FunctionalAmbivalent

Things Not to Do

Don't wear a penis costume to your high school graduation.

For Those of You Who Think a "Guest Worker" Program Is a Good Idea

A key to President Bush's immigration reform was to have been a "guest worker" program that would allow business to continue to benefit from low-cost immigrant labor while guaranteeing that those immigrants were never granted the rights of citizenship. These guest workers would be incredibly vulnerable, without most of the legal rights the rest of us enjoy and devoid of political influence or power.

President Bush's friends, the Saudis, have a guest worker program, and here's how well it works:

The New York-based organisation Human Rights Watch has called on  Saudi Arabia to do more to protect Asian domestic workers from mistreatment.

It says some cases amount to slavery, with employers going unpunished for withholding wages, forced confinement, or physical and sexual violence.

HRW says some workers are imprisoned or lashed on spurious charges such as theft, adultery or witchcraft.

Granted, the culture of the United States is not as vile as the culture of Saudi Arabia; we don't even like it when people whip their pets, let alone their servants. But the difference between the "moderate" Republican guest worker program and the Saudi's institutionalized slavery is just a matter of degree. Creating a guest worker program of our own would surely lead to abuse, if not of the domestic help, then of factories full of workers who face deportation if their boss gets pissed at them.

Why we'd want to do this to our country is beyond me.

One of My Favorite Things

When I was a student at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, there was a t-shirt you could get that said:

University of Iowa
Idaho City, Ohio

Now the New Republic continues the joke in talking about the upcoming Idaho primary.

"The home state of Larry Craig, Napoleon Dynamite, and the undefeated 2006 Boise State Broncos may not be the top prize at stake on February 5, but given that Iowa is one of the reddest in the country, it should provide a test..."

As a Rule, I Believe That Anything That Everyone Agrees On Is Probably a Bad Idea

Rolling like a steamroller through Washington, D.C., is the "economic stimulus" package that really won't do much to stimulate the economy. I mean, realistically, it's $150 billion dropped into a $13-trillion economy; how much can it do?

The answer is: a lot, especially if you're a politician up for re-election and you want to tell the folks back home I'm doing something. Call it "panic pork," more a placebo than actual medicine, doled out to calm everyone down and make a few friends.

The irony, of course, is that we're in the mess we're in because of excess debt, and the money Congress is about to pony-up will have to be borrowed so that our consumer-spending party can keep going just a little while longer.

The President, Republicans, Democrats and the pundit class are all in agreement. Have you heard anyone question "the economic stimulus package"? I haven't.

Which worries me. Things that everyone agrees on scare me, because more often than not the things everyone agrees on -- bell bottom pants, Peter Frampton, the USA Patriot Act -- end up being things that are regrettable.

Now we're all agreeing on borrowing money to provide minor relief for a debt crisis. Doesn't that seem just a little bit nuts?

UPDATE: Now the Senate wants to throw some additional money at retirees, as a class the wealthiest group in the United States. Entirely by coincidence, I'm sure, they're also the group that votes more than any other.

So, to recap, we're going to borrow money that will have to be repaid by grandchildren to give to grandparents who, by and large, don't need it. How does this make sense?

The Best Healthcare System In the World

A construction worker with a minor head injury goes to the emergency room for stitches. You will not be surprised to know that the matter has ended up in court.

According to a lawsuit he later filed, Mr. Persaud was then told that he needed an immediate rectal examination to determine whether he had a spinal-cord injury. He adamantly objected to the procedure, he said, but was held down as he begged, “Please don’t do that.” As Mr. Persaud resisted, he freed one of his hands and struck a doctor, according to the suit. Then he was sedated, the suit says, with a breathing tube inserted through his mouth.

While he was sedated, Mr. Persaud was rectally examined. Then he was arrested for striking the doctor.

It's One of Those Right Brain. Left Brain Things, Apparently

A hospital in Rhode Island has been fined $50,000 for its third case this year of operating on the wrong side of a patient's brain.

The hospital issued a statement saying it was re-evaluating its training and policies, providing more oversight, giving nursing staff the power to ensure procedures are followed, among other steps.

Rhode Island Hospital is, interestingly, a teaching hospital.

Screwing-Up Christmas

Today in the grocery store, "O! Little Town of Bethlehem" was on the Muzak.

How To Create a Food Shortage

Russia has joined the Third World fad of putting price controls on food:

Russian food prices rose steeply in September, with vegetable oil up 13.5 per cent, butter up 9.4 per cent and milk 7.2 per cent, thanks to global agricultural price increases. Given a big low-income population and meager pensions, the price rises are among the few factors capable of deflating President Vladimir Putin’s 80 per cent-plus approval ratings.
...
Russia’s agriculture ministry said the food pricing arrangement was voluntary. But industry insiders said they had come under heavy pressure. “We were told in no uncertain terms that we have to freeze prices on certain products,” said one Russian food industry executive, who asked not to be named. “Everybody understands what the government is doing. It is part of their election campaign.”

Food prices are going up because worldwide demand is going up. Not only do farmers have to feed all the people in the world, now they have to feed cars and the biotech industry, too.

Ordinarily, rising prices on basic commodities increase supply, as farmers plant more in order to make more money.

In the counterintuitive world of farm price supports and government subsidies, however, there's no telling what might happen. Here in the United States, we pay some farmers to grow less while subsidizing others to grow more, both of which have the interesting effect of making it harder for subsistence farmers in far off places to subsist. And in the game of government agricultural meddling, the United States is far from the most egregious offender.

Russia joins a worldwide movement of governments trying to lower food costs by artificial means:

China has also agreed to food price controls; Egypt, Jordan, Bangladesh and Morocco are increasing subsidies or cutting import tariffs to lower domestic prices. Rich countries are not im­mune: Italian consumer groups organized a pasta boycott last month in a protest over prices.

Italians complaining. Who would have guessed?

Anyway, for those of you who have forgotten your basic economics, prices rise when supply, relative to demand, goes down. Lowering prices by government fiat is not a good way to increase supply.

Russia's approach to food price controls is ironic, since it attacks not the problem of food supply but the supposed perfidy of the blood-sucking merchant class. It is the commercial equivalent of killing the messenger. The Soviet -- excuse me -- Russian price controls limit the markup that can be charged on select food items -- bread, cheese, milk, eggs and vegetable oil -- by retailers and other middlemen. This is ironic because it recalls the days when Russia, then under-performing as the Soviet Union, produced lots of food even as market shelves were bare. The problem then was not food production but food distribution, a government-run system of dysfunctional railroads, trucking lines and state stores that replaced the blood-sucking merchant class of Czarist times. That government run distribution system of apathetic nine-to-five clock punchers wasn't able to ramp-up for the harvest, leaving food rotting in storage facilities and farm fields. It was actually easier to buy grain from the United States and ship it all the way around the world than it was to get native stocks a few hundred miles from the Russian breadbasket to the hungry in the capitol city of the worker's paradise.

By attacking, once again, the distribution channels, Russia could be headed back toward the good old days of bare store shelves and periodic, localized famine. At that point, Russians being Russians, I'm sure the public outcry for a permanent Putin administration will be overwhelming.

A Perfect Example of How Both Right and Left Expect Too Much of Government

Three pro-life pharmacists in Washington are suing to overturn the state's regulation mandating that pharmacies dispense the "morning after" pill.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court Wednesday, a pharmacy owner and two pharmacists say the rule that took effect Thursday violates their civil rights by forcing them into choosing between "their livelihoods and their deeply held religious and moral beliefs."

Stop me if I'm wrong, but don't lots of jobs require people to balance the needs of the employer with the employee's deeply held religious beliefs? Don't soldiers have to balance their sense of patriotic duty with "thou shalt not kill"? Don't bank loan officers have to consider Christ's admonition to give to the poor with their fiduciary duty to not give the bank's money away? And don't we, as a society just kind of expect people to make up their own minds about what's more important in their lives?

But anti-abortion pharmacists want special protection. And abortion rights proponents want government to force access to emergency contraception.

What the state ought to do is step away from the controversy entirely. This is just the kind of thing that the marketplace -- of both ideas and goods -- handles lots better than government.

If the pharmacy owner, in this case, wants to limit the drugs he dispenses based on his religious beliefs, that should be his right. The fact that he lets his religious beliefs interfere with his business will become known in the market and some people will choose to do business with him because of that and some people will choose not to.

The pharmacy employees, on the other hand, can quit if they don't like the owner's policies. If they refuse to dispense a legal drug against the policy of their employer, the employer should be free to fire them if they don't have the good sense to find another job more aligned with their beliefs. We don't need to create a protected class of workers, nor do we need to set the precedent that people can refuse, with impunity, to do their jobs based on self-decided matters of conscience. (Give people that right and watch how many religious sects spring up that require margarita communion during the Friday afternoon mini-sabbath.)

Taking this approach would have several salutary effects. It would:

1. Protect personal liberty
2. Give Washington state government more time to deal with real problems
3. Put a couple of lawyers out of work

I seriously don't see what in this controversy requires government intervention.

I Also Predicted That Dick Cheney Would Resign the Vice Presidency Before the 2004 Election

Just over two years ago I wrote a post that turned out to be about the wrongest thing I ever wrote.

But the last few days I've seen something that makes me think this might be real.  Right now, in the news from the Mideast, I sense something that's not unlike the feeling just before communism collapsed.  Things are happening that never happened before; people are doing things that used to get them killed, but no one seems to have the belly for pulling the triggers.  It seems we may be encountering a turning point in history.  It's a feeling that is fleeting, a feeling not of the inevitable, but of the tantalyzingly close.

Read and take joy in how bad my analysis of the Middle East can be. And if you want to have additional fun, follow the trackbacks to the Republican blogs that linked to it. From two years farther down the road, their gloating and condescention looks even worse than my analysis.