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Houses Passes Health Care Bill
Health care reform bill H.R.
3962 passes the House of Representatives by a vote of 220 to 215.
Among Republicans, only Anh "Joseph" Cao votes for the bill.
As always, the actual shape of the bill remains shrouded in moment-to-moment mystery. The San Francisco Chronicle's Carolyn Lochhead notes that moderates have succeeded in "untethering [the so-called public option] from Medicare."
After Ayn Rand Week, the Healing Begins
How little you have to do to get into the feature well of a slick magazine these days. Thomas Mallon's takedown of Ayn Rand in The New Yorker is not online, but it is so phoned-in and lacking in protein that even this synopsis of the article feels padded.
There's 1943-vintage prissy caviling about Rand's writing style. ("It is, in fact, badly executed on every level of language, plot, and characterization.") There's 1957-vintage hyperventilating about the author-as-dictator. ("[T]he narrative voice of this implacably anti-Communist author is a bellows of Stalinist bad breath.") There is much guilt by association. (Mallon treats Alan Greenspan's distancing himself from Rand as an indictment of Rand rather than of Greenspan.)
But there is no attempt to engage the material or address its continuing popularity. Kurt Vonnegut, in most ways the anti-Rand, said a person who attacks a book is like a person who puts on armor to attack a banana split. Mallon's war on Rand's heterodoxies leads to some unintentionally interesting dead ends. When he declares that Rand's fiction belongs "in the crackpot pantheon of L. Frank Baum" and "is no closer to the canon of serious American novels than Galt's Gulch is to Brook Farm," is Mallon implying that there's some canon of American lit in which The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is not taken seriously, at least as a book with plenty of historical and sociological interest?
Mallon condemns as typically Randian overwriting the following passage, which describes The Fountainhead protagonist Howard Roark using a blowtorch: "it seemed as if the blue tension eating slowly through metal came not from the flame but from the hand holding it." Had Mallon been willing to venture an original opinion, he might have been able to make something out of this. King Vidor's adaptation of The Fountainhead is a completely entertaining movie, and as this nicely composed shot indicates, part of the movie's success lay in Vidor's finding ways to translate Rand's purple descriptions into interesting images:
Though the tool and the scene differ from the above passage, the movie works very hard to take Rand's evocation of modernist architecture, strong/silent males, and glamorous blondes completely seriously. If you're writing an assessment of Rand's enduring popularity, you'd at least want to take into account the interplay between style and philosophy -- an area in which Rand is remarkably similar to her contemporaries the Existentialists, who were loved at the time and are remembered today as much for their cigarettes and leather jackets as for anything they had to say about the relationship of existence and essence.
"Rand may be," Mallon continues, "in an aesthetic sense, the most totalitarian novelist ever to have sat down at a desk." It's worth remembering that there were, in fact, real totalitarian novelists: Fyodor Gladkov and many others for the Soviet Union, Kurt Eggers, Hans Baumann and a few others for Nazi Germany. They wrote actual, approved propaganda and curried artistic favor with their respective dictator/critics.
But by talking about the "aesthetic sense," Mallon may be moving toward a legitimate insight. Jean-Luc Godard criticized Steven Spielberg along the same lines, saying, "He gives you an emotional situation, then tells you how you have to respond to it." The difference is that Spielberg's post-1990 output has mostly been aimed at justifying establishment opinion. (You can't go wrong saying World War II veterans were brave, the Holocaust was horrible, and the Arab-Israeli conflict is complex.) Mallon may believe that Rand's propaganda merely aimed to flatter Americans' belief in themselves as rugged individualists, but he doesn't say so. In any event, the messages Rand was sending were very much at odds with the views of mid-century political scientists, literary dons, and most other keepers of establishment opinion. If she's a totalitarian, who's the Maximum Leader?
All interesting questions. Unfortunately, Mallon doesn't want to ask them. His purpose is to tell you Ayn Rand's books aren't worth reading, which is not particularly daring, given that this view of Rand is still widely shared among middlebrow thinkers. But it's a weird goal for a writer to have. You might even call it totalitarian.
No Health Insurance? Go Directly to Jail.
As the
House moves forward with debate on its
trillion-dollar-plus health care bill today, it's worth
remembering what's at stake: The House bill would give the
government the power to require that every individual buy health
insurance, pay a penalty for choosing not to comply—or potentially be sent to
jail.
Now, jail isn't a certainty; depending on the infraction, fines are also an option. And, looked at another way, all this really means is that the government continues to retain the authority to lock up those who don't pay their taxes. But still, this is a stark reminder that when liberals talk about "health care as a right," what they really mean is "health insurance as a requirement."
Even When I Thought it Was Stimulation, I Knew it Was the Banks All Along
Arnold Kling tries to explain recent Fed policy actions re: injecting reserves into the economy and simultaneously paying banks interest on reserves to high school students, and comes to a sobering conclusion:
In spite of all the sophisticated rhetoric about "quantitative easing" and "new tools for monetary policy," the only way that I can understand what the Fed was doing is to say that the goal was to stimulate bank profits, not the economy. If your goal were to stimulate the economy, you would inject enough reserves to do that and not pay interest on reserves. That might require buying some long-term bonds or mortgage securities, but not the hundreds of billions that the Fed actually bought.
Everything the Fed has been doing over the past fifteen months makes sense if you think of their goal as transferring wealth from taxpayers to banks. If you try to explain it as an attempt to implement an expansionary monetary policy, you won't even get past my high school students.
My November Reason magazine feature on the new political war against the Federal Reserve.
Are Americans Really Saving More?
Although officials on President Obama's economic team continue to claim that the personal savings rate of Americans is increasing, this rate has actually been declining since May. In fact, it's possible that a recovery in personal savings that began late in the Bush Administration ran out of steam early in the Obama Administration. Here is how the numbers have been trending since December:
These numbers are subject to regular, substantial change as the Bureau of Economic Analysis gets more complete data. For example, the May peak was initially claimed to be a full percentage point higher, at 6.9 percent, than it is now. September's 3.3 percent will be subject to revision up or down -- and all the revisions made to monthly statistics this year have been down.
Yet the rising personal saving rate continues to be a favorite talking point about the recovery. On Sunday, Treasury Sec. Tim Geithner made the claim his closing comment in an interview with Meet the Press's David Gregory:
You're seeing them do the rational thing, David, you're seeing Americans start to save again. After a long period where people were not putting enough aside against the risk of a recession or a job loss, you're seeing people start to save again. And that's a healthy, necessary adjustment. It'll help make sure the growth is more stable, more sustainable in the future.
Geithner and others are right about one thing. The personal savings rate is a little more than one percent higher now than it was in 2005:
However, the frequent revision of these numbers means that even the uptick in personal savings over the last four years may be less dramatic in relative terms. For example, while many ignoramuses (including this ignoramus) have claimed that the American savings rate entered negative territory in the early years of the 21st century, this is not true. The personal savings rate has not been negative on an annual basis since the Great Depression. On a monthly basis, the rate has gone negative only once, in September 2001 -- and even this is debatable given some changes in accounting related to the 9/11 attacks.
Finally, there is not much meaning encoded in month-to-month changes in the savings rate. The claim that Americans are upping personal savings as part of the recovery -- in addition to being logically faulty, given the Administration's exertions to drive the recovery by increasing spending on real estate, new cars and other items -- is unsupported. If anything the data point to a trivial increase in savings, which began under the previous administration.
This Is the Modern World
This month's edition of Cato Unbound tackles one of the most interesting questions historians have: Where did modernity come from? Stephen Davies leads off with a revision and synthesis of several classical liberal theories about the issue; his essay has attracted a friendly critique from Jack Goldstone, one of the scholars whose work Davies drew on and revised, and some more scathing criticisms from Anthony Pagden, who doubts many of Davies' premises. Jason Kuznicki will weigh in with another response to Davies next week, and then Davies will answer his critics. Watch it all unfold here.
Executive Pay Caps We Can Believe In
Writing at The Freeman, economist Bruce Yandle (listen to him talk about his famous “Bootleggers and Baptists” article here) makes the case for capping a certain type of executive pay:
Yes, it is high time that pay and investment guidelines be mandated for all top level executives who may in the normal course their daily work push the entire economy too close to or even over the edge of systemic risk falls. If nothing else, this Great Recession has taught us that top executives can practically capsize the economy.
But the chief concern is not with presidents and vice presidents of too-big-to-fail banks and other bailed-out enterprises. As large as they are, they are small potatoes relative to the big generators of systemic risk. The critical concern is with top government executives who can create national and international panic, lay the groundwork for international inflation or deflation, and just by voting and writing regulations can change the risk profile of entire industries.
We taxpayer/investors demand a set of risk-sensitive compensation guidelines that will mandate pay and wealth-management rules for all federal government top executives starting with the president of the United States and all cabinet members and their deputies. While we’re at it let’s include all members of Congress and every member of the commissions and boards that manage the nation’s independent agencies, including, of course, the board of governors and chairman of the Federal Reserve System.
New at Reason: Shikha Dalmia on What's Wrong with Ayn Rand
Love her or hate her, you can't deny that
Ayn Rand is
experiencing a revival. Yet as Reason Foundation Senior
Analyst Shikha Dalmia writes, Rand's entire project involved
liberating the individual from the yoke of collectivism and
creating the social, moral, and political conditions in which he
could live a fully actualized life. But is self-actualization
through productive work—the ultimate goal of this liberation for
Rand—all there is to a happy life?
Morally Hazardous Hikes
Tracie Cone of the Associated Press reports:
Last month two men and their teenage sons tackled one of the world's most unforgiving summertime hikes: the Grand Canyon's parched and searing Royal Arch Loop. Along with bedrolls and freeze-dried food, the inexperienced backpackers carried a personal locator beacon -- just in case.
In the span of three days, the group pushed the panic button three times, mobilizing helicopters for dangerous, lifesaving rescues inside the steep canyon walls.
What was that emergency? The water they had found to quench their thirst "tasted salty."
If they had not been toting the device that works like Onstar for hikers, "we would have never attempted this hike," one of them said after the third rescue crew forced them to board their chopper. It's a growing problem facing the men and women who risk their lives when they believe others are in danger of losing theirs.
"Rescue officials are deciding whether to start keeping statistics on the problem," Cone writes, "but the incidents have become so frequent that the head of California's Search and Rescue operation has a name for the devices: Yuppie 911." The unnecessary calls range from the accidental ("very often the beacons go off unintentionally when the button is pushed in someone's backpack") to the ridiculous ("a woman who was frightened by a thunderstorm"). Apparently, poor incentives have taken a system conceived as a way to help people beset by catastrophe and turned it into an overused, potentially overstretched service invoked at the drop of a hat. Now where have we seen that before?
Bonus comparison: If the health insurance angle ain't doing it for you, maybe you'd rather think of the beacons as a metaphor for bank bailouts:
"Now you can go into the back country and take a risk you might not normally have taken," says Matt Scharper, who coordinates a rescue every day in a state with wilderness so rugged even crashed planes can take decades to find. "With the Yuppie 911, you send a message to a satellite and the government pulls your butt out of something you shouldn't have been in in the first place."
As one rescue worker told Cone, "We are now entering the Twilight Zone of someone else's intentions."
Lame Lobsters Cause Bad Loan Policy
Remember 2008 when congressional Democrats
really, really, really wanted to pass the stimulus? At
the time, they needed to snag a few Republicans to get the bill
through. Meanwhile, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) really,
really wanted federal money to give to lobstermen in her
state, since lobsters aren't big sellers when everyone feels
poor.
Thus the American Recovery Capital program was born. The $255 million loan program for small businesses has an expected 60 percent default rate. That's largely because the program is explicitly targeted at businessmen who can't pay back loans.
From today's Washington Post under the bleak headline "SBA bailouts draw little notice," the details of a loan plan that only makes sense in a world gone mad:
The loan program offers an unprecedented 100 percent guarantee to banks, vs. the SBA's standard 75 percent. The loans' anticipated default rate is 60 percent, compared with the agency's average 10 percent. And all of the funds must be used to repay other delinquent loans—another first for the SBA.
"Logic tells you this is a bad idea. By definition these businesses are already failing, but we are lacking standards right now; our world has been turned upside down," said Barry Bosworth, an economist with the Brookings Institution.
The WaPo piece wraps up by pointing out that programs like this are almost impossible to kill once they exist, so we should probably just get used to Snowe's lobster pork.*
*Wow, "lobster pork" is pretty much the ultimate in treif.
New at Reason: Brian Doherty Interviews Sociologist Howard Campbell on the Juarez/El Paso Drug War Zone
The Mexican city of Juarez, on the U.S.
border at El Paso, Texas, has been suffering from wild waves of
drug war-related
violence in the past few years.
Howard Campbell, a professor of sociology and anthropology at
the University of Texas at El Paso, just came out with a book,
Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El
Paso and Juarez that sheds light on the background of what
he calls the "drug war zone" that binds Mexico and the United
States.
Senior Editor Brian Doherty interviewed Campbell about how the drug war is destroying Mexico, and why it can never succeed in its ostensible goal of preventing the sale and possession of certain drugs.
A Revolution in Europe
In the latest print edition of The New Republic (not online, alas), Anne Applebaum reviews Christopher Caldwell's new book on Islam and Europe, Reflections on a Revolution in Europe. I read it a few months ago and happily noticed that, unlike many shrill commentators on this issue, Caldwell actually did an enormous amount of on-the-ground research (when I was living in Sweden, he stopped by Timbro, my former employer, to talk about the situation in Stockholm and Malmö) and speaks a handful of European languages. For those of us that are reflexively pro-immigration in the United States—and if I were to hazard a guess, I would say the Caldwell is not one of those fearful of "Mexifornia"—he provides a compelling and convincing argument as to why the situation in Western Europe is rather different than the one in Texas and Southern California. Here is Applebaum giving the reader a rough précis of Caldwell's argument:
Caldwell's is a complicated argument, with both religious and social elements, not all of which I am qualified to judge. Among other things, he notes that Muslim dislike of European attitudes to women and sex leads Muslim men--even second-generation Muslim men--to import wives from their home countries. The imported wives, who often do not speak European languages, in turn tend to preserve the customs of the home countries in their adopted countries for another generation. He also observes a phenomenon that historians of American immigration would certainly recognize: in practice, contact with European culture has tended to make Muslims more conservative, not more liberal, about the culture they remember from the past. Their children and grandchildren, meanwhile, are able to keep in touch with that culture in a way that previous generations never could, through the easily manipulated world of satellite television. Back in Bangladesh, young people may long to be "modern" and go to nightclubs, but in the Bangladeshi enclaves of London, one sees a much different sort of Islamic world on Al Jazeera.
Applebaum gives Caldwell a fair hearing, and seems to broadly agree with his diagnosis of Europe's current immigration challenge. And she is also right to point out that his argument is far more complex and nuanced than one can possibly convey in 3000 words. But diagnosis and prescription and rather different things; Applebaum sees a rosier future, one in which Europe's intergrationist impulse and the benefits of liberal society eventually overwhelm the tribal and illiberal:
Perhaps because I belong to the group of people who fondly and naovely imagine that Islam may evolve--every other monotheism has--I am not entirely persuaded by Caldwell's elegant pessimism. There are multiple examples--many multiples of examples--of Muslim immigrants who have integrated seamlessly into Europe. I am thinking of the secular and sophisticated Iranians of Paris, the Pakistani shopkeepers on British high streets, even individuals such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of Europe's most fervent exponents of Enlightenment values. All have succeeded because some elements of European life--the entrepreneurial tradition and the blandishments of capitalism; the cosmopolitan cultural scene; the large role given to public intellectuals, particularly those who have something new to say--are well suited to the absorption and the cultural adaptation of outsiders. I do not see why Muslim immigrants will remain magically immune to all the integrationist influences that have shaped other immigrants into contented citizens of Western societies.
There are also some historical precedents. As noted above, the habit of importing spouses from the old country was also practiced by American immigrants--Jewish, German, Irish--some of whom also remained isolated in their own communities into two, three, or more generations. But these groups were finally integrated, partly through the lure of prosperity--in the end you had to speak English in order to get on--and partly through schools and peer pressure. Caldwell is right when he notes that Europeans always underestimate how deeply conformist American society is, and how much overt pressure there has always been to assimilate; but it is not impossible to imagine that a few changes in Europe could make a big difference. Indeed, that ban on the veil in schools in France is now widely perceived as an enormous success, precisely because it has tended to accelerate the assimilation of Muslim girls (and thus it might eventually be possible to drop it). Nor is it impossible to imagine that Europe could recover from the current recession--from which, with the exception of Britain and Ireland, it has suffered less drastically than the United States--and that a subsequent burst of economic growth could pull immigrants into the mainstream.
Time Traveling, Anti-Physics Saboteurs Now Enlisting the Aid of Birds?
A few weeks back, I wrote about the argument put forth by two respected physicists that the Large Hadron Collider was failing due to sabotage from the future. Absurd, right? Except that more evidence just keeps piling on: According to reports, the LHC has undergone a series of troubles, and recently shut down due to a bird dropping a piece of bread into a key section of the machine:
The Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, just cannot catch a break. First, a coolant leak destroyed some of the magnets that guide the energy beam. Then LHC officials postponed the restart of the machine to add additional safety features. Now, a bird dropping a piece of bread on a section of the accelerator has, according to the Register, shut down the whole operation.
Of course, if those scientists are right, we should be thanking the errant bird for doing its part to save the world.
Previously at Reason, Ron Bailey examined whether the LHC might cause the end of the world. (And for the easily panicked, if you're ever uncertain about whether or not it has, you can always find out here.)
Kids Today, With Their Briar Pipes and Fancy Cigars
Last week New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
signed into law a ban on the sale of flavored toba
cco products that takes
effect in February. This ordinance goes beyond the arbitrary,
irrational
federal ban on flavored cigarettes, since it also covers
cigars, pipe tobacco, and smokeless tobacco. As with the
federal ban, the official rationale is that the newly prohibited
products appeal to children. According to the
Staten Island Advocate, "health experts say [flavored
tobacco products] are a blatant attempt to hook young people
on a dangerous product." Michele Bonan of the American Cancer
Society
calls them "Big Tobacco's training wheels,"
while Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan) says
banning them is necessary "to protect the children of New York
City."
The rest of the city council evidently was swayed by this argument, since all but one member voted for the ban. Yet Bonan and Quinn have no idea what they're talking about, and they have no evidence to back up their bald assertions. Are they seriously maintaining that cherry-flavored pipe tobacco, which you may recall your grandfather smoking, is part of a plot to lure teenagers into nicotine addiction? Do they honestly believe that the kids today are into rum-flavored cigars, or that they are sneaking into Nat Sherman to score the latest offering from CAO or Drew Estate?
Like the federal ban, the New York City ban makes an exception for one kind of flavored tobacco product that really is widely consumed by teenagers: menthol cigarettes. And since selling tobacco to minors is already illegal (as the lone dissenter on the city council noted), the only sales that will be blocked by the ban will be sales to adults. Still, it's for the kids.
More on flavored tobacco products here.
[via The Rest of the Story]
Reason Writers Around Town: Nick Gillespie in the American Conservative on William Carlos Williams' In the American Grain
The American Conservative is running a symposium on great works that have been neglected. Participants inlcude David Bromwich, San Tanenhaus, Florence King, and Reason's Nick Gillespie, who writes:
Is any major American writer fading faster than William Carlos Williams, who had the bum judgment to write a five-book epic poem about Paterson, New Jersey, of all godforsaken places? Williams is best remembered, if at all, for his “red wheel/barrow/glazed with rain/water” and his introduction to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, which is more than most poets, and certainly most Garden State loyalists such as myself, deserve.
But at least one Williams work deserves to be read by every American and every citizen of the world who aspires to be American or understand the place: 1925’s In the American Grain, a wide-ranging collection of essays, fragments, and prose poems that challenged and exploded the very idea of national identity. Eric the Red, Ponce de Leon, the French missionary Sebastian Rasles, the Indian princess Jacataqua—they are real Americans by Williams’s count, as are Poe, Lincoln, and Aaron Burr, whose antinomianism infuses our historical experiment with its greatness, peril, and often self-defeating arrogance.
“They say, they say, they say,” Williams’s Burr utters near the end of his life. “Those two little words have done more harm than all others. Never use them ... never use them.” Williams’s meditation on what it meant to be living in the New World was written at the start of the American Century, but it continues to speak loud and clear to our current confusion over our place in the world.
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