Escape from Pianosa

Socialist medicine takes a beating by Don Boudreaux and commenters at Cafe Hayek.

Then Kurt Loder has a go at Michael Moore’s Sicko on MTV.com. This is my favorite part, and Loder really gets the economics right:

“When governments attempt to regulate the balance between a limited supply of health care and an unlimited demand for it they’re inevitably forced to ration treatment. This is certainly the situation in Britain. Writing in the Chicago Tribune this week, Helen Evans, a 20-year veteran of the country’s National Health Service and now the director of a London-based group called Nurses for Reform, said that nearly 1 million Britons are currently on waiting lists for medical care — and another 200,000 are waiting to get on waiting lists. Evans also says the NHS cancels about 100,000 operations each year because of shortages of various sorts. Last March, the BBC reported on the results of a Healthcare Commission poll of 128,000 NHS workers: two thirds of them said they “would not be happy” to be patients in their own hospitals.”

In summary, you get a massive tax increase for declining quality in health care and you may have to wait a year or two to get it. And you might die while you’re waiting. Why anyone, let alone everyone would want to be forced into such a system is beyond me.

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You know, governments wouldn’t be able to segregate schools if governments didn’t have control over schools. Just sayin’.

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Listening to Bryan Caplan talk about his new book The Myth of the Rational Voter, I realized that I’ve been too hard on politicians. Yes, they do awful and stupid things all the time but that’s what they have to do to stay employed.

As spineless as they may be, they move in the direction of the voters, and often the voters demand ridiculous policies. So just as I don’t fault a business for responding to the market and producing silly products, I shouldn’t fault politicians for responding to voters who demand (literally) poor policy.*

The funny thing is that voters demand bad economic policies and then punish politicians for poor economic results. For example, they demand higher tariffs but get angry when less trade leads to less growth and less wealth and less employment. Not that they connect the dots. Anyway, it’s a tough life being a politician.

*Caveat: people who demand bad products waste their own money. People who demand bad policies invariably waste my money, so I feel that I have the right to thumb my nose at their ‘inferior preferences.’

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My observation today is that when you learn something new, it’s best to immerse yourself in a subject completely and learn all the “rules.” For me recently, I’ve been learning about economics but in the past this has applied to languages I’ve learned as well.

And everything you learn–every new system, whether it’s a science or a language, has a system and various subsystems. When you learn Spanish, you know that there are several ways to conjugate verbs. For instance, all verbs ending in -ar conjugate the same, as well as all verbs ending in -ir and -er. They all follow their own systems, but in this way we learn the simple rule for conjugating a verb, and then we can easily apply it to the thousands of verbs.

And it’s all very easy, except for when it’s not. Except for the two dozen or so “irregular verbs” that conjugate differently and the nasty but indispensable verbs like ser and estar and ir, without which we would not be able to go or to be.

Pardon the rambling but my original thought was that in economics, you learn lots of laws. Laws about how markets work and economic laws that govern human behavior. They may be harder to prove in laboratories but they govern all the same–things like supply and demand and the fact that when you place an artificial ceiling on price, then you will create a shortage. Yes, even in Iran, they have a gasoline shortage due to a short-sighted choice to ignore economic law.

And so all these laws and ideas about free markets–they really do exist and they really do work, except it’s not as simple as that. There’s a cultural component and “institutions matter.” So you cannot just throw up a society based on capitalism and say voilá and watch it grow. Because people have to believe in the system for it to work. You need more that courts to enforce laws, because courts will not be effective if nobody believes they will.

There is a cultural component underlying all social institutions and this is something I can see but that I understand very little about. In Spanish you can learn the exceptions to rules, but in economics I don’t think that anyone really understands all the answers yet. So I am a libertarian, but I will admit that there are gray areas and that pushing the magical “make everything libertarian” button might have some adverse consequences.

And if culture is so important, then that’s a bit sad too. Because it means bringing prosperity to impoverished places takes deep cultural change and not just checks from the west or military revolutions.

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Here’s a funny CraigsList posting that mocks the way writers are paid. Looking at CraigsList every day for freelance writing stuff, there’s always dozens of posts that “don’t pay, but you get great exposure!” As if real magazines are impressed by your unpaid credentials.

Excerpt:

AWESOME OPPORTUNITY FOR ELECTRIC COMPANY!

Do you make electricity?? Are you just dying to share it with others??

We are looking to start up the electrical grid for our new community. If you’d like to contribute some kilowattage while getting to know a great group of people who value natural living, nudity and goats, please send a backhoe, poles and powerlines to Rural Route 67, Scrub Brush Springs. All submissions considered.

(No pay.)

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Or wait, maybe they are…

MC Hammer Endorses Ron Paul.

OK, he hasn’t officially endorsed Ron Paul, but he is blogging about him. You could pretty much replace “Ron Paul” with any other presidential candidate and that would still be hilarious.

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Aspiring satirists take note:

“Interestingly, 19% of Americans state that they rely on satire sites or shows like the Daily Show for their [political] information.”

More here.

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I wonder at the motives of people who say that setting a timetable for withdrawal in Iraq will embolden our enemies. I admit that they have a point; leaving now would seem to validate the strategy of the terrorists in Iraq. Certainly the terrorists would perceive it and market it that way.

But what are the alternatives? We could sneak out in the middle of the night, leaving millions of vehicles and weapons. They’d never know what hit them! When questioned, we could play dumb.

“What’s that? Oh yeah, I mean, we just didn’t feel like being there anymore. The hot desert sun and all. No no! Don’t think…oh no, we don’t want you to think we left because of you! Oh gosh no. You terrorists are taking this all wrong! No, we left cus we felt like it. I mean, the soldiers dying every day in Iraq–that was annoying to be sure. But don’t get all full of yourself thinking it was just cus of that. There were lots of other totally non-terrorist reasons.”

Alas, they’d probably see through that–and then they’d have all of our tanks and stuff. So we could just stay “until we win.” And we win when nobody wants to kill Americans. But every day we’re there, more people want to kill Americans. Are you trying to tell me that you never want to leave?

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The nice thing about waging war on inanimate objects like drugs or poverties, is that nobody gets hurt. Sometimes when I think about The War on Drugs, I imagine DEA agents surrounding a house, barging through the door, and pointing their assault rifles on little baggies of marijuana or vials of cocaine.

Ridiculous right? Of course it’s ridiculous. The war on drugs isn’t a war on drugs at all; it’s a war on people. People who often find often themselves dead or in jail for the supposed crime of voluntary exchange.

And so language is twisted until it loses its meaning. I wonder how long it is before the anti-immigration movement cooks up some dehumanizing term for immigration. Will it be the war on illegality? How about the the war on border violation? The war on cheap labor? As you can see, I’m no good at this game.

And in this way we can begin another unwinnable war against our fellow humans–in this case Mexicans, Salvadorans, and others who have the extraordinarily bad luck of being born next to, but not within, the most prosperous nation in the history of the world.

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I’m putting all my satirical stuff on a new site, Absolutely Serious.

I’m going to continue writing here as well. My (working) trip to Europe is looking more promising by the day, so I’ll be blogging that here as well.

Enjoy.

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Unbelievable:

A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting.

Read the rest. Here’s the best line:

“The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soliders to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistably attractive to one another,” Hammond said after reviwing the documents.

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I just watched the premiere episode of Flight of the Conchords. It’s an offbeat comedy about two Nw Zealanders transplanted in what looks like New York. Subtle but hilarious. You can watch the first episode for free. Link here.

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I saw one of those big utility signs parked along the road this week. The message in big green dots said “water ban this weekend. Friday 6pm until Midnight Sunday.” And I thought to myself ever so smugly that a free market in water would never have this problem. When the supply gets thin, the price goes up. And people decide that maybe watering their lawn isn’t the best use of their hard earned dollars. Water ban averted.

And then I imagine the day that I drive by the hospital and there’s a sign that says “No medical care this weekend, due to overuse.”

Because I’ve heard the argument that medicine is far too important to leave to “the free market.” I agree in one respect; that medicine is important. Far too important not to leave to the free market. When the government runs out of “free” health care, where will you go? They don’t sell it in bottles at Safeway.

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