Paul M. Jones

The normal critique of socialized medicine is to point out that people have to wait a long time for these kinds of treatments in places like Britain. And that's certainly a valid critique. I'm sure my mom and daughter would still be waiting for their treatments, while my father and wife would probably be dead.

The key point, though, is that these treatments didn't just come out out of the blue. They were developed by drug companies and device makers who thought they had a good market for things that would make people feel better.

But under a national healthcare plan, the "market" will consist of whatever the bureaucrats are willing to buy. That means treatment for politically stylish diseases will get some money, but otherwise the main concern will be cost-control. More treatments, to bureaucrats, mean more costs.

via Glenn Reynolds on the hidden cost of national health care | OpEd Contributor | Washington Examiner.

WSJ: Few Economists Favor More Stimulus. I say cancel the unspent stimulus we’ve already got, replace with a payroll-tax holiday. That would really stimulate, instead of just lining politicians’ pockets.

via Instapundit. I completely agree.

And, even more unusual, with a Frenchman:

U.S. President Barack Obama (C) and France's President Nicolas ... - Yahoo! News Photos.

Watch a liberal Democrat and a conservative Republican redline the Bill of Rights together:

"You may have green shoots, whatever you want to call them, you may have temporary relief, but you are still in a world that's breaking," Taleb said ...

"We're in the middle of a crash," Taleb said. "So if I'm going to forecast something, it is that it's going to get worse, not better."

The government needs to deleverage debt and not try stimulus packages that will inflate assets, he said.

"What makes me very pessimistic in not seeing any leadership or awareness on parts of government on what has to be done, which is deleverage $40-to-$70 trillion," Taleb said.

"The monkey on our back is debt," he added.

via 'We're in the Middle of a Crash': Black Swan - Financials * Europe * News * Story - CNBC.com.

Another line from Taleb in this interview, paraphrased from memory: "The people making predictions about the economy, which of them saw the current situation coming? None of them. So why believe them now?"

I read Taleb's "Fooled By Randomness" and "Black Swan" a couple years ago, and found them insightful.

Byron York catches Barney Frank with his hand in the till. The issue is TARP: recall that the banks that received TARP money are supposed to repay it to the Treasury, along with dividend payments. President Obama has held out hope that the taxpayers may, in the end, make money on the TARP program. Recall, too, that TARP was billed as an extraordinary response to an unacceptable risk--that the nation's financial system might come crashing down. So the federal government bailed out the banks, but the banks were supposed to repay the money and the TARP statute provides that when the money is repaid, it "shall be paid into the general fund of the Treasury for reduction of the public debt." Which, of course, benefits the taxpayers who put up the money.

The greedy Congressman Frank apparently can't bear the idea of taxpayers getting their money back, so he has proposed to divert the money to a more politically appealing purpose.

via Power Line - Quick, Spend the Money Before the Taxpayers Find Out!.

The problem besetting newspapers is not that there are hordes of bloggers giving it away for free. Bloggers are, to be sure, great competition for the op-ed section. But the op-ed section is not a money maker, as the New York Times so painfully discovered with Times Select. As I wrote at the time, the Times confused what people were emailing each other with what they would be willing to pay for. If those things were the same, poems about Jesus and pictures of kittens wearing hats would have replaced gambling and porn as the internet's most profitable content.

via Old Media Blues - Megan McArdle.

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army and Marines found it useful to send a female soldier along on raids, as it was less disruptive to have a woman search the female civilians. There was no shortage of volunteers for this duty. The marines, as is their custom, saw more opportunities in this. Thus the marines began sending a team of women on such missions. ...

... So the marines in Iraq called these all-female teams (3-5 women) Lionesses. Again, no shortage of volunteers, as female marines, even more than their sisters in the army, were eager to get into the fight. But that's not what the lioness teams were created for. What the marines had also noticed was that the female marines tended to get useful information out of the women they searched. Iraqi women were surprised, and often awed, when they encountered these female soldiers and marines. The awe often turned into cooperation. ...

... Iraqi men were also intimidated by female soldiers and marines. In the macho Arab world, an assertive female with an assault rifle is sort of a man's worst nightmare. So many otherwise reticent Iraqi men, opened up to the female troops, and provided information. Women also had an easier time detecting a lie (something husbands often learn the hard way.)

The lioness teams proved capable in combat, as sometimes these peacekeeping missions ran into firefights or ambushes. But the main advantage of having a team of women along was the greater amount of intelligence collected. In addition, the female marines also made it easier to establish friendly relationships in neighborhoods and villages. This provided a more long term source of information.

via Intelligence: Girls With Guns Get It. Just read the whole thing; you gotta love the Marines, and Marine women in particular.

A public option, Shelby added, would "destroy the marketplace for health care."

But the notion that most American consumers enjoy anything like a competitive marketplace for health care is flatly false. And a study issued last month by a pro-reform group makes that strikingly clear.

The report, released by Health Care for America Now (HCAN), uses data compiled by the American Medical Association to show that 94 percent of the country's insurance markets are defined as "highly concentrated," according to Justice Department guidelines. Predictably, that's led to skyrocketing costs for patients, and monster profits for the big health insurers. Premiums have gone up over the past six years by more than 87 percent, on average, while profits at ten of the largest publicly traded health insurance companies rose 428 percent from 2000 to 2007.

Far from healthy market competition, HCAN describes the situation as "a market failure where a small number of large companies use their concentrated power to control premium levels, benefit packages, and provider payments in the markets they dominate."

So extreme is the level of consolidation, in fact, that one former top Federal Trade Commission official working with HCAN has sent a letter to the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, asking for an investigation into the health insurance marketplace.

via Health-Care Market Characterized By Consolidation, Not Competition | TPMMuckraker.

There is a powerful role both for the market and for philanthropy...Philanthropy alone lacks the feedback mechanism of markets, which are the best listening devices we have; and yet markets alone too easily leave the most vulnerable behind.

via Marginal Revolution: Aid Realism for the Idealist.