A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

SB 90 – So You Want to Murder Your Fetus?

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SB 90 passed the Senate on a vote of 39 – 11. Prior to performing an abortion, the bill requires a woman’s physician to tell her that her fetus might feel pain; that she can put it up for adoption (and maybe even get that paid for if she’s just murdering her fetus because she’s cheap); that she might die if she gets an abortion; and that human life begins at conception.

I for one want to thank the Indiana Senate for settling the vexatious philosophical question of when human life begins. Now, if they could get back to legislating the value of pi so it didn’t have all of those digits.

Government For the Rich

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Tom Coyne, writing for the Louisville Courier Journal, had an article covering President Obama’s visit to Elkhart. One quote, in particular, stood out to me. Speaking of the stimulus plan:

“I don’t think it’s going to help enough of the right people,” said Sue Wyatt, 64, of Bristol, who works as a hotel manager and a hair stylist. “I think it’s going to give more to the rich and a lot less to the poor.”

It’s hard to blame her for this perception, given the talk of the TARP funds pouring into the hands of, by and large, the same bankers who were instrumental in getting us into this mess; funds being used to subsidize their lavish lifestyles — lavish, in particular, I would suppose compared to a woman in Bristol holding down two jobs. The funds also are pouring into the hands of companies who simply can’t obtain this stunning results without paying their CEOs more than $500,000 per year.

Negative perception of government is inevitable, I suppose. First, it is a very large organization, and with such organizations, the failures are going to be noticed more than the successes. Second, you have at least one of the major parties proclaiming that government is the problem and often seeming dead set on proving that very thing after getting elected.

Going unnoticed, however, are all the ways in which government works and makes our lives better. Notice those property rights you have? Like them? Me too. But, here is the thing. There are no property rights without government. Instead of property rights, without government, you have property only so long as you can hold it by force. I’ve used this one often in the past, but only because it gets overlooked: without government, you have a Hobbesian state of nature, the war of all-against-all leading to lives that are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Government courts help us enforce contracts and other property rights. Government employees with guns will help enforce court orders if not complied with “voluntarily.” Those same government employees with guns will help you out if someone is trying to take your stuff by force. The point being that the “no government” crowd often seems delusional in that they just think people will magically refrain from stealing your stuff. In fact, it wouldn’t even be “stealing” inasmuch as there would be no law prohibiting the strongest from acquiring as much stuff as they could until such time as a bigger, better armed mob came along to take it from them.

Government does other fundamental things such as regulating weights and measures, organizing and maintaining drainage for a jurisdiction, maintains the roads, maintains traffic controls, clears the snow, takes away the trash, defends the country, helps keep the air and water clean, provides for a minimum of workplace safety, regulates the currency, provides for a creator’s monopoly on intellectual property — just to name a few off the top of my head.

This is not to say that government is a universal panacea — but neither is it the universal toxin we seem to hear about from some quarters. For those who, however grudgingly, acknowledge that government can do some good — we’re now just haggling over the price. How much government is good and why?

I’ll have to leave my rant here. I had a notion to forge on into some discussion of the New Deal and how it made the lives of ordinary Americans better than they had it before FDR and how a certain contingent of high society still hates FDR for committing treason against his class. But, speaking of property rights has reminded me that I have to head to work and try to acquire some of my own. Maybe later.

More on Oxley’s DUI

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Harold Adams, writing for the Lousville Courier Journal has more on former Rep. Oxley’s DUI on Friday. He hit a parked car while driving with a BAC of 0.17. He says he “made an error in judgment. . . I take full responsibility. I make no excuses, and I expect no special treatment.”

Gov. appoints P. Thomas Snow as Alcohol & Tobacco Commission Chairman

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The Richmond Palladium-Item is reporting that Judge Thomas Snow, currently in Wayne Superior Court 1, will be appointed chair of the Alcohol & Tobacco Commission. Normally this wouldn’t mean much, but Judge Snow is the father of one of my sister’s best friends growing up. So, from that perspective, it’s a good appointment. And, by all accounts, Judge Snow is “the kind of person who makes any institution he joins a great deal better, and that which he leaves, saddened.”

Economy & Military Conflict

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The Associated Press had an article entitled “Indiana seeing a rise in military recruitment,” which is ostensibly due to the problems with our economy. This made me think of the historical notion that bad economic times lead to military conflict. If nothing else, countries have a surplus of able-bodied citizens and have to direct their energy one way or another in a way that keeps the existing government in power. I’m not especially concerned that unemployment in the U.S. will lead to increased saber rattling by us — we have an uncommonly stable government — but look for increased hostility around the world as other economies go in the tank.

Oxley Arrested on DUI Charge

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Former Representative and Democratic Lt. Governor candidate Dennie Oxley was arrested on a DUI charge Friday, allegedly with a BAC over 0.15.

I have no idea of the details of Oxley’s incident, but every time I see a public figure arrested for a DUI, it suggests to me that hammering on the “don’t drink” side of the equation is insufficient. We need alternatives to driving our own vehicles to get around – whether that’s better public transit or zoning for corner pubs or something else, I don’t know.

IPOPA on Phelps & Marijuana

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IPOPA has a nice rant on the brouhaha over Michael Phelps and the devil’s weed marijuana. Bottom line: the reaction to Phelps is as ridiculous as our demonization of marijuana as opposed to our approach to cigarettes and alcohol.

On Unemployment Numbers

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Meteor Blades has a nice explanation up about how the Bureau of Labor Statistics computes those unemployment numbers you always hear about on the news. Turns out that they’ve been rejiggered over the years so that “5%” now doesn’t necessarily mean what “5%” meant 15 or 20 years ago. Also, there are various categories. U3 is what the media usually reports.

The BLS definition of U3 is “Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force.” The BLS categorizes U6 as “Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers.”

Employed part time for economic reasons covers workers who would love to have a full-time job – who may need full-time work to pay all the bills – but can only find something part time. Marginally attached workers are those available for work, who have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months, but who aren’t included in the unemployed count because they have not searched for work in the four weeks preceding the most recent BLS survey.

Which one might be “right,” depends on what you’re trying to learn from the statistics. U6 probably makes the most sense if you’re trying to figure out how the economy is treating people who want to work.

Finding out about the different categories was a light bulb moment for me. I had been doing collections and getting the feeling that people were having a rougher time than before, but the unemployment numbers were hovering around 4% or whatever. I was down on the ground without a good perspective, but even knowing that, the stats didn’t reflect the reality I thought I was seeing. The U6 numbers were probably a better correlation for me.

A Primer on How Hospitals Get Paid

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Uwe Reinhardt has written a primer on how hospitals get paid. Government programs like Medicare and Medicaid might not be the most rational approach, but the free market is not doing any better for non-government paid health services.

Hospitals have a giant charge master, usually secret, with a master schedule of sticker prices for various services. Almost nobody pays these prices; though the uninsured tend to get charged these prices. Private insurers negotiate discounts from the master charge list, but the resulting prices tend to have less to do with quality of service than they do with bargaining power of the insurer vis-a-vis the hospital. Small hospital versus big insurer = big discounts while big hospital versus small insurer = smaller discounts.

Over all, then, annually establishing the prices that a given insurer will pay a particular hospital and the prices charged the uninsured is an enormously cumbersome and highly labor-intensive process not used by any other health system in the industrialized world. It adds a significant component to the high administrative cost that is unique to the American health system.

One interesting aspect of this process is the wide variation in how much a basic medical service costs at different hospitals — a variation that does not appear to be tied to quality.

Normal free market rules do not apply to health care, in my opinion. First, the market is inelastic. In many cases, you can’t simply do without unless you’re willing to die to save some money. Second, the knowledge of what needs to be purchased is not within the grasp of the average consumer. Third, the price and cost of the services from one provider to the next are not available to the average consumer.

General Weather Grousing

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Is it just me getting old, or have we spent way too much time this January with temperatures in the teens, single digits, or below? Hopefully this link is permanent; it’s January 2009 historical weather data from Weather Underground. The low has been below 20 degrees on 21 days this month, most of the packed into the second half.

Grumble grumble.