Wow. So Michael Kinsley sat down last night, fired up his sardonic-left-wing-rhetoric generator, and let fly with a Slate column on health care that...makes no sense at all, as far as I can tell. For some reason, he's against single-payer health insurance. Here is his explanation of why single-payer is a bad idea:

What's different about health insurance is the opposite: Much of it isn't insurance at all but a subsidy. The value of the subsidy is the difference between what the individual pays and what the insurance would cost in the free market. If people were buying health care or insurance with their own money, they might or might not spend too much—whatever "too much" is—but no one else would need to care if they did.

A subsidy has to take from someone and give to someone else. Everybody can't subsidize everybody. Or, to put it another way, society cannot give the average citizen better health care than the average citizen would choose to buy on his or her own. And this is what people want.

I don't really understand what Kinsley is trying to say here, but I'm pretty sure it's totally wrong. And baffling. This construct of the "average citizen" whose decisions to buy health care "on his or her own" must, axiomatically, equal the total health care purchased by the polity, divided by the number of citizens... This just seems like complete nonsense. If every American were required to buy, say, national defense individually, how many nuclear-powered aircraft carriers would result? Zero, obviously. (Unless maybe Rupert Murdoch decided to really go on a binge.)

As for the distinction between "insurance" and "subsidies"...this is a totally bizarre distinction. Insurance, obviously, is a subsidy: it is the subsidy of the unlucky by the lucky. We do it because 1. none of us are entirely sure that we or our children won't wind up unlucky, and 2. societies which treat all of their citizens AS IF they might just as easily have been lucky as unlucky, end up with happier and more productive citizens, and are simply better places to live. Anyway, what people want to get through single-payer isn't better CARE than the average citizen would choose to buy on his or her own; it's better COVERAGE. And that is easily attainable - in fact, the simple fact that it is universal renders it in that crucial sense superior to any individually purchased coverage, because it is guaranteed, regardless of whether you lose your job or become impoverished.

This isn't a zero-sum game; changing the system changes the whole landscape of available assets. Just like anything else in economics. But especially in health care. To give one example: Kinsley worries about more people wanting access to $100,000-dollar-a-year pills. But with most pills, doubling the number of people taking them makes it possible to cut the cost of the medication drastically, because the additional production cost of an extra dose is often negligible. The expenses are all for the overhead. In fact, after paying off initial capital costs, the price of the pills might drop to $100; so the more people we insure and treat, the faster we can start saving money. Kinsley's whole reductive way of thinking about these problems is ridiculous - if I understand him at all, which I'm not confident I do, because it's such a weirdly written piece.

I have a feeling I've seen Kinsley do this before - try to look at some complicated economic problem through the college-sophomore lens of adding up all the assets, dividing them out, and positing that whatever comes out must equal what goes in. Of course, real economic and social problems are vastly more complicated than that; what comes out almost never adds up to what went in. But what a totally weird thing for him to write - and at this moment...?

The FCC has decided to fine CBS $3.6 million for teen sex:

The FCC said an episode of the CBS crime drama "Without a Trace" that aired in December 2004 was indecent, citing the graphic depiction of "teenage boys and girls participating in a sexual orgy."

CBS objected, saying the program "featured an important and socially relevant storyline warning parents to exercise greater supervision of their teenage children."

Regardless of our positions on freedom of speech as it relates to mindless commercial crap, can we all agree that this statement by CBS poisons the minds of young people by making them think it's okay to lie in pursuit of a buck, or to avoid facing legal consequences? Why can't they just say, "The program was intended to titillate viewers without stepping over the line of decency as we understood the FCC to have drawn it. We regret violating the standards, but would appreciate it if the FCC would draw the standards more clearly in advance so we don't end up in such situations again"?

Honestly, why do people in corporate America think it's okay to issue such transparent lies, so routinely? Do we Americans really think it's fine to lie to make your corporation look better? It doesn't even make the corporation look better - it's such a transparent lie, it only makes them look like a bunch of slimy weasels. This is what they ought to be fined for - for teaching kids that if you come home from a drinking party with a dent in the family car, you should tell your dad you got it swerving to avoid hitting a faun. The airwaves, as Edward R. Murrow was always reminding us, are a public trust.

Today in the Times Maureen Dowd makes the very sensible suggestion that Dems should back Obama in '08, before his street cred and freshness value are worn out. But she also has a couple of caveats which I find bizarre. Consider, regarding skeptics of an Obama run: 

They fret that the Illinois senator would wilt against the Arizona senator's foreign policy experience — and he probably would.

When has any presidential candidate ever "wilt(ed) against" any other candidate's "foreign policy experience"?  This is one of those ridiculous inside-the-beltway shibboleths. Going back the last 46 years, the only winning presidential candidates who had more foreign policy experience than the guy they beat were George HW Bush in '88 and Nixon in '72. Going back further, Eisenhower had more for pol exp than Stevenson, but the Egghead hardly "wilted" in foreign policy debates. In our last election, if anyone "wilted" in debates over foreign policy, it was the guy who won the election - the incumbent - who still seemed like a lightweight struggling to remember countries' names after 4 years in office.

To believe that Americans select their presidents on the basis of experience in foreign policy is to take a far too lenient a view of the American electorate. In our last election, at a moment when the US's engagement with the foreign world was held to be of far greater importance than in any election in decades, speaking fluent French nevertheless was viewed as a liability. Welcome to America, or, as we like to call it, Greater Texas. What counts in for pol during a presidential election is not "experience"; Americans are far too anti-intellectual for that. What counts is an easily understandable attitude which comes across looking strong, not weak. If Obama would have a problem cultivating that image, then he might indeed have trouble in an election, but it has nothing to do with "experience".

In a related point, Dowd worries that others are right to say Americans would never elect someone who has a name that sounds like a terrorist's. I disagree. Once Obama's image becomes known, Americans will have no more problems with his name than they do with Hakeem Olajuwon's. If Americans' weakness is their anti-intellectualism (or even, lately, anti-competence-ism), their strong point is their lack of racism...towards rich people and celebrities.

Tony Judt has an amazing scathing review of John Lewis Gaddis's "The Cold War: A New History" in the current NY Review of Books. Among other things, he notes that Gaddis treats the advent of current failed-state problems such as terrorism as if they had nothing to do with the Cold War, when a cursory glance around the world shows that basically every failed or failing state was a Cold War battleground: Somalia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Liberia, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, and so on. It's a brilliant review - read it:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18793