Month: August 2009

Death Panel Apologists

by Chris Bodenner

Cornell Professor William Jacobson insists that Palin “put that term in quotation marks to signify the concept of medical decisions based on the perceived societal worth of an individual, not literally a ‘death panel.'” Mike Crowley has an epiphany:

Oh! Not literally a death panel! Funny how some people misunderstand quotation marks as indicating precision and literalism. So, when I write that William Jacobson is in favor of a new “greedy insurance industry price-gouging scheme,” people should understand the nuanced concept signified therein.

P.S. Jacobson doesn’t even bother trying to defend the other phrase Palin puts into misleading quotation marks–“level of productivity in society”–which as far as I can tell has no connection to any proposal authored or even imagined by any Democrat currently in a position of power. Presumably that’s another concept the currently-unemployed Palin didn’t have time to spell out.

Another apologist: Ann Althouse.

Attack Of The Job Stealing Robots!

by Patrick Appel

Over the weekend, Gregory Clarke imagined a future where nearly all low-skilled laborers are replaced by machines –forcing upwards of 100 million Americans to seek public assistance. Clarke argues that such a society would require very high taxes on the few citizens smart enough to compete with the supercomputers. Drum raises an eyebrow. Ryan Avent is skeptical:

[T]his is silly. Why? Machine and robotic resources aren’t free; they’re resource constrained just like everything else is resource constrained. We have the tecnological know-how to replace millions of human workers with machines right now, but we don’t because the expense of building, programming, operating, and maintaining the machines is too great. It’s not worth it. As demand for human labour falls, the price of human labour will also fall making the hiring of humans more attractive. Meanwhile, as demand for robot labour increases, the price of robot labour will also increase (since the stuff robots are made of is scarce), making the use of a robot for any given task less attractive. There will then be some market equilibrium which will, in all likelihood, involve plenty of employment for low skilled workers.

I’m with Avent. Most garments are sewn by hand. The technology exists to fully industrialize clothing manufacture but the equipment and programming costs are prohibitive. Will Wilkinson tackles Clarke from a different angle:

[T]echnological innovation over the past two centuries has been incredibly rapid, and workers have been repeatedly displaced by technology only to move on to different kinds of jobs. Why hasn’t technological change so far created much higher rates of unemployment? Does Clark think this is a historical fluke? Why does he think this pattern is about to be broken? Why does he think technological change is finally reaching a tipping point? His failure to address this obvious point at all is glaring. Is this whole conjecture really built on his experience with an automated phone call to United Airlines?

Shaming The Ayatollahs

by Chris Bodenner

In an open letter to Rafsanjani and his Assembly of Experts, reform candidate Karroubi demands an investigation into the raping of protesters:

Karroubi said, "Some of the detainees of the [post-election] unrest claim that the detained girls have been sexually assaulted with such brutality that they have all sustained intense vaginal tearing. The young men in detention were also sexually assaulted in a manner that some are now suffering from depression and other physical and psychological problems and are incapable of even leaving their homes.”

"The people who informed me about these events hold sensitive positions in the country… these officials told me that the things that happened in the detention centers [are so deplorable] that even if one count is true, it would be a tragedy for the Islamic Republic… and it would whitewash the sins of many dictatorships including that of the deposed shah.”

One of our Persian readers explains why this letter is a "huge deal":

By publicly stating that he knows of many, many young girls and guys who have been brutally raped while in the infamous Kahrizak jail, Karroubi breaks a major taboo and brings shame on the whole system. He challenges the religious figures and any conservative Ayatollahs who are very sensitive to sexual crimes to indirectly hammer Khamenei. More importantly, by writing the letter to Rafsanjani and not the Supreme Leader, he is basically elevating Rafsanjani to a position higher than Khamenei. (After all, Rafsanjani is the head of a council that appoints and can potentially remove him.)

“Astroturf”

by Patrick Appel

Julian Sanchez wonders if the term has lost meaning:

Any “astroturf” campaign on the modern media landscape is going to require actually ginning up some broad-based activism if it’s going to be effective. And any genuinely spontaneous, bottom-up action that seems even moderately interesting and resonant with national issues is going to find a whole lot of political professionals eager to promote, guide, replicate, or co-opt it.  Sure, you can still talk about more or less manufactured movements, but the lines seem a lot blurrier to me.  If a few locals decide maybe there should be a rally in the town square, and a high-profile blogger or Twitter user picks it up and promotes it, is that astroturf? What if it’s the big-name activist who has the idea, and the locals decide to pick it up and run with it? In cases like this, the differences just don’t seem nearly as profound anymore.

Death Panels Without the Panels

by Robert Wright What more is there to say about Sarah Palin’s now-famous claim that President Obama’s health-care plan features “death panels” that will give patients the thumbs up or thumbs down? Just that, if this were Obama’s plan, it would have more in common with our current system than you might think. In Palin’s fantasy, the death-panel “bureaucrats” were going to pick winners and losers based on a judgment about their “level of productivity in society.” Well, if you view income as a gauge of a person’s productivity in society—and God knows there are Republicans who do—then the quality of health care is already correlated with “productivity in society.” Obama’s plan, by making health care more affordable to lower income people, would make that less true. This is just another way of making a point already made by Peter Singer in response to less delusional concerns about the possibility of rationing under Obama’s plan: we already ration health care; we just let the market do the rationing.

Any government health care plan will bring some new form of “rationing,” since no government can afford to guarantee everyone all possible medical treatment. But let’s be clear: the people who are trying to sabotage reform by telling mind-boggling lies about its hidden rationing agenda seem, in fact, pretty content with rationing; they seem happy with a system in which the least “productive” members of society get bad health care, including, occasionally, health care so bad that it leads to death.

And if these opponents of health-care reform are going to conjure up images of fascism to caricature the pro-reform side, it seems fair to conjure up a comparably hyperbolic symbol of their side of the argument—social Darwinism. As Herbert Spencer put the social Darwinist credo, “The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many ‘in shallows and in miseries,’ are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.” But I guess a picture of Herbert Spencer on a placard doesn't pack quite as much punch as a picture of Hitler.

The View From Your Sickbed

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

The most recent story is very much mine, too. I’m 39, and aside from having the HIV virus floating around at undetectable levels in my veins, I’m a completely productive member of society. At the moment I’m a corporate slave to a pretty decent technology company that offers health insurance and other benefits that are about as good quality as you’ll find anywhere. Corporations being what they are, however, I’d like to get off that Gerbil Wheel and start a business of my own. (How supremely Republican, no?) There’s only one reason I don’t: healthcare. Even at $800/month, there’s no way I could get the same level of coverage should I get into an accident, or have something happen to my health. Getting healthcare as an individual with a pre-existing chronic condition such as HIV or diabetes makes starting a business a great deal more risky and less profitable than it already is under normal circumstance.

So while Republicans are screaming about socialism, they ought to look to their attitude on liberty and see if they can’t find some good reasons to support healthcare (insurance) reform, rather than throw a collective childish tantrum. They ought to be mad at themselves for electing that dumbass W who didn’t champion this opportunity to lock in public loyalty for decades when Republicans controlled both Congress and the Presidency. What we got from them was a massive giveaway to seniors to secure the 2004 election – not real, positive long-term fixes to serious long-term problems.

Do As I Say, Not As I Say

by Chris Bodenner

“[W]e must stick to a discussion of the issues and not get sidetracked by tactics that can be accused of leading to intimidation or harassment. Such tactics diminish our nation’s civil discourse,” – Facebooker Sarah Palin, two days after calling Obama’s healthcare plan a “downright evil” that will target her Down Syndrome baby with a “death panel.”

The Spoils Of Intelligent Libertarianism

by Patrick Appel

Yglesias offers a charitable take on libertarianism:

I think libertarianism is best understood as a kind of esoteric doctrine. There’s strong evidence to believe that people who overestimate their own efficacy in life wind up doing better than those with more accurate perceptions. It follows that it’s strongly desirable for society to be organized so as to bolster myths of meritocracy. This will lead to individual instances of injustice and to a lot of apparently preventable suffering, but over the long-term the aggregate impact of growth (which, of course, compounds) on human welfare will swamp this as long as we can maintain the spirit of capitalism.

Tyler Cowen nods his head. The basic insight of libertarianism –skepticism towards government action– is a healthy political ballast when used selectively.