Did my matzos come?

Mark Steyn points to this story:

A Canadian woman has given birth to extremely rare identical quadruplets.

The four girls were born at a US hospital because there was no space available at Canadian neonatal intensive care units. . . . Autumn, Brooke, Calissa and Dahlia are in good condition at Benefis Hospital in Great Falls, Montana. . . .

Health officials said they checked every other neonatal intensive care unit in Canada but none had space.

The Jepps, a nurse and a respiratory technician were flown 500km (310 miles) to the Montana hospital, the closest in the US, where the quadruplets were born on Sunday.

(Emphasis added.)

Steyn comments, "Well, you can't expect a G7 economy of only 30 million people to be able to offer the same level of neonatal ICU coverage as a town of 50,000 in remote rural Montana."

A reader objects:

Presumably you know that the shortage of hospital beds in Calgary, like the shortage of apartments is due to the fact that the oil patch is attracting just a few more new residents than Armageddon, Montana or wherever it was exactly that she found a vacant room...

There are literally tens of thousands of things that government tries to do and shouldn't, but health care is a fundamental of any civilized society and the US version provides a pretty good argument that government does indeed have a role to play in it.

Steyn's response:

Sorry, no sale. The explanation that Calgary's success logically leads to a lack of hospital beds demonstrates only the perverse government inversion of normal laws of supply and demand. But, more to the point, there is no unforeseen boom in Swift Current, Saskatchewan or Trois Rivieres, Quebec, is there? Yet not only was there no bed available for this mother-to-be at the Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, but there was no bed available at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton, no bed available at the Toronto General, no bed available at the Royal Victoria in Montreal. There was no bed available in Canada coast to coast.

Anyway you slice it, that's a failure of the system. Or look at it this way: Where would she have given birth were America not next door? In the toilet?

That last link is to a story in the UK Daily Mail:

A young mother had to deliver her own baby in the lavatory of a flagship hospital because there were no trained midwives available.

Surveyor Catherine Brown had made the agonising decision to undergo a chemically-induced abortion after being told her 18-week pregnancy was risking her life.

But when the time came to give birth she was on an ear, nose and throat ward and had only her mother to help her through the ordeal. Her premature son Edward died in her arms minutes later.
 

At WeeklyStandard.com. Matt Sanchez:

In the hallway of the Iraqi Army base, the photos of young slain soldiers who have died in the line of duty smile at visitors. I accompanied intelligence adviser Lieutenant Morton Ellison to observe the interrogation of a man arrested on suspicion of terrorist activities. The suspect confessed before I saw him. "It's the strangest thing," said the young Ellison who was roughly the same age as the blindfolded man sitting Indian-style on the carpet, "a lot of these guys are really proud of what they do, so they brag about it."

In an effort to get the Iraqi equivalent of "street cred'", the detainee confessed to several murders and to planting IEDs. I've witnessed a couple of interrogations that have gone the same way, men like this one casually discussing the people they had murdered.

Jeff Emanuel:

MORE THAN ONE of the adults declared the devastation before us to be the work of the Jaisch al Mahdi (Arabic for the "Mahdi Army," or the militia loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al Sadr--also known as "JAM").

Pressed further by the Lieutenant, the women offered no proof or substantiation for their claim, nor were they able or willing to give names or to sign sworn statements identifying their attackers. "I want to help you," said Geiger to the assembled, newly-homeless crowd. "But I can't do it without information. I need lots of people to tell me the same thing that one or two of you did, and to sign sworn statements, or else I can't go arrest anybody for this."

. . . As we walked away, we left behind a dissipating crowd of National Policemen and newly homeless Iraqi civilians, as well as a fire truck whose crew was still hard at work trying to put out the fire at a house that they had been dousing with water since our arrival.

Without anyone willing to go on the record and help themselves, there was nothing more that Baker Company could do there.
 

On Free Exchange, a blog (the blog?) at Economist.com:

The theory of the second-best was first laid out in a 1956 paper titled, sensibly enough, "The General Theory of the Second Best", [paid access] by Richard Lipsey and Kelvin Lancaster. Roughly put, Lipsey and Lancaster pointed out that when it comes to the theoretical conditions for an optimal allocation of resources, the absence of any of the jointly necessary conditions does not imply that the next-best allocation is secured by the presence of all the other conditions. Rather, the second-best scenario may require that other of the necessary conditions for optimality also be absent—maybe even all of them. The second-best may look starkly different than the first best.

Consider a frivolous analogy to cookie-baking. If the optimal cookie contains chocolate chips and coconut flakes, but you have no chocolate chips, chances are you don't need the coconut either. The second-best cookie may be the gingersnap. If ingredients (or logical conditions) do their work through a certain combination or complementarity, you may have to aim for something completely different even if you're missing just one of them. . . .

[T]he theory of the second-best hardly implies a program of vigorous government intervention—or much of anything substantive, for that matter. . . . The methodological insight at the heart of the theory of the second-best is that in a complex world we must rely on well-confirmed generalizations and an artful application of economic sense, not high theory, when designing and evaluating policy.

This seems to me a sensible argument for minimizing governmental involvement in the economy. But my general belief is that government should intrude as little as possible into the economy, so I'm disposed to find supporting evidence.

(Via Megan McArdle.)
 

Mark Steyn:

Four or five years ago, I had a fascinating conversation with some Dutch cabinet ministers about the need to ensure that immigrants understood what they would be required to assimilate with. So I was interested to see what they'd come up with. It turned out to be a video which they distributed to every embassy around the world to play to anyone thinking of moving to the Netherlands. It showed a topless woman on the beach and two guys kissing. Message: If you're uncomfortable with this, you might prefer to emigrate somewhere else. Except that they added a rider to say that, if you are uncomfortable with this because you're a Muslim or whatever, then you don't have to watch it. And that pre-emptive negation of the entire point of the exercise said more about the real state of the Netherlands than anything on screen.
 

Reuben F. Johnson on Russia:

Russian spokesmen and the Kremlin's professional spinmeisters take full advantage of the fact that the average person elsewhere is largely ignorant of what takes place inside Russia. They try to present the manner in which "sovereign democracy" is practiced in Russia as being just like democracy elsewhere. But it isn't. . . .

What Russia's 2008 election promises to deliver is a "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" regime. It will be--in everything but name--a third term for Putin since the same band of Chekisty (Russian slang for those from the intelligence and secret police ranks) will still be in charge. . . .

In 1995, longtime Soviet ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin released his memoirs, In Confidence, which were reviewed by Steven Merritt Miner in Foreign Affairs. Miner's conclusion was that "one puts down this hefty book with a nagging worry. Dobrynin has advanced a stab-in-the-back theory explaining the Soviet collapse. How widespread this view is among the Russian elite remains to be seen. But carrying as it does a sense of betrayal, xenophobia, and imperial longing, it is a dangerous sentiment. One hopes it never becomes the reigning ideology."

Twelve years later nothing could be clearer than that it is the reigning ideology--and will continue to be so--in Putin's third term.
 

Wikipedia (some links amended to be available directly):

After the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Arab governments claimed that their great concern was for the fellow Arab refugees and that Israel stood in the way of helping the refugees. Critics argue the Arab governments could easily have provided the refugees with new homes, just as Israel resettled Jewish immigrants and refugees from foreign countries. It was not done, nor did Arab states provide funds to improve the conditions in refugee camps.^[15] Some parties find the lack of Arab effort to relieve the refugee crisis as a way of using the Palestinian Arabs as political pawns, to exploit as tools against Israel, and/or to promote anti-Israel sentiment.^[16][17]

In 1957, the Refugee Conference at Homs, Syria, passed a resolution stating that "Any discussion aimed at a solution of the Palestine problem which will not be based on ensuring the refugees' right to annihilate Israel will be regarded as a desecration of the Arab people and an act of treason (Beirut al Massa, July 15, 1957)."^[18]

The Arab League issued instructions barring the Arab states from granting citizenship to Palestinian Arab refugees (or their descendants) "to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their right to return to their homeland".^[19]

Syrian Prime Minister, Khalid al-Azm, wrote in his 1973 memoirs:

Since 1948 it is we who demanded the return of the refugees [...] while it is we who made them leave. [...] We brought disaster upon [...] Arab refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave. [...] We have rendered them dispossessed. [...] We have accustomed them to begging. [...] We have participated in lowering their moral and social level. [...] Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson, and throwing bombs upon [...] men, women and children-all this in the service of political purposes.