Matt Yglesias

The Fire Department: A Public Option

Acton Fire Station (cc photo by stevechapman)

Tina Dupuy had a nice item in the Huffington Post yesterday noting that urban firefighting in the United States was once a private for-profit industry. Then around the middle of the nineteenth century, cities began to decide that this system was too haphazard, corruption-prone, and unfair and thus began the dread big-government takeover of firefighting:

Yet if we had to have the “conversation” about the firefighting industry today, we’d have socialism-phobic South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint on the TV every chance he could get saying things like, “Do you want a government bureaucrat between you and the safety of your home?”

Rep. John Boehner of Ohio would hold press conferences and ask, “Do you want your firefighting to be like going to the DMV? Do you want Uncle Sam to come breaking down your door every time some Washington fat cat says there’s a fire?”

It’s a good point. Anyone who’s honest about it is ultimately going to have to admit that direct public-sector provision of services is something that can be done in a quite high-quality way. Obviously, low-quality service is also possible. The fact of the matter regarding the DMV is that even though people find DMV lines important, people also just don’t care about it very much. No lifelong Democrat has ever crossed party lines to vote for a Republican gubernatorial candidates because he’s fed up with the low-quality of the DMV and excited about injecting some new blood into the stodgy motor vehicles bureaucracy.

By contrast, people do care about crime and Rudy Giuliani was able to get elected in super-Democratic New York City. Any mayor with a lick of sense at least attempts to provide a crime control agency that performs well. I think the evidence from the UK is that NHS quality is a constant subject of political debate and politicians are forever attempting to achieve better performance. This, I take it, is the reason why the NHS is so successful at delivering cost-effective treatment outcomes. A very low budget by world standards is why its outcomes don’t look great in absolute terms.

Meanwhile, in the United States it is worth keeping in mind that public provision of health care services isn’t on the table. And we don’t need to guess what public provision of health insurance might look like; Medicare is a very large and not-at-all obscure government program. It’s not perfect, I’m not even sure I’d say it’s great, but it measures up quite well in terms of both cost and quality relative to the private sector.

Endgame

Looking forward to a post-work “beer summit”:

— Jeffrey Goldberg is making sense on Israel and “self-hating” Jews.

— Roger Cohen usually makes sense on Israel, but his diet is weird.

— Undersea cable problem cuts West Africa off from the internet.

— The case for taxing plastic bags.

— David Ignatius is right about this.

Song of the day: Ida Maria “Oh My God”—hadn’t seen the video before, it’s really cool.

Just When You Thought the “Beer Summit” Story Couldn’t Get Any More Ridiculous…

… along come the temperance activists:

Beer sends the “wrong message to our nation’s youth who are becoming alcoholics at young ages,” said Rocky Twyman, founder of Pray at the Pump, in a statement this morning. “Whether or not he likes it, President Obama is a role model for all the youth in America. His actions count.” [...]

The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union also isn’t happy. “There are so many other beverages he could have chosen that would have served just as well,” said president Rita K. Wert, suggesting lemonade or iced tea.

Speaking of becoming alcoholics at young ages, when I was a young man I, like Professor Gates, was a frequent Red Stripe drinker. Why? Well, because high on the relatively short list of bars in New York City that would serve 16 year-old boys in the great year 1997 was Cafe Creole at 99 MacDougal street where someplace called 99 Below is today. Being Caribbean-themed, Red Stripe was on offer. So cheers to underage drinking, it doesn’t seem to kill foreigners.

The “Round Numbers” Theory of Legislating

Tim Fernholz notesthat hot on the heels of centrists slicing Obama’s stimulus plan by a suspiciously round $100 billion, it’s pretty distressing to learn that centrists are now looking “to cut roughly $100 billion from the cost of health-care reform proposals.” Unlike in the stimulus case it’s not that a cheaper health care bill is necessarily a worse one, but the process is backwards:

Instead of starting with what good policy will be, though, we’re starting with “lop $100 billion off whatever the President thinks is a good idea and we’ll go from there,” even if that has the potential to produce a health care plan that doesn’t work very well.

It’s worth saying that the key issue when it comes to government spending should be not cost but value. A dollar spent on improving the health of the population, or producing a more educated citizenry, or less crime-ridden streets is a dollar that’s very well spent. People tend to be skeptical about government spending, however, for the non-crazy reason that they’re often skeptical that money will be spent on effective programs or in effective ways. But when you try to hold down headline price numbers in arbitrary ways and for arbitrary reasons you’re not doing anything to ensure quality-control and thus address any real problems with “big spending” liberalism.

Adviser: Time to “Declare Victory and Go Home” from Iraq

(dod photo)

This seems like good advice to me:

A senior American military adviser in Baghdad has concluded in an unusually blunt memo that the Iraqi forces suffer from deeply entrenched deficiencies but are now capable of protecting the Iraqi government, and that it is time “for the U.S. to declare victory and go home.”

Prepared by Col. Timothy R. Reese, an adviser to the Iraqi military’s Baghdad command, the memorandum asserts that the Iraqi forces have an array of problems, including corruption, poor management and the inability to resist political pressure from Shiite political parties.

Things have gone better than I expected over the past 12 months, which seems like an excellent chance to take advantage of the situation to cut our losses before any of the long-standing issues with the current Iraqi state create new problems.

Imperial Russia Only Had One Czar Because It Was a Centralized Autocracy

For a couple of months now, conservatives have been launching nonsensical attacks on the Obama administration for having too many “czars” and darkly warning of incipient dictatorship. In fact, “czar” is not an official position in the government, and the president can’t do anything about the fact that people in the media may or may not refer to a given executive branch official as a “czar.” Now the nonsense really hits the big-time with a dishonest and absurd Washington Post op-ed that, sad to say, fits in the best tradition of that section of the paper. For example, Cantor writes that “Vesting such broad authority in the hands of people not subjected to Senate confirmation and congressional oversight poses a grave threat to our system of checks and balances.”

Now, Cantor is a practical politician. Lying about his political enemies when he can get away with it is what he does. In theory, the Post has editors to prevent their pages from being used as a vehicle for such lies. In practice, the Post seems to feel that its op-ed pages should be used to mislead people. Thus, though my colleague Amanda Terkel was able to verify that many of these alleged “czars” have, in fact, been confirmed by the Senate nobody on the staff of the Post was able to do so.

Meanwhile, as a basic point of logic what’s with this complaint:

At last count, there were at least 32 active czars that we knew of, meaning the current administration has more czars than Imperial Russia.

The thing about Imperial Russia is that as a centralized autocracy it only had one czar. Having multiple people in positions of authority makes a political system less, rather than more, autocratic. Consider, “under Hitler, Germany had only one Fuhrer, but in the contemporary United States there are dozens of important political leaders.” Do you find that idea alarming? Are we worse than the Nazis? Of course not.

How Big a Swing Would House Republicans Need in 2010?

Andrew Gelman tries to look ahead to the 2010 midterms by first looking back at the Democrats’ share of the House vote over time:

From this picture, it looks possible but unlikely that there will be a 6% swing toward the Republicans (which is what it would take for them to bring their average district vote from 44% to 50%). Historically speaking, a 6% swing is a lot. The biggest shifts in the past few decades appear to be 1946-48, 1956-58, and 1972-74 (in favor of the Democrats) and 1964-66 and 1992-194 (for the Republicans). I don’t know if any of these would quite be enough to swing the House majority. A more likely outcome, if the Republicans indeed improve in next year’s election, is for them to make some gains but still be in the minority.

It is worth noting, as you can see from the chart, that in recent years there have been several occasions in the late-1990s in which Democrats won a narrow majority of House votes but the GOP controlled the majority of House seats. The drawing of district lines thus seems to favor Republicans. Since the lines will be redone after 2010, the electoral landscape may come to be more favorable for the Democrats once the census/redistricting process is done.

Stephen L. Carter on Profits

As Ezra Klein says, it was very strange of the editors of the Washington Post’s opinion pages to decide that running an op-ed that just drifts from a generalized defense of the existence of capitalism to some specific points about health care reform. But any day you read a Washington Post op-ed that doesn’t contain a deliberate effort to mislead the audience is a pretty good day.

Unfortunately, even his generalized analysis of profit is wrong:

High profits are excellent news. When corporate earnings reach record levels, we should be celebrating. The only way a firm can make money is to sell people what they want at a price they are willing to pay. If a firm makes lots of money, lots of people are getting what they want.

This is not correct. Carter is stumbling over an ambiguity in the ordinary language phrase “make money.” What’s true is that the only way a firm can generate sales is to sell people what they want at a price they are willing to pay. So if a firm has an enormous sales volume, then lots of people are getting what they want. But profit is the difference between revenue and costs. Very high profits indicate a lack of competition.

Sometimes that’s because public policy is distorting the market. When you make it illegal to issue new liquor licenses in Adams-Morgan, you generate monopoly profits for existing license-holders. Sometimes it’s just because barriers to entry are high. Starting a company capable of building civilian jumbo jets would be extremely difficult, so Boeing and Airbus don’t face much competition. Sometimes it’s a matter of deliberate public policy—we grant temporary monopolies to pharmaceutical companies, thus allowing them to generate giant profits, in hopes of encouraging capital to be invested in the pharmaceutical R&D sector. Sometimes it’s because of network effects—the fact that most people use Windows is a good reason to use Windows, which makes it hard for Microsoft to lose market share. And sometimes it’s just transient—the first gas station in town might earn huge profits, but that encourages people to open new gas stations and drives the revenues down to close to the marginal cost, shaving the profits.

Profit’s not the worst thing in the world, but it’s hardly the best. When you’re looking at big profits, you really do need to ask where they come from and whether or not this is something you want. In the pharma case, people endlessly debate whether or not there isn’t a better model. The incentive effect is good, but the mechanism for producing it seems wasteful. The liquor licenses thing is definitely wasteful—instead of grandfathering certain business in and letting them generate monopoly profits you ought to auction the licenses and let the public capture the regulatory surplus. In the case of airplanes, it doesn’t seem worth doing anything. My guess is that one day China will decide it wants to waste its citizens’ money on launching a third civilian airplane maker, and people who live outside the US/EU/China “axis of perverse determination to build airplanes” will benefit from the increased competition.

One should also note that for all of Carter’s love of profits, he’s a professor at Yale. The higher education sector is everywhere dominated by governments and non-profit foundations and you rarely see professors complaining about this.

“Intension” vs “Intention”

Emerson Hall, Harvard University (cc photo by Dan4th)

Back when I was in college I thought the philosopher’s distinction between “intensional” with an “s” and “intentional” with a “t” was a sick joke designed to confuse undergraduates and the typo-prone. So I’m heartened to see that in his paper “Against Darwinism” (via Tyler Cowen), Jerry Fodor has a footnote lambasting this nonsense:

It’s hard to imagine a less fortunate terminology than the philosopher’s ‘intention/intension’ distinction. But I suppose there’s nothing can be done at this late date. In what follows, an intensional context is one in which the substitution of coextensive expressions isn’t valid. Intentional states are just the familiar beliefs, desires, intentions and so forth that populate theories of cognition and of the integration of behavior.

I don’t really think the philosophical community should adopt this fatalistic “there’s nothing can be done” attitude. Surely this is what professional associations are for. This is a very, very confusing terminological choice and it helps nobody.

At any rate, haven’t read the paper beyond this footnote, but I have strong feelings on this issue.

So You Say You Want Me to Want a Revolution?

Nick Baumann at Mother Jones and the mystery blogger behind Democracy in America both see my various complaints about American politician institutions as a sign of incipient radicalism. Well, not really. I’m very skeptical about the utility of violence in bringing about positive political change and am thus a poor candidate for revolutionary. But I do want to see reform of the political process. In particular, I would note:

— The House shifted in the past from a strict seniority rule for committee chairmanships to one that allows for change (see, e.g., Waxman vs Dingell) and I would like to see them shift in the direction of routine contestation of committee and subcommittee top spots.

— The Senate could and should peacefully effectuate a similar shift.

— The Senate has, in the past, altered the filibuster rule and should do away with it.

— The electoral college is a sick joke and the National Popular Vote movement offers a plausible way to end it.

— As best I can tell, absolutely no rule is preventing states from experimenting with electing their House delegations via proportional representation.

— The District of Columbia ought to be a state, and nothing is stopping the current Democratic congressional majorities from admitting us as one.

— There’s no practical way to get rid of the Senate, but we can at least try to have a public political culture that acknowledges that it’s an unfair and anachronistic system.

It wouldn’t take a “revolution” to achieve any of that. But it would dramatically transform the context in which legislative activity takes place for the better.

I also would like it noted, for the record, that my interest in political reform does not stem from any “disappointment” in how Barack Obama isn’t able to get anything done. I was writing about this back in December because I always knew that Barack Obama wouldn’t be able to get anything done.

As Usual, Public Wants Lower Deficit Without Cutting Spending or Raising Taxes

According to the latest New York Times poll, the public continues to be ill-informed and hypocritical:

Most Americans continue to want the federal government to focus on reducing the budget deficit rather than spending money to stimulate the national economy, a new New York Times/CBS News poll finds. Yet at the same time, most oppose some proposed solutions for decreasing it.

Fifty-six percent of respondents said that they were not willing to pay more in taxes in order to reduce the deficit, and nearly as many said they were not willing for the government to provide fewer services in areas such as health care, education and defense spending.

This is why I think shrewd politicians don’t spend too much time sweating the details of public opinion about issues. What really matters in recent polling is that as Barack Obama is subject to the usual partisan attacks, his polling honeymoon has vanished and if the economic situation continues to deteriorate he’ll get even less popular. When vulnerable members of congress push the health care vote back into the fall, they’re almost certainly pushing it into a time period during which opinion will be fairly anti-Obama.

Senate Progressive Contemplating Rational Committee Assignment Decisions

By divine right.

It used to be that the way you decided who had political authority in a country was that you looked at who had political authority last year. If he was still alive, then he kept his authority. If he died, his oldest living son got political authority. Then he kept it until he died. At which point it passed to his oldest living son. This system persisted for a long time and it has enough of a grip on the human imagination that you still see it formalized in Saudi Arabia and informally in effect in places like Syria and North Korea. It doesn’t, however, make any real sense. It’s not a rational or fair or just way to allocate political power.

Meanwhile, in the United States Senate the way they determine who gets to chair the Senate Finance Committee is they ask who chaired it last year. If he’s still around, he stays in charge. And if he dies or retires or loses an election, then the power automatically falls to the next guy in line. The guy can be corrupt or incompetent, and he still gets it. His views might be out of line with the sentiments of the party in charge or the American people, and he still gets it. He might represent a state containing no metropolitan areas, no racial minorities, and barely any rural white people and he still gets it. Vast authority with almost no accountability.

That’s why I was glad to read this:

In an apparent warning to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), some liberal Democrats have suggested a secret-ballot vote every two years on whether or not to strip committee chairmen of their gavels. [...] Harkin did not mention Baucus, but his suggestion would likely resonate with the senior Montana Democrat, who has often clashed with his colleagues over important bills.

The merits of this proposal really have nothing to do with the details of Baucus or the health care battle. They are also obvious and overwhelming. We wouldn’t pick committee chairmen by alphabetical order, or based on their ethnicity, or their age, or a system of primogeniture. We don’t generally believe in a system of political authority by divine right. Instead, political authority normally derives either from election by the people or else appointment by other elected officials. Congressional committee chairmanships, especially in the Senate, are a strange and anachronistic exception to that rule and changing the rule is an excellent idea.