Sunday 3/30/14 Musings

We use a lot of limes in our house and have noticed how the price has ratcheted higher over the last few months.  Today, I read an article about how disease and unfortunate weather when Mexican lime trees were blossoming created the shortage.  Also, demand has picked up substantially over the years, so the supply shortage shows that the basic supply/demand curve has a fair degree of inelasticity in it.  In other words, buyers pay up rather than not purchase limes or switch to other citrus.

Timothy Egan discussed how scientists have known for decades that strip logging certain types of hills creates the conditions that can lead to mudslides.  It is disingenuous for political leaders to say they had no way of knowing a mud slide could happen.  The science was there to say it could happen, but there is no science to say when it will happen.  People make decisions all the time to risk their home and life to a natural disaster.  The state cannot tell them to not do that.  But then these people cannot blame the state when something bad happens.  And they should not look to the rest of us for some compensation for their loss of home.  That is what is happening with flood insurance and we cannot fix it for the same reason we cannot have prudent gun control.  Homeowners who benefit from Federal subsidized flood insurance can swing elections so politicians with beaches in their district refuse to sanction fully priced flood insurance.

What I keep thinking is that science denial is mostly about greed and a desire to brave the unknown odds in the belief either (i) that the government will provide a FEMA safety net or (ii) the voter will win the game during their lifetime and the price will be paid by a subsequent generation, so it is their problem, not the voter's.

Ross Douthat once again wrote about religion and how people feel about state provided benefits vs church provided benefits.  I don't see society that way, even though Douthat assumes as a securlarist  that I think state provided benefits are better.  This is a chicken and an egg discussion.  My religiousness, or lack thereof, did not start with one iota of thought about how I will get services.

I decided upon my beliefs independently long before I had any awareness about a social safety net (age 16 or 17).  Douthat thinks that a safety net was part and parcel of my thought process.  What I think about a social safety net, comes from an examination of reality and hard evidence that it is necessary for a state to provide a social safety net in this modern industrial world.  We cannot go back to the world of some ideal that never existed, poor people died early all the time in that world, and for Douthat to think we should be fighting in politics for this ideal that only existed in selected ways and never supported 100% of the population, just shows how even thoughtful Republicans can simply be wrong.  We need social policies that work for all.