I have to agree with USA Today’s editorial on Cash for Clunkers (via), but they don’t even mention opportunity cost. Even with the minor fuel economy savings, “helping” people into loan payments further redirects money away from local economies and family savings. I feel for the auto workers, but the auto industry has enjoyed riding the wave of the housing bubble (buyers relying on home appreciation to offset auto depreciation) and the wave has crashed.

So this seems like a bad deal for buyers, local businesses, the environment, and the taxpayers who’ll pay for it.

Anti-new car propaganda:

• Why You Shouldn’t Buy a New Car
• Don’t Do It! (Cars are not invenstments)
• Drive Free, Retire Rich doesn’t include used car risk, but should still work

I’m warming to some of the free market health care ideas. Even if we move towards more government sponsored coverage (which seems politically inevitable) it seems like some of these principles could help to increase competition and push costs down, regardless of who’s paying. Continue reading  

Radley Balko is a thoughtful libertarian blogger who provides particularly awesome coverage of criminal justice system misconduct. You should read it. In Reason magazine he’s issued a challenge for “lefty bloggers” to define their limits “on the size, cost, and influence of the federal government.” I think this has the potential to be an interesting exercise, but in another way it feels kinda cheap. A few lefties will bite, say dumb things, and libertarians will jump all over them in the comments and we’ll have really pushed the debate forward… I don’t consider myself “lefty”, but I guess I do find the conversation of how to provide a safety net and upward mobility for the poor more important than a debate over what level of taxation on the clearly rich represents “tyranny”. Continue reading  

While we still have a functional press, journalists have a duty to bring the truth to the public. When evidence leads us to wonder if government officials committed serious crimes, and much of the public desires the truth, there’s just no excuse for the press to look the other way.

Glenn Greenwald criticized NBC News political director Chuck Todd for joining the choir of pundits making excuses for avoiding the investigation of potential war crimes. When Todd offered Greenwald an interview, only under much pressure would he give lip service to the notion that an investigation should be done, but it’s obvious he feels no obligation to the public in pushing for the truth. He’s afraid a trial would be “cable catnip”, or a politicized media circus.

What message does that send if we have this political trial, and how do you know this won’t turn into a political trial? In fact, we know it’s going to turn into a political trial. I’ll take that back – we don’t know whether it’s going to turn into a political trial.

Government cover-ups are acceptable if they keep his news day orderly. He has other worries as well:

If you have this trial, and there is, inevitably, some appeals and some, where we have a back-and-forth, where there is some sort of, where it becomes a legal debate about whether so-and-so can go on trial, or not go on trial, what was allowed – they were, they thought that they were following the law, that they, you know, what message does that end up sending? Does that end up harming us down the road?

The message sent by such an event would be a very good one to send: criminals will be punished and organizations that permit or encourage them will be made in the least very uncomfortable.

Personal opinions don’t excuse Todd and other “journalists” from their responsibilities to the public. The free passes they give today lay the groundwork for future corruption and its quiet pardoning. Already Obama has had some shady and questionably legal actions (disregard of contract law, the embrace of state secrets privileges); more conservatives should realize the necessity of and demand a strong press persistently shining a light in the corners of the White House and Congress.

Radley Balko provides some good evidence toward debunking the myth that immigrant communities bring violent crime, but while these communities are safe, a report on identity theft makes a convincing case that there are serious costs unfairly imposed on the citizens whose identities are stolen to employ those communities (beyond the more distributed costs of social services).

If our society is to be permissive about the use of false documentation, what does one say to a person finding themselves on the hook for loans they didn’t borrow, wanted for crimes they didn’t commit, liable for taxes on income they didn’t receive, or being denied safety net benefits because of someone else’s actions? Also our desire to allow good-natured illegal immigrants to live quietly on false identities means criminals can as well.

The report claims that organizations like the IRS, SSA and credit bureaus knowingly maintain policies that ease ID theft, and certainly the private sector enjoys handling the money of (and preying on vulnerabilities of) the falsely documented, so it seems there are some nasty incentives at play.

I’m still very much torn on many issues, but the situation doesn’t seem sustainable and has an ugly effect on some Americans’ view of Hispanics. Certainly criminalizing a huge percentage of the population and economy isn’t a reasonable solution, and the idea of mass deportation is ludicrous (and would likely be an even bigger civil liberties disaster than we already have), but there must be practical and humane means to provide decentives to future border crossings and visa over-stays.

There’s a sane middle between the libertarian ideal of free borders and the ugly rhetoric coming out of the cultural warriors.

This New Yorker article on health care proposes that we shouldn’t focus on who writes the checks, but rather that hospitals have a well-coordinated team in place keeping costs down.

Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected…

Even if facilities had identical rates for procedures, the cost of a given inpatient stay is impossible for anyone to predict. Neither the incoming patient nor the insurer are in a great position to judge what care given would be unnecessary or inefficient, yet hospitals in McAllen, Texas (and likely all over) appear to deliver a lot of care that might qualify as such. So what can we do about it?

In other news, there’s probably never been as much public support for single-payer care as there is now, but like many of Obama’s promises, it’s off the table. Again, a single-payer switch might only shave minor administrative costs, but it should also give us more control over providers to encourage more to operate like the Mayo Clinic.

I still find the free market health care dream intriguing. If we could just remove all government regulation and insurance, the market would just work its magic and care would be affordable (and for enough people to be considered a success). It would be a grand experiment* to just say, “OK, you get ten years to make it work.” (*Does any country have a freer market health care system I should look at?)

The reality:

1. Voters will never ditch Medicare, so the experiment will never happen.
2. Democrats, like Republicans, will be driven by existing industry dollars, so single-payer will go nowhere (unless unemployment got much, much worse).
3. We’ll inevitably raise taxes to cover Medicare (no politician facing re-election will let it (or SS for that matter) go insolvent on ideology).

So we’ll continue to have a system that few are happy with, and we’ll pay too much for it.

If this National Review article is accurate, the stimulus bill is worse than I was imagining. It’s not that I’m against every piece of it, but wrapping up countless unrelated projects under one bill and/or pushing it through Congress as an “emergency remedy” is a terrible way to create laws.

This is how we got the Patriot Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.

Although the right is ablaze over this, I think I’m a little too cynical to believe that there’s a good/evil party boundary in this. I fear it’s in times like these that both parties will “reach across the aisle” and push through pet projects via a monumental bill to tell citizens they “did something about the recession”. It’s the minority party’s role to “oppose” and break out their own pens to fair it up.

If the Senate Reps oppose this with the same zeal, they’ll win some respect from me. If it passes, for years to come we’ll be discovering wonderful new treasures similar to the Enron loophole and unregulated credit default swaps, and plenty of junk both parties are opposed to. We’ve already found a revival of the Byrne grants frequently abused in our drug war.

I don’t see how any elected official can look us in the eye and say, “all this is what we need and we need it immediately, there’s no time to read the fine print.”

New general rule: the level of debate and time for press scrutiny of a bill should be proportional to its scope. Maybe there should even be some limitation of scope within a single bill.