As a former Nebraskan, I figured it was my duty to send a contribution to GiveBenTheBoot.com. It’s bad enough that Reid’s bill is majorly counterproductive, but then to start the corruption right off the bat by striking a special deal for Nebraska at the expense of other states… Ben Nelson needs to go, so I sent a contribution to help make it happen.
At least Nebraska’s Governor Heineman has some principles other than the almighty dollar. AP story here.
Remember how people said the financial crisis meant we needed more regulation? Recently there have been reports like this one in the WSJ.
There also has been in-fighting among different bank regulators, with each debating the health of giant financial institutions, say people familiar with the matter.
Sounds like banks and other businesses had better spend less time trying to figure out what their customers want, and more time trying to figure out what regulators want.
If ever there was any doubt that those who are trying to impose nationalized health care on us care about something other than peoples’ health care…
This is not Ann Coulter’s or Jonah Goldberg’s explanation of the goals of the left. This is how they explain themselves to each other. There was a contest at a web site called Public Option, Please, and this is the poster that won.
Makes one long for the good old days when the worst we had to fear from the left was Stalinism.
H/T to Joshua Claybourn at In The Agora. My favorite comment at that site: “Can we get bypass surgery?”
Once upon a time ecologists tried to explain the complexities of ecosystems in a similar fashion, while pointing to the dangers of trying to replace them with monocultures. Don Boudreaux explains it so well this time that I’m quoting and linking it here for future reference.
Our world is full of complexities that defy human engineering. Can Congress engineer winter snow away from Minnesota or summer hurricanes away from the Gulf Coast? Of course not, and any attempts Congress might make to do so would be seen immediately to be hubris of the highest and most hazardous sort.
Attempts to consciously re-design the health-care industry are equally hubristic and hazardous. That industry is one of billions of unique, often personal, relationships, each of which is part of countless long chains of efforts to transform raw materials and human effort into life-improving and life-saving drugs and treatments. Like weather, these long chains of human relationships weren’t designed by anyone. Like weather, they change and evolve. And like weather, their all-important details are beyond the comprehension of would-be re-designers. These long chains of human relationships cannot be undone and reassembled at will by politicians and ‘experts’ without risking enormous unintended catastrophe.
Want proof? Look no further than your own lament that the very ‘engineers’ – the members of Congress – who are now attempting to redesign the details of the health-care industry cannot as much as read and grasp all of the words on the bill that they’re debating.
I’m not sure how there can be a “bio” ethics that’s different from ethics, period, just as I’m not sure how there can be a sexual morality that’s different from morality, period.
For some time I’ve assumed that the real purpose of bioethicists is to have someone to call on for cover when you need to do something really shoddy to other people.
Maybe it’s worse than that, though. Wesley J. Smith writes the following in The Weekly Standard, in an article titled, “The Long Awakening : A Belgian case revives the Schiavo decision.”
…[B]ack in the 1980s there was no question about whether a patient like Houben would receive life-sustaining care. Depriving catastrophically injured patients of food and water was not even considered–except among bioethicists, who were already quietly preparing the ground for the practice of withdrawing sustenance from such patients.
During the years that Houben was thought unconscious, society changed. Bioethicists nudged medicine away from the Hippocratic model and toward “quality of life” judgmentalism. Today, when a patient is diagnosed as persistently unconscious or minimally aware, doctors, social workers, and bioethicists often recommend that life-sustaining treatment–including sustenance delivered through a tube–be withdrawn, sometimes days or weeks after the injury.
Headline in the Battle Creek Enquirer: “MI lawmakers continue squabble over schools money“
My response (posted as a comment on the BCE site):
Squabble? Why do you use that word? It disrespects the democratic processes of disagreement, debate, and deliberation.
And if Andy Dillon says the Republican plan has provisions that would cost us federal matching funds, couldn’t some intrepid reporter have asked him just what provisions those are? They may or may not be something that speaks well of the federal funding. We need to know.
Headline: Obama to GOP: ‘Stop trying to frighten the American people’
What the Republicans don’t understand is that they are usurping a function that is the sole prerogative of the president. What do they think this is? Health care? Global warming?
In olden times, if you got too far in debt to pay back your loan, you would get thrown in prison and would not be let out until you paid the uttermost farthing. Of course, it was difficult to generate enough income to come up with those farthings while you were in prison.
To some people this system seemed counterproductive if not unjust. It motivated them to come up with a better method, such as bankruptcy court.
But now the Obama administration is taking us back to the older ways.
According to Monday’s WSJ, Citigroup and Wells Fargo would like to get out of the Trouble Asset Relief Program. They have money to pay back the taxpayer money that had been loaned to them. But the government likes having those companies in its debt. In this case the uttermost farthing consists of about $20 billion more than they even owed. The government won’t let them pay back the money unless they also raise $20 billion in common stock. Of course, it’s hard to raise that kind of money while you’re in prison. Who wants to invest in Citigroup and Wells Fargo when they’re operating under the government’s thumb? So, as the article says, “Disagreements over capital-raising mean Citigroup is unlikely to repay its TARP investment in the foreseeable future….”
Jason Zweig has an article in the WSJ “Intelligent Investor” section in which he says that sixty percent isn’t much better than a coin flip. He needs to learn some probability and statistics. You can make good money with odds like that, especially if you get hundreds of coin flips.
The article is about whether it does any good to hire a top-notch CEO to turn a company around. It’s important to get these things right, because CEO compensation is under attack by the Obama administration these days. The article doesn’t say anything specifically about that. However, it does use as a context the new CEO that GM needs to bring in.
Here is the weird paragraph:
If you took the CEOs with the best track records and brought them in to run the businesses with the worst performance, how often would those companies become more profitable? According to economist Antoinette Schoar of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, who has studied the effects of hundreds of management changes, the answer is roughly 60%. That isn’t much better than the flip of a coin.
I’m actually surprised that it works 60 percent of the time. I would have guessed a much smaller number. If those odds are correct, all the more reason for the Obama administration to quit trying to control wages and prices.
[Late note: The Zweig article seems to appear in more than one place on the WSJ web site. And at this one, a couple of people made the same point I did about 60 percent being a lot better than a coin flip.]
Good! Very good! I see a bright future for Google in the world of advertising. It could sell bottled sewage, for example, by making the disclaimer: “Drinking bottled sewage is unlikely to decrease cholera incidence. It will probably cut cholera cases worldwide by less than ten percent.”
That’s for another time, though. For now it tried to sell something different:
Google news headline for a Washington Post article: “In health-care reform, no deficit cure.” Google news summary: “Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid’s health-care legislation is projected to cut less than 10 percent from federal deficits over a decade.”
In defense of the Washington Post, it should be pointed out that its article is not nearly as misleading as Google’s summary.