My Personal Health Insurance Comparison

The other day I posted about it making the most sense for young healthy people, under Obamacare, to choose the lowest premium plan possible, tied to a health savings account, looking strictly at the numbers involved, and not worrying about what plan had what coverage, and also asked how that might effect the stability of the insurance system in general.

I've since looked at the follow up information that BlueCross-BlueShield sent me regarding my plan options moving forward, so I figured I'd make the comparsion to my current plan.

My current plan is called Blue Edge HSA 100%.  Under this plan, I am given access to either BCBS's PPO network of doctors, or their BlueChoice network of doctors.  My individual deductible on this plan is $1,750, and my coinsurance is 100%, meaning I pay nothing after my deductible.  For this plan, my monthly premium has been $246.08.  This amount includes dental coverage that I tacked on, which if I remember correctly, is about $25/month of this amount.  So if we're comparing health insurance to health insurance, my premium just for health insurance is roughly $221/month.  This has been an individual insurance plan, and so I will compare this to the individual rates of the new plans being offered.  Rates in my article from the other day were quoted for both myself and my wife, and so differ from the rates in this post.

My current plan has been cancelled, and BCBS has sent me a letter indicating that the most similar plan to my current plan is the new Blue PPO Gold 001 plan.  This plan runs $376.40/month, and has a deductible of $3,250.  So for the most similar plan, the monthly premium has increased roughly 170%, and the deductible has also nearly doubled.  I am also limited to only the PPO network.  Even better news, this plan is also not eligible to be used with an HSA.   Here is what this plan offers:

I am also told that Blue PPO Bronze 005 is the most similar in price to what I have today.  This plan is $239.43/month, so they've managed to offer a plan at a similar price.  This plan has a $5,000 deductible, and a coinsurance of 80%, with an out of pocket max of $6,250.  This means that even after I've paid $5,000 in deductibles, I'm still paying 20% of the bills until I've hit $6,250.  This plan does qualify for use with an HSA, and here is what this plan offers, compared side-by-side with the plan above, so we can see how much worse it is on the surface.

There's really not a lot to like about that picture, since what it's really saying is that I might more or less count on coming out of pocket to the tune of $6,250 just about no matter what, because of the 80% coinsurance.  Basically with this policy I'd be cutting checks to BCBS to the tune of $2,873.16 a year for the right to have them tell me I'm paying for everything myself until I've spent $5,000, and then I'm also still paying 20% until I've shelled out another $1,250.  At least I get to have an HSA with this one.  Yay!

Bottom line is, for me, that I'm either paying almost double in premiums, with almost double the deductible, to get similar coverage to what I already have, but can't use an HSA, or I can buy much, much worse coverage for a similar price.

Given the fact that they have another plan called Blue Choice Bronze PPO 006, that turns that litany of 80% coverage into 100% coverages, with a $6,000 deductible and $6,000 out of pocket max, and for only $160.09/month, also HSA eligible, I'm not sure why anyone would bother with something like the Blue PPO 005 above.  At least not a young, healthy person in a big city like me anyway.  If my doctor isn't in the Blue Choice network, I can find one that is.

This obviously becomes much more problematic where people live more spread out.  If someone is stuck with the Blue PPO network of doctors, they're stuck with something like that awful Blue PPO 005, or else instead, for some terrible reason, double the premiums.

Another Market Force within Obamacare

It's been quite some time since I've had the time on my hands, or the ambition to write about any politics here.  I've recently started my own company, and so have a bit better outlook on life in general, and a bit more time on my hands now that I manage my own time as I please.  With that, I've been doing some thinking on this roll-out, or lack thereof, of Obamacare, and I've found something in all this that I'm interested to write about that I think happens to be an angle not many other people are seeing in it.

A great many commentators have been expounding on whether or not Obamacare will collapse under its own weight due to lack of people being able to sign up for it, or people just not signing up and taking the penalty instead.  This may very well end up being the case.  From what I can tell from researching rates over the past week or two, we're all either looking at incredibly high premiums compared to what we're used to, or else incredibly high deductibles compared to what we're used to.  I will note here that I make too much money to qualify for subsidies under the law, so I can't and won't bring those into my discussion of the rates, which works for me, as I wish to focus on this purely as a market analysis anyway, without the government distortion.  With such high premiums, accompanied by de facto poor service in the form of high deductibles, the number of "eff-you" types who will forego coverage for the penalty would seem to be high.

The long view of this idea that Obamacare will collapse under its own weight due to lack of participation, is that with the market unable to support the healthcare needs of the many sick and old, on the backs of the few healthy and young, the left wing will at some point execute the complete takeover of the healthcare system in the form of single payer.

I'm not immune to thinking this myself, and certainly feel that this would be the worst case scenario, resulting in rationing of healthcare, and DMV-like service in the hospitals themselves, not just on the website where you're supposed to be able to sign up for your coverage.

All of this said, I've been spending a good part of the last week or so researching the available plans, and I'm seeing something else happening, that may be more catastrophic both to insurance companies, and the government, than anyone has thought to this point.

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO BUY INSURANCE

Yes, the thought has been that most likely scenario in all of this is that a great many people will forego insurance for the penalty.  However, as Megan McArdle recently pointed out, this will not be so easy.  The penalty is a nominal $95, or 1% of your gross income.  This is next year's figure, and I am sure it will increase over time.

Now, if a person makes $100,000, then the $1,000 penalty tax that has to be paid is really a pittance compared to the amount this person would have to shell out in health insurance premiums, so let's go hypothetical and imagine that the penalty is made high enough to prod people into actually buying insurance, and every single person in the land has to buy insurance, and does.  This hypothetical leads us to examine what policies will be bought en masse across the country.

WHICH PLAN MAKES THE MOST SENSE?

For the purposes of this post, I am going to use information from Blue Cross-Blue Shield of Illinois, both because this is my insurance company and I am most familiar with them, and because when I compare estimates on healthcare.gov (sans subsidy), they are easily the most inexpensive across the board.

Here are the results for plans for my wife and me from Blue Cross-Blue Shield.

Looked at in this manner, we are seeing what the maximum outlay might be if shit really hit the fan and deductible payments were maxed out.  What I look at most closely, however, being a younger, healthy person, is how much money here remains in my own control.  This is where having an HSA kicks in.  Basically, if I am able to afford to stash away the maximum tax-deductible HSA contributions for two years, without having to dip in to the HSA account to pay deductible fees, I am basically no longer coming out of pocket on deductibles in the future.  Granted, of course, I will likely have some small amount of medical expense, so that not everything I pile away into the HSA will stay there over the course of two years, but let's even say in 2.5-3 years, my HSA has enough money in it that if I get hit by a car, I'm not diving into my checking account to cover deductible payments.

This being the case, the market force at play within Obamacare is one that should be driving all the young, healthy people onto low-premium, high deductible "Bronze" level plans, that they can tie to a Health Savings Account.

This is the arrangement I've had set up for myself for three years now, and only the deductible and premiums are really changing here for me.  I will be very interested to see what comes of this system over the course of the next year.  The mandate has the opportunity to force young, healthy people to actually think about their insurance coverage for the first time that I can recall.  From a personal standpoint, I've always had insurance, either through my parents, or through school, or through work.  Three years ago, I became an independent contractor, and had to buy my own insurance.  This was the first time I actually ever looked at any of these plans beyond what the deductible was and what the copay was.  Now millions of other people are going to be in that boat as well.  Unless somebody that is young is also sick with, perhaps, diabetes or some type of other length of life disease, where it will make sense to have more of a "maintenance plan" type of insurance, there really is no conceivable reason why a young person would choose anything but the low premium, high deductible, HSA combination.

And so my question is, what happens then to the structure of this program?

If everyone who is healthy enough to forego a "maintenance" insurance plan chooses to do so (and why wouldn't they?), my early assumption has to be that the insurance industry will be unable to support the older sicker people based on the lack of premium revenue.  The whole idea here was to force everyone to buy insurance, raise premiums, and use the higher premiums on healthy people to pay for sicker peoples' maintenance insurance.  But if younger people in general go the route of paying the bare minimum into the insurance pool as possible, instead contributing to their own HSA accounts, and the deductibles be damned, doesn't this eventually pull just as big of a Jenga piece out from the foundational levels of the scheme as people just not signing up anyway?

I do recognize that the more immediate problems with the system, such as not being able to sign up, and having no real financial reason to sign up due to the extremely low penalty, are likely to drive this train off the rails much sooner than my scenario.  However, I also think that my scenario is another one that dooms this system as well.  Ironically, however, taken to the next logical step in the long view, the market response would be to increase deductibles further, meaning that people would be much, much more inclined to begin actually shopping for their healthcare, rather than just showing up and expecting to be serviced for no charge, meaning that in the long run, prices to the consumer might actually come down as the healthcare industry would finally again be required to service the consumer rather than throw a fat bill at the insurance company's wall to see what sticks.  Over the long term, proponents might actually trumpet to the heavens that the program has worked!

But I wouldn't give our government the credit for such foresight or patience as to wait for all of that to come to fruition.  If they had the foresight or patience for that, they'd have simply written a program that majorly incentivized people to get onto HSA's, and opened up the insurance markets across state lines, giving people more freedom and choice.  But the government response to a market response of insurance prices going up will surely be one instead of further control, perhaps to put some kind of fiat cap on deductibles, and eliminate HSA eligible plans, putting us all on more expensive maintenance insurance, leading to the necessity to increase the subsidy to lower income citizens, or perhaps even broadening the criteria for acceptance onto Medicaid (which is already looming large as a major wrench in the works).

Ultimately, this would also mean the healthcare industry will continue to overcharge for services, since there will continue to be no price feedback from the actual consumer.

Why They Need Us

It's been a long time since I felt like posting anything.  But now the Obama Campaign recently issued The Life of Julia, and it's just too stupid to pass up.

Enough has already been said picking it apart, so I won't really bother with that.  I will however, give you twenty-nine seconds that explains exactly the road the President is headed down with this nonsense.



It's really not any more difficult than this.  Either you believe people need to be reliant on the government to live their everyday lives or you don't.

Jake the dog is Bender from Futurama

And no, not just in the sense that John Dimaggio voices both of them.

I mean literally, they're the same 'person' but with millions of years difference.

Now please, stop throwing your chairs in outrage and listen... Or read... Unless you're blind.

Lets start with the first point:

Jake is a dog, not a robot. Right? Well if you remember your Blade Runner you'll remember that 1) Harrison Ford is a super badass, and 2) That at a certain level of sophistication, there is no clear distinction between a robot/android and a biological creature. Now the Bender we know was a 2^nd generation robot and pretty unsophisticated. Prof. Farnsworth invented the first gen not long before and society had not fully accepted robot kind [remember prop infinity?] by the time of Futurama.

After enough generations of machines building and designing their successors, they would end up looking and functioning like biological beings. And if the 2^nd gen version had extendy arms and legs, I'm sure the nth gen would have extendy everything.

Lets also look at the designation 'dog.' No other traditional animal exists in the post-apocalyptic world of Ooo. Aside from sentient worms, evil penguins, and a snail that contains the mind of the Litch, we've yet to meet anyone or anything (aside from Finn) who was a traditional earth-based life form. Yet we have Jake the 'magic' dog. It is my assertion that as human society progressed and intertwined with robots, we changed the designation of our partners to something that meant a best friend and constant companion. And what better friend has mankind ever had than the dog?

Then regarding the proclamation that Jake has 'magic' stretching powers, we must only remember Clarke's law that “ Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic .”

So we've crossed the first plausibility gap. Now lets take a look at behavior.

In the episode 'Apple Thief' Jake repeatedly tells Finn about how he used to snatch purses and hock stolen goods before he learned it was bad. This behavior is [likely intentionally] reminiscent of Bender's general attitude and behavior. But when did he 'learn it was bad?' We know that all Bending units (except our Bender) are basically immortal. When they 'die' their minds are uploaded into a new body and they go on with their lives.

Well any new body would require a new set of operational programs – essentially like installing new drivers when you throw a new video card in your PC. It would be poor design if a robot mind were dropped into a new body and didn't know what internal commands to use in order to move and function. And with any new ability that their new chassis provided, there would need to be a set of moral/social guidelines on how and when to use those abilities. Therefore robot morality would evolve over time and develop along with their abilities and social freedoms/responsibilities.

At some point in a robot's near-immortal life they would 'learn' that stealing was wrong when their moral core was updated to include that definition.

Also, Jake's immaturity and fierce loyalty to his equally immature human companion mirror how Bender acted (perhaps with a more upgraded moral core – this \is\ a kids show after all). Plus Jake's eternal drive to party and inability to do anything else with much conviction are very Bender-ish as well. Such loyalty is perfectly normal for a race that was created to live with humans, and even explains why every woodland creature ignored baby Finn except Jake's parents.

And one last piece of the puzzle: the Rainicorn-Dog wars.

These wars are why Jake's romance with Lady Rainicorn is so scandalous. That these two can and do co-exist shows us that there is no inherent reason for the two species to clash, and no reason is ever given. Except one that may have missed you.

Rainicorns eat humans.

Here I assert that Rainicorns are the reason why humanity is all but extinct. As they are able to phase matter through their bodies, fly at speed, and who knows what else, they would be a nearly unstoppable enemy. Where they came from and why they speak Korean are not germane. If humanity were locked in a losing war with the Rainicorns, our faithful companions and social equals [the Dogs/Robots] would certainly fight on our side [and if it was part of his base programming that he may one day need to fight the Rainicorns, it would explain why Jake can understand Korean but never speaks it]. Jake is told by his father in a flashback that he would be hurting people his whole life. This is exactly the kind of thing a parent would cheerily say to their offspring if an eternal war was being fought.

In any conflict involving humans, robots, and an even more powerful foe, robots would certainly do the bulk of the fighting. They would likely even continue fighting on our behalf even after we had pulled our last-resort [scorched-earth] and blew a giant hole in the Earth. And for the untold ages after that, it would no longer be the Human-Rainicorn war, but the Rainicorn-Dog war. Only in the past few decades with the invention of soy-humans have the Rainicorns stopped their attacks.

(Note all the nukes in the first screen of the opening sequence)

Bender plays classical piano with perfect form.

Jake plays the viola with perfect form.

Bender can stretch his arms and legs.

Jake can stretch his arms and legs with much more precision, as well as the rest of his body (to the apparently cellular level)

Bender is fiercely loyal to his human friend.

Jake is fiercely loyal to his human friend.

Bender is a party animal, and often gets distracted from his primary task to do something more fun.

Jake is a party animal, and often gets distracted from his primary task to do something more fun.

Bender is childish and cowardly when facing his own perceived mortality (ie sick/dying).

Jake is childish and cowardly when facing his own perceived mortality (ie sick/dying).

At some point after Futurama, Humanity is living along side Robots as equals when a war with the Rainicorns begins. After the planet is heavily nuked (the so called 'mushroom wars' referenced in-series) the Robots (who now resemble and are called 'Dogs') continue to fight the Rainicorns until a stalemate is reached and the conflict is mostly forgotten. Some time after this, Adventure Time takes place.

Jake is a super-advanced bending robot, retaining only his general attitude towards life, voice and the basis of his physical abilities.

A Letter to Sam Harris on the Economy

Dear Mr. Harris-

You have requested that economists in particular contact you in regard to the 08-19-11 Addendum to your blog post "How Rich is Too Rich?"  I am not an economist, but I follow economics very closely.  I'm an engineer by degree and run a construction company, so it is perhaps in my nature, as well as required of my position, to know what's happening in the world, economically.  I hope you will take a few minutes to think about my take on your ideas, however, because admittedly this is long, I will not be surprised or disheartened if you do not.

First, I will assess your first idea:

Future breakthroughs in technology (e.g. robotics, nanotech) could eliminate millions of jobs very quickly, creating a serious problem of unemployment.


In a very broad sense, I think that the creation of a massive robotics industry causing large scale unemployment would perhaps be akin to the fear once upon a time that the rise of the automobile industry would have caused large-scale unemployment due to their replacing horse-drawn carriages.  To shamelessly steal from DeVito's speech in Other People's Money, there was once a company that made the world's best buggy whips, whose employees surely found themselves eventually unemployed due to the rise of the automobile.  But as those people lost their jobs due to the rise of an industry that made their profession nearly obsolete, so too did a new industry arise whose ability to employ massive numbers far surpassed the ability to employ of carriage-makers, horse farmers and buggy whip makers combined.  In the aggregate, employment rose.

Will robotics eliminate jobs?  Of course, it has already eliminated thousands upon thousands of jobs, from the automobile industry to the airplane manufacturing industry to the construction even of submarines.  Many welds on the newest submarines, for instance, require accuracy that only robotics can achieve.  This means that welders that worked on submarines are out of that particular work.  But they are still welders.  They just need to weld elsewhere.  Perhaps they might even go to work for the company that is manufacturing the robots.

If we look to the future of robotics, the scenario that kills millions and millions of jobs is the perhaps Asimov's Foundation series scenario, or more recently, the scenario in the movie, Surrogates, where robots become so commonplace, there is nearly one robot, or more, for every human being.

But who makes the robots?  Surely for the smaller components and the excessively detailed work, there are other robots.  But there are still going to be assembly line jobs.  There are going to be jobs for the people who need to supply the materials, all the way back to the original mines they came from.  Robots won't do everything.  All along the way there will need to be people to do the work.  Perhaps this is best explained easily in Leonard Read's pamphlet, "I, Pencil."  If the industry grows to such a magnitude as you suggest, then yes, surely it will create massive unemployment in other currently existing industries, but it will create massive employment in a new, growing industry.  Such is the nature of capitalism and economic progression.

But many of your readers responding to you have already covered this basic idea, and you are looking for something more.

I am suggesting, however, that there is nothing that rules out the possibility of vastly more powerful technologies creating a net loss of available jobs and concentrating wealth to an unprecedented degree.


To this I would suggest that there is and always has been this possibility, however the missing piece of the equation is necessarily the rate of population growth.  It did not used to be uncommon for families to have 4, 6, 8 or even 10 or 12 kids.  When our economy was largely driven by agrarian life, it was economically necessary for a family to have as many workers as possible to work the farm.  Given the rise of mechanical farming equipment, the farm family has gotten smaller over the years.  In the early-to-mid 20th century boom in manufacturing, we saw our population skyrocket as we had an economy that we were comfortable still having several children per family, as factory workers would have assumed that their kids could eventually go to work in the factory, if nothing else.  I would suggest to you that as many manufacturing jobs have moved overseas, families have trended to get smaller as a response, with families focusing on grooming their children for white collar work, whether as engineers, academics, or businessmen.

The moving of blue collar manufacturing positions overseas has also been a response to the market.  Union contracts in the United States grew to the point that the manufacturing of goods locally has in large part become untenable.  I would put this largely on the unsustainable nature of a pension model for retirement, moreso than the wage rates themselves, but this is another topic altogether.  So if we are talking about a "serious problem of unemployment" I assume we are talking about it locally in the United States, because technically speaking, the jobs haven't disappeared, they have gone elsewhere, where the labor can be had for significantly less money.

I make this point because, if we were to see such a significant rise in robotics, it would be not only because the manufacture, sale and maintenance of the robots was that much cheaper than American labor, but also that much cheaper than rock-bottom foreign labor.  Looking at it macro-economically, taking the world market as a whole, and taking employment to be a worldwide phenomenon, because it is a worldwide phenomenon, I feel the possibility of a rise in robotics to replace employment of human labor to such an extent that all levels of human employment are made economically obsolete to be something that is probably a few hundred years down the line, should it ever happen.  There's an entire world's worth of cheap labor to exploit before a saturation of robotics seems likely to even begin to take place.

Now, on to your next idea:

The federal government should levy a one-time wealth tax (perhaps 10 percent for estates above $10 million, rising to 50 percent for estates above $1 billion) and use these assets to fund an infrastructure bank.


You do, strangely, caveat this by ultimately saying "Leaving aside fears of government ineptitude, please tell me why it would be a bad idea for the rich to fund such a bank voluntarily."

Let me first point out that these are two wildly different things.  The federal government descending upon the rich and absconding with 10-50% of everything they own from behind the barrel of a gun is not the same thing as our country's 400-something billionaires voluntarily pooling their money together to charter a new bank that would be used to fund infrastructure projects.  To insinuate anything of the kind is disingenuous.

The latter would most certainly not be a bad thing, though let's remember that the structure of such an entity would be as a bank, loaning money out to municipalities and states and the federal government to fund infrastructure projects.  This money would have to be paid back with interest, and that this is really not any different than how this already happens, except for the fact that this bank would be something like another Federal Reserve style central bank dedicated solely to infrastructure, though, I would assume and hope, not allowed to print money.  To that effect, I guess I don't really understand the point of it, other than that it's an accounting trick to move debt out of treasuries and into another entity.  The debt still grows, only it doesn't affect the country's balance sheet.  At some point it becomes another Fannie/Freddie-type of entity, with so much debt that it doesn't even know how much of it is even good anymore.

This is to say nothing of the point, also, that if the super-rich are the ones funding this bank, they are getting even richer because of it, thereby increasing the wealth gap you are hoping to close.

If you have taken the time to read through all of this, thank you.

Sincerely,
Paul Kroenke

I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

Gateway Pundit finds a story so absurd you know a Democrat has to be at the center of it.

Democrat Representative Michael Sturla has made the ludicrous claim that fracking causes the spread of STD's "amongst the womenfolk."

While it's refreshing to see that someone has picked up John Murtha's mantle of severely bigoted Pennsylvania Democrat, perhaps even more refreshing is Sturla's response to criticism of his bigotry.

“This is in the heart of the drilling area” said Sturla, as he read from the report.  “Other issues: an increase in sexually transmitted diseases.  One of the recommendations: increased Department of Health availability of services related to STDs and substance abuse.” 

“I don’t make this stuff up,” said Sturla.  “Should we not have drilling in the state because of that?  No, but it’s one of those impacts that we need to deal with.  In the Marcellus Shale Commission report, it says we should deal with it.”

Bigoted Comedy Gold.

Oh, and as an added bonus, (based on Ed Schultz's criteria) he's a racist!

“It’s just you can’t whitewash it and say it doesn’t exist,” said Sturla.

Fracking?  Drilling?

Ron Paul is The One

Great timing on this video as a response to his being deemed the "13th floor of a hotel" by the media in general.

Brett Baier at Fox News may be rolling his eyes and smirking away in neocon hell, but there are plenty of people who recognize Ron Paul as The One.

Fair (and unbalanced) to Say

John Stewart on the media's continuing ludicrous blackout on any coverage related to Ron Paul.

The Daily Show - Indecision 2012 - Corn Polled Edition - Ron Paul & the Top Tier
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

What can we really say? For someone who has forced himself to the forefront of the national debate since the primaries four years ago, the media still treats him like a crazy person. Here is a man whose ideas have driven the groundswell of libertarianism in America, who other candidates are taking seriously this time (they treated him with the media's same level of derision last time, openly laughing at his responses on stage and never debating him), and even Fox News, the guys that are supposedly the leaders of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy are acting as if he's irrelevant.

It occurs to me that Michele Bachmann has been something of an economic understudy of Ron Paul's over the past four years.  I wonder if, as Mike Huckabee joined forces with John McCain last time around to freeze Romney out of the primaries in the south, perhaps Bachmann (because let's face it, she can't and won't win) has been handpicked to pull libertarian minded social conservatives away from the Ron Paul camp so that the likes of Romney and Perry can battle it out without having to worry about debating Paul on actual ideas.

A Would-Be Nobel Laureate

That's what I am.  If only someone would nominate me for my prescience.  Two-and-a-half years ago I wrote the following:

Why is it that these people think that if they do the exact same things wrong, only bigger and bigger, somehow in the end it will ever turn out right? 

After a world-wide house of cards collapses, what will they do then? 

Their only hope for another 30 years down the road will be to have imperialized space to the same extent as they have this planet, so they can ruin economies at a universal level as well!

Now, Nobel Prize Winner in Economics and "economic journalist" for the New York Times Paul Krugman has jumped on my bandwagon of crazy.



Ladies and gentleman, stand in awe of the intellect of a Nobel Laureate!

Rick Perry and Federalism

I love Reason.com.  Very often they do some of the best libertarian-based analysis of any issues that are offered around the intertubes.  Today, however, Jacob Sullum strides to the plate with the confidence of Casey at the bat, and like Casey, screws himself into the ground with a huge swing and a miss at Rick Perry.   

I was much more offended by the alacrity with which Perry, who is expected to announce his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination next Saturday, abandoned his avowed federalist principles to embrace the legislative agenda of the Christian right. It took less than a week.

"Our friends in New York," Perry told GOP donors in Aspen on July 22, "passed a statute that said marriage can be between two people of the same sex. And you know what? That's New York, and that's their business, and that's fine with me. That is their call. If you believe in the 10th Amendment, stay out of their business."

It soon became clear that Perry, who wrote a book championing federalism, does not really believe in the 10th Amendment. In a July 28 interview, he assured Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, that he supports amending the Constitution to declare that "marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman." So much for letting states define marriage as they see fit.

Perry did a similar about-face on abortion. On July 27 he told reporters in Houston he favors overturning Roe v. Wade, which would leave states free to set their own policies in this area. "You either have to believe in the 10th Amendment or you don't," he said. "You can't believe in the 10th Amendment for a few issues and then [for] something that doesn't suit you say, 'We'd rather not have states decide that.'"

Two days later, Perry's spokeswoman told The Houston Chronicle he "would support amending the U.S. Constitution…to protect innocent life." Most versions of the Human Life Amendment would ban abortion throughout the country, even in states that want to keep it legal.

On its face, this seems like an anti-federalist about face, but really, it's federalism at its core.  How can mandating this or that at the federal level be federalist, you ask?  The answer is simple.  Amendments to the constitution are not fly-by-night mandates on the people a-la Obamacare's mandate that we all buy health insurance or face stiff fines.  Amendments to the Constitution represent one of the most federalist processes we have to govern ourselves.


First, an amendment must be introduced in Congress, go through the rigorous process of debate and revision and whatnot, and then be passed by a 2/3 majority in both the House and the Senate.  After this happens, the amendment is then sent to the states to be voted on, where it must be approved by 3/4 of all of the states to be added in as part of the Constitution.

This is not some top-down, anti-federalist ignoring of the 10th amendment to further ones agenda.  This is the process by which a massive, massive majority of the country decide that we are going to fundamentally change the laws under which we live.

In supporting amendments to the constitution, Perry is indeed supporting the federalist process.  While his support of an amendment like the Human Life Amendment, which limits the freedom of people anywhere to have an abortion, even in states that wish to keep it legal, would appear to be anti 10th amendment, it's not really anti 10th amendment if the massive majority of all the states, and thereby the people, voted to change our laws in this manner.  The point of federalism is for states to decide what is best for themselves.  Amending the constitution would be a case of all of the states deciding for themselves.

I take Sullum's point to heart, even though his argument is technically incorrect.  I like Rick Perry for his economics.  I don't particularly like Rick Perry's social politics.  I don't think it's any government's place, local, state or federal, to have any place in deciding who can marry whom.  Nor is it any government's place to decide whether or not a woman should be able to decide whether or not to have a baby, or whether or not we should be mandated to pay for birth control or abortions for that matter.  These are places where no matter the opinion on the issue, government just needs to take its nose out of our personal business and let us live as we will.

However I see this for what it actually is: Rick Perry playing to his evangelical base during the primaries.  A candidate needs the base in the primaries.  Neither of those amendments will ever see the floor of Congress, much less be passed by 2/3 majorities in both houses, and you can forget 3/4 of the states ever ratifying.  Come the general election, Perry will be dancing on the head of a pin to articulate the reasons why his positions are indeed not anti-federalist, but if he speaks the plain truth, that amendments are a federalist process, he should get through to the likes of Jacob Sullum.

We don't have to enjoy or even agree with Perry's social politics.  But let's not intimate the man is a power-hungry emperor-in-waiting when that is clearly not the case.

Farewell, Old Friend

As a child, I don't particularly recall music playing a major role in my life.  I vaguely recall thinking Paradise City by Guns 'n' Roses was an awesome song when I was something like 9 or 10 years old.  Growing up in rural Wisconsin, I recall Motley Crue getting a lot of airtime as well.  But I was never really into music.  I was just a kid and I never really had a reason to be, I guess.  Music was there, on the radio.  That was all.  Things changed for me in the 90's, after moving to Chicago.

I wasn't as quick to really catch on to the whole grunge movement, as I was a bit younger than would be required to be in the mainstream of it.  But when I hit 13, I stumbled across an "Alternative" radio station, playing  some good stuff.  I was particularly taken by Alice In Chains.  By 14, I was fully into music, and I found my musical home with that "Alternative" radio station.  That radio station was Q101, and it gave me what was at that time nearly unlimited access to a vast library of phenomenal new rock music that was nothing like anything else out there.  Q101 broke me into the world of rock music.  I fed on everything they played with the eagerness of youth in exploration.  I began asking for nothing but new CD's for Christmas, and spending weekend afternoons looking for imports and B-sides and other hidden gems at an out-of-the way used CD store that not many people knew about, trying to build my collection.

I gave up on the station from about 16 to 18 because they had lapsed into a mode of Lilith Fair driven softness and playing Creed songs 9,487 times a day that I couldn't stand, and I greatly preferred the hard rock coming across the airwaves from Rock 103.5 in the form of Pantera, Megadeth, Sevendust, and the beginnings of the likes of Godsmack and Disturbed, up until the day the station, who had been one of the top stations in the entire country for several years running, had its format changed by Clearchannel for no particular reason at all in 1999.  As an 18 year old male, seething with too much energy, aggression, anger and depression, the loss of an aggressive rock music outlet, the loss of something I felt was a part of me every day, was a crushing blow.

I begrudgingly went back to Q101 until I got to college and reveled in the rebirth of Rap through Eminem, Dre, Ludacris and Nelly, all in time for my hardest partying days.

But there remained Q101 in the background.  Every now and then through its constant curtain of Red Hot Chili Peppers (replacing Creed as the 9,487 plays-per-day artist-du-juor for about the past decade), there would be a glimpse of what the station used to be: a pioneer in the alternative music industry.  Every now and then I'd find something new and great coming across the airwaves, most recently over the past few years with artists like Manchester Orchestra, Cage the Elephant, The Mars Volta and Silversun Pickups.

None of those kind of artists ever got played enough on the station, however, which is part of what has always been wrong with the station.  They'd introduce us, every great once in a while, to something new and amazing, play it for about two weeks, and then promptly dismiss it to the bin of radio history, rapidly queueing up some adolescent trash like Three Days Grace, or else the seven millionth play of fucking Red Hot Chili Peppers' Californication.  They would also hard-headedly ignore things they should have been playing like Mumford & Sons or Mutemath or My Morning Jacket.  Yet still, that one gem every now and then kept the station mildly relevant, and the general mix of music was usually reasonable.

I will be 30 in two days, and for my 30th birthday, Q101 will no longer exist.  I don't feel crushed by this the way I did in losing Rock 103.5.  I feel more like I suppose I will feel when my dad's old dog Skeeter finally dies.  Limping and almost entirely blind, she is so far beyond her best years he tried to put her down a year ago, only to pull the trigger, muzzle to her head, and then watch her sprint away into the forest.  The next day, unspeakably, she was back on her spot on the couch as if nothing had happened.  Like Skeeter, Q101 has shown intermittent signs of life but has been on its last legs for some time.

This is the station's own doing, of course, obstinately refusing to embrace the new music that it should have been embracing, in favor of becoming something of an "alternative classic rock" station.

What I will miss most about Q101 is the same about what I will miss about Skeeter being gone: the fact that it was there.  Every day I knew I could turn it on and find something good, and that every now and then there would be just a glimmer of how great it used to be.  Finally, I will miss having the last remnant of a good rock music station in Chicago.

The list of artists this station has introduced me to over the past 16 years, both in the form of transcendent artists and in the form of one-hit wonders, is nothing short of staggering.

Alice In Chains, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, Green Day, Smashing Pumpkins, KORN, Marylin Manson, 311, Social Distortion, The Offspring, Weezer, The Violent Femmes, The Joshua Tree, The Dovetail Joint, The Cure, TOOL, The Deftones, Silverchair, Sublime, Nine Inch Nails, KMFDM, Stabbing Westward, Rammstein, Foo Fighters, A Perfect Circle, Cypress Hill, Rage Against the Machine, Primus, Incubus, Rancid, Goldfinger, Sponge, Rise Against, Muse, The White Stripes, Blur, Radiohead, Cake, Ben Folds Five, Harvey Danger, Spacehog, Elastica, Andrew WK, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Beastie Boys, Presidents of the USA

For all of them, and for everyone else I can't seem to pull off the top of my head...

Thank You, Q101.

There is now a gaping hole in this city's musical landscape.  I can only hope that someone will fill it, sooner rather than later.

Illinois Pension Reform Begins

It's sure to be a major battle.  This video from the Illinois Policy Institute outlines the prominent aspects of House Bill 149, a bill to bring reform to the pension system of public employees in Illinois.

The major questions over the bill that are tackled here are:

What will current employees keep?

How will the bill affect the public sector employee retirement age, currently 55, as opposed to private sector retirement age, currently 65?

What is the State Constitutional protection of pension benefits?

It's Ron Paul's World

We're just living in it.  Says...Juan Williams...

Very interesting conversation about the results of Paul's being the father of the Tea Party movement, and in particular following on the discussion of the legalization of drugs.

Morality Over Freedom?

Michael Gerson wrote what amounts to a "for shame" kind of attack piece on Ron Paul in the Washington Post yesterday, decrying the Congressman's "second-rate values."  Gerson, as could be expected, seized on Paul's statement from last week's Republican debate that all drugs should be legalized, up to including cocaine and heroin.  Gerson rather ham-handedly goes at the argument by attacking what was actually one of Ron Paul's most poignant comments from the entire debate:

The freedom to use drugs, he argued, is equivalent to the freedom of people to “practice their religion and say their prayers.” Liberty must be defended “across the board.” “It is amazing that we want freedom to pick our future in a spiritual way,” he said, “but not when it comes to our personal habits.”

When you stop to think about it for a minute, this is a pretty obvious statement arguing for removing the authority to control drugs from the realm of the federal government.  What that one sentence does, quite matter-of-factly, is force a religious social conservative to look him or herself in the mirror and ask whether they would like there to be a federal law regarding whether or not they are allowed to choose their own religion.  Framed in this manner, if you are free to make the personal choice to fill your heart and soul with the holy spirit, or whatever deity of your choosing, why then should you not also be free to fill your lungs with smoke or your veins with poison?  Choosing to be a Catholic and live within the hard rules of Catholicism means that you have chosen to forgo many modern forms of birth control.  It is a choice you make, and if you find yourself with a child before you are financially capable of supporting one, you find a way to move on.  You may not be ready, either, emotionally, to raise that child, but you try, because you live with the choice you have made.  Perhaps over the years you damage both yourself and that child emotionally or even physically, due to the stresses a life of unreadiness brought you.  Perhaps you don't.  But it was your chocie to be a Catholic, and it was your choice, therefore, to live that particular life.


This may seem a strange example for comparison, but it holds as follows.  We do not view the choice of Catholicism and the subsequent lack of choice regarding when to have a child as being poisonous.  But if the family is not ready for it emotionally or financially, stresses and strains are applied to the family and the localized community that have the opportunity to eventually become poisonous, not only to that immediate family, but to that localized community as well.


The same is to be said of drug use.  Yes, it is a precarious choice to poison yourself, and perhaps eventually to destroy yourself, and in the process to have the opportunity to have a detrimental effect on the localized community, but should or should it not be your choice?


It is a question worth asking, though Gerson would have us believe that the concept itself is entirely backward, and that the mere suggestion of it by anyone is to deny the fact of addiction.

This argument is strangely framed: If you tolerate Zoroastrianism, you must be able to buy heroin at the quickie mart. But it is an authentic application of libertarianism, which reduces the whole of political philosophy to a single slogan: Do what you will — pray or inject or turn a trick — as long as no one else gets hurt. 

Even by this permissive standard, drug legalization fails. The de facto decriminalization of drugs in some neighborhoods — say, in Washington, D.C. — has encouraged widespread addiction. Children, freed from the care of their addicted parents, have the liberty to play in parks decorated by used needles. Addicts are liberated into lives of prostitution and homelessness. Welcome to Paulsville, where people are free to take soul-destroying substances and debase their bodies to support their “personal habits.”

I will forgo going into too much discussion about how Gerson ignores and therefore absolves entirely the economics behind why drug neighborhoods become drug neighborhoods, though this has far more to do with the "why" of things than does the actual drug use, and focus more on the fact that Gerson rests on the ever-popular "only government" argument, and specifically given his essay, "only the federal government," though he hides it within the cloak of the superiority of his own Republicn Morality.

Libertarians often cover their views with a powdered wig of 18th- and 19th-century philosophy. They cite Locke, Smith and Mill as advocates of a peaceable kingdom — a utopia of cooperation and spontaneous order. But the reality of libertarianism was on display in South Carolina. Paul concluded his answer by doing a jeering rendition of an addict’s voice: “Oh yeah, I need the government to take care of me. I don’t want to use heroin, so I need these laws.” Paul is not content to condemn a portion of his fellow citizens to self-destruction; he must mock them in their decline. Such are the manners found in Paulsville. 

This is not “The Wealth of Nations” or the “Second Treatise of Government.” It is Social Darwinism. It is the arrogance of the strong. It is contempt for the vulnerable and suffering. 

The conservative alternative to libertarianism is necessarily more complex. It is the teaching of classical political philosophy and the Jewish and Christian traditions that true liberty must be appropriate to human nature. The freedom to enslave oneself with drugs is the freedom of the fish to live on land or the freedom of birds to inhabit the ocean — which is to say, it is not freedom at all. Responsible, self-governing citizens do not grow wild like blackberries. They are cultivated in institutions — families, religious communities and decent, orderly neighborhoods. And government has a limited but important role in reinforcing social norms and expectations — including laws against drugs and against the exploitation of men and women in the sex trade.

Without quite exactly saying it, because it would undermine his Superior Republican Morality to begin with, Gerson argues that only the federal government, led by Superior Republicans, has the ability to manage the issue of drugs with a "necessarily more complex" alternative to actual constitutional freedom, and so we come to the actual point.


The argument here is not one of whether drugs are bad for you, as Gerson would clumsily lead you to believe.  The argument, rather, is one of who should decide whether drugs are bad for you.


The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution tells us that this is an issue to be decided at the local level, within the local governments and within the states.  Michael Gerson and others of the Superior Republican Morality would have things decided at the federal level, because, of course, just like the Superior Democrat Morality regarding the environment, they just know better than you.


A conservative will join a libertarian in thinking that the federal government largely oversteps its bounds by doing something like limiting the gallons-per-flush on a toilet, or making 100 watt light bulbs illegal.  These are not, after all, life-altering choices of a moral bent for conservatives.  But drugs are.  And because the Superior Republican Morality comes into play, ultimately you just don't know what's best for you.


But the federal government sure does.  And it ain't Freedom.

Damn These Elites

From the humble, proletarian pen of a hard-working man of the people Nobel Prize Winning Professor of Economics at Princeton and the London School of Economics, to the lowly pages of a little known newspaper with small circulation New York Times comes a damning of the elites that run our lives yet another tired blaming of the Bush Administration for our economic woes.

Paul Krugman must receive a per-word raise every time he finds a way to write something less coherent than his last piece.

So it was the bad judgment of the elite, not the greediness of the common man, that caused America’s deficit. And much the same is true of the European crisis.

Needless to say, that’s not what you hear from European policy makers. The official story in Europe these days is that governments of troubled nations catered too much to the masses, promising too much to voters while collecting too little in taxes. And that is, to be fair, a reasonably accurate story for Greece. But it’s not at all what happened in Ireland and Spain, both of which had low debt and budget surpluses on the eve of the crisis. 

The real story of Europe’s crisis is that leaders created a single currency, the euro, without creating the institutions that were needed to cope with booms and busts within the euro zone. And the drive for a single European currency was the ultimate top-down project, an elite vision imposed on highly reluctant voters. 

Does any of this matter? Why should we be concerned about the effort to shift the blame for bad policies onto the general public? 

One answer is simple accountability. People who advocated budget-busting policies during the Bush years shouldn’t be allowed to pass themselves off as deficit hawks; people whopraised Ireland as a role model shouldn’t be giving lectures on responsible government. 

But the larger answer, I’d argue, is that by making up stories about our current predicament that absolve the people who put us here there, we cut off any chance to learn from the crisis. We need to place the blame where it belongs, to chasten our policy elites. Otherwise, they’ll do even more damage in the years ahead.

While the general point that we shouldn't be listening to most of the now-reformed "fiscal hawks" telling us what to do now is a good one to take from this article, the fact that Krugman couches that same argument in a finger pointing tirade at some shadowy elites (read: EVIL REPUBLICANS) is not only purely irresponsible, it's also hypocritical, particularly his shot across the bow at Alan Greenspan.

Let me give a particular shout-out to Alan Greenspan, who played a crucial role both in financial deregulation and in the passage of the Bush tax cuts — and who is now, of course, among those hectoring us about the deficit.

Apparently Krugman has forgotten, or maybe wishes all of the rest of us had forgotten, about his own prodding of Greenspan to do exactly what led us into the housing bubble and eventual crisis in the first place.

KRUGMAN: I think frankly it’s got to be — business investment is not going to be the driving force in this recovery. It has to come from things like housing, things that have not been (UNINTELLIGIBLE). 

DOBBS: We see, Paul, housing at near record levels, we see automobile purchases near record levels. The consumer is still very much in this economy. Can he or she — or I should say he and she, can they bring back this economy? 

KRUGMAN: Well, as far as the arithmetic goes, yes, it is possible. Will the Fed cut interest rates enough? Will long-term rates fall enough to get the consumer, get the housing sector there in time? We don’t know

That particular exchange took place back in 2001, prior to 9/11, where Krugman surveyed the post-internet recession and proclaimed that the Fed had to pump up the housing sector.  The Nobel Prize Winning, New York Times Contributing, Princeton and LSE Economics-Teaching ELITE Krugman, was one of those people pushing us further down the Keynesian Road to Serfdom to the point we find ourselves at now.

I remember some lowly prole writing something pretty smart recently...

But the larger answer, I’d argue, is that by making up stories about our current predicament that absolve the people who put us here there, we cut off any chance to learn from the crisis. We need to place the blame where it belongs, to chasten our policy elites. Otherwise, they’ll do even more damage in the years ahead.

Vegan Bacon

And the appropriate response to it...

Fight of the Century

In January 2010, Econstories.tv launched a now infamous campaign to bring the story of the Hayek vs. Keynes economic debate to the masses via the rap battle.  "Fear the Boom and Bust" went viral, and has since garnered over 2.1 million views.

Five days ago, they released their follow up, a spectacularly deep video, both musically and visually.  The video presents the debate between Keynes and Hayek, beginning with a dual grilling before a Congressional panel, and moving to the boxing ring as they trade economic theory blows.  We end with Keynes being patted on the back by the Fed Chairman, Wall Street types, and the media at large, while Hayek is shunned, but suddenly embraced in full by a crowd of Regular People.

The message is fantastic throughout, and is an excellent continuation of the debate.  It's already gotten over 450,000 views.  Why not give it a few more?  Enjoy "Fight of the Century!"



BONUS:  Lyrics with hyperlinked relevant articles and posts from Mises.org

Chart Fu: Fisking Rachel Maddow

So there's a chart floating around the Leftosphere, that looks like it originated on Queen Maddow's blog - originally submitted by one of her loyal subjects, naturally - that is meant to set forth the idea that mean, evil Republicans are the ones responsible for our debt woes, rather than Democrats.  First thing's first, to hell with all of them.  Nobody has stopped spending or growing this government in my lifetime.  They've all just been spending on different things.

However, I do have to point out that the chart is horribly misleading (from a Liberal, no less...I know, unbelievable right?), as is the assertion by the chart-maker (Dick Seaman!) that "If voters don't understand this, the media has failed them."  Well, here is the chart...

First of all, this is an obvious shot at getting Obama off the hook for the enormous growth in spending under his watch by comparing it to past spending that took place under Republican presidents.  There is a glaring omission about this chart  that has Dick Seaman spraying his results blindly all over Queen Maddow's inbox.

TIME AND RATE OF DEBT INCREASE

By putting the presidents and their debt in a meaningful order, we can see that things are far different than Maddow's Seaman Chart would have people think.

First, we see that over the course of 8 years, Reagan increased the debt by about $1.75 trillion, or 288%, an average rate of 36% per year.

Bush I increased the debt by about $1.5 trillion, or 155%, in four years, an average rate of 39% per year.

Clinton slowed things down slightly, increasing the debt about $1.6 trillion over 8 years, an average rate of 17.3% per year.

Things ramped up again under Bush II, nearly doubling in 8 years by $4.89 trillion, but still a slower overall rate of increase than Reagan or Bush I, averaging just over 23% per year.

The chart also shows that the debt under Obama has increased by nearly 134% since taking office, about 2.25 years into his first term as President, for an average rate of 59.44% per year.  While it would seem to me to be unlikely that this rate will continue through to the end of his first term, if it did, we would expect the debt to top $25 trillion.

The resulting percentages in Maddow's Seaman Chart would burst forth with much different excitement.  We would see that the debt occurring under Reagan and the Bushes, totaling $8.14 trillion, would amount to 32% of the total debt, and that all by itself, the debt under Obama would total $14.67 trillion, or 57.8% of the total debt.

If voters don't understand this, the media has failed them.

System Fail: ADA trumps OSHA for biggest lack of common sense

So you walk into Chipotle and order a burrito.  They ask you what you want on it, following the Subway model of sandwich building, and you walk down the line adding black beans and rice and whatever else you'd like to stuff your face with at that particular moment, uncaring as to the future state of your bowels.  Your burrito is finished for you and you take your seat and chow down.

Unless you're in a wheelchair, in which case the 45" high counter - designed at this height for the ergonomic health of Chipotle's employees and to comply with various OSHA lawsuits, along with the actual benefit of increased productivity - is too high for you to see over.  This is when Chipotle, in order to best accommodate all of its customers, actually brings the food around the counter to you, providing you the highest level of service imaginable, to ensure that you, like anyone else, can see what it is you would like to have on your burrito.

But still, that damn, counter!  That counter isn't fair.  You don't want to be treated any differently that anyone else, even though you are different.  You want to be able to shuffle through the Chipotle line three lousy inches at a time like all the rest of the cattle, damnit!  It's time to sue!  And so it goes, all the way to the Supreme Court, who refuses to hear Chipotle's claims that you are frivolous and lawsuit happy, and so the 9th Circuit's ridiculous ruling stands:

The barrier "subjects disabled customers to a disadvantage that non-disabled customers do not suffer," the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in July in a case from San Diego County. The ruling came on the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires businesses to treat disabled patrons equally and remove unnecessary obstacles.  Maurizio Antoninetti said in his lawsuit in 2005 that a 45-inch barrier at Chipotle restaurants in San Diego and Encinitas blocked his view of the counter, where customers can inspect each dish, choose their order and watch it being prepared. 

Chipotle said it met wheelchair users' needs by bringing them spoonfuls of their preferred dish for inspection before ordering. But the appeals court said that doesn't match "the customer's personal participation in the selection and preparation of the food."

Let's set aside for a minute the absolutely ludicrous assertion that the court has rested on the idea that "the customer's personal participation in the selection and preparation of the food" at Chipotle has become a right, and focus more on the end result of this fiasco.

After the appeals court ruling, company spokesman Chris Arnold said Chipotle was retrofitting restaurants with "a new counter design that eliminates any concern regarding wheelchair accessibility."

Chipotle has over 1,000 locations, and 26,500 employees.  I can imagine a counter that will work for the end purpose for this, one that will, perhaps, display the ingredients on an angle, at a lower elevation, but that is going to require thousands and thousands of employees, every day, to bend over farther than normal, repeatedly, and perhaps far enough, over and over, to eventually cause back problems.  Perhaps this will happen, and perhaps some blood sucking enterprising lawyer will assemble a massive class action lawsuit, leaning on OSHA, against Chipotle's viciously non-ergonomic counters.

I only hope, at that time, that this lawyer will remember to include Maurizio Antoninetti and the 9th District Court of Appeals as parties to that lawsuit along with Chipotle.  Because if it weren't for them, all of those future thousands of Chipotle employees, would have been standing upright all day instead.

Ferris Bueller's (Indie) Day Off

This is probably all the funnier to me because I just watched Ferris yesterday (next to Empire Records, one of my favorite, "there's nothing good on background noise movies").  Scenes from the movie cut and set to emotionally overtoned piano music to make you think it would be something more along the lines of 500 Days of Summer.

This is the magic of editing, something Ace recently found out is capable of stealing about two hours of your life if you're not paying attention.  However, whereas he was pissed that the Adjustment Bureau sucked instead of being awesome, in this case, I would be supremely pissed to find out that Ferris Bueller's Day Off is an amazing comedy that I would have never seen, instead of some stupid, overly sappy teen drama.