The Proximal Tubule

Anthony Howell flew to Florida last week to help out a friend whose home was badly damaged by Hurricane Charley. Now, he may face a $5,000 fine and a felony charge.

...Howell, a Rockland County licensed contractor who runs Triad Builders in the hamlet, said his friend, Alex Arzoomanian, had called him on Aug. 14, because Arzoomanian's home in Kissimmee had been damaged by the hurricane and subsequent thunderstorms.

Arzoomanian had taken over the home after his mother died in May and had not had time to get homeowners insurance. His 4,000-square-foot shingled roof had taken a beating, and after the numerous Florida contractors he had called said they couldn't help him immediately, Howell offered to take a week off work to help.

So Arzoomanian paid for the $400 plane ticket and picked up his friend of 15 years at the airport on Aug. 16.

They began repairing the roof the next day.

...Three days into the job, Howell was approached by two deputies from the Osceola County Sheriff's Office and two investigators from the state's Department of Business and Professional Regulation, who gave him a cease-and-desist order.

Under Florida law, only contractors licensed by the state may engage in roof repair. It carries up to a $5,000 fine. Not to mention that the practice of unlicensed contracting becomes a third-degree felony when the governor has declared a state of emergency.

• Check out Galen's objection to the "45 million uninsured" stat. A lot of people have looked into this cliam, and all have come to the same general conclusion (even if the details differ somewhat): 45 million is a cooked number. And I think Graham knows this, it's just that he ignores it so he can light up more states on his map. I have never seen a health socilaist respond to this critique. Not that they couldn't make an argument, I've just never seen them try.
  
  
• It may have finally occurred to me how much of the argument used by these people relies on the "savings from reduced paperwork" deal. It's almost like they implicitly understand that many of their argumetns are invalid; seriously, if this one thing doesn't pan out, the whole ship would go down.
  
  
• If you step back and look at what is being said in these arguments is this: we great socialists have spotted a free lunch. We have devised a way for those people who pay for their health care to get better care for less money. But that's not all! Tell them what else, Bob. In addition we'll give away health insurance to millions of people for free! At no cost to you. Just because we think we have eliminated some paperwork (thank god the government will now foot the bill; all those loggers and papermakers forced out of work will have to get health insurance somehow).
  
  
• If you were born several years before me, and you were paying attention, you know we've been down this road before. I believe it's called Social Security and Medicare. SS was hyped as a great insurance scheme and a wonderful welfare program. Now, it's neither. Both give substandard insurance and trap many elderly into poverty. SS faces a present value deficit of $25 trillion, and Medicare is estimated to be much, much higher (estimated $50-60 trillion). It's the single greatest issue facing us today. Are we doing something about it? Hell, no. Not only are we ignoring the problem, we're falling for the same fraud to make the problem bigger.

In 2001, we spent $4,887 on health care per capita, compared with $2,792 in Canada and $2,561 in France. Yet the U.S. does worse than either country by any measure of health care success you care to name - life expectancy, infant mortality, whatever.

Suppose that we wanted to compete in the Health Care Olympics not by cutting health care spending but by finding ways to increase longevity and reduce infant mortality. In that case, we will have to address pregnancy among low-income teens. But there is no medical procedure that can solve the Random Family problem, unless you want to talk about castration.

Overall, I think that it is a mistake to define the health care problem as the need to reduce the ratio of expenditures to life-expectancy gains. I think that the policy implications of such a definition are mostly unacceptable.

The father of the population bomb, Dr. Ehrlich, a professor of population studies and biology at Stanford, says he was "pleasantly surprised" by global changes that have undermined the book's gloomiest projections. They include China's one-child policy and the rapid adoption of better seeds and fertilizers by Third World farmers, meaning that more mouths can be fed, even if just with corn porridge and rice. (He notes, however, quoting United Nations figures, that about 600 million people go to bed hungry each night.) But Dr. Ehrlich still argues that the earth's "optimal population size" is two billion. That's different from the maximum supportable size, which depends on the consumption of resources.

"I have severe doubts that we can support even two billion if they all live like citizens of the U.S.," he said. "The world can support a lot more vegetarian saints than Hummer-driving idiots."

The NYC sex market is responding to what is expected to be increased demand during the Republican National Convention:

Agencies are flying in extra call girls from around the globe to meet the expected demand during the Aug. 30-Sept. 2 gathering at Madison Square Garden.
"We have girls from London, Seattle, California, all coming in for that week," said a madam at a Manhattan escort service. "It's the week everyone wants to work."

Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama has admitted to the youthful indiscretions of using marijuana and cocaine. This should be an inspiring story. Young man from difficult youth, experiments with drugs, but takes a positive route, working his way to being the keynote speaker at the Democratic convention and the new rising political star. Unfortunately, instead it's a tale of political hypocrisy as usual. You see, Obama wasn't caught, so he was able to get to where he is today. If he had been jailed, the tale would be different. Yet he works to imprison and ruin the lives of other young people with youthful indiscretions who happen to be not as lucky as Barack Obama. And he's proud of it.

Reader Robert Lauer calls the U.S. budget deficit and trade deficit “twin 500-pound gorillas” (Letters, August 28th). He’s right to worry about the budget deficit, which reflects the administration’s and Congress’s recklessness. But the trade deficit is no cause for concern. It reflects foreigners’ preference to invest in American assets rather than to cash out all of their dollar holdings immediately for goods and services. This fact means not only that more investment than otherwise takes place in the U.S., but also that more foreigners have real reasons to wish the American economy well.

Your newspaper would help to end this needless fretting by referring not to the "trade deficit" but to the "capital-account surplus." The two are the same thing, except that the former sounds oh so very ominous.

On a serious note though: I wanted to address something VERY important. Garden State is not a movie that condemns taking medication for psychiatric reasons. Please do not interpret what I wrote to mean that life is better spent without medicine. I have seen countless friends and loved ones have their lives changed and sometimes saved with the aid of antidepressants and the like. Garden State focuses on a character that was incorrectly prescribed some very serious medication at a young age and never had the opportunity to find a way or reason to come off them. He also quits cold turkey which is something you should NEVER do! I completely support medicine when it's needed. And in total honesty, this is not some paragraph I was asked to write by lawyers, I felt I needed to be totally clear with many of you who've shared some very personal things.

What Garden State's really about is how short life is. And how we get caught up in so many entanglements and insecurities and worries and obsessions and trivial arguments while life races right by us shaking it's head at how seriously we take ourselves. Keep in mind that the sun's gonna burn out in about a million years and truly nothing will have mattered.

Either conclude that following a policy of using force to confront Islamic extremism is too bloody to stomach, leading inevitably to adopting a policy of withdrawal from wherever Islamic terrorism threatens modern global civilisation...

...or conclude that once a decision to use force is taken, it will be followed through robustly and ruthlessly with the intention of killing fundamentalists leaders like Sadr and ideally as many of his hardcore supporters as is practical as well.

In reality I expect neither clear conclusion will be reached in the corridors of power in Washington DC (and do not get me going about the buffoons who run the Foreign Office) and a middle-way fudge that is already being offered up in the established media will be the perceived wisdom as key elements of the political classes work to keep the world safe for Sharia, legally enforced burquas, clitoridectomy and judicial amputations.

Surely the best way to ensure the survival of a tolerable regime in Iraq is to fill the graveyards with as many Islamic extremists as possible. If that policy is not acceptable, then surely one has no business using force to begin with as it seems perverse to kill people unless you are willing to do so for a damn good reason... either fight a war or do not, the middle way just gets you the worst of both worlds: you are hated for the people you kill and held in contempt for the people you would not kill.

Then after I spoke -- and included the share of revenue of pharma companies given to sales and marketing (c. 30%), R&D (11%) and profits (c.18%) in my talk -- Chang went on a long rant about the fact that R&D was really expensive and cost "hundreds of millions of dollars". Actually the real number is tens of billions of dollars, but he never referred to the percentages of revenue pharma spends on what --it was just empty rhetoric.

James Pengov, 36, of Elyria, said he was hoping to land enough money from selling his vote to pay medical bills.

"Up for auction is MY VOTE!," said Pengov's Aug. 19 posting on the online marketplace. The item, advertised as "Presidential Vote for Sale," with a starting bid of $50, was yanked 12 hours after it was posted.

"Simply tell me who to vote for, after paying the auction, and it will be so," his listing said. "If you care, buy my vote and you will have twice the power in the upcoming election!!!!"

In waging a crusade to stop satellite radio, the Fritts forces exhorted the nation's radio station managers to contact their congressmen and tell the "truth about satellite radio."

"They got broadcasters across the country to hammer like hell on the Congress and the FCC," says the ex-NABer. The NAB literature's central talking point was straightforward: "There is no need for ‘more' radio service, no need for national radio service and no need for more competition in radio service."

Digital radio promised lower costs, higher quality and more variety. To portray this as a bad thing, the NAB turned the free-market logic of 18th-century economist Adam Smith on its head, stressing the harm satellite radio could do to the listening public.

Satellite's "purported benefits are, in the main, nonexistent, unrealistic or of minimal value," the group assured the FCC in 1995. Left free to compete, the NAB added, satellite radio would offer inferior programming and shove better-quality AM and FM service off the air. Thus competition would leave consumers worse off, the NAB said in an Orwellian conclusion: "Adding a new service would likely decrease the overall service to the public."

"Economists just don't take a lot of those arguments seriously," says Stuart Benjamin, a Duke University professor who studies broadcast regulation. "To be blunt, the NAB has power that is not commensurate with the persuasiveness of its arguments."

The speeches in Madison Square Garden affirmed the great truths now routinely preached from the pulpits of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal--government the problem, not the solution; the social contract a dead letter; the free market the answer to every maiden's prayer--and while listening to the hollow rattle of the rhetorical brass and tin, I remembered the question that [Richard] Hofstadter didn't stay to answer. How did a set of ideas both archaic and bizarre make its way into the center ring of the American political circus?

I was most impressed to read of Lewis Lapham's ability to travel in time in "Tentacles of Rage" [Essay, September]. As far as I can tell, on the day I received my copy of Harper's Magazine, the Republican convention had yet to take place, and living in New York, I think I would have noticed. Admittedly, the pablum will be predictable (barring some unforeseen event), but it seems awfully sloppy of Lapham to discuss feelings he had while watching something he has yet to watch, simply in order to put some additional feathers on one of his rhetorical barbs. What is most appalling is that he chose an actual piece of journalism, rather than his accustomed punditry, for this rather silly fillip. This doesn't exactly give me faith in his understanding of what it is reporters actually do.

On the other hand, if he has in fact traveled in time, I would appreciate it if he could let all of us subscribers know the outcome of the forthcoming election.

As Mr. Ostrowski properly notes, the rhetorical invention was silly. The mistake, however, is a serious one, and if I'd had my wits about me as an editor, I wouldn't have let the author mix up his tenses in manuscript or allowed him in page proof to lapse into poetic license. Both of us regret the injury done to the magazine and apologize, wholeheartedly, to its readers.

Our results suggest that a federally sponsored national health care organization can provide care that is equivalent to or better than that provided by high-performing commercial managed care plans.

The United States is more productive in all these diseases except for diabetes in the United Kingdom (ed. note: maybe we need a national health care system just for diabetes). The reasons for this result can be traced directly to the huge differences in the way the health care sector is organized and governed across these three countries. The UK health care system is almost entirely government owned and run...The result has been that the United Kingdom has no invested as quickly in technologies that have dramatically improved the diagnostic capabilities of medicine and significantly reduced recovery time...Germany, on the other hand, has a system more like the United States had twenty years ago. In Germany, medical expenses are paid for on a task-by-task basis for services of doctors and hospitals. As a result, hospitals in Germany have no financial incentive to reduce length of stay.

Voicing an opinion is costless - anyone can argue that socialism is great, or that the government won’t really inflate a fiat currency. Having a false opinion may be costless if it doesn’t affect your life much, and it can produce a benefit of feeling good. So people may choose an opinion based on how it appeals to their hopes, rather on on what they believe is true.

An example of a more incentive compatible system is gambling. While people often gamble irrationally, gambling still tends to draw out more beliefs and less hope than mere discussion. By placing a wager, you tie your opinion to a personal gain or loss, so you care whether you are correct. Hence “Wanna bet?” really means “Do you actually think that, or are you just saying it?", and its a great way to call the windbag’s bluff. People offer absurd opinions much more often than they make idiotic wagers.

According to its inventor Tony Blair, speaking with Clinton and other heads of state at a 1998 NYU School of Law banquet, "[the Third Way] leaves behind, if you like, the old left that was about big government or state-controlled tax-and-spend, and [here he gets a little vague] it is not the politics of laissez-faire, either . . . it is essentially a belief that we can construct a different type of politics for the 21st century based on the values of what I would call progressive politics, but rigorously, in a really disciplined way, applying those in an entirely fresh perspective for the problems that we face today."

This admittedly lacks specificity, but I think we can safely say that the Third Way is an attempt at compromise between capitalism and socialism, a new-age effort to reestablish free-market roots while preserving and grafting onto them the aforewilting progressive leaf system. Just as I thought.

Every form of intervention generates an imbalance that seems to call forth a next step toward markets or toward further intervention. The choice determines whether the social system will be pushed toward the economics of prosperity or that of poverty. The Third Way, in short, attempts to combine policies that are internally contradictory. To attempt a pivot between laissez-faire and socialism is to be caught in precisely the imbalance that afflicts the US and Europe today.

The self-enamored power-seekers of our species do not seem to be capable of seeing themselves as other than puppeteers of our national welfare, and not only that, but also of international finance, global temperature, and world peace. Where is the humility? Where is the modest, observant curiosity about what really makes a healthy economy go around? Clinton speaks as if that problem has been solved for some time now. I question that assessment.

Everything you've been taught about the World War II "internment camps" in America is wrong: - They were not created primarily because of racism or wartime hysteria
- They did not target only those of Japanese descent
- They were not Nazi-style death camps In her latest investigative tour-de-force, New York Times best-selling author Michelle Malkin sets the historical record straight-and debunks radical ethnic alarmists who distort history to undermine common-sense, national security profiling. The need for this myth-shattering book is vital. President Bush's opponents have attacked every homeland defense policy as tantamount to the "racist" and "unjustified" World War II internment. Bush's own transportation secretary, Norm Mineta, continues to milk his childhood experience at a relocation camp as an excuse to ban profiling at airports. Misguided guilt about the past continues to hamper our ability to prevent future terrorist attacks. In Defense of Internment shows that the detention of enemy aliens, and the mass evacuation and relocation of ethnic Japanese from the West Coast were not the result of irrational hatred or conspiratorial bigotry. This document-packed book highlights the vast amount of intelligence, including top-secret "MAGIC" messages, which revealed the Japanese espionage threat on the West Coast. Malkin also tells the truth about:
- who resided in enemy alien internment camps (nearly half were of European ancestry)
- what the West Coast relocation centers were really like (tens of thousands of ethnic Japanese were allowed to leave; hundreds voluntarily chose to move in)
- why the $1.65 billion federal reparations law for Japanese internees and evacuees
was a bipartisan disaster
- and how both Japanese American and Arab/Muslim American leaders have united to undermine America's safety. With trademark fearlessness, Malkin adds desperately needed perspective to the ongoing debate about the balance between civil liberties and national security. In Defense of Internment will outrage, enlighten, and radically change the way you view the past-and the present.

EVER SINCE the Sept. 11 attack on America by radical Islamic terrorists, the use of ethnic and religious profiling in assessing security risks has been a subject of controversy. In this debate, the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II has been often cited as a cautionary tale. Now, a conservative author and columnist, Michelle Malkin, has come out with a book provocatively titled "In Defense of Internment: The Case for `Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror."

In Malkin's view, a misguided guilt complex about the Japanese internment is keeping us from taking necessary homeland security measures based on ethnic profiling. And so she sets out to debunk "politically correct myths" -- such as the notion that the relocation and internment of about 112,000 ethnic Japanese, two-thirds of them American citizens, was a product of wartime hysteria and racism rather than a reasonable response to a clear and present danger.

"In Defense of Internment" does make a convincing case that some Japanese aliens and even Japanese-Americans had pro-Japan sympathies, and that the Japanese military was working to recruit agents in their ranks. But does this amount to a case for internment?

...Ironically, the profiling measures Malkin advocates today, such as selective monitoring of aliens and visitors from countries with terrorist links, are moderate and fairly sensible. She is right that it's ludicrous to invoke Japanese internment as a parallel. But surely, defending something as extreme as mass internment can only undermine her case. The people Malkin dubs "profiling alarmists" argue that if you accept any ethnic profiling, you're on a slippery slope to defending internment camps. And Malkin does her best to prove it for them.

But there are two points those on both sides seem to have missed. First, detaining 14 Middle Eastern men is neither more nor less an infringement of civil liberties than detaining 14 passengers chosen at random. Either way, 14 people have their liberty infringed.

Is it worth detaining 14 people (or an entire planeload of people) on every flight to see what's in their McDonald's bags or to question them closely about their reasons for traveling? I honestly don't know. But this I'm sure of: If you're going to detain 14 people, they should at least be the 14 people who are statistically most likely to be worth detaining.

Second, just because you detain particular people, it doesn't follow that you've got to treat them unfairly. Being detained and questioned is a burden; it's inconvenient and it's demeaning. But there's no reason that burden has to be borne entirely by the detainees. To spread the burden, all the airlines have to do is give each detainee a $100 bill for his trouble. If Northwest had had a policy like that on Annie Jacobsen's flight, it would have paid out $1,400 to the 14 Syrians. Assuming there were another 200 passengers on that board, they could have covered that cost with a $7 hike in ticket prices.

I am guessing that Annie Jacobsen would have been thrilled to pay a $7 surcharge for the comfort of knowing that her Syrian co-passengers had been thoroughly vetted before takeoff. The Syrian musicians, in turn, would have picked up a hundred bucks apiece in exchange for, oh, 15 minutes or so of answering questions. How many musicians do you know who would turn down a gig at that hourly rate?

FOR THE SIXTH year in a row, health care costs are rising at rates that far exceed the rate of general inflation. Studies continue to suggest that health care delivery is uneven at best, and in some cases, harmful, and everybody's got a financing scheme or a policy proposal to shift the cost and quality burden onto someone else.

But most of these ideas won't solve the problem.

The real problem is about much more than high drug prices or corporate profiteering. It rests with the lack of credible, publicly available -- and understandable -- information around the cost and quality of health care. If the whole thing is just a big black box, why should we be surprised if it isn't as effective or efficient as we might like it to be?

When someone buys any other product or service, he or she knows the price of that product, and has some ability to determine if its quality is worth the cost. In recent years, the Internet has made consumers even better purchasers than they were before, driving down prices, improving knowledge and enhancing value.

But not in health care. As consumers, we don't know the price of any common medical procedure. We don't know the price of an appendectomy at South Shore Hospital, knee surgery at the New England Baptist, or having a baby at Brigham and Women's. We don't know if it costs more or less to have an MRI at UMass Memorial or Worcester Medical Center, or if bypass surgery at the Beth Israel Deaconess costs less than bypass surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. We also have no clue about how much it actually costs at either institution: $5,000? $15,000? $25,000? $50,000?

In 2005, the number of federal regulators is expected to exceed 2000's mark by 40 percent. The total number of regulators will be 242,500—a new record. So says a new study by the Mercatus Center.

That means our nation will have more regulators than pharmacists, and way more than aerospace engineers. More than dentists and biologists combined.

And that’s just counting federal regulators.

I thought it would be more difficult, or maybe more complicated, but it was neither. A transplant surgeon called from the University of Minnesota this morning to tell me they had a cadaver kidney for me (I’ve been on the transplant list for four-and-a-half years). “I’ll pass,” I said in a quiet but steady voice. “Call the next person on the list.” The physician wanted a reason. “I’m still working out some ethical issues with the whole transplant business.” There. It was out before I had a chance to even think about censoring myself.

That was pretty much a lie. I mostly worked out transplant ethics for myself within six months of my diagnosis. But it’s easier than telling the whole story. Or maybe more convenient. The short version of the whole story is that I feel very strongly that corporations should not profit from the misfortune of the chronically ill. It would be hypocritical for me to hold that position and then turn around and benefit from someone else’s misfortune. In order for me to receive a cadaveric kidney transplant, there has to be a cadaver. Get it?

This is a classic example of what Nassim Taleb calls being "fooled by randomness," in his intriguing book of the same name. We think that randomness means there will be no clusters or sequences of similar behavior, and therefore when we see them we assume they're evidence of some hidden pattern. (You can see this in the way people interpret everything from clusters of cancer cases to hitting streaks in baseball.) But they're really just evidence of the numbers working themselves out.

But the offering was also a success for another reason, which is that it forced institutional investors to compete, for once, on a level playing field. The problem with the current IPO system isn't just that companies end up leaving billions of dollars on the table when they go public, but that select mutual-fund and hedge-fund managers (as well as well-connected individuals) are handed what amounts to free money. In a traditional IPO, the investment bank underwriting the offering controls the allocation of shares. In the late 1990s in particular, that allocation process became a way of doling out favors and securing future business. For instance, if you were a mutual-fund manager who funneled a lot of trades through an investment bank -- or who agreed to do so -- then you were more likely to get a hefty allocation of IPO shares.

Want to, say, cook up a batch of pink anhydrous ammonia, a key ingredient in creating methamphetamine? It's no problem when you have a congressman working on your behalf, a $10 million grant from a farm-supply company, university professors at your beckon call, and the DEA willing to help you with your research.

Announcing the publication of the pain medication pamphlet, which was prepared in consultation with leading pain experts, the DEA's Patricia Good said the government's goal is "ensuring both the ready access to prescription opioids and the elimination of their abuse and diversion." Since pain cannot be objectively verified—as the pamphlet notes, "self-report is the 'gold standard' for pain measurement"—this mission is plainly impossible, and insisting on it is a mark of delusion or bad faith.

...During the same press briefing in which the DEA's Patricia Good denied that drug law enforcement has a chilling effect on pain treatment, David Joranson, one of the experts who helped produce the pamphlet, noted that "the medical and regulatory environment for pain management seems to be worsening," with physicians increasingly fearful of investigation and reluctant to prescribe opioids. "In some ways," he said, "the use of pain medications has become a crime story when it really should be a health care story."

On February 1, 2002, Cecil Knox was seeing patients in his Roanoke, Virginia, clinic when more than a dozen federal agents burst through the doors with guns drawn. Helmeted, shielded, and wearing bullet-proof vests, they terrified waiting patients and employees. One worker later told the Pain Relief Network, a patient advocacy group, she thought she and her husband, who was helping her in the office that day, would be shot. She looked on in horror as an agent put a gun to his head and ordered, "Get off the phone! Now!"

Knox, a pain management specialist who had been practicing medicine in Roanoke for seven years, was dragged out in handcuffs and leg irons. The local U.S. attorney’s wife, a TV reporter, was among the journalists tipped about the raid in advance. She stood outside with a gaggle of other media people to announce her husband’s triumph. Knox’s assets were frozen and bond set at $200,000. He and several employees soon faced a 313-count indictment, including charges of drug distribution resulting in death or serious bodily injury, prescription of drugs without a medical purpose, conspiracy, mail fraud, and health care fraud. Prosecutors said Knox had illegally distributed millions of dollars’ worth of OxyContin, a timed-release version of the narcotic painkiller oxycodone.

William Hurwitz, a McLean, Virginia, internist and prominent pain specialist, received similarly heavy-handed treatment when he was arrested last fall. Hurwitz, who is Jewish, was visiting his children on Rosh Hashanah eve when federal agents descended upon his ex-wife’s house in McLean and took him away in handcuffs. As with Knox, the government froze Hurwitz’s assets; his bail was set at $2 million. He was charged with 49 felony counts, including drug trafficking resulting in death or serious injury, conspiracy, and running a criminal enterprise.

Like Knox, Hurwitz attracted attention largely because of his OxyContin prescriptions. Attorney General John Ashcroft said "the indictment and arrests in Virginia demonstrate our commitment to bring to justice all those who traffic in this very dangerous drug." Prosecutors said Hurwitz was "no better than a street corner crack dealer" who "dispenses misery and death." Assistant U.S. Attorney Gene Rossi had earlier declared that the feds would "root out" such doctors "like the Taliban."

Knox and Hurwitz are just two recent targets of an aggressive push by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to impose their judgments about the proper use of opioid painkillers (drugs derived from opium and synthetics that resemble them) on doctors throughout the country. In their attempt to prevent prescription drug abuse, the DEA and the DOJ in effect have taken upon themselves the authority to regulate the practice of medicine, traditionally the province of the states. Worse, they have transformed disagreements about treatment decisions into criminal prosecutions, scaring physicians away from opioids and compounding the suffering of patients who have trouble getting the drugs they need to relieve their pain.

Like the man who's surprised to learn he's been speaking prose all his life, the fusionist is a political category whose members may operate without much awareness of their label. Fusionism is the idea, named and developed decades ago by Frank Meyer of National Review, that conservatism and libertarianism share a common agenda. Thus, the fusionist believes that conservatives and libertarians ought to be allies -- and indeed that their respective philosophies are largely or essentially combinable into a coherent body of thought.

Greg Mitchell notes that contrary to WaPo executive editor Leonard Downie Jr.'s assertion, doubts about the Bush administration's Iraq policy were not just found among the lunatic fringe. Downie and company simply decided contrary views were on the fringe and refused to cover them.

But Iraq and the Post is just an example of the way media outlets often define news as that which fits their world view. As belief in the pro-active power of government is the closest thing to an official religion of newsrooms, questioning government officials who insist they have perfect knowledge of a foreign land and infinite ability to organize and direct men and machines across thousands of miles is heresy.

The bloody business of war just makes the cost of such rigid orthodoxy stand out. The same thing takes places everyday with dozens of other issues. Land use, taxes, mass transit, telecom -- you name it and solid stories are spiked and buried because they do not fit what "everyone knows."

President Bush on Monday announced plans to bring home up to 70,000 troops from Europe and Asia within a decade in a major realignment that Democrats said was politically motivated in an election year.

"The world has changed a great deal and our posture must change with it," Bush said of his plan for one of the biggest shifts of U.S. forces at many of 5,458 military facilities worldwide since the Cold War.

Todd Krampitz essentially bought his liver and screwed who knows which patient likely to be far sicker than Todd out of a chance for a cure of their liver disease and the addition of many years of life. Organ donations that specify the recipient are rare (only about 50 out of thousands of transplants each year) because cadaver organ donation is almost always an anonymous process. Unlike most transplant patients and their families, Todd Krampitz (who owns his own digital photography company) had enough money to pay thousands of dollars for billboard and other ads.

Because transplantable organs represent a very finite commodity, rationing is mandatory and the UNOS was supposed to impart as much fairness to the system as possible. Diagnosis, medical condition, and age are the criteria that are supposed to determine who gets to the head of a transplant list. Todd's media campaign for a new liver sets a very disturbing precedent. What happens if more and more patients begin their own ad campaigns? Will the organ go to that patient who spent the most and advertised the most? How will this be functionally and ethically different from allowing organs to go to the highest bidder?

Good news? Bad news? I think we can all agree that loved ones should be able to donate kidneys or liver tissue. We can also agree that selling organs is distasteful, at least to armchair philosophers and op-ed columnists.

Society has a compelling interest in ensuring both the ready access to controlled prescription drugs when medically needed and ongoing efforts to minimize their abuse and diversion," the DEA pamphlet says. "These two goals are not in conflict."

An indirect solution to the rising health care costs have been found. Start suing the DEA for malpractice! Should be easy since I am sure none of the agents and Asscrack have a medical license allowing them to practice medicine.

What was truly different this time around was that the Democratic National Committee consciously handed out around 35 of its 15,000 press credentials to independent webloggers not tethered to any traditional news organization. While statistically on the insignificant side (being outnumbered 430 to 1 and all), the novelty of indie bloggers was an irresistible hook not just to the scrum of reporters on the scene, but to the tenured scolds in America's august learning institutions.

"Make no mistake," sniffed Harvard's Alex S. Jones, director of the Kennedy School of Government's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, on the opinion page of the Los Angeles Times. "This moment of blogging legitimization -- and temporary press credentials -- doesn't turn bloggers into journalists."

It's instructive to reflect that my profession's top educators confer the power of journalistic "legitimization" onto political parties, while desperately trying to claim that questionable role for themselves (even though there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution or American law that establishes anything like a credentialing process for reporters).

"Blogger" may be one of the English-language's most unfortunate words -- my Boston friends were already refusing to pronounce the thing before the convention even started, and I tried whenever possible to substitute the word "booger" -- but there's something to be said for spitting out 15,000 words in real-time while the Journalism School professors fret and The New Yorker uses a small army to pinch off two Talk of the Town snippets. By the time the circus moves to New York, we may even get the hang of it.

Bush-hating economist Brad DeLong has praise for the following argument against Social Security privatization, from Mark A.R. Kleiman:

"privatization proposals actually add hundreds of billions of
dollars in extra expenses to the federal budget per year. Which means, of course, hundreds of billions of dollars in additional taxes or national debt. Far from being a free ride, privatization will cost taxpayers dearly."

This is known as the "transition cost" argument, and it is completely bogus. Below is a table that explains why. It shows how Social Security obligations would be paid for, both under the present system and under transition to a system where today's workers are given private accounts instead of paying Social Security taxes.

Social Security Obligations	Source Under Current System	Transition to Privatized System
Obligations to current retirees	Today's Taxpayers	Future Taxpayers
Obligations to today's workers	Future Taxpayers	Today's Taxpayers

Under the current system, the payroll taxes collected today go to pay benefits to people who are currently retired. So where is Social Security going to get the money to pay benefits to today's workers? From future taxpayers, just as today's taxpayers fund the retirement of yesterday's workers.

Under 100 percent privatization, or under any transition from today's "pay as you go" system to a fully-funded system, today's payroll taxes would not go to pay current benefits, but instead would be used to fund the retirement benefits of today's workers. As a result, the government would have to find another source of revenue to pay current retirees. In practice, this means that the government would issue debt, putting the burden of repaying that debt onto future taxpayers.

A complete privatization plan is a swap: instead of having future taxpayers fund the obligation to pay today's workers when they retire, future taxpayers would fund current retirees. Conversely, instead of requiring today's workers to pay for today's retirees, today's workers would take care of their own retirement.

This swap adds no economic cost to Social Security. Essentially, today's taxpayers and future taxpayers are no better off and no worse off than before.

The "transition cost" argument is generated by ignoring the second row of the table above. What the left-wing demagogues do is look at the first row of the table, and point to the borrowing that will be necessary, with the consequent liability for future taxpayers. What they overlook is the second row of the table, which shows a huge liability for future taxpayers being lifted. That liability is the obligation to pay retirement benefits to today's workers.

In accounting terms, it is true that the government debt liability in the first row appears on the government's balance sheet, while the obligation to pay Social Security in the second row does not. However, no one, particularly on the left, would suggest that future Social Security payments are not obligatory. The fact that the government balance sheet counts debt as a liability but does not count future Social Security payments as a liability is an accounting charade. The "transition cost" argument is derived from that charade. It has no basis in economic reality.

Following up a natural disaster with the artificial disaster of anti-gouging laws simply compounds the problem; first people get hit by a hurricane, which causes the shortage, and then they get hit by the government, which fights tooth and nail the market"s attempts to fix the shortage. The best analogy to anti-gouging laws would be a doctor who keeps ripping the scabs off his patients' wounds as fast as they form.

Price controls cause and maintain shortages. Always and everywhere. This is one of the simplest and most basic economic laws there is. It's known to anyone who knows even the rudiments of economic reasoning (a description which apparently does not apply to our elected officials). Nor do the laws of economics suddenly go into abeyance because there's been an emergency; those are not among the laws that rulers have the power to suspend.

President Bush plans shortly to ratchet up his campaign rhetoric on economic issues by announcing expanded individual investment plans - including for education, healthcare and retirement - under the rubric of building an "ownership society."

Such ideas, including the partial privatization of Social Security, have traditionally been considered a dangerous "third rail" in electoral politics.

But amid discontent among some economic conservatives over Bush's spending policies, senior Bush administration officials and campaign strategists have sought to reassure conservative leaders that free-market reforms will be pushed aggressively.

You cannot--not given current projections--"support" all three of (a) diverting Social Security revenue to young workers' private accounts, (b) maintaining benefits at their current levels, and (c) keeping payroll taxes from rising. One of the three must crack. Does Bush not know this? Or does he know this all too well?

While Bush has prevailed in some free-market reforms - such as inserting medical savings accounts into last fall's Medicare legislation and offering vouchers for D.C. students - the initiatives brought on bitter legislative battles. And although these and further privatization reforms are near and dear to most Republicans on the Hill, they have traditionally been viewed as anathema on the campaign trail, where Democrats have effectively cast them as elitist and inherently risky schemes.

But amid discontent among some economic conservatives over Bush's spending policies, senior Bush administration officials and campaign strategists have sought to reassure conservative leaders that free-market reforms will be pushed aggressively.

These officials have now calculated that the received campaign wisdom is wrong and that private ownership of such core responsibilities as education, healthcare and retirement can help Bush win re-election.