Hit & Run

House Passes Health Care Bill

2009-11-08T00:58:00-05:00

Health care reform bill H.R. 3962 passes the House of Representatives by a vote of 220 to 215. Among Republicans, only Anh "Joseph" Cao votes for the bill.

As always, the actual shape of the bill remains shrouded in moment-to-moment mystery. The San Francisco Chronicle's Carolyn Lochhead notes that moderates have succeeded in "untethering [the so-called public option] from Medicare."

After Ayn Rand Week, the Healing Begins

2009-11-07T22:47:00-05:00

How little you have to do to get into the feature well of a slick magazine these days. Thomas Mallon's takedown of Ayn Rand in The New Yorker is not online, but it is so phoned-in and lacking in protein that even this synopsis of the article feels padded.

There's 1943-vintage prissy caviling about Rand's writing style. ("It is, in fact, badly executed on every level of language, plot, and characterization.") There's 1957-vintage hyperventilating about the author-as-dictator. ("[T]he narrative voice of this implacably anti-Communist author is a bellows of Stalinist bad breath.") There is much guilt by association. (Mallon treats Alan Greenspan's distancing himself from Rand as an indictment of Rand rather than of Greenspan.)

But there is no attempt to engage the material or address its continuing popularity. Kurt Vonnegut, in most ways the anti-Rand, said a person who attacks a book is like a person who puts on armor to attack a banana split. Mallon's war on Rand's heterodoxies leads to some unintentionally interesting dead ends. When he declares that Rand's fiction belongs "in the crackpot pantheon of L. Frank Baum" and "is no closer to the canon of serious American novels than Galt's Gulch is to Brook Farm," is Mallon implying that there's some canon of American lit in which The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is not taken seriously, at least as a book with plenty of historical and sociological interest?

Mallon condemns as typically Randian overwriting the following passage, which describes The Fountainhead protagonist Howard Roark using a blowtorch: "it seemed as if the blue tension eating slowly through metal came not from the flame but from the hand holding it." Had Mallon been willing to venture an original opinion, he might have been able to make something out of this. King Vidor's adaptation of The Fountainhead is a completely entertaining movie, and as this nicely composed shot indicates, part of the movie's success lay in Vidor's finding ways to translate Rand's purple descriptions into interesting images:

Though the tool and the scene differ from the above passage, the movie works very hard to take Rand's evocation of modernist architecture, strong/silent males, and glamorous blondes completely seriously. If you're writing an assessment of Rand's enduring popularity, you'd at least want to take into account the interplay between style and philosophy -- an area in which Rand is remarkably similar to her contemporaries the Existentialists, who were loved at the time and are remembered today as much for their cigarettes and leather jackets as for anything they had to say about the relationship of existence and essence.

"Rand may be," Mallon continues, "in an aesthetic sense, the most totalitarian novelist ever to have sat down at a desk." It's worth remembering that there were, in fact, real totalitarian novelists: Fyodor Gladkov and many others for the Soviet Union, Kurt Eggers, Hans Baumann and a few others for Nazi Germany. They wrote actual, approved propaganda and curried artistic favor with their respective dictator/critics.

But by talking about the "aesthetic sense," Mallon may be moving toward a legitimate insight. Jean-Luc Godard criticized Steven Spielberg along the same lines, saying, "He gives you an emotional situation, then tells you how you have to respond to it." The difference is that Spielberg's post-1990 output has mostly been aimed at justifying establishment opinion. (You can't go wrong saying World War II veterans were brave, the Holocaust was horrible, and the Arab-Israeli conflict is complex.) Mallon may believe that Rand's propaganda merely aimed to flatter Americans' belief in themselves as rugged individualists, but he doesn't say so. In any event, the messages Rand was sending were very much at odds with the views of mid-century political scientists, literary dons, and most other keepers of establishment opinion. If she's a totalitarian, who's the Maximum Leader?

All interesting questions. Unfortunately, Mallon doesn't want to ask them. His purpose is to tell you Ayn Rand's books aren't worth reading, which is not particularly daring, given that this view of Rand is still widely shared among middlebrow thinkers. But it's a weird goal for a writer to have. You might even call it totalitarian.

No Health Insurance? Go Directly to Jail.

2009-11-07T12:53:00-05:00

As the House moves forward with debate on its trillion-dollar-plus health care bill today, it's worth remembering what's at stake: The House bill would give the government the power to require that every individual buy health insurance, pay a penalty for choosing not to comply—or potentially be sent to jail.

Now, jail isn't a certainty; depending on the infraction, fines are also an option. And, looked at another way, all this really means is that the government continues to retain the authority to lock up those who don't pay their taxes. But still, this is a stark reminder that when liberals talk about "health care as a right," what they really mean is "health insurance as a requirement."

Even When I Thought it Was Stimulation, I Knew it Was the Banks All Along

2009-11-06T18:28:00-05:00

Arnold Kling tries to explain recent Fed policy actions re: injecting reserves into the economy and simultaneously paying banks interest on reserves to high school students, and comes to a sobering conclusion:

In spite of all the sophisticated rhetoric about "quantitative easing" and "new tools for monetary policy," the only way that I can understand what the Fed was doing is to say that the goal was to stimulate bank profits, not the economy. If your goal were to stimulate the economy, you would inject enough reserves to do that and not pay interest on reserves. That might require buying some long-term bonds or mortgage securities, but not the hundreds of billions that the Fed actually bought.

Everything the Fed has been doing over the past fifteen months makes sense if you think of their goal as transferring wealth from taxpayers to banks. If you try to explain it as an attempt to implement an expansionary monetary policy, you won't even get past my high school students.

My November Reason magazine feature on the new political war against the Federal Reserve.

Are Americans Really Saving More?

2009-11-06T18:15:00-05:00

Although officials on President Obama's economic team continue to claim that the personal savings rate of Americans is increasing, this rate has actually been declining since May. In fact, it's possible that a recovery in personal savings that began late in the Bush Administration ran out of steam early in the Obama Administration. Here is how the numbers have been trending since December:

These numbers are subject to regular, substantial change as the Bureau of Economic Analysis gets more complete data. For example, the May peak was initially claimed to be a full percentage point higher, at 6.9 percent, than it is now. September's 3.3 percent will be subject to revision up or down -- and all the revisions made to monthly statistics this year have been down.

Yet the rising personal saving rate continues to be a favorite talking point about the recovery. On Sunday, Treasury Sec. Tim Geithner made the claim his closing comment in an interview with Meet the Press's David Gregory:

You're seeing them do the rational thing, David, you're seeing Americans start to save again. After a long period where people were not putting enough aside against the risk of a recession or a job loss, you're seeing people start to save again. And that's a healthy, necessary adjustment. It'll help make sure the growth is more stable, more sustainable in the future.

Geithner and others are right about one thing. The personal savings rate is a little more than one percent higher now than it was in 2005:

However, the frequent revision of these numbers means that even the uptick in personal savings over the last four years may be less dramatic in relative terms. For example, while many ignoramuses (including this ignoramus) have claimed that the American savings rate entered negative territory in the early years of the 21st century, this is not true. The personal savings rate has not been negative on an annual basis since the Great Depression. On a monthly basis, the rate has gone negative only once, in September 2001 -- and even this is debatable given some changes in accounting related to the 9/11 attacks.

Finally, there is not much meaning encoded in month-to-month changes in the savings rate. The claim that Americans are upping personal savings as part of the recovery -- in addition to being logically faulty, given the Administration's exertions to drive the recovery by increasing spending on real estate, new cars and other items -- is unsupported. If anything the data point to a trivial increase in savings, which began under the previous administration.

This Is the Modern World

2009-11-06T16:45:00-05:00

This month's edition of Cato Unbound tackles one of the most interesting questions historians have: Where did modernity come from? Stephen Davies leads off with a revision and synthesis of several classical liberal theories about the issue; his essay has attracted a friendly critique from Jack Goldstone, one of the scholars whose work Davies drew on and revised, and some more scathing criticisms from Anthony Pagden, who doubts many of Davies' premises. Jason Kuznicki will weigh in with another response to Davies next week, and then Davies will answer his critics. Watch it all unfold here.

Executive Pay Caps We Can Believe In

2009-11-06T16:32:00-05:00

Writing at The Freeman, economist Bruce Yandle (listen to him talk about his famous “Bootleggers and Baptists” article here) makes the case for capping a certain type of executive pay:

Yes, it is high time that pay and investment guidelines be mandated for all top level executives who may in the normal course their daily work push the entire economy too close to or even over the edge of systemic risk falls. If nothing else, this Great Recession has taught us that top executives can practically capsize the economy.

But the chief concern is not with presidents and vice presidents of too-big-to-fail banks and other bailed-out enterprises. As large as they are, they are small potatoes relative to the big generators of systemic risk. The critical concern is with top government executives who can create national and international panic, lay the groundwork for international inflation or deflation, and just by voting and writing regulations can change the risk profile of entire industries.

We taxpayer/investors demand a set of risk-sensitive compensation guidelines that will mandate pay and wealth-management rules for all federal government top executives starting with the president of the United States and all cabinet members and their deputies. While we’re at it let’s include all members of Congress and every member of the commissions and boards that manage the nation’s independent agencies, including, of course, the board of governors and chairman of the Federal Reserve System.

New at Reason: Shikha Dalmia on What's Wrong with Ayn Rand

2009-11-06T16:30:00-05:00

Love her or hate her, you can't deny that Ayn Rand is experiencing a revival. Yet as Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia writes, Rand's entire project involved liberating the individual from the yoke of collectivism and creating the social, moral, and political conditions in which he could live a fully actualized life. But is self-actualization through productive work—the ultimate goal of this liberation for Rand—all there is to a happy life?

Morally Hazardous Hikes

2009-11-06T15:52:00-05:00

Tracie Cone of the Associated Press reports:

Last month two men and their teenage sons tackled one of the world's most unforgiving summertime hikes: the Grand Canyon's parched and searing Royal Arch Loop. Along with bedrolls and freeze-dried food, the inexperienced backpackers carried a personal locator beacon -- just in case.

In the span of three days, the group pushed the panic button three times, mobilizing helicopters for dangerous, lifesaving rescues inside the steep canyon walls.

What was that emergency? The water they had found to quench their thirst "tasted salty."

If they had not been toting the device that works like Onstar for hikers, "we would have never attempted this hike," one of them said after the third rescue crew forced them to board their chopper. It's a growing problem facing the men and women who risk their lives when they believe others are in danger of losing theirs.

"Rescue officials are deciding whether to start keeping statistics on the problem," Cone writes, "but the incidents have become so frequent that the head of California's Search and Rescue operation has a name for the devices: Yuppie 911." The unnecessary calls range from the accidental ("very often the beacons go off unintentionally when the button is pushed in someone's backpack") to the ridiculous ("a woman who was frightened by a thunderstorm"). Apparently, poor incentives have taken a system conceived as a way to help people beset by catastrophe and turned it into an overused, potentially overstretched service invoked at the drop of a hat. Now where have we seen that before?

Bonus comparison: If the health insurance angle ain't doing it for you, maybe you'd rather think of the beacons as a metaphor for bank bailouts:

"Now you can go into the back country and take a risk you might not normally have taken," says Matt Scharper, who coordinates a rescue every day in a state with wilderness so rugged even crashed planes can take decades to find. "With the Yuppie 911, you send a message to a satellite and the government pulls your butt out of something you shouldn't have been in in the first place."

As one rescue worker told Cone, "We are now entering the Twilight Zone of someone else's intentions."

Lame Lobsters Cause Bad Loan Policy

2009-11-06T15:15:00-05:00

Remember 2008 when congressional Democrats really, really, really wanted to pass the stimulus? At the time, they needed to snag a few Republicans to get the bill through. Meanwhile, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) really, really wanted federal money to give to lobstermen in her state, since lobsters aren't big sellers when everyone feels poor.

Thus the American Recovery Capital program was born. The $255 million loan program for small businesses has an expected 60 percent default rate. That's largely because the program is explicitly targeted at businessmen who can't pay back loans.

From today's Washington Post under the bleak headline "SBA bailouts draw little notice," the details of a loan plan that only makes sense in a world gone mad:

The loan program offers an unprecedented 100 percent guarantee to banks, vs. the SBA's standard 75 percent. The loans' anticipated default rate is 60 percent, compared with the agency's average 10 percent. And all of the funds must be used to repay other delinquent loans—another first for the SBA.

"Logic tells you this is a bad idea. By definition these businesses are already failing, but we are lacking standards right now; our world has been turned upside down," said Barry Bosworth, an economist with the Brookings Institution.

The WaPo piece wraps up by pointing out that programs like this are almost impossible to kill once they exist, so we should probably just get used to Snowe's lobster pork.*

*Wow, "lobster pork" is pretty much the ultimate in treif.

New at Reason: Brian Doherty Interviews Sociologist Howard Campbell on the Juarez/El Paso Drug War Zone

2009-11-06T15:00:00-05:00

The Mexican city of Juarez, on the U.S. border at El Paso, Texas, has been suffering from wild waves of drug war-related violence in the past few years. Howard Campbell, a professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso, just came out with a book, Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juarez that sheds light on the background of what he calls the "drug war zone" that binds Mexico and the United States.

Senior Editor Brian Doherty interviewed Campbell about how the drug war is destroying Mexico, and why it can never succeed in its ostensible goal of preventing the sale and possession of certain drugs.

A Revolution in Europe

2009-11-06T14:49:00-05:00

In the latest print edition of The New Republic (not online, alas), Anne Applebaum reviews Christopher Caldwell's new book on Islam and Europe, Reflections on a Revolution in Europe. I read it a few months ago and happily noticed that, unlike many shrill commentators on this issue, Caldwell actually did an enormous amount of on-the-ground research (when I was living in Sweden, he stopped by Timbro, my former employer, to talk about the situation in Stockholm and Malmö) and speaks a handful of European languages. For those of us that are reflexively pro-immigration in the United States—and if I were to hazard a guess, I would say the Caldwell is not one of those fearful of "Mexifornia"—he provides a compelling and convincing argument as to why the situation in Western Europe is rather different than the one in Texas and Southern California. Here is Applebaum giving the reader a rough précis of Caldwell's argument:

Caldwell's is a complicated argument, with both religious and social elements, not all of which I am qualified to judge. Among other things, he notes that Muslim dislike of European attitudes to women and sex leads Muslim men--even second-generation Muslim men--to import wives from their home countries. The imported wives, who often do not speak European languages, in turn tend to preserve the customs of the home countries in their adopted countries for another generation. He also observes a phenomenon that historians of American immigration would certainly recognize: in practice, contact with European culture has tended to make Muslims more conservative, not more liberal, about the culture they remember from the past. Their children and grandchildren, meanwhile, are able to keep in touch with that culture in a way that previous generations never could, through the easily manipulated world of satellite television. Back in Bangladesh, young people may long to be "modern" and go to nightclubs, but in the Bangladeshi enclaves of London, one sees a much different sort of Islamic world on Al Jazeera.

Applebaum gives Caldwell a fair hearing, and seems to broadly agree with his diagnosis of Europe's current immigration challenge. And she is also right to point out that his argument is far more complex and nuanced than one can possibly convey in 3000 words. But diagnosis and prescription and rather different things; Applebaum sees a rosier future, one in which Europe's intergrationist impulse and the benefits of liberal society eventually overwhelm the tribal and illiberal:

Perhaps because I belong to the group of people who fondly and naovely imagine that Islam may evolve--every other monotheism has--I am not entirely persuaded by Caldwell's elegant pessimism. There are multiple examples--many multiples of examples--of Muslim immigrants who have integrated seamlessly into Europe. I am thinking of the secular and sophisticated Iranians of Paris, the Pakistani shopkeepers on British high streets, even individuals such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of Europe's most fervent exponents of Enlightenment values. All have succeeded because some elements of European life--the entrepreneurial tradition and the blandishments of capitalism; the cosmopolitan cultural scene; the large role given to public intellectuals, particularly those who have something new to say--are well suited to the absorption and the cultural adaptation of outsiders. I do not see why Muslim immigrants will remain magically immune to all the integrationist influences that have shaped other immigrants into contented citizens of Western societies.

There are also some historical precedents. As noted above, the habit of importing spouses from the old country was also practiced by American immigrants--Jewish, German, Irish--some of whom also remained isolated in their own communities into two, three, or more generations. But these groups were finally integrated, partly through the lure of prosperity--in the end you had to speak English in order to get on--and partly through schools and peer pressure. Caldwell is right when he notes that Europeans always underestimate how deeply conformist American society is, and how much overt pressure there has always been to assimilate; but it is not impossible to imagine that a few changes in Europe could make a big difference. Indeed, that ban on the veil in schools in France is now widely perceived as an enormous success, precisely because it has tended to accelerate the assimilation of Muslim girls (and thus it might eventually be possible to drop it). Nor is it impossible to imagine that Europe could recover from the current recession--from which, with the exception of Britain and Ireland, it has suffered less drastically than the United States--and that a subsequent burst of economic growth could pull immigrants into the mainstream.

Time Traveling, Anti-Physics Saboteurs Now Enlisting the Aid of Birds?

2009-11-06T14:41:00-05:00

A few weeks back, I wrote about the argument put forth by two respected physicists that the Large Hadron Collider was failing due to sabotage from the future. Absurd, right? Except that more evidence just keeps piling on: According to reports, the LHC has undergone a series of troubles, and recently shut down due to a bird dropping a piece of bread into a key section of the machine:

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, just cannot catch a break. First, a coolant leak destroyed some of the magnets that guide the energy beam. Then LHC officials postponed the restart of the machine to add additional safety features. Now, a bird dropping a piece of bread on a section of the accelerator has, according to the Register, shut down the whole operation.

Of course, if those scientists are right, we should be thanking the errant bird for doing its part to save the world.

Previously at Reason, Ron Bailey examined whether the LHC might cause the end of the world. (And for the easily panicked, if you're ever uncertain about whether or not it has, you can always find out here.)

Kids Today, With Their Briar Pipes and Fancy Cigars

2009-11-06T12:58:00-05:00

Last week New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed into law a ban on the sale of flavored tobacco products that takes effect in February. This ordinance goes beyond the arbitrary, irrational federal ban on flavored cigarettes, since it also covers cigars, pipe tobacco, and smokeless tobacco. As with the federal ban, the official rationale is that the newly prohibited products appeal to children. According to the Staten Island Advocate, "health experts say [flavored tobacco products] are a blatant attempt to hook young people on a dangerous product." Michele Bonan of the American Cancer Society calls them "Big Tobacco's training wheels," while Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan) says banning them is necessary "to protect the children of New York City."

The rest of the city council evidently was swayed by this argument, since all but one member voted for the ban. Yet Bonan and Quinn have no idea what they're talking about, and they have no evidence to back up their bald assertions. Are they seriously maintaining that cherry-flavored pipe tobacco, which you may recall your grandfather smoking, is part of a plot to lure teenagers into nicotine addiction? Do they honestly believe that the kids today are into rum-flavored cigars, or that they are sneaking into Nat Sherman to score the latest offering from CAO or Drew Estate?

Like the federal ban, the New York City ban makes an exception for one kind of flavored tobacco product that really is widely consumed by teenagers: menthol cigarettes. And since selling tobacco to minors is already illegal (as the lone dissenter on the city council noted), the only sales that will be blocked by the ban will be sales to adults. Still, it's for the kids.

Reason Writers Around Town: Nick Gillespie in the American Conservative on William Carlos Williams' In the American Grain

2009-11-06T12:10:00-05:00

The American Conservative is running a symposium on great works that have been neglected. Participants inlcude David Bromwich, San Tanenhaus, Florence King, and Reason's Nick Gillespie, who writes:

Is any major American writer fading faster than William Carlos Williams, who had the bum judgment to write a five-book epic poem about Paterson, New Jersey, of all godforsaken places? Williams is best remembered, if at all, for his “red wheel/barrow/glazed with rain/water” and his introduction to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, which is more than most poets, and certainly most Garden State loyalists such as myself, deserve.

But at least one Williams work deserves to be read by every American and every citizen of the world who aspires to be American or understand the place: 1925’s In the American Grain, a wide-ranging collection of essays, fragments, and prose poems that challenged and exploded the very idea of national identity. Eric the Red, Ponce de Leon, the French missionary Sebastian Rasles, the Indian princess Jacataqua—they are real Americans by Williams’s count, as are Poe, Lincoln, and Aaron Burr, whose antinomianism infuses our historical experiment with its greatness, peril, and often self-defeating arrogance.

“They say, they say, they say,” Williams’s Burr utters near the end of his life. “Those two little words have done more harm than all others. Never use them ... never use them.” Williams’s meditation on what it meant to be living in the New World was written at the start of the American Century, but it continues to speak loud and clear to our current confusion over our place in the world.

Read the whole symposium here.

Reason.tv: Goddess of the Market Author Jennifer Burns on Ayn Rand

2009-11-06T12:00:00-05:00

Reason Senior Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward recently sat down with Jennifer Burns, an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia and author of the new book Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.

Shot and edited by Meredith Bragg.

This is part of the Reason.tv series Radicals For Capitalism: Celebrating the Ideas of Ayn Rand.

Go here for more information, other videos, and related materials. Go here for downloadable versions of this video.

Work Boots Give the Economy a Kick

2009-11-06T11:43:00-05:00

Last week the Obama administration issued a report that attributed 640,000 "saved or created" jobs to spending authorized by the $787 billion stimulus package that Congress approved in February. "Although President Obama initially said that 90 percent of the jobs created by the stimulus program would be in the private sector," The New York Times notes, "the data suggests that well over half of the jobs claimed so far have been in the public sector." Indeed, most of the jobs cited in the report are public school positions, and "some school districts said that they might not have actually laid off teachers without the stimulus money." The Times is too polite to add that the rest of the school districts—the ones that claim they're sure these jobs would have been cut but for the federal money—are lying. Counterfactual assumptions about teacher jobs may be the biggest source of uncertainty in the report, but it is by no means the funniest. Consider:

The report claims the purchase of a $1,000 lawn mower to cut grass at the Fayetteville National Cemetery in Arkansas saved or created 50 jobs.
"Many Head Start programs reported saving the jobs of employees who in fact had simply been given raises with stimulus money."
"A $7,960 contract for a 'Basketball System Replacement' in Ohio claimed three jobs."
A sewer project in Douglas County, Wisconsin, somehow has created 100 jobs, even though it hasn't begun yet.
"C3T Construction Co., a general contracting company in Milwaukee, listed 24 jobs retained for projects on which no work had begun and no stimulus money had been received."
"Owners at five Section 8 housing complexes in Madison and Milwaukee reported saving 38 jobs with more than $540,000 in additional rental assistance for low-income residents, though they acknowledged no new jobs were created."
"A Kentucky shoe store reported that it had created nine jobs with an $890 order for work boots."

If you've come across other striking examples of fudging or fraud in the job report, point them out in the comments.

In Washington, It's Always Opposite Day

2009-11-06T10:56:00-05:00

Unintended consequences seem to be the order of the day: In addition to Martin Feldstein's piece positing that health-care reform might actually incentivize people to drop their insurance until they get sick (thus shrinking the risk pool and increasing premiums), former Bush budget official James Capretta has a useful post explaining how the a Medicare payment system originally designed to encourage more doctors to become general practitioners produced the opposite result—and led to the situation we have today, in which Congress is trying to simultaneously fix one major health-care mistake and pass another one:

In the late 1980s and 1990s, the Medicare bureaucracy set out to reform the way physicians are reimbursed for providing services to the program’s enrollees. The idea was to shift more resources toward generalists, who were then thought to be undercompensated for spending time with patients, and to control overall costs by limiting the growth of aggregate payments to growth in the size of the U.S. economy. After several years of study, lengthy payment regulations were issued, including a predecessor to the SGR formula, which had immediate and profound financial consequences for nearly every practicing physician in the United States.

And so what happened? The exact opposite of what was intended. Instead of encouraging more physicians to enter into primary care, the Medicare physician-fee schedule has rewarded more specialization. The fee schedule only controls prices, not volume. As Medicare’s administrators have tried to hold down costs with fee cuts, specialists increased their share of the pie with more tests and procedures, at the expense of primary-care reimbursement rates. Not surprisingly, the trend of physicians entering specialist practices has accelerated dramatically in the last twenty years. Moreover, overall costs have never been brought under control. With volume soaring, the SGR formula governing annual fee updates has gone completely off the rails. In 2010, fees are supposed to get cut by 21 percent unless Congress overrides it yet again. To secure the AMA’s endorsement of their health-care bill, House leaders are planning to scrap the SGR component of the physician fee system altogether, at a cost of more than $200 billion over a decade.

The irony of the situation seems to be lost on House Democrats: Congress is moving to repeal a prime example of health-care central planning run amok while simultaneously extending federal control to every corner of American health care.

Ron Paul Running Mates: A Lament

2009-11-06T10:47:00-05:00

Yesterday Brian Doherty blogged about the eternal recurrence of the third party. Meanwhile over at RonPaul.com, they're running a running mate poll for 2012. (The poll doesn't specify whether we are talking about a major party run or a third party run.)

The list is pretty dispiriting, simply as a catalog of prominent libertarian/libertarian-friendly/libertarian-tolerant politicos (although several on the list may not even meet those basic criteria).

For a fun bonus activity, tally up the number of truthers and/or birthers on the list in the comments section.

If Ron Paul runs for President in 2012, who should be his running mate?

Adam Kokesh

Rand Paul

Michael Badnarik

John McCain

Lew Rockwell

Michele Bachmann

Mitt Romney

Alan Grayson

Michael Bloomberg

Cynthia McKinney

Jim DeMint

Pat Buchanan

Jesse Ventura

Sarah Palin

Gary Johnson

Mel Watt

Mark Sanford

Glenn Beck

Mike Huckabee

Alex Jones

Dennis Kucinich

Andrew Napolitano

Chuck Hagel

Wayne Allyn Root

Lou Dobbs

Other (specify below)

Peter Schiff

Chuck Baldwin

FYI: At the moment, Andrew Napolitano and Peter Schiff are the front runners.

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2009-11-06T10:17:00-05:00

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Higher Premiums, Less Coverage?

2009-11-06T09:43:00-05:00

Could health-care reform actually lead to fewer people being insured? Harvard economics professor Martin Feldstein argues that the answer is yes:

A key feature of the House and Senate health bills would prevent insurance companies from denying coverage to anyone with preexisting conditions. The new coverage would start immediately, and the premium could not reflect the individual's health condition.

This well-intentioned feature would provide a strong incentive for someone who is healthy to drop his or her health insurance, saving the substantial premium costs. After all, if serious illness hit this person or a family member, he could immediately obtain coverage. As healthy individuals decline coverage in this way, insurance companies would come to have a sicker population. The higher cost of insuring that group would force insurers to raise their premiums. (Separate accident policies might develop to deal with the risk of high-cost care after accidents when there is insufficient time to buy insurance.)

The higher premium level would cause others who are currently insured to drop coverage, pushing premiums even higher. The result would be a spiral of rising premiums and shrinking numbers of insured.

Now, as Feldstein explains, there are already fines built into the bill to prevent this. But for many people, those fines won't be enough to keep them in the insurance pool:

Consider: 27 million people are covered by health insurance purchased directly, i.e. outside employer-based plans. The average cost of an insurance policy with family coverage in 2009 is $13,375. A married couple with a median family income of $75,000 who choose not to insure would be subject to a fine of 2.5 percent of that $75,000, or $1,875. So the family would save a net $11,500 by not insuring. If a serious illness occurs—a chronic condition or a condition that requires surgery—they could then buy insurance. Since fewer than one family in four has annual health-care costs that exceed $10,000, the decision to drop coverage looks like a good bet. For a lower-income family, the fine is smaller, and the incentive to be uninsured is even greater.

Feldstein thinks all of this could lead to greater subsidies, or perhaps a more dominant public option. I think it's possible he's underplaying the psychological cushion of having insurance, as well as the fact that people like having insurance to help pay for routine care (as I've noted before, many people in the U.S. understand health insurance as essentially a form of medical pre-payment). But no matter what, the larger point seems pretty clear (if not surprising): The potential unintended consequences for this version of health-care reform are huge.

Reason Morning Links: ObamaCare, the PATRIOT Act, a Climate Bill, and More

2009-11-06T08:17:00-05:00

• The Fort Hood shooter is alive after all.

• At least 10,000 tea partiers protest ObamaCare in Washington.

• The House Judiciary Committee defies the White House by rejecting the PATRIOT Act's "lone wolf" provision.

• The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee passes cap and trade while Republicans boycott the vote.

• Investigators "increasingly doubt" that the census worker found dead in Kentucky was killed for political reasons.

• Former NYPD chief Bernie Kerik pleads guilty to eight felonies.

• A political bargain falls apart in Honduras.

• Venezuela cracks down on violent video games.

New at Reason: Friday Funnies

2009-11-06T07:00:00-05:00

In the latest edition of Friday Funnies, Chip Bok looks at Obama's plans for a second stimulus.

Third Parties: Always on the Horizon

2009-11-05T19:35:00-05:00

The Hill gathers an august panel of politics watchers to muse on whether election 2009 shows there's gas in the ol' rusty Third Party tank. Some observations, from the realistic to the conspiratorial to a practical suggestion for change:

David Boaz: "...the two parties have pretty well locked up the political system. The noted political scientist Theodore Lowi wrote back in 1992, "One of the best-kept secrets in American politics is that the two-party system has long been brain dead -- kept alive by support systems such as state electoral laws that protect the established parties from rivals and by federal subsidies and so-called campaign reform. The two-party system would collapse in an instant if the tubes were pulled and the IVs were cut." But those tubes are firmly locked in place. Ballot access rules, campaign finance regulations, the ban on party cross-endorsements, direct government subsidies to the major parties, and other election rules make it very difficult to launch an independent candidacy or a third party."

John F. McManus, president of the The John Birch Society: "In 1966, Georgetown University Professor Carroll Quigley....wrote: "Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy." This is surely what has occurred at the top of the two major political parties. It would be helpful to America if voters would seek alternatives to the Dems and Reps at all levels. But public awareness of political realities, while steadily increasing, is still far from where it ought to be to effect a needed return to the principles that made our nation great."

Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote: "It's time for policymakers to acknowledge Americans' growing restlessness with the major parties. That's why in the long-term, elections in Minnesota's twin cities may have more influence on our politics than this week's higher-profile races. In Minneapolis, instant runoff voting (IRV) earned high praise in its first use for elections for mayor and city council, while neighboring St. Paul became the latest city to adopt IRV, joining Memphis, Oakland and San Francisco...

We should expect rising totals for third parties and independents -- and without IRV, more frustrated voters and distorted outcomes. In New Jersey, support for independent Chris Daggett plunged primarily because of voter fears that a vote for him would be "wasted" and "spoil" the election, as indeed Jon Corzine's campaign apparently was counting on. In such multi-candidate races, IRV upholds majority rule by allowing voters to rank candidates in order of choice and using those rankings to simulate a traditional two-round runoff if no candidate wins a majority."

Past Reason magazine pieces by me on third parties as consumption expenditure and on the promise of ballot fusion.

The Party of Discipline

2009-11-05T18:07:00-05:00

I have been bleating on about this since theater critic Frank Rich's intemperate-stroke-incoherent column about the "Stalinists" opposing Dede Scozzfava, but here is yet another example of a sinister political party purging its more moderate members:

Democratic Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu is out as keynote speaker for the Palm Beach County Democratic Party’s annual fund-raising dinner next week because party leaders dislike her stance on health care reform, county Democratic Chairman Mark Alan Siegel said today.

Landrieu, a moderate who recently described herself as “extremely concerned about a government-run, taxpayer-funded, national public plan,” has not committed to voting to cut off a likely Republican filibuster and forcing a vote on the legislation.

Democrats need 60 votes to invoke “cloture” and force a vote.

“We just didn’t want to have a keynote speaker who’s not committed to cloture. It would have just been wrong,” said Siegel, who said party higher-ups and rank-and-file members had voiced displeasure with the choice of Landrieu as a keynoter.

Full story. This, incidentally, is referred to by its practitioners as enforcing "party discipline," which is rather different than a "plan to purge moderates."

Ft. Hood Shooting Discussion Thread

2009-11-05T17:39:00-05:00

Thought it might be a good idea to give you H&R readers a thread to discuss the Ft. Hood shootings.

The latest as of this posting:

At least 12 dead, 31 injured.
One gunman, identified as Army Major Malik Nadal Hasan, is reported dead.
Two other suspects are in custody.

Here's the Google News feed, sorted by date.

What Do Pot Arrests Accomplish?

2009-11-05T17:20:00-05:00

In the January 2008 issue of Reason, I compared trends in marijuana arrests to trends in marijuana use and concluded that "there is no clear relationship between the number of arrests and the number of pot smokers." That is, it did not seem to be the case that a) increases in use were driving up arrests or b) increases in arrests were driving down use. In the November issue of The Bulletin of Cannabis Reform, Jon Gettman takes a more detailed and sophisticated look at the numbers and reaches much the same conclusion:

The most important characteristic of marijuana arrests in the United States is that they have been steadily increasing over the last 20 years with little or no impact on the level of marijuana use in this country....Marijuana arrests have nearly doubled from 1991 to 2008, increasing by 150% during the 1990s and increasing steadily in recent years, producing an annualized change of 6.56% per year during this period. Overall, levels of marijuana use in the United States have remained fundamentally unchanged during this period.

The implication is that the risk of arrest has gone up. By my calculation, comparing annual arrests to annual users, it has roughly doubled. But Gettman argues that "the overall marijuana arrest rate of between 3% and 6% of users is not enough to represent a meaningful deterrent." He also notes that the risk is not evenly distributed:

While the marijuana-use rate for African-Americans is only about 25% greater than for whites, the marijuana possession arrest rate for blacks is three times greater. This is not a regional disparity, but is seen in every state and most counties.

Looking across jurisdictions, Getmann finds little evidence that relatively lenient treatment of pot smokers is associated with higher levels of use or that relatively harsh treatment is associated will lower levels of use. He estimates that "marijuana arrests cost state and local governments $10.3 billion in 2006."

The whole report is here (PDF). And in case that does not satisfy your appetite for marijuana arrest numbers, the Marijuana Policy Almanac, which includes "state rankings and individual reports for all 50 states plus the District of Columbia," is here.

I considered the latest marijuana arrest figures in September.

New at Reason: Jesse Walker on the Baby Einstein Refund

2009-11-05T16:30:00-05:00

After the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood organized a class action lawsuit, the Walt Disney Company offered a refund to parents who purchased its Baby Einstein videos under the impression that they were educational. Managing Editor Jesse Walker asks: Is this a victory against corporate fraud or just a triumph of the buttinskis?

... Jason, Freddy, God, Spock, Chucky...

2009-11-05T15:59:00-05:00

Add the Almighty Creator of the Universe to the long list of beloved characters who have survived their own deaths. At Obit mag, Nathan Schneider resurrects the "death of God" movement of the 1960s. This theological school is best remembered today by a Time mag cover story that was quoted in Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby and misquoted in Bernie Taupin's lyric for "Levon" (which also wrongly attributes the quote to The New York Times; Taupin is correct, however, in noting that Mars is cold as hell).

But there was a lot more to the death of God school, including some heady-sounding theosophy that approaches pretty closely to Hazel Motes' Church of Truth Without Jesus Christ Crucified:

"It was as though the country itself was possessed by a theological fever," recalls Emory University professor Thomas J. J. Altizer, the most shocking of the “death of God” theologians, "one in which the most religious nations in the industrial world had suddenly discovered its own atheism." Like a good heretic, he traces his insight to a haunting vision of Satan himself, which he then came to interpret through the dialectical goggles of Blake, Hegel, and Nietzsche. By way of them, he concluded that modernity's turn away from a supernatural God represents a culmination of Christ's incarnation and death on the cross. Just as that death led to a resurrection, the death of God opens the way for a renewal of faith, one based in the fuller affirmation of temporal life and creativity. "In matters theological as well as personal," wrote Altizer's colleague Mark C. Taylor, "he simply cannot imagine a death that is not a resurrection."

Altizer took pains to insist that, Satanic inspiration notwithstanding, his ideas lie within the bounds of orthodoxy. His landmark book bore a puzzling title: The Gospel of Christian Atheism. "The intention throughout this voyage," he explained, "is to seek a truly radical and yet nevertheless fully Christian theology." He was serious about calling his message "gospel" -- he meant it as good news.

Read the whole article for more interesting stuff, including a Baalist-sounding call for "a renaissance of festivity and fantasy to bring the divine back."

Some quotable person said he couldn't be an atheist because that would require a god for him not to believe in. This seems to be the next logical step along that path: an atheism that requires a god, then requires the god to disappear, so you can better appreciate the world without god. I think there are less fussy ways to arrive at that conclusion, but maybe there are hidden depths in Altizer's argument.

Anyway they thought Chucky and Leprechaun were dead too, but they were wrong!

New at Reason: John Stossel on Bias in Journalism

2009-11-05T15:00:00-05:00

Every journalist has a point of view. So why, writes John Stossel, "am I the one called biased?"