Wednesday's interesting reads - 6/11/08

"A Vote for McBama" by Robert Samuelson (HT: Greg Mankiw):

"But for me, McCain does have one provisional and accidental advantage. By most appraisals, the Republicans will get slaughtered in congressional elections, and I have a visceral dislike of one-party government. It didn't work well under Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. Divided government doesn't ensure good government, but it may limit bad government by checking the worst instincts of both parties."

As much as I'd like to believe that a Republican House working with a Republican Senate workign with a Republican president would pass Republican legislation, I know (because we saw) it won't. Democrats, I'm afraid, would be different. I'm afraid they will pass all kinds of left-wing, populist legilation. I can't help but think of all that was passed in the first months of FDR's presidency. I could be wrong though.

Don Boudreaux says a very similar thing here:

"I'm flabbergasted by the faith that people - left, right, and center - put in politics and in the candidates du jour. Millions of Americans today famously believe that a President Obama will fundamentally "change" America (into what, though, is unclear). And today, David Brooks suggests that a President McCain might well quash special-interest-group politics and turn Uncle Sam's attention chiefly to the general interest ("Talking Versus Doing," May 20).

These are delusions. I'll bet $100 that, regardless of which candidate wins the White House, in 2013 the federal budget will still contain agricultural subsidies and tariffs that take billions of dollars from the many to give to the few - that a majority of Members of Congress will continue to successfully sponsor earmarks - that the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare will be no smaller than they are today - and that partisan bickering will be every bit as much a part of the daily news as it is now."

"The Entitlement Mess" by John Stossel (via Townhall):

"Entitlement? How can you be entitled to someone else's money?

To finance "entitlement" programs, the government threatens force against the taxpayers who provide the money. Why are people who favor compulsion called humanitarians, while those who favor freedom are stigmatized as greedy? ...

"Change We Can Believe In Is All Around Us" WSJ op-ed by Brian Wesbury:

"It's also what everyone seems to want – change. Sen. Obama promises to provide "Change We Can Believe In." Sen. McCain suggests that "the choice is between the right change and the wrong change." If it's the war that is the focus of all this talk about change, well, that's understandable, and maybe people really do want change. But if it's the economy, it's hard to imagine that change could happen any faster.

In fact, the U.S. economy (really, the global economy) is transforming at an absolutely astounding rate. We're living in Internet Time, where policies and their consequences travel the world at the speed of light. The normal human reaction to such a rapid pace of change is to be overwhelmed, stressed out, anxious and fearful. As a result, it is probably true that when voters listen to talk about change, what they really hear are promises of "no change," which would be a huge difference from the status quo. They just want things "the way they were.""

Effectively what he's saying is that most of us are actually conservative in the classical sense: we want things to stay the way they are (or, have recently been). He's right. Most of us are very scared of change. Change brings insecurity and uncertainty, both emotionally and financially.

"Americans have had it so good, for so long, that they seem to have forgotten what government's heavy hand does to living standards and economic growth. But the same technological innovation that is causing all this dislocation and anxiety has also created an information network that is as near to real-time as the world has ever experienced...

Both Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama view the world from a legislative perspective. Like the populists before them, they seem to believe that government can fix problems in the economy. They seem to believe that what the world needs is a change in the way government attacks problems and fixes the anxiety of voters. This command-and-control approach, however, forces a misallocation of resources. And in Internet Time this will become visible in almost real-time, creating real political pain for the new president.

In contrast to what some people seem to believe, having the government take over the health-care system is not change. It's just a culmination of previous moves by government. And the areas with the worst problems today are areas that have the most government interference – education, health care and energy."

"Another Failure on Climate Change" NY Times editorial:

"There was blame enough to go around. Republicans and some Democrats complained — not without reason — that the bill’s manager, Barbara Boxer, had spent too little time in preliminary hearings discussing its potential economic impact. She also confused matters by adding last-minute amendments, including one aimed at reducing the federal deficit, that seemed to have little to do with the issue at hand.

The timing was terrible. A bill that would inevitably raise energy prices did not sit well with senators dealing with record gasoline prices. And a Republican leadership more interested in protecting industry than the environment behaved like babies, at one point spitefully forcing a complete reading of the 492-page bill, sapping any political momentum."

I submitted the following letter:

"In your June 11 editorial “Another Failure on Climate Change”, by essentially framing the discussion as choosing between “protecting industry and [protecting] the environment”, you established an inappropriate dichotomy. Very few on the “industry” side of the debate absolutely don’t care about the environment, just like very few on the “environment” side absolutely don’t care about industry; we all have a vested interest in both. What this country needs before we adopt environmental policy like this, therefore, is an open, frank discussion of the tradeoffs between environmental protection and economic prosperity. We all make tradeoffs similar to this all the time: almost no one eats fast food or smokes a cigarette totally unaware of the health tradeoffs, but they do it anyway. Let’s not rush Congress, and the rest of America, down a new regulatory path until we all are comfortable with how much we will be asked to sacrifice in terms of prosperity. Only then can we realistically decide if it’s worth it."

"How the Senate Can Help Ted Kennedy" WSJ op-ed by Steven Walker and Ronald Trowbridge:

"The recent news that Sen. Ted Kennedy has brain cancer sharply focuses national attention on the tragedy of all forms of cancer. The senator has a malignant glioma so difficult to treat that half of those diagnosed with it die within a year, and nearly all are dead within two years.

There are many promising new cancer treatments in the pipeline, but under current Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, almost no one gains access to them, no matter how dire the need or how compelling the evidence that the drugs work.

Most people receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis die before the most promising treatments in the pipeline reach them. Why? Because those tragic events occur on the wrong side of the magical moment when someone at the FDA puts an approval letter on a fax machine declaring the drug they needed – and never got – is 'safe and effective.'"

I sent the following letter:

"Unfortunately, it isn’t until someone close to us is personally affected before we realize the costs of a particular policy. Steven Walker and Ronald Trowbridge obviously have. Let’s hope our United States Congress will soon. Messrs Walker and Trowbridge discussed in their op-ed what the Senate can do for one of their own, and my hope is that they act. It’s plain to me just how over-regulated the pharmaceutical industry is (to say nothing about the broader health care industry). I think it’s terrific that we’ve legislated a way for more potentially life-saving medicines to reach AIDS patients; it’s time we widen the tent to include other illnesses. The process of FDA approval costs the pharmaceutical industry and taxpayers billions and billions of dollars every year, but the most important cost – lost lives – is the hardest to quantify. Has anyone stopped to compare the number of lives saved by keeping potentially dangerous medicines off the market to the number of lives lost because a drug that went on to get approved took 10 years to get to market instead of 7 (or fewer)? Let’s make sure we’re not sacrificing the lives of the many to protect the lives of the few."