Code of Ethics for Elected Officials

A lot of elected officials, especially at the Federal level, have started using social media, some fairly heavily.  This has been met with mixed feelings.  Some people see this as increased government transparency, while others have seen this as political propaganda.  Either way, participation in social media presents a serious conflict of interest for elected officials.  While it definitely can and probably should be used to increase government transparency, it can also be used to influence people and to spread propaganda, misinformation, and even downright lies, and it has actually been used this way.

As such, we need a code of ethics for elected officials, that includes but is not limited to the use of social media.  I would like to suggest a set of ethical rules for elected officials.

1. Elected officials should always specify whether a social media post, video, recording, or other publication is being produced in an official capacity.  Ideally, elected officials should always use separate accounts for official and personal communications, and the personal accounts should not reference the elected office of the official in any way.
2. Social media content published in an official capacity should stick to facts.  It should not contain propaganda, personal opinions, campaign advertisements, promotion of political or personal agendas, or anything else not directly related to the job the person has been elected to.  Statements of intent to vote on a particular bill in a particular way are appropriate but should avoid any explanation except, "This is what my constituents want".  (And even that explanation might come back to bite you, if it turns out they don't want that.)
3. Official publications that contain information later discovered to be incorrect should be amended whenever possible, noting the error and resolution, and if it is not possible, an official retraction should be published as soon as the mistake is discovered, and reasonable effort shall be made to direct all past, present, and future consumers of the original publication to the retraction.
4. Official publications should generally be reviewed by advisors and/or peers before being published.
5. Official publications should adhere to any standards, regulations, and policies set by the government body the elected official is a member of.
6. Unofficial publications should avoid any and all implication that they might be official in nature or otherwise represent anything other than the personal views of the official, including but not limited to using a separate account for that does not mention the office of the user in the username, profile, or any other publicly accessible information associated with the account.
7. Unofficial publications should avoid accidentally or intentionally using the public profile, fame, wealth, or any other benefit afforded by the public office to endorse or promote any particular political agendas, and indeed, elected officials should generally limit unofficial publications to sharing facts and personal opinion in neutral ways that do not promote or otherwise argue in support of any particular position or platform, even if adherence to this rule feels like it hampers freedom of speech and freedom of expression.
8. Unofficial publications should not be produced or published during time an elected official may reasonably be expected to be working, including any time the body the official is a member of is in session, for bodies that are not active constantly.  For bodies that are constantly active (including the Executive Branch), officials should not produce or publish unofficial publications at any time where doing so would interfere with the work or take time away from the work that would cause even minor negative effects, and ideally any such personal projects should be worked on only during specifically scheduled time off (for example, vacations).
9. Elected officials should surrender access to any and all social media accounts used for official publications upon retirement (whether voluntary or through the loss of an election or expiration of a term limit) from the position.  Ideally, the account should transferred to the ownership of the government body the official was a member of, which will act as caretaker to preserve the account and its contents for consumption by the public.  If the official is later elected to office again, ownership may be returned for the duration of service.
10. Retired elected officials should continue to abide by the terms of this code of ethics with regards to their private social media accounts, with the exception that they may engage more fully in the endorsement of personal political opinions, so long as they continue to avoid using the fame and other benefits associated with having held public office to gain an unfair advantage over other figures who have not had the benefit of holding public office.
11. Retired and current elected officials should never take advantage of the benefits of holding or having held public office for profit or personal benefit of any kind, including the use of official publications for gaining advertisement revenue, the use of official publications in campaign advertisements, the use of official publications for endorsing or advancing personal political agendas (or personal agendas of any kind), the leverage of experience in elected office to claim any manner of authority or special expertise on any matter (including paid speaking engagements), or the engagement in any kind of compensated work for any entity that the official has accepted any form of lobbying from.

Each element of this code of ethics is designed to avoid specific problems that are common today, as outlined below.

1.  Many elected officials, especially those in Congress, are currently using their position to gain fame, for future personal benefit and for the purpose of advancing personal political agendas.  This is not the purpose of elected office, and it is a misuse of taxpayer money that pays the wages of these officials.  Separating official communications from personal communications will help regular citizens separate legitimate concerns related to the job from the personal politics and agendas of the officials.  Public office was never intended to be used as a stage from which to endorse a political platform or other personal agenda.  Public officials are elected to represent the will of the people, not to preach or impose upon the people their own wills.
2. As with 1, the separation of the job from personal opinions is important, and without that separation, elected officials can and do abuse their positions to promote their own platforms, instead of doing their job, which is to represent the will of the people.  The only valid reasoning for voting in a particular way on a bill is that it is what one's constituents want or is otherwise more consistent with the will of those who the official represents than the alternative.
3. Accuracy is critical to transparency.  The people cannot make informed choices when voting, if the information they have is not accurate and up to date.
4. Oversight is wise and necessary in ensuring this code of conduct is adhered to.  It is clear that not all elected officials understand the difference between personal opinion and their job.  Oversight may help them to learn that difference, and if it doesn't, at least it may prevent more egregious violations of this code of conduct.  Oversight will also help to catch factual errors before publication, avoiding the need for excessive retractions.
5. Again, oversight is wise and necessary.  This provides governing bodies with the ability to more narrowly define what is and is not appropriate in an official publication.  This includes censorship of sensitive material that could pose a security threat if published, as well as general rules of civility and propriety in official publications.  Official publications will reflect on the quality of the governing institutions, thus they have a right to regulate the nature of those publications.  (For example, a Representative angrily swearing in a statement about the President reflects very poorly on the House in general, as well as on her constituents and on the U.S. as a nation.)
6. The use of elected office to promote personal political agendas is a serious abuse of power that needs to be stopped.  Again, the purpose of elected office is to represent the will of the people, not to promote one's own political agendas.  Using the benefits of public office to help promote personal agendas is an abuse of power and a theft of taxpayer money.  No elected position should be used to gain an unfair advantage in promotion of personal agendas over those who do not hold any elected position.  To do so is unethical and undemocratic.
7. Merely seeing the title of an elected official in the username or profile text of an account could imply that the publication is official in nature, and it will definitely provide an unfair advantage based on the elected office of the person.  Those seeing an unofficial account for the first time, who do not already know the name of the official, should not be able to tell from the account that the account is owned by an elected official.  It is impossible to enforce complete fairness, as it is unreasonable to require elected officials to use pseudonyms for their personal accounts, but as much as possible, fair practices should be observed, which is why it is suggested that elected officials should generally avoid active promotion of personal agendas on their private accounts, even if doing so seems like it gives up certain rights.  (Note that it is also traditional for the President to release his or her tax records, despite the fact that the privacy of such personal records are generally regarded as protected by the Constitution, so this is not an unprecedented ethical rule.)
8. The time an elected official is being paid to work should never be used for personal activities.  Elected office is a job, and the wages payed to elected officials are payment for labor rendered.  An elected official who is working on personal projects during work time should rightly be fired, just like any other employee who did the same thing would.  It is completely and entirely inappropriate for any elected official to be spending paid work time on personal projects, and accepting full payment for work time partially spent on personal projects is theft against one's employer, in this case the American people.
9. Official publications of elected officials legally belong to the employer of the officials, which is the American people, and thus should be preserved for the use of the people as desired.  In addition, allowing retired officials to retain control of official accounts would allow them to abuse those accounts.  Thus, all official accounts that are not currently in active use should be preserved by the body those accounts are accountable to, both to minimize opportunity for abuse and to ensure the preservation and public availability of the contents of those accounts.  A government cannot remain transparent when ex-officials retain the power to destroy official publications.
10. Retiring does not absolve an official of ethical responsibilities.  Retired officials should not be restricted in public participation in political discourse and promotion of personal agendas, as they are no longer bound to the job of representing the will of the people, but they still should not be allowed to abuse or otherwise leverage their status as retired public officials to gain an unfair advantage over those who have not served in elected office.
11. Abuse of power of this nature is rampant in our government currently, and it interferes seriously with the democratic process.  It is common practice for elected officials to cultivate special relationships with for-profit businesses and other profitable organizations to create future opportunity for themselves once they leave public office.  This results in the drafting and passage of laws and policies designed specifically to benefit special interests, often at significant cost to the general public, purely for the personal benefit of the elected officials.  This is an abominable and wicked practice that undermines democracy, violates the will of the people, and causes significant harm to the people.  This should be regarded as blatant bribery, and all elected officials guilty of this practice should be impeached and thrown out of office, then tried for the high crime of bribery (and/or solicitation of bribery) and sentenced to long prison sentences, without options for house arrest, intermittent imprisonment (like nights or weekends only), or parole.  (And maybe if high profile, wealthy people actually had to pay the same price for their crimes as poor people, our prisons would be less cruel and abusive to prisoners.)  Elected officials should be legally and permanently barred from working for any company or organization they have ever been lobbied by, and they should also be barred from taking any sort of payment or compensation for any work they do that they would not have had without serving in an elected office.  In addition, any official content produced while in office was paid for and thus belongs to the people, making it a violation of copyright law to use it for personal profit or benefit without the express permission of the people.

The fact is, a significant amount of the corruption in our government could be quelled, merely by enforcing a code of conduct addressing these elements.  This does not exhaustively cover all possible forms of corruption (for instance, the practice of earmarking funds for states as a tacit bribe for the passage of some unpopular bill), but it covers some of the most destructive and most common types of and motivations for corrupt behavior.  Hopefully by restricting elected office from being an engine for politicians to promote their personal political platforms and build relationships with special interests for future profit, the motivation for corrupt people with ill intent to seek elected office will be significantly reduced, and the tendency toward corruption for those who originally had purer motives will be decreased significantly, giving us a more democratic government that is more concerned with the will of the people than with their own personal profit.

Sales Tax Parity

The subject of whether states should be allowed to legally obligate retailers based in other states to collect sales tax has been something of a hotbed recently.  On the conservative side, the claim is that brick and mortar stores suffer, because they have to collect sales tax, while online businesses only have to collect tax if they have a physical presence in the state.  The liberal claim is that sales tax tends to stay low enough that normal price fluctuations for many goods make a significantly bigger difference.  If this is true, then the claims that people can usually find products for cheaper online, because the sellers don't have to collect tax, is unfounded.  There seems to be several important details that are ignored though.

The first is shipping.  Brick and mortar stores ship everything to a central location.  This allows them to take advantage of bulk rates for larger shipments.  The customers then come to the physical location, eliminating any obvious outward shipping costs.  Online retailers have to ship to their own location, and then they have to ship to individual customers.  They cannot get bulk rates on the outward shipping, because the destinations are residential and the products are individually packaged.  Depending on the particular product, shipping can easily be much higher than even the highest state sales tax (as of 2014, the highest state sales tax was 7.5%).  This does depend on the particular product.  A diamond ring worth $5,000 could cost $5 to ship, skipping things like insurance, and even with insurance, the price barely approaches 1% of the value of the item.  An online retailer would definitely benefit from not having to collect sales tax.  Most products, however, do not have such a low shipping cost to value ratio.  A vast majority of lower cost products cost enough to ship that shipping can run as high as 50% to 75% of the value of the product, and for products worth less than $20, you can easily end up paying several times the cost of the product in shipping.  The important fact, however, is that a vast majority of products you can buy online cost more shipping than sales tax would cost (and, in case you want to discuss free shipping, someone is paying for it; usually it is worked into the price of the product or other products commonly purchased with that product).

The second detail is the fact that a vast majority of online retailers are small businesses.  In fact, there are many times more online businesses at this point than there are brick and mortar stores.  What this means is that forcing online retailers to collect tax is going to do far more harm to small businesses than the current situation, even if the claims about taxes and pricing were true.  The big argument right now is that small brick and mortar stores deserve a fair playing ground, but the comparison is always against huge online retailers like Amazon.  Amazon does not have lower prices because they don't have to charge sales tax.  They have lower prices because they operate at a much larger scale than small businesses.  Compare these small brick and mortar stores to small online businesses, and you will find that the big pull for online sales is not price.  Prices for small online businesses are often comparable, if not higher than small brick and mortar stores.  People shop online for niche products because they cannot find a nearby brick and mortar store selling what they want.  Forcing these small online businesses to collect sales tax is going to bankrupt many of them, not because of lost sales, but because the extra work involved is too expensive.  We are not talking about collecting tax for one state here.  Online businesses will have to keep track of sales from every state with sales tax.  They will have to keep track of what state what tax collection goes to, and they will have to do all of the tax paperwork for every state they sell to.  Brick and mortal stores only have to collect tax for the state they are located in.  Online stores will have to deal with that on a grand scale.  It is beyond absurd to expect small businesses to do this.

The third ignored detail is the purpose of sales tax and of taxes in general.  Brick and mortar stores cost the state money.  There are law enforcement costs associated with protecting the physical property of the business.  There are costs associated with utilities and traffic.  The tax is actually paid by the customers.  Just like the businesses, the customers cost the state money.  It is reasonable for a brick and mortar store in a state to be required to collect sales tax, because all parties involved in the transaction owe a debt to the state for protection, social programs, and state administration.  In online transactions across state borders, this is not the case.  Customers living in a given state might owe the state, but the seller does not.  If the seller owes anyone, it is the state that the seller is located in.  Placing the burden of collecting sales tax for other states on the seller is unethical, because the seller is entirely unaffiliated with that state.  It comes down to the same thing as before: We are talking about forcing millions of small online businesses to collect an manage tax for a huge number of states.  Now, a bunch of one person businesses suddenly have to keep track of tax rates for every state.

To help understand the magnitude of forcing online businesses to collect sales tax for all states, consider the following.  In the U.S., only 5 states do not have sales tax.  That is 45 states that do.  State sales tax rates range from 7.5% to 2.9%.  Changes in state sales tax rates are fairly common, so an online business would have to keep close track of when state tax rates change and by how much.  It would have to track 45 different values, and it would have to keep a close watch on the other 5 states as well, because there is no guarantee that they won't suddenly decide to add a sales tax.  It would also have to keep track of where each sale came from, how much tax was charged, and when it was charged (in case of rate changes).  It would have to sum all of the taxes for each state every year, and it would have to do tax paperwork for 45 states every year.  This is the kind of work that most businesses have to hire a tax lawyer for.  Small businesses cannot afford a tax lawyer, and if a small business owner was skilled enough to keep up with all of this, it would probably pay better to get a job doing it exclusively.  In short, dealing with taxes at this level is a full time job, and small business owners already tend to work 60+ hours a week.  This is not just economically unwise.  It is downright unethical.

The real problem is that forcing online businesses to collect state sales taxes does not increase fairness.  It removes an imaginary inconvenience from brick and mortal stores, and it utterly destroys online businesses.  Brick and mortar stores only have to track sales tax for one state, making online businesses track sales tax for 45 states in no way makes things more fair.  It cruelly eliminates a huge section of the competition for small brick and mortar stores, and it dramatically increases unemployment.


http://taxfoundation.org/article/state-and-local-sales-tax-rates-2014

What's Wrong With Socialism

Socialism is a pretty big deal to conservatives.  It is treated as the devil.  Socialism is treated like tyranny.  It takes away freedom and destroys fairness.  It eliminates the will to work.  Really though, what is actually wrong with socialism? Why do most conservatives fear it?  Why do people think that it is a threat to freedom?

The answer is sadly simple: Taken to its logical end, socialism results in communism, where all wealth is equally distributed, everyone owns everything, thus no one owns anything, and there is no ownership, thus there is no motivation.  Socialism as seen in the USSR is frightening, because, aside from the corruption aspect, it resulted in all of the things that most conservatives fear about it.  It nearly eliminated personal freedom entirely, and it reduced motivation to work so far that it caused serious economic problems.  This extreme socialism realized the darkest fears of conservatives.

There is a major problem with this fear though.  During the earliest times of this nation, after it had declared independence, but before it became the US, a similar problem was observed with democratic republics.  Contrary to popular belief, our founding fathers did not base the design of the Federal government entirely on the democratic republic of Athens (or similar governments of that era).  Much of that design was based on existing colonial governments of the time.  Different colonies were trying out different versions of democratic government, though nearly all used some form of republic.  One problem that came up a lot was too much democracy.  I believe the colony was Virgina (I might be wrong; it's been a while; there may also have been others).  One colony created a legislature that had absolute power.  The governor did not have veto power.  The result was a very high level of democratic representation, which resulted in a very high level of democracy.  The end result of this was that at one point, many farmers were having a difficult time paying their debts, so the legislature of this colony (mostly farmers, elected by farmers) passed a law suspending all debt payment for farmers.  The result was catastrophic.  With no legal guarantee for debt payments, lenders stopped lending.  Those owning existing debts found relief, but those lending were quickly in serious financial trouble, and without anyone willing to grant more loans, the economy of the colony suffered very seriously.  This was not the only problem.  Different colonies experimented with different balances, all with different results.  When the founding fathers drafted the Constitution, they based the Federal government on what they had learned from all of these experiments.  The President was given veto power, to help avoid problems like the Virginia situation.  Congress was divided into two houses, partially because many states with a single legislature still had problems with too much democracy causing unwise laws to be passed, and partially because the state governments wanted more direct representation in Federal government (this last part was demolished when Senators became elected by public vote, instead of appointed by state governments).  In short, too much democracy is no better than too much socialism.  In fact, there are other historical cases where democratic governments have quickly destroyed themselves, because there was nothing to prevent the majority from ignorantly passing self destructive laws.  Historically, democracy was such an epic failure that many of the founders of this nation even questioned the wisdom of a democratic government, because they feared this would happen with the US as well.

Any form of government taken to an extreme will result in problems.  Isolating all governmental power in a single person has proven problematic almost constantly throughout history.  Democratic forms of government have historically never lasted very long, because they tend to become very unstable as size increases.  On paper, extreme communist socialism sounds like an excellent idea, but in practice, we have seen only disaster.  In the US, we are seeing fairly extreme capitalism (extreme compared to most of history) recreating the feudal systems we thought we had thrown off long ago.

The problem is not socialism.  The problem is extreme.  The type of government matters less than how far it is pushed.  In the US, we have gotten by for far longer than most governments throughout history have managed to stay stable, with a system combining democracy, republic, capitalism, and various amounts of socialism.  The US is not purely democratic.  It is not purely a republic (the Supreme Court is not elected by popular vote, among other things).  It is not purely capitalistic (we regulate fairness and safety to some degree).  It is not purely socialist.  It does have elements of all of these though.  None of these need to be feared, so long as they are not taken to extremes.  Extreme democracy will result in voters making decisions that they are not informed enough to make.  Extreme republic will result in so much politics that no one will have time for anything else, not to mention still having voters making decisions that they are not qualified to make.  Extreme capitalism will result in a caste system including slavery, though perhaps less overt than the chattel slavery we are all familiar with.  Extreme socialism will result in exactly the same things that happened with the USSR.

The fact is that the only extreme we are really close to is capitalism.  We don't need to fear socialism, because we are so far away from it that we are suffering problems from the opposite extreme.  The fears about socialism are well founded, but they should be fears about extreme socialism, not about socialism in general.  Fearing socialism is about as logical as fearing democracy.  In either case, there can be too much of a good thing, but too little is just as destructive.  What we should really fear is imbalance.  Right now, the imbalance is against socialism, not toward it.

What's wrong with socialism?  The same thing that is wrong with capitalism and democracy: too much is a bad thing!

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

A landlord sues a tenant for not paying rent four months in a row.  The tenant says the rent was paid on time each of those months.  The landlord's lawyer asks the tenant for some proof that the rent was paid.  The tenant, who is representing herself, says she was not given receipts when she paid the rent, and it was paid in cash, so there are no bank records of the transaction aside from withdrawals for amounts that represent rent as well as some bills.  Because there is no proof the rent was paid, the judge rules that the tenant has to pay the landlord the value of four months rent.

An employee blows the whistle on an OSHA violation where he works.  A week later, he is fired without cause.  He knows that there are anti-retribution laws specifically intended to protect whistle blowers, but he cannot afford a lawyer, so he walks away.  He ends up unemployed for over 6 months, because his previous employer lies about his character when called for references.  He knows he could sue for slander, but again, he cannot afford legal representation, so he just deals with it.

A small video game company comes up with an awesome new game idea.  Partway through public beta testing, a major game company files a lawsuit against them for patent infringement.  The lead designer knows the element in question has been used before, and that it was in a game much older than the large company's patent, but he cannot recall what that game was.  Settling out of court would destroy the company, essentially turning it into a slave of the larger company, so they opt to hire a lawyer.  When the lead designer still cannot remember the name of the game that used the element in question, the judge rules that the small company infringed on the larger company's patent.  Ultimately, the legal costs cause the small company to go bankrupt.


These three stories have several things in common.  The first is that the rich prey on the poor.  In the first story, the landlord uses the legal system to rob the tenant.  In the second, the employer sends a message to its employees, that retribution will be served for reporting labor law violations.  In the third, the big company destroys potential competition using a patent that is not technically valid.  The second thing they have in common is that none of the defending parties have adequate legal representation.  The first two have no representation, and the third does not have sufficient legal representation to do the necessary research to find the prior art that would invalidate the patent.  The third thing they have in common is that the defending parties are all assumed to be guilty unless they can prove their own innocence.  In short, justice is not met, fair legal representation is not available, and the principle of innocence until guilt is proven is violated.

In criminal trials, the U.S. Constitution mandates a legal right to legal council for the defendant.  U.S. criminal courts provide court appointed lawyers for defendants that cannot afford to pay for their own.  This is protected as a legal right.  This right is not extended to civil law though.  This is a problem.  In the above three situations, sufficient legal council was a necessary part of a just outcome, and without that, justice was not served.  In the first, a lawyer might have been able to gain access to the landlords financial records to search for evidence that the rent was paid.  In the second, the lack of legal council was the pivotal factor that ultimately prevented the victim from even pursuing the issue.  In the third, better legal council might have been able to find the prior art that the lead designer could not.  Even in civil cases, fair legal representation is necessary to ensure justice, but in the U.S., only criminal defendants are provided with legal representation.

U.S. law does not actually mandate the idea of innocence until guilt is proven.  Taken together, several Constitutional amendments are interpreted to mean that this principle should be followed, but this really comes down to ambiguous phrases like "fair trial."  Further, these amendments apply only to criminal cases, not to civil cases.  This is also a problem.  Many civil cases place the burden of proof on the defendant.  In other words, the defendant is assumed guilty unless she can prove innocence.  Typically this is a matter of convenience, and it has nothing to do with justice.  It is more convenient for a defendant to produce proof of payment than it is for a prosecutor to prove that payment was not rendered.  It is more convenient to ask the defendant to provide proof of prior art or proof that an idea is common knowledge or otherwise not novel or unique than it is for the prosecutor to prove that no one has ever had the idea before or that the idea is particularly ingenious.  The fact, however, is that doing these things places the burden of proof on the defendant, making the defendant legally guilty unless she can provide proof that she is not.  Not only is this common in civil cases, it is a problem in a majority of civil cases involving wealthy prosecutors suing poor defendants, who cannot afford legal representation.

In the recent past, these two things have been established all over the world as fundamental human rights.  It is widely recognized that trying someone without adequate representation is unfair and morally wrong.  Likewise, it is also widely recognized that the accuser bears the burden of proof, not the accused.  In fact, this was well understood even in some ancient cultures, where an accuser could be put to death, if proof of the accusation could not be established.


The fact is that there is little difference between criminal and civil law.  Both are intended to prevent or mitigate harm.  The only difference is classification and penalty.  In criminal law, the state acts against the suspect.  The suspect is judged by a jury based on codified legal standards.  If the suspect is found guilty, a penalty is selected based on a set of codified standards.  The punishments all restrict the freedom of the convict.  In civil law, an individual or organization acts against the suspect.  The suspect is judged by a judge based on personal opinion and legal precedent.  If the suspect is found guilty, the judge determines a penalty based on the request of the prosecutor and the cost of the damage.  The penalties typically take the form of fines paid to the state and remunerations given to the prosecutor.  The actions prompting a lawsuit can be nearly identical in many cases, with only minor differences.  For example, if you accuse me of stealing money from your pocket, I will go to criminal court.  If I live in your apartment building, and you accuse me of not paying my rent, I will go to civil court, despite the fact that the harm caused may be identical.  Both cases amount to theft.  The circumstances of the theft are different, and this is used as justification to provide counsel for one and not the other and to assume initial innocence in one and initial guilt in the other.  The differences between criminal and civil cases do not justify refusing to provide fair counsel or assuming initial guilt.

Civil law needs two things desperately: Fair representation and innocence until guilt is proven.  These two things are essential parts of a fair justice system, and without them, justice cannot be served, regardless of whether it is criminal or civil court.

Missouri SNAP Restrictions

One Missouri state Representative, Rick Brattin, recently drafted a bill that would restrict what food stamp recipients in the state could buy with their SNAP benefits.  Besides the fact that imposing new limitations is against Federal law, there are many problems with this.

The specific restrictions the bill would illegally impose include prohibiting the purchase of "cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood, or steak."  Brattin complains that he has seen people buying products like lobster and fillet mignon with their food stamps, and evidently he takes offense at this.  In fact, he takes so much offense at this that he is willing to challenge Federal law by passing an illegal state law to prevent this.

The real problems with this bill are not related to Federal law at all, however.  There are health implications as well as a question of discrimination.  Besides that, expensive foods that are sometimes regarded as extravagant can easily be part of a very frugal diet.

"Seafood" is a huge category of foods, and nutritionists currently recommend eating at least two servings of fatty fish per week.  Many recommend twice that, but since fatty fish are typically the more expensive types (salmon, for example), and many Americans cannot afford to eat it more often than that, they say twice a week is enough for a reasonably healthy diet.  This bill would defeat the purpose of the SNAP program.  The acronym stands for "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program."  If seafood is prohibited, it might as well be renamed SCAP (Supplemental Calorie Assistance Program), because a significant part of the "nutrition" part is being thrown out over whether poor people should be allowed to eat traditional rich person food.

This brings up the next problem.  This is very blatant discrimination against the poor.  This Representative seems to believe that poor people should not be allowed to eat traditional rich person food.  He is acting like some kind of elitist foodie who cannot stand to see the rabble eating his precious steak and lobster.  Now, I understand why energy drinks would be prohibited, as they are more like medication than food.  Likewise, soft drinks are barely food (let's ban water too).  Chips actually provide a decent amount of calories (at a very low cost per calorie), and with the recent discovery that diets high in plant oils are very beneficial, chips can be part of a very healthy diet (in moderation).  Prohibiting cookies is absurd, as they typically contain a lot of healthy components, despite their higher than average sugar content.  The steak restriction is even more absurd.  Yes, people on SNAP probably should not be eating fillet mignon every night for dinner.  If they are, then it is the state's fault for giving them far more SNAP money than they need.  Real SNAP recipients do not eat steak and lobster dinners on SNAP regularly (because they cannot afford it).  If Brattin did not actually see how those buying these products on SNAP used them, then he has no business judging them.

Let me share my personal experience with this matter.  My family is on food stamps, and while we have never bought fillet mignon on food stamps, we have bought cheaper steaks and we buy about two lobsters each year.  For our New Years dinner, we have also been known to buy a few crab legs.  When we do this, we carefully budget our food stamp money so we can afford it.  Would Brattin deny us this opportunity to learn good financial skills?  (Actually, we are not poor due to poor financial skills.  For the most part, we manage our money quite well, but apply this to the many people on food stamps who do benefit from the experience.)  The steak is almost never cooked as whole steaks.  Once in a while, I make an oriental beef and broccoli dish, which calls for one pound of thinly sliced steak.  At $5.99 a pound (and we rarely buy it without a dollar or two discount), with $1 worth of broccoli and maybe $1 worth of rice, all seven of us eat a fairly nice (and healthy) meal at a cost of $8 or less.  That comes out to about $1.15 per person.  Most Americans spend two to three times that on a meal.  Obviously, we could use chicken instead to get it under $1 per person, but would Brattin really be so petty as to deny us quality in our meal for a few cents, even though we already spend far less than the average?  Evidently he would.

Now, the lobster is usually for special occasions, like anniversaries.  Even we consider it a bit extravagant, which is why it is a once a year thing.  Like I mentioned, we carefully budget for this.  It seems rather absurd that the state would interfere in our food buying choices, when we are already being so careful not to abuse the system.  Now, I recognize that others may choose to abuse the system, but punishing us for it is just plain wrong.  Further though, lobster is actually not that expensive.  On sale, where we live (Idaho, so not close enough to the ocean to make it seriously cheap), it is $4.00 for a medium sized lobster tail (we don't buy whole; the price is higher while the meat to shell ratio is lower).  Not on sale it costs more like $5.99 a tail, though in the winter it sometimes gets up to $7.99.  We don't buy it when it is not on sale.  Now, we could probably eat lobster once a week without extravagant spending.  Consider this: I can make a lobster sauce with one $4 lobster tail that is enough for the whole family (did I mention, we have 5 kids, so that is 7 people).  Over rice (about $1 worth; I would actually use pasta, which might come out to $1.50 or $2.00 total), the entire meal could be $5, with maybe another $1.50 for some kind of canned or frozen vegetables.  At $6.50 for the whole meal that is 93¢ per person (the flour, milk, and spices used in the sauce are almost negligible in cost).  That is a meal with lobster that costs less than $1 per person.  With pasta instead of rice, it would come out closer to $1.08 per person.  We could eat that every day and not spend all of our SNAP money!

The point here is that even the most expensive foods can be part of a very fugal and healthy meal.  Unless Brattin can prove that this is not how those people are using their purchases, then he is totally out of line condemning them for extravagant use of SNAP benefits.  Even expensive fillet mignon or crab legs can be integrated into a meal that costs far less than what the typical American spends.  In fact, even caviar could be used this way, though I have a hard time believing anyone would actually do this with caviar (I am not going to judge though).  Anyhow, judging people based on what foods they are buying is stupid.  Instead judge them on how they use the food that they buy, and if you don't know how they are using it, withhold your judgment!

What this really comes down to is freedom.  The U.S. is becoming less and less free as time goes by, with the government frequently thinking that it can make our decisions better than we can.  If we are not allowed to decide for ourselves, how can the government ever expect us to get better at decision making?  The first time some family buys enough steak and lobster on SNAP for every dinner for a week, they will quickly discover that their SNAP benefits won't feed them enough if they spend that way (unless they are doing what I suggested above).  Maybe they will start shopping sales.  They will probably budget more carefully the next month.  Most importantly though, they will learn from their own experience.  Maybe they will keep eating a lot of steak and lobster, but they will shop sales and add coupons to that, and if they are willing to do that much extra work to eat steak and lobster frequently, they deserve it just as much as the CEO who does an equal amount of work running his company (seriously, sale shopping and couponing is a lot of work).  Some people like bacon gravy for breakfast regularly (a meal that I have heard is often considered a poor man's meal in the south, but which I consider to be gourmet food).  It is reasonable to say that the guy who likes bacon gravy is more deserving of eating what he likes than the guy who likes steak and eggs, just because the prices are different?  This is an elitist attitude.  I don't think Brattin is actually bothered that SNAP recipients are spending some of their benefits on food that is expensive.  I think he is bothered that poor people are eating his elitist gourmet food!

(Thankfully, Brattin is the only one actually interested in the bill.  He has no co-sponsors, and the state legislature is not actually even considering the bill.)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/08/missouri-food-stamps_n_7026704.html

3D Printed Gun Control

The issue of control of undetectable 3D printed guns is coming back to Congress soon.  With the substantial advances since the last time the question came up, some believe it is time for another round.  As before, the emphasis is not on how easy it is to print the guns but rather on their stealth nature.  Current gun law prohibits owning guns that are less detectable (in a metal detector) than 3.7 ounces of steel.  Current 3D printed gun models satisfy this law by adding a chunk of steel of that weight to the gun as a non-functional part (typically internally).  The bill currently being drafted would require that specific functional parts of the gun be made of metal, which would make it impossible to legally print a gun with current 3D home printing technology (the industrial version includes support for printing in several metals that could be used for the metal components).  The major concern is that terrorists or felons could 3D print guns that would not be detectable by any modern security, and the assumption is that making it illegal to do so would stop them.

The big problem with this is that last line: The bill assumes that making undetectable guns illegal will somehow make a difference to those who would use them for terrorism.  Now, in the past, gun control advocates have used this same excuse to demand mandatory registration of firearms as well as increasing seller accountability.  These things would at least make it harder for felons and terrorists to obtain firearms, but the argument that criminals will get them anyway has largely prevented Congress from strengthening gun control.  With 3D printed guns, it is far worse.

Modern 3D printers are cheaper than handguns.  Blueprint files are extremely easy to obtain, and it is nigh on impossible for the government to do anything about this, since they are available over BitTorrent and other P2P file sharing services (and legally, because they are licensed to allow free redistribution).  In other words, for maybe half the price of a decent handgun, a criminal can obtain the equipment to print any number of 3D printed guns.  The print media is cheap enough that once a criminal has the 3D printer, he can print guns at $10 to $20 a piece.  The government cannot do anything about this.  Just catching one marginally careful criminal would be difficult and costly.  Catching even a majority would be almost impossible.  Individual criminals that used specialized security software would be almost impossible to catch, even if the government was already keeping a close eye on them.

The biggest hindrance to criminals wanting to 3D print guns is the technical complexity of setting up the 3D printer system.  Careful criminals will have the buy components for the printer, instead of buying a pre-assembled one, to avoid government detection (and simply having the printer is still not enough to justify law enforcement action).  The task of assembling a 3D printer is not trivial to anyone without significant electronics experience.  Likewise, setting up the software and learning to use it is also not a straightforward task.  The average criminal that would need a gun would likely give up before making even one 3D printed gun, because it is so much easier to just steal a few hundred dollars and buy one on the black market.

The fact, however, is that this really is a valid concern.  The average felon will probably not go to the effort to print an undetectable gun.  The real concern is terrorists.  Plastic guns could easily be carried through all sorts of government checkpoints by terrorists, and the consequences could be dire.  Before jumping to conclusions about the best solution to this problem though, we should consider the facts.  The first fact to consider is that terrorists living in the U.S. long term have managed to get bombs through government checkpoints, despite much stronger legislation against bombs.  Unfortunately, criminals and terrorists do not allow themselves to be governed by mere laws.  In other words, making undetectable guns illegal is not going to make any difference where it really counts.  Not only can criminals easily 3D print guns without any real chance of detection, they can print them in massive amounts, and nothing short of banning 3D printing outright, along with at least half of the necessary components for building 3D printers (components that power enough of our technology that banning even one would be absurd), will make any difference.

The point here is that anyone rushing to legislation banning 3D printed guns is totally out of touch with the technology.  This technology is here to stay.  In fact, as soon as 3D printing was invented, using it to make guns became inevitable.  The long term consequences of this may result in a lot of harm, but there is nothing that can be done at this point to stop it.  If legislation to ban 3D printed guns, detectable or not, does eventually go through, all it will do is turn 3D gun printing into a completely criminal activity.  It won't make detecting those criminals any easier.  The one good thing about this will be that honest people will still be able to obtain traditional firearms.  Consider, however, who will have more and better access to firearms if honest citizens have to pay $300 or more for anything decent, while criminals can make functional firearms for well under 10% of that.

The only thing laws against making undetectable guns will do is make prison sentences longer for criminals that have them when they get caught.  Most crimes that would be committed with such a weapon are already worthy of a life sentence, so the added gun charge will be trivial.  Frankly, it would be equally effective without infringing on the rights of the rest of us to simply make committing crimes with 3D printed guns more illegal than committing those crimes without.  At this point though, firearms (including undetectable ones) are only going to become easier to obtain, and there is nothing any government can do to stop it.

Obamacare 5th Birthday

Today is the 5th birthday of Obamacare, and many of its supporters are excited about recent data showing how successful it has been.  Over 16 million Americans have managed to get health insurance through the programs it created, and the estimated percentage of uninsured adults in the U.S. has dropped from 20.3% to 13.2% in the last two years.  By these metrics, Obamacare has indeed been a success (assuming we can find evidence that attributes these gains to Obamacare; no such evidence currently exists).

The problem with all of this excitement is that the rate of insured Americans is not the important part.  Obamacare was designed, according to its supporters, to help the poor get better access to health care (which is why its official name is "Affordable Care Act").  More Americans may be insured, but what do the numbers specifically for the poor look like?  Has the percentage of insured poor Americans improved as much as the national average, or is that 13.2% almost exclusively the poor?  Really though, even this is not the important metric.  It is the Affordable Care Act, not the Affordable Insurance Act.  The real question is: Are the poor in the U.S. actually receiving improved health care?  In corollary to that, are the U.S. poor significantly healthier than they were before?

The success or failure of Obamacare has nothing to do with health insurance.  The only guarantee with increased numbers of Americans being insured is that the insurance companies are making more money.  The long standing quality problem with U.S. health insurance was not really addressed by Obamacare.  High deductibles are still a major problem, and there is no reason to believe that Obamacare has solved this problem, especially for the poor who still cannot afford the high premiums required for lower deductible plans.  It would be quite interesting to see the data on how much more money health insurance companies have paid out in claims to their poor customers.  This would at least be an indicator of whether the poor are even benefiting at all from Obamacare.  If the payouts are not rising at the same rate that insured Americans are, then Obamacare is essentially scalping the poor for the benefit of the rich insurance companies.

Aside from general success or failure, which depends solely on how the law has affected the actual health of the poor, the question of payouts is very important.  Is Obamacare really a law the helps the poor, or is it legalized government extortion that only profits health insurance companies?  If it is not helping the poor significantly, then its costs are not justified, and it should be abolished as quickly as possible.  If it really is providing significant help to the poor (which I doubt, though I am prepared to be proven wrong), then the evidence of that should be made public.  Currently, however, the evidence we have only indicates that more people are giving money to insurance companies.  There is no evidence that this is actually benefiting anyone else.

Hobby Lobby and Mandatory Benefits

The Hobby Lobby case was an extravagant law suit.  Of course religious freedom should have won.  There should never have been any question.  The problem was not with Hobby Lobby, and it was certainly not about human rights.  The problem is with who carries the obligation to enforce those rights.

Consider how this would play out: The government decides to enforce the right to own property by putting businesses in charge of it.  Now, businesses are legally required to handle things like evictions and property deeds for their employees.  If an employee is robbed, the employer is required to investigate and bring the thief to justice.  Oh yeah, and this only applies to full time employees.

Now, considering the following: The government and the majority of Americans establish that adequate medical care is a fundamental human right.  The government comes up with a list of medical care related things that every person should have free access to.  Now, to enforce this the government does two things.  First, it puts enforcement in the charge of for-profit businesses.  Businesses are now required to provide their employees with the list of things that every person should have free access to.  Now, we cannot forget though, this only applies to full time employees.  The second thing the government does is to mandate that anyone who is not a full time employee must pay, out of their own pockets, for insurance.  This is great.  Now, the government says that adequate medical care is a fundamental human right, so we are forced to enforce this right ourselves on an individual basis.  That makes perfect sense.  Imagine if this was applied to freedom of speech.  If the government tries to shut us up, our only recourse is to fight the government as an individual.  Appealing to the law would not be an option, because it is our own problem, not the government's.  This applies equally to medical care.  The government is pretending to provide what has been established as a fundamental human right by saying that for-profit businesses and individuals have to enforce this right.

The Hobby Lobby case should not have been about religious freedom.  That should have been a given.  The Hobby Lobby case should have been about responsibility.  If the government is not responsible for enforcing human rights, then no one is.  Enforcing rights is the purpose of the government.  The reason health care has become a problem in the first place is that the existing system, including mandatory benefits and health insurance, is entirely inadequate.  Forcing people to subscribe to the current system can hardly be considered enforcing a fundamental human right to adequate medical care.  In fact, it is little more than another way for the government to control us and subject us.

The big problem with requiring businesses to enforce human rights is that it forces people to work for them.  This is a rather foul case of discrimination against freelancers and business owners.  Human rights do not just apply to those who work for someone else.  If something is a right, then, by definition, it applies to everybody.  Further, allowing businesses to get out of this obligation for part time employees is even worse discrimination against the poor.  Clearly, the American lower class does not have the right to adequate health care, based on the precedents set by the law.  This also gives businesses far too much power.  A business can decide who has the right to adequate medical care merely by setting schedules and employee classification.  If my employer does not like my religion, my political ideology, my race, or even my hair color, a simple reduction in hours can change my classification to part time, exempting me from the right to adequate medical care.  Even worse, now I am legally required to go buy insurance (which, just for the record, does not provide adequate medical care), even though my pay check just got substantially reduced.  Choosing who human rights apply to is not the responsibility of for-profit businesses.  In fact, even governments have no business discriminating in this area. 

Enforcement of human rights is the job of the government.  It is not the job of businesses, and it certainly is not the job of the individual.  If individuals have to enforce their own fundamental rights, then the government is obsolete.  A government that puts the burden of enforcing human rights on businesses and individuals is lazy and corrupt.  If adequate health care is truly a fundamental human right, the government needs to get off of its lazy butt and take care of the problem.  This is the government's job.  It is not the job of businesses or individuals.  Further, if adequate heath care is a human right, it should apply to everyone, not just those who work full time and not just those who are willing and can afford to buy into the system.

Hobby Lobby should never have needed to defend its religious rights.  The government never had any business placing the burden of providing a fundamental human right on the business in the first place.  There are certainly cases where religious freedom must be balanced with other human rights, but it was entirely wrong of the government to place Hobby Lobby, or any other business, in this position in the first place.  Not only could this pitting of religious freedom against the right to adequate health care have easily been avoided, it should have.  If the government had done the right thing in the first place, this issue would never have arisen.

Collision Avoidance

In networking, there is this idea called collision avoidance.  In data networks, information is sometimes transmitted over a medium that is shared by multiple computers.  In these circumstances, it is possible that two computers will start transmitting data almost simultaneously, corrupting both data sets.  Even if both check to make sure no one else is transmitting, one might start transmitting after the other one, but before it detects the signal.  While this is not very common on physical wires since the advent of Ethernet, where hubs, switches, and routers direct the traffic on shared cables, this is still a major concern with wireless networks.  While collision detection helps computers know when corrupted data needs to be retransmitted, the ideal solution is collision avoidance, which prevents collisions altogether.  Collision avoidance involves communication between computers before sending data, to prevent collisions that would waste network bandwidth.

Collision avoidance is also important outside of the field of networking, and most people use it daily.  Maybe you are walking down the hall at work, and you move slightly to the right to avoid walking into another person.  At dinner, two people might try to pass condiments to the same person, and one will have to stop and wait for the other.  Often this is a perfectly smooth exchange where no communication is necessary.  One person gives right-of-way to the other, or both people take measures to avoid collision.  Other times, two people might both move in the same direction, maintaining their course of collision with reference to each other, and then some kind of communication must occur (usually a glance and some laughter).  It is subtle, but the information communicated in the glance will usually make it clear who is going to do what to avoid the impending collision.

Perhaps one of the most common daily uses of collision avoidance occurs while driving cars.  In general, if we follow all traffic laws, we will avoid collisions, but there are some cases where this is not true.  The most notable one is where two people approach a 4-way intersection from opposite sides, and stop simultaneously.  If they do not stop at the same time, the law says the rule is first-come-first-served.  If they are not opposite from each other, the law says the guy to the right gets to go first.  In a situation where there is complete symmetry, however, there is no rule sufficient to prevent collision.  In fact, there is not even a way of distinguishing which car is which (even if you say ,"the bigger vehicle goes first," what if they are the same make, model, year, color, etc...).  This is one case where communication is necessary for collision avoidance.  Sometimes one car will communicate its intent to go first by inching forward.  This does not always work, as both may try this tactic, but it often does.  By far, the most common communication I have seen is the wave.  One car will wave the other to go first.  Whoever waves first goes last.  For this situation, this form of collision avoidance is pretty good.  The wave is a common collision avoidance communication for almost all instances where collision avoidance is necessary in traffic.

Now, here is what I actually want to talk about: the misuse of collision avoidance.  Sadly, this is almost as common as using collision avoidance legitimately in traffic, but instead it actually increases the risk of collision.  Sometimes, at an intersection, one car will clearly stop before the other (in fact, I deliberately regulate my speed when approaching intersections to make sure it is clear who stopped first).  When this happens, the law states that the first car to stop goes first.  Sometimes though, the guy who stopped first will "be polite" and wave the other driver on.  This results in a dilemma.  The waver has essentially signaled that he is forfeiting his right-of-way.  Unfortunately, the law does not recognize this, and it still states that the first to stop is the first to go.  Now, assuming there are no extenuating circumstances (maybe the waver's car just stalled, and he cannot get it to start again), the second driver has to decide to either break the law or wait until the other driver gives up and goes.  This can, and has, caused accidents, as both drivers give up waiting at the same time and crash right into each other.  The worst part is that the fault is legally attributed to the second driver, even though the first told her to go!

Far from polite, waving someone on when it is not their turn is rude and dangerous, not to mention invalid.  If you have the right-of-way take it.  If there is some reason you cannot, then you should probably turn your hazard lights on.  The only time collision avoidance is valid is when there is enough ambiguity that there is an actual risk of a collision.  If you really do not want to go first, the start slowing down sooner, so you do not stop first.  Do not tell people to break the law.  Do not waste other people's time by waiting for them to go when you clearly have the right-of-way. Certainly do not endanger other people's well being in a lame attempt to be polite.

Unions

I have a problem with unions.  It comes down to two things: Unions are too powerful and too easy to abuse.  Unions are currently absolutely necessary to take care of problems that the government refuses to treat fairly.

The recent Supreme Court ruling on a dispute between an Amazon contractor and its warehouse employees (which I have discussed in more detail in a previous post) illustrates the second part of my problem.  Without unions, many workers are just plain not treated fairly.  In the Amazon case, workers were being forced to go through excessively long security checks daily without pay for the time spent.  Our Supreme Court justices (whom I must assume are idiots, because the only other option is that they are deliberately helping to enslave and oppress innocent Americans, and I want to give them the benefit of the doubt) declared that businesses do not have to pay workers for time spent doing anything that is not, in essence, part of the job description.  At this point, this declaration now counts as an infallible part of U.S. law.  The government offers no protection for what amounts to blatant wage theft.  There is only one solution: unions.

Unions were originally created in response to government inability to enforce fair labor practices.  In the early U.S., it was common for employers to underpay workers and to require far more hours of work than is healthy or fair.  Unsafe work conditions were more common than safe ones by a very wide margin.  People were regularly inured or killed in workplace accidents that could have easily been prevented, because owners were too cheap to spend even small sums to ensure safety.  Children were treated as slaves, working 16 hours days in these conditions, for so little money that entire families had to work, and that was still not enough to get by.  The government was not powerful enough to do anything to stop these unfair practices, and in many cases, the government did not have enough reach to even be aware of them.  The solution was labor unions.

Workers in these conditions eventually banded together, demanding fair treatment.  Their employers refused the the demands and threatened to fire anyone who continued to dissent.  Eventually the workers realized that if all of them dissented at once, their employers would be unable to replace them all fast enough to avoid financial catastrophe.  The worker strike was born (it was actually born in France, but it was quickly adopted by oppressed U.S. workers).  Nearly all of the workers in one or more factories refused to continue work until conditions, hours, and wages were improved.  Employers were powerless against the unions because they were dependent on the employees.  Firing them all would result in financial ruin for the company.  Initially the government panicked: Worker's unions threatened the U.S. economy.  If workers had so much power, they could easily force businesses to pay so much that it would cause rampant inflation.  Besides that, even short strikes resulted in production halts, and in factories that produced necessities, those halts could result in serious harm.  This did something else very important though: It put the problem of workers right in the face of the government, where it could no longer be overlooked or ignored.

The government realized that treatment of workers was a major problem.  It also recognized its responsibility in doing something about it.  The government still did not have the power or reach to handle the problem on its own.  It did have the power to protect the workers in their own attempts to deal with the problem.  Business owners lobbied the government to make unions and worker strikes illegal.  Their claim was that these things caused economic instability.  Their claims seemed reasonable, however, the government eventually recognized that the underlying problem was not the strikes, but the unsustainable hours and pay, as well as the often deadly work conditions provided by employers.  Laws were passed to protect unions and striking workers from retaliation.  Currently, workers cannot be fired for discussing unionization, actually unionizing, or for striking.  Workers who are striking on economic grounds (wages, other compensation, or work hours) can be "permanently replaced" (they cannot be fired, but if a willing replacement can be found, the strikers hours can be reduced to 0 indefinitely, which is approximately the same as being laid off).  The government also created a set of safety and treatment requirements and guidelines for how employees may be treated.  Strikes related to these issues are further protected, prohibiting even permanent replacement.  When it comes to safety and other government protected employee rights, replacements hired during a strike must be fired to make room for striking employees returning to work once the dispute has been resolved.

The potential for abuse of unions was still clear, so some restrictions have been added.  Closed shops, where the company may only hire union members, was strictly prohibited.  Closed shops allow the union to control all hiring decisions by restricting admittance into the union.  This gives the union veto power over any hiring action.  In the U.S., closed shops are illegal.  Union shops, where new hires are required to join the union after being hired, are legal, as well as agency shops, where non-union members must still pay union dues, and open shops, where employees may choose but are not required to pay dues if they are not union members, are all legal in the U.S..  Prohibition of closed shops prevented the most obvious abuses of unions, but it still left some loopholes, most of which still exist.


When unions were originally created, they were necessary.  They were very useful, and they did a great deal of good.  Since then, many things have changed.  The biggest change is power and reach of the government.  Workplace safety is no longer a serious union issue, because OSHA, a government agency, defines and enforced workplace safety.  If a workplace is unsafe, it is faster and easier for an employee to report the violation to OSHA than it is for a union to try to resolve the issue, and the penalties for those violations are enforced by the government, making workplace safety violations fairly rare.  Wages are still a problem, but not because the government is not powerful enough to do anything about it.  They are a problem because the government refuses to do anything about it.  Worse, the most common places for wage issues are not well suited to unions, because employee turnover is too high.  In the past several decades, most union wage issues were not problems of employers paying unfair wages.  Most of the issues were greedy employees who were already being paid far higher than the U.S. average wanting more than their fair share (and, in the case of the U.S. steel industry, this was one of the blows that ultimately killed it).  Unions are no longer useful tools for enforcing fair wages.  Instead they are tools for overpaid employees to rip off their employers even more.

Work hours were another major thing that unions were good for.  Twelve to sixteen hour work days were common.  Unions pulled the U.S. work week down to 40 hours and the work day to 8, requiring extra pay for any time worked beyond that.  Of course, the goal was actually closer to 35 or 30 hours a week (20 according to some), but unions lost sight of that goal almost a century ago.  Unions are no longer necessary to enforce this though, because the government has enacted laws prohibiting employers from giving employees more than 8 hours of work in a day and 40 in a week, with an additional requirement that when this is violated, employees are paid extra for time beyond those limits.  This is no longer a union problem; it is now a government problem.  Worse, despite unions and government, the average American voluntarily works an average of 50 hours a week and often the overtime goes entirely unpaid.  When the workers don't care, there is little unions can do to fix the problem.

Overall, unions have lost most of their usefulness.  They still have potential for abuse though.  Unions have a great deal of lobbying power.  In Alaska, in the mid '90s I believe, the workers at some of the power plants went on strike.  I don't know all of the details, but I do know that the labor union exercised power that belongs only to government and individual citizens, by manipulating the state government in making some very harmful laws.  The power plants hired electrical workers from Washington state, as temporary workers until the strike was resolved.  In retaliation, the union lobbied the state government to change certification laws to require electrical workers in Alaska state to have gone through their training in-state.  In other words, a journeyman or master electrical worker in Washington state could only be hired as an apprentice in Alaska, without going through all of the time required for certification within the state of Alaska.  The union did this to put more pressure on the power company by denying them well qualified temporary workers (the law specifically prohibited hiring them into positions that normally required journeyman certification).  Besides being a low and very unethical blow, this has some severe economic implications.  I am certain the argument given to the legislature and governor was that hiring out-of-state workers would drain money from the state economy.  I don't think this justifies using the law to lie about a person's job qualifications, but besides that, this economic justification was incomplete.  The end result was that the workers got most of their demands.  The economic consequences of that was increased cost for power, which resulted in economically damaging inflation in a state where the cost of living is already quite high.  There may have been short term economic costs of hiring out-of-state workers, but the long term costs of not doing so were far worse.  There is also another long term economic cost: The electrical workers union in Alaska now has a legally enforced monopoly on electrical labor.  The political power held by unions has not just been harmful in Alaska.  In other places in the U.S., unions have used the law or other political influence to merge with other unions against their will (by "merge," I mean "hostile takeover").

Unions have largely become for-profit institutions in the U.S..  Their primary goal is no longer doing what it best for the workers or even representing the workers.  Their goal now is to do whatever gets the union the most money.  This frequently means demanding higher pay even when it is not needed or fair.  It also preempts any requests for reduced hours, because reduced hours means lower gross pay, which means lower dues.  By allowing union and agency shops, the government has allowed unions to force employees to become union members and to pay union dues against their will.  Unions in the U.S. typically have a number of permanent employees who are not actually members of the union.  In many unions, this includes a CEO and other administrative positions, who make decisions about what the employees want, without actually having any experience of being one of those employees.  Some of these positions, like lawyer and accountant, are justified, but full-time administrative positions in a union are absurd.  Unions are now run primarily by people who are totally disconnected from the union members and their work environment.  Frankly, a union that is a for-profit business should not have any degree of legal protection beyond what is normal for any other for-profit business.  Otherwise, it is even more prone to abuse.

So, now we come down to the problem: The government now has the reach and power to make unions entirely obsolete, and it has already made them mostly obsolete.  Instead of doing that though, it is actually making unions more necessary.  Unions should no longer exist, because they should no longer be needed.  When they were created, the potential for good outweighed the potential for abuse.  This is no longer true...except, when the government fails to do its primary job of representing the will and best interest of the people.

The Amazon case is prime example of where unions are useful.  The employees are being robbed by their employer.  They could unionize and strike, demanding pay for their time worked, demanding that the security check be listed in the job description (making it an essential part of the job, and thus legally part of paid work time), or demanding that the security checks be discontinued.  They could even unionize and heavily lobby Congress to repeal the highly constitutionally questionable law the Supreme Court used to justify its appallingly oppressive decision (even abuses of power can have legitimate non-abusive uses).  The problem I have with this is that they should not need to unionize to get paid for all of the time they spend doing work required by their employer.

An employer should have the right to require employees to do worthless work (plenty already do it anyhow), but employees should have the right to get paid regardless of whether the work required is profitable or not.  This should be legally protected.  What free society has a law that explicitly permits employers to blatantly and openly require work time from an employee that does not need to be compensated?

Overtime

It turns out that the average working American is working around 50 hours a week.  Almost 12 percent of Americans work more than 60 hours a week.  This is a problem, for several reasons.  First, we still have a high rate of unemployment, and I have said before that people working more than 40 hours a week are effectively stealing work from those working less than that (who want to work 40 hours a week).  Second, many of these workers are salaried, which means that no one is getting paid for this extra work.  In these cases, the extra hours are being stolen, without any benefit to the thief.  Some workplaces even mandate that salaried employees work more than 40 hours a week.  Hourly employees are legally entitled to extra pay for overtime hours, but this does not justify stealing work that is needed by others.  Ironically, hourly overtime costs the employer more, in addition to increasing unemployment.  This free labor and poorly distributed work is a big problem, even though it may not be obvious.  Given current unemployment as well as the 50 hour a week average of most U.S. workers, a redistribution of labor could easily solve unemployment entirely.

The first thing that needs to be done is the elimination of any unpaid labor (within an employer/employee relationship).  Salaries should only apply for the first 40 hours a week of work.  Even salaried workers should be entitled to overtime pay for any hours beyond 40 in a week.  This by itself would push businesses to hire more employees, instead of expecting free labor from salaried employees.

The second thing that needs to be done is fines for overtime.  Many states' labor laws technically forbid overtime, but they include clauses stating that overtime must paid at a higher rate when it does occur.  Federal labor law does not forbid overtime, but it also requires a higher pay rate for overtime.  In all cases, however, salaried employees are exempt.  Federal labor law needs to remove the salaried employee exemption, and it needs to turn the 40 hour a week limit into a hard limit.  No states with a hard limit actually enforce it, and there is no set penalty for violation of the limit (though, the limit does entitle an hourly employee to refuse to work overtime without threat of retribution).  In addition to a Federal hard limit, penalties need to be set and enforced for violation of that limit.  Fines for overtime would accomplish two useful things.  First, it would encourage employers to hire more employees instead of facilitating the theft of work.  Second, it would provide a source of funding for welfare to support those who are not able to find work because that work is being stolen by other people working overtime.

A more extreme third thing that could be done is fines for employees working more than 40 hours a week.  The point of this is to combat the likely response of getting a second job for people who loose overtime hours due to the first two things.  Again, this would both discourage working more than 40 hours a week, and it would provide a source of funding for welfare when people choose to work more hours anyway.

There is a fourth thing that needs to be done, and perhaps it should have been the first.  Overtime labor laws need to be strictly enforced.  Wage theft is becoming a major problem in the U.S., and a majority of it comes from unpaid work and overtime paid at a non-overtime rate.  There is a local business where I live that has a strategy for avoiding overtime pay that happens to be highly illegal.  This business logs hours based on client projects.  Employees are forbidden from working more than 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week on any one project.  The business owners seem to think that overtime pay is only necessary if overtime is worked all on one project.  This business has employees (as well as ex-employees) who are owed thousands or tens of thousands of dollar in unpaid overtime.  At least one has tried to report the situation to the state labor board but was told that they are too far behind to do anything about it.  Evidently this situation is common across the U.S.  In many cases, employees do not know their right, but in other cases, they fear retribution (also illegal) or state labor boards are understaffed (or, possibly, just lazy).


It is absurd that our country has set a 40 hour work week, but we have a high rate of unemployment largely because the average work week is actually 50 hours.  Enacting and enforcing laws that push this back down to 40 hours could increase the amount of available work by up to 20%, which would completely cover our unemployment with some to spare.  This would tip the economy to favor employees over employers, which would go a long way in increasing wages and reducing poverty.  Our economy needs us to eliminate unpaid overtime and dramatically reduce overtime overall.

Upper Class Blindness

In America, we do not like to see poor people.  We do not want to see homeless people.  We do not want to see people living in poorly maintained low income housing.  We would prefer not to see the hungry.  So, what do we do about it?  Evidently, we try to hide it.  Within the last year, at least 21 U.S. cities have passed laws forbidding the feeding of homeless people in public.  Some cities have replaced park benches with new models that include separators designed to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them.  Businesses have placed obstacles on sidewalks to make sitting on them painful, to deter the homeless from loitering near their stores.  In many cities, construction projects have been approved that destroy or renovate low income apartments to become classy higher income housing.  In some cases, low income housing has been replaced in response to higher income residents that live nearby, who feel that the nearby low income housing damages their property values and forces them to see things they would rather not.  In the U.S., our solution to our discomfort at seeing poor people is to create laws to drive them away.

This is a major ethical problem.  We have plenty of poor in the U.S., and the number is only increasing.  Hiding the problem is not fixing it.  All of these laws and other solutions are actually making the problem worse.  Now, hungry homeless people are being forced to starve, because they cannot be fed where they are, and they have nowhere else to go.  Tearing down low income housing is putting more people on the streets.  Perhaps the worst part, though, is that all of these efforts to hide the problem are making it less obvious, which makes it easier to ignore the suffering.

There is a solution.  It is a painful one, and the upper class will certainly be opposed to it.  It needs to be done though.  The problem has been ignored for so long that there seems to be no other reasonable way.  First, I think we need an amendment to the Constitution offering Federal protection for the poor.  No law should be allowed to persist which is designed specifically to discriminate against the poor.  When a city tries to enact a law designed to hide the fact that the city is tolerating the pain and suffering of its poor, Federal courts should have the legal backing to come down hard on that city.  Building projects designed specifically to relieve the rich from the burden of seeing the suffering of the poor should also be shut down.  In fact, the truly ethical city would deliberately zone such that every large, expensive house looked out at cheap low income housing.  The homeless shelter should be right next to the highest income mansion.  The soup kitchens should be right across from the country clubs.  Not only should it be legal to feed the homeless right out on the streets where they live, it should be encouraged to feed them in prominent locations where the rich can observe, and the right to feed them in those places should be legally protected.  The point of all of this is that the people with the greatest capacity to improve the situation should be the people who have the greatest exposure to the problem.  Yes, this will be very emotionally painful.  It should be.  Imagine the pain and suffering of those poor people.  If we think we cannot bear to feel at least a part of their suffering, we deserve to feel the full impact of their fate for ourselves.

Upper class blindness needs to be cured.  If this requires the poor to be shoved in the faces of the rich, then this is what needs to be done.  Perhaps if the rich were forced to realize what their money games are doing to our nation's poor, they would think twice about how their business deals and profit strategies might be causing harm to others.

Discrimination Against the Poor - Part 1

I want to share a little bit of back story before I start the actual article.  We just had our 5th child.  It was a natural birth at a local hospital.  Our first birth was a water birth in a birthing center, and we went home three hours after the birth.  Our other three were all natural in-hospital births, where the hospital required us to stay for 24 hours for observation after the birth, and my wife was sick of this.  We made a birth plan specifying that we wanted to leave 12 hours after the birth, and while we forgot it at home, we made our plans very clear to the hospital staff.  Our nurse, our midwife, and the pediatrician all accepted our decision, though some of them did not agree with it.  The nurse, however, informed the billing person for the hospital, who came in and informed my wife that if we left against medical advice (the hospital's 24 hour policy required the pediatrician to write the discharge for the baby as "against medical advice" if we left before 24 hours), Medicaid would not pay for the services provided for the baby, and we would have to pay out of pocket.  The midwife had told us something different, so I went home and did some research, while my wife tried to contact Medicaid by phone.  Eventually, she reached Medicaid who told her that they had no such policy and could only find a reference stating that if we brought the baby back before the 24 hours were up, we might be charged for services for the new visit that did not qualify as medically necessary.  Before that, however, my research at home revealed a rats nests around the billing lady's claim.  First, her claim was completely and absolutely false.  Second, most hospitals tell their patients this lie (though, hospital staff rarely knows the truth to begin with) and not just those insured through Medicaid.  I found three research papers from three different studies about this problem.  None of them found any insurers in the US with such a policy.  Anyhow, we left about 13 hours after the birth, and we informed the nurse that the claims were false and asked her to forward that on to the billing lady (the baby had no issues within those last 11 hours, though, the hospital staff had already determined she was perfectly healthy and the probability of problems was extremely low).


It should be obvious that poor people in the US face regular discrimination.  It is awfully hard to get hired for a job, even a really poor job, without nice clothing to wear to the interview (in fact, at least one US charity loans suits to poor job applicants to wear to interviews).  Many Medicaid, Food Stamp, and WIC office employees treat clients as inferiors.  Often, schools in poorer areas of towns and cities get sub-par teachers, while the other schools get the more skilled ones.  Middle and upper class people often look down on poor people and treat them as inferiors, and sometimes poor people even treat each other more poorly than those with more wealth.  Many Americans assume poor people are lazy.  This problem is so prevalent that comments from the few people that really are freeloading on government welfare often reflect badly on anyone who is receiving government welfare for any reason.  There is one place where this discrimination against the poor is especially repugnant, not to mention of questionable legality.

Most hospital employees in the US will tell patients that if they leave before their treatment is complete (known as leaving "against medical advice" or AMA), their insurance will not pay for it.  Because most patients leaving AMA are Medicaid patients, and because more wealthy patients can afford the costs better, this affects poor people far more than anyone else.  At least three studies have been done on this subject in the last three years, and none of these studies have found any insurance provider in the US with such a policy (some insurers actually laughed at the researchers for even asking).  Medicaid also has no such policy.  Now, in most cases, the hospital employees are not deliberately lying (though, hospitals do stand to benefit from patients staying "for observation" longer than is strictly necessary).  This is a common misconception among hospital employees, and it is presumably perpetuated as interns are taught this lie by regular employees.  This problem is not just bad for patients, it is also bad for insurers and potentially very bad for hospitals.

Because this problem affects primarily the poor, it is a clear case of discrimination against the poor.  As such, it is rather appalling.  It is also dangerous and perhaps even illegal.  This may be one reason that medical costs in the US are so high.  The biggest reasons people leave a hospital AMA are poor treatment or lack of additional time after treatment is complete.  Often, Medicaid patients have long waits to see a doctor, when their conditions are not critical.  Eventually, they get fed up with waiting, and they sometimes leave against medical advice.  The second, and more nefarious problem is when a patient has completed treatment, but the hospital either wants to observe the patient for an extra day or more, or the patient has to wait a long time for the doctor to do a final review and sign discharge papers.  In both cases, the hospital may charge more money to Medicaid, another insurer, or the patient, for the longer stay.  In the second case, however, it is possible that the long waits are actually deliberate abuse of the system, designed to allow the hospital to charge more for the visit by keeping the patient there longer.  Either way, forcing patients to wait so long that they consider leaving without getting full treatment is dangerous to the health of the patient.  Telling the patient that insurance will not pay if they leave early, however, may be more dangerous to the hospital than the patient.

Most hospitals require patients to sign a release before leaving AMA, to reduce liability for any problems that might have been prevented had the patient received full treatment.  Patients leaving AMA is considered a big problem in the US right now, especially among Medicaid patients (males patients are also more likely to do this).  Concerned hospital workers may be tempted to lie to patients to convince them to stay and complete treatment.  This carries two very dangerous consequences.  If found out, these lies will cause patients to distrust doctors, and this is already a big enough problem in the US; we really do not need to add to it.  Lying to patients may cause them to look for alternatives to normal medical treatment that might be dangerous or at least allow serious conditions to go untreated.  This is not in the best interest of the patients, and as such, it qualifies as a violation of the oath taken by nearly all medical practitioners in the US to avoid harming patients.  The second consequence is worse, at least for the hospital.  Medical patients have legally protected rights in the US, and one of those rights is to refuse treatment.  Any medical patient in the US may choose to leave a hospital at any time, without legal penalty, and if the hospital attempts to hold them against their will, the hospital is breaking the law.  This is a very serious offense.  Lying to a patient to manipulate them into forgoing this right, when they would otherwise have chosen to exercise it is a violation of this right.  Telling a patient that there will be severe financial penalties (for people on Medicaid, nearly any hospital bill is severe) is essentially forcing the patient to make a choice under duress.  Decisions made under duress are not legally binding.  If the patient has informed a hospital employee of an intent to leave AMA, and the hospital uses this lie to convince the patient to stay, the patient's original decision is still in force (because the overriding decision was made under duress), and by keeping the patient, the hospital is both holding the patient against his or her will (this is illegal by itself) as well as violating the rights of the patient.

There are several better ways to treat this kind of situation.  First, financial employees in hospitals should determine policy for specific insurance providers before any employee is allowed to suggest to a patient that penalties might exist.  Since most insurance companies have no such penalties, there is no point discussing them without asking the companies first.  Second, instead of trying to scare patients to stay by lying to them, it should be far more effective to inform them of the actual medical consequences of leaving AMA.  Even Medicaid patients are not stupid.  If they still want to leave, fully informed of the potential consequences, then it is their legal right to do so.  At that point, they have chosen to own the consequences, and nobody has any right to force them to stay.

This problem is dangerous to both patients and hospitals.  Employees need to be educated properly so that they do not inadvertently do or say things that could get the hospital in trouble.  Violations of patient rights can incur heavy fines, and multiple instances can get hospitals shut down.  Given how prevalent this problem is in the US, there have probably been enough of this kind of patient rights violations at most US hospitals to get them shut down.  Further, this kind of discrimination against the poor needs to stop.  Most poor people may not have the research skills to ever discover the lie they have been fed, but this does not absolve hospital employees of their responsibility to treat patients well and honestly.  If nothing else, more care should be taken to treat the poor fairly and legally, because they have a disadvantage.


Following are the studies on this problem:

The University of Chicago Medicine
http://www.uchospitals.edu/news/2012/20120203-billing.html

PubMed.gov, Journal of General Internal Medicine
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22331399

Annals of Emergency Medicine, An International Journal
http://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644%2809%2901798-3/fulltext