Some Sunday Wisdom From Greg Lukianoff and Coleman Hughes

And now on to the miscellany:

  • As promised. Over the past few I've linked to a couple items that were supercritical of Kash Patel's promise that Trump Part 2: The Entrumpening would "come after the people in the media who lied" (here and here). But I promised that I would link to someone who (sorta) takes the other side, Holman W. Jenkins Jr., who saith: The Media Is Scared of Kash Patel. Good. His dismissal of the "come after" issue:

    Relax. The law doesn’t allow scope for this. An FBI chief might help, though, by championing the release of classified documents to encourage the press to decide it no longer pays to stonewall. In three cases, the FBI and fellow agencies made use of false “Russian intelligence” concerns to get away with illegal or improper acts to influence our domestic politics. The press has been covering it up.

    Best case: As FBI Director, Patel would forego his promise to "come after" Trump's political adversaries, and instead start shining a bright light on that coverup.

  • Reminder: You are free to dislike and undisplay the motto. The Valley News, over there on the other side of the state, reminisces about The Upper Valley fight over NH’s ‘Live Free or Die’ motto.

    Half a century ago the Upper Valley was ground zero for a battle between state power to compel citizens to display a message they disagreed with and determined dissenters willing to resist, even to the point of going to jail for their beliefs.

    Over a period of several years the struggle included a determined conservative governor from Orford, aggressive Lebanon police and a waffling state court system against a diverse assortment of people from Claremont, Lebanon, Cornish, Plainfield and Hanover bent on fighting for what they believed were their free-speech rights.

    It would take a precedent-setting ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court to finally settle the matter, and it would be a total victory for those who took on the state in defense of their protections under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The outcome asserted that free speech rights also include the right not to say anything.

    It's a pretty good summary of the legal wrangling back then. And I was unaware of this bit:

    [Defendant] Maynard was completely vindicated, but that wasn’t the end of the story. The district court had ordered the state to pay the $20,000 in legal fees Maynard incurred during the long legal slog.

    But the state wasn’t paying up.

    So the judge called in the U.S. marshal and instructed him to go to the New Hampshire Liquor Commission store in Hooksett and collect from the registers the cash needed to settle things up. The store manager was on the phone immediately to his boss in Concord and frantic calls to the governor’s office finally got the money on the way from the state treasury.

  • Don't the ghouls know Halloween is over? Jeff Maurer looks at what they are saying, and observes: “Pay Every Claim” Is Not a Viable Model for Any Health Insurance Company. The issue is the "glee" with which some are greeting the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, combined with the allegations about unjustly denied claims from health insurers.

    But to those dancing on Thompson’s grave, the issue is not complicated: UnitedHealthcare denies patients’ claims, and that is immoral. Many of the social media comments about Thompson’s death include stories of a particular claim that was denied, and in many cases, those stories are heart-wrenching. And that’s true even when you factor in that 90 percent of what’s said on social media is total bullshit.

    But no world exists in which any health insurance company will pay every claim. A company that pays every claim is not a health insurance company: That’s a sugar daddy. That’s a mythical creature far more fanciful than anything C.S. Lewis or Dr. Seuss ever imagined. That company would also go broke in the blink of an eye — I would invest in a company that makes shit-flavored breath mints before I’d invest in an insurance company that says “okey dokey!” to every single claim.

    Say what you will about Kash Patel, I'm pretty sure he hasn't advocated murdering FBI agents that promoted the Steele Dossier.

  • "Simple" is good. Alex Tabarrok provides Some Simple Economics of the Google Antitrust Case. Sample:

    The case is straightforward: Google pays firms like Apple billions of dollars to make its search engine the default. (N.B. I would rephrase this as Apple charges Google billions of dollars to make its search engine the default–a phrasing which matters if you want to understand what is really going on. But set that aside for now.) Consumers, however, can easily switch to other search engines by downloading a different browser or changing their default settings. Why don’t they? Because the minor transaction costs are not worth the effort. Moreover, if Google provides the best search experience, most users have no incentive to switch.

    Consequently, any potential harm to consumers is limited to minor switching costs, and any remedies should be proportionate. Proposals such as forcing Google to divest Chrome or Android are vastly disproportionate to the alleged harm and risk being counterproductive. Google’s Android has significantly increased competition in the smartphone market, and ChromeOS has done the same for laptops. Google has invested billions in increasing competition in its complements. Google was able to make these investments because they paid off in revenue to Google Search and Google Ads. Kill the profit center and kill the incentive to invest in competition. Unintended consequences.

    Fun fact: The highest-rated comment on Tabarrok's post states "Old people do not know how to switch browsers." I resent that remark!

  • I'm in favor. Although it won't happen, Joe Lancaster makes a good case that we should Abolish the IRS.

    Imagine you need a job and somebody's hiring. After negotiating a wage that you both can live with, work begins. But when payday arrives, before you can even take your earnings to the bank or the bar, someone else swoops in with an outstretched hand and demands his "cut"—or else.

    A mob boss? A pimp? Nope: the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

    The 16th Amendment gave Congress "power to lay and collect taxes on incomes" in 1913, after the Supreme Court had previously ruled such taxes "unconstitutional and void." Later that year, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Revenue Act of 1913, instituting a progressive federal income tax nationwide.

    Well, that was a mistake.

    To amplify Lancaster's point, I'll embed a short PDF (retrieved from here):