Waaaah.

Double Waaaaaaaaaaaah with extra points for surreal headline.

Radley Balko of TheAgitator.com has been working on a paper on no-knock raids, where the police burst into a house without warning to surprise the occupants and, presumably, leave them less able to set up a Waco-style standoff or resist the police. The problem is that frequently it leaves people, even innocent people, thinking there’s a home invasion in progress, not a search warrant being served.

One such case may very well be Cory Maye, a black man on death row, convicted by a majority white jury for killing a police officer during a nighttime raid that may or may not have been in practice, if not in policy, a no-knock raid. Details are still coming out, but I think the balance of the evidence is that Cory Maye was certainly innocent of being a drug dealer and reacted in fear by shooting someone invading the room where his daughter was, not knowing it was a police officer.

At most he should be looking at a reckless endangerment charge, if you question his use of a gun for self defense, instead of hiding and hoping nothing bad would happen. But even if the police announced themselves, it is reasonable to believe that Cory Maye was asleep and didn’t hear the announcement, only the noise. Living in a bad neighborhood, it’s not unreasonable at all to assume that an invasion is likely to be by someone intending harm.

The point is the hysteria around these no-knock raids are creating at least as many dangerous situations as they solve, in addition to hurting more innocent people than other methods. I’m sorry the officer was killed–it’s horrible to happen. But if you’re looking for someone to blame, blame the person responsible for the policy of no-knock raids, not a guy who is scheduled to be executed for trying to defend his daughter and then giving up when, according to police, they re-identified themselves.

Certainly there’s not enough certainty there to add another death to this tragedy, and whether you believe that drugs or handguns should be legal, you can recognize that this case doesn’t deserve the death penalty.

Whew. The Patriot Act Pogrom has been dealt at least a speed bump. Now, every liberal who used to freak out like Sununu was to Bush I as Rove is to Bush II, apologize to the nice man who apparently still believes that the Constitution is useful for something besides kindling.

Condoleezza puts whiny Euros and distorting Democrats in their place in this interview with Fafblog:

RICE: First of all, we don’t send prisoners off to be tortured, Fafnir. We just transport prisoners to countries where torture happens to be legal and where they happen to end up getting tortured.

FB: Well that explains everything then! It’s all just a wacky misunderstanding, like that episode a Three’s Company where Jack sends Janet off to Uzbekistan to get boiled alive by the secret police.

On Hugo Chavez’s deal to sell oil at a deep discount to certain Massachusettsans:

“He’s doing the right thing,” Kelly, 44, said in a phone interview Wednesday. “The people of Venezuela are lucky to have him. That’s what government is supposed to be about — taking care of the little guy.”

Yes, the people of Venezuela are lucky to have him. He’s selling oil at a 40% discount to people in a country whose per-capita income is over SIX TIMES that of Venezuela’s. That’s a man who really knows how to take care of the little guy.

So the eponymous CEO of Ford Motors, Inc., went before Congress to argue for tax breaks to encourage “investment” in more fuel-efficient vehicles. Choice quote;

Bill Ford said more action was needed to stimulate the development of hybrid vehicles and those powered by ethanol.

Um. Mr. Ford, sales of the Toyota Prius should have stimulated your development of hybrid vehicles four years ago. If the best you can come up with is licensing their older technology for existing products that don’t sell well, then you aren’t familiar with the term “investments”. Investments are made by the market in places where it can actually generate a return. The problem is, you’ve been developing crap that nobody wants, because apparently you use Homer Simpson as your market tester. You stubbornly hung on to SUV production even as your lunch was being eaten everywhere else. Instead of using that profit to shore up your other lines, you bet the farm on a type of car that any schmuck could have told you would disappear the second gas prices got even a little high.

You don’t need any tax breaks to do what your competition has been doing: innovating. You might be surprised to know that innovation doesn’t happen in Congress, it happens in the lab. If you can’t get money from the markets because you’ve proven you can’t sell air conditioners to Floridians, well, that may be a signal that you don’t have what it takes. The only thing that’s going to turn that around is to plunge all your R&D effort into finding something that someone will buy. All the images of farmers driving F-250s is great, except that less than 3% of the population of the US is involved in farming.

Your customers don’t need tax breaks either. In fact, since the Prius costs so much, it’s arguably people to whom tax breaks least matter that have been buying them. Here’s a thought: make a really slick version of your Focus with decent handling, a nice interior, amenities, and a hybrid engine, and go toe-to-toe with Toyota. Or take the Focus, strip it down even more, find a way to make a hybrid engine cheaper, and start taking out the Echo market. Or ignore hybrids and use composite materials to make your mid-sized cars get better mileage by reducing their weight. Try joining the rest of the universe and bring back a sport wagon instead of Yet Another SUV. Let your European designers style your American cars. Fire anybody who was on the US Contour design team.

See, there are lots of things you could do to stimulate fuel efficiency. You don’t need anybody’s permission. I don’t know if anybody told you, but you’re CEO–you can actually make this stuff happen if you want it. Try it! Give an order right now. Ask for coffee. See? Look at that power.

Do it, convince people that you can actually build something that people want to buy that is fuel efficient. And do it back in Detroit, not DC.

…because you have rejected science, and science is the basis for the Fire Department.

I suggest that the Reverend Pat Robertson stay in his office and call God, and order his employees not to show lack of faith in God by invoking the devil-worshipping science-whores at the Fire Department. After all, if you reject something, you’re opening yourself up to disaster, and then, you can’t call what you just rejected, eh, Pat?

I have read a couple of debates on health care recently, by crowing members of the “reality-based community” who, in those posts, say that anyone who disagrees with them is “dumb” or “delusional” (those are direct quotes). Somehow they view themselves as different from Republicans. Behaviorally, I see little distinction.

There’s an amazing amount of simple dismissing of economists, because the conclusions they come to do not square with ideology. This is a perfect mirror for conservative attitudes toward evolutionary biologists–and yet the opposition to biology was brought up as somehow having to do with the value of markets in regard to health care.

Several times I saw these points brought up in the discussion as “refutations of right-wing canards that have been disproven time and and time again.”

1. Markets do not work in regard to health care, so market-based arguments are irrelevant. “First off, markets don’t work in health care.”
2. Price information is impossible to achieve in health care, so a market-based solution cannot function, even if markets applied to health care, which they don’t. “The provider community has resisted, and will continue to resist, price transparency. Lotsa luck getting them to agree to post their prices in a way the consumer can use.”
3. Health care is not substitutable, so there is no competition in health care markets. You must have all services immediately upon falling ill, and there are no choices in treatment. “Every ecomonic law I am familiar with has, at it’s heart, a rational actor. Well, I can’t think of a less rational economic actor than a mother with a sick child, can you?” “the heart attack victim who is brought in, unconscious, on a stretcher, is in no position to ask questions about the army of practitioners and laboratory full of machines that is brought to bear in saving his life. Rational decisionmaking is gone.”
4. Implicit in these critiques is the idea that our current system is an unfettered market system.

The first three can be partially refuted by looking at eye surgery to improve vision. It’s substitutable–you can get contacts or eyeglasses. Price information is frequently touted on the radio. And, as it is regulated only to the extent of quality and not for provision (it is not covered by any insurance or government program), prices have declined over the same period that prices have risen for healthcare generally. It also helps refute the fourth: if you compare the procedure to get LASIK versus insurance-covered medicine, there’s not a great market at work in insurance-covered medicine.

Of course, it is optional, and therefore fails to meet the time-dependency test of the third objection. To respond to this, I want to take two tacks: first, such conditions are not unique to health care, and second, most healthcare is not provided in that severe a crisis.

If you are a homeowner, and a pipe breaks, and you do not know where the shutoff valve is, do you shop around for quotes from a plumber? Or do you call the first number you can find to have someone come out and deal with it, and pay them whatever they ask? Of course it’s the latter. Does this mean there’s no market for plumbing? Should we have National Pipe Care? And do you call the most expensive plumber, or do you first call the plumber you’ve felt has a good price and only not go with them if they’re not available?

Of course, most plumbing calls are for leaky faucets and repair work after an emergency has been dealt with. Similarly, non-life-threatening diseases form the bulk of primary care. Most mothers with good insurance bring their little tyke in for every sniffle, even though the vast majority are viruses that will pass in a week, with or without treatment. They demand antibiotics anyway–otherwise, there would be no antibiotic crisis in the First World. So clearly, incentives matter to mothers with sick children. When they don’t have such insurance, they don’t bring them in as often, because they have to trade off the money for a useless antibiotic versus just letting a cold run its course–and since it’s non-life-threatening, a child who doesn’t get better can come back for further treatment if the cold doesn’t go away. Even when the disease is life threatening, moving into the more expensive areas of medicine, the progressions are rarely fast enough to prevent a day’s worth of price versus quality comparison shopping.

Of course, with employer-provided insurance, you never see the price or make the decision of where or whether to get treatment, or whether a less expensive treatment will do you well enough. So doctors have no incentive to post prices. That gets us back to whether what we have is a true market. Why do we tie insurance to your job? Because a long time ago, the government put in place wage controls. So to compete for workers, employers would offer insurance. The government allowed it by making such “contributions” tax-exempt. That basically distorted the market in favor of third party payment for health.

So that brings us to the final Surreality-based objection: any criticism of single-payer or government-provided health service equates to a defense of the current system. Not even close. I want lots of changes to our current system, and I’m far from sanguine about it. One reason national health systems are cheaper than hours is that they don’t attempt to be heros all the time: they ration care. Canadians have far fewer MRIs per capita than Americans. Not all headaches require MRIs, folks. Of course, if Americans payed directly for their MRIs, they’d probably opt for more cost-effective treatments. The biggest problem in any market system is getting people to go to preventative care, when it’s most affordable. I think allowing catastrophic care insurance (which is what really should be covered by insurance) to require the insured to get regular physical exams (and gym memberships?) and charge discriminatory prices based on controllable risks, such as weight or smoking, would go a long way to addressing that problem.

But the blinkered gainsaying, straw-manning, and ad hominems that are practiced in the Reality-based community while simultaneously posturing themselves as the “smart ones” who are “sane” (and they say libertarians are elitist…) pretty much earns them a spot right next to Tammy Faye Baker on the next Surreal Life.

I’d love to see some more progressives who admit that the market does things well and who explicitly accept and identify the tradeoffs of efficiency versus other values they’d like to make–including an acknowledgment of the pain they will cause people, especially poor people, before their justification of why that pain is necessary for their other value. That’s a conversation I could have much more readily than trying to dissuade somebody who believes that nobody involved in health care responds to incentives.

I spend so much time playing at being a geek that I forget I once got a degree in international relations. But other people remember, so I got this email a couple of days ago:

I had a choice between two essay questions on the exam I was taking in a Global Politics class. The questions essentially flowed thus:

1. What should poor countries do to encourage their own development?

2. Have the IMF and World Bank had a positive or negative influence on global economics?

In my opinion, question 2 was harder to answer than question 1 and I felt a bit insulted that the prof would even put question 1 on the exam because it not only contained really lame phrasing but it also seemed just way too easy to answer. I chose to answer question 2 for this portion of the exam because I thought I would be able to put more thought and substance in question 2 than I would have in question 1. Dave said that question 1 was the really important one and that you would be able to explain to me why.

I’ll spare the casual reader my reply. If you’re curious, International Political Economy in 1000 words or less follows after the break.

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Ah, rats.

I was so looking forward to the circus. On the other hand, whew. The woman writes worse than I did in high school, and seems to have thought less about her judicial philosophy than I have.

Interestingly, even though pundits are dismissing it as the “official” reason, I suspect her withdrawal letter gives the genuine reason. Rather than endanger the imperial presidency, Bush will allow a rare reversal. I doubt anyboy who stops and thinks about it for a while believes that Bush cares what conservatives, liberals, or anybody else thinks of the competency of his candidate. Loyalty is the Rosa Parks of principles in the Bush administration, with competency taking the very back seat.