Category Archives: Economics

Business, Economics, History, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Technocracy

57 Comments

Always ends up being idiocracy:

…the elites had to wait for the man of their dreams.

When they found him, he was a rare breed: a genuine African American (his father was Kenyan) who thought and talked like the academics on both sides of his family, a product of the faculty lounge who dabbled in urban/race politics, a man who could speak to both ends of the liberals’ up-and-down coalition, and a would-be transformer of our public life whose quiet voice and low-key demeanor conveyed “moderation” in all that he spoke and did. Best of all, he was the person whom the two branches of the liberal kingdom—the academics and journalists—wanted to be, a man who shared their sensibilities and their views of the good and the beautiful. This was the chance of a lifetime to shape the world to their measure. He and they were the ones they were waiting for, and with him, they longed for transcendent achievements. But in the event they were undone by the three things Siegel had pegged as their signature weaknesses: They had too much belief in the brilliance of experts, they were completely dismissive of public opinion, and they had a contempt for the great middle class.

…Obama had reassured them again and again that if they liked their plans and their doctors, they would be able to keep them, but this proved inaccurate. For the first time in American history the cost of a massive social program would be concentrated on a small slice of the populace that was not rich, and in some instances, could not afford it. Those costs came in many different dimensions: Parents found they could not take sick children to the same hospitals they had used before. People with complex chronic conditions found that the teams of doctors who had worked together to treat them had been broken up. For the people who had been insured through the individual market the elites had little compassion. Cancer patients who took their complaints to the press (and to the Republicans) were “fact checked” and then viciously attacked by the Democrats, among them Harry Reid, who called them all liars. “We have to pass the bill, so that you can find out what’s in it,” Nancy Pelosi infamously said. People had finally found out and they were furious.

In February 2010, in the midst of the row over Obamacare’s passage, 80 highly credentialed experts in health care, graduates of and teachers in the best schools in the country, sent an open letter to the president and the leaders of Congress insisting the bill be passed. The Affordable Care Act, they maintained, would “cover more than 30 million people who would otherwise have gone uninsured. .  .  . Provide financial help to make coverage for millions of working families. .  .  . Strengthen competition and oversight of private insurance. .  .  . Provide unprecedented protection for Americans living with chronic illness and disabilities. .  .  . Make significant investments in community health centers, prevention, and wellness. .  .  . Increase financial support to states to finance expanded Medicaid insurance coverage, eliminate the Medicare prescription drug donut hole .  .  . provide a platform to improve the quality of the health care system .  .  . [and] reduce the federal budget deficit over the next ten years and beyond.”

They were not alone. “Historians will see this health care bill as a masterfully crafted piece of legislation,” wrote Jonathan Chait in the magazine Herbert Croly cofounded. “The new law untangles the dysfunctionalities of the individual insurance market while fulfilling the political imperative of leaving the employer-provided system in place. .  .  . They put into place numerous reforms to force efficiency into a wasteful system. They found hundreds of billions of dollars in payment offsets, a monumental task in itself. And they will bring economic and financial security to tens of millions of Americans who would otherwise risk seeing their lives torn apart.”

It did none of these things. It did not fix the dysfunctions of the individual market; it destroyed it. It did not save money; it squandered billions. It did not bring peace and security to tens of millions of people; it took it away from them. The best and the brightest had made their predictions. They were wrong.

Hayek wrote a book or two about this sort of thing.

Business, Economics, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

The Climate Debate

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Over at First Things, John Murdock has some thoughts (including a discussion of me, Mark and the Mann suit), but there is also a howler:

Big decisions, whether in the life of a person or a nation often boil down to trust. America has been hemming and hawing for a while now, trying to decide if the 97 percent or so of climate scientists who say we have a big manmade problem are looking out for our best interest or are self-serving quacks.

Sorry, but this number has been debunked multiple times. It is simply false that 97% of scientists say that we have a “big manmade problem.” You can only get to such a ridiculous number by watering down what the “consensus” is about. Most scientists (including me) believe that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Period. Once you get beyond that, to whether or not we are causing a significant change in the climate with emissions, let alone whether or not the results will be catastrophic, and need to be addressed with immediate public policy, the “consensus” falls completely apart. Anyone who believes in that nonsensus needs to go read this.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Ending Our Dependence On Moscow

5 Comments

Defense News has a hit and a miss. First, the hit:

…And after SpaceX unveils the manned version of its previously unmanned Dragon spacecraft this week, NASA should accelerate development of the project

Yes, though unlike me, they don’t actually propose how to do that.

Here’s the miss, and it’s a big one:

and revive the Space Launch System to put super heavy payloads into orbit.

What does “revive” the SLS mean? I thought it was ahead of schedule? That’s what its proponents keep telling me.

And what “super heavy payloads” are there that need to be put into orbit? What does this have to do with dependence on the Russians? This recommendation seems to be a complete non sequitur.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Mitchell Study

4 Comments

I just looked over the preliminary briefing on the RD-180 mess. A couple things stuck out at me. First, let’s compare the policy dictates on launch between the DoD and NASA:

“Secretary of Defense, as the launch agent for national security space missions, shall:
– Ensure, to the maximum extent possible, the availability of at least two US space transportation vehicle families capable of reliably launching national security payloads”

“Administrator, NASA, as the launch agent for civil space missions, shall:
– Develop, in support of US space exploration goals, the transportation-related capabilities necessary to support human and robotic exploration to multiple destinations beyond low-earth orbit, including an asteroid and Mars.”

Emphasis mine.

First, note that the DoD is tasked with a resilient launch capability. No such requirement exists for NASA. Which is why we went through two periods of over two-and-a-half years when we couldn’t get astronauts to orbit during the Shuttle program. Note also what else is missing from the NASA mission: no mention of heavy lift. Some, of course, believe that it is implicit in “transportation-related capabilities necessary to support human and robotic exploration…beyond earth orbit,” but many studies indicate otherwise. And the two omissions are related. If heavy lift is necessary, and if resilience were necessary for human exploration then, as with the DoD mission, the wording would be “Develop, to the maximum extent available, at least two of the transportation-related capabilities necessary to support human and robotic exploration…beyond low-earth orbit.”

Of course, they can’t even afford one, so they know that if they make that a requirement, it would make it utterly hopeless. But it does demonstrate the dramatic difference in importance between national security and “space exploration” “beyond low-earth orbit.”

Also note, later on in the briefing, that they say that there will be a “heavy-lift” requirement for military payloads. But they don’t define that explicitly, instead pointing out potential examples of such a capability (e.g., growth Delta and Falcon Heavy). That is, the DoD has a different definition for “heavy lift” than NASA does.

Given that the two of them, together are supposed to (among other things):

Work with each other and other departments and agencies, and with the private sector, as appropriate, to pursue research and development activities regarding alternative launch capabilities to improve responsiveness, resiliency, and cost effectiveness for future space launch alternatives,

it would be nice if they could resolve these disparities. Particularly since serious use of the EELV (and Falcon) families for exploration could drive down the costs of those vehicles for everyone. Instead, NASA is wasting billions on a non-redundant rocket that no one needs, except those working on it, who depend on it for their salaries.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Next ObamaCare Lie

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The Dems don’t really want to “fix it.” Every attempt to make a legislative change has been blocked in the Senate. Don’t let them get away with it.

[Update a few minutes later]

Hey, remember when Dems thought that the VA was a great model for government health care?

But they continue to pine for single payer, and surreptitiously or otherwise hope that the ObamaCare debacle will push us in that direction.

[Update a couple minutes later]

More problems and arguments lie ahead:

…the vast middle ground of “modify the law without repealing it” is terra incognita. It is as accurate as Burns’s formulation, and no less precise, to say that those who want to leave the law as it is are outnumbered more than 5 to 1 by those who want to repeal or change it.

There’s an additional ambiguity: What does it mean to leave the law “unchanged” when the Supreme Court has already struck down parts of it and the administration has declined to follow or enforce others? That’s not a salient question for immediate electoral purposes; in terms of voting intention, “left unchanged” can be taken as a statement of support for the Democrats. But even if the statutory language proves resistant to any effort at modification, there will be a new administration after 2016. That could mean more discretionary (or extralegal) changes and perhaps the end of ObamaCare as we know it.

“ObamaCare as we know it” is also an ambiguous turn of phrase, to say the least, for what do we know of ObamaCare? A few provisions are relatively straightforward, such as the expansion of Medicaid eligibility (in those states that have gone along with it) and the mandate that family insurance plans cover 23-, 24- and 25-year-old children of policyholders.

But the whole of ObamaCare is an insanely complicated scheme that even experts are still struggling to understand. “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it–away from the fog of the controversy,” then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said in March 2010. We’ll be finding out for many years to come, and there’s no reason to think that “fog” will ever lift.

The only way to lift the fog is to blow it all away.

[Update a few minutes later]

And then there’s this:

“The IRS isn’t likely to bring such proceedings to earn a pittance,” Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan, tells McIntyre. Then again, it wasn’t money the Obama IRS was after when it embarked on a campaign of harassment against conservative nonprofit organizations. These ObamaCare penalties may be too draconian to be applied generally, but applied selectively, they could be a powerful weapon of an abusive administration.

This administration is nothing if not abusive of the weapons at its disposal.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

Forget Safety, We Need Our Own Spaceships

34 Comments

I have a follow-up to my Friday USA Today column, over at The Corner.

[Update a few minutes later]

At the suggestion of a colleague, lest I appear to be advocating kamikaze missions, the suggested language for the legislation might be: “The exploration and development of space is a national priority. Therefore, NASA’s first priority must be mission success in the critical steps toward reaching this goal. Consistent with this priority NASA shall strive at all times to achieve a level of safety comparable to that enjoyed by other critical national programs in extreme environments, such as deep-ocean and polar activities.”

The challenge and onus would then be on NASA and Congress to say why that is not a reasonable standard (which is currently met without all of NASA’s ridiculous safety/cost-plus/certification rigmarole).

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Space Movement

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Is it moribund, and losing ground?

I’m not sure it matters, except to the degree that it influences government policy. Ultimately, it’s going to happen privately, if the government doesn’t prevent it. The flaw of past thinking of the movement was the notion that NASA was going to lead the way, and that it would need more money to do so. It’s pretty clear that that was never a realistic possibility.