Clear Thinking to begin the week

Posted on April 20, 2009 by Tom

Former Cardinals and Pirates outfielder Andy Van Slyke from this recent interview ($) in Baseball Prospectus:

"Well, [former Astros pitcher] Mike Scott, to me, is the best pitcher to ever pitch in the big leagues. I went 1-for-38 against him. . . . Mike Scott, when he was at the apex of his career, was actually cheating very well. When he threw that forkball, and he scuffed it all up… he threw 97-98 mph, and then he’d throw a forkball that was in the 90s and I just couldn’t hit him."

Q: Were there a lot of guys "cheating very well" in your era?

"I think there was more of it going on back then than there is today. You don’t really see guys scuffing balls—you don’t see guys with sandpaper—but it was very prevalent when I came to the big leagues. The guys… everybody knew who was doing it. It was just hard to catch them."

Arnold Kling on an upcoming debate that he will be having with Robert Kuttner regarding health care finance:

The debate should be about how the cost-benefit trade-offs and rationing will take place. I will argue that most health care spending should be paid for out of pocket, with insurance reimbursement only for very large expenses over a multi-year period. With consumers paying out of pocket, they will take price into account in making their choices, and they will self-ration. The alternative is to have government officials make the choices about what treatments people are to obtain. I do not think that this is a one-sided debate, in which one position is clearly better than the other. But I hope that Kuttner and I can have this debate, rather than go off into red herrings like drug company profits.

The Financial Times’ Clive Cook chimes in on America’s intractable but nonsensical drug prohibition policy ($) (other posts on drug prohibition are here):

How much misery can a policy cause before it is acknowledged as a failure and reversed?

The US “war on drugs” suggests there is no upper limit. The country’s implacable blend of prohibition and punitive criminal justice is wrong-headed in every way: immoral in principle, since it prosecutes victimless crimes, and in practice a disaster of remarkable proportions. Yet for a US politician to suggest wholesale reform of this brainless regime is still seen as an act of reckless self-harm. [. . .]

Strict enforcement, . . . has reduced drug use only modestly – supposing for the moment that this is even a legitimate objective. The collateral damage is of a different order altogether. Violence related to drug crimes has surged in Mexico and in US cities close to the border, giving rise to renewed interest in the topic. . . . [. . .]

Few policies manage to fail so comprehensively, and what makes it all the odder is that the US has seen it all before. Everybody understands that alcohol prohibition in the 1920s suffered from many of the same pathologies – albeit on a smaller scale – and was eventually abandoned. [. . .]

Is an outbreak of common sense on this subject likely? Unfortunately, no. Only the most daring politicians seem willing to think about it seriously. . . . [. . .]

Somebody in the White House should take a look. This national calamity is no laughing matter.

And finally, Mark Steyn notes the insidious nature of encroaching government regulation over citizens:

The proper response of free men to the trivial but degrading impositions of the state is to answer as [gun owner] Pierre Lemieux did. But it requires a kind of 24/7 tenacity few can muster – and the machinery of bureaucracy barely pauses to scoff: In an age of mass communication and computer records, the screen blips for the merest nano-second, and your gun rights disappear. The remorseless, incremental annexation of "individual existence" by technologically all-pervasive micro-regulation is a profound threat to free peoples. But do we have the will to resist it?

Hayes Carll "She Left Me for Jesus"

Posted on April 19, 2009 by Tom

Tyson

Posted on April 18, 2009 by Tom

This Church has something for you

Posted on April 17, 2009 by Tom

A Houston Original

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Tom

One of Houston’s many treasures is Jack Burke (earlier posts here), the 86 year-old co-founder and owner of Champions Golf Club. The energetic Burke was recently slowed by a "mild" stroke (my late father used to say that the only mild strokes were those that happened to someone else), but that didn’t stop Jack from taking his family to Augusta National Golf Club last week for the Masters, where Burke is a former champion (1956). John Garrity provides this fine article on Burke’s Augusta National visit (H/T Geoff Shackelford), which includes the following hilarious and typically Burkean anecdote that former Masters champion Bob Goalby tells fellow PGA Tour member, Miller Barber:

"You know Miller?" Goalby arches an eyebrow. "He’s got about 14 curlicues in his backswing, and then he sticks the club straight up in the air with no wrist cock. Anyway, he asked Jackie for a lesson."

"They went out on the range, dumped the balls out. Miller said, ‘I’m mixed up on my backswing. Watch me hit some.’ So he hit about a dozen balls before Jackie turned and started walking away."

"Miller’s got this squeaky voice. He shouted, ‘Jackie! Jackie! Where are you going?’ And Jackie said, ‘Back to the clubhouse. I’m not going to live long enough to figure out that backswing.’"

Defining Health Insurance

Posted on April 15, 2009 by Tom

All sorts of interesting debates regarding reform of the American health care finance are breaking out across the blogosphere, which is a good thing.

Those discussions prompted one of the best thinkers on health care finance reform — Clear Thinkers favorite Arnold Kling — to provide a particularly lucid explanation of the illusory nature of American health insurance and, in so doing, highlight one of the key issues to implementing reform of the current system:

Let me offer two choices:

(a) Health insurance is the collective provision of all health care.

(b) Health insurance is the sharing of extreme risk in health care spending.

In my view, (a) represents what most people think of as good health insurance. For example, I have a friend who says her health insurance is great because she can get new eyeglasses every year for everyone in her family for a co-payment of only $10.

We have never observed (b). (b) would mean something where you only make a claim when your expenses are going to run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Claims would be rare and large, as in fire insurance. Premiums would be low, as in fire insurance.

Since we never have observed (b), we do not know whether it is something that could be provided by the market or would have to be provided by government. I am willing to concede that it may be the latter. However, what most people mean by universal health coverage is (a), which has some pretty obvious incentive problems. [. . .]

The bottom line is that what we think of as health insurance is not going to survive if we are going to get control of health care costs. Either health insurance is going to become very intrusive about our choices of medical services (the top-down, government option, under the guise of "health care quality"), or we are going to see much higher deductibles and co-payments (the bottom-up option).

The Chronicle’s Enron myopia

Posted on April 14, 2009 by Tom

Even when it is on the right side of an issue, the Chronicle reminds us of its failings.

As noted earlier here, it has become fashionable among the Old Media to support the recent decision of the Justice Department to request dismissal of the criminal case against former Alaska senator Ted Stevens because of the DOJ’s misconduct in handling the prosecution. The Chronicle chimed in last week with this self-righteous editorial.

Of course, for anyone paying attention, prosecutorial misconduct by the DOJ is not unusual. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan sanctioned the DOJ by dismissing indictments against 13 former KPMG partners. Federal prosecutors in Miami are in hot water with a federal judge there over abusive tactics in a criminal drug case against a local doctor. There even appears to be a connection between the prosecutorial misconduct in the Steven case and the dubious case against former Vice-Presidential aide, Scooter Libby.

As the always-insightful Larry Ribstein points out, could it be that there are agency costs in managing corporate criminal prosecutions just as there are in managing corporations? Along the same lines, Doug Berman suggests that an insidious culture within the DOJ has produced the abuse of power.

But the most galling aspect of the Chronicle’s emergent awareness of abusive state power is that it has virtually ignored the egregious examples of prosecutorial misconduct in its own hometown, particularly in the case against Jeff Skilling that resulted in a barbaric and indefensible 24-year prison sentence.

As conflicted publications such as the Wall Street Journal promoted Enron myths and the demonization of Enron executives, the Chronicle could have provided a valuable public service by providing balanced reporting and analysis of what really caused Enron’s demise and how such a company can be better-structured to survive in even the most adverse market conditions. When clear evidence of prosecutorial misconduct emerged early in the Enron-related criminal cases, the Chronicle could have provided an even greater public service by taking a strong stand against such dangerous abuse of state power. It’s certainly not hard to find historical reminders of the injustice that results from such abuse.

So, what did the Chronicle do instead? It embraced the Enron Myth and led the mob in demonizing Enron executives. From the beginning of the Enron-related criminal cases, the Chronicle editorial staff simply elected to ignore mounting evidence of prosecutorial misconduct in favor of the easier approach of leading the angry mob. The Chronicle’s coverage of the Skilling prosecution was so inflammatory and biased that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals made the highly unusual finding that the Chronicle created a presumption of community prejudice against Skilling (see pp. 41-45 of the Fifth Circuit decision).

Even now, despite the legacy of prosecutorial misconduct in the Enron-related criminal cases and the fact that what happened to Enron has now happened to many big Wall Street firms, the Chronicle stubbornly clings to the Enron Myth and refuses even to acknowledge that the evidence of prosecutorial abuse in the Enron-related cases is worse than what caused the dismissal of the Stevens case.

As with most Old Media newspapers these days, the Chronicle is struggling to survive. Winning that first Pulitzer Prize sure would sure provide a boost to the Chronicle’s flagging spirits.

Wouldn’t it be the ultimate irony if the decision to lead the angry mob against Enron distracted the Chronicle from a truly enthralling story of prosecutorial misconduct that could have won the newspaper that elusive Pulitzer?