Monthly Archives: December 2013

Property Rights, Local Version

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Winona, MN, has decided it has the right to determine what a man can do with his private property and do so without such trivial acts as seizing it under eminent domain and paying “just compensation” for it.  The 5th Amendment doesn’t apply to this town’s City Council, it seems.

Winona’s “government” has decided that only 30% of the homeowners on any city block will be allowed to rent their homes, and the city will decide which 30% will receive this boon.

Aside from the legal question of this property taking, there are practical effects.  Winona is a university town, and many of its city blocks are within student-commute of the university.  Renting a house by groups of students, or renting a room or two in a house by a student (letting a room counts the whole house against the 30% limit), was a way for a student to find cheap housing.  No more.

Renting a house, or a room or two, was a way for a homeowner to pick up some additional income, an especially valuable thing in this economy of ours.  No more.

Renting a house when it was for sale, but not selling, was a way for a homeowner to pick up some extra income and perhaps relocate to a new job and be able to afford housing in the new location.  No more.

The Winona City Council members have decided they will make these decisions—mere homeowners are unequal to the task—and they will limit to whom they grant their blessing.

It’s a twofer: arrogant and unconstitutional.

Toward An Affordable Health Insurance Industry

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John Cochran, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Professor of Finance, among other positions, is on the right track, but he’s wide of the mark in some critical respects.

The unraveling of the Affordable Care Act presents a historic opportunity for change.  Its proponents call it “settled law,” but as Prohibition taught us, not even a constitutional amendment is settled law—if it is dysfunctional enough, and if Americans can see a clear alternative.

And

Only deregulation can unleash competition.  And only disruptive competition, where new businesses drive out old ones, will bring efficiency, lower costs, and innovation.

That’s plainly true, and he goes on to tout further—correctly IMNSHO—the advantages of a free market in the delivery of health insurance and the delivery of health care services.  However, he has some misconceptions in the extent to which those two industries should be allowed to go in a free market.

Health insurance should be…lifelong and guaranteed-renewable, meaning you have the right to continue with no unexpected increase in premiums if you get sick.

This isn’t insurance: it eliminates the concept of premiums being based on the risk being transferred.  Or, it is insurance, and the risk being transferred and the fee charged for accepting that transfer (the premium) will be elevated to account for the higher risk involved in that mandated longer-term risk acceptance as well as the changed risk factor represented by having gotten sick.  And sick again with the same thing.  And again.

Insurance should protect wealth against large, unforeseen, necessary expenses, rather than be a wildly inefficient payment plan for routine expenses.

This is blatantly normative and not at all related to the competition of free markets.  There will, indeed, be customers who want policies that cover “routine expenses;” it’s not Cochran’s—or government’s—place to proscribe these because they disagree that such policies have utility.

Rather than a mandate for employer-based groups, we should transition to fully individual-based health insurance.

Again, no.  This is another interference with a competitive free market.  It’s certainly true that the (tax-policy encouraged) “mandate” for employer-based groups is a distortion of the market.  However, rather than simply distorting the market in a different direction, let that market—the individuals who aggregate into that market—decide whether group plans are viable.

Aside from that, there is the matter of preexisting conditions.  The only risk that can be transferred here is the timing of the next flare up of the condition.  Forcing folks with these conditions onto the individual market will simply artificially elevate the premiums they’ll have to pay for the transfer of that risk.  Group plans would allow the risk acceptors, those insurance companies, to spread the timing across a risk pool larger than one, which would allow them to charge a lower premium—with a truly free, competitive market forcing them to compete for the business, and so exerting further downward pressure on the premiums charged.

Current group plans can convert to individual plans, at once or as people leave.  Since all members in a group convert, there is no adverse selection of sicker people.

This isn’t a free market—it’s a mandate to move away from a policy structure that many will want to retain, even if the coverages available within a particular group might change under free market imperative.  The free market also will handle the question of adverse selection just fine—that pricing matter.

Distressing to Whom?

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Scientists have zapped an electrical current to people’s brains to erase distressing memories, part of an ambitious quest to better treat ailments such as mental trauma, psychiatric disorders and drug addiction.

In an experiment, patients were first shown a troubling story, in words and pictures.  A week later they were reminded about it and given electroconvulsive therapy, formerly known as electroshock.  That completely wiped out their recall of the distressing narrative.

“It’s a pretty strong effect.  We observed it in every subject,” said Marijn Kroes, neuroscientist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and lead author of the study, published Sunday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

And

The hope is that one day it may be possible to selectively eliminate a person’s unwanted memories or associations linked to smoking, drug-taking or emotional trauma.

This is an extremely promising tool for helping folks overcome serious troubles.  Like many powerful tools, though, it can be very dangerous.

“Distressing memories.”  Distressing for whom?  The individual? Or Government?  Rudimentary efforts have already been tried: the Soviet Union’s Gulag.  It’s been warned of for a long time: Clockwork Orange.

Now that this sort of thing is coming to fruition, the tool wants, badly, close monitoring and control, and not only by our government.

A Thought on Immigration and Amnesty

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The immigration debate in Washington boils down to a debate over how to handle the country’s 11 million or so illegal residents.  A Washington Post editorial over the weekend suggested a compromise: let them stay but don’t give them citizenship.

No.  Either we believe in redemption and rehabilitation, or we don’t.  We do believe in it, at least tacitly, for other criminal behavior—capital murder and sex offenses nearly the only things that are excepted.  And sex offenses get heinous acts.  Nearly all other offenses against us or our society have endpoints to the penalty exacted, and then the offender pretty much is allowed to go on his way with a clean slate.

A man enters our country illegally, though, and after that single and singular crime, he makes himself a productive member of his community.  On what basis do we insist that this crime is so heinous that he must pay for it for the rest of his life—the he must be denied any opportunity to earn citizenship in our country?  On what basis do we say his illegal entry—his sole crime (and it is a crime, no doubt)—is of a piece with capital murder or molesting a child?

Pay a price for having entered illegally?  Pay a price for having violated a traffic law?  Certainly.  And that means there’s no amnesty, either for the illegal entry or the traffic violation.  But there’s also more to this than just the utilitarianism of punishment for a crime and calling it square.  There’s the morality of it—redemption and rehabilitation.  We give that much to our felons, why not also to a man whose only crime is that he came illegally into our country to make a better life for himself and his family?  No.  Allowing a path along which to earn citizenship, a path that includes a price for illegal entry, isn’t amnesty.

The man who comes here and makes his way, who becomes a contributing member of our society—that’s the kind of man we want to immigrate.  That’s the kind of initiative, of drive, of work ethic, of desire to make a better life that brings creativity to our economy and to our nation.

Compare and Contrast

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First, the VA strikes again; Todd Starnes has this sorry…tale.

A choir from the Alleluia Community School, a high school in Augusta, GA, was told—when they arrived to perform at the Charlie Norwood VA Medical Center, and not before—that they could sing about Frosty the Snowman.  They were explicitly barred from singing such offensive songs as “Silent Night,” “Joy to the World,” and “O Come All Ye Faithful” because the American veterans there, all of whom had fought for our country and suffered the consequences of those fights, couldn’t bear the stress of hearing such carols.

Brian Rothwell, spokesman for the VA center, had this excuse:

It is out of respect for every faith that the Veterans Administration gives clear guidance on what “spiritual care” is to be given and who is to give it.

Second, a tale of a Christmas in the Hanoi Hilton in 1970, via Richard Goldstein in The New York Times:

As Christmas 1970 approached, 43 American prisoners of war in a large holding cell at the North Vietnamese camp known as the Hanoi Hilton sought to hold a brief church service.  Their guards stopped them, and so the seeds of rebellion were planted.

A few days later, Lt Cmdr Edwin A Shuman III, a downed Navy pilot, orchestrated the resistance, knowing he would be the first to face the consequences: a beating in a torture cell.

“Ned stepped forward and said, ‘Are we really committed to having church Sunday?  I want to know person by person,'” a fellow prisoner, Leo K Thorsness, recounted in a memoir.  “He went around the cell pointing to each of us individually,” Mr Thorsness continued.  “When the 42nd man said yes, it was unanimous.  At that instant, Ned knew he would end up in the torture cells.”

The following Sunday, Commander Shuman, who died on Dec 3 at 82, stepped forward to lead a prayer session and was quickly hustled away by guards.  The next four ranking officers did the same, and they, too, were taken away to be beaten. Meanwhile, as Mr. Thorsness told it, “the guards were now hitting POWs with gun butts and the cell was in chaos.”

And then, he remembered, the sixth-ranking senior officer began, “Gentlemen, the Lord’s Prayer.”

“And this time,” he added, “we finished it.”

Yet, the VA claims its policy is meant to welcome and respect all faiths while at the same time protecting them from “unwelcomed religious material.”  By disrespecting the Christian faith.  By defining the Christian faith as “unwelcomed.”  The faith for which those men in the Hanoi Hilton had fought, even in barbarous captivity.

How does any of this work, exactly, Brian?  A (very) belated Merry Christmas to you, too.

 

h/t Power Line