Cost Controls and Health Care Education

by Guest Authors March 31, 2010

by: Dan Summers “The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.” — Voltaire While reading Jason’s predictions about the health care reform bill, I was struck by one of the comments. Commenter A. R. Yngve wrote, My dad was a physician (the “general practitioner” sort) in Sweden. Toward the end of his life, he collaborated on a thick booklet titled “Self-Care” which was sent out for free to I don’t know how many people ...

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The Next Step

by Jason Kuznicki March 30, 2010

Mark Thompson makes an excellent point below: Once we have embarked on a particular social program, it becomes fiscally responsible to minimize the costs of that program, whether by placing strings on participation in the program ... or by prohibiting activities that increase the program’s cost, or – as in this case – by taxing the activity that increases the program’s cost. In short – anything that increases the program’s cost becomes a negative externality that is fair game for ...

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Monday Poetry: Two by Sappho

by Rufus F. March 29, 2010

Sappho is one of the first and greatest poetic singers of romantic longing and the ‘bittersweet’, an image she apparently coined. Along with the Greek lyric poets (Archilochus, Sappho, Mimnermus, Alcaeus) of the Archaic age (7th-6th centuries) she moved poetry away from the sweeping epic to the individual and personal. Does Homer ever deal with the choked back anguish caused by unrequited or expressed love? Certainly Odysseus yearns for Penelope, which is romantic tension, and Menelaus has good reason for ...

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A few books that have made me

by Will March 26, 2010

This is more for my own satisfaction than the edification of our readers, but I can’t let a great meme go to waste. I tried for the ‘gut instinct’ approach, but that left me with about 30-odd books that say more about my interests than what really influenced my worldview. The final list is a pretty hodgepodge distillation of personal interests and political/philosophical influences, and many of them led me to other books that said much the same thing more ...

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Sin Taxes and the Welfare State

by Mark Thompson March 26, 2010

In the comments to E.D.’s post on a hypothetical tax on alcohol, Michael Drew writes: A significant portion of the negative externalities come in the form of medical costs from DUI and long-term disease, in other words health-care costs. These are costs that will simply be rolled into the general health care system, whichever way. Health care is simply government’s one overriding cost liability going forward. In theory, yes, one could do the accounting necessary to try to guide these ...

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Math should be uncanny.

by William Brafford March 26, 2010

When I read E.D.’s piece on maybe teaching less math in elementary school, I figure that since I studied math in college and still do some recreational math, I should have something to say about math education in America. But whenever I dip into literature on math pedagogy, I come out baffled. There are a lot of people who have worked really hard to figure out how to make an effective math curriculum, but to students it all still seems ...

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Against sin taxes and soft prohibition

by Erik Kain March 26, 2010

"An oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger, or a beer." ~ Confucius Matt Yglesias and Mark Kleiman both think that taxing beer at much higher rates is a good idea. They go so far as to assert that while only one dime of taxes is raised on a can of beer, one whole dollar of damage to society is incurred. The reasoning behind this seems quite shaky and more than a little absurd. So let me ...

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The Hand that Feeds

by Scott H. Payne March 25, 2010

In response to recent stories about death threats and various other means of intimidation through violence visited upon members of Congress, James Joyner writes (h/t: Drum), And, unlike Michelle Malkin, Dan Riehl, and others, I do think Republican leaders have some responsibility to condemn violence. No, I don’t think they’re directly responsible for any of it; we don’t yet even know for sure who’s making the threats. But we’ve had over a year of very heated rhetoric over the dire ...

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The chloroformed mind: the case against teaching math

by Erik Kain March 25, 2010

Peter Gray has a fascinating piece in Psychology Today arguing, quite counter-intuitively, that in order to improve math scores we should stop teaching math – at least at the elementary level. He gives the example of L.P. Benezet, superintendent of schools in Manchester, who ran experiments along these lines in New Hampshire back in the 1930’s: Think of it. Today whenever we hear that children aren’t learning much of what is taught in school the hue and cry from the ...

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Dragonlance

by Erik Kain March 25, 2010

“This book was one of my earliest introductions to fantasy and thus to the limits (or lack of limits) of the imagination. I read Dragonlance before I read Tolkien, and was just amazed by the bigness of the world. All I wanted for my tenth birthday was to swing my sword like Caramon, and get a Tika on my side. Talk about the original ride-or-die chick. She is single-handedly responsible for the early onset of puberty amongst untold legions of ...

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Anti-statists and the current regime

by Erik Kain March 24, 2010

Bob Cheeks asks: “Do you see yourself, in some degree, to be anti-statist? What is your opinion of the current regime?” Well I suppose I do consider myself to be anti-statist, but I’m also a realist and I realize that it’s not always possible be simply anti-whatever, but that you need to work with what you’ve got to some degree. The state isn’t going anywhere any time soon. What I would like to see is a real return to local ...

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Triple Bank Shot Foreign Policy Theories = Very Bad Policy: Bombing Iran Edition

by Chris Dierkes March 24, 2010

And now for something completely non Philip Blond related…. A foreign policy rant.  (I don’t know what Blond’s foreign policy views are anyway). Veteran readers of mine (both of you) will recall that David Rothkopf typically drives me up the wall and ends up being a favorite whipping boy of mine.  I’m trying very hard to be charitable here (it’s my Lenten discipline), but the man did write the following sentences and hit the publish button (my emphasis): In the ...

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In defense of sandwiches; or, Rise of the Bread Tories

by Erik Kain March 24, 2010

“Surely, a loaf of bread is the centre of the parable of life” ~ yet more G.K. Chesterton I do love a good sandwich. Indeed, there are few things I love more than a good sandwich. I love eating them, naturally, but I also love making them, piling them high with meats and cheeses, lettuce, an assortment of vegetables of various textures and flavors, all the different combinations of sauces and spreads. Sometimes they’re hot, sometimes cold. Sometimes they are ...

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‘A braintrust of Other Ways’

by Erik Kain March 24, 2010

“In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves — the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy; and in this I have always believed.” ~ G.K. Chesterton Patrick Deneen has posted an excellent email from an anonymous source which gets to the heart of much of what I’ve found troubling about Blond’s prescriptions for a more localized economy. ...

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For Non-Blonds

by Jason Kuznicki March 24, 2010

I’ve learned one thing from listening to Phillip Blond’s recent talk at Georgetown: I’m no Red Tory. My turning point came about halfway through the lecture. Blond had thrown out a few zingers here and there, to nervous titters from the audience — You’ll hate me for saying this, but I like it when a woman doesn’t have an abortion! or whatever the line was — but I hadn’t yet grasped what he was getting at, which seemed a grab-bag ...

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Sophocles “Oedipus Rex”

by Rufus F. March 24, 2010

Oedipus Rex is an extraordinarily cruel play. Oedipus has seemingly done nothing wrong and lacks the fatal flaw that would justify the way that coincidences and events align against him. The punishment is completely disproportional to his crime, which seems to have been his birth. And whatever he does to extricate himself from his fate seems only to implicate Oedipus further. The story is constructed something like a noir thriller in which a minor transgression brings devastating consequences, or a ...

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The Polls and the Polis

by Rufus F. March 24, 2010

In a really crackerjack post, Mr. Dierkes, writes: “The hallmark of the liberal procedural republic according to Sandel is that citizens are treated as consumers. The market becomes the dominant form of thought and practice in the polis. Beings become instrumentalized and utilitarian ethics is the only (meager) form of ethics/morality left in such a market-satured universe.” Hopefully, I’m not pivoting too far from this in writing about something I’ve been interested in for a while now, namely what it ...

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Unable to Clear The Derivative Deck

by Chris Dierkes March 23, 2010

Peter Atwater writes (concerning the fears of a double dip recession): Unfortunately, from my perspective there have been two very distinct recoveries. The first one is a recovery in asset prices — which I attribute exclusively to the unprecedented level of liquidity provided by the Federal Reserve and the resulting “forced march” into risk. (i.e. people will tolerate 0% returns on their deposits for only so long before heading into something yielding more). The second one is the recovery in consumer spending — ...

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An ‘antique liberal’ by any other name

by Erik Kain March 22, 2010

David – I wonder if what Blond is trying to do is to bridge the divide between the modern liberal state and the sort of Aristotelian or anti-modern philosophy of MacIntyre or the radical orthodoxy of Blond’s mentor, John Milbank? Rather than presenting a sort of philosophical paradox, perhaps Blond is in fact attempting to reconcile the necessary contradictions which any critique of modernity, democracy, or liberalism will inevitably run into. Similarly, I wonder if what Blond is driving at ...

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Blond with Sandel(s)

by Chris Dierkes March 22, 2010

Two of the League’s brethren attended Philip Blond’s lecture at Georgetown last week.  Will’s review here, David’s here. For those interested, Blond’s thought has been a source of numerous posts in the League’s annals (e.g. me, Erik). Will writes: Despite my nasty libertarian streak, I found a lot to like in Blond’s talk, particularly in his enthusiasm for decentralization and local competition. My only quibble is that while Blond’s diagnoses are often compelling, his proposed solutions are sometimes less so. ...

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Throwing the baby out with the veal calf

by David Schaengold March 22, 2010

Over the last year or so, bloggers at First Things have taken the position that the animal rights movement represents a unique threat to the dignity of human life and especially the unborn. While I think this position alienates many of their potential allies and conflates a number of widely divergent views within the community of people who care about animal welfare, their confusion is not entirely inexplicable. The philosopher Peter Singer is perhaps the most cited spokesman of the movement, ...

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