Brian Zimmerman has an article on continued anger over the Richmond Community Schools dress code. The code appears to be fairly draconian, forbidding logos (except Satanic Richmond Red Devil logos!) and even stripes, floral prints, and other patterns. Anything more revealing than a crew neck is frowned upon. I didn’t see any word on the school corporation’s position on burqas.

Now it looks like the various sides are in the silly season. Both are dug in and neither can probably back down without looking silly. My suspicion is that the school corporation was being overly strict initially with an eye toward backing off later when it appeared everyone was more or less toeing the line. As long as people are putting up a fuss, they can’t back off without damaging their authority.

Obviously the school is in a bit of a tough position — partially of is own making, but not entirely. There are some kinds of dress which are unduly distracting or a problem. The least burdensome thing for everyone would probably be to go with an “I know it when I see it” approach. But, this leads to arbitrary enforcement and, more importantly, accusations of arbitrary or discriminatory enforcement. They’d probably like to avoid these line drawing problems by just going with uniforms. But, there was apparently push back on that idea. So, they went with a series of arbitrary rules about dress that they are strictly imposing on everyone. Good luck with that.

The Indiana Chamber of Commerce is trying to get word out about their upcoming Conference on Energy Management. Their keynote speaker is Jim Rogers, chief executive of Duke Energy. The conference will take place on September 2, 2009 at the Hyatt in Indianapolis.

Rogers is apparently one of the few coal men who acknowledge the problems of coal emission and the need to reduce our carbon footprint. The Indiana Chamber doesn’t share his position on many of these issues, so this might be an interesting event that isn’t all about preaching to the choir.

I thought I would go ahead and plug my wife & sister-in-law’s latest commercial venture: The Winecharm Factory. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept (and therefore probably uninterested in the product, so why am I bothering), a winecharm is a little charm that goes around the stem of your wine glass with the practical value of helping you tell your glass from someone else’s. Presuming, of course, that you’re no longer drinking wine out of the old Pizza Express cup left over from college. It also adds a little flair to your wine glass. [Insert Office Space, “Tchotchkes” anti-flair reference here.]

If you like what you see, feel free to pass the word along to your wine drinking friends.

Senator Kennedy has passed away. There will be the digital equivalent of buckets of inks spilled on this subject by people who know far more about him than me. My earliest memory of him had to do with a Chappaquiddick bumper sticker my parents had put up on the refrigerator. (I told you I grew up Republican). After that, as I began to learn more history, I was struck by the prominence of his family and how awful it would be to lose so many family members to tragedy.

Rosemary – Suffered a failed lobotomy when Edward was 9.
Joe Jr. – killed in the war when Edward was 12.
Kathleen – Died in a plane crash when Edward was 16.
John – Assassinated when Edward was 31.
Robert – Assassinated when Edward was 36.

Edward would eventually come out of the shadow of his siblings — to a large degree, anyway since it would be hard to come entirely out of the shadows of John and Bobby. He was an effective Senator, known as the liberal lion. Health care has been described as his hallmark issue, and he has died on the eve of the best chance of health care overhaul in several generations. If it fails for the lack of one vote in the Senate, that would cap off the litany of epic tragedies for Joe Sr.’s kids.

The Google front page alerted me to the fact that it’s been 400 years since Galileo demonstrated his first telescope – a 8x magnifier that changed the world. More than anyone else, Galileo is responsible for the birth of modern science.

Science is best seen, I think, not as a thing or a discreet body of knowledge, but a particular way of observing reality. And, while we pretty much take it for granted these days, scientific observation was a pretty significant shift from how things had been done before. At its root, scientific observation requires the honest interpretation of experimental results. Galileo saw the relationship between math and the laws of nature. He observed and measured, experimented and repeated.

Observed reality, of course, got in the way of reality as decreed by clergy. In Galileo’s case, it was the inconvenient fact that he observed things which could only be explained in a model where the earth revolved around the sun. This was contrary to church dogma that the sun revolved around the earth. Truth is often not a real match for temporal power, so, for his heretical heliocentric views, Galileo spent the end of his life on house arrest by order of the Pope.

Eventually, the Catholic Church came around. In 1835, it took Galileo’s “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” off the index of forbidden books. Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was published in 1859. If we figure a 200 year lag time on these things, maybe the evangelicals will come around on evolution in another 50 years or so.

This Krugman column is about two years old, but it just came to my attention, and I doubt much has changed since then. The French and the Japanese have been able to get more people wired to the Internet, and their connections are faster as well.

What most Americans probably don’t know is that over the last few years the situation has totally reversed. As the Internet has evolved — in particular, as dial-up has given way to broadband connections using DSL, cable and other high-speed links — it’s the United States that has fallen behind.

The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did.

Even more striking is the fact that our “high speed” connections are painfully slow by other countries’ standards. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband connections are, on average, more than three times as fast as ours. Japanese connections are a dozen times faster. Oh, and access is much cheaper in both countries than it is here.

The reason for this, according to Krugman, is that the French and Japanese have better regulatory policy in place to govern those who who control the pipes from your house to the larger Internet.

For my part, I’ve generally been fairly content with my Internet service, but that could be because I don’t know any better.

EJ Dionne has a column wherein he mentions something I had noticed:

If governments around the world, including our own, had not acted aggressively — and had not spent piles of money — a very bad economic situation would have become a cataclysm.

But because the cataclysm was avoided, this is an invisible achievement. Many whose bacon was saved, particularly in the banking and corporate sectors, do not want to admit how important the actions of government were. Anti-government ideologues try to pretend that no serious intervention was required.

This reminds me of Upton Sinclair’s comment, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

We’ll continue to get Enrons and World Coms and Lehman Brothers and the Bernie Madoffs and the rest of them so long as the Masters of the Universe type propaganda goes unchecked during the boom times. This is the story line that suggests a certain few individuals have earned untold riches through their unparalleled skill, hard work and intellect. The money flowing to their companies and to them is due, in this story line, to the infallible market giving them their due. Inevitably the boom times end and the mask is, at least briefly, ripped away. We learn that these folks are relatively ordinary human beings after all. Often the wealth flowing their way had as much or more to do with luck, fraud, oddities of our economic environment, bubble making, cronyism, and other variables than with reasonable compensation for the value actually created by these individuals.

There seems to be a powerful need to forget the moments – such as last fall – when the curtain is drawn away and the Great and Powerful Oz is revealed to be a jumped up huckster. Now we’ll see the rise of a narrative where the bail out was unnecessary because the fall out would not have been so bad. (I contrast this with a slightly different narrative where the fall out would have been catastrophic, but we should have let it happen anyway so the proper lessons would get learned.) The Masters of the Universe will get back to being Masterful, the government will get back to being the enemy that never did anyone any good, and the Masters’ dynastic fortunes will return to being viewed as nothing more than proper compensation set by a rational marketplace for a job well done. Rinse. Repeat.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has a couple of articles concerning Allen County and City of Fort Wayne legal fees. The lesson seems to be that, if you have a police force, you’re going to get sued. Over recent years, Allen County seems to be averaging about $200,000 per year in legal fees and about $43,000 per year in settlements. That strikes me as a pretty good ratio. The City of Fort Wayne has been spending something like $2 million per year on combined legal fees and settlements. The article cites an expert of some sort who says that Fort Wayne has a pretty good settlement history.

The lion’s share of these expenses stems from police cases. That is unsurprising. Even if you have well run police departments — and I have no particular knowledge of Allen County or Fort Wayne, one way or another — the police have to deal with inmates who are unhappy to be where they are and who have lots of time on their hands. They also get called to situations where force has to be used. Even when force is being used properly, it’s not too tough for the person on the receiving end to make allegations that can cost a municipality a lot of money to defend. The presence of “deep pockets” also skews things a bit. If you have a situation where Person A created the bad situation, where the police respond to the bad situation, and where Person B gets hurt as a result of the situation; Person B is more inclined to blame the police –at least in legal proceedings — if, as is often the case, Person A has no money. And, of course, there is always the possibility that the police will screw up in one way or another.

This is an area where municipalities don’t have a great deal of control over expenses. And, while that can help a lawyer such as myself make a living, it’s horribly annoying for taxpayers.

Marc’s comment which I am perhaps belaboring helped me articulate in my own mind something that might be obvious to others but which had been somewhat inchoate in my own head. Regulation guides innovation. The free market cannot operate in a vacuum, devoid of laws.

The bit that helped me out was this:

In essence, the way the “market” for insurance works, the incentive is directed toward innovation on abdicating the duties under the policy, not innovating to create a more efficient system.

Regulation is going to shape where the innovative energy goes. Absent any regulation at all, you get innovation on how to kill people and take their stuff. So, you outlaw murder. Then, you get innovation on how to force people to work for you without compensation. Then, you outlaw slavery. Then, you get innovation on how to con people into giving you something for nothing. Then, you outlaw fraud. Etc.

“The market” doesn’t magically direct innovation to where it is going to do the most good. It directs innovation to where it is going to profit the innovator most. It falls to the legal system to make the harmful opportunities unprofitable.

(I thought this comment from Mr. Dukes to an earlier post deserved its own post)

The idea that the government is putting health insurers out of business is a popular straw man in this debate, but like all straw men, is void of substance.

There are all sorts of services we expect our government to provide at the expense of privatization. I don’t recall anyone defending the private security firms when the TSA was formed to conduct airport screenings. And in this case, nobody is preventing health insurers from offering plans.

In addition, anyone who has this notion that health insurance is a competitive marketplace is mistaken. For the basic laws of economics to apply to a market, there are certain criteria that must be met, the cornerstone of which fails right out of the gate.

Buyers and sellers must be free to enter and exit the market place with little or no barriers to entry and exit. Clearly this is not the case with private health insurance. The inability for consumers to easily switch providers is a deal breaker here. If a person has a current health problem, they cannot switch to another provider with the same coverage because the other provider will not offer the same benefits, or they will raise price barriers that prevent any sort of market competition. In addition, we all have very little input to the purchase decisions, as they are dictated by employers in most cases. So there is no market for insurance. At least not one to which you can apply micro-economic analysis.

In addition, health insurance is insulated from being penalized for poor performance. If a bank screws up someones checking account, they move to another bank, taking their deposits and base for the bank to lend money with them. This creates a strong incentive for the bank to act in the consumer’s interest. When a health insurer does not perform, in many cases the consumer dies. Virtually no penalty for poor performance while a huge incentive to actually work against the interests of the consumer. In essence, the way the “market” for insurance works, the incentive is directed toward innovation on abdicating the duties under the policy, not innovating to create a more efficient system. Actually, the private insurers are incented to create the most inefficient system available by denying coverage, payment, and benefits to policy holders, hoping enough of them die before they can get through the 17 levels of 1-800 hell that accompanies their new found ailments.

I am convinced that anyone who thinks the health insurance industry “works” has never had to actually USE their insurance for much more than office visits.

A member of my family (mother) was diagnosed with a blood/bone cancer 18 months ago. A transplant and treatment has cost over $400,000 since then. My father was a member of a strong labor union for his entire career and because of that, my parents are better off than most. Even still, it is a Herculean effort to actually get paid for those expenses.

And I never fail to consider the person diagnosed with this sort of disease who has no health care coverage. In most of those cases the option is to check in to hospice and die.

We evaluate the public good versus liberty all the time. It is why we are screened at airports and have our phones tapped on international calls. It is why we don’t privatize the fire department. It is why we have Social Security and Medicare. This is another one of those evaluations. There are many, many ways an innovator in insurance can make a living. So health insurance isn’t one of them anymore. Seems like a trivial price to pay for the betterment of tens or hundreds of millions of lives.