When will we learn?

Snow fell on Baghdad on Friday for the first time in memory, and delighted residents declared it an omen of peace.

“It is the first time we’ve seen snow in Baghdad,” said 60-year-old Hassan Zahar. “We’ve seen sleet before, but never snow. I looked at the faces of all the people, they were astonished,” he said.

Apparently a crook hired a thug to kill off a couple because they had failed to pay their debt. Despite four separate attempts the thug failed every time.

Vardanyan said he wasn’t paid for the attack because “he didn’t do the job correctly,” TBO.com reports.

Image my surprise when I read that line and realized that the crook that hired Vardanyan knew more about economics then your standard liberal. He realized that keeping the incentive structure working properly is the only way to insure that people get the job done correctly. To this end he did not pay Vardanayn when he failed to kill the couple.

If only liberals were as wise as crooks that hire thugs to kill people.

This story serves as an example of how the state has a monopoly on coercion. The state can force you to do its will. This is why you must trust the state while you can choose to trust a corporation.

A tactical law enforcement team broke into Tom Shiflett’s home and took his 11-year-old son to hospital for court-ordered medical treatment for a minor head injury.

Garfield County’s All Hazards Response Team raided the home Friday night, a day after Jon Shiflett fell after grabbing the handle of a moving car. The child was returned to the family at about 2:30 a.m. Saturday, hours after the raid.

“Inappropriate is not nearly strong enough a word. It was gross irresponsibility and stupidity,” said Ross Talbott, owner of the Apple Tree Mobile Home Park south of New Castle who rents to the Shifletts and who witnessed the raid. “Is this Russia? I don’t know what we’re coming to when they think your kid needs medical help and they send a SWAT team.”

In the end, the injury wasn’t as severe as caseworkers from the Garfield County Department of Social Services thought when they went before a judge seeking a search warrant and order for medical treatment.

The doctor recommended fluids, Tylenol and ice to treat the bruises, according to a copy of Jon’s patient aftercare instructions.

When was the last time you heard about a corporation busting down someone’s door and taking their child?

Via Instapundit.

Instapundit updated this article with a readers comments which I think make an extremly excellent point.

Consider the irony. The Marines and Army have now progressed in their counterinsurgency campaign and the understanding of the population to the point that they can cordon and knock. They are respectful, cautious, and unwilling to impose anything foreign or hostile to the culture or the honor of the head of household. Yet in America we have men donning tactical gear to forcibly enter the homes of people and remove them for … forced medical service for non-life threatening injuries. It is a sad picture.

Deserves a quiet night.

Recently Darwin responded to a post of mine on health care.

I don’t want drug companies to make less money off of their inventions. I want this country to spend the same amount on universal healthcare as it does on the current system. We can spend the same amount of money, give the corporations the same amont of profit for their innovations, and still provide better care to more people, for several reasons:

You suggest that the state pays the pharmaceutical companies the amount that they would of made had the state not monopolized the market. The problem: how does one determine the profit for future drugs. With out a market system in play your bureaucrats and experts will no longer have any actual data available to them to determine the price of new drugs. As the years go by under universal healthcare, the less information experts and bureaucrats will have about actual prices and have to ‘determine’ price. Given the nature of politics it would be VIRTUALLY impossible for price determination to not become political.

Before I would even consider universal health care you would have to convince me how price determination would never become political. I would argue it’s impossible. As one drifts farther away from the markets the more difficult it becomes to not rely on politics to determine price and once you reach a certain threshold, all pricing becomes political. Seriously you should examine the hundreds of failed attempts of the last century of price control. It never works.

The drug companies could produce ten times the amount of pills they are making now for only a very small increase in their overhead costs, because most of the costs are in development, not production. The only reason for them to produce less is so they can cahrge more, followingthe classic supply and demand formula. If the government just pays them a lump sum (the same amoutn they’d make under the current system) to produce as many pills as are actually needed, they’d still have just as much incentive to invent new products, but everyone could benefit from them much more quickly.

This proposal still has the problem of delineating how price is determined once the information of the free markets is no longer available.

Pharmaceutical companies that enjoy the rights to exclusively sell a drug do not have to under produce to increase revenue. They simply charge more money because the state has granted them a monopoly on production. To this end they probably produce as much of the drug as necessary to supply those willing to pay the price. The exorbitant price reflects the high cost of research and development of the drug. As someone that does research you should know first hand how much highly educated people, equipment, and resource cost to do research. This cost must be rolled into the cost of the drug otherwise the company goes out of business. Plus the company needs to turn a profit, yes so that dividends can be paid to the stockholders, but also to reinvest a large portion into the development of future drugs.

2. A huge amount of the money currently going into the healtchare system pays for HMO’s, which are for-profit middlemen who are completely unneccesary to the actual healthcare process. If take them out of the picture, we can give that money to researchers and doctors, and provide even more incentive than we have now.

I have no idea what percent of health care goes towards HMO. I have no problem eliminating middle man to bring down the cost of health care. You know what won’t eliminate the middle man from health care? State sponsored health care. How can you be so blind as to fail to see how universal health care will create an entire army of bureaucrats whose job will not essential to health care but necessary to make the system work. What’s worse is that by monopolizing health care, the state will feel no competitive force to reduce this bureaucratic staff. Like many social program it will become a ever aggrandizing bureaucratic beast consuming more and more of the GDP. If you honestly want to reduce the cost of middle men in health care you would not aver the state as the solution.

On a personal note, Ana is currently not going to a doctor to get her joint problems looked at, because if tehy find any type of condition, no matter how treatable it is, she can never get health insurance again. More generally, doctors routinely discourage people from getting tested for AIDS, because insurance companies will decline them or raise their rates just for getting tested (even if teh test is negative).

You sound like an idiot stating that no matter what the condition the insurance companies will refuse to treat Ana for the rest of her entire life. It could turn out that she has no condition and in that instance it’s seems very likely she would find health care rather easily. The larger point you are trying to make is that a certain segment of the population will be afflicted with a condition that will preclude them from health insurance.

This is no doubt a tragic outcome. Fortunately people like you are free to set up a charitable foundation in which you and other like minded people can pool your resources together to pay for the medical treatment of those unable to find insurance companies willing to distribute the treatment cost to other policy holders. In fact because I trust you, I would be willing to donate some of my money towards your charity. Let me know when you have it set up.

It seems wise that insurance companies raise rates when one gets themselves checked for HIV. Willingly being checked for HIV implies a riskier lifestyle increasing the probability of increased medical expenses down the road as compared to those that live a more tamer lifestyle. It makes sense that insurance companies hedge their bets by increasing your rates to offset the increase cost you pose to the other policy holders and the company in general.

Why should people that explicitly chose safer lifestyles to avoid expensive health care be forced to pay for those that have selected a riskier lifestyle? Why should risk taking people be allowed to throw off the mantle of responsibility for their choices just because they don’t want to assume the cost of that risk today? You advocate that companies that externalize costs by dumping pollution into the river should be forced to pay for that cost. Why do you give a free pass to those that wish to externalize their healthcare costs to others?

Otherwise, I’m in favor of aan intelligently-design government solution; something has to change, fast.

Never thought I would see the day you would embrace intelligent design. People can change after all.

Over at Reason Magazine I found this jewel:

In Chicago, the racial aspects of gun control have come up before. In February 1994, a black Democrat State Senator from Chicago, Rickey Hendon, had his home robbed. One of the items taken was an unregistered handgun. The Senator refused to apologize. “I have a right to protect myself,” he told the Sun-Times. Because of historical economic disparities between blacks and whites in all parts of the country, gun control disproportinately affects blacks, who tend to live in higher crime areas; lack the resources for private security, alarm systems, and other measures; and aren’t particularly trusting of or willing to rely upon the police to protect them. Going back to Chicago, when the city instituted a freeze on handgun registrations in 1983, some of the loudest objections came from black politicians, who said the ban discriminated against black Chicagoans in rough neighborhoods who lacked the resources to protect themselves in other ways.

Oh wait, I totally forgot that with gun bans there will be no guns in poorer areas of town so people will no longer need to worry about defending themselves against criminals carrying guns.

Eddie Vedder:

And he still gives his love, he just gives it away
The love he receives is the love that is saved
And sometimes is seen a strange spot in the sky
A human being that was given to fly

This story talks about how in michigan over the last six years there has been no siginficant increases in violent crime since ever since legislation was passed making it easier to acquire a firearm.

The incidence of violent crime in Michigan in the six years since the law went into effect has been, on average, below the rate of the previous six years. The overall incidence of death from firearms, including suicide and accidents, also has declined.

The story also covers a more rigorous academic analysis.

John Lott, a visiting professor at the University of Maryland who has done extensive research on the role of firearms in American society, said the results in Michigan since the law changed don’t surprise him.

Academic studies of concealed weapons laws that generally allow citizens to obtain permits have shown different results, Lott said. About two-thirds of the studies suggest the laws reduce crime; the rest show no net effect, he said.

But no peer-reviewed study has ever shown that crime increases when jurisdictions enact changes like those put in place by the Legislature and then-Gov. John Engler in 2000, Lott said.

Hate to say it but if an expert doing science says its true it has to be. I look forward to some of my readers changing their position on gun control now that they know the truth.

Sony has recently announced that there will be making available music that is not DRM protected.

In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet, BusinessWeek.com has learned. Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony (SNE) and Bertelsmann, will make at least part of its collection available without so-called digital rights management, or DRM, software some time in the first quarter, according to people familiar with the matter.

Sony BMG would become the last of the top four music labels to drop DRM, following Warner Music Group (WMG), which in late December said it would sell DRM-free songs through Amazon.com’s (AMZN) digital music store. EMI and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group announced their plans for DRM-free downloads earlier in 2007.

The legislation that gave these corporations Digital Rights was very poorly written. As a consequence consumer largely ignored the legislation and found ways to get around the protection measures. This is notable for several reasons.

A common complaint from Darwin has been that lobbyists corrupt our legislative branch leading to the passage of laws that the majority the citizenry would disagree with. I have argued that when legislation does not enjoy the support of a large block of voters that legislation will die. Either the laws will be repealed and or the citizenry will largely ignore the laws. In both instances, the ‘corruptive’ effect of lobbyists is diminished by the fact that the bad law fails to have the desired effect. It’s not hard to see the fact that the four major music distribution companies have realized that the laws they were able to get passed have been ignored and therefore are willing to abandon the legal rights DRM grants them.

It’s also noteworthy because the failure of the recording companies to make consumers respect their rights underscores just how helpless corporations are at forcing their will on the consumer. All four recording companies at the start of this digital era attempted to force consumers to respect the digital rights given to them by law. Millions of consumers simply ignored these companies’ attempts at coercion. Consumers could easily ignore the company’s coercive attempts because not a single one of these corporations could directly force a consumer to respect digital rights. In cases where they did force someone to obey the company’s digital rights it’s was always mediated through the state via the courts.

One final thing to note. The recording companies turn around on this position started when one of the recording companies began using a non DRM rights model to sell songs through Apple. Once it was noted that success could be attained through that matter competitive force caused the other recording to begin flipping their models. Thus, we see its free market competition that brought about the change. A change that is more in line with what the citizenry wants, but also does not require any of the onerous regulatory laws someone like Darwin would demand. Regulatory law is simply unnecessary because the markets responded to the citizen before enough political will was marshaled for the passage of regulations.

Lobbyists are helpless to force citizen to do the will of their corporation. Securing the passage of laws that most citizen disagree with will not protect the company or industry’s interest since the citizenry will simply ignore those laws. I should like to point out that the Digital Rights Media Act of 1998 was no doubt passed because the vast majority of citizen did not understand what the law meant. It seems to me that lobbyists are most effective at influencing law when the majority of the citizenry is ignorant of the significance of the law. If true, it’s difficult for me to get to upset at the ‘corrupting’ influence of lobbyists. If anyone is to blame it’s the ignorant citizenry. Seems to me the lobbyists are clever by taking advantage of relatively neutral political climate to get their legislation passed.

And as this story shows, no matter how clever the corporations lobbyist are, companies are helpless to force the citizenry to do their bidding. As I have said before, and I’m sure I will say again, I can choose to trust a corporation. I have no choice but to trust the government.

I feel there is a much truth to this characterization.

Environmentalism has become the political lifeboat into which the survivors of the socialist shipwreck have crammed themselves. The need to “manage the climate” became the new foundation on which to base regulatory structures, impositions, and taxes which were formerly justified by the imperative to manage the “commanding heights of the economy.” Kyoto was the highest expression of the program to “manage the climate” and provided the same new basis for socialistic policies that Marxism once did. As such, Kyoto was too politically useful to discard. But like its socialist predecessor it suffered from the problem that it wouldn’t work. That weakness would be artfully concealed by superseding it with a successor agreement to be drafted in Bali. But delegates who came to Indonesia already knew that Kyoto’s key weakness was mandating “carbon emission” reductions. Reducing “carbon emissions” really meant reducing economic output in a world where poverty is a major problem.