Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I’m beginning to wonder how the health care bills that have been passed by the House and Senate can be constitutional.

Let’s consider a healthy 25-year-old who lives in California and never travels outside of the state. As a matter of federal law, he will be required to purchase health insurance. If he uses the health insurance it will be with a doctor or hospital within California. Forcing this guy to buy insurance is not one of the enumerated powers of the federal government (see Section 8 of Article I of the Constitution). Expansion of federal power is typically put through under the “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States” clause, also referred to as “Interstate Commerce”. But in this case the Californian never leaves his state. The health insurers are prohibited from doing business across state lines. The doctors are licensed just in California and are prohibited by other states from practicing anywhere other than California. How can this be interstate commerce?

Now let’s consider the 14th Amendment, which guarantees “equal protection of the laws”. This was originally imposed by the Feds upon the states, but I think it has been interpreted to apply to the federal government as well. Let’s stick with our Californian. He will be hit with higher state taxes to pay for Medicaid patients in California. He will be hit with higher federal taxes to pay for Medicaid patients in Nebraska. Overall he will be getting a very different deal than citizens of Nebraska (source).

Suppose that our Californian is not among those fortunate enough to work for the government. That means it is 93 percent probable that he does not belong to a union. He will be subject to a tax on health insurance provided by an employer; a government worker, autoworker at a government-owned car maker, or worker at a munitions plant who belongs to a union will not pay the tax (more; this is a recent promise by Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress to their union supporters).

The Californian’s in-state decision to purchase services that are illegal to sell across state lines is being regulated by the Federal government. The Californian is paying higher taxes for a federal program than a Nebraskan simply because he is a Californian rather than a Nebraskan. The non-union Californian is paying a tax that union workers nationwide are exempt from. Where is his and California’s protection from intrusive federal regulations? Where is his equal protection under the law compared to a union worker in Nebraska?

How can these new schemes not require an amendment to the Constitution?

Some references (all written before the decision to tax union members differently from other U.S. citizens):

• WSJ article from September 2009 by a former state judge
• UPI article on planned Florida challenge to the Supreme Court
• Christian Science Monitor on potential South Carolina challenge to the Supreme Court, based primarily on the favoritism toward Nebraska citizens
• Cato Institute piece saying that a penalty assessed through income tax is not an income tax and therefore is not covered by the 16th Amendment

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A friend told me that his daughter had graduated from architecture school in June (eight months ago). I congratulated him. “Not so fast,” he responded. “Out of 46 graduates, only one has a job.”

Architecture has always gone through boom and bust cycles, though perhaps there will never be a bust quite as deep as the current one in the U.S. (we’ve built enough square footage to house 600 million Americans in a 1950s level of comfort; we’re also drowning in commercial real estate). Shouldn’t architecture schools train graduates to survive such cycles? An architect should also be trained and qualified to do a job that tends to be in high demand during recessions and depressions. How about bankruptcy lawyer or paralegal? A lot of bankruptcies are related to real estate purchases or construction and the architecture expertise could come in handy.

Any other ideas for career training that would complement architecture?

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One of the luxuries of living in a one-party state is that one need not pay attention to politics. Presidential candidates do not campaign here. Representatives and Senators, secure of being reelected, ignore communications from constituents other than large donors. Our TV and radio pleasure is not interrupted by political ads. We get to enjoy the full use of our airports and highways, without roadblocks and restrictions put up by the Secret Service. We can concentrate on our work, friends, hobbies, and family.

This charmed life has been rudely interrupted by the special Senate election for a successor to Ted Kennedy. Polls indicate that Republican Scott Brown has some conceivable chance of beating Democrat Martha Coakley, challenging the conventional wisdom that a Republican has a better chance of being hit by a meteor than of being elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts. One thing that the polls do not show is the huge number of voters who know nothing about either Brown or Coakley. They may not even know that an election is scheduled. However, when they drive by a school on their way to the supermarket and see a “vote today” sign, they will go into the booth and, just as illiterate Indians back in the 1960s looked for the hand symbol and voted for Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party, will vote for the party in which they are registered (in the case of Massachusetts, overwhelmingly Democrat).

The mailbox is stuffed full of appeals to vote for Coakley, each one from a different organization or committee. Each appeal is a four-color glossy double-sided 8.5×11″ sheet. Presumably the fear is that voters wouldn’t be motivated enough to open an envelope. There are photos of the hated King Bush II and Scott Brown is identified as a Republican. Radio stations are filled with ads by Coakley and affiliated groups. I haven’t heard any ads that say anything positive about Coakley; they all concentrate on what is bad about Brown. Mostly what is bad is that he is a Republican. The word is repeated like a curse in every sentence: “Republican Scott Brown is a Republican who will go to Washington and vote with the Republicans, just as he has voted with Republicans in the state senate.” The “do not call” registry does not apply, apparently, to political harangues, so the home phone has been ringing every day for two weeks. Machines with Obama’s voice urge us to vote for Coakley. People call up and ask us to campaign for Coakley. Friends have emailed asking me to campaign for Coakley.

[The Brown campaign, by contrast, must have only a tiny fraction of the financial resources. I have not heard a single ad for Brown and have not received anything in the mail promoting Brown. No Brown supporters or automated machines have called the home phone.]

So I finally decided to have a look at Coakley’s resume. She is a lawyer who has spent nearly her entire professional life collecting a government paycheck. It is difficult to see how she would add a new perspective to a U.S. Senate already stuffed with people who have similar backgrounds. Why should we have to give up our leisure time to assist with her promotion within the Party? The Russians under the old Soviet Union did not volunteer to get out the vote for the Communist Party. Coakley will win, but do we have to miss an episode of South Park?

[I also looked for the first time at Brown’s biography the other day. He is also a lawyer. The biggest knock against him is that he has spent 15 years as a Republican in the Massachusetts legislature, both in the house and senate. Aside from collecting a fat salary and generous pension, what would motivate a person to do that? The legislature meets all year every year. As it has been controlled by Democrats for decades, the meetings serve no purpose. The Party’s senior officials could decide what they want to do with the state, write it up in one big document, and have the Democrat-controlled legislature approve it in one hour. A Republican has the right to collect a paycheck, the right to attend votes, the right to sit in on some meetings, but could not possibly influence the outcome in any way (and indeed his Web site does not claim that he ever got any specific law passed). If Brown wanted to accomplish anything as a politician, he would have had to move to New Hampshire or switch to the ruling party. But he did not do either of those things, which means that he has essentially done nothing for a good chunk of his professional life.]

Terrified that the reliable sheep of Massachusetts will stray from the Democrat flock, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are visiting this weekend. Thousands of Secret Service goons have converged on the state, commercial flights from Logan will be interrupted, and the area flight schools are all shut down due to temporary flight restrictions (massive economic losses right there) in order to prevent the nation’s most faithful Democrats from shooting the nation’s most beloved Democratic politicians.

For decades the Democrats have been taxing the citizens of Massachusetts and handing the money out to their cronies. Now they are wasting our time as well.

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Below is an email from a friend of a friend who works at a school in Ile de la Gonave, Haiti, an island to the northwest of the capital (map).

I was on the second floor of LKM’s round building when the earthquake passed. We were conducting an interview with Artis Fanm [link?], in the middle of asking questions when the entire building began shaking. The seven of us looked at each other briefly before shooting out the door and down the stairs. We were sure it was the school building that was falling down, and were unaware of any outside force. Once we reached the ground several of us fell to the floor, shaking, praying, scared. Moments later other people’s reports made it clear that it was not the school, but an earthquake. People were indeed afraid, but I was reassured that small tremors happen every once in a while in the area. After a few minutes it was clear that this was not one of these small tremors. A few houses in the area, those built with rocks as opposed to cinder blocks, had fallen in. Luckily there were almost no people injured. A small child was hit by some rocks, but it was not serious. I was with a mother who had not seen her children, and we set off down the road to find them. We were unsure of the destruction, everyone on the road was laughing mimicking the way they had almost fallen down, getting back to what they had been doing, playing dominoes, or giving a friend a haircut.

Upon arriving at the school we checked the internet and turned on the radio. These connections made it clear what was happening. The ground continued to give out small shakes, not regularly, but pretty often. People refused to enter into buildings, unsure of whether or not the worst was over. Upon receiving news however, the immediate reaction was to call people in Port-au-Prince, family and friends, to find out whatever news they could. The phones, however, had shaky service at best. Only one of the three major carriers was working. In Haiti, almost every andeyo, or in-the-country, has people or a large part of their family in the city. We received word from a few, very few, that they were alright, many calls went unanswered. Now, two days later, people are standing, grouped together in the place that gets the best telephone service, calling in vain, on cellphones that are not working, searching for people. This, it seems, is the biggest problem, a huge lack of communication.

As night began to fall everyone grouped together in the yard of the school, listening to the radio or getting the latest news from the people with computers in their hands. People were very afraid to enter their houses. The majority of people slept outside or did not sleep at all. The radio has been on nonstop, but has been little actual help to the people in Matenwa, in terms of getting specific news.

Now, it is still a question of getting information from Port-au-Prince, about family members. That is the most pressing thing in Matenwa, people are worried, scared, and helpless. As of yesterday, there has been a complete outage in telephone communication. The one carrier that was working no longer has signal. The night after the earthquake the streets were filled with people singing and praying together.

The biggest issue for Matenwa and Lagonave will be one of finding food and other resources. People here are already hungry. It is very difficult to find cooking oil and other necessities, as the merchants who travel back and forth from the mainland have stopped. All places removed from the city are sure to experience these difficulties, but Lagonave, an hour long ferry ride away will be especially bad. The already poor infastructure leading to the Islandwas shattered, and people are afraid to leave. The one person to arrive in the community from Port-au-Prince, met Enel, reported walking over dead bodies and walking most of the hour long, by car, trip to Carries, and finding only the sailboat running to Lagonave. The reality has not really set in. Looking across to the mainland, one would never know what had happened. As I write, there are still slight tremors. In the library of the school, as soon as they happen, everyone picks up and runs towards the door. On Lagonave we will wait and see. It is still early, but already the lack of food and supplies can be felt. The price of rice has already gone up 20% in the area. It will be very difficult here. The shortage of food, is sure to affect everyone here and with no connection to the mainland it is unclear when or how it will be resolved.

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About 20 of America’s self-described smartest people spent more than 2.5 years counting faculty noses at MIT and tabulating by skin tone, producing a 150-page report complete with four-color cover: “the report of the Initiative on Faculty Race and Diversity”. If you’d always wanted to know what percentage of faculty in MIT’s Urban Planning department described themselves as “Asian”, this is the document you’ve been waiting for. If you worried about how many dark-skinned MIT employees were born in the U.S. compared to how many immigrated from overseas, the answers are here. President Hockfield was so proud of this report that she made sure that all alumni were spammed about its availability.

Considering that this was prepared by a group of people who work with numbers all day every day, the statistical errors are remarkable. For example, the percentage of Hispanics in the U.S. population is compared with the percentage of Hispanics on the MIT faculty. An underlying assumption of this report is that it is important to have more native-born Hispanics teaching at MIT; immigrant Hispanics are disfavored for some reason. What’s wrong with comparing the prevalence of Hispanics in the overall population to the prevalence on the MIT faculty? The median age of a native-born Hispanic in the U.S. is 17 (source); the median age of an MIT professor is somewhere between 55 and dead (and likely to go to “beyond the grave” now that we’ve melted down all U.S. retirement assets). If a 15-year-old Hispanic girl is not teaching at MIT, can we infer ethnic bias?

My favorite part of the report is “An example from a peer research institution is the University of Michigan, where highly respected non-minority faculty were engaged as both consultants and advocates to address and champion diversity and excellence across campus.” In Gratz v. Bollinger, this exemplar institution was found guilty of unconstitutional race discrimination by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Question One is why the Ku Klux Klan was not hired to produce this report. Like the University of Michigan, the Klan has been convicted of race discrimination in a variety of federal courts. The Klan has always had a passionate interest in skin color and ethnicity. The Klan is also committed to advancing the interests of native-born Americans over immigrants (source). The Klan would probably have charged a lot less than the committee of PhDs and would no doubt have included a bonus section on the number of Jewish faculty members in different departments.

Question Two is why the report does not consider whether MIT is unfairly underpaying professors of color. The report states that black, American Indian, and native-born Hispanic professors have more value to the school than white and Asian professors. Yet there is nothing in the report about professors “of color” (the report’s term) being paid more than their less valuable colleagues. If a black professor is paid the same as a white professor, he or she is being exploited. The report also complains that MIT has an insufficient number of professors of color. Certainly there are plenty of black, Hispanic, and American Indian professors around the world. If they’ve chosen to work at some school other than MIT it might be because that other school recognizes their value and compensates them accordingly. Were MIT serious about increasing the number of professors with a particular skin tone, it would offer to pay such workers more.

[Suppose that a clothing manufacturer in Maine had the same problem. The only people who applied for jobs as models were white and the company wanted to be able to sell its products to people with different skin colors. The company would not wring its hands and cluck disapprovingly for decades. Nor would it pay 20 PhDs to spend 2.5 years writing a 150-page report. The company would raise the price it was willing to pay for models “of color” and, within a few days, a diverse group of models would find it worthwhile to drive up from New York City.]

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This Wall Street Journal article has an interesting analysis of U.S. home prices in terms of how many weeks an average American would have to work to pay for the mortgage on a house or for the house itself. The conclusion is that houses are cheap and therefore should not fall further in value. Nowhere in this analysis does the author, Brett Arends, consider the employment situation. If median earnings for those who continue to be in the workforce remain the same but 2 million more Americans lose their jobs, that’s approximately 1 million mortgages that won’t be paid. There isn’t a lot of demand for new or upgraded housing from unemployed people, who ultimately will have to move in with relatives.

[Note that stable wages for those with political power, but an ever-larger group of potential workers thrown under the bus is exactly what Mancur Olson predicted.]

The author treats Boston and New York City as anomalies, saying that because housing prices haven’t fallen as much they still might fall farther. To me, however, what distinguishes New York City from Miami or Las Vegas is that nearly $1 trillion of tax dollars have been sent to New York, a percentage of which turned into Wall Street bonuses, a percentage of which turned into demand for housing. Boston has an unusual number of industries that can survive the collapse of the rest of the U.S. economy, e.g., universities that can admit foreign students, biotech firms that develop drugs for world markets, and multinational high-tech firms such as EMC.

Is a house in Michigan cheap? Not if the number of houses exceeds the number of jobs. In that case, the value of an extra house is $0.

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One of my Berkeley friends, apparently having forgiven me for my less than flattering portrait of his town, sent me http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/01/dynamic-america-poor-europe.html . What struck me about this page is the second table, in which the GDP per capita of various U.S. states are presented. It turns out the citizens of Washington, D.C. are more than three times as productive as the average American. This despite the fact that Washington has a lot of poor and/or unemployed people.

Perhaps we have to reevaluate our view of government workers and lobbyists as parasites. These people are actually the nation’s most productive people! Alternatively, we might need to find a better measure of economic well-being than GDP.

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A cardiologist friend just got a New Year’s greeting from Blue Cross Blue Shield of DC/Maryland/Virginia. She’s a healthy woman in her 40s. They are raising her personal health insurance rates by 30 percent. Can she recover this from the reimbursements that they will pay her for the work that she does on patients’ hearts? Maybe not; they are simultaneously cutting payments to cardiologists by 35 percent. Her explanation: “insurance companies are crooks and the healthcare reform/debacle will only make it worse”.

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A lot of cars have heated seats. When the seat heater is on, most drivers will set the interior temperature 3-7 degrees lower than with the seat heater off. Why not apply the same technology to houses?

Imagine being at home in a 65-degree house. Even in a T-shirt and jeans, it would probably be comfortable to walk around, stir a pot on the stove, carry laundry, scrub and clean, walk on a treadmill while typing on a computer (as I’m doing now!). However, if one were to sit down and read a book, it would begin to seem cold. Why not install heat in all of the seats and beds of the house? And sensors to turn the heat on and off automatically? In a lot of ways, this would be more comfortable than a current house because the air temperature would be set for actively moving around while the seat temperature would be set for sedentary activities.

The cost? Let’s say $50 per seat or single bed. Assume that a typical house has 6 rooms, each of which has an average of 6 seats or beds. Round up to 40 and multiple by $50 and we’ve added $2000 to the capital cost of the house. If an average house costs $2000 per year to heat and lowering the thermostat by 5 degrees cuts the cost by 15 percent, it will take roughly 7 years to pay back our investment (assuming nominal cost of electricity). Maybe not the most dramatic way to cut down on our burning of fossil fuels, but it is one that would increase our comfort level rather than reducing it.

What am I missing?

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When I started programming, in 1976, all that an individual programmer needed to demonstrate her or her work was a room-sized mainframe computer, a card reader, and a line printer. So it made sense to have job fairs where employers sat at desks with posters and candidates walked around. Today most software can be demonstrated from a laptop or a smartphone, so why not have the programmers sit at desks and let the employers walk around and browse among the achievements?

That’s exactly what is happening in Mountain View this weekend at The Hacker Fair. Does anyone else know of similar events past or future?

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