Return to the Free Liberal Homepage

July 27, 2009

The Uninsured and Health Care Reform

New Mexico State Senator Sue Wilson Beffort had an excellent opinion piece in today's Albuquerque Journal. As Beffort points out, it is useful to note that New Mexico has a whole host of public programs available for the uninsured, that people with pre-existing health conditions are not denied insurance (as reform proponents often claim), and that prescription drugs are actually becoming more affordable for both the elderly and the general public. As Beffort summarizes her argument, Congress should consider maximizing these programs and their effectiveness before completely revising our entire health care system.

In addition to this piece, a reader attacked my recent opinion piece. The author, Leon Logan, writes:

Paul Gessing's column on July 20 is pure propaganda that is a coordinated and intensive effort to maintain the status quo in health care.

He says that the "heavy hand" of the government and its bureaucracy are the reasons for our expensive health-care system. The Food and Drug Administration is given as an example. I suppose his "research" has determined that the "heavy hand" of the government was responsible for our current financial situation. Medicare's bureaucracy is about one third that of private insurance "bureaucracy."

The Rio Grande Foundation is supposed to be a "nonpartisan, tax exempt, research and educational organization." I guess the fact that we have the most expensive health-care system in the world, rank about 35th in results ... and the only "free market" system was too obscure for "research" to reveal.

Not surprisingly, Logan argues that I want the "status quo." This is patently false and I mention some specific reforms at the end of the piece. I've also made the case for free market reforms elsewhere. And then he goes on to exempt the government from any and all responsibility for the current financial crisis, a very complex situation that resulted from many factors, including government policy.

Lastly, the cartoon below is an excellent summary of the "uninsured" situation in the United States.


Posted by PaulGessing at 12:44 PM | Comments (2)

July 21, 2009

Democracy in America on the Local Level

Last week, Randy Simmons gave several lectures at the Institute for Humane Studies' Liberty and Society seminar. Mayor of Providence, Utah and a professor at Utah State University, Simmons has both a theoretical background in free market ideology and practical knowledge of the workings of local government.

Simmons' said that as a political leader, his actions are guided by one question: "Will this policy increase choice or decrease choice?" For example, with regard to zoning, often a contentious issue within municipal governance, Simmons pointed to his mayorial successes achieved by allowing people to use their property more freely.

This view of leadership is consistent with Alexis de Tocqueville's vision how a laissez-faire politic allows citizens to develop systems and institutions that allow for cooperation and prosperity. Today, Simmons explained, democracy is often misconstrued as being about voting, while the classical liberal view of democracy centered around societies' emergent orders unhampered by political regulation.

Simmons said that political markets obscure these outcomes because voters do not face the same set of incentives as consumers do, even though they are the same people. This is because votes are indivisible, and they obscure people's strengths of preferences on policy issues; the price system that allows for signaling in the market for goods has no equivalent in the political market. The problem of the irrational voter is not as severe at the local level as it is at the state or federal level because when fewer people participate in an election, an individual voter has a greater chance of being able to influence an election's outcome. However, even municipal governments do not provide an effective way of carrying out voters' individualized preferences.

When governments serve to protect property rights rather than limiting how citizens can use their property, people can discover methods for maximizing their property's utility. For example, many neighborhoods have established homeowners' associations to deal with collective action problems in a manner less coercive than what a local government could carry out.

According to Simmons, Tocqueville's democracy was about the emergence of "neighborly peace" among Americans that can be achieved when people are provided with a system of property rights designed to protect liberty and encourage innovation. While federalism is important for a more direct system of democracy, the best policy for allowing liberty and prosperity to thrive is limited government at every level.

Posted by emilyw at 11:33 PM | Comments (3)

July 19, 2009

Why Finance Wizards are Evil

Why are MBAs so evil? Why do they keep milking America’s great companies dry? Why do the financial wizards rip off retirees and other investors with obscure financial instruments and concealed pyramid schemes?

What do they teach MBAs in college anyway? Amorality 501? Do they hold secret convocations where the elite students sign their names in blood to some Bavarian Illuminati oath in order to join the Rockefeller family termite chart?

Not quite. The real reason is more mundane, but harder to understand without some math. The real reason can be found in this Dilbert cartoon I came across the other day in my calendar.

Dilbert.com

Present value: an evil concept that renders global warming moot and the fires of Hell a distant irrelevant nightmare. Finance wizards live by present value.

For non-MBAs let me explain. Present value is running compound interest in reverse. Suppose you can reasonably expect to make 5% on your money. If you have $1000 dollars today, this is the same as $2653 dollars twenty years in the future. That is, we multiply $1000 by 1.05 twenty times, $1000 * (1.05)20. In other words $2653 dollars 20 years in the future is equivalent to $1000 dollars today, $1000 = $2653/(1.05)20. Or if we start our analysis looking at $1000 in the future, the present value of $1000 twenty years hence is $1000/(1.05)20 = $376.89.

But that’s mere first level MBA arithmetic; for true finance wizards we need a more aggressive compounding rate. Let’s use 10% for the elite – or those who believe themselves elite -- finance wizards. For them $1000 twenty years hence is the same as $1000/(1.1)20 = $148.64. Wizardry at finance leads to discounting the future. Who cares about melting icecaps? That’s a hundred years down the road!

And who cares about eternity? Most of eternity is a long way away. Eternal agony in Hell is intimidating to financially ignorant rubes because they add up the years of agony and come up with infinity. Finance wizards know better. Each year into eternity needs to be divided by another factor of 1 plus the interest rate. Those who remember their second year algebra should recognize this as an infinite geometric series with the common ratio r as 1/(1 + k) where k is the interest rate expressed as a fraction. Dust off your old algebra textbook and you will find that such as series converges to a/(1-r) where a is the value of the first term and r is the common ratio. Let a be the annual agony of Hell and r be the aforementioned 1/(1+k) and you get total agony A = a(1+k)/k, or a(1.1)/.1 = 11a for a 10% compounding rate.

Eternity is a mere factor of 11! While bad, this is finite. Throw Pascal’s wager out the window. An agnostic MBA has little to fear from Hell. With a low but finite probability of a medieval-style Hell, evil today look’s like a pretty good bargain. And MBAs are trained to look for bargains.

Even a Christian MBA might opt for evil if he’s young enough. If expected death is 25 years away, we discount the factor of 11 by (1.1)25. 11/(1.1)25 = 1. If today’s pleasure from evil outweighs the agony of a year in Hell, then go for it. For a Christian believing in a medieval Catholic vision of Hell, it’s still a no-go, but for members of modern watered-down feel-good churches, the numbers look good. (George W. Bush = Methodist with an MBA. Hmmmmmm.)

Evil is a bigger bargain for those Biblical literalist MBAs who note that the traditional conception of Hell is likely a translation error ; that is, those who believe that most of the dead sleep until Judgment Day, with the good receiving eternal life and the evil being burned up in a big garbage dump. For them, we calculate the value of everlasting life in the future vs. the benefits of evil now. We apply the same geometric series analysis to eternity, but are now comparing lost future bliss as the price for today’s evil pleasures instead of future agony as the price. Also, since Judgment Day is after the Millenium, we discount for at least a thousand years. 1/1.11000 = 4*10-42. Multiply this by eleven and the present value of future eternal bliss is still utterly insignificant! Beware of Biblical scholars with MBAs!

And this is why the financially educated need to be subjected to regulatory hell now, with the threat of greater near term hell should they act up. And we cannot afford the rule of law and innocent until proven guilty for such dangerous characters. They’ll just apply quantitative analysis to the probability of a guilty verdict and act accordingly. Sarbanes Oxley was way too lax.

The above essay is satire. I am in no position to judge the motives of MBAs or our previous president. And I do not support Sarbanes Oxley or scrapping innocent until proven guilty! In large part this is a spoof of conspiracy theorists and yellow journalists who ascribe malevolent intent where the true reasons are ignorance and/or recklessness. But yes, this is also a friendly jab at business major types as well. Business concepts such as present value are powerful tools, useful when the underlying premises behind them hold. Applied robotically, they lead to silly and even downright dangerous conclusions. Case in point: the analysis above. Do not use the above analysis for your afterlife planning! There are several incorrect assumptions implicit in using present value to discount eternal consequences. I invite the business majors and economists in the audience to figure out what those incorrect implicit assumptions are and add them to the comments.

Posted by CarlMilsted at 01:14 PM | Comments (1)

July 17, 2009

Read and Learn the Constitution!

This article is based on a recent talk I gave on the US Constitution. While Sotomayor may wind up being better in terms of adhering to the Constitution than one might have expected at the outset of her nomination, until average Americans embrace and fully understand the document, particularly the 9th and 10th amendments, our rights will continue to be violated and the federal government will continue to grow out of control.

Posted by PaulGessing at 05:59 PM | Comments (0)

July 08, 2009

The Founders' Individualism

Tim Peck at the Asheville Tea Party calls Americans to put the individual "back in the driver's seat" and reclaim the ideals of the founding fathers. /KDR

Posted by KevinRollins at 07:42 PM | Comments (0)

Caritas in Veritas

Yesterday, I took a look at Pope Benedict XVI's recent Encyclical on Charity in Truth. It is definitely his Magnum Opus and should lay to rest the question of which Joseph Ratzinger became Pope (the choices being the young firebrand of Vatican II or Pope John Paul II's Rotweiler).

I highly recommend it, as the Pope both writes well and has a good translator. Given that he stresses the Gospel of Life as part his economic message, you probably can't call him a Democrat - at least not in the U.S. style. Given that he espouses the justice of government action to redistribute wealth, desires that the UN be reformed to have teeth and is a strong supporter of organized labor - you certainly cannot call him a Republican or a Libertarian. He could probably be best pegged to the Christian Democratic Party label - they are conservative on life issues but liberal on economics. In the United States, we have no party that approximates what is in the encyclical, unless you consider the party Carl Milsted is proposing for the "Upper Left." Given Benedict's shout out to a green environmental agenda in his encyclical, this might be a good fit. I think we can safely call him a Free Liberal - as he does not directly condemn (or even mention) Capitalism - rather he says it can't be left purely to its own devices.

If Catholics actually read the encyclical or find out what is in it, i would think it would be hard to remain either a Republican or a Libertarian after reading it. I don't think the Obama Catholics will have any problem with it at all - in fact it comes close to justifying their position that the best way to end abortion is to attack poverty. Without the midwestern Catholic contingent, I am not sure the Republican Party can survive. The only question is, has the brand been so horribly damaged so that Free Liberals looking for a home won't bother taking it over.

The meeting with Obama and the Pope on Friday should prove interesting in light of the encyclical. Whoda thought that the Vatican Rotweiler and the Illinois Senator with the funny name might become buds. Given the encyclical, I frankly can't see why not. Maybe the Democrats will become the Free Liberal Party. If the GOP goes away and the Dems become too big, the natural result is schism - maybe one of the pieces will finally give Catholics and Free Liberals the political home they desire. More will be revealed.

Posted by MichaelBindner at 09:30 AM | Comments (3)

July 06, 2009

Publishing Opportunity

ALLiance Issue 3 submission deadline is August 1!

It’s that time again. ALLiance a journal of theory and strategy is seeking submissions. Please consider submitting an article, poem, artwork, etc. The only submission guideline I have is that your work fits under ALL’s “mission
statement”:

The Alliance of the Libertarian Left is a multi-tendency coalition of mutualists, agorists, voluntaryists, geolibertarians, left-Rothbardians, green libertarians, dialectical anarchists, radical minarchists, and others on the libertarian left, united by an opposition to statism and militarism, to cultural intolerance (including sexism, racism, and homophobia), and to the prevailing corporatist capitalism falsely called a free market; as well as by an emphasis on education, direct action, and building alternative institutions, rather than on electoral politics, as our chief strategy for achieving liberation.

Ideally submissions will be received by August 1. However, other arrangements can be made. Issues 1 and 2 can be found here: http://www.scribd.com/Christopher%20Lentil. Submissions can be sent to chris@chrislempa.info.

Try this link as well

Posted by MichaelBindner at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)

July 02, 2009

It's just not

I was at one of the local pool halls today for lunch. The manager asked me if it was the "best cheeseburger I'd ever had?" while wearing an expectant smile and nodding.

REALLY?!!! Is that a serious question?

No Ma'am, it wasn't. Not even in the top ten. Less than average even for this place.

I can't imagine that she really believed it could have been the greatest burger experience ever. Even the local Fuddrucker's would have outdone it. Didn't even register on the Barley's in Asheville or Ted's Montana Grill Bison Burger scale.

Sort of like Microsoft claiming that Vista is as good as Mac OS X.

It's just not.

KDR

Posted by KevinRollins at 06:40 PM | Comments (0)

Free-for-all (frfr-ôl) -- n. A disorderly fight, argument, or competition in which everyone present participates.

from Dictionary.com



Advertisement
Free For All -- The Free Liberal Blog