Jay Reding.com

Rudy Giuliani has now officially endorsed John McCain for the Republican nomination, calling McCain an American hero.

Rudy would be an excellent pick for an Attorney General in a Republican administration. As a former prosecutor and USA, he has the right connections and the right set of experience. He’d be tough and crime and government corruption. His managerial style has been less than desirable (see Bernie Kerik), but it’s hard to argue that he didn’t manage to produce real results in a hostile bureaucratic environment. The same could be said of Rudy as Secretary of Homeland Security. He would be a solid pick in a position that required transforming a bureaucracy and getting it back on the right track.

It’s unlikely that Rudy would be a solid VP pick (although not out of the question) as McCain might want to pick someone with more pull among conservatives, but if Rudy wants to go into public service there are any number of positions he could take.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece on the failure of California’s attempt at universal health care and what it means for the rest of the nation. It is interesting to see how many of these plans have failed to pass or ended up being scrapped due to cost overruns. If universal health care was such a great thing and so economically compelling, it’s hard to see why so many states would be having such a hard time making it work. The reason why is simple: universal health care doesn’t actually work in the real world:

Like collapses in Illinois, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, this one crumpled because of the costs, which are always much higher than anticipated. The truth teller was state Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, who thought to ask about the price tag of a major new entitlement amid what’s already a $14.5 billion budget shortfall.

An independent analysis confirmed the plan would be far more expensive than proponents admitted. Even under the most favorable assumptions, spending would outpace revenue by $354 million after two years, and likely $3.9 billion or more. “A situation that I thought was bad,” Mr. Perata noted, “in fact was worse.”

This reveals that liberal health-care politics is increasingly the art of the impossible: You can’t make coverage “universal” while at the same time keeping costs in check — at least without prohibitive tax increases. Lowering cost and increasing access, in other words, are separate and irreconcilable issues.

Universal health care has a basic and fatal flaw, you can’t simultaneously reduce the cost of a service and increase access to it. If you have universal access, you have to find a way of paying for people to get that access, which raises costs. If you want to keep costs down you can only economize so far before you have to restrict access. Universal health care is a bit like a perpetual motion machine—it would be wonderful in theory, but it can’t actually exist in reality.

What inevitably ends up happening is that governments cut costs first—which requires them to cut off access. This is how Britain’s NHS and the Canadian system work. You end up either waiting in line or having a government bureaucrat deny your request for treatment. That’s why the healthcare systems in those countries are having such trouble managing costs without drastically cutting back on services—and why both are more and more turning to private agencies to provide services they cannot.

The failure of the California plan isn’t a shock—people support universal health care in theory, but when confronted with the fact that there’s no such thing as “free” health care most people balk at the price. A further sign that the support for universal care is theoretical comes from evidence that most Americans are satisfied with their current health care coverage. When confronted with a plan that forces people to change their coverage—and not necessarily for the better—it’s not surprising that the theoretical support for universal coverage ends up losing to the desire not to lose what people already have.

Universal health care is not the only solution, and already there are better solutions out there. In fact, of all the possible solutions, universal health care is almost certainly the least advantageous. Corporations love it because it passes on the costs to the federal government—turning it into a corporate welfare transfer payment. Bureaucrats love it because it gives them more power, as it would with politicians. However, it’s hard to see where the groundswell of demand for universal health care really is. If there was such a groundswell, a liberal state like California wouldn’t be balking at the price.

The failure of California’s initiative demonstrates why universal health care simply doesn’t work. The laws of economics and human behavior go against it, and those factors can’t be legislated away. You can’t square the circle of trying to simultaneously lower costs and increase access without throwing a ton of money at the problem and continuing to throw more and more money at it until the system collapses. If even California legislators can learn that principle, hopefully Congress can as well.

It looks like John Edwards is leaving the 2008 race.

Edwards was an also-ran in the race, but it is somewhat surprising that he is giving up before Super Tuesday. Generally candidates don’t leave unless the money is tight, and Edwards seems to have been doing well enough in terms of fundraising to stay on for a while. Then again, given Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer, it’s also quite possible that family concerns are understandably influencing Edwards’ decision.

The question is where Edward’ support will go. Based on the previous contests, much of Edwards’ support may go to Hillary—she’s the one who seems to have the greatest appeal to union voters and lower-income voters, both of whom were demographic groups thats most strongly identified with Edwards. It would also be strategically wise for Clinton to pick up Edwards for the VP position—Edwards has some appeal with the “NASCAR voters” that Clinton alienates and would broaden her geographic appeal. It would also help Clinton with the far-left base of the Democratic Party who have embraced Edwards.

It was only a matter of time before Edwards quit, but to have Edwards quit before Super Tuesday creates an opportunity for one of the two Democratic candidates to vault ahead of the other in what is likely to be a very close race. The question that everyone will be asking now is how those Edwards voters break.

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty offers some kind words towards Edwards:

As much as we may grind our teeth in response to Edwards’ economic snake oil, and mock other characteristics (the YouTube hair fussiness, the giant house, the work for a hedge fund to “learn about poverty”, the exorbitant speaking fees, the $400 haircut)… he’s a man with a family, who soldiered on into an exhausting effort, at the urging of his wife who’s taking on cancer that may end her life. Elizabeth’s cancer didn’t turn into a political prop, and there was something inspiring in the way that this couple treated the worst possible news one could imagine as a minor impediment to what they saw as the mission of their lives. Some of us are left wondering if we would be able to fight on the way they did if tragedy struck our lives in the same way.

Keep this man far away from elected office – and keep an eye on the rumor that Obama would make him Attorney General – but wish him and his family well as they continue on life’s path ahead.

It’s always good to get a reminder that are political adversaries are also human beings, and we shouldn’t let differences of ideology or policy distract us from that. In today’s cutthroat political world, too many times we tend to forget.

CNN has official called John McCain the winner in the Florida primary, beating out Mitt Romney and giving himself a clear shot at the nomination. At this point, I think McCain will be the Republican nominee.

This marks the likely end of the Giuliani campaign, and already there are rumors that Giuliani will drop out and endorse McCain. That seems likely. Giuliani’s whole strategy was to wait out the early contests and pick up all his momentum in Florida. It was a risky strategy, and it appears to have backfired against him. Giuliani is a great leader, and I don’t think this is the end of his political career, but he didn’t show the kind of oratorical brilliance that I’ve seen from him on several occasions.

Mitt Romney’s strong executive experience doesn’t seem to have helped him in Florida. Romney has been a stalwart conservative in this race, but ultimately I don’t think he has enough momentum out of Super Tuesday to make it all the way. He’s certainly not out of the race, but he has a great deal of ground to gain in very little time.

Sen. John McCain is an American hero, a man of great personal integrity and someone who has always stood strongly on the side of his country. He often rubs conservatives the wrong way, and his “maverick” image causes much consternation—however, when it comes right down to it a man who agrees with us 80% of the time is better than a woman who represents the worst of American politics and a man whose great rhetoric is but a cover for a fundamental lack of real-world experience. We may have our issues with John McCain, but when it comes down to the basic principles of the party: fiscal conservatism, a strong national defense and strengthening the family, McCain has his heart in the right place.

Conservatives should make their voices heard, and they should continue to push Sen. McCain towards the mainstream of the party as they have on issues like immigration. However, if McCain gets the nomination—and it seems altogether likely that he will—conservatives cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good. John McCain will cut wasteful spending in Washington, defend our troops in Iraq and our war against radical Islamist terrorism and will continue to be a strong voice for respecting human life, born and unborn. He may not be perfect, but he can lead, and we need true leadership in Washington more than anything else.

Via National Review is this preview of tonight’s State of the Union address. Captain Ed will be liveblogging the speech at Captain’s Quarters. I’ll be in class tonight and will have to catch the speech in reruns.

It is interesting that Bush is finally going for earmark reform, but in a way that punts the reforms into next year when Bush won’t have to deal with it. It’s a case of “better late than never” but it’s hardly an act of political courage for the President to finally jump on the reform bandwagon without actually doing anything to stem the tide of pork this year.

Bill Quick reacts with revulsion to the idea of a McCain-Huckabee ticket in 2008. I’m with him on that. McCain’s biggest liability is with conservative voters, and to have to people on the GOP ticket who lack strong conservative bona fides would be to alienate the vast majority of GOP voters. The GOP has to realize that the times when the GOP has been successful are the times it has embraced small-government values. The GOP won in 1980 because Reagan elucidated a vision of smaller government. The GOP won in 1994 on the basis that the Democratic Party had lost touch with America and that the Contract with America presented another vision of smaller more efficient government.

The GOP needs to wake up, and fast. Congress’ approval ratings are barely in double digit territory. People have as dismal a view of government as they have ever had. If the GOP wants to be the part of slightly less big government rather than the party that will restore sanity and accountability to government, then the GOP will lose once again.

What is the vision of the Republican Party? Is it based upon our principles of economic liberty, personal morality and strong national defense? Or is it nothing more than the mere desire to scrape together enough interest groups to win? If it is the latter, then the GOP has learned nothing from their failures in 2006.

In a time of rampant public distrust of government, putting the architect of McCain-Feingold together with a clone of Jimmy Carter is exactly the wrong strategy. If people want more government, they can vote Democratic this November and get all the government they can handle.

Ronald Reagan said it best: the most dangerous line in the world is “I’m here from the government, and I’m here to help.” The Republican candidates keep invoking the name of Ronald Reagan—but only one of them seemed to understand what he stood for, and that guy isn’t running any longer.

To lose those principles is to not only lose the Republican base, but the independent voters that the GOP needs to win. You don’t win elections by being pale imitations of the other side, you win elections by bolding and proudly defending your principles. A McCain-Huckabee ticket would send exactly the wrong message.

Mitch Berg takes a rhetorical baseball bat to a Star-Tribune op-ed calling for a new New Deal. Columnist Bob MacLean thinks that the US badly needs a make-work program to “rebuild infrastructure”—a theory which Berg manages to tear apart with aplomb. The columnist suggests the following:

Let’s use the $150 billion currently proposed for rebates and corporate welfare to instead fund an 18-month infrastructure and government-efficiency initiative. This initiative — call it IGE — would be a contemporary version of the indisputably successful WPA program launched in 1935 by presidential order to cure economic depression.

First of all, the idea that the WPA was “indisputably successful” is wrong—in fact, there’s been a significant amount of economic research supporting the contention that the New Deal in fact made the Great Depression worse by preventing the normal market mechanisms from restoring normal employment. In fact, throughout the Depression and the height of the New Deal, unemployment remained incredibly high. For those who could get jobs, wages were propped artificially but that came at the expense of wider employment—the lowest the unemployment rate ever got during the New Deal period was around 14%, and in fact unemployment peaked again in the late 1930s despite all of Roosevelt’s programs. What truly ended the Great Depression was not the New Deal but the outbreak of World War II.

Even if we ignore the data and take the popular view, MacLean’s argument still doesn’t make much sense. Berg points out the obvious: do we really want unemployed mortgage brokers and software engineers either doing engineering inspections or digging ditches? Either you’re taking skilled labor and making it do unskilled work or taking skilled labor and putting it into a position where all those skills are wasted. It makes absolutely no sense, and it’s why such programs are completely worthless as an economic stimulus. How do you advance an economy by taking skilled labor and turning it into unskilled labor? The short answer is you don’t. Digging ditches does not prepare a worker for competing in the 21st Century.

Then there’s the fact that this is an 18 month program. If the real purpose is to reduce unemployment over the long term, then what’s the point? You’ve taken people with marketable skills and taken them out of the skilled labor pool for 18 months, putting them even further behind. The fatal flaw in this theory is the completely ridiculous assumption that the amount of productive work in digging ditches for 18 months is greater than the amount of productive work that people could get in the free market. That’s not a very intelligent argument, and it belies the kind of economic illiteracy seen frequently from the left.

If the goal was really to reduce unemployment, there’s a case to be made for funding worker retraining programs to increase the pool of skilled workers. If the goal is to increase domestic employment in unskilled or semi-skilled labor, the quickest way to do that is to start enforcing immigration laws—the effects of that alone would be a dramatic increase in the number of open jobs.

Instead, this is an example of trying to return America to the days when Fabian socialism was an active part of American politics—which is why we constantly hear the drumbeat of economic despair from the left. If there’s a crisis, then their radical ideas can have more of a purchase. When things are looking up, there’s less of a need for radical government intervention. Ironically, the party that once said “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” now has an economic position that requires scaring the American people into accepting radical policies.