Government is Unfair

Here is my old friend from my days as a Minnesotan, Danny Shapiro, talking about his critique of the welfare state (sadly, this video is not embeddable). His thesis: just about every welfare state policy is inferior to some alternative, even by the standards of those who advocate such policies, including the standard sometimes known distributive justice (or "fairness").

A glaring example, possibly different from the sort he cites, just popped up in a Madison WI newspaper.

First, a word of explanation. One way to grasp the idea of distributive justice is to think of the phrase from The Communist Manifesto, "to each according to his ____." How you fill in the blank varies -- according to his moral virtue, talent, contribution to society, effort, or maybe (Marx and Engels' favorite) need -- but the basic idea is that your wealth, income, or whatever, ideally ought to be part of an ordered response to characteristics people have which indicate that they "deserve" the income, etc. Discussions of distributive justice commonly take place with the following sort of background assumptions: There is little chance that free markets will conform to any of these ordered patterns. If distributive justice makes sense, then the government should step in and fix the situation. The question is whether it does make sense and if so which form is the best (to each according to his ... what?). That is how Robert Nozick discusses it in his classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974).

People seldom ask whether government itself is distributively just. Take a look at this list of the 20 highest paid municipal employees in Madison WI last year:

John Nelson, Bus driver, $159,258

Dean Brasser, Comptroller, $151,551

Noble Wray, Police chief, $143,585

Michael May, City attorney, $143,434

Carolyn Hogg, Assistant city attorney, $138,084

Mark Olinger, Planning and Development director, $136,787

Randy Gaber, Assistant police chief, $136,248

Debra Amesqua, Fire chief, $136,163

John Davenport, Assistant police chief, $134,382

James Keiken, Assistant fire chief, $133,589

Michael Dirienzo, Assistant fire chief, $133,144

Paul Bloom, Assistant fire chief, $132,873

David Dryer, Traffic engineer/parking manager, $130,831

Tom Carto, Overture Center president, $129,566

Carl Gloede, Police Captain, $128,750

Katherine Noonan, Assistant city attorney, $126,709

James Hess, Monona Terrace director, $126,593

Roger Allen, Assistant city attorney, $126,592

Brad Murphy, Planning unit director, $126,363

Greg Tatman, Bus driver, $125,598

Note that two of them, #20 and, astoundingly, #1 are ordinary city bus drivers. Mayor Dave Cieslewicz did not earn enough to make it on to this list. Now, I'm not anti-bus-driver (my grandfather drove a bus in Detroit MI all his working life) but surely there is no sane version of the distributive justice idea that can justify this arrangement.

The above-linked article, by the way, explains why this odd distribution of income happened: Bus drivers, unlike mayors, are unionized, and the Teamsters got the municipal bus drivers a contract with lavish pay for overtime, and apparently no limits on how much overtime any one employee can accumulate. The article also mentions that this situation last came to John Q. Public's attention in1998, when it caused a bit of a flap. Obviously, the resulting public ire had absolutely no effect on the situation during the twelve long years that have crept by since then.

I draw two conclusions:

1. Government can be distributively unjust, even absurdly so.

2. It can be very, very difficult for John and Jane Public to do a damn thing about it.

The Real Ruling Class

Is there a ruling class in our world? Surely, there have been castes or classes in the past, with some ruling and extracting the product of the labor of others, while others must obey and be exploited.

Marxists say there is such a class and that it is the capitalists. Others think that insofar as the power of capital rests on voluntary market transactions, the ideas of "ruling" and "exploitation" do not really apply here. Others look for more mysterious, hard-to-see rulers. Who really rules us? Is it the Trilateral Commission? The Jews? The Bavarian Illuminati? Each theory is more arcane than the last.

I think the answer to the question is the one that is right under your nose. Consider the very words, "ruling class." Who literally rules you? Who has the power de facto to extract wealth from you without your consent and even against your wishes?

The answer of course is the state, the government and its employees (see also the above graph, click to enlarge). For most its history and prehistory, the human race has lived in stateless societies, in conditions that were very primitive but also very equal. With the birth of the state, extreme political and economic inequality comes about. Primitive states were often frankly wealth-extraction devices and had virtually no other declared function. Modern states have evolved considerably and, I admit, do some things that are for the common good.

The wonder of it is that, though this answer is screamingly obvious, it is almost never given. Looking to see who the real overlords and masters of the Earth are, people consider everything but the obvious.

My point here is not (yet) to judge or blame. Maybe these people deserve all this wealth and power. My point here is the irrefultably obvious one: that they do indeed have them, staggering amounts of them, and that they are gaining on the rest of us day by day.

Beyond that, my only point is that we probably should not give them any more than they already have. It is in this context that I view the health care reform bills now before congress. Any one of them would surely be one of the largest gains in government power in the history of the republic.

Peter Singer's Defense of Death Panels

Okay, he doesn't call it that, but, unlike Obama, he is honest enough to call it "rationing."

His argument, as often with Singer, is simple and not very original, but I find his recent article in the NYT is eminently worth reading. It is helping me to identify the real issues involved in the medical care debate.

"Health care is a scarce resource," he says, "and all scarce resources are rationed in one way or another." Free markets determine that some people get the good and some do not. The British National Health Service does the same thing. One difference is that it is obvious that the NHS is doing this:

Last year Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence gave a preliminary recommendation that the National Health Service should not offer Sutent for advanced kidney cancer. The institute, generally known as NICE [I love that acronym!], is a government-financed but independently run organization set up to provide national guidance on promoting good health and treating illness. ... NICE had set a general limit of £30,000, or about $49,000, on the cost of extending life for a year. Sutent, when used for advanced kidney cancer, cost more than that, and research suggested it offered only about six months extra life.

The recommendation was later rescinded, after a public uproar. Not an attractive picture. That judgment would have been a death sentence of sorts for people with advanced kidney cancer.

But markets, he says, do the same thing. It is just much harder to figure out who the victims might be. He quotes a study of Wisconsin emergency room patients who had been in auto accidents. The study "estimated that those who had no health insurance received 20 percent less care and had a death rate 37 percent higher than those with health insurance."

[Rather confusingly, he also quotes with apparent approval a study that concludes "there is little evidence to suggest that extending health insurance to all Americans would have a large effect on the number of deaths in the United States." This seems to conflict with the Wisconsin study. Anyway, I am concerned with the moral principles that underlie his argument, and not with the alleged empirical facts.]

Both systems withhold care from some people, who die (or die earlier) as a result. The difference (this is not how he puts it, but this is what he means) is that when bureaucrats decide who must die, it represents a conscious decision, so that the people who die might actually be the ones who ought to die.

When the market makes the determination, more often than not, the wrong person dies. The Wisconsin ER patients had an average of 3o more years of life to live, if they had received the care that would have saved them. Compare the people sentenced by NICE: they had an average of only six months, and not a good six months at that.

Socialized medicine is superior because, in it, (at least if the right people are in power) it is more likely that the people who die are the ones who ought to die. What we need (again, this is my wording, not his) is a redistribution of death.

(I urge you to read his article to see if my characterization of it is unfair.)
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My initial reaction to this:

To call both what the market does and what the English death panel does "rationing" is close to verbal trickery. It smuggles in the idea that these two processes are on an equal moral footing, without having to argue for it. I call what the market does "allocation" and only call what the government does "rationing." The reason I use different words for them is that I see a big moral difference between them.

Part of it is a matter responsibility. The death of the untreated English cancer victim is somebody's doing. This person dies because someone decided this person should die. The death of the American auto-accident victim is -- an accident.

There is another difference that underlies this one. Singer thinks it is good, and not evil, for NICE to take responsibility for deciding who shall die because he thinks there is such a thing as the one who ought to die.

This is what I deny. I deny that the cancer victim ought to die, but it is not because I think that the accident victim ought to die. I think it is monstrous to judge that any innocent person ought to die.

Further, it is monstrous arrogance the think you have the right to decide who ought to die. And to act on that decision is tyranny itself.

The Public Option is a Trojan Horse: Reason #2

Yesterday, I explained a reason why the health insurance "public option" in American Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 is a Trojan horse that is likely to result in most Americans, like it or not, being dumped into the hands of the government. It had to do with the fact that the some or all of the costs of this service would be transferred, by means of taxation, onto people other than the individual consumer, making the cost to them relatively low. Thus the government insurance company would tend to crowd out the private ones.

According to this study there is another reason it would tend to shove private health insurance out of the picture. It has to do with the way in which the plan would combine government medicine with a certain feature of the present system, a feature that the study describes like this:

In today's system, hospitals and physicians provide a substantial amount of free care to uninsured people called "uncompensated care." Also, payments for Medicare and Medicaid are usually less than the cost of the services provided resulting in payment shortfalls. Hospitals and physicians cover the cost of uncompensated care and payment shortfalls under public programs by increasing charges for private health plans in a process known as cost-shifting.

Since we can expect the "public option" -- a vast expansion of Medicaid -- to continue the same pricing policies, this will shift further costs to the shrinking number of people who still have private health insurance. This of course would increase the price gap between public and private insurance, driving even more people into the government medical system.

I expect the result would be a system in which the majority have crummy medical care but at low cost to them (until tax time) and a wealthy minority have much better care -- maybe something very much like the sort of care that most Americans have now.

This is why the town hall protesters keep mentioning the fact that members of congress will not be taking the public option for their own medical insurance. They all have private insurance now, and they are too wealthy to be driven into our part of the system.

Isn't it ironic? If you believe in equality and "fairness," the ideas the drive government health systems, you ought to be against this one!

Food Network: Swerving Toward Excellence?

Chef Anne Burrell's instructional show, Secrets of a Restaurant Chef, premiered yesterday.

I'm hoping it is part of a trend of some sort. When it was founded in 1993, with Mario Batali, Emeril Lagasse, and Bobby Flay on board, the Food Network spent several years producing instructional cooking shows. The intended audience was food hobbyists and the aim was to show them how to cook the sort of fancy food you get in a good restaurant. The point of view was what used to be called "gourmet" (a word that is now fast disappearing from the language). Then they were bought by media conglomerate E. W. Scripps in 1997. I have no way of fact-checking this, but it seems that around that time things changed fundamentally. Today the intended audience of the network is women who cook for their families and want to do it better, a much bigger and more lucrative audience than "gourmets." Today FN is a very Rachel Ray kind of place. Bobby, Emeril, and Mario no longer have instructional shows.* Everything is quick 'n' easy, all the ingredients can be found in any supermarket. Bobby has a new show that will begin soon. In it, he travels around the country cooking with ordinary folk in their back yards.

And then, yesterday, Anne somehow slipped under the door. The very title of the show gives away that it's about restaurant food. The FN website reassures us that she will be showing us how to turn restaurant methods into easy home cooking. This is clearly not true, as anyone who saw her making the bolognese sauce yesterday can tell you. The fact that FN publicity is trying to position her show as typical neo-FN fare makes me worry, because it means that their incredibly rigid policy of quick-'n'-easy-everything has not really changed.

So I've got an open letter to Bob Tuschman, Programming Vice President of the Food Network. Here goes.

Dear Bob,

Please, please, please don't cancel Anne's show! I know it's good, and that it treats food as if it were an artform, but is that really so terrible?

Now, I know that a giant corporation needs a lot of customers, and that this means aiming their product mainly at the average person. It's democracy in the market place.

I'm not saying go back to the old programming policy, but would it really hurt to allow one show that teaches fancy cooking skills to survive?

And besides, would you really lose viewers by permitting one or two of these shows? Sure, some of your main audience would avoid it, but you would pick up new viewers, people who now feel that your daytime lineup offers them nothing. People like me.

A year from now, I hope I will still be able to tune in and see Anne, still winking at the camera, shouting, throwing handfuls of salt into the sauce, and flailing her plump but shapely arms.

And, in the meantime, could you please move her out of that 8:30 on Sunday morning time slot?

Yours truly,

L.
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* Correction: As I point out in the comments section, Emeril does have a new instructional show on the Food Network, one with a much lower profile that "Emeril Live" had.

News Flash: I just got a message from Sienna Farris, who apparently is a public relations representative of the Fine Living Newtork, with the excellent news that a new "Emeril Live" will soon premiere on the Fine Living Network. She had this to say:

Fine Living has created a show page for Emeril Live which includes
special preview videos (embeddable), original recipes, a blog by Emeril's
culinary crew, and 30 fun facts you never new about Emeril (including where
the famous "BAM!" came from, among other things):
http://fineliving.com/emerillive

You can catch all new episodes of Emeril Live on Fine Living Network 7
days a week @7pm, starting 7/7.

Here is an article by food writer Juliette Rossant about these developments. Note that she says some of the same things I have said above, but without the anger and the whining. She gives more details here.

I see that FLN is also running Mario Batali's Molto Mario (= "Extreme Mario"). It's interesting to note that like FLN, FN, is owned by Scripps. Maybe Scripps is considering using the smaller (half of FN's audience-size) FLN to appeal to some of the audience that was gradually squeezed out by FN's creeping RachelRayism. So that's another glimmering ray of hope.

Merry Christmas 2007!

A lot of people I know must secretly find Christmas very annoying. Just think of all its bad points:

1. All the giving that we are doing is directed toward people to whom we are sentimentally attached, so it is really selfish. True altruism would be giving to complete strangers, people we have no selfish reason to give to.

2. At Christmas, we give things to individuals, and turn our attention away from the good of society as a whole.

3. Christmas giving is wasteful and actually diverts resources away from the total social good. The things we give are mostly useless things -- candy, wine, a necktie, toys.

4. Further, all this money brings about less real value than the same money would produce if it were spent by the recipient of the gift. (Your uncle would have picked out a different necktie if he had chosen it himself, one that would be better for him.)

5. Christmas giving is regressively redistributive. We don't give to people because they are weak, sick, incompetent -- because they need our help, in other words. No, we give to them because of their virtues and their strengths, because we find them worthy of love. Instead of giving to them that have not, we give to those who are already well-endowed by nature, circumstance, or their own efforts. Giving is only good when we give to the right recipients, and Christmas selects the wrong ones.

As you can probably guess, these are the reasons I love Christmas. Merry Christmas from all of us here on Jefferson Street to all of you! And happy all those other holidays, too!
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The picture above shows the Madison Community Orchestra giving one of its annual Holiday Concerts in the Capitol rotunda (the largest stone dome in the world!). That's me in the brown suit on the far left, playing the second violin part of Leroy Anderson's "Sleigh Ride." Photo by Deborah Katz Hunt.

The Gourmet is Dead, Long Live the "Foodie"

Have you noticed that no one uses the word “gourmet” any more? The word you do hear is “foodie.” What is the difference between a gourmet and a foodie? They are the very same thing. Or they are so different they are incomparable. That is, they are the same thing, viewed through the diversely tinted lenses of two different conceptual structures.

Allow me to explain.

The word “gourmet” only makes sense within the context of a specific world view. An essential part of this view is the notion of haute cuisine. What is this “high” cuisine? That’s a deep question, and I don’t have an answer yet, but the one factor that is relevant here is easy to see if we just glance at the history of the thing. High cuisine as we know it today was formalized by August Esoffier (1846 - 1936) [Wikipedia picture to the left], but it was really founded by Escoffier’s great predecessor, Antoine Carême (1784 - 1833). Carême worked as a chef for George IV, Tsar Alexander I, briefly for Napoleon (who found food a bore), but especially for Talleyrand. He cooked for the participants at the Congress of Vienna (1815). Escoffier on the other hand had a long business association with a business man, César Ritz, owner of the Ritz hotel chain. Escoffier spent his whole, long career cooking in hotels. The Ritz hotels were of course very pricey (when I was a kid, “ritzy” meant “fancy and expensive”) but anybody who earned and saved up the money (for a year? two years?) could have a meal cooked under the direction of the great Escoffier, the greatest living chef, perhaps the greatest who had ever lived.

Things were very, very different in Carême’s day, just three generations earlier. No matter how much money you earned and saved, you could not buy your way into the banquet at the end of the Congress of Vienna. You could not crash the gate at the Tsar’s winter palace, either. Your money was literally not good enough. Carême’s world was a hierarchy. He was attached to people like the Tsar by a very personal relationship. His labor was their property, by right of their being monarchs and nobles, and you, you lowly worm, could not have it. Any of it.

By Escoffier’s time, things had changed profoundly. His labor belonged to whoever had the cash to pay for it. He was connected to his customers by the very impersonal relationship of the competitive market. Of course services like his were still frightfully expensive, but that too would change eventually. Now fine food is, at least in principle, and on occasion, within the reach of nearly everyone.

What brought this about? That of course is the entire story of the modern world, and a very long one, but it includes two closely related forces: democracy and the free market. But my point, or the first part of it, is that the curious notion of the gourmet, and the world of high cuisine, did not first arise in the world built by these two titanic forces, it began in the hierachical, oppressive world of Carême.

In that world, most people had to struggle to find enough food to live. The average Frenchman's life expectancy at birth was about 30 years. But there was a tiny group of people who had the time and leisure to, not only eat but, savor the qualities of food as if it were a work of art. The balance and interplay of flavors and textures, the pleasing appearance (presentation, plating), and so forth. This is just what gourmets do. And food-as-art is what high cuisine is.

At last I get to my main point: the gourmet-idea, and high cuisine itself, carry a lot of elitist baggage from the era of caste divisions. The gourmet is a sniffish fellow, who thinks he is better than others. He doesn't just savor that perfect Sauce Béarnaise, he savors his ability to savor -- and your lack thereof! A "foodie," insofar as there is any difference, is just someone who likes to savor the experience of eating. The word, with its diminutive ending, even sounds egalitarian. It sounds like an over-familiar nickname. I think of President Carter telling people, jes' call me Jimmy. Isn't that what the foodie is doing? I'm not trying to be anything special. No nose in the air, no lifted pinky here! I'm just a foodie! Please don't resent me!

You can see the whole foodie culture as an attempt to make high cuisine safe for the brave new world of pan-democracy. Will it work? Well, this is just the question that Tocqueville and Nietzsche raised with such force: can quality and democracy coexist? (Tocqueville: that depends. Niezsche: Nein!). The jury is still out on that one.
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By the way, last night I watched the Japanese Iron Chef show for the first time, and I was surprised to hear the people on the show refer to each other as gourmets several times. And without a trace of irony. On the American (Food Network) version of the show, no one would dare to use that word in that way. What a difference a culture makes! ... Meanwhile, on this side of the Pacific, I just noticed a headline for a New York Times travel section article on fine restaurants in Minneapolis: Minneapolis Makes Foodies Take Notice. We're using the word in headlines now!
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* Here I am using "gourmet" as a term applied to a person. People do speak of gourmet meals and gourmet foods, but at least in this country they no longer call themselves gourmets.