Flipping on War

There's some airbrushing going on regarding fellow travellers and communists all over the Internet. A common case is with the members of the folk singer group the Almanac Singers, especially prominent members Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger. 
A lot of people flipped their opinions on war when their country was attacked in WW II. The Almanac Singers flipped when the USSR was attacked. Before that happened the Almanac Singers recorded their debut album, Songs for John Doe. Here's the full song list. I've listened to it all. It's quite educational and filled with savage attacks on Roosevelt from the left.

Ballad of October 16th

Billy Boy

'C' for Conscription

Liza Jane

Plow Under (The only one I couldn't find on YouTube)

The Strange Death of John Doe

Washington Breakdown

With the attack on the USSR, the group flipped their politics and wrote pro-war songs. It's hard to find the album as most copies were destroyed when it became politically inconvenient. 

The Almanac Singers flip due to an attack on a foreign nation instead of an attack on the US did not sit well and the group soon disbanded. An honest pacifist was fine in pre WW II America but politicking in song to the Soviet's tune didn't sit well with most. 

Climate Change Public Policy

Climate change as policy is a chain of claims that depends on all of them to be true to justify the public policies that warmists like Al Gore have been advocating. If the chain breaks down along the way, there is no justification for proceeding along that policy course. People seem to forget that so here's a list of all the things that must be true for the green policies being advocated to make any sense whatsoever.

Climate Science:

1. Anthropogenic (man released) CO2 is a major component of climate warming

2. CO2 sensitivity must be high enough

3. CO2 effects must not dampen out too fast (i.e. logarithmic instead of exponential curve for CO2 effect)

4. The net of atmospheric feedback effects must be durably overcome by CO2

Economics:

5. Anthropogenic warming effects must be more expensive to adjust to than to prevent. 

6. The discount rate for time preferences between now and 2100 must not exceed a certain value

7. Investment now in economic growth will not yield so much value that it's a superior use of funds over reallocating the resources to global warming prevention. 

8. Technology will not change enough in the next 90 years to sufficiently change the costs to make waiting and managing the effects the more prudent course. 

9. Purposeful planning on large scales and over decades will not suffer the sort of deviations en route that made a pathetic mockery of Soviet 5 year plans. 

This list is not exhaustive. I'm omitting, for example, the issue of focusing adjustments exactly in the areas where purchasing power parity (PPP) indicates the money is least effective. 

Every single one of these nine points has challengers. The amount of work proving points 8 and 9 are so minimal as to be laughable. It's just assumed to be justifiable as if we haven't had a century of data saying that the problems of long term state planning and government economic distortion are large and largely unsolvable, to a great extent because technology surprises require faster shifts than governments are capable of. 

Every time I hear "the science is settled", it's invariably about points earlier up in the chain which establish that there's some sort of problem but do nothing regarding picking out a policy choice. But the policy choices among the warmists are settled at least as much as they view the climate science as settled. 

All those policy choices were made without going through the actual trouble of establishing any of the basic economic groundwork. We're all supposed to acquire historical amnesia about economics. This magical rehabilitation of state solutions justifies permanently moving 1% of global economic product into the service of handling climate change for the next nine decades (the Stern Report's recommendation). It is a fantastic sum to be thrown at a problem using a methodology that is known bad. 

Germanic Influence on Anglospheric Thought

This talk from Paul Marks is a bit longer than my usual fare. I suggest you spend the time. The question of how and where all the destructive 20th century statism is quite important to the major task of our generation, cleaning out the rot. If you want a summary, I'll attempt to give one after the video

Germans are impressive. They have an incredible academic tradition that is powerful and rigorous. Frederick the Great's taking on the major powers of Europe and winning led to a great deal of intellectual deference in the political classes of England and the US and Bismarck's unification of Germany only strengthened the trend. Bottom up collectivism on class lines and top down collectivism on racial lines both got their foundational texts and impressive heft from their german adherents and even those who opposed these developments were seduced into supporting their spread in the english speaking world.

HT: Samizdata - worth a visit for the comments which are first rate and include lengthy additions from Paul Marks

Blacklist Emotions

While I don't know what Anil Dash thinks about my calling his twitter blacklist a blacklist, I'm having a bit of fun today with an overactive defender named Nathan Edwards who has come to the conclusion that I'm condescending to Anil (I don't think I am and certainly didn't intend to). And when I clarified that and gave more detail as to what I was talking about, he switched to the idea that I'm making fun of Anil for running a blacklist (I'm not).

In reality, I made an implicit prediction, that Anil's tribe, like most (but not all) lefty tribes are ok with blacklists in practice so long as they are conducted by ideological allies and not labeled as blacklists. You see, a great deal of the left has swallowed the idea that only the evil guys on the right do blacklists and correct thinking people never do blacklists. It's not true. Before Hollywood got scared into not hiring communists in the McCarthy era, communists were busy beavers working to keep anti-communist art off the silver screen. You don't hear much about that earlier effort. It would ruin the narrative.

The experiment continues.

US politics by quadrants

Sometimes a stranger does you a great favor and enunciates what's been swimming around in your back brain for a very long time but never quite had the chops to make it to the forebrain. "The goal is to learn and once you have enough learning, the product becomes obvious."

It's not just product but political action that has the same dynamic. If you learn that, as a rule, government action is more efficient than private action, you default to doing everything via government. If the opposite, the default is to solve problems via private action. If you find that your rule (government/private) is strong, you won't look too hard for exceptions. If it is weak, you'll be more careful to do exception checking. These two questions underlie a lot of the political back and forth we have in the US. The hard, few exceptions pro-government solutions quadrant is discredited. This is where communism is as well as the no hopers of the Democrat party. The soft, many exceptions to the rule pro-government solutions quadrant is where you find a great deal of the Democrat party and a relatively small number of Republicans. The soft, pro-private action many exceptions quadrant is where you find the GOP establishment and the hard, pro-private action with little exceptions checking is where you find both the libertarians and the TEA party. Independents aren't committed to any particular quadrant but drift between the soft variants of government vs private provision.

Depending on the actual shape of reality, more information will strengthen one quadrant over the others but we haven't actually gathered enough information to be sure which quadrant works better. After the collapse of the USSR, we're only pretty sure that it's not the hard pro-government quadrant.

The actual confidence of adherents to each quadrant will emerge as metadata in fundraising for Citizen Intelligence because the entire purpose of the enterprise is to raise the information available to everybody along the spectrum. Those who are confident that their quadrant will benefit will support and are convinced the project will execute well will tend to support. Those with low confidence will not.

Obamacare Scrooged

People signing up for Obamacare are being robbed by the government. This time it's not metaphorically, like when your perfectly satisfactory insurance plan is made illegal and all the compliant plans are more expensive and have worse terms but literally. People are having their accounts debited improperly during the Christmas season. And because it is being done by the government, there is little recourse to sue due to sovereign immunity and, of course, those most injured haven't the money to hire representation anyway. I think Pope Francis calls it 'despoliation of the poor'.

Double debits, wrong day debits, wrong amount debits, these are all standard hazards with any sort of Electronic Funds Transfer (ETF) system. There's nothing particularly new about these issues. It's all part of the back end errors that those dastardly Republicans have been hyperventilating about and Democrats have been pooh poohing for weeks now.

You never know when Tuttle will turn into Buttle in one of these systems. But what's in a name?

Merry Christmas Cross posted: Chicagoboyz

America's government system is generally unknown

Government in the US is not a hierarchical endeavor entirely. General purpose governments are closer to that but special purpose governments are not really hierarchical at all. And you can owe a fine or go to jail for violating a special purpose government rule just as easily as for a general purpose government.

The judge sitting on the case will piously intone "ignorance of the law is no excuse" when we're talking about a situation where virtually everybody is ignorant. It's a system that cannot survive forever as a rule of law republic and it's visibly breaking down without the tools necessary to take things back under control.

If you know all the governments, you can ask important followup questions like:
How do I get in touch with them?
What do these people do?
Are they doing it well?
Are they doing things that they shouldn't be doing at all?

My county actually runs an amusement park. I would be fairly surprised if a majority knew that or supported the idea. Government is filled with situations like that where they are doing things that simply don't come to the attention of the majority.

On a larger level, the US has a communist style production system with respect to class I pharmaceuticals. To produce them, you need to get a special license from the Attorney General of the US and production quotas are published yearly just like the Soviets did. I would be shocked if 10% of america knew it or understood it and most would not support it.

Given that we have tens of thousands of governments (at the very least) and for a wide majority of US citizens we generally do not even know the names of all of them that claim jurisdiction over where we live, work, and travel on a daily basis, it's inescapable. We don't understand our own governments and have no practical way to escape a rational ignorance of the law.

Don't shut it down

One of a few self-inflicted things holding libertarianism back from being a serious governing party is a mistaken idea as to the magnitude of the differences between government and private solutions. The differences add up over a generation to huge improvements in civilizational progress but in the course of a year or two it's very often a real horse race. The impulse to close the EPA or other cabinet departments thus destroys a great deal of real value and turns non-ideological but frugal people away from libertarian solutions. That's a large enough demographic horrified by libertarian theoreticians to keep practical libertarians away from serious executive power.

Over time, the gains from shutting down government departments accumulate and overwhelm any transition losses but that tipping point is far beyond the horizon where prediction ends and vague guesswork takes over. This also makes non-ideological practical people uncertain and unhappy with such solutions.

This leaves the much more difficult road of competition and privatization of government functions. Rob and raid government meat inspectors and set up a private inspection regime. This is orders of magnitude more difficult than simply saying close the USDA. It also fundamentally shifts the terms of debate in a direction favorable to libertarian solutions. The existence of UPS and Fed-Ex daily demonstrate that the government is not the only organization that can deliver the mail. The libertarian solution for the post office focuses on getting rid of the government monopoly on first class mail and privatizing the post office, something that is well on its way in a piecemeal fashion. Nobody seriously advocates downing tools and just shutting the USPS down and that makes mail reform discussions much more practical.

The RBRVS must die, or why repealing Obamacare is not going to fix US medicine

I just saw a great explanation of the labor theory of value. Take some scuba gear and dive down to the sea bottom. Go bring up a seashell in one hand and a diamond in another. By the labor theory of value, both these objects are the same value. In terms of assigning prices in a modern economy, this simply does not work. Outside of certain anarchist and marxist circles the labor theory of value is dead as a doornail. The theory is not dead within the federal government. We spend almost a trillion dollars in Medicare and Medicaid using that system. In US bureaucratic speak, the implementation of the labor theory of value is the Resource-based relative value scale (RBRVS) system. This payment system is so convenient for private insurers that they offer contracts based on the RBRVS system. They often offer a blanket multiplier of what Medicare pays to incent doctors to join their networks. But if government is paying too much for one code and too little for another, the mistake gets passed through and applied to private insurance contracts as well. Medicaid also allows states to set prices as a percentage of Medicare's RBRVS pricing system. In Medicaid's case, the payment is generally less than Medicare. Pricing signals are being muffled and often outright ignored based on the whims of a small committee of the AMA whose recommendations on pricing are accepted about 90% of the time and another committee within CMS who make the final decision by law. We've organized much of our economy based on the principle that prices are emergent, built on supply and demand factors and that it is impossible for any central committee to manage prices. And then at the close of the Cold War, we set up exactly this sort of system to handle what is now trillions of dollars of public and private healthcare spending.