I experience stabbing pains of guilt when I read about the Iraq Inquiry in Britain. That  horrible story no longer moves me to anger; I just shake my head and keep walking.

I am sincerely grateful, therefore, to Daniel Larison in The American Conservative for still being very angry. I am glad he won’t let it rest.

Of course the new administration will try to make the best of it, claim progress and take credit for anything it can. That is in the political self-interest of this administration. Having inherited a mess that the political class has convinced itself was improving, it would not be advantageous to be the one overseeing the unraveling. The rest of us are not burdened by such considerations.

I don’t think it is particular noble to destroy another people’s country on the basis of unfounded, paranoid fears that its small, economically weak, militarily inferior government posed grave threats to the global superpower. There are many words that come to mind to describe this, but noble is not one of them. It is not especially noble to do this with no meaningful plan for restoring order and governance in the wake of the invasion. There is no nobility to be found in the afterthought of poorly constructing a democratic regime whose elections served as the trigger for massive bloodshed. Likewise, there was not much nobility when our government belatedly recognized its incompetence and failure long after it could do the civilian casualties any good and proposed a plan that would temporarily reduce violence long enough for the previous administration to get out the door.

My anger is still there but is deep below the surface but I am glad that Larison is still able to rouse it back up and remind me. I don’t want to forget.

Next time someone tells you that the republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility and/or growth, show them this (from the economist) and have them annotate the decades with a red or blue marker.

You probably know that the US spends more of its GDP on health care than any other OECD nation (for better outcomes).

Yet every major country spends very significantly less of its national output on health than we do. As Table 1 shows, we spend five percent of GDP more than the country with the second-highest level of health spending as a share of GDP. Five percent of GDP is about $700 billion that Americans could be spending on new homes, cars and clothing, nice restaurants, paying off bills or anything else they can imagine. Instead, that money went to doctors, hospitals, pharmacists and insurance companies. If we only spent as much as Japan—a country known for having an excellent health system and a healthy population—we would have eight percent of GDP, about $1 trillion, to spend on anything we like.

But did you know that government spending on health care is also higher most other countries too?

what I am trying to show is that for no more than we are already spending on health through the government we could have a single-payer system no worse that those that exist in almost every other major country. My point is that this is an option that the administration should have at least floated and on which we should have had a national debate. I don’t think Americans would have embraced such an option, but as I said at the beginning it would have clarified the debate by focusing on the overall cost of our health care system—which I believe is far too great for what we get in return—and made reforms such as those that the Democrats have put forward seem modest by comparison.

Data from the OECD. Commentary from Bruce Bartlett’s excellent blog.

Daniel Larison on anti-jihadism.

For most of the last decade, our preference in and out of government has been to deny that U.S. and allied policies had anything to do with jihadist attacks and their ability to recruit and win sympathizers. This acknowledgement would be to “blame the victim,” so that even if it were the correct analysis it was politically incorrect to say it out loud. Instead we have been treated to a whole host of explanations for why jihadist violence exists and why it tends to be directed at the U.S. and our allies. The lamest of these has been rather popular, namely the claim that “they hate us for our freedom,” or modernity or secularism or whatever it is that the person making the argument finds worthwhile about the West and sees lacking in Muslim countries. Then, of course, there is the trusty appeal to the enemy’s insanity. Unlike us, they are not really rational, and so their actions cannot be explained by referring to anything so mundane and normal as political grievances.

One day, Larison will say something I disagree with.

Daniel Larison is rapidly becoming my favourite conservative and today he takes on a former favourite, Davids Brooks.

Brooks’ column today is about The White Messiah

This is the oft-repeated story about a manly young adventurer who goes into the wilderness in search of thrills and profit. But, once there, he meets the native people and finds that they are noble and spiritual and pure. And so he emerges as their Messiah, leading them on a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilization.

Larison, as always, goes ever so gently for the throat:

Brooks is right when he says the story teaches that, “Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.” What he fails to do is connect this to the urges of our own liberal imperialists and humanitarian interventionists, who are constantly warning against leaving other nations to their own devices and who are frequently complaining about our boundless benevolence that is repaid with contempt or indifference. He might consult his colleague Thomas Friedman on this point, since Friedman seems to think that most Muslims worldwide are “holding our coats” while we do all the heavy lifting on their behalf and that Afghanistan can be likened to a “special needs baby” that we as a country have just adopted. Muslims do tend to be reduced to supporting actors in Friedman’s own journey of self-importance.

One of the commenters at Eunomia used the delightful phrase

the neocons’ inexplicable War Against Avatar

Excellent!

Nicholas Kristoff felt obliged to apologize for comparing The Best Health Care System in the World to Slovenia’s.

In several columns, I’ve noted indignantly that we have worse health statistics than Slovenia. For example, I noted that an American child is twice as likely to die in its first year as a Slovenian child. The tone — worse than Slovenia! — gravely offended Slovenians. They resent having their fine universal health coverage compared with the notoriously dysfunctional American system.

As far as I can tell, every Slovenian has written to me. Twice. So, to all you Slovenians, I apologize profusely for the invidious comparison of our health systems. Yet I still don’t see anything wrong with us Americans aspiring for health care every bit as good as yours.

Read today’s column for a good summary of whythe best system in the world is…. well… not.

Why I enjoy reading Conor Friedersdorf:

That’s why I am sympathetic to the “conservative dissidents,” despite my many policy differences with them. Unlike the base, I don’t think politicians who are squishy on substance did in Republicans. I think what brought down the right is a corrupt conservative movement, without insufficient capacity for constructive criticism, and beset by heretic hunters who denounced anyone engaged in critical thinking. Long live the dissidents. Long live debates. Long live partisan and ideological disloyalty if it means routing out corruption.

He is the best of the swelling crop of I-am-a-conservative-but-the republican-party-sucks writers but he has hot competition from Daniel Larison

Republicans object to so many irrelevant things that Obama does and they treat absolutely everything as some supreme, unpardonable error that it is impossible to take any of their criticism seriously.

and Bruce Bartlett.

Q. Do you think that there is a fundamental problem with the Republican economic philosophies that are currently being put forth or do you think the Republicans are just being anti-Obama administration in order to gain political capital? - Trevor L

A. I think the Republican Party is brain-dead. It stands for one thing and one thing only - being against whatever the Democrats are for and regaining political power by whatever means necessary. The idea that the G.O.P. is the party of ideas is laughable.

What should a government do if science shows that it’s policies are misguided? Why, fire the scientists of course!

Professor Nutt was the British government’s chief advisor on the harm caused by illegal drugs and he wrote a paper showing that the official ranking of the harm caused by various drugs - class A, class B or class C - is out of alignment with the actual harm caused by them.

The prof’s team rated drugs according to a bunch of factors relating to the harm they cause ranked them in this table. (The official ratings - which determine the severity of punishments for possession and distribution - are in parentheses).

1. Heroin (Class A)

2. Cocaine (Class A)

3. Barbiturates (Class B)

4. Street methadone (Class A)

5. Alcohol (Not controlled)

6. Ketamine (Class C)

7. Benzodiazepine (Class B)

8. Amphetamine (Class B)

9. Tobacco (No class)

10. Bupranorphine (Class C)

11. Cannabis (Class B)

12. Solvents (Not controlled)

13. 4-MTA (Class A)

14. LSD (Class A)

15. Methylphenidate (Class B)

16. Anabolic steroids (Class C)

17. GHB (Class C)

18. Ecstasy (Class A)

19. Alkylnitrates (Not controlled)

20. Khat (Not controlled)

He got fired and now many of the other scientists on his team are resigning in protest.

Read his speech. It’s very readable and quite fascinating. It covers a range of ideas like the fallacy of the precaution principle

To repeat what the former Home Secretary said, ‘We must err on the side of caution and protect the public.’

and gives some famous examples of where precaution resulted in additional harm.

The most interesting bit was the study of how the media distorts the reporting of drug deaths. This table shows the number of deaths in Scotland resulting from drug misuse over a period during the 90s.

0

Check out the number of deaths from cannabis…exactly.

Professor Nutt must have known that he would be fired for this speech - which makes it all the more admirable that he gave it.

Well done, prof.

FrumForum (formerly New Majority) has an article comparing the Republicans circa 2009 with Michael Foot’s Labour party. There are a lot of parallels.

In the wake of Labour’s 1979 election defeat, the party entered into a period of prolonged crisis, a debilitating conflict between left, right and center that nearly put the party out of business. Don’t look now, but history may be repeating itself across the pond thirty years later…

Foot vs the Republican leadership

The breakway SDP Party vs the RINOs

Labour wins (1983) in red

Paul Krugman:

I was startled last week when Mr. Obama, in an interview with Bloomberg News, questioned the case for limiting financial-sector pay: “Why is it,” he asked, “that we’re going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or N.F.L. football players?”

That’s an astonishing remark — and not just because the National Football League does, in fact, have pay caps. Tech firms don’t crash the whole world’s operating system when they go bankrupt; quarterbacks who make too many risky passes don’t have to be rescued with hundred-billion-dollar bailouts.