Boycott the Olympics

After a pretty short period of soul-searching, I’ve decided that I am definitely boycotting the Beijing Olympics this summer. China has been a perennial abuser of human rights, and this is probably the best chance anyone has had in a while to make clear their intolerance for China’s violent authoritarianism.

If you care about religious freedom, think about the Dalai Lama in exile from Tibet.

If you care about the Freedom of Speech remember Tiananman Square

If you care about the death penalty, think about all those executions.

If you care about Darfur, Boycott the Olympics.

Semi-Poetic musing for the night

We struggled through infinite night, grasping at the intimate dawn. Nursing drowsy dragging conversations when being exhausted is better than being alone. ( 4/17/08 )

It’s way past my bed time, forgive me. Regular blogging resumes tomorrow.

The Show

You know you’re finally starting to make it as a blogger when other bloggers read and immediately misinterpret what you’ve written in order to insult you. The glory is going to my head.

Long ago I wrote about an article in the Economist discussing Cadbury’s fair-trade policy which works with farmers to develop more profitable farming techniques instead of merely paying a price higher than the market price (equivalent to a subsidy). I lauded Cadbury for this approach because it will help to prevent over-supply (typical of standard fair-trade policies) while concurrently raising standards of living for the farmers.

Perhaps I didn’t make this clear: this is not how typical fair-trade works. Fair-trade as it is generally conceived involves merely purchasing goods at above-market prices which often leads to other farmers entering the industry which subsequently drives prices back down, making everyone worse off. I’m not arguing for the status quo, but I am arguing against artificially subsidizing farmers who should be either leaving the industry or trying to innovate more efficient growing techniques.

Through the looking-glass makes a circuitous argument for buying fair-trade coffee (is it a subsidy or Cadbury style I wonder?) because it tastes better, which, while this may be true, is irrelevant. What happens if you can only make the best coffee by literally grinding up homosexuals and minorities for flavor, should we still choose on taste alone? Just because the fair-trade chocolate he buys tastes better than Hershey’s doesn’t mean there’s anything better about the taste of fair-trade cocoa per se.

I don’t buy standard fair-trade products because they distort the market, and if you’re concerned primarily about the welfare of farmers, taste isn’t the thing you’re most concerned about.

Deadliest Catch and the Deadliest Regulation

I was watching the deadliest catch (a great hang-over show by the way) on Saturday and it was a rerun of the first episode from (I believe) this season. The narrator began by introducing the idea behind the show (it’s crab!) and then began to describe how regulation from the fish and game commission had cut the number of boats allowed to fish for crab by about 2/3, from 250 to 89 (these numbers aren’t exact – my memory is kind of fuzzy).

The reason for the regulation wasn’t given, but it sure wasn’t to protect crab populations because the season’s crab quota went unchanged. It wasn’t to protect to the deckhands, because by extending the season all of the crew faces a higher risk from exposure and extreme weather conditions. So basically all of the captains of the 89 ships who were left in the fleet got a super sweet deal which extends their fishing season and allows them all to bring in nearly twice as much crab at the expense of the deckhands and the all of the other fishing captains who couldn’t get their hands on licenses.

Per the tradition, the season kicks off with a group of the captains at a bar having a send-off before the season starts. Right before the show cuts to commercial the captains have a toast to “fish and game.” I can see no legitimate reason for this kind of arbitrary regulation besides giving a huge boon to the well-connected fishing captains at the expense of their crews.

Healthcare B.S.

Jesus Christ this makes me angry:

What will be the biggest factor pushing the tab so much higher? Innovation. “The healthcare industry will continue developing new stuff for every age group,” Reinhardt explains. Will that “new stuff” — in the form of new drugs, devices, tests and procedures — be worth it? Some of it will be. Some won’t. … In many areas, we seem to have reached a point of diminishing returns. This also is true in the drug industry, where most new entries are “me too drugs” — little different from products already on the market.

“In truth, the aging of the population is not a big problem,” Reinhardt says. … This doesn’t mean that healthcare spending won’t continue to levitate. “But what will drive costs in coming years, will come, not from the demand side of the equation, but from the supply side,”… We can be certain that, without some significant reforms, suppliers will continue to invent new products for every age group, charging us more and selling us more — using whatever methods it takes, from direct-to-consumer advertising to promises of near immortality and perpetual youth… — if we just swallow enough pills and replace enough body parts. …

Holy Shit! You mean to tell me that without reforms medical care will keep getting better and better as we get older? Well then by all means let’s regulate the hell out of the industry. Anything but innovation. If someone comes up with a cure for cancer it’s going to be expensive, so let’s make damn sure that never happens.

Sorry about that, but there’s nothing more frustrating then stupid views on healthcare.

The Politics of Healthcare

At Slate Ezra Klein writes a piece for the “Fixing It” series which gives advice to the incoming president on how to fix the colossal mess they are going to find themselves in, ready or not, on day one. He discusses the politics of health care and he hits upon the most important factor, which everyone (especially Paul Krugman, again, and again, and again), tends to forget.

On health care, the vital question for the next president isn’t merely what to do but how to do it…The problem is not just policy—Washington is stuffed with wonks and idea entrepreneurs eager to explain how to fix the health care system—it’s politics. Without 60 votes in the Senate, you don’t have a policy. You have a position. And nobody is going to get good, affordable medical care from a position paper. [my emphasis]

Your health care policy is only as good as what you can get through congress. People (most notably the leftish blogosphere) gave Barack Obama a lot of flak because his health care reform policy didn’t require a mandate for insurance. But a mandate is completely unviable. IT WILL NOT HAPPEN, at least not in the next 20 years. To say “my health coverage plan will have a universal mandate,” is to say “my health coverage plan will either be laughed off the floor or will be passed with so many changes, exceptions, and prime-pork as to be practically worthless.”

The whole-fixing it series is worth a read, but it will give you a depressing sense of just how bad everything got screwed up in the past few years. On a side note, I want to criticize Mr. Klein for making the classic leftish error of forgetting how far our current health care system has brought us.

about 10 million Americans have joined the ranks of the uninsured, and according to at least one estimate, more than 100,000 Americans have died because they lacked access to quality care.

Ezra is wrong, 100% of Americans have died because they lacked access to quality health care. I’m going to die, at some point, because either I can’t afford the procedures to keep me alive, or those procedures haven’t been invented yet. The problem with arguments like this is, what defines “quality care”? At what point do we say, “look, we’ve spent enough money on keeping your sack of bones of breathing, die already.” 100 years ago no one had access to “quality care,” and, hopefully, 100 years from now they’ll look back at us and say exactly the same thing. The reason people, in general, are living longer is because of general improvements in the standard of medicine, and any health-care-solution which significantly fetters the development of medicine is going to make humanity as-a-whole worse off.

I do think that such expensive health-care is a problem, but any solution which cripples innovation and weakens the industry as a whole might make today’s sick better off, but at the expense of tomorrow’s well-being.

Amber is the color of illegal revenue.

Via Megan McArdle. From Here.

Six U.S. cities have been found guilty of shortening the amber cycles below what is allowed by law on intersections equipped with cameras meant to catch red-light runners. The local governments in question have ignored the safety benefit of increasing the yellow light time and decided to install red-light cameras, shorten the yellow light duration, and collect the profits instead.

I hate the idea of police-by-camera. I think that police stations issue too many speeding tickets as it is, they aren’t trying to promote public safety, but instead they are just trying to raise revenue. I’m two for two on getting tickets while driving through middle-of-nowhere Texas (91 in an 80). The car was under control, there was no one else on the road (except for, of course, all of the cops driving 2008 V8 Mustangs), so how is it in the public interest to give me a ticket?

Radar camera’s are just ways for the city to raise absurd amounts of revenue by essentially creating a “driving-tax” which no one votes on. I feel considerably less-safe driving through intersections equipped with the radar cameras because cars abruptly slow-down when they get in range, causing traffic to back up and, I’m sure, extra accidents.

Iraq Paradox

Matt Yglesias makes an interesting observation:

Then beating the insurgents became the goal. Our troops had to stay in Iraq and risk their lives in order to kill the people who were trying to kill them to force them out of Iraq — we couldn’t leave until all the people who wanted us to leave were dead.

So this means that we won’t even try to leave Iraq until all of the insurgents are dead. When we are ready to leave, no one in Iraq will want us to leave. We’ll be “abandoning” all of the people who wanted us there in the first place since we’ve killed those who thought otherwise.

Hillary Clinton is Destroying America

Reality might not be so melodramatic, but the truth is that she has no chance of winning and by staying in the race she is fragmenting the democratic party (deliberately), alienating independents, and allowing John McCain to look increasingly responsible as the Democrats bicker their way to the party’s nomination.

Unless Clinton is able to at least win the primary popular vote — which also would take nothing less than an electoral miracle — and use that achievement to pressure superdelegates, she has only one scenario for victory. An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else…

Journalists have become partners with the Clinton campaign in pretending that the contest is closer than it really is. Most coverage breathlessly portrays the race as a down-to-the-wire sprint between two well-matched candidates, one only slightly better situated than the other to win in August at the national convention in Denver.

The fact that she is even staying in the race makes me like her less-and-less. She is running a scorched-earth, win-at-any-cost campaign which not only reflects poorly on American democracy in general (can we really afford a worse international reputation?), but also is quickly grinding away the chance of a Democratic victory which, 8 months ago, seemed incredibly inevitable.

I’ll give this to Hillary: had she won the primary, he would have made a tolerable president (she would have looked positively outstanding compared to the current administration), but she isn’t going to win the primary without some kind of political legerdemain which will disgust huge swaths of the Democratic party. I planned on voting against the Republicans no matter what this election, but if Hillary Clinton steals this campaign from Barack Obama, I’ll be in a quite a bind.

Obama Understands Credit

From Obama’s speech today, he makes a few good points.

“Our capital markets have helped us build the strongest economy in the world. They are a source of competitive advantage for our country. But they cannot succeed without the public’s trust. The details of regulatory reform should be developed through sound analysis and public debate. But there are several core principles for reform that I will pursue as President.

First, if you can borrow from the government, you should be subject to government oversight and supervision. Secretary Paulson admitted this in his remarks yesterday. The Federal Reserve should have basic supervisory authority over any institution to which it may make credit available as a lender of last resort. When the Fed steps in, it is providing lenders an insurance policy underwritten by the American taxpayer. In return, taxpayers have every right to expect that these institutions are not taking excessive risks. The nature of regulation should depend on the degree and extent of the Fed’s exposure. But at the very least, these new regulations should include liquidity and capital requirements.

Second, there needs to be general reform of the requirements to which all regulated financial institutions are subjected. Capital requirements should be strengthened, particularly for complex financial instruments like some of the mortgage securities that led to our current crisis. We must develop and rigorously manage liquidity risk. We must investigate rating agencies and potential conflicts of interest with the people they are rating. And transparency requirements must demand full disclosure by financial institutions to shareholders and counterparties.”

Overall he makes some good points and exhibits a pretty good understanding of capital markets and the general causes of the credit crisis, but he also seems to be regulation-happy, planning loads of new commissions to help oversee the capital markets. Like most of the Democratic party, Obama is trying to toe the line between the fact that economic growth is spurred by innovation (the opposite of regulation), and that sometimes these innovations behave in ways that aren’t expected and some people end up getting hurt…there’s no such thing as a free lunch, or a free law.