Where Fun Comes to Die

I know this is old news, but there’s something about the recent SCHIP expansion that bothers me. Unlike the Republicans, I don’t care about SCHIP’s impact on the private health insurance market. If the US healthcare system is an example of capitalism in action, well then, maybe that Mao fellow wasn’t entirely wrong.

What bothers me about the SCHIP expansion is not what it does, but how it’s paid for. The bill is estimated to cost $32 billion over the next 4 1/2 years, and that’s being paid for with an increase on tobacco taxes.

Full disclosure: I love smoking. At the right time and place, a good cigarette is one of life’s great pleasures. I oppose smoking bans in bars on the grounds that people who don’t like smelling smoke while they drink should avoid taverns altogether and seek out places more suited to their tastes, such as yoga clinics or candle shops. 

But this is about more the fact that I like spending time in flavor country.  This is about basic fiscal sanity.

The smoking rate in America has been in a steady, gradual decline for years, and many government officials have made anti-smoking efforts into a centerpiece of their public health campaigns. Given the draconian smoking bans that are being adopted in some parts of the nation (and the American public’s insatiable love for drug wars), it wouldn’t surprise me at all if possession of tobacco was a criminal offense before too long. To keep up with the Depression-are analogies that are so popular nowadays, Obama funding SCHIP with a tobacco tax is like Roosevelt funding social security with taxes on laudanum and cocaine-flavored sodas.

I understand why Obama would rather tax smokers than pay for SCHIP out of general revenues.  Smokers are an easy target politically, and voters always prefer raise somebody else’s taxes.  But as the tobacco well gradually dries up, one of three things has to happen:

(1) The government, realizing that gets more money from cigarette sales than the tobacco companies do, starts up a major ad campaign encouraging everyone to smoke “for the children’s sake.” 

(2) The government sets its tax receipts and public expenditures at sustainable levels.

(3) The government finds some exciting new way to push the buck along, like selling organ-backed securities to the Chinese or imposing a mullet tax.

I’d love to see #1, because I think it would be hilarious. I think we’ll probably see #3, because I’m cynical. #2, which would require people to think about the future and live within their means, is fundamentally unamerican.

Ever since it broke, the Blagojevich story has been weighing heavily on my heart. It’s not the corruption that bothers me. Blagojevich was right when he said that a Senate seat is “an [expletive] valuable thing,” (especially these days, when the government is throwing about hundreds of billions of dollars like a Macy’s parade Santa throwing out candies), and wanting to capitalize on valuable things is human nature. That’s not to condone it, but the basic impulse is understandable. Besides, it’s Illinois. People would become confused and frightened if the politicians didn’t steal. There’d be human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together…mass hysteria! 

The corruption is distasteful, but to me it’s not the scariest thing about the story. The scary thing about the story is the fact that Governor Blagojevich was so bad at crime. When you know that you are the target of a corruption investigation, you should not openly plan criminal conspiracies over the phone or in your office. When picking a target to shake down, you should pick easier targets than President-Elect Obama, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. Anyone who’s watched The Sopranos or The Wire should be able to figure this stuff out. I don’t like the fact that a state governor, who should be a relatively sophisticated and saavy lawbreaker, doesn’t bother to take the precautions that two-bit coke dealers know to take. If a man can’t even solicit a bribe properly, how can we expect him to manage an entire state government?

In his feverish quest to make things as difficult as possible for Obama, Bush has been adopting a bunch of bothersome last-minute regulations.  He’s got nothing left to lose, so now he can do whatever he wants.  It’s like a presidential version of ‘Falling Down.’  However, I think that one of the last-minute regulations has got a lot of merit.

I speak, of course, of the regulation forcing hospitals and pharmacies to employ health care providers who won’t  provide birth control.  I love the idea of having regulations enacted so that fulfilling your religious beliefs is easy and painless.  It’s like getting the government to send a civil servant to go to church in your place.  As Jesus said to his disciples when sending them out to preach, “And if anyone will not receive you or listen, to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town.  And then go lobby for regulations that will require the townspeople to listen to you politely or else face serious civil penalties.”  Matthew 10:14  

The problem with the rule is that it doesn’t go far enough.  I’m looking forward to a future in which all religiously-minded slackers will be permanently employed by government decree.  Observant Jews could get jobs at the hog farm, where they could read the newspaper, take frequent smoke breaks, and refuse to compromise their moral beliefs by touching unclean animals.  Lazy Quakers could get jobs at munitions factories, and spend the entire day surfing Youtube, and nobody could force them to violate their conscience and actually make some damn munitions.  It would be a paradise for those who observe every one of their faith’s strictures except the prohibition against sloth.   

OK, that’s enough sarcasm for now.  Even by Bush standards, these are some low shenanigans.  Anti-discriminations laws are fine and dandy, but I cannot understand regulations that require employers to hire people whose religious convictions prevent them from doing the job.  We all know that Bush is no fan of reproductive freedom, but why does he hate freedom of contract as well?

Seeing as how a Presidential election is upon us, I would feel remiss in not posting to an appreciation of Lyndon LaRouche, professional Presidential candidate (he ran for President eight times, and made quite a good living by exploiting campaign finance laws), cult leader and madman. Whatever else you might say about the fellow, he lived an interesting life.

Most election years I vote Libertarian, because that’s the sort of cranky weirdo that I am. And if I happen to be living in a swing state, people invariably tell me that I’m throwing my vote away and that I’ll be sorry if the Republicans (who I generally like even less than the Democrats) win. This is pernicious nonsense.

It bothers me when people talk about how close their particular state is when they’re making up their mind about how to vote, as if their individual vote could change the election. It can not. The odds against an election coming down to a single vote, even in a very close race, are astronomical. And even if it did come down to a single vote, our election systems aren’t finely tuned enough to detect the true winner at that margin. There will always be miscountings, smudged ballots, Diebold chicanery, and other such snafus. If an election is truly within a single vote, there’s no way our system is precise enough to say who actually won. 

Voting isn’t about personally making a difference. Your individual vote will not, and can not, make a difference. But your individual vote will state your preferences about who should lead the country and where it should go. Getting the opportunity to express yourself like that is a very precious right.

Here’s an analogy that I think is useful. Let’s say that Congress is considering a new bill to bail out the perverted arts to the tune of $30 billion. And let’s say for the sake of argument that I hate this bill. I write a letter to my Congressman telling him to oppose the bill, I write an angry letter to my local newspaper expressing my opinions, and I put a “Honk if you find Richard Mapplethorpe’s sadomasochistic nudes less compelling than his technically accomplished floral still lives” sign up in my yard. If the bill doesn’t pass, it will be because the bill faced opposition from a sector of society including me. But there’s no plausible set of circumstances under which my individual opposition could be the deciding factor. 

Voting is not a long-shot attempt to personally pick the President. A ballot is not a lottery ticket offering a one-in-a-billion chance to be in charge of the Illuminati’s President-picking department. What it is is a chance to express oneself and have your voice be heard. The only time a vote is ‘wasted’ is when somebody votes for their second-choice candidate out of the bizarre delusion that they need to vote tactically. 

(For the record, this year I am voting Obama.)

This article on a legal auction of government ivory got me thinking about the unintended consequences of the ivory ban. I don’t think government prohibition ever works nearly as well as planned, but it seems to me that there’s an especially perverse incentive created when the government bans luxury goods. After all, what’s the point of a luxury good except to show off your ability to get things other people can’t have?

Ivory is a little bit useless. You can’t eat it, you can’t live inside of it, and (as I learned through a disastrous youthful experiment with an antique billiard ball) it cannot be crushed and snorted. It’s so valuable because it’s a status symbol, and it’s a status symbol because it’s so hard to get. This is why men are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to eat an animal that is the last of its species, even if the meat is gamey and improperly seasoned.

An outright ban will never be completely successful in stomping out the ivory trade, because there will always be some rich jackass who’s willing to break the law in order to prove that he’s a cool guy who can buy forbidden wares. No, the only way to stomp out the ivory trade is to make ivory uncool.

Instead of auctioning off its ivory willy-nilly to any passing elephant-hater with a fistful of yen, Namibia should have given it to undesirables. What better way to ensure the safety of the African elephant than by ensuring that Amy Winehouse shows up at rehab wearing ivory jewelry? Michael Jackson could be given a fine ivory mask to hide his wretched face, and Stephen Hawking could receive a beautiful ivory wheelchair. Elephant bone aficionados may risk a fine in order to get ahold of precious ivory, but they will not risk being in the company of yard-sleepers, famed perverts and nerds.

Prognostication is always a tricky game. But right now, it appears that Barack Obama is almost certain to be the next President of the U.S.A. Unless he marries Bill Ayers in a nationally-televised Muslim ceremony, it seems that he’s got a lock. McCain’s done a fine job of exciting a party that wasn’t predisposed to like him, but he’s turning off independents in the process and the Republican party is losing ground badly in voter registration.

McCain’s recent problems with independents and the tone of his campaign have got me thinking about Cass Sunstein’s work on group polarization. The basic theory is that groups of like-minded individuals tend to adopt more extreme positions than the individuals would independently . People in groups of conservatives will tend to become more conservative, people in groups of liberals will tend to become more liberal and so on. 

I’m not as up to speed on the literature as I probably should be, but it seems to me like one of the natural side effects of this phenomenon would be that as group opinion hardens, a group will tend to shed its more moderate members through self-selection or outright expulsion. As the group gets smaller and smaller its beliefs will become more and more intense, until all you’ve got left is a small, intensely devoted core. 

This theory would certainly seem to explain for some of John McCain’s recent problems with his own supporters. Who wants to associate themselves with yahoos like these?  The base, meanwhile, is busily casting out heretics when it ought to be making converts.

Although I certainly don’t want McCain to win the election (libertarians hated McCain before it was cool), it can’t be good to have one of the two major political parties melting down so completely. We are at a time when the size and power of the federal government is about to expand on a massive scale. It would be nice to have a credible, intellectually vibrant opposition standing athwart history yelling ‘stop’ (or at least ‘slow down a bit’), and unfortunately, we don’t have anything of the sort. 

So what can be done? McCain could probably heal a lot of the damage by stressing civility and good sportsmanship for the rest of the campaign and sending Palin off to a nunnery. But that would entail giving up any hope of victory. I think McCain would rather face a glorious blowout loss than a noble forfeit (which, to be fair, is an entirely human and understandable instinct).

The system does have some capacity to correct itself. A few years in the wilderness will probably help the Republicans regain some of their appeal. Absolute power will begin to corrupt the Democrats absolutely. More importantly, absolute powerlessness will give the GOP some time to think about what it’s done wrong. But in order to regain its lost ground, the Republican party must have the capacity for honest self-examination and self-criticism. It’s an open question if the party can learn those virtues even as it shrinks towards critical mass.

It’s strange to hear the Republican presidential candidate speak of Russia as a very wealthy nation. It’s not that I disagree or anything, but it’s a jarring sentiment to hear from the Republican. It’s like hearing Yakov Smirnov boast of his homeland’s wealth and prestige, or seeing the Wolverines attending a peace conference. These truly are dark days.

I thought that Sarah Palin did pretty well at the vice presidential debates tonight, what with the soft bigotry of low expectations.  I hope that her handlers gradually increase her folksy cuteness over the course of the campaign, until by November 3 she is wearing overalls with one broken strap and playing in a jug band.  

There’s one particular issue that came up repeatedly in the debate that I want to talk about.  Both Palin and Biden took a lot of time explaining how they would work across party lines and how some of their best friends were members of the other party and whatnot.  There’s a few things about this that struck me as weird.  First, it’s a little bit odd to be using bipartisanship as a partisan issue with which to bash your opponent. It’s like two pacifists beating others’ heads in over which is the more non-violent.  

I also thought it was strange to be using bipartisanship as an issue in the midst of an intensely bitter and partisan campaign.  The candidates seem to despise each other, and partisanship has made the credit crisis even more unmanageable than it would normally be. Does anybody think that President McCain would be able to work with Senator Obama or vice versa? 

Then there is the question of if bipartisanship is even desirable.  With some good and noble exceptions, I feel like a lot of bipartisan voting occurs either in the middle of a crisis or when both sides agree that they’ll each take everything they want.  Neither situation lends itself to good and thoughtful policymaking.  And unfortunately, in the current bipartisan issue du jour, we have both a crisis and utterly shameless logrolling.  Behold, as the bailout is festooned with costly ornaments like some sort of terrible $700 billion Christmas Tree.

Ultimately, I wonder if pledging to cooperate even does the candidates any good.  How many people are impressed by candidates who say that they will be bipartisan?  Do the voters want a leader who will compromise and seek common ground, or do they want a leader who will march to victory on a road of bones?

L’shana tova! Happy 5769, everybody! It certainly is starting out with a bang, isn’t it?  I feel like I ought to make some connection between the start of the Jewish New Year and the shakeup of the financial system, but it just doesn’t feel right.  To me the High Holy Days are all about tradition and renewal, and that’s pretty much the opposite of what we’ve got these days.  I could probably come up with an elaborate metaphor in which Hagar the forsaken maidservant represents Lehman Brothers and that little bastard Ishmael represents toxic mortgage-backed securities, but my heart is not in it.

Still, somehow I’m in the mood for a Blblical allusion.  Another possibility would be Revelation 18:10.  “Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.  And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more: The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble, and cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men.  And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and thou shalt find them no more at all. The merchants of these things, which were made rich by her, shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing, and saying, Alas, alas that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls! For in one hour so great riches is come to nought.”  (as a side note, it’s worth noting how much the state of economic punditry has declined between St. John of Patmos and Jim Cramer)

I think the story of the Tower of Babel best represents our nation’s recent calamities.  Has there ever been such a perfect storm of mutual incomprehension? Almost by definition, nobody has any idea what in the hell is going on.  The administration has blown its credibility to such an extent that onlookers roll their eyes and snort with disbelief when George Bush claims that the sky is blue.  The wizards of Wall Street are claiming that great and terrible calamities will occur if they are not rewarded for their failure (nice work, if you can get it).  And the Democrats, after years of saying that lenders must offer credit to the poor, are now saying that lenders were reckless and predatory for offering credit to the poor.  Fortunately, intense partisan bickering seems to be saving us from the horror of bipartisan reforms.  We’ve reached the point where nobody knows what’s going on, nobody can talk to each other and we’re all in complete disarray.

The next few weeks might bring a new Great Depression, an unprecedented government expansion, both of the above, neither of the above, and even (my personal favorite) a complete Mad Max-style meltdown where we all go out to the desert and live like barbarian punk rock race-car drivers.  It’s bad times to be a shareholder, or a homeowner, or a worker, or someone who cares even a little bit about the government’s long-term solvency, but it’s a darn good time to blog.  Welcome to WhereFunComesToDie.  Let’s see what happens next.