In a decision that drives home the stakes of video franchise reform, the village of Roselle, Ill., this week passed an ordinance halting AT&T’s broadband upgrades for 180 days while the village determines if the network additions require a separate video franchise.

The vote coincides with a coordinated push by the DuPage (County, Ill.) Mayors and Managers Conference to halt AT&T network upgrades in cities, villages and towns within in this suburban county that comprises Chicago’s outer western surburbs.

In a memo to DuPage city officials, Mark Baloga, executive director of DMMC, recommended towns immediately pass ordinances similar to Roselle’s that outright halt local broadband upgrades. He further advised communities stop granting right-of-way permits for AT&T Project Lightspeed and urged cities to adopt new ordinances that specificially create franchise regimes that cover the services AT&T is proposing.

Project Lightspeed is AT&T’s $4-billion project to upgrade its network with fiber optics and next-generation DSL. It will support faster Internet speeds and cable TV-like multichannel video services, video-on-demand and other service that integrate voice, data and video. It is the central component in AT&T’s strategy to transition away from its declining phone business and establish a beachhead against cable TV companies in the burgeoning market for integrated broadband services.

View the Roselle ordinance here. View the DMMC memo here.

The developments, which will affect the availability of broadband competition to some 1 million residents in DuPage County, validate many of the concerns that proponents of franchise reform have.

This is the first report of an organized attempt by a group of local communities to derail a major broadband initiative over franchise fees. Statewide franchising would preserve franchise revenues yet prevent the jurisdictional delays plainly on exhibit here.

Legislation to create statewide video franchise rules has passed in Texas and Indiana and is pending in Florida, Virginia and Missouri. In Congress, the latest version of the Barton-Rush telecom reform bill, scheduled for mark-up this month, would create a national video franchising mechanism.

Posted by Steven Titch at 09:43 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There are moments in journalism when I am bewildered that we actually pay attention to reporters. For instance, take this little non sequitur from Science:

The scientists estimate that atmospheric temperatures over Antarctica in the winter have risen by about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 Celsius) in the last 30 years, and the change is due in large part to greenhouse gas emissions.

“Greenhouses gases could be having a bigger impact in Antarctica than across the rest of the world and we don't understand why," said John Turner of the British Antarctic Survey.

And I'm not a scientist!

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 03:51 PM | Permalink

Seriously.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 12:05 PM | Permalink

This is a terrific parody of the Truth Anti-Smoking campaign. There's some explicit language ... so be warned.

(Hat tip: Hit and Run)

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 11:49 AM | Permalink

Common Cause Tuesday issued a report “exposing” a group of organizations as supposed “lobbying fronts” for the telecommunications industry. The report, “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: Telecom Industry Front Groups and Astroturf,” lists nine organizations it says “try to mimic true grassroots, but that are all about corporate money, not citizen power.” Despite the title, it takes no position on artificial playing surfaces.

You can find this list here.

Admittedly, some groups on the list, such as mywireless.org, Keep It Local NJ and Consumers for Cable Choice, are principally funded by single sectors within the telecom industry. However, like many liberal groups these days, Common Cause undermines its own case by overreaching.

The American Legislative Exchange Council and FreedomWorks also made the list. These organizations deal with a wide range of policy issues beyond telecom. While telecom companies may account for a portion of their funding, if they were to stop funding tomorrow, these groups would not disappear.

Also making the list were the New Millennium Research Council, which issued the report on municipal wireless last year (full disclosure: I contributed a chapter as part of my work at The Heartland Institute) and the highly-regarded Progress & Freedom Foundation (More full disclosure: I participtated in PFF workshops on the Digitial Age Communications Act, for which I did receive a stipend from the organization). While oriented toward telecom and IT issues, both organizations, especially PFF, draw funding from a wide range of donors. For all of Common Cause’s blather about “exposing” NMRC and PFF, in both cases, donor lists are easy to find on their websites.

So consumed is Common Cause in playing “gotcha,” it subverts its own conclusion that PFF’s positions against network neutrality and in favor of video franchise reform are a direct result of its donor influence. A look at the PFF donor list finds quite a few companies that have taken public positions in favor of network neutrality and against video franchise reform.

Common Cause may be wildly inconsistent, but the think tanks it calls “Astroturf” organizations aren’t. All their policy positions are consistent in that they favor less regulation and greater market freedom. Most businesses, large and small, line up with this thinking. So it is not surprising that many companies in telecom--an industry awash in regulatory issues--wish to support work which furthers these aims.

This is where false dichotomy comes in. Common Cause wants us to take for granted that it speaks for the greater good and that free-market think tanks like PFF (and by extension Heartland, the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation) simply exist to advance narrow special interest agendas. It’s a card that’s been played most recently by Sen. Edward Markey, who, in taking a position in favor of enforced network neutrality, dismissed the opponents as favoring “the communications colossi at the expense of the public interest.”

What qualifies Common Cause, which, by the way, doesn’t disclose its donors, to declare itself exclusive spokespersons for the public interest?

Reports like “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing” are desperate measures spawned by advocates of an approach to political economy that has been on the wane for some twenty-five years. If Common Cause had anything valuable to add to the telecom debate, it would be researching market data, presenting evidence to support its assertions, and proposing and defending legislative and regulatory courses of action. That’s what we do.

So let’s get back to the debate:

We feel that the public interest is served when the government permits commerce and trade to function freely, respects and protects property rights and allows individuals and corporate shareowners to use their own judgment to assess business risk and keep and direct the financial return. We believe this holds in telecom as much as it does in any other enterprise.

We’re prepared to defend our positions with logic and empirical evidence. As such, we find it a poor use of time, money and resources to write reports “exposing” the donors to organizations who take opposite viewpoints. Frankly, to us, who you are doesn’t matter as much as the strength or your ideas.

We’re prepared to engage opponents here. For lack coherent response, Common Cause would rather call us names.

Posted by Steven Titch at 12:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Outside the box thinking might have been handy in New Orleans before the hurricane instead of after, but a plan to sell flooded school buses on ebay might just be one of those 'if you got lemons make lemonade' kind of moments. Notably: " The district plans to contract out its student transportation."

More striking than the plan itself, is the obtuse AP reporting on what the buses symbolize:

"Some submerged to their roofs in the black flood waters, the yellow school buses were widely photographed in the days after Hurricane Katrina and have become an icon of the city's devastated school system."

Of course they represented no such thing. Rather, they were the first image to reveal the stark irony of Mayor Nagin's indignant raving regarding the lack of outside help when the most obvious preparation and response at the local level to evacuate those without their own transportation was ignored.

I don't suspect this is so much a conspiracy to place blame for the hurricane response higher up the political food chain, as a tin-earred observation that proposes to pass for news analysis and instead impeaches the credibility of mainstream news. Message to AP, if I want news, I hit the blogosphere, speaking of which, check out a more indepth discussion of local resources available for the evacuation.

Aerial photos of buses that were not flooded, were a few miles from the Superdome, and were not used to evacuate are news to me.

A skeptic view is here but doesn't ring true. A lack of "experienced drivers" would be no bar to using these buses in an emergency. The point here is that this was a slow motion tragedy. If the buses had been moved to higher ground they would have been available. Even if inexperienced drivers put a few dents in them doing it. Fuel is an issue, but there is little likelihood that these buses were all without fuel,and if they were there is no evidence that the depots where they were parked were without fuel. If 'Snopes' is right about anything, it is that hindsight in these cases is 20/20. Indeed, federal and state officials might have tried rounding up local resources if local officials were out of their depth. But, as per usual, this excuse seems only to be offered on behalf of local officialdom.

Mary Landrieu had perhaps a more honest excuse when speaking with Fox News: "I am not going to level criticism at local and state officials. Mayor Nagin, and most mayors in this country, have a hard time getting their people to work on a sunny day, let alone ... in front of a hurricane."

What is really clear, in hindsight (although some would argue it was readily foreseeable) is that individuals used to relying on government have their own capacity for private action inhibited. I'm not speaking about the notion that many individuals trapped at the Superdome were the beneficiaries of various programs of government support, but that the national discussion has focused on what level of government to blame. The middle class is as reflexively dependent on government as the underclass.

Hindsight also appears to be laying to rest the notion that it is critical to the national economy to rebuild this city in a swamp. The idea that trade on the Mississippi would collapse without a Crescent City of millions was hyperbole from the start. Although Harvard has drummed Larry Summers out on his ear, they apparently still have an infinitesimal minority of folks who can think economically yielding a serious debunking of this notion.

The Port of New Orleans is run by a state appointed board,but its operations are contracted out to various operators. It is obvious that the nexus of private commerce fueled a quick return to operations. The first ship called at P&O Ports in New Orleans only 2 weeks after the hurricane. And increasing mechanization and efficiences in port operation make it seem almost irrelevant to port operations whether they are adjacent to a city of several million or not. Indeed, it was the City that needed the port, not the vice versa.

Posted by Brian Bishop at 05:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Kevin Drum is defending the idea that government should negotiate drug pricesfor seniors:

At any rate, big customers in the private sector routinely negotiate low prices with their suppliers, and it's not clear to me why things would be much different in this case. In fact, I can't think of any good reason to believe that the notoriously inefficient federal government should prove to be a steelier negotiator than, say, Blue Cross, which also buys in enormous volumes and has the added advantage of being a private company with plenty of incentive to negotiate the lowest prices possible.

Kevin is right, but not in the way he thinks. The problem here is two-fold: (1) There is an assumption that the government will dutifully negotiate the best prices. When, in reality, it is more likely that the government will cozy up to one company (or all of them) and continue voluntarily get bilked in exchange for gracious campaign support or support for pet causes and what not. (2) It assumes that the "large customer" based "private" market is optimal, when in fact many would argue that the dominance of the "big customers" in health insurance has lead to massive inefficiency. Thus, adding the government as a bigger purchaser would in fact, make things even worse.

The existing inefficiencies in the health care market are a direct result of the individual buyer having been removed from the equation. The effort with Part D was to try and find ways to bring that buyer back in to increase efficiency in the market.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 08:46 AM | Permalink

Texas Gov. Rick Perry told the Texas Association of Manufacturing on March 22nd that the upcoming special session of the legislature is an opportunity to give Texans a significant property tax cut that stands the test of time and to make lasting improvements to the state's tax structure so that it is more modern, broader and fairer.

He said the economic growth the state has experienced in recent years occurred because Texas has created an environment that welcomes job creation and rewards entrepreneurship like no other state. “My philosophy is simple: You can't tax, spend, regulate and litigate your way to prosperity,” Perry said.

For more details, chick here:

Posted by John Skorburg at 03:43 PM | Permalink

Most of the reporting of the AT&T-BellSouth merger can’t help but raise the irony that it seems to be re-assembling the old Bell System. After all, the combined AT&T-BellSouth will incorporate four of the seven regional Bell companies created by the 1984 settlement that ended the six-year antitrust case against the old Ma Bell.

Certainly the irony is fair to cite, but beyond that, a lot has been forgotten about the details of the antitrust settlement and its original goals. All that remains is the popular assumption that local and long distance service must be kept separate to preserve telecom competition.

The AT&T break-up is commonly misunderstood to have been a judicial order and a punitive judgment against monopoly behavior.

Here are just three examples of the error from the March 6 news reports of the AT&T-BellSouth merger (emphasis mine).

From USA Today:
"Four of the original seven regional Bell phone companies created in the court-ordered breakup of AT&T — plus what remained of AT&T — would become part of the new AT&T."

From UPI:
“As a result, if the buyout of BellSouth is approved, four of the seven former AT&T companies that were split up by the government to prevent a monopoly in the industry will be reunited once again.”

From The Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
"…That appears to mean that the only likely future buyer of Qwest is Verizon, the other remaining local telephone company that grew out of the consolidation of the telecom firms created by the 1980s court-ordered breakup of the old AT&T."

The truth is that the AT&T break-up was neither court-ordered nor punitive. I remember it well. At the time, I had been covering the industry at Electronic News for just over a year.

The AT&T divestiture was the result of a negotiated settlement between AT&T and the U.S. Department of Justice. The case had lingered six years, having been initiated during the Ford administration. AT&T admitted no wrongdoing. The settlement was announced in January 1982, the same day the Justice Department outright dropped its 13-year antitrust suit against IBM.

The agreement to the spin off the 22 Bell local exchange companies into seven geographic entities came as a surprise. Most thought that the Justice Department would force the separation of AT&T’s local and long distance operations from Western Electric and Bell Labs, its wholly-own manufactured and R&D arms. Instead, AT&T, at least at the time, thought it had negotiated a far more favorable deal. Most analysts agreed.

The settlement barred entry by the divested companies into both the competitive long distance and the emerging market for data networking and information services. Moreover, the original divestiture settlement called for AT&T to keep the Bell name and logo, ownership of the telephones and customer premises equipment in service (back then most consumers and business leased their equipment from AT&T), the Yellow Pages, and the licenses for its nascent local cellular phone operations. AT&T was set to walk away with two-thirds of the Bell System assets leaving its divested Bell companies two-thirds of the liabilities.

It was here that U.S. District Judge Harold Greene, who had been preciding over the case, stepped in and modified the final judgment to the benefit of the soon-to-be-divested companies, not, as is commonly believed, to punish them. In the Modified Final Judgment (MFJ), the Baby Bells ended up keeping the Bell name, their rights to CPE, the Yellow Pages and most significantly, the wireless licenses.

Still, given the state of competitive telecommunications at the time, the MFJ was highly advantageous to AT&T. Although AT&T still had a 90 percent market share in long distance, MCI and Sprint were making tremendous inroads. The divested Bell companies, by virtue of their captive customers, would have been even more than a threat. By keeping the Baby Bells out, AT&T was, by and large, protecting itself.

The divestiture agreement did not set an expiration date for the ban on Bell long distance and information services. Instead, it created a system of “triennial reviews” whereby Greene would review the competitive situation and rule whether the Bell entry into either segment would constitute a competitive threat. These triennial reviews continued well into the 1990s.

Over time, it is easy to see how the regulatory separation of local and long distance and voice and data became enshrined as policy. During a time of unprecedented change in telecom, virtually every regulatory proposal to bubble out of the Reagan, Bush or Clinton administrations had to take the MFJ into account. But when we understand that the MFJ was not imposed by the court as a remedy to a proven case of antitrust, but as the result of a settlement by AT&T largely to serve AT&T’s interest, it forces a change in our perspective. These walls never should have been accorded the sacrosanct treatment they received in the years since.

Indeed, the first triennial review in 1987, a landmark report by Peter Huber called “The Geodesic Network,” asserted that using geographical limits to regulate telecom, an industry that existed to break down geographical limits, would be extremely detrimental to the evolution of the U.S. networking infrastructure. Huber recommended that Greene lift the MFJ restrictions and allow market forces to drive the evolution of the U.S. telecom network, which he correctly concluded—almost a decade before the World Wide Web emerged—had begun to shift from the closed hierarchical architecture built by the Bell System to an open node-to-node and peer-to-peer architecture. His findings were debated, but largely dismissed. Greene, however, did begin to loosen restrictions on information services, which ultimately would allow Bell entry into email and data networking, which at the time was still using early packet-switched protocols such as X.400 and X.25. Still, the long-distance prohibition prevented the divested companies from becoming full-fledged national and international data competitors with AT&T, MCI and Sprint.

By the mid-1990s, analysts such as Probe Research’s Victor Schnee said telecom market economics, both at the supply and demand sides, could not support seven large but partitioned local exchange companies and that consolidation was inevitable.

What Congress gave us instead was the 1996 Telecom Act, which all but cemented the walls between local, long distance, voice and data that AT&T, not Judge Greene, had created. It instituted an elaborate system of price controls that propped up competitors that would never be profitable if left to market mechanisms. It heavily penalized the local exchange companies, and prevented them from leveraging their size and scale to construct broadband networks.

Finally, 22 years after divestiture, we’re getting past all this. The flaws of the 1996 Act are understood. Former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, who ten years ago called a proposed merger between BellSouth and the old AT&T “unthinkable,” now says it makes sense. AT&T, the company that divided local and long distance to begin with, no longer exists, having been devoured and restructured by one of its own children. The competitive market is broadband and national in scope. Telecommunications has completed a major, long-delayed, phase in its evolution from narrowband voice to broadband data.

Posted by Steven Titch at 12:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Perhaps there’s no better evidence of just how “out of touch” Hollywood has become than their obvious inability to make movies that really challenge our prejudices and preconceptions. Instead, they spend their time zealously preaching the virtues of tolerance to an America public that is arguably as tolerant as ever.

So it should come as no surprise that the most politically incorrect movie to hit the screen in years comes to us from a rookie. That rookie is Jason Reitman and his film is Thank You for Smoking.

Reitman’s Thank You for Smoking is not a movie about smoking. Though, I must admit, part of my motivation for seeing the film is my own love/hate relationship with nicotine, as I imagine is the case for many of you. And sure, the main character, Nick Naylor, is the chief lobbyist for “Big Tobacco” and the plot revolves around one senator’s effort to add a graphic warning label to cigarettes. Nevertheless, be warned, you will not leave theatre with any deeper conviction about tobacco policy.

What the movie is about, thankfully, is not nearly so simple. On the one, it is an homage to political incorrectness itself. The simple facts of the movie say it all: the protagonist is a very likable tobacco lobbyist, the antagonist is a sniveling Vermont senator with a (D) behind his name, Hollywood is complicit in big tobacco’s new product placement campaign, and the amorous reporter is just as dishonest as the rest of them.

Furthermore, despite the ubiquity of tobacco throughout the script, no one is ever seen smoking on screen. This is a mature cinematic choice that subconsciously reinforces the notion that the film is not actually about tobacco but at the same time acknowledges how political incorrect it has become to smoke on film. As Hollywood producer Jeff Megall (played by Rob Lowe) tells us, smoking in the movies is now been confined to the “RAVs,” or Russians, Arabs and Villains.

But, like any notable film, Thank You for Smoking is not politically incorrect just to be politically incorrect. Instead, it attacks the professionalization of politics and its affects on political discourse.

In a particularly poignant scene, Naylor engages his son in an argument about which is better ice cream, chocolate or vanilla. Naylor lovingly demonstrates the art of verbal jujitsu by twisting his son’s defense of chocolate and accusing him of arguing against individual liberty. His son, a little confused, insists this was not the topic of discussion, a point Naylor believes irrelevant. “It’s not you I’m after,” he tells his son while gesturing to surrounding crowds, “It’s them.”

When you and I discuss politics over coffee, our motives and intentions should be very different from those talking heads we watch on television every night. They have incentives to disagree, we do not. Their debate is about the anonymous “them”, ours is about a very personal “us.” But too often, this distinction is missed and we find ourselves arguing with one another as if there were some “them” out to which we have something to prove.

Smoking explores this basic distinction and demonstrates how our political theatre operates almost entirely on self-interest masquerading as the public-good. But it does this without being judgmental or cynical, a remarkable feat in it’s own right. “Everyone has a Mortgage to Pay” is a commonly heard refrain.

Smoking also attacks our commitment to tolerance by reminding us how judgmental those professing “tolerance” can be. We’re so aggressive about making sure society at large tolerates a person’s race, cultural, or sexual orientation—factors generally thought to be beyond an individual’s control. But when it comes to respecting others’ choices—whether it be to smoke or do drugs—we remain decidedly judgmental.

Thank You for Smoking is a well-scripted, well-executed piece of cinema. From the opening chorus of “Smoke Smoke Smoke That Cigarette” to the closing dig at cell-phone hysteria, it is unapologetically un-PC and unfailingly entertaining. But its genius lies in trusting the audience to think for itself. In an era where Hollywood prides itself on being America’s conscience, Thank You for Smoking leaves the judging to us.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 10:48 AM | Permalink

Froma Harrop of the Providence Journal is one of my favorite lefty columnists. She's generally not given to hysterics (unlike, say, Paul Krugman) and even when she's wrong (which is fairly often) you get the sense that she's at least thought about what she's writing, rather than simply reciting a litany of slogans and tired cliches. And when she's wrong, her insights are still great. On top of that, she's a fantastic writer.

Which means, of course, that when she gets it right in her column, she's a delight to read. Such was the case with a recent column on how government granted monopolies (aka 'licenses') for gambling do little but breed corruption. As she writes, "The monopoly of gambling has become more immoral than the activity itself. Wherever a politician can deliver the right to virtually print money, corruption breeds. The most colorful example is lobbyist-crook Jack Abramoff, who made millions defrauding the tribes that hired him to guard their casino monopolies."

Harrop has nailed it. The gambling licenses that casinos hold are little more than government-enforced monopolies on an activity that tens of millions of Americans enjoy. Monopolies that lack government enforcement usually last about as long as it takes another entrepreneurial spirit to set up shop. Without government enforcement, the big casino's monopoly on gambling would last about as long as it took your corner bar to buy a few decks of cards and hire someone to deal them.

But instead, we have the government granting special priveleges to license holders, as if by confining poker games to large buildings filled with flashing lights while keeping it out of the back room of the local bar & grill they have somehow struck a blow for virtue, morality and the American Way.

I should say at this point that I'm not a fan of gambling, at least of the commercial sort. As a form of social recreation, a few friends playing poker on a Friday night for nickels and dimes doesn't raise any concerns with me. But having had to walk through casino floors to get to my hotel room on more than one occasion, the only word that comes to mind is "appalling." Row upon row of hypnotized elderly women plunking their money into slot machines, hordes of bleary-eyed men hoping to 'catch a break' on the next turn of the card - this is fun?

No, actually it isn't, at least for most of the people I've seen. I defy anyone to set foot in any casino in America and see more than an isolated handful of people smiling, laughing, appearing to enjoy themselves (except for the owners raking in their monopoly profits, of course). Most have expressions ranging from boredom at best, to grim determination and concern, to occasional panic.

I am a libertarian, and as such I can't see any good reason (well, not any good reason that isn't trumped by an understanding of freedom and basic economics) to prohibit gambling. But the granting of government monopolies is a travesty, one that breeds corruption as would-be monopoly operators scramble to get in on the easy money.

The answer is to open it up, allowing pretty much anybody to get into the game. Regulate it to the extent required to keep minors out of the games and keep the games honest, but aside from that allow anybody who wants to set up a poker table and a slot machine to do so, legally. Let the market prevail, just as we generally do with liquor, Playboy, boy bands, and other morally objectionable things. But end the priveleged monopoly status of casinos.

Harrop's full column is available here: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/03/the_governments_monopoly_on_ga.html

I highly recommend it to all

Posted by Sean Parnell at 03:53 PM | Permalink

Against their better judgement, the editors of this site offered me an opportunity to share my acerbic wit with cyber libertarians and accidental tourists, premised on the understanding that I would have the good taste to avoid scatilogical humor. But I never promised anything about scatilogical politics!

Only in 21st century America could this scene be protected by government.

"The problem began when city workers removed cypress trees on "bird island" at Lake Eola in Orlando.
The trees had to be removed because the bird droppings were polluting the water, according to the report."

but

"Federal law prohibits the bird nests in Orlando from being disturbed."

So the government doesn't want birds polluting the water, but the government doesn't want anyone bothering the birds. So the birds get diverted to benches and cars and the response is to put up signs. Forget bothering the birds, how about killing them!

Anywhere else, there would be a hoarde of workers on the public dole slaughtering birds left and right. Even in England they would slaughter the birds and just argue over whether they should let dogs join the hunt. Libertarians would, of course, demand that we privatize by instituting a bounty or, better yet, simply let the private market slaughter the birds -- say car companies or bench owners might have an interest.

I reckon it might only take a few days of a virulent bird flu to change peoples' minds about this, so maybe there is a silver lining in every cloud.

Posted by Brian Bishop at 07:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is how it ends. Not with empirical evidence, a trial, an expert opinion. Not with a referendum or an election. Not with a public policy paper or an academic conference. Not with critical analysis and not with caution. These days this is how a debate ends ... with a commercial.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 09:55 AM | Permalink

There is a fascinating oped in the Journal today on Charles Murray's plan which would give $10,000 to every citizen annually in lieu of government administered social programs. Not only would this be a more efficient allocations of funds, and leave people with more options, Murray also thinks such a plan would return a certain moral grounding to the welfare state. We would all know exactly how much others were getting and, thus, be more willing to judge some citizen's misuse of the endowment. The result is a more responsible citizenry. The only problem is that freeing the polity from responsibility is, arguably, part of the motivation behind the welfare state, is it not? If we believed people were responsible enough to invest their own money why would we take social security taxes in the first place? Paternalism is welfare's secret motivation. So while the plan is a clever one, it hardly seems any more realistic than dismantling the welfare state altogether. Though, there is something to be said for vision.

Will Wilkinson has some interesting thoughts on the Murray plan as well.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 12:53 PM | Permalink

The Heartland Institute has been on top of the anti-mercury campaign for a while, but now there's a website that appears dedicated to dispelling the myths about mercury propagated by groups like the Sierra Club. Its called "Fish Scam." The most interesting feature is a mercury calculator, through which I have discovered that I would have to eat 11.6 lbs. of Tuna a week to have any risk of adverse symptoms associated with mercury poisoning.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 10:08 AM | Permalink

A nod to freedomdemocrat's Logan Ferree for subjecting himself to the criticism I have leveled at his libertarian scorecards for the house and senate. He left a comment that parallels several offline comments I've had on my blog posts that appears to return this discussion of partisanship to one of pragmatism -- thus vindicating Mike Van Winkle's instincts.

The sagebrush rebellion was snuffed out when its effective coalition broke apart into factions promoting regulatory reform through state based management of federal lands, and those promoting privitization of the vast federal estate. This theme obviously continues to play itself out as virtually any federally managed use of these lands is portrayed as fraught with subsidy rather than freeing overregulated industry. Thus, Logan disagrees with my proposal that votes for opening ANWR to oil exploration would be reliable indicators of a libertarian philosophy. Logan is by no means the lone libertarian with respect to such criticism, he is just wrong.

Logan wrote in this regard:

"I personally believe that public lands should be privatized if they are to be used by the corporate sector. Anything else amounts to a corporate subsidy to them."

For a politically sophisticated individual, that is a stunningly naive economic analysis -- and self-contradictory with the ostensible point derived from his research, i.e. that Democrats are more libertarian than Republicans. Does anyone recall any Democratic proposals to sell ANWR?

Yet this shibboleth, that nothing short of outright sale of land qualifies as a libertarian initiative, ironically insulates Democrats from accountablility for their misanthropic hostility to resource exploitation. Republicans seldom propose serious divestment anymore as the Democrats have made this a political liablility. Many Republicans would gladly sell the federal estate -- or return it to the states for disposition, given the equal footing doctrine that was ignored when Western States were essentially forced to cede their undeveloped land to the federal government as the price of statehood. This is not to promote state ownership as, per se, superior to federal ownership, although these government entities that have to balance their budgets have generally tended toward more active market based management strategies with regard to state owned resources. But the Democrats (and northeastern RINOs from my neck of the woods) have cast these lands as some kind of eternal patrimony for their plethora of armchair environmentalist constituents, and the idea of privatizing much of the federal estate is significantly more fleeting than Democracy in Iraq.

But one would have to ignore the history of capitalism to imagine that outright sale is the only market mechanism for price setting with regard to split estate aspects of land. Those, who opine as Logan, have apparently not heard that in the private market we have this device called a "lease" in which consideration is offered for a use short of a fee interest in real property.

Thus, before one presumes that support for opening ANWR is simply some pragmatic compromise of libertarian principles, one should examine the economic arrangements that attend oil and gas leasing on the federal estate and comparable practices in the private sector. Mineral wealth, including oil and gas underlying property, has commonly been economically segregated from the surface estate in property. This is a useful economic arrangement given the complexity of exploring for and exploiting this wealth in an environment of radical price and regulatory variability.

Private owners regularly engage in royalty arrangements with oil exploration companies that provide a share of revenues to the property owner for oil or gas recovered from drilling on the property. Why on earth would those proposing that the federal government be more market minded think it rational to prevent the federal government from doing the same thing?

Indeed, royalties on oil and gas production, this great subsidy that the federal government is purportedly passing along to industry, happens to be the second largest source of income to the federal government after income taxes.

This doesn't insulate federal leasing programs from inquiry as to whether these enormous revenues might, nonetheless, be greater if not for favoritism of some sort in the programmatic structure. But of course the same would likely be alleged of virtually any conceivable plan for selling parts of the federal estate. What are the terms, is it offered in ways that limit the potential bidders or narrow the market, etc.

The devil is in the details, and the details with regard to oil and gas leasing don't point up a government that is laissez faire to a fault, but do largely reveal a market oriented program that set standard royalties with respect to those commanded in private market leases (1/8 or 12.5% on shore and deep water, 1/6 or 16.6% near shore). And on top of these royalties, the leases themselves are the subject of competitive bidding in which the government is free to reject even winning bids that are short of the value anticipated.

As I mentioned in previous posts, there have been various programs of royalty abatement based generally on oil price thresholds and the costs associated with the particularized setting from which the oil will be recovered. In these circumstances the government essentially makes itself more of a partner bearing some of the risk of the price volatility of the commodity. Should such forebearance also be associated with a higher rate of return should the price of oil cross some upper threshold. Perhaps, but these are simply matters that any landowner who doesn't want to do their own drilling, recovery of oil and transportation and sale of the commodity must balance. Are anti-oil leasing libertarians suggesting that we charter a federally owned and run oil company to produce these resources or do you favor continuing to allow anti-corporate hostility to keep them locked away from consumers?

Hostility, by the way, that is entirely misplaced on the ANWR issue. This is not something you can run up the public choice flagpole and say that the corporations are using their market position to influence the government to give this resource away to them. The only, and I mean only, investment in promoting the oil leasing in ANWR has been from the state of Alaska and some serious sweat equity investment from Inupiats in Kactovic. If the presence of corporate influence is to be the measuring stick by which subsidy is judged, rather than comparison of federal to private market actions, opening ANWR is purely a political issue pitting local interests against national environmental groups.

It is quite possible that, by setting some of royalty rates and policies through legislation, the response of the federal government as landowner is not quite as facile as the individual owner and that legislative decision making may be driven by ideas regarding derivative benefits of these economic activities to constituents, corporate and individual. But I have seen no evidence that the federal leasing program is a stark departure from the market practices of private property owners.

The offshore drilling provides yet another example of how bizarre the notion that leasing, rather than selling, federal land is a subsidy. Virtually no libertarian proposals exist to privatize in fee any serious proportion of territorial or international waters. Yet libertarian proposals abound for creating markets in discrete resource segments resident or transient in various geographically bounded ocean areas. Are these libertarian proposals, from leases for aquaculture to ITQs in fisheries, to leasing of mineral rights, all subsidies and the libertarians proposing them really only corporate shills in disguise? I think not.

Posted by Brian Bishop at 06:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (24) | TrackBacks (0)

Taking a little license with the tobacco commercial that gave rise to juxtaposing grammar and taste, the latest 'conundrum in a coffepot' suggests that, according to self-appointed mobs who proprose to speak for the universal palate, some broadsheets are publishing editorial cartoons in bad taste, like a newspaper shouldn't. This may come as shocking to some, but it leads me to ask: "what do you want, Good Humor or Good Taste?"

It lead Donn Fresard, the editor of the MIchigan Daily, a the student newspaper on the University of MIchigan campus to publish a serious non-sensational critique of the sensational criticism of editorial cartoons.

Ironically, he defends publication of cartoons attacking affirmative action while also defending the decision of the Daily not to republish the Jylands Post cartoon depictions of Muhammed. In the first case he argues cogently that whether the cartoons are offensive or not is essentially a subjective non-substantive measure of their worth. But in the latter, the Daily gives in to the idea that the offensive (Fresard substitutes the word shocking, but it has the same meaning) quality of the Muhammed cartoons drowns out the message.

He did invite readers to 'prove' him wrong, and I don't even need such an invitation. My case is only a click away...

Donn,

I work with a foundation dedicated to expanding the range of intellectual discourse and eliminating speech codes at Brown University. It is this interest that drew me to your recent piece on the Daily site. I think your writing clear, well reasoned, compelling, and mature. Obviously those feelings are subconsciously bolstered by the fact that I agree with the majority of your position, but I like to think that I would afford the same plaudits to a quality piece expressing an alternative point of view.

With that said. I did not agree with your tag or alternative proposition regarding the Daily's treatment of the Danish cartoons. I don't propose that I have "proved you wrong", because you did not expound upon the criteria be which you arrived at the belief that the Danish cartoons are "shocking". Although taking such a claim at face value, I would say you are objectively wrong. You are of course in the right regarding where the decisionmaking authority resides for publishing in the Daily, but your invitation to discourse is accepted. I hope you would afford me the courtesy of some illucidation on your point. Here is some on mine:

I would ask you to consider whether, indeed, it is a submission to the very same highly attuned sensitivities you warn against in response to cartoons published by the Daily, that ironically lead the Daily not to republish the Danish cartoons.

I was struck by your contention that the "shock" of such images would "overwhelm the message". I assume the message you refer to is the message of the cartoons themselves, although it seems that when it comes to covering editorial cartoons rather than publishing them that other messages are involved, i.e. the message of Jylands Post in publishing them, or the message of the Daily in reporting on them. Certainly neither of these messages is served by not offering readers an opportunity to see the cartoons being debated. Indeed, in such a high profile case, where so few news outlets published the cartoons, I would argue you are selling your readership short by essentially finding these depictions "objectively shocking", just as reactionary members of the University community labeled your publication of anti-affirmative action editorials "objectively racist".

It is your ink and your decision, but I suspect your conception that these images were shocking -- if not literally, subtextually -- is arrived at in the very context of an atmosphere of public discussion driven by the politically correct rhetoric advancing 'offense' as some kind of good taste exception to the first amendment. Even if, as you have eloquently pointed out, you don't agree that political correctness requires a community veto of your publishing efforts, it seems that your editorial policy operates in some awe of the mob.

It may be that your coverage did offer explicit direction to readers on how to view the cartoons. If they haven't, one source is Michelle Malkin's blog:
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/004413.htm

For the life of me I can't see how one could conceive of these editorial images as "shocking" in any sense of the word. They vary from literally associating Muhammed with the violence being carried on in his name (the most widely circulated 'turban as bomb' cartoon purporting in the minds of me too American journalists to illustrate the offensive or shocking nature of images derived from the Danish challenge) to self deprecation of the cartoonists and the enterprise in which they are engaged. To me, neither the implied message of the most well known cartoon, nor its arguably low key image lacking gross ethnic caricature or mockery seem the least bit shocking. But, more to the point, where this is the only image that has received widespread circulation, I think you do the discussion of the issue a disservice by not presenting the range of these images. Do you believe these images represent some significant outlier for the genre, that they somehow are in poorer taste than the satirical opinions that are common to editorial depictions throughout the western world? I submit that these drawings are generally in less poor taste than many editorial cartoons I've seen.

It is easy to conceive of them as offensive to some, especially given the consistently reported notion that depictions of Muhammed are forbade by religious edicts (observed a bit in the breech with respect to art history). What is not consistently reported is how bland these offerings are. These can't possibly be conceived of as comparative of government supported 'serious' art depicting the crucifix in urine, for instance.

Perhaps you and fellow editors responsible for the decision not to republish those cartoons also felt that this controvesial Serrano "Piss Christ" image was 'shocking' and thus can claim a consistency in your outlook. But I would be interested to hear what exactly you found so "shocking" about the cartoons.

Brian Bishop

Posted by Brian Bishop at 08:40 AM | Permalink

!DVD available - call Gwen at 312-377-4000 or email carver@heartland.org for more info!

Florida’s top school choice official, Virginia Gentles, addressed the Illinois School Choice Initiative’s March 16 luncheon at the Metropolitan Club in the Sears Tower. Gentles, executive director of the Florida Department of Education’s Office of Independent Education and Parental Choice, described the many school choice programs available to parents in the Sunshine State, how those programs have affected K-12 education in Florida, and how more choice would benefit students and parents in Illinois.

“In Florida,” said Gentles, “school choice serves two very clear principles: #1, making education about the student, not the system; and #2, empowering parents to make the best decisions for their children.”

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 05:12 PM | Permalink

Mike recently posted links to a topic that drew me to blogging in the first place, although I think the title might be a little bit of false advertising. It is really about "partisanship and idealism" rather than "pragmatism and idealism".

Stephen Gordon at Hammer of Truth has seized upon a young Democrat's libertarian view of his party to support the theory that the party out of power develops more libertarian tendencies. I think that is a reasonable proposition. But the ‘research’ Stephen cites to support this is tainted by the choice of legislation used to analyze Congress, as well as ignoring the Democratic party's institutional responsibility for the existing anti-libertarian status quo in the economic sphere. I don’t think libertarian oriented Democrat Logan Ferree necessarily conspires to make Democrats look better on the Nolan chart, although I can’t rule it out.

Sorry that, as usual, it has taken me rhetoric of such logorrheic proportion to half explain why, but for the fearless of heart, or those with a large periodicals shelf or an ethernet connection next to the W.C. (and with only a slight bit less respect for what Shakespeare actually said): read on Macduff.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that Republicans tend to the authoritarian side of the ledger, although kneejerk criticism of the Patriot Act doesn’t qualify as serious argumentation regarding civil liberties. But the biggest fallacy in staining the analysis to emphasize differences over social and economic freedoms is that the economic self is the social self. Self ownership is the fundamental civil liberty. There is no serious effort by Democrats to roll back their paternalism in the economic arena that has been the predominant invitation to the federal government to legislate in the sphere of private matters, and it is absurd to argue that they represent an equal choice on economic liberties by cherrypicking a few votes.

This is, nonetheless, an inevitable methodology and I don’t detect so much of purposeful bias in the choice of votes, nor a quasi-libertarian quality to what side of any vote Logan has chosen. What is lacking is a deeper understanding of the extent to which these liberties have already been circumscribed, and by whom – and who is willing to visibly do something about it.

The Senate votes catalogued by freedomdeomcrats.org offer a serious window on who leads on these issues. With the exception of Russ Feingold, no Democrat introduced any of the fiscal or trade measures considered by the scorecard to be pro-libertarian. The record is mixed on the fiscal and trade votes chosen in the house, but the only macro libertarian idea was a Republican proposal to cut spending across the board on an appropriations bill which Logan criticised as blunt but supported given the departments involved. The Private Property Rights Protection Act was arguably a bipartisan macro-libertarian undertaking but Logan’s professed respect for property rights fell short when it came to recognizing a much more important vote in this regard, that on Richard Pombo’s ESA reform legislation that is currently being held up in the Senate. Pombo actually assembled a moderately bipartisan coalition of support and inclusion of this vote wouldn’t have changed the results so much as indicated an understanding of economic liberty that transcends the faddishness of a narrow subset of the property rights ideal following the Kelo decision.

As someone who came to the libertarian political persuasion directly as a result of inverse condemnation of property, it is easy to recognize that Logan has little understanding of the anti-libertarian regulation of property that has been the hallmark of Democratic politics for years. The argument can fairly be made that the Republican administration has done very little to roll back Democratic regulations – despite the hew and cry (or should I say hue and cry) of green groupies. But a complete lack of attention in these fiscal and trade votes to regulatory reform indicates a glaring lack of libertarian priority.

Even on hot button issues like immigration, Republicans took the lead on both sides of the issue.

Logan did reveal a nuanced view on trade when rating house votes regarding trade agreements on consistency, rather than choosing sides.

Votes on particularized energy bill amendments are scored in both houses. But efforts in the house to strip demonstration projects on improved environmental and production technologies for uranium mining are no more or less principled than any other activity and, worse, can as easily be read as evidence of irrational aversion to nuclear energy.

The Senate vote, a slightly better choice, was on a Sununu amendment to remove loan guarantees. But, notice that these loan guarantees are largely oriented towards environmental shibboleths. Here is the list of eligible projects and enabling language from section 1703 or HR 6:

“The Secretary may make guarantees under this
section only for projects that--
(1) avoid, reduce, or sequester air pollutants or
anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases; and
(2) employ new or significantly improved technologies as
compared to commercial technologies in service in the United
States at the time the guarantee is issued.
(b) Categories.--Projects from the following categories shall be
eligible for a guarantee under this section:
(1) Renewable energy systems. ; (2)Advanced fossil energy technology (including coal gasification meeting the criteria in subsection (d)).;(3) Hydrogen fuel cell technology for residential, industrial, or transportation applications.;(4) Advanced nuclear energy facilities.; (5) Carbon capture and sequestration practices and technologies, including agricultural and forestry practices that store and sequester carbon.;(6) Efficient electrical generation, transmission, and distribution technologies.; (7) Efficient end-use energy technologies.; (8) Production facilities for fuel efficient vehicles, including hybrid and advanced diesel vehicles.; (9) Pollution control equipment.;(10) Refineries, meaning facilities at which crude oil is refined into gasoline.”

Surely there is the public choice style incentive for operaters of more traditional generation and refining to try to skew the implementation of such unlimited federal largess towards typical operations disguised as new or alternative or environmentally friendly technology. But the beard for the provision is the idea that traditional technology and traditional advances as inspired solely by market forces are inadequate for environmental priorities. This, as well as the rest of the energy bill, is so skewed to having ones regulatory cake while still claiming that our just desserts are domestic energy production, that it couldn’t possibly succeed. Thus I would join Logan in seeing rejection of the bill as the libertarian position. But don’t think for a minute that most Democrats who voted against the bill were thinking in that vein.

The obvious sub-votes to score would have been on opening ANWR or resistance to CAFÉ standards. These are signature issues defining whether congressmen are willing to stand against overreuglation of domestic industry. I don’t like the compromise that was made on CAFÉ standards(having them set by executive fiat) but I think the example set by voting against environmentalists demands for specific congressional action is far more important than arguing over a 10 million dollar nuclear demonstration project – a house vote scored by Logan as mentioned above. Votes for ANWR and against CAFÉ are both cast fundamentally in favor of cost benefit analysis and demonstrate that those casting them won’t be stampeded against energy production based on environmental fearmongering. The vote touted by Logan says instead goes after a minor piece of pork while leaving the rest.

There is no question that the energy bill is a mess of pork, but it’s form has been largely dictated by the environmentalists. Just as Bush’s ideas of advancing school choice as an alternative to the current morass of the public schools were subsumed by liberal ideas of more federal involvement in education, talk of supporting domestic energy sources as a policy alternative to questionable efforts to stabilize world energy markets through projection of US power and influence throughout the world have been submerged by environmental scare tactics. What I think of the resulting bill can’t be printed respectfully on this website.

But if one looks carefully through the bill, the only subsidies are to causes favored by environmentalists and energy generation technologies that have been made impossibly expensive by environmental regulation. There are royalty credits for more expensive forms of fossil fuel exploration (e.g. deep water drilling, small volume wells). But these are basically refunds on revenues the government wouldn’t have but for the resource exploitation considered. Credits for windpower are subsides, as they are used as tax credits to offset other income, not to reduce royalties that wind generators would have to pay for generating windpower, there are none.

Reductions in royalty costs are not subsidies, even if they are admittedly less than ideally transparent market instruments. A more market oriented approach would be simply to open all royalty amounts up to competitive bidding that would reflect the cost of location associated with recovering energy from various portions of the federal estate -- given the industrial and environmental challenges posed by differing subclimates and environments and the proximity of industrial and transmission infrastructure -- instead of setting a standard royalty and creating an economic threshold that limits domestic exploration along with the byzantine regulatory overload. But royalty rebates approximate this, if smacking of technocracy. Marginal well credits on royalties only apply when the price of oil is below $15 a barrel so, for all essential purposes, they don’t exist. Deep water credits are supposed to have oil price related triggers although some leases negotiated during the Clinton administration were not subject to such provisions and this will lead to legal action in the near future. What are the only credits not subject to modification when the price of energy rises, in other words without any market component? Alternative energy credits like the windpower subsidies.

My effort is not to belittle serious efforts to analyze the libertarian tendencies of our politicians, nor to defend the libertarian credentials, on average, of the current crop of Republicans. Logan should be congratulated for taking the trouble to identify and research legislative minutia in what seems an honest attempt to take the immediate libertarian temperature of Congress. But the macro trends are undeniable, that Democrats have been destroying economic freedoms for decades and there is no evidence that they have had any epiphany regarding regulation of the economy as a central purpose of government.

The energy bill is green pork. We have put a regulatory strait jacket on the domestic energy industry and, surprise, surprise, we have to provide incentives to get them to do anything. I’m shocked, shocked. So let all these visionary Democrats who lead the demogaugery against Dubai Ports World push a libertarian fix for the shocks to the domestic economy as Arab banks respond by getting out of the dollar, and – who knows – maybe denominating the sale of their oil in another currency. Let’s see the very people, i.e. the very Democrats, who have wanted to precipitously raise gas taxes for years, stop bemoaning the cost of gas to their poor constituents and railing against oil company profits as usual, and remove the regulatory hurdles to significant advance in domestic energy sources and thus induce market pressure to bring those prices down. Like that is going to happen -- Not! If it should, you can count me amongst freedom democrats -- which would be the equivalent of eating my hat. Otherwise count me as a dissatisfied Republican curmudgeon who sees little libertarian hope is his own circles, but none whatsoever with the Democrats.

Posted by Brian Bishop at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

Stephen Gordon has a good post at Hammer of Truth discussing the myriad of different ways libertarians can move forward, despite a lack of consensus on what role libertarians should play in politics. The apparent division is between the pragmatist (which I prefer to "moderate") and the idealist (which I prefer to "radical"). There is no conflict between the two, but unfortunately the idealist always seems to think there is one.

In reality, the idealist, in all his self-delusion, serves a very important function as the conscience of the movement. The pragmatist, understanding as he does that we can only get there from here, that whatever liberty is going to look like it is going to have be molded out of the existing society, needs the idealists to keep him honest. The idealist is the angel on the shoulder constantly keeping the pragmatist on track as he meanders from one compromise to the next. The pragmatist is right about the logistics, but the idealist is the driving force behind his machinations.

The problem only arises when the one forgets to recognize and appreciate the other. The idealist out of touch with reality and the pragmatist who's lost his "religion" are really the same threat.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 12:22 PM | Permalink

One of my favorite professors used to talk about how the truth is often the biggest barrier to truth. Initially this concept sound strangely paradoxical. But I never tire of pointing out real world applications of the tool. Perhaps the most obvious example is our current political situation, in which one truth, that the Bush administration has botched foreign policy to some degree, masks another important truth, that the left has not offered a coherent alternative to Bush's incompetence (ignoring the problem doesn't count).

Take for instance, Russ Feingold's call for censureof the administration over the wire-tapping. While there maybe a certain justice in this (like the FISA law or not, Bush appears to have broken it) it also confirms where five years of Bush-bashing has gotten the Democrats ... that is, nowhere. Given the President's weakness, now would be a good time to assume a leadership role. Start talking about how you're going to fix health care, education, and social security. Tell us how you're going to bring Washington back in touch with the people. Give us a foreign policy vision that maintain civil liberties, while vigilantly pursuing terrorism. After hounding Bush for five years, they've finally brought the presidency to its knees ... now what?

But then, leadership was never the plan was it? The truth of Bush's short-comings has until now sheltered the left from their own dirty truth: ideological bankruptcy.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 02:20 PM | Permalink

Bill Higginson tried to sound a thoughtful note on this blog regarding the debatably dubious Dubai deal. William Triplett, a former counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Comittee penned an epitah for the UAE undertaking that tried to put some similarly fine points on the matter but smacked of staying on both sides of the issue.

The idea that any serious thought would be expended by any parties to this political firestorm is generous to a fault. President Bush, who has consistently resorted to terrorism as the one arrow in his quiver, found out the hard way the cost of going to this political well so often. The parable here is a cynical corollary of Aesop's famous fable, the moral of which is reported to be: "Even when liars tell the truth, they are never believed".

President Bush now knows: "When liars admit their lies, people don't believe them either".

So President Bush tries to tell the American public that engagement with the world at large is more important than partisanly perpetrated perceptions of security risks. And the public tells him to stuff it.

That would be the same public that has no problem buying oil from the UAE (or Saudi Arabia where more of the hijackers and more terrorist funding originates).

It is not that I have so many tears to shed for the government run Dubai Ports World. In one of those 'medium is the message' moments, Aesop's own life, or more pointedly his death, rather than his fables provided the moral for this story: "Beset with the blood of Aesop" more commonly quoted as "What goes around comes around".

I'm shocked, shocked to see that Dubai Ports World whose business interests are subjugated to the political sphere when it comes to supporting the boycott of Israel has been subjected to a similar dose of reactionary political intolerance when it comes to operating in America.

But I'm actually more shocked to learn, from the same UPI analysis:
"It has been illegal since 1977 for U.S. companies to comply with the boycott, by agreeing not to do business with Israel, or by certifying that their products do not contain any Israeli materials"

Where were all the free speech advocates when this little ditty slipped into the lawbooks.

It may be in the rational liberal economic interests of citizens of any country that they have the freedom to trade with the largest range of partners internationally. But this includes the freedom not to trade based on one's own conscience or -- god forbid -- on weighing one's business interests.

Of all the misguided trade policy the United States has fostered, this small revelation ranks up there. If a company wants to comply with anti-Israel content laws, that is their business -- just as it was Google's business whether it wanted to comply with Chinese censors. Google has to weigh whether the potential alienation of customers in free countries outweights the tradeoffs it makes to do business under dictatorships.

If this is not a decision left to the individual business, I don't see how we can characterize our system as freedom in comparison to any others.

The only reason our citizens ought to be prohibited from conforming their business practices to the regimen required by some foreign locality is if this is in aid of fraudlent or forcefully coerced opportunities in those countries, e.g. actual slave labor. We may think it unwise or unsuited to long term peaceful settlement for Arab governments to refuse to trade with Israeli companies, even while disagreeing with Israel's territorial mangement, or even its right to exist. But we don't live in an ideal world of liberal economics. Politics are regularly translated into protectionism here in America.

As a practical matter, economic boycotts are the quintessential non-violent expression of moral outrage. They can be as readily portrayed as a substitute for more violent dispute resolution, or a precursor to some escalation that could be avoided by the voluntary engagement of economic citizens across the lines of nationalism. I don't contend for their effectiveness, either for citizens or governments. But to selectively make out this Arab boycott as the equivalent of slave labor, or suicide bombing -- such that giving comfort to it is a crime -- is absurd.

Posted by Brian Bishop at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (17) | TrackBacks (0)

Talk about one size fits all education policy!

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 09:57 AM | Permalink

Or should I say Gladwell v. Leavitt. Gladwell has a pretty good discussion of Leavitt's abortion/crime argument on his blog. If you haven't read Freakonomics you probably don't know what I'm talking about.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 08:56 AM | Permalink

The Christian Science Monitor reports today that homeowners around the nation are increasingly angry about property tax increases. It is true that property taxes in many areas have been rising much more quickly than either the overall inflation rate or increasing values of homes, and not just for the wealthy but for everyone. These windfalls, moreover, are not being collected because the communities desperately need additional swimming pools in the local schools. (You should see the astonishing luxuries in most schools in decent neighborhoods.) No, the local governments are collecting these high taxes simply because they can: people living in highly preferred communities are at the mercy of their local taxing bodies, and the latter are increasingly taking advantage of local residents.

Citizens around the nation are utterly fed up with this legalized extortion and have begun to take action, the Monitor reports:

This year, legislative proposals, citizen initiatives, and lawsuits are on the agenda in at least 20 states. These new efforts reflect both residents' distrust of how their property tax dollars are being spent and concerns that rising assessments are driving working-class people out of popular towns and cities. . . .

"The intensity of outrage has not been this high since Prop. 13's heyday," says Pete Sepp, spokesman for the director of the National Taxpayers Union in Alexandria, Va. . . .

Revolt is in full swing in Incline Village, Nev., on the shores of Lake Tahoe.

There, Maryanne Ingemanson's tax bill is now $80,000 a year for a 5,000-square-foot house. She and a group of residents raised $400,000 to fund a lawsuit claiming recent assessments are unfair. Last week, 17 residents won a battle against the tax assessor when an elected county board threw out the new assessments.

Of course, many believe homeowners should be glad that their homes are worth more, says Ms. Ingemanson. But many people - especially the working class and those on fixed incomes - can't always afford the new taxes and have to leave. "This runaway taxes situation is driving people from their homes," she adds.

South Carolina last week passed a law that caps the increase in property assessments at 3 percent per year.

Many Georgia lawmakers are backing a measure to put a similar cap in the state constitution. The bill's sponsor, first-term state Rep. Edward Lindsey (R) from Atlanta, argues that it's unfair to hit homeowners with a big tax boost years before they sell their home and profit from its increased value.

"Not even the IRS is so bold as to tax people on unrealized gain," says Mr. Lindsey. "These are essentially backdoor tax increases that give government no incentive to be efficient or responsive."

I deliberately retained the mention of Lake Tahoe here, because I think it's important in that it is a relatively hard case with which to sympathize. It's easy to suggest that people living in very expensive homes in beautiful places such as Tahoe should be taxed higher than others, but I think that even the most wretchedly coldhearted socialist must see that charging a person $80,000 a year just so that they can keep their home is an outrageous act of greed and malevolence.

The value of these homes is indeed very great on paper, but the people living in these places are not actually benefitting from any increased value from their homes if they do not sell them (except for their ability to take out home equity loans, which is not a special advantage)—at which point they are no longer subject to paying the property tax! And of course, the burden is even harder on people of lesser incomes, as the Monitor story points out. This property tax revolution is a welcome development indeed, and I wish its purveyors godspeed.

Posted by Sam Karnick at 08:13 PM | Permalink

From a Heartland News Release Yesterday:

"The proposed merger of AT&T and BellSouth is another step in the necessary transition of the U.S. telecommunications industry from voice toward integrated broadband and video services. Consumers will benefit in many ways.

"The cost of last-mile broadband access--the most expensive part of the broadband network--will continue to drop because AT&T will be able to take advantage of greater economies of scale. The same holds true for the cost and quality of content. A combined AT&T-BellSouth will be in a better position to give consumers nationwide what they want: a functional bundle of basic and premium broadband services and applications that work across voice, video, and wireless platforms.

"Still, news of the merger has brought the same predictions from opponents who warn of higher prices and less competition. They appear not to have noticed--or do not wish to acknowledge--that despite more than a decade of carrier consolidation, broadband prices continue to drop and competitive alternatives flourish.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 05:04 PM | Permalink

The Washington Times is devoting a new space in its paper to ideas, calling it the "Ideas Lab". A novel concept. I've only been doing PR for a few months but once I started combing through newspapers actually looking for public policy stories I quickly became frustrated by the "political" nature of most news. I hadn't noticed the dearth of policy reporting until I started looking for it. So, for me at least, its three cheers for the Ideas Lab.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 10:11 AM | Permalink

Catallarchy has a great post on "maximizers" and "satisficers". A "maximizer" is one who is continuously searching for better options, even when he or she is relatively satisfied. A "satisficer" is more apt to stop searching once a reasonably satisfying option is found. Specifically, Patri Friedman asks "is satisficing rational?" I'm not sure this is the right question. It impies that any one particular mindset is more rational than the other. The reality, I think, is that whether the behavior (maximizing or satisficing) is rational depends on the circumstances in which we find ourselves. The key is that any "rational" behavior can be irrational if performed for irrational reasons.

The issue then is whether the motivation is rational maximization or an insatiable standard of satisfaction. The same would hold for the satisficer who risks maximizing utility for some reason other than being truly satisfied. Of course, we are now getting beyond the categories available to economics but the discussion heightens my awareness of just how difficult it is for any one person to determine his or her level of satisfaction about anything, much less a social scientist to determine the optimal level of satisfaction for an entire society (i.e. utilitarianism).

PS> If you're not reading Catallarchy regularly your missing out.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 04:03 PM | Permalink

The upcoming, sort-of-libertarian film, Thank You For Smoking, now has an official trailer. It looks hilarious.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 10:57 AM | Permalink

… are hybrid cars as phony as the hydrogen economy? As pointed out yesterday -- well it was really a week ago, but this blogella (is that how you say novella in blog), begun the day after, has taken me quite a bit of research and thought, the value of which I hope will be open to some speculation here and elsewhere -- Steve Milloy takes the libertarian cudgel to Bush's alternative energy boosterism. Starting with the most glaring policy inconsistency of the new Bush energy push, Milloy observes that Ethanol takes more energy to produce than can be derived from burning it. Can you say "grasping at straw"?

From there, thinking about alternative energy and subsidies gets more complex…

…By various measures, solar power costs three times as much as conventional generation. But that is different than saying that it uses more energy than it produces. In terms of immediate economic efficiency, it is similar to Ethanol as a pie in the sky ‘solution’.

The internal complexity of investment in windpower is almost irreducibly complex, or at least much less well investigated or established than would allow good debate over the actual costs and benefits of wind generation. But the vast array of subsidies for windpower generation has generated somewhat of a consequentialist backlash amongst libertarian energy philosophers. Environmental externalities of windpower are the sudden preoccupation of many skeptics of alternative energy, who nonetheless write off such externalities in traditional generation as defensible given the benefits of the energy produced.

It is fair to argue that there is less benefit to a kwh of windpower, given its non-linear and somewhat unpredictable availability. It is fair to try to deduce a full monetary cost reflecting capital investments in back-up generation capacity (although these factors are not linear either, they depend on whether discretionary demand management can mitigate need for back-up power as well as regional availability of such generating capacity), and less efficient use of transmission infrastructure (again, varies by proximity to existing infrastructure and future location of loads and other generation).

Taking into account these related costs and subsidy costs, windpower probably costs twice as much as conventional generation. If we can't win the policy argument over renewables by simply pointing out the gross extent of the subsidies involved, it means that various externalities are being given more weight in the political process. By resorting to complaints about environmental externalities, we give comfort to this style of precautionary policy setting and the skewed employment of such argument against traditional energy sources.

Indeed there may be merit to factoring externalities into energy decisionmaking, and it is not inconceivable – although I remain unconvinced – that windpower has more environmental liabilities per effective kwh. The difficulty becomes how to push these decisions down the chain closer to the individual consumer, rather than elevating them to the whim of collective decisionmaking, or worse the misanthropic devotions of elite lefists and their technocratic beards.

So I’m not really quibbling with the point that windpower is not a particularly economic or dependable alternative to traditional generation, but I do have to quibble with Steve Milloy's Prius math. I never thought I’d be splitting alogrithmic hairs with this solid reasoning science journalist, but I think the convenience to libertarian argumentation of the edmunds.com press release he quotes: “Most Hybrid Vehicles Not as Cost-Effective as They Seem” doesn’t add up when looking at a market response to these vehicles largely independent of the climate of generous tax subsidies which really fuels windpower.

There is no question that gas savings don’t pay for the premium in cost of a hybrid if compared to other thrifty alternatives. But their somewhat-elegant technology and mileage mean that the comparison to the Toyota Camry (in which the Prius pays itself back in 5 years at only 15,000 miles per year) rather than Corolla is not as inappropriate as it appears on its face. My in-laws traded in a Volvo station wagon for their Prius, not a Corolla. They would not likely ever have considered buying a Corolla, but exceeding the perceptual threshold of 40 mpg, along with the sense of cutting edge technology, lighter ecological footprint were all motivations in their decision to consider the hybrid equivalent. Interest in the technology, faddish or not, is a market driver arguably dwarfing the tax consequences at the moment. Internet sites like cnet, devoted to high tech reviews are uncharacteristically reviewing hybrid automobiles as an obvious paean to their technophilic qualities. The tax deduction was a negligible factor, although this year’s change, perhaps the most ironic of Bush flip-flops could increase the perceptual contribution of the tax credit to the hybrid market (the realities of the credit are that it disappears so quickly for popular hybrids as to be irrelevant but it may have minor threshold effect if the crop of 1st adopters, like my inlaws, thins).

More to the point, a little fossicking about with the edmunds.com researchers who did this study, and recasting or extending their analysis based on the edmunds methodology and then adjusting a few assumptions (for instance from EPA mileage estimates that edmunds used, weighted 2/3 highway driving 1/3 city, yielding 54 mpg for the Prius and 35.33 for the Corolla to real world reporting, quick web search suggests 45 and 32 are more appropriate) demonstrates a 10 year break even against the Corolla, driving 30,000 miles/year. The battery warranty for the Prius is 10 years. Other reliability, maintenance costs are still out to see if this is a reasonable comparison. But this isn’t a radical scenario for well maintained delivery or long distance commutters.

I think we should be clear about the ‘least-worst’ quality of hybrid vehicles as government incentivized conservation devices, at least insofar as the menu Steve Milloy has presented. The numbers simply do not support equating hybrid subsidies to windpower and solar write-offs from the federal purse. Further, these tax credits (formerly deductions) offer choice at the consumer level rather than incentives to institutional decisionmakers who are often better off not making the costs transparent to their customers, while touting perceived benefits. Thus, hybrid credits ought to be recognized as a potentially better policy choice than government mandated CAFÉ standards. By way of full disclosure, I have long been willing to accept stiffer congressionally enacted CAFÉ standards as a pragmatic compromise if it enables enactment of legislation such as Steve proposes allowing the exploitation of domestic resources that have been locked up by environmental scare tactics. Worse than arbitrary numbers set by Congress is the current compromise of having them set by the executive, political cowardice of the worst order on Congress’s part.

I can't give solace to arguments that CAFE standards are inappropriate because heavier vehicles are safer. Using scare tactics to oppose scare tactics isn't exactly the height of intellectual discourse. This 2001 Heritage report makes the case that 46,000 deaths can be attributed to CAFE standards since their adoption in 1973. Allowing a few years for implementation to being to kick in, that amounts to 2000 deathas per year. Liberal economic thinkers correctly upbraided EPA for significant alterations to particulate standards based on 15,000 deaths per year (originally alleged by EPA to be 40,000 deaths per year, errors in their math were exposed by Kay Jones and the figure revised downward to 15,000. Jo