June 24, 2009
Mark Steyn writes about Britain's rising protectionist party.
Are you getting just a teensy bit tired of the ol’ “Whither the Right?” navel-gazing? Even with our good
friends at the New York Times, the Washington Post, et al. so eager to offer helpful advice, there’s a limit to
how much pondering of conservatism’s future a chap can take. So how about, just for a change, “Whither
the Left?”
Exhibit A: The European parliamentary elections. The Continent’s economy has taken a far bigger
clobbering than America’s: Capitalism is dead, declared Cardinal Murphy O’Connor, head of the Roman
Catholic Church in England and Wales. In France, President Sarkozy agrees, while being careful to identify
the deceased as “Anglo-American capitalism.” And woe betide any Continental foolish enough to have got
into bed with it: In Spain, the unemployment rate is 17 percent and rising.
In theory, this ought to be boom time for lefties. As their jobs, homes, and savings vanish, the downtrodden
masses should be stampeding back to the embrace of the Big Government nanny’s apron strings. Instead,
the Euro-Left got hammered at the polls, the center-right survived, and a big chunk of the electorate
switched to the “far right” — the various neo-nationalist and quasi-fascist parties cleaning up everywhere
from Northern England to the Balkans. My favorite of these new and mostly unlovely groupings is Bulgaria’s
Attack party, mainly because of its name. I would suggest the Republican party adopt it, but no doubt within
a month or two the latest Bush scion would be claiming to stand for a Compassionate Attack movement and
governors of coastal states would be declaring themselves fiscally attacking but socially surrendering, and
the whole brand would go to hell. ...
Christopher Hitchens says that to gain insight into Iranian society, ignore the mullahs. Listen
instead to the authors and poets.
The best-known and best-selling satirical novel in the Persian language is My Uncle Napoleon, by Iraj
Pezeshkzad, which describes the ridiculous and eventually hateful existence of a family member who
subscribes to the "Brit Plot" theory of Iranian history. The novel was published in 1973 and later made into a
fabulously popular Iranian TV series. Both the printed and televised versions were promptly banned by the
ayatollahs after 1979 but survive in samizdat form. Since then, one of the leading clerics of the so-called
Guardian Council, Ahmad Jannati, has announced in a nationwide broadcast that the bombings in London
on July 7, 2005, were the "creation" of the British government itself. I strongly recommend that you get hold
of the Modern Library paperback of Pezeshkzad's novel, produced in 2006, and read it from start to finish
while paying special attention to the foreword by Azar Nafisi (author of Reading Lolita in Tehran) and the
afterword by the author himself, who says:
In his fantasies, the novel's central character sees the hidden hand of British imperialism behind every event
that has happened in Iran until the recent past. For the first time, the people of Iran have clearly seen the
absurdity of this belief, although they tend to ascribe it to others and not to themselves, and have been able
to laugh at it. And this has, finally, had a salutary influence. Nowadays, in Persian, the phrase "My Uncle
Napoleon" is used everywhere to indicate a belief that British plots are behind all events, and is
accompanied by ridicule and laughter. ... The only section of society who attacked it was the Mullahs. ...
[T]hey said I had been ordered to write the book by imperialists, and that I had done so in order to destroy
the roots of religion in the people of Iran.
Fantastic as these claims may have seemed three years ago, they sound mild when compared with the
ravings and gibberings that are now issued from the Khamenei pulpit. Here is a man who hasn't even heard
that his favorite conspiracy theory is a long-standing joke among his own people. And these ravings and
gibberings have real-world consequences of which at least three may be mentioned:
1. There is nothing at all that any Western country can do to avoid the charge of intervening in Iran's
internal affairs. The deep belief that everything—especially anything in English—is already and by
definition an intervention is part of the very identity and ideology of the theocracy.
2. It is a mistake to assume that the ayatollahs, cynical and corrupt as they may be, are acting rationally.
They are frequently in the grip of archaic beliefs and fears that would make a stupefied medieval
European peasant seem mentally sturdy and resourceful by comparison.
3. The tendency of outside media to check the temperature of the clerics, rather than consult the writers
and poets of the country, shows our own cultural backwardness in regrettably sharp relief. Anyone
who had been reading Pezeshkzad and Nafisi, or talking to their students and readers in Tabriz and
Esfahan and Mashad, would have been able to avoid the awful embarrassment by which everything
that has occurred on the streets of Iran during recent days has come as one surprise after another to
most of our uncultured "experts." ...
Anne Applebaum says that women's contributions to the Iranian insurrection have been
overlooked.
Women in sunglasses and headscarves, speaking through megaphones, brandishing cameras, carrying
signs: When they first appeared, the photographs of the 2005 Tehran University women's rights protests
were a powerful reminder of the true potential of Iranian women. The images were uplifting; they featured
women of many ages; and they went on circulating long after the protests themselves died down. Now they
have been replaced by a far more brutal and already infamous set of images: The photographs and video
taken this past weekend of a young Iranian woman, allegedly shot by a government sniper, dying on the
streets of Tehran.
I don't know whether the girl in the photographs is destined to become this revolution's symbolic martyr, as
some are already predicting. I do know, however, that there is a connection between the violence in Iran
over the past week and the women's rights movement that has slowly gained strength in Iran over the past
several years.
In the United States, the most America-centric commentators have somberly attributed the strength of recent
demonstrations to the election of Barack Obama. Others want to give credit to the democracy rhetoric of the
Bush administration. Still others want to call this a "Twitter revolution" or a "Facebook revolution," as if zippy
new technology alone had inspired the protests. But the truth is that the high turnout has been the result of
many years of organizational work, carried out by small groups of civil rights activists and above all women's
groups, working largely unnoticed and without much outside help. ...
A couple of Corner posts on Obamacare. Larry Kudlow;
... According the U.S. Census Bureau, we don’t have 47 million folks who are truly uninsured. When you
take college kids plus those earning $75,000 or more who chose not to sign up, that removes roughly 20
million people. Then take out about 10 million more who are not U.S. citizens, and 11 million who are eligible
for SCHIP and Medicaid but have not signed up for some reason.
So that really leaves only 10 million to 15 million people who are truly long-term uninsured.
Yes, they need help. And yes, I would like to give it to them. But not with mandatory coverage, or new
government-backed insurance plans, or massive tax increases. And certainly not with the CanadianEuropean-style nationalization that has always been the true goal of the Obama administration and
congressional Democrats. ...
George Will writes that the simplest answer to the question, "Why Obamacare?" is the correct
one.
To dissect today's health-care debate, the crux of which concerns a "public option," use the mind's
equivalent of a surgeon's scalpel, Occam's razor, a principle of intellectual parsimony: In solving a puzzle,
start with the simplest explanatory theory.
The puzzle is: Why does the president, who says that were America "starting from scratch" he would favor a
"single-payer" -- government-run -- system, insist that health-care reform include a government insurance
plan that competes with private insurers? The simplest answer is that such a plan will lead to a single-payer
system.
Conservatives say that a government program will have the intended consequence of crowding private
insurers out of the market, encouraging employers to stop providing coverage and luring employees from
private insurance to the cheaper government option.
The Lewin Group estimates that 70 percent of the 172 million persons privately covered might be drawn, or
pushed, to the government plan. A significant portion of the children who have enrolled in the State
Children's Health Insurance Program since eligibility requirements were relaxed in February had private
insurance.
Assurances that the government plan would play by the rules that private insurers play by are implausible.
Government is incapable of behaving like market-disciplined private insurers. Competition from the public
option must be unfair because government does not need to make a profit and has enormous pricing and
negotiating powers. Besides, unless the point of a government plan is to be cheaper, it is pointless: If the
public option conforms to the imperatives that regulations and competition impose on private insurers, there
is no reason for it.
The president characteristically denies that he is doing what he is doing -- putting the nation on a path to an
outcome he considers desirable -- just as he denies any intention of running General Motors. Nevertheless,
the unifying constant of his domestic policies -- their connecting thread -- is that they advance the
Democrats' dependency agenda. The party of government aims to make Americans more equal by making
them equally dependent on government for more and more things. ...
Marc K. Siegel gives a doctor's opinion about Obamacare by discussing his current
experiences with Medicare and Medicaid.
Wondering why the American Medical Association came out against a "public option" in health reform -- that
is, against government-offered health insurance for every American? For this MD, at least, it's a simple
matter of learning from experience.
As a practicing internist, I've been dealing with two government insurance programs, Medicare and
Medicaid, for more than two decades. Over the years, I've seen the government shrink reimbursements
under first Medicaid and then Medicare -- to the point that, in 2005, I finally decided that I couldn't stay in
business unless I stopped taking Medicaid patients, and saw no more than a few Medicare patients each
day.
It was costing me more to file the Medicaid paperwork than I got back from the government. I now either
charge Medicaid patients a few dollars, or just see them for free. ...
David Brooks looks at the Senate's inner workings to produce healthcare reform.
... In the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body, senators don’t run things. Chairmen and their staffs run things.
During the spring, as the Obama administration faded to invisibility, the finance and health committees
separately put together plans. These plans did not alter the employer exemption. They did build on the
current system. They did include approaches that have been around since Richard Nixon.
The problem with the committee plans is that they don’t do much to change the underlying incentives, and
consequently don’t do much to control costs. “The single most expensive option is to build on the existing
system,” says the health care costs guru John Sheils of the Lewin Group.
The C.B.O. measured the plans, and the results were devastating. A successful plan has to be revenueneutral for the government over the next 10 years, and it has to reduce the total health care burden over the
long term so the country doesn’t go bankrupt. The Senate committee plans failed both criteria. They would
cost the government more than $1 trillion this decade and send total health care costs zooming at least
twice as fast as the economy as a whole.
The C.B.O. reports sent shock waves through Washington. ...
Corner posts following up on NY's amazing education pensions.
And an interesting article in Popular Science on Iceland's attempts to advance geothermal
energy production.
It's spring in Iceland, and three feet of snow covers the ground. The sky is gray and the temperature hovers
just below freezing, yet Gudmundur Omar Fridleifsson is wearing only a windbreaker. Icelanders say they
can spot the tourists because they wear too many clothes, but Fridleifsson seems particularly impervious.
He's out here every few days to check on the Tyr geothermal drilling rig, the largest in Iceland. The rig's
engines are barely audible over the cold wind, and the sole sign of activity is the slow dance of a crane as it
grabs another 30-foot segment of steel pipe, attaches it to the top of the drill shaft, and slides it into the well.
Beneath the calm landscape, though, Fridleifsson and his crew of geologists, engineers and roughnecks are
attempting the Manhattan Project of geothermal energy. The two-mile-deep hole they've drilled into Krafla,
an active volcanic crater, is twice as deep as any geothermal well in the world. It's the keystone in an effort
to extract "supercritical" water, stuff so hot and under so much pressure that it exists somewhere between
liquid and steam. If they can tame this fluid — if it doesn't blow up their drill or dissolve the well's steel lining
— and turn it into electricity, it could yield a tenfold increase in the amount of power Iceland can wrest from
the land.
Iceland's geological evolution makes it especially well suited to harvesting geothermal energy. The island is
basically one big volcano, formed over millions of years as molten rock bubbled up from the seafloor. The
porous rock under its treeless plains sponges up hundreds of inches of rain every year and heats it
belowground. Using this energy is simply a matter of digging a well, drawing the hot fluid to the surface, and
sticking a power plant on top. ...
National Review
Protectionism Racket
by Mark Steyn
Are you getting just a teensy bit tired of the ol’ “Whither the Right?” navel-gazing? Even with our good
friends at the New York Times, the Washington Post, et al. so eager to offer helpful advice, there’s a limit to
how much pondering of conservatism’s future a chap can take. So how about, just for a change, “Whither
the Left?”
Exhibit A: The European parliamentary elections. The Continent’s economy has taken a far bigger
clobbering than America’s: Capitalism is dead, declared Cardinal Murphy O’Connor, head of the Roman
Catholic Church in England and Wales. In France, President Sarkozy agrees, while being careful to identify
the deceased as “Anglo-American capitalism.” And woe betide any Continental foolish enough to have got
into bed with it: In Spain, the unemployment rate is 17 percent and rising.
In theory, this ought to be boom time for lefties. As their jobs, homes, and savings vanish, the downtrodden
masses should be stampeding back to the embrace of the Big Government nanny’s apron strings. Instead,
the Euro-Left got hammered at the polls, the center-right survived, and a big chunk of the electorate
switched to the “far right” — the various neo-nationalist and quasi-fascist parties cleaning up everywhere
from Northern England to the Balkans. My favorite of these new and mostly unlovely groupings is Bulgaria’s
Attack party, mainly because of its name. I would suggest the Republican party adopt it, but no doubt within
a month or two the latest Bush scion would be claiming to stand for a Compassionate Attack movement and
governors of coastal states would be declaring themselves fiscally attacking but socially surrendering, and
the whole brand would go to hell.
Perhaps it’s just as well. On closer inspection, Europe’s “far right” doesn’t seem to go very far at all. The
British National party’s parliamentary victories are a very belated breakthrough for fascism, for which in
Britain there were few takers back in the Thirties. So what do they stand for? They won’t accept blacks or
Asians as members — typical right-wing racists, eh? Also, they want protectionist laws limiting the import of
foreign goods. They favor giving workers shares in their bosses’ companies. And they want to nationalize
the public utilities, railroad companies, and so forth. Economic protectionism. Worker cooperatives. State
ownership. Boy, these right-wing nuts with their crazy ideas on free-market capitalism.
If you think the British elections are beginning to sound like the dinner-theater production of Jonah
Goldberg’s book, you’re right — if by dinner you had in mind tripe, pork scratchings, and mushy peas
washed down with 14 pints of brown ale and a knife fight. Economically, the BNP is the Labour party before
the Blairite metrosexual makeover, and its voting base comes all but entirely from the old white working
class abandoned by “New Labour” in its pursuit of more fashionable identity groups. Economic protectionism
is not its principal appeal. But yoke economic protectionism to cultural protectionism and you’ve got an
electorally viable combination. These are bad times, but they’re not just bad economically. According to a
YouGov poll, the average BNP voter is a manual worker with an annual household income of £27,000 — or
about £2,000 less than the national median. Two thousand quid isn’t to be sniffed at, but it doesn’t explain
why these voters were willing to take a flyer on an openly racist party universally reviled by the media and
political class and banished from public discourse.
England has (or had) a three-party system: Labour, Liberals, Tories. But on any number of issues — the
European Union, immigration, crime, the remorseless one-way multiculturalism under which what were
homogenous white working-class communities 40 years ago Islamize more rapidly with each passing day —
on all these issues, the big three parties, plus the BBC and the rest of the elites, are in complete agreement:
We don’t want to talk about it. Since the election, the grand panjandrums of the Palace of Westminster have
been competing to out–Lady Bracknell each other in professing how “horrified” they are by the BNP’s
success. Such protestations are invariably accompanied by ostentatious recital of their own multiculti bona
fides, nicely parodied by Ed West in the Daily Telegraph: “I was just saying how awful the BNP were to my
Polish cleaner yesterday. She agreed, as did my Chinese nanny, Wen or Yen, or whatever her name is. My
Brazilian catamite wasn’t that bothered.”
If 20 percent of the U.S. electorate had voted for the American Fatherland Front or some such, you’d never
hear the end of it from Le Monde and the Guardian and all the rest. But the Euro-elites have adjusted to the
knuckledraggers’ lèse majesté, and are already congratulating themselves on holding the “far right” vote
down to the low double digits. It won’t be that low next time, but they’ll adjust to that too. You can’t blame
’em: It’s easier to do that than rethink your entire worldview, never mind try to figure out anything you could
actually do about these issues. I doubt the new kids on the block will be able to do anything, either. But, for a
while, there will be votes in impotent rage, and the economic-and-cultural protectionism twofer will eat deep
into the mainstream Left’s base. They in turn will not change — for, in Britain and elsewhere, they have
determined to celebrate diversity even unto societal death.
Slate.com
Persian Paranoia
Iranian leaders will always believe Anglo-Saxons are plotting against them.
By Christopher Hitchens
I have twice had the privilege of sitting, poorly shaved, on the floor and attending the Friday prayers that the
Iranian theocracy sponsors each week on the campus of Tehran University. As everybody knows, this
dreary, nasty ceremony is occasionally enlivened when the scrofulous preacher leads the crowd in a robotic
chant of Marg Bar Amrika!—"Death to America!" As nobody will be surprised to learn, this is generally
followed by a cry of Marg Bar Israel! And it's by no means unknown for the three-beat bleat of this twominute hate to have yet a third version: Marg Bar Ingilis!
Some commentators noticed that as "Supreme Leader" Ali Khamenei viciously slammed the door on all
possibilities of reform at last Friday's prayers, he laid his greatest emphasis on the third of these
incantations. "The most evil of them all," he droned, "is the British government." But the real significance of
his weird accusation has generally been missed.
One of the signs of Iran's underdevelopment is the culture of rumor and paranoia that attributes all ills to the
manipulation of various demons and satans. And, of course, the long and rich history of British imperial
intervention in Persia does provide some support for the notion. But you have no idea how deep is the
primitive belief that it is the Anglo-Saxons—more than the CIA, more even than the Jews—who are the
puppet masters of everything that happens in Iran.
The best-known and best-selling satirical novel in the Persian language is My Uncle Napoleon, by Iraj
Pezeshkzad, which describes the ridiculous and eventually hateful existence of a family member who
subscribes to the "Brit Plot" theory of Iranian history. The novel was published in 1973 and later made into a
fabulously popular Iranian TV series. Both the printed and televised versions were promptly banned by the
ayatollahs after 1979 but survive in samizdat form. Since then, one of the leading clerics of the so-called
Guardian Council, Ahmad Jannati, has announced in a nationwide broadcast that the bombings in London
on July 7, 2005, were the "creation" of the British government itself. I strongly recommend that you get hold
of the Modern Library paperback of Pezeshkzad's novel, produced in 2006, and read it from start to finish
while paying special attention to the foreword by Azar Nafisi (author of Reading Lolita in Tehran) and the
afterword by the author himself, who says:
In his fantasies, the novel's central character sees the hidden hand of British imperialism behind every event
that has happened in Iran until the recent past. For the first time, the people of Iran have clearly seen the
absurdity of this belief, although they tend to ascribe it to others and not to themselves, and have been able
to laugh at it. And this has, finally, had a salutary influence. Nowadays, in Persian, the phrase "My Uncle
Napoleon" is used everywhere to indicate a belief that British plots are behind all events, and is
accompanied by ridicule and laughter. ... The only section of society who attacked it was the Mullahs. ...
[T]hey said I had been ordered to write the book by imperialists, and that I had done so in order to destroy
the roots of religion in the people of Iran.
Fantastic as these claims may have seemed three years ago, they sound mild when compared with the
ravings and gibberings that are now issued from the Khamenei pulpit. Here is a man who hasn't even heard
that his favorite conspiracy theory is a long-standing joke among his own people. And these ravings and
gibberings have real-world consequences of which at least three may be mentioned:
1. There is nothing at all that any Western country can do to avoid the charge of intervening in Iran's
internal affairs. The deep belief that everything—especially anything in English—is already and by
definition an intervention is part of the very identity and ideology of the theocracy.
2. It is a mistake to assume that the ayatollahs, cynical and corrupt as they may be, are acting rationally.
They are frequently in the grip of archaic beliefs and fears that would make a stupefied medieval
European peasant seem mentally sturdy and resourceful by comparison.
3. The tendency of outside media to check the temperature of the clerics, rather than consult the writers
and poets of the country, shows our own cultural backwardness in regrettably sharp relief. Anyone
who had been reading Pezeshkzad and Nafisi, or talking to their students and readers in Tabriz and
Esfahan and Mashad, would have been able to avoid the awful embarrassment by which everything
that has occurred on the streets of Iran during recent days has come as one surprise after another to
most of our uncultured "experts."
That last observation also applies to the Obama administration. Want to take a noninterventionist position?
All right, then, take a noninterventionist position. This would mean not referring to Khamenei in fawning
tones as the supreme leader and not calling Iran itself by the tyrannical title of "the Islamic republic." But be
aware that nothing will stop the theocrats from slandering you for interfering anyway. Also try to bear in mind
that one day you will have to face the young Iranian democrats who risked their all in the battle and explain
to them just what you were doing when they were being beaten and gassed. (Hint: Don't make your sole
reference to Iranian dictatorship an allusion to a British-organized coup in 1953; the mullahs think that it
proves their main point, and this generation has more immediate enemies to confront.)
There is then the larger question of the Iranian theocracy and its continual, arrogant intervention in our
affairs: its export of violence and cruelty and lies to Lebanon and Palestine and Iraq and its unashamed
defiance of the United Nations, the European Union, and the International Atomic Energy Agency on the
nontrivial matter of nuclear weapons. I am sure that I was as impressed as anybody by our president's
decision to quote Martin Luther King—rather late in the week—on the arc of justice and the way in which it
eventually bends. It was just that in a time of crisis and urgency he was citing the wrong King text (the right
one is to be found in the "Letter From a Birmingham Jail"), and it was also as if he were speaking as the
president of Iceland or Uruguay rather than as president of these United States. Coexistence with a
nuclearized, fascistic theocracy in Iran is impossible even in the short run. The mullahs understand this with
perfect clarity. Why can't we?
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion
Poisons Everything, now out in paperback.
Washington Post
An Overlooked Force in Iran
By Anne Applebaum
Women in sunglasses and headscarves, speaking through megaphones, brandishing cameras, carrying
signs: When they first appeared, the photographs of the 2005 Tehran University women's rights protests
were a powerful reminder of the true potential of Iranian women. The images were uplifting; they featured
women of many ages; and they went on circulating long after the protests themselves died down. Now they
have been replaced by a far more brutal and already infamous set of images: The photographs and video
taken this past weekend of a young Iranian woman, allegedly shot by a government sniper, dying on the
streets of Tehran.
I don't know whether the girl in the photographs is destined to become this revolution's symbolic martyr, as
some are already predicting. I do know, however, that there is a connection between the violence in Iran
over the past week and the women's rights movement that has slowly gained strength in Iran over the past
several years.
In the United States, the most America-centric commentators have somberly attributed the strength of recent
demonstrations to the election of Barack Obama. Others want to give credit to the democracy rhetoric of the
Bush administration. Still others want to call this a "Twitter revolution" or a "Facebook revolution," as if zippy
new technology alone had inspired the protests. But the truth is that the high turnout has been the result of
many years of organizational work, carried out by small groups of civil rights activists and above all women's
groups, working largely unnoticed and without much outside help.
Since 2006, the One Million Signatures Campaign has been circulating a petition, online and in print, that
calls for an end to laws that discriminate against women and the enactment of laws that provide equal rights
for women in marriage, equal rights to divorce, equal inheritance rights and equal testimony rights for men
and women in court. Though based outside the country, the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation, founded
by a pair of sisters, translates and publishes online fundamental human rights documents; it maintains an
online database of the names of thousands of victims of the Islamic Republic as well. In the past decade,
Iranian women have participated in student strikes as well as teachers' strikes, and in organizations of
Bahai, Christian and other religious groups whose members are deemed "heretics" by the regime.
Not Obama, not Bush and not Twitter, in other words, but years of work and effort lie behind the public
display of defiance and, in particular, the number of women on the streets -- and their presence matters.
Their presence could strike the deepest blow against the regime. For at the heart of the ideology of the
Islamic Republic is its claim to divine inspiration: Its leadership is legitimate, as is its harsh repression of
women, because God has decreed that it is so. The outright rejection of this creed by tens of thousands of
women, not just over the past weekend but over the past decade, has to weaken the Islamic Republic's
claim to invincibility, in Iran and across the Middle East. The regime's political elite knows this well: It is no
accident that the two main challengers to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the Iranian presidential
campaign promised to repeal some of the laws that discriminate against women, and it is no accident that
the leading challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, used his wife, a political scientist and former university
chancellor, in his campaign appearances and posters.
The Iranian clerics know that women pose a profound threat to their authority, too: As the activist Ladan
Boroumand has written, the regime would not bother to brutally repress dissidents unless it feared them
deeply. Nobody would have murdered a peaceful, unarmed young woman in blue jeans -- unless her mere
presence on the street presented a dire threat.
The regime may succeed. Violence usually succeeds, at least in the short term, in intimidating people. In the
long term, however, the links, structures, organizations and groups set up by Iranian women, not to mention
the photographs of the past week, will continue to gnaw away at the Iranian regime's legitimacy -- and we
should take note. I cannot count how many times I've been told in recent years that "women's issues" in the
Islamic world are a secondary subject: Whether the discussion is of the Afghan constitution or the Saudi
government, the standard line among most commentators has always been that other things -- stability,
security, oil -- matter more. But regimes that repress the civil and human rights of half their population are
inherently unstable. Sooner or later, there has to be a backlash. In Iran, we're watching one unfold.
The Corner
Mark Steyn's Obamacare Rallying Call
by Kathryn Jean Lopez
From his guest-host appearance on Rush's show Monday: "The minute health care becomes a huge,
unwieldy, expensive government bureaucracy it's a permanent feature of life and there's nothing anyone can
do about it. That's why Republicans need to resist this in Congress, because if we cross this line we can
never go back."
The Corner
We Don’t Need Obama’s Big-Bang Health-Care Plan
by Larry Kudlow
It looks like President Obama’s big-bang health-care reform is going down to defeat. This is good. But my
question is why do we need it at all? According to a recent ABC News/USA Today/Kaiser Family Foundation
survey, 89 percent of Americans are satisfied with their health care. That could mean up to 250 million
people are happy. So why is it that we need Obama’s big-bang health-care overhaul in the first place?
There’s more. According the U.S. Census Bureau, we don’t have 47 million folks who are truly uninsured.
When you take college kids plus those earning $75,000 or more who chose not to sign up, that removes
roughly 20 million people. Then take out about 10 million more who are not U.S. citizens, and 11 million who
are eligible for SCHIP and Medicaid but have not signed up for some reason.
So that really leaves only 10 million to 15 million people who are truly long-term uninsured.
Yes, they need help. And yes, I would like to give it to them. But not with mandatory coverage, or new
government-backed insurance plans, or massive tax increases. And certainly not with the CanadianEuropean-style nationalization that has always been the true goal of the Obama administration and
congressional Democrats.
Instead, we can give the truly uninsured vouchers or debit cards that will allow for choice and coverage, and
even health savings accounts for retirement wealth. According to expert Betsy McCaughey, instead of
several trillion dollars and socialized medicine, this voucher approach would cost only about $25 billion a
year.
But the Democratic agenda has never really been about just the uninsured. And it certainly hasn’t been
about real cost-cutting or true market choice and competition. Nor has it been about tort/trial-lawyer reform.
Instead, the Democratic agenda has always been a class-warfare, anti-business attack on private-sector
doctors, hospitals, insurance firms, and drug companies. It’s all about control, knocking down their profits,
and telling them what to do.
Because government planners know best, right? Wrong. Absolutely wrong.
Washington Post
The Stealth Single-Payer Agenda
By George F. Will
To dissect today's health-care debate, the crux of which concerns a "public option," use the mind's
equivalent of a surgeon's scalpel, Occam's razor, a principle of intellectual parsimony: In solving a puzzle,
start with the simplest explanatory theory.
The puzzle is: Why does the president, who says that were America "starting from scratch" he would favor a
"single-payer" -- government-run -- system, insist that health-care reform include a government insurance
plan that competes with private insurers? The simplest answer is that such a plan will lead to a single-payer
system.
Conservatives say that a government program will have the intended consequence of crowding private
insurers out of the market, encouraging employers to stop providing coverage and luring employees from
private insurance to the cheaper government option.
The Lewin Group estimates that 70 percent of the 172 million persons privately covered might be drawn, or
pushed, to the government plan. A significant portion of the children who have enrolled in the State
Children's Health Insurance Program since eligibility requirements were relaxed in February had private
insurance.
Assurances that the government plan would play by the rules that private insurers play by are implausible.
Government is incapable of behaving like market-disciplined private insurers. Competition from the public
option must be unfair because government does not need to make a profit and has enormous pricing and
negotiating powers. Besides, unless the point of a government plan is to be cheaper, it is pointless: If the
public option conforms to the imperatives that regulations and competition impose on private insurers, there
is no reason for it.
The president characteristically denies that he is doing what he is doing -- putting the nation on a path to an
outcome he considers desirable -- just as he denies any intention of running General Motors. Nevertheless,
the unifying constant of his domestic policies -- their connecting thread -- is that they advance the
Democrats' dependency agenda. The party of government aims to make Americans more equal by making
them equally dependent on government for more and more things.
Arguments for the public option are too feeble to seem ingenuous. The president says competition from a
government plan is necessary to keep private insurers "honest." Presumably, being "honest" means not
colluding to set prices, and evidently he thinks that, absent competition from government, there will not be a
competitive market for insurance. This ignores two facts:
There are 1,300 competing providers of health insurance. And Roll Call's Morton Kondracke notes that the
2003 Medicare prescription drug entitlement, relying on competition among private insurers, enjoys 87
percent approval partly because competition has made premiums less expensive than had been projected.
The program's estimated cost from 2007 to 2016 has been reduced 43 percent.
Some advocates of a public option say health coverage is so complex that consumers will be befuddled by
choices. But consumers of many complicated products, from auto insurance to computers, have navigated
the competition among providers, who have increased quality while lowering prices.
Although 70 percent of insured Americans rate their health-care arrangements good or excellent, radical
reform of health care is supposedly necessary because there are 45.7 million uninsured. That number is,
however, a "snapshot" of a nation in which more than 20 million working Americans change jobs every year.
Many of them are briefly uninsured between jobs. If all the uninsured were assembled for a group
photograph, and six months later the then-uninsured were assembled for another photograph, about half the
people in the photos would be different.
Almost 39 percent of the uninsured are in five states -- Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California,
all of which are entry points for immigrants. About 21 percent -- 9.7 million -- of the uninsured are not
citizens. As many as 14 million are eligible for existing government programs -- Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP,
veterans' benefits, etc. -- but have not enrolled. And 9.1 million have household incomes of at least $75,000
and could purchase insurance. Those last two cohorts are more than half of the 45.7 million.
Insuring the perhaps 20 million persons who are protractedly uninsured because they cannot afford
insurance is conceptually simple: Give them money -- (refundable) tax credits or debit cards (which have
replaced food stamps) loaded with a particular value. This would produce people who are more empowered
than dependent. Unfortunately, advocates of a government option consider that a defect. Which is why the
simple idea of the dependency agenda cuts like a razor through the complexities of this debate.
New York Post
Why Docs Fear Government 'Help'
by Marc K. Siegel
Physicians fear that near-mindless efforts to find cost savings . . . will damage our very ability to practice.
WONDERING why the American Medical Association came out against a "public option" in health reform -that is, against government-offered health insurance for every American? For this MD, at least, it's a simple
matter of learning from experience.
As a practicing internist, I've been dealing with two government insurance programs, Medicare and
Medicaid, for more than two decades. Over the years, I've seen the government shrink reimbursements
under first Medicaid and then Medicare -- to the point that, in 2005, I finally decided that I couldn't stay in
business unless I stopped taking Medicaid patients, and saw no more than a few Medicare patients each
day.
It was costing me more to file the Medicaid paperwork than I got back from the government. I now either
charge Medicaid patients a few dollars, or just see them for free.
It's getting tougher to take Medicare patients, too: New drugs and new technologies are wonderful healthcare tools -- but keeping current, and making sure to choose the right tool, uses up more and more of my
time. Yet Medicare's reimbursement for my efforts keeps on shrinking.
I'm not alone. Each year, I find I have fewer specialists to refer my Medicare patients to. The best
mammographer I know no longer accepts Medicare, so I find myself trying to persuade my patients to see
her anyway (and pay $300-plus out of pocket) because she's so good.
Nor is this just my impression. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission reported that 28 percent of
Medicare beneficiaries looking for a primary-care physician last year had trouble finding one, up from 24
percent the year before. And a survey last year by the Texas Medical Association found that only 38 percent
of primary-care doctors were taking new Medicare patients. Here in New York, less than half the internists
affiliated with New York Presbyterian Hospital accept Medicare.
The problem is even worse with Medicaid -- which only half of physicians accept, according to a 2005
Community Tracking Physician survey.
The problem is spreading to private insurers -- who often follow the lead of Medicare and Medicaid. HMOs,
in particular, have cut reimbursements to doctors; many of my colleagues have dropped out of HMOS as a
result (giving me fewer options of who to refer my patients to).
Recent New York state surveys show doctor participation in HMOs is still far better than for public insurance
-- but the dropout rate is 10 percent a year from the state's largest HMO, the Health Insurance Plan of New
York, and 14 percent from the also-large Health Net of New York.
The bottom line, I think, is that primary-care physicians fear that near-mindless efforts to find cost savings -the kind we've seen in existing government programs, and spreading to private plans -- will irrevocably
damage our very ability to practice, to prevent and treat illness.
We're told a "public option" will mean insurance for people who now don't pay -- but it seems to me, based
on hard experience, that it will mean worse health care for everyone.
Marc K. Siegel is a practicing internist at NYU's Langone Medical Center and a Fox News medical
contributor.
New York Times
Something for Nothing
By David Brooks
On May 12, the Senate Finance Committee held a hearing on health care reform. There was a long table of
13 experts, and a vast majority agreed that ending the tax exemption on employer-provided health benefits
should be part of a reform package.
They gave the reasons that experts — on right or left — always give for supporting this idea. The exemption
is a giant subsidy to the affluent. It drives up health care costs by encouraging luxurious plans and by
separating people from the consequences of their decisions. Furthermore, repealing the exemption could
raise hundreds of billions of dollars, which could be used to expand coverage to the uninsured.
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden piped up and noted that he and Republican Senator Robert Bennett have a
plan that repeals the exemption and provides universal coverage. The Wyden-Bennett bill has 14 bipartisan
co-sponsors and the Congressional Budget Office has found that it would be revenue-neutral.
The Finance Committee’s chairman, Senator Max Baucus, looked exasperated. With that haughty and
peremptory manner that they teach in Committee Chairman School, he told Wyden and the world that this
idea was not going to happen.
In the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body, senators don’t run things. Chairmen and their staffs run things.
During the spring, as the Obama administration faded to invisibility, the finance and health committees
separately put together plans. These plans did not alter the employer exemption. They did build on the
current system. They did include approaches that have been around since Richard Nixon.
The problem with the committee plans is that they don’t do much to change the underlying incentives, and
consequently don’t do much to control costs. “The single most expensive option is to build on the existing
system,” says the health care costs guru John Sheils of the Lewin Group.
The C.B.O. measured the plans, and the results were devastating. A successful plan has to be revenueneutral for the government over the next 10 years, and it has to reduce the total health care burden over the
long term so the country doesn’t go bankrupt. The Senate committee plans failed both criteria. They would
cost the government more than $1 trillion this decade and send total health care costs zooming at least
twice as fast as the economy as a whole.
The C.B.O. reports sent shock waves through Washington. Senators and staffs began casting about for a
way to get a good C.B.O. score. President Obama redoubled his rhetoric about fundamentally reducing
health care costs. Everybody continued looking around for a compromise that could get a bipartisan
majority.
Now you might think that in these circumstances someone might take a second look at the ideas
incorporated in the Wyden-Bennett plan, which already has a good C.B.O. score, bipartisan support and a
recipe for fundamental reform.
If you did think that, you are mistaking the Senate for a rational organism. For while there are brewing efforts
to incorporate a few Wyden-Bennett ideas, there is stiff resistance to the aspects that fundamentally change
incentives.
The committee staffs don’t like the approach because it’s not what they’ve been thinking about all these
years. The left is uncomfortable with the language of choice and competition. Unions want to protect the
benefits packages in their contracts. Campaign consultants are horrified at the thought of fiddling with a
popular special privilege.
So the process is moving along as it has been. There is a great deal of talk about the need to restrain costs.
There’s discussion about interesting though speculative ideas to bend the cost curve. There are a series of
frantic efforts designed to reduce the immediate federal price tag. Some senators and advisers suggest
cutting back on universal coverage. Others have come up with a bunch of little cuts in hopes of getting
closer to the trillion-dollar tab. The administration has ambitious plans to slash Medicare spending.
But there is almost nothing that gets to the core of the problem. Under the leading approaches, health care
providers would still have powerful incentives to provide more and more services and use more expensive
technology.
We’ve built an entire health care system (maybe an entire government) on the illusion of something for
nothing. Instead of tackling that basic logic, we’ve got a reform process that is trying to evade it.
This would be bad enough in normal times. But the country is already careening toward fiscal ruin. We’ve
already passed a nearly $800 billion stimulus package. The public debt is already projected to double over
the next 10 years.
Health care reform is important, but it is not worth bankrupting the country over. If this process goes as it has
been going — with grand rhetoric and superficial cost containment — then we will be far better off killing this
effort and starting over in a few years. Maybe then there will be leaders willing to look at the options staring
them in the face.
The Corner
Advice to Our Youth
by John Derbyshire
I'm getting a steady trickle of emails like this on in response to my boiling-blood post last week:
While my military retirement (one year away, alas) is also "guaranteed by amount" versus a 401K, I find it
interesting that I, and other military officers with 20 years of service in the a-holes of the world (Iraq,
Afghanistan), will retire with annual pay of just a little over what Mr. Hunderfund will receive monthly.
Knowing what I know now, I concede that I've made a grievous financial error in defending my country
instead of getting my doctorate in Education Principles and Management and working for the NY Education
Dept.
My advice to my nieces and nephews about to enter the workforce? Find a government job post-haste, and
preferably one like Education or Eco-(fill in the blank) that has very strong liberal support. Or move to
Australia/Singapore/Hong Kong.
[Me] So I guess my longstanding advice to the youth of America needs slight qualification: Get a civilian
government job. The military, like the private sector, is for suckers.
The Corner
More Advice to Our Youth
by John Derbyshire
From a reader:
John — You are spot on with this one. I tell this to every young person who asks me about their plans for
future employment. The pecking order I have is:
• 1) Politics: The surest way to get rich in America is to join the political class. Don’t be put off by the
running-for-office bit. That’s just the part of the Leviathan that extends beyond the surface. There are literally
tens of thousands of jobs working for politicians that afford an enterprising person the chance to get rich.
Rahm Emmanuel is the poster child. Ballet Major → Political Aide → Political Advisor → Patronage Job in
the Financial Services Racket → Congressman → Chief of Staff → ??? He will make millions more after he
leaves the White House, despite never having had a real job.
• 2) Federal Job: The pay is 30 percent higher than the dreaded private sector. Promotion is about time
served. The work is easy, if dull, and the hours are short. The benefits are the envy of the world and the
pension is fabulous. You can never be laid off or fired.
• 3) State Job: Does not pay as well as federal jobs, but is still better than real work. Plus, no one bothers
to check up on state employees as they occasionally do with federal employees. So, you never have to
break a sweat. The bonus is, the opportunities for theft far exceed the federal side.
Seriously, what rational person can argue with any of this?
[Me] Well, I'll quibble. To judge by the small-town bureaucrats and local edbiz flunkies in my original post,
that may be the most remunerative "work" of all, at least retirement-wise.
Popular Science
Iceland's Geothermal Bailout
Last October, Iceland's economy tanked. Its bailout? A two-mile geothermal well drilled into a
volcano that could generate an endless supply of clean energy. Or, as Icelanders will calmly explain,
it could all blow up in their faces
by Christopher Mims
The Kuwait of the North: Engineers at the Tyr drilling rig in Krafla’s snow-covered caldera hope to use a
supercritical-water source two miles underground to produce 10 times as much geothermal electricity as a
normal well Courtesy Sveinbjorn Holmgeirsson/Landsvirkjun Power
It's spring in Iceland, and three feet of snow covers the ground. The sky is gray and the temperature hovers
just below freezing, yet Gudmundur Omar Fridleifsson is wearing only a windbreaker. Icelanders say they
can spot the tourists because they wear too many clothes, but Fridleifsson seems particularly impervious.
He's out here every few days to check on the Tyr geothermal drilling rig, the largest in Iceland. The rig's
engines are barely audible over the cold wind, and the sole sign of activity is the slow dance of a crane as it
grabs another 30-foot segment of steel pipe, attaches it to the top of the drill shaft, and slides it into the well.
Beneath the calm landscape, though, Fridleifsson and his crew of geologists, engineers and roughnecks are
attempting the Manhattan Project of geothermal energy. The two-mile-deep hole they've drilled into Krafla,
an active volcanic crater, is twice as deep as any geothermal well in the world. It's the keystone in an effort
to extract "supercritical" water, stuff so hot and under so much pressure that it exists somewhere between
liquid and steam. If they can tame this fluid — if it doesn't blow up their drill or dissolve the well's steel lining
— and turn it into electricity, it could yield a tenfold increase in the amount of power Iceland can wrest from
the land.
Iceland's geological evolution makes it especially well suited to harvesting geothermal energy. The island is
basically one big volcano, formed over millions of years as molten rock bubbled up from the seafloor. The
porous rock under its treeless plains sponges up hundreds of inches of rain every year and heats it
belowground. Using this energy is simply a matter of digging a well, drawing the hot fluid to the surface, and
sticking a power plant on top. Then, as power plants go, it's business as usual: Steam spins a turbine that
drives a generator, and electricity comes out the other end. More than 50 countries use geothermal power;
pretty much anywhere magma and water are within a few miles of the surface is fair game. Iceland ranks
14th in the world for geothermal resources but is the highest per-capita producer of geothermal power. It's
committed to getting clean power out of the ground.
And commitment is what the rocky country needs right now. Last fall, Iceland entered a deep economic
recession following a financial meltdown. Now, Iceland's economy is down to fishing, metals and its clean,
limitless supply of geothermal energy. It's betting heavily on that energy, hoping to someday offload excess
electricity to Europe through undersea cables, and Fridleifsson's project is the all-in wager of the game.
Many countries dabble in green energy — a solar plant here, a wind farm there — as they try to wean
themselves off oil and coal. Iceland, on the other hand, has been making zero-emissions power a reality
since the oil shock of the 1970s, when its progressive inhabitants realized that their dependence on
imported energy was an economic vulnerability. Fridleifsson's project, once just a scientific experiment, is
the most recent expression of that ethos. If the gamble pays off, it could not only catapult Iceland out of debt
but revolutionize renewable-energy efforts around the world.
The process has been methodically slow, but after nearly a decade and $22 million, the Iceland Deep
Drilling Project should hit supercritical water next month. Fridleifsson has already weathered one failed
attempt, in 2005, when a well collapsed during a routine flow test. And so, close as he is, he's modest about
his chances; when pressed, he admits to being "cautiously optimistic" about the current attempt. The
project's risk assessor gives it a 50-50 shot at succeeding. Fridleifsson doesn't mention that if it works, a
plant built around this well could deliver as much power as a small nuclear plant and become the global
model for geothermal projects. And he certainly doesn't mention (as oilmen, solar engineers and wind
farmers so often say of their work, but Fridleifsson actually deserves to of his) that it could rearrange the
future of energy.
A Modest Proposal
Iceland turns geothermal energy into electricity in two ways: Venting 600°F steam from a mile underground
through a turbine, and a more energetic method that pulls 390° water from deep wells and heats surface
water, making steam to drive turbines. Harnessing a natural supply of supercritical water — water that's
three times as hot and under enormous pressure — and turning it into electricity would be like switching
from diesel to jet fuel. "If we succeed, we expect to increase power output by 5 to 10 times [above what a
typical well can produce]," Fridleifsson says.
To appreciate the benefits of free supercritical water, it helps to understand that most coal plants and
nuclear power plants make supercritical water before generating electricity. The plants transfer heat energy
— produced by burning coal or by the radioactive decay of isotopes — to water in a pressurized tank to
bring it to a supercritical state. The process allows the water to maintain the high-energy intermolecular
hydrogen bonds of a liquid, yet flow through pipes with near-zero resistance like a gas. It then runs through
heat exchangers to create even more steam, which drives turbines to make electricity.
Day at the Office: Typically stormy weather at the Krafla drilling site Sigurveig Arnadottir/Isor
The IDDP well will dip two and a half miles belowground into a pocket of water heated to 1,100° by a bubble
of magma. Water normally exists as steam at this temperature, but the immense pressure of the rock above
holds the water in a near-liquid state. Once the water squirts to the surface, it will retain nearly all the energy
that heated and compressed it. It is virtually certain that engineers will have to redesign existing heat
exchangers to handle the water's heat and potentially corrosive chemistry, but a plant running on naturally
occurring supercritical water could churn out up to 500 megawatts, on par with a small nuclear reactor and
half of what a large coal plant produces. Unlike these, though, the IDDP's zero-emissions power source will
last as long as the Earth's core continues to heat rainwater.