All hail Donald Trump

People didn’t believe me when I said I’d praise Trump for the good things he did. Well now it’s time.  Here’s the WSJ:

Arya Majumder would have celebrated his 19th birthday last month. Instead he died of cancer in 2010, his condition exacerbated by a scarcity of bone-marrow donors. . . .

Other families may be spared the same life-upending sorrow because last week the Department of Health and Human Services withdrew a proposed Obama -era regulation that would have prohibited compensation for bone-marrow donation. About 11,000 ailing Americans are currently searching the national marrow registry, hoping to find a compatible donor. This year at least 3,000 people will die waiting for a transplant. Others, like Arya, must settle for an inexact match, which can cause lifelong health complications or prove fatal. . . .

The 1984 National Organ Transplant Act prohibited payment for organ donors, and bone marrow was included, though it regenerates like blood, eggs or plasma. Represented by the Institute for Justice in 2012, the mother of three girls suffering from a condition known as Fanconi anemi, which often impairs bone marrow function, won a lawsuit against the federal government to allow compensation.

But the Obama Administration then wrote new rules to recriminalize payment for marrow, and HHS sat on the pending regulation for four years, leaving sick patients and their families in limbo. The regulatory uncertainty deflated the interest of entrepreneurs seeking to invest in much-needed marrow-supply services, as well as of top-tier researchers who wanted to study the effectiveness of compensation.

Great news for utilitarians!

HT:  Frank McCormick

 


Tags:

 
 
 

12 Responses to “All hail Donald Trump”

  1. Gravatar of flow5 flow5
    8. August 2017 at 07:01

    When are you going to run for office?

  2. Gravatar of Christian List Christian List
    8. August 2017 at 08:11

    I will never understand how such an intelligent educated man like Obama could advocate such terrible vicious laws. Maybe he isn’t so intelligent and educated in the first place?

    I mean this topic is really a no-brainer and even when you are kind of slow and got no clue about this topic at all, it can be explained to you in less than 3 minutes. Nevertheless the Obama Adminstration, a bunch full of ivy league supposed-to-be brainiacs, made just a terrible law. That’s really frightening. Obama and his folks could be extremely ideological in the worst possible way.

  3. Gravatar of Cameron Cameron
    8. August 2017 at 12:50

    Aaaaand he’s quickly negated this positive by threatening to bomb North Korea!

  4. Gravatar of BC BC
    8. August 2017 at 14:14

    Given the recent Obamacare debate, did the CBO (or some other “non-partisan” governmental body) score the paid donation ban(s) to determine how may recipients would lose their bone marrow donations as a result of the ban? I don’t remember the media hammering Obama about how many people would lose their bone marrow.

    (Of course, it’s much more accurate to say that a potential recipient loses a donation as a result of a ban then to say that someone “loses” their health insurance as a result of choosing not to buy it when a mandate is lifted.)

  5. Gravatar of Bob Murphy Bob Murphy
    8. August 2017 at 16:55

    Nice post, Scott. I had somehow missed this.

  6. Gravatar of Benjamin Cole Benjamin Cole
    8. August 2017 at 18:50

    OT but since Scott Sumner recently drove through his homeland:

    “Faced with 132 job openings and an increasingly unreliable American workforce because of alcohol, despair, depression and a spike in the use of opioids and other drugs, a factory in Wisconsin hopes it will get help from its newest employees, who arrived recently in four boxes: Robot 1 and Robot 2.”

    —30—

    Egads. I am glad Sumner crossed Wisconsin unscathed. Road wrecks must be rife.

    The above story is interesting in many ways, and confirms a bias-suspicion of mine: Productivity figures will perk up when labor markets return to old norms, instead of being chronically very loose.

    There are still 1.5 people looking for work, for very job opening in America. This is what the Fed calls “labor shortages.”

    Another paragraph from the story:

    “In Wisconsin, where it has 550 employees, all non-union, wages started at $10.50 per hour for first shift and $13 per hour for overnight. Counting health insurance and retirement benefits, even the lowest-paid worker was more expensive than the robots, which Tenere was leasing from a Nashville-based start-up, Hirebotics, for $15 per hour.”

    I guess $10.50 an hour as starting pay in a factory is now considered “high” by American standards.

    So they are going to robots to avoid “tight” U.S. labor markets.

    I hope the robots work, and I think it is great that robots can be effective against $10.50-an-hour workers.

    The greater productivity should be seen in the stats, and will result in higher living standards.

    The higher living standards may not be passed down to the workers, however.

    FRED reports that U.S. adult full-time employees make less now than in 1979.

    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881900Q

    The story:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/rise-of-the-machines/2017/08/05/631e20ba-76df-11e7-8f39-eeb7d3a2d304_story.html?utm_term=.2fd43f25e2f6&wpisrc=al_alert-national&wpmk=1

  7. Gravatar of Major.freedom Major.freedom
    8. August 2017 at 19:50

    Bah, Utilitarian principles could also be used to justify a ban on marrow payments, Sumner.

    Utilitarianism is a state strategy, not a right code of conduct for individuals, i.e. an ethic.
    Utilitarianism has, since the start of the collectivists who thought it up, been a playbook that state apologists turn to in order to naked aggression from states. It has for example already been used to justify bans on organ selling.

    Utilitarianism does not actually provide any concrete, time invariant principles of action that applies to everyone. There is a total absence of coherent concepts where it matters most. There is in fact no such thing as “social gains” or “social costs”, concepts advanced as if myself and my family for example were merely some cells of a larger animal which experiences the gains and losses. The gains and losses for me, and the gains and losses for the individuals in my family, are to be destroyed by way of forcing them into being just pieces of the much more important “society”. These non-existent concepts are nevertheless supposed to be the principles of utilitarianism.

    Any supposed ethic that rests on the belief in the existence of non-existent concepts, belong in the trash can of abortive attempts at ethics through history.

    The claim “Utilitarian principles lead only to allowing individuals to buy and sell bone marrow” is a political ploy, a deceitful appeal to scientific standards by way of mimicking various components of the language of chemists and physicists. See, they too treat their subject matter as homogenous. Interchangeable, one atom of hydrogen is indistinguishable from every other hydrogen atom. But human society isn’t like a collection of hydrogen atoms. There is a population of unique individual actors. The gains and losses for one individual cannot be added to or subtracted from the gains and losses of another individual. If at this time and place, I prefer a hamburger over $5.00, and you prefer $5.00 over a hamburger, and we each make gains for ourselves by trading, there is no “social gains” to be added nor is there any “social costs” to be subtracted. I lost $5 and gained a hamburger. You lost a hamburger and gained $5. We cannot add up the positives and subtract the negatives here. There is no values with the same common denominator. We can add 2 and 3 to make 5 because 2 and 3 share the common characteristic of being a number. We cannot add a hamburger to $5 to arrive at a total gain of hamburger$5 or $5hamburger. We cannot subtract $5 from a hamburger, or vice versa.

    Sumner, it is not utilitarianism that is motivating you to support removing state interference in bone marrow buying and selling.

  8. Gravatar of Ben J Ben J
    8. August 2017 at 21:23

    Major,

    Don’t you have pizzagate to investigate?

  9. Gravatar of major.freedom major.freedom
    9. August 2017 at 14:08

    Kind of a creepy mindset you have Ben J, to joke about such a tragic topic.

  10. Gravatar of Steve J Steve J
    9. August 2017 at 17:10

    MF – what alternative is better than utilitarianism?

  11. Gravatar of Benjamin Cole Benjamin Cole
    9. August 2017 at 19:14

    “FBI conducted predawn raid of former Trump campaign chairman Manafort’s home”

    Washington Post 4h ago

    Not quite Gestapo-tactics, but…Red-baiting tactics of the 1950-60s?

    Really, a “predawn raid” of a home? I thought that was drug-lord fare.

    Was Manafort going to flush documents down the toilet? Were doors kicked in, and flash-bang grenades used?

    The FBI, say, arriving unexpectedly at 9 am at Manafort’s with search warrants is not enough?

    Egads.

    Now Mueller will be under even more pressure to “come up with something.”

    Shades of Kevin Starr?

    Great theater though. Why do we bother with fiction (except for orthodox macroeconomics)?

    This is better than anything you could make up…

  12. Gravatar of Benjamin Cole Benjamin Cole
    9. August 2017 at 22:28

    Unit labor costs decreased 0.2 percent over the last four quarters. (See tables A1 and 2.)

    https://www.bls.gov/news.release/prod2.nr0.htm

    So, unit labor costs are…well, deflationary.

    Okay “labor shortages” and declining unit labor costs.

    Roger that.

Leave a Reply