The Christian God

Alister McGrath -- one of the best Christian apologists I've ever heard -- recently debated Christopher Hitchens at Georgetown University. If you have some time to spare and you're interested in religious philosophy, it's definitely worth watching.



I am no longer a practicing Catholic, but I've always had a big problem with the kind of militant atheism offered up by prominent "antitheists" like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. These men consistently distort the Christianity that I grew up with, presenting the most horrific passages from the Old Testament as an integral part of Christian dogma.

I suspect Hitchens and Dawkins know that they are setting up a straw man here, since any theologian would tell you that serious Christians do not follow the law of the Pentateuch.

In his book The Dawkins Delusion?, McGrath offers an excellent explanation of how Christians tend to reflect on the Old Testament:

So how are we to make sense of the Hebrew Scriptures . . . ?

Christians base their approach on the teaching of Jesus, who saw himself as having come to fulfill, not abolish, the Jewish law (Matthew 5:17). Dawkins takes the view that Jesus regarded the Old Testament as wrong, requiring correction; Jesus, however, saw himself as fulfilling the Old Testament, and thus transforming it.

The Hebrew Scriptures are read and interpreted through a Christological filter or prism. It is for this reason that Christians do not -- and never have -- implemented the cultic law set out in the pages of the Old Testament.

True to form, Dawkins ignores this inconvenience, insisting that to take the Bible seriously is to "strictly observe the Sabbath and think it just and proper to execute anyone who chose not to." Or to "execute disobedient children." Dawkins knows this is not true; enough Christians have told him so.

The Supreme Court and Obama's Monopoly

Like many political junkies, I've been watching the confirmation hearing of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the past two days. One remark by Senator Orrin Hatch really piqued my interest:

"In fact, Sen. Obama never voted to confirm a Supreme Court justice," Hatch said. "He even voted against the man who administered the oath of presidential office, Chief Justice John Roberts, another distinguished and well-qualified nominee."

I decided to investigate some of Obama's statements during the confirmation hearings of John Roberts and Samuel Alito, and I found one comment that I think is particularly unfair -- especially coming from a constitutional law professor.

In a floor statement during the confirmation hearing of Justice Samuel Alito, then-Senator Obama said:

And when I examine the philosophy, ideology, and record of Samuel Alito, I am deeply troubled.

. . .

[Judge Alito has] overturned a jury verdict that found a company liable for being a monopoly when it had over 90% of the market share at the time.

It's not just his decisions in these individual cases that give me pause -- it's that decisions like these are the rule for Samuel Alito, not the exception.

I'm sure that President Obama is aware that market share is not the sole criterion upon which firms are evaluated with regard to the Sherman Antitrust Act. In fact, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that monopoly power does not automatically imply a violation of the Act.

From Wikipedia:

Section 2 of the [Sherman Antitrust Act] forbade monopoly. In Section 2 cases, the court has, again on its own initiative, drawn a distinction between coercive and innocent monopoly. The act is not meant to punish businesses that come to dominate their market passively or on their own merit, only those that intentionally dominate the market through misconduct, which generally consists of conspiratorial conduct of the kind forbidden by Section 1 of the Sherman Act, or Section 3 of the Clayton Act.

Why would President Obama cite this as an example of Judge Alito's 'troubling' record, without offering the necessary context for the decision?

Update: A list of Supreme Court precedents on the subject of monopoly power.

Ginsburg Speaks

My friend who blogs at Art at the Auction recently linked to this interview with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The interview is definitely worth a read, but I was very disappointed with Ginsburg's explanation of Ricci v DeStefano:

Q: Can I bring up the Ricci case, brought by the New Haven firefighters?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: This case had some very hard elements. It was a bit like the Heller case, which involved the Second Amendment. [Last year, the Supreme Court found that Washington gun-control laws that barred handguns in private homes were unconstitutional.] For that, the plaintiff was a nice guy who was a security guard at the Federal Judicial Center, and he had to carry a gun on his job, but he couldn’t carry it home. And in Ricci, you have a dyslexic firefighter. Which is just exactly what you should do as a lawyer. I mean, that’s what I did.

Q: It’s true, it’s a very good strategy. He was a very sympathetic plaintiff. And it was important that the city had already given the test that the white firefighters scored high on and the black firefighters did not.

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Yes. And the city weights the written and oral parts of the test 60-40, and says: That’s what the union wanted, it’s been in the bargaining contracts for 20 years.

I don’t know how many cases there were, Title VII civil rights cases, where unions were responsible. The very first week that I was at Columbia, Jan Goodman, a lawyer in New York, called me and said, Do you know that Columbia has given layoff notices to 25 maids and not a single janitor? Columbia’s defense was the union contract, which was set up so that every maid would have to go before the newly hired janitor would get a layoff notice.

In an earlier post, I criticized Ginsburg's dissent in this case. But Ginsburg again misses the central problem with her argument. As I've explained:

The question is whether the City vacated the results solely on the basis of disparate impact, without a legitimate belief that the test was flawed. Since they refused a technical evaluation of the test -- and in fact argued in district court that evidence of test validity is irrelevant -- it’s pretty clear that at the time they vacated the results, city officials did not have a legitimate belief that the test was flawed. They vacated the results simply because they got the wrong racial outcome. If city officials had looked at the imbalanced racial outcome, and then commissioned a technical review of the exam which found the test to be flawed, they would have been on more solid footing.

The City did, of course, have a collective bargaining agreement with the New Haven firefighter's union that specified a 60-40 weighting for promotional exams. This weighting may have been arbitrary. Ginsburg can even argue that it was unfair.

But this is not the reason the results of the exam were vacated.

NPR's Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Story

I listen to NPR almost every day, and like my friend Petpluto, I'm a huge fan of their Planet Money blog. But every once in a while, NPR produces a story that is so insanely one-sided it give me goose bumps.

That was definitely the case with their latest attempt to explain the public option. The story sounded like it came directly from the mouth of the Obama administration's press secretary. There were so many controversial ideas presented without any qualification, I was shocked when the commentary ended so abruptly. How could NPR not see the blatant bias in its presentation?

Fortunately, I'm not the only one who felt this way. NPR's own Alicia Shepard recently acknowledged that the story was poorly executed, and promised that NPR will try to do better next time.

I have to applaud NPR for its accountability and its journalistic integrity. It's very refreshing.

The Debate Over Administrative Costs Continues

Ezra Klein has another excellent post unpacking the issue of Medicare administrative costs. He argues that administrative cost comparisons are far more difficult than they may seem, and the entire debate is a bit of a distraction anyway.

The bottom line:

[N]o matter how good you got at slashing administrative costs, they will never be a panacea to the problems of the system. Rick Kronick, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, has done some of the best work on administrative costs, and he summed the situation up quite well. "The main question," he said, "is why are health care costs going up at 2.4 percent a year faster than GDP? And most of the answers to that question have nothing to do with administrative costs . . . ."

A friend also directed me to this article discussing health care costs and treatment options. Definitely worth a read.

Even More on Medicare Administrative Costs

Paul Krugman responds to Robert Book's recent article on Medicare administrative costs. Robert Book offers his reply in the comments section.

I agree with Paul Krugman on one point -- The Heritage Foundation is an advocacy group, so their numbers should always be met with some skepticism. This is true of any partisan think tank.

It's also true of partisan op-ed columnists for the New York Times.

Update: Greg Mankiw argues that the issue of administrative costs is really a red herring:

Low administrative costs are not to be confused with high administrative efficiency. In other words, administrators are not necessarily a deadweight loss to the system.

Medicare is consistently cited by the GAO as a program that is at "high risk" for fraud. In fact, Medicare administrators have repeatedly pleaded with Congress to increase funding for anti-fraud measures, which would ultimately raise Medicare's administrative costs:

Congress keeps a tight cap on Medicare's administrative overhead, leaving the perennial ''high-risk'' entitlement program with an infinitesimal fraction of its current $456 billion budget to combat fraud.

Indeed, Congress has a history of running Medicare -- whose healthcare programs are funded by U.S. taxpayers -- on the cheap. That policy has contributed in part to a generation of scammers bilking billions out of Medicare, which critics describe as a flawed honor system that's more intent on paying claims quickly than on verifying them first.

Update II: Megan McArdle weighs in on the Medicare debate . . . and on the larger debate over national health care.

More on Medicare Administrative Costs

Robert A. Book, a Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, argues that Medicare’s per-person administrative costs are, in fact, higher than those of the average private insurer (via Greg Mankiw):

Medicare beneficiaries are by definition elderly, disabled, or patients with end-stage renal disease. Private insurance beneficiaries may include a small percentage of people in those categories, but they consist primarily of people are who under age 65 and not disabled.

Naturally, Medicare beneficiaries need, on average, more health care services than those who are privately insured. Yet the bulk of administrative costs are incurred on a fixed program-level or a per-beneficiary basis. Expressing administrative costs as a percentage of total costs makes Medicare's administrative costs appear lower not because Medicare is necessarily more efficient but merely because its administrative costs are spread over a larger base of actual health care costs. When administrative costs are compared on a per-person basis, the picture changes. In 2005, Medicare's administrative costs were $509 per primary beneficiary, compared to private-sector administrative costs of $453.

I don’t know all the methodological details of Book's analysis (and I'm skeptical of any study produced by Heritage), but his essential point should extend well beyond the health care debate. The question of how to compare unique data sets is often very complicated, even in the absence of politics. Basic considerations -- like whether to measure in terms of absolute numbers or proportions -- are often controversial. We should be particularly wary of unqualified statistical comparisons presented in the context of an emotionally charged policy debate.

They’re often very misleading.

How Embarrassing . . .

I really wish I'd never written this:

Whatever Palin's shortcomings, stupidity is certainly not among them. She wouldn't have been chosen if McCain didn't believe she could stand up against Joe Biden in a debate.

I have a good feeling she'll surprise everyone . . .

Oh, how wrong I was.

But apparently I'm not the only one who regrets giving Palin the benefit of the doubt, particularly after her embarrassingly awful resignation speech:

I liked Sarah Palin and supported her inclusion on the GOP ticket last fall. I thought she had more toughness than this. It’s a big disappointment, and it’s the end of any hope of Palin getting taken seriously as a politician on the national level in the future.

What's Happening in Honduras?

I really don't know anything about Central America, but I recently came across this excellent article in TIME Magazine explaining the roots of the Honduran conflict.

It seems that the ousting of the left-wing president Manuel Zelaya is really the culmination of a decades-old class struggle in Honduras, which has divided the country into two distinct political factions. Zelaya's largely socialist reforms have sparked intense hostility among wealthy business owners and other entrenched powers:

The mustachioed, sombrero-wearing Zelaya makes for an unlikely leftist hero. A 56-year-old former rancher and timber merchant, he took office in 2006 after campaigning on a centrist platform. But once in power, he drew close to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and quickly copied his formula for popularity: giving handouts to the poor and blaming all the country's problems on the rich. Amid rising crime and a spluttering economy, the establishment turned on Zelaya. The flashpoint came in June, when he called for a nonbinding referendum on changing the constitution to allow Presidents to stand for a second term. The Supreme Court ruled the vote illegal and soldiers whisked Zelaya away before it could take place, leaving Congressman Roberto Micheletti to be sworn in as the new President.

The Organization of American States has threatened to suspend Honduras' membership unless Zelaya is quickly restored to power, and the United States finds itself in the unusual position of supporting a leader who has aligned himself with Hugo Chávez and other left-leaning regimes.

Some conservatives have criticized President Obama for his stance, arguing that the removal of Zelaya was both legal and beneficial to the United States. But the Obama administration has, in fact, been slower than most European states to recall its ambassador from Tegucigalpa, perhaps aware that the threat of violence looms large if Zelaya decides to return to the country and attempt to retake power.

The situation in Honduras will likely provide an interesting test of Obama's foreign policy realism, with which I tend to sympathize. At the very least, we should all hope that this conflict ends not with a bang, but a whimper . . .

The Latest Health Care Reform Bill

In a letter to Senator Kennedy, the CBO offered its initial assessment of the new draft legislation on health care reform. The bill would add just under $600 billion to the national debt over ten years, and would likely cover about 2/5 of the uninsured.

The revised draft that came out of the HELP committee includes an employer mandate, which "would virtually eliminate the migration of employees from their employer-based insurance to public insurance, thereby reducing the financial burden on the government." This equates to a dramatic $400 billion reduction in the net cost to the federal government.

In addition, employees would no longer receive a federal subsidy to purchase coverage through the insurance "gateways" if their employer is already offering insurance -- even if that employer-provided coverage has been deemed "unaffordable."

Regarding the public option, the CBO estimates no "substantial effect on the cost or enrollment projections, largely because the public plan would pay providers of health care at rates comparable to privately negotiated rates -- and thus was not projected to have premiums lower than those charged by private insurance plans in the exchanges."

Greg Mankiw sees this latter point as a vindication of his earlier position on the public option. Meanwhile, Ezra Klein offers pragmatic support for the employer mandate . . . well, sort of.

The problem with employer-provided insurance, as many economists have pointed out, is that it distorts price signals and encourages consumers to "buy" more health care. When you're not paying for something directly, you tend use more of it. But employees really are paying for their employer-provided coverage -- the cost is generally passed on to workers through lower wages.

If it's true that employer-provided coverage encourages overuse of health care and deflates wages, will an employer mandate really help to reduce health care costs in the long-run?