The right's war debate

When even Ann Coulter is calling you a warmonger, it tends to frighten people.

Jim Manzi on epistemic closure

I've always liked Manzi, and calling out Mark Levin's book for wingnuttery at NRO's corner is a pretty good example of why.

Seeing Andy McCarthy and K-lo squirm futily in response just ices the cake.

Malkin award nominee

"Here is the fact: Democrats are saying they would prefer to see tens of thousands of Americans die than to see a KSM subjected to sleep-deprivation or to have his “phobias exploited.” I doubt that this reflects the values of most Americans."

—Andy McCarthy, NRO

Terrorists and the right are co-dependent

Yglesias goes there. He's right, though.

Ignoring the cost of torture

Via the Dish, Julian Sanchez has been reading NRO's Corner and comments on the pro-torture right's stunning stupidity:

[I]f it seems as though torture ever yields important and actionable intelligence more quickly than alternative methods, we’re supposed to take it for granted that this completes the necessary utilitarian analysis. And this is just absurd. How does torture affect the willingness of enemy combatants to surrender? How much does it complicate our relations with allies? How many people does it help to radicalize against the United States? How many non-radicals does it leave sufficiently disgusted that they’re less motivated to assist the U.S. in fighting radicalism in their communities? You’ll notice that torture-fans never really attempt to deal remotely seriously with any of these questions; they just babble inanities about how Fanatics Will Hate Us No Matter What. Which, of course, some will—but that’s hardly to the point, is it?

Spreading the patriotic message everywhere

Via Ordinary Scott



At 1:27 ...

People want to go against the word of God and live alternative.
The media wants to crucify conservatives.
Just 'cause we live by a set of principles.
To me liberals are some sick individuals.
They want to ban the Second Amendment—that's just criminal.
God forgive me if I sound a little cynical.
But how are you going to support killing a baby?
And how you gonna ban prayer in the Navy?
Another thing matters: it's between a man and a lady.
Have you all lost your minds? Have you all gone crazy?
Every night I pray to God: Daddy, save me.
And give us a leader like the one we had in the 80s.
Maybe one day our prayers will be answered.
And we'll be cured from this liberal cancer.
Until that day I keep on praying.
And ignore what the left-wing lunatics are saying.

Dear Lord, please save us from your followers.

Protesting diplomacy

Unfortunately Obama's bow was too deep, the Japanese dislike handshakes (though exceptions are made for foreigners), and any touching during a bow is a serious faux pas in Japanese culture.

But almost nobody on the Right is aware of this; they've just been hysterically criticizing the very act of bowing (nevermind that Nixon and Bush Sr. did so as well).

Quote of the day

"..I've got [Palin's] book, I have it right over here [..] I made a prediction when I talked with her yesterday. I said "You've got enough in here that people who get hold of this, like the AP, or any of the state-controlled media, they're going to focus on the soap opera aspects of your book and they're going to ignore what is truly one of the most substantive policy books I've read. This woman, governor Palin, clearly is jazzed by policy, particularly environmental policy and energy policy, as well as taxes and so forth."

—Rush Limbaugh, The Rush Limbaugh Show, 13 November 2009

Morale plummets in Afghanistan, improves in Iraq

WASHINGTON – Morale has fallen among soldiers in Afghanistan, where troops are seeing record violence in the 8-year-old war, while those in Iraq show much improved mental health amid much lower violence,

Look for the Right to praise the surge as a success and berate Obama for dithering on Afghanistan.

What is this 'rule of law' and 'due process' you speak of?

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and four other men accused in the plot will be prosecuted in federal court in New York City.

Update: Redstate goes bonkers. The action alert I also received:

Stop Obama From Importing Terrorists Stateside

[..] the terrorist will get all the rights afforded an American citizen in a criminal trial, including the right to a fair trial, the right to a taxpayer funded attorney, the right to review all the evidence against him, potentially including classified intelligence matters, the right to exclude evidence against him including, potentially, any confession obtained through enhanced interrogation techniques, etc.

Horror of horrors!

Link blag

Conor Friedersdorf knows how to fix the Right. Now if only they were listening...

Larison has smart things to say about the Crist-Rubio Florida Senate Primary.

Pelosi was smart to pass cap and trade early.

The physics of free-throw shooting.

Researchers have found a way to grow new organs by grabbing cells, spraying them onto a protein frame, dunking them in "growth-stimulating compounds," and then sticking them in an oven. Naturally, they're using this technique to grow new penises.

Nicole LaPorte was a Twilight virgin.

A headline to appreciate: "Madonna to meet Jesus's parents".

New poll shows 100% of grandsons are talented...

ATLANTA—A Zogby poll of 1,542 American grandparents published Monday found that grandsons were described as "very" to "extremely" talented by 1,542 of the respondents. "Participants in the poll were emphatic in their descriptions of the talents of grandsons in fields as diverse as advertising and sales, choral performance, baseball, talking, crawling, making their beds, video games, and instructing their elders on proper cell-phone use," pollster Tom Waterton said. "In addition, an overwhelming percentage of grandchildren were described as outgoing, sharp, and looking just like Uncle Andy, you remember Uncle Andy, he was always up to something, too bad he passed so young, he would have loved the grandchild in question." Sources at Zogby admitted that the survey was incomplete, as several hundred pollsters are still unable to get their assigned grandparents off the phone.

"Under the Rightwing Rock"

Every time I think about maybe possibly voting Republican in the future, some bozo neocon opens his mouth and reminds me of the kind of people I'd be putting in government....here's Andrew:

If you don't think Bush's and Cheney's embrace of torture-as-policy has had a profound effect, check out this instant response to Fort Hood from Mark Noonan in the neocon camp:

A terrible event - but I don’t want anyone to call it an “act of violence” or “a terrible tragedy”. It was an attack - one or more men decided with malice to attack a US military base. We need to get right down to the bottom of this - and, liberals, if the stories of accomplices in custody are true, this is where harsh interrogation might be needed: whoever was involved in this most emphatically does not have a right to remain silent.

So we go from torturing a foreign terror suspect who may know the whereabouts of a WMD that is about to go off imminently (the original Krauthammer position) to torturing American suspects in a shooting spree (suspect, I might add, that subsequently turned out to be mirages).

This is not a slippery slope; it's a well-watered slide to throwing out the entire American system of government.

No political lesson

Letter from a witness:

This was premeditated. This wasn't VBC again. That guy snapped, not this one. He was so damn calm when he was shooting. Methodical. And he was moving tactically. The Army really is diverse and we really do love all our own. We signed up to be shot at but not at home. Not unarmed. No one should ever see what the inside of that medical SRP building looked like. I suppose that's what VA Tech looked like. Except they didn't have soldiers coming from everywhere to tourniquet and compress and talk to the wounded while rounds are still coming out.

No one touched him...the shooter that is...other than to treat him. Though I told the medic (and I'm not proud of this) that was giving him plasma that there better not be anyone else who needed it because he should be the last one to be treated. But I had just finished holding a soldier who was critical (I counted three entry wounds) and talking to him about his children.... If the shooter had a grievance he should have taken it out on those responsible; he wasn't shooting people he knew (media reports to the contrary). He was just shooting anybody who happened to be present for SRP medical processing, mainly lower enlisted.

But please, no one use this politically! The Army is not "broken", PTSD doesn't turn people into killers, most Muslims aren't evil, and whether we should stay or go in Afghanistan has nothing to do with this. I'm babbling...sorry.

Megan concludes:

This guy was some form of lunatic or psychopath, and it seems pretty clear to me at this point that he was inspired by terrorists.  But there's no evidence that he was a terrorist--that is, that he was hooked into some organized network.  Lots of people do terrible things in the name of their religion--just ask George Tiller.  Their acts are, as the Catholic Church says, "sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance".  But they are no more indictments of a community than the acts of that Korean kid who went crazy at Virginia Tech.

There is absolutely no political lesson to be learned from this.  Gun control would not have stopped a commissioned officer from obtaining guns.  Barack Obama had no power to stop this.   Infectious PTSD is a lousy theory.  And nations certainly do not--and should not--shape their foreign policy around the possibility that a random psychopath will start shooting up a crowd.  Evil people do evil things.  That's all.

Addendum: No lesson other than more examples of the Right's immaturity, of course.

Lessons from NY-23

Sanity from the right:

For the better part of today, I have been reading reactions among the right to the news of Dede Scozzafava's withdrawl from the NY-23 race. Probably the most oft repeated commentary I have seen is that the developments of this race once again prove that, "moderate Republicans rarely succeed, and true conservatism wins every time".

Scozzafava dropping out is indeed a great thing for the conservative movement. It represents a victory for the grassroots activists on the ground over a disconnected and out of touch Republican establishment. But the analysis that says this proves "conservatism wins every time" is woefully misplaced, extremely lazy, and not at all grounded in reality.

This notion is an extension of rhetoric that has been used by Rush Limbaugh for years. It has gained popularity as the "true conservative" (whatever that means) base has grown frustrated with what it sees as "squishy moderates" losing in national elections. We heard it endlessly following John McCain's defeat in 2008, and had heard it previously when Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton in 1996.

But the reality is very different. This increasingly popular notion is simply false, and lets take a look at why.

(continued)

Miscarriage of judgement

Conor Friedersdorf on Glenn Beck and his defenders.

Climate change denialism and alarmism

Kevin Drum wrote:

I mean, suppose you accepted that climate change was both real and catastrophic. What options would you have if you insisted on sticking solely to free market principles? Beats me. Hell, it’s hard enough to address even if you don’t. But that’s where we are these days: an awful lot of our most pressing problems simply can’t be solved unless you accept that the government has to be involved. So conservatives are stuck.

Yglesias responds:

I think this is far too kind to the behavior of right-of-center institutions—Heritage, AEI, Cato, National Review, Weekly Standard, the Chamber of Commerce, Rush Limbaugh, etc.—on the issue of climate change. It implies that there’s some genuine ideological dilemma that makes it impossible for a committed free marketer to propose constructive policies to avert catastrophic climate change. But how about reductions in subsidies for fossil fuel production and consumption? The free market credentials seem impeccable. Or how about a “green tax shift” in which carbon is taxes or carbon emission permits are auctioned and the revenue is used to finance deficit-neutral reductions in other taxes? Again, it surely can’t be that free market principles commit people to the precise series of revenue streams currently used in the United States.

Now of course in the real world it’s going to be impossible to legislate a pure free market “tax shift” policy just as it’s going to be impossible to legislate a pure “tax polluters to subsidize clean energy” approach or a pure “cap and rebate” or a pure anything. But if people started from the premise that emissions need to be reduced, and then debated the extent to which this needs to be done in a free market way versus some other kind of way, then compromise would be easy to reach and a solution could be within reach. But that’s not what we have. Not because market-oriented approaches are inadequate to the challenge but because too many of the key institutions that espouse market-oriented approaches are run by people who are too corrupt, incompetent, immoral, stupid, or cowardly to get their side to take the problem seriously.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The German Federation of Industry had a bunch to say, not all of it sensible on the merits, about making German climate policy friendly to export-oriented manufacturers, but none of it involved ranting about “cap and tax” or denouncing “socialism” or pretending that the whole problem was made up by Al Gore.

I agree: the many climate change deniers on the right are awful.

However, alarmists from the left are also contemptible. Al Gore, Barack Obama, Matt Yglesias, et. al. did not make up the problem. But they sure do exaggerate, peddling end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenarios and distorting our extremely limited ability to mitigate the more moderate warming that's actually likely to happen.

Jim Manzi's non-denialist, non-alarmist cost-benefit analysis looks correct to me. You can read his many detailed posts on the subject at The American Scene.

Movement conservatives vs. pragmatists

A battle is joined.

Red State Update: Health care and town hall yell meetin's

I'll drink to the second half.

Flight of the wingnut

Why I oppose government programs

As a contemporary example, Cato argues Cash for Clunkers is among the dumbest ever:

• A few billion dollars worth of wealth was destroyed. About 750,000 cars, many of which could have provided consumer value for many years, were thrown in the trash. Suppose each clunker was worth $3,000 at a guess, that would mean that the government destroyed $2.25 billion of value.
• Low-income families, who tend to buy used cars, were harmed because the clunkers program will push up used car prices.
• Taxpayers were ripped off $3 billion. The government took my money to give to people who will buy new cars that are much nicer than mine! 
• The federal bureaucracy has added 1,100 people to handle all the clunker administration. Again, taxpayers are the losers.
• The environment was not helped. See here and here.
• The auto industry received a short-term “sugar high” at the expense of lower future sales when the program is over. The program apparently boosted sales by about 750,000 cars this year, but that probably means that sales over the next few years will be about 750,000 lower. The program probably further damaged the longer-term prospects of auto dealers and automakers by diverting their attention from market fundamentals in the scramble for federal cash.   

Sane folks should agree these outcomes are outrageously dumb.  B-b-but, Obama bragged the program was popular!  And truly, it was.

Offering everyone $100 towards burning an old set of ugly clothes and buying a sleek new replacement might also prove popular, both to consumers and the clothing industry.  Huzzah, let's do it!  Regrettably, such popularity does not make it a good idea nor mean that implementing it would make any kind of economic or environmental sense—which it clearly wouldn't.

This basic problem of economic inefficiency, generalized, is why the majority of other government programs and economic interventions are also really bad ideas. What is politically popular seldom implies economic efficiency.  Often, quite the contrary. Political popularity foments fiscal insanity.  First you get your Democrats, who want to give every person on Earth a free cake, dog, and pony—plus the choice of a prepaid subscription to either People or The Washington Monthly.  This proves popular.  Then as a reaction you get your Republicans, who don't want to pay half a cent toward anything.  This also proves popular.  Unsurprisingly, voters want to have their cake and not have to pay for it, too.  Politicians are happy to pander to both sides.  The emerging compromise?  Massive deficits—a.k.a. having our children and grandchildren deal with it somewhere down the line.

Yes, Virginia—I don't mean to scare you with technical phrasing, but politics and government really do suck.

A sufficiently free market, by contrast, implements a method that almost always results in superior efficiency to either political popularity or technocratic fiat.  It's called price signals.

Unfortunately, due to a history of misguided (but politically popular!) government interventions and regulation, the U.S. health-care system does not have price signals.  This works out very poorly.

Allow me to paint you an analogy.  It would be as if credit cards were issued by "insurance card" companies who agree to provide their customers with "consumption coverage".  You would pay them a pre-arranged monthly "consumption premium", and in exchange they would "cover"—with just a small co-pay!—any shopping you do with their card, provided it was clear that you "needed" it.  Ramen noodles would probably be covered—eat more than you can puke.  So would most canned goods.  Even many of the cheaper fruits and veggies.  But the fine entrée you wanted to serve at your next dinner party?  Sorry, your insurance card company doesn't think you "need" it.  Oh, and there would also be limits on things like how much gas you can buy per week or how many drinks you're allowed at the bar per night.  Sound good?  Meanwhile, more and better ways would be developed to game and profit off the convoluted system.  Retailers would overcharge whatever they could get away with making the "insurance card" companies pay, and consumer demand for more and better purchase coverage would rapidly increase. Thus the monthly cost of these "consumption premiums" would also soar.

The above scenario is basically the status quo of U.S. health-care.  Obviously, it sucks.   In lieu of price signals, people always want more and better health-care to be provided, just like in the above they always want more "consumption coverage".    When the consumer doesn't pay for services, markets become dysfunctional. (Also true of some marriages >_>)

So how to reform the system?  Apart from those unfortunate Brits—who tragically got the idea during WWII that it would be good for their state to stay in the business of directly providing care—the left's favored solution tends to be single-payer: a government takeover of health insurance companies, analogous to taking over the odd "insurance card" ones above.

Insurance companies make great villains, but as we saw with Cash for Clunkers and can observe by looking at many other programs—particularly socialized health plans in other countries—they all have their own kinds of problems.   These problems are different from the US status quo: better in some ways, worse in others.

For example, one thing other countries' socialized systems are better at is cost control (.pdf).  They use their monopsony power to negotiate lower prices, and they can often be better at saying no to consumers.  They say no in more equitable ways, such as long waiting times, and some Canadian towns run regular lotteries to decide which families get a doctor.

Controlling costs would be nice, especially compared to an expensive system like the US status quo.  But one thing centralized bureaucratic cost controls also do is reduce the incentive for future private innovation.  Why spend your time experimenting with and further developing a new health product if you can't know whether the health bureau will decide it's a cheap and effective enough treatment to get it off the ground?

In short, the choice between the U.S. status quo and a single-payer system offers trade-offs.  I won't spill more ink trying to formally pin them all down: it's a big topic, kind of like going on about the difference between Republicans and Democrats.

At this point someone usually pipes up and wails about the plight of the uninsured poor.  But that is not a health-care system problem, it is an income problem.  And one of the few ways to directly mitigate an income problem is to provide subsidies to low-income families (some ways are more economically sound than others).  Point is, you could implement subsidies and attain universal health insurance coverage in the U.S. without directly changing anything about our health-care delivery system or the insurance companies themselves.  It would just be really expensive and balloon either the deficit or tax rates, which is why it shouldn't be done in isolation.

Happily there's a reform that would lower costs for everyone while actually increasing innovation:  bring back the price signals that are so essential to market efficiency.  Here's how this might be accomplished:

Firstly, repeal any state-level regulation—often called "patients bill of rights"—that require insurance companies to fully cover particular procedures or put an artificial ceiling on deductibles.  This would clear the regulatory barriers for health plans that sport low premiums and high deductibles, suitable for catastrophic coverage only.  This is how real insurance is supposed to work, like the kind we have for our cars and homes.  By contrast, the sort of thing we call "health insurance" today is actually "pre-paid health care".  Just imagine how high your car insurance payments would be if it were required to cover 80% of the cost of oil changes, tire rotation, wiper blades, new tires, regular service, etc.

Secondly, implement something like Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) for all the routine, preventative, non-catastrophic care.  Apart from trimming administrative jobs in our bloated health insurance industry, this would free consumers to shop for their own health care (Enter price signals, mission accomplished).

Of course, esteemed Nobel laureates like Paul Krugman shall protest:  "Health care is not a bowl of cherries...or a carton of milk, or a loaf of bread."

Indeed, shopping for health-care probably sounds like an odd idea to most.  But HSAs have been tried right here in America, and the data suggest they work well:

Consumer-driven health (CDH) products [i.e., high-deductible health plans relying on HSAs or Health Reimbursement Arrangements to reimburse for qualified expenses] have been marketed in various forms since the early 2000s. While emerging data is [sic] not entirely conclusive, general directional conclusions can be drawn from the studies published to date. […]

With regard to first-year cost savings, all studies showed a favorable effect on cost in the first year of a CDH plan. CDHplan trends ranged from -4 percent to -15 percent. Coupled with a control population on traditional plans that experienced trends of +8 percent to +9 percent, the total savings generated could be as much as 12 percent to 20 percent in the first year. All studies used some variation of normalization or control groups to account for selection bias.

For savings after the first year, at least two of the studies indicate trend rates lower than traditional PPO plans by approximately 3 percent to 5 percent. If these lower trends can be further validated, it will represent a substantial cost-reduction strategy for employers and employees.

Generally, all of the studies indicated that cost savings did not result from avoidance of appropriate care and that necessary care was received in equal or greater degrees relative to traditional plans. All of the studies reviewed reported a significant increase in preventive services for CDH participants. Three of the studies found that CDH plan participants received recommended care for chronic conditions at the same or higher level than traditional (non-CDH) plan participants. Two studies reported a higher incidence of physicians following evidence-based care protocols.

Bottom lines: the status quo puts health care rationing in the hands of insurance companies.  Single-payer puts rationing in the hands of bureaucrats.  A free, CDH market places it in the hands of consumers.

Which of the three do you prefer?

Contrary to popular belief, those of us on the economic right do not advocate market solutions because we have some arcane faith in mythical powers of the market.  We do so because they actually work better—even when they're politically unpopular.

(At this point someone usually pipes up to rail about how the financial crisis, like, totally discredits the idea of markets being better. Let's try not to be distracted by this different, macroeconomic topic that has more to do with a combination of poor regulation and lack of understanding the business cycle.)

The mean socially conservative Republican voter is our useful idiot. They don't understand free market economics any better than the left does, and are liable to show up at your local town halls spouting all sorts of nonsense about government conspiracies to kill more babies.  But the socons are willing to vote with us, so we often have to hold our nose and work with them.  It's called fusionism, and it's been the price to pay for an economic way of doing business that—while superior on the merits—would otherwise be too politically unpopular.  See for example the situation in contemporary Europe, which unlike the US has managed to purge socon fervor the old-fashioned way: through a long, tragic history of disastrous war.

I deplore social conservative attacks on personal freedom as much as the next freethinker, and I aim to counter them.  But I also deplore the left's attacks on economic freedom.  And I'm aware of the uncomfortable truth: unless I can convince a lot more of my fellow social liberals to cut back on their leftism and support freer markets, a chronic Faustian bargain with socons is necessary to preserve what economic freedoms we have.  Without this bargain, the U.S. economy would become more like Europe's, with the lower efficiency and lowered growth that over the long term is worse for everyone—rich and poor alike. Unless, of course, one is lucky enough to become a politician, bureaucrat, or have a personal connection to the business. Then the European political-economic landscape looks pretty rosy, and one can seek out all sorts of creative ways to gloss over the underlying economic inefficiency.

(Cross posted)