Monday Reads: Kewl Science Edition
Posted: July 2, 2012 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Big Bank Theory, Kewl science, Leap Second, overuse of antibiotics in food animals, Translucent Ants 45 Comments
Good Morning!
I’m tired of politics. I’m also tired of attracting mad teabot trolls so let’s talk science for awhile!
These translucent Ants eating colored sugar are just about the most surreal thing I’ve seen for awhile. There are more pictures at this link.
Scientist Mohamed Babu from Mysore, India captured beautiful photos of these translucent ants eating a specially colored liquid sugar. Some of the ants would even move between the food resulting in new color combinations in their stomachs.
There’s more information on this at the Daily Mail. I guess you are what you eat.
Scientists aren’t shy when discussing that creator gawds are redundant. This article from an Indian media outlet discusses a Caliifornia conference where scientists provided thoughts on the spontaneous nature of the Big Bang. Naturally, it won’t get play in this country where magical thinking is encouraged and science and education are defunded.
Leading scientists have once again got themselves embroiled in the debate about the existence of God or a god’s involvement in the Big Bang.
During a panel discussion at the SETIcon II conference in Santa Clara, Calif., over the weekend, scientists discussed the Big Bang and whether there was a requirement for some divine power to kick-start the Universe 13.75 billion years ago.
Unsurprisingly, the resounding answer was: No.
“The Big Bang could’ve occurred as a result of just the laws of physics being there,” the Discovery News quoted astrophysicist Alex Filippenko of the University of California, Berkeley as saying.
“With the laws of physics, you can get universes,” he stated.
However, Filippenko, a speaker on the “Did the Big Bang Require a Divine Spark?” panel, was vague on whether or not god (or, indeed, heaven) exists- he merely pointed out that the birth of the Universe didn’t require an intervening omnipotent being to get the whole thing started. The laws of physics, pure and simple, sparked universal creation.
“I don’t think you can use science to either prove or disprove the existence of God,” Filippenko said.
He then meandered into a classic chicken-and-egg argument: “The question, then, is, ‘Why are there laws of physics?’ And you could say, ‘Well, that required a divine creator, who created these laws of physics and the spark that led from the laws of physics to these universes, maybe more than one.’
“The ‘divine spark’ was whatever produced the laws of physics. And I don’t know what produced that divine spark. So let’s just leave it at the laws of physics.”
On the other hand, British astrophysicist and author Stephen Hawking cares little for society’s belief in supernatural beings (or subtlety for that matter).
In his 2010 book, “The Grand Design,” Hawking said, “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”
A “spontaneous Big Bang” is something SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak, also a speaker at the SETIcon II panel, agrees with.
“Quantum mechanical fluctuations can produce the cosmos,” said Shostak.
“If you would just, in this room, just twist time and space the right way, you might create an entirely new universe. It’s not clear you could get into that universe, but you would create it.
“So it could be that this universe is merely the science fair project of a kid in another universe. I don’t know how that affects your theological leanings, but it is something to consider,” he asserted.
Here’s an interesting set of research findings from the journal Nature under the title “Pig Out”. It’s on how dangerous the use of antibiotics in farm animals is and how it will adversely impact human health in the near future.
The spread of dangerous bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics is fueled by overuse of the drugs — and not just in people. Farmers around the world routinely feed antibiotics to their animals, not only to prevent and treat infections, but also to make their animals grow faster. This leads to drug-resistant bacteria in the animals, and this resistance can spread to the bacteria that infect us.
The overuse of antibiotics in farm animals is a global issue. Human propensity for trade and travel ensures that resistant bacteria spread easily around the world, so as long as any one country pumps its pigs and poultry full of the drugs, everyone is at risk.
In 1998, the Danish poultry industry took the unusual step of volunteering to stop using antibiotics for the promotion of animal growth. Two years later, the country’s pork farmers did the same. Denmark might be a small country, but it is the world’s largest exporter of pork. And it didn’t stop there, writes Frank Aarestrup in a Comment piece on page 465, Denmark went on to reduce its overall use of antibiotics in livestock by 60%. It achieved this by creating a comprehensive surveillance system to monitor overuse, and limiting the amount of money that vets could make from selling the drugs to farmers.
Many feared that the changes would cripple Denmark’s pork production. Instead, production rose by 50%. “Any country trying to limit the use of antibiotics in livestock can learn from what my colleagues and I did in Denmark, adjusting what worked to local needs,” Aarestrup writes. These are encouraging words, but it is unlikely to be that simple.
The biggest obstacle is likely to be generating the political resolve and public support needed to crack down on the lucrative trade in antibiotics. This was possible in Denmark because there, perhaps uniquely, warnings from the medical community were picked up by the media, creating widespread public awareness of the problems caused by the overuse of antibiotics. People in other countries may not be so engaged, particularly when faced with the inevitable lobbying of the agricultural and veterinary sectors, which make big profits from selling antibiotics.
From Science Magazine and Chinese researchers in anthropology we learn that pottery used for cooking was invented probably 20,000 years ago which is earlier than previously thought.
The invention of pottery introduced fundamental shifts in human subsistence practices and sociosymbolic behaviors. Here, we describe the dating of the early pottery from Xianrendong Cave, Jiangxi Province, China, and the micromorphology of the stratigraphic contexts of the pottery sherds and radiocarbon samples. The radiocarbon ages of the archaeological contexts of the earliest sherds are 20,000 to 19,000 calendar years before the present, 2000 to 3000 years older than other pottery found in East Asia and elsewhere. The occupations in the cave demonstrate that pottery was produced by mobile foragers who hunted and gathered during the Late Glacial Maximum. These vessels may have served as cooking devices. The early date shows that pottery was first made and used 10 millennia or more before the emergence of agriculture.
Ever heard of a ‘Leap Second’? Here’s news on how a bug with the program that adjusts the world’s atomic clocks created problems over the weekend with the many internet sites. Evidently Google was one of the major sites that anticipated the bug. Remember Y2K? Our wobbly, spinning planet just doesn’t parse into our concept of time.
Reddit, Mozilla, and possibly many other web outfits experienced brief technical problems on Saturday evening, when software underpinning their online operations choked on the “leap second” that was added to the world’s atomic clocks.
On Saturday, at midnight Greenwich Mean Time, as June turned into July, the Earth’s official time keepers held their clocks back by a single second in order to keep them in sync with the planet’s daily rotation, and according to reports from across the web, some of the net’s fundamental software platforms — including the Linux operating system and the Java application platform — were unable to cope with the extra second.
Many computing systems use what’s called the Network Time Protocol, or NTP, to keep themselves in sync with the world’s atomic clocks, and when an extra second is added, some just don’t know how to handle it.
The “leap second bug” hit just as the web was recovering from a major outage to Amazon Web Services, an online operation that runs as much as one percent of the internet. Some operations, including Google, saw the leap second coming and prepared for it, but others weren’t so diligent.
So, exactly how closely related are we homo sapiens to the Great Apes? Here’s a great explanation on the genetics behind our common ancestry with our Ape cousins. Do you know we have fused chromosomes that are still separate in other primates? Here’s some fascinating information from the genome project. It’s the kiss of death to “intelligent design” and the “there are holes” in the theory of evolution.
So, I brought the weird science this morning. You need to bring the weird politics and news. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Deadly Shallows
Posted: June 30, 2012 Filed under: Affordable Care Act | Tags: Ruth Bader Ginsberg 12 Comments
Wonk the Vote mentioned a great article today about Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her commentary on the ACA published in New Yorker Magazine and written by Amy Davidson. I wanted to follow up on this with some more information on the court’s sharpest mind.
“Staying power” is something that Ginsburg has. As Jeffrey Toobin says in this week’s Political Scene podcast, “Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seventy-nine. She is about five feet tall, eighty pounds, she has had every disease known to humanity. She is as tough as nails.” She made her way at a time when you could have a legal education from Harvard and Columbia and still be turned down for a job because you were a woman. She is not as loud or colorfully charismatic as Scalia—who is?—but neither does she seem to have learned to give up. (Those wondering about the liberal future of the Court might note that, on a point related to Medicaid expansion, Ginsburg was joined by only one Justice: Sonia Sotomayor.) We don’t know what happened inside the Court, or why Roberts voted the way he did. But by writing a scathing opinion, Ginsburg may at least have done him the favor of showing him what he might have looked like if he had signed on with Scalia: a political opportunist, and almost a fool.
She wasn’t the only one exerting that pressure, of course. But she is the leader of the liberal wing and the one who articulated what would have been the Court’s internal reproach.
Ginsberg’s writing on the case was full of gems including her use of Romney Care as one reason for upholding the Obama version.
In her opinion of the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act on Thursday, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made note of Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health care law as a reason why the individual mandate was constitutional.
While Ginsburg was a part of the majority opinion, she had differing reasons as to why the mandate was constitutional. The rest of the justices found that under the Commerce Clause, the mandate requiring all U.S. citizens to buy health insurance was not valid. They upheld it as a tax.
Ginsburg, however, said it should have been upheld under the Commerce Clause, and explained how Congress followed Massachusetts’ lead in preventing only sick people from signing up for health insurance:
“Massachusetts, Congress was told, solved the adverse selection problem. By requiring most residents to obtain insurance … the Commonwealth ensured that insurers would not be left with only the sick as customers. As a result, federal lawmakers observed, Massachusetts succeeded where other States had failed.”
Ginsburg continued, citing briefs “noting the Commonwealth’s reforms” and “noting the success of Massachusetts’ reforms.” She noted that the reforms reduced the number of uninsured to less than 2 percent, the lowest rate in the nation.
“In coupling the minimum coverage provision with guaranteed issue and community-rating prescriptions, Congress followed Massachusetts’ lead,” Ginsburg wrote.
Ginsberg did not write an ideological screed like the opposition. Instead, she actually focused on well known economic theories like adverse selection or the “lemons” problem and indicated a direct knowledge of the concept of externalties noting that broccoli was a private good. It is a good that is separable from public benefits and costs. This is the traditional microeconomic way of looking at how to determine if a good should remain in a basically unfettered private market or should be considered for regulation or public provision. Scalia’s broccoli horrible indicates the man has no knowledge what so ever of basic market structures and economics. Ginsberg toasted his cerebral marshmallows on that one.
It’s the noxious “broccoli” argument, a Tea Party cock-and-bull story elevated to law by the chief justice of the United States. But as the unflagging Ruth Bader Ginsburg explains, in her often hilarious separate opinion, “although an individual mightbuy a car or a crown of broccoli one day, there is no certainty she will ever do so;” nor will she get broccoli for free “at the expense of another consumer forced to pay an inflated price”. Ginsburg calls this freshman slippery-slope reasoning “the broccoli horrible”, and she mocks her conservative benchmates for imagining that “a vegetable-purchase mandate” could bring down the healthcare costs of “lithe Americans”:
“The court would have to believe that individuals forced to buy vegetables would then eat them (instead of throwing or giving them away), would prepare the vegetables in a healthy way (steamed or raw, not deep-fried), would cut back on unhealthy foods, and would not allow other factors (such as lack of exercise or little sleep) to trump the improved diet.”
Unlike broccoli, healthcare is something everyone, but everyone, will need at some time. For Ginsburg and the other liberal justices, the individual mandate is not the unprecedented dilemma Roberts insists it is. There is nothing particularly new here. On the contrary, it fits in naturally with what Ginsburg calls “Congress’ large authority to set the nation’s course in the economic and social welfare realm”, and failing to recognize the legislature’s power to do so under the commerce clause is for her “stunningly retrogressive”.
Scalia was so played in her argument that he should blush every time he sees her if he had any intellectual honesty at all.
What’s so horrible about eating broccoli?, the legal naïf might wonder. But then Justice Ginsburg comes back at him very sharply:
Consider the chain of inferences the Court would have to accept to conclude that a vegetable-purchase mandate was likely to have a substantial effect on the health-care costs borne by lithe Americans. The Court would have to believe that individuals forced to buy vegetables would then eat them (instead of throwing or giving them away), would prepare the vegetables in a healthy way (steamed or raw, not deep-fried), would cut back on unhealthy foods, and would not allow other factors (such as lack of exercise or little sleep) to trump the improved diet.Even in her brave opinion, Justice Ginsburg reveals the heart of the problem: nobody on the Supreme Court knows how to cook broccoli.
Speaking of intellectual dishonesty,Governor/exorcist/kidnapper Bobby Jindal took the leap to intellectual dishonesty infinity and beyond with this one. He obviously spent know time with the court’s opinion.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) said Thursday’s “frightening” Supreme Court ruling could lead to penalties for Americans whose lives are out of step with government priorities.
On a call with reporters, Jindal said that the decision to uphold the healthcare law as a tax is a “blow to our freedoms.”
“What’s next?” he said, expressing concern for people who “refuse to eat tofu” or “refuse to drive a Chevy Volt” — a popular hybrid car.
He doesn’t even realize how he just got dumped into Ginsburg’s trap. But, that’s about what happens when you go after the crazy little Teabot vote.
She even managed to call Roberts an “activist” judge by reminding every one of precedent.
“Rather than evaluating the constitutionality of the minimum coverage provision in the manner established by our precedents, THE CHIEF JUSTICE relies on a newly minted constitutional doctrine. The commerce power does not, THE CHIEF JUSTICE announces, permit Congress to `compel individuals to become active in commerce by purchasing a product.’” This argument gets “no force from our precedent and for that reason alone warrants disapprobation.”
Jindal sure missed this one.
Ginsburg: Congress can’t do silly things like compelling people to eat broccoli or buy General Motors cars because that would violate the well-established reasonableness test under previous Supreme Court decisions. But even if it did, the voters would rebel.
“As the controversy surrounding the passage of the Affordable Care Act attests, purchase mandates are likely to engender political resistance. This prospect is borne out by the behavior of state legislators. Despite their possession of unquestioned authority to impose mandates, state governments have rarely done so.”
It’s a good thing we have a few true intellectuals and scholars around still. May we continue to be blessed by her fine mind.
You can read the entire ruling here.
Just in Case You Didn’t Notice …
Posted: June 29, 2012 Filed under: U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: highway fund, student loans 34 Comments
Congress finally renewed highway funds and extended the lower student loan rate. This news comes via the HILL. This should save a few jobs and fill a few potholes. It also renews my Flood Insurance during the hurricane season!!!
Congress on Friday approved legislation that will extend federal highway programs through 2014, a low interest rate on student loans for one year, and the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) for five years.
Leaders in the House and Senate negotiated the giant package, leaving no doubt that it would have enough support to pass. The bill will likely be the last major piece of legislation approved by Congress until after the November elections.
The House voted 373-52 in favor of the bill, which was supported by every voting Democrat, while 52 Republicans opposed it. In the Senate, the tally was 74-19, with 23 Republicans joining every Democrat in voting for the measure. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) voted present, while Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) missed the vote.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said President Obama looks forward to signing the bill.
Congress faced a weekend deadline for extending the highway and student loan provisions. The rates for federally backed student loans were set to double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent, and transportation funding was due to expire.
See? They can work together ever so often.
TBIF Reads
Posted: June 29, 2012 Filed under: Affordable Care Act (ACA), Hillary Clinton, morning reads | Tags: archaeology, Betsy Ross Bridge, Health Care Ruling, Hillary Clinton, Maurits Escher, Nora Ephron 67 Comments
Good Morning!!
Here’s some reads to get you started today!
“I haven’t had a chance to read the decision. I literally just heard as we landed that the Supreme Court has upheld the healthcare law. Obviously I want to get into the details, but I’m very pleased. That’s how I hoped it would turn out,” Clinton said in video posted by PSB’s “NewsHour” and reported by Agence France Presse.
The high court ruled to uphold the healthcare law in 5-4 decision that prompted calls for repeal from Republicans and daylong praise by Democrats.
“I think it’s a great moment to just think about what this will mean for the millions and millions of Americans who have already benefited from the Affordable Care Act and some many more who will continue to do so,” Clinton added.
She noted that although there is still a lot of work to do implementing the healthcare law, she was “obviously quite exited to hear the results.”
Most right-wing hacks responded in their normal over-the top way. Rush Limbaugh–why is he still relevant?–said that SCOTUS was a “death panel”. The Aqua Buddha doesn’t understand the role of the Supreme Court in the constitution. He said that just because SCOTUS says it’s constitutional doesn’t mean it is constitutional. Representative “Mean Jean” Schmidt gives all women a bad name with this show of hysteria. (Let’s not even mention Quitterella or “I married a closet case” Michelle Bachmann.) Let’s just say the Teabots are on a rampage.
I’m sure we will find more realistic assessments of the ruling in a few days when constitutional law scholars sift through the thing.
Nobel Prize winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz is out on the interview circuit in support of his new book. Here’s an interesting interview with Stiglitz on the terrible consequences of income inequality.
One of the myths that I try to destroy is the myth that if we do anything about inequality it will weaken our economy. And that’s why the title of my book is The Price of Inequality. What I argue is that if we did attack these sources of inequality, we would actually have a stronger economy. We’re paying a high price for this inequality. Now, one of the mischaracterizations of those of us who want a more equal or fairer society, is that we’re in favor of total equality, and that would mean that there would be no incentives. That’s not the issue. The question is whether we could ameliorate some of the inequality — reduce some of the inequality by, for instance, curtailing monopoly power, curtailing predatory lending, curtailing abusive credit card practices, curtailing the abuses of CEO pay. All of those kinds of things, what I generically call “rent seeking,” are things that distort and destroy our economy.
So in fact, part of the problem of low taxes at the top is that since so much of the income at the very top is a result of rent seeking, when we lower the taxes, we’re effectively lowering the taxes on rent seeking, and we’re encouraging rent-seeking activities. When we have special provisions for capital gains that allow speculations to be taxed at a lower rate than people who work for a living, we encourage speculation. So that if you look at the design bit of our tax structure, it does create incentives for doing the wrong thing.
Basically this means that lowering taxes for the hyper-rich doesn’t create jobs. It creates gambling and influence peddling.
Here’s “Eight Great Lines Written by the Late Nora Ephron” from truthdig.
Even people who don’t like Nora Ephron movies have to concede that she broadened things for women, both the female professionals following in her wake and the female audience members soaking in her stories. She was no bleeding-edge feminist, but in a culture that produces one vapid Prince Charming chick flick after another, Ephron generally focused on characters—Julia Child among them—who had their own force of personality, their own reasons for being.
Truthdig contributor Carrie Rickey remembers on her own blog eight of her favorite Ephron lines. Here are three:
“When your children are teenagers it’s important to have a dog so someone in the house is happy to see you when you get home.” — from the book “I Feel Bad About My Neck”
“Harry, you have to find a way of not expressing every feeling you have, every moment you have them.” — spoken by Meg Ryan in “When Harry Met Sally … ”
“She makes coffee nervous” — spoken by Tom Hanks (of Parker Posey) in “You’ve Got Mail”
I guess I’m going multimedia these days. I have another Youtube for you. This one is kinda kewl. It’s on “mathematics made visible and the art of M.C. Escher. Who hasn’t had at least one of his posters hanging on your dorm or bedroom wall as a kid?
His cool, analytic tendency was apparent from the start. “Maurits Escher is a good graphic artist,” wrote the headmaster of the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts in 1922, the year of Escher’s graduation, “but he lacks the right artistic temperament. His work is to too cerebral–neither emotional nor lyrical enough.” Escher’s work became even more cerebral over time, as it grew in geometric sophistication.
There’s a great 1 hour long documentary available too. Follow the link above when you have the time. It’s well worth it.
I also recommend that you read the FT and “A manifesto for economic sense” by Paul Krugman and Richard Layard.
As a result of their mistaken ideas, many western policy makers are inflicting massive suffering on their peoples. But the ideas they espouse about how to handle recessions were rejected by nearly all economists after the disasters of the 1930s. It is tragic that in recent years the old ideas have again taken root.
The best policies will differ between countries and will require debate. But they must be based on a correct analysis of the problem. We therefore urge all economists and others who agree with the broad thrust of this manifesto for economic sense to register their agreement online and to publicly argue the case for a sounder approach. The whole world suffers when men and women are silent about what they know is wrong.
Here’s an interesting archaeological find from the UK. A woman and a cow were found buried together in Cambridgeshire.
The grave was uncovered in Oakington by students from Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Central Lancashire.
At first it was thought the animal skeleton was a horse.
Student Jake Nuttall said: “Male warriors might be buried with horses, but a woman and a cow is new to us.”
He added: “We were excited when we thought we had a horse, but realising it was a cow made it even more bizarre.”
Co-director of the excavation, Dr Duncan Sayer, from the University of Central Lancashire, said: “Animal burials are extremely rare, anyway.
Grave goods including brooches indicated the woman was of high status
“There are only 31 horse burials in Britain and they are all with men.
“This is the first animal to be discovered with a woman from this period – the late 5th Century – and it’s really interesting that it’s a cow, a symbol of economic and domestic wealth and power.
“It’s also incredibly early to find any grave of a woman buried with such obvious wealth.”
One more totally bizarre dig story. I know. I wanted to be an archaeologist as a kid. I’m still fascinated with it all. This one is from Philadelphia: “How Thousands of Headstones Ended Up Under a Philadelphia Bridge”. Go look at the pictures. They are very haunting and macabre.
The Betsy Ross Bridge in Philadelphia seems like any other. It doesn’t have the grace of the Golden Gate or the history of the Brooklyn Bridge, nor does it draw any acolytes wanting to make the trek across. The structure exists primarily to move people, and this it does well, helping connect Pennsylvania to New Jersey. Most commuters, however, are surely unaware of what the bridge’s foundation is actually built on: a cemetery.
The bridge springs from the headstones of a forsaken graveyard, dumped unceremoniously into the Delaware River. The sunken stones at the base of the bridge came from Monument Cemetery, once located two miles from City Hall. Monument Cemetery, established in 1839, was the second Victorian garden style cemetery in Philadelphia, after Laurel Hill, now a protected historic landmark. Monument was modeled after the Pere Lachaise in Paris, and was created to function both as a final resting place for the dead as well as a green respite from the surrounding urban environment.
That’s my offerings today! Thank Buddha it’s Friday! What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Broccoli Loses! Oh teh Humanity!
Posted: June 28, 2012 Filed under: Affordable Care Act (ACA), SCOTUS, U.S. Politics, Women's Healthcare | Tags: Brocoli Mandate 61 Comments
It’s one of those Bizarro World days where you get to see “liberals” cheer over an American Heritage invented, Romney inspired, aka Dolecare private insurance scheme while conservatives moan that it’s
Alas poor Scalia! His revolution has stalled. It seems Justice Roberts either cares about his name or precedent after all. He managed to shift grounds but still worries about the ‘Broccoli Horrible’.
The majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts bluntly insisted that the clause does not vest Congress with “police powers … to regulate an individual from cradle to grave.” It also explicitly embraced the conservative argument regarding health care and broccoli.
In oral arguments three months ago, Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia famously demanded that Solicitor General Donald Verrilli explain why, if the government can compel someone to buy health insurance, it can’t also compel them to buy broccoli.
That comparison outraged progressives and horrified health care experts, because it seemed to trivialize the enormous societal significance of health care.
Roberts, however, enshrined the broccoli-related concerns in his opinion, writing:
According to the Government, upholding the individual mandate would not justify mandatory purchases of items such as cars or broccoli because, as the Government puts it, “[h]ealth in-surance is not purchased for its own sake like a car or broccoli; it is a means of financing health-care consumption and covering universal risks.” Reply Brief for United States 19. But cars and broccoli are no more purchased for their “own sake” than health insurance. They are purchased to cover the need for transportation and food.In their concurrence, the four liberal justices, led by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, nevertheless took issue with some of Roberts’ conclusions — including the one about broccoli.
Ginsburg tried to explain some of the ways in which broccoli (or a car) are different from health care:
Although an individual might buy a car or a crown of broccoli one day, there is no certainty she will ever do so. And if she eventually wants a car or has a craving for broccoli, she will be obliged to pay at the counter before receiving the vehicle or nourishment. She will get no free ride or food, at the expense of another consumer forced to pay an inflated price.And she even seemed to poke fun at Roberts for swallowing such an argument:
As an example of the type of regulation he fears, The Chief Justice cites a Government mandate to purchase green vegetables. Ante, at 22–23. One could call this concern “the broccoli horrible.” Congress, The Chief Justice posits, might adopt such a mandate, reasoning that an individual’s failure to eat a healthy diet, like the failure to purchase health insurance, imposes costs on others. See ibid.Consider the chain of inferences the Court would have to accept to conclude that a vegetable-purchase mandate was likely to have a substantial effect on the health-care costs borne by lithe Americans. The Court would have to believe that individuals forced to buy vegetables would then eat them (instead of throwing or giving them away), would prepare the vegetables in a healthy way (steamed or raw, not deep-fried), would cut back on unhealthy foods, and would not allow other factors (such as lack of exercise or little sleep) to trump the improved diet.
Be prepared to eat thy Broccoli or Move to Canada for that horrible Universal Health Care you all fear Teabots! Meanwhile, I’m trying to imagine all those governors actually opting out of a huge amount of federal funds to make a point about their Medicaid programs. Yes, death panels are okay as long as its for poor people. Don’t you just love those sociopaths cum libertarians?
A rejection of health care egalitarianism, namely a recognition that the wealthy will purchase more and better health care than the poor. Trying to equalize health care consumption hurts the poor, since most feasible policies to do this take away cash from the poor, either directly or through the operation of tax incidence. We need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people will die just because they are poor. Some of you don’t like the sound of that, but we already let the wealthy enjoy all sorts of other goods — most importantly status — which lengthen their lives and which the poor enjoy to a much lesser degree. We shouldn’t screw up our health care institutions by being determined to fight inegalitarian principles for one very select set of factors which determine health care outcomes.
Like I said, welcome to the new Bizzarro world. It sounds strangely like a Dickens novel. Bless their little hearts, every one!
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