Encouraging news

A surprisingly positive op-ed piece about the War in Iraq appeared in yesterday's New York Times. The authors, two senior policy guys from the left-leaning Brookings institute, are exceptionally candid in their assessment:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were
surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

They conclude with this advice:

But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.

This is, of course, not the message that Congressional Democrats want to hear. Now that we're moving into the August Congressional recess (where the Congressmen go home and pretend to be Real People for a few weeks) without a bill with layman's opinions on how to proceed in Iraq, maybe we will actually be able to bide our time until the long-awaited September report from General Patreaus on the progress of the Surge campaign and make a real assessment of how to proceed there.

Books: Founding Brothers

For those of you who are always keen to learn more about the Founding Fathers of our nation, particularly those who enjoy seeing their veneer of perfection stripped away to glance at the messy details of forming of the United States, Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis is a must-read. The book focuses largely on Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams and their interweaving histories by elaborating on a few specific stories from the early days of the Republic. While these stories provide a much fuller picture of the characters involved, the details provided spill out across the era to paint a much clearer portrait of everything it took to start a new nation - and one unlike anything else tried before.

The slowest piece of this book is the Preface, largely because it is also the most academic portion of the book, setting the stage for the tales and will come in the subsequent chapters. The most interesting chapter - and indeed the most insightful throughline for the whole book - is the one called "The Silence," which uses an abolition bill offered by the Quakers in 1790 as a springboard for discussing the larger slavery debate that raged quietly throughout the revolutionary generation.

I found much of what was discussed in the book to be new facts about old names and stories: the work Alexander Hamilton did to draft George Washington's famous Farewell Address, the foresight of John Adams and the political gaming that caused him the election in 1800, the repeated inconsistency of Thomas Jefferson, the full story of the famous duel between Hamilton and Aaron Burr. More surprising to me was how the politics and personalities of the young US remind me of the political climate today.

Nothing but high praise for this book, which reads more like a novel than a history book. It is available from Amazon here.

Farming for Money - Posthumously

The Heritage Insider reports this:

The GAO found that the Department of Agriculture had distributed $1.1 billion to the estates of deceased farmers over a seven-year period. The Washington Post reports that the payments do not necessarily represent fraud: “Most estates are allowed to collect farm payments for up to two years after an owner’s death, giving heirs time to restructure their businesses and probate the will.”

A previous article I read on this indicated that while some may be using that money to restructure the estate, many were just holding on to money for farms that the dead owner's heirs had no involvement in running or where the farm didn't even operate anymore. That article even mentioned how one set of heirs continued to send updates on the farm to the government, despite the fact that the owner was dead and the farm was defunct.

If that's how the government's going to run things, perhaps you and I should dig into our past and see if any of our deceased relatives had farms. My great granddaddy Bell had one....hum....

Find a cheaper price

Mapquest is offering a neat new tool at the top of its website - a search engine for cheap gas.

Now, I know websites have long existed that tell you where the cheapest gas in an area is, and that's great....if you know you're looking for cheap gas. But what if you're driving from Northern Virginia to Baltimore and need directions? You go to Mapquest and see the little gas search at the top of the page and suddenly remember you're down to a quarter of a tank and are going to need to fill up.

Mapquest has given you what you wanted (directions) and something you needed (help finding cheap gas) but weren't even thinking about. It's helped you out! So you spend a few extra minutes there, and that helps Mapquest sell more ads later.

Innovation that leads to a mutually beneficial exchange. The very essence of a free society. Lovely.

Focusing on the Customer

I was trying to poke around on Craigslist this evening, but then got a page that wouldn't load. I clicked on another page and got this message:

Craigslist and many other sites are having issues at the colo facility.
Please sit tight, and try again later.
We are aware of the situation, and the happy craigslist elves are scurrying to make it better, even now.

They could have said just said there was an error and left me to wonder if it would ever be fixed, if anyone even knew - just like sooooo many other companies would do.

But they let me know they were on it. We're cool. Everything's going to be fine.

They've got elves working on it.

If you know there is a problem with your product/service/candidate, acknowledge it. Let it be what it is - and, to the best you can, fix it.

Breaking the Tax Break on Health Insurance

In his book, The Cure, David Gratzer points to a specific date in the early '50s when a tax break given to companies to cover employee health insurance was written into law as one of a handful of crucial dates that have led to our current health care situation. I've come to agree that the ingrained notion that employers, not individuals, are responsible for providing health insurance is a bit illogical and is a major roadblock on our way to real progress in health reform.

It strikes me as great, then, that today I have read two different proposals to reform health care that both include breaking the employer/insurer link. The first one I encountered was in the Economist, where it discussed two similar bills making their way through each chamber of Congress. Now, to be sure, these are universal health-care proposals in the vain of the Massachusetts plan, which has its positives and its negatives.

Both versions of the bill require individuals to buy their insurance, and
include insurance-market reform and subsidies to make sure that all Americans
can do so. They also end the current tax break for health insurance provided by
employers, which should break the link between insurance and employment by
making coverage portable.

The other thing I read today was from a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Allan B. Hubbard, director of the National Economic Council under President Bush. He argues that the way to fix health insurance is through the tax code, which currently has skewed the incentives on insurance:

Under today's tax code, people who are fortunate enough to get health insurance
through their jobs get a big tax break -- but those who have to buy coverage on
their own get no tax break at all. That is not fair, and it is not wise.

His remedy - or rather the President's - is a flat $15,000 standard tax deduction for health insurance. Though he does not go so far as to say the administration's plan would eliminate the corporate tax break, it does move responsibility to individuals, and eventually the tax break would probably have to go.

I don't know what the right size for such a deduction would be. A one-size-fits-all deduction may encourage people to continue the common practice of being over-insured, which would do nothing to drive down costs in the long run. However, using the tax code to reward a positive behavior like having insurance seems a better step than the government mandating me to buy something.

Ultimately, though, breaking the employer/insurer link alone would be a huge step forward and would cause a dramatic change in how people view insurance. Currently, because insurance is so tied to jobs, it is really seen as an entitlement, and that is the worldview framing this debate. Let's change our worldview and see what new ideas come out of that.

The Democratic Candidate Debate

I didn't watch it, but I read it. The YouTube question format was a brilliant stroke and is yet another example of the Left trouncing the Right in use of new media.

The debate was fairly dull and tame until the crazy climate change questions, which always get me worked up. I'm struck by how well Obama is able to stay on message ("I'm the guy who's really different and isn't connected to corporate or other special interests"), how disappointing Bill Richardson was, how good Clinton is at being relatively centrist, and how not-crazy Gravel actually sounds in some of his answers (see below - and my opinion omits his crazy inside-baseball complaint against Obama using bundlers). I'm also impressed by the increased nuance some of the candidates - particularly Biden and Clinton - showed on their answers about Iraq.

Overall, though, despite the benign nature of many of the answers, I am more convinced than ever that these people are not the right people for our country. They are for solutions that punish the job-makers, that pick winners and losers while patting themselves on the back for not doing that, and that bring more people into dependence on government instead of encouraging self-reliance.

Honest and Awful:
Hillary Clinton, when asked if she would describe herself as a liberal:

You know, it is a word that originally meant that you were for freedom, that you were for the freedom to achieve, that you were willing to stand against big power and on behalf of the individual. Unfortunately, in the last 30, 40 years, it has been turned up on its head and it's been made to seem as though it is a word that describes big government, totally contrary to what its meaning was in the 19th and early 20th century.

And right here, she could come out against big government and that she trusts people to make decisions for themselves instead of bureaucrats and politicians - a truly progressive idea - but instead, she shifts back to the Village...

I prefer the word "progressive," which has a real American meaning, going back to the progressive era at the beginning of the 20th century. I consider myself a modern progressive, someone who believes strongly in individual rights and freedoms, who believes that we are better as a society when we're working together and when we find ways to help those who may not have all the advantages in life get the tools they need to lead a more productive life for themselves and their family.
So I consider myself a proud modern American progressive, and I think that's the kind of philosophy and practice that we need to bring back to American politics.

Answers That Make You Pause and Shake Your Head Hoping That Will Make The Answer Make More Sense:
Barack Obama, as part of his answer to a question on paying reparations for slavery, which he opposes:

Unfortunately, we've had a White House that hasn't invested in the kinds of steps that have to be done to overcome the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in this country.

Most Respectable Answer:
Mike Gravel on a question about whether he sent his kids to public or private school:

My children went to public school and private school, and I'm recommend that we need a little bit of competition in our system of education. Right now, we have 30 percent of our children do not graduate from high school. That is abominable, and that is the problem of both parties.

Most Respectable Statement that Didn't Answer the Question:
Also from Mike Gravel, responding to a question about how politicians can use their power to make Americans conserve energy:

Very simple, change our tax structure. Have a fair tax where people are taxed on what they spend rather than what they earn. And our tax system is totally corrupt right now. And so if we now have a retail sales tax, you'll take this nation of ours from a consuming nation to a savings nation. And that's the most significant thing we can do to alter climate change.

Did You Want To Prove Ann Coulter Right?:
John Edwards, responding to the final question where each candidate had to say something they liked and didn't like about the candidate to their left. This is from the CNN article; the transcript omits this for some reason:

Edwards said he liked Clinton's service to the country, as well as her husband's. But Edwards looked at the salmon-colored jacket Clinton wore and said jokingly, "But I don't know about that jacket."

Read the debate and know what we may getting ourselves into.

Movie news worth noting

Those who know me know that I deviate most significantly from the human race in two ways:

1. I don't like ketchup
2. I don't like movies, and particularly don't like sitting in movie theatres

Though I have yet to encounter anything to make me deviate from point 1, I do make occasional exceptions for point 2 - I have already committed to seeing the Simpson's movie in theatres (not on opening night, of course, but once the crowds thin out a bit).

Now comes along this news, posted by my friend Scott, that a second X-Files movie is in the works. This pleases me. A movie now is much more fitting than their attempt to do one mid-series, which, while not awful, was not nearly what it could have been.

The first X-Files movie, however, did provide for me the quote I used on my award page in my senior yearbook in high school. Kudos to anyone who can cite the quote in the comments, and a prize is probably deserved to anyone who can figure out who the quote should truly be attributed to (I improperly credited it to Cigarette Smoking Man...whoops).

Conservative alternative lifestyles

The buzzword on the left nowadays is "tolerance" for those with different lifestyles--like cross-dressers--but almost everything that these folks want to do, liberals won't tolerate. One smoker lamented that if "gays were discriminated against today the way smokers are, there would be an uproar." Gun owners have reason to be fearful too. In a recent blog interview on Moveon.org, John Edwards of North Carolina proclaimed that health care, child care, a livable wage and a clean environment are "rights," but owning a gun is a "privilege." The men and women who gathered in Kiowa would like to send him a copy of the Constitution.

I suspect that if liberals would loosen their puritan collars and start showing real tolerance of conservative "alternative lifestyles," they'd be having more fun too.

Read all of Steve Moore's Wall Street Journal article. A great jolt of perspective in a politically correct world.

The Bridge to A Better Place

I'm not a fan of Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK). I think he is indicative of all that has gone wrong with the Republican party. His continued defense of pork-barrel spending, particularly the infamous Bridge to Nowhere, has degraded the trust Real People have in the Republican party's claim at being the party of limited government.

Club for Growth has a new poll out showing that people in Stevens' own home state may be ready for a change to someone a little more principled. The Club's poll shows 66% of likely Republican voters in Alaska disapprove of the Bridge to Nowhere earmark, and an amazing 71% agreed indicate that want a candidate "who wants to cut overall federal spending, even if that includes cutting some money that would come to Alaska."

People are notorious for lying in polls of course, but let's hope this is outside of the margin-of-lying-error and some brave, fiscally sound conservative will step up to challenge Stevens in his next campaign.

If we treated education like traffic

"If we're stuck in some particularly frustrating traffic jam, we might erupt in anger," notes Ted Balaker of the Reason Foundation in "Why Mobility Matters to Personal Life."

But most of the time we just surrender a little bit more because we assume degraded mobility is the natural result of an increase in population and driving. Rarely do public officials seek to undo such feelings of surrender. Most planning agencies have decided they will not even attempt to reduce congestion - they only aim to reduce its growth. ... Imagine if our leaders told us that, in the future, our education system would get worse, there's nothing we can do about it, and that all they hope to do is make test scores fall more slowly.

HT: GPPF's Friday Facts

Must be nice

Just walked by DC city hall, where the cars of several council members were parked outside. These included a sharp new Mercedes sports car (at-large seat A, according to the license plate), a sleek new Mercedes sedan (at-large seat D), and a shiny new Sebring convertible. Glad to know they are being well compensated for their service to the city.

To their credit, one member was driving a Honda Accord circa 1994. There is some hope...

Why limited government?

There is a post at Red State this morning that discusses where American conservatism goes once George Bush leaves office. The author focuses on two points, one being the need for a renewed emphasis on limited government and the other being a healthier skepticism towards engaging in war.

Now a philosophy of limited government is not the same as a philosophy of principled anti-statism. Limited government need not be impotent or feckless government. Nor should an American Conservative imagine this his native political tradition embraces rigid hostility to the state. Skepticism of the state is the more native posture. But over the last decade or so, the trend has been exactly in the opposite direction. Libertarians and anti-statists and fiscal Conservatives have howled and hurled their imprecations against the growth of the state; and all the while elected Republicans, often professed men of the Right, have expanded its scope and influence.

Beyond just believing these things again, conservatives have to be able to sell this idea. Limited government isn't just lip service - it's a BIG idea. It says that individuals - you and me and even that guy that you don't really - best know how to conduct their lives rather than government.

To me, this idea comes down to trust. Trust is what keeps our society moving. Without trust, our free market society falls apart, because a market economy requires that we trust a lot of people every day in a myriad of interactions. The more we ask government to take care of, though, the less we are required to exert our own trust in other people - we divert all our trust to government to keep us safe in our cars and make sure we get the proper amount of change at the grocery store, instead of trusting others in the same situations to do right. Worse, we watch our own ability to be trusting slip away, as we let our own accountability acquiesce to government.

The idea of limited government says that government does indeed have a place in building trust, but that a lot of things are up to individuals to handle. Limited government gives a framework in which to act freely - big government gives specifics rules for action that ultimately hinder progress (even when they seem really really helpful in the short-term).

We need to shift more and more of our trust for making societal progress away from government and back to the people we interact with every day. It's hard, because ground-up progress by Real People takes longer than top-down progress. Just because something's hard, though, doesn't mean it isn't worth doing.

Economics of cats

The wife has been pleading for us to get a cat for some time now, and when she brings it up I have continued to refuse, laugh it off, find, a compelling argument for limiting the number of creatures in our home, or find something very important to deal with on the bottom of my shoe.

Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution seems to take her side, though, from a strictly economic point of view.

Thinking big outside the box

At the end of a History Channel program about the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, they made a very interesting point. When the Eiffel Tower was built, it was a shocking design, completely out of keeping with French design at the time. Now of course the Tower is the very icon of all things French. The commentator noted that, had the tower been built in London (or in Barcelona, as originally intended) then we would see the Tower as a truly British piece of architecture today.

Sometimes the things we see as dramatically different and unthinkable will appear, after a time, to be common and unthinkable only in the sense of it not being there. Many ideas we have are borne out of the past. Sometimes they need to be borne out of the future.

Are you sitting on a Big Idea just because it's out-of-keeping with common standards? If you follow through with it, it could become the common standard.

[side note - read the wikipedia article on the Petronas Towers (or watch the History Channel show on it) to see the value the builders gained from having competing teams working on each of the two towers. A project of this size can almost be assured of coming in behind schedule, but competition led to an on-time completion]

Too liberal for liberals?

I'm currently in a uber-liberal mountain town out west on business. I got a press release under my door at the hotel this morning, accompanying my bill, letting me know about the simul-case of the Live Earth concerts going on around the world. From 3-7, they would have a big screen set up in the park so people could come and watch the concerts, allowing town folks to "take a stand...to confront and combat the global climate crisis."

The City will be at the event, answering questions about global warming and giving away a variety of energy-efficient compact florescent light bulbs, low-flow shower heads, and water-saving kits.

Very helpful. And sparsely attended. I saw about seven people sitting there. They were set for hundreds. Whoops.

My favorite thing is that it said these concerts were "designed to catalyze a global audience to cure the climate crisis." Because by listening to music, we all become instant climate doctors.

When I walked by, I did not become an instant climate doctor. I did, however, get a Shakira song stuck in my head.

Fertile Ground

In 2002, if you had randomly selected one hundred politically conservative adults in America (none from the same families), you would have found, between them, 212 children. If you had selected a hundred liberal adults, they would have had 156 children. This gap is primarily caused by religious differences and marriage patterns.

That's from Arthur Brooks' truly excellent book, Who Really Cares: America's Charity Divide, in the section on how families and upbringing play into how charitable we are. Conservatives are more charitable in general, and this particular sentence illustrates how it is easier for conservatives to pass down charitable traits to new generations - there are simply more of them to pass it down to.

This statistic suggests there is an increasing number of people who are predisposed to a conservative message. Why, then, do Republicans, the partisan torch-bearer for rightward-thinking individuals, not have a permanent lock on elections?

I think it has less to do with ideas and more to do with personalities. When Real People conservatives see their politicians selling out conservative principles, the party label begins to stand for nothing.

I think this is the hole the GOP currently has to climb its way out of. Unfortunately, I am not yet convinced that the GOP establishment realizes it is in this hole.

Another morning frustrated by the Post

In a piece pointedly titled "Massachusetts Begins Universal Health Care" in this morning's Washington Post, the paper makes a small but obvious omission - the name of the Governor who spearheaded and signed this legislation into law. That governor, of course, is Mitt Romney, a top contender for the GOP presidential nomination.

The article, on the whole a positive piece about the new law, with discussion of some of its financial challenges (and no discussion of alternative free-market approaches to health care reform), does not mention the current governor either, but I find it odd that the author would bypass mention of Romney. The article only mentions one Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is the Post's image of what a Republican should be. Not mentioning Governor Romney seems to be an intentional slight to avoid casting a conservative Republican in a positive light (from their perspective).

Many Republicans are suspicious of Romney's involvement in leading this universal health care bill in Massachusetts. I've heard it argued that his original bill started out much more market-oriented but a liberal legislature destroyed much of those intentions, or twisted them to their own ends. The end result, though, leans far closer to socialized medicine than liberalized health care, and conservatives want more explanation of how he could let that happen.

If Romney had slipped from the national stage after the end of his term then skipping his role would be irrelevant, but when he has become one of the Big Six presidential contenders, its certainly newsworthy to make the connection between him and the bill for their readers.

Georgia Public Policy Foundation

One email I look forward to each week is the Friday Facts email from the Georgia Public Policy Foundation. The email always highlights interesting things.

I also like it because I think it's an excellent development (in the fundraising sense of the word) tool. It keeps the organization in the mind of donors and makes them feel connected to its work. And, also notable, is that it frames GPPF as a dispenser of knowledge. They don't have to create all the information that's there, and that probably makes it even more effective because donors and activists can see GPPF as finding these interesting things for me - they are doing me a favor! - and so I'll pay attention to those things of theirs that they highlight.

Here are a couple items from today's Friday Facts email, both of which happen to be environmentally focused:

• Warming by worming? Open University researcher Jim Frederickson reports that worms produce greenhouse gases 290 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Worms are being used commercially to compost organic material instead of putting it into landfills. The German government wants 45 percent of all waste to be composted by 2015. The Composting Association has called for data on worms and composting to be re-examined. Source: Materials Recycling Week
  
• Those so-called Lexus lanes – high-occupancy toll lanes – save motorists more than time during rush hour. The Wall Street Journal reports that a Minneapolis worker who uses the 11-mile express lane on I-394 to get home quickly to her disabled husband has paid as much as $6 in tolls in brutal traffic. She discovered another benefit: She burns about a quarter of a tank of gas a week in the express lane, down from a half-tank in the slower-moving regular lanes. Source: Wall Street Journal

You can get on the mailing list at their website at www.gppf.com.

Interesting stuff from Café Hayek

This is an interest post from Don Boudreaux at Café Hayek about anti-trust laws vs. self-regulation of the market.

In another post, he relays an antedote from a French family about a friend of theirs who died a few days after being denied a hospital bed when he went in complaining of chest pains. I like the point he makes:

This incident, while true, is also an anecdote. It doesn't prove anything about the merits or demerits of France's universal-health-care system compared to those of the (still somewhat) private system in the U.S. But this sad event does reveal that merely declaring, statutorily, that every citizen has a right to health care, or that health care is "free" to every citizen, does not make health care available to all or free."