A Second Hand Conjecture

In a blow to social libertarians, the prodigal country of Holland is finally taking steps to scrap legal prostitution and drug sales, citing widespred social decay and crime.

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Michael F. Cannon at Cato blogs about a NYTimes article on the rife fraud found and covered up at Medicare. A confidential draft of a federal inspector general’s report claimed that the behavior they found at the Medicare Administration was rife with irregularities.

Medicare reported to Congress that, for the fiscal year of 2006, AdvanceMed’s investigations had found that only 7.5 percent of claims paid by Medicare were not supported by appropriate documentation. But the inspector general’s review indicated that the actual error rate was closer to 31.5 percent.

Law makers called it “tantamount to corruption”. Michael ends his piece with some great quotes:

[One] congressional watchdog had seen it all before:

“This report doesn’t surprise me,” said Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California and a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee. He has pushed to cut improper Medicare spending. “To look better to the public, you cook the books,” he said. “This agency is incompetent.”

Of course, Pete Stark’s solution for Medicare’s incompetence is to force you to enroll:

There is a road map laid out for us…Medicare. Medicare has lower administrative costs than any private plan on the market…Medicare has shown us the power of simplicity; we need only expand its promise to the rest of our population.

Medifraud for all!

heh, indeed.

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Arkansas Blog has the updates on this horrible tragedy.

Arkansas State Democratic Party Chair Bill Gwatney was shot and critically wounded at State Democratic Party Headquarters on Capitol Avenue about 11:50 a.m. today, witnesses at the scene said. Police were not releasing the victim’s identity, but it was supplied by several people on the scene.

A suspected shooter was shot and taken into custody after a chase into adjoining Grant County. His condition wasn’t known. Sources say they are working to confirm tentative information that the suspect, who was critically wounded, was a former employee of a Gwatney car dealership.

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As a philosophy student, issues of free will were some of the most complex and intriguing that I studied. Is free will real or a chimera? If real, is it always applicable? How do we judge such questions?

At one of my favorite blogs, The Volokh Conspiracy, guest blogger Adam Kolber addresses these topics with a fascinating example.

Consider the subject of this medical case study, who had no prior history of unusual sexual behavior. At around age 40, he began to demonstrate pedophilic behaviors (e.g., he made sexual advances toward his prepubescent stepdaughter). The man was found guilty of child molestation and given the opportunity to successfully complete a sexual addiction treatment program in lieu of going to jail. Unfortunately, he made sexual advances toward others in the treatment program and was forced to leave the program. Prior to being sent to jail, he complained of severe headaches and was taken to the hospital. Doctors soon discovered that he had a brain tumor in his orbitofrontal cortex. After the tumor was surgically removed, his sexual behavior returned to normal. You have to read the full case study for all the details. The bottom line, though, is that the study authors think it quite likely that the tumor played a causal role in the subject’s inappropriate behavior.

Many of my students have the intuition that the man should not be deemed criminally responsible for his sexual activities while he had the tumor. He is certainly not responsible for having the tumor, and it seems like the crime would not have happened but for the tumor. In most jurisdictions, however, I think the subject would be unlikely to mount a successful insanity defense.

It has been argued for ages that if one is incapable of exercising rational free will, but has made choices to lose the ability to exercise rational free will, that one is still responsible for bad outcomes that may occur in such situations. Should someone whose brain is malfunctioning, however, be considered someone who had a choice in resulting bad behavior?

Do check out the the blog and Kolber’s more recent posts.

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photo: Simón Pais-Thomas

Toronto police recently seized shipments of 10,320,000 counterfeit cigarettes from China (PRC authorities themselves intercepted nine billion in 2007). Chinese made counterfeits bearing fake American branding such as Marlboro, are produced “in underground operations, caves and old warehouses,” and shipped through Vancouver for sale on a vast black market that has developed to evade the high sales taxes legitimate Canadian retailers must charge.

This illustrates another deleterious economic effect of the 23% national sales tax championed by Mike Huckabee (many more were discussed this morning here). As consumers are forced into the black market to escape artificially inflated government pricing, the quality of goods declines with volume, as otherwise quality-focused consumers are introduced to the cheap sub-market products of illegal trade for the first time.

Since the black market is by definition unregulated, there is no effective deterrent for engaging in product counterfeiting to substantially enhance margins, as black marketeers compete with each other, rather than with retailers who are priced and regulated out of the real market. Thus, with high national sales taxes not only does the tax base contract as the black market expands, the real quality of life enjoyed by the populace begins to erode as the marketplace is flooded with cut-rate and even dangerous goods:

Usually priced at $10-to-$15 per 200 instead of a retail price averaging $70, Martin said some contain tobacco scooped off floors. Cut-rate workers also chop up stalks and sometimes leave in lumps due to blunt cutters.

“It’s just human nature for people to save a dollar,” the 10-year investigator said.
(London Free Press)

The belief that most Fair Taxers have that people will not resort to the underground economy to reap fantastic savings, betrays the scheme’s essentially utopian nature. When prices are artificially inflated above natural market prices by the state, someone will always be available to exploit the opportunity. While it is human nature to save a dollar, it’s also human nature to make one when you can. And with a 23% burden resting on businesses to finance the welfare state, there are many to be made.

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There’s a moment in Mark Steyn’s book America Alone, where he relates the truism that we’ve all experienced conversations with a mild-mannered, educated and seemingly rational person from the Arab world, where quite unexpectedly they say something nutty in the most casual way. “Of course the Jews planned 9-11″ for instance. As Steyn notes, when this happens it’s a peculiar form of media and culture-shock, and you’re not quite certain what to say in response. But this strange cultural dissonance can also be experienced between Europeans and Americans just as easily on certain issues.

(more…)

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Here’s a truly incredible story from the college football recruiting trail. Kevin Hart, an unheralded OG from Fernly High in Nevada, held a press conference to announce that he had accepted a scholarship offer from Jeff Tedford to play for Cal. Local media turned out as well as half the school to see the announcement. One snag: Tedford had never spoken to Hart, nor was Cal interested. It seems that someone was impersonating him as well as Mike Sherman from Texas A&M and other coaches in phone calls. Police are investigating. Full story. H/T: BRB

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Israel Matzav has a video clip of a report on the Al Qaeda attack on the Israeli embassy in Nouakchott, Mauritania. You have to lament for the investigation when your eye witness refers to the scene of the attack as “the embassy of the Zionist Entity.”

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Peg Kaplan brings us the story of an ex-Marine judge and the pissant he sentenced.

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Flopping Aces catches us up to speed on the SanFran tiger mauling affair. Apparently the two Dhaliwal brothers were begging for trouble…and for some reason the San Francisco police want to drop the case.

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In a bottom-up rebellion in Sicily, a group of Palermo youths have started a social networking site called Addiopizzo, which provides public attention and mutual support for Sicilian businesses which publicly refuse to pay the mafia “protection” money. Evidently it’s starting to deplete the mob of what has long been its most stable revenue source.

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