It’s trivial to use this incident to support the exact opposite of Greenwald’s conclusion. If bankers are complaining that they haven’t gotten anything in exchange for their political contribution to Democrats, then presumably cash donations do not have much influence on politics. (As for Greenwald’s implication that taxpayers are funding bankers’ ill-gotten bonuses, I refer you to Karl Smith.) To see this as evidence that Obama and Congress have been “bought” by Wall Street strikes me as a very twisted perspective.

But really, my intuition is worth approximately nothing here. As is Greenwald’s. Viewed in isolation, this one data point can be fit into radically opposed narratives. It’s easy to see what you want to see if you look at the world anecdote by anecdote. To determine how much money influences politics it really is necessary to approach the question in a much more careful, methodical manner.

I’m against forced redistribution, even to help the deserving poor.  Still, unless you buy the whole libertarian package, I understand taxing the rich to help the poor.  What I can’t understand is taxing everyone to help everyone.  Means-tested programs like TANF and Medicaid aren’t crazy; they take from Peter to pay Paul.  Universal programs Social Security and Medicare are crazy; they take from Peter to pay Peter. 

Even if you’re not into economics, universal programs should strike you as pointless.  But they’re actually worse: When you tax Peter to pay Peter, you distort Peter’s incentives along the way.  Of course, even means-tested programs require taxation.  But they require much lower taxation than universal programs.

…

Just think about how small government would be if only the bottom decile got full Social Security and Medicare benefits, and these benefits were phrased out over the second decile.  Right now, these programs are about 35% of the budget and growing fast.  With this means-testing formula, they would shrink down to roughly 5% (or even less, since the richer live longer).

Admittedly, if we got to this point, I still wouldn’t be satisfied.  The day we started means-testing all redistribution, I’d furrow my brow and ask, “So charity should be compulsory, but immigration restrictions are OK?”  But I’ll take what I can get.

There is a pragmatic argument to be made for continuing redistribution. As Tyler Cowen put it, “the nation-state will remain the fundamental locus for redistribution. That means helping the poor at home more than abroad; a decision to do otherwise would destroy political equilibrium and make everyone worse off.”. But anyone who supports redistribution at all should advocate open immigration to the greatest extent which is politically feasible.

It should go without saying that all of the sponsors of the pending bill to ban American companies from collaborating with domestic Internet spying in foreign countries — the inspirationally-named Global Online Freedom Act of 2009 — voted in favor of the 2008 bill to legalize what had been the illegal warrantless interception of emails and to immunize telecoms which helped our own government break the law in how it spied on Americans.

I suspect that most of the US Congress really truly fails to see the hypocrisy in this.

Karx Marx loves capitalism.

Matthew Yglesias writes about the current research on birth control and fertility rates (featured in The Economist recently) and how it applies to Afghanistan.

We know the rules by now, the strange conventions and stilted Kabuki scripts that govern our cartoon facsimile of a national security debate. The Obama administration makes vague, reassuring noises about constraining executive power and protecting civil liberties, but then merrily adopts whatever appalling policy George W. Bush put in place. Conservatives hit the panic button on the right-wing noise machine anyway, keeping the delicate ecosystem in balance by creating the false impression that something has changed. We’ve watched the formula play out with Guantánamo Bay, torture prosecutions and the invocation of “state secrets.” We appear to be on the verge of doing the same with national security surveillance.

This is a very odd scenario. One possible explanation is that Congress, the President, and the media are all puppets of an elusive but far-reaching shadow government. Another possibility is that this is just the sort of thing that happens when you combine representative democracy with freedom of the press. Personally, I’d like to think it’s the shadow-government thingy.

Secondly, Dan of XARK writes in defense of rule breaking generally, and in defense of cyclists breaking traffic laws in particular. I’d sign on to that manifesto even if I had no idea what a bicycle was. Meanwhile, Slate features a more balanced overview of the bicycles-in-traffic issue.

a tribal refusal to criticize one’s own, a gut belief that someone as good and just as Barack Obama couldn’t possibly really be continuing Bush/Cheney policies and complicitly helping to suppress their war crimes

…and he documents just how very, very different the reality is.

But then, I do commute by bicycle, and my cultural sympathies lie with the left-wing environmentalist Europhiles, even if we often disagree on questions of policy.

Now, what if someone who lives a great distance from you beats and rapes his wife? What if there’s a faraway land where this behavior is common and widely condoned by other men? As the Guardian newspaper reports, these are not hypothetical questions.

Afghanistan has quietly passed a law permitting Shia men to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey their husbands’ sexual demands

…effectively legalizing rape within marriage, which is all the more horrifying for the fact that women in Afghanistan typically have little say over whether or to whom they will be married. The law also contains various other provisions eviscerating the legal rights of women in that country.

One response to those questions, and a particularly odious one, is to assert that although beating and raping one’s wife is unacceptable in our culture, it is acceptable in their culture, and we have no basis to claim that our culture is better or to impose it upon others.This argument implicitly allows their culture to be defined by a subset of the population (i.e. male clerics and their male followers), who happen to be the same group imposing their will on others by force. Afghani women presumably have a somewhat different opinion on being starved and raped by their husbands.

In principle, our response to these faraway violations of human rights should be no different than our response to violations of human rights committed next door. In practice, however, there are numerous problems which may lead a consequentialist to conclude that invading a foreign country to protect half of its population from violence at the hands of the other other half might not actually be a great idea. It’s hard to alter foreign cultures by force, and it’s easy to spend a lot of money and get a great many innocent people killed while trying.

In this case, however, I’d say intervening to protect Afghani women is the correct thing to do, since we’ve already invaded and occupied Afghanistan. That is, we’ve already paid a large part of the costs associated with the humanitarian intervention in question. At this point, allowing the Afghanistan government to legalize spousal rape is pretty much on par with, say, the Northern states fighting the Civil War and then not bothering to make slavery illegal.

One might argue that US military is not in Afghanistan for humanitarian reasons, but rather to stamp out the allies and supporters of the 9/11 terrorists — and we don’t want to stay there longer than we have to just to protect Shia women. I would suggest, however, that using religion to justify violence against women and committing violence against foreigners in the name of god are really two different manifestations of the same underlying problem. It’s not just a freak coincidence that the Taliban welcomed Al-Qaeda into Afghanistan.

The unfortunate fact is that much of Afghanistan is immersed in a deeply illiberal culture which is disturbingly willing to condone violence against anyone outside a narrow in-group demarcated by religion, gender, and tribe. As this horrendous law demonstrates, it’s hardly unthinkable that the current Afghani government could morph into a second incarnation of the Taliban. Protecting the basic rights of Afghani women is essential to changing that culture for the better, and the United States has every reason to do so.

the probability of having your [health insurance] policy torn up given a massively expensive condition is pushing 50%. One in two.

Assuming for the moment that that is correct, there’s really only one word to properly describe individual health insurance: a scam.

And shocking as it may be, I see no reason to doubt the article’s analysis. In a prepared statement, the CEO of Assurant Health recently informed Congress that

Rescission is rare. It affects less than one-half of one percent of people we cover.

This sounds pretty minuscule at first. However, it’s only for a small minority of very sick people that the insurance company has any financial incentive to cancel the policy — they are happy to take your money so long as you’re healthy.

As the article describes, no more than 5% of a insurer’s health policies cost the company enough to give it any financial incentive to tear up the policy. Furthermore, it’s only the sickest, most expensive 1% of the company’s policies (those which pay out more than $35000 per year) that it really has a strong incentive to rid itself of. If only these 1% of cases are targeted for rescission, then given that you are suffering a major medical problem costing more than $35000 per year, the chance of the insurance company booting you out is 50%.

Now, individual health insurance contracts certainly could be written to protect the insurance buyer from being defrauded by the insurer in this way. But they aren’t. The core problem is that health insurance policies are by their nature hideously complicated beasts (compared to say, fire or life insurance policies, which are far simpler). Before you sign one, you’d be well advised to hire a doctor, a contract lawyer, and a mathematician review it; the insurance company most assuredly has hired such people to help it write its health policies.

But in practice, no one goes to that much trouble and expense to evaluate a health policy. Consequentially, health insurance contracts are written entirely to protect the interests of the insurer, not the individual consumer.

A lot of regulation aimed at the health insurance industry is misguided and does more harm than good for the people who want to buy health insurance. The issue of rescission, however, is one case where regulation is badly needed.

Instead of simply taxing people and paying their medical bills, the government will mandate that everyone buy “private” health coverage, then tax them and subsidize their purchase of health coverage.

Instead of creating a government agency to pay everyone’s medical bills, the proposal tightly regulates insurance companies and requires them to accept anyone who wants to buy insurance. As far as I can tell, insurance companies will be left with less decision-making power than many actual government agencies.

It’s a single-payer system administered by the lobotomized husks of former insurance companies.

Now, if you support a single-payer system, you very well might support the Democratic proposal out of political necessity. But I don’t see how this proposal has any economic advantages over single-payer. If you do, the comments are open.

In 1974-75, California spent $1,373 per pupil on k-12 public schooling. By 2006-07, it was spending $10,937. Adjusting the earlier figure for inflation (to $5,286 in 2007 dollars), that still represents a more than doubling in real spending per pupil.

Of course, if California public schools had doubled student achievement and eliminated dropouts, that might justify their staggering increase in cost. They haven’t.  On the most reliable available measure of state academic achievement trends, the NAEP, California public school students have seen their scores go up by about 0.2% per year at the 4th and 8th grades since state-level data became available in 1990.  In other words, the state’s scores have barely budged from the low position they have long occupied.

…

California is in budgetary hell because of a massive collapse in the productivity of its public schools. If the public schools had just maintained the productivity level they enjoyed in 1974-75, taxpayers would now be saving $36 billion annually. That’s $10 billion more than the deficit the state is currently facing.
It’s not hard to understand why: public schooling is a monopoly. There is no field within the free enterprise sector of the economy that has had a similarly horrendous productivity collapse over the past 35 years.

Powerful teachers’ unions demand ever more money for public schools. Many politicians give it to them out of fear for their jobs. Many more politicians simply throw more money at public schools so that they can take credit for “doing something” about education. Meanwhile parents cannot take their business elsewhere — they are forced to keep paying taxes for public schools.

I don’t really expect school choice to produce dramatic improvements in education outcomes in the short run. Improvements would be the result of a market-based evolutionary process, which is likely to operate on a timescale of decades. The big short-run advantage to school choice is getting equally good education at a dramatically lower price. I don’t think it’s especially radical to suggest that the market can do at least as good as California’s public monopoly was doing 35 years ago.

However, if one asks how much a state ought to spend on defense, the answer is determined not by how many citizens it has. The correct way to go about answering that question is to examine the magnitude of the external threats one faces and buy guns in proportion to those threats. There’s no reason military spending should scale linearly with a state’s population.

Israel is a perfect example. There’s a very good reason for Israel to spend a lot of money on its military: its neighbors have attacked it in the past and might very well want to do so again.

The United States spends $607 billion on its military each year. That’s 41.5% of all the military expenditures in the world. Spending that much might be perfectly sensible if we were worried about, say, being simultaneously attacked by Russia, China, and all of Europe. Or space aliens.

Yes, I’m being flippant. But the fact is, outside of loony conspiracy theories full of blue-helmeted stormtroopers and flying saucers, there’s simply no justification for spending $607 billion on defense.

Doing science is hard to begin with. When large amounts of taxpayer money get handed out based on what “the evidence” says, a host of new obstacles arise.