"If you're going to do health-care cost containment, it has to be stealth," said Jon Kingsdale, speaking at a conference sponsored by the New Republic magazine last October. "It has to be unsuspected by any of the key players to actually have an effect." Mr. Kingsdale is the former director of the Massachusetts "connector," the beta version of ObamaCare's insurance "exchanges," and is now widely expected to serve as an ObamaCare regulator...
(WSJ 7/7/10)
Liberty demands the ability to make a free and reasonable decision, and then act upon it. This also implies an atmosphere of truth. Information may be limited. The information may be by the very nature of the question obscure to human knowledge. It may be technically complex and obtuse. But liberty cannot exist without the mutual agreement between the governed and the government that both will be fair and honest with each other. From the governed side, the rules, responsibilities and limits of the government should be clear and concise. From the government side their aims, methods and obedience to the rules should be honest and transparent. Most importantly, the government should never hold its citizens in contempt, never place itself as the censor of the citizen's reality. No servant of the people --no servant or tool--should ever be allowed to define itself.
Power and its abuses come from pride. From arrogance. The leader knows the truth; he knows more than the citizen does or can. This arrogance used to be conferred by God on special families and bloodlines. More recently it grew out of concepts, pseudo scientific notions that elites agreed linked individuals in a human herd of behavior the elites could guide. Now this pride is self conferred; you just come up with an idea and value it because you are so able and everyone else is not.
In any free society, a statement such as Mr. Kingsdale"s above should be the end of his public service. With prejudice.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Heroes and Bathoes
It has been a long road from making the Enlightenment flesh in the Declaration of Independence to the worrying over the Army's risk of capsizing Guam. There have been ups and downs (Jackson, Polk, Buchanan, Lincoln) but no one would make a graph of highlights or a few points. Still, the leadership from Wilson on has not been stellar. Roosevelt get points for not losing a war, Truman for being an honest human being, Eisenhower for building a road system and confidence, Kennedy for being inspiring, Clinton for being malleable, the second Bush for being steadfast but none of these qualities look good isolated on a resume or an on-line dating questionnaire. And none of the negatives are included. None of the goofy experiments, none of the immortal bad ideas. True, these errors have not been limited to the executive branch. Social security, separate but equal, the draft lottery, the federal pharmacy plan--all special little Edsels from their own little designers--all designed as products of our best and brightest.
Adams was not always right (see Sedition Act), nor was Jefferson (see his reason for not freeing his slaves) nor was Lincoln (see McClellan, for Heaven's sake) but the one quality that seems different in the more modern America is the scope of government vision, the state as seen from the government pinnacle. Reagan's appeal was his refusal to be mired in small fights, his insistence that the government was first a concept, a philosophical creation. Why one of America's least abstract leaders would be so correct in his assessment of this need is beyond me but others should understand and follow. This is simply a different country and, even when it is not, it still wants to be. Special interests, unions, abortion pros and cons, race, internal combustion pros and cons--all of these competing and haggling partisans--must always be the sideshow of the towering American Experiment. As much as these debates get under our collective skin, and as much as the new communications allow for dental drilling intensity of these debates, they are Lilliputian in comparison.
And any political leader who aligns himself primarily with these debates diminishes himself and will diminish his legacy.
Adams was not always right (see Sedition Act), nor was Jefferson (see his reason for not freeing his slaves) nor was Lincoln (see McClellan, for Heaven's sake) but the one quality that seems different in the more modern America is the scope of government vision, the state as seen from the government pinnacle. Reagan's appeal was his refusal to be mired in small fights, his insistence that the government was first a concept, a philosophical creation. Why one of America's least abstract leaders would be so correct in his assessment of this need is beyond me but others should understand and follow. This is simply a different country and, even when it is not, it still wants to be. Special interests, unions, abortion pros and cons, race, internal combustion pros and cons--all of these competing and haggling partisans--must always be the sideshow of the towering American Experiment. As much as these debates get under our collective skin, and as much as the new communications allow for dental drilling intensity of these debates, they are Lilliputian in comparison.
And any political leader who aligns himself primarily with these debates diminishes himself and will diminish his legacy.
Experts and Critics
A recent article by a federal reserve economist laments the intrusion of nonprofessionals and amateurs into the field of economic discussion. http://www.scribd.com/doc/33655771/Economics-is-Hard She is inclusive; she dislikes bloggers but Krugman too. There is simply too much information, too many things to consider and the subtleties of these complexities mixing with the abstractions of general theories...well, it just can overwhelm the little people.
And then there is this declaration:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/
This article claims that not only are people generally ill informed, they are resistant to making better decisions when given better information. Worse, the more sophisticated thinkers are the worst students because, presumably, they are more confident in their opinions and more convinced in the value of their starting points.
What's a guy to do?
The reflexive answer would be minimize the damage these poor thinkers can do. Professionals as well as critics. But critics do little damage; they just worry people. The experts on the other hand can do plenty. One is reminded of the dearly departed Long Term Capital Management, an investment company created by Nobel Prize winning economists whose brilliance was so great that they made all but a few cast a shadow. They invested and behaved almost in isolation--like a cult--with no criticism from without because no one could make any sense of what they were doing. And they created a disaster. The fund went bankrupt and almost took Citicorp with it. My bet is they would have benefited from a few more average opinions from minds feeding on less rarefied air. But they sought no advice. Nor did they take any lessons. Indeed, a few years ago, the same people came back to the marketplace with the same philosophy and attracted three more billion dollars which they then lost in a new and improved bankruptcy.
There is a theme here. History is littered with the efforts of men trying to shape the hard world to their mental vision. But unlike the scientific world which is intensely critical and hostile to anything but the most rigorously proven cause and effect, this softer world of quasi-science functions in a atmosphere virtually devoid of self criticism. So however flawed the critics are, they are mandatory by default.
And the experts? They should contract their horizons, minimize their scope. They should be cautious when their analysis is that the failure of a system was the result of not doing it hard or long enough. They should try to learn the differences between law and notion. They should be made to study Heisenberg and Quantum Entanglement. Then they might be able to reach the Nirvana that is the hallmark of scientific search for knowledge and its ideal, truth.
Humility.
And then there is this declaration:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/
This article claims that not only are people generally ill informed, they are resistant to making better decisions when given better information. Worse, the more sophisticated thinkers are the worst students because, presumably, they are more confident in their opinions and more convinced in the value of their starting points.
What's a guy to do?
The reflexive answer would be minimize the damage these poor thinkers can do. Professionals as well as critics. But critics do little damage; they just worry people. The experts on the other hand can do plenty. One is reminded of the dearly departed Long Term Capital Management, an investment company created by Nobel Prize winning economists whose brilliance was so great that they made all but a few cast a shadow. They invested and behaved almost in isolation--like a cult--with no criticism from without because no one could make any sense of what they were doing. And they created a disaster. The fund went bankrupt and almost took Citicorp with it. My bet is they would have benefited from a few more average opinions from minds feeding on less rarefied air. But they sought no advice. Nor did they take any lessons. Indeed, a few years ago, the same people came back to the marketplace with the same philosophy and attracted three more billion dollars which they then lost in a new and improved bankruptcy.
There is a theme here. History is littered with the efforts of men trying to shape the hard world to their mental vision. But unlike the scientific world which is intensely critical and hostile to anything but the most rigorously proven cause and effect, this softer world of quasi-science functions in a atmosphere virtually devoid of self criticism. So however flawed the critics are, they are mandatory by default.
And the experts? They should contract their horizons, minimize their scope. They should be cautious when their analysis is that the failure of a system was the result of not doing it hard or long enough. They should try to learn the differences between law and notion. They should be made to study Heisenberg and Quantum Entanglement. Then they might be able to reach the Nirvana that is the hallmark of scientific search for knowledge and its ideal, truth.
Humility.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Don't Play Lacrosse at Duke
Yesterday my youngest son was driving home from work when he saw a child, four or five years of age, toddling alone along the sidewalk. Concerned there was no adult in sight, he slowed, waited and finally called to the boy and asked if he was lost. At that moment a man and a woman turned the far corner and started down the street. They were obviously the parents and my son waved and drove off. The man smiled; the woman was furious. She may have written down his license number.
We have become very sensitive to certain risks in society. And our approach has been to emphasize the marginal, to accept no small chance. In spirit this is not unlike much of our approaches elsewhere. We do not stop therapy for the terminally ill, we will stop using a drug with a tiny complication rate, "impairment starts with one sip", we do not build nuclear plants because despite the country's safe nuclear history there is always that chance.
All hospitals now have newborn units that are isolated from the rest of the hospital with complex entrance codes; regular hospital ids, even for physicians, do not allow access and special response teams--for example cardiac arrest--are admitted to these units only by visual recognition. (I can not imagine how anyone would get out in a fire.)
My shoes were x-rayed by airline security this weekend.
Every college campus has a rape counselling center.
These precautions are taken against terrible but rare crimes that the society takes very seriously.(In the last several decades I can recall three specific and separate instances where day care employees were tried--and convicted--for crimes against children that included acts that were physically impossible and at any other time in history would be considered witchcraft.)The original estimates of campus rape reported by Koss was one in four. 25%! (The chance of being the victim of any felony in Detroit is 2%.) Yet the average visit to a campus rape center is 5 women annually for private schools, proportionally higher for larger. Kidnapping of newborns in hospitals from 1983 to 2006 averaged 5 in 4,000,000 births annually. 1 in 800,000. Shoe bombers are rare as well. There are 23,000 kidnappings in the U.S. a year, over 80% by family or acquaintances. In 1999 115 children were taken by strangers overnight for the purpose of abuse or ransom. 115 in 40,000,000.Yet these are crimes that are personal and community disasters. What cost or inconvenience should be spared?
In a culture that seems to be searching for community, suspicion and fear are ruinous acids in the cultural fabric. Individual experience will always trump general experience. I have no answer to this but I do have advice for all males: Protect yourself first. Always , always think the worst. The worst will be thought of you.
We have become very sensitive to certain risks in society. And our approach has been to emphasize the marginal, to accept no small chance. In spirit this is not unlike much of our approaches elsewhere. We do not stop therapy for the terminally ill, we will stop using a drug with a tiny complication rate, "impairment starts with one sip", we do not build nuclear plants because despite the country's safe nuclear history there is always that chance.
All hospitals now have newborn units that are isolated from the rest of the hospital with complex entrance codes; regular hospital ids, even for physicians, do not allow access and special response teams--for example cardiac arrest--are admitted to these units only by visual recognition. (I can not imagine how anyone would get out in a fire.)
My shoes were x-rayed by airline security this weekend.
Every college campus has a rape counselling center.
These precautions are taken against terrible but rare crimes that the society takes very seriously.(In the last several decades I can recall three specific and separate instances where day care employees were tried--and convicted--for crimes against children that included acts that were physically impossible and at any other time in history would be considered witchcraft.)The original estimates of campus rape reported by Koss was one in four. 25%! (The chance of being the victim of any felony in Detroit is 2%.) Yet the average visit to a campus rape center is 5 women annually for private schools, proportionally higher for larger. Kidnapping of newborns in hospitals from 1983 to 2006 averaged 5 in 4,000,000 births annually. 1 in 800,000. Shoe bombers are rare as well. There are 23,000 kidnappings in the U.S. a year, over 80% by family or acquaintances. In 1999 115 children were taken by strangers overnight for the purpose of abuse or ransom. 115 in 40,000,000.Yet these are crimes that are personal and community disasters. What cost or inconvenience should be spared?
In a culture that seems to be searching for community, suspicion and fear are ruinous acids in the cultural fabric. Individual experience will always trump general experience. I have no answer to this but I do have advice for all males: Protect yourself first. Always , always think the worst. The worst will be thought of you.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Spies and Influence
The recent Russian spy arrests gives more than an insight into a changing, gentrified spy world; it comments on the very nature of society and where the leverage is. LeCarre is quite gone. The spy no longer looks to compromise an official with the proverbial "dead girl or live boy" in bed. No more complex financial exchanges, no simple sex and/or cash. Nor is there the search for the famous deluded idealist. No, these spies go to Harvard and then try to get on commissions.This is the line from the Russian headquarters to one of the spies, Murphy, quoted in the L.A.Times: "The group allegedly attended one of Moscow's most elite spy schools before landing in America. Their mission was spelled out, somewhat awkwardly, in a 2009 message to the Murphy's from Moscow Center.'You were sent to USA for long-term service trip,' the message read, according to the FBI affidavit. 'Your education, bank accounts, car, house etc. — all these serve one goal: fulfill your main mission, i.e, to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in US and send intels [intelligence reports] to C [Center].'"
"Policymaking circles?" Guys just sitting around? Is the implication here that the informal groups that casually discuss and advocate policies are a real power that infiltrating units hope to learn from and perhaps influence? And are those Russian interests so acceptable to us that they could be advocated by a seemingly honest American without much suspicion or risk? Have the enemies of the United States analysized us and decided that weapons and tactics are not as rewarding a spy target as formal and informal policy conferences? Does a spy get more bang for his buck sitting at a GDP luncheon than stealing a guidence system blueprint? Does a bullet he inserts in a Power Point have more impact on his manipulative plans than a titanium one? Has confrontation become a nudge? Can the aims and opinions that advance the Russian state really be presented to American conferences as just other ideas?
One of the great problems in the government occurs when a policy seems to confound logic and national benefit. The immigration debate stumbles to mind. The advantage of coming to this country illegally is to have your children automatically made citizens and recipients of welfare benefits, education and safety. Moreover you are an attractive employee as you have lower wage demands with no withholding or social security taxes. But the declaration that the government cannot control its own borders reveals an ineptness in an area that most people think is basic and consequently undermines the government. Moreover, to make an illegal immigrant a citizen has no effect on his children but eliminates the major reason to employ him as his wages and tax expenses will immediately rise. So amnesty will make the government a laughingstock , creates a huge number of unemployed and will not solve the underlying problem of terrorist infiltration or the attractiveness of illegal workers. So it makes no sense and consequently inspires theories that try to make sense of the decision by emphasizing more shadowy motives.
This administration has been making and supporting some peculiar decisions. This new spy information should make great talk show fodder.
"Policymaking circles?" Guys just sitting around? Is the implication here that the informal groups that casually discuss and advocate policies are a real power that infiltrating units hope to learn from and perhaps influence? And are those Russian interests so acceptable to us that they could be advocated by a seemingly honest American without much suspicion or risk? Have the enemies of the United States analysized us and decided that weapons and tactics are not as rewarding a spy target as formal and informal policy conferences? Does a spy get more bang for his buck sitting at a GDP luncheon than stealing a guidence system blueprint? Does a bullet he inserts in a Power Point have more impact on his manipulative plans than a titanium one? Has confrontation become a nudge? Can the aims and opinions that advance the Russian state really be presented to American conferences as just other ideas?
One of the great problems in the government occurs when a policy seems to confound logic and national benefit. The immigration debate stumbles to mind. The advantage of coming to this country illegally is to have your children automatically made citizens and recipients of welfare benefits, education and safety. Moreover you are an attractive employee as you have lower wage demands with no withholding or social security taxes. But the declaration that the government cannot control its own borders reveals an ineptness in an area that most people think is basic and consequently undermines the government. Moreover, to make an illegal immigrant a citizen has no effect on his children but eliminates the major reason to employ him as his wages and tax expenses will immediately rise. So amnesty will make the government a laughingstock , creates a huge number of unemployed and will not solve the underlying problem of terrorist infiltration or the attractiveness of illegal workers. So it makes no sense and consequently inspires theories that try to make sense of the decision by emphasizing more shadowy motives.
This administration has been making and supporting some peculiar decisions. This new spy information should make great talk show fodder.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
G-20 Tug-of-War
A lesson from the G 20 so far seems to have gone unlearned. This regular confab among the nations' elites has produced a revealing insight: A central question about the current economic problems has produced complete disagreement. The Americans, true to Keynes, want to continue the flood of federal money to prime dry pumps and create the hitherto undemanding aggregate demand. The German camp, remembering the world altering effects of the last hyperinflation period in Germany, want to cut expenses and deficits and shrink their budgets.
So the basic question of the G 20 is unanswered. Moreover, there is antagonistic disagreement over how to approach the question. The solutions offered by the two camps are diametrically opposed.
The average guy should take this news with some concern. The really big leaders and elites just do not disagree, they completely and totally disagree. Paul Krugman really, really disagrees with the German position. The Austrian economists really, really disagree with the Americans. Now some disagreement within the most heterogeneous of groups is inevitable but a 180 degree disagreement in a leadership group is not. Somehow this schism within the world leadership has not been viewed as anything more than interesting. But it is a lot more. There is no middle ground between these positions, no compromise. There is no "partial pump priming", no "sort of budget control". There is no agreement and no hope for one. The average guy should be plenty worried. There is no solution pending and the leaders not only are stymied, they would not know what to do if they could. One option is disconnection; different countries with different visions could pursue different courses. But that means some will be wrong. Some might lose. And with the vision that we are one world, that solution is anathema.
The average guy probably thought he was in better hands.
So the basic question of the G 20 is unanswered. Moreover, there is antagonistic disagreement over how to approach the question. The solutions offered by the two camps are diametrically opposed.
The average guy should take this news with some concern. The really big leaders and elites just do not disagree, they completely and totally disagree. Paul Krugman really, really disagrees with the German position. The Austrian economists really, really disagree with the Americans. Now some disagreement within the most heterogeneous of groups is inevitable but a 180 degree disagreement in a leadership group is not. Somehow this schism within the world leadership has not been viewed as anything more than interesting. But it is a lot more. There is no middle ground between these positions, no compromise. There is no "partial pump priming", no "sort of budget control". There is no agreement and no hope for one. The average guy should be plenty worried. There is no solution pending and the leaders not only are stymied, they would not know what to do if they could. One option is disconnection; different countries with different visions could pursue different courses. But that means some will be wrong. Some might lose. And with the vision that we are one world, that solution is anathema.
The average guy probably thought he was in better hands.
G 20
The G 20 has returned, like a winter cold. Or locusts. This time it has settled on Toronto. The meeting to promote economic growth has again shut the host city down, closed the roads--so the guests can travel easily, closed the restaurants to outsiders--so the guests can eat and entertain each other without the irritation of outsiders, closed the entertainment sites--so...so...so. It is so obnoxious and so offensive that it is surprising the average guy tolerates it.
The ruling elite has a lot of chutzpah. They create policies that wreck the economies then they hold unbelievably inconveniencing meetings to redesign the economies they have wrecked. This is all done with the open mouthed respect of the average guy who does not seem to connect the elite with the mini depressions that accompany their trips and meetings. If the elite had any interest in the average guy they would at least stop using their towns for dystopia practice and police training. They should go somewhere like a military base or an aircraft carrier and at least remove the mini disasters they create with their beneficial visits. But I bet they will not do that, at least until the average guy stops their malignant visits by refusing them. The elite just can not resist thrill the deference and the specialness that these visits among the little people gives them.
And where would the good food come from?
The ruling elite has a lot of chutzpah. They create policies that wreck the economies then they hold unbelievably inconveniencing meetings to redesign the economies they have wrecked. This is all done with the open mouthed respect of the average guy who does not seem to connect the elite with the mini depressions that accompany their trips and meetings. If the elite had any interest in the average guy they would at least stop using their towns for dystopia practice and police training. They should go somewhere like a military base or an aircraft carrier and at least remove the mini disasters they create with their beneficial visits. But I bet they will not do that, at least until the average guy stops their malignant visits by refusing them. The elite just can not resist thrill the deference and the specialness that these visits among the little people gives them.
And where would the good food come from?
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