Re: Townhall.com – 12/02/2008 – “Freedom and the Left” – Thomas Sowell

Sowell says of educational institutions that require community service as a curricular requirement “The arrogance of commandeering young people's time, instead of leaving them and their parents free to decide for themselves how to use that time, is exceeded only by the arrogance of imposing your own notions as to what is or is not a service to the community.” Doesn’t Sowell realize that it is the job of educators to define what educational experiences are required of their students, and if educators are to be considered arrogant for doing their job, so be it. And doesn’t Sowell realize that a university’s choice of the service it may require of its students reflects primarily the value of that service to the student’s academic/intellectual development and to other intra-university issues and not to the value of that service to the community outside the university.

The relationship of the university with its students (and/or the parents of its students) is a contractual one. The university provides an educational program that the student (or parent) buys into with tuition. If the student fails to meet his/her obligations under the contract, the university can hold the student in breach and expel him/her without a degree. If the university fails its obligation to provide the educational opportunities it has promised or if the student decides he/she no longer wants to participate in the opportunities offered in the educational program, the student is free to walk away from the program. Regardless of the reason for pre-graduation departure, the student keeps all the academic credits he/she has earned under the contract. If the student completes the academic program requirements, the university is obligated to award the promised degree. Tuition and degree progress are benchmarked by academic time periods (usually semesters, trimesters, or quarters) and/or specific courses taken. Nobody is forced to do anything --- everything is by agreement.

I object to Sowell’s model of a university degree where the students (or the students’ parents) dictate the content of academic programs --- this may be a reasonable model for pay-on-demand tutoring but not for a university degree program. Universities are pretty good at providing educational degree programs and doing basic research and not that good at anything else. What Sowell wants universities to provide is some sort of training that would make students and parents happy. Rather than change the universities, students and parents who don’t want a university education should go elsewhere, leaving universities to provide the service that they are good at providing to those who want and/or need that service.

It may be that parents, working independently from one another, could somehow run a university better than teams of professional academic administrators and educators, but I know of no evidence supporting that conclusion. If parents feel that way, let them establish their own schools administered under that model.

It may be that commerce based on a consensus of customers that excludes the opinions of suppliers could work better than free market transactions between customers and suppliers, but I know of no evidence supporting that conclusion. If Sowell is really a believer in the free market system, he should drop his Communistic-like “dictatorship of the customers” model of commerce and adopt one where both buyers and sellers participate in determining what goods or services get put on the market. There is plenty of demand for university education as it is and there is plenty of room to establish alternative schools following a model that Sowell and those who agree with him might desire.

I take strong issue with Sowell’s views of on-campus ROTC educational programs. Academics other than anti-war types have problems with ROTC programs on campus. At Seattle U (where I was on faculty) I participated in an academic review of the ROTC program. The greatest problem I had with our ROTC program was that it was ultimately controlled by non-university military personnel who determine curricula and staffing, a situation that is allowed in no other program, and that the ROTC program was loaded up with non-academic “training”. While I supported the ROTC program in its academic review, I would have much preferred a purely academic program in military science (history, strategy, tactics, logistics, etc) under the control of university administrators and university employed academics (presumably mostly retired military) meeting standard academic requirements such as PhD degrees in Military Science or related subjects. The program I would have preferred probably would not meet ROTC’s military training goals, but I think universities are designed to educate, not train, and the training the military has inserted into ROTC (in my opinion) does not really belong in a university program.

Re: New York Times Op-Ed – 7/24/2008 – “Paying Doctors to Ignore Patients” – Peter Bach

While it is true that there are problems in Medicare’s way of paying doctors, Bach’s suggestions would make things even worse.

There are two major problems with Medicare’s reimbursement structure. First it overpays for procedures compared to other necessary medical services, such as office visits. Second, it reimburses doctors less for providing non-procedures than their direct cost plus reasonable return on their time and investment. This payment situation reduces the incentive to provide any care to patients other than the high-cost procedures.

Lowering payments across the board is obviously the worse possible cure for this problem --- it reduces cost only by reducing supply or quality, doing absolutely nothing positive to improve the efficiency of providing medical care. To its credit, Congress understands the stupidity of this tactic and reverses the payment cuts whenever they are proposed.

Bach thinks making doctors risk managers (fixed fee per patients’ normal care and disease treatment) is a solution. But risk management is by nature a probabilistic endeavor, and the laws of probability are reasonable approximations of reality only for large populations. Insurance companies are suitable risk managers because they have huge numbers of insured. But very few doctors have sufficient scale of practices to manage their own risks. When their patient demand is below average, doctors would make extra money but when their patient demand is above average, the doctors would run in the red and/or fail to meet the demand. Being rather small entities with very limited capital resources, physicians could easily be bankrupt or fail to meet their responsibilities in providing care when demand is randomly high. Furthermore, doctors are not trained as financial risk managers, so it would be almost impossible for a low overhead small business to afford the type of expertise necessary to determine an appropriate per patient average cost, even though doctors know what to charge for each type of service they provide. Let the government set the rates? That would create a temptation too great to resist to pin reimbursements to government budget constraint rather than to the real costs doctors face and ignore the real cost differential between practices in different regions and different types of patients --- problems we face with the current reimbursement system.

Bach’s arguments seem to ignore the fact that the practice of medicine is a business and is influenced by all the income and expense issues of any other business. Should the government fix the price that Hewlett Packard can charge for every desktop computer based on an average configuration, and if a particular user needs an extra large hard disk, either the user gets the disk upgrade for free (at HP’s cost) or is denied the necessary feature? I should hope not --- no company and particularly not HP could stand such interference with the way they do business. Neither can physicians.

What can be done? I might suggest three positive steps.

First, fix the undesirable incentives built into the Medicare fee schedule that favors procedures over other types of medical care. Perhaps opening each procedure and other types of care to bids, using the average of the lowest 10% of the bids as the base rate for each, and offering those bidders at or below that rate a 10% bonus on their reimbursements. 

Second, rather than trying to force everyone into the average cost model and then ratchet down those model costs to force efficiency, re-price procedural reimbursements to reflect the real costs before profit (perhaps using a procedure like the bids I suggested above), perhaps corrected for regional and other uncontrollable factors, and reimburse doctors that amount, allowing doctors to price compete by billing patients as much as they want above that.

Third, encourage price as an issue in selecting physicians. Make patients aware of and responsible for some of the financial burden of their healthcare.

I am not a believer in a 100% free market (I think some regulation is sometimes a good thing), but I do sincerely believe that Medicare has encroached too far into the free market for medical services, and more intervention, especially price fixing, forced risk management, and hiding the cost of patient care from the patient, is not appropriate.

Re: Washington Times – 7/20/2008 – “STANGLER: Doctor nurse will see you now” – Dane Stangler

What a novel idea to keep costs low. Stangler takes the old saying “You get what you pay for” to new heights.

Stangler thinks that ”it seems odd that with rising health care costs, we should seek to toughen requirements for health-care providers. That will likely only increase costs; studies show nurse practitioners provide 80 percent of the care a physician provides at a much lower cost. DNPs already command higher prices than NPs.” Perhaps we should lower requirements for NPs, and then we could pay them even less. If we removed all educational requirements, maybe we could get the care for free.

Stangler’s wishes to the contrary, the level of education required of a health care provider is more than a cost issue --- one may validly question whether the current level of training a NP (or any other professional) has is sufficient for their responsibilities. If NP’s have high enough educational standards already they should be licensed to take that responsibility without requiring an additional degree. If not, they should have their responsibilities decreased down to their level of competence or be required to get more education.

Such decisions (DNP or not to DNP) must be made based on cost/benefit, not cost alone. Almost all Stangler’s comments are addressed to the cost side. Only one mention is made of a single study that addresses the benefit side. Hopefully, the DNP decision will be made by those who give equal attention to both the cost and benefit sides of the issue.

Re: BreakPoint – 8/1/2008 – “A Civil Right to Gay Marriage” – Regis Nicoll

Nicoll errs when he fails to see distinction between biblical marriage (or whatever you want to call the marriage for procreation and family raising) and legal marriage (the license issued by the state and granting certain joint civil rights).

Let’s assume that biblical marriage is a natural right and non-biblical marriage is not a natural right. That leaves open the question as to whether non-biblical marriage should be a civil right.

As Nicoll admits, “Civil rights are legal privileges granted by the State to promote the common good of the governed”. What kinds of rights fit that description? Based on one of the three “civil rights” Nicoll cites (right to drink alcoholic beverages) I think he really should give some more thought to his definition of “common good of the governed”

I would assert that government should recognize rights that do not materially contribute to the common good of the governed but the recognition of which do no material harm (I think this is the brand of reasoning that would make the consumption of alcohol a right if anything will). Government should interfere with individual freedom only to the extent that is needed to promote the common good, and if something is not harmful it ought to be allowed, that is, anything that is not harmful to society should be a right.

Most do consider biblical marriage (heterosexual marriage for the purpose of procreation and family raising) a natural right.

Most people consider heterosexual non-biblical marriage entered into for reasons other than procreation and family raising a right. Many heterosexual couples marry because they love each other and want to spend their life together in a monogamous relationship. Perhaps they cannot have children for medical reasons. Perhaps they fear they cannot raise children because of economic, physical, or other limitations. Perhaps they fear that the pattern of their own mistreatment as children by their parents might be repeated by them on their children. For whatever the reason, society recognizes that such marriages are not only of value to society but do no harm to it as well.

In the past (even in our own country) restrictions have been placed on the right of heterosexual marriages. But those restrictions such as limiting heterosexual marriage to partners of the same race have been stripped away, perhaps because heterosexual marriage was seen as a natural right but more likely because society recognized that such mixed marriages are actually good for society but even if not a positive good do no harm.

Inevitably we will recognize that although homosexual marriage is not a natural right, whether or not it contributes to the common good is not material because in the long run, recognizing homosexual marriage actually does no real harm, and thus should be allowed by the state. My apologies to those who are upset by the thought of homosexual marriage, but like some people’s problems with marriages of mixed race or mixed religion, or even with childless marriages, protecting you from the pain of your own prejudices is insufficient reason to interfere with the free choice of others.

I think it is quite appropriate that religious institutions are allowed to restrict marriages performed under their jurisdiction to heterosexual couples of the same religion or religious denomination, especially if their sacred traditions explicitly disallow other types of marriages --- freedom of religion and all that. But I think that homosexual marriage has as many advantages and as few disadvantages to society as non-biblical heterosexual marriage and as such, should be considered a civil right.

I like to distinguish ceremonial marriage from civil union. A civil union is a government recognized “legal contract” between two persons that grants them specific civil rights, the right of inheritance perhaps being of most significance. Ceremonial marriage, on the other hand, is a “social contract”, granted by non-government social organizations (primarily but not necessarily exclusively religious) with no inherent legal rights. I have no problem to attaching the rights of civil union to ceremonial marriage, but I do have problems when the rights of civil union are restricted by qualifications imposed on ceremonial marriages by non-government institutions.

Government should be involved in the business of civil unions, open to any two persons of sufficient maturity, who want to spend their lives together in a single “family” regardless of any other characteristics they may have. Government should not be involved in ceremonial marriage, a social institution in of itself granting no legal benefits.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Family Security Matters – 7/28/2008 – “The Greens Are Going Crazy” – Alan Caruba

Perhaps Caruba has a point --- there may be a lot we might learn from China.

Perhaps Caruba thinks we should follow China’s lead in social and political policy. Perhaps Caruba thinks we should give Communism a try? Perhaps Caruba thinks we should wipe the internet and newspapers of all objectionable content, especially suggestions that current government leadership is less than stellar? Perhaps Caruba thinks we should try China’s ideas on family planning? I could go on and on.

Just because China is wrong on political and social issues doesn’t mean that they are wrong on Green, but it is hardly an argument that they are right on Green either.

Furthermore, Caruba’s assumptions that China isn’t also concerned with the environmental effects of fossil fuel combustion is not that well founded --- hasn’t China just put limits on auto travel and factory operation in an attempt to clear the air of pollution hanging over the Olympic Games? China seems to have recognized the errors in its past polluting behavior and is making an attempt to correct them. If Caruba wants us to learn from China, perhaps what we should learn is that the effects of growth blind to the environmental harm it can produce isn’t worth the cost.

Re: The Heritage Foundation – 7/24/2008 – “Economic Freedom as a Human Right” – Kim Holmes

While I have no problem with Holmes’ view on the importance of economic freedom, I take issue with the claim that economic freedom is a human right of the same sort as freedom of speech.

Here I will use the terms natural rights and civil rights as in BreakPoint – 8/1/2008 – “A Civil Right to Gay Marriage” – Regis Nicoll, where natural rights are basic human rights and civil rights are privileges granted by governments. These two sets of rights are disjoint and together span the space of all rights.

One might argue that natural rights are beyond limitation by government or any other power save the individual who possesses such rights. But it is generally accepted by those who see freedom of speech a natural right that neither perjury, nor malicious statements known to be false, nor symbolic actions that hurt others (like burning down someone’s house as a symbolic act of disagreeing with their politics) are valid expressions of freedom of speech. And it is generally accepted among those who see freedom of religion a natural right that religiously motivated involuntary human sacrifice or the physical punishment of those who defame your religion by believing otherwise are not valid expressions of religious freedom. Government cannot create natural rights (they can only create civil rights) but governments may limit specific actions as expressions of natural rights.

By economic freedom, I assume Holmes implies the right to acquire, use, and dispose of property as one sees fit. Property, however, is a different kind of entity than speech or religion.

The right to freedom of speech means freedom to all speech (except as restricted above) and the right to freedom of religion means the freedom to practice any religion or religions (except as restricted above). There can never be any confusion over the “ownership” of the speech in freedom of speech --- each individual possess the freedom of all their speech and never the freedom of someone else’s speech. Similarly, freedom of religion implies the freedom of any individual to practice the religion of their choice but not the freedom to force others to practice or not practice any religion.

One’s property rights, however, do not apply to all property but only to the specific property that by agreement within a society are subject to that person’s ownership. But questions of property ownership are not only possible but common because there is no self evident “natural” criterion by which ownership is established. For example, the land on which many of us live was acquired by treaty from the various Native American tribes by our government and sold or otherwise distributed to individuals, eventually arriving in our hands via transfer of ownership to us. But many of the provisions of consideration in the treaties were never honored by our government. Is a transfer of property contingent on consideration valid if the consideration was never produced? Do Native American tribes really still own the land in the parts of the US where the promises of treaties ceding title to the land were never properly honored? Such an argument over natural rights is hardly imaginable.

Summarizing:

 (1) Such rights as freedom of speech and freedom of religion are inclusive of all speech one may choose to make or any religion one may choose to practice, subject only to very few restrictions mainly but not exclusively aimed at protecting the rights of others from being infringed upon.

(2) Such rights as property rights are not only subject to the same types of restriction as freedom of speech and religion but are additionally severely limited to only the tiny subset of all property that is somehow properly described as belonging to the person (or specific association of persons) who are designated “owners” of the property. The criteria for defining just who owns property is not a self evident natural law --- the definition of that criteria is a function of government and/or the mutual agreement of parties involved in the transfer of property ownership. The complex criteria for establishing ownership is totally uncharacteristic of natural rights (where ownership is intuitively obvious) but is characteristic of civil rights

(3) Economic freedom, generally concerned with the methods of acquiring, using, and disposing of property as one sees fit is not a natural right but a civil right.

There are other arguments involving the differences between civil and natural rights. For example, natural rights are not transferrable between individuals (individuals have natural rights because of who they are whether or not they want those rights, but of course are always free not to execute their rights if they so wish) but civil rights may or may not be transferrable depending on the way in which government grants these rights.

Re: TownHall.com – 5/14/2008 – “Too Complex? Part II” – Thomas Sowell

Sowell describes “the most fundamental reality of economics” as “what everybody wants has always added up to more than there is”. Sowell is wrong. Lots of things are available in quantities far beyond the sum total of everyone’s needs. Take the atmosphere. Where Sowell is right is that economics tends to ignore the value of anything that is currently not scarce, one of the great failures of economics.

Sowell tries to blame high current oil prices on those who restrict drilling, but such an argument is just too simple. There are plenty of other reasons why oil is expensive now: war and terrorist disruptions of oil production throughout the world (and fear of these disruptions), financial speculation, high cost of finding and drilling for new oil, etc.  

There’s a lot more to high housing prices than government restrictions limiting supply. Rural land is expensive because rural land owners are speculating on future prices --- listings are expensive but little land gets sold at those prices. Just drive around rural areas and look at the number of persistent for-sale signs. City land is expensive because lots of people want to live close together but the laws of nature forbids two people from occupying the same space and there is a real cost to stacking people vertically, so that at some point city land becomes insufficient to meet demand even without government restrictions. But long before the land is exhausted the infrastructure necessary to support such population densities becomes prohibitively expensive and thus limits land utilization. If few houses are being built because of government land restrictions, demand for construction labor such as carpenters, electricians, and plumbers should also be low and competition for work should keep hourly rates low, but such is not the case.

One problem with a free market economics is that it tends to discount the future to virtually nothing. As economists view it, as long as there is someone who wants to pay the cost today, they should get their way. If 100 years from now, the whole world explodes, so what, the value of the world in 100 years to those alive today is near 0, because of the time-cost of money and that few who are alive today will be alive then. But societies and governments have much longer time horizons than individual people (although some societies and many governments fail to survive 100 years), and thus it is appropriate for them from time to time to overrule free market economics by giving appropriate weight to the long term and to other hard to monetized factors.

While it is true that many politicians interfere with the free market for votes rather than for valid economic reasons, not every such interference is justified only by its political ramifications --- some are for real good reasons and accomplish real positive results, both ethical and economic.

Re: TownHall.com – 5/14/2008 – “The Way of the Future in American Schooling” – Matthew Ladner

Inter school competition, private or charter schools, or home schooling are not the solution to our educational system problems --- none address what is really the major problem with education in the US today. The main problem with our educational system is parents who do not value education themselves and/or are unwilling and/or unable to transmit to their children the importance, enjoyment, and effort involved in getting an education. Schools (of any kind) can do relatively little when the majority of their students have no interest in learning and enter school without the drive or discipline to learn.

Don’t get me wrong --- good schools and good teachers can make a difference. But even the best schools and teachers have a point where they will be overloaded with unwilling and/or hostile students, and like any system stressed past its design limits, will fail.

Charter schooled, private schooled, and home schooled students are all indicators of parents who actually care enough about their children’s education that they actively invest their time and/or financial resources. It’s no wonder that these schools might look more successful than public schools --- if they didn’t they’d have to be really bad schools, given the advantage they have in family support for the education of the student who are enrolled there.

Segregating the committed family students to those “special” schools and leaving the public schools to deal with the disinterested family students is hardly a solution when well over half the student population is from disinterested families. The result will be future populations that will be dominated by people who do not respect education and, because they are unfamiliar with the educated, do not trust them. Surprisingly (to me at least), many conservatives who favor home, private, and charter schools, are most likely to distrust many well educated people, who they accuse of being “elitist”. Go figure.

I do not know how to get the “masses” to value education and recognize that students can’t really be taught but can only to be led to learn, that learning is hard but enjoyable work, and that the ultimate responsibility for education is the student and family and not the “educational system”, either public or private. The educational system is at best an incredibly powerful tool for students to use in helping them learn, but a tool neither necessary nor sufficient to get an education.

I do know that the dismantling of public education by redirecting limited funds to students with interested parents will make getting an education for students with disinterested families much, much more difficult then it already is.

Re: TownHall.com – 5/16/2008 – “None Dare Call It ‘Appeasement’” – David Limbaugh

Limbaugh asks why “It's perfectly fair for Barack Obama and his cohorts to repeatedly disparage President Bush's foreign policy as "cowboy diplomacy" but unspeakably horrific for Bush to analogize the Democrats' approach to foreign policy to appeasing Hitler?”. The answer is because (disparaging or not) Bush’s foreign policy is a very good example of “cowboy diplomacy” and the Democrat’s foreign policy is nothing whatsoever like appeasing Hitler.

What is “cowboy diplomacy” anyway? It is carrying out foreign policy following the model of interpersonal relations that most of us associate with the old wild west --- with us / against us alliances and shoot first / ask later action. Sounds like Bush #2’s approach to foreign policy to me. Whether being accused of being a cowboy diplomat is disparaging or not is a matter of opinion --- as far as I am concerned there is a time for cowboy diplomacy and a time where cowboy diplomacy is quite inappropriate. I think today, on the issues facing us with Iran and especially Syria, cowboy diplomacy is the wrong tactic. But there are other issues and other times when I would support such an approach --- say the start of Gulf War I, where I thought that if anything, we took too long to act.

How would negotiating with Iran or Syria resemble “appeasing Hitler”? Hitler wasn’t appeased by being negotiated with. He was appeased by getting agreement to his demands without having to provide sufficient enforceable concessions in return. Possibly Limbaugh thinks Americans are just too weak willed or weak brained to accomplish effective negotiations. But I believe we (but probably not Bush) can negotiate at least as well as either the Iranians or the Syrians, and in any negotiations we would be the winners. Limbaugh wants to hide from adversity rather than face the challenge of talking --- he’s just afraid to do what is required to win! He must be one of those American hating chicken livered Liberals that Conservatives rant about.

It is interesting that while Bush was blasting away at “appeasers” who are willing to negotiate with countries like Syria, Israel is in heavy negotiations with Syria on issues of mutual interest. Israel, unlike the US, has been willing to negotiate with almost anyone (it draws the line against terrorists currently terrorizing them) face to face and has suffered no apparent harm from talking while achieving some notable success, including an unlikely but long standing peace with Jordan and Egypt.

Talk is cheap; action is dear; neither is ab initio beneficial or detrimental. Appeasement always refers to action (or refusal to take action), never to talk, and it’s the action (or inaction), not the talk, that does the harm. Talk is so cheap with so little risk that it’s ridiculous not to talk --- so long as you’re willing to fight when necessary, even as you talk.

Re: TownHall.com – 5/5/2008 – “McCain is right on health care” – Star Parker

I agree with McCain that the incentives to businesses for providing employee health insurance should be eliminated and replaced by incentives to the employees to acquire health insurance coverage for themselves.

However, McCain’s solution is only part of the answer to health care funding. It fails to account for those now without employer funded health insurance and who are unable to acquire health insurance on their own either because of its cost or because it is unavailable to them, especially the children of our poor.

Hopefully, someone will propose a system fusing McCain’s private insurance for the rich, middle, and working classes with the some reasonable health insurance for the poor. But I’m not holding my breath.

Re: TownHall.com – 5/31/2008 – “Environmentalists Pick Up Where Communists Left Off” – Charles Krauthammer

Except for his use of the word “entirely” in the last sentence of the second paragraph I agree with Krauthammer’s first two paragraphs:

“I'm not a global warming believer. I'm not a global warming denier. I'm a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can't be very good to pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere, but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.”

“Predictions of catastrophe depend on models. Models depend on assumptions about complex planetary systems -- from ocean currents to cloud formation -- that no one fully understands. Which is why the models are inherently flawed and forever changing. The doomsday scenarios posit a cascade of events, each with a certain probability. The multiple improbability of their simultaneous occurrence renders all such predictions entirely speculative.”

But from here on, our opinions diverge.

Krauthammer says “Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation”, but the science of global warming is better established and more widely accepted than many predictive economic theories on which economists routinely advocate radical economic and social regulation and on which free-market economists dogmatically reject such regulation.

Krauthammer says “If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue”, but he’s way off base here. First of all, Newton’s laws weren’t overthrown, they were shown to be limited to a domain now understood to be a subset of the universe, the huge sub domain of small mass, low speed, and low acceleration. The domain where Newton’s laws do not apply was not discovered until relatively recently and no evidence has ever been found to overthrow Newton’s laws in the huge domain of its applicability. And secondly, very few people believe that global warming is a closed issue. Science is never closed --- science is always open to better explanations of known fact and discovery of new fact. In time, some scientific theory becomes so successful and useful it is used as if it is fact, but of course it never is fact. And very few think that the theory of global warming is nearly that successful.

Krauthammer says “For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class -- social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies -- arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism)”. He apparently forgets that for centuries before that, ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous right wing monarchists believed (or claimed to believe) that by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress, and by the will of God, only they (and their progeny) were fit to rule. He ignores the dogmatic beliefs of today’s right.

Krauthammer says “Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history”. But communism lives on in North Korea, China, Cuba, and elsewhere; elements of socialism (central planning and legal enforcement of those plans) prosper in every country in the world; and two decades of current history wouldn’t prove the death of communism or socialism even if it were true that communism and socialism completely disappeared from the face of the earth over that time span. Can Krauthammer’s acceptance of the defeat of socialism by free-market capitalism really be better supported by evidence than the belief others have in the validity of global warming?

From here, Krauthammer’s arguments become even worse. He apparently does not understand the positions of liberals or environmentalists and the economic consequences of their beliefs. He clearly doesn’t understand scientific theory validation or the degree of validation necessary for theory application. But above all, he has done exactly what he accuses people who disagree with him of doing --- letting his own personal prejudices cloud his ability to think rationally. I doubt he even really understands the positions he instinctively and reflexively espouses.

Re: TownHall.com – 5/2/2008 – “Willful Blindness to the Jihad” – David Limbaugh

I’m afraid Limbaugh has missed the point of American justice. He states correctly that the “entire orientation of the criminal justice system is to protect the rights of innocents, affording the accused due process and a litany of other constitutional protections”. He correctly continues that “we are at war with an enemy who doesn't fight wars according to conventional rules”. But he begins to loose his way with “If we continue to treat them as criminal suspects rather than enemy combatants, they'll always be many steps ahead of us in a war that only they are fighting” when he seems to refer to both those accused of and those guilty of being the enemy as equivalent entities. And with “While our government frets over their constitutional rights -- rights to which enemy combatants have never been historically entitled -- it abdicates its duty to protect American lives” Limbaugh clearly reveals his utter confusion between being accused of a crime and actually being guilty of a crime.

In making any determination about the guilt or innocence of the accused, the legal system is always faced with two distinct but related kinds of errors. On one hand, an innocent may be wrongly convicted and punished; on the other hand, the guilty can be erroneously absolved of guilt and thus escape their just punishment. Assuming the null hypothesis in our legal system is always that the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty, the first kind of error is called a “type I error” (an invalid rejection of a correct null hypothesis) and the second type of error is called a “type II error” (an invalid acceptance of an erroneous null hypothesis). In general the probabilities of making type I and type II errors are related, and by decreasing one, the other tends to increase.

For those of who believe that our judicial system must maintain the same type I / type II threshold no matter how serious the danger of a type II error is, the danger of terrorism is of no significance in establishing the guilt of a suspected terrorist, and everyone (accused terrorists included) is equally innocent until proven guilty. It is not that we don’t understand the danger of terrorism; it’s just that we do recognize the danger of deserting our democratic traditions and institutions in the name of defending them and declaring the accused guilty based on the accusations against them instead of the evidence in support of the accusation. 

For those Americans who cannot believe that our democracy is a strong enough form of government to stand up to terrorism, I challenge them to produce a better form of government. But until then, the accused (regardless of what they are accused of) must be offered the same protection against being falsely accused that the innocent deserve.

Re: TownHall.com – 5/2/2008 – “O’Reilly-Clinton Interview Shows Dem Flaw” – Dick Morris & Eileen McGann

What Morris & McGann seem to miss is that McCain’s position in Iraq is not to win in Iraq but to keep fighting while not allocating enough resources to win.

Most Democrats of national stature, including both Clinton and Obama, would agree that if we could achieve our objectives in Iraq at a cost we are willing to bear (in lives, money, and time) we should stay and fight ‘til our objectives are met. But Democrats also believe that our goals are not achievable at a cost our society (including an overwhelming majority of Republicans) would agree to. Thus continuing to fight with inadequate resources is a failing strategy.

Our choices are not just “fight and win” or “cut and run” --- there is a third, “fight and not win”.

Democrats may be guilty of choosing “cut and run”. Most Democrats believe that we have defined a set of objectives in Iraq such that winning is impossible and that in the end Iraqis will not want what we want them to want, and thus to win we will have to perpetually impose our will on Iraq against the wishes of its people, something that no democratic nation can successfully do for long. Democrats choose “cut and run” over “fight and not win”, not over “fight and win”.

Republicans claim to support “fight and win” but are oblivious to questions of what the Iraqis really are willing to accept from America’s intervention and whether Americans (including a huge majority of Republicans) will ever agree to allocate enough resources to actually win the fight, and as such are actually supporting “fight and not win”.

Most Americans are unwilling to even consider allocating the kind of strength necessary to win in Iraq. Until they allocate the appropriate level of resources, the Democrats have the superior strategy.

Re: TownHall.com – 5/1/2008 – “Treehuggers Against Trees” – Iain Murray

Compelling fiction, but nothing to do with the history of American forests.

Native American did practice burning to clear patches for crops and create forest edges for game animals but Native Americans had relatively little concern for forest health per se.

Murray says “The pioneers, however, used much more wood in their civilization than the Native Americans. They needed it for housing, for boats and river ships, for railroad sleepers, for carriages, and for town infrastructure. To them, fire was an enemy”. While the pioneers did use much more lumber than the Native Americans, what the pioneers used was what the local forests provided. Transportation difficulties made moving wood long distances impractical, and while small areas of forests surrounding growing population centers were cleared for their wood content, the vast majority of the pioneer forests that were cleared were cleared by burning for farmland, not for wood products. 

Early forestry practice involved clear cutting and leaving. Neither fast nor slow growing trees were planted --- logged forests were left with slash on the ground, resulting in huge fires that decimated uncut neighboring forest land, towns, and farms as well. This was a particular problem in the upper mid west. Consider the 1871 fire at Peshtigo WI where 1.3 million acres were burned and 1,500 people were killed. The founders of our national forest reserves were not the kind of “environmentalists” that Murray sees lurking behind every bush but practical people who recognized that our forests were being destroyed and the consequential losses therein wore intolerable. The predecessors of our National Forests were created in 1891 to stop the pillage of our forest resources and protect our watersheds; it wasn’t until 6 years later that the cutting of any timber at all was allowed on government controlled forest lands.

State attempts to encourage replanting by offering tax breaks to foresters for managing their post logged forests were to no avail --- early foresters were only interested in cutting and running and preferred to loose their land to tax foreclosure rather than stay and manage their land for future generations (at any reasonable discount rate, the cost of maintaining a stand for years without income was not worth the opportunity cost of moving on to the next stand of virtually free timber). Lots of state lands were acquired by such tax foreclosures.

Virtually all the original attempts to bring European style sustained yield forestry to the United States were efforts of the federal governments over the strong objections of the cut and run loggers, a notable exception being the Pinchot managed Vanderbilt estate in North Carolina before Pinchot became the chief national forester.

In time, industry came around to growing as well as logging timber only because land prices rose and standing timber supply declined to a point where it was no longer possible to cut and run and meet market demand with private holdings at the same time. But that didn’t stop them from complaining that the government was “locking up” the forests by requiring them to do on public land what they were no longer economically able to do on their own private land.

It’s a myth that private forests are better managed than national forests. To the extent that national forests are poorly managed, it is mainly due to budgetary and political policies mainly imposed by the timber industry interests on our government that slant budgetary allocations toward timber extraction and away from any constructive ecological management. 

Murray forgets that ecological processes are not necessarily favorable to what man wants out of forests, and fire prevention is not a high priority for ecological processes.

In the Pacific Northwest wet coastal Douglas Fir forests, infrequent “catastrophic” fires are natural and have occurred for thousands of years without man’s interference. In these forests, the climax species is primarily Western Hemlock with a few large species, especially Western Redcedar, Grand Fir, and in limited areas Sitka Spruce, mixed in. Huge, wide ranging fires burn those fire susceptible trees and the burned areas are reseeded by a few old, legacy Douglas Fir trees. Douglas Fir seedlings grow much faster than the other species and thus almost completely form the forest canopy. But Douglas Fir cannot reproduce in its own shade while the climax species can can, so the climax species form an understory of young trees that persist and slowly grow in the shade of the forest cover. Barring fire, the Douglas Fir begin to decline, and on the timeframe of perhaps 500 years begins to be reduced in the forest population, and the forest eventually reverts to its climax form, at least until the next “catastrophic” fire. In these forests you can keep Douglas Fir growing forever by thinning and clear cut rotations, but if you think that has anything to do with natural processes or forest health, you just don’t really understand anything about either natural processes or forest health.

In the western dry high elevation mountain forests dominated by lodgepole pine, the situation is even more extreme. Lodgepole pine is a fast growing, short lived, insect prone tree requiring full sun to germinate and grow and hot fire to release its seeds. Stands of lodgepole pine grow quickly and burn to the ground more quickly only to rise again, like the phoenix, out of their ashes. There is really no other way for lodgepole in these forests. If you think a pre-fire stand of dense, thin, over-aged forests is unhealthy, so be it, but understand, this is a necessary precondition to a new stand. If you could thin a lodgepole stand without burning it to the ground, lodgepole pine wouldn’t be able to naturally regenerate. And in the end, when the last lodgepole died of old age without getting a chance to release its seed in fire, the stand would be gone forever unless hand replanted or reseeded by man.

Murray thinks that the environmental movement was born in the 1970’s. That’s an error that Murray could correct by actually studying the subject he’s writing about.

Murray thinks the environmental movement has made American forestry policies worse. Again he exposes great ignorance. Forest policies prior to the environmental movement couldn’t have gotten worse --- anything worse is unimaginable.

Murray thinks “Environmentalists are dogmatically opposed to man's interference with nature”. He’s again wrong. Environmentalists believe that many of man’s interference with nature have consequences detrimental to man, and believe that all things considered, the less interference with nature, the better for man. But they support many “interferences” with nature that are necessary for mankind’s survival and/or wellbeing.

Murray said “in 1988, a million acres of Yellowstone National Park burned to the ground as the combination of overgrown forests and natural burn led to catastrophe”. The Yellowstone burn did not level a million acres of forest, but took many significant bites out of it. And although it might be accurate to describe the fire as a catastrophic fire, it hardly can be said to be a catastrophe, and the catastrophic lodgepole pine forest fires is what you get when nature takes its own course.

Murray says “Before the 1990s, commercial logging companies had been allowed access to the national forests for a fee that was placed in a trust fund, something that helped keep the forest service within budget and provided extra funds for fire control when needed. Moreover, logging represents a way to thin forests without the risk of managed burns. Loggers benefit, the forest benefits and the public and taxpayers benefit”. Actually, with the exception of the Pacific Northwest, the Forest Service not only sells its timber below market value but looses money on the sale. Actually, logging (at least in the west) consists of clear cutting, not thinning. Actually it would be completely uneconomical to harvest the understory to preserve the mature trees (which is what frequent ground fires accomplish) --- loggers instead remove mature trees and leave the fire-prone understory components behind unreduced or as slash.

I could go on, but I’m fed up. Murry just doesn’t know or understand anything about the subject he has written about. He knows nothing of forestry, forest history, environmentalism, or anything else he has written about here --- my guess is he just made it up as he went along.

Re: TownHall.com – 5/3/2008 – “Need Growth, Think Global Warming?” – Wayne Winegarden

Winegarden says “Because of our current technology constraints, limiting U.S. emissions limits our use of energy and, consequently, our economic growth”. He’s wrong in several ways.

First, energy’s relation to economic growth does not follow from energy consumption but from what we get out of energy consumption. If the economy could be measured by automobile miles driven, wouldn’t doubling gas efficiency and increasing miles driven by 50% mean significant economic growth with significant decrease in energy consumption? As we actually began to put the current commercial technologies available into our products, we will greatly reduce energy efficiency at little to no net cost, especially as the prices decline with economy of scale.

Second, emissions are a very poor measure of energy consumption --- our hydroelectric capacity produces plenty of consumable electric power with no emissions.

Third, technology constraints do not currently prevent us from reducing emissions without reducing energy production or utilization. In addition to existing market ready technologies that allow energy production with reduced emission (natural gas generated electric power, for example) there are many just commercialized (solar heating and solar generated electric power, for example) and others proven in concept and in the process of commercialization (wave power, for example). And of course, the more efficiently we use the energy produced, the less energy is needed to fuel our usage, and consequently the less emissions are released.

In my opinion, cap and trade will do for energy emissions what home equity withdrawal, variable rate mortgages, and packaged mortgages did for home ownership in the long term. But that’s because cap and trade is a terrible policy that will not accomplish what it is intended to and will have negative side effects, not because it is a government policy. There are plenty of governmental incentives for continuing to use current technology (especially in the tax code) that could be removed from inefficient high emission technologies and transferred to efficient low emission technologies.

Winegarden’s arguments about job creation sounds like pre-automobile era economists arguing that leasing oil rights on federal lands and building roads for automobiles would harm horse breeders, hay growers, and buggy manufacturers. They’d be right about that but really, really wrong about the effects on the economy. Winegarden is just as wrong about opposing incentives to move to an efficient, low emission energy economy.