"All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds"

If you've been following this blog for some time (thanks Mom!) you'll know that I grew up in Indonesia and had some shameful interactions with children who had Kwashiorkor, a disease of malnutrition where it is estimated that two thirds of its victims don't live to see adulthood.  That story is here feel free to read it, it doesn't make me look very good.  In it I admitted to feeling great shame and asking God for forgiveness for my callousness.  But while I wasn't too hard on myself, I think I let some other people off of the hook far to easily.

Like my Church. I went to a rock ribbed Southern Baptist missionary church:  Kebayoran Baptist, sang in the choir, did the youth group, you name it, I did it.  My best friends were M-Ks, missionary kids.  Yet I do not recall one sermon or statement talking about the KK kids that all of us saw outside our own gates.  Yes there were missionary appeals for the poor, yadda, yadda.  But no one dealt with the poor dying ones in front of our nose.  I've defended myself by reminding everyone that I was just a teen, but I know that's a crock.  And if it's a crock  for me, how much more for my Parents? and if for my Parents, how much more for the Pastors and Elders of the church?  And if for them, then how much more for a supposedly 'merciful' God?

The world we have is the world God made and allows to exist. He could change it at any time. God is not required to 'tolerate' anything. He doesn't need to 'take the good with the bad' or the 'roughs to get the smooths'. He can have any outcome he chooses and any outcome that happens he's seen in advance and therefore has willed. That's because the notion that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God can just 'let' something 'happen' is logical baloney (or perhaps even liverwurst than that). So the outcome that exists with starving street children and thuggish rich kids must be the one he likes most. As Voltaire's Pangloss would say of God's creation: "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds" God must really dig our pain.

So how 'bout it God?  I've apologized.  Don't you have something to say?  C'mon, at least be a man about it.


Horrified by all of my libertarian polemics?  Here's a compilation of my non political, non economic pieces for those nights when you have insomnia.

Sarah Silverman, we love your Lady Parts, it's the rest of you we can't stand.

Lots of feminist ladies claim that men are afraid of 'lady parts'. See the silliness at the link.  As a former red blooded American teen male I can assure you that this is false.  We adore lady parts, so much that we want to behold and caress them all the day long.  We think you women are actually the ones frightened of your own bits of tackle. After all you're always hiding them and slapping us if we try to touch.

I forgot the absolute best part of the story: there's a new website to promote lady parts. It's called from V to shining V. Which is funny because I never noticed any shining.  But if there was it sure would be handy in bed.  "There it is"!

It's stories like this that wiped out the parody industry and energized the "adult" entertainment industry: "get your hands off my shiny lady part, you'll get fingerprints on it!".

The real key to Patient Protection and Affordable Care (Acting)

Every health care service that patients pay for out of pocket has falling real prices.  Every health care service that insurance pays for has rising real prices.  Knowing that fact what would you do to protect patients and help make care more affordable?  In other words if you were the "Lightbringer" seeking to "fundamentally transform" America (at least in a way that makes more Americans happy), how would you PPACA?

Here is general healthcare price inflation relative to the Consumer Price Index (incidentally, I believe this includes the falling price sectors that are not insured so the insured sector price inflation is probably somewhat higher). It's not a pretty picture.

Contrast that with what has happened to the price of cosmetic surgery which customers pay for out of pocket with their very own money earned by their own widdle hands:

So it turns out the venal, self serving purveyors of tummy tucks, boob jobs and Nancy Pelosi's fright mask are actually less thieving than the selfless servant surgeons and physicians who care so deeply doing 'real' medicine..  Boy I wish we could get the humanitarians to care a little bit less and compete a little more on price, don't you?

But this is just one sector.  It's not real medicine.  OK, lets take a look at laser eye correction surgery, known as Lasik.  Lasik is not paid for by most insurance plans, yet once again its prices have fallen relative to the general price level.  It seems that evil capitalists have gotten a hold of the sector and applied their black magic to it.  Foul spells like:  scale economies, experience curves, specialization, automation, discounting, price discrimination and (gasp!) the profit motive.  The result:  a lot fewer lasik practitioners with much higher productivity and velvet for their patients.  You know it was just this sort of vile capitalist behavior that Barack Obama was elected to stop!

You'll note that average pricing includes a major technological innovation that improved quality and safety yet at the end of the day, average prices remained the same in nominal terms even with the better procedure factored in.  Suffice it to say that other ophthalmologic procedures paid for by third parties saw their nominal prices soar.  Presumably because they were "doing it for the children", God bless 'em.  Here's a good summary of the above.

So eyes, skin, boobs, 'big deal', how about something really important like hearing?  The hearing aid market is largely a senior citizen market and Medicare does not cover it.  Historically hearing aids have been custom fitted by audiologists and cost $3,000 the pair with lush margins for both the audiologist and the hearing aid manufacturers.  Today with the advent of smart phones perfectly functional hearing aid apps are selling for $3.99 and can be linked with any manner of inexpensive in ear speakers.  See here.

Imagine how much they would cost if the 'lightbringers' had organized a 'socially responsible' 'Universal Hearing Program'?

At some point the politicos need to recognize that they have no idea how to manage supply, demand and pricing for health care services (or any other damn thing for that matter) and instead allow as much as is humanly possible a true market to function where only truly catastrophic health care events are covered by insurance.  It's only when consumers can make valid trade offs between all of their consumption options and pay for their choices with their money that disciplined markets that optimize cost, quality and innovation exist.  Of course to do this would require the Obami to repudiate almost all of their 'reform' and reimplement and extend the W. Bush insurance reforms that they just superseded.

And given the absolute swingeing chaos that Obamacare has become we might get what we need done simply because the insurance market collapses.  

Modern American debtors prisons or so why did we have a revolution anyway?

There evidently are tens of thousands of Americans in prison because they can't pay their debts.  And governments routinely seize (steal) the assets of people who have been convicted of no crime. Indeed some of them are targeted for prosecution based upon the extent of their unencumbered assets and their lack of social or political pull. And of course, there are hundreds of 'crimes' that do not require mens rae or criminal intent. .

So, can someone explain to me precisely why we had  a revolution? It seems that the only state abuse we don't have from the old country is droit du seigneur. Well actually that's not true: Bill Clinton, JFK and LBJ practiced it with "vigah" (or is that vigger?) and W probably did before he found Jesus (his was definitely vigger). And BHO prefers droit du golf. 

I warn my children about the police and the "officers" of the court ten times more often than about criminals. And I worry 100 times more. Because a criminal just about has to kill you to destroy your life.  All the authorities have to do is convict you of one of thousands of increasingly random 'felonies' and your life prospects collapse. And in our plea bargain hell, 98% of the time they'll get  you to plead guilty to avoid truly cruel and unusual imprisonment which is now the norm. And they alone among the nation's armed and dangerous can kill you and get away with it. 

God help us every one.

Crucial last jobs report before 2012 election was faked

It turns out that the Census bureau (who conducts the monthly household employment survey) fabricated the survey results for households it could not reach.  And it just so happens that the employment report in question was the last one before the 2012 election and it further happens that this 'special' month had an 'amazing' reduction of unemployment from 8.1 to 7.8 percent.  A result contradicted by other macroeconomic indicators. At the time Jack Welch, Rick Santelli and others openly questioned the number but were shouted down by Obama's Press Choir singing the progressive Hallelujah Chorus.  Awfully damned convenient, don't you think?

For the sake of the Republic, I hope that the Obami are the ones who initiated this because as was true in the IRS scandal if it turns out that the Federal Civil Service are becoming independent partisan operators in our politics, then the Republic is in desperate trouble.  I don't think my leftward friends understand just how the deck is stacked in their favor.  Almost the entire public workforce, from the Feds, States, Cities, Schools, Universities you name it is Democrat.  When Democrats are in power they help them, when Republicans are, they resist them.  But heretofore it's been rather passive behavior that befits their status as 'non-partisan'.

But now it appears as if our 'servants' may be actively manipulating our politics and indeed our data to promote Democrat electoral success.  If  this is the case and continues, it will eventually mean the end of the Republic.

The only silver lining in all this for Conservatives is that the officers, non coms and combat troops of our military are overwhelmingly and resolutely conservative.  And Christian.  Which is why the Obami have been running a rather massive purge of 'politically unreliable' General Officers.  It won't work, Barry.  Because unlike the FBI, DEA, IRS or Census Bureau, the Officer Corps has honor.  They're willing to die for the country, but not lie for you.

And I thought I judged women by their looks

Women live in a tough world - evidently they are constantly judging each other's appearance:

To see how female students react to a rival, researchers brought pairs of them into a laboratory at McMaster University for what was ostensibly a discussion about female friendships. But the real experiment began when another young woman entered the room asking where to find one of the researchers.

This woman had been chosen by the researchers, Tracy Vaillancourt and Aanchal Sharma, because she “embodied qualities considered attractive from an evolutionary perspective,” meaning a “low waist-to-hip ratio, clear skin, large breasts.” Sometimes, she wore a T-shirt and jeans, other times a tightfitting, low-cut blouse and short skirt.

In jeans, she attracted little notice and no negative comments from the students, whose reactions were being secretly recorded during the encounter and after the woman left the room. But when she wore the other outfit, virtually all the students reacted with hostility.

They stared at her, looked her up and down, rolled their eyes and sometimes showed outright anger. One asked her in disgust, “What the [expletive] is that?”

Most of the aggression, though, happened after she left the room. Then the students laughed about her and impugned her motives. One student suggested that she dressed that way in order to have sex with a professor. Another said that her breasts “were about to pop out.”

I don't think that I can recall a single incident in my life where I had that type of conversation about a man.  Now, about a woman, yesireebob.  But of course my assessment was a bit different than the mean girls.

I also found this disturbing:

Studies have shown that women’s ideal body shape is to be thinner than average — and thinner than what men consider the ideal shape to be.

Don't do it ladies!  Stop before you diet again.

Intergalactic Adverse Selection Coming to a Country Near You

Hospitals want to sign up their sickest uninsured patients for O'care. If they pull it off then there will really no reason for most Americans to buy health insurance. See link below.

It will leave the insurance market a smoking Obama shaped ruin.  Of course this will probably happen anyway.

Sigh.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/will-hospitals-buy-aca-insurance-for-their-uncovered-patients.html

Models are not reality - Minimum wage example

Scott Sumner put together a good chart showing the correlation of unemployment rates with minimum wages in Europe.  The chart shows that price and demand vary inversely.  What a shock.  Inevitably the first commenter claims that Scott is wrong. There must be another explanation because 'rigorous empirical models' 'show' that minimum wages have no effect on employment.

I am always wary of people who cite ‘rigorous’, ‘empirical’, ‘models’ as evidence for real world phenomena. Particularly when we have hundreds of truly empirical studies using real historical data from all over the world that confirm that demand for labor varies inversely with its price (like every other bloody commodity whether legal or banned) .

Models are crude representations of reality not reality itself and reflect the modelers particular biases. Many of the models are funded by governments. Governments like power and control so the models tend to show top down state manipulation of basic variables as ‘working’.

It’s always amusing to see one of the model ‘faithful’ confronted by actual, you know, facts. They stutter, their face flushes, for a moment their mind is blank. Then years of statist catechisms kick in and they announce with the vigor of a true believer that their God The Model is true and even more importantly is ideologically righteous and therefore it’s reality that has is wrong.

Hallelujah, Amen.

Flailing, flailing under the bounding main!

Or should that be circling, circling 'round the political drain?

The DC cognoscenti have begun talking about O'care repeal in order to save the Dems scrawny necks. (see link below) But wasn't this the moral equivalent of something or other or at least somebody's essential whatsit? I'm sure I heard from my Lords that to even talk about postponing this was tantamount to terrorism or Nazism or something pretty darn nasty.

And now its never mind?   Aren't THE PEOPLE worth more than a few wrung Pelosi necks? Hell, I'll even wring 'em for you.

It'll be fun.  Wringing, wringing all the Pelosi necks!

http://www.nationaljournal.com/against-the-grain/why-obamacare-is-on-life-support-20131118

President Obama hasn't just jumped the shark, he's jumped his base

This morning the host on  NPR game show "Whaddya Know?" brutally mocked President Obama for what seemed like an eternity.  At first the crowd sounded uncomfortable ("Are we allowed to mock the lightbringer, when he stumbles and smashes the light?" but they laughed anyway.

Seen in the USC student section at the USC Stanford game:  Stanford supports Obamacare.

Ouch baby, very ouch.

POLITICO: “I don’t know how he f—-ed this up so badly,” said one House Democrat who has been very supportive of Obama in the past.

Ooh! I know! I know! Pick me!

Why are we subsidizing the creation of a ruling class?

It's no secret how elite schools and universities get 'elite'.  They do so by obsessively recruiting the cognitive and financial rich. The little "eagle eggs" (that is what the Vice Principal at my kids posh grammar school called them, honest) start their school or university life on third base (sorry about the US sports reference, I can't do cricket analogies, it's my lousy education). When they score a run, the school or university proudly claims that they were instrumental in helping the little tyke 'hit a home run' when all the brat did was take a base.  

This is rather funny because I think many elite schools actually deliver low levels of value add because their raw material is already fairly refined. Does anybody seriously believe that the entering class at Chicago would suffer any serious economic or social harm if they didn't get to Hyde Park?  And some absolutely dreck public schools may actually add more value because the delinquents are so far down. Just looking at which school has the cleverest students really tells you nothing about how good they are at improving a child's life chances. Although I'm sure there are a lot of crap public schools just like there are a lot of crap public anythings.

The real obscenity (and perhaps this is more US than elsewhere) is that elite schools and universities spend huge sums helping the cognitively super rich get richer while molding them into an elite social class in partnership with the financial super rich. Mind you, these are charities that are given massive tax subsidies to increase inequality and concentrate power in our society. 

Don't get me wrong, I believe Harvard and Eton and the rest of them can do whatever the hell they want - they're greedy little sows so they'll probably just go on gobbling up more power and status and wealth until they burst. However, the government shouldn't be subsidizing this profoundly elitist enterprise.  Let the Richie Richs' - both cognitive and financial pay for their own finishing schools.

Either that or let them take on a real challenge:  adding value at the bottom of the cognitive barrel.  Now that takes brains.

Chronicling the deterioration of the progressive mind and the NYT

Progs used to have some economics chops and conscience, now all they have is the will to power.  Read the two editorials on minimum wage, both from the NYT one from '87 and one from today.  Of course relatively few people read the NYT today and even fewer believe the Gray Granny anymore.  But clearly the bland bitch has had a few small, brain damaging strokes in the last 36 years.  Or they have "Upperwestsideheimers" Disease - a condition that causes them to forget reality and replace it with fashionable leftist fantasy and confabulation.  Koch brothers!!

1. From 1987, “The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00“:

Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working poor people out of the job market. A far better way to help them would be to subsidize their wages or – better yet – help them acquire the skills needed to earn more on their own.

An increase in the minimum wage to, say, $4.35 would restore the purchasing power of bottom-tier wages. It would also permit a minimum-wage breadwinner to earn almost enough to keep a family of three above the official poverty line. There are catches, however. It would increase employers’ incentives to evade the law, expanding the underground economy. More important, it would increase unemployment: Raise the legal minimum price of labor above the productivity of the least skilled workers and fewer will be hired.

The idea of using a minimum wage to overcome poverty is old, honorable – and fundamentally flawed. It’s time to put this hoary debate behind us, and find a better way to improve the lives of people who work very hard for very little.

2. From 2013, “Redefining the Minimum Wage“:

Over the last half-century, American workers have achieved productivity gains that can easily support a $15-an-hour minimum wage. In fact, if the minimum wage had kept pace over time with the average growth in productivity, it would be about $17 an hour. The problem is that the benefits of that growth have flowed increasingly to profits, shareholders and executives, not workers. The result has been bigger returns to capital, higher executive pay — and widening income inequality.

Efforts by the states and the federal government to raise the minimum wage are an important way to counter that dynamic. But they must be seen as modest and partial steps in the direction of fair wages. Other steps include more progressive income taxes, enhanced rights to form unions without retaliation, and government job-creation programs, because a tighter labor market would force employers to compete for workers.

Fast-food workers, Walmart employees and staff of federal contractors have all been agitating recently for higher pay from profitable employers. They deserve raises, and they deserve to have the federal government behind them.

A chart that needs no explanation

I have come to the conclusion that those who support drug criminalization are worse than racists and homophobes.  After all no on is in prison for being a different race or gay.  We need to ostracize these cruel, evil people.  Here's a short film documenting the destruction they have wrought.

History in the Making: Obama's Obamacare Collapse Press Conference

Progressivism's Stalingrad, el Alamein and Midway all rolled into one.  Key viewing tip:  when his lips are moving that means he's lying.

Tar and feathers? Sorry, these gun totin' thugs need a Texas Necktie Party

Our fearless protectors are absolutely out of control.  They've become the primary threat.  The clean and decent ones better do something quick before they're all swept away.  I warn my kids about the police about 100 times more often than I do about criminals.  And I think I need to increase the ratio.

Give Us Cash or Lose Your Kids and Face Felony Charges: Don’t Cops Have Better Things to Do?! “Imagine getting pulled over while on a family vacation and having small-town cops accuse you and your family of being drug couriers. Then imagine hearing that you have two options: Fork over your cash and continue on your vacation or face felony charges for money laundering and child endangerment, in which case you go to jail and your kids get handed over to foster care. That’s what happened to Ron Henderson and Jennifer Boatright while traveling through Tenaha, Texas, a town that regards piracy as just another way to raise revenue.” Tar. Feathers.

UPDATE:
It turns out that Tehana is one of these truly criminal towns.  I googled the town and found this, this, this, and this on the first page.  C'mon honest Texas Cops, I know you're out there.  Clean up your messes before you get cleaned up.

Hattip Instapundit.com

Laws, we don't need no stinking laws

The Lightbringer is bringing us post-Constitutional government and bless his heart even YEEAARRGGGHHHman Howard Dean is noticing.  Hattip: Instapundit.com

DAVID HOGBERG: ObamaCare a ‘Surreal’ Trainwreck. “How bizarre has Obamacare become? Well, bizarre enough that for the first that I can remember, I find myself agreeing with Howard Dean. As you’ll see in the clip below, Dean questions whether President Obama has the legal authority to allow people to keep their health plans. . . . But, as has often been the case with Obamacare, the president will disregard the law. Finding myself in agreement with Howard Dean is surreal. So is watching a president ignore the rule of law with impunity.”

The Obami choose Chaos #2

PETER SUDERMAN: President Obama Admits That ObamaCare is Unworkable. “This president’s announcement today that the White House will allow health insurance companies to continue selling plans that do not meet the Affordable Care Act’s minimum criteria—-millions of which have already been subject to cancellation notices—-is likely to be a pivotal moment in the political fight over the 2010 health law.

Pivotal indeed.  By making this 'concession' he screws the insurance companies because letting the healthy keep their older, cheaper plans while the sick sign up for the new insurance fatally undermines the devil's bargain that was necessary to get the insurers to play namely: "make the young and healthy pay through the nose and we'll cover all comers, no questions asked".  And of course he waited to announce this until the insurers had issued their rates for next year - so they can't protect themselves with pricing.  And since there is no underwriting, they can't limit their exposure.  They will lose billions.  Unless they totally withdraw from the market.  And I'm sure the administration is telling them that if they withdraw they will be for all intents and purposes out of the health insurance business forever.  Poor bastards are trapped like rats in box.  But this is what comes of conspiring with progressives to rig the market for yourselves.

And there of course will be no actual law submitted to Congress changing all this, Obama will simply amend the law by executive fiat, like the elected Monarch that he is.  The Constitution be damned.  In honor of Barack Obama, the first of his name I present a little light music:

"It's beginning to a lot like Caracas, everywhere I loooook!"  (With apologies to "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas" or:

"Loot, loot, loot, loot, loot the Man,
Loot, loot, loot, loot, loot, the Man,
Loot, loot, loot, loot, loot, the Man.
Loot the Ma-a-an, Ta-ake his ha-a-and (and arm and leg and assets and equity).
We're Obama rock 'n rollin', Obama rock 'n rollin' tonite"  (With apologies to "Barbara Ann")

After Failure comes Flailing

Well it's all but official now: there's no way out for O'care. It tripped coming off the blocks and is crawling blindly off into the shot put landing range weeping softly. Its opponents (me! me!) are cheering louder than than the crowd at a Miley Cyrus prison concert when the twerking begins and the press - heretofore the easiest lay at Capitol High - are primly straightening their skirts and touching up their makeup on the way to the Principal's office to claim "that nasty man, Barack Obama, seduced us" (over and over and over again).

And 535  sweathogs are taking the campaign slogans developed from focus groups and busily turning them into 'amendments' to Obamacare.  It's crazy time at Capitol high and the inmates are bouncing off the walls.  And during crazy time, failure turns in to destructive flailing.  It's as if each of the 535 had light sabers that couldn't be turned off.  Here are the most likely sweat-crazed results:

• Postpone the individual mandate.  This will make lots of people happy.  It will result in millions of sick people signing up and no healthy ones.  It will cost the insurers billions.
• Let people keep their current plans.  This will make lots of people happy.  It will cost the insurers billions and the chaos and confusion will also make them look stupid, diverting attention away from the truly stupid.
• Establish a Federal Charter that mandates a common, low cost Federal plan standard.  Even if you could get the Obami to completely reverse field philosophically from mandating wildly expensive prepaid healthcare to mandating modest catastrophic policies you are setting up a future catastrophe.  Like replacing 50 petty rent seeking bureaucracies with one intergalactice champion rent seeking bureaucracy that you can never escape.  This is the dumbest idea I've seen a conservative come up with since, well I can't think of another one right now.

So regardless of which looney idea our light saber wielding 'lightbringers' come up with we are in for a year of chaos, confusion, waste and economic destruction towards no useful purpose.  All I can say is remember what 'ol Claytie Williams said:  lay back and enjoy it gang because they done already raped ya.

Hattip:  Instapundit.com

French out tough the Obami on Iran

The French won't sign on to the Obami's cave to Iran.  So if they're the "cheese eating surrender monkeys" what does that make us? The hamburger munching capitulation baboons?

http://m.nationalreview.com/article/363875/france-derails-iranian-suckers-deal-clifford-d-may

The Feds Can Buy Anyone ANYONE

It turns out that the Feds paid news site WebMD boku bucks to pitch pro O'care tales.

While I'm sure the Obami were neck deep in this one the fact is that  in a world of seemingly infinite quantitative easing and decades of continuing resolutions the enterprising bureaucrat can always find slush funds to bribe with. I mean when threats of imprisonment, forfeiture and destruction aren't enough. Our Federales are fabulously rich, incredibly cruel and practically unaccountable.  Break 'em up, break 'em all up.

http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/nov/12/webmds-healthy-deal-with-obamacare-millions-of-dol/

The Ethanol Lunacy

Yep, that's about it.  You won't be surprised that the combined Federal Remocrat/Depublican Obami party favors more, more, more!  The Feds use crap science (we're all going to burn!) to justify a new round of criminal rent seeking.  When more science comes in showing that not only are we unlikely to burn but that ethanol production is environmentally and economically catastrophic the parasites have dug their way deep into the body politic and can't be dislodged.  Which is why it is stupid to do domestic policy at the monopoly Federal level.  Once these nutters get a sufficient pretext to ram something in you have no chance of every getting it back out.  Break it up, break it all up.

Taken from Real Clear Energy Sidebar:

• ETHANOL CONTROVERSY
  • AP Report Critiques Ethanol
  • Millions of Farm Acres Damaged
  • Prairies Vanish Under Policy
  • Industry Reacts to Investigation
  • Green Source With Dirty Secrets
  • Time to Kill the Ethanol Mandate

The Fundamental Assumptions Underlying O'care are all wrong

The following is a comment I posted on Samizdata (a site I highly recommend BTW) in response to a post about some fresh new piece of Obamacare lunacy.  It really is the stupidest law ever, gang.

The remarkable thing about O’care is that its fundamental assumptions are so flawed. First, that the US healthcare system is ‘bad’, ranking 37th in the world according to WHO when in fact when you control for auto accidents and murder (both much more common in gun and driving mad America) American life expectancy turns out to be highest in the world.

Second, they assume that health insurance improves healthiness. The only two large randomized studies to test this (Rand back in the early 80s and Oregon Medicaid in the past few years) could find NO quantitative health impact of having insurance (although the Oregon study found a self assessed 30% reduction in ‘depression’ – of course if someone else suddenly began paying a big chunk of my rent or food bill I’d probably become less depressed too).

Third, there is an assumption that health insurance equals access to health care. One that my English friends on this website have much more familiarity with than we wasteful yanks. The best actuaries estimate a successful O’Care will increase unit demand for healthcare services by 30% without increasing supply. And in the US today, the poor’s health plan Medicaid already has huge problems with access. As does Romneycare in MA where getting in to see a new physician typically takes between 1.5 and 2 months vs. days or a week in the rest of the country.

Finally, they assume that even if everything turns to crap at least it will be more equal crap. But in fact, systems that ration care bureaucratically often offer less equality of access: bureaucracies reward people who can follow rules, make appeals, leverage connections, and live in places where lots of affluent doctors want to work (i.e. near their homes). There’s no real evidence that this system offers more equality of access than the US system. Indeed, the US wouldn't get the highest (gun and car death adjusted) life expectancy in the world if large parts of the population couldn't get access.

Leave it to the Progs to do the exactly wrong things for the precisely wrong reasons. Again and again and again and…

Obama: Trapped in the happy talk bubble

Jim Geraghty points out that Barack Obama is probably not lying to us when he tells us that the Exchange From Hell will be fixed by Nov. 30 and that everything else will go right.  Instead that's probably what he's being told.  And never having the opportunity to develop managerial skills (and being temperamentally unsuited for them) he makes the Lawyer Managerial Mistake.

The  Lawyer Managerial Mistake goes like this:  the Lawyer (or Rookie) has subordinates who are supposed to deliver complex tasks/results.  He receives status updates from them that sound strangely overoptimistic but instead of investigating to get to the truth of the matter, he tells himself that the subordinate knows that if he lies about progress and then fails to deliver he'll be 'in trouble' and will suffer 'discipline'.  So he's constantly 'surprised' because he refuses to get involved until something goes officially 'wrong'.  It's the law enforcement approach to leadership - give people all the rope in the world and if they fail hang them.  It has some problems:

1. It turns all forms of failure into malfeasance.  Most subordinates fail not because they are bad guys doing bad things but because they are inexperienced, frightened, confused, ignorant.  Beating them for their ignorance doesn't reduce it.
2. It obscures the objective:  the objective of a project is to deliver its benefits, not to 'hold people accountable'.  The reason we punish people under the law (well the original reason) was to establish a moral standard and deter transgressions against that standard.  Punishing people for failure to deliver on objectives may feel good but it is still failure.
3. It absolves the leader of responsibility:  many projects fail because of unrealistic objectives/expectations.  In this case, the failure has little or nothing to do with the subordinate but instead implicates the leader.

Here's some Obama examples from George Will:

"He seems to think that his job as chief executive is not to be the executive but to be angry at his own administration when it doesn't perform well," said the syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor. "Fast and Furious, the IRS, Benghazi, NSA, investigation of our Mr. Rosen, there's just a list of things that surprise him."

And some more from Jim Geraghty:

But there are plenty of other times Obama's been surprised by the result of his own policies. He seemed to think that reaching out to the Iranians would lead to a change in the regime's behavior and attitudes. Then he thought they would appreciate him not calling them out on their atrocities; he later regretted his "muted" stance during the regime's bloody crackdown in 2009.

He was surprised to learn that shovel-ready projects were not, in fact, shovel-ready.

He was surprised to learn that large-scale investment in infrastructure and clean-energy projects wouldn't create enormous numbers of new jobs.

He was surprised that his past housing policies hadn't helped struggling homeowners as he had promised.

The "recession turned out to be a lot deeper than any of us realized."

When a woman says her semiconductor-engineer husband can't find a job, Obamasaid he was surprised to hear it, because "he often hears business leaders in that field talk of a scarcity of skilled workers."

This is clearly going on around PPACA:  Obama is trapped in bubble after nested bubble of happy talk that he is happily repeating.  And in honor of happy talk I give you Happy Talk the song.

Fauxahontas vs. Hillarincompetence?

Progs are all atwitter about Elizabeth Warren (she's Indian, you know) challenging Hillary, Inc. for the 2016 nomination.  Imagine that:  after the Black Jesus, we'll get Fauxahontas.  Hallelujah! Too funny. Maybe they should go back to Kerry - he's turning out to be a real Poindexter at State.

Yes I-Ran!

We're turning Confucian-ese I really think so

The battle for slots at prestige colleges is becoming insane.  Which makes sense because as we shift from a performance oriented economy to a static state run status economy, the battle shifts from cost, quality, responsiveness to acquiring positional credentials that entitle their bearer to extract economic rents from others. Which leads to crazed battles for access to the right credentials: not skills or education mind you, but the right scraps of paper.

It's all so progressive. Just ask the Mings.

The eleven nations of North America?

These types of categorizations are always fun.  Although there is no way that California's Central Valley is anything but el Norte.  From the Daily Mail.  Enjoy.

The administration has had more time to implement Obamacare than the US spent defeating Hitler

Putting things in perspective: March 21st 2010 to October 1 2013 is 3 years, 6 months, 10 days. December 7, 1941 to May 8, 1945 is 3 years, 6 months 1 day.

Of course President Obama had those nasty Nazi Republicans shooting at him and...well...um....

Andrew Huszar: Quantitative Easing nothing but a banker enrichment scheme

The WSJ has a column by Andrew Huszar, an ex Morgan Stanley MD that the Fed brought in to execute its quantitative easing program.  He is scathing in his denunciation of a program that generated virtually no gains in the real economy but tripled the value of big bank stocks and helped concentrate 70% of all banking assets in the hands of the 0.2% biggest banks.

This is a $4 Trillion and counting regulatory capture.  Makes the farmers and old fart's fiscal depredations look almost ascetic.

Oh, and I almost forgot:  he fears QE is inflating another asset bubble.  Meet the new disastrous policy, worse than the old disastrous policy.  Because we will get screwed again.

Explain to me again what this wonderful Federal Superstate is for?  I mean aside from stitching up even more of the wealth and power for the northeastern liberal gentry.  Break it up, break it all up.

Overcriminalization of business

This NYT article describes the problems with overcriminalization.  Problems like being prosecuted for actions that you had no reasonable reason to believe were illegal.

In a corporatist world all of the various interest groups are in a cold war with each other to gain power and wealth.   Overcriminalization is one way that the uberstate maintains control and primacy.  I'll bet you Federal Pariahs like the 'Koch Brothers' are getting a lot more scrutiny than its pets like Warren Buffet.  Which is why there are so very few business leaders willing to openly challenge the Federal superstate.

And as the superstate's coercive regulatory plaque builds up, the economy slowly but surely runs down.  Slower and slower, weaker and weaker until it chokes to death.  State parasitism is a fatal disease that we desperately need to find a cure for.

Meet the old boss, same as the new boss

Hmmm.   Gallup: Both men and women prefer a male boss.

Hattip instapundit.com

Income and education by zip code: with a massive flaw

This is a great interactive chart:  you can find out the income and education level vs. the rest of the US for any zip code.  But it has a horrible flaw:  there is no adjustment for cost of living.  The result is the Northeast looks far richer than it really is.  The brutal truth is that real per capital income is higher in Oklahoma or Alabama than in New York State.  A reality that this chart completely misses.  Indeed, I wonder how much of the so called 'income inequality' in the nation is spurious, reflecting the fact that lots of lower income people live in lower cost states and vice versa.  Hmm, I'll have to noodle on that one.

Make minimum wages match cost of living

Don Boudreaux recommends that if the government is going to set minimum wages, it should set all other prices as well.  While I think this is a clever riposte, I think it's a lousy tactic (silly economist).  The real way to fight this recurring lunacy is to require that minimum wages be commensurate with cost of living in a given area. That way if we had a $10 minimum for America at large (Cost of living index: 100) then Manhattan would have a $20 minimum while Houston would have a $9 minimum.

Get that accepted as a standard and watch the so called ‘compassionate ones’ in big blue cities panic.   We’ll never have to worry about minimum wage shenanigans again.

The Modern Double Standard

One of the ways that it isn't your father's world any more is the way society treats sexual misbehavior differently for men and women.  Take sex tourism:  male sex tourism is considered deviant, even criminal while affluent, older women travelling to poor countries to buy 'love' from young men is 'celebrated' in films and TV shows.  Here's a good discussion of the phenomenon.

This is just part of a broader modern double standard:  males desire for sex is considered to be illegitimate unless validated by a woman's equal desire.  And since men's sex drives are so much stronger than women's this inevitably results in male sexuality even in marriage being considered excessive, a burden, even deviant.  And outside of marriage it gets even worse: male porn, overwhelmingly visual and graphic, showing unattainable women enthusiastically showering men with their heart's desire (lots of athletic, lights on sex) is rightly recognized as diseased.  Female porn showing unattainable men enthusiastically showering women with their heart's desire (money, status, obsession) is studied in churches as a window into souls.

The impact of this on marriages is devastating.  Wives come to look upon their husband's normal sexuality as abnormal and a burden while frustrated husbands secretly feel the same way.  As a result they can't talk about their needs with their wives (or anyone else).  And since they and their wives consider a man's normal needs inside of marriage to be somewhat illegitimate it becomes much easier for husbands to turn to other forms of illegitimate sex (porn, prostitutes, more willing women) to fulfill their illegitimized humanity.

This is a much bigger problem than it was in the the old, patriarchal society.  Back then most men had few realistic sexual outlets other than marriage and their wives were taught if not to be enthusiastic, at least 'dutiful'.  Today mere boys learn (as they always have) that girls are expensive, humiliating and ultimately frustrating so they turn (as they never could before) to an ever increasing flood of graphic and 'realistic' in the gynecological sense, porn.  Boys are learning that your HDTV is cheap and will never reject or humiliate you.

It seems that the true sex ratio between women who want men and men who can be bothered to burn money, time and ego to chase women has turned decisively against women.  The result - as always in our social economy - is that women have found that they must 'give' more and more for less and less to get and keep the attentions of men.  In a very real sense the feminist 'liberation' from sex inside marriage unless they wanted it has led their daughters to be trapped in a world where they find that they need to sexually exert themselves to even get to marriage.

In short, today's mothers and fathers by failing to deal honestly with their sexual relationships have truly screwed their kids.  And the 'orthodox' church, dominated by men who are women pleasers (you can't really lead a serious church unless you are at least in your 40's and 'happily' married), has decisively sided with its target matron customer, validating her illicit desires (see female porn above), anathemizing her husband's and in general validating her natural prejudices.

But the real question is what in the hell do I tell my kids?

This is a test that I'd like to give to our 'leaders'

A government that would rape, torture a man to find a fistful of drugs is not worthy of our allegiance, obedience or respect

Agree, Disagree?  Discuss.  Read the obscene story here.

You know my opinion.

Hattip Mark Perry

Actually, I think the Elephants have their hands around each other's necks

Anti Semitism now a left wing problem.

It seems that Jews are fleeing Europe again.  Anti-semitism is all the rage these days in the muslim banliues and Council Estates.   But it's also 'hip' to hate in the tonier precincts of Bloomsbury and the Left Bank.  Today Jew hating is a leftist obsession as this report from WR Mead explains.  Of course the greatest Jew hater of all time led a party called the National Socialist German Workers or Nazi party.

These 'cats may believe in government but they have absolutely no idea how to govern

The Obami are perhaps the most statist crowd to get power since Woodrow Wilson (our last academic President). They believe in government with all their hearts and minds.  It's a pity they don't know a damned thing about actually, you know, governing.   They are continually deriding the private sector as greedy, corrupt, unable to deliver on what people need without their intervention.   They have constantly dictated, mandated, manipulated, prosecuted, persecuted, and nudged the people to behave as they see fit because they are so much more capable and wise than we are.  And if you ask them where this spectacular competence and wisdom came from, they point to a political campaign.  But BHO didn't run the campaign, he was the talent. Like Barbra Streisand on tour it was other people who did all the planning, budgeting and coordination, BHO just waltzed up to the mike and 'sang' to the rapturous applause of the true believers or the mainstream press. But I repeat myself.

And like that loud dumb blonde, these 'cats have absolutely no idea what they are doing. They've shoved their oars into virtually every nook and cranny of the US economy, driving a ferocious capital strike that has real unemployment nearing depression levels without the foggiest idea of how it was all going to work.  Egged on by an equally ignorant partisan press, no one who was anyone asked the hard questions (of course we Republicans and Libertarians screamed bloody murder but you see, we're not anyone, because we don't believe).

This failure to even minimally govern extends far beyond healthcare.  The EPA is in the process of executing a 10X increase in its regulatory coverage.  10X due to CO2 despite there being no surface warming for going on eighteen years.  I'm sure that one is going to be painless.  Dodd Frank, the lunatics guide to financial regulation is lost in the swamp.  Stunningly, these poindexters took the half dozen competing agencies that 'regulated' financial services (I've always wondered how can you 'regulate' something when the regulators are so chaotic and 'unregulated'?  Don't they just introduce more complexity and uncertainty into the system?) and instead of rationalizing them they added another.  And of course all the blood and treasure we spent in the middle east to establish a little stability was arrogantly swept away to the point that staunch allies for over 70 years are now announcing publicly that they are ex allies and are seeking to make a deal with the Russians.  To top it off, BHO is selectively enforcing immigration, gun, minimum sentencing and other laws as if they were just a list of suggestions for his perusal.

Perhaps we should only allow minimally qualified individuals to run for the Presidency.  OJT is just too damned expensive.

Add this to Jobs Aliens Just Won't do Anymore

Police Anally probe drugs suspect.  Here.

Somehow I think the Gentry will sidestep this

Minimum wage laws have always been for the little people and flyovers.  If you were 'highborn' you could work at jobs that ignored the law, getting experience and connections not available to the rabble. Of course these illegal jobs only apply to the professions of the left gentry - law, government, finance,  politics, media, entertainment, the 'right' charities. You know, the Boni, the Good Ones.  Let an oilman like a Koch do the same in his industry and he must be prosecuted.  After all everyone knows that oil men are evil, criminals really. Not like us at all.

I'm sure the young ladies in this story will get a good talking to.  The Lords do not give up their privileges.

Laws are for little people. Link below.

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/178809/

"We're gonna need a bigger boat"

That's from Jaws after Roy Scheider sees how big the shark is.  A similar reaction is sweeping through IT professionals as they process Kathleen Sebelius's latest testimony to the Senate Finance Committee regarding the Healthcare.gov funcionality.  As James Taranto points out:

An expert assessment comes from Robert Charette, a technology risk-management consultant, in an interview with Willie Jones of IEEE Spectrum (IEEE is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers):

Jones: Last week, . . . Sebelius assured her inquisitors at a congressional hearing that her department has brought in experts that have a handle on the problems the site is facing. How confident should we be in Sebelius' assurances?

Charette: Not very. They're talking about dozens and dozens of items on their punch list—both in terms of functionality and performance issues. They've got just over 30 days to get through the list. Let's just say that there are 30 items on it. What do you think is the actual probability of getting through testing them, making sure that the system works end to end and that there are no security holes all in a single month? How do you expect to get that done, knowing that every time you make a fix, there's a high probability that you're going to introduce an error somewhere else?

Jones: Let's spin this forward a bit. How do you think this next month will actually go?

Charette: They said that they needed five weeks at the minimum to test it, and they're still making all these changes. Where will that five-week window fit? If they had stopped right then and tested it for five weeks, they wouldn't have been able to finish on time. And five weeks was probably the absolute minimum they needed, assuming everything worked. They're patching the system as they go along and as Sebelius admitted, they're doing very local unit tests (which, by the way, is what got them into this mess in the first place, with each contractor saying, "Well, my stuff works"). If they discover something major, they may have to run the whole system test again.

Jones: So they'll most likely gain functionality, but security is not a given.

Charette: Yes, unfortunately. It would be very surprising if there isn't some type of breach, either at the federal or state level, by this time next year.

And this pessimistic assessment ignores the fact that this system is interfacing with literally hundreds of other systems from hundreds of other companies any one of which could be busted by only one fix.  And according to la Sebelius how many 'fixes' are we talking about?  "Hundreds"

As I said before: we're gonna need a bigger boat.

So it's Hillary's to lose. OK, good government types, are you cool with this?

Now that it turns out that the Young Pretender really was just pretending to be a competent Chief Executive (but in fairness, who could have known? all the other career Senior Law Lecturers who've never published even a single scholarly article have been highly effective chief executives) the Old Pretender - Hillary Clinton - pops up fresh, demure and ever so eligible.  And boy is she rich. She just returned from a two speech junket that earned her a cool $400,000 from those arch egalitarians at Goldman Sachs - a group dedicated to the proposition that what is good for Goldman Sachs is good for...Goldman Sachs.  When combined with husband Bill's steady haul as 'Elder Statesman' the two are estimated to be worth a cool $80 Million.  Boy, I wish I'd become a 'public servant'.

And she is picking up endorsements from the great and the good, well at least the great of the Democratic Party establishment:  Chuck Schumer et al.  And her minions  - no matter how unprincipled and corrupt - are winning important elections.  Yes things are looking very good for a January 2017 coronation for Hilary Clinton, the second of Her Name.  Never mind the political incest, the incompetence, the undisguised greed and the failure to demonstrate either good judgement or leadership skills, the Old Pretender is odds on favorite to retake the Eagle Throne of the elective monarchy that our constitutional Republic has become.

And the question I have for my (overwhelmingly decent, moderate, good government) Democrat friends :  Are you OK with this?  The remarkably corrupt wife of a corrupt ex-President who is so deep in the pocket of the party's Wall Street financiers that she doesn't even try to hide it, waltzing around as your heir apparent?  Is this what the Party of Jefferson, Jackson and Roosevelt has decayed into?  A vehicle for grasping lawyers and financiers to stitch up power in the name of the people?

And if not, what are you going to do about it?

Just asking.

Dems have Terry McCauliffe, we have Deuce Bigelow

Rob Schneider aka Deuce Bigelow and the Making copies guy on SNL has come over to the light (well at least the deep dappled shade).  We get a clown, they get a deeply crooked unfunny clown.  The right has definitely come out ahead.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/30/lifelong-hollywood-democrat-jumps-ship-to-join-gop-endorses-republican-candidate-for-governor/

Oh Pinnochio!

A bit of a spike in the word Pinnochios.  Wonder why?  I also wonder if liar, lying liar, lying sonofabitch and pants on fire have spiked as well.  Ohbama..well.  HT Carpe Diem

How in the heck can this be called an achievement?

Once upon a time I was a buck Partner at an international consulting firm, or maybe Partner First Class but definetely way down the totem pole.  Project fodder, really.  And for reasons still unclear to me I was given the unenviable assignment to parachute into a truly catastrophic large scale sysems and reengineering project for a major telecommunications company that will remain nameless because they have a lot of lawyers who know where I live.

Well, long story made short our client service partner at said Telco had managed to combine the alienation of half of he client's top management with really, really lousy project management and garnish it with apparently random but destructive last minute design changes and the odd 'strategic' 'untruth'.  At $4 million a month.  I've never ever had an experience - before or since - where I've been yelled at, cursed and cried at by different execs all in the same day.  It was that kind of gig.  Of course my 'heroic' efforts (primarily hiding in the men's room until the worst was over) to save the project came a cropper and we were ignonimously chucked out on our ear (quite right IMHO).  I've never really seen anything quite like it.

Until this frosty morn when while finishing my McDonalds flapjacks and sausage I read the Washington Post.  In the touchingly naive way that only very bright 'light workers' who have never implemented anything bigger than the gas in their SUV can do, they outlined the difficulties that the Political Achievement formerly known as Obamacare and before that as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Peepahkaaah) were having.  Reading the lilting cadences of official Washington I was transported instantly back to the phone company.

Some things were different:  instead of a $60 Million project it was a $634 million project.  And instead of one outside contractor (us! us!) they had about 50.  But the basics of the fiasco were the same:  half of the client execs enraged and opposed (the Republican half), absolutely no project management - not even a person called a project manager, lunatic last minute changes, and a whole stack of 'strategic untruths' told to top mangement and critical customers until the very end.  Same story, different verse at 10X the price.  But of course this is our Federal Government so whaddya expect?

Well for one thing, I didn't expect that WAPO would call O'care/PPACA Barack Obama's 'top acheivement'.  I mean how can you describe a world class fiasco as one's acheivement?  The ring tone chaps would never have dreamed of representing our project to the Board as such and had the financial press gotten wind of it they would have scourged, nailed, speared and otherwised crucified the phonies (and us) for it.  Everyone wanted to forget it so much that they fired us in a way that got us paid lots of penalty money.  They wouldn't dream of calling it an 'achievement'.

And for another thing, they lacked the raw chutzpah to come up with the novel notion of blaming the uninvolved half of the executive team for the project's failure to build consensus and a design that supported the entire company's needs. the half that just happened to have no control the project at the point of initiation.  And they sure as heck wouldn't think that the Board would ever, ever believe that the executives who had opposed the project, had no say in its design, had not selected the contractors and had not been involved during the build could be held responsible for the result.  Anyone who had suggested such a ridiculous thing would have had their thorazine drip doubled.

In other words:  calling the somewhat less than catastrophic initiation of a major project an 'acheivement' and the tarring of the uninvolved, essentially powerless opponents of the project as the villains responsible for the fiasco is a creative leap that would literally be beyond the (non-deranged) imagination of any senior private executive that I have known during my long and quite checkered career.  But it seems to be par for the course in Washington where the Glorious Federal Superstate exerts so much gravitational force that it literally bends reality.

And I'm afraid that there's no men's room big enough for us all to hide in until this blows over.  God help us every one.

Schadenfreude: Just Another Way to Say I Love It or Why Liberals Are Smarter Than Conservatives

Recently I have been in a rare good political mood.  I've been skipping on the sunny side of the street because of the healthcare debacle (denouement? catastrophe? or my favorite:  Obamageddon?) that is Obamacare.  There is nothing quite like telling your political opponents (and anyone else who would listen to a crank like me) that their plans were going to end in tears and then turn around and find them in the corner blubbering with mascara running thickly down damp cheeks.  I think I now truly understand what the Germans mean by schadenfreude.  And golly is it fun.

And the fun is just beginning!  The IT was the easy part.  There is no physical or economic law that says you must screw up your systems project (although there is a rule of thumb that says that the Federal Government will screw up any systems project larger than a Windows upgrade) but from now on out the birds hitting the pavement with a sickening splat really will be chickens trying to roost at velocity.  And that's because the other things wrong with the law directly contradict fundamental reality - as Les (As God is my witness, I thought Turkeys could fly) Nessman learned:  like gravity and turkey aerodynamics, the Gods of political economy are cruel masters who do not suffer fools gladly.  Even if you are a five time winner of the Buckeye News Hawk award.

But as I watch Obamacare spokespeople channeling Kevin Bacon claiming that all will be well as soon as those gosh darn IT kids straighten up and fly right and that it's a good thing to cancel millions of policies and replace them with much more expensive options that just happen to not include any of the good doctors or hospitals and so on and so forth I get uncomfortable.  It's like watching a prize fight get out of hand.  The punch drunk defending champeen keeps getting back up bent and bloody just to get knocked down again.  At some point I start worrying less about the outcome than whether his blood gets on my ceremonial boxing loafers.  But the ref won't call the fight because he (like the mainstream press) has ten big ones riding on the Champ to win.  So it goes on until the punch drunk pugilist can no longer stand in the forlorn hope that he can turn it all around with a lucky swing.

Liberals Are the Clever Ones

Which brings me to the point of this post (although my introductory 'excessive celebration' in the end zone was a heckuva lot of fun):  Liberals (and advocates of state supremacy and power in general) are smarter than we conservatives are - they have to be.  It was actually rather easy for this libertarian-conservative to predict that O'care was going to crater:  all I needed to know was the conservative Canon of Tears:  Adam Smith (people are selfish), Ed Burke (they're unpredictable), Fred Hayek (all these selfish, unpredictable people doing their own thing means making them do what you want them to really, really hard), and Connie Eble (shit happens).

After all, predicting that an unread, unproofed 2,700 page law that creates a "national" "program" that seeks to "transform" one sixth of the economy, giving 30 million people insurance, while letting everyone keep their current plan and doctor at a lower cost than today will fail spectacularly isn't rocket science.  Just like it isn't hard to predict that trying to turn two primitive, ethnically and religiously balkanized muslim countries into Jeffersonian (or even Mohammedan) democracies was going to end badly.  I mean talk about putting yourself in places where shit is bound to happen.*

But I digress.  Back to Liberal brilliance:  leftist schemes (I'm using scheme in both the English sense of the word: plans or programs and American:  sneaky, underhanded) like O'care explicitly eschew (gesundheit) assumptions like self interest or behavioral complexity or even shit happening - for a mechanistic, legalistic view of the chaos that is our nation. Like the Ivy League lawyers they inevitably are, they hold to the novel faith that if they write the 'right' runes on the magical Congressional Hard drive and the Bureaucratic Priests press "Enter", then what they will - regardless of the opinions and plans of the other 315 million Americans - will happen as they planned it while they ride off to save the people from some other disaster about to befall them. But of course incompetent geniuses are always making this mistake - just ask Dougie "Dr. Evil" Powers:

Dr. Evil:  All right guard, begin the unnecessarily slow-moving dipping mechanism. 
[guard starts dipping mechanism] 
Dr. Evil: Close the tank! 
Scott Evil: Wait, aren't you even going to watch them? They could get away! 
Dr. Evil: No no no, I'm going to leave them alone and not actually witness them dying, I'm just gonna assume it all went to plan.

Which seems to be what everyone in the Administration above the rank of PHP Coder First Class did. And that brings me to my point, well two points actually:  First of all, liberal schemes always tend to ithe grandiose and complex:  grandiose because that's what liberals do:  they fundamentally transform.  And to do grandiose you need to get everybody in the Zeppelin and that takes a pinch here and stitch there for the endless number of special (in both the adult day care and political corruption senses of the word) supporters with special needs.

But - and this is the rub:  to make massive and novel changes is to war against reality.  A reality that is filled with self interest, unpredictability, mass confusion and shit happening.  In some cases you find yourself pushing against self interest, in others you fabricate complex provisions to deal with behaviors that you predict will happen because of something else you've done which is in response to another provision which was to counter a third undesired outcome.  And it's not long before you end up wih 2700 incomprehensible, mutually contradictory pages of legal dreck.

And it is definitely harder to keep track of all of the pluses and minuses, the nested multi-layer flow charts and special deals for special folks that this entails rather than use the simple rules of thumb that us low wattage conservatives use. So simply to get elected and function in Washington liberals must have higher IQs**, particularly when you recall that in addition to conceiving and keeping track of the 2700 pages of flowchart fun they also need to keep straight which narrative goes with which group of special needs.  Get enough of the details wrong and well.....you have O'care.

So hoist a glass to the intrepid liberal statists of Washington DC:  never have so many expended so much brain power to make the irrational and implausible work really badly.  We conservatives stand in awe of their snowballing intellectual achievement.

*None of this is to suggest that Republicans can't do the same stupid things, after all, look at Iraq and Afghanistan.  They were easy to conquer (simple task that we're good at) but an absolute jihadist nightmare to turn into 'respectable' democratic republics or even disreputable balkan kleptocracies.  We should learn from the example of those arch-conservative revolutionaries of yore: the Founding Fathers.  They set themselves a single, very difficult task: ditch the British Empire while retaining basically everything else, even the nasty bits like slavery, puritanism and really bad teeth. Contrast this with the French revolution which tried to turn Frenchmen into Thermidors or whatever and you get the difference between conservative and liberal change.  Too many degrees of freedom will kill you every time.

**This 'smarty pants' attribute of liberals drives conservatives nuts.  And it's our own fault. We continually get into contests with liberals on their territory using their rules.  It's a little like a master plumber entering a spelling bee.  The little alphabet jockeys can spell old elbow wrench's waders off but being able to spell campylobacteriosis or escherichia coli isn't going to do squat (and neither will you) if the toilets back up.

This Chap's retirement must have recently vested

Because the Avatars of the great and glorious state want there to be no choice:  Perimeters and controls is their solution for everything.

REALITY-BASED POLICY: ABC News: Exclusive: After Westgate, Interpol Chief Ponders ‘Armed Citizenry’” “nterpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said today the U.S. and the rest of the democratic world is at a security crossroads in the wake of last month’s deadly al-Shabab attack at a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya – and suggested an answer could be in arming civilians. In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Noble said there are really only two choices for protecting open societies from attacks like the one on Westgate mall where so-called ‘soft targets’ are hit: either create secure perimeters around the locations or allow civilians to carry their own guns to protect themselves.”

H.L. Mencken had the modern superstate pegged long ago:  

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

While Islamic terror isn't totally imaginary, it's ability to threaten our civilization is small.  Particularly when compared to the awesome and mostly destructive power of the modern administrative state.

This 'cat will never work again.

HT Instapundit