When I was in high-school, my favorite book was Catcher in the Rye. My favorite TV show was My So-Called Life. My favorite film was Rebel Without a Cause. Notice a pattern? Teen angst, baby!
No doubt if they had been around at the time and I had known about them my favorite band would have been Belle and Sebastian. Jonathan David, for example, is a near perfect distillation of all too common scenario (for my teenage self, at least). It also includes an homage to French cinema, and a scripture reference (I have no idea what the outfits are an homage to). Enjoy.
If I had a magic wand that could magically get rid of all the handguns in the United States, and prevent people from getting any more of them, I would use it. But I don’t have such a wand, and if my plan for dealing with the social problems associated with handguns was to search high and low for such a wand, most people would, I think, conclude that I was wasting my time.
A national gun ban, in my view, was the gun control folks’ equivalent of a magic wand. I don’t know how effective a national ban would have been in limiting gun deaths and/or gun crime, but the question is largely irrelevant. Such a ban was never a realistic possibility. From 1939 until last Thursday, the Second Amendment was basically dead letter. It provided no meaningful restriction on the ability of government to restrict access to handguns, up to and including a total ban. Yet despite this, neither the federal government nor any state government has come anywhere close to passing such a ban, and if Heller had gone the other way, no such ban would have been forthcoming. Read the rest of this entry »
Only World War III would prompt Republican presidential candidate John McCain to bring back the military draft, McCain said on Tuesday.
Many Americans are fearful the U.S. government will be forced to reinstitute the draft given the prolonged Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Asked about that possibility by a potential voter in Florida during a telephone “town hall meeting,” McCain said: “I don’t know what would make a draft happen unless we were in an all-out World War III.”
As we head into the summer doldrums, I know that many of our readers here at Vox-Nova are probably suffering severe withdrawal from their favorite TV programs. Luckily, I have just the thing: A ten part lecture series! The lectures, by Prof. Paul Cantor of the University of Virginia, examines the interactions between commerce and art, and studies the myriad ways in which artists have been influenced by economic concerns.
Lecture Two focuses on Shakespeare, and the ways in which his plays were influenced by economic considerations arising out of the Globe Theater, and Royal patronage.
Lecture Three examines the economics of painting, dealing in particular with the rise of painting in the merchant cities of Italy and the Netherlands. Read the rest of this entry »
So far all of our attempts to pick out the specific intent or motivation that make an individual act racist have failed. But perhaps we have been looking in the wrong place. Perhaps, as the example of the restaurant owner might indicate, our thinking about racism should concentrate not so much on the intent of an action and as on its effect, and even there not so much on the individual instance but on wider social outcomes.
This shift in focus from intent to effects has certainly been present in the law over the past few decades, and it has also been present, I think, in a lot of discussion about race and racism generally. Among some segments of the population, for example, it is common to hear more emphasis placed on what is called “institutional” or “systemic” racism than on the actions of individual racists themselves.
If what makes an action or institution or policy racist is not the intent behind it but its effects, then the obvious question is: what kind of effects are necessary for an act or institution to be racist? Read the rest of this entry »
Start with a question that at first glance may seem far removed from matters of race and racism: why do teenagers pay higher rates for car insurance than do other drivers? The answer, obviously, is that they have a higher rate of accidents. Note, though, that a particular teenager will still be a higher rate even if he happens to be an excellent driver and will never get into an accident. Why? Because while a particular teenager might be safe, many of his peers are reckless and/or inexperienced, and it is not possible for the insurance companies to distinguish him from the others. To the extent that there was a low cost way of distinguishing between good drivers and bad drivers, insurance companies would use it, and in fact teen drivers do often pay more or less for insurance depending on their sex, because it turns out that teenage boys get into a lot more accidents than teenage girls.
This process is known as statistical discrimination, and in many areas of life it is considered unobjectionable. Yet, as with so many other things, when it comes to race matters are different. Read the rest of this entry »
Today is the feast day of St. Thomas More, the patron saint of lawyers and politicians. More was that rarest of all creatures, an honest lawyer and politician. He also got his head cut off, which goes to show what that sort of thing will bring you.
I’ve long thought that the example of St. Thomas More was, or at any rate ought to be, of particular relevance to judges. Under our system of government judges are called upon to settle legal disputes between different parties in accordance with the positive law applicable to the factual circumstances of the case. They are not, generally speaking, empowered to “do justice” on a case by case basis as they see fit.
In most cases, the result demanded by the law and the “just”* result will be the same. Occasionally, however, the two will differ. A legal technicality may require putting a clearly guilty and dangerous criminal back on the streets. A law or policy which seems reasonable enough may conflict with a constitutional provision or statute of higher authority, and thus under the law may be deemed void. A law which in general leads to the best result may, in a particular case, lead to an unfavorable one. Read the rest of this entry »
There are clear gains from having an active market in water rights. It would help solve the problems posed by current water shortages in the West, and it would provide the flexibility necessary to confront the impact of climate change on water supplies in the coming decades. It would be, in a word, fluid.
The solution for the poorer parts of the Third World is deregulation of the market for piped water, combined with the enforcement of property rights. Yes, I’m saying that Third World governments should consider letting private companies sell water at any price they want… And no, I don’t mean a water concession with a price regulated by the government, I mean true laissez faire in water supply. No price regulation, no rate of return regulation, no government ownership of assets, no political pressure to keep prices low.
Many of the world’s poor don’t get good water because they don’t live near a piped water connection. Or if they have a connection, it is often bad and irregular, with backflow putting dangerous and dirty substances into the drinking water. The underlying problem is that many governments artificially hold down the price of water, or they won’t let water companies cut off nonpaying customers. The result is that water companies don’t want to serve these poor customers in the first place, and they certainly don’t want to spend money by adding more water connections for the poorer areas. Deregulation would give water companies a stronger monetary incentive to serve these customers.
It may sound like something out of the Onion, but in fact it’s only Canada:
A Canadian court has lifted a 12-year-old girl’s grounding, overturning her father’s punishment for disobeying his orders to stay off the Internet, his lawyer said Wednesday.
The girl had taken her father to Quebec Superior Court after he refused to allow her to go on a school trip for chatting on websites he tried to block, and then posting “inappropriate” pictures of herself online using a friend’s computer.
The father’s lawyer Kim Beaudoin said the disciplinary measures were for the girl’s “own protection” and is appealing the ruling.
“She’s a child,” Beaudoin told AFP. “At her age, children test their limits and it’s up to their parents to set boundaries.” Read the rest of this entry »
News stories about Africa typically are about war, famine, pestilence, and/or death. But according to a recent article in the Financial Times (reg. required), some underreported trends in the region are more hopeful:
The number of armed conflicts has dropped dramatically from over 20 in 1999 to 5 today; for example, long running civil wars in Angola, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Liberia have all come to an end.
Unnoticed by the media and much of the investment community has been a step change in Africa’s economic performance in the last 5 years. Real GDP growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) averaged 4.1 per cent in 1997-2002 and by 2007 it had risen to 6.6 per cent.
More importantly, real incomes are rising and Africans are getting richer at an unprecedented rate. In 1997-2002, real GDP per capita rose at a rate of 1.8 per cent per annum, this was up to 4.6 per cent in 2007. At 1.8 per cent per annum it takes 39 years for real incomes to double, but at 4.6 per cent per annum real incomes double within 15 years. Read the rest of this entry »
In yesterday’s post on the Boumediene decision, there was a bit of a side discussion on the likelihood of McCain’s bombing Iran. It seems to me, though, that we may have gotten ahead of ourselves on this. According to Intrade, there is about a 33% chance of McCain’s being elected President. Meanwhile, there is a 25-30% chance that the U.S. and/or Israel will execute air strikes against Israel prior to December 31, 2008.
The possibility that President Bush would engage in a “lame duck bombing” is one that has concerned me for a while now. It seems to me that he wouldn’t want to strike prior to the election, as doing so could cause, shall we say, inconveniences for the Republican candidate. But if Obama were to win the election, and Bush firmly believed both that Iran’s getting nukes was an unacceptable threat and that an Obama administration would do nothing to stop it, he might very well decide that an attack in December or early January was the only way, in his view, to keep America safe.
Exactly what the fall out from such an attack would be is impossible to say. Certainly it wouldn’t make him very popular either at home or abroad. The question is whether people would see the problem specifically as resting with Bush (in which case Obama’s quick succession afterwards would blunt the negative consequences of the attack), or not, in which case the incoming Obama administration would have quite the mess on their hands. It’s not a situation I care to contemplate all that much, but that doesn’t mean the possibility isn’t real.
Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that a good catchword could stop people from thinking for 50 years. Something similar seems to be true of the “it’s the same as race” argument. The argument is most prominent these days in matters relating to homosexuality, but it’s hardly confined to such discussions. Similar analogies have been made by everyone from proponents of deaf culture, to animal rights activists. In a society without many examples of moral righteousness, it is perhaps not so surprising that people would want to trade on the positive connotations of the Civil Rights movement by associating with it their own pet projects and causes. Such analogies, however, are almost always quite problematic.
Consider: next to racism, no discriminatory ‘ism’ is subject to more widespread opprobrium than is sexism. Yet both law and society treat differential treatment based on sex very differently from differential treatment based on race. With regard to race, for example, the Supreme Court declared in Brown that “separate but equal is inherently unequal” and has struck down laws mandating such things as separate bathrooms and sports teams based on race. When it comes to sex, by contrast, we have separate bathrooms and sports teams that are required by law to be separate but equal. Read the rest of this entry »
Barack Obama celebrated Father’s Day by calling on black fathers, who he said are “missing from too many lives and too many homes,” to become active in raising their children.
“They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it,” the Democratic presidential candidate said Sunday at a largely black church in his hometown.
“Any fool can have a child. That doesn’t make you a father,” he said. “It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.” Read the rest of this entry »
1. Basic biology: A man produces hundreds of millions of sperm every day. Each of these sperm contains (half of) the genetic blueprint for a different person. The slightest physical movement changes the position of sperm.
2. Therefore, any change in my life prior to my children’s conception would have led my children not to exist. If I had crossed my legs differently, or walked to the frig, or even chuckled an extra time, the sperm would have been rearranged, negating my children’s existence. I might have had different children, of course, but they wouldn’t be the ones I have.
3. Like most parents, I have a massive endowment effect vis-a-vis my children. I love them greatly simply because they exist and they’re mine. If you offered to replace one of my sons with another biological child who was better in every objective way, I’d definitely refuse.
4. Therefore, if you offered me a “do-over” on any aspect of my life prior to my children’s conception, I would refuse, for it would mean that these specific children would never have been born. Read the rest of this entry »
Year after year, decade upon decade, the U.S. Senate’s network of restaurants has lost staggering amounts of money — more than $18 million since 1993, according to one report, and an estimated $2 million this year alone, according to another.
The financial condition of the world’s most exclusive dining hall and its affiliated Capitol Hill restaurants, cafeterias and coffee shops has become so dire that, without a $250,000 subsidy from taxpayers, the Senate won’t make payroll next month. Read the rest of this entry »
In his book The Logic of Life, Tim Harford describes a recent sociological experiment which, he claims, has profound implications for the way we think about race and racism. Participants in the study (a group of students from the University of Virginia) were divided into two groups: employers, and potential employees. Employees were then further subdivided (randomly) into “greens” and “purples.” The experiment contained 20 distinct rounds of play, and the student employees were rewarded with a small cash bonus for each round in which they were able to secure employment. In each round, the employees first had to choose whether or not to “get an education.” Opting for an education cost the students a small fee, but it also increased the chances that they would do well on a series of “tests” (actually random dice rolls, on which educated students “passed” with a 4, 5, or 6, while uneducated students passed only on a 6).
Once the employees had made their educational decisions and perform the test rolls, “resumes” for each of them would be sent to the employer students, on which were listed only two pieces of information about each employee: 1) whether they were a green or purple, and 2) whether they had passed their tests. The employer students then had to decide whether or not to hire the potential employees, and received cash bonuses in each round for the employees they hired who had gotten an education (all of this was done via computer, btw, in order to avoid collusion and/or side bargaining). After each round, the students were presented with the results indicating the average test scores and hiring rates for greens and for purples during that round. And then the whole process was repeated.
A couple of posts back, I said that it was problematic to define racism in terms of holding certain factual beliefs, because we typically don’t consider it particularly wicked to hold a mistaken factual belief. There is, however, a pretty glaring counter-example to this claim, namely Holocaust denial. Whether or not the Holocaust happened is a factual question, yet we don’t regard someone who denies the reality of the Holocaust as being merely mistaken, but as being somehow evil.
The fact that we regard Holocaust denial with such opprobrium is not due simply to the fact that it goes against the evidence. We would probably look more kindly, at least from a moral point of view, on someone who denied that WWII happened than on someone who just denied the Holocaust. Nor is there anything wicked about the idea of there not being a Holocaust as such. If the Holocaust really hadn’t happened, that would be a wonderful thing. Read the rest of this entry »
Well, it is official. You won. We lost. Same sex marriage is the law in California. We might win the amendment in the fall, but let’s face it. The momentum is on your side: the Inexorable March of Progress and all that. Those of us in the Marriage Movement can go back to our main business of trying to make marriage more permanent and stable. To tell you the truth, same sex marriage is a bummer of a topic that isn’t much fun to talk about. I’d much rather spend my time trying to steer people away from divorce and cohabitation and teen sex.
So now that people with same sex attraction can marry, we need to start giving them sensible advice about preparing for marriage. Item #1: stop living together. Straight people have learned a lot about premarital cohabitation in the last 30 years. Women in cohabiting relationships are nine times more likely to be murdered by their partners than married women. Children in cohabiting relationships are more likely to be abused than children living with married couples. Read the rest of this entry »
After weeks of bad news, things turned Barbara Wagner’s way this week.
Last month her lung cancer, in remission for about two years, was back. After her oncologist prescribed a cancer drug that could slow the cancer growth and extend her life, Wagner was notified that the Oregon Health Plan wouldn’t cover it.
It would cover comfort and care, including, if she chose, doctor-assisted suicide.
Then on Monday a representative of the pharmaceutical company Genentech called Wagner and offered the medicine for free.
Wagner said she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so she did both.
Treatment of advanced cancer meant to prolong life, or change the course of this disease, is not covered by the Oregon Health Plan, said the unsigned letter Wagner received from LIPA, the Eugene company that administers the plan in Lane County. Read the rest of this entry »
Imagine a man, let’s call him Sam, who is a believer in astrology. Sam thinks that you can tell a lot about a person based on the date of his birth. He is fond of ascribing various personality traits and other characteristics to people based on their astrological sign, and will often make generalizations about people based on their signs, such as “Leos are arrogant” or “Scorpios are good problem solvers.” (I neither know nor care whether these specific statements are accurate according to astrology. The point is merely that astrology does make claims of this sort about groups based on their astrological sign) Many people think Sam is kind of flaky because of these beliefs, but no one would say that he is wicked or dangerous on account of them, nor would most people take offense if they heard him espouse his astrological beliefs, or feel that he should be shunned because of them.
Now consider Sam’s brother, Steve. Steve is a believer not in astrology, but racial stereotypes. He ascribes various personality traits and other characteristics to people based on their race, and will often make generalizations about people based on their race, such as “Blacks are lazy” or “Asians are good at math.” Needless to say, society does regard Steve’s belief in these racial stereotypes quite differently than we do his brother Sam’s belief in astrology. We do consider what Steve believes to be wicked and dangerous, people do take offense at his opinions when uttered, and many people do refuse to associate with Steve based on his beliefs. Read the rest of this entry »
Our attempts to define racism in terms of equal dignity or in terms of colorblindness floundered because it turned out that the racist, by making certain factual assumptions, could comply formally with the principles while keeping his racist beliefs. An obvious solution to this difficulty would be to define a racist not as someone who violates a particular moral principle, but rather as someone who holds certain racist beliefs (e.g. whites are more intelligent than blacks). But this idea is itself problematic, for several reasons.
First, if racism consists simply in believing certain factual claims, then it is hard to see why racism would be intrinsically immoral, let alone why it would be viewed as being as wicked as it typically is. Simply believing something false isn’t ordinarily viewed as a grounds for moral condemnation, even where the beliefs in question are unreasonable. We might view the man or women who believes in the magical powers of crystals as a flake, but we wouldn’t view them as wicked the way we would a racist. Read the rest of this entry »
As anyone familiar with the Colbert Report knows that Stephen Colbert typically runs rings around his interviewees, leaving them befuddled, and sometimes even violent. Every once and a while, though, he has on a guest who is, in his own words, a formidable opponent, and judging by his appearance on the show this week, I’d say that George Will falls into this later category. No matter what Colbert threw at him, Will always seemed able to match him wit for wit, and by the end of the interview one can visibly detect the surprise turned admiration on Colbert’s face.
Will, though, did mar an otherwise stellar performance when, describing the conservative philosophy of government, he stated that the government should “deliver the mail, defend the shores, and get out of the way.”
The government should deliver the mail? Hardly. From the American Letter Mail Company to Fed Ex, from the American West to Sweden, whenever private enterprise is allowed to compete with the government in mail delivery, it wins handily. But, as they say, even Homer nods.
Sad news. Harriet McBride Johnson, attorney, author, and disability rights activists, has died. Like many people, I was familiar with Ms. Johnson mainly through her writings. Her book, Too Late to Die Young, is a wonderful collection of essays about various events in her life: protesting Reagan and Jerry Lewis, arguing with Peter Singer about whether it ought to be legal to kill people like her, running for City Counsel in Charleston, South Carolina on a platform of gun control, abortion rights, and the right to burn the American flag. And so on. As the trite saying goes, I didn’t always agree with what she had to say, but she wrote with clarity and grace, which is about all one has the right to expect from an author. She will be greatly missed.
For those interested in getting a “taste” of Harriet’s writings, here is her recounting of her confrontation with Peter Singer, here is an essay she wrote about “the Disability Gulag,” and here is one about Terri Schiavo.
According to the principle of colorblindness, it is always wrong to treat a person differently than you would have treated them in the same circumstances had they been of a different race. Many people take the principle of colorblindness to be obviously true, suggest that racism consists in the violation of this principle, and believe that the key to harmonious race relations comes from strict adherence to it. Certainly this is what I was raised to believe. Yet upon reflection, it seems to me that colorblindness - at least when considered as an ethical principle - does not have much going for it.
To begin with, the principle is subject to a number of compelling counter-examples. For example, suppose that you are a movie producer, casting a film about the life of Martin Luther King. According to the principle of colorblindness, it would be immoral to deny an actor the title roll in the film on the grounds that he was white. But that is absurd. Likewise, medical science has found that certain diseases and maladies afflict certain racial or ethnic groups at a higher rate than others, and that certain racial groups respond differently to certain medications and treatments than others. According to the principle of colorblindness, it would be immoral to treat patients of different races differently on account of these facts. Yet this, also, is absurd.
On the other hand, the fact someone follows the principle of colorblindness is no guarantee that they are not racist. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve noted previously the thin green line that separates parody from reality, but I have to say that the folks behind this website have taken unintentional self-parody to an all new level. The site, which appears to be associated with the Australian Broadcasting Company, asks kids to calculate their family’s level of greenhouse gas emissions.* Based on these answers, the site calculates “when you should die” in order to not use “more than your fair share of Earth’s resources.” If you put in the “average” answers for all of the questions, you will be told you should die at age 9.
The use of these sorts of scare tactics is hardly new. When I was in the Boy Scouts, we had a weekend retreat one time that was devoted to environmental issues. This guy spoke to us about how he and all the other adults were using up all the earth’s resources, and that by the time we got to be adults there would be nothing left, but he and his adult friends didn’t care, because they’d all be dead by then anyway. Bwahahaha! Needless to say I was suitably freaked out by this. Also needless to say, I managed to reach adulthood while somehow avoiding the imminent environmental apocalypse of which he spoke. Since then I’ve always been filled with a profound sense of skepticism when I hear people talk about environmental doom and gloom (a skepticism reinforced by the fact that the guy who spoke to my Boy Scout troop was hardly unique). Still, it’s amazing that folks would be quite to baldfaced about it as they are at this site.
*While the quiz does ask questions about driving, food, flying, etc., it turns out that one’s death date is mainly determined by how much money one spends. If you spend more than a subsistence level on “ordinary stuff” you are doomed to an early death, though you can prolong your life somewhat by spending money on “stuff that’s better for the environment” and “ethical investments.”
1934 Created in the image of the one God and equally endowed with rational souls, all men have the same nature and the same origin. Redeemed by the sacrifice of Christ, all are called to participate in the same divine beatitude: all therefore enjoy an equal dignity.
1935 The equality of men rests essentially on their dignity as persons and the rights that flow from it: Every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God’s design.
One might well conclude from this that racism consists in the denial of this equal dignity, and/or the fundamental rights that flow from it. And certainly to deny such rights to members of a certain race based on their race and/or claim that the members of certain races lack this equal dignity would seem to be a paradigm case of racism. But if this is all racism consists of, then a great many things typically regarded as racist would turn out - at least potentially - not to be so. Read the rest of this entry »
The controversy surrounding the Reverend Wright and related fall out has got me thinking about issues of race and racism. So much so that I would like to do a series of posts on the subject. This is, in many ways, a rather fraught undertaking. Conversations about race tend to be very difficult, and are especially prone to devolving into a series of charges and counter-charges. There are no doubt many reasons for this, but key among them, I think, is that we lack a clear understanding of what exactly it is racism does and doesn’t consist in. Virtually everyone agrees that racism is wrong and that it is seriously wrong, but there is no general agreement as to what racism is, or to what makes it wrong. Without such a common agreement, conversations on race are bound to be heated, as what some consider obvious racism will for others be seen as unobjectionable, and visa versa.
Before we can have any sort of practical discussion about race and racism, therefore, we need to answer, as clearly and as precisely as we can, the question: what is racism, and why is it wrong? It is that question I wish to examine in the series that follows. Before I start, however, there are a couple of points that - given the sensitive nature of the topic - I feel need be made. Read the rest of this entry »
I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of this movie. Not because it was any good, mind you. At times the film seemed little more than a collection of every half-baked criticism of corporations ever uttered by man. So much so that the film often seemed to lapse into self-parody, which is what, for me, provided the bulk of the entertainment. Read the rest of this entry »
Writing in Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria does a fairly decent job of explaining the elements of Senator McCain’s foreign policy vision that I find so disturbing:
On March 26, McCain gave a speech on foreign policy in Los Angeles that was billed as his most comprehensive statement on the subject. It contained within it the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years. Yet almost no one noticed.
In his speech McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries. Moscow was included in this body in the 1990s to recognize and reward it for peacefully ending the cold war on Western terms, dismantling the Soviet empire and withdrawing from large chunks of the old Russian Empire as well. McCain also proposed that the United States should expand the G8 by taking in India and Brazil—but pointedly excluded China from the councils of power.
We have spent months debating Barack Obama’s suggestion that he might, under some circumstances, meet with Iranians and Venezuelans. It is a sign of what is wrong with the foreign-policy debate that this idea is treated as a revolution in U.S. policy while McCain’s proposal has barely registered. What McCain has announced is momentous—that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order, a policy that began under Richard Nixon (with Beijing) and continued under Ronald Reagan (with Moscow). It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war.
Although best-selling online role-playing game World of Warcraft boasts over ten million subscribers, it’s also leaving in its wake an increasing list of casualties.
Even though she’s never played the game, 28 year-old Jocelyn is one of the fallen. A well-spoken California resident, she divorced her husband of six years after he developed a crippling addiction to the smash online RPG.
“He would get home from work at 6:00, start playing at 6:30, and he’d play until three a.m. Weekends were worse — it was from morning straight through until the middle of the night,” she told Yahoo! Games in an interview. “It took away all of our time that we spent together. I ceased to exist in his life.”
Call it a crisis or not, as you please, but the fact is that Medicare is facing a huge longterm shortfall. As they say in Al Anon, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. But, assuming politicians are willing to do this, what should be step two? Writing in last week’s Wall Street Journal, congressman Paul Ryan offers one proposal:
According to the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the rest of government will consume nearly 40% of the economy by the time my three young children reach my age (38). This will require more than doubling the average tax burden of the past 40 years just to keep the government afloat. Continuing down this path will eventually strangle our economy.
To meet this challenge and secure our fiscal future, I’m introducing a comprehensive legislative plan called “A Roadmap for America’s Future.”
The bill secures the existing Medicare program for those over 55 – so Americans can receive the benefits they planned for throughout most of their working lives. Those 55 and younger will, when they retire, receive an annual payment of up to $9,500 to purchase health coverage – either from a list of Medicare-certified plans, or any plan in the individual market, in any state. Read the rest of this entry »
For decades, malpractice lawyers and insurers have counseled doctors and hospitals to “deny and defend.” Many still warn clients that any admission of fault, or even expression of regret, is likely to invite litigation and imperil careers.
But with providers choking on malpractice costs and consumers demanding action against medical errors, a handful of prominent academic medical centers, like Johns Hopkins and Stanford, are trying a disarming approach.
By promptly disclosing medical errors and offering earnest apologies and fair compensation, they hope to restore integrity to dealings with patients, make it easier to learn from mistakes and dilute anger that often fuels lawsuits.
Malpractice lawyers say that what often transforms a reasonable patient into an indignant plaintiff is less an error than its concealment, and the victim’s concern that it will happen again. Read the rest of this entry »
We all know that Barack Obama is in favor of change. Less clear has been exactly what it is he wishes to change. For most of the campaign the assumption has been that Obama wants to change government. He speaks often, for example, of the need to take power away from the “special interests” (which is no doubt why he supported the ethanol mandate). But based on some of his statements, it seems his ambitions may run higher than that. Perhaps Obama wishes not merely to change government, but to change us:
Pitching his message to Oregon’s environmentally-conscious voters, Obama called on the United States to “lead by example” on global warming, and develop new technologies at home which could be exported to developing countries.
“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said.
“That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen,” he added.
I might humbly suggest that getting other countries’ OK as to where we set our thermostats isn’t leadership either (except, perhaps, in a globalized version of Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin’s use of the term).
I’ve started reading Matthew Connelly’s book Fatal Misconception, which is a history of the population control and eugenic movements. So far the book is quite good, and I hope, once I’ve finished it, to write up a more formal review. For the moment, though, I’d thought I would quote from the book’s opening, which I found quite striking:
Imagine a world with an average life expectancy of less than thirty years. Many babies do not live to see their first birthday. Subject to chronic malnutrition, children are vulnerable to disease, grow slowly, and find it hard to learn. Those who survive to adulthood seem stunted, with an average body mass a third smaller than our own. The great majority live off the land. The few who inhabit cities - dwelling with their own waste and drinking water alive with microbes - are even more likely to die early deaths. Altogether, there are not even a billion people on earth, less than a sixth as many as there are today.
This is not some post-apocalyptic future. It is the world we left behind two hundred years ago.
The amazing thing is that historically speaking conditions 200 years ago weren’t particularly bad. They were, if anything, better than they had been for most of human history. What is atypical is not the poor condition of people 200 years ago, or of many people today. Rather, it is the high standard of living the West currently enjoys that is out of the ordinary.
On the First Things blog, Archbishop Chaput has responded to the use of some of his prior statements by the group Roman Catholics for Obama. Chaput begins by detailing his support for the RFK and Carter campaigns, and then notes:
In the years after the Carter loss, I began to notice that very few of the people, including Catholics, who claimed to be “personally opposed” to abortion really did anything about it. Nor did they intend to. For most, their personal opposition was little more than pious hand-wringing and a convenient excuse—exactly as it is today. In fact, I can’t name any pro-choice Catholic politician who has been active, in a sustained public way, in trying to discourage abortion and to protect unborn human life—not one. Some talk about it, and some may mean well, but there’s very little action. In the United States in 2008, abortion is an acceptable form of homicide. And it will remain that way until Catholics force their political parties and elected officials to act differently.
Why do I mention this now? Earlier this spring, a group called “Roman Catholics for Obama ’08” quoted my own published words in the following way: Read the rest of this entry »
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh wonders what would happen if the U.S. adopted an “open borders” policy. The consensus view seems to be “way too many” though exact figures tend to vary greatly, as one would imagine. I don’t necessarily disagree with that assessment, but I do wonder whether people may be overestimating the number of people who would actually come to the U.S. and/or overestimate the negative impact that such unlimited immigration would have.
The first thing a lot of people seem to fail to factor in is that just because the U.S. has decided to fling open its borders doesn’t mean that other countries are going to follow suit. Getting into the U.S. is one thing, getting out of your home country can be quite another. For the most part, the sort of countries one would most want to get away from are precisely the ones that limit your ability to leave, and I suspect that such limits would only grow more strict if the government knew it could lose the bulk of its population to the U.S. in short order. Read the rest of this entry »
Wal-Mart is famous for its low prices, but according to a new analysis by a couple of University of Chicago profs, Wal-Marts price cutting has also cut something else (or at least restrained its growth): inequality. Steven Levitt reports:
Inequality is growing in the United States. The data say so. Knowledgeable experts like Ben Bernanke say so. Ask just about any economist and they will agree. (They may or may not think growing inequality is a problem, but they will acknowledge that there has been a sharp increase in inequality.)
According to two of my University of Chicago colleagues, Christian Broda and John Romalis, everyone is wrong.
Their argument could hardly be simpler. How rich you are depends on two things: how much money you have, and how much the stuff you want to buy costs. If your income doubles, but the prices of the things you consume also double, then you are no better off. Read the rest of this entry »
Suppose the government were to announce tomorrow that it was no longer going to enforce any of its traffic laws. Stoplights would continue to work, parking spaces would still be clearly marked according to type, etc., but if a cop saw you run a red light or park in a no parking zone, he would be powerless to do anything about it (other than give you a dirty look). What effect would this new policy have on people’s behavior?
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
-Emma Lazarus
Finally, let’s discuss poverty. Everyone’s against it, but hardly anyone admits that most of the increase in the past 15 years reflects immigration — new immigrants or children of recent immigrants. Unless we stop poor people from coming across our Southern border, legally and illegally, we won’t reduce poverty. Period.
From 1990 to 2006, the number of poor Hispanics increased 3.2 million, from 6 million to 9.2 million. Meanwhile, the number of non-Hispanic whites in poverty fell from 16.6 million (poverty rate: 8.8 percent) in 1990 to 16 million (8.2 percent) in 2006. Among blacks, there was a decline from 9.8 million in 1990 (poverty rate: 31.9 percent) to 9 million (24.3 percent) in 2006.
The curious thing is that Samuelson seems to treat this as an argument against immigration (and he’s not the onlyone). Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve long suspected that a significant chunk of the support for things like campaign finance reform derives simply from annoyance with negative political ads. To a certain extent I think this annoyance is overblown. Negative ads tend to be fairly substantive, whereas their “positive” counter-parts are often nearly content-free (”I care about the environment; that’s why I’m standing in front of this river”). But even I have to admit that they can often be grating (whether the proper response is to scrap the First Amendment rather than, say, pressing the mute button, is another issue).
What I find curious, though, is the fact that while negative advertisements play a role in just about every close political campaign, they are almost totally absent from commercial advertising. Occasionally a company will mention a competitor in its ads in a less than favorable way (see here), but even this tends to be rare and relatively mild compared to standard political ads. The grainy black and white ads with the distorted photos and ominous sounding announcers, so common in politics, are just unheard of. What explains the difference? Here are some possibilities: Read the rest of this entry »
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Vox Nova
"In their patriotism and in their fidelity to their civic duties Catholics will feel themselves bound to promote the true common good; they will make the weight of their convictions so influential that as a result civil authority will be justly exercised and laws will accord with moral precepts and the common good."
Second Vatican Council, Apostolicam actuositatem 14
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Today is the feast day of St. Thomas More, the patron saint of lawyers and politicians. More was that rarest of all creatures, an honest lawyer and politician. He also got his head cut off, which goes to show what that sort of thing will bring you. 