After slipping into another certainly fruitless discussion with a certain of our regular commenters, it occurred to me that one of humanity’s detrimental tendencies, with particular implications for modern society, is to think of societal mechanisms with too narrow of a focus, usually adjusted to the breadth at which our preferences appear clearest.
The case in point: I would argue that the appropriate concept of workers’ unions is as, themselves, a reaction to the market (using “market” in its broad, theoretical sense, of course). Workers needed a mechanism through which to assert their rights and needs, and in many respects, the unionization method worked out well. However, if we begin to see unions as the source of, rather than the means for, improvements, we create another institution that must constantly be justifying its existence. We also maintain a centralized power even in the absence of a centralized goal toward which to wield it, thereby giving those at its head unhealthy room to lead toward their own ends.
The question is not what good unions may or may not have done in the past. It isn’t even what they boast of wrenching from employers (often taxpayers) now. The question that we must consider is whether unions currently help us to strike the appropriate balances between employers and workers and between freedom and regulation. Keeping them in their conceptually appropriate place, if we diminish the influence of unions — or even disband them altogether — now and need their services again someday, we can always reestablish them, no doubt in a more effective form for having scuttled entrenched interests.
Just a reminder!!!
The Rhode Island legislature has passed a law moving the state’s presidential primary to tomorrow, forcing candidates from both parties to hastily revise their schedules and platforms.
“I love Rhode Island, always have—especially the people,” said Sen. John Edwards while being briefed on Rhode Island politics aboard a plane bound for Providence. “Just because it’s a small state doesn’t mean it’s not important. Frankly, I’ve always believed Rhode Island, or the ‘Ocean State,’ as I prefer to call it, should be much bigger—an issue on which my opponents have remained curiously silent.”
Former Gov. Mitt Romney announced his intention to release a 10-point plan addressing the issues that most deeply affect Rhode Islanders, as soon as he and his staff figure out what those issues are.
Ahem, SOURCE.
[Open full post]Whether you’re left, right or independent, PAY ATTENTION:
Earlier this year, the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) rejected a postal rate increase plan offered by the U.S. Postal Service. Instead they opted to implement a complicated plan submitted by media giant Time Warner. (Click here for a timeline)
Under the original plan, all publishers would have a mostly equal increase (approx. 12 percent) in the cost for mailing their publications. The Time Warner plan overturned this level playing field to favor large, ad-heavy magazines like People at the expense of smaller publications like In These Times and The American Spectator. It penalizes thousands of small- to medium-sized outlets with disproportionately higher rates while locking in privileges for bigger companies.
A lot of your favorite ideological websites are outgrowths of the smaller mags that are being affected: National Review has The Corner, The New Republic has The Plank, for instance. If you want to let the Post Office know that you disagree with this move, SIGN THE PETITION.
[Open full post]I’m not commenting on the veracity of either side’s claims, as reported by Karen Lee Ziner in today’s Projo. I’m just pointing out that if United Healthcare decides to drop St. Joseph’s and Our Lady of Fatima hospitals from its provider network, the average United customer has no recourse, because of the way that health insurance is tied to employment. In a more rational system, people who didn’t like United’s decision could walk away from United and buy their insurance elsewhere. However, since employment-based health insurance places consumers in the position of taking the one choice that’s offered or taking nothing at all, United is free to make this decision without considering what its customers want.
OK, I will comment on one claim mentioned in the news item. This ratio does seem a bit out of whack…
At a news conference at Our Lady of Fatima, [St. Joseph Health Services president and CEO John Keimig] , “[United Healthcare] is the same company that earned over $5 billion in profits nationally last year. It is the same company that paid its CEO the staggering total of $124 million in compensation last year — an amount that is approximately 150 percent of the total annual payroll for all of the 2,000 employees here at St. Joseph Health Services …”If one insurance CEO getting paid the same amount as 2,000 hospital employees is a problem, the solution is to allow every individual Rhode Islander to seek insurance from companies that can provide the same coverage with less corporate overhead. Under the existing system, insurance companies can increase the price of their services far above their costs because consumers are not free to take their healthcare dollars to insurers who run their businesses more efficiently, i.e. to insurers able to charge lower rates for the same or better service and still make a profit. Break the link between insurance and employment, and you’ll see insurers suddenly become a lot more accomodating towards individual consumers.
It should be noted, however, that if hospitals want to be less subject to the whims of insurers, they too need to become more friendly towards the individual consumer. [Open full post]
Mark Arsenault reports in today’s ProJo that Steve Laffey has written a tell-all about his failed 2006 Senate campaign. The title indicates where he’s going with this one–Primary Mistake: A Candidate’s Tale of How Washington Republicans Tried to Squash a Reagan Conservative but Instead Lost Everything (link added and title revised to reflect information at linked site-ed.).
Laffey will argue in the book that his race epitomized what went wrong with the Republican Party, which lost control of the House and Senate in the last election. “The national Republican Party lost power because it put power in front of principle,” Laffey said yesterday. “I wanted to set forth some principles that we should hold on to.”
His editor at Penguin Group [who is publishing the book], Bernadette Malone Serton, said that Laffey tells the story of the campaign with stunning candor.
“Steve Laffey is so candid in talking about what Washington Republicans did to him that the rest of the country needs to know why they lost the Senate in 2006,” she said.
“And he names names in his book,” she promised.
Neither Laffey nor Serton would describe the contents of the book in detail before it is published, but both said it has nationwide implications.
“It’s a wake-up call to all Republicans for 2008,” Serton said, “because if these are the kind of decisions [by Republican leaders] and the games that are going to be played, that could very well affect the outcome of the presidential election.”
Laffey, who is traveling out of the country, explained by telephone yesterday why he wrote the book.
“I’m a very future-oriented person,” he said. “I don’t sit around and stew. I thought immediately that my race had a lot of implications nationally. I thought I had something to offer nationally for the party and the public.
“I really thought my race was the epitome of how the national Republican Party lost power and did the wrong thing over the last six years.”
The book ends with “a very positive message for the future, a very hopeful” message, he said.
Buckle-up!
[Open full post]Here’s the background on the ethanol spat between Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Brazilian President Lula da Silva going on at the South American energy summit being held this week.
Brazil is a major importer of Bolivian natural gas. About a year ago, Bolivian President Evo Morales, a Hugo Chavez lackey, nationalized his country’s natural gas industry. Morales demanded that all foreign natural gas companies operating in Bolivia, including Brazil’s government-owned energy company, renegotiate their existing contracts with terms more favorable to Bolivia. This sudden action led Brazil to realize that an over-dependence on energy controlled by Hugo Chavez and his clients was not in the Brazilian national interest, and President da Silva’s government began work on an ethanol cooperation pact with a country outside of the Chavez sphere of influence, i.e. the United States. Agreement on a pact was announced in March.
Since control of natural energy resources is the only international bargaining chip that Chavez has (without oil, his place on the international stage would be exactly that of Cuba’s), Chavez is desperately trying to stop alternatives to oil from being developed. Without high oil prices to pay for Chavez’s subsidies to Venezuela’s poor, it will become obvious to everyone but anti-American ideologues that Chavez’s “Bolivaran revolution” has been a failure.
Chavez will now try a two-pronged strategy. 1) Try to flood Brazil and other Latin American countries with cheap oil to stave off the demand for ethanol. However, Brazil won’t buy into this plan, after the experience with Morales in Bolivia. Plus Chavez can only make the price so low, before he loses the money he needs to subsidize Venezuela’s dead non-petroleum economy. 2) Try to scare people into thinking that increased ethanol production will cause food shortages and demand the governments ban the production of ethanol as a fuel. Translation: We can never have any new technological developments again, because the resources used to produce them might drive up the price of something we already have.
The United States should cement its commitment to the energy pact with Brazil by immediately dropping its 54-cent-per-gallon import tariff on Brazilian ethanol.
Rhode Island Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Peter McWalters is the keynote speaker at an international education conference being held in the United Arab Emirates this week…
The first-of-its-kind School Reform conference being organised by The College of Education at the United Arab Emirates University in cooperation with Hamdan Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Award for Distinguished Academic Performance was opened today (Tuesday, April 17, 2007) by H.H. Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan, Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, and Chancellor of UAE University, at the Madinat Jumeirah in Dubai.According to the conference program, sessions that Commissioner McWalters will be able to attend include “Comprehensive Administrative School Reform in the Arab World” presented by a speaker from Saudi Arabia, a “Vision for Teachers Preparation and Qualification” presented by a speaker from Syria, and a session on the role of Special Education Programs in School Reform in the Sudan.
The three-day conference, concluding on April 19, will host workshops and discussions featuring 50 case studies (25 in Arabic and 25 in English) of prominent international scholars and researchers in the field of school reform…
Some of the eminent speakers at the School Reform conference include Peter McWalters, Commissioner, Rhode Island Department of Education, USA; Kati Haycok, Director, Education Trust, State of California, USA; Professor Wayne Edwards from Massey University, New Zealand; Professor Dorothy Harnish from University of Georgia, USA; and Dr. Kristiina Erkkila, Director of Development for the City of Espoo, Finland.
If, however, the Commissioner believes Rhode Island has something to learn from educational programs sanctioned by Middle Eastern dictatorships, shouldn’t he also be willing to take at least a cursory look at the education reform experiences of some places closer to home, like Utah and San Francisco, that are trying different versions of de-centralized school reform? [Open full post]
Our prayers go out to the victims of yesterday’s Virginia Tech shootings.
No political commentary here, obviously. But what purpose is being served by investigators’ seeming coyness about admitting whether there is the possibility of a second shooter or not…
Virginia Tech’s president said Tuesday that a student was the gunman in at least the second of the two campus attacks that claimed 33 lives to become the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.UPDATE:
Though he did not explicitly say the student was also the gunman in the first shooting, he said he did not believe there was another shooter at large.
According to ABC News, Virginia Tech President Charles Steger has confirmed the possibility of a second shooter…
Virginia Tech President Charles Steger told “Good Morning America’s” Diane Sawyer this morning that there was still the possibility that there were two shooters in the separate campus attacks on Monday morning.UPDATE 2:
Again, from ABC News…
At this time, police are not looking for a second shooter, however, they did not rule out the possibility that an accomplice may have been involved.[Open full post]
Last night I learned that Pat Buckley, wife of conservative giant William F. Buckley, Jr., had passed away. By all accounts, she was a truly remarkable woman.
[Open full post]Meaghan Wims of the Newport Daily News has the details of the Portsmouth’s school committee’s budget proposal for next year…
The School Department is proposing a $33.4 million budget for the 2008 fiscal year, which begins July 1. The tight spending plan represents a $1.3 million increase over current-year spending and falls within the state’s 5.25 percent cap on tax-levy increases in fiscal 2008.Once again, we see a Rhode Island community planning to raise taxes and cut programs at the same time. And the problem is not that Portsmouth has a history of underfunding its school system. As Keith Kyle and Thomas Wigand of the Portsmouth Concerned Citizens organization have documented, Portsmouth increased its school budget by about 50% between 1997 and 2007. Yet despite a decade of increases, one budget proposal made last year by the Portsmouth school committee involved a 9.1% tax increase coupled with eliminating 12.5 teaching positions. Why the Portsmouth school department is consistently unable to afford its existing educational baseline is a question in need of an answer.
To keep expenditures balanced, the school board voted this week to close Prudence Island School after this school year and to change Portsmouth Middle School to a grades 6-to-8 configuration, with fifth-graders being housed in the community’s three elementary schools.
The school district also has cut a third-grade, a fifth-grade and a special education teacher, plus supplies, special education tuition and building maintenance costs.
To reiterate the often mischaracterized position of “fiscal conservatives”, it’s not an inherently bad thing to raise taxes to pay for good schools. But constantly having to raise taxes and cut programs at the same time, repeatedly demanding that citizens pay more and more to receive less and less, is a sign of a structural problem within the education bureaucracy that is a bigger threat to the quality of education than is the total funding level. Perhaps Mr. Kyle and Mr. Wigand say it best…
The Portsmouth School Department appears to have a management problem, not a budget appropriation problem.[Open full post]