Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Alexis Levinson has an interview with Elizabeth Emken today at the Daily Caller. It sounds like she might have a chance after all.

For the first time since she was elected in 1992, more Californians do not want Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein re-elected than do, and her likely Republican opponent hopes to capitalize on that desire for change to oust the three-term senator.

Emken is definitely saying the right things. Her experience is as both an IBM efficiency expert and an activist in DC for autistic children. She has experience outside of government, and also experience with the legislative process, “having helped to push through legislation like the Children’s Health Act of 2000 and the Combating Autism Act of 2006.”

She says that she carried her experience with actual business projects through in the legislation she championed:

“I think what makes these bill stand out is that in these bills I put accountability mechanisms… There’s a requirement of a strategic plan, there’s a requirement for a report to congress to mark the objectives, how we’re doing in terms of the strategic plans. And there’s also sunset provisions—it says, look you have to come back and justify why would we should continue funding these programs. These are elements that I believe should be encompassed in all types of legislation,” she explained.

Read the whole thing. Should be an interesting election here in a few months. Dianne Feinstein is the epitome of the establishment Democrat, supporting spending and opposing freedom without regard for whether it’s liberal or conservative, but whether it increases the power of the federal government. She ought to be defeatable, even in California.

I was worried I’d be one of at best a handful of people attending Carl DeMaio’s living room community coffee yesterday. The event only came up on Facebook a few days ago, and the location wasn’t in the announcement: it only came up in response to a comment an hour or two before the event. Despite that, the living room was full and people were standing in the hall.

So I’m guessing he’s as popular as the polls say he is. In September, the most recent poll I could find, 10 News interviewed him for their article on their September 2011 poll that tied him with Filner:

In 10News’ June poll, DeMaio was also in the lead. On Tuesday, he told 10News he’s not concerned about the polls or any of his opponents.

“I’m not really seeing us running against any of these other individuals. I’m running against City Hall,” DeMaio said.

That remains his strategy, judging from what he said today. He was relentless in his push for fiscal reform. While he touched on immigration and the homeless, he mostly discussed these in terms of their financial effect on San Diego—and thus on San Diego’s roads and services—as well. I was very impressed with his answers to these questions. They combined a drive to do right by people with an overall vision of increasing opportunity, reducing crime, and improving public services.

DeMaio also endorsed three candidates for city council: Ray Ellis in district 1, Mark Kersey in district 5, and Scott Sherman in district 7.

The wording is so clumsy it almost had to be deliberate.

Google News is often especially interesting because it highlights the opening paragraphs and titles of newspaper articles, which are often wildly different from the actual article.

As international anger grows over reports of mass carnage at the hands of the Syrian regime, a UN Security Council draft resolution condemning Syria failed to be adopted Saturday after veto-wielding members…

Where are the editors on this rag? I have a suspicion an editor tacked that opening paragraph on to what is otherwise a reasonably decent article, with, in this case, a reasonably decent title. “Failed to be adopted?” Is the resolution complicit in its own demise here?

Is that what you think, CNN Wire Staff? Really? You know that Saturday morning cartoon you all watched when you were kids that showed how bills became laws? That wasn’t real. There isn’t really an anthropomorphic scroll wandering the halls of the U.N. trying to become a resolution.

CNN, you ignorant sluts.¹ It isn’t the “draft resolution” that failed to be adopted today. It was the feckless United Nations that failed to adopt the resolution!

“One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.”—Arthur Koestler

I should have added The Other McCain to my blogroll long ago. He and Legal Insurrection pretty much start my blogging day. He’s a compelling writer even when I disagree with him, and he’s one of a handful of journalists doing actual shoe-leather reporting. Sometimes reading his blog seems like reading a journalism-noir book from the seventies.

So even though I’ve been to BlogCon and he hasn’t, you should still hit Stacy McCain’s tip jar instead of mine!

Your new, government-approved laptop from the state computer exchange, complete with all required features—and no more. (Image courtesy Johann H. Addicks, CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0)

The first step, when you walk into quicksand, is to walk back out. You’ll find it a lot easier to build a bridge over the mire when you’re not sinking into it

We have a huge problem with health care costs in this country, problems caused by our strange system, mostly set up through tax breaks to employers but not individuals, that disconnects the people who need health care from the people who provide it. Rather than having people who need care purchase from the people who provide care, we set up a system that requires “insurance” even for routine, predictable costs. But the person who needs the insurance in order to get the care doesn’t buy the insurance either. They look for a job that pays for the insurance that pays the people who provide the care.

The doctor gets paid by the insurance company. The insurance company gets paid by the employer. The patient… also gets paid by the employer. The patient is completely disconnected from their own health care. It’s a system that obviously can’t work in the long run. Yet, when it fails, we set up a system—ObamaCare—that adds yet another layer, so that in order to get health care we’ll need to look for a job that pays for insurance that’s micro-managed by government that pays the people who provide the care amounts approved by government for approved care.

Either form is a recipe for higher prices and poorer care. And the reason we moved to the worse system that is going to make for even higher prices and even poorer care is that the original system raised prices and reduced care.

We need to back out of the quicksand before we can build the bridge.

While reading Priming the Pump, I started thinking about the advances that happened just because of computer-makers trying to cut costs to meet buyer needs. And then I thought, what if we bought computers like we do our health care? We wouldn’t buy computers ourselves. We’d get them through our employers. But our employers wouldn’t buy them for us either. They’d buy us a plan that guarantees us a computer when we need one. What can the plan buy us? The federal government and our state government both have strict rules on that.

“[American businesses] clearly haven’t gotten lazy because the iPhone is an American idea. What’s happened is that these regulations have gotten so ridiculous that no one can actually act on brilliant ideas in this country… regulations so pervasive and so restrictive and so abhorrent that businesses just can’t get anything done…”

A little more on what I talked about in The Parable of the Mexican Farmer. “These are self-inflicted wounds.”

Over at The Other McCain, Smitty comes out, while responding to Walter Russell Mead, in favor of taxing the states:

If we can put a moon on the man, why cannot we devise a system whereby every state is billed by DC annually, and let the states compete for citizens to pay the taxes? Pardon my rampant capitalism, but there it is… tax reform should be simplified, and the information about who lives where, for tax purposes, should be opaque to DC. The federal government has no business operating below the multi-state and international level.

Smitty also thinks government revenue would “crater” under such a system. I disagree, at least to the extent that “crater” implies a drastic, unwanted loss of taxation and services. People want services and are willing to pay for them. The only difference between a state-based system and a federal system is that some people would vote with their feet when the cost of services exceeds the value of those services.

I expect that a person’s state taxes would increase by about 60% to 90% of what they had been giving to the federal government; that federal bureaucrats would suddenly discover that they can, in fact, provide the same services at a much reduced cost; and that the vastly improved jobs climate would make up the difference. Because while the taxes would still be paid, just to the state instead of the feds, the regulations would be halved. And perhaps even more importantly, the need to maintain national lobbyists would almost disappear. Most businesses could live without them if the federal government wasn’t making new tax loopholes every day.

Is Apple sending jobs overseas just to be spiteful?

“Corporations ship jobs overseas just to shave a couple of cents off of the price of their widgets. But that’s a false dichotomy, because these corporations have so much money that they could afford to just shave the price off anyway and keep those jobs in America.”

Sound familiar? It’s pretty much what Betsey Stevenson, former chief economist at the Labor Department, says in the New York Times today:

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

It’s a bit contradictory when you put both of those thoughts together in the same paragraph—that companies ship overseas to cut costs, but that they could afford to cut costs anyway. And yet there’s a sense that it’s true. Let’s bring it a little closer to you or me to see why. Pretend, for the moment, that you have so much money you almost don’t know what to do with it.¹ But, you still need to eat. You need vegetables. You could buy your vegetables from local farmers; or you could fly to Mexico and buy your vegetables there. They’re cheap enough in Mexico that it pays for the immediate cost of flying there: your total dollars paid is less.

Would you do it?

Most likely not. The money doesn’t matter to you, but the trouble does, and it’s a lot more trouble and time-consuming to go to Mexico whenever you need more vegetables than it is to pay a higher price for vegetables in your home town.

Now, let’s add a couple of wrinkles that businesses face: whenever you buy vegetables in your home town, you have to spend more time filling out forms than it would take to fly to Mexico and back. Further, once you buy from any particular farmer, you have a relationship with that farmer that you cannot break. The law requires you to buy from that farmer. Even if you find a farmer who grows better-tasting vegetables, you are still required to buy vegetables from the first farmer. You are required by law to visit him, to negotiate with him, and to pay him, for vegetables that you no longer want. And if you don’t use them, you have to find a way to dispose of them—which will require even more paperwork.