bearing blog

Keep your hands off my family's Sudafed.

From Reason.com (h/t Radley Balko's excellent The Agitator), the latest update on the policy issue that was recently voted "Policy Issue Most Likely To Turn Bearing Blog Into A Flaming Libertarian Site Devoted to Deregulation:"

 The Wall Street Journal reports that "a nationwide resurgence in illegal methamphetamine labs" has caused state and federal legislators to re-examine the effectiveness of the Sudafed crackdown. They plan to do what prohibitionists always do in the face of failure: double down—in this case by requiring prescriptions for a cheap, safe, effective decongestant that not long ago was readily available in convenience stores across the land. That requirement will force doctors to police Americans' pseudoephedrine consumption...

Yes, you heard it:  the feds (and some states; Oregon's already done it) want to turn Sudafed into a prescription-only drug, not because of safety concerns, but because making it difficult for us to get it has not worked to stop methamphetamine production, and even less to stop methamphetamine use.

Leaving aside the ridiculously bad timing of such an endeavor (we already spend HOW MUCH on health care?  And you want to turn an effective self-treatment option, a well-beloved one measured in the dollars spent on pseudoephedrine every year, into one that requires a doctor's visit?  Perhaps an emergency room visit, for the uninsured?)....

...aw, what the hell, I've ranted about this before, here's my post from 2007 about the stupid guidelines on children's "cold medications" that don't distinguish among the several different compounds commonly sold as "cold medications."

And can I just add to the comments on the Reason website...

"have you ever tried to breastfeed a baby who has a terrible head cold and can't breathe through her nose? It's awful. Bleeding awful, both for you and the baby. An effective decongestant can mean the difference between a sick baby who can't easily take in her only source of fluid and nutrition, and a baby who can do it easily. Believe me, saline spray does NOT do the trick.

(disclaimer: nursing mothers should be cautious taking decongestants because of anecdotal evidence that in some women it compromises milk supply)"

The Nobel Peace Prize.

Even though at first I really, truly thought I was reading an Onion headline when I saw "Barack Obama Wins Nobel Prize" yesterday...  and even though I'm really thankful that skepticism about this particular honor appears to be largely (if, as is to be expected, unequally) bipartisan and not another cause for major, ugly division...

I think the Nobel committee are demonstrating that they're rational actors here.  It's just that their motivations aren't the motivations that people expect them to have, and the power they have to act is less (and more) than people realize.

The people of the Nobel committee do not, actually, possess a special power to identify individuals that have accomplished extraordinary feats to reduce world conflict and promote peace between peoples.  Even less do they possess the power to recognize less fruitful but no less heroic efforts toward that goal.  Any of us can do the same with a decent Internet connection.

Nor is the ability to give away a chunk of cash to a deserving recipient particularly special.  Lots of organizations and individuals do this every year. 

What they do uniquely possess -- and I am sure they are aware of this -- is a peculiar power to send a message of approval, a message that will be repeated in the world's large media outlets and so be sure to be heard.   And that's the power they are deploying every year:  the power to say "We approve of this person or this organization." 

They also possess -- again, this is a unique thing -- a certain moral authority that commands respect.  I don't know what the worldwide "approval rating" of the Nobel Peace Prize committee would be if you took a poll, but I have to think that it's pretty high and pretty evenly spread out, compared to other similarly visible global groups. 

The power to send messages will continue, I think.  But the moral authority, the worldwide respect, can be lost, or diluted, or restricted to a smaller group of sycophants.  I expect that it depends largely on people's perception of whether the messages they send are consistent with the group's stated purpose.

So anyway, I suspect the Nobel committee was (rationally, and in accord with their actual rather than imaginary special powers) trying to do this with the Prize:

(1) To send a message to the people of the United States that the committee approves of our selection of Barack Obama as president.   (Remember, they don't care that much about our domestic policy of any kind.  It's not really on their radar.  Think foreign policy alone.)

(2) To send a message to Barack Obama that they expect him to promote the Nobel committee's visible and stated and public purpose of promoting peace.

Nothing unexpected here.  Since we are dealing with an organization, of course, and since some sort of law states that every organization's first purpose is self-perpetuation, we can probably add this third purpose:

(3) To increase their organization's world stature and moral authority, by associating the name "Nobel Prize Winner" with President Barack Obama, a name they are betting will continue to be regarded highly on the world stage (not the domestic stage -- remember, you have to separate the two, we're talking about people outside the US here) for a long time.

Whether their actions actually give them the results they hope for ... we'll have to see.   But let's not forget the opportunity cost here.   They could have used their power to draw attention -- and attention means funds -- to some little, unknown organization that's doing great good somewhere, somewhere where attention and funds could make the difference between success and failure.  They chose a different path, a glitzier one to be sure.   The world rarely remembers the choices that could have been made, but weren't. 

(Next time I'll complain about the Nobel Prize in Physics.  I promise.)

"Filtered reality."

David Post at the Volokh Conspiracy makes a novel baseball/politics analogy that I think is right on.

I then said something like – “but it does seem like the overall level of defense is improving all over – I see so many great plays these days . . .” before I recognized how stupid a comment that was.  Of course I was seeing more great defensive plays than I had 10 or 20 years before – because 10 or 20 years before there had been no Sportscenter (or equivalent).  In 1992 (or whenever exactly this was), I could turn on the TV and catch 20 or 30 minutes of great highlights every night, including 5 or 6 truly spectacular defensive plays; in 1980, or 1960, to see 5 or 6 truly spectacular defensive plays, you had to watch 20 or 25 hours of baseball, minimum.

I call it the ESPN Effect – mistaking filtered reality for reality.  We do it a lot.  All I hear from my left-leaning friends these days is how crazy people on the right are becoming, and all all I hear from my right-leaning friends is how crazy people on the left are becoming, and everyone, on both sides, seems very eager to provide evidence of the utter lunacy of those on the other side.  “Look how crazy they’re becoming over there, on the other side!” is becoming something of a dominant trope, on left and right.  It is true that we’re seeing more crazy people doing crazy things on the other side (whichever side that may be, for you) coming across our eyeballs these days.   But that’s all filtered reality; it bears no more relationship to reality than the Sportscenter highlights bear to the game of baseball.  My very, very strong suspicion is that there has never been a time when there weren’t truly crazy people on all sides of the political spectrum doing their truly crazy things.

That sounds about right...

So the "cash for clunkers" ran out.

It's good news, right?  The point was to get people to buy a bunch of cars, no?  The sooner the better?

I sympathize with car dealers who didn't get a shot at the money, but -- If anything, the only obvious bad news here for the country is about what might have been:  It turns out that the government could have offered $2,500 to $3,500 instead of $3,500 to $4,500 per vehicle, and people would probably still have bought a bunch of cars, more of them for the money budgeted, and maybe a little more slowly.

The success of this voucher program makes me wonder if perhaps voucher-type programs should have been tried sooner.  A lot sooner.   Vouchers in general strike me as a good compromise that combines government funding and assistance with market freedom.

Veterinary spending is rising along with human medical spending. Why?

Megan McArdle:

"Veterinary spending is subject to few of the perversities that either left or right suppose to be the main problems afflicting health care spending.  Consumers pay full frieght most of the time.  They are price sensitive, and will let the patient die if keeping him alive costs too much.  There is no adverse selection.  There is no free riding on mandatory care.  Government regulation is minimal.  Malpractice suits are minimal, and have low payouts.  So why is vet spending rising along with human spending?"

Check out the graph at the link.

"In Search of Dignity."

An interesting, if flawed, little op-ed in the NYT (h/t Instapundit) that begins with an anecdote about George Washington.  

First, a comment on Washington's well-known copybook --- okay, it's well-known to classical/traditional/Charlotte Mason homeschoolers anyway.  I can't count how many times I've seen people suggest using pieces of this as copywork for children of the right ages, for history, handwriting, or grammar practice, and maybe they'll absorb some of the rules while they're at it:

When George Washington was a young man, he copied out a list of 110 “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.” Some of the rules in his list dealt with the niceties of going to a dinner party or meeting somebody on the street.

“Lean not upon anyone,” was one of the rules. “Read no letter, books or papers in company,” was another. “If any one come to speak to you while you are sitting, stand up,” was a third.

But, as the biographer Richard Brookhiser has noted, these rules, which Washington derived from a 16th-century guidebook, were not just etiquette tips. They were designed to improve inner morals by shaping the outward man. Washington took them very seriously. He worked hard to follow them. Throughout his life, he remained acutely conscious of his own rectitude.
In so doing, he turned himself into a new kind of hero. He wasn’t primarily a military hero or a political hero. As the historian Gordon Wood has written, “Washington became a great man and was acclaimed as a classical hero because of the way he conducted himself during times of temptation. It was his moral character that set him off from other men.”

Washington absorbed, and later came to personify what you might call the dignity code. The code was based on the same premise as the nation’s Constitution — that human beings are flawed creatures who live in constant peril of falling into disasters caused by their own passions. Artificial systems have to be created to balance and restrain their desires.

I like this characterization of Washington, and of the premise mentioned in the last paragraph.

Is it a bit precious to draw a connection between the first president and the latest based on this? Particularly since there is no obvious evidence that President Obama shares the philosophical premise implicitly imputed to President Washington in that paragraph.  It's more about... bearing:

Americans still admire dignity. But the word has become unmoored from any larger set of rules or ethical system.

But it’s not right to end on a note of cultural pessimism because there is the fact of President Obama. Whatever policy differences people may have with him, we can all agree that he exemplifies reticence, dispassion and the other traits associated with dignity. The cultural effects of his presidency are not yet clear, but they may surpass his policy impact. He may revitalize the concept of dignity for a new generation and embody a new set of rules for self-mastery.

I think the writer is correct that President Obama has a dignified bearing, and I think that is part of his popular appeal because it is refreshing.  It isn't clear, though, whether President Obama's bearing is an outward expression of an inner conviction, like the one almost universally depicted by Washington's biographers, or if it's the result of something else.  It would be nice if the country got used to a little dignity and started expecting it of its leaders -- more on the outside might raise the probability that we'd get more on the inside.

Readers know that I am a policy voter, not a personality voter, so bearing (a personality trait, and one that can be used to soothe opponents into complacency) isn't something I take much into account at the ballot box.   But it is something I appreciate.   As anyone might guess.

Putting the careful thought up front.

One of the nice things about catching up with distant friends by going to stay with them for a couple of days is that you can spread your conversations out.  While I was in Iowa with Kim-in-IA we were able to chat about pregnancy, homeschooling, politics, home renovation, books... lots of stuff.  At a good leisurely pace, too.

So, politics and identity re: politics.  One of the things that bugs her a little bit about the local Catholic homeschooling group is that she gets email messages through it that promote generally conservative politics.  "I understand sending out political messages about life issues, or schooling stuff," she said, "but it bugs me that they would just sort of assume that just because I'm a Catholic and I'm in this homeschooling group, that I am a party-line Republican."

Yeah, that kind of stuff bugs me too.  And so we talked a bit about that.  I mentioned my post a while back about "conservative creep," and about not always being real happy about winding up voting Republican all the time just because I've made up my mind to vote pro-life. 

The answer, of course, is to get more politically active in general --- go to the caucuses, support the best candidates in the primaries (the ones who are pro-life  and who agree with me in other things besides that)... it could mean going to Democrat and third-party primaries and casting lonely votes for the struggling pro-life Democrats, God bless 'em, or it could mean getting more involved in the Republican party and trying to adjust the other planks in the platform.   Doing that requires identifying with one or the other.  

Sometimes I think that  pro-life voters who will always vote pro-life might have more inherent power to change the Democratic party (making it more pro-life) than to change the Republican party; after all, we can promise our final vote to the Democrats if they will only nominate a pro-life candidate, whereas the Republicans know damn well that until the Dems get more diverse with respect to life issues, they can put pro-lifers in their pocket and not listen to any other concerns we might have.

But I digress.  Anyway, Kim made a comment that struck me --- she said she appreciated hearing about my decision (not made without some struggle) to become what is often called a single-issue voter.  So often the so-called single-issue voters are derided for not putting much thought into the decision.  But in describing the process by which I became convinced to vote pro-life, I'd pointed out without noticing that there is usually a great deal of thought put into those decisions up front --- and that careful and reasoned thought shouldn't be discounted.  

I really appreciated that insight, because to be honest I hadn't been giving myself much credit for that up-front deliberation.  I'd sort of internalized that "single-issue-voters-don't-have-to-think-hard" message and have been kind of quietly bummed and embarrassed about being a primarily pro-life voter, as an identity, even if I've been fairly confident about each vote I've cast. 

 (Why are we all so wrapped up in what our vote says about what kind of person we are?  Can't it just be a tool to get done what we think should be done, and leave the personality out of it?)  

But Kim is right:  Like most so-called "single-issue voters" I know, I did put a lot of thought into that, and tried to figure out whether it was important to vote pro-life in, e.g., the "Soil and Water Commissioner" race, or what to do in various hypothetical combinations of three or more candidates with various likelihoods of winning and various levels of political attractiveness, things like that.  Looked for rules of thumb.  Weighed hopeful idealism vs. pessimistic pragmatism.  Had to consider how it all played out not just in final elections, but in primaries, and also how it plays out locally in a city and state where frequently Democrats (that is, "DFL-ers!") run opposed only by Greens and independents.  Struggled with the imagined consequences of becoming One Of Those Kind Of Voters.  Struggled with my conscience.

That struggle, that thought, isn't nothing.  It doesn't become nothing just because it is over and it ended in a firm conclusion.  I have settled on "the way I will vote" probably permanently.  One must always leave room for the possibilities of new evils coming along, graver than anything seen in this generation; but that's a hypothetical, and I live in the real present.  I did put a lot of thought into my vote, how to spend all my votes.

Anyway, I appreciated the kind word, which gives me just that much more confidence in my political decisions.   And that makes me feel readier to speak openly about them, and to defend them to others.

Morning political essay.

There is a very thoughtful essay by Yuval Levin making the rounds this morning.  It's entitled "The Meaning of Sarah Palin" and I thought it was an excellent piece of political writing.  Even if the thought of one more piece on Gov. Palin makes you want to hurl, for whatever reason, I think this one is worth reading because it analyzes the kind of symbol she became to the American left and to the American right, how both of those symbols were divorced from reality, where the McCain campaign really failed in political terms, and what lessons both left and right can take from the whole episode.

It's a non-vitriolic, balanced, level-headed, non-point-scoring discussion (at least I think so).  There aren't many of those out there.  This one's worth looking at.  Particularly interesting to me was the identification of a double axis:  cultural elitism vs. cultural populism, and economic elitism vs. economic populism, on which to think about political figures and political attitudes.  

Very much interested in what others think of it.

h/t VC.

Wanting to keep an open mind.

It's hard for me to disagree with the sentiments in this post about the stimulus bill.  (h/t Instapundit)

But maybe I'm just insufficiently aware of the counter arguments.

Anyone willing to defend it reasonably, or to point me to a link to someone who will?

(I went googling around, specifically looking for a list of the 11 Democrats who voted no, and got a few places, but the discussion in the comboxes isn't heavy on what I would call a defense of the bill as passed, rather than an argument about how we got into a place where we supposedly needed a stimulus, e.g. here.   I am not saying that is representative of stimulus-bill supporters, and am hoping to see something better.)

Conservative creep.

I entered full communion with the Catholic church at the Easter Vigil in 1993, when I was a freshman in college.  I'd longed to do so through most of high school and didn't feel I could till I'd moved away from home.   (That's another story.)

A couple of years after that, I had a second conversion in which I was forced to realize that I could not be simultaneously a believing Catholic and a supporter of legal abortion.  (Why it took me so long is another story again.  Hint:  There were some serious problems in that particular RCIA program.)  

My first vote was cast for Clinton, and my sympathies lay with Democrats in general, and I was in particular strongly anti-capital-punishment (still am).  So I went through a certain period of gritted-teeth mourning about that.  What do you mean there aren't ANY Democrats on this ticket who aren't really strong supporters of abortion?  Does this really mean I shouldn't vote for any of them?  Even the Soil and Water Commissioner?

  I argued with myself about it for a long time, and I read the arguments of Catholics who honestly argued that there were proportionate reasons to vote for candidates despite their support for legal abortion, and I read the arguments of Catholics who honestly argued that the standards for what's "proportionate" have to be very high indeed, and I struggled with it, and ultimately I became convinced that practically nothing else in the current political climate is proportionately serious.   I remain sympathetic to people who have not become so convinced, and I acknowledge that greater or more urgent evils could arise, but I'm certain of my own position now.  Not really happy about it, but certain.

That was a while ago.    For my whole life, of course,  the power of people to decide how to regulate abortion, how to protect the baby and how to protect the mother, in their cities, counties, and states has been controlled at the national level by the outcomes of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.  There's less variety in approaches than there might have been.  

And things tend to line up a certain way.  It need not be so, but:  Opponents of nationalized abortion policy as it exists, a.k.a. supporters of expanding the variety of approaches to the problem of protecting both the baby and the mother, are usually opponents of abortion as well, and are usually Republicans.  Supporters of nationalized abortion policy, a.k.a. supporters of continuing the restriction on finding alternative ways to extend legal protectections to mothers and to children, are usually supporters of abortion or at least of the legal right to abortion, and are usually Democrats.  

I don't really thoroughly understand why this is.  Why isn't it a little bit more mixed up?  Why isn't there a large and vocal bloc of (for example) abortion rights supporters who are also supporters of the right of the people in a state to use legislation to craft an abortion policy that seems right to them?  Why are so few Democrats who oppose abortion?  I don't get that.  I guess part of it has to do with game theory, how people choose to make alliances in different situations.   Right now the situation is controlled by RvW and DvB, everywhere in the country, and in that situation people who might otherwise be ideological opponents are lined up on the same side (e.g., libertarians who don't want ANY national abortion policy and social conservatives who would like to see a national ban can both agree to oppose RvW.)   But this doesn't explain to me why the anti-abortion candidate in a race is predictably the Republican and the pro-legal-abortion candidate in a race is predictably the Democrat.  It does not have to be this way, and yet it is.

So.  Where am I going with this?

I find myself voting for a lot of Republicans, and I have been for a while.  When I first started, it was hard to do and I didn't much like it.  But it has gotten easier.  For one thing, as time has gone on (and especially after I had children -- I know not everyone has that reaction, but many do, and I'm one) I've felt less conflicted and more confident about my decision to give so much weight to abortion policy when making up my mind about candidates.  

But another reason it's gotten easier?  Over the years I've started paying more attention to the content of the arguments of the people I've been voting for, and really trying to hear them out.  And a lot of it has made more sense to me than I expected it to, way back when.  Perhaps it's just unconscious human nature:  I've chosen to constrain my votes in a certain way, and I'd like to feel better about my vote, and letting myself feel convinced by them makes me feel less grumpy, because I can be happy about my vote in a more, oh, I don't know, unalloyed way.  And maybe it's just because I'm still not all that comfortable admitting that I've become a "single-issue voter."  Yeah, some of that baggage is still with me.

Anyway, my point?  If the Democrats had been a little bit more ideologically diverse, they might have kept me.  As it is, the longer I spend voting Republican because I feel I ought to, the more I seem to be drawn towards conservative and/or libertarian policies that are unrelated or only marginally related to life issues, and the more I seem to be repelled by many progressive policies.  

From the inside, I can report that it certainly seems that the shift in my thinking is the result of being rationally convinced by many of these arguments.   And I still hold a number of positions that are generally associated with liberals rather than conservatives (for instance, I still don't like capital punishment), and I still wind up being pissed off at people I vote for from time to time because they violate other principles I hold dear (hello, expanded domestic surveillance?  excuses for torture?) so it's not like it's been a universal move to the right.  Plus, sometimes the left-right continuum has seemed to spin around beneath me:  I'm practically a free-speech absolutist, and efforts to control speech all seem to be coming from the left these days, what's up with that?  

But I do think it is fair to acknowledge the possibility that my political positions are at least partly due to a subconscious desire for less cognitive dissonance.  

Of course, if it's true for me it's probably true for a lot of people.