Half Past Noon

Just kidding. Ok, maybe not.

In the middle of the room stood a long table of plain boards placed on trestles, with benches down each side. At one end of it, where an arm-chair stood pushed back, were spread the remains of the Badger’s plain but ample supper. Rows of spotless plates winked from the shelves of the dresser at the far end of the room, and from the rafters overhead hung hams, bundles of dried herbs, nets of onions, and baskets of eggs. It seemed a place where heroes could fitly feast after victory, where weary harvesters could line up in scores along the table and keep their Harvest Home with mirth and song, or where two or three friends of simple tastes could sit about as they pleased and eat and smoke and talk in comfort and contentment.
–Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Farewell:

Getting here can be described as the best road trip in America! Soaring through nature’s finest show you will see Denali – the Great One – soaring under the midnight sun. Alaska has so many extremes. In the wintertime the frozen road competes with the view of the ice-fogged frigid beauty. The cold, though, doesn’t it split the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs? And in the summertime – when temperatures are 150 degrees hotter than they were just a few months ago and than they will be just a few months from now – you will see the fireweed along the frost heaves. Merciless rivers rush and carve and remind us that Mother Nature wins. The big, wild and good life teeming along that road leads north to the future. That is what we see here. What we, and the rest of America, see in the Last Frontier is hope, opportunity and country pride, and it is our men and women in uniform that secure it.

This helps frame the earlier post a lot better. 100% with this comment from Pastor Wilson from this post:

David, Christopher is right — I never “blanketly condemned” home births. I am against ideological home births, just as I am against ideological hospital births. We need to be careful not to demonize the method choices of others (as one commenter put it), but I can be critical of an ideological commitment that skews everything. That goes beyond method. For example, if some home birthers demonize the hospital, it can lead to odd commitments. “We are going to have our baby at home, but if anything goes seriously wrong, we have the Great Satan for backup.”

And remember also that my point in this thread has been one that many home birth practitioners have agreed with — don’t have the government pay for it.

Earlier today, I almost posted Krugman’s new article about how the unique features of healthcare make it unsuitable for control by traditional free market formulations. You can read the article here. The reason why somebody like me – who is swinging so rapidly from libertarianism to some sort of socialist shenanigans that my cheeks are getting all flappy in the wind – fixates on healthcare is because it is one of the clearest examples of how capitalism is ill-suited to direct our energy and efforts toward the Things That Really Matter.

I thought Krugman hit the nail on the head. The profit motive – the thing that makes capitalism tick and calibrates the supply and demand curves to resonate in harmony with the universe – can pretty easily rub up against the Hippocratic oath.

Enter Mankiw. He suggests, very wisely I think, that the healthcare debate turns on the issue of trust. A quote:

Perhaps a lot of the disagreement over healthcare reform, and maybe other policy issues as well, stems from the fundamental question of what kind of institutions a person trusts. Some people are naturally skeptical of profit-seeking firms; others are naturally skeptical of government.

Later:

This philosophical inclination most likely influences my views of the healthcare debate. The more power a centralized government authority asserts, the more worried I am that the power will be misused either purposefully or, more likely, because of some well-intentioned but mistaken social theory. I prefer reforms that set up rules of the game but end up with power over key decisions as decentralized as possible.

What puzzles me is that Paul seems so ready to trust solutions that give a large role to the federal government. (In the past, for instance, he has advocated a single payer for healthcare.) I understand that trust of centralized authority is common among liberals. But here is the part of puzzles me: Over the past eight years, Paul has tried to convince his readers that Republicans are stupid and venal. History suggests that Republicans will run the government about half the time. Does he really want to turn control of healthcare half the time to a group of policymakers that he considers stupid and venal?

Usually, Mankiw’s critics berate him for being glib, uninsightful, and even flippant. This, however, is the most helpful thing I’ve read on the healthcare debate in months. I daresay this same argument can be used to dissect many of the debates we’ve been having lately.

John Stewart is unstoppable.

So, any thoughts on this? My initial thought is ok, maybe, as long as I can use the same sort of rhetoric.

Given a recent public incident involving me, an economist, and the phrase “Distributism is Fascism,” I thought this new Onion article was just too good to ignore.

The Onion’s recent change – a take over by the Yu Wan Mei Amalgamated Salvage Fisheries and Polymer Injection Corporation and its many subsidiaries, has made for some pretty complex satire on the site. While we may mock the Chinese for their ruthless statist tendencies, we look equally silly when compared to their cultivation of discipline, loyalty, respect, and community. Also, this particular round of antics has also given birth to Eel Milk, which I’m quite sure is the most ghastly thing ever imagined:

I can’t get enough of this new iteration of The Onion. They continue to assert themselves as some of the best satire on the web.

Sorry, I got waylaid by health care debates. I should have known better, particularly since I never have anything constructive to say about that topic. Back to Medaille (where at least I’ve achieved a degree of level-headedness).

The Economics of Distributism II: Political Economy as a Science

Medaille kicks off talking about how economists have longed to make their craft (economics) a “perfect” science. He quotes Friedman:

As Milton Friedman puts it, “Positive economics is in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgments. As [J. N.] Keynes says, it deals with ‘what is,’ not with ‘what ought to be.’”

I start with this because I think it’s important to qualify that most of the Christian free market capitalists I know would strongly disagree with Friedman here. In fact, this is something my father taught us early on in life: economics alone doesn’t save you, nor can we live as if economics can’t be touched by our biblical worldview.

Why is this important? Because here we come to one of the downsides of adopting a general label (like “capitalist” or “Reformed” etc.). Labels, as Davey and I have discussed, are inevitable and certainly not all-evil. But I think it’s important to remember that these labels we fight over and try to define are never to be accepted wholly. They must always be accepted with exceptions, because the world never fits in any of those little boxes. Should we even bother with labels? Of course! As Davey pointed out to me, to try and make for yourself an independent patchwork quilt of beliefs is a fruitless and even dangerous exercise. But when we seek to defend such labels, we should do so while noting their weaknesses, while noting where our life experience or other influences have persuaded us to disagree.

Conversely, when we seek to attack another label, we ought to employ the same tactics. Take, for example, my attacks on socialized medicine. Take them as an example NOT because it’s a good one, but because it’s the opposite. I would have been better off focus on specific criticisms, specific things instead of spouting off. (And no, this isn’t an invitation to revisit the topic. Please no.)

Back to the article.

I don’t have much to contribute about the rest. His point about statistics (that they involve judgments and can’t be trusted as objective numbers) is a good one. The final conclusion? Every “humane” science must be concerned with the end of man, which is to say, before we try and decide what economic system is best, we must first wrestle with the question of what is the chief end of man.

Nothing new, and I might add that this isn’t something that the Christian free market capitalists I know would disagree with. (Again.) Perhaps the next post will bring something more controversial.