Ah, government "efficiency"

It always amuses me when people explain to me how inefficient things like infrastructure would be if we didn't have a "central government to plan and coordinate it" all. How could we possibly have private roads?? What, would you have to stop and pay a toll every block?

Constructors of such silly strawmen really ought to consider the bar that their preferred system is setting before casting stones. In this post from Washington State's department of transportation, they gleefully announce the success of their planning process:

The announcement of a preferred alternative marks a milestone 13 years in the making. Since 1997, WSDOT and regional leaders analyzed design alternatives for a replacement SR 520 bridge and improved corridor.

13 years? 13 *years*?? 13 mother fucking YEARS???

It took these clowns 13 years - and who knows how much money went into this planning - just to decide *what to do*? And all that while, the bridge has been "seismically vulnerable", so it's not like there wasn't a cost to this delay (beyond the obvious costs).

A free market alternative may or may not be better, but anyone trying to claim that there's just no *room* for an alternative to be better has their head up their arse.

Obamacare supported by insurance companies

One of the really incorrect things you see in the debate on Obamacare is the lefties' kneejerk assumption that if something is big government, it must be anti big-corporation. So many lefties hate and mistrust capitalism and they associate big companies with capitalism that it is not even a questioned thing in those circles. However, one thread I've been learning the importance of over the last year or two is that there is a huge difference between "big corporations" in a truly capitalist society, vs big corporations in our current setup. In our current setup, we have what is sometimes called "crony capitalism" which, unfortunately, is not capitalism at all, or is certainly not "free markets". I've made this mistake myself for a long time as well, often defending large corporations as if they must be little valleys of true capitalism/free-markets instead of realizing that in our current setting, they are often egregious products of crony-capitalism.

Crony capitalism quite simply is corporations that use the non free-market power of government to their advantage, thus doing decidedly non free-market things. A classic example are laws for regulating companies: often these are pushed by the biggest companies in that industry because they are large enough to afford the cost of regulation while it greatly increases the barrier to entry of small competitors, effectively providing them protection. Of course, direct subsidies and tariff protection are too extremely obvious cases as well.

In either case, one of the illusions going around about Obamacare is that this is a way for the left and the US population to stick it to insurance companies, and that this is essentially the people vs the insurance companies. Explicit in that is the notion that the insurance companies must be fighting Obamacare.

In fact, though, they are *supporting* Obamacare, in a classic piece of crony capitalism. As Reason writes:

"We allow the insurance industry to run wild in this country," President Obama declared on Monday. "We can't have a system that works better for the insurance companies than it does for the American people."

Yet Obama's plan to tame health insurers would boost their business, protect them from competition, and guarantee their profits, all at the expense of consumers and taxpayers. It is therefore not surprising that the insurance companies, while they object to the president’s rhetoric and quibble over some of the details, are happy to be domesticated. Here are five ways in which Obama would help insurers while pretending to fight them:

The individual mandate. What industry wouldn't welcome a law requiring everyone in the country to purchase its product? The insurers' only objection to this edict—which would force young, healthy people who don’t want insurance to subsidize the care of older, sicker people who do—is that the penalties for failing to comply are not severe enough.

The employer mandate. Requiring businesses to buy medical coverage for their employees brings the insurers more conscripted customers. It also shores up a perverse system of employer-provided health insurance that insulates consumers from prices, limits their choices, and weakens competition.

Subsidies. Allocating taxpayer money to help individuals and small business buy medical coverage makes customers less price-sensitive, allowing insurers to charge more than they otherwise could.

Regulations. Obama wants to dictate the details of what he considers to be minimally acceptable medical coverage, including the size of deductibles and the extent of benefits. This policy, which forces people to buy pricier policies than they would choose on their own, is like decreeing that all Americans should buy a Nissan Altima with GPS, a sunroof, and leather seats, even if they would prefer a Hyundai Accent.

Limits on competition. Obama pays lip service to the idea of letting health insurers, like other insurers, compete for customers across state lines. But his minimum coverage requirements would undermine a major benefit of such competition: the ability to escape a particular state's restrictions on the policies insurers can offer.

If Obama's plan works as advertised, it will be a huge boon to insurers. As he himself notes, "they're going to have 30 million new customers" thanks to the government's mandates and subsidies.

More on "hating the rich"

I had an unpleasant interaction with someone recently that culminated in his changing his .sig to "Rich people who whine about paying taxes should be publicly raped and executed. Paid for with their own money, of course."

Now, clearly, this person is, unfortunately, dealing with some emotional issues. I am not claiming that any emotionally healthy people actually advocate this. But the mindset that it exaggerates is a baffling common one: that there is something evil about "the rich".

There are lots of reasons for this mindset (and undoubtedly have been many attempts to explain it one way or the other; I'm hardly the first to have commented on this), but sometimes I come back to a common theme: that "money" distorts people's thinking. To illustrate, consider the following thought experiment:

Bill Gates is rich because he has lots of money. According to the above mindset, there is nothing at all wrong with taking his money, because he has way too much of it and it should be redistributed to poorer people. That is not "theft", it is "taxation". As we know, Bill Gates got rich selling copies of MS Office and MS Office (for the most part; let's just leave it at that for the purposes of our thought experiment). That is, many times over, he exchanged a product to a consumer that judged the product to be of more worth to them than the $200 or so that they paid for the product. Imagine now that Bill Gates never sold those copies of software: he produced them, in prodigious quantities, but stockpiled them in a warehouse. At this point, he doesn't own a single dime, but he's sitting on an amount of product worth a fortune. Is he rich? And if he is, would it then be ok to just go in and take his *product* - the product he hasn't even sold - and call it "taxes"?

I maintain that the typical anti-rich person would be conflicted with doing the latter, even though it is the exact same. What is the difference between waiting for Mr Gates to sell a copy of the software and then taking the money that was paid for it from him, and just taking the software in the first place? (Assume zero transactional costs, since that is not at all germaine to the thought experiment). But the "anti-rich" person is going to have a hard time with their kneejerk rich-hating *if the victim doesn't have a nickel to his name*.

Somehow there's a cognitive mistake being made: people don't treat "money" as just a proxy for "stuff". Stuff, they understand: you can't just take stuff. But money? Money isn't "real", so taking it is purely an abstract act.

I can't help but imagine that part of this cognitive mistake is a function of fiat currency: it literally *isn't* real. No wonder it seems like an abstraction: it is. The government's constant manipulation of currency just exacerbates this impression. It's yet another mark against fiat currency and the Fed, though hardly the only one.

I'll end with a "pithy saying" of my own invention, relatively devoid of any real meaning like most pithy sayings and only distantly tangentially related to this post, but still kind of fun to me:

It is often said that "money is the root of all evil." It has always struck me that, in fact, it's a *lack* of money that is the root of all evil.

Stop the Panic on Security

Here's an article that I really can't add much to; it's spot-on.