Supreme Court Strikes Down Health Care

There was an interesting review in the NY Times Book Review this past Sunday about a book which runs in a long line of books about voter psychology which try to explain why Joe Sixpacks vote against their economic interests, for Republicans. The bottom line was that people start with a position, often based on some sense of what's right and then "reason" back to where they wanted to go in the first place.

So, if what's right is we should work hard for ourselves and our families and we should not be asked to help others who have not worked as hard, then we will look at any argument and come home to that "moral" place.

So, if you are looking at a law passed by a government which wants to make you help pay for someone else's healthcare, you will invoke words like freedom, liberty, taxation without representation, images of the government making you buy broccoli, grave sites, etc. all to get back to the place you actually started from: I'll help myself, and my family, but I don't want to help my fellow citizens, people I don't know, who likely don't deserve my help.

Justice Scalia invoked all this rather baldly, saying no 25 year old who is not currently ill should be made to contribute to a pot of gold which is most likely going to be used for some 70 year old.

Of course, in making that argument, he's just rejected the whole notion of Medicare and Social Security.

The phantom, if you look back among the blogs, predicted the Supreme Court would vote 5-4 to blow Obamacare out of the water: Scalia, Alito, Thomas, Roberts + Kennedy.

The make up of the Congress, the will of the people (whatever that kaleidoscope may be at any given moment), the votes in the House and the Senate matter not. You've got 5 young Republicans on the Court and the will of George W. Bush will last into the next decades.

This is one of the ways the rich stay rich and the powerful retain control in this land of the free, home of the brave.

Kayla Williams: Loves her Rifle

I'm a sucker for memoirs, when they are well done.

Kayla Williams has written a really good memoir.

A good memoir is made good by the details. She says something every twenty pages or so that sounds so honest and fresh--she comes home and looks at all the Americans around her and they all look...fat.

She is someone I could likely enjoy in small doses, but those would be worthwhile doses.

I've known women like her, mostly nurses. But what is different about her is her eye for detail and her memory and her ability to make the mundane details of her job, accounting for every single item of Army equipment, knowing what each letter and number on the stock of a rifle or computer means in the Army's coding system.

She describes what it is like to ride behind the driver, on the left hand side of a Humvee, with no door, holding a rifle with a round in its chamber and the safety on, and having to decide whether or not to open fire on a civilian car which is recklessly trying to pass her convoy, and lifting her rifle only to notice an eight year old boy in the back seat, and deciding not to fire but to wave instead.

She also, casually, reveals the lie we all heard from President George W. Bush when he went on TV to insist Abu Ghraib was, "Not who we are." Turns out, Abu Ghraib was exactly who we were, frightened, stupid, sadistic, ignorant, emotional, irrational, the worst sort of thugs.

She thinks beyond the average grunt's thoughts. She did not intervene during an Abu Ghraib style interrogation when her fellow American soldiers burned their captive with cigarettes after stripping him naked and using her to humiliate him.

She documents, as so many have before her, the essential truth that any war of occupation is a lie. The President, whoever he is, the generals talk about a "mission" when there is no mission. The only mission is not to allow the natives to embarrass the President and the generals, and of course, it's a fool's mission.

This is a book worth reading.

I hope Kayla Williams is safe now. She ended the book in 2004 and she notes she can be called back into the Army and back to Afghanistan any time until 2008.

She joined the Army, as did almost all her brothers in arms, for the money.

The volunteer Army has really become, as Bob Dylan once said, "Join the Army if you fail."

Once in the Army, many succeed in getting what they did not get from American schools or factories or "communities." They got a community; they became competent at something.

Of course, they had to kill people to do that.

The Bell Curve

"I can’t begin to tell you the dismay and the shock and probably panic that exists in the White House and in the salons of the elites of the Democratic Party over this. They didn’t even consider this a possibility. This never entered their mind. This was going to be the end – not just of me, folks, the end of talk radio."

--Rush Limbaugh

Every once in a while, I get in a funk. A reliable precipitating event is reading the New Yorker cartoon contest, where they give you a blank cartoon and you have to supply the caption. They show you the three editor's picks for the cartoon from which the winning caption will be selected. Every single one is so much better, so much more clever and intelligent and inspired than anything I can come up with. That is a sort of intelligence I simply do not have.

And this deficiency only scratches the surface of my mental dullness. Music, oh, there is a vast ocean of intelligence I simply am slack jawed before. Or any form of math from multiplication tables to calculus, count me out. (Geometry, for some unfathomable reason, came very easily. Go figure.)

So I exist on a sliver of the one narrow band of intelligence I can use and earn a living with, and I'm like one of those narrowly adapted frogs: If they ever change my pond, just a few degrees of temperature, or lower the water level an inch, or introduce a new predator, I'm toast.

The one thing that keeps me going is knowing there are some people eking out a living out there in the world who are even more mentally inept than I.

Take Rush Limbaugh, and those who listen to him.

Just look at the moronic bombast which he repackages every day--the salons of the effete elites, the repetition of the same phrase as six cliches which say the same thing, "They are terrified. They are scared silly. They are shaking in their boots," etc. As if regurgitating up another phrase saying exactly what the previous five have said is somehow effective and entertaining.

But there you have it--just when you think you are the bottom of the barrel you discover, you are actually higher up than someone else.

Likely in the big middle.

Games Rich People Play

Julian H. Robertson has 2.4 billion dollars. If he paid New York City income tax, which is assessed at 3.6% for all citizens who live in Manhattan, where he owns a coop, he would owe $26 million dollars for the year 2000.

Not exactly chump change, but given what he makes every year, not a bite he would feel, more of a mosquito bite than an snake bite.

When his wife died, in 2010, he donated $27 million to the New York Stem Cell Foundation, for cancer research.
(Sanford Weill got Cornell University Medical College named after him for a donation of $54 million dollars, or maybe it was $154 milion; I lose track, when the numbers get that big).

In order to avoid paying the $26 million dollars to New York City, Julian Robertson had to keep a computer record to document he did not spend more than 183 days in New York City, because if he was physically present in NYC for 184 days, well then he was officially a resident of NYC, but if he spent 183 days, he was not. He could claim residency in New Hampshire, for example, which has no state or city income tax, if he had one of his many homes in New Hampshire.

So, in order to not be taxed that $26 million, Robertson would perform an elaborate dance between one of his homes on Long Island, being sure not to cross the line into NYC before midnight on certain nights. He would voice mail or email his secretary to document which day was a New York City day, based on whether his limousine crossed a city line.

Reading the article about his game playing, by James Stewart in this week's New Yorker, you see, as the details of how Mr. Robertson lived his life, flying from a golf outing in Scotland, landing at an airport beyond the city line in his private jet, you see how people in that upper strata of wealth play the games they play.

Of course, you ask yourself this question: If I had this much money, and I loved to live in my New York City penthouse, over looking Central Park, with all New York City has to offer, would I not be happy to pay my 3.6% share to keep that city the wonder of the planet it is?

My father, who had risen from a cold water flat in the Lower East Side, to a life of comfort and considerable pride and wealth, living in a house he loved in Bethesda, used to say, "I'm happy to have lived long enough, to have been successful enough, and to have an income which requires me to pay such taxes."

I would submit, my father was a closet patriot. He never wore an American flag pin in his Brooks Brother lapels; nor did he fly a flag from his door; nor did he have a sticker on his car with a flag or a support-our-troops logo. He just paid his taxes without any avoidance games. He thought of this as an obligation as a member of the community.

For the rich, however, as Leona Hemsley famously said, "Taxes are for the little people."
The rich believe taxes go down some black hole of government, and are wasted money, spent on unionized government workers who don't deserve their salaries, wasted on programs for the undeserving poor, squandered on road repair projects which could be done more cheaply by private enterprise, misdirected to public works which are unnecessary, flushed down the pipes of public swimming pools which ought to be private businesses, wasted on public parks enjoyed by the hoi polloi, burned up in public schools for people without means or importance.
In short, if $26 million dollars is going to come out of my pocket, I want to give it to stem cell research because I know how best to spend my own money.
And if I spend it the way I want to, I get my name on a building or some special thanks from grateful people who think well of me for donating the money.
If I pay taxes, nobody thanks me and nobody thinks well of me. In fact, they all take a certain satisfaction they've got their pound of flesh out of the rich guy. They take my money and they spit on me.
Of course, this whole evasion of responsibility for the community is rooted in a rejection of the notion of community, of the possibility that city government might be spending taxpayers' money for the common good. It is, most basically, a rejection of the notion of democracy.
It is cynicism in rawest form.
It is Ayn Rand incarnate. Nothing good can come from supporting public institutions run by political figures, even if the mayor of New York is one of the one percenters, a businessman who promised to run the city more like a business.
We could fashion the rules so this sort of thinking and behavior is outlawed.
If we did, there would be people who cry out, oh but then the very rich would take flight from New York City. We'd lose the very rich.
We heard that same sort of talk here in New Hampshire when we discussed taxing the rich.
I said, "Good riddance."
In New York's case, this would be particularly true. How many of the one percenters would actually leave New York?
Posh.

Fukishima, Mon Amour

I used to ride my bicycle down to this place on weekends.

Whenever I despaired of the state of the nation, it was reassuring to look up at the Capitol building and recall that however bleak the presence of Rush Limbaugh ranting like some mad Goebbels, leading his pack of hyenas, as Lincoln said, "This too, shall pass.

We may be in trying times, because we have hit a bad skid in the economic cycle. But this is not the Great Depression.

Rush Limbaugh is a howling jackal, but he's no worse than Joseph McCarthy, and in fact, he has less effect than McCarthy, at his peak, had.The grid lock in Congress today is bad, and has paralyzed that dysfunctional body, but they are not arguing over slavery. Senators are not bludgeoning each other on the Senate floor, although this may be only because of increased security.

Jihadists of various sorts may wish us ill, but we lived for 50 years with Soviets who had thousands of nuclear bomb ladened missiles hungering for our vital organs.
We are, in short, in a place which is no worse than we have found ourselves in the past
In fact, the most worrisome worries may not actually be related to Rush Limbaugh, or some anonymous jihadist with a nuclear bomb in his backpack, or a Bible thumping Santori who wants to turn the United States into a Christian version of Iran, ruled by the Christian version of Sharia law, it may be the quiet sort of threat, like the pestilences of the past, like plague and polio, which are invisible, below the notice of the general public. It may be the nuclear plant next door.

Fukishima was a year ago and a few Jerimiah's are pointing out we have insufficiently safety controls on our plants. Fires which can burn through wires which run to machines which are the only things standing between the neighboring communities and meltdown are a more likely source of disaster and end game than anything Rush Limbaugh is warning about. And the risk posed by the nuclear plant strikes me as more worrisome because we cannot know how safe or unsafe these fortresses are. We can only guess, and we can know the reason they would be unsafe would be money. The regulators are in the pocket of the industry and the industry cares only for profit.
Lincoln, FDR, those who fought McCarthy and even JFK facing the nuclear armed Soviet Union did not have to worry about a disaster exploding from within because of a few people who were simply lazy, incompetent or afraid to make a fuss over a disaster waiting to happen. Those are the sorts of human weaknesses I can believe in.

Charles Murray and the Libertarian Mind

What Have I been missing?

I'd read about The Bell Curve but long forgotten the controversy that book sparked which suggested there is something definable as "intelligence" which determined an individual's fate, almost magically, like the sword in the stone myth--certain people are simply gifted.

But Charles Murray is not a name I knew, until I read his OP Ed piece "Narrowing the New Class Divide" in yesterday's New York Times.

I'm now reading his stuff, googling like mad, linking and it's pretty clear there are large areas where we disagree, but I'm reminded of those Venn diagrams I used to play with in school, with the areas of overlap--there are some areas where I couldn't agree more and where Murray shines a light where light really needs to be intensely shined.

What he does say which seems eminently reasonable:

1. People have different abilities,

2.Half of the children are below average,

3. Too many people are going to college,

4. It's important to rigorously educate the academically gifted.

5. The goal of secondary school and college educations ought to be redefined.

6. credit should be given to anyone who is good at what he or she does, not just those who have earned a bachelor's degree.

7. The B.A. bubble ought to be pricked: This degree has become an arbitrary ticket to higher earning jobs and it has over the past generation become educationally meaningless. He notes we do not need education to change much of this toxic effect because there is a Supreme Court ruling (which I am looking for) which says employers cannot use scores on standardized tests to choose among job applicants without demonstrating a tight link between the tests and actual job requirements. (This may be connected to the New Haven firefighters exam.)

Those are points I can applaud.

He also thinks government should do as little as possible and stay out of the way of every decision as it relates to the citizen's life, with respect to labor, regulation of industry; that's his dark side.

But allow me to tell two stories which illustrate the importance of what he is saying:

A welder who worked at a General Electric airplane engine plant got to be a superior welder. This sort of welding is not the sort of thing your father did in the garage; this is very high tech stuff and the science and skill and learning required are impressive, or the airplane falls out of the sky. After several years, he was not only doing his own work but managing a whole subdivision of welders and the management called him into the office and told him it was time he moved up to a management level position. Fine, he said. But a week later they got back to him: No promotion because he had not gone to college and had no B.A. "I was a real star based on what I did and what I knew, but I didn't have that sheepskin," he said. "What exactly does that sheepskin mean, in my world?" This is not government doing something really stupid; this is the vaunted private sector shooting itself in the foot. I've heard similar stories frequently among the factory workers, the shipyard workers who work on the nuclear submarines in the Portsmouth Ship yard. It breeds justifiable resentment. Why should I not benefit from my own learning and hard work and some frat boy who spent four years drinking on a fraternity porch is given the prize?

The other story comes from my own experience as an employer. When I had one employee, she performed the tasks I needed done and she did her best. When I had two employees, fights started about who would do what, and why did I have to file the charts when Donna had nothing to do? I learned from this employees do not always put the job first; their personalities sometimes get in the way and when there is more than one employee, people start asking why they should work hard when they see others not doing as much.

Unions often find themselves in the line of fire, and sometimes for understandable reasons: At one New York hospital it takes 30 minutes to clean an operating room to be ready for the next surgery; at another, it takes an hour. The hospital where the union insists on giving employees an hour between cases can do only half the number of surgeries daily and loses money. The union claims it's workers are overburdened having to wield mops and pails so quickly; the non unionized hospital has no trouble cleaning more quickly and has no trouble meeting budget.

As my father used to say, "I'm all for the workers, but these guys are not working."

Mr. Murray will provide much fodder for my cannons. Stay tuned.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics

Richard Hofstader is a joy to read, and reading him is a both unnerving and soothing, a harmony of opposites.

What he describes in the Rush Limbaughs of the 1950's and in fact, the 1850's is so recognizable you have the sense, "Well, there have been people as bad, or worse, than Rush Limbaugh throughout American history and the country survived. Eventually, these people were found out or dismissed or simply became boring, and we moved on."

On the other hand, the damage done by Joseph McCarthy, Henry Clay, George Wallace, Father Coughlin while not fatal to the nation, did ruin many lives, damaged individuals who never recovered and diminished the idea of America in substantive ways.

Of course, George Will, the sissy pundit, dismissed Hofstader as "the iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension" who "dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders."

Looking, however, at Rush Limbaugh and Charles Krauthammer, you are hit in the face with their glaring psychopathology, the snarling, desperate, bitter paranoia which may be entertaining to those of similar affliction, or, like circus freaks of old, fascinating to people who are not so obviously afflicted.

At least Hofstader's analysis provides some explanation for the obvious question of why anyone would listen to the expostulations of these mutant brains: The fact is the American people have historically responded to the paranoid style. It is something of the fabric of the American soul. Maybe it has something to do with a nation of immigrants, and immigrants have good reason to be paranoid; as they say, just because you are paranoid doesn't mean there is nobody out there trying to get you.

In fact, you almost have to give in to psychological explanations, when you see the seething froth dripping from the lips of a Rush Limbaugh, or the Darth Vader aspect of a Krauthammer.

Some historians and social commentators will look beyond the bilious rhetoric for an underlying economic reason for positions taken, the public reasons always being a disguise for the real, unspoken financial reasons for "belief." But, in the case of Limbaugh lashing out against supporters of female contraception, the economic benefit to Limbaugh must be remote, compared to the obvious psychological pathology revealed by his desire to see videos of the Georgetown co-ed having sex.