Coyote Blog

New Carnival of the Capitalists up at Odyssey of the Mind.

This is a real low both for journalistic and governmental integrity (via Captains Quarters):

The blogosphere buzzed yesterday with the revelation that pundit Armstrong Williams received $241,000 from the Department of Education to promote the No Child Left Behind Act and push other commentators to do the same. Williams did not disclose the payment while pushing NCLB in several columns and on his television appearances; instead, he represented his opinions as his own independent views.

This is simultaneously wrong and stupid.

The beta for Microsoft anti-Spyware is a free download here.  They created most of the vulnerabilities, so presumably they may be best able to plug them.

I installed and ran the beta and it looks good.  I ran the program after running several other programs like adAware and spybot S&D and it found a bunch of things that the others missed (though how you know for sure, I don't know.  This message about found problems could be like the little dial that xerox machine repairmen set to determine when they get to come back).  The program even claims to have found and cleaned out TV media, which tops my all-time frustration list.  After the run, the program lists the threats found, and actually has good information about each threat so you know what you are eliminating. 

Update:  PCMag review

Professor Bainbridge posted:

it's starting to look like the folks who ran the election in King County either (1) really did emulate old man Daley's Cook County elections or (2) are among the most incompetent morons in government.

Wow, the perfect application to test Coyote's Law in real time.  Coyote's law states:

When the same set of facts can be explained equally well by

1. A massive conspiracy coordinated without a single leak between hundreds or even thousands of people    -OR -
2. Sustained stupidity, confusion and/or incompetence

Assume stupidity.

Applying this to King County, I will assume stupidity.  I must say that having lived in King County, this is not the first time Meyer's Law has come up.  The city has made so many colossal blunders, including having a major bridge sunk in 1990 when someone accidental left the stopcocks open (that bridge, ironically, had been named after the State Highway director on whose watch was built the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which tore itself apart famously).  There have for years been rumors that the ridiculous constriction created in downtown Seattle on Interstate 5 by the building of the convention center (and which is almost impossible to fix) was made on purpose by anti-growth planners.

I have written that many forms of environmental regulation, such as pollution limits, are not in conflict with property rights, but are in fact essential to their preservation.

However, one area where statist environmentalism and property rights do conflict is over "preservations".  Whether it be preserving species or habitat or forests or open space or wilderness or whatever, preservation is often used as an excuse for raping property owners.

Which is a shame, since there are very viable free market alternatives open to environmentalists as a substitute for state coercion.  I have supported the Nature Conservancy for years, because it (generally) works to bring together private funds to purchase lands for various preservation goals.  This organization and other sets up private land trusts, generally using private money but sometimes with a public contribution to buy out landowners.  The blog Nature Noted focused on the activities of these trusts, including this recent deal in Michigan.  This deal in particular is cool, because we run most of the public campgrounds in this area.  Thanks to the Commons for the link to this site.

Todd Zywicki at Volokh has an interesting post on what is driving hybrid car purchases in certain cities.  While certain segments are driven by environmentalism and fuel economy, the real boom in certain cities has come with the legal change in some cities allowing single persons in hybrid cars to use the carpool lanes.

"'I'd say 95 percent of the people who buy a Prius say it's to get into HOV,'" said Jay Taye, sales manager at Ourisman Fairfax Toyota. "'They talk about the tax break and the HOV, and once in a while they say they prefer it for the gas mileage as well.'"

By the way, he links an absolutely dead-on article about public transit in the Onion here called --"Report: 98 Percent of Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others"

The link between the Onion article and the Washington Post story referred to by Zywicki is that what people really want is a fast commute in their car, and they are willing to pay for it.

Several years ago, I sent in a proposal to the Arizona Dept. of Transportation for their new HOV lanes in the Phoenix area, though I never got a response back.  I suggested that HOV lanes probably did not really increase carpooling, since they probably just shifted vehicles that would have already been carrying 2+ people into the faster lane.  Why should I get this artificial subsidy of a dedicated lane when I am driving my kid to a soccer game but not when I am driving myself to do productive work?  Either way, the lane is not changing my behavior.

Anyway, I suggested that instead, AZ DOT should create a number of special passes for exclusive use of the HOV lane.  The number of passes should be set as the largest number that could be issued while keeping the HOV lane moving at the speed limit at rush hour.  Maybe 5000?  Anyway, they would have the stats to set the number, and it could be adjusted over time.  I proposed that they then auction off these passes in a dutch auction once a year.  I posited that the clearing price might be as high as $1000, thus raising $5,000,000 a year that could be used for other transportation projects.

I have friends that said I was crazy, that no one would spend $1000.  Back then, I argued it in two ways.  First, thousands of people in town spend not $1000 but tens of thousands of dollars, in the form of purchasing a nicer-than-basic-car, to make their driving experience better.  In those terms, to the Mercedes or Lexus owner, $1000 was nothing and in fact the price might go higher.  Second, if each pass holder saved 15 minutes per commute, or 30 minutes per day over 250 work days, they would save 125 hours of their time each year.  Bidding just $1000 for this would mean that people would have to value their free time (since commuting generally comes out of free and family time) at $8 an hour.  I certainly value my free time at a MUCH higher rate than this.

This article cited above effectively adds another data point to what people might pay.  To buy a Prius, they are spending at least $5000-$10,000 more than a similar car that can't go into the HOV lane, and probably even more when you consider features they may be giving up to have the car.   

Today, I would bet that the clearing price for 5000 such passes may be $3000-$5000, thus increasing the annual revenue to the city/state as high as $25,000,000.

By the way, though it is a bit different than what I am suggesting, the best related plan that I know of that has actually been executed succesfully is congestion pricing in central London.

UPDATE:  Dang, reading up further in Volokh, Zywicki anticipated my post with a similar one here.

Best laid plans.... I try to run a small business and economics blog and 90% of the hits I have gotten over the last 2 days have been on Tsunami before and after pictures.  OK, well, I have have been updating the original before and after post with links to people who really are blogging the tsunami and its aftermath.  Nature has some amazing before-after satellite shots, including these, which are wider angle views of the original shots I posted:

These shots are chilling, and help explain the death toll better than any single photos I have seen:

Makes me think of Atlantis.  Hat tip to the Nature site to Marginal Revolution.

For more before and after images, look here and  here and here (in this last link see the powerpoint download in the lower left).  This site has a ton of tsunami blog links, including pictures and video.  Here is a link-filled roundup (new 1/4) and an older one here, and another here.  And here is a dedicated blog.  Here is a 1/5 roundup of Indian blog posts about the tsunami and its aftermath.  And here is a local blog with news.  And here is the Amazon Red Cross donation page.

Update:  A more recent roundup as of 1/11 here.

Best laid plans.... I try to run a small business and economics blog and 90% of the hits I have gotten over the last 2 days have been on Tsunami before and after pictures.  OK, well, I have have been updating the original before and after post with links to people who really are blogging the tsunami and its aftermath.  Nature has some amazing before-after satellite shots, including these, which are wider angle views of the original shots I posted:

These shots are chilling, and help explain the death toll better than any single photos I have seen:

Makes me think of Atlantis.  Hat tip to the Nature site to Marginal Revolution.

For more before and after images, look here and  here and here (in this last link see the powerpoint download in the lower left).  This site has a ton of tsunami blog links, including pictures and video.  Here is a link-filled roundup (new 1/4) and an older one here, and another here.  And here is a dedicated blog.  Here is a 1/5 roundup of Indian blog posts about the tsunami and its aftermath.  And here is a local blog with news.  And here is the Amazon Red Cross donation page.

Update:  A more recent roundup as of 1/11 here.

Hey, what does a good capitalist have against gold and silver?  Nothing, per se, but I have been reading John Steele Gordon's An Empire of Wealth and it got me to thinking how important for the eventual success of the US it was the English and the Dutch, rather than the French and the Spanish, colonized most of the eastern US.

Very few countries colonized by Spain have been able to recover from the experience, even hundreds of years later.  When people decry imperialism, they should be thinking first of the old Spanish empire.  Their colonization was nearly entirely extractive - focused on pulling out gold and silver and some tropical agricultural products.  There was no thought of developing a colony that might grow in value over time through investment and entrepreneurship.  Perhaps worse, Spanish and French imperialism were entirely micro-managed top-down by the state, leaving a legacy of bad statist economics in the countries they colonized.  My previous post, though it focused on France rather than Spain, shows through statistics the legacy of poverty and bad government that this approach left behind.

So, how does silver and gold come into play?  Well, the US eastern seaboard is singularly devoid of precious metal ore deposits, which kept Spanish attention to the south, seeking more lucrative immediate spoils in Mexico and South America.  The lack of abundant fur animals like beaver kept the French to the north.  As a result, the US was left to be colonized by the Dutch and the English.  Unlike the Spanish and the French, most of this colonization was not military or state-run.  Most of the major colonization pushes were actually for-profit private enterprises.  Though these early colonies would have loved to find gold and silver, lacking this they had to find ways to develop the land and the New World to make returns for their investors.

This week, an odd substance has been spotted in Arizona rivers.  Courtesy of a commenter badassredskin on Fark.com, some good Sedona flood before and after pictures:

Slide Rock Park, near Sedona before (note bathroom building for reference)

Same park, more recently:

This has made a real mess of the Oak Creek Canyon near Sedona, which by the way I consider one of the most beautiful spots on earth.  Slide Rock Park is a great park, though I am a bit biased since my company runs the concession store at Slide Rock Park.  Our building at this park is fine, but we have had several of our campgrounds in this canyon flooded.

Too bad the weather was not like this for these guys!

As a capitalist and believer in individual rights, one of the things I notice a lot today is just how many people do not trust individual decision-making.  Now, I do not mean that they criticize other people's decisions or disagree with them -- in a free society, you can disagree with anybody about anything.  I mean that they distrust other people's free, private decision-making so much that they want the government to intervene.

Interestingly, most people don't think of themselves as advocating government interference with people's private decisions.  However, if you ask them the right questions, you will find that they tend to fall into one of several categories that all want the government to intervene in individual decision-making in some way:  nannies, moralists, technocrats, and progressive/socialists.  Though the categories tend to overlap, they are useful in thinking about some of the reasons people want to call in the government to take over parts of people's lives.

By the way, before I get started, just to avoid straw-man arguments like "well, you just want 12-year-olds to have sex with dogs", there are three philosophical limitations that apply to decisions made by individuals or between individuals:

• The decisions or agreements are made without fraud or physical coersion
• The decisions are made by adults (the very definition of adulthood is the legal ability to make decisions for oneself)
• Decisions and areements don't violate the constitutional rights of others

That being said, here are examples of the government interventionism of  nannies, moralists, technocrats, and progressive/socialists.

Continue reading ‘Respecting Individual Decision-Making’ »

I am willing to make a bet.  I will bet that at least 90% and probably 100% of US Senators have money invested in equities.  Why?  Because, for long term investments, you would be insane not too.  Even with substantial drops in the market form time to time, equities outperform bonds and government securities by miles and miles.  From this chart, you can see that even if you had the misfortune at age 30 to invest all you savings in stocks the day before the 1929 stock market crash, you STILL would be better off by age 45 having invested in stocks than bonds and your investment would be worth 10 times more at age 65 than if it had been in bonds.  And remember, that is the case of investing on the worst possible day of the last century.  Any other comparison is even more favorable for stocks.  The difference in wealth between stocks and government securities at retirement age is staggering.  Any financial adviser who told a person under 50 saving for retirement not to invest some of their money in stocks should be fired on the spot for malpractice.

However, just like Senators who put their kids in private school but oppose school choice for the rest of us, Senators do not think the rest of us are mature or smart enough to invest in stocks.  Quoting Senator Specter:

On the issue of privatization, I had some time ago considered an idea to place a relatively small portion of benefits in an investment account, providing that the "security" aspect of Social Security was retained and the investment was under professional management. However, with the severe fluctuations of the stock market, I have since rejected that idea.

Men like John Kerry get most of their wealth from stocks, and would fire any financial adviser who did not invest a good portion of his wealth in equities. He understands that stocks will fluctuate from time to time, but that over decades (which is how one invests for retirement) they are the best choice. How hypocritical is it that he and others are saying "Stocks are great for me, they make me wealthy, but trust me, they're not right for you".  More on distrust of individual decision-making here.

I have always thought that the media tends to support big government.  I have never understood if that is because the media is dominated by big-government liberals, as conservatives claim, or if there is some shared self interest between media and a large government, since so much of what is newsworthy flows from the government.  After all, look how dull the news gets in August when Congress lets out.  Anyway, I have always been frustrated by the unhelpful media coverage of budget debates.  In particular, the media seems to systematically want to call a slowing of spending growth a "cut".  Patterico's Pontifications has an example.

There are legitimate concerns that need to be addressed in putting together tort reform legislation; and there are shortcomings, as usual, in the GWB proposals (see below).  This, however, via Kevin Drum, is grasping at straws by tort reform's opponents.  Drum cites a recent UC San Diego Study described here that shows that there are a disproportionate number of medication errors in the first few days of the month.  The study claims that this is due to pharmacists being overworked and making mistakes because they claim poor people all rush to buy their drugs after their government checks arrive.

Kevin Drum cites this study as evidence that malpractice tort reform is misguided, because, as he puts it "one of the causes of malpractice lawsuits is "” surprise! "” malpractice".

OK, its hard to know where to start.  Though I am a supporter of tort reform, I would probably not have gotten worked up enough to bother to post.  However, this is another example where science and "studies" are misunderstood and perverted in the media, which DOES tick me off enough to write.  Here goes:

• This study has nothing to do with medical malpractice!  The debate is around doctors and doctors getting driven out of business by their malpractice rates.  What do pharmacist mistakes have anything to do with the types of medical malpractice and medical malpractice insurance rates.  The departure of doctors from certain counties has nothing to do with pharmacy errors.
• Though the authors and Mr. Drum wish to imply that all the medication mistakes measured are by medical professionals, the study in fact includes:

"wrong drug given or taken," or "accidental overdose of drug," or "drug taken inadvertently."

Note that of the four categories of mistakes above and included in the numbers (wrong drug given, wrong drug taken, accidental overdose, and drug taken inadvertently), three of the four are reasonably the fault of the individual taking the drug, not the pharmacist.  However, since most supporters of the current tort system tend to reject the notion individual responsibility, I guess this little issue was ignored. 

• The authors never have anything to say about Mr. Drum's point, ie they do not correlate these deaths with actual malpractice suits, so it is impossible to actually make Mr. Drum's point in the first paragraph.  The best evidence I have seen is equivocal - it says that a large number of lawsuits are baloney, but that a large number of true malpractice victims go uncompensated.
• The authors actually have no evidence, other than their supposition, that these deaths are due to pharmacists being overworked.  They did not do any research into the specific cases involved - they just surveyed notoriously inaccurate death certificates.  In fact, though it may be in the actual report, I don't see any evidence that demand actually increases or that pharmacists are indeed overworked the first few days of the month - they just seem to hypothesize it without proof.  And, if there really is more work load the first few days of the month, they never mention any data on staffing - presumably if there is such a trend, pharmacies may actually staff up for it, which would also defeat their supposition.  My business gets more traffic on certain days of the year and we staff for it.

OK, while we are on the topic of medical tort reform, I will offer up a couple of more thoughts beyond just the silly use of this study:

• No one denies that some malpractice torts are from real malpractice.  Wrong legs ARE cut off, etc.  No one wants to protect people who are guilty of obvious malpractice.
• The issue is less with the existence of medical torts but with their enormous escalation in the last 10-20 years.  To argue that malpractice torts mostly result from real malpractice, you have to argue that the incidence of real malpractice has gone up dramatically over the last 20 years.  That may be, given the great increase in complexity of medicine, but I doubt it is the entire explanation

As usual, part of the problem in this argument is that GWB and his minions suck at getting a message out that can drive a consensus.  Here is my alternate message on medical malpractice:

The system today is broken for two reasons: 

• First, bad doctors and real malpractice is not punished strongly enough, and some of the worst practitioners go on to hurt more and more people.   Insurance today spreads the cost of bad medicine to all doctors, reducing the negative impact on the worst.  In addition, insurance premiums and torts are a poor substitute for better discipline and penalty systems for bad medicine
• Second, too many good doctors are punished with suits because they had bad outcomes from good medicine.  Sometimes babies are born with birth defects, sometimes medications that help millions have unpredictably bad side effects for a few unlucky people, and sometimes people die and there is nothing that can be done.

More important than damage caps, both for truly injured patients and good doctors, is to bring scientific sanity to the system, and to make sure that bad medicine, not bad outcomes, are punished.

By the way, in a previous post Mr. Drum said that there is no cost to "frivolous" suits since they don't go to court.  This is quite wrong:

• I am not in medicine, but I am in a public contact business that gets some slip and fall suits, but I assure you that your insurance premiums can go up substantially even for suits that don't go to trial
• You still have to have a lawyer at $400 or so an hour to defend against a frivolous suit.  You can't walk in the first day and say, "hey judge, this is BS, let's drop it".  I have spent tens of thousands of dollars before frivolous suits against me get dropped
• Frivolous suits do go to trial and can win.  Just think McDonald's coffee.

And yes, I have had experience with frivolous suits.  In one case, a person who claims to have stepped on a nail head protruding from a board in our campground sued us for sexual dysfunction.  That case is still active more than 3 years later!  In another case, a person claimed to have hurt her knee falling on some steps.  Excluding the issue of why I am at fault if she fell down a perfectly safe set of steps, we eventually discovered that she had hurt her knee several weeks earlier, had no medical insurance, and was visiting a number of local businesses making the same claim to try to get someone to pay for an operation.

So please, don't lecture me on frivolous suits.  When Mr. Drum has to pay $400 an hour to defend a suit from someone who got an infected paper cut while reading his article in a magazine, then he can talk about why frivolous suits are OK.  However, he is right in this respect - I don't think the answer is capping damages.  The answer is having a way to defeat these things, to drop them out of the system quickly and inexpensively.  To have some kind of sanity filter.  This would help those of us subject to BS suits, and would help the truly injured get to trial faster.

California Governor Schwarzenegger pointed out in his state of the state address that out of 150+ state congressional districts in California, NONE changed party in the recent elections.  The Governator rightly called out gerrymandering as practiced in states like Texas and California for being a threat to democracy and an incumbent protection program.

This is great to hear, but I would give this a 0% chance of success for anyone but Ahnold.  The problem with doing anything about it is that your political support will almost by definition be coming from the minority party in the state.  That is not a winning political formula.  Even Kevin Drum, who seems to agree with Arnold's logic on this feels compelled to disagree to protect his party. However, Arnold is getting good at taking issues over the heads of legislators straight to the voters, so you never know.

By the way, as a libertarian who cares a lot more about the democratic process than either party, I would take Drum's proposed deal in a second.

(sign of the times:  my ieSpell program already has Schwarzenegger built into the dictionary)

The Carnival of the Vanities is up here.

The Onion reports that "Americans Feel Safer with Martha Stewart in Jail":

"When I found out [Stewart] was behind a 10-foot-thick concrete wall, I heaved a huge sigh of relief," said Daniel McAllen, a jeweler from Newark, NJ. "If she were on the streets, who knows what sort of business maneuvering she'd be up to behind closed doors?"

"I have a family to think of," McAllen added.

Boston-area teacher Helen Greene said she had been "afraid to leave the house" before the verdict in Stewart's trial was announced.

LOL.  Well, if they feel safer, I feel wealthier.  Last weekend, my wife read something in a Martha Stewart magazine that sent her off reorganizing her closet.  By the end of the weekend, I had bought over 400 identical wooden hangers (hint: get them from Ikea, they are half the price there as anywhere else) and a variety of other organizing gear.  Thank god Martha is in the slam so that maybe now, my weekends can be more peaceful.

Find this week's rankings here.  Incredibly, Buffalo ended the year at number 5, and just a hair from #4, and are on the outside looking in at the playoffs.  I think the Colts are breathing a huge sigh of relief to be facing Denver rather than the Bills in the first round - a fate which they interestingly controlled by tanking the last game of the season, despite their coaches assurances to the contrary.

For the Super Bowl, I am sticking with the Patriots in the AFC.  Its tough not to pick Pittsburgh, who were impressive with even their scrubs beating a surging Buffalo team in the last week.  However, I will go with experience. The NFC is a total mess.  No one has ever lost much money betting against the Eagles to reach the Super Bowl, but everyone else really, really sucks.  Everyone else is an 8-8 team, even the Falcons who should be 8-8 but got away with a few.  I'll go with NE and Philly in the Superbowl, with the AFC winner, whoever they are, taking the title.

By the way, the Cards finished 27th in the rankings, which is actually (pathetically enough) one of their best finishes.  However, don't get cocky.  You can see from this post that the Cardinals are still the standard for mediocrity against which all teams are compared.

Two years in a row, voters had to choose two out of three very good teams to send to the BCS championship game.  And, for the second straight year, the team left out (USC, Auburn) has looked a lot better than OU, who got blown out for the second straight year in the Championship game.  I thought the Big 12 was way overrated at the beginning of the season and I have not changed my mind.  Maybe it is some flaw in the distribution of the AP's voting ballots, with a disproportionate number going to Big 12 States.  Certainly it seemed that way when Texas slipped by Cal in the last poll of the season as a number of voters seemed to "reevaluate" their rankings to slip Texas in.

UPDATE:  Same goes double for Ashlee Simpson

In most states, if you are registering as a "foreign" corporation (in this context foreign means out-of-state) you have to have a registered agent in that state.  In some cases, this can be a person who works for you, but since our employees are seasonal in many states, this does not work for us.  So, we have to go out and pay some local attorney a few bucks each year to be our "agent".  The services of this agent seem to include mainly forgetting to forward important mail that the state insists on sending to the agent rather than to my corporate office.  I just got a $250 fine from California because I did not respond to some reporting requirement that they sent to my registered agent, who then in turn lost it or whatever.

Can anyone tell me why this requirement still exists.  Or, even better, why it ever existed.  Maybe it was useful in the days before the Pony Express or the telephone to have a nearby contact, but who cares now?

It is not that often I get the opportunity to find something about taxes and markets in Kevin Drum's column that I agree with, but his guest blogger Paul Glastris has a good series of posts on state and local tax breaks, and even direct subsidies, for relocating businesses (first post here).  Glastris argues for the elimination of these tax breaks and subsidies, and I agree 100% with this conclusion, though not necesarily his legal justification for doing so (more on that later).

I have written a number of times about my frustration with a particular type of these subsidies - the public financing of stadiums for private sports teams (here, here, and here).  This stadium construction is usually undertaken as a result of corporate blackmail, where sports teams threaten to move unless they get a new stadium.  The dynamics of other tax breaks and subsidies to relocating businesses referred to by Glastris are usually similar, though these companies don't tend to have the monopsony power of sports franchises so they often get a smaller payout.

Why do local governments pay out huge incentive to corporations who after all have to put their business somewhere?  The answer is that they are caught in a classic prisoner's dilemma.  Basically, in this "game", each participant has individual incentives that seem to point to a certain set of actions.  Unfortunately, when players follow these incentives, the result is sub-optimized for everyone.

In this example, local authorities see a business that may move to town, and decide it is better to have it in their city with tax concessions than to have it in another city.  Since cities lose some of these battles and win some, and since cities that lose one battle tend to pay more to win the next one, the end result is that businesses end up being distributed fairly evenly, but cities have all given up huge tax concessions.  Clearly the ideal state, at least for city governments, is to not give any tax concessions at all.  In this case, businesses would likely still end up being distributed fairly evenly, but cities would not have given out tax breaks.

The only way to get to this end state is 1) have a philosophic change, with local citizens rejecting the use of government to affect relocation decisions (ie become libertarians!); 2) collude - have the council of mayors get together and sign a no new subsidy pledge or 3) have some higher authority police the local governments (that is the option explored in the Glastris article - can the US Government or courts constitutionally stop this). 

The Washington Monthly, in opposing these tax breaks, has a problem, though.  As good technocrats and liberal interventionists, they wholeheartedly support the government's right to regulate the hell out of business and commercial decision-making.  They can't, therefore, take the much cleaner libertarian argument I do, that the government should not be interfering in free, arms-length commercial decision-making at all. 

They are stuck with narrowly opposing just one kind of government interventionism (tax breaks to business) and this leads to a couple of problems in Galstris's argument.  The first is a consistency problem, which you can see in the attorney's letter Glastris quotes.  He argues in the first paragraph of his letter that these tax breaks violate the commerce clause because they unduly influence interstate commerce, then argues in his second paragraph that these tax breaks have no discernible influence on corporate decision making.  Well, if the second part is true, then their logic in the first part can't be true.

The other problem with their argument is that liberals want a commerce clause, as redefined by courts in the 1930's, as enabling massive government intervention, but in this case Glastris is trying to use it in its pre-1930's use, which was restrictive.  If the Glastris wants to take the position that the commerce clause limits state and local businesses from trying to change the decision-making and cost structure of businesses engaged in interstate commerce, wouldn't this same logic extend to making unconstitutional state-based business regulations?  If you can't give a local tax break to a certain industry, doesn't that mean you can't give a higher tax (say on lodging) to another industry?  The specific words of the Ohio decision referenced says:

... the tax scheme discriminates against interstate commerce by granting preferential treatment to in-state investment and activity.

I might ask, if you take this argument, wouldn't laws that make in-state investment and activity less attractive than other states also be unconstitutional? 

One final note.  As a libertarian, I have gone through phases on targeted tax breaks.  There have been times in my life when I have supported tax breaks of any kind to any person for any reason, by the logic that any reduction in taxation is a good thing.  I know there are many libertarians that take this position.  Over time, I have changed my mind.  First, targeted tax breaks seldom in practice reduce the overall tax burden - they tend to be made up somewhere else.  Second, these tax breaks tend to be gross examples of the kind of government coercive technocratic meddling in commerce and individual decision-making that I despise.  Almost always, they are trying to get individuals to do something they would not otherwise do, so in practice they tend to be distorting and carry all kinds of unintended consequences (as well as being philosophically repugnant).

It has always been ironic to me that those who started the "free speech" movement of the 60's have been in the forefront of clamping down on campus speech via speech codes.  The answer to this paradox was that the free speech movement was never about free speech, but about advancing a mostly Marxist point of view to the exclusion of all others.

FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, has a nice roundup of work they have done to defend free speech on campuses in 2004.  Hat tip to Virginia Postrel.

I don't know whether it warrants the "crisis" moniker (to me, government is always in a disastrous state), but Social Security is indeed facing an enormous cash flow shortfall in just a few years.  Those who use bogus government accounting to say that there is no problem until 2042 are either disingenuous or delusional.  People making this argument are saying that yes, cash flow will be negative, but those negative cash flows will come out of the huge Social Security trust fund, which won't be depleted until 2042.

Um, the only problem with this is that... there is no Social Security trust fund.  I mean yes, there is such a thing on paper with a large number next to it, but there is no actual pool of cash or investments to draw on.  The "trust fund" is full of government IOU's to itself - the actual cash was spent for general budget needs over the years.  As a result, in just a few years, Social Security will require:

• Massive new taxes
• Large benefits cuts
• A complete restructuring of all parts of the program
• More government borrowing

Good post at Assymetrical Information goes into it in more depth.

The Carnival of the Capitalists is up this week at Management Craft.  I haven't had time to read through everything, so I have no recommendations this week.  The site does note that future article submissions need to go to this site, as the old email system will no longer be used.  My hosting date in February is coming up soon, and I am definitely looking forward to it.

I have mentioned on a number of occasions that journalists seldom get science stories right.  Most journalists have no science background (if they were good at math and science, they would not have been journalism majors) and they and their employers have huge biases towards spinning every science story as an end-of-the-world disaster.  I remember when I lived in St. Louis we used to say that the local TV stations accurately forecasted 12 of the last 4 blizzards.

Here is a good story and analysis from Satblog analyzing one of the news stories popping us saying that we in the US are all at risk from 100 foot tsunamis or whatever.  The blog calls a recent Dallas Morning News front page story about a tsunami that could wipe out all of Florida

a great example of the crap that passes for science reporting these days, and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific process.