Final Intrade v. Zogby Showdown Results

Superdelegate chicanery notwithstanding, Obama has won his party's nomination, so my head-to-head contest between a major pollster (Zogby) and major prediction market (Intrade) will be coming to a close.

Unsurprising to those who know a little bit about the scholarship, economics, and/or track record of prediction markets, the traders of Intrade provided us much better data this election season than the respondents to the Zogby polls.

Standings
Wins	Losses	Ties	Pct	Contender	Avg Eve Prob
7	3	11	59.5%	Intrade	71.3%
3	7	11	40.5%	Zogby	40.7%

Schedule
Score	Date		State	Party	Intrade	Zogby	Winner		Intrade Pct	Zogby Pct
7-3-11	6-May		IN	Dem	Clinton	2-way-tie	Clinton		85%	42%
6-3-11	6-May		NC	Dem	Obama	Obama	Obama		90%	50%
6-3-10	22-Apr		PA	Dem	Clinton	Clinton	Clinton		82%	47%
6-3-9	4-Mar		OH	Dem	Clinton	2-way-tie	Clinton		70%	45%
5-3-9	4-Mar		TX	Dem	Obama	2-way-tie	Clinton		57%	44%
5-2-9	5-Feb		NJ	Rep	McCain	McCain	McCain		96%	52%
5-2-8	5-Feb		NJ	Dem	Clinton	2-way-tie	Clinton		67%	43%
4-2-8	5-Feb		NY	Rep	McCain	McCain	McCain		98%	53%
4-2-7	5-Feb		GA	Dem	Obama	Obama	Obama		96%	48%
4-2-6	5-Feb		MO	Dem	Obama	Obama	Obama		63%	47%
4-2-5	5-Feb		CA	Rep	McCain	Romney	McCain		56%	40%
3-2-5	5-Feb		CA	Dem	Obama	Obama	Clinton		52%	46%
3-2-4	29-Jan		FL	Rep	McCain	2-way-tie	McCain		51%	33%
2-2-4	26-Jan		SC	Dem	Obama	Obama	Obama		90%	38%
2-2-3	19-Jan		SC	Rep	McCain	McCain	McCain		56%	29%
2-2-2	19-Jan		NV	Dem	Obama	Clinton	Clinton		54%	42%
2-1-2	15-Jan		MI	Rep	McCain	2-way tie	Romney		54%	27%
2-0-2	8-Jan		NH	Dem	Obama	Obama	Clinton		91%	39%
2-0-1	8-Jan		NH	Rep	McCain	McCain	McCain		82%	34%
2-0-0	3-Jan		IA	Dem	Obama	3-way tie	Obama		54%	28%
1-0-0	3-Jan		IA	Rep	Huckabee	2-way tie	Huckabee		53%	28%

Lord willing, I will have another showdown season, but will most likely choose another pollster. Whereas Intrade listed contracts and probabilities for every state primary, Zogby only provided election eve updates for only 21 of the 87 held to date. Rasmussen stands out as a worthy pollster, but I would be happy with any candidate referrals from my readers as well.

Yes, I'm glad we got Mike Lowell

ARod fainted during the birth of his first daughter.

I was there during the birth of my first daughter (as well as my second), about 18 inches from the birth canal, it wasn't so bad. I stayed upright and cut the umbilical cord and all that jazz.

Again, Obama channels Carter

here.

More insights into the theology of Gaia

The seeders and the seeds:

If beavers build a dam, it is perfectly natural. If men build a dam it is an assault on nature. A beehive is beautiful, an apartment complex is an eyesore. How can we reconcile this? In the purely material world, the world of matter and energy, the one devoid of gods and spirit, nature is all there is. Every human artefact is as natural as a flower, because it can be nothing else. There is nothing that is not a part of nature. Nature is all there is.

If one is to paint human action as toxic and unnatural, there has to be something outside of nature, either something above it, or something below it. So the goddess returns in her new incarnation as Gaia. We have sinned against her, and so fallen out of nature.\

We are the key. The only way living planets can possibly reproduce is to spawn intelligent life. Life capable of developing interstellar travel, capable of spreading life to other worlds. We are the ones entrusted with this task. The dolphins, the chimps, the whales, the parrots, none of them can do this. We are the only chance for Gaia. She created us to save her. But if we take Watson’s advice we condemn Gaia and all life to die when the sun finally reduces us to ashes. This would be a colossal failure of nerve and purpose, a dereliction of duty, a betrayal of life itself.

Consider a fetal bird, growing inside the egg. Slowly it devours all the energy resources in its small world, which grows ever more cramped. Should the bird try to reduce its footprint and so stave off the end just a little longer? Our purpose is not to graze alongside the buffalo, or to catch fish by hand. Our task is to ensure that Gaia’s children flourish long after Sol’s third planet is no more. We are not a virus or a cancer. We are Gaia’s only chance. She created us for a purpose, to take her througout the galaxy. We are the seeders, and we are the seeds. That is the true environmentalism.

The Ridiculous Farm Bill

taken down by Posner and Becker.

Taken down previously here, here, and here.

If you ARE outraged

you're not paying attention!

Arthur Brooks on happiness research on liberals and conservatives

Mr. Kahneman told me that conservatives think the world is fairer than liberals do, and this makes them happy:

If you believe that people generally get from life what they deserve to get, and if you belong to the majority who are doing fairly well (employed and healthy, for example), you will probably be more satisfied with life than an equally fortunate person who believes that there is much stubborn unfairness in the world.

In other words, that liberal you know who drives a Beemer isn’t very happy about it because he feels guilty.

Psychologist Philip Tetlock is a professor of leadership at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He suggests that conservatives seek out simplicity and clear moral values:

Conservatives quite unapologetically prefer leaders who project can-do decisiveness and dissonance — free rhetoric anchored in solid moral principles.

Assuming that it is easier to be happier in a world where right and wrong are crystal clear, this might lead conservatives to be happier than liberals.

In my book I argue that conservatives are more optimistic about the future than liberals are, and believe in each individual’s ability to get ahead on the basis of achievement.

Liberals are more likely to see themselves and others as victims of circumstance and oppression, and doubt whether individuals can climb without governmental help. Consider a bit of evidence.
• The 2005 Maxwell Poll on Civic Engagement and Inequality asked, “How much upward mobility — children doing better than the family they come from — do you think there is in America: a lot, some, or not much?” Among those sampled, 48 percent of below-average income conservatives believed there’s “a lot,” versus 26 percent of upper-income liberals.

• In the same poll, 90 percent of the poorer conservatives agreed that, “While people may begin with different opportunities, hard work and perseverance can usually overcome those disadvantages.” Just 65 percent of richer liberals agreed.

• The liberal-conservative differences on these questions persist when we control not just for income, but also for education, sex, family situation, religion, and race.

Not the party of Lincoln

with nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

Megan reviews the Kindle

and loves it.

If only I read books anymore ...

Cartoon of the day

(via Mark Perry)

Correlations in everything: how daughters affect their legislative fathers

reports Ian Ayers:

Ebonya Washington, an economist at Yale, has a great paper that was just published in the American Economic Review called “Female Socialization: How Daughters Affect Their Legislator Fathers’ Voting on Women’s Issues.”

She looks at members in the House of Representatives and looks to see whether their voting patterns change. She provides interesting evidence that, “conditional on total number of children, each daughter increases a congress person’s propensity to vote liberally on reproductive rights issues.”

I'm reporting that I am a bigger feminist than ever, since my 2 daughters arrived. But alas, I have still not drunk the kool aids of "affirmative action" nor "boys and girls are the same".

Correlation of the day: decreasing grocers and increasing obesity

over at Freakonomics.

Trade reduces poverty

even with China!

Increasing competition reduces poverty

even in Massachusetts:

Because there was no price competition, some of the biggest insurers wouldn't do business in the state. During this exercise in central planning, the number of insurers dropped to 18 last year, from more than 70 three decades ago. But as of April 1, the state government decided to try a little experiment in the free market. We do mean little – proposed premiums must still be filed with the regulator, who can approve them or not. And many factors used to set rates in other states – such as credit history – are barred.

Even so, this modest experiment in price competition is already working to reduce costs for consumers. Progressive, the third-largest insurer in the country, entered the market May 1 with rates that are on average 18% below the old price-controlled rates. Overall, premiums in the state are due to fall nearly 8% this year as insurers adjust to a world in which they need to compete to attract customers instead of bargaining with their regulator for price hikes. Imagine: When you remove price controls, supply increases and prices fall.

Losing our First Amendment rights

under the guise of "Campaign Finance Reform":

With his fund raising headed for the stratosphere, Mr. Obama has transformed himself from earnest reformer to Senator Moneybags willing to renege on his pledge to accept public financing. Mrs. Clinton flirted initially with another donor scandal, and now her big givers are maxed out so even she has to scramble for cash for the later primaries. And John McCain, the caped crusader of reform for more than a decade, has taken to bending rules so he can remain competitive: His campaign pledged his eligibility for federal matching funds as collateral for a bank loan, then declined public funding and its spending limits for the primary season.

If you don't like how this looks, send your complaints to the three candidates. They were all proponents of fund-raising rules sold as a way to "cleanse" the system. Send your complaints as well to the good-government types who pledge allegiance to the idea that money is the root of political evil. They have had their way since the Watergate era, passing reform after reform.

Yet in 2008 the role of money is more important than ever, only by means less accountable and transparent. To run for President nowadays means devoting a large share of your time to creating a fund-raising "machine." Scores of good potential candidates won't run because they can't stomach the endless wheedling required to raise campaign cash in $2,300 chunks.

The King Canutes of reform are outraged. Their answer is to stack new regulations on top of the current malfunctioning regulations they said would solve everything. Fred Wertheimer at Democracy 21, the godfather of this mess going back to the 1970s, now denounces the 527s, which he says create "enormous inequities."

Maybe he's referring to George Soros, his billionaire ally and fellow supporter of McCain-Feingold. Today Mr. Soros and his friends conduct a fleet of liberal 527s so broad that it is nearly untrackable. The reforms that were sold in the name of minimizing the influence of "fat cats" has made one of America's richest men among the most powerful in politics. The very reforms championed by Mr. McCain could help Mr. Soros defeat the Arizonan this year.

Another unsavory result has been deterring nonprofessional candidates from giving political lifers a run for their money. No one can realistically contemplate running for office without a team of lawyers to navigate the campaign laws. This year, to complicate matters further for the benefit of incumbents and insiders, those insiders are politicizing the Federal Election Commission that is supposed to enforce all of these rules. The FEC has been left without a quorum indefinitely, thanks to a Democratic charade over one of President Bush's nominees.

Last year, Mr. Obama placed a hold on the nomination of Hans von Spakovsky, on grounds that he had once supported a voter ID law in Georgia. Last week, a 6-to-3 Supreme Court majority agreed with Mr. von Spakovsky on voter ID. But don't expect that to sway Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who still refuses to confirm Mr. von Spakovsky as part of a traditional FEC nominee group of bipartisan pairs, or even to confirm two other FEC nominees without him. How convenient. Blocking an FEC quorum opens up maneuvering room for Democrats in a year when they have the financial advantage. They can count on their inventive campaign tactics receiving adjudication around, say, 2011.

The Founding Fathers would have had no trouble detecting the absurdity of having political actors determine what does or doesn't constitute free political speech. The First Amendment was written precisely to deny politicians such control. The Supreme Court has nonetheless upheld the idea of limiting campaign contributions on grounds that it would reduce "corruption." But after 30 years of contrary evidence, the Justices should revisit that fanciful notion. Money is required in modern America to amplify political speech. Attempting to limit or ban money merely gives the advantage to those best able to game the rules, or to the news media that can make nonfinancial "contributions" via endorsements.

If this campaign proves anything, it is that more reform on the post-Watergate model will only compound the McCain-Feingold-Clinton-Obama folly. The rules themselves are the scandal, empowering the powerful and making it harder for voters to judge the indebtedness of candidates to individuals or interest groups.

The better path is more simplicity and transparency, so office seekers can raise whatever amount they can from whomever they want so long as it is reported immediately on the Internet. It's time we reclaimed politics from the reformers who ruined it.

Quotes of the day

The remarkable thing about the Venkatesan affair, to me, is that her students cared enough to argue. Normally they would express their boredom with the material by answering emails on their laptops or falling asleep. But here they staged a rebellion, a French Counter-Revolution against Professor Defarge. Maybe, despite the professor's best efforts, there's life in American colleges yet.--Joseph Rago

Health care, the fastest growing major sector of the economy, is also the sector that is increasingly being absorbed by the government. Extrapolating current trends, Medicare alone would be most of GDP in another generation or so. It boggles my mind how someone can not be worried about too much government.--Arnold Kling

But the problem isn't politicians -- it's politics. Politics won't allow for the truth. And we can't blame the politicians for that. Imagine what even a little truth would sound like on today's campaign trail: "No, I can't fix public education. The problem isn't the teachers unions or a lack of funding for salaries, vouchers or more computer equipment The problem is your kids!"--P.J. O'Rourke

Global warming hippy-crites

The Daily Mail briefs us on the carbon emission hypocrisies of Leo DiCaprio, Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Chris Martin, Brad Pitt, Babs Streisand, and John Travolta (via Drudge).

I complained about the same thing last year.

Chris Masse will be thrilled to know

that Ron Paul's campaign is not yet over.

Unsecured laptops: the latest case for more limited government

via Jon Henke:

Apparently no policies or procedures which procured and secured laptops that gave the Department a way to keep up with who had them and whether they were secure.

I have to wonder what would happen to the person in the corporation I work for, and which provides me with a laptop, if this same problem existed. Well really I don’t have to wonder, but I do wonder what will happen to the person or persons responsible for this particular mess.

My guess - nothing.

At this point the Department has no idea of where the laptops are, what information has been compromised (and in situations like this, until you know otherwise you have to assume it has all been compromised), or frankly, what to do about it.

Republicans went to Washington to drain the swamp

and they ended up partnering with the alligators.--Fred Thompson

All-star list advocates for freedom in prediction markets

via Steve Levitt:

Abstract:
Prediction markets are markets for contracts that yield payments based on the outcome of an uncertain future event, such as a presidential election. Using these markets as forecasting tools could substantially improve decision making in the private and public sectors.

We argue that U.S. regulators should lower barriers to the creation and design of prediction markets by creating a safe harbor for certain types of small stakes markets. We believe our proposed change has the potential to stimulate innovation in the design and use of prediction markets throughout the economy, and in the process to provide information that will benefit the private sector and government alike.

Signatories:
Arrow, Kenneth J.,
Sunder, Shyam,
Forsythe, Robert,
Litan, Robert E.,
Zitzewitz, Eric,
Gorham, Michael,
Hahn, Robert W.,
Hanson, Robin,
Kahneman, Daniel,
Ledyard, John O.,
Levmore, Saul,
Milgrom, Paul R.,
Nelson, Forrest D.,
Neumann , George R.,
Ottaviani, Marco,
Plott, Charles R.,
Schelling, Thomas C.,
Shiller, Robert J.,
Smith, Vernon L.,
Snowberg, Erik C.,
Sunstein, Cass R.,
Tetlock, Paul C.,
Tetlock, Philip E.,
Varian, Hal R. and
Wolfers, Justin

I'm always hearing how Red Sox fans are obnoxious

being a Red Sox fan in New York. But the Yankee fans who tell me this never bring up stories like this.

Graph of the day: GDP vs. estimated IQ

(via Mark Perry)

Two birds with one stone

The interests against immigration and for universal healthcare need to join forces.

How free markets free people

here:

Knowing the fair market value of crops allows farmers to fetch better prices and circumvent local traders who used to dictate terms.

Justin Wolfers has the best roundup on Hillary's jumping the economic shark

here.

UPDATE:

Soon I expect to hear the Senator from New York promise to jump out of a tenth-story window and fly, to demonstrate defiance of "elite" physicists who doubt the feasibility of the project.--Arnold Kling, with credit to Megan McArdle

Megan weighs in:

Must we abandon common sense merely because economists occasionally speak it? No, I say, a thousand times no, no more than we would abandon children and dogs merely because Hitler was fond of them.

The majority rarely asks for liberty, but when it does

it's beautiful.

Bryan will shill for a stupid policy

if the effects approximate zero.

The All Purpose Excuse

at Dan Drezner's.

One of the founders of today's Halliburton

is LBJ!

Great visualization on consumer spending allocations and inflation over the past year

Click on graph for larger version. The original NY Times version provides annual inflation for specific goods. (Via Mark Perry)

Quotes of the day

Liquidity is not a virtue in and of itself unless it produces a benefit to the real economy.--Yves Smith

Of course, I agree with Yves, but then I would replace "Liquidity" with "Government" and agree even more. Besides protecting individual rights and property, I think government should be tiny to non-existent. The sin of pouring liquidity into the economy in the short-term is miniscule compared with the distortionary subsidization and the unconstitutional regulation of markets over the past century.

Life sends the message, "I'd better not be poor. I'd better get rich. I'd better make more money than other people." Meanwhile, politics sends us the message, "Some people make more money than others. Some are rich while others are poor. We'd better close that 'income disparity gap.' It's not fair!"

Well, I am here to advocate for unfairness. I've got a 10-year-old at home. She's always saying, "That's not fair." When she says this, I say, "Honey, you're cute. That's not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That's not fair. You were born in America. That's not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you." What we need is more income, even if it means a bigger income disparity gap.

Using politics to create fairness is a sin. Observe the Tenth Commandment. The first nine commandments concern theological principles and social law: Thou shalt not make graven images, steal, kill, et cetera. Fair enough. But then there's the tenth: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's."--P.J. O'Rourke (via Don Boudreaux)

And finally:

That's the spirit of America, as John Adams never quite said: may I advocate classical-liberal limited government, so that my son may advocate anarcho-capitalism, and that my grandson may plan to build new artificial countries in the ocean.--Brian Doherty, via Bryan Caplan

UPDATE: Intrade v. Zogby Showdown: Indiana and North Carolina

Some slight adjustments from Zogby and Intrade, on election eve. Indiana still interesting as Intrade traders are calling for Clinton, while Zogby is still reporting a statistical dead heat.

Date		State	Party	Intrade	Zogby
6-May		IN	Dem	Clinton	2-way-tie
6-May		NC	Dem	Obama	Obama

Intrade		Zogby
				NC Dem
9%		40%		Clinton
91%		48%		Obama
0%		5%		Someone else
		8%		Not sure
				IN Dem
83%		42%		Clinton
16%		44%		Obama
1%		7%		Someone else
		8%		Not sure

Previous post here.

Legistorm is a great disinfectant

You know, the sunlight thing.

Chris Masse has been covering the CFTC's call for feedback on prediction markets regulation

Check it out.

Markets in everything: Women who sun tan

"You look much hotter tan ... "

A breakthrough in battery capacity?

Here (via Scott Adams):

The new technology, developed through research led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours, a boon to ocean-hopping business travelers.

"It's not a small improvement," Cui said. "It's a revolutionary development."

The breakthrough is described in a paper, "High-performance lithium battery anodes using silicon nanowires," published online Dec. 16 in Nature Nanotechnology, written by Cui, his graduate chemistry student Candace Chan and five others.

The greatly expanded storage capacity could make Li-ion batteries attractive to electric car manufacturers. Cui suggested that they could also be used in homes or offices to store electricity generated by rooftop solar panels.

Steve McIntyre uncovers incompetence with IPCC (the climate change authority)

It seems that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is not following it's own policies on documentation and disclosure.

UPDATE: More bad news for buyers of global warming, courtesy of Steven Milloy.

UPDATE: Tim Blair has more:

The same people who only now predict a twelve-year cooling still expect to be taken seriously about eventual massive warming. They’re making this up as they go along. And it’s your fault for believing previous warming threats.

DISCLOSURE: I am short 2008.GLOBALTEMP.TOP5

Is the optimal carbon tax rate 0%?

Jim Manzi thinks so (via Tyler Cowen).

I wonder if and how Greg Mankiw would respond to this.

Quote of the day

... compared to forced-union states, right-to-work states have had faster economic growth, lower unemployment rates, greater employment growth, higher state real GDP growth, greater growth in personal income, higher population growth, and greater home price appreciation.--Mark Perry

The Intrade v. Zogby Showdown: Indiana and North Carolina

Date		State	Party	Intrade	Zogby
6-May		IN	Dem	Clinton	2-way-tie
6-May		NC	Dem	Obama	Obama

Intrade		Zogby
				NC Dem
10%		34%		Clinton
90%		50%		Obama
0%		8%		Someone else
		8%		Not sure
				IN Dem
85%		42%		Clinton
13%		42%		Obama
1%		7%		Someone else
		9%		Not sure

The Indiana contest will be of interest, as Zogby is showing a dead heat, while Intrade is heavily calling for Clinton.

Policymakers still can't grasp the concept of opportunity cost

Especially the environmental interests:

Wind, hydro, and all the "alternate" sources of energy have been dubbed "green" because they are supposedly clean, renewable, and sustainable. In fact, what being "green" really means is that they all require vast amounts of land.

In a 2007 paper – well on its way to becoming a classic – Jesse Ausubel, director of the program for the human environment at Rockefeller University, calculated the amount of wood it would take to run one standard 1,000-megawatt electrical plant, the kind that can power a city the size of Cincinnati. Feeding the furnace year-round would require a forest of one thousand square miles. We have 600 such coal plants around the country now – to burn wood instead would require a forest the size of Alaska.

Glen Canyon Dam, which can produce 1,000 megawatts of electricity, is backed up by a reservoir 250 miles square (Lake Powell, in Arizona and Utah). That's why we stopped building dams in the 1960s – because they were drowning scenic canyons and displacing populations.

Those 30-story windmills produce 1.5 megawatts apiece – about 1/750th the power of a conventional generating station. Getting 1,000 megawatts would require a wind farm 75 miles square.

In a January cover story for Scientific American, three leading solar researchers proposed meeting our electrical needs in 2050 by covering southwestern desert with solar collectors. The amount of land required would be 34,000 square miles, about one-quarter of New Mexico.

And that's where biofuels went awry. Nobody ever bothered to calculate how much land they would require.

Unintended consequences: Obama needs a working FEC now, but he previously mothballed it

James Taranto notes:

Barack Obama should be careful what he wishes for, to judge by this Associated Press dispatch:

Obama's presidential campaign wants federal regulators to investigate fellow Democrats who are backing Hillary Rodham Clinton's candidacy, taking intraparty discord to a new level of confrontation.

Obama's campaign lawyer, Robert Bauer, filed a complaint Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission, accusing the pro-Clinton American Leadership Project of violating campaign finance laws by running ads against Obama. The group is spending $920,000 for an ad in Indiana questioning Obama's economic policies.

There's just one little problem:

Complicating matters is the FEC's lack of a quorum to act on any investigation or regulatory matter. The six-member commission has four vacancies. Though the commissioners would be unable to act on such a complaint immediately, FEC investigations typically take more than a year to resolve.

What the AP doesn't note, though our John Fund did last month, is that the FEC's inability to conduct business is Obama's own fault:

Democrats balked at confirming Hans von Spakovsky, who had served on the FEC for two years. Sen. Barack Obama put his nomination on hold for years because Mr. von Spakovsky, as a Justice Department official, supported laws requiring voters to show photo ID.

Blog power

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide (via Drudge):

From the kitchen table in his tranquil suburban neighborhood, Brodkorb for the last year has used his blog "Minnesota Democrats Exposed" to launch a furious political assault on Franken. He's labeled the former comedian and liberal commentator a "mean-spirited and un-Minnesotan" candidate who's running a "desperate and ridiculous" campaign.

That's routine stuff in the world of political blogging, but in the last two months Brodkorb has scored two direct hits that have the Franken campaign reeling. Brodkorb scooped the traditional media by detailing extensive bookkeeping problems in New York and California that ultimately prompted Franken, this week, to pay about $70,000 in back taxes to 17 states.

Manny's Homerun Tracker

here. Very cool.

Quote of the day

Being a capitalist can be very rewarding and a lot of fun. Just don’t be the tallest capitalist, because you’re likely to get your head chopped off.--Larry Ribstein

Latest episode of Bush pulling a Carter

is brought to you by Stan Collender.

Initial episode here.

Arthur Herman feels that we have yet to learn the lessons of Vietman

as he writes:

Actually, the U.S. had won the war in Vietnam on the battlefield, just as the surge has done today in Iraq. Over Easter 1972, South Vietnamese forces, backed by U.S. airpower, crushed the last communist offensive, killing nearly 100,000 North Vietnamese troops.

The North was forced to sign peace accords in Paris recognizing the Republic of South Vietnam. The last 2,500 U.S. support troops went home. What they left was a fragile but sustainable peace, and an elected government in Saigon that was growing stronger every month.

After nearly two decades of devastating war and 58,000 American combat deaths, the U.S. left Southeast Asia. As the last helicopter lifted off from Saigon, the New York Times's Sydney Schanberg wrote an article with the title, "Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life." And the Times's columnist Anthony Lewis asked, "what future could possibly be more terrible than the reality" of a war that had cost so much in lives and treasure?

With the North Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer Rouge taking over, the world was about to find out.

At least 65,000 Vietnamese were murdered or shot after "liberation" – the equivalent in terms of Vietnam's population at the time, of killing three-quarters of a million people in today's U.S. The new communist regime ordered somewhere between one- third to one-half of South Vietnam's population to pass through its "re-education" camps, where perhaps as many as 250,000 died of disease, starvation, or were worked to death (the last inmates were not released until 1986).

That number does not include the thousands of "boat people" who tried to flee the totalitarian nightmare of communist Vietnam, and perished at sea.

Cambodia's fate was even worse. At least one and a half million innocent Cambodians were butchered or starved to death in the Khmer Rouge's killing fields and re-education camps, put to death by a fanatical regime that believed that anyone who wore eyeglasses must have "bourgeois intellectual tendencies" and be shot.

The scale of moral collapse and suffering went beyond Indochina. The pullout had a ripple effect on U.S. power and prestige, just as the proponents of the so-called "domino theory" had warned. American foreign policy, crippled by remorse and self-doubt, stood helplessly as others rushed into the power vacuum.

Marxist-Leninist regimes emerged not only in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, but in Ethiopia and Guinea Bissau (1974), Madagascar, Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Angola (1975), Afghanistan (1978), and Grenada and Nicaragua (1979). Soviet troops were welcomed in Fidel Castro's Cuba for the first time since the 1962 missile crisis. Cuban troops traveled freely to Africa to prop up Marxist regimes there.

In 1979 the Ayatollah Khomeini was able to establish his brutal theocratic rule over Iran, confident that America, having learned "the lessons of Vietnam," would never intervene.

Technology: Another argument for more limited government

The Census Bureau decided as long ago as 2000 that handheld computers were the future, and spent four years trying to develop one in-house, with little to show for it. That earlier failure led to the contract with Harris in 2006. As usual in government, no one in particular seems to be taking responsibility for the serial failures – which of course is part of the problem. There is little incentive for getting it right, because no one below the level of a political appointee ever loses a job for getting it wrong. You can even lose your job for getting it right if it means more efficiency.

In the case of the botched handhelds, the result is that the Census will now have to deploy some 600,000 temporary workers to go door to door and get the forms filled out by hand. The handhelds will still be used for "address canvassing," although even at that they can't handle more than 700 addresses at a time. For this great leap backward, taxpayers will pay $3 billion more for the census than originally estimated.

At a recent Senate Commerce hearing, Oklahoma's Tom Coburn put this in perspective: "So we're still going to pay $600, four times what the American [tax]payer should be paying, for something that can be done on a $150 BlackBerry." He added: "A $400 iPhone can do twice as much as the $600 handheld. You could buy iPhones and do all of this."

We wish we could be shocked by this fiasco. But no one who's followed the IRS's decades-long failure to upgrade a computer system built in the 1960s, or the Federal Aviation Administration's reliance on vacuum tubes in the age of global positioning systems, can really pretend to be surprised.

We keep hearing that the era of big government is back, and all of the presidential candidates are promising that Uncle Sam can and should do so much more for us. Here's a radical idea: Before it takes on more obligations, maybe the government should first have to show that it is capable of doing in remotely competent fashion what the Constitution has obliged it to do for some 220 years.

Obama's disappearing friends trick (and his last best friend?)

by Daniel Henninger:

This week we learned the limit of a dream in American politics. At Barack Obama's darkest hour, not one prominent ally came forward to support him. Everyone abandoned Everyman.

No prominent black clergyman came forth to make even the simple point that Jeremiah Wright's notion of the "black church" is but one point on a spectrum of faith. Rev. Wright, now written off as a virtual nut case, got more support from black clergymen than did Obama.

Barack Obama was bleeding by Monday and needed cover. Where, when he could have used them, were Obama's oh-so-famous endorsers: Jesse Jackson, Ted Kennedy, Oprah, John Kerry, Chris Dodd, Patrick Leahy, Tom Daschle, Amy Klobuchar, Claire McCaskill, Jay Rockefeller, John Lewis, Toni Morrison, Roger Wilkins, Eric Holder, Robert Reich, Ted Sorenson, Alice Walker, David Wilhelm, Cornel West, Clifford Alexander, Donald McHenry, Patricia Wald, Newton Minow?

Where were all the big-city mayors who went over to the Obama camp: Chicago's Richard Daley, Cleveland's Frank Jackson, Atlanta's Shirley Franklin, Washington's Adrian Fenty, Newark's Cory Booker, Baltimore's Sheila Dixon?

It isn't hard for big names to get on talk TV to make a point. Any major op-ed page would have stopped the presses to print a statement of support from Ted Kennedy or such for the senator. None appeared. Call it profiles in gopher-holing.

The list is long this week of supporters who let Barack Obama hang out to dry. More than a few were last seen running out on Hillary Clinton. Perhaps the solution here is for the two soloists to meet, flip a coin, and spend the next six months as a pair running against John McCain. It looks like they're the only friends they've got.

Hope for U.S. healthcare?

It is good news for his candidacy if Mr. McCain is making space now for political creativity and policy risks. Last week he laid down an economic plan, even venturing to Democratic redoubts like Youngstown, Ohio, and New Orleans's Ninth Ward. Now he has returned to his health-care reform, based on market principles and increased consumer choice, which he first outlined during the primaries.

He contended that the health insurance and delivery system is in fact failing many Americans – but that it was failing because of market distortions mostly created by the government itself. Fixing these irrationalities would both make insurance more affordable and increase overall coverage in the bargain. Nor would it require the vast new entitlement programs Democrats are eyeing.

His major proposal would change the tax treatment of insurance. To review: Today's tax code permits businesses to deduct the cost of providing insurance to their employees, but it doesn't do the same for individuals. This creates third-party payment problems; workers aren't aware of the full, true costs of many treatment decisions, part of the reason the U.S. has double-digit health-care inflation. And it makes insurance less affordable for everyone outside the employer-based system, who must pay with after-tax dollars besides. Mr. McCain would correct this imbalance with a refundable tax credit, restoring the parity of health dollars.

As the Senator argued, coverage shouldn't be "limited by where you work" and said that "Americans need new choices beyond those offered in employment-based coverage." Focusing on equity is a canny political argument. For those who don't get insurance through their employers, the current system is patently unfair. As the private market for health insurance became revitalized, everyone else would be more liberated from their bosses' system. A significant portion of the uninsured population at any given point is people who left or lost employment; but portable individual policies would follow them from job to job.

That's a broader political and economic argument than the exclusive liberal concentration on the uninsured. Mr. McCain is saying that the health-care system isn't working as it should, or delivering the quality it should, for the large majority of Americans. "The real reform," he noted, "is to restore control over our health-care system to the patients themselves," introducing more competition on price into the system.

It's true that individual subsidies might be required for some people with severe chronic illnesses who might have a harder time finding private insurance in this kind of world. So Mr. McCain sharpened his proposal for high-risk pools to cover "uninsurables," building on current insurance experiments in about two dozen states. Such provisions are crucial to a functioning market but also blunt a political liability that Democrats were eager to exploit in the fall's debates, suggesting that Mr. McCain is preparing to frontally assault liberal health-care assumptions.

If Mr. McCain's plan is short of ideal, the innovative portions outweigh its false lunges. It also energizes the intellectual progress conservatives have made in recent years in their health-care thinking. Not least, it marks significant progress for Mr. McCain, who often hasn't seemed as engaged with domestic policy as he ought to be. Fortunately, it looks as though the curtain is rising for a necessary debate about the role of government in health care.

Desperado: Hillary blames Bush for husband Bill's policy

reports Steven Thomma (via Drudge):

It's a story Hillary Clinton loves to tell, about how the Chinese government bought a good American company in Indiana, laid off all its workers and moved its critical defense technology work to China.

And it's a story with a dramatic, political ending. Republican President George W. Bush could have stopped it, but didn't.

If she were president, she says, she'd fight to protect those jobs. It's just the kind of talk that's helping her win support from working-class Democrats worried about jobs and paychecks, not to mention their country's security.

What Clinton never tells in the oft-repeated tale is the role prominent Democrats played in selling the company and its technology to the Chinese. She never mentions that big-time Democratic contributor George Soros helped put together the deal to sell the company, or that the sale was approved by the administration of her husband.

"The jobs went to China, but so did the technology. And now the United States military has to buy the magnets we need for the smart bombs we invented from China," she said as the union members booed.

Here's the complete story.

In 1995, General Motors decided to sell the Indiana-based Magnequench to a Chinese-American consortium. The consortium included:

• San Huan New Materials and Hi-Tech Co, a company owned by the Chinese Academy of Sciences;
• Onfem Holdings, a company controlled by the State Nonferrous Metals Industry Administration in the Peoples Republic of China;
• Soros Fund Management, headed by George Soros;
• The Sextant Group, founded by Archibald Cox Jr.;

Soros, of course, is the wealthy investor who has contributed vast sums to Democratic candidates and liberal causes.

He's given more than $250,000 to Democratic campaign committees, tens of thousands to individual Democratic candidates, and about $2.5 million to the liberal group, Moveon.org, according to Federal Election Commission records.

He's also contributed to Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign, and to Obama's Senate and presidential campaigns. He contributed to Republican Sen. John McCain's first presidential campaign, in 1999, when he was running against Bush for the Republican nomination.

Because Magnequench made magnets for smart bombs, the sale to a group including foreign owners required approval under a 1988 law.

After a 30-day review, the Clinton administration's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which includes representatives of the Pentagon, approved the sale in 1995.

The buyers reportedly promised to keep manufacturing in the United States.

Yet in 1998, they started building a new plant in China, close to the source of the raw materials used in the magnets.

The company reorganized in 1999, buying out Soros as well as Onfem Holdings.

In 2000, Magnequench bought a magnet factory in Valparaiso, Indiana, the same year it started operations at its China plant.

In 2001, it closed its original plant in Anderson, Indiana.

And in 2003, it decided to close the Valparaiso plant, laying off its 225 workers.

Indiana politicians asked the Bush administration to intervene.

Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., and Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-Ind., said the move would leave the United States without a significant domestic source of rare-earth magnets used in smart bombs. The Valparaiso plant made about 80 percent of the magnets bought by the Pentagon, they said.

The administration did not block the move.

The Clinton campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

No hint of recession in the first quarter of 2008!

Real GDP for Jan-Mar 2008 was reported to be 0.6% (annualized). This means that the traditional definition of two consecutive quarters of declining real GDP has only the second-third or the third-fourth quarters as timeframes to possibly declare recession in 2008.

Of course, this is the preliminary report, and 2 revisions will be reported in May and June.

And yes, I know there are plenty of government statistics conspiracy theorists out there that exclude any reported data that does not support their theses. My usual response to them: Yes, the government data is noisy, incomplete, and filled with artifacts of error, but can you show me your indicators which are superior to the government data? (Silence and blank stares usually follow).

Here is the last 24 hours of trading of the 2008 Recession contract at Intrade, the huge sell off occurring after the 8:30 am report a few minutes ago:
DISCLOSURE: I am short US.RECESSION.08

Cartoon of the day

(via Joshua Gans)

Hillary's diet: Atkins for show, Pork for dough

discovers Pat Toomey:

“Senator Clinton was happy to support earmark reform when she knew the bill would not pass, but when it comes to being a leader on the issue Senator Clinton is nowhere to be found.”

“Hillary Clinton defends these projects as critical to New York, but she doesn’t explain why taxpayers across the country should be forced to fund her pork projects without so much as a vote or why she thinks she knows how to spend their money better than they do. After the United States Senate rejected her request for $1 million for a hippie museum last year, one would think Senator Clinton would have learned her lesson.”

Toomey also derides Congress' Farm Bill for robbing from the middle class to pay the rich, and starving the poor in the process.

School vouchers work

according to Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters (via Andrew Coulson).

Irony of the day: Who is supplying those Free Tibet flags?

Oh.

Peyton Manning is no Roger Staubach

that's for sure.

The brainwashing continues

William Gray being the latest casualty (via Glenn Reynolds). The consumers of this cooked science are the victims.

CNN is smarter than social scientists when it comes to analyzing war

says Bryan Caplan.

Obama/Bush v. Clinton/McCain

over gasoline tax policy.

UPDATE: Greg Mankiw is not impressed with the McCain/Clinton plan.

UPDATE: Pigs fly!

2008 Recession contracts trading below 50% probability

where it hasn't been since 2007.

DISCLOSURE: I am short US.RECESSION.08

According to Intrade, as Ohio goes, so goes the 2008 presidential election

notes Eddy Elfenbein:

I went to Intrade to see the latest results on outcome for each state's vote in the electoral college. The table below shows each state, the latest price for Democratic and GOP candidate to win the state, the number electoral votes and the projected number for the GOP candidate (sorry Dems, it just seemed easier that way).

The projected number is the GOP contract times the number of electoral votes. The total comes to 251.65, which indicates a Democratic victory. Let me add the usual caveats that this is far from scientific, and the trading volume is very light.

A few observations. Once again, Ohio is the Middle C State. The states that are more in the GOP column than Ohio added up to 258 electoral votes, the states that are more Democratic add up to 260. You need 270 to win, so as goes Ohio, so goes the nation. At least, according to Intrade.

Currently, five Bush states are in the Democratic column; Nevada, Colorado, Ohio, New Mexico and Iowa.

Quotes of the day

There are some things you learn best in calm, some in storm.--Willa Cather

Having financed several of America’s largest home builders, I know a few things about the housing industry. What happened to housing was not a failure of securitization, but rather a disastrous lowering of underwriting standards and other unfortunate practices.--Michael Milken

Look, it’s really quite simple: If there were a significant population of undecided gray aliens in Pennsylvania, right now Hillary Clinton would be talking fondly about her abduction by aliens and all the life lessons learned on that space ship. She’d be scolding Barack Obama for the way he demeans them. Obama, in turn, would say that he understands their bitterness when the US government has spent decades promising change but instead dissecting their kin in Area 51. But if all the gray aliens lived in states like California, Texas, South Dakota, or Vermont, i.e. states that aren’t even close and don’t matter for the nomination? Then we’d never hear a peep (or telepathic signal) about them. If anything, we’d hear about the need to build a big fence and hope that the aliens don’t learn how to fly over it.--"Thoreau", via Virginia Postrel

As God has shown us, by turning stones to bread ...

Nancy Pelosi's biblical theology is as sound as Lionel Richie's.

(In "We Are The World", penned by Richie, Willie Nelson sings the lyric in the post title. Unfortunately, Richie misremembers Satan's temptation of Christ for a miracle that Christ performed).

Another Richie heresy:

We're saving our own lives

Larry Ribstein on Prediction Markets

Hear, hear:

The pollsters are calling a dead heat in Indiana. Should you even be interested? The pollsters haven’t done so well in calling past primaries. Gordon Crovitz discusses a better idea in today’s WSJ:

We think of forecasting stock-market performance and presidential outcomes as entirely different exercises. When stocks are assessed for future earnings, we don't look to opinion polls to define their price. Why shouldn't active, anonymous trading on politics, backed by money, work just as well in setting the odds of a political outcome? * * *In contrast, polls depend on getting a representative sample, truthful responses to poll questions, and proper use of statistics. Election-predicting markets seem to work so long as there are enough traders whose aggregate information is fully reflected in bets. * * *Iowa Electronic Markets claims that its results have been more accurate 75% of the time versus some 1,000 opinion polls since the early 1990s.

The problem is that regulations, primarily those against gambling, stunt these markets. The Iowa prediction market operates under a CFTC no action letter that limits bets, and still gets threats from state attorneys general, as Tom Bell writes. For a handy summary of the legal state of play, see Michael Abramowicz’s Predictocracy, 49-53.

And even if you think that prediction markets are like gambling, that doesn't necessarily justify regulating them. As Steve Levitt argues:

To me, there is no difference between a “prediction” market and a “gambling” market. If there is demand for people who either want financial risk surrounding an event or want to hedge risk, why should the government get in the way? It doesn’t matter whether it’s the value of a bond, a share of stock, a presidential election, a firm’s likelihood of hitting its quarterly numbers, or the chances that the White Sox will win the pennant. In general I am not much of a libertarian, but our government’s policy towards gambling is completely idiotic and rife with internal contradictions.

Maybe all this thinking will gain some traction. Then in future elections we may come to see as rather quaint the idea of getting information by asking people to give anonymous opinions about candidates, with no penalty or constraint on lying.

Here are the Intrade v. Zogby standings:

Wins	Losses	Ties	Pct	Contender	Avg Eve Prob
6	3	10	57.9%	Intrade	69.6%
3	6	10	42.1%	Zogby	40.2%

And the schedule (Zogby data much more limited than Intrade):

Score	Date		State	Party	Intrade	Zogby	Winner		Intrade Pct	Zogby Pct
6-3-10	22-Apr		PA	Dem	Clinton	Clinton	Clinton		82%	47%
6-3-9	4-Mar		OH	Dem	Clinton	2-way-tie	Clinton		70%	45%
5-3-9	4-Mar		TX	Dem	Obama	2-way-tie	Clinton		57%	44%
5-2-9	5-Feb		NJ	Rep	McCain	McCain	McCain		96%	52%
5-2-8	5-Feb		NJ	Dem	Clinton	2-way-tie	Clinton		67%	43%
4-2-8	5-Feb		NY	Rep	McCain	McCain	McCain		98%	53%
4-2-7	5-Feb		GA	Dem	Obama	Obama	Obama		96%	48%
4-2-6	5-Feb		MO	Dem	Obama	Obama	Obama		63%	47%
4-2-5	5-Feb		CA	Rep	McCain	Romney	McCain		56%	40%
3-2-5	5-Feb		CA	Dem	Obama	Obama	Clinton		52%	46%
3-2-4	29-Jan		FL	Rep	McCain	2-way-tie	McCain		51%	33%
2-2-4	26-Jan		SC	Dem	Obama	Obama	Obama		90%	38%
2-2-3	19-Jan		SC	Rep	McCain	McCain	McCain		56%	29%
2-2-2	19-Jan		NV	Dem	Obama	Clinton	Clinton		54%	42%
2-1-2	15-Jan		MI	Rep	McCain	2-way tie	Romney		54%	27%
2-0-2	8-Jan		NH	Dem	Obama	Obama	Clinton		91%	39%
2-0-1	8-Jan		NH	Rep	McCain	McCain	McCain		82%	34%
2-0-0	3-Jan		IA	Dem	Obama	3-way tie	Obama		54%	28%
1-0-0	3-Jan		IA	Rep	Huckabee	2-way tie	Huckabee		53%	28%

Progressive inflation

reported by Christian Broda and John Romalis (via Greg Mankiw):

Using household data on non-durable consumption between 1994 and 2005 we document that much of the rise of income inequality has been offset by a relative decline in the price index of the poor....

we find that inflation for households in the lowest tenth percentile of income has been 6 percentage points smaller than inflation for the upper tenth percentile over this period. The lower inflation at low income levels can be explained by three factors: 1) The poor consume a higher share of non-durable goods —whose prices have fallen relative to services over this period; 2) the prices of the set of non-durable goods consumed by the poor has fallen relative to that of the rich; and 3) a higher proportion of the new goods are purchased by the poor.

We examine the role played by Chinese exports in explaining the lower inflation of the poor. Since Chinese exports are concentrated in low-quality non-durable products that are heavily purchased by poorer Americans, we find that about one third of the relative price drops faced by the poor are associated with rising Chinese imports.

UPDATE: Mark Perry points out massive deflation:

... an international phone call that cost $100 in 1973 now costs only $1.60 (adjusted for inflation), and a call that cost $10 now costs only 16 cents.