This is a hotly debated question in health care policy. Here’s my rough stab at it: the 1970s inflation interacted particularly badly with two pre-existing policy choices: the tax deduction for employer-sponsored health insurance, and Medicare.
Start with employer-sponsored health insurance, which is, as everyone knows, tax advantaged relative to salary, because your employer can deduct it as an expense, but you don’t have to show it as income on your taxes.
This was an incredibly dumb decision, but in the defense of the folks who made it in the 1940s, at the time, health insurance wasn’t very expensive, because the health care system couldn’t do all that much (and the female labor that ran hospitals was cheap due to discrimination, or in the case of nuns, basically free).
Come the 1970s, inflation started causing a problem called “bracket creep”. Back then tax brackets weren’t indexed for inflation, so as inflation went up, folks got pushed into higher and higher tax brackets, even though the buying power of their salary had stayed the same, or [had] gone down. This was great for the government (and is a big reason our deficits were not disastrous in the 1970s), but it was terrible for people, and led to the tax revolts that helped put Reagan in office.
But I digress. The point is that bracket creep made non-taxed benefits much more attractive relative to salary, so insurance started getting more generous. That process has continued for decades. Insurance used to be “major medical” that covered big ticket items like hospital stays. Now we expect it to cover the cost of going to the doctor for the sniffles. Well, if you insulate people from those costs, they will incur more of them.
Effectively, this raises demand for health care services. But the US system, decentralized and litigation-happy, is very bad at controlling the supply side. End result: high costs.
The other thing that happened is Medicare. The original legislation called for reimbursing services at “reasonable and customary rates”. This was a gold mine for doctors and hospitals. In New York, for example, doctors used to be forced to do charity care as the price of their admitting privileges at prestigious city hospitals. Once Medicare came into the picture, there was no need for that! Or to economize on beds; you could always find someone to fill them. Eventually, Medicare tried to crack down (http://reason.com/archives/2011/12/13/medicare-whac-a-mole), but by then, it was damned hard to cut physician and hospital incomes, in part because they had made decisions based on their — like building new hospitals with all private rooms — that couldn’t be undone. Our cost base is permanently higher, and politically, we have shown no will to slash provider incomes. So even though our growth rate is about average for the OECD, we’re growing from a much higher level.
Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.
April 8, 2019
QotD: Why does US healthcare cost so much?
April 7, 2019
Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and the murders at the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey
I was too young to know anything about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter except what I “learned” from listening to Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” long after the events. In Quillette, Lona Manning recounts the story, which doesn’t agree with Dylan’s interpretation (but Dylan was far from the only journalist or celebrity to be fooled):
How many people who followed the BBC Radio 4 podcast series about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter were startled — or even outraged — when Carter was not triumphantly vindicated in the final episode?
In the small hours of June 17, 1966, two black men walked into a late-night Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey and opened fire on the occupants. They left bartender James Oliver and patron Fred Nauyoks dead at the scene and mortally wounded a woman named Hazel Tanis, who would succumb to her injuries a month later. Another customer named Willie Marins lost an eye in the shooting but survived. Neighbors Patty Valentine and Ronald Ruggiero told police that they had seen two black males flee the scene in a white vehicle. This testimony was corroborated by petty thief Alfred Bello who walked past the dead and the dying to empty the cash register after the shooters had fled.
Half an hour later, Paterson police stopped middleweight boxer Rubin Carter and his companion John Artis in a car bearing out-of-state plates that matched the eyewitnesses’ description. A search of the car yielded a .32 and a 12 gauge shotgun, the weapons police later determined had been used in the shooting. Carter and Artis were eventually indicted by a grand jury and convicted of the Lafayette murders in 1967. Carter vehemently protested his innocence and his case became a cause célèbre after his 1975 autobiography found its way into the hands of Bob Dylan. Carter was retried in 1976, after the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the first conviction had been unsafe. Despite support from Dylan, Muhammad Ali and the New York Times, the two were convicted again. John Artis was paroled in 1981, and Carter was finally released in 1985 after the second conviction was overturned and prosecutors declined to try him a third time.
Sports reporters Joel Hammer and Steve Crossman spent 18 months researching and reinvestigating the case and promised listeners of the BBC’s podcast that they would provide the “full” and “true” story. Their in-depth look at the crime provides far more detail about the murders than can be gleaned from Bob Dylan’s 1975 protest song or the hagiographic 1999 Norman Jewison film starring Denzel Washington. Dylan accused the prosecution team of framing Carter for the slayings and called them “criminals in their coats and their ties” who were “free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise.” Crossman and Hammer are likewise very critical of the prosecution; for example, they think that Alfred Bello should never have been allowed to testify. How could the life of such a man, be in the palm of some fool’s hand? And they argue that the prosecution ignored — or perhaps even suppressed — an investigation into a very plausible suspect, Eddie Rawls (who is now deceased). But they stop short of calling it a frame-up and an attempt at judicial murder.
On the other hand, Crossman and Hammer think the “racial revenge motive” was a reasonable one. The very first newspaper accounts of the slaughter at the Lafayette Grill included the speculation that the murders were committed in revenge for the slaying, earlier that night, of black bartender Roy Holloway and this would also be the prosecution’s contention. That Crossman and Hammer now accept the plausibility of this theory is a significant concession to the prosecution’s version of events, not least because it was Judge Lee Sarokin’s rejection of this motive which led him to overturn the second conviction—the prosecution’s case, he ruled, had been based on “racism rather than reason.”
Coincidentally, on the front page of the East Bergen Record, under the murder story, there was a wire service article about Stokely Carmichael proclaiming “Black Power” at a rally in Mississippi, an event which marked the transition from the peaceful civil rights tactics of Dr. Martin Luther King to the radical activism of the Black Panthers. These two articles encapsulated all the elements of the Lafayette Grill case that continue to be debated over 50 years later. Why did someone walk into a working-class bar and slaughter the occupants? Was the black community in Paterson in a ferment that night because a white man blew off Holloway’s head with a shotgun? And what, if anything, did this have to do with the state of race relations in America at the time?
April 6, 2019
Springfield Arms Double Trigger Navy Revolver
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 6 Mar 2019http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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The Springfield Arms Company existed only for a brief period in 1850 and 1851, making revolvers designed by its chief engineer, James Warner, before being driven out of business by Colt patent lawyers. During that time, Springfield (no relation to the arsenal) made a variety of models in .28, .31, and .36 caliber and with a variety of barrel lengths and other features (including a well-designed safety notch to allow the guns to be carried fully loaded safely). In an attempt to avoid patent infringement, Warner separated the cylinder rotation and firing mechanisms into two different triggers on some models, including this Navy pattern example. The front trigger would rotate and lock the cylinder, and then it would trip the rear trigger which released the sear and fired the gun. This was not sufficient to save him from copyright infringement suits, though, and only about 125 of the double-trigger Navy revolvers were made.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754
April 4, 2019
Ingram M10 & M11 SMGs: The Originals from Powder Springs
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 3 Apr 2019These SMGs are lots 1069 (M10/45), 1070 (M10/9), and 1067 (M11) at Morphy’s April 2019 auction:
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/ingr…After the commercial failure of Gordon Ingram’s M6 submachine gun in the early 50s, he would radically change the layout of his designs. Instead of a Thompson-lookalike Ingram’s M10 (the M7, M8, and M9 doing experimental prototypes only) would be a boxy and compact affair with a Czech-style telescoping bolt. It found little interest until a meeting between Gordon Ingram and Mitch WerBell resulted in WerBell demonstrating it to excited military audiences in Vietnam in 1969.
WerBell was an ex-OSS man who had started a company called Sionics, selling suppressors to the US military. He thought the combination of Ingram’s submachine gun and his suppressor would be a fantastic package, and he found plenty of interest among special operations personnel in Vietnam. He would create the Military Armament Corporation based at his farm in Powder Springs, GA and entice Ingram to join as his chief engineer. The result would be the .45ACP M10, a 9mm version of the M10 (made for use with subsonic 9mm ammunition), and a scaled-down .380 ACP M11 submachine gun.
MAC would have a short life, with all its assets sold at a bankruptcy auction in April 1976 – but it had plenty of time to create what would become an iconic gun – the Big MAC. Many imitations and copies would follow, but Powder Springs was the home of true original Ingram M10 and M11 submachine guns!
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Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754
QotD: Anti-masculinity
One of the many harms inflicted on us by the hive minded lunatics running our society is the binary world view. Everything is either all good or all bad. As such, everyone must either fully embrace something or completely reject something. Indifference, ambivalence and moderation are not permissible in a world run by zealous fanatics. The only things that matter, that can matter, are those things that require a moral position. Everything else falls outside the set of things that exist, at least to the hive minded.
The most obvious example is homosexuality. Like all normal men, I am mildly intolerant of homosexuals. I get that they cannot help themselves and I get that it is “natural” in the same way schizophrenia is natural. I’m fine with them doing what they must, just as long as they do it in private. Of course, that makes me a monster. In the hive, you must either fully embrace homosexuality and what comes with it, or you are a homophobe and not fit for decent company. There’s no room for indifference or mild intolerance.
Hive mindedness is much more of a female attribute, than a masculine one. That’s not to imply that all women are howling at the moon zealots. It’s just that the fairer sex is much more inclined to deal in absolutes. The reason is that men have ways to arbitrate disputes that do not require a transcendent set of rules. One chimp squares off with the other chimp and the winner is the one who was right about where to find the best bananas. Women don’t have that so they look for a set of rules to figure out winners and losers.
It’s why it was no accident, that as soon as the girls got the vote, and the boys were off fighting the Kaiser, the girls banned alcohol and prostitution. To quote Judge Roy Bean, “Drinking and gambling and whoring were declared unlawful. All those things which come natural to men became crimes.” Morality, at least in the modern age, is the set of rules the girls use to control the boys, which is why the prim-faced moralizers of today are running around trying to stamp out anything that smacks of masculinity.
“The Z Man”, “Pouf-berries”, The Z Blog, 2017-04-08.
April 1, 2019
QotD: George H.W. Bush
Way back in the olden thymes, conservatives during the Reagan years had a real fear that the Rockefeller Republicans would not only undermine the conservative agenda, but find a way to corrupt the Reagan administration. It was an unwarranted fear. Those Progressive Republicans were a dying force in politics. Reagan was a man of his age so his conservatism does not always make sense to the modern ear, but he stuck to his guns for the most part. He was a politician, so he compromised when he had to.
Then George H. W. Bush was ready to take the reigns of the movement and the party, despite being a Rockefeller Republican. Bush was a Progressive by any measure, but he supposedly got religion in the 1980’s, and to be fair, a lot of people went through that transformation. There were even old Jewish guys, who used to support communists, that were suddenly changing teams to join the new emerging majority. Bush spent a lot of time convincing the voters he was just like Reagan and they had nothing to fear.
The ’88 election was a landslide for Bush and a lot of sensible people thought that he would be the finishing touches to the new conservative majority. He would smooth out the rough patches and put a shine on other aspects to it. His famous pledge to never raise taxes was the cornerstone of his pitch. Wiser heads, the paleocons, saw what was coming, but most did not. That’s why when Bush broke his promise, a year into his presidency, his voters were crushed. Bush was a liar.
History is written by the victors and that means the Left, so we’re always told that Bush lost in ’92 because Clinton was sent by the void where God once existed, to bring joy and bliss to the blessed and smite the wicked. The truth is, Bush lost because the core of his voters rightly saw him as a liar and a fink. Many people I know, including myself, voted third party as a protest. Yeah, it meant a degenerate would win the election, but at least we knew what we were getting. Liars like Bush always find new ways to screw you.
[…]
This brings us back to Bush. He spent the remainder of his presidency trying to rebuild his standing with conservatives. He even scored what was pitched as a stunning victory in the First Gulf War. But, you only get one shot to piss away your integrity and Bush did not miss that opportunity. He entered the general election as a weak incumbent and Clinton used his broken pledge in commercials to remind everyone that Bush was an untrustworthy liar. Imagine that. Clinton beat Bush on the integrity issue.
“The Z Man”, “Donald Herbert Walker Trump”, The Z Blog, 2017-04-07.
March 31, 2019
CSI: Robert Mueller won’t be renewed for a third season
In the latest Andrew Heaton newsletter, a brief ode to CSI: Robert Mueller, which didn’t get enough of a ratings boost from this season to get renewed for next year:
The biggest news of the week is, of course, that the Supreme Court ruled a guy in Alaska can continue moose hunting on his hovercraft. (Thank God — if we can’t blast away at megafauna from a floating disk, why did we even bother fighting the British to begin with?!) After that spectacular work of jurisprudence from the highest court in the land, the second biggest news item is probably the Mueller report.
[…]
Back to the Mueller report. I didn’t really follow CSI: Robert Mueller over these last two seasons. For one thing, it seemed very complicated. One character got indicted over rugs. Another character got indicted over porn hush money. These always struck me as convoluted plot devices.
Secondly, I suspected that the Mueller report would wind up being more smoke than fire, so I decided not to do daily play-by-play’s, and instead focused my prodigious analysis on things like hover board moose hunting. (For example, if you shoot a moose while levitating, does the activity fall under FAA jurisdiction, or is it still under the purview of the Federal Moose Department, like everywhere else?)
My friends who breathlessly and repeatedly stated that Trump was hours away from a Watergate-level scandal seemed very confident the walls were closing in, and very eager to accumulate any and all ammunition to fire at the White House. For them, the Mueller investigation did not exist to determine whether or not the president colluded with Russia. Its purpose was to broadly accumulate sufficient material to impeach Trump with, on any charge capable of pulling it off. But that was never the remit of Mr. Mueller — nobody ever said, “Hey throw some spaghetti at impeachment charges until something sticks.”
To be clear, I am not a fan of Mr. Trump, nor would I hesitate to support his impeachment if presented with good evidence that he broke the law or unlawfully shot a moose from an unregistered hovercraft outside of designated moose-killing zones (MKZ). But if we’re going to go down the impeachment route, there needs to be a smoking gun and a clearly outlined felony charge. Removing the head of state from office through political guile and vague technicalities wouldn’t alleviate the staggering divisiveness Mr. Trump has bequeathed us, it would bake it in for two generations.
Despicable man-child though he may be, overall it’s a win for our country that its leader turned out to not collaborate with our arch-rivals to undermine democracy. That’s a net positive. I’ve become more Burkean during the Trump years, and worry about the institutional damage his relentless tantrums are inflicting on constitutional restraints, the veracity of courts, and the role of the media. I don’t want to add the validity of American elections to his collateral damage.
You can subscribe to the Heaton newsletter here or you can visit his website here.
March 30, 2019
QotD: Organic spices are a racket
There’s a whole other piece to be written about organic spices, but the short version is that demanding organic spices is never going to be good for the farmers growing them. The U.S. standards for organic products amounts to ridiculously expensive and oftentimes unnecessary practices for small farmers who just don’t have the resources to do it. There are plenty of ways to arrive at ethical treatment of animals and land that are not part of our complicated organic laws. And that’s not to mention the people who demand organic products but will also freak out at the sight of a bug or won’t buy something that’s even a little bit misshapen or with a tiny brown spot on it. You can have pesticides or you can have pests.
Caitlin PenzeyMoog, “Salt grinders are bullshit, and other lessons from growing up in the spice trade”, The A.V. Club, 2017-04-06.
March 26, 2019
Matt Taibbi on “a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media”
A revised and updated chapter from his Hate, Inc.:
Note to readers: in light of news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation is complete, I’m releasing this chapter of Hate Inc. early, with a few new details added up top.
[…]
Over the weekend, the Times tried to soften the emotional blow for the millions of Americans trained in these years to place hopes for the overturn of the Trump presidency in Mueller. As with most press coverage, there was little pretense that the Mueller probe was supposed to be a neutral fact-finding mission, as apposed to religious allegory, with Mueller cast as the hero sent to slay the monster.
The Special Prosecutor literally became a religious figure during the last few years, with votive candles sold in his image and Saturday Night Live cast members singing “All I Want for Christmas is You” to him featuring the rhymey line: “Mueller please come through, because the only option is a coup.”
The Times story today tried to preserve Santa Mueller’s reputation, noting Trump’s Attorney General William Barr’s reaction was an “endorsement” of the fineness of Mueller’s work:
In an apparent endorsement of an investigation that Mr. Trump has relentlessly attacked as a “witch hunt,” Mr. Barr said Justice Department officials never had to intervene to keep Mr. Mueller from taking an inappropriate or unwarranted step.
Mueller, in other words, never stepped out of the bounds of his job description. But could the same be said for the news media?
For those anxious to keep the dream alive, the Times published its usual graphic of Trump-Russia “contacts,” inviting readers to keep making connections. But in a separate piece by Peter Baker, the paper noted the Mueller news had dire consequences for the press:
It will be a reckoning for President Trump, to be sure, but also for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, for Congress, for Democrats, for Republicans, for the news media and, yes, for the system as a whole…
This is a damning page one admission by the Times. Despite the connect-the-dots graphic in its other story, and despite the astonishing, emotion-laden editorial the paper also ran suggesting “We don’t need to read the Mueller report” because we know Trump is guilty, Baker at least began the work of preparing Times readers for a hard question: “Have journalists connected too many dots that do not really add up?”
The paper was signaling it understood there would now be questions about whether or not news outlets like itself made galactic errors by betting heavily on a new, politicized approach, trying to be true to “history’s judgment” on top of the hard-enough job of just being true. Worse, in a brutal irony everyone should have seen coming, the press has now handed Trump the mother of campaign issues heading into 2020.
Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As Baker notes, a full 50.3% of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.”
March 25, 2019
The Boston Massacre – Snow and Gunpowder – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 23 Mar 2019Boston, 1770. A frigid winter night. A British sentry strikes a local citizen. Civilians begins to gather. Reinforcements arrive to back up the young sentry. Insults and snowballs escalate. Then out of the darkness comes a shout: “FIRE!”
The Boston Massacre didn’t come out of nowhere — resentment between the early US colonies and the British army had been brewing for some time over the Stamp Act. A propaganda war ensued between the loyalists and the radicals. John Adams would get his revolutionary start as he worked to resolve this injustice…
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March 24, 2019
So this is why we all know about “Florida Man” and “Florida Woman”
Now that it’s been explained … nope, I still think Florida is the home of the crazy.
March 22, 2019
The rise of the neo-barbarians and modern tribalism
Sarah Hoyt isn’t a fan of civilization being replaced by the prehistoric landscape of tribe versus tribe, forever:
Tribalism seems to be the default setting of the human race.
Maybe it’s because we’re built on the frame of Great (or at least pretty good) Apes. Band seems to be the default unit of a Great Ape.
The people who do those cute and vapid studies on how your toddler is racist — by which they mean he prefers people who look like mommy and daddy, or their surrogates in his life — don’t seem to understand that. They don’t seem to understand that for most of human existence, (prehistory is much longer than history) for a toddler to stray outside his tribe meant at best he was raised as a slave, and at worst he became lunch.
I wonder if it’s this uncritical, sort of history-and-genetics free view of the world that causes the left to think that tribes are awesome.
Might just be their usual — and honestly, isn’t it tiresome by now? — view of the world which thinks everything “natural” by which they mean pre-civilized is better. This leads to nostalgie de la boue and therefore elevates primitive/non civilized cultures over western culture.
Or perhaps it is simply the fact that Marxism was “rescued” by Gramsci. Marxism was bad enough in its inability to see individuals, and ascribing everyone to economic tribes.
[…]
Anyway, back to our point: one of the great advances of humanity, possibly as momentous as the discovery of fire, was the overcoming of tribalism.
Forging tribe-like bonds based on “we share this land” and in fact, being able to tell ourselves stories about how “everyone in this land is one people” gave rise to the city state, the country, and eventually the “community of civilized men.”
Of course, yes, Christianity had a lot to do with this, but there was some of that going on already in the Roman Empire, where Persian and Greek could both declare (after the appropriate formalities and acculturation) “Civis Romanum sum.”
As bad as the super-states of the twentieth century got — because there’s nothing as a large nation with a good dose of crazy-making philosophical theory — it allowed commerce and industry, which are miles and miles better at creating and keeping wealth than hunting-gathering.
The problem is that the left, led by Gramsci, has re-invented tribalism. And no, I don’t just mean tribalism of place of origin or color — though they include that — I mean tribalism of EVERYTHING.
Being unable to see individuals (has anyone done studies of their brain? Maybe there’s something missing) they instead keep sorting people into increasingly smaller groups based on things that have bloody nothing to do with what the person IS capable of, or thinks or believes: Color, who people sleep with, what people have between their legs, who people like to sleep with, what people call their deity, etc. etc. ad very definitely nauseum.
[…]
The other side effect of this is that everyone who isn’t a member of the tribe is potentially the enemy. This is what leads to the internecine fights within the left, and why if they should win (forbid) we’ll be stuck in civil war after civil war forever. Adapting the Arab proverb: Me and my Marxist classmates against the world; Me and my black Marxist classmates against our white Marxist classmates; Me and my black Marxist female classmates against our black Marxist male classmates; Me and my black lesbian Marxist female classmates against our black straight Marxist female classmates… and so on ad infinitum, until the tribe of one is at war with everyone else, and worse stuck in a pit of anger and resentment because he/she isn’t given all the recognition and compensation he/she should have from the rest of the world at large.
At the same time anyone outside it is viewed as less than human. This is why they think they can tell everyone to shut up because “white privilege” or “male privilege” or whatever, and they honestly think there will be no resistance and no backlash.
Understanding the Great Depression
Marginal Revolution University
Published on 23 May 2017In this video, we examine the causes behind the Great Depression with the help of the aggregate demand-aggregate supply model.
In 1929, the stock market crashed and an air of pessimism swept across America — making bank depositors nervous. What would you do if you thought your money might not be safe with the bank? You’d probably want it back in your own hands. What happened next? A run on the banks.
Along with the Stock Market Crash of 1929, it’s one of the iconic moments of the early days of Great Depression. However, the Great Depression was an incredibly complex downturn in which the economy experienced a series of aggregate demand shocks. By the end of this video, you’ll walk away with a better understanding of the many factors behind the Great Depression and how to apply the AD-AS model to a real-world scenario.
