Holiday Blogging

My blogging will be minimal or even non-existent over the holidays. One thing I’m contemplating is cutting back on new blog entries and spending more time updating old ones. WordPress.com, my gracious blogging host, generates a lot of statistics about which blog entries are popular. I may spend more time updating some of my more popular older works (which people actually read) and less time adding new material. I’ll decide soon. In the meantime, I hope my faithful readers all enjoy a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

The Other Trillion

The furor over President Obama’s trillion-dollar restructuring of American health care has left his other trillion-dollar plan starved for attention. That’s how much the federal balance sheet will expand over the next decade if Mr. Obama can convince Congress to approve his pending takeover of the student-loan market.

The Obama plan calls for the U.S. Department of Education to move from its current 20% share of the student-loan origination market to 80% on July 1, 2010, when private lenders will be barred from making government-guaranteed loans. The remaining 20% of the market that is now completely private will likely shrink further as lenders try to comply with regulations Congress created last year. Starting next summer, taxpayers will have to put up roughly $100 billion per year to lend to students.

via Obama Plans Government Takeover of Student Loans – WSJ.com.

Our economy could maybe (if we try very very hard and get very very lucky) survive the trillion dollar hit from health care reform, but what about a second trillion dollar hit for student loans? Obama’s world sounds increasingly like late night ads for diet plans: eat all you want and still lose weight! What next – free Escalades for all? Few seem to recognize that every increase in the national debt must be balanced by a decrease in living standards. I don’t understand the appeal of greatly reduced circumstances in return for different health care and an indifferent education.

The Climate at the EPA

Because the act was never written to apply to today’s climate neuroses, clean-air regulation is based on an extremely low threshold for CO2 emissions that will automatically transfer hundreds of thousands of businesses into the EPA’s ambit. The agency is required to regulate sources that emit more than 250 tons of a given air pollutant annually, which may be reasonable for conventional pollutants like NOX or SOX.

But this is a very low limit for ubiquitous CO2, and so would capture schools, hospitals, farms, malls, restaurants, large office buildings and many others. To exempt these sources, the tailoring rule unilaterally boosts the rule for greenhouse gases from 250 tons to 25,000 tons, an increase of two orders of magnitude.

via Obama Wants to Use EPA Loophole to Force Through Cap-and-Trade – WSJ.com.

The WSJ Editorial Board is quite critical of the EPA’s decision to enforce carbon emission standards only on the biggest emitters. Well, I’m no fan of the global warming hysteria, but fair’s fair. If the agency is required to enforce the standards, it makes sense to prioritize the work and go after the big “problems” first.

The big “problems” will be power suppliers of all sorts. To comply with forthcoming regulations, the suppliers will either have to go out of business (unlikely) or increase prices to cover the new costs. If they’re smart, they’ll identify the price increase as a carbon surcharge right on the bill they deliver to every American home and business. The higher costs for businesses will, of course, be passed on to consumers by means of higher prices – for everything. Higher prices mean less discretionary income for households and less money to invest – including those investments that might otherwise be made in green energy.

Changing the climate may prove quite expensive. It may prove to be ineffective and expensive. Still, those who warn of impending doom just might be right, so we should at least pay attention. On the other hand, there are many skeptics. That says to me that we shouldn’t commit whole hog toward a plan of action, but we shouldn’t do nothing. Starting with a portion of the plan makes sense. We will learn a lot. We might learn it’s just too expensive, or we might learn the impact is better for the climate and not so bad for the economy. Who knows?

I’d rather see tentative steps in the wrong direction than a full commitment to a bad plan. If I’m right, we won’t irrevocably damage the economy and will have the opportunity to change course. If I’m wrong, we haven’t lost much by not addressing the entire problem at once, especially since we probably couldn’t do it anyway.

Tortured Morality

Oh good – CIA torture is back in the news. Editorial pages and blogs are bound to be full of strong opinions. Unfortunately, it very much resembles five year olds arguing about cosmology. It’s incoherent to have an opinion on this one issue unless it fits in some larger context of morality. Figure out your view of morality and ethics in general and the specifics are not so hard.

I suggest reading the excellent Wikipedia entry on consequentialism.

Consequentialism refers to those moral theories which hold that the consequences of a particular action form the basis for any valid moral judgment about that action…

Consequentialism is usually understood as distinct from deontology, in that deontology derives the rightness or wrongness of an act from the character of the act itself rather than the outcomes of the action, and from virtue ethics, which focuses on the character of the agent rather than on the nature or consequences of the action itself.

There are many flavors to consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, each having a different view of morality. If you haven’t wrestled with this, thinking it through, then you don’t have a moral philosophy. Without a moral philosophy to underpin your thoughts, your opinion on a specific moral issue simply isn’t intellectually honest. As a bonus, if you have developed a coherent moral philosophy, or are in the process of doing so, you can at least understand the views of those who have a different perspective of right and wrong.

Obesity

Lately you can’t get away from people talking and writing about obesity. Megan claims that our thinking about obesity is largely wrong. Given her track record, I’m inclined to believe her. Before you get morose about your own extra pounds or think that some kind of War on Obesity will solve the health care problem, give her a read.

Evil

Can the problem of evil, about which so much has been written, be reduced to biochemistry?

Adam Smith was right: we are moral creatures because we are empathic. Research at CNS reveals the science behind Smith’s insights: we are virtuous because of the moral molecule, oxytocin. Adam Smith said it best, "Whatever appears to be the proper object of gratitude, appears to deserve reward; and that, in the same manner, whatever appears to be the proper object of resentment, appears to deserve punishment."

Read the whole thing – and more.

Bite Sized Culture

Tyler Cowen has a new book which I won’t read – not because it isn’t good, but as he explains, technology is driving us to consume information in smaller and more selective chunks. There are good reviews here, here, and here.

There are implications to this that I haven’t thought through. In a world dominated by short spurts of information (blogs, YouTube, Twitter), there is certainly some risk of losing the bigger picture and the fuller explanation. On the other hand, there are countless interconnections and intersections of information that might otherwise go unnoticed.

I’m developing some sympathy for the contemporaries of Gutenberg. This changes everything – but how?

Who Decides?

There sure is a lot of blogging underway regarding healthcare.

Don Boudreaux makes some good points and then makes a key point:

Does anyone seriously suppose that decisions by government bureaucrats over who will get, and who will be denied, some expensive lifesaving procedure would be better than having such decisions made according to each patient’s willingness and ability to pay?

In either case, some people will be denied care. I’d prefer that the impersonal forces of the market direct such decisions than to have them made by bureaucrats. Each of us, at the end of the day, has more control over the size of our bank accounts than we have over politically influenced bureaucrats.

If you think such decisions about who does and does not get care, and who lives and dies, are far-fetched, you might want to read this. There is a lot of emphasis on reducing the cost of healthcare. The most straightforward ways are to deny treatment or defer treatment (in hopes that you either get better on your own or die). We should all hope that when the politicians are done with “healthcare reform”, we still have the option of spending our own money for treatments that would otherwise be denied.

Out of Money

I have to admire President O’s candor in admitting that the nation is broke. I’m not so thrilled with his response, which makes the spendthrift Bush administration look like a model of fiscal rectitude. What this foretells is obvious. Most of us don’t have the option of easily bailing out of dollars, so we’re stuck with it. I expect heavy duty inflation within a year and high interest rates to accompany it. What to do with this prediction is up to you.

Something Dark

I was thinking about this post concerning economic fallacies when I was struck with the importance of a well known fact of the human condition: there is something dark in all of us that makes us want to impose our will on others. This allows us to accept bogus arguments that lend credence to our desires. This is all the easier when we can argue in terms of “the common good” or “national security” or “family values”. What we need to fear is not terrorists, communists, the radical left or the radical right, but ourselves. We are easily seduced by the notion that our ideas should be imposed on others, whether they like it or not. We are all latent thugs.