A Day for a Non-Veteran, Too

I would like everyone to meet Herman Knose.

Herman is not a veteran because he never left the Army. Near Salerno, Italy his platoon was cut off by two German armored columns supported by heavy artillery and infantry. I have known Herman’s name for years. I have many friends who were with him on that day. Some tried to put together a defense and surrendered when it became hopeless. Some hid in barns, some ran for the woods along the river.

Herman may have done any or all of these, but no one knew then and no one knows now. We do know that after that day, September 11, 1943, the war moved on and left the countryside quiet and nearly deserted. In December, somebody walking in those woods - by now miles behind the front – came across what was left of Herman.

Herman’s 2nd cousin, Susan Knose, took interest in his story and came to reunions of the 2nd Chemical Mortar Battalion – Herman’s unit, and my father’s. She gave me this picture, and suddenly Herman was not a name. He was a cheerful-looking young guy with blond hair that I'm sure he thought was thinning too early. He reminded me very much of a Norwegian engineering student that I knew many years ago and I couldn’t help projecting that young man’s friendly, personable manner onto Herman.

Herman was married. Susan has become a friend of his wife, who was devastated by the long uncertainty of her husband’s fate and the eventual knowledge of his loss. Later she married again and raised a family. Somehow I think Herman would be glad for her – he doesn’t look like a man to resent others for having happiness that was denied to him.

One day I walked along a river in Italy, on the edge of the woods where Herman lay all through the autumn months of 1943. I wondered what he saw, what he thought as he disappeared into those shadows. I wonder still. I wonder about the farm he never tended, the career he never had, the house he never owned. About the children his wife never had the chance to bear him.

Susan found he was buried at first in Italy, and later was brought back to the U.S. and buried in a family grave. From there, wordless, he reminds me every day to be grateful for all that I have.
That is the only way I can give any meaning to the fact that I have so much that he never had.

What's Cap and Trade?

Somebody asked me, since I was in the oil business for four decades, to explain this cap and trade business for reducing global warming emissions.

As a sensible plan, cap and trade ranks a little worse than the Pope selling dispensations for sin.


Cap and trade says that if you increase your emissions (say, for a new manufacturing investment that will create jobs) then you pay a fine to the government. That's the cap part. OR you can pay money to somebody who has reduced their emissions. For their reductions, they have the right to make an increase without paying a fine, and they sign over this right to you. You show the authorities that the other guy made a reduction that offsets your increase, and you can go ahead with your investment/increase without paying the fine. If you pay less for the offset rights than you would for the fine, then that's to your advantage. That's the trade part -- you're trading their reduction for your increase, and total emissions stay the same.

There will probably be a market for offsets -- for example, you could buy for $100 the right to increase emissions by 10 pounds per year. You wouldn't actually pay any particular person who made reductions, any more than you pay an individual to buy shares in the stock market. And if you reduce by 10 pounds a year, you can sell that in the market for $100. If the government wants to reduce emissions instead of holding even, then they can say that reducing by 1o pounds a year only lets you sell offset rights for 8 pounds a year.

Cap and trades have already been used, for example to reduce smog-related emissions in some cities. The benefits are:

1) An incentive for people to voluntarily make emission reductions that cost the least to achieve, and then make a profit by selling the rights. This is better than "command and control" reductions which require one guy to spend a huge wad for a very small reduction, while the guy down the road, who could get ten times the benefit for that money, spends only a little money and leaves all those cheap reductions unachieved.
2) If are you plan to make an increase, you have an incentive to make reductions for several years in advance to keep your total the same and avoid any fines. This means you will go look for reduction opportunities that you otherwise wouldn't care about.


So what's not to like?


1) All this requires a massive swapping of money which must be carried out by a massive new bureaucracy
2) It requires a massive number of government regulators to make sure that all the massive reductions claimed were actually made.
2) The price of offsets goes up and down, so somebody contemplating spending money to reduce emissions can't be sure of recovering their costs.
3) Most of the reductions would have taken place for some other reason than cap and trade. For example, if you put in a more efficient home heater it will reduce emissions but you did it to reduce your fuel bill , not because you could make money from cap and trade. Imagine all those money losing plants that GM is shutting down. GM would be able to sell those reductions to offset increases, which allows somebody else to increase their emissions and "use up" the offsets that the GM plants are no longer emitting.
4) There are lot of lawsuits about how to interpret the rules. For example, should you be able to sell offsets by comparing the emissions from your new heater to those from your old heater when it was new? Or by comparing the emissions from your new heater to those from your old heater when you replaced the old, rusted, clogged shadow of it's former self that it had become by the time you ditched it. If the latter argument prevails you get to sell two or three times as much offset as the other way. The regulators, on the other hand, see this as allowing two or three times as much increase from somebody else. So there will be a lawsuit to decide how much offset you can sell. Multiply that by approximately one jillion. And for all this cap and trade has not caused any reduction, the whole argument is about how much we can add while pretending we aren't.


So the net effects are:
a) GM gets some money, which probably goes to upper management as bonuses
b) The economy loses the same number of auto workers as it would have anyway.
c) The economy gains (if that's the word) financial bureaucrats and government regulators.
d) Emissions stay the same as they were before.
e) The lawyers make money. Which is the only universal principle in modern American society.

Health Care "Duh" Bait

It’s interesting that people are showing up at health care discussions with the avowed purpose of disrupting discussion. “Interesting” in the same sense that root canal is interesting: i.e, painful and indicative of a hole in somebody’s head.

Why do they do this? The following possible motives occur to me.

1) Their opponent has valid ideas that they can’t refute so they want to keep people from hearing the ideas.

2) They think their opponent is wrong or is lying and everybody else is too stupid to realize it.

3) They are too ignorant or inarticulate to be able to expose the errors and untruths that their opponent is speaking.

4) They have been spreading lies about what their opponent is saying and they will be exposed as liars if people hear what the opponent is really saying.

5) They themselves are ignorant on the topic or too stupid to understand it, which will be revealed if serious discussion takes place.

6) They hate America and Americans and free speech and they want us to fail.

7) If people agree with their opponent then something will be done that costs them money, power or privilege, and they don’t want that regardless of the benefits to anybody else.

I’m not arguing in favor of anybody’s case here. I’m just saying that I have not figured out why anybody would intentionally prevent discussion of an important topic unless they are devoid of intelligence, honor, knowledge, integrity, objectivity, decency, courtesy and patriotism.

If anybody can come up with a reason for preventing discussion that suggests the preventer has any positive traits, I would sure like to hear them. 'Cause to be honest I am just coming up dry.

Killing Tiger Woods

Every time I suggest that our current medical care system is not perfect, I get asked "So you like socialized medicine? How will you like it when you're denied treatment because you're too old? Oh, so you want the government to run everything?" This is like saying I don't play golf and getting the reaction "So you want to kill Tiger Woods?"

I'd like to make three points:
A) Our current health care system sucks.
B) The U.S. rations health care worse than any system in any other developed country.
C) Improving our system has more to do with how we change it than with who runs it.
Details follow

A) Our current system sucks. Look up objective data from the Census Bureau, the Centers for Disease Control, or the Statistical Abstracts. (The "liberal media" show some bias on the topic; Fox News and Rush are intentionally deceptive.) You will find we spend more per person than the next 20 countries and have shorter life span, higher infant mortality, and higher fatality from disease because of late diagnosis. The only high-performing measures are profitability of health care providers and pharmaceutical companies. There is a growing trend toward U.S. citizens flying to other countries to get treatment because it's cheaper and has higher success ratio. These include several countries with full government run systems. If you put all these systems in a hat and pull one out at random, you will find it works better than our system.

B) The U.S. rations health care. We hear about somebody in England or Canada who couldn't get an MRI or a kidney transplant or whatever. In the U.S. people are denied simple antibiotics. I was on a jury a trial regarding a man who DIED because he didn't have insurance to cover treatment for a simple stomach ulcer. Other systems may deny you health care but they at least have some logical reason. The U.S. denies you health care solely based solely on your wealth. You can get any treatment you can pay for. If you are not rich and don't have insurance, you can't get any reasonable health care at all.

C) Criteria for a good health care proposal. Health care in other countries, no matter who runs it or how it's paid for, gets better results at lower cost than ours because they meet some of these criteria. The U.S. doesn't meet any of them.

1) Statistically valid risk sharing; people of any age or state of health can obtain insurance at a cost that is not prohibitive. Insurers cannot offer low rates to healthy people and then ditch them when the need treatment.
2) Minimum participation requirements; people cannot stay uninsured while healthy, then scam the system by jumping into it when their health goes bad.
3) Support preventive care as well as curative.
4) Compensation to service providers is based on results, not on the volume of procedures carried out.
5) Sound analysis of the success of various treatments. Information available to both providers and consumers; providers cannot simply recommend the most profitable treatments first.
6) Fast, accurate sharing of medical info; a patient will not have to answer the same questions five times on each hospital visit or get the same test repeated for each of six specialists.
7) A competent medical expert develops treatment plans, using input from a coordinated team of specialists. (In today's system, plans are nothing more than the compiled notes of several specialists who may never talk to each other.)
8) A competent medical expert maintains continuity of treatment regardless of changes in doctors or hospitals.
9) Participants have free choice of providers.
10) Providers compete for business based on quality and cost that is measured objectively with results available to consumers.
11) Useful, objective, audited data on cost and quality must be available on every service provider.
12) Fast, accurate sharing of records prevents patients from obtaining multiple treatments or prescriptions from providers who are unaware of each other.
13) All children are insured, at taxpayer expense if that is the only way. Parents may make poor choices in life, and it is irrational and unChristian to punish the children for them. (Yeah, yeah, the Bible says sins of the fathers are to be visited on the sons. You can go by that, if you want.)

We will never see a proposal meeting these criteria because of my Painfully Drawn Conclusions about democracy:

1. Both parties have very wise, capable people, and some incredibly brainless yahoos. The public mostly pays attention to the latter; listening to the first group takes too much mental effort.
   
2. Both parties judge ideas based on how well they conform to pre-conceived ideology, regardless of whether the ideas are workable or will do any good.
3. Many on both sides will leave the public worse off rather than let the other party share in the credit for making anything better.
4. Neither party will propose anything that is not trite and simplistic. Any serious proposal will displease enough voters to keep them out of office, so what's the point?

I want to acknowledge my long-term co-worker and friend Richard Cotton, whose discussion and challenges to my thinking led to the formulation of these ideas. His ability to provide this help to me is no doubt directly related to te fact that he is a graduate of Auburn.