The Importance Of Opposition

Why I doubt the wisdom of consensus politics

Life is easy for anyone who has power or authority if no-one questions their use of that power. Life is extremely difficult if alongside power and authority there is effective opposition.

However without effective opposition then good decision making on difficult or controversial matters is almost impossible. Arrogance and ignorance dominate if the only voices heard are in agreement. That is why the term ‘yes-men’ is so pejorative. Any decision important enough to be taken by government is also important enough to hear and judge the reasoning for both (or indeed all) sides. To listen requires at least some level of doubt.

The Conservative Party seemed at one time to recognise this, and when Margaret Thatcher was seen not to be listening to those who disagreed with her she was removed. New Labour only ever cared about power, and silenced internal dissent ruthlessly while despising the opposition. For most of the time opposition was weak, and Labour took full advantage of that weakness. That is why so much New Labour legislation has had unintended consequences where they have been incompetent, or consequences that were not those the authors claimed to be striving for.

Barack Obama never had effective opposition before he entered the race for the White House. He was a Chicago politician in the Democrat Party, which not only has all-but-guaranteed office but a party machine of legendary ruthlessness and corruption. Even in his work as a law professor Obama did not have the usual academic opposition, for the simple reason that he appears not to have published anything. He lectured, but there was little to challenge what he taught.

During campaigning Obama did see opposition, but once he was the Democrat candidate the media shielded him from and effective scrutiny of his policy (or lack of it) and political history. When he did see any his response was petulant, aggressive and ignorant. Obama wanted to silence opposition, not listen to it and response, and he or his agents have often used his skin colour to do so, accusing anyone who disagreed with him of being racist however strong their argument.

Once in power Obama did not anticipate opposition, with Democrats holding the House of Representatives and a filibuster-proof Senate majority.

However opposition to Obama’s policy out in the real world has been so consistent and vocal that it has had practical influence. The massive changes he wanted to make to the healthcare system in the USA are unlikely to pass in anything close to the form he wanted.

How did Obama respond to the debate about the issue ion his latest major speech? As Power Line notes in an excellent article he called it bickering. Now this is one line in a long speech, but I see it as the most telling. Along with many other attacks on his opponents it shows that Obama does not understand the importance of debate, the vital role played by debate.

In addition the Power Line article highlights several passages in Obama’s speech where he claims the opposition is lying when it seems he is the one being dishonest. While the bill might not have death panels or give free coverage to illegal immigrants the results are the same. British experience with NHS tourism (people who are not entitled to care coming to Britain just to get treatment) and the decisions of NICE suggest that Power Line is right.

The Power Line article also shows how useful opposition could be if Obama really wanted to improve healthcare (as opposed to help his socialist backers). The debate has brought up many ways of improving healthcare, such as opening state markets, tort reform and decoupling insurance from employment, that would certainly improve health and be supported not only by Republicans but most importantly by the people.

In his election campaign Obama claimed to want that consensus politics that I so distrust. In fact what he wanted was for others to agree to his ideas, he didn’t want to listen to theirs. I am glad in a way that he does not want consensus, glad he has not reached out for a cross-party back-room deal. It has energised his opposition; the health bill has been studied by opponents while proponents admit to not having read it.

Even better his opposition is within the people, it is a grassroots movement, whatever socialists say. The Republican Party has so little to do with the effective opposition that it has been wrong-footed. It has not taken advantage and realigned itself with the protesters, many of whom are non-aligned or even Democrat voters.

However it is a pity he didn’t use the opposition, listen to those opponents.

The demands for consensus politics must be resisted. Any action of government should be challenged by intelligent, reasoned opposition. Then it is far more likely that new legislation will not only have the intentions stated by proponents but it might actually achieve those intentions as its sole consequence.

The NHS and Professor Hawking

There has been a huge fuss in parts of the US left-wing blogosphere and commentariat after a dumb comment in Investor’s Business Daily, suggesting that Stephen Hawking would not have survived under the NHS. For those Americans not especially familiar with scientific academia it is an understandable error – he ‘speaks’, after all, with an American accent (which he chose to keep when offered a new English-accented speech synthesiser, as he by then identified with that voice).

It seems some of the howling criticism is far more flawed than the original article, which at least had a valid point despite the erroneous example.

Hawking himself, an old leftie, makes a ridiculously claim that he “... wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS”, but no apparent attempt to justify that assumption.

Ezra Klein claims that the IBD was telling lies, a truly inane suggestion; if they had known Hawking was British then they would never have published the article. It is not as if there was any chance of the error slipping by unnoticed!

Yes, the article does over-simplify the calculation NICE makes of the value of extended life or improvement in quality of life. However nuanced it might be, that calculation is still made, and the monetary figure given is roughly correct. The inclusion or exclusion of nursing care is irrelevant to those whose life (or quality of life) is dependent on drugs or surgery, and they pay the same into the system. Who is to say they should suffer?

The wonderfully-named (and it appears otherwise sensible) Donklephant* suggests that talk of rationing is an intellectually-bankrupt scare tactic. Here is where my tale is told.

I was earning in total roughly £4-6000 below average wage (depending on weather, luck and economics). I was employed part-time, paid for time I worked, so I could also work self-employed in other capacities. Therefore I was only paid as and when I worked, and simply could not afford to take time off.

I hurt my back. I could not physically work more than an hour or two in my employment, and legally was unable to work at all in the role I was hired for self-employed. I had a choice, which was to wait six weeks to see a consultant, then an indeterminate time (by previous experience a modest three weeks in that area of the country, but no guarantee) for physiotherapy, or pay for a consultation and physio, a total the thick end of £500, which I did not have spare.

Of course I paid; what did you think, I could afford to drop my pay by 70% for a couple of months?

What is that but rationing? Waiting is still rationing, whether the patients rationed out of play recover without treatment, give up and accept chronic illness, pay for private care or die. That is still rationing.

The final insult was the VAT on part of my bill (I needed an assessment to prove I could do my job, and although treatment is VAT-free that was not), 17.5% going to pay for people paid more than I to receive healthcare I could not have.

This might be only one example, but in order to destroy the entire left-wing basis of the NHS there is only need of one counter-example. How can anyone possibly justify charging me tax to pay for the NHS under those circumstances?

*Donkey = Democrat, Elephant = Republican, for those less familiar with US politics.

Update: the Telegraph has an excellent article on the NHS with reference to US healthcare.

I Find Myself Repeating … (updated)

That the Left don’t want to know, they’d rather be Left than right

I wrote a couple of days ago about Paul Krugman not wanting to know the arguments against Obama’s changes to health-care arrangements in the US. This proposal is highly political, and of course those campaigning in favour tend to be left-wing, but also rather authoritarian, as the legislation is coercive rather than permissive. ‘Authoritarian left’ is a pretty good description of New Labour, and the antithesis of libertarian.

So the methods used to try to win support for the change interest me, regardless of whether the legislation itself is beneficial or harmful. This video, which I found on the US conservative website RS Redstate, is a meeting of the American Association of Retired People, the AARP.

The middle-aged, left-wing activists running this meeting did not want to know, and I think that is because they had no doubt that they were right.

• Notice that the woman who opened the meeting told the members what their views were, “…I think we can all agree…”. When they told her that she was wrong, she accused them of being rude. She did not want to know their views.
• When it is pointed out that she works for them, her dismissive body language says that she didn’t really want to know that.
• The man who takes over starts out solidly on broadcast mode, dishonestly giving one side of the story. He points out that the current system limits healthcare to support his advocacy of a change, implying by omission that government-run healthcare is not rationed (as we in Britain know to our cost it is).
• At the 2-minute point of the video the first woman says, quite unconvincingly, that she is sorry to her members. She then walks out, clearly in a huff. She certainly did not want to know what her members told her.
• As the meeting continues the next opinion heard is from a man saying he had never been canvassed on the issues. Someone made (left-wing) policy for the association but did not want to know members’ views.

You might say that Obama does want to know. It appears that he wants to be informed of any email or website arguing against the planned legislation. Of course if he planned to have these objections considered with a view potentially to amending the legislation then this would be a laudable if inefficient request.

Read Obama’s words, “…those who profit from the status quo, or see this debate as a political game … are filling the airwaves and the internet with outrageous falsehoods to scare people into opposing change …”.

“So we've got to get out there, fight lies with truth, and set the record straight”

That does not sound to me like a man who wants to hear the arguments. He does not want to know. It appears he has already decided that he is right and any possible argument against is wrong. Actually I think it is more to do with power and control, and Obama is not interested in the arguments against the legislation because they all concern health, wealth and liberty, and I suspect that neither is his goal (at least relating to other people).

It appears that, as is so often the case with authoritarians, Obama has broken the law in even asking for this information. I do hope this is tested in court and he is humiliated. He has already received bad publicity from this incredibly stupid email, more can only be better.

Of course more evidence of the American Left’s unwillingness to even listen on the issue of healthcare is in the video in the update to my post on the police state.

Still the Left does not want to know, because it still does not doubt. This is why, dear reader, that on the subject of the Left and most especially Barack Obama, I have always had My Doubts.

Glen Reynolds, of Instapundit, is the ultimate source of all links, so many, many fine hats tipped to the great legal academic.

Update: the US Democrats are willing to stack an ‘open’ meeting with union members just to avoid having to listen to their opponents. They don’t want to know.

Update: it appears that Barack Obama is breaking another article of the same privacy law. David Hardy, the blogger who points this out, reckons this to be a far more serious breach. Oh, dear.

Update: so keen not to know they try to start fights … with the people Democrats are calling a mob.

Update: it helps of course if you only answer written questions after your talk, but only tell your supporters that they can submit written questions. Then get your supporters to beat up opponents.

The Left Don’t Want to Know

Or ‘Better Left than right’.

Sorry for the hiatus in blogging. Have had a busy week working and visiting family.

However I did catch Glen Reynolds’s link to this clip of a television debate in America about the proposed changes to the healthcare system. In the clip a chap called Paul Krugman, a self-proclaimed ‘liberal’ New York Times blogger, asks the few Canadian members of the audience if they think their government-run health system is terrible, and although the proportion is not given, all or nearly all of them said they thought it was terrible.

What I found really telling was not that this was a great argument against Obama’s plans (which it is of course) but Mr Krugman’s response, which was “Bad move on my part!”.

So what Mr Krugman is saying is that it is more important to win a TV debate than to learn something (that there might be a lot of people who have a bad impression or a bad experience of government-run healthcare) or that the debate comes to the best answer it can. Left-wing ideology seems, by extension, to be more important to Mr Krugman than good healthcare.

Often I get the same impression from the current UK government and the British left in general, on the subject of the NHS but even more on education, where the ideology of ‘equality’ is more important than the actual welfare of young people. Comprehensive education is important enough to ignore its failings, equal access is more important than maintaining the quality of education at our world-class universities, and instead of dumping ideologically-driven teaching methods and curriculums in schools which have damaged state education the universities are told to bias their selection against privately-schooled applicants.

There are more examples, certainly in the welfare system, in defence, on the EU, where winning the argument is more important than finding the best course, but it is more dangerous in education and health, where the results will last for decades or are often fatal.

I also think this theme fits in well with my previous post on the intended consequences of legislation being to keep power; the intentions might also be to keep ideological purity.

Update: Obama and the British Labour Party have the same dislike of the concept of education vouchers (despite Obama saying that he would consider the issue on merit). This looks more like left-wing dogmatism than rational objection with more evidence. Yet more evidence here, but still Ed Balls, Gordon Brown and Barack Obama would rather be Left than right.

Update: It appears that Paul Krugman holds a Nobel Prize for economics. It also appears that he has no desire to get the correct answer to a problem, and that he knows nothing at all about people’s response to incentive (which is core to economics and econometrics), since he fails to understand the limitations of government-run healthcare. Are they giving away Nobel Prizes with Cornflakes now?

Giving Up Can Be Murder

Suicide is not the intended effect of giving up smoking. Nor is committing the perfect murder.

My apologies for the long post. I felt that some background was needed, but there is a serious point at the end which I have not seen documented anywhere else.

Champix (or Chantix in the USA) is the trade name of varenicline. It is intended as an aid to stopping smoking, and is available on the NHS. Of course like any medical treatment it has side effects. Could those side effects lead to serious violence?

With the authoritarian stamp of the smoking ban and other government pressure there are a lot of people trying to give up smoking. There is also an increasing medicalisation of attempts to give up. Every other advert on our local radio station seems to be for the Stop Smoking Service. Fortunately Pirate FM rarely manages to finish an advert without interrupting it with the start (or even the middle) of another. Has anti-smoking political pressure allowed an unsafe drug on the market?

Varenicline is the first drug to be licensed to help stop smoking that doesn’t contain nicotine. The manufacturer, Pfizer, quotes that after twelve weeks of treatment with Champix or an inert placebo four times as many of those taking Champix are still not smoking. The figures at twelve weeks are 44% of those taking the real drug not smoking and 11% of those on the placebo. This is better than none-medical methods or nicotine-replacement therapy (NRT).

Here is where I follow Pfizer’s publicity off the path of good science, because they don’t quote figures that I can find, and I am quoting non-specifics without being able to provide a reference, as I heard this on Radio 4 some days ago. I looked in the NICE Report (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) and they have blanked out the figures.

Pfizer boasts about rates of success giving up at 12 weeks, and these are better than NRT. The problem is that giving up for 3 months does not provide great health benefits. The suggestion I heard on the radio, although the figures are redacted from the table 5, page 32 of the NICE report (lovely word, redacted; has a ring of dishonesty about it) was that at twelve months the success of Champix was almost identical to NRT, certainly within the statistical errors of the trials.

So we have a drug that is as effective as NRT. I have never smoked, but from friends I am aware that NRT can be unpleasant and quitting can be difficult, so an alternative is surely welcome, is it not? Well let us look again at the side effects.

Side effects listed as common include dizziness and hypertension, either of which can themselves be dangerous in some circumstances. However that is within the normal range of side effects of many medicines. Also listed as a common side effect is ‘emotional disorder’. The point made on Radio 4 and in the side effects link was that this can go as far as depressed moods and suicidal ‘ideation’, i.e. feeling down and having thoughts about suicide, a combination that seems to me rather dangerous.

So far this is an accepted, documented problem. Careful monitoring and warnings to patients to see a doctor or stop taking the medication at the first sign of depression or suicidal thoughts can deal with this. What about the undocumented effects? Could Champix lead to murder?

There is nothing I can find in the literature beyond warnings of ‘behavioural changes, depression, or suicidal ideation’. Even these do not get a mention in Pfizer’s adverts, although warnings against operating machinery do and all the information is on the website.

I think that “I wanted to kill ’im”, to quote a friend who was taking Champix, goes a bit beyond the usual understanding of ‘behavioural changes’. A mild and pleasant young lady, very fond of her lover, was driven to thoughts about killing him, and a desire to do so.

Of course this is more bad science, anecdotal evidence, but as I do not have the authority or capacity to do better science it will have to do. This friend had never had such thoughts before taking Champix, nor has she since giving up in fright. She was on no other medication likely to have this effect, and had no expectation of a reaction that might cause a placebo effect. Champix warnings do suggest psychological changes, and the friend said that she suffered others, being in a daze much of the time. In fact she attributes her giving up entirely to forgetting to smoke, such was the influence of the drug (of course that means the drug succeeded, as an addict would be unlikely to forget even then).

So what if my friend had killed her lover? Beyond the distress to her and others, she would have been given a life sentence, as this is not an acknowledged side effect. Her life would have been ruined. What if she had not been a pleasant person in love with her paramour, and clever enough to recognise the responsibility of the drug for her thoughts? What if such feelings are induced in a self-centred, unintelligent but otherwise harmless person? Thousands of them smoke. Will any be induced to murder?

As more is known about the drug, and this effect, if real, is documented the drug becomes a serious danger. What is to stop any smoker bored of someone close to them from starting a course of Champix, then in cold blood murdering that person? In court the murderer breaks down in remorse, blaming the medication. Manslaughter while the balance of mind disturbed milord, now given up the medication, no longer a threat. Free to go. So we are where I hinted that we would reach; the perfect murder.

Fortunately my other half cannot take Champix, due to her job, so I am safe!

Update: Mark (whose profile indicates he is interested in "smoking cessation") confirms in the comments that both Champix and NRT have overall success around 7%. Also in the comments generalsn has a link to a brief article on a financial website which does mention FDA concerns over violence in people taking the drug.