Atrios linked to this item on how the Obama team “has notified all politically-appointed ambassadors that they must vacate their posts as of Jan. 20.” The end of the item observes:

Most ambassadors, of course, are foreign service officers, but often the posts involving the most important bilateral relations (such as with Great Britain, Japan and India) or desirable locales (such as the Bahamas) are given to close friends and well-heeled contributors of the president.

I had always just thought of this is a kind of casual, widely accepted corruption. But recently I did learn the official story as to why this is good practice, namely that an important political supporter or a friend of the president is likely to have a much easier time of getting access to the Oval Office than any mere foreign service officer would. Thus, it’s arguably better for the host country to have a political appointee than a career FSO. Therefore, this practice helps build good-will and so forth.

Not sure I buy that, or even that the person who explained it to me buys it, but that’s the story.

If you want universal health care, AHIP — the insurance industry trade group — is happy to give it to you. But there’s a price. They released a plan today, ably described by Igor Volsky at the Wonk Room:

AHIP is all for “affordable” coverage on the government’s dime. That is, rather than agreeing to end premium discrimination based on age or sex, it wants the government to issue tax credits and cap total health expenditures for lower-income individuals to protect Americans from bankruptcy. The plan calls on the government to ensure affordability, while protecting industry profits.

This is why I hope we don’t see Barack Obama giving a table-pounding speech absolutely demanding that congress pass a universal health care bill. Health care reform is urgent, but the point of reform is to actually make things better, not just to anything that happens to constitute reform. So you push for change, but also leave yourself the room necessary to say “no” to a one-sided proposal.

Marie Gryphon has a paper out from the Manhattan Institute advocating the adoption of a “loser pays” model for civil litigation:

The United States struggles with a uniquely costly civil justice system. The direct costs of tort litigation, in particular, reached $247 billion in 2006, or $825 per person in the United States. Moreover, tort costs in the U.S. as a percentage of gross domestic product are far higher than those in the rest of the developed world—double the cost in Germany and more than three times the cost in France or the United Kingdom. The amount that is spent on tort litigation every year is greater than what Americans spend every year on new automobiles. [...]

This study explores the likely effects of adopting a “loser pays” rule for attorneys’ fees in the United States. Loser pays, sometimes called the “English rule” but actually, in essence, the rule in place in the rest of the world, refers to the policy of reimbursement by the parties who lose in litigation of the winners’ legal expenses, including attorneys’ fees. This study argues that loser pays could be an important part of a larger effort to reduce litigation costs, better compensate prevailing litigants, and better align tort law with its goal of deterring socially harmful conduct.

The whole thing seems plausible to me. And certainly the litigation-heavy nature of American society and the American economy seems problematic especially because it’s difficult to make the case that this boatload of litigation is really doing a great job of delivering just outcomes. But of course other countries don’t merely have things like the “loser pays” rule, they also have less structural dependence on litigation to remediate harms. They rely more on things like prophylactic regulation and collective bargaining agreements to handle things that in the United States are handled by lawsuits or fear of lawsuits.

Business types would tell you that things like regulations and unions put an intolerable burden on the economy. But it turns out that run-amok litigation also puts an intolerable burden on the economy and does so in a more arbitrary, less fair manner. Making the switch would be a good idea. But what the business world seems to want is neither preemption regulation nor post hoc litigation . . . instead they just want to be able to get away with malfeasance.

Kevin Drum follows up on the “soft power” issue:

I’ve heard “smart power” bandied about, but I doubt that will catch on. Too jargony. “Non-military power” gets to the nub of things, but doesn’t roll off the tongue very well. So what’s a good alternative word that basically means “mostly non-military”? Anybody care to chime in?

I think the problem is more with the “soft” than with the “power.” The idea is that soft power is attractive rather than coercive, and “power” has such heavy connotations of coercion that you wind up needing to bend over backwards to dispel those connotations with something like “soft.” But what Joseph Nye is talking about when he writes about soft power is something more like brand appeal than a form of “power.”