Socialism

There's a saying making the rounds on twitter, facebook and the occasional protest sign:

Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who gives away free health care. You're thinking of Jesus.

It's a clever saying, but Jesus frowned on forcing one's views on others, not to mention taking things from people by force. Thus he was not a socialist.

Voluntary charity? He was all for it. Submitting to an oppressive government? His own advice. Using government to oppress others? Not his cup of tea.

Freedom and Honduras

There's a surprisingly encouraging article at Reason Magazine titled Global Freedom Had Few Blooms. Not so much because of the article, which listed many assaults against freedom that had occurred over the course of the past year, but because of the comments involving the case of Honduras.

Honduras, in case you didn't know, recently averted a coup by the sitting President, Manuel Zelaya. Its Supreme Court, with the cooperation of its Congress, ordered the military to remove him from the country, and made another person from Zelaya's party the interim President. Afterwards, evidence of vote fraud (in the form of election returns for a referendum that had not yet taken place) was found on computers in the office of former President Zelaya. That the United States supports Zelaya, and not the people of Honduras, raises troubling questions.

The article at Reason included Honduras as an example of a place where democracy did not do so well, but the commenters quickly corrected it, pointing out what I've said above, and much more as well. Check it out for yourself.

This article was encouraging not only because it led to an accurate description of the Honduran situation, but because that description came from the grass roots, so to speak, not from above. The world of the future that I want to see is one where thinking, action and awareness move from the bottom up, not from the top down.

Who owns me?

If I owned myself, then I'd be able to:

• sell my body parts
• rent my body parts

Laws that prohibit those things have severe consequences. Thousands of people who are waiting for an organ transplant die every year. Prostitutes are mistreated and enslaved by their pimps.

Lawmakers believe that those things are less bad than people feeling economic pressure to sell or rent themselves when they don't want to. That's appalling. People feel economic pressure every day; that's why we have jobs. People make foolish decisions every day too; we don't need the nanny state to protect us from every bad decision that we might make.

Markets in Health Care

Some people sing the praises of markets, and some don't. Some say that we need a free market for health care, and some say we've tried that and it doesn't work. Well, we've got markets for health care, but they're not what you might think.

The first market is for health insurance. The providers are the big insurance companies and the customers are companies that employ people. The customer wants to pay as little as possible and so if a provider charges too much, they go to a different provider.

The second market is for health care. The providers are doctors, clinics, hospitals and so on, and the customers are the big insurance companies. The customer wants to pay as little as possible and so if a provider charges too much, they go to a different provider.

Notably absent from those two markets are you and I.

I want a market where I am the customer. Which health care reform bill provides that?

Banning Compensation Decreases Supply

In the United States it is against the law to buy and sell human body parts. As a result many people who need an organ transplant die before a donated one is available.

In Canada, it is now "illegal to pay donors for sperm." As a result there is now a shortage, and sperm is being imported from the United States.

Is profit really worse than shortages that lead, in some cases, to death? I don't think so. People should be allowed to sell their body parts, pre- or post-mortem. It would solve many problems and save many lives.

blog comment of the day

Seen here:

Yet another reason to conscript legislators. Perhaps with retention elections, "Do you like the incumbent, or would you prefer we draw another name from your district?"

That would solve a lot of problems.

The Jews In The Attic Test

By Joe Huffman, the Jews In The Attic Test asks: will this law make it difficult or impossible to protect innocent life from a government intent on their imprisonment or death?

I was surprised by how many laws fail this test. Check out the link for the author's take.

Cap And Trade

It should be a death penalty crime for a member of Congress to vote for a law that they have not read. Such behavior threatens the very foundations of society.

Health Care Price Discrimination

A law should be passed that does two things:

1. Prohibit the government from setting prices of medical procedures and care, as it does now
   
2. Prohibit medical providers (doctors, hospitals and so on) from charging different amounts to different customers for the same procedure, as they do now
   

This law would have both positive and negative effects. Positive:

• Prices would more accurately reflect true costs
• Uninsured people would not pay artificially inflated prices
• It would be easier for everybody to shop around to find the best prices . . .
• . . . which would drive prices down
• Providers would not need to turn away Medicare and Medicaid patients in order to stay in business
  

Negative:

• Insurance companies would not be able to negotiate for group discounts (which aren't really discounts; the "normal" price the uninsured (don't) pay is increased and the "discount" is the previous "normal")
• The constitutional basis for regulating prices federally is shaky (I realize that Congress disagrees)
• Medicare and Medicaid would need new methods to determine what procedures to pay for
  

Have I missed any?

Health Care Problems

Health care is an area where the title of this blog is especially true. It would be nice if there were a simple solution that would make everybody, or at least me, happy. There are a plethora of proposed solutions, but none of them are simple, and all that I have seen or heard of have significant flaws.

When approaching a controversial topic involving government action, it is best to start by identifying the high level problems that we would like "reform" to address. Here's a partial list:

• I can't afford advanced procedures
• my ordinary health maintenance costs are increasing
• there's a growing shortage of doctors and nurses
• it's annoying and sometimes difficult to find in-network health care providers
• it's annoying and sometimes difficult to deal with paperwork

All we have to do to fix all those problems is adopt my ideology!

Just kidding. It's not that simple.

Apologizing for Slavery

The United States Senate recently apologized for slavery. Specifically, for allowing the institution of slavery to exist in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

In my opinion, the U.S. Civil War made apology unnecessary. Hundreds of thousands of people died to free the slaves. (Some say that the Civil War was not about slavery, but it was: the South seceded to preserve the institution of slavery.)

People alive today who fault the current United States for slavery that was ended almost 150 years ago will never be satisfied; apologizing to them is futile.

Slavery still exists in the world today. Rather than focusing on wrongs performed by people who have been dead for generations we should focus on wrongs being committed this very minute.

Insufficiently Cynical

This week I had one of "those moments" when I read allegations that the Obama Administration was using political reasons to influence which Chrysler dealers would close. As usual the situation is not that simple: there's been no full statistical analysis, initial claims of persecution seems overblown, and the extent of improper influence appears limited to keeping open "friendly" dealerships that the official criteria would have closed. Some of the most troubling aspects of this story, however, are what it reveals about our current situation:

It's completely plausible. The administration has already used improper tactics to support its political allies in Chrysler (their denial was "there's no proof.")

The Press is mostly silent. Contrast this with their behavior concerning allegations that the previous administration gave special treatment to Halliburton.

A Republican administration would be just as suspect. Politicians do things for political reasons.

These things should not be done behind closed doors. Make the formula and official criteria public.

These things should not be done at all. It's not the government's job to bail out failed businesses.

Big Companies Like Fascism

Fascism is a political and economic system where big government and big business are intertwined, supporting each other to the detriment of the rest of society. Historically fascism has featured charismatic leaders, nationalism, and (to put it mildly) intolerance, as well as extremely effective government propaganda (for example Mussolini didn't actually make the trains run on time). The political aspects of fascism are well known; less well known are the business aspects.

Large corporations like fascism because government rules and regulations can be used to increase their economic dominance. Sometimes it's explicit, in the case of cable television monopolies, and sometimes it's implicit, in the case of licensing requirements that make it more expensive for new competitors to form. Sometimes it's both, in the case of factory regulations that contain grandfather clauses exempting existing facilities.

Nationalism in the general population appeals to businesses because it can be used to promote import tariffs and subsidies of local businesses.

Intolerance in the general population appeals to businesses because it distracts. If Joe Average blames a specific person or group for the current economic slump he's not paying attention.

Whenever you see a big company lobbying for increased regulation, realize that it's not out of any sense of goodness or moral duty. Companies lobby for regulations because they think they will profit. It's not bad for companies to seek profit (profit is why they exist), but their focus on profit gives them tunnel vision. They don't see (and when they do, they don't care about) the negative effects on society of tilting a level playing field in their favor.

Taxation and Fairness

When discussing taxation, much ado is made about fairness. Most agree that "everyone should pay their fair share" but to different people that's a different amount. Some say that people should pay the same percentage of their income. Others say that people should pay the same percentage of their spending. Advocates for the poor say that the current system of progressive taxation (so named because it was championed by the Progressive movement of the early 1900s) is the most fair, because the poor have hardly any money already. (Calling Progressive policies progressive is a claim that I am not going to address in this post.)

In my opinion, the only fair tax is a head tax: every person pays the same. Since (without making the tax so high that some can't pay) this is not sufficient to pay for the government programs we need (much less the government programs we don't need) we should set aside our differing notions of fairness and look at what is practical.

There are many practical reasons why it's a bad idea for only rich people to pay taxes. If politicians are elected in order to hand money to the majority, the system will collapse. If the rich feel oppressed, they will leave and tax revenue will collapse. If it's more profitable to not work than to work, the economy will collapse.

If the poor and the middle class are taxed they will have financial incentive to vote for fiscally responsible government. To make this incentive more direct, taxation should not be concealed via payroll taxes, sales taxes, inflation or some other mechanism. Paying taxes should be as visible as possible: a check that you write (or an electronic funds transfer that you initiate) to the government at least yearly, better yet quarterly, and maybe even monthly. Treat it like any other bill, and people will take action to control it the same way we take action to control our other bills.

To make it easier to pay taxes quarterly or monthly the income tax system should be streamlined. This is worth doing anyway and should have been done long ago. (A positive side effect of massive tax simplification is that the IRS can be downsized, saving lots of money.) The current income tax system has thousands of exemptions, deductions and credits, and rather than cherry-pick which should be eliminated, it would be more fair to eliminate all of them and only add in the handful that are really needed, if any. I'm not even sure that the standard deduction is needed, but that's a topic for another post.

Measuring Freedom's Value

This idea is not original to me.

How many dead people is freedom worth? Thousands of people have already given their lives for it. How many is too many? To be more specific, if we knew ahead of time that we could save 10 million lives by giving up our freedom of speech, would you choose to do so?

What about freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, freedom from unlawful search and seizure, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, and so on?

This sounds very abstract, but it becomes less so when we consider laws designed to protect us. For example, the US Supreme Court has ruled that police checkpoints (where the police stop every motorist in search of drunken drivers, or illegal immigrants, or something like that) do violate the 4th Amerndment to the Constitution, but are OK anyway when they're in the public interest. I don't know how many deaths have been prevented by sobriety checkpoints, but it's probably been at least 10. Is that enough?

Periodically we hear (usually in the context of some new safety law) the phrase "If it saves even one life it will be worth it." I'm skeptical. Everybody dies, and postponing death for one person by a few years, even by a few decades, does not have infinite value.

In 2008 the US Congress passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA). Intended to remove sources of lead from the mouths of young children, its side effects include driving out of business "tens of thousands" of companies, including thrift stores. I consider myself part of the anti-lead-in-babies camp, but that is a little drastic, especially in these difficult economic times. Nobody even knows if CPSIA will save any lives at all (it was passed in a fit of hysteria over Chinese imports, with very little scientific justification), but only one Congressman out of all of them voted against it.

What I conclude from all this is that people don't actually value freedom very much at all.

Earth Day

Today is Earth Day. It's also Lenin's birthday. I don't observe either, for the same reason: people are more important than ideology.

It is unfortunate that the modern environmentalist movement has embraced the methods of Lenin, which brought about the deaths of millions and the political subjugation of millions more. Let's be clear: those negative things were not the goals of Lenin, they were the inevitable by-products of centralized decision-making. Whenever leaders try to dictate from afar how we should live, rights are trampled and people die.

There is no danger that we will destroy the biosphere with greenhouse gas emissions. Humanity will survive climate change more easily in the future than it has in the past. We should support measures that increase freedom and oppose proposals to decrease it.

Artificial Wombs

A Louisiana lawmaker has proposed a new law that will make it illegal to:

create or attempt to create a human-animal hybrid, . . . transfer or attempt to transfer a human embryo into a non-human womb . . . (or) transfer or attempt to transfer a non-human embryo into a human womb.

I understand how discomforting it can be to think of mommy as moommy, but consider the many benefits of artificial womb technology:

• People would still be people. You're not less human if you were a preemie and spent your first three months in a life support chamber.
• Abortion would almost disappear. People could put an unwanted baby up for adoption as soon as they learn they are pregnant. People who want to adopt a baby could ensure that it has the best prenatal care available.
• Women with medical conditions that require powerful drugs would not have to choose between their own lives and the lives of their unborn offspring.
• Artificial wombs would protect fetuses from the risks of everyday life, such as car accidents.
• High-risk pregnancies could be monitored by medical professionals 24/7.
• Premature births would have better outcomes if a baby could be transplanted into an artificial womb and provided with a normal gestation time.
• If for purely legitimate purposes we needed to raise a large army of clone warriors loyal only to me, we would be able to do so.
• Some fertility problems could be mitigated.
  
• Once the technology becomes safer than traditional pregnancy, it frees women from some of the negative side effects of pregnancy.
  

Artificial womb technology has many benefits and few drawbacks. Even if it were only used to save lives that would otherwise be lost, it would be worth it, but the long term potential is even greater.