Aaron Klein for the Brookings Institution: America has a highly decentralized infrastructure system, particularly for surface transportation and drinking water systems. State and local governments combine with infrastructure operators to design, build, operate, and maintain almost everything. There are benefits and drawbacks to this decentralized system. One problem is the lack of coordination among our multiple infrastructure agencies in purchasing products. Solving this problem could reduce costs for many types of infrastructure and ensure a more stable set of jobs and production of infrastructure assets. Pooled procurement is a promising method to achieve these gains.
Pooled procurement is when two or more infrastructure operators agree to coordinate their procurement of like assets. Combining forces allows infrastructure purchasers to utilize economies of scale and achieve lower costs per unit of infrastructure purchased. This can also spread certain fixed costs of infrastructure procurement (contracts, due diligence, and delivery) over a larger number of buyers, lowering each one’s share. These savings make the infrastructure cheaper or allow more to be built at the same price.
For example, take 20 bus systems scattered throughout the country, each wanting to buy 10 buses. Instead of negotiating 20 contracts, they would negotiate one large contract. The price per bus should be lower at 200 than at 20. The average cost per bus system of shopping, comparing, and negotiating the contract should also be lower. This could include maintenance, warranty, and repair contracts that could similarly spread risk and lower costs.
Killing women shouldn’t be less than murder
Molly Bangs for the Century Foundation: In the rationale for its travel ban, President Trump’s administration cites instances of “honor killings” at the hands of immigrants from the Muslim-majority countries of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen among its reasons for barring people with these nationalities from entering the United States.
It is true that according to the penal codes of many countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, from Article 375 in Libya to Article 630 in Iran, should a man kill his wife, mother, sister, or daughter after catching any of them engaging in a sexual act outside of marriage, his actions are legally codified as lesser crimes than murder.
Some researchers were puzzled by the fact that such homicides also occur in the United States, pointing to roughly twenty-five documented honor killings each year occurring in the country. The perpetrators of these domestic murders that have been labeled as honor killings have a key common trait: they are immigrants from the MENA region…
But gender-based violence and its legal backing know no borders.
The majority of killings of women in the United States are related to intimate partner violence — and of these, 93 percent are committed by current or former romantic partners. When the killers of women are American men who are not Muslim, Middle Eastern immigrants, such instances are not widely associated with “honor.” But not dissimilarly to many MENA countries, when the non-immigrant American killer claims he did not execute a premeditated murder, but was instead provoked by his wife’s infidelity, the act is dubbed a crime of “passion,” thereby allowing the reduction of the crime from first-degree murder to second-degree manslaughter.
Electronic health records are a tool of Big Brother
Jeffrey Singer for Cato at Liberty: As a practicing physician I have long been frustrated with the Electronic Health Record (EHR) system the federal government required health care practitioners to adopt by 2014 or face economic sanctions. This manifestation of central planning compelled many doctors to scrap electronic record systems already in place because the planners determined they were not used “meaningfully.” They were forced to buy a government-approved electronic health system and conform their decision-making and practice techniques to algorithms the central planners deem “meaningful.” Other professions and businesses make use of technology to enhance productivity and quality. This happens organically. Electronic programs are designed to fit around the unique needs and goals of the particular enterprise. But in this instance, it works the other way around: health care practitioners need to conform to the needs and goals of the EHR. This disrupts the thinking process, slows productivity, interrupts the patient-doctor relationship, and increases the risk of error. As Twila Brase, RN, PHN ably details in “Big Brother in the Exam Room,” things go downhill from there.
With painstaking, almost overwhelming detail that makes the reader feel the enormous complexity of the administrative state, Ms. Brase, who is president and co-founder of Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom (CCHF), traces the origins and motives that led to Congress passing the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in 2009. The goal from the outset was for the health care regulatory bureaucracy to collect the private health data of the entire population and use it to create a one-size-fits-all standardization of the way medicine is practiced…
Brase provides wide-ranging documentation of the way this “meaningful use” of the EHR has led to medical errors and the replication of false information in patients’ health records. She shows how the planners intend to morph the Electronic Health Record into a Comprehensive Health Record (CHR), through the continual addition of new data categories, delving into the details of lifestyle choices that may arguably relate indirectly to health: from sexual proclivities, to recreational behaviors, to gun ownership, to dietary choices. In effect, a meaningfully used Electronic Health Record is nothing more than a government health surveillance system.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by the various think tanks.
