Over at the Guardian, Ana Marie Cox writes about the fallacy of using anecdotal evidence to support an argument.  Specifically, she repudiates the individual horror stories about Obamacare that have dominated much of the press coverage.  According to Cox:

The failure of the exchanges created an information vacuum as far as Obamacare successes went; in rushed the individual stories of those who claimed to have been hurt by the changes to the market. It didn’t matter that these stories are, even without enrollment numbers from the exchanges, demonstrably unrepresentative! Only a fraction of Americans, 5%, even have the kind of policies that could have been cancelled – these were the people who could claim to have been “lied to”… or worse. Their stories became part of an Obamacare horror story canon.

She has a point.  Individual stories, while powerful, should not be mistaken for the truth about a social program.  Of course, Obama is as guilty of this technique as anyone, telling stories about people for whom Obamacare has been a success. Actually, even there the administration has bungled, given that Jessica Stanford, who was cited by Obama in the Rose Garden as being emblematic of all of the good that the ACA does, can’t afford her new insurance.  That issue aside, the problem with Cox’s argument is that she provides no statistical evidence to show Obamacare is working.  The reason for this is because there is none.  Even the lone figure that Cox cites above – the 5% – is false.  The American Enterprise Institute estimated that between 50 and 100 million people will have their insurance policies terminated in a second wave of cancellations when small businesses are forced into new standards in 2014.  The 5% figure Cox cites only applies to individual policy holders, who are the vanguard of a much larger problem.

I applaud Cox’s desire to separate anecdote from statistics.  Anecdotes can be powerful conveyors of ideas, but rigorous analysis must always guide policy making.  It’s just a shame that Obamacare fails on both counts.

Writing in the Daily Beast, Eleanor Clift talks about the gun control law (the Undetectable Firearms Act) that mandates guns be detectable by airport screeners.  She then discusses how 3D printing of guns could neuter the law.  She is right.  The ability to print an all-plastic gun is a serious challenge to the Undetectable Firearms Act.  However, it is completely unclear that Clift recognizes this fact.  She ends her piece by stating:

For most people, there’s no upside to being able to manufacture firearms in your basement that you can then carry onto a plane. It would be nice if laws could keep up with the times, but leaving well enough alone may well be the price of victory on guns for this Congress.

Again, Clift is right – there is no upside for most people to carrying a concealed weapon on a plane.  However, there is a BIG upside for terrorists in doing so.  Those terrorists aren’t going to be stopped by the Undetectable Firearms Act.  Moreover, the characterization of 3D printed guns as “ loopholes that make it possible to evade the law with new technologies” (Clift quoting White House assistant press secretary Matt Lehrich) demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of what is happening here.  3D printed guns are not loopholes, they are technological advances that will render the law completely obsolete.  As long as manufacturing of a plastic gun required sophisticated techniques, it can be controlled.  Once a (truly) functional plastic gun can be created by the push of a button the law is finished.  It may exist, but it offers no protection.  To stop plastic guns from winding up on planes requires new, innovative technologies, not legislation.

John Nichols, writing in The Nation, criticizes U S Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes’ decision to allow Detroit to file for bankruptcy, arguing that “the process has been framed in a manner that runs the risk of undermining the city’s long-term recovery by taking money away from the most vulnerable residents of Detroit.”  Quoting parties who are politically interested in not allowing Detroit to file for bankruptcy (the National Public Pension Coalition, Demos) Nichols argues that the city doesn’t really have a major fiscal problem and that investors (whom he defines as “Wall Street”) should bear the burden of Detroit’s problems and that pensions should be entitled to all of the money and benefits they were promised when the spendthrifts elected to run Detroit were handing out money.

The gist of the piece is that the entire process is a subversion of Democracy because the people of Detroit overwhelmingly voted against the governor who appointed the city manager and the mayor has been stripped of most of his authority.  ‘Unfair!’, cries Nichols, who apparently thinks that democracy means that if a law is passed which defies fiscal reality then reality should bend to the law.  Under the Nichols’ philosophy of government, if the city of Detroit bans gravity and people don’t start to float away then that is an indication that the universe is wrong.

Nichols’ choice of language in decrying the appointment of an emergency manager to resolve the fiscal crisis in Detroit is telling.  Apparently he believes it is the job of the mayor, when faced with a massive fiscal hole, to shield public employees and pensions, not to fix the long-term problems.  Under Nichols’ formulation, the taxpayers of Detroit and the people who loaned Detroit money, with guarantees, should take whatever hits come and his favored constituencies should get a free pass:

Snyder had to develop the new emergency manager law after a previous version of the legislation—which he had used to take over smaller cities—was overturned by Michigan voters in a statewide referendum. In Detroit, 82 percent of voters said they did not want the emergency manager law. But they got it anyway. So it is that, while Mayor Duggan may be assigned some responsibilities, he will not have the clearly defined authority that an elected mayor should have to protect pensions, preserve labor agreements and set priorities when it comes to the delivery of basic services.

Nichols talks a lot about democracy, but nowhere does he mention that we don’t operate in a democracy, we operate in a republic, and that applies to the states, too.  The states are sovereign bodies, but the cities are not.  Detroit is not independent of Michigan, and its authority stems from power that Michigan grants it.  It doesn’t matter what Detroit voters want – Detroit voters are the ones who elected the politicians that bankrupted the city.  If the voters had been more responsible in their choices perhaps the city would be in better shape.   Or perhaps not, systemic forces may have doomed Detroit anyways.  Regardless, the idea that because Detroit’s voters are against a law then the law shouldn’t take effect is ludicrous in a system where the state is the sovereign.

Finally, here is my favorite section of the article:

By relying on what the Demos study identifies as “extraordinarily aggressive assumptions”—and by accepting premises advanced by the same financial institutions that urged Detroit officials to make unwise financial choices—the judge has shaped a bankruptcy process that errs on the side of helping Wall Street rather than the citizens of Detroit.

At the same time, the judge has empowered an emergency manager who has a track record of acting on those “simply inaccurate” premises, rather than the officials just chosen by Detroit voters to guide their city toward fiscal and social stability.

To sum up the situation, for years, the voters placed irresponsible, and sometimes criminal, politicians in charge of Detroit.  For years, politicians made promises that were fiscally irresponsible.  For years, Democrat-controlled unions, allied with the city politicians, pushed through increases in wages and benefits that were unsustainable in the long run.  Now, argues Nichols, the officials chosen by Detroit voters, who have such a great track record of fiscal management, should be entrusted to “to guide their city toward fiscal and social stability.  Perhaps they should pass a law declaring Detroit solvent.  That should solve the problem.

By Charles Kesler.  Sounds right to me.

Even a smart liberal like Sam Tanenhaus considers the Tea Party to be the last gasp of a dying conservatism that has ceased to be Burkean and become, in his word, “Jacobin,” that is, revolutionary in the bad, French sense. Of course, the Tea Party’s very name refers to a revolution—but to the American Revolution, not the irrational French one. Tanenhaus doesn’t see much of a difference because he seems to dismiss as extremist any form of politics that doesn’t go with the evolutionary flow, and that appeals to universal and timeless principles of justice. One is tempted to say that he rejects natural rights as firmly as John C. Calhoun did and for a similar reason: they endanger the ancien regime, which in our time is liberalism.

Because bureaucratic attachment to ideology produces serious harm by an organization that can ignore both common sense and oversight:

Rationing Bone Marrow

HHS Proposes Rule to Amend NOTA, Nullify Flynn v. Holder

Emily Bazelon at Slate has a fascinating account of the Nazis’ use of bodies for their scientific research and its legacy.  Here is the title: The Nazi Anatomists: How the corpses of Hitler’s victims are still haunting modern science—and American abortion politics.  Here is the http address:

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2013/11/nazi_anatomy_history_the_origins_of_conservatives_anti_abortion_claims_that.html

Talk about journalistic malfeasance.  In an 8,000 word article (most of it very interesting) Bazelon links Todd Akin’s ridiculous comment to Nazi atrocities, implying that the origin of his comment stems from bad Nazi science.  Perhaps it does (though Bazelon provides no direct evidence, only speculation).  Regardless, from the title of the article and the http link one is left with the impression that conservatives’ ideological opposition to abortion is largely influenced by inaccurate scientific conclusions drawn in the 1930s by Nazi researchers.  It is an absurd claim that has no basis in fact and it is appalling editorial work by Slate.  The editors should be ashamed of themselves and, if Ms. Bazelon had a hand in choosing the title of the piece, she should be ashamed, too.

On her NY Times Blog:

The question is what this shift in public attitudes might mean for the courts, the Supreme Court in particular. The Supreme Court operates inside the mainstream culture — which is, after all, where the justices live — influenced not by the “weather of the day” but by the “climate of the age,” as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg likes to say, quoting the great constitutional scholar Paul Freund. So does it matter, for example, that recent polls have found a decided movement in public opinion toward protecting privacy and civil liberties and away from the government’s anti-terrorism priorities? In cases concerning GPS searches and drug-sniffing police dogs, the justices have been expressing increasing skepticism about law enforcement tactics that evade the traditional warrant requirement. During the new term, the court is likely to take up a case on warrantless searches of cellphones, a case that could gauge the justices’ readiness to recalibrate the balance between privacy and security.

Rights shouldn’t depend on the country’s prevailing opinion, unless that opinion is expressed through an amendment to the Constitution.  As far as GPS and drug sniffing dogs are concerned, the recent opinions addressing them should have been, as they were by Thomas and Scalia, decided based on the Fourth Amendment’s original intent.

Money – The Crisis Washington’s Ignoring

Since Bernanke became Fed chairman, the price of an average gallon has soared 54 percent to $3.52, even while the value of the gallon of gas has plunged nearly 33 percent to 1/372nd of an ounce of gold.

In other words, it’s not the gas price that is going up, but the dollar that’s going down.

Writing in the Daily Beast:

“The Republican Party is destroying America. Harsh words, yes. But inescapably true.”

“There isn’t even a feint toward decency. In what has become a recurring nightmare,”

And she quotes Norm Ornstein, approvingly, who apparently believes that the government operates at peak efficiency, thus meaning that any cuts, per the sequester, are destined to kill Americans, destroy the wilderness and lead us back into the stone age:

If sequester continues … it is a cancer eating away at national parks, food safety, basic research … it’s a terrible situation. No matter how much [Republicans] talk about how it was Obama’s idea … the whole idea was to create such awful consequences that no sane person would accept it. But these aren’t sane people.

Of course, since Obama signed the sequester it would seem natural to ask what role he has in this nuclear bomb going off, but that part is left unexplored.

Daniel Gross at the Daily Beast has a column about Moo Cluck Moo, a fast food joint in Detroit paying $15 an hour.  The column lauds the chain for its wage rate, which is well and good.  However, Gross can’t resist some editorializing at the end, which would be fine (the whole column is an opinion piece), except for its logical inadequacy.  The last line of the column is:”Every day Moo Cluck Moo is open, it stands as a rebuke to an industry that says it can only function by paying crappy wages.”  This comes immediately after Gross points out that the restaurant has one location and has been open less than a year.  Thus, he ignores his own evidence when he arrives at the conclusion that Moo Cluck Moo’s existence proves anything regarding the entire fast food industry.  Unless there is some basis for extrapolating from one restaurant, in one location, open less than a year to a $160 billion industry, operating 160,000 restaurants and serving 50 million people per day, Mr. Gross should quit writing one sentence before he thinks he is done.