Category: Government

Video games are not reality.

I don’t talk too much about my personal life on Rolling Doughnut. Part of that is to preserve some anonymity, and part of it is because, despite being a blogger, I understand that my life is only interesting to me and those close to me. You probably don’t care to hear that I’ll punish a few members of the Locust Horde in Gears of War tonight. Sometimes, though, reality interferes to push my life into something more universal and relevant.

On Monday, my brother joined the Marines. He should be finishing his first semester at college, but for reasons I don’t care to share here, he’s now in boot camp. He wants to fight in Iraq, for all the wrong reasons. He’s 18 and thinks he has the world figured out, as most people do at that age. Nothing will stop him. Where he is fearless in thinking that battlefield death is noble, I’m scared to death thinking that the next time I see him will be at his funeral. He seems strangely content, even anticipatory, of the idea. I am not.

I turned against the war in Iraq a long time ago. As I said, I was very naive in believing that we could build a nation. For that I carry my share of the blame. But I do not believe I was out of line to trust the Bush administration to run the war competently once it decided to engage. It has failed to do so at every step. This is unforgivable, yet, President Bush appears prepared to send more men and women to fight a war that he is not serious about winning. He is a shameful, little man.

I’ve accepted that my brother will be sent to Iraq. Despite his high entrance exam score, he chose to join the infantry. He does not understand that he is a number to the military, a troop level increase. A body. To me, he is a human being, with flaws, strengths, misconceptions, and honor. I respect his right to make this decision, but I also want to meet his children one day. I wonder if President Bush cares more about that or his political legacy.

I don’t like the conclusion I’ve reached.

You’d Shake Your Canteen and Walk Away

I’m not going to hammer away at the details of New Jersey’s new civil unions for same-sex couples. From what I understand, the basics seem to satisfy the absurd separate exception allowed by the original ruling, while failing to meet the fundamental equal requirement. All in all, a proud day for politicians everywhere.

Instead, this gets to the problem that we’re facing as a civil society: our politicians are allowed to ignore the Constitution(s) they’re expected to uphold.

But Assemblyman Ronald S. Dancer, a Republican from Ocean County, said that the bill was an affront to the Bible, and that “this is one time that I cannot compromise my personal beliefs and faiths.”

I’m not familiar with New Jersey’s practices, but I’m willing to guess that Assemblyman Dancer is not sworn to uphold the Bible or his personal beliefs and faiths. Unfortunately, another state legislator understands the true end-game here, so those of us who support equality are busted:

“I believe the foundation of our state is families, marriage, one man, one woman,” said Senator Robert W. Singer, the Republican from Jackson who sponsored the amendment proposal. “Why do you want to crumble that? We’re not taking away anyone’s rights, just sanctifying what marriage is.”

I can’t wait until the day that the foundation of New Jersey and the United States as a whole crumbles because gay Americans enjoy equal rights. I long for it with my very being. I also want the terrorists to win on that day. And I hate children. And puppies. Definitely puppies.

Politicians are stupid.

Better Than Other Proposals – Still Obviously Wrong

I’ve written about Sen. Ron Wyden in the past, in less than favorable terms. Today, I’m feeling antagonistic. I’ll try to contain myself.

Several business and labor leaders on Wednesday hailed a proposal to provide health care coverage to all Americans through a pool of private insurance plans.

A dozen years after Congress rejected a Clinton administration plan for universal health care, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden offered a plan he said would provide affordable, private health care coverage for all Americans, except those covered through Medicare or the military.

“Employer-based coverage is melting away like a Popsicle on the sidewalk in August,” Wyden said.

Wyden, a Democrat and a member of the Senate Finance health care subcommittee, said his plan would “guarantee health coverage for every American that is at least as good as members of Congress receive and can never be taken away.”

Wishing something true and having it come true are not the same. The pool will, of course, not stay private. If the plan is affordable, it will be crap. Employer-based coverage should melt away because it’s a horrible scheme for keeping people insured and for maintaining economic efficiency. And “can never be taken away” is as empty a promise as you’ll hear today, at least since no one is talking about Social Security. Basically, before presenting the facts, it’s clear this will be a steaming pile.

Before getting to the plan, let’s consider what the business and labor leaders said:

Continue reading “Better Than Other Proposals – Still Obviously Wrong”

Merit is not fixed at birth.

There is nothing that government can’t achieve, if we funnel more money and social equality into addressing so-called problems:

One of the most important things that government could do to reduce drug use, fight the obesity epidemic and deal with a host of other youth problems is quite simple: Include more kids in organized after-school sports.

But to do that, we must first make some major changes in interscholastic sports programs in the nation’s public middle and high schools. The goal should be full inclusion: Nobody gets cut from the team.

The essay is bad, with little that is practical or desirable. But there are two points that get lost in this recommendation. First, kids in organized sports use drugs. I recall this from my one year of high school baseball, but it’s not a leap to realize that kids in sports are still kids. Kids make bad choices. Maybe lack of participation in sports plays a role in increasing drug use, but I want evidence before accepting it as truth. It’s dumb to throw more money at something with hope that it’ll fix what we’ve only assumed.

To the second point, there are other outlets for organized sports, but the school team carries greater weight. I agree. Yet, merit is vital as a measuring stick for kids. I wanted to be on the baseball team in high school, but I wasn’t good enough to play beyond one season. That was tough, but I dealt with it by working hard to improve. If I’d known I would make the team, I would’ve had no incentive to practice. Toss in this suggested implementation strategy and there is little reason to care:

To ensure that schools would field the most competitive teams, the most skilled players would still get the bulk of the playing time at the varsity level. But no one would be cut.

Pardon me for disagreeing, but I never wanted to sit when I played organized sports. As a kid, I’d rather play for a losing team than watch from the bench as a good team wins. I even skipped a season of Little League as a kid because I knew I wouldn’t get to play much. The effort involved to practice with the team only to watch other kids play would not have been worth the minor payoff of being included. I played catch and practiced with my brother to play the game.

I coached Little League one season. I made a rule in the beginning of the season that playing was more important than winning. Every kid would play an equal amount of time, regardless of skill or the score of the game. I communicated this at the first practice. When the season was over, every kid had played the same number of innings. We didn’t win much, but the kids played together as a team as the season progressed. They helped each other and the team played better every week.

I wouldn’t implement such a policy in business, but extracurricular activities is not business. Kids are smart enough to understand who has more (and less) talent. What that team found out was that every kid could develop the talent he or she had, no matter how limited or expansive. Isn’t that more important for kids than being included on the periphery?

Instead of spending more money so that everyone (allegedly) feels good about themselves, communities should address the problem with an approach open to the best solution. It should not flow from a preferred political outcome. If involvement is so important with sports, and I believe it is, kids need an environment where they know their efforts will be rewarded. Merit is a vital measuring stick, regardless of how abundant that talent is, but it’s measured individually as much as it is collectively.

Central planning is not an economic policy.

Here’s an interesting but misguided study:

A new poll shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans favor allowing the government to negotiate prescription drug prices for the Medicare program, suggesting there will be considerable political pressure on the next Congress to do so.

Eight-five percent of the 1,867 adults polled in the Kaiser Family Foundation survey released yesterday said they favored such negotiations, including majorities of Republicans, Democrats and independents.

So people presumably understand that negotiating in the marketplace makes sense. Why include government? Do people not pay attention to results?

Julie L. Goon, special assistant to Bush for economic policy, said that Medicare beneficiaries are saving an average of $1,200 a year on drugs and that the existing program is popular and efficient.

“The government doesn’t do a particularly good job of negotiation,” Goon said. “I think it would be a mistake to open up the political process to what particular prices are available for drugs.”

Success is measured by beneficiaries saving money without noting that the cost is that someone else pays that $1,200. Of course, we could look no further than the stunningly frank admission that government doesn’t do a particularly good job of negotiation. The trade-off for those savings-that-aren’t-really-savings is fewer choices. Well done.

Welcome to government meddling with healthcare. Anyone who wants more is crazy.

Destroying an Admirable History

Many have pointed out that the notion of civil liberties in the United Kingdom is now a sham, but this is ridiculous:

Commander Dave Johnston, giving a personal point of view, said that samples could also be taken from people renewing passports and from migrants.
…

The head of the Met’s Homicide and Serious Crime Unit also suggested taking DNA from dead people might help “cleanse” the database.

He added that blood samples were already taken from babies at four days old to test for genetic diseases but stressed it was important to have a debate over the human rights issue.

A debate? Do you think? A child’s future is unknown, which is just part of life. Are we ready to assume that children are guilty until proven innocent, and that solving hypothetical, unlikely crimes trumps any rights a child has?

DNA samples are retained from those arrested but not convicted and from victims and witnesses who give their consent.

Apparently.

“We are already above that.”

Nothing in this article about raising the minimum wage is in any way support for the move. It doesn’t counter it either, unless you want to make logical inferences into the facts. It’s mostly a “this won’t do much” fluff piece, with a little bit of touchy-feely goodness masquerading as business sense. As such, it’s important to ask, if raising the minimum wage is so irrelevant, why bother? To feel good about ourselves? That’s not wise business.

A couple of morsels:

“When you let the minimum wage fall as low as it’s fallen, it becomes almost irrelevant,” said Harry J. Holzer, professor of public policy at Georgetown University and a former chief economist for the Labor Department. “This is an attempt to make it somewhat more meaningful, but not so meaningful that it destroys a lot of jobs.”

Wait, it becomes almost irrelevant? So the greedy capitalists don’t sit around trying to screw their employees out of wages, instead paying market wages above the minimum required by law? Who would this benefit? The answer, of course, is new, unskilled entrants into the job force (teens) and older workers, presumably staying active with employment. They need more why?

Also note that this attempt would not be so meaningful that it destroys a lot of jobs. A few jobs is acceptable, as long as we’re doing something that feels good. I bet the unemployment line won’t feel good to those (few?) who lose their jobs or don’t get jobs because they’re not created.

Carlos Castro is another area employer who said he won’t cut workers if the minimum wage goes up. As the owner of Todos Supermarkets in Alexandria and Woodbridge, he pays a starting wage of $7 an hour for cashiers, stockers, meat cutters and cooks — well above the $5.15 minimum in Virginia.

“You just can’t get by on minimum wage these days, and I don’t want to force my employees to have to get a second job to support themselves,” Castro said.

Castro said that if Congress increases the federal minimum wage, he will probably raise his pay to keep it above that — precisely what the EPI anticipates happening around the country.

This is the perfect way to see that increasing the minimum wage cause arbitrary, artificial gains for employees. It’s central planning at its ugliest. Who is going to pay for that increase in wages to stay a specific dollar amount above minimum wage? Rather than understand that the market already takes care of the problem in setting wages, the busybodies want to make sure that those few who are near the current, allegedly outdated minimum will no longer be harmed. Except they will be harmed, as prices increase to offset the new expenses. This is not a hard concept.

Rather than tie up business in endless regulation, government needs to get out of the way and let the market, powered by human creativity, solve whatever problems exist that harm the working poor the government so dangerously cares about.

Are we getting funny money?

Consequences be damned, I suppose:

A federal judge said yesterday that by keeping all U.S. currency the same size and texture, the government has denied blind people meaningful access to money.

U.S. District Judge James Robertson said the Treasury Department has violated the law, and he ordered the government to develop ways for the blind to tell bills apart.

“Of the more than 180 countries that issue paper currency, only the United States prints bills that are identical in size and color in all their denominations,” Robertson wrote. “More than 100 of the other issuers vary their bills in size according to denomination, and every other issuer includes at least some features that help the visually impaired.”

Perhaps I’m missing the importance of this issue, but it seems to border on folly. How pervasive is this problem, really? But I’ll assume that the court’s ruling is not only correct, but reasonable. What are the impacts, economically?

For example, how much effort and expense will be involved so that I can use one of the soon-to-be-redesigned bills to add fare to my Metro card? It took months for WMATA to reconfigure the machines to work with the most recent redesign. I can’t wait to see the fare hikes that will come out of this.

What about cash registers? Wallets? The ramifications are numerous. Of course, much of that has to do with size changes, which the Treasury is apparently not obligated to undertake. Okay, but there will be impacts.

Of course, it’s also useful to remember that cash use is becoming less common over time. That’s not a license to discriminate, if one-size-fits-all money is discrimination, but is the court merely remedying yesterday’s problem? I think it is.

I wonder how selective it would be.

Following up on yesterday’s post on Rep. Rangel’s ridiculous plan to bring back the draft, CNN has a quick look at what a draft would look like, courtesy of the Selective Service website. I particularly enjoy this part of the process:

PHYSICAL, MENTAL, AND MORAL EVALUATION OF REGISTRANTS
Registrants with low lottery numbers are ordered to report for a physical, mental, and moral evaluation at a Military Entrance Processing Station to determine whether they are fit for military service. Once he is notified of the results of the evaluation, a registrant will be given 10 days to file a claim for exemption, postponement, or deferment.

I’m open to the possibility that this means an evaluation of conscientious objector status, or some other moral claim. But it’s not worded that way. So… It’s quite interesting that Selective Service performs a moral evaluation of “registrants” in pursuit of the immoral forced servitude (usually referred to as slavery) of the “registrant” (usually referred to as a human being with an inalienable right to liberty).