the starving edge

The clearest explanation of our health care mess, and the dangers of universal health care, I’ve ever read, and from a
Reddit comment no less:

ayrnieu 3 points 1 hour ago*medicare cannot be blamed for what [the HMOs] have doneYes, it can. Specifically the associated bad tax policy behind it is to blame for the rationed-care horror stories of Sicko. Listen: huge tax breaks(1) exist for medical insurance that goes through your employer(2), for which you pay nothing(3). As #1 is not true of personal co-pay insurance, this form of insurance is effectively given a huge tax penalty. #2 naturally means that you lose coverage when you lose your job. #3 naturally means that your HMO gives you the gimlet eye: they can’t trust you to make sound decisions about your medical care, because you’ve zero incentive to do so. Even if your co-pay is minimal, HMOs are much less wary of you than of a fully-covered person.Some other problems about the nation-wide health misdirection:Disgusted with HMO’s rationing care in Sicko? If you fools get what you ask for, you’ll get the US Government as your HMO, with the same incentives to ration care, and with no freedom on your part — what are you going to do, get insurance through Canada?Sick of the angst about what can be taught in public schools? Prepare for ‘what can the one giant HMO provide for?’.If you ‘insure’ everyone, then you are in fact not insuring some people; you rather are simply subsidizing their medical care. Not to say that you shouldn’t advocate subsidizing the continuing medical costs of poor cancer children, but you should think more clearly about what you want and how you want it.More on incentives: ready for the nation-wide, Washington-directed onslaught of health propaganda, nutritional meddling, food bans, penalties for poor health, media frenzies when a SWAT team accidentally sets a fast-food restaurant on fire (shooting any puppies in the vicinity)when any of this onslaught’s new laws are violated therein? Are you ready for a Washington crony to have both incentive and justification and ever-increasing precedent to control your life in the name of reducing your medical-insurance burden to society? Are you ready for the entire course of (again) public schooling to repeat itself as you grow older and sicker? For decades the only argument will be ‘we need to spend more money!’; we’ll have endless(ly stupid) front-page New York Times articles that blame doctors or families or local bureaucrats for systemic failures; things will get inexplicably worse, and yet in 2050 any Presidential candidate that blames the Department of Health itself for the failures will be roundly mocked: Candidate Foo wants us to go back to 2007, when nobody had any kind of healthcare!More on incentives: the immediate supermedicare-fueled expansion of government won’t end with new fascinating rules about what you must (under penalty of the threat of force behind any governmental demand) do to reduce your medical costs. Oh no. Hospitals, instutions that currently perceive you as a source of income when you enter their facilities, will all be nationalized (explicitly or in effect), and will lose any vestigal incentive to give a shit about you. Nurses and doctors will still be the mostly good people they are today — but incentives really, really matter.

From Cafe Hayek:

Most notably, they found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard. Similar figures were found for dairy products and fruit.

From lef.org:

A group of researchers meticulously reviewed the statistical evidence and their findings are absolutely shocking.4 These researchers have authored a paper titled “Death by Medicine” that presents compelling evidence that today’s system frequently causes more harm than good.This fully referenced report shows the number of people having in-hospital, adverse reactions to prescribed drugs to be 2.2 million per year. The number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections is 20 million per year. The number of unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5 million per year. The number of people exposed to unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million per year.The most stunning statistic, however, is that the total number of deaths caused by conventional medicine is an astounding 783,936 per year. It is now evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the US. (By contrast, the number of deaths attributable to heart disease in 2001 was 699,697, while the number of deaths attributable to cancer was 553,251.5)

From a company blog:

Operating a business was a real education for me. There were bills to pay and a payroll to be met and we had trouble doing either because we lost half of our initial $45,000 of capital in our first year. Our customers thought our prices were too high and our employees thought they were being underpaid, and we were losing money. Renee and I were only being paid about $200 a month and the business was a real struggle. Nobody was very happy and Renee and I were now seen as capitalistic exploiters by friends on the left who believed we were overcharging our customers and exploiting our workers — all because we were apparently selfish and greedy.I didn’t think the charge of capitalist exploiters fit Renee and myself very well. In a nutshell the economic system of democratic socialism was no longer intellectually satisfying to me and I began to look around for more robust theories which would better explain business, economics, and society. Somehow or another I stumbled on to the works of Mises, Hayek, and Friedman, and had a complete revolution in my world view. The more I read, studied, and thought about economics and capitalism, the more I came to realize that capitalism had been misunderstood and unfairly attacked by the left. In fact, democratic capitalism remains by far the best way to organize society to create prosperity, growth, freedom, self-actualization, and even equality.

From Salon:

So you don’t consider climate change a major problem threatening civilization? No. [Laughs.] I think war and financial crises and big governments marching into our homes and elimination of habeas corpus — those are immediate threats. We’re about to lose our whole country and whole republic! If we can be declared an enemy combatant and put away without a trial, then that’s going to affect a lot of us a lot sooner than the temperature going up.

Louis XIV, the “sun king” of France from 1643 to 1715, is often marveled over by historians for his “magnificence”. Buy like most rulers with their own cult of personality, he did far more harm than good to his people:

The economic and financial condition of France at the beginning of the eighteenth century was truly pitiable. In spite of her great natural resources, the variety of her favourable climates, the fertility of her well-watered soil, and the thrift, industry, and intelligence of her people, the efforts of able ministers like Mazarin and Colbert to increase her national wealth had been rendered nugatory by the senseless politics of the Great Monarch. Costly campaigns abroad, ruinous extravagance at home, left the kingdom at his death, in 1715, with a debt of 3460 million francs, of which over 3300 had been contracted since the death of Colbert in 1683. His murderous wars, reducing the birth-rate, increasing the mortality, and “an act of religious intolerance, disavowed by religion” –the expulsion of the Protestants–had reduced the population by four millions, or 20 per cent, since 1660. Agricultural products had fallen off by one-third since he ascended the throne.

The Physiocrats, Henry Higgs, p. 5

This is what centralization of power around a few egos leads to: “costly campaigns abroad” (like those brought to us by today’s neocons), ruinous extravagence at home (like that brought to us by today’s “compassionate conservatives” and tax-and-spend leftists), and massive debt (like that brought to us by the combination of all of the above).

From The Economist:

If America’s health-care regulations are as costly as they claim, the system is merely masquerading as a free-market model and may be no better than others.

From AMERICAN.COM: A Magazine of Ideas, Online:

Aid not only crowds out local entrepreneurship, it makes governments lazy and deprives countries of the incentive to build effective institutions. Public revenue derived from taxes makes governments directly responsible to their citizens. Free money builds white elephants and bloated bureaucracies, it being far easier to create new government jobs than implement policies to fight unemployment, especially when someone else is footing the bill.

My writing for my various blogs will follow various study projects I will be pursuing.

Western Letters from Homer
I will study the archaic poets Homer and Hesiod, the great Greek dramatists (Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides), the early historians (Herodotus, Xenophon and Thucydides), and continue on to Hellenistic, Roman, medieval, early modern, and recent authors.

These readings will inform posts on The Sword and the Lie.

Western Philosophy from Plato
I will study western philosophy, starting with the Greeks. I will read all of Plato’s major works, starting with Ion. Then I’ll work through Aristotle, and then the “pre-Socratics” through references within the works Plato and Aristotle, and Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers and Hippolytus’ Refutation of All Heresies. I’ll then study Hellenistic philosophy via the works of Cicero and others.

These readings will inform posts on Sensible Synthesis, insofar as they discuss epistemology and ethics, and Starving Edge, insofar as they discuss humanitarian ethics.

Economics from the physiocrats
I will study economics, starting with the 18th century French proto-economists the physiocrats (as well as their mercantalist opponents like Jean Babtiste Colbert.) I’ll then move on to Adam Smith and the classical economics he founded, as well as its opponents.

This line of study will support posts in Starving Edge and The Sword and the Lie.

Mathematics from properties of equality
For Delphi, the blog for my education company The Sopheum (and to some degree for Sensible Synthesis), I shall discuss and explore mathematics from its most basic elements.

Antiquity from Sumer
From the first glimmers of history in Sumer, I shall explore the history of the state and religion (for The Sword and the Lie and of education (for Edutheria).

Educational Philosophy from Plato
For Delphi and Edutheria, I shall reflect on pedagogy and education systems.

And finally…
History of Science from Copernicus (for Delphi and Sensible Synthesis).

History of Technology from hand axes (for Delphi).

Here is one of the litany of causes espoused by economic leftists which only ends up hurting poor people: localism — the idea that keeping economic activity local promotes the welfare of the community.

Coyote Blog outlines why that is such a fallacy:

It doesn’t work.  The total energy used for transport, say of food products, is a small percentage of the total energy used in the total production process.  The energy transportation budget is generally smaller than efficiency gains from scale or from optimizing location.  For example, a wheat farm in Arizona on 50 acres is going to use a lot more energy (and water, and fertilizer, and manpower) than a wheat farm on a thousand acres in North Dakota.

It leads to poverty.  Our modern society, our lifestyles, our lifespans all are a result of the fantastic increases in efficiency we have reaped from the division of labor.  A push to localize all production reverses the division of labor.  Many products, such as semiconductors, become outright impossible on a local scale.

It leads to starvation.  It is hard for us to imagine famine in the wealthy nations of the world.  Crop failures in one part of the world are replaced with crops from other parts of the world.  But as recently as the 19th century, France, then the wealthiest nation on earth but reliant on local agriculture, experienced frequent crop failures and outright starvation.