Steven Landsburg, idiot savant

You will all remember Steven Landsburg, the economist and Slate writer who argued that one should vote for George Bush because John Kerry's running mate John Edwards is a racist -- that is, Edwards is against free trade, which is pretty much the same thing as being a Klansman when you come right down to it. If you are a connoisseur of idiocy and were concerned that Landsburg's election piece was a lucky one-off, you can relax. Today he shows us there's no luck involved; he has a powerful talent for breathtaking stupidity.

Oh sure, Landsburg teaches economics at a university and has written several books and doubtless knows lots and lots about demand curves and linear regression and the like. Presumably he doesn't drool uncontrollably and spend hours staring at bits of lint. His stupidity is a giant, an heroic thing nonetheless, if we measure stupidity by the inability to see one's own hand in front of one's face.

There was until recently a young woman, an African immigrant called Tirhas Habtegiris. She died a most horrible death. Landsburg felt an obviously strong compulsion to write about her. Well, not about her so much, actually, nor even about her death. No; what he writes about is how stupid it is to be upset at her death.

Ms Habtegiris had the misfortune to be suffering from incurable cancer, and needed a ventilator to breathe. Now a ventilator is apparently an expensive thing, and it was Ms Habtegiris's further misfortune to be poor. The hospital of Baylor University, a Baptist institution in Texas, gave her family ten days to find enough money to pay for the vent. They couldn't, and so on the eleventh day the hospital unhooked Ms Habtegiris from life-support. She took about 15 minutes to die. She wasn't comatose, by the way; she was fully conscious when they pulled her plug. For how many of the fifteen minutes left to her thereafter she stayed conscious, I cannot say.

Somebody calling himself 'YucatanMan' was appalled at the killing of Ms Habtegiris and has been making a big stink about it at Daily Kos. There is a certain kind of economist that sees outrage like YucatanMan's as a perfect opportunity for arrogant and condescending display. Landsburg is one of them:

[YucatanMan is] appalled because "economic considerations," as opposed to what the bloggers call "compassion," drove the decision to unplug Ms. Habtegiris. I conclude that YucatanMan either doesn't understand what an economic consideration is or doesn't understand what compassion is....

Landsburg then goes on to trot out bogstandard Econ 101illustrations of why the state should not assume (or impose on others, e.g., Baylor Hospital) the duty to ensure that people like Ms Habtegiris are guaranteed ventilator therapy. (If we think access to ventilators important, and if we assume that it would cost $75 to buy ventilator insurance, then we should simply give everybody $75 dollars. Most of us wouldn't buy ventilator insurance, but it's more efficient to just give everybody the modest cash sum and anyway, it's good to be free to choose; and so on, blah blah blah). I conclude that Landsburg either doesn't understand YucatanMan's post or is deliberately misreading it.

As an aside, I should mention at this point that, even though Landsburg's writing reveals him to be a contemptible little shit, it's very likely that if we leave emotion out of it, I would agree with him about many more economic points than I would with YucatanMan. What's more, I have little time for dKos (indeed, I'd never have known about YucatanMan's post if it weren't for Landsburg's link). None of which detracts from the fact that Landsburg has hopelessly missed, or willfully ignored, YucatanMan's (quite obvious) point. You see, YucatanMan isn't writing about economics. He's writing about monstrious hypocrites.

[Tirhas Habtegiris] was killed by doctors who removed the ventilator keeping her alive. And this action was fully legal under Bush's "economic considerations" law....

Politicians did not speculate on her diagnosis via video tape. Conservative religious zealots did not picket the hospital. She didn't have insurance. Ventilator treatment is expensive. Baylor did not want to incur any more expenses. So they removed a conscious woman from a respirator.

THIS is the true face of "compassionate conservatism" and of the phony "culture of life". They don't give a rat's ass, as long as the insurance will pay the bill. No insurance? Good-bye, you die....

Recall the abject hypocrisy of Schiavo: Bush rushed back to Washington (more than he did for New Orleans) to sign the Schiavo Federal Court review legislation. But, Tirhas Habtegiris died quietly, died for 15 minutes, without anyone knowing, without politicians manipulating her life and death, never uncared about within the phony "culture of life."

I don't know YucatanMan from Adam, and for all I know he has many ideas about economic matters that I'd think wrong or even foolish. But he is not writing about any of them in the post Landsburg attacks. YucatanMan's post isn't about choosing between compassion and cold heartless economic reality. It's not even about how, having chosen to make 'compassion' an element of policy, one might implement that policy most efficiently.

No; YucatanMan's post is about the appallingly low moral character of George and Jeb Bush and Bill Frist and Tom DeLay and the rest of the Red State Shintoist CINO Brigade. The Republican Party ЦК whipped the yahoos into a frenzy over a woman brain dead for years, vilifying her husband and issuing thinly-veiled threats of violence to the federal judiciary. But not a peep from them about pulling the plug on a conscious woman in accordance with a money-saving bill signed into law by the Party Leader; not a peep, and still less a donation of the money the hospital demanded to keep the woman alive.

As Landsburg either can't or won't understand what YucatanMan is writing, let me make it simpler for him: Republican pieties about a 'culture of life' are lies. The 'culture of life' isn't about life; it's about bread and circuses for bible-thumping rubes.