Unity?

The editors at the New Republic have recently lent their views to the partisan aspect of the health care debate in an op-ed titled "Long live the death of bipartisanship." Attached are the comments I submitted to them:

I agree with you that Democrats don't have to work with Republicans in a bipartisan fashion. Furthermore, if I was in favor of additional government intervention in healthcare (I'm not) I would likely see things the same way: Why risk getting what you want (or dilute it) by seeking a "bipartisan" bill?

But what of the President? One of the central themes of candidate Obama was unity and an end to partisanship. If you were in the middle (and neither of us are), what if you voted for Obama because you thought he would bring the country together? All the major legislation thus far has been very partisan: the stimulus bill, the budget, cap and trade, and now health care. Do you think he has been successful in bringing the country together?

The fault (to the extent that partisanship is a fault) is certainly shared between Obama and Republicans for not working together. I think, however, that candidate Obama's words about unity are an important aspect of the partisanship of the health care debate. Don't you?

Is it really for the children?

It’s not uncommon to invoke “our children” when making a public policy argument, and in this respect, President Obama is like many other politicians. In his recent op-ed in the New York Times arguing for health-care reform, he stated:

This is about America’s future, and whether we will be able to look back years from now and say that this was the moment when we made the changes we needed, and gave our children a better life.

The better life our children will enjoy years from now will result from, he argues, better health care stemming from his reform. Whether health care will actually improve from federal intervention is the subject of much debate. There is another aspect, though, to the quality of life our children will enjoy years from now: the debt that they inherit from us.

“Our” children will be entering adulthood in ten years (2019), when his youngest daughter Natasha turns 18, and my youngest daughter (Sarah) turns 21. The economy will already be weaker in 2019 than it otherwise would have been as a result of the “stimulus” package. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) wrote on 2/4/09 that it “estimates that by 2019 the Senate legislation would reduce GDP by 0.1 percent to 0.3 percent on net.” This damage to our economic future is due to the additional debt from the stimulus.

On top of that, the federal budget proposals that followed make things worse. On page 11 of the CBO’s 3/20/09 analysis, it states “ The cumulative deficit from 2010 to 2019 under the President’s proposals would total $9.3 trillion, compared with a cumulative deficit of $4.4 trillion projected under the current-law assumptions embodied in CBO’s baseline.”

To put these numbers in context, when Natasha and Sarah are becoming adults, they will each owe an additional sixteen thousand dollars from Obama’s federal budget proposals, on top of the fourteen thousand dollars they would have owed anyway. It’s not just Sarah and Natasha, either. Every man, woman, and child will be on the hook for the national debt, and in an economy that is already weakened then by the hangover from the stimulus.

Against that backdrop, we are now going to have the federal government start spending on health care. The details are still being worked out, but the preliminary analysis of the Kennedy-Dodd bill was a price tag of over $1 trillion (or about three grand each for Sarah, Natasha, you, me, and every other American).

We all see the world through our own lens. From my point of view, however, spending money now and giving the bill to the next generation does not provide them with a better life.

Cheers for Paglia

I am a fan of Camille Paglia. Not her politcs or worldview, but her honesty. Although she's on the left, her most recent article calls both Obama and Pelosi out (and not gently, either). I'd read her once or twice before, and had a similar reaction then also.

I find her much more intersting than Hugh Hewitt, for example. I like Hewitt, I like his politics (which are far closer to mine than Paglia's), but when I listen to him on the radio, I know that the shortcomings of the left are magnified and the shortcomings on the right are rationalized.

Jefferson vs. Hamilton

Let me preface this post by saying that I’m sure Joseph Ellis has forgotten more about American history than I know. That knowledge may well have armed him with a greater understanding of human events and put him in position to better evaluate the proper role of government, which was the subject of his 8/9/09 editorial in the LA Times.

In it, Ellis states that Jefferson's view of limited government (which I share) is “increasingly anachronistic” and goes on to state ”It became abundantly clear that government power was necessary to regulate the swoonish swings of the marketplace.” He favors instead a Hamiltonian view “which presumes that there is a collective public interest that only government can serve.” He goes on to give several examples, one of which I’d like to discuss:

“In the ongoing banking crisis, to take another example, the removal of government regulations permitted major banks to assume unconscionable amounts of debt, much of it in the form of toxic investments that still remain on the books. It has been obvious that the banks needed to be temporarily nationalized to force them to purge bad debts from their portfolios. But fear that the stock market would interpret this course as creeping socialism has prevented such straightforward action. So we are still waiting for many of the same self-described financial wizards who created our fiscal mess to get us the rest of the way out of it.”

If only those pesky limited-government types hadn’t impeded the government from exerting an appropriate control over banks! This view, however, ignores several factors that were in play in the recent banking crisis:

1. Easy money from the Federal Reserve. If the Federal Reserve doesn’t stem from the Hamiltonian (vs. Jeffersonian) view of the world, then nothing does.
2. The Community Reinvestment Act. In this gem, the government forced the banks into lowering credit standards, which made mortgages riskier.
3. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Again, a government creation that contributed to the problem (and brought to you from the Hamiltonian world view).

In each of these cases, government action contributed to the problem. For Ellis, however, the only culprit is Wall Street, and the only solution is Government.

As it happens, I’m reading a biography of Hamilton right now (by Chernow). Perhaps when I’m through, I’ll gain a greater understanding and appreciation of the Hamiltonian view. I suspect, however, that I’m not the only one who would benefit from understanding the other side.

Don't know much about Teddy Roosevelt

While in New York, I visited the birthplace of Teddy Roosevelt, and the Museum of Natural History (Roosevelt has a prominent role in the museum), and was inspired to read more about him. I started with a book I have titled “Don’t Know Much About History” by Kenneth C. Davis, and flipped to the era that Roosevelt lived in.

When I went to chapter 5 (the time between the Civil War and WWI), I was greeted with an introduction that seemed to fall somewhat short of an objective historical accounting. In one example, Davis writes about workers in the new industrial age and states on the first page of the chapter that they were ”miserably underpaid.”

Miserably underpaid? It’s not unusual to hear talk like this, but I have to say I think it reveals far more about the writer than the subject. Let’s begin by stating what should have been obvious to him. These “miserably underpaid” workers were not slaves. They chose to exchange their time and efforts in exchange for the money they received in return. If you offer to pay someone $1 to work in a mine for 12 hours, and at the end of that 12 hours you give them the dollar, they are paid exactly right. In fact, if you give them $1.01, they are now overpaid.

Let’s look at this another way. If you can generate $10 worth of value in an hour for an employer, and an “evil, greedy, exploiting , (feel free to insert any other invective you've seen) employer” is only paying you $1, then doesn’t another employer stand to profit enormously by hiring you away at $2/hr? They would be doubling your salary, which would certainly be beneficial to you, and at the same time, they can make an $8 profit per hour of your time. You’re still being “exploited,” but you aren’t quite as miserably paid as before.

But wait, there’s more! You’re still worth far more than you’re being paid, so it would still behoove another company to come along and pay you $3/hr. You’d again be getting a nice raise, and the company would again profit from your work. The logical conclusion to this, of course, is that as long as you are “miserably underpaid” another company has an incentive to come along and raise your pay. You are also free to seek out other opportunities on your own, or to start your own business and employ yourself.

One final lens to view this through: What if those greedy bastards didn't hire them for such a pittance?? If working long hours in dangerous conditions for low pay is your best option, what are you left with if that's taken away?

I’ve simplified things to illustrate the point, and recognize that things aren’t always so simple. There is such a thing as market failure, but I wonder if the people who slander companies understand what the requirements for a free market are (the absence of which can cause distortions). In this particular case, the author presents no evidence of market failure, he simply jumps to stating the workers were “miserably underpaid.” He may not even have realized that they were likely being paid more than most other employers would have valued their employment (more on the “free agent curse” in another post).

I don’t suspect Mr. Davis to be any more biased than most people (myself included). Furthermore, the sentiment he exhibits (that companies exploit workers) is widely shared. As I see the world differently, however, seeing his bias here taints my reading of this section of his book, an area that I was interested in learning more about. While I don’t particularly mind the bias that’s on display, once I’ve detected it I wonder what’s being omitted.

My solution was to pick up a book on Roosevelt by David McCullough. I haven’t read this one yet, but have liked other works by him, not only because McCullough tells a story well, but also because I haven’t detected bias when reading him.

Blinded by partisanship

The recent arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has drawn a lot of attention, more so after President Obama chimed in that the police had acted "stupidly." This event was the source of an 8/1/09 editorial by Frank Rich in the New York Times. In it, Rich states:

"What about those far more famous leaders in Hume’s own camp who insistently cry “racist” — and in public forums — without any credible justification whatsoever? These are the “certain people” Hume conspicuously didn’t mention. They include Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, both of whom labeled Sonia Sotomayor a racist. "

The flap of Sotomayor stems from her saying the following - "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life,"

By definition, this statement is both racist and sexist. The factors in it determining who makes a better conclusion are race (whether the person is hispanic or white) and gender.

I looked up "racist" in dictionary.com and got the following definition:

1. a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.

In advancing the notion that "more often than not" a better conclusion would be made by a Latina woman vs. a white male, Sotomayor is using race to distinguish quality of judgement.

There can certainly be a debate about whether uttering a racist statement makes one a racist. But I don't understand what argument can be made that the statement itself is not racist. So it is not without "any credible justifcation whatsoever" that someone who makes racist statements would be called a racist. There is evidence of racism.

Given the tenor of the article, it seems like Rich isn't particularly fond of Republicans. To be fair, I'm not particularly fond of most of the policies of Democrats. But that doesn't mean that everything someone on the other side says has no creedence to it.