Stupid Health Benefits Question
Whose idea was it to tie them to employment, anyway?

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal (print edition) has a feature article about the fact that most paper-boys don't get health coverage or death benefits. The lede involves a kid in Hawaii getting run over by a van.

So it's a nice tug-at-the-heart story, the kind that whips up public sympathy and often leads to unwise new goverment action. (Thus really surprising to see in the Journal.) The thing is, in the very specific case, aren't most paper-boys dependents anyway? In the 90% case, wouldn't their parents' health coverage apply to them too?

If (say) there were new laws mandating health benefits for newspaper carriers, I predict that suddenly teenagers wouldn't get those jobs anymore. To the extent that "first job experience" is character-building or has other mystique, that might be a bad thing. I guess you could mow lawns or something. It certainly never occurred to me to seek a benefits package from my neighbors when I hopped on the ol' John Deere.

(Yards in Oklahoma are big.)

Anyway, the whole system of assuming that health coverage comes from your employer seems untenable to me. I can see why it made sense to someone and why it's not as bad an idea as other alternatives. It worked much better when typical companies were bigger and typical employees didn't change jobs as often... the antiquated economy of most pre-Dilbert corporate bureaucracy parodies.

When employers have to provide health coverage, it's the illusion of a free benefit, since people never stop and think about how/why it drives salaries down. I think I'd prefer a world in which the typical salary was much higher but included no health coverage at all. Then, people could (and obviously 99% of people would) spend their money to get exactly the level of health coverage they wanted. Thorough but expensive packages would exist. No-frills alternatives would protect you from six-figure bills if a major organ gives out but still leave you, say, a $10K [word I'm not thinking of for the threshold below which you pay 100%].

The argument against this is that short-sighted people would fail to cover themselves and then become free riders, since nobody would have the heart to tell a suddenly-sick free rider that he's fresh out of luck and needs to float off and die. I hate it when people restrict their freedom so much because they think not everyone can be trusted.

By the way, TIPS is a bad idea
It's ridiculously bad, arguably the worst idea of the Bush administration.

I'm not even as worried about the civil liberties as I am about the degradation of performance caused by really useful info being drowned out by noise.

Fortunately, the civil liberties diehard in the U.S. are exactly as powerful as they need to be, so that the really bad ideas go down in flames while the merely inconvenient ones end up grudgingly accepted.

Also, have you noticed that the most invasive "anti-terrorism" policies are also the least effective? It's uncanny. Let's not set up a secret police, and let's also quit snooping through old ladies' luggage.

Dr. Death
Two lessons from this guy:

1. Don't cross your doctor. Maybe Elaine wasn't so unlucky?

2. The "right to die" has a slippery slope. I'm not nearly as bullheaded on where/how life ends as I am on where/how it begins but euthanasia still deeply scares me.

Political Un-humor
Is it just me or are several of these fake Family Circus captions just plain unfunny? (See also July 4.)

"People who disagree with me are wacko nutjobs [who will destroy us all]" isn't funny on either side and never was.

Nor (in fairness) was Mallard Fillmore (or ever will be).

It's possible to be funny and political (see The Boondocks most of the time and even Rush some of the time), just appalling how often people try and fail badly. Usually they fail because of how ignorant they are of what people who disagree with them might actually say, think, or feel.

UPDATE:
The "John Ashcroft's fetishes..." entry (currently top of page) is hilarious.

Required Reading
Skip the post below ("Peace"). Dan Savage puts it better than I ever could.

Peace
Very eloquent September 11 thoughts here but with a more pacifistic ending than similar narratives I've seen.

I was (it turns out) far removed from the points of attack but still, slowly but surely, angered and still a little angry, for two reasons:

1. They had to go and ruin it. Long list of things that "they" ended up ruining, everything from air travel to the Middle East situation. We, collectively, had some really nice things going. Pointless destruction, intentional murder of civilians, just an enormous sense of needless loss.

You could say this argues against any predominantly military response, since war just leads to more of that kind of act. Then again...

2. There are people out there who want to kill us. Every single freakin' one of us. Because we're Americans; because we're infidels. Because we're Jewish, or if not ourselves then that we dare to think of Jewish people as actual human beings rather than spreading blood libels about them. Because some of us are gay and the rest of us are gay friendly.

As long as there are people out there who want to kill us all, and as difficult as it would be to reason with them (impossible, really: what you have is tens of thousands of people who've misinterpreted an entire religious tradition), my take on the necessary and sufficient condition for peace is that we take away their power to harm us.

Fuller understanding can come later. For now, as understanding goes, I'm content with

• Some things are so evil that you just don't do them. And you sure as hell don't get 72 virgins out of it. This is more like it.


• Americans will do the right thing in the end, and can and will be quite friendly to you if you don't go messing with people.

This is appalling
Yahoo! bends over for Chinese gov't.

In case you've forgotten, China is not free. People there do what the government tells them to do and think what the government tells them to think. Prisoners of conscience are tortured. China wants us to forget about this, but we won't. At least I won't.

Maybe this will turn into a daily feature, if only so that other people don't forget.

Iran is not free. God willing, by a year or so it will be. Iraq is not free.

Last but not least, Cuba is not free. Would it be wrong for me to pray that Castro dies tomorrow?

"Choice"
(or skip the conservative critique and click here for the original article, if you already have a NY Times registration)

Somebody tried to convince me once that, because of how viscerally opposed I'd be to mandatory abortions*, I should be in favor of voluntary ones. That is, somehow "the right to choose not to" implies "the right to choose."

I didn't buy this for a minute -- after all, I have the right to choose not to rob the corner liquor store -- but the other way around almost has to be true. At least, based on the original NY Times story and the different ways different people would react, someone or something is hypocritical here and I really don't think it's me.

*- Gotta love non-hypothetical "hypotheticals," since China has been brutally enforcing its "one-child" policy for years now anyway.