Nullius in Verba

Many socialists love to point to the evil United States health care system and smirk. Indeed there are entire organizations made up of socialists throwing boulders at the US that are somehow given credibility by the media. Harvard University has an entire department devoted to it.

Now there are several things wrong with the US health care system and as an employee of this Canadian one I can affirm that there are several things wrong with ours as well. So much so that I would rather have the US system.

The problem is that most socialists assume that public health care will be much cheaper in the US like they think it is elsewhere. The important point to remember is that public health care in the US isn’t very cheap at all for a variety of reasons. What people don’t realize is that the US has one of the largest social safety nets in the world, and with that comes rent seekers. Socialists will claim that the public system is better for example, because it is a monopsony but the problem with monopsony all you junior economists is that a monopsony is Pareto inefficient due to a decrease in optimal quantity purchased and that means waiting lists (notice how they love economic words when it suits them?).

(Creating disasters - the government has been doing it for millenia)

The main reason socialists love public health care is because they know they can get rich off of it. The idea of of more unions and bureaucrats makes them incredibly happy.

Lets do some quick goat calculations in today’s game:

“How many more bureaucrats could the US hire if the system was Public?”

Ok get out your calculators.  

• The US GDP : $13 ,244,550,000,000.00
• Percent spent on health care 15.3%, total spent $2,026,416,150,000.00
• Percent spent on public health care 44%, total $891,623,106,000.00
• Percent spent on private health care 56%, total $1,134,793,044,000.00
• Current population 302,280,000. People covered under both systems 253,915,200
• Percent of those covered by public system 27%, population covered 68,557,104
• Percent covered by private system 69%, 175,201,488 (There are a few percent covered by other systems)
• Cost of public system per person in system: $13,005.55
• Cost of private system per person in system: $6,477.07
• Cost of US system if it was fully public: $13,005.55 X 243,758,592 = $3,170,215,488,000.00

The increase in cost of a full Public System is $1,143,799,388,000.00.

(A graph for Captain Capitalism. Click to Enlarge)

Cost of a bureaucrat: $40,000.00.  Projected increased number of bureaucrats: 28 million!!!

And that, folks, is a lot of bureaucrats!

Just think how extra fun it will be to try and navigate your 80 year old parents through a system with 28 million more bureaucrats.

Oh and just so you know, if you have a heart attack, you want to have it in the US. You’re more likely to survive. Indeed, when you actually look at mortality and morbidity outcomes between Canada and the US in terms of things doctors can change, all that money may result in better outcomes. 

* Raw Data from OECD.

I won’t be getting much time to quality post, so probably only one really large post a month for a while as I am back to busy again. Occasionally I will put up a small post of interesting things seen in the sphere.

Anyhow some food for thought for those friends of mine out there who get out to my humble blog but don’t go see Small Dead Animals.

As spoken about earlier, eventually sane people get sick of freaks who like to blow up their kids. Iraq is changing. Now I’m not one who has GW Bush in his list of favorites (all you socialists out there don’t get too excited, I think Hillary Clinton is the worst thing that could ever happen to the US White House.)  Der Spiegel, more “left” than six week old leftovers, has an article about how Bush’s latest strategy - the Surge is actually working. It’s a good thing there exist intelligent Generals like Petraeus.

Ramadi is an irritating contradiction of almost everything the world thinks it knows about Iraq — it is proof that the US military is more successful than the world wants to believe. Ramadi demonstrates that large parts of Iraq — not just Anbar Province, but also many other rural areas along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers — are essentially pacified today. This is news the world doesn’t hear: Ramadi, long a hotbed of unrest, a city that once formed the southwestern tip of the notorious “Sunni Triangle,” is now telling a different story, a story of Americans who came here as liberators, became hated occupiers and are now the protectors of Iraqi reconstruction.

Oh boy, more evidence that there are some serious things wrong with the climate data. Could it be that the measured change in temperature from the fifties is actually simply within the range of variance.

As an example from the summary, one station had five different locations during 1954–1983, with the locations as much as 41 km apart. Two other stations each had four different locations. At least half the stations had substantial moves (two other examples, of 25 km and 15 km, were given above). Moreover, several stations have histories that are inconsistent, making reliable analysis unattainable.

Update

Darrell points out an article by physicist Freeman Dyson. Yet another scientist becomes a heretic.

As one of my old friends who was a girl and a planet loving environmentalist can attest, I used to frustrate her completely by saying that: you use more energy and release more bad CO2 by going on a hike than you do driving to Costco. I don’t know if anyone of you out there is familiar with the counter-cultural musical Avenue Q, but I used to bug her about eco-culture like Trekkie-monster bugs Kate-monster about internet porn.

Oh the eco-movement is to make money,
oh the eco-movement is to make money,
grab your cheque and send it quick,
money, money, money!
(sing along)

I completely forgot about this until I was just reminded by strolling over to Small Dead Animals (Kate’s blog that can generate more hits than CTV and CBC). Yes one day completely bored at university back when I was saved from becoming a complete socialist quack by the beginning of the study of the glorious thing called economics, I stumbled upon all kinds of data in the SFU library and one of the databases had a bunch of energy use estimations in them. Being rather bored I calculated up some things and quickly realized that physical excercise was very bad for you, the environment, and every-one else, oh and that all the estimations of the lives we’d save by eating low fat foods, driving with seatbelts, stopping smoking etc. etc. would save more people in Canada from death than Canada actually currently had.

Forget what the Suzuki says about light bulbs, its time to stop eating:

The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. “Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,” he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. “If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.

“The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.”

Now those of you who think organic farming is better at saving the air from the hordes of bad CO2, think again:

Organic farming practices generate significantly greater CO₂ emissions while producing less than conventional agriculture. On the other hand, growing genetically modified crops allow the farmer to reduce CO₂ emissions while maintaining yields.

But any economist can tell you that increasing productivity of a good decreases waste. In this case it happens to be food. Farming practices we used in the days of Sumeria will not feed 6 billion humans without causing an environmental decimation folks.

Ahh, but don’t be too quick to join the ranks of the eco-green terrorists out there and start amusing yourselves to death by starting the campaign of culling a few million more people than the eco-socialists are already doing by mandating the third world back to the stone age. You’d better kill the termites first - they release and produce more Greenhouse Gas methane and CO2 than we all do, and there’s only billions and billions more of them every year.

(In Praise of Folly - Erasmus 1515. A satirical work that is considered one of the greatest influences on Western culture and philosphy. If you are interested in modern praises of folly just watch CTV and CBC follow Al Goreacle or the Suzuki around) 

As an aside, it turns out that the investigational work of several bloggers has revealed serious data errors in the NASA calculations of average temperature increases in the United States due to of all things, a Y2K computer error. The hottest year on record is now 1934 instead of 1998, and the recent years have fallen in significance compared to the 1930’s during the dustbowl famine.

(Which one of these things is not like the other, which one of these things is not the same… la la la)

It also appears that many of the environmental sampling stations are more often placed next to A/C units etc. which put out lots of heat increasing the temperatures measured at those stations - which are used to determine if global warming is real or not. A bunch of volunteers have been combing the country taking pictures of the data stations and logging them on the blog: SurfaceStations.org. The problem with peer review is that often it doesn’t replicate the experiments down to the data collection itself, hence faulty data in can lead to faulty data out in a peer reviewed article. Peer review is a good system but it isn’t perfect. (Note at the current time SurfaceStations.org and ClimateAudit are offline subject to Denial of Service attacks by neo-socialist hackers who don’t want the message getting out. And I remember when hackers used to strive for truth.)

There are some potentially valid reasons to buy a Prius or some other hybrid, but saving the world from the hordes of evil CO2 isn’t one of them. But hey, most of the educated people out there aren’t suprised.

Once again yet another group has come out with a study showing that the vaunted Prius uses more energy over it’s lifetime than the gas guzzling Hummer. CNW Marketing Research has produced a “dust to dust” study demonstrating that overall the Prius has an energy-cost average of $3.25 per lifetime mile vs. the Hummer with one of $1.95. Mostly the added environmental damage is from the production of the Prius’ batteries and transport of said product. The other thing that CNW noticed is that people aren’t using the Prius that long before it’s thrown out, hence a lot of fossil fuels has gone into the production of a vehicle that isn’t being well used.

(For those of you who think that the only good carbon is dead carbon, the only thing that will bog a Hummer down is taxes.)

Now, like any economist or other scientist, I can state this as a certainty because I’ve done computer modelling: almost any conclusion can be reached by the construction of a model. (Tell that to the global warming gang). All one has to do is make sure that one adds the variables that will in theory support one’s hypothesis and make up excuses why to leave out the variables that will not. The debate on whether the hybrid is an environmental benefit or boondoggle will rage on and on.

My real suspicion is that if the Hummer and Prius are fairly close on the environmental scale of damage, and one can argue back and forth on this, the fuel efficient and economical cars like the Corolla and Civic must be much better than a Prius.

(Update) Looking at more evidence I’m likely still better off buying the conventional car for quite a while. Lave and MacLean conclude that the benefit from the Prius over the Corolla is negligible especially when considering the costs of production. Lave’s previous work has agreed with he CNW that indeed the production of hybrids results in higher environmental stress than conventional cars, and indeed have only tiny effects on ozone production and yet have increased environmental effects due to battery materials.

Of course Al Goreacle and the Suzuki will continue to push the hybrid on us, regardless, but won’t actually use them to get to their big-expensive speaking engagements.

Anyhow why am I going on about some old news? It only took our friendly Globe and Mail writer Neil Reynolds about two lines to twist this story into yet another anti-Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) story where of course it’s all Stephen Harper, Jim Flaherty, and probably George W Bush’s fault too if you look hard enough. (This is yet another one of those times where Dick “The Dick” Cheney may or may not be at fault, but let me remind you that the Laffer curve we discussed in this post earlier was his fault.) 

Now Neil Reynolds has a very interesting biography, been everything from an NDPer to a Libertarian, has run a variety of newspapers and is very vociferous on his outlook that small government, low taxes, and person freedom are the best way to go and on that I couldn’t agree more. However as he once said about working at the Toronto Star that he isn’t above going with the accepted way of things:

People know all newspapers have biases. Some people read us because they don’t agree with our bias. They get a provocative charge out of being told they’re wrong … I worked at the Toronto Star for eight years, and they were the biggest spinners of all. They had a written policy that ‘everything [Liberal finance minister] Walter Gordon does is front page news.’ I didn’t agree with Gordon, but I followed the policy anyways, with a clear conscience. Everyone knew it was a left-wing rag, and we called it PRAVDA, affectionately. But it was a great crusader, and the best-selling daily in the country.

And the way of things is CPC bashing. In his column he writes that Jim Flaherty was mistaken in giving tax breaks for fuel efficient cars and increased taxes on fuel guzzlers.

In his March budget, Mr. Flaherty made fuel efficiency - gas mileage alone - the sole basis for the environmental rating of new cars. He will reward high-mileage cars (with rebates from $1,000 to $2,000) and punish low-mileage cars (with surcharges from $1,000 to $4,000). The program could well be a phenomenal waste of energy. Junk it, Mr. Flaherty. It’s not fit for the road.

Now before all you socialist huggers out there get too excited and start waving placards about yet another frothing trashing of the CPC, lets not forget that Reynolds has a way of being facetious which doesn’t necessarily mean he’s on your side. In fact who really knows what he means, one of his previous suggestions has been to cut the GST on any new car since they are in general more fuel efficient. Probably because he reached the same conclusions I did.

However if there is one thing Reynolds admits to knowing is which way the bandwagon is headed and how to get on. So it’s likely his editors at the G&M were ecstatic with his implications regarding the CPC because the media will continue to lap up anything that windbags with no credibility like the Suzuki and Al Gore will say and yet neglect to do any real research of their own. 

For example, Stephane Dion can recycle some old wine glasses and to the media he’s the greenest guy since Kermit the Frog, yet Flaherty can implement some Suzuki Foundation suggestion and he’s the Genghis Khan of the Greenhouse Gas Horde.

Anyhow the real reason the Hybrid may be better for us all really has nothing to do with CO2. Instead it may, and this is a may, help reduce smog in cities that has been linked to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases in suseptible people as well as cancers. Even the evidence for this is still in some ways weak, but its out there and probably a lot more reliable and relevant than the media-hyped science on CO2. Yet can we get a peep out of them on this? When the CPC announced they were targeting smog as a health issue, the media was speechless. It was like watching an episode of the Simpsons when Homer is told the implications of something and he just blinks a couple times with a blank look on his face. Yet say the word Global Warming and they’ll lead the charge to Jerusalem.

(The War on Greenhouse Gasses is the New Crusade and Global Warming is the New Religion)

So if you’re going to drive a hybrid, it should be because you’re trying to save lil’ Johnny from yet another asthma episode and subsequently another visit to me. If you think you’re any better than the dude in the Hummer that just passed you, think again. You, my friend, are the one making the planet hotter.

Maybe.

Today’s Three points:

1) The fuel efficient cars are likely your best bet if you want to save the world.

2) No matter what the CPC does, according to the media it will always be wrong.

3) The Prius and other hybrids are a good idea in theory because they may reduce the harmful local effects of combustion engine emissions on lung and heart disease, not because they reduce CO2.