Years of abstinence programs but higher pregnancy rates

Teen pregnancy rates have risen in the US by 3%, the first reversal in the downward trend that started in 1990. Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association, a group that only exists because of Bush redirecting money from your pocket into theirs, says the rise in pregnancy rates is "another opportunity to throw a barb at abstinence education." Abstinence doesn't need education. Abstinence is doing nothing and any idiot can do nothing. On the other hand, responsible sexuality takes information and knowledge—two things that religious loons think are dangerous even for adults.

For teens, 15-17, the pregnancy rate reached its highest point in 1990 and it steadily declined, year after year, until 2006 (the data for 2006 is what is now being released.) In 2006 it rose for the first time since the high in 1990.

Apparently all that government effort to stop teen sex hasn't worked. In 2007 the government crowed that teens were having less sex than ever before. The bureaucrats reported that in 2005 47 percent of high school students reported they were sexually active, down from 54 percent in 1991. The government said that lowering of reported sexual activity was good and that it lead to lower "birth rates." But teen pregnancy rates went up, not down. And by 2006 birth rates were also up.

Less sex is supposedly taking place but pregnancy rates are up. That would seem to indicate that what changed is that fewer teens are now taking precautions to avoid unwanted pregnancy—and for most teens being pregnant is unwanted. This would seem to verify the criticism of the abstinence programs that what they do is encourage reckless sexuality among teens.

The dilemma for the moral conservative (or immoral conservative, depending on your point of view) is that teens are having less sex but there are more pregnant teens. Perhaps sex education does "encourage" sex but it would seem to encourage responsible sex. And perhaps abstinence encourages less sex but it would seem to discourage responsible sex as well. So, is the choice between more teenage sex with less pregnancies or less teenage sex with more pregnancies?

If you can only have one or the other which should the conservative support? I guess it depends on whether or not the conservative in question actually cares about teens getting pregnant more than he is horrified by teenage sexuality. My guess is that practical conservatives, who worry because teen pregnancy creates social problems for the teen, will want less pregnancy. But the moralistic conservative, imbibed with "biblical morality" will think the sex itself is immoral and be thrilled that there is less of the "dirty" activity going on in general, even if the result is more ruined lives. And, when it comes to the social problems of girls becoming mothers, the moralistic conservative is likely to see that as nothing more than the "wages of sin,
" which are a good thing since they discourage "immorality."

I'm not surprised that years of government abstinence programs would lead to higher pregnancy rates. Couterprodutive results are often the result of government meddling. With that in mind I can't say I'm hopeful for the state of the middle class now that Obama has pledged to protect them. I've watched how government programs in the US "protect" kids and it isn't pretty. I've seen how we our government went in to Iraqi to "protect" people from Saddam Hussein. And I've seen how the drug warriors protect us from drugs and the travel Nazis protect us from terrorists. Perhaps we should just kiss the middle-class good bye now and get it over with.

Bailout promises, Mao's famine and bad incentives.

I suspect a lot of people are shocked by the blatant falsification of statistics by various government bureaucrats, at different levels, which gives a pretense to the Obama administration to claim their stimulus package created, or saved, jobs. I'm not sure why people are surprised at all.

One of the problems with the bureaucratic system of management is that such self-reporting is often the criteria used to measure "success." The problem is that the incentives for the bureaucrats are such that they pushed to fudge the numbers, in whichever direction necessary, to please their superiors. In the bureaucratic system pleasing the overlords, is necessary for advancement. So it's best to tell them what they want to hear.

Equally important is that government agencies, which report successes for their programs, often get showered with additional funding. Additional funding means more conferences for the top bureaucrats, often at resorts with very nice beaches. It also means more funding for pay increases and benefits.

There are numerous reasons why it is "helpful" to distort the facts in a way pleasing to those who have power over you. Often the distortions are small, just an attempt to show something "positive," but as the distortions move up the bureaucratic ladder they accumulate and the distortions grow.

A prime example of this, and the disastrous consequences that can follow, is found in Jasper Becker's book Hungry Ghosts. Becker's book is about the great famine in China from 1958 to 1962, where it is now estimated that 30 million people starved to death. And bureaucratic incentives to distort information had a lot to do with it.

Mao was a moron, plain and simple. He believed that various Marxist principles could be used to produce bumper crops. Since the Maoists said that solidarity of the people made the people stronger, then the same applied to grains. Thus growing grains tightly packed together would make them stronger, not destroy crops. This was just one area where the Maoists tried to apply "scientific Marxism" to the physical laws of agriculture—applications that failed over and over.

So these experiments were dismal failures. But such failures are not enough to lead to a famine. Other factors come into play. One such factor was the fear of the dictator. Mao's ideas failed but no one wanted to tell him. Tyrants could easily confuse the message with the messenger. So the incentive was to lie.

Local bureaucrats, instead of admitting that crops had been reduced, decided to write reports claiming that crops had increased. Those reports went to the superiors. The superiors, not aware of how much of the report was bluster, combined these exaggerated reports together. And they, thinking the reports were accurate, saw no harm in making them look even better by increasing the crop yields. And so it went. As the "data" accumulated it appeared that scientific Marxism was a success in agriculture. The top echelon of Mao's China got reports that made them very happy.

Desperate for hard currency the Chinese officials decided to take advantage of their bumper crops and sell them outside China. So they confiscated a large section of what crops did exist for export. This meant that food was scarcer at the local level as the farms were depleted of their stock to fill the quotas for export. A year goes by and the next set of reports have to be prepared. Again no one wanted to be the first to prick the Maoist bubble. Nor did anyone want to report they had failed, not when everyone else was apparently so successful, as the reports clearly indicated. So once again they took the figures from the year before and added a bit to them. And the process repeated itself.

At the top levels of the government Communist officials received more data, carefully collected from across the country, indicating an even larger crop than the year before. So the quotas for export were increased.

More food was confiscated. But a problem arose. You can't confiscate food that doesn't exist. Authorities scoured the countryside and couldn't find the crops that supposedly existed. The conclusion they drew was a simple one: the farmers were greedy, counter-revolutionaries who had obviously hidden the bumper crops. They were attempting to sabotage the revolution. So the officials, convinced the farmers had hidden food somewhere confiscated all the food they could find—which was actually all the food there was. The farmers had no hidden stocks, the data was wrong. The cumulative effect of lots of small distortions produced a massive error which resulted in the deaths of millions.

We saw a similar sort of bureaucratic distortion when the Bush administration looked at the "reports" on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Intelligence agents, dealing with lots of unknowns or information that could be interpreted in various ways, tended to interpret the data with the wants of their superiors in mind. This tended to bias everything in one direction with no one wanting to be the odd man out. This was especially true with Bush officials who tended to be disciplined if they contradicted what the President wanted. (A humorous example of this process can be found in the film The Tailor of Panama.)

Can't the same thing be found in private industry as well? Yes, but to a much more limited degree. For instance I know a publication which faked its circulation figures, claiming numbers double the actual figures. Advertisers paid on the assumption that the number of responses would be higher than they actually were. The advertisers who could accurately measure the results tended to drop their ads. But some businesses had no method of determining results from their ads and they tended to stick around as advertisers where the others didn't.

The difference is in how results are measured. The private sector has a "bottom-line" which tells the superiors everything they need to know. If something is working it shows up in increased profits. If it isn't working it shows up in reduced profits or losses. (For a good exposition on the differences between profit management and bureaucratic management see Bureaucracy by von Mises.) The more a business is able to use the "bottom-line" the harder it is to fudge the reports according to the benefits that accrue to those making the reports.

Government tends to shun profit management and has no bottom-line. Attempts to quantify the data are distorted by the incentives of the system. The net result is that even well-meaning superiors find it difficult to make rational decisions because the information they use has been distorted by the system.

While Mao could be a tyrant I don't think the evidence indicates the starvation was intentional—as opposed to Stalin's planned starving of the kulaks in the Ukraine. Eventually the situation got so bad that someone told Mao the truth and the situation changed. However, Mao's moronic Marxism was sufficient to create the crisis and the bureaucratic system made the situation worse by distorting the facts. And Mao was clearly a willful killer who ran a system that murdered millions intentionally as well as unintentionally.

The key point is that such distortions are systemic in nature. They are built into the structure of the bureaucratic model of management. They are not determined by the motives of the bureaucrats per se. Good people, facing bad incentives, are still likely to screw up. Bad people, facing good incentives, are likely to do good things. The progressive Left errs by thinking intentions are critically important while incentives are a minor issue. Many of the errors of the socialist Left are derived from this one fallacy.

By the way, this exposes the errors conservatives make about the Left as well. They assume the bad results, inherent in the system, are the result of immoral or evil motives by the Left. Typically that is not the case. A second, similar error of the conservatives, is that they buy into the Left-wing assumption that motives matter. So the Right will claim that putting "moral" people, "Christians" or "conservatives" into the system will change things. It won't. In the past, before they were taken over by theocrats, the Republicans claimed that putting "businessmen" into office would give us business-like management. That wasn't possible. The problem is not personnel but incentives built into the system.

Theologians shouldn't tresspass on economics.

If an economist used his position to pontificate on theology the world would laugh. But when a theologian uses his credentials, in an imaginary field, to lecture on economics we are expected to pay attention.

As this blogger sees things the one institution that has no right anymore to lecture on morality is the Roman Catholic establishment. But the Vatican has been sticking its nose into the affairs of the world for centuries and won’t stop now. Consider some of the uninformed statements made by the current Vatican leader, Joseph Ratzinger, who uses the name Benedict when pretending to speak for God.

In a new encyclical on economics Ratzinger continues the Catholic tradition of opposing depoliticized, free markets. Like his predecessors he misstates what depoliticized markets are. He writes that “profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end” but if profit “is produced... without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.”

Ratzinger has been concerned with imaginary “truth” for so long that he doesn’t understand how this world works or why. Profit is a motivating factor. Each of us acts to promote our self interest—even the Catholic hierarchy. That motivation can lead to good and to bad but seeking “the common good” is more likely to lead to bad results than good. Let me explain something that the Vatican, always besotted with power, has never understood.

When profit-making is politicized it leads to bad results. When profit-making is depoliticized it leads to good results. First, consider the depoliticized market. A depoliticized market is one where individual entrepreneurs are unable to impose their will on unwilling consumers. To a large extent the local grocery store is a depoliticized market (though even here politics can distort things). This store must entice you to buy there because it has no ability to force you to purchase there.

The result is that they have to make an effort to serve your good if they wish to make a profit. Because they lack the ability to use force they need your voluntary co-operation in order to make a profit. Like them, you too are looking out for your own self-interest. You will trade with them provided you believe that you are better off making this exchange than any other trade you might make. Your decision, like theirs, is based entirely on your self-interest.

You are not attempting to increase their profits. If they profit, or not, is of no concern to you. You are merely making an exchange that you believe will benefit yourself. Similarly the store is doing the same thing. By seeking their own self-interest both are acting in ways that makes the other better off. Yet neither is seeking to improve the life of the other.

The danger comes in when concepts like the “common good” are allowed to dominate. This concept is used to politicize the market. The argument is that an unregulated market is not one where the common good dominates so individuals act in bad ways. But how? Without the ability to force other traders into unwilling exchanges there is no ability to create exchanges where one party loses.

The only way to systematically destroy the mutual benefits of free exchange is to politicize the market. Politicization means that the state will forcibly intervene into the exchanges. But what can government intervention accomplish?

It might require two individuals to exchange, who would have done so anyway. But since they would have exchanged without the intervention then government has, in fact, accomplished nothing.

It might force an exchange where neither of the parties would have made the exchange. Why didn’t they make the exchange voluntarily, in this case? The answer is: because each considered the exchange a net loss. Intervention here makes each trader worse off, not better off.

What the advocates of politicized markets really want is to force exchanges where one partner benefits and the other one loses. Ratzinger, totally ignorant of economics, believes that the political classes will use state power to force exchanges that benefit the poor and powerless. The Vatican, one of the wealthiest institutions in the world, is quite willing to use the wealth of other people to “benefit” the poor but rather unwilling to use their own wealth in that manner. They are willing to use funds donated from their members for such things but the vast holdings of the Vatican itself are not sacrificed for the “good” of the poor.

Politicized markets attract predatory individuals who use state power for their own benefit, or for the benefit of their favored friends or supporters. The poor and powerless never control the politicized power structures no matter what Ratzinger or Marx or anyone else may think. Power attracts the powerful, not the powerless. Concentrated political power, established under the pretence of the “common good” always ends up in the hands of private interests. More importantly these private interests are able to impose exchanges on individuals that they otherwise would not make.

The reality is that politicized markets can never serve the common good since they can only impose exchanges which are not wanted, not exchanges that are wanted.

What Ratzinger wants is political control over markets. He fantasizes that political power will be used according to the values he espouses. In truth, that power will be used in ways quite different from what he wants.

Ratzinger wants a state system of redistribution of wealth. How ignorant can this man be? When power is in the hands of the powerful there is real wealth redistribution. But it comes at the expense of the poor and the powerless. One of the great myths of redistributive state is that it redistributes wealth toward the needy. While there may be some show-programs which appear to help the poor and powerless, for the most part redistribution will go up the economic ladder not down.

Ratzinger continues what has been church tradition for centuries: opposition to depoliticized markets and a belief in centralized control of markets based on Catholic teaching. The Vatican has never been happy promoting their own morality on matters such as sex or economics. What they have always yearned for, and still yearn for, is for state power to coercively force Catholic moral values on others. Ratzinger wants the forced redistribution of wealth, not charity. The Vatican has consistently been unable to envision their moral agenda without the use of state power. This sort of fascistic tendency is not one the Vatican is about to give up, no matter what some “libertarian” apologists for Catholicism say.

Big Brother Corp (BBC) is watching -- here's why.

This holiday season consider the plight of those living under tyrannical regimes run by tin-pot morons. I especially think of our friends living under the heavy hand of Gordon Brown in the United Kingdom. Brown is playing Stalin to Tony Blair's Lenin. Blair really pushed England heavily in the direction of a police state. Consider this video as some evidence. This is a government television advert informing the audience that they are all in the data base and can be found if they commit the heinous crime of not paying a permit fee to own a television.



Here is another:



Here is another:



In this case you will see a TV license thug sent around to investigate a family suspected of not having a license. One member of the family is video taping the man when he suddenly assaults the family member.



Here is another British family being harassed by a government thug over alleged non-payment of their license. The family doesn't own a television. Listen to them as they note how many hours they spent dealing with this issue yet the government TV network refuses to listen.

The BBC is an arm of the government not matter how they pretend otherwise. The original justification was that the market can't provide television -- obviously it can and does. That was a lie. Then they said it was a licensing fee so as to avoid commercials, which pay for broadcast television in other nations. But the BBC sells commercials anyway.

What I found particularly odd was that the BBC then rips off the British public with their DVDs. I'm a Torchwood fan and watched in while living in the UK. I bought the DVDs for it there. Season one was broken into three separate DVDs each cost about $40 at the time , or $120 for the set. The same set on BBC America cost $68. That set is currently "on sale" at the British BBC shop for $80, but the normal current price is $110.

While living in the UK I did some research for a UK think tank where I investigated the selling prices of BBC DVDs in both the UK and the US. The British public, who had already paid license fees to fund the production of BBC shows, were paying substantially more than the American public, who hadn't paid a cent previously to produce those shows.

I suspect the reason for this is simple. In the US the BBC has no legal power to threaten people and no law granting it near-monopoly status. In the UK the BBC is the giant in broadcasting because government regulations stifle competition and give the BBC funding taken, coercively from all viewers. TV 4, which is independent, is not subsidized by the taxpayers. And cable viewers pay for those networks directly. The BBC can take funding from viewers who don't watch the BBC -- no other broadcast station in the UK has that power. These legal privileges mean the BBC doesn't have to treat the public well.

But, in the US, it is a different matter. Lacking the privileges granted by the UK politicians, the BBC is just another vendor selling a product. So when it comes to the American market they can't charge the high fees which they routinely imposed in the UK.

The same entity, the BBC, has to act very different in two different situations. Where they must compete in the US market they can't intimidate people to pay them for the privilege of own a TV and they have to sell their products at competitive prices. In the UK, where they have political power regulating the market, allegedly for the good of the consumer, they threaten and intimidate the public, use the police to collect revenue for them, then sell adverts on the channels anyway, and finally rub salt in the wounds by selling the finished product at a higher prices than the charge for the same item in the United States.

And there are still some people who argue that having government regulate business is for the good of the consumer. Reality check: government regulation is almost always the means by which the corporate powers are able to rip off the consumers in ways they couldn't in the competitive market.

Politicizing markets to rob the poor and reward the rich.

Numerous historians and economists, from all sides of the political spectrum, have noted that Big Business is able to use the Regulatory State to protect itself from competition and to transfer wealth from taxpayers to themselves. What we have is an Iron Triangle of Interests which harms the economy and make all, but the favored few, worse off as a result.

The most obvious partner in this Iron Triangle of Interests is Big Business itself. These corporations use the political process to buy influence with politicians. And politicians are very anxious to sell that influence to the various bidders. Of course, when it comes to purchasing influence with the political elite it is always the rich and powerful who are able to do so.

The poor and the powerless simply don’t have the wealth or influence that will benefit politicians. At best the needy are merely the excuse used for the accumulation of power by the political elite, power which is then used to benefit those who can actually compensate the politicians for their services.

A basic principle of human nature is that people want to improve their conditions with the least amount of effort necessary. Taking what others produce is often easier than producing it yourself. And Corporations are not different from individuals when it comes to this tendency. If the political process has the power to benefit Corporations then they will use it for just that reason. If they are unable to transfer wealth by political pull they will have to seek profits by competing with others to satisfy the needs and wants of people.

In depoliticized markets Corporations must produce goods or services which consumers desire. There must be an exchange of value for value. This is necessary because a depoliticized market is a voluntary market. Without coercion an exchange is only consummated when all partners believe they will benefit. When the political elite are able to interfere with such transactions they are able to force individuals into making non-optimal exchanges. This element of force is what allows them to distort the process so that wealth is transferred to their favored interest groups.

It is no surprise that Big Business is quite happy to use the political process as a form of profit-seeking. What would be surprising would be a world where this didn’t happen.

But Big Business is only one party to this Iron Triangle of Interests. What we need to ask is who else participates and why.

We can see how the political elite benefits from pure self-interest. The more power they have to interfere in markets the more able they are to secure funding from those anxious to use that power. But well-intentioned politicians, from both Left and Right, who actually think they are working for the benefit of society, continue to participate in this process and allow it to survive. While a substantial number of politicians are fully aware that they are transferring wealth from the bottom of the economic ladder to the top, many would be horrified at the thought of being used this way. Yet they continue to participate. So why does this happen?

On the Left, well-intentioned politicians have some understanding of how Corporate Elites can profit at the expense of the poor in society. Where these politicians go wrong is on two levels. First, they believe that voluntary exchanges, in a depoliticized market, are inherently exploitative. But worse yet, they honestly believe that the Regulatory State is the cure to the exploitation. One result is that they are used by Big Business to “reform” the system through regulations which are wrongly believed to even out the playing field.

Consider a department which is set up to regulate industry X for the “benefit of all.” They are given powers which effectively politicizes the market. The rules they write can dramatically change wealth outcomes. Those most effected, the industry itself, becomes intensely interested in the actions of the agency and the rules they impose. The big interests in that industry, with the most resources, are willing to spend a chunk of those resources in order to assure that the rules and regulations happen to favor themselves.

The less powerful in that field are keen to skew the rules in their favor as well. But their ability to do so is significantly lower due to their relative dearth of resources. And those politicians who are knowingly selling their favors will use their influence to skew these rules in favor of the corporate interests most likely to reward them. Over time the natural tendency of the politicized market is for it to come under the influence of the very interests which it was designed to control.

Left politicians, hoping to limit the power of Big Business, actually enhance that power through the Regulatory State. They create the mechanism by which involuntary exchanges can be introduced.

The third element in this Iron Triangle is Right politicians. These individuals buy into two myths as well. One is the idea that what’s good for business is good the country. To them Big Business is some sort of mythological hero acting for the benefit of all. They look at the results of a depoliticized market, which is wealth-enhancing, and foolishly conclude that such results are the deepest desires of business interests. In a depoliticized market all participants enhance their wealth by exchanges. But that is not the case in politicized markets. Conservatives fail to recognize this. So they assume Business is merely interested in producing wealth -- which is not the same thing as accumulating wealth.

From this they assume that measures which help Business will eventually help society as a whole. This is not the case. The rent-seeking businessman can thus use both sides of the political spectrum to their benefit.

When the Left dominates they lobby for regulations which end up skewing the market in favor of their preferred interests. Of course, when such politicized markets exist there is competition between different interest groups wanting the regulations skewed in their direction. A change in the political elite offers special interests previously unfavored by the political process to distort the market in a different direction -- their own. They sell this new distortion as a form of “deregulation”.

Of course deregulation itself can be used as a form of market distortions. This is hard for some on the Right to grasp. Consider an electric company which has used regulations to limit competition. In return for that privilege the Left pushed through rules which attempted to restrict the income they could earn. When the Right comes to power the company then pushes to deregulate the price controls but doesn’t lobby to open the market to new competition.

Another example would be when government places a tax on all production. The tax is the same for everyone. But the Right pushes through selected tax cuts which reduce the tax burden in only one field of production. The result is that the profits in that field are pushed to higher levels merely because the tax burden is lower. In a depoliticized market that field may not be one which would attract new investment at all. But because of selective deregulation this field appears more profitable because other forms of investment face higher taxation. Investment flows to this industry instead of where it would naturally.

Of course the Right is also open to politicizing markets for various reasons as well. They will intervene in markets to prevent consumers from spending resources on “immoral” products. They might argue that a certain field is “necessary for national security” and thus has to be politicized -- fields such as energy production and agriculture are two prime examples that the Right loves to pamper.

As the country swings from Left to Right and back again the rhetoric changes, but the ability of the Corporations to use the political process to enrich themselves remains the same. And the prime reason is that neither Left nor Right is quite willing to depoliticize markets.

The financial acumen of the politicians.

A friend of ours, Richard Venable sent the following. I'm not sure if he was passing it along or wrote it, either way he deserves some appreciation.

Not Looking Good for the Bailout Plan

Back in 1990, the Government seized the Mustang Ranch brothel in Nevada for tax evasion and, as required by law, tried to run it. They failed and it closed. Now we are trusting the economy of our country to a pack of nit-wits who couldn't make money running a whore house and selling booze?

True, very true. I'm perplexed at why anyone believes people, who have the ability to steal money through taxes, but still can't balance a budget are the ones to resolve the financial mess in housing, and housing related banking. More importantly they were the morons who created the mess through their government-sponsored businesses, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. If you want an indication of how bad politicians are at running finances all you need do is check out the national debt clock we have about half way down in our far left column.