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I rode in the back of a Honda Jet on a demo flight recently and wrote up a draft review of the Honda Jet. Comments/corrections would be appreciated.

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I’m listening to Forensic History: Crimes, Frauds, and Scandals, lectures by Elizabeth Murray. Lecture 10 is titled “Bad Boys of U.S. Politics” and covers forensic methods used during investigations of sexual encounters in which one participant was a prominent politician.

The long list of cases from which Professor Murray was able to draw leads to the following question: Given how many people have run for President this year, why aren’t there any sex scandals? Are politicians behaving differently? Politicians with something to hide not running? The public not caring anymore?

[What does the lecture cover? Professor Murray charts the changing ways in which people profit from sexual encounters with politicians. Carrie Phillips was able to get paid by the Republican Party for keeping quiet about having sex with Warren Harding. Murray points out that Megan Broussard got paid (by the media) for the opposite behavior: disclosing details about Twitter exchanges with Anthony Weiner. Rielle Hunter got an initial $1 million for keeping quiet about having sex with and getting pregnant by John Edwards, then an additional stream of child support payments. (Murray doesn’t cover this, but it seems that having a baby with a politician is more profitable than choosing a sex partner from among the high-income masses. Hunter got paid $500,000 per year initially. She could have gotten that by having sex with a man earning roughly $4 million per year in Massachusetts. However, though Edwards and his wife were pretty rich, they lived in North Carolina. Hunter also lived in North Carolina and presumably had sex with Edwards mostly in North Carolina. According to our interviewee for that state, it is tough for a plaintiff to get more than about $60,000 per year in child support revenue under North Carolina family law. And due to the fact that both the sexual intercourse and the residence were in North Carolina, it would have been tough for Hunter to obtain the jurisdiction of a state where children are more lucrative.) Murray reminds us that the FBI got a blood sample from President Clinton (“Clinton I”?) and used that to do DNA testing on Monica Lewinsky‘s dress… all paid for by us! (see also “Monica Lewinsky’s lost child support profits”) She expresses astonishment that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s dalliance with the nanny was covered up for so many years (note that, according to Professor Murray, Arnold didn’t do anything discreditable other than having the affair).]

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I’m a little disappointed that Bernie Sanders hasn’t taken my suggestion to change names to “Bernice Sanders,” identify as a woman, and capture votes from those Americans who wish to see a female president. Despite this, it is time for me to declare my (lukewarm) love for Bernie Sanders for President.

Personally I would prefer for the U.S. to have a market economy along the lines of a Singapore or Hong Kong. Government would consume less than 20 percent of GDP and provide high-quality basic services. This, however, is not what a majority of Americans want. Nor is it what Republicans are actually promising (and in any case, I don’t think that Republicans have any chance to win a national election). Thus I have not educated myself regarding the Republican candidates and don’t have an informed opinion regarding which of them, if any, might make a good President. [The popularity of Donald Trump does not signify the popularity of “Republicans”; Trump was a registered Democrat until recently and many of the ideas that he espouses, e.g., restrictions on trade to increase revenues for domestic companies and increase salaries for domestic workers, are not policies that are typically considered “Republican.” If anything, the popularity of a protectionist Democrat running as a “Republican” shows that support for a market economy is shrinking even among nominally Republican voters.]

If the U.S. cannot have a market economy, what choices do we have? Broadly I think the remaining options are Socialism and Crony Capitalism.

Americans with jobs have a visceral reaction against Socialism because they associate it with other Americans kicking back and living off their labor. Maybe it is a welfare family playing Xbox with friends in a government-provided house while serving chips purchased with food stamps. Maybe it is someone who once had sex with a working American and is now living off child support and/or alimony. These, however, are not essential elements of Socialism. In the former Soviet Union, for example, able-bodied citizens had to work. You couldn’t get paid by the government and/or a court-ordered fellow citizen for having sex, having children, or having been briefly married. You couldn’t be a stay-at-home parent. You couldn’t sit at home collecting Welfare because your skills failed to command a government-set minimum wage. In a Socialist U.S. there could well be a dramatic reduction in the share of GDP allocated to the non-working.

[Example of a conversation that wouldn’t have happened under Socialism: “My sister is thinking about becoming a midwife, but she doesn’t want to study science.”; “We could show her how to make a lot more money [under Massachusetts family law] delivering her own baby.”]

Government bureaucrats allocating resources in a Socialist economy are at least explicitly tasked with doing whatever is in the best interest of a society in the long run. This is distinct from picking winners/cronies in a Crony Capitalist economy where a company might be favored with taxpayer funds because of its connections to a politician.

Let’s consider health care. If we could cut spending on health care from 17.5 percent of the GDP down to a more typical developed country level of 10 percent (or we could dream of cutting down to a smart/rich country’s level of 4.5 percent! (see Singapore in this table)), that would enable us to increase private domestic investment by at least 50 percent (current level is 16.7 percent of GDP). This would provide a bigger boost to GDP growth than almost anything else other than perhaps providing young people with a world class education (see Smartest Kids in the World for why that probably won’t ever happen in the U.S.).

Obamacare, which Hillary Clinton supports, is classic crony capitalism. It costs a fortune. The benefits flow primarily to the health care industry. Nobody cares about the 33 million Americans who end up without insurance. If the goal is to provide health care to residents of the U.S., this is perhaps the least effective and most expensive system that one could possibly design. If you add in the costs of Americans spending time figuring out which policy to buy, figuring out why a claim wasn’t paid, talking to insurers, etc. and the medical billing sub-industry’s costs, it becomes an even more ludicrous self-inflicted wound to our economy.

Bernie, on the other hand, presents the only credible alternative to the crony capitalist world of Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.: socialized medicine to at least a basic standard. (I proposed a slight twist on this in 2009.) At Beaver Creek about half the adults with enough money, leisure time, and vitality to spend a week skiing were in the health care industry, e.g., as doctors, nurses, technicians, or somewhere in admin/ownership/investment (I didn’t meet anyone from a health insurer, though! If they are getting crazy rich from the mountains of paperwork they aren’t spending their dough at Beaver Creek). They all spoke out against Bernie, fearing a dramatic reduction in their incomes should his single-payer system be enacted by Congress.

This alone is, to my mind, sufficient reason to vote for Bernie. Health care is the biggest problem with the U.S. economy and Bernie is the only one who is willing to stand up and say “Stop the madness.”

What about Bernie’s plan for higher tax rates? We’re voting for a president, not a dictator. He would have to make his case for European-circa-1970s tax rates to Congress and they could decide whether to attempt to muddle through with the current system or jump on the “full Socialism” wagon.

Note that I don’t think Bernie’s higher tax rates would product higher tax revenue. My theory is that the combination of local, state, and federal governments is already squeezing as much juice out of the U.S. economy as can be squeezed. Bernie assumes that people won’t respond to economic incentives by changing their behavior. Virtually every paper at the 2015 American Economic Association meeting found the opposite, as did the research cited in The Redistribution Recession. As in the old days of high nominal tax rates, sometimes the behavior change is an elaborate tax shelter (it will be turbocharged in our era due to globalization). Most Americans will respond by working less, though, just as Europeans did in response to their higher tax rates.

What if America became a society like 1970s Sweden or England where it didn’t make sense to work especially hard? That would be a materially poorer society than what we’d have given a market economy, but we’ve already chosen to cut GDP growth in favor of more bureaucracy, regulation, and government (see this CIA list of countries ranked by GDP per capita). But money isn’t everything. If you go to the Vail Valley, of which Beaver Creek is part, you’ll find a large number of Americans who are healthy enough to work, and often highly skilled, but who choose not to work. Some of them saved enough during their working years to have a fancy house but most live in modest two-bedroom condos. All of them enjoy the outdoors, spending time with friends and family, etc. It is a lot easier to build and maintain friendships there than in a place where people work hard. Good luck asking someone in downtown Boston or New York to take the day off to go hiking or skiing! If Bernie’s proposed tax rates get approved then the U.S. as a whole becomes more like the Vail Valley. People will earn enough to get by and spend the rest of their time on activities that research shows are better contributors to happiness than additional income. (Citizens of the Former Soviety Union spent a lot of time with friends, family, literature, etc., since it wasn’t practical to get ahead by working 60-hour weeks.)

Bernie as President means an open debate about what kind of economy and society we want. Hillary as President means back-room deals that quietly siphon off more of America’s GDP into the pockets of cronies.

What if Bernie + Congress = deadlock? That would mean we’d be living under more or less the same federal laws and regulations that we have now. Deadlock means millions of government workers collecting taxes, distributing handouts, and running programs more or less as they have been doing for the past few decades. Is that an emergency? Only for people who don’t think we have enough churn in laws and regulations! Deadlock might produce extra economic growth because American business owners, for the first time in memory, would have some assurance regarding the future legal and regulatory environment.

In summary, given that Republicans are so far out of step with the American majority that they can’t win a national election, and that the only other Democrat candidate is a torch-bearer for Crony Capitalism, I have concluded that President Sanders is our best realistic hope in November.

[Note that I recognize that the thinking of the American voter is typically 180 degrees opposite to mine. Thus the fact that I would choose Bernie over Hillary is to me a confirmation of my 2015 prediction that Hillary was assured of victory. I have certainly seen this among my liberal Facebook friends. Folks who were two years ago demanding a single-payer health care system and for the U.S. to emulate the highest-tax European welfare states are now saying that single-payer can’t work and that the European welfare states are horrifying examples of slow GDP growth. Everything that Bernie advocates is stuff that they were themselves advocating a couple of years ago, but now they’ve changed their mind and are advocating whatever policies Hillary proposes.]

Related:

• “Charles Koch: This is the one issue where Bernie Sanders is right” (the hated rich bastard says “[Bernie] thinks many corporations seek and benefit from corporate welfare while ordinary citizens are denied opportunities and a level playing field. I agree with him. Democrats and Republicans have too often favored policies and regulations that pick winners and losers. This helps perpetuate a cycle of control, dependency, cronyism and poverty in the United States. … The tax code alone contains $1.5 trillion in exemptions and special-interest carve-outs. Anti-competitive regulations cost businesses an additional $1.9 trillion every year. Perversely, this regulatory burden falls hardest on small companies, innovators and the poor, while benefitting many large companies like ours. This unfairly benefits established firms and penalizes new entrants, contributing to a two-tiered society. … That’s why Koch Industries opposes all forms of corporate welfare — even those that benefit us. (The government’s ethanol mandate is a good example. We oppose that mandate, even though we are the fifth-largest ethanol producer in the United States.)”)

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My ski class in Beaver Creek consisted primarily of Southerners who were connected to the healthcare industry, e.g., running addiction clinics, providing radiology treatments, or coordinating nursing care for patients at home. (Radiology in Memphis has its challenges; one patient had to be sent to the local zoo to be weighed prior to treatment.) One gal was from Minnesota. All of us had arrived in Colorado 2-4 days earlier. All of us were feeling weak and dizzy near the top of the mountain (11,000′ above sea level). All of us would be returning home in 2-5 days, i.e., before we’d completely adjusted to the altitude.

That leads to the question… if people are planning a one-week ski vacation that requires getting on an airliner, why not go to Whistler, British Columbia? The base is at 2,200′ above sea level. The peaks are less than 8,000′ above sea level. The resort is a two-hour drive from the international airport, i.e., no farther than Colorado resorts are from the Denver airport. Why does a person who lives at sea level plan a trip to a Colorado or Utah resort where he or she will be guaranteed to struggle with the altitude and not adjust before it is time to return home?

Readers: What’s Whistler like?

[I visited friends who were renting a place in Beaver Creek for two months. Although they were able to ski, they hadn’t adjusted to the altitude even after two weeks and were feeling weak and headache-y.]

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A friend has a child in first grade in the Concord, Massachusetts public schools. This is one of the richest suburbs in the United States and Concord is considered by Massachusetts standards to have excellent schools. Here’s a recent email: “[Johnny] is finishing reading the second Harry Potter book. Below is what he brought home from school today.”

(Child’s name changed.)

• Touring the Mediocrity Factory

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According to “Many are wondering what Camille Cosby is thinking” (Boston Globe), today is supposed to be Camille Cosby’s deposition in litigation regarding her husband Bill Cosby’s sexual encounter with a woman in Pennsylvania back in 2004. Is this a demonstration of the general principle that the best (or only?) way to learn more about two people having sex in Pennsylvania is to ask someone who was sitting at home in rural Massachusetts at the time?

Related:

• Cosby: His Life and Times
• What was supposed to happen between Bill Cosby and the women who are suing him?
• Divorce litigator on the Bill Cosby mess

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“Don’t Privatize Air Traffic Control” is a New York Times editorial from February 15, 2016. The Times argues that the FAA is actually efficient but has been starved for funds: “Congress itself is to blame for some of NextGen’s problems because it has not provided stable funding to the F.A.A. in recent years.” The Times‘s portrait of the FAA as a model of efficiency is hard to square with experience, but a system run by a government crony could surely be far worse (see Amtrak, for example). And in fact the stuff that the FAA currently farms out to contractors seems to be frozen in time (see my NBAA report for how multi-billion-dollar ADS-B weather can’t catch up to 15-year-old XM weather).

Americans are so bad at running bureaucracies that it seems almost certain that any new system for collecting fees will have administrative costs vastly higher than the current system, which at least we know how to run (taxes on airline tickets; taxes on fuel purchased by private aircraft operators).

If Congress wants to change something, I would suggest privatizing aircraft certification so that multiple competing organizations could verify manufacturers’ compliance with regulations. This works well for consumer products. See UL and TUV Rheinland. This can boost the GDP by allowing U.S. aircraft manufacturers to get new and upgraded products to market faster.

If Congress truly can’t resist monkeying with air traffic control, the idea of giving it all to one big unaccountable bureaucracy is the height of madness. The U.S. is already split up into about 20 “centers” (list). Why not split things up so that running the radar in each center (and airports within those centers’ airspace) is contracted out every five years? Separation services (the people on the radio talking to pilots, issuing routes, etc.) would also be contracted out to the lowest qualified bidder every five years within each center. (One issue with privatization is that currently the federal government engages in age-based employment discrimination that would be illegal for a private employer. A controller cannot be hired if over age 30 and must generally retire at age 56.)

I think that we have ample evidence that when there is competition Americans can run things reasonably cost-effectively. If the government takes something over we’ll pay 2-4X the competitive market price (see healthcare, for example!). If the government gives a single private company the exclusive right to do something, there is no limit on how badly taxpayers and consumers can be abused.

Related:

• The CATO Institute buys into this idea, mostly due to the fact that the Canadian monopoly hasn’t ripped off citizens up there

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It seems that some years ago Colorado set up what today can be a safe space for Yale undergraduates, Berkeley residents, and anyone else who doesn’t want to hear someone question the wisdom of bigger government:

Artist: Peter Frykholm of Precision Peaks; work on display at City on a Hill coffee in Leadville, Colorado.

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I took a 20-year break from downhill skiing and discovered that everyone is now wearing a helmet. This surprised me because all of the people I know who have been injured when skiing suffered from torn ACLs, broken legs, knee problems, etc. It also surprised me because the people I have read about being killed when skiing collided with trees and decelerated so definitively that it is tough to see how an inch-thick helmet would bring down the G forces to something survivable (this article makes the same point).

Given how warm it was in Beaver Creek, I’m wondering why it wouldn’t make just as much sense to wear a bike helmet. Is there a significant difference, other than insulation, between a bike helmet and a ski helmet? Ski helmets seem to cost a lot more and casual skiers may already own a bike helmet and not need to spend $10-12/day renting a ski helmet.

The deeper question is how these helmets are supposed to work. If your head hits the snow, won’t you be sliding and therefore will avoid a concussion? If your head hits a tree at full speed, won’t you be dead? Under what circumstance does the ski helmet make a big difference in the severity of injury? (“Ski Helmet Use Isn’t Reducing Brain Injuries” is a nytimes article from 2013 on the subject) Finally, is there a difference between snowboarding and skiing with respect to the value of helmets? To my casual eye the snowboarders seem to be more likely to hit their heads.

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Our waitress in Orlando last month was a young Venezuelan. Her father owned a business and had sent all of his children abroad to study and, he expected, ultimately to settle. One child was in London, one in Portugal, and one a student at the University of Central Florida (this state-run school is supposedly the largest university in the U.S. for undergrad enrollment, though presumably that excludes University of Phoenix) and working nights in a more or less Asian strip-mall chain restaurant.

“Sanders says exactly the same things as Hugo Chavez,” she pointed out. “Even his hand gestures are the same.”

Fortunately for Hillary, this young woman is currently ineligible to vote due to her lack of citizenship.

My liberal friends on Facebook are suggesting that woman are required to vote for Hillary because she is a woman and it would be “revolutionary” to have a woman as a political leader in the U.S. I like to cut and paste the following responses: “Maybe if we show them the way, even the U.K. and Germany might be inspired to elect female leaders” and “It would be amazing if a wealthy white American aged 60+ could be elected to the White House” and, finally, since all of them are also passionate transgender advocates, “How do you know that Hillary will still identify as a woman when he or she takes office in January 2017?”

[Could Bernie Sanders assure a victory by changing his gender identity to “female”? Then Bernice Sanders could get both votes from people who support the Sanders policies and from people who would like to see a female president in the White House.]

Readers: Especially given the common practice of former presidential wives winning elections in Latin America, Would it be interesting from a feminist point of view if Hillary becomes president? And, more seriously, in an age where we are not supposed to be making cisgender assumptions, is it even meaningful to “vote for a woman”? How does the voter know that the candidate will continue to identify as a woman?

Related:

• Piketty, Democracy, and Hugo Chavez
• Hugo Chavez: Great politician; poor administrator
• Hugo Chavez’s legacy
• Amy Alkon on women voting for women
• Venezuela’s Collapse Brings ‘Savage Suffering’ (WSJ, February 12, 2016): “Dying infants, chronic power outages and empty shelves mark the world’s worst-performing economy … Inflation in this oil-rich country is expected to hit a world’s-worst 700% this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. The economy shrank by 10% last year and is expected to decline another 8% this year, according to the IMF, the worst performance in the world.”

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