Crazy Jane:

Links Again

The Bronchitis thing is mostly over. I'm still home on doctor's orders, taking codeine tablets to control the coughing and have injured a rib somehow, but overall I feel a lot better, and will be back in action as a teacher of English by Wednesday. 

During my nearly two weeks of house arrest, I've had time to read great big fat loads of analysis of the financial crisis, and have a few links which will no doubt be totally riveting to my three readers. The Atlantic has this article, in which a former stock analyst pretty convincingly argues that in the free market, where everyone acts rationally in his own interest, bubbles like the recently burst real estate market are bound to form. He also has a fairly cogent take on why we never learn from them. Key point? There's no one to reasonably scapegoat. Ross Douthat offers qualified agreement, but Matt Yglesias doesn't buy it.

Also, this month's Cato Unbound has a round table of four prominent economists with four very different points of view on what happened to touch off the crisis, and it makes for interesting, if slightly laborious reading, and promises in future to become even more interesting as they all start responding to one another.

Finally, a couple of conspiracy theories: please enjoy this article, reporting on the fact that some people are convinced that Barack Obama's election is the "biggest hoax in the history of our country" because guess what?! Obama isn't even and AMERICAN CITIZEN!!!! The article's from politico, but it reads like an article from The Onion. And, there's always the terrifying spectre of the Fairness Doctrine. Even George F. Will saw fit to waste column space on this non-starter, apparently. However, no one but The Embattled Right has any interest in it whatsoever, if you read this recent piece on The New Republic. As Yglesias puts it, "I’ve never heard of anything like the current conservative mania for blocking a particular legislative provision that nobody is trying to enact."

Yes. This is a boring politics blog. 

I'll just end with a brief conversation I had with my 16-year-old son the other day while chatting it up on video skype:

Him, groggy and deadpan, having just woken up: Hi Mama.
Me: Geez! Your hair looks like a MOP!
Him, totally bershon, totally over me: Well, YEAH. I had HAIRSPRAY in it!

Aww yeah.

Bronchitis strikes, but fear not...

So, I'm in rough shape. I've got a bit of ye olde bronchitis, and the cough is truly horrifying. One of the things, however, that I love about the way Czechs do things is that you must go to the doctor to be eligible for sick time pay, and when you do, the doctor gives you a little slip of paper that tells your employer that you are ill, and must stay home. Once you have that slip of paper, it is actually ILLEGAL for you to go to work again until the doctor has given you permission, and your employer is not permitted to LET you work. 

Of course, you have some say so in this; you can go and tell the doctor, "I'll be better tomorrow." If your illness is minor, she'll sign off on it right then, and you can be back on the job the next day. But, if you're like me, and you turn up with a wracking cough and a host of other symptoms with no clear end in sight, and particularly if she has to prescribe an anti-biotic, she simply says, "You need to rest at home. Do not go outside into the cold. Take this medicine, and stay in bed until you have finished it" and then tells you to come back in a week, when she will check you, and consider allowing you to go back to work. There is no limit on sick days; if you are sick, you cannot work, period.

I love this, because as an American who is used to a system of limited allotted sick time, being ill meant not only a significant loss of pay, but it was also fraught with the feeling that my boss was angry, and it was all my fault: I chose to stay home and nurse my illness, and the minute I feel the slightest bit better, I'd better be back. I love to be told by my doctor that, not only am I not allowed to go to work, but that she will be the judge of when I am better, and none of this has a thing to do with what anyone at my job thinks. Brilliant. In my case, for today, she's totally right. Even if I am feeling better in a couple of days, this illness is the result of being generally tired, over-busy and run-down, and I DO need a good long rest to completely beat it. If I don't send it off properly, I'll be fighting a chronic cough and low-level malaise all winter. 

I guess none of this would seem particularly "business friendly" and could be seen as an interference with people's free choice about whether or not to kill themselves as cogs in the free market's wheels. It's a policy that certainly impacts the overall productivity of the Czech work force (though I think, on the whole, that working Czechs are as, if not more, self-motivated than cowed, stressed-out, Americans). But, at the same time, it also allows you a little human frailty, time to take care of yourself when you're sick, and contributes to a less stressful life overall.

Oh, and did I mention that the doctor's visit, including all lab work, cost about $2.00 and I paid the equivalent of $6.00 for three prescription medications? Yeah. That too. I pay mandatory medical insurance out of my payroll taxes, and have a basic state policy. It costs me about $35.00 per month, and there is nothing that is not covered by it. My doctor could prescribe SPA TREATMENTS and send me off to Marienbad for a MONTH if she thought I needed it. 

All this to say that fear of a single-payer medical system in the US is over-wrought, man. People are freer and less freaked out if they can take care of themselves and count on medical care, no matter what.

Can't say I agree with every word...

...but this article by P.J. O'Rourke (a staunch conservative, and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard) is a pretty interesting summation of the many areas where American political conservatism has cooked its own goose, as well as a stinging and very fair indictment of the pettiness of what's been passing for our political discourse.

Good reading. It brought home to me the fact that there is a conservative argument that doesn't include discriminatory social positions, the unwanted and illogical correlation of the free market with Christian virtue, or one-note stridency about abortion rights. There's an argument that has nothing to do with the culture wars, and everything to do with fiscal responsibility. I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who isn't in support of "fiscal responsibility," and to my mind, the debate should be about how to achieve it in a way that serves the American people. Instead, the Republican party has allowed itself to become the party that wants to legislate private behavior, enshrine discrimination in the Constitution, and appears to support a fiscal policy that amounts to social Darwinism.

Call me an optimist, but I have to believe that there are conservatives who have clear, compelling arguments. Why can't we hear them? I think that O'Rourke is right: the Republican party has abandoned a principled message to consolidate a base that can't understand it.