Not Buying What They Voted For

Writing in The Washington Times, Douglas Holtz-Eakin notes that Americans aged 18-40 are likely to vote against ObamaCare with their pocketbooks. Polling data suggest that the premium hikes that will kick in in 2014 are going to have a large negative effect on the program's incoming cash flow:

In this group of current insurance purchasers, only 83 percent will still purchase if premiums rise 10 percent; 65 percent, if premiums rise 20 percent; and only 55 percent, if premiums rise 30 percent. The economic lesson is simple: As premiums rise, eventually, some consumers reach a price point at which they simply stop buying health insurance.

Holtz-Eakin notes that despite this behavior, many of these people are "not anti-ObamaCare":

The poll shows a response to the health care law split more or less right down the middle: 29 percent viewing it favorably, 33 percent unfavorably, and 38 percent "half-and-half." Within the law, some features are viewed favorably (coverage for pre-existing conditions is a positive for 68 percent), while others are frowned on (55 percent have a negative view of the individual mandate and penalty.)

This reminds me quite a bit of the people who find that they can't afford to live in blue states, and so move to red states, and yet continue voting for the policies that caused them to have to move in the first place. While people ultimately will vote according to what they believe is right, it could help some to begin to question whether the are doing the right thing to be clear about terms. In this case, I wonder how people might have voted at the ballot box if they knew that ObamaCare is tantamount to outlawing (actual) health insurance? Or that, as Holtz-Eakin notes, they are serving as milch cows? Either lesson will require education: The uneven approval of parts of the plan suggest to me that many people do not understand how the "bad" is related to the "good". We are thus in danger of people taking home the wrong lesson: that ObamaCare was merely a badly-executed idea.

-- CAV

The Sixties Aren't Over

If you thought the campus barbarism of the 1960s was long dead, Thomas Sowell has an update for you:

An all too familiar scene was enacted on the campus of Swarthmore College during a meeting on May 4th to discuss demands by student activists for the college to divest itself of its investments in companies that dealt in fossil fuels.

As a speaker was beginning a presentation to show how many millions of dollars such a disinvestment would cost the college, student activists invaded the meeting, seized the microphone and shouted down a student who rose in the audience to object.

Although there were professors and administrators in the room -- including the college president -- apparently nobody had the guts to put a stop to these storm trooper tactics. ...

Correctly calling the current status quo, in which we have "whole departments of ethnic, gender and other 'studies'", a "peace of surrender", Sowell nevertheless finds a hopeful counterexample in history:

Back in the 1960s, the University of Chicago was a rare exception.

As Professor George J. Stigler, a Nobel Prize winning economist, put it in his memoirs, "our faculty united behind the expulsion of a large number of young barbarians."

The sky did not fall. There was no bloodbath. The University of Chicago was in fact spared some of the worst nonsense that more compliant institutions were permanently saddled with in the years that followed, as a result of their failure of nerve in the 1960s.

When the entire culture, seemingly, is on the side of goons, many who would oppose the tide lose their resolve. It is they, the decent people who might otherwise stand against barbarism, who need reminding of such historical lessons and of the reasons the sky will not fall down.

That said, Ayn Rand's analysis of the so-called student "rebellion" of the 1960s supplies an element missing from Sowell's analysis: Those who oppose such nonsense often would find it helpful to know that others understand that they are right to do so. Of course, the mere fact that  someone isn't acting like a storm trooper doesn't mean he is necessarily opposed to them.

In her essays, Ayn Rand identified the essential evils of the New Left and their cause. Where most viewed the New Left and its violent college protests, its worship of untouched nature, and its orgiastic mob celebrations as some sort of inexplicable, youthful rebellion against the “establishment,” Ayn Rand identified that these “rebels” were in fact dutiful, consistent practitioners of the ideas taught to them by their teachers.

Sadly, knowing this, we have to wonder whether the lack of spine on display at Swarthmore was really due to a faculty too "wimpy" to oppose the barbarians -- or to join them.

-- CAV

Short of a Phone Call

In her aptly-named "Potomac Watch" column in The Wall Street Journal (via HBL), Kimberly Strassel makes some astute observations about the targeting of conservatives for scrutiny by the IRS under Barack Obama:

Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. "He put a target on our backs, and he's now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?" asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.

Later, noting that, "The president didn't need a telephone; he had a megaphone," Strassel elaborates on how Obama targeted conservative groups:

The president derided "tea baggers." Vice President Joe Biden compared them to "terrorists." In more than a dozen speeches Mr. Obama raised the specter that these groups represented nefarious interests that were perverting elections. "Nobody knows who's paying for these ads," he warned. "We don't know where this money is coming from," he intoned.

In case the IRS missed his point, he raised the threat of illegality: "All around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates . . . And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation."

Read the whole thing.

-- CAV

5-18-13 Hodgepodge

Exhibitionism vs. Eroticism

If you find modern culture to be awash with sex, and yet completely unerotic, Emily Esfahani Smith has written an essay for you. She asks, "Is Sex Still Sexy?"

Eros, in fact, is everything that Speak About It and the hookup culture are not. Casual sex, readily available sex, publicized sex, sloppy drunk sex, sex for the sake of self-gratification and self-discovery--this is not eros. "Sex-on-tap," Nehring writes in A Vindication of Love, "attenuates rather than inflames passion. It is for this reason that the relentless emphasis on sexual climax that distinguishes our day from most others in historical memory has a largely depleting effect on the life of the emotions... The natural distances between people have been diminished so radically as to make romance--which depends on the retention of other-ness, tensions, and reserve--impossible."

I don't agree with everything she says here, but find her piece thought-provoking, and a good description of the general state of modern culture. Smith is clear that her objections to this state of affairs are not religious. She makes a point to noting that one commentator she quotes is an atheist, for example.

I am reminded of the following, by another atheist thinker, Ayn Rand:

Sex is a physical capacity, but its exercise is determined by man's mind--by his choice of values, held consciously or subconsciously. To a rational man, sex is an expression of self-esteem--a celebration of himself and of existence. To the man who lacks self-esteem, sex is an attempt to fake it, to acquire its momentary illusion.

Romantic love, in the full sense of the term, is an emotion possible only to the man (or woman) of unbreached self-esteem: it is his response to his own highest values in the person of another--an integrated response of mind and body, of love and sexual desire. Such a man (or woman) is incapable of experiencing a sexual desire divorced from spiritual values.

Yes. Sharing everything lessens mystery, but one must also have something to share. Merely not talking about mindless sex isn't the solution.

Weekend Reading

"It's virtually impossible to get a point across to anyone who feels that you're meddling in something that's none of your business." -- Michael Hurd in "10 Tips for Good Communication", at The Delaware Coast Press

"Consider apology as a way of honoring what you know to be true, while at the same time honoring yourself and those you care about." -- Michael Hurd, in "Apology as the Last Word", at The Delaware Wave

My Two Cents

Michael Hurd's treatment of the subject of apology shows that the conventional wisdom on the subject is both wrong and harmful. It is easy to forget, in this age of insincere, conditional "apologies" that making an apology can be moral and practical.

Explosion on the Moon

My daughter's love of the moon has made me more alert to stories like this one:

"On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've ever seen before."

Anyone looking at the Moon at the moment of impact could have seen the explosion--no telescope required.  For about one second, the impact site was glowing like a 4th magnitude star.

There is video available at the link, but you need to view it as a loop to really see anything.

--CAV

Friday Four

1. Recent astronomical discoveries are challenging long-held hypotheses about how planetary systems develop.

As of this month, we've discovered 884 planets, 692 planetary systems, 132 of them with more than one planet and, strange to tell, almost none of them look like us.

Indeed, the Earth may well be a strange planet in a strange system.

2. David Pogue of The New York Times recently vistied Europe and encountered some clever uses of technology. I liked this one:

And most controversial (to Americans) of all, your room key has to be inserted by the hotel-room door to turn on power and air-conditioning.

Yes, it means that your room takes a couple of minutes to cool when you return in the summer. But it also means that you can't leave for the day with all lights and chillers blazing. (As a handy by-product, you can't misplace your room key, either.)

Pogue likes this one because it's "green", but I am no convert to environmentalism. I could see a mom-and-pop hotel or a budget chain using something like this, even without the perverse incentives of green guilt and fascistic governmental "nudging" that are at play in Europe.

Pogue also saw an elegant solution to the problem of switching planes in Helsinki.

3. Even after watching my baby daughter develop for nearly two years, I sometimes find it hard to be completely sure exactly where she is. For example, we've been playing, "I see you" at the park a lot lately. Is she really using a sentence here or are the syllables an imitative noise?

I strongly suspected the former, but got confirmation last night. We're transitioning to me being in charge of Pumpkin's going-to-bed routine ahead of our son's arrival, and I currently rest on a bed nearby while Momma Van Horn does the routine. Pumpkin piped up at one point, "I see Daddy."

4. He died some years ago, but we should all take a moment to reflect on how fortunate we are that Maurice Hillman invented the mumps-measles-rubella vaccine.

For most children, mumps was a nuisance disease, nothing worse than a painful swelling of the salivary glands. But Dr. Hilleman knew that it could sometimes leave a child deaf or otherwise permanently impaired.

He quickly dressed and drove 20 minutes to pick up proper sampling equipment from his laboratory. Returning home, he woke [his sick daughter] Jeryl Lynn long enough to swab the back of her throat and immerse the specimen in a nutrient broth. Then he drove back to store it in the laboratory freezer.

The Times goes on to note that, "Over his career, [Hillman] devised or substantially improved more than 25 vaccines, including 9 of the 14 now routinely recommended for children."

-- CAV

Who Saves the Savior?

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

Scandal-Mongering: Desperate and Doomed

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 (b) 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