Coyote Blog

The PJ Tatler has this bit on the arming of government bureaucrats:

Quin Hillyer discusses the increasing armed firepower of the federal government.  Most people expect agencies like the FBI to be well armed for law enforcement purposes.  But the Railroad Retirement Board?  He reports that federal agencies far and wide now have armed agents, including the Small Business Administration.  For what?  To scare away phony 8(a) applications??  The United States Department of Education bought 27 Remington Model 870 12-gauge shotguns last year

I have no insight into what is going on in these particular agencies.  But I can comment on another agency.  Nearly every state parks organization has seen a proliferation of law enforcement titles among its employees.  Seemingly every field employee nowadays needs to have a gun and a badge.  Why?

Well, there are those who say that this arms race is necessary to keep the parks safe against some mythical crime wave.  But I can say with some authority, since our company runs over 150 public parks across the country, that with very, very few exceptions, parks don't need this kind of on-site law enforcement support.  Most problems can be handled with on-site customer service employees, with the occasional call the the sheriff if things get rough.  In fact, customer service is actually improved without all the badges around.  Rangers with law enforcement credentials tend to solve issues with their visitors by issuing citations.  This is awful customer service -- I am sure McDonald's doesn't like it if someone messes up the bathroom or parks across two parking spaces, but you won't see them issuing citations to their customers.

The reason for this proliferation of law enforcement titles in parks is not demand for order, but incentives among employees.  In most states, getting a law enforcement title in a parks organization gives one an automatic raise, participation in the far-more-lucrative state law enforcement pension plan, and training that can be valuable when one leaves the parks organization.  Also, for some, it carries non-monetary benefits -- some folks think its cool to wield a gun and a badge.

My article this week at Forbes.com digs into some fundamental flaws of climate models

When I looked at historic temperature and CO2 levels, it was impossible for me to see how they could be in any way consistent with the high climate sensitivities that were coming out of the IPCC models.  Even if all past warming were attributed to CO2  (a heroic acertion in and of itself) the temperature increases we have seen in the past imply a climate sensitivity closer to 1 rather than 3 or 5 or even 10  (I show this analysis in more depth in this video).

My skepticism was increased when several skeptics pointed out a problem that should have been obvious.  The ten or twelve IPCC climate models all had very different climate sensitivities — how, if they have different climate sensitivities, do they all nearly exactly model past temperatures?  If each embodies a correct model of the climate, and each has a different climate sensitivity, only one (at most) should replicate observed data.  But they all do.  It is like someone saying she has ten clocks all showing a different time but asserting that all are correct (or worse, as the IPCC does, claiming that the average must be the right time).

The answer to this paradox came in a 2007 study by climate modeler Jeffrey Kiehl.  To understand his findings, we need to understand a bit of background on aerosols.  Aerosols are man-made pollutants, mainly combustion products, that are thought to have the effect of cooling the Earth’s climate.

What Kiehl demonstrated was that these aerosols are likely the answer to my old question about how models with high sensitivities are able to accurately model historic temperatures.  When simulating history, scientists add aerosols to their high-sensitivity models in sufficient quantities to cool them to match historic temperatures.  Then, since such aerosols are much easier to eliminate as combustion products than is CO2, they assume these aerosols go away in the future, allowing their models to produce enormous amounts of future warming.

Specifically, when he looked at the climate models used by the IPCC, Kiehl found they all used very different assumptions for aerosol cooling and, most significantly, he found that each of these varying assumptions were exactly what was required to combine with that model’s unique sensitivity assumptions to reproduce historical temperatures.  In my terminology, aerosol cooling was the plug variable.

I am sure everyone is resting easier now that the government has taken over all student loan activity.  Now we won't see any of that abusive behavior by private lenders.  Ha ha, just kidding.  Don't get behind on your government student loans! Via Radley Balko (Updates:  Still bizarre the DOE has this kind of firepower, but DOE says its a criminal / fraud case, not a payment issue.)

Kenneth Wright does not have a criminal record and he had no reason to believe a S.W.A.T team would be breaking down his door at 6 a.m. on Tuesday.

"I look out of my window and I see 15 police officers," Wright said.

Wright came downstairs in his boxer shorts as the officers team barged through his front door. Wright said an officer grabbed him by the neck and led him outside on his front lawn.

"He had his knee on my back and I had no idea why they were there," Wright said.

According to Wright, officers also woke his three young children ages 3, 7, and 11, and put them in a Stockton police patrol car with him. Officers then searched his house.

As it turned out, the person law enforcement was looking for was not there - Wright's estranged wife.

"They put me in handcuffs in that hot patrol car for six hours, traumatizing my kids," Wright said.

Wright said he later went to the mayor and Stockton Police Department, but the City of Stockton had nothing to do with Wright's search warrant.

The U.S. Department of Education issued the search and called in the S.W.A.T for his wife's defaulted student loans.

Last week I asked readers to help me remember the name of a science fiction book centered around an OCD man who has to carefully follow a specific routine or else reality unravels, an event that leaves the world subtly, or sometimes not so subtly, changed.

The book is called Resonance, and I re-read it this weekend.  I had forgotten a lot of it but it really is a terrific, under-hyped book.  There is real suspense as the unraveling of the world accelerates and our hero starts to better understand exactly what is going on.  What I enjoyed the most was how there were two people in the book who had special, err, powers but who initially totally interpreted what these powers were or how they worked.

I have never seen a paperback version of it, but commenters tell me you can find it in the Baen free library (if so, that is a screaming deal because this is a pretty good book) and it is available on the Kindle.

I was pretty bummed out that Gary Johnson is not to be included in the debate slate for New Hampshire.   I am not one (most definitely not one) to invest all my hopes and dreams in a political candidate, but I really like Gary Johnson and thought he could bring a new libertarian voice (in addition to Ron Paul's) to Republican discussions dominated by statists like Romney and Huckabee.   I have met him once and listening talk about things like the costs of the war on drugs and immigration is just so refreshing from a politician of any sort, particularly a Republican.    And in contrast to Ron Paul, who comes off as a bit wacky (and wonky), Johnson does it all in a very non-threatening way.   Many people in this country self-identify as fiscally conservative and socially liberal -- this is their guy.  They just haven't heard of him yet.

As an ex-governor well respected by independents, he strikes me as infinitely more worthy of a debate spot than, say, Donald Trump, who did receive an invitation.  I wrote a whole column on the importance of being previously famous, rather than experienced, as a qualifier for office nowadays.

I didn't blog the whole Weiner thing during the events because I really couldn't have cared less about the whole deal.   I see a nearly 1:1 correlation between the ego-gratification politicians get from the job and the eco-gratification Weiner was getting from young girls, so none of it surprised me in the least.   And on the other hand, I would not have been surprised if it had been a hacker.  If it was not a hacker this time, it will be some other time.

But I thought this video of Weiner's denials last week and how he comported himself under questioning about his alleged (at the time) behavior is now absolutely fascinating in light of his press conference yesterday admitting everything.  Watch this guy - he absolutely looks like a man sincerely angry at being wronged by bogus and, as he says over and over, "outrageous" accusations.  You just have to believe the guy.  Yet now we know he was lying his ass off.  Important lesson to remember as you watch politicians, on any topic, in the future.

It is NOT a good thing to have one's criminality be determined based on whether the state feels one has a "legitimate purpose" for his actions (in this case, speech).

I can 't decide if the last question asked of Congressman Weiner today is a new low in journalism or a step in the right direction of treating Congress with exactly the dignity it deserves.   Maybe we can just merge Cspan and TMZ.   In either case, it has to be the first time these words were ever uttered in a press conference:

Were you fully erect, Congressman?

I am happy that my neighbors here in Phoenix are not allowed a hecklers veto to prevent grocery store chains, or any other business, from serving me at convenient locations.  I live walking distance from an intersection with three grocery stores (Whole Foods, Fry's, Albertsons) and I love it.

Apparently, Congressional Democrats are angling for yet another big stimulus spending bill.  Forget for a moment that the last one did nothing for the economy.  There still seems to be a mythology that infrastructure projects can rapidly be green-lighted.  For example,

"The American people, while concerned about the deficit, place much more emphasis on job creation, and they see a role for the government," Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) told The Hill. "A fast injection of job stimulus on the public side would help tremendously. … It [the job report] helps our argument about investment."

This notion of a "fast" injection of job growth is just absurd.  We can leave aside dueling economic models, and just consider for a moment what it takes to get an infrastructure project, say a bridge replacement, going.  In short, it takes years of design, planning, vendor selection, and permitting.  The protests from losing bidders and environmental opponents in the courts alone can take years.  That is why most of the first stimulus just was handed to state and local governments to help defer bureaucrat layoffs, rather than going to all those supposedly "shovel-ready" projects.  The only thing that turned out to be shovel-ready was the US debt ratings.

Here is an article I wrote in January, 2009 on why infrastructure projects can't be done quickly.  By the way, I tell a story from my own experience in Ventura County, CA, and all the time spent to date trying to get a minor building improvement permitted.  To this day in mid-2011, it STILL has not been fully permitted.  Every time we think we are done, a new division of the County pops up with its hand out for a check.

Update:  The main reason such stimulus spending does not work from a macro standpoint is that one is taking money out of private hands (either through taxes or crowding out private borrowing) which have strong incentives to employ the money productively and putting it into government hands that has strong incentives to employ the money politically.  Here is a Forbes article I wrote on the problem, and here is an interesting example of incentives problems related to the stimulus.

The movie Gasland last year attempted to document the dangers of fracking in natural gas fields.  The accusation is that the procedures opens up paths in rock for gas and fracking chemicals to contaminate drinking water, even through thousands of feet of impermeable rock.  I don't know much about the topic, but I was suspicious the movie was yet another example of environmentalists opposing any sort of energy source.

The most memorable part of the film was when the move makers showed how tap water in one town, I suppose near some recent fracking activity, actually could be lit on fire due to the methane in it.  Wow, this looked compelling.  Somehow gas was getting in the water system -- must be the fracking, no?

Well, it turns out tap water in this area has had problems with methane since at least 1936, over a half century before fracking ever came into use.  Reports from the 70's from state agencies discussed the problem.

Well, of course the director of the movie would be embarrassed and would look into it, right.  Hah, just kidding.  Just as Erin Brokovitch didn't want to hear about scientific studies disproving her so-called cancer clusters, the director actually knew about this history and ignored it.  Specifically, he said the historic information about methane in the water was "not relevant."

Phelim McAleer has the whole story, including a video the Gasland director is working hard through legal channels to suppress.

In the 1860's and 1970's, in the United States, there was a great post-war westward migration.  Many settlers began to try to farm lands west of the 100th meridian.  These normally very arid regions experienced a couple of decades of much greater rainfall during this period.  We know today that this was merely a cyclical variation of the type that is constantly occurring in the climate.  However, people of this time chose to believe that this was a permanent change, attributing the shift in rainfall to anthropogenic effects (any of this sound familiar?)  The saying at the time was that "rain followed the plow."

The basic premise of the theory was that human habitation and agriculture through homesteading affected a permanent change in the climate of arid and semi-arid regions, making these regions more humid. The theory was widely promoted in the 1870s as a justification for the settlement of the Great Plains, a region previously known as the "Great American Desert". It was also used to justify the expansion of wheatgrowing on marginal land in South Australia during the same period.

According to the theory, increased human settlement in the region and cultivation of soil would result in an increased rainfall over time, rendering the land more fertile and lush as the population increased. As later historical records of rainfall indicated, the theory was based on faulty evidence arising from brief climatological fluctuations. The theory was later refuted by climatologists and is regarded as a serious error. In South Australia, George Goyder warned as early as 1865, in his famous report on farming in the state, that rain would not follow the plow. Despite this, until further droughts in the 1880s, farmers talked of cultivating cereal crops up to the Northern Territory border. Today, however, grain crops do not grow further north than Quorn.

The result was eventually disaster for thousands and many abandoned farms in places like Eastern Colorado.  To some extent, the theory had a grain of truth - changes in land use do affect the climate.  For example, the loss of snow on Kilimanjaro is generally attributed (by non Al Gore types) to deforestation in the area.  But as is so often the case, the effects of man's land use tended to be more local (as with urban heat islands in cities) rather than regional, and ended up in this case being small compared to natural variations.

Because we give special powers to use force to the police that most of the rest of us do not have, the police need more scrutiny and accountability, not less.  However, the police tend to fight this accountability at every turn -- in particular, they tend to want to ban any filming of their public activities, even if they have to do it through violence.  Likely, this is because every time a video surfaces, it seems to contradict the cover story the police involved have agreed to.  I am all for mandatory surveillance of police.

Update: Here is a fun search.  Google:  "Video Contradicts Police Report" and see how many different hits you get.

Here is an amazing example of how far the state will go to protect entrenched competitors from new competition.  Because it is far more important to make absolutely, 100% sure (precautionary principle, you know) that no one is competing in the Minneapolis market without a license than it is to encourage volunteer-ism in the wake of a natural disaster.

Tree trimmers who work in Minneapolis need to be licensed with the city. It’s a regulation in place throughout many cities, and something Haege knows all about. He’s licensed in Hastings and several area cities. Since he doesn’t work in Minneapolis, he isn’t licensed there.

All that was moot, of course. He was just going to volunteer and was not charging residents for his services.

He had brought a bucket truck to get high if needed, and he brought a wood chipper to dispose of fallen trees. He and the volunteers got to work on homes where the resident didn’t have insurance.

“We were removing stuff so people could get out of their driveways and out of their doors,” he said. “The place was a pretty big disaster.”

What happened next shocked Haege.

A city inspector arrived at the scene. She told Haege he had to leave. Immediately.

“You have to leave right now,” the inspector told Haege. “You’re not licensed to be here.”

“I said, ‘I’m just a volunteer,’ and she didn’t believe me.”

Haege went back to his truck and got his volunteer paperwork. Still, that did little to get the inspector off his back.

“I don’t want to see you up here,” she told him.

“She just didn’t believe me,” he said.

A volunteer from the Urban Homeworks, who had been with Haege since he signed up to volunteer that morning, did his best to convince the inspector that Haege wasn’t charging for his services.

Residents then came out of their doors in his defense, telling the inspector that he had just performed work at their house and hadn’t charged them a dime. Still, the defense fell on deaf ears.

The inspector told him to get out of the city, so Haege left with the volunteer. As they were on their way back to the volunteer area, residents waved down Haege, pleading for help. He pulled over and helped get a tree out of the way for them.

Haege had no idea police officers were behind him in a sort of unofficial escort out of town. He said they stopped traffic for about two hours while they figured out what to do with him. At one point, officers threatened to throw him in jail, he said.

All the while, residents continued defending him, screaming in his defense.

Officers told him to leave. They told him he was going to receive a “hefty fine” in the mail, and that if he stopped on the way out, the fine would be doubled.

The other day I was reading an article on the crash of Air France flight 447, discussing recovery of the black box (two years after the crash).  It was suspected that the air speed measurement devices may have failed, thus impairing the automatic pilot, but it was not understood why the pilots were unable to fly the plane manually.  Was something else going wrong?  Did automatic systems, operating off bad data, override manual controls somehow?

The article said that the black box showed the plane went into a stall, and the pilots spent much of the fall pulling back on the yoke to regain altitude.  This made zero sense to me.  A stall occurs when the wing is angled to steeply.  The wing generates lift because the air on top of the wing must follow a longer curve than the air on the bottom of the wing, and thus must move at higher velocity.  This higher velocity results in lower pressures.  In effect, the plane is sucked up.  When the wing is too steeply angled, the air on the top of the wing breaks away from the surface, and lift is lost.

It is therefore absolutely fundamental in stall situations to drop the nose.  This does two things -- it decreases the wing angle out of stall territory, and it increases speed, which also increases lift.

Apparently, the experts are just as befuddled as I was reading the data.  Dropping the nose in a stall is on the first page of pilot 101.  This is not some arcane fact buried on page 876 of the textbook.  This is so basic I know it and I don't have a pilots license.  But apparently the pilots of 447 were yanking up on the nose through the whole long fall to Earth.

Megan McArdle responds to yet another call for government-enforced unbundling (or a la carte pricing) for cable TV.  I think she does a pretty good job in response, but I wanted to go in depth on a couple of issues.

First, it is interesting to me that the exact same people, typically on the Left, who want to unbundle cable TV are the same ones who angle for net neutrality, which in effect is government rules to enforce bundling of Internet services.  Which leads me to think this has less to do with consumer protection and more to do with the raw exercise of power to overturn free market solutions to problems.

Second, I think that unbundling would be a terrible solution for customers, particularly for those whose interests are focused and esoteric (e.g, they like the GLBT channel or whatever).  These folks think unblundling will get them cheaper rates for the one channel they want.  What it more likely will get them is fewer of those niche, esoteric channels.  I will simply repeat an earlier article I wrote four years ago on this topic:

I see that the drive to force cable companies to offer their basic cable package a la carte rather than as a bundle is gaining steam again.  This is the dumbest regulatory step imaginable, and will reduce the number of interesting niche choices on cable.

For some reason, it is terribly hard to convince people of this.  In fact, supporters of this regulation argue just the opposite.  They argue that this is a better plan for folks who only are passionate about, say, the kite-flying channel, because they only have to pay for the channel they want rather than all of basic cable to get this one station.   This is a fine theory, but it only works if the kite-flying channel still exists in the new regulatory regime.  Let me explain.

Clearly the kite-flying channel serves a niche market.  Not that many people are going to be interested enough in kite flying alone to pay $5 a month for it.  But despite this niche status, it may well make sense for the cable companies to add it to their basic package.  Remember that the basic package already attracts the heart of the market.  Between CNN and ESPN and the Discovery Channel and the History Channel, etc., the majority of the market already sees enough value in the package to sign on.

Let’s say the cable company wants to add a channel to their basic package, and they have two choices.  They have a sports channel they could add (let’s say there are already 5 other sports channels in the package) or they can add the Kite-flying channel.  Far more people are likely to watch the sports channel than the kite flying channel.  But in the current pricing regime, this is not necessarily what matters to the cable company.  Their concern is to get more people to sign up for the cable TV.  And it may be that everyone who could possibly be attracted to sports is already a subscriber, and a sixth sports channel would not attract any new subscribers.  It is entirely possible that a niche channel like the kite-flying channel will actually bring more incremental subscribers to the basic package than another sports channel, and thus be a more attractive addition to the basic package for the cable company.

But now let’s look at the situation if a la carte pricing was required.  In this situation, individual channels don’t support the package, but must stand on their own and earn revenue.  The cable company’s decision-making on adding an extra channel is going to be very different in this world.  In this scenario, they are going to compare the new sports channel with the Kite-flying channel based on how many people will sign up and pay for that standalone channel.  And in this case, a sixth (and probably seventh and eighth and ninth) sports channel is going to look better to them than the Kite-flying channel.   Niche channels that were added to bring greater reach to their basic cable package are going to be dropped in favor of more of what appeals to the majority.

I think about this all the time when I scan the dial on Sirius radio, which sells its services as one package rather than a la carte.  There are several stations that I always wonder, "does anyone listen to that?"  But Sirius doesn’t need another channel for the majority out at #300 — they need channels that will bring new niche audiences to the package.  So an Egyptian reggae channel may be more valuable as the 301st offering than a 20th sports channel.  This is what we may very likely be giving up if we continue down this road of regulating away cable package pricing.  Yeah, in a la carte pricing people who want just the kite-flying channel will pay less for it, but will it still be available?

Living in Phoenix I know a number of people who work for Apollo (University of Phoenix).  They have obviously been appalled by the Obama war on for-profit colleges and the egregiously-flawed report that came out last year.  Several have told me they have complained for a while that certain hedge funds were pushing this initiative in order to make money off of short positions on their stock.  I thought this was a bit paranoid, but now the accusation is coming from third parties, even those on the Left:

A proposed regulation from the Education Department threatens to devastate for-profit career or trade schools, but one thing is even more controversial than the regulation -- how it was crafted.

Education Department officials were encouraged and advised about the content of the regulation by a man who stood to make millions if it were issued.

"Wall Street investors were manipulating the regulatory process and Department of Education officials were letting them," charged Melanie Sloan of a liberal-leaning ethics watchdog called Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington....

Among others, Sloan is referring to Steven Eisman, a hedge fund manager and a figure in the book "The Big Short," who testified in the Senate against for-profit career or trade schools, attacking them as "fundamentally unsound."

At the same time, he was betting that the stocks of those companies would fall, a practice known as short selling. "Making sure that they were going to be defamed and that their value was going to be depressed," said Harry Alford, head of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, who worries about the schools because they serve many minority students.

Simultaneously, through emails and conference calls, Eisman was advising Education Department officials -- and one White House adviser -- in detail on how best to write the new regulation, which he estimated would reduce the schools' earnings by as much as 75 percent.

The proposed regulation from the administration is aimed at what are known as career or vocational schools. The rule would cut federal aid to programs where student debt levels are deemed to be too high and where students are struggling to repay their loans.

In other news, everyone seems A-OK with kids in not-for-profit universities running up $200,000 debts to get such lucrative, workplace-ready degrees as women's studies, comp. lit. and poetry.

I am trying to remember the name of a science fiction novel that came probably between 5 and 10 years ago.  The novel centers around a man who is strongly OCD (or Aspergers maybe), who tries to closely adhere to a very set process and schedule for his life, else reality will "unravel," bringing both small and large changes in his life (ie he finds his home somewhere else).  It turns out that what is in fact happening is that he can jump between parallel universes, and eventually he is called on to use this skill to save all the universes from some catastrophe.  Does that ring any bells with anyone?  I know a couple of kids who are old enough to understand they have similar traits that might appreciate them at the center of a novel.

By the way, I seem to remember Orson Scott Card (?)  has a novel where the main character was OCD, where folks who had certain compulsions were treated as prophets.  Can't remember the name of that one either.  I remember the protagonist would trace cracks on the floor when she got upset.

Update: Found it:  Resonance.  Thanks to commenter Joe Martin.  He has a link to it in the Baen free library.

Well, I hesitate to recommend this movie, because the first three people I told about this as if it was some kind of clever discovery of mine said "Oh, yeah, loved it, saw it years ago."  So maybe everyone else saw this movie a decade ago and I just missed it.  But I really enjoyed an older Christopher Nolan (Inception) directed movie called Memento.    It stars Guy Pierce (LA Confidential, one of my favorite movies) and Carrie-Anne Moss (Matrix).

The movie is about a man trying to get revenge on his wife's murderer.  The only problem is that somehow, from roughly the point in time his wife died, he lost all of his short term memory.  So he can never remember things more than a few minutes.  He has to trust notes he has written (including tattoos on his body) for clues that he pursues.

The clever part of the movie is that it is shot backwards.  Well, I don't mean everyone walks backwards.  It is shot in a series of 3-10 minute clips with normal forward action, but then the clips are reassembled in the film in reverse order.  The end of each scene is therefore usually the beginning of the previous one  (though there is a second thread in black and white that moves through the movie in a slightly different way).

This seems crazy and confusing, until you realize that at any point in the movie, you are in exactly the same place as the protagonist - you know nothing about the past, or even, in the start of the clip, how you got there.  Its not a casual movie that you can watch while you are doing something else, it requires some concentration, but it worked well for me.   The most incredible thing is that despite the fact you know how it all comes out, the movie is incredibly tense and exciting -- you don't know why it came out that way, and the movie is full of twists and turns.

Postscript: There was a movie last year of completely different style -  straight forward plot line, uneven acting, more of an action movie - that had a sortof kindof similar plot.  The movie was called Vengence, and it was about a man who was losing his memory and slowly degenerating trying to find his daughter's killer.  It is a totally different movie, but cribs some of the Memento plot devices, such as labelled Polaroid pictures as a memory device.  It is pretty good, particularly for fans of Asian-style action movies, and is directed by Johnnie To.

Kevin Drum doesn't buy the regime uncertainty argument as a partial explanation of the slow recovery.

Here's what's remarkable: Carter, a law professor at Yale, apparently never once bothered to ask this guy just what regulations he's talking about. Is he concerned with general stuff like the healthcare law? Or something highly specific to his industry? Or what?

Regardless, I've heard this kind of blowhard conversation too often to take it seriously. Sure, it's possible this guy manufactures canisters for nuclear waste or something, and there's a big regulatory change for nuclear waste storage that's been in the works for years and has been causing everyone in the industry heartburn for as long as they can remember. But the simple fact is that regulatory uncertainty is no greater today than it's ever been. Financialuncertainty is high, but the Obama adminstration just hasn't been overhauling regs that affect the cost of new workers any more than usual. The only substantial exception is the new healthcare law, and if you oppose it that's fine. But it was passed over a year ago and its effects are pretty easy to project.

First, the costs of the health care law are NOT easy to project, and are made even harder when your company might or might not get waivers from certain provisions.    Second, he seems to forget cap and trade, first by law and then by executive fiat; the NLRB's new veto power over corporate relocations it exercised with Boeing; the absurdly turbulent tax/regulatory/permitting regime in the energy field, and particularly oil and gas.  How about trillion dollar stimulus projects, that until very recently Obama was still talking about replicating (and Krugman begs for to this day).  I could go on and on.  This is spoke just like a person who never had to run a business.

Further, I wrote this in the comments section:

I think you are both right and wrong.  I am sure the discussion about this is to some extent overblown.  But you are thinking about business and hiring much too narrowly.

You seem to have a mental model of business showing up at the door, and someone turning that business down because they don't want to hire an employee to serve it (or out of sheer petulance because Fox News told them to sit on their hands, lol).  You find it unlikely anyone would refuse the business, and so do I.

But I run a small to medium size business, and a lot of hiring decisions don't work that way.    I do have some situations that fit your model - I have a campground that is really busy this year, so we hired more people to serve the volume.   No problem.

But most of my hiring decisions are effectively investments.  I am going to create a new position, pay money to train that person, and pay their wage for a while in advance of demand.  Or I am going to open a new site or department or location and make a lot of investment, and the return on investment may be very sensitive to small changes in labor or regulatory costs.

For our business, with labor costs over 50% of costs, the issue is definitely labor costs.  Our pre-tax margins are in the 6-7% range.  So if labor costs are 60% of revenues, then a 10% change in labor costs might wipe out the margin entirely, and a much smaller change in costs might flip the investment from making sense to not making sense.

We run a seasonal business with part-time workers who are older and on Medicare.  Regulations about exactly how much we will have to pay under Obamacare have not been written, so we have no idea how much our employment costs will go up in 2014, so we sit and wait.  I have cancelled two planned campground construction projects in the last 6 months because we have no freaking idea if they will make money.

If I am having trouble with just this one law figuring out whether to make investments, what are, say, oil companies doing in evaluating investments when they have absolutely no idea what their taxes will be, whether they will be permitted or not to drill, or whether they will be subject to cap and trade?

One other thought, it strikes me that there is a lot of good scholarship that suggests that the Great Depression was extended by just this kind of regime uncertainty.  Now, of course, the proposed structural changes to the economy being proposed at the time were more radical than anything on the table today.  The National Industrial Recovery Act was essentially an experiment in Mussolini-style economic corporatism, until most of it was struck down by the Supreme Court.   Nothing so radical is being proposed (unless you work in health care).

Look, I know the Left has convinced itself that only consumer demand matters in an economy, but business investment has simply got to matter in a recovery.   If the returns on future investments are harder to predict, and therefore riskier, businesses are going to apply a higher hurdle rate to new investments, meaning they don't stop entirely, but do invest less.

One interesting may to confirm this some day would be to look back and see if larger corporations with political access invested more than smaller ones or ones with less access.  Did GE, who clearly can get whatever it wants right now from the government, invest more than a small company or even than Exxon, which is on the political outs?  If so, this in my mind would confirm the regime uncertainty hypothesis, because it means that the companies doing most of the investing were the ones confident that they could shape the mandates coming out of the government in their favor.

Beyond regime uncertainty, if you want to talk about Obama and the recovery, you have to mention that a trillion dollars was diverted from private hands to public hands.  Does anyone believe that taking a trillion dollars out of whatever investments private actors would have used the money for and diverting most of it to help maintain government payrolls is really the way to increase the strength and productivity of the economy?

My column this week in Forbes is about the declining rate of entrepreneurship and startups in the US.

A recent study by the Beauru of Labor Statistics confirmed a potentially disturbing trend — that the number of new startup businesses in the United States has declined since 2006, and the number of jobs created by those startups has been in decline for over a decade.

This is not just a result of the recent recession.  These declines pre-date the current recession, and besides, startup activity has always held up well in past recessions as unemployed workers try entrepreneurship as a path back to prosperity.

There are likely a myriad of economic and demographic reasons for this decline, but certainly the growth of government power in the economy must be seen as a major contributor.  Government intervention in commerce nearly always favors large companies over small, even if that was not its specific intent, for a couple of reasons:

1. Increasingly complex and pervasive regulations on everything from labor practices to salt content tend to add a compliance cost burden that is more easily born by larger companies
2. Large, entrenched competitors are becoming more facile at manipulating government to create barriers to competition from upstart companies with different business models.

The role of government in throttling entrepreneurship has been evident for years, in the enormous differentials between US and European business startup rates.  Historically, the US has had entrepeneurship rates 3-4 times higher than in the large European industrial countries, due in large part to the barriers these latter countries place in the way of business creation.  But the US, with its current bi-partisan drive towards a corporate state, may soon be engaged in a race to the bottom with these other countries.

I go on to discuss each of these two points in more depth.

I read this article three times to see if it made any sense, and it still does not, except as an incredibly ballsy attempt by a member in good standing of the corporate state to get more revenues out of its customers by government fiat.

A major shift in business is occurring at Arizona Public Service Co. and other regulated utilities in the state.

APS, Southwest Gas and other utilities are beginning to ask regulators to "decouple" their prices from the volume of their sales, which proponents said will encourage conservation.

If approved by the five-member Arizona Corporation Commission, decoupling would allow APS to collect a certain amount of revenue per customer regardless of how much energy was sold.

It would wipe out utilities' incentive to sell more power and be akin to a fast-food restaurant paying loyal customers to go on a diet.

Wow, what a fabulous business concept!   It's obviously a holdover from some horrible past wherein we pay for services based on, you know, actually getting those services.  End the tyranny of giving consumers something in return for their money!  In the modern corporate state, everyone knows a corporation earns revenue in proportion to how much influence it has with the government, and how much that government can be cajoled to let the company take by fiat from consumers.  Silly old me, actually charging people in my business for camping when they actually camp.  I should have been running to the government to get them to let me charge everyone in the country whether they camp or not.  By all means, let's let McDonald's decouple taking your money from actually giving you a Big Mac in return.

Seriously, beyond the fact that this concept is obscene, it makes zero sense even against its stated goal of conservation.   They are basically talking about shifting the consumer's marginal cost for electricity to zero.  How in the hell is that going to spur conservation?  Charge me the same amount each month for gas whether I drive or not, and that is going to cause me to drive less??

Apparently, in the weird mental world of utilities, conservation only results form utility subsidies of  efficient appliances.  So the big benefit here is utilities can somehow better afford their subsidies for more efficient appliances.  Left unexplained is why anyone would want to buy even a subsidized such device once their marginal cost for electricity goes to zero.  This is such a typical government-think, assigning much more value to government intervention and choice of winners in balancing supply and demand than they do to the operation of markets and prices.

Here is an idea -- just freaking stop subsidizing this stuff.  See, problem solved.   We now no longer need a new pricing model.  Either a conservation makes sense for the end user to invest in or it doesn't.  Here is an example they cite

An example of how APS promotes efficiency is found at the 250-student Metropolitan Arts Institute in Phoenix, which replaced $23,000 in lights last year. APS contributed $20,000 to the project.

The school said it saves about $2,000 a month in energy costs with the new lights and recovered its costs for the project in two months.

The new lights use less energy and produce less heat, reducing the air-conditioning needed.

Why the hell is our utility using my money to subsidize this particular institution?  If the numbers are right, the investment, without a subsidy has a 12-month payback.   Very respectable.  So why does this even need to be subsidized in the first place? Why is my money needed to give the Arts Institute a 1.5 month payback instead of a 12-month payback?

This is a total ripoff.  I can't possibly believe they are even considering giving this to these guys.