The basic idea is that this fellow – Johnny Monsarrat – sets up a pagoda of sorts at various public gatherings and allows people to submit questions to him by writing them down on a card. He writes the answers on the backs of the cards, and then puts them back up in the booth. My favorite so far:
To which he answers:
I mean, I don’t necessarily agree with everything this guy says – at one point he espouses Inner Chimp theories – but finding things like this always makes me ask: “What are you doing with your life? Why are you doing that?”
HT: Jim Woodell, an economic developer type in PA.
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.
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.
Here is a video taken the day after Michael Jackson’s death, in Toronto’s Dundas Square. Completely spontaneous, just a bunch of folks dancing to his music. For the first few minutes, you can pick out people who clearly know the iconic Motown 25 performance, but if you get a feel for it and jump ahead to 2:30, you’ll see exactly why I occasionally miss big cities.
On a recent trip to DC, a friend and I ran into a vagrant that called himself the Black Rain Man. You could name any country in the world and he would rattle off a series of facts or a story in barely intelligible but beautifully rhythmic bumspeak. He entertained us for the while, constantly eliciting high fives and hugs from us. Never even asked for money.
The anonymity of the metropolis is a true tragedy, and I have felt the loneliness and isolation of New York City. Still, a vast sea of humanity like New York demands that some learn how to rise to the top, or even tread water. I’m often reminded of the talent, beauty, and sheer possibility of our fellow man in such places.
While doing some research about “pay or play” insurance schemes being bandied about in the Great US Healthcare Reform Conversation, I ran into this very interesting article about Canadian Healthcare.
As well as rehashing some common tax misconceptions that I have already covered in a long post here – and correcting some errors I made in understanding and calculation – this Snopes article also cites some studies on wait times in a couple of provinces that I found interesting.
As I continue to discuss healthcare with various people, I keep on returning to a fairly basic point: a lot of other countries have socialized healthcare, or a public-private blend, and they seem to be doing just as well as us while spending considerably less. Healthcare is complicated, and the reasons for this disparity are myriad, but the empirical evidence coming out of places like Canada and New Zealand is compelling to me.
Two friends have started a blog about economics. One is schooled in business, the other in economics proper; both are schooled in the finer cuts of the Christian intellectual cow, and I’ll be reading with some interest over the next few weeks.
Though I can’t imagine they’ve started this blog purely because I’m a bum-hugging socialist these days, I’ve been pretty vocal about my distributist hissy fit around both of these friends, and if the jibes are to be believed, they hope this blog to – in some fashion, at least – serve as a counter point to my Marx-in-a-Mitre mouth-foaming here at HPN.
To quote Mackattack himself:
tim and i are taking you pinkos on
And anybody so strident as to avoid punctuation and capitalization must have something good on us.
