Month: May 2011

Last week Rand Paul compared universal healthcare to slavery. Following on his son's heels, Ron Paul connected Social Security to slavery. Reason editor Matt Welch says "comparing slavery to anything short of, well, slavery, strikes me in the best case as wildly, off-puttingly inaccurate." Matt Zwolinski, another libertarian, is on the same page:

Rhetorically, I strongly suspect that the argument is unlikely to convince anyone who is not already a committed libertarian.  And philosophically, of course, it’s just not true that universal health care involves anything like slavery, even if it (like slavery) is morally wrong, and even if it (like slavery) is wrong largely because of the coercive nature of the practice.  However wrongful and coercive universal health care might be, no one’s advocating beating down doctor’s doors and hauling them away, no one’s advocating that they be bought and sold or separated from their families or…well, this is really too obvious, isn’t it?  There’s a pretty good case to be made that the military draft was a form of slavery.  But not everything of which libertarians disapprove warrants that reproach.

Matt Yglesias searches for the roots of the Pauls' beliefs:

[W]hen I hear this stuff I think of my former professor, the late great libertarian political philosopher Robert Nozick who developed the notion (“demoktesis”) that democratic governance is a form of slavery. Nozick is a very smart guy and the position is rigorously argued. That said, regulated welfare state capitalism is clearly not actually the same as slavery. The fact that one can reach the conclusion that it is shows that there’s something deeply unsound with the Nozick-style view of property rights and highlights the extent to which libertarian ideology represents a departure from the values of classical liberals in whose work one finds no support for such a conclusion.

Too scary for above-the-fold:

Michael Specter welcomes some great news:

A new study, of eighteen hundred couples on four continents, has shown that H.I.V.-positive people on antiretrovirals are ninety-six per cent less likely to infect their sexual partners than H.I.V.-positive people who are not on those drugs. Intuitively, that makes sense, because antiretrovirals lower the amount of virus in the bloodstream. Yet hunches, even smart hunches, often prove false. … The results, released [last week] by U.S. federal health officials, were so unequivocal that the study has been stopped four years early.

Well: duh. It has been pretty obvious from the get-go that people with HIV on the full retroviral Monty are much less infectious than those untreated. I've made this intuitive case for many years. But it's almost fifteen years since the cocktail transformed so many lives. Why has it taken this long for a major study to reach this conclusion and put it into effect?

I suspect one reason is that the public health authorities did not want to give gay men any indication that sex was any safer now than it has been since the 1980s, for fear of unleashing a new wave of sex and disease. But science is always a better bet than getting men to restrain sexual desire in impeding an epidemic. Both would be great, of course, in stemming the virus's spread, along with sero-sorting, in which HIV-positive men do their best to have sex only withn HIV-positive men. But I wonder what the full effect would be if all men diagnosed with HIV were immediately put on retrovirals and all HIV-negative men were put on a basic anti-retroviral at the same time.

I bet you'd see a sizable decline in HIV transmission.

The Dish quoted the great American writer on the refuge of the public library in modern life. It's a beautiful meditation made all the more poignant by the fact that this particular library may soon close because of a lack of public funds.

Halong Bay, Vietnam, 12 pm

Mark Thoma is worried that the eventual debt ceiling deal will hurt the recovery:

I think we are headed for budget cuts that are larger than the economy can handle as it struggles to climb back to full employment. The short-run deficit fears are overblown, and the consequences of cutting too much, too fast are not being taken seriously enough, but it's hard to see another outcome.

The British example is, so far, discouraging. Stagflation looms.

The NYT reported last week:

As gay rights advocates intensify their campaign to legalize same-sex marriage in New York, the bulk of their money is coming from an unexpected source: a group of conservative financiers and wealthy donors to the Republican Party, most of whom are known for bankrolling right-leaning candidates and causes.

David Link takes issue with the word "unexpected":

Responsible, thoughtful and strategic members of the national GOP have a long-term interest in ridding the party of the toxic influence that Ronald Reagan first brought in, the first George Bush tolerated, and the second Bush encouraged in the most cynical and malignant way. … Same-sex marriage in a state like New York is one of the openings they have to help break the ice.  They need to enable moderate members of their party to dislodge themselves from the stigma of religious fundamentalism, so they can focus on the economic issues that are paramount for their party and for the nation.

A reader writes:

I'm totally convinced that Bush was some sort of Greek tragic hero: a man who made it all the way to the White House to prove to his father that he was worth something. Maybe he figured that he could just not rock the boat for four years and everything would turn out okay … and then 9/11 happened.  He was totally out of his depth after that, checked out, and handed control of the country off to a collection of thugs and lunatics and pathetic incompetents: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzalez, Yoo, Addington, "Brownie".

If he had only been the commissioner of Major League Baseball, maybe this country wouldn't be in such horrific shape after eight years of his administration, regardless of his personal decency or character flaws that every person has.  That's why he's such a tragic figure in the original sense of the term.

Another writes:

You went way too soft on GWB.

His dangerously shallow and expedient espousal of “freedom” – a shallowness made manifest, for instance, by his inability/refusal to understand that such a noble concept can have no truck with torture – and, more particularly, his belief that said “freedom” is easily introduced and maintained in foreign lands, no matter how different their histories are from our own, are exactly what put us in the deep, deep hole we are only now beginning to climb out of. (Fukuyama’s recently published The Origins of Political Order does an excellent job of showing how utterly unworkable Bush’s “freedom agenda” truly was from the get-go.)

As someone who voted for the man twice, much to my everlasting shame, I have to say his aw-shucks, let’s-you-and-me-have-a-non-alcoholic-beer-after-we-go-dirt-biking amiability only makes what he did that much scarier – because I fell for it! Why are you doing the same now, after all the country’s been through on his account?

Another:

Let me just join the doubtless long line of readers in saying: He probably looks terrific because he seems to have felt little responsibility for what happened during his tenure, therefore no aging effects caused by guilt and worry – continuing to sleep like a baby. Even if he grows a beard, please don't tell us how attractive he looks.

Another:

George Bush doesn't befuddle me.  His response, while it could have been, a la Cheney, less gracious, still seems to make its crummy points in a read-between-the lines way.  For one thing, isn't it customary to call the sitting president, or any living president, President So-and-So, and not just refer to him by his last name like he were the third baseman for the Rangers?  It brought to mind when he would say "Democrat Party."  Tenably a slip-up, it's actually rude, and intended to demean.

I also think the former president implies that Bin Laden's death is not the big deal some make it out to be. "He was held up as a leader" seems to say Bin Laden's leadership was a matter of perception more than fact.  The figurehead is dead.  I think the incidental details of his having lunch at a specific restaurant is meant to underline this.  "Hey, life goes on.  Did my lunch need to be interrupted?  Probably not.  But I went home anyway.

Personally I prefer Cheney's testy, begrudging, Goddamn-it-they-did-it response.

(Photo: Former U.S. President George W. Bush looks over the field on Opening Day at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington on April 1, 2011 in Arlington, Texas. By Tom Pennington/Getty Images.)

We hit the debt-ceiling today. The WSJ explains how the Treasury will juggle its books to avoid default and buy us some time. Ezra Klein checks in on the negotiations:

There's not been much evident progress towards a deal in recent days, though there's been an escalation in Republican demands from the Senate side (McConnell wants Medicare cuts but no tax increases) and a plea from the Obama administration for Democrats to stop adding new demands onto an already overburdened negotiations process. But the outlines of a deal have been relatively obvious for some time: For better or worse, the final deal will be heavily tilted towards spending cuts, and accompanied by some sort of procedural mechanism to make future deficit reduction more likely.

Chait sets some ground rules:

Republicans want to force [Obama] to agree to a budget deal he doesn't like as the price for lifting the debt ceiling? Then he gets to attack the terms of that deal. That's how ransoms work. You can demand that the mayor hand over a suitcase with ten million dollars in non-sequentially marked bills in return for you not blowing up a bus, but you can't also expect the mayor to run around saying how proud he is that he and the hostage-taker were able to work out this wonderful bargain. If the Republicans want to strike a fiscal bargain that both sides believe would improve public policy that happens to be concurrent with the passage of the debt ceiling, then that's another story.

This seems more prudent to me than Krugman's crash-and-burn strategy.

Josh Green wonders why:

I have a theory about why he's bailing out early. And it has nothing to do with preserving his last shred of dignity, because that's long gone and Trump never seemed overly concerned with holding onto it anyway. Like any politician who's screwed up, Trump is now playing defense, trying to hold onto what he has. In the realm of celebrity, which is what he seems to care about most, that's primarily "Celebrity Apprentice."

When the news broke yesterday that NBC was re-upping with Trump for another run of "Apprentice," it was pretty clear that he was going to abandon his political ambitions–if he ever really had any to begin with. Given that the last three months were so detrimental to his ratings, I wouldn't be surprised if his NBC deal included a clause that he fold up his tent and shut down the circus. That's just good business sense — and in Trump's case, it doubles as an act of mercy.