This is Why We Can't Have Ni... Well, Things

Brandon, don't go!

I can tell from the tone--particularly the troll comments--that you guys don't want me here. I presented things pretty modestly, straightforwardly, and earnestly--i.e. in a fashion unbefitting a troll--and you jumped down my throat. Clearly, this site is not meant to be a place for exchange--more like group masturbation, if you want my honest opinion--so I won't post here again. Best of luck.

Listen here, commentariot. We've worked long and hard to get a troll here. Brandon may have sucked, but for one brief comment thread, he was ours. Next time someone comes around telling us that OUR arguments are poorly defended and that WE are biased, you'd better find a way to make him repeat himself, loudly and often. None of this making him take his bawl and go home.

I'm not sure why Brandon thinks we don't want this place to be an exchange. We would love to exchange insults with him any time. Oh well, back to the self pleasuring. Anyone got a tissue?

Are You Gonna Finish that Kidney?

The Gift of Life

Virginia Postrel has a terrific piece on organ donation in our pages. Long story short: don't count on cadaver organs, because there aren't enough of them, and organs from living donors last longer. We need quasi-market mechanisms to attract more living donors.

Yes. Yes we do need to start paying people money for their organs.

I confess, I don't understand the ban on paying for organs. We let eighteen year olds decide to go to Iraq in order to eventually pay for college, but we won't let a thirty-five year old sell off a part of himself that he probably won't need, and with which he could save a life?

I confess, I do not understand how someone could not understand a ban on BUYING KIDNEYS FROM DESPERATE PEOPLE! Oh ho, you may say, what if they're not desperate? Well, I'm gonna have to go ahead and surmise that people either donate kidneys out of charity (no money down!) or desperation (hey ma! We get to eat MEAT tonight! God bless the Slice and Sell!).

Oh wait, everyone's a rational actor and the only form of coercion is deceit money hunger sex power guilt social pressure the government and its evil evil threats of ripping out your organs so you can eat force.

Now if you'll excuse me, I really want an X-Box 360 so I'm going to sell my liver.

Nutpicking

Funny.

Jozef July 13, 2009 7:28 PM
...
As for "villany", I read the incoherent voice of the mob on the internet - places like seekingAlpha and RollingStone are given over to halfwits peddling anti-Jew Goldman Sachs conspiracy stories (Matt Taibi [sic] is an arab by the way - I can't help think that doesn't influence his narrative, that and all the ecstasy and cryst meth he's done)
...

Is Taibi [sic] fatty beast? IT IS MYSTERY.
These are the people who agree with you, Megan.
(And no, he doesn't finish his sentence.)

What Rhymes With Villian?

don't blame the rich, it was the one armed man!

The Price of Innovation:

Two pieces worth reading on health care innovation. First, Glenn Reynolds on his family:

*irrational gigglefit*
Next,

Veterinary spending is rising just about in line with human medical spending. Kudoes [sic] to AEI for publishing a graph that seriously undercuts one of the major conservative arguments about health care: that the main problem is consumers who don't bear their own costs. Veterinary spending is subject to few of the perversities that either left or right suppose to be the main problems afflicting health care spending. Consumers pay full frieght [sic] most of the time. They are price sensitive, and will let the patient die if keeping him alive costs too much. There is no adverse selection. There is no free riding on mandatory care. Government regulation is minimal. Malpractice suits are minimal, and have low payouts. So why is vet spending rising along with human spending?

I think my brain just broke. I... yep, broken. I try to begin to respond to the previous, but it's an infinite loop of uhhhhh, what?

Villains of the Piece:

We all know how this goes; Megan gets roundly mocked for writing something abjectly stupid, only recognizes she's getting attention for it, and tries to make it worse so she'll get more attention.

A woman gets into her car, and waves at her husband, who is crossing in front of the car. Pressing the pedal to the ground, she puts it into gear . . . and steams forward at full speed, crushing him against the wall of the garage.
Is she a villain? It rather depends, doesn't it?
Scenario #1: she's angry because she found out he had an affair, and decided to kill him "by accident" for the insurance. Scenario #2: she thought she was stepping on the brake, and stepped on the gas instead. The former is a crime, the latter a tragedy. But you can't divine which simply by knowing that something terrible happened.

So even if Goldman Sachs was in the driver's seat to some degree, it didn't mean to speed forward and crush the economy in the blink of 8-10 years, their collective foots slipped. And the personal wealth accrued along the way is like an insurance payout. Those brokers loved the economy, they need those townhouses and vacation homes and mansions in the woods to grieve in dignity and privacy.

Ritholtz is not, in many of these cases, describing villainy. He is describing "being wrong", which is not a crime, thank God. Villainy involves people who know, or should have known, that what they were doing was likely to lead to the awful results.
I mean, you can quibble and say "You should have known that that was the gas pedal", and indeed you should have, but if, for whatever reason, your senses deluded you, you're not a villain. No, even if you were thinking about the presentation you had due at work--or how angry you were at your husband for having a fling with his secreatary [sic]--rather than concentrating on your driving.

I'm embarrassed for Megan, this is so weak. I can't believe she put this up. Oops, their collective foots slipped for about a decade? What the fuck?

When something is common enough, I think it definitionally isn't villanous [sic].

Hi, genocide, racism, antisemitism, physical abuse in a family, and fucking etcetera.

I have no reason to love Goldman Sachs, and I don't. I didn't like them when I was interviewing for investment banking internships in business school (worst interviews by far were sponsored by Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns).

How about when they sponsored those Atlantic salons, Megan? (No, I don't know that they did so, specifically, but the odds aren't terrible.)

But while it is irksome that bankers thought they were geniuses who had somehow magically made risk disappear, while it is vexing that they made so much money taking so many systemic risks, none of these things are actually illegal.

... because Megan says so.

And while their arrogance and greed were certainly a necessary precondition of the crisis, they were not in any way sufficient. They needed cooperation from moronic Asian savers who lent them the money, regulators who thought--just as the bankers did--that they'd gotten too smart to have a financial crisis--and homeowners who had come to view homeownership as a way to get rich without working. Everyone who said "renting is throwing your money away" is a guilty party in this. And that's . . . almost everyone.

Everyone who bought a house is EVILBADGRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRYOUKILLEDMYBROTHER!!!!!!!! The bankers are blameless, the... Asians forced the executive class to do these things and become fabulously wealthy and enjoy a life of unimagined luxury and privilege. How can you not just pity these poor used bankers, you heartless bastards?
Stopped clock moment:

Oh, the crisis has produced villains, or rather, exposed them. Bernie Madoff, Allen Stanford, et al are genuine human sewage as far as I can tell. But the crisis would have gone on just the same without Bernie Madoff, and Bernie Madoff would have gone on just the same without the housing bubble. At any given time, there is a certain amount of garden variety financial fraud going on. It tends to emerge in financial crisis not because they're actually connected, but because falling asset values expose the con.

And yet these are the only people you've ever expressed any desire to punish in any way. Isn't ownership of a completely refurbished brownstone on 74th off the park punishment enough?

But I think the case needs to be a leetle bit tighter than the fact that bankers make stupid decisions, bankers get paid a lot, and we just had a financial crisis. I'd like to see someone make the case that they did things that were actively, knowingly, illegal and morally turpitudinous, rather than simply totally moronic. Because with the total moron thing, they had an awful lot of company.

Yeah, all these morons did was manage to personally enrich themselves while doing massive financial harm to millions of people, how could anyone think they knew what they were doing?
Dear David Bradley, can't you do better than this? You really think this is worth what you're paying? There are far better liars and cheerleaders for the rich in the world.

(ok, ok, quiet update in response to an email. yes, the [sic] in the title was intentional, but it's ok if you don't believe me, I'll make a genuine mistake soon enough.)

So

I've been thinking of making a "worst of" post with a permanent link over in the left hand column, any suggestions?
Don't worry about it being too obvious to mention, I try my hardest to forget what Megan has written after mocking it.
Think spectacularly wrong and/or spectacularly shitty, like Dude, where's my recession or Jail the Jena 6.

Update:

Lots of suggestions, thanks all. My aim is a non-exhaustive list of the truly, unambiguously cringe worthy moments during our watch for relative newcomers to peruse. The 2x4 has to be mentioned despite predating us, of course, and I'm surprised no one has brought up "people who get something wrong therefore know more about the topic", yet. I'll take a week or two to build a list and throw up something preliminary for further input then.

More on Tyibee

Hooh, hoo, fun:

Megan McArdle (Replying to: NattyB) July 10, 2009 6:37 PM

As I say, I don't think that the message excuses incoherence on the details. I don't disagree that the banks need to be taken down about eighteen pegs. But I don't think that Taibbi's the man to do it. Or if he is, he's carefully hiding it.

To which I say:

Nutella on Toast (Replying to: Megan McArdle) July 12, 2009 2:48 PM

Cool, so how about making a single post about how they need to be taken down any pegs at all, let alone a dozen and a half.

Criticize them just once, place. I dare you.

God I wish that my back felt better so that I could go outside an play. Trawling for dumbass on the internet has gotten so dull. Is there any other place where the more fishermen there are, the larger everyone's catch is?

Cottage Cheese

Not that I've been adding anything here recently, & there's no such thing as bad publicity (especially w/ a link) but

There’s an entire cottage industry dedicated to picking apart her posts and they do a pretty good job.

let's name some names here, people! Not merely FMM, but fellow cottage snark industrialist Susan of Texas.

At least this guy was kind enough to link.

Ted, here is a blog that chronicles McMegan’s insipidness.

Do read both the linked threads. Then no one here will have to waste time or keystrokes on the inspirational Megan posts.

Oh, we see it's been done. Have to do some catching up around here.

Heh, Indeed

Megan says;

Megan McArdle (Replying to: Downpuppy) July 10, 2009 3:59 PM

Whether or not you agree with me, I am in fact required to get the details right in the pieces I publish in my magazine. There's no out for "truthiness".

Note the qualifier "in my[!] magazine". Not the blog, the magazine.
So there you have it, there is no requirement for Megan to get her facts right in her blog, by her own implicit admission. We all know this, but it's nice to have it confirmed.

And the comment just prior was a beaut, too;

Megan McArdle July 10, 2009 3:52 PM

I'm just not down with the idea that there's some sort of elusive "central point" to stories that permits you to write a bunch of total nonsense as long as the "central point" is good.

Well provoked and done, Downpuppy.

OMG. Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

Funding Health Care With a Surtax
Little darling, it's been a long and stupid debate.

I'm afraid I gave the impression yesterday that I thought the fate of Manhattanites makes $200K+ was infinitely more tragic than the fate of single mothers making $20K.

Little darling, it seems like years since you made sense.

Not so.

Here comes the dumb.

The point wasn't that beleaguered Manhattanites are particularly worthy of our sympathy--though there really is a disconnect between the lifestyle being taxed in Manhattan and Omaha at similar levels of income.

Here comes the dumb.

Rather, it's that almost no one, including people who are quite affluent, seems to have realized that they're on the hook for the spending they support. Yet the more practical plans for funding Obama's expensive agenda involve things like a VAT, which will fall on the activists most enthusiastic about national health care. Yet none of the think tankers I know believes that they are undertaxed, or can easily spare 10% of their wages.

Why is that the most practical? Look at our current deficit. There's a reason that most countries do not attempt to fund large welfare states with a very progressive income tax, the way we do*.

She's so wrong, duh na na na na na na na na:



Wikipedia's info on French, Dutch and British tax rates. All of them are progressive. The only exception I could find was Sweden (maybe). Most other countries didn't have detailed info on their tax rates that I saw.

Also, obligatory mention of the fact that our top marginal rates used to be THREE TIMES HIGHER than they are now and we did not all die. SHOCKOLA.

Paying for a huge new entitlement which will, at best, grow steadily during downturns, should not be done with a tax that will plummet the way progressive income tax revenues seem to during a depression. See: California, State of.

Megan really loves to be ignorant of California. I find this hilarious. There are 8 million ways in which California is stupid but Megan can't correctly nail down one of them.

California is at war with itself and the referendum system has hamstrung the legislatures. I know I've mentioned this before so I'll just move on.

But at any rate, I was in no way trying to argue that it's unfair to raise taxes on wealthy people. Only that a) doing so seems to raise shockingly little revenue and b) fairly wealthy people seem to be getting a nasty surprise from this, and I expect that the surprises will get nastier as the administration is forced to dip into lower income quintiles who were told to expect a tax cut.

Her argument for why raising upper marginal tax rates is bad supposes that wealth mobility allows the wealthy to flee these tax rates, causing future economic losses. Her proof is that immediate increases garnered "only" $100,000,000,000. I predict that the sun will be up at midnight and offer as evidence that fact that it is up now.

Now, the asterisk. It's awesome.

* (Yes, yes, I know the liberals are squirming in their seats, waiting until they can tell me that it is a MORAL OUTRAGE that I called our system progressive. "Progressive" is a slippery term with many meanings, but in this case, I merely mean that our tax system collects a vastly disproportionate share of its income from the wealthier members of society. The individual income tax, which is the largest single source of revenue, collects 75% of its money from the top 10% of taxpayers. FICA is regressive in incidence, but still collects most of its income from the higher quintiles, for the unsurprising reason that higher quintiles have more income subject to the tax. Calculating corporate income tax incidence is functionally impossible, but one hopes it falls more heavily on the rich than the poor--if it doesn't, we ought to get rid of it.

I'm not sure what liberals get outraged over using the correct term for PART of our tax code. I think they might get mad about the parts that AREN'T progressive. Me, I'm more outraged that she uses bullshit numbers (75% comes from 10%! Wahhh! How much wealth does that 10% control, you disingenuous bitch?!?!). I get angry because she makes bullshit claims like that fucking FICA, which goes away above $100,000, is fucking progressive somehow. It drives me crazy that she totally ignores all of the tax shelters, incentives and other laws that make corporations better off than the humans of which they themselves are only a legal facsimile. Yeah, that kind of idiotic free-market cock sucking is what makes me morally outraged. I'm sure someone out there is cringing at the use of the word "progressive" though, and has absolutely no reason to do so. Megan was just using it's dictionary definition and inferring anything about her world view from her use (and vigorous, preemptive defense of said use) is something only poopy heads do.

"You are missing the point!!!" you want to say, but for this purpose I am not. I am not making a normative argument about the justice of American tax distribution. I am making a positive argument about the dependence of American tax revenue on the income of the upper quintiles.)

She still seems to be confused about the definition of the words "opinions" and "arguments." Opinions can be had for any reason, but arguments require evidence and precedent. Making shit up and referencing nothing does not constitute an argument. Talking about think tank people "I know" and imbuing them with such shallow idiocy that they don't know that health care will have to be paid for is called FUCKING BULLSHIT, not an argument.

Na na na. Na na na. Na na.

Whoops

Looks like someone pissed someone else off with her review of Bruno.

That's the right link, but it won't get you anywhere. Still shows up in searches of Teh Atlantic Voices in Their Heads, though.

How many professional lapses does it take to get the tootsie roll center of a pink slip? Megan McArdle may never know.

h/t bulbul
Update:
Susan in comments here informs us of this from comments over there:

Megan McArdle (Replying to: Nimed) July 9, 2009 11:27 AM
I accidentally violated the embargo. It will be back up this evening.

I accidentally violated one of the most basic rules of the profession I purport to represent. My bad.

So Much for the Break

Megan has another question today:

So What About That Surtax?

A Democrat of my acquaintance, who makes something, but not a huge something, over $200,000 a year while living in Manhattan, was recently grousing to me about the surtax. "My taxes on a marginal dollar are going to go up almost 1000 basis points!" said he.

This is true, I agreed. And just what, I wondered, had he thought was going to happen if he elected Obama? Not clear. Our subject had listened to Obama talk about taxing people who made more than $250,000, which seemed entirely reasonable; he hadn't realized that being single, his tax hikes would start much lower than that--that he, too, was "the rich". Mentally speaking, the rich don't live in eight hundred moderately roach-infested square feet in an unfashionable neighborhood of New York.

Speaking of invidious comparisons, doesn't McHypocrite have a whole bunch of posts about people being stupid for living in NYC? Didn't she say once that people who advocated rent control were silly and "didn't have a god given right to a co-op in the city" or something quite similar? I'd give you a link, but we're blogging MM style.

I dunno, man, I grew up in central Jersey. It was a pretty awesome place to live, a popular commute was to the city, and my father's 100-200k a year was enough for a great 5 bedroom in a great neighborhood with great schools. It was walking distance to the train. I guess it pays to not be retarded.

Fuck, I know a waitress in NYC that is in a decent neighborhood and has more than 800sqft. It's called Brooklyn, Megan's stupid friend (or mythical taxicab driver), and it's not nearly as bad as it sounds.

A few readers emailed to ask me about the proposed 4% income tax surcharge on incomes over $250,000, and what I think is that this experience will eventually be renacted(for fuck's sake, woman, do you even KNOW what the red line under most of the words you type MEANS? -ed) down the income chain. What's really astonishing is how little money the thing is expected to raise: less than $100 billion a year over the next ten years. That's not even enough to cover the current static estimates of the health care plans on the table.

OMG, ONLY $100,000,000,000? That's a paltry 5% of all yearly healthcare costs FOR THE COUNTRY for a whopping 4% increase over the lowest top marginal tax rates that we've had in decades. WHAT WERE WE THINKING WITH THIS WHOLE IDEA OF PAYING FOR HEALTH INSURANCE FOR EVERYONE?!?!?!

Needless to say, I don't think the plan will cost as little as it is projected to, since virtually no US government health care plan in history ever has.

Love the two-fer here. Add the qualifier "US government" so that all the successful health care plans don't count and then provide no evidence for even her incredibly narrow claim.

Meanwhile, the gaping maw of Medicare opens ever-wider.

God I wish they still taught English majors the definition of a cliche.

Obama is going to have to push much farther down the income ladder to pay for it all,

If only he had thought to pay for things as he went, like some presidents that Megan voted for, supported for years and never criticizes in any real fashion.

This hardly dooms his electoral chances--my acquaintance remains a die-hard Democrat. But it sure won't be popular.

Megan's totally right. Rich Ordinary Joe's are going to be super pissed about slight tax increases to prevent poor people from living in squalor. They were all like "Obama's fairies will pay for health care" when they voted for him because they're stupid socialists who haven't read history like Megan totally has.

Best fact ever: The only numbers a quick googling can find for the total yearly cost of the Obama health care plan vary from 75-150 billion dollars. OMG! What will we do with the the adequate amount of money we have to pay for the very useful program????

Take a Break

And remember, 1:12:35 8/13/21 is going to be a lot more exciting than 12:34:56 7/8/9 was.

Sorry, needed a distraction/it's the most clever thing I've thought of this week.

Trollin, Trollin, Trollin

Megan wants attention. Alas, we exist to give it to her, though at least it's not the kind she wants. A not shorter, then shorters.

Sigh:

Ezra complains that I called him a communist, or ignored the TOTALLY AWESOME EXAMPLES OF NATIONAL HEALTH CARE in order to compare it to the Soviet Union, which we all agree sucks. [sic - ain't no USSR no more]
Uh, no.
I said that these arguments about administrative costs and rationalizing production and eliminating wasteful competition turn out not to be nearly as good arguments as they initially sound.

Odd as this may sound, Megan is completely right. She "said" these things, she didn't argue them. Arguing a point requires providing your partners in debate, or those listening in, good reasons to adopt your position, whereas Megan operates on the basis that it being her position is reason enough. I can say that I am worth $11 trillion and that being a libertarian literally causes cancer in babies, but...
It's hard for me to believe that even Megan, or anyone, thinks Europe doesn't produce any kinds of innovations in medicine or any other field, but apparently she does. That said, I still can't parse the following;

But I'd argue that the difference is that Germany and France, unlike the Soviet Union, have companies which produce in American markets to provide them products.

I mean I honestly don't know what she's even trying to say. Germany and France develop new products because we develop them for them by buying the products they develop? What?
The onslaught of stupid that follows is too extraordinary not to note.

One key thing to remember is that there's a big difference between a situation where the government is a sizeable buyer/producer, and one where the government is essentially the only buyer/producer. ....
Look at defense spending. ... virtually everyone thinks defense procurement is an overpriced disaster, which gets innovation only at drastic cost. Unfortunately, there's no other way to go about it.

... I... How do you even respond to that? There's no other way to defend the nation but to allow military contractors to inflate their prices to the tune of untold billions. After all, up until the military industrial complex formed following WWII, we had never lost a war. Then we tied in Korea and lost Vietnam, obviously there's no other way.

Right now, the US has a market--no matter how screwed up--for medical goods. It is not a good market. But no one in the market, except Medicare, has enough pricing power to totally undermine the market mechanism, so it grinds out an equilibrium that bears some resemblance to consumer demand. In turn, Europe can buy those market-produced products. But if you kill the last market, everything suddenly looks very different. What's the right price for innovation? What should we research? Those questions stop being decided on the basis of the number of consumers served, and start being decided on the basis of who has the best lobby.

I just don't get it. How can Megan, or anyone seemingly literate in the most basic sense, think there are no scientists in Europe, or anywhere else in the world? Does she think the history of the vcr means we invented everything sold in Japan? There's stupid, and there's simply incoherent. The basis of Megan's attempt at an argument here is mindblowingly nonsensical.
And then there's this;

There's one more difference, which is that health care is not transportable.

This is why the organization Doctors Without Borders is actually a Dadaist art troupe who perform "operations" using giant prop bodies and surgical tools.
And she closes with something a medical executive told her;

But as anyone who has lived in Europe can attest, the beliefs about what happens in America are ludicrous. And I'm not talking about "the man on the street"; I'm talking about journalists, politicians, doctors. It's not uncommon for Americans getting treatment in Europe to be asked "You'd never be able to afford this in America, right?" by their doctors and nurses, when "this" is stitches or antibiotics. I'd be terrified of switching places with an American too, if American health care were actually one eighth as bad as most Europeans seem to believe. Yet despite that, as far as I know the net migration is actually the other way.

Yes, then they ask the American not to shoot them, then they say "Eugh-haugh-haugh!"

But the main point is not that one system is better than the other.

And as Sarah Palin argued, the real quitters are the ones who don't quit.

Question Answered:

Look, all I'm saying is that Obama's inability to fix the economy in under six months means the previous 80 years' worth of data regarding the relative performance of the economy during Democratic versus Republican Presidencies is now inapplicable. If you can't handle that, you have the problem, not me.

A Public Plan and the Law of Unintended Consequences:

Dear Hilzoy, please forget that you're done dealing with my intellectually dishonest self and give us a link?

The Politics of the Possible:

I bet I can be so annoying you HAVE to link to me, Krugman. Dammit, I need traffic.

Sasha Baron-Cohen Strikes Again:

Why is she writing a movie review, and why does it read like a short paper stretched out to meet a word count?

We went and saw Bruno last night.

Or, "we saw Bruno last night". English major.

And we're done. Nutella and Susan are right, Megan is in a manic phase. She must be feeling up because of the engagement. She's not even trying to hide the stupid, in a way I like it, it makes this much easier.

Holy Fucking Fuck

ohhhhhhhh, boyohboyohboy. Fun.

Information Wants to Be Free. (Which is why you have corporate entities pay large sums for it to be distributed in private, off the record.)

I'm not going to comment much on my employer's salons except to say that I've been to them, and there's no scandal there.

This is true. No one had any respect left for The Atlantic, and anyone who's paid even the slightest attention to it lately knows well that David Bradley has completely perverted its original aim;

"In politics, The Atlantic Monthly will be the organ of no party or clique, but will honestly endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea. It will deal frankly with persons and with parties, endeavoring always to keep in view that moral element which transcends all persons and parties, and which alone makes the basis of a true and lasting prosperity. It will not rank itself with any sect of anties: but with that body of men which is in favor of Freedom, National Progress, and Honor, whether public or private."

so no, no scandal, it's just pathetic.

At the paid ones, where the journalists talk, the journalists dictate what we say, and the sponsors are told they have no control. At the unpaid salons, it's--well, it's an off the record briefing, of the sort that every other journalist is well familiar with. Either way, I've never said or done anything that I wouldn't say at a regular interview, and neither have the other journalists.

That, Megan, is not the point. The point is that we now have concrete proof that your employment depends on pleasing "the masters of the universe", and that they are the people you are talking to and regurgitating the talking points of without attribution. This is how the money that pays your salary is generated, and you know it. And as anyone who has ever dealt with the masters of the universe knows, they don't pay people to disagree with them.

Off the record conversations allow journalists to get much deeper understanding of what's going on. That's why journalists talking to their friends about their jobs at companies of interest to the journalist talk off the record.

You aren't a journalist, Megan. Journalists source their claims, even if off the record. You just say that someone told you x, and we're supposed to believe you because you believed them. That's called being a fucking gossip, and that's when you're being diligent. Usually you just make outlandish claims without the slightest supporting evidence of any kind.

Now, there are journalists that get carried away with the excitement of an off-the-record conversation. Subjects can lie just as easily off the record as on it. But it's absurd to say that the only worthwhile conversations between journalists and the powerful are on the record. Off the record conversations allow politicians to say things that they cannot say publicly because the Fed Chairman or the Secretary of State or the Schools Chancellor cannot be seen to say certain things as they are trying to affect outcomes--they are, as the economists like to say, endogenous to the system. Restricting their ability to explain things off the record would restrict the supply of information available, not expand it.

So, according to Megan, top corporations are paying The Atlantic big bucks in order to give her information. In way, this is true, in that they are paying her to listen to and then restate their self-serving propaganda.
What a fucking idiot. This is less believable than her "defense" of not mentioning her now fiancee's various ties to the totally grassroots protests the Koch Foundation paid for and organized, and that little doozy, it is rumored, cost her the NYTimes gig that Douthat got. This won't get her fired, but maybe now the careerist pretend liberal actual centrists in her circle will slowly detach. As we'll see in shorters about to come, it seems she's not able to rely on them for a charitable interpretation and links anymore. That's progress, of a sort.

Crap. She Got Into the Coke Again.

Two multi-paragraph posts today. This portends a week or two of prolific output. I'm sure brad and M are with me when I say "FUUUUCCKKKKK." I really need to find a new way to screw off at work.

Let's see what Megan's ass has to say about Medicare today. I'm sure it's lovely.

Medicare's Mythical Administrative Cost Savings

The title of this post is going to make some of my readers very angry. Medicare has lots of administrative cost savings, they will say. This may be so. But I mean mythical in another sense: there's ultimately no way to prove or disprove these amazing savings. The problem is indeterminate.

Angry? Not so much. I feel more a sense of pity. This is basically Megan's every-post about something she doesn't like. It's old hat. It's like getting angry over the need to brush your teeth. We're used to her stupid shit by now.

Jon Cohn, who I respect greatly, spends a lot of time on the money and time that insurance companies put into denying claims. This is undoubtedly true. But I have two caveats. First, some of that effort is a good thing: without it, there would be fraud.

I know, right. Whenever I'm in lab I constantly skip doing experiments to avoid having done experiments that didn't work. It's a great, efficient, time saving maneuver.

No, not the automatic denials so many insurers are fond of, and I'm not defending. But Medicare should probably spend a lot more effort rooting out excessive billing. And I don't know what percentage of claims denial consists of refusing to line the pockets of doctors and labs.

Medicare should totally spend more time doing something Megan doesn't know how much time it spends doing. Remember, when presented with the Hobson's choice of catching fraud or making sure sick people get the care they need, it's all about catching the fraudsters. It's far more important to punish the guilty rather than not punish the innocent. That's the opposite of the foundation of our whole legal system!

But the more important point is that I doubt this is the majority of their administrative costs, or even the difference between their administrative costs and Medicare's.

Oh, she doubts something. I'm sure she has a good reason for that.

I'm not trying to justify the bullshit automatic claims denial, but that's not actually a very costly process: a hospital submits a bill, they deny it, you yell at them. Nor is refusing to cover people with pre-existing conditions, or any of the other multifarious complaints of single-payer advocates.

Actually, it is costly to pay someone to answer calls from irate customers whose dialysis claim was rejected despite their lack of functioning kidneys. It also costs the customer and or doctor money to make the call. Finally, it costs the insurance provider money when they finally pay the fucking claim that they improperly rejected in the first palce. Other than those costs, though, it's totally costless.

As to the mention of pre-existing conidtions. Brilliant. See, you can't say that private health insurance costs more and doesn't cover people cause obviously it costs nothing to the people who aren't covered. Nyah!

Rather, private insurers have costs that Medicare doesn't have within the agency. Private insurers bill. Medicare does too, but the IRS has its own budget--hell, its own courts--which don't show up on Medicare's balance sheet.

Anyone who can tell me where the "rather" came from, what the fact that insurance companies "bill" matters, or what the fuck the IRS has to do with anything gets free health insurance that doesn't cover any pre-existing or post-existing conditions.

My guess would be that these explicit costs are still lower than Medicare's. But then there are implicit costs to government fiat that markets don't have. As Tyler Cowen points out, taxation has deadweight losses, and Medicare is a tax on employment, which is something we are particularly anxious not to suppress right now.

Guessing, huh? Well, heh, at least she admits it.

Also, dead weight loss is the argument against everything and it's totally awesome. Unlike medicare savings, it can totally be proven either way.

The final point is that while people commonly think of administrative costs as "wasted", in fact, they are an important part of the market system.

Well, yeah, if your goal is to be an asshole and not pay for people's health insurance, she's right as cancer.

As Alex Tabarrok points out, and I have myself from time to time (o_O ~ed), many of the arguments in favor of national health care are literally socialist. And no, I am not using that term to apply to "anyone who is in favor of redistribution" or "government programs". But consider the following common arguments:

Cover your nose people, here comes a very shitty list.

* National health care will be cheaper because we will reduce administrative overhead
* National health care will reduce wasteful competition in the form of me-too drugs
* National health care will reduce wasteful competition in the form of advertising and other marketing expenses
* National health care will allow us to rationally distribute care to where it does the most good rather than the current messy, wasteful hodge-podge
* National health care will use resources for production instead of profits
* National health care will achieve economies of scale in purchasing and record-keeping
* People will not overuse free goods because there are hard limits to desired consumption

Anyone who can figure out how the first three items are socialist gets a free copy of "Liberal Fascism." Anyone who can figure out why economies of scale at Walmart are capitalism deluxe but economies of scale for health care are evil socialism gets a free lunch with Megan McArdle. Anyone who can explain what the fuck the last point even means gets a free psychiatric evaluation.

Anyone who can explain to Megan that the liberal's goal is much less about "streamlining health care" and much more about "sick people not dying on the street" gets to be fucking president. of the earth. forever.

But why were they discredited? That list looks really, really good on paper, even to my jaded libertarian eyes. A lot of the answer lies in the reason that we don't like monopolies--even though that list is just as true of monopolies as it is of the government.

Right. That's why the liberal idea of having the government pay for health care control all service provision and product development is so silly. God, I'm glad Megan's around.

My critics will want me to explain why, then, Europe can do it cheaper. The answer is threefold. First, most European nations have better governance than we do--the American political system is a Public Choice disaster. Second, they pay people less money in a way that's hard to replicate here (and even if it wasn't, would be a one time savings that wouldn't check the rate of growth). Third, we're still driving quite a bit of product innovation. Our messy, organic, wasteful, unfair, irrational system allows experimentation, and they cherry pick the best results. If we stopped doing this, their system would stop looking so good.

First, maybe if idiots like our muse would stop voting for people like, oh say, George W Bush, to pick a random example, we might get some decent governance. Second, oh, it's hard to replicate. Well, that explains why several countries in Europe have all replicated it. I guess Europe is a country, now. I thought that that kind of thing only happened in Africa. Canada is also apparently in Europe now. Third, there are in fact new products made in Europe, you stupid, American exceptionalist piece of shit.