You Don't Say

Apparently, spending hundreds of billions of dollars to construct a facility used 8 time a year with contracts that ensure that virtually all of the profts go to the subsidized plutocrats isn't a good deal of municipalities.

WAPO: Robert Nozick is the Only Acceptable Definer of Human Rights

Shorter Fred Hiatt: FDR was a total commie; King and his so-called "civil rights" maybe even worse. They probably didn't even understand that "human rights" should be defined exclusively in the terms that will maximize the imperialist power of the United States. Let's also completely ignore the fact that, in practice, the protection of even "negative" rights requires the substantial expenditure of state resources, making them no more "natural" by our logic by any other.

...Matt has more about the editorial that "really breaks new ground in terms of red baiting and absurdity."

Juan Gonzalez Stole My Lunch Money!

In the process of dubbing Juan Gonzalez the Least Valuable Player of the aughts, Jayson Stark deems Long Gone Juan an embezzler:

The ability to steal money is a quality I always look for in an LVP. And clearly, that became one of Juan Gone's specialties. He had one season in the '00s (2001) in which he hit 30 homers and drove in more than 75 runs. Yet he managed to parlay that season, and past reputation, to a total of $46.925 million worth of paydays in the '00s.

Yep, $46.925 million. That's more than Chase Utley, more than Miguel Cabrera, more than Hanley Ramirez, more than John Lackey. More than David Wright, Joe Mauer and Prince Fielder combined, for that matter. Yikes.

It's also more than the salaries of the five AL MVPs from 2000 through 2004 put together. And it's more than the opening-day payroll of 56 different teams in the '00s. So how impressive is that?

Indeed. It's clear that Stark understands this failure in moral terms; the term "steal" and the tone both indicate that Juan Gonzalez managed this theft because of a string of serious moral failings. While some might suggest that 34 year old outfielders often suffer from a series of nagging injuries that sharply curtail both playing time and effectiveness, Stark will have none of it; Gonzalez figuratively robbed, virtually at gunpoint, the Kansas City Royals of $4.5 million in 2004. Neifi Perez, oddly enough, isn't considered a thief for the $4.1 million that the Royals paid in 2002 because "it can't be just about the ability to string together production-free numbers," and Derek Bell isn't eligible for LVP even though he claimed explicitly that he was reducing his productivity because of unhappiness with the team.

No; the villain is Long Gone, who had the temerity to accept the contract offers that teams made, then went on to perform, repeatedly, the outright dastardly act of actually cashing the checks that team offices handed to him. What a monster! And then, just because he wanted to steal MORE money from the fans of Major League Baseball, he played half a season in the Atlantic League, and three years in the Puerto Rican League.

This would all be just plain stupid were it not for the fact that Stark is part of a sports journalistic machine that habitually blames players for the idiotic mistakes made by team owners. Somebody gave Juan Gonzalez $4.5 million? Blame Gonzalez! There's a strike? Those greedy players are at it again! Ticket prices going up? Stupid greedy players! And of course, it would be nice if this pattern weren't duplicated in coverage of labor-management disputes in the rest of the economy.

There's certainly a way in which someone might determine the decade's Least Valuable Player, and it would involve comparing salary and productivity. It might, moreover, be the case that Juan Gonzalez actually was the LVP, although I rather doubt it, and it would almost certainly be because of the $24 million he made in 2002-3 from the Rangers, rather than from the $4 million that the Royals wasted on him. But that rather gives away the show. Accepting a $4 million contract offer from the Royals on the heels of several unproductive seasons doesn't make you a thief; it just means that you have a pulse.

...I think that one LVP candidate has to be my beloved Ken Griffey, who was paid $97 million for 17 wins above replacement over the course of the decade. Other possibilities?

But Bob Kaplan Said that Europeans Have Lost Their Will to Live!

Quick question: Did the news that a Dutchman was the first to tackle Shoebomber #2 remind anyone of how, in United 93, the appeasement-minded coward was clearly European?

Me neither.

"Just take a left after the big black Mammy."

Those would be directions given to me the first time I tried to visit my in-laws without the wife there to navigate. I hadn't a clue what he meant. Then, as I crested a hill south of Natchez, I suddenly did:

Texas advertises itself as a "Whole 'Nother Country," but that's only true if you live off a farm-to-market road. Houston's sprawl is as uniformly bland as the city that extends from Los Angeles to San Diego; but in the actual South, even the metropolitan areas surprise you.

This is my way of saying: as I'm writing from a location where the power—much less the internet—is intermittent, I'm not going to be able to address the arguments in Avatar thread for a couple of days. I will do so soon, though, as I value your new low opinion of me.

CBO projections as political props

Glenn Greenwald has a nice catch here, on Matt Welch's egregious hackery. Calling a document traditionally labeled a report a report 'lying' is pretty rich, but the larger issue is, as Greenwald demonstrates, Welch and Reason's writers are perfectly happy to cite CBO "reports" as accurate and reliable when it serves their purposes to do so.

There's a sense is which Welch is kind of right, of course--CBO budget forecasts change quite a bit from year to year. This kind of projection is just inherently speculative, as all kinds of important complicated factors for program cost and cost savings, including but not limited to the performance of the economy overall. Welch points readers to the Peter Suderman piece on the CBO, which isn't bad, but doesn't really offer much new information and insight, other than reiterating what we all knew--economic projections are volatile and uncertain. Suderman labels them "Gatekeepers" and means to suggest tehy are a powerful independent actors, but their power is rather clearly limited to the power politicians wish them to have. Somehow, CBO cost projections failed to prevent the Bush tax cuts or the Iraq war. Suderman obviously overstates the CBO's independent political power; their power is clearly a product of other political actors.

Interestingly, Suderman cites this Jon Gabel op-ed from August, in which Gabel demonstrates that the CBO has systematically underestimated cost savings from previous Medicare reforms. If this is continuing to occur, then obviously the use of the CBO is making good HCR more difficult. The current director of the CBO responds to this and other charged here. On the other hand, the CBO dramatically underestimated the costs of the Iraq war. What I'd really like to see, though, is some more systematic data on the accuracy of the CBO's projections, and the directional trend of their inaccuracy. (This may well be available, and if it is please point me to it. I'd conduct a more thorough search myself, but my current internet connection is intolerably slow.)

Annals of Bad Amazon Reviews

While working on my Statecraft and the State syllabus, I happened upon this Amazon review of Margaret Levi's Of Rule and Revenue:

"As specialization and division of labor increase, there is greater demand on the state to provide collective goods where once there were solely private goods or no goods at all."

From the second sentence of this book, it charts its course in oblivious contradiction of reality. In reality, of course, economic activity individuates and privatizes as society develops. The few exceptions, e.g., the Soviet Union, are typically short-lived and embarrassing to their promoters.

Ms. Levi is obviously a clever person, but sadly, as with many clever people in academia, her intelligence in this book is deployed mainly to play games of self-referential abstraction.

This book's obscurity and practical uselessness mean that it is unlikely to be of any consequence. There probably is a good book to be written on a general theory of comparative taxation, but this ain't it.

That's just... super. Anyone have other examples of Amazon review that exceed stupid by utterly missing the point?

Today In Yoosta-Bee Concern Trolling

Shorter William Daley: The Democratic coalition needs to be big enough to encompass legislators who oppose every significant item on a moderately progressive agenda, or the party is doomed.

We Can't Get on Any of the Best Enemies Lists...

How is Noon not on this list?

H/t GC.

Relevant Seasonal Videos

To echo Rob, Happy Holidays, and take care of each other!

Merry Christmas and So Forth

Happy holidays. Be good. Stay safe.

Wait, Acorn Did Not Commit Voting Fraud?

You're kidding, right? At least that's the line by the reasonable representative from Iowa, Steve King (R). After weighing his complete lack of evidence to the contrary, he finds this report "unconvincing". Instead, he goes with his well honed imagination:

“This report doesn’t begin to cover the transgressions of Acorn,” Mr. King said.

Admittedly, the authors of the report were likely unable to interview the voices in King's head, so he does have a point.

“I think Acorn is bigger than Watergate.”

To which all I can think is that I'd like some of that eggnog he is drinking, but I have to drive back down to Oregon from Kitsap County today.

Of course, maybe with that eggnog and King's imagination, my car might be sprinkled with fairy dust, sprout wings, and we could fly down to Oregon . . . because it must be powerful stuff, seeing as how King has voted in favor of Acorn projects early and often.

Life's ironies can be delicious.

As an aside, it appears that Congressional legislation cutting off Acorn is vulnerable to a constitutional critique as a bill of attainder. I'd search to see if Scott or Paul have picked up on this, but I can see the wings unfurling from my car as I type . . .

Dinga Dinga Dee!

This is indescribably awesome in every way:

Via Danger Room.

The Enemy of My Enemy Really Isn't Necessarily My Friend

I'll bet that there are some things that I'd agree with Grover Norquist about. He has a nice beard, for example. If somebody asked me to co-sign a "Defense of Facial Hair" letter with Grover, though, I suspect I'd have to shave.

I Always Suspected That Peter Mandelson Was a Wanker

I'll have more to say about this later, but I'm out the door for a Christmas dinner with my partner's family. Merry Christmas, Lord P.

Of course, the British university system never really recovered from the Thatcher slash and burn approach, only just recently recovering a modicum of respectability. Nobody really believed Tony Blair's desire to see 50% of British "school leavers" in university was possible (or even desirable), but this is the same government, right, that now claims this:

Lord Mandelson made his position clear in the Secretary of State’s annual letter to the Higher Education Funding Council for England. He said: “My predecessor repeatedly made clear the risks of student over-recruitment putting unmanageable pressures on our student support budgets.”

And people wonder why most people no longer believe a word that the Labour government has to say about, well, much of anything.

Give 'Em Enough Rope

This largely fawning Times Magazine profile of Robert George nonetheless manages to be quite damning. George's purportedly major intellectual contribution, Fitzpatrick explains, is to apply tautology and bare assertion natural law to contemporary questions of jurisprudence and political theory. You will probably not be surprised to learn that this would-be modern Aquinas has discovered that "natural law" and "practical reason" reveal...a near-perfect photocopy of the 2008 Republican platform:

Last spring, George was invited to address an audience that included many bishops at a conference in Washington. He told them with typical bluntness that they should stop talking so much about the many policy issues they have taken up in the name of social justice. They should concentrate their authority on “the moral social” issues like abortion, embryonic stem-cell research and same-sex marriage, where, he argued, the natural law and Gospel principles were clear. To be sure, he said, he had no objections to bishops' “making utter nuisances of themselves” about poverty and injustice, like the Old Testament prophets, as long as they did not advocate specific remedies. They should stop lobbying for detailed economic policies like progressive tax rates, higher minimum wage and, presumably, the expansion of health care — “matters of public policy upon which Gospel principles by themselves do not resolve differences of opinion among reasonable and well-informed people of good will,” as George put it.

[...]

The “rights” to education and health care are another matter, George told his seminar. “Who is supposed to provide education or health care to whom?” George asked. “Health care and education are things that you have to pay for. Resources are always finite,” he went on. “Is it better for education and health care to be provided by governments under socialized systems or by private providers in markets or by some combination?” Those questions, George said, “go beyond the application of moral principles. You can get all the moral principles dead right and not have an answer to any of those questions.”

It is to his credit, I suppose, that he's so straightforward about his cafeteria Catholicism. But it is nonetheless clear that the argument he's making fails on its own terms. Surely the truism that "you can get all the moral principles dead right and not have an answer to any of those questions" applies no less to abortion policy than anything else, which makes it highly relevant that George's preferred policy mix (draconian criminalization of abortion, reactionary gender politics, minimal welfare state) in fact has a notably dismal record even when it comes to reducing abortion rates. Indeed, there's much better evidence that robust welfare states reduce poverty than that abortion criminalization substantially reduces abortion rates (as opposed to the incidence of safe abortions.) Moreover, it seems rather clear that grubby politics rather than natural law is the primary factor in determining why George and his adherents are more concerned with same-sex marriage than, say, no-fault divorce when addressing alleged offenses against traditional marriage.

As a punchline, I'll also highlight this tidbit:

Later that year, when Bill Clinton denied Casey a chance to speak about abortion at the 1992 Democratic convention, it was George who had helped to write Casey’s speech.

Yes, the fact that Casey was denied that speaking slot sure was an outrage...

Lee Sigelman

Rest in peace.

Where Are The Votes?

I think Nate Silver's decimation of the reconciliation dodge is definitive. Granted, I roughly share his ideological priorities, and as a result I don't think there's a very serious argument the bill doesn't improve the status quo (and any such argument would apparently have to rely on some pretty reactionary propositions, such as "compensation in the form of health care should be permanently exempt from taxation.") So any argument for blowing up this bill does indeed have to rely on claims that a better bill could be obtained through reconciliation. Which seems implausible in the extreme. As I see it, the key points:

• There's no way that there's even 50 votes for a public option sufficiently robust to be worth risking the bill's regulate-and-subsidy provisions over.
• Once you consider the lost votes of Feingold and Byrd -- as well as God knows how many centrist wankers who would use reconciliation, and the threat is poses to their leverage, as a pretext to vote nay -- it's not even obvious that there are 50 votes for a weak public option through reconciliation.
  

The bottom line is that holding out hope for a better bill through reconcilation is to fundamentally misunderstand the politics of the situation. The fact that pre-existing majoritarian Senate rules would probably result in a better bill most certainly doesn't mean that using reconciliation would result in a better bill -- many Senators have a vested interest in the existing rules. So killing the bill in the hope of reconciliation would almost certainly make the rest of the bill much worse, and at best would result in a weak public option in exchange. As a percentage move, this would be roughly akin to having Babe Ruth circa 1923 bunt with a runner on second down three runs. It may be true that the threat of reconciliation could have led to a better bill, but I doubt it for these reasons -- especially once Feingold made it clear that he wouldn't play ball, I don't think either conservative Democrats or Republicans would have viewed the threat as credible.

At any rate, the only reason to oppose the bill is if you think it's worse than the status quo on the merits. The rest is ice cream castles in the air.