Category: national politics & policies

Categories
crime and punishment national politics & policies

Police Incentives Matter

criminal justice reform, incentives, law, police, money,

“For every bullet the German police fired on duty in 2016, American police killed 10 people,” writes Jason Brennan for MarketWatch. “Even overwhelmingly white states like Wyoming and Montana imprison citizens at higher rates than authoritarian Cuba.”

What is going on here?

And by here I mean “these United States of America.”

Well, Brennan, who is the Robert J and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, has an answer.

“What matters even more than black and white is green,” he writes, referencing the current protests and riots sparked by coverage of the George Floyd killing by Minneapolis police. “Fixing our criminal justice system means fixing the incentives.”

Professor Brennan points the finger at a number of federal programs:

  • The 1981 Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act “authorized and incentivized the U.S. armed forces to train police in military tactics” while the 1990 National Defense Authorization Act established a pipeline from the military industrial complex to local police forces.
  • The drug war set up police theft of private property via civil asset forfeiture, and encouraged federal drug warriors to share the loot with local police departments.
  • In many localities, direct election of prosecutors leads to campaign boasts about prosecution stats and long sentences, even when these policies make us less safe.

There’s a lot here to mull over, and you may not agree with everything Brennan argues, but the basic point is quite clear: “Even if we magically erased all racism overnight, the U.S. would still be harsh and violent” — and that because our politics has skewed incentives all wrong.

Getting rid of programs and laws that disincentivize good policing is a must.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies

President Goes Postal?

China, mail, postal service, letters, shipping,

A bullying bull in a China shop?

“President Donald Trump is taking another swipe at China,” Jen Kirby wrote for Vox back in 2018, “by ripping up an international treaty that’s more than a century old.”

We’re talking about the Universal Postal Union — or UPU. “At 144 years old, the UPU is one of the oldest intergovernmental agencies,” she explained. 

“The organization made possible the international mail system,” offered Washington-based attorney and UPU expert Jim Campbell. 

Wellesley College Professor Craig Murphy, “an international organizations expert,” called Trump’s threat “absurd.”

“It makes the international postal system run smoothly,” explained Kirby, “it’s the reason why you can get a package from South Africa or a postcard from your aunt on vacation in Bali.”

So why gum up the efficient delivery of letters and packages?

“Trump does have a legitimate gripe,” Kirby abruptly changed tone, “and administrations going back to Ronald Reagan have voiced similar complaints about the UPU.” 

But did nothing about it.

“Countries like China that were developing nations in 1969 . . . still pay the U.S. Postal Service a pittance to deliver mail,” Foreign Policy’s Keith Johnson clarifies, which “means that Chinese firms had a tiny edge in shipping goods to the U.S. market — making the Postal Service pick up much of the tab for actually delivering the package, even while costing U.S. firms potential sales.”

“Tiny edge”? 

Bull.

“[I]t’s actually cheaper to ship some products from certain places overseas to the US,” Kirby acknowledged, “than it is to deliver something between New York and Kansas.”

The gripe? 

The “disproportionately dramatic response . . . reveals the White House’s obsession with what it sees as China’s unfair advantage in global trade.”

Yet, this is an unfair advantage. 

Er, well . . . was. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies

Up, Up and Away?

Space Force

The new U.S. Space Force wants “flexibility.” It has requested from Congress the ability to purchase and use satellites and other developing technology with agility.

That is, it wants permission to follow an “alternative acquisition system” — as explained in a “23-page report to Congress from the U.S. Air Force, the current parent of the Space Force,” according to Ed Adamczyk for United Press International. Adamczyk says that “Congress mandated a retooling of the Space Force acquisition system when it created the new branch of the military in December.”

What the new Space Force yearns for certainly looks like off-budget funding of technological assets. 

The official wording speaks of a reduction in “space portfolio constraints via incremental funding,” which Adamczyk explains as an “expanded ability to pay for space systems without regular oversight or constant requests for congressional approval.” 

That, he writes, “is a constant in the report.”

The point? To “rapidly leverage industry innovation to outpace space threats.” 

While it is popular in ‘paranoid’ circles to warn of ‘one world government’ threats to form a ‘new world order,’ this is transparently a push to effect a breakaway above-world government that sure would change the balance of world power.

Scurrying further down a long and winding rabbit hole, it might also be a way to legitimize currently unconstitutional military-industrial complex programs, perhaps part of the black budget Pentagon/HUD double-digit unaccounted-for spending and income. 

Space Force is ambitious. Good. But it craves scant constraint from Congress.

Not to mention the citizens of these earthbound United States. 

Not good.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies

Masks Work

mask, filter, coronavirus, Covid, pandemic, epidemic,

Early in this pandemic, experts — including CDC officials — told us that if you aren’t a medical worker dealing with infected patients, wearing a mask is ineffective in protecting yourself and others.

Many reversed themselves, though without honestly explaining why they had ever downplayed the value of masks to begin with. Masks are even now mandatory some places.

But we still hear naysayers who declare masks to be pointless.

One blithely declares: “The main transmission path is long-residence-time aerosol particles (< 2.5 μm), which are too fine to be blocked.” That’s less than 2.5 micrometers. A micrometer is one millionth of a meter. Yes, small.

But “too fine to be blocked”?

A properly worn mask need not be 100% effective to block tiny particles. Viruses do not fly unerringly through holes and gaps in the mask. They have no guidance system and no little legs enabling them to scamper to a hole if it hits fabric. 

Nor is the virus invariably unattached to larger particles. 

Obviously, the better the filtering, the more effective the mask.

Suppose you go to a supermarket and 

  1. wear a mask, 
  2. try to keep your distance from others, 
  3. go when fewer people tend to be shopping, and 
  4. leave fast. 

All pointless?

Short of wearing a hazmat suit or never leaving a one-resident home, no protective measure will be 100 percent effective all the time, infallibly. This doesn’t mean that partly effective measures should be dismissed as entirely ineffective. 

A part of something is, well, not zero.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

mask, filter, coronavirus, Covid, pandemic, epidemic,

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
nannyism national politics & policies too much government

Regs to the Chopping Block

chopping block, regulations,

Donald J. Trump started his presidency with a flurry of activity. One of the things he did was sign an executive order to reduce Americans’ regulatory load.

This move may have been the most important initiative the new president advanced. It led to an economic boom that was not all just smoke and mirrors and “stimulus.” Real factors were involved in the resulting progress.

Now, however, the economy is in tatters. Massive unemployment, rising real poverty. 

But this is not a normal depression. It was the result of the reaction to the coronavirus — largely by the states, but at the recommendation of Trump himself, as advised by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Trump now wants what increasing numbers of Americans want: a return to business and normal life. But “re-opening the economy,” as it is called, is not going quickly or smoothly.

On Tuesday Trump signed an executive order to give his Cabinet secretaries broad permission to cut regulations, “instructing federal agencies to use any and all authority to waive, suspend and eliminate unnecessary regulations that impede economic recovery.”

“And we want to leave it that way.” 

Which is the most promising part of this. 

“Mr. Trump has made nixing regulations,” explains John T. Bennett in The Independent, “especially ones put in place by the Obama administration, a top priority during his over three years in office.”

We could call the nixing of the lockdown orders themselves a “freeing up” of the economy. To help ease over all the damage, also “freeing up” business from regulatory kludge could not hurt.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

chopping block, regulations,

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

The Rationale Has Ended

hospital, bed, pandemic, corona virus, Covid, lockdown,

Early on, we feared the worst. Based in no small part on the extravagant predictions of serial alarmist/lockdown scofflaw Neil Ferguson, a British epidemiologist, the worry quickly became: our hospitals will be swamped!

To prevent that, governments around the world 

  1. instituted lockdown orders, shutting down most commerce and peaceable assembly, to “flatten the curve,” thereby postponing many incidents of coronavirus and giving hospitals a steadier workload over time; and
  2. set up emergency clinics and hospitals, to take on overflow.

In the U.S., the Army Corps of Engineers contracted with private companies to set up field hospitals. Given the alarmist talk of “exponential growth,” that sure seemed like a prudent use of $660 million.

Now?

Well, most never saw a patient.

Many field hospitals are being dismantled.

And so is the case for the lockdowns: the hospitals are generally not being swamped, which means that as summer approaches we can open things up and let herd immunity build up.

Indeed, we may already have reached that condition, according to Nic Lewis writing on Judith Curry’s Climate Etc. blog. 

At issue is the “Herd Immunity Threshold” (HIT). The disgraced Ferguson’s original HIT was over 50 percent, while Lewis argues that the actual HIT level “probably lies somewhere between . . . 7% and 24%,” suggesting that “total fatalities should be well under 0.1% of the population by the time herd immunity is achieved.” 

Why the lower HIT? 

More realistic models take into account human diversity — a point also made by economist Daniel B. Klein, who adds important truths like “[f]or most people COVID-19 is scarcely a disease at all!”

It turns out that being reasonable about this pandemic requires neither complete gloom and doom nor risky response.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

hospital, bed, pandemic, corona virus, Covid, lockdown,

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
media and media people national politics & policies

Of Light and Darkness

AYTU, ultra violent, UV, light, Covid, Corona Virus, epidemic, pandemic,

Josh Disbrow runs a pharmaceutical company called Aytu Science.

So far, so good. We all know that we need medicines in order to treat pandemic infections and so forth.

But the company blundered. It promoted technology that President Trump found occasion to refer to publicly, perhaps in a too offhand way, as a means of fighting the COVID-19 virus: “Supposing,” said the president, “you brought the light inside the body. . . .”

As you know, all presidential utterances must be reviewed beforehand by committees and focus groups in order to perfect the calibration. Apparently that didn’t happen this time.

Disbrow reports that the work Trump mentioned — using ultraviolet light against microbes — “has been in development since 2016 . . . and is a promising potential treatment for COVID-19.” Aytu had licensed the tech, called Healight, from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

After Trump spoke, Disbrow knew there’d be ill-informed controversy about Healight (the man’s an oracle!). So Aytu Science created a video to explain it, posted the video to YouTube and Vimeo, and promoted it through Twitter.

But YouTube and Vimeo quickly took down the video, and Twitter suspended Aytu’s account.

These guardians of “platform” discourse apparently contend that given the life-and-death stakes, it’s crucial to weed out misinformation. One must simply smother discussion about “a light inside the body,” etc. Because it makes the president look reasonable.

Strange standard. 

Open discussion and debate help us learn what is true, breaking down rigid opinion and prejudice, in effect shining light where it could not reach before.

YouTube and Vimeo and Twitter have embraced darkness.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

AYTU, ultra violent, UV, light, Covid, Corona Virus, epidemic, pandemic,

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Accountability ideological culture national politics & policies

Believe Biden?

Joe Biden, #metoo, hypocrisy,

“Women should be believed.”

That’s what Joe Biden said when Justice Brett Kavanaugh faced allegations of sexual assault during his 2018 Supreme Court confirmation process. While former Vice President and presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Biden is still for “taking the woman’s claims seriously,” now that he’s been accused, he wants us to “vet it, look into it.”*

Biden wasn’t alone then — “believe all women” became something of a rallying cry — and now his new procedural caution also echoes across the land. 

“Allegation against Biden prompts reexamination of ‘Believe women’” The Washington Post headlined its report. “The inconvenient truth is that this story is impacting us differently,” the creator of the MeToo expression, Tarana Burke, told The Post, “because it hits at the heart of one of the most important elections of our lifetime.”

“Compared with the good Mr. Biden can do,” Linda Hirshman writes in The New York Times, “the cost of dismissing Tara Reade — and, worse, weakening the voices of future survivors — is worth it.”

“I don’t want an investigation. I want a coronation of Joe Biden,” Martin Tolchin explained in a letter to the Times, where he once worked as a reporter before becoming editor-in-chief of The Hill. “I don’t want justice, whatever that may be. I want a win, the removal of Donald Trump from office, and Mr. Biden is our best chance.”

Thus principle loses to expedience. 

As important as fighting sexual predators is, the old principle of trusting accusers only by sex is no better than the new principle of trusting the accused by party.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* As for vetting? “We found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Biden, beyond hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them feel uncomfortable,” The New York Times tweeted, quoting from their story. Citing “imprecise language,” the tweet has been removed and that last phrase scrubbed from the online story without explanation.

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies

Incentives Going Viral

Covid, corona virus, epidemic, pandemic, incentives,

Back in the 1850s, when the Fugitive Slave Act was in force, the federal commissioners who determined whether a nabbed black person in the North could legally be “returned” to the South to serve as somebody’s slave were paid $5 a head if the answer were No, and $10 a head were the answer Yes.

It is universally agreed among scholars that this incentive resulted in free blacks being kidnapped and turned into slaves.

It was one of the reasons why there was so much resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act in the northern states.

Incentives matter.

Similarly, though with far less momentous initial consequences, hospitals get paid more from the federal government if doctors or administrators list a patient as a coronavirus patient when placing them on ventilators.

This became an issue because a medical doctor, Minnesota State Senator Scott Jensen, made it one in several venues, including on Fox News.

The Snopes fact-checking service rated Jensen’s claims a “mixture,” but USA Today diagnosed the claims “as TRUE.”

Not only do hospitals and doctors get paid more, laboratory-confirmed tests are not required — all “made possible under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act through a Medicare 20% add-on to its regular payment for COVID-19 patients.”

Incentives making a difference, you can see how this might inflate the numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths.

We do not know the extent of the resulting misinformation. But we know it has some effect. 

Muddying up statistics is itself a danger, since evaluating the pandemic and our reactions to it is going to be a huge issue in the next few months — and years.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Covid, corona virus, epidemic, pandemic, incentives,

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies political economy

Cure and Consequences

From the beginning of the panic-induced shutdown of much of what we call “the economy,” many of us were wondering if the cure might not become worse than the coronavirus disease.

The ramifications of the near-total curtailment of the production, processing and movement of goods and services? Potentially disastrous.

The notion that politicians and bureaucrats inhabit that sweet spot which allows them to distinguish “essential” from “non-essential” work activities? Dubious at best. 

It smacks of what F.A. Hayek called “the fatal conceit” and “the pretense of knowledge.” The consequences of the shutdown have from the first suggested a tragedy in the making.

On Tuesday, The Washington Examiner’s Emma Colton reported on a tweet: “Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie warned that the United States could face food shortages due to the ‘brittle’ supply chain, bankrupting farmers and forcing them to euthanize livestock.”

Massie does not mince words: “We are weeks, not months, away from farmers euthanizing animals that would have been sold for meat/food. Also, fruits and vegetables are going to rot in the fields.”

The late psychiatrist Thomas Szasz liked to use a word applicable here: iatrogenic. Doctor-caused.

The insistence that President Trump follow every jot and tittle of advice from Dr. Anthony Fauci and the federal medical establishment may provide an object lesson on why we must not trust “doctors” and “scientists” to make policy alone.

They specialize.

And our commercial society (as Adam Smith called “the economy”) is the very opposite: a veritable cosmos of human interaction.

Which makes the politicization of medical doctoring potentially quite fatal, as Rep. Massie warns.

Just ask anyone who’s lived through Communism’s command economy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts