The Corporation

I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of this movie. Not because it was any good, mind you. At times the film seemed little more than a collection of every half-baked criticism of corporations ever uttered by man. So much so that the film often seemed to lapse into self-parody, which is what, for me, provided the bulk of the entertainment.

Why McCain Scares Me

Writing in Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria does a fairly decent job of explaining the elements of Senator McCain’s foreign policy vision that I find so disturbing:

On March 26, McCain gave a speech on foreign policy in Los Angeles that was billed as his most comprehensive statement on the subject. It contained within it the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years. Yet almost no one noticed.

In his speech McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries. Moscow was included in this body in the 1990s to recognize and reward it for peacefully ending the cold war on Western terms, dismantling the Soviet empire and withdrawing from large chunks of the old Russian Empire as well. McCain also proposed that the United States should expand the G8 by taking in India and Brazil—but pointedly excluded China from the councils of power.

We have spent months debating Barack Obama’s suggestion that he might, under some circumstances, meet with Iranians and Venezuelans. It is a sign of what is wrong with the foreign-policy debate that this idea is treated as a revolution in U.S. policy while McCain’s proposal has barely registered. What McCain has announced is momentous—that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order, a policy that began under Richard Nixon (with Beijing) and continued under Ronald Reagan (with Moscow). It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war.

More.

Video Games: The Cause of, And Solution to, All Life’s Problems

A while back I came across the following news item about how video games were leading couples to divorce:

Although best-selling online role-playing game World of Warcraft boasts over ten million subscribers, it’s also leaving in its wake an increasing list of casualties.

Even though she’s never played the game, 28 year-old Jocelyn is one of the fallen. A well-spoken California resident, she divorced her husband of six years after he developed a crippling addiction to the smash online RPG.

“He would get home from work at 6:00, start playing at 6:30, and he’d play until three a.m. Weekends were worse — it was from morning straight through until the middle of the night,” she told Yahoo! Games in an interview. “It took away all of our time that we spent together. I ceased to exist in his life.”

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Medicare?

Call it a crisis or not, as you please, but the fact is that Medicare is facing a huge longterm shortfall. As they say in Al Anon, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. But, assuming politicians are willing to do this, what should be step two? Writing in last week’s Wall Street Journal, congressman Paul Ryan offers one proposal:

According to the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the rest of government will consume nearly 40% of the economy by the time my three young children reach my age (38). This will require more than doubling the average tax burden of the past 40 years just to keep the government afloat. Continuing down this path will eventually strangle our economy.

To meet this challenge and secure our fiscal future, I’m introducing a comprehensive legislative plan called “A Roadmap for America’s Future.”

The bill secures the existing Medicare program for those over 55 – so Americans can receive the benefits they planned for throughout most of their working lives. Those 55 and younger will, when they retire, receive an annual payment of up to $9,500 to purchase health coverage – either from a list of Medicare-certified plans, or any plan in the individual market, in any state.

The Power of I’m Sorry

For decades, malpractice lawyers and insurers have counseled doctors and hospitals to “deny and defend.” Many still warn clients that any admission of fault, or even expression of regret, is likely to invite litigation and imperil careers.

But with providers choking on malpractice costs and consumers demanding action against medical errors, a handful of prominent academic medical centers, like Johns Hopkins and Stanford, are trying a disarming approach.

By promptly disclosing medical errors and offering earnest apologies and fair compensation, they hope to restore integrity to dealings with patients, make it easier to learn from mistakes and dilute anger that often fuels lawsuits.

Malpractice lawyers say that what often transforms a reasonable patient into an indignant plaintiff is less an error than its concealment, and the victim’s concern that it will happen again.

Just Getting Warmed Up

We all know that Barack Obama is in favor of change. Less clear has been exactly what it is he wishes to change. For most of the campaign the assumption has been that Obama wants to change government. He speaks often, for example, of the need to take power away from the “special interests” (which is no doubt why he supported the ethanol mandate). But based on some of his statements, it seems his ambitions may run higher than that. Perhaps Obama wishes not merely to change government, but to change us:

Pitching his message to Oregon’s environmentally-conscious voters, Obama called on the United States to “lead by example” on global warming, and develop new technologies at home which could be exported to developing countries.

“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said.

“That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen,” he added.

I might humbly suggest that getting other countries’ OK as to where we set our thermostats isn’t leadership either (except, perhaps, in a globalized version of Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin’s use of the term).

Obama’s talk of “new technologies” and controlling thermostats put me in mind of a story from a couple of months ago, when the California legislature was considering installing devices in people’s homes that would allow the government to set people’s thermostats for them:

The Disaster of the Past

I’ve started reading Matthew Connelly’s book Fatal Misconception, which is a history of the population control and eugenic movements. So far the book is quite good, and I hope, once I’ve finished it, to write up a more formal review. For the moment, though, I’d thought I would quote from the book’s opening, which I found quite striking:

Imagine a world with an average life expectancy of less than thirty years. Many babies do not live to see their first birthday. Subject to chronic malnutrition, children are vulnerable to disease, grow slowly, and find it hard to learn. Those who survive to adulthood seem stunted, with an average body mass a third smaller than our own. The great majority live off the land. The few who inhabit cities – dwelling with their own waste and drinking water alive with microbes – are even more likely to die early deaths. Altogether, there are not even a billion people on earth, less than a sixth as many as there are today.

This is not some post-apocalyptic future. It is the world we left behind two hundred years ago.

The amazing thing is that historically speaking conditions 200 years ago weren’t particularly bad. They were, if anything, better than they had been for most of human history. What is atypical is not the poor condition of people 200 years ago, or of many people today. Rather, it is the high standard of living the West currently enjoys that is out of the ordinary.

Archbishop Chaput on Catholics and Obama

On the First Things blog, Archbishop Chaput has responded to the use of some of his prior statements by the group Roman Catholics for Obama. Chaput begins by detailing his support for the RFK and Carter campaigns, and then notes:

In the years after the Carter loss, I began to notice that very few of the people, including Catholics, who claimed to be “personally opposed” to abortion really did anything about it. Nor did they intend to. For most, their personal opposition was little more than pious hand-wringing and a convenient excuse—exactly as it is today. In fact, I can’t name any pro-choice Catholic politician who has been active, in a sustained public way, in trying to discourage abortion and to protect unborn human life—not one. Some talk about it, and some may mean well, but there’s very little action. In the United States in 2008, abortion is an acceptable form of homicide. And it will remain that way until Catholics force their political parties and elected officials to act differently.

Why do I mention this now? Earlier this spring, a group called “Roman Catholics for Obama ’08” quoted my own published words in the following way:

Here Comes Everybody

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh wonders what would happen if the U.S. adopted an “open borders” policy. The consensus view seems to be “way too many” though exact figures tend to vary greatly, as one would imagine. I don’t necessarily disagree with that assessment, but I do wonder whether people may be overestimating the number of people who would actually come to the U.S. and/or overestimate the negative impact that such unlimited immigration would have.

The first thing a lot of people seem to fail to factor in is that just because the U.S. has decided to fling open its borders doesn’t mean that other countries are going to follow suit. Getting into the U.S. is one thing, getting out of your home country can be quite another. For the most part, the sort of countries one would most want to get away from are precisely the ones that limit your ability to leave, and I suspect that such limits would only grow more strict if the government knew it could lose the bulk of its population to the U.S. in short order.

Wal-Mart vs. Inequality

Wal-Mart is famous for its low prices, but according to a new analysis by a couple of University of Chicago profs, Wal-Marts price cutting has also cut something else (or at least restrained its growth): inequality. Steven Levitt reports:

Inequality is growing in the United States. The data say so. Knowledgeable experts like Ben Bernanke say so. Ask just about any economist and they will agree. (They may or may not think growing inequality is a problem, but they will acknowledge that there has been a sharp increase in inequality.)

According to two of my University of Chicago colleagues, Christian Broda and John Romalis, everyone is wrong.

Their argument could hardly be simpler. How rich you are depends on two things: how much money you have, and how much the stuff you want to buy costs. If your income doubles, but the prices of the things you consume also double, then you are no better off.