Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • but we all KNOW that healthcare costs are the long term problem with the US budg

    http://www.multiplier-effect.org/?p=3351Yes, but we all KNOW that healthcare costs are the long term problem with the US budget.

    We also know WHY healthcare costs are the problem:

    1) extending the last year of life.

    2) experimental procedures.

    We also know why it’s a difficult problem to fix healthcare costs:

    3) Because there is no market system by which doctors can choose to deny coverage for experimental procedures and extending the last year of life. Because it is expressly against medical ethics. Because it is profitable for businesses to deliver services. Because it is bad for business to reject a customer, who will just go elsewhere for the service.

    4) Because there is no market system for controlling extension of the last year of life and experimental procedures, we must create a non-market system (a bureaucratic system) or “DEATH PANELS” to deny coverage for experimental procedures and extending the last year of life, in order to contain costs.

    We also know why bureaucratization of experimental procedures is dangerous:

    5) Because experimental work is expensive, research and development conducted by trial and error – most of which fails to produce beneficial results.

    We also know why conservatives (republicans) dislike the bureaucratic method:

    6) Because it is impossible to work harder, apply more discipline, and use one’s own initiative and resources, in order to secure access to the best doctors, facilities, and experimental treatments.

    And it’s disingenuous to argue that this is a financial problem. It is in fact, a series of moral hazards – in the broadest sense of the term.

    (The technical, mixed-economy solution, would be to transfer the costs that were rejected by the Death Panels for experimental procedures and extension of life to those poor people in need of health care. I’m not advocating that. I’m just suggesting that it’s the only known solution that avoids perverse incentives for all parties, while maintaining a closed healthcare ecosystem.)

    We already solve the problem of transfers by subsidizing insurance companies for automobile drivers. There is no reason that we cannot sponsor (insure) non-profit, insurance companies that specialize in coverage for the underclasses, and make use of the visa/mc network to manage payments for services. We insure banks. Why can’t we insure insurance companies as a proxy for serving the disadvantaged?

    Source date (UTC): 2012-01-20 14:35:00 UTC

  • GOSSIP Back in Seattle for a few days. Hearing the usual industry gossip. (This

    GOSSIP

    Back in Seattle for a few days. Hearing the usual industry gossip. (This is still such a small town.) And, I suppose nothing should surprise me. But the daftness of human beings, and their ability to envision drama where none exists, never ceases to amaze me. How on earth do people come up with this stuff?

    Nothing ever happens to or with money without a lot of bankers and investors agreeing to it. The world is a mundane, bureaucratic, procedural place administrated by lawyers who are incentivized to over analyze everything.

    Each of us has a narrow view of the world, and an exaggerated concept of our place in it.

    This region is extremely simple. We had one company that created a lot of manufacturing and engineering jobs, that was overtaxed, over-regulated, and finally fled the state. We then won the lottery and got a second company that concentrated an unheard of amount of money in what was a previously semi-rural population. That company had an atypical organizational structure that asked purchasing decisions to me made by very junior people. That purchasing strategy was important when technology was new – since the older generation would not have been as aggressive or experimental – or cheap to hire.

    But times change. People learn. Competitors emerge. And the Innovator’s Dilemma (curse) and the rent-seeking and laziness, politicization and disutility of bureaucracy take their normal course. That company no longer spends money in the same manner. It’s stock no longer appreciates in value as it did. And it’s employees no longer posses the relative wealth that they did. And so the entire region is affected by those changes.

    And many people, who previously sold their skills and labor to that company, and because of it, who had an impression of themselves and their skills as special, scarce or unique, are now stunned and despondent over the change in their fortunes. They lived in homes, worked at companies, and built organizations, during a period, where the entire American economy was booming with debt, booming with cheap overseas products, and while at the same time, that regional company was exporting cash into a town with scarce resources, and a small population. Those frustrated people are competing the broader economy, not the unique and temporary economy that they were living in during the past. Like American laborers, who must now compete in the global economy against people who will work 14 hours a day doing the same work, people in this area must compete globally.

    Revel in our time. In what we had. But don’t expect that it is repeatable. Or that there is anything you, or the people you work for, or the politicians that supposedly administer our governments, could have done anything about. If you had the opportunity to live during the period from 1988 – 2008 in this area, then appreciate having had the joy of participating in one of the greatest times and places to live in human history. (Remember the fun of Entros? The art galleries prior to 2001? The multiple playhouses? The increase in great restaurants? The feeling that it would never end? Daily life when Neo came upon our movie screens? Remember when Redmond was the ‘sticks’, and when Bellevue didn’t have a skyscraper?)

    The American dream was first built on cheap land. Second on jobs that were possible because of cheap land. Third because the world went into a debilitating war. Fourth because of cheap credit made possible by the petrodollar and our postwar anti-communist military capability.

    But the world caught up. There was no malfeasance – on anyone’s part. It’s just the slow five hundred year grid, as industrial capitalism moved from the heartland of England to every nation in the world. People in Beijing and countless other cities are living the seattle experience today. We can envy them, or celebrate them.

    It’s a choice.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-01-17 17:22:00 UTC

  • During their schooling years, we ask our children to find their natural talents

    During their schooling years, we ask our children to find their natural talents and virtues. To find themselves. And the truth is, they don’t have any natural talents. It’s just whatever they spend 10,000 hours doing. So we don’t find ourselves, we maker ourselves, and asking children that question is actually destructive. It only forces them to be more introspective – self centered. When in fact, the world treats you far better if you try to master the art of satisfying the wants of others, rather than yourself. You only get to live your fantasy for having made the satisfaction of others come true. So Instead, we should ask our children what very obscure thing that they could imagine being really good at, and imagine enjoying, that others will pay them for.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-01-04 10:55:00 UTC

  • Classifying People By Their Government Rather Than Occupation Simply Justifies The Expansion Of State Power

    Today, Krugman yet again argues that there is a lack of demand. Yes, there is a lack of demand, I agree. There is a lack of demand because our lower classes are unproductive in comparison to their peers in the world. There is a lack of demand for their labor. Since there is a lack of demand for their labor, there is a lack of money for them to spend. A state is merely one means of classifying people, and it’s a convenient one for statists, whose only purpose is to justify expansion of the state. In a world of relatively free trade, people are citizens of their occupational sector. The American upper classes have moved ahead with the rest of the world economy, and the American lower classes have not. And the reason for that failure is state policy, and in particular, state policy on education. State policy on education is more concerned with achieving political unity between disparate races and cultures than it is in creating productive citizens who can compete in the world market, and therefore create demand. Harrison Bergeron writes for TheTimes.

  • Honduran Experiments In Creating The Libertarian Paradise

    Over On The Economist, an unnamed author writes that the Hondurans are sponsoring a libertarian experiment:

    , libertarians have a real chance to implement their ideas. In addition to a big special development region, the Honduran government intends to approve two smaller zones. And two libertarian-leaning start-ups have already signed a preliminary memorandum of understanding with the Honduran government to develop them.

    Then references this chart which lists other attempts at libertarian utopias.

    But they only serve to illustrate the futility of these paradises. The biggest problem for any libertarian venture, is that the cost of developing an economy on anything other than LAND that contains human beings who may act as consumers is simply too high for an economy to form. The sea is, so to speak, infertile soil. The cost of prohibiting rent-seeking is equally high. Libertarianism states will be created by the application of violence against those who do not wish to possess freedom, and maintained only by the application of violence against those who would steal freedom. Silly anarchic fantasies to the contrary. Monarchy. Rule of the One-Law Under Common Law. Private government. Freedom. Violence is the source of freedom. Do not surrender your violence without demanding freedom in exchange.

  • Traveling from the ecotopian culture, through the breadbasket culture to the fou

    Traveling from the ecotopian culture, through the breadbasket culture to the foundry culture it is painfully obvious that the only declining culture in north america is the foundry sub civilization that was built around the great lakes and Erie canal in order to supply goods for the western expansion and rapid immigration that was made possible and then necessary by the Louisiana purchase.

    The civil war was fought over which economy and culture would profit from westward expansion. And the success if the propagandists to define the war as over slavery or unity is exceeded only by the propaganda that Germany started the first world war.

    We should never have ceded from England nor stopped the south from doing so. The end of the west is not started by the French revolution as much as the american.

    economics tells us the incentives and the incentives tell us the truth. Words are too often used as deception to mask a fraud.

    In history the French are always wrong – reveling in their creativity at corruption , the English a but less so because of their empiricism, and the Germans right about everything because it fell to them to keep the east at bay, but demonized for their discipline and treated as rubes — a convenient propaganda measure to hide the dependence that France and England relied upon for their freedoms.

    How is that for casual analysis? 😉

    Everything is related to everything across a ling enough time span.

    Our vanities have consequences. Because small things in large numbers have vast consequences.

    Source date (UTC): 2011-12-24 11:13:00 UTC

  • BLEEDING HEARTS OR ANARCHISTS? There is a movement called ‘Neo-Classical Liberal

    BLEEDING HEARTS OR ANARCHISTS?

    There is a movement called ‘Neo-Classical Liberalism’, whose members refer to themselves as “bleeding heart libertarians”. This movement combines classical anglo american political institutions and the classical liberal sentiments in favor of freedom and innovation, with libertarian economic and political insights, new institutional economics, and modern macro economics.

    I’m torn between trying to coalesce that movement somewhat or simply attempting to repair Austrian Libertarian theory on it’s own by fixing the hole left in praxeology by the failure to incorporate forgone opportunity costs. — It is really a matter of audiences. But audiences matter.

    The rothbardian movement is doing such a good job of promoting libertarianism – albiet among relative populists. The Hoppeians are infinitesimally small in number. (Hans might not like it but I consider myself a Hoppeian). But the Neo-Classical Liberal program has a chance of selling to the broad conservative audience.

    So my plan is to bring the ‘Propertarian Methodology’ of Rothbard and Hoppe to the Neo-Classical Liberal framework, by adding my work on forgone opportunity costs to the Propertarian body of work. This should solve the problem of explaining the differences between Hayek and Mises, and represent them as a single, unified, spectrum of reasoning differing only in temporal preference.

    Propertarian reasoning is the only fully rational explanation of ethics ever developed. Propertarianism unites ethics, economics and politics with econometrics. Combined with the insights provided by the debate over economic calculation and incentives, Propertarianism allows us to fully describe human activity as rational, but limited by knowledge, and fraught with error.

    I realize this is geek speak. But maybe there are a handful of geeks out there who are vaguely interested. 🙂

    My other goal is to write in short, clear sentences.

    I have less confidence in achieving that goal than in solving the greater philosophical problems that I’ve set my mind to.

    Source date (UTC): 2011-12-16 08:22:00 UTC

  • WORTH READING: DEFINE ‘RICH’. What is rich? Is ‘Rich’ something we can define or

    WORTH READING: DEFINE ‘RICH’.

    What is rich? Is ‘Rich’ something we can define or calculate? And how much can we tax them?

    It is certainly possible to calculate who is ‘rich’. The goal of every individual is to exit the market. Whether that individual studies hard to get a good (protected) job in big company, or works for the government which by definition is extra-market (and protected), or seeks a (protected) union job, or whether that person does none of that rent-seeking, and instead, exits the market through saving or investment.

    “Rich” means ‘exiting the market’. To exit the market one needs roughly on hundred times the median income, or about 4.5-5M today. It used to be that a million dollars meant something meaningful, but it doesn’t. You can easily burn through it if you’re the kind of person that can make it in the first place.

    Rich is a balance sheet calculation, not an income calculation. If a person’s balance sheet exceeds about one hundred times the median income (which is by definition, the 1%) then realistically, it doesn’t matter how much of their income you tax.

    I suspect that the various means of calculating maximum utility taxation is closer to 60 or 65% based upon what I can find.

    But if you tax the income of a small business person who is trying to exit the market, then we certainly have the right to wipe out social security, wipe out pension programs, fire federal workers and wipe out their savings. Because unless those assets are counted, the definition of ‘rich’ is asymmetrically used to punish people who participate in the market.

    Source date (UTC): 2011-12-13 20:38:00 UTC

  • If you want to do something that is meaningful to you for a very long time, you

    If you want to do something that is meaningful to you for a very long time, you can become very angry at those things that prevent you from doing it. The feeling starts out as distraction, and matures into simple dissatisfaction, then dissatisfaction turns to frustration, frustration to exhaustion and exhaustion to anger. That anger then tends to spill out onto people around you, and you can treat even those you care most about in ways that they dont deserve, for reasons that are not related to them whatsoever. Your dreams are real if and only if, you are more willing to bear the difficulty of achieving them, then you are the frustration from not trying to achieve them.

    Source date (UTC): 2011-12-12 18:41:00 UTC

  • Is Membership In The 1% Club Education Or IQ?

    Greg Mankiw makes a case for graduate school education:

    Apart from their bank accounts, Gallup finds education to be the greatest difference between the wealthiest 1% of Americans and everyone else. The Gallup analysis reveals that 72% of the wealthiest Americans have a college degree, compared with 31% of those in the lower 99 percentiles. Furthermore, nearly half of those in the wealthiest group have postgraduate education, versus 16% of all others.

    But it’s not education that gets people into the 1%. It’s IQ and hard work. Education produces little more than signaling.