list in a nationalized system have no options at all… except, perhaps, to come to the USA and buy the care they need.

In the meantime, there is simply no question that the USA is the world leader in healthcare innovation, and the reason is because the government isn’t in charge of all the research, and companies who DO the research stand to make some money from it.

Unfortunately, there will always be imperfect results in the world. And if we act prudently, and try to move the USA healthcare system away from the regulatory precipice, there will be people who individually experience negative effects from the change. Nevertheless, it is the right thing to do, for all those people who will positively benefit from making our system more efficient, not less, and more competitive, not less.

We can, however, create a great deal of suffering by trying to repeal the laws of economics.

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Jun 03 2008

The Left at Christian Universities part 1

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 12:31 am

I will be starting a series of posts on “the left” at Christian universities. It is widely assumed, I think, that most Christian universities are made up of faculty with a right-leaning tilt. While that’s certainly true for some, it is not nearly true for all, and the trend-line is definitely leftward.

There are several dynamics at work in this. Over the next few weeks, I’ll try to unpack my ideas about this, based on many years in the Christian academy, and some research I’ve been doing into trends at various institutions.

I promise, there will be something to offend nearly everyone.

For now, I will say that two clear signs of the leftward move are the creation of administrative posts to promote “diversity”, and a more-or-less uncritical acceptance of the standard environmentalist narrative, particularly anthropogenic global warming.

But we’ll talk.

UPDATE:  Part 2 of this series here.

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