Category: Current Events

People respond to incentives. Often governments attempt to change the inputs of an existing situation to get a certain output without anticipating that people will respond differently to the new inputs. I find this most consistently and amusingly illustrated with tax policy.

Continue reading Everyone’s A Tax Evader

In the wake of Michigan’s new Right-To-Work law, which was passed in spite of violent Tea Party – I mean union – protests, the usual suspects have been trotting out statistics that make unions look either very good or very bad. Conservatives and liberals tend to like or dislike unions for respective ideological reasons, but they both like to throw out stats to “prove” that their position also happens to be best for everyone.

Conservatives claim that RTW states have lower unemployment and create more jobs. Liberals claim that workers in RTW states have lower wages and fewer benefits. These claims actually might not be at odds; if it’s true that unions collude to raise their own wages to protect their jobs and price others out of the market, it would make sense that the more pro-union states might have higher-paying jobs, but fewer of them. So are both sides right? Or are they both wrong?

Continue reading Dueling Labor Union Statistics

Breaking the Taboo is a new hour-long documentary arguing that the War on Drugs has failed, and it’s streaming on YouTube for free. It’s a high-quality production produced by Richard Branson’s son and narrated by Morgan Freeman, and it features many interviews with former heads of states around the world.

Continue reading The War on the War on Drugs

It’s been a bad week for Republican reformers. First, Justin Amash and Tim Huelskamp were silently kicked out of their House committees. Second, young staffer Derek Khanna was fired (Khanna authored the brave copyright reform memo that I praised along with thousands of others before it was swiftly deleted.)

Some say the conservative committee members were booted for being too far to the right at a time when Republican leadership is trying to compromise on a budget deal. But Amash seems to think it’s because the leadership is more willing to raise taxes than cut the bloated defense budget. If Amash came too close to upsetting the special interests of defense, maybe Khanna came too close to upsetting the special interests of entertainment.

It’s nothing new to see the “party of small government” rejecting attempts by its members to actually turn it in small government directions. But if the GOP needs to become more “moderate/left” to survive, it’s especially ironic that the leadership only seems to be toying with the big-government policies to their left (ex. raising taxes) while rejecting all of the small-government opportunities (ex. cutting defense spending).

Republicans don’t have to embrace taxes and entitlements to attract more voters. Cutting the defense budget, ending the war on drugs, reforming copyright, restoring civil liberties – these are all “small-government” policies that are popular with both liberals and independents. The GOP could embrace these libertarian views and reduce their many hypocrisies while broadening their appeal without compromising their ideals; there are may libertarian-leaning conservatives trying to do just that.

But that requires the GOP to reject the special interests that foster those hypocrisies, and they still seem unwilling to do so. It’s not surprising, but I think it’s a sad and ultimately self-defeating strategy. The battle is yet young, however, and if the reformers’ goals are as self-evident as I think they are, I have hope they will eventually succeed.

There is a narrative of Obamacare as a triumphant reform of America’s medical system, engineered by the smartest technocrats in the country to create better and more affordable healthcare for us all. The obstructionist denialism of the Republicans was dealt a crippling blow with the Supreme Court’s upholding of the individual mandate last summer, and the 2012 elections finished them off. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is now free to work its glorious magic on the citizenry.

There is another narrative of Obamacare as a hodge-podge, cobbled-together, bureaucratic-bloated, corporate-handout monstrosity that was just barely sufficiently greased around the edges to buy enough votes to pass an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress. The overly ambitious assumptions and interventions supporting this precarious nightmare began cracking and unraveling almost immediately, and are fast accelerating towards a tipping point that will precipitate the inevitable collapse of this inherently unstable behemoth.

Even if every exquisite detail of the 906-page master plan was executed as perfectly as comic economist Jonathan Gruber imagined, my bias still expected the results to be less satisfactory than advertised. The scope of the overhaul was too broad and too deep; the entanglement of the new bureaucracy was too complex; the manipulated inputs into the CBO’s rosy cost analysis projections were too contrived. But, of course, as with any exceedingly large enterprise, the plan has not even proceeded according to plan.

The Early Cracking

Continue reading Is Obamacare Already Beginning To Collapse?

Well, it’s been two weeks since the Petraeus scandal broke, and the dust seems to be settling as we haven’t had any new shocking plot twists for a few consecutive days. I believe that the real scandal is not what the FBI uncovered (that the head of the CIA was having an affair with his biographer), but how they uncovered it (by poking through private emails with no warrant or even a real suspicion of a crime).

Continue reading Why I Think It Should Be Hard For The Government To Read My Email

Hamas and Israel are at it again, launching hundreds of rockets and airstrikes at each other. Typical news articles reporting on the latest developments say that around 139 Palestinians have died so far while around 5 Israelis have died. This leads to typical comments like “death totals 130 to 5… sounds like a legit war…”

These lopsided death tolls might lead one to believe the Israel is far more aggressive than Hamas, but this is not necessarily true. The same article says that Hamas has launched about 1,400 rockets into Israel, while Israel has carried out about 1,500 airstrikes into the Gaza Strip – roughly equivalent numbers. The reason the death toll is so striking is that Hamas basically sucks at attacking Israelis, and Israel is much better at defending itself.

Continue reading Why the Israeli-Hamas Death Toll Is So Lopsided