From the beginnings of the steam engine in Scotland, to the semiconductor fabrication plants in California, human history over the last three hundred years has witnessed the unfolding of an inexorable trend and veritable explosion of material progress. The end of the Eighteenth Century saw the rise of portable firearms and the resulting obsolescense of traditional European set piece warfare; the discovery of the nature of electricity; and the development of the steam engine. The end of the Nineteenth Century witnessed the birth of mechanized warfare, conceived in the Crimean War, born in the fires of the American Civil War, nurtured through the Franco-Prussian War, and imitated in the Sino-Japanese War; the harnessing of electricity by the Wizard of Menlo Park; the development of the internal combustion engine; the rise of Darwinism as an explanation for natural history; and the building of an ever more sophisticated telecommunications network. By the end of the Twentieth Century, nuclear weapons were the ultimate military status symbols; electricity is taken for granted even in developing nations; gas engines were becoming hybridized with electric motors; the Human Genome Project was nearly completed; and the Internet was already old enough to drink, even in the United States, and web logs were already laying their seeds.
Month: April 2005
The problems of the culture
Social conservatives have a good point. They note that the laws and social conventions of a society have far-reaching effects across the society, and ultimately determine whether that society thrives, stagnates, or crumbles.
Unfortunately, they usually spend nearly all of their time talking about sexual rules and customs. While sex is endlessly fascinating, there are other rules of our culture that are at least as important and more urgently in need of repair.
One of the most unfortunate cultural rules we’re burdened with is this one: it is absolutely unconscionable in our compassionate society to allow someone to hurt himself. This rule has enormous costs – the continued existence of Social Security to the present day can be traced to it (you can’t let people neglect to save and then be unable to retire or pay their bills after they can’t work), as well as our problems with the cost and quality of medical care (since people mustn’t be allowed to hurt themselves with medical treatment or devices, a large and expensive infrastructure has been built for the express purpose of preventing people from being treated without permission and close supervision), as well as the continued use of the groundcar, the War on Drugs, grade inflation (if we can’t stop people from earning failing grades, we’ll just have to stop flunking them instead), the shakedown of the cigarette makers and the associated advertising ban, a large and growing body of product liability judgements, and much, much more.
If you rule out the possibility of letting people hurt themselves, your only alternatives are to use force to stop them (and use force against other people who help them or even fail to stop them) or to bail them out (with money provided at taxpayer expense, or unearned credentials at the expense of those who can actually earn them but can no longer prove it). The former causes restrictions to multiply out of control, while the latter guarantees the continuation of self-destructive behavior and causes costs to multiply out of control. While restrictions may prevent one form of avoidable suffering, they also restrict the ability of people to solve their own problems and avoid other forms of avoidable suffering; for instance, when doctors are given 25 year sentences for insufficiently restricting the use of pain medication, people with severe pain are deprived of the best available tool for solving it, and must either live with the pain or commit suicide or become criminals to get rid of it. But according to our rules, these people’s suffering is an acceptable price to pay to prevent other people from enduring entirely self-inflicted suffering.
As long as this rule is ingrained in our culture, effective solutions to our worst problems will be politically infeasible, and politically feasible solutions will be ineffective or destructive. The free market is a wonderful tool for solving problems, but it only works well when people are left to use their own judgement and their own resources to acquire the best available solutions to their own problems, and reap the benefits and bear the costs.
Quote of the Day
“[C]onservatives tend to believe that the world is going to Hell, and that tends to make them grumpy.”
Charles Krauthammer
(From this good essay about the not grumpy Irving Kristol, on the occasion of the final issue of The Public Interest. While I’m at it, here is Kristol’s very enlightening history of American conservatism 1945-1995.)
Offshoring Jobs – Literally
Here’s an interesting twist on offshoring jobs: buy an old cruise ship, park it in international waters 3 miles off Los Angeles, and fill it with programmers. Very smart in terms of circumventing H1B visas. India without the travel time. Outsourcing opponents will have a fit with this one. But in terms of logistical intelligence, it’s brilliant if they can pull it off. The article cites $10 million as their target price for an old cruise ship, which seems a bit low. Gotta love the free market.
Via Slashdot
Having Babies and Having Socialized Health Care
It’s been my experience that most people who favor a form of universal, government controlled health care have extremely unrealistic expectations. They want unlimited resources to be available to everyone, at any time, no matter the cost.
This subject was recently explored by Susanna at A Cut on the Bias. The subject of her short post was a proposal by the Australian government to limit in vitro fertilization treatments to 3 tries per couple. Any further attempts would have to be funded by the couple themselves.
That seems perfectly reasonable to me, at least so far as any government controlled health care plan can be said to be reasonable. But Deb over at Accidental Verbosity doesn‘t see it that way.
Deb details the resource-intensive care that she received during her pregnancy, and she argues that since the care allocated to a healthy fetus shouldn’t be rationed then the procedures to create such a fetus also shouldn’t be rationed.
Deb makes a good case as long as you accept the base she’s using to build her arguments: that unlimited care is too valuable and politically sensitive to ration. The only problem is that this is a straw man.