Miscellany: 9/08/14

Quote of the Day
Man is so made that whenever anything fires his soul, impossibilities vanish.
Jean de la Fontaine

Chart of the Day

Courtesy of Reason

Image of the Day

Centralized Healthcare vs. the US System

In the ubiquitous world of apple-and-orange  international health statistics quality and accessibility (criteria favoring the American mixed system) seem to defy measurement. Notice that Kelly-Gagnon (cf. excerpt after the video) is making a point I did in yesterday's post about declining consumer inequality. Early-adopter Americans of healthcare innovation often provide economy of scale application to global consumers.

"The American [health care] system is more expensive than the Canadian system," says Michel Kelly-Gagnon, president of the Montreal Economic Institute. "To that, I answer that a Mercedes is indeed more expensive than a Toyota Corolla."

"Thank god for that," he says, explaining that innovation depends on early adopters who are far more likely to be well-off and pay high rates for new and better options. That doesn't mean only the rich benefit, though. "Certain treatments that are only available to the richest people," he says, "will eventually become more economical and the whole world will benefit."

Obama's Deferral on His Immigration Initiatives is a Betrayal of Transparency and Democracy; It's Totally Political

Obama's deferral on taking action on rumored unilateral immigration initiatives is clearly based on trying to protect as much as possible vulnerable incumbents just 3 months before a potential wave mid-term election that seems likely to leave Obama with an opposition-controlled Congress, all but a lame duck like George W. Bush's last 2 years.

Now it seems everytime I write about immigration, I seem to lose readers. It seems over the past several weeks I have been running across several vulgar populist appeals arguing that chronic state budget problems are not due to anti-growth policies but to public expenditures of various welfare state programs on undocumented aliens. I think Dick Morris floated the red meat politics of jobs, arguing immigrant job gains occur at the expense of born American citizens.

I've made it clear that I believe in a restoration of liberalized immigration, including temporary work visas. The economic advantages of win-win immigration are compelling to any informed economist. I saw the Senate bill as insufficient reform, one which mostly played to the Democrat core constituencies of Latinos and unions. For most immigrants trying to work through the system, the status quo, with inadequate quotas, is unacceptable.

Whereas I want liberalized immigration passed and signed into law, we must have the rule of law. The proper course of action is for the President to negotiate, not simply demand capitulation to his terms. For him to wait until he is no longer accountable to the American people, directly or indirectly, to announce a policy, no doubt reflecting concessions to special-interest constituencies, is a mortal sin against American democracy. Obama owes it to the American people to come clean before the mid-terms; he is leaving the opposition but one constitutional tool to force accountability on any President: impeachment.

Proposals









Facebook Corner

(Being Classically Liberal).  Many libertarians and conservatives deny science when it threatens their personal beliefs. For example, 97% of the academic papers on climate change attribute it to human activities, that's quite a consensus. [1] Attempts to refute this statistic have been shown to be fatally flawed. [2] Claims that supposedly prove global warming to be false have been refuted time and again by actual scientists. [3]
A lot of the science denial in regards to global warming comes from right wingers precisely because it threatens their belief that the government should never intervene in anything. It is better for them to simply pretend as though global warming doesn't exist rather than admit to themselves that government action (via carbon taxes or caps on emissions, etc). Whether on the right or left, ideologues tend to dismiss facts which threaten their beliefs.

If you are a global warming denier, ask yourself: why would nearly all research on the matter come to the same conclusion if it wasn't true? In fact, what do you think is more likely, that all the experts on the matter are wrong, or that you purposefully dismiss global warming as a hoax simply because it threatens your ideology?
If libertarians and conservatives want to be taken seriously, we can't be the perpetrators of science denial.
Citations:
[1] http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/may/28/wall-street-journal-denies-global-warming-consensus
[3] http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/09/01/global_warming_denial_claims_of_arctic_ice_recovering_are_exaggerated.html

The issue has less to do with whether human efforts, however weakly, exacerbate trends, but the materiality of said interventions in the context of prevailing natural factors, the accuracy and scope of existing climate models, and the feasibility and efficacy of public policy and economic interventions. We also, by principle, reject political correctness as blurring the line between science and public advocacy, which is an intrinsic conflict of interest. There's also the equivalent of Gore-style alarmism, of failed predictions, etc., the scandals of Climategate where skeptics are intimidated, even politically barred from publishing their work.

(Milton Friedman). See Image of the Day
In economic terms a cartel is a group of producers that get together to control prices by restricting production. In the drug wars I am good with reduced production.

What gives you more confidence--the highest incarceration rate in the world or crimes to support consumption at artificially high prices and untaxed profits to the cartels?

Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Gary Varvel via 

Courtesy of Bob Gorrell via Townhall

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists

Barry Manilow, "Bandstand Boogie"