Instead of having a plan developed behind closed doors and then you have to vote for it to find out what is in it, you legislate the old fashioned way, congressional vote by vote. “A return to regular order“. The great advantage of this is its great disadvantage. Congress cannot centrally plan the economy, or any significant part of the economy. No one central plan can receive a majority vote, or even a large plurality. Your are only going to …
Category: economics
Why Ryancare will not work
Ryancare, like Obamacare, involves cross subsidies. Some people wind up subsidizing other people. The resulting landslide of rules and regulations will shut down competition, with the result that everyone plus the government winds up paying unreasonable prices. Ryancare requires that insurance cover people with pre-existing conditions. That is not insurance, that is a handout. If the government is going to give people handouts, should be done openly through government funded hospitals and the like. If you rope private enterprise into …
The cost disease part 2
Costs of many important things, in particular education, housing, and healthcare are rising in ways that create artificial first world poverty, the inability to afford a wife and children. Scott Alexander wrote a superficially thoughtful and well informed examination of these problems, which analysis was made stupid by crimestop. A lot of high intelligent well informed people responded with explanations of the problem which accurately described parts and details of the problem, but crimestop prevented them from seeing, or at …
The cost disease
Some leftists and a PC libertarian have noticed that progress is not progressing: Education, healthcare, and infrastructure is getting much more expensive without improving in quality, and in many respects declining in quality. Doctors no longer make house calls. Education teaches ignorance and stupidity. Infrastructure has brutalist architecture. Naturally they are completely mystified about what is causing it because crimestop makes them stupid. First world poverty – the inability to afford a wife and children – is as artificial as …
The psychological benefits of protectionism
Free trade is good on average, but: 1. Protectionism declares production, which is at present condemned as fascist nazi sin against Gaia, to be righteous and good. Protectionism strikes at the moral superiority of progs, who think that shutting down factories, mines, and sawmills is inherently virtuous. 2 . International agreements like the Transpacific Partnership are not free trade, and impair people’s ability to form families and have children, which harms the kind of people that voted for Trump. 3. …
Trump’s healthcare plan
Trump has explained the free market part of his healthcare plan in detail. It is heavily influenced by the free market part of Singapore’s tremendously successful free market healthcare system. I have no doubt that if implemented as described, it is going to work and work well. Trumps plan for the free market healthcare system is great. But what about Singapore’s socialist healthcare system for the poor and unfortunate? Trump gets vague. Hospitals, he tells us, are going to get …
The perils of government intervention in health care.
It is mighty embarrassing if a sick person is turned away from hospital to die in the street because he has no money. So the kindly government insists that sick poor people be treated for free. But if the hospital is going to treat poor people for free, then the hospital is going to besieged by people with carefully memorized symptoms for vague and difficult to treat diseases who show up looking for a bed, some food, and some human …
Replacing Obamacare
The major problem with the American healthcare system is that it has no prices, making it a completely non market system. It also has a massive redistribution from whites to nonwhites, which wealth redistribution system disrupts the provision of healthcare. What tends to happen is a hospital treats a hundred illegal immigrants for morbid obesity, and they do not pay their bills, and then it treats one white male, and he does pay his bill – which is set high …
Nuclear Technological decline
The US no longer produces weapons grade plutonium. Supposedly this is a choice. It has asked other countries to not produce weapons grade plutonium, and to get rid of the weapons grade plutonium they do have. The economical way to destroy weapons grade plutonium is to burn it in nuclear reactors, to use it for power, which destroys some of it and irreversibly contaminates the rest with plutonium 240, making it unusable for weapons, though still usable for power. Unfortunately, …
Civilization and dysgenesis
We may reasonably suppose that the first six civilizations were founded by high IQ peoples. Their homelands are now all occupied by low IQ peoples, as for example Egypt and the Indus Valley. And any smart people currently in the vicinity of the Indus valley are descended from foreign invaders who conquered a low IQ population that had lost or was losing the capability to operate cities and irrigation. The Maya created writing and the positional number system, and used …