Do you believe that the government of the United States considers itself obliged by law to respect anyone’s rights? You are wrong. Read Chris Floyd’s article on a recent Supreme Court decision to let a lower court’s ruling stand, and weep your bitterest tears. If you count yourself among those who believe that this country stands for something better than the historical norm of tyranny and savagery, consider yourself as having made a grievous mistake.

In truth, any “constitutionally protected rights” you are now exercising exist solely at the pleasure and convenience of the rulers. The minute the continuation of your life or liberty no longer pleases them, they will, as the Court’s decision makes clear, simply declare you an unperson to be dealt with as they choose, whether they choose to torture you, confine you in a steel cage for the rest of your life, or peremptorily kill you. They recognize NO rights in anyone (except themselves, of course) that they are bound to respect.

This horror is the end to which a brave experiment has come. If the rulers can, at their pleasure, declare ANYONE THEY SELECT a legal unperson, the notion that the United States is a free country is nothing but the sickest of sick jokes.

Don’t tell me I’m hysterical because most people don’t have their doors kicked in and suffer having themselves or their relatives dragged off into legal oblivion. The USSR and Maoist China did not drag away most people, either. The government, for its own support, needs most people to continue producing goods and services. The point is the principle on which the government will act, and that principle is now plainly that the rulers will act however they wish. Those who resist may simply be “disappeared.”

Congratulations, fellow Americans. Your beloved country has now become Argentina at its worst.

In preparation for hearings on the government’s contractors in Afghanistan by the Senate Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight, the majority staff has prepared a memorandum, dated December 16, 2009, which gives an overview. I commend this report to your attention with the caveat “read it and weep.”

Not that this information differs in its general contours from the information in scores of similar reports I have read over the past three decades. In the field of military and foreign-policy-related contracting, only the criminals’ identities change (although some do persist); the crimes remain the same. The general rule in this area of government action is:  no misfeasance or malfeasance goes unrewarded.

Please do not take my word for these things; read the report for yourself. It’s available online. Because it was prepared by the subcommittee staff, you won’t have to worry about the kinds of biases that unfriendly commentators such as I might bring to the matter. The situation is bad enough even when described in the usual bland language beloved by all government flunkies.

Here are the first three items of the summary:

Wasteful Spending on Defense Department Contracts Nears $1 Billion. According to federal auditors, approximately $950 million in questioned and unsupported costs has been submitted by Defense Department contractors for work in Afghanistan. This represents 16% of the total contract dollars examined.

Afghanistan Contract Spending Exceeds $23 Billion. According the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS), the United States has spent more than $23 billion on contracts performed in Afghanistan since 2002.

Number of Defense Department Contractors in Afghanistan May Reach 160,000. There are currently 104,000 Defense Department contractors currently [sic] working in Afghanistan. The increase in troops may require an additional 56,000 Defense Department contractors, bringing the total number of Defense contractors in Afghanistan to 160,000

The 104,000 military contract workers in Afghanistan as of September 30, 2009, compares to approximately 64,000 uniformed U.S. military personnel there at that time. Thus, the contract workers made up 62 percent of the total force. With the number of uniformed personnel scheduled to increase by 30,000 during the next six months, and assuming that the contract workforce increases by the projected maximum of 56,000, the contract workers will make up 63 percent of the total U.S. force in mid-2010.

The contractors perform a wide variety of tasks for the military, including feeding the troops, doing their laundry, building and maintaining their housing, taking care of warehousing and other logistical needs, administering contracts, making translations, and providing security. The final two items are especially interesting in that they call our attention to the facts that (1) the American soldiers―men and women from places such as Sioux City, Newark, and Chattanooga―are somewhat at a loss to understand Pashto and other local languages and hence are completely clueless as to what’s going on in the country they’re trying to control; and that (2) the U.S. uniformed personnel, armed to the teeth, feel the need for more than 10,000 armed civilian workers to provide security.

The report proceeds under such headings as “Failure to Apply Lessons Learned from Iraq,” “Poor Coordination of Interagency Efforts,” and “Continual Personnel Turnover.” Its third major section is titled “Waste, Fraud, Abuse, and Mismanagement Mar Afghanistan Reconstruction and Development.” Subheadings include “Inadequate Contracting and Program Management Practices” and “Contractors Overseeing Contractors.” I’m sure you are beginning to get the picture. I don’t want to spoil your reading by giving away all the details. Trust me, however: it’s a pretty juicy story, even when expressed in dry bureaucratese.

Over the years, I have noticed that such orgies of military waste, fraud, and abuse are always attributed in large measure to mistakes, oversights, inadequately trained personnel, poor planning, and so forth—that is, to incompetence, rather than to criminal intent. But ask yourself: if these same “problems” have infected a contracting system for almost seventy years, can they possibly be honest mistakes? These attributes of government contracts are hardly secrets. They have been spelled out in countless official reports and analyzed by hundreds of academic experts and others. Why haven’t the problems been fixed?

The answer is all too obvious: one man’s waste, fraud, and abuse and another man’s road to riches. The military contracting system works in this seemingly atrocious way precisely because that’s how the powers that be want it to operate. When the dust settles, hundreds of billions of dollars will have been relocated from the taxpayers’ pockets to those of the officially contracted pirates who habitually infest these waters, persons associated with firms such as KBR, Fluor, DynCorp, and Xe. Of course, a portion of the loot returns in various forms to the members of Congress and the executive-branch officials who authorize and purport to oversee the whole predatory apparatus.

Breaking news this week:

Obama’s minions attacked Senator Joseph Lieberman and other independents/moderates on health care while that same faction begged with him not to have Senator Dick Durbin kill the DC Voucher Program. Durbin pulled the plug on those poor kids and Obama signed on the dotted line. [NOTE: I am opposed to any federal involvement in education but this issue is about duplicity, not the merits of government-sponsored voucher programs]

Apparently, Illinois has two rascals in office and both were U.S. Senators (one now president): Durbin and Obama. Way to go Illinois (my home state).

Thankfully, Durbin doesn’t have a snowball’s chance of “cash for clunkering” his way into the White House. Billions for clunkers but not a dime for D.C. kids unless it flows through the rotten public school system. “Change you can believe in” is apparently change you can’t count–unless you have connections. Most poor kids do not have connections.

So far, the baby boomers have coughed up some mediocre-awful presidents. (Clinton-Bush-Obama). On a positive note, they do “feel our pain” (Clinton), know that “when people suffer government must act” (Bush), and America must lead by following and listening (Obama).

This sounds like a remake of “Yes, Prime Minister.” In that classic British comedy, the buffoon (Prime Minister) declares “I am their leader, I must follow them.” That was funny. Too bad our president is too stiff to have a sense of humor, because he really does make good copy. Glad that SNL and other outlets recognize him as a comedy asset.

“You lie!”

That line came from a Republican congressman when President Barack Obama delivered his speech in favor of national health care.

The line is even more appropriate when discussing candidate–now President–Obama’s shifting policies on Iran. The Wall Street Journal summed up the latest do-nothing, say nothing, see nothing turn in Obama’s Iran policy:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704541004574600274098469020.html

In a word, the president has promised sanctions, drawn lines in the sand, but never followed through with even words.We are told that Obama was to be a Great Communicator like FDR or Reagan but his exaggerated oratorical skills were used more to win the favor of Old Europe than to address the awful Iranian despots’ march toward a multiplicity of nuclear weapons. Throw in the tone deafness about Iran’s continuing support for terrorists, murder and torture of protestors, a new round of U.S. hostage-taking, and you have the makings of another Neville Chamberlain. I suppose he would be the first “black Neville Chamberlain.”

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, words mean something. If you say something, mean it. As a Dr. Seuss character put it:

“I say what I mean and I mean what I say”

Does President Obama mean what he says? If so, perhaps he can tell the people of Iran, Israel and the rest of the world if he says what he means.

Crosspost from a new blog on science policy, http://blindsciencepolicy.blogspot.com/

Was ClimateGate inevitable? Moreover, with all the negative attention given to corporate-funded research (supposed conflict of interest), what about government-funded research? If you research global warming and conclude there is no (or little) problem, how much will the government throw at a problem that doesn’t exist? On the other hand, if your research scares the bejesus out of government officials (and the public), how much will various government spend?

To paraphrase Carl Sagan, “billions and billions . . . “

In his speech to Congress on the need to overhaul health care, President Obama asserted:

More and more Americans pay their premiums, only to discover that their insurance company has dropped their coverage when they get sick, or won’t pay the full cost of care. It happens every day.

The following week, Health Care for America Now, a group supporting the Democrats’ health care reform bill, ran a television ad claiming that private health insurance companies: “Deny 1 out of 5 treatments prescribed by doctors.”

When fact-checked by PolitiFact.com, it turned out the statistic had been derived by the California Nurses Association, which broadened its definition of “denial” to include such administrative non-events as a claim having been sent to the wrong insurer. Such snafus occur behind the scenes, and the patient never knows about them because his/her claim is, in fact, subsequently paid by the correct insurer.

And the drumbeat goes on—

Every day in cities and towns across the United States, Americans with insurance are denied medically necessary care by a for-profit insurer. A treatment, test, medication or even a surgical procedure ordered by their physician is denied, all in the name of increasing the bottom line.

—surely leading inexorably to the conclusion that we must take action NOW to pass health care “reform”!

But, when you take the “profit” out of health care, what do you find?

According to the American Medical Association’s National Health Insurer Report Card for 2008, the government’s health plan, Medicare, denied medical claims at nearly double the average for private insurers: Medicare denied 6.85% of claims. The highest private insurance denier was Aetna @ 6.8%, followed by Anthem Blue Cross @ 3.44, with an average denial rate of medical claims by private insurers of 3.88%

In its 2009 National Health Insurer Report Card, the AMA reports that Medicare denied only 4% of claims—a big improvement, but outpaced better still by the private insurers. The prior year’s high private denier, Aetna, reduced denials to 1.81%—an astounding 75% improvement—with similar declines by all other private insurers, to average only 2.79%.

Maybe there’s something to be said for the need to keep your customers satisfied in order to make that profit after all.

One of the issues health care reform is grappling with is how to extend health insurance coverage to the uninsured.  At first glance, it would appear that one way to make sure everyone has health insurance is to mandate that everyone has to buy it.  This article indicates that about 16.2% of Americans are currently uninsured.  But (I’m not the first one to point this out) every state requires drivers to have auto insurance, yet this article says that nationwide, 14.6% of drivers are uninsured.

There’s not much difference in the percentage of uninsured motorists and those who don’t have health insurance.  The comparison is slightly unfair, because all uninsured motorists can afford a car, or at least afford access to one, whereas the health statistic includes everyone, regardless of whether they can afford a car or anything else.  Is there any reason to think that a health insurance mandate would be any more successful than an auto insurance mandate at getting people to buy insurance?

I am curious, though, as to how violators would be identified, and how they would be penalized for their violation.  A fine would be levied against the uninsured, but it’s hard to see how one would be identified as uninsured unless the person needed health care and couldn’t produce proof of insurance to the doctor or hospital.  Do we bill the person for hospital and physician services, and on top of that levy the fine?  Would health care providers have the responsibility for turning in violators?

Some uninsured individuals are eligible for programs like Medicaid, but don’t enroll.  When they end up in the hospital, the hospital sees that they enroll, because then the hospital can get paid.  But someone like this would still be in violation of the mandate, so presumably would be subject to the fine even if Medicaid paid for the health care.  If the person didn’t pay the fine, would he or she then be jailed?

Consider a scenario: Joe gets laid off and loses his employer-provided health insurance.  So, Joe looks for another job, and has a number of promising leads.  He’s thinking he should have another job in a month or so, because he’s got good prospects.  But before one pans out, he’s in an auto accident on the way to a job interview and ends up in the hospital.  Does Joe deserve a fine because he didn’t line up health insurance before he went looking for another job?

Let’s face it: Many of the 16% of Americans without health insurance aren’t in the best of financial circumstances, and when one thinks about the mechanics of identifying them and fining them for being uninsured, it just doesn’t seem feasible.  The government might find a few relatively well-to-do uninsured and fine them to make an example of them, but for most uninsured, it’s implausible to think that they actually will have to pay a fine.

The percentages I cited at the beginning make it appear that a mandate would have little effect on the actual share of Americans who have health insurance.  But when you think about how the mandate might actually be enforced, it appears unworkable.  In that respect, it’s not that different from other aspects of the current reform proposals.

“Higgs is just a pessimist” — how often I’ve come across expressions of that sentiment during the past twenty-five years! In certain circles, I have become the butt of jokes – some good-natured, some not – by virtue of my alleged pessimism.

Okay, maybe I am somewhat pessimistic. My wife, who is confident that she knows more about me than I know about myself, says so, and I am certainly not going to take issue with someone who possesses superior knowledge. But my reputation as a pessimist stems not from the kind of knowledge that my wife possesses in special measure, but from my writings over the years about the growth of government and related matters.

In this context, I have been rather puzzled by many of the accusations of pessimism, because whereas I have always tried to rest my expectations on my knowledge of what happened in the past and my understanding of why those events occurred, those who dismiss or depreciate my prognostications seem to me to be lapsing into wishful thinking – groundless optimism, if you will.

When my book Crisis and Leviathan was published in 1987, several reviewers took issue with it on the grounds that my forecast – which occupies less than one page at the end of the book – was unduly pessimistic, especially in view of the great transformation that some of them imagined had been wrought by the “Reagan Revolution.” What provoked this bizarre focus on three paragraphs in a book of 372 pages? After disavowing any pretense of knowing the future, I wrote that if human society survives (which is always iffy, given the combination of technological power and moral infirmity), we do know one thing:

We know that other great crises will come. Whether they will be occasioned by foreign wars, economic collapse, or rampant terrorism, no one can predict with assurance. Yet in one form of another, great crises will surely come again, as they have from time to time throughout all human history. When they do, governments almost certainly will gain new powers over economic and social affairs. Everything I have argued and documented in the preceding chapters points toward this conclusion.

For years afterward, I would tell those skeptical of my thesis – people who were convinced that Big Government was gradually being diminished – that the gains in freedom (which, even at the time, I considered to be more than offset by contemporaneous losses) would be swept away overnight at the onset of the next great crisis. When 9/11 occurred, I had occasion to put my views to the test.  Was I wrong then? When the current recession came to a head in the financial debacle of September and October 2008, I had another occasion to put my views to the test. Was I wrong then?

I’m not gloating. It’s possible that my views are altogether cockamamey and that the huge spurts of government growth after 9/11 and again after the financial debacle have occurred for reasons that simply appear to validate my views. I don’t think so, however: too many of the details fit my scheme. But consider again the matter I raised at the beginning of this essay: was I right (or apparently right) about these events only because these are bad developments, and such developments always seem to confirm the expectations of ex ante pessimists?

In my years as a basketball player, we used to say after a bad shot fell through the hoop that it’s better to be lucky than good. Have my well-confirmed expectations about the post-crisis events of the past decade been simply lucky, rather than soundly based?

In my work on the growth of government over the past three decades, I have always rested my conclusions on a combination of facts and theory. I may be wrong about the facts, although those who have disputed my views have not so much claimed that I got the facts wrong as that I misinterpreted them or that I committed sins of omission. I may also be wrong about the theory, but my theoretical views have seemingly proved their mettle in a variety of applications, in their details and their broad contours, and in one historical episode after another in the modern (post-Progressive) ideological era. In sum, I don’t believe that my views on the evolution of the U.S. politico-economic order ever did, or now do, simply express my psychological tendency toward pessimism.

So, it has always irritated me when my arguments were dismissed or depreciated on the grounds that “Higgs is just a pessimist.” Such a reaction strikes me as a sort of ad hominem fallacy. You might as well say that Higgs is wrong about the growth of government because he’s a jackass (a trait I am neither confirming nor denying).

This past week, however, we have seen President Barack Obama awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, and seen him use the occasion to present the same-old-same-old pseudo-justifications for enlarging the foolish war in Afghanistan and for perpetuating  global U.S. hegemony. As if that shameful travesty were not more than enough insult added to our injuries, we have seen Ben Bernanke named Time magazine’s person of the year, in the wake of the Fed’s having placed the U.S. economy in the kind of jeopardy that it has not suffered since World War II. If you wanted to invent news items to illustrate the black absurdity of our political and ideological situation, you could not have come up with nastier ones.

These sorts of events rarely come as a surprise to me, however:  they fit nicely into the analytical narratives I’ve been writing for decades about where the country is heading and why. But, as always, I may be wrong. So, to keep up your spirits, I recommend that you ask some well-established experts what they think. Chances are that they will reassure you. After all, as everybody knows, Higgs is just a pessimist.

Fresh from his recent White House-sponsored jobs summit, President Obama is pushing a new economic stimulus plan intended to soften the pain of a 26-year-high unemployment rate that sees one in ten Americans out of work.

Against all expectations, $200 billion of the money originally appropriated by Congress for bailing out financial institutions under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) either remains unspent or has already been repaid to the U.S. Treasury.

Will wonders never cease?

Rather than use that $200 billion to either pay down the monumental federal debt or, better yet, return it to the taxpayers, President Obama proposes spending $50 billion to “create” additional jobs. As such, some of the TARP “surplus” money now will be used for, among other things, financing tax credits for companies that hire new employees, subsidizing public infrastructure projects that were not previously “shovel-ready” and providing tax deductions to individuals who improve energy efficiency in their homes.

Heroin addicts experience a “rush” immediately after main-lining their drug of choice. They do not at the moment grasp the long-run consequences of their health-degrading habits. With an unemployment rate unexpectedly falling to 10 percent from 10.2 percent in the past month, the Obama administration and many pundits have fallen into the same trap. But if Washington injects a trillion dollars or more into the U.S. economy, things are bound to improve in the short run.

Yet any such taxpayer-financed economic stimulus must, by definition, be temporary. The federal government has no resources of its own. It therefore can finance its spending programs in three ways only: by taxing the private sector, by borrowing from it, or by printing money. All three options impose burdens on ordinary Americans, who must pay higher taxes either now or in the future, or see the values of their investments eroded by continued declines in the value of the U.S. dollar.

It pays to employ someone only if his or her contribution to market value exceeds the employer’s added cost in the form of wages and fringe benefits. Jobs credits reduce the after-tax cost of hiring new workers, but do not make what they produce worth more. A business guided by the profit motive rationally will fire people they would not have otherwise have hired when the subsidy expires, as it must eventually do.

And tax credits can affect employers’ incentives counterproductively. Why not fire a current employee now and rehire the same person later to take advantage of the proposed tax credit? How about claiming the same credit by cutting the hours of one or more existing workers to create a full-time, tax-credit-eligible vacancy? Some workers simply may be shifted from jobs that do not qualify for the credit to those that do, with no net effect on total employment.

President Richard Nixon once said famously that “We are all Keynesians now.” Although Barak Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke seem to have swallowed that adage, America’s taxpayers should not be bamboozled. There is no such thing as a free jobs lunch.

Job creation is something that can happen only in the private sector. But that requires government to get out of the way by reducing taxes across-the-board and eliminating oppressive regulations. If it does not adopt such market-friendly policies soon, America might as well be France or Germany, with permanently higher unemployment rates, less adaptability to change and slower rates of economic growth.

The U.S. government is becoming Daddy Warbucks to an increasing number of firms. According to the Wall Street Journal:

… the government has become the nation’s biggest mortgage lender, guaranteed nearly $3 trillion in money-market mutual-fund assets, commandeered and restructured two car companies, taken equity stakes in nearly 600 banks, lent more than $300 billion to blue-chip companies, supported the life-insurance industry and become a credit source for buyers of cars, tractors and even weapons for hunting.

In his recent Beacon post , “Boeing and the Higgs Effect,” Peter Klein outlined the ratchet effect of corporations getting well gummed up in government largesse. And even that “all-American” company, GE, has shifted its strategy to tie its fortune to seeking up to $192 billion from stimulus projects over the next 4 years.

In fact, in a current series, “USA Inc.,” the Wall Street Journal is chronicling a depressing picture of a corporate landscape almost totally given over to the kind of crony-capitalism one used to think reserved for banana republics and former iron curtain strongholds, crowding out private investment and making political savvy the new currency over actual business acumen.

Yet if there’s one lesson that can be drawn from the spectacular failure of Dubai World, it is that the State is not very good at picking good investments. The U.S. government ought to learn that lesson before it follows Dubai into bankruptcy (newly legitimized there, handily enough).

But then again, with the Obama administration’s first-year record deficit of $1.85 trillion piled on top of Bush’s before him, and pushing up against the current debt “ceiling” of $12.1 trillion (against an estimated total U.S. GDP of $14.4 trillion), can bankruptcy be far on the horizon in any event?