Ivy Sneakers

Public Again

2011-01-12T20:39:00.003-05:00

I consider this blog to be inactive at this point and I it set to private last summer, but for the sake of posterity I'm setting it to be public again. I generally stand by what I've posted here, but I would gently remind readers that the oldest posts on this blog are from the very beginning of my college experience, so some of my thoughts have (naturally) evolved since then.

Barack Obama and D-Day

2010-06-07T01:45:00.004-04:00

Barack Obama failed to say anything to commemorate the anniversary of D-Day. From Gateway Pundit:

On June 6, 1944, the D-Day invasion of Europe took place during World War II as Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, France. America lost 2,499 of its finest men that day.

It’s too bad Barack Obama missed the anniversary today.

The White House website has nothing posted today on the 66th Anniversary of the D-Day landing.

The president had other things on his mind.
He was attending his second party this week, tonight at the Ford Theatre.

I have to admit that I find this pretty troubling. For many Americans, including me, D-Day is one of the most important days in American history. It was this country's finest hour; a moment that perfectly achieved the platonic ideal of using American military power to fight tyranny and make the world a better, safer place. There have been many other moments where the US used its military power for good, but none where American intervention is so universally viewed to have be for the better. I'm willing to bet that even among those who believe that US power should only be exercised sparingly, the Normandy landings are still viewed positively.

And yet, Obama's apology tour and a couple of years listening what to what he, his wife, and his associates have to say about America, I get the feeling that he just doesn't think that the US has that much to be proud of. He gave a decent speech on D-Day last year, but even there he took time to underline America's flaws:

The nations and leaders that joined together to defeat Hitler's Reich were not perfect. We had made our share of mistakes, and had not always agreed with one another on every issue. But whatever God we prayed to, whatever our differences, we knew that the evil we faced had to be stopped. Citizens of all faiths and no faith came to believe that we could not remain as bystanders to the savage perpetration of death and destruction. And so we joined and sent our sons to fight and often die so that men and women they never met might know what it is to be free.

(I should add that Obama's appearance at Normandy only came after pressure by Sarkozy and ended up as a snub for the British.) If anything, I get the feeling that he views D-Day as a special case where the situation was so clear cut that for once the US actually did the right thing. It may have been our finest hour, but only because he seems to think that there has been no other time where America's position in the world had a positive impact. I feel like that goes a long way towards explaining his willingness to ignore the anniversary this year. As important as D-Day may have been, why would he celebrate it if he feels that it's the exception rather than the norm across American history?

Obama's Approval Rating Hits a New Low

2010-05-25T12:34:00.003-04:00

According to Rasmussen, he's at 42% approval for May 25, with 24% strong approval and 44% strong disapproval. Although the strong disapproval level is as high as it has ever been, it hasn't moved a lot over the last 5 months or so other than a slight decrease followed by a rebound. By contrast, the strong approval rating got a large bounce up into the 30's after the passage of Obamacare. That bounce now seems to have entirely disappeared.

Crist vs Rubio and Blumenthal vs the Truth

2010-05-17T23:37:00.003-04:00

A couple weeks ago I wrote about dislike for Charlie Crist and my dislike of writing about campaigns. Apparently the former trumps the latter. After Crist declared as an independent in Florida, his poll numbers jumped by enough that he momentarily had the lead in the three way contest between him, Rubio, and Democrat Kendrick Meek. According to a new Rasmussen poll, however, Crist now trails Rubio 39-31 with Meek coming in at 18%. If support for Meek collapses, Crist may pick up some of those voters, but I can't imagine him getting more than another 4 or 5 percent out of the voters who are currently supporting Meek. When Lieberman ran as an independent against Lamont in Connecticut in 2006, the Republican candidate still held on to 10% of the vote, and that was in a situation where the independent candidate had been forced out of his own party on a matter of principle. By contrast, Crist's decision to leave his party was nothing more than political opportunism, and he lacks a signature issue where Florida Democrats would prefer him to Rubio in the same way that Connecticut Republicans preferred Lieberman to Lamont on foreign policy. Consequently, I have a hard time imagining Meek dropping below 13 or 14 percent support. Add this to the negative publicity following Crist's refusal to refund campaign donations and Rubio's fundraising advantage, and I have a hard time imagining Crist winning.

Speaking of the Connecticut Senate race, the New York Times reports that Democratic candidate Richard Blumenthal has been lying about his service- or lack thereof- in Vietnam. Avoiding service in Vietnam doesn't disqualify a candidate, but getting caught in a lie about it looks pretty bad. It will be interesting to see how this one plays out. (Hat tip: Hot Air.)

Why I'm Sick of Hearing About Bob Bennett

2010-05-17T00:24:00.006-04:00

Much ado has been made about Bob Bennett's failure to make the runoff for the Utah primary. As Jack Kelly summarizes, various commentators are horrified:

"This is a damn outrage," said David Brooks, a "conservative" columnist for The New York Times on NBC's "Meet the Press" program last Sunday.

"It's almost a nonviolent coup," agreed E. J. Dionne Jr., a liberal columnist for The Washington Post.

"The long promised purge is on," wrote Kathleen Parker, a "conservative" columnist for the Post.

Not to be outdone, Dana Milbank dramatically claims that Bennett's loss will lead to the demise of the Republican party:

Future historians tracing the crackup of the Republican Party may well look to May 8, 2010, as an inflection point.

That was the day, as is now well known, that Sen. Robert Bennett, who took the conservative position 84 percent of the time over his career, was deemed not conservative enough by fellow Utah Republicans and booted out of the primary.

The problem is that Bennett's ouster just wasn't all that extraordinary. Bennett has historically been a fairly conservative senator, but not remarkably so. Furthermore, over the last two years he has voted for TARP, sponsored an alternative health care bill that included an individual mandate, and overall racked up a record as the 9th most liberal Republican senator in 2009. Given that Utah is one of the two or three most conservative states in the union (and that the delegate based nomination process is disproportionately influenced by the most conservative Utahns) this voting record clearly worked against him.

But there's more to it than a simple issue of the voting record. Utahns (and tea partiers and conservatives everywhere) have had little reason to be happy with the record of Congress over the last decade or so. With the exception of the Bush tax cuts (which are about to expire), there have been few legislative achievements to celebrate. At the same time, government spending has literally doubled over the last ten years. This has been helped along by the Republican congress that approved large, earmark filled appropriations bills and fiscal disasters like the Medicare prescription drug benefit. Clearly, conservatives need senators in Washington who are willing to try to make radical changes.

Looking at the issues pages for Mike Lee, Tim Bridgewater, and Bob Bennett makes it pretty clear that the first two are pretty similar on most issues and that either of them is much more likely to bring change than Bennett. (Bennett's website has been taken down following his loss, but is still cached.) For example, consider the position that each takes on health care. Lee lists repealing ObamaCare as one of his "three vital priorities". Bridgewater also supports the repeal of ObamaCare and provides a detailed set of market based alternative bills that he would want passed. By contrast, Bennett's health care page consists only of two things. The first is a video of him explaining his vote against the final Obamacare bill. He justifies his opposition not through appealing to conservative principles but rather through objecting to the speed with which it was brought to a vote and the questionable accounting practices used to obtain its cost estimate. The second is a list of health care related earmarks that Bennett won for the state of Utah. In short, he doesn't exactly come off as a conservative visionary, especially when compared to Bridgewater and Lee. Instead, he comes off as a Washington insider who would generally vote the conservative line but wouldn't participate on an attack on the worst parts of Washington culture. His awkward video explaining why he no longer supports term limits (unlike his rivals) can only reinforce this perception.

If Republicans force out every moderate and insist on running die hard conservatives in seats that are more suited for moderate candidates, then they will lose races that they should have been able to win. If this happens on a large scale in 2010 and 2012, then, yes, the Republican party will suffer significant damage. But Bennett's seat is in no danger of being lost to the Democrats, and conservatives in Utah have legitimate reasons to be unhappy with him. In short, the circumstances in Utah are uncommon enough that it's time to stop drawing conclusions about national trends and instead acknowledge that reports of the death of the Republican party have been greatly exaggerated.

Paying the Interest on the National Debt

2010-05-13T09:51:00.001-04:00

I came across this rather shocking article a couple days ago:

In the wake of the financial crisis and recession, Moody's Investors Service has brought new transparency to its sovereign ratings analysis — so much so that 2018 lights up as the year the U.S. could be in line for a downgrade if Congressional Budget Office projections hold.

The key data point in Moody's view is the size of federal interest payments on the public debt as a percentage of tax revenue. For the U.S., debt service of 18%-20% of federal revenue is the outer limit of AAA-territory, Moody's managing director Pierre Cailleteau confirmed in an e-mail.

Under the Obama budget, interest would top 18% of revenue in 2018 and 20% in 2020, CBO projects.

But under more adverse scenarios than the CBO considered, including higher interest rates, Moody's projects that debt service could hit 22.4% of revenue by 2013.

That's pretty staggering. Can you imagine living in a world where it's safer to lend money to Microsoft (or any other AAA rated corporation) than to the US government? That's an amazing thought. More to the point, can you imagine a world where the US government is forced to default on its debt? I can't imagine anything that would destroy the prestige and power of the US faster than being humiliated by the Chinese government after approaching them to renegotiate a trillion dollars in debt.

Even setting aside the risk of a credit downgrade, the United States can expect to spend more and more of its tax revenues on interest on the debt. Over the last year, the Federal Government spent about 187 billion dollars paying interest on the approximately 7.8 trillion dollars of the national debt that is held by the public, with "public" in this context meaning anyone who isn't the US government: individuals, China, banks, etc. (The usual figure for the national debt of 12.9 trillion includes money that the government owes to programs like Social Security and Medicare. As far as I can tell, this money doesn't have interest paid on it.) The overall interest rate for the government's debt right now works out to something like 3.2%, which is absurdly low. While 187 billion dollars is certainly a large amount of money, it's not too painfully large by government standards. After all, it only represents something like 13% of the federal deficit of 1.4 trillion dollars in 2009 and 8% of the total of 2.4 trillion dollars in revenue. If the cost of interest were to remain at these levels, we would be ok.

Of course, the amount that the government spends on interest won't remain anywhere near 200 billion dollars a year, for two reasons. First, the amount of publicly held debt has been skyrocketing. In 2009 alone, it increased a staggering 22%, from 6.4 trillion dollars to 7.8 trillion dollars. With another 1.3 trillion dollar deficit expected for 2011 and 10 trillion dollars in projected deficits for the next decade, this trend will only continue. If Congress doesn't slash spending now, we could quite possibly see the publicly held debt triple in size by 2020, and that's assuming the deficits don't turn out to be larger than is now projected.

On top of this, interest rates will have to go up. Indeed, despite the explosion in publicly held debt, interest payments actually declined by 65 billion dollars last year as interest rates plummeted. As I mentioned above, the government is now paying about 3.2 percent interest on its debt. As recently as September 2007 that rate was above 5%, and within the last decade it was above 6.5%, or more than twice what it is now. So over the next decade, and perhaps even over the next two years, we can expect to see interest rates increase by two thirds or even double.

The combination of these means that interest payments could quintuple to a billion dollars or more annually over the next decade. (The CBO figure of $700 billion is quite a bit lower than this, but history shows us that CBO estimates are consistently quite a bit lower than reality.) Either scenario would leave us in a place where interest payments represented at least 20% of government revenue. The government would lose its AAA credit rating, which would cause interest payments to grow even more. (A reduction from AAA to AA would probably increase the total amount of the interest payments by about 8%) All other forms of government spending would have to be cut drastically just to keep deficits at the same level they are at now.

Ultimately, some method for reducing the debt would need to be found. My guess is that when the time comes, we can expect high inflation. As painful as that inflation will be, politicians will opt for it rather than showing the courage necessary to cut government spending in a meaningful way through pursuing entitlement reform. If Obama and the Democrats don't get serious about deficit reduction now, it's going to be a rough decade.

Charlie Crist and Politics

2010-05-06T12:42:00.003-04:00

I generally hate writing about political maneuvering and primary challenges and the like. I'm much more interested in the issues than in articles about why the Republican party needs to move to the left/move to the right/widen its tent/get rid of RINOs/appeal to minorities/rally the base/nominate Sarah Palin/get rid of Palin in order to be viable over the long run. To be honest, someone who went from living in Utah (Bush by 46% in 2004) to living at Yale (Obama by 75% in 2008) can't really claim to have a good sense of the mood of the country and of what voters really want out of the Republicans.

All that said, I truly despise Charlie Crist and really hope that he loses in Florida. I was more or less indifferent to the primary campaign between between him and Rubio until the middle of April. And then Crist vetoed Florida's education reform bill:

The governor's decision to veto the bill drew a stark line between his administration and the Republican establishment. It earned plaudits from teachers unions, which opposed the bill.

The legislation—one of the most sweeping of its kind in the nation—would have eliminated tenure for new teachers and required merit-pay plans linking salaries to student learning progress. Unions opposed the measure, saying it would make it harder for Florida to hire good teachers, and that it violated collective bargaining rights.

I have long believed that the American teachers unions are one of the biggest problems in education today. Quite simply, the teachers unions exist not to advance the interests of students or even of all potential teachers, but rather the interests of members of the teachers union. The tenure and seniority based system of compensation that they advocate rewards mediocrity. The most talented individuals will always have offers from professions where they'll be paid in accordance with their abilities and their talent. Some of these remarkable human beings will take the pay cut and become a teacher because they enjoy teaching and feel that it's a worthwhile way to spend their lives. Personally, I have had the good fortune to be the student of many such teachers. But unfortunately, a career where seniority trumps competence is just not that appealing to potential teachers. Far too many of the college graduates who go into teaching are those who don't have other options. If you're not particularly good at what you do, a profession where you're virtually guaranteed steady pay raises and tenure for life is pretty nice. When the teachers unions complain loudly about how switching to merit pay will make teaching into a less appealing profession, my thought is that it makes it less appealing to the teachers who are the least effective, ie, precisely the group of teachers we need to get rid of to improve our education system. Merit pay is not a silver bullet, but it's hard to deny that merit pay will attract better teachers than the current system.

Crist, of course, knows that as well as anyone, which explains why he had originally supported this bill. By the time it passed the Florida legislature, though, it had become apparent that he was going to need to drop out of the Republican senate primary and run as an independent in the fall. His decision to veto it was an absolutely disgusting bit of political maneuvering, which is why former Senator Connie Mack resigned as the chairman of Crist's campaign in protest. It's one thing for the teachers unions to oppose this bill in their own interest. It's an entirely different thing for Crist to veto it at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Florida students because he thinks its in his own personal interest. I hope that Crist is humiliated in the November election and never again wins an election for anything.

GM's Dishonest Advertising

2010-04-26T12:40:00.004-04:00

GM has been running a commercial claiming that they have paid off their government loan 5 years ahead of schedule. I couldn't find a way to embed it, but you can see it here. The clip opens with GM CEO Ed Whitacre observing, "A lot of Americans didn't agree with giving GM a second chance, and, quite frankly, I can respect that." Since the government shouldn't be in the business of giving out first chances, much less second chances to companies that have completely failed, that sounds about right to me. He then goes on to proudly announce that "We have repaid our government loan, in full, with interest, 5 years ahead of schedule." If the money to repay the government were the revenue from increased sales of quality cars, that might be worth running celebratory commercials about. As it turns out, though, GM repaid the government with.... more money from the government. As Senator Chuck Grassley put it in a letter to Timothy Geithner (and via HotAir):

The bottom line seems to be that the TARP loans were “repaid” with other TARP funds in a Treasury escrow account. The TARP loans were not repaid from money GM is earning selling cars, as GM and the Administration have claimed in their speeches, press releases and television commercials. When these criticisms were put to GM’s Vice Chairman Stephen Girsky in a television interview yesterday, he admitted that the criticisms were valid:
Question: Are you just paying the government back with government money?

Mr. Girsky: Well listen, that is in effect true, but a year ago nobody thought we'd be able to pay this back.

In short, GM (which the US government has a 60% stake in) and its allies at the Treasury have been blatantly and deliberately misleading the American people with the massive fanfare surrounding this accounting trick. I'm not sure that a commercial has ever made me this angry. It should give pause to those who argue that increased government involvement in business will put an end to questionable accounting and dishonest practices.

Spirit Airlines' Carry on Bag Fee and Political Idiocy

2010-04-22T22:27:00.007-04:00

I've been meaning to write about this for a while, but the last 3 weeks have been the busiest of my life, so I'm just getting around to it now. A couple weeks ago, Spirit Airlines announced that they intend to start charging for carry on bags, effective August 1:

The president of Spirit does a good job of justifying the new fee. It seems like it will be more or less revenue neutral for them, with the proceeds being used to reduce ticket prices and checked bag fees, and the resulting reduction in carry on bags should help reduce the overcrowding of overhead bins and the associated delays. On the whole, anyone who is traveling without a carry on will pay less and have a better experience. It's a gutsy move that the company has taken a lot of heat for, but it also solves a problem by exploiting the fact that people respond to incentives. I suspect that the backlash against the fee might make this a net loss for Spirit, but that's the nature of a competitive market, and I think that the management of Spirit at least deserves credit for experimenting with this solution.

And with that, enter the politicians:

Seven U.S. senators have backed proposed legislation concerning the Florida-based airline's carry-on fee.

"We are going from the sublime to the ridiculous with airlines," Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) said at a news conference last week in Washington.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called the fee a "slap in the face to travelers." Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) called it "skyway robbery."

The lawmakers hope to put the kibosh on the fee by imposing a tax on all airline revenue collected from such charges.

Ah, yes: because people who voluntarily purchase tickets to fly with a particular airline are helpless victims who desperately need to be protected. I can't imagine that this legislation will actually go anywhere, but considerably more idiotic things have happened. If this legislation does get passed, it will be a fantastic example of destructive political showmanship.

Health Care Pain, Part II

2010-03-30T10:52:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I wrote about how the requirement to display calories on the menu will cost some small businesses up to $200,000. Today we find out about another (entirely foreseeable) consequence of the health care bill, courtesy of the Associated Press:

CHICAGO — Health insurance premiums for young adults are expected to rise about 17 percent once they're required to buy insurance four years from now. That estimate is from an analysis by Rand Health.

Young people will need to carry more of the burden of health care under the new health overhaul law. The new law limits an industry practice of charging older customers more.

As my boss asked me last fall, "Are you looking forward to paying for my health care for the rest of your life?" Let me be perfectly clear: I am PSYCHED. Especially because the AP is incapable of actually writing an article condemning Obama and closes by reciting liberal talking points:

Even so, the pluses could outweigh the minuses. Some 2 million people under age 26 should qualify for coverage under their parents' health plans. And Medicaid expansion will insure 9 million more young adults.

Way to speak truth to power!

Another Problem with the Health Care Bill

2010-03-29T15:03:00.001-04:00

To add insult to injury, it turns out that the bill will require restaurants with more than 20 locations to provide calorie information on the menu. I've always found this a little bit obnoxious, but it turns out that it's also quite expensive. Apparently it can cost as much as $200,000 dollars to calculate the nutritional information for all the items on a menu. For a restaurant that has 20 locations and does a million dollars in business at each location each year, this represents 1% of their annual revenue, which I can imagine hurts quite a bit. I doubt that any restaurants will be closing over this, but they'll pass along the costs to consumers and hire fewer employees, which is unfortunate in this economy.

The Healthcare Debacle

2010-03-26T13:10:00.004-04:00

I haven't written about health care reform for a while largely because I said most of what I had to say on the subject more than 6 months ago here and here. My beliefs about the substance of health care reform haven't changed since then, and writing about up-to-the-the-minute procedural maneuvering in Congress bores me to tears, so instead I've been spending my time on problem sets and the like. But one way or another, the fact that they finally passed the bill deserves a (belated) blog post of its own.

The bill does nothing to address the problems that I discussed in my previous posts, and by limiting the extent to which insurers can vary premiums to reward clients who live healthy lifestyles, it makes some problems worse. By so heavily regulating such a massive sector of our economy, Congress is expanding the power of the government over the day to day lives of individuals in a rather disconcerting way.

The single provision that troubles me the most in this respect is the individual mandate. For starters, the mandate is constitutionally questionable, as I argued a couple months ago. In short, no matter how broadly the Commerce Clause has been read, there's a difference between the power to regulate interstate commerce, which is the power that Congress actually has, and the power to compel private individuals to engage in commerce, which is what the individual mandate does.

I'm also troubled by the individual mandate on a philosophical level. As far as I can see, there are two arguments that can be made for it. The first is that by forcing people to buy health insurance, we will make them better off. But Americans are adults! The whole premise of democracy is that we trust each and every citizen with the extremely important task of choosing our elected leaders. We do so despite the fact that a given individual may be uninformed or may have personal interests that run against those of society on the whole. So why is it that we would second guess the choice of an individual who chooses not to buy insurance? Surely the decisions they make about their own health will be at least as well informed and thoughtful as the decisions they make in a voting booth.

The other argument is that we should compel people to buy health insurance because when healthy young people stay out of the insurance pool, the result is higher premiums for everyone else. In short, compelling individuals to buy insurance might be bad for them, but it has a desirable impact on the overall market. I don't even know where to begin with my objections to this. If you want to "share the wealth," then at least be honest about it and tax some people and subsidize others. Don't force individuals to do something that you claim is good for them while quietly acknowledging that you're forcing them to subsidize health care for others. Furthermore, the same argument could be used to argue that the health of the American car industry requires everybody in this country to buy one car a year from GM. (In the interests of intellectual honesty, this article makes an interesting case as to why the GM example might actually be frivolous.)

Of course, the health care bill is so poorly designed that as appalling as the mandate is, the bill would actually be worse without it. Thanks to language that's designed to prevent insurance companies from turning down applicants with preexisting conditions, individuals could theoretically hold off buying insurance until they were in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. (This begs the question of why we're calling it "insurance" in the first place.) I really despise the individual mandate, and it's telling of how bad the rest of the bill is that things would be even worse without it.

"The Al Qaeda Seven"

2010-03-15T20:48:00.004-04:00

I'd heard about the controversial "Al Qaeda Seven" ad from Keep America Safe, but I didn't get around to watching it until earlier today:

I actually find the ad a bit distasteful and overblown. Although I have strong feelings on the what the status of detainees in Guantanamo should be, I have enough respect for the importance of process to recognize that we need to have talented, ethical legal experts vigorously making the strongest case for each side. (This is essentially the sentiment that Ted Olson expresses in the article that I've embedded at the bottom.) Consequently, although I would never advocate for a detainee myself, I think it's wrong to attack lawyers who "represented or advocated for terrorist detainees," as the ad does.

However, there are two relevant issues that the ad raises. The first is that these lawyers are now working for the Department of Justice. (Indeed, that's the point of the ad.) In effect, some of the same people who argued cases against the government are now responsible for arguing cases for the government. At a bare minimum, that's a bit disconcerting, in the same way that it would be troubling if a mob lawyer were in charge of investigating organized crime. As I said above (and as Olson writes below) you need to have the strongest arguments made on both sides. Perhaps these lawyers are perfectly capable of arguing both sides, but you have to wonder about how enthusiastic they actually are about defending government policies.

Furthermore, some of the lawyers who have represented Guantanamo detainees have engaged in deplorably behavior that legitimately raises questions about who their sympathies lie with. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal (which was co-written by a co-founder of Keep America Safe) documents some of the more appalling instances. I don't wish to summarize the article, but it's well worth reading, and it provides examples of lawyers who have violated major rules and caused significant breaches of security at Guantanamo. The ad oversteps when it condemns all lawyers who have represented detainees, but had it instead targeted the lawyers discussed in the Wall Street Journal article, the criticism would have been far more justifiable.

olsen -

Repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell

2010-02-24T15:16:00.002-05:00

Top Army officials appeared before Congress today to testify about repealing don't ask, don't tell:

Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said Tuesday that he has "serious concerns" over the impact of a repeal of the military's controversial "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding gay and lesbian service members.

"I do have serious concerns about the impact of the repeal of the law on ... a force that's fully engaged in two wars and has been at war for eight and a half years," he told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

He agreed, however, that it would be fair to characterize his opinion as not being "strongly" for or against a repeal.

The general objected to a proposed moratorium on discharging people under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy before a repeal is formally enacted.

"I would recommend against it," he said. "We would be put in a position of actually implementing [a repeal] while we were studying implementation. And I don't think that would be prudent."

I feel strongly that don't ask, don't tell is a military question and nothing more. Our military exists solely to keep this country safe. At the moment, it is the best in the world at what it does, and I trust our generals. If they say that continuing don't ask, don't tell will help this country win wars, then I'll support that. If they say that allowing openly gay service members (more than 13,500 of whom have been discharged over the last 17 years) will give our military needed manpower, then I'll support that instead. This isn't a question of civil rights, or of moral judgments on gays, or anything like that. It's a question of what it takes to get the job done.

I Win

2010-02-19T22:34:00.003-05:00

From The Daily Mail:

The perfect man is a geek with facial stubble... women's secret turn-ons revealed

Most women claim to be attracted to tall, dark and handsome men, but a new study has revealed that facial stubble and a geeky personality are their biggest secret turn-ons.

Despite complaining that it looks unkempt and feels rough to touch, the unshaven look on a man is actually a turn-on for 41 per cent of women.

A slightly geeky personality came second, proving that women really do like a guy who knows their stuff when it comes to technology.

A hairy chest was voted third, followed by a man who loves to read or cries at a soppy film.

Other secret turn-ons to feature in the top ten include grey hair, glasses and being a passionate supporter of a sports team.

What more is there to say, other than that I started getting grey hairs in high school?

My Yale Daily News Article on Alcohol

2010-02-18T11:01:00.002-05:00

I wrote an article for the Yale Daily News about alcohol at Yale. It's nothing particularly new, but it can be found here.

The YDN Embarrasses Itself

2010-02-11T16:07:00.004-05:00

The YDN published a column yesterday about Sarah Palin wearing a black bracelet with her son Track's name on it. Apparently doing so conclusively demonstrates her "horrifying contempt" for those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for America:

This brings me back to my issue with Palin. The name on her black memorial bracelet — one, like the gold star, a demonstration of a friend or associate who was killed in action — is that of her oldest son, Track. Track served honorably in Iraq, and both he and his parents should be thanked for his selfless service to his country. He is also alive.

Commemorating Track’s service by wearing a a black memorial bracelet which is reserved for those dead or even a red bracelet for those missing in action, demonstrates a horrifying contempt for those who gave their last full measure of devotion or an almost unbelievable ignorance of the importance of symbols in American history.

Unfortunately, given Palin’s reputation and frequent public statements, I assume it is the latter.

Take that Palin! You're unbelievably ignorant and you hate soldiers! Then again, maybe not. As Hot Air explains, black bracelets actually can be used to honor a loved one who has been deployed. Perhaps more to the point, her bracelet isn't even black! Mary Katharine Ham reports that she was given the bronze bracelet by the founder of a website called HeroesBracelets.org. The author of the piece, Eric Robinson, has added a correction to that effect:

In my column in the News Wednesday, I criticized former Alaska governor Sarah Palin for wearing a black memorial bracelet with her son’s name on it, as Track returned unharmed from Iraq last fall. However, Sarah Palin's bracelet was not black; instead, it was a dark brown "DeployedHero" bracelet worn by those who have loved ones currently serving in the military. The bracelet is different from the black one associated with men and women who are killed in action overseas. Recognizing this, I apologize to the governor and to any reader who might have been misled by my piece. I hope that this serves as an important lesson for anyone interested in the importance of these symbols.

That's a remarkably bland apology for a piece that made such overblown charges against Governor Palin. The last sentence, however, amuses me. Does Robinson really think that the lesson here has to do with the importance of symbols? I think that the real story here is Yalies like Robinson and the YDN editors allowing their distaste for Palin to lead them to make embarrassing mistakes. The "Sarah Palin is ignorant" narrative is a favorite on campus; add to that a line about Sarah Palin's "horrifying contempt" for fallen American soldiers and you have an article that could slip through the YDN's fact checking process. After all, nobody seemed to consider that (a) Sarah Palin would have no reason to deliberately wear the wrong kind of bracelet and (b) as a military mother, she probably knows a little about military symbolism. I respect Mr. Robinson for his service in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the real lesson here is that if you assume that everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot, sometimes you'll be left with egg on your face.

Removing Trays From Dining Halls is a Stupid Idea

2010-02-06T18:17:00.004-05:00

I just wanted to put myself on the record as having said that. The water and energy savings obtained from not using trays (and thus not having to use half a gallon of water to wash each trays) is equivalent to either taking showers that are about 12 seconds shorter or alternatively (assuming ten minute showers) skipping one shower every 7 weeks or so. Seeing as I already do the latter, I plan to be using trays for every meal that it's convenient to do so.

That said, if you don't find it any more convenient to use a tray, more power to you. If I'm just grabbing a bowl of cereal and a glass of juice, I'll gladly skip the tray. But trays were introduced to dining halls for a reason.

How Much Have You Paid...

2010-01-29T14:01:00.003-05:00

for Nancy Pelosi's booze? Perhaps all the anti-Wall Street rhetoric and talk of "fat cats" we're hearing is designed to deflect attention from the fact that the American taxpayers are spending about a thousand dollars a week to pay for Pelosi's in flight food and booze, for a total of $101,000 for the last two years. Of course, this is only a fraction of the staggering $2.1 million that has been used to pay for Pelosi's travel on Air Force jets in the last two years. The story of Pelosi's abuse of private jets dates back to last spring and was written about by John Fund last August, but continues to be an aggravating example of waste and hypocrisy. Wasn't it just 14 months ago that congressional Democrats forced the CEOs of car companies to drive to Washington (in hybrids, nonetheless) for congressional hearings? Maybe Pelosi should look into doing the same thing.

It's Time to Get Serious About the Deficit

2010-01-28T02:48:00.003-05:00

Obama seems to have finally decided to pay attention to the deficit, or so he would have us believe:

Now, even as health care reform would reduce our deficit, it’s not enough to dig us out of a massive fiscal hole in which we find ourselves. It’s a challenge that makes all others that much harder to solve, and one that’s been subject to a lot of political posturing.

My emphasis. After taking a few minutes to blame Bush for all the problems with the deficit, he finally gets around to presenting his own plan for dealing with the it:

Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years. Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will not be affected. But all other discretionary government programs will. Like any cash-strapped family, we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don’t. And if I have to enforce this discipline by veto, I will.

Wow- a spending freeze! He thinks that it's important to move beyond political posturing and act on long held principles! Or maybe not. For starters, this is the same proposal that McCain made and that candidate Obama criticized repeatedly during the campaign last year. Well, maybe he's just realized that we just really really need to make dramatic cuts to spending! Then again, maybe not. The freeze would only reduce spending by something like 1%. As the Wall Street Journal explains:

Mr. Obama's touted spending freeze for some domestic agencies is the politics of gesture. It would apply to only 17% of the budget, and these programs have already had a 22% increase in their annual appropriations in the past two years, and another 25% increase including stimulus.

OK- so Obama's proposing a step that (a) sounds a lot more significant than it is and (b) he opposed all of 18 months ago. Well, at least nobody can dispute his claim that it's an issue that lends itself to political posturing.

More on Political Correctness at Yale

2010-01-22T13:09:00.002-05:00

I wrote in my last post that Yale takes its only long weekend of the year at a rather awkward time in the semester, and I speculated that the decision was driven by considerations of political correctness. The Yale Daily News explains one problem caused by the bizarre timing of the day off:

When the University began to recognize the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in 2002, administrators moved classes scheduled for Monday to the preceding Friday in the first week of shopping period. While this measure allows students to attend Monday classes more than once before they finalize their schedules, it leaves the 21 seminars that only meet on Fridays unable to convene until after shopping period ends and schedules are due to college deans. As a result, students and professors said they must devise alternate ways to allow shoppers to try these Friday courses on for size....

Students hoping to take a class offered only on Fridays can e-mail the professor for information, attend an information session if the professor offers one, or just put the class on their schedules and hope for the best. University Registrar Jill Carlton noted that students can add or drop classes after handing in their course schedules, but to add a class, they must petition their residential college deans and the Committee on Honors and Academic Standing.

So what was it that drove Yale to start recognizing MLK day and create this scheduling problem? The YDN explains:

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2001, 150 students rallied on Beinecke Plaza to protest the holding of classes. In response to student pressures, the faculty approved the current schedule effective January 2002.

Anybody up for holding a protest on President's Day? Sure, he's a dead white male, but there's no denying: Washington was pretty awesome.

An Amusing Bit of Political Correctness

2010-01-18T14:47:00.004-05:00

If you look closely at the Yale Academic Calendar, you'll notice that Yale has exactly one long weekend all year (and compensates for that with long Thanksgiving breaks.) The long weekend doesn't come in the middle of fall term, when we have 12 weeks of class without any days off. It doesn't come at the midpoint between Christmas and Spring Breaks. Instead, it comes today- all of 5 days after our three week Christmas break and early enough in the term that most students haven't even finalized their schedules. What could possibly motivate Yale to place its only long weekend in such a weird place? Well, today is MLK day. By contrast, all the other holidays that occur while school is in session- Columbus Day, Presidents' Day, and Veterans' Day- basically celebrate dead white males and consequently went out of fashion long ago.

I'm not complaining about having a day off, and I like Yale's tendency to prioritize long breaks over three day weekends. Furthermore, I believe that Martin Luther King Jr. did great things for this country and is a man worthy of admiration. But I also believe that Lincoln and Washington are each at least 55% as worthy of celebration as MLK. Assuming that worthiness of celebration is additive, we can conclude that Presidents' Day is at least 10% more important than MLK day, and Yale should therefore be celebrating that too, whether or not doing so is politically correct.

The End of (the Theory of) Global Warming

2010-01-16T18:40:00.004-05:00

2010 should be remembered as the year that the theory of anthropogenic global warming was thoroughly discredited. The first week of the year saw a unusually cold temperatures world wide. A single weather event neither can neither prove or disprove a theory that purports to describe long term trends in climate, but this cold snap is particularly interesting for a couple reasons. As the latest event in a ten year trend of flat or even declining temperatures, it has forced even the most ardent believers in global warming to admit that we may actually be entering a cooling period. Of course, they hasten to add that this cooling is but a temporary reprieve, and the world will soon resume its death spiral of warming. Indeed, some even claim that the unusually cold weather is being caused by global warming.

But a closer examination of this cold snap makes the global-warming-causes-cold-weather theory seem implausible. (Granted, the casual reader might draw that same conclusion merely from the name of the theory.) The argument for global warming causing cold weather goes something like this: a slight warming around the globe could theoretically trigger a change away from normal weather patterns. This could then have unpredictable results, including cold weather along the lines of what we've experienced this winter. But if the whole explanation comes down to a disruption of normal patterns, I would expect the freezing weather to have a different pattern than previous cold winters. By contrast, as the first video I linked above explains, the deviations from average temperature at various locations around the Northern Hemisphere this winter are remarkably similar to the deviations during the winter of 1979. In other words, the places that were abnormally cold then are also abnormally cold now. This suggests to me that whatever is causing the cold this winter also had an effect 31 years ago. Since that is right around the time the last cooling period ended, I have a hard time believing that global warming is to blame this time.

The similarity in temperature deviation could be nothing more than coincidence, and I admit that my analysis in the above paragraph is hardly rigorous scientific research. But clearly there are variables that affect global climate other than the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I don't claim to know what all those variables are or how each one affects climate. Then again, Socrates might say that makes a better than average climate scientist.

Obama Uses Calculus to Argue the Economy Is Getting Better; Country Not Convinced

2010-01-09T13:09:00.002-05:00

From an "AP Analysis" about Obama's tendency to blame everything on Bush:

Gloomy employers just slashed another 85,000 jobs in December, but Obama rarely misses a chance, as he did again Friday, to remind people that, hey, remember the job erosion at the start of the year? About 700,000 a month.

That is true, but it doesn't matter much to the man or woman who is out of work, a point Obama concedes.

In other words, even if we're still losing jobs, at least the second derivative is positive.

Interestingly enough, Nixon is alleged to have brought calculus into politics when he said, "The rate at which inflation is increasing is decreasing" while campaigning for reelection. This would be the second of derivative inflation, which is itself (sort of) the derivative of the value of money. Thus, if Nixon ever actually made that statement, he would have taken the unprecedented step of bringing a third derivative into politics. However, there is no evidence that he actually made that statement. The only references I've been able to find for it have been on various calculus worksheets for classes that have their materials online. Furthermore, this page shows that for the last 3 years of his first term (which is when he was presumably campaigning for reelection), Nixon could have done himself one better and simply invoked the first derivative of inflation, which was negative for almost all of that time. Nixon's use of the third derivative seems to be nothing more than an urban legend that has been passed from one calculus teacher to another.

The negative reaction to Obama's argument (and to Nixon's alleged claim) conclusively demonstrates one thing: this country either knows too much calculus or too little calculus to put much faith in second derivatives.

Obama Lied!

2010-01-07T14:49:00.003-05:00

Obama made a big deal during the 2008 campaign of promising that the discussions about health care reform would be televised. That would have been a good thing. For a representative democracy to work, the people need to understand what is going on with in the government. The founding fathers of this country understood that, which is why the Constitution provides, "Each House shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such Parts as may in their Judgment require Secrecy." Unfortunately, Obama seems to have changed his mind:

Granted, I can see why Congress feels that these meetings "require secrecy." I wouldn't want video footage of me supporting this disaster of a bill.

Yale Must Be Doing Something Right

2010-01-06T23:03:00.003-05:00

Iran has blacklisted Yale:

The Iranian government has labeled Yale University as one of its enemies.

The New Haven school made the government's list of 60 "subversive" international organizations Iran's government said is trying to undermine the Middle Eastern country's government, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security included Yale among other organizations the ministry argued citizens should not work with or take aid from, according to The Guardian.

Also making the list were the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, the BBC Persian, and the Foundation for Democracy in Iran.

Another group on the list, Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, is also based in New Haven.

I'm proud of my school for making the list, although Iran apologist (and Yale anthropology professor Marcia Inhorn, who I mentioned in my article on censorship at Yale) must be rather disappointed. But as the last sentence makes clear, we are only the second most deserving institution located on the New Haven Green to make the list. The more deserving organization is the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. As their mission statement explains:

The Iran Human Rights Documentation Center seeks to:

* Establish a comprehensive and objective historical record of the human rights situation in Iran since the 1979 revolution, and on the basis of this record, establish responsibility for patterns of human rights abuses;

* Make such record available in an archive that is accessible to the public for research and educational purposes;

* Promote accountability, respect for human rights and the rule of law in Iran; and

* Encourage an informed dialogue on the human rights situation in Iran among scholars and the general public in Iran and abroad.

The IHRDC believes that the development of an accountability movement and a culture of human rights in Iran are crucial to the long-term peace and security of the country and the Middle East region. As numerous examples have illustrated, the removal of an authoritarian regime does not necessarily lead to an improved human rights situation if institutions and civil society are weak, or if a culture of human rights and democratic governance has not been cultivated. By providing Iranians with comprehensive human rights reports, data about past and present human rights violations and information about international human rights standards, particularly the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the IHRDC programs will strengthen Iranians’ ability to demand accountability, reform public institutions, and promote transparency and respect for human rights. Encouraging a culture of human rights within Iranian society as a whole will allow political and legal reforms to have real and lasting weight.

Unfortunately, Yale may soon claim the number one spot among institutions located on the New Haven Green. That's because, as the Boston Globe reported last October, the US government has decided to cut off funding to the IHRDC. I guess that any systematic effort to document the abuses of these theocratic thugs makes it harder for Obama to justify his approach of "engagement." If we're lucky, Iran's decision to include the IHRDC on its list of "subversive" organizations will cause Congress to come to its senses and restore this funding, but I'm not holding my breath. After all, spending $700,000 for “Shrimp Industry Fishing Effort Research Continuation” is much more important.

Will ObamaCare be Found Unconstitutional?

2010-01-04T14:34:00.001-05:00

Orrin Hatch coauthored an article in the Wall Street Journal last Saturday arguing that ObamaCare is unconstitutional in three major ways. The most interesting argument that the make relates to whether or not the provision requiring individuals to buy insurance is unconstitutional:

First, the Constitution does not give Congress the power to require that Americans purchase health insurance. Congress must be able to point to at least one of its powers listed in the Constitution as the basis of any legislation it passes. None of those powers justifies the individual insurance mandate. Congress's powers to tax and spend do not apply because the mandate neither taxes nor spends. The only other option is Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce.

Congress has many times stretched this power to the breaking point, exceeding even the expanded version of the commerce power established by the Supreme Court since the Great Depression. It is one thing, however, for Congress to regulate economic activity in which individuals choose to engage; it is another to require that individuals engage in such activity. That is not a difference in degree, but instead a difference in kind. It is a line that Congress has never crossed and the courts have never sanctioned.

In fact, the Supreme Court in United States v. Lopez (1995) rejected a version of the commerce power so expansive that it would leave virtually no activities by individuals that Congress could not regulate. By requiring Americans to use their own money to purchase a particular good or service, Congress would be doing exactly what the court said it could not do.

I agree with the argument outlined in the second paragraph. The Commerce Clause gives Congress the power "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes." Congress can structure the way in which interstate commerce is conducted. Nothing in this sentence, however, gives Congress the power to coerce individuals into buying a good that they neither want nor need. If you accept that the Constitution actually has some kind of meaning, avoiding this conclusion is more or less impossible. (The exception to this would be if you've made a name for yourself pretending to be a conservative while subtly suggesting that other conservatives are racist.)

The third paragraph, however, is a bit deceptive. Lopez was indeed the first restriction on Commerce Clause power in about 6 decades. But the reasoning the court used in that case wouldn't apply here. The majority in Lopez determined that the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 didn't actually regulate commerce. In effect, the court said that Congress could not use the commerce clause to regulate activities that aren't actually commerce. By contrast, requiring individuals to buy insurance involves commerce; the problem is that the mandate doesn't just regulate commerce, but instead goes much further by requiring individuals to use their own money to in ways that they don't want to. Lopez is not relevant as precedent.

If a legal challenge to Obamacare made it to the Supreme Court, however, Justice Kennedy could very well be the deciding vote, and Lopez gives us some insight into his reading of the Commerce Clause. Although he joined the majority in Lopez, his concurrence makes it clear that he takes a rather broad view of the Commerce Clause. (Follow that link at your own risk. Kennedy is no Scalia, and his dry writing demonstrates that.) He writes that "The Commerce Clause grants Congress extensive power and ample discretion to determine its appropriate exercise" and states that the Court's decision in Lopez is "limited but necessary." Given that Kennedy seems to have drifted left over the decade and a half since he wrote those words, I have a hard time believing that he would join the conservative wing of the court in overturning the individual mandate provision of ObamaCare.

So while ObamaCare may be unconstitutional, the answer to the question I posed in the name of this post has to be "Probably not."

Preventing Terror Attacks

2009-12-28T17:55:00.010-05:00

The foiled Christmas Day attack raises a lot of questions about how to proceed in preventing future terror attacks. It seems to me that our anti-terror methods managed to do about half of what they should have. Umar Abdulmutallab was on some watch lists, but not on the 14,000 name list for increased security screening or the 4,000 name no-fly list. He wasn't able to get a lot of explosive on the flight, but he still did manage to get some on. The problem is that semi-effective doesn't really cut it when we're talking about counter-terrorism. Even though we had Abdulmutallab's name on one list and even though we limited his options for smuggling explosives onto the flight, we still ended up with a terrorist who came very close to igniting 80 grams of PETN on an airplane. US Government tests have shown that 50 grams of PETN could blow a hole in the side of the airplane, so, as one security expert phrased it, "for all intents and purposes, Northwest Flight 253 exploded in midair."

Clearly current security screening procedures are inadequate. The absurd restrictions placed on international flights following the Christmas attack are at best useless and at worst actually counterproductive. What apparently could have made a difference is the full body scanners that have slowly been deployed at 19 airports in the US. Although these scanners raise issues of cost and personal privacy, they should still be deployed. In particular, air travel is a privilege, not a right, and in this day and age, passengers will need to be willing to sacrifice some privacy in order to take advantage of it.

Unfortunately, there's an upper limit to how much airport security can do. The opinion pieces I've read can roughly be divided into two groups. The first group emphasizes the importance of no fly lists and the like. As Bill Dupray writes:

One wonders why a guy named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was on a terror watch-list because his father was worried about his militant behavior and reported him, was allowed to get on a plane. Call me a simpleton, but why wasn't that guy on the list to get the full-proctology screening at the airport?

He has a point. This is the second terror attack in the last two months where American officials had advance warning of the radical beliefs of the terrorist who carried out the attack (with the first instance being Nidal Hasan.) For whatever reason- be it ineptness, bureaucracy, political correctness, or a failure to take the threats seriously- the government failed to act on this information. (My guess is that all of those factors were at work.) To prevent future attacks like the attempted bombing of Flight 253 and the Ft. Hood massacre, our government will need to act more efficiently and more aggressively, even if that results in what some people perceive to be racial profiling.

Other opinion pieces argue that focusing on airport security is an inefficient use of resources:

Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab could easily have worn regular underwear, completed that flight uneventfully, and picked up a pile of handguns at a gun show once he got here, or committed any number of other destructive acts.

To the degree we can harden a target, all the terrorists need to do is switch targets. This insight was reflected in Robert Gibbs’ much more sensible reaction to the Detroit incident, in which he focused on the US’ efforts to strike at terrorism’s roots.

This argument is flawed. Airport security is a worthwhile investment precisely because Al Qaeda has a long-standing interest in attacking American airliners, as demonstrated by 9/11, Richard Reid, the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot, and most recently the attempted bombing of Flight 253. As 9/11 demonstrated, Al Qaeda prefers to continue to attack targets that have been attacked in the past.

At the same time, it starts to get at an important point. Even if we implement tighter security and expand our no-fly list, airplane flights will never be entirely immune to the threat of terrorism. Furthermore, terrorists will continue to have other ways of launching attacks against American civilians. As long as there are Islamic extremists dedicated to attacking the United States, there will always be a decent chance that some of them will find a way to get around our security protocols, whatever those may be. The only way to eliminate the threat from radical Islamists is to capture and kill their leadership and extinguish their ideology. The true failure of the American government occurred in 2007, when the Bush Administration released two prisoners from Guantanamo Bay who went on to help plan this attack. We can confiscate nail clippers and make our lists as long as we want, but the only way to prevent future attacks on airliners (and on civilians in general) is to eliminate the scourge of fundamentalist Islam.

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-25T12:29:00.001-05:00

I wish you all a lovely day.

Delta and JFK Airport

2009-12-24T12:53:00.002-05:00

I'm glad that my flight out of this terminal was on Friday. From New York's local Fox Station:

Port Authority police officers had to help control an angry crowd at the Delta Air Lines terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Tuesday.

The PA says the police had to help maintain order and help customer service representatives that bore the brunt of the anger.

Port Authority spokesman Steve Coleman told Fox 5 that it took less than an hour to get things completely under control.

The weekend snowstorm has left many people stranded in New York. Some people had flights rescheduled days later than their original itinerary, forcing them to miss cruises and other vacations.

A year ago, I had the privilege to spend a Saturday in JFK during a snow storm while waiting for a Delta Flight to Cincinnati, where I would connect to Salt Lake. At 3:30, the flight was still listed as leaving at 1:30, and nobody seemed to have any idea what was going on. The flight eventually boarded at 4, and didn't take off until about 9 from what I heard. (I wasn't on it. I had realized that there was no way I would make my connection in Cincinnati and took Delta up on its offer for a later flight and a $200 travel credit.)

There is no doubt in my mind that JFK is managed in a spectacularly inefficient way. Something could probably be done about the horrendous delays- I don't know enough about the system to suggest what- but at a bare minimum the airlines and the airport could make a good faith effort to inform passengers of just how long the delays will be instead of repeatedly delaying the flight by another 15 minutes or, in my case, just not saying anything at all.

Earmarks and Vote Swapping

2009-12-24T12:47:00.002-05:00

From NRO's The Corner:

In a surprise move, Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), chairman of the Senate Steering Committee, will seek a vote this afternoon on an amendment to prohibit the practice of trading votes for earmarks in the United States Senate. “Americans are disgusted by the earmarks, kickbacks, and backroom deals that have been used to buy votes for this health-care takeover,” says DeMint to NRO. “I hope we can put every senator on record on whether they support this legislative bribery, and we'll know who is part of the problem.”

As a resident of Utah, I feel that there's something perverse about Harry Reid sending my money to Nebraska in order to bribe Ben Nelson to vote for a bill that I don't agree with in the first place. But I suppose that's just the nature of earmarks. Ironically, the problem of earmarks is very similar to the problem of over-insurance that has driven up health care prices (and that Congress seems dedicated to making worse.) If my insurance covers a treatment that I would never pay for out of pocket (like, say, acupuncture) I might still try it out because it's free to me. As everyone does this, insurance prices go up. Similarly, states use earmarks to fund all sorts of projects that they wouldn't want to pay for themselves. The problem is that as every state requests money to spend on migrating loons and the like, well, somebody has to pay for it.

Earmarks and the compromises made for Ben Nelson also make me feel uncomfortable on a more philosophical level. If you look at the Constitution, there's a very clear sense that everyone should be treated equally by the law. For example, Article I, Section 9 forbids Congress from passing any bill of attainder or giving preference to the ports of one state over another. I'm not going to claim that these provisions make earmarks unconstitutional. But if it's forbidden to pass a law specifically targeting an individual, then should it really be OK to modify a bill to specifically reduce the excise tax on Blue Cross and Blue Shield? If it's forbidden to give preference to the ports of a state, then is it really OK for Harry Reid to send $100,000,000 to Louisiana in an effort to (successfully) buy Mary Landrieu's vote? (Even Reid himself seems to recognize that this should not be acceptable. The part of the bill that sends the money to Louisiana doesn't actually refer to the state by name but instead constructs an elaborate legal category that- surprise- only contains Louisiana.) The methods that the Democrats used to get this bill (and many other bills) passed may adhere to the letter of the Constitution, but they certainly violate its spirit.

Healthcare Reform Draws Closer...

2009-12-20T15:06:00.002-05:00

It looks like health care will clear the Senate. The Weekly Standard speculates that Pelosi might not actually have the votes in the House at this point, but I'm not too optimistic. After all, "The House might save us" is roughly as scary a phrase as "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." I've said most of what I have to say about health care from this point, but I still thought that a brief post to acknowledge the impending passage of this monstrosity would be worthwhile.

Off topic: Can anyone explain what's happened to blogger Charles Johnson? He seems to have gone insane.

Another Downside of Wind Power

2009-12-17T23:48:00.004-05:00

Public gasps at Lake Michigan wind farm images

SCOTTVILLE — A collective gasp was heard when computer enhanced photographs depicting numerous wind turbine generators were shown in Lake Michigan off Pentwater harbor and Little Point Sable at informational meeting in Scottville Tuesday night.

The photos were included as part of the public presentation before a full house at West Shore Community College by wind farm developer Scandia Wind LLC.

“It’s (Lake Michigan) more beautiful without them. Even I recognize that,” said Harald Dirdal, a project manager with Havgul Clean Energy of Norway.

I've been arguing for a while that part of the appeal of alternative energy is that their downsides don't seem as real to us because we don't have to deal with them on a day to day basis (yet). My limited contact with wind power is consistent with this article: windmills are aesthetic disasters that destroy landscapes. Before Congress legislates its way into a complete restructuring of how our country gets energy, it might want to consider that the downsides of alternative energy- lack of reliability, high cost, and aesthetic damage, among others- might not be so tolerable once they exist in reality rather than just in projections/

The Global Warming Cult

2009-12-12T21:34:00.002-05:00

I went out for sushi tonight to celebrate surviving a three and a half hour math final today (which is closely related to my lack of posting recently) and saw some people conducting a candlelight vigil with signs that said "Ask me about 350" (which refers to the latest fad in the global warming cult.) For them and for the people who decided that the Yale cupcakes should all say "350" on them for one day a few weeks back, I feel compelled to provide a link to this scathing indictment of the whole movement:

Doctor Zero: A Memo To The Global Warming Cult

Global Warming: The New Religion

2009-12-07T12:31:00.005-05:00

In my second post ever on this blog, I wrote about how global warming alarmism has become something of a religion. In the year or so since I put up that post, evidence has continued to accumulate in favor of that point of view. The latest example is a sign I noticed while walking back from the math building a couple minutes ago:

My only question is whether or not this is some brilliantly executed parody of the green movement. Do they not realize how ridiculous they make themselves seem by holding candlelight vigils in places of worship? Global warming no longer has any basis in science (at least as the word was used 30 years ago) or reality. Without science and without reality, all that is left for the global warming movement to do is hold candlelight vigils and fly jets all over the world to discuss the evils of carbon emissions.

Reason n+1 that ObamaCare is a Horrible Idea (For Some Large Value of n)

2009-12-06T13:53:00.006-05:00

From the Wall St. Journal

Another day, another study confirming that ObamaCare will increase the price of health insurance. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association has found that premiums in the individual market will rise on average by 54% over the status quo, which translates into an extra $3,341 a year for families and $1,576 for singles. The White House denounced the report as a "sham" before it was even released, which shows how seriously it takes such concerns....

Lo and behold, Blue Cross found costs will rise if Democrats force insurers to cover anyone who applies and then limit how much insurers are allowed to charge based on age or health condition. Economists call this adverse selection; people will wait until they're sick to buy coverage, and the Democratic rules make it perfectly rational for them to do so.

The impulse to make coverage more widely available is understandable, and if you take it as your starting point, it's natural to then conclude that insurance companies shouldn't be able to vary premiums with age and health status. But the basic laws of economics (or perhaps just the basic laws of arithmetic) state that if you require insurance companies to cover sick people for the same rates as healthy people, rates are going to go up! You can expand coverage, but not without raising costs. There are no free lunches, and it's time for the Democrats to be honest about that.

Musings on Mitt Romney

2009-12-03T11:56:00.003-05:00

Mitt Romney used an op-ed in USA Today to blast Obama for the miserable job he's done handling the economy. He proposes his own ten point plan for how to get the economy going again. The whole piece is quite refreshing; Romney clearly has tremendous faith in the private sector from his considerable experience with it (which he makes a point of comparing to Obama's inexperience.) Furthermore, he provides specifics in a way that the Republican Party hasn't recently. (Then again, Obama's shut-up-and-"get-out-of-the-way" hasn't provided congressional Republicans with a whole lot of opportunities to talk.)

At the same time, Romney has his name attached to the train wreck that is Romneycare. Various bloggers have even used this as grounds to argue that he's not a fiscal conservative at all. I can't help thinking that his considerable intelligence and his incredible administrative talents are the cause of his downfall. He's been so successful running private companies from the top down (as well as the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics) that despite his belief in free market principles, he can't quite resist the temptation to try to design the health care market in a better way. The problem with this is two fold. The firs problem is practical: the multi-trillion dollar health care sector is far too large to be run in the top down fashion that suits companies. The second is more philosophical. The CEO of a company is trying to optimize one thing: profit. (Of course, to do this he needs to do things like optimize efficiency, quality, etc.) By contrast, the government doesn't have something that's easy to optimize. Sure, it should probably be trying to maximize the happiness of its people (which social scientists would probably describe with some more official term like "net social utility.") But how can the government really know what makes its people most happy? Does requiring me to by health care that I can't really afford and don't want really make me happier? Who is the government to tell me how to spend my money to make me happy? I think Romney has a strong impulse rooted in his good character to try to make the system better. But he forgets that at the end of the day, the government is just supposed to protect people's rights and let them do whatever will make them most happy.

I realize that what I just wrote is nothing more than speculation and armchair psychology. (If only this metal folding chair were an armchair.) I also realize that I haven't posted in more than two weeks. Since I have no doubt that large numbers of people have been in a deep dark pit of despair for this very reason, I offer my apologies and simply say that I am quite glad to finally have my laptop back after several weeks of it being repaired.

The Real Problems with Health Care

2009-11-18T16:14:00.003-05:00

Jeffrey Flier wrote a piece for the Wall St. Journal about the health care reform debate:

As the dean of Harvard Medical School I am frequently asked to comment on the health-reform debate. I'd give it a failing grade.

Instead of forthrightly dealing with the fundamental problems, discussion is dominated by rival factions struggling to enact or defeat President Barack Obama's agenda. The rhetoric on both sides is exaggerated and often deceptive. Those of us for whom the central issue is health—not politics—have been left in the lurch. And as controversy heads toward a conclusion in Washington, it appears that the people who favor the legislation are engaged in collective denial.

Our health-care system suffers from problems of cost, access and quality, and needs major reform. Tax policy drives employment-based insurance; this begets overinsurance and drives costs upward while creating inequities for the unemployed and self-employed. A regulatory morass limits innovation. And deep flaws in Medicare and Medicaid drive spending without optimizing care.

The article is worth reading. I can't help pointing out, though, that his assessment of the flaws with the health care system and proposed reforms have a lot in common with what I argued here.

Dear Mr. Obama: I Want a Refund!

2009-11-18T15:21:00.003-05:00

On the stimulus, that is.
From Watchdog.org:
$6.4 Billion Stimulus Goes to Phantom Districts

Just how big is the stimulus package? Well for one, it has doubled the size of the House of Representatives, according to recovery.gov, which says that funds were distributed to 440 congressional districts that do not exist.

According to data retrieved from recovery.gov, nearly $6.4 billion was used to “create or save” just under 30,000 jobs in these phantom congressional districts–almost $225,000 per job. The web site operates on an $84 million budget and is tasked with monitoring the distribution of the $787 billion stimulus package passed by Congress–which, for the record, counts 435 members–in early 2009.

This embarrassment manages to succinctly illustrate a couple of the more absurd aspects of Obama's handling of the stimulus. First, the "jobs saved or created" statistic that his administration keeps talking about is nothing more than blind guesses made in an effort to justify a trillion dollars in spending. After all, statistics that are based in reality tend to be rather hard to create for areas that don't exist. Second, a trillion dollars is an absurd amount of money. My guess is that somehow this $6,383,184,549 in phantom spending will be accounted for somehow, but I shudder to think how much taxpayer money is disappearing into an abyss of fraud, waste, and abuse.

Conclusion: the government should take over health care. I've heard that they'll even have a nifty website where the government will let you keep track of human lives saved or created.

More on Sarah Palin

2009-11-18T14:59:00.002-05:00

Sarah Palin gives Oprah biggest audience in two years

Once again, Sarah Palin shows that she has a phenomenal ability to command the attention of people around the country.

We've been talking about Reagan in my Cold War class for the last few days. I've been amazed at how much contempt is evident in the way that foreign policy "experts" talk about him. Clearly, they all thought he lacked the intellect necessary to tackle the complex challenges of the Cold War. But somehow, that clueless actor with a fantastic ability to connect with people managed to bring down the Berlin Wall and win the Cold War. The liberal elite of this country certainly enjoy calling Sarah Palin stupid; somehow they miss that she was an incredibly effective governor. She may not have an Ivy League degree, but she clearly has the ability to get things done.

I'm not saying that Sarah Palin is the next Reagan. To the best of my estimation, her reputation was irreparably damaged by the campaign last fall. But as I said last Saturday, categorically dismissing her is a mistake.

Would it Kill Obama to Act Presidential? Please?

2009-11-15T16:33:00.001-05:00

Ridiculous:
Hot Air: 46 Handshakes, 1 Bow

Can Sarah Palin make a comeback?

2009-11-14T20:05:00.002-05:00

Matthew Continetti does a good job of arguing in today's Wall Street Journal that she can. The article is well worth a read for anyone in the Yale bubble. The amount of contempt for Palin at Yale is truly staggering, and the overwhelming majority of it is rooted in intellectual snobbery. When Palin comes up in conversation, students tend to focus quoting various lines from either the Katie Couric interview or from Saturday Night Live. Nobody seems to pay attention to the fact that until a bit more than a year ago, Palin was regarded as an extremely popular governor with bipartisan support who had brought down a corrupt Republican machine. She more or less walked into an ambush last year and received more hostile press coverage than anyone else in recent American political history. But she has two years to rehabilitate her image before the Republican primaries really get going, and that might be long enough. It would certainly be a mistake to categorically rule her out.

How Long Until Obama Takes Ownership of the Economy?

2009-11-13T14:27:00.004-05:00

Obama has spent a lot of time blaming Bush and Republicans for the problems that his administration has encountered with the economy. (I am not even close to the first person to make this point. For example, James Taranto has made it here, third item.) The voters were initially willing to agree with him on this. In fact, they elected him for that exact reason. But since Obama became president, the economic situation has gotten significantly worse, with the unemployment rate increasing from 7.6% in January to 10.2% last month. Nobody expected Obama (or McCain, if he had won) to instantly fix the economy after his inauguration. But eventually, Obama is going to be held responsible for the state of the economy.

As it turns out, the voters seem to have already reached that point, as a Rasmussen Reports survey from earlier this week indicates. 45% of Americans now rate Obama's handling of the economy as "poor." In particular, independents seem to have lost their faith in him:

The partisan divide on the question, as is often the case, is startling. Seventy-two percent (72%) of Democrats say the president’s handling of the economy is good or excellent. Only 10% of Republicans and 27% of voters not affiliated with either party agree.

Ironically, Obama may have accelerated this process with the rhetoric that he (and his subordinates) used to encourage Congress to pass the stimulus. If you argue that two weeks is too long to spend cutting hundreds of billions of dollars in waste from the stimulus, well, you're sort of implying that the time frame the recovery will be short enough that two weeks makes a difference. Obama gambled political capital by pushing for a trillion dollar stimulus that he claimed would stop the rise in unemployment; rightly or wrongly he's being blamed for its failure to do so.

Obama, however, seems to be set on blaming Bush for the current situation (as the James Taranto piece I linked to above documents.) In my mind, this is a mistake. By blaming the recession on Bush while continuing to push his other priorities (read: that $3,000,000,000,000 health care reform bill) he runs the risk that people will just see him as ineffective on economic matters. Obama convinced people that the recession was Bush's fault more than a year ago. By continuing to make that argument a year later despite having dropped a trillion dollars on the stimulus, he makes himself look ineffective and incompetent. Even the most enthusiastic Bush haters will eventually have to respond to "This is Bush's fault" with "Well, yes, but what are you doing about it?"

In my book, Obama deserves a lot of the blame for the continued slide in unemployment. Yes, jobs are a lagging indicator. Employers are reluctant to hire new employees until they are sure that the current recession is over. In short, uncertainty makes employers hesitant to hire. Well, American employers- particularly small business owners- have a whole hell of a lot to be uncertain about right now. Beyond the two year old recession, they have a whole lot of questions floating around in their minds. Are they going to get socked by new cap and trade taxes? Are they going to started being taxed for 8% of their payroll if they don't provide health insurance for their employees? Will hiring another employee now make their company large enough to be hit by that tax? In short, even if hiring someone makes sense right now, will it still make sense a year from now? The jobs data from October suggests that most employers are answering that question with "no." In particular, the rate of temporary hiring has been increasing. The combination of an uncertain economy and an uncertain taxation environment makes employers extremely hesitant to make long term commitments.

It's time for Obama to take ownership of the economy rather than blaming everything on Bush. If this means that he needs to put health care reform on the back burner (or on the ash heap,) so be it. At a bare minimum, doing so would be presidential.

The Health Care Trainwreck

2009-11-10T17:43:00.002-05:00

I would feel a lot better about the Obama-Pelosi-Reid attempt to take over health care if I could name a single industry (other than the military) where the government is generally believed to do a better job than the private sector. Let's face it: there's a reason that the post office is the supreme example of inefficiency, that our public schools are considered a disaster, and that everyone has a horror story about visiting the DMV. The government has a way of creating a bureaucracy and wrapping it in Byzantine regulations that may have been designed with the best of intentions but all too frequently have catastrophic results. This is what is about to happen to our health care system, as explained by Betsy McCaughey in her terror inducing article in the Wall Street Journal from a couple days ago. In theory, the Senate could still save us from this monstrosity, but I have very limited confidence in Olympia Snowe.

So welcome to a world were the government legally requires some families to spend 20% of their pre-tax income on health care. Welcome to a world where the services covered by your health insurance are not dictated by your preferences but by panels of so-called "experts" who apparently understand your needs than better you do. Apparently we have concluded our foray into treating the citizens of this country as adults who can make their own decisions.

There is only one little redeeming irony about this debacle. Out of everyone who voted in the last election, the demographic that will suffer the most from this disaster are the same young voters who supported Obama by a 2 to 1 margin. As my boss asked me last night, "Are you looking forward to paying for my health insurance for the rest of your life?" My generation- the same generation that drank the "Hope and Change" Kool-Aid so enthusiastically- will first feel the pain financially. We will be required to purchase expensive health care plans that cover procedures that we neither want nor need, and we will be forced to pay higher taxes. But gradually, as we start to use the medical system in earnest, we'll realize that the true cost of Obamacare isn't financial. We'll realize that care is rationed in a way that it wasn't for our grandparents and that medical technology no longer advances at anywhere near the rate it did when we were young. And, when the end finally approaches, we might even come to regret laughing so hard at the comment that Sarah Palin made about death panels.

This irony is not lost on me, and I even appreciate it a little. But I suspect that I would appreciate it more if I were not one of its victims.

Here's to Courage and Resolve

2009-11-09T11:43:00.003-05:00

Twenty years ago today, the "morally obscene"- to borrow a phrase from historian John Gaddis- structure that was the Berlin wall fell. Of course, the passive phrasing of that sentence is rather misleading. The wall did not spontaneously come down by itself. People around the world ranging from Lech Walesa and John Paul II to Ronald Reagan and the East German citizens themselves struggled, fought, and sacrificed to pull it down. Here's to them for having the principle and the guts to stand up to an evil empire, and here's to hoping that the people of today and the people of tomorrow can find that same courage when, inevitably, history once more demands it of them.

Tragic News

2009-11-02T16:56:00.002-05:00

Andre Narcisse, a nineteen year old member of the Yale Class of 2012, was found dead in his suite yesterday. He was the same age that I am. In the wake of such a tragic loss, I can only hope that he is now in a better place. Rest in peace.

Shocker: Lockerbie bomber still not dead

2009-11-02T16:45:00.004-05:00

Remember Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the convicted Pan-Am bomber who was released from a Scottish prison in late August on compassionate grounds? Well, it turns out that his imminent death from cancer wasn't so imminent. More than 10 weeks later, he is still alive. This makes his release from prison even more appalling: only inmates with less than 3 months to live are eligible for the compassionate release program. Scottish authorities managed to compound their severe lack of moral conviction with an inability to determine whether or not this murderer was even eligible for the program in the first place.

Of course, when I first wrote about this story in August, the first person to comment on it managed to predict merely from watching him walk off the plane that he had longer than 3 months to live. Whoever evaluated al-Megrahi was either incompetent or, more likely, just looking for an excuse to let him go.

One Year Anniversary and 200 Posts

2009-10-27T19:47:00.003-04:00

I noticed last night that today is the one year anniversary of my first post to this blog. Have I really been blogging for that long? Go figure.

Coincidentally, this is also my 200th post to the blog. (Actually, the utter lack of content in my previous post suggests that this is not a coincidence. Instead, I probably just linked to that story about a shark because the mathematician in me couldn't resist being at exactly 200 posts on the one year anniversary. But that's just a theory.)

That's a Big Shark.

2009-10-27T19:45:00.002-04:00

Check this out:

Great White nearly bit in half by an even BIGGER monster: Swimmers stay out of the water after warning over giant 20ft shark
The picture of the Great White that got bit is pretty cool.

In the Interest of Fairness...

2009-10-27T00:36:00.002-04:00

...I think I should mentioned that Calhoun sponsored a game night in the dining hall last Saturday with free ice cream and snacks. I have written quite a few posts criticizing Yale for its failure to provide alternatives to drinking, so it's only fair that I mention this instance of Calhoun providing an alcohol free activity. I'm pleased with the decision to do so and encourage the Calhoun College Council to organize more events along these same lines.

A Followup to "Black Power at Yale?"

2009-10-26T21:52:00.010-04:00

Over the course of a day or so last week, I got five comments on my "Black Power at Yale?" post. I believe that's the second most comments I've ever received on any post, and they made it clear that my post was misinterpreted as an attack on the legitimacy of the Black Student Association at Yale (BSAY), so I thought I would clarify my point. First, I recognize the legitimacy of the BSAY. I was not claiming that the organization. Additionally, I can see how the title of my post as well as my rhetorical question "Do the organizers of this event really aim to send the message that to be black at Yale is to be a radical communist black supremacist?" led them to misinterpret the post in this way. However, I'd like to make it clear that the answer to that rhetorical question was "no." My point was exactly the opposite: the organizers of the event should have been more careful with the imagery that they used, precisely because they did not want to send that message.

There can be no denying that the image of the clenched black fist has strong associations with radical groups like the Black Panthers. (As Wikipedia phrases it, "Probably its most widely-known usage is by the Black Panther Party in the 1960s." Wikipedia is not authoritative, but I'm willing to use it to measure popular perception of a symbol.) The commenters on my previous post (all of whom seemed to be members of the BSAY) alluded to the fact that the use of the image dates to the founding of the BSAY during a period when black students at Yale faced significant challenges. Several accused me of failing to sufficiently research the meaning of the image before posting something about it. I only spent half an hour or so researching the symbol, but that research consistently showed that the clenched fist is generally a symbol of communism and socialism and that the clenched black fist in particular is strongly associated with the Black Panthers. Perhaps another hour of research would have led me to the interpretation of the symbol that the designer of the poster wanted, but either way my initial claim remains unchallenged: regardless of the meaning that the clenched black fist was supposed to have on that poster, the use of that image has some very strong and very troubling connotations to the casual passerby.

Again, I would like to point out that I assumed that the organizers of the event did not wish the use of the symbol to have these connotations. But connotations can be hard to control, as the BSAY should know. After all, they were the organization that protested when the Freshman Class Council announced last January that the theme of the Freshman Semi-Formal was "Gone With the Wind." The FCC, which contained multiple black members, clearly did not intend to offend and eventually changed the theme after being confronted with the reality that some students interpreted the movie as being about the enslavement of black. In short, the FCC approved the theme while oblivious to its negative connotations and then changed it- at the BSAY's request- when those connotations became apparent. In light of this, I would expect the BSAY to stand by my claim that campus organizations should think through the connotations of the images, symbols, and allusions that they use.

Finally, two of the commenters insinuated that my discomfort with the clenched black fist stemmed from racism. (To set the record straight, my dislike of the symbol comes from its association with the Black Panthers and an extreme distaste for the murder and torture that the Panthers used while fighting for their goals of communism and separation of the races.) I do not wish to waste time addressing this point beyond observing that I can't imagine that it is productive to go through life assuming the worst about those who disagree with you.

I want to know...

2009-10-25T22:03:00.000-04:00

...how many congressmen would find this cartoon amusing. Probably all too few.

A Pleasant Surprise

2009-10-25T16:48:00.002-04:00

In the utter chaos of midterms, papers, and problem sets over the last couple weeks, I forgot to mention a very nice surprise from a couple weeks ago:

Congratulations to Max Rosett of Yale University, the Wednesday winner of $100 in Campus Reform's "Report a Leftist Abuse" contest!

I was awarded the prize for this account of Akhil Amar's bias in the classroom. Thank you to the folks at Campus Reform for sponsoring this contest! I am quite honored to have received this recognition.

The Benefits of Global Warming

2009-10-25T16:37:00.002-04:00

From Breitbart.tv:
‘Canadian Tourism Federation’ Celebrates Global Warming in Spoof Video

The video is amusing, but it touches on a serious point: even if global warming is occurring and even if global warming is caused by carbon emissions (both of which are gigantic "if"s), the effects won't all be negative. Scientists who study global warming have a strong incentive to focus on the downsides of climate change: nobody wants to throw research money at a cause that amounts to "New Haven will have slightly more pleasant winters by the year 2100 and farming will be able to extend farther north." Stranded polar bears and the end of civilization make for a much more compelling call to action. Before we decimate our economy with cap and trade, though, we should consider that there might actually be some benefits to global warming, even if we don't hear as much about them.

Free Speech and Obama

2009-10-22T19:38:00.006-04:00

I couldn't decide whether to go after this from a serious perspective or a snarky one, so I'm going to just put both posts up.

Post I:

I have little or no confidence in Obama. I would be hard pressed to name anything he's done that I would say impressed me. Consequently, I am rarely disappointed by his actions. This, however, provided on of those rare occasions:

While attracting surprisingly little attention, the Obama administration supported the effort of largely Muslim nations in the U.N. Human Rights Council to recognize exceptions to free speech for any "negative racial and religious stereotyping." The exception was made as part of a resolution supporting free speech that passed this month, but it is the exception, not the rule that worries civil libertarians. Though the resolution was passed unanimously, European and developing countries made it clear that they remain at odds on the issue of protecting religions from criticism. It is viewed as a transparent bid to appeal to the "Muslim street" and our Arab allies, with the administration seeking greater coexistence through the curtailment of objectionable speech. Though it has no direct enforcement (and is weaker than earlier versions), it is still viewed as a victory for those who sought to juxtapose and balance the rights of speech and religion.

Free speech is the most important political right that we have. Without it, the right to vote means little. Great ideas can be stifled, and deeply flawed ideas will go unchallenged. There is not a totalitarian regime in the world (or in all of history) that has not desperately tried to restrict free speech, and the regimes that have failed to do so have been short lived indeed.

Furthermore, the tremendous advances that have been made by the West over the last 400 years occurred as the emphasis in public discourse moved from dogma to rationality. An essential part of this was the relaxation of religious restrictions on free speech. Without free speech, the tremendous scientific progress that has lifted the world out of poverty would never have been made. (Lysenkoism provides a powerful example of what happens when science is expected to conform to certain speech codes.)

The notion that we can restrict some kinds of speech without encroaching on the important kinds of speech is inherently flawed. After all, who gets to determine what kind of speech is "hate" speech and thus not deserving of protection? It certainly should not the despotic governments of the Muslim countries that are pushing this resolution. But even if there were some objective arbiter of what is and isn't hate speech, there would still be no way to get around what some might describe as an inconvenient truth: Sometimes, there are things that need to be said even if certain people would label them as hateful. There are very real problems related to everything from demographics to despotism that can only be addressed if we are free to say things that might be considered hateful.

Free speech has been an incredible tool for the advances of science, technology, and freedom. The distinct superiority of the West in each of those fields is closely linked to its embrace of freedom of expression and freedom of thought. Recently, though, there seems to be a troubling eagerness to abandon it. Yale showed this when it refused to reprint the Danish Cartoons last summer. Now Obama seems to be just as eager. Americans of all political orientations should join in condemning this move.

Post II:

In light of this, we can safely conclude that Obama is simply laying the groundwork to go after Fox News on anti-blasphemy grounds.

Disagreement in a Democracy

2009-10-21T16:46:00.010-04:00

John Fund wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal yesterday criticizing the intimidation that has been used by certain supporters of gay marriage in California. A friend of mine posted it on Facebook, and in the ensuing discussion, someone argued that it is acceptable for gay marriage advocates to create repercussions for opponents of gay marriage, assuming those repercussions (boycotts, protests, etc) are all legal. I agree with this on some level. Part of the reason that I publicly post my views on this blog is that I'm willing to take both credit and responsibility for them. That said, I disagree with the notion that "it's legal" is sufficient justification for targeting opponents of gay marriage with intimidation tactics.

Just because something is legal does not mean that it isn't distasteful. I would like to think that gay rights advocates are capable of handling opposing views without resorting to destroying the livelihoods of those who oppose them. It may be legal to use tactics of intimidation and protest to force your opponents to abandon their careers, but it is hardly admirable. Furthermore, in the long run, the health of our democracy depends on a tolerance for dissent and free speech that goes beyond the narrowest interpretations of the protection offered by the First Amendment.

I'm reminded of the student in my Greek history seminar who (unsuccessfully) tried to argue that shouting down speakers who disagree with you is not restricting free speech, but rather just exercising it yourself. Rather disingenuous in my opinion.

My Life Recently

2009-10-18T23:42:00.003-04:00

I was sitting at lunch with my friend Kyle last Friday and he asked me what I thought of the health care bill that Olympiad Snow voted in favor of last Wednesday. I told him that I thought that I had a midterm, a paper, and two problem sets in the 6 days before that Wednesday, another midterm and another problem set on that Wednesday, and then a third midterm and a second paper in the 6 days after. Thus the lack of posting.

Fortunately, my life will be much less exciting soon, and my blog will no longer be in the pathetic state of having an excuse for not posting as the last post.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ridiculous

2009-10-09T12:39:00.006-04:00

The Nobel Prize has gone to people like Elie Wiesel and Lech Walesa for their struggles in the name of human dignity. It has been awarded to the certifiably evil Yasser Arafat, apparently for his half-hearted efforts to end a terrorist campaign that he himself had incited. Before today, I thought that they had covered the spectrum in terms of giving the prize to every possible kind of recipient.

And then they gave it to Barack Obama. To parrot exactly what every other blogger (and Twitterer, and Facebooker) in the country has already said today, what has he actually done? As I wrote on Monday, even SNL is mocking Obama for doing nothing!

There can now be no doubt that the Nobel Peace Prize carries no actual significance. (The same thing could have been said at any point during the last two decades.) As Claudia Rosett does a great job of explaining, the five member prize committee consists of leftist Norwegian politicians. Why should we care what they think? Yes, the Nobel Prize has gone to some great people, but those people were made great by their actions, not by the decision of a committee of politicians.

SNL Mocking Obama

2009-10-05T11:38:00.002-04:00

Hot Air linked to this SNL skit mocking Obama yesterday:

Of course, he's being criticized from the left for not doing enough, but he might be about to watch his support among his base crumble. Seeing as he has absolutely no support from the right at this point, he'll be in a lot of trouble if and when that happens.

(Probably) My Last Post on Cash for Clunkers

2009-10-04T12:39:00.003-04:00

When I wrote (ie, ranted) about Cash for Clunkers in early August, I pointed out both that it had no environmental impact and that the government was actually spending $1,500,000,000 to encourage people to destroy wealth. Someone left a comment observing that the program may have had stimulative effects because it encouraged the sales of a large number of cars. We can now categorically dismiss that argument, though: September car sales were atrociously low, proving that (as many people suspected) the bulk of extra car sales from Cash For Clunkers weren't actually extra car purchases but instead car purchases that had been pushed up by a month or two. In other words, all we got for our $3,000,000,000 was large transfer of wealth to people who buy politically correct car models.

Victory in Afhanistan

2009-10-03T05:31:00.002-04:00

The Wall St. Journal has run a couple articles over the last couple days that compellingly argue that withdrawing from (read: losing in) Afghanistan would have catastrophic consequences for America's allies and interests, to say nothing of its credibility. What I'm still trying to get my head around, though, is the notion that this subject is even up for debate. Shouldn't this qualify as a self evident truth?

How Not to Be a Racist

2009-10-01T22:07:00.002-04:00

With all the accusations of racism being thrown around these days, it gets hard to keep track of what you can safely do without being dubbed a racist. Fortunately, my friend Jamin pointed me to this useful reference. Before saying anything about Obama in public, just check the handy flow chart to determine whether or not you will be labeled a racist.

Another Downside to Alternative Energy

2009-09-30T12:16:00.002-04:00

I glanced across the Yale Daily News over lunch and noticed an article about a proposed wind farm in Vermont:
Yale Daily News: Yale-backed wind plan incites controversy

The town of Ira, Vt., population 452, has no stores, no gas station and no post office. What it does have are sweeping vistas of Vermont’s Green Mountains.

And the slopes of those mountains have wind — wind that a developer wants to harness to produce an estimated 240,000 megawatt hours of clean, renewable energy every year. The developer, known as the Vermont Community Wind Farm, is leasing the land from Wagner Forest Management, a firm that manages 4,000 acres on behalf of investors, one of whom is purportedly Yale University, according to a local state legislator who said he has seen records of the transactions.

The plan to erect some 60 windmills around nearby Herrick Mountain and Susie’s Peak would ruin the precious scenery, say the town’s residents.

“Suddenly you’re thrusting an industrial complex into what’s really a rural residential neighborhood,” said David Potter, who represents Ira in the Vermont House of Representatives. “In my opinion, [the windmills] don’t fit.”

This is a concrete example of something I have written about: alternative energy has some very serious downsides that become a lot more visible once we try to implement it. As I wrote last spring after seeing a commercial that said we would "only" need about 9200 square miles of solar panels in the desert to power the entire United States:

Relying on fossil fuels undeniably has very real problems associated with it, ranging from petro-dollar funded terrorism to smog and pollution. But because we deal with those problems on a day to day basis, we are acutely aware of them. By contrast, it's much easier to dismiss the problems associated with alternative energies, which is why we get statements that amount to "All we need to do to generate enough electricity for the United States is cover an area almost as large as Massachusetts with solar panels." Similarly, we can ignore the fact that the electricity generated by Electrichusetts would be both unreliable and prohibitively expensive because, at the moment, we aren't paying absurd amounts to light our homes with electricity that goes out every time it snows. The idea of continually collecting the rays of the sun and them it to electricity is understandably appealing. But that doesn't make the challenges associated with doing so any less significant.

I concluded that post with some crudely photoshopped pictures of what the southwest (ie, Zion, Arches, and the Grand Canyon) would look like if covered by solar panels. With this article, the YDN was able to provide a picture of 3 windmills atop an otherwise scenic ridge in Vermont. I have no doubt that there would be bitter backlash if those windmills were instead oil wells. It will be interesting to watch as people confront the downsides of solar and wind power and perhaps even become opposed to them.

Objectivity in the Classroom

2009-09-29T21:40:00.002-04:00

My brother pointed me to this comic yesterday. Given my background in math and the stuff I've written about politics in the classroom, I feel it's particularly appropriate.

Confusion in Congress

2009-09-23T12:50:00.003-04:00

The Wall Street Journal's Political Diary pointed me to this interesting quote from Steve Malanga's article on RealClearMarkets:

On Capitol Hill today the House Committee on Financial Services under Chairman Barney Frank is holding hearings on legislation supported by the Obama administration that would bring insurance companies and credit unions under the umbrella of CRA, placing new lending demands on these groups and opening them up to protests and pressure tactics by organizations like Acorn. As proof that Washington is a looking-glass world where basic values and logic get perverted, proponents of the new legislation claim we need more CRA to rein in the bad practices of the housing bubble, which is sort of like arguing that the cure for alcoholism is another martini.

I didn't realize that there had been talk of expanding CRA, but this story confirms that the House has indeed been holding hearings on the subject. I generally agree with Mr. Malanga's take on the subject, but I'm a bit more curious than he is about why these Democrats think expansion of the CRA will put an end to the bad business practices that led to the collapse of the markets last fall.

I can't help wondering if Barney Frank and various members are missing the fact that there are different ways of defining "bad business practices." You can define it as practices that endanger the success of a company, like taking excessive risks and being over-leveraged. This is the sense in which bad business practices led to the financial meltdown. Frequently, though, when someone says "bad business practices," the speaker is referring to practices that he perceives as ethically objectionable. The problem with having these two definitions is that many things that are objectively good business practices by the first definition may seem to some people to be bad business practices by the second definition. For example, denying loans to people with no credit history is a good way to avoid issuing bad loans. Unfortunately, doing so tends to have a disproportionate effect on minorities and first time home buyers. Consequently, if the government wants to encourage home ownership among first time buyers and among minorities, it needs to forbid this "bad" practice and, by doing so, force companies to take large risks. In fact, this is exactly what our government has done with regulation over the last couple decades: at one point, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston issued guidelines that said, "Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor." This (and various regulations with similar intent) led to all sorts of subprime loans being issued, which in turn led to the subprime mortgage crisis that precipitated the meltdown last September.

We've heard a lot coming out of Congress about the need to regulate "bad" business practices into oblivion in order to prevent future meltdowns. As far as I can tell, though, our Congressmen don't understand that the "bad" business practices the CRA is designed to prevent are exactly the techniques that banks use to avoid making risky loans.

On a semi-related note, I think that the story of the CRA, the tax deduction for mortgage interest, and the other pieces of regulation that increase the availability of mortgages is a classic lesson in the law of unintended consequences. Encouraging home ownership was a good, perhaps even noble, goal. But in order to do so, the government had to reduce practices like redlining and the use of credit history, and this led to banks taking larger risks, which in turn helped cause the financial crisis. Clearly, a noble goal had disastrous consequences. Congress would do well to keep that in mind before it goes ahead and requires everyone to buy insurance.

Burma's Junta > Honduran Democrats...?

2009-09-22T19:08:00.002-04:00

From Hot Air:
Wonderful: Obama grants visa to Burmese junta member — but not to Honduran leaders
I've been meaning for the last few days to write an article about how Obama's obsession with improving relationships with our enemies is coming at the expense of relationships with our allies. I was worried that a couple of my examples would be a bit stale by the time I cleared up enough space in my schedule to write the article. Fortunately, Obama seems obsessed with continuously providing me with new examples to use when I finally get around to writing that article.

Pork Barrel Spending and All That Good Stuff

2009-09-22T10:21:00.002-04:00

The Wall Street Journal has been running a series of articles on the federal subsidies that prop up the tiny airport in Johnstown, PA:

Republicans had their Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska, and now Democrats seem intent on wrapping themselves firmly around Congressman Jack Murtha's Airport for No One in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. So much for changing the culture of spending in Washington.

Last week 53 Senators—including 51 Democrats—voted down an amendment by Republican Jim DeMint of South Carolina to stop spending federal funds on the airport that Mr. Murtha built with more than $150 million in federal subsidies and earmarks over the last two decades. (The Republicans voting against Mr. DeMint were Kit Bond and George Voinovich, neither of whom is running for re-election.) The airport has three daily commercial flights, and those are to Washington, D.C. The federal subsidies average $100 for each of the fewer than 30 passengers who use the airport each day, which means it would be cheaper for taxpayers to buy a train ticket for Mr. Murtha and other Washington D.C.-bound travelers than to keep the airport open.

You can make a good argument that there is a value to having airports available to small communities. The question we need to be asking, though, is whether or not the government should be forcibly confiscating money from some people and giving it to others for projects like this one. The statistics contained in this article make it quite clear that the answer to that question- as with most earmarks- is a resounding no.

Sorry to Beat a Dead Horse....

2009-09-20T21:59:00.003-04:00

...but I'm writing an email right now to a prospective Yale student who doesn't intend to drink in college, and I really have no choice but to tell him the truth: Princeton and Harvard do a much better job of providing viable alternatives to drinking than Yale does. (My previous posts on the subject can be found here, here, here, and here.) It makes me unhappy to have to do that; I've really had an amazing experience at Yale, particularly this year, and I'd much rather be able to send him an enthusiastic "Yale is better than Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford in every way imaginably" email. Does the administration care that I can't do so?

Since I mentioned the amazing experience I'm having here, I thought I'd go ahead and provide a link to an online version of a class that I'm taking with Donald Kagan, who Wikipedia tells me is generally considered to be the foremost scholar on ancient Greek history. The class in an introduction to that subject and the lectures for it can be found here. I also managed to get into a seminar with him, which is a truly fantastic experience to have as sophomore.

Swine Flu Assistance For Poor Countries

2009-09-20T02:53:00.002-04:00

The Drudge Report linked to a story about a UN report that claims a swine flu pandemic in third world countries could potentially kill millions if countries like the United States and Britain don't intervene. I tend to be skeptical of anything the UN says or does, but since I haven't seen a good reason not to believe this report, I'm willing to (at least for the moment) take it at face value. If there really is the potential for millions to die, then Western countries- particularly the United States- should intervene. I mention the article, though, because the following paragraph amused me:

The 47-page report provides a detailed breakdown of the basic needs of 75 vulnerable countries with the weakest capacity to withstand an escalation of the virus. Six countries from Latin America, including Cuba and Bolivia, 21 countries from Asia and the Pacific such as North Korea and Bangladesh, and 40 countries from Africa such as Congo and Eritrea are included in the survey.

Would that be the same Cuba whose health care system Michael Moore drools over? Do they really need help from the horrendous American system? Can we please just agree that Moore is completely irrelevant so that I can stop asking rhetorical questions?

Where Are All the Hurricanes?

2009-09-18T16:41:00.002-04:00

The Associated Press reports that it's been an unusually calm hurricane season:

MIAMI – It may be tempting the weather gods just to point this out, but this has been a dud of a hurricane season so far.

Only two hurricanes have formed in the Atlantic over the past three months, and neither hit the U.S. — a somewhat unusual lull.

This may be the biggest story of the year. The facts it contains allow us to categorically reject any and all theories of climate change. Once again, though, the AP missed the real story and didn't include a single word to that effect! Damn the liberal media!

Of course I'm being facetious. Random pieces of anecdotal evidence neither prove nor disprove a scientific theory. Every time we get a warm day, though, the media forgets that inconvenient little fact in their mad rush to label it as proof positive of global warming.

Annie Le and Raymond Clark III

2009-09-16T23:31:00.014-04:00

I have been hesitant to say anything about the Annie Le case as I've watched it evolve over the last week from a perplexing disappearance at Yale to a horrifying murder that has garnered national attention. I've certainly thought about the tragic affair, particularly since the body was found last Sunday. Even so (and despite living less than a mile from where the murder was committed) I haven't felt that I have anything to add to the discussion. In my mind, posting something about it simply for the sake of posting something about it would feel disrespectful to Annie, her friends, and her family. Consequently, I've avoided doing so. I only stress this point to make it clear that what I'm about to say isn't due to callousness or a decision to take Annie's murder lightly.

Raymond Clark III deserves the presumption of innocence. Let me say that again: Raymond Clark III deserves the presumption of innocence. Unfortunately, the American media and the American public are unwilling to give him that. His life has already been ruined, despite the fact that he is yet to be formally named a suspect in the case. Yes, the police collected DNA from him, but that DNA is yet to be tested and may very well exonerate him by the end of this week. In a perfect world, the public would view Clark as innocent until he was convicted by a jury of his peers. In a better world than ours, the public would refrain from passing judgment at least until the results of the DNA tests came back. In our world, though, he has already- I apologize for the cliche- been convicted in the court of public opinion, complete with articles quoting his neighbors about how they've always though he was creepy. There seems to be a picture of him on every tabloid cover and every newspaper front page. I can't imagine that he'll ever be able to return to his job at Yale, and any future employer who does even the smallest amount of research about him will see his name connected to a murder. In short, his life has been turned upside down.

At some point in the future, I may discover that by writing this piece I was defending a murderer. In fact, DNA testing may provide the evidence necessary to arrest Clark before you even read this. Even so, I will stand by my point. I can't help thinking of James Van de Velde- the first person to be named a "person of interest" when Yale student Suzanne Jovin was murdered in 1998. He was eventually cleared, but not before having his life destroyed, as an article from 1999 explained:

Van de Velde, who is 39, has been a named suspect -- the only named suspect -- in the murder of Suzanne Jovin, a Yale senior, for going on nine months. He has never been charged. But layer by layer, his life has been whittled down. He has no job now and few prospects, just a growing pile of rejections. His casual friends and colleagues have dropped away, leaving a small, hard core of loyalists. He cannot, of course, date. His savings are dwindling, and his legal bills are rising. His upbringing, his career and his social life have been publicly fly-specked by journalists searching backward, through the darkest of lenses, for signs of a murderer in the making.

(As a clarification, the article was written before he was cleared.) To this day, a Google search for his name shows nothing but pages somehow connected to the Jovin case. In short, Yale, the media, and public opinion punished him for a crime that he did not commit.

Raymond Clark III may have murdered Annie Le, and if he did, he deserves the harshest possibly punishment. But for the moment, we don't have definitive proof that he did anything worse than be in the wrong place at the wrong time. By ignoring that, we may have just destroyed the life of an innocent man.

Black Power at Yale?

2009-09-14T21:36:00.004-04:00

I was poking around Yale's virtual flyerboard at yalestation.org and came across this flyer:

Now, I'm sure that the event being advertised is entirely innocent. The image of a clenched fist, though, is not. The black power fist has historically been associated with black supremacist movements (particularly the Black Panthers) and has connotations of support for socialism and communism. More generally, the clenched fist is a symbol of radical leftist movements of all types (as discussed here.) Do the organizers of this event really aim to send the message that to be black at Yale is to be a radical communist black supremacist? Next time they might be worth thinking through the connotations of the imagery they use.

Note: Please see my followup post which can be found here.

How to Fix Health Care

2009-09-13T02:48:00.003-04:00

My latest article for The D.C Writeup can be found here. I actually cut it down quite a bit from the original version due to space concerns. The full original text is below (and will include links as soon as I get around to it):

I recently wrote a column about the chilling effect that single payer health care would have on medical innovation. A friend of mine who read that column sent me an email asking me about my opinion on how to reform health care in general. I started to respond to him with an email, but I realized I have quite a bit to say on the topic, so instead I just wrote an article. Health care reform should focus on the solutions to four problems:

Problem 1: Health insurance isn't just insurance: What we call health insurance is, quite simply, not insurance. Think about something like fire insurance. You consistently pay a relatively small amount so that in the case of a unlikely event like your house burning down, you don't have to absorb the whole loss. Of course, the insurance company has to take in more from each person than it pays out on average so that it can pay its employees and still make a profit. A customer of the insurance company expects to pay the company more money than it will pay him, but he's willing to pay this premium to reduce his exposure to truly catastrophic events.

Health insurance does contain an element of insurance, but it's a lot more than just insurance. Health care companies- which is a more accurate way to refer to them- do provide insurance, but they also cover all sorts of very regular, relatively low cost events, like purchasing contraception or going to the local clinic because you have the common cold. With things like the common cold, there's no real reason to insure against them; you're hardly exposed to a catastrophic risk if you have to pay for one trip to the doctor's out of pocket. (Similarly, I am yet to hear of anyone who was bankrupted because they suddenly, unexpectedly needed to purchase $20,000 in contraception.) Instead, having a health care company that pays for them just adds an extra layer of cost: you pay your insurance, which then uses some of your money to pay the clinic, some to pay the clerk who handled the clinics reimbursement request, and little bit of it to keep as profit. Clearly, being over-insured just adds cost, even if you're getting the exact same care that you would be otherwise.

Of course, that isn't actually the case. Getting your coverage through a health care company tends to reduce your control over your medical care. If two doctors charge the same amount per visit but your health insurance company only covers one of them, you've really only got once choice, regardless of your actual preference. After all, you (through your insurance premiums) have already paid for a trip to visit the doctor that's covered by your plan. In this case, adding the intermediary of an insurance company both increases price and reduces your options.

Being over-insured also drives up costs through inefficient spending on various procedures and treatments. Let's say you want to attend a $70 acupuncture session but are only willing to pay $50 for it. If that procedure isn't covered by your health care, you'll take your $70 and spend it in some way that you think is a better use of your money. If your insurance company does cover it, though (as it would be required to do in about a dozen states), you'll do the rational thing and let your insurance company pay $70 for a procedure that you only value at 50 dollars. Of course, your insurance company will have to recoup this expense by raising premiums. If everyone gets one treatment of this type that they value at $50, then everyone's premiums will be at least $70 higher in order to provide less than that amount in care.

There are several reasons why American health insurance tends toward managed care rather than insurance. The most direct of these is regulation in various states that requires health care plans to cover various procedures. According to the NCPA, about a quarter of states legally require health insurance plans to cover acupuncture, and well over half of states require coverage for contraceptives. This is great for the minority that takes advantage of these provisions, but it leaves everyone else paying for benefits that they don't want and won't use. Furthermore, the variation in insurance premiums between relatively regulation free states like Utah ($3,259 for a family insurance plan) and heavily regulated states like Massachusetts ($16,897 for a similar plan) are truly striking.

Since the probability of states like Massachusetts reducing regulation is very close to 0, one way to bring down the cost of health insurance is to pass a federal law allowing consumers to purchase insurance from any state they choose. This would allow consumers to purchase the insurance plan that is most like actual insurance and best fits their needs. Furthermore, each state's legislature should carefully review the existing regulations for health insurance and eliminate requirements to cover various procedures. In a state with minimal regulation, insurance companies can insurance plans that are truly insurance plans: high deductible and low premium, designed to let you pay for the day to day stuff while insulating you from the cost of truly catastrophic events.

Problem 2: Tax law favors employer based coverage: Under current tax law, health care benefits provided by your employer are not taxed. This means that coverage purchased by you by your employer is essentially purchased with pretax dollars and coverage that you purchase yourself is purchased with after tax dollars. This can be quite the difference. Let's say that you earn $100,000 a year and are taxed at a rate of 30%. If all of this comes in the form of money, you'll be left with $70,000 after taxes, and if you then use some of that money to purchase a $10,000 insurance policy, you'll have $60,000 and an insurance policy. If, on the other hand, your employer reduces your income by $10,000 to $90,000 and instead uses that money to purchase that same health care plan for you, you'll have $63,000 and an insurance policy left after taxes. In other words, a policy that costs $10,000 to buy on your own only costs you $7,000 if your employer buys it for you.

This means that it hurts quite a bit more to get insurance by yourself than it does through your employer. Because of this, the only people who buy insurance as individuals are people who really need it. Those people tend to be particularly expensive to insure, so insurance companies are forced to raise prices further. The combination of these effects goes a long way towards explaining why it's so hard for individuals to purchase affordable insurance.

As it turns out, John McCain had a pretty good idea for how to fix this. (You might want to take a screen shot of that sentence; you won't see it too much when I'm discussing anything related to economics.) He wanted to replace the tax exemption for health benefits with a $5,000 tax credit for everyone. This would eliminate the tax advantage for employer provided coverage. Obama spent $44 million on ads criticizing this change as a "$3.6 trillion tax increase" for middle class families while ignoring the tax credit that would offset the tax increase for everyone except those with the most generous employer health plans. Since he's been President, though, he hasn't ruled out the idea of taxing benefits, albeit without a tax credit to offset the tax increase this would entail.

Removing the tax advantage for health care would also facilitate the shift from health care plans to health insurance. Currently, employers have an incentive to provide their employees with as much compensation as possible in the form tax free health care benefits. A bare bones low-premium high-deductible plan obviously won't serve for this; instead, you need as large a portion as possible of that employees health care to come in the form of a comprehensive health care plan.

Problem 3: Scared doctors pay insurance and run too many tests: One of the first things that I noticed when I got to Yale was that the sides of buses in New Haven, just like the buses in Salt Lake, are plastered in advertisements for personal injury lawyers. America's tort law is set up in a way that allows ambulance chasing lawyers to sue repeatedly sue doctors, each time hoping for a multimillion dollar payoff. This inflates medical costs directly through the exorbitant malpractice premiums that doctors are required to pay. In 2008, the median cost of malpractice insurance for an Ob/gyn was about $50,000 and doctors in some states were required to pay as much as $250,000 a year for malpractice insurance, or $125/hr for a doctor that works 2,000 hours a year.

Doctors in a litigious environment also tend to practice defensive medicine, running unnecessary tests in order to cover their backs in the event of malpractice suit. This had been estimated to cost American patients as much as $178 billion per year, which would represent about 10% of all medical spending or $1700 for a family of four. While it is important to hold doctors accountable for mistakes, the extent to which doctors have been forced to practice defensive medicine makes it clear that our system has taken this too far.

In addition to capping damages, one proposal for fixing the culture of runaway litigation is to require the loser in a lawsuit to pay the legal fees for both sides. This would reduce the number of frivolous lawsuits that get filed against doctors and hospitals. The probability of this reform being implemented is pretty minimal, though. Congress of full of former trial lawyers who made fortunes litigating cases like the one where a Philadelphia jury held 6 defendants responsible for no less than $100 million in damages.

Problem 4: Patients aren't responsible for their own behavior: One of the new rules that may be implemented under ObamaCare is "Community Pricing" which would forbid insurance companies from varying premiums based on anything other than location and (in some versions) age. This would be extremely counterproductive. A large portion of America's health care costs can be attributed to unhealthy lifestyle choices. As Safeway's CEO Steven Burd explained in a Wall Street Journal piece last June:

Safeway's plan capitalizes on two key insights gained in 2005. The first is that 70% of all health-care costs are the direct result of behavior. The second insight, which is well understood by the providers of health care, is that 74% of all costs are confined to four chronic conditions (cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity). Furthermore, 80% of cardiovascular disease and diabetes is preventable, 60% of cancers are preventable, and more than 90% of obesity is preventable.

Under most insurance plans, patients aren't held financially responsible for lifestyle decisions that drive up costs. Safeway, which self insures, decided four years ago to try a little experiment. They implemented a program that gives employees significant financial incentives for healthy behavior:

Safeway's Healthy Measures program is completely voluntary and currently covers 74% of the insured nonunion work force. Employees are tested for the four measures cited above and receive premium discounts off a "base level" premium for each test they pass. Data is collected by outside parties and not shared with company management. If they pass all four tests, annual premiums are reduced $780 for individuals and $1,560 for families. Should they fail any or all tests, they can be tested again in 12 months. If they pass or have made appropriate progress on something like obesity, the company provides a refund equal to the premium differences established at the beginning of the plan year.

As it turns out, people tend to be pretty good at responding to financial incentives:

At Safeway, we are building a culture of health and fitness. The numbers speak for themselves. Our obesity and smoking rates are roughly 70% of the national average and our health-care costs for four years have been held constant. When surveyed, 78% of our employees rated our plan good, very good or excellent. In addition, 76% asked for more financial incentives to reward healthy behaviors. We have heard from dozens of employees who lost weight, lowered their blood-pressure and cholesterol levels, and are enjoying better health because of this program. Many discovered for the first time that they have high blood pressure, and others have been told by their doctor that they have added years to their life.

The bottom line? Over the last 4 years, Safeway's per person health care costs have remained flat. By contrast, most American companies have seen their health care costs grow by 38%. Safeway's example and common sense make it clear that reducing the prevalence of problems like obesity and smoking must play a key roll in any effort to drive down health care costs. Safeway has started in the right direction by rewarding healthy behavior; however, at the moment the law limits how large a financial incentive they can offer. If Congress wants to reduce the cost of health care, they could start remove these restrictions. If, instead, Congress passes a bill that mandates some form of community pricing, they will have done the exact opposite. Community pricing would prevent insurers from offering a lower rate to a healthy, thin non-smoker than to an obese smoker with a long history of poor lifestyle decisions. This would a lot like forbidding an auto insurance company to offer a lower rate to a 35 year old woman with a perfect driving record than to a 22 year old male with a history of accidents, tickets, and DUI convictions. It just doesn't make sense.

The fundamental problem with American health care is that people have been separated from their decisions. American consumers with managed care don't pay directly for treatment, don't pay for the consequences of their own behavior, and don't have full control over their treatment. The tax code and regulation push them towards managed care rather than true insurance. The solutions to these problems can be found in deregulation and reform of the tax code rather than in increased regulation, the public option, community pricing, and ultimately single payer health care.

A Minor Success

2009-09-10T11:35:00.003-04:00

I was looking through my Google Analytics data today and discovered that I am now the 5th result for "Global Warming Does Not Exist." What more proof do you need of this blog's ever-expanding influence and power?

Some Thoughts

2009-09-09T16:53:00.004-04:00

School is back in session and I'm taking a lot of really great classes, but time for blogging is at something of an all time low. But a couple things have been on my mind:

1. "The Preseason Scouting Report": Yale's most recent campus scandal involves an Email that ranked 53 freshmen girls on attractiveness and in some cases used vulgar language to describe pictures of them on Facebook. This has provoked the standard reaction of outraged letters to the editor and critical editorials in the Yale Daily News (including a very reasonable piece by Yale's Dean, Mary Miller.) People have even been trotting out comparisons to the infamous "We love Yale sluts" incident. All of this has got me wondering what they expect. Both of these incidents were direct results of Yale's culture of going to a party, having something to drink, and then finding someone to drink with. I don't intend to argue that the university should enforce a code of chastity or anything like that. But no matter where a school's center of acceptable, mainstream behavior is, you're going to have students whose behavior varies from that center in one way or another. If the official position of the school is moderately conservative, sending an Email like this a very significant variation from standard behavior. If you're a school that literally throws condoms at incoming freshmen during orientation sessions, sending an Email like "The Preseason Scouting Report" isn't as much of a deviation for standard, acceptable behavior.

2. Obama's speech to school children. The speech went off yesterday and it was a good speech, emphasizing the importance of hard work and personal responsibility in education. There were some passages that reflected a very different political philosophy than I have- "You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to... make our nation more fair" but overall it was a very reasonable speech from our Commander in Chief, and it may have even done some good. That brings me to my first point: no matter what you think about Obama's politics, he still fills the highest office in our government and he is entitled to some respect for that. I don't intend to single out Republicans on this one- after all, the left showed Bush no respect whatsoever- but in my mind there is something valuable about the leader of our country reminding young children of the importance of hard work. It would be a mistake to forget that due to partisan bickering. On the other hand, it's worth noting that the speech that I linked to at the beginning of this paragraph was presumably written well after Republicans started fiercely criticizing the decision to deliver this speech. In retrospect, their criticism looks foolish, but it is at least possible that the speech would have been objectionable if Obama had just quietly written it.

There are some more things on my mind, but I need to go read for my (absolutely amazing) Ancient Greek History class with Donald Kagan. If you want to watch the lectures yourself, you can find them here.

Republican Prospects for 2010

2009-09-06T21:12:00.003-04:00

My latest article for The D.C. Writeup can be found here. The text (without the links that I included in the actual article) appears below:

For the first time in four years, there are whisperings about the possibility of an election cycle in which the Republicans don’t get drubbed. Newt Gingrich and Dick Morris have both raised the possibility of the GOP retaking the House, with Morris predicting as much as a 100-seat Republican gain. According to Rasmussen, Obama’s approval rating is now in the negative double digits, down from +30 a couple days after his inauguration. Republicans hold a lead of 7 points on Rasmussen’s generic congressional ballot, one point larger than the Democrat’s lead of 6 points on Election Day 2008. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid looks vulnerable, and a majority of Americans say Congress is too liberal. Card check is dead, cap and trade has stalled, and Blue Dog Democrats are spending their town hall meetings trying to distance themselves from ObamaCare. Sounds like it’s time to party like it’s 1994.

Then again, a closer look at the situation makes it clear that the Republicans shouldn’t pull out the champagne quite yet. Sure, it’s been a bruising couple months for the Democrats. Yes, Obama’s poll numbers are down. But the 2010 midterms are still 14 months away. Fourteen months before the last election, Hillary seemed to have the Democratic nomination locked up, John McCain’s campaign was all but dead, and the financial crisis that became the defining issue of the election was nowhere to be seen. The Republicans might have a shot at taking control of the House if the election were held next month, but that’s not the case.

Republicans also have to be concerned with their lack of popularity — even among their supporters. Seventy-four percent of Republican voters believe that Congressional Republicans are out of touch. The Republicans’ advantage on the generic congressional ballot has emerged almost solely as the result of a precipitous drop in support for the Democrats, from 47 percent on election day to 36 percent now. Over that same period, support for the Republicans has only increased by 2 percentage points, from 41 percent to 43 percent. Indeed, while Republican support grew during the fight over the stimulus at the beginning of Obama’s presidency and has been growing again since the start of the health care debate, it actually declined by 4 percentage points during the relatively uneventful period between mid-March and the end of May. If the Democrats don’t make the mistake of using reconciliation to jam a health care bill through Congress, we could see the Republican advantage slowly erode or even be reversed between now and the November 2010.

Nancy Pelosi tried and failed to spin the town hall protestors as “astroturf” Republican operatives. Of course, part of the reason that everyone knows the protests are real is that the RNC is in such a sorry state. After last November’s thrashing, I have a hard time imagining that the RNC could organize a successful birthday party, much less a massive national series of protests. At the moment, the protesters are enraged by the idea of the fundamental restructuring of the health care system that the Democrats have proposed. I have a hard time believing, though, that your average town hall attendee wants to give the Republicans a decisive majority in Congress so that they can take a whack at mucking up health care. For the moment, the Republicans might just be playing the useful idiot by doing their best to prevent the passage of ObamaCare.

It comes down to this: conservatives and some moderates might dislike Democrats more than Republicans, but the Republicans still need to show that they deserve to be back in power. Let’s go over some recent history that might weigh on the minds of voters next year. Spending grew tremendously during the Bush presidency with a Republican Congress. By the end of his second term, Bush had all but abandoned the Bush Doctrine and adopted a soft power approach to diplomacy that isn’t too different from Obama’s approach. The notion that the government should bail out private business started under a Republican president and with plenty of enthusiasm from various Republicans. If the Republicans can’t come up with a compelling message to convince conservatives and moderates that this time will be different, retaking the House will be virtually impossible.

It’s still possible that the Republicans will pick up a significant number of seats in 2010. This would become more likely if John Boehner adopted a new Contract with America along the lines of what Doctor Zero proposed a couple days ago. But the election is still a long way from now, and the Republicans have their work cut out for them if they want the predictions that Newt Gingrich and Dick Morris have made to come true.

Petty and Unprofessional: More About Bias at Yale

2009-09-02T16:51:00.008-04:00

Today is the first day of classes for fall semester 2009 at Yale. One of the classes that I'm considering taking is "A Guided Tour of the Constitution" with Akhil Amar. Amar is a fantastic lecturer (as I learned last year in his Constitutional Law class last year) but has a tendency to take unprofessional, petty cracks at conservative politicians and judges. He also used the last 5 minutes of his class last fall to enthusiastically proclaim his class "the Obama generation." He's picking up right where he left off. A mere 21 minutes into his first lecture of the semester, he asked his TA's to take some extra handouts from the left side of the room and give them to people on the right side of the room. He then gave into temptation and added "Go ahead and redistribute the wealth." I'd heard this joke before so I knew where he was going. He paused for a minute and slowly walked across the stage and then turned to the class and said, "If you read the Constitution you'll see that wealth redistribution is in there and if you don't understand that, Sarah Palin, then take a closer look at the 16th amendment."

I'm interested in learning more about our Constitution and more about the core beliefs at the heart of this great country. I'm not interested in listening to a teacher deliver the same stale jokes that he included in his jokes last fall. At this point, I'm beginning to suspect that there might be better uses of my time.

Edit: 50 minutes into class, while talking about the ratification of the Constitution: "Imagine what it would be like if we had a national conversation, if more people participated than ever before, and we made history." He paused, waiting for someone to respond somehow. Nobody did so- I refused to- so he continued "You don't have to imagine. That's what we did last fall." Shameful.

Edit II: Holy hell- now he's talking about how it pains him to see Rick Perry, "a leading member of the grand old party of Lincoln," making idiotic comments about secession. Way to straw man the opposition.

Edit III: Should a teacher make it clear who he considers the opposition to be? Seems like an abuse of power to me.

Obama's Approval Rating...

2009-09-02T00:48:00.003-04:00

...has fallen off a cliff. Rasmussen now puts it at 45% with 41% of Americans saying they strongly disapprove. Ouch. You can see the trends here, although the link is time sensitive.

A Couple Links: Global Warming and Massachusetts Health Care

2009-08-30T11:05:00.002-04:00

Peter Foster: The Man Who Doubted Al Gore
Great article about being a climate skeptic (or active disbeliever, to put it more honestly.)

Meanwhile, Hot Air looks at Massachusett's health care reform and concludes that it hasn't worked there. Maybe it would work better if we did the same thing again, only this time on a national level...

Chappaquiddick and the Death of Newspapers

2009-08-28T20:27:00.004-04:00

I came across this story on CNN today:
Experts: Media today would demand Chappaquiddick answers
I was tempted to borrow a running joke from James Taranto and file this under "What would we do without experts" but the story actually makes an interesting, albeit obvious and unoriginal, point:

Sen. Ted Kennedy would have had a "very, very difficult" time politically surviving the drowning death of a young woman if it happened in the era of blogs, talk radio and 24-hour news cycles, experts said.

Those who mourn the death of the newspaper industry should think long and hard about that statement. In an era with three TV channels and a limited number of newspapers, the story didn't get the same attention it would today. Fewer people were able to add their opinion to the discussion (if it even was a discussion.) There weren't youtube videos showing the bit of water where Mary Jo Kopechne drowned and there weren't blogs to continually point out the questions that still needed to be answered. In a world where the macaca incident can cost a senator an election, abandoning the scene of the accident and failing to report it would have been fatal to Kennedy's political chances. The decline of the newspaper industry has occurred as a direct result of the revolution in technology that would now give this story the attention it deserved.

How can anyone seriously argue that the continued success of our democracy is contingent on someone (ie, the government) saving the newspapers? Last May, John Kerry was quoted as saying

America's newspapers are struggling to survive and... there will also be serious consequences for our democracy where diversity of opinion and strong debate are paramount.

The age of newspapers dominated was an age where a limited number of journalists were able to control and construct the news according to their own narrative and their own agenda. Their is more diversity of opinion on the internet than their ever was in newspapers. Furthermore, the notion that only newspapers can be an effective check on government is false. When Thomas Jefferson said "If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn't hesitate to choose the latter," newspapers were the only form of media. Technology now provides far more options. In light of this plethora of alternatives to newspapers, the notion that the government should intervene to save newspapers so that the newspapers can remain firm, effective critics of government is just ludicrous.

The (Possible) Demise of ObamaCare

2009-08-24T19:39:00.004-04:00

We're still a long way from being able to declare ObamaCare dead, but pundits have started publishing articles that look an awful lot like groundwork for a later autopsy of Obama's core piece of legislation. A couple of articles on CNN fit this bill. The first one, from Tom Johnson, is entitled "What LBJ Would Do":

LBJ would:

Have a list of every member of Congress on his desk...

He would have a willingness to horse-trade with every member...

He would have Billy Graham calling Baptists, Cardinal Cushing calling Catholics, Dr. Martin Luther King calling blacks, Henry Gonzales calling Hispanics, Henry Ford and David Rockefeller calling Republicans...

He would use up White House liquor having nightcaps with the leaders and key members of BOTH parties.

Each of them would take home cufflinks, watches, signed photos, and perhaps even a pledge to come raise money for their next election...

He would threaten, cajole, flirt, flatter, hug -- and get the health care bill passed.

The not-so-subtle criticisms of Obama- particularly the capitalization of the word "BOTH"- look like the groundwork for a later article proclaiming that ObamaCare failed because Obama told the Republicans to "get out of the way" rather than reaching out to them on a personal level. In other words, the problem isn't substance; it's that he's being too partisan.

On the other hand, you have this article by Roland Martin, also on CNN:

Democrats have floated the idea of going it alone and passing health care reform. Some have said the president will pay a big price among independent voters if he does that.

Well, tough.

If health care was his first priority to getting elected, that should remain the case. Damn the 2010 midterm elections, and damn the 2012 presidential elections.

Congress has been trying for more than six decades to achieve health care reform, and the Democrats have all the stars lined up to do so. Of course, even with their large majority, it won't be a cakewalk getting a bill passed in the Senate.

If it doesn't happen now, I don't want to hear any carping from the left. Your own party had a shot and screwed it up. Democrats, you will have no one to blame but yourselves. It's now or never. So stop whining about the Republicans and get your own house in order.

In other words, if ObamaCare fails, it will be because Obama was too willing to reach out the Republicans. Forget about liquoring the leader of both parties; take your 51 votes and do what you need to do. Damn the niceties and damn those independents.

Finally, there's the pick-a-message-and-stick-with-it crowd, like this article in the LA Times:

Reporting from Washington - Democratic strategists say the Obama administration's evolving, abstract arguments for healthcare reform are backfiring and contributing to a decline in public support for the legislation.

The strategists, many of whom saw healthcare reform fail in the Clinton administration, contend that President Obama has advanced too many rationales for his plan, leaving people confused.

For example, Obama has argued that a new healthcare system is necessary to spur an economic recovery. He also has offered up healthcare as an antidote to rising deficits. Earlier this week in a conference call with religious leaders, Obama laid out a "moral" imperative for revamping the nation's healthcare system.

At other points, Obama has portrayed "meddling" insurers as a reason for scrapping the existing system.

"One of the difficulties has been that the explanation has changed," said Howard Paster, a legislative liaison in the Clinton administration. "Originally it was keyed very much to the economy. More recently, emphasis has been placed on issues of fairness and equity. We need to have a consistent set of reasons for doing this."

When newspapers start asking Clinton advisers to analyze Obama's attempt to reform health care, it can only be a sign that things aren't going well. In this case, the problems are being blamed on Obama's lack of a clear, coherent message.

So some people on the left think that the Dems need to move to the left, some think they need to reach out to the right, and some think they need to focus on having a clear message. It reminds me a lot of reading right wing blogs after last Novembers thrashing.

My take on Obamacare's demise? I don't think that there's a health care bill out there that could get past a filibuster in today's senate. Moving any further to the left alienates Blue Dogs and moving any further to the right (ie, removing the public option) alienates the true liberals without really doing too much to boost support among moderates. Obama's running into a couple of big problems. First, despite the Obamania that swept this country last fall, the United States is still a center-right country. Large portions of the country have a tendency to prefer a smaller government. Second, most people are happy with their health insurance at the moment. This makes it harder to sell a massive overhaul of the system.

Obama Approval Rating Hits a New Low

2009-08-23T16:10:00.002-04:00

According to Rasmussen Reports, Obama's approval rating has hit a new low, with a particularly large drop (to an all-time low of 27%) in the number who "strongly approve" of his performance as President. The change over the last few days has been remarkably fast and may be statistical noise, but it will interesting to watch the trends over the next few days.

Note: Both of those links change with each release of the new Rasmussen Reports poll each day. If you're viewing this after August 23, you can see the numbers I'm referring to by following the second link and looking at the data for August 23.

The Taliban: True Barbarism

2009-08-22T22:51:00.002-04:00

Just in case there was any doubt about the superiority of Western values to Islamic totalitarian barbarism:
Monitors: Taliban cut off fingers of Afghan voters.

Fortunately, the real news story is the success of the election:

Sporadic attacks on election day killed 26 people and injured scores more. Still, Afghan officials hailed the voting as a success.

On Friday, the European Union echoed those sentiments and congratulated Afghanistan for holding elections under what it called challenging circumstances.

"While deploring the loss of life, we believe that the security measures successfully prevented any major disruptions of the elections," the E.U. said in a statement.

There's still a lot of work to be done, but for now let's celebrate a victory for democracy.

Cash for Clunkers End Monday

2009-08-21T12:35:00.003-04:00

Good riddance:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program will shut down on Monday, the government said Thursday.

Dealers must submit any pending Clunker deals, including any necessary paperwork, by 8 p.m. ET Monday.

"It's been a thrill to be part of the best economic news story in America," said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. "Now we are working toward an orderly wind down of this very popular program."

Officials decided to wind down the program, which Congress passed to spur flagging auto sales, after determining that it would soon run out of money.

Welcome to the new world: where 1.5 billion dollars of wealth destruction and 1.5 billion dollars of wealth transfer are "the best economic new story in America."
My previous posts on the subject can be found below:
Ivy Sneakers: Cash for Clunkers
Ivy Sneakers: Cash for Clunkers: A Rant
Ivy Sneakers: An Alternative Use for the Cash-for-Clunkers Cash

A Dark Period in American Higher Education

2009-08-20T19:32:00.003-04:00

My latest article for The DC Writeup can be found here. The text (without links) can also be found below.

Once again, Yale is making national headlines for all the wrong reasons. The controversy began last Wednesday when the New York Times revealed that the Yale University Press had decided to remove reproductions of the controversial Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons from Jytte Klausen’s upcoming book “The Cartoons That Shook the World.” Perhaps they did so for the ironic effect of stripping them from a book that purports to be the definitive account of the controversy surrounding their publication in September 2005. But the university went a step further than that, and removed all images of Muhammad from the book. To understand why one of the world’s leading universities would engage in an act of censorship so blatantly opposed to the basic principles of freedom of inquiry, a short history lesson is in order.

Yale has long prided itself on being a diverse place. It has actively recruited minority students for the last four decades and, consequently, today about one in every three Yale undergraduates is an ethnic minority. Yale students can major in a range of fields including Ethnicity, Race, and Migration; African Studies; East Asian Studies; and Modern Middle Eastern Studies. Many of these departments and majors are among the oldest in the country. Students and faculty widely regard Yale’s diversity and wide ranging fields of study as integral elements of its nature.

At the same time, and rather unfortunately, Yale’s tendency towards multiculturalism often clashes with the institution’s longstanding commitment to Western Civilization education. One embarrassingly public example of this was the debacle in the early 1990’s that led to the return of a $20 million gift from Yale alum Lee Bass. The school had approached Bass in 1991 about funding a program in Western Civilization. The bulk of the money was to be used to endow chairs for seven professors who would teach a sophomore seminar on the subject. When Bass agreed to provide the money, university administrators were thrilled; the school’s multiculturalists were less so. Professor Sara Suleri Goodyear (who is still listed as a full time professor in Yale’s English Department) stated, “Western civilization? Why not a chair for colonialism, slavery, empire, and poverty?” Shortly thereafter, the university underwent an administration change. The new administration was slow enough in implementing the program that Bass became uneasy and asked for certain conditions to be attached to the gift. When Yale refused to meet those conditions and no compromise could be reached, the university decided to return the money.

Internal deliberations at large institutions are always somewhat unclear, and Yale claims that opposition from the faculty played no role in the administration’s failure to implement the program in a timely matter. However, publications ranging from conservative campus papers at Yale to the Wall Street Journal dispute this account of events. Furthermore, the multiculturalists at Yale ultimately got exactly what they wanted when the gift was returned. In short, this incident provided ample proof that there are those at Yale who are at best lukewarm on Western values.

This goes a long way toward explaining why Yale decided in 2005 to enroll Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi as a special student. Mr. Hashemi is best known for being the deputy foreign secretary of the Taliban at the time of September 11 attacks. Additionally, he was the international representative of a backwards regime that publicly executed adulterers, deprived women of their rights, and generally administered a harsh, perverse form of sharia law in Afghanistan. To the average American, allowing him to enroll at Yale was an outrage; to the moral relativists at Yale, recruiting such a unique student was a priority. Richard Shaw, the Dean of Admissions, told the New York Times that the last time a foreign student of Hashemi’s caliber applied to Yale, “We lost him to Harvard,” and “I didn’t want that to happen again.” Somehow, Yale was surprised by the outrage that followed when John Fund wrote a series of articles documenting the whole affair. Then again, perhaps they had cause to be surprised: it’s a rare event that unites Neocon hawks with radical feminists. Yale stonewalled through the worst of the criticism and then quietly decided not to renew Mr. Hashemi’s status as a student the following year.

With this history in mind, Yale’s refusal to publish the cartoons makes sense. If you let multiculturalism affect what you teach at your university, and if you let moral relativism determine who you bring to your university, it’s only a matter of time before those two things creep into how you do research at your university. As Martin Kramer reports, one of the central figures in the decision to remove the cartoons was Marcia Inhorn, the director of Yale’s Middle East Studies department. Inhorn returned from a 2006 conference in Iran and declared that Iran is “a country to watch on many levels,” “far from backward,” and generally as good as (if not better than) the United States. If Western values aren’t particularly good, why should things like “freedom of speech” and “academic freedom” factor into what does and doesn’t get published? Why not instead substitute the standards of backward bands of murderous religious fanatics?

As a student at Yale, I have learned to accept that the official views towards everything from drinking to foreign policy clash with my own personal views. For the most part, I just ignore this. There are a lot of very smart people at Yale with a lot of interesting, important things to teach me. If I have to filter out bias in the classroom, then so be it. But the decision to remove the representations of Mohammed from Klausen’s book is something else. If Yale and similar institutions are moving in a direction where primary sources will routinely be removed for fear of offending Jihadis, then this bit of censorship marks a victory for anti-intellectualism and the start of a dark period in American higher education.

On Releasing a Terrorist

2009-08-20T13:59:00.004-04:00

Earlier today, Scotland released the only terrorist ever convicted in connection with the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people. Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi is a free man and headed home to Syria. The Scottish authorities are defending this ludicrous decision on compassionate grounds- al Megrahi has terminal prostate cancer- and saying things about how his lack of compassion for the victims is no reason not to show compassion to him. CNN seems perfectly willing to play along with the conversion of the justice system to the feel-warm-and-fuzzy-inside system. Their story on the release contains this grimly amusing passage:

Families of the Lockerbie victims have been sharply divided whether al Megrahi should be ever be released.

Susan Cohen, who lost her 20-year-old daughter, was adamant about her position, calling al Megrahi a "mass murderer" and his release "appalling."

"Are we so devastatingly weak now, have we lost all our moral fiber that you can say that Megrahi can be released from prison for a compassionate release? Where was his compassion for my daughter? Where was his compassion for all those people?" Cohen told American Morning.

Bert Ammerman, whose brother died in the bombing, called al Megrahi's release "ludicrous."

"First of all, he got his compassionate release when he got life imprisonment and not capital punishment, which Scotland doesn't have," Ammerman told CNN. He should have remained in prison, then after his death, his body could have been returned to Libya, he said.

"Two, he's going to be going back, even if he has terminal cancer, as a hero and he's going to be received as a hero in Libya," Ammerman said.

"Three, let's cut through all this information. He's being released because big business in the United States, Great Britain want the oil in Libya, and that's what's driving this whole wagon," he added.

So the families of the victims are sharply divided between those who think the release is "appalling" and those who think it's "ludicrous." It looks to me like someone at CNN took the Dan Rather approach to journalism and wrote the "sharply divided" line without seeing if the facts fit that narrative. Unfortunately, it turns out the don't. Nobody connected to the bombing thinks this mass murderer deserves even a single second of freedom.

Edit: A later CNN story seems to get it right. (The title is "Most families outraged at Pan Am 103 bomber's release.") I'm not sure if there's any significance to it, but the original story was from the international version of CNN and the new one is from the American version.

Don't Listen Now...

2009-08-20T13:54:00.002-04:00

... but it looks like Obama's been contradicting himself. Who knew?

Risk in the Marketplace and in Skiing

2009-08-19T17:29:00.004-04:00

Charles Schwab has an interesting article in today's Wall Street Journal. He makes the point that the only way to eliminate risk for investors is to simply not let them invest. I'm reminded of a training session I attended in November 2007 for my weekend job working as a junior ski instructor. We were given a handout that (quoting from memory) said

One of our primary responsibilities as the ski industry professionals is to develop strategies for managing risk. Risk is an inherent, integral, unavoidable part of skiing, and it is closely linked to the reasons we ski in the first place. We can prepare for it, we can manage it, and we can reduce it, but we can not control it and we can not eliminate it.

In both skiing and investing, the benefits of taking part in each activity- excitement and financial gain, respectively- only exist as a function of the potential for loss in each activity- physical injury and financial loss, respectively. Various strategies can increase the potential benefits while but only while simultaneously increasing the risk of loss. The appropriate level of risk for each individual varies quite a bit: Billionaires can expose themselves to levels of financial risk that I would never dream of, and I can do things in the back country that the tourists wearing expensive skis on the bunny hill would be insane to try. Similarly, a father concerned about his family's well being has less reason to take risk than a single man with similar financial assets and skiing ability.

Most importantly, we cannot judge decisions by their outcomes. In any area that inherently involves risk, bad decisions can have good consequences and vice versa. A gambler can make tens of millions of dollars by purchasing a lottery ticket, but even so purchasing the lottery ticket was a bad decision. Conversely, a skier who decides to take it easy can still get hurt. The question that needs to be asked is not "Did things turn out badly" but rather "Did people expose themselves to excessive risk, given the information they had at the time?" Frequently a bad outcome follows bad decisions, but the two are not the same. The regulators in our society would do well to remember that.

It Would Be Funny...

2009-08-18T00:26:00.002-04:00

...if it weren't so depressing:
Wall Street Journal: Hard-Hit Schools Try Public-Relations Push
Sure to succeed; after all, the biggest problems that our public schools have is with brand image.

No Treats From Obama

2009-08-17T23:48:00.001-04:00

Posting this probably makes me a racist, an evil-monger, and eligible for referral to flag@whitehouse.gov, but so be it:

Thanks to Jed Brinton for pointing this out.

Awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson

2009-08-14T20:40:00.002-04:00

Shameful.

Private Jet Irony

2009-08-14T20:16:00.003-04:00

The latest scandal in Congress seems to have blown over now that Congress has scrapped plans to spend more than half a billion dollars on private jets for ferrying its members all over the place. I'm not too interested in this scandal, but I feel like I have to point out its irony. Isn't this the same group of politicians that browbeat the CEOs of GM, Chrysler, and Ford into driving hybrids to Washington? Wasn't that all of 9 months ago? Once again, I find myself agreeing with Winston Churchill: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

Killing Innovation: The Chilling Effect of Single Payer Health Care on Medical Innovation

2009-08-14T03:29:00.005-04:00

The following originally appeared as an article on The DC Writeup.

In recent days, conservative writers have flooded the internet with one article after another explaining the seemingly infinite number of flaws in the Democrats’ health care reform. These criticisms — which by themselves provide ample reason to reject ObamaCare — tend to focus on the effects that universal health care would have on the average American’s experience with the medical system: reduced access to cutting-edge experimental treatments, higher taxes, and perhaps worst of all, reduced control over intensely personal medical decisions. Not as much attention has been given to the chilling effect that government-run health care would have on medical innovation, perhaps because these effects will not be felt immediately. In the long run, however, the defining feature of a socialized American health care system will be the dramatic slowing of medical progress.

Before I get too far into this, though, I would like to address any charges that I might be straw manning Obama’s plan. After all, it doesn’t provide for the immediate nationalization of health care; instead, it merely provides a “public option.” However, the public option will quickly spell the end of private health insurance, as the Wall Street Journal explained last April. Indeed, universal coverage is the end that the Democratic reformers seek, and the public option is just the best means to that end, as Barney Frank and Barack Obama both assert in this video.

With that in mind, we can focus on the relevant issue: the effect that universal health care would have on medical innovation. Any universal health care system has to have some mechanism for determining what treatments are cost effective. In Britain, this task falls to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, better known by its acronym NICE. While NICE is frequently credited with controlling the costs of British health care, it is also known for denying experimental, cutting-edge treatments to British patients. This has dire implications for British cancer patients. This is strikingly illustrated by the difference between British and American five-year survival rates for patients diagnosed with cancer: 73% vs. 84% for breast cancer and 57% vs. 92% for prostate cancer. Clearly, British cancer patients are victims of a system that is forced to ration care.

If, however, the United States were to “forgo experimental treatments” in cancer treatment and other areas (as Tom Daschle has suggested we should), the effects would go beyond the patients of today. Future patients with a variety of conditions would be victimized as well. It borders on tautology to say that the successful experimental treatments of today will become the standard treatments of tomorrow, but it seems well worth the time to examine some historical cases. For example, when cardiovascular stents were first introduced as a method to reopen partially blocked coronary arteries, they required open heart surgery to insert. Consequently, they were widely dismissed as far too involved and expensive to been useful. In short, they were exactly the kind of treatment that a government would dub “experimental” and refuse to pay for. But there was still a demand for them in the private market, and as doctors continued to perform the procedure, the techniques and the technology involved improved dramatically. I recently talked to someone who had a stent placed in his heart last year. He told me that he spent less than an hour in the operating room and that two days later he was hiking.

Another powerful example is magnetic resonance imaging, better known as MRI. When MRI was first introduced in the early 1980’s, the machines were expensive. Consequently, the Canadian health care system purchased them at a remarkably slow rate. At the same time, the American health care system was buying far more of these highly useful machines. By 1992, the disparity was striking: Canada had just 30 machines while the United States had about 2900. Imagine, though, if a government run American system had made a similar decision about the cost effectiveness of MRI machines. At best, the United States would now share Canada’s average waiting time of 10.1 weeks for an MRI. But it is far more likely that, with greatly reduced demand from the world’s largest consumer of MRI machines, many of the advances in MRI over the last two decades would quite simply never have been made. Americans would now be waiting far longer for access to inferior technology.

Cardiovascular stents and MRI are here to stay, but there are plenty of emerging technology that could be stopped cold in their tracks by an American equivalent of NICE. For example, doctors have recently developed a technique that eliminates the need for anesthesia or narcotic painkillers during minor surgeries. Instead, an electronic pump delivers a local anesthetic directly to the site of the pain. This is as effective as potentially addictive drugs like morphine and has minimal side effects. However, according to a source familiar with the industry, Medicare has dubbed the technology experimental and refuses to reimburse doctors for the cost of the pumps. If a NICE-like board that controlled the bulk of American medical spending were to make that same decision, at least one company would almost immediately be forced out of business and several others would be severely damaged. Rather than letting the market determine whether or not this promising new technology is useful, bureaucrats would be able to arbitrarily make the choice.

The advance of medical technology has been one of the true miracles of the last half century. Doctors and patients who have chosen new, experimental treatments have helped make this possible. If, however, the United States were to abandon the bulk of experimental treatments and instead determine the path of medical progress by committee, we would witness a dramatic slowing in the pace of medical development. Universal health care would cost the American people a lot in the the short term, but its retarding effect on medical progress is what makes it truly unacceptable.

Simply Inexcusable

2009-08-04T21:28:00.002-04:00

I don't care about geopolitical strategic considerations or the effect on overseas contingency operations, Mr. President. At a certain point, you just need to do what's right. And I can tell you one thing: recognizing Ahmadinejad as "the elected president of Iran" was just wrong. For all of George Bush's visible faults, at least he had the courage at one point to call evil regimes evil.

An Alternative Use for the Cash-for-Clunkers Cash

2009-08-04T21:21:00.003-04:00

For roughly the amount that's being spent on ~~Cash-for-Unions~~ Cash-for-Clunkers, we could by everyone in America who opposes ObamaCare one of these. Doing so would involve no wealth destruction, and I dare say that those are even more fashionable than a Prius in certain circles...

Teachers Unions Look Out for Teachers, Not Students

2009-08-03T15:13:00.003-04:00

The Wall Street Journal has a good article today about situations in New York and Baltimore that have resulted in teachers unions acting against the interests of students. The core of the issue comes down to this

The actions of the teachers unions in both Baltimore and New York make sense from their perspective. Unions exist to advance the interests of their members. The problem is that unions present themselves as student advocates while pushing education policies that work for their members even if they leave kids worse off. Until school choice puts more money and power in the hands of parents, public education will continue to put teachers ahead of students.

I've written about this several times. Quite simply, I could not agree more.

Cash for Clunkers: A Rant

2009-08-03T00:06:00.006-04:00

Only half a billion dollars of wealth destruction and half a billion dollars of wealth transfers? Better expand it!

The more I think about Cash for Clunkers, the more it irritates me. Here's the government's message to someone who earns $16/hr and pays $4500 in taxes a year: You're going to 40 hours a week for the next seven weeks in order to pay your taxes. We're going to take the some of that money and use it to pay someone to destroy their perfectly functional car, thus making decent used cars unavailable to those who can't afford a new one. We're then going to take the rest of that money and give it to that same person so they can buy a new car from a car company that we, the government, own. (In case you didn't hear, your tax dollars from last year went to purchasing General Motors.) However, if we just let them buy whatever car they want, they might commit the faux pas of buying an oh-so-unfashionable car that only gets (gasp!) 23 miles to the gallon, so instead we're going to restrict their options to the cars that we think are right for them! Does this sound great or what?!?!

Of course, the program doesn't seem to actually have any "green" benefit, since continuing to drive an old car frequently releases less carbon than investing the energy to buy a new car, even if the new car is more fuel efficient. Furthermore, its net effect on the wealth of Americans will be a loss equal to the value of the destroyed cars, as illustrated by the parable of the broken window. All in all, thinking about Cash for Clunkers just makes me more and more despondent about the prospect that Congress may soon be making my health care decisions for me.

A less emotional analysis of the program can be found here.

Edit: I tracked down a list of who voted for and against this idiotic program. This MSNBC article summarizes it:

Four Republicans - Kit Bond of Missouri, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Susan Collins of Maine and George Voinovich of Ohio - voted with two independents and 54 Democrats, while Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska was opposed along with 35 Republicans.

Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., changed her vote to support the bill and spoke by phone with Obama during the vote.

No surprises there.

Cash for Clunkers

2009-08-01T22:21:00.003-04:00

The Obama administration seems to have decided that they're going to emulate the New Deal as closely as possible with various programs. The latest one, "Cash for Clunkers," pays people to destroy their still-functional cars. Perhaps this is a deliberate attempt to reenact the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers to slaughter 6 million piglets and 220,000 pregnant cows at a time when people were starving. If Obama is actually trying to reenact the New Deal, I've got bad news for him: the Depression lasted for a solid 7 years after Roosevelt was elected, and the New Deal seems to have only made it worse.
For more on this ill conceived program, see Hot Air's post about it:
Just a reminder: Cash for Clunkers requires destroying perfectly usable cars

Second DC Writeup Post: George Hincapie

2009-08-01T22:13:00.003-04:00

My second article for The DC Writeup can be found here. The text is below as well:

The Tour de France finished up last Sunday. The news stories from this year’s Tour center on a few big names: Mark Cavendish, the 24-year-old from the Isle of Mann who won no fewer than six stages, Alberto Contador, who wrapped up his second overall win with dominating performances in each of the decisive stages, and of course 37-year-old Lance Armstrong, who managed to pull off a third place in his return to the sport. These men mix raw talent with hard work and deserve the attention that they’re getting for their achievements. Far less attention was given to cyclist George Hincapie, who finished 19th overall.

But for those of us who watched carefully on the last day, something else stood out. Several kilometers from the finish line, the Garmin-Slipstream cycling team went to the front of the peloton in an effort to disrupt Cavendish’s bid for stage win number six. For a moment, it looked like they might succeed. But with just over a kilometer left, Hincapie launched a powerful response, going to the front and giving everything he had to outpacing the Garmin team. He approached the last corner at the head of the race with Cavendish drafting behind him and used his years of experience to take the perfect line through the corner. By the time Cavendish launched his sprint several hundred meters from the finish line, it was already over.

Two days later, X-rays would reveal that Hincapie had done all of this with a broken collar bone from a crash several days earlier

This is hardly a one-time occurrence. George Hincapie has made a career out of being the best teammate a cyclist can ask for. He’s been a key member of Cavendish’s team for the last two years. He’s best known, however, for being the only cyclist who was a teammate of Lance Armstrong for each of Lance’s seven Tour de France wins. He was also a teammate of Alberto Contador when Contador got his first win in 2008, which means that Hincapie is the only cyclist who has ever ridden on 8 Tour de France winning teams. He has spent years of his career chasing down breakaways, going back to the team car to get water, and generally protecting Lance Armstrong so that Lance could be as fresh as possible for the last, decisive climb of the day.

Throughout his career, Hincapie has sacrificed his own ambitions in order to help his teammates. His 6′3” frame does not make him a natural climber, but he forced himself to become a top-notch climber so that he could help Armstrong through tough mountain stages. He could have had some big wins in the one-day “classics” races held in the spring each year, but instead he always trained to have his form peak in July, during the Tour de France, and consequently he never really had a chance to find out.

I’m not trying to praise Hincapie for altruism (although he has a reputation for being a very nice guy.) I’m saluting him for making a brilliant career move by recognizing that he had the potential to be a truly world-class teammate. I would bet that there isn’t a team in professional cycling that wouldn’t be glad to add Hincapie to their roster. He has focused on something that he does very well and has made a successful career out of it.

George Hincapie has succeeded in cycling in a way that few people will ever succeed in anything, and I’m not one to define success downwards in an idiotic “you’re all winners” sort of way. But there are people who succeed in a similar way, albeit on a smaller level. These are the people who find something they’re really good at and use that as the basis for a successful career. The immigrant who opens up a really good Thai restaurant, the woman who starts a successful cleaning business, and, yes, the plumber who just understands how things work — all of these people deserve our praise and support. Let’s remember to give it to them.

185 days later...

2009-07-24T22:07:00.002-04:00

It's finally happened: I've checked every day this week, and Obama's approval rating on Rasmussen Reports has slipped below 50% (to 49) for the first time. Over the last 26 weeks, his approval rating differential has gone from +35 (65%-30%) on Inauguration Day to -2 (49%-51%) today, for an average of about 1.5% loss a week. I'm reminded of 4 years ago, when Bush topped out with his highest approval rating of his second term at 54% on February 5th and then pretty much monotonically lost political capital as he tried and failed to reform social security. I have two questions. First, how far will Obama's approval rating drop before it bottoms out? Second, which presidential term will the rest of Obama's presidency most resemble: Bush's second term, Clinton's first term, or Carter's only term? At this point, the most obvious analogy is Clinton's first term. Obama, like Clinton, came into office with a fairly leftist agenda, and appears, like Clinton, to have over reached with an attempt to nationalize health care. The part that unclear is whether or not he'll remain on his current course or start to engage in Clinton style triangulating and chart a more moderate course. If not, he could quickly find that his presidency on a path that looks a lot like either Carter's presidency or Bush's second term with Congress gridlocked and his own party turning against him. If the economy remains stagnant, John McCain's claim that Obama was running for Carter's second term will suddenly seem a lot more believable. On the other hand, Obama's current eagerness to engage with regimes like North Korea and willingness to expand the government makes me wonder if his presidency won't end up seeming a lot like Bush's second term.