I know, I know. Chances are, if you're reading this you probably understand well the critical role that prices play in the economy and the reasons why no complex economy can survive absent them. But this little nugget in the Journal this morning was too good to pass up. The article was on the Bolivarian (socialist) Alternative to global trade, called ALBA and being promoted by Hugo Chavez. The only problem with the plan is that when trade is driven by politics rather than prices, things get a little screwy:

... Bolivian Indian women in traditional bowler hats met with Cuban trade officials and Venezuelan entreprenuers, who encouraged them to sell sweaters and embroidered shawls in Cuba and Venezuela, although neither conutry is known for cold weather.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 01:06 PM | Permalink

It's been apparent for a while that so-called religious conservatives when pushed, two often will choose religion over conservatism. When faced with a decision between big government in accordance with spiritual beliefs or small government in accordance with no one's beliefs, they cannot reliably be counted on for small government. This creates almost insurmountable divide in what was once a harmonious coalition. But it's getting even worse, evangelical groups are now advocating for a whole host of government programs ... Heather Wilhelm sums it up nicely here. Can a tent divided long endure?

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 12:49 PM | Permalink

Of course, I'm not one prone to rabid flag waving, and I have more than my fair share of ambivalence over the war in Iraq. But I do find it interesting that Google chooses to recognize the Persian New Year but not Memorial Day. That's just not good marketing.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 08:53 AM | Permalink

The three-percent tax in long-distance service, a 107-year old relic of the Spanish-American War, is no more.

The Department of Treasury announced it would no longer collect the tax, meaning phone bills just got a little bit cheaper. One can hope this might have some impact on the rationale for state excise taxes (usually much higher) on service.

Large companies had been suing the IRS—and winning—on whether the tax could be applied to flat rate charges.

More info here.

Posted by Steven Titch at 04:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (23) | TrackBacks (0)

... not Iraq, Caltech -- ground zero in The Environmental Wars next week. Still time to think about joining the free market[intellectual] militia in attendance. This unusual conference presents serious questioners of the media 'consensus' on hot button environmental issues -- along with some of the journalists and opinionmakers who support the status quo.

The conference is unique in not presenting dissenting opinions as fringe, but as serious and welcome skepticism. Of course, that is what you might expect from a Skeptics Society but it is not what you usually get with regards to the environment.

Although I have been touting this skeptical soiree about town, some have recently and rationally questioned whether even this seemingly 'up the status quo' offering is the product of serious skepticism. The host's recent high profile skeptical apostasy in embracing Al Gore's interpretations of glacier melt (buttressed by an eclectic group of more serious thinkers who present hypotheses of other human signatures in the historic ecological record) was a disappointment.

His Flipping Point is rather flippant for anyone who was honestly skeptical of 'consensus' climate science. These ice pictures have been around for several years, as have studies suggesting that landed ice volume was increasing even while these pictoral anecdotes were being ballyhooed as evidence for the second coming of Noah. National Review has a good summation that was conveniently published contemporaneously with Michael Shermer's defection:

and is reproduced on Free Republic (IP warning, l lifted this picture from Free Republic who probably lifted it from National Review, but given the importance of the cause one hopes they'll take one for the gipper).

Not to mention (well I did mention) this first person ditty, admittedly anecdotal, on glaciation from the Times of India. (Well this is no doubt some Indianophile arguing that 2nd or 3rd world people should be able to develop economically too. What kind of backward thinking is that? After all, subsistence has such a light footprint.)

In Shermer's defense, i.e., in my own defense as someone who has promoted participation in this affair, it appears that his idea of activism on global warming does not extend to silencing dissent. Gore, on the other hand, ironically believes in ignoring such inconveniences in his Inconvenient Truth. When responding to a 'hardball' question from Katie Couric on yesterday's Today Show suggesting that some scientists felt he conveniently overstated consensus on the extent, causes and likely effects of warming (she didn't say it quite so pointedly), Gore simply replied: "There is no debate". That's a clever way to win an argument. I am sure you are surprised that this was good enough for Katie Couric who was unprepared herself to cite any specific challenges to Gore science and simply moved on to his presidential ambitions.

Even as Shermer's climate conversion buttresses the opinion of those suspicious of whether he was actually skeptical at all in this realm, for his temerity of presenting the likes of Michael Crichton, John Stossel, Ron Bailey, and Jon Adler- who are - he is being massacred by malthusians, lambasted by lefists (see especially comments to main posting) , while more moderate criticism ensues on the scientific american blog, and he is almost lauded by libertarians in the most remarkably unsensational remarks on the conference posted on the science blog at University of Colorado.

I have to say that Shermer responds admirably to this criticism, especially with this closing remark on the scientific american blog:

why is it always the left who whines so much about these matters? Why haven't I received a single complaint from anyone on the right about including all the noted lefties on our speaker's list? In the end, only the data counts, so come to Caltech the first weekend in June and decide for yourself what the data really says.

On the other hand, if widespread attention to this conference only enhances Shermer's reputation as a serious skeptic, and he then deploys those credentials in service of his switch to activism on global warming, am I doing more harm than good by jumping on the bandwagon? Is the skeptical movement itself such a small codicil of thinkers as to represent an intellectual backwater that opinionmakers may as well bypass? These are fair questions, but I think we dismiss this realm of philosophy at our peril. Rationalists, often assembled in what admittedly verge on anti-superstition cults, have an outsize influence in debates that the public believes belong in the realm of rationalism.

Despite what we consider to be flash points between religious and secular societal institutions, America has one of the most fluid boundaries between spiritual community and the polity. Despite the constant hammering on the difficulty of accommodating literalist evangelical interpretations in society at large, the American nation has the highest percentage of those self identifying as religious, while exhibiting a somewhat a la carte approach to their religious ideology. Americans generally respect the duality of religious and scientific realm and further, have a tendency to define the border between the two for themselves rather than as a consequence of urgings of religious leaders. This generalization may result from my regional observations and doesn't pretend to represent a serious study, but, if offhanded, it certainly is not a unique characterization.

Thus those who look to the church as a social anchor for shared community and values may well look to even, perhaps especially, atheistic sources for scientific answers. Astride this gap sit influential scientists such as catholic Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University, who testified for the plaintiffs fighting to stricken an intelligent design curriculum from public schools in Kitzmiller v. Dover. More to the point than Scopes redux, Miller is a lead author for an influential high school biology text widely employed in the nation's high schools. The book treats global warming as a companion to Darwin in the sense that it presents the matter as settled science. Yet there is a serious distinction between the maturity of our understanding of modeled climate and filling the gaps of theorized evolution. Or to make a more articulate analogy of the two realms, the debate over climate science is nothing like the debate between evolutionists and evangelicals. Rather, it is akin to the debate amongst those trying to tease out the actual mechanisms, drivers and graduality of particular evolutionary steps by coupling interpretation of the fossil record with modern understandings of variation at the genetic level. In other words the controversy over climate science is in the very same arena where there is scientific controversy over evolution.

In contrast to those who argue that our miraculous world is beyond the scientific understanding of mortal man (that would include the Intelligent Design community and earth worshipping environmentalists of the Lovelock sort), the contrarian community in the climate science realm debates on scientific grounds. The predominate disagreement amounts to the choice of null hypothesis. If the assumption is that human processes are unnatural or undesirable, and thus the question is does science prove that human carbon emissions will not have harmful consequences on a macro environmental scale, climate contrarians loose. But if the null hypothesis derives from the general idea that background processes including non-anthropogenic atmospheric cycles, cataclysmic geology and extra-planetary forcings are the overriding climate drivers and the question is instead whether science prove that human carbon emissions will have harmful consequences on a macro environmental scale, climate consensists loose.

Darwin's defenders, whether religious or not, run together with the skeptics crowd. For scientists like Miller, I tend to think the only source for credible alternative thinking on environmental issues is a strong diverse skeptical movement that casts the same skeptical eye in the environmental arena that it does elsewhere. Miller, after all, is not a climate scientist, but is clearly influenced by scientific institutions that have adopted the global warming doxology. He promotes the idea of a scientifically literate and informed lay community and would surely consider himself to have incorporated credible scientific sources for aspects of his texts that stray from his own area of expertise. Thus, regardless of Shermer's surrender without an apparent fight on global warming science, his willingness to maintain an arena for scientific skepticism on climate science is critical and I intend to support it.

Skepticism, whether associated with the movement that takes that title or not, remains an important force in the global warming debate, but that is by no means the only environmental hot button out there. It took 40 years for the culture to realize the the Carson inspired ban of DDT had a downside, Malaria. The CFC ban remains scientifically controversial even if the political question seems like water under the dam. The same issue of Scientific American in which Shermer signs on with the climate consensus reports casually that scientists generally agree causely that the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo has been far and away the largest notable signature in stratospheric ozone depletion during the period of heighten interest and study of this phenomenon (based on sulphur dioxide, not chlorine emissions - although there are indirect effects of the volcanic sulphate aerosols with stratospheric chlorine availability, reported isotopic anamolies in volcanic deposition clearly implicate a significant direct pathway). And issues abound that are today fostering economic dislocations that would are already giving some future regime of btu suppression a run for its money. From the true state of various 'endangered' species, to the environmental effects of oil drilling in Alaska and on the outer continental shelf, to the 'scientifically' motivated defense of every mudpuddle demand a renaissance of skepticism.

I cannot promise that Michael Shermer and the Skeptics Society are its font, but you've got to start somewhere. I'll be reporting from the front and you can decide whether I was duped or not.

Posted by Brian Bishop at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (35) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm been busy preparing to report from the front of the environmental wars (more on this shortly). But no month goes by without a good excuse to bash what used to be the preeminent distillation of science for the popular culture and has become yet one more journal of lefist political opinion.

Scientific American hasn't yet created a digital link to Jeffrey Sachs's new column, Sustainable Developments, and when they do, you might have to pay for it, and I can't in good conscience suggest giving them even 2 cents, so you may have to infer what Sachs wrote in the June 2006 issue from my curmudgeonly (I'm sure you're shocked) reply:

To the editors (whom it obviously doesn't concern),

It is disappointing, if not unexpected, to see Scientific American continue morphing from a journal of science to a journal of political opinion. Jeffrey Sachs uses his new sustainability soapbox to inform us with the kind of pseudo-scientific elan that characterizes political pronouncements of scientists that the "Iraq War, in my view, counts as just such an oil war". In a sense Scientific American may have done Sachs a disservice, as it appears that he is not a scientist, but a policy wonk.

I did not support the invasion of Iraq, but reducing the complex moving target of American goals playing out in Baghdad to sloganeering for sustainability is as unscientific as it comes. Sachs's unqualified supposition offers implicit comfort to even less tethered charges of anti-war activists that the conflict does not simply signal the strategic importance of middle eastern oil to the American economy, but has turned American troops into Pinkertons for Exxon.

Ironically, even if our derivative interests are stability in energy markets, this is no "war for resources" in the classic sense. We are not fighting because Iraq has oil we wish to take as spoils. We are fighting to give Iraqis what we have -- a pluralistic democracy respecting individual rights, the institution of property, and the rule of law. This approach can be criticized as patronizing, pollyannish, and impossible. But despite selective lapses with strategic support of distasteful dictatorships, it has been the consistent counterintuitive approach of the United States to believe that in spreading development and democracy -- which inevitably leads to more, not less, competition for the resources we covet -- our own lot will be improved.

The Sierra Club fought a pitched battle over immigration because many of its adherents worried about others attaining the living standard of the United States. It's too late, we're exporting it. And technology inspired by economics -- the expensive oil the Sierra Club has long wished to bequeath us through taxes has arrived as a consequence of the economic success of such enormous market entrants as China and India -- will continue to improve our circumstances while our ecological footprint is mitigated as a side benefit. But we should stop listening to the likes of Sachs who believe that "ecological time bomb" scare tactics should be the tail wagging the dog.

Chris Mooney has sold a bunch of books decrying the extent to which Republicans have allowed their desire for political outcomes to affect the scientific realm where a clearer duality is appropriate: Leave science to the scientists and leave the political economy to the polity. Mooney is simply wrong that the blurring of these lines is a phenomenon that is predominated by the right.

Brian Bishop

Posted by Brian Bishop at 07:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBacks (0)

While he’s clearly agitated enough to post two responses to one of my recent comments, D.C. Parris, editor-in-chief of LXer.com, fails to answer my central point – that it’s bad policy to mandate open source procurement. As I write in The Dangers of Dictating Procurement, Massachusetts has done exactly that. A directive from Peter J. Quinn, the state’s since-departed chief information officer, mandates use of the Open Document Format (ODF), an alternative, open source software format to Microsoft Office, format for electronic document creation and storage.

Despite calling most of my observations incorrect (I will cede that I overreached when I said open source was in the public domain, and I’ve corrected it), in his post of May 20, he concedes my conclusion is correct:

"The key procurement choice is whether the state’s IT organization will commit to a long-term product path with companies like Microsoft, or a long-term consulting path with companies like IBM. Both paths carry inherent costs, which may differ from department to department."

The problem is that this is not how the choice is being presented to the people of Massachusetts. The debate is being oversimplified as: Microsoft: Expensive; Open Source: Free.

And it’s an oversimplification that open source advocates, in their zeal, are guilty of propagating. When it comes to addressing the costs of managing open source software across IT platforms, even Parris tries to sidestep the subject by writing, “The whole ‘FOSS is not free’ argument is so old and hashed over, it’s not really funny.” That’s the easiest way to answer a contention you can’t deny.

Parris follows this up with the more risible “anyone with the most basic understanding the Free Software Movement (his caps) would know that it has never been about money.” That may be true for some open source programmers, but it’s not the impression I get when I read the IBM or Sun annual reports. These companies expect big-time revenues from the open source implementations like Massachusetts wants to attempt.

Now in his second post, May 22, Parris takes me to task for “re-framing” the open source debate to make it about competition between IBM and Microsoft, as if I were indulging in rhetorical gamesmanship. I don’t think you can divorce the Massachusetts directive from its commercial consequences. The policy, and any others like it that follow, will be a boon to IBM, Sun and any company that’s made IT consulting services a cornerstone of its business strategy.

A software procurement decision is matter of a dollars and cents. Zealots like Parris may carry perceptions of the moral superiority of open source over proprietary (“it’s never been about money” is the dead giveaway here), but when a state assigns the power of dogma to what is, bottom line, a vendor’s business strategy, it does an immense disservice to its citizens.

Finally Parris evades completely the big elephant in the room – that the adoption rate of OpenOffice and ODF is dismal. Hence, the policy’s blushing hedge to allow use of the popular (and MS-supported) Portable Document Format (PDF) as a substitute. That will let the 99.9 percent of users without OpenOffice download documents from the state’s web sites.

You can make a better case for forcing the use of Firefox, the open source alternative to Microsoft Explorer. But then again, when the market provides an alternative that truly offers measurable value, like Firefox does, you don’t need a law or directive to force its adoption. Users gravitate toward it.

Parris instead spends a great deal of space speculating about my affinity for Orson Welles (for the record, I never tire of watching Citizen Kane) and criticizing Microsoft's marketing and technology strategies – opinions he’s certainly entitled to. Lots of bluster, to be sure, but over the course of two blogs and some 1500 words, Parris gives no reason why Massachusetts taxpayers should feel good about the state's IT procurement policy.

However you may feel about Microsoft, the Massachusetts directive comes across as an attempt by a group of companies to use state government power to spur distribution of a little-used standard in which they have a commercial interest in promoting. If ODF has value, let it compete without a handicap.

Nowhere does Parris say how much Massachusetts is going to save, or gain in economic value, from an open source—which is my big question. “It’s not about money” is not an acceptable answer. Taxpayers and conscientious representatives have a right to know the cost. From all signs I think this directive will cost at least as much, and probably more, than a policy that allows state IT administrators to consider all alternatives, including the use of Microsoft software.

Posted by Steven Titch at 08:42 AM | Permalink

Max Borders does a great job explaining why happiness research is a bad idea (Sorry Will). To summerize ... it's like that song from Your a Good Man Charlie Brown:

HAPPINESS IS FINDING A PENCIL.
PIZZA WITH SAUSAGE
TELLING THE TIME.
HAPPINESS IS LEARNING TO WHISTLE.
TYING YOUR SHOE FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME.

Happiness simply has too many definitions--one for every happy person--to be studied objectively. A professor of mine (Lear) talked a lot about what he called enigmatic signifyers (smarty-speak for enigmas), the idea being that there are some concepts that escape all definition. But being enigmatic doesn't diminish the power and importance of the enigmatic concept. To the contrary, it's precisely that these concepts motivate us despite our inability to truly define them that makes them so interesting. If happiness had some rigid definition that could be quantified it would lose all meaning in our lives. It would cease to be that thing for which we constantly search, inward and outward, and become something we simply count. But this neuters the very concept ... it's the searching, the struggle to understand and define our own experience of life that gives a concept like happiness its value. To objectify it would be to kill it.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 06:28 AM | Permalink

... is that there is no transcendent value. Don Boudreaux trots out the Hayek (and now the Buchanan) that conservatives love to hate. Hayek's defense o liberalism was decidedly anti-foundationalist (to use postmodern terminology.) Buchanan, who I had always assumed was in league with conservatives, apparently concurs, which means I need to read more Buchanan. Boudreaux adds:

"There's no individualism, no liberalism, if each of our values is smothered and squelched by some set of pretend transcendent values forced on us by our 'betters.'" Of course, this anti-foundationalism usually gets attacked as watered down relativism, and indeed one Cafe Hayek commenter has done so. But in fact, it is not relativism at all. It's what we might call a complex objectivism, in which the truth itself is dispersed throughout the social order and each of us has access only to pieces of it. Liberal democracy, through markets and votes, allows various spontaneous combinations of that knowledge to form and be put to use so long as it doesn't prevent some other combination of dispersed knowledge from also being formed.

This vision of social order is the primary distinction between a "liberal" (in the Classical sense) and a "conservative." For the conservative there is presumption that tradition itself is the trancedent value. While Hayek did indeed have respect for tradition, it is not a justification for prohibiting the free exchange of ideas, behaviors, and money. He simply thought that we also shouldn't prevent people from behaving traditionally simply because we see thing we're smart enough to know how useless it is.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 03:17 PM | Permalink

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

On May 18th, Rebeca Nieves Huffman’s speech, "And how are the children", addressed the education crisis and it how specifically affects Hispanic children. Noted by Hispanic Magazine as a "Top Latina Leader in Education," Huffman is the President and CEO of the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options (Hispanic CREO). At Hispanic CREO, Huffman leads national efforts to improve the educational outcomes for Hispanic children by empowering families through parental choice in education.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 02:34 PM | Permalink

For once, I don't have the answer, I have the question. And I don't think it has been answered, or perhaps even considered by the multitude of voices speaking on immigration.

Among them, Ben Zycher at the normally civil classic liberal blog: The Reform Club couldn't resist the alliterative temptation to call Michelle Malkin a moron. Unfortunately he doesn't link the particular post that animates his animosity, but his depiction of the rhetoric and its contemporary time frame seems to implicate either this or this.

It is too cheap a shot to attack Malkin based on her obvious ethnic origins -- or, more clearly put, her obviously non-caucasian features. This kind of hyperbole of hypocrisy is of the same sort that suggests beneficiaries of affirmative action cannot use the college and professional careers they obtain to argue against the legitimacy of affirmative action.

There is an obvious dollop of sensationalism that brings Malkin to post evidence of crimes by aliens as some kind of anecdotal argument regarding immigration polices. But sensationalism sells - maybe not as much as sex but close. Malkin's blog is amongst the most visited conservative -- and very occasionally libertarian -- spots on the web.

The stodgy, intellectual and thoughtful approach over at the Reform Club, to which Zycher's ad hominem seems the exception, draws a respectable 'crowd' but we're talking 4 orders of magnitude less than Malkin. Of course full disclosure reveals our upstart respectable blog, fromtheheartland.org, struggling to emulate the success of The Reform Club.

Ironically, once digesting Zycher's argument, which essentially restates Milton Friedman's regarding open borders and a welfare state, I'm left wondering, what is the difference between Zycher's position and Malkin's.

Given that no immigration proposals have even considered eliminating government incentives for migration and allowing the market to function my assumption is that Zycher would be equally upset with the Senate.

I have been trying for some time to reconcile my general belief that labor should be as unrestricted in its movement as capital with the idea that borders exist to define the limits of a political constitution, and the rule of law could not exist without them. Yet our existing laws regulate immigration. There are lots of other things I think shouldn't be regulated either, and openly flouting laws is one way to change them, but it is difficult to maintain one's standing as a believer in the rule of law while practicing even non-violent civil disobediance. This is a fundamental tension for libertarians to resolve.

Posted by Brian Bishop at 08:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

That's the question libertarians have been asking themselves since at least last August, but probably longer. The rise of populism and special interest politics in The Republican Party, has made what was once an easy compromise (voting Republican) far more unnerving. Ryan Sager has a pretty tight analysis of the problem over at Real Clear Politics. The only quibble I would really have is the assumption that libertarians were once wholly in the Republican camp. I'm not sure this has ever been the case, though I haven't researched the quesiton.

But to answer the question before us: What can be done?

The libertarian party is clearly not the avenue to political influence but what is? My gut instinct is that libertarians need their own "MoveOn" that will run high-profile commercials attacking politicians and government programs that infringe individual liberty. Such a group could ally itself with Republicans or Democrats depending on the issue. The main advantage to this type organization is that (1) It would go directly to the people and (2) assuming the "loophole" hasn't been closed, 527 status allows for large donations from individual donors (of course, we would need a libertarian Soros.)

A second option would be to retreat from the political realm altogether and focus our energies instead on cultural and intellectual institutions, like media (where the libertarian perspective does quite well because it doesn't carry water for either side) and academia.

In the long run the second option is probably wisest, but in the short run there might be some mileage in a 527.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 12:43 PM | Permalink

It's funny, as anecdotes of diminishing privacy in the electronic age continue to flow from that 'unlikely' source of government - and the Bush administration in particular, the less reasonable and precedented our expectation of privacy implicated in a certain 'breech', the more cogitated I become.

The latest foible (I hesitate to say the latest, as a putative later foible is reported here on The Volokh Conspiracy) is, ironically enough, not constitutionally invasive. So called envelope information, e.g., who you send a letter to, or who you call on the phone, is not protected by the 4th amendment, only the contents of the communication is protected constitutionally. A serious discussion of the distinctions between envelope and content information attends Orin Kerr's tour de force: Internet Surveillance Law After the USA Patriot Act: The Big Brother That Isn't.

Nontheless, libertarian shops have an expected propensity for rejecting the legitimacy of these phone record collections, but an ironic apparent affection for stautory law that appears to make phone companies the villains here (see good compilation at Reason.com).

What is distinctly lacking in prevailing libertarian analyses is a distaste for statutory liability being visited on private parties whose relationships with their customers ought to be governed by freedom of contract and not opportunistic legal activism -- even if fueled by libertarian principle.

Kerr carries on dispassionate running commentary (accompanied by less dispassionate responses from readers) at the Volokh Conspiracy on statutory liability that may attend phone company actions in their latest dance with the NSA:

1. Thoughts on the Legality of the Latest NSA Program
2. More Thoughts on the Legality of the NSA Call Records Program:
3. Civil Liability and the NSA Call Records Program
4. Falkenrath on the NSA Call Records Program
(my numbering reverses his, so these posts read in chronological order)

It doesn't sound like I am very agitated about the government phone number collection scheme, but that would be wrong. My problem is the amount of government resources being dumped down sinkholes like this. There is probably little coincidence that TSA and NSA share two thirds of their acronymic DNA. This program reminds me a lot of searching passengers randomly and seizing their nail clippers while refusing to arm pilots.

Rather than capitializing solely on the rhetorical convenience of that example, I condede that you could make arguments against arming pilots, but believe that on balance these arguments did not carry the weight to virtually neuter the program to do so. Rather, it seems, the idea was never taken seriously by those who are here from the government to help us. Likewise, it is not inconceivable that some kind of pattern recognition software could find some needle in this haystack of phone calling information, although Hammer of Truth's Stephen Van Dyke makes a good case that mostly what they are doing is bringing in more hay.

Bottom line is, we don't have a privacy right in who we call, anymore than gay guys have a right to be a scoutmaster. But that doesn't mean focusing on purging their ranks of gays is necessarily an effective way for the boy scout movement to regain a relevant voice in youth culture. When I was a boy scout, most of my peers considered it proof I was gay.

The day to day revelations of relatively simple things that government and citizens can do to somewhat frustrate terrorist ambitions, along with dispassionate understanding of the level of risk truly posed, make this absurd threshing about for some silver bullet look like so much rainbow chasing. Not to mention that critics are probably right that this information will eventually be used in areas of law enforcement unrelated to terrorism. None of this makes me cynical about my government -- I already was.

Posted by Brian Bishop at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The LATimes is endorsing Proposition 81, a $600 million bond issue to fund 60 library projects across the state. Now forget for a minute that I'm not an expert. How many of you actually use the library the way you used to? Not that we should rid ourselves of public libraries per se, but we should certainly question their usefulness before expanding library systems. In my experience, only useful service the library provides these days is free internet for patrons. The growing availability of used books and the growing popularity of library exchange systems have steadily decreased the demand for large book holdings.

While I can't make a proper judgment on Prop. 81, I will say that bonding should be reserved for VITAL infrastructure, rather than DESIRED infrastructure. And I suspect there is a bit of a boondoggle in the works. Californians reading these pages should fee free to correct me.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Researchers at Flinders University in Australia are coming to a not surprising conclusion that children who grow up with bigger back yards (as is typical of the suburbs) are more healthy. However, as reasonable a conclusion as this seems, it stands opposed to a well funded campaign by university researchers in the United States and Canada to prove virtually the opposite.

The North American research appears to be designed on the same assumption that is its conclusion --- that the suburbs make us fat. However, that research has excluded important variables, such as eating (there is a connection between eating and weight). What the US and Canadian research lacks in rigor, however, it makes up in publicity. Somewhat unlike the rule for serious academic, the researchers (or perhaps it would be better to call them advocates) have held congressional briefings, given national news media exclusive interviews months before publication, etc.

In contrast, the Australian research is just that --- research --- without the publicity, but with a complete analysis.

Link

Posted by Wendell Cox at 07:56 AM | Permalink

The "gaggle" as they call it. Milbank's acconut is pretty interesting. Snow seems like the kind of guy you want out front if you're the White House.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 08:55 AM | Permalink

Alaska Pipeline ... the board game? I'm thinking of board game called Demagogue. Imagine a game like Taboo where a player draws a card with a policy issue he/she has to get their teammate to guess using only populistic cliches. I think that would sell!

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 09:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

[The Heartland Institute released the following statement on May 11, 2006. It may be quoted or reprinted in full, with proper attribution. The statement is also available here. - Editor]

"Network neutrality," a misguided policy that would require phone and cable companies to make no distinctions in the way they transmit all Internet traffic, is being cloaked in the robe of Internet freedom. Truth is, the network neutrality campaign is little more than an attempt by the nation's largest bandwidth users to avoid paying the cost of the network disruption they cause.

Network neutrality won't give us a freer Internet. Americans enjoy an unfettered Internet experience today, and robust competition among service providers ensures that will continue. Net neutrality would, however, make basic Internet access more expensive for average users, because it would stick them with costs they shouldn't have to bear.

A net neutrality law would prevent service providers from seeking compensation from third-party companies whose applications place a massive management strain on the network because of the huge amount of bandwidth they consume. That's why it's no surprise that companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Amazon, which aim to profit from gobbling as much Internet bandwidth as possible for free, are the loudest advocates of network neutrality. Rather than pay the cost of relieving the bandwidth crunch they themselves are creating, they want Congress to pass the cost onto consumers. This is what network neutrality really is ... and it's no way to help spread broadband across the United States.

Network neutrality would trip up any attempts to maximize the utility and benefits of the Internet, because it would bar effective management of the Internet's underlying resource: bandwidth.

Network neutrality is wrong-headed policy and should be opposed by anyone who hopes to see the U.S. continue its leadership in the digital economy.

Posted by Steven Titch at 08:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

With the obvious intention of currying favor with carriers for free transmission of fromtheheartland.org faster than the speed of life; and - less toungue and cheek- at the risk of subjecting this blog to its first DOS (denial of sanity) attack from commentors and trackbacks: I feel compelled to point to the self-interested chatter that is supposed to qualify as argumentation on behalf of net neutrality.

I'm a big fan of alliteration, but somehow this one had escaped me until I fell across a rather cryptic reference by Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit.com. He seems to be buying into casting this as a battle between titanic telephone and bantamweight bloggers. When you're a lumberjack, everything looks like a tree, so it is unsurprising to see that the author of An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths would cast this as yet one more battle cry for the little literati to take up the sling.

It is not that internet architecture and the commercial interests of the relatively narrow band of broadband providers aren't worthy of discussion, but this appears to be an intellectual fait accompli, not a serious discourse. The vast silence in the grassroots blogosphere in the face of such a sweeping regulatory effort made me wonder: where has skepticism of government solutions gone? Apparently if forced to choose between Big Media and Big Government, Glenn Reynolds has thrown in his lot with the latter, or actually with both. The blogoshere ain't leading this charge, they're following the likes of Google's Guru Vint Cerf. The coalition for net neutrality operates under that typically 'understated' rubric of "Save The Internet".

As Congress and the FCC debate the imaginary phenomenon of broadband duopoly as the chief threat to internet innovation, I can't help but be reminded of the incredibly misguided efforts of the government and the grassroots attacking Microsoft's browser bundling. As it turns out, browsers are essentially secondary to the web experience and the whole argument was an enormous waste of resources while Google and other search and portal providers were busy stealing center stage. I'm hoping that, between ad hominem invectives that seem often to be the reward for anyone questioning the wisdom of net neutrality, some commentors might indicate how the internet is anymore in need of saving from Verizon and Comcast than it was from Microsoft (see, e.g. hopelessly neo-liberal and obviously[still] paid flak Mike McCurry, former Clinton administration spokesman, taking a bath at HuffingtonPost for asking essentially the same thing: "Any one want to have a rational conversation about that or do you want to rant and rave and provide a lot of May Day rhetoric that is not based in any fact?")

In a post slightly more explanatory of his own outlook Reynolds suggests: "Net neutrality has gotten us this far, and I don't see any reason to get rid of it. " Talk about false idols, Reynolds is arguing exactly contrary to the real history here. The Net has been the wild, wild west. There haven't been any rules and that is what has gotten us this far. Now he wants rules?

In a similar misdirection of title, the Baltimore Sun published this oped that caught Matt Drudge's attention: Proposed rule changes would tangle the Web. What journalism professor Michael Socolow really decries is a lack of rules.

What is so bad about a lack of rules? Or, more to the immediate point, let us recall what is bad about rules. After all, while we're talking about the FCC and 'neutrality' regulations, why don't we have them guarantee equal bandwidth to ideologies. Instead of having commercial providers experiment with offering portions of bandwidth at different costs to receivers and senders of information, why not insist that they filter content and allow only equal volumes of left-leaning and right-leaning transmissions. How quickly we forget.

I think the onetime cowboys of the wild, wild web have been seduced by the notion that e-galitarianism is the root of their success. The web has never been that way. Back when I used to pay AOL for 5 hours a month, you can damn well be sure I shut off the images in my browser. So I had a 'lesser' experience than some rich guy. So what. And now I'm supposed to be worried because yahoo might pay to have their search run a little faster than google, or the 'use all the bandwidth you want' ideas like VoIP might be limited - either because they impinge on other users or because they compete with broadband providers' other services.

I can call virtually anywhere in the first world (or almost any signifincant destination of first world toursts) for between 10 and 15 cents a minute with my traditional wire provider. Sure it would be nice if it were a nickel or a flat rate, but as various ways of accomplishing yet more savings in this arena compete, I don't see any justification for regulation. It was deregulation that got the number down to 10 cents in the first place, why would I suddenly trust regulation to trim it further?

Early adopters of VoIP may be getting a good deal, but that doesn't mean that they are entitled to it as some kind of constitutional principle of the internet. To date, with no rules prevailing, and millions of customers and billions of daily transmissions there are a handful of anecdotes of blocking of VoIP and of vindictive censorship (one of few large scale examples being Google's willingness to censor the internet in order to operate in China - that would be the same Google championing net neutrality here).

It is not irrational for these examples to be bantied about in discussion of whether they augur some anti-innovative trend, and they should play into competing notions of property rights and utility regulation, etc. But you can't closely hold customers even when you are an apparent monoply, the river goes around such rocks. The whole point is that we declare monoplies, or duopoloies or ostensibly anti-competitive circumstances based on how big we draw the circle. Those who don't find themselves well served by traditional landlines, instead of complaining about the limitation of choices from landline carriers, can often choose to forego them altogether in favor of cellphones. Those who don't like what the cable TV pipes to their house (or the cost) can get satellite TV through several providers and technologies; or, god forbid, put an old-fashioned antenna back on their house; or, even worse, read a book.

My case couldn't have been summed up better than by Tim Wu writing for Slate, one of the would be sheriffs of the wild, wild web:

"AT&T can extract cash in other ways, too, like charging its customers higher prices. I believe that it's better to have consumers pay more for service than to have AT&T picking and choosing winners on the network."

In other words, lets adopt for the internet everything that is wrong with the health care system, i.e., that price signals for the various components of health care don't get through to the consumer, and that any efforts to allow the consumer to choose various levels of coverage tend to make providers offering them targets for charges of discrimination and calls for regulation to fix the 'problem'. So we get the Wu effect down at the OK Corral of health care, we keep charging everybody whose wallet we can possibly get our hands on more money -- declaring it necessary to preserve health care neutrality.

Tim, if it is all the same to you, I'll take my chances that my wallet will come out better going up against Verizon than going up against the government any day of the week. If this makes my insanepundit so be it.

Posted by Brian Bishop at 07:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

April 2006 saw the 2nd-highest tax revenue collection in history, up 13.4% since April of 2005. Let's keep tabs on how many media outlets cover the story, specifically The New York Times.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 02:43 PM | Permalink

Well, Hayek's birthday has come and gone with very little acknowledgement. Of course it is his 107th, not the kind you celebrate. Nevertheless, Mises Blog is recognizing the moment with a series of classic Hayek quotes. My favorite:

"Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom."

But as is often the case with great thinkers, there are tensions in Hayek on display even in this list of quotes. For example, does the following quote really match up with the previous one?

"...if the result of individual liberty did not demonstrate that some manners of living are more successful than others, much of the case for it would vanish."

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Long time Heartland volunteer and friend, James Koller, sent a little advice for anyone out there looking for medicare options:

Finding co-pay medical insurance that you can afford these days is a problem, especially if you have a serious medical condition caused by an illness or accident. So while trying to figure out what to do, I think, I have found something new and different; and hopefully a few words about the dilemma I faced will prove interesting and maybe even helpful to some of you as well.

Because most don’t have the time to muck around with minor asides, when thinking about making changes to how medical services are to be delivered - to American’s. The big questions this subject raises and the fear it generates has caused a different look at , one small par t of the healthcare picture in America , currently .

I know from personal experience, having called other private fee-for-service medical co-pay insurance companies, they were only comfortable with counties that contained affluent small town America, and those who call home out in the sticks. Looking at the service area for Sterling Option I - area 1 there was no mention of , the state of New York , or of California. I assume this is so because Combined Insurance Company is head quartered in the city of Chicago. With the strategy being they are taking on risk only in insurance markets they know well. Area 2 has a different monthly premium, and the cost sharing amount may also be different.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 07:16 AM | Permalink

Within a week of each other, agencies in two states ruled that Internet Protocol (IP) video service, as designed, is not a cable TV service and therefore not subject to state regulations regarding the payment of video franchise fees.

The decisions are as courageous as they are logical and come at a time when both state and federal legislators are revisiting the local video franchise process. In Oklahoma, Attorney General Drew Edmondson issued an official opinion stating that a telephone company with existing statewide authority to place its phone lines in the public rights-of-way doesn't need to obtain separate municipal franchises if it plans to provide additional services -- including video -- over its phone lines.

“A ‘telephone line’ does not cease to be a telephone line because it is used for transmitting video service in addition to voice service,” Edmondson wrote in his opinion. “Although we can find no Oklahoma cases on this point, cases in other jurisdictions that grant telephone companies statewide access to rights-of-way have decided this issue.”

In another development, the Connecticut Department of Utility Control tentatively ruled that telephone companies that use IP video platforms are not subject to franchise fees.

Internet-protocol television is "merely another form of data stream," the DPUC ruled according to Multichannel News.

Oklahoma and Connecticut are the first states to draw a distinction between video services based on the delivery platform they use. Cable TV systems, as well as Verizon’s new FiOS fiber optic video service, receive satellite signals at a local downlink point—a headed—and retransmit them to homes via their own facilities. Of the hundreds of channels piped down the cable and the viewer selects them with a set-top box, which mimics the old TV channel knob (as in “Don’t touch that dial!”) some may remember from their youth.

AT&T has always maintained that its U-Zone Internet Protocol (IP) video service is not cable TV in the classic sense. Indeed, the case can be made that the U-Zone set-top box works much more like a browser than a tuner. With U-Zone, the viewer downloads video the same way he or she might do so from a web site, although AT&T’s content is streamed and optimized for viewing on a large-screen TV. Bottom line – it’s not passively delivered like cable. The user must tell his set-top box to go out to the Internet and retrieve it. AT&T is a service provider in Oklahoma and Connecticut, although in Oklahoma, at least one small phone company, Pioneer Telephone Cooperative, has been delivering video over DSL lines for at least a year.

The decisions set an important precedent (and we hope the DPUC stands its ground when it makes a final decision June 7). It will mean that in the future, local communities cannot collect fees on revenues from video delivered via browsers. Nor can they impose new fees on facilities-based carriers just because video progarmming is part of the data that crosses their networks. That exempts all one-off movie downloads and subscription-based video services. This is not something that’s too far off. Check out CBS’s new Web-based Innertube. This is how video will be offered in the future. One can easily imagine AT&T setting up its own content aggregation business to compete with iTunes or Netflix. Nothing can stop Verizon or the cable players doing so either.

The message from Oklahoma and Connecticut is clear. Municipalities can not expect the flow of cash from video franchise fees to last forever. Once the old cable model of downlink and transfer gives way to more centralize programming distribution, and billings for video programming are financially disconnected from billings for broadband connection, franchise fees are through.

Posted by Steven Titch at 01:41 PM | Permalink

Temptation is a central concept in Christian faith, and church elders are providing their own contemporary parable in that regard this week as Cardinal Arinze apparently asks Christians to employ anti-discrimination laws in jursidictions where they reside to censor the Da Vinci Code. Please Cardinal Arinze, lead us not into....

Commentors to Ilya Somin's post on the Volokh Conspiracy have made intellectually supportable arguments that Arinze's remarks are vague and don't constitute the blatant demands for censorship that accompanied the non-violent portion of the Muslim clerical response to the Danish cartoons. But no post I have read opines that the very line of reasoning introduced by Arinze, a right for religious beliefs to be "respected", augers well for Catholicism (or western civilization for that matter). For crying out loud, why not just assert a right for religious beliefs to be believed by everyone.

A point made in an earlier post by the eponymous creator of that conspiracy is that various European laws prohibiting holocaust denial offered intellectual comfort to non-violent muslims demanding that the 'offensive' cartoons be surpressed. I think this "censorship envy" phemnomenon is probably real, and a powerful statement regarding the place [or more properly the lack of any place] for the government to ban offensive speech in the first place.

You can make all the fair distinctions that you like, e.g. that the holocaust is history, not an article of faith, whereas the merits of displaying likenesses of Muhammed is doctrine - often observed in the breech. But none of these arguments speak to why government should be involved at all. The American view of free speech remains among the strongest in this regard and no one has seriously suggested banning holocaust denial in the U.S. despite the prevalence of Lipstadt's "immoral equivalencies", i.e. loose lipped, poorly drawn, sensationally convenient, holocaust analogy.

Ironically, one of the most famous recent incidents was Ward Churchill's description of workers in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmann's". Eichmann was a Nazi party member who joined the SS and was transferred to the Gestapo. He was not a civilian who quietly accepted his country’s transgressions while engaging in business as usual. He was the person who planned for the transportation of Jews to the death camps. Thus Churchill is guilty of gross sophistry to suggest that since "Eichmann was not charged with direct killing but with ensuring the smooth running of the infrastructure" he was the moral equivalent of ‘technocrats’ at the World Trade Center whose participation in the American economy supports through indirection any of America’s international prerogatives with which Churchill is dissatisfied – and there are of course many. It may come as a great shock to fans of the academy, but Churchill was guilty of gross hypocrisy as well, having recently completed a 'paper' on the intellectual dishonesty of minimizing holocausts through such immoral equivalencies. (a succinct and useful recap of the drama surrounding Churchill's "Justice of Roosting Chicken'"s essay including his own statements in its defense quoted above is available here)

A shepard watches over their own flock. The interest of the Church may well be that Catholics awash in [un]popular depictions of the faith may be alienated from the church or its teachings. But the church doesn't have a right to its adherents, only a pulpit from which to ask the flock for renewed faith.

A boycott. I have no problem with that although it might be counter-productive and Acton Institute's Father Robert Sirico, in an interview with Fox's Neil Cavuto seems to be acknowledging just that by planning to see the movie -- even while pointing out that it is part of a popular culture trend to marginalize traditional catholicism. Indeed, simply in the subcategory of the 'allegations' of the Da Vinci Code, a range of fictional and non-fictional treatments of the underlying story are dominating book lists as well as movie theatre. While Father Sirico thinks it potentially offensive to Catholics, he seems to be able to separate fact from fiction and clearly believes that believers can do the same.

Arinze would do well to spend some time on the Acton website where respect for liberty attends rather than flees the spiritual climes.

Posted by Brian Bishop at 07:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

No this isn't the cover of Variety Magazine, it's the cover of The New Individualist, the publication of one of two competing flagships of objectivism. One would have hoped that reports in Variety that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are philosophically attracted to the long awaited hollywood project to bring the objectivist epic to the silver screen might have led to some skepticism from those advancing Ayn Rand's philosophy. Rather, silence from the Ayn Rand Institute and nothing short of pop culture gushing at The Objectvist Center must have Ayn Rand turning over in her grave.

When not recreating her breakthough role by raiding Ayn Rand's Tomb, Jolie revels in her new role as 'tax raider', using her media platform in Namibia to make herself into the anti-Ayn Rand, pushing an impossible altruism - i.e. the extension the concept of no child left behind to the entire world.

Ayn Rand was by no means in retreat from popular culture, but she entered it in combative defense of her philosophy. The best that can be said for Pitt and Jolie is they are a la carte objectivsts, which is to say they aren't objectivists. They certainly look the parts, and it may not be necessary to be an objectivist to understand and reproduce the roles in Rand's work. But it defies the imagination that those who are objectivists are sitting quietly on the sidelines while these globetrotting altruists are touted as the objectivist Camelot.

It is too early yet to read this current edition of The New Individualist on line, so we'll have to bide our time to see how critical TOC authors are of this trend of pop interest in Rand that does not reflect serious commitment to grapple with objectivist philosophy. But TOC has it's own Wesley Mouch style problems to defend, having moved to Washington DC.

Meanwhile around the blogosphere, criticism seems oddly muted as well.

Mises Blog

Volokh Conpiracy (a hint of skepticism)

Daily Pundit (healthier cynicism)

Bidinotto (seeing stars)

Posted by Brian Bishop at 06:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (43)

This is a must read essay. David Frum argues, very convincingly, that in fact the "limited government" movement, which I will call the libertarian movement (not to be confused with the Libertarian Party), is dead--at least in terms of political participation in the Republican Party. In fact, Frum points out that the slow, tortuous passing really began in 1998 when congressional Republicans decisively lost the budget battles (in the political sense) and turned their attention toward compromise and scandal.

Frum writes:

And this change of course was ratified by the whole party in the nomination contest of 1999-2000, when George W. Bush swept to a crushing triumph by campaigning as a “compassionate conservative” opposed to budget-cutting and committed to maintaining Medicare and Medicaid in more or less their existing form. In September 1999, he condemned congressional Republican attempts to curb the Earned Income Tax Credit as “balancing their budget on the backs of the poor.” In the following general election, Bush committed himself to adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.

At the time, these maneuvers looked to many Republicans like wise and necessary adjustments to political reality. And since Bush had also committed himself to broad tax cuts, free trade, and Social Security reform, many gambled that the his self-described “different kind” of conservatism would nonetheless balance out as a favorable sequel to Goldwater-Reagan-Gingrich limited government conservatism.

This assessment has obviously proven wrong.

But is this the correct interpretation of events. Have we lost a decisive battle and are we now forced to adjust to political realities and accept 'our place' in the political lanscape? Or might we interpret this as a failure of one particular strategy in a multi-pronged approached to reshaping the American government. Have we learned that the era of less govenment is over? Or have we learned that change won't come from elections?

To answer these questions we first have to fess up to one reality ... Ronald Reagan's election was a fluke. It did not reflect a widespread libertarian disposition in the American public. It will never happen again, ever.

The nature of politics in our postmodern, overly-calculative society is that politicians follow, rather than lead. If you create a constituency there will be a politician willing to pander to it. The fundamental challenge is not winning political battles per se, but creating (or identifying) libertarian constituencies. Creating issues, in other words.

Add to this postmodern political reality the rapid decentralization of media and mass communications, and you have a political lanscape that is very new and very foreign. We used to decry single-issue voters as narrow-minded and shallow. But more and more, change seems to come an issue at time, rather than with broad sweeping party platforms.

Perhaps single issue voters are the future? Indeed, some liberals will argue there were only two issues in the 2004 election: terrorism and gay marriage. Look at the Dubai Ports deal and Immigration. Not so long ago, there was Kelo, a public opinion battle won decisively by libertarians.

Is clear cut winning issue like Kelo, worth an entire eight years of Bush?

Perhaps we should look upon the collapsing limited government movement inside Washington as evidence that libertarians should've never been in Washington in the first place. How, one might ask, did we ever think that would work? Perhaps now, all those resources that went into getting limited gov't conservatives and libertarians elected, will slowly shift back over into efforts to get our message out and influence the public debate.

There is hope for the future, but it's on college campuses, and in newspapers, and in podcasts, and blogs, and think tanks, and grass roots activism ... and things we haven't even heard of yet. To the extent that there is any hope in Washington, it will only be once we create the voters for our "leadership" to follow.

Posted by Michael Van Winkle at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (26) | TrackBacks (0)

Politicians have long bragged about how much federal money they were bringing back home, and it worked because citizens of one's district or state knew that tax money sent to D.C. that did not come back in the form of direct services or greater national security would simply be spent on projects in states with representatives who were better at getting their way. That brought about a natural process known as pork-barreling, in which every successful representative tried to get the most federal money possible spent in his state, which led to an incredible amount of taxpayer money being spent on boondoggles such as roads to literally nowhere and federally financed hot dog museums. Politicians would brag about how much bacon they were bringing home, regardless of how unconstitutional and worthless the projects actually were.

Now that the Republicans have been in power for a few years and have become openly addicted to pork-barreling, it's no longer fashionable.

Well, good! As the New York Times reports, challengers in some congressional and Senate races are actually talking about their opponents' success at bringing home this federal money—and using the incumbents' spending as a weapon, "portraying them as symbols of corruption and waste in Washington," as the Times puts it. The national controversy over these "earmarks"—which finally occurred when the hated (by the media) Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress—has begun to turn the public against this wasteful spending—in principle (see below). Aspiring politicians are quick to take advantage, as the Times story notes:

And so, in a reversal of tactics, challengers here and in other states like Montana, Ohio and Rhode Island are telling voters what the incumbents have brought home, in the hopes, it seems, that the national controversy over the pet projects known as earmarks has come home, too.

"In a time of war, and with the costs of Katrina, we've got to look at what we want to have and what we've got to have," said Mr. Ricketts, who has never run for office but was ahead of the two other Republican candidates in a recent poll. "We've got to end earmarks — or at least reform them."

"I am critical of the fact that the federal government is worried about paying for parking garages — and for a million other things like that," said Steve McCollister, who heard Mr. Ricketts speak at a recent fund-raiser in west Omaha. "But they are. And if they are, I want my senator to be in there. I want Nebraska to compete."

That's probably the way most people feel. And despite the fact that nearly all of these projects are wasteful and are not constitutionally appropriate candidates for federal spending, it's important to remember that the real bloat is in the entitlement programs, corporate welfare (including farm subsidies), and national defense. The federal budget is in large part an accumulation of politicians' attempts to buy votes in order to remain in office, using our money.

That's the way the system works, and that's not going to change until the federal government is made subject to the kind of constitutionally imposed tax and budget limitations (known as taxpayers' bills of rights, or TABORs) many states have implemented or are considering.

The only solution is a real federal TABOR.

Posted by Sam Karnick at 12:19 PM | Permalink