Out with the old, in with the news

If there is any doubt that the newspaper industry is dying, just look to today’s HoCo section of the Baltimore Sun. I can honestly say that there was nothing posted there that interested me in any way whatsoever. Paper versions of newspapers have been dead to me for a long time (I have never subscribed to a paper version of a newspaper), but even the on-line versions are beginning to suck.

A fresh concept that is rising of this change in consumer tastes for information is HoCoMoJo. The concept is described as a cross between an online newspaper, a blog and Facebook. It appears to have some twittering thrown in the mix as well. Mojo is short for MObile JOurnalism, and of course it's also that stuff that Dr. Evil stole from Austin Powers.

What is different about HoCoMoJo is that the site is subsidized by readers who contribute content. That may not sound like a big deal to some, but I think that is really freaking cool. It decentralizes the flow of information and removes barriers to entry in the news biz, sort of like what Wikipedia did to online encyclopedias. Right now, the content leaves a lot to be desired and few people seem to be contributing anything. But, I am optimistic that a good framework is in place and good content will follow shortly.

I won't hold my breath

The problems with the health care industry will be fixed soon, because some local political "leaders" met with industry groups in Annapolis to discuss how to fix the problems in the health care biz. Peter Beilenson assures us that this is not just a "bellyaching session", he wants to actually do something.

The 92participants voted on a range of possible solutions, including a state-financed tuition program for medical students who choose primary care and agree to practice in Maryland for a minimum period of time, and tax deductions or bonuses to doctors who work in underserved areas or with uninsured patients. They also discussed how medical practices could band together in larger groups to provide leverage against insurance companies, and a requirement that insurance pay the same amount to every doctor for similar treatments.

"We don't want this to be just a bellyaching session," Beilenson said. "We want to do something about it."

If government regulation worked, health care would be a model industry. The reason it sucks is because there is too much government in health care already. The supply of doctors is regulated, ways in which they can structure their practices are regulated (i.e. Boutique plans classified as insurance), medicines are regulated by the FDA, etc. Couple that with a problem of many people believing that health care should be free or steeply subsidized, and we have disaster.

Chop, chop, political figures. Use legislation to arrange us like chess pieces to solve problems. I'm sure it will work this time.

Dancing days are here again

The Council is preparing to appoint a new member (.pdf) to the Howard County Library Board of Trustees.

I hope this fellow is a little more critical of the library management and asks tougher questions than the Board has asked thus far. Admittedly, I don't know much about what the current Board has done, but I don't think it speaks very highly of the Board when library management is publishing misleading statistics claiming that 95% of county residents use the library when the Board has to know that is not true.

The worst thing that can happen to an organization is that the Board does not view management with a healthy degree of skepticism, and I fear that may have happened with the current Library Board. In the case of a publicly funded government entity like the HCPL, the Library's Board should really be advocating for the taxpayer since the taxpayers are essentially the stockholders. After all, he who pays the piper calls the tune.

New tricks

The Concerned Citizens of Western Howard County finally have their own website which can be found here.

Breaking point

Yesterday I read a quote from Jen Terrasa in a Baltimore Sun article that really surprised me. I was surprised at how ridiculous her comment was. I was going to leave the comment alone since I already blogged about the same article here, but it is worth mentioning based on its own merit (or lack thereof).

"What you're talking about is punishing these folks for success," she said. Taking money from Healthy Howard would send a damaging signal of no confidence and force the nonprofits into a competition for funding, she added.

"Why take one recipient and pit them against each other, unless you just don't like providing health care," Terrasa said.

The best thing that could happen to the non-profit world is that they would have to compete with each other for funding. The act competition will force these non-profits to innovate new and exciting ways of doing good deeds and create the most bang for the buck. Ideally, the non-profits should be competing for funding directly from the citizens rather than getting money from elected buffoons, but some competition would be better than no competition.

The absolute worst scenario imaginable would be that the Council would fund any moronic idea that any non-profit put in front of them. That would be the complete lack of competition, and would create wasteful spending on "feel good" programs that have low return on investment.

While I am on the subject, another recent comment from Jen Terrasa that made me cringe was the following:

"How do you put a dollar amount on a life?" Terrasa asked at one point. Later she said she'd spent an hour talking to a doctor who treats Healthy Howard patients who felt the program and its health coaching feature is having a positive effect. Removing the anxiety of not having affordable health care makes a big difference in people's lives, Terrasa said.

Here's the thing: everyone puts a value on human life everyday. By choosing to spend many of her evenings doing work as a County Councilperson instead of running on a treadmill at the gym, Jen Terrasa has made a decision about the value of her own life. By not choosing to live in a cheaper house and spending the extra money on exercise equipment, Terrasa has placed a value on her own human life. By spending money on new clothes rather than visiting the doctor for a checkup, Terrasa has placed a value on her own life. Does Terrasa oppose giving more money to HHAP than she voted to give to the school system? If so, according to her own logic she is placing a dollar value on human life.

Intelligent decisions are made at the margin- not by dismissing any criticism of funding HHAP as an attempt to value human life. For Terrasa to pretend that all criticism of the funding the HHAP is wrong because it is "placing a dollar value on human life" is extremely naive. That kind of nonsense has no place in an intelligent debate.

Healthy Utopia Access Plan

In an editorial in the Baltimore Sun which strangely appeared in the politics section, Larry Carson along with several Democratic politicians report that Republican Greg Fox is engaging in partisanship by attempting to reduce funding to HHAP. This is absurd.

I am one of the least partisan people out there. I attack members of all political parties equally. Perhaps I am even too hard on politicians, because the framework of our Republic in which these politicians are operating is as much to blame as they are themselves. If you give a monkey a gun and the monkey shoots someone, you don't blame the monkey. Back to the point of this post, I just don’t see any partisanship on behalf of Greg Fox here.

Here’s why: it makes sense to cut funding to HHAP as Fox suggested. For as much money as HHAP has spent per enrollee, it could have easily paid to have each member join a boutique medical plan. $500,000 of that funding has come from taxpayers, with private donations and member fees providing the bulk of the total funding. The plan is flush with cash, which HHAP czar Beilenson wants to keep on hand for “unexpectedly heavy medical expenses.” This is despite the fact that HHAP is not insurance, so I am not sure why they need reserves on hand for unexpected medical expenses.

I would ask the four members of the council who want to give HHAP another half million dollars this: if the plan is so good, why not take it to the people and ask for voluntary contributions rather than use the force of government to steal more money for HHAP? Could it be that many citizens would balk at giving money directly out of their wallets to a program that has enrolled only 200 people and is flush with large amounts of cash already?

Hardly surprising

HT: Greg Mankiw's post here.

I have recently started the process of buying a car (to be used, primarily, by my teenage daughter and, in a couple years, my older son). Like every conscientious consumer, I have been doing a bit of research. In particular, I got a copy of the Consumer Reports auto issue (April 2009).

Page 15 was particularly enlightening. There, in their "Automakers report cards," Consumers Union summarized their findings for each of fifteen major car companies.

Dead last was Chrysler. CU recommended zero percent of the Chrysler vehicles they tested. That's right--zero. Second to last was General Motors. CU recommended 17 percent of GM models. By contrast, most other companies had half or more of their models get the thumbs up. Honda was the top ranked brand; CU recommended 95 percent of its models.

Is it any surprise that Chrysler and GM are now in the process of going out of business? From the perspective of the Consumer Reports advice, it looks like their business model was to count on the ignorance of the buying public about the quality of their products. Their bankruptcy should perhaps be viewed as a success of the market system.

Great moments in draft history

Yay for volunteer armies:

Friedman used his polemical powers to win the commission over to his belief in an all-volunteer army. Vietnam troop commander William Westmoreland gruffly announced during one commission hearing that he was not interested in leading an army of “mercenaries.” Friedman coolly replied, “Would you rather command an army of slaves?”

Westmoreland bristled. “I don’t like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves,” he said. “I don’t like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries,” Friedman snapped back—and pointed out that if they were, then he was a mercenary professor and Westmoreland a mercenary general.

Church boom

What’s up with all these churches that are popping up everywhere? Several local churches with expansion plans have made the local blogs recently, here and here. The latest proposed church is targeted for Rt. 40 near Forest Motel.

Obviously, I am a strong believer in freedom so I don’t oppose church organizations expanding their operations (and I think residential/commercial zoning is a bit of a joke), but it is a concern of mine that public demand is so high for places where you go to be told things that aren’t true.

Recognition time

Normally when I hear about national recognition that local cities/towns receive for being nice places to live, I always get a kick out of how politicians tend to take credit for the quality of life which caused the town to receive the recognition, when in fact they had little or nothing to do with it. It is as if the politicians think they have anything to do with our quality of life, rather than the hard work and ideas of the private citizens who comprise the community.

However, Ellicott City recently received recognition for being one of the top 25 cities with the "Best American Values" precisely for the stuff that the local government is pursuing. Specifically mentioned was the library system with it's "high patronage", the solar panels installed at the East Columbia Library, the Choose Civility program, and the Healthy Howard Access Plan. This all sounds very impressive to an uninformed outsider, but it is really just a bunch of crap.

The library system is a dinosaur that frequently does not have copies of books that I want to read, as well as poor hours and a poor selection of electronic resources. It costs tens of millions a year to operate now and we are being forced to spend over $100 million on building new libraries/upgrading existing libraries over the next 5 years. As far as "high patronage" goes, only about one-third of residents check out even a single item in a six-month period, and fewer than half check out an item in a single year. I blame the library management, the library board of trustees, and the local officials for allowing the library to publish misleading statistics about the utilization rate of the library system. The Choose Civility plan is kind of lame, and doesn't mean anything to our quality of life. The solar panels installed at the East Columbia Branch of the library cost $45,000 and will take 50 years to pay for themselves in lower electricity costs.

The Healthy Howard Access Plan has consumed $500,000 in resources stolen from taxpayers and has only enrolled 200 people.

While all of these things may appear really awesome at first glance, they are actually very unimpressive to those who understand them.

Healthy spending plan

It looks like the Council is going to throw another $500,000 at the Healthy Howard Access Plan, despite the fact that the plan is flush with cash and has only enrolled somewhere around 300 people. Greg Fox, and to a lesser extent Courtney Watson, seem to be the only ones questioning the sanity of giving more money to HHAP:

"A lot of the budgeting was done off [projections] of 2,200 people, and we're not there," Fox said. "With all the other money that was supposed to have been raised and the lack of participation so far, could we reduce county funding to $250,000 or $175,000?" he asked.

A $500,000 grant from the Horizon Foundation also remains virtually unspent, questions revealed.

But Beilenson and other program officials explained that Healthy Howard Inc. is a start-up program, and that pools of money must be held in reserve in case enrollees incur unexpectedly heavy medical expenses or are diagnosed with serious illnesses.

Watson also asked sharp questions about budgeting and the rate of return for spending.

"It doesn't make sense to me that you need that $500,000 and an additional $500,000 when the program is not where you thought it would be," she said at one point.

Just say no

It’s nice to know that the council knows how to say “no” to the school system. Government seems to be functioning as a technology used by special interests groups (in this case parents with kids in public schools) to curry favor at the expense of the every other taxpayer. The function of government as a provider of courts of law, roads, etc. seems to be less important than oiling the squeaky wheels of society who want something for nothing.

Somalia video

I saw a funny video, courtesy of Evan Coren who posted it to his blog. The video portrays Somalia as a libertarian paradise:



Like the Daily Show, this video is meant to be funny and not to be taken too seriously. But also like the Daily Show, there is an element of truth to the humor. I really don’t know anything about Somalia other than they have pirates, but if they are teetering on the edge of anarchy it will make for a good real world experiment. The pie will be bigger for everyone in Somalia if they cooperate economically with each other. While this is easier said than done, there is a large profit opportunity for the network of people who are able to make it happen.

Their economy is mostly agrarian, and with all agrarian societies it is a long road to industrialization- be it under the rule of government or otherwise. The first step on that road is to have security. Perhaps denser populations will invest in private security firms, which will make those places safe areas to trade. Or maybe large farmers will hire security firms (former pirates, perhaps?) to protect their fields in exchange for some of the crops. Markets will develop, people will demand a currency to facilitate trade which could certainly be provided by private corporations or perhaps they could use a commodity as a store of value. People will begin to make money and create wealth, capital will flow to non-agrarian uses like insurance companies, mediation services, factories, etc., and they will be moving down the slow road to prosperity. I don’t mean to oversimplify, there is a lot of risk involved and they very well may fail. There are lots of problems to overcome (like those of national defense, roads, etc.) that I don’t even pretend to have the answer to. But that’s what is great about the market, it is a powerful force for solving problems.

In the short term, Somalia would be better off with government, just as in the short term Revolutionary America was economically better off under the rule of the British. Some of the most quintessential Americans, like Ben Franklin for example, were not jazzed about breaking loose from the control of the British. So while there is a tremendous amount of risk involved for the people living in the borders of Somalia, there is also a large incentive for each person living there to do something that will make themselves better off. All these people working together to pursue their own self-interests will make things better for everyone.

So I would not be quick to dismiss the ability of the people living in the borders of Somalia to teach us some things about society. Even if Somalia does fail as a society without government, that is not an argument in support of the kind of moronic nonsense that our government engages in everyday (bailouts of failed companies, screwing with interest rates, stupid regulations, etc.) But regardless, it will be interesting to keep an eye on Somalia.

Splitting the check

This is a great article on the negative consequences that result from a drift toward collectivism in health care. Most people have unrealistic expectations from the health care industry, in that they want the very best medical services available and they want someone else to pay for those services (be it a private insurer or the government). But this means that few people will be willing to say "this particular treatment is not worth the cost".

If you go to dinner with a large group of strangers and you know that the bill will be split evenly, aren't you more likely to order pricier dishes and drinks than you would order if you, and you alone, were responsible for picking up your full tab?

Add into this mix a supply of health care providers that is heavily restricted by medical labor unions and government regulation, and we have a complete disaster. We have a large number of medical services consumed at a high cost and with low benefit relative to the costs.

It is truly frightening that some people think health care problems can be fixed by allowing the government to manipulate the actions of others as carelessly as one might manipulate pieces on a checkerboard. If government intervention worked, health care would be a model industry today. The reality is that government manipulation is responsible for the majority of problems with health care.