This One Weird Trick Will Save You Trillions on Health Care!

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Bernie Sanders may have reacted badly to the news (again) that his much-coveted single-payer health-care system would cost at least $32 trillion in new federal spending over a decade. But not everyone has. At Vox, Dylan Scott echoed a line that was popular at Jacobin and Mother Jones, and cast the price tag as a bargain that would actually cut overall health spending:

Mercatus is projecting a $32 trillion increase in federal spending, above current projected government expenditures, from 2022 to 2031.

In terms of overall health care spending in the United States over the same period, however, they are actually projecting a slight reduction.

There is the rub. The federal government is going to spend a lot more money on health care, but the country is going to spend about the same.

Ah, I see. So the Sanders “Plan” is going to save money. And all we need to do to get to that happy state of affairs is:

•    Force every doctor and hospital in America to accept Medicare reimbursement rates for all patients — these are 40 percent lower than the rates paid by private insurance — while assuming that this would have absolutely no effect on their capacity or willingness to provide services

•    Raise taxes by 10 percent of GDP — overnight

•    Explain to the 150 million people with private insurance that the rules have been changed so dramatically that (a) they can no longer keep their plans, and (b) henceforth, tens of millions among them will be paying more in taxes than they were previously paying in both premiums and out-of-pocket costs

Easy!

Boys and Girls Are Different — Let’s Celebrate That

By Ben Shapiro

Tuesday, July 31, 2018

I have two children. Our four-year-old is a girl; her two-year-old brother is a boy.

I know these things because I have a functioning inferior temporal cortex.

Apparently, the editors at the BBC do not. There, recognition of sex is a mark of stereotypical discrimination. In a video hashtagged #NoMoreBoysAndGirls, the BBC swapped the clothing of two children who appear to be about a year old; in their words, “Marnie becomes Oliver; Edward becomes Sophie.” Then they place these children on a play rug, where adults come in and proceed to give them toys they believe are appropriate to their gender — so a woman comes in and gives “Sophie” a doll, for example. The BBC explains, “Men hugely dominate careers prizing maths, spatial awareness, and physical confidence. Are boys ‘better’ at these? Is it nature or nurture? . . . When children play spatial-awareness games frequently, their brains change physically within just three months.”

When informed that they have given stereotypical toys to these clothing-swapped children, the women are aghast at their own behavior. “I thought that I was somebody who had a really open mind,” one woman lamented.

So, is toy stereotyping truly a reflection of our patriarchal system?

No. No it isn’t.

Robust studies demonstrate different toy preferences among boys and girls. A 2016 study from City, University of London, found that “children as young as 9 months-old prefer to play with toys specific to their own gender.” A 2017 research review from the same university found that “despite methodological variation in the choice and number of toys offered, context of testing, and age of child, the consistency in finding sex differences in children’s preferences for toys typed to their own gender indicates the strength of this phenomenon and the likelihood that it has a biological origin.” This shouldn’t be shocking: Even rhesus monkeys differentiate toy preference by sex. And the patriarchy among rhesus monkeys is difficult to chalk up to gender stereotyping.

So, are boys succeeding in STEM fields because they’re handed trucks? Or are they succeeding because they prefer trucks? A solid way of finding out is by looking at countries with the weakest patriarchies — what’s the job distribution there among men and women? Unsurprisingly, it turns out that countries with greater “gender equality” show fewer women seeking STEM degrees. Per capita, more women in countries such as Albania and Algeria are seeking STEM degrees than are women in much-ballyhooed Norway. Why? Because women in rich countries choose not to pursue STEM fields as often.

Yet we’re supposed to believe that we have the ability to change natural differences between boys and girls by swapping their clothing.

This is not only idiotic, it’s counterproductive. What’s wrong with little girls liking little-girl things? What’s wrong with little boys liking little-boy things? Nothing. Differences between boys and girls are one of the great joys of life.

But, say the critics, we’re neglecting the little boys who want to dress in tiaras. What of them? Isn’t our reinforcement of gender stereotyping damaging to those boys? For the vast majority of boys, the answer is no: Reinforcing gender confusion will be far more damaging to little boys than simply telling your son to put down his sister’s tiara. (He’s likely picking it up only to annoy his sister anyway.) And encouraging gender confusion among otherwise unconfused kids simply to “fight stereotypes” ensures that more children are confused.

Yet the same people who spend their days fretting over small white girls wearing Moana costumes will say that their brothers ought to wear Little Mermaid outfits; the same people who claim that brain plasticity is so great that we can train little girls to become engineers by handing them robot toys suggest that gender itself is biologically set in stone.

None of this makes any sense — and none of it is about actually protecting children. At no point do advocates of gender confusion actually explain why additional gender confusion is better — or even show the statistical evidence that pushing boys to wear dresses will somehow create more female engineers, or show why we should push girls to become engineers if they don’t want to do so anyway. This is social engineering by people hell-bent on remolding society without regard to the health of children.

Instead, why don’t we simply assume that parents should raise boys and girls differently? My little girl isn’t going to grow up thinking she can’t perform in science — her mother is a doctor. My little boy isn’t going to grow up thinking boys don’t take care of kids — I’m home more than Mom is at this point. But I’m not going to reinforce gender-bending behavior that tends toward higher rates of depression and suicide over time, when I can simply reinforce the beauty of the differences between boys and girls, and make my kids feel safe and secure in their own biology.

Reality Check: Women Are Worse Off In ‘Democratic Socialist’ Countries

By Vanessa Brown Calder

Monday, July 30, 2018

In light of self-professed “democratic socialist” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s primary election results, the term “democratic socialism” has been bandied about a lot recently. Not least of all on “The View” this week, where Meghan McCain argued with Joy Behar about normalizing it.

When McCain pressed Behar for an example of a democratic socialist country that was successful, she listed five Nordic countries: Sweden, Finland, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark. Those countries are better described as social democracies, with relatively free economies paired with generous redistributive social welfare programs. That is, these countries aren’t examples of socialism that “works.”

Why does this distinction matter? Notably, Ocasio-Cortez’s vision of a world where capitalism “will not always exist” and her Bernie-esque policy prescriptions including government job guarantees and doubling the federal minimum wage actually lie to the left of Scandinavian countries economically. Proponents like Behar often don’t realize that replicating the Scandinavian system would require not only increasing redistribution, but also increasing economic freedom — something that is seemingly not at the top of either Behar or Ocasio-Cortez’s policy wish-list.

That aside, the generous redistribution Behar favors in Nordic countries hasn’t resulted in all roses for women: there are trade-offs. In a recent report, “The Nordic Glass Ceiling,” Swedish author Nima Sanandaji outlines “several aspects of Nordic social policies [that] have negatively affected women’s career progress and even contributed to a glass ceiling” for working women.

Policies including public-sector monopolies, punishing taxes, publicly funded child care and parental leave, and even ineffective gender quotas have held back Nordic women’s career trajectories. Sanandaji argues that, as a result, “the proportion of women managers, executives, and business owners is disappointingly low.”

Indeed, the United States surpasses the Nordic countries and other western European countries on a variety of metrics. OECD data shows that 14.6 percent of U.S. working women are managers, while in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, just between 1 and 4.6 percent of working women are managers. Overall, women in the United States are about equally likely as men to be managers, while women are only half as likely as men to be managers in western OECD countries overall.

As Sanandaji stresses in his report, redistributive policies and high taxes in the Nordic countries push women to be “part-time workers and part-time housewives” partly because Nordic career women “find it harder to afford domestic help than their American equivalents” due to high taxes and perhaps partly because substantial redistribution including lengthy parental leave makes women more expensive to employ and leads to statistical discrimination at work. Working a part-time schedule usually doesn’t qualify workers for promotions to management roles, which may explain some of the difference in managerial rates between men and women.

On the other hand, U.S. women are more likely to work full-time, the U.S. labor market is less segregated by sex, and women are more likely to work as professionals in the United States as compared to other western European countries. In Behar’s feminist worldview, these characteristics should all constitute advantages of the U.S. model.

Behar’s mostly female “The View” audience likely cares to know about these trade-offs. Contrary to claims, it’s not all roses in Scandinavia, and the U.S. model (including lower taxes and less redistribution) holds a variety of advantages over the Scandinavian one.