JUSTIFY

People that prefer their moral thinking to be straightforward might be somewhat vexed in applying principles to the treatment of detainees in the war on terror. Laying aside whether one form of interrogation or another consitutes torture, or what exactly the definition of torture is, anomalies abound when trying trying to apply moral reasoning to the treatment of human beings in the setting of war. An obvious illustration of this point arises from the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to conduct targeted airstrikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The human targets of these strikes are killed and maimed without warning. There has been no judicial process by which their status has been determined or their conduct condemned. Furthermore, the manner in which the strikes are conducted raises the risk of collateral damage, potentially killing and maiming innocent bystanders. Similarly, when Navy SEALS assassinated three pirates holding an American sea captain, the event caused little moral consternation, in stark contrast to interrogating terror suspects by use of sleep deprivation techniques or pouring water over a cloth covering their faces to simulate drowning.

For some reason, killing adversaries in the field is more readily accommodated than causing physical and psychological stress to a captive, and soul-searching ensues in the latter case when our collective conscience seems unvexed by the former. There is an obvious disconnect in the ways in which we view the treatment of different adversaries whose past histories and enmity of the Unites States are indistinguishable. In the one case, we have the power to kill them and in the other to cause them discomfort or indignity, but in each case the decision is ours. There may be an arguable distinction arising from the threat posed by terrorist still in the field and one in our custody, but this distinction fades when viewed in light of the purposes of a Hellfire missile strike or enhanced interrogation.

It might be that the paradox of legitimate assassination and illegitimate interrogation arises from some infirmity in the arguments used to justify the two cases, but a more fundamental question arises regarding the concept of justifying one or the other in the first place.

The term "justify" means to make just that which ordinarily is not. We do not justify educating our children or providing emergency medical services. We need not justify paying our debts or contributing to charity because these things need no justification; they are already just. We speak of justifiable homicide or justifiable use of force because these are not inherently just, but may be considered so in the appropriate circumstances. Aquinas spoke of just war because it is quite natural to conceive of war as an enterprise unconcerned with the common attributes of justice.

The conception of all activities as just, justifiable or unjust would seem to be theoretically elegant; classifying as it does all human conduct according to some notion of reason and moral values. But in the context of warfare, it would seem that such an assumption is not valid. During the Second Word War, Churchill ordered the Royal Navy to attack the French fleet anchored at Oran. Was this justified? Churchill also sacrificed the Highland Division to achieve more political than tactical ends. During the Doolitle raid on Tokyo, U.S. Navy destroyers fired on unarmed picket ships to prevent them from alerting the Japanese military of the raiders' presence. Each of these could arguably be justified by the circumstances, even though they may make us uncomfortable when viewed retrospectively, but even then the concept of justification seems somewhat superfluous. There is a quiet suspicion that the exigencies of war are so extraordinary that they do not conform easily to our customary moral reasoning.

Back in the 1980s certain Jewish leaders opposed the idea of studying the Holocaust to identify its causes. Their position was that such evil was best considered as evil, rather than as some understandable quirk of human behavior. They believed that the crimes of the Third Reich should not be candidates for rationalization. It seems obvious that one cannot "justify" the Holocaust, not because such a catastrophe does not meet rational and considered grounds for justification, but because it is practically impossible to find a context in which our moral reasoning and judgment can even comprehend the historical fact. It is quite literally absurd to ask if the Holocaust could be justified.

There are several references to an occurrence, subsequently adapted as part of the plot for the last episode of M*A*S*H, in which a Jewish mother suffocates her infant child to avoid detection by the Nazis. Is it even reasonable to ask if this woman's action was justified? Can anyone find a context in which such a decision is even remotely amenable to the moral judgments that we make based on our experience and abstract notions of just and unjust? Can anyone even imagine, much less understand how remote such a decision is from our experience and judgment? Who is competent to make such a judgment?

It is perhaps a conceit of civilization that we should judge our conduct against standards that we ourselves adopt, but it is likely the case that there are some activities so foreign to our abstract notions of morality and justice, and so peculiar to our own experiences that we can neither justify them nor condemn them. Some things cannot be understood, much less justified. They arise in that chasm in man's nature, on one side of which are the base fears and instinctive drives of survival, and on the other, the aspirations and virtues that he seeks through reason. War is terrible in part because it gives rise to acts that we cannot honestly judge as just or unjust; the acts themselves are terrible, the natural acts of ordinary people confronted with mortal threats not of their own choosing. Sometimes life presents dilemmas where each of the alternatives is appalling, and only the deluded and morally frivolous will presume to judge those who are forced to choose.

RIGHTS

Societies protect rights because they benefit from doing so. Religions are tolerated because most religions advocate altruistic principles that are socially beneficial, not to mention that the oldest constitutional government is less that two hundred and fifty years old, but several religions have survived for millennia. When governments try to force citizens to choose between political interests and religious beliefs, it can't be sure that the masses won't opt for the latter.

The right to privacy arises from the fact that when people must interact in a society, reputations and public impressions are necessary to the relationships that allow that society to function. Recognizing a right to privacy allows a person some measure of control over his public image, and consequently allows him to function as a productive member of society. Libel and slander laws, it should be remembered, protect not privacy in itself, but reputation.

Freedom of speech recognizes that most worthwhile adeas originate with individuals, collective creativity being so fanciful as to be almost an oxymoron. Freedom of expression is necessary to access individual inspiration, and recognizes that the great ideas of history were largely solo accomplishments.

The right to own property assumes that individuals will have an incentive to put property to its most efficient uses, and as a consequence maximize the benefits of enterprise.

Rights are not altruistic accommodations by tolerant government; they are the essential components of the success and ultimate survival of societies.

SOCIALISM'S LIMITS

Socialism is a doctrine of the average, the middling, and the mediocre. There are at least three inherent characteristics that limit achievement under socialist doctrines.

The first is that it does not have the optimizing advantage that competition provides to capitalism. Competition, and thus capitalism inherently rewards efficiency; socialism inherently rewards uniformity, a condition that is unavoidably opposed to exceptionalism.

The second characteristic that handicaps socialism arises from the concept that the value of money, like all values, is largely a matter of opinion. This principle is largely self-evident, and examples of it abound. When the stock market tumbles and investors lose billions, what has happened is that the opinion of the worth of the implicated investments has changed. The natural consequence of this is that economic growth results from providing captial to the production of goods and services that people generally find valuable. The disadvantage of socialism in this regard is that some central authority tries to prescribe what people should value, and if that authority is wrong, stagnation follows.

It is quite natural for a government to decide that everyone would be better off if they preferred fuel efficient vehicles at the expense of safety, or certain food choices at the expense of individual preference, or economic security at the expense of opportunity, but if these do not refect what the majority of peoplel value, no amount of regulation or stimulus will remedy the defect. Governments cannot force the people to want something, even if it is for their own good.

The third shortcoming of socialism is that human beings are inherently progressive creatures, and by that is meant that they will always strive to find more efficent means of pursuing individual interests. Efficiency is simply the amont of something desirable per amount of something necessary or expendable, and if the socialist limits the amount of the desirable thing, the natural human response is to increase efficiency by limiting the expenditure of something else. If the governemtn caps salaries, workers will respond by limiting the amount of effort they expend.

Socialism is a doctrine of caution, not of vitality or inspiration. It is suffused with the catchphrases of social justice and equality, but produces only artificial facsimiles of these. Socialism seeks its ends by minimizing risk, but in so doing minimizes the rewards to be gained from accepting those risks. Socialism requires that people in significant measure give up some of the aspirations, ambition and daring that is a natural part of human nature, all in the interest of achieving something that works much better in theory than it does in practice.

REGULATION

In Washington right now there is a great deal of squabbling and pontificating regarding the role of regulation is our finacial system. It is accepted as given that regulation is fundamental, that it is necessary to the functioning of the economy. Now it may in fact be the case that government regulation in some manner is a better way, and some might argue, the best way of ensuring market integrity, but this does not establish that it is the only way.

Economic activity is much older than the government regulatory schemes about which we fret right now. Trade occurred between tribes and loosely organized city-states and between farmers and tradesmen without a noticeable bureaucracy. The function which is now served by regulation was once served by skepticism, explicitly recognized as the principle of caveat emptor. One has to think that if banks and other financial institutions had to rely only on their own evaluation of financial risks, and had to bear the consequences of evaluating poorly, then there would have been no credit default swaps, derivative financial instruments and "opaque transactions."

It may certainly be argued that the novel financial instruments, which emerged under the noses of regulators, did have beneficial attributes, such as increasing liquidity, etc., but the more skeptical banker would be expected to rely on more conventional means of ensuring the same, i.e. having people that take out loans pay them back.

The net benefit of regulation is undoubably positive but that does not mean that there is not a down side. If people generally retained the skepticism of our more saavy ancestors, the consequences of regulatory failures would be much less severe. When regulators do their jobs poorly, such as when the investigator who examined Bernie Madoff's books could not figure out where the investment returns came from but let Mr. Madoff continue to pretend to make them, that is arguably worse than having no regulation at all. Like domesticated animals that have lost their survival instincts, and thus are incapable of providing for themselves, so too are Americans who have been gulled by the existence of regulatory schemes into thinking nothing bad can happen to them.

When people remain responsible for the results of their own voluntary transactions, there is an inherent limit to the amount of damage done by nefarious or poorly designed schemes. It takes thousands of people to make a disaster. But when assurance against calamity is relinquished to regulators, it takes only the ineptness or corruption of a few individuals to cause a fiasco.

GRANDSTANDING

I have yet to see any widely distributed pundit make what I believe to be an obvious point regarding Congress's attempt to confiscate AIG executive bonuses:

The single most important determinant of economic recovery is confidence in the financial system. Predicatability is essential to confidence. One would be reluctant to drive an automobile if sometimes the steering wheel affected the direction of travel and at other times it did not. We would not use microwave ovens if sometimes they warmed our frozen burritos at at other times responded with a mechanical boxing glove sock-in-the-face.

Predictability is essential not only to confidence but to progress of any sort. That is the reason, and in fact the only reason why we have written laws and why we enforce contracts. What Congress is doing with this retroactive abrogation of contacted terms is destroying the predictability necessary to economic activity. It is undermining confidence that companies and individuals can plan and function without being frustrated by the unpredictable emotional tantrums of our elected officials.

I doubt that our elected officials have any idea at all how much real damage will result from their opportunistic grandstanding.

FORCE

Here is an illustrative pastime for when the new government starts cranking out new laws, policies and regulations: Whenever you read about such actions, count the number of times the word "requires" appears in the descriptions. You know, a law requires employers to do this, or insurers to do that, a new regulation requires drivers to do such and such and utilities to do so and so. Get a feel for how much the activities of government are dependent on compliance with "requirements" and imagine what happens when such compliance is not forthcoming. You may notice something odd about liberals and government.

A fundamental paradox of liberalism is this:

Liberals look to government to be the primary problem solver and organizing institution of life, not only for themselves, but for everyone. They instinctively look to government to ensure fairness, to insulate everyone from risk, to coddle subjective grievances and validate emotional needs. They look to government to do this because 1.) Government has a seemingly endless supply of money, and 2.) What the government cannot procure by persuasion it can compel by force. One quickly realizes that these two attributes are not separate. The government also aquires control of money under the threat of force. Thus, liberals flock to government to solve their problems, validate their worths and calm their fears, primarily because the government can, if necessary, resort to force. The liberal view of the world contains no small elements of compulsion, from compulsory taxes, to compulsory use of particular light bulbs, to compulsory diversity, to compulsory insurance, to compulsory community service etc. They like government because it "requires" things under the threat of force.

But the United States and Israel have lost moral standing in the world because they, when deemed necessary, well...use threats of force. Thus, the threat of force, and the consequent metastasis of government into the lives of its citizens, is the prime attraction of the liberal to the concept of big government, but the threat of force as a necessary element of survival? Well, that's bad. Threatening force to subsidize an indulgent ideology is satisfyingly chic; threatening force to make someone stop killing the citizens of your country is barbaric. It's the type of paradox that resists self-reflection, and not coincidentally, the type of paradox that allows a particularly shallow and clueless sort to wear a Che T-Shirt without the slightest hint of irony.

HYPOTHESIS

Here's my hypotheses regarding the financial crisis:

1. The fallacy. The fallacy underlying the current financial mess is that the amount of realestate in the United States is relatively fixed, but the population continues to grow; thus real estate is always going to appreciate over time. Thought eh general principle is true, the fallacy is that it will continue to appreciate over ANY period of time.

2. The anomaly. The anomaly in the situation occurred because of efforts to intervene in the market mechanics of real estate pricing, to the effect that the appreciation in realestate outpaced income growth. This inflated the housing bubble and would inevitably lead to a bust.

3. The confounder. The usual balancing mechanisms that operate in fair markets were skewed by artificial devices that obscured where value was being created and disappeared. These were the "derivatives" which supposedly added liquidity to real estate investments. What actually happened however was that the derivatives became divorced from the intrinsic value of the underlying mortgages and asumed the nature of wagers. Thus, money invested in these derivatives did not go to increasing value, but merely shifted it between the people who bet correctly and those who did so poorly.

4. The vortex. Because of the proliferation of derivatives, and because of the synergistic effect of ineffective government oversight on one hand and inappropriate meddling on the other, money that should have gone to maintaining equilibrium in the credit market, and maintaining liquidity of the system the old fashioned way, i.e. by having debtors pay off their obligations, the underlying assets became "toxic" and the artificial value of realestate collapsed.

5. The upshot. Foolishness in the housing market shook the credit and investment sectors of the economy, but the underlying premise is still sound. Even though real estate and housing are subject to bubbles, i.e can have artificially high valuations, over the long term, real estate values will appreciate. My bet is that the safest investments right now for liquidity appreciation and safety is real estate investment trusts.

SURVEY

Among all of the current political discourse and debate; whether this program or that expenditure is appropriate, or whether this new regulation, mandate or prescription is necessary, there exists a more fundamental set of questions. Specifically, given that the one attribute that the state has over private enterprise is that it may resort to force, what do we consider appropriate uses of force by the state? Obviously, most of us agree that the state may use force in our behalf to prevent bodily harm or breach of the peace. We agree generally that the state may protect property rights, such as when a sheriff evicts delinquent tenants from a home. But now it seems we are being presented with a menu of potential proscriptions and mandates that, if the average citizen does not comply, such compliance will be enforced by the authority of the state. So to get an idea of just where the acceptable boundaries of such enforcement lie, it may be useful to consider whether we think that laws should be passed and enforced that affect matters such as the following:

1.) Determining whether you have the right to educate your children according to your values, or must relinquish them to the priorities of the public education system;

2.) Determining how and when to discipline your children;

3.) Whether you may express an opinion that someone's religious beliefs seem nutty to you;

4.) Whether you may decide for yourself what life's activities justify risks to your health;

5.) Whether you should be legally liable in any way for expressions that hurt the subjective feelings of others;

6.) Determine what kind of car you drive, if you are allowed to drive it at all;

7.) Whether you can pay from your own resources for medical services that you want and can afford, but that are not favored in a managed system;

8.) Whether you can decide for yourself who you will and will not do business with, on whatever criteria you choose;

9.) Whether you can express opinions that make other people "uncomfortable;"

10.) Whether you may refuse to participate in or fund the voluntary activities of others that you find morally objectionable;

11.) Whether you can defend your life and family from mortal threats with appropriate levels of force, including lethal force;

12.) Whether you can tell a joke that some official somewhere thinks creates an undesirable "atmosphere;"

13.) Whether you can decide for yourself what altruistic causes are most deserving of your financial support;

14.) Whether you may charge whatever a willing buyer is willing to pay for your products or sevices;

15.) Whether you may decide for yourself what activities are meaningful and beneficial to you, regardless of what someone else thinks those activities should be.

GENESIS

Humans have a certain type of curiosity that is a fascination with origins. We delve into geneology of course, but we also want to satisfy ourselves as to the origins, and thus the nature, of more universal phenomena. Thus, James Bruce was moved to search for the source of the Nile, scientists are presently striving to confirm the existence of the "God particle" and ruined investors search for the etiology of their woes. The entire conflict between evolution and creationism is over which of the two doctrines is a more useful approach to the seminal question of human life. Underlying these investigations is the assumption that there is a single underlying nature, which if understood, will enable us to more effectively manage our affairs. In some cases, like physics, or biology, this is true, but human psychology seems to extend the principle to areas unsuitedto the premise. One such inappropriate discipline is politics.

The emphasis on bipartisanship and rejecting extremists of both the left and the right, is motivated by a notion that the welfare of the people has a single objective origin, and that there is some form of political compromise that leads us closer to an ideal form of government. For example, the current fashion is to agree that the more perfect economy is one that strikes a balance between private enterprise and government activism. Similarly there is presumed to be some type of Zen-like balance between individual liberty and governmental regulation, and between individual prerogatives and coerced duties.

For centuries, physicians have tried to trace the origins of disease in order to have some clue as to how to treat it. But in each case they had no dispute as to what the goal was: to return the patient to the state of health he enjoyed prior to affliction. When Bruce sought the source of the Nile, there was no confusion as to what phenomenon he was trying to explain. This is not the case with politics however. The whole existence of politics arises from the fact that there is no right answer to the question of what is the proper role of government, and what should be the priorities of interests among citizens of the state. If we seek to understand the role of government and the rule of law, we are likely to come to vastly different conclusions if we assume that it arises form the need for collective defense, than if does from protection of economic growth, or maintenance of public order, or providing food and shelter.

In fact, the nature of politics is inherently and unavoidably adversarial, a characteristic that need not vex the physicists seeking elementary particles, explorers seeking out geological features, or researchers trying to understand what makes people sick. In the latter cases, it may reasonably be assumed that there is a "right" answer; in politics there are only accomodations of certain interests, and while these accomodations and compromises might achieve certain common goals, they do not resolve the tension that arises because people will always have differing interests, needs, and ideas of how things ought to be.

CONTINUITY

Part of the President's stimulus program is concerned with electronic medical records, promising that they will improve care. The theory is, apparently, that any doctor who sees a patient will have access to the patient's previous previous history, and therefore will make more informed medical decisions. Certainly having access to an accurate history contributes somewhat to treatment decisions for a given patient, and to the extent that such records can be made reasonably available, we should make an effort to do so. However, the improvement in quality to be expected from such availablity is likely overstated. A much more significant factor is the continuity in care that a pateint enjoys over time with a single dedicated provider. Knowing a patient's allergies and previous history is not the same as knowing the patient. NOt all of the subtle and subjective information related to a patient's health will ever make it into a written record, no matter how thorough the effort at documentation.

Reforming the healthcare system to make it more data-intensive is not likely to improve upon the care that is delivered by physicians who spend time with their patients and form therapeutic relationships over time.

QUOTE

An interesting quote from Theodore Roosevelt, from the speech "Citizenship in a Republic" given at The Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910:

Of one man in especial, beyond any one else, the citizens of a republic should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic, that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another, profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic. It makes no difference whether he appeals to class hatred or class interest, to religious or antireligious prejudice. The man who makes such an appeal should always be presumed to make it for the sake of furthering his own interest. The very last thing an intelligent and self-respecting member of a democratic community should do is to reward any public man because that public man says that he will get the private citizen something to which this private citizen is not entitled, or will gratify some emotion or animosity which this private citizen ought not to possess.

Stimulus?

STIMULATING

In reading various commentators reagrding the recently passed stimulus legislation, one thing seems to be non-controversial: the thing that stimulus money is buying is confidence; confidence that the economy is sound, that jobs are relartiely secure and that better times are on the horizon. The success of the stimulus will depend on how well the billions of dollars achieve this end.

One would think that the most efficient use of money for this purpose is to actually invest in activities that are expected to lead to the production of wealth. It appears however that there are entire classes of spending that seems to have the opposite effect, that far from enabling the production of new wealth or value in the American economy, we are underwriting the creation of persistent money sinks that will take money in the future, rather than produce it. The most obvious of these is the dependency programs (welfare) in which the whole point is to give money to people who do not produce enough of value to make their own. Another category is healthcare, where the returns are decidedly non-economic, and the grab bag of educational spending that most likely contains both worthwhile and worthless programs. Underwriting dependency seems to be a poor investment.

The presence of questionable spending in the stimulus package raises an obvious question: if the need for targeting spending was so urgent, why does the package contain any spending that does not have the purpose of promoting valued economic activity? Can the amount of pork in the bill be taken as an inverse measure of the seriousness of those who drafted it?

LAWYERS

The lawyer's art consists of this: Making distinctions between things that are identical and finding similarities between exact opposites.

Cost Effectiveness

The stimulus bill has created some consternation over its creation of a federal board to evaluate the realtive cost effectiveness of various medical treatments. I have no problem with the general theory of evaluating the cost effectiveness of medical care, but I share the qualms about an appointed government entity doing so. The reason is quite simple: Appointed government boards are not objective. In fact any such body is prone to degenerate into an ideological feifdom in which the personal agendas, tastes, prejudices and hare-brained theories of the members compete for validation. This is true of any body that pretends to consensus, such as the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, The Judicial Qualifications Committee of the American Bar Association, or the various Nobel Prize juries.

It is quite natural for individual memers of such bodies to adopt pet issues, which they then focus on until they become causes, and eventually obsessions. This is how the current campaigns against "medical errors" and patient confidentiality are allowed to go to such pointless extremes in disrupting the practice of medicine. It explains how one powerful politicial could mandate universal testing for phenylketonuria, despite the notable rarity of the condition. A fifteen member federal commission assessing the cost effectiveness of medical treatment might reflect the personaol conviction of one member that any casue of death is preferable for a person who has shown the first signs of Alzheimer's disease. Another might believe that "cost effectiveness" should include the relative economic contribution expected of a Down's syndrome child in deciding that any type of care is not cost effective, or that an objective measure of years of life saved must be adjusted for the subjective sense of what makes life worth living.

As an alternative, one might consider what would happen if halthcare payers were freed of any mandates regarding the coverage that they provide. It should be emphasized here that health insurance neither insures health nor provides access to healthcare. It fundamentally protects the assets of the insured against catastrophic financial losses resulting from the use of expensive medical services. If insurers could contract directly for specific services, e.g. ICU care for heart attack, or dialysis for kidney failure, the actuarial process would naturally weed out therapies that are not cost effective. Now the person needing a non-cost effective treatment would be disadvantaged regardless if the cost effectiveness decision were made by the marketplace or by some pack of bureaucrats, but in the former case at least, this disadvantage would not be due to the ideological bent or the flawed judgment of politcal appointees. People would be free to pursue availablity of orphan therapies, much as they do now for elective plastic surgery, or new age mumbo jumbo. Since insurers would have to compete for insureds, they would have an incentive to make the broadest array of services available, but would naturally favor those with the greatest cost effectiveness. The providers of services not covered would have na incentive to improve the cost effectiveness of those services, and if the demand for such services is great, the insurer could fairly distribute the cost among those creating the demand. Cost effectiveness would be determined, in short by what types of services people value and are willing to pay for, rather than what some policy makers would like to prescribe.

INTEGRITY

It is somewhat disheartening to realize how degraded many of our institutions have become, once ideology was accepted as an excuse for abrogating ethics. Journalism is of course the most familiar discipline to succumb to the concept that some things are too important for principles. They are not alone, however. During the Clinton impeachment hearings, the Journal of the American Medical Association rushed into print an article of questionable scientific merit, regarding what is and is not considered sex. This was a clumsy political stunt that inevitably tarnished the reputation of peer-reviewed scientific literature. This episode was followed by the Lancet's bogus inflation of Iraqi war casualties, and the embarrasingly incestuous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's politically motivated and insultingly un-scientific report on global warming.

It should of course immediately cast doubt on the ideologies compelling such dishonesty, that they require shading, spinning and concealment of the facts for their advancement. Perhaps we would all do well to remember why integrity was at one time considered a virtue instead of an impediment to the march of doctrinal fantasies.

HUBRIS

President Obama has had a little trouble getting his feet under him post-inauguration. He has had difficulty with some of his appointments, difficulty keeping true to some of his campaign rhetoric, and his pronouncements about foreign affairs have not been met with the welcome that one would have assumed now that Bush was no longer president. India has invited the President to butt out of the Kashmir issue, Europe responded quite predictably to the "Buy American" provisions of the stimulus bill, necessitating an awkward retreat. The confidence and adulation of the campaign and run-up to the inauguration are fading, as it seems the President is discovering that the job is much harder than it appeared from the campaign trail.

What is evident here is a trait of human nature that afflicts nearly all inexperienced persons. Many people think that they can do another person's job, because what they know of it without experience is typically quite superficial. It is tempting to think that the airline pilot just takes off and lands the plane while the autopilot does the bulk of the flying, or think that a respiratory therapist just provides nebulizer treatments, or that an engineer just plugs numbers into equations that he looks up in books. Many people fall into the easy conceit that can do other people's jobs as well or better, and this trait has become part of the vernacular of everyday life: kibitzer, Monday-morning quarterback, arm-chair general, sidewalk supervisor, etc. There is no shortage of people who think that they are a lot smarter than they actually are, until reality brings the fact home to them.

The tendency to underestimate tasks until one is actually responsible for their performance leads to other errors of thought, for instance, the conclusion that any competent person should be able to perform the job better than the person against whom the critic judges his own hypothetical performance. If difficulties are encountered by someone in their job, it must be due to the someone, rather than the job.

This particular infirmity of thought seems to have afflicted the most devout of President Bush's detractors. It is seemingly inconceivable to them that the difficulties encountered by President Bush could have been the result of unseen complexities, difficult circumstances, good faith mistakes or simply bad luck. No, it is important for the hard core critic to attribute any shortcomings of the Bush administration to bad character. It must be shown that anyone who disagreed with the progressive view of Bush's policies did so out of malevolence, with the implication that Bush's critics not only favored better policies, but were also better people. This is the foundational principle behind the cry to prosecute Bush administration officials. Bush's people had to be scoundrels, because it should have been so easy to do a better job.

Now President Obama is finding out that not only is it not easy to do a better job, it is not easy to do the job at all, especially without meaningful executive experience. The detainees at Guantanamo are not characters in a video game that disappear when the game is turned off. The easy moralizing that plays well to sympathetic audiences becomes a burden when one's associates can not live up to it. Foreign governments actually expect more than "understanding" and will not sacrifice their interests to our good intentions.

President Obama might be excused some of the recent mis-steps of his young administration, but one suspects that these stumbles arise from the naive perceptions of a talented man who doesn't know nearly as much as he thought he did.

GUANTANAMO

President Obama's plan to close the military detention facility at Guantanamo Naval Station in Cuba contained a noticeable amount of latitude. It may well be the case that practical ambiguities sometimes trump theoretical certainties.

The existence of the facility in Cuba is not necessarily the result of malign motives, war criminals or pell-mell abandonment of fundamental principles. It might just be the case that establishing the facility was an attempt to deal with a vexing and grave problem within constraints imposed by general principles. A tough legal and moral challenge arises when conventional military forces encounter enemies that do not observe accepted standards of conduct, and whose rogue activities intentionally put at risk non-combatants and other innocents.

This is not the first time in history such issues have arisen. The common law concept of "outlawry," in which criminals were deprived of any protection of the law as a result of their non-observance of it, is an analogous situation. Note that the outlaw, once declared, could be killed with impunity, as he could not seek protection of the law. Prior to the Nuremburg Trials, the English Chancellor, Lord Simon suggested that Allied forces resurrect the principle of outlawry so that Nazi war criminlas could be summarily executed. Churchill was sympathetic to this suggestion, but the United Staes and Soviets insisted on the more formal requirements of a trial.

No doubt, there were those dissenters from the concept of outlawry who argued that declaring the law not applicable to certain persons was a rejection of the concept of laws, and doing so was sacrificing the very thing that was sought to be protected. And doubtless, these concerns were dismissed with the observation that the surest way of sacrificing the thing to be defended was by refusing to defend it, not only with words and rhetoric, but by violence if necessary.

The claim that Americans are sacrificing their principles by balancing them against existential threats is simply an invalid generalization that may be nurtured in the academy but orphaned in the real world. It is comforting to think that in a civilized society, no one would forfeit his life to the state without a trial. This airy notion is refuted by the fact that even in civilized societies, police carry guns, and sometimes use them to deadly effect without a priori concurrence of judge and jury. It takes little deductive reasoning to conclude that sometimes justified homicide occurs without due process of law.

Ideals by their very nature are concerned with perfection; otherwise they are not ideals. But human affairs by their nature are seldom perfect. If they were, there would be no need for Guantanamo, no need for rules of war and no need for policemen. Recognizing that real world threats often do not accommodate idealistic responses is not abandoning principles; it is recognizing that such principles do not spring immaculately from the breasts of chattering and self-important critics, but that they must be fought for continually by good and honorable people, sometimes in ways that are ugly.

None of this is to say that Guantanamo should or should not close, that the detainees there should or should not have recourse to habeas corpus, or that they should or should not be given the protections of the Geneva Conventions (incidentally, the explicit exclusion of non-uniformed combatants from GC protocols was felt necessary to protect non-combatants). It is merely to point out that those who wish to fight terrorists with platitudes should not expect to be taken seriously when real people are slaughtered because the choices are hard and the theories just didn't work out very well.

STIMULUS

A lot of discussion surrounding the proposed stimulus legislation concerns whether it is too big or too small, whether it should focus on spending or tax cuts, whether the prgram will have the intended effect, etc. There is a much for fundamental question, however and that is: what is the one single thing that is needed for the stimulus to be a success? What is the fundamental condition necessary to begin economic growth?

It is at arguable that if you give people money to spend, they will not do so if they believe that they will need it for more important things later. That is the fundamental issue. What the economy for needs as a stimulus is for people to believe that the economy will grow, that if they spend money, it will be possible for them to make more. What the stimulus requires therefore is not a large infusion of cash that people will be unable to resist spending, it is confidence that spending is not an imprudent impulse that will lead to impoverishment down the line.

What the economy needs more than anything is for people to have confidence that their economic circumstances will be sustainable. This makes gloom-and-doom posturing in order to generate political pressure to pass the stimulus legislation counterproductive. What makes the economy grow is people producing products and providing services that are necessary or desirable. How much economic activity occurs is a result about how confident people are about their own economic stability, rather than their perceived need to spend whater funds thay might get their hands on. There are vanishingly few, if any, families that will stop spending money altogether if the economy worsens. There is going to be some baseline level of economic activity regardless of the stimulus, tax policy, unemployment or whatever. The economy will grow naturally when the demand for the things that people want and need impels others to supply them. Lenders will lend money to people who are good credit risks for transactions that are economically reasonable. Recessions end when normal, healthy and rational economic activity resumes following the imbalances and miscalculations of periods of growth. Growth resumes when money is once again used to allow the provision of services and the production of items that people have use for, not the sloppy and haphazard consuption that a panicked government seeks to impose upon its citizens.

DIPLOMACY

Critiques of American foreign policy, particularly by the more progressive and academic commentators, appear to suggest several premises:

1.) That the nations of the world will only pursue their interests if another nation makes them angry, or provokes them in some way;

2.) That nations will will not pursue their interests in exchange for "understanding;"

3.) That only the United States and its allies have extra-territorial interests;

4.) That wars result not from intractable conflicts between the interests and ambitions of nations, but because of misunderstandings;

5.) That only the United States and its allies select as leaders persons that cannot be reasoned with;

6.) That diplomatic failures that result in massacres are preferable to military successes that do not;

7.) That all conflicts on the planet result, somehow, from the United States's use of natural resources.

OBSERVATIONAL ECONOMICS

Ever wonder why there seems to be no consensus about economic issues? Why it is that some economists advocate greater government control and others adovocate less; why some are Keynesians and others subscribe to the Austrian school? Shouldn't the proper relationship of deficits to tax rates and fiscal to monetary policy be worked out by now, instead of serving as the subject of very boring debate? I suspect that a large part of economics is tied up in what economists think rather than what they see. Even if they do see something worthwhile, like Pareto's observation that 20% of the land owners owned 80% of the land, they cannot help but letting their imaginations run wild, inflicting upon the dismal science all sorts of integral equations, probability distributions and theoretical gobbledegook. When economists do hit upon a valid observation, they tend to become like the blind men and the elephant, allowing their valid observations to lead them to specious conclusions.

The good news is that non-economists can traipse off on the same intellectual journeys. Non-economists like me can make basic observations and mar them up with wild conjectures about what they mean, and as it is usually the analysis that leads to folly, I should like to propose a few simple observations, which I trust will be largely non-controversial, and leave the theorizing as an amusement for others.

The first observation is that economics, as apposed to say biochemistry, is a discipline of no use to non-humans. Even the industrious creatures, like beavers, bees and starlings, go about their activities unvexed by supply and demand, and consideration of fiscal policy. Economics arise where human beings interact with each other, and economics is a characteristic of those interactions. The "laws" of economics are thus corrollaries of the laws of human nature, having as their objects very limited ends. It is human ingenuity that creates derivative markets, micro economies and loan to value ratios. The reason that humans need economics and bees do not is that bees build hives, collect pollen and make honey without fretting about how efficient they do those things. Humans however are concerned with progress, and progress requires efficiency. Thus, we have the secdond observation about economics.

The point of economics is to allow people to produce goods, perform services and exchange these among each other in the most efficient way possible. The most important word in the language of economics is "per" because all efficiencies are simply the amount of something per the amount of something else; the amount of corn per acre, the amount of dollars per hour, the amount of income per capita, the amount of healthcare per dollar, the amount of benefit per unit of risk, etc. The economist takes notice of a basic truth about nature: all progress is really just an improvement of the efficiency of something, and efficient organisms survive at the expense of the inefficient ones.

The observation that bees and beavers do not consciously alter their behavior as they adopt newer economic theories leads to the third observation: economics is really a subdisciplne of and an application of the principles of human behavior. It is possible to design economic policies and plot economic data because human beings do have at least a modicum of predictability in their behavior. The fact that there has been so much human misery and historical disaster as a result of overly-idealistic or utopian economic theories is testament to the fact that economists and politicians do not understand this nearly as well as they should. All economic reasoning should begin (but does not) from what observation suggests is the fundamental principle of economics: Human beings are tool users. They use thier reason and ingenuity to exploit whatever resources are placed at their disposal, including laws, policies and programs. This is the genetic material of the law of unintended consequences, and a primary reason why enterprises of noble purpose and great promise are brought to grief.

The observation that humans are tool users should be one of the most obvious and revered principles of economic thought, because evidence for it is everywhere. People use religion for non-relious purposes; they use principles of public benefit to private advantage; they exploit loopholes in laws and allow institutions to assume responsibility for matters that had previously been individual burdens. As an economic principle, it is irrelevant that some of these exploitations may speak of bad character on the part of the actor, because it does not necessarily have to be. The key characteristic is that it is foreseeable and should be expected. No one should really be surprised that black markets arise when products are prohibited, or that business executives engage in imprudent behavior when they believe that government policy will insulate them from the risks. It should not come as a shock when patients try to cram all of their elective surgeries into the last few months of the year, after their deductibles are satisfied, rather that subjecting themselves to pay more from their own pocket.

Practical economics is concerned with how to encourage particular behaviors (investing or spending or capitalizing businesses or using green technology, etc.) in ways that increase certain types of efficiency, often at the expense of others. The interesting thing is that there is no concensus on what forms of efficiency are most desirable, or whether the proposed policies will achieve their aims. The fallacy of modern practical economics is the belief that policies that change what economies provide somehow changes what people want.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Regarding the tax lapses of Mr. Giethner and Mr. Daschle:

Why whould we entrust the responsibilities of public officials to individuals who are so apathetic in their responsibilities as citizens?

The Pitbull

An Allegory of the Left

One fine late summer day, Larry strode down the sidewalk next to a tall wooden fence. As he walked, a dog began barking spiritedly from the other side. "Hmmm," thought Larry "that poor, poor animal is being oppressed by the authorities who erected this fence." This thought filled Larry with a rush of self-esteem. "This fence is not right," thought Larry. "I see no sense in it, other than to concentrate power in those who built it. I shall help the poor animal inside." The resulting jolt of self-esteem left Larry lightheaded. He nonetheless took it upon himself to pry loose a board in the fence, feeling he had now freed the dog to follow its conscience about which side of the fence to stay on.

Larry continued down the sidewalk, buoyed by the gossamer wings of esteem for himself, and his own sense of wonderfulness. His thoughts were interrupted by the unmistakeable sound of a pit bull, who had apparently decided that it preferred to be on the same side of the fence as Larry, if only because that made mauling things easier. Larry turned to see the snarling animal bearing down on him, teeth bared, snarling violently, anticipatory saliva flying off into the slipstream.

"Maybe this dog will bite me," Larry considered, his self esteem momentarily displaced. "Perhaps I can reason with him. I'll get him to consider tofu, or some other less meat-oriented diet." A chastening thought then occured to him. "What if attacking me is reasonable? I really shouldn't impose my value system." The familiar opiate of self-worth again comforted Larry.

"Perhaps I should jump the fence to get away from this doggie," thought Larry as the distance between them was becoming uncomfortably small. "No, I shouldn't assume that just because this is a charging pit bull that it is any more likely than any other dog to bite me. Unless Clifford the Big Red Dog would send me over the fence, I won't let my prejudices get the better of me."

As the dog was now airborne, jaws agape, Larry thought "I wonder what we all did to provoke this dog. I can't help but feel some collective responsibility." The expected rush of esteem was interrupted by the animal sinking its canine chompers into the flesh of Larry's upper arm. The pain was intense and it took some effort for Larry to reason: "You know, this is why we need universal healthcare."

TIME

One of the challenges of diplomacy is that occasionally one encounters an adversary who seems to have nothing to lose; the zealot who does not value his own life, the despot who has lttle concern for the welfare if his people, the anarchist who values only chaos. There is in fact however, one thing that all serious men and women value, one thing that if plausibly threatened will get their attention. There is one thing that any serious person with serious ambitions can not afford: someone causing them to waste their time.

ZERO TOLERANCE

We have all heard stories of draconian and Kafkaesque entaglements suffered by people whose innocuous conduct conflicts with some over-zealous enforcement of "the rules." Often it seems that common sense is banned from the conduct of human affairs. Children are suspended from school for possessing a Tylenol, and five year olds are labeled sex offenders for hugging a classmate. When the inevitable outcry arises, public officials hide behind the fiction of "zero-tolerance," as though that were some sort of noble principle.

In fact zero-tolerance is a symptom of thoughless fanatacism. While "zero tolerance" itself might not explicitly contravene the Constitution, the principles behind it have certainly been disfavored in American law. In rejecting the concept of mandatory death penalties, the Supreme Court cited the case of Pennsylvania ex rel. Sullivan v. Ashe, 302 U.S. 51, which observed:

For the determination of sentences, justice generally requires consideration of more than the particular acts by which the crime was committed, and that there be taken into account the circumstances of the offense, together with the character and propensities of the offender.

Note that the Court is refering to what justice requires, and that it quite explicitly is "the circumstances of the offense." The whole point of "zero tolerance" enforcement is that the circumstances of the offense is irrelevant. We may then logically conclude that "zero tolerance" policies are contrary to what "justice generally requires." But that is not all that the Supreme Court had to say on the matter. The death penalty case that cited Ashe was Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U.S. 280, which also contained the language:

While the prevailing practice of individualizing sentencing determinations generally reflects simply enlightened policy rather than a Constitutional imperative...

So we see that consideration of individual circumstances in assessing infractions is "enlightened policy" and that ignoring such considerations must be less so. Thus, the Supreme Court has opined that ignoring the individual circumstances of a rule infraction or transgression of the law conflicts with both justice and enlightened policy.

The phenomenon of zero tolerance policies reflects several not-very-appealing traits in the officials that support them. One such trait is obviously cowardice, hiding behind inflexible policy in order to be spared a controversial decision. But this is not the whole story. Many otherwise well-meaning officials devolve to "zero-tolerance" troglodytes. They may start off with good intentions, and adopt a particular cause which they then embrace with greater and greater fervor. They come to accept that what they believe is so right that it must be a virtue not only in specific cases, but a virtue in general, so that there can be no counter-examples to refute the righteousness perceived.

Zealots see zero tolerance not as a dictum of lazy management, as much as an expression of a universal truth. Of course, anyone who reasons this way has crossed the line that separates reason from fanaticism. The same malady of thought that perceives the sex-offender in the affection of a kindergartener is the same that senses the threat of racial impurity, or of ideological infidelity. Fanatacism is a disorder of believing that other people need to accept the fanatic's view of the world, and must live in accordance with that view. It is one person driven to hysteria by people living their own lives.

HEALTHCARE FICTION

Legal systems have long made use of "fictions" because it facilitates expression of legal principles. Thus, for legal purposes, a corporation is treated as a person, and the government is allowed to confiscate your car if, unbeknown to you, it was part of a drug transaction, on grounds that the car committed a crime.

Our healthcare system is also burdened by the use of fictions, and in fact, the typical large hospital intensive care unit is often a theater in which doctors, nurses, patients and their families play "Let's pretend," so as not to too directly confront the unpleasant and painful. There is however, one fundamental fiction in haelthcare that should be identified and recognized as false, since it inhibits reasoned analysis of the challenges of healthcre delivery. That fiction is this: We only want what is best for the patient. The reality is that everyone wants more or less what is good enough for the patient considering other concerns.

For any given patient, there are a number of parties interested in the healthcare decisions applicable to that patient; and not "interested" in the sense of humanely concerned, but interested in the way the mafia is interested in protection rackets. The hospital is interested in providing care that is economically sustainable in the setting of limited reimbursement, staffing concerns and its role as a community resource. Insurance companies are interested in reimbursing providers for care that is cost effective, and to some degree predictable so that they can perform their actuarial functions and assess risk. Nurses are interested in providing care in a manner that allows them to effectively care for all of the patients in their charge without having thier services monopolized by any one patient. Doctors are interested in providing care according to their ethical obligations, the constraints on their time, the necessary stewrdship of resources, and the competing demands of all of the other parties. This of course has not mentioned the specter of defensive medicine. In sum, what each of the parties wants is to do what is good enough for the patient, while having their interests considered.

To better understand this dynamic, one should think in terms of efficiency, that is, each patient care decision should be thought of a ratio of the benefit to the patient per unit of something valuable that is expended. Each party measures the patient's care (or wants to anyway) according to different ratios. Let's say the numerator for such ratios is the improvements in the objective health measures of the patient. The hospital administrator considers the amount of such change per unit of unreimbursed hosptial services; the nurse may consider such benefit per unit of his or her time, and the doctor needs to consider the benefit with respect to his time, the risk of adverse consequences to the patient, and the knowledge that his decisions could bankrupt some of the players involved. Even the patient has to consider the amount of benefit against the pain, disability, burden of therapy and risk of a poor outcome. In no absolute sense can anyone identify what is "best" for the patient.

In a sense, each of the players has an argument for why their interests should be considered. The insurance company can say, "hey, when you bought your policy, in exchange for lessening the risk that a disease would financially ruin you, you agreed to our efforts to reasonably limit the costs of your care. The physician can say, "when you chose me to care for you, you did so subject to my time constraints, training, and ethical perpective," etc.

When we regard healthcare decisions in terms of efficiency as above, where each decision tries to maximize some benefit with respect to some cost, it is rather straight-forward to see that each such cost is the criteria for sime form of rationing. THis is the fundamental fact of healthcare in the United States, in Canada, Great Britain, wherever; all healthcare is rationed.

The fiction that we "do what is best for the patient" is a child's fable meant to hide the fact that healthcare delivery is a mix of moral, economic, technical, and metaphysical concerns. It creates the paradox that, in reality, healthcare in some form or other is available to everyone, but if they are expected to pay for it, then they are somehow denied access to it (thus requiring a government "system" to intervene on their behalf). This, however is the beauty of a healthcare market. Patients are free, by their choices to seek care that is efficient in terms of financial risk to themselves, if that is their desire, or efficient in terms of their moral values, or in terms of philosophy of life, or really just about anything that is important to them. And in the long run, having this choice may be what is best for the patient.

LEADERS

Even before Barak Obama has been inaugurated, there has been some grumbling that he might not be exactly faithful to some of the principles upon which he campaigned. In point of fact, events usually require pragmatism over idealism. Some of the people that yearned for Obama as a "new kind of leader" will discover they are much better off with the old kind of manager.

Every so often an American president is both a great leader and a great manager; Washington, Lincoln, maybe Teddy Rooselvelt. At the same time, men who showed great aptitude for leadership, like U.S. Grant and John Kennedy proved to be not so hot presidents. Jimmy Carter was an awful president because he was a dismal failure as a manager; specifically, he could not ably distinguish between those issues upon which he could prescribe and those which he needed to effectively manage as events took their course. Bill Clinton, despite having an ideology similar to that of Carter was a much better president because he was both a more effective manager and a better politician.

"Leaders" don't seem to fit so well in a liberal democracy. They seem to be much more prevalent in North Korea, where Kim Jong Il carries the title "Dear Leader," Nazi Germany (Der Furher), Iran, where Ali Khamanei holds the title "Supreme Leader," and communist Cuba (El Comandante, El Jefe Maximo). Even second tier despots like Idi Amin polished their leadership credential with titles like "His Excellency, President for Life Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor," which presumably looks impressive on a resume under "Positions Held." Napoleon was a great leader, but I doubt his chances in a fair election.

A sober President Obama will realize that his task is to manage events over which he has varying degrees of control, rather than to lead a pluralistic society on some utopian goose-chase. A good president knows enough to stay out of the way of a decent, resourceful and energetic people as they continue a spectacular journey that has gone on for more than two centuries, rather than presuming to lead them to some fantasy land that exists only in rhetoric. Great presidents must tend always to the mundane and the humdrum, even when rising to meet great challenges. A free and self reliant people do not need to be led to political paradise, they need someone to make sure the lights stay on, that the barbarians are kept from the gate, and that the institutions upon with they rely operate fairly.

Many of the things that starry-eyed Obama supporters hoped he would accomplish are simply beyond his power to do so. He is constrained not only by the Constitution, but by the unintended consequences of well intentioned but poorly thought out policies. The laws of economics and the interests of America's rivals will not subside under the force of Mr. Obama's personality.

The first priority for Mr. Obama must be to safeguard individual liberty, and to do so in ways that are likely to be unpopular, such as opposing speech codes and erosion of rights of conscience. He should realize that America's greatness is a result of liberty and equality of opportunity, not the lethargic homage of a cult of personality.

SOCIALISM

A big difference between socialism and capitalism is the criterion upon which they judge success. Capitalism aims for being being a little better than everyone else with whom one competes for capital, while socialism shoots for being just good enough in the absence of competition.

Technological and economic progress entail risk, and mismanagement of these risks is largely responsible for the current financial difficulties. "Bailouts" exacerbate the conditions leading to such strife, because they essentially make risks irrelevant. Artificially insulating enterprises from the inherent risks of their activities simply subsidizes foolhardiness.

Socialized enterprises eventually stagnate because such systems seek to distribute risk rather than compensating individuals and organizations for taking the risks associated with progress. Socialized enterprises become risk averse paradoxically because, in order to distribute risks, they forego the incentives for talented people and organizations to run risks for proportionate rewards. Socialization loses the optimizing effects of competition, and socialized enterprises sag inevitably to lethargic mediocrity.

FREE MARKETS

President Bush today said that he supports free markets. In light of the current economic turmoil, other people think that free, as in unregulated, markets are the problem. Free markets are not really the issue. Free markets are largly unsustainable because part of the the freedom inherent in the name is the freedom to manipulate, or coerce, or rig the outcome of market activity. Eventually, the free market ceases not only to be free, but also ceases to be a market.

The attribute of being free does not imply free from government regulation; indeed government is an appropriate agent to ensure that markets are free from improper influences. The benefits of markets depend on voluntary transactions, but only if the process of those transactions is fair. "Free market" is really an inexact term for "fair market."

A fair market means that the transactions that occur there are not improperly influenced by external factors. It is the process by which the transactions occur that must be kept fair, and government regulation is a legitimate means to achieve this. Government can enforce rules regarding openness of information, anti-competetive or coerced processes. Govenment regulation can help ensure that transactions occur between two willing parties acting in their own interests.

The risk of regulation is that it is not obvious to the agents of government when the legitimate purpose of regulating a fair market transgresses into manipulation of markets in the interests of other policy concerns. A very clear example is the real estate melt-down and credit crisis, in which market dynamics were altered by the external coersion of facially well-intended government policies. Markets are inherently agnostic and non-judgmental. They do not function any better when the policies that contaminate their processes are benevolent than when they are malevolent. Whenever government regulation favors one market participant over others, for whatever reason, the market is no longer free, it is no longer fair, and the benefit of market mechanisms will be lost.

MARKETS

P. J. O'Rourke published some post-election thoughts in the Weekly Standard in which he commented that "the free market is just a measurement." This stimulated further discussion on The Corner blog on National Review Online. I suspect that this will be a continuing discussion as the concept of markets are criticized in the wake of the current economic turmoil and recent election. I will therefore express these preliminary thoughts, in anticipation of more in depth discussion to follow:

1.) Money is simply a representation of collective opinion on the relative values of things that people either need or desire. It serves functions relating to credit, exchange of goods and so forth, but these functions are consequences of this basic fact.

2.) A market is a forum by which exchanges tht determine relative values, i.e. set prices, occurs. Markets are an inherent reality of human interaction and economic activity.

3.) A "free market" is one that is unregulated, and for this reason does not exist anywhere. A fair market is one that functions in such a way as to make markets most useful. A fair market is one that functions free from extraneous influences on good faith transactions between dealing parties. Markets must be regulated to some degree to ensure that the process of the transactions is fair, even if the transactions themselves are not. See the post on "FAIRNESS" below.

4.) Capitalism is a process by which resources are allocated most efficiently. Fair markets provide a mechanism by which capitalism is able to provide resources for the generation of wealth, the management of risk, and the creation of economic growth. Capitalism is inherently competetive.

5.) Competition is simply a method of optimization, the most desriable outcome of which is efficiency, i.e, competition inherently favors more efficient processes over less efficient ones.

6.) Efficiency is the amount of something desirable or needed that is produced per unit of something else that is either desirable or limited.

INDIVIDUALS

One of the pillars of collectivist thought is the observation that many worhtwhile things cannot be accomplished by one person alone. There are may worthwhile things that require collective effort, from building an automobile or a bridge, to performing life-saving surgery, to exploring space. The complexity of many modern endeavors requires cooperative effort, and this in fact is the reason why people self-aggregate into, corporations, clubs, guilds, political parties, and any number of groups whose members share a common purpose.

The collectivist impulse is to organize effort through the forces of government. At first glance, this seems a perfectly logical and efficient practice, since the government can tax, and promulgate rules and laws that facilitate the task at hand. But a moment's contemplation reveals that the only thing that government can uniquely contribute to any effort is coersion.

There is a reason why the liberties enjoyed by the United States political system have resulted in so many types of entrepreneurial accomplishments and progress in science, technology and quality of life. That reason is that inspiration and ingenuity are the fruits of individual volition and talent rather than the coerced products of collective effort. Thirty mediocre composers could not collectively write the works of Mozart, nor could fifty career bureaucrats produce the resolve of Churchill or Ghandi.

Collective effort is necessary to some enterprises and a hindrance to others. It is the liberty to aggregate together to accomplish the former when necessary, and the liberty to pursue one's own genius when necessary to the latter. The power of the state to coerce is a poor substitute for the creative power of a free people.

ZEALOTS

Emerson was wrong when he said "...to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius." To believe that what is true for you is true for all men is fanaticism, and fanaticism generally does not end well.

When fanaticism boards the ship of life, the load is lightened by jettisoning common sense. This being insufficient, the next thing to go is empathy, then reason and finally human decency.

It is quite easy to get angry at moronic public officials who suspend first graders for drawing pictures of guns, or who hug a classmate. Anyone can make fun of them. We can think of them as daffy Quixotic prigs, or officious Barney Fifes. But what is essential is that they be recognized for what they are: dangerous zealots who have long lost sight of reason.

AN ANALOGY

Most everyone likes sprots analogies, but sports gives a non-threatening insight into the way things are accomplished in a free society. So, in that spirit, I offer an analogy to illustrate the proper role of government in the economy.

A football game consists of two teams managed by coaching staffs playing according to agreed upon rules, enforced by neutral officials. The rules are necessary to accomplish the purposes of the game, ensure some level of fairness, and make the game worth playing in the first place. The coaching staffs provide the management, teh skilled expertise to make their teams perform at the highest level. The better the caches perform their duties, the more competetive and therefore the more worthwhile the game. The referees perform teh role of regulators. When they do not perform impartially, the game suffers. Now, if at some point, the officials decide that the coaches are not doing their jobs, and begin to perform the duties of coach in addition that of referee, the rules of the game no longer are important. The officials are no longer impartial and the outcome of the game no longer depends on a fair competition, but on the predilection of the officials.

In our economy, the proper role of government is analogous to the role of football officials. They are regulators, and regulation is important for the proper functioning of competetive enterprise. When government also assumes the role of manager, the inherent benefits of competition, the promotion of efficiency, are lost. Government can set the rules to allow for a healthy, competetive economic activity, but when it assumes to become a player in, or micromanager of that activity, outcomes become divorced from merit, and the entire enterprises degenerates into a bureaucratic mire.

SO WHAT IS HEALTHCARE?

As mentioned below, healthcare is not a right. It has not been recognized as such by the Supreme Court and more importantly it cannot be practically treated as a right. What those who advocate a right to healthcare are proposing is that halthcare be "declared" a right, but this is simply a euphemism. What they really advocate is that healthcare be treated as an entitlement. This is just as impractical however, since the practical limits on recognizing healthcare as a right also apply to viewing it as an entitlement; one that would prove unworkable in practice.

Some people make the false distinction between rights and privileges, concluding that if healthcare is not a right, it must be a privilege. This is not true, as a provider's obligation to provide healthcare services arise from ethical concerns and contractual relationships. They are not privileges bestowed upon a privileged class to be exercised at the pleasure of the favored. The consideration of healthcare in terms of rights and privileges is pointless, because such consideration only seeks to identify a source by which services must be provided, and a rationale by which they may be accessed. These are secondary concerns.

First and foremost, healthcare should be thought of as a limited resource. It is not a social amenity that flows undiminishingly from government altruism, the supply of which is both created by, and is wonderful proof of, community compassion. Healthcare rather is a worthwhile endeavor that is subject to human folly, greed, virtue, and humanity. It is limited by hard choices and the often unacknowledged inadequacies of medical science.

A sound healthcare policy is impossilbe without first recognizing that healthcare is a resource, limited by a finite pool of talented professionals and the practical divide between what is desirable at any cost and what is possible in an economically sustainable system.

One of the great difficulties in managing healthcare as a resource is that conventional methods do not apply. If the government wished to conserve limited resources it would do so by taxing their consumption. If it wanted to encourage development of resources, it would subsidize their production. When the government "provides heathcare" meaning that it acts as the middleman to process payment form the taxpayer, on behalf of the patient to the provider, it in effect subsidizes the consumption of a limited resource. More importantly, it subsidizeds the demand for the resource, leading to inexorably higher costs, as the supply is subject to more practical limitations. This inevitably leads to rationing on the basis of cost.

A more realistic approach is to have any subsidy (if at all) directed toward development of those therapies that are, or will be, cost effective. This obviously also is a form of rationing, but is rationing on the basis of cost efficiency. This has the benefit of favoring those therapies that are not necessarily cheaper, but cheaper for the benefit they provide. This would not deprive patients who are willing to to pay for less cost-effective means of therapy of their choice of care; it would simply use market mechanisms to select out the most cost effective medical practices to make the overall system more efficient..

IS HEALTHCARE A RIGHT?

As I opine here, the answer is "no." As mentioned, healthcare is not a right, because it is a service that must be provided by others, and no one has a claim of right on the endeavors of another. There is no claim, for example, that one's rights are violated if the police do not prevent a crime.

Furthermore, healthcare is not only a service, it is a limited resource, and the fact that it is limited makes it practically impossible for it to be a right. "Limited" implies that not everyone can have it, and it is absurd to argue that there is a right to something that one cannot have. Consider for example the case of claiming that liver transplants (which are inarguably healthcare) are a right. Obviously there are not enough liver donors to go around, so some people who will die without a transplanted liver will not get one. Any "right" to a new liver in such a case is a rather hollow one.

As a practical matter all heathcare is rationed. This fact is incompatible with healthcare being a right, and it is mere demagoguery to pretend that this is not so. Likewise, healthcare is not a right because there is no firm understanding of what healthcare is. Chiropractic therapy can reasonably be considered healthcare when applied to musculoskeletal ailments, but might be viewed more skeptically when considered a cure for cancer. Aromatherapy may have some health benefits, but it is a strained argument that asserts that it is a right. Some cosmetic procedures might qualify as healthcare while others would not, but drawing the distinction would seem contrary to the spirit of rights.

The range of healthcare services includes a number of interventions of varying degrees of cost, effectiveness and availability. This necessitates the judicious use of some of these modalities, allowing access to some people but not others, again a situation anomalous to the common understanding of rights.

To get around these informities, those who assert that healthcare is a right qualify their claim by saying that "basic" healthcare is a right, a limitation that argues against the premise. That is like saying that the First Amendment guarantees a right to express basic opinions or practice basic religion. Civil libertarians would find little comfort if the Fourth Amendment protected the right of the people to be basically secure in their persons, papers and effects. Rights should rest on firmer foundations than transient interpretations of what is "basic."

Finally, the Supreme Court, through Justice Marshall, understood the importance of healthcare without being gulled into recognizing it as a right (Estelle v. Gamble, 420 U.S. 97):


Similarly, in the medical context, an inadvertent failure to provide adequate medical care cannot be said to constitute "an unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain" or to be "repugnant to the conscience of mankind."

In fact, the Sumpreme Court was even more explicit:

The Constitution imposes no obligation on the States to pay the pregnancy-related medical expenses of indigent women, or indeed to pay any of the medical expenses of indigents.

Maher v. Roe, 432 U.S. 464 (1977) If the Consititution imposes no obligation to pay for the medical expenses of indigents, it cannot be said to guarantee healthcare as a right.

FAIRNESS

"Fairness" has assumed a prominent role in economic and political discussions lately. Pundits and politicians compare varous economic schemes as though fairness were a commodity in itself. I propose here though, that fairness is given too much deference. I submit that an economic plan that leads to the production of wealth, but that is perceived as unfair is better than a fair plan that leads to stagnation.

Fairness is often used as a synonym for justice. This confusion may be deliberate or not, but it is definitely unhelpful. Fairness is an attribute of a process, not an outcome, and is specifically refers to whether such a process is free from bias or improper influence. The outcome of a process may be just or unjust regardless of whether the process was fair. It is seemingly unfair that some basketball teams have players that are taller and more talented than others, yet if the game is played according to the rules free from bias or manipulation, the outcome, even if a foregone conclusion cannot be considered unjust. It may seem unjust that one person takes an entire jackpot for himself, but if the process is the result of a blind lottery or the flip of a fair coin, there seems to be no valid grounds for complaint.

The veneration of fairness as an end rather than as a desirable attribute of a means is the result a common oversight: desirable attributes are desirable first and foremost because they are useful. Fair processes are presumed to produce better results than biased ones, and fair competitions are presumed to produce more worthy winners than those that are rigged. Democracy, for example, accomplishes its purposes more readily when elections are fair than when they are not.

There are many experiences in life that are not fair, simply because there is no benefit of fairness in them. It is not fair that a model citizen develops cancer, while a criminal does not. The purposes and processes of biology are independent of social merit. Likewise, it may seem unfair that the daughter of an industry magnate has certain advantages over the son of a laborer, but this only become true if the latter proves himself more deserving of an outcome that he is then denied.

Fair processes are more likely to lead to just outcomes. Imposing fairness in outcomes is likely to produce only a moribund equilibrium, where no one dares much nor accomplishes much, because results are divorced from merit. And that is not only ultimately unfair, it is unjust.

FANTASY

Fantasy is the seed and root of every progressive movement. This is self-evident to some degree, since progressives strive for a condition that does not exist and has never existed, except in the fantasies of the most devout.

Some of these fantasies are meant to be inspirational, like the virtuous proletariat marching arm in arm toward socialist utopia, or the ummah living in Islamic tranquility. Most of these fantasies tend to be fantasies of abstraction, like "fairness" or "justice" or "equality." The abstraction takes the world of the progressive and dessicates it until there is nothing left but the fantastic and unobtainable ideal. But a world that is so narrowly focused ceases to be a world. All progressive movements and their associated fantasies inevitably degenerate into a unitary vision, a homogenizing monotony that is at odds not only with human history, but with the human spirit.

The problem with adopting a fantasy as a world view, is that fantasist often becomes the fanatic, believing not only that his fantasy is desirable to himself but necessary for others. Then, whether it is the degenerate religious fantasies of al Qaeda, or the political fantasies of the Khmer Rouge, or the racial fantasies of the National Socialists, human catastrophe follows.

Fantasy is part of every healthy human mind, but the ability to make the key distinction between fantasy and real life is a necessary part of leaving childish things behind.

EMOTIONS

Emotions are notoriously bad counselors. The heat of passion is much more likely to produce regret than glory. It should be remembered that animals have emotions, but this fact does not seem to have contributed much to the collective achievements of the animal kingdom. One typically looks first to the level-headed for direction in a crisis; likewise, chldren are apt to have their conduct directed by emotional wants, a trait that necessitates the involvement of grown-ups in the more crucial decisions.

The pursuit of emotional satisfaction far too often leads to folly and pain, yet a great deal of political discourse targetss emotional chords. This is particularly true in the present campaign, where such airy and vacant themes of change and hope are the center of the debate. It is not cynical to observe that that the vilification of Sarah Palin, the visceral hatred of all things Bush, and the irrational platitudes goading class warfare are appeals to emotion rather than thought. This is not likely to turn out well.

The politics of the moment seek to apply the formidable intellectual, economic and cultural resources of the United States to the ultimate end that persons who share a particular ideology will feel good about themselves. We really aren't being courted by "Change we can believe in" as much as "Change we can feel good about."

Just as the president has very little control over economic cycles (the NASDAQ lost 45% of its value under President Clinton), a president (at least with due respect for the Constitution) can't really deliver on promises of self esteem, or ensure that the emotional tantrums of an ideological fringe will have better uutcomes than the emotional tantrums of preschoolers.

There is a segment of the American Left that wants war-crimes trials, that wants Wall Street executives frog marched on the evening news for the sheer schadenfreud of it. They want to name sewage plants ofter George W. Bush, and "ban" the military from their communities because they think that childish emotions must lead to eternal truths. Of course, those that look to a "progressive" government for progress and emotional satisfaction will be disappointed. The world is too complex and too dangerous to allow serious leaders to accede to the emotional outbursts of angry and unhappy people.

HOSPICE

Hospice care definitely has its place in the management of certain diseases. However, somewhere along the line, the notion arose that it is somehow more noble to get sick and die than it is to get sick and recover.

SELF DEFENSE

How about this as an academic argument:

The key phrase of the Second Amendment is found in the preamble, but not the militia part. The key phrase is "necessary to the security of a free state." Why the adjective? The flip answer is that a state that bans the possession and use of arms by the "people" is not as free as one that does not. But there is a more mechanical aspect that supports a right to self defense.

A free state implies necessary restraints on the armed agencies of government that are vested with the authority to use force. This lessens the risk that such entities will become agents of tyranny, but also impedes their ability to defend the life and safety of individual citizens. Unless the people are willing to accommodate an oppressive police presence in the interest of public safety (airline security lines notwithstanding) the citizen of a free state (i.e. one in which government force is restrained in the interest of individual liberties) must be allowed the right and means to provide their own defense.

As an aside, I think that probing whether English common law protects a right of self defense is largely unhelpful. It is my understanding (quite possibly wrong, but...) that people living in England were subjects, and that the King owned some sort of interest in his subjects' lives beyond humanitarian or humanistic ones. Killing one of the King's subjects was almost as bad as killing one of the King's cows. People living under the U.S. Constitution however are not subjects in that sense, and are not afflicted by the disabilities imposed by monarchical abstractions.

To sum up: "Free" implies limitations on the state's ability to provide an arbitrary level of security, this necessarily implies a degree of self reliance on the part of the free citizen to protect his life in the setting of such limitations. If the Constitution prevents the policeman from looking in the trunk of the speeding hit man's car when he is on the way to kill you, the Constitution impliedly allows you to rectify that by dispatching the miscreant when the choice comes down to you or him.

REDISTRIBUTION

One of the problems with the progressive notion of redistribution is that it is anti-progressive. Redistribution is an end rather than a means, and it is rather a dead-end. Redistribution is the process by which the loaves are divvied up rather than by which they are created. There is nothing industrious about redistribution. It is a policy that assumes that the distributed goods are the final fruits of effort and merit rather than the seeds of further progress.

LAW

The recently completed United States Supreme Court term has generated a gread deal of internet comment and analysis. Websites such as the Volokh Conspiracy are loaded with critiques and discussions as to what the various opinions mean and argue over the legal principles that are either vindicated or violated by these decisions.

What is interesting about these discussions is that very smart people disagree sharply over the legal principles, interpretations and construction of the law. They also argue over history and legal philosophy, supporting wildly varying conclusions. In reading these discussions, one can make the following observations:
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There are a number of philosphies of law, each of which presupposes the existence of some definite thing, such as a divine law giver, a state of nature, a social compact, or natural order. The position taken in these abstract legal arguments depends largely on what one presupposes as the foundation of law. TO understand the arguments, it might be helpful to fully understand the different theories by reading Aristotle's Rhetoric or Montesquieu's The Spirit of Laws or Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, but in understanding how the controversies in law arise, it is helpful to presume, not a particular fundamental principle, such as the social contract, but merely to accept that legal reasoning presumes such a principle, regardless of what that is.

Legal reasoning tends to be fairly consistent: specific observations and historical data are analyzed to try, using inductive reasoning, to identify the underlying principle that will resolve the dispute. Deductive reasoning then applies this principle to the specific facts to the case at issue. This is true whether one is an originalist or legal positivist or utilitarian, or whatever. This process is subject to the limitations and quirks of human cognition. Very smart people reach different conclusions based on the same data becase the cognitive processes that are used are not deterministic.

When a person analyzes facts and data and legal precedent, and uses them to distill an underlying legal principle, he is using the cognitive process of pattern recognition. This process has a sensitivity and specificity associated with it. Someone who is very adept at recognizing recurrent patterns and readily identify the common principle in disparate facts is also likely to find patterns where none exist. This is a natural consequence of pattern recognition in human cognitive processes and is responsible for the phenomenon of apophenia, the experience of seeing patterns in random data. This potential lsource of "false-positive" error affects not only legal reasoning, but all forms of cognitive analysis where pattern recognition is necessary, such as interpreting electrocardiograms. In order to increase the liklihood that a doctor will correctly identify the subtle patterns associated with particular types of cardiac pathology, he will have to accept the risk of identifying that pathology when none is actually there. He trades off false positive interpratations as the price of minimizing false negatives.

In the legal context, this apophenia phenomenon leads legal scholars on jurists to find patterns in factual scenarios, legal precedents and modern culture that appears to fit with a certain principle. Sometimes they derive a useful rule or concept, but they also will occasionally be fooled into thinking that they have identified an underlying truth that really isn't there.

HOMOSEXUALITY

Homosexuality is an expected consequence of nature using sexual reproduction as a method of providing genetic diversity.

There would be little diversity resulting from all males being attracted to the same trait, and all females doing likewise. In the extreme case, not only would all males be attracted to the same type of female, they would be attracted to a single individual. This would frustrate the purpose of genetic diversity, which would negate the benefits of sexual reproduction. Thus, "normal" males (to focus on this portion of the species) are attracted to a variety of different female attributes; some men prefer thin females, other more sturdy shapes, some prefer large breasts, others not, different men are attracted preferentially to different body parts, etc. Nature endows the male inventory with a bell curve of sexual appetites, and as we move from the norm, we encounter all types of paraphilias that are not ultimately character defects, but the statistical and anomalous consequences of nature's quest for genetic diversity within the species. Nature has decided that it is OK to have a small percentage of the population have sexual orientations that incline away from reproduction as price to keep stirring the genetic pot. This may explain why there is no true homosexuality gene. If all sexual appetites were genetically determined, all types of genetic traits would cluster in discrete populations, and once again, the goal of genetic diversity would be frustrated.

PRIVACY

The current debate over acquisition of foreign intelligence takes many things for granted, so much so that many key concepts are neglected. Aong these are:

1.) The nature of privacy. The notion of privacy is given great deference in national security debates, so much so that it nears divine reverence. What is lost in this treatment, is the fact that privacy has a purpose. Citizens of a free society need to have some measure of control over their own reputation. It is necessary for the orderly interactions that are necessary to living with one another. This is why English common law allowed actions for libel and slander, and why the common virtue of minding ones own business has survivied as an element of good manners. A reputation is no small matter in any community, and respecting privacy makes it easier for one to defend against scurrilous acusations or other stains upon an individuals honor. Society should therefore respect privacy because it benefits the society to do so, not because it is an absolute virtue. A society is not required to allow plots, even by its own citizens, to advance in darkness, simply because "privacy" is beneficial in other respects.

There is no benefit to American society in allowing non-citizens outside of national borders to transact any business, no mater how innocuous, in secrecy. Respect for the privacy of such transactions is not a matter that affects the orderly business of this society, and there is no infringement on any right by simply slistening on on what there is to hear. The right of privacy inherent in the fourth amendment is a compact between a government and the free people that consent to it, not a capitulation of a universally recognized human right.

2.) "Expectations of privacy." Even in American criminal law, privacy rights are subject to the common sense limitation that there is no privacy where none would be expected. Two non-citizens outside of the United States cannot reasonably expect that a communication that passes through the U.S. would not be scrutinized by a government that is trying to protect its people from nefarious schemes and terrorist atrocities.

3.) The concept of penetration in terror attacks. When terrorists plot an operation, one of the most difficult elements is to determine how to penetrate the vigilance of the target to accomplish the deed. This is an element of all terrorist operations, from the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, to the attempted assassination of Margaret Thatcher, to the attack on the USS Cole, to the attacks of 9/11. Penetration is the most tenuous element in a terrorist plot, as can be seen in foiling the Millennium plot. Thus, this is where terror plots are most vulnerable, and where surveillance is most useful. Surveillance is a very efficient way to defeat the ruses and stealth used by terrorists to penetrate their targets.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN

I believe that the current controversies regarding "intelligent design" are best understood in light of Aristotle's theory of the four causes. He concluded that there are 4 types of cause: formal, material, efficient and final. The formal cause of something is the pattern, design, or archetype that determines the final form of the thing. The architectural plan for a house or blueprint of a machine are examples. The substance that actually makes up the thing, the bricks and mortar of the house or metal of the machine is the material cause. The efficient cause is the factual production of the thing; the building of the house or assembling of the machine, and the final cause is the reason why the enterprise was undertaken in the first place, e.g. somebody needed a house or the machine was thought to be useful.

The contemplation of the biological origin of man also demonstrates each of Aristotle's four causes. Genes are the formal cause of homo sapiens, ribonucleic acids are the material cause, evolution or natural selection is the efficient cause. These observations seem to involve little controversy. The issue arises when people consider the final cause, the "why?"

The final cause (in the Aristotelian sense) creates contention when included in scientific thought because it is not science. It is irrelevant to understanding the other three types of causes, and is not amenable of scientific investigation. Those who wish to introduce an "Intelligent Designer" as the final cause of man conflate philospohical and religious yearning with scientific empiricism, ending up with something that is neither intellectually or spiritually fulfilling.

People search for a final cause of their existence, not because it is scientifically necessary, but because it is emotionally comforting. Piety would be so much easier if the objects of our devotion could be accessed by more familiar forms of reasoning. Faith would be much easier if it didn't require so much faith.

Ultimately, intelligent design will be found irrelevant to both the science of biology and the destination of a true spiritual journey.

AUDIENCES

It seems to be common sense that most objections to free speech that someone finds "offensive" are complained of simply because someone's feelings are hurt. The real objection to speech is that it may be potentially pursuasive and contrary to the broader interests of those who take offense.

One of the notable aspects about the rhetoric of Reverend Jeremiah Wright and others who "speak truth to power" is that they seldom speak anything controversial apart from cheering and sympathetic crowds. One suspects that those such as Rev. Wright speak as they do, not because of the change they seek, but because of the reaction they receive. Not all showmen are courageous.

A better example of someone who exercised her right of speech out of conviction is Sacheen Littlefeather, who was booed at the Academy Awards for explaining why Marlon Brando was refusing the Best Actor Oscar for The Godfather. As to why Brando didn't explain in person...

WIZARDS

The present political fixation with the allegedly unique attributes of Barack Obama is merely another instance of the human trait of seeking out supermen, masterminds and saviors. This activity actually happens every year in national sports, and the phenomenon is particularly prevalent in college football. Every year coaches resign and are fired, and fans of the affected team denigrate one candidate or another, thinking that merely accomplished mortals stand in the way of the team finding teh "wizard."

Presently, there are a few coaches that bear the Wizard mantle, with Pete Carroll being the most obvious. Larry Coker, Bob Stoops, Bobby Petrino, Nick Saban and Jim Tressel have also ehld the title at one time or another. The fact is though, that there are no wizards. There is no one who has figured out something or who has some intangible gift that delvers success beyond that which can be explained by competence, experience, hard work and a little luck. Agood football coach will lose one out of every five times he takes the field. An exceptional coah will lose one out of every six. And that is not one out of five or six games against top ten opponents; it is against all-comers.

Every coach gets outcoached, has bad days and is beaten by inferior opponents. There are no Wizards in college football, or in world leaders. Great men like Churchill and Lincoln had their blunders, off days and fiascos. Every year some anointed coaching mastermind, who has let expectaions rise to an undefeated national championship, will lose a game that leaves fans wondering if maybe it's not time for a change. We can expect the same thoughts about our political leaders every election as well.