It being the Memorial Day Weekend we’re being inundated with war movies on television. To my eye most of the movies they’re showing seem very inappropriate to the day.

If you were curating a film festival wih a Memorial Day theme, what movies would you include? Here’s a sample of the films that occurred to me:

• The Patriot (2000)
• Glory (1989)
• The Red Badge of Courage (1951)
• The Big Parade (1925)
• Wings (1927)
• They Were Expendable (1945)
• A Walk in the Sun (1945)
• Saving Private Ryan (1998)
• Steel Helmet (1951)
• Fixed Bayonets! (1951)
• Platoon (1986)
• Full Metal Jacket (1987)
• Jarhead (2005)
• The Hurt Locker (2008)
• Restrepo (2010)

I’d appreciate your suggestions and why you’ve suggested them.

It just occurred to me that both of the movies I suggested depicting the Korean War were directed by Sam Fuller.

Update

I suddenly realized that this is my opportunity to pitch a little 2012 gem, appropriately titled Memorial Day. It’s streamable via NetFlix.

So, apparently too is the refusal to acknowledge mistakes. I located the post I was looking for, this post at Zerohedge on the data errors I mentioned yesterday in Thomas Piketty’s (PEE-keh-tee’s) work. Here’s the summary:

In the interest of brevity, I had to limit my quotations from Summers’ review. But I hope the limited excerpts above show my point: Summers was absolutely devastating in his critique of the theory underlying Piketty’s book. Yet Summers overall kept coming back to praise it, because Piketty gosh darn it had done “meticulous” work documenting the disturbing accumulation of wealth among the super rich over the last few decades. Except, as it turns out, that maybe a big chunk of those results were due to stupid mistakes or worse.

I think we’ll be able to gauge how much reputational damage has been done to Dr. Piketty when we see whether he gets his Nobel award (contrary to popular opinion there is no Nobel Prize for economics).

The science is kind of interesting. There are some interesting aspects of what the data reveal even with the corrected data, illustrated in the linked post. Britain appears largely to have returned to its downward trend in the concentration of wealth after a brief uptick around 2000. That alone is sufficient to refute Dr. Piketty’s central claim.

Wealth appears to be increasingly concentrated in the United States but not catastrophically so. To my eye we appear to have a much longer cycle.

Did the Panic of 1907 really knock the socks off the Gilded Age? If that’s the case it would be interesting since it suggests that the Fed and Treasury working in tandem are producing the worsening distribution in wealth. IMO that’s obvious but it’s nice to have some confirmation of it.

While I was looking for something else at the econblog Zerohedge I stumbled cross this genuinely wry post which asks two questions. If inflation is so low:

1. Why do the costs of the Federal Reserve cafeteria rise at a multiple of the notional rate of inflation?
2. Why are wages at the Federal reserve rising at a multiple of the notional rate of inflation? (and faster than cafeteria prices are)

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There are graphs, of course.

In all seriousness, I suspect it’s because they’re measuring different things. That having been said, I think that while for the Fed we may be in a period of low inflation most people are experiencing things as a period of stagnant wages and moderate inflation. They’re either falling behind or barely able to keep up.

In a bit of damage control over the criticism of VA waiting times Tim Noah retorts that the private sector is little better:

News stories about the Phoenix VA and some other bad actors indicate the wait can be many months, but an internal VA estimate—one based on “hard” time stamps and therefore less vulnerable to manipulation than the records allegedly falsified — puts the average wait at about 21 days.

Directly comparable data for the private sector are unavailable. But a 2014 survey of physician wait times found the average private-sector wait time to be 18.5 days – two and a half days less than at the VA. In Boston, which has a high concentration of top-quality private-sector hospitals, the average wait time was 45.4 days.

He’s right that there are potentially long waiting times in healthcare beyond the Veterans Administration. He’s wrong in thinking of it as the “private sector”.

The number, size, and placement of hospitals aren’t determined by market forces. They’re determined by state regulators and physicians in collaboration. The same is the case with the number of doctors and nurses. Med schools are accredited by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, essentially an arm of the American Medical Association, the physicians’ guild. It’s a little more complicated in nursing but the final outcome is the same: the number of nurses that are trained is determined by a guild.

Add to that the two-thirds of healthcare spending that derives from government in one form or another and you have our healthcare system. Describing any part of it as “the private sector” is, at the very least, a great exaggeration. It’s as centrally planned as Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Note that I’m not arguing for a free market healthcare system. I’m just the little boy pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, in this case that there is no private sector healthcare worthy of the name.

Rather than setting up false dichotomies between government healthcare and private sector healthcare I think we would be much better served by wondering why so large a proportion of the total welfare produced by our system is reaped in the form of producer surplus.

When I read the caption of James Taranto’s post, “Cocaine, Hookers and Deficits”, I thought it was going to be about Congress. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be about revisions to Italian GDP.

I think that my confusion is understandable.

There’s an interesting op-ed by Philip Howard at the Wsshington Post on what broke Washington. His basic thesis is that the sheer accumulation of laws is the major problem:

The main culprit, ironically, is law. Generations of lawmakers and regulators have written so much law, in such detail, that officials are barred from acting sensibly. Like sediment in the harbor, law has piled up until it is almost impossible — indeed, illegal — for officials to make choices needed for government to get where it needs to go.

I think there’s a certain amount of truth in this and that our system is particularly susceptible to such accretions. Our laws tend not to have sunset clauses and over time constituencies grow up for any expenditure for whom the expenditure has become a matter of life and death.

Something he doesn’t take note of is that we have a common law system. Under a common law system the laws enacted by legislatures are only the tip of the iceberg. The overwhelming preponderance of law is the law written by judges. We now have more than 300 years or accumulated judge-written law and in some areas, e.g. tax law, even specialists don’t understand the law.

One thing I want to caution you about. Mr. Howard is reckless in his assertion of fact. For example, when you examine his footnotes about this statement:

Special education, for example, now consumes about 25 percent of the total K-12 expenditures.

they don’t support the claim. He’s inferred it from a combination of hard data, testimonial, and guesswork. I haven’t bothered investigating any of his other statements of fact but verbum sap.

It’s an interesting op-ed nonetheless. I’m more concerned than he apparently is with his prescription.

This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

I’ve pointed out before how Republican presidents tend to favor Eisenhower’s staff approach to the presidency in which very strong cabinet officers are granted substantial freedom of action while Democratic presidents prefer a more White-House centered approach with lots of micro-management from the top.

I think that President George W. Bush made a major error in handling such a staff administration by pitting his cabinet officers against one another. That’s something weak managers do.

President Obama seems to have opened a new chapter in the history of the presidency. Neither he nor his appointees seem particularly interested in the actual functioning of government. Nobody gets out in front of an issue. They’re always taken by surprise.

The Will Rogers presidency. I don’t know nothing but what I read in the newspaper.

The Illinois legislature has once again demonstrated that they’re willing to make the hard decisions unless there’s the slightest chance they might have to pay a political price for them in which case not so much:

SPRINGFIELD-A so-called “doomsday budget” filled with spending cuts went down in dramatic fashion Friday, drawing only five “yes” votes and thrusting the whole debate over a 2015 state spending plan up for grabs one week away from an adjournment deadline.

A $34.8 billion package was put up on the board in the House early Friday and drew only minimal debate before members rejected the plan by a 5-107 vote.

The plan, sponsored by Rep. Fred Crespo, D-Hoffman Estates, was cast as an alternative spending approach since a bid to extend the 2011 temporary income tax permanently drew only 34 House Democratic votes during an informal poll taken earlier this week by House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago.

“You’ve got to be for something, folks,” Crespo said before the vote.

Once again they’re kicking the can down the road to the veto session. This will have the dual effect of postponing re-approving the tax hike until after the November election and enabling the criminally incompetent and self-serving Illinois legislative majority to blame the otherwise impotent Republican minority for their own nonfeasance.

In Illinois our problems aren’t caused by partisan gridlock but by the cowardly and grasping majority. Democrats control both houses of the state legislator by significant majorities and the governor’s mansion. In theory they can pass anything they care to. In practice they refuse to act because it might jeopardize their offices.

In Illinois more than 80% of state legislators run unopposed. Don’t expect elections to change anything.

The Illinois credit rating limbo. How low can you go?

There’s a very interesting and highly technical article at Science on the sources of income inequality among those below the top 1% of income earners, a persistent subject of interest in this blog. I genuinely wish the author would produce another, comparable set of data that excludes workers in the healthcare and education sectors since I think those sectors skew the returns to education severely. If a substantial component of the income inequality below the top 1% of income earners is largely attributable to those sectors, it would merely demonstrate that policy is capable of producing income inequality, something that I think should surprise no one.