Archive for the ‘economics’ Category

The perils of government intervention in health care.

Monday, January 16th, 2017

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 contact.

So, the next thing the government should do is empower to the hospital to turn away unwanted patients with a jab from a stun gun. But they don’t, because that looks kind of bad. But they do kind of sort of give the hospital some kind of monopoly power, and some power to hurry up patients who are taking too damned long to die. And then to the government’s surprise they find the hospital is mistreating and murdering affluent middle class patients. The government also finds that it still running up gigantic medical bills on bums, who are supposedly getting all sorts of extremely expensive medical treatment, though in fact they are getting this super expensive treatment only in the most superficial manner or not at all.

The hospital is rushing middle class patients out the door or into the morgue, while every corridor is piled high with incredibly expensive (and profitable) bums piled three to a urine soaked bed. (Yes, Canada, I am looking at you.)

When the government empowered the hospital to be quietly and furtively brutal and murderous, the intent was that the hospital only be brutal and murderous to the horde of bums besieging it – but they could not actually say that out loud, and if they had said it out loud would still find it difficult to get compliance.

So now the hospital is massively over treating bums, massively undertreating people who are genuinely ill with genuine diseases, and murdering any of its customers who are too sick and weak to protest. And medical costs are soaring.

So what should the government do?

Firstly, needs to hit who everyone lays down his head on a hospital bed with a high enough deductible that anyone who is not all that sick and who has to pay the deductible will not go near the hospital bed. It does not have to be all that high, does not need to be nearly as high as the Obamacare deductibles. Five hundred should do it. First thing that should happen on intake is a wallet inspection.

But suppose the patient does not have five hundred in his pocket, nor an acceptable credit card, and seems unlikely to pay. Then the nice friendly hospital for nice respectable middle class people sends him to the hospital for poor bums staffed by big ugly lesbian nurses with thick mustaches, where the first thing he meets is the death penal, with a big male guard holding stun gun, a baton, a taser, and a twelve gauge shotgun standing uncomfortably close beside him, and the death panel decides whether his treatment is likely to be cost effective.

Now at the nice friendly middle class hospital for nice middle class people we try to organize things so that the doctor and the hospital has to please the customer, if they are going to make some money, and the patient bears enough of the cost to scream bloody murder if overbilled or billed for nonexistent or barely provided services. Deductibles need to be high enough to hurt a bit, but not so high that they are, like Obamacare deductibles, frequently unpayable.

And at the hospital for poor bums, we provide all the wonders of socialist medicine so beloved by Bernie Sanders, modeled on the wonderful success of Cuban healthcare. </sarcasm>

If the hospital is in the business of handing out free beds and food, it is going to need to be able to whack undeserving customers with a baton, jab them with a stungun, and throw them into the street hard enough to bounce several times. On the other hand, you would probably prefer to send your elderly grandma to hospital that does not do that sort of thing. So we need to keep a good separation between the hospital that hands out freebies, and the hospital that does not hand out freebies.

Or, equivalently you need to have very different rules in place for treating the people who are getting free food and free beds, from treating the people who want to get out of hospital as soon as they can. You have to treat one lot pretty much the opposite of the other lot.

Replacing Obamacare

Thursday, January 5th, 2017

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 enough so that the one person who pays covers the hundred people who do not pay.

The best system is Singapore, which has a socialist healthcare system for the poor, and the most Ayn Randian hard core capitalist healthcare system in the world for everyone else.  Which system provides healthcare at a fraction of the cost of everyone else’s system and for the most part healthcare of substantially better quality.

If you are poor and sick, or sufficiently healthy that the quality of your healthcare does not matter much to you, you go to a government owned hospital, consult with a government employed doctor, buy government owned medicines from a government owned pharmacy.  Otherwise, you just pay for it as if you were hiring a plumber to make modifications to your bathroom. The major government intervention in the private sector is making pricing information accurate and available.  Private healthcare practitioners are free to dump people who will not or cannot pay on the socialist sector, or just not let them through the front door if they fail a credit check.

So the explicitly socialist system takes care of the pity cases, and the explicitly capitalist system takes care of everyone else.  So everyone else gets the benefits of capitalism, and only the poor or the healthy suffer the consequences of socialism.

Nuclear Technological decline

Sunday, October 9th, 2016

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, the US, in attempting to do so, ran into “massive cost overruns”, which is to say, technological decline. Putting it in breach of its agreements with Russia and Japan.

Under the US-Russian PMDA, originally signed in 2000, both parties agreed to dispose of at least 34 metric tons of weapons grade plutonium, enough to produce 17,000 nuclear bombs.

The US, however, has not disposed of any plutonium, despite spending a lot of money attempting to do so. If you cannot use it, probably cannot make it.

Civilization and dysgenesis

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2016

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 it to accurately predict the motions of the moon and sun. Their descendents were for the most part homeless nomads, their largest city being two hundred mud huts. Their great cities were abandoned, even when they commanded key resources. The descendants of the Maya are obviously incapable of operating a great civilization, indeed, without white rule, could not even have cities, or political units larger than tiny tribes with poorly defined territories. They wound up running naked through the jungle with pointy sticks to the extent that they had any jungle.

You would think that positive eugenics is natural in a civilization. The smartest people get to the top, command and effectively utilize all the good stuff, so have more surviving children. And sometimes it does work like that.

But if the smart people are the ruling and fertile people, they will proceed to ensure that their smart children get all the top jobs. This will disturb the topmost rulers, who would like to have limitless freedom to appoint obedient people to the good jobs, regardless of ability, and more importantly, regardless of family. In particular, they would like the freedom to not appoint the sons of powerful rival families. If you have a bunch of fertile smart industrious men inserting their kids into the top jobs, then you wind up with aristocratic or semi aristocratic system. The Bishop is succeeded by the Bishop’s son, which bothers the pope no end. The colonel is succeeded by the colonel’s son, which bothers the general, which bothers the King. One drastic solution, popular in China, is to give the top jobs to eunuchs. You want a top job, have to give up your man parts. Note the striking similarity with today’s political correctness, which requires metaphorical castration of males, and prefers literal castration of males.

Affirmative action for women makes a lot more sense when we recall that working women, unlike working males, do not reproduce, therefore will not be succeeded by their children. If you are a ruler, able (aristos) fertile patriarchal families are a problem, working women and eunuchs are the solution. And if the very smartest women are not all that bright, all the better, will be less capable of plotting against you. So the smartest females do not reproduce. Even if working women are substantially less productive than working men, working men are threat, working women are not a threat. Similarly any measures to prevent the affluent white male children of affluent white males from getting ahead. Such measures are rationalized in the name of social justice, but such measures give the most powerful more power.

From the point of view of the emperor, eunuchs are a better solution than working women, since eunuchs are substantially smarter than women, and have zero offspring, not merely near zero offspring.

A system of rule by the best (aristos) will, if the best are fertile, tend to become hereditary or semi hereditary. Thus patriarchy plus meritocracy will give rise to aristocracy, because affluent patriarchs have numerous sons, the meritocrats start running the system as a job placement program for their numerous sons, and the Pope will not be happy. Conversely, when the King tries to do stuff to make it less hereditary, he is apt to make the best less fertile.

One would suppose the mandarinate to be eugenic, and indeed China, unlike other civilizations, has not become a low IQ wasteland. But mandarin exam was corrupted to select for grinds rather than smarts. Any test can be gamed. The more that scoring high in the test matters, the less predictive of accomplishment it is. Thus selecting people on the accomplishments of their family and recent ancestors is apt to produce more accurate predictions than over reliance on an examination system. If the outcome of an IQ test has little direct effect on your career, it will accurately predict accomplishment. If you hand out nice jobs on the basis of an IQ test, considerably less so. If nice jobs are handed out on the basis of the test, the test is apt to become a marathon of rote memorization, which is what happened with the Chinese mandarinate exam. But for obvious reasons, emperors were unenthusiastic about handing out nice jobs on the basis of family accomplishment, for accomplished families are rivals.

Fertility in our civilization is of course massively dysgenic, because women are artificially placed in the workforce and education, with the most able women being most forcefully helicoptered into courses and jobs far beyond their ability.

As “Smart and Sexy” demonstrates, our mandarinate exam (the SAT and LSAT) has been jiggered to avoid selecting too heavily for ability. If, however, our mandarinate exam was fixed as proposed in “Smart and Sexy”, and if we had patriarchy, our civilization, like the Chinese, could avoid becoming a desolate wasteland of low IQ savages running through the woods with sharp sticks. And it would not be hard to make our mandarinate exam better than the traditional Chinese mandarinate exam.

The Chinese communist party currently selects on test results, on family accomplishment, and on individual accomplishment. This is likely to give substantially better results than the traditional Chinese mandarinate exam. Unfortunately they also are affirmative actioning women, probably for the same reasons we are, and this is producing significant dysgenesis in China.

Common Core Explained

Friday, August 12th, 2016

tl;dr

Problem: If you try to teach children reading, writing, and arithmetic, People of Color will underperform. Thus teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic has disparate impact.

Solution: Yo Stop teaching dem dat racist whitey sheeit what ‘chew thinkin’ man?

A child who has been educated with common core is a child who cannot do maths, cannot spell correctly, nor write grammatically. He is cut off from the past two thousand years of civilization.

Fertility and corporal punishment

Sunday, July 31st, 2016

To 1933, wives in movies are never spanked by their husbands.

From 1933 to 1945, wives in movies are sometimes spanked, but it is shocking, unexpected and unusual.

From 1945 to 1963, wives in movies and on television are sometimes spanked and it is routine, respectable, and usual. For example in “I love Lucy” we are never shown a spanking on screen, but Lucy is regularly very afraid of receiving a well deserved spanking for her many amusing misdeeds.

In the Western “McLintock” the authority figure, representing virtue, middle class respectability, and normality, unambiguously endorses the husband beating the wife severely for gross misbehavior, with a small coal shovel.

From 1945 to 1963, appropriate and proportionate corporal punishment of wives is depicted as normal, proper, appropriate, expected, and respectable. As in McLintock, it is what respectable middle class husbands do ensure that their wives and families behave in a respectably middle class manner – since women, unless restrained, have a not at all middle class preference for drama.

This had a dramatic effect on marriage and fertility in the US, almost as spectacular as the disastrous fall in fertility that ensued when McArthur emancipated Japanese women. Marriage went up, fertility went up.

USA fertility and corporal punishment of wives


USA fertility and corporal punishment of wives

We see a significant rise in fertility when spanking starts being depicted, and massive rise in fertility when it starts being depicted as normal. When spanking stops being depicted as normal, stops being depicted at all, soon followed by a massive demonization of men who rule their families and a hate fest against them, which is to say, against marriage and husbands, as marriage was traditionally understood, fertility drops like a stone, as spectacularly as when women were emancipated in Japan.

The high high fertility period was the gap between first wave feminism (Amelia Earhart getting a ticker tape parade for being transported across the Atlantic by a man like a sack of potatoes) and second wave feminism.

During that period it once again became socially acceptable to refuse to hire women for jobs for which they are inherently unfit, and once again became socially acceptable to spank one’s wife (McLintock). During that period women were once again expected to aspire to becoming wives and mothers, rather than despise that role.

Before 1933, no corporal punishment of wives depicted in Hollywood. 1933 to 1945 portrayed as shocking and unexpected, though not necessarily wrong. It is often justified in the context of the movie, but it is also depicted as the act of an outlaw – illegal but romantic.

We first see corporal discipline of one’s wife (spanking) portrayed in the media as normal, legal, proper, and socially acceptable in 1945, and fertility abruptly rises, and this depiction continues to 1963. whereupon it abruptly, suddenly, and totally stops – and fertility starts falling.

As the MRAs argue, feminism has artificially raised female status above male status. When a man and a woman walk in opposite directions down the corridor, the man gives way and the woman walks right down the middle of the corridor. Women continually interrupt men with impunity. (Perhaps the reason I am not totally unsuccessful with women despite being old, fat, and bald is that I am competing with the likes of Scott Alexander.)

But the MRA demand, actual equality, feminism done right, is obviously absurd and unworkable, because of the obvious inferiority of women in the male sphere. (Obviously women are superior in the female sphere, such as babies, home, housework, and finding my car keys.)

Thus, for example, no one really expects women to bear the costs of their own decisions, because women really should not be making those kind of decisions unsupervised. Thus “equality” in practice means women make decisions and men pay the costs of those decisions.

So what we have to sell is the principle of patriarchy – that women should be ruled by fathers or husbands, that men really are superior, that women should give way and should not interrupt. All women should be deferential to all men, but should obey those men and only those men who are committed to care for them.

And we have to reject and dismiss consent culture. Consent does not make sex right, nor lack of consent make sex wrong. Moment to moment consent is bad for everyone, and particularly bad for women. Women lack agency in sexual matters, making “rape” ill defined. The concept maps poorly to real life situations. “Rape” used to mean dating a woman without the consent of parent or guardian, irrespective of how she felt about it, or whether you physically had sex with her. We did not really have a word or concept for what we are now calling rape until the late eighteenth century or so.

The very concept of rape and consent attributes unrealistic agency to women. As in the old testament, we should give female consent as little moral and legal weight as possible, because the word is difficult to fit to real life events.

I don’t think women have agency in sexual matters, since between menarche and menopause their sexual actions are driven by volcanic forces of which they are scarcely aware. They do not want what they want, and they do want what they do not want. Nor do female children get “talked into sex”. If you have good preselection from adult women, female children with no breasts who have not yet experienced menarche will sexually harass you. The problem of adult men having sex with female children is primarily a problem of badly behaved female children, not badly behaved adult men. With women who have boobs, men pursue, and women choose, for sperm is cheap and eggs are dear. Pre boobs, and pre menarche, which is to say pre eggs, the shoe is apt to be on the other foot.

Thus, for example, Scott Alexander’s girlfriend consented to sex with lots of people, not including Scott Alexander, felt bad about it, felt that a gay man could do what she did without feeling bad about it or making Scott feel bad about it, so proceeded to surgically disfigure herself and declare herself to be a gay man. Clearly she would be much better off had she received a few severe spankings followed by some nonconsensual sex from Scott Alexander.

The population collapse is nothing to do with automation etc, since emancipated women in poverty stricken third world countries reproduce even less.

It simply a matter of whether or not men and women can enforceably contract with each other to durably form patriarchal families. If they can, total fertility per woman is around six or seven. If they cannot, total fertility per woman substantially less than replacement. If something in between (as for example the fifties when marriage as traditionally understood was illegal, but was nonetheless depicted on television as normal, normative, and respectable) then the fertility rate is something in between. The economy makes scarcely any difference, short of outright famine and hard Malthusian limits.

Timor Leste proves that if men have the opportunity to be patriarchs, they will not let poverty stop them. They will do whatever it takes.

Back in the fifties, when spanking was respectable, employers tended to advertise for married men, because they expected married men to be more highly motivated.

So we set up society so that prosocial behavior, reasonable competence, upholding order, and a bit of hard work pretty much guarantees a man will become a patriarch, and lo and behold, we will get prosocial behavior, order, hard work, and lots of well brought up children.

If, however you deny men the opportunity to become patriarchs, they hang out in their mother’s basements and watch cartoon porn, regardless of whether their society is rich or poor.

If patriarchy is the law of the land and I have a legal path to be a patriarch but no job, I can find a job, or create one, or scrape up a living somehow. If patriarchy is outlawed and I am legally prohibited from being a patriarch, I will be receptive to the life of the outlaw, the life of the bum, the vagrant, or hanging out in my mother’s basement. Jobs are not the problem. The lack of a reason to get a job is the problem.

If you look at high fertility and low fertility times and places, the factor that massively outweighs absolutely everything else by far, is whether or not a man and a woman can make a deal to form one household and have babies and expect their partner to be forced to stick to it. Patriarchy is necessary for this, since one household must have one captain, but patriarchy is in itself insufficient – the woman also needs protection that her children will neither be torn away from her, nor will she and they be abandoned by their father. The deal has to guarantee both the authority of the husband over his wife and children and the economic and emotional security of the wife and children, has to guarantee the father and husband obedience and respect, and the wife and children that they will be protected and looked after.

Reality is that wherever and whenever men have the option to be a patriarch, the overwhelming majority of men gladly make whatever sacrifice necessary to attain that role, even if extremely poor.

Hookers are only a marginal improvement over masturbation. What progressives offer men is just not what most men want, as revealed by men’s actions.

Yes, a harem is better than just one wife, but a changing rotation of whores is not a harem. The point of having more than one woman is having more than one woman. If I sleep with several women that is really great. If one of them sleeps with another man that is really bad and I will certainly dump her, probably beat her, and might well kill her. I will be very angry and sad for a very long time.

Look at the typical male polyamorist. He is psychologically scarred and mentally crippled for life. Having a bunch of whores rather than owning a woman, or better, owning two women, just really sucks brutally. Those guys are traumatized and damaged.

It unmans men, as if every day a bully beat them up, and they could do nothing about the daily humiliation but suck it up. Just look at what it does to men. It would be kinder to cut their balls off, which is pretty much what progressives are planning to do to us.

The typical male polyamorist looks as if a fat blue haired feminist has been beating him up every day – indeed, he would probably love it if a fat blue haired feminist beat him up every day.

Whores are a marginal improvement on beating off to anime. When men are reduced to such desperate straights, it totally crashes their testosterone and they buy an anime cuddle pillow and weep bitter tears upon it.

The criminalization of patriarchy was the criminalization of the deepest and most powerful need of white men.

Report on moonshine

Saturday, July 30th, 2016

About a year ago, I produced thirty liters of moonshine.

Tasted as if distilled from dead rats and kerosine

Double distilled it. Still tasted as if distilled from dead rats and kerosine.

Forgot about it for a year. After a year, tried it again. Not bad at all.

Trump explains crony capitalism to the masses

Saturday, July 23rd, 2016

If you already know all the stuff that Trump is explaining, his speech is kind of dull, but for leftists and normals, it is full of shocking news, as for example the Obama policy of swiftly releasing violent immigrant criminals to continue predating on white people in order to drive us out, or simply kill us. That was pretty boring to me. Of course our rulers want us dead. Remember that incident with Angela Merkel and the flag. Also bears shit in the woods and the Pope is not Catholic. But it totally shocked the audience.

At 28 minutes into his speech, he explains crony capitalism:

Hillary’s single greatest accomplishment may be committing such egregious crimes and getting away with it, especially when others, who have done far less, have paid so dearly.

Audience cheers enthusiastically.

When that same secretary of state rakes in millions and millions trading access and favors to special interests and foreign powers I know the time for action has come.

Audience cheers enthusiastically.

I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people who cannot defend themselves

Audience cheers enthusiastically.

Nobody knows the system better than me.

Trump gives evil supervillain sneer, as if he is condescending to the audience, after just having robbed them.

Audience is silent and confused.

He carries his condescending sneer a little bit over the top.

Audience laughs nervously.

Trump gives an asshole smirk, like he is saying “Oh what a naughty boy I am, and I got away with it.”

Audience roars with laughter.

Then he gives a mock surrender, holding his hands up as if being arrested by the audience for the innumerable crimes of which we know perfectly well he is guilty.

Laughter continues for quite a while. He waits for everyone to get it. Yes, he knows how the powerful special interests abuse the system, having abused the system quite thoroughly. He knows how Hillary takes millions for access by special interests and special favors to them, having paid her millions for access and favors.

Holds up his hand to signal audience to stop laughing, and to signal he is going back from non verbal communication, to verbal communication.

Which is why I alone can fix it.

Wild cheering with a little laughter.

Patriarchy and fertility

Friday, July 22nd, 2016

We observe high fertility in those nations and cultures where patriarchy is legally and socially enforced, in particular Muslim Afghanistan and Christian Timor Leste. Affordability of family formation has little effect. Clearly males in patriarchal societies are highly motivated to have children. They will do whatever it takes so that they can afford a family.

Thus, if pro social behavior in a patriarchal society is rewarded by a wife and the ability to support a family, you get highly motivated workers and soldiers.

Some people have argued that this observation is psychologically unreasonable “The guys I know don’t want children”

Henry Dampier explains why males in our society don’t want children in his 2015 article “Why no one wants to be a patriarch”

If you want men to join the legions, you make it so that the clearest path to power for a typical man will be to join up with the legions, serve his time, and then marry and be fruitful on his plot of land. If you want men to form households, you given them rights over those households and the families that issue from them. …

… Men lost the right to use legal force against their wives and children in stages. …

… the disciplining doesn’t really go away from society. The switch is just passed on from the father to the policeman and the schoolmaster. The state’s hirelings retain the right to discipline children, although wives tend to be permitted to run wild, especially nowadays, restrained only by their desires and sense of self-interest.

The disciplining also changes from spanking to drugging, often heavy drugging of untested chemicals onto children. …

The reason why no one wants to be a patriarch today is that patriarchs have no more legal authority. They have no formal power over their wives or children. They only have influence. Influence is both fickle and distinct from power. When a child misbehaves in the modern world, there are only a few paths that a parent can take. They can verbally discipline the child (more likely to work in a higher-class household than a lower-class one), they can illegally or semi-legally beat them, they can take them to a psychiatric professional of some kind, or they can feed the kid to the justice system. Schools have their own corrections systems of varying levels of effectiveness.

Further, paternal heads of household can be deprived of their assets and children at any time at the arbitrary whim of their wives. The wife can commit adultery, and the man can still lose his property in the ensuing divorce. The children and the wife alike can be wildly disrespectful to the head of household, and the man has no recourse other than whining.

I was the boss of my family and I found being a patriarch and having children hugely rewarding. But then I am a grade A asshole, and I am not afraid to commit illegal acts, though I tend to consult lawyers on ways to weasel out or buy my way out if caught, before I commit them. It is hard to be a patriarch if you are a nice guy, or if you have respect for law and social pressure, because marriages on the Pauline model are illegal, being marital rape and psychological abuse. Marriage as it has been understood for thousands of years is illegal and criminal, so of course the population is collapsing. Workable families are similarly illegal. Indeed, these days any sexual interaction with women is illegal with the notable exception of hiring whores and escorts – whores, escorts, and porn stars being the only women who are likely to give you explicit verbal consent moment to moment.

Extrapolating my subjective experience, and the subjective experience depicted by Henry Dampier, fully explains observed fertility patterns, for example the very spectacular collapse of Japanese fertility.

People don’t want children as assets. Never have, never will. If you think we can modify fertility with the tax system read Luke 15:11-32 and 2 Samuel 15:2 – 19:6 to gain an understanding of human nature and the human condition.

The problem is that children can be taken away from a man and used as hostages against him. That is why men do not want children.

Marriage and family is outlawed, thus only outlaws have wives and families.

Defense of capitalism:

Friday, July 15th, 2016

Reactionary future criticizes capitalism from the right.

Capitalists have power independent of the state. They are apt to use that power politically. Example George Soros. By and large, capitalists overwhelming back the left.

But, if they back the left, they are sucking up to power, or like the NGOs, serving the state when the state wants a smidgen of deniabity. For example you cannot see daylight between George Soros in the Ukraine, Harvard in the Ukraine, and the State Department in the Ukraine. In the Ukraine, it is perfectly clear that George Soros it taking orders from the State Department.

Charles the second said that science and the scientific method was high status, and rich people all over the place proceeded to apply the scientific method and sponsor science. Harvard says that equality is high status, and all the rich people attempt to tap the untapped potential of women and nigerians.

The State Church keeps capitalism in line with no problems.