Sean Penn is Still an Idiot

I saw this by would-be diplomat Sean Penn. Some highlights:

• There has been a systemic barrage of misreporting and context-shifting within the U.S. media and espoused by many U.S. Representatives relative to Venezuela and its democratically elected President Hugo Chavez.
• The American people have grown accustomed to hearing the Venezuelan president referred to as a dictator, not only by media representatives but by members of the leadership in both parties. This is a defamation, not only to President Chavez, but also to the majority of Venezuelan people, poor people who have elected him president time and time again.
• a president elected by the impoverished and at the service of the Venezuelan constitution, a document not unlike our own.
• He is a flamboyant, passionate leader. And while our own cultural and constitutional conditioning would lead us to serious concerns in the powers of his office, there must be an informed adjustment to give our analyses a context that may extend beyond our borders.

(All emphasis added by me)

I am fortunate to know some people that live in Venezuela. People that are subject to the dictator, Hugo Chavez. There is no other title that he is worthy of. He is not democratically elected, and he is certainly not returned to office out of the love of his imprisoned subjects. He is, second to the Brothers Castro, the embodiment of what happens to a vibrant, diverse and hard-working people, economy and nation when subject to socialism and Marxian ideals (apparently the kind that Thomas Friedman finds so appealing).

The contest between who is more repulsive is a tight one. Obviously Chavez himself is a despicable person who maintains an iron grip on control of his country while its people suffer at the hand of his idiotic policies borne of his megalomania. Critical members of the media and any nascent political opposition frequently disappear. He is re-elected because there is no choice. It's pretty easy to win a race when you're the only one running, you write the rules and officiate the match all in one. A nuance perhaps lost on Mr. Penn.

Is Mr. Penn more repulsive than Mr. Chavez? Which is worse, the bloodthirsty dictator or his allegedly educated and enlightened actor apologist?

Chavez has the actual blood on his hands, so he is obviously worse. But Penn fights the good fight. And if he keeps writing as poorly as in this piece and this other golden oldie, he might start to nudge his good buddy Hugo off the pedestal.

Eh, Canada?

Not to pile on, but our friend Professor Krugman also says that Medicare in the United States is "sustainable" because Medicare in Canada is sustainable. Let's get one thing out of the way quickly and agree with the premise that if you increase taxes and restrict consumer choices ("less open-ended and more serious about cost control" is how the Super Genius euphemistically presents it in his piece), then the program can be shown to be sustainable. On paper. I will glide by the fact that Canada has no need for any significant defense spending because she happens to enjoy the rather extraordinary free rider benefit of being attached to America.

I will instead focus on this line: "Now, Canadian health care isn’t perfect — but it’s not bad, and Canadians are happier with their system than we are with ours."

There are a few problems with this position. First, how exactly can we measure this? I'm sure there are polls out there, but seriously think about how this can be compared in any meaningful sense. To be able to have a preference, one needs to be rather familiar with both options. Just showing data that says x% of Americans are "somewhat dissatisfied" with healthcare compared to y% of Canadians is useless as far as comparison goes. I may not like my broadband provider. But that doesn't mean I necessarily prefer another broadband provider with which I have absolutely no familiarity, right?

Also, there also this:

No, It isn't

I've noticed a little meme on the liberal/progressive/socialist end of the spectrum that is being used as a cudgel in the debate about the proper size and scope of government. I first noticed this with Professor Krugman (see here and here) and saw it somewhere along the line repeated by the captain of the JV squad, Ezra Klein. That the federal government "is an insurance company with an army."

No it isn't. At least the United States of America isn't. It is extremely important to remember that I am not a professional historian, political scientist, lawyer or genius polemicist writing for the New York Times. But I can read. And I have read this, the constitution of the United States. I've read a couple books about the constitution. I've even sloughed through a couple Supreme Court decisions. I've given more than a passing glance at Hobbes, Locke and even Rousseau, along with some other works on political science and political economy. I've read some of the Federalist Papers and even a few of the Anti-Federalist Papers. I even have a copy of Madison's notes on the Convention. I'm not listing this stuff to make it look like I'm smart. Because you don't have to be smart to have read these things (and truth be told, I've forgotten most of what I've read, but I think I still have the gist of most of it and I also still have most of the texts). Thanks to Google Books I can state categorically that the word "insurance" does not appear in The Social Contract, Leviathan or Two Treatises on Government. The word "insurance" does not appear in the constitution and the matter was not broached during the convention. It is not mentioned in any of the amendments passed since ratification.

The point being that the government is not an insurance company. It isn't supposed to be one, anyway. And if it were to try and be one, it would carry out that function rather poorly and it has). But none of that matters to the epic minds that embrace the notion of state control of just about everything. Not when the government can inflate the currency, increase taxes, bastardize the interest rates and deny that long-run expectations of catastrophic outcomes are not rational considerations in economic decisions today*.

But merely stating as if it is a given fact that the government is a huge insurance company with an army, then anyone who disagrees with the basic premise is immediately marginalized.

"What do you mean the government isn't an insurance company? What would you do with Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security? Who would provide health insurance for the indigent, infirm and elderly? Who would provide retirement funds for retirees?"

Are we that far gone as a society that we don't realize that a human being's first responsibility is to himself? That this isn't some Randian/Objectivist homage to selfishness but simple common sense? Is it that much of an anathema to speculate that people would be able to make arrangements on their own, voluntarily, to take care of themselves?

Because they can't afford it? Ummm, guess what? Neither can the government. Because when you give someone something for nothing, they tend to want more of it. That is not greed, that is normal. When people don't have to apply marginal utility preferences, when scarcity is removed from the equation by the deus ex machina of government, costs will explode.

Here's another meme that has the added benefit of being true: the government doesn't produce anything, it merely moves resources from one area of the market to another. Anything "given" to one must first be taken from another. When this is done under penalty of law, this is not compassion or charity, it is bullying and theft.

When legislators and bureaucrats (or New York Times columnists) presume to know how to direct resources to more efficient (or humanitarian) outcomes, it can be difficult to prove to them that they are wrong.

But they are wrong. And closing your eyes and repeating silly, and untrue, mantras over and over again won't change that.

*Banks, firms and individuals are not hoarding (i.e. "not not spending") money due to uncertainty and concerns over long-run considerations, both of which are usually (but not always) created by government interference in the market. It's a "liquidity trap" that can only be countered by, yep, more government spending. If this seems like an idiotic concept, then congratulations are in order. You fully understand Keynesian economics and why it doesn't work.

Vonnegut Graphs Fiction

from Robert Krulwich on NPR.

More Funny Math

I'll skip the humorous tut-tutting Professor Krugman does in this post about another person's lack of civility. I'll disregard his almost pathological need to misrepresent facts and insult the intelligence and good faith of those not smart enough to agree with him. Par for the course.

I'll focus on one tidbit, Krugman writing: "He repeats the idea that nobody collected benefits in the beginning because life expectancy at birth was only 63 (life expectancy at age 65, which is what matters, was almost 80 for women and 78 for men)." emphasis added.

Retirement was set at 65 when Social Security was started because you were expected to die by then. Yes, it was well known that if you lived to 65, which you weren't expected to do, then the actuaries did account for the fact that you would live a few years longer. Good genes, non-risky behavior, diet and, again, good genes all played a roll in deciding how long after 65 you would live had you made it. But, and here's a very important point that Professor Super Genius* not only knows but purposely and maliciously misrepresents, you were not expected to live to see the age of 65. A majority of people would live (to 63), working usually 2/3 of that time and having a percentage of their wages taken from them and given to those lucky enough to keep going past the median mortality rate. This number has gone up significantly over the decades since it was instituted while we have only nibbled around the "retirement" age.

Why? Because it is politically risky to mess with a program where you take a little bit of money from a whole lot of people (via the payroll tax) and give it to others, but under the guise of the federal government "saving" it for you. An idea that was known all to well by the man we have to thank for this poorly run Ponzi scheme, Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

"I guess you’re right on the economics, but those taxes were never a problem of economics. They were politics all the way through. We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program."**

Krugman knows he is full of blarney (trying to keep it clean). And FDR knew he was creating a system that would be impossible, politically, to fix. It was established to create a political class of citizens who would then be beholden to and dependent upon, the federal government. The workers will feel trapped into continued support because of the money already taken from them and "invested" into the system.

*

**Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, vol. 2, The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), p. 308-309

New Flash...

Teachers Unions work for the benefit of the teachers and not the children. No kidding.

More on Teaching

An old friend posted a link to this article published by the New York Times. I take exception to some of the arguments made by the authors, specifically that simply paying teachers more would increase performance. A similar idea was floated by the mayor of Newark, NJ last fall, (link and comments here).

Wages are set by the market, and they are already distorted by the teachers' unions. Arbitrarily and artificially inflating wages would no more lead to better results in the classroom than increased wages for soldiers would have won Vietnam (to use the authors' analogy to the military).

The 20% of teachers who leave urban school districts (no source for the data is provided) are replaced by others willing and able to do the job at the wage provided.

The authors cite the old trope of equivalency between other jobs for which "degrees are required." Since when and why are bachelor's degrees required to teach elementary education? When was a primary or secondary teaching job ever considered a sole breadwinner job?

They also conflate aggregates and apply them to specifics (The average starting salary is $39,000; the average ending salary — after 25 years in the profession — is $67,000. This prices teachers out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas, and makes raising a family on one salary near impossible.) First, which salary prices the teacher out of home ownership, the beginning or the final? Teachers in small, rural communities, of which this country has thousands, probably don't make enough to purchase an average home in LA or New York City where the supply of housing is limited. But then, most of the people who also live and work in those communities probably can't afford to buy a home in those 32 metropolitan areas (again, this is tough to tell though, because the authors don't cite a source for the data).

Further, I can only say that in my school district (not affluent) teachers with more than 25 years make more than $100k. This doesn't include the fact that, yes, they do get summers off and have a pension that is nonexistent in the private working world, guaranteed by current and future taxpayers. They also went on strike a few years ago because the district wanted them to contribute 7% to their healthcare costs, up from 2%. This, according to the union and therefore the teachers that refused to work, amounted to an unacceptable "wage cut" because the automatic wage increases in the proposed contract wouldn't be a bottom line increase in wages.

Oh, and they are about to go on strike again.

I am not "anti-teacher." There is an obvious advantage to having personnel around who have experience and wisdom and who know how to do a specific job better than someone with identical training and desire but no experience. There is also the added benefit of the mentoring that takes place. But there is also a limit on that cost, and the wage structure in many school districts exceeds that cost.

To go back to the authors contention that we don't blame the soldiers for failure during war, I would agree. We blame the government. Schools are not performing well. Performance has declined (in aggregate) while costs have increased at a pace far ahead of inflation. So, let's blame the government for getting involved in education. I know a lot of public school teachers, and they all argue that tenure (dismissed as "worthy of debate" in the piece) is necessary because of the political, and thus capricious, nature of school boards. This also is an argument for eliminating government as the provider for this particular service.

Let's allow parents to decide where to send their children. Allow them to decide where they feel they would get the best return on their investment. This would allow for many more schools. Allowing more people who want to teach to do so. Teaching is a noble profession; this would lead to more people teaching. This is good, no? It would also lead to reduced costs for taxpayers.

Teachers' unions are against this because they know that even if teachers decide to unionize at a private institution, they will not be able to get the wages and benefits they can from a purely public-run institution because, by necessity, privately held firms are budgeted and run more efficiently. Or they disappear. This doesn't mean public school have to disappear, but the unions don't want the option of sending a child to another school because they know which option most parents would take.

Competition and choice will improve the American education system. Merely throwing more money at the problem will not fix it. The logic employed by the authors is fatally flawed.