David Dow took a break from writing books in favor of judicial activism to complain about judicial activism. I just want to comment on this thing that keeps coming up:
First, Congress’s authority in passing the law rests on an elementary syllogism: You don’t have to drive, but if you do, the government can make you buy insurance. The logical structure at work here is that if you are going to do something (drive, for example), the government can make you purchase a commercial product (insurance, for example), so long as it has a good reason for doing so (making sure you can pay for any damage you do). That logic is obviously satisfied in the health-care context. You are going to use medical care, so the government can make you buy insurance in order to make sure you can pay for it. Liberty, like every other human and constitutional right, is not absolute. Under some circumstances, it can be regulated.
(a) I can choose not to drive, and therefore choose not to purchase car insurance. ACA requires me to purchase insurance or be considered a criminal, regardless of my personal choices. It’s not the same at all.
(b) I am required to purchase liability insurance, to protect the person I harm in an accident, not myself, or my property. Health insurance covers me, not people I may harm through my actions. It’s not the same at all.
(c) States require drivers to purchase liability insurance, not the Feds. And New Hampshire doesn’t even require. It’s not the same at all.
I’m not saying there aren’t limits to liberty or that we can’t regulate things. I’m saying this dumb drivers insurance analogy people have used for years now makes no sense.
It’s sad when good scholars and smart people will say pandering nonsense in the popular press to help out their team (see also: Krugman).
Related: It’s also sad that defenders of the individual mandate have to reach back to 1792 for any precedent, and that apparently doesn’t bother them. If there were no constitutional concerns with the federal government requiring individuals to purchase a good or service, why hasn’t it happened in the past two hundred years? I question the strength of a case that rests on citizens being forced to purchase muskets to put down rebellions and defend against “Indian tribes.”
Clearly, I’m just some idiot and not a legal scholar of any kind. But these arguments all take a “this is basic logic” tone that is plainly not true. Basic logic says that individual mandate is something new, something that the United States has not required citizens to do for nearly her entire history. And GEICO has nothing to do with it.
Contingent valuation is a survey-based economic technique for the valuation of non-market resources, such as environmental preservation or the impact of contamination. While these resources do give people utility, certain aspects of them do not have a market price as they are not directly sold – for example, people receive benefit from a beautiful view of a mountain, but it would be tough to value using price-based models. Contingent valuation surveys are one technique which is used to measure these aspects. Contingent valuation is often referred to as a stated preference model, in contrast to a price-based revealed preference model. Both models are utility-based. Typically the survey asks how much money people would be willing to pay (or willing to accept) to maintain the existence of (or be compensated for the loss of) an environmental feature, such as biodiversity. -Wikipedia
How awesome would it be to use contingent valuation to find willingness-to-pay numbers for educational services, and then compare these to direct costs of education (in fees and/or taxes) and determine if there is producer or consumer surplus? And then to do this in Hunterdon County, New Jersey and Siem Reap, Cambodia and compare as a percentage of income to get an idea of who values education more?
Very awesome.
D’oh:
Do not attend graduate school unless you are fully supported by—at minimum—a multiyear teaching assistantship that provides a tuition waiver, a stipend, and health insurance that covers most of the years of your program. The stipend needs to be generous enough to support your actual living expenses for the location. Do not take out new debt to attend graduate school. Because the tenure-track job market is so bleak, graduate school in the humanities and social sciences is, in most cases, not worth going into debt for.
More at The Chronicle
David Spencer in The Freirean Approach to Adult Literacy Education:
The term “problem posing” is often misunderstood, perhaps because of the negative connotations given the word “problem” and the frequent reference to problem-solving skills in education. In the Freirean approach, cultural themes in the form of open-ended problems are incorporated into materials such as pictures, comics, short stories, songs, and video dramas, that are then used to generate discussion. The teacher asks a series of open-ended questions about these materials that encourage students to elaborate upon what they see in them. Ultimately, this questioning process leads the students to define the real-life problem being represented, discuss its causes, and propose actions that can be taken to solve it (Freire, 1970, 1973; Wallerstein, 1983). Ideally, the solutions evolving from the group’s discussion will entail actions in which reading and writing skills are required, thus giving learners a concrete purpose for the literacy they are developing.
I only ask you, friends of the Internet, as a creator and consumer of culture, to not confuse your enthusiasm for a thing—expressed in tweets and tumbls and comments and torrents and downloads and upthumbs and gifs—with actual support for a thing that you want to last.
He’s talking about last night’s episode of Community, but - good grief - this statement extends to so so so much more. Just replace enthusiasm for with outrage over, support for with action against, and change last to stop.
