Archive for category PPC
A Bridge Loan Over Troubled Waters?
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Business, PPC on June 22nd, 2012
As mentioned yesterday, the Denver Democrats have invited Rep. Maxine Waters to speak at the annual State House District 7 Unity Dinner this Saturday night. While we think Waters is a terrible excuse for a Congressman, she’s all-too-representative of her party in at least one respect – a belief that it’s possible to give money to one person without taking it away from someone else.
As the interview deteriorates from a policy discussion into Waters’s patented grievance-mongering, CNBC’s redoubtable Mark Haines former analyst and Erin Burnett go from incredulity to resignation, that they’re dealing with someone with roughly a 1st grade understanding of accounting. In fact, you can only arrive at her beliefs through a rigorous process of re-education; 1st grade math problems routinely feature apples being taken away from Johnny and given to Timmy.
In the past, HD7 has invited Mayor Michael Hancock, Auditor Dennis Gallagher, and Speaker Andrew Romanoff. Say what you will about them, they have the virtue of being adults. Hancock and Gallagher have demonstrated fiscal common sense in their positions with the city, and while we’ve had our disagreements with Romanoff in the past, he at least demonstrated some understanding of economic and fiscal matters. (Who knows? Maybe she’s even one of the idiots who needs educating?)
People like Hancock, Gallagher, and Romanoff have actually had responsibilities to larger groups that have pulled them to the center, in rhetoric, if not always in deed. Waters, with a safe seat in south-central, has the luxury of indulging her worst impulses on a regular basis, and probably isn’t the ideal figure for a broad-based party to unify around.
If the Denver Democrats insist on inviting folks like Maxine Waters to keynote these dinners, perhaps they need to rename them the Fragmentation Dinner.
Denver Democrats to Host Anti-Semitic Speaker at “Unity Dinner”
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, Israel, Jewish, PPC on June 21st, 2012
Colorado Democrats, and even Denver Democrats, like to portray themselves as being more centrist, less likely to be run by their wing nuts. Certainly, there’s been little if any evidence of an anti-Israel bias in the state’s Congressional delegation over the years. Unfortunately, their choice of speaker for Saturday night’s State House District 7 “Unity Dinner” calls that claim into question.
The speaker is California Congressman Maxine Waters, who, only three months ago, was peddling Jewish conspiracy claptrap to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, a hard-leftist organization:
AIPAC has a lot of power, a lot of influence. They raise a lot of money, and they raise this money not just for re-elections, but also to see that the people who will support their agenda are in key places in all of the committees. and all of the leadership of Congress. So they do exercise tremendous power, and I think that the more money you take from AIPAC, the more you get tied down to their policies. I do not accept contributions from AIPAC.
Well, that’s mighty independent of her, given that AIPAC doesn’t make campaign contributions, spending its money on lobbying. Make no mistake, there are plenty of pro-Israel PACs, an they are often informed by AIPAC as to the positions of Congressmen on specific bills or appropriations. But AIPAC doesn’t even issue legislative ratings. So if Rep. Waters wants to stay clear of undue Jewish influence, it’ll take more than dodging non-offered contributions from a non-existent PAC. (The PAC in AIPAC stands for “Public Affairs Committee.”)
What’s disturbing is that the Denver Democrats would choose someone like this to speak at a Unity Dinner. The last couple of years, they’ve had more or less traditional liberals speak at their Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner: Cory Booker, Deval Patrick.
And, typically, the choice has evoked no response from the establishment Jewish institutions here in Colorado, dominated as they are by those who identify Jewishness with membership in the Democrat party.
Obama Wins, 9% – 42%
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Economics, Media Bias, PPC, President 2012 on June 7th, 2012
The last jobs report was about as bad as it could have been without actually putting us back in recession. A downward revision of April’s job creation, coupled with a May net of 69,000 wasn’t even enough to keep the unemployment rate flat. The last 27 months of anemic growth have let the rate drift down only because massive numbers of Americans are giving up looking.
Almost everyone who was paying attention knows this was a bad report. A Gallup poll had 9% of people calling it positive – probably people who think anything not negative is good, or people who found jobs – while 42% called it negative to some degree. Ten percent had no opinion, and 40% called it “mixed,” which is pretty much the “no opinion” for people who don’t want to admit they weren’t paying attention.
Naturally, Postblogger Ezra Klein runs a piece headlined: “Most Americans didn’t think the last jobs report was bad news.” It’s true that the number of people who think things are getting worse hasn’t gotten worse, and the additional 3% who think rate it “poor” is pretty much statistical noise.
But people can go a long time before realizing that changes are permanent. In the mid-90s, I worked for a while in Johnston, Pennsylvania, and many people talked about how they were waiting “for the Mill to come back.” The Mill had been closed for many years, and wasn’t coming back, that, or any other century.
The economy can tread water for a long time, not getting better or worse, slogging along an a Euro-stupor, or a sushi-style lost decade. People won’t necessarily rate things as getting worse, even though they know they’re not getting any better.
But that doesn’t make losing 9-42 any less of a loss.
PERA, the Unions, and You
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Education, PERA, PPC on June 3rd, 2012
One of the less-noticed points of contention at Douglas County’s open negotiations the other week was the status of school district employees who are actually on the union payroll. Basically, union heads leave the classroom to spend their time representing teachers and the union, yet remain officially school district employees. The district wants to end this practice, and in fact, pick-slipped the union heads a couple of weeks ago. The union wants to retain them as district employees, and claims that this is a non-issue, as the union reimburses the district for the employees’ salaries and PERA contributions.
The problem isn’t the current costs – although there may be some conflicts of interest in having a union boss refuse supervision and evaluation by the district, while still remaining nominally an employee. The problem is PERA, and its something that the retirement plan ought to look at.
What happens here is that the unions, the national, state, and local, pay this employee’s salary. That salary is no longer determined by the seniority or performance measures that apply to all other teachers, but by the people actually paying the salary. So that employee is no longer being paid on their value to the district, or to the students, but to the union. Their PERA benefits, which, over their lifetime, are calculated based on that salary. Which means that PERA is paying benefits to potentially hundreds of employees statewide based not on their service to the taxpayers, but on their service to the union. And since those benefits will, as currently constituted, far exceed the amount paid into the system, they constitute a net payout to the union, which doesn’t have to cover their own employees’ retirement benefits for those year.
The union will say that it’s unfair that a teacher should have to give up earned retirement benefits when they become a union rep. But of course, they don’t have to give up anything they’re vested in. This is, in the end, no different from a bureaucrat or a regulator leaving to take a job as a lobbyist. They’re no longer directly serving the state government, and should no longer be a part of the state government retirement system, except for the benefits they have earned. The union will argue that this will make becoming a union rep a much less desirable position, but never explain why that desirability should come at the direct expense of the taxpayer rather than the union and the teachers it represents.
PERA’s Benchmarks
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PERA, PPC on June 1st, 2012
Along with all my other exciting duties, I’ve taken on the role as the manager of the PERA Project for the Independence Institute’s Fiscal Policy Center. It’s an astonishing amount of material to become acquainted with, but I’m starting with the most recent Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, from 2010 (the 2011 report won’t be ready until July, for some reason).
Most funds try to achieve some level of diversification within their target investments. This is true even for narrow, industry-specific funds, but is clearly true for larger, broad-based funds like a retirement fund, whose primary goal needs to be capital preservation and conservative growth.
In PERA’s case, they divide their investments into five asset classes: stocks, bonds, real estate, commodities, and alternative investments. While there’s some correlation among these, they are true asset classes, meaning that they really do respond to different economic conditions and stimuli. While a generalized, panicky flight for the exits would affect them all, for the most part, these investments don’t move in tandem.
However, the benchmarks against which PERA measures its performance are another matter, and may be setting the fund up for diminished returns.
The benchmarks themselves are not only highly correlated, in several cases, they’re just the same as each other:
| Global Benchmark | |
| DJ US Total Stock Market Index | |
| MSCI ACWI ex-US Index | |
| Fixed Income Custom Benchmark | |
| Barclays Capital Universal Bond Index | |
| Barclays Capital Long Gov’t Credit Index | |
| Alternative Custom Benchmark | |
| DJ US Total Stock Market Index + 3% | |
| Real Estate Custom Benchmark | |
| NCREIF Open-end Core Fund Index + 1% | |
| Opportunity Fund | |
| DJ US Total Stock Market Index | |
| MSCI ACWI ex-US Index | |
| Fixed Income Custom Benchmark | |
There are some questions here. First, the “Opportunity Fund” is currently invested in timber and raw materials. Surely there must be commodity indexes that would be more reflective of the fund’s style. A mixture of equities and fixed income indices doesn’t seem to bear any relationship to the fund’s investments.
Second, fund managers are judged in part by how well they track or beat these benchmarks, PERA is potentially setting up incentives to invest in assets that are reflected in those indices, throwing away the benefits of diversification. The Opportunity Fund, for instance, is being judged on what amounts to a combination of the Global and Fixed Income Benchmarks. It may be in commodities or timber now, but it could well end up migrating to investments that track those other two funds.
The Alternative Investment Fund is the most problematic; in essence, it’s just being held to the US stock market plus 3%. But look at its portfolio: private equity, venture capital, and distressed debt. Those investments don’t necessarily peak at the same point in the business cycle as vanilla equities. The difficulties and dangers of benchmarking alternative investments, which are often illiquid and lacking in direct peers, have been noted before. But there are any number of hedge fund indexes available for them to use. Surely some basket of those would be more reflective of the fund’s actual and intended holdings.
I’ve only just noticed this, and to be fair, I don’t have any evidence that it’s actually affecting investment decisions. Moreover, it’s a second-order effect. Obviously, this isn’t as bad as if the asset classes themselves were highly-correlated. But it’s possible that PERA is creating investing incentives that could come back to bite them in bad years, and cost them valuable basis points in normal years.
What I Saw At The Open Negotiations
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, Education, PPC on May 25th, 2012
Last night I attended the Douglas County teachers union contract negotiations conducted under the county’s new Open Negotiations policy. This was the first meeting which teachers were able to attend, and the Douglas County Federation of Teachers – the local for the American Federation of Teachers – had called for teachers to show up in force. There was the hope that a large, unruly audience might prove more entertaining than a philosophically incoherent negotiating team.
In the event, I had to settle for the incoherence, but it was illuminating enough.
The crowd itself was large – eventually reaching about 350 people – but well-fed, and thus, well-behaved. Nobody tried to start a drum circle in the back of the room, for instance. After some early applause, one of the union negotiators reminded the group that they were there are spectators, not participants, and more like spectators at the Masters or Wimbledon than the Super Bowl, at that. The teachers resorted to mass waving a couple of times, but that’s the sort of thing that comes with hanging around grade-schoolers all day, I suppose, and the novelty quickly wore off. No Pinkertons were needed.
Aside from the 1% – no, not that 1% – the 1% pay raise that the Board had proposed, the two most contentious issues were the district’s desire to stop collecting union dues, and the desire to stop paying the salaries of union heads who aren’t in the classroom.
The union tried to turn the first issue into a 1st Amendment fight, essentially arguing four things: 1) the union speaks for the teachers, so stopping the collections amounts to trying to squelch free speech, 2) the union is being singled out for this treatment because 3) it opposed the election of the current Board members, even though 4) it didn’t contribute dues money to their opponents’ political campaigns.
It should be fairly easy to ridicule these arguments and dispose of them. A union, recognized by the district or not, is just an organization, and it should be responsible for contacting its own members and collecting its own dues. There’s no good reason to spend taxpayer resources doing that, and the fact that the dues money goes right back into political campaigns to determine the unions’ negotiating partners and (evidently) collections agents, is just all the more reason to put that burden on the union itself. It’s not a free speech issue, any more than Denver’s reluctance to come by and put a lein on my property against my shul dues is a free exercise issue.
Unfortunately, a federal judge in Wisconsin disagrees. Thus the reason for Jed Palmer’s claim that this issue had been “extensively litigated in Wisconsin,” and the specific line of questioning trying to establish the same facts in Douglas County. Unfortunately for the union, the Board showed that dues money had been used in campaigns, and also said that since each contract was negotiated separately, if they found evidence of similar activity on the part of, say, the bus drivers, they’d try to negotiate the same disengagement from them. (You can see some of the raw video of this exchange.)
Since this is a negotiation, and not legislation, the union was basically arguing that they didn’t have the power to bargain away their members’ 1st Amendment rights, and claimed that this was an issue of working conditions. There are, of course, all sorts of restrictions on teachers’ 1st Amendment rights when they’re working. They get fired all the time for pushing their political views in the classroom, for instance. They were trying to find legal backup for their position, claiming that not only was the district wrong, but that the negotiators couldn’t concede the point even if they wanted to. Whether this is setting the stage for a strike or a lawsuit remains to be seen.
More interesting, although probably a slightly lower priority for the teachers, was to stop having the union heads be district employees, as they are no longer in the classroom, but have as their sole job representing the teachers. The union has already offered to reimburse the district for all of the salary, and all of the PERA contribution costs, of those positions, which run to several hundred thousand dollars a year.
What’s the issue here, since the union has offered to reimburse all the expenses, and the salary will get paid whether or not the union leader is working for the union or for the district? It seems as though either side could give way without any loss.
Not so fast. The key here is the PERA benefits, which are calculated by a formula based on earnings, which are set by the union. Making a union head leave PERA for the duration of his service would certainly make union leadership a less desirable task. But it’s also unfair on the face of it to put taxpayers on the hook for benefits they can’t limit, for services not being rendered to them. (Somehow, and I’m really not sure how, this issue got tied up with the national AFT’s Education Research & Dissemination program, sort of a classroom best-practices training that they run. But it appears that that, too, is paid for by dues and not by the district.)
At one point, in the middle of the discussions, Jed Palmer decided to launch an all-out blitz on the American Legislative Exchange Council, a national organization of conservative state legislators, and its supposed marionette-like control over the board. While hypocrisy is always one of the easiest political charges to level, it’s worth pointing out that teachers unions – including the AFT – have a long history of collaborating with outside groups, as well.
Van Jones and other assorted fellow-travelers have attempted to make ALEC toxic, with a little success, mostly because it’s a very successful way for conservatives to coordinate legislative policy nationally, as the left has done for decades. I doubt that ALEC’s toxicity extends to the general public, though, and it seemed to be more of a way of both building on that campaign, and rallying the troops.
Therein lies one of the dangers of open negotiations, but also one of the opportunities. The crowd Thursday night was well-behaved. But it’s still early. If the union finds that it has over-stated its position on, say dues collection, it’s going to find it more difficult to walk back a public position than a private one. Even when teachers were well-informed of what was going on behind closed doors, while the public wasn’t, they weren’t a physical presence in the negotiating room. The presence of a large number of angry teachers – and if things drag out, they could get angry – could serve to intimidate their own negotiators as much as the school board.
On the other hand, assuming that the sessions don’t have to move behind shatter-proof glass, the open sessions will allow an interested public to see what positions are taken, what justifications are used, and may ultimately, over time, have the effect of forcing both parties to engage in more persuasion, less posturing.
UPDATE: I tweeted as much of the proceedings as I could stay for; once the negotiations moved into salaries and benefits, I just didn’t have the numbers or understanding of the issues to be able to comment intelligently. You can see the thread, my tweets, and the very illuminating tweets from @parentLEDreform.
UPDATE II: From someone more familiar with the FTE issue than I:
Here is the ironic thing. Earlier this year, the administration realized that although we were paying half the union leadership’s salary (actual compensation for particular individuals varies), they were not doing anything that we could see for the District. Dr. Fagen asked them to be accountable for the half we were paying, i.e. spend time with an assigned administrator completing special projects. Initially, the president agreed, but then she backed off the statement. She said she was not interested in such an arrangement. Dr. Fagen sent her an email documenting their conversation, reiterating their understanding that the union would now be paying 100% instead of participating in a collaborative relationship for partial pay. The union agreed… then backtracked again, calling in attorneys. Eventually the Board thought we might be better off divesting ourselves of this torturous relationship. We would not be talking about union salary reimbursement, PERA, etc. right now if they had simply agreed to accountability for the 50% of pay.
Bridge Over Troubled Financial Waters
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Budget, Colorado Politics, PPC, Taxes, Transportation on May 24th, 2012
Transportation funding in Colorado has been a problem for, like, ever. Typically, capital spending is funded by what’s left over after the general fund expenses have been taken care of, but in recent years, to quote Geoffrey Rush from Shakespeare In Love, “There’s never any profits.” Which means that highway maintenance has been suffering. In 2005, the voters adopted Referendum C, but rejected Referendum D, which would have put a substantial pot of money at the disposal of the government for unspecified road projects.
So in 2009, the legislature passed FASTER. FASTER did a number of things, but primarily is raised vehicle fees in order to pay for bridge repair. Much of the debate at the time centered around the claim that fees are not taxes, and that this was simply a re-interpretation to get around TABOR’s requirement that tax increases be subject to a vote of the people.
The reality is a little more subtle than that, and it shows that when the state is bound and determined to get its hands on your money, there are almost no lengths to which it will not go, no manipulations in which it will not engage. (Just consider Obamacare’s fluctuating claims that the money you’ll have to pay is either a tax or a penalty, depending on the legal theory it happens to be operating under at the time.)
In fact, what the state did was to create a TABOR Enterprise, the Colorado Bridge Enterprise, which is exempt from a number of TABOR restrictions. It can, for instance, issue revenue bonds. Enterprises can also raise their fees-for-service without TABOR limits, but they can’t collect generalized taxes. They also must get less than 10% of their annual revenue from the state. This is how, for instance, the University of Colorado can continue to raise tuition year after year. So while the argument rested on a fee not being a tax, that was mostly because Enterprises can only collect fees, not taxes, and it was essential that the bridges be transferred to the Enterprise.
That 10% revenue limitation was also a problem, since in the first year, the bridges themselves would be the bulk of the Enterprise’s income. So the state depreciated all the bridges to $0. No salvage value, no remaining years of useful life, nothing. A claim that’s risible on the face of it, one that would get a private company and its auditors clapped in irons, but a dodge that the state felt perfectly comfortable resorting to.
The other details are equally unsavory. While the assets are supposed to be owned by the state, there is supposed to be an arms-length relationship between the state and the Enterprise. The members of the Enterprise Board are the members of the Colorado Transportation Commission. The fee itself is collected not by the Colorado Bridge Enterprise, but by the state Department of Revenue, which charges no fee for this service. And the revenue bonds are the Stimulus’s Build America Bonds, whose interest is subsidized by you, the federal taxpayer.
The difficulty is that since the Enterprise owns only bridges, the only fee that it can reasonably assess is for the use of those bridges. But since it’s not a toll, out-of-staters, and most trucks don’t pay the fee. And the fee is assessed as part of the vehicle registration, whether or not your vehicle is road-worthy and anywhere near any of the bridges in question. Suddenly this fee begins to look an awful lot like a tax, or at least a fee that the Bridge Enterprise doesn’t have the power to collect, since it’s not on bridge use, but on auto use.
That’s the basis for the lawsuit against FASTER. The plaintiffs are rural farmers who have vehicles that don’t go far from home, or even off the farm, and yet are charged a usage “fee” for a bridge they can’t even see, never mind drive over.
“How many legs does Cobalt have, if you call the tail a leg?”
“Four. Doesn’t matter what you call the tail, it’s not a leg.”
There’s a legitimate discussion to be had – and a vast literature – about the best way to fund roads. They do constitute a “system” from which all of us benefit. They’re the paradigm of platforms that government ought to be building, rather than products that try to dictate end results. As Rep. McNulty pointed out in the debate, roads lower the cost of commerce for everyone, save lives, and enhance freedom. To that extent, general fund money, or a vehicle fee, a gas tax, a mileage fee, a usage fee, a toll, or peak usage tolling – in order of increasing specificity – are all reasonable means. The economic effects of each are different, and they each make sense for different kinds of roads.
If the legislature had gone to the people and asked them for $31 a year, hell, even index it for inflation, in order to repair bridges that could become homicidal, they might well have voted for it. (Although the 2004 incident resulted from workers’ error, not the age of the bridge).
What’s clearly unfair is to creatively interpret the rules in order not to have to ask.
An Evening With Arthur Brooks
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Business, Economics, PPC on May 23rd, 2012
Also last night, Susie and I went to go hear Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute speak, at the Young Americans Center for Financial Education. The Center is truly a wonder, set up to teach grade schoolers about business, finance, and economics. Brooks spoke in Young Ameritowne, a large hall set up like a town square, ringed by mock storefronts – sponsored by actual businesses – that the kids role-play at operating. Go see it. (Now if they could only devise a program targeted at state legislators, we’d be golden.)
The failure of conservatism and free-market forces to arrest the country’s leftward drift for almost a century now should be of profound concern, and should be a puzzle to those of us fighting the fight. AEI was founded in 1938. Go back and read some of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s journals from the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and you’ll see two types of articles. One it the neo-confederate and near-neo-confederate type, of which we are well rid, and which come from a world as alien as Gilbert & Sullivan.
The others are those that could have been written any time in the last four years, changing only the names of the programs and actors. Those arguments didn’t carry the day back then, yet we expect that they’ll work this time.
Why, when all the empirical evidence is that socialism doesn’t work, capitalism does, that less freedom produces greater misery, why have we been losing the fight for 100 years, since Wilson’s election? This despite poll after poll that shows that Americans continue to embrace capitalism under that name, and reject redistributionism, by overwhelming margins?
This question has been bothering me for well over a year now, because even with all the intellectual ammunition at our disposal, it doesn’t bode well for this fall, or for what comes afterwards, with so much at stake. And too few conservatives and libertarians seem to be asking it at all.
What a relief, then, that someone with Brooks’s intellect has recognized the same problem, and what a pleasure that he’s actually got a persuasive answer.
Brooks is such a clear thinker and gifted speaker that I can reproduce the bulk of his argument from memory a day later, and I have a terrible memory. He gives you just what you need to remember, and he gives you the pegs to hang it on. When Susie and I saw him speak at the Western Conservative Summit in 2010, we thought his was far and away the best talk of the weekend.
Brooks contends that both the liberal answer – that Americans secretly want socialism – and the conservative answer – that all we need is better data – are flawed, because they don’t address the moral arguments that people find persuasive.
What we’ve been missing is a moral defense of capitalism, one that doesn’t take an 1137-page hardback “novel” to summarize. Moral arguments deal with people, and arguments that deal with people are always more persuasive than arguments that deal in numbers. Too often we dismiss that sort of thinking as “feelings over facts,” but Brooks contends, correctly, I think, that that’s a mistake. It’s how people actually come to conclusions and make decisions, and winning the argument means reaching people on their terms, not making it necessary for them to come to us.
Brooks’s case consists of three parts:
1) Earned Success. That is what truly defines happiness, not mere wealth. Earned success means linking success and its rewards to talent and effort. When results are decoupled from action, you get, “learned helplessness,” a recipe for unhappiness and frustration, since you’ve learned that you can’t really control your future.
2) Fairness. Conservatives like Milton Friedman resist talking about fairness, largely because we think it’s too subjective. But it’s also persuasive, and those same polls that show people love capitalism also show that they crave fairness. Well, what could be more fair than letting people keep what they earn, and decide how to use their own wealth? It’s a critical battlefield, one we can own, but not if we don’t show up for the fight.
3) Capitalism is good for the poor. Mere wealth may not be the measure of happiness, but poverty is a pretty good measure of misery. And it’s capitalism that reduces the misery that is a hand-to-mouth existence, not socialism, not all the good intentions in the world.
Moral defenses of capitalism abound. From Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, to Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, people have been thinking for generations about why a free system is a better system. But Novak is an academic, and neither Americans nor Europens feel tyrannized by the welfare state. The Greeks may yet provide a contemporary illustration, but thus far, most people see serfdom coming from the barrel of a gun, not a food stamp debit card.
The beauty of Brooks’s defense is that it not only speaks about people, it speaks to people, on terms that relate to their lives. It does it without policy prescriptions that strike people as weird, or re-opening arguments that were dealt with 170 years ago, when we decided we didn’t like polygamy and did like internal improvements.
The YA Center promptly violated 1) and promoted learned helplessness by giving out copies of Brooks’s new book, The Road to Freedom, which promises to tighten up the argument, and explain, for instance, why direct help with the best of intentions can have very bad results.
I’m looking forward to reading it, and reviewing it.
Health Care, Religion, Government, and The Left – Part II
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Economics, Health Care, PPC, Property Rights, Regulation on May 23rd, 2012
Last night, I posted some audio of lawyers at a loss for words at a panel discussion on religion and government. This morning, I’d like to post another clip from the Q&A, one that I think is particularly revealing about the left’s attitude towards religious liberty. The commenter is Ed Kahn, the lawyer for the Colorado Center on Law and Policy, and he’s discussing to what extent a hospital’s association with a religious body should matter. Shorter answer: none. But let him tell you himself.
(The audio quality here is markedly worse than the clip last night from Ms. Hart. I think it’s a combination of Mr. Kahn’s voice and the fact that he was sitting farther away from the mike, but there’s a persistent hiss. I ran it through the noise reduction algorithm, and while it got rid of most of the hiss, there’s a residue that makes it sound like he’s talking from the engine room of a starship, if the engine were powered by boilers, but I think it’s easier to hear than the raw sound.)
They can close shop on Saturday, but that doesn’t make them like a church or synagogue in my view. And if they’re going to hold out their product or their service to the public, then they should not be able to mandate that their religious beliefs to which they subscribe, that the results of that belief should be visited on the people who are entitled to sign up for that service.
If there’s a market where comprehensive health care is available without restriction, and people understand that, then maybe it’s ok for somebody to say that we’re a Catholic health insurer and our hospital is going to be open six days a week, but our emergency room will be open on the Sabbath. But in general, I think that if you’re providing a public service that is a necessity, especially, that it ought to be provided across the board, and the law ought to require it as a condition of licensing.
Some states do say to Catholic (unintelligible) hospitals, “You cannot restrict (unintelligible) abortion, you cannot restrict contraception services or tubal ligation,” and that, I think, is the better standard. So I start there. I think the concept that these organizations are health care, providing what’s a necessity, not simply a good like a candy store, overrides the ability to finesse what services they will or won’t provide, given an economic necessity or need, especially in monopoly situations.
There’s almost too much here to unpack, but let’s give it a try. It embodies almost all the current liberal assumptions about having a right to other people’s work product, and the inconsequentiality of others’ religious beliefs, to the extent that they differ from your own.
The phrase that really popped out at me was this: “…people who are entitled to sign up for that service.” Who talks this way, about people “signing up for a service?” The Left, apparently. Remember when Michael Moore rolled up to congressmen, asking them if they would be willing “sign their kids up to serve in Iraq,” as though it were a particularly violent venue for sleep-away camp. Seventh-graders are “entitled to sign up for” band. Adults purchase products and services with their own money. Seventh-graders buy things, too, generally with their parents’ money, which leads them to feel entitled.
The statement provides a case study of the inevitable intersection between social issues and economic ones. The Left feels entitled to sign other people up to do things for them, without realizing that at a minimum, there’s an opportunity cost. Grant the dubious proposition that All Hospitals Are Created Equal, that you can require anything calling itself a hospital to provide a menu of services at all times, in all places. They still can’t pay for the staff, facilities, and equipment to be perpetually on-call for every conceivable service or procedure. They will have to make choices. And since they are the ones providing the services, their own priorities and values will and ought to guide those choices.
That’s really the only fair way to decide.
If Charles Bronson were still around, he might reprise his scene from The Magnificent Seven where he throws the Mexican child over his knee and whacks him a couple of times for ingratitude, reminding him that his parents don’t do everything for him because they have to. (Hey, you want to be treated like a child?) Nobody makes the church or churches run these hospitals in the first place, except themselves from their own religious conviction. If that same religious conviction prevents them from providing other services, Planned Parenthood should just see that as a market opportunity.
Of course, the same law that enables the HHS Mandate also makes it virtually impossible to open new, specialized, physician-owned hospitals, thus providing further justification for commandeering existing facilities.
The Sound of Silence
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Health Care, PPC on May 22nd, 2012
This evening, I attended a panel discussion at one of the local synagogues on the topic of religion and government. It was sponsored by the very liberal National Council of Jewish Women, and featured four attorneys: Melissa Hart, Assoc. Prof. of Law and Director of the Byron White Center for the Study of Constitutional Law at CU, Ed Kahn, Special Counsel for the Colorado Center on Law and Policy, Dan F. Lynch, Attorney, Teacher and Author, and Rebecca T. Wallace, Staff Attorney, ACLU of Colorado. (In case you’re wondering whether Mr. Lynch was there for balance, I can assure you he was not; his primary concern seemed to be the imminent threat of Christian Zionists manipulating our government into starting WWIII to hasten the Apocalypse, or something like that.)
The panel was somewhat interesting, as these things go. The audience was mostly liberal, and the panelists were never really challenged. Most of what they said would be pretty unremarkable to anyone familiar with the leftist cant about religion in the public schools, public square, and private hospitals.
Until the last question, submitted by yours truly. It’s a question that was inspired by a Spengler column a couple of months back, at the height of the HHS Mandate controversy, and let me hasten to assure you that except for cropping out Mr Kahn’s basically non-responsive answer at the end, and bumping up the volume, I have not edited this clip at all:
The silence – finally ended by Mr. Kahn wishing aloud that someone else would take the question – is 9 seconds long.
Nine seconds long.
That’s roughly an eternity, when you have four lawyers on a panel. There is no charitable interpretation of this silence, the only explanation being that they simply hadn’t considered the question before. (Ms. Hart’s answer, that kosher slaughter is central to the Jewish religion, at least relieves us of the fear that they don’t really care about kashrut; like most Conservative or Reform Jews, they’re happy to have it around, even if they don’t practice.)
Ms. Hart’s response, that she has “faith” that the legal system would never do such a thing will be of slight comfort to conservatives who’ve seen the courts do many previously unthinkable things in the last half-century, but I will admit that I was only partially successful in hiding a wry smirk.
Like so many who inhabit the lefty echo chamber for a living, the panelists simply fail to consider that the results of their activism might one day be turned against something they care about, and have no good answers when their assumptions are challenged in a constructive, rather than confrontational, way.
Maybe they should have just stayed silent.
UPDATE: I’ve filtered out some of the noise from the sound clip, and attached the following transcript:
Moderator: OK, I have maybe a technical question. Assuming the HHS Mandate – and if you answer this question you can tell us what that is – is allowed to stand, suppose that a government office were to decide that kosher slaughter violated the relevant animal cruelty statues. How would you persuade them, or persuade the judge, to continue to permit kosher slaughter?
[9 seconds of silence]
Mr. Kahn: I hope someone else will take this.
Moderator: Now we see which of them has studied the Talmud.
Ms. Hart: So, one of the things that gets harder when politics gets stranger, as it is right now, but one of the things that I say to all of my first-year Civil Procedure students is that I have a very deep faith in law. I believe that to practice law and to love law, as I do – civil law – you have to have a great deal of faith in law and in the (unintelligible) practice in law, including the courts.
HHS is Health and Human Services, and I assume the question is referring to the provision – to the question about the abortion and contraception provision.
I – (2 second pause) have faith that no court would find that a state could outlaw rules of kosher under animal cruelty provisions, that the centrality of the kosher rules to the Jewish faith, and the lack of any kind of question of that is so clear, that even a law that seemed to be neutral, and animal cruelty law, would not pass (unintelligible) as a way of forbidding the laws of kosher. I don’t believe that because of any precedent that tells me that that’s definitely true. I believe that because I have faith in the courts not to go to that extreme.
If if you’re looking for precedent and the arguments you would make from precedent, I would go back to the law that I talked about briefly in the beginning, the Lukumi Babalu Aye case, that actually was the state’s, the community’s ban on animal sacrifice was an animal cruelty provision. And the courts were willing to look behind it and say there are other ways to prevent cruelty to animals than this kind of prohibition. So I think that courts have addressed animal cruelty provisions in the context of religious laws before – this is a quite different kind of religious law – and have found that they’re able to separate these things out and should separate these things out and I believe that they will continue to do that.
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