Did Hillary Clinton deplane in Bosnia under live fire? Evidently not, from this video -- so why did she say she did? If she is "sleep deprived," how can she handle being commander-in-chief?
Peggy Noonan hopes Hillary's lying, because if not, perhaps Hillary can't tell the difference between truth and falsehood?
Or are the roots deeper than that? Jonah Goldberg discusses the leftist idea of "lying for justice" in some detail in his recent book, Liberal Fascism.
The left is not overly enamored with the West and our enlightenment heritage, anyway. What I see in this "misstatement" and others like it is a repudiation of the western concept of truth. The idea that truth is what you observed actually happening is very Aristotelian, with roots in the Greek philosophical revolution going back before Athens became a power. But there are non-western concepts of truth that are very different.
If you read the Gospel of John, you can see why it is not a synoptic gospel. It doesn't give a synopsis of the life of Jesus. Saint John the Evangelist is a polemicist. If you were able to confront John and ask him whether the marriage at Cana miracle ever really happened, I maintain he would grab you by the collar and shout, "What are you worried about that for? The point is the Glory of the Lord Jesus Christ!"
Which is one thing when we're talking about Him. But He also warned us to beware of false prophets who would deceive the very elect (Mark 13:22). I am prepared to put my faith in God, but not in any mere mortal.
What we've been seeing all along with the Clintons is the repudiation of the western idea that Truth is what you observe and the story has to be based on that. My values create a Narrative. Truth is only there to serve that Narrative. Observations and objective standards are irrelevant. The ends justify the means.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Friday, December 28, 2007
Benazir Bhutto
Benazir Bhutto has been murdered, and I am sorry for her nation's loss.
I saw her as the best hope for Pakistan. Whatever was going to happen, how likely were the nutbars to fall in with a woman prime minister?
She was previously charged with corruption, but somehow the charges never held up under objective scrutiny; when the courts were not being managed by the army, her conviction was overturned.
Now we have a country that is a nuclear power, can't keep control of its own forces and is descending into political chaos.
Benazir Bhutto has been murdered, and the world is so much the worse for it.
I saw her as the best hope for Pakistan. Whatever was going to happen, how likely were the nutbars to fall in with a woman prime minister?
She was previously charged with corruption, but somehow the charges never held up under objective scrutiny; when the courts were not being managed by the army, her conviction was overturned.
Now we have a country that is a nuclear power, can't keep control of its own forces and is descending into political chaos.
Benazir Bhutto has been murdered, and the world is so much the worse for it.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Nothing But Upside
The Wall Street Journal and the San Francisco Chronicle agree: anything that looks like a mortgage bailout is a bad idea. Both articles draw comparisons with the Japanese banking crisis of the nineties, wherein bad loans were carried on the books, avoiding the recognition they were bad, until they became completely atrocious. Both authors question how admission to the lifeboat will be determined, and both point out the moral hazards. Both articles empathize with the homeowners who have kept current on their mortgages.
However, soon there should be an awakening, because even the homeowners who have been dutifully paying their mortgages have something to lose here: todays foreclosure is tomorrows comp. The popularity of sites like Zillow demonstrate that all the homeowners have one eye on their valuations. Once the homeowning public sniffs out the threat of a large-scale devaluation accelerated by defaults, opinions will swing round in favor of a bailout. It's too good an opportunity to vote ourselves rich.
However, soon there should be an awakening, because even the homeowners who have been dutifully paying their mortgages have something to lose here: todays foreclosure is tomorrows comp. The popularity of sites like Zillow demonstrate that all the homeowners have one eye on their valuations. Once the homeowning public sniffs out the threat of a large-scale devaluation accelerated by defaults, opinions will swing round in favor of a bailout. It's too good an opportunity to vote ourselves rich.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
The Other Shoe
There will be plenty of discussion on health care reform in the next eleven months (only 341 more shopping days until election!), and I believe that a single payer system is inevitable. Yet changes to who pays are only the first and less threatening of the health care problems looming before us. Much worse will be what happens when health care eats the economy, and a single payer system poses risks of accelerating that.
Today our system provides some people a varied baseline level of care in a crazy-quilt matrix of rules, provider networks and payment structures. Access to this level of care is based on employment, preferably with a mid-size or larger employer. There is a social safety net in the form of medicare, which providers hate because the government is fashionably late with the payments.
Providers typically enter into contracts with insurers where the provider will perform services at less than list price. In addition to the business management problems this causes for providers, this leads to ridiculous situations where the only people paying full price for medical services are the uninsured.
Many individuals have no idea how much of the cost of coverage their employer is eating until they have to go out and get their own coverage. People who are self-employed or whose employer does not provide coverage are left twisting in the wind.
Access to coverage in excess of the baseline has been rationed by ability to pay. Is this fair? Compared to what? Here we can meaningfully divide the problem in two: fairness of the baseline and fairness of rationing of care beyond the baseline. A consistent baseline would be more fair. The government thought it had the back-door key to achieving this in the forties, when the current employer-provided system was being worked out. Back then, the economy was all about big companies, and it was assumed that most people would be employed by one. But those assumptions have all gone by the wayside in the past twenty-five years.
A system that offered everyone the same baseline care could address the injustices described by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2005 article. However, the first problem will be locating the baseline. In 1991 Oregon sought permission from the feds to overhaul its health care system (it was denied). The state wanted to broaden access, while at the same time restricting coverage under certain conditions. One change they wanted to make was to refuse to pay for liver transplants for alcoholics. Alcoholics are, in fact, protected under the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and it is doubtful that it would be legally permissible to refuse to pay for their liver transplants.
The liver transplant example illustrates the moral hazard that Gladwell rails against in his article. His examples are illustrations of the unevenness of the baseline, but the question becomes, where would the baseline be set? The issue is not just one of mean-spiritedness toward the sick; someone has to pay for all this. Creating one giant risk pool of all American citizens and having everyone pay for everyone else increases the likelihood that we will vote ourselves healthy, especially as the baby boomers advance through their sunset years. This is the moral hazard lurking behind health care reform. The hazard is not that poor people will get to have their teeth fixed; it's that a teenager can freely start smoking because society will pay for his lung overhaul in his later years.
Health care will, in an economic sense, always be rationed because it is another domain, like money and time, where resources are limited and wants are not. How do you allocate access to leading-edge cancer treatments that are very expensive? Rationing based on ability to pay is, at least, impersonal and therefore comprehensible. In other forms of rationing, who decides who gets to live and who has to die? Do candidates have to demonstrate need? Worthiness? And by what standard will these be evaluated?
Health care already represents more than 15% of gross domestic product (GDP), and climbing. Despite the sweet seductions of macroeconomics, every dollar of GDP does not represent an equal amount of wealth produced. Two apples are twice as good as one apple. Apples continue being desirable until you approach satiation, where diminishing marginal utility sets in. But health care doesn't work like that. Health care is not a good in the same sense that apples, iPods, back rubs and gallons of gasoline are goods. Health care does not produce wealth the same way that apple farming or gasoline refining produces wealth. Health care also does not increase your standard of living the way a massage does. Doctors, nurses, lab techs and other practitioners certainly earn their money, but if you've had one brain tumor removed very competently, you aren't going to hope to have another so you can experience it a second time.
There is a theoretical upper limit to the portion of the economy that health care can occupy before the economy actually begins to contract, because health care remediates problems more than it increases aggregate wealth (as is also true with auto repairmen and divorce lawyers). Therefore, cost containment is critical to the delivery of more health care to more people, as many proponents of health care reform recognize.
Here is a page authored by two MDs, who recognize "the tendency of bureaucracy to reproduce and amplify itself." Despite making the assertions that "National health insurance could solve the cost-vs-access conflict by slashing bureaucratic waste," the authors offer no specifics of how the risk of bureaucratic expansion would be mitigated.
The current system of health care coverage is a failure. It imposes additional costs on every person employed, reducing job growth, and creates perverse incentives that do not align with the behaviors we want out of economic agents. It needs attention at a national level. But do not lose sight of the need for cost containment, because the problem is waiting right around the corner.
Today our system provides some people a varied baseline level of care in a crazy-quilt matrix of rules, provider networks and payment structures. Access to this level of care is based on employment, preferably with a mid-size or larger employer. There is a social safety net in the form of medicare, which providers hate because the government is fashionably late with the payments.
Providers typically enter into contracts with insurers where the provider will perform services at less than list price. In addition to the business management problems this causes for providers, this leads to ridiculous situations where the only people paying full price for medical services are the uninsured.
Many individuals have no idea how much of the cost of coverage their employer is eating until they have to go out and get their own coverage. People who are self-employed or whose employer does not provide coverage are left twisting in the wind.
Access to coverage in excess of the baseline has been rationed by ability to pay. Is this fair? Compared to what? Here we can meaningfully divide the problem in two: fairness of the baseline and fairness of rationing of care beyond the baseline. A consistent baseline would be more fair. The government thought it had the back-door key to achieving this in the forties, when the current employer-provided system was being worked out. Back then, the economy was all about big companies, and it was assumed that most people would be employed by one. But those assumptions have all gone by the wayside in the past twenty-five years.
A system that offered everyone the same baseline care could address the injustices described by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2005 article. However, the first problem will be locating the baseline. In 1991 Oregon sought permission from the feds to overhaul its health care system (it was denied). The state wanted to broaden access, while at the same time restricting coverage under certain conditions. One change they wanted to make was to refuse to pay for liver transplants for alcoholics. Alcoholics are, in fact, protected under the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and it is doubtful that it would be legally permissible to refuse to pay for their liver transplants.
The liver transplant example illustrates the moral hazard that Gladwell rails against in his article. His examples are illustrations of the unevenness of the baseline, but the question becomes, where would the baseline be set? The issue is not just one of mean-spiritedness toward the sick; someone has to pay for all this. Creating one giant risk pool of all American citizens and having everyone pay for everyone else increases the likelihood that we will vote ourselves healthy, especially as the baby boomers advance through their sunset years. This is the moral hazard lurking behind health care reform. The hazard is not that poor people will get to have their teeth fixed; it's that a teenager can freely start smoking because society will pay for his lung overhaul in his later years.
Health care will, in an economic sense, always be rationed because it is another domain, like money and time, where resources are limited and wants are not. How do you allocate access to leading-edge cancer treatments that are very expensive? Rationing based on ability to pay is, at least, impersonal and therefore comprehensible. In other forms of rationing, who decides who gets to live and who has to die? Do candidates have to demonstrate need? Worthiness? And by what standard will these be evaluated?
Health care already represents more than 15% of gross domestic product (GDP), and climbing. Despite the sweet seductions of macroeconomics, every dollar of GDP does not represent an equal amount of wealth produced. Two apples are twice as good as one apple. Apples continue being desirable until you approach satiation, where diminishing marginal utility sets in. But health care doesn't work like that. Health care is not a good in the same sense that apples, iPods, back rubs and gallons of gasoline are goods. Health care does not produce wealth the same way that apple farming or gasoline refining produces wealth. Health care also does not increase your standard of living the way a massage does. Doctors, nurses, lab techs and other practitioners certainly earn their money, but if you've had one brain tumor removed very competently, you aren't going to hope to have another so you can experience it a second time.
There is a theoretical upper limit to the portion of the economy that health care can occupy before the economy actually begins to contract, because health care remediates problems more than it increases aggregate wealth (as is also true with auto repairmen and divorce lawyers). Therefore, cost containment is critical to the delivery of more health care to more people, as many proponents of health care reform recognize.
Here is a page authored by two MDs, who recognize "the tendency of bureaucracy to reproduce and amplify itself." Despite making the assertions that "National health insurance could solve the cost-vs-access conflict by slashing bureaucratic waste," the authors offer no specifics of how the risk of bureaucratic expansion would be mitigated.
The current system of health care coverage is a failure. It imposes additional costs on every person employed, reducing job growth, and creates perverse incentives that do not align with the behaviors we want out of economic agents. It needs attention at a national level. But do not lose sight of the need for cost containment, because the problem is waiting right around the corner.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
I Told You Once
I once worked with a software development manager; let's call him Ralph. He was highly placed within the company, not a mere supervisor. Among Ralph's many endearing habits, he would send emails with terse answers to questions.
Want to know where a detailed description of a program was living? "That's in the most recent project ABC functional overview." It's your problem to find where that lives. Off you go to the shared drive. Here is a copy of the project ABC functional overview from five months ago. Is this the most recent? Don't ask Ralph; he just won't reply. In his world, if you look in the right place, which is the place he would put the document, it will be obvious. But don't get it wrong either, because Ralph will let you know how incompetent you are in front of whomever happens to be in the meeting.
Compounding this, he often began sentences with "Again, ..." Everyone in the room felt like he was saying, "Why is it necessary for me to tell you a second time, you blithering idiot?"
Ralph was not just a middle manager, he was also the Lord High Fixer for a lot of the company software. The Lord High Fixer needs an unbroken block of time to concentrate on the nasty problem only he can solve. At the same time, everyone knows to go to the Lord High Fixer to get information, much of which is not publicly available because the Lord High Fixer hoarded it. So the Lord High Fixer develops coping strategies to avoid having his job turn into Chief Answer Person, and making the experience of asking him a question entirely unpleasant is an oft-traveled route (And why, you ask, is a middle manager also doing hands-on work himself? Ah, that's a subject for another post).
Having a software background myself, I can also say there's something appealing about packing as much information into as few words as possible. I have fallen into this error myself, and it drives the Princess of Darkness batshit insane when I do. It really irritates me when an intellegent person, such as Princess, doesn't pick up my meaning. But when you're on the receiving end of this, you feel like you're being told you're stupid. I resolve today to cease this behavior.
Yes, it's tiresome when you are trying to solve a technical problem and you get bombed with requests for information. It is also tiresome when you have a client breathing down your neck for information and some dipwad expects you to parse his statements and retrace all the steps he took to find it rather than just make it easy for you to get the answer.
So how about this compromise: the people asking for information will make a reasonable attempt to look it up before bothering other people, and the person having information will, when asked, be patient and reasonably detailed in giving an answer or a pointer to an answer.
There are enough people outside of the company who can make your workday suck. We don't need co-workers making it worse.
Want to know where a detailed description of a program was living? "That's in the most recent project ABC functional overview." It's your problem to find where that lives. Off you go to the shared drive. Here is a copy of the project ABC functional overview from five months ago. Is this the most recent? Don't ask Ralph; he just won't reply. In his world, if you look in the right place, which is the place he would put the document, it will be obvious. But don't get it wrong either, because Ralph will let you know how incompetent you are in front of whomever happens to be in the meeting.
Compounding this, he often began sentences with "Again, ..." Everyone in the room felt like he was saying, "Why is it necessary for me to tell you a second time, you blithering idiot?"
Ralph was not just a middle manager, he was also the Lord High Fixer for a lot of the company software. The Lord High Fixer needs an unbroken block of time to concentrate on the nasty problem only he can solve. At the same time, everyone knows to go to the Lord High Fixer to get information, much of which is not publicly available because the Lord High Fixer hoarded it. So the Lord High Fixer develops coping strategies to avoid having his job turn into Chief Answer Person, and making the experience of asking him a question entirely unpleasant is an oft-traveled route (And why, you ask, is a middle manager also doing hands-on work himself? Ah, that's a subject for another post).
Having a software background myself, I can also say there's something appealing about packing as much information into as few words as possible. I have fallen into this error myself, and it drives the Princess of Darkness batshit insane when I do. It really irritates me when an intellegent person, such as Princess, doesn't pick up my meaning. But when you're on the receiving end of this, you feel like you're being told you're stupid. I resolve today to cease this behavior.
Yes, it's tiresome when you are trying to solve a technical problem and you get bombed with requests for information. It is also tiresome when you have a client breathing down your neck for information and some dipwad expects you to parse his statements and retrace all the steps he took to find it rather than just make it easy for you to get the answer.
So how about this compromise: the people asking for information will make a reasonable attempt to look it up before bothering other people, and the person having information will, when asked, be patient and reasonably detailed in giving an answer or a pointer to an answer.
There are enough people outside of the company who can make your workday suck. We don't need co-workers making it worse.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Life Imitates Art (Badly)
Sunday morning is filled with political discussion shows. Sure, now that there are all the news channels of various stripes on cable, you can get your fix 24/7. But Sunday morning is when the shows reign. While you're there, you can watch the experts handicapping the field.
Sunday afternoon and evening, in the fall, are all about pro football. You can learn about the strategies and the lives of the players. Now that ESPN has made Monday Night Football primarily an outlet to flog Disney content, Sunday is where football is at. While you're there, you can watch the experts handicapping the field.
It's an easy transition from political coverage to sports coverage, because they are performed so similarly. Discussions of strategies and tactics, life stories, who has momentum. Keith Olbermann slides effortlessly from one to the other.
Whatever this contributes to football, sports are a form of entertainment. Politics, however, is more than that. Politics is how we make decisions as a people, and it's hard to see the kind of data made available being informative to the citizenry.
The choice a candidate makes whether or not to advocate immigration reform is analyzed in the same way as the choice a head coach makes whether or not to go into the cover two: What are it's strengths, it's weaknesses? What voters does the position attract? Whom will it alienate? It's all about the tactics, and nothing about the ethics.
Olbermann and others like him attempt to address this in their shows, but by giving us pre-formed opinions. They'll make up your mind for you. That's not what I want.
I want to understand the issues, not hear influential people's opinions on the issues. I'm not interested in the tradeoffs between voting blocs, but the tradeoffs between consequences. I'm more interested in how a candidate will govern than how a candidate will win.
The commentators are knowledgeable enough to tell us when a president is being sent legislation as veto bait or when a candidate is trying to paint his opponent an unpopular color. They could just as easily use their knowledge to defuse these tactics, to call them out for what they are.
We can't afford to have politics viewed as another form of entertainment. It's not just a game. It's where the rules are made by which we live our lives.
Sunday afternoon and evening, in the fall, are all about pro football. You can learn about the strategies and the lives of the players. Now that ESPN has made Monday Night Football primarily an outlet to flog Disney content, Sunday is where football is at. While you're there, you can watch the experts handicapping the field.
It's an easy transition from political coverage to sports coverage, because they are performed so similarly. Discussions of strategies and tactics, life stories, who has momentum. Keith Olbermann slides effortlessly from one to the other.
Whatever this contributes to football, sports are a form of entertainment. Politics, however, is more than that. Politics is how we make decisions as a people, and it's hard to see the kind of data made available being informative to the citizenry.
The choice a candidate makes whether or not to advocate immigration reform is analyzed in the same way as the choice a head coach makes whether or not to go into the cover two: What are it's strengths, it's weaknesses? What voters does the position attract? Whom will it alienate? It's all about the tactics, and nothing about the ethics.
Olbermann and others like him attempt to address this in their shows, but by giving us pre-formed opinions. They'll make up your mind for you. That's not what I want.
I want to understand the issues, not hear influential people's opinions on the issues. I'm not interested in the tradeoffs between voting blocs, but the tradeoffs between consequences. I'm more interested in how a candidate will govern than how a candidate will win.
The commentators are knowledgeable enough to tell us when a president is being sent legislation as veto bait or when a candidate is trying to paint his opponent an unpopular color. They could just as easily use their knowledge to defuse these tactics, to call them out for what they are.
We can't afford to have politics viewed as another form of entertainment. It's not just a game. It's where the rules are made by which we live our lives.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
A Special Providence
"A special Providence protects fools, drunkards, small children and the United States of America." — Otto, Prince of Bismarck
It's true, and if you don't believe it, here's an example: President Franklin Roosevelt was a sick man in 1944. He held on for another year, and we got Harry Truman. Had he died in 1944, we would have been looking at Henry Wallace, admirer of the Soviet Union, as president.
We live in a nation that is rich enough for people to worry about bullshit like how animals feel about being killed and eaten. I doubt they like it. But in nations where people are living hand-to-mouth, no one cares about how the animals feel.
The Soviet Union had to build walls to keep people from leaving. Some US citizens want to build walls to keep people from coming here. We should be embarrassed about building a wall across the Mexican border, but it is also a powerful statement that so many people want to come here.
We are the beneficiaries of the traditions of England: rule of law, empiricism, property, contracts, government accountability. It is our traditions, not land, population or resources, that make our economy what it is. We can sow today and reasonably expect to reap tomorrow.
Sure, we have our share of unfairness and futility. We have people coasting and other people carrying them. We have people who work hard and live in poverty. We have people who suffer through no fault of their own. Everybody does.
We have a total inability to have a logical public discussion of ideas without lapsing into ad hominem attacks and abuse. But, whatever side of the political divide you're on, you don't have to worry about the secret police coming to your door the way my father did.
If you live in this country, you don't expect to see the inside of a working concentration camp. Neither do you expect famine or to bury a child of your own.
We have troops in foreign lands, dying for causes you may or may not agree with. But they die at a lower rate than soldiers of other countries, because we are rich enough to substitute technology and firepower for people.
The nutbars of the world hate us because we're here. It's convenient for them to blame all their shortcomings on us. Their hate means nothing; consider the source. For a lot of other people in the world, we are the City on the Hill.
We have limitations, and we need to take these limitations seriously. Most of the entries in this blog will include discussions of current problems. This entry is to give thanks for living in the United States of America.
It's true, and if you don't believe it, here's an example: President Franklin Roosevelt was a sick man in 1944. He held on for another year, and we got Harry Truman. Had he died in 1944, we would have been looking at Henry Wallace, admirer of the Soviet Union, as president.
We live in a nation that is rich enough for people to worry about bullshit like how animals feel about being killed and eaten. I doubt they like it. But in nations where people are living hand-to-mouth, no one cares about how the animals feel.
The Soviet Union had to build walls to keep people from leaving. Some US citizens want to build walls to keep people from coming here. We should be embarrassed about building a wall across the Mexican border, but it is also a powerful statement that so many people want to come here.
We are the beneficiaries of the traditions of England: rule of law, empiricism, property, contracts, government accountability. It is our traditions, not land, population or resources, that make our economy what it is. We can sow today and reasonably expect to reap tomorrow.
Sure, we have our share of unfairness and futility. We have people coasting and other people carrying them. We have people who work hard and live in poverty. We have people who suffer through no fault of their own. Everybody does.
We have a total inability to have a logical public discussion of ideas without lapsing into ad hominem attacks and abuse. But, whatever side of the political divide you're on, you don't have to worry about the secret police coming to your door the way my father did.
If you live in this country, you don't expect to see the inside of a working concentration camp. Neither do you expect famine or to bury a child of your own.
We have troops in foreign lands, dying for causes you may or may not agree with. But they die at a lower rate than soldiers of other countries, because we are rich enough to substitute technology and firepower for people.
The nutbars of the world hate us because we're here. It's convenient for them to blame all their shortcomings on us. Their hate means nothing; consider the source. For a lot of other people in the world, we are the City on the Hill.
We have limitations, and we need to take these limitations seriously. Most of the entries in this blog will include discussions of current problems. This entry is to give thanks for living in the United States of America.
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