Reticulator

Medievalization

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Nov 072007
 

George Will, in his 22-October Newsweek article, made a good analysis of the cost-benefit of doing something about global warming. His article is as usual, educational. He compares the global warming zealots with Bush on Iraq:

Zealots say fighting global warming is a moral imperative, so cost-benefit analyses are immoral. Like our Manichaean president, they have a simple fixation: Are you with us or not?

I hadn’t thought of that one, although I do often mention how the nationalized health care zealots act from same hubris as George W Bush on Iraq.

But I have a nit to pick with Mr. Will. It’s in this section where he explains how if we really want to save lives, there is something we can do: Institute a 5 mph speed limit. (He doesn’t mention that a 5 mph speed limit would also reduce transportation fuel consumption.)

Recent loopiness about warming has ranged from the idiotic (an academic study that “associated” warming with increased Italian suicide rates) to the comic (London demonstrators chanting, “What do we want? Carbon taxes! When do we want them? Now!”). Well, you want dramatic effects now? We can eliminate what the World Health Organization says will be, by 2020, second only to heart disease as the world’s leading cause of death.

The cause is traffic accidents. The surefire cure is speed limits of 5mph. In 2008 alone, that would save 1.2 million lives and $500 billion in damages, disproportionately in the Third World, which will be hardest hit by increasing traffic carnage. But a world moving at 5mph would be, over the years, uncountable trillions of dollars poorer, which would cost some huge multiple of 1.2 million lives through forgone nutrition, education, infrastructure—e.g., clean water—medicine, research, etc.

The costs of such global slowing would be the medievalization of the world, so the world accepts the costs of velocity.

Now I can’t say I favor the idea of a 5 mph limit. That speed is getting dangerously close to the minimum I need just to stay upright on my bicycle. But I do favor some policies that would slow down the world’s personal transportation system, e.g. a substantial tax on fossil fuels (to be offset, of course, by countervailing tax cuts elsewhere). And Will is right, even if he exaggerates, about what that would cost us. So I would not favor something quite like what Will is mocking.

But that’s not the nit. The nit is that word “medievalization.” I don’t think these changes, whether in the extreme form held up to ridicule by Mr. Will or in more modest forms, would necessarily have to result in medievalization. He has picked the wrong word.

The medieval system was governed by a federated system of personal relationships rather than market relationships. It was a world of institutionalized personal loyalty and obligation rather than fee-paid-for-services-rendered.

A world with a slowed-down transportation system might be a more federated world, in both commerce and politics. It might be less Walmartized. People would shop more at local mom and pop stores rather than at distant shopping centers. People would work and entertain themselves closer than home, and local institutions might become more important at the expense of far-off celebrityland (Hollywood, Washington D.C.). So there would be changes — not all of which we would be able to predict. (Though I predict that central planners who think they can predict everything might have their influence diminished.)

But those changes would not need to be accompanied by a change to a system of lord-vassal relationships and fixed societal roles. Medievalization? It could just as easily result in LESS medievalization and MORE free market.

Whose freedom march?

 Bash the Messenger, Human rights, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Nov 072007
 

It’s a sad state of affairs when the issue of freedom in other countries is seen as a Bush idiosyncracy. Back in the days when Liberals were liberal, it was a cause that almost everyone in the United States favored. But here is a headline and lead paragraph from an article in Monday’s WSJ:

Pakistan Crackdown Slows Bush’s Freedom March

President Bush’s vaunted “freedom agenda,” using U.S. aid, influence and example to advance political liberty around the globe, suffered one of its worst setbacks this weekend when Gen. Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency in Pakistan.

I suppose it’s hard for the average newspaper journalist to ever stop thinking about George Bush. And there are those who are going to think of every event in terms of whether it hurts or helps their partisan faction. But isn’t this crackdown also a blow to the freedom of the people of Pakistan? Shouldn’t that issue be just as important as whether it helps or hurts Bush?

And if it’s too hard to focus on the lives of people in other countries, there is also the fact that every loss of freedom elsewhere is a threat to our own freedoms in the United States, too.

It’s not all about Bush.

Honor roll candidate

 Regulation  No Responses »
Nov 062007
 

This looks like a good candidate for the Subversive Honor Roll.   It’s the Anti-Planner:  Dedicated to the sunset of government planning.  I learned about him from Bill Steigerwald at Townhall.com

He’s off to a good start when he says this:

I’ve often heard people say, “I’m not against planning, I’m just against bad government planning.” After 30 years of looking at government plans — forest plans, park plans, transportation plans, city plans, state plans, all kinds of plans — I’ve realized all government planning is bad.

Quack, quack from Michael Moore

 Health care reform  No Responses »
Nov 052007
 

Most of us already knew that Michael Moore is a liar. But we didn’t know that he’d make the mistake of going to the UK so he could show how their National Health System is the sort of thing we’d want to emulate. Minette Marrin in The Sunday Times (UK) tells about it in Quack Michael Moore has mad view of the NHS. She doesn’t hold back in describing their system:

This, along with an even rosier portrait of the French welfare system, is what Moore says the state can and should provide. You would never guess from Sicko that the NHS is in deep trouble, mired in scandal and incompetence, despite the injection of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.

While there are good doctors and nurses and treatments in the NHS, there is so much that is inadequate or bad that it is dishonest to represent it as the envy of the world and a perfect blueprint for national healthcare. It isn’t.

GPs’ salaries – used by Moore as evidence that a state-run system does not necessarily mean low wages – is highly controversial; their huge pay rise has coincided with a loss of home visits, a serious problem in getting GP appointments and continuing very low pay for nurses and cleaners.

At least 20 NHS trusts have even worse problems with the hospital-acquired infection clostridium difficile, not least the trust in Kent where 90 people died of C diff in a scandal reported recently.

Many hospitals are in crisis. Money shortages, bad management, excesses of bureaucrats and deadly Whitehall micromanagement mean they have to skimp on what matters most.

Overfilling the beds is dangerous to patients, in hygiene and in recovery times, but it goes on widely. Millions are wasted on expensive agency nurses because NHS nurses are abandoning the profession in droves. Only days ago, the 2007 nurse of the year publicly resigned in despair at the health service. There is a dangerous shortage of midwives since so many have left, and giving birth on the NHS can be a shocking experience.

Meanwhile thousands of young hospital doctors, under a daft new employment scheme, were sent randomly around the country, pretty much regardless of their qualifications or wishes. As foreign doctors are recruited from Third World countries, hundreds of the best-qualified British doctors have been left unemployed. Several have emigrated.

As for consultants, the men in Whitehall didn’t believe what they said about the hours they worked, beyond their duties, and issued new contracts forcing them to work less. You could hardly make it up.

Nothing surprising there, though we can be sure it won’t stop the U.S. left wing from trying to reproduce those results in our country.

And what does Marrin herself think should be done?

None of these problems mean we should abandon the idea of a universal shared system of healthcare. It’s clear we would not want the American model, even if it isn’t quite as bad as portrayed by Moore. It’s clear our British private medical insurance provision is a rip-off. I believe we should as a society share burdens of ill health and its treatment. The only question is how best to do that and it seems to me the state-run, micromanaged NHS has failed to answer it.

OK, I can understand why she doesn’t want to exchange their system for ours. The people pushing nationalized health care may be in deep denial, but so are those who try to ignore the problems with our own health care, for example, those who say nobody is denied health care in our country — all you need to do is go to the emergency room, etc etc.

But where is the discussion about what should be done to fix the problems with existing national health care systems? All I ever hear is “the government should provide this, the government should provide that,” without talking about what it would take for the government to actually do that. There is no talk about the moral hazard issues. Marrin points out that the NHS has failed to answer the question of how best to provide universal care. Well, where does one go to find an intelligent discussion of how to fix it? All we get is a wish list of how life in fantasyland ought to be.

If I ever hear of any good discussions on the topic, I’ll be sure to blog about it here.

Piling on

 Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
Nov 012007
 

It has been years since I watched one of the so-called presidential debates. I prefer to save my energy so I can mock the ensuing media coverage. If they were really debates rather than panel discussions, it might be different.

So here’s my take on the latest Democrat “debate”, based on some headlines and lead paragraphs I’ve found from google news:

The candidates did make a slight move in the direction of real debates, by asking Hillary Clinton some tough questions. The media asked some tough questions, too.

The New York Times and its lapdogs call this process “piling on.”

I think we can take this to mean the New York Times does not share my taste for real debate. And we should not expect the New York Times to raise any difficult questions itself, at least not for certain candidates.

Did I get it right? Or do I need to read more carefully.

Richard Meinertzhagen and Sandy Berger

 Clinton scandals  No Responses »
Oct 312007
 

Tonight I heard an interesting talk by Dr. Pamela Rasmussen, author of the two volume set, “Birds of South Asia: the Ripley guide.”

The last part of her talk was about her work in uncovering the fraud perpetrated by Richard Meinertzhagen in the first part of the 20th century. A lot of observations about the distribution of birds in south Asia had been credited to him, with museum specimens existing to back them up. Except it turns out that a lot of his specimens were frauds. In many cases he stole bird specimens out of other collections, doctored them and relabeled them as his own, making false claims as to where and when they had been found. Rasmussen was not the first person to make accusations of fraud, but her detective work showed that the fraud was a lot more extensive than anyone had known.

Meinertzhagen’s techniques, as described by her, reminded me of the Sandy Berger story. He would ask the curators for collections of specimens to study, but wouldn’t return them all. He was once found to have a briefcase full of them as he was leaving the U.K. museum where he was working. He had Berger-like stories to cover himself — the previous curator had allowed him to do it and he always returned them — except he didn’t always return them. He was banned from the museum for a year until an influential aristocrat by the name of Rothschild got him reinstated — and in the meantime he was stealing specimens from Rothschild, too. It was only in the 1990s that his fraud became known, though there had been people way back who had suspected.

Well, Hillary has been in the process of rehabilitating Sandy Berger like Rothschild did Meinertzhagen. But will Berger complete the parallel by stealing from Hillary, too? Probably not, but it made me laugh out loud to think about it. (People turned around and gave me strange looks.)


Yes, dare you

 Clinton scandals, First Amendment  No Responses »
Oct 282007
 

Conservative writer Austin Hill has praise for Bill Clinton’s words, “How dare you.”

As he then attempted to continue with his address, another heckler shouted at President Clinton, claiming that the terrorist attacks had been an “inside job.”

“An inside job?” Clinton retorted, with indignation in his voice. “How dare you. How dare you! It was NOT an inside job!”

In a matter of a few seconds, former President Clinton used a spontaneous moment with rude people in his midst to communicate to a fearful, skeptical American people. What was the message he conveyed? That the worst suspicions about our country and government are not to be tolerated, and certainly not to be believed.

I beg to differ. I think it’s fine that Clinton confronted the hecklers, and it’s fine to tell them they’re nuts or to make fun of them. And it’s fine to have them carted away if they’re not letting him speak.

But to say, “How dare you?” That implies they should not be allowed to say such things. In fact, that’s the message Austin Hill took away, as indicated by his words, “not to be tolerated.” Our Bill of Rights gives people the right to say crazy things. That’s how they dare say that. We do need to tolerate such words; otherwise we’re not much better than those who took down the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

I realize it might just have been a manner of speaking, and that Clinton may not really have meant this kind of speech should not be allowed. Maybe I shouldn’t be so hyper-literal.

On the other hand, maybe in Clinton’s case we should parse his words very carefully and take them seriously. I am reminded of this incident from 1995, as told by Todd S. Purdum in the NYT:

This area is also a stronghold of anti-Government paramilitary groups, and Mr. Clinton addressed them tonight in a question from the daughter of a worker in the Federal Bureau of Land Management, who said the Oklahoma City bombing had left her afraid for his safety.

“The most important thing we can do to make your father safer is to have everybody in this room, whatever their political party or their view, stand up and say it is wrong to condemn people who are out there doing their job, and wrong to threaten them,” Mr. Clinton said. “And when you hear somebody doing it, you ought to stand up and double up your fist and stick it in the sky and shout them down.”

Shout them down? That’s the way dissidents may have been handled in the beginning days of Nazi Germany. But that’s not the sort of behavior the Leader of the Free World should be encouraging.

If people were a physical threat to this woman’s father, that should be reported to the police. If they were just criticizing him for working for the government, that is their right. And it is her right to criticize them back. Or to ignore them, if that would seem to be more effective.

But for an American president to be advising people to be shouted down is to encourage mob rule and the voice of unreason. He should be upholding the right of people to dare to say what the voices in their head are telling them, secure in the knowledge that we are upholding a country where reason and evidence will stand against it. Telling crackpots that they dare not speak vindicates their conspiracy theorizing in their own minds, and lends them credibility. What we need to do is bring these people and their crackpot ideas out into the sunshine, not shove them into a closet.

And speaking of sunshine, what was on those papers that Sandy Berger stuffed into his shorts, anyway?

Distinguishable from legislating

 Legislative process  1 Response »
Oct 272007
 

Like me, The Main Adversary has been greatly influenced by George Will’s arguments against the line-item veto.

But having thought it over a little more, there is at least one point I’d argue with.

But were a president empowered to cancel provisions of legislation, what he would be doing would be indistinguishable from legislating. He would be making, rather than executing, laws, and the separation of powers would be violated.

I don’t think this is true.

When a court strikes down legislation, that is not considered the same as legislating. We make a distinction between initiating a piece of legislation and saying no to it.

When a state supreme court told a state legislature that it had six months to write a law to enable gay marriage, THAT was legislating. That was a usurpation of the law-making power. But when it overturns a law banning gay marriage, whether we agree with it or not, that is not a usurpation of the legislature’s job. Rather, it is a check on the legislative power.

When a state supreme court tells a legislature that it must raise taxes to provide funds for schools, that, too, is legislating. When a state supreme court overturns a law providing funds for private schools, that could well be within its powers to act as a check on the law-making power.

By George Will’s logic, we could have no checks and balances, because any time the courts or the executive say no, that would be indistinguishable from legislating.

I don’t see how the fact that it’s one provision of a law vs a whole law that’s being vetoed would change things on those grounds. It is true that the line-item veto has been declared to be unconstitutional — but it can hardly be on the grounds that it’s indistinguishable from legislating. There is a very clear distinction between the two.

Exploiting children for partisan politics

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Oct 252007
 

There has been a lot of talk about the socio-economic status of Graeme Frost’s family and eligibility for SCHIP programs. I don’t know much about that. It’s not that I am uninterested. I have had my own experience with people trying to make me and my family, with our middle-class income, dependent on government welfare programs. But I’m more interested in his case of the issue of whether it’s right to take kids, put words in their mouths, and put them up on stage for partisan political purposes.

We seem to have an instinctive sense that it isn’t right when celebrity stage parents do it. The following is from a book review in the Wall Street Journal: The Perils of Being a Child Prodigy : Why Ervin Nyiregyházi never lived up to his potential.

In fact, “Musical Wonder Child,” part one of “Lost Genius,” might easily have been subtitled, “How Not to Raise a Prodigy.” The child of an amateur pianist and a tenor in the chorus of the Royal Hungarian Opera, Nyiregyházi was paraded around Europe performing for the social elite. Although his parents arranged quality musical training for their son, his mother banished his chess set for fear it would lure him away from music. She urged him to play Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” in less than 60 seconds and insisted he perform in short pants to heighten his marketing appeal. (He finally rebelled at the age of 17.)

We could come up with other examples like that, too. But somehow, whenever there is talk of cutting government spending, people think it’s OK to parade their kids like was done with Graeme Frost, and even put words in their mouths. Back in the mid-1990s when the new Republican Congress was battling the Clintons, some parents at the local VA was were also parading their kid in front of journalists for the sake of continued government spending. That’s when my campaign against this kind of child exploitation began.

I had already got somewhat sensitive to this issue some years earlier when my two oldest children were young, probably a little younger than Graeme Frost. I took them to a debate between Jackie MacGregor, Republican candidate for Congress against the incumbent, extreme leftist Howard Wolpe. MacGregor was a bit of an extremist herself, as am I. But she said some things I couldn’t support, and finally I just sat on my hands during her final applause lines. My kids were clapping wildly, though, along with the rest of her partisans in the crowd. I was glad I had brought them to the event, but it made me think how dangerous it is to use children this way. They knew which side their parents supported, but they weren’t old enough to think these things through themselves.

Graeme Frost is in 7th grade, so he is old enough to start thinking. The Kennedy-vs-Nixon campaign was in full swing when I was that age. Our teacher in our two-room school in rural Nebraska was at one point quizzing the kids about their political affiliation vs that of their parents. There was one 8th grade girl who supported the Democrats while her parents were Republican. The rest supported whichever candidate their parents supported. The teacher used that as evidence that only one of us was thinking for ourselves, while the rest of us were not doing so yet. That infuriated me, and I’m still angry over it 48 years later. Just because I agreed with my parents didn’t mean I wasn’t doing my own thinking. So I became a rebellious teenager — rebelling against those who said teenagers of the 1960s needed to rebel against their parents. (Well, to some extent I did, as my parents can still testify. But it in many ways I refused to do so, still angry over the implications of what our teacher had said in 7th grade.) I imagine Graeme Frost is doing some of his own thinking, too, and might be similarly resentful over what I’ve been writing here. But at that age kids shouldn’t be used as props for their parents to hide behind.

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