Here’s what’s caught my eye this morning:

• Inauguration blogging from Angry Bear here and
  here, LaShawn Barber,
  Backcountry Conservative,the wise Pennywit,
  Poliblog,Politopics,
  Scrappleface,
  The Daily Demarche,
  The Volokh Conspiracy,
  Kevin Drum,
  and Wizbang.
• The text of Bush’s inauguration speech.
• The bloggers at Iraq the Model respond to Sarah Boxer of The New York Times. So does Ali.
• Conversations with some Frenchmen from The New Sisyphus.
• I see that Matthew Yglesias is as puzzled as praktike and I that
  libertarians aren’t more libertarian.

That’s the lot.

Medpundit draws our attention to a Wall Street Journal article writing:

While medical reimbursement declines, dentistry is booming. Which makes doctors the poor relations of dentists.

I’ve got quite a few dentists who are clients. In my
professional capacity I have found them personable,
respectful, grateful for services rendered, not technology-averse,
and extremely hard-working in improving their businesses
as businesses. For dentists the greatest business
challenge is finding and retaining good staff.

I’ve had medical doctors as clients, too. They’ve been
smart, peremptory, technology-averse, knew more than
I did about my own specialty (or gave that impression at any
rate), jealous of their prerogatives, and slow to pay. I’m
not sure what the greatest business challenge for medical
doctors is today. It may be reimbursement.

That having been said I think that there are other reasons
for the change in fortunes of dentists.

First, dentists don’t seem to be quite as beholden to insurance
companies as medical doctors are. Quite a few of my dentist
clients don’t accept insurance at all. And government doesn’t seem quite as involved, either. It may be that entrepeneurialism is a more successful strategy than rent-seeking.

Second, dentistry is structured quite a bit differently than medicine.
The really successful dentists of my acquaintance are not just
billing their own time but have quite a team of hygienists, etc. whose
time they’re billing.

Have I mentioned that most dentists’ offices (scores) I’ve been in are cleaner
than the doctors’ offices (also scores) I’ve been in?

The pomp and circumstance of the inauguration and the festivities surrounding the inauguration don’t interest me very much and I won’t be following them, analyzing them, or writing about them. But there are a couple of points I do want to make.

The ritual of the inauguration doesn’t seem particularly important to me. But the fact of the inauguration is enormously important.

The election of George Washington and both of his inaugurations were important. But they weren’t of critical importance. It was Washington’s voluntary leaving of power and John Adams’s inauguration in 1797 in a manner proscribed by law and according to the will of the people that was of critical, earthshaking, world-changing importance. And every inauguration that has followed it including this one commemorates that momentous event.

That kind of peaceful transfer of power in a manner proscribed by law and according to the will of the people remains all too rare in the world today. Everywhere it exists there is peace and, in varying degrees, prosperity. That’s something worth contemplating.

I do have one final thing to say about the inauguration celebration. Cancelling the inauguration festivities would take money from the hands of cooks, waiters, chauffeurs, custodians, florists, delivery people and hundreds or thousands of plain working people who need that money to support their families. Unlike the thousands of other government doings this affair doesn’t put money in the hands of a standing bureaucracy who should be ashamed of themselves and go out and get honest jobs, it puts money directly into the hand of a lot of actual workers.

So, sure, there’s a war on. Sure, there was a horrible disaster in the Indian Ocean. Let’s abolish the NEA or the Department of Labor or the Department of Commerce or any of the thousands of welfare programs for corporations and the middle class. But leave the inauguration alone. It employs a lot of poor working stiffs and pumps money into a segment of the local economy in DC that really needs it.

UPDATE: Submitted to the Beltway Traffic Jam

Here’s what’s caught my eye this morning:

• Fashion blogging from Wretchard of Belmont Club.
• Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing asks Why is American Airlines gathering written dossiers on fliers’ friends?
• I see that praktike of chez Nadezhda is complaining about libertarians not being
  libertarian much as I did yesterday.
• The Diplomad has a favorite ten lies.
• The Eduwonks have a great round-up of posts from the edusphere.
• Lance in Iraq has found a wonderful opportunity for human shields (hat tip: Terrorism Unveiled).
• Joe Gandelman of The Moderate Voice has some choice observations on the prospect of replacing Dan Rather with a team.
• shrinkette wonders about Abu Ghraib and the Stanford experiment.
• Jack at Tigerhawk has a nice post on partisanship and blogging.

That’s the lot.

What is it about the subject of the health care system that turns otherwise sensible bloggers into blithering idiots? I’ve been wandering around the blogosphere today and I’ve seen a number of posts about reforming the Medicare system. That’s a discussion we should be having and I’m sincerely glad the discussion is going on.

But whenever there’s the beginning of a discussion of commonsensical cost-control measures there’s an absolute deluge of anarcho-capitalist flapdoodle in praise of free markets and condemning socialized medicine. I’m not just creating a strawman here. Here’s a direct quote from a prominent blogger:

“Well,” the counterargument goes, “The Europeans and Canadians spend a smaller–some much smaller–portion of GDP on health care. That’s because they have all these cost-control mechanisms in place. All we have to do is copy their systems.” Ah, but here’s the rub: They can afford to do that because America still offers such a great scope for medical innovation. That’s why almost every single advancement in medical science comes from the US, and not from Canada or Europe. The Euros get to keep their costs down, and benefit from American led medical innovation. But that’s not a sweetheart deal that would continue if the US clamped down on innovation by implementing European-style price controls.

[…]

Absent the inovations that the free market system provides in the US, the whole world would suffer.

Emphasis mine. I’m not going to link to the post because I don’t want to call a blogger that I otherwise like and admire a blithering idiot in public.

Leaving aside for a moment that he presents absolutely no hard data to support his claims there’s another problem: we don’t have a free market in health care in the United States. Like the rest of the world we have a managed system with enormous subsidies granted to healthcare suppliers in the form of patents, licenses, the prescription drug system and so on that are offset somewhat by more enormous subsidies granted to healthcare consumers in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, etc. I can point you to any number of prominent scholars who attribute the innovation that he’s praising to U. S. patent law. And a patent is a temporary govern-granted monopoly. There’s absolutely nothing natural or free market about it.

You can be a free market enthusiast or you can approve of the patent system in the United States. You can’t do both without cognitive dissonance because they are diametrically opposed.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s a perfectly good social benefit argument for patents. But for goodness sake don’t call your social benefit argument a free market while calling the other guy’s social benefit argument socialized medicine.

Alice Banchini of Alice in Texas has an excellent post on lying. Whenever I want to get the straight skinny on moral conduct I always turn to Aquinas first:

Accordingly if these three things concur, namely, falsehood of what is said, the will to tell a falsehood, and finally the intention to deceive, then there is falsehood—materially, since what is said is false, formally, on account of the will to tell an untruth, and effectively, on account of the will to impart a falsehood.

If you tell the truth thinking it is a lie with the intent to deceive, it is deceit but not a lie. If you tell a falsehood thinking it is the truth, it’s neither deceitful nor a lie.

The Jesuits added some new wrinkles to this kind of thinking that had to do with the consequences of the lie and the person to whom the lie was told. If the consequences of the truth would be to injure someone else, the Jebbies were inclined to excuse the lie. Or if the person asking the question had no right to the truth, the Jebbies also considered a lie excuseable. That’s where the term “equivocating Jesuit” came from. Have I mentioned that I’m Jesuit-educated?

This week’s Carnival of the Liberated, a sampler of some of the best posts of the week from Iraqi bloggers, is now available on Dean’s World. This week it features some Westerners blogging from Iraq. And the Iraqi bloggers have been very, very busy. There are posts on grief, WMD’s, a nuclear physicist,
cultural integration, the high cost of living, an old taxi driver and lots more.

I see that Soviet-style gigantism is alive and well living in the EU. First, we had the world’s tallest bridge and now we have the world’s largest passenger aircraft:

LONDON, England (Reuters) — Cost overruns and political bickering will be set aside Tuesday at Airbus as the Toulouse-based planemaker unveils its mighty A380 double-decker, the biggest airliner ever built.

French President Jacques Chirac and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are among more than 5,000 guests invited for a first glimpse of the A380, which some airlines are betting will reshape the industry.

Customers have committed almost $40 billion to buying the 555-seat plane, expecting it to lower operating costs and fatten profits, battered in a slowdown since 2001.

It’s calculated that Airbus needs to sell 248 of these craft to break even and at this point they’ve got commitments for 149. And a lot can happen between a commitment and a delivery.

Over the last few years in the United States the business model for successful airlines has tended to move away from flying large passenger aircraft in favor of more frequent flights by smaller aircraft and shorter distances. This enables an airline to conduct business in a significantly more agile fashion.

The Soviet Union was reknowned for behemoth works projects: the world’s largest aluminum plant, the titanic Yenisei river dam, mammoth rockets, and the enormous Bureisky hydroelectric project. It’s nice to know that the thirst for the gigantic is alive and well and living in the EU. I sincerely wish Airbus well and hope they have all the success in the world with their new craft.

But somehow I wonder if it’s just the wrong product at the wrong time.

I just noticed that, according to Sitemeter, The Glittering Eye has had more than 50,000 visitors as of sometime this afternoon. It’s actually probably quite a bit more than that since for the first several months of operation I didn’t have Sitemeter set up correctly in some important templates. And Webalizer (a host-based usage stats program) tells me that I’ve had almost 140,000 visitors since start-up.

That’s fewer than top bloggers get in a normal day but I’m not in the least jealous of them. I like where I am and what I’m doing and IMNSHO that’s more than enough.

Thanks to all of my blog-friends and readers who visit The Glittering Eye. When you like something you’ve read, please tell other people about it. And y’all come back now.