A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Barb Berggoetz, writing for the Indianapolis Star, has an article about efforts by social conservative advocacy group, Advance America, to put pressure on lawmakers to pass the constitutional ban on marriage equality.

Advance America, a prominent conservative interest group supporting the proposed amendment, has asked legislators to answer a survey about their voting intentions by Wednesday.
. . .
[Eric] Miller, founder and executive director of Advance Ameri­ca, said in his Aug. 28 letter to legislators that he will compile the responses and “make them available to citizens around the state.”

The article goes into how the landscape and public opinion on gay marriage has changed since 2011 when the General Assembly last took up the issue.

The Evansville Courier Press has a couple of interesting editorials today. The first, and most enjoyable (because space is awesome), notes that Voyager 1 is still going despite what, by today’s standards, seems like primitive technology. The Voyager 1 space probe has entered interstellar space. “Its next space rendezvous will be with a dwarf star in the constellation Camelopardalis — in 40,000 years.” (As Bill Bryson pointed out, “Space” is aptly named.)

Voyager carries an eight-track tape recorder to store its data, has a computer that The New York Times calculates has a fraction of the memory of a low-end iPhone and sends data using a 23-watt transmitter, which the Times compares to a refrigerator light bulb.

The second discusses the fracturing of House Republicans this year over the federal debt situation. “House Republicans seem to have splintered into more factions than the Italian parliament, only slightly lighter on the histrionics.”

The factions described by the editorial are those who want to pass continuing resolutions to allow continued funding of the federal government with provisions that forbid funding the health care reforms passed by Congress some years ago. This would shut down the government as the President and the Senate would never go along with that. Closer to mainstream, other parts of the House (notably speaker Boehner) would like to tie the continuing resolutions to “tax reform” including “entitlement” cuts that most Democrats wouldn’t go for. This is a closer call but still looks to be a recipe for government shut down.

Politically, the calculus seems to involve whether the President would cave, how the public would react to a federal government shut down, and/or who would take the blame. Longer serving House Republicans still seem to be scarred by the stand off in the Clinton years where they took a beating when the government shut down and the House Republicans took the blame.

I think the dynamics have shifted somewhat since the Clinton years. Debt seems to be a bigger issue now than it was then. The problem the House Republicans face is that many of them opened the check book to George W. Bush and subsequently have opposed just about every initiative President Obama has favored. If those things weren’t true, they would have a better chance of taking a hard line on debt without looking like mere obstructionists. Also, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

The further lesson on spending we can take from Voyager 1, not that anyone in Congress is likely to take note, is not to be penny wise but pound foolish — some spending yields incredible returns on investment. Where are we dumping money unproductively and where are we refusing to spend money that would be very useful? That’s the kind of narrow bore spending discussions we should be having; but will not because it’s hard to get voters emotionally engaged with specific, detailed policy questions. Instead the discussions are more like “grr, debt bad” or “you monster, how could you vote to starve grandpa?”

Jeffrey McCall had a column in the Lafayette Journal & Courier that made me think of a passage from John Perry Barlow’s “Economy of Ideas.”

McCall was writing about what big money sports represent for media corporations:

Sports television is great for the mega media corporations. Live game broadcasts are virtually DVR-proof, meaning fans watch the games as they happen. Thus, viewers can’t skip the commercials, as they often do when they view recorded sitcoms or dramas.

That phenomenon was anticipated by Barlow who was reflecting on the changing nature of copyright in a digital age. Barlow had observed back in the mid-90s that copyright really regulated the bottles instead of the wine. Now that the nature of the container was changing – becoming digitized and not analog – it would pose a problem.

I believe one idea is central to understanding liquid commerce: Information economics, in the absence of objects, will be based more on relationship than possession.

One existing model for the future conveyance of intellectual property is real-time performance, a medium currently used only in theater, music, lectures, stand-up comedy, and pedagogy. I believe the concept of performance will expand to include most of the information economy, from multicasted soap operas to stock analysis. In these instances, commercial exchange will be more like ticket sales to a continuous show than the purchase of discrete bundles of that which is being shown.

The other existing, model, of course, is service. The entire professional class – doctors, lawyers, consultants, architects, and so on – are already being paid directly for their intellectual property. Who needs copyright when you’re on a retainer?

In fact, until the late 18th century this model was applied to much of what is now copyrighted. Before the industrialization of creation, writers, composers, artists, and the like produced their products in the private service of patrons. Without objects to distribute in a mass market, creative people will return to a condition somewhat like this, except that they will serve many patrons, rather than one.

The live sports event fits the real-time performance model. It commands attention in a predictable fashion. People will often wait through the ads to see the event in real time. That’s why it commands a premium from cable subscribers.

A certain amount of confidence is necessary to get anything done, but I’ve often observed that certainty can be a debilitating learning disability. You have to have some humility and doubt in order to entertain the possibility that your beliefs might be wrong and receive the information necessary to correct them.

There is an article about Tony Bennett in the Indianapolis Star having to do with allegations he misused state resources for political purposes. The particulars of the allegations are of the sort that are probably legitimate public policy concerns but which the parties level against each other frequently enough that it’s tough to get worked up about them. But what struck me was the e-mail from Bennett to his staff:

The email said: “Below is a link to Glenda’s forum in Bloomington. It is 1:35 minutes. I would ask that people watch this and scrub it for every inaccuracy and utterance of stupidity that comes out of her mouth.”

“Utterance of stupidity that comes out of her mouth” strikes me as beyond the pale.

Update: I had not read the original e-mail chain (pdf). Turns out, the sentence I highlighted has a spelling error. “Utterance of stupidity that comes put (sic) of her mouth.”

Sheila Kennedy has a good post on why Gov. Pence’s embrace of “market driven” health care is misguided.

When Pence announced his negotiated one-year “deal” with the federal government to continue “Healthy Indiana” in lieu of expanding Medicare (a “deal” that leaves some 400,000 Hoosiers without healthcare), he insisted that “Consumer driven healthcare is the path to the future.”

She notes, “Economists define a market transaction as one involving a willing buyer and willing seller, both of whom are in possession of all relevant information.”

The consumers in these transactions very rarely have all the relevant information. Sheila also observes that it is not the patient and doctor negotiating the transaction; rather that it’s the insurer and the doctor negotiating the transaction. I’d go a step further; often the doctor isn’t negotiating the transaction either – it’s a hospital or a doctor’s group representative — I don’t remember the last time a doctor gave me a straight answer in a deposition about the cost of anticipated future surgery.

Consumer driven plans probably work tolerably well for straightforward, elective procedures. But in most cases, the decision to get health care services is made under duress. What is really happening, I believe, is that Americans are being priced out of health care, their utilization rates are dropping — not because they don’t need the help, but because they can’t access it — and their health is suffering.

For citizens whose wages have been stagnant for decades facing health care prices that have been rising dramatically over the same period, this is how they can be made to bear the cost when they are out of money: by, almost literally, contributing their pound of flesh.