The Crowhill Journal

This morning I heard some clips of Joe Biden from two years ago. He sounded sharp and alert. I didn’t agree with what he was saying, of course, but he sounded like a man in full possession of his faculties.

We’ve all heard clips of him from the past few weeks and months. The man is deteriorating before our eyes. It’s ridiculously obvious, and it’s past time for somebody to end this.

It’s elder abuse to put this man out there as a candidate for president. He’s getting worse by the month, and if there are any debates this fall, …. Well. It will be very sad.

I don’t know if I have ever liked or agreed with Joe Biden, but it’s simply wrong to let him do this, and the party has to intervene.

There comes a time when you have to take the keys away from your father and tell him that he can’t drive anymore. It’s a hard thing to do, but it has to be done.

P&C drink and review Spruce Willis, from DuClaw, then discuss the state of journalism.

Sometimes journalists are simply ignorant. Other times they mix in opinion with the story. In fact, they do that most of the time.

Pigweed and Crowhill review a few recent egregious examples of journalistic malfeasance, like the way the press treated Kavanaugh vs. the way they’re treating Biden.

Later the boys get into science journalism, which is, if possible, even worse.

Pigweed and Crowhill drink and review Pigweed’s Imperial Amber Ale while they listen to a new performance by the Ben Franklin Players. Then they discuss Earth Day and environmentalism.

People today believe the world is bad and getting worse. But if you measure the planet by its ability to promote human flourishing, Earth is getting better all the time. We should be very happy about that! But instead, people think there’s some awful crisis going on.

The engine for all this prosperity is energy, and practically speaking, that means fossil fuels. Or, to put it simply, more fossil fuel use means more human flourishing. It means fewer people in grinding poverty.

Humans should care for the environment so they can promote a better life for humans. That should be the focus of our environmentalism.

I recently recorded an interview with the Close-Minded Podcast about my book, Eggs are Expensive, Sperm is Cheap.

The interview should be available on iTunes shortly, if it isn’t already. It’s available here now.

I also recently recorded the book for audio, and it’s available on Amazon and Audible. Here’s a link.

Thank God this isn’t the problem we had feared it was going to be, but let’s pretend that we were faced with a situation where hospitals had to ration ventilators. How would you have them do it?

I read an opinion piece this morning about how horrible it would be for a government agency to take a ventilator from an old person and give it to a young person.

My reaction was … what do you want them to do? Take it from a poor person and give it to a rich person? That’s the free-market approach.

It’s true that health care is a limited resource that has to be rationed, and as a general rule, the best way to ration a limited resource is through a free market.

That being said, there are some commodities that we don’t want to be rationed entirely by the market. Food, water, shelter, and healthcare are usually among them. For those commodities, we want a mostly free market.

There are many problems with the idea of a government committee creating rules to ration health care. One of the most obvious is that they will inevitably have a political and/or ideological agenda. Another, less obvious problem is that many people won’t agree with the rules the “experts” come up with.

Another big problem with government-run healthcare is that it will hide behind this idea that they’re acting for the common good, but you know perfectly well that the politically connected will still get preferential treatment. Stalin’s mother is not going to be on a waiting list for a ventilator.

Yet another problem is that central control stifles innovation. We want people to have the freedom to try new ideas.

This is part of the reason the healthcare debate is so difficult. We have to navigate a messy collection of values. We want free-market principles to drive innovation and to allocate scarce resources, but we don’t want the poor guy’s ventilator given to the rich guy’s kid. We don’t want to kill grandma to save the young person, but … well, in a way we do. And honestly, so does grandma. And we want to be able to provide some level of care to even the poorest person.

I don’t know enough to navigate between all these choices, but we shouldn’t cheapen the argument with simplistic slogans.