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Category Archives: Politics
Vaccines and Insurance
Phil Plait trumpets the idea of raising insurance premiums for those who do not vaccinate their kids. While it’s a good idea — and justifiable — it simply will not work and a principle reason it won’t work is Obamacare.
For one, most people get their insurance through their employer, a link Obamacare strengthens rather than severs. This has the advantage of diffusing risk and keeping insurance rates constant even for those with serious medical issues. But it means you can’t tweak the rates like this.
For another, I’m sure someone will argue that being unvaccinated is a pre-existing condition. So you’d not only have to allow insurance rates to be varied like this, but to have Congress micro-manage the insurance industry by declaring that being unvaccinated is not a pre-existing condition.
For a third, Obamacare, by mandating insurance coverage for children, essentially removed child-only policies from the market. In most states, it’s now impossible to buy health insurance that only covers your children. It’s simply not economically feasible when people can wait until their children are sick to buy insurance.
That leaves federal plans like Medicaid and S-CHIP as the only option. And if you think a political class that can’t even dispute the vaccine-autism link for fear of offending someone will pass this into law … well, I’ve got some Central Pennsylvania beachfront property you’d just love.
Such are the fruits of getting the government ever more involved in our lives.
The Valley of Creative Destruction
I was tooling around on the White House website and came across this video from Austin Goolsbee:
To summarize for those of who don’t want to watch (although Golsbee is a decent speaker), he talks about how many start-ups end up failing (falling into the “Valley of Death”) and how the government can make them more successful. The four steps he outlines to do this are capital, regulatory reform, mentoring and tax relief.
While the second and fourth of those are useful, I think the entire idea is bullshit. There’s a concept behind the “valley of death” that Goolsbee knows well – creative destruction. In order for one startup business to succeed, many have to fail. We have to find out what doesn’t work before we can find out what does. And having the government hold people’s hands and make businesses “too small to fail” interferes with that process.
We need the Valley of Death. Government should not be tipping people into it with regulations that favor big business (CPSIA comes to mind) or ridiculous taxes. But business that succeed overcome the valley by crawling over the broken bodies of those that came before. Failure to fail is not an option.
Monday Morning Linkorama
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Thursday Linkorama
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Saturday Long Form Linkorama
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The Year Of Smarm
We’re already 20 days into 2011, so it seems pointless to look back over 2010. I thought, however, I’d take a second to look back at what I said last year, throw out some parting thoughts about 2010 and look ahead to 2011.
I was right about the economy improving without jobs. I was a little off on the election — the GOP took the House. Sarah Palin did not begin to fade, although I see her star waning now. My sports predictions weren’t too bad — at least the Colts and Rangers made the final. My foreign policy predictions were way off: Iran seems stronger than ever and Afghanistan is still a mess. But I was right that it would be a so-so year in TV and film. And I was right about science. We saw a fantastic year in science, including several knock-out blows delivered to the anti-vaccine nonsense.
When I look back at 2010, what really crosses me is the sense of smugness so many seemed to radiate. There were so many people making smug smarmy remarks from false confidence. It was a year when people who were wrong about everything loudly and arrogantly talked about how right they were. No one exemplifies this more than the aforementioned Palin, whose every speech drips with condescending sarcasm and arrogant ignorance. But she wasn’t the only one. Bad climate skeptics proclaimed Global Warming to be dead based on incorrect analyses of Climategate and an inability to read declarative English sentences such as “this study on ocean level rise has been withdrawn in favor of studies favoring more ocean level rise”. Tea Party critics dismissed legitimate concerns about the direction of the country, branding the Tea Partiers as racists and extremists. Pro-torture advocates ignored the established record of civil trials and proclaimed civilian justice was a failure in the wake of Ghailani trial. And, in the sports, the Sports Media Twerps were as arrogant, condescending and wrong as ever — ranging from OSU arrogantly asserting that their eight home games proved their toughness to the HOF voters covering up their complicity in the steroid scandal by refusing to vote for suspected users.
It was a frustrating year, but one we could see coming. I said 2009 was the Year of Fantasyland. No one is more smug than the person who is being proven wrong day after day.
2011 is shaping up to be a year of reality. It will be a year when the Tea Party is going to have to actually govern instead of complain. It will be a year when the free markets, free trade and regulatory sanity will be absolutely critical. It will be a year when we have to shrug and grimly put our shoulders to the boulder. I think this will happen. Because I am, at heart, an optimist.
Specific predictions:
Oh well.
The Lady or The Tiger
This was published about a week ago and I’ve been pondering it since. After careful consideration, I’ve decided it’s mostly rubbish.
A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it’s like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I’ve done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:
• attend a sleepover
• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• watch TV or play computer games
• choose their own extracurricular activities
• get any grade less than an A
• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin.
A bit of background here. Amy Chua, the author of the piece, is a Professor of Law at Yale. Her daughters are highly successful, being musical prodigies and excelling academically. The article claims that this is a result of parenting that was obsessive, almost abusive, doing such things as calling her daughters “garbage” and threatening to burn her daughter’s stuffed animals if she didn’t learn a difficult piano piece. The article contrasts these methods against “western methods” that are more laid-back.
Chua is now backing away from her comments, claiming the WSJ only published the most extreme excerpts of her book, that she had a great relationship with her daughters, that much of the quoted article was tongue-in-cheek, etc., etc. I’m assuming that the WSJ article would not have run without her approval. If it was taken out of context, it was done so on purpose to provoke book sales.
Still, the general point about parenting is being discussed everywhere. Did her strict parenting make her children successful?
Tuesday Linkorama
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Evolution of a Meme
This is why I’ve gotten so sick of the Right Wing Echosphere lately. Some blogger mistakes a closed-captioning system for a prompter. The entire RWE repeats his “discovery” then later has to admit he was wrong.
No one bothered to do any fact-checking. No one bothered to call the University of Arizona or the White House. No one even bothered to pause and think, “wait, does this make sense?” They instantly judged and vented.
This a distressing pattern I’ve seen on innumerable “nontroversies” (especially on the subject of global warming). It’s why I’ve become skeptical of just about any claim I hear.
Thursday Linkorama
I was posting plenty on the Arizona shooting over at the other site and planned to post some here. But after the President’s great speech last night, I really don’t feel there’s much more to say.
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Weekend Linkorama
I’ll have my year-in-review, year-ahead post soon. Meanwhile…
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Monday Linkorama
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Midweek Linkorama
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