An interesting interview with the author of the new book, Antifragile:
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Author: Redactor
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Destutt de Tracy
Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges. It is never anything else, in any epoch of its duration, from its commencement the most unformed, to its greatest perfection. And this is the greatest eulogy we can give to it, for exchange is an admirable transaction, in which the two contracting parties always both gain; consequently society is an uninterrupted succession of advantages, unceasingly renewed for all its members.
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Rationing Pain Relief
If you doubt that ever-expanding government control over medicine hurts people, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is eager to disabuse you. How else to explain his new requirement that city-controlled emergency rooms restrict supplies of painkillers in the name of the war on drugs?
The idea is that if emergency rooms shrink supplies below what medical practitioners think reasonable, then it’s harder for addicts to get their fix.
Have personnel known that certain patients were addicted to painkillers and treated them with painkillers anyway? Or are painkiller addicts stealing the supplies? Whatever the rationalizations, it’s evident that substandard supplies will make it harder to help non-addicts in serious pain.
What about days when demand is especially high? Or when delivery of new supplies is disrupted?
Like any central planner confident in his own omniscience, Bloomberg is sure that limiting the supply of painkillers below the level judged adequate by hospitals could never make it harder to help persons in pain. He also says, if so, so what? “[So] you didn’t get enough painkillers and you did have to suffer a little bit. . . . There’s nothing that you can possibly do where somebody isn’t going to suffer. . . .”
His rationale, here, would “justify” making it harder to obtain anything whatever that enhances our lives if that thing might also be used destructively. A counsel to impair life in the name of saving it.
Bloomberg adds callousness to his hubris, topping it off with absurdity.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
If censorship reigns, there cannot be sincere flattery, and only small men are afraid of small writings.
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The Budget Math Deficit
The White House once promised to answer any petition posted at its .gov site that garnered at least 25,000 signatures. (It has since increased the minimum.) Facetious persons urged it to build a Death Star like the planet-destroyer in Star Wars.
Well, the petition got the necessary signatures, and the Obama administration responded: No, we shan’t build a Death Star. One reason given? Paul Shawcross, a budget official, noted the prohibitive cost.
“We’re working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it,” he says.
Really?
Now consider a widely reprinted lesson in accounting offered a little more than a year ago by Laurie Newsom of the Gainesville Tea Party. Newsom suggested that to better understand the government’s spending antics, drop eight zeros from the budget numbers. Newsom cited annual tax revenue of $2,170,000,000,000, a federal budget of $3,820,000,000,000, new debt of $1,650,000,000,000, national debt of $14,271,000,000,000. And “budget cuts” of $38,500,000,000.
Delete eight zeros and pretend that the national government is just one household. So instead of federal revenue of $2.17 trillion, we have one household bringing in $21,700. But in the same year, its residents are spending $38,200 and adding $16,500 to a credit card with an outstanding balance of $142,710. One the other hand, the family has “cut” $385 from its spending.
Sound like a very disciplined effort to get the fiscal house in order?
Things that can’t continue forever, don’t.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Destutt de Tracy
Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges. It is never anything else, in any epoch of its duration, from its commencement the most unformed, to its greatest perfection. And this is the greatest eulogy we can give to it, for exchange is an admirable transaction, in which the two contracting parties always both gain; consequently society is an uninterrupted succession of advantages, unceasingly renewed for all its members.
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Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
I force myself to laugh at everything, for fear of having to cry.
I don’t know what the optimum ratio of employees to independent contractors would be. No one does. But we can be pretty certain that the current skewing of the economy towards less wage employment and more independent contracting by Obamacare is not a good thing.
You see, “one consequence” of the health reform package, writes economist David Henderson on EconLog, “is an increase in contracting out to avoid the 50-person threshold.”
Now, if there were a general shift towards part-time employment and professional contracting as a result of businesspeople and workers appraising their advantages on the open market, we’d just note this with interest or a shrug and say, “whatever the market decides.”
After all, people might substitute wage contracts for performance contracts (or vice versa) for reasons given by Nobel Laureate R.H. Coase, who figured out why firms exist at all: contracting out isn’t costless. It takes time to negotiate each deal, each task, etc. My friend Dr. Henderson will correct me, I hope, if I’m wrong, but employing labor full-time — by bundling numerous tasks together — is usually easier and cheaper than seeking out specialists and consultants for each task you want done.
In recent years we’ve seen a rise in consulting professionals, in part because the Internet has reduced the costs associated with working from a distance. But today’s switch to independent contractors (as well as to part-time employment) is a result of Obamacare raising the cost of keeping full-time employees. Of course businesses will seek to . . . economize.
And we know such substitution is suboptimal because people are doing it under duress, the threat of force behind Obamacare.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
President Obama was sworn in for a second term on Sunday, re-enacting the rite on Monday so he could leverage the attention of a traditional news day.
Obama makes a good speech. He intones “We, the People,” with a pause in the middle: “We . . . the People.” He tells us to seize the moment.
But I’m not at all sure he’s seizing — or sizing up — the facts. He says, “we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.” As I understand it, those who do very well have increased in number. Many folks have moved out of the middle-income earning category into the upper regions. We’ve more millionaires now than ever — even adjusted for inflation. Their ranks aren’t exactly shrinking.
Many of us are struggling, though. And we struggle under the watch of a general “progressive” mindset. You can’t blame income trends on the “free market.” Though some sectors of the economy are pretty free — the important new technology sector, for instance, and much of consumer retail — the medical and financial sectors are heavily regulated and managed by government, and the housing market has been transformed by multiple government policy initiatives. And here, with these three institutions, is where we’ve taken the biggest hits.
And where some of the worst effects on the poorer amongst us can be felt — and where the biggest pro-rich policies can be seen. Think bailouts, for starters.
The Progressives long ago seized the epoch. The necessity of the moment is to seize it back from them. Their policies of government intrusion and management have rigged the game to get us where we are now.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.