Shoe, Meet the Other Foot, Part II

Real Clear Politics finds a similar line from Barack Obama:

"I mean, the fact of the matter is, is the president has been on his 60-day tour, and everywhere he goes the numbers just get worse. The American people have essentially voted on this proposal and really what you have is a situation now where I think that the president and the Republican Congress are going to need to figure out a way to save face and -- and step back a little bit. And if -- if they let go of their egos -- listen, I've been on the other side of this where -- particularly with my wife. (laughter) Where I've gotten in an argument and then at some point in the argument it dawns on me, you know what, I'm wrong on this one and it's -- it's -- it's irritating, it's frustrating. You don't want to admit it, and so to the extent that we can provide the president with a graceful mechanism to -- to say we're sorry, Dear, then I think that would be -- that would be helpful."

Gains From Trade, Metropolitan Edition

Here's a serious question:  why don't more cities rent out their snow services?  Upstate New York is apparently blissfully free of snow, and short of money.  Washington DC is one of the flushest metro areas in the country, and in need of snow removal.  Why not get some of the snow removal equipment--and talent--from Rochester and Syracuse and Buffalo on the road?  They could be here in twelve hours at the outside, and have this place cleaned up in a jiffy.

It seems like this would be a win-win combination.  But as far as I know, no one's even suggested it.

Blogging the Snowpocalypse

You will probably have noticed that I did not post this morning.  That's because sometime before 8 am, I decided that I should get to the grocery store and pick up my lung medicine in the hiatus between snows.

Four hours later, I returned with a trunk full of whatever could be scavenged from the grocery store shelves.  You have never seen a city as completely incompetent at dealing with snow as Washington DC.

I mean, two feet of snow is inconvenient anywhere.  But in DC, only the main streets have been plowed.  And by "plowed", I mean that one meager lane has been cleared, so that even major arteries like New York Avenue frequently narrow to one lane.  The side streets have been turned into defacto one-way streets--except that no one knows which way.  The result is a lot like driving on a country road in Ireland, where you are apt to come upon someone going the other way, and then spend precious moments staring at each other until one party reluctantly backs up to a wider spot.

The difference is that Irish drivers are somewhat familiar with the conditions.  DC today is the province of taxi drivers and SUV owners who seem simultaneously confused and overconfident.  As I eased down the street in our little Japanese sedan, I quickly surmised that none of the drivers in the bite-sized tanks surrounding me had ever seen snow before.  Three blocks later I revised that opinion:  I don't think any of them had ever seen cars before.  Certainly not the ones they were operating.

Apparently, if you buy an SUV in the Greater Washington DC area, this gives you license to drive much faster than the rest of traffic on a road that only has one open lane.  Unfortunately, it does not give you any basic information about the function of four wheel drive--such as the fact that while 4WD does allow you to accelerate better in snowy conditions, it does not improve your braking ability.  Nor, as one of my twitter mates pointed out, does it enhance your turning power.  And of course, four wheel drive will not stop you from fishtailing on the slick layer of slush covering a solid base of hard-packed snow.  I witnessed one minor fender bender and three near accidents in the perhaps three miles that I covered this morning.

By the time I finally got to the grocery store, I discovered the scene many of you have already viewed on cable television.  There was virtually no meat.  There were no eggs--I thought I was missing them, until I realized that the egg section comprised the rows and rows of empty shelves stretching beneath one lonely carton of egg beaters.  The frozen pizzas were pretty well decimated.  Oddly, all of the shredded cheese and sliced cheese was gone, but there was plenty of the stuff in blocks.  And I scored the last three containers of Yoplait Light.  Oh, and the last four twelve-packs of regular diet coke.  Sorry, Safeway shoppers--but I'm told that Diet Dr. Pepper tastes more like regular Dr. Pepper.  More than what, I couldn't say.

I also noticed what Brian Caplan has remarked upon:  the store brand frozen foods were pretty much still stocked at normal levels.  This, even though Safeway's store brands tend to be private label versions of top premium brands--and more than occasionally, are better than anything else on offer.  I helped myself freely to their quite tasty rising crust pizza, but anyone who wanted a slab of Red Baron's tomato-flavored cardboard was out of luck.

Naturally, both the fresh and frozen vegetable sections were still stocked to overflowing.  I spent quite a bit of time last night making backup lists of vegetables I might buy, since I naturally expected that the produce would be picked over pretty well by now.  Silly Megan.  Apparently, when DC gets snowed in, it wants to do so with diet soda, Ritz crackers, six pounds of shredded cheddar, and a lifetime supply of stew meat.  Me, I'm making slow cooker spaghetti sauce tomorrow.

When I got to the store, the lines looked reasonable.  But by well before 9 am, they were stretching towards the back of the store.  God knows what was left for the people who put off their shopping until noon.

I understand that it doesn't necessarily make sense for DC to maintain plentiful snow moving equipment, when these types of heavy snowfalls only occur about once every seven years.  But it seems to me we could try to maintain some psychological readiness.  If this is how we react to a snow storm, what are we going to do when the Russkis invade?

Assigning Blame for the Budget Deficit

Veronique de Rugy has a good post on the limits of blaming Bush for the deficits. Yes, Bush enacted a horrible prescription drug benefit and tax cuts that didn't improve matters.  But the net increase in interest on the Federal debt under Bush was dwarfed by the current and future projected deficits, and will naturally shrink further as inflation returns.  And the tax cuts expire this year.  The proponents of blaming every single bad thing that happens on one George W. Bush offer the wan defense that, after all, it would be hard to not extend the tax cuts.  But that argument applies equally well to Bush; it would have been hard not to enact the tax cuts in the first place, and politically disastrous not to do a Medicare prescription drug benefit, and idea that was essentially forced on him by Democrats eager to curry favor with seniors.

But the fact remains that George Bush enacted a bunch of tax cuts, and did nothing to implement the spending control those tax cuts demanded.  He shouldn't have done that, even if voters would have been, like, rilly rilly mad if he didn't give them free drugs.

So, too, at some point, Obama has to take responsibility.  Listening to his defenders reminds me of those people who sit around whining about how their Dad was really distant and critical . . . I mean, fine, you apparently had a rotten childhood, but Dad can't get come and get you off the couch and find you a girlfriend and a better job.  Girls and employers get really creeped out if they try.

Whatever George W. Bush did or did not do, he's no longer in office, and doesn't have the power to do a damn thing about the budget.  Obama is the one who is president with the really humongous deficits.  Deficits of the size Bush ran are basically sustainable indefinitely; deficits of the size that Obama is apparently planning to run, aren't.  If he doesn't change those plans, he will be the one who led the government into fiscal crisis, even if changing them would be [sob!] politically difficult.

I have a serious question for the people who are mounting this defense:  at what point in his presidency is Obama actually responsible for any bad thing that happens?  Two years?  Five?  Can we pick a date for when bad things that happen on Obama's are actually in some measure the responsibility of one Barack Obama, rather than his long gone predecessor?  And then stick with that date?  Conversely, can we agree that as long as the bad things that happen are really George Bush's fault, any good things that happen should probably be chalked up to his administration as well?

Shoe, Meet the Other Foot

When a reader offered up this New York Times editorial, I confess I suspected he might have written it himself--it was so pitch perfectly hilarious.  But no, it's real:

June 23, 2005

Social Security Follies

Congressional Republicans have begun talking with top White House aides about an exit strategy -- not from Iraq, but from the winless quagmire of President Bush's campaign to privatize Social Security. Mr. Bush has responded to this new political reality by, first, insisting that the American people do not yet understand the virtues of privatization, and second, blaming the failure of his deservedly unpopular plan on Congressional Democrats.

That's absurd.

After listening to Mr. Bush talk of little else during his second term, the American people understand quite well what he is proposing for Social Security, and by wide margins reject it. In fact, the polls show that the more they learn about privatization, the less they like it. And with good reason. The very real risks of privatization -- in terms of retirement security and the enormous budgetary cost to the country -- far outweigh the potential rewards.

So when Congressional Republican leaders tell the president that Social Security private accounts are a nonstarter, they are conveying the informed views of their constituents.

Mr. Bush has reacted by railing against Democrats for obstruction -- as if Democrats are duty-bound to breathe life into his agenda and, even sillier, as if opposing a plan that the people do not want is an illegitimate tactic for an opposition party.

Rather than accept defeat and consider alternatives, Mr. Bush is becoming even more feckless as public and political opposition mounts. On Tuesday, in a lame ploy to draw the Democrats to the table, he gave tepid approval to a proposal by Robert Bennett, the stalwart conservative senator from Utah, to restore the system's solvency in a way that would not include private accounts -- all the while saying that he was not prepared to give up private accounts.

For contrast, I give you an editorial written just four and a half years later:

January 26, 2010

Editorial

Don't Give Up Now

It would be a terrible mistake for Democrats to abandon comprehensive health care reform just because voters in the Massachusetts Senate race last week decided that they liked the Republican, Scott Brown, more than the Democrat, Martha Coakley.

There is no question that without a filibuster-proof majority it will be a lot harder to pass a bill. But it should not be impossible if Congressional Democrats and the White House show courage and creativity. Health care reform is too important to throw away, and it is not too late to persuade voters that it is in their interest.

Congress is achingly close to passing legislation that would cover most uninsured Americans and provide much more security for all Americans -- guaranteeing that if they lose their jobs they will be able to buy affordable policies and can't be denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

If the Democrats quit now, so close to the goal line, the opportunity for large-scale reform could be lost for years. Meanwhile, the number of uninsured, currently more than 46 million, will keep going up and the cost of health care will continue to soar.

Many panicky Democrats see Mr. Brown's win as proof that angry voters will punish them in November if they press ahead with reform. We believe that is a misreading of what happened and what's possible.

Ms. Coakley ran an inept campaign. And the White House hasn't done enough to address voters' profound and legitimate fears about losing their jobs and their homes. But President Obama and Congressional Democrats have also clearly failed to explain why reform will make Americans' lives more secure -- not less.

What makes this all the more frustrating is that Massachusetts, which adopted its own very similar health care reform in 2006, is a compelling example of both the benefits and popularity of the effort.

A poll taken in Massachusetts after the election by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health found that a surprising 68 percent of those who had voted said that they supported their own state's plan, including slightly more than half of those who had voted for Mr. Brown.

Mr. Brown, who promised to block reform in Washington, voted for his state's program in 2006 and did not campaign against it this year. Instead, he argued that since Massachusetts' citizens already have coverage, why should they help pay to expand coverage elsewhere.

That cynical I've-got-mine argument doesn't make a lot of sense -- even in Massachusetts. The Senate bill would funnel additional money into the Massachusetts program and federal efforts to rein in costs should ultimately benefit all of the states.

Democrats should take another look at what really happened in Massachusetts and then summon the nerve to enact comprehensive reform. They must make clear to voters that they have little to fear. Even the mandate requiring everyone to buy insurance doesn't kick in until 2014. And they must make clear that reform offers immediate gains, especially for middle-class Americans.

Once the bill becomes law, many dependent children could remain on their parents' policies until age 26. Insurers would no longer be able to set lifetime caps on the amount they will pay for health care. Children could not be denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions. The gap in drug coverage for Medicare beneficiaries, known as the doughnut hole, would begin to close. And small businesses would immediately get tax credits to cover their employees.

Recent polls show that the public is divided, with more opposing the bills than favoring them. The negatives have been driven up by critics' distortions about a supposed government takeover of medicine and the tawdry deal-making necessary to win 60 votes to overcome a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

Still, a recent national poll by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that large shares of people became more supportive when told about such provisions as tax credits for small businesses that offer coverage, exchanges where people could choose among competing policies, and rules against denying coverage.

We are hearing a lot of talk in Washington, including from President Obama, about possibly paring down the current bills -- to cover many fewer of the uninsured and focus instead on reeling in the worst abuses of the insurance industry and reining in health care costs. That could be difficult technically; many of the parts are not easy to disentangle without undermining their effectiveness. And the politics on Capitol Hill -- where the Republicans are determined to oppose pretty much anything President Obama endorses -- are unlikely to get easier.

The most promising path forward would be for House Democrats to pass the Senate bill as is and send it to the president for his signature. That would allow the administration and Congress to pivot immediately to job creation and other economic issues. The Senate bill is not perfect, but it would expand coverage to 94 percent of all citizens and legal residents by 2019, reduce the deficit for decades to come, and create pilot programs to move the medical system toward better care at lower costs.

I've no doubt you could find equal and opposite editorials if you hunted through back issues of the Wall Street Journal. 

It may not make much difference, from a libertarian's point of view, when the presidency or control of congress changes hands.  But it does provide a hilarious spectacle.

Is Apple Paving the Way for Oligopoly?

Commenter Bosco Higgins offers an astute possibility as to why Apple might be signalling that they're willing to cut prices, even though this will just encourage consumers to wait:

If I had to guess I would say it is a pricing signal to its competitors (Kindle, Nook, Sony) saying that if they try to compete on price, Apple is prepared to willing to drop iPad prices. It is the old prisoner's delimma on pricing - Apple is trying to establish a cartel price and scare the other participants from defecting.

It's not a bad guess. Oligopolies can be maintained for quite some time with the right signaling games.  On the other hand, I'm not sure how credible a signal they can send.  Apple may eventually make most of its money from content, but right now it's a vendor of shiny hardware, which it sells at a hefty premium.  Amazon doesn't need to command a premium price in order to protect a brand image; they're a discounter, and that's why people like them.  If Apple starts getting into price wars, it's heading into uncharted and dangerous lands.

Apple Says it Will Lower Prices if iPad Doesn't Sell

Remember the kerfuffle over the original iPhone?  Apple charged luxe prices for the first few months, and then after it had wrung every possible dollar out of the early adopters, dropped the cost to capture more price-sensitive users.  Many of those who had bought early reacted with the righteous fury of a wronged spouse.

This time around, they can't say they weren't warned:  Apple has apparently already said that if sales of the iPad aren't brisk enough, it will drop the price.  I expect it will have to, if the company is to have any hope of hitting the 1-5 million sales analysts are projecting in the first year.  $500 is pretty steep for a netbook without a keyboard.

The question, of course, is "how low can Apple go?"  Apple could afford to drop prices significantly on iPhones, because they were driving big volume.  I just can't imagine that they're going to push 30 million iPads out the door in the first 3-4 years of its existence; it's ultimately something of a niche product.

One estimate is that the cheapest iPad costs $270 to manufacture.  Throw in advertising, transportation, distribution, and so forth, and maybe they can cut the price $100 if they're willing to make a slim profit in order to establish a market.  Of course, there's probably more room on the high-end models, and presumably costs will fall as they get more experience, and volume.  But I don't see them getting within striking distance of a Kindle particularly soon.

Still, they can probably cut the cost deep enough to make it worth waiting for.  So why announce it?  It seems to me that this practically guarantees a slow start to sales.

Obama's Hail Mary on Health Care

Asking Republicans to be part of a televised forum on health care reform is a clever move:  put up or shut up.  Nonetheless, I'd guess it probably fails.  Republicans are saying what you'd expect them to:  we won't engage in sham negotiations.  If you want us to come to the table, shelve this monstrous and unpopular plan and let's start over.

Democrats should recognize the tactic:  they invented it.  And used it successfully against Social Security reform in 2005.  Sure, they wanted to do Social Security reform, they said.  All Republicans had to do to bring them to the table was get rid of the central point of the reform:  the private accounts.  Astonishingly enough, they did not suffer at the polls, even though the president tried to stir up public discontent with their "obstructionism".  The problem is, the public doesn't get mad at you for obstructing things the public doesn't like.

Quote of the Day

Kenneth Anderson:

And  finally Joshua Kurlantzick, in the Boston Globe, "Dazzled by Asia," arguing that if you're assuming an emerging Chinese hegemony, you might be disappointed.   (To which I'd my own oft-repeated observation that if the corollary is longing for American decline and the rise of a new, post-American-hegemony, world of cooperative great powers in peace and harmony, think again -- the human right universalism of the last fifteen years has been an epiphenomenon of American hegemony, and if it fades, the human rights universalists fade with it.  A multipolar world is competitive and more aggressively Westphalian, not less.)

The Economics of Film Distribution

Interesting comment from one of our readers on digital film distribution:

I distribute films and did so for a major studio for some years. Not an exhaustive answer but here are a few things at work in no particular order.

The delay for video rental after the theatrical release is because the exhibitors (movie chains like Regal) insist on not having their business encroached by the home video market.

Studios are somewhat ambivalent about embracing online rentals for a number of reasons. With each new format VHS, DVD, Blue Ray etc. they have been getting to resell the same product to the same customer which may end with online sales.

Studios have been slow to do it but want to do their own digital distribution. On the other hand Netflix and Amazon are some of their largest customers and so are shy about going into competition with them.

Part of poor availlability in older titles has to do with the fact that ownership of the digital rights can be varied and hard to track down or establish. The studios may not own them. Some heir to some producer or star from back in the day may own them and no one is actively working to generate revenue with them. There may be fights for control of those rights that are keeping them from coming to market. Digital rights were not spelled out in contracts for films long ago.

The companies that specialize in monetizing the "brand" of a star like Marilyn Monroe typically only want to invest in a star that has lots of different revenue streams like merchandizing stuff ets. A great movie star who is not actually iconic, like a Walther Matthau for example, cannot generate enough revenue to pay for a company to work at keeping his films availlable in all formats, His films will only be moved into a new format when someone buys a whole library of content that has some of his work in it.

It isn't cost effective to spend the money establishing legal ownership of a film that won't sell many copies.

This is a little of what is happening and why. There is a real dearth of good economic history written about Hollywood. Some of this is also because so many decisions in this industry aren't made for economic reasons in a straightforward way - and a lot of the data and reasons people do make economic decisions are pretty propietary about their data.

On an Entirely Personal Note

Wedding planning tool of the century:  Google Docs.  I just realized you can email a form to your guests and have them put in their addresses, which go straight into a spreadsheet.  This was too valuable not to share with anyone who may be trying to get 100 of their nearest and dearest into a big room.

The Reality of Health Care Plans

A number of you have asked me what I think of Paul Ryan's health care plan.  I think it's a serious plan--but it's serious in the way that serious government plans are, which is to say that it has virtually no hope of being enacted as written.

Consider Matt Yglesias' relatively uncharitable, but accurate, summation:

Right now, the rapidly rising cost of health care implies rapidly increasing Medicare costs. Ryan doesn't have a plan to control those exploding costs. Instead, his plan is to refuse to pay the bill. This saves a ton of money. If instead of paying for old people's health care you just . . . don't pay for their health care, then you reduce expenditures a great moment. But the reason nobody's come up with this genius proposal before is that we've had a decades-long commitment to finding a way to ensure a dignified retirement, including adequate medical care.

Of course, this is true of the Democratic plans too; it's just that their "not paying" consists of equally arbitrary caps on provider payments which will cause some providers to exit Medicare, plus giving some board the power to decide what treatments we can't cover.  Whether you prefer the Democratic plan or the Republican plan boils down to whether you want the decisions about which stuff not to buy to be made by possibly ignorant consumers, or possibly arrogant technocrats.  I had a pretty good experience, when I was uninsured, with getting providers to think seriously about which costs it was worth imposing on me.  And I think that the ability of a centralized board to decide on "the right treatment" for 300 million patients is highly oversold.  But I was a pretty educated patient, so your mileage may vary.

The problem with both sets of plans is that the voucher cap would never withstand the assault from angry and frightened seniors, while the provider caps and treatment disallowals would never withstand the pressure of various other interest groups.  That's why I want to turn the Federal government into an income-based catastrophic insurer, for expenses that exceed 15-20% of AGI.  I don't think there's much hope of controlling cancer treatments or heart surgery.  But I think we could eliminate a hell of a lot of unnecessary day to day expenses--the ER visits of convenience and CYA tests for diseases there's no indication the patient has.  But the only way we'll do that is by making the consumer responsible for those costs.  Short of that, we're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Open Thread/Ask the Blogger

What do y'all want to talk about?

How Much Will Health Care Matter in the Fall?

When Wonk Room says that Obama is sending "mixed messages" on health care reform, I take it to mean "faint hope indeed".  So it's worth asking:  how much will this matter in November?

This is not another way of asking "are Democrats better off passing or not passing the bill?"  Rather, what I'm interested in is how much health care will matter compared to other issues, if we assume that the bill doesn't pass?

I'm guessing that it will not matter as much as we now think.  Everything that is imminent and vivid takes on an outsized importance in our minds.  So naturally, we tend to project that forward--to think that voters will still care as much about health care in nine months as they do right now.

Beyond that, I think that wonky types have tended to assign too much weight to health care in the 1994 elections.  When liberal pundits look back, they see the failure of something they'd been trying to pass for decades--one of a handful of the most important items on the progressive agenda.  Similarly, conservatives see that we almost underwent a radical transformation of one of the largest sectors of the economy.  Naturally, both groups tend to think of this as the most important thing that happened--and therefore, assign it the leading role in the Republican Revolution.

But that's not what was necessarily important to the voters, god bless their disinterested little hearts.  In fact, Clinton had passed an incredibly unpopular piece of legislation, the 1993 budget deal, which raised a bunch of taxes and didn't offer many goodies to voters.  Unemployment had taken two long years to fall, and still wasn't back to the levels that prevailed early in Bush's term.    The assault rifle ban was, as Sean Trende has noted, very unpopular in rural areas.

It's not clear to me that health care was paramount in peoples' decisions--arguably, exit polls show they still preferred the Democrats on health care.   Nor am I sure that it will be a key factor this time around.  The economy will probably be the largest factor, followed by the stimulus, the banks, and whatever other issues crop up between then.  I doubt that much of the electorate is going to punish Democrats for either being doofuses who can't get anything done (preferred liberal narrative) or blind autocrats trying to force their government run health care on America (preferred conservative narrative).  They'll be too worried about the economy. That's not really fair, of course; they can't magick the economy back into health.  But Democrats have benefited from such unhappy timing at least as often as they've been its victims.

All bets are off if they pass it, of course; voters do pay attention to laws that actually happened.  But hypothetical laws?  I have my doubts.

London Real Estate Bubble: Still Going Strong

In the US press, the real estate bubble is an example of American capitalist excess.  Anyone who has lived abroad knows better.  The American real estate bubble wasn't even particularly special by global standards.  Certainly, the British boom beats it for both size and staying power--according to Brett Arends, it's still going on.

Arends attributes this to the British government's hefty stimulus, and he may be right.  This is one of the uncomfortable questions that attends government intervention to keep financial crises from going too deep. We seem to know now how to keep bubbles from turning into Great Depression style disasters, with a combination of monetary policy, fiscal stimulus, and safety nets for both banks and individuals caught in the storm.  But what happens next?  Japan's Lost Decade?  Or are we just setting ourselves up for a bigger, badder bubble down the road?

My Quarterly Plea for Comment Thread Civility

As y'all know, I exercise a pretty light hand on the comments section.  That's a tough choice.  I could probably have a more civil comments section if I were more willing to delete nasty comments and ban trolls.

On the other hand, I don't trust myself in the position of censor.  That's why I'm pretty obsessed with a hard core version of the first amendment:  I don't trust anyone as a censor.  One will always find most outrageous those people who disagree with one's own pet notions.  If I started deleting comments, the net effect would be to pull the comments section towards agreeing with my particular brand of libertarianish, market-loving philosophy.  This is not, to my mind, the point of the comments section.  So I delete comments only when they are obscene or intolerably nasty; I ban people only when they have a history of repeatedly derailing threads, defaming my family, or similarly doing things that would get them kicked out of any decent private home.

So I have to ask you guys to do it for me. Play nice.  Don't call people names--any names, not just profane ones.  Don't characterize people as having bad motives.  Don't make absurd statements about how liberals, Republicans, or some other group are less virtuous, clever, empathetic, rational, pragmatic, civic-spirited, patriotic and so forth, than the fine, upstanding Americans on your side. 

In the first place, it's incredibly rude.  In the second place, it's basically never true.  (I give you one exception:  white supremacists are a bunch of vile racist jerks, and you are free to state as much in the comments section.  But you are *not* free to characterize those who oppose affirmative action as white supremacists).  And in the third place, while you lightheartedly believe that you are opening your opponents to justified ridicule, in reality all you achieve is to start everyone else snickering at you, because you sound like such a bigoted, arrogant fool.

Assume goodwill on the part of those with whom you are arguing.  Assume that they are basically good people.  Assume that they, like you, are trying to make the universe a better place for a small planet full of East Africans Plains Apes.  When you encounter a maddeningly frustrating argument, consider the following possibilities:

1. You are stuck on something that is ultimately a value judgement between two incommensurable and worthy goals:  the autonomy of women versus the future life of a fetus
2. One of you has misunderstood the argument of the other (and you may be the one in error)
3. There are key missing facts

Try to employ these exclusively, rather than the thesis so beloved of most of the internet: 

4.  My opponent is a selfish jerk who wants to bring as many people as possible under the dominion of his iron fist.  Also, he is stupid, has poor taste in clothes, and vivisects puppies in his spare time.

As to profanity, I ask you all to remember that my mother and father read this blog.  They, who watched me run on fat toddler legs through fields of grass in my little flowered sundresses.  They, who listened to my innocent lips burbling the Lord's Prayer on the way home from Sunday school.  Please do not say anything that you would not like a perfect stranger to hear you saying about, or to, their daughter. 

Many of you, liberal and conservative, are of course behaving yourselves splendidly.  Your comments bring joy to my weary heart, and wisdom to my withered brain.  Of you, I ask only one favor:  don't feed the trolls.  If people behave badly, don't respond.  Ignore them.  They are wailing toddlers seeking attention with a tantrum because they don't know any other way to get it.  Act accordingly.  If other commenters become unbearable (cough/Basic Fact/cough), email me.  I'm never unaware of it, and if the complaints get too heavy, I'll ban them.  Not that this will necessarily prevent them from coming back--but unlike feeding their madness, it at least provides temporary relief.

Thanks,

The Management

PS.  Any comments along the lines of "I would be civil, but I cannot stand idly by while you defame national health care and vivisect puppies!" will not be deleted.  But they will drive me into the sort of bleak, existential despair that I usually reserve for August afternoons spent reading Camus.

Update:  These rules are oldies, but goodies

1) No one gets to pick some time in the distant past when everyone was right, and declare that they draw their moral authority from the denizens of that halcyon era. The fifties and the sixties are over, folks. If your idea can't stand on its own now, its popular history won't help it.

2) Stop complaining that the other side is advocating for their ideas. Lying and deception are fair game for outrage; campaigning is not. If your ideas can't stand the heat, throw 'em out and get some better ones.

3) Stop calling the other side names. It's not just counterproductive; it's boring. Unless your rhetorical skills are something special, limit your attacks to their ideas.

4) Stop whining about what happened in the past. If politics were nice and perfectly fair every time, it wouldn't be politics, it would be nursery school. Clinton is out of office. I don't care what he did or did not do with any number of women, and I don't care what the Republicans did to him. It was five years ago. Get a new topic. Ditto the 2000 election. If Gore runs against Bush and loses then, you're going to look a little stupid.

5) Can the hypotheticals. I don't know whether Gore would have done all right in office after 9/11 or not. You don't either. You don't know what the Republicans would have said or not said about him, although I would point out to one commenter on this site that what restrained Daschle & Co. from criticising Bush for so long was neither good taste nor goodwill, and one can assume the same rough factors would have restrained the Republicans. Either way, you don't know. What's particularly odd is that the people presenting these hypotheticals always act as if they were irrefutable facts with which no one with smidge of reason could possibly disagree. "You can't tell me that if a plane had gone down in China on Clinton's watch, the press wouldn't have given him a full pass." Whatever, chum; the Psychic Friends Network just cut me off for non-payment.

6) If you have to fudge numbers and blur distinctions in order to make a case for your ideas, why do you believe them? If you don't understand the science or math behind an issue, why are you arguing with people who understand it better? Do you hope to convince them with the vast inertial weight of your ignorance? Or are you hoping to get them so frustrated by the difficulty of explaining climatology to someone who dropped out of freshman physics that they spontaneously combust? [unfortunately, this does not work -- ed.] Or do you just enjoy looking like a total idiot in public?

7) People should not be referred to as "Fascists", "Marxists", "Communists", "Nazis", etc. unless they are actually devotees of the schools of political thought, or members of the political parties, that those labels describe. Many people will be surprised to learn this, but those terms actually have specific meanings, which are not "The political orientation of anyone who strongly disagrees with me."

8) Assume, until proven otherwise, that your opponent is a person of goodwill. Accept that some things are value judgements that will not be argued away: between, for example, a higher absolute standard of living for the poor, or less inequality of income. Between economic growth and wilderness preservation. Between great taste and less filling. If you know that your opponent is factually or theoretically wrong, assume that this is ignorance or misinformation, not malice.

9) Do not walk in assuming that you occupy the moral high ground. No one listens to sermons except the converted.

10) If you're wrong, admit it at once. No one will fault you for being mistaken. Everyone will hate you for refusing to admit it. Andrew Sullivan et al. didn't go after Tapped because they got the numbers wrong, but because they refused to admit the possibility that the numbers were wrong, and wrote snotty posts about anyone who suggested they should check again.

11) Many people wander into the other half of the Blogosphere having carefully nurtured a plethora of witty responses to the straw man arguments that flourish in the echo chambers of both the liberal and conservative press. They are therefore expecting that as soon as they have shone the cold light of reason on the ridiculous notions of those rubes on the other side, all but the mean-spirited and vicious among them will immediately see the error of their ways. When they find out that those people have real live reasons for believing as they do, often bolstered by real live facts, they are hurt. This is not what they expected. They feel surprised, and somehow betrayed. At this juncture, they often choose to go on the offensive, name calling and writing sarcastic, bombastic screeds which often seem to center around the silliest and most biased material available to their side, yet are shocked to find out that libertarians are, for some reason, unconvinced by the latest publications from the CSPI. Often, defending their initial assertions against angles they hadn't, in their previous hothouse environment, really considered, leads them to take increasingly extreme positions in defense of their original unnuanced view, until having found themselves arguing that in order to, say, prevent abortions we should take down the name and phone number of anyone who ever paused in front of a Planned Parenthood Clinic and then hunt them down and shoot them, they flounce away after declaring that everyone on the site is a bunch of ignorant [expletive deleted] who kill babies for fun. If you find yourself caught in this cycle, I have news for you: they're not the ignorant [expletive deleted] here.

12) If, when someone seems to refute a point you have made, you say "That's not the point", you must then state what the point is. If they then refute that point, you are not allowed to say that that actually wasn't the point either, and the real point was some third thing that hasn't been yet refuted. Neither may you change the subject to tangential or related issues until you have conceded that you were incorrect about the first topic.

13) If you are going to attack someone for citing sources that are biased, do not try to prove this by using sources that are equally biased in the other direction; i.e., do not try to prove that Cato is wrong about something by flashing up a talking points memo from a Nader group. Your opposition could get seriously hurt laughing that hard. It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.

14) No one is much moved by exhortations to the effect that they're just selfish and mean. First of all, it's rarely true, except in the case of Objectivists, and they don't care.

15) I don't care how mad you are -- I mean it. No name calling. Unless they call names first. Even then, it's polite to fire a warning shot across the bow.

16) No, drug testing in schools is not the same thing as jack-booted thugs coming to our house in the middle of the night and making us "disappear". Neither are trigger guards on handguns. As much as you may disagree with these particular decisions, let's tone it down a little, 'kay?

17) And fer gosh sakes, will you get out a little more? The sureness of your own ineluctable moral superiority, of the venal stupidity of the other side, of the patent weakness of the opposition's arguments and moral fiber, is a little tiresome. Cruise around and see what the other side has to say. Then attack them. Nicely, of course. Really, it saves a lot of trouble putting words in the mouths of straw men when you can probably find some idiot somewhere who said pretty much the same thing, and think of how much less typing you'll do. Oh, and after you've slapped them around, it's polite to offer a handkerchief with which they can clean themselves up before they have to go back to work.

Cute

State Department vehicle hits journalist, breaking his knee, and gets the MPD to cite him for jaywalking.  Note to State Department:  if you hit a pedestrian walking anywhere near a crosswalk, you were at fault.  The accident is bad enough.  But trying to blame it on the victim is appalling.

Note to My Angry Liberal Interlocutors

Before you pop off at me, would you please try to read all the words in the post?  In order?

I say this because in the past few weeks, I've had a notable uptick of incidents where someone berates me by saying, "Well how come you don't think we need to help mentally ill people who have jobs!" or "You're completely ignoring the possibility that once a company gets a monopoly, they will jack up prices!", when I have spent a paragraph or so discussing exactly the problem that they are angrily demanding that I address . . . or rather, angrily declaring that my failure to understand this point is evidence of my total hypocrisy/ideological blindness/hatred of the unfortunate.

I have many flaws.  There is no need to go fabricating imaginary ones.

Can Monopolies Help Consumers?

By now, I'm assuming that most of you know the rough outlines of last week's dispute between Amazon and Macmillan.  The shorter version is that once the iPad was introduced, Macmillan used its new leverage to demand that Amazon let the publisher raise the prices of eBooks in order to protect sales of its front list hardcovers.  After a weak attempt at retaliating, Amazon folded.

The longer version you should get from our excellent Atlantic Business piece by Virginia Postrel.

So as soon as competition was introduced into the eBook market . . . prices to consumers go up?  This sounds like an odd outcome.  Isn't competition supposed to make prices go down?

Not necessarily.  Actually, if you're among the majority of Americans who view the Sherman Anti-Trust Act as one of the finest legislative achievements in our history, you'll be surprised to find that the evidence that breaking up monopolies helps consumers is actually kind of weak.  Monopolists often operate in markets where there are great returns to scale, and they keep competition out by offering prices too low for a smaller new entrant to compete.  After the breakup of Standard Oil, probably the Sherman Act's most famous scalp, prices for key petroleum distillates actually rose.

Government granted monopolies do display higher prices and poorer quality, because the government-granted monopolies don't need to worry about new entrants.  If cartel agreements were legally enforceable, all monopolies would look like Comcast.

But Kindle's strategy was on the "benevolent monopolist" side:  Amazon wanted to attain a virtual monopoly over the eBook market by using its bargaining power to keep the prices of eBooks low.  Once Steve Jobs showed that he was willing to give publishers better terms, that bargaining power was eroded.

Does that mean consumers are worse off?  Maybe.  As someone who likes to consume cheap electronic reading material, I'm tempted to say yes.  But the publishers would say that if consumers like new books, they need profit margins high enough to feed the queue.

There's also the possibility that once companies have gotten a monopoly, they will start gouging consumers.  In practice, you see less of this than you'd think, because in the absence of some sort of legal protection of their monopoly status, they can't act so badly that people start switching to other companies.  But that's not to say it doesn't exist.

Still, I think it's worth noting that while we usually discuss antitrust as a means of helping consumers, in fact, it's more obviously successful at helping competitors.  This is why libertarians are so often against antitrust interventions:  they don't recognize a right to be free from competition, even the "unfair" kind.

It may also explain why the harshest actions against Microsoft have come out of the EU.

How Unions Work

In a valiant attempt to defuse the ideological conflicts between the reformist and traditionalist wings of the liberal education wonketariat, Matthew Yglesias argues that this disagreement is not not ideological at all.  Rather, it is an artifact of past decisions about educational structure:

Take, for example, the hot issue of teacher compensation. The traditionalist view is that teachers should get paid more for having more years of experience and also for having more degrees. The reform view is that teachers should get paid more for having demonstrated efficacy in raising student test scores. This is an important debate, but I think it's really not an ideological debate at all. I think the only reason it's taken on an ideological air is that unions have a view on the matter and people do have ideological opinions about unions in general. But if we found a place where for decades teachers had been paid based on demonstrated efficacy in raising student test scores, then veteran teachers and union leaders would probably be people who liked that system and didn't want to change to a degree-based system. Because unions are controversial, this would take on a certain left-right ideological atmosphere but it's all very contingent.

This is a very interesting thesis, but ultimately I think it's wrong.  There is a reason that unions kill merit pay, and it's not because they just happened to solidify in an era when merit pay was out of fashion.

To state the obvious, unions negotiate ironclad contracts to cover dozens, hundreds, or thousands of workers.  Once they take effect, those contracts are rarely renegotiated, and they apply to every single worker no matter what the situation.  So unions are always going to be looking for the simplest, least subjective metrics by which to measure their members.  Furthermore, they will be looking for metrics which are not under the control of the other side.  The school board cannot change how many years you have in service, or whether or not you have a degree.  But it can change the curriculum, or the tests.

Obviously, people who are not in unions write employment contracts, which are similarly hard to write.  But non-union employment contracts operate in an environment where both sides often hope to continue the relationship beyond the initial term.  This offers quite a bit of good-faith flexibility, because people who are too rigid about the exact letter of their contracts are apt to find that their contract isn't renewed.  Even in contracts with a very definite term, there are reputational considerations.  That's just not how unions operate, because the union can't be fired by the employer.  When the contract expires, you're going to negotiate another contract.  The result is that people in non-union employment contracts can tolerate quite a bit more ambiguity on both sides than people in a collective bargaining situation.

The unhappy corollary of this is that the metrics will not only tend towards simplicity and ease of measurement; they will also tend to reward mediocrity.  Again, this is not an accident of history.  A collective bargaining unit run by a "majority rules" system is always going to look for a system that rewards the median or modal worker, not the best.

A merit pay system can work in one of two ways.  It can benchmark teachers against the average, and reward the people who achieve the most improvement. Or it can set some minimum standard and give a bonus to any teacher who bests that standard.  (You could set three tiers, or what have you, but the concept is basically the same).

In my opinion, the first system is probably going to best maximize productivity (though this is an interesting discussion for another blog post).  But it would never pass a union vote, because the majority of teachers wouldn't benefit from it, and those who did would have to work harder.  The second system might pass.  But the union would make heroic efforts to water down the benchmarks until the majority of their members were receiving at least some "bonus" pay.

But compare either system to what now exists in our nation's schools.  Every single teacher can stay on for years unless they do something direly wrong.  Every single teacher can get a useless education degree, which basically requires a pulse.  They have a system that spreads benefits absolutely evenly among all their members. 

How would any alternative gather majority support from the union members?  I mean, you can add on resistance to change, which I think is significant.  But even if they were picking a new system from scratch, the seniority + degrees system is clearly going to satisfy many more members than either of the merit pay alternatives.  It would probably be the majority choice no matter what.  And of course, over time, teacher's unions select for the sort of people who prefer this arrangement to competitive merit pay for one reason or another.

Unions are set up to minimize frictions and maximize benefits for the bottom 55%.  That's how they work everywhere--in schools, and out.  That's how they have to work.  No amount of cajoling, no number of white papers, is going to change that.

Cue the Lawyer Jokes

Treasury department is seeking mentally retarded lawyers.

Toyota's Weekus Horribilus

I cannot get too interested in the conspiracy theorists asking whether the US government doesn't now, due to its ownership of GM, have a conflict of interest when it starts publicly raking Toyota over the coals.

Item One:  Toyota didn't handle this particularly well, and there's at least some suggestion that they downplayed problems that were killing people.

Item Two:  Many people in our government already had ample bad incentive to rake Toyota over the coals, because they come from states where the UAW is popular.

Now, there's no question that this is good for American automakers, since their lingering reputation for terrible quality has historically handicapped them in competing against the Japanese.  But I'm willing to bet the biggest beneficiary is Ford, not GM or Chrysler.  Ford is perceived as basically healthy; the other two, as crippled and weak.

What it means for Toyota should be a management shakeup.  The US is a huge market, and they just did brutal damage to their brand on one of their two or three biggest selling points. People are going to want to see rapid commitment to making sure this never, ever happens again.  Moreover, it would be good for Toyota to actually make such a commitment.  How do you design floor mats that will kill people if used improperly?  Giving engineers power is a great way to get quality improvements.  But they have to keep in mind that they're designing cars for normal people, not engineers.

Great Moments in Campaign History

By the way, the number of liberals using "I voted for it before I voted against it" as an example are kind of missing the point.  I suspect many of them never understood why this was a powerful moment in the 2004 campaign, and thus don't understand why its lessons don't really apply here.

The reason that Kerry got punished for this is not that he changed his mind.  The reason he got punished is that he voted against something popular--funding for troops.  "I voted for it before I voted against it" was seen (correctly) as a weaseling attempt to avoid taking responsibility for a vote that turned out to be politically unpopular.  Kerry's reputation as a "flip-flopper" played into a perception that he was unprincipled and opportunistic--not that he was indecisive. That was Carter's image problem, not Kerry's.

Had the bill been unpopular, it would probably not have had such a connotation.  Any moderately competent spin doctor would have said, "Well, I was assured that the problems with the original bill would be solved in a later stage of negotiations.  Unfortunately, the bill got worse instead of better, and I was forced to vote against it."  It might not have been a huge winner, but it would never have turned into a catchphrase, and might well have enhanced the good senator's reputation as a judicious maverick who is willing to change his mind when the facts change.

New PPP Poll Suggests Dems Should Pass Health Care?

So what to make of the new PPP poll suggesting that Demcorats are marginally better off passing health care than not?  I take it seriously.  But not too seriously, for the following reasons:

1.  It's a national poll, but congressmen are running in local races.  The poll shows that Democrats say they are more likely to turn out, and independents who like health care reform say they will like their representatives better, if it passes.  But we don't know where those base members and HCR-favoring independents live.  They probably are not clustered in a state like Arkansas, where over 60% of the voters polled by PPP (a Democratic outfit) reported that they were against health care reform.  Motivating the base in California in New York isn't going to save Blanche Lincoln.

2.  Polls are an okay guide to public opinion about things (with the usual caveats about framing).  They are not a good guide to what people will do.  Just ask the executives who brought you New Coke.  The customers they surveyed overwhelmingly said they'd switch to New Coke.  They weren't lying; they just didn't know what they were actually going to do. 

3.  Another round of health care legislating might drive its popularity down even further in the polls.  Which would make passing the legislation even more costly.

4.  Passing HCR has opportunity costs.  Time spent negotiating this is time not spent passing some other piece of legislation that might actually move your popularity upward in November.  Nancy Pelosi doesn't care about such fripperies; her seat is safe.  But anyone in danger cares very much.

5.  Passing health care will refresh the public's memory of it.  The longer ago an electoral initiative happened, the less salient it is.  In an election year, even three months matter.

6.  Evidence from an actual election offers some counterevidence to the PPP poll:

There were two controversial pieces of legislation that defined the Clinton Administration for Republican-leaning voters: the assault weapons ban and the first Clinton budget (a.k.a. the tax hike). If we look at the fifteen Democrats who voted against both pieces of legislation, only one lost (she represented a district that gave Bush a 15-point win in 1992). In fact, about half of them saw their share of the vote increase or stay roughly the same from 1992!

Let's move on to Democratic incumbents who represented Republican-leaning districts who voted for only one of these two pieces of legislation. There were thirty-seven such Democrats. The casualty rate here is a little higher; thirteen of them, or thirty-five percent of them, lost. And of the twenty-two Democrats from Republican-leaning districts who voted for both pieces of controversial legislation, ten of them (45%) lost.

In other words, the problem for Democrats in 1994 was not that they didn't support Clinton's agenda enough. It was that they got too far out in front of their conservative-leaning districts and supported the President too much.

Maybe I'm a heartless econblogger type, but I'll take revealed preference over stated preference every time.  Now who is willing to take the other side and argue that it was no easier for Republicans to campaign against real, existing, hated laws than to campaign against phantom ClintonCare?

Beware of Pundits Bearing Predictions

Harry McCracken walks through the iPhone naysayers, and wonders if those who panned the iPad will look as foolish in the next few years.

This specter always haunts pundits, and every time I'm tempted to make predictions about products that are too firm, I recall William Goldman's famous adage that "No one knows anything".  If Steven Spielberg had realized that 1941 was going to flop, he wouldn't have made it.  But he couldn't tell, and there you are.

That said, I'm still unsure how the iPad gets around the core problem:  it doesn't replace anything.  Buying an iPhone let me take my phone, my camera, and my iPod out of the briefcase.  Buying a Kindle let me remove a newspaper, several books, and some documents I have on PDF.

What does the iPad let me take out?  Not my laptop, because it can't multitask and I'd have to add a portable keyboard.  Not my iPhone.  Maybe I could take out my Kindle, but then I'd have to put books back in for long plane journeys.  The best I get is a couple of magazines, which aren't exactly causing me space or weight issues.

Maybe I'm missing something.  It sure looks cool.  But that's not enough to justify the outlay.

Deficit Hawks: Don't Tax, and Spend

"Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree" ~ Senator Russell Long

So now the fiscal hawks have been asked to put their money where their mouth is and actually cut some spending, it turns out, they have some reservations.  I mean, of course, they want to cut spending.  They want it with a rare passion.  They just don't want to cut any spending that might, y'know, be done in their districts.

It is this sort of thing that makes me wonder if I ought to be despairing at our fiscal future.  I'm not, yet.  Most countries as developed as ours do get their deficits under control, when they have to.  We just don't quite have to at this point.  In our own past, when push came to shove, we shoved taxes up and put the brakes on spending.

On the other hand, California's crisis is rather novel, and perhaps it presages something in the federal future.  The fiscal hawks are living in a fantasy world where there exist some imaginary spending cuts that don't affect anyone's district.  Those who favor tax increases have convinced themselves--or at least, the electorate--that they can fix everything by raising taxes on a tiny slice of the very wealthy.  That way lies fiscal crisis.

Greece's Monetary Trap

The Greek government has just unveiled a new fiscal austerity plan. With a combination of tax increases and spending cuts, it aims to get budget deficits down to about 3% of GDP--10 percentage points lower than where it is now.

Everyone is expressing optimism.  But while this sort of belt-tightening is necessary for Greece to stay in the EU, it's going to come at a huge cost.  Greece is already in recession--that's why its budget problems loom so large--and the fiscal contraction will only make them deeper.  Meanwhile, the EU will be setting its interest rates to meet the needs of larger, healthier members (and inflation-hawk bondholders).  Tight fiscal and monetary policy means a long, painful period ahead for the Greeks.

This is the dilemma that faced Argentina with its monetary peg to the dollar; ultimately, it led to devaluation and default.  We will see if Greece can whether it better.

Quote of the Decade

I somehow missed this one.  Puts today's posts in an entirely new, and more ridiculous, light:

"We need to stand up to the special interests, bring Republicans and Democrats together, and pass the farm bill immediately," Barack Obama

Depratment of Huh?

Thomas Levenson cites me in a simply bizarre way when talking about the decision by Colorado Springs to slash its budget for many public services:

This, from the Denver Post, on the city of Colorado Springs' discovery that taxes actually pay for things that people, you know, need and use. (h/t Atrios).

This is, among other things, what folks like Megan McArdle never seem to get -- not merely that governments do things that (a) private entities won't and or can't and (b) that are necessary if you are, say, going to have thousands or millions of folks living in close proximity to each other, and (c)  those things that need to be paid for -- by the people in common, that is to say, by government -- include a bunch of stuff essential for a sound economy and any chance of achieving what is commonly thought of as the American way of life.

That is -- it might be hard to quantify the contribution of adequate street lighting to GDP -- but ask yourself what it would do to retail sales to have pools of darkness every thirty feet along a commercial street.

Or -- it may not show up on a a monthly report of manufacturing output, but ask yourself whether the long-tail consequences of a diminished police presence in a factory district might include an impact on that district's safety, and hence production -- or if a change in fire response times could translate into altered insurance costs.

And you don't even have to ask the speculative question about the value of investment in school facilities and in the quality of public schooling as discovered in very real dollars in the home valuations realized by property owners in the relevant districts.  That's on that answers itself.

I mean, it makes a certain amount of sense, insofar as I am one of the internet's leading advocates for getting rid of the police and fire departments, cutting spending on education, and eliminating street lights . . .

Oh, wait a minute, that was one of those anarcho-capitalists I once met at a cocktail party.  Like Thomas Levenson, I frequently confuse them with myself. 

It's easy to do, because we share so many policy preferences:  my support for the FDIC, my advocacy of a negative income tax, and of course, my belief that America should levy a stiff source-fuels tax on all fossil fuels.  Unless you actually see us standing next to each other, you'd think we were, like, identical octomilletuplets.

But here's an easy way to tell:  is Megan in favor of the existence of a government?  Why, yes, she is!  Which means she believes that some things are public goods, and is therefore not an anarcho-capitalist.  One over here, the other over there.  Like Kibbles and Bits--the same, but different.

The second way to tell if I resemble Thomas Levenson's description is a little more complicated:  have I ever advocated getting rid of the police, streetlights, or education spending?  Why no, I haven't!  Of course that way requires actually firing up Google, which means you could sprain your fingers. You can understand why Thomas Levenson didn't want to risk it.

So if you are a liberal with a similar dilemma, let me see if I can't undo some of your confusion regarding what those crazy libertarians might believe.  It all starts with a very simple proposition:  the existence of public goods does not imply, as a corollary, that all good things should be public.

If you can't understand why a libertarian is against your program, start with the possibility that they might not think it is a true public good.  That way you don't need to jump straight to the ludicrous conclusion that opposing your new boondoggle means they logically must also want to rip down the guard rails on the highway.

America's Perpetual Almost-Decline

I am generally impatient with the narratives of American decline.  I have been alive for thirty-odd years now, and it seems that for my entire adult life, the nation has been just on the brink of plunging over some abyss or the other.  That Japanese were going to buy the country lock, stock, and barrel.  Our manufacturing jobs were going to evaporate.  We were descending into the dark night of fascism.  The Chinese are going to steal all of our clean jobs.  Etc.

As I wrote in the post I linked, way back in 2004:

So after fifty years of sullenly expecting it, the doom everyone was waiting for has not only failed to come to pass--even the worry about it has faded utterly. And we achieved this neither by defeating the Soviet Union in battle, nor by unilaterally disarming, the two solutions that were most widely proposed as the only thing that could save us from this disastrous fate (and the former only in the few brief years before Russia tested her first nuclear weapon).

Why do I bring this up? Well, because the failure of one impending doom to come to pass has not stopped other prophets from pushing theirs.

. . . . A few weeks ago, I was talking to a libertarian who was arguing that the Patriot Act was a one-way ticket to totalitarianism. We were violating fundamental rights that had been enshrined in the constitution for 200 years, and once we'd given them up, it was going to be a short step on the slippery slope to a police state. I share her fear of government intrusiveness. But this a markedly ahistorical view of the constitution and the liberties it allows us to enjoy, which is no more accurate for its extreme prevalence in libertarian circles. There is no primal state of liberty, created by the Constitution, from which we have slowly but inexorably been moving away. Liberties have been granted, and taken away, and granted again throughout the history of our country. Just off the top of my head: Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, the Palmer raids, the detention of the west coast Japanese in camps during World War II, the committment of anyone FDR or one of his minion's thought was especially dangerous to the war effort to St. Elizabeth's mental hospital during same, the McCarthy hearings--see this wonderful Richard Posner piece for a more elegant exegisis of the history of American liberties. The shape of liberty has changed over the 200 years of our existence, expanding in some places and contracting in others. There is no libertarian eden, located somewhere in the American past, from which we are now fallen, or falling.

Now, this doesn't mean that the Patriot Act is a good thing. But the fact that we have the Patriot Act now does not mean, as many libertarians ardently argue, that we will always have the Patriot Act. If the Patriot Act is bad, we should vigorously fight it. But there is no need to construct doomsday scenarios in which the existance of the Patriot Act consigns us to a totalitarian future.

Not to dump on libertarians exclusively, because everyone seems to do it. Social conservatives think we're doomed because the institution of marriage has been dangerously undermined, and is therefore likely to disappear entirely, along with God, patriotism, and the super-sized big mac meal, if we don't do something, quick. A large number of wonkish types (including, on odd days, me) spend a lot of time worrying about the possibility that our old-age entitlements will drive us into disastrous bankruptcy; few of us stop to reflect on the many, many unsustainable economic trends that have worried policy wonks right up until the moment that the impending doom suddenly solved itself under the inexorable logic of Herb Stein's famous dictum: "If something can't go on forever, it won't." Many liberals, like Paul Krugman, think that we nearly got into socioeconomic eden sometime around 1966, give or take, and have been staging a fast retreat towards armageddon ever since; marginal tax rates and some forms of social spending here take the part of doom-bringer, even though on every measure except simple inequality, the lives of the poor and the middle class seem to be richer in material goods, leisure, and quality of work than they were in the Golden Era of America's Middle Class.

That's not to say that liberals shouldn't want more progressive taxes and social spending, policy wonks more sustainably structured entitlements, social conservatives more traditional cultural values, or libertarians more freedom. It's perfectly reasonable to look at the way things are and say "they could be so much better if . . . " What we shouldn't do is compare our present to some highly airbrushed past, or mindlessly extrapolate trends, and thereby hastily conclude that we're all going to hell in a handbasket.

Madeline Albright spoke at my sister's graduation last weekend, and during her speech she said something to the effect that the world situation now was scarier than it had been at any time since World War II. This is a common belief -- commoner among liberals, but not exclusive to them. But huh? Think of what the world looked like to George Orwell. Nazism defeated, but at terrible cost--and no one knew, then, that Fascism wouldn't re-emerge. Russia, with Stalin still at its helm, devouring Eastern Europe. The most terrible weapon ever imagined recently used for the first time, and every nation with two scientists to rub together working hard to develop their own, personal holocaust-maker. The Cold War incipient in the battles over Berlin. And, if you're Orwell, a nasty case of tuberculosis, and no nice antibiotics to cure it. Things were bleak.

Yet we made it through, with a modicum of liberty and a splash of human kindness, and now democracy is springing up like mushrooms everywhere you look, poverty is steadily decreasing, though perhaps not as fast as we'd like, and wars are killing fewer and fewer humans each decade. The world is a pretty good place to live, and getting steadily better for almost everyone. As flawed as the human race is, we seem to be a lot better than the doomsayers think at muddling through.

I stand by this.  Times are bad right now.  But they were bad in every previous decade, too, one way or another.  I'd say they're worse than usual, but that is a data point, not a trend.

I am particularly weary of the notion that the failure to pass a health care bill proves that the American government, and/or the Republican party, has entered some unprecedentedly awful phase that have rendered the nation "ungovernable".  This confuses passing your parochial policy preferences with "governing".  America is still being governed about as well as she ever has been, and if you think that this is not so, try going somewhere like Somalia, or Haiti, which really doesn't have a functioning government. 

I have a simple three-step test to indicate whether a country is "governable":

1. Is it having, about to have, or living in the aftermath of, a coup?
2. Has the civil war killed at least 1% of the population?
3. If an alien landed and demanded to be taken to see a representative of your government, would you be unable to comply with this request?
   

If your answer to any of these questions is "yes", then you may be living in a country that is ungovernable, and should consult the World Bank, or an arms dealer, if the symptoms do not resolve within a week.

Otherwise, you are living in a functional nation-state.  You may not like what the government does (or doesn't do), but it is governable, and indeed, is being governed right this very minute!

It isn't even true that it has somehow become impossible to pass important legislation.  The two most recent things that absolutely had to be passed immediately--the bank bailouts, and the stimulus--were.  Maybe they were bad ideas.  But it turns out that Congress can still pass bills, even unpopular ones, if the matter is sufficiently urgent.

I don't find it particularly surprising that Democrats with a numerically large but politically weak coalition found it difficult to persuade their members to pass a politically unpopular bill in the face of an electorate that has made it clear it will un-elect anyone who thinks that they aren't accountable to the voters.  I certainly don't view it as evidence of catastrophic decline.

Nor do I find it particularly surprising that Republicans with a numerically small, but politically fairly uniform coalition, find it easy to maintain party discipline.  It is not even the first time that such a thing has happened.  The Democrats maintained just such party discipline during Social Security reform, with similar results.

Maybe the Republicans are really taking obstructionism to some unprecedented new level, but you can't prove it by health care reform. 

The fact is, Republicans maintained party discipline in the face of some pretty strong Democratic party discipline.  Democrats love to describe themselves as "open to compromise", but what they mean by this is that if they could have gotten the Republicans to sign onto this vast new edifice to which the GOP (and their base) was radically opposed, Democrats would have been willing to make some trivial tweak like adding a weak tort reform position.  Would Democrats have signed onto social security privatisation, if Republicans had been willing to do EFCA in exchange? 

Some things just aren't open to compromise.  A compromise bill would have looked like something else entirely--more like Medicare Part D. It wouldn't have been "HCR 1.01".

Moreover, Republicans maintained this discipline in the face of the bill's growing unpopularity--just as Democrats did with Social Security reform.  If the public had displayed strong majorities in favor, some GOP members would have defected, just as some Democrats would probably have reluctantly gone along with Social Security reform if the GOP had kept its favorables above 50%. 

Don't get me wrong:  I think that the American government doesn't work that well, for reasons well described by Jonathan Rauch.  It does many things that I don't like, and the ones that I do like, it mostly does in some grotesquely inefficient manner.  But that's not new.  Is it really novel, nor surprising, to find that even parties with large majorities find it difficult to pass very unpopular bills on straight party-line votes?

In the near future, I expect Obama to focus more on popular measures that Republicans will have a hard time opposing, and unsurprisingly, these measures will face less opposition.  We will continue to muddle along.  Neither our government, nor our country, will be close to perfect.  But you need only read some history, or travel in the third world, to realize that imperfect as they are, things will still be really damn good.