Virtue & Wealth

The Pope has garnered an interesting comment from the UK Guardian.

What makes Pope Francis's attack so significant is that his position, too, is charged in moral terms.

What he really believes is that riches in themselves are bad for people. That is part of the reason he does not live in the papal apartments. This is not a view shared throughout the Catholic hierarchy. Nor is it really, whole-heartedly, shared by the politicians who will praise his views. I don't see any party anywhere in the world, except perhaps the Greens, running for election on the basis that they will make the voters poorer but more virtuous.

I'm not sure that position is as unusual as the gentleman portrays it to be. Generally all government action makes you poorer, and therefore has to be pitched in terms of some new capacity that you will achieve in return: and excellence of capacity is, of course, what the ancients meant by the term "virtue." Progressives promising to force you onto health care exchanges are promising to strip you of considerable wealth in return for a capacity, so far unachieved, to provide some measure of healh insurance to those the markets deem too risky to insure in an ordinary risk pool. Conservatives asking you to support the local bond referendum so they can build a new jail, and therefore lock up more criminals, are also suggesting that they will make you a little bit poorer -- in return for a society that is a little bit more virtuous, in the sense of being stronger against the presumably wicked.

So there's always a trade of wealth for virtue, if government is meant to be the means to the end. The radical thing about Reagan's claim was that you could, by shrinking government's powers and sphere of influence, pursue wealth and virtue at once.

That "riches in themselves are bad for people" is not a position Aristotle held, nor Plato -- both held that a proper substance was necessary to pursue virtue, because it provided the leisure for contemplation. What both condemn is not wealth, but a life that focuses on wealth instead of virtue.

That riches are perilous does seem to be Jesus' position, though, and the Pope is not supposed to be neutral between these ancient thinkers.

Keep your doctor, fire your senator, Pt. 374

Bookworm Room lives in Marin County, California, and pays special attention to how blue politics work out there.  Her post today alerts us to new fun that awaits not only those unlucky enough to have been dumped into the Obamacare exchanges, but also anyone who bought insurance directly from a company that also sells on the exchanges, which by law must mirror what they offer on the exchanges.  Customers of California's Blue Cross Anthem already knew they were in for a tough time finding doctors who were part of their new network, or even determining with any certainty which doctors really were part of the network, given the consistently misleading information they have received to date.  Now customers find that, if they get surgery done at some hospitals, their insurance may cover the bills from their surgeons and from the hospital, but not the bill from their anesthesiologist, pathologist, or radiologist.  (That is, they will find this out if they are alert enough to call first and demand specific information about every conceivable bill that may be coming their way as they schedule surgery.)  And yet at Marin General, for instance, the patient has no choice about which of these professionals to use; the hospital farms out the ancillary work as it pleases.

Yes, this law is really going to bend that cost curve down.

We're still trying to decide what to do later this year if our insurance policy really will not be renewed.  (It's impossible to guess ahead of time how far HHS and the White House will go to avoid panic just before the midterm elections.)  If we really must replace our coverage, I am inclined to go with a company (such as Health Assurance) that has elected to stay out of the exchanges altogether.  So far, the indications are that Health Assurance is maintaining a provider network that can be attempted to be believed.

Recently an old friend looked me up on Facebook, then began to argue with me about how inexcusable it was to support the repeal of Obamacare.  Didn't I care about the uninsured, she demanded?  You can imagine my response.

"Different from you and me"?

Kevin Williamson looks at the fuzzy boundaries of the category we call "the rich":

Far from having the 21st-century equivalent of an Edwardian class system, the United States is characterized by a great deal of variation in income:  More than half of all adult Americans will be at or near the poverty line at some point over the course of their lives; 73 percent will also find themselves in the top 20 percent, and 39 percent will make it into the top 5 percent for at least one year.  Perhaps most remarkable, 12 percent of Americans will be in the top 1 percent for at least one year of their working lives.

Darn 73-percenters.

Progress?

I was reading what seemed like an ordinary article about coming attractions in the biotech revolution when I came across the casual statement:

Cats that glow like jellyfish, now in labs, are just the beginning.

Wait.  What?

Yes.  It hardly seems a sporting thing to do to an animal that likes to hunt at night.

I know I said I like innovation in resource use, but I don't believe cats are merely a resource for us to use as we please.

Overdrawn at the planetary bank

Are we?  Matt Ridley says "Nonsense."  Did Stone Age civilization collapse because people ran out of stone?  Contrasting "ecology" with "economy," Ridley finds that one little letter makes all the difference.  Despite our benevolent host's apparent conviction that the study of economics amounts to inquiries into the ways in which people can be induced to accept monetary bribes to tarnish their honor, the field really consists of examining the ways a society decides how to wield scarce resources for which there are multiple possible uses.  A market economy typically makes this decision by letting prices rise and fall according to the scarcity of the resource, together with the demand for it, as expressed by a large number of individuals exercising freedom of choice.  But supply and demand aren't static, even at a particular price point.  As a resource in high demand becomes scarce and costly, the pressure is on to find a substitute.  And human beings under pressure are remarkably gifted at innovating substitutes.

Our natural short-term perspective regards a price spike as a catastrophe--what if someone in need can't pay the price?--but a longer view suggests that a price spike often is just the impetus needed to discover a cheaper alternative.  As Ridley points out,

The best-selling book "Limits to Growth," published in 1972 by the Club of Rome (an influential global think tank), argued that we would have bumped our heads against all sorts of ceilings by now, running short of various metals, fuels, minerals and space.  Why did it not happen?  In a word, technology:  better mining techniques, more frugal use of materials, and if scarcity causes price increases, substitution by cheaper material.  We use 100 times thinner gold plating on computer connectors than we did 40 years ago.  The steel content of cars and buildings keeps on falling....

In many respects, greater affluence and new technology have led to less human impact on the planet, not more.  Richer people with new technologies tend not to collect firewood and bushmeat from natural forests; instead, they use electricity and farmed chicken—both of which need much less land.  In 2006, [Jesse Ausubel at Rockefeller University] calculated that no country with a GDP per head greater than $4,600 has a falling stock of forest (in density as well as in acreage).

Would any of those things have happened if the Global Department of Resource Justice had had the authority and the funding to prevent anyone from feeling the consequences of scarcity?  Human beings who care about the suffering of others experience a strong temptation to respond to price spikes by imposing price freezes.  (How dare those hoarders of valuable resources withhold them from the needy?)  While there may be good arguments in favor of the brief application of charitable relief to ameliorate an unusually abrupt transition from one resource to its substitute, we're not doing anyone any favors by subsidizing an economic choice about any resource that has begun to get scarce enough to be unaffordable. If that approach made sense, we'd be subsidizing the use of whale oil so that poor people could light as many lamps as the rich.  Or subsidizing stone tools so that no one had to figure out how to make them out of metal.

Saturday Morning AMV

I'm pretty sure this was just a refight of WWII. With an exciting new ending!!

Only Rarely Does Political News Make Me Feel Like Screaming

"Let's hope #Kremlin & @mfa_russia will live by the promise of hashtag"

These people represent you. They represent me. These are my representatives.

Or Maybe Not

President Barack Obama has declared any secession vote in Crimea illegitimate, and warned: “We are well beyond the days when borders can be redrawn over the heads of democratic leaders.”

The End, Beginning

A meditation on what it is to be a good man. To be a good woman.

Political will

President Obama scolded mid-east leaders:  "What we haven't seen is frankly the kind of political will to actually make tough decisions." Any comment I could make would only be bouncing the rubble.

For Our Gracious Host

As well as for anyone else, who like Grim, split your own wood.

http://www.geek.com/news/physics-exploiting-axe-splits-wood-in-record-time-1591725/

I think this is amazing.  And probably the first real advancement in what is an ancient tool in a very long time.

Warning Order: Bannockburn

It is now exactly two months until the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn.



Prepare yourselves with due care.

Admirable brevity

Economist and Nobel laureate Thomas Sargent:

I remember how happy I felt when I graduated from Berkeley many years ago. But I thought the graduation speeches were long. I will economize on words. Economics is organized common sense. Here is a short list of valuable lessons that our beautiful subject teaches. 

1. Many things that are desirable are not feasible. 

2. Individuals and communities face trade-offs. 

3. Other people have more information about their abilities, their efforts, and their preferences than you do. 

4. Everyone responds to incentives, including people you want to help. That is why social safety nets don’t always end up working as intended. 

5. There are tradeoffs between equality and efficiency. 

6. In an equilibrium of a game or an economy, people are satisfied with their choices. That is why it is difficult for well-meaning outsiders to change things for better or worse. 

7. In the future, you too will respond to incentives. That is why there are some promises that you’d like to make but can’t. No one will believe those promises because they know that later it will not be in your interest to deliver. The lesson here is this: before you make a promise, think about whether you will want to keep it if and when your circumstances change. This is how you earn a reputation. 

8. Governments and voters respond to incentives too. That is why governments sometimes default on loans and other promises that they have made. 

9. It is feasible for one generation to shift costs to subsequent ones. That is what national government debts and the U.S. social security system do (but not the social security system of Singapore). 

10. When a government spends, its citizens eventually pay, either today or tomorrow, either through explicit taxes or implicit ones like inflation. 

11. Most people want other people to pay for public goods and government transfers (especially transfers to themselves). 

12. Because market prices aggregate traders’ information, it is difficult to forecast stock prices and interest rates and exchange rates.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

At ease

A sense of entitlement from having served in the military?  Really?

Tom Cotton cheerfully swats away Sen. Pryor's absurd criticism:

BLM II: Messing with Texas

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott slammed the federal Bureau of Land Management’s claims that private property within the state now belongs to the federal government.

The BLM says the federal government owns a 90,000 acre piece of land along Texas’s Red River, despite it being maintained and cultivated by private landowners for generations and no law has been passed by Congress giving BLM ownership of the land.

...

“I am deeply concerned about the notion that the Bureau of Land Management believes the federal government has the authority to swoop in and take land that has been owned and cultivated by Texas landowners for generations,” Abbott wrote in a letter to BLM Director Neil Kornz.

"If A President Signs a Bill into Law, Must He Obey It?"

The answer turns out, of course, to be "no."  It is impossible to make the President obey the law.

Brian Boru's March

The Feast of St. George

April 23rd is the feast day of the patron saint of the mounted warrior, the Order of the Garter ("Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense") and many other orders of knighthood.  Here is an article on the life and myth of St. George, patron saint of the cavalry. New Advent has another piece.

The End, The Beginning

How to rebuild civilization, just in case.

Any Stick Will Do To Beat You

At some point, you might as well do it your own way. You're going to take the hit one way or the other.