Randy Simmons, the libertarian mayor of the small town of Providence, Utah, opines that “Most elected Utah Republicans are populists, not conservative. They want to run people's economic and private lives.”
Simmons complains that he “once thought the Republican Party believed in individual rights, free markets, and property rights,” but that nowadays “Republicans want a big government (look at the TARP vote in the Senate for example) and Democrats want a bigger one.” He charges that “City Councils are even worse as they are infected with a do-gooder mentality. Instead of asking what the proper role of local government is they assume they can fix things.”
The definition of the term populist is kind of slippery, since it has different or layered meanings. It almost always denotes competition between the elite class and the broader populace. It was once tightly associated with the briefly tenured and fairly radical Populist (or People’s) Party of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, but it has since obtained a more varied definition.
Simmons’ use of the word populist, however, seems to simply denote the political class employing government power in the name of the people — using a top-down approach to place burdens on some for the benefit (or presumed benefit) of ‘the people.’ Using ‘the people’ to justify political actions is a common trick employed by politicians of almost all persuasions.
Whether the politicians’ belief that they are accomplishing overall public good through government coercion is genuine or not, it does not necessarily follow that their actions are morally correct, the majority agree with the particular policy at hand, the rights of the minority have been properly respected, or the claimed benefits are actually achieved.
The frustration Simmons expresses with the Republican Party seems to be twofold. 1) The GOP is comprised of such a broad conglomeration of viewpoints that it is difficult to define what the party stands for. 2) The general center or prevailing view of the GOP has become less libertarian and more populist in recent years.
On point #1, Simmons is right that the GOP doesn’t currently know what it stands for. Following the spectacular implosion of the GW Bush doctrines that were in many ways a repudiation of the doctrines of the 1994 revolution, there is currently a huge struggle for power and ideology going on within the party. Although the Left has succeeded in uniting the GOP in opposition to leftist policies, there is otherwise little internal coherency as to what direction the party ought to go.
Point #2 also has some validity. Although his actual policies were far less than libertarian, Ronald Reagan succeeded in infusing the GOP with the idea of limited government. The 1994 Republican revolution was ushered in on a promise to actually implement these ideals.
While the GOP congress held the line on government expansion to some degree during the Clinton years, the effort to maintain a ‘sustainable majority’ led the inheritors of the revolution to engage in every type of corruption of which they had accused the Democrats. With the advent of GW Bush’s compassionate conservatism, all pretence of limited government and devotion to liberty went out the window.
Today, not only do the ragtag remnants of the Republican Party have little clue as to what principles the party stands for, the faction that claims to stand for limited government has no legitimacy inside or outside of the party. Any limited government bona fides that ever existed were run through the shredder during the preceding decade and it will take a long time to earn them back.
Although the GOP has suddenly found some backbone to stand up against big government policies (just at the moment when such opposition is completely meaningless on votes where it really matters), is there anyone — anyone — out there that thinks matters would be substantially different if John McCain had won last November, even if he had by some miracle gotten a Republican congress? Maybe some priorities would be slightly different, but populist sentiments and political paybacks would still be the order of the day.
The Utah GOP has a strong ‘conservative’ base. But if you attend the conventions and listen to what these ‘grass roots Republicans’ want, you will have to conclude that Simmons is right. They are mostly populists. And most elected GOP officials in Utah are also mostly populists. The arguments between the ‘conservative’ and ‘moderate’ camps devolve down to which populist policies ought to be pushed.
This leaves the question as to whether it is more profitable for liberty-minded people to work within the GOP to help shape the party’s future or to scrap that approach as futile and work from the outside. I have been told (see comments) that working from the outside is the only way to effect real positive change. As I note in my responses, I remain unconvinced that this is so.
Like Simmons, I am very dissatisfied with the Republican Party. But I find myself even more at odds with the Democratic Party. Are my only choices to be a pariah inside of the GOP or else a pariah completely outside of mainstream party politics?
Friday, August 21, 2009
Of Corruption and Term Limits
David Miller briefly discusses term limits in this post about the 22nd Amendment that instituted term limits for our nation’s chief executive. Should term limits be extended to other offices?
David admits to being somewhat ambivalent on the subject. I too have long been indecisive about broader term limits. On the one hand, incumbency carries with it tremendous advantages for staving off challengers. On the other hand, shouldn’t voters be able to elect whoever they want, even a long-tenured incumbent? Shouldn’t they be allowed to vote their belief that there is value in experience? Shouldn’t voters get the natural consequences of whoever they elect?
In response to David’s post, I asked two questions that I think are quite pertinent.
Interestingly, it always seems to be the political class that most strongly opposes term limits. They discount Lord Acton’s axiom that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
It seems to be the basic nature of just about all politicians that the longer they are in power, toying with control over people’s lives, the more corrupt they become. The system in which they operate is so rife with distortions that they are often incapable of sensing its steady negative influence.
While I agree in principle that people ought to be left to vote for whomever they wish and that they ought to bear the consequences of their votes, we live in a very imperfect world. It is a world where power corruption has resulted in systems that overwhelm attempts by those outside of the power structure to significantly affect our political systems.
Looking back at my two questions, I suggest that the combined number of the objective answers to these two questions is “so incredibly small that the loss of such valuable service after a few years due to term limits would not be too heavy a price to pay for the benefits that could be derived by limiting service terms.”
Are there valid arguments against term limits? Of course. But does permanent incumbency really bring us good government?
David admits to being somewhat ambivalent on the subject. I too have long been indecisive about broader term limits. On the one hand, incumbency carries with it tremendous advantages for staving off challengers. On the other hand, shouldn’t voters be able to elect whoever they want, even a long-tenured incumbent? Shouldn’t they be allowed to vote their belief that there is value in experience? Shouldn’t voters get the natural consequences of whoever they elect?
In response to David’s post, I asked two questions that I think are quite pertinent.
- How many really good elected leaders — so good that you wouldn’t want to replace them with ANY of the other people in that jurisdiction — have you seen during your lifetime?
- How many elected officials that stay in office for a long time do not become part of the problem they originally campaigned to fix?
Interestingly, it always seems to be the political class that most strongly opposes term limits. They discount Lord Acton’s axiom that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
It seems to be the basic nature of just about all politicians that the longer they are in power, toying with control over people’s lives, the more corrupt they become. The system in which they operate is so rife with distortions that they are often incapable of sensing its steady negative influence.
While I agree in principle that people ought to be left to vote for whomever they wish and that they ought to bear the consequences of their votes, we live in a very imperfect world. It is a world where power corruption has resulted in systems that overwhelm attempts by those outside of the power structure to significantly affect our political systems.
Looking back at my two questions, I suggest that the combined number of the objective answers to these two questions is “so incredibly small that the loss of such valuable service after a few years due to term limits would not be too heavy a price to pay for the benefits that could be derived by limiting service terms.”
Are there valid arguments against term limits? Of course. But does permanent incumbency really bring us good government?
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Could the Free Market Address Senior Citizens' Health Care Needs?
GMU Economist Russ Roberts posts an interesting question from a reader named Tom on his Café Hayek blog. In essence, the reader questions how the free market could possibly service the health care needs of senior citizens, given that pretty much everyone’s health care needs increase dramatically in their senior years.
Some readers take exception with Tom’s assumption that no private insurer would accept the risk. They note the success of long term care and cancer care insurances, which anticipate significantly high risk.
Others suggest that Tom’s question shows that he is blinded by the state of our current health care market, which is heavily skewed by government meddling. One respondent says that Tom incorrectly “assumes that greed driven capitalism has no answer to the problems associated with the ravages of time.” In a truly free market (or even a more free market), it is claimed, insurance would look and act far differently than it does today. It would evolve to become far more tailored to people’s needs.
Some mention health savings plans and high deductible insurance. Many discuss long-term contracts where level premiums would be charged, with the premiums being lower the younger the contract is begun.
Some raise the question of how to deal with people that have very high cost (or potentially very high cost) health conditions, especially where those conditions are no fault of their own. Wouldn’t government have to step in to help these people? Not necessarily say some. A mixture of private enterprise and philanthropy may be sufficient.
But not everyone thinks that government has no role to play in health care. One respondent says that “when all else fails the government may be the reliever of last resort,” but that “there is a long road for each of us to reach that stage….” But it is important to note that “during this trip WE CONTROL ALL OUR MEDICAL DECISIONS” instead of having the state control them.
Some that say that government coverage of seniors is the only feasible solution argue for voucherizing the system to enable as much flexibility and market input as possible.
One respondent expresses his faith in the free market to come up with all kinds of solutions that we can’t even conceptualize at present. In response to this, a pessimist writes:
The general point is that given the chance, the free market would evolve to satisfactorily handle the health care needs of most of our senior citizens and even those among us that have serious health conditions. Government could play a role in helping those that the market simply couldn’t reach.
But it is also entirely possible that dissatisfaction with diversity of outcomes might engender a desire to once again politicize the system in a vain attempt to enforce equality. We never seem to learn the lessons of the consequences that must be paid when we try to achieve altruism by force.
“So here is my question: which insurer in their right mind would take on my risk?Roberts then asks his readers to answer these questions. The response has been pretty prolific. While no one mentions the Medical Savings and Loan concept, plenty of other ideas are offered.
“I suspect none. Once philanthropy and savings were exhausted, I would surely risk a painful life and preventable death.
“Do I want this? Does anyone? Isn’t “socialized” medicine for older people an unpleasant moral necessity for our wealthy society? Please note I am deeply suspicious of most arguments cast in moral terms in discussions of politics and economics. I ask these questions guardedly.”
Some readers take exception with Tom’s assumption that no private insurer would accept the risk. They note the success of long term care and cancer care insurances, which anticipate significantly high risk.
Others suggest that Tom’s question shows that he is blinded by the state of our current health care market, which is heavily skewed by government meddling. One respondent says that Tom incorrectly “assumes that greed driven capitalism has no answer to the problems associated with the ravages of time.” In a truly free market (or even a more free market), it is claimed, insurance would look and act far differently than it does today. It would evolve to become far more tailored to people’s needs.
Some mention health savings plans and high deductible insurance. Many discuss long-term contracts where level premiums would be charged, with the premiums being lower the younger the contract is begun.
Some raise the question of how to deal with people that have very high cost (or potentially very high cost) health conditions, especially where those conditions are no fault of their own. Wouldn’t government have to step in to help these people? Not necessarily say some. A mixture of private enterprise and philanthropy may be sufficient.
But not everyone thinks that government has no role to play in health care. One respondent says that “when all else fails the government may be the reliever of last resort,” but that “there is a long road for each of us to reach that stage….” But it is important to note that “during this trip WE CONTROL ALL OUR MEDICAL DECISIONS” instead of having the state control them.
Some that say that government coverage of seniors is the only feasible solution argue for voucherizing the system to enable as much flexibility and market input as possible.
One respondent expresses his faith in the free market to come up with all kinds of solutions that we can’t even conceptualize at present. In response to this, a pessimist writes:
“The problem is that a free market would deliver unequal results. Better results for everyone, but still unequal. And since people would have nothing to compare it to, they'd bemoan the inequality and press for regulation and subsidies and guarantees. …It takes quite a while to read through the entire body of responses to Tom’s questions, but doing so is an informative experience.
“Schumpeter predicted that democracies would trend towards socialism as basic human needs are met and the people become afraid of creative destruction. How right he was.”
The general point is that given the chance, the free market would evolve to satisfactorily handle the health care needs of most of our senior citizens and even those among us that have serious health conditions. Government could play a role in helping those that the market simply couldn’t reach.
But it is also entirely possible that dissatisfaction with diversity of outcomes might engender a desire to once again politicize the system in a vain attempt to enforce equality. We never seem to learn the lessons of the consequences that must be paid when we try to achieve altruism by force.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Dealing With Drug Crime
Two former Baltimore City Police officers recently offered their views on enforcing drug laws in this Washington Post op-ed. They make some very valid points.
The former officers say, “Legalization would not create a drug free-for-all. In fact, regulation reins in the mess we already have.” Government could regulate drugs like it does alcohol and tobacco “to control where, when and to whom drugs are sold.” They write:
As far as I can tell, however, the drug legalization model that these guys are prescribing would still fail to address many of the same problems currently being managed via law enforcement. The alcohol market they cite is based entirely on recreational drug use (protestations of health benefits notwithstanding). Ditto with the tobacco market and even California’s ‘medical’ pot market.
But the individual and broader societal impacts of these drugs — whether they are used legally or not — are miniscule when compared to the impacts of many of the harder drugs that are either illegal or are tightly controlled. The general addictive qualities and the general deleterious effects of the misuse of these harder drugs are orders of magnitude greater than those of drugs like alcohol, tobacco, and pot. That’s why no one needs a doctor’s prescription to buy alcohol or tobacco, and that essentially bogus doctor’s prescriptions are acceptable for buying marijuana in California.
The drug distribution system suggested by the two former police officers would not apparently do away with the current prescription based model. Are they suggesting that we should follow the California ‘medical’ pot model for obtaining prescription drugs? We currently arrest doctors that give out bogus prescriptions, and for good reason.
The law expects doctors to prescribe only those drugs that meet a valid medical need. Are we going to rewrite the regulations to include a desire to get high as a valid medical need? That’s highly doubtful. Since the prescription model isn’t going away, and getting high is not a valid medical use, exactly how would the ‘legalized drug’ system deliver recreational drugs?
Yesterday I attended a presentation by a law enforcement drug task force where the current most problematic patterns of drug abuse were described. The most common model is for someone to get a legal prescription for a narcotic drug following an injury or surgery and to become addicted to the drug. When the doctor will no longer prescribe the drug, they begin doctor shopping and even stealing from their friends’ medicine cabinets.
The addict soon becomes aware that we have systems designed to catch doctor shoppers. Some turn to prescription fraud at this point, but we also have systems to detect that behavior. A few turn to pharmacy robbery. Many finally end up turning to the black market for privately produced narcotics. The problem spans almost all age groups from middle school kids to senior citizens.
Anytime a substance is controlled, a black market will develop to deliver that substance to those excluded from getting it. It is difficult to see how any prescription based system would work much differently than our current system. Due to recreational addicts accessing the black market, we would still end up with all of the same nasty law enforcement problems mentioned above.
Perhaps the former officers are deliberately vague because they favor a system where any adult could legally purchase any drug for any purpose without a doctor’s prescription, much the way that alcohol and tobacco purchases are handled. Such a system would essentially destroy the prescription model. There would simply no longer be any use for such a model. Your doctor would just tell you to go to the drug store and buy thus-and-such drug. Or you could decide to self medicate. No prescription would be necessary.
Few Americans are willing to entertain the thought of such a system, but let’s honestly ask the question of whether a system like that would take the “gangsters out of the game,” as they put it. Proponents say that it would, much as happened in the alcohol industry when Prohibition was repealed.
The Netherlands is often cited as a positive model for drug legalization. But the results of that nation’s experiment have been mixed. “Dutch rates of drug use are lower than U.S. rates in every category” and the percent of population that becomes problem drug users is lower than the EU average. But the Netherlands currently has “the second highest drug related public expenditure per capita of all countries in EU.” 75% of that expenditure is for law enforcement. Drug related crime (including violent crime) is a major problem. Last year, parliament voted to strengthen certain drug bans rather than further relaxing drug laws.
It turns out that many of our controlled drugs do not quite follow the alcohol and tobacco model. Many of these drugs have significantly greater addictive properties and much greater potential for harmful side effects. Legalization has not proven to substantially improve drug crime problems, although, some social problems may be reduced to a degree. It is quite unclear that legalization would be “a vast improvement on the status quo.”
I believe it would be foolish to fail to see the problems with our current drug policy. But neither is wholesale drug legalization necessarily the best answer to those problems. Drug abuse is a serious and complex public issue that deserves a serious and thoughtful approach. Simple ideological ‘solutions’ aren’t likely to fill the bill.
“Drug users generally aren't violent. Most simply want to be left alone to enjoy their high. It's the corner slinger who terrifies neighbors and invites rivals to attack. Public drug dealing creates an environment where disputes about money or respect are settled with guns.”The two former officers describe the results of “the ineffectiveness of drug policies,” including “violence, poor community relations, overly aggressive policing and riots,” plus “the drug war's clear and present danger toward men and women in blue.” These horrors, they assert, provide ample reason for them to declare that legalization of drugs is the solution. They claim that doing so would save law enforcement money while also raising tax revenues.
The former officers say, “Legalization would not create a drug free-for-all. In fact, regulation reins in the mess we already have.” Government could regulate drugs like it does alcohol and tobacco “to control where, when and to whom drugs are sold.” They write:
“Prescription drugs are regulated, and while there is a huge problem with abuse, at least a system of distribution involving doctors and pharmacists works without violence and high-volume incarceration. Regulating drugs would work similarly: not a cure-all, but a vast improvement on the status quo.”To bolster their argument, they assert:
“Drug manufacturing and distribution is too dangerous to remain in the hands of unregulated criminals. Drug distribution needs to be the combined responsibility of doctors, the government, and a legal and regulated free market. This simple step would quickly eliminate the greatest threat of violence: street-corner drug dealing.”California’s medical marijuana dispensaries are cited as “a good working example, warts and all, that legalized drug distribution does not cause the sky to fall.”
As far as I can tell, however, the drug legalization model that these guys are prescribing would still fail to address many of the same problems currently being managed via law enforcement. The alcohol market they cite is based entirely on recreational drug use (protestations of health benefits notwithstanding). Ditto with the tobacco market and even California’s ‘medical’ pot market.
But the individual and broader societal impacts of these drugs — whether they are used legally or not — are miniscule when compared to the impacts of many of the harder drugs that are either illegal or are tightly controlled. The general addictive qualities and the general deleterious effects of the misuse of these harder drugs are orders of magnitude greater than those of drugs like alcohol, tobacco, and pot. That’s why no one needs a doctor’s prescription to buy alcohol or tobacco, and that essentially bogus doctor’s prescriptions are acceptable for buying marijuana in California.
The drug distribution system suggested by the two former police officers would not apparently do away with the current prescription based model. Are they suggesting that we should follow the California ‘medical’ pot model for obtaining prescription drugs? We currently arrest doctors that give out bogus prescriptions, and for good reason.
The law expects doctors to prescribe only those drugs that meet a valid medical need. Are we going to rewrite the regulations to include a desire to get high as a valid medical need? That’s highly doubtful. Since the prescription model isn’t going away, and getting high is not a valid medical use, exactly how would the ‘legalized drug’ system deliver recreational drugs?
Yesterday I attended a presentation by a law enforcement drug task force where the current most problematic patterns of drug abuse were described. The most common model is for someone to get a legal prescription for a narcotic drug following an injury or surgery and to become addicted to the drug. When the doctor will no longer prescribe the drug, they begin doctor shopping and even stealing from their friends’ medicine cabinets.
The addict soon becomes aware that we have systems designed to catch doctor shoppers. Some turn to prescription fraud at this point, but we also have systems to detect that behavior. A few turn to pharmacy robbery. Many finally end up turning to the black market for privately produced narcotics. The problem spans almost all age groups from middle school kids to senior citizens.
Anytime a substance is controlled, a black market will develop to deliver that substance to those excluded from getting it. It is difficult to see how any prescription based system would work much differently than our current system. Due to recreational addicts accessing the black market, we would still end up with all of the same nasty law enforcement problems mentioned above.
Perhaps the former officers are deliberately vague because they favor a system where any adult could legally purchase any drug for any purpose without a doctor’s prescription, much the way that alcohol and tobacco purchases are handled. Such a system would essentially destroy the prescription model. There would simply no longer be any use for such a model. Your doctor would just tell you to go to the drug store and buy thus-and-such drug. Or you could decide to self medicate. No prescription would be necessary.
Few Americans are willing to entertain the thought of such a system, but let’s honestly ask the question of whether a system like that would take the “gangsters out of the game,” as they put it. Proponents say that it would, much as happened in the alcohol industry when Prohibition was repealed.
The Netherlands is often cited as a positive model for drug legalization. But the results of that nation’s experiment have been mixed. “Dutch rates of drug use are lower than U.S. rates in every category” and the percent of population that becomes problem drug users is lower than the EU average. But the Netherlands currently has “the second highest drug related public expenditure per capita of all countries in EU.” 75% of that expenditure is for law enforcement. Drug related crime (including violent crime) is a major problem. Last year, parliament voted to strengthen certain drug bans rather than further relaxing drug laws.
It turns out that many of our controlled drugs do not quite follow the alcohol and tobacco model. Many of these drugs have significantly greater addictive properties and much greater potential for harmful side effects. Legalization has not proven to substantially improve drug crime problems, although, some social problems may be reduced to a degree. It is quite unclear that legalization would be “a vast improvement on the status quo.”
I believe it would be foolish to fail to see the problems with our current drug policy. But neither is wholesale drug legalization necessarily the best answer to those problems. Drug abuse is a serious and complex public issue that deserves a serious and thoughtful approach. Simple ideological ‘solutions’ aren’t likely to fill the bill.
Monday, August 17, 2009
A Friend Calls It Quits
A man I counted as a friend took his own life a few days ago. I first met him when he and his family moved into our neighborhood about five years ago. This man and his wife seemed like good people, but from my first interactions with them, I couldn’t help but wonder how they ever paired up. I’ve seen opposites make good mates, but this couple seemed like they were mismatched.
Over the intervening years, the family’s children have spent time in our home. Their oldest child is between the ages of two of my children and struck up a friendship with the younger of those two. My wife became friends with the wife in this family.
I have watched this family struggle over the years. They moved to our area to buy and run a small business. Those years were very harsh for them. The interminable hours, difficulty attracting sufficient customers, and constant difficulty managing the finances and the low wage workforce took its toll. Those of us that knew the family breathed a huge sigh of relief when they finally sold the business.
But then employment challenges became the order of the day, causing additional strains on family relationships. Eventually, the man was working out of state. Location became a point of contention. Although this fellow constantly gave the appearance of having a cool and self-disciplined demeanor, we became aware that during some of his weekends home, he applied a number of coercive and manipulative practices in an attempt to get family members to meet certain demands. This even included threatening his children that he’d commit suicide if they failed to do as he wished.
During this time I became increasingly concerned about some of the communications my wife was having with the wife of this family. It began with this lady reaching out to friends for help, but it soon evolved into building a case against her husband. Some information was shared that I felt amounted to a betrayal of marital confidences. It saddened me to see people that I cared for experiencing such marital strife.
I hoped and prayed that they could get the help they needed and work things out. I knew that research showed that most couples that hold on through difficult situations find their marriages happy or very happy within five years. I was grateful when it was reported that some tremendous changes had taken place. The husband moved back home and found a job locally. He went to Scout camp with his son and became involved in some community efforts.
We had less insight into the family’s internal issues after their kids and our kids ended up attending different schools. The marital difficulties apparently did not get sufficiently resolved. My friend did not come with his son to Scout camp this year. He was ‘out of town.’ I later found out that he and his wife had split up a couple of weeks earlier. That helps explain the son’s despondency at camp.
The older children were unsurprised when they were told of their father’s suicide. They said that they had expected that he would carry out his threats sooner or later. I have no insight into the demons and mental issues with which my friend struggled, and I am not his judge. I’m sure that the pain he was dealing with was very real to him.
But it is difficult for me to imagine the extreme level of abuse my friend meted out to his children. His repeated and excessive attempts to inflict guilt on his children have been crowned by a horrifically demented and selfish act. This is something with which they will have to grapple for the rest of their lives. It’s terribly unfair.
I have found that one of the ways I manage grief is to write about it. In writing this post, I intend no harm to this family, which is already suffering beyond anything I can imagine. I wish them all the best and will demonstrate this by praying for them and working to help them.
Over the intervening years, the family’s children have spent time in our home. Their oldest child is between the ages of two of my children and struck up a friendship with the younger of those two. My wife became friends with the wife in this family.
I have watched this family struggle over the years. They moved to our area to buy and run a small business. Those years were very harsh for them. The interminable hours, difficulty attracting sufficient customers, and constant difficulty managing the finances and the low wage workforce took its toll. Those of us that knew the family breathed a huge sigh of relief when they finally sold the business.
But then employment challenges became the order of the day, causing additional strains on family relationships. Eventually, the man was working out of state. Location became a point of contention. Although this fellow constantly gave the appearance of having a cool and self-disciplined demeanor, we became aware that during some of his weekends home, he applied a number of coercive and manipulative practices in an attempt to get family members to meet certain demands. This even included threatening his children that he’d commit suicide if they failed to do as he wished.
During this time I became increasingly concerned about some of the communications my wife was having with the wife of this family. It began with this lady reaching out to friends for help, but it soon evolved into building a case against her husband. Some information was shared that I felt amounted to a betrayal of marital confidences. It saddened me to see people that I cared for experiencing such marital strife.
I hoped and prayed that they could get the help they needed and work things out. I knew that research showed that most couples that hold on through difficult situations find their marriages happy or very happy within five years. I was grateful when it was reported that some tremendous changes had taken place. The husband moved back home and found a job locally. He went to Scout camp with his son and became involved in some community efforts.
We had less insight into the family’s internal issues after their kids and our kids ended up attending different schools. The marital difficulties apparently did not get sufficiently resolved. My friend did not come with his son to Scout camp this year. He was ‘out of town.’ I later found out that he and his wife had split up a couple of weeks earlier. That helps explain the son’s despondency at camp.
The older children were unsurprised when they were told of their father’s suicide. They said that they had expected that he would carry out his threats sooner or later. I have no insight into the demons and mental issues with which my friend struggled, and I am not his judge. I’m sure that the pain he was dealing with was very real to him.
But it is difficult for me to imagine the extreme level of abuse my friend meted out to his children. His repeated and excessive attempts to inflict guilt on his children have been crowned by a horrifically demented and selfish act. This is something with which they will have to grapple for the rest of their lives. It’s terribly unfair.
I have found that one of the ways I manage grief is to write about it. In writing this post, I intend no harm to this family, which is already suffering beyond anything I can imagine. I wish them all the best and will demonstrate this by praying for them and working to help them.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Spending Rehab
The town of which I am a resident has just gone through a rather painful process to develop its annual budget. We’re a mostly residential community with a population of about 17,500. One of the reasons that I like living here is that it still has somewhat of a hometown atmosphere.
As reported here, one city councilman claims that they’ve gone through “through everything in every department” and cut everything they could. The city administrator says that this year’s budget is $898,000 smaller than last year’s. That’s pretty significant for a city this size, representing a spending cut of about $51 per resident.
But employees will receive no raises and no additional positions will be filled. That sounds harsh, but when citizens are having to tighten their belts, it is appropriate for government to do the same. This is a departure from last year when, instead of working hard to cut spending, city officials voted for a tax increase over the protestations of upset citizens.
But there’s less mystery here than meets the eye. The mayor and half the council members are up for election this year, while no city officals were on the ballot last year. As Bill Bennett notes in his book, America: the Last Best Hope, Vol. 2 (p. 171), “It’s a good thing for the leaders of this great republic to fear the people.”
Spending is fun!
I found a comment by one of the city council members to be quite telling of how politicians think. Of the spending cut exercise she said, “We now know how much more fun it is to spend money than it is to cut money.”
It’s not quite fair to pin such sentiments solely on politicians. I think it’s pretty much human nature. It’s almost always more fun to spend money than to cut spending. If this were not so we’d never have reached the current volume of personal and business debt in which our nation is drowning. But it’s even more fun when you’re spending other people’s money. And that’s where politicians differ from most of us (except for those of you that took the Cash-for-Clunkers dollars and ran.)
In the current economy, many individuals, businesses, local, and state governments are cutting back. The incentives for spending have been replaced by incentives for more austerity. Some were responsible and are better suited than others to weather leaner times. But even the spendthrifts are being forced to cut back.
The faith based road to prosperity
Note that I did not include national government in the previous paragraph. It is the one entity left that is still convinced that we can spend ourselves into prosperity. It has hired an army of economic prophets that strongly affirm that this is true, and it employs intimidation tactics against any officials that fail to pay adequate obeisance to the approved doctrine.
The current preaching is that the only way to salvation is for the federal government to spend gobs more cash than we have or can ever hope to repay. There is no such thing as overleveraging. It does not exist in the lofty realms of the all powerful centralized directive, say the economic prophets. (Murmur amen.)
Stop me before I spend again!
Back to my home town. The city’s recent austerity exercise would likely have been much less severe had more fiscal discipline been the rule of the day during the fat years. Since we know that it is the nature of nearly all people, including politicians, to be less than thrifty with other’s funds, why were there insufficient safeguards against this in my city during the first eight years of this decade?
When government starts doling out benefits, those with their hands out to government proliferate. The cries to meet this or that worthy ‘need’ soon rise to cacophonous levels. These calls frequently require ongoing commitments, so that once politicians achieve a sense of altruism by obligating taxpayer funds, a permanent constituency makes subsequent reductions in the revenue stream politically painful.
These commitments usually come in such small chunks that they pass under the voting public’s radar. Or they are presented in the rosiest of lights sans any adequate understanding of the negative costs involved so that the public accepts them as an overall good.
Who could possibly be opposed to a municipal swimming pool or to a grand fireworks display on the 4th of July? Ka-ching! Permanent commitment with built-in barriers to cost cutting. But, oh, didn’t that feel good? Gimme another hit.
Pressures to altruistically spend taxpayer dollars + insufficient vigilance by citizens = government overspending that defies cost cutting efforts.
As reported here, one city councilman claims that they’ve gone through “through everything in every department” and cut everything they could. The city administrator says that this year’s budget is $898,000 smaller than last year’s. That’s pretty significant for a city this size, representing a spending cut of about $51 per resident.
But employees will receive no raises and no additional positions will be filled. That sounds harsh, but when citizens are having to tighten their belts, it is appropriate for government to do the same. This is a departure from last year when, instead of working hard to cut spending, city officials voted for a tax increase over the protestations of upset citizens.
But there’s less mystery here than meets the eye. The mayor and half the council members are up for election this year, while no city officals were on the ballot last year. As Bill Bennett notes in his book, America: the Last Best Hope, Vol. 2 (p. 171), “It’s a good thing for the leaders of this great republic to fear the people.”
Spending is fun!
I found a comment by one of the city council members to be quite telling of how politicians think. Of the spending cut exercise she said, “We now know how much more fun it is to spend money than it is to cut money.”
It’s not quite fair to pin such sentiments solely on politicians. I think it’s pretty much human nature. It’s almost always more fun to spend money than to cut spending. If this were not so we’d never have reached the current volume of personal and business debt in which our nation is drowning. But it’s even more fun when you’re spending other people’s money. And that’s where politicians differ from most of us (except for those of you that took the Cash-for-Clunkers dollars and ran.)
In the current economy, many individuals, businesses, local, and state governments are cutting back. The incentives for spending have been replaced by incentives for more austerity. Some were responsible and are better suited than others to weather leaner times. But even the spendthrifts are being forced to cut back.
The faith based road to prosperity
Note that I did not include national government in the previous paragraph. It is the one entity left that is still convinced that we can spend ourselves into prosperity. It has hired an army of economic prophets that strongly affirm that this is true, and it employs intimidation tactics against any officials that fail to pay adequate obeisance to the approved doctrine.
The current preaching is that the only way to salvation is for the federal government to spend gobs more cash than we have or can ever hope to repay. There is no such thing as overleveraging. It does not exist in the lofty realms of the all powerful centralized directive, say the economic prophets. (Murmur amen.)
Stop me before I spend again!
Back to my home town. The city’s recent austerity exercise would likely have been much less severe had more fiscal discipline been the rule of the day during the fat years. Since we know that it is the nature of nearly all people, including politicians, to be less than thrifty with other’s funds, why were there insufficient safeguards against this in my city during the first eight years of this decade?
When government starts doling out benefits, those with their hands out to government proliferate. The cries to meet this or that worthy ‘need’ soon rise to cacophonous levels. These calls frequently require ongoing commitments, so that once politicians achieve a sense of altruism by obligating taxpayer funds, a permanent constituency makes subsequent reductions in the revenue stream politically painful.
These commitments usually come in such small chunks that they pass under the voting public’s radar. Or they are presented in the rosiest of lights sans any adequate understanding of the negative costs involved so that the public accepts them as an overall good.
Who could possibly be opposed to a municipal swimming pool or to a grand fireworks display on the 4th of July? Ka-ching! Permanent commitment with built-in barriers to cost cutting. But, oh, didn’t that feel good? Gimme another hit.
Pressures to altruistically spend taxpayer dollars + insufficient vigilance by citizens = government overspending that defies cost cutting efforts.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Do School Districts Provide Appropriate Value?
Do Utah’s 41 school districts provide value commensurate to their cost? Robyn Bagley of Parents for Choice in Education in this provocative article essentially asks for a cost-benefit analysis of the school district model. The questions posed in the article are purposefully pointed and imply a specific conclusion.
Since three of my children attended a charter school last year and will attend again this year, I was intrigued by Bagley’s arguments. I was interested in Bagley’s claim that charter schools essentially cost the taxpayer less.
I understand Bagley’s claim that charter schools all receive the exact same funding per pupil, but I’m not so certain about the assertion that charters receive less per-pupil funding than school districts. The state average per-pupil spending among the school districts for 2007-8 was $8,191, while per-pupil spending among the charters was $8,980. To me it looks like charters spent $789 per student more than the school districts did on average.
Am I missing something here? There is nothing in the figures provided, as far as I can tell, that demonstrates that the standard school district model costs more per student than the charter model. In fact, it seems that the opposite is true. I’d appreciate links to verifiable information that bolster’s Bagley’s assertion. It may be possible to make a case that superior educational outcomes more than compensate for additional charter school funding, but that’s another issue.
One thing that is certain is that the property tax rate column of the funding chart lists the average state rate at 0.005877, with the rate for charter schools being “N/A.” Bagley’s linked post explains that among the school districts “29% of the state's overall K-12 budget comes from property tax.” Not so with charters. As explained in this Utah Charter Schools FAQ, “The legislature appropriates funds each year to replace some of the local property tax revenues that are not available to charter schools.”
Should funding follow the student?
Bagley’s linked blog post argues for backpack funding. As far as I understand it, the proposal is to assess property tax for education at the same level statewide. (If that’s not proposed, implementing the plan would at any rate quickly result in a common statewide education property tax rate.) Those funds would go to the state and would be sent out, along with state and federal funds, in equal amounts per student, regardless of where the student attends school. This would follow the charter funding model and would eliminate disparities in tax rates and per-pupil spending.
It is implied that this would lead to more equal educational outcomes, but that is far from certain, since such outcomes are often deeply impacted by cultural, economic, family, and physical factors. Also, no explanation is provided for dealing with students in sparsely populated areas, where some per-student costs are necessarily higher.
Why are charter teachers so much less expensive?
Another figure that jumps out from the funding chart is that the average teacher compensation among the school districts in 2007-8 was $66,397, while it was only $47,016 among the charters. Despite this massive disparity, charter schools claim to produce better educational outcomes.
While I don’t know all of the reasons for this nearly $20,000 difference in teacher compensation, one factor is that when the state provided a raise exclusively to district personnel in actual teaching positions, the school districts reclassified as teachers many whose jobs are mainly administrative so that these (often higher paid staff) could also reap the benefits of the raise.
Another factor is that most charter school teachers are not members of an educator’s union, so they do not participate in union negotiated compensation packages. This allows the charters broad latitude in hiring and compensation decisions. A poorly performing teacher at a charter school that does not improve will likely soon be looking for another job. Just try to do that in a regular school district.
Interestingly, I found that many of the high quality teachers at my children’s school jumped at the chance to have a much freer hand in plying their trade with much less oppressive bureaucracy. Many took pay cuts to come to the school, while their previous schools were sorry to see them go. (I know this because some had previously taught my older children in district schools.)
School districts vs. more autonomy
Bagley notes that “those in the education establishment whose jobs depend on it could give you 1001 reasons why” allowing “all public schools to operate essentially like charters” (i.e. getting rid of school districts) won’t work. I can list a few of those right here:
“Why do over-bloated, mid-level education bureaucracies exist anyway? What I mean is, why do taxpayers subsidize districts? You're now probably thinking, well how else do we run our local schools? We need districts to administer and execute oversight, don't we? Do we? That's the question I'm posing. Do districts produce high-performing schools? Maybe they actually hinder them with their one-size-fits-all big government approach? Fair questions.”The recent kerfuffle about tax increases by the Jordan School District is used as a backdrop for the article. Bagley appears to assert that much of the taxes consumed by school districts provide little value. The charter school model is cited to bolster this argument.
“This Fall nearly 80 charter schools will be operational here in Utah. These Utah charters are independent schools, [mostly] autonomous from a district, making their own management, governance, and budgetary decisions. Don't panic. They are subject to legislative and USOE rules and regulations and have general oversight by a State Charter Board. Each charter is governed by a volunteer board and those board members serve with no compensation or benefits. The Board hires their Director/Principal who then takes on the role of CEO of the school. They, not union bosses, determine the contracts and salary schedules for teachers and employees. They set the direction of the school and contract out services to the providers of their choosing. They develop the culture and the emphasis.Are charters cheaper?
“… Most importantly, charters are in high demand. While they now serve roughly 30,000 students, thousands more remain on waiting lists hoping to get into the school of their choice through a lottery process. Another way they differ from traditional schools is that charter enrollment and growth is capped (not a good thing, in my opinion), and most new charters exceed their capacity before their doors even open. The buck stops with them. If they can't operate within their budget, their doors close. If there is mismanagement or their students are performing poorly, parents hold them accountable. They compete for students. If the customer isn't satisfied, they can vote with their feet and leave.”
Since three of my children attended a charter school last year and will attend again this year, I was intrigued by Bagley’s arguments. I was interested in Bagley’s claim that charter schools essentially cost the taxpayer less.
“Here's the clincher - charters receive a set amount of funding per-pupil (which is less than district schools by the way-see here). Remember that nasty fight going on in the Jordan District over a property tax hike? Unlike traditional public schools where per-pupil spending varies district by district, there is no inequity in funding. (see our last blog).”Looking at the link provided to the Utah School District Comparison, you can see that per-pupil spending varies quite a bit among the 40 school districts listed. It is not surprising that sparsely populated districts tend to have much higher per-student costs.
I understand Bagley’s claim that charter schools all receive the exact same funding per pupil, but I’m not so certain about the assertion that charters receive less per-pupil funding than school districts. The state average per-pupil spending among the school districts for 2007-8 was $8,191, while per-pupil spending among the charters was $8,980. To me it looks like charters spent $789 per student more than the school districts did on average.
Am I missing something here? There is nothing in the figures provided, as far as I can tell, that demonstrates that the standard school district model costs more per student than the charter model. In fact, it seems that the opposite is true. I’d appreciate links to verifiable information that bolster’s Bagley’s assertion. It may be possible to make a case that superior educational outcomes more than compensate for additional charter school funding, but that’s another issue.
One thing that is certain is that the property tax rate column of the funding chart lists the average state rate at 0.005877, with the rate for charter schools being “N/A.” Bagley’s linked post explains that among the school districts “29% of the state's overall K-12 budget comes from property tax.” Not so with charters. As explained in this Utah Charter Schools FAQ, “The legislature appropriates funds each year to replace some of the local property tax revenues that are not available to charter schools.”
Should funding follow the student?
Bagley’s linked blog post argues for backpack funding. As far as I understand it, the proposal is to assess property tax for education at the same level statewide. (If that’s not proposed, implementing the plan would at any rate quickly result in a common statewide education property tax rate.) Those funds would go to the state and would be sent out, along with state and federal funds, in equal amounts per student, regardless of where the student attends school. This would follow the charter funding model and would eliminate disparities in tax rates and per-pupil spending.
It is implied that this would lead to more equal educational outcomes, but that is far from certain, since such outcomes are often deeply impacted by cultural, economic, family, and physical factors. Also, no explanation is provided for dealing with students in sparsely populated areas, where some per-student costs are necessarily higher.
Why are charter teachers so much less expensive?
Another figure that jumps out from the funding chart is that the average teacher compensation among the school districts in 2007-8 was $66,397, while it was only $47,016 among the charters. Despite this massive disparity, charter schools claim to produce better educational outcomes.
While I don’t know all of the reasons for this nearly $20,000 difference in teacher compensation, one factor is that when the state provided a raise exclusively to district personnel in actual teaching positions, the school districts reclassified as teachers many whose jobs are mainly administrative so that these (often higher paid staff) could also reap the benefits of the raise.
Another factor is that most charter school teachers are not members of an educator’s union, so they do not participate in union negotiated compensation packages. This allows the charters broad latitude in hiring and compensation decisions. A poorly performing teacher at a charter school that does not improve will likely soon be looking for another job. Just try to do that in a regular school district.
Interestingly, I found that many of the high quality teachers at my children’s school jumped at the chance to have a much freer hand in plying their trade with much less oppressive bureaucracy. Many took pay cuts to come to the school, while their previous schools were sorry to see them go. (I know this because some had previously taught my older children in district schools.)
School districts vs. more autonomy
Bagley notes that “those in the education establishment whose jobs depend on it could give you 1001 reasons why” allowing “all public schools to operate essentially like charters” (i.e. getting rid of school districts) won’t work. I can list a few of those right here:
- Districts can take advantage of economies of scale that more autonomous schools can’t.
- OK, but are those economies of scale actually buying us anything of value?
- Districts can offer more special programs that charters can’t, such as foreign language and sports.
- How valuable are those programs? Who do they benefit? Does their value exceed the more personally tailored instruction and programs available through charters? Wouldn’t schools pop up that offer such programs for those that want them?
- Charters work well for students with highly supportive and involved parents. They would be far less successful if they had to deal with all of the problem students that districts have to deal with.
- How can we be certain that these problem students would not perform better under a more autonomous school atmosphere? (Empirical facts, not anecdotes, please.)
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Low Expectations
Peggy Noonan makes this astute comment about what we expect of our federal legislators:
In fact, when a politician uncharacteristically behaves in a manner that seems truly unselfish and benevolent, our first impulse is not to think, “What a wonderful gesture.” Rather, we think that something fishy is going on. We do so because our experience tells us that politicians almost always act in their own self interest in a system where the everyday way of doing business would be considered morally abhorrent to most of us.
When George Washington resigned his military commission following the American Revolution and opted to return to private life, people all over the U.S. and Europe were stunned. He could literally have become king of the United States. Many people thought that Washington had ulterior power based motives. But they were dumbfounded when he really did retire from public life and return to running his Mount Vernon estate.
Years later, it was only at great importuning by James Madison and others that Washington agreed to attend the Philadelphia constitutional convention, a path that ultimately led to Washington becoming the first President of the United States. Many historians believe that the convention would not have succeeded without Washington’s personal influence and stature. But this is only true because of the tremendous trust both politicians and regular citizens could place in him, due to his extraordinary demonstration of his willingness to eschew power.
We may revere such rare examples, but we do not expect them to be repeated in our day. We fully expect politicians to live down to their reputations. In this we are rarely disappointed.
A few years ago I heard a politician express his frustration with the public’s view of him and his colleagues. He wondered how it was that so many people could be so enthused about his candidacy, only to view him as the enemy almost immediately upon taking office. He opined that he and his colleagues were still the same people with the same concerns that they had during the campaign.
Among the reasons for this phenomenon are:
The incremental and back door approaches often accomplish far more of a political agenda in a longer lasting manner than the front door approach. This is why we must always be vigilant in watching for such insidious advances. (Such as the Ginnie Mae–FHA partnership that is rapidly becoming a clone of the Fannie Mae–Freddie Mac debacle, as explained here.)
But sometimes the political class simply won’t be satisfied with the incremental approach. It seems that our two-party political system often creates the appearance of a mandate for a party to implement much of its ideological agenda, when the electorate is just sending the message that the other party is out of favor. This occurred during the G.W. Bush administration. It’s happening now.
The politicos felt that last year’s election was a mandate for massive change. But as Noonan notes, not only have the changes naturally brought on by the recession produced a significant aversion to change since last autumn, the pace of change since then is terrifying the nation. (See here for an interesting view on the increasing pace of change in our lives.) The current tack of the politicos is to in effect say, “Don’t worry. You can trust us. This will all be for your good.”
The people aren’t buying it. They’ve had enough change for now. They want normalcy and the political class is working in direct opposition to that desire. The politicians can try to ram their ideology based change down the throats of a less-than-willing public, but there will be stark consequences to pay for such forceful arrogance.
Interestingly, I doubt that there is anything to be done about it now. There might have been a point where sensibility could have been restored a few weeks ago, but that did not happen. The forces that have been set in action are now beyond the ability of anyone to control. All we can do now is to watch it the way we’d watch a violent summer storm. Once the storm is over we’ll have to go out and see what kind of damage has been done.
Perhaps the agents of change will achieve some kind of Pyrrhic victory, but my guess is that their cause will suffer many self inflicted wounds from which recovery will prove difficult.
“They hired a man to represent them in Washington. They give him a big office, a huge staff and the power to tell people what to do. They give him a car and a driver, sometimes a security detail, and a special pin showing he’s a congressman. And all they ask in return is that he see to their interests and not terrify them too much. Really, that’s all people ask. Expectations are very low.”I think Noonan gets this about right. We really do have low expectations of our politicians. Sure, we’d all like to live in a utopia where politicians are actually great and altruistic people. We even sometimes allow ourselves to be beguiled (especially during campaign season) into thinking that this or that person might actually fill such a bill. But we don’t really expect it.
In fact, when a politician uncharacteristically behaves in a manner that seems truly unselfish and benevolent, our first impulse is not to think, “What a wonderful gesture.” Rather, we think that something fishy is going on. We do so because our experience tells us that politicians almost always act in their own self interest in a system where the everyday way of doing business would be considered morally abhorrent to most of us.
When George Washington resigned his military commission following the American Revolution and opted to return to private life, people all over the U.S. and Europe were stunned. He could literally have become king of the United States. Many people thought that Washington had ulterior power based motives. But they were dumbfounded when he really did retire from public life and return to running his Mount Vernon estate.
Years later, it was only at great importuning by James Madison and others that Washington agreed to attend the Philadelphia constitutional convention, a path that ultimately led to Washington becoming the first President of the United States. Many historians believe that the convention would not have succeeded without Washington’s personal influence and stature. But this is only true because of the tremendous trust both politicians and regular citizens could place in him, due to his extraordinary demonstration of his willingness to eschew power.
We may revere such rare examples, but we do not expect them to be repeated in our day. We fully expect politicians to live down to their reputations. In this we are rarely disappointed.
A few years ago I heard a politician express his frustration with the public’s view of him and his colleagues. He wondered how it was that so many people could be so enthused about his candidacy, only to view him as the enemy almost immediately upon taking office. He opined that he and his colleagues were still the same people with the same concerns that they had during the campaign.
Among the reasons for this phenomenon are:
- Upon taking office, you do in fact be come one of THEM. While people have difficulty voicing it, many seem to innately understand that your incentives change substantially upon taking political office. You may think you are the same, but you’re not. Even erstwhile supporters will turn against you the moment they sense that you are doing something that could impinge on their personal interests.
- During the campaign, you necessarily surround yourself with supporters. Once the campaign is over, most of these people go back to living their regular lives. The ones that are still hanging around generally want something from you.
- What you said you’d do on the campaign trail was pie in the sky, and everyone knows it. But once you take office you have the ability to make actual impact on people’s lives. Those that sense no harm in your actions are like satisfied customers. Few of them make any noise about it unless you deliberately seek them out. Those that sense potential harm, however, will constantly be breathing down your neck. So it can seem that your supporters have become your enemies, when this is not necessarily the case. (Although, it could be the case if you ruffle too many feathers.)
The incremental and back door approaches often accomplish far more of a political agenda in a longer lasting manner than the front door approach. This is why we must always be vigilant in watching for such insidious advances. (Such as the Ginnie Mae–FHA partnership that is rapidly becoming a clone of the Fannie Mae–Freddie Mac debacle, as explained here.)
But sometimes the political class simply won’t be satisfied with the incremental approach. It seems that our two-party political system often creates the appearance of a mandate for a party to implement much of its ideological agenda, when the electorate is just sending the message that the other party is out of favor. This occurred during the G.W. Bush administration. It’s happening now.
The politicos felt that last year’s election was a mandate for massive change. But as Noonan notes, not only have the changes naturally brought on by the recession produced a significant aversion to change since last autumn, the pace of change since then is terrifying the nation. (See here for an interesting view on the increasing pace of change in our lives.) The current tack of the politicos is to in effect say, “Don’t worry. You can trust us. This will all be for your good.”
The people aren’t buying it. They’ve had enough change for now. They want normalcy and the political class is working in direct opposition to that desire. The politicians can try to ram their ideology based change down the throats of a less-than-willing public, but there will be stark consequences to pay for such forceful arrogance.
Interestingly, I doubt that there is anything to be done about it now. There might have been a point where sensibility could have been restored a few weeks ago, but that did not happen. The forces that have been set in action are now beyond the ability of anyone to control. All we can do now is to watch it the way we’d watch a violent summer storm. Once the storm is over we’ll have to go out and see what kind of damage has been done.
Perhaps the agents of change will achieve some kind of Pyrrhic victory, but my guess is that their cause will suffer many self inflicted wounds from which recovery will prove difficult.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Worse Than Doing Nothing
“When health care is subsidized, no one should be surprised that people demand more of it and that the costs to produce it increase.” —Arthur Laffer
I realize that we are currently in a major economic slump. But over the last four decades the overall economic picture has improved dramatically in dynamic ways. Most life necessities and nonessentials are less expensive in real terms (i.e. number of labor minutes) than they were 40 years ago. Despite the expansive increase in the purchase of luxury and restaurant foods during this time, for example, Americans spend a much smaller chunk of their take home pay on food than in the golden era of the mid-60s.
The resulting increase in discretionary income has expanded our choices by orders of magnitude. The average American today has ready access to literally millions of products and services that simply didn’t exist 40 years ago. Many of the things we buy today could not have been had at any price back then. (Think home computers, iPods, and breathable odor resistant clothing for athletics.)
And many things that were once luxuries have become common as the real costs of these things have decreased. (Think home carpeting, power car windows, air conditioning, and even recreational vehicles like boats and motorcycles.)
Detractors like to say that wages have decreased during this time, but they are using carefully selected data that ignores total compensation, compares newer immigrants with long-term residents, and uses archaic measures for determining economic class. Tellingly, most of this nation’s ‘poor’ have cell phones and enjoy more individual dwelling space than do many members of other nations’ upper classes.
There are, however, some economic pockets that have not enjoyed this kind of reduction in real costs. Health care is one of those fields. While there have been tremendous improvements in health care technologies and services, real costs have increased.
The common explanations of why health care costs have increased while most other costs have decreased simply don’t hold water. Some like to point to expensive new technologies. But in every other field, new technologies have reduced costs over time. Why would it be different in health care? Greedy professionals have been mentioned. But highly compensated professionals exist in other arenas that have seen real costs decline.
Another favorite whipping boy is the health insurance industry, which operates with a profit motive. But casualty insurance also operates with a profit motive, and yet real costs in that field have not increased like in the health care field. Besides, I have previously discussed how there is always a profit motive of some kind in human transactions, except in certain highly personal interactions where individuals willingly sacrifice.
Literally every single reason bandied about in mainstream media and policy circles for the increases in medical care costs do not, upon proper scrutiny, prove to be major contributors to the problem. So what is at the root of this matter? Economist Arthur Laffer suggests in this WSJ article that government subsidies that distort the market are the real troublemakers, because they provide incentives for health care consumers to consume too much.
The current proposals for expanding the role of government in health care would not only do “nothing to address the gap between the price paid and the price received,” but implementing these “reforms would literally be worse than doing nothing.” Proponents of the government centric plans claim that these initiatives would be better than the status quo, but Laffer cites his own research that demonstrates that such claims “couldn’t be further from the truth.” Laffer’s research found that:
One of the favorite rants by supporters of expanding government’s power over the health care industry is that opponents of the plan have no plan of their own. There are some easy comebacks to this.
As for what to do to fix health care, Laffer proposes the following:
The same was true when the Republicans controlled the levers of government. You never saw them voting to reduce their own political power. They might have gone for centralized government lite, but it was still all about power. If we understand this one principle, it will make it a lot easier to figure out why the political class acts as it does. It will also help us to see through the current government-as-savior health care sales job.
I realize that we are currently in a major economic slump. But over the last four decades the overall economic picture has improved dramatically in dynamic ways. Most life necessities and nonessentials are less expensive in real terms (i.e. number of labor minutes) than they were 40 years ago. Despite the expansive increase in the purchase of luxury and restaurant foods during this time, for example, Americans spend a much smaller chunk of their take home pay on food than in the golden era of the mid-60s.
The resulting increase in discretionary income has expanded our choices by orders of magnitude. The average American today has ready access to literally millions of products and services that simply didn’t exist 40 years ago. Many of the things we buy today could not have been had at any price back then. (Think home computers, iPods, and breathable odor resistant clothing for athletics.)
And many things that were once luxuries have become common as the real costs of these things have decreased. (Think home carpeting, power car windows, air conditioning, and even recreational vehicles like boats and motorcycles.)
Detractors like to say that wages have decreased during this time, but they are using carefully selected data that ignores total compensation, compares newer immigrants with long-term residents, and uses archaic measures for determining economic class. Tellingly, most of this nation’s ‘poor’ have cell phones and enjoy more individual dwelling space than do many members of other nations’ upper classes.
There are, however, some economic pockets that have not enjoyed this kind of reduction in real costs. Health care is one of those fields. While there have been tremendous improvements in health care technologies and services, real costs have increased.
The common explanations of why health care costs have increased while most other costs have decreased simply don’t hold water. Some like to point to expensive new technologies. But in every other field, new technologies have reduced costs over time. Why would it be different in health care? Greedy professionals have been mentioned. But highly compensated professionals exist in other arenas that have seen real costs decline.
Another favorite whipping boy is the health insurance industry, which operates with a profit motive. But casualty insurance also operates with a profit motive, and yet real costs in that field have not increased like in the health care field. Besides, I have previously discussed how there is always a profit motive of some kind in human transactions, except in certain highly personal interactions where individuals willingly sacrifice.
Literally every single reason bandied about in mainstream media and policy circles for the increases in medical care costs do not, upon proper scrutiny, prove to be major contributors to the problem. So what is at the root of this matter? Economist Arthur Laffer suggests in this WSJ article that government subsidies that distort the market are the real troublemakers, because they provide incentives for health care consumers to consume too much.
“Consumers are receiving quality medical care at little direct cost to themselves. This creates runaway costs that have to be addressed. … When health care is subsidized, no one should be surprised that people demand more of it and that the costs to produce it increase.”This creates a “health-care wedge … that reflects the difference between what health-care costs the specific provider and what the patient actually pays.” Someone else picks up the tab for the difference. That someone is the faceless mass of American taxpayers. (It’s so much easier to justify theft when the victim is a faceless and compliant mass.) Laffer says that the result is “like a negative tax: Costs rise and people demand more than they need.”
The current proposals for expanding the role of government in health care would not only do “nothing to address the gap between the price paid and the price received,” but implementing these “reforms would literally be worse than doing nothing.” Proponents of the government centric plans claim that these initiatives would be better than the status quo, but Laffer cites his own research that demonstrates that such claims “couldn’t be further from the truth.” Laffer’s research found that:
“a $1 trillion increase in federal government health subsidies will accelerate health-care inflation, lead to continued growth in health-care expenditures, and diminish our economic growth even further. Despite these costs, some 30 million people will remain uninsured.”It is interesting to note that one of the major purposes cited for expanding government control of health care — covering the uninsured — will remain unfulfilled even if these schemes are realized.
One of the favorite rants by supporters of expanding government’s power over the health care industry is that opponents of the plan have no plan of their own. There are some easy comebacks to this.
- When doing nothing is better than implementing these plans, no alternative plan is necessary.
- Why is it that progressives are always so concerned with ‘planning’ other people’s lives? Didn’t we learn anything from 20th Century Communists about the follies of centralized economic planning and what happens when you try to plan other people’s lives?
- Opponents of the plans have presented many plans of their own. Political power brokers hate all of those plans because they diminish government power rather than growing it.
As for what to do to fix health care, Laffer proposes the following:
“Rather than expanding the role of government in the health-care market, Congress should implement a patient-centered approach to health-care reform. A patient-centered approach focuses on the patient-doctor relationship and empowers the patient and the doctor to make effective and economical choices.I like Laffer’s proposal, but I doubt anything like that will actually happen. When was the last time politicians voted to reduce their own power over the lives of citizens? Let’s be honest. These people don’t actually care one iota about improving health care or decreasing health care costs. This whole thing is entirely about power. Period.
“A patient-centered health-care reform begins with individual ownership of insurance policies and leverages Health Savings Accounts, a low-premium, high-deductible alternative to traditional insurance that includes a tax-advantaged savings account. It allows people to purchase insurance policies across state lines and reduces the number of mandated benefits insurers are required to cover. It reallocates the majority of Medicaid spending into a simple voucher for low-income individuals to purchase their own insurance. And it reduces the cost of medical procedures by reforming tort liability laws.
“By empowering patients and doctors to manage health-care decisions, a patient-centered health-care reform will control costs, improve health outcomes, and improve the overall efficiency of the health-care system.”
The same was true when the Republicans controlled the levers of government. You never saw them voting to reduce their own political power. They might have gone for centralized government lite, but it was still all about power. If we understand this one principle, it will make it a lot easier to figure out why the political class acts as it does. It will also help us to see through the current government-as-savior health care sales job.
Friday, August 07, 2009
Should Legislators be Required to Read the Bills They Vote On?
“If a bill is too big to read, it's a good sign you shouldn't be passing it. Rule by anonymous technocrats is a form of tyranny, however benign.” —Mark Steyn
Mark Steyn believes that every legislator should be required to read in its entirety any bill upon which he or she votes. One of his readers took issue with this stance (here):
Another of Steyn’s readers writes in to remind that “Congress passed the onerous Sarbanes-Oxley on the premise there needed to be a new law requiring CEOs to read their financial statements and personally face legal penalties in case there are errors.” What could be more appropriate than making them take their own medicine?
Steyn drolly notes that Sarbanes-Oxley was “Another hastily drawn piece of must-pass-now legislation that's done wonders for our overseas competitors.”
I fully subscribe to the concept that no legislator should be permitted to vote on any piece of legislation that she or he has not personally read in its entirety. Another philosophy is that no bill should exceed 10 pages in 12-point font with one-inch margins.
The main idea here is to make sure that those we elect to represent us in making laws are fully aware of what they are voting on. The hope is that this would cause more serious deliberation. It would also necessarily slow the pace of legislation. While some see that in a negative light, many think that less legislation coming out of Washington and our state capitals would produce an overall public good.
But the law of unintended consequences applies everywhere. One possible side effect would be to push more policy out of the realm of elected legislators and into the already expansive realm of unelected appointees that enjoy far too much arbitrary power. It would be easy. Bills would simply be filled with statements like, “With specific regulations to be determined by the Department of ….” After all, politicians are nothing if not inventive of ways to avoid taking responsibility.
You could try to draft policy that would take these things into consideration, but it would likely exceed the 10-page length limit mentioned above. There is simply no satisfactory substitute for a culture of individual liberty that regards the aggregation of coercive powers with tremendous suspicion.
Mark Steyn believes that every legislator should be required to read in its entirety any bill upon which he or she votes. One of his readers took issue with this stance (here):
“Every CEO in the country, including Ronald Reagan as President, reads executive summaries of important documents. The idea that any Senator has to read an entire bill is nonsense. He needs staff not only to read it but to relate how items on page 3 relate to provisions on page 1009. Did George Bush read every line of the bills he signed? Bill Clinton signed Welfare reform and I bet he did not read the final bill (though to be fair he is wonky enough to have read a lot of it). What is true is that without time there is no way staff could read it and draft the necessary critiques for Senatorial review but this “He hasn’t read the bill stuff” is stupidity not some great insight.”Steyn completely disagrees with this line of thought. He replies that a senator “is not a CEO — notwithstanding the vast Gulf Emir-sized retinue to which he has become accustomed.”
“He doesn't run anything. He has no payroll to make, no contracts to fulfill, no deliveries to expedite. A legislator is elected to legislate — so, if he doesn't read the law before he makes it law, he's not doing the only job he has.”That last comment is worth serious consideration. This raises a couple of questions.
- What precisely is it that we hire legislators to do?
- How well do they actually perform these tasks?
Another of Steyn’s readers writes in to remind that “Congress passed the onerous Sarbanes-Oxley on the premise there needed to be a new law requiring CEOs to read their financial statements and personally face legal penalties in case there are errors.” What could be more appropriate than making them take their own medicine?
Steyn drolly notes that Sarbanes-Oxley was “Another hastily drawn piece of must-pass-now legislation that's done wonders for our overseas competitors.”
I fully subscribe to the concept that no legislator should be permitted to vote on any piece of legislation that she or he has not personally read in its entirety. Another philosophy is that no bill should exceed 10 pages in 12-point font with one-inch margins.
The main idea here is to make sure that those we elect to represent us in making laws are fully aware of what they are voting on. The hope is that this would cause more serious deliberation. It would also necessarily slow the pace of legislation. While some see that in a negative light, many think that less legislation coming out of Washington and our state capitals would produce an overall public good.
But the law of unintended consequences applies everywhere. One possible side effect would be to push more policy out of the realm of elected legislators and into the already expansive realm of unelected appointees that enjoy far too much arbitrary power. It would be easy. Bills would simply be filled with statements like, “With specific regulations to be determined by the Department of ….” After all, politicians are nothing if not inventive of ways to avoid taking responsibility.
You could try to draft policy that would take these things into consideration, but it would likely exceed the 10-page length limit mentioned above. There is simply no satisfactory substitute for a culture of individual liberty that regards the aggregation of coercive powers with tremendous suspicion.
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
What Can We Learn From Finland's Top Ranked Education System?
Ellen Gamerman has a fascinating article in the WSJ about education in Finland. Having lived in Norway which shares a common border with Finland, having visited Finland, and having a brother that spent time living in Finland and that can speak Finnish, I was interested.
Finnish 15-year-olds ranked the best in the world on recent standardized tests focused on science, math, and reading. Yet:
While Gamerman explains that the last three years of high school are split into academic and vocational disciplines, she skips the fact that compulsory attendance stops just prior to those years. This fact perhaps helps explain Finland’s lower high school dropout rate (4% for academic and 10% for vocational schools) when compared to the U.S. rate that is “roughly 25%.”
But that doesn’t explain why students that have yet to enter their final three years of high school outperform their peers around the globe. According to Gamerman, the elements that contribute to this superior performance include:
The standard U.S. model of recent years has been to trust teachers less and less and to mandate more and more from centralized bureaucracies. It would appear that the U.S. trajectory is going in the wrong direction.
The author credits Finland’s entirely free college education system with allowing “Finnish children to enjoy a less-pressured childhood,” since they don’t have to worry about getting into college or paying for it. OK, but that’s kind of a weird comment to put into an article about educational excellence. Somehow, lack of pressure to perform well is supposed to improve performance? I’m not seeing the connection. Nowhere does Gamerman explain how free college affects degree attainment rates or how it affects the value of a degree.
Gamerman mentions a 15-year-old that she suggests is gifted. When the girl is ahead of her peers in the classroom, “she sometimes doodles in her journal while waiting for others to catch up.” I wonder what the gifted yet active bodied boys do. I have at least two sons that often can’t seem to consistently sit around and quietly doodle in such situations. Although at least one of them is a spectacular doodler, these boys often get up, move around, chatter, and generally bother others. I’d like to see how Finnish teachers handle such cases.
While the Finnish teaching model is probably a great benefit (we know, for example, from research that if a child in American schools can get high quality teachers three years in a row before junior high school, they can exceed all of the other bad teaching put together), I wonder how much of the Finnish excellence is based in cultural factors that are not easily reproduced elsewhere.
By definition (per founding documents), the United States is a pluralistic society. Despite what others claim, the U.S. is the most culturally diverse nation on earth. We’re simply never going to have the kind of homogeneity they have in Finland. Nor do we generally believe such to be a virtue.
Parents can do a lot to increase their children’s responsibility level and to promote reading. But achieving some kind of wholesale cultural change in this direction would be a tall order and would probably include unacceptable levels of coercion.
Studying the Finnish model of education is a worthwhile pursuit. But we would do well to be careful to pull out those worthy elements that can feasibly be emulated and then try them out in pilot programs where they can be refined and improved. We can’t become Finland, nor should we try. But there are things we can learn from Finland that would improve American education without increasing its cost or expanding the power of the educrats.
Finnish 15-year-olds ranked the best in the world on recent standardized tests focused on science, math, and reading. Yet:
- Finland spends less per student than does Utah, which perpetually ranks 51st among U.S. states in per-pupil spending.
- Finnish children don’t start school until age seven.
- Class time is less structured than in most U.S. schools.
- Finnish students have little homework.
- Their schools offer few extracurricular activities such as sports and social dances.
- There are no programs for the gifted or recognition of high performers.
- Finnish teachers are paid about the same as their American counterparts, although, the country has a higher cost of living.
While Gamerman explains that the last three years of high school are split into academic and vocational disciplines, she skips the fact that compulsory attendance stops just prior to those years. This fact perhaps helps explain Finland’s lower high school dropout rate (4% for academic and 10% for vocational schools) when compared to the U.S. rate that is “roughly 25%.”
But that doesn’t explain why students that have yet to enter their final three years of high school outperform their peers around the globe. According to Gamerman, the elements that contribute to this superior performance include:
- Good basic teaching sans a lot of the fluff and frills to which we have grown accustomed.
- A great deal of teacher autonomy, including selection of textbooks and development of curriculum designed with the goal of getting students to reach national standards.
- A high degree of student responsibility. Gamerman suggests that this is rooted in cultural norms.
- A high level of cultural, social, and economic homogeneity.
- A culturally based (or maybe need based) love of reading.
The standard U.S. model of recent years has been to trust teachers less and less and to mandate more and more from centralized bureaucracies. It would appear that the U.S. trajectory is going in the wrong direction.
The author credits Finland’s entirely free college education system with allowing “Finnish children to enjoy a less-pressured childhood,” since they don’t have to worry about getting into college or paying for it. OK, but that’s kind of a weird comment to put into an article about educational excellence. Somehow, lack of pressure to perform well is supposed to improve performance? I’m not seeing the connection. Nowhere does Gamerman explain how free college affects degree attainment rates or how it affects the value of a degree.
Gamerman mentions a 15-year-old that she suggests is gifted. When the girl is ahead of her peers in the classroom, “she sometimes doodles in her journal while waiting for others to catch up.” I wonder what the gifted yet active bodied boys do. I have at least two sons that often can’t seem to consistently sit around and quietly doodle in such situations. Although at least one of them is a spectacular doodler, these boys often get up, move around, chatter, and generally bother others. I’d like to see how Finnish teachers handle such cases.
While the Finnish teaching model is probably a great benefit (we know, for example, from research that if a child in American schools can get high quality teachers three years in a row before junior high school, they can exceed all of the other bad teaching put together), I wonder how much of the Finnish excellence is based in cultural factors that are not easily reproduced elsewhere.
By definition (per founding documents), the United States is a pluralistic society. Despite what others claim, the U.S. is the most culturally diverse nation on earth. We’re simply never going to have the kind of homogeneity they have in Finland. Nor do we generally believe such to be a virtue.
Parents can do a lot to increase their children’s responsibility level and to promote reading. But achieving some kind of wholesale cultural change in this direction would be a tall order and would probably include unacceptable levels of coercion.
Studying the Finnish model of education is a worthwhile pursuit. But we would do well to be careful to pull out those worthy elements that can feasibly be emulated and then try them out in pilot programs where they can be refined and improved. We can’t become Finland, nor should we try. But there are things we can learn from Finland that would improve American education without increasing its cost or expanding the power of the educrats.
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
The Birther Conspiracies: Where Reason Meets Its Match
A few weeks ago I wrote a post affirming that President Obama is in fact a natural born U.S. citizen, and is thusly qualified to serve as president under the citizenship provisions of Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution. Predictably, the post drew responses from advocates of the idea that the President is not a natural born citizen. In the weeks since I wrote the post, the word birther has been coined as a label for such people.
The rapid and broad adoption of this term—even by many of the President’s opponents—is a rare PR coup. It is a natural snarl word that evokes images of nutcake conspiracy theorists. Some highly irreverent ‘definitions’ of the term can be found in this Urban Dictionary listing. Even many conservatives are actively working to marginalize the birther movement, since it reflects badly on everyone that opposes any of the President’s policies through guilt by association.
WSJ Editor James Taranto applied his capable hand to debunking the birther conspiracy in two posts last week (7/30/09 – first item, 7/31/09 – fourth item titled Brouhaha, Balderdash, Ballyhoo--Birtherianism!). An abridgement of Taranto’s arguments simply won’t do. So I will reprise both of them in their fullness.
As noted in my previous post, any court in the land will dismiss any case brought before it based on the birther conspiracies. The court will either find the case meritless or will find that the plaintiff has no standing to bring the case. To the birthers this is simply evidence of how deep the conspiracy lies. As with all conspiracy theories, inconvenient contrary evidence is either ignored or explained away by more ignoring of evidence, introduction of falsehoods, and/or giving improper weight to various bits of information.
Even if birthers are determined to remain convinced that the President is not a natural born citizen of the United States (despite all evidence otherwise), they have only two courses of action available to them:
This leaves birthers only with the path of dishonesty. This is their only real option. This is so, even if they sincerely believe in their disingenuous arguments.
There are ample legitimate grounds for opposing President Obama’s policies. Birtherism distracts from these genuine reasons and diminishes their potency in the court of public opinion due to guilt by association. The President and his supporters have much to gain by keeping birthers in the news because doing so increasingly makes all of the President’s opponents look like they’re crazy.
I agree with Taranto, that birthers may help propel President Obama into a second term. If that is the case, they will succeed in achieving the exact opposite of their stated goals. It will mean that the American people have considered and then reconsidered the birthers’ theories and judged them to be without merit, and it will extend a presidency they boldly oppose.
I suppose it is possible that many birthers will actually be pleased if this does happen. These may very well be like Don Quixote, seeking fulfillment by playing the hero to imaginary injustices, even if this path leads to the ruin of the very ideals they claim to support.
The rapid and broad adoption of this term—even by many of the President’s opponents—is a rare PR coup. It is a natural snarl word that evokes images of nutcake conspiracy theorists. Some highly irreverent ‘definitions’ of the term can be found in this Urban Dictionary listing. Even many conservatives are actively working to marginalize the birther movement, since it reflects badly on everyone that opposes any of the President’s policies through guilt by association.
WSJ Editor James Taranto applied his capable hand to debunking the birther conspiracy in two posts last week (7/30/09 – first item, 7/31/09 – fourth item titled Brouhaha, Balderdash, Ballyhoo--Birtherianism!). An abridgement of Taranto’s arguments simply won’t do. So I will reprise both of them in their fullness.
It’s Certifiable (7/30/09)
Several readers have written over the past few days taking us to task for dismissing so-called birthers as lunatics without bothering to refute their claims. We reluctantly concede their point. The birthers have managed to sow confusion in the minds of some who are not lunatics, and for the latter group’s benefit it is worth clarifying matters.
Compounding the confusion, some rebuttals of the birthers’ claims have been based in part on misinformation. National Review, for example, asserts that it would not matter if the president had been born in a foreign country: “His mother was a native of Kansas, whose residents have been citizens of the United States for a very long time, and whose children are citizens of the United States as well.”
In fact, although some people born outside the U.S. are natural-born citizens (including John McCain, born in Panama, where his father was stationed as a naval officer), the timing and circumstances of Obama’s birth make the place a necessary condition for natural-born citizenship. The State Department Web site explains the law that would have applied if Obama were born overseas:Birth Abroad to One Citizen and One Alien Parent in Wedlock: A child born abroad to one U.S. citizen parent and one alien parent acquires U.S. citizenship at birth under Section 301(g) INA provided the citizen parent was physically present in the U.S. for the time period required by the law applicable at the time of the child’s birth. (For birth on or after November 14, 1986, a period of five years physical presence, two after the age of fourteen is required. For birth between December 24, 1952 and November 13, 1986, a period of ten years, five after the age of fourteen are required for physical presence in the U.S. to transmit U.S. citizenship to the child.Obama was born before 1986 to married parents, and his father was an alien. Thus if it were an overseas birth, his mother would have to have lived in the U.S. for 5 years after age 14 in order for her child to be a natural-born American. Mrs. Obama was only 18 when Barack was born, so she had not even lived 5 years after age 14.
This is something of a technicality: Someone born overseas and after 1986, but otherwise in identical circumstances to Obama, would be a natural-born citizen thanks to a law signed by President Reagan. We don’t recall any outcry back then about the threat that some such person could grow up to be president, nor, as far as we are aware, are any birthers calling for a change in this law to return to the status quo ante 1986. Even if the birthers’ conspiracy theory were true, it would be hard to square the intensity of their emotion over the subject with the practical effect of Obama’s (hypothetical) overseas birth, which would be roughly nil.
Ah, but the law is the law, the birthers will reply--and who can disagree? The birthers can. Whether out of ignorance or dishonesty, they misrepresent the law at every turn. Back in November, as we noted, the birthers were claiming that the Supreme Court had ordered Obama to “prove” his eligibility for the presidency. In fact, all that had happened was that a lawyer had asked the high court to hear an appeal of a lower court’s decision throwing out his frivolous lawsuit for lack of standing. The justices, of course, denied the petition, and all such lawsuits have been summarily dismissed for lack of standing. The law is the law.
The birthers have also misrepresented the law in the claims they have made about Obama’s birth certificate. In truth, Obama has proved that he is a native of Hawaii, and this proof would hold up in any legal or administrative proceeding.
In order to explain the birthers’ deception on this point, it is necessary to delve into the arcana of Hawaiian vital records. The document that Obama has released, which carries the title “certification of live birth,” confirms that the president was born in Honolulu. It is a legal birth certificate, and, as the Honolulu Star-Bulletin notes, it is the only kind of birth certificate the state of Hawaii issues.
FactCheck.org has a close-up photo of the certificate, which states clearly at the bottom: “This copy serves as prima facie evidence of the fact of birth in any court proceeding.” If a court were somehow to take up the question of Obama’s eligibility, then, the birth certificate would almost certainly be sufficient to resolve the question in his favor. The opposing side would have to provide serious evidence calling into question the veracity of Hawaii’s official state records. Innuendo and hearsay would not be admissible.
Further, if Congress were to pass the so-called birther bill, Obama would be able to comply easily. The bill would require presidential campaigns to submit “a copy of the candidate’s birth certificate” to the Federal Election Commission. The certificate Obama has released publicly would meet this requirement.
Ah, but what about the original birth certificate? This is the nub of the birther “case,” and this is where things get really obscure.
As the Star-Bulletin notes, Hawaiian birth certificates have changed in form since Obama was born. Back then, the official record was a paper document with the title “certificate of live birth” (rather than “certification”), and it included “more information, such as the name of hospital, certifier’s name and title; attendant’s name and title, etc.” Hawaii no longer issues those old-style birth certificates:[Spokeswoman Janice] Okubo explained that the Health Department went paperless in 2001.CNN has reported--or rather, CNN executive Jon Klein reported to staffers in an email that others reported--that the obsolete paper certificates were destroyed when the department switched to electronic record-keeping. Klein’s information appears to have been in error. The Honolulu Advertiser reported yesterday that Okubo and her boss, Chiyome Fukino, both confirm that Obama’s original birth certificate still exists. Fukino says she has seen it and that the information matches the now-official electronic records reflected on the certificate Obama has released.
”At that time, all information for births from 1908 (on) was put into electronic files for consistent reporting,” she said.
Information about births is transferred electronically from hospitals to the department.
”The electronic record of the birth is what (the Health Department) now keeps on file in order to provide same-day certified copies at our help window for most requests,” Okubo said.
So why doesn’t Obama release the original certificate? The Advertiser says it is “unclear” whether the president “would even be allowed to see it if he asked.” It is clear, though, that the Hawaii statute governing disclosure of public records does not prohibit state officials from providing him with a copy, since he is “the registrant” and therefore has “a direct and tangible interest” in the record. One would think that Obama could persuade state officials to give him a copy, even if that is not their usual policy.
But the real question is: Why should he? The demand has no basis in principle and would have no practical benefit.
Obama has already provided a legal birth certificate demonstrating that he was born in Hawaii. No one has produced any serious evidence to the contrary. Absent such evidence, it is unreasonable to deny that Obama has met the burden of proof. We know that he was born in Honolulu as surely as we know that Bill Clinton was born in Hope, Ark., or George W. Bush in New Haven, Conn.
The release of the obsolete birth certificate would not “resolve the issue” to those for whom it is not already resolved. They claim without basis that today’s birth certificate is a fake; there is nothing to stop them from claiming without basis that yesterday’s is as well.
The president would gain nothing politically for his trouble. By acknowledging the birthers’ demands, he would lend them a modicum of credibility. By ignoring them, he actually reaps political benefits from their efforts. His critics, even those who are not birthers, end up looking like cranks by association. His supporters use the birthers to paint Obama foes as racist--which is probably unfair even to the birthers, as we argued Tuesday, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t effective.
In a Commentary article last year, William F. Buckley recounted the way he, Sen. Barry Goldwater and a handful of other top conservatives worked to stigmatize the John Birch Society, whose founder, Robert Welch, maintained, among other things, that President Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” and that the U.S. government was “under operational control of the Communist Party.” The Birchers, like the birthers, made respectable conservatives look like kooks, and in preparation for a prospective Goldwater presidential campaign, Buckley and his associates “thought it best to do a little conspiratorial organizing of their own against it.”
They succeeded in “excommunicating” the Birchers. It’s probably impossible to do the same to the birthers, because today the right wing is too vast to mount much of a conspiracy. The birthers are likely to be with us for as long as Obama is president--and because of them, it is more likely that this will be for the next 7½ rather than just 3½ years.
Brouhaha, Balderdash, Ballyhoo--Birtherianism! (7/31/09)I think that Taranto does a fine job of debunking the birther myth that President Obama is not a natural born citizen of the United States. But I am quite certain that even these well reasoned arguments will not dissuade many birthers from their cherished but misguided belief that they are seeking to protect the Constitution.
We thought our column yesterday, in which we definitively debunked the notion that President Obama has failed to prove he was born in America, would put an end to birtherianism. As it turns out, some people simply will not listen to reason. It also turns out, however, that the birther industry has produced a whole host of other false theories about the president, many of which are not even consistent with one another. Since it appears that some people who are willing to listen to reason remain confused, we thought we’d debunk more of the birther myths:
• A child is not a natural-born citizen unless both parents are U.S. citizens. That this is false should be obvious. It is uncontested that Obama’s father was an alien. Thus if both parents had to be citizens in order for a child to be a natural-born citizen, the question of Obama’s eligibility never would have come up. He would have been ineligible right off the bat and would not have run for president. The birth certificate and place of birth would be irrelevant.
Nonetheless, the birthers have blown a lot of smoke around the meaning of the phrase “natural-born citizen,” and we are here to clear it up.
Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution stipulates that the president must be a “natural born citizen” (or, in an obsolete provision, a citizen in 1788), but it does not define the term. The original interpretation relied on British common law, under which, as Justice Horace Gray noted in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), “every child born in England of alien parents was a natural-born subject unless the child of an ambassador or other diplomatic agent of a foreign State or of an alien enemy in hostile occupation of the place where the child was born.”
The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, established this principle as a constitutional right: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Aside from the children of foreign diplomats and (theoretically) military occupiers, the only U.S. natives not to be natural-born citizens were Indians born on reservations--and this exception was abolished by the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.
Other statutes have extended natural-born citizenship to some children born overseas to U.S. citizens. There is a theory that these statutes are unconstitutional--that the Constitution, in granting natural-born citizenship to those born on U.S. soil, thereby denies it to everyone else. Although this view is eccentric, it is an open legal question. According to the State Department’s Consular Affairs Manual (at page 9 of PDF), “the fact that someone is a natural born citizen pursuant to a statute does not necessarily imply that he or she is such a citizen for Constitutional purposes.” Since Obama was born in the U.S., he is in any case a natural-born citizen by constitutional right. By contrast, John McCain, born in Panama, is a statutory natural-born citizen.
Some birthers imagine that there is a difference between being a “citizen by birth” or a “native citizen” on the one hand and a “natural born” citizen on the other. “Eccentric” is too kind a word for this notion, which is either daft or dishonest. All three terms are identical in meaning. As Chief Justice Morrison Waite noted in Minor v. Happersett (1874):Additions might always be made to the citizenship of the United States in two ways: first, by birth, and second, by naturalization. This is apparent from the Constitution itself, for it provides that “no person except a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President,” and that Congress shall have power “to establish a uniform rule of naturalization.” Thus new citizens may be born or they may be created by naturalization.No doubt some birther somewhere is fervidly developing “proof” that Obama hatched from an egg and thus is not a citizen. Where is the shell?
• Obama might be a citizen of Indonesia, not the U.S. After the president’s parents divorced, his mother married an Indonesian man and moved the family to Jakarta, where Barack lived from ages 6 through 10 (1967-71), at which point he returned to the U.S. The hypothesis--based on thin evidence and fat speculation--is that Obama was adopted by his stepfather and therefore became an Indonesian citizen.
Even if that were true, however, it would not deprive him of his status as a natural-born citizen of America. As the State Department Web site notes:Parents cannot renounce U.S. citizenship on behalf of their minor children. Before an oath of renunciation will be administered . . ., a person under the age of eighteen must convince a U.S. diplomatic or consular officer that he/she fully understands the nature and consequences of the oath of renunciation, is not subject to duress or undue influence, and is voluntarily seeking to renounce his/her U.S. citizenship.It is outlandish to suggest that a boy under 10 could persuade a diplomat of all that. It is only a tiny bit less outlandish to think that Obama came back to the U.S., spent eight or more years here, and then decided to renounce his citizenship.
Besides, the oath of renunciation is administered in writing. What are we to conclude about someone who refuses to accept an official state birth certificate as proof of birth but expects us to accept utterly preposterous theories with no documentary evidence whatever?
• Obama might have been an illegitimate child. The claim here is that Obama’s father had been married to another woman before Obama’s mother, the previous marriage was not legally dissolved, and therefore the marriage was invalid. We haven’t investigated the facts, because they are irrelevant to the question of citizenship. Obama was born in the U.S., and that is sufficient to make him a natural-born citizen.
Ironically, if Obama had been born overseas, he would have been a natural-born citizen only if illegitimate. Here, from the State Department Web site, is the legal provision that would have applied:Birth Abroad Out-of-Wedlock to a U.S. Citizen Mother: A child born abroad out-of-wedlock to a U.S. citizen mother may acquire U.S. citizenship under Section 301(g) INA, as made applicable by Section 309(c) INA if the mother was a U.S. citizen at the time of the child’s birth, and if the mother had previously been physically present in the United States or one of its outlying possessions for a continuous period of one year.If his mother was in the U.S. from birth to age 1, that would have been enough to meet this residency requirement. It may seem counterintuitive that the standard is easier to meet for a child born out of wedlock, but it actually makes perfect sense. An illegitimate father has no inherent legal tie to his child, and thus the father’s country has no claim to the child’s allegiance.
• “Why has Obama spent X dollars defending himself against lawsuits when he could just produce the original birth certificate and make the whole thing go away?” X varies, just in our emails of the past 24 hours, from “thousands” to “almost a million”; one reader set the amount at “$950,000.” As far as we know, all these estimates have a common source: thin air.
In any case, while this question sounds eminently reasonable, in fact it betrays a complete lack of understanding of the legal process. The “defense” against these frivolous lawsuits has consisted of filing a motion for summary judgment, which in every case has been granted.
In a motion for summary judgment, a defendant in a lawsuit asks the judge to dismiss the case as meritless before trial. In considering whether to grant such a motion, the judge is obliged to treat all facts in dispute as if they were resolved in the plaintiff’s favor. He may dismiss the case only if he finds it is without merit as a matter of law. The defendant’s introduction of additional factual evidence into the record would make the process more costly and time-consuming, not less.
The production of a 1961 birth certificate would make these lawsuits “go away” only if one assumes that it would persuade the plaintiffs to withdraw their claims, or not to file them in the first place. This assumption is completely fanciful. As we noted yesterday, birthers “claim without basis that today’s birth certificate is a fake; there is nothing to stop them from claiming without basis that yesterday’s is as well.” Sure enough, an outfit styling itself the Western Center for Journalism has produced what purports to be a report from “an investigator” commissioned by “a retired CIA officer”--neither of them has a name--arguing that the original birth certificate might be fraudulent.
• The serial number of Obama’s birth certificate is fishy. We’re including this one just because it is so much fun. Earlier this week the Honolulu Advertiser reported that 82-year-old Eleanor Nordyke had provided the newspaper with copies of the old-style birth certificates for her twin daughters, born in the same hospital as Obama on Aug. 5, 1961, the day after the president’s birth. Jerome Corsi of WorldNetDaily looked at the certificates and offered this analysis of the serial numbers:Susan Nordyke was born at 2:12 p.m. Hawaii time and was given No. 151-61-10637, which was filed with the Hawaii registrar Aug. 11, 1961.Corsi gives equal weight to these “possibilities” even though the first one is innocuous and makes complete sense, whereas the second presupposes that the officials who administer Hawaii’s vital records are parties to some sort of conspiracy. Someone must have taken Occam’s razor away from him for fear that he would cut himself.
Gretchen Nordyke followed at 2:17 p.m. and was given No. 151-61-10638, which was also filed with the Hawaii registrar Aug. 11, 1961.
According to a version of Obama’s purported short-form certificate available from FactCheck.org, Obama was given a higher registration number than the Nordyke twins. The online image indicates the number is No. 151-1961-10641, even though he was born Aug. 4, 1961, the day before the twins, and his birth was registered with the Hawaii registrar three days earlier, Aug. 8, 1961.
The middle figure in Obama’s purported registration also is different than the Nordykes’. Obama’s is 1961, indicating the year, while the Nordykes’ is merely 61.
One explanation for the out-of-order serial numbers might be that several serialized stacks of birth certificates were made available at different hospitals.
Another possibility is that Obama’s number is not a genuine registration number created in 1961 but was issued when the short-form document was generated during the 2008 presidential campaign.
As to why the old-style certificate says only “61” where the modern one says “1961,” Corsi might want to consult his own Web site for the explanation.
Several readers have called our attention to an article by Andy McCarthy of National Review in which he partially dissents from his own magazine’s editorial renouncing birtherianism. Even McCarthy, however, scoffs at the birthers:The overwhelming evidence is that Obama was born an American citizen on Aug. 4, 1961, which almost certainly makes him constitutionally eligible to hold his office. . . . The mission of National Review has always included keeping the Right honest, which includes debunking crackpot conspiracy theories. The theory that Obama was born in Kenya, that he was smuggled into the U.S., and that his parents somehow hoodwinked Hawaiian authorities into falsely certifying his birth in Oahu, is crazy stuff.Apart from the “almost” before “certainly,” we agree entirely. McCarthy goes on to raise a series of other questions about Obama’s background--questions that do not, however, raise serious doubts about the legitimacy of his presidency and that, however interesting they may be to observers or historians, are of scant political salience now that Obama has been elected.
In 2012, Obama will have a record on which voters can judge him; his pre-2008 personal history will surely be of no more interest than Bill Clinton’s Arkansas scandals were in 1996 or George W. Bush’s military service in 2004. This is the sort of thing that animates partisans--and only partisans.
Taegan Goddard of CQ Politics reports that a new Research 2000 poll for the Angry Left site DailyKos.com “found 77% of Americans believe President Obama was born in the United States, 11% do not, and 12% are not sure. Among Republicans only, 42% think he’s an American citizen, 28% do not, and 30% are not sure.”
That is, a majority of Republicans--58%--are willing at least to entertain a fringe conspiracy theory about the president of the United States. Independents (83% yes, 8% no, 9% not sure) are much closer to Democrats (93% yes, 4% no, 3% not sure) than to Republicans. This is not a sign of strength for the GOP.
As noted in my previous post, any court in the land will dismiss any case brought before it based on the birther conspiracies. The court will either find the case meritless or will find that the plaintiff has no standing to bring the case. To the birthers this is simply evidence of how deep the conspiracy lies. As with all conspiracy theories, inconvenient contrary evidence is either ignored or explained away by more ignoring of evidence, introduction of falsehoods, and/or giving improper weight to various bits of information.
Even if birthers are determined to remain convinced that the President is not a natural born citizen of the United States (despite all evidence otherwise), they have only two courses of action available to them:
- Impeachment.
- Sow as much doubt about the President’s legitimacy as possible through the use of half truths and blatant falsehoods.
This leaves birthers only with the path of dishonesty. This is their only real option. This is so, even if they sincerely believe in their disingenuous arguments.
There are ample legitimate grounds for opposing President Obama’s policies. Birtherism distracts from these genuine reasons and diminishes their potency in the court of public opinion due to guilt by association. The President and his supporters have much to gain by keeping birthers in the news because doing so increasingly makes all of the President’s opponents look like they’re crazy.
I agree with Taranto, that birthers may help propel President Obama into a second term. If that is the case, they will succeed in achieving the exact opposite of their stated goals. It will mean that the American people have considered and then reconsidered the birthers’ theories and judged them to be without merit, and it will extend a presidency they boldly oppose.
I suppose it is possible that many birthers will actually be pleased if this does happen. These may very well be like Don Quixote, seeking fulfillment by playing the hero to imaginary injustices, even if this path leads to the ruin of the very ideals they claim to support.
Monday, August 03, 2009
Antimoral Societies
In his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, Nobel winning economist F.A. Hayek discusses the muddled moral thinking brought on by “fifty years’ approach toward collectivism.” His discussion of morality on pages 231-233 is thought provoking.
Of course, 65 years have passed since Hayek penned these lines. The world has had ample time to absorb the inexpressible horror of the WWII-related atrocities, even if it has never fully come to grips with the extent of the Soviet atrocities that killed even more people. The point is that compulsory collectivism expunges significant moral virtues from the individuals that make up society. Without these virtues, society evolves into something never intended by its designers.
This didn’t happen overnight in Germany. It began in the 1870s and only reached its apex decades later as new generations were raised without firsthand experience with the virtues Hayek discusses. Without this individual morality, anything could be justified in the name of the collective—“the People,” the “good of society,” or whatever you want to call it. My Dad spent his entire childhood in Germany surrounded by people that accepted this paradigm; some enthusiastically so.
Although the early German socialists intended a system that truly promulgated goodness and equality, the system they designed eventually required ruthless coercion to reach its goals. This system removed some of the emoluments common to public office in freer systems (ostensibly because those benefits were considered immoral). The result was that an entirely different character of individual was attracted to public office. The people, in fact, demanded leaders that could ‘get the job done.’
This is why collectivist systems cause the cruel and ruthless to rise to leadership. It happened with Hitler. It happened with Lenin and Stalin. But if these particular individuals hadn’t been on the scene at the operative moment, the system would have conscripted some other equally benighted despot.
Some countries today are attempting to achieve benevolent collectivism, believing that they are wise enough to devise systems that will avoid the barbarity of Germany and the Soviet Union. They are playing with a force they cannot control.
As new generations lose touch with virtues that can only be developed when liberty is maximized, today’s benevolent dictatorial rulers will eventually be replaced with those that will find no means so cruel that they cannot be justified by the goals being pursued. There are ways to avoid this, but a return to liberty often requires significant unpleasantness.
Could this same kind of thing happen in “the land of the free and the home of the brave?” Go back and read the Hayek paragraphs quoted above and consider where we are today as well as our current trajectory. Then you tell me.
“Issues in this field have become so confused that it is necessary to go back to fundamentals. What our generation is in danger of forgetting is not only that morals are of necessity a phenomenon of individual conduct but also that they can exist only in the sphere in which the individual is free to decide for himself and is called upon voluntarily to sacrifice personal advantage to the observance of a moral rule. Outside the sphere of individual responsibility there is neither goodness nor badness, neither opportunity for moral merit nor the chance of proving one’s conviction by sacrificing one’s desires to what one thinks right. Only where we ourselves are responsible for our own interests and are free to sacrifice them has our decision moral value. We are neither entitled to be unselfish at someone else’s expense nor is there any merit in being unselfish if we have no choice. The members of a society who in all respects are made to do the good thing have no title to praise. As Milton said: “If every action which is good or evil in a man of ripe years were under pittance and prescription and compulsion, what were virtue but a name, what praise should then be due to well-doing, what gramercy to be sober, just, or continent?”
“Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily re-created in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.
“That in this sphere of individual conduct the effect of collectivism has been almost entirely destructive is both inevitable and undeniable. A movement whose main promise is the relief from responsibility cannot but be antimoral in its effect, however lofty the ideals to which it owes its birth. Can there be much doubt that the feeling of personal obligation to remedy inequities, where our individual power permits, has been weakened rather than strengthened, that both the willingness to bear responsibility and the consciousness that it is our own individual duty to know how to choose have been perceptibly impaired? There is all the difference between demanding that a desirable state of affairs should be brought about by the authorities, or even being willing to submit provided everyone else is made to do the same, and the readiness to do what one thinks right one’s self at the sacrifice of one’s own desires and perhaps in the face of hostile public opinion. There is much to suggest that we have in fact become more tolerant toward particular abuses and much more indifferent to inequities in individual cases, since we have fixed our eyes on an entirely different system in which the state will set everything right. It may even be, as has been suggested, that the passion for collective action is a way in which we now without compunction collectively indulge in that selfishness which as individuals we had learned a little to restrain.Hayek goes on to allude to the German (and perhaps Russian) atrocities—of which the public at that time had only the tiniest bit of knowledge—by mentioning various vices that have come to be “accepted more and more as a matter of course; injustices inflicted on individuals by government action in the interest of a group are disregarded with an indifference hardly distinguishable from callousness; and the grossest violations of the most elementary rights of the individual, such as are involved in the compulsory transfer of populations, are more and more often countenanced even by supposed liberals. All this surely indicates that our moral sense has been blunted rather than sharpened.”
“It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now—independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one’s neighbors—are essentially those on which the working of an individualist society rests. Collectivism has nothing to put in their place, and in so far as it has destroyed them it has left a void filled by nothing but the demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to do what is collectively decided to be good. The periodical election of representatives, to which the moral choice of the individual tends to be more and more reduced, is not an occasion on which his moral values are tested or where he has constantly to reassert and prove the order of his values and to testify to the sincerity of his profession by the sacrifice of those of his values he rates lower to those he puts higher.”
Of course, 65 years have passed since Hayek penned these lines. The world has had ample time to absorb the inexpressible horror of the WWII-related atrocities, even if it has never fully come to grips with the extent of the Soviet atrocities that killed even more people. The point is that compulsory collectivism expunges significant moral virtues from the individuals that make up society. Without these virtues, society evolves into something never intended by its designers.
This didn’t happen overnight in Germany. It began in the 1870s and only reached its apex decades later as new generations were raised without firsthand experience with the virtues Hayek discusses. Without this individual morality, anything could be justified in the name of the collective—“the People,” the “good of society,” or whatever you want to call it. My Dad spent his entire childhood in Germany surrounded by people that accepted this paradigm; some enthusiastically so.
Although the early German socialists intended a system that truly promulgated goodness and equality, the system they designed eventually required ruthless coercion to reach its goals. This system removed some of the emoluments common to public office in freer systems (ostensibly because those benefits were considered immoral). The result was that an entirely different character of individual was attracted to public office. The people, in fact, demanded leaders that could ‘get the job done.’
This is why collectivist systems cause the cruel and ruthless to rise to leadership. It happened with Hitler. It happened with Lenin and Stalin. But if these particular individuals hadn’t been on the scene at the operative moment, the system would have conscripted some other equally benighted despot.
Some countries today are attempting to achieve benevolent collectivism, believing that they are wise enough to devise systems that will avoid the barbarity of Germany and the Soviet Union. They are playing with a force they cannot control.
As new generations lose touch with virtues that can only be developed when liberty is maximized, today’s benevolent dictatorial rulers will eventually be replaced with those that will find no means so cruel that they cannot be justified by the goals being pursued. There are ways to avoid this, but a return to liberty often requires significant unpleasantness.
Could this same kind of thing happen in “the land of the free and the home of the brave?” Go back and read the Hayek paragraphs quoted above and consider where we are today as well as our current trajectory. Then you tell me.
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