Thursday, August 27, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Health Care Omerta in the U.K.
It's fine for Brits to talk trash about the National Health Service, but not to Americans.
Michael C. Moynihan | August 25, 2009A few weeks ago, I sat down with Daniel Hannan, the Milton Friedman-loving member of European Parliament representing South East England, to discuss his infamous showdown with Prime Minister Gordon Brown, his opinion of the British National Health Service (NHS), and what the Republicans could learn from the recent successes of Britain's Conservative Party. When I asked Hannan his opinion of Tory party leader David Cameron—who, I argued, “lurched towards the center” in search of popularity—he demonstrated unswerving party loyalty. Cameron, he admonished, was hardly a Tory wet and is more committed to free-market ideas than his old guard Thatcherite critics were willing to admit.
The following day, Hannan repeated his criticisms of the NHS on the Fox News Channel, warning Americans that his country's health system was a "60-year failure" that he "wouldn't wish on anybody." He delivered a stark verdict:
I find it incredible that a free people living in a country dedicated and founded in the cause of independence and freedom can seriously be thinking about adopting such a system in peacetime and massively expanding the role of the state when there's no need.Had Hannan muttered dark warnings about the British health service's sustainability on the floor of the European Parliament, the Labour Party would surely have made political hay out of it, arguing as they often do that the Tories, if given power, would speedily dismantle the NHS and replace it with a more American-style system. But this was something else entirely. To go to America, to appear on Fox News, and denounce Nye Bevan's "post-war achievement" was too much for both Labourites and squishy Conservatives. READ MORE REASON
Abolish the DHS
Does "time with my family" ever actually mean "time with my family" in Washington? Tom Ridge gave the standard resignation line when he stepped down as Secretary of Homeland Security shortly after the 2004 elections, but last week he revealed that there was much more to the story.
In a forthcoming book, Ridge complains that the weekend before Election Day, Bush administration officials leaned on him to raise the color-coded threat level. Dismayed, Ridge refused the demand, and concluded he needed to resign. "I wondered," Ridge writes, "Is this about security or politics?"
That's a question we ought to ask about DHS as a whole. Since its creation in 2003, the department has done little to provide genuine security and much to encourage a pernicious politics of fear. We'd be better off without it.
The Homeland Security Advisory System is a case in point. Even before Ridge's revelation, two separate studies showed that Bush received a boost to his approval ratings with each escalation of the terror threat level. The warning has been raised above yellow ("elevated") 16 times, but it's never been lowered to blue or green, the bottom rungs on DHS's Ladder of Fear. Yet, with Spinal Tap logic ("this goes to 11!") the department insists on keeping all five levels.
The department itself is a dog's breakfast of 22 federal agencies brought together in the hope of providing better coordination on a common mission. But turf battles left key antiterror agencies like the FBI out of the reorganization, and DHS finished last or next to last on every measure of employee morale in a 2006 Office of Personnel Management study.
The truth, as analyst Jeffrey Rosen points out, is that DHS is 'an institutional money pit that has more to do with symbols than substance." Indeed, a congressional investigation in 2008 documented some $15 billion in failed contracts that have run wildly over budget or been cancelled before completion. READ MORE @ CATO
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Betting Against the Fed
by Steve H. Hanke
Added to cato.org on August 21, 2009
This article appeared in the September 7, 2009 issue of Forbes.
The Federal Reserve is scrambling to convince the public that it is not a secretive institution that acts at the behest of Wall Street, but the public isn't buying the Fed's line. According to a Gallup Poll conducted in mid-July, the Fed received the lowest approval rating of the nine government agencies and departments evaluated — even lower than the Internal Revenue Service.
Trying to show the softer side of the central bank, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke took us on a tour of his hometown of Dillon, S.C. on a 60 Minutes segment in March, and in July he fielded questions from newsman Jim Lehrer and an auditorium full of people for more than an hour in a televised town hall meeting.
Both events were carefully choreographed — and unprecedented. During his face time Bernanke explained many things, including the Fed's strategy for shrinking its balance sheet and withdrawing the ocean of excess reserves from the banking system. Unfortunately, he did not address my main beef with the bank: that it clings to a flawed inflation-targeting regime with a horrible history of monetary policy failures. READ MORE
Transparency Chic
Someday your government may have as little privacy as you do.
Katherine Mangu-Ward | August 24, 2009Newborn babies have their own blogs and grandmothers are on Facebook. We Google potential dates. Privacy is dead. But one kind of information is still cozily locked away, safe from prying eyes: the law. President Obama may have come to Washington promising greater transparency, but progress has been less than impressive.
While the feds stumble toward openness, geeks and developers who made oversharing a way of life are bringing their can-do attitude to government transparency. Can't find what you're looking for on Regulation.gov? Try the new, user-friendlier OpenRegs.com. Frustrated by the terrible interface of Obama's Recovery.gov? Check out the easily-searchable Recovery.org.
But with the possible exception of the ever-leaky CIA, no aspect of government remains more locked down than the secretive, hierarchical judicial branch. Digital records of court filings, briefs and transcripts sit behind paywalls like Lexis and Westlaw. Legal codes and judicial documents aren't copyrighted, but governments often cut exclusive distribution deals, rendering other access methods a bit legally questionable. Supreme Court decisions are easy to get, but the briefs and decisions of lower courts can be hard to come by. Last week, a team from Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy took a pot shot at legal secrecy, setting in motion a scheme to filch protected judicial records and make them available for free online. One of the developers, Harvard's Stephen Schultze, says he went digging for some First Amendment precedent last fall and was shocked by the outdated technology he found. Knowing that "there's a certain geek cache to openness projects these days," Mr. Schultze and Princeton computer science grad students Tim Lee and Harlan Yu went straight to work.
Their almost-definitely-probably lawful system works like this: Right now, lawyers, nonprofits and researchers who use PACER, the clunky database maintained by the federal court system, must hand over their credit-card numbers and pay eight cents a page for records. Eight cents a page might not seem like much until you realize that the system isn't keyword searchable.
That's right: In 2009, judicial records in the U.S. are essentially unsearchable. Digital records—with confidential personal information (theoretically) redacted by attorneys—must be downloaded in unwieldy, badly labeled chunks. This is incomprehensible to anyone under 30. But it's a sad fact of life for those who pay lawyers hundreds of dollars an hour to dig up what would could be Googled in any other field. READ MORE
Monday, August 24, 2009
The Appendix: Useful and in Fact Promising
The body's appendix has long been thought of as nothing more than a worthless evolutionary artifact, good for nothing save a potentially lethal case of inflammation.
Now researchers suggest the appendix is a lot more than a useless remnant. Not only was it recently proposed to actually possess a critical function, but scientists now find it appears in nature a lot more often than before thought. And it's possible some of this organ's ancient uses could be recruited by physicians to help the human body fight disease more effectively.
In a way, the idea that the appendix is an organ whose time has passed has itself become a concept whose time is over.
"Maybe it's time to correct the textbooks," said researcher William Parker, an immunologist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. "Many biology texts today still refer to the appendix as a 'vestigial organ.'"
Slimy sac
The vermiform appendix is a slimy dead-end sac that hangs between the small and large intestines. No less than Charles Darwin first suggested that the appendix was a vestigial organ from an ancestor that ate leaves, theorizing that it was the evolutionary remains of a larger structure, called a cecum, which once was used by now-extinct predecessors for digesting food.
"Everybody likely knows at least one person who had to get their appendix taken out - slightly more than 1 in 20 people do - and they see there are no ill effects, and this suggests that you don't need it," Parker said.
However, Parker and his colleagues recently suggested that the appendix still served as a vital safehouse where good bacteria could lie in wait until they were needed to repopulate the gut after a nasty case of diarrhea. Past studies had also found the appendix can help make, direct and train white blood cells.
Now, in the first investigation of the appendix over the ages, Parker explained they discovered that it has been around much longer than anyone had suspected, hinting that it plays a critical function.
"The appendix has been around for at least 80 million years, much longer than we would estimate if Darwin's ideas about the appendix were correct," Parker said. READ MORE