Shannon Love

The Dangers of Decompartmentalized Health Care Spending

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So the Democrats have a problem convincing senior citizens that socialized medicine won’t diminish the already dubious quality of care they receive through Medicare. [h/t Instapundit]

Seniors no doubt base this suspicion in large part on their 50+ adult years of watching politicians over-promise and under-deliver. They probably remember back to 1965 when Medicare itself was sold as a cost-saving measure, and today we’re told it’s going to bankrupt the government unless we socialize 15% of the economy. They no doubt wonder how long it will be before Obama’s ideological descendants will tell us that Obama’s miracle plan is a disaster than can only be solved by more socialism.

Seniors have another reason to be nervous. Obama’s plan will put them in direct competition with everyone else for health care spending.

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Rationing Versus Allocation

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Economists commonly talk about the entire economy as a “rationing” system because all resources are finite and human desire is infinite. In terms of standard dictionary terminology, the day-to-day economy does not ration. We use the term rationing only to describe situations when an individual gets a fixed amount of something regardless of price. For example, during a mass evacuation, we stop using a price mechanism to control an individual’s access to gasoline and instead set a fixed limit of gallons per vehicle.

When opponents of politically-managed health care claim that politically-managed health care will lead to rationing, they use the term in the ordinary sense. Proponents of politically-managed health care have dishonestly tried to obscure the debate by substituting the specialized definition that economists use for the standard definition, so they can claim the current system already “rations” care so nothing will change.

It’s thinly possible that some proponents of politically-managed health care are honestly confused and aren’t just intentionally employing rhetorical tricks to hide the real consequences of the policies they advocate. For those people, I offer the following explanation that uses the common definition of rationing.

It involves tires.

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Poorly Thought-Out Marketing Slogan

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My son is watching TV and he sees an add in Microsoft’s new marketing campaign. Their slogan?

Windows: Life Without Walls

My son quipped, “If you don’t have any walls, why do you need windows?”

It’s the kind of joke that writes itself. Did no one at Microsoft or their ad agency think of this pun or the impression it creates? Seems to me like an unforced error.

How the Apple Tablet Could Save Computing

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Popular Science bitches and moans about how the rumored Apple Tablet could ruin computing. [h/t Instapundit]

The Apple Tablet is rumored to be a cross between a laptop and an iPhone.  The iPhone isn’t really a cell phone, rather, it is a handheld computer employing a touch interface with a  cell phone  built-in. It uses a slimmed down version of Apple’s MacOS X operating system that Apple uses on all its computers. This makes it easy to make an actual laptop-like device that uses the iPhone’s operating system complete with the special cell-phone associated attributes of the handheld.

In PopSci’s thinking, this is a problem because the iPhone’s default setup only allows people to use software written by independent developers but approved by Apple installed exclusively by being downloaded from Apple’s App Store. According to PopSci, this is bad because if this model spreads to all computers, people wouldn’t have the same level of flexibility to run any software they please on the new type of computer as they do on current ones.

PopSci needs to rethink that because without a new business model to pay for the creation and distribution of software, there won’t be any software for people to run.  You can’t make money anymore writing and selling software using the current business models. PopSci isn’t saving freedom for end users, they’re killing it. Apple is saving the freedom of end users by making it possible for software developers who aren’t giant corporations to make a living at writing software.

The iPhone and its App store recently convinced me to return to writing software directly for end users and I am far from alone in doing so. The iPhone app store has ignited a renaissance in software development and PopSci shouldn’t be trying to abort that. We don’t need a software Bonfire of the Vanities.

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