What is Real Environmentalism?

Well Global Warming has been conclusively "proven" showing immense increases in the earth's temperature that coincide with increases in CO2 in the atmosphere. This was all shown by the internationally-renowned researchers at East Anglia University, and they won a Nobel Prize for their work!

Oh wait... it turns out they MADE UP ALL THEIR DATA. So now we're back to the same spot that we "nutty extremist, climate-denyers" (or something like that) have always claimed: There is still no evidence proving CAUSATION between atmospheric CO2 and the Earth's temperature. Not a single shred of certified, reliable scientific data proving causation!

In fact, the Earth's temperature peaked in 2002 and has been cooling in the eight years since then. How does that not refute the global warming argument?!

For the record, I am all for humanity being responsible stewards of the environment, since this is our only currently inhabitable planet. We should make sure to keep it in usable condition, absolutely. But I am flat-out opposed to hypocritical political opportunists (ahem, Al Gore, ahem) using bogus science and emotion in a naked power grab. Especially when these scoundrels (yeah, that's right) stand to make millions upon millions of dollars on the backs of gullible but innocent people who get swept up in mass hysteria.

Let's talk about REAL environmentalism, where we provide market-based incentives for people to use resources more efficiently. For example, let's say that people who choose to drive more fuel-efficient cars will pay less for gas. And let's allow people the choice to save money on their energy bills if they turn down the heater/AC and use energy-efficient lightbulbs and appliances. That way, we give people the choice to save their own hard-earned money instead of shoving rhetoric down their throats and invisibly enslaving them (financially and behaviorally) with silly regulations and unjust limitations that help no one and are unfair and re-distributive. Imagine how much we can accomplish in that kind of world...

Wait, don't we already let people save their own money when they use less resource?  Shouldn't we just do more of the same and encourage that sort of personal responsibility?  It only makes sense that if you use less "stuff" (like oil, natural gas, electricity, paper, wood, metal, etc.) that you should pay less for it.  Is it so far-fetched to think that instead of creating onerous regulations and seeking to demonize the providers of our resources (like oil companies, energy utilities and other industrial firms), we should simply allow the market to create its own incentives to save?

For common resources where the private market is inefficient, we should create private property to encourage firms to save those resources as well.  This has worked well in many so-called pollution credit markets.  We just need to make sure that we're actually targeting real pollution, not a bunch of hot air (literally).

That's what real environmentalism should be about.

The Worst Legislation EVER?

I'm used to hyperbole so this might be viewed as a bit of a stretch, but the following tidbits might actually be true:

The Healthcare Bill the Senate passed might well be the WORST LEGISLATION EVER PASSED.  Once it goes through the House (and it surely will), it will enact so many destructive components to our nation's economy that it may just surpass the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, and the Escaped Slaves Act of 1831 for pure stupidity.  Allow me to explain a few things that this bill does, without the propaganda of Senate Democrats to bolster it.


- The CBO projected that it will add an additional $2.4 TRILLION to the nation's deficit over the next ten years.  Who knows how much this entitlement will cost after that?  For those keeping score, that's equal to 17% of America's annual production.  This means we will have to give up about 1/6th of all our wealth that we create in one year to pay for this legislation over the next decade.


- It will increase taxes on all Americans by about $1.5 TRILLION on the next decade.  President Obama famously claimed that he "will not raise taxes on any Americans making over $250,000 a year" until he changed that to "$200,000" and then "$150,000" and later changed it to "$100,000" and then "$75,000".  Well now, this legislation settles it at "$0".  EVERY SINGLE AMERICAN WILL SEE THEIR TAXES RAISED.  This is plainly written into the bill.


- It will cut $500 BILLION from Medicare over the next ten years.  That's right: the very entitlement that Democrats and liberals have threatened to kill others to protect is going to be gutted like the fresh catch of the day with all the aplomb of the bad guy in Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  The only problem here is that all of the benefits that Medicare is legally obligated to provide will remain meaning that an ADDITIONAL $500 BILLION hole is now opened up in a program that will literally be out of money i.e. bankrupt in a decade.


- It will give the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) unprecedented authority over medical decisions.  You read that right: bureacrats from an unelected government body will dictate medical care standards to physicians, surgeons and specialists based solely on accounting tables.  If you have a medical malady and require treatment that costs money, YOUR DOCTOR WILL NO LONGER HAVE AUTHORITY TO TREAT YOU.  This is not hyperbole; this provision is a central tenet of the "reform".  The idea is that the lowest cost alternative of care will be used.  The only problem is that every patient and every medical situation is different and requires a trained physician to make decisions on what is needed for treatment.  Sometimes, the cheapest alternative is not the most effective to heal people's ailments.  Under this legislation, they'll no longer be allowed to do that.


- The CMS will be excluded from lawsuits over these treatment decisions.  The private insurance industry is liable for all the payment decisions they make.  If you don't agree with a judgement by your health insurer, you have the right as an American to seek legal retribution to overturn their decision, and also to seek damages from the insurer if their decision leads to medical harm.  But the Feds have cleverly excluded their own body, the CMS, from ever having to be sued over these decisions.  This is patently unconstitutional and absurdly wrong.


- Medical device makers will no longer be allowed to set their own prices for new innovations.  Currently, such manufacturers spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually to create novel medical inventions to improve patient care and combat illness.  This legislation allows the CMS to set prices for all medical innovations that "resemble" previous products, based on the prices for those other innovations.  There's only one problem: medical innovators introduce newer versions of older devices and medicines on a continuous basis so they can incrementally improve their products.  The advantage of this approach is that consumers benefit from all this innovation all the time.  If they don't like the price of the newer version, they can use a competitors product (if one exists) or an older version of that product.  Now, consumers will have to wait until suitably "new" innovations are brought to market by the medical device makers so they are exempt from rules.  Very simply, this will slow down and stifle medical innovation.  For proof of this, look at Britain's National Health Service which is struggling to increase medical innovations in their country because onerous regulations just like this are keeping medical inventions from being made and brought to market.


This doesn't even include the NAKED BRIBERY to several states that was included in the legislation in order to get this destructive bill through the Senate.  Simply put, those exclusions for several states from having to pay their own Medicare bills violates the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution.  Altogether, this makes this the most heinous and truly destructive bill that the Congress of the United States has ever passed.


I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this subject.

Global Warming Is Like Santa Claus

Global warming is like Santa Claus: it exists so long as you want it to.

As for the scientific validity of the case for global warming, there are so many convincing arguments against it, but I'll start with one that I hope you, as a scientific thinker, can appreciate. If you are given a data set (regardless of what the data are) with x and y values and you plot them on a Cartesian plane, you can draw the inference that there is a correlation between these values. This can lead you to one of three possible explanations for this correlation.

1. x causes y, so y is dependent of x

2. y causes x, so x is dependent of y

3. y and x are independent of each other, and have a coincidental correlation.

Global warming theorists simply looked at such a chart plotting temperatures against man-made CO2 emissions and immediately assumed that CO2 caused the temperature to increase. They haven't even bothered investigating the alternative explanations for this correlation, which is what good scientists would seek to do. As yet, there has not been any causal relationship shown between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and global temperatures. Until such proof is presented and validated by the scientific community, I will remain skeptical of these claims.

Last week, the researchers at the East Anglia University climatology department were shown to have been manipulating their data set on temperatures and CO2 levels. This data was, until now, the primary source for global warming theorists. Additionally, they even admitted that there has actually been a decline in global temperatures since 2002, while CO2 emissions have risen steadily, bucking the purported trend between the variables.

Meanwhile, the main proponents of global warming theory, most notably Vice President Al Gore, stand to reap immense financial rewards based on the validity of this theory. For example, Gore personally owns a firm that sells "carbon credits" that people can purchase to offset their personal carbon creation. If global warming was shown to be false, his investment would collapse. So he has a strong incentive to keep the hoax alive, even if he needs to resort to outright lies to make it so.

Politicians the world over have found a convenient bogeyman in the form of global warming. Unless they are granted sweeping powers over people's lives and decision-making, they claim that the world will essentially end in apocalypse from this threat. And it is immensely convenient, since the "enemy" is not a human figure but instead a phenomenon of nature. Additionally, they claim that this end-of-world scenario will unfold in 50 to 100 years, just long enough for them to never have to live long enough to see if it becomes true or false. There is simply far too much incentive for the parties invested in this theory to give up on making it stick in the mind of the voting public. Hence, even when substantial scientific evidence is presented that overwhelmingly refutes this theory, they childishly begin name-calling their opponents rather than take on the issue at hand. The finest rule of politics is: if you're debating an issue and you start losing, just change the subject and call the other guy names. Works like a charm.

Just don't call them 'death panels'... How about 'that-thing-that-comes-after-life-ends panels'?

This is an excerpt from one of President Obama's town halls last week about health care:

Sturm: But at 100 the doctor had said to her, I can’t do anything more unless you have a pacemaker. But the arrhythmia specialist said, no, it’s too old.Her doctor said, I’m going to make an appointment...and when the other specialist saw her, saw her joy of life and so on, he said, I’m going for it...

My question to you is, outside the medical criteria for prolonging life for somebody elderly, is there any consideration that can be given for a certain spirit, a certain joy of living, quality of life? Or is it just a medical cutoff at a certain age?

President Obama: We actually have some - some choices to make about how we want to deal with our own end-of-life care...I don’t think that we can make judgments based on peoples’ spirit. [my own emphasis added] That would be a pretty subjective decision to be making. I think we have to have rules that say that we are going to provide good, quality care for all people.

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The proponents of the President's plan were taken aback when former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin decried the President's plan as including "death panels" that will decide what care elders receive at the end of life. They claimed that this was merely an insidious scare tactic and have launched a "get the real facts out" campaign to combat these claims.

There's only one problem: the President has advocated exactly the type of "death panel" that Gov. Palin warned us about, just under a different guise and different nomenclature. The unvarnished truth here is that no matter how much powdered sugar you bury a turd in, it still ain't gonna be a donut.

Obama says he wants to establish a panel to decide which treatments are most effective. That means taking the decision away from a doctor and patient and having a government panel make a decision for you. They'll make an arbitrary decision based on some accounting tables, not on your individual medical circumstances.

We don't spend health care dollars on healthy people. We spend them on people who fall ill. And something like 70% of medical spending in the US is in the last six months of a patient's life. So if a government panel of bureacrats starts making decisions on who deserves what medications and treatments based solely on accounting calculations and NOT ON MEDICAL EVIDENCE, then what else do you call this kind of legislation? Arbitrary-decide-what-medicine-you-get-at-the-end-of-your-life panels. A bit cantankerous of a title compared to 'death panels' but it's the same thing.

We'll Send You A Pain Pill In The Mail, If It Ever Gets There

President Barack Obama has spent most of the last few years tethered very closely to his teleprompter, moving from fringe candidate in a party primary to become the leader of the free world as the President of the United States. For good reason, his campaign manager Rahm Emanuel and his chief policy advisor David Axelrod have made sure he's stayed "on message" while delivering speeches all over the country and the world. This is nothing new, and it is hardly irregular for a politician to simply read from a speech when addressing the public. Nothing wrong with that.

What's been slightly odd is how much Obama is dependent on his teleprompter for assistance when speaking. For such a gifted speaker, it is odd that he requires the constant use of that machine to help him through his speeches. Again, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this; I'm merely making a curious observation.

It's quite curious in light of what happened last week during a town hall meeting the President held, one of several he is attending all over the U.S. trying to sell the public on his proposed health care reforms. It's difficult to use a teleprompter in such environments simply because (unless extremely well staged) it is challenging to predict exactly what kind of queries the President would face from the live audience at such an event. Hence, the President is forced to ad-lib, and more or less shoot from the hip. Theoretically, it's not too difficult for a talented orator such as Obama to paraphrase his ideas on a subject that he has focused on so closely of late.

It's quite curious then that when Obama had to answer a question about how private insurance companies will be able to compete with a public option for health insurance (which would be subsidized by taxpayer dollars) that he had to go a bit off script and talk from the cuff. The video of his response has gone viral all over the net, the crucial point of which was:

"UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. It's the Post Office that's always having problems."

With these words, Obama committed a potentially-fatal political Freudian slip. His point, taken in whatever context you wish, seems to be that a government-run enterprise is far less adept at supplying a necessary service than it's private, for-profit brethren. But the President is advocating just that: he wishes that we replace a privately-run system of for-profit health insurers with a government-run public option.

We all know how recklessly inefficient and slow the "snail mail" carriers seem to be with delivering our things. It's also notable that while UPS and FedEx, as noted by Obama, are consistently profitable amidst difficult markets and changing economic dynamics. Meanwhile, the U.S. Postal Service is enormously unprofitable, having lost more that $6 billion last year alone, and must be propped up by public funds. Long before GM stood for Government Motors or Clunkers could be redeemed for Cash, the U.S. taxpayer was bailing out the USPS due to it's inability to compete in the competitive marketplace.

So let's briefly review: the President wants us to trust us to give up our privately-run, for-profit health insurance to be replaced with a public, government-run option. This, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that another government-run institution is grossly incapable of doing just that. And let's not forget that the USPS only has to deliver the mail and some packages, a task far more trivial than having to allocate life-saving medicines and procedures to patients in need of these resources.

We all know that the Post Office is hardly the only government-run organization notorious for ineffectiveness and inefficiency. Have you visited a DMV or a Medicaid clinic lately? Yet the President insists that the current health care system is untenable and filled with exactly the sort of "waste, fraud and abuse" that other government-run institutions have made famous. He is adamant that without competition from a publicly-backed health insurer, private insurance companies won't be able to allocate health care resource effectively. This appears to be a very troubling argument.

Perhaps he has a point about public and private firms, however. After all, we wouldn't be able to appreciate FedEx and UPS without the mass incompetence of the Post Office to compare them to.

Gettin' Edu-mah-cated: Health Care Economics

Sara B: Thanks for responding. You're officially the first to reply to my first post. Now to the business at hand. This is the crux of Sara's response to my previous post:

"I like to think of the universal health care plan as one way we look out for each other. I think of my community as a collective being; everyone contributes towards a better good. It can't always be 'me, me, me.' One must be altruistic and caring."

That's a nice idea. You're restating the idea of "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". This maxim was first espoused by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in Das Kapital. I'm not pointing this out to make a silly name-calling, straw-man argument. I'm simply pointing out the fact that you're talking about Marxist socialism in another name.

The idea behind this is pure nirvana: everyone works as hard as they possibly can, no matter what they get for it. Natural differences between people will always arise, and the best and brightest will produce more than the rest of us, and everyone is better off from all this additional production. Additionally, in this utopia, everyone simply takes as much as they "need" to get by.

There are a number of issues with this idealization, however, and it all centers around one simple concept: scarcity. There is never any rational end to each person's "needs". Some people may "need" to eat and drink more than others. Some families require larger houses and larger, less fuel-efficient cars. Some people value open spaces and parks. Others love urbanization and crowds. The Marxist ideal makes no room for this difference in needs (no matter how subjective they are), tastes and new technologies. It simply assumes that everyone has the same basic requirements and that is all enough. So, without a finite restriction on demands for various goods and services (remember, there are hundred of thousands of services and products available), then only a limitless supply of those goods and services will suffice.

However, there are limited resources in the world. There are only so many able-bodied people, so much time, and so much natural resource to go around. That means there is a shortage of production to fulfill the limitless needs and desires of people. That necessitates us having to choose how to use our limited resources the best way possible. We can organize our usage in several ways, but they tend towards one of two extremes: a central planning body can dictate the production and consumption of goods, or a perfectly competitive free market can allocate our supplies and demands for us.

The primary problem with a central planning body is that due to constantly changing market conditions (prices and quantities of goods and incomes of consumers), it is simply too grandiose a task for any group of people, no matter how sophisticated a computer model they might have to efficiently allocate these resources. That means that no matter how hard they try, they cannot make sure that the right amounts of the right goods and services are provided to the right consumers at the right time. At least, no more so than a market can.

I don't mean to belabor an economics lesson here. This same logic applies to health care. There is a limited supply of health services out there for our consumption. Doctors, nurses, hospitals, and medical equipment are not simply limitless. Additionally, production of all these resources is very time-consuming and expensive. For example, it takes 4 years of college, 4 years of medical school and four more years of internship and residency to "produce" a doctor. And it costs about $1,000,000,000 on average to produce a new pharmaceutical drug. So somewhere, we must pay to incentivize doctors to go into the medical field, and we must pay for drugs to be created.

In the places where a central planning body has taken over the payment part of allocating health care resources (Great Britain, Canada, Australia), the result is a functional catastrophe. In spite of the altruistic intentions of their creators, these systems have failed miserably at providing even the most basic care for most citizens. The result has been more scarcity of health care resources, not less. The people who allocate resources for these countries have no ill intentions. They want everyone to get health care when they need it. But for the aforementioned reasoning, they cannot allocate resources effectively. Too many resources are wasted in one area, and not enough are delivered in another. They simply can not handle the task at hand because the conditions within the market are changing too quickly for them to catch up.

Rather, in a (pardon the pun) healthy marketplace, if there exists a demand for a product or service, that demand pulls the necessary resources from the market and moves them to the proper channels so that they are delivered to the person asking for them in the proper way at the desired time. This demand is evidenced to the marketplace when individuals show willingness to spend their own money on health care, signaling to health care providers that a profit opportunity is available. Thus, those doctors, nurses, pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment makers can step in and provide a necessary good or service.

I'm not advocating that the current system is just perfect and ought to be left alone. I'm sayign that the kind of changes that Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama are advocating are exactly the wrong kind of change. Any number of focused legislative changes could be enacted to spur the kind of changes in the market that you and I both want to happen. We both agree that everyone who needs health care deserves it and should have access to it. We simply disagree on the best way to make that happen. I'll post again with some of my own ideas on how to get the improvements in the health care market we seek.

Pelosi: Let Them Eat Cake

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi attacked the private health insurance industry during a news conference yesterday. "It's almost immoral what they are doing," Pelosi said to reporters. "Of course they've been immoral all along in how they have treated the people that they insure ... They are the villains in this.” This type of rhetoric is pretty normal for Speaker Pelosi, except that this blurb comes with a particularly toxic form of hypocrisy.

Speaker Pelosi, as a distinguished member of the United States House of Representatives, gets her own private health insurance from the federal government. In fact, it has often been described as gold-plated, top-of-the-line health coverage (in another life, we might call it the Cadillac of Health Insurance Plans). As an excellent example of how wonderful this coverage is, it has provided for literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in testing and treatment for Sen. Edward Kennedy.

So what Speaker Pelosi appears to imply, but stops short of actually saying is, "Let them eat cake," as Marie Antionette, Queen of France during the French Revolution, supposedly stated when told of starving French peasants. Antionette was perfectly clueless to just how absurd her proposition was seeing as bread, let alone cake, cost more than most workers earned. In that spirit, Speaker Pelosi wants the rest of us hoi polloi to starve under government-controlled health care while she and the rest of her Congressional brethren will continue to enjoy virtually limitless private health insurance.