The young man next to my daughter in the video is my son, David.  I took the video at our church’s Baccalaureate Luncheon, which is held in honor of new high school graduates.  The two of them sang a song called 100 Years, which is about the passing of the phases of your life – appropriate for the occasion.  It is worth noting that they only rehearsed this about 3 times, and that they largely figured out the harmonies on the fly.

Here is the video again:

If you would like to see the full YouTube page, on which it’s a little easier to see what’s going on, click here:  See video on YouTube.

From the time my daughter, Julia, was five months old, she refused to sit on laps – mine or anyone else’s.  Even then, she had an agenda of her own.  From the time she could wriggle across the floor, she was always going someplace to do something.  She is the most independent person I know.

A year and a half ago, as a high school sophomore, she had one of those experiences in which she discovered that her friends weren’t really her friends.  That’s been happening since high school was invented, but these days it happens on Facebook, which seems to make it hurt even more.  She went through a brief but intense period of personal struggle, and she came out the other side a much stronger – and even more independent – person.  She has used her experience to help others.

She decided that high school wasn’t for her, so she started asking around to see if there was a way to be done with it sooner than the rules said she would be.  She discovered that if she stopped taking study hall, loaded up on classes at school and took a couple of classes outside of school, she could graduate as a junior.

She graduated tonight, and if I’d taken a picture that did her justice, I would post it here.

Her academic performance was very good, if not brilliant, but along the way she participated in more activities than I can count.  In a school of 3200 students, she was known, and more or less adopted, by her principal.  She got college advice from her superintendent.  She was accepted by all but one of the colleges she applied to, and she plans to attend a school that ranks as one of the top 25 large universities worldwide.  It is her superintendent’s alma mater.  She deferred college for a year, which she will spend in Honduras working in an orphanage.  She made all of this – the early graduation, the college selection, the testing, the applications, the activities, the sourcing of an opportunity for both service and personal growth – happen with virtually no involvement from her parents.

What more could you ask for?

Well, sometimes you get more without even asking for it.

This is my platform and these are my children.  This is from the baccalaureate ceremony at our church yesterday.  All about the phases of your life.  The video is shaky, but you won’t get me to admit that it’s shaky because the guy holding the iPhone was shaking.  I invite you to brighten your day by spending a couple of minutes listening to them.

I am indeed exceptionally proud and utterly unapologetic.  I am also incredibly lucky.

They are concerned about what, dangerous side effects?

Last Sunday, I found myself listening to a program hosted by these guys, commentator Tavis Smiley and Princeton (nee Harvard) professor Cornell West.

I haven’t previously sought them out, but I was in the shower, they were on the air, and I was trapped.  What I heard would have stopped me in my tracks had my tracks not been washing down the drain.  I kept listening post-shower with a mixture of fascination and horror.

Celebrating International Labor Day, their first guest, whose name I didn’t catch, said that real wages in the US are down because of the decline in collective bargaining.   This is precisely backward.  Real wages have fallen because American workers now compete with one or two billion highly productive workers in places like China and India.  The decline of collective bargaining is a collateral issue, not a cause.  It’s a supply and demand thing.  Adam Somebody. . .give me a minute, it’ll come to me.

Their next guest, an oxymoronically described “Socialist Economist” named Richard Wolff, opined without a shred of evidence that the reason for the inequality of wealth in America, massive national, state and local debts, high unemployment and the financial crisis is that the “fruits of technology have been given to such a small number of people” instead of being distributed to the masses.  This notion is so bizarre on its face that it defies logical refutation – sort of like blaming Mars for the Chicago Cubs.  I should point out that with two Google clicks I learned that fully half of the billion people in Africa – the world’s poorest – have cell phones and that as of 2007 fully half of America’s poorest – those making less than $20,000 AND living in public housing – owned a computer.  Prices have dropped since then, so that number may well have gone up.

If you think we’ve hit bottom, guess again.  At West’s urging, Wolff went on to decry the rewards bestowed upon entrepreneurs and innovators for their entrepreneurship and innovation.  Every great inventor, he said, has benefited from the influence of parents, teachers and many others, without whom said inventions would not have been realized, and who therefore should share in the rewards.  Apparently, it takes a village to raise an iPhone.  I’m still trying to figure out how many shares of Apple stock Steve Jobs’ second grade teacher should have gotten.

All of this is silliness that raises the question of why an otherwise responsible broadcaster would give up an hour each week to this kind of drivel.

There is, however, a moral component to this story, and I’m going to get in trouble for bringing it up.

Although the guests I heard were not African-American, Smiley and West are, and they (West in particular) make a point of speaking in the jargon of the 1960s Black Power movement.  (By admitting that I recognize this, I’m dating myself.  And please, I mean that in the chronological, not social, sense of the word.)  In doing so, they attach a specific racial context to the perspectives they air.  I don’t pretend to know what percentage of African-Americans they speak for.  I hope it’s small.  More fervently, I wish that our discussions about how to make the world a better place were not cloaked in race.

Most of the time, they aren’t.  But this radio program struck me as one of the most racist, denigrating and debilitating rants I’ve ever heard.  Ignoring basic facts of global competition, claiming that something as remote as the distribution of the benefits of technology is responsible for differences in economic outcomes, suggesting that economic rewards should be collective (which is a polite way of saying that you deserve something you didn’t earn) – these all take away from people the beautiful responsibility of being responsible for their own lives.  The message to any poor black kids who happened to hear this is, “Not only is it not your fault, it won’t get any better until somebody else fixes something else over which you have no power.” The natural reaction is, “OK, then why try?”

I had CNN on while writing this and heard that more than half of African-American and Hispanic boys drop out of high school.  I’m going to swing at a wild pitch here, but I’m guessing that has more to do with differences in economic outcome than does anything relating to who does or doesn’t have a profound personal relationship with Google.

The Smiley and West show I heard is a manifestation of the loss of our culture of personal responsibility.  That loss is hardly restricted to any racial or socioeconomic class.  Every kid on every soccer team gets a medal.  People sue – and win – for spilling hot coffee on themselves and for getting squashed by vending machines they tipped over while trying to get a free Coke.  This morning on NPR’s intentionally funny show, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, I heard that a California man is suing BMW because his motorcycle tickled his giblets in a way that he claims gave him a 20-month version of the condition Viagra ads say is dangerous if lasts more than four hours.  So he’s suing for what, a sudden and immense increase in popularity. . .?

Life isn’t risk free.  The American promise is equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.  We have never managed to fully deliver on that promise, but today we no longer expect it.  If we manage to change that, it will be one soccer player, one radio show, and perhaps one lightly read blog post at a time.

That’s enough for today.  Now I’m going to go experience some private distress over my relationship with Google, which I’m sure is much more profound and personal than I wish it were.  Or perhaps I’ll go motorcycle shopping.

If you are healthy today, there are precisely three things that can happen to you over, let’s say, the next 12 months that would cause you to spend more on healthcare than you can afford on your own:

• Behind Door #1 are things that are bad but have no lasting consequences.  These acute events are predictable in the aggregate but not in the individual.  You have essentially no control over whether they will happen to you.  And when they’re over, they’re over.   These characteristics make them insurable.  That is, a private market could pool and underwrite these risks.

• Behind Door #2 are things that are bad and that DO have lasting consequences.  Unless an insurance company is willing to take you on for life, these risks are not insurable.  Yes, you have SOME control over the odds that SOME of them will happen to you.  You can eat better, lose some weight, get more exercise, stop smoking and – ahem – drinking.  We should all be held accountable for those choices.  But that wouldn’t make these risks insurable.

• And behind Door #3 is you getting older.  This is not an insurable risk either, but it is one over which you have complete control.  Not only can you reduce it, you can eliminate it entirely.  Of course, that involves what most major religions consider to be a mortal sin, but that’s between you and your parish priest.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but no one is entitled to their own facts.”  As a matter of moral philosophy, it is impossible to disagree with the notion that people should be accountable for their lifestyle choices.  But Doors #1 and #3, which are not affected by lifestyle choices, have the most prize money behind them, while Door #2, on which those choices have some impact, has the least.  The only way to pay for people who find themselves behind Doors #2 and #3 is to confiscate money from everyone else.  Call that what you will, it is not insurance.

There is an excess of emotion and an absence of fact in this whole debate.  The best idea I’ve heard yet comes from my friend Jack Carroll, who says that we should treat healthcare as a pension – you pay in early in order to be covered late – and supplement that ‘pension’ with private insurance to cover Door #1.

There are only two circumstances under which this would work.  One is that we require everyone to participate – a confiscation of wealth, and therefore a tax.  The other is that we allow people to opt out and agree to let those who do so go without medical care.

That, Monty, is the choice we ultimately have to make.

I love free markets.  I think that much of what the government gets involved in is none of the government’s business.  I think that despite good intentions, regulations often do more harm than good.  And I think government debt is the biggest drag on the economy.

The issue here is different.  Neither healthcare nor health insurance is actually a market.  So expecting them to act like markets is fool’s errand.

A true market for health care would exist only if we left everyone to to pay for it on their own, allowing each of us to buy as much healthcare and insurance as we want and can afford.  That would result in a large number of people going untreated, which is an outcome that we are highly unlikely to accept.  As soon as we decide to subsidize care for anyone, we’re on the steep, slippery slope of taxation and redistribution, regardless of what we choose to call it.  Fully in the grip of gravity, we will wind up at the bottom of that slope.

I’m not saying I like this, just that I think it’s the reality.  If that’s where we’re going to end up, we should, as my friend Steve Smolinsky says, “Get on with it.”

Just how “non-market” is healthcare?  Here’s another example.  My insurance company denied the claim for my appendectomy, ostensibly because they didn’t know if I had any other insurance (I don’t).  With a single check box, they could have obtained that information during enrollment.  Failing that, they could have called me.  Instead, they pushed the problem back on the hospital, which tracked me down, got me to call the insurance company and verify that I don’t have any other insurance, so that the hospital could resubmit the claim, which the insurance company says it will take another 3-4 weeks to pay.

The sole benefit of this exercise is to generate a month or more of float.  That may be a nominal savings for the insurance company, but it is a net cost to the system.  This is a routine practice (shades of “The Rainmaker”).  A little quick math suggests that it adds perhaps $1 billion in cost system-wide.  This cost is borne by doctors and hospitals, who build it into prices, which ultimately results in larger bills being submitted to. . .insurance companies.

Over the past 20 years or so, every industry has driven time and unproductive cost out of its processes.  This is the only case I can think of where an industry has actually added time and cost, and has been able to get away with it.

In true markets, buyers and sellers get to decide who they want to do business with.  This drives them to efficiency and equilibrium.  In this case, the hospital had no choice.  I showed up on their doorstep, the little guy had to come out, they had to do it, and they had to accept my insurance.

If you are a seller of services and you do not have the ability to say no, precisely what kind of market are you in?

This is one of the fundamental problems with healthcare.  It isn’t a market because the fundamental condition that defines markets – multiple two-party transactions between buyers and sellers who can place an economic value on the good or service to be exchanged – doesn’t exist.  (For more on this, scroll back to “A Plague on Both Our Houses” from November 2009.   I thought I was clever and original in making this argument, but the same case was made by Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow.  In 1963.  I’m often late, but rarely by 49 years.  And rarely in such good company.)

The Supreme Court’s current consideration of the Obamacare individual mandate reveals another fundamental problem:  health insurance isn’t really insurance.

To be fair, part of it is.  When you write a check for health insurance, part of the money goes to protect you against the possibility that something both unexpected and bad (like having your appendix flare up while you’re in Arizona visiting Dad) will happen to you in the next 12 months.

The rest of the money, however, pays for the care of people who are older, and therefore predictably less healthy, than you are.  You are also paying for people to whom something bad, that turned out to have ongoing consequences, has already happened.  The younger and healthier you are, the higher a percentage of your premium is used to subsidize the care of people who are either already ill or are far more likely than you are to become ill in the next year.

The individual mandate is a means of forcing these young, healthy people into the system because without them, the system would collapse under its own weight.  But confiscating money from some people in order to pay for something that benefits other people isn’t insurance.  It’s a tax.

In that context, the individual mandate amounts to an outsourcing of taxation.  It also provides a thin veneer of private sector involvement that lets us pretend we’re free marketers when we really aren’t.  (On this, see the comments of conservative and former Bush aide David Frum.)

So what we’re talking about here is insurance that’s not actually insurance, which we use to fund a market that’s not actually a market.

I wish it weren’t so.  I believe in markets and spend my days helping people figure out how to prosper in them.

But I also believe in calling a spade a spade.  The system will function only if we force people to participate, which is a steep and slippery slope.  We are going to wind up with a single-payer, government run healthcare funding system.  Not because we should, or because it’s better or worse, but because it’s inevitable.

That is the irresistible force of gravity.  The sooner we acknowledge it and act on it, the less it’s going to hurt.

The fun here is not in the picture but in the dialog that preceded it.

From left to right, these are my new best friends Gabrielle, Keith, Bill and Deb.  I met them at Buddy Guy’s on New Year’s Eve.  Bill and Deb were sitting at a stage side-table that had three extra chairs.  They kindly offered to let my wife and me take two of them.  Later on, Gabrielle came over and asked Bill if she could sit in the last chair.  And a little while after that, as Keith was working his way across the room to join her, she turned to Bill and the following conversation took place between them (this is reasonably close. . .remember, it was New Year’s Eve).

“Would you care if we share?”

“Would we care?”

“Yes! Would you care?”

“What would you share?”

“We would share this chair!”

“You would share the chair?”

“We would share the chair!”

“We would not care if you share the chair!”

For those paying close attention, I am also happy to report that Mr. Brown is out of town.

And moving on. . .  I saw this scene in Chicago’s Grant Park garage.  Can I be forgiven for being a bit confused about which way to go?

I grew up near bona fide mountains, so maybe I’m a snob.  Even so, I’m thinking oxymoron here.

Speaking of oxymoron. . .

I would love to see Thanksgiving at this family’s house.  Actually, I’d love to celebrate Thanksgiving at their house.

This is what I’ve been waiting for.  A toilet seat that’s smarter than I am.  Thank God for my Costco membership.

This label is from a garment that I can only assume was intended for single-use.  (You may notice a reference to “the beaded area.”  I swear it’s not my garment.)

This is the one picture on the page that I didn’t take.  I wish I knew who did so I could give them credit.  My friend Steve Smolinsky sent it to me with the subject line “Occupy Wall Street Explained in One Picture.”  I think this poor girl’s problem is that she simply wasn’t specific enough about her area of interest.

This is a serious case of cyber-teasing.  Only one bar AND a chastity belt.

And finally. . .in 2010, I both wrote enough about Canada Geese (reminder, zillions of Canada Geese here and none in Canada; I smell a Canadian plot) that my friend Andy Rockwood took me to task for it.  So no geese this year.  But I can’t stray too far from home.  I took this picture the Sunday before Christmas, about 10 minutes before the local CompUSA store opened.  Standing in front was. . .wait for it. . .

. . .a gaggle of geeks.

Of course, you might ask what I was doing there.

Happy New Year to all.  May 2012 be the year of your dreams.

I can’t help but like Newt.  He’s your rumpled uncle with an elfish grin (unlike Ron Paul, the dyspeptic uncle who shows up and ruins your Thanksgiving).  I like the way he pontificates on a wide range of subjects, regardless of how much he does or doesn’t know about them.  More important, he’s a genuine visionary, and I love his insistence on looking at old, serious problems in new, unconventional ways.  We need that, desperately.

This is not to say I think Newt should be President.  Like most visionaries, he has no filter to help him know which of the ideas he constantly generates is fantastic and which is foolish.  And visionaries tend to make lousy leaders.  Remember, the one time he was actually in a leadership role, he got a lot done and got fired for it.  He’s also a trifle self-absorbed, and he has a certain talent for self-destruction.  With Newt in the lead, the questions are (were?) whether he will spontaneously combust before or after the nomination (or election), and which would be worse.

Mitt has more of a problem.  If he were a rapper, we’d call him “25 Percent” because that’s as high as he’s gone and may be as high as he’s going.  Mitt has a trust problem.  He can’t engender it.  It doesn’t help that he’s a Mormon in a party with a big Evangelical base (see previous post).  But he has two bigger problems.  One is that he’s changed positions enough times to make a porn star blush.  This calls for sincere, compelling, understandable and believable explanations, which he has not been able to deliver.  A 59-point economic plan makes this worse, not better.

His other problem is The Smile.  Mitt’s default expression is the kind of smile people wear at cocktail parties that they wish they weren’t attending.  People who know him consistently describe him as sincere, engaging, funny and inspiring, but you wouldn’t know it to watch him in public.  This makes him 2012′s Al Gore.  The Smile is a learned behavior that is undoubtedly subconscious at this point in his life.  It likely makes him feel like he’s being friendly and approachable.  Unfortunately, the message it sends to everyone else is that he can’t be trusted.  Humans can smell insincerity from a mile away, the same way dogs smell fear.  The brain’s subconscious reaction to facial expressions and body language that don’t fit the circumstances is, more or less, “You’re lying.”  In this situation, perhaps it’s a slightly gentler “You have no core.”  This is probably not true of Mitt, but he sure comes across that way.  For a guy who already has a lot to explain, that’s a big handicap, one that may well turn out to be fatal.

Around the time of this debate, I bet a friend of mine a steak dinner that Barack Obama will be reelected.  This is a matter of prediction, not preference.  As I watch the Republican nomination process unfold, I’m not becoming more optimistic about my children’s future.  I am, however, licking my chops.

When I started writing this blog, I swore that I would never discuss religion because I want to share insights without offending.  The not-so-good Reverend Jeffers has moved me off the dime.  (I also swore I wouldn’t take a public political position, but that may change, too.  I have discussed sex, but only in the context of being felt up at airports.)

So here goes the religious discussion:

Mormonism strikes me, and most people I know who aren’t Mormons, as pretty silly.  Its greatest miracle is that the golden plates from which Joseph Smith supposedly received his revelation disappeared before anyone other than one carefully selected accomplice could see them.  It doesn’t help that Smith was a convicted con man.  His particular swindle was divining, which he did by putting three stones into an opaque hat, sticking his head in, and claiming that the stones glowed and told him where the water was.  He received the Book of Mormon by sticking the same stones and the same head into the same hat.

This isn’t to say that Mormons are silly.  To the contrary, the ones I’ve known have been unfailingly, almost frighteningly nice and have been guided by a strict moral code.  Many have been great leaders and business people.

The reality is that the only reason Mormonism strikes we non-Mormons as silly is that it’s founding events occurred recently enough for us to have sufficient perspective on them to encourage doubt.  The same can’t be said for any of the other great religions, the foundings of which are separated from us by the Dark Ages and more.

And this gets us (well, me) to the problem with religion.  Religion would be great if it weren’t for the part that involves belief.  More specifically, the problem is exclusivity of belief – the conviction that since my belief is right, yours must be wrong.

My daughter recently did a paper on the sources of mass injustice.  In our discussion about it, what emerged was the notion that mass injustice occurs as the result of a dominant ideology that holds non-adherents to be less worthy than adherents, which makes them marginally less than human, which makes it OK to denigrate, abuse and even slaughter them.  Sadly, religion, which has the potential to do so much good, takes many people down this path (cf. “Jeffers”).

Belief is certainty in things not seen.  This isn’t easy, so every religion has stories of people seeing and believing (cf. “Doubting Thomas”).  But there’s a problem.  In the cold light of day, there is absolutely no basis for believing the mythology of one religion and denying the mythology of the others.  How can you say that Jesus was resurrected and is seated at the right hand of the Father, and simultaneously deny that Mohammed made it from Mecca to Jerusalem overnight (unless he, too, was felt up at an airport) and ascended to heaven from the Temple Mount?  They all have the same factual basis, which is thin at best.

These are the mythologies of religion, and are best separated from the moral codes and imperatives, which are remarkably similar across all of the major faith traditions.  All of the great religions teach some form of the Golden Rule – compassion, generosity, caring for others.

They also teach humility.  The core of humility is the deep, profound, fully internalized knowledge that you might be wrong.    The antithesis of humility is pride, which is clearly proscribed by Christian and other scripture.  It would be nice if devout adherents to religious creed would find it in themselves to remember that they believe but do not know, which makes them just as befuddled as everyone else.

Despite the impression I may have created, I envy people of great faith.  They find in it a comfort and source of guidance that I don’t have.  The best among them are both humble and generous in spirit.  My friend Bill T is a shining example.  He is a devout Christian.  His faith motivates him to do a tremendous amount of good in the world, more than I’ll ever accomplish.  He holds his faith dear, but would never tell anyone who disagrees with him that they are wrong.  I see this in his relationship with my daughter, to whom he is a mentor.  She has chosen to embrace the Jewish part of her heritage.  He sees her for who she is, genuinely loves her for who she is, privately hopes that she might migrate to his view of the world, and still has the humility to keep that hope to himself.  He will not impose, and he encourages her to find her way in the world.

This is religion well embraced.  The Reverend Jeffers’ of the world would do well to take note and to emulate.

Having said the above, I may as well state my own creed.  I don’t pretend to know if there is a god who made me.  If there is, he made me to be a person who isn’t able to know if he exists.  I’m OK with that uncertainty.  What I do know is that if there is a god, he made sure that pretty much everyone got the message about caring, compassion and generosity, so that’s what I figure he cares about. And that’s how I try to live my life.  I fail, completely and utterly, but I try, and I hope that my trying is enough.

Wrapping up. . .the Dr. Jeffers thing reminds me of an old joke.  A cardinal rushes into the Pope’s chambers and exclaims breathlessly, “I have wonderful news and really bad news!”  The Pope asks for the good news, and the cardinal says, “Jesus is on the phone.  He wants to talk to you!”  The Pope exclaims, “That’s incredibly good news!  What bad news could there possibly be?”  To which the cardinal replies, “He’s calling from Salt Lake City.”

We like jokes because they hold little bits of truth.