The prospects for reversing course and taking a free-market approach to health care grow dimmer by the day

 James C. Capretta at the American Enterprise Institute has a piece today that, in a just-giving-you-the-facts-folks tone, asserts that the "Affordable" Care Act is about to get expanded and that that expansion will be irreversible.

As usual (think the original farm bill from 1933 that has turned into a cyclical five-year renewal pattern), the expansion is being touted as a necessary emergency measure:

President Biden established the financial parameters of the current bill by calling for a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 response plan. The measure is wide-ranging, with provisions focused on vaccines, testing, and public health, as well as unemployment and economic support. To relieve some of the pressure on families struggling financially, the president wants to increase ACA subsidization of their health insurance premiums. Because the legislation is advertised as an emergency measure, most of the provisions suggested by the president are billed as temporary, including the expanded ACA subsidies.

You'll recall that, in the early days of the ACA rollout, some states stood their ground and resisted Medicaid expansion. The Biden administration says, "We can't have that":

The bill also includes a new incentive for states to expand their Medicaid programs as authorized by the ACA. Thirty-seven states (plus D.C.) already have adopted the expansion. The new lure — a two-year bump in federal matching payments of 5 percentage points — is aimed at encouraging the hold-outs to drop their opposition. CBO estimates this provision would cost another $16 billion over ten years because it would accelerate adoption by a certain number of states.

In the early years of this blog, I used a term that I've largely backed off from. I would refer to the American public as the "cattle masses." But I think it may be time to revive it.

What I meant by it was that, over the course of the last 90 years, people have had a dependency mindset ingrained into them. They have come to see government as in the business of "providing services" and inserting itself into areas that were previously and properly the domain of the private sector.

See if Capretta's observation about "political realities" doesn't fit with this:

As Robert Laszewski has noted, and history confirms, the political pressure to extend the added ACA subsidies beyond 2022 will be immense. Without an extension, many families with incomes above 400 percent of the FPL would see large premium increases in January 2023, as would all households with incomes between 100 and 400 percent of the FPL. The number of people affected could approach 10 million or more.

Republicans in Congress are opposed to the current pandemic response bill in part because of its expense, but that does not mean they will fight an extension of the ACA subsidies when the time comes. The iron law of American politics — that voters are never more enraged as when existing benefits are threatened — will scare them off from taking such a position. Even if a first extension is only for a year or two, the political momentum toward permanence will be clear, and unstoppable.

By the way, this situation points up once again why Donald Trump was completely worthless as president. In his 2016 campaign, he was asked about his health care policy, he responded, "We have to take care of everybody."

What a stupid thing to say.

Who is "we" and what does "take care" mean? He had no clue as to what a viable health care policy would look like.

Now at this point, some readers' feathers may be ruffled. There may be a reaction along the lines of my position being heartless and devoid of compassion for what actual people have to deal with in caring for their health.

This is why it behooves us to look at a bit of history regarding how present arrangements came into being, and the best source for that, in my estimation, is this 2012 Forbes article boy Avik Roy:

Because much of America’s work force was off fighting World War II, the Roosevelt administration feared that the domestic demand for workers would outpace labor supply, leading to a spiral of higher wages and runaway inflation. The 1942 law [the Economic Stabilization Act] mandated wage ceilings for a broad range of occupations, and required federal approval for any changes thereof.

But fringe benefits, such as health insurance, were not covered under the 1942 wage controls. As a result, many employers started offering health benefits as a way around the new federal wage limits. This loophole gained further strength when, in 1943, a federal court held that employer-sponsored health insurance was exempt from taxation.

In the early postwar years, courts and the IRS continued to struggle with how to treat the tax status of health insurance. Then, under President Eisenhower, Congress passed a comprehensive revision of the federal tax code called the Internal Revenue Act of 1954. Section 106(a) of the 1954 Internal Revenue Code officially excluded employer-sponsored health insurance from taxation:

General rule — Except as otherwise provided in this section, gross income of an employee does not include employer-provided coverage under an accident or health plan.

The employer tax exclusion disproportionately benefits high earners

The enshrinement of health insurance as non-taxable income meant that employers and their workers had a huge incentive to divert dollars of salary into dollars of health insurance. For example, a worker who pays federal and state income taxes at a combined rate of 30% will receive $7,000 for every $10,000 his employer provides in gross salary. But the same employee will receive $10,000 in benefits for every $10,000 his employer spends on health insurance—a 43% improvement.

This subsidy is even higher for the highest earners. A Wall Street banker who pays federal and state income taxes of 50% will receive $5,000 for every $10,000 his employer provides in gross salary. But by receiving $10,000 in benefits, he gets a 100% improvement on his taxable income. And because he’s a high earner to begin with, he’s likely to benefit from an especially generous health insurance plan.

This exclusion of employer-sponsored insurance from taxable income—known as the employer tax exclusionfor short—is what ties Americans’ health insurance to their jobs. If you lose your job, and stop paying for health insurance on your own, and then get sick, an insurer is under no obligation to cover you, due to what is now your “pre-existing condition”—and, in rare cases, the insurer may do just that.

This flaw in the setup became more glaring as time went on. What to do about it?

. . . the policy solution to the pre-existing condition problem is to make sure that people own their own insurance policies, and don’t have to change plans when they change or lose their jobs. This is what wonks call continuous coverage.

Put health insurance on the same footing - ownership-wise - as home or auto or life insurance. 

Now, on to the question of why health insurance came to cost so damn much:

The second most important reason why we have a pre-existing condition problem is because insurance is too expensive. And the high cost of insurance is also largely due to the employer tax exclusion.

Because people don’t buy insurance for themselves, they have no incentive to shop for value and buy the plans that meet their needs, without extraneous coverage. In addition, this fourth-party system in which third parties buy insurance on our behalf makes us all insensitive to the cost of our care. We go to the doctor and expect our costs to be covered. We don’t have any reason to think about how much one hospital costs versus the next.

The private insurance market can be divided into three subgroups: the large-group market, for employers with more than 50 workers; the small-group market, for those with 2 to 50 employees; and the individual or non-group market.

The individual market is dysfunctional in America because few Americans use it. Insurers have a hard time building economically viable risk pools with a heterogeneous group that consists of young people,

Economists of all ideological stripes agree that the employer-sponsored system in America is a key reason why health insurance is so costly here. And, in turn, because insurance is so costly, people with low incomes can’t afford it, and go without it for long periods. And if they get sick when they’re uninsured, they have a pre-existing condition.

By the way, in the course of running down the above-excerpted article, I came across a great piece Roy wrote for The Atlantic in 2016, in which he refutes economist Kenneth Arrow's 1963 paper's five objections to putting health care on a free-market footing. Arrow's five objections:

1. Unpredictability. Arrow points out that people's needs for health care are unpredictable, unlike other basic expenses like food and clothing. But while we can skip the occasional meal or sale at Old Navy, our need for health care can be far more urgently necessary.
2. Barriers to entry. Arrow notes that you can't just set up shop on the side of a road and practice medicine: you must have a license to be a physician, and gaining that license requires years of expensive schooling and training. As a result of this constraint on the supply of physicians, there is a constraint on the supply of medical services.
3. The importance of trust. Trust is a key component of the doctor-patient relationship; if a surgeon makes a serious mistake during an operation, for example, the patient may die or become permanently disabled. The patient must trust that the surgeon knows what he's doing and can't test-drive the surgery beforehand.
4. Asymmetrical information. Doctors usually know far more about medicine than do their patients. Therefore, the consumer of medical services (the patient) is at a serious disadvantage relative to the seller (the doctor). Patients are therefore vulnerable to exploitation. In addition, third-party payors of medical bills, such as insurers or the government, are that much more removed from the particulars of a given case and unable to effectively supervise medical practice.

 

1. Idiosyncrasies of payment. Unusually, patients pay for health care after, not before, it is received (that is, if they pay for health care at all). Because patients don't see the bill until after the non-refundable service has been consumed, and because patients are given little information about price and cost, patients and payors are rarely able to shop around for a medical service based on price and value. Compounding this problem is the fact that patients rarely pay for their care directly.

Roy's refutations:

Unpredictability is hardly unique to health care. Indeed, in the five decades since 1963, an entire industry has emerged to address the problem of unpredictability. Think of the extended warranties you're offered when you buy a new television, in case the product stops working. If you worry about being suddenly short of money, or accidentally making a mistake with your checking account, you can buy overdraft protection. If you're afraid of flying, you can buy traveler's insurance. And I haven't even brought up the classical forms of insurance, such as homeowner's insurance, auto insurance, and life insurance.

It's true that we have instituted barriers to entry in the delivery of medical care. It's a problem that Paul Starr documents well in his definitive history of the subject, The Social Transformation of American Medicine. But again, this is hardly a problem that is unique to health care. It's a lot easier to get a medical degree than it is to start an airline or a bank from scratch. We require licensure of lawyers, but Ken Arrow never managed to write a paper advocating for the nationalization of the legal industry. And it's not just doctors and lawyers: in many parts of America, you need a license to become a cat groomer, tattoo artist, or a tree trimmer.

Trust is certainly important in medicine. But trust is also important in many, if not most, commercial transactions. We trust that the manufacturers of car brakes have thoroughly vetted their products. We trust that cruise ship captains are sober when they're on duty. And if we feel our trust has been violated, we trust properly licensed lawyers to sue on our behalf.

As any Megan McArdle fan knows, asymmetries of information are everywhere. The ancient Latin aphorism caveat emptor ("let the buyer beware") has been enshrined in property law for centuries. The idea is that sellers know more about the defects of what they are selling than do buyers. Hence, traditionally, we hold buyers responsible for understanding what they are buying, so long as the sellers haven't engaged in fraudulent misrepresentation. We accept that auto mechanics know more about our car's problems than we do, and we take our business elsewhere if we feel like they've been ripping us off.

When it comes to medicine, the internet has made great strides in reducing asymmetries of information. A parent of a child with a genetic disorder, or Lyme disease, is likely to know as much, if not more, about available treatments than will your garden-variety family practitioner. Patient forums and websites like WebMD give people access to medical knowledge in a way that they didn't have it before.

The last of Arrow's concerns is the most important: that we pay for medical services in a non-standard way, especially through third parties. Free-marketeers have long sought to remedy this problem. On the other hand, Arrow's proposed solution to third-party payment--government-sponsored insurance--makes the problem worse, by further removing patients from the price and value of the care they receive.

To conclude, though, I'd like to get back to Capretta's point that subsidies are here to stay. 

Subsidies. 

Let that term really sink in.

It's a synonym for redistribution. Using government's monopoly on the coercive use of force to take your hard-earned money and give it to someone else to satisfy his or her individual need or want. 

Once your freedom to do as you see fit with your own money is gone, we are looking at a very different kind of country than the one James Madison envisioned. 

Whether that concerns you or not indicates a great deal about the extent to which you have either retained your humanity or decided to be a dull animal willing to be herded into the pen for your daily gruel.  

Education thoughts

I have to give lefties thanks when it's due for bringing things onto my radar that might not otherwise show up.

Today, several rants showed up on my Facebook newsfeed about Betsy DeVos and her views on budget and funding matters for her department. I'd been busy thinking about Kim Foxx and the implosion of the Southern Poverty Law Center and missed coverage of DeVos' appearance before a House committee.

Here's a fairly objective report about it:

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Tuesday defended deep cuts to programs meant to help students and others, including eliminating $18 million to support Special Olympics, while urging Congress to spend millions more on charter schools.

"We are not doing our children any favors when we borrow from their future in order to invest in systems and policies that are not yielding better results," DeVos said in prepared testimony before a House subcommittee considering the Department of Education's budget request for the next fiscal year.
It was the first time that DeVos, a wealthy former Michigan Republican Party chairwoman and school choice advocate, had been called before a Democratic-led panel in the U.S. House to explain President Donald Trump's spending priorities.

While proposing to add $60 million more to charter school funding and create a tax credit for individual and companies that donate to scholarships for private schools, DeVos' budget proposal would still cut more than $7 billion from the Education Department, about 10 percent of its current budget. President Trump proposed a $4.7 trillion overall budget this month with an annual deficit expected to run about $1 trillion.

It calls for eliminating billions in grants to improve student achievement by reducing class sizes and funding professional development for teachers as well as cutting funds dedicated to increasing the use of technology in schools and improving school conditions. In many cases, DeVos said the purpose of the grants has been found to be redundant or ineffective.

In the case of the $17.6 million cut to help fund the Special Olympics, a program designed to help children and adults with disabilities, DeVos suggested it is better supported by philanthropy and added, "We had to make some difficult decisions with this budget." 

A fair number of the FB rants focused on the Special Olympics cuts.  I did not see any of the ranters address her assertion that that enterprise is better supported by philanthropy. And that leads me to a very basic question: Why should the federal government be in the Special Olympics business at all?

Seriously. What the hell does it have to do with the core functions of government outlined in the Constitution?

Which in turn leads to the larger question I've asked for years: What justification is there for a federal Department of Education?

In my coverage of local government for some radio stations and a website, I am constantly amazed at the number of local things that happen - some in the education area, but also in stuff like bridge construction and community corrections staffing - as a result of federal grants.

I suppose there's a tilting-at-windmills element involved in asking why that money couldn't stay in our city and county in the first place and not be run through the DC filter where various layers of bureaucracy take their cut for - well, indeed, for what? I guess to come up with the acronyms for the programs by which they send it back to us. The whole scheme is so entrenched in our way of operating as a nation that no one seriously proposes looking at dismantling the whole apparatus, even though it would be the sensible way to proceed.

With the table thus set, may I recommend a piece by the American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Hess at Forbes entitled "The Problem With Senator Harris' Proposal to Have Uncle Sam Boost Teacher Pay." He says that teachers, many of whom do indeed deserve more pay, ought to look at what really erodes their chances of getting it: good old administrative bloat:

. . . here’s the bizarre dynamic at the heart of the challenge: Teachers have a legitimate gripe about take-home pay, even though school spending has steadily gone up over time. Nationally, after-inflation teacher pay actually declined by two percent from 1992 to 2014, even as real per-pupil spending grew by 27%. This disparity is mostly a product of two realities. The first is that schools have added staff—particularly support staff—at a rate that far outpaces growth in student enrollment. Nationally, between 1992 and 2014, student enrollment grew by 20%, the number of teachers by 29%—and non-teaching staff by 47%. The second is that the cost of teacher pensions and health care have eroded paychecks. Nationally, between 2003 and 2014, even as teacher salaries declined, the per-teacher cost of benefits rocketed from $14,000 to $21,000. That’s $7,000 a year that would, other things equal, be showing up in teacher paychecks.

And federalizing teacher pay is only going to add more bureaucrats to the mix.

The first step in curing post-America's education problems is for someone somewhere to quit taking for granted that the federal gravy train ought to be ridden, since it's there. It would take guts, but everything about returning post-America to its previous identity as the United States of America is going to take guts.

And I daresay that hopping off the gravy train would go a long way to rectify the damage being done by the social-justice jackboots. They'll get weeded out as local taxpayers insist on some accountability. Teachers aren't going to be as likely to stand at the front of the classroom and prattle on about gender fluidity and the global climate being in some kind of trouble if no one is goading them with federal dollars.

And people who personally know Special Olympic athletes and care about them and cheer them on in competition would feel a greater sense of connection, since there would be no faraway filter between their dollars and the games and meets.

Freedom is always elegantly simple compared to any alternative. It also has a far greater human touch.

In 2025, we reach a very eye-opening debt-and-deficit milestone

At LITD, we post a lot about this subject, because the ways in which it's going to bite post-America in the tail end loom large.

For instance, there's this:

On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported on a development students of American governance have known about for years, but politicians have studiously avoided doing anything about: the United States’ debt will cost us more in the near future than our own national defense. 

Exactly when?

Kate Davidson and Daniel Kruger report:

The Congressional Budget Office estimates interest spending will rise to $915 billion by 2028, or 13% of all outlays and 3.1% of gross domestic product. Along that path, the government is expected to pass the following milestones: It will spend more on interest than it spends on Medicaid in 2020; more in 2023 than it spends on national defense; and more in 2025 than it spends on all nondefense discretionary programs combined, from funding for national parks to scientific research, to health care and education, to the court system and infrastructure, according to the CBO.

We can't expect the party newly in the majority in the House of Representatives to face this like grownups. Quite the contrary:

Democrats have no interest whatsoever in paying down the national debt. In fact, it’s exactly the kind of lever they’re looking for to raise taxes should they gain office in the near future. Instead of blaming the actual culprit of our national debt – out of control entitlement spending – Democrats have spent the last decade falsely blaming the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and tax cuts. They’re currently proposing an exponential expansion of our spending on entitlements with programs like “Medicare for All” and free college tuition, which won’t be paid for by anything other than a tremendous middle class tax hike. Democrats want Nordic social democracy; they’re going to have to push Nordic tax rates in order to achieve it.

In fact,  the decidedly un-Madisonian functions of the federal government that have come along since 1935, and certainly 1965, are so entrenched that the cattle-masses won't hear of any kind of restructuring to them.

The United States of America was a great beacon of freedom and testimony to human advancement. Post-America is just another pen for the cattle-masses.

 

 

The real-world political and cultural implications of our lopsided redistribution picture

Check this out:

More than half of Americans receive more money in various types of government transfer payments (Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security) than they pay in federal taxes.

According to a report released this year by the Congressional Budget Office, only the top two income quintiles in the United States pay more in taxes than they receive in government transfers.

 Not surprisingly, the lowest income quintiles receive far more in transfers than they pay in taxes:

In the lowest quintile, households pay only $400 in taxes (as of 2014, the most recent data available) while receiving more than $16,000 in various types of tax-funded transfer payments.

The end result is households in the bottom three quintiles have higher incomes after taxes and transfers than they do before taxes and transfers:

The second-to-top quintile is slightly worse off after taxes and transfers, and the highest quintile is sizably worse off. In other words, the top two income quintiles are subsidizing the bottom three, and the advantage, proportionally speaking, gets larger as income goes down.
The Politics of a Majority on the Dole

The political implications of this are considerable. As Ludwig von Mises once noted, once we get to the point that a majority of the voting population receives more in benefits than it pays in taxes, then voters will demand more and more wealth be transferred to them through government programs. It will then become politically necessary to extract larger and larger amounts of wealth from a minority in order to subsidize the majority.

Market economics will become less and less popular because the voters will have realized they can — in the words of James Bovard — "vote for a living" instead of work for a living.

And the mindset that "the government" is providing the goodies and can continue to do so because it has magic powers becomes more entrenched.

And character traits like initiative and ingenuity dwindle, and post-Americans become more and more like cattle.

Saturday roundup

North Korea:

The must-read on this subject is by Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute at National Review:

Given the hopes that President Trump’s North Korea policy had generated in the roughly 18 months leading up to Singapore, the results were little short of shocking. There is no way to sugarcoat it: Kim Jong-un and the North Korean side ran the table. After one-on-one talks with their most dangerous American adversary in decades and high-level deliberations with the “hard-line” Trump team, the North walked away with a joint communiqué that read almost as if it had been drafted by the DPRK ministry of foreign affairs. 

The dimensions of North Korea’s victory in Singapore only seemed to grow in the following days, with new revelations and declarations by the two sides. What remains unclear at this writing is whether the American side fully comprehends the scale of its losses, and how Washington will eventually try to cope with the setbacks the meeting set in motion.

Kim Jong-un’s first and most obvious victory was the legitimation the summit’s pageantry accorded him and his regime. The Dear Respected Leader was treated as if he were the head of a legitimate state and indeed of a world power rather than the boss of a state-run crime cartel that a U.N. Commission of Inquiry wants to charge with crimes against humanity. In addition to the intrinsic photo-op benefit of a face-to-face with an American president who had traveled halfway across the globe to meet him, the Dear Respected Leader bathed in praise from the leader of the free world: Kim Jong-un was “a talented man who loves his country very much,” “a worthy negotiator,” and a person with whom Trump had “developed a very special bond.” Kim even garnered an invitation to the White House. These incalculably valuable gifts went entirely unreciprocated.

Second: Kim was handed a major victory in terms of what went missing from the summit agenda. For the Kim regime’s security infractions are by no means limited to its domestic nuke and missile projects.

As Professor Bruce Bechtol Jr. details in an important forthcoming book, North Korea is a WMD merchant for Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other elements in the Middle East, supporting and in turn being supported by an unholy alliance of terror agents abroad. Not unrelated, North Korea maintains immense stockpiles of chemical weapons, as Kim Jong-un’s assassination of his half-brother in a Malaysian airport with nerve agents was certainly intended to remind us. North Korea is also actively involved in cyber warfare and cyber crime, as the Sony hacking and the cyber-robbing of numerous overseas banks attest. DPRK security services routinely abduct foreign nationals — from Japan, South Korea, Europe, and maybe even America — as has been documented by HRNK, the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. And then there is the nightmare of human rights under the regime — a catastrophe unparalleled in the modern world — and its commitment to eradicating the Republic of Korea, a U.N. member state.In getting a pass on all these matters in the official record of its deliberations with Washington, North Korea scored a huge plus. 

Third: Regarding the key issues that were mentioned in the joint statement, the U.S. ended up adopting North Korean code language. 

Until (let’s say) yesterday, the U.S. objective in the North Korean nuclear crisis was to induce the DPRK to dismantle its nuclear armaments and the industrial infrastructure for them. Likewise with long-range missiles. Thus the long-standing U.S. formulation of “CVID”: “complete verifiable irreversible denuclearization.”  But because the nuclear quest is central to DPRK strategy and security, the real, existing North Korean state cannot be expected to acquiesce in CVID — ever. Thus its own alternative formulation, with which America concurred in Singapore: “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

In this sly formulation, South Korea would also have to “denuclearize” — even though it possesses no nukes and allows none on its soil. How? By cutting its military ties to its nuclear-armed ally, the U.S. And if one probes the meaning of this formulation further with North Korean interlocutors, one finds that even in this unlikely scenario, the DPRK would treat its “denuclearization” as a question of arms control — as in, if America agrees to drawing down to just 40 nukes, Pyongyang could think about doing the same. The language of “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” ensured that no tangible progress on CVID was promised in the joint statement.

Likewise the communiqué’s curious North Korean–style language about agreeing to build a “peace regime” on the Korean Peninsula. What is the difference between a “peace regime” and plain old “peace,” or, say, a peace treaty among all concerned parties? From the North Korean standpoint, a “peace regime” will not be in place until U.S. troops and defense guarantees are gone — and a peace treaty between North and South may not be part of a “peace regime,” either, because that would require the DPRK to recognize the right of the ROK to exist, a proposition it has always rejected.

Fourth: The North delivered absolutely nothing on the American wish list at the summit and offered only the vaguest of indications about any deliverables in the future. No accounting of the current nuke and missile inventory. No accounting of the defense infrastructure currently mass-producing nukes and missiles. No accounting of WMD sales and services in the Middle East, or cyber-crime activities, or counterfeiting, or drug sales. Not even a small goodwill gesture, such as the release of Japanese abductees or an admission that North Korean agents did indeed kidnap David Sneddon, a young American last seen in China, as many who have followed the case believe.Nor did Team Trump’s much-vaunted timetable for handing over nukes and dismantling WMD facilities emerge. Quite the contrary: As Bruce Klingner of the Heritage Foundation and others have pointed out, the joint language commits North Korea to even less than any of its previous (flagrantly violated) nuclear agreements did: less than its agreements with South Korea in 1991 and 1992; less than its Agreed Framework in 1994; less even than the miserable Joint Statement from the so-called Six-Party Talks in 2005. 

Mona Charen's Ricochet piece, "Historic Snooker," from a few days ago is worth your while as well:

Why is our president smiling? You can always argue that democratic leaders must treat with dictators and even villains of various stripes for the sake of winning a war or securing the peace. You can even argue that sometimes presidents flatter unsavory leaders to build trust and ease tensions. But no historical comparisons can illuminate Trump’s ricochets between hysterical threats (“fire and fury”) and pusillanimous praise (“very talented”) without any substantive change on the part of the dictator. What has changed since the State of the Union address in which Trump honored the memory of Otto Warmbier and detailed the atrocities of the North Korean regime? In gratitude for the exchange of pleasantries, the release of a few hostages, and vague offers of “denuclearization” Trump has made himself Kim’s doormat.

As a matter of substance, the Singapore summit achieved less than nothing. It was a profound defeat for U.S. world influence and for democratic decency, arguably the worst summit outcome since Yalta. Kim promised to consider “denuclearization,” exactly as his father and grandfather had done repeatedly over the past several decades – breaking their promises each and every time. For this puff of cotton candy, Trump agreed to halt “U.S. war games” (using the North Korean term for joint military exercises with South Korea) which Trump himself called provocative! He invited Kim to the White House. He also issued the risible tweet announcing, ahem, peace in our time: “There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea. 

It’s difficult to determine just how stupid Trump thinks the American people are. But there is no question that Trump’s affection for strongmen and thugs, evident before in his praise of the Chinese murderers of Tiananmen, and his warm words for Putin, Duterte, and Xi, has now extended to the worst tyrant/killer on the planet. Trump did far more than overlook Kim’s atrocious human rights abuses, he became Kim’s PR man. “he’s a very talented man and I also learned he loves his country very much.” He has a “great personality” and is “very smart.”

Trump granted Kim’s legitimacy: “His country does love him. His people, you see the fervor. They have a great fervor.”

In 2014, a United Nations report concluded that North Korea’s crimes against humanity “entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.”

What of all that? Trump is understanding, even impressed. “Hey, he’s a tough guy. When you take over a country — a tough country, tough people — and you take it over from your father, I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have. If you can do that at 27 years old, I mean, that’s one in 10,000 that could do that. So he’s a very smart guy. He’s a great negotiator.”

What was Trump’s chief argument in 2016? The U.S. had been the victim of “bad deals,” with other countries and he was the great deal maker. He fingered the Iran deal as the worst deal in history. His defenders will excuse the truckling to Kim as a clever gambit to extract concessions. But Kim has offered absolutely nothing. All of the concessions have come from the United States, including the most crucial one – we’ve put ourselves on the same moral plane as North Korea. That’s what Make America Great Again has achieved.

The Border Crisis:

Heather MacDonald at City Journal gets to the heart of the matter:

Underlying this episode were several cardinal principles of left-wing activism: that favored victim groups must never be held responsible for their actions, and that policy should be made based on immediate claims of need, with no regard to long-term consequences. The reigning assumption during the family-separation meltdown was that the adults who brought children with them across the border had no responsibility for their subsequent plight. The only actor with agency was the federal government; it alone bore the blame for alien minors being placed in detention facilities. Yet the but-for cause of the child separation was the adult’s decision to cross illegally into the U.S., child in tow. If you don’t want to be separated from your or another person’s child, don’t cross the border illegally. Likewise, any whisper of immigration enforcement inside the border is inevitably greeted with cries that such enforcement would cause illegal aliens to be “fearful.” If you don’t want to fear deportation, don’t assume the risk of deportation, however slight that risk may be, by illegal entry.

Obeying the law, however, is something that must never be demanded of politically correct victims. If lawbreaking carries negative consequences, the fault lies with the legal system, not with an individual’s decision to break the law in the first place.

This principle is at work in the ongoing attacks on the criminal-justice system as well: the overrepresentation of blacks in prison is attributed to allegedly racist actors and institutions, not to lawbreaking by the criminals. Non-legal forms of distress are also covered by the no-agency rule. If single mothers experience elevated rates of poverty, the fault lies with a heartless welfare system, not with their decision to conceive a child out-of-wedlock. The father, of course, is as good as nonexistent, in the eyes of the single-mother welfare lobby. If teen mothers are stressed out, the problem lies in the absence of daycare centers in high schools.

The “progressive” solution to these dilemmas is to confer an immediate benefit on the alleged victim that will alleviate the problem in the short term, perverse incentives be damned. Illegal aliens with children must be exempt from immigration rules. The likelihood that such a policy will encourage more illegal aliens to come is out of sight, out of mind (if not covertly viewed as an affirmative good). If having more out-of-wedlock children puts a strain on a single mother’s welfare check and food stamps, then the government should increase the allotment to reflect the additional births. If that single mother and her children show up at a shelter claiming homelessness, give them an apartment. If such free housing encourages more single mothers to flood the shelter system, contract for more apartments.

Also check out Rich Lowry's latest column, entitled "Dems' True Goal Is To End All Border Enforcement," which has appeared in the New York Post as well as Jewish World Review.

Post-America's Crumbling Civility:

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders tweets about her attempt to patronize a restaurant:

Last night I was told by the owner of Red Hen in Lexington, VA to leave because I work for @POTUS and I politely left. Her actions say far more about her than about me. I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so

A Facebook friend of mine (he's a buddy in the offline world as well) reports that our societal brittleness has reduced his longstanding friendships by one:

Well today it happened. I was called by one of my old friends "one of the biggest pieces of shit" that he knows, and asked me to unfriend him.
Why you may ask?
For presenting and defending conservative points of view.

Sad times my brethren, sad times. 

You probably know about Nikki Haley announcing that the US was pulling out of the UN Human Rights Council. (It probably should have been noted and celebrated here at LITD; it's been a busy week.) Since then, she's had the opportunity to demonstrate why it was an excellent move. 

Future first female POTUS Nikki Haley is exactly right. In the same week that saw Ms. Haley deliver a blistering “Dear John” letter to the UN “Human Rights” Council, the alleged watchdog group also had the pleasure of enduring her entirely justified clapback wrath at their new report scrutinizing US poverty. The “Human Rights” Council, which includes Afghanistan, China, and Cuba, condemned the US for lowering tax rates on rich people and curbing certain programs for poor citizens. This, despite the fact noted by Haley that the US currently has its lowest unemployment rate in decades.

The Council, which includes Iraq, Pakistan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was set to present the report Friday, which was drafted by Philip Alston, a man who left his home country of Australia and took a high-paying seat as a law professor in the United States of America at New York University. Haley lambasted the apparently non-satirical report as “misleading and politically motivated” (also, water is wet).

Haley added:

It is patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America. In our country, the President, Members of Congress, Governors, Mayors, and City Council members actively engage on poverty issues every day. Compare that to the many countries around the world, whose governments knowingly abuse human rights and cause pain and suffering.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, a socialist democratic socialist, defended the report against his own country, calling the scathing examination “totally appropriate”. Specifically, he highlighted the 40 million who still live in poverty* (defined by the Census Bureau’s mobile goalpost as $25,100/yr for a family of four--roughly the average salary of Poland or Greece) and the 30 million who do not carry health insurance since they are no longer forced by the federal government to buy any (this of course leaves poor citizens with no medical recourse other than the full coverage already provided for them by Medicaid). Sen. Sanders’ criticism of US wages was a scorching indictment of the nation listed as having the 2nd highest average salaries in the world after Luxembourg according to the OECD. No doubt this will only bolster the credibility of the findings of the “Human Rights” Council, which includes Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, and Venezuela. 

Another must-read this weekend: Kristen Soltis Anderson's Washington Examiner piece, "The Four Species of Beltway Republicans."  She categorizes them as the Trump enthusiasts, the establishmentarians, the internal opposition, and the remnant.

 

 

More than ever, victimhood-mongering is all the Left is offering America

Two opinion pieces are currently generating a lot of buzz.

One is Jessica Valenti's New York Times op-ed on how "real feminists" need to prevent conservatives from "appropriating" feminism.

Particularly rich is this assertion:

Now we have a different task: protecting the movement against conservative appropriation. We’ve come too far to allow the right to water down a well-defined movement for its own cynical gains. Because if feminism means applauding ‘anything a woman does’—even hurting other women—then it means nothing.

Would she care to attempt to justify the role hijab-wearing Muslim Linda Sarsour played in organizing and leading the pussy-hat march?

The message is pretty obvious: real feminism of necessity implies buying into the entire "progressive" worldview. It's also a tacit acknowledgement that real feminism is about raging with resentment that nature equipped the female gender to be the the half of the human species in which newly-conceived human beings gestate. That's what is meant by statements such as Valenti's characterization of conservatives having an "abysmal record on women's rights."

She cites the examples of Gina Haspel becoming CIA chief, trotting out the very tired and banal "torture" red herring, proving the above point that this is really about signing on to the entire leftist agenda, and Suzanne Scott's appointment as Fox News head.

Then there is Indy Star reporter Justin Mack's column  entitled "NFL New National Anthem Kneeling  Policy Enslaves Black Players, Fans."

Let's start with that. A person becomes an NFL player, an employee of a team which, by extension, adheres to certain league rules, of his own volition. In fact, a person has to want it pretty badly. The odds of making it are daunting, and the work of honing one's skills through high school and college is hard. So no one is forced at gunpoint to to become an NFL player. And it's a universal given that a person agreeing to be employed anywhere agrees to the conditions attendant to that employment.

Then there are two particularly offensive phrases in Mack's piece that require some examination: "The only thing missing from that directive is the word 'boy' at the end," and "You can have fame and riches too if you fall in line."

Look, pal, the directive applies to all NFL players. It's colorblind. The only way to racialize it is to say, as Mack pretty explicitly is, that it targets blacks because there is some set of special circumstances surrounding them.

And that's a lot of hooey.

Heather MacDonald has done the exhaustive research that rebuts the notion that there is some kind of systemic prejudice against blacks on the part of America's law-enforcement entities:

Who is killing these black victims? Not whites, and not the police, but other blacks. In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous, according to the Washington Post. The Post categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings as “unarmed.” That classification masks assaults against officers and violent resistance to arrest. Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer. Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population. That 18.5 ratio undoubtedly worsened in 2016, in light of the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers—committed vastly and disproportionately by black males. Among all homicide suspects whose race was known, white killers of blacks numbered only 243. 

Violent crime has now risen by a significant amount for two consecutive years. The total number of violent crimes rose 4.1 percent in 2016, and estimated homicides rose 8.6 percent. In 2015, violent crime rose by nearly 4 percent and estimated homicides by nearly 11 percent. The last time violence rose two years in a row was 2005–06.  The reason for the current increase is what I have called the Ferguson Effect. Cops are backing off of proactive policing in high-crime minority neighborhoods, and criminals are becoming emboldened. Having been told incessantly by politicians, the media, and Black Lives Matter activists that they are bigoted for getting out of their cars and questioning someone loitering on a known drug corner at 2 AM, many officers are instead just driving by. Such stops are discretionary; cops don’t have to make them. And when political elites demonize the police for just such proactive policing, we shouldn’t be surprised when cops get the message and do less of it. Seventy-two percent of the nation’s officers say that they and their colleagues are now less willing to stop and question suspicious persons, according to a Pew Research poll released in January. The reason is the persistent anti-cop climate. 

Four studies came out in 2016 alone rebutting the charge that police shootings are racially biased. If there is a bias in police shootings, it works in favor of blacks and against whites. That truth has not stopped the ongoing demonization of the police—including, now, by many of the country’s ignorant professional athletes. The toll will be felt, as always, in the inner city, by the thousands of law-abiding people there who desperately want more police protection. 

The whole leftist enterprise is about stripping the individual of all agency.

The overlords who derived their power from an all-pervasive state want to reduce people to the level of cattle, and they get a lot of help from the glib and rage-filled denizens of the self-appointed cultural arbiters of post-America.

They talk a good game about "empowerment," but they will brook no chiming in from those who point out that all this indignation is about keeping blacks, women and any other group that wears its demographic classification like a badge utterly dependent on them for some kind of collective "liberation" that is always just beyond reach.

Republican failure to repeal the "A"CA - first thoughts

A lot of layers of lessons here.

I'll start with a lesson that applies to a number of other issues, particularly how to deal with rogue states' nuclear ambitions. I've said before that the reason we're in such a pickle regarding North Korea and Iran is that no one mustered the foresight decades ago to take requisite preventive measures.  This applies to the health care situation as well. Full-throated defenses of a free-market approach should have been coming from every Republican legislator in both houses of Congress in the early 1990s in response to Hillary Clinton's attempt to steer policy toward a collectivist bias. I put a fair amount of the blame in Bush 43, who readily signed on to the expansion of Medicare to include prescription drugs. Collectivists, including then-presidential candidate Obama, held the megaphone, since arguments in favor of liberty, choice and competition were relegated to the op-ed pages and some wonky journals. As with the line rogue regimes eventually cross (they become nuclear powers, and there's no going back), once this degree of government involvement in health care became law and got a few years of application under its belt, turnaround faded to the status of an improbability.

Another level it behooves us to look at is the aforementioned wonkery. I'm all for everyone and anyone being as knowledgeable as possible, certainly about the details of health care. And I acknowledge that, regarding health care, that's a pretty daunting task. Everybody concedes that health care policy gets complicated real fast.

But why?

That is not really so complex. The progressive mindset that started infecting American thought just about a century ago - the idea that modern, urban, industrialized life had become too complicated to be addressed by the Constitution and required a battery of specialists and experts in various fields to staff executive-branch agencies to regulate various aspects of life - flourished to the degree that FDR's ridiculous 1944 "second bill of rights," asserting such impossibilities as freedom from want, a guarantee of a job, and, yes, guarantee of health care, found a disturbingly large applauding segment of the public. Then of course came 1965 and the two major programs which have sprawled and grown more insolvent every day since their enactment: Medicare and Medicaid.

So the idea that government was supposed to "do things for us" and "provide services" came to be seen as innocuous and as self-evident as the actual governmental function of keeping us safe.

I'll say it again: freedom is elegantly simple. Government involvement in any aspect of life is the factor that complicates it.

It comes to change the thinking of private-sector players as well. Health insurance companies started talking to their customers in a markedly different way than those in the auto-insurance or home-insurance business, in which the monthly premium is clearly intended to mitigate the risk of unplanned occurrences.

Then there is the inexorable collapse of the "A"CA. Failure to repeal guarantees that millions of Americans will experience a moment of unprecedented shock at some point in the not-all-that-distant future, and waiting to fill the vacuum will be full-fledged socialism:

The bill for Obamacare’s unworkable financial scheme is already overdue, with health care companies fleeing the marketplace and that will leave 40 percent of the nation’s counties with only a single Obamacare-compliant insurer in 2018. Waiting in the wings for the moment of national health-care crisis is Bernie Sanders with Medicare for All, his euphemism for socialized medicine. At an estimated cost of $32 trillion over a decade, Bernie’s remedy would attempt to cure cancer with a draught of hemlock.

Then there is the question of why the Republican Party, even as it enjoys control of all three branches of the federal government and a majority of state governments, has shown that it is not the repository of the kind of clarity needed to provide a path back to freedom.

For that, I don't have a handy, paragraph-sized answer. I suppose a lot of it is all the factors involved in achieving political victory and just getting one's tail end to Washington: the fundraising, the kind of networking and schmoozing that must be undertaken, the risk of being vilified for speaking too plainly in a hostile media climate as society becomes more brittle.

It's a grim juncture at which we find ourselves, but there is no alternative to continuing to defend freedom. If it's foremost among one's values, one can't live with oneself if the only other voices in the national conversation food fight are championing tyranny and dehumanization.

When the cattle-masses get bored, they cook up identity-politics and junk-science nonsense

Hackneyed adages endure for a reason. Their lack of dependency on circumstantial factors imparts to them a reliability that allows us to quickly size up situations in which we sense their application.

Take idle hands being the devil's workshop. Evidence for this one's veracity abounds.

George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowen senses that, in recent decades, America has become a society of idle hands. His new book, The Complacent Class, fleshes out his observation, as does an interview with the American Enterprise Institute's James Pethokoukis:

PETHOKOUKIS: Instead of calling it “The Complacent Class” you could have titled it “The Stagnant Society.” I think your thesis is, since the 1980s, American society has become less dynamic, more risk averse. We’re not starting businesses, we’re not moving, and this is a bad thing. Is that about right?

COWEN: Yes, it’s a bad thing but it’s quite tricky. Mostly, we’re doing this because it makes us happier. Life is safer, more convenient and more comfortable – no one wants to say those are bad things. But, at the margin, if you don’t take enough risk, there does come a time where you start moving backwards, can’t pay the bills, or have decent governance. So over the longer run it’s a bad thing.

What are the key data points you think which would support the idea? First, that we’re a complacent society.

Most of the book looks at different ways in which change in the United States has slowed down. So, for instance, we move across state lines at much lower rates, about 50% lower, that we used to, we Medicaid ourselves much more frequently, we’re not so willing to let our children even play outside, there are schools that have banned the game of tag because it’s too violent, startups are a percentage of overall businesses activity, our DOW, rates of productivity growth, innovation, as we best can measure them – they too are down, our physical infrastructure has barely progressed in many parts of the country, it’s gotten worse, travelling is harder than it used to be.

So we’re in this world where there’s one wonderful, souped up sector – information technology — but we’re using those games to just slow down change in so many other parts of our world.

Cowen sees plenty of political-level culpability across the spectrum for abetting of this phenomenon:

Looking at what’s happening in Washington I don’t sense that policy-makers are looking at the world the way that you’re looking at it right now.

Washington is a mix of the most foolish place in our country, but actually the part with the deepest understanding. It’s the one part of America that gets why it’s so hard to change things. I agree the campaigns were very backward looking. When Trump talked about infrastructure it was repairing roads, tunnels, and bridges – an idea I’m not against by the way – but when that’s the entirety of your positive vision I think that’s quite sad.
And now we see the Republicans controlling the major branches of government and not actually being able to do much with that. And I think that too is reflecting just how deep and far reaching the stasis is. The government is often where some problems show up first.

So we need some sort of external shock. It’s not that we necessarily want it, but it’s just this coming that will shake us up out of places. Is Trump that shock?

Trump is the beginning of that shock, but Trump is not the end of the process. My view is not that Trump will bring fascism, but he will be too weak of a president and he will be at another step along an ongoing deterioration of governance in this country. He’s not well informed, he does not know how to work the levers of power, and this country’s not solving its problems under him.

So yes, it seems that Trump has won that race and arrived in first place as the disruptive shock. But it’s also, oddly, a presidency of stasis. The disruption is that you cannot refuse to solve your problems for ever; sooner or later those problems will get their revenge on you. 

I sometimes take flack in the comment threads here at LITD for my use of the term "cattle-masses" to describe the swath of American society that has embraced the complacency on which Cowen focuses. The accusation is that it takes an unduly dim view of this magnificent species of which we're members. But is there not a sort of abnegation of the full depth and breadth of our humanity at work in the acceptance of the state's having become a provider of services, the entity that addresses the big questions of the human condition, such as sickness, old age and economic security?

(And allow me here the liberty of a brief digression. Speaking of AEI economists, I am deeply dismayed at the turn Pethokoukis's college James C. Capretta has taken lately. He is the Institute's specialist in health-care economics, and his last few columns, as the abortive Paul Ryan "repeal-and-replace" plan was crafted and then yanked for lack of votes, has been touting statist proposals of the rankest sort: incentivizing people to keep insurance coverage consistent (Mr, Capretta, it is not the government's role  to be "incentivizing" anything), automatic enrollment into insurance, more subisidization, and "compromise" on Medicaid. Someone needs to stand at the front door of the AEI building and waylay Mr. Capretta's Kool-Aid supplier.)

And consider what else has been morphing and metastasizing during the same time frame in which Professor Cowen's complacency has gained its foothold: identity politics and junk science.

They've been morphing and metastasizing to the point at which we get this kind of infantile confluence:

 Witness the upcoming March for Science, scheduled for Saturday, April 22. This also happens to be Earth Day, which is nice enough — and hey, who could object to a good old-fashioned rah-rah session for science? I, for one, always welcome a refresher on string theory, or the confounding conflict between the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, or that long, troubling episode in our planet’s history when a few impertinent continents apparently traipsed all the way over to the other side of the globe and no one was there to panic about it.

Alas, this March for Science does not appear to be largely about science, or about people who know a great deal about science, or even about people who want to know a great deal about science. (It would be kind of fun, in fact, to quiz earnest potential attendees about the details of the scientific method, or whether Johannes Kepler should finally win that well-deserved Oscar.) Keeping up with today’s hottest trends, the March for Science has wrapped itself in identity politics, cranked up the oven to “scorch,” and potentially set things on track to unceremoniously collapse into one giant intersectional soufflé.

The troubles brewing within the March for Science surfaced in January, marked by a now-deleted official tweet: “Colonization, racism, immigration, native rights, sexism, ableism, queer-, trans-, intersex-phobia, & econ justice are scientific issues.” Since then, the addled march has torn through four different diversity statements, shellacked by critics on both sides. (Harvard’s Steven Pinker bashed the march’s “anti-science PC/identity politics/hard-left rhetoric,” while others complained the statement didn’t go far enough.) The march’s latest set of “Diversity and Inclusion Principles,” when paired with its more shame-faced and apologetic sibling, the “Statement on Diversity and Inclusion,” tops out at over 1,000 words.

You might think that this amounts to a protest march protesting too much. But the hits keep coming. When Bill Nye, the children’s TV personality-turned-science-advocate, was announced as an honorary chair of the march last week, critics bemoaned his status as a white male. Oddly, no one seemed particularly riled up about the fact that Nye is not an actual “scientist” at all. “I was born a dorky white guy who became an engineer,” Nye told BuzzFeed, reportedly “baffled” at the brouhaha. “I’m playing the hand I was dealt. We can’t — this march can’t solve every problem at once.” 

But “science,” at least according to the new dogma, can. Since the election of Donald Trump, a trendy new sign has popped up in yards across America: “In this house, we believe black lives matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal, science is real, love is love, kindness is everything.” People of various political leanings could talk for hours about some of the tenets of the sign — which specific “women’s rights” are we referring to, for instance? — but the “science is real” line confuses me every time.

What, after all, can it mean? Most likely, the line refers to anthropogenic climate change, and a beef with the Trump administration’s approach to that contentious issue. But if that’s the case, why not just have your sign say “Manmade climate change is real”? There’s clearly something else afoot, and it strikes deep into the heart of progressive politics today. 

Could this kind of nonsense have occurred in, say, the 1940s - let alone the 1870s, not to even mention the 1660s?

No, we had a grasp on the parameters of reality that has come to elude us.

And a vicious-cycle trend seems to be at play here. The less robust and vital our God-given ingenuity, the more we cook up ridiculous fantasies that further dull it.

I think Pethokoukis and Cowen are onto something with the notion of a shock. I don't know what form it will take, and neither does anybody else. Let us just hope that it's not something so rude that it takes from us the benefits of the material advancements of the last few decades.

The information revolution may not have had the impact of the discovery of electricity or the invention of the internal combustion engine, but the fruits of those advancements come to a screaming halt without the IT overlay which now drives it.

It would be good for the whole thing to not go kablooey in the course of our learning our lessons about human nature and how reality works.