Birth Control is Not a Right

So Rush Limbaugh satirized Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University Law Student, who is advocating in favor of the Obama Administration policy that mandates employers who provide health insurance also provide coverage for contraceptives and abortifacients. I have yet to hear or read Limbaugh's remarks, or Ms. Fluke's for that matter.

What I can say, is that when my wife and I were Ms. Fluke's age, we were also living on graduate student stipends. We took care of our own birth control costs, and never thought to ask the University to help us with them. Because we assumed that birth control was not our right - it was our responsibility. Birth control is considered a right by people whose ideology confuses license with liberty.

On the other hand, the real issue is not graduate students, but the working poor. When you are bringing in such low wages that you have to count pennies, then maybe you do need a little help to make ends meet. Maybe the government should win this one. But Catholic and some other religious institutions have moral objections to birth control. At least let them have a means test, so that they will only be compelled to provide such coverage to those whom they pay wages too low to afford it.

That will at least provide those institutions a way to opt out of providing coverage for birth control by raising the wages of those lowest on the pay scale, and letting them make their own choices as to how to spend their own money.

Wikileaks

In case you weren't watching, Wikileaks has obtained and released a large number of secret diplomatic messages from the US. Wikileaks is hosted in Sweden, and run by an Australian. Therefore, US law does not apply directly to them. But it does apply to the source(s) who leaked the documents to Wikileaks.

As a pre-condition for having one's US security clearance activated, one must sign several documents acknowledging one's having read and understood the legal penalties to which one may be subjected if one discloses classified information either (a) accidentally, or (b) knowingly and willingly. These penalties can be severe.

So, to the person(s) who stole the documents, one message. If they catch you and punish you, you can't say you didn't know it was coming.

For the rest of you, another message. It will probably surprise you to know that it is illegal under US law to classify a document without proper authority, as described in written classification guides. In particular, it is illegal to classify a document simply because its disclosure would cause embarrassment. This was enacted to correct abuses of the system of classification in the previous century.

So why does the US mark some information as classified, anyway? Information that is the property of the people is kept from the public domain (classified) in order to protect the people from harm. In other words, if you're an American, you are a co-owner of the US government, and all its information, classified or otherwise. It's just that, for example, you really don't want to know how to operate a nuclear weapon, because even though you would never use such knowledge, someone else, who wants to incinerate your town, just might.

Contempt for Congress, Among Others

The US House of Representatives has passed a healthcare reform bill. If it makes it through the Senate unaltered, it will, according to Betsy McCaughey writing in this weekend's Wall Street Journal, require employers and insurers to offer only "qualified" plans which can differ only in premiums and co-pays, not on what is or is not covered. The message is that the Democrats think you're too stupid to choose between competing plans if the choice is any more complicated than just dollars and cents. Their solution is to make health insurance a commodity. According to the Congressional Budget Office, your premiums will go up, not down, and the bill doesn't specify what a qualified plan is or is not. Otherwise translated as "we'll stick it to you later."

There is more, much more, to this 2,000 page piece of trash, but this much is clear. The Democrats are enemies of your economic liberty because they think you're too stupid to handle it. They just want to make life simpler for you. This doesn't mean that the Republicans are friends of liberty. No way. They want to take away your sexual liberty, because they think you're too irresponsible to handle it. And they've taken away a good bit of your privacy because they think you're too cowardly to accept the risk of terrorist attacks that real privacy brings.

In other words, if you care about your liberty, you might as well lump the parties together and call them Republicrats. Neither of them are comfortable trying to govern a free people who take responsibility for themselves and live with the consequences of their choices, wise or unwise. They are well-intentioned, but their desire to take care of you, to keep you safe from either yourself or from others, does not make them your friends.

Of course, the Republicrat discomfort with liberty (which compels them to seek the power to limit liberty) is only one reason why our legislation has been so outrageous of late. The other is that Congress as arrogated unto itself so much power and authority that it can no longer effectively handle its workload. As a result the Congressional Staff now numbers around 24,000. About 11,000 of them work of individual Senators and Congresspersons. They tend to be just out of college or law school, and they view their positions as stepping stones to real careers somewhere else. In other words, they have little or no real world experience, and they are not going to have to deal with the consequences of what they write as legislation. And what they write are not so much like laws as they are like bad term papers - there may be flashes of brilliance in somewhere in them, but they're too long and too full of other junk to find them out.

If I could wave a magic wand, I'd make Congress delegate a significant amount of their power back to the states so that local problems could get local solutions, and to the federal regulatory agencies so that more time and thought and less politics might go into those curbs on our liberty that we must accept in order to have a functioning republic. Then I'd cut back the Congressional staff, and turn more of their positions into careers rather than transitional jobs, so that there would be some experience and historical memory among the staff.

I'm not sure what I'd do about the bribery. It is clearly more widespread than Congress and exists at higher levels than I had thought. How else did some of New York City's wealthiest employers get H1N1 vaccine ahead of the city's medical clinics?

Of course, I could be wrong. Both the American Medical Association and the American Association of Retired Persons have endorsed this monstrosity of a health care bill. Or maybe big businesses and big lobbies aren't necessarily friends of liberty either. After all, the main reason that we are trying to reform the health care system in the first place is that we are currently at the mercy of big businesses (our insurers and employers) and big lobbies that look out for their interests rather than ours.

Update on Clergy Sexual Abuse

"It's not uncommon for pedophiles to gravitate toward jobs and professions that give them access to children," said a psychologist friend of mine. "We see them become, or try to become teachers, priests, that sort of thing."

I can imagine a pedophile, in denial about his tendency, being drawn to the priesthood. Once a priest, he abuses a child and is found out by another priest, who protects him. But why is he protected? Perhaps the other priest is a pedophile who has thus far successfully resisted temptation, and feels that "there but for the grace of God go I." Perhaps the other priest is just trying to protect the institution on which he has come to depend for his livelihood. Even worse, perhaps neither priest is in denial, and they both sought the priesthood with malice aforethought. I do not know.

Nowadays I imagine that the Church seeks professional help in evaluating and eliminating candidates for such tendencies, but again I don't know.

I do know that the abuse of parishoners, especially young ones, by clergy can be devastating. Kay Goodnow has contributed the text of her deposition to a mediator concerning her experience of clergy abuse.

Have a read. The church settled out of court, meeting the monetary settlement, but reneging on the non-monetary provisions. Much like what one would expect of a business, rather than what one would expect of a church that professes to care about the well-being, the souls of its members.

Balanced Budget Bill Rewrite

You want a balanced US federal budget? You want it on time? I have a suggestion, modified in response to Blainn's comment. Suppose we, the people of the United States, all demanded that Congress enact and the President sign the following legislation:

Prior to the beginning of each fiscal year, Congress and the President shall complete all non-emergency appropriations for the fiscal year. Every member of Congress, their staffs, the President, the Vice President and the President's, Vice President's and the White House staff shall forfeit his or her salary for each day that any non-emergency appropriation is delayed past the start of the fiscal year. At the end of each fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office shall report to the people whether the federal budget for fiscal year just past is in deficit or in surplus. If the federal budget for the fiscal year just past is in deficit, then for the fiscal year going forward these same officials and their staffs shall forfeit a fraction of their salary equal to the federal budget deficit divided by the total federal budget for the fiscal year just past. If the federal budget is in surplus, then for the fiscal year foing forward these same officials and their staffs shall receive a fractional bonus to their salary equal to the federal budget surplus divided by the total federal budget for the fiscal year just past.

In other words, let the people who control the federal budget bear personal consequences for mismanaging it, and reap personal rewards for managing it well. (Why do I pick on the staffs? They are the ones who actually do all the work of getting the appropriations bills calculated, negotiated, recalculated, written and signed. And they are the ones who will have the most leverage with the Congress and President, who normally become rich enough to go without their salaries for a long time.) No need for artificial spending limits or borrowing caps, or limits on earmarks. Just make it personal and set them free to do the right thing.

A real Balanced Budget Bill

You want a balanced US federal budget? You want it on time? I have a suggestion. Suppose we all demanded that Congress enact and the President sign the following legislation:

Congress and the President agree henceforth to enact and sign a balanced federal budget by 30 September each calendar year. Further every elected member of Congress and every member of their staffs, the President, the Vice President and every member of the President's, Vice President's and the White House staff shall forfeit his or her salary for each day that the budget is past due. If the budget is in deficit, these same officials and their staffs shall forfeit a fraction of their salary equal to the projected annual federal budget deficit divided by the total projected federal budget for the current year. If the federal budget is in surplus, these same officials and their staffs shall receive a fractional bonus to their salary equal to the projected annual federal budget surplus divided by the total projected annual federal budget for the current year.

In other words, make the people who set the budget bear personal consequences for mismanaging it. (Why do I pick on the staffs? They are the ones who actually do all the work of getting the budget calculated, negotiated, recalculated, written and signed. And they are the ones who will have the most leverage with the Congress and President, who normally become rich enough to go without their salaries for a long time.) No need for artificial spending limits or borrowing caps. Just make it personal and set them free to do the right thing. Stay tuned - I'm trying to work one up for health care.

Reparations for Slavery

On the question of possible reparations paid (presumably) by the US Government to descendents of Africans enslaved in America, the answer is NO. The institution of legal slavery in the United States ended 144 years ago in 1863. The Confederate States of America continued the practice until its military defeat by US forces in 1865. In other words, the US fought and won a very costly war to end slavery, so the cost of reparations must be deducted from the cost of the war, with interest. But more to the legal point, there is nobody alive today who can show that they themselves have been personally damaged by the above referenced slavery.

On the other hand, there are plenty of people who can show that they have been damaged by the Jim Crow laws that used to be common throught the United States until the middle 1960s. Or the discriminatory hiring practices that were not stopped until the then farcical "Equal Opportunity" was replaced by "Affirmative Action," in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Or even the red-lining and steering practices of the banking and real estate industries that continued into the 1980s. Folks who have been on the receiving end of such practices are still very much alive, but somehow the idea of reparations for slavery always seems to push their causes out of public view. Could it be because someone might actually have to pay up if we could keep public attention on our more recent practices?

How Free is the USA?

The latest "big thing" is how President George W. Bush has sacked some US Attorneys. Maybe he sacked them in order to let the others know that they had better be zealous in investigating and prosecuting possible malfeasance on the part of Democrats. That kind of exercise of arbitrary power makes me suspicious. It reminds me of the time President Bill Clinton sacked all the US Attorneys and replaced them with his own people. Maybe he did it to insure that certain details about that Whitewater thing would never come out.

Both men could exercise arbitrary power within certain bounds. And if they did not exercise it, then they would lose power, because their opponents would chisel away at their power in other areas. In other words, they did what they could because they had to. It's the way our system works.

They were trying to protect themselves from accusations. Had they actually broken any laws, which would validate the claims of those who sought to accuse them? Of course. So have you, if you're an American. We have so many laws, which are so complicated, that you can't know them all. Chances are, you've fallen afoul of one or more of them somehow, somewhere in your life. All it takes for you to find out is to enrage someone who has the resources and desire to have you investigated. We have so many laws that we are no longer a nation of laws, but of people. The only reason you have freedom of speech or action or property rights is that nobody is currently willing to make the effort to take them away from you.

It's the kind of tyranny that creeps over all democracies, one well-intentioned law, regulation, rule, or judicial opinion at a time:

It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II, Chapter 4, Section 6, "What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear"

The counter-argument is that as our society gets more complex, we need more complicated rules to govern it. On the other hand, it is a well-known result from the science of complex systems that "Simple rules lead to complex behavior - complex rules lead to simple behavior." Too many complex rules freeze the system up. None of its parts can do much of anything.

What to do? When a computer code gets too long and unreadable, the computer scientists "re-factor" it. They look at how it is supposed to work, and, having learned from their past mistakes and new developments, re-design it and re-code it from the ground up.

We need our Congress and our regulatory agencies to re-factor government. Not just to keep making up new stuff to pile on top of the old because nobody remembers what it does anymore. And not to re-factor with laws and regulations that are even more complicated than the originals because they are written by unelected staffers who promote for their own agendas without ever coordinating with each other or even - gasp - reading each other's sections of the documents they produce.

But until that happens (and Hell freezes over, I suppose) I have a word of advice. Once anyone gets elected or appointed to any office of public power, that person must be suspect. It is in the nature of power itself in a society governed by too many small complicated rules. One in power must abuse the system to protect herself or himself from those who are abusing the system to get at them. As the old saying goes, "Politicians are like diapers. They both should be changed frequently, and for the same reason."

Corrupting The Nation's Youth

Letter Submitted to The Nation
Re: Princeton Tilts Right

I was delighted to see that my college friend, Robby George, is doing well enough to attract the attention of The Nation. Though Robby and I disagree on abortion and homosexuality, I have always had the impression that Robby's civility was not a tactic to disarm his critics. Rather, I think he believes that civility and civil discourse are more important to preserving our democracy than winning a particular argument.

This point may be lost on Max Blumenthal, who characterizes George's Madison Program as an attack to which Princeton University has capitulated. It is more likely that Princeton is becoming tolerant of yet another form of diversity - that of opinion.

Rather than seeing Robby as Princeton's token conservative, Mr. Blumenthal characterizes him as a corruptor of the nation's youth. If Blumenthal were an ancient city-state, I imagine he would call for Robby George to drink hemlock.

On the Backs of the Poor

One thing that you have to admire is the mindless gall with which a supposedly pro-business Republican Administration can ride roughshod over contract law when it comes to the public sector. Consider that Medicare has decided to cut back its reimbursements for psychological services - get this - retroactively. Now I can understand the need to save money, and the need to change a reimbursement schedule. But the heart of Capitalism is that "a deal is a deal." Changing the deal after the fact between private parties is a tort, in this case a breach of contract, which is an invitation to a lawsuit by the damaged party. Were I running a psychological services center, I would refuse to refund the money. I would also refuse to take any new Medicare clients until the matter is resolved.

But this attitude of, "We can do what we want, we're the government," doesn't end there. Consider that it is not unusual for the Social Security Administration to make errors in determining how much money a recipient should get, and further, to fail to discover the error for months or even years. Upon discovery, it is standard procedure to demand immediate back payment, with interest, of any excess amount given in error to the recipient. If the recipient were a business, then the recipient's accounting department could have detected the error and notified the Social Security Administration. But businesses don't get Social Security. People do. And often enough, the person getting Social Security is living a hand-to-mouth existence. There is no way he or she is going to be able to decipher the complex formulae that would show that the pittance he or she is receiving is too great. There is also no way that he or she going to set aside some portion of that pittance as insurance against some bureaucrat's miscalculation. In other words, it is perfectly reasonable to warn him or her that the pittance is about to be reduced. But it is not reasonable to ask for any of it back.

Instead, I recommend improving the system so that the bureaucrats don't screw up as often. If I were part of the Administration I would seek to make government a little less high-handed when dealing with the down on their luck.

One Justice for All

Here is my problem with Harriet Miers as a nominee for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America: I have a litmus test for federal judical appointees, and I am not convinced she could pass it. This doesn't mean that I think she isn't of the highest intellectual caliber. On the contrary, she is a well-educated and experienced lawyer, a leader of lawyers, and a valued crony of George W. Bush. No, smart isn't the problem. I simply suspect that she has spent her life thinking about politics and lawyering - she must have done so at some level of consciousness to guard the door of her lips so well that no word has dropped one way or the other about any current "hot-button" issues that her potential opponents could use to disqualify her out of hand.

Well, what's wrong with spending a life thinking about politics and lawyering? Nothing, except that the title of her prospective new job includes the word "Justice." And that is the subject of my one question litmus test: What is Justice? You have two hours. Talk.

On the other hand, that question is far from the clever, political, lawyerly minds of the good Senators who questioned her predecessor, John Roberts. Amid all the sparring over the respect of precedent - code for, "Will you let Roe v. Wade stand regardless of your personal feelings about it?" - the subject of Justice itself never came up. I don't expect it will emerge from the fracas this time, either.

Instead, the focus will be on the nature of Ms. Mier's Evangelical - code for "Christian Fundamentalist" beliefs, now that the Bush Administration has clumsily made an issue of it in order to mollify their perceived "Religious Right" base of support (thus outing their ultimate stealth candidate), and whether those beliefs will permit her to rule on the merits of the case (on abortion, of course) rather than based primarily on what she brings to the case.

So much for how the urge to fight over abortion demeans our public discourse, especially our discourse around appointments to the US Supreme Court. It even limits the choices of candidates to those least outspoken, indeed it makes that criterion more important than all the others. Perhaps it's out of place for me to say it, but I question the wisdom of that.