digamma.net - notes

So I didn’t think much of Madagascar was particularly interesting - I don’t really go for the Dreamworks/Pixar style of CG animation. But I can not give a thumb down to a film in which a lemur sings Reel 2 Reel’s dance classic “I Like to Move It Move It".

Following up on my post on what is and isn’t insurance, I find this bit of candid wisdom from MaxSpeak:

Right now the money your employer spends on your health insurance is excluded from taxable income. There is a double discount here, not a single one. The tax break is one. The opportunity to buy as part of a group is another. Handing you a new tax deduction and pushing you out of the employer system preserves one discount, but not the other.

The group discount is itself double-sided. One side is that you pool your risks with others in similar health. This benefit we could expect if people bought insurance individually, at least in principle. In a competitive market, you shouldn’t have to pay more than reflects your risks. In this sense, abstracting from some other factors like administrative cost, the group membership is superfluous.

The other benefit of being in a group is the possibility that your average expected costs will be less more than those of the group. In this narrow sense you are not insuring yourself – you are sponging off healthier members of the group.

Exactly! No libertarian would disagree with any of this.

From a market standpoint, many people are simply not insurable. For others, the cost of insurance they could purchase as an individual, given their health status and income, is prohibitive. In nutty libertarian-think, they should have had the foresight and personal responsibility to purchase insurance when they were young and healthy. This assumes they could make deals with reputable companies that would be honored indefinitely. Their failure, and subsequent resort to group insurance and the public sector, infringes on the liberty of everyone else.

By contrast, in the libertarian universe, those saddled with medical problems early on, and those without the wherewithal to purchase insurance, are subjects fit for charity, not for imposing their bad luck on the rest of us.

Well, hold on. I’m willing to impose some people’s bad luck on the rest of us. A lot of libertarians are - go read the chapter “Alleviation of Poverty” in Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom if you don’t believe me.

What I’m not willing to do is, in the name of helping the sick, wreck a whole industry that does a lot of good work and gets better every year.

If you want to turn our healthcare system into France’s, which makes sure poor people get cared for but still lets healthcare act like an industry, we’d all love to see the plan. If you want to turn it into Canada’s or Britain’s, all I can tell you is brother you’ll have to wait.

Matt Yglesias:

Democracy, liberal institutions, and roughly free markets have spread a great deal since 1945 and that’s overwhelmingly happened without the United States of America invading places and setting up new state institutions. That’s not to say that we’ve been totally uninvolved, but it’s been around the margins and rather subtle. We ought, I think, to have a little faith in democracy’s success and track record and not be in some kind of panic where either we need to spread freedom around the world tomorrow or else just decide we don’t care about values or humanitarianism.

In some cases, you could replace that first “without” with “despite".

Cambodia is awesome. In twenty-five years, Phnom Penh has gone from a collective trauma that left them in the stone age to a bustling city that’s probably what Bangkok looked like fifteen or twenty years ago. I’m less apalled by the atrocities that happened here than inspired by the resilience.

And, like Yglesias says, all without a US invasion. (Yeah, I know, Vietnamese invasion, but we opposed that bitterly.)

Alec Oveis and Mark Leon Goldberg think “simply recruiting vets ought not be a substitute for the hard intellectual slog that the Democrats seem to be avoiding when it comes to debating a national security agenda.”

I’m a blogger on vacation, so I’m always in favor of a “hard intellectual slog". But is that really necessary to win elections? It seems to me that Bush and friends won the “national security vote” in 2002 and 2004 by saying and doing some pretty stupid things. Maybe the arguments were well-tested for efficacy, but the closest thing they had to hard policy analysis was the Project for the New American Century.

As much as I hate to say it, what the Democrats really need to win are silly sound bites.

Atrios:

But that isn’t the worst problem with medical savings accounts. Basically they encourage young and healthy people to not buy health insurance, which makes the pool of insurance buyers on average older and sicker and more expensive, further driving up insurance rates, further driving healthy people out, etc… And good luck getting any insurance after you’ve gottten a couple pre-existing conditions (Translation: gotten sick once or twice) under your belt, unless you can get it through your employer.

In areas that don’t require car insurance, you don’t hear people worry that the system “encourages alert and defensive drivers to not buy car insurance, which makes the pool of insurance buyers on average more careless and more aggressive and more expensive, further driving up insurance rates, further driving good drivers out, etc.”

The reason you don’t hear that is because good drivers don’t pay that much into the car insurance system. With real insurance, you pay for the amount of risk you impose. With goofy American health “insurance", you divide up the costs for everybody’s risk equally.

This just isn’t insurance. It’s redistribution. Maybe it works, and maybe imposing it on whole countries via government is a good idea, but insurance it’s not, and we all need to stop calling it that.

I’m in Phnom Penh. But I’m too jetlagged and hot to do anything but blog the same shit I blog at home.

Ugh.

Ed Kilgore chastises Democrats who dare to suggest that Grover Norquist, because he opposes Bush’s wild expansions of executive power, isn’t still Satan. I could almost understand that. But then he totally goes beyond the pale.

As for the Patriot Act, have we all forgotten Norquist’s obsession with turning American Muslims into a GOP constituency group? Could that have something to do with his motives for opposing a Patriot Act extension?

Did I read that on Little Green Footballs? MichelleMalkin.com? Instapundit? No, I read that on TPMCafe.

Here are the two basic attitudes towards Muslims in the modern GOP. You’ve got about 90% of Republicans who think Islam is pure evil, a “death cult", and Muslims should be interned for the duration of the War On Anyone Anywhere Being Scared of Anything - and that’s not counting the LGF crowd who favor outright elimination.

Then you’ve got your small minority who think Muslims - because of their conservative family values and increasing population - make a great GOP target group. And so they oppose ridiculous infringements on Muslims’ rights. This is a very good thing!

And Kilgore has to throw racist innuendo at Norquist over it.

Normally at this time of year, it’s extremely cold in northern New England - temperatures get into the negative 30’s during the night, and sometimes daytime highs will be in the single digits. Conservatives will joke “so much for global warming” and leftists will retort that in fact global warming is SUPPOSED to make winter cold more extreme.

This year, it’s unseasonably warm. Nearly all the snow has melted, and temperatures have been above freezing even in the dead of night.

This is incontrovertible evidence of whatever you already believed about global warming.

The Killing Fields is a decent film, but who was the genius who thought Imagine was appropriate soundtrack for the last scene? Is it meant to be ironic? It could be a Khmer Rouge anthem!

From Will Hickman’s blurb of Original Sin: Clarence Thomas and the Failure of the Constitutional Conservatives -

In the end, Marcosson gives two visions of democracy: in one, the word of law rules the people; in the other, representatives of the people bend the law to their will. Neither is perfect, but the latter is closer to justice.

I wonder how Will Hickman feels about the detention of Jose Padilla, and Bush’s no-warrant wiretaps. After all, we wouldn’t want the word of law to rule the people.

Domo arigato.

Garance Franke-Ruta gets the history of American abortion policy very wrong:

Abortion is legal in America, not because of the wisdom and fairness of its judges or righteousness of its politicians; it’s legal because thousands – millions – of women worked for decades to challenge their partners, their families, their elected representatives, and society as a whole about the wisdom of keeping it illegal. Countless hours and sleepless nights and marches and arrests and speeches went into that work; endless conferences and fundraising efforts and legal challenges undergirded it. It was not an easy accomplishment.

This is false. Those are the reasons abortion is legal in Europe. Abortion is legal in America because the Supreme Court said so.

Looking at some other movements for social change, it took 82 year of fighting for women to get the vote in this country,

This is true. Those 82 years were spent winning battle after battle in state legislatures, and finally getting 3/4 of them to ratify an amendment to the Constitution.

and more than 70 years for abolitionists to win their battle to outlaw slavery (not to mention a civil war).

You can take issue with a lot of what the federal government did in the name of abolishing slavery, and I do, but Lincoln and the Republicans were still elected democratically.

The difference here is critical. When a group loses an election fair and square, they can moan, but they know they had their shot. When a group gets their chosen policies overruled by an extremely questionable court decision, justified more on its outcome (back alleys! coathangers!) than on any Constitutional language, they’ve been disenfranchised.

Certainly courts have to override majority will from time to time, but I argue - and this is the opposite of Franke-Ruta’s argument - that court decisions are a poor substitute for real social change.

The joy of reading lots of political commentary is finding that one writer who said exactly what you’ve been thinking forever but just couldn’t put into words. This post by Glenn Greenwald (via Eschaton) is really fantastic. Read the whole thing, but just for the lazy readers, here’s a taste:

In his little item, Jonah was talking about – and, of course, defending – the strip searching of the 10-year-old girl in the case where Judge Alito ruled that the search warrant issued to the Police authorized searching of the girl. Jonah then went further - much further – and defended all strip-searching of all children, even without a warrant, whenever the Police thinks the kids’ parents are “drug dealers"….

There is, of course, a great irony that self-styled “conservatives” like Jonah constantly rail against the evils of disregarding the mandates of the law in order to achieve some desirable outcome. That’s the whole “judicial activism” shtick – that these judges are evil and undemocratic because they want to exceed the law in order to achieve the outcome they like. And yet their entire world-view has come to be based on the premise that transgressions of any and all types of laws – from FISA to anti-torture laws to Constitutional guarantees of due process – are perfectly justifiable as long as they are in pursuit of some desirable outcome, usually fighting the “terrorists,” but other results they like can justify these lawless transgressions as well….

The conservative arguments against such disregard for the law were and are absolutely right. There just aren’t any conservatives who agree anymore.

But I disagree with Glenn Greenwald’s conclusion:

Thanks to the ceaseless fear-mongering of this Administration, we are becoming – excuse the grotesque imagery – a Nation of Jonah Goldbergs, scared and lazy creatures who sit around believing that the Government is justified – even obligated – to act literally without constraint against the Bad People, the ones who are deemed to be Bad not pursuant to any “procedural niceties” but simply by the unchecked decree of the Government. These Jonah Goldbergs love to talk tough. But they are repulsively coddled and effete, whining about every perceived petty injustice which affects them but breezily endorsing the most limitless abuses of others, as long as the “others” seem sufficiently demonized and far enough away.

On the contrary, I like to think that we are a nation of people who, one by one, are realizing they are not Jonah Goldbergs.

Kevin Drum laments that bloggers stay out of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because it “routinely attracts near-insane levels of vituperation from partisans on both sides.”

That statement is true of that issue, but not really in the blogosphere. When I was in college, anti-Israel extremists were all over the place - at one point, one of the student centers hung a horrific banner that read “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” (If you don’t see the problem with that sentiment, find the Jordan River and the Sea of Galileea map.)

In the blogosphere that Political Animal inhabits, there isn’t really much of an anti-Israel fringe. Nobody even links to Indymedia. MaxSpeak (another alumnus of the West Bank of the Raritan) may represent the furthest left anyone goes on the issue.

The danger of discussing the conflict is that if you’re insufficiently pro-Israel, you’ll get linked by the dreaded Little Green Footballs. It’s like an Instalanche or a Slashdotting, except the new viewers all want to kill you.

Kos and Atrios make a good point. I’ll quote Atrios:

There’s a difference between conservative Democrats, or even corporate whore Democrats*, and Fox News Democrats. As Kos notes, Petey’s smart enough to know this, so why does he pretend not to?

*No, corporate whore Democrats are not “free market” Democrats. Corporate whore Democrats are the ones who write special legislation for favored sectors at the expense of workers and consumers. See Bill, Bankruptcy.

This distinction is blurred on both sides, I think. The Joe Liebermans of the party want to conflate opposition to the war and Bush administration with general leftism. Some leftists, on the other hand, like to conflate support for, say, free trade with a wholesale embrace of Bush. (Amusing, since Bush’s trade policies are a protectionist nightmare.)

If Beinart were right and the Markoses of the world really wanted to crush conservative Democrats, Harry Reid would be toast. He’s anti-abortion, for god’s sake. But Reid stands up to the Republicans on torture and corruption, and so he gets a pass. That’s not about ideology, it’s about smart strategy.

Via an ad on Eschaton I find the unintentionally hilarious children’s book Why Mommy is a Democrat.

Using plain and non-judgmental language, along with warm and whimsical illustrations, this colorful 28-page paperback depicts the Democratic principles of fairness, tolerance, peace, and concern for the well-being of others.

Just how plain and non-judgmental? Well,

Why Mommy is a Democrat may look like a traditional children’s book, but it definitely isn’t just for children. With numerous subtle (and not-so-subtle) satirical swipes at the Bush administration and the Republican party, Why Mommy will appeal to Democrats of all ages!

I feel horrible for the kid who has to listen to this crap while his parents chuckle at the “not-so-subtle satirical swipes at the Bush administration".

But I shouldn’t be so negative. Here are the sections I’m looking forward to reading:

Democrats kill scary Arabs just like Mommy kills spiders.

Democrats make sure we don’t see anything naughty on TV or on the Internet, just like Mommy does.

Sometimes Mommy is mean to us, but she says we have to say she’s nice all the time because otherwise Daddy might get custody, and he would be worse somehow, although we’re not sure how. Mommy says she’s the lesser of two evils.