The reason I can't be a Republican

(also read the eventual companion piece, "the reason I can't be a Democrat")

There are some internal contradictions in Republican ideology that I simply can't get around.

"Government doesn't do things well.  Private industry can do things better than the government, so we should shrink the government and let private industry take over the things government used to do."

That's a pretty concise and agreed-upon distillation of Republican policy, right?

If that's so, how can Republicans be for the death penalty?  If the government doesn't do things well, how can you entrust them with the right to take a life?  Republicans freely admit that legislators are crooked.  Do they think that DAs, prosecutors, and judges aren't?

And how can Republicans be for an expanded military presence?  How can they be for drone strikes, which have killed the wrong people on many occasions, and which make children "fear the sky"?  What about their support for military actions that primarily benefit certain contractors?  Isn't that basically the government picking winners and losers in private industry?  Or is the military a branch of the government that is above reproach?

How can they be against the legalization of drugs?  They're against regulations on companies, but they're for regulations on what we can put in our bodies?  They believe that the government should have a say in whether we can use things that grow naturally?

The one thing I can conclude from all this is that the real thing Republicans stand for is "making the government smaller, except for the parts that benefit us or hurt people who aren't us".  Normally, someone who's well-off isn't getting the death penalty.  And well-off people aren't going off to war, but they do own stock in military contractors.  And they're not getting in trouble for having illegal drugs, but they do own stock in pharmaceutical companies.

If Republicans could be honest, and say "if government really does suck at everything, we need to cut back on the military," they would come a long way with me.  Or if they said "government is too error-prone; we should get rid of the death penalty."  Or "government is too intrusive; we should eliminate drug laws."  But I think they're too beholden to a moral-values faction that does not ideologically belong with their libertarian wing.

They think that if they split, they would lose to Democrats.  But the way I see it, if there was an honest libertarian party that didn't try to pull any of the Republicans' anti-science, anti-gay-marriage, pro-military-adventures bullshit, it would peel off a significant number of Democrats.  They'd have a fighting chance.

Ebola and insuring everyone

If Ebola doesn't convince you that we need everyone in the country to have no-cost health care coverage, I don't know what will.  Even if you're extremely libertarian.

Imagine you come down with some symptoms of Ebola. Here's a handy infographic describing them:

So let's say you have the day 7-9 symptoms of "headache, fatigue, fever, muscle soreness". No big deal, right? Probably just the flu. You would go to the doctor, but you're uninsured, so it would cost maybe a hundred bucks. So you don't go. And you continue going to work because you'll lose your job if you miss work and you don't have a doctor's note.

You infect everyone at your job. With Ebola. If you had gone to the doctor and he had recognized the symptoms, you would have been put in isolation, and no one else would have been infected.

This isn't just a hypothetical situation. There are plenty of people in America who get very sick and don't go to the hospital because it will ruin them financially. And this happens to the detriment of everyone in society.

It's a net positive for everyone for people to feel free to get medical aid. If we could spend a billion dollars of taxpayer money to prevent a virus from killing millions and disrupting global commerce, it would be a no-brainer. So even if you're looking at it from a self-centered, "I want only what's best for me" standpoint, insuring everyone makes sense.

A 1993 study said it would only cost an additional $856 per person in taxes to give everyone health insurance. Isn't it obvious that this is the way we should go?

Why the future is scary

I just turned on my TV.  "We Bought A Zoo" is on.  I'm thinking, this is probably a decent movie.  I seem to remember that it got good reviews, and it's got Matt Damon, who is usually in good movies.

It's certainly not the best movie that I could be watching right now.  I have a list of movies that I absolutely need to watch, and it's not on that list.  So if I were operating like a computer might operate, I would find the most important movie to watch and watch it right now.  And then, next time I had enough free time to watch a movie, I'd watch the next most important movie on that list.  And so on.

But here's the paradox: if I did that, I absolutely would not be able to appreciate the movies that I watched.  My great-movie receptors would be too saturated and I wouldn't even care any more.

To appreciate things, you've got to cleanse the palate and get back to a neutral state.  You need to have non-peak experiences in order to have peak experiences.  But I don't think most people appreciate this.

People claim that they want "the best of everything".  You would get NO satisfaction from that.  You need to experience average for a long time to reset your good-receptors, so you can appreciate great.

What worries me is that we're going to have access to so much instant-satisfaction stimulation in the future, and we won't know how to deal with it.  We'll think that constantly bombarding ourselves with the best movies, TV shows, food, youtube videos, etc. will make us happy.  And when it doesn't we'll think there's something wrong with us.

American free-market health insurance is a disaster

Health insurance companies have become useless bureaucracies set up to complicate a transaction. They are not competing with each other on price or service. They don't have to. They have the country carved up into regions, and there's usually only one or two options available per region.

Doctor's offices have to hire people to interface with the insurance agencies. Their entire job is to persistently hound the insurance companies to get them to pay off claims. An inefficiency (overly restrictive acceptance criteria for claims) gets turned into a job.

And on the other side, there are people who work for insurance agencies whose jobs it is to find ways to avoid paying for claims.

And then health care providers negotiate privately with these agencies to charge absurd fees for things. Seen an ER visit bill lately?

So the prices we pay for insurance go up, but there's nowhere else for us to go; it's expensive-ass insurance or be uninsured.

Conservatives think that the free market will fix the health care cost-benefits problem. And it might, in a way that I can't currently imagine. But the current system, with medical prices rising every year because of the lack of competition, is simply a drain on our economy.

Insurance is an easy thing to provide when you're providing it for lots and lots of people. You simply observe the average amount of money people pay for health care in a free market, and charge slightly above that. You're guaranteed (to a 99.99% level) to make nearly the exact profit you set out to make. Law of large numbers, right?

But you can be undercut by someone else who's willing to make less of a profit. So you differentiate yourself. You think, why not just own a bunch of good doctors? Then we could have our patients go to doctors we choose who set rates we decide. Those rates will be lower, so we can charge less.

Now the insurance companies own the doctors and people have to effectively choose which company's doctors they want to use. But they don't really get to choose, because in the meantime congress made it so companies can give health insurance as a non-taxed benefit, so people get whatever insurance the company they work for has. So now you've got a market where the consumer has absolutely no say in where the product he has comes from.

There is no consumer benefit to the health insurance company system. There are massive drawbacks. There is no meaningful competition. Most regions are monopolies.

But insurance is necessary for health care. It is unreasonable to ask people to save enough money to cover an expensive medical procedure. And it is unreasonable to ask people to not require expensive medical procedures. Insurance is a good thing when properly used. It is a tool to allow people to pool risk, so the occasional devastating disaster can be averted. This benefits everyone; can you really say that it's a good thing that someone goes bankrupt because they had a treatable medical condition?

So we need some form of insurance. The only thing is, I don't see how the free market can provide this insurance without denying agency to the true free-market participants in healthcare: the patients and the doctors. The free market simply doesn't work for necessary insurance for an inelastic good.

With that in mind, I've reluctantly concluded that the best solution is single-payer healthcare. I don't trust the government to do it well. I think it may lead to less innovation. But honestly I don't see how they could make the on-the-ground medical situation for most of the US population worse than it is now: fearful that you'll get some injury or disease because it will bankrupt you.

A mathematical theory of happiness, suffering, and life satisfaction

This theory totally jibes with my experience. I'm posting it here

1. because I think it's kind of clever but mainly
2. because I want to know if it matches other people's experience

So please, leave comments!  And don't be put off by the (minimal) math language...this is a very simple theory!

You can chart people's happiness over time.  What usually happens is, something good will happen, and happiness will go up, and then it'll gradually return to baseline.  Or something bad will happen, and happiness will go down, and gradually return to baseline.

There are limits to happiness and sadness.  Nobody's happiness is constantly increasing or decreasing. You get to a certain level, and nothing can be added that could possibly make you happier.  These moments are usually etched in our memories pretty strongly.  I can certainly remember the happiest time of my life!  Incidentally, these are usually times when the people around us have been extremely happy, too.  It's very hard to be happy when it's coming at the expense of other people...at least, at the expense of other people who you care about in any way.

What we call "suffering" is actually the negative derivative of happiness.  That is, you "suffer" when your happiness is going from a high level to a low level.  And here I have one of my own critiques of this theory: "suffering" also happens when you're just completely stuck at a low level of happiness. So maybe there's a better way to express this.

Overall life satisfaction is the negative derivative of suffering (or the second derivative of happiness). That is, you're satisfied with your life when you're decreasing the amount of suffering.

This means that life satisfaction is 0 when the amount of suffering is constant, even if the amount of suffering is 0.  Even if the happiness levels are high.  There is absolutely no life satisfaction that you get from living "the good life" if you've always lived the good life.

Life satisfaction is only positive if you decrease your suffering...which means that you had to be suffering a fair amount in the first place.  Or if you're decreasing the suffering of those around you (as the happiness of people around you strongly tracks your own happiness).

So the way to a satisfying life is to put yourself in situations where you're not happy, and then change yourself or your environment so you're happy.  In other words, get into uncomfortable situations, then get out of them.

Calvin's dad was right.