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Worrying that legal euthanasia may lead to trouble with insurance companies is only a problem in the very few, terribly uncivilized, western countries that do not have universal medical care paid for by taxes.

Yes, we keep hearing reports of how those government run plans turn out.

British healthcare in crisis despite massive investment
Cruel and neglectful' care of one million NHS patients exposed
Hospitals must make deep cuts to survive

For $41-billion, Canadians deserve a straight answer

The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care

My health-care prejudices crumbled not in the classroom but on the way to one. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute. Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care. I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic—with a three-year wait list; or the woman needing a sleep study to diagnose what seemed like sleep apnea, who faced a two-year delay; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks. . . .

Nor were the problems I identified unique to Canada—they characterized all government-run health-care systems. Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled—48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. A while back, I toured a public hospital in Washington, D.C., with Tim Evans, a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe. The hospital was dark and dingy, but Evans observed that it was cleaner than anything in his native England. In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave—when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity—15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren’t available. And so on. ...

In The Business of Health, Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider factor out intentional and unintentional injuries from life-expectancy statistics and find that Americans who don’t die in car crashes or homicides outlive people in any other Western country.

And if we measure a health-care system by how well it serves its sick citizens, American medicine excels. Five-year cancer survival rates bear this out. For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50 percent; the European rate is just 35 percent. Esophageal carcinoma: 12 percent in the United States, 6 percent in Europe. The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2 percent here, yet 61.7 percent in France and down to 44.3 percent in England—a striking variation.

Also note that the United States actually has tax payer funded medical care, Medicare, for example. Medicare refuses more treatment than private insurers:

I wondered the same thing, and found an article that attempts to draw the lines.

I think the logic goes that the Fairness doctrine broke down political talk because it fined broadcasters for not having opposing viewpoints in equal amounts, so the safest way to get out of it was to not have political talk. Net neutrality seems similar because it fines ISP's that don't treat all content as equal, and the appearance of showing favorites could bring fines. The theory I think is that net neutrality would somehow force certain types of content off the web through scaring ISP's with fines if they participate in certain... something. Would a right-wing ISP be fined by left-wing subscribers for seeming to load Fox News faster? And what would be the recourse?

It seems, if you had a right wing webhost for instance, the analogous thing would be for the right-wing webhost to be forced to include left-wing sites. Which it doesn't. Net neutrality's only downfall seems to be hampering ISP's from combating DDoS attacks. I guess theoretically, a politically motivated group could DDoS a site from the opposite side, without the ISP being able to do anything about it, but that's all I can come up with.

You're wrong. High tech companies are fleeing California for low tax states. In fact, high earners inevitably flee high tax states for low tax states:

Examining IRS tax return data by state, E.J. McMahon, a fiscal expert at the Manhattan Institute, measured the impact of large income-tax rate increases on the rich ($200,000 income or more) in Connecticut, which raised its tax rate in 2003 to 5% from 4.5%; in New Jersey, which raised its rate in 2004 to 8.97% from 6.35%; and in New York, which raised its tax rate in 2003 to 7.7% from 6.85%. Over the period 2002-2005, in each of these states the "soak the rich" tax hike was followed by a significant reduction in the number of rich people paying taxes in these states relative to the national average. Amazingly, these three states ranked 46th, 49th and 50th among all states in the percentage increase in wealthy tax filers in the years after they tried to soak the rich.

Here's a comparison between California and Texas that explains, in great detail, how and why Texas is kicking California's ass.. This is also why more than half the new jobs created in the last twelve months were created in Texas. Another reason is strong vs. weak or no public sector unions. One thing that articles notes:

Renting a 26-foot U-Haul truck to go from Austin to San Francisco this July would cost you about $900. Renting the same truck to go from San Francisco to Austin? About $3,000. In the great balance of supply and demand, California has a large supply of people who are demanding to move to Texas.

High tech employees are fleeing California for Texas, because they can keep more of what they make, the government isn't going bankrupt, and the roads and schools are now better in Texas. Despite all the money California spends on a a bloated public sector, the actual core services delivered are worse in California than they are in Texas:

“Today, you go to Texas, the roads are no worse, the public schools are not great but are better than or equal to ours, and their universities are good. The bargain between California’s government and the middle class is constantly being renegotiated to the disadvantage of the middle class.”

Here's a slightly older analysis from 2007. Since then, of course, things have gotten better (relative to the rest of the nation) for Texas and worse for California.

Low taxes and small government create jobs. High taxes and big government destroy jobs.

New York - poorest state in the USA, NYC - poorest city, when calculated by purchasing power parity.

...snip...

Source or I call BS.

Concerning "Teachers are not even allowed to fail students", here are three examples:

• http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/31/48hours/main510772.shtml
• http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2002/07/12/parents_rule/index.html and http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_3_sndgs06.html
• http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:nf2oy6XkOdkJ:bigbadboss.com/uploads/S13_Teacher_Forced_to_Pass_Failing_Students.pdf+teachers+failing+students&hl=en&sig=AHIEtbReyva8kUpt3YiVDo4OgBZYlKtfNw

These don't illustrate parents disrupting class but two of them illustrate parents forcing the school to let their child pass.

See the WSJ here http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/does-the-us-lead-in-life-expectancy-223/tab/article/
and The City Journal here http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_canadian_healthcare.html

And another post ... pompidom ... You're the type of guy they invented restraining orders for.

Wonder how long you'll keep it up.

The only link put up was the wikipedia link. You know the article where anyone defending the American system is simply scolded for being an "asshole", "idiot", "racist" (of course), and others.

Heh you probably are "enriching" the wikipedia discussion too. They sure have your style of discussion.

But the page is a very good example of how discriminatory and utterly biased wikipedia really is. Tolerance for alternative opinions is zero, and rules are routinely violated for political ends.

This gets published :

Studies have come to different conclusions about the result of this disparity in spending. A 2007 review of all studies comparing health outcomes in Canada and the US in a Canadian peer-reviewed medical journal found that "health outcomes may be superior in patients cared for in Canada versus the United States."

Guyatt, G.H. et al. 2007. A systematic review of studies comparing health outcomes in Canada and the United States. Open Medicine, Vol 1, No 1.

What is wrong with this claim ? Doesn't "Open Medicine, Vol 1, No 1" seem a bit suspicious ?

Needless to say, a look at the magazine's site will confirm what one fears : it is a magazine with lots and lots of political articles, interspersed with some medical papers whose dubious methods are only exceeded by their irrelevance.

It's a "medical" magazine that's specifically created to push political ends. It has no credibility and is more biased than a democrat. Hell, it's a monologue and they still can't resist insulting their "opponents".

And claims like the following are "somehow" inadequately referenced :

"Today, five million Canadians are without a family doctor. A 2005 survey found that just 23 per cent of Canadians were able to see a physician the same day they needed one - placing this country last among the six studied, including the U.S., Britain and Australia. Canada's doctor-patient ratio is among the worst of any industrialized nation: with just 2.2 physicians per thousand people, it ranks 24th out of 28 OECD countries (well below the average of three). And among the G8 countries, Canada ranks dead last when it comes to physician supply." -Canada's Doctor Shortage Worsening (Macleans)

Strange, isn't it ? Combined with the less-than-polite "discussion" page illustrates the utter lack of trustworthiness and the purely political nature of the "research".

Of course the article says nothing about the inherent disadvantages of socialized healthcare, such as the necessity of so-called "death panels", which make treatments illegal. It also neglects the obvious economic truth : socialized health care can only provision as much health care as can be expected you'll produce in future value (taxes). Needless to say, that is VERY bad news for anyone who plans on getting old. States, obviously, have "profit" motive too, as "profits" in health care enable spending on other programs.

Since you clearly don't care about bias, let me just reply with an article of my own :

http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_canadian_healthcare.html

Go ahead and start with the insults. You sure need a hell of a lot of ventilation.

Additionally, consider that languages and dialects differ in their expressiveness, and IRC-speak (or whatever they're calling it these days) is not among the most expressive. You have to leave that idiom to express ideas like this post's or its parent's; so someone who can't leave the idiom can't vocalize certain kinds of thoughts short of the Greenspun's Tenth Rule case.

Anyone who's tried to do philosophy in formal Modern English appreciates how terrible of a language it is for the purpose compared with Greek or German; and IRC-speak is a language that makes Modern English look expressive...

conservatives are very afraid of a government that actually works for the people

No. Fiscal conservatives don't have an objection to government working. We object to a government trying to insist that everything is its business. We'd like the things that just about everyone except the radical anarchists believes should be government services to be government services - police, fire, search and rescue, military, roads, animal control, natural disasters. And we think things like this describe not a rare example, but a typical result of a large government sector - not that it can't be done well, just that it so rarely is.

In large parts of the South and Midwest that are today Republican strongholds, there was a prominent Progressive movement in the 20s and 30s. As primarily agricultural states, they were very much opposed to Big Business. (Heck, look at LBJ!) They started voting Republican when the Democrats began ignoring the populist elements of their makeup in favor of the social liberal ones, but only in national elections - local and state parties continued to field Democrats who won elections. The governments were composed of redistributionist types. And some were corrupt, and they didn't work. Some were clean, and they worked. It had nothing to do with the social attitudes of the people involved, but it sure did play a part in how a younger generation started to think.

I suspect you would find that the new California Empire would just rob you just as blind as the Federal government does. After all, consider California's current inability to be fiscally responsible. Consider that the robbers of the "Federal Empire" are led by Speaker Pelosi, who was elected by... the citizens of California.

And consider that California doesn't even spend its money effectively - the services cost more but provide less in public goods compared to the performance of other demographically and geographically similar states.

Good luck with that plan to secede. That eight-largest economy will wither rather quickly if a secession happens.

the USA

So does Cuba, does that mean we should follow Cuba's lead?

There are waits for some procedures for stuff that won't kill you. If you have a serious illness you get to see a doctor and whatever specialist is required within hours in most cases.

Canada has no rationing? None at all? Waiting for surgery isn't as bad in Canada? Wait tymes weren't at an all-time high in Canada? Average waiting tymes in Canada for surgery isn't 16 weeks?

Falcon

According to the British government, there has been a 48% decrease in recorded crime since the peak in 1995, which seems to argue that the proliferation of cameras and draconian gun control have been effective in protecting the safety of Britons.

Unfortunately, recorded violent crimes have approximately doubled since the current record-keeping system was implemented in 1998, and there are compelling reasons to believe that most other categories of crime are now being massively underreported, suggesting that crime problems in Britain are getting much worse despite a near-total ban on guns and the installation of millions of surveillance cameras.
 
I'd say something isn't working...
 

Not so fast. As a guy who has married into a Canadian family (hailing from Vancouver, to be specific), I have had quite a re-education as to how bad the Canadian Health Care system is. I, like many other Americans, bought into the idea of how great Canada's Health Care System was, but I have been taught that this is absolutely not the case. I've learned this from many family members and friends. I've read many articles and stories like this one that paint a very different picture than the rosy one I had heard about before.

Just to get an idea of where this article is coming from:

City Journal Winter 2000
The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities
Howard Husock

The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act, a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law, into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities--and, as Senate Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm memorably put it, a vast extortion scheme against the nation's banks. Under its provisions, U.S. banks have committed nearly $1 trillion for inner-city and low-income mortgages and real estate development projects, most of it funneled through a nationwide network of left-wing community groups, intent, in some cases, on teaching their low-income clients that the financial system is their enemy and, implicitly, that government, rather than their own striving, is the key to their well-being....

http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_1_the_trillion_dollar.html

This article from eight years ago sure did a great job of predicting this whole thing. Is it any surprise that when a government (whether under Clinton or Bush) promotes "affordable housing" as an end in itself, by manipulating interest rates and bank regulations, that they're bound to create a bubble, and bubbles by definition cannot last?

its not obvious. http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0728hm.html in fact there is more fact bending going on. the AVERAGE is about the same. but what matters is not average scores but the exceptional. there are more low performing and high performing men when it comes to math. and thats what matters, the pool of high performers when it comes to academics/fields of study. and of course personal drive/interest. programs putting girls into intensive math training in schools have turned out to be failures at keeping them in the same field when they reach college. and so what? you don't force people into fields of study like that, its just a matter of personal preference and choice as it should be. there are already disproportionately more women in medical school than men. never mind nursing which is both high paying and dominated by women. trying to force people into an ideological ideal instead of just allowing for opportunity of choice has been the problem with activist campaigners dealing with this kind of stuff. theres always the assumption that if numbers aren't equal its always sexism, not preference. this is clearly simplistic and wrong.

I think one of the worst things that republicans have done to this country is to make people feel educated on a subject after ingesting a few sound bites.

Then read this in-depth article on education costs run amok in New Jersey. It's fascinating (and not boring) reading. Unfortunately it will pop your misconcpetions about how well-spent our education dollar is. Maybe after reading this, you can give us a soundbite or two about how spending $500,000 per graduating high school student is good for the taxpayer.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_2_new_jersey.html

Care to talk in specifics, or are you fine with wallowing in ambiguity? Here are some specifics (written 8 years ago, yet it predicted this whole crisis)

How's it working out for you having your government take a "hands off" approach to your banks? (assuming you are an American).

It was a hands on not a hands off approach that caused to problem banks are in today. The Community Reinvestment Act forced lenders to reduce discriminatory credit practices such as not giving mortgages to those that could not afford the loans and giving low or no down payment mortgages. "The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities" published in 2000 foresees the problem. [I thank a poster who provided the link earlier.]

Falcon

How's it working out for you having your government take a "hands off" approach to your banks? (assuming you are an American).

Clue yourself in. The subprime crisis was caused by government intervention, not by any "hands off" approach. Just because people can co-opt the word "deregulation" for their own purposes doesn't mean any less regulation is occurring. Check out this excellent article written 8 years ago that predicted the whole thing, down to the huge dollar amount:

The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities

Right. A single cause for a multi-trillion dollar meltdown. If only it were that simple. Rather than try to pin the whole thing on the CRA, perhaps you might also want to look into the Commodity Futures Modernization Act as well, which deregulated the type of insurance (credit default swaps) that banks were using to allow themselves to make the insane loans they were making. The CRA may have been misguided and caused some more risky loans to be made, but it certainly didn't, on its own, lead to lenders giving large home loans to people with no evidence at all that they could pay it back. Nor did it allow for the obfuscation of the value of these loans through the creation of these ridiculous securities, which is one of the main causes of all of the problems. Nobody knows the true value of these things. That causes panic.

By deregulating credit default swaps, the government (republicans in this case, and Phil Gramm specifically), allowed companies like AIG to insure these mortgage backed securities, even though they couldn't really know their true value. To make matters worse, they weren't required to disclose any of this, and they were not required to have a capital reserve to cover the insured securities either, so when home values started crashing, they couldn't cover even a fraction of the securities that they insured. The whole house of cards came down.

Banks thought they had it made, and were loaning to anything with a pulse because they figured they were covered either way, either the person pays, or they collect the insurance. AIG thought that they'd just sit back and watch the premiums roll in and that they were facing little risk. They both thought they were getting a good deal. Why they thought home prices would never fall remains a mystery.

There are not enough houses on my road to EVER make it financially justifiable without requiring a 10+ year contract from every resident on the road.

So persuade them to sign such a contract, or persuade neighboring communities to lift the bans that make it impossible for the economies of scale to thrive and bring down prices, thus increasing the likelihood of your demand to be fulfilled. Simple as that.

You seem to think that a service should only be available if it's cost effective to the provider.

Where did I say that? That's quite an absurd claim, although I've seen Democrats and Republicans both use such arguments. I'm for individual rights. And that's it.

I disagree. I pay the same taxes everyone else does and I pay the same rate for my crappy service as anyone in a city with 10MB/s service.

You're complaining about the status quo, while defending the status quo. People should not be forced to give their property, income, productivity to the government to fund services they don't want. The government must violate their rights in order to serve your desires. Your mistake is in believing that by getting something now, you'll still have it later. That may be true, but only if your tax rate continues to soar to maintain the service. Just check out Edward Collins and his govt-funded attempt at providing the US with the first transatlantic trade. There was no incentive toward efficiency, cost reduction, or reliability, and he ended up accounting for one third of the total US debt. Year after year, despite huge losses, he asked the government for even more money, and they gave it to him. Then Vanderbilt started offering the public the same service, without any help from the government, and he was successful.

I should be offered the same services and option everyone else gets for the price.

According to... what? Do you claim to have an inalienable right to internet access - a right to the product of other people's work?

In this part, the gov't acted as it should, on behalf of everyone involved.

Again, how is making things cheaper a function of the government?

Your gov't wants to buy mortgages from idiots that are now amazed that blue collar workers cannot afford $500,000 homes

Please get a clue, this is becoming tedious. This whole mortgage crisis was caused by government intervention. Banks were not surprised that poor people couldn't afford houses - they were forced to provide these loans by the government. Read the following excellent article, written 8 years ago, which predicted this whole crisis, down to the huge dollar amount:

The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities

This is what happens when people only get their information from the TV or popular magazines: it's completely wrong.

As for McShame, I wouldn't vote for that idiot or Obama, or the Libertarian Party, or any of the other dolts running for President. They're all for various flavors of rights violations. They talk about supporting rights only when it is politically profitable to do so (to win votes), and they likewise discard rights when it is profitable. Pragmatism has no future.

How's it working out for you having your government take a "hands off" approach to your banks? (assuming you are an American).

Clue yourself in. The subprime crisis was caused by government intervention, not by any "hands off" approach. Just because people can co-opt the word "deregulation" for their own purposes doesn't mean any less regulation is occurring. Check out this excellent article written 8 years ago that predicted the whole thing, down to the huge dollar amount:

The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities

Imagine that....bringing up moral equivalency of Israel and Hezbollah, Hamas, etc. (And yes, that is exactly what you're doing.

Regarding, Ayers, read this:
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0430jm.html

So, if bin Laden quits now, then shows up in New York in 2031, we just give him a big hug?

Close: Obama kicked off his political career at Ayers' house. And they didn't just serve on a board together. They have associated with each other and shared ideas for years.

A reasonable person, when learning that a neighbor (or "some guy in the neighborhood" blew up the Pentagon and bombed a police station, would end all associations with that person. If for no other reason than personal safety. Obama is the son of a 60s hippie radical, who worshiped people like Ayers. Obama's continuing association with Ayers is disgusting.

You realize the politics involved in the enforcement of this law? The collusion between the Clinton administration and race-baiters like Acorn and Rainbow Coalition? Read The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities to see what really went on with CRA and then tell me it was a harmless, fairly-enforced policy. PLEASE, IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE, READ THIS ARTICLE.

City Journal
    is published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy research

The Manhattan Institute (MI) is a right-wing 501(c)(3) non-profit think tank founded in 1978 by William J. Casey, who later became President Ronald Reagan's CIA director.[1]

The CRA is but one of the problems I listed. Like Freddie and Fannie's effects on credit and the housing bubble? While the GOP attempted to reign in the FM's, Dems said "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" to.

Ah, yet another quote from the WSJ's "opinion" column, which is the print equivalent of the sean hannity show.

You realize, of course, that a good portion of our current crisis [wikipedia.org] is caused by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, introduced by Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), which in 1999 repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act, opening up "competition" among banks, securities companies and insurance companies. Which in turn lead to our current set of mega-institutions that are so large and intertwined they can't be allowed to fail?

Wrong wrong wrong! That "deregulation" actually helped mitigate the crisis by allowing prudently managed banks like Wells Fargo to diversify their portfolios and products in other areas (like mutual funds, etc) besides home loans. Had they not been able to do so, the bailout would have been a lot bigger. Wamu was stupid, but some banks took advantage of the law.

I'm sorry, but you can keep praying.. in your dreams.. that freeing corporate agents (who are otherwise completely free of liability) from regulation will result in anything but abuse and malfeasance.

I would suggest this article by Stiglitz, a nobel winning economist (disclaimer: and, author of about 50% of the texts through which I earned my economics degree).
this article is also instructive.

No, McCain is too liberal and statist on too many issues, and too pandering for me. I am a Reagan Republican.

Read my sig, read the articles I quoted from someone else who is eminently competent, then realize you drank the cool-aid of the corporate fat-cat lobby hook, line, and sinker.

We did the "reaganomics" thing.

The first time it led to depression.
The second time it led to massive recession.
The third time it led to the greatest across-the-board consolidation (and related consumer abuse) in a century, a "jobless recovery" thanks to offshoring, and eventually our fine credit crisis.

I blame democrats for not pushing hard enough against it.

You realize, of course, that you've left a lot out?

Yes, it is Saturday and I (am trying to) have a life.

You realize, of course, that the CRA did not force banks to make loans to individuals who couldn't afford them? What it did do was say that you could not refuse credit based on location or area (redlining) and instead had to base your loan evaluation on the INDIVIDUAL, and upon the individual's ability to pay. (Try reading the bill and not the Wiki.)

You realize the politics involved in the enforcement of this law? The collusion between the Clinton administration and race-baiters like Acorn and Rainbow Coalition? Read The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities to see what really went on with CRA and then tell me it was a harmless, fairly-enforced policy. PLEASE, IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE, READ THIS ARTICLE.

You realize, of course, that the vast majority of the subprime loans that are going belly-up were made by financial institutions like CountryWide... which are not banks, and as such, WERE NOT COVERED BY THE CRA IN THE FIRST PLACE.

The CRA is but one of the problems I listed. Like Freddie and Fannie's effects on credit and the housing bubble? While the GOP attempted to reign in the FM's, Dems said "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" to.

You realize, of course, that in early 2005, the Office of Thrift Supervision (under GW Bush) implemented new rules that substantially weakened the CRA, and as such, its impact on credit markets?

Good! Of course you'll give Bush credit for this? But there was still a decade of this shit going on prior to 2005.

You realize, of course, that a good portion of our current crisis [wikipedia.org] is caused by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, introduced by Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), which in 1999 repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act, opening up "competition" among banks, securities companies and insurance companies. Which in turn lead to our current set of mega-institutions that are so large and intertwined they can't be allowed to fail?

Wrong wrong wrong! That "deregulation" actually helped mitigate the crisis by allowing prudently managed banks like Wells Fargo to diversify their portfolios and products in other areas (like mutual funds, etc) besides home loans. Had they not been able to do so, the bailout would have been a lot bigger. Wamu was stupid, but some banks took advantage of the law. And the securities companies (already massive and trading in derivatives long before 1999) failed because of the credit swaps, not because they were "competing" with banks. It was buying the already shitty mortgages that killed them. In other words, they were very often a customer, not a competitor.

The same Phil Gramm, BTW, that was John McCain's presidential campaign co-chair and his most senior economic adviser. The same Gramm that in July explained the nation was not in a recession, stating, "We have sort of become a nation of whiners."

And Gramm was exactly right. We were not in a recession, which is two consecutive quarters of economic contraction. We didn't even have one.

And we have turned into a nation of whiners. There was a time when people did not blame the government for their bad decisions and fortunes, like taking out loans they couldn't afford, then blaming big bad lenders. A time when just about every economic, social, and educational indicator was much lower than today, yet people complained less.

Now, people just want to bitch and have government be their mommy, then bitch again when government predictably screws it up. The government shouldn't be a mommy because 1) adults should be responsible for themselves and 2) Britney Spears is more qualified for the job than Uncle Sam.

Do you work for the

And just how did CRA force lenders to enter in to bad contracts?

You know what? I am tired of typing the same thing over and over again and people like you ignoring the plain truth about something that is easily Wikipedia'd or Google'd. Either read my post on it or read this 2001 article laying it all out about CRA's horrors. This was a Trillion Dollar Government Shakedown of Banks, whether you want to believe it or not. I suspect you are inclined to believe what you want, not what the facts tell you (isn't that what people here say about the Intelligent Design folks?). You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts, brother.

...Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, how those government sponsored enterprises acted as ATMs

A lie. Fannie Mae specifically didn't have any US backing on the paper it gave out. And probably the same for Freddie Mac.

It's not a lie. The simple fact is they are government created entities fulfilling a government mission - just like the post office. And like the post office, they are exempt from the rules that private companies are bound to follow.

Created by the federal government in 1938, Fannie Mae was given a range of special privileges, including exemption from state and local taxes, a $2.25 billion line of credit with the U.S. Treasury, and the implicit backing of the federal government. Fannie Mae is a government sponsored entity, a hybridized enterprise endowed with an advantageous set of special privileges. Source

And both of those entities - regardless of official policy - made private representations to lenders that the government had their backs, and Republicans were trying to stop this.

Washington-based Fannie and McLean, Va.-based Freddie are the engines behind a complex process of buying, bundling and selling mortgages that remains a mystery to millions of Americans whose home loans pass through this system. Together Fannie and Freddie hold or guarantee about $5 trillion in mortgage debt â" about half of the nation's total.

They traditionally backed the safest loans, 30-year fixed rate mortgages that required a down payment of at least 20 percent. But in recent years, they lowered their standards dramatically, matching a decline fueled by Wall Street banks that backed the now-defunct subprime lending industry.

Armando Falcon, who clashed frequently with the companies during his six years as Fannie and Freddie's chief government regulator, said in an interview last month that the companies' woes are similar to the downfall of other major corporate titans like Enron and WorldCom earlier this decade. "It boils down to a whole lot of greed and arrogance," he said.

The companies, he said, took advantage of the perception on Wall Street that the government would stand behind them in a time of crisis, as is now the case. Source

****

Dems forced banks to lend to those with bad credit

I keep hearing this. Show me one example where a bank was forced to loan out money to someone and where they instead couldn't have said "fuck this I am not lending any more money with these kind of unprofitable regulations."

More than an example (since I have no access to bank loan records or to the private conversations of bankers), I'll just point out to you that dramatically expanding the subprime lending market was the whole purpose and effect of the Clinton's Expansion of CRA. Just Google "Clinton CRA subprime" to see what the effects were.

Howard Husock warned of all of this in 2001: The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities.

And again, what did Democrats say during 2003 hearings on this problem?

First, let's understand what caused this crisis. Then you'll understand why the bailout won't work.

Economist: Why Bankruptcy is better than bailout

The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities ( written EIGHT YEARS before this crisis, predicting everything down to the dollar amount)


Now, check out the $150 Billion in pork-barrel projects that were added by the Senate to the original 100-page bailout that failed in the House, turning it into a 450-page bailout:

- "Wooden arrows designed for use by children" (Sec 503)
- Wool Research (Sec. 325)
- Film and Television Productions (Sec. 502)
- Litigants in the 1989 Exxon-Valdez oil spill (Sec. 504)
- Virgin Island and Puerto Rican Rum (Section 308)
- American Samoa (Sec. 309)
- Mine Rescue Teams (Sec. 310)
- Mine Safety Equipment (Sec. 311)
- Domestic Production Activities in Puerto Rico (Sec. 312)
- Indian Tribes (Sec. 314, 315)
- Railroads (Sec. 316)
- Auto Racing Tracks (317)
- District of Columbia (Sec. 322)


This is the bill that senators are screaming about, saying "IT MUST BE PASSED OR DOOMSDAY!" Who believes them? And yet the bill easily breezed through Congress.

To inform yourself about what is wrong with the bailout, and what caused the crisis in the first place, read these two excellent articles:

Economist: Why Bankruptcy is Better than Wall Street Bailout

The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities ( written EIGHT YEARS before this crisis , predicting everything down to the dollar amount)

I'm not sure it's as simple as that. France collapsed so quickly because its society didn't knit together when it came under threat from the Nazis.

That's a serious problem. It's always comforting to believe that war is always wrong and there is no such thing as the national interest. But every now and again you're faced with something - Nazism, Communism, Fundamentalist Islam - which really is a threat to the national interest, in fact to civilisation itself. And French intellectuals have consistently responded in childish, self indulgent way to this. That makes their civilisation at threat from the barbarians. The point of the 'surrender monkeys' jibe is that the only reason they'll still free is that other people rescued them.

You can see the same thing happening now with the inner city riots. The French elite try to pretend that there is no problem, and that 'street culture' is somehow as valid as real culture. This is street culture

http://www.strictlysocial.com/journal/2008/05/01/justice-stress-video/

Actually it's a glorification/condemnation of street culture by two French yuppies. There's something very French about the idea that's a straightforward condmenation is somehow simplistic. I'm sure French Intellectuals made the same sort of double edged films about the Nazis, until the Germans occupied their country and told them from then on straight glorification would be a better idea.

Theodore Dalrymple put it

http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_4_the_barbarians.html
To assure the immigrants that they and their offspring are potentially or already truly French, the streets are named for French cultural heroes: for painters in Les Tarterets (rue Gustave Courbet, for example) and for composers in Les Musiciens (rue Gabriel Fauré). Indeed, the only time I smiled in one of the cités was when I walked past two concrete bunkers with metal windows, the école maternelle Charles Baudelaire and the école maternelle Arthur Rimbaud. Fine as these two poets are, theirs are not names one would associate with kindergartens, let alone with concrete bunkers.

But the heroic French names point to a deeper official ambivalence. The French state is torn between two approaches: Courbet, Fauré, nos ancêtres, les gaullois, on the one hand, and the shibboleths of multiculturalism on the other. By compulsion of the ministry of education, the historiography that the schools purvey is that of the triumph of the unifying, rational, and benevolent French state through the ages, from Colbert onward, and Muslim girls are not allowed to wear headscarves in schools. After graduation, people who dress in "ethnic" fashion will not find jobs with major employers. But at the same time, official France also pays a cowering lip service to multiculturalismâ"for example, to the "culture" of the cités. Thus, French rap music is the subject of admiring articles in Libération and Le Monde, as well as of pusillanimous expressions of approval from the last two ministers of culture.

One rap group, the Ministre amer (Bitter Ministry), won special official praise. Its best-known lyric: "Another woman takes her beating./ This time she's called Brigitte./ She's the wife of a cop./ The novices of vice piss on the police./ It's not just a firework, scratch the clitoris./ Brigitte the cop's wife likes niggers./ She's hot, hot in her pants." This vile rubbish receives accolades for its supposed authenticity: for in the multiculturalist's mental world, in which the savages are forever noble, there is no criterion by which to distinguish high art from low trash. And if intellectuals, highly trained in the Western tradition, are prepared to praise such degraded and brutal pornography, it is hardly surprising that those who are not so trained come to the conclusion that there cannot be anything of

It doesn't need to be illegal - it is probably sufficient to ensure that it will not happen through other means - restricting publication, fear... Here is an interesting read on the topic.

So apperently the Muslims in the Netherlands are willing to show it if they can see it upfront to make sure it contains no legally libel content.

I find it interesting that they are concerned about "libel".

Muslims nations: Defame Islam, get sued?
A SLAPP Against Freedom

The 1in4 statistic has been around quite a bit longer. According to CityJournal, it was originally generated by determining a set of behaviours which qualified as rape, asking women about what they dealt with, and then reported it even though the vast majority denied that they had been raped. Much like the re-definition of racism so that underpriviliged minorities can't be racist, this is little more than academic fraud.

I can't quickly find the studies you are referring to. I strongly suspect that they used the same flawed methodology and redefinition, rather than point blank asking if they had been the victim of rape or attempted rape.

Geeks might think it's funny, but if someone who didn't know about the FSF and RMS walked in, they'd just think, "Who is this tosser?"

I was thinking about this aspect of human nature at my favorite coffee shop yesterday. The curious aspect of this is our ingrained tendency to admire (or mentally confer social status toward) the kind of person who takes one look at something like this, and makes the snap "loser" judgment. There is in practice no social approbation for the fact that this snap social judgment might be wrong, or that making this snap social judgment is a talentless act (the average nine year old does it six times before recess).

The tried and true human strategy is this: if you haven't got a clue, enforce conformity. That never gets you into any significant trouble.

This is a lesson we learn somewhere in our preschool / elementary school years, and then in puberty the lesson is reinforced with a pile driver of social derision.

There was a new girl who showed up in my grade six year. She had been in an accident with some boiling water. Her entire lower face below the nose was hideously disfigured. This was back in the era of the Jackson Five. Back then, you couldn't alter your hideous disfigurement with a new one. By that age I had spent some time in a children's hospital, down the hall from the burn unit. I wasn't inclined to laugh. Nor was the rest of my class for the first two months: they were too freaked out by the red and pink planetscape of moonbuggy skin folds. The girl was in heaven. Within a few weeks, she had convinced herself this school was different.

Not for long. Soon the pre-adolescent piranhas gathered their nerve. The burned girl made the rest of us uncomfortable, she deserved to suffer. Not only was she taunted, but anyone who spoke a nice word to her risked incarceration in their hallway locker.

These are the same people who grew up to become the adults who make these snap judgments about RMS's peculiarities.

So there I am in back in grade six, horrified by my membership in the human race. Not a good omen for my own future popularity, either. I was developing the illness known as "writer".

I don't have much respect for the kind of social security one obtains by having an unfailing instinct for whom to ridicule next. That's my choice, I know the world will never conform. What shocks me is the implicit justification of this behaviour when people put forward assertions that RMS's kooky behaviour is a liability. If I were RMS, I wouldn't have much use for these people of low investment and lightning derision, either.

What would actually happen if we rounded all these people up and blasted them into space on Arc B? How would human civilization fail if deprived of lightening derision? What essential element of human social cohesion would immediately fail us?

I have a suspicion it's a self-populating niche. Remove the worst offenders, those who remain will quickly spill into the vacant niche. Maybe we're *all* wired for asshole ascendency, and at any given time, those of us deprived of the social advantage of asshole in residence make chicken salad out of chicken shit proclaiming our virtuous forbearance. It's not as if you can read the lkml and not detect the agents of conformity bridling to assume power. The more extreme a group of non-conformists styles themselves, the more debate rages over their code of conduct.

I think because the harsh lessons on conformity are first learned at the elementary school age, the lessons enter the mind as inviolate rules of the universe. We acquire these lessons before we acquire the capacity to reflect upon them.

Here's a piece that ran at aldaily recently: What the New Atheists Don't See. I have no idea if this article is any good, I just looked long enough to see that it mentions all the neo-atheist books that have been in the news lately. Children acquire rel

Women mostly don't need to be self-taught. Colleges and educational institutions are happy to educate women. Meanwhile there's an increasing bias in educational institutions against males:

Schoolboy's bias suit
Where The Boys Aren't
Why boys can't be boys
The Trouble With Boys

and especially

How the Schools Shortchange Boys

It's not a big factor in this particular case, but one reason some guys are self-taught is because they've learned education isn't for them -- rather it's against them.

This is an existing racket which has just been ported to the web.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_the_ada_shak edown.html
http://www.theconservativevoice.com/articles/artic le.html?storyid=5543
http://blog.mises.org/archives/001453.asp

Ridiculous. Almost all behavioral problems ARE related to boring lectures. See this article. Boys are treated different in our new reverse affirmative action educational system.

Aggressive, rational-dominated, left-brained boys are given short shrift.
They are punished for questioning anything, particularly the purpose of assignments.
They are forced to adopt coping mechanisms that are inappropriate for school.

Boys are troublemakers, girls are not.

The flipside: girls are subservient, obedient "yes men" in the world of schooling. They do everything without question. They don't like to think for themselves, because it posits them as disobedient.

It's practically Freudian, the difference in "looking for approval" between boys and girls.

In the early half of the 20th century, most schoolteachers were female, and lived in a pre-feminist world. They taught to boys and girls, cajoled them both, catered to them individually if need be, and especially tolerated some of the more "wild side" of "boys will be boys" attitude.

Today's female teachers have grown up not only deifying their own equality cum superiority as canon, but also with a wanton disregard for "cutting someone slack" and, more importantly, the individual nature of students. Thus upon entering the classroom, they immediately identify their problems, which *surprise surprise* are always boys.

So, is this the answer then? Boys are just more problematic than girls, by an astounding margin? Or, in fact, are boys being emasculated and marginalized in the classroom? There is a lot of good literature on this, by the way. Check out "Raising Cain", or "Johnny Won't Read" or any other number of scholarly books on the increasing condescension and inflexibility displayed towards the male psyche in America's classroom.

Back to the topic, boring lectures are just the tip of the iceberg. They constitute a perpetual pattern of overinvolvement on the part of the teacher. Education after 13 used to consist of the Socratic method and a whole lot of "personal reading." They expected results, but they did not predetermine them.

Welcome to the 21st century of education. It's going to get worse, too.

Nor, sometimes, do the English.

Or was it just the Welsh, or the South Welsh, or the ...?

Is all this crime the result of shiny inanimate objects or really stupid policies?

One favorite paragraph:
It is not difficult to guess the reason for the senior policeman's anger. My wife had forced his men to record a crime that they had no intention whatever of even trying to solve (though, with due expedition, it was eminently soluble), and this record in turn meant the introduction of an unwanted breath of reality into the bogus statistics, the manufacture of which is now every British senior policeman's principal task--with the sole exception of enforcing the dictates of political correctness, thereby to head off the criticism levied at them for many decades by the liberal Left--not always without an element of justification. Proving their purity of heart is now more important to them than securing the safety of our streets: and thus Nero fiddled while Rome burned.

Also, nice to see that gun control laws work the way we Second Amendment supporters said they would.

Unfortunately for surrounding major cities, crime is up.

I think that while it is a nice period for the working New Orleans, there is no guarantee once the city is back on track that it will stay free from freeloaders. Part of this is the bigger issue of people living on welfare that could work, but that's another discussion entirely. The wifi will be good to have for the working residents, but how long until the speeds drop, the networks deteriorate, and maintinence is not handled correctly?

Cheers,
Dave

FEMA was funded for katrina before it hit. Honestly I put most of the blame on the governor of Louisiana; she should lose her job.

In my dealings with the state of Louisiana I've found it to be a very corrupt place. People I've dealt with there have been very impolite and had dog eat dog attitudes. I see it as a really violent, nasty and uncivilized place.

P.S. The people I dealt with were white so don't go accusing me of racism.

Here's some links that show an increase in crime in Houston since Katrina.

http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.36 0/blog/2006/02/did-katrina-evacuees-bring-more-cri me.html

http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2006-01-04ng.h tml

If they start defacing websites for just a cartoon, imagine what they will do if it was a offending movie/act: take whole servers and backbones down? Oh the horror.

We already know what Mohammedans do when someone makes a film that hurts their poor widdle feewings. Fscking savages.

Meanwhile, the Clinton administration has proposed security guidelines for housing authorities across the country, including provisions for locking building entrances and lobbies, frisking suspicious-looking people, and including a clause in leases under which tenants would agree to warrantless searches under some circumstances.

Your assumption, by the way, that harsher sentencing is a direct contributor is likely erroneous.

I don't know why the crime rate is falling and there doesn't appear to be any consensus. It appears to correlate with harsher sentencing and lower unemployment and those are both plausible explanations but it could be something else or some kind of cyclical pattern.

However, the crime rate fell without making the punishment fit the crime, teaching people to evaluate whether laws are just, or applying laws equally, which were your requirements. I can't see any reason to think those will be much help aside the devout hope that people will respond positively to well-intentioned measures. Some views of human nature suggest that criminals will simply treat those measures as a show of weakness.

Take Finland's admirably low crime rates...

Shoplifting, which is the crime specifically under discussion here, is still a big problem in Finland:

Finland's shrinkage is among the highest in Europe, or 1.44 percent of turnover. However, Finland's figure did fall by three percent from the previous survey.

According to the barometer, 48 percent of the shrinkage is a result of shoplifting. Dishonest employees create one third of the losses, and seven percent can be blamed on suppliers. The rest is caused by mistakes in pricing and breakage.

In Finland, shoplifting costs the retail sector some 448 million euros annually. Combined with the anti-theft investments of 118 million, the annual total rises to 566 million euros.

In any case, I doubt if Finland has any lessons to teach the U.S. about crime fighting without first reorganizing the whole society around a huge social support structure, the way Finland has done, with the accompanying high taxes and big government that Americans traditionally resist.

There has never been a time or a place where this has not been the case. Literature, the arts and so on has always been a matter for a cultural "elite" (and I don't mean it in the republican/conservative sense) and the low-to-middle class people that aspire to it.

This is not true. In Soviet Union the arts where a matter for everyone. All works of art were for everyone. Museums, theatres, classical music, classical literature, all of that was intended for everyone, to farmers, workers, engineers, scientists, other artists. It was a matter of state interests to improve first the literacy, then education and cultural level of all people. And it worked. Of course, with the collapse of the socialism publishers decided to get some quick profits, turned to printing pulp, people became interested to check it out, they initially liked it, because it didn't require as much thinking, then publishers stopped printing classics and good modern books and people didn't have a choice, but had to read the pulp. Finally, some demand emerged again for the classics, but now the print runs are small, the prices are high and the rich tend to buy good books, while the poor read low-quality dreck.

And although the Soviet Union clearly lead in the quest for literacy and high culture for everyone, other countries tried to follow. Read The Classics in the Slums, an article about British workers in late 19th century - early 20th century. They had a huge interest in reading, art and learning and a lot of them (a majority?) were interested in classical literature (Greek tragedies, Shakespear, poetry), classical music and education. For them it was a matter of personal development and a break from the monotony of the jobs. Not everyone could easily accept that because of class prejudice - "They knew that you breathed and you slept and you worked, but they didn't know that you read. Such a thing was beyond comprehension. They thought that in your spare time you sat and gazed into space. . . . You could almost see them reporting you to their friends. "Margaret's a good cook, but unfortunately she reads. Books, you know."" It's today that people actually sit and gaze into space. It's called TV.

A UK survey of pupils (1940) in a below average group showed that 62% of boys and 84% of girls had read some poetry, their favorites including Kipling, Longfellow, Masefield, Blake, Browning, Tennyson, and Wordsworth, 67% of girls and 31% of boys had read plays and students averaged six or seven books per month (this excludes texts required in schools).

A USA study of adults ("Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America", 2002) showed that 43% of American adults had not read any books at all (other than those required for work or school), only 12.1% had read any poetry and only 3.6% had read any plays.

Another interesting article is As a weapon in the hands of the restless poor - On the Uses of a Liberal Education, an amazing experiement in teaching humanities to poor people. 50% graduated from the course and liberal education DID help poor people to improve their lives. It not only increased students' self-esteem, but also their abilities to divine and solve problems. They enrolled in colleges, got jobs, became politically active.

Read something like Against School to get some understanding on why Western school is so bad. It is by design, the system goes back to German schools and was intended to sustain the difference between the classes. The children of the elite got classical education, while the masses got dumbed down education. It is sometimes called the "two corridors model".

This is another area, where Soviet system shined. There was only one system of education, starting with the kindergarden and ending with post-graduate studies. A worker could (and was encouraged

this is the same crap that people spout off when they criticize the US for not education statistics.

Don't forget, America is big and populous. What works in Luxembourg and Switzerland can't be expected to work here.

Also, don't discount the detrimental effects of unrestricted immigration/open borders.

"in 2000, for example, nearly 30 percent of federal prisoners were foreign-born"
see the city journal

The truth is that even on a normal day, New Orleans is a sad city. Sure, tourists think New Orleans is fun: you can drink and hop from strip club to strip club all night on Bourbon Street, and gamble all your money away at Harrah's. But the city's decline over the past three decades has left it impoverished and lacking the resources to build its economy from within. New Orleans can't take care of itself even when it is not 80 percent underwater; what is it going to do now, as waters continue to cripple it, and thousands of looters systematically destroy what Katrina left unscathed?

A city blessed with robust, professional police and fire forces, with capable government leaders, an informed citizenry, and a relatively resilient economy can overcome catastrophe, but it doesn't emerge stronger: look at New York after 9/11. The richest big city in the country in more ways than one mustered every ounce of energy to clean up after 9/11 and to rebuild its economy and its downtown--but even so, competing special interests overcame citizens' and officials' best intentions. Ground Zero remains a hole, and New York, for all its resources, finds itself diminished, physically and economically, four years on.

In New Orleans, the recovery will be much, much harder. The city's government has long suffered from incompetence and corruption. Just weeks before Katrina, federal officials indicted associates of the former mayor, Marc Morial, for alleged kickbacks and contract fraud. Morial did nothing to attract diversified private investment to his impoverished city during the greatest economic boom of the modern era.