When you read or hear some writer or speaker — especially a journalist or a politician — asserting

Economists say X.

ask yourself two questions:

• Is this all economists or most economists or just some economists?
• Why has this writer or speaker chosen not to specify whether it is some, most, or all?

The same point applies to other areas of expertise. A bald climatologists or scientists or health experts or historians or philosophers should get one to ask the analogous questions. But, right now, I am provoked by yet another article about what economists say.

The Woman of Interest draws my attention to

That's right, folks. The US Federal government, which eats so much of the economy, wouldn't bother to expose this group; the state is too busy using its power to get more power. Instead, a relatively small private firm identified the perps in seven weeks.

Let's walk through what it would mean if insurers could not deny coverage to any applicant and could not charge higher premiums on the basis of preëxisting medical conditions.

The out-lays of insurers would of course increase, so the they will do one and likely both of two things:

• Increase premiums for all subscribers: Those without preëxisting conditions would pay more than previously, to off-set the out-lays for those with preëxisting conditions.
• Reduce coverage for all subscribers: The contractual liabilities of insurance companies would be reduced in the case of conditions that could be preëxisting, so that subscribers who developed such conditions after subscription would receive less treatment or face greater out-of-pocket expense.

So the buck-per-bang price of insurance (and probably the absolute price) would increase. This would occur regardless of whether subscription were mandatory, but I think that the consequent increase in price would be greater were coverage not mandatory.

In the absence of requiring people to purchase coverage, fewer people would buy insurance voluntarily. Those most likely to reduce their demand for insurance would be the less affluent and those who perceived themselves as relatively healthy. A significant share of the latter would indeed be relatively healthy, and their departure would mean that the average out-lay per subscriber would increase, which would push-up costs. The departure of the less affluent would tend to push-down out-lays, as the less affluent tend to lead less healthy life-styles, but it would be unreasonable to expect the less affluent to depart in sufficient numbers to restore the lower price, and I'm not aware of anyone advocating a strategy of pricing the poor out of the insurance market.

In fact, without compulsory subscription, it becomes less reasonable to subscribe until one actually needs treatment. Coverage would no longer function as insurance because it needn't be purchased on a precautionary basis. Instead, subscription would simply be a buy-in for some programme of medical care. When the expected cost of needed medical care were less than the buy-in price, one should not purchase a subscription; when the expected cost of needed care were greater, one should buy a subscription.

The proposal is to make subscription compulsory, in which case it's not clear why insurance companies should continue to be involved at all. Insurance premiums would have been replaced with a tax (regardless of whether it were called a tax or called a user fee or called a premium), and the insurance companies would be functioning as extensions of the state. Possibly a bona fide insurance could be offered to supplement coverage provided under the proposal, but it remains none-the-less unclear what legitimate reason there might be for using insurance companies to collecting a tax or to reïmburse those who provided state-mandated coverage. I'm inclined to interpret the intent in part to be to buy-off the insurance companies, giving them what will seem a guaranteed source of revenue, and in part to give a private-sector façade to a state monopsony.

Returning to the issue of the increase in buck-per-bang price, a consequence is going to be that most people who would insure in the absence of the proposed measures are going to have less coverage in their presence, unless they are required to have as much or more coverage than before, at the greater prices implied by not imposing higher fees on those with preëxisting conditions.

Ms Bachmann is reading the relevant law just fine, and Ms Lowe is engaged in treason.

The United States Constitution is the supreme legislation; no part of it can be annulled by an ordinary act of Congress. The Constitution provides for a census, but the Fifth Amendment protects us from having to offer more information than the identities of those in our households.

In the last two Censuses, all that I have provided was that information. In the first of these, I received a telephone call from the Bureau of the Census about my failure to provide more information, and I stated my refusal firmly. They dropped the matter, because they know that the legal code will not pass constitutional muster; it is a bluff.

I am not at all sanguine about the oppositional up-rising in Iran. Although it is evident that Ahmadinejad's faction rigged the counting of the vote, I think that he would have won, by approximately the same margin, had the votes been honestly counted. I see the up-rising as that of a minority, and of a minority that is considerably less thuggish than the majority whom they oppose.

---

Meanwhile, I am fairly sure that, by the end of the calendar year, the attempt by our own President to reëngineer America will have failed, and that the changes that he will have been able to effect will, over-all, be viewed by most Americans as wrong-headed in one way or another.

In some future entry, I'll have more to say about my perceptions of his programme.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan notes the The Results as They Came In for the Iranian Presidential election. Specifically, as the official figures were up-dated, they fell almost perfectly along a straight line. The fit has an R² of .998, which is a virtual impossibility. So the official figures are a bald lie. That doesn't mean that Ahmadinejad wouldn't have won under a fair count, but it means that he chose to steal the election rather than to risk losing under a fair count.

Recently, I began watching The Stranger (1946) for the first time in many years.

There are many things that one might say about this film, and in particular about the sociological aspects of this film. Here, I want to draw attention to one in particular.

Here's a clip:

On another page, I provide a fairly full transcription of the dialogue for the whole clip. Here, let me focus on a shorter excerpt from within this clip.

Dramatis Personæ

Mr Wilson	(Edward G. Robinson)	…	undercover agent of the Allied War Crimes Commission
Franz Kindler aka Charles Rankin	(Orson Welles)	…	fugitive Nazi official, living under an assumed identity
Adam Longstreet	(Philip Merivale)	…	Justice of the SCotUS
Mary Rankin née Longstreet	(Loretta Young)	…	daughter of Judge Longstreet, newlywed bride of Charles Rankin
Noah Longstreet	(Richard Long)	…	son of Justice Longstreet
Jeffrey Lawrence	(Byron Keith)	…	town doctor
Red	(unknown)	…	Mary's dog

Wilson: Do you know Germany, Mr. Rankin?
Charles: I'm sorry, I— I have a way of making enemies when I'm on that subject. I get pretty unpopular.
Wilson: Well, we shall consider it the objective opinion of an objective historian.
Charles: Historian? A psychiatrist could explain it better. The German sees himself as the innocent victim of world envy and hatred — conspired against, set upon by inferior peoples, inferior nations. He cannot admit to error, much less to wrongdoing, not the German. We chose to ignore Ethiopia and Spain, but we learned, from our casualty list, the price of looking the other way. Men of truth everywhere have come to know … for whom the bell tolled. But not the German. No, he still follows his warrior gods, marching to Wagnerian strains, his eyes still fixed upon the fiery sword of Siegfried. And [glances at Jeffrey] in those subterranean meeting places that you don't believe in, the German's dreamworld comes alive and he takes his place in shining armor, beneath the banners of the Teutonic Knights. Mankind is waiting for the Messiah; but, for the German, the Messiah is not the Prince of Peace. No, he's… 'sanother Barbarossa, another Hitler.
Wilson: Well, then, you, uh, you have no faith in the reforms that are being effected in Germany.
Charles: I don't know, Mr. Wilson. I can't believe that people can be reformed except from within. The basic principles of equality and freedom never have, never will take root in Germany. The will to freedom has been voiced in every other tongue [Wilson nods.] — All men are created equal, liberté, égalité, fraternité — but in German—
Noah: There's Marx: Proletarians, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.
Charles: But Marx wasn't a German; Marx was a Jew.
Justice Longstreet: But, my dear Charles, if we concede your argument, there is no solution.
Charles: Well, sir, once again, I differ.
Wilson: Well, what is it, then?
Charles: Annihilation. Down to the last babe in arms.
Mary: Oh, Charles, I can't imagine you're advocating a … Carthaginian peace.
Charles: Well, as an historian, I must remind you that the world hasn't had much trouble From Carthage in the past … 2,OOO years.
Justice Longstreet (chuckling): Well, there speaks our pedagogue.
Mary: Well, uh, speaking of teachers, Mr. Wilson, …
Wilson: Yes, huh?
Mary: The faculty is coming for tea next Tuesday. If you have nothing better to do, would you like to join us?
Wilson: Uh, I'd like to, but my work here is finished. [Charles smiles faintly.] I'm leaving Harper tomorrow.

(Later, Charles and Mary Rankin enter their home.)
Mary: Extraordinary, isn't it, clocks being Mr. Wilson's hobby, too?
Charles: Yes, isn't it?
Mary: Well, Red, how do ya like your new house?
Charles: He loves it. Come here, Red; I think I'll take you for a walk. Come here, boy.
Mary: Oh, darling, you don't have to take him out. Just let him out. He won't run off.
Charles: I need the walk; I'm restless. Come on, boy.

(At Wilson's room.)
Male voice from phone: That's good. How are you coming along?
Wilson: I'll be in Washington tomorrow afternoon. You were right about Rankin. He's above suspicion.

Notice that Professor Rankin has advocated genocide — wiping-out the Germans Down to the last babe in arms. The only person at the table who raises the slightest objection is Mary, and even her response is mild. Wilson, the principal hero of the story, concludes from this advocacy that Professor Rankin is above suspicion — the emphasis on above is Wilson's — rather than, say, a pathological Germanophobe.

When Americans remember the war and its aftermath, we tend to forget that there was a time when preaching genocide, while a minority position, was socially acceptable. In fact, such sentiment reached up to the highest levels of government. Here are a couple of excerpts from The New Dealers' War by Thomas Fleming (which excerpts may be familiar to those who followed my LJ):

New Dealers and others around the president made no attempt to alter this dehumanizing war against the Japanese. In September 1942, Admiral William Leahy, Roosevelt's White House chief of staff, told Vice President Henry Wallace that Japan was our Carthage and we should go ahead and destroy her utterly. Wallace noted this sentiment without objection in his diary. Elliot Roosevelt, the president's son, told Wallace some months later that he thought Americans should kill about half the Japanese civilian population. New Dealer Paul McNutt, chairman of the War Manpower Commission, went him one better, recommending the extermination of the Japanese in toto.

[…]

At the White House on August 19, 1944, [Secretary of the Treasury] Henry Morgenthau told Roosevelt the British were much too benevolent in their postwar plans for Germany and so were the State Department and the European Advisory Commission. The Secretary was, incidentally, shocked by FDR's appearance. He is a very sick man and seems to have wasted away, he told his diary. But that observation did not deter him from urging the president to stop this soft approach to Germany.

Roosevelt's animus against the Germans erupted into fury. Give me thirty minutes with Churchill and I can correct this, he told Morgenthau. We have got to be tough with Germany and I mean the German people, not just the Nazis. You either have to castrate [them] or you have got to treat them … so they can't just go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.

Morgenthau left the White House convinced that he had a mandate to create a better plan to deal with postwar Germany. He put Harry Dexter White in charge of a special committee to draft the Treasury's analysis of the German problem. The result was the Morgenthau Report. It proposed to divide Germany into four parts. It also recommended destroying all the industry in the Ruhr and Saar basins and turning Central Europe and the German people into agriculturists. At one point Communist agent White, who was described by his Soviet handler as a very nervous cowardly person, feared they were going to extremes. He warned Morgenthau this ideal was politically risky; it would reduce perhaps 20 million people to starvation. I don't care what happens to the population, Morgenthau said.

Proponents of a multilateralist foreign policy have treated the consequences of the post-9/11 foreign policy of the Administration of GW Bush as a sort of proof of the merits of multilateralism over unilateralism.

Part of the problem with this argument is that, while the invasion and occupation of Iraq was essentially unilateralist, the earlier invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was multilateralist, and that invasion doesn't seem to have been a comparative success.

Moreover, politically weakened when the Rumsfeld strategy failed, the Administration was compelled to pursue a multilateralist policy with respect to Iran and to North Korea. Again, the policy does not seem to have worked.

In fact, the war with Iraq was not begun under that Administration, nor was it begun unilaterally. It was begun in early 1991, as a multilateral policy under the Administration of GHW Bush, and continued as such under the Clinton Administration. After more than twelve years of undeclared multilateral warfare, forceably embargoing Iraq and lobbing missiles at them, and the deaths of an enormous number of Iraqis, with Saddam Hussein trying to bide his time until it became impossible for the United States to remain in Saudia Arabia, the United States switched to a unilateral war policy.

Also during the Administration of the elder Bush, the United States participated in the multilateral invasion and occupation of Somalia. (At its outset, the mainstream media celebrated it as a sort-of proof-by-expectation of the merits of the UN.) That wasn't exactly a success either. (But, somehow, not taken as proof-by-outcome of the deficiencies of the UN.)

Now, proponents of multilateralism variously argue that they just need(ed) more time, that the specific implementations have been defective but the general approach is none-the-less appropriate, or that their policy is imperfect but less of a failure than the alternative. Unilateralists present the isomorphic arguments got by swapping uni and multi.

The last form of argument, that the policy is better than the alternative hangs on the notion that the only one alternative exists; that we must have either unilateralist entanglements or multilateralist entanglements. Well, that's certainly not logically true. Logically, we might simply avoid entanglements altogether. Instead of having our diplomats author or co-author Strongly Worded Declarations, we might tell our diplomats to just shut-up. Instead of trying to police the world in-or-out-of NATO, we might send our troops over-seas exactly and only when specifically attacked within our own territory.

I don't know that military isolation would spare us any grief. While a very large share of the present problems of America are caused by the past misdeeds of the United States, I'm of the opinion that indeed a large part of the world hates America because they see its liberalism (tattered as it may be) as an obscene rebuke to their own cultures, and dread that, in the absence of violence, that liberalism would over-sweep their cultures. And that part of the world would use the past sins of the United States as an excuse to fly planes into our buildings for decades after the United States tried to withdraw. But, in spite of my practical doubt, and in spite of my not knowing just how to transition, I'm convinced that we need to move towards military isolation, and to keep moving until we get there and can stay there.

In any case, when you evaluate the foreign policy of the United States, consider the invasion of Iraq, but also consider the dozen years of war before that; consider Afghanistan, consider Iran, consider North Korea, consider Somalia, consider the Sudan. Don't compare practical unilateralism to mythical multilateralism.