Who is John Galt?

rethinking american politics

From my standpoint, at least the way I think, I find it reaffirming when different ways of looking at things back each other up.  There is only one reality; one truth, but there are many ways of interpreting it.  When your interpretations are inconsistent, it isn't because there are multiple realities.  So I enjoy the exercise of taking apart different observations to see if they validate -- or invalidate -- conclusions I've reached in the past.

I caught pollster Scott Rasmussen on Rush Limbaugh's show, Friday, with guest host Mark Davis.

Now, I've always thought of America as a partisan spectrum of Democrats, independents and Republicans, and I'm sure many of you see it that way, too.  This implies a political struggle over the independent vote.

I don't self-identify as Republican; like many people, I consider myself a conservative.  And while you can substitute liberals/moderates/conservatives to describe the same political struggle, I thought Rasmussen said something quite profound -- something that changes the very nature of the struggle.

she said, they said

Interesting developments with Nancy Pelosi's "CIA lied" assertions.

Dems are playing with fire on this.  The proof will be found in whether they actually go through with a thorough investigation which could exonerate (or convict) Pelosi.  Republicans have nothing to lose on this, and they'll probably push for hearings.  Who wants to provide cover for a lying CIA?

My money says these Democrats are just looking to give Pelosi cover, and that they'll stop short of public hearings "to avoid embarrassing the CIA," or on some national security grounds.  Yeah, they're afraid of embarrassing somebody, but I don't think it's the CIA...

false security; real chains

Liberals are big on security.  It's in everything they seek.  All welfare -- the "social safety net" -- is security; a guarantee that you can't fall below a certain level.  Health insurance is security: being able to go through life not worrying about getting sick.

In terms of freedom, security is "freedom from risk."  Almost reasonable sounding: What you can accomplish should not be limited by your fear of what might happen.  Sounds liberating.

The fundamental problem is that what you ultimately do accomplish is ultimately limited by what actually does come to pass.  Good intentions, for example, cannot trump outcomes.  Similarly, true accomplishment comes only after we rationalize and mitigate risk -- not by eliminating it.  

Look at Social Security: millions of people receiving guaranteed income, supposedly insulated from the "risky" stock market.  But in reality, that system is nothing more than a direct transfer -- a guaranteed seizure of wealth -- from people living in the risky free market -- the real world -- to people who are afforded a guarantee; people who are living under an illusion.

wsj op-ed

If you can read only one piece on healthcare, this should be it.

H/T: Donald Luskin

why *shouldn't* our healthcare be expensive?

Suppose you go to a restaurant.  You look at the menu, and there you see a soup.  The soup uses prime meat, fresh, exotic vegetables, and rare seasonings.  The soup is personally prepared in a time-consuming process, by the very highly qualified head chef himself.

The price of the soup is very high, and many patrons cannot afford it.  The manager demands to know why, and sets out to see which "inefficiencies" are making the soup too expensive.  Somebody, he reasons, is charging too much for something that's going into the price of the soup.

Many people have started from the conclusion that healthcare is simply "overpriced," and are now working their way backward from that conclusion to find evidence that supports it.  Somebody, somewhere, they reason, is simply making too much profit.  Somebody, somewhere is "wasting" healthcare dollars.

Ignoring whatever you believe the actual performance of the American healthcare system is, relative to other systems, consider the purely technical requirements it must meet, compared to those systems.  Forgetting whether you are satisfied with the product, consider the quality of the ingredients that go into it relative to the products delivered in other countries.

why we have jobs

In the morning, you go to work.  You make something.  Or part of something.  Or you support someone else who makes something.  Maybe you just clean the windows so the people who make something will enjoy their view more, making them more productive.

After work, you climb in a car that some other workers made.  You drive to your home, which was made by yet more workers, and which is filled with products which were made by even more workers. 

All of those workers had people who supported them, too, maybe even someone like you who just cleaned their windows and made them more productive.  Productivity is good, because it's the difference between products that only some of us can own and products that everyone can own.

high prices

Economics has many ways to explain high prices.

"Profit" isn't one of them.

what we celebrate this weekend

Rush Limbaugh's father wrote this speech, about the signers of the Declaration of Independence:

...Eighteen were under 40; three were in their 20s. Of the 56 almost half - 24 - were judges and lawyers. Eleven were merchants, nine were landowners and farmers, and the remaining 12 were doctors, ministers, and politicians.

With only a few exceptions, such as Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, these were men of substantial property. All but two had families. The vast majority were men of education and standing in their communities. They had economic security as few men had in the 18th Century.

Each had more to lose from revolution than he had to gain by it. John Hancock, one of the richest men in America, already had a price of 500 pounds on his head. He signed in enormous letters so that his Majesty could now read his name without glasses and could now double the reward. Ben Franklin wryly noted: "Indeed we must all hang together, otherwise we shall most assuredly hang separately."

You owe it to yourself to read the whole thing.  It's not about cook-outs or fireworks.

success, or failure?

If we put government in charge of fixing a social concern -- like the cost of education -- then how do we measure success?

Liberals seem to measure the success by how many people benefit from the program.

But shouldn't we be measuring it by what happens to the cost?

I mean, wouldn't a truly successful government intervention, into high tuition costs, for example, be distinguished by falling tuitions?

Do the libs really even understand they're taking the side of the problem?

has to

A liberal, on how hospitals and doctors can possiby be operating at or below cost:
"So why the hell does anyone think our cost structure reflects what healthcare really has to cost here? The ignorance and logical incompetence are astounding."

See, the great thing about the free market is anyone should be able to answer that question by going down to the corner, hanging a shingle, and getting rich beyond their wildest dreams by simply undercutting everybody else whose service costs more than it supposedly "has to."

But maybe it does "has to" cost this much.  Maybe doing the actual medicine part any cheaper just results in higher regulatory fines and higher court costs.  Maybe the "has to" problem is that government says providers "has to" deliver a very high, very uniform level of care to stay in business.

Maybe the standard of care is the thing that's unsustainable.  After all, aside from some experimental procedures and aesthetics like the quality of the hospital food and in-room cable, isn't the technical standard of care for the poor the same as for the rich? I think they are, which begs the question: Are we all getting a rich standard of care or a poor one?

And I think the cost reflects that we "has to" get a pretty high standard of care.  Or, in other words, cheaper care is illegal. 

On one side of the coin, it's against the law to victimize the underinsured with substandard care.  We value equality more than that.  Sounds -- well, fair.  But sometimes when you look at the exact same thing in a different light you see that it has other implications:  On the other side of the same coin, there are 47 million people for whom it is illegal to purchase the level of care they could afford. 

How -- well, equal.