Tech Paladin

Every once in a while, the Supreme Court decides to drop a real bombshell. The last big one we got was Roe vs. Wade, but yesterday was another one of those days, with the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission case that was decided yesterday. I think it promises to be the next big Supreme Court-created wedge issue. And what a wedge it is! On the Huffington Post, commenters are saying no less than that it represents a fascistic corporate coup, while the Drudge Report proclaims it a victory for free speech.

When one side sees it as an attack on democracy, and the other sees it as a triumph of liberty, you know there’s gonna be a fight. I found a couple good round-ups of the differing opinions regarding the decision. And as I read the articles and debates listed there, I noticed that the primary difference between reactions was not reflected so much in the writers’ political parties, but in the way they perceived and framed the issue itself.

Those who celebrated the decision generally spoke about free speech, and the dangers of regulating and privileging certain types of speech above others. They warned that once the ball on clamping down certain types of speech had gotten rolling, it would keep going until all speech was regulated. They decried the fact that a man who produced a political video had more rights to show it than a man and his friends organized as a corporation created for the same purpose. They wondered it was fair that GE’s political speech was protected because it owned NBC, but corporations that had no media subsidiaries were muzzled.

On the other side, people who viewed the decision as unfavorable focused in on entirely different aspects. They tended to talk about free speech very little, while talking about democracy itself quite a lot. They worried that corporations would dominate political discourses with infusions of cash. They felt that regulation or even banning of political speech can be justified if it furthers the goals of an informed polity. They ruminated on the substantial differences between corporations and individuals and sought to elevate individual voices while clamping down on corporate ones.

In short, one side focused on the process: Is it fair that men organized as corporations have fewer speech rights then other men? Does “free speech” really mean anything if congress can strip it from disfavored groups and entities at will, and enact laws about who can speak where, when, and about what subject?

The other focused on the outcome: What will unfettered corporate influence and money do to democracy? How will the common man’s political voice be heard in a sea of corporate cash? What does democracy really mean if money can speak louder than votes?

I encourage you to read the NYTimes debate here, but here are telling snippets from each contributor that I think illustrates my point that they focus on dramatically different elements:

The debaters opposed to the decision:

Heather K. Gerken: “The court has done real damage to the cause of reform[…]”

Richard L. Hasen: “The way the opinion is written will make it very hard for Congress or state legislatures to put effective controls on money in campaigns, or even adopt effective public financing laws.”

Michael Waldman: “What can be done to prevent this outcome? Given the huge power of corporations to tilt policy, at the very least it may make sense to pass laws saying that corporations and unions with government contracts cannot spend unlimited sums on campaigns.”

Fred Wertheimer: “Today’s Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case is a disaster for the American people. It will unleash unprecedented amounts of corporate “influence-seeking” money on our elections and create unprecedented opportunities for corporate “influence-buying” corruption.”

Now the ones in favor:

Eugene Volokh: “The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision simply means that other corporations, and unions, will enjoy much the same First Amendment rights that media corporations have.”

Joel M. Gora: “The First Amendment has always been based on the idea that the more speech we have, the better off we are, as individuals and as a people. The Citizens United case eloquently reaffirms and reinforces that core constitutional principle.”

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You see how all the writers opposed to the decision focused on its perceived negative political outcome, while those in favor focused on the perceived improvements to the process of free speech?

I am totally fascinated with this stuff. Ever since I read Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions, I’ve been seeing patterns like this, and the reactions to this decision actually fall along very predictable lines. I encourage you to read his book, which completely changed my thinking about life, philosophy, and politics. Sometime I’ll write a real review of it.

The issues this judgement addresses are age-old and pretty irreconcilable. I think we’re going to be debating it for a very, very long time.

Update:

Here’s a set of word clouds from a Harvard social science blog showing the relative frequency of words used in the majority and minority opinions:

The majority opinion:

So say the Harvard social scientists: “Obviously, what we see is a strong consideration of “speech” interests — no doubt discussed in the context of First Amendment issues.”

And the minority one:

So say the Harvard social scientists: “The actual phrase “speech” is much less frequent, suggesting that the liberal Justices were more concerned with corporations influencing elections than free speech issues.”

Fascinating!

Back in college, I once discovered the BlueHippo company. They’re a firm that sells laptops to poor people with the enticing prospect of no-credit-check financing. But under the hood, they’re an incredibly sleazy, predatory company that makes their money based on their target market’s financial ignorance. Take, for example, the following ad from back in 2006, when I found it (I took a screenshot, and it’s obviously not around anymore):

See how many scummy things you can find in the ad! Wow, a shitty laptop for only 52 payments of $50; what could be better!? A couple of my friends and I were so outraged by this that we prank-called them a couple of times, just to see if they were really as unscrupulous as they seemed. It turns out they pretty much were, dodging questions and offering half-answers when asked about the pricing structure, and simply lying outright regarding the product itself. Don’t take my word for it; we actually recorded one of my friends! The resulting conversation is enlightening, in a sad sort of way:

Here are a few of the outrages revealed by this conversation:

1. The sales rep allows the customer to believe that he will only be making 5 weeks of payments and pay only a total of $380, rather than the full lifetime price of $2730 (!!!).
2. She lies about the length of the creditworthiness payment period: it’s actually 13 weeks, not 5.
3. She lies about the free printer deal, though the website clearly features it on the laptop page.
4. She lies about the computer’s specs: it has a 256K cache, not 256 Megabytes of RAM, and it has only a CD-ROM drive, not a CD-DVD combo drive.
5. She lies about the included software, saying it comes with word, which it obviously doesn’t.

Thus it was with glee that I found an article on ArsTechnica today describing the FTC’s probe into BlueHippo’s affairs. They’ve discovered that BlueHippo raked in 15 million dollars and only shipped one PC. That’s right, only one PC. Based on the tactics their sales staff uses, I can believe it.

It sounds like the FTC is finally getting its act together to bring down the hammer, and I say it’s about time! My friends and I were shocked three years ago when we discovered that a business like this actually existed, and I’m still shocked today that it hasn’t been shut down yet!

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On a somewhat related note, I’ll mention that I’m often asked how the poor will be protected from predatory scams like this in a Libertarian society. The answer is actually pretty close to what the FTC is already supposed to do: enforce anti-fraud laws. The sales rep my friend talked to over the phone flat-out lied to him, a potential purchaser. That should be illegal. Like, Federal-pound-me-in-the-ass-prison illegal. The functioning of a market economy relies on sellers’ and purchasers’ abilities to make informed decisions. When participants lie to each other, bad products get bought and sold; wealth is squandered; trust is lost; people feel cheated.

A more Libertarian society would recognize that the free flow of information is paramount to voluntary exchange and therefore harshly punish deception and fraud. BlueHippo’s business is a textbook definition of these abuses. The ArsTechnica article mentions some fees it has so far been forced to pay; a truly just restitution would see the company forced to return all the money it accumulated from its customers in a fraudulent fashion, and 100% of that money would go back to the victims, not the enforcement agency. This would reduce the company’s lifetime revenue to zero, and its profit to something negative, thus putting it deep into debt and almost certainly probably out of business. That sounds like a fair punishment to me, and it’s more than has actually happened in this case.

Can anyone explain to me what this is? Whenever I read anything about gays and the political battles surrounding them, there are always a few dudes who come out of the woodwork and start yelling about, “THE RADICAL HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA!” I would love for anyone to explain to me just what this is or means, because I’ve known and am friends with a whole bunch of gay people, and none of them had an “agenda” beyond simply wanting to be recognized as fellow human beings, entitled to all the rights and privileges as any other one, regardless of what who they prefer to share their plumbing with.

Ultimately it usually comes down to the fact that there are a lot of people who are scared of gays and don’t relish the thought of living in a world where homosexuality is considered acceptable or (shudder) normal. But their mistake is in thinking that their perceived right to inhabit such a world trumps the actual right of the people in question to peacefully live their own lives free from government persecution and discrimination. This is what the civil rights movement was fought about: blacks were legally and socially second-class citizens, with the local governments complicit in their repression. Such repression can’t happen without a government allowing or at least turning a blind eye to it, and the keys to ending it were normalizing blacks in society, and having a bigger government force the smaller ones to acknowledge and protect black people’s freedom just like they did for white people.

And that’s really what this is all about: anti-gay people basically admit that they want the government to discriminate against gay people and treat them like second-class citizens and allow them to do so as well, in the same way that blacks and women were treated for much of the last century.

Sadly, the bigotry engendered by the belief that you have the right to live in a country whose government represses groups you disapprove of doesn’t end with the modern right; I find about as many examples of the left doing it too. One I’d like to draw attention to is (surprise!) the Brady Campaign’s Doug Pennington. Buried in his latest post is a telling sentence:

An aside: isn’t it ironic how some libertarians want government to stay out of their lives, yet have no problem with forcing other people to live with loaded, concealed weapons everywhere they turn? The grocery store; the park; the school; the airport. Apparently, we have the “freedom” to live with what these so-called libertarians tell us to live with. After all, they have the guns, right?

Try replacing the words “loaded, concealed weapons” with “gays” or “negroes”. Looks a lot more bigoted now, huh? The truth is, we have to live with a lot of things that we might find distasteful. The Bill of Rights in fact ensures it!

For example, the First Amendment forces us to live with inflammatory newspaper articles that insult our beliefs, and fringe religions that blaspheme against all that we consider holy; it does this because each individual’s freedom to believe, express, and worship what he wishes trumps everybody else’s sense of offense and umbrage against same. Similarly, the Second Amendment forces us to live with our neighbors’ right to own and carry weapons, and the Fourteenth Amendment forces us to accept black people and other racial minorities as legally equal to white people.

No government can force freedom onto anyone; it can only force bigots to recognize others’ existing freedoms. That’s the whole point of the Bill of Rights, and that was the genius behind the American form of government — the idea that the government would act as a guarantor of liberty rather than its chief infringer, as was the case under theocracy and monarchy. Our history is a rollercoaster ride of coming closer and backing away from that ideal, as exemplified by highs like the civil rights movement or the decriminalization of sodomy, and lows like the Japanese-American internment during World War II or the normalization of the income tax in 1913.

But let no one believe that any one political party has a monopoly on this bigotry. It was beloved Democrat FDR who interned the Japanese-Americans by executive order as much as it was was racist Republicans who opposed civil rights. In this vein, I’ll end with one of my favorite Reason.tv videos:

I don’t know what her proposed solutions are going to be like, but she’s absolutely nailed the problem:

“I plan to make the point that what we have right now is not actually capitalism — it’s corporatism. It’s welfare for the rich. It’s the government picking winners and losers. It’s Wall Street having their taxpayer-funded cake and eating it too. It’s socialized losses and privatized gains.”

Hear, hear.

I am literally speechless. The racism in this decision is patently shocking to me. To claim that blacks will not know who to vote for unless Democrats are identified by party strikes me as being about as racist as saying that blacks needed slavery, because they wouldn’t be able to take care of themselves otherwise. The fact that this haberdashery comes from the Obama Justice Department is just bizarre.

Last Wednesday’s Daily Show featured Barbara Ehrenreich, a popular lefty journalist who writes almost exclusively about poverty and inequality. It’s a fascinating interview, and I encourage you to take a look. In a nutshell, she describes a cancer of the middle class, a mostly-unnoticed condition that appalls her. The culprit: positive thinking!

Really, watch the interview. It’s got Stewart at his best, and Ehrenreich at her most perplexing. Here it is if you haven’t seen it yet:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Barbara Ehrenreich
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

See, we don’t really have any real control over our lives, so we’d better just admit it and not try to delude ourselves with false cheer. Boy, how much more negative can you get?

Another fascinating, if ironic twist, is that the next day, Stewart interviews one Jennifer Burns regarding her book about Ayn Rand, whose philosophy is perhaps the most opposed to Ehrenreich’s as is possible: Ayn Rand essentially believed that humans were strong, powerful, possessed of an inner will that if tapped, would make them productive and powerful. Ehrenreich seems to believe that people are generally weak and impotent, running on rails already laid down for them, and that believing yourself to have any agency over your own life is delusional at best, and dangerous at worst.

This is not to say that I’m a Randian or anything, because I’ve known someone who held himself to her ideal, and he was emotionally stunted and generally miserable for it. But I have to say, if someone put a gun to my head and asked me to choose from among a philosophy that cast me as a powerful force with the will to mold the world in my image, or one that told me I was impotent, weak, and incapable of achieving anything, I’d go with the first. Then I’d use that power to beat the hoodlum unconscious with a loaf of stale bread. But I digress.

Stewart even asks her at one point whether the method really matters if the results are there, giving the example of a former alcoholic who swears off drink after finding religion. Ehrenreich’s response: “I never think delusion is okay.”

I’ve read some of Ehrenreich’s work, including Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, her most famous one. Politically, I’ve changed a great deal since then, but even at the time, I noticed how all her criticisms were focused entirely on society failing to provide for its citizens, rather than those citizens’ failure to provide for themselves. This is not to say that everyone must be a self-made man or anything, but given an example of a person who has made extremely poor decisions regarding their money, time, property, or family, Ehrenreich lumps them in the same category as the serially unlucky and the genuinely discriminated-against.

Now I understand why. She can’t hold people accountable for their actions because she believes them to be completely at the mercy of the hostile world around them. If people really are weak and impotent, as she clearly believes, then obviously, they can hardly be blamed when they inevitably fail to achieve their goals. This is why, for example, she takes the government to task for failing to raise the minimum wage to far higher levels; in such a world, a caring, benevolent government is one of the weak, impotent individual’s only resources.

But what of the 97.8% of the employed-hourly population who earn more than the minimum wage? Why are they earning more? If the world is so hostile and personal effort is mostly wasted, what has caused these people to earn more? These are questions that can’t be answered purely by looking through the lens of victimization or exploitation.

In the end, she sort of comes off as a bitter old lady whose pet peeve is excessive cheeriness, and generalizes her distaste for same onto the rest of the country. But there’s more there; in between the lines, she is laying out a very saddening personal philosophy and world view, and I believe she is poorer for it.

Yesterday I read a pretty ridiculous article on the Huffington Post that described the health insurers’ reaction to the Baucus bill. The gist of it was that health insurers were mean old Scrooges who were threatening congress by holding America hostage with the promise of raising premiums if the bill passed. Those big meanies! Why can’t we just bop them on the head and send them to time out?

The reality, though, was sadly hidden behind layers and layers of populist anger. Unlike real journalism the article didn’t ask any of the relevant questions: why were the insurers saying this? What would be the bill’s impact on their business from a profit-driven as well as a moral perspective? Without analyzing the economics behind the story, you can’t really understand what’s going on. Here’e my take:

Ever wondered why there’s no real equivalent of the “pre-existing condition” for car insurance? That’s because it’s not very expensive to insure someone’s car, so insurers don’t have to be all that choosy about who they cover. If all of the sudden crashes became 500% more expensive to recover from, insurers might indeed become more selective in the face of higher expenses, denying potential customers for things like unsafe cars, poor driving records, or just plain bad luck.

Health insurers are the same. They don’t deny people coverage because they’re mean, they do it because they have to: health care costs have risen so high that if they want to remain in the business of providing health insurance, it is their only other option besides raising everybody’s premiums, which nobody wants.

So when the report was released and they health insurers announced that everyone’s premiums would go up if they were forced to cover pre-existing conditions, they were just stating a fact. In an environment of high and ever-rising costs, one method of containing them is to deny coverage to those most likely to be financial liabilities. Another is to spread the financial burden of doing so onto everyone, resulting in rising costs for those who are healthy. Neither of these options is especially pleasant. There must be a better way.

Well okay mr. smartypants, so what’s your brilliant solution?

First off, we have to distinguish between health care and health insurance. Health care is a whole bucket of things including checkups, flu shots, nutrition, exercise, medicine, therapy, things like that. Health insurance is just a way of paying for it.

Insurance companies operate in an environment heavily constrained by the cost of the underlying good or service that they are insuring for. The cost of health insurance is therefore forever chained to the cost of health care. If health care itself becomes more expensive, the insurance that pays for it must become more expensive too so it can keep up with the rising costs of paying its policyholders’ claims.

This is why I think it’s so silly to blame everything on the insurance companies. They just have to react to the price of the product they cover, and they didn’t choose for health care to be unbelievably expensive! They would all love for health care to be cheap, because it would mean more money for them, because they wouldn’t have to deny customers at risk of filing a whole lot of claims for health care. Alas, they have no control whatsoever over that; they have to deal with the present reality.

The reality is that health care itself is too expensive and only getting moreso. If the price of it falls, then everybody wins! So we have to ask ourselves: why is health care so damn expensive?

Why is anything expensive? Not enough of it to go around, and everybody wants some. Health care is no different. There has been an explosion of demand for health care in the last 40 or 50 years due to rising standards of comfort, advances in medical technology, and prices previously falling into the reach of people who had gotten little of it before. So basically everybody wants more and more health care.

Unfortunately, the supply of health care remains very constricted. There aren’t enough doctors, and it’s just plain difficult to succeed in the medical profession. That’s really what this is all about. If we had more doctors who were able to spend more of their time on treating patients, then the price of care would fall due to the influx of supply, innovation and competition, just like it does for practically every other industry.

But right now doctors are hounded six ways to sunday. They’re crushed by student loans, they get sued even when it isn’t their fault and can’t apologize without it being interpreted as an admission of guilt, they have to spend truckloads on liability insurance to stay in business after getting sued, they’re forced to accept Medicare payments even when those payments don’t cover the cost of the procedures, they have to please regulatory boards that often deny licenses for silly reasons, and they still have to make enough money to pay their employees and purchase the expensive new equipment that their customers demand on top of all this!

it’s anticlimactic, but I don’t have a magic cure-all the way politicians claim to.¹ But I think that there’s a lot of obfuscation on this issue and that we have to focus on the core element: the cost of health care, and reasons why it has risen so dramatically.

Banning insurers from discriminating against pre-existing conditions sounds good because nobody likes the admittedly pretty vile practice, but doing so has financial consequences of its own for everybody else, including people who are already struggling to afford the cost and may be pushed over the edge. The bottom line is that if health care were cheaper, insurance companies wouldn’t have discriminate to begin with!

So rather than pointing fingers at boogymen and scapegoats, let’s ask tough questions. Why is the price so high? Why are more people not becoming doctors to fulfill the explosive demand? Why do doctors order so many unnecessary and expensive tests? Why can we not find clear and obvious prices for medical services like we can for others? Does insurance make sense for the health care expenses that are routine and predictable?

These questions are hard, but they’re the ones we have to be asking if we really want a world-class health care system instead of yet another 2,000-page bill that nobody reads, costs billions, and has only dubious real benefits and plenty of unintended consequences. As much as I’d like to believe we can band together and do it, I’m pessimistic. Hopefully we can salvage the resulting mess before it bankrupts the country.

1. To be precise, only one party makes this claim. The other one just stamps its feet and pouts and yells about how bad the other one’s plans are. [↩]

Obama Says He’s ‘Surprised and Humbled’ by Nobel Prize

What? WHAAAAAAAAT? But he hasn’t done anything! Surely someone out there deserves this award for actually, you know, making a difference!

I don’t doubt that Obama could do great things diplomatically, but the fact remains that right now it’s all hypothetical. Sure, he might solve the middle east’s problems, he could meaningfully combat global warming, and he may disarm North Korea and Iran, but as of right now, he hasn’t done any of that yet, and it’s by no means certain that he will!

What he’s done is given a bunch of pretty speeches, his prettiest being his recent “wouldn’t it be nice” about a nuclear-free world. Apparently, the Nobel committee members were so impressed with the idea of an American president who doesn’t like nukes that they felt they needed to call it out, and you know, give him an award usually reserved for people who have actually made a difference.

But even Sarkozy of France recognized this rainbow-powered, unicorn-frolicking world without nukes to be a nice idea, but dangerously unworkable back in reality, where there are at least a few nations who really want them. The fact remains that if the U.S. and Europe give up all their nuclear weapons, that’s not going to do a thing about the countries that have no such squeamishness around them. What it will do it simply tilt the balance of power in favor of the countries that choose to defy the toothless U.N. and do not disarm.

So no, I don’t believe Obama deserves this award. Allow me to repeat myself: he hasn’t done anything! Giving a speech of dubious merit doesn’t count! It’s not action. It’s talk. And talk is cheap. Anybody can shoot their mouth off, but it takes blood, sweat, tears, and toil to actually accomplish anything like that on the world stage. Wake me up when Obama actually done so, and then, maybe then, I’ll be willing to entertain the idea of him with a Nobel Peace prize. But now? It’s a joke. All I feel is that the Nobel committee has been so dazzled by our president’s star power and utopian dreams that they’ve ignored that (I presume) wide pool of actually deserving candidates.