IBD: Mr. President, we are still waiting for your response to Congressman Ryan's question

Read it here.

Joe Klein really is a genius

Commenting on the health care summit, Joe Klein concluded that "that the Republicans had nothing very interesting, or clever, to say" and that "the President was his usual, unflappable, well-informed self". The thing that is most impressive about his commentary is that he arrived at these conclusions without actually watching any of the summit.

He goes on to say that "the obvious truth here is that the Republicans do not want any sort of health care bill to pass at all because they do not want to hand President Obama a victory. Shame on them."

So obvious that he didn't even need to watch it! Wow, he's good.

Segregating people is how insurance works

Senator Tom Harkin said this yesterday at the health care summit: "It's time to stop segregating people on the basis of their health".

But again, "segregating" people is how insurance works. The guy with the house on the beach will pay more for homeowners insurance than the guy who lives inland. A teenager will pay more for auto insurance than a 35 year old. The person with a cancer history will pay a lot more for life insurance than someone with a clean bill of health. It's not about getting as many people into the largest possible pool, it's about identifying risk factors and charging premiums accordingly. The process of segregating people into risk pools is how insurance companies keep premiums low for the most number of people.

Furthermore, in a free market, what we should see is specialization among carriers. For example, certain carriers would serve the mass market, while others would be niche players, specializing in providing insurance for various higher risk customers. An insurance company that specializes in higher risk cases would probably look very different from a mass market carrier in terms of its operations, product design, risk management, capitalization, the expertise of their employees, etc. State regulations, however, don't allow insurance companies to look different, and the health care reform being debated in Washington would make that problem even worse.

Paul Ryan: "It's a difference in philosophy"

I thought it was because the Republicans were in the pockets of the big bad insurance companies, but maybe Congressman Ryan has a point:


And this was devastating:

The President doesn't understand what insurance is

The President made it clear today that he thinks that high deductible, catastrophic health insurance is bad insurance, and that low-deductible "comprehensive" insurance is good insurance. But low-deductible plans are not really insurance at all. They could more accurately be described as prepaid medical, or at best, one part prepaid medical and one part insurance. Furthermore, some of us believe that one of the primary causes of skyrocketing health care costs are these low-deductible plans, but the President seems to believe that insurance company profits are the source of the escalating costs.

Second, he argued that the purpose of insurance is to group both unhealthy and healthy people in the same pool. That's not correct. The whole purpose of insurance is to group people into various risk pools and charge premiums accordingly. That's why a home on the beach is more expensive to insure than a home 10 miles inland. According to the President's logic, both the beach home and the inland home should pay the same premium.

It's obvious that the President doesn't understand what insurance is.

Hedge fund manager Cliff Asness explains it much better than I do over at Bloomberg.

Lileks on the joys of modern architecture

From the inestimable James Lileks.

One of the things I love about modern architecture is the way it radiates a warm, almost intimate sense of humanity:

Read the whole thing. Disturbingly, modernist architecture tends treats buildings as if they were primarily a means for artchitects to express themselves, and the people who have to work, study, and live in them as uninvited party-crashers at a private art gallery.

Ramirez on Palin

As ridiculous as the White House press secretary's mocking of Palin was, the former governor would do well to heed this advice from editorial-cartoonist-extraordinaire Michael Ramirez

Hayek is so hot right now

Since November 2008, a recent edition of Hayek's Road to Serfdom has seen a quadrupling in sales, and has not slowed down since. I gather that these are not huge numbers we're talking about -- James Patterson needn't worry that his current thriller will be dethroned by the Austrian economist -- but even so it's a remarkable turn of events for an economics text first published in 1944 which during most of my lifetime has been all-but-ignored by the academy and media.

Not surprisingly the editor of the strong-selling volume credits current economic and political trends for the Hayek resurgence:

I think that the underlying reason for the sustained interest in Hayek's book is that it taps into a profound dissatisfaction in the public mind with the machinations of its government. Both Presidents Bush and Obama have presided over huge growth in the size of the federal government and in the size of the federal deficit, with little obvious effect on unemployment. Things seem out of control.

George Mason law professor Todd Zywicki provides a thoughtful analysis of the book's relevance to today:

What I think is timeless and relevant about The Road to Serfdom is what I think of as the key philosophical-economic insight that drives the book. Which is that there is a central economic issue that characterizes all human societies, namely the problem of scarcity. Governmental intervention cannot repeal the reality of scarcity. So, at root, we have a basic choice to make: either each of us chooses for ourselves (classical liberalism) or government chooses for us (or to put it otherwise, we all choose for each other). On this central insight, I think that Hayek has the matter exactly right–either we choose for ourselves or someone else chooses for us.

Hayek’s historical prediction follows from this basic insight–in a world where government chooses for us, somebody has to decide whose needs get met and whose do not. Which further means that government has to come up with some array of which needs are more important than others. Taxes provide the paradigm example: each dollar in taxes basically means that the individual has one less dollar to spend on what he wants and instead one dollar is given to the government to spend. At the margin, each dollar in taxes means that you have to sacrifice some of your leisure (in order to work more) or forgo some consumption activity that otherwise would have spent money on (a book, vacation, a clarinet for your child, or whatever). But Hayek’s crucial insight is keeping this central question front and center–either you decide what to do with your own money or someone else decides. Those are the only two choices.

Here we have a concise explanation of what Thomas Sowell calls the "tragic vision" -- the awareness that there are no cost-free solutions, only trade-offs. As a consequence the question of who decides what trade-offs are worth making is an important one. This is not a recipe for nihilism -some trade-offs are worth making, some decisions good and others bad. Nor is it a prescription for anarchy. But in a democratic republic in which we believe that all men are created equal, the question of "who decides" must remain, as Zywicki says, front and center. This is particularly the case when the ruling class behaves as if there were no trade-offs.

Both in their personal financial lives and on the political stage, Americans are getting a crash-course in scarcity, trade-offs, and the importance of "who decides?" It's no surprise that Hayek is getting some attention.

(For other manifestations of the Hayek boomlet, see John Stossel's recent program, and of course, the rad Hayek v. Keynes rap video. Now there's a phrase one doesn't type every day.)

Bayh's moderation was not always in evidence

The announcement by Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) that he will not seek a third senate term came as a shock, and has occasioned numerous articles referring to him as a "moderate". This is true to an extent -- as governor of Indiana he earned a reputation for fiscal sanity, and he has taken pains to distance himself from his party's far left. But his famed moderation did not have a dramatic impact on his voting record -- at least not the sort of impact that all the crowing about his moderation would lead one to believe.

Here are Sen. Bayh's annual ratings from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action since he first took office:

Year / Rating

2008 70%
2007 95%
2006 85%
2005 95%
2004 90%
2003 75%
2002 70%
2001 100%
2000 80%
1999 90%

Average 1999-2008 = 85%

A moderate is someone who agrees with liberals 85% of the time, apparently.

The horror, the horror

This from the NY Times:

With his (Beck's) guidance, they (Beck viewers and tea party activists) explored the Federalist Papers...and some went to Constitutional seminars.

What is this country coming to.

Billingsley on Castro, Commies, and Gilbert Arenas

I’m very pleased to see that my friend and former colleague Lloyd Billingsley has a new memoir out, Our Time After a While: Reflections of a Borderline Baby Boomer, which is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iUniverse. I am awaiting the arrival of my copy in the mail, and I am sure to have thoughts about it when it arrives. In the meantime, I thought I’d introduce you to Lloyd and his writing.

Lloyd and I worked together at the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (now known as the David Horowitz Freedom Center) in Los Angeles. I was a staff writer, and he a senior writer, for the Center’s anti-political-correctness monthly, Heterodoxy, and he also served as managing editor of the bi-monthly education reform magazine, Report Card. A remarkably industrious writer, Lloyd performed these responsibilities while also serving as the Washington Times’ California correspondent, filing several stories a month, and regularly contributing op-ed pieces to newspapers all over. By this time he was an experienced journalist with hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles to his credit, along with half-a-dozen books. Despite the disparity in our level of experience, he always treated me with respect, patience, and kindness. He was a terrific mentor and friend.

Currently, he is editorial director for the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute, where he keeps a keen eye on politics, education, and culture, writing from a libertarian and anti-leftist perspective, with a special emphasis on goings-on in the Golden State. He’s especially knowledgeable about the influence of Communism on Hollywood, and on a related subject, Hollywood’s treatment of the Cold War and of anti-Communism. On this score, check out his Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s.

And now, for your reading pleasure, here’s a brief Billingsley sampler, consisting of some of his recent work and a couple of older pieces that I especially appreciated. Enjoy!

“Hollywood’s Missing Movies: Why Hollywood has ignored life under Communism” (Reason, 2000). The title says it all. This is a must-read, as relevant today as it was when it was first published. I’m putting this first, out of chronological order, because it is one of my all-time favorite LB pieces

“California’s Corporate Exodus” (PRI, January 2010) – on corporate employers fleeing the state its punitive approach to taxation and regulation.

“Gilbert Arenas, Guns, and Government” (PRI, January 2010) – contrasts the NBA’s no-nonsense response to an all-star’s bringing of guns into the workplace with the San Diego police department’s decidedly more lenient treatment of one of its own, and the treatment of government employees generally.

"New Castro, Same Cuba, Same Ignorant Apologists” (FrontPageMagazine.com, Nov. 2009) - An entertaining, maddening look at the American Left’s continued willingness to be charmed by the Cuban regime, even now.

"Seeing Red” (Claremont Review of Books, 2002) – a review of three books on Communism, the “Red Scare” and Hollywood anti-anti-Communism, including Ron Radosh’s memoir Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left.

Instapundit: Climategate reminiscent of Bellesiles

Glenn Reynolds, a/k/a the Instapundit, makes a sharp observation regarding Climategate:

As this scandal runs on, it’s beginning to remind me of the Michael Bellesiles scandal...

Bellesiles, for those who don’t remember, was a historian at Emory who wrote a book making some, er, counterintuitive claims about guns in early America — in short, that they were much rarer than generally thought, and frequently owned and controlled by the government. Constitutional law scholars who expressed doubts about this were told to shut up by historians, who cited the importance of “peer review” as a guarantor of accuracy, and who wrapped themselves in claims of professional expertise.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Bellesiles had made it up.

Read the whole thing.

Lawrence O'Donnell vs Mark Thiessen

This video is getting a lot of attention.

My take is that if you are going to write a book with the subtitle "how Barack Obama is inviting the next attack", then this kind of response should not be surprising. I can't believe I just defended Lawrence O'Donnell.

Fiscal Responsibility

This story perfectly captures the ridiculousness of the "stimulus" bill, and the ineptitude of the education establishment.

Polk school district to give iPods to some parents Wednesday, February 10, 2010

POLK COUNTY (Bay News 9) -- The Polk County school district is giving away iPods to some parents. The school district is using the device to reward parents of children with disabilities who fill out a 10-minute online survey. The district wants to know how well it's connecting with the parents and how to get parents involved in their children's education. The district is spending about $350,000 in federal stimulus money for the iPods. The district has more than 10,000 students with disabilities.

Radosh on Beck on Bond on MLK

Historian Ron Radosh, a former socialist who moved rightward after researching for a book on the Rosenberg spy case, offers a gentle correction to Glenn Beck on MLK, and in particular Rev. King's democratic socialism. While I think he's being a little hard on Beck, the history lesson he provides is a valuable one.

Earlier this year, NAACP chairman Julian Bond said in an NPR interview that MLK believed in a "modified form of socialism," and that this fact has gotten lost in favor of an "anesthetized" view of the civil rights leader. Continued Bond:

We’ve made him into a different kind of person than he actually was in life. And it may be that that’s one reason he’s so celebrated today because we celebrate a different kind of man than really existed. But he was a bit more radical. Not terribly, terribly radical but a bit more radical than we make him out to be today

On his own radio show, Beck mused that this must have been an attempt on the part of Bond to resuscitate President Obama --i.e., if Obama has socialist tendencies they're okay since MLK had them too. Radosh says this amounts to a "conspiracy theory":

[Beck surmises that] Julian Bond spoke about King’s belief in socialism to make
Obama’s socialist agenda acceptable. Beck goes on to argue that this “icon” America has created, whom we say has “combined George Washington and Abraham Lincoln,” is probably being falsely portrayed as a socialist. King, he said, in reality “didn’t exist that way. He was different than that.” . . .

But Bond was not saying anything was wrong with King, only stating a fact. And it was King himself, as we shall see, who made it clear numerous times that he did see himself as some kind of a socialist.

Again, I think Radosh is being a bit hard on Beck in this piece -- it's not so crazy to think that Bond intended to create a little space for leftist politics by noting King's socialist sympathies. Beck's comments were overblown given the off-hand (and truthful) nature of Bond's remarks, but don't amount to loony conspiracy-theorizing. (The fact that Bond was not criticizing King adds support to Beck's position, rather than detracts from it as Radosh seems to think, and people, conservatives included, often try to use the King-agrees-with-me mode of argument).

More significantly Radosh provides a valuable brief history of MLK's political beliefs and the way he kept his eyes on the prize (to coin a phrase), making sure his views on civil rights stayed front and center, so that his life's most important work would not be derailed by his other political views which he knew were less popular.

It's an important piece, and not only because preserving the historical record is intrinsically worthwhile. Radosh's biographical sketch takes into account not only the things about MLK that every sane person loves him for, but also an aspect of the great man's life that some people might disagree with, what Radosh describes as King's "mild socialist beliefs." This kind of fully orbed approach is the antidote to politics and history as they are too often practiced these days, in which a public figure is cast as either "all good" (from the speaker's perspective) or "all bad" and the historian's job is to hand out white hats and black hats. Conservatives, especially, ought to be unfraid of seeing every human being as they really are. What King was, of course, was an American hero, and acknowledging that he wasn't a free-marketeer doesn't change that one bit. It also does not mean that socialism is sound economics, and the fact that some wonderful men thought otherwise does not change that fact either.

Beck vs. Joe Klein

This is hysterical. (I recommend picking it up at the 3 minute mark).



Plus, Beck mentioned this book yesterday on his radio and TV shows. Notice the sales rank.

What grade are we in?

Wow. The White House really is obsessed with Sarah Palin .

Their approval ratings are really going to skyrocket now. What grade are we in here...third, fourth?

An extra $1.6 billion, I mean trillion

Several weeks ago, Veronique de Rugy called out Karl Rove for not being completely honest about the Bush White House's contribution to the current fiscal situation. But here, she addresses the claim that all of the budget deficits currently projected for the next 10 years were inherited.

To do this, she generously assumes all of the 2009 spending and the growth of that spending, including the spending requested by the Obama White House in February 2009, is Bush's fault entirely. She then isolates the growth in spending over the next 10 years based on budget requests made by the White House since February 2009. The result? An extra $1.6 trillion in spending over the next 10 years.

Hmmm. Maybe that's why the tea party folks and the establishment Republicans are getting along so well.

Tea party radicals?

If the tea party movement is so radical, then why are they so excited about Scott Brown? Rich Lowry explores that question in his latest column.

Headlines

Over at Real Clear Politics, the top two headlines on Saturday were:

Blame the Childish, Ignorant American Public

followed by

Why Are Liberals So Condescending?

And I thought Glenn Beck was exaggerating

This from Foxnews.com: "North Carolina Schools May Cut Chunk Out of U.S. History Lessons".

As the North Carolina curriculum stands now, ninth-grade students take world history, 10th-graders study civics and economics and 11th-graders take U.S. history going back to the country's founding.

Under the proposed change, the ninth-graders would take a course called global studies, focusing in part on issues such as the environment. The 10th grade still would study civics and economics, but 11th-graders would take U.S. history only from 1877 onward.

One of the themes of the Glenn Beck show has been the idea that one of the goals of the Progressive movement is to detach us from our nation's founding principles, and one of the ways to accomplish this is to simply stop teaching about the founding. I thought he was exaggerating, but with this proposal (which I have to believe has no chance of being implemented), maybe he was on to something.

A layup

Paul Ryan is everywhere

Here , here and here .

And the best line from the Ross Douthat article:

The Obama plan for long-term fiscal solvency is … to appoint a commission charged with proposing plans for long-term fiscal solvency.

And speaking of the "commission",this is must watch. Fast forward to 62 minutes to see this exchange:

Tim Geithner: "What we are saying is that we are going to solve our part of the mess we inherited. We inherited a structural deficit, and to bring that down, we are going to have to work together."

Paul Ryan:"Then why don't you do it in your budget! You guys run the government. If you are going to solve our fiscal situation then why don't you do that."


[Update]
What's most amazing about that clip is how bad Geithner comes across on TV. All I can think of is Uriah Heep. OK, maybe that's unfair. But when he starts claiming that Bush was left with surpluses as far as the eye could see, ignoring the fact that the CBO estimates in 2000 for the 2001 baseline budget completely missed the tech bubble recession, he is being completely dishonest.

...and another Paul Ryan interview.

If even Orszag says that it's not a credible budget minus the commission, the deficits are not sustainable using the administration's own methodology. So we have a budget here that's not credible and not sustainable under the administration's own admission. And that to me is a huge dereliction of duty. I'm one guy from Wisconsin with a small staff, and if I can put out a plan that solves our fiscal crisis, surely the head of our government can do the same.

Why O'Reilly is so successful

Anyone who thinks the Bill O'Reilly show is a one-sided scream-fest should really watch this informative and entertaining interview with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome. The interview doesn't make any news, but it is vintage O'Reilly, and is a great example of why his show is so wildly successful.

Paul Ryan vs Peter Orzag

This is an interesting back and forth, and includes this rather stunning admission by Obama's budget director:

Peter Orzag: "His plan succeeds in addressing our long-term fiscal problem, which is a significant accomplishment."

Paul Ryan: "Peter Orszag is right that the Roadmap dramatically changes the future structure of the Medicare program. That's the point."