What is Seen and Not Seen,

Wesley James Young:

The most important point about health care is whether or not the sick are being healed. The current debates over insurance schemes are disingenuous to this self-evident truth. Insurance does not guarantee treatment[1], as you may know from the many complains about long waits in European countries for treatment. Insurance is supposed to guarantee that people will be paid for their labor, but that is not necessarily the case[2][3]. The doctor is less wealthy when confined to the artifice of a state run system. There are those who would point out that we could correct the problem doctors fleeing from the state and turning away Medicare and uninsured patients by forcing all doctors to work for the state, but that opens a new set of problems. What happens to insurance companies and the people they employ? How will the state allocate resources without creating shortages? If the last question perplexes you, consider the tendency for Canadians to cross the border to get operations they cannot afford to wait for. Insurance does not lower costs, it merely hides them.

People demand three things in their health care: the latest treatment, with unlimited access, immediately. Unlimited access requires someone to pay. One might think that the state can raise taxes to pay for these costs, but it does not work like that. The prices rise and the state can no longer afford to pay for them. The ignobly quixotic movie Sicko had many sad stories about people being denied treatment by insurance companies. Unfortunately someone else, the state, has to deny treatment across the pond[4]. Lower wait times requires more hospitals and more doctors, an expense that makes things worse for state run systems. Some people are against insurance companies screening for pre-existing conditions and charging higher premiums. If everyone has to pay the same rate and sicker people cost more, then what happens to insurance rates? The rates can rise or they might stay the same and the coverage will decrease.

There is more that can be said about the problems of health care, but three paragraphs is hardly enough. Some changes that may improve the current set of arrangements are: Allowing more flexibility in insurance premiums, changing the way Medicare pays doctors so they are less incentivized to give more treatments regardless of cost, making medical malpractice suits more costly to the plaintiff, removing the various laws regulating what an insurance company has to provide in a plan. Some of these points may not directly connect with earlier statements but the space allotted does not allow for a complete coverage of every point to be made. Hopefully you will give them their due consideration.

A Timid Observer,

Dave Imbriaco:

First and foremost, the American healthcare system is broken beyond repair. The United States spends more than any other developed nation on healthcare and gets worse results. France and Canada, who have universal coverage, pay $2,931 and $2,736 per individual annually on healthcare while the United States pays $5,267 per person per year.[5] The fact that we spend nearly double what our northern neighbors do on healthcare and have horrific results is pathetic. Furthermore, if nothing is done to fix our healthcare system, by 2016 we will be spending $4 TRILLION, yes, trillion, on healthcare alone (20% of our GDP).[6] Last year, we spent $2.4 trillion on healthcare nationally[7] (given these numbers, a $1 trillion (the plan is now speculated to cost a little more than half that original amount) reform package sounds a lot more appealing now, doesn’t it?). Lastly, only in American can you legally be kicked off of your healthcare plan even if you’ve paid all your bills and premiums as soon as you get sick. Don’t believe me? Three different insurance executives told Congress themselves that they would.[8] We’re America for Christ’s sake, we can do better than this.

Healthcare reform is also not real without the creation of a strong government-sponsored program. Such a program can be funded by increasing taxes on people making more than $250,000 a year (about 2% of Americans, I’m utterly sick of all these “tea parties”). We simply cannot trust the private insurance companies to reform and police themselves in lieu of real reforms. My conservative opponents will argue here that this will jeopardize the entire healthcare industry and potentially put private insurers out of business. So what? It’s the private insurers that deny people coverage for “pre-existing conditions”, arbitrarily raise premiums on a whim and look for any way possible to get out of paying up when you do in fact get sick. Unless they make drastic changes to how they do business, if private insurance companies are put out of business by cheaper, better government healthcare, good riddance. The free market is the wrong tool to guide health insurance – profit should not be an incentive in healthcare: care should be the incentive.

Conservatives love to look for Canadians or Europeans who are dissatisfied with their healthcare systems to argue that public healthcare is a bad idea. Yes, public systems have problems but the benefits of public healthcare far outweigh the costs of it. Public health care isn’t some draconian system that “puts a government bureaucrat in between you and your doctor” – the biggest lie currently being spread about government plans by the American Right – a public healthcare system that is accountable to all taxpayers and not a small group of shareholders and executives will keep Americans healthier. The for-profit healthcare system that we have in America is really what is making us sick as a nation. As mentioned previously, if nothing is done, healthcare spending is going to essentially bankrupt the federal government faster than the Republican Party.

This week, we thought we might try something a little different, an experiment in collaborative article assignments and cross-party comparison. We asked two of our columnists, Wesley James Young and David Imbriaco, each to answer three questions. Wesley has been known to affiliate with the RU Republicans, while Dave is an avowed liberal, as anyone who has followed their staunch debates on the our comment boards in the past weeks will know. We hope this article will prove the first of many successful collaborations on the parts of our two most outspoken liberal and conservative voices. You should note that they did not conspire together for their answers, some of which may surprise you. But in order for that success to become a reality, we look to our readership to follow in Dave and Wesley’s footsteps by engaging each other in and with their comments. Happy Reading! – The JVP

Wesley: I do not fit comfortably into the liberal, in the European or etymological sense of the word, or conservative boxes. I love freedom and believe in the individual, but I am reluctant to advocate an instantaneous change of affairs or to engage in arguing from assumptions that men can be better than what they are. A man is perfectible; Man is not.

1) What was the greatest moment in American history?

Wesley: In 1787, a group of statesmen gathered in Philadelphia to amend the incredibly weak Articles of Confederation. They emerged with a document that sought to balance the seemingly irreconcilable ideas of a government capable of protecting its people from the threat of foreign enemies while avoiding the poison of becoming a domestic enemy. No American has remained unaffected by this one document, no nation has treated such a text with the reverence it is given. It has flaws, but I would not add a single word to its text.

Dave: One of the greatest moments in American history in my opinion has been the creation of Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid in 1935/1965. OK, I know I’m cheating by picking two, but I do so to make a larger point. Actions like these show how the United Sates government takes care of its own citizens. I’m not saying that any of these systems are without fault, but it shows how when people hold their government accountable, the government will do things for the people. I remember something that a Frenchman (if I’m not mistaken!) said in an interview with Michael Moore in his documentary Sicko. He said something along the lines of “in France, the government fears the people, where in America, the people fear the government.” These actions show that government can in fact be the solution and is even more relevant now as healthcare is (hopefully) reformed.

2) Who is the greatest American hero?

Wesley: The greatest American hero does not exist. The virtue of our nation is that we are not bound behind the yoke of the great man. American virtue is the ability for the individual to truck, barter, and exchange with one another without fear of official reprisal. The hero of America is every American—not plural, but singular.

Dave: In seeking to pick someone that is relevant to the situation we find ourselves in today, we can look to Franklin Delano Roosevelt as an example of an American hero. FDR reminded us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself and in 1941 he called upon Americans to work and fight to preserve our way of life and Americans responded to his leadership. He lead the United States out of the greatest economic catastrophe (recent events are yet unfinished) and against the threats of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. This is the kind of leadership President Obama is surely capable of as he combats our “Great Recession” and the threat of international terrorism, but only time will tell to see if our President truly discovers his potential, and most of us are rooting for him.

3) What is the greatest threat posed to America today?

Wesley: Franklin Roosevelt once said “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Unfortunately that has never been true. There have been two long held fears in this country: choice and failure. The prohibitionist is frightened of choices that may harm the actor. The overly sympathetic would relegate us to the grey twilight of knowing neither great failure nor great success in the name of providing a safety net. There is fear of allowing the exercise of our “right to keep and bear arms” because our choices may not match their ideal of proper conduct. We deny the right of a man to speak his mind in the name of not offending parents or annoying magpies who lack the ability to not listen. We impose wage floors, which reduce employment, because we fear wage cuts. We praise mandates on healthcare to protect the patient from feeling the cost while never asking what price we pay. We fear that voluntary interaction cannot spend as much as funds conscripted into state service, while avoiding the question of overall effectiveness. We bust trusts, while failing to acknowledge their virtues.

Dave: We need to realize something, and CNN’s Fareed Zakaria is doing an excellent job of telling Americans a painful truth: American can’t do whatever it wants anymore. Zakaria calls it “the Post-American World.” For the past eight years the United States has been an international bully, and look what these policies have left us with: a nuclear-armed North Korea, alienated allies and an legacy of distrust between the United States and its partners in the world. The United States needs the rest of the world to prosper, and the rest of the world is calling upon the United States once again to lead as we have many times before in modern history. If we can be humble and understanding in dealing with other nations, we will inadvertently pull them away from extremism. Hearts, minds and the support of foreign peoples are not won with bombs and drone attacks, they are only silenced and suppressed by them.

What is Seen and Not Seen

On Wednesday the 29th, it was my privilege to attend a lecture given by a skeptic of man-made global warming, Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley. It is  likely your reaction to such a view will be either vehement opposition to the idea that anyone can disagree with the “inconvenient truth” of Al Gore’s movie or of the sudden realization that maybe one is not alone in one’s doubts.

Lord Monckton gave a most detailed discussion of his objections to the idea that the effects of our CO2 emissions will lead to the apocalypse. I shall try as best I can to note those arguments which were brought up in the discussion and those I have formed myself. Before continuing I must note that disagreeing with a theory does not make one a wilderness hating ogre. I enjoy gardens and the plant life that bleed so readily for my gastronomic enjoyment.But I digress…One argument that Lord Monckton gave was to point out where the IPCC–the United Nations official body for reporting official models of CO2 emissions–excessively overestimated the actual levels to the point of being phantasmagorical. A close examination of the IPCC report brings up some further questions of my own. Why are the emissions scenarios of the IPCC listed in increments of 1990, 2000, 2100 anon? If one is going to predict what chaotic systems will do, would the accuracy rise or fall the further away you moved from the day your data was gathered? Fall, I should think–at least, if this were not the case, economic models would be much more accurate. Unfortunately, I do not possess the knowledge necessary to sanguinely claim that Lord Monckton gives an accurate depiction of the distance between reality and the IPCC predictions.

And unfortunately I cannot afford the time to give you a proper walk through of Lord Monckton’s arguments. The sheer volume of information and the time spent checking the facts would leave my exams fallow. I can only recommend that when you have a spare moment, you give his arguments a close read at http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/science_papers.html.

But I must now confess that I am a skeptic of the idea that mankind is the ultimate cause of the falling sky. I know that the earth is theorized to go up by one degree Celsius over some long period of time but I question the impact of such effects when you consider that life on this planet has been through such warm periods before. The Discovery Channel once ran an entire show about this era, known as the medieval warming period, when wine could be grown in the now cold region of southern Britain. Even if the global temperature rises more than one degree, is it going to suddenly happen over-night?–no. Man will simply do as he has always done in such situations: adapt.

My skepticism is also buttressed by the basic premise of trying to predict the effects of our current society in the long run. Thomas Malthus predicted starvation for the future peoples of the world because the phase “be fruitful and multiply” would eventually cause us to consume all of the fruit. Based on historic records, his predictions were reasonable. The one flaw in his work was the failure to take into account the invention of steam engines, the industrial revolution, and the improvements in medical technology culminating in a much wealthier society that would have more time to have fewer children. This principle is best illustrated today by looking at birth rates across the globe [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b4/World_net_birth_rate_2007.png]. Looking at the map, you will notice that the least industrialized countries produce the most children and fall victim to the Malthusian imperative. Another false prophet of doom is William Stanley Jevons. Jevons was a great economist who wrote a book on an impending coal shortage, http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Jevons/jvnCQ.html. Over a hundred years later and we have found a new shortage to worry about–classically educated students (we have plenty of oil). The models used to predict the value of houses before our current economic troubles were based upon a limited dataset that only went as far back as the start of a rise in prices so they failed to predict the inevitable problem of a fall in prices.

My point is that raising alarms about problems that will solve themselves can be of no benefit to the commonwealth.

]]> http://johnsonvillepress.com/2009/05/03/reflections-on-global-warming-wesley-james-young/feed/ 15 http://johnsonvillepress.com/2009/04/27/reflections-on-turnitincom-wesley-james-young/ http://johnsonvillepress.com/2009/04/27/reflections-on-turnitincom-wesley-james-young/#comments Mon, 27 Apr 2009 07:43:56 +0000 agino http://johnsonvillepress.com/?p=260 What is Seen and Not Seen

The law is a very Newtonian concept until the professional quibblers, lawyers and judges are invited to dilute it into a rhetorical baryogenesis. As thesis meets anti-thesis to produce the synthesis of a judicial decision, lines thought well drawn are shown to be variable and ill-fitting to any prediction. For, those of you who are still awake after my pretentious opening, I am trying to justify taking an unexpected position. Mike Stuzynski recently published a piece in the Targum decrying the use of turnitin. His argument has merit, you can tell I am serious by the fact I have dedicated a lot of words to not refuting it. I am unable to obtain a sample of the work produced by this service, so my argument is based on impression of what the service may be.

If I were to take a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses, presumably borrowed from a friend or found outside a dyspeptic English majors room, and create a service that compares your work to Joyce’s in some manner, would I owe the Joyce estate “four shining sovereigns?” Does Anthony Burges have to return the Rheingold because he wrote a novel that was an echo of the same plot as Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen?

My argument is equivocating the act of quotation and imitation with the services of turnitin, but I have already admitted that I am arguing from a the flawed position of not having complete knowledge of the service in question but until more evidence can be shown, I must say nay to Mike’s argument.

On a more tangential point, there is a book that I am reminded of. Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law professor, once wrote a book called The Future of Ideas (available gratis at http://www.the-future-of-ideas.com/download/). He argues in the book for a reduction in the constraints of copyright law. Its relevance is more to our times than it is timely for my argument.

]]> http://johnsonvillepress.com/2009/04/27/reflections-on-turnitincom-wesley-james-young/feed/ 1 http://johnsonvillepress.com/2009/04/13/what-is-seen-and-not-seen-wesley-james-young-3/ http://johnsonvillepress.com/2009/04/13/what-is-seen-and-not-seen-wesley-james-young-3/#comments Mon, 13 Apr 2009 05:52:36 +0000 agino http://johnsonvillepress.com/?p=230

Recent news items have so prodded my nature that I am almost moved to rant in a manner that would make Coriolanus seem temperate. I am referring to the many reactionary remarks on recent acts of violence and a plan for the legislature of Iowa to allow for homosexuals to marry. I suspect some may accuse me of Apophenia, but there is a connection in these events. That connection is property rights.

If your neighbor buys a Jackson Pollack painting and you are of the opinion that your neighbor is damaging the artistic integrity of your Mondrian—bear with me—does that mean that he should be taken to court for harming you. It does make sense if your neighbor builds a pigsty and the smells and filth offend you, but can an idea harm you? If your neighbor owns a knife, does that harm you? “But I’ve read stories about vicious knife-wielding killers!” you may respond. I remember another man who read stories, some fact and some fiction; he decided to fight the evils in those stories. He also had a partner named Sancho Panza to help him…

But what about guns? A knife has many uses, but a gun is designed to kill, some of you may say. That is like saying that a hammer is designed to pound nails while I demonstrate the fragility of a crab shell or bleach is designed to clean while I mix in a bottle of ammonia. Guns have a myriad of uses including sport shooting and scaring animals away. I find it strange that whenever someone kills with a gun, the questions are about restricting a man’s “right to keep and bear arms” and trying to prevent the unpredictable while any other sort of murder invites questions about the murderer. “Should we get him help” and “why did they let him out” are the first questions asked. If I won something and the only way I can harm you is if I decide to harm you, should you worry about what the object is or how much I value your life?

I do not support the government getting involved in marriage. I believe that marriage is an institution in the hands of the Lord. I am not opposed to a contractual agreement on property sharing and the dissolution of the joint body being submitted before the state but any mention of the word wife and husband should be divorced from the matter. In other words the government should only be involved in the enforcement of contracts and the spiritual side should be left to the churches where they belong. Those that do not wish to perform the spiritual service for homosexuals may do so clear in the knowledge that Congress shall make no laws with respect to religious establishments. Thus I advocate for the government to not “marry” anyone.

Property rights are under fire everyday by those who would pretend towards motherhood and priestly vestments. Never mistake legislators for either.

There are many different labels that one could use to describe me: Liberal, Conservative, Smith-Hayek, and Quixotic. Such labeling fallaciously assumes a system of abstract ideals to describe my way of thinking. My views have a very simple basis: “if I know a man is determined to help me, I run away.” I am not against the idea of having a government but I am against the idea of treating it like Hercules. Rolling our responsibilities onto his semi-divine shoulders while we go apple picking, only to be tricked into having our own burdens plus a few more returned to our shoulders. A more concrete example would be minimum wage laws. If the lowest wage anyone would receive without such laws is $6 and the new law mandates $6.50, then You have made the guy with a job $.50 richer but you have also made the next employee $.50 more expensive which will lower employment and ultimately lower potential future growth (a burden). The increase in wages will translate to higher prices which will nullify that short term gain and translate into having the previous wage problems returned plus a reduction in employment.But I am a firm believer in taking things with a grain of salt, and so I supplement this article with one by Hugh Rockoff, a more learned economist than myself to support my reasoning: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PriceControls.html. I know there are studies that support the existence of the minimum wage but I have yet to see a reason why that is consistent with the rest of economic theory. If you find a more convincing reason, let me know.

I am to the straw man commonly referred to as a “free market fundamentalist.” The ability for man to satiate his needs through truck, barter, and exchange has led to the wonders of the modern era. If the whaling industry and the protections that are given to ethanol producers and sugar mongers were not so inhibitory, perhaps today we would be driving whale powered cars–who can say? If there were higher taxes on whale oil, would petroleum have been discovered any sooner? Environmentalists claim that the market cannot get us off of oil fast enough, but why should I fuel up with hydrogen, if oil is cheaper?  How many of the government advancements which have benefited the general public resulted from the intended purpose of government research? The internet was originally intended for defense department communication and Teflon was first used as a coating for missile nosecones. Companies invest in technologies that may increase their profits, legislators invest in votes and altruism. When a government project fails, a congress man gets another term. When GM fails, the CEO gets the boot. How long can we sustain such hypocrisy?