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Crash the North Korean Economy – Here’s How

For years human rights activists have launched balloons carrying leaflets and digital media into North Korea. At the same time, North Korea manufactures and circulates counterfeit foreign currency, including US currency. Is there an opportunity here?

The balloon campaign has gone on for years, supported by at least one western human rights organization and North Korean defectors located in South Korea. A New York Times article documented a claim that activists launch “between 700 and 1,500 balloons a year, each carrying 30,000 to 60,000 leaflets.”

At the same time, a Congressional Research Service report says that at times North Korea has earned from fifteen to twenty million dollars per year from counterfeiting:

The United States has accused the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) of counterfeiting U.S. $100 Federal Reserve notes (Supernotes) and passing them off in various countries … What has been confirmed is that the DPRK has passed off such bills in various countries and that the counterfeit bills circulate both within North Korea and around its border with China.

North Korea is also extremely poor. CNN published a story in April of 2017 that said two of Korea’s three major revenue sources were cybercrime and forced labor. Bloomberg published a story in December 2017 with a comparison between the North and South Korean economies:

In a report published by South Korea’s statistics office Friday, per capita income in North Korea in 2016 was estimated at 1.46 million South Korean won ($1,340), or about 4.5 percent of that of the South. Total trade volume was less than 1 percent of South Korea.

Also, on December 23, 2017 the United Nations Security Council approved a new set of sanctions on North Korea.

So, place these items side-by-side:

  • North Korea is extremely poor and facing tightening international sanctions,
  • North Korea is a currency counterfeiter,
  • North Korea is unable to stop a multi-year amateur bombing campaign that drops anti-government media across the country.

My proposal: use those leaflet-carrying balloons to ‘airmail’ massive amounts of counterfeit North Korean bills from one end of of the country to the other.

If the US can in the normal course of business print official US currency, surely it can also print high-quality counterfeit North Korean currency. North Korea’s official currency is the won, which circulates in bills sized between ten and 5,000 won. I suggest printing the 5,000 won note. Thousands and thousands of them. If one of our balloons can carry 60,000 leaflets…well that’s a lot of won! (5,000 won X 60,000 bills per balloon X 1,500 balloons = 450 billion won.) Eventually, the North Korean currency will become worthless. The economy will collapse.

It was hard to believe I was the only one to think of this, and of course I was not. Researching this blog post I found the following article published by Forbes magazine: Bomb North Korea–With Its Own Money. Much more authoritative than this piece, and what a great title!

It would be easy and cheap. So why not? Maybe because it would be seen as an act of war and push the crazy little fat guy over the edge. Maybe because once you do it the cat is out of the bag and the US is vulnerable to the same trickery.

THE BOTTOM LINE
No one is going to do this, for a variety of reasons I don’t even know about. Someone should sell it as a movie concept.

Questions About Single-payer Healthcare

Federal involvement in healthcare has certainly had its sad aspects, and the unhappiness continues with the current round of talks in Congress, which I’ve already commented on. Regardless of what the Republican Congress decides, it seems clear that eventually the US will join the rest of the world and migrate to some version of a single-payer health care system.
I’m skeptical about single-payer, for two reasons:

  • I have the same misgivings as any conservative/libertarian about government services. Briefly, they’re messy and immoral.
  • I see the prospect of more freedoms lost, and wonder what the rules will be (what rights do I lose?); and is the plan really to make everyone follow the same rules?

Questions

Does single-payer really work?

Yes. It’s the standard way to pay for health care in most countries of the developed world.

What are the pros and cons?

PRO
lower administrative cost
increase in preventive care
rate consistency
lower per-person cost
everyone is covered
ends the discussion over how to cover pre-existing conditions

CON
taxes will increase
scope of government control will increase
less incentive to lower cost and innovate
overall quality of care will drop
increase in wait times, and shortages of doctors and equipment

Is everyone included?

That’s the idea. We’ll see. I doubt that ‘everyone’ will include for example: the military, Congress, cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court Justices, the President, and so on. Obviously the military is exempt. I wish it would include everyone, outside of the military. It will not.
I’m fascinated to see who gets the Cadillac coverage not available to the rest of us.

What procedures are included?

TBD. The idea is that the legislation will define a ‘basket’ of services to be covered. Outside of that basket will be services like elective cosmetic surgery and AddADick2Me surgeries (I hope). Within the approved basket your primary care provider decides what is appropriate (or not) for your symptoms, and you wait in line with everyone else.

What medical services will I be able to buy?

Interesting issue. This is the flip side of “what procedures are included”. Probably some doctors and clinics will continue to operate on the private market, but they’ll only be allowed to deliver services not included under single-payer, like high end cosmetic surgery in Beverly Hills. You will not be allowed to buy procedures and services that are covered by single-payer.
This aspect is one of the things that some on the left love. They call it “jumping the queue”. Buying services and procedures (capitalism) is jumping the queue, and is strengstens verboten under single-payer.

How will care be rationed?

Rationing will occur at two levels:

  • First, not all services and procedures will be covered. Presumably, Congress will be unwilling to pay for EVERYTHING, so they’ll have to decide what not to cover. If you want a service that’s not covered presumably you’ll have to pay cash for it, or there will be supplemental insurance available to cover it.
  • Second, there will be queues. Your doctor will approve you for knee surgery, but you’re going to wait in line for it behind a lot of other people. Waiting times are one of the top complaints in Canada and the UK, both of which use a single-payer system.

Of course, many on the left point out that our current system also rations health care — by income.

What are the opportunities for bypassing the system?

Oh, I wouldn’t really know about that <g>. Seriously, some of us have already experienced some of the nonsense involved with this. If you have Medicare or private medical insurance and want to bypass the checks and limits your insurer has in place, try paying cash for a service or procedure.
Under a single-payer system there may be doctors in your community who remain in the private pay economy, but they will likely only be allowed to deliver those services that are not covered by single-payer. One of the escape valves for Canadians has been that the US is nearby. If Canadians don’t want to wait nine months for a rotator cuff repair, they drive across the border into the US, pay cash and get treated immediately. So, for us in the U.S. I guess there’s always Mexico, Thailand, or Taiwan.
High tech employers like Microsoft and Amazon use generous medical insurance as a perk to compete for employees. Under a single-payer system companies will probably still offer health insurance to employees, but this insurance will not cover services provided by single-payer.

Will there be a doctor shortage?

Probably. That’s why wait times are a characteristic problem with single-payer systems – if there were sufficient doctors there would be no wait times. Congress will try to hold down costs by lowering doctor payments, while at the same time it increases demand by paying for services. Supply and demand is like gravity. Inescapable. An opinion piece in the New York Post described the consequences experienced in Canada:

Our northern neighbor’s health-care system is plagued by rationing, long waits, poor-quality care, scarcities of vital medical technologies and unsustainable costs. … the average Canadian has to wait 4½ months between getting a referral from his primary-care physician to a specialist for elective medical treatment — and actually receiving it. … Canada’s wait times are certainly growing: That average 18-week delay for “elective” referrals is 91 percent longer than in 1993.

There’s also a severe shortage of essential medical equipment. Canada ranks 14th among 22 OECD countries in MRI machines per million people, with an average wait time to use one at just over eight weeks. Canada ranks a dismal 16th in CT scanners per million people, with an average wait time of over 3.6 weeks.

The United States ranks second in MRI machines per-capita, and fifth in CTs.

Will drug prices go down?

Probably, since group buying power will allow the government to negotiate lower prices. However, we’ll then probably see fewer new drugs developed. Why? Supply and demand.
The U.S. economy is about one quarter of the world’s total in size, but the top three (and six of the top ten) pharmaceutical companies are based in the US. If their revenue is choked off by price controls, where do they go? With less capital available for R&D, it seems inevitable there will be fewer new drugs developed.

What happens to the insurance companies?

Some on the left salivate at the prospect of the insurance companies going under, while they engage in schadenfreude over the fate of those companies’ employees. I doubt the big insurers are going out of business. A 2013 article in USNews listed the biggest 125 medical insurers in the US. These were the top five:

  • UnitedHealth Group Inc (UNH)
  • Kaiser Foundation Group (non-profit)
  • Anthem Inc (ANTM)
  • Aetna Inc (AET)
  • Humana Inc (HUM)

Four of the five are for-profit corporations with shares trading on one of the major stock exchanges. Presumably they’re watching what’s happening and will diversify into other lines of business as single-payer approaches.

The bottom line

Here’s a definition of the law of supply and demand, courtesy of Bing.com: “the price charged for a product is determined by the level of demand and the quantity available.”
Single-payer health care creates an increased demand, while maintaining or lowering prices, without increasing supply. Over time, there will be problems.

Climate Change – Looking at the Wrong Issues

Yes, global warming is real. I concede the climate is getting warmer and more chaotic. I see it happening in my own favorite Icicle Valley. Further abroad, here’s the latest from Scientific American; and this morning’s Wall Street Journal announced record quarterly losses for insurance companies due to harsh weather. I don’t dispute the data, although I do say that computer models are a slender reed to lean on. However, the reality of climate change is the wrong issue.

First, if you go through the list of big and deadly problems, where does climate change rank, in terms of severity? Consider these three:

  • nuclear proliferation: think of John McCain’s ‘crazy fat kid’ dropping a nuclear weapon on Hawaii, or Seattle;
  • ocean acidification: if you want a reason to dislike carbon dioxide, this might actually be a better reason;
  • microplastics: visualize drowning in a sea of plastic beads.

(Note in the previous paragraph the role of carbon dioxide in both ocean acidification and climate change. Maybe we should treat carbon dioxide as the problem, and relegate climate change and ocean acidification to just symptoms of the problem?)

Then, how certain are we about the causes of climate change? Fans of climate change argue it’s anthropocentric — caused by human action. But humans have only been around for 200,000 years and climate change goes back a lot farther than that. Look at the long-term record of global temperatures shown in the chart below, published by NASA. The chart covers a timespan of 800,000 years. How many of those temperature spikes can we attribute to human agency?

NASA global temperature record

So if the current warming trend is anthropocentric, what about all the earlier ones? What was the cause for the previous temperature spikes? We should believe the mechanism for climate change was one thing then, but a different thing now? Why is that?

Climate change is real, but it seems there are unanswered questions about causes.

Bottom line
Climate change is not the biggest or most urgent problem facing humankind.
The geologic temperature record shows the climate warming and cooling without human input. This should give us more caution in asserting that the current warming trend is caused by humans.