No Give, No Take Organ Donation

Creative ways to organize exchange between private individuals create more wealth.  In this case it creates a larger pool of organs for transplantation.  Of course simply allowing people to sell critical organs would expand the market even more.  Social squeamishness is costing tens of thousands of people their lives.

In Entrepreneurial Economics I argued for a “no give, no take” system for organ donation–people who signed their organ donor cards would be given priority over non-signers should they one day need an organ. The idea has an element of justice to it but the primary goal is to increase the incentive to sign one’s organ donor card.

Israel recently adopted this policy by giving extra points on the allocation system to people who previously signed the organ donor card. In the case of kidneys, for example, two points (on a 0-18 point scale) are given if the candidate had three or more years previous to being listed signed their organ card.  One point is given if a first-degree relative had signed and 3.5 points if a first-degree relative had previously donated.

It’s early but so far the policy appears to be very successful:

Due to the population’s surge of interest in obtaining an organ donor card, the Adi-National Israel Transplant Center has extended through March 31 the deadline to register as a donor and receive special benefits.

…During the past few weeks, Adi’s phone system has collapsed several times due to the high demand.

Since Adi decided to give preferential treatment to those registering as a potential organ donor, tens of thousands of people have registered, raising the number of potential donors to over 600,000. Until last year, the rate of registration was among the lowest in the Western world.

Hat tip to David Undis whose excellent group Lifesharers (I am an adviser) is implementing a private version of no-give, no take in the United States.

Here is my piece on Life Saving Incentives and here are previous MR posts on organ donation.

Information technologies are cumulative in their effect

Improved software, of which algorithms are a specialized part, is another key source of improvement that can't be overlooked.

Moore’s law squared

by JOHN on JANUARY 1, 2012

In a review of linear programming solvers from 1987 to 2002, Bob Bixby says that solvers benefited as much from algorithm improvements as from Moore’s law.

Three orders of magnitude in machine speed and three orders of magnitude in algorithmic speed add up to six orders of magnitude in solving power. A model that might have taken a year to solve 10 years ago can now solve in less than 30 seconds.

Source: In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman

The Capital Strike enters a new, more dangerous phase

With the Constitution Bending (not even recess) appointments of three new members to the NLRB, the Obama administration has served notice that it will attempt to achieve administratively what it could not achieve legislatively:  namely a significant expansion of union power and representation.  The result will be chaos as unions rush to take advantage of a very biased NLRB ahead of the inevitable take over of the Senate by Republicans next year.

The impact on employment?  Employers will have a new and remarkably corrupt reason to sit on their hands.  The capital strike will continue.  Stay tuned for more economically destructive rent seeking by an administration frantically ransacking the Federal Government for more ways to reward its friends before the next election.  Very Chicago.

Politico breaks the news that the president has appointed no fewer than three members to the activist National Labor Relations Board:

President Barack Obama made more controversial recess appointments Wednesday, filling three open seats on the National Labor Relations Board just hours after he appointed Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The three appointees — Sharon Block, Terence F. Flynn, and Richard Griffin — will take their place on a board that has been sharply attacked by Republicans for favoring labor.

“The American people deserve to have qualified public servants fighting for them every day – whether it is to enforce new consumer protections or uphold the rights of working Americans,” Obama said in announcing the appointments.

This is the president declaring war on the House and Senate GOP. Expect lots of power-grabbing executive orders to follow. 

This is why we need multi-lingual ballots

The Constitution requires that candidates for citizenship speak English.  Yet we now must provide multi-lingual ballots.  This is because the rules are not being followed by civil 'servants' who have sworn to uphold the Constitution.  Once again our Federal state is lawless and out of control.  Remember:  so called civil 'servants' aren't on your side, they're on their side.  Here's more evidence of the Federals contempt for the rule of law:

Finally, my colleague David North just today has crunched numbers dumped by USCIS and found that it’s become dramatically easier to get citizenship. Of the naturalization decisions rendered in FY 2000, 31.1 percent were denials. In 2011, only 7.6 percent were denials. As David notes:

The data in the table reinforce what I have written in several previous blogs: USCIS is an agency that loves to say “yes” when asked to grant a benefit and its current leadership is leaning on the system to make it even more friendly to applicants of all kinds.

Obama's Debt Star

And this does not include another 85 Trillion in NPV of future liabilities.  We're going down.  Hard.

OBAMA’S LEGACY: US Closes 2011 With Record $15.22 Trillion In Debt, Officially At 100.3% Debt/GDP. I guess the “Debt Star” really is his emblem.

More Obama PushmePullyou Madness

Pushing home ownership as a social welfare program created the sub prime mess. John Lott points out that our Dear Leader has learned nothing from that disaster.

Just days before Christmas, the Obama administration gave Bank of America a big lump of coal, levying a hefty $335 million dollar fine on the company for discriminating against minorities in its lending practices. 

Supposedly Countrywide, a mortgage company bought by Bank of America in 2008, had not given out enough low interest rate loans to minorities from 2004 to 2008.

What the large fine reveals is that President Obama hasn’t learned anything from the recent financial crisis. 

What the president sees as discrimination in awarding a mortgage, lenders saw as wise business decisions. 

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/01/02/obama-has-learned-nothing-from-mortgage-meltdown-mess/#ixzz1iVDIRE3D

Corn Crime from the Corn Caucus

Ethanol:  It shifts money from the working class and poor to the rich, despoils the environment and drives up food prices for the world's poorest.  Of course it's supported by politicians across the political spectrum.  It could be that Corn Farmers are the most evil pressure group in America.  Perhaps that's why Federal Politicians love them so much...they're role models.  And exhibit number one for why our Federal Superstate is  headed for destruction.  If we can't cut these thieves off, how are we possibly going to cut back Grandma?

The Case for Optimistic Pessimism

When everything is smashed, there is no one above you and a lot of pieces to play with. - Me.

The case for optimism

The chance of a lifetime

A friend asked me the other day, "...given the sorry state of so much in the world, what's possible to look forward to?"

The state isn't sorry. It's wide open.

Interest rates are super low, violence is close to an all time low, industries are being remade and there's more leverage for the insurgent outsider than ever before in history.

The status quo is taking a beating, there's no question about it. That's what makes it a revolution.

I said this nine years ago and I stand by it. In the twelve years since I wrote this essay, people have started social movements, built billion dollar companies, toppled dictators, found new jobs, learned new skills and generally made a ruckus.

State Sponsored Spyware: the next assault on our freedoms

Corey Doctorow explains why general purpose computers will come under assault by the State and it's penumbras.  Because free computation is the enemy of state sponsored looters everywhere.

The Statists: seeking to blame Wall Street for the Federal Government's sins

Wall Street is just a market filled with sinful people like every other place.  It operates in the environment that the State creates.  Our vast and unaccountable Federal State has created an environment where the powerful and connected can loot the weak and dispersed.  That Wall Street takes advantage of the Federal's immense power is not a bug of the system, but a key feature.  That being said, the attacks that seek to divert blame from it's source are getting very extreme.  I particularly like the fascist imagery - It's so....accurate.  And in Newsweek, no less.  Kristallnacht II anyone?

SO MUCH FOR THAT “NEW CIVILITY” BULLSHIT: In Newsweek: “There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. I just hope that this time the mob targets the right people in Wall Street and in Washington. (How does a right-thinking Christian go about asking Santa for Mitch McConnell’s head under the Christmas tree?)”

China feeling surrounded?

Wally Mead talks about how the Chinese fear cultural encirclement.  And ties it back to Jeff Davis, Kaiser Bill and Adolph Hitler.  Very interesting.

Christmas is a good time to remember that a normal distribution of events has TWO tails

Despite all of the sourness in our world today, as much as we expect disasters, we should also expect miracles.  Because of the incarnation, Time's arrow has a direction:  it points to Christ.

Christmas, Kurtosis, Fat Tails, Black Swans and Risk Management
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Christ was born into the Pagan world of Rome, a world of cyclical despair. As historian of science Stanley Jaki spent his life documenting, the pagan world view was one of endless cycles, of oscillations, of rise and fall, golden ages of glory, bronze ages of decline, iron and stone ages of despair, with no genuine permanent progress. For this reason, among others, Jaki says neither the ancient Greeks nor Romans produced modern science, which depends greatly on the idea of progress.

I would argue that this is the reason why they also failed to create modern economics, which is also based on the idea of progress. For the ancient pagans you can move along supply curves, but not shift them to the right. Hesiod said if you want to have more wealth the only way is to work more hours.

The idea of the Labor Theory of value fits perfectly with a world of cyclical futility. More money comes only from more sweat; the only thing resembling an escape is the acquisition of slaves through conquest. Wealth for the slave owner is still built on sweat, but the slave’s, not his. The only thing he risks is the blood that he loses in combat acquiring the slaves.

That’s the world of the Caeser Augustus whose executive order for a tax census sent Joseph and Mary back to their home town of Bethlehem to be counted. Augustus’ wealth came from Joseph the carpenter’s sweat. And if Joseph resisted, then it would be blood, so a pregnant woman is conscripted into a perilous journey.

Technological breakthroughs, better business modeling, virtuous cycles built on capital accumulation were not the basis of Augustus’ wealth; confiscation was. In fact, according to Aristotle, return on capital was a violation of the nature of things. If the only way to create more wealth was to shed more sweat, then capital was unnatural, the attempt to find fertility where only barrenness could exist. Interest, therefore, was based on an unnatural act, that of treating wealth as though it was fertile, when it was as barren as a mule.

Which brings us to Christmas. What is more barren than a virgin’s womb? (Perhaps only the tomb, but that is a topic for a column in April.) The late Christopher Hitchens quipped more than once that if civilization suddenly collapsed, would we really need to remind ourselves that Christ was born of a virgin?

The obvious implication is that the Christmas story (Fact? Myth?Both?)is useless for the rebuilding of civilization. That is a very odd observation from a man who prided himself on his knowledge of history, because, in fact, that is exactly what civilization did remind itself of after it collapsed. What Civilization?

Why Christopher Hitchens’ civilization and yours and mine: Western civilization.

When Rome fell and barbarian hordes raped and murdered their way across the dark ages, civilization was rebuilt on the Christmas story. Mary, a woman, was the Chris-bearer (in Greek, Christopheros) after whom Mr. Hitchens was named. She assented to that role willingly. If an all-powerful God does not rape, then neither should you. If God prized human life enough to bind himself to it through incarnation, then you, barbarian warrior, should not murder. If God comes as a child through a woman, then women and children are fully human, endowed with no less dignity than men.

If in the battle of Christ vs. Caeser, Christ is both right and ultimately triumphant, then you, oh king are limited in your power. Small wonder (but wondrous all the same) that the emperor Henry IV stood in the snow on Christmas day 1077 to publicly repent of his acts of oppression against the Church and so began the investiture controversy which eventually broke the back of statism and led to the rise of modern liberty.

Christmas is a good time for us to recognize that though the world generates catastrophes, but it also has been given what JRR Tolkien called eucastrophes. Eucatastrophes are sudden, unexpected, but perfectly logical-in-hindsight explosions of good. Tolkien coined the word first to describe the incarnation which Christians are currently celebrating.

Eucatastrophe is to catastrophe, as fat right tails are to fat left tails. And any risk management system which scans the world for the latter is incomplete if it ignores the promise of the latter. If the story of Christmas is true, the power of euchastrophe is stronger than the power of catastrophe. But it is much harder to see, hidden far from power, swaddled and surrounded by shepherds.

What does all of this have to do with Kurtosis (and what is that anyway?) and normal distributions and black swans and risk management? For that come back next week, when I should be writing about New Years, but will still be writing about Christmas.

Obesity is a national security issue?

Yeah, that's the ticket.

ENERGY IS A NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUE. THEREFORE, OBESITY IS A NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUE: “Americans, on average, have gained enough weight during the past 40 years to cancel out automakers’ vehicle-lightweighting efforts such as using lighter components or removing spare tire, reflecting an additional challenge automakers face to meet progressively more strict fuel-economy and greenhouse-gas emissions standards. . . . The combined weight gained by the average American male and female can cut average fuel economy by as much as one percent, which could translate to an additional 153 million gallons of gas burned in the U.S. over the course of a year.” Hence, Michelle Obama’s food-nannyism is really about national security. Take it away, White House Press Office. . . .

Life Among the Barbarians

Beware of New York's Barbaric Gun Laws.  Across the board, New York is the most repressive, fascist state in the nation.  And it is the nest of our Wall Street looters.  What a place.

A tourist from Tennessee waltzed into one of the most secure sites in the city — and politely asked a cop if she could check her weapon.
Instead, she was dragged out in cuffs.
Now, Meredith Graves, 39, is facing at least three years in prison for thinking New York’s gun laws are anything like those in the Bible Belt.
Graves, a fourth-year medical student, showed up at the memorial on Dec. 22 to pay her respects during a trip north for a job interview.
She didn’t realize that the loaded .32-caliber pistol in her purse would be a problem until she saw a sign at the site that read, “No guns allowed,” sources said. “She remembered she had the gun on her,” a source said. She walked up to a security guard and said, “I have this gun. Where can I check it?”

Under Mayor Bloomberg, New York’s nothing like the Bible Belt, of course — it’s much less civilized and much more repressive.. And just like black people visiting the South in the 1930s, gun owners today need to realize that irrational prejudice and legal persecution are a risk when visiting these benighted places. This is why we need national civil rights laws to protect gun owners wherever they go. This is a topic I discuss in my Second Amendment Penumbras piece,forthcoming in the Southern California Law Review. I also note that a patchwork of confusing (often even to law enforcement) and overlapping laws regulating the exercise of a fundamental right is a burden on the constitutionally recognized right to interstate travel. At the very least, they should warn you when you’re entering a repressive regime.

The 55 MPH Speed Limit: a stone cold killer

Remember:  the police aren't on your side, they're on they're side.

Unfortunately vestiges of the 55mph limit remain, in part because police like the 55mph limit which lets them write tickets at will whenever they need an increase in revenues. John Carr at the National Motorists blog gives a particularly egregious example from Massachusetts:

The speed limit on Route 3 is 55. The speed limit used to be 60….It was reduced by executive order in 1973 to comply with the national speed limit. When the national speed limit was repealed in 1995 the highway commissioner ordered the low limit retained…

It gets better. Route 3 was completely rebuilt a decade ago. The design speed for the project was 110 km/h (68 mph). The design speed is like a warranty: nothing in the road design requires a driver to go slower than 68 mph, not even on a wet road at night (the design conditions).

The average speed is not far from the design speed. The 85th percentile speed, which is supposed to be used for setting speed limits, is around 75 mph. A little over by my measurement, which found 1% compliance with the speed limit.

Eventually the absurdity of the 55 mph speed limit sunk in and in 2006 MassHighway traffic engineers recommended a speed limit increase. State Police vetoed the change, preferring the 99% violation rate that let them write tickets at will. Police have no legal role in setting speed limits. Somebody in the Romney administration weighed the risk of losing ticket revenue against the risk of being blamed for accidents. Police won.

After engineers lost that fight people began to worry about the high accident rate on Route 3. The state hired a consultant to do a Road Safety Audit. The consultant’s report blamed the low speed limit, among other factors, for the high crash rate. The report explicitly recommended raising the speed limit.

Three years later, state officials have not followed the advice of their engineers, their consultant, or 100,000 drivers per day. State police are still out there running speed traps and helping keep the road as dangerous and profitable as they can.

Hat tip: Radley Balko.

Census Bureau: DC growing faster than any state

The District of Colombia's population grew faster than any state last year according to the Census Bureau.  Far faster than second place Texas and third place North Dakota despite it being an 'inner' city.  Which isn't that surprising whan you remember that its principal industry is government.

So while America suffers under the worst sustained economic conditions since the Great Depression, the Washington DC area's population booms.  And of course it has also become the richest city in the nation on a per capita basis.

The Nation's Capital booms while the country strangles.  Funny how that works.

State Power = Scope X Reach

The ability of the State to manipulate you to do what it deems appropriate is a function of the scope of it's control (it controls banking transactions but not hugs) and its reach - the state hasn't been able to find a way to reach yard sales or cash transactions, for example.  However, the continuing exponential growth in IT capacity is radically increasing the state's reach by allowing everything to be monitored, stored and searched. So therefore if state power is not to increase radically with catastrophic results for human liberty, then as the reach of the state increases, its scope must decline.

An outcome I fear will not happen.

IS THE ANSWER PERVASIVE DISINFORMATION? Government Total Recall On Past Communications. “UCLA electrical engineering prof John Villaseno thinks the growing capacity of computers to collect, store, and analyze data will enable governments to assess, track, and draw connections between dissidents on a scale previously not seen. . . . As the cost of computer disk storage and other storage media continue to plummet the amount that governments can record goes up. Storage costs have fallen so far that the amount that can be captured about each person and kept long term has gotten pretty detailed. In the future the amount that can be recorded and stored per person will undergo more doublings. Every phone conversation that takes place will be able to be captured and stored for decades. . . . When a government decides someone is of interest as a potential trouble maker that government will be able to quickly analyze every phone conversation (and a large fraction of all online text conversations) that person ever participated in . Then threat assessment software will assess the threat posed by the citizen who is critical of the regime. A retrospective approach is not the only possibility of course. A political threat profile could be maintained that gets continually updated with the latest movements, utterances, and purchasing decisions.”

College is Oversold

It turns out that the massive investments that we have made in more 'higher' education over the past few decades have succeeded only in producing more people with 'skills' that no one wants.  Alex Tabbarok explains here.  Our Federal government has the unique ability to turn silk purses into sows ears.  On a massive, continental scale.

The Capital Strike in a Nutshell

Among all of the destructive things done by Chicago style Liberalism in the last three years, perhaps the greatest is what it has done to business confidence.  After all, if you're going to feed off the productive economy it makes sense to ensure that it's growing strongly.  It is a foolish parasite that gets so greedy that it kills its host.  

Andrew Puzder, CEO of CKE Restaurants, writing in Bloomberg:

"Our company, CKE Restaurants Inc., employs about 21,000 people (our franchisees employ 49,000 more) in Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s restaurants. For months, we have been working with Mercer Health & Benefits LLC, our health-care consultant, to identify Obamacare’s potential financial impact on CKE. Mercer estimated that when the law is fully implemented our health-care costs will increase about $18 million a year. That would put our total health-care costs at $29.8 million, a 150 percent increase from the roughly $12 million we spent last year.

The money to cover our increased expenses will have to come from somewhere. We are a profitable company and, after paying our obligations, we reinvest our earnings in the business. Reinvesting in the business is how we grow, create jobs and opportunity. This is true for most U.S. businesses.

The complexity of this legislation makes it hard to anticipate costs in the future. Our investments pay off -- when they are successful -- over the long term. Because we don’t know what our health-care expenses will be in two or three years, we are unable to determine with any certainty how much our investments will have to return for us to be profitable. All of that counsels in favor of holding off on new investments and saving our funds. We want to grow. But we are unable to do so knowing that large and undetermined liabilities will absorb funds we otherwise would invest for expansion. 

Washington needs to understand that legislation like the health-care law has costs as well as benefits, that the costs suppress job growth, and that when too much legislation kills too many jobs, everyone suffers. Chief executives have responsibilities to their existing employees, customers and shareholders. We simply cannot risk their jobs and their money by investing when we know that legislation like Obamacare will make it so much harder to earn a profit. The sooner both parties in Washington understand this, the sooner we can all begin looking for ways to strengthen the social safety net without hurting the economy."

Worst Government in the World?

There are lots of governments that are objectively worse than the US Federal government, but most of them are weak and impotent.  In terms of power and ability to dictate to others, the US Government is by far the greatest.  Combine that with it's arrogance, venality and indeed, stupidity, and I submit that the Feds are hands down, the Worst.  Government.  Evah.

CHANGE: New Law Assumes Americans Abroad Are Tax Criminals, Imposes Billions in Compliance Costs on Foreign Banks. “The IRS, under pressure from angry and confused financial officials abroad, has extended the deadline for registration until June 30, 2013, and is struggling to provide more detailed guidance by the end of this year. But beginning in 2012, many American expatriates — already the only developed-nation citizens subject to double taxation from their home government — must furnish the I.R.S. with detailed personal information on their overseas assets.”

Perhaps we need to harmonize our customs with other nations’. Isn’t it “arrogant” and “inconsiderate” for us to be so far “outside the mainstream” of civilized practice? Or does that only apply to things like capital punishment?

GAO: Federal regulation quality is at an all time low

Don't you understand?  It's not about quality or the public good or efficiency, it's about power.   And the worse the regs are written, the more arbitrary discretion and power the statists get to exercise.  They like that.  The WSJ has the sordid, if all too predictable story.

President Obama is leading his regulators in an anvil chorus unlike anything in modern U.S. history. So it is unsurprising but still instructive that independent students of regulation say the quality of the many rules they're putting out seems to be at all-time lows.

Regulatory quality isn't the same as content—though bad rules are usually badly written, as seems to be the case here. Rather, quality refers to a deliberative process: defining the problem; measuring costs, benefits and risks; weighing alternatives, making trade-offs, avoiding duplication; and giving the public opportunity to comment. If all goes well a quality rule will promote or at least not impair "economic growth, innovation, competitiveness and job creation," as Mr. Obama's January 2011 executive order on regulation had it.

It's too boring for the press corps to notice, but a growing body of evidence suggests that the Obamanauts are undermining these basic due diligence practices that have been commonly accepted by whatever party happened to be in power.

Take the rule-making aftershocks of the Dodd-Frank overhaul of financial markets, which the Government Accountability Office reviewed in detail in a late November report. The GAO observes that the law "requires or authorizes various federal agencies to issue hundreds of regulations," some discretionary, others not. Among the 32 final rules the banking, futures and securities agencies have issued so far and GAO reviewed, the report dryly notes that "regulators may be missing an opportunity to enhance the rigor and improve the transparency of their analyses."

Poor regulatory quality is a feature, not a bug of 'Chicago Liberalism'.

All I wanted was sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads

Dr. Evil may soon get his wish....

WELL, IT IS THE 21ST CENTURY: Will We Soon Be Able to Fire Laser Beams From Our Eyes?

The global market for good governance seems to be heating up

Small, open countries, because they face more competition tend to govern better.  Large insular countries tend to do much worse.  Historically the US did well because we let most governance devolve to the states.  Now with our wonderful Federal Government and it's magic money machine, we are firmly in the Insular category.  To paraphrase Adam Smith:  "There's a lot of ruin in a (big, insular) country".

The world is changing more rapidly, so automatic pilot isn’t good enough any more.  “Good governance” and most of all adaptability have become more important.  This will benefit the Nordic countries, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, and Singapore.  It is mostly bad for India, Russia, and the Mediterranean countries, plus other countries with lots of corruption.  It remains to be seen which category the United States and China will fall into.

So how do you know what you know? #100

Surprise:  NYT presents an unfinished, meaningless statistical analysis, claims it proves the opposite of what the numbers really say.  These cats are either completely unethical or mind crushingly stupid.

Or both.

From the Times:

The New York Times examined the [concealed-carry] permit program in North Carolina, one of a dwindling number of states where the identities of permit holders remain public. The review, encompassing the last five years, offers a rare, detailed look at how a liberalized concealed weapons law has played out in one state. And while it does not provide answers, it does raise questions.
More than 2,400 permit holders were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors, excluding traffic-related crimes, over the five-year period, The Times found when it compared databases of recent criminal court cases and licensees. While the figure represents a small percentage of those with permits, more than 200 were convicted of felonies, including at least 10 who committed murder or manslaughter. All but two of the killers used a gun.

All of these numbers are completely meaningless; in any large population, there will be some crime. The only way to see what these numbers mean is to compare concealed-carry holders to the general population. Fortunately, state-level murder data are easy to find.

North Carolina has a statewide murder rate of about 5 per 100,000. Even without counting manslaughter, that’s 25 murders committed per 100,000 North Carolinians every five years. There are about 230,000 valid concealed-carry permits in North Carolina, so by pure chance, you’d expect these folks to be responsible for nearly 60 murders over five years. And yet only ten of them committed murder or manslaughter. Instead of “rais[ing] questions,” the Times has demonstrated yet again that permit holders are more peaceful than the general population

The Cruel Myth of Affirmative action

Bastiat, the Patron Saint of unintended consequences has been particularly busy at our elite colleges.  Jeff Jacoby explains.  Frankly, it's hard to find an area of 'public' policy where long held liberal pieties aren't crashing and burning.  It must be hard to be a 'good government' (as opposed to a 'Chicago') liberal these days.

This is the cruelty of affirmative-action “mismatch’’ — the steering of minorities to schools where they are less likely to succeed. Absent such preferences, black and Hispanic students would attend universities for which their credentials better suited them. Many would earn higher grades or degrees in more prestigious and challenging fields; more would go on to graduate school and careers in academia or the professions. If it weren’t for race-based admissions policies, in other words, underrepresented minorities wouldn’t be so underrepresented.

Racial preferences, says University of San Diego law professor Gail Heriot , have backfired. She is one of three members of the civil rights commission urging the Supreme Court to recognize the damage it unleashed when it allowed racial “diversity’’ to trump the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws. Skin color was always an ill-contrived proxy for diversity of experiences and beliefs. What more than 30 years of race-based admissions have made clear, Heriot argues, is that “even with the best motives in the world, race-based admissions do far more harm than good.’’ Especially to the students they are supposed to help .

So how DO you know what you know? #99

There's a new poverty con.  The Obama administration has directed the Census Bureau to create a new poverty measure that measures 'relative' rather than absolute poverty.  It increases the number of 'poor' and even more importantly guarantees that the proportion of 'poor' will remain constant and the numbers of 'poor' will continually grow with population (just wait for all of the MSM "ranks of poor rise again" stories) no matter how rich they become.

And of course the MSM is already misreporting this statistical ledgermain in ways that promote the 'need' for more 'anti-poverty' initiatives by our Great and Glorious Federal state.  The noted Right Wing Reactionary Micky Kaus explains here.

So when the people responsible for the statistics and the people responsible for reporting the 'news' conspire to present 'new' numbers as the same as the 'old' ones to achieve their political agenda, how do you know what you know?

So how tough are your kids?

Getting As in High School just isn't that hard.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education. This piece is from a few months back. but the Chronicle of Higher Education is re-running it and given that the issue has gotten more attention lately it’s worth looking at. Key bit: “What good does it do to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the quality of education before we increase the quantity of students?”
Plus: “Increasingly, undergraduates are not prepared adequately in any academic area but often arrive with strong convictions about their abilities. So college professors routinely encounter students who have never written anything more than short answers on exams, who do not read much at all, who lack foundational skills in math and science, yet are completely convinced of their abilities and resist any criticism of their work, to the point of tears and tantrums: ‘But I earned nothing but A’s in high school,’ and ‘Your demands are unreasonable.’ Such a combination makes some students nearly unteachable.”
To some degree, the higher education bubble is a creature of the lower education bubble.
UPDATE: Reader Don Bagwell writes:

Everything has a sports analogy parallel. The University of Michigan football squad’s defense last year was near the very bottom of the rankings. This year it made dramatic improvements under new coaching. Greg Mattison, the new defensive coordinator, is quoted as saying he was astonished at how confident the defensive players were when he first met with them after assuming the job, despite their poor showing last year. Mattison credits this year’s success to a return to remedial coaching — basic fundamentals — and very hard work to break the players of their unwarranted confidence
I maintain young people of today actually yearn to be taught life’s hard lessons, but can’t find teachers to teach them. When one is found (Mattison at Michigan, other “tough love” coaches in football, the U.S. Marine Corp and other branches of the military), those who yearn eagerly flock to the teaching. The extent of lower education’s failure — and liberals’ support of of lower education’s methods — is hard to overestimate.

The problem is the statism

The reason that the 'chattering classes' become enamored with China or Japan or before them the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany isn't the 'results' they gained so much as it was the power that the central elites were able to exercise.  For fascists everywhere power is the most potent of drugs.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: China Rail Fail: 42% Spending Cut in Bullet Train Meltdown. “The Panda Lobby, the pundits and policy wonks who want the US to imitate China’s state capitalism, has long celebrated what it claims to be China’s far sighted and effective approach to industrial policy. China, the Panda pundits tell us, will own the future because of its courageous subsidies to green technology and high speed rail. The meltdown of the Chinese solar industry has been widely reported; now comes word that the rail program is also in trouble. . . . Those of us who remember the short lived but intense Sushi Lobby, the Americans who thought the US needed to imitate the brilliant success of Japanese state capitalism back in those halcyon days of the 1980s when the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo were estimated to cost more than the entire state of California, will be waiting to hear how the Panda pundits explain the high speed rail meltdown.” Actually, back in the day we called them the Chrysanthemum Club.

Surprise, surprise, surprise: Nobody reads this crap

Study documents the obvious:  much of what passes for 'research' in the humanities is unread (and unreadable) drivel.  Via Meadia points out that we are paying an enormous price for producing landfill.  It is very doubtful that without the massive Federal tax, loan and grant subsidies any of this would get done.

There is a slow train coming around the bend......

Samuelson: Our Federal political system is failing

All institutions that lack an effective external check (aka competition) eventually devour those they ostensibly serve.  Which is why we must break it up, break it all up and restore the market for good governance that our Founders envisioned when they created our nation.  Monopolies suck.  Particularly state monopolies with magic money machines.  There is no effective external check on their greed short of collapse.  And electing Republicans, even Conservatives is no answer:  they are co-proprietors of the same avaricious Federal monopoly.  As with the Liberals, the Federal State has become their 'precious' - their path to riches and status and power and even though it destroys us, they will never voluntarily relinquish it.  The rest can be read here.

Each reverts to scripted evasions. Liberals imply (wrongly) that taxing the rich will solve the long-term budget problem. It won't. For example, the Forbes 400 richest Americans have a collective wealth of $1.5 trillion. If the government simply confiscated everything they own, and turned them into paupers, it would barely cover the one-time 2011 deficit of $1.3 trillion. Conservatives deplore "spending" in the abstract, ignoring the popularity of much spending, especially Social Security and Medicare.

So the political system is failing. It's stuck in the past. It can't make desirable choices about the future. It can't resolve deep conflicts.


Update:  Evidence of how good it is to be a Federal Legislator (and why they'll never give it up).

#OCCUPYCONGRESS: Growing Wealth Widens Distance Between Lawmakers and Constituents. “Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House has risen 2.5 times, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, rising from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars. Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly.”

North Pole ring raided, Nicholas "Santa" Claus arrested

U.S. Federal agents arrested Santa Claus earlier today at the North Pole.

Composite Sketch of Suspect

The United States Department of Fish and Wildlife has arrested Santa Claus, an elusive figure with many aliases (e.g., St. Nicholas).  On the morning of 24 December, 150 heavily armed Fish and Wildlife special agents raided Claus’ North Pole compound, seized several tons of exotic woods forbidden by the Lacey Act, arrested Santa Claus and a female accomplice identified only as Mrs. Claus, and liberated thousands of diminutive slave labourers known only as “Elves”.

Claus has been charged with multiple counts of money laundering, illegal exportation of currency, illegally importing into the United States toys made of contraband–rare woods, ivory and other banned substances.  He has also been charged with violations of slave labor and child labor laws, hundreds of patent and trademark violations, and illegally entering and exiting the United States.

Indeed, Fish and Wildlife agents also seized an unidentified aircraft called a “sleigh” which had numerous secret compartments holding the contraband.   Fish and Wildlife agents charged Mr. Claus with animal cruelty with regard to the caribou that he used to launch this “sleigh”.

Agent Smith

Special Agent Hugo Smith said, “We arrived just in the nick of time.  A moment later, and the caribou would have launched the sleigh and Claus would have escaped with the illegal materials.  By now, he would be in the United States, breaking into people’s houses and selling this stuff.”

The United States Department of Immigration and the Internal Revenue Service have also had their eyes on Mr. Claus.  An immigration official who also attended the raid said that they were able to obtain several dozen passports.  He said, “It seems that this Santa Claus character has a different name in every country–his EU passport says, ‘Father Christmas’ and his Canadian passport says, ‘Père Noël’.  We have, however, determined with certainty that Santa Claus is a United States citizen.”

Apparently Claus worked in Hollywood during the 1940s and 50s making autobiographical films, such as Miracle on 34^th Street.  During that time he applied for and received  U.S. citizenship.

Douglas Shulman, Commissioner of the IRS, has released the following statement:

IRS Commissioner

At long last, the notorious tax cheat, Santa Claus, has been apprehended.  He has been living in a foreign country for the last 50 years and during that time he has not filed his US taxes even once.  It has become clear, however, that he has run a lucrative business at the North Pole and has never reported any of the income.  In addition to criminal tax evasion, we intend to charge Santa Claus with 190 counts of criminal failure to file Foreign Bank Account Reports (FBAR), as we found evidence in his papers that he is operating or has signing authority on bank accounts in 190 different countries.  It is our contention that the fines alone could help us bring billions in revenue into the United States government.

Pleased to Nab a Tax Cheat

According to United States law, all United States Citizens are required to pay taxes to the IRS and to report any foreign bank accounts.  Failure to obey these filing requirements may result in civil and criminal penalties including imprisonment.

The Obama administration declared that they were very pleased with the news..  ”It is about time,” Obama said from his Hawaiian retreat, “that the United States returned those who have fled the country just because they don’t feel like paying their fair share anymore.”

The Republican candidate for president, Ron Paul criticized the raid, “The United States has neither the authority nor the right to go into another country and enforce its laws.  Santa Claus is a citizen of the North Pole and it is overreach for us to go there and arrest him.”

Also running for president, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich responded to Paul, “The United States must reserve the right to arrest terrorists and to violate the rule of law in order to provide safety for the People of the United States.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada said that his government did everything that they could to help the United States, even to the point of allowing the use of Canadian air space.  ”We are cooperating with the good faith efforts of the United States to eliminate terrorists in order to maintain the safety and security of all Canadians.”

A President fabricated to fit liberal pieties celebrates a religion fabricated to fit liberal pieties

Bartender:  a double helping of BS for all of us!

MALCOLM: The Obamas celebrate Kwanzaa in spirit of umoja.

Because proles should be seen (and taxed), not heard

PUBLIC PENSION UPDATE: New York Post: Mum’s The Word.

New York’s teacher-retirement fund wants to keep taxpayers in the dark about the pensions it hands out. Must be some darn fat pensions, huh?
Wouldn’t want to enrage the public to the point where pensions are trimmed, now would it? 

In a predictable — but disturbing — development, the state Teachers’ Retirement System last week said it will no longer publicly disclose the names of teachers and how much they get in retiree benefits.
Even though the public foots the bill. 

The move comes after other public-sector pension systems zipped their lips, following a disturbing appellate-court ruling last October. . . . this is information that has been openly available — without protest — for almost three decades. 

It was only when the Empire Center set up an easily searchable Web site with names and pension amounts that the funds started squawking.

I wonder what the line for government has been

Because you know, they've been adding so much value.  The reality is that the government and non profit parts of our economy have been able to expand and flourish only as parasites on the productive economy.  But now the parasites are multiplying too fast  And eventually the parasite load becomes unsustainable.

Our leaders have become such cowards...abroad

We have 50,000 military style SWAT raids in the US each year mostly to bust 'drugs' yet we stand by and let PIRACY flourish because of the cowardice of our political leaders.  I pray for the day when we treat our enemies as badly as we treat our own citizens.

I’m just off the USS Abraham Lincoln, which is currently heading across the Pacific to support our troops in far hotter waters. One of the more interesting conversations I had was with an officer who had, in an earlier deployment, spent a good deal of time doing anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden and off the coast of Somalia. He said his ship once came across a pirate “mother ship” apparently dead in the water. It was not in imminent danger, however, nor was the ship itself engaged in piracy—that was the job of the small boats which launched from the mother ship. As the cruiser hovered nearby, the pirates threw over the side a life preserver with a message attached to it. The cruiser grabbed the life-preserver, and opened the attached plastic bag with the message in it. It read, in perfect English, “Unless you’re going to give us booze, women, and money, why don’t you just get the f—k away from here?” And, because of U.S. rules of engagement, that is exactly what we did.

It is no surprise that piracy thrives when the pirates know our rules of engagement and know they have little to fear for their actions. Today, our sailors are instructed to consider piracy a matter for the courts rather than simply a military matter. As soon as the Oval Office and Pentagon allow our sailors to truly crackdown on piracy and destroy both the ships that enable it and the properties on shore built with its proceeds, its curse will continue to hamper international shipping. The alternative is simply a very expensive pageant and, frankly, our servicemen and women deserve far better than spending holidays and kids’ birthdays away from their families simply to sit off the coast of Africa in a show of force which the pirates no longer take seriously.

Wealthy bicoastal suburbanites in expensive homes benefit from the mortgage interest deduction

Of course the wealthy and powerful benefit from almost everything the state does.  That's how fascism works:  the powerful manipulate the state to take what they want and the young and weak lose.  The bigger and more powerful the state, the greater the looting.  More here.

Poll: Americans like their banks more than their government

Of course, the banks have stolen far, far less.  And they don't wave guns and shackles in your face while telling you how wonderful they are.  And they give away candy and coffee.

Details here.

Each Chevy Volt has $250,000 in subsidies, average buyer makes $170,000 a year

It's all so terribly progressive.

Michigan Capitol Confidential -- "Each Chevy Volt sold thus far may have as much as $250,000 in state and federal dollars in incentives behind it – a total of $3 billion altogether, according to an analysis by James Hohman, assistant director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

The Volt is subsidized by multiple companies on its way to production. The analysis includes adding up the amount of government subsidies via tax credits and direct funding for not only General Motors, but other companies supplying parts for the vehicle. For example, the Department of Energy awarded a $105.9 million grant to the GM Brownstown plant that assembles the batteries. The company was also awarded approximately$106 million for its Hamtramck assembly plant in state credits to retain jobs. The company that supplies the Volt’s batteries, Compact Power, was awarded up to $100 million in refundable battery credits. These are among many of the subsidies and tax credits for the vehicle.

It’s very unlikely all the companies involved in the production of the Volt would ever receive all the $3 billion in incentives. But the analysis looks at the total value that has been offered to the Volt in different aspects of production – from the assembly line to the dealerships to the battery manufacturers. The tax credits and subsidies are offered for periods up to 20 years, though the majority is offered over a much shorter time frame.

GM has estimated they’ve sold 6,000 Volts so far. That would mean each of the 6,000 Volts sold would be subsidized between $50,000 and $250,000, depending on how many government subsidies were realized.  The $3 billion in total value includes $690.4 million offered in incentives by the state of Michigan and $2.3 billion in federal money. That’s enough to purchase 75,222 Volts with a sticker price of $39,828.

“This might be the most government-supported car since the Trabant,” said Hohman, referring to the car produced by the former Communist state of East Germany (pictured above).

According to GM CEO Dan Akerson, the average Volt owner makes $170,000 per year."