Obamacare Infographic

Infographics are often a great way to explain complicated concepts without walls of text.

Here’s a good one that was shared with me describing some of the fundamental technical problems with Obamacare.

Source: Healthcare-Administration-Degree.net

Obama Administration Debates Dying Cancer Patient

Obama’s senior adviser, Dan Pfeiffer, just called a terminal cancer patient a liar, blaming her insurance company for being driven out of business by Obamacare.

At least Obama wasn’t lying when he said, “I’m really good at killing people.”

Will Single-Payer Solve the Obamacare Problems?

The popular response among progressives to the Obamacare trainwreck (higher costs, dropped coverage, incompetent mismanagement) is to suggest that all of this would be better if we had just enacted single-payer (i.e. nationalized/socialist) health care in the first place. But do you really think the same government that was too incompetent to manage a website and run the health insurance industry will be competent enough to run the entire health care industry directly?

If you nationalize all of this, those additional costs that Obamacare created through centrally-mandated inefficiencies won’t just go away. They’ll get worse as the government takes more of the decisions away from the health industry professionals, replacing their time-tested judgements with those of politicians. The only thing that will change to make anyone’s life easier is we’ll be paying for it through taxes rather than through insurance companies. But shuffling the costs around like that doesn’t make them go away. We will have to pay those costs, or our country will default, and then we’ll all be facing total economic devastation.

Socialist health care doesn’t fix fascist health care. It only sweeps the costs of inefficient centralized management under the rug and pretends they aren’t there.

Tea Partiers are Better Educated than You

On average. That’s right. The more intelligent you are, the more likely you are to be a Tea Partier. So all you folks who think those Tea Partiers are all just crazy, ignorant “bitter clingers,” perhaps you don’t know something that they do.

All humans operate with a limited knowledge base. Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe your intellectual opponents seem crazy and irrational because they have some piece of knowledge that you’re missing? You may actually be the irrational one.

Think about that the next time you feel the need to use the government to push some program on someone. Leave people to their own judgement, and you can be sure you’re not just dumbing down all of society.

The Biggest Corporation

I’m going full populist today.

Imagine a corporation that possesses monopoly power over all of its services. Its CEO is immune to any form of accountability (aside from a massive regulatory agency which is too inept and internally-divided to do anything), and there is no direct, external oversight. This corporation also maintains an arsenal of weapons, which it uses with impunity to support its own interests, often to force you to buy its products and muscle competition out of the markets. Pretty horrible and scary, right?

The worst part is, this corporation actually exists. It calls itself your government.

We all are the regulatory agency that has the power to hold the CEO accountable for his crimes and break up this massive monopoly, if only we could agree to do it. So why do so many people seek to defend this corporation from oversight, and repeatedly fall on their swords in support of its power-hungry CEO? Isn’t a free, competitive market better than one single, massive, monopolistic, unaccountable conglomerate dominating us all?

The same company with the power to judge us and throw us in jail should not be allowed to participate in any other industries. It’s just too open to corrupt abuses of power.

Title Change

In case you’ve noticed, the title of this blog has changed. This decision was made after googling my own name, and discovering that all of the results related to my scientific endeavors have been drowned out by links leading here.

Unfortunately, the world of a science is filled with people who are perfectly happy working for the government. Many scientists see their own intelligence as a reason to use politics to force their beliefs and lifestyle on others, rather than as a reason to be free of government intrusion. This stems from the belief that the public is too stupid to appreciate good science, and so the only way to get funding is to appeal to the confiscatory power of government, rather than by seeking out voluntary funding sources. Of course, this unenlightened view ignores the fact that the government is made up of the same descendents of Cro-Magnons that make up the general public, but with even less inspired variance. Yet, even scientists usually don’t have the courage to question their own funding. Just like everyone else, they don’t like to bite the hand that feeds.

So, to avoid being retaliated against in the professional world for my advocacy of liberty, I must distance my online presence from my professional name. Of course, I will never allow myself to be silenced, but I will be a more effective voice for my cause in the future if my career success is not hindered by butting heads with my colleagues. A name change seems the simplest way to achieve this.

Democracy is Not Freedom

The Arab Spring is supposed to be a wonderful thing because it is eliminating dictators and installing democracy throughout the Middle East, right? The people get to choose their government! That’s freedom! Right?

Well, is it freedom when majorities vote to install Islamic law with totalitarian reach in the government, as they are doing in many of these “liberated” Middle Eastern nations? How free do you think women in Egypt feel, now that a secular dictatorship has been replaced with a misogynistic Islamic democracy?

With this in mind, I’m going to put forward a radical concept that few in the democratic world have managed to grasp: Democracy is not freedom. Replacing a tyrannical dictator with a tyrannical majority does not free a people. Too many people believe that whatever the majority wants is right. That it’s oppression to deny the majority their will. But when the majority seeks to infringe on the inherent rights of the minority, they cannot possibly be supporting freedom.

Democracy is not the essence of freedom- it is merely a tool that can be useful for protecting freedom. True freedom comes from the principles of liberty, which must be protected for all people from the will of any minority or majority. That means protecting individual sovereignty for all, not just ensuring popular sovereignty. The democratic socialist governmental structures of the European Union as well as the Bolivarian governments of South America suppress the individual sovereignty of the people in favor of expressing the collective will of the majority. The majorities in these countries may feel pretty free because they’re getting everything they want, but the members of the minority who they oppress are having their liberty infringed upon every day.

That is why the United States government was originally founded with a Constitution and Bill of Rights strictly limiting the power of the democratic government to infringe on the liberty of individuals. This government was not meant to be an expression of collective will, but a means of ensuring that no individual could come under monarchical or majoritarian oppression. Yet, in recent generations, we’ve strayed from these principles, allowing charismatic leaders to convince us that they can solve the problems of poverty, of unemployment, of poor education and health care, if only we would give them more power to express the collective will of the people. What they leave out of these platitudes is the clarification that their solutions would express the will of the majority at the expense of the basic liberty of the minority. Yet, we’ve supplanted nearly all of our constitutional principles in favor of the democratic socialist perspectives of Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama.

This envisioning of the government as a mechanism of expressing collective will is wrong. It is an anti-liberty view, as should be clear from the oppressive horrors that voting majorities have brought everywhere from 1930’s Europe to the modern Middle East. The collective will of majorities can be very oppressive, and it is no better when this collective will is used to provide financial security to one group at the expense of another group. These so-called “positive freedoms” come at the expense of the “negative freedoms” (the liberty) that all humans have an inherent right to. The government cannot buy one person a service without stealing property and labor from another person. So please, don’t try to equate democracy with freedom. Unrestrained democracy can be just as oppressive against the liberties of the people as unrestrained hereditary leadership.

For true freedom to come to all citizens of a nation, we must refocus the role of government back on the protection of liberty and individual sovereignty. No democratic form of government should ever be built without a constitutional guarantee to liberty. There just cannot be freedom without it. When individuals are free from forcible forms of organization, they are free to create their own voluntary forms of communal organization that can solve the nation’s problems without the suppression of human rights.

The Separation of Ideology and State

Quite a few people in this country support the separation of Church and State, feeling that religion has no place in defining the role of the State. Yet, many of these same people have no problem forcing their own ideologies and beliefs of any other nature on others through the mechanism of government.

What’s the difference between the different religions and the different political ideologies of our day? Religions are old enough to base their righteousness in the idea of divine right. That’s all. In every other way, the different religions are not fundamentally different different types of belief than those various political factions that lead to our modern squabbles over the economy, over how people should live their lives. As time goes on and the major political parties take turns wielding the power of the State, we allow these ideologies and ways of life that we do not believe in to be imposed on us simply because they come from the will of 51% of the people. Is this right? Is it right for two neighbors to force the third to live as they do? Would you allow the majority religion of the country to force their beliefs on you? It would certainly be democratic, but is it liberty?

So I have a simple question to ask: Why don’t the people of this country drop the blatant contradictions in their beliefs and favor a total separation of Ideology and State? Stop using taxes and the power of the law to force others to live as you choose to live. Stop trying to force everyone in the country to support your favored programs. For liberty’s sake, just leave each other alone. The violent power of government should not be used for every goal you have in life. All it truly needs to be used for is defense against further imposition of violent power.

How can you favor the Separation of Church and state without also accepting the Separation of Ideology and State, unless your motives are duplicitous and hypocritical?

The Debt Cliff

A simple analogy for those trying to understand the debt ceiling debates:

The debt ceiling is a brick wall that we’re running towards. If we hit that brick wall, it will hurt. Hence, the Democrats want to break down that wall and remove it altogether so that we don’t run into it.

However, the Republicans understand something which the Democrats do not: that this brick wall blocks the path to a sheer cliff. The Republicans want to keep this wall up because of the far more severe pain we will experience if we run off the cliff. They see that the entire nation of Greece is painfully trying to climb back up this cliff, having run off the edge and been safely caught before the bottom in a net laid out by Germany. Unfortunately, no nation in the world can afford a net big enough to catch us if we take the plunge.

In the past, we’ve avoided the pain of running into the wall by breaking it down and rebuilding it further up the road. This will not help us when we run out of road. The only solution to avoid further pain is to simply stop running down this road. Though the Democrats blame the Republicans for leaving a brick wall up for us to run into, it is those same Democrats who keep us running towards it by protecting ever-growing entitlement spending, and who will run us right off the cliff edge in the absence of such a wall.

If this wasn’t clear enough, the road is the national debt, and the cliff edge is the point where our interest payments on our national debt become too large for the national budget to ever achieve a surplus again.

According to recent Congressional Budge Office models, we will officially hit that cliff edge in 2058, though that assumes that we’re willing to completely eliminate our military, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and just about every other government program in order to repay our debt. If we assume that a functioning military is more important than repaying our debts, then we’re going to hit that cliff in 2050. If we assume this, and that Social Security funds are untouchable because they’re owned by the people paying into the system, then we’re going to hit that cliff around 2034. With those assumptions in place, if we want to have even a single dollar available to fund Medicare and Medicaid, we better turn away from this cliff before 2026. And of course, in 2015 (just three years from now) we’re going to hit the point where it becomes exponentially more costly to steer away from the cliff every year.

Of course, all of these fiscal scenarios optimistically assume that our credit rating is never downgraded again, and that the government doesn’t add any additional spending to the current baseline scenarios. Basically, this is assuming that we don’t further speed up our run down the road, even though we have been accelerating faster than ever before under the current administration. The more realistic scenario is that all of those deadlines will approach far faster than is currently assumed.

Freedom Correlations, Part 2: The Most Important Form of Freedom

Last time, I examined how economic freedom (as defined by the Heritage Foundation) correlates with state failure (as defined by The Fund for Peace) by plotting each country on a graph of economic freedom score vs. failed state score. I found a strongly negative correlation between economic freedom and state failure, with the best-fit model being a monotonically negative sigmoidal curve. This model predicted that for countries at the extremes of economic freedom, changes in economic freedom have little effect on state failure, whereas countries with economic freedom scores in the middle of the pack compared to the rest of the world change rapidly with changes in economic freedom, gaining 40 points of state failure for every 15 points of economic freedom lost. Furthermore, it was found that with a (economic freedom score, state failure score) value of (76.3, 34.8), the United States is right on the brink of this “Fast Failure Region,” and headed in the the wrong direction, validating the widespread perception of U.S. decline. At this point, I would like to gain greater insight into the policy-based causes of state failure by investigating how each subcategory of economic freedom impacts state failure. This will give us information about which policies have the greatest effect on a country’s prosperity, hopefully presenting a feasible solution to prevent national decline.

For each subcategory of economic freedom, I performed an analysis similar to the one used to produce the graphs shown in Part 1. Definitions of each subcategory are provided in Part 1 of this series. I plotted the country scores for each subcategory from the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom against that country’s score in The Fund For Peace’s State Failure Index. I then searched for the curve of best fit that could be used to model each correlation, while being careful not to over-parameterize the functions. The resulting fits (described by R² value and the sign of the correlation) are summarized in Figure 4. It’s important to note that the correlations are not all described by the same functions.³

Figure 4: The magnitude and direction of correlations of each type of economic freedom with state failure. Freedom subcategories are arranged by increasing magnitude of correlation.

As can be seen from the chart, not all forms of economic freedom show a negative correlation with state failure, and not all forms show much of a correlation at all. For instance, Labor Freedom, which is the freedom for a business to make any voluntary contract it wants with its laborers, shows very little correlation at all with state failure. This would indicate that, contrary to the hopes of all the unions and the fears of all the business leaders out there, labor laws don’t really have any effect on a country’s overall prosperity. Also, providing a little bit of support for the Keynesian worldview, it would seem that the Freedom from Government Spending subcategory actually has some indirect positive relationship with state failure. An exception to the monotonicity of these correlations arises from the observation that State Failure is not actually a function of Fiscal Freedom, but still does have a correlation. Fiscal Freedom, which is the freedom from taxation, is actually dependent on State Failure, rather than the other way around, peaking around a State Failure score of 65, and declining towards the extremes of both national prosperity and national collapse. Perhaps this can be explained through the idea that both tyrannical governments and well-trusted, benevolent governments have the greatest capability to extract taxes from the people, but that’s a topic for another day.

Though not all forms of economic freedom stave off state failure, it’s clear that some categories do have a very strong record of keeping nations prosperous. Investment Freedom, Business Freedom, Financial Freedom, and Trade Freedom all have similarly strong levels of negative correlation with state failure. These four correlations also have similarly shaped models, giving the overall freedom correlation its Boltzmann Sigmoidal fit. It makes sense that these forms of freedom would act so similarly, as these are the forms which are most closely associated with the productive operations of our economy’s businesses. It should come as a major warning to regulation advocates that depriving businesses or the financial sector of their freedom has such a huge impact on the prosperity of a country. The initiation of the Great Depression in 1929 showed us what can go wrong if countries get too manipulative and protectionist with their trade policies, and the 2008 Great Recession showed us what can go wrong if countries get too manipulative with their financial sectors. The correlations here suggest that perhaps these devastating economic incidents weren’t freak accidents, but laws of nature.

But of course, the most significant correlations observed in this study were the State Failure negative correlations with Property Rights (R² = 0.73) and Freedom from Corruption (R² = 0.75) (Figure 5). Perhaps it should be obvious that increasing corruption leads to increasing state failure. That might even be considered a tautology, depending on how you define “corruption.” But therein lies the problem with this analysis: “Corruption” does not have a universally-accepted singular definition. Nobody tries to legislate corruption, and everybody agrees that corruption is bad. Furthermore, it’s probably a good assumption that corruption is probably already illegal in every country in the world. So how can we propose prosperity-promoting policy changes to reduce corruption when nobody can even agree on what it is?

Figure 5: The correlation between Freedom from Corruption score and Failed State score with an asymptotic exponential fit.

It turns out, it’s not important for this analysis how you or I or how any politician defines corruption. What’s important is how the Heritage Foundation defines corruption, because they’re the ones that made this index and assigned these scores. So how does Heritage define corruption? Well, they defer the definition to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). And how does Transparency International define corruption for their index? Well…they don’t. As stated in their FAQ, “There is no meaningful way to assess absolute levels of corruption in countries or territories on the basis of hard empirical data,” so they instead base their index on, “how corrupt a country’s public sector is perceived to be” in population surveys. So Heritage’s definition of corruption is based on everyone’s definition of corruption, which nobody can agree upon. Great, we’re running in circles.

In order to get to the bottom of this quandary, I tried something that Heritage probably should have done when they first started publishing this index: I plotted the corruption scores for countries against the other measures of economic freedom, and found something very interesting. The Freedom from Corruption scores correlate with the Property Rights scores through an exponential relationship with an R² value of 0.92 (Figure 6). Given that the data for these two different measures come from two completely different type of surveys, this correlation is strong enough to suggest that they’re measuring the same thing. In other words, the correlation is definitional. Freedom from Corruption is the protection of Property Rights. The fact that the corruption perceptions data came from population surveys suggests that most people at least subconsciously feel that violations of property rights are corruption, even if they won’t necessarily acknowledge it on either the philosophical or practical levels. The lack of exceptions here is surprising, given that most countries are philosophically very socialist, and that there are even quite a few shamelessly communist nations in the world. Perhaps this is a case of, “When it happens to me, it’s a crime, but when it happens to you, it’s business.”

Figure 6: The correlation between Property Rights score and Freedom from Corruption score with an exponential fit.

So, now that we know that Heritage (and world populations in general) think of property rights when judging the level of corruption in a country, we know that the most important form of economic freedom for promoting prosperity is indeed property rights. The correlation graph is shown in Figure 7. Though a Boltzmann Sigmoidal fit provides the best match to the data (R² = 0.73), it is only the lower Property Rights region that actually shows a deviation from a linear fit. Hence, a line with a slope of -0.79 can be fit to the data with an R² of 0.72. Averaged over the whole chart, every 10 points lost in the protection of Property Rights leads to an 8 point increase in in State Failure. This trajectory is extremely reliable given how empty the chart is in the bottom-left and top-right quadrants. The most extreme outlier with low State Failure even with low Property Rights is Argentina (20, 46.5), which seems to have narrowly dodged the bullet of state failure even with some of the worst protection of property rights in the world. The most extreme outlier in the other direction, with high State Failure even with reasonably high protection of Property Rights is Israel (70, 82.2), for reasons which are probably obvious. New Zealand (95, 25.6) is the bottom-right-most point, achieving very low State Failure with the absolute highest protection of Property Rights. The United States (85, 34.8) falls very close to the best-fit line, and could probably get down to a failure score of 25.8 just by protecting property rights as well as New Zealand.  That would bring us down to Canada’s or New Zealand’s low level of State Failure, even without any new social programs. In fact, it appears that no matter how many social programs a country puts in place, it can’t save them from failure if they do not protect property rights. It’s clearly property rights, not social services, that make a country generally prosperous.

Figure 7: The correlation between Property Rights score and Failed State score with a Boltzmann sigmoidal fit.

I also plotted the countries’ Property Rights scores against each subcategory of State Failure to determine the mechanism by which a country collapses after diminishing the right to private property (Figure 8).⁴ Property rights apparently have a negative correlation with every component of state failure, emphasizing their importance. There is absolutely no silver lining to the degradation of private property rights. Still, there are some mechanisms of state failure which are more directly related to a failure to protect property rights than others. The correlation with State Legitimacy (R² = 0.75) is extremely strong, suggesting that giving the government the power to deprive citizens of their property rights immediately leads to power struggles, cronyism, black markets, electoral manipulation, and protests of the whole mess. The Security Apparatus (R² = 0.66) also suffers severely from the loss of property rights, creating rebellion, militant groups, gang violence, and riots. Without private property rights, other Human Rights (R² = 0.62) also reliably suffer, leading to the loss of press freedom and other civil liberties, while increasing the incarceration and execution rates. Contrary to Marxist belief, private property rights are actually very good at inoculating a country against the entrenched aristocracy of Factionalized Elites (R² = 0.62) and the income inequality of Uneven Development (R² = 0.58). No matter how much money the government dumps into infrastructure, if that money is obtained by violating the private property rights of the people, then even Public Services (R² = 0.59) will suffer. Ultimately, Poverty and Economic Decline (R² = 0.51) is the result of any effort to replace private property rights with any philosophy deemed “more important.”

Figure 8: The magnitude and direction of correlations of Property Rights score with each type of State Failure. Failure types are arranged by increasing magnitude of correlation.

Collectivist philosophies survive on the belief that private property rights cause income inequality, poverty, bribery, and entrenchment of an elite class. However, these data sets show that the beliefs of socialists, Marxists, and communists are simply incorrect. The world very clearly does not work the way they believe it does. In fact, private property rights protect a nation from the economic and political ills that create squalor, stagnation, and sectionalism. And contrary to the beliefs of Liberals, it is impossible to protect the civil liberties of a nation without maintaining strong private property rights. Economic freedom is absolutely crucial to the protection of personal freedom. No country in the world has managed to lift its people out of poverty and socioeconomic turmoil without protecting private property rights. So, if you truly care about the prosperity of the people, and the lifting of the underclasses out of poverty, then beware of socialist politicians who advocate taking the property away from certain demonized groups as a means of bringing prosperity to the honest working people. They advocate the impossible. As they diminish the property rights of the people in general, they will drive their country towards failure, using the resulting socioeconomic collapse as further fuel for their cause. In reality, no matter how many scapegoats they identify, these socialists and communists and so-called “liberals” are the source of the pain that they rail against, even if they are very good at redirecting the perception of cause. They are their own demons. Any nation which falls into a popular mindset of “we just need more socialism and it will fix everything,” will trap itself in a perpetual spiral of self-destruction. The data presented here proves this.

As Americans used to know, the only true way to lift “your poor, your tired, your huddled masses” from squalor is through liberty. Protect the private property rights of the people, and give them the freedom to innovate, and they will find their own ways to survive with a prosperity that no central authority could have ever imagined. This is how Libertarianism aspires to help the people.

This analysis will be continued in Part 3. For peer-reviewed journal articles showing similar trends, refer to this list. 

Footnotes
3. The correlations of State Failure with Business Freedom, Financial Freedom, Investment Freedom, Monetary Freedom, Property Rights, and Trade Freedom  were modeled with Boltzmann sigmoidal fits trending monotonically in the negative direction. The correlation with Freedom from Corruption was modeled with an asymptotic exponential decay function. The correlations with Labor Freedom and Freedom from Government Spending were modeled with linear fits, with negative and positive slopes, respectively. The correlation with Fiscal Freedom was modeled with an extremes peak function to account for the non-monotonic nature of this relationship.
4. The correlations of Property Rights with Demographics, External Intervention, Factionalized Elites, Group Grievances, Human Flight, Poverty and Decline, Public Services, Refugees, Security Apparatus, State Legitimacy, and Uneven Development were modeled with Boltzmann sigmoidal fits trending monotonically in the negative direction. Not all of these models showed the full range of the sigmoidal shape within the range of the charts, but the sigmoidal model was still necessary to capture the fluctuations in the monotonic trends in the data.