"Recidivism" is the Wrong Word

Deputy national security adviser John Brennan has caused a furror with his remark that, when counting terrorists who return, after release, to the battlefield "20% [recidivism] isn't that bad." Opponents of the Obama Administration's project of criminalizing the terrorist enterprise owe Mr. Brennan a debt of gratitude for this remark, because it helps to clarify what, precisely, is wrong with the thinking behind the project.

"Recidivism" refers to the likelihood of a criminal, upon incarceration and release, to commit the same or similar crime again. "Recidivus," in Latin, means to fall back. The implication is that the released criminal, in addition to having "paid his debt to society," has "learned the error of his ways." To commit crime again is to fall back to the ways which the criminal has acknowledged, at least at some point in time, to be wrong.

But the question arises, do terrorists ever acknowledge that the ways of jihad are wrong ? and if so, is their admission credible ? The conditions for releasing a criminal after a period of incarceration are two-fold, as I say. First, the criminal must have in some sense "Paid" for the crime. Justice must be served. But also there must be no danger to society incurred by the release.

Therefore, terrorists should be treated more or less the way we treat the criminally insane. They fight under an ideology and under the direction of the ideology's authorities. From our point of view, this ideology has no practical distinction from psychosis. They do not "fall back" to jihad because it is facile to think that such a profound caste of mind is ever broken by any period of incarceration. They "continue with" jihad.

The reason the war on terror, more appropriately the war against Islamic fundamentalist extremism, is indeed a war, is that it is conducted under the direction of authorities, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, whose disposition is known not to have changed. The only sensible justification for releasing proven jihadist terrorists would be that those authorities publicly recognize that hostilities toward the United States and the west are over.

More thoughts on this can be found under "war on terror" at

http://www.stopaforusrep.com.

Illegal Immigration: some thoughts

The problem of illegal immigration seems to sleep in the winter and re-emerge in the spring. The weak economy has also abetted the tide of illegal aliens, while at the same time exacerbating the rancor felt by Americans whose jobs they are taking. A temporary amnesty that independently provides illegal workers and their employers with an incentive to register their status with the federal government can quickly and humanely solve this problem. More thoughts on this can be found at:

http://www.stopaforusrep.com/Illegal_immigrants/Illegal_immigrants.html

Hello Instapunditers

Come back often ! Cheers, Mike

Blood in the Water

Well, Aaron Nicodemus, of The Worcester Telegram & Gazette reports that four Republican candidates and one independent have taken out nomination papers for the U.S. congressional seat in the third district of Massachusetts currently held by James McGovern. Among those candidates is Michael Stopa, physicist, blogger and political neophyte, whose web site can be found at http://www.stopaforusrep.com.

So here in Massachusetts there seems to be that ol' smell of blood in the water.

Inside the Whale

The theme of underliberalskin is partly a comment on life as a conservative lived in the heart of liberal country (Cambridge, MA, USA). In this sense it has something in common with Orwell's "Inside the Whale" (with no serious attempt to compare myself to Orwell). And in part it is a reflection on the events that have led the "educated classes" so horribly astray in the last half century. That is, I want to explain as best I understand what are the irritations, the bogeymen and, most of all, the daydreams of the everyday liberal. In that regard, I will return again and again to (a) the triumph of von Mises, Hayek, Friedman and the Chicago school of economics; (b) the ascent of Ronald Reagan; (c) the fall of communism; (d) the attempt by Al Gore to steal the presidential election in 2000 and last (e) the all-encompassing desire to be the one who "saves the planet."

To get the narrative rolling, I start with one fact. As documented by Yergin and Stanislaw in "The Commanding Heights," the essential failure of Soviet communism was the abolishment of the price system. Aside from undermining the relationship between consumers and producers, the command economy undermined the relationship of businesses to businesses as well. When one business (i.e. one Soviet production unit) contacted another one to obtain raw materials, manufactured items, etc. required for their business and their product, there was no consistent method for determining what one business should charge another business. The entire close-knit fabric of production came unraveled. As a result, when the Soviet economy was fully examined after its fall, it was discovered that the gross domestic product of the entire Union (with some 300 million inhabitants) was comparable to that of Denmark (5 million) or South Korea (35 million). The utter failure of the world's premier command economy is now documented and theoretically, philosophically understood in depth. This is the origin of the Chicago School of Economics. We are living in a period where economic theory represents a footnote to the Chicago School and where liberal philosophy is entirely based on exceptions to the rules of price as information and freedom as prosperity.

Margaret Thatcher, in her moment of the Lady is not for turning, famously held up a copy of Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" and exclaimed "this is what we believe!"

Indeed.

Paul Ryan's revolution

There was never really a credible argument to be made that Republicans and conservatives had no ideas with regard to how to solve problems with healthcare, taxes, and the fiscal train-wreck that the nation's entitlement programs are heading toward. Individual private Social Security accounts, lowering business, capital gains and individual income tax rates, capping medicare payments for those still ten years or more away from retirement, providing a health insurance tax credit, etc. etc., are thoughts that conservatives have been thinking for years. The amazing thing though about Paul Ryan's H.R. 6110 (introduced with Tom Coburn and others in the Senate) is that it boldly puts the ideas all into one place. If ever the word audacious was appropriate for our political world this is surely the time.

In short (and believe me, this is short), H.R. 6110 institutes a "qualified health insurance" tax credit, reforms the Medicaid and SCHIP programs, reforms Medicare and makes it fiscally sound, (re-)introduces private Social Security accounts, eliminates the death tax, allows taxpayers to opt into a simplified system with only two tiers and, aside from the healthcare credit, essentially no deductions or credits, fully repeals the alternate minimum tax, eliminates taxes on interest, capital gains and dividends, reforms the business tax and slashes spending overall. Oh and by the way it insures the 47 million Americans currently without coverage and sends a nice basket of fresh fruit and chocolates to every household in the nation.

As Glenn Reynolds would say, read the whole thing.

Here's the point: it is now all on record. It's all in one place. You ask us for ideas, this is what we want.

Let me try to explain why "audacious" does not sufficiently cover this situation. Conservatives have been trying to get each of these things through Congress for years and have, in the best of political times seen their legislation die a slow death (think Bush and Social Security reform).

Question: is this a good idea ? politically, I mean. This bill contains cuts to Medicare, private Social Security accounts, repeal of the death tax. These have all been transformed into Reptilian bogeymen over the past twenty years. You can be sure that some Democrats in some districts will be waving this bill like a bloody red flag before November: "HEEERRRREE is what they want to do to your medicare !!" "WHHERRRRE will be your precious monthly retirement check the next time the market crashes ???" From thirty thousand feet it looks like a target-rich zone.

But I, for one, don't care. I like it. It has been said and it is good. I would love to have been in the room when Nancy Pelosi first laid eyes on the "Findings and Purpose." Surely she laughed that annoyed-civil-servant laugh of hers and said: "they've got to be kidding." But it had to bring a little clammy coldness to her hands and feet to think that "they actually have the temerity to ask for all this stuff ???"

Additional thoughts here, here and here. Thoughtful (albeit errant) post from the proverbial other side of the aisle here.

The Growth of Medical Markets: Why the Rich Should Get Better Healthcare than the Poor

In the afterglow of the recent lightning strike in the Massachusetts special Senate election it appears as though the Republicans are working to take the initiative in proactively formulating policy alternatives, specifically on health care, to those of the Obama administration and its allies on Capitol Hill. With Bob McDonnell preparing to give possibly the most closely-watched response to a State of the Union Address in history, the minority party has an unparalleled opportunity to formulate the structure of the policy outcome. It is therefore crucial that the debate within the party be as clear as possible and that Republicans, as free marketers, know what it is they are fighting for. With this in mind, here are two principles, one empirical and the other normative, that I believe will bring clarity to the health care debate.

The principles are simple and simply stated, but I believe that taken together they incarnate the core of the conservative perspective. The empirical principle is the following:
A. People want to live longer, healthier lives.
And the normative one is:
B. More money should buy more health care.
These ideas are deceptively simple. But I believe they can serve as a guide to what the Republican counter-proposal to Obamacare should be and what McDonnell should say in proposing it.

That people want to live longer and be healthier is a statement of human aspiration that is about as close to bedrock as it’s possible to get. It is so universal and devoid of controversy that it seems at first to be almost devoid of meaning. Medicine, and the demand for it, has existed for millennia. But medical research has transformed the world in the last hundred years; and it is accelerating. Now when we get sick we know what is happening to us. And we suspect that no matter how dire our case may be, if we can hold on long enough science will find a cure. Needless to say, nothing of the kind was true in, say, the Middle Ages. You got sick and you prayed and God either healed you or he didn’t. Interestingly, liberals of the baby boomer age in particular, for many of whom the comforts of an afterlife have no appeal, are especially fixated on mortality. It can help to stay aware of this when actually arguing the merits of different approaches to healthcare with liberals.

The second principle is a rejection of the idea of healthcare egalitarianism. You won’t hear anyone on the campaign trail (other than the odd libertarian) making principle B into a rallying cry (“More wealth, more health!”). According to principle B, at some time and some place life-saving techniques and medicines will be available to some, who have money, and not to others, who have not. But the free market ideology says that healthcare is like any other good, it is bought and sold for a price. Furthermore, the cost of a good is something that government can hide, but not simply cancel. That cost represents information about how much effort went into producing that good. (We are all Hayekians now). The point of principle B is then that government should not attempt to conceal the cost of healthcare and its constituent parts from its consumers. Particularly insofar as healthcare represents new technologies coming to market, the argument for principle B is that it most efficiently facilitates principle A.

Analyses of the economics of medical research became commonplace in the popular press as a result of the AIDS epidemic. Most people understand that drug companies pour a great deal of money into new medicines and that they pay for that research and development with the substantial profits they are able to make with a relatively small number of successful products. In addition, medical technology goes far beyond drug research and includes everything from in situ sugar monitors for diabetics, to laboratory equipment for cheap, accurate blood tests, to materials science of stent implantation, not to mention the explosion in genomics-related research. The list goes on and on. The complexity, bordering on (constructive) chaos, in the medical research community is critical, because placing the government between consumers and producers of healthcare is only the first step in an inevitable chain of top-down control. When government becomes the only customer, it begins to dictate the allocation of industry R&D dollars based on its imperfect understanding of what its citizens want. This model works acceptably well for things like military equipment. But for the heterogeneous demands of the consumer economy, short-circuiting the cost mechanism leads to inefficiency at best and catastrophe at worst. The results of the state control ideology in Europe are already in. A 2007 analysis in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery revealed the deleterious effect of price controls in the European drug market saying that “pharmaceutical innovation is not only occurring faster in the United States than in Europe, but the gap is getting wider.” This is no surprise for anyone who remembers what was uncovered during the 90’s inside the carcass of the former Soviet Union. As Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw pointed out, by the time of its dissolution the economy had nearly collapsed. The entire U.S.S.R. had a real GDP somewhere in the range of that of South Korea or Denmark (and ten to thirty times the population). The lesson for healthcare and for any other sub-portion of the economy is the same: if you treat it like a lifeboat, that’s what it’s going to turn into.

People are, as I said, intensely interested in longer, healthier lives. Consequently they have great wisdom when it comes to government messing around with their healthcare. Witness Massachusetts. Most Americans don’t feel we are at a crisis where medical insurance costs are going to bankrupt them. Most Americans don’t view the treatment of the poor in America who lack health coverage as a humanitarian disaster. Indeed, most Americans realize that the intensity of attention that the Obama administration has chosen to bestow upon healthcare suggests that a European-style, government-controlled system was always a goal in and of itself, irrespective of the legitimate complaints against the current system. The psychological motivation of the educated classes here is the same as the motivation that ultimately leads to socialized anything, it is the primal urge to control. If you’ve ever played, or seen your kids play the computer game SIMS II, you’ll recognize that it is the perfect pastime for the educated liberal class. In the game you have a village and its inhabitants whose appearance, home and lives you control in exquisite detail. Of course they only blather nonsense to each other, but what do you expect from two-dimensional cyber-bots? It makes you wonder if the game’s creators are planning an extension pack entitled “Tea Party SIMS.”

But I digress.

Since the Obama administration along with their brethren congressional ideologues have intellectually approached healthcare as a solution seeking a problem, Republicans and moderate Democrats have an advantage because they are actually looking at the problems. They are not looking beyond them to the Promised Land. And therein lies the opportunity for Republicans to steal a march on their opponents. So what are these problems and how should conservatives and moderates address them?

Everyone agrees that the emergency room is no place to treat the everyday medical problems of poor people. Some form of expansion of Medicaid, that provides means-tested, basic health insurance for those with insufficient means might be devised in such a way that there is no mad rush for everyone else to abandon their health plans and get in line for government health stamps. This type of government insurance might be supplemented with free or minimal cost clinics that treat arbitrary walk-ins, including illegal aliens, with no questions asked. Doctors and hospital administrators are by now accustomed to not asking (non-medical) questions.
As for controlling costs and improving service, this is an area where the free market solutions of deregulate and foster competition have been beating the statists to a pulp since the demise of Bell Telephone. The most obvious cost-control proposals are already out: 1. allow interstate competition between insurance companies; 2. promote plans which connect consumer cost more directly to usage of medical care, especially where catastrophic illness is not involved; 3. pass tort reform. With regard to this latter idea, why has no one until now suggested that we nationalize the class action lawsuit industry? We have state prosecutors for criminal cases, why not establish a system of state-appointed prosecutors for malpractice and/or class action claims - some kind of single payer system? That would throw a chill into the trial lawyers lobby.

Finally, no conservative should be caught dead suggesting that insurance companies should be regulated so that they are not allowed to take account of prior conditions. It should be clear that this will only produce a race to the bottom with respect to how little the insurance companies can get away with providing to these individuals and how much they can be made to pay. And if the system is blind then the costs will just get passed on to everyone. Insurance company executives won’t have to cancel their Tahiti vacations in order to cover those with diagnosed prior conditions. People in these conditions could have some form of government option available to them alone. If we are going to protect people from their own stupidity (or, to be fair, from the vagaries of lady fortune), then we should at least keep the costs in front of us.

In a week and a month and a year that has been chock full of good news, here is more good news still. In spite of Hayek’s warnings about the slide into serfdom, the fight against statism has a powerful ally: gravity. Interposing government restrictions into a complex economy in times of explosive access to information is ultimately like trying to keep water from running downhill. People want longer, healthier lives and they will, somehow or another, figure out a way to use their money to acquire them. Our job is just to rely on the people’s wisdom, poke a few holes in the dike and try to minimize the unintended consequences.

Scott Brown Rally

Wild in Worcester

From the Scott Brown after-rally at the ballroom of the Crowne Plaza, Worcester, January 17, 2010, ~5 pm.

A rally for Scott Brown for Senator of Massachusetts took place today at Mechanics Hall in Worcester, MA. Posted here is a first hand account of the rally accompanied by a few original photographs.

Mechanics Hall is a fairly famous venue renowned for its excellent acoustics on Main Street in Worcester, MA. I cannot attest to the acoustics because, as you'll see below, it was impossible for a lot of us to ever make it inside. I arrived at 2:15 pm for the event which was scheduled to begin at 3:00 pm.

The now-familiar Brown signs were in evidence from the corner, right off interstate 290, where you turn downtown. I was coming west from Holliston. Finding the event proved to be no problem since the traffic flow with bumper stickers and signs, many homemade, in the windows was easy to follow. I parked about a ten minute walk away and followed the crowd.
Upon arrival the scene looked like this (left). I estimate that several hundred supporters were lining both sides of Main Street. Cars were crawling through slowly (there's a traffic light right in front of the Hall) and horn-honking was rife. The noise of the crowd kind of rose and fell with waves of car horns and various chants from bullhorns and an occasional burst into "God Bless America."

A saunter through the crowd gave the impression of an extraordinarily polite mob who were sick and tired of it all and weren't going to take it anymore and, oh excuse me did I bump you with my sign ? There seemed to be a lot of political neophytes here. An old guy I walked in with spontaneously noted that he had never participated in any kind of political rally before. My impression was that he was not alone. There was, from this group of inexperienced politicos, a lot of electricity being generated.

The crowd itself was fairly hard to characterize. There was neither an excess of young nor of old. There were a fair number of families with children. There was also a clear representation of tea party participants and organizers with battle-tested protest paraphenalia. But far and away the Scott Brown acolyte profile is, if this rally is any guide, pretty ordinary folks.

So that the record is clear, there were a handful of Coakley supporters who staked out a corner across and slightly down the street from Mechanics Hall. I engaged a couple of them in conversation and there was mutual suspicion as to whom was from Massachusetts and who was from out-of-state. I actually counted them and there were, at peak, about thirty. They were mostly pretty quiet, I'd say grim, and the Brown supporters seemed to give them a wide berth. I was one of only a few who sashayed over to inspect the outsiders.

Another group of four interlopers who represented themselves as billionaire's for Brown (see below) did mingle with the crowd and chant billionaire-esque slogans. One of them claimed to me, reliably, I think, that he was from Worcester (I had guessed Cambridge). At one point a few of the Brown supporters tried to cover their signs with Brown placards in a move that looked like the beginnings of something confrontational. This lasted about ten seconds before cries all around of "leave them alone, they're Americans, too," (or the like) erupted. I guess they were having fun. They would no doubt have had more fun, with spot interviews on MSNBC, if the crowd had beaten them to a pulp. For a while I thought one of the women (the blonde, second from left) was actually a guy in drag. But closer inspection revealed that she was indeed a she. I guess that's not very complimentary.

A little before 3:00 pm the Scott Brown campaign bus pulled in. And a little after that it was announced that there was no room in Mechanics Hall for anyone else. This was a little bit of a surprise to me because I had not tried to go inside, thinking that we few (we happy few) hundred on the street were all there were. But no, Mechanics Hall holds a tad under 2000 and it was at capacity. I guess that while I wandered around the street there must have been a steady stream into the hall. Can't say how I missed it. The only other possibility is that it was already filled when I arrived. When the announcement, by some kind of bullhorn or PA from the bus, came that Mechanics Hall was filled and none of the rest of us would be able to get inside, the crowd exploded in wild cheers. At that point the Coakley people unaccountably, en masse (see photo above), slung their signs over their shoulders and trudged away.

So the overflow was directed to the Crowne Plaza Hotel ballroom up the street. It was quite a merry parade. We even had an equestrian escort - perhaps a tea party veteran? Horses were not, alas, allowed into the Crowne Plaza ballroom...so he had to wait in the bar.

To cut the travelogue short, the Crowne Plaza ballroom was packed with I estimate another thousand to fifteen hundred standing supporters. While we waited for the event to begin, people took turns taking the microphone and offering vignettes of their reasons for participating and their origins. People from as far as Pennsylvania ("we need to unseat Arlen Specter next") were there, doctors with concerns about the health care bill were numerous. There was even a single nut from the physics department at Harvard (me). We managed to pass the time swimmingly.

The main event commenced (for us on big screen as seen, initially at least, from rather a distance) with brief comments from a couple local organizers including a comedian whose name, I apologize, I don't remember. Some of the New England Patriots linemen were there (again, I don't recall names). The Brown daughters came on and Doug Flutie was next and he was looking and sounding great. John Ratzenberger, as you probably know by now, was there and he got a rousing response. They ALL got a rousing response. Ratzenberger was very poised in front of the audience and offered an anecdote about being a carpenter at Woodstock during the famed concert. He described how that concert was in the process of becoming a man-caused disaster until the National Gaurd arrived in helicopters to rescue the rabble who were, wet, un-prepared, stoned and hungry (though perhaps that's redundant). The National Guard distributed blankets and munchies. Ratzenberger suggested, a propos of Hillary Clinton's suggestion that a statue be erected at Woodstock, that it be a statue of a National Guardsman feeding a crying hippie. Curt Schilling, who noted for the record that he was not a Yankee fan, came on and did the actual introduction of Scott.

Scott Brown is a remarkable political candidate. He gives a talk like he's addressing his daughter's softball team, which he's coached, and all of the parents at the end of a successful season. He is as relaxed, as lacking in artiface and as suddenly filled with heart as you can imagine. His speech was no doubt written in advance. His remarks at the overflow room (about more, below) were clearly extemporaneous. But nowhere was there a note falsity.

I'm always suspicious of complaints about negative campaigning by politicians. But Scott Brown led the crowd in a chant of "Shame on Martha" with a sincerity that was genuine.

So he finished a fabulous, warm speech, during which he promised to come down the street to the Crowne Plaza. The last pictures are of his appearance there. He was preceeded in by his daughters. The crowd went wild. I got a couple of photos of him from fairly close-up. He actually started his talk by hemming and hawing and saying he just didn't know what to say...like he was the star at a surprise birthday party. Someone had instructed the hotel facilities guy to turn off the PA system for reasons that are unclear. So the testifying disciples (who resumed their testamonies after the Brown speech at Mechanics Hall) procured a bullhorn to give their testimonies. The room is really big, so the bullhorn was necessary.

So Brown made his remarks on bullhorn. Where have we seen this before? "We can't hear you!" "Well, someone, like the liberal intelligensia, will hear all of us soon!"

I leave you with the latest quotations from intrade.












It was grand indeed !