Eric The Blue

Market fail

From an article in National Review criticizing Biden's proposed "Build Back Better" (BBB) legislation, "which," the author complains, "would create a large new federal childcare program":

Childcare costs are high enough already, but the new childcare program would increase them further. Under the heading of "quality regulation," BBB requires that childcare workers be paid as much as elementary-school teachers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2020), elementary-school teachers earned an average of $63,930 annually in 2019, compared to an average of $25,510 for childcare workers. That is, under BBB, childcare facilities would have to pay childcare workers 151 percent more. Because $63,930 is nowhere near what equates supply with demand in the childcare market, its operation would have to change dramatically in order to comply with the statute. Perhaps childcare workers would be required to hold master's degrees, or be represented by unions that could otherwise limit supply the way they do for kindergarten teachers.

Suppose that this passage was on a standardized test measuring the reading comprehension skills of high-schoolers. You know the kind of thing I have in mind. One of the questions might be something like:

Which of the following statements would the author of the above passage most likely agree with:

A. Child care workers are under paid

B. Kindergarten teachers are over paid

C. Both child care workers and kindergarten teachers should be paid more

D. You can't tell what the author thinks about the salaries of child care workers and elementary school teachers. 

It's clear that B. is the correct answer, right? The author is what I'd call a market fundamentalist (or evangelist). He thinks that raising the salaries of child care workers would throw off the balance between the supply of workers and the demand for their labor. Kindergarten teachers are paid astounding sums only because their union has accomplished just that—interrupted the sacred operation of supply and demand—and, if the author is trying to veil his disdain, he hasn't succeeded. The Biden administration wants child care workers to earn what elementary-school teachers earn. The author thinks that's exactly backwards. Elementary school teachers should earn what child care workers do: $25,510 per annum. For that's what the market has decreed. 

"Childcare costs are high enough already," he asserts. The natural impulse is to agree, but, according to the god he worships, it isn't really true. Before my oldest (of two) started kindergarten, our household childcare costs were in the range of $30 to $35k per year. I thought that was "high enough"—essentially double the mortgage, for instance. Do the math, however. The kids got to what they called "school" at around 7 in the morning and were picked up by about 5:30 in the evening. Let's say, to keep the numbers round and the estimate conservative, 10 hours per day, times 5 days per week, times 50 weeks per year, times 2 kids. That's 5000 hours of care, conservatively, and including lunch and snacks every day. The cost was about $6 per hour, or a little more than $30,000 per year. 

The problem with a free-market child care system is that it doesn't work. For the consumer, it isn't affordable, and for the supplier there is simultaneously no money to be made. Maybe the clearest way of demonstrating this is just to point out that the workers, if they have kids themselves, can only dream of being able to afford the child care that they are themselves providing. The system is plainly broken and the solution of the National Review writer is . . . whatever you do, don't tinker with the brokenness!

By the way, though with different details it's pretty much "ditto" for health care: the free market doesn't work in that field either, and Republicans can't bring themselves to admit it. Sort of a pattern.

Manchin; Sinema

I'm late to the Democratic voters' hate fest for Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, because I've had a hard time working up the volume of hate required to join in the fun. With regard to Sinema, yes, she's a narcissist, but, since we're talking about the US Senate, this is more like a prerequisite than an entry in the DSM. With regard to Manchin, I get a kick out of people saying the Dems have to primary him. Have they heard that he represents West Virginia, a state Trump carried by 39 points? That a senator from West Virginia votes with our side more than half the time is a Gift From God, and they want to get rid of him!

It would be great if we could clone Manchin and swap him in for any of the 50 Republican senators—either one from West Virginia's neighbor to the west, Kentucky, would be just splendid, for example.

It is pretty wild, however, that one senator from West Virginia, who owes his personal wealth to the coal industry in his state, should get to decide what, if anything, our federal government is going to do about climate change. The population of West Virginia is less than 2 million. The population of Los Angeles County is more than 10 million, and it shares its two US senators with 30 million other Californians. But Manchin will consider the views of West Virginians, including perhaps friends and family in the coal biz, before telling the president and the rest of us how it's going to be. 

Football weather

The kind of October Saturday—bright sunshine and just warm enough to make you wonder whether "crisp" might be inapt—that seems intended for college football. I haven't had a Gopher ticket since the Mason era, in the Metrodome, which was peculiarly depressing, and not just on account of the atmospherics: of the half dozen or so excruciating losses that I was sober enough to remember, the one that stands out was the time Michigan scored 31 points in the fourth quarter to beat us, 38-35. I think I remember reading it's the only known game in D-1 football history in which a team rushed for more than 400 yards and lost. Ah, yes, I see now, thanks to this new thing called The Internet, that the game I'm remembering was contested on October 10, 2003, and that the Gophers rushed for 424 yards to Michigan's 94. Lost anyway.

It was on a morning walk with the dog that I fell in love with the weather, and I considered going to an MIAC game, but I've noticed how one-sided not just some but most of the games seem to be. Last week, for example, there were five conference games, and here were the scores of three of them: 49-7 (Bethel over Hamline), 50-0 (St. John's over Augsburg), and 72-7 (Gustavus over St. Scholastica). Athletic competition? Or assault and battery? Either way, I don't want to be a witness.

So I opened the windows and watched the second half of the Gopher game on TV. Luckily, PJ Fleck was making the in-game decisions and not me. Around half way through the last quarter, the Gophers, leading by 5, had the ball between the 40s. After three straight runs, it was 4th-and-1. I groaned in my soul when the punting team took the field, but then we called time out, and I thought maybe we were reconsidering. No, we punted, Nebraska fair caught it on their own 10, and then on the first play we scored a safety when their quarterback, under pressure, was called for intentional grounding in his own end zone. Good call to punt, Coach! We get two points and the ball. "Please don't be too conservative," my Left Soul whispers to the Right One. But we run on first down and lose 3 yards. Earlier in the game, we had completed something like 16 passes in a row! On second down, we run again, nevertheless, and gain 9. Now it's 3rd-and-4. We run off tackle and gain 5 for the first down. Two plays later, we bust a run for about 55 yards and a game-clinching touchdown. 

When they think you're going to pass, run; and when they think you're going to run, run anyway. It  can work, especially if you're ahead by a little late in the game and your offensive line, which may or may not fit within the Grand Canyon, has been leaning on the other team for 3.5 quarters.

I downloaded a pedometer on my phone and set a goal of 8500 steps per day. With weather like this, I've been almost making it. Dog gives me a cockeyed look when I have the leash in my hand again, as if to say, "Damn, man, we got back from the last one only about an hour ago." 

Straddling the lines, sort of, in the culture war

Driving through the northern exurbs of the Twin Cities on my way to a golf course, I find myself wondering how many strip malls with shitty-looking takeaway places at both ends and, in between, a pawn shop, a vape shop, and a tattoo parlor, are needed to meet local demand. I know the residents think I have to fight off criminals to drive into my garage when arriving home late from having been served vegetarian fare by a gay waiter, but to me their world doesn't look like paradise, either. The jokes practically write themselves, once you've taken in the scenery.

Q: Why don't Trump voters go to the dentist?

A: They spent all their money on 4-wheelers.

Having established my elitist bona fides, let me try to strike a conciliatory note. What is with the tiny entrees served on the center of a "dinner plate" the size of a satellite dish? If Trump voters knew about these places, they could have some fun, because you shouldn't have to cook up oatmeal at home right after dropping $40 on plant life at some candlelit bistro without a TV in the bar. Tucker Carlson should enlighten them. Instead, he's making the case that caring for children is gay. Real men frolic with porn stars while momma's home nursing baby Barron. 

 

 

A hundred pages more of Crime and Punishment

I have been progressing through Crime and Punishment and can answer some of the questions concerning "what's gonna happen" that I mentioned here. Raskolnikov, for example, does murder the old pawnbroker. Of course, right? It would be a type of novel that hadn't yet been invented if he only thought about it for around 460 pages. What I hadn't guessed is that the old lady's mentally "slow" sister, with whom she lived, would return to the apartment before the expected time, with the result that she (the sister) is incontinently murdered too. In for a dime, in for a dollar. To buttress my claim that the novel is pulpy, I'll set down the passage in which the first murder occurs. Dostoevsky does not cheat the reader's voyeuristic curiosity:

The old woman was, as usual, bare-headed. Her thin fair hair, just turning grey, and thick with grease, was plaited into a rat's tail and fastened into a knot above the nape with a fragment of horn comb. Because she was so short the axe struck her full on the crown of the head. She cried out, but very feebly, and sank in a heap on the floor, still with enough strength left to raise both hands to her head. One of them still held the 'pledge' [the pawned object with which Raskolnikov had gained admission]. Then he struck her again and yet again, with all his strength, always with the blunt side of the axe, and always on the crown of the head. Blood poured out as if from an overturned glass and the body toppled over on its back. He stepped away as it fell, and then stopped to see the face: she was dead. Her wide-open eyes looked ready to start out of their sockets, her forehead was wrinkled and her whole face convulsively distorted. 

So that happens on page 66 of 465. The sister comes home on page 68 and is similarly bludgeoned to death, though her pathetic incomprehension makes the details even harder to bear. Part One then comes to its end on page 74. At the beginning of Part Two, on page 78, Raskolnikov receives a summons to report to the local police office. Things seem to be moving too fast to last another 400 pages, but it soon develops that the cops want to talk to him about a landlord-tenant issue: his poverty has been well established, he thought he had an arrangement with his landlady, but she apparently had tired of not getting her rent and had complained to the police. Acutely conscious of his guilt for terrible crimes, he finds himself explaining to the cops about a misunderstanding with his landlady. The cops are casual and bored. 

So what about that Connecticut Compromise?

"South Dakota Is A Moral Sewer And Should Be Abolished," shouts The New Republic, to which native South Dakotan John Hinderaker, of the unintentionally hilarious Power Line Blog, replies, "South Dakota is a beacon of light showing the way, the truth, and the light to blue-state heretics." I at first thought the brief for the prosecution was going to focus on Kristi Noem, the execrable governor of South Dakota, who's recently been in the news on account of her daughter's difficulties earning a real estate appraiser license. She (the daughter) apparently flunked the test and, next thing you know, the person overseeing the licensing operation has been fired and the first daughter of South Dakota is an appraiser. The issue, the governor explained, is that the agency head was too old, the test too hard, and the difficulties associated with becoming a real estate appraiser were dragging down an otherwise vibrant state economy.

Now that those problems are solved, back to the competition for leading the country in COVID cases per capita!

Turns out, however, that the case against South Dakota is a history lesson going back to when it was only Dakota, no North or South or Noem, and Hinderaker's response includes this:

. . . [the] underlying complaint is that the Dakotas, "two states with a combined population of fewer than two million . . . get four senators." Of course, leftists weren't complaining as recently as 2005, when the Dakotas sent four Democrats to the Senate, or 2011, when three of four Dakota senators were Democrats. If South Dakota were still sending Democrats to Congress, you can be sure that liberals would not be attacking that state, just as they are not now attacking Delaware or Rhode Island. 

Leftists try to delegitimize institutions that they do not control as "undemocratic." Thus, the Supreme Court has come under withering attack, with threats to pack the Court by adding more seats to be filled with new, left-wing justices. Needless to say, leftists found no fault when they controlled the Court. The Senate is likewise in the Left's crosshairs. How can it possibly be right for small states and big states to have the same number of senators? Of course, if the shoe were on the other foot, they would ask how it could possibly be right for the big states to swamp the rights and interests of the small states. Maybe they never learned about the Connecticut Compromise in high school. 

In today's terms, the fact that states have equal representation in the Senate reflects the importance of the states in our constitutional system. Our country is a union of 50 states, not 320 million atomized individuals. It is also a valuable part of the constitutional checks and balances that prevent momentary majorities, like the microscopic one the Democrats now enjoy, from running roughshod over others' rights.

I wonder if he thinks knowing about the Three-Fifths Compromise obliges you to deem it just and wise. A few other observations:

(1) Since the 50 Democratic senators represent 56 percent of Americans, and the 50 Republican senators represent the remaining 44 percent, the Senate's undemocratic structure is the cause of the "microscopic" majority to which Hinderaker refers. First, the overrepresentation of small states elevates the power of a distinct minority to essentially equal strength. This overrepresentation is then justified on the ground that the majority's advantage is "microscopic" and therefore must not be permitted to enact its agenda. 

(2) Who is "running roughshod" over the rights of others? Hinderaker mentions the Supreme Court, where there is currently a 6-3 conservative majority. But that's not what Americans voted for. The three justices who joined the court during Trump's administration were nominated by a president who had lost the popular vote. They were then confirmed, to lifetime terms, by a Republican Senate representing a minority of the citizens. A majority voted for one thing, got the opposite crammed down its throat, and is now treated to lectures concerning the majesties of a system that makes this possible. For what it's worth, which is apparently nothing, Alexander Hamilton had written in Federalist No. 22 that giving equal weight to all states in the national deliberations "contradicts that fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail." 

(3) Hinderaker's "analysis" makes it sound as if there are no relevant facts or merits to consider, just partisan hypocrisy. To the degree there are facts and merits, the issue was put to rest in the 18th century by men whose work product has an authority like that of Scripture and so may not be questioned. "States matter," he says. They sure do! Today, the 15 most populous states have 63 percent of the country's population but just 30 percent of Senate seats. Demographers project that by the next census this figure will likely rise to 70 percent. At that point, less than one-third of the population will elect more than two-thirds of the senators—a veto-proof majority. Hamilton, in the same essay, Federalist No. 22:

Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract  the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third. 

I can understand a plantation owner from South Carolina feeling uncomfortable, but that Alexander Hamilton was one smart, far-seeing white man. That he had the better of the argument is becoming more and more clear. 

Table talk

[13-year-old, at the end of a rant, adduces the final proof of the “immaturity” of her tablemates in a certain class]: Today, they spent 10 minutes fighting over a pencil.

10-year-old sister: Was it long with a sharp point and big eraser?

Twins last month

The Twins went 15-15 in September/October, which allowed them to avoid a 90-loss season: after winning the last game of the year, on Sunday, against the Royals, they stood at 73-89, last place in the AL Central, the weakest division in the league. They needed a mini hot streak to land that well, for they did not lose any of their last four series of the year: swept a two-game series at Wrigley against the Cubs, then came home and split four games with the Blue Jays (who were fighting for a playoff spot), won two out of three from the Tigers, and then travelled to Kansas City, where they won two of three games on the last weekend of the season.

I always find something to interest me, even in the last month of a losing season—often, the struggles or successes of some call-up who's excited to be getting a chance. Maybe the guy rolls one through the infield for a single and the TV shows his familial entourage going nuts in the sparsely populated stadium. This year, however, Jorge Polanco had my eye: on September 11, he hit two homers, his 29th and 30th of the season, and had 3 RBI, numbers 88, 89, and 90. Could he attain a 30-homer, 100-RBI season? Here are a few names from Twins history who never accomplished that feat: Tony Oliva, Kent Hrbek, Kirby Puckett. Polanco, however, went into a little RBI slump and I'd pretty much given up when he only had 95 entering the last game of the season. Then, in his first at-bat, he launched one with two aboard: 98, which is where he finished. I don't think he got another at-bat with a runner on base. 

Speaking of 30-homer seasons, Miguel Sano did it for the second time: 30 this year, 34 in 2019. Here is a comprehensive list of Minnesota Twins who have had more 30-homer seasons than Sano:

Harmon Killebrew (8)
Justin Morneau (3)

I'm as frustrated with him as anyone—he strikes out way too much, makes a butt-load of errors, and, notwithstanding all the dingers, has never driven in as many as 80 runs in a season. But can you give up on the guy? I feel he's a whisker away from a year in which he bats .260 with 40 homers and 120 RBI. Pipe dream? Well, here's another possibly unrealistic hope: Buxton plays in 150 games and has more than 600 plate appearances. Or how about Max Kepler rebounding?—he batted .211 and had 54 RBI, possibly the most feeble output of any everyday right fielder in the game. Can Garver stay healthy enough to bat 400 times? Because, if he does, he might hit 30 over the fence and another 30 that bounce against it. 

All fun to daydream about, but if none of those things happened, the team could still go from 89 losses to 89 wins with some steady starting pitching. In the American League, only the Orioles, who lost 110 times, allowed more runs than the Twins—and our relief pitching was more than serviceable. I don't know what their plans are but I'm confident that Bailey Ober, Griffin Jax, and three days of wet weather is never going to be a motto along the lines of "Spahn, Sain, then pray for rain."