Gus Van Horn blog

Am I the only one who finds irony in the following statement by David Axelrod? The government is simply too big for President Obama to keep track of all the wrongdoing taking place on his watch, his former senior adviser, David Axelrod, told MSNBC. "Part of being president is there's so much beneath you that you can't know because the government is so vast," he explained. This person has spent an entire career promoting paternalistic politicians. Paternalism relies on the premise that individuals are incapable of caring for themselves and need central planners like Barack Obama to take care of them. As Axelrod has now admitted (and pro-capitalist economists have known for ages), the goings-on of the government (let alone a nation of over three hundred million) are too much for one man to track. Perhaps it's time for us to reassess Axelrod's notion of what the government is supposed to be doing, and move towards individuals taking more responsibility for (and having more control over) their own lives. Clearly one individual can't do this for all the other individuals. That said, the alignment of Obama's political agenda with whom the IRS targeted is too convenient for Axelrod's argument, however true in general, to have a shred of credibility for this situation in particular. Even Barack Obama knows something about what his underlings are doing. The man who ran as everyone's personal savior has no business pleading "I couldn't help it!" now. Oh. Barack Obama wasn't the one talking? Obama can't know what some random loose cannon like David Axelrod might choose to do? Well, then, let's see what Barack Obama says about the matter himself. -- CAV Link to Original

Writing for The Week, Peter Weber asks whether Republicans will overplay the various scandals that could engulf the Obama Administration. That's a fair question, given how the GOP handled the Lewinsky scandal back in the 1990s and, more importantly, why it did so. Weber quotes blogger Jonathan Bernstein regarding the how: Scandal-mongering, obviously, is very lucrative within the conservative marketplace.... [but] actually finishing an impeachment presumably ends whatever scandal they are mongering. It might be better to just keep the witch-hunt going.... On balance I think the final word on this is likely to be John Boehner's demonstrated ability in guiding House Republicans past their worst self-destructive instincts. This may be, but Weber indicates earlier that the American public is weary of scandals and, at least in the case of Bengazi, indifferent to them. So even this much political calculus looks futile to me. Regarding why the GOP might overplay any or all of Obama's scandals, one need only consider why they overplayed the Lewinsky scandal and why they were unable to defeat Barack Obama in 2012. As I said after the 2012 election: Barack Obama did not win comfortably. He has no mandate. If America is so brain-dead as to actually want this non-entity for President again, our goose is cooked. But this "win" seemed more like something happening by default. Perhaps if voters had had a clearer and more inspiring choice, the result would have been different. Perhaps Scott Brown wasn't the only Republican who sounded too much like his opponent, but only the most obvious one. Obama -- or the man who first signed ObamaCare into law in his own state? A man who wants to run a massive welfare state somehow -- or one whose Vice President wants to save the massive welfare state by slowing its rate of growth? This wasn't really much of a choice, was it? The Republicans only spoke of dismantling the welfare state "brick by brick" when they took Congress during Clinton's presidency. Based on their subsequent actions, they made this promise only because they thought it would get them elected. They did no such thing, and they did not represent a true, principled alternative to Bill Clinton's vision of improper government. The GOP didn't truly oppose the welfare state then, and they don't now. Until they do, the Republicans can only hope to gain power as a more palatable alternative, whatever that might mean -- at least until most voters become completely cynical about all politicians. So I see scandal-mongering as a poor long-term strategy as well as a poor short-term one. That said, if Barack Obama deserves to be impeached and removed from office -- and I would hope that anyone would see using the IRS to violate freedom of speech as sufficient reason -- the GOP should cast aside any forecasts of short-term electoral losses (or Democrat gains due to "healing") and move precisely in that direction. They should, that is, for the right reason, which is protecting the individual rights of all Americans. Such a move would represent a step in the right direction, and, by that fact, show that the GOP is (a) serious about providing Americans a proper-government alternative and ( trustworthy. If the GOP hopes to use Barack Obama's scandals to oust a man from power, they might succeed. However, any attempt on their part to use Barack Obama's scandals as a substitute for having to make a case to voters that they deserve to hold office will backfire sooner or later. -- CAV Link to Original

This morning, I noticed the following blurb at Instapundit: "Most Transparent Administration in History Releases Completely Redacted Document About Text Snooping." It may surprise many people that an administration that spends so much time preening about "transparency" would do this. But it makes perfect sense when some of its other actions are considered, like using the IRS to intimidate political opponents -- or obtaining months of the phone records of a large news agency. As I wrote over a year ago, regarding the fad of "transparency": Ayn Rand once rightly pointed out that privacy is a hallmark of civilization. Those who truly appreciate this, but won't stand up for privacy, risk opening themselves up to all kinds of mistaken suspicion and plain old bullying about anything they happen to do that might be misinterpreted -- or "misinterpreted". and Where the minutes of a meeting might once have served a legitimate purpose -- as a memory aid for those for whom the meeting was a concern -- they now serve as an ammunition depot for anyone with an ax to grind to seemingly base an allegation of wrongdoing or bad intent on reality. Predictably, transparency laws have had a stifling effect on debate in the corridors of power... Of course, since federal regulations and the tax code manufacture criminals, who needs misinterpretation? Barack Obama's fascistic record of introducing government control over every aspect of our lives that he can provides the clue. If, as he wrongly sees it, the government should run everything (individual knowledge or opinion be damned), who else has the right to or need for information? Barack Obama not only fails to see a double standard, he sees this prying as moral and necessary. Whether the people who populate this country are Americans, who understand that civilization is founded on privacy -- or are not, and regard themselves as part of a collective -- remains to be seen. Perhaps there is hope, given that even Massachusetts Democrats are upset enough to draw parallels between Barack Obama and Richard Nixon. To paraphrase a character in an Ayn Rand novel, "Run for your life from any man who tells you that privacy is evil. That sentiment is the leper's bell of an approaching blackmailer." There is no legitimatereason on earth for the government, absent objective evidence that the information might solve a (real) crime -- or is relevant to a court proceeding or national defense -- to compel (openly or not) a private citizen to disclose personal information. -- CAV Link to Original

I'm late to this one, but I can't help but mention that one man's account of going a year without using the Internet reminds me of an article from The Undercurrent from a couple of years ago. Paul Miller of The Verge begins his tale: I was wrong. One year ago I left the internet. I thought it was making me unproductive. I thought it lacked meaning. I thought it was "corrupting my soul." It's a been a year now since I "surfed the web" or "checked my email" or "liked" anything with a figurative rather than literal thumbs up. I've managed to stay disconnected, just like I planned. I'm internet free. And now I'm supposed to tell you how it solved all my problems. I'm supposed to be enlightened. I'm supposed to be more "real," now. More perfect. But instead it's 8PM and I just woke up. I slept all day, woke with eight voicemails on my phone from friends and coworkers. I went to my coffee shop to consume dinner, the Knicks game, my two newspapers, and a copy of The New Yorker. And now I'm watching Toy Story while I glance occasionally at the blinking cursor in this text document, willing it to write itself, willing it to generate the epiphanies my life has failed to produce. I didn't want to meet this Paul at the tail end of my yearlong journey. Miller's journey began with a notion that has gained wide currency in our culture: I'd read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I'd begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the internet was "doing to me," so I could fight back. But the internet isn't an individual pursuit, it's something we do with each other. The internet is where people are. But what are people? More to the point, of what is one's character made? Miller is right that our choices are a big part of the answer, but what if we are unhappy with those choices? Valery Publius of The Undercurrent makes a similar point when she argues against the idea that techology is making us less intelligent or creative: [D]oes technology really mold our minds? To be sure, it is a tool that extends the reach of our hands and of our senses. As a tool, it can be used poorly or used well. People who watch a lot of television can become illiterate couch potatoes. But they can also become media critics. Twitter can be used to share meaningless gossip about celebrities, or it can be used to foment political revolutions. Even media critics and revolutions are not guaranteed to deliver anything true or meaningful. If we sometimes don't like what they deliver, isn't it obvious that we shouldn't blame the tools--but the choices made by the tool users? Publius goes a step further than Miller, who, to his credit, sees that he was blaming a tool and owns up to it. Consider an alternate big idea: the manmade world we see around us is the product of the choices of individual human minds. If we don't like the world, we should rethink the choices that produced it. [bold added] I see a strong dose of determinism in modern critiques of communications technology. Determinism obviously suggests the Internet as a scapegoat for one's problems, but Miller's piece still ends with an air of uncertainty. Even though he sees through "What has the Internet done to me?", it's as if Miller isn't quite sure where to go from there. Is the pervasiveness of determinism in our culture making it harder for Miller (or many others like him) to realize that one can make the deeper changes necessary to find happiness? The tools for doing so exist, although they have (understandably) been blamed for failing to do just this. -- CAV Link to Original

A Cure Worse than the Disease Helene Goldberg's preview of a book about the left's latest excuse to meddle -- I mean the anti-bullying crusade -- makes several worthwhile points. Among them is the following, which she quotes from Sticks and Stones author Emily Bazelon: If real change can and has come from a concerted effort to stop bullying, there's also a risk that a search for solutions will end up doing more harm than good. By prying too far into the lives of teenagers, we impinge on the freedom they need to grow. We stifle development when we shut down unstructured play at recess, for example, or censor every word online, in the name of safeguarding them from each other. We risk raising kids who don't know how to solve problems on their own, withstand adversity, or bounce back from the harsh trials life inevitably brings. [bold added] In recent years, I have come to see almost every cause of the left -- in so far as it is an attempt to replace individual judgement and initiative with some government-enforced outcome -- as similarly undercutting independence. Weekend Reading "ecause abortion is a right, the government's circumscription of it is tantamount to nullification of that right and a physician's right to practice medicine is similarly curtailed." -- Amesh Adalja, in "When Abortion Rights are Restricted, Gruesome, Gosnell-Style Black Markets Arise", at Forbes "By making it harder (if not nearly impossible) for the government to regulate gun possession and transfers, his development could move the government to instead (properly) focus its efforts on punishing gun misuse." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Why 3D-Printed Untraceable Guns Could be Good for America", at Forbes "If you respect the one you love, their point of view should matter." -- Michael Hurd, in "Is Arguing Healthy?" at The Delaware Wave "Believing that other people make you feel a certain way is a denial of personal responsibility; a surrender to the false view that you're not responsible for the workings of your own mind." -- Michael Hurd, in "What Makes You Mad?", at The Delaware Coast Press "[J]ust as the flattered, puffed-up student gets a painful dose of reality after graduation, so the economy gets it when the never-liquidated errors finally bring about the inevitable crash." -- Harry Binswanger, in "By Eliminating Failure, the Government Robs us of Success", at Forbes Government-Funded Exuberance The Binswanger piece linked above offers the following insight on the phenomenon that a government official once called "irrational exuberance": omething does change, psychologically, in the boom preceding a crash. The change is not an increased desire for wealth. Nor is it that people become fixated on the short range. What changes is people's assessment of risk. People do not become more greedy, they become over-optimistic. Seeing stocks and real-estate go up and up, they imagine that this is the new normal and that a decline in prices is not in the cards. [bold added] I found this piece quite valuable for making several connections like this. Thief Schooled by Old Man I always enjoy stories like this: "I give him three good rights -- I caught him right in the face. He went down and he never got up again." --CAV Link to Original

A list on fatherhood is long overdue... 1. It happens so often that it took me a month or so to remember to mention it here: My daughter likes to stand on my feet when I'm sitting on the couch and she wants to use the coffee table. It may seem to be a silly thing to put down here, but one day, she'll stop doing it, and other memories and concerns could eventually crowd out my memory of this now-daily small delight of fatherhood. I don't want to forget the fact that it always makes me smile when she does this. 2. Another delight of fatherhood is the element of surprise inherent in seeing a new personality develop. This week, I was amused at how indifferent my daughter was to seeing elephants at the zoo, and yet how much she liked prairie dogs. Also she is currently fascinated by boys. She often points and says, "Boy!" when she sees one. She also giggled with delight during a one-sided game of peek-a-boo with one during a trip to the Magic Houseyesterday. 3. Lately, whenever we arrive home from picking Mrs. Van Horn up from work, Pumpkin has been saying, "Out! Out!" because she wants to get out of the car seat, just as we get into the driveway. Usually, I unlock the front door, then come back to get the baby. Whenever she is released from the seat, she gets out and goes to the other side of the back seat, and giggles as she tries to avoid me picking her up to get her out. I guess that means we're playing "chase" now. When I go to the other side of the car to get her, she tries to "escape" back to the other side. 4. Our son is on the way: One month and one week from now, Mrs. Van Horn will be headed to the hospital for a c-section. Experience makes me no less excited or nervous than the first time around. -- CAV Link to Original

Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal refrains from the cliché about a crisis being both a danger and an opportunity -- but maybe he shouldn't have. Henninger notes that young Americans face high, chronic unemployment and underemployment, to the extent that it is beginning to affect the culture: The U.S. under Barack Obama is at the edge of the dark jobs forest Europe disappeared into in the 1970s, with our annual growth during his term down around 2% instead of over its normal 3%. Our kids are starting to look and sound like Europe's smart kids--despondent and resigned. It doesn't have to be this way, but politicians are too busy fighting each other over nonessential "hot button" issues to exploit the underlying opportunity: For an alert opposition, openings exist. The Young America's Foundation just did a deep polling dive into the attitudes of these voters, and one answer stands out. Asked if the "free market is mostly unfair and requires government intervention to correct," 33% agreed and 45% disagreed. And a November analysis by Civicyouth.org at Tufts University noted that younger black males (age 18-24) have never been as excited about Barack Obama as women are. Not having a job could chill enthusiasm for any president. [bold added] Part of the problem is that too many conservatives are not truly pro-capitalist: If you don't really understand how capitalism could eliminate problems like this, you likely will not even realize that there is a chance to offer such a choice. I am glad that at least some, like this author, understand what's going on: Opportunities like this can have a short shelf life. -- CAV Link to Original

Surprise, surprise! It appears that Nicolas Maduro, Chavez's hand-picked successor was truly (and just) that. His narrow electoral "victory" appears to have been engineered by an election machine heavily assisted by Cuba: On April 14, everything was in place to ensure a Chavista electoral victory just as it did last October. However, that machinery could not compensate for Maduro's failure to motivate his party's base. Instead, the system detected an impending defeat in time for the Chavista authorities to tamper with the vote primarily in polling places where they knew opposition monitors were absent..[ sic] It is telling that since the night of the election the [Venezuelan National Electoral Council] has stripped all precinct-level reporting from its website. However, the opposition's monitors collected tally sheets from at least 60 percent of the voting centers, including some that show a 15-30 percent drop in turnout in Chavista bastions since last October's election. Reports that opposition candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski won in some of the poorest neighborhoods of the country suggest that Maduro was defeated soundly. The article details how the Chavistas, with lots of help from Cuba, rigged the elections, such as by "reminding" people with government jobs to vote and sending opposition supporters to vote at inconvenient locations. I agree with the author that such findings will erode the moral legitimacy of the current regime, but do wonder what practical consequence this can have, given the details about how the voting was rigged. Oh, and then there are other problems with removing such a regime (i.e., Why it came into power in the first place, and why a principled opponent of Chavez didn't arise). Even the freeest elections can kill freedom, if the voters don't want or understand it enough. -- CAV Link to Original

Gillian Tett of The Finacial Times discusses and comments on the results uncovered of several private studies of American buying habits versus known pay and benefit cycles. These studies have revealed a marked recent deterioration in the American standard of living: Before 2007 ... consumer spending on food and drink was fairly stable during the month in most US cities. But since 2007, spending patterns have become extremely volatile. More and more consumers appear to be living hand-to-mouth, buying goods only when their pay checks, food stamps or benefit money arrive. And this change has not simply occurred in the poorest areas: even middle-class districts are prone to these swings. ... I have to agree with Tett that this is alarming. The second reason I find this trend intriguing - if not tragic - is what it reveals about our attitude towards time. During most of the past century, it has often seemed as if a hallmark of modern "progress" [ sic] is that our planning horizons, as a society, have expanded. Unlike peasants or herdsmen in the pre-modern age, who lacked the ability to measure the passage of time or calculate future risks with precision, 20th-century man appeared to have so much control over the environment that it was possible - and desirable - to take a long-term view. No longer were people destined to scramble in a reactive manner; they could plan ahead, mastering time. The fact that people were no longer foraging for food each day, but were able to visit a supermarket proactively at pre-planned intervals, was a good metaphor for a much bigger social and cognitive shift. [bold added] Improper government, in the form of central "planning" and the redistribution of looted wealth, is to blame for our current economic hardship, but many people, buffeted by the storm will understandably (but mistakenly) seek any port, even if that means more of the same. This doesn't mean we are doomed, but it does mean that people need to be aware of a positive alternative to this state of affairs in a hurry. -- CAV Link to Original

Recently, an Android update informed me that my note-taking app, Epistle, was no longer supported. The developer had decided to create a new app for purchase, called Draft. When I first checked the page for Draft in the Google Play Store, it appeared that work was incomplete, and that for my purposes the new app was not as good as Epistle. But then, about a week later, I noticed that my notes were no longer syncing, due to an API change in Dropbox and the fact that Epistle hadn't changed since 2011. This meant that I had to use something instead of Epistle. So I checked the page for Draft again at the Google App Store and found that significant progress had been made since the time before. Since the app is only about $2.50, I went ahead and bought it. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it does everything Epistle did and more. I was especially pleased with its better markup editing. Among other things, I can dictate a note into my phone using Draft and Google Voice, and then edit the result as a markdown file without having to toggle app settings to do so. (Most of my other uses for Epistle/Draft are for plain text files.) Realizing this made me wonder how easy or difficult it would be to compose a blog post on my phone, so I tried it one afternoon. This post is the result. --CAV P.S. I composed the above on the phone. Although Draft handles markdown editing quite well, I could not paste links into the document from my browser. That wastes time by requiring me to add them once I've imported the markdown into Blogger. Also, editing anything on the phone is a chore, and reminds me of a quip by some developer that went something like this: "If you're trying to replace the keyboard, your users shouldn't be saying, 'I wish I had a keyboard.'" The original editing, even for this short post took about twenty minutes. I then found myself editing it heavily in Blogger for a similar amount of time. This was an interesting experiment, and it tells me that composing with Google Voice/Draft could conceivably come in handy from time to time, although it isn't easy and doesn't save time. Apart from the above unorthodox use, I highly recommend Draft as a note-taking app. Link to Original

The Cult of "Positive Attitude" As someone who has to be careful not to sound hypercritical, I assure you that that particular problem is not what this post at Meeting Boy describes: f you stack the deck with yes-men, then consensus means nothing: A very large organization which we're all familiar with had a leader who insisted on positive attitude and people who work to find solutions and make things happen. "Can-do attitude" was very important. So in a short time they were racing to the launch of his big project. The consensus within his team was that it was a good plan, with one department head even calling it a "slam dunk". If anyone had any concerns, they stayed quiet. The project ended up a huge disaster despite a very impressive first month, with lots of back-patting and one group even declaring "mission accomplished". In the end it: Turned out to have been sold-in with faulty information. Had a promised price tag of $60 billion, but exceeded $1 trillion. Was supposed to take 3 months, but lasted over 8 years. It didn't turn out too well for that leader either. Sure, he has his pension, but he's a pariah now, invited to nothing, and trying to make the best of retirement by painting pictures of animals.As someone who has become suspicious of almost any attempt to build a "consensus" in recent years -- and not just because of global warming "activism" -- I found this piece a valuable dissection of what goes on during the building of such meaningless consensuses. I also suspect that many people who have been slammed for being "negative" in such situations might welcome knowing that at least someone else appreciates their more objective "attitude". Weekend Reading "If U.S. policymakers aren't willing to enact these fundamental reforms, at the least it should consider shifting from bail-outs to bail-ins." -- Richard Salsman, in "Bankruptcies, Bail-Outs & Bail-Ins: The Good, Bad & Ugly of Bank Failure Resolution", at Forbes "[ObamaCare is] like having a law requiring homeowner's insurance to pay for lawn care, house painting and water heater replacement, while at the same time prohibiting the companies from operating an actuarially sound business." -- Beth Haynes, in "Almost All Americans Lack Health Insurance", at The Huffington Post "If it's true that your marital relationship is one of the things you value in life, then why would you want that relationship to suffer because of your unwillingness to 'selfishly' work to find a solution that satisfies you both?" -- MIchael Hurd, in "Compromise Isn't Always Good", at The Delaware Wave "[T]hinking before you speak presupposes that you have somewhere else to think!" -- Michael Hurd, in "Is That ME Talking?", in The Delaware Coast Press Cyprus Better than Bailouts? To be clear, the Salsman piece is not advocating Cypriot-style measures as answers to bank failures. Rather, it makes the point (among others) that such measures are less bad than the kind of bank bailouts we have seen in the U.S. I know that many fellow readers of his piece will find his position controversial (or at least initially shocking). But hear him out: He makes a good argument. Heh! (But I hope I don't bank there!) A reader's comment on an interesting list of myths about password security reads in part as follows: True story. My wife and I went into a major bank this morning, just as they were unlocking the doors. Had to wait while they booted up. One employee yells across the bank, "What's the password?" and the other one yells back, "1-2-3-4!" The fact that they could even be ALLOWED to SET such a password tells me everything I need to know about their "IT people". Not only is the password bad, I am astounded that people were yelling it back and forth, and with members of the public within earshot to boot. Were I privy to the identity of the bank, that would be all I needed to know about it. --CAV Link to Original

1. Admitting that he has dismissed some very good ideas "at least four times", entrepreneur Dustin Curtis relates a couple of amusing examples. Here's the end of one of his accounts: "What a stupid idea," I thought to myself. As we finished our coffees, I think he sensed my apathy, and we parted ways. But just before I walked away, he asked a question: "What do you think about the name we've been using? It's called Pinterest." I think the author is being a little hard on himself when he calls his stories possible warnings against "arrogance": There's no way to bat 1.000 when evaluating new ideas. That said, I think there is value to be had in the sense of being able to remember that some really good ideas have been laughed at in their infancy. If you have an original idea, don't forfeit your own judgement of it just because it has naysayers, which it will. 2. An old friend told me recently that, thanks to the expanson of Google Steet View into Russia, it is now possible for anyone to see a building -- 120 Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg -- that Ayn Rand called home for a time in her childhood. 3. Since we live so close to it and it has a great penguin exhibit, we've taken our daughter to the excellent St. Louis Zoo quite a few times now. She has recently started branching out from her love of penguins to also being fascinated by owls. (Thanks, Warner Brothers!) So it is that we had reason to take her to the zoo's bird exhibit, which turned out to have only two owls (each of a different species) on display that day. I like to think of the following as her two-word review of that exhibit: "More owls!" She has been surprising me daily with the speed at which she has been improving her speech. She often uses nearly complete sentences, like, "Take coat off," or "Let me sit," and frequently surprises me with words I recall using rarely, if ever, with her. As I write this, specific examples elude me, as this is now near-daily, and the words are not particularly unusual. 4. Think of the implied personal security tip as "hacking" the range-of-the-moment mentality of most criminals: As lame as this ATM skimming attempt was, a few aspects of this crime are worth highlighting because they show up repeatedly in skimming attacks. One is that the vast majority of skimming devices are installed on Saturdays and Sundays, when the crooks know the banks will be closed for at least a day. As a result, you have a much higher chance of encountering a skimmer if you regularly use ATMs on a weekend. The rest of the post is worth reading and ends with an even more general way to safeguard your bank account from card skimmers. -- CAV Link to Original

A couple of times before, I have relayed the following quote, by economist George Reisman, regarding a common misconception about economic planning: The overwhelming majority of people have not realized that all the thinking and planning about their economic activities that they perform in their capacity as individuals actually is economic planning. By the same token, the term "planning" has been reserved for the feeble efforts of a comparative handful of government officials, who, having prohibited the planning of everyone else, presume to substitute their knowledge and intelligence for the knowledge and intelligence of tens of millions, and to call that planning. (as quoted in Andrew Bernstein's Capitalist Manifesto, p. 345) [bold added] An article discussing the growing number of government agencies purported to combat terrorism illustrates an aspect of the problem faced by those who would attempt central planning quite well: In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation's most sensitive work. " I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything" was how one Super User put it. ... [link in original, bold added] And remember, this guy is merely trying to keep up with the activities of a relatively small number of people compared to the population at large. (This is not to say that government can't successfully combat terrorism if properly applied to the problem.) -- CAV Link to Original

Two articles about different aspects of ObamaCare came to my attention this morning. Both use the term "train wreck" in their titles. First, John Stossel describesthe new regulatory morass that the people in charge of your health will be mired in: Government likes to think regulations can account for every possibility. Injured at a chicken coop? The code for that will be Y9272. Fall at an art gallery? That means you are a Y92250. There are three different codes for walking into a lamppost -- depending on how often you've walked into lampposts. This is supposed to give government a more precise way to reimburse doctors for treating people and alert us to surges in injuries that might inspire further regulation. And that's just a sample from the 20,000 pages of new rules -- seven feet high, printed out -- that the regulatory apparatus has added since passage. Second, John Kartch of Americans for Tax Reform paints a gory picture of tax time next year. Before Obamacare, Americans facing high medical expenses were allowed a deduction to the extent that those expenses exceeded 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income (AGI). Obamacare now imposes a threshold of 10 percent of AGI. Therefore, Obamacare not only makes it more difficult to claim this deduction, it widens the net of taxable income. According to the IRS, 10 million families took advantage of this tax deduction in 2009, the latest year of available data. Almost all are middle class. The average taxpayer claiming this deduction earned just over $53,000 annually. ATR estimates that the average income tax increase for the average family claiming this tax benefit will be $200 - $400 per year. And that's just (part of) the beginning, too. Other parts of ObamaCare being phased in over the next few years will draw out the agony. I guess, as Nancy Pelosi put it, we are " ". Perhaps, in a literal sense, we did have to pass it to find out in concrete terms what unimaginable idiocy could gush forth from government bureaucrats. But was this lesson really necessary? Our founders' preference for a nation of "laws and not men" should have helped us know what debacle awaited us for placing such an important matter as our health in the hands of an unaccountable bureaucracy. There's a lesson or two in this bag of goodies about handouts and government regulation. We'd better learn it and start applying it fast. -- CAV Link to Original

Writing in FrontPage Magazine about the need to "call Islam 'Islam'", "recovering Muslim" Bosch Fawstin (via HBL), offers the following bit of clarity in response to some critics: Non-observant Muslims are not our problem, but neither are they the solution to our problem. Our problem is Islam and its most consistent practitioners. There is nothing in Islam that stays the hand of Muslims who want to kill non-Muslims. If an individual Muslim is personally peaceful, it’s not because of Islam, it’s because of his individual choice, which is why I often say that your average Muslim is morally superior to Mohammad, to their own religion. The very rare Muslim who helps us against Jihad is acting against his religion, but that doesn’t stop some among us from thinking that his choice somehow shines a good light on Islam. It doesn’t. A good Muslim according to us is a bad Muslim according to Islam. I could have used this degree of clarity about a week ago! The rest of the piece is similarly good, and I consider it required reading on the War We Should Be Fighting But Aren't. On his blog, Fawstin notes that his piece has generated over a thousand comments, and he invites further discussion. f you disagree, make your counter-argument and let's keep this conversation going until I win, which means we All win. So read the whole thing, and discuss it if you wish. -- CAV Link to Original

Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Bill McNabb discusses what he calls the "uncertainty tax". This sounds like a good phrase at first, and I think it names an under-appreciated evil of central planning. However, I think the people studying the problem are already in the process of suggesting a cure worse than the illness. What is the "uncertainty tax", as McNabb an his colleagues understand it? Today, there is uncertainty about regulatory policy, uncertainty about monetary policy, uncertainty about foreign policy and, most significantly, uncertainty about U.S. fiscal policy and the national debt. Until a sensible plan is created to address the debt, America will not fulfill its economic potential. That makes sense. The article later claims that "since 2011 the rise in overall policy uncertainty has created a $261 billion cumulative drag on the economy". That's quite a bit, but McNabb attributes the problem to "ineffciency", presumably related to our central planners not spitting out new plans fast enough. But is this really the right way to look at this problem? I don't think so. Let's look at a quick and dirty example. You live on a frontier beset with bandits. Spring is nearing and you want to plan your activities for the next year. There are things you'd feel more confident about doing without the uncertainty of possibly being robbed or attacked hanging over your head. All things being equal, you may or may not be raided. You decide to make a decision since you want to be able to plan further into the future: Are you better off surrendering to the bandits -- or accepting a different kind of the uncertainty, that of joining an effort to defeat the bandits? Your decision to surrender could be made and executed quickly, but the "tax" extracted by the bandits would be far worse than any losses you suffered by planning with the sole aim of eliminating "uncertainty". So it is that I view the uncertainty tax, when remembering the greater context of central planning in the guise of government economic regulations, which alone cost the economy $1.75 trillion-- every year. So the "uncertainty tax" is really on top of this far higher figure. Given its nature as a symptom of not knowing what the regulations (when they even can be understood and followed) will be, I'd happily take an even higher "uncertainty tax" if it meant that this nation were finally having a serious debate about the propriety of the government running every aspect of our lives and the economy. Unfortunately, this conception of an uncertainty tax suffers from the problem of conflating fear of increasing government interference with merely not knowing how much meddling there will be. The temptation is to streamline regulatory and policy decision-making and implementation, but that temptation can easily lead to it becoming too easy for bad decisions to become policy that is much more expensive than any mere uncertainty can be. -- CAV Link to Original

The Bad News: America's Economy Needs a "Savior" A CNBC story calling America's $2 trillion underground economy "recovery's savior" takes note of the ominously increasing similarity between our economy and others: You normally see underground economies in places like Brazil or in southern Europe," said Laura Gonzalez, professor of personal finance at Fordham University. "But with the job situation and the uncertainty in the economy, it's not all that surprising to have it growing here in the United States." Let's not treat the "job situation" or "the uncertainty in the economy" as if they were bolts from the blue. With our nation increasingly becoming one of men, and not laws, businessmen increasingly have to factor into their decisions human whim -- be it in the form of absurd regulations, haphazard enforcement, or even laws that are impossible to comply with (as Tom Bowden notes below). No wonder the only options for growth that most people can see are either to join the gang in power, or to try to operate under its radar. Weekend Reading "An insurance policy that reflects your risk profile is not a subsidy; an insurance policy that has been engineered by bureaucrats to artificially lower the insurance costs for some people at the expense of others is." -- Rituparna Basu, in "How Obamacare Law Fleeces the Young", at Politix "[E]mployers who wouldn't otherwise concern themselves with workers' lifestyles now have an incentive to do so in order to collect federal funds." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Big Brother Has A New Face, And It's Your Boss", at Forbes "As someone who cares about this overly self-effacing person, your job is to convey, in words and actions, that, 'You don't have to be this way with me.'" -- Michael Hurd, in "Make a Decision! Have an Opinion!", in The Delaware Wave "In my experience, the only people with sustained recoveries are those who make a serious, initial commitment to transforming their character." -- Michael Hurd, in "What's so Great About Rehab if it Usually Fails?", at The Delaware Coast Press "If read literally, the Sherman Act of 1890 (and the European Union's legal equivalents) prohibit virtually every action a profit-seeking business needs to survive." -- Tom Bowden, in "What Are The Search Results When You Google 'Antitrust'?" at Investors Business Daily My Two Cents The Basu article does a good job of debunking the idea that there is no difference between (a) how insurance companies spread risk in a free market and ( government-forced subsidies. Basu then goes further to show just how badly this scheme throws a monkey wrench into the personal plans of the young. Dueling Magicians Something is art because someone says so. A glass of water is an oak tree because someone says so. Guess how disputes are settled in such a world: Michael Craig-Martin's 1973 conceptual artwork An Oak Tree presents a glass of water with a plaque explaining that it's a tree -- not symbolically but literally: "The actual oak tree is physically present but in the form of the glass of water." This is a comment on transubstantiation and, by extension, on the patron's faith in an artist's presentation of his work, but it backfired: When the National Gallery of Australia bought the piece in 1977, customs officials barred it as "vegetation." I'm no fan of government officials wielding arbitrary power, but Craig-Martin got a surprisingly tame (and amusing) version of what he asked for -- by adopting for his own use the very notion he purported to question. --CAV Link to Original

1. Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson on creativity: We're not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery-it recharges by running. [bold added] This was taken from Watterson's 1990 commencement address to his alma mater, which I enjoyed and found insightful. 3. And, while we're picking the brains of humorists, here's Steve Martin on success: Be undeniably good. When people ask me how do you make it in show business or whatever, what I always tell them and nobody ever takes note of it 'cuz it's not the answer they wanted to hear -- what they want to hear is here's how you get an agent, here's how you write a script, here's how you do this -- but I always say, "Be so good they can't ignore you." If somebody's thinking, "How can I be really good?", people are going to come to you. It's much easier doing it that way than going to cocktail parties. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a video or a transcript of the entire interview. 2. Here's an idea I am on board with: VSRE. Why? I get a lot of email: requests for advice, presentations, meetings, new projects/services... In most of these cases, the answer itself could be as simple as "Yes", "No", or "Tuesday", or "I'll be available after July". But I want to be polite, which adds a considerable overhead to delivering a simple reply. The "I can't", ends up looking something like "Dear John, thank you ..., I would be happy to ... but right now I'm ... and ... and ... and I won't be able to invest the required amount of time. Please [....] Thank you". Even saying yes, gets more complicated than it should: unless I know the sender really well, I'll go with something more than "Great. Yes. Send me details.". As a result I find myself delaying replies, until get the time to write "a proper reply", and this takes much more time than it should. At last, there is a way to cut through the overhead! (And the link offers a way to start using this abbreviation.) 4. Reader Snedcat emails me a link to a very interesting web page about huge internal combustion engines for marine use. No time? Even just skimming the photos is fun. -- CAV Link to Original

A web site dedicated to small business offers a list of twelve productivity tips from very productive individuals. You may find, as I did, that you already do some of these, but that others are completely new, or at least are things you hadn't considered much in the past. You will get ideas from each item, though. For example, I have become very big on Item 6, grouping interruptions, in the past few months: This idea comes from restaurateur Danny Meyer. He has his assistant group all questions that come up during the day in one list so she doesn't have to interrupt him repeatedly during office hours. Take a cue from this and see how you can ask others on your team to group questions, requests and other non-urgent inquiries so you're not distracted by interruptions that don't add value. [link in original] Interruptions don't just break up work flow. Their time cost includes not just what it takes to attend to the tasks themselves, but also the time it takes to switch from one task to another. (Twice, if you attend to one when in the middle of something else.) This latter cost can be minimized by looking at a list and grouping similar items together. This is most easily seen by errands that require a car and its inherent time cost. Now that I'm having to use a car for practically all my errands, I have become reacquainted with what I call the "twenty-minute idiot tax". It is usually the case that the time it takes to get into a car, reach a destination, and park will cost about that much. A trip to the grocery thus costs forty minutes plus however long the actual shopping takes. Going to the grocery and the pharmacy separately has about eighty minutes of such overhead, but only sixty minutes (or forty, if the two are in the same location) when the two are grouped. Similarly, if my wife cleans up clutter around the house, I ask her to group together receipts or anything else I normally deal with so I can knock them all off at once. Nevertheless, this item has caused me to be on the lookout for other interruptions I might not have been treating that way, or at least not explicitly. Item 7, outsourcing personal chores, is a potential gold mine, since I do most of our household chores and shopping. I'd heard of grocery shopping through Amazon, for example, but not its Subscribe and Saveprogram, which might save me or my wife from having to do at least some of our errands. In addition to the list offering worthwhile suggestions, it is well-stocked with links that can elaborate on many of them. -- CAV Link to Original

Given the contortions that leftist politicians and intellectuals go through to avoid linking Islam with terrorism, I find Steven Emerson's reaction to terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's admission of religious motivation amusing: One imagines they'll give Dzhokhar Tsarnaev a good talking-to for demonizing Islam in his statements to investigators. On a more serious note, it is obvious from reading the rest of the piece that the policy of bending over backwards to avoid offending (all?) Moslems is actually making prejudice against Moslems quite understandable. Some Moslems who oppose terrorism have themselves pointed this out: In a 2011 column, [sacramento Imam Abu Laith Luqman] Ahmad called it "a mistake in my view for American Muslims to categorize every and all suspicion or criticism of Islam and Muslims as simply the result of islamophobia. To do so, only serves to perpetuate the view that many Americans have of Muslims as irrational people, who cannot be trusted... [link in original] It is clear from the rest of the article, that there is a debate about -- rather than a uniform rejection of -- Western values among adherents of Islam. I am also sure that I am not the only person who knows and respects professed Moslems who embrace such values as, for example, secular government and freedom of speech. The campaign against "Islamophobia" thus achieves the exact opposite of its orchestrators' professed goal. This is making the lives of good people difficult. It also endangers lives by hampering the frank discussion of motive after terrorist attacks. -- CAV Link to Original

Two articles address different aspects of the mindlessness of the Boston Marathon bombers, the latest murderers to find in Islam an excuse to act on what Michael Hurd rightly calls their "metaphysical temper tantrums". The first article, in Mother Jones, ticks off (only) eleven "mystifying" things the terrorist brothers did, while claiming that their motive for committing the atrocities they did remains unclear. The list includes such items as, "Run out of Cash": When Dzhokhar carjacked a Mercedes on Thursday night, he and his brother had one thing in mind: Get cash, and fast. They emptied $800 from an ATM using their victim's PIN number, before they reached the account limit. Holding up a stranger for money suggests a woeful lack of planning on their part (they hadn't budgeted) that helped alert them to the authorities. [link in original] Just as most leftists resolutely refuse to put two and two together, treating it as some strange coincidence that so many terrorists are Moslem, the article memorably asks of another item, "Why a BB gun?" The entirety of this list suggests a common cause to me, though: The two murderers were not long-range thinkers. Why the BB gun? Why hadn't they planned an escape? Indeed, why hadn't they planned a more effective attack? Because their mental habits didn't include planning, which depends on a long-range view of life in the real world. Whatever orders they got, weapons they found, or money they got were what happened to be around. There is no more mystery here than there is about what motivated them. The second article describes the influences that the elder, more dominant brother fell under, as he made the transition from a dissolute form of emotionalism to a dogmatic one: Once known as a quiet teenager who aspired to be a boxer, Tamerlan Tsarnaev delved deeply into religion in recent years at the urging of his mother, who feared he was slipping into a life of marijuana, girls and alcohol. Tamerlan quit drinking and smoking, gave up boxing because he thought it was in opposition to his religion, and began pushing the rest of his family to pursue stricter ways, his mother recalled. Later: ... Tamerlan stated that he "took offense to celebrating anything," be it the Prophet's birthday (which not all Muslims celebrate) or American holidays. And still later: Anzor Tsarnaev said he was "outraged" by his son's decision to drop boxing. He said Tamerlan told him that a Muslim must not punch another man in the face. So Tsarnaev, thanks to Islam, stopped drinking, smoking, or celebrating anything, quit boxing, and committed the murders at the Boston Marathon. I can no more think of a rational explanation for (1) why a man who recoils at the idea of punching someone else (who expects it) in the face would also feel that it's okay to kill or maim a complete stranger with a concealed bomb; any more than (2) why he'd bother with a BB gun while attempting an escape. But there is a philosophical explanation, and Christian Beenfeldt gave it years ago when writing about the similar case of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh: What neither the subjectivist nor the dogmatist can fathom is the need for an objective approach-a method of seeking truth, acquiring knowledge, and defining moral standards, not by indulgence in emotions, but by a process of reasoning based on factual evidence alone. In every issue and area of its life, a mind on this premise is moved not by arbitrary whims, but by logical arguments that are grounded in directly perceivable facts. Read the rest for an excellent elaboration on how emotionalism lies at the root of dissolution and religious fundamentalism alike. The Brothers Tsarnaev rejected reason root, trunk, and branch. This is not only reflected in their decision to murder athletes during their moment of triumph, but also in the slipshod way they carried out their anti-life jihad. If there is any consolation to come from this latest inhuman and deadly outburst, it is that the enemy is small and self-limited by its very nature. -- CAV Link to Original

Matt Welsh, who does research for Google, but who had once been an academician, writes about the "other side" of "'academic freedom'" (his scare quotes). He titles his post "Volatile and Decentralized," but he could have just as easily given it the title above since it touches on how government funding actually makes it more difficult to conduct ground-breaking research. Who decides which problems are sexy (and therefore publishable)? I'll tell you: it's the 30-some-odd people who serve on the program committees of the top conferences in your area year after year. It is very rare for a faculty member to buck the trend of which topics are "hot" in their area, since they would run a significant risk of not being able to publish in the top venues. This can be absolutely disastrous for junior faculty who need a strong publication record to get tenure. I know of several faculty who were denied tenure specifically because they chose to work on problems outside of the mainstream, and were not able to publish enough top papers as a result. So, sure, they could work on "anything they wanted," but that ended up getting them fired. [bold in original] This isn't necessarily an obvious result of government funding, but, much later, that becomes a little easier to see after he compares research in academia to that in industry: Okay, but how much freedom do you have in industry? This is worth a separate post on its own, which I will write sometime soon. The short version is that it depends a lot on the kind of job you have and what kind of company you work for. My team at Google has a pretty broad mandate which gives us a fair bit of freedom. But unlike academia, we aren't limited by funding (apart from headcount, which is substantial); technical skills (we can hire people with the skills we need); or the somewhat unpredictable whims of a research community or [National Science Foundation] panel. So, yes, there are limitations, but I think they are no more severe, and a lot more rational, than what you often experience as an academic. [bold and link in original] The NSF, as does any grant-giving organization, has to rely on experts from the fields for which it is to give grants. Who is an expert? Absent knowedge of a field -- a common circumstance of government officials -- one has to rely on what others in the field say, or use indirect measurements, such as number and prestige of publications. So far, so good. Private foundations would have a similar problem. But private organizations ultimately are looking for results, be they profits or, say, cures for illnesses a charity has been founded to fight. These constraints would ultimately limit the number of wasted grants or the time during which bad decisions would go on. Government funding, on the other hand, is acquired without regard to profitability or purpose, and research results can, improperly, be used to affect public policy. The former means a a negative feedback mechanism for doling out bad grants is missing, and the latter means that there can be perverse incentives for funding bad research. This is not to say that a company or a large charity could never, by lack of vigilance, follow a clique of experts down a dead end. But the nature of government, as a monopoly (which it should be), and as the institution that can legally coerce citizens, magnifies the danger of some theories becoming entrenched and of new approaches getting starved. (Let me add that I do not regard either taking money from people or dictating how they should live -- even if it were according to correct research results -- as proper uses of governmental power: The problem I am discussing merely compounds others.) Were research funding not centralized, the dangers of such entrenchment would be greatly diminished as funders that supported less fruitful work would not be the only (or main) game in town. At least our economy is free enough that we can see an example here and there. -- CAV Link to Original

Editor's Note: There will be no post tomorrow due to weekend travel. 1. Calling canes the "22-inch rims of 19th century cruising culture", Wayne Curtis writes an entertaining article about walking canes. The article also caused me to smile as I recalled randomly spotting a woman using an elegant cane a few years ago. 2. I am sure that I am not the only one who has marveled at times about how differently some people rate (and even describe) their own appearance than others. Dove has gone beyond this and incorporated the phenomenon into a marketing campaign: Follow the link for a couple of examples and the video. 3. Neat! I can claim to have been the first person nicknamed by my daughter. She sometimes calls me "Dah-dee-dah". Also, she's putting together simple sentences, now. The first I heard was "Make more," which she said after I made some "confetti" from an extruder as we were playing with Play-Doh a few weeks ago. 4. Interesting: A Lifehacker post describes a way to use Google Voice to block robo-callers from your cell phone or your land line. The National Do Not Call List has become such a joke that I unplug the land line when Pumpkin is napping and Mrs. Van Horn isn't here. (She's a physician: which is the only reason we bother with a land line any more.) The post also has a few other ideas for doing effectively the same thing. -- CAV Link to Original

I don't agree with George Will that regulation (i.e., interference with the economic decisions of individuals) is a legitimate government function. Nevertheless, I do appreciate the point he makes in his latest column, to the effect that government regulation and the opaque funding mechanisms for many regulatory agencies are mutually reinforcing, all other things being equal: Two conclusions I would not draw from this -- but that I could see others making -- are: (1) The solution to expanding executive (bureaucatic) power is to make such agencies more directly accountable to the voting public; or (2) We are in a politically hopeless situation. Both conclusions are manifestations of the same error, which is to discount the role of political philosophy in shaping politics. A public with much more influence, but operating under bad premises or misinformation could well decide to make a given agency even more powerful. Conversely, a public that has realized that it should weed out any and all inappropriate uses of government will, sooner or later, become aware of such shenanigans, and, when it does, elect legislators and executives who will correct these problems. Often, the correction would be in the form of abolishing such agencies. The real problem is that too many people are willing to take small bribes from the government in exchange for being a little bit less vigilant, as we saw with the Republican congressional majorities of the nineties that reduced taxes -- but without exactly dismantling the welfare state "brick by brick". -- CAV Link to Original

Amity Schlaes warns of a phenomenon she calls "tax grope": Citizens have resigned themselves to the new rates, official and public, that will apply this year to long-agreed-upon definitions of taxable income. Traditional income is fair game. The taxpayer is alert, though, to something else: future arbitrary impingement by a tax authority in an unexpected way. Sometimes the intrusion comes from an expected party, more uncomfortable and irritating than fatal. But sometimes, the intrusion shocks either by its scale or because it comes as a total surprise. [link dropped] And from which unexpected directions and at which unexpected force will these blows come? Here's just one example, from Barack Obama's budget: The government is getting ready to go after retirement accounts. Page 18 of the budget suggests that an IRA or 401(k) ample enough to provide pensions of more than $205,000 a year is too high. New penalties apply to money in the plan exceeding a " maximum permitted accumulation." This reduces whatever benefit was there from compounding. The suggested limit on such savings would be $3 million. Still these lines should chill even citizens whose 401(k)s fall short of that amount. After all, authorities could lower the limit later, as happened with the erstwhile rich-man's levy, the alternative minimum tax. [bold added] Such caprice on the part of government officials has always been a danger inherent in the premise that your pocket is the government's to pick, but we have not experienced the problem on a massive scale, yet. Whether this is because of the remnants of our heritage as a society that respected property rights, in the form of custom, or perhaps simply because there has not yet been a big enough crisis to make the government feel like it could get away with it so far does not matter. In any event, the threat of non-objective "law" which Ayn Rand long ago identified as the evil inherent in anti-trust law, is about to be visited upon individual Americans. This is obscene. As bad for individual planning and the economy as taxation is, at least it has been predictable. Ms. Schlaes shouldn't have bothered explaining the tame historical pedigree of the phrase "tax grope": Leaving it up to the imaginations of her readers, however sordid, would have done better justice to Barack Obama and his plans. -- CAV Link to Original