Sunday, while riding, I had an entrepreneurial idea which I’m also almost certain occurred in abundance in the cash-for-clunkers boondogle.  This enterprise would most likely be best employed by a car dealer, perhaps one who put his bottom line ahead of his “patriotic duty.” Imagine a car dealer has a potential customer who wants to buy a new car, yet has no clunker to turn in. Here is a way in which that most of that $4.5k windfall could aid that person in buying a new car. He follows the following steps:

1. The initial ingredient is a person (person A), willing to buy a car with the help of $3.5k cash-for-clunker money in the absence of said clunker.
2. First, locate a person (B) who owns a qualifying “clunker”, i.e., not-so-good gas mileage and has owned it for two years.
3. Offer that person an exchange/upgrade car + $1000, which of might be used toward the purchase of said “upgraded” clunker.
4. That same said person is “lent” the money is then (on the books at least) used purchase the new car that the person A wants and is purchasing.
5. Person B then “sells” car A (for a song and as agreed) to person A.
6. Person A drives off with his car, which cost $3.5k less than negotiated originally.
7. Person B drives off with a “new” used car. His original “clunker” is then turned to sand.
8. The car dealer makes his commission on two cars (one used and one new).

If you don’t think this occurred with some frequency over the summer, you haven’t noticed that this is America … the land ruled by enterprising hucksters. The $1k/$3.5k split of course is illustrative and would vary in proportion as the market dictated. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to defend this practice … or suggest how/why it is not possible given the current law. While it certainly violates the spirit of the law, I’m pretty sure a half-way competent lawyer could see a way to making it fit the letter of the law.

The Cash-for-clunkers hornswoggle has educated Americans in a practical lesson in Bastiat’s Parable of the Broken Window. This paradox/parable is one which the Keynsian’s would like to whitewash with talk of multipliers and other such nonsense, but the essential argument is largely untouched by that rhetoric, i.e., for the multiplier to be considered it is essential that the hidden costs implicit in their multiplier be ignored. The parable as recounted in the wiki piece above, excerpted is:

Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son happened to break a pane of glass? If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assuredly bear witness to the fact, that every one of the spectators, were there even thirty of them, by common consent apparently, offered the unfortunate owner this invariable consolation—”It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?”Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economical institutions.

Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier’s trade—that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs—I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.

But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, “Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.”

It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented

This is the problem with the clunker. The taxed money which will be extracted from the public will not be able to be used for the various purposes to which they would have used those monies for, instead it is taken and used in this way. Very often that same said clunker gets just a few mpg more than the car it replaced, which then is scrapped … and the energy costs of production will take many years to recoup … so the net energy/pollution equation is likely for almost a decade … a loss in many if not most cases. Furthermore today, in the wake of cash-for-clunkers, we hear that the used car market is not difficult right now. The price of used cars is up and the availability of cars is down. There are few cars available … due to so many having been having silicate added to their engines. One might ask which whether the used car vs new car consumer is better or worse off financially relatively speaking in order to review who has been helped and who has been harmed by this policy.

1. Of Flight 103.
2. Stealth training.
3. In group bias and the administration..
4. Ms McArdle considers the (unlikely?) 2nd gunman hypothesis.
5. I think John Climacus ~30 step program more likely to have a salutary effect.
6. Finishing he bill … and finding a para-military healthcore at the end.
7. US special ops elsewhere, i.e. not Iraq or Afghanistan and the GWOT, which has some sort of new name but I don’t know what that is this week.
8. An opinion that life imitates art regarding Obamacare.
9. Noting Iran.
10. A List: 10 Myths believed the first time heard.
11. Fact checking the so-called abortion myth and the healthcare bill.
12. Some comic relief.
13. Gay in Armenia.
14. Well, I certainly learned about it early on … but then again a lot of WWII history I learned from Avalon Hill doing strategic war gaming as a kid (Third Reich and ASL come to mind).

1. Russia and the Ukraine moved in different directions post-communism. Why? Here’s one (Ukrainian) response.
2. Terrorists in Russia.
3. A clock (full disclosure: I have a non-Arduino based BCD clock on my desk at work).
4. The left admits to dishonesty in the healthcare discussion. But, I can’t guess, which three?
5. Consistency and the healthcare debate. Noting the above, I’m guessing the private option in the healthcare discussion is not what they really want.
6. Grow your own.
7. Continuing to read the bill.
8. Working for the enemy in WWII.
9. Obama’s inconsistent rhetoric on healthcare noted.
10. Kennedy wants a “speedy replacement”. What? This cancer thing is new news to him?
11. The TBS/BFoC-RUADH. Shooting books?
12. 20% of birthers are Democrats, apparently.
13. Mr Axelrod.
14. Camera tech … or the HD of 50 years hence.
15. Yet another broken promise. Silence from the left.

1. Yum.
2. Noting Chesterton on the natural.
3. Some suggestions on healthcare.
4. Hands and the unpaved road one hath trod.
5. This cricket race will be discussed in the next few days.
6. While the end-of-life notions in the current healthcare bill have been misrepresented by left and right … the two points made here are important to remember.
7. Copts in the beltway.
8. Continuing to slog through the bill … and some further suggestions for the WH here.
9. Examining words Mr Obama offered in Moscow … and some of his actions.
10. Liberal and conservative … and conversion of the former to the latter.
11. Pre-historic/pre-human flight controls?
12. And where does one place confession?
13. Band of brothers … and the Pacific war.
14. Children on the street in the Ukraine.
15. How will (did?) they finagle keeping Congressional names out of that list.
16. A young doctor and single payer.
17. Awaiting a defense of government overreach from the left.

Jim Hanley at Positive Liberty is considering natural rights. He, like I, don’t think they exist. In fact, he goes even further, to say that:

I have been gently critiqued for being a materialist. I haven’t asked DAR enough questions to yet understand his critique, but I think it has to do with whether one can develop a meaning philosophical structure without importing some non-materialist concepts. Perhaps that is so. But I do believe that when we begin with a materialist understanding of our subject, homo sapiens, we can’t get to natural rights without importing, in a wholly ad hoc fashion, some non-materialist assumptions that lack a firm foundation.

and in comments elucidates:

I had indeed thought about your “patterns” argument. My response would be that I am not a nominalist. It is not the naming that makes it real, and it is debatable just how real the particular category we mean by the name is. But there are these particular animals that have real physical existence. We give the name bonobos to what we believe is a set of animals that are alike in a particular way, and do not give them name to all other animals that we do not believe are alike in that particular way. But whether or not our category accurately reflects the empirical reality of animal likeness/difference, those particular animals have material existence.Whether the categories can be counted as real or not, well, I think we run into the problem of fuzziness of language. I think categories are real because we create them, and understand them as being nothing more than our constructs. That is, the proper referent of categories is not actually to the physical world, but only to our interpretation of the physical world, and they are real referents to our interpretation. If people want to understand them as directly referent to the physical world, then I would argue that categories in that sense are not real.

In earlier essays I had noted that there is a large category of real non-materialist concepts, namely transcendental numbers. This includes a number of un-measureable unobtainable, i.e., transcendental numbers like pi, e, the golden mean and so forth. These are in fact numbers which arise both in our natural cognition about numbers and similar mathematical reasoning and also arise naturally (repeatedly) in any number of mathematical representations of material measurement. More complicated mathematical concepts such as groups, mappings, metric, manifold just as do real numbers are both non-material and are real.

The demonstration that some real non-materialist things are real is not a demonstration that all non-materialistic concepts are as well. It just shows that being a non-material does not exclude the possibility a priori that the said same thing is not real. It is however a demonstration that there are definitely non-materialistic things that are real in a stronger fashion than the categorical reality to which Mr Hanley alludes. So what one seeks is an ontological distinction serving to demarcate and separate the non-real and the real non-materialistic ideas. For it seems plausible that there are non-material non-mathematical concepts that share a similar reality to the mathematical concepts noted above.

1. Press releases “of the damned.”
2. Reading the bill, and remaining unimpressed.
3. A twist to the Obama/joker poster story.
4. A new Miyazaki film noted.
5. The scum beneath the tape.
6. I’m interested … 92 mpg for 3k miles.
7. Evil and modern political parlance.
8. Pharma and price control.
9. Against drones in Pakistan.
10. One paramedic’s perspective.
11. Adding and “R” to cash for clunkers.
12. Specialization.
13. Housing numbers.
14. Byzantium (and Gondor) and why it matters, even if some of my commenters disagree.
15. The liturgical gangstas.
16. Under cover techies.
17. Suu Kyi on sanctions.
18. Into the valley of the mega-church.
19. Jurisdiction and healthcare.

One of the rising mini-blog storms in the right (and responses on the left) that arose today is about the silence on the left regarding the troops and low level conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan (and perhaps Pakistan). The default notion that arises here is that this lack of response that this reflects how much that the left was anti-Bush and the conflict was just a proxy for that animus. There may be some truth to this accusation, however I think that is not the whole or even the larger part of it. For while it is true that the anti-war propaganda and general energy/excitement that is present now has pretty much vanished, it is also true that the small government, e.g., tea party, sentiments that have and had been strong on the right vanished during much of the Bush tenure.

Ronald Reagan, I think, coined the “11th commandment: thou shalt not speak ill of your own party”, which is largely at play here. A corollary of this commandment is that while one does not speak ill of the doings by those in your party that you disagree with … one’s defense of the same is usually tepid or absent as well. For example, on my part, while I did not really soundly thrash Mr Bush for expanding Medicare entitlements … I did not defend it one bit either. I was silent. Likewise, we see the left, while they are silent as Mr Obama expands operations in Afghanistan (and likely delays withdrawal in Northern Iraq) neither will they, I suspect, leap to his defense against those who would speak against this. Likewise on Medicare and now the two COIN operations, criticism does largely not arise from the other party, which is in general agreement with those moves (even if they might criticize implementation details). The criticism arises more from non-party aligned people further to the right or left (or in the case of Medicare … the Libertarian fringe movement).

1. A book noted, and in turn the other book mentioned (The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters) is available in English as well.
2. Why the change? Why, with promises of the “most open administration ever” are we guessing?
3. Becker/Posner on healthcare again, here and here.
4. On the bio-geological.
5. Asleep at the switch?
6. On women and ministry.
7. An interesting post on innovation.
8. Misplaced assumptions. “Any reform is going to require lots of regulatory oversight …”, uhm, that would not be true if the reform is based on the removal of regulation. This is a reply as well to those assumptions.
9. Healthcare and some back of the envelope cost estimates.
10. Oops.
11. Some thoughts on marriage.
12. Pointing at an excellent essay on healthcare, which the Democratic rhetoric will ignore because they are not really engaging in debate here, because those who disagree with our benighted President are apparently “simply dishonest.”
13. Thinking linking by Siris. My six word narrative. “Oops. My bad. Heroic rescue … thwarted.”
14. A film.
15. On the politics of climate change … and a problematic paper.
16. Afghanistan and the helicopter.
17. A pol with a backbone.

1. Crossing the state/entertainment wall of separation.
2. The last remaining pro-life democrat passes and is mourned.
3. Production numbers.
4. The corner notes someone reading the bill.
5. Whole foods and healthcare.
6. The bear moves in the woods.
7. Explaining why/how liberals find everyone else racist.
8. And the public healthcare will give everyone a nice pony too, it’s all just moving deck chairs on the Titanic.
9. A market for education.
10. Logic or lack thereof and patching the economy.
11. A Georgian narrative.
12. A tea party noted.
13. California water and policy.
14. A better fridge.
15. Knowing the enemy … or at least the left.
16. Why small government is important.
17. Mr Obama, getting the details wrong (and in a manner that matters).

In a short exchange discussing my incomprehension of a leftist blogger’s claim that management was unnecessary. I have come up with a possible answer as to why a person might consider this reasonable and it ties in with notions of why the left might find government healthcare more palatable than the right. The offending quote, as a reminder was as follows:

It quickly became clear that I was the only person even remotely on the left. And it wasn’t simply that the others disagreed with me; they couldn’t even understand me. I remember us discussing a scene in Invisible Man where a factory worker brags he’s so indispensable that when he was out sick the boss drove to his house and begged him to come back, agreeing to put him in charge. When I suggested Ellison might be implying that labor, not management, ought to run workplaces, the other students (and the teacher) didn’t just disagree—they found the idea incomprehensible. How could you run a factory without managers?

As I pointed out in my original essay a realistic business that employs more than two to five people requires management. Many firms, HR service companies and general contracting firms for example, in fact are nothing but management. One way out is the model implemented by the Leninist implementation of Marxism, i.e., the state solution. Government, somehow, is seen as the organ supplying the management functions. A kinder, more modern, way of phrasing that term is that the left prefers statist solutions. Mr Swartz, I suggest, doesn’t suggest that management not occur. But instead prefers that all of management, namely HR, sales, procurement, and capital management be done by the state. This, I suggest, was why he discovered, he was the only one “remotely” on the left. Most on the left I presume in the US would balk at having the state take up all of these roles for all private industry. The eastern bloc experiment showed that giving that much power to a state, ignoring the asymmetries of the locus of information, and removing personal incentives to personally garner the fruits of one’s labour was a recipe for disaster.

Public healthcare moves us further in this direction, increasing the power of the state, ignoring asymmetric of information pools, and lessens the already too weak personal incentives in the medical industry complex replacing it with even weaker political incentives (which it might be added in actuarial situations never reliably calculate risk always preferring diminish risk to lessen costs today pushing the burden of the payment to the future). Public healthcare is not, by definition, socialism nor communism. It is an explicitly a big government, statist, solution, and shares that feature with the assumption of management by government noted above.

The “public option” version being touted by the Democrats right now isn’t even single payer. However, it is disingenuous to argue that is ultimately what many of them, including the President desire and in fact likely feel that this step will move them closer to their goal. The “keeping the private insurance companies honest” rhetoric is merely cover for what, I suspect, is their aim and the likely result. That is that the public healthcare option, which will receive much of its funding from a levy on private contributions to healthcare, will be in a position to provide unfair competition that will ultimately force the private healthcare industry out of the market and to eliminate them and thus arrive at single payer via acquisition of a monopoly.

Ultimately, if there is to be a solution to the healthcare cost situation it is my belief that it will in fact require large scale changes in how healthcare is provided. Increased bureaucratic and state involvement is not the route which will lead to more flexible and innovative approaches to how medicine is practised. Instead it will more likely entrench those practises which are now in place. Right now, medical insurance and practise is heavily regulated as it is, which in turn stifles innovation itself. It is unclear how cementing and fixing the processes more tightly to bureaucratic reigns will spur innovation, which should be a primary goal.

1. An allegorical map.
2. A discussion of differences between Orthodox and the Catholic churches.
3. NASA resources, pointed out ostensibly for the homeschool crowd, but really useful for any family with kids (HT: Mark Shea).
4. A prediction validated.
5. A convert needing help.
6. A mad woman in the kitchen.
7. Family and Amsterdam.
8. Change is “scary”, yes, and when the change moves in the wrong direction that’s even scarier.
9. On obedience to spouse …  a convert’s perspective.
10. Fact checking Mr Obama… oops.
11. Well, I’m surprised … I’d have thought the figure closer to 95%, after all I think 40% was a low figure for useless documents in the preprint stream in academic physics.
12. Best Syrian blogging contest … and a snag (besides the ineffective performance of google’s automatic translator from Arabic to English).
13. Hmm, I think the tag-line/title overstates the case … after all they’re not talking about mothers-in-law/spouse or sibling rivalries.
14. Beautiful women and cheap leeches.
15. 10 subprime myths.
16. A question on achievement and metrics.

1. Plywood wheels!
2. 5-stroke engine?
3. If time permitted I’d fisk this. Suffice it to say claims that government spending are the proximate cause for the recover (when the majority of the stimulus remains to be spent) and oops pesky data contradicts the premise. Bleeding was thought to cure disease and often the patient recovered, too.
4. Right leaning humor, heh.
5. Obama/Pelosi Not in tune.
6. Cash for clunkers … to purchase clunkers.
7. Logic and global warming.
8. Medvedev speaks to the Ukraine. and an a colourful interpretation from the Ukraine.
9. Home schooling stats.
10. A book suggested.
11. Sudan.
12. Watching Afghanistan.
13. Off with her head … and that tag line is the main reason I linked that piece.
14. Insane civilization … ours.
15. Oh, Ninevah.

Norman Geras yesterday pointed to a Dawkins quote and said some things which I agree (in which neither of us agree with Mr Dawkins) yet I would go further. He begins (the quote is from Mr Dawkins):

‘that imposing parental beliefs on children is a form of child abuse’ surely merits some clarifying explanation before we assent to it. It is, of course, easy as well as necessary to draw a distinction between putting a belief to children in a way that makes it plain to them that there are alternatives to, questions about, disagreements over it, and insisting on the belief as the sole unchallengeable truth. There’s a difference between trying to educate children in a spirit that encourages interest in the world and finding out about it, on the one hand, and indoctrination, on the other.

I don’t think this is really a reasonable point of view. The decision of whether there are “alternatives” depends in part on how strongly we feel the matter at hand is true and by contrast how strongly we believe the contrary is false. Take ethics. There are a variety of starting points for ethics, one of which is solipsism. We do not necessarily want to teach our children that solipsism is a reasonable basis for normative ethics even if some philosophers have suggested or explored that possibility (or even if some long lost civilization based its particular practices on that).

Mr Geras continues:

Again, must we not discriminate better from worse as between maintaining some standards of personal cleanliness and not doing so, or between behaving with consideration and kindness and being rude and dishonest? More generally, educating children involves, willy-nilly, the imparting of moral beliefs. This cannot be done without the presentation of some things as good and others as less good or downright bad. Even done in a non-doctrinaire way, it must involve a degree of active direction. It’s misleading, therefore, to pretend that only dogmatists and fanatics narrow the minds of their children to the available sum of human beliefs.

So the question I pose is as follows, examine this exchange attributed to St. John Chrysostom (wiki on St. John here):

“You cannot banish me, for this world is my Father’s house.”
“But I will kill you,” said the empress.
“No, you cannot, for my life is hid with Christ in God,” said John.
“I will take away your treasures.”
“No, you cannot, for my treasure is in heaven and my heart is there.”
“But I will drive you away from your friends and you will have no one left.”
“No, you cannot, for I have a Friend in heaven from whom you cannot separate me.
I defy you, for there is nothing you can do to harm me.”

Imagine a person with that sort of view of his faith (if that does not strike a chord or set an example to which you would aspire) and the way in which he sees the world. For more, I’d also recommend his very famous Paschal (Easter) homily as well, which might rightly be put in similar pride of place for the Church as the US places the Gettysburg address. Any educational process includes an implicit or explicit evaluation of the value of the “alternatives” suggested. How would this parent instruct his children? In yesterday’s discussion JA offered:

That being said, I think the idea that there’s something wrong with indoctrinating a child with one religion is an important one. Now it’s one thing if you are the liberal sort who says this is our tradition and this is what we do and this is what it means to us… but it’s quite another if you are more dogmatic and say this is what’s true, period.

I don’t find any way that a person, who is like St. John can do anything other but state that his faith is “what’s true, period.” It is my contention that those who assent to the notion as expressed in the quote above have a tepid faith specifically not a faith such as expressed by St. John above.

1. Considering Dawkins and imposition of beliefs on the young. Two remarks from me, first I’d guess that this person has not personally yet raised any kids and second the assumption that religious beliefs are the sort in which you “should teach that there are alternatives” presupposes a tepid sort of belief. You would not teach your child that the universe really doesn’t exist (solipsism) is “a viable option” for basing ethics because you don’t believe it is reasonable.
2. SSD cleaning.
3. Judgement vs vetting.
4. Matters the Democrats are dodging in the healthcare “debate”. Why the scare quotes.
5. Birther and truther, a graph.
6. Oddly enough the thing that struck me in this piece was his vision of “ideal” society, wifi, robust GDP, and universal healthcare. How tepid. And, in response to the main point, the problem is The Bottom Billion.
7. Exercise won’t make you thin … tell that to the endurance athletes of the world, they’ll likely disagree just a bit.
8. An Attack!!
9. On Sodom and Gomorrah two short pieces, here and here (the second is a response to the first).
10. Christian response to political oppression done right.
11. Turning it around.
12. A motive for Russian aggression against Georgia.
13. Afghanistan and marketing.
14. Plugging the City.

1. The freedom of letting go.
2. Anti-semetic and philosemetic and some 19th century literature.
3. There will be a second round. Jah, we knew that.
4. Concerning a particularly useful invention.
5. On SSM.
6. Bitter-sweet customs.
7. What is democracy … a global view.
8. A ghastly city, perhaps that will put an end to romanticising the native American culture.
9. An early road map.
10. This sort of begs an important question. How do people think they can do climate prediction if solar output varys and we don’t understand how or why?
11. He may “have a point”, just not the one you think he has. When you read, “The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition.” I think one could transplant objections and responses to objections over the Iraq war directly into this sentiment. Yet, I figure few on the left thought their objections were “cynical efforts to gain partisan political advantage”. There’s a lesson here.
12. In that line of thought, an exercise for the left. Replace the words “Obama” with “Bush” in this article and what would be your response.
13. If this idea becomes the norm, will publishing in a “reject” journal satisfy degree requirements?
14. This notion on healthcare that everyone without insurance wants it that way is problematic.
15. Where the left’s version of the birther inanity is showing up.
16. Syriac study resources.
17. Religion and Egypt.
18. On Darwin and ideas.