"Unintended" Consequences

I have a problem... But I guess in light of my lack of blogging consistency lately, I should probably go back a few steps first.

Here's the brief, but important, background you need to know: At the end of July, I moved across the country from Los Angeles to Connecticut. I did so to be with a woman who I intended to be my partner in love, in life, and in business... Unfortunately, and without going into the sordid details, despite my best possible efforts; my dreams of partnership were... let's say....... not adequately shared.

This was a chapter in my life that I can truly say, I went into expecting a completely different ending. Yet as these  kinds of painful experiences often remind me, life laughs in the face of the plans of men. I can't even begin to describe what's happened, and it would be pretty inconsiderate of me to get into much of it publicly anyway, but for me at least - it was devastating... So much so that staying in Hartford was just no longer a viable option. That city was a place I moved to out of love for someone incredibly special to me, and now it is synonymous with pain, betrayal, loss and loneliness. It was never a city I was moving to because of the city, and once my reason for being there was stripped away and my heart broken, it really had nothing more to offer.

Where I am... Ish.

A couple weeks ago, I went to visit a good friend in Catskill, New York and at my friend's invitation and based on the much more comfortable, homey and inviting environment of the little villages up & down the Hudson River Valley, I decided it best to leave Hartford and move 2 hours away to this lovely part of New York.

And so far, the move has taken me away from drama and problems that have been making me miserable for weeks and being happier makes me more productive and a better person to be around in general... It's all been a big win so far....

However... Personal anguish aside, this move has presented me with a number of other significant and somewhat unanticipated roadblocks. For instance, I have had to get a new cellphone on an individual plan to replace the shared, "family" plan I was on before, and I've had a lot of other standard moving expenses, a few business hassles and of course a ton of personal trials...

Good bye, lovely office :(

But boy was I unprepared for the problem that is the subject of this blog today!

Apparently, after just getting health insurance in the State of Connecticut, I need to (or at least, probably should) cancel that subscription and find a new plan in New York.

Yes... I know how absurd it is for people like me who have only changed geographical location by 70-80 miles to have to rearrange big expenses like health insurance - much less anything else - but thanks to decades of ridiculous anti-competitive policies, the minute I crossed that arbitrary boundary into New York state, I'm no longer legally supposed to have a Connecticut insurance policy - regardless of whether or not I'm pleased with the price or services as compared with my options in my new location.

So that is what it is... I've done it several times before, and each time I've been able to fairly quickly & easily find a basic (real) insurance plan that hedges against serious illnesses without costing me too much per month.

Until now...

When I began searching for a health plan again in the state of New York, I discovered that where I used to have dozens of options for individual plans, now I only had six... And none were remotely what I'd consider "affordable" (one was over $900 a month!). I was confused... and while poking around a bit, I found a possible explanation for this sudden change. From Connecticut's Blue Cross & Blue Shield's website, I was informed of the following:

‎"Please note effective 9/17/10, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield will not sell Individual health insurance plans until we receive final approval from Connecticut Department of Insurance on our plans that include Health Care Reform mandated benefits"

I'm not entirely certain this is the cause of my problem finding insurance in New York, but this behavior isn't exactly uncommon among insurance providers and other health care professionals at the moment, is it?

I spent months writing thousands upon thousands of words on health care, and the misnomered plans to "reform" the system in the United States.

I'm not alone in this, but I can certainly say that I tried very hard to inform people in my immediate sphere of influence that the results of the bill that was passed would be uniformly bad as the already abysmal set of incentives created by the past 50 years of government intervention in to the health care market would be made catastrophically worse.

Thanks to an accident of fate, I am now going to wind up being a bit of a casualty in this problem purely because I have to change my insurance policy at the worst possible time.

In spite of the numerous times we were all told that if we like our current plans, we don't have to change them, that's obviously not the case. Granted, I'd have had to change my plan anyway thanks to the system already being set up as a cartel, but historically I'd have been able to find something comparable... And now I can't. Now as I can figure it, I have basically 3 options...

1. Try to figure out a way to keep my CT plan and go across state lines any time I need to visit a doctor, or pretend I'm "traveling" to NY when I need care.
2. Go broke trying to afford one of the limited options for NY health insurance that are available to me... or...
3. Drop my health insurance coverage entirely and if/when I find myself in need some kind of serious medical care, and assume that in the 2,000-plus pages of mandates there really are those vaunted provisions forcing insurers to cover people with "pre-existing" conditions.

The funny thing about option three is that it's clearly the one that the new incentives most promote for someone in my position. I cannot afford the insurance options currently available, I don't really want the hassle or problems associated with trying to keep insurance in a state I'm not living in, and I know that my risk as a healthy, 27-year-old man with no history of serious illness and no chronic medical needs... So why keep the expense?

The past several years I've kept the expense because it was moderate, affordable and in the off-chance that I have needed any kind of health problem taken care of, it made my unforeseen expenses a little bit lower. I visited the doctor for the first time in 5 years about 4 months ago, and my out-of-pocket expenses were perfectly reasonable... Nothing wrong with that.

But the game is changed now... And not just for me... Millions of Americans are about to experience some serious disruptions in their health insurance.

McDonald's and a host of other major corporations have already applied for (and received) waivers exempting them from the new health care bill, 3M and a few others have already started dropping and modifying their employee benefits and insurance companies across the United States are already significantly modifying the options they're offering to their customers, for instance by dropping child-only coverage plans... Oh, and prices for insurance coverage have already gone up significantly!

Out of some pretty astounding and sometimes hilarious naiveté, a number of my acquaintances are employing a few different tactics to deflect any criticism of the law and the new incentives it created by alternatively pretending that no one is really making any changes, or admitting that things are changing significantly but claiming that the changes are all going to be good in long-run.

This is right in line with the double-speak coming from the Obama administration about the law anyway, though, isn't it?

Obama repeatedly said things (exactly) like this:

"Let me be exactly clear about what health care reform means to you. First of all, if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan.  Nobody is talking about taking that away from you."

No? 

Then why bother with changing things? 

OF COURSE the new health insurance legislation was designed to force changes to the system! That's the whole point... Why pretend otherwise? The answer to that question is easy enough: The vast majority of Americans were/are relatively happy with their coverage.

A few years ago, a Washington Post/ABC Poll found that:

"Among insured Americans, 82 percent rate their health coverage positively. Among insured people who've experienced a serious or chronic illness or injury in their family in the last year, an enormous 91 percent are satisfied with their care, and 86 percent are satisfied with their coverage."

Now, the same poll found that a majority of Americans were dissatisfied with the overall state of health care/insurance and they would prefer a single payer system... Of course, when it comes to single-payer ideas:

"support, however, is conditional: It falls to fewer than four in 10 if it means a limited choice of doctors, or waiting lists for non-emergency treatments."

All this really shows is how ignorant of economics Americans (and most people around the world for that matter) tend to be...

What it's really saying is that a lot of people want someone else to pay for all their health care bills and cover everyone, and they want more choices, and no waiting lines, no rationing and better quality of care, AND they don't want their taxes to go up.

I wanted a magic lamp with a musical, wish-granting Groucho Marx in it after seeing Aladdin when I was 9, too.

The real problem here is that people engage in a lot of fantastical thinking when they ponder this topic, in large part because they never bother to understand or learn the principles of economics involved. Obama can take advantage of people's poor understanding by talking out of both sides of his mouth. On the one hand, if you like what you've got, keep it - on the other, everything needs to change!

What??

I really wish it were possible to live in a world where everything just magically works out and everyone gets everything they've ever wanted without working for it, paying for it, or even producing it. Such a world would be wonderful indeed... We could all laze about and eat grapes while having our every material need & want instantly provided for. Alas, we live here in the real world where resources are limited by what has actually been produced and is available for consumption.

In this case, we've created a situation where producing health care goods & services is severely limited and bottlenecked. There are government mandated limits to how many doctors & nurses can be licensed each year, limits to drugs & vaccines produced, limits to the number of clinics & hospitals built, limits to competition in insurance and limits on which treatments insurers must pay for and thus limits on how affordable insurance will ever be.

At the same time, we've subsidized buyers of health care and artificially ballooned demand for insurance to a massive degree, promising everyone basically anything they want at no cost to them.

Out here in the real world, what that does is cause supplies to diminish, and prices to rise... A lot.

To this day I cannot figure out why anyone thought this would be a good policy to pursue. And perhaps I overestimate people's logical reasoning abilities, but considering I spent the last year trying to warn people about the consequences of the new incentives - I cannot see how the consequences we're seeing today and the ones we're going to be saddled with for the foreseeable future (higher prices, poorer quality, lower access to actual health care - regardless of how many people are "insured") are "unintended".

That's always the problem with ignoring economic reality... In a few months, all the people I know who are still defending the health care bill will claim that all the new problems are just those greedy, evil insurance companies seeking "profit over the people".

Blah blah blah... They will never own up to the incentives that were already in the system, or the massively worse ones that are now propelling us towards a true health-care disaster. When that disaster comes, they will claim that "no one" saw it coming, and that all the "experts" were so sure that this would work, and if only those dirty businessmen hadn't changed their behavior in "unpredictable" ways everything would have worked perfectly just as the planners had designed it to.

And history repeats itself... The longer I live to see this cycle play out, the less credulous I am when people want me to believe that the bad results of their ideas are the result of good intentions. Politicians and their "advisers" who promise undeliverable miracles are either remarkably stupid, remarkably cynical (seeking power at any cost, regardless of how many lies they have to tell their constituents), or they are undeniably evil. 

I'm not a big fan of any of those selections... Are you?

Ron Paul on War, Economics & Liberty

At the request of AntiWar.com's Angela Keaton - here is an excerpt from last weekend's "Principles Over Party" Rally in San Francisco.


At the request of Angela Keaton of www.antiwar.com, here's Ron Paul's speech excerpted from the "Principles Over Party" Rally held for John Dennis in San Francisco on Saturday, September 4th, 2010.

As usual, Dr. Paul's speech touches on all the important issues of the day that Americans desperately need to start caring about. He speaks of the need to bring our troops home from around the world, to *actually* end the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, to reduce spending & taxes at all levels and to promote true liberty for the people of this country.

Visit www.citizenamedia.com for more liberty-oriented media!

Dangerous Conclusions and Eco-Terrorism

I'm sure there will be plenty of analysis over yesterday's hostage situation at the Discovery Channel HQ in Maryland, but I'm betting that there will be a lot of pushing it under the rug as well.

If I had to guess, I'd imagine that we'll see most news-outlets calling James Lee's armed takeover of the TV studio as an isolated incident.

And while that's absolutely correct, I have to point out the last few years of hyperbole in the media fear-mongering about potential home-grown terrorists produced by "conservatives" stoking the flames of anti-government sentiment. For a long time now, much of the media has been warning of increased attacks coming from Tea Party protesters and from other "right wing" extremist groups (often inaccurately including libertarians).

Last year, the Department of Homeland Security released a report highlighting the possible increase in extremist groups as a result of the recession, focusing - of course - mostly on those from the right.

In April of 2009, the Huffington Post unsurprisingly ran with the report, claiming:

"If you think the conservative "Tea Party" movement is daunting, take a look at a new report issued by the Department of Homeland Security that says right-wing extremism is on the rise throughout the country.

In the report (a full copy of which is below), officials warn that right-wing extremists could use the bad state of the U.S. economy and the election of the country's first black president to recruit new members to their cause."

HuffPo goes on to quote some even more hyperbolic nonsense from ThinkProgress (because they're obviously such an unbiased source for analysis of "conservative" thought, right?), highlighting passages from the DHS report about anti-immigration sentiments and of course, racism against President Obama.

Now... CNN reported on the DHS release as well, and oddly enough, they included some information that the Huffington Post decided to leave out.... Here's a significant point:

"...the nine-page report said it has "no specific information that domestic right-wing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence"..."

Oh... And... That the Southern Poverty Law Center (which tracks extremist groups):

"...has documented "a steady, not dramatic," growth of extremist groups -- from 602 in 2000 to 926 in 2008, an increase of more than 50 percent.

Though "there has been a lot of talk about the country being stolen," it is "a little early" to conclude that Obama's election has driven massive growth in such groups, he said.

A DHS official said the department was not trying to squelch free speech by issuing the report. "There is no link between extremists being talked about in that report and conservative political thinkers, activists and voters," the official said."

So... Let's see... HuffPo takes the DHS report and instantly pushes ahead with the narrative that conservative thought and conservative issues are propelling an increase in extremists - and the idea that there is some kind of imminent danger associated with that - even though the original report made special effort to moderate such fears.

But when that report came out, we were in the middle of national "debates" about health care and other issues and day after day I was told by one talking head or another that the likes of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh were inciting their viewers/listeners to potentially extreme or violent action.

Again at the Huffington Post, in an article titled "Did Rush Limbaugh Try to Incite Violence?", Jeffrey Feldman wrote:

"When a prominent radio figure begins systematically calling for his listeners to engage in acts that intended to bring about political violence, citizens have a responsibility to examine the implications of such a development.

In Limbaugh's case, the comparison to Rwandan hate radio shows the right-wing pundit's differences and similarities to past uses of broadcast media to incite violence. Limbaugh does not call for direct violent action, but he defines the American Left in ways that suggest violent action against them may be warranted.

Moreover, Limbaugh specifically claims that calling for citizens to create chaos leading to violence is a healthy part of the Democratic process, but that holding Liberal political views is a threat to democracy's survival--thereby leading his listeners to see the political opposition as a civil enemy."

And then there was Senator Nancy Pelosi's comments in response to Joe Wilson's infamous "You Lie!" outburst in Congress...

"...Democrats have become increasingly concerned by the ratcheting up of rhetoric on both sides — and particularly alarmed by the recent hanging in effigy of Rep. Frank Kratovil (D-Md.) by a tea party activist on the Eastern Shore.

"I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw this myself in the late '70s in San Francisco, this king of rhetoric. ... It created a climate in which violence took place. ... I wish we would all curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements and understand that some of the ears that it is falling on are not as balanced as the person making the statements may assume.""

So yep... Right wing extremists... Radio hosts inciting violence... Civil unrest being fueled by the rhetoric of conservative law-makers... Indeed.

We spend a lot of time listening to people in the media talking about guys like Timothy McVeigh and others, but what about the Ted Kaczynski's of the world? What about PETA funding arsonists and murderers? What about the Animal Liberation Front or other eco-terrorist outfits? And of course, what about James Jay Lee?

The "left" has more than its share of violent extremists - and far more than its share of murderous revolutionaries - but unlike the cases of extremism coming from the so-called "right", we seem to ignore all of those or isolate them from their ideological roots.

James Lee, who assaulted the fine folks at the Discovery Channel yesterday and was eventually shot by the police, was influenced into his extremist actions by Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth"... And while I certainly won't accuse Al Gore of deliberately inciting anyone to violence, surely we should at least take a second to recognize that Lee's positions are the ultimate conclusion of a lot of the ideas Gore has supported over the years - not just in the film, but in Earth in the Balance as well.

Lee had a list of 11 demands he wanted the Discovery Channel to comply with - though I have to say, it gets pretty repetitive. Check out the first two demands (emphasis mine):

"The Discovery Channel MUST broadcast to the world their commitment to save the planet and to do the following IMMEDIATELY:

1. The Discovery Channel and it's affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn's "My Ishmael" pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other's inventive ideas. Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. A game show format contest would be in order. Perhaps also forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation. Do both. Do all until something WORKS and the natural world starts improving and human civilization building STOPS and is reversed! MAKE IT INTERESTING SO PEOPLE WATCH AND APPLY SOLUTIONS!!!!

2. All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it."

Filthy human children... Like that one?

Apart from advocating human sterilization and pushing mass infertility, Lee goes on to rail against war, which I find kind of ironic since he definitely wished for the destruction of humanity and lots of war is a great way to reduce populations. But whatever... The man certainly makes no sense in any other context, so why expect him to be consistent?

At any rate... The whole set of demands can largely be summed up by Lee's request that people be wiped off the face of the earth in order to preserve his bizarre concept of "nature"... Number 8 pretty much says it all:

"8. Saving the Planet means saving what's left of the non-human Wildlife by decreasing the Human population. That means stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies!You're the media, you can reach enough people. It's your resposibility because you reach so many minds!!!"

Saving the Planet = No humans. Got that?

This is the ultimate consequence of the classic environmentalist's separation of man & nature, and their persistent and utterly idiotic devotion to the logical fallacy, Appeal to Nature, in which the argument is made that because something is "natural", it must be ideal.

Global Warming alarmism is always a fine example of this.

The assumption that average global temperatures today (or perhaps 50 years ago) are "correct", and that any deviation from that average is a problem. Why? Why is one temperature correct and another temperature incorrect?

Many environmentalists will say that the change in temperature will be a problem for humans, so that is a potentially legitimate reason to be concerned - though it's also a problem best solved by technology and wealth, not by policies that destroy wealth and inhibit development... But if it's just a question of bio-diversity and animal populations, even human population distribution for that matter, why is the current distribution ideal and a different one less ideal?

The Earth has seen all types of really immense climate changes over even the last 1,000 years - not to say anything of the last hundred million... And each time, plant & animal life survives, albeit often in a completely different form... But it remains a fallacy to presume that the form life exists today is the one that should be.

Aside from Appeals to Nature, Is-Ought Problems and the classic Naturalists Fallacy, the further problem with not only James Jay Lee, but in fact with most environmental activists, is a patently insane devotion to the idea that the planet is "over-populated" and other - as Ronald Bailey put it - Malthusian twaddle. This is complete, and utter nonsense which has been demonstrably false time & time again... But it's based on one of the most common misconceptions - that of the zero-sum world.

As Lee's favorite book ever, Ishmael, put it:

"The biological community is an economy, isn't it? I mean, if you start taking more for yourself, then there's got to be less for someone else, for something else. Isn't that so?" Ishmael answers, "Yes,"

Sorry Ishmael... Your dumbass Gorilla brain (oh yeah... Ishmael is a telepathic Gorilla... Blech!) failed you.

Quite in opposition to such an idea, and easily demolishing Malthusianism on its face, humanity has used our considerable mental powers to greatly expand food and other resource production while needing less space and less energy through technological advancement. This means that Malthus' claim that population grew exponentially while resources are produced linearly is actually incorrect and can be/has/will be overcome through ingenuity. In Malthus' time, to produce the amount of food needed to sustain one human life required a hell of a lot more space than it does today - but humanity has this cool tendency to use intellect to solve problems like that - and this is why all of Malthus' predictions were wrong.

It's also why modern-day Malthusian idiots like Paul Erlich get their asses handed to them in the prognostication department repeatedly.

But these ideas are actually pretty mainstream for environmentalists!

The vast majority of self-described environmentalists who I've met, who I've seen on television or in the media or even who's books I've read or been exposed to hold all the basic premises that Lee used to create his idiots screed.

The world is over-populated! It's humanity vs. nature (rather than humanity as part of nature)! The way the world is right now is the way it ought to be. Blah blah blah.

The only difference is, many more sane people don't actually take guns & bombs into populated areas and threaten TV executives in order to promote their ideas... And fortunately most stop a little bit short of calling for mass human sterilization... At least... Not publicly.

But I often wonder - if you believe that mankind is a blight on nature, and that there are far too many people living on the planet... And especially if you take on even more ridiculous beliefs (as Lee did), such as the idea that " food production leads to the overpopulation of the Human race" - what alternative is there for you but to want a huge percentage of the human population of the world to either die or not ever reproduce?

Humanity is the problem, and there are way too many of us, right? So how can you not advocate for the eradication of a significant number of us?

What other conclusion can you draw?

There is a lot of danger in accepting the inevitable conclusions of a lot of ideas, and when you believe - fundamentally - that humanity is evil and that it is something that harms the way the world is "supposed" to be, you're not actually that far off from a guy like James Lee. Hopefully you're not a psychopath and you value specific human life more than your bad ideas - but if you are criminally insane, bad ideas have a lot of harmful consequences to those around you. Of course, if you're not criminally insane and you still hold a lot of bad ideas - with the right amount of force behind them, those ideas can harm a lot of people too.

Drawing hyperbolic conclusions about Al Gore's movie or books inciting people like Lee to crazy behavior is... well... crazy. Just like blaming Rush Limbaugh or Congressman Wilson for any potential "right wing" craziness would be completely incorrect... Just like blaming Catcher in the Rye or J.D. Salinger for the assassination of John Lennon would be an idiotic thing to do.

But recognizing the end-of-the-line logical conclusions of some people's horrific premises is worth doing and especially worth noting at times like these.