Last Gasp, Maybe

This thing still on? We thought we should share, just in case.

As lifted from mediabistro.com's FISHBOWLLA.

Ames also wrote this blistering piece calling out The Atlantic‘s Megan McArdle, among other journalists, who trashed Ames and Levine’s reporting while failing to disclose the full extent of their personal and financial connections to the Koch brothers. Worth the read.

Heh indeed.

If Wishes Were Horses We'd All Be Eating Steak

I keep letting Mr Troll bully me back into the land of the self-centered and dum, and it hurts me. I need to stand up for myself.

I would love to hear the TSA's side of this--and see the whole video.

I'd love to see her -- from her position of mild import -- champion a cause not centered around her relatively minor inconvenience. I wonder whose wish will be granted first.

Bonus Fun: Sometimes I fantasize about violence, but I keep it awesome.

Waaaaaaaahooooooooo

Look, a totally famous blogger put me in her random collage video, so now I'm totally famous.

Also, here's a picture of a libertarian making a sandwich.


Yum. Sandwich.

Beneath it All

We got some real good laughter going on about McMoron, our beloved Morbo informs us. Even fellow libertarian Angry Bear is calling her a goddamn idiot. Apparently she's arbitrarily getting her panties in a bunch about some mortage crap that I don't give a fuck about. Something something she's dum then she shows up in comments and says the following in defense of her position:

McMegan
Sigh. The point was that the product was created with heavy government interference/subsidies, not that the CFPA should be keeping banks from making loans they want to make.

Then there's a pile on:

Susan of Texas
Using that logic we should not use the internet, because it was created with "heavy government interference/subsidies." Yet, here we all are, voluntarily buying the service that others voluntarily provide.


Downpuppy
Or highways, railroads, piped water, sewers, electricity, airports...

Granted, highways have had some fairly ugly consequences, such as Houston suburbs.


Mcwop
And global warming.


Rob
Sighhhhh. Banks only exist due heavy government influence.


ilsm
Central banks are a threat to liberty, just like standing armies.

Libertarians are opposed to manipulating money, whether by the government or by a semi (hardly) independent federal reserve.

Do prepayment penalties make small banks want to sell the notes to big banks? And does the prepayment penalty make fannie and freddie bigger? and is that the libertarian angst against prepayment penalties?

Also are libertarians agnostoc pacificists, not being against war just the instrument of war? Or do they just want Cincinnatuses around to drop the plow and save the republic, which is so small as to not need saving..................?

ilsm will not change

I am no libertarian.

ilsm will not change

Oooooooooooooooo, just shy of the goal line, huh Meggers?



SIGGGGGGGGGGGGH. I think I'm in love.


Update: It occurs to me that I saw (in what little of this I did read) her mention that the 30 year mortage thing she's complaining about became popular in 1945ish, or somewhere just after WWII. So apparently it's such an insidious, lurking evil, it lays dormant for 70 fucking years or so.

Seriously, I just jizzed my pants.

Update2: AHHHHHHHHHHHH. i'm fucking hyperventilating, here. In the comments to her own original post she says:

I, too, am in the process of applying for a 30-year fixed . . .

Oh lord, I hope she gets her divorce soon so that I can marry her next.

What He Said

OMG. Libertarians amuse, confound and anger me more than I can possibly explain. Here, I'll let this guy do it for me.

Money shot(On marital rape in days of yore):

To be blunt, this issue is almost entirely symbolic. While it’s a heinous crime, I seriously doubt that more than a small fraction American women in 1880 worried about being raped by their husbands.

How deluded to you have to be to put your foot down when you're caught idiotically claiming that the pre-civil rights area was a freer time?

Megan: Still Not Getting It

Best Wishes for the New Yr. (If not new decade.) to most. However,

But the implied combination of tiny savings, minimal income, and inability to find a paying tenant in a real-estate market with a sub-2% vacancy rate, does not suggest that the solution to his problems is a mortgage modification.  I'm not sure what the servicer could have done, other than foreclosed outright.  Or what Felix thinks this has to do with people who decide to default on their mortgages so that they'll have more money to spend on cruises and new furniture.

Here's the point, Mlle. McA.: What this has to do w/ your previous tale (the horrid immoral bastards who left their houses & mortgages to spend their money on furniture & cruises, & probably ruied their credit in the process) which did, indeed, describe a horrible affront to the entire mortgage banking community, is that "going on a cruise" is not the principal, primary or even main reason that people are stiffing their mortgage servicer. The tale seemingly told by Mr. Salmon's "sad case," involving job loss, is the real story of the millions of Americans in serious financial trouble, not the exceptional defaulting douchebags that some twits get all excited about.

Also awful:

Modifications are supposed to be a deal that makes both sides better off by avoiding the huge costs of foreclosure, not a vehicle for transferring wealth from bondholders or bank shareholders to people we like better.  The latter is what the progressive income tax is for.

Oh ha ha. Guess what, toots: I like defense contractors & American military morons who kill babies from 30,000 ft. (or the other side of the world) even less then I like bondholders & bank shareholders, not that the entire group of them aren't firmly interconnected & equally evil. Not very likable, either, what w/ their being murderers & such. Apparently in Megan World the horrid progressive income tax all goes directly to welfare cheats, people who go on cruises w/ their new furniture, & the millions of lazy bums who have a better life on General Relief & Food Stamps than if they had a job.

WON'T SOMEONE PLEAES THINK OF THE CORPORATIONS!?!?!?!

So apparently there's some kerfuffle going on somewhere on the internets. Some gold mining company or whatever basically took all their gold from Fort Knox and sold it a huge a profit and now they're paying their employees ridiculous amounts of money for being key advisers to the president's accountant or some shit. I dunno. It's all a bit technical and I can't keep this crap straight in my head. Inconsequential, really. What I want to know is, how does the gold mining company feel about it?

I defended the banks paying bonuses that had already been agreed before the crisis. But this really is ridiculous, and the banks should have known better, if only for PR reasons.

Oh nooooo! It's the return of bad PR! Those poor miners! What will this mean to them?

If they get an ugly new regulation regime, they'll have only themselves to blame. Whatever they really think, deep in their hearts, they're certainly doing their best to give the impression that they believe they are entitled to collect huge paychecks no matter what happens, and have the taxpayer pick up the tab for their mistakes.

Yes! Whatever they believe deep in their hearts! Who knows! I mean, sure, it looks like they're paying themselves hand over foot while seizing control of regulatory agencies through lobbying efforts, but appearances can be so deceiving. Unless you're brown, in which case appearances are everything.

If those silly saxophone players had just APPEARED to give a fuck, we never would've regulated 'em. Americans don't care about their loss of wealth and jobs, growing income inequality and what amounts to outright bribery of the American government! Nope, they just wanna believe that their corporations love them. Maybe someone could make some snazzy commercial for these bankers, like the ones for GE and shit where they make you feel all warm and fuzzy without even bothering to sell you a product. Then everything should be fine.

A Funny

From Salon:

 As for the libertarian intellectual movement, isn't that a contradiction in terms? How intellectual can a movement be, if it reflexively answers "the market!" to every question of domestic and foreign policy, before the question is even asked?

Snap!

Read It

This requires no intro:

http://michaelprescott.net/hickman.htm

On Counterproductivity

Let's see if Megan can be a condescending moron:

Let me see if I can make this even simpler:

She shoots! She scores! Condescension in the bag!

1. There is more than one meaning of the word rationing. Economics is a young discipline, and hasn't had the opportunity to nail all its terms down as perfectly as philosophy has. There is a fairly rare technical usage, which refers to any allocation of a scarce good: i.e. "price rationing versus fiat rationing". Then there is the common usage of the term, which refers to a fiat system in which the government uses fiat in order to abrogate the price system and impose a different distribution of the aforementioned scarce goods.

Oh, and she nails the moronity on her second attempt! Look at her conflating "meaning of a word" with "what she was actually arguing." Because, when she said the government rations and private insurance doesn't, she meant technically and wasn't arguing the pros and cons of public/private insurance!

But what's this, Megan has the ball again:

2. The former is a fact. The latter is a mistake.

3. It is no more technically incorrect to use both the common usage and the technical usage in discussing an issue than it would be to use "cost" in both the economist's sense--as any price, non-monetary or monetary, attached to an action--and in the common usage, as "price".

Oh she scores again! Notice how she creates two additional bullets which are clearly part of the first one! An amzing display of trying to make herself look smart and coming off retarded! The whole "making lists is a pretentious dodge to create the illusion of having "points"" bit really makes that tally standout in the annals of being a fucking douche bag!

4. My problem with the latter is that abrogating the price system generally results in a distribution and supply of goods that does not enhance the general welfare, or even, in the long run, the welfare of the people it is supposed to be helping. (See, United Soviet Socialist Republics, economic history of). There is substantial reason to believe that rationing in World War II led to sub-optimal material outcomes, whatever its moral or spiritual benefits.

Oh, and she's on another fast break! She uses the word abrogate and... YES! SHE FAILS TO USE IT CORRECTLY! BEAUTIFUL 3-POINT PLAY. THE CROWD IS GOING FUCKING WILD! Wait, the refs are reviewing the play and... THEY HAVE DECIDED TO AWARD MCARDLE QUINTUPLE POINTS FOR A SENSELESS REFERENCE TO THE USSR AS WELL AS THE SLIPPERY SLOPE FALLACY! WHAT A DAY FOR TEAM GLIBERTARIAN!

5. That said, Mr. Holbo is mistaken about the common usage. Rationing does not have to control 100% of a relevant good in order to constitute rationing, and indeed, no government ever succeeded in doing so (or for that matter, tried particularly hard). For example, during World War II, people who ate in restaurants could get around some rationing requirements in the US, and I believe also in Britain. Taxicabs got preferred access to gasoline. Both allowed the wealthy to "opt out" of the system. Yet I hope we can both agree that rationing during World War II was in the common sense, rationing.

Now here's an interesting gambit. McArdle seems to be making an actual argument based on actual facts. Let's see what the refs think of her examples and the call is..... IT'S GOOD! Yes, the refs seem to agree that since eating out and taking a taxi are luxuries that don't constitute the majority of consumption and easily COULD HAVE been rationed at the time if the government felt it necessary, they are stupid examples! The refs all agree that, while a 100% may not be the needed level for true rationing to occur, it is certainly less than the 10% or fewer of people who will be covered under any "public option" that will most likely not be passed due to opposition from right-leaning democrats! Furthermore, the refs are awarding her another bonus for continuing to fail to grasp that providing insurance isn't rationing because it is removed from the actual providers of service!

DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES? YES!

I Do It For The Kids

Shorter:

More Reasons to Hate the CPSIA

01 Sep 2009 01:45 pm

Profit trumps human lives. Every time.

Libertarian "Thinking?"

What is she thinking?

20 Aug 2009 03:47 pm

The Benefits of Advanced Directives

[...]

I think, perhaps oddly for a libertarian, that patients should get to make choices about what they want for end of life care, unless it actually bankrupts us. But that implies actually making a choice, and thinking deeply about these issues, even though we'd rather not confront them directly. Frankly, I've been looking at living wills, and I get a panic attack just thinking about the conditions under which they might be needed. This makes it hard to make a clear decision about what I want.

Isn't (g)libertarianism about freedom & choices & not what the gov't. wants? How is it "odd" for a libertarian to think patients should have a choice? This makes it sound as if libertarians are in favor of death panels, that in Liberty World the aged & infirm are seen as bankruptors & should be dealt w/ immediately before anyone's precious portfolio is deflated. Could this possibly be correct? Or is it just Megan's inability to express herself?

And note the "panic attack." Really? Is McArdle just scared 24/7, her phobias waiting to attack her at the slightest excuse? Is she scared of being scared, that is, panicky about a panic attack? It happens.

And if this giant of reason & intellect (That's why she's a libertarian, after all: She sat down & thought about all the issues of the day, & came to the conclusion that the best thing is to keep the powerful in power, by any means necessary, & w/ as little oversight as possible. This is why I, at least, respect every last mis-spelled word that drifts from her keyboard. 'Cause you know she really gives serious think-time to everything. Except when panic attacks.) can't deal w/ her eventual mortality, how does she expect the great unwashed to "actually make a choice?"

Shorter

Shorter Book Banning:

I don't fucking care if some kid might get lead poisoning. I wanna fucking collect books that I read when I was young for purely nostalgic purposes! Damn you, invasive government!

Pish Tosh

The Massachussetts health plan has been successful by some metrics--the recorded number of the uninsured has gone down--and unsuccessful on others.

Well, I'll be, the primary goal of a program has been achieved, although other imperfections in this still new and seminal initiative have yet to be worked out.

Sounds horrible.

Also, I agree with her, capitation is idiotic.

Bundles of Stupid

Making a Bundle Out of iTunes:

Well, she's got the capitalization down. Now only if she could make some sense.

I suspected that this was some sort of an elaborate troll, but no, this chap at PC inciter actually wants to break up Apple's monopoly over the iTunes store, the iPhone, and the iPod.

What monopoly, you may ask, and indeed, I did. Apple has a monopoly over these things only in the trivial sense that P&G has a monopoly over Charmin, and I have a monopoly over the chocolate cake I baked last night.

Megan is right, although the concept of her harping on someone else for misusing a word is pretty much the best Allaanniiss Mmoorriisseettee song, ever.

Well, I'd like to get takeout from Ray's Pizza and enjoy it in the stunning ambience of Cafe des Artistes. If the waiter refuses to let me do so, is that a monopoly?

No, that's what we call "bundling". Most people hate bundling. That's because most people are under the impression that they would pay less if things were unbundled. Sometimes this is true. But if you forced Cafe des Artistes to "unbundle" the location from the food, that doesn't mean I'd be able to enjoy a cut rate meal in a beautiful location. They'd just charge me $100 for the seat.

Well, yes, because they don't currently charge you for the seat, only the food. The seat is implied with the purchase. Totally like iTunes, which gives its phones and mp3 players away for free and then charges you only for the music. What an awesome analogy. It only fails almost entirely.

Similarly, people who want their cable unbundled because they only want to pay for a few channels are under the delusion that they could save huge bucks by cutting off the Golf Channel. But cable companies don't save any money when you drop the Golf Channel, because they stream all the channels down the coax at once.

Through a series of pipes and tubes..... O_o ???? ¿que?

I hate it when she gets technical.

Indeed, it may cost them money; the Golf Channel now has fewer potential viewers, and hence falling ad revenues, and they have to hassle around with custom packages for every customer, which is labor intensive, and thus extremely expensive (and also more likely to break).

Potential viewers, the dream of every advertising man. I love that she calls cajoling people into buying shit they don't need "labor."

Like cable, iTunes is mostly fixed cost, which means that unbundling would make their profit fall much faster than their revenue.

This is such utter horseshit and completely contrary to Apple's entire business model, which is to make things user stupid friendly and force brand loyalty down people's throats. Then, when they're scared to even look at a PC, the consumers are fed iLife. Give all your money to Apple. We'll be you for you!

Megan is too stupid to know about the plethora of other mp3 players, online music libraries and internet phones that are much cheaper and don't force you to buy your fucking groceries through the iMart. iPhone will make plenty of fucking money on its own, and iTunes will still be profitable if you can play that song about rain on your wedding day that bought from it on a fucking "Chocolate" (or whatever's the rage these days). See, selling things makes money even if people don't buy other things. iTunes is mostly in business because people like the iPod and it was the first one on the scene with a presence. That doesn't make getting rid of iTunes a catastrophe for Apple and it sure as fuck doesn't make Apple products the fucking pinnacle of consumer satisfaction anymore than Morton's salt really is the fucking salt of earth. It doesn't "just work." It's just fucking there and people don't think that they really have a choice.

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.

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????

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.

No One Goes There Anymore. It's too Crowded.

I haven't gotten to attend many panels this year, because I've been on too many.

o_O

The questions for Goolsbee are much more hostile than they were last year. I don't know whether to attribute this to the economy, or the fact that the disadvantages of Obama's policies are now apparent. All policies sound better when they're in white paper, and Obama's rhetorical deftness made it particularly easy to make his proposals sound like all things to all people. Now deficits have to be paid for, climate change bills turn out to lack teeth for anyone except the Chinese, health care gets scored by the CBO rather than optimistic campaign members.

Time taken to realize GWB was a failure: 6 years.

Time taken to realize that BHO is a failure: Less than 6 months.

Ideological win.