The safety net

From the American Enterprise Institute, an essay speaking exactly to what's been troubling me lately about the argument that we have to submit to mandatory entitlement programs because capitalism is too risky:

What used to be called "public charity" is now "entitlement programs."  The difference is much more than semantics.  The word "charity" carries with it the implication that the intended beneficiary is someone else.  Those who paid taxes to support such programs, approvingly or not, did so in the clear understanding that they were paying to help other people; they neither expected nor desired any personal benefit from the programs.  . . .

Gradually, however, the left inculcated the notion that we are all at risk, due to the nature of "capitalism" (i.e., freedom), and hence that government programs for those in need ought to be seen as a universal necessity.  In other words, such programs were no longer to be viewed as something the vast majority of citizens provide for the benefit of the very few, but rather as something government ought to be providing for each of us as a primary function.

As I read somewhere else today, the safety net is supposed to be a trampoline for the very few, not social flypaper for the many.  I've been arguing with Grim recently about the conflation of insurance with subsidies.  The distinction is critical:  Insurance is appropriate for most adults, but subsidies are not.  If the category of "needy citizens" expands to include a large fraction of Americans, or even (as is now becoming the norm) a majority of Americans, the category has lost its meaning and programs that address it have lost their justification for existence.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

Taxing Internet Sales

Dr. Mercury at Maggie's Farm has been discussing the current proposals to tax Internet sales nationwide.  Some states are already doing it; my own beloved Texas has bullied Amazon into assessing sales tax, effective this month.  One of the ostensible rationales is the need to "level the playing field" for brick-and-mortar stores (as if anyone believed the motive was anything but the obvious desire to glom onto more revenue), but as Dr. M and many commenters pointed out, the local stores are going to need a lot more than an 8% advantage to complete with the on-line prices and selection.

Here at Swankienda99, we rely heavily on Amazon for things we can't get locally.  Ever since Amazon expanded out of books and took on the entire retail market, I've depended on them for the many food brands my duopolistic grocery store won't carry.  They're an especially good source for brands that have fallen out of disfavor but haven't completely ceased production.  In fact, I buy most things from Amazon that I don't need to touch or handle ahead of time, from cookware to linens to small appliances.  They let me search efficiently for products by key word and best price, they provide customer reviews that take the place of indifferent sales clerks, and they get me my stuff in two days for a flat annual fee.  It just has to be a product that can be easily shipped, so it can't be too heavy, too voluminous, or too perishable.

In order to compete, local stores may have to specialize in that kind of tricky freight, or provide expertise and advice that can't be duplicated by my fellow customers on-line, or carry things for which I'll pay a premium for same-day availability.  Big-box stores have gotten used to being passive purveyors who make their customers wander through miles of aisles on scavenger hunts.  I wonder if future retail merchants won't have to function a bit more like knowledgeable brokers in order to lure customers back.

What do you guys buy online?

They never learn

James O'Keefe always uses the same trick to get people to admit what they're doing.  He pretends to be a guy with a scam to bilk money out of the taxpayers, and he runs it by an organization he suspects is aiding and abetting similar scams.  He gets them talking and joshing with him.  He repeats, in increasingly outrageous terms, exactly what kind of scam he's running and how it works like a charm.  They laugh and agree that, yes, it works just like that, and they're totally cool with it.  Hey, the money's sitting right there, who wouldn't pick it up?  Ah?  Ah?  Usually they give him a little friendly advice about magic words to use in packaging the scam.  Then he releases the video and waits for them to complain that they were taken out of context.



In his wake he probably leaves a trail of emergency meetings designed to prevent anyone from each organization from spilling the beans to any more strangers who might be carrying cameras.  But he keeps moving from industry to industry, so they never see him coming.  And he doesn't seem to be running out of targets.

Act One, Scene One

The Post Office defaults on nearly eleven billion dollars in benefit payments for 'future retirees.'  That's not a state or a city; that's the US Federal Government.

So, what does that mean for the 'future retiree,' i.e., the current worker?  Does he or she have those retirement benefits or not?  Not, I would think, at least not to the same degree.

The Post Office is the least important of services, and so merely the first to arrive at where all are heading.  Soon it will be veterans' benefits and pensions, or the benefits and pensions of other federal agencies; then it will be Medicaid, or Medicare.  The question in front of us is mostly, I think, "How soon can we accept that this is the end of everything we've believed in and fought for, and start thinking about what comes after?"

We've come to the denial stage in our grief over the death of America.  Can it still be saved?  So much, we want to believe that it can be.  We've given so much.  I once watched rockets come in over Camp Victory, and saw them burst under the Phalanx guns.  'The rockets' red glare; the bombs bursting in air!' I thought at the time.  'Now I've seen it:  now I understand.'

Maybe half of one percent of us saw something like that in Iraq or Afghanistan.  I am speaking to Cassandra's point -- second link, above.  What matters most to what most people believe is where their interests are vested.  There are too many vested interests against reform on the scale necessary for America to survive.

Look out for them petards

It looks like bad things can happen when you jam an unpopular law through Congress using a tricky parliamentary procedure.  For one thing, some of the usual inconsistencies that might have gotten worked out in conference in a smaller bill are set in stone when the conference process has to be avoided like the plague and, in any case, the bill is thousands of pages long and full of the inconsistencies that inevitably result from brutal last-minute horse-trading.   In the case of ObamaCare, Congress managed to pass a bill that provides for consumer subsidies and employer penalties for states that set up the required insurance exchanges, but does not authorize either consumer subsidies or employer penalties if the states opt out and the federal government establishes the exchanges on their behalf.

Nor was this a scrivener's error, as the IRS now claims.  It was a conscious choice to increase the pressure on states to set up exchanges.  Apparently everyone calculated that, as the Cato Institute put it, the bill would reach state capitals to be greeted as a liberator.  As things stand, however, there is real doubt whether the IRS has the power either to issue subsidies in the form of tax credits or to impose penalties on non-conforming employers in the states that say "Thanks, but no thanks."  To date, eight states have politely declined, while many more are stalling.

The Cato paper provides a helpful summary for those of us who have forgotten just how contorted the parliamentary shenanigans got:

Congressional Democrats had intended to empanel a conference committee that would merge the PPACA with the “Affordable Health Care for America Act” (H.R. 3962) that had passed the House of Representatives.  Had this occurred, the PPACA might look quite different than it does today.  But in January 2010, Republican Scott Brown won a special election to fill the seat vacated by the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA).  Brown’s victory shifted the political terrain.  It gave Senate Republicans the 41st vote necessary to filibuster a conference report on the House and Senate bills. 

As a result, House and Senate Democrats abandoned a conference committee in favor of a novel strategy.  House Democrats agreed to pass the PPACA exactly as it had passed the Senate, but only upon receiving assurances that after the House amended the PPACA through the “budget reconciliation” process, the Senate would immediately approve those amendments.  Since Senate rules protect reconciliation bills from a filibuster, the PPACA’s supporters needed only 51 votes to pass the House’s “reconciliation” amendments.  The downside of this strategy was that the rules governing budget reconciliation limited the amendments House Democrats could make.  Supporters opted for an imperfect bill – that is, a bill that did not accomplish all they may have set out to do, but for which they had the votes – over no bill at all. 

The Act signed into law by President Obama and the law that the IRS rule purports to implement — the PPACA — is a hybrid of the two Senate-committee-reported bills, as amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (HCERA).  This history, and the need to resort to the reconciliation process to pass the final law, helps explain why the final legislation looks as it does, and why the Act does not conform with the hopes or expectations of some of its supporters.

Normally, if a bill contains a technical glitch, Congress can just fix it . . . . Oh, wait, they don't have the votes any more, do they?

Love and welfare

Building

It's fun watching a meme take root.  This week, President Obama put his finger on the sore point that divides individualists from collectivists when he made a speech that has been paraphrased as "You didn't build that -- somebody else built it for you."  By now you've all seen a number of posters showing Mr. Obama cheerfully explaining the concept to the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs.  I enjoy watching the Net play with the theme:

Outlaw Country: A Final Word

Now that I've spoken to the things that seem to me to really matter, I want to just give the singers a chance to relax and have some fun. It wasn't all about a serious movement. Some of it, at least, was about the joy they found in life.

 





















They weren't just Outlaws.  They were merry men.  Maybe that makes a difference.  Maybe it makes all the difference.

Ya'll know the words to "Rocky Top," right?

Encyclopedia Brown

When I was in the second grade, our teacher offered us special credit if we could learn to spell "encyclopedia."  We all did:  e-n-c-y-c-l-o-p-e-d-i-a, or -p-e-a-d-i-a.  I think at this point the old form is no longer taught even as an option.

One of my favorite series of books as a boy were the Encyclopedia Brown mysteries.  I read that the author died today, at the age of 85.  The neat thing about them, for an aspiring boy detective, was that they presented all the facts but none of the solutions.  The solutions were collected in a separate section in the back, for you to check once you had sorted out what you thought the proper answer might be.

In this the author -- his name was Donald Sobol -- answered the complaint raised by no less than Raymond Chandler in his famous essay, "The Simple Art of Murder."

 The poor writer is dishonest without knowing it, and the fairly good one can be dishonest because he doesn’t know what to be honest about. He thinks a complicated murder scheme which baffles the lazy reader, who won’t be bothered itemizing the details, will also baffle the police, whose business is with details. The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off.

Donald Sobol didn't do that:  he gave you the cute answer, but he assumed you would figure out the missing piece.  Learning to do that was the point of reading his stories; it is why they are still worth reading, for boys of a certain disposition.

But if I am going to quote from the Chandler essay, I ought to quote the parts everyone ought to know.  Here they are.

[Hammett] wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street...

It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization. All this still is not quite enough.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.

If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.

If you have that, you have enough to write a good mystery; you may even have a great deal more.

Socialize the Loss

Bloomberg is looking more at the Bain Capital issue.

What’s clear from a review of the public record during his management of the private-equity firm Bain Capital from 1985 to 1999 is that Romney was fabulously successful in generating high returns for its investors. He did so, in large part, through heavy use of tax-deductible debt, usually to finance outsized dividends for the firm’s partners and investors. When some of the investments went bad, workers and creditors felt most of the pain. Romney privatized the gains and socialized the losses.

What’s less clear is how his skills are relevant to the job of overseeing the U.S. economy, strengthening competitiveness and looking out for the welfare of the general public, especially the middle class.

Oh nonsense, man! Nothing could be more relevant to overseeing the U.S. economy.

Imagine that the country was a corporation, and its shareholders were those entities rich or powerful enough to arrange major campaign contributions.  The workers are those who, well, aren't that rich.  What happens when we suffer severe losses as a corporation?  We socialize the losses.

When things go well, why that's private profit!

I'm surprised you don't get this.  The President's out campaigning on the very point this afternoon.  How many times does he have to explain how economic management works?

Changing diapers prevents Alzheimer's

. . . Or, what can happen when popular science writers get hold of almost any story about non-human biology.  It seems that bees stay vigorous as long as they're tending larvae in the hive, but slide into decrepitude quickly after assuming their mature function of foraging.  When researchers removed the young larvae caretakers, some of the older bees were forced to give up foraging and tend the larvae themselves.  A protective protein in the brain slowed the decrepitude that afflicted their foraging colleagues.  The irrepressible authors cannot restrain themselves from noting:

They found Prx6, a protein also found in humans that can help protect against dementia – including diseases such as Alzheimer’s – and they discovered a second and documented “chaperone” protein that protects other proteins from being damaged when brain or other tissues are exposed to cell-level stress. 

In general, researchers are interested in creating a drug that could help people maintain brain function, yet they may be facing up to 30 years of basic research and trials. 

“Maybe social interventions – changing how you deal with your surroundings – is something we can do today to help our brains stay younger,” said Amdam.  “Since the proteins being researched in people are the same proteins bees have, these proteins may be able to spontaneously respond to specific social experiences.”

France to California: This Means War

Animal-rights activists in California attempted to block not only the in-state production of foie gras but also its importation.  The French, never willing to take an act of aggression lying down, responded with a call to boycott California wine.

An interesting side note:  California Republicans argue that, while the state can do almost any fool thing it wants within the state, the Interstate Commerce Clause forbids it to regulate what happens outside its borders.  It falls to the federal government to make mistakes in that arena.

Love that Thomas Sowell

He's a potent anti-Orwellian force:

Let us begin with the word "spend."  Is the government "spending" money on people whenever it does not tax them as much as it can?  Such convoluted reasoning would never pass muster if the mainstream media were not so determined to see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil when it comes to Barack Obama. 

Ironically, actual spending by the Obama administration for the benefit of its political allies, such as the teachers' unions, is not called spending but "investment."  You can say anything if you have your own private language.

An Insight into Information Warfare

Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post suggests a model for thinking about the negative advertising campaigns of the Presidential election that is straight out of US Army doctrine.

The extent of [the Obama campaign's] effort is only now becoming clear. The Associated Press reports: “President Barack Obama’s campaign has spent nearly $100 million on television commercials in selected battleground states so far, unleashing a sustained early barrage designed to create lasting, negative impressions of Republican Mitt Romney before he and his allies ramp up for the fall.” Think of it like the Confederacy’s artillery barrage on the third day of Gettysburg before Pickett’s charge — you have to in essence disable the other side before the charge begins or its curtains.

This is exactly how the US Army thinks of what it currently calls "information operations."  It considers them a kind of strategic effect, a "shaping" effort almost precisely analogous to artillery.  You can use a heavy information barrage to deny terrain (as for example by blanketing a neighborhood with wanted posters with a picture and a large reward:  you might not catch the guy, but he'll have to feel very shaky about trying to pass through the neighborhood).  You can use it to demoralize.  You can use it to disrupt the cohesion of an enemy unit.

It's sort of surprising to see someone like Rubin get that concept so well.  It's also surprising to see the Obama campaign's efforts likened to a Confederate barrage.

"Always go right at 'em"

Photon Courier on why Admiral Nelson could beat the tar out of his opponents, and on the disquieting trend in the U.S. to follow rules and regulations rather than do what makes sense.   He quotes a 1797 Spanish naval official about why he always got his butt kicked:

An Englishman enters a naval action with the firm conviction that his duty is to hurt his enemies and help his friends and allies without looking out for directions in the midst of the fight; and while he thus clears his mind of all subsidiary distractions, he rests in confidence on the certainty that his comrades, actuated by the same principles as himself, will be bound by the sacred and priceless principle of mutual support. . . .  Experience shows, on the contrary, that a Frenchman or a Spaniard, working under a system which leans to formality and strict order being maintained in battle, has no feeling for mutual support, and goes into battle with hesitation, preoccupied with the anxiety of seeing or hearing the commander-in-chief’s signals for such and such manoeuvres.

Following the links at Photon Courier takes us to this 2005 article at WaPo bemoaning the lack of "insurbordination and freelancing" witnessed in the stumbling aftermath of Katrina:   "Everyone coloring inside the lines -- it's a great system until the wind starts blowing really, really hard."

Outlaw Country, Part 4: Raven's Requests

Raven asked toward the beginning of this series for some "libertarian country."  I don't think they were thinking in exactly those terms, but they often did sing about the independent capabilities of the country-born man.



They didn't much care for welfare:





...or affirmative action...



...or government regulations imposed on their business activities.





Some of that's libertarian, but a lot of it's just outlaw.

The LIBOR Scandal

A surprising unity of right and left seems to be forming around the news that American regulators were fully informed of fraudulent LIBOR rates as early as 2007, and chose to do nothing to protect American borrowers, states or localities.  The cost to the American people is unknowable; the additional instability brought on by added mistrust of the banking system, and suspicion that the "regulators" are complicit in ongoing fraud and thievery, could produce additional unknowable costs.

The usual response from the left on this kind of issue is for greater regulation, but here the regulation has demonstrably done nothing to fix the problem.  It's not that they weren't aware, it's that they knew and gave a pass to their buddies.

The guy who was the head of the NY Fed at that time, by the way, is now our Secretary of the Treasury, one Timothy Geithner:   the same Timothy Geithner who became Secretary of the Treasury even though he had massive unpaid taxes; indeed, the same Timothy Geithner who was allowed to pay back the money without penalties by the IRS (try that if you own a small business like, say, the Dawsonville Pool Room).  In other words, when he was caught, he was extended the same kind of look-the-other-way courtesy that he extended to the London bankers.

In both cases, the loser was the American people.  Who were the winners?  What can we say about them, and what ought we to do about them?

Women and Bikes

Via Instapundit, "Women and motorcycles:  ridership is on the rise."  (Alternative title by Arlo Guthrie.)

There still aren't a lot of women bikers, but my wife has taken up riding.  The persistent high gas prices of the last several years finally broke down her sense that they were too scary and dangerous.  Now, she rides everywhere -- rain or shine, city or mountains -- and she's getting pretty good.  She tells me that, for her, it's almost everything she loves about horses, and that she's really come to enjoy just getting on her bike and riding with me.

So if any of you female readers have been thinking about it -- or if you haven't, but reading this is making you think about it -- you might give it a try.  You'll save on gasoline, and you might find a new source of joy in your life to boot.

Actually, This Makes Perfect Sense:

Hot Air is giving him a hard time about it, but really, this is a perfectly accurate description of the President's experience.

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

That's just how it really happened for him: it's not that he was smarter than everyone else, or harder working, but he rose from success to success -- from Columbia to Harvard, from Harvard to the University of Chicago, two published autobiographies, two Grammy awards for the audio recordings of those same autobiographies, the Senate, even the Presidency and the Nobel Prize.

He didn't publish at Harvard, didn't do much at U. Chicago, was a failure as a community organizer, didn't succeed in his first push to get elected to public office... but there was always somebody there to dust him off, and push him up to the next rung.

Somebody else made all that happen -- a whole system of somebodies else.  Naturally he feels loyal to the system that raised him so high.  That system includes unions, especially teacher's unions; the academic system, especially affirmative action; and the Democratic Party, especially the Chicago machine and, more recently, the DNC.  At the international level, the community of saints at the UN and the Nobel committee are likewise contributors to his success.  All these people had to work very hard to pull him through to the pinnacle of human achievement.

It's less likely to be true of the small businessman, for whom there may be 'that special teacher,' or a friend or family member who helped them build an initial stake.  On the other hand, there really may not be.  A great deal more comes from individual effort in these cases.

Still, even for those who lack access to the networks and alliances that make it easy for the well-connected to move upwards and onwards with little effort, it surely would be nice to have such access.  And you can get some, if you want, by purchasing dinner with Barack tonight at one of his spectacular fundraising efforts.

Why wouldn't he believe this?  You can't argue with success, and by many measures he is the most successful man in the world.

"Your rejection does not meet my needs at this time"

Admirable anti-rejection letter.

H/t Rocket Science.