Month: October 2009

Why has the debate over unemployment benefits been so muffled?

Roughly 400,000 folks exhausted their federal unemployment benefits in September, with another 200,000 projected to do the same by the end of October, according to a recent study by the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group. By the end of the year, NELP estimates that 1.3 million Americans will have exhausted their benefits unless Congress steps in with an extension. Each day the Senate dallies, another 7,000 people go off the rolls.

But the Democrats – useless at politics as always – are not making hay out of this. DiA jumps in:

Republicans will vote against cloture because they want votes on two amendments, one to bar ACORN from receiving federal funds and one to do something or other about illegal immigrants. Since the House passed its version of the bill five weeks ago, over 125,000 people have exhausted their unemployment benefits. Meanwhile, however, there is bipartisan support for extending or even increasing the first-time home buyer's tax credit, implemented as part of this year's earlier stimulus package and currently set at $8,000. Johnny Isakson, a Republican senator from Georgia, wants to up the credit to $15,000 and extend it to anyone who buys a home…

[If] there's any bill that ought to be sailing through the Senate in the midst of the worst recession since 1945, it's the extended unemployment benefits bill; and if there's a form of stimulus spending that ought to meet with severe scepticism in the Senate, it's the tax credit for homebuyers, especially buyers who already own homes. But that's not how things seem to be working these days.

These, however, are the usual political lies. The Dish version – showing a clinical willingness to tell lies even when they are demonstrably untrue according to basic empirical evidence – is here. She’s so dishonest she has lost track of what honesty could possibly mean.

Check out the neck-and-neck referendum poll in Maine. A poll this close indicates a loss for marriage equality. Now check out Obama's 67 percent favorables in the state. He has a chance to help.

“The Fun Theory” is an ingenuous initiative by Volkswagen:

This site is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.

Go see how they get people to recycle and throw away their rubbish. Go here to submit your idea for a cash prize.

Ed Morrissey's reaction to the GDP numbers and various other economic indicators:

If we have a double dip recession after these gimmicks end, Barack Obama won’t have George Bush to kick around any longer on the economy. He’ll own it after this.

I don't disagree. But then I have also – unlike Morrissey – noted that Bush's own reckless fiscal policies made surviving a recession without risking national bankruptcy far from easy. And his failed wars continue to drain the coffers. And his non-regulation of Wall Street undoubtedly helped precipitate the crisis. It will be impossible for historians to judge the first year of Obama if they don't understand the crushing Republican inheritance.

Stapleton denies.

Here's my essay version. And here's Stan, Kyle and Token. Just for background.

Rick Hertzberg believes health insurance reform is just beginning:

The resulting [health care] “system” will be a nightmare, of course, but it won’t be as bad as the current nightmare. Once another twenty or thirty or forty million people are covered, however crappily, the issue will no longer be whether they should have coverage. It will be how to make coverage better and more efficient and more humane and, for society, less expensive in relation to outcomes.

I stick with Hayek in believing in some core government interventions where the individual cannot save himself. Finding a way to ensure that as many people as possible can get private (or semi-public) health insurance counts as one of them. But a reader notes that this Hayek position is not uncontroversial among many libertarians (which is why, despite my deep libertarian inclinations, I have never claimed the label). Here's Richard Epstein on the topic:

In sum, I think that the charge of Hayekian socialism carries with it a certain accuracy, because Hayek did not see the close intellectual and institutional connections between the government interventions that he supported and those which he opposed.

In part, Hayek made mistakes because of the political circumstances of his own time. In order to slay the dragon of central planning, he thought it imperative to concede some points to the opposition. But a second reason is at work as well, and it brings us back to the philosophical origins of Hayek's position. The central feature of Hayekian thought was its reliance on ignorance. It is ignorance that make central planning fail. It is ignorance that gives local knowledge its real bite. It is ignorance that leads us to embrace a conception of subjective value. I value my ignorance as much as the next fellow.

But truth be known, Hayek has gotten his central philosophical point only partly right.

He overstates the level of ignorance that we have, and thus underestimates the dangers of government intervention driven by knowledge of partisan advantage. It may well be that I cannot draw the demand curve for my new widget; but I do know that there are few states of the world in which I am better off without my protected monopoly that with it. And ignorant, thought I may be, I will be prepared to invest a good deal in securing that legal protection if allowed to do so by the rules of the game. With partial knowledge I can put self-interest to work in the political sphere just as I can put it to work in the economic sphere.

Truth be known, that is where Hayek goes wrong. We (collectively) may not know enough to manage a complex economic system from the center, but we (individually) do know enough to seek to rig the rule of the game to cut in our favor. Imperfect information coupled with confined self-interest offers a better set of behavioral assumptions about individual actors and social processes. Once we make those assumptions, we must be aware of the dangers that come from interferences with the contractual freedom and with legal efforts to maintain, from the center, minimum levels of security for us all.

These ideals may sound fine in the abstract, but in practice they confer too much power on government bureaucrats and often invite private behaviors that ape many of the worst characteristics of the central planning that Hayek rightly deplored. The Hayekian critique applies to the Hayekian concession on minimum welfare rights. In that important sense, the charge of Hayekian socialism sticks.