"The Big Fat Surprise": How Science Is Corrupted By Government Money And Government Process

I haven't made a practice of reviewing books here, but it's time for an exception.  A few weeks ago a reader named Nina Teicholz, who is also an accomplished writer in the health arena, wrote to offer me a copy of her recent book, titled "The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet."  I took her up on the offer, and shortly after that the book arrived in my mailbox.  And then I actually read it, which is somewhat remarkable given that I'm about 20 books behind at any given time.  

This is a book that you really need to read.  And not just because you will finally learn some real information about what constitutes a healthy diet.  This is also a story of the corruption of science by government money and government process that has application far beyond just the field of nutrition.

Today, all Americans deeply know, seemingly as part of their cultural heritage, that a healthy diet is low in fat.  Indeed, not just low in overall fat, but particularly low in saturated fat, the kind that is found in large amounts in butter, milk and cheese.  Go to the market, and seemingly every product has a "low fat" option, generally accompanied by the phrase "heart healthy!"  Eat out with your friends, and observe them demonstrating their virtue over you by eating nothing but a salad, perhaps accompanied by a smidgeon of low-fat chicken or fish.  (Maybe this phenomenon is less prevalent outside of Manhattan.  But a great thing about living in Manhattan is how easy it is to horrify your friends by eating an intentionally high-fat meal in their presence.)

I've been on to the scam of the low fat diet for some time (see, for example, here from July 2013).  But it's actually harder than you might think to get your hands on real information on this subject.  Hundreds upon hundreds of articles just take it as a complete given that low fat equals heart healthy, without ever questioning where this idea ever came from.  Besides, the American Heart Association has been on the low fat bandwagon for decades, and same for the U.S. government dietary guidelines.  Hey, everybody knows it!

And now into the groupthink leaps Ms. Teicholz, with a thoroughly-researched tome on the development of the so-called diet-heart hypothesis.  She tells the story of how over the course of a few decades from about the 1950s to the 80s that hypothesis rapidly swept away all dissenters and rose to uncontested dominance in the field.  Oh, even as the evidence relating to the hypothesis ranged from ambiguous at best to completely adverse in many instances.  But the hypothesis was backed by a small group of intensely committed scientists and journalists who managed to get control over the principal scientific organizations (notably the American Heart Association in this instance) and the principal government grant-givers (here NIH and NHLBI), and used that control to marginalize and ultimately de-fund their opponents.

I won't attempt to go too deeply into the details, but a few examples will give some of the flavor. The diet-heart hypothesis owes its triumph more than anything else to the work from the 1940s to the 1980s of one Ancel Keys, a highly energetic and ambitious professor from the University of Minnesota.  In the mid-50s Keys proposed testing the hypothesis by doing a first-ever international multi-country epidemiological study.  In 1956 he won from the U.S. Public Health Service to fund the proposed study a $200,000 annual grant -- at the time an enormous sum.  The countries he chose to study were Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Finland, the Netherlands, Japan and the United States.  And the results:

What Keys found, as he had hoped, was a strong correlation between the consumption of saturated fat and deaths from heart disease.  (page 38)

But here's the thing:  from previous work by Yerushalmy and Hellebore (1950) Keys already knew rough numbers for fat consumption and heart disease rates for 22 countries, which included five of the seven that Keys selected to study (the exceptions were Greece and Yugoslavia).  And the five countries for which these data were known all fit neatly along an upward-sloping line from low fat/low heart disease (Japan) on one end, to high fat/high heart disease (United States) on the other end.  Meanwhile, there were plenty of countries that were known not to fit into this neat pattern.  And these were not small or insignificant countries.  Examples were France, Switzerland and Mexico.  Well, they were just omitted from the study.  Teicholz:

[Keys] might have selected a European country to challenge his fat hypothesis, like Switzerland or France (or Germany or Norway or Sweden).  Instead, he chose only those nations (based on national statistics) that seemed likely to confirm it. . . .  Attempting to explain why Keys did not seek out countries that would offer more challenges to his ideas, [Keys colleague] Blackburn said, "Keys just had a personal aversion to being in France and Switzerland."

Sure. To this day, in books I have read on the supposed support for the diet-heart hypothesis, the Keys seven-country study is cited as among the most important evidence.

By the early 70s the need for some more definitive proof or refutation of the diet-heart hypothesis had become clear, but the main government funders (here mainly NIH) were daunted by the prospective cost.  Were they really going to spend literally billions to provide controlled diets for years to tens of thousands of people in two groups?  Instead, they opted to do two not-inexpensive studies, but kind of on the cheap.  $250 million was allocated to the two studies.  First up was the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial, or MRFIT (pronounced "Mister Fit"), a massive test that ran from 1973 to 1982.  Here was the plan: they screened 361,000 middle-aged American males to find some 12,000 with particularly high blood cholesterol, greater than 290 mg/dL.  They divided these into two groups, an "intervention" group and a control group.  The intervention group got multiple such interventions, including counseling to quit smoking, medication to lower high blood pressure, and advice on a low fat, low cholesterol diet.  They drank skim milk, used margarine instead of butter, limited eggs to two of fewer per week, and avoided meat and desserts.  The control group's members were left to do as they pleased.  The men were followed for seven years.  Results?

The results, announced in September 1982, were a disaster for the diet-heart hypothesis.  Although men in the intervention group had been spectacularly successful in changing their diets, quitting smoking, and reducing their blood pressure, they died at slightly higher rates than the controls.   

Oops.  Teicholz details how the results of MRFIT were then systematically suppressed and forgotten.  Meanwhile, the remainder of the $250 million went to a study called Lipid Research Clinic Coronary Primary Prevention Trial, abbreviated as LRC.  This study divided 3800 men who had high blood cholesterol again into two groups, both of which were counseled to reduce fat in the diet, but one of which also received an early cholesterol-lowering drug called cholestyramine.  In other words, diet was not part of what was tested; the test was of the cholesterol-lowering drug.  The results were reported in 1984.  The treatment group had "slightly fewer heart attacks" (page 128), but total mortality for the two groups was almost identical.  The treatment group suffered additional deaths from such things as suicide, accidents, and cancer.  And commenting on other similar studies, Teicholz says:

Other cholesterol-lowering studies where diet had been the only intervention consistently found higher rates of cancer and gallstones in the experimental group . . . .  In addition, populations found to have very low cholesterol, such as the Japanese, suffer from higher rates of strokes and cerebral hemorrhage compared to groups whose average cholesterol is higher.  (page 129)  

But somehow the extremely ambiguous results of the LRC study -- a study that did not even test diet at all -- got spun into being the definitive proof of the diet-heart hypothesis.  In 1984 NHLBI organized a massive conference specifically intended to generate a scientific "consensus" on the causes of heart disease.  The conference was organized by Basil Rifkind and chaired by Daniel Steinberg, two of the leaders of the LRC study.  The conference ended with a so-called consensus statement that admitted of no ambiguities:

The conference "consensus" statement, which Steinberg read out on the last morning of the event, was not a measured assessment of the complicated role that diet might play in a little-understood disease.  Instead, there was "no doubt," he stated, that reducing cholesterol through a low-fat, low-saturated-fat diet would "afford significant protection against coronary heart disease" for every American over the age of two.  (page 132)

And thus the low fat diet got an imprimatur of "consensus" from a small amount of highly ambiguous data.  Nothing since has been able to dislodge it.  Example: a long-running study of essentially everybody in the town of Framingham, Massachusetts reported follow-up results in the 90s.  Here are some:

In 1961, after six years of study, the Framingham investigators announced their first big discovery: that high total cholesterol was a reliable predictor for heart disease. . . .  However, thirty years later [1991], in the Framingham follow-up study . . . it turned out that the predictive power of total cholesterol was not nearly as strong as study leaders had originally thought.  For men and women with cholesterol between 205 and 264 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL), no relationship between these numbers and heart disease risk could be found. . . .  [F}or men aged forty-eight to fifty-seven, those with cholesterol in the midrange (183-222 mg/dL) had greater risk of heart attack death than those with higher cholesterol (222-261 mg/dL).  (pages 64-65)

Teicholz describes several more studies with results that would either refute the diet-heart hypothesis or are highly troubling in other respects, notably showing higher total mortality for people on low cholesterol diets from causes including cancer, stroke and violence.  But so what?  Since when is it the actual evidence that counts when "science" turns on control of government funds and government-sponsored committees that control grants and publication rights.  The small clique of intense promoters of the diet-heart hypothesis -- notably Keys, Rifkind and Steinberg -- gradually got control of the key associations (e.g., American Heart Association) and government funders (e.g., NIH and NHLBI) and saw to it that their opponents lost their funding, were no longer invited to conferences, and could no longer get their papers published.  And thus,  the day has long since been carried.  It's just a part of our culture.  Everybody knows that a low fat diet is "heart healthy"!

Teicholz overall is a lot nicer about the state of corruption than I would be.  But low key can be very effective.  I'm just hoping that someone other than me pays attention.

Of course, readers will quickly recognize that this story bears remarkable resemblance to the story of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.  The AGW story is even far worse because all the proposed solutions are catnip to leftists looking for reasons to promote government takeover of everything.  Is there any hope of ever again looking at the evidence to see if the hypothesis has been refuted?  Perhaps if that occurs in the arena of nutrition, the good sense will spread.

The Most Important Lesson Of The Twentieth Century, Forgotten

If you had to name the single most important lesson to be learned from the history of the twentieth century, what would it be?  For me, there is one that far and away dwarfs all others.  It is that socialism doesn't work.  Not only doesn't work: inevitably leads to loss of freedom for the people, dictatorship, and impoverishment.  And, if a government attempts to impose a "pure" form of socialism, then it gets worse and worse: mass starvation and intentional slaughter of the people by the millions or tens of millions.  Oh, plus a corrupt elite that gets to live in luxury by controlling the military and secret police, all while everyone else starves.

In my days in high school in the 1960s, it was still barely possible to be a supporter of socialism under the theory of "you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs."  (The phrase was used repeatedly by the reprehensible Walter Duranty of the New York Times in justifying Stalin's atrocities.)  Sure they've had a few purges, the theory went (while suppressing the enormous numbers actually slaughtered), but with government-led regimentation of the economy, everyone will eventually be richer and the wealth will be far more equitably distributed.  But even then word of the economic disaster of China's "Great Leap Forward" was leaking out.  (Today we know that that effort in the late 50s and early 60s to collectivize the Chinese economy led to rapid economic collapse, mass starvation, and something in the range of 18 to 45 million deaths. )  Then when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990 and 1991, we learned that in return for decades of living in constant fear in a 24/7 prison state, the Soviet people had gotten an economy that was less than 20% the size of the main Western economies on a per capita basis, with the majority of that going to the military while the people lived in tiny hovels and ate potatoes if they were lucky.

But could it be that the problems of the Soviet Union and of Maoist China were just problems of proper execution, and that socialism would work just fine and achieve the utopian workers' paradise as soon as someone did it right?  To refute that possibility, we've been given one after another after another example of socialist disaster for the past 50 and more years.  Consider the cases of Cambodia (the "killing fields" of 1975 -79 -- estimated 1.7 to 2.5 million killed out of a population of about 8 million, and most of those shot rather than starved); Cuba (abject poverty and total repression, while the elite lives in luxury); North Korea (same plus periodic mass starvation and a gulag imprisoning hundreds of thousands); and, most recently, the complete self-destruction of Venezuela. 

And in the face of this history, we have running for President a candidate proudly declaring himself to be a "socialist."  Writing in the New York Post over the weekend, Paul Sperry points out that Bernie Sanders absolutely should be taken literally in his adoption of the word "socialist" to describe his program;  indeed Sperry suggests that the word "communist" would also be appropriate.  Sperry recites a litany of Sanders's actions embracing socialism and communism, from joining the Young People's Socialist League in college, to heading the American People's History Society ("an organ for Marxist propaganda"), to taking "goodwill" trips (during his tour as mayor of Burlington, Vermont) to the Soviet Union and to Nicaragua, to even flying a Soviet flag on his desk.

And with that background, Sanders is nipping at the heals of the supposed frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.  And what is the core of Sanders's support?  For starters, it's academics and young people who are either still in college or have recently completed a college education.  Could there be any clearer indication of the crisis in higher education today?  In academia they have completely abandoned any effort to learn about the world and pass the knowledge on to the next generation, and instead they have retreated into total self-absorption and delusion.

Not having a strong penchant for self-torture, I watched only small snippets of last night's Democratic debate.  But I've seen enough to diagnose Hillary's problem: she is very likely a socialist herself.  Confronted with Sanders's proposals for government takeover of the healthcare sector, takeover of health insurance companies, takeover of all big banks, and so forth, Hillary is unable to articulate why these are bad ideas.  Her best response is something like, "this is too expensive right now and we need first to digest what we've already started."  But fundamentally, she agrees with the concept that the government can and should assume collective responsibility for taking care of all significant problems of the people.  Certainly, she has never articulated a boundary or limit beyond which government takeover of the economy should not go. 

How Can We Get The Government's Money Out Of Politics?

Buried toward the end of President Obama's State of the Union Address a couple of days ago was the usual progressive call to "reduce the influence of money in politics":

I believe we’ve got to reduce the influence of money in our politics, so that a handful of families or hidden interests can’t bankroll our elections.  And if our existing approach to campaign finance reform can’t pass muster in the courts, we need to work together to find a real solution, because it’s a problem.     

As with most everything else in this pastiche of vague platitudes, there were no specifics as to what he intends as the "real solution" to the supposed problem.  What would that be Barack?  Repeal the First Amendment?  (Progressive icon Senator Chuck Schumer has taken several runs at repealing the First Amendment in the name of "campaign finance reform" -- see for example here.)

Meanwhile of course Obama omitted any mention of the vast sums that the government itself spends every year to promote itself and its ongoing growth.  In his progressive world view, the government itself is just the neutral a-political experts using their perfect knowledge and expertise to improve the world.  Of course they need to explain how that works to the ignorant rubes!  Does Obama even realize that the government spends far more each year promoting itself and its growth than all the money contributed to political causes by all private citizens, rich and poor?  Without doubt, in Obama's mind, government using the taxpayer trillions to promote yet more government just doesn't count as "money in politics."

The SOTU came just a few weeks after the GAO slapped the Obama EPA for covertly using non-appropriated government funds to support enhancement of its own power via its new "waters of the United States" rules.  Here is a report in The Hill from December 14.  Excerpt:

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said a pair of social media campaigns by the EPA in support of its “waters of the United States” rule broke laws that prohibit federal agencies from promoting or lobbying for their own actions. . . .  “We conclude that EPA’s use of Thunderclap constituted covert propaganda, in violation of the publicity or propaganda prohibition,” GAO wrote.  We also conclude that EPA hyperlinks to the [Natural Resources Defense Council] and Surfrider Foundation webpages provided in the EPA blog post constitute grassroots lobbying, in violation of the grassroots lobbying prohibition.”  The GAO said the EPA also violated the law that prohibits spending government resources that have not been appropriated.    

If you don't remember from when this first came to light last May, EPA used the covert social media lobbying campaign to generate hundreds of thousands of astroturf comments on the proposed regulation.  Those comments were then used by EPA administrator Gina McCarthy in Congressional testimony in March in an effort to demonstrate supposedly overwhelming public support for the power-grabbing regulations, and to blunt Congressional criticism.  From a New York Times report on May 18:

“We have received over one million comments, and 87.1 percent of those comments we have counted so far — we are only missing 4,000 — are supportive of this rule,” Ms. McCarthy told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in March. “Let me repeat: 87.1 percent of those one-plus million are supportive of this rule.”

Caught red-handed, EPA's response was exactly what you'd expect:  hey, we were just trying to educate the public as to what was going on!  From The Hill:

“We maintain that using social media to educate the public about our work is an integral part of our mission,” EPA spokeswoman Monica Lee said in the statement.  “We have an obligation to inform all stakeholders about environmental issues and encourage participation in the rulemaking process. We use social media tools just like all organizations to stay connected and inform people across the country about our activities.”   

They have no idea that government self-promotion with taxpayer funds has any relationship at all to "money in politics."  Oh, and don't count on seeing a prosecution any time soon by the Obama Justice Department of those bureaucrats who spent unappropriated funds on illegal self-promotion.  

For a summary of just a few items in the tens of billions of annual government spending that goes to promotion of the growth of the government, see my article "The Main Business Of Government Is Promoting Its Own Growth."  Items covered there include the vast sums spent to encourage sign-ups for Obamacare; the aggressive campaign of the Obama administration to expand the usage of food stamps (SNAP); the Agriculture Department's fraudulent "food insecurity" surveys, cynically designed to promote expansion of DOA "nutrition" programs; the Census Department's fake "poverty" statistics, equally cynically designed to promote more completely ineffectual "anti-poverty" spending and programs; the vast grants by the Federal Reserve to community housing groups, much of which are used for lobbying for more government spending; and on and on and on.  

But hey, we need to "reduce the influence of money in politics."  That way, no one will be able to push back at all against the onslaught of government growth.       

What Is The Bipartisan Compromise Between Ever-Expanding Government And Shrinking Government?

There wasn't a lot very specific in President Obama's State of the Union speech last night; mostly it was vague generalities with little that could be pinned down.  And much was about foreign policy, which I'm not going to comment on here.  But considering the domestic side, even though it was all very general, an overall vision still comes through.  A good summary of that vision is what I wrote on my ABOUT page as the basics of the Manhattan/progressive orthodoxy:

The central tenet of [the] orthodoxy is that all personal problems of the people in society can be solved by government taxing and spending. . . .   A few subsidiary tenets of the orthodoxy . . .  include:  the government has infinite capacity to tax and spend and does not need to make any choices about spending priorities; the government has an infinite ability to borrow; an appropriate function of government is to take on all down-side risk of life so that no individual ever needs to worry about loss of anything. . . .  

So early in the speech we got a typical pie-in-the-sky list of how the government should take on and pay for some laundry list of new things that you might find difficult or expensive in your life.  No costs were mentioned, of course; nor was there mention that we may have any priorities that may come before any of these things; nor that anything else in the budget might ever have to be cut; nor that the government's ability to tax and borrow and spend is anything other than infinite and free and costless to the individual citizen.  And, of course, the concept that it might not be such a great idea to replace individual responsibility for many things with collective responsibility for everything -- that concept is just beyond considering in polite company.  Here is an excerpt:

[W]e should build on [the] progress [of No Child Left Behind], by providing Pre-K for all and offering every student offering every student the hands-on computer science and math classes that make them job-ready on day one. We should recruit and support more great teachers for our kids.  And — and we have to make college affordable for every American.  No hardworking student should be stuck in the red. We’ve already reduced student loan payments by — to 10 percent of a borrower’s income. And that’s good. But now we’ve actually got to cut the cost of college.  Providing two years of community college at no cost for every responsible student is one of the best ways to do that, and I’m going to keep fighting to get that started this year. It’s the right thing to do.  But a great education isn’t all we need in this new economy. We also need benefits, and protections that provide a basic measure of security. . . .  That’s why Social Security and Medicare are more important than ever, we shouldn’t weaken them, we should strengthen them.

And on from there.  But you get the picture.  Somewhere along the line he also promised a whole new approach to eliminating poverty (no specifics, but is there really any chance that he would ever agree to cut a dime of the current trillion +/- per year -- that never reduces poverty by a single soul -- before launching the raft of new programs?); plus a transformation of our entire energy economy in a ridiculous attempt to influence the weather; and, best of all, a cure for cancer!  Hey, government can do anything and everything, and it's just a question of spending enough of the infinite money!  And then, toward the end of the speech, came the usual call to end the "rancor" in Washington and "work together" and "compromise" (all, of course, to accomplish his agenda of infinite activist government):

[Democracy] doesn’t work if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice. . . .  Democracy grinds to a halt without a willingness to compromise or when even basic facts are contested or when we listen only to those who agree with us. . . .  It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency — that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. . . .    

So how about this business of "thinking the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice"?  That phenomenon may be a big part of what's behind what many are seeing as a high current level of voter anger in this cycle.

My observation is that, at least in my lifetime, anger has been far more characteristic of the Democrat/progressive side than of the Republican/libertarian side.  After all, if you think that all human problems (poverty, inequality, hunger, healthcare, bad weather, cancer, expensive college education, etc.) are easily solved with government spending, then it's a short logical leap to the conclusion that those who stand in the way of the obvious solutions are immoral and evil.  And it's an even shorter leap from there to anger.  How could these evil people be OK with seeing children starve?

Over on the Republican side, there have long been some (such as myself) who thought that the endless list of progressive spending programs accomplish nothing other than to make everyone a lot poorer while only worsening the problems they are supposedly intended to solve.  But, at least until recently, few questioned the progressives' sincerity in advocating the spending.  Thus, there was generally little serious anger.  But suddenly, the existence of a high degree of anger on the Republican side is the theory most often advanced to explain the rise of Donald Trump, as well as to explain the morphing of the pitches of other candidates to tap into this perceived deep vein of animosity.  

This anger may be about many things, one example being immigration.  But near if not at the top of the list is the ongoing metastasizing growth of the oppressive and incompetent federal government.  Note that anger from this particular source may be directed by the Republican base of voters as much or more toward their own "establishment" as toward Obama and the progressives.   Without doubt, many Republican voters are frustrated by the continuing failure of their Congressional delegation to mount any kind of effective  push back against the endless addition of more and yet more government programs to fix everything in your life.  Republicans control both houses of Congress, they supposedly have the "power of the purse," and yet they can't manage to shrink the federal budget by even a dime, and can't manage to eliminate even one single agency or program.  John Boehner's only real job was to push back against the growth of the government.  We got rid of him for failing at that, and replaced him with Paul Ryan, who gives the appearance of being a much more principled small-government guy and not just a Washington deal-maker.  And next thing you know we get a federal budget that is barely an improvement from what the previous regime would have delivered.  They even re-authorized the Ex-Im Bank -- with plenty of Republican support!  (I'm not meaning to be overly critical of Ryan, who was doing his best to play a mediocre hand.  I'm just trying to explain the frustration, and thus the anger, of the Republican voter.)

But to return to Obama's call for bipartisanship and "compromise," the fundamental question remains, what is the "compromise" between those who want to grow the government and then grow it some more with infinite spending and a program for every human need and want, and those who think the government should be shrunk dramatically?  Obama's idea is simple: we'll "compromise" and just grow the government a little more slowly than I would prefer.  Instead of free junior college for all next year, we'll phase it in over a few years.  Well, how about the compromise of, instead of shrinking the government by 50% (as I would like), instead we shrink it by 5% per year for the next ten years?  Yes, this is not what Obama has in mind at all.  His interest in real compromise is zero.

Friedrichs And The Ability To Push Back Against The Progressive Vision

Earlier today the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association.  You have probably heard of the case.  Rebecca Friedrichs and several other public school teachers in California are suing to stop forced payment of dues by them to the teachers union.  Under prior Supreme Court precedent these dissenting teachers have been entitled to a refund of a portion of their dues (about a third) that the union concedes to be devoted to explicitly political activities, such as lobbying or contributions to candidates or parties.  But the union contends that the remainder of the dues go to supposedly core union functions of collective bargaining and employee representation, which are non-political and outside First Amendment protection under prior Supreme Court precedent.  A Supreme Court case from the 70s (Abood) supports the union's position that it can compel payment of most of the dues; but a more recent Supreme Court case from 2014 (Harris) questioned that proposition without explicitly overruling Abood.

Friedrichs now directly takes on the issue of whether the subjects of collective bargaining and employee representation are so clearly and obviously political and public policy issues that they must come within First Amendment protections that prevent forced speech and forced association.  Here is an excerpt from Petitioners' brief on that subject:

[P]ublic-sector bargaining involves countless matters “relating to education policy.” . . .  In California, for example, state law authorizes teachers unions to bargain over “class size,” CAL. GOV’T CODE § 3543.2(a), a hotly debated policy issue. Unions also collectively bargain for seniority preferences in transferring and reassigning teachers. Id.; see also, e.g., JA129 (“seniority ... will be the deciding factor” in filling vacant positions). Such policies have an important—and, many believe, detrimental—effect on education policy. . . .

The same is true nationally. One recent study analyzed the collective-bargaining agreements in the nation’s 50 largest school districts and found that unions have generally bargained for:

• teachers to be “paid on a rigid salary scale that evinces little regard for individual competence,” . . . 

• “extensive labor rules” that “hobble[]” managers from efficiently assigning and terminating teachers, . . . ; and

• “contracts” that “routinely stipulate the number of students a teacher will instruct, the number of preparations (i.e., courses) a teacher may have, the number of parent conferences that a teacher will hold, what time they will leave school at day’s end, what duties they can be asked to perform, and even how and how often they will evaluate students’ written work,” . . . .   

In my naiveté, those things seem to me among the highest public policy concerns in today's political debate, on which people of differing political persuasions hotly disagree.  Could it really be that people who honestly think that things like strict hours limitations and seniority restrictions for teachers are bad for the students are forced in our system to pay billions of dollars to support the opposite viewpoint?  To me, it seems amazing both that the Supreme Court could have made such a terrible mistake, and also that it has taken until now to get the issue back before the Court for correcting.

Reports from this morning's argument express the strong view that the Court is likely to overrule Abood.  For example, here is the lede from the USA Today story:

The Supreme Court left little doubt Monday where it stands on forcing teachers and government workers to contribute to public employee unions against their will: It's ready to strike the requirement down.

But it's by no means unanimous.  Instead, it's very likely to be the usual five-to-four conservative/liberal split, with the "liberal" justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan and Sotomayor in dissent.  From Lyle Denniston at ScotusBlog:

The four Justices who were in dissent in the Harris case appeared to be headed toward dissent again, even as they made no headway in shaking [Petitioners' lawyer] Carvin’s assault on the teachers’ union as a state-compelled advocate for workplace policies that the non-union members appear to find objectionable.  Those four appeared to be clinging to the Court’s usual reluctance to overturn a constitutional precedent that had been followed for nearly four decades.  

Well, stare decisis can be a strong argument in many circumstances, but it's rather unusual when it's the only argument; usually one would expect at least some principled basis to support the prior decision.  

Obviously this case is of substantial political importance to the Democratic Party, since nationally the teachers unions are their single biggest contributors, with the large part of that money coming from compelled dues.  A very discouraging phenomenon is that the four "liberal" justices almost always vote as a bloc on any issue that is politically important to the Democratic Party and its allies.   

The ultimate question is, how can it be possible to push back against the failed progressive vision of governance if that vision is backed by billions of dollars of compelled contributions from those who fundamentally disagree? 

Can Somebody Explain The Loathing Of The Successful To Me?

Back in September I wrote a four-part series about trying to understand the support for Bernie Sanders, particularly among those who seem to be upscale and well-educated.  The first article in the series was titled "Can Somebody Explain The Bernie Sanders Phenomenon To Me?"   Nobody succeeded, although a few took on the challenge.  More recently Bernie seems to be fading in the face of the Hillary! juggernaut.  But in places where I hang out, which include Manhattan's West Village and, at times, New Haven, Connecticut, a vote taken today would very likely give Bernie the edge.

Recently I have reviewed statements by and about Sanders, looking for overarching themes in Bernie's message.  One recurring theme stands out above all others: loathing of the successful.  The theme is so strong in Bernie's messaging that one has to believe that his followers overwhelmingly share the loathing.  Given that the followers are largely an upscale bunch, this raises an interesting question: Is the loathing of the successful a reflection of the phenomenon often noted here of the intense jealously felt by percents 2, 3 and 4 of the income distribution against percent 1?  Or is the loathing a reflection of self-loathing and guilt by many at the very top?  Or is it a combination of both?

Consider for a moment a list of the most successful cities in the world.  New York, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo.  What do they have in common?  The answer is that these are the homes of the world's financial markets.  Pay in the financial industry in New York is far higher than in other industries.  (A report from New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli in October put the average pay in the securities industry in New York at $404,800.)  The same premium pay phenomenon applies in the other major centers of finance.  Major cities that lack large financial markets (in the U.S. these include the likes of Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Philadelphia) would dearly love to have them.

But to Sanders and others on the Left (another example is Elizabeth Warren), the financial business is the embodiment of evil.  Here is the Washington Post yesterday, quoting a Sanders campaign speech:

Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders took aim at the nation’s financial sector in a fiery speech Tuesday, declaring that “fraud is the business model of Wall Street” and calling for regulatory reforms to address “a lot more illegal behavior than we know of."  Speaking just blocks from Wall Street, Sanders vowed to break up banks that are “too big to fail,” jail unscrupulous Wall Street executives and provide an array of new protections for consumers.    

"Fraud is the business model of Wall Street" -- where does he come up with that?  He is accusing multiple hundreds of thousands of people of systematic illegal conduct.  Does he have any evidence to point to?  What I know is that the Justice Department and U.S. Attorneys spent billions in the aftermath of the 2008/9 financial crisis in a lawless political quest to pin the crisis on Wall Street scapegoats, and they came up almost entirely empty handed.  Yes there was a series of shakedowns of the big banks, in which those banks seriatim paid a billion or two or five to settle some endless phony investigation, in almost every case without any actual individual getting charged with wrongdoing.  And there was Preet Bharara's insider trading jihad, which substantially fell apart when the Second Circuit finally ruled that a huge part of it did not represent a violation of the law at all.  

And how about that business about "a lot more illegal behavior than we know of"?  It's an explicit allegation of systematic illegal behavior immediately coupled with an admission that he doesn't have any evidence to back it up.  This, from a man running for President of the United States.  

So even though he has no evidence whatsoever to support his charges, Bernie just knows that these guys are evil because they make too much money and he loathes them so much.  And he has just the answer for how to put the evil guys in their place -- lots more laws and regulations: 

During his 48-minute speech, Sanders suggested sweeping reforms would be necessary to curtail “the greed of Wall Street and corporate America.”  “We will no longer tolerate an economy and a political system that has been rigged by Wall Street to benefit the wealthiest Americans in this country at the expense of everyone else,” Sanders told a crowd of about 1,300 in a packed theater in Manhattan, where enthusiastic supporters repeatedly interrupted him with applause and even finished some lines of his speech before he spoke them.

 "Sweeping reforms"?  Pray tell, what would those be?  As far as I know, in 2010 -- the aftermath of the financial crisis and with Democrats in control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency -- we got the Dodd-Frank law, otherwise known as a gigantic multi-thousand page grab bag of every good, bad and terrible idea for incremental regulation of the financial industry that anyone on the Left had ever thought of.  The whole idea was to rein in the evil Wall Street guys once and for all.  For years I kept a copy of this monstrosity on my desk just to remind me of how enormous it was -- it weighed about 10 pounds.  Is it really possible that in that gigantic mishmash they forgot all of the important stuff?  In the speech, Sanders gave next-to-no specification as to what additional reforms he had in mind, beyond limitations on credit card interest rates and ATM fees.

And I should have mentioned that this Sanders speech was in none other than Manhattan, in a "packed theater."  This is the Manhattan where wealth generated in the financial industry is fundamentally what supports the theater, the universities, the museums, the opera and symphony, and other cultural institutions of all kinds.  But the official position is that we loathe these "Wall Street" guys and the whole financial system, and they should be regulated to death if not prosecuted and put in jail (except of course for the few I know personally, who are really pretty nice guys, and by the way will you kindly give me some money for my charity?).

Meanwhile, down in Greenwich Village, with its stock of beautiful historic buildings, you will find literally every third such building undergoing some kind of renovation or restoration, again largely paid for with wealth generated in the financial business.  But again the official position is that we loathe the upgrading of our neighborhood and the people behind it, and we support Bernie for President.  The current issue of our local paper West View News has a big article supporting Bernie on the front page.  The author is Arthur Z. Schwartz, who is New York counsel to the Sander campaign.  Yes, it's the Arthur Schwartz who was once General Counsel of the disgraced ACORN.

Do Bernie's supporters ever stop to think of whether it would really be a good idea to stomp out the prospects for outsize success in our society?  They have accomplished that in places like Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea, but it didn't work out too well for the citizenry.