Overwhelming Majorities

Here's a list of things which have overwhelming support by Americans, yet which congress is actively blocking or trying to overturn.

• 91% want universal background checks for all gun purchases, with no loopholes.
• 82% say the war on drugs has been a failure
• 72% of Americans want the minimum wage to be increased
• 72% want higher taxes for rich people.  Even a lot of rich people do...e.g. Warren Buffett and Nick Hanauer
• 82% want health insurance companies to be banned from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions
• 72% want companies with 50 or more employees to be required to provide health insurance
• 89% of those who are favorable or neutral to ACA say congress should improve it.  59% of all Americans say congress should improve it.
• 69% say Alcohol is more harmful than Marijuana.  I suspect the vast majority of those who disagree haven't tried it...
• 69% of Americans under 30 support gay marriage.  54% of all Americans now do.
• 80% of Americans think that Corporations should not be allowed to contribute to political causes.
• 76% of Americans believe abortion should be safe and legal in at least some circumstances.  more than half believe it should be safe and legal in most circumstances.
• 70% think the US should not arm the rebels or anybody else in Syria

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• 97% of climate scientists believe that climate change is happening and that human activities are causing it.
• 57% of Americans believe humans are causing it.
• 64% of Americans believe there should be strict limits on CO2 emissions from coal. 
• 69% of Americans believe that global warming is a serious or very serious problem
• 70% believe the government should regulate greenhouse gas emissions
• 63% believe the government should regulate greenhouse gasses even if it would increase their electric bill $20 a month.

Gresham's Law

The simplest expression of Gresham's Law is "bad money drives out the good."  But the same principle applies in any other area where cheating is possible.

Thomas Gresham was an English financier who lived during the time of Elizabeth I.  The archetypical bad money of his day were coins which had been "stripped", their edges clipped and the small strips of precious metal collected and sold for a profit.  The serrated edges of many coins are intended to make this practice more difficult.  Gresham observed that when there is bad money in circulation, anybody who finds themselves with good money is less willing to spend it, knowing that it will preserve its value better, while bad money is best spent while they can get away with it.

Cheating in sports follows the same pattern.  By the 1990s, bicycle racers had all realized that blood doping, EPO and other cheats made it very difficult for non-cheaters to be competitive, and it's thought that there were very few non-cheaters in the pro peloton.  14 of the 15 winners of the Tour de France between 1996 and 2010 have admitted to doping, as well as many dozens of others in the field.  The officials tried to regulate cheating out of the sport, but the cheaters got better at avoiding detection.  Perhaps they're now strict enough--we shall see.  The achievements of Lance Armstrong, Bjarne Rjis, Marco Pantani and the others are not really diminished by the fact that they were cheating: most of their competitors were too.   For example, the 2nd place rider in all but one of Lance Armstrong's victories was also convicted of cheating at some point, and that one, Andreas Klöden, has been plausibly accused.

This is true in other sports too:  Large chunks of the record book in baseball was rewritten in the 1990s and 2000s by steroid users.  American Football, where the players seem to be regarded as more disposable than in most other sports, has been rife with steroid use since the 1950s at least, and there's been very little attempt to stop this.

But the most impact that cheaters have had on our society is in economics.   Derivatives and banks were deregulated, coming to a head in the late 1990s.  Within a few years, several effective scams to disguise fraud were invented:  Derivatives were used as a way of distributing a small amount of high risk mortgages among a larger number of low risk ones, theoretically moderating the risk.  These were extremely profitable.  But with a little bit of fraud, it became possible to put more and more high risk mortgages in with the good ones and soon there was a bubble.  There was a demand for mortgages to "securitize" and to the people making the short term profits, it didn't really matter if they were good or bad--bad ones were easier to get though.  All the banks, even the government backed ones, felt they had to get in on this bubble or miss out.  But after a few years, the bad mortgages started to make their presence felt. The panic that resulted crashed our economy. A few of the guilty have received handslaps: Angelo Mozillo was fined of about 12% of his take, much of which was paid by his company.  Bernie Madoff, who was running a ponzi scheme that benefited from the climate of regulatory blindness but really wasn't a part of the problem, actually went to prison.  A few of the perps lost their companies.

Most companies want to treat their employees fairly.  Provide a decent pension, health insurance, a living wage, etc.  But when a few companies find a way to undercut this, their competitors all feel the need to do the same, or lose in the market.  An example is the airlines, which once had pretty good pensions and wages for pilots and other employees.  In 2005, US Airways, and then United, declared bankruptcy and were allowed to default on their pension programs, turning them over the taxpayer funded Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, which would pay only a fraction of what was due to retirees.  Many other airlines were soon forced to follow suit.

Obamacare

One of the "Republicans" running for congress in my highly gerrymandered district just sent me a request for a donation, which began "If you think Obamacare is an unqualified success, I have sent this to you in error."  Is the PPACA an unqualified success?  No.  But is it a huge win for our nation, especially for the tens of millions who could not get health insurance at all and the tens of millions more who had been getting gouged outrageously, either by selling them what was effectively minor care insurance which would be cancelled if something serious occurred, or by overbilling them or their employer.  The PPACA has already made a huge bend in the rising cost of health care, has banned fraudulent policies, and has required efficiency improvements from insurers, providers, and more.  It has unquestionably improved the health insurance status for the previously uninsured.

There are basically three types of health insurance available in various countries around the world:

1: Fully Nationalized.  The government pays health service providers out of the general tax base, and no private insurers are involved.  Everywhere this has been tried, from the NHS in Britain and its counterpart in France and the Scandinavian countries, Medicare in Canada, the VA and Medicare in the US, this has worked extremely well.  It hasn't always been sufficiently funded--the drastic cuts to the VA that occurred under several Republican administrations have led to terrible wait times--but the actual cost and outcomes per patient actually covered are significantly better than any other approach.  This is sometimes called "Single Payer".   I'm not aware of any country that has single payer that does not permit you to buy premium coverage either through the private market or by paying special fees to the nationalized system.

2: Strongly regulated private insurance: Switzerland, Germany, Japan and a number of other countries have this.  It works differently in each place, and while it's not quite as efficient as single payer, it's dramatically better than the unregulated approach the US took until 4 years ago.

3: Weakly regulated private insurance.  There are only a few countries in the world that do this and it's a catastrophe in all of them.  The US has the highest health care costs of any country in the world by nearly a factor of 2, and this factors in our crazy quilt of far-more-effective nationalized systems, including Medicare, Medicaid, VA and more, which work way better than laissez-faire.  The PPACA was an attempt, designed largely by insurance industry lobbyists at the Heritage Foundation, to bring some of the worst abuses under control while not really changing much.  We now have slightly more regulated private insurance.  The insurers can't rip us off quite as badly.

The name "Obamacare" was an attempt at an ad hominem assault on the PPACA.  The theory was that people who hate Obama, whether because of the color of his skin or the party he represents, would be inclined to hate Obamacare, whether they actually know what it is or not.  In fact, while most of the provisions of the PPACA enjoy 70% or higher support of Americans, including strong majorities of Republicans, only the mandate and the name "Obamacare" score lower than 50%.  The exchange, extending coverage for dependents up to age 26, and disallowing denial for pre-existing conditions, have close to 90% support.  The fact that these guys are still trying to run against "Obamacare" and have not been run out of congress on a rail tells us that their ad hominem assault has been working, at least for some of the voters.

Is Obamacare an unqualified success?  No.  Is it a huge success, albeit flawed and incomplete?  Yes.  We should fix the problems--the biggest of two being that most insurance still comes through employers, and that there are still private insurers getting payments every month, including from some people who are pretty darned poor--but it's a huge step in the right direction.

Somewhere in the Middle

There are a lot of policy questions where two factions take an extreme position and shout at each other.  There are even more where one faction wrongly characterizes the other as extreme and shouts against the strawman.  Three easy examples are Taxes, Minimum Wage and Communism versus Capitalism.

Everybody wants their taxes to be as low as possible.  Of course.  But taxes pay for needed services: police, fire, the military, bank regulation, public education, and so forth.  Some anti-tax warriors argue that all of these things should be implemented through the market, but all have been tried, and all failed catastrophically.  They also argue that if taxes go too high, that "job creators" will stop hiring people. At some point this is probably true, but there is no evidence that any tax level under 70% has caused this problem, ever, andwhile there have been a few short-lived economic pops from tax cutting, all so far have led to longer term economic declines and spiraling government debt.  The answer lies somewhere between. Taxes need to be high enough to provide the needed services, but low enough that only "discretionary income" is affected.

The minimum wage suffers from the same argument.   The people who are given a higher wage because of a law have more money to spend.  This stimulates the economy.  A few businesses may not be able to sustain the higher wage and may have to cut employees, but quite a bit of practical experimenting has made it clear that the stimulative effects balance the higher costs in the vast majority of cases.  Again though, it's important to recognize that all the practical experiments are with relatively small changes. None have been as precipitous as the doubling that a few municipalities have been proposing.  Most of the proposals today are to raise the present $7.25 minimum to about $10, which would put it in line with where the minimum was in 1968, which while the highest national level ever, we know it didn't hurt the economy or employment opportunities for low wage workers.  $15 might cause problems, but we don't actually know.  It's hard to imagine that raising the minimum wage to $25 or more not causing problems, but the only people people suggesting anything like that are the opponents of raising it or having a minimum wage at all.

Perhaps the most important argument of all is the one between the various forms of government-participant economies, ranging from regulation of specified industries to full government-operation of virtually all businesses, versus, laissez faire capitalism.  Everywhere either has been tried, both laissez-faire and full government control have failed disastrously, requiring violent repression of the opponents of either regime to even survive for a few months.  The example of Chile is instructive: a US funded coup d'etat overthrew the elected socialist leadership, and spent much of the next decade implementing increasingly abusive restraints on the people, to try to impose a free market.   Every ratcheting up of force resulted in the market being less free and more dominated by fewer and fewer rich people, and more and more poverty.  Even though the regime has been gone for more than 20 years, the lingering impacts persist to this day.  Chile under socialism was one of the stronger economies in the western hemisphere.   The drive to deregulation and lower taxes for the wealthy is having the same effect in the United States, and the repression is more subtle: nearly all of it is through propaganda.  At the other end of the spectrum, the Soviet Union, Communist China, and their satellites have found that without repressive control, they can't maintain the control needed to make their socialist economies work.

The right place for the economy is somewhere in the middle: some activities need to be nationalized in order to work well: the military, the police, the highway system, pensions, etc., and others need to be strongly regulated: banking, common carriers and a number of others.  But we need to give private business as much freedom to innovate as we can, right up to the point that it becomes a problem.  The problem, it seems to me, comes  whenever it is necessary to coerce a sizable population, whether by force or through propaganda or some more subtle means, to maintain a status quo. 

The Ten Commandments

Many of the Ten Commandments are good ideas for keeping a civil society.  The problem is that many things have been attributed to them that are simply bogus.  First of all, they are not the first code of laws: Hammurabi pre-dates Moses by at least 500 years, and Hammurabi’s code is well enough developed it seems likely he got it from somewhere else.  Given the historical relationship of the Israelites and the Babylonians, it seems pretty clear where the Israelites got the idea.

Another problem is the idea that there’s something special about that particular code of laws.   Clearly not, since they were just the first ten.  Exodus and Leviticus go on and on with hundreds more.  Moreover most Christians have explicitly rejected the second and fourth, as well as a rather high percentage of the Mosaic legal code—and well that they have, for much of it is poor law, and a lot of it is nonsensical and/or cruel.   Jesus himself spoke on this point extensively.  For example, Mosaic law advocates vengeance, but Jesus realized that the feuds that this provoked solve nothing and create more problems than they solved.  Codes of laws are undeniably a good idea, but it’s been nearly four thousand years since Hammurabi, and we’ve learned a lot since then. 

Here are the Ten Commandments as they appear in Exodus 20 in the King James translation.  I’ve stripped out some of the supporting text for brevity.    As you can see, quite a few of them are not particularly relevant to a modern, civil society:  The first four are purely about religion, and have no place in the legal code of a free society.  Notice, significantly, that the third is not about foul language, but instead about using God’s name for personal vanity, for example thanking him for helping you score a touchdown. The fifth, seventh and tenth are certainly good advice, but have not survived codification as law.  That leaves three:  killing, stealing, and bearing false witness.   30% is not a passing grade on most tests, "Judge" Moore.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

Thou shalt not kill.

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Thou shalt not steal.

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.

Extrinsic Cost Pirates

The Cliven Bundy fiasco is very telling.  Bundy doesn't want to pay the grazing costs for government-owned and subsidized land he's been using, and then ex-post-facto, denies the existence of the federal government entirely, and got a lot of support from the Tea Party Channel: Hannity, Fox News, etc.  Now it turns out he is also sort of disappointed that he can't own slaves, and thinks the slaves had a better life than their freed descendents.  It's true that the descendents of slaves in America have a much harder life than the average white person but I doubt many would willingly go back to it.  This was a step too far for even the most ardent Tea Partier, and Bundy's few days of being a hero are over.

The uniting theme of these two is that Bundy wants to foist his costs onto someone else.  The federal government, by enforcing EPA and other regulations on the land Bundy wanted to use without cost, are keeping the land healthy.   Note that they didn't actually kick him off at first--they just reduced the number of cattle he could run on it, and billed him for it.  Same thing with slavery.  The slaves are working at considerably less than market rates, and can be made to do things that a worker would not, such as work in toxic environments.  A worker would get hazardous duty wages and probably all sorts of protection.  Economists call such costs, for which the beneficiary does not pay, extrinsic costs.  Of course Bundy wants to get away without paying his costs.  But if everybody does that, we're soon all reduced to living in caves.

A lot of America was built on extrinsic costs, exploited by pioneering businesses, supported by an enthusiastic government.  For example, the pioneers who settled the west, the stage coach and railroad lines that transported them and their goods, etc., exploited resources that were already there.  At first, ruinous exploitation seemed trivial and harmless--there was so much land it seemed impossible to cause consequential damage.  But before long, there were enough settlers that their destructive techniques were causing consequential harm.

Fundamentally, what the Tea Party and their supporters want is to get away without paying extrinsic costs.  One of the important roles of government is to support such things.  Many extrinsic costs are extremely indirect: Most businesses could not exist without a substantial level of education to its founders and employees, the vast majority of which was paid for through taxes.  Roads, traffic controls, police.  Government does a very large fraction of the pure research that created the computer and semiconductor revolution, the space race, biotech and many more industries.  Laws that protect the environment by protecting it from abuses of dumping, pollution, etc. The Tea Party, whether they know it or not, is advocating for the rights of Extrinsic Cost Pirates to exploit--our land, our government, our people, and deny that they are doing it.