You get the idea - when there is uncertainty people will sit on their hands. Even worse to reduce uncertainty people will spend money now in the form of lobbying and political donations to reduce uncertainty in the future. That is very good for politicians but not so good for the general public.

Because uncertainty is so stifling I would even go against my gut instincts and say that promised stimulus money must be spent. Fully fund whatever programs have already broken ground and dump the rest. Less than 25% of the promised stimulus projects hit the "broken gournd" goal so we can stop digging an uncertainty hole and still save a few hundred billion dollars. Everybody but the politicians win. And by that I mean stop losing.

That was their revenues, but what about their profits? Those were $48 billion, combined (mostly Exxon). By contrast the current national healthcare proposals cost $100 billion a year (and only cover 1/3rd of the uninsured). You could take every dime (two dimes, if you think they're cheating) of profit out of these Big Corp Inc and it wouldn't pay for the "modest" proposals floating around congress.

Summary

Blow by Blow

The only structural advantage the government plan would have over HMOs is that it is really hard to sue the government. Of course the government could pass a law making it really hard to sue your insurance provider, but that ain't gonna happen. All the other political problems with HMOs (lobbying by specialists, etc) apply to the government plan as well.

A question ABC did not ask about talking point #1 is: why not start with Medicare? If it is so easy to slash costs by 1/3rd then why not just do it, right now, to prove you can? Well, because that wouldn't be big and bold enough. It would leave out the "FOR EVERYBODY" from the "FREE SHIT."

Talking Point 2: Too many doctors go into specialists instead of primary care because the money is better. Obama suggests loan forgiveness for going into primary care. He also suggests that his system will provide more care by the same number of doctors by reducing the amount of paperwork and bureaucracy by having the government run it. And he said that with a straight face.

If we want more GPs the government could do things like making them harder to sue (malpractice insurance is a big bite out of their paycheck). Or we could make a medical degree more inexpensive by breaking up the AMA certification cartel; because medical schools can control the supply of docs they have an interest in charging students a lot but not quite so much that not going to med school isn't worth it.

Talking Point 3: Health Plan Exchange, a centralized market where people can compare and shop for health plans. Yeah, because that worked out so well for Massachusetts.

Which gets back to the Big Bang nature of this plan. No state plan, no government run healthcare, no nothing has accomplished what this plan promises. What was it about the MA, CA, or TN plans that didn't work for tens of millions of people that will suddenly work for 300 million?

Talking Point 4: Rationing happens anyway but the government will do it better. Your private plan is rationed after a fashion (higher premiums, etc). If you don't have a plan you are definitely rationed. Obama goes back to the argument to efficiency: the government plan will ration less because it will be so efficient it will have more money to throw around.

Talking Point 5: The Congressional Budget Office estimates the plan (as ill defined as it is) will cost $100 Billion a year and only cover 1/3rd of the uninsured. Obama's response is that you have to spend money to save money and after we spend all that money the growth of health care costs will slow down. This is an irrefutable point because like the "jobs saved" promise whatever happens Obama can just say it would have been worse without him.

Obama again repeats the idea that the government will reduce the amount of bureaucracy. They say the TV camera adds ten pounds but I never knew what they meant until just now -- the size of the balls on this guy are enormous.

Talking Point 6: More about paying for it. An audience member asks how we will "raise the revenue" [read: taxes] to pay for all this money we are saving. The propaganda format of the program is showing because Obama completely dodges the question and basically says doing this is cheaper than doing something else. Imagine how much healthcare would cost if we didn't raise taxes to pay for it!

The Government is Good at One Thing

The efficacy-through-inefficiency argument has some limits. The US got the atom bomb from the Manhattan Project but so did the USSR - by spending a fraction of the money on spying and despite the US spending a boatload of money to combat it. Efficacy-through-inefficiency must be very leaky because otherwise some company/town/state/country would have noticed and gone super-specialized (they haven't). Threatening key individuals with death and monitoring them 24/7 has been tried (USSR) but it wasn't enough to keep their people inside. Efficacy-through-inefficiency is limited.

Big Projects mostly aren't

Every time you hear a politician say he needs $10 now to save $11 later you should worry. Big Projects are leaky so wait for someone else to do it.

Other lower courts have found that the 2nd is incorporated under the 14th (i.e. states can't restrict more than the feds) so the Supreme Court will end up deciding the issue sooner or later.

The opinion is annoying for how standard it is - cherry picking all the way down. It cites varying state laws about self defense as evidence that the states get to do their own thing. Supreme Court decisions do this all the time; just last year the majority cited the fact that of all states that allow the death penalty very few explicitly allow it to be applied to minors but then bizarrely used that as a reason to end the "legal laboratory" of states. Heller which upheld the 2nd as an individual right also held that fully automatic guns weren't covered because there are so few legal machine guns in circulation -- no shit sherlock, they have been heavily regulated since 1968 and the sale of new ones banned since 1986 (due to restricted supply the going rate for a legal M16 is $15k).

The Federal courts wouldn't need to do all this legal squinting and cherry picking but for the fact that ever since the New Deal the national courts have had a plenary power to make law and set national policy. It is no longer possible for a Federal court to look at a case and say "not my job." In Gonzales v Raich a woman who was growing medical marijuana in her backyard, for her own consumption, and with a license from California was found guilty under Federal law because by not participating in interstate commerce she was ... wait for it ... participating in interstate commerce by not buying from someone else and therefore altering the general price. That conclusion was allowed because a New Deal court wanted to uphold price fixing measures on wheat used the same logic. Oh, and if you think it was the left side of the bench that dissented, you'd be dead wrong. Justice Thomas:

If the Federal Government can regulate growing a half-dozen cannabis plants for personal consumption (not because it is interstate commerce, but because it is inextricably bound up with interstate commerce), then Congress' Article I powers -- as expanded by the Necessary and Proper Clause -- have no meaningful limits.

* McCain, Bush, and many others from the first two branches signed Campaign Finance Reform despite the fact that they thought it was unconstitutional. Remember all the politicians who lost the next election based on the fact that they violated their oath of office? Me neither.

Nearly three years after Urban Gourmet burned down the property has been reopened as Eat at Jumbos. Like Urban it is a pizza and burgers shop. Jumbos would like you to know "Eat At Jumbos is not affiliated with Tufts University" - I have no idea why they want you to know this, but it is printed on the menu. The nearest part of the Uni is several blocks away so I'm not sure where the confusion is. [update: I'm told that "Jumbo" is the Tufts' mascot. Worst. Mascot. Ever.]

The Powderhouse Pub has been renamed to just The Pub. Good luck googling that. This probably happened six months ago when they redid the joint but I didn't notice until I saw that the sign had a jagged edge. They simply chopped up the old sign; if you want to own a 3' by 8' piece of wood that says "Powderhouse" you can find it in the alley behind the bar.

Talking with Luigi of Pescatore Seafood and Crowley's Liquors: the restaurant traffic is pretty even despite the economy. The beer & liquor business has shifted into an all-beer business. I would have guessed the opposite because liquor has more booze per buck. Then again I don't understand why $2 airplane bottles sell so well at the counter. Or lottery tickets ...

Confronting the head of a non-TARP fund holding Chrysler debt and unwilling to release it for any sum less than that to which it was legally entitled without compelling cause, this country's "Car Czar" berated the manager of said fund with an outburst of prose substantially resembling this:

Who the fuck do you think you're dealing with? We'll have the IRS audit your fund. Every one of your employees. Your investors. Then we will have the Securities and Exchange Commission rip through your books looking for anything and everything and nothing we find to destroy you with.

I wanted to redeem a $20 gift card given to me by teddied for Christmas*. I wanted to download a $10 expansion pack to Fallout 3. I could find the expansion pack no problem (the advertising dept smartly displayed it first as something I'd be interested in) but I couldn't buy it. On the download screen is a handy payment-looking-thing titled "redeem code" which seems right because the card has a 25 number code on it. But if you enter the code there it tells you to go screw. If you go to "account management" there is a help screen that tells you about redeeming Microsoft Points cards but doesn't tell you how except to go to the "Marketplace" section. If you'd guessed that the something I tried to buy was already in the Marketplace section then enjoy your cookie. Oh, and there's two marketplace interfaces. The first is the one that tries to sell you stuff and the second is harder to get to and administrative. You have to find the second one, navigate the submenus, enter the code, and then go back to the first one to actually spend the money.

Unacceptable stupidity. The above was just a brief description of my pain. Other bugs include the refusal message from the "redeem code" link: it told me "that code is not applicable to this content" which made me doubt the card itself. You see the card's bottom half is a giant advertisement for the game Guitar Hero which I do not have. Would they sell a $20 card that could only be applied to particular $60 game? I had no idea but the message suggested as much.

I did eventually buy the $10 thing I wanted to buy but not without a lot of hassle and frustration.

As for the DLC [DownLoadable Content, basically a small content expansion] itself the interface again sucks. On the launch screen you can either continue your previous game, some other options (load/save/etc), or visit downloads. If you visit downloads there are two options: "back" and "thing you just paid for." If you click the latter it makes a sound and does nothing. To actually play the thing you just downloaded you have to go back and hit continue - but that's not all! continue will take you to the autosave right before the original game ended and then you have to finish the last couple minutes again at which point a message flashes that the new content is loaded. As annoying and non intuitive as that is the game doesn't continue depending on how you finish those last two minutes. If you sacrifice yourself to save the world, it continues; if knowing that you want to play the continuation you just paid for you instead sacrifice a friend to save the world, you are boned and the game just ends. Oh, and to sacrifice yourself you need the 3-digit code to activate the bomb. Since it has been several months since you played the game you have to google to find the 3-digit code. Maybe the game devs don't hate the players but it certainly feels that way.

If Dante were alive today he would reserve an inner circle of hell for shoddy craftsmanship.

* for Christmas we do a "Secret Santa" instead of gifts-all-around. It isn't secret because someone assigns all the gift givers and everyone tells their person what they want. The beauty of the system is that instead of giving and receiving $300 of gifts you give and get just $50 -- which involves less shopping and is generally less silly.

Grandstanding comes more easily to these folks than doing; and accomplishment without an audience is almost unthinkable.
     - Peter Wood, talking about modern college students.

Economics is called "the dismal science" for a reason - that reason is that econ has everything to do with people and people are miserable. For my money the Austrians come closest to the truth; they even label econ as "praxeology" - literally the study of people.

The biggest names in economics talked about people first. Adam Smith didn't just write The Wealth of Nations, he also wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments - he was thinking about people stuff all the time. Friedrich Hayek didn't just write The Road to Serfdom he also wrote theories of human cognition before it had it's own field. Economics stuff was people stuff to them.

Nobel laureates in economics always get their prizes for proving that the sciency thing is a people thing. Hayek got his, Krugman got his for demonstrating that the old theory of natural advantage by land was at least matched by local knowledge of how to use land (the French make good wine not just because of the hills, but because that they have good hills encourages the group of people to get smart about using them). Other recent prize winners also won for being novelly descriptive; the coolest thing public choice theory can do is to kinda explain how people have behaved instead of plotting how they will behave. It's people stuff all the way down.

I like economics and I am thrilled by game theory. Anyone that tells you the economy is a problem than can be solved if we just put the brightest minds in a room is a utopian. Politicians are like the consultants of the tech world - who would hire them if they didn't promise a silver bullet? And both politicians and consultants don't actually have to deliver, they just have to convince you that if they weren't there things would be oh-so-much worse. And when politicians go looking for an economist? they aren't going to hire the guy without a silver bullet theory.