“I became a Conservative by being around Liberals, and I became a Libertarian by being around Conservatives.”

– Greg Gutfeld

From this Reason Hit & Run interview. Hat tip to QandO.

This chart from the Goldwater Institute explains it all:

Over time, due to a slow increase in health care benefits provided by employers, Americans have been paying less and less out-of-pocket for their own medical expenses. Consequently people receiving health care no longer have any interest in how much it costs; somebody else is paying for it. And when there is no motivation to seek low prices, costs rise. Free market forces are no longer in place in the health care industry. This, in a nutshell, is the primary reason for chronically rising health care costs.

Hat tip to John Stossel.

If you believe that vaccinations cause autism, please read this feature article in the June 3 issue of eSkeptic.

In this NY Times op-ed piece, Paul Krugman expressed the opinion that those who oppose government regulation to deal with climate change are guilty of “treason against the planet.”

This type of statement — that if you don’t agree with me about X, then you must be a Y — is known as “demonization.” I’ve previously posted several such examples of demonization here on The Thinker:

• CNN’s Jack Cafferty insinuated that since Obama was so clearly the right choice for president (in his opinion), anyone who planned to vote otherwise must be a racist (see this post).
• “Skepchick” Donna Druchunas opined that libertarians are ludicrous (see this post), since they don’t share her political views regarding the proper role of government.
• A senior bishop of the Church of England stated that those who ignore climate change are “as guilty as” Josef Fritzl [the Austrian who kept his daughter, whom he repeatedly raped, locked in a cellar for 24 years] for “destroying the future of our children.” In other words: since you don’t agree with me on climate change, you are an incestuous rapist (see this post).

Demonization isn’t a logical fallacy, strictly speaking, although it could be considered a reverse form of the ad-hominem attack.  (The ad-hominem says “You are a Y, therefore you must be wrong about X,” whereas demonization says “You are wrong about X, therefore you must be a Y.”)

Rather, demonization is an indicator of one (or both) of two things:

(1) The person committing the demonization is guilty of extreme intellectual arrogance — i.e., I am so right about X that anyone who disagrees with me must be a Y.

and/or

(2) The person committing the demonization is guilty of  intellectual dishonesty and is engaging in propaganda intended to cast aspersions upon his/her opposition.

Now, regarding the original subject of this post, here are a few legitimate reasons why one might be concerned about proposed government regulation to address climate change.

First, the science related to the exact degree of warming that will occur is not settled. Consequently we don’t know the extent of the problem to be solved, and therefore don’t know what extremes of solutions are warranted.

Second, the negative consequences of these regulations on our economy may very well outweigh the benefits. It is not evident that this was considered in formulating the proposed solutions.

Third, the proposed government regulations are driven at least in part (and probably in large part) by politics and special interest groups. The proposed solutions will therefore likely be misaligned with what science alone (sans politics) would dictate to be an appropriate course of action. As is usually the case with politically motivated solutions to complex problems, we can reasonably expect to see some unintended consequences.

From this NY Times science blog article:

The new federal report on climate change gets a withering critique from Roger Pielke Jr. [a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder], who says that it misrepresents his own research and that it wrongly concludes that climate change is already responsible for an increase in damages from natural disasters.

Dr. Pielke says that the authors of this new report, like those of previous reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Stern Review, cherrypick weak evidence that fits their own policy preferences.  He faults all these reports for all relying on “non-peer reviewed, unsupportable studies rather than the relevant peer-reviewed literature” and for “featuring non-peer-reviewed work conducted by the authors.”

Roger Pielke is not a global warming denier, either. From his own blog:

I am a strong supporter of action on both adaptation and mitigation policies related to human-caused climate change. At the same time I have seen some disturbing things take place in the scientific community. And it is just my luck that the area where I have observed the most shenanigans is the area in which I have considerable expertise — disasters and climate change.

And the NY Times article quotes Dr. Pielke as saying:

“Until the climate science community cleans up its act on this subject it will continue to give legitimate opportunities for opponents to action to criticize the climate science community.”

I’m glad to see someone on the “alarmist” end of the global warming debate trying to hold his side to a high standard of intellectual integrity.

According to this post on Carpe Diem and the sources cited therein, since 2002 Spain has spent more than $1M in government subsidies for EACH “green” job (e.g., wind industry, etc.) it has created. Moreover, creating those jobs has resulted in the destruction of 2.2 jobs for each “green” job created. Not coincidentally, Spain’s unemployment rate is over 18%, more than twice the European Union average.

Guess what? That’s not the scary part.

The scary part is that President Obama views Spain’s “green” job creation as a model for the U.S. to emulate.

According to this article on CNET (hat tip to TJIC), the EPA has suppressed an internal report criticizing the agency for its position on greenhouse emissions. Here’s the story:

The EPA wanted to push its findings that greenhouse emissions were an imminent danger that needed to be curtailed. Their findings were rushed through an internal review process with little notice. An internal report was issued that expressed skepticism of the EPA’s position. Among other things, this internal report chastised the EPA for uncritically adopting positions from other scientific sources without any examination. The report provided numerous examples of well pedigreed scientific findings that cast doubts on these positions.

The EPA suppressed this internal report and issued its findings anyway. The author of the critical report was told: “I decided not to forward your comments… I can see only one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.”

The suppressed report can be read here.

Also see this set of internal EPA emails which would appear to substantiate the claims that the internal report was suppressed.

The EPA’s findings, of which the quashed report was critical, were submitted to the White House and are expected to “set the stage for the first-ever national limits on global-warming pollution.” You can read about it here.

Michael Barone has  analyzed Obama’s presidential style and has expressed it as his Three Rules of Obama:

First, Obama likes to execute long-range strategies but suffers from cognitive dissonance when new facts render them inappropriate.

As an example, Barone offers up that Obama’s strategy of appeasing America’s enemies “has been undercut by North Korea’s missile launches and demonstrations in Iran against the mullah regime’s apparent election fraud. His assumption that friendly words could melt the hearts of Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have been refuted by events.”

Second, he does not seem to care much about the details of policy.

Says Barone:

He subcontracted the stimulus package to congressional appropriators, the cap-and-trade legislation to Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, and his health care program to Max Baucus. The result is incoherent public policy: indefensible pork barrel projects, a carbon emissions bill that doesn’t limit carbon emissions from politically connected industries, and a health care program priced by the Congressional Budget Office at a fiscally unfeasible $1,600,000,000,000.

And the last of the Three Rules:

Third, he does business Chicago-style.

And by this, Barone means:

From Chicago he brings the assumption that there will always be a bounteous private sector that can be plundered endlessly on behalf of political favorites.

Hat tip to QandO.

In this Reason Hit & Run article, Radley Balko opines that presidents try to keep any campaign promises that grow their own power and the size of government, and back away from those promises that would shrink government and make it more accountable.

He offers up PolitiFact’s report card on Obama’s campaign promises as evidence to support his assertion. So far Obama hasn’t broken any of the 20 campaign promises he made that would expand the government, and of the six promises he has unquestionably broken, 5 would have either limited his power or made the government more transparent and accountable.

Hat tip to Coyote Blog.

Root cause analysis is a class of problem solving techniques predicated on the belief that problems are best solved by attempting to seek out and solve their root causes, rather than merely addressing their obvious symptoms. These problem solving methods are widely employed in a disparate number of fields - medicine, manufacturing, engineering, you name it - because (a) they make sense; and (b) they have been shown to work very well.

One such problem solving method, the Five Why’s , was originally developed by Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota. It’s been around for quite a while and is popular in certain manufacturing and management circles. Here’s how it works: When you encounter a problem, you repeatedly ask “Why?” at least five times, to get to the root cause(s) of the problem. Then you fix the root cause(s) of the problem, rather than merely addressing the symptoms.

Here’s an example of applying the Five Why’s to a problem (taken from Dancing Elephants):

Problem: A few years ago the Washington Monument was crumbling.
Why was that so?
Because the building was being cleaned using harsh chemicals.
Why was that so?
Because the building was covered in bird poop.
Why was that so?
Because the birds flocked to the building to eat the spiders.
Why was that so?
Because there were tons of spiders to eat the gnats.
Why was that so?
Because the gnats love the lights that shine on the monument.

Solution: Turn the lights on later in the evening.

The Obama administration is currently attempting to solve the problem of 46 million Americans who lack health care insurance. But in spite of his vaunted status as a brilliant problem solver who has surrounded himself with competent experts, it has apparently never occurred to him (or to other Americans who are clamoring for universal health care coverage) to probe any deeper and ask why there are so many uninsured Americans.

So I’ll take my stab at it here.

Problem: There are 46 million uninsured Americans.

Why are there 46 million uninsured Americans? (1) Because health care insurance has become too expensive for many to afford; (2) because many Americans, perhaps as many as 20 million of that 46 million, are only temporarily without insurance while they are between jobs. (So the magnitude of the problem has been inflated.)

Why has health care insurance become so expensive? Because the costs of medical care and medicine have skyrocketed over the past 20-30 years.

Why have the costs of medical care skyrocketed? (1) Because an increase in government subsidizing of certain health care expenses, through programs such as Medicare, have driven up the costs. (2) Because third party payment programs (i.e., employer-sponsored health insurance) has bureaucratized medical care, and has removed incentives for patients to be concerned about cost, since it is somebody else’s money paying for it. (3) Because of the rapidly rising costs of malpractice insurance — costs which are passed on to consumers.

I’m only three Why’s deep and I’ve found three factors to be probed deeper. I’ll wager the net result of this analysis would be a whole fault tree leading to a myriad of root causes to be addressed. It’s certainly a far more complicated situation than merely “there are 46 million uninsured Americans, and we need to solve that problem!” But since that’s the symptom Obama is addressing, we can count on the root problems remaining unsolved. Costs will continue to rise — probably faster, due to government subsidization — and taxpayers will pay for it.

For further reading:

This Investors.com article presents research results showing that government-funded health care (i.e., Medicare) costs have risen much faster than private health care costs — suggesting that moving to government-funded health care for the rest of us would drive costs up even further.

This Forbes article discusses Milton Friedman’s 2001 analysis of health care in the U.S. (Hat tip to Reason Hit & Run.)

This CBSNews article talks about the rising costs of malpractice insurance.