Coyote Blog

Bob Murphy on occupational licensing, via Cafe Hayek

It is a paradox of our age that the interventionists think the public is too stupid to consult Angie’s List before hiring a lawyer, and so they need politicians to weed out the really bad ones by requiring law licenses. Yet, who determines whether a person (often a lawyer!) is qualified to become a politician? Why, the same group of citizens who were too stupid to pick their own lawyers.

Kevin Drum simply does not understand why Wall Street might be piling into broadband stocks despite proposed "tough new regulations."  He posits a number of hypotheses -- that Wall Street expected the rules to be worse than they turned out to be.  But this can't be it because the hundreds of pages of rules are still a secret.  He also hypothesizes there might be some nefarious secret loophole buried in the rules Wall Street knows about but we don't.

This is crazy!  How can a reasonably bright person like Drum who writes about the political economy not understand the issue of regulatory capture?  Seriously, I have always figured that the Left, which has a seemingly infinite appetite for regulation, must favor regulation because they find the benefits to out-weight the crony-ist downsides.  Is it really possible Drum is unfamiliar with the downsides altogether, or is he just being coy?

Here is what regulation, particularly utility-style regulation, tends to do -- it locks in current business models and competitors.  It makes it really hard for new entrants to challenge incumbents with innovative new business models or approaches, because regulations have been written based on the old business model and did not take the new one in account.  So a new entrant must begin business by getting regulators to allow their new model, which never happens because by this time incumbents have buildings full of lobbyists aimed at the regulatory process.  Go ask Tesla and Uber and Lyft about how easy it is to enter a heavily regulated business even with a superior new business model.

This is particularly true in the technology world.  The biggest threat to incumbency is someone with a new technology or approach to the technology.  Don't believe me?  I suggest you go to the offices of Netscape or AOL or Lycos or Borders or Circuit City or Radio Shack and interview them about the security of their multi-billion dollar businesses in the face of new online technologies.  At best, regulators put a huge speed bump in the way of competitors, costing them time and money to get their alternative business model approved.  At worst, regulators block new competitors altogether.

I will give you a thought experiment.  Let's say these exact same rules were adopted in the year 2000, when AOL and Earthlink dial-up ruled the internet access world.  Would cable and satellite and DSL have grown as quickly?  I can see the regulators now -- "hey, all the rules specify phone dial up.  There's nothing here about cable TV.  Sorry [Cox, Comcast, whoever] you are going to have to wait until we can write new rules.

The other thing that happens with utility-style regulation is that companies in the business tend to get their returns guaranteed.  Made a bad investment in a competitive market?  Well good luck getting customers to pay extra to bail you out from your bad decision when they have other options.  But what happens when your local power company wastes $10 billion on a nuclear plant that never opens -- it gets built into your rate base!

In the cast of broadband, they are locked in what business school students would see as a classic supply chain battle.  Upstream companies like Netflix supply content via downstream broadband companies.  Consumers are only willing to pay a certain amount for this content, so the upstream and downstream fight a lot over who gets what share of that consumer $.    This happens everywhere in the business world, from Cable TV to oil refining to selling TV's at Wal-Mart.  There is a real danger that broadband will lose this fight in the future -- but not now.  Regulated industries never die, they appeal to their regulators for help.

As of yesterday, Wall Street is looking at broadband companies and realizing that they are now largely immune from competition and some level of minimum returns are likely now gauranteed forever.  Consumers should hate this, but what's not to love for Wall Street?

Postscript:  Kevin Drum describes the new regulation this way:  "Basically, under Wheeler's proposal, cable companies would no longer be able to sign special deals to provide certain companies with faster service in return for higher payments."  This is a bit like describing the Patriot Act as a law to force people to take their shoes off at the airport.  Yes, it does that narrow thing, but it does a LOT else.  The proposal is hundreds of freaking pages long.  It does not take hundreds of pages to do the narrow little niche thing Drum (like most neutrality supporters) wants.

This Administration has cleverly taken this one tiny concern people have and have used it as an excuse to do a major regulatory takeover of the Internet.  This is a huge Trojan Horse. But I have already ranted about the details of that and you can read that here.

I am just amazed at how many otherwise smart people are rooting for the government to regulate the Internet:

According to a pair of new reports from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, the FCC chairman Tom Wheeler will soon do what some net neutrality advocates have been clamoring for for ages: Try to officially reclassify internet service as a telecommunications service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. That'd effectively put internet access in the same bucket as landline telephone service, which is treated as a public utility in the United States, and would basically ban the paid prioritization of certain web sites and services over others....

We -- along with many of you -- will be watching the outcome of that vote with bated breath. For that matter, so will representatives and head honchoes of the country's internet service providers. A vote in favor of reclassification means that all of those companies will eventually have to deal with way more intense regulatory scrutiny, and do away with plans to treat some web-centric companies with deep pockets as first-class citizens of the internet while the rest of us wait longer for other stuff to load.

So, out of the fear in the last sentence, that some people will get better service than others -- something that, oh by the way, has never really happened so is entirely hypothetical -- you are urging on a regulatory regime originally designed for land-line phone companies, a technology that basically went unchanged for decades at a time.  The phones that were in my home at my birth in 1962 were identical to the one in my dorm room when AT&T was broken up in 1982.  Jesus, we are turning the Internet into a public utility -- name three innovations from an American public utility in the last 40 years.  Name one.

And all you free-speech advocates, do you really think the Feds won't use this as a back-door to online censorship?  We are talking about the same agency that went into a tizzy when Janet Jackson may have accidentally on purpose shown a nipple on TV.  All that is good with TV today-- The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Arrested Development, etc. etc. etc. results mainly from the fact that cable is able to avoid exactly the kind of freaking regulation you want to impose on the Internet.

Here is my official notice -- you have been warned, time and again.  There will be no allowing future statements of "I didn't mean that" or "I didn't expect that" or "that's not what I intended."   There is no saying that you only wanted this one little change, that you didn't buy into all the other mess that is coming.   You let the regulatory camel's nose in the tent and the entire camel is coming inside.  I guarantee it.

Update:   Apparently the 1934 Telecommunications Act imposes a legal obligation on phone carriers to complete calls no matter who they are from.  Sounds familiar, huh?  Just like net neutrality.  It turns out this law is one of the major barriers preventing phone companies from offering innovative services to block spam calls.

Closely on the heals of their victory in an asset forfeiture case in New York, the Institute of Justice (IJ) successfully fought the state licensing requirement for hair braiders in Texas.

A 2013 press statement on the Institute for Justice’s website described Brantley’s frustration with the criteria: â€œThis means that Isis must spend 2,250 hours in barber school, pass four exams, and spend thousands of dollars on tuition and a fully-equipped barber college she doesn’t need, all to teach a 35-hour hair-braiding curriculum,” the statement read.

U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks on Monday seemed to agree with Brantley’s concerns that the requirements for hair-braiding entrepreneurs were superfluous. Sparks ruled that the Texas laws were unconstitutional and “absent” a rational connection with Brantley’s intended marketplace, the Associated Press reports.

“I fought for my economic liberty because I believe there is a lot of hope for young people who seek to earn an honest living,” Brantley said in a press statement. “This decision means that I will now be able to teach the next generation of African hair braiders at my own school.”

Brink Lindsey of Cato is on the topic "If you could wave a magic wand and make one or two policy or institutional changes to brighten the U.S. economy’s long-term growth prospects, what would you change and why?"  I am by no means in the distinguished academic company that were invited to contribute, but I thought it was an interesting topic.  Here is my (uninvited) contribution.

The question of skills and the American workforce is typically tackled in only one direction:  that we need more high-skilled workers to meet the challenge of emerging industries and business models that are increasingly driven by technology.  A recent report by the OECD, and as summarized in the New York Times, is a typical example of this concern.  As Eduardo Porter writes in the Times:

To believe an exhaustive new report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the skill level of the American labor force is not merely slipping in comparison to that of its peers around the world, it has fallen dangerously behind.

The report is based on assessments of literacy, math skills and problem-solving using information technology that were performed on about 160,000 people age 16 to 65 in 22 advanced nations of the O.E.C.D., plus Russia and Cyprus. Five thousand Americans were assessed. The results are disheartening....

“Unless there is a significant change of direction,” the report notes, “the work force skills of other O.E.C.D. countries will overtake those of the U.S. just at the moment when all O.E.C.D. countries will be facing (and indeed are already facing) major and fast-increasing competitive challenges from emerging economies.”

A lot of head scratching goes on as to why, when the income premium is so high for gaining skills, there are not more people seeking to gain them.  School systems are often blamed, which is fair in part (if I were to be given a second magic wand to wave, it would be to break up the senescent government school monopoly with some kind of school choice system).   But a large portion of the population apparently does not take advantage of the educational opportunities that do exist.  Why is that?

When one says "job skills," people often think of things like programming machine tools or writing Java code.  But for new or unskilled workers -- the very workers we worry are trapped in poverty in our cities -- even basic things we take for granted like showing up on-time reliably and working as a team with others represent skills that have to be learned.  Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, despite his Princeton education, still learned many of his first real-world job skills working at McDonald's.  In fact, back in the 1970's, a survey found that 10% of Fortune 500 CEO's had their first work experience at McDonald's.

Part of what we call "the cycle of poverty" is due not just to a lack of skills, but to a lack of understanding of or appreciation for such skills that can cross generations.   Children of parents with few skills or little education can go on to achieve great things -- that is the American dream after all.  But in most of these cases, kids who are successful have parents who were, if not educated, at least knowledgeable about the importance of education, reliability, and teamwork -- understanding they often gained via what we call unskilled work.   The experience gained from unskilled work is a bridge to future success, both in this generation and the next.

But this road to success breaks down without that initial unskilled job.   Without a first, relatively simple job it is almost impossible to gain more sophisticated and lucrative work.  And kids with parents who have little or no experience working are more likely to inherit their parent's cynicism about the lack of opportunity than they are to get any push to do well in school, to work hard, or to learn to cooperate with others.

Unfortunately, there seem to be fewer and fewer opportunities for unskilled workers to find a job.  As I mentioned earlier, economists scratch their heads and wonder why there are not more skilled workers despite high rewards for gaining such skills.  I am not an economist, I am a business school grad.   We don't worry about explaining structural imbalances so much as look for the profitable opportunities they might present.  So a question we business folks might ask instead is:  If there are so many under-employed unskilled workers rattling around in the economy, why aren't entrepreneurs crafting business models to exploit this fact?

A few months back, I was at my Harvard Business School 25th reunion.  Over the weekend, they had dozens of lectures and programs on what is being researched and taught nowadays at the school.  I can't remember a single new business model discussed that relied on unskilled workers.

Is this just the way it is now?  Have the Internet and computers and robotics and complex genomics made unskilled work obsolete?  I don't think so.  I have been running a business for over a decade that employs more than 300 people in unskilled positions.  I will confess that the other day I came home tired from work and told my wife, "Honey, in my next company, I have to find a business that doesn't require employees."  But that despair doesn't come from a lack of opportunities to deliver value to customers with relatively unskilled labor.  And it doesn't come from any inherent issues I might have running a large people-driven service company -- in fact, I will say there has been absolutely nothing in my business life that has been more rewarding than seeing a person who has never had anything but unskilled jobs discover that they can become managers and learn more complex tasks.

The reason for my despair comes from a single source:  the government is making it increasingly difficult and costly to hire unskilled workers, while simultaneously creating a culture among new workers that short-circuits their ability to make progress.

The costs that government taxes and rules add to labor have been discussed many times, but usually individually.  Their impact is clearer when we discuss them as a whole.  Let's take California, because that state is one I know well.  To begin, the minimum wage is $9 (going to $10 an hour in 2016).  To that we have to add taxes and workers compensation premiums, both of which are high because because California does little to police fraud in unemployment and injury claims.  For us, these add another $3.15 an hour.  We also now have to add in the Obamacare employer mandate, which at a minimum of $3000 per full-time employee (accepting the penalty is cheaper than paying for health care) adds another $1.50 an hour.  And the new California paid sick leave mandate adds another 45 cents an hour.  So, looking just at core requirements, we are already up to a minimum of $14.10 an hour, less than 2/3 of which actually shows up in the employee's paycheck.

But these direct costs don't even begin cover the additional fixed costs of hiring employees.  We pay a payroll company thousands of dollars a year to make sure that regulations on taxes and paychecks are followed.  We spend so much time making sure our written plans and documentation on safety meet the requirements of OSHA and its California state equivalent that we barely have the capacity to actually focus on safety.  In California we have to have complex systems in place to make sure our employees don't work through their lunch break, that they have the right sort of chair and that they sit in them frequently enough, that they follow all the right procedures when the temperature outside goes over 85 degrees, that they get paid for sick leave and get their job back after extended medical leave.... the list goes on and on.

In a smaller company, we don't have lawyers and a large human resource staff.  In fact, we tend to have little staff at all.  If some new compliance issue arises -- which happens about every day the California legislature is in session -- the owner (me) has to figure out a solution.  In one year I literally spent more personal time on compliance with a single regulatory issue -- implementing increasingly detailed and draconian procedures so I could prove to the State of California that my employees were not working over their 30 minute lunch breaks -- than I did thinking about expanding the business or getting new contracts.

Towards the end of last year I was making a speech to a group of business school students, and someone asked me what my biggest accomplishment had been over the prior year.  I told them it was probably getting the company down from hundreds of full-time workers to less than 50, converting everyone to part-time.  And it was a huge effort, involving new systems and a number of capital investments to accommodate more staff working fewer hours.  And it had a huge payout, saving us hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in Obamacare penalties and compliance costs.  But come on!  How depressing is it that my biggest business accomplishment was not growing the business or coming up with a new customer service but in cutting the working hours for good employees?  But that is the reality of trying to run a service business today.  The business couldn't be profitable until we'd adjusted our practices to these new regulations, so there was no point in even thinking about growth until we had done so.

Labor-based business models that work at a $7 or $8 total labor cost may well not work at $15, and they certainly are not going to grow very fast if the people responsible for seeking out growth opportunities are instead consumed in a morass of legal compliance issues.  But there is perhaps an even more damaging impact of government interventions, and that is to the culture of work.  I will confess in advance I don't have comprehensive data to prove my hypothesis, but let me tell a couple of stories.

Until 2010, we never had an employee sue us.  We had over 8 years hiring 350 seasonal workers a year, mostly older retired folks, without any sort of legal issues.  Since 2010, we have had eight employee suits threatened or filed, all of which we have won but at a legal cost of $20-$25 thousand each (truly Pyrrhic victories).  So what changed around 2010?  Well, our work force composition changed a lot.  Before that time, we typically hired older retired folks, because the seasonal nature of the job is simply not very appropriate for a younger person trying to support themselves without other means (like retirement or Social Security).   However, after 2009 when a lot of younger folks were losing their traditional jobs, they began applying to our company.  Our work force shifted younger, which actually excited me because I felt it would help us in attracting a younger demographic to the campgrounds we operate.    But all eight of these legal actions were by these new, younger employees.  I asked one person who was suing us over what was a trivial slight, really a misunderstanding, why they did not just call me (my personal number is in their employee handbook) to fix it.  They said that if I had fixed it, they would have lost the opportunity to sue.

I mentioned earlier that we had struggled to comply with California meal break law.   The problem was that my workers needed extra money, and so begged me to be able to work through lunch so they could earn a half-hour more pay each day.  They said they would sign a paper saying they had agreed to this.  Little did I know that this was a strategy devised by a local attorney who understood meal break litigation better than I.  What he knew, but I didn't, was that based on new case law, a company had to get the employee's signature every day, not just once, to avoid the meal break penalties.  The attorney advised them they could get the money for working lunch AND they could sue later for more money (which he would get a cut of).  Which is exactly what they did, waiting until November to sue so they could get some extra money to pay for Christmas bills.  This is why -- believe it or not -- it is now a firing offense at our company to work through lunch in California.

Hopefully you see my concern.   I fear that we have trained a whole generation that the way one gets ahead is not to work hard and gain new skills but to seek out and exploit opportunities to file lawsuits.  That the way to work in an organization is not to learn to manage the inevitable frictions that result from different sorts of people working together but to sue at the first hint that you have been dissed.  As an aside, I think this sort of litigiousness, both of employees and customers, is yet another reason employers are reluctant to hire low-skilled employees.  If as a business owner one is absolutely liable for any knuckle-headed thing your most junior employee might utter, no matter how clear you are in your policies and actions that such behavior is not tolerated, then how likely are you to hire a high-school dropout with no work experience?

Is it any surprise that most entrepreneurs are pursuing business models where they leverage revenues via technology and a relatively small, high-skill workforce?  Uber and Lyft at first seem to buck this trend, with their thousands of drivers.  But in fact they prove the rule.  Uber and Lyft are very very careful to define themselves and their service in a way that all those drivers don't work for them.  I would go so far to say that if Uber were forced to actually put all of those drivers on their payroll, and deal with they myriad of labor compliance issues, their model would fall apart

We cannot address the skill gap unless people have entry level, low-skill-tolerant jobs to take the first steps up the ladder of success.  If the government continues on its current course, it will become impossible to run a business that employs unskilled workers.  The value of the work performed will simply not justify the cost.  We may be concerned about income inequality today, but if we kill off the profitability of employing unskilled workers, then we are going to be left with a true two-class society -- those with high-skill jobs and those on government assistance --and few options for moving from one to the other.

The Business Secretary of the UK is desperately worried that when travelling to other countries, Brits will encounter a different selection of Netflix programming from what they are used to at home.  This trivial issue seems to demand a whole new regulatory and copyright regime:

Vince Cable will risk a clash with the film and music industries on Tuesday by calling for the creation of a single EU market for digital services such as Netflix.

The Business Secretary will say in a speech in Brussels that such services should offer the same content in all EU member states, for services paid for in one country to be available in the same form in all countries and for pricing offers to be replicated across the continent.

At present Netflix and Spotify, which operates a subscription streaming service for music, offers different catalogues at different prices depending on where the customer is located.

Harmonising such services across the EU would require copyright holders to change the way they license their material, which is currently carefully segmented for different geographic markets to maximise sales

This article on bad bipartisan energy laws and regulations from Master Resource brought back some old memories of the 1970s.

Folks who are at all economically literate understand the role that government price controls (specifically price caps) had on gasoline shortages in the 1970s.  When there was a supply shock via the Arab oil embargo, prices were not allowed to rise to match supply and demand.  As in the case of all such price control situations, shortages and queuing resulted.

It is too bad in a way that most folks today can't really remember the gas lines of 1973 and again in 1978.  It was my job in 1978 as the new driver in the family to go wait in line for gas for all the family cars.  I wasted hours and hours sitting in gas lines. I wonder if anyone has every computed the economic value of the time lost to Americans sitting in gas lines because politicians did not want the price to rise by 20 cents.

A number of my friends who knew my dad was an Exxon executive were surprised at my waiting in lines, and wondered why we didn't get some sort of secret access to gas.  But my family waited in lines like everything else.

Well, almost like everyone else.  Because of my dad's position, we did have a bit of information most people did not have, at least in the first shock of 1973.  It was not a secret, it was just totally unreported in the media.  The key was the knowledge of a piece of Congressional legislation called the Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act of 1973.  It had an enormous impact on exacerbating the urban gas lines, but either out of a general ignorance or else a media/academic desire not to make government regulation look bad, it is as unknown today as it was unreported in 1973.

What the law did was this -- it mandated that oil companies distribute gasoline geographically in the US in the same proportion that it was sold in the prior year.  So if they sold x% in area Y last year before the embargo, x% must be distributed to area Y this year after the embargo.  I can't remember the exact concern, but Congress had some fear that oil companies would somehow respond to price signals in a way that caused gasoline allocations to hose someone somewhere.

Anyway, the effect was devastating, probably even worse than the effect of price controls.  The reason was that while Congress forced gasoline supply distribution patterns to remain the same as the prior year (in classic directive 10-289 style), demand patterns had changed a lot.  Specifically, with the fear that gas might not be available over the road and looming economic problems, people cancelled their summer long-distance driving trips.

Everyone stayed home and didn't drive the Interstates cross-country.  So there was little demand for gas at the stations that served these routes.  But by law, oil companies had to keep delivering gasoline to these typically rural stations.  So as urban drivers fumed sitting in gas lines for hours and hours, many rural locations were awash in gas.  Populist Congressmen berated oil companies in the press for the urban gas shortages and lines, all while it was their stupid, ill-considered laws that created a lot of the problem.

So this was the fact that should have been public, but was not: That instead of sitting in urban gas lines for four hours, one could drive 30 minutes into the countryside and find it much easier.  Which is what we did, a number of times.

By the way, it was about this time that I read Hedrick Smith's great book "The Russians."  It was, for the time, a nearly unique look at the life of ordinary Russians under Soviet communism.  I wish the book were still in print (I would love to see one of the free market think tanks do a reissue, at least on Kindle).  Anyway, about 80% of the book seemed to be about how individual Russians dealt with constant shortages and ubiquitous queuing.  It seemed that a lot of the innovation in the general populace was channeled into just these concerns.  What a waste.  Dealing with the 1970s gas lines and shortages is about the closest I have ever come to the life described in that book.

I reported a while back about the apparent (from all the media angst over "gridlock") horrendous shortage of laws.  Well the California legislature is stepping in to the breach, passing over 900 new laws over the last year.  Our company is steadily exiting California because we have no desire to learn to comply with 900 new laws a year, but obviously many of you are simply begging to be legislated and regulated more so you are welcome to rush into the breach.

Arnold Kling on the recent financial crisis:

1. The facts are that one can just as easily blame the financial crash on an attempted tightening of regulation. That is, in the process of trying to rein in bank risk-taking by adopting risk-based capital regulations, regulators gave preference to highly-rated mortgage-backed securities, which in turn led to the manufacturing of such securities out of sub-prime loans.

2. The global imbalances that many of us thought were a bigger risk factor than the housing bubble did not in fact blow up the way that we thought that they would. The housing bubble blew up instead.

What he is referring to is a redefinition by governments in the Basel accords of how capital levels at banks should be calculated when determining capital sufficiency.  I will oversimplify here, but basically it categorized some assets as "safe" and some as "risky".  Those that were risky had their value cut in half for purposes of capital calculations, while those that were "safe" had their value counted at 100%.  So if a bank invested a million dollars in safe assets, that would count as a million dollar towards its capital requirements, but would count only $500,000 towards those requirements if it were invested in risky assets.  As a result, a bank that needed a billion dollars in capital would need a billion of safe assets or two billion of risky assets.

Well, this obviously created a strong incentive for banks to invest in assets deemed by the government as "safe".  Which of course was the whole point -- if we are going to have taxpayer-backed deposit insurance and bank bailouts, the prices of that is getting into banks' shorts about the risks they are taking with their investments.  This is the attempted tightening of regulation to which Kling refers.  Regulators were trying for tougher, not weaker standards.

But any libertarian could tell you the problem that is coming here -- the regulatory effort was substituting the risk judgement of thousands or millions of people (individual bank and financial investors) for the risk judgement of a few regulators.  There is no guarantee, in fact no reason to believe, the judgement of these regulators is any better than the judgement of the banks.  Their incentives might be different, but there is also not any guarantee the regulators' incentives are better (the notion they are driven by the "public good" is a cozy myth that never actually occurs in reality).

Anyway, what assets did the regulators choose as "safe"?  Again, we will simplify, but basically sovereign debt and mortgages (including the least risky tranches of mortgage-backed debt).  So you are a bank president in this new regime.  You only have enough capital to meet government requirements if you get 100% credit for your investments, so it must be invested in "safe" assets.  What do you tell your investment staff?  You tell them to go invest the money in the "safe" asset that has the highest return.

And for most banks, this was mortgage-backed securities.  So, using the word Brad DeLong applied to deregulation, there was an "orgy" of buying of mortgage-backed securities.  There was simply enormous demand.  You hear stories about fraud and people cooking up all kinds of crazy mortgage products and trying to shove as many people as possible into mortgages, and here is one reason -- banks needed these things.  For the average investor, most of us stayed out.   In the 1980's, mortgage-backed securities were a pretty good investment for individuals looking for a bit more yield, but these changing regulations meant that banks needed these things, so the prices got bid up (and thus yields bid down) until they only made sense for the financial institutions that had to have them.

It was like suddenly passing a law saying that the only food people on government assistance could buy with their food stamps was oranges and orange derivatives (e.g. orange juice).  Grocery stores would instantly be out of oranges and orange juice.  People around the world would be scrambling to find ways to get more oranges to market.  Fortunes would be made by clever people who could find more oranges.  Fraud would likely occur as people watered down their orange derivatives or slipped in some Tang.  Those of us not on government assistance would stay away from oranges and eat other things, since oranges were now incredibly expensive and would only be bought at their current prices by folks forced to do so.  Eventually, things would settle down as everyone who could do so started to grow oranges. And all would be fine again, that is until there was a bad freeze and the orange crop failed.

Government regulation -- completely well-intentioned -- had created a mono-culture.  The diversity of investment choices that might be present when every bank was making its own asset risk decisions was replaced by a regime where just a few regulators picked and chose the assets.  And like any biological mono-culture, the ecosystem might be stronger for a while if those choices were good ones, but it made the whole system vulnerable to anything that might undermine mortgages.  When the housing market got sick (and as Kling says government regulation had some blame there as well), the system was suddenly incredibly vulnerable because it was over-invested in this one type of asset.  The US banking industry was a mono-culture through which a new disease ravaged the population.

Postscript:  So with this experience in hand, banks moved out of mortage-backed securities and into the last "safe" asset, sovereign debt.  And again, bank presidents told their folks to get the best possible yield in "safe" assets.  So banks loaded up on sovereign debt, in particular increasing the demand for higher-yield debt from places like, say, Greece.  Which helps to explain why the market still keeps buying up PIIGS debt when any rational person would consider these countries close to default.  So these countries continue their deficit spending without any market check, because financial institutions keep buying this stuff because it is all they can buy.  Which is where we are today, with a new monoculture of government debt, which government officials swear is the last "safe" asset.  Stay tuned....

Postscript #2:  Every failure and crisis does not have to be due to fraud and/or gross negligence.  Certainly we had fraud and gross negligence, both by private and public parties.  But I am reminded of a quote which I use all the time but to this day I still do not know if it is real.  In the great mini-series "From the Earth to the Moon", the actor playing astronaut Frank Borman says to a Congressional investigation, vis a vis the fatal Apollo 1 fire, that it was "a failure of imagination."  Engineers hadn't even considered the possibility of this kind of failure on the ground.

In the same way, for all the regulatory and private foibles associated with the 2008/9 financial crisis, there was also a failure of imagination.  There were people who thought housing was a bubble.  There were people who thought financial institutions were taking too much risk.  There were people who thought mortgage lending standards were too lax.  But with few exceptions, nobody from progressive Marxists to libertarian anarcho-capitalists, from regulators to bank risk managers, really believed there was substantial risk in the AAA tranches of mortgage securities.  Hopefully we know better now but I doubt it.

Update#1:  The LA Times attributes "failure of imagination" as a real quote from Borman.  Good, I love that quote.  When I was an engineer investigating actual failures of various sorts (in an oil refinery), the vast majority were human errors in procedure or the result of doing things unsafely that we really knew in advance to be unsafe.  But the biggest fire we had when I was there was truly a failure of imagination.  I won't go into it, but it resulted from a metallurgical failure that in turn resulted form a set of conditions that we never dreamed could have existed.

By the way, this is really off topic, but the current state of tort law has really killed quality safety discussion in companies of just this sort of thing.  Every company should be asking itself all the time, "is this unsafe?"  or "under what conditions might this be unsafe" or "what might happen if..."   Unfortunately, honest discussions of possible safety issues often end up as plaintiff's evidence in trials.  The attorney will say "the company KNEW it was unsafe and didn't do anything about it", often distorting what are honest and healthy internal discussions on safety that we should want occurring into evidence of evil malfeasance.  So companies now show employees videos like one I remember called, I kid you not, "don't write it down."

The similarity between the the text of the recent NY report on fracking and the fictional state attack on Rearden Metal in Atlas Shrugged is just amazing.

Here is the cowardly State Science Institute report on Rearden Metal from Atlas Shrugged, where a state agency attempts to use vague concerns of unproven potential issues to ban the product for what are essentially political reasons (well-connected incumbents in the industry don't want this sort of competition).  From page 173 of the Kindle version:

[Eddie] pointed to the newspaper he had left on her desk. “They [the State Science Institute, in their report on Rearden Metal] haven’t said that Rearden Metal is bad. They haven’t said that it’s unsafe. What they’ve done is . . .” His hands spread and dropped in a gesture of futility. [Dagny] saw at a glance what they had done.

She saw the sentences: “It may be possible that after a period of heavy usage, a sudden fissure may appear, though the length of this period cannot be predicted. . . . The possibility of a molecular reaction, at present unknown, cannot be entirely discounted. . . . Although the tensile strength of the metal is obviously demonstrable, certain questions in regard to its behavior under unusual stress are not to be ruled out. . . . Although there is no evidence to support the contention that the use of the metal should be prohibited, a further study of its properties would be of value.”

“We can’t fight it. It can’t be answered,” Eddie was saying slowly. “We can’t demand a retraction. We can’t show them our tests or prove anything. They’ve said nothing. They haven’t said a thing that could be refuted and embarrass them professionally. It’s the job of a coward.

From the recent study used by the State of New York to ban fracking (a process that has been used in the oil field for 60 years or so)

Based on this review, it is apparent that the science surrounding HVHF [high volume hydraulic fracturing] activity is limited, only just beginning to emerge, and largely suggests only hypotheses about potential public health impacts that need further evaluation....

...the overall weight of the evidence from the cumulative body of information contained in this Public Health Review demonstrates that there are significant uncertainties about the kinds of adverse health outcomes that may be associated with HVHF, the likelihood of the occurrence of adverse health outcomes, and the effectiveness of some of the mitigation measures in reducing or preventing environmental impacts which could adversely affect public health. Until the science provides sufficient information to determine the level of risk to public health from HVHF to all New Yorkers and whether the risks can be adequately managed, DOH recommends that HVHF should not proceed in New York State....

The actual degree and extent of these environmental impacts, as well as the extent to which they might contribute to adverse public health impacts are largely unknown. Nevertheless, the existing studies raise substantial questions about whether the public health risks of HVHF activities are sufficiently understood so that they can be adequately managed.

Why is it the Left readily applies the (silly) precautionary principle to every new beneficial technology or business model but never applies it to sweeping authoritarian legislation (e.g. Obamacare)?

Today Apple Computer won the class-action anti-trust case filed against them.  The plaintiffs were seeking a billion dollars in damages (after tripling) for a DRM system (Fairplay) that does not exist any more used on a device (the iPod) that Apple has pretty much phased out.  These products were such a threat to the survival of competitors that they don't even exist any more.  This is not atypical of how anti-trust often plays out in the marketplace, particularly in the technology sphere.  Any day now I will be filing my lawsuit against Commodore for suppressing competition in the home computer market.

from here

Kevin Drum quotes Politico about a coming series of Administration environmental diktats:

...The administration was committed to its upcoming deadlines many months ago, in some cases under court order, after postponing a number of the actions until after the 2012 or 2014 elections. Now that Obama is almost out of time, they’re coming all at once.

The whole "under court order" and "our of time" thing is an scam.  The Administration colludes with environmental groups to sue them demanding some regulation the Administration wants but knows it can't get through the regular legislative or regulator process.  The Administration immediately rolls over in the suit and settles, agreeing to implement the regulation it wanted in the first place.  Then it can claim the settlement of the court suit "requires" them to proceed with these regulations.  I can't tell if I should be embarrassed for the reporter writing this that they are so ignorant of how these suits work or angry that the reporting is essentially colluding in this deceptive practice.

I often wonder if Democrats really believe they will hold the White House forever.  I suppose they must, because they seem utterly unconcerned, even gleeful in fact, about new authoritarian Presidential powers they would freak out over if a Republican exercised.

Coyote's first rule of government authority:  Never support any government power you would not want your ideological enemy wielding.

Net Neutrality is one of those Orwellian words that mean exactly the opposite of what they sound like.  There is a battle that goes on in the marketplace in virtually every communication medium between content creators and content deliverers.  We can certainly see this in cable TV, as media companies and the cable companies that deliver their product occasionally have battles that break out in public.   But one could argue similar things go on even in, say, shipping, where magazine publishers push for special postal rates and Amazon negotiates special bulk UPS rates.

In fact, this fight for rents across a vertical supply chain exists in virtually every industry.  Consumers will pay so much for a finished product.  Any vertical supply chain is constantly battling over how much each step in the chain gets of the final consumer price.

What "net neutrality" actually means is that certain people, including apparently the President, want to tip the balance in this negotiation towards the content creators (no surprise given Hollywood's support for Democrats).  Netflix, for example, takes a huge amount of bandwidth that costs ISP's a lot of money to provide.  But Netflix doesn't want the ISP's to be be able to charge for this extra bandwidth Netflix uses - Netflix wants to get all the benefit of taking up the lion's share of ISP bandwidth investments without having to pay for it.  Net Neutrality is corporate welfare for content creators.

Check this out: Two companies (Netflix and Google) use half the total downstream US bandwidth.  They use orders and orders of magnitude more bandwidth than any other content creators, but don't want to pay for it (source)

Why should you care?  Well, the tilting of this balance has real implications for innovation.  It creates incentives for content creators to devise new bandwidth-heavy services.  On the other hand, it pretty much wipes out any incentive for ISP's (cable companies, phone companies, etc) to invest in bandwidth infrastructure (cell phone companies, to my understand, are typically exempted from net neutrality proposals).  Why bother investing in more bandwidth infrastrcture if the government is so obviously intent on tilting the rewards of such investments towards content creators?  Expect to see continued lamentations from folks (ironically mostly on the Left, who support net neutrality) that the US trails in providing high-speed Internet infrastructure.

Don't believe me?  Well, AT&T and Verizon have halted their fiber rollout.  Google has not, but Google is really increasingly on the content creation side.  And that is one strategy for dealing with this problem of the government tilting the power balance in a vertical supply chain:  vertical integration.

Postscript:  There are folks out there who always feel better as a consumer if their services are heavily regulated by the Government.  Well, the Internet is currently largely unregulated, but the cable TV industry is heavily regulated.  Which one are you more satisfied with?

Update:  OK, after a lot of comments and emails, I am willing to admit I am conflating multiple issues, some of which fit the strict definition of net neutrality (e.g.  ISP A can't block Planned Parenthood sites because its CEO is anti-abortion) with other potential ISP-content provider conflicts.  I am working on some updates as I study more, but I will say in response that

1. President Obama is essentially doing the same thing, trying to ram through a regulatory power grab (shifting ISPs to Title II oversight) that actually has vanishly little to do with the strict definition of net neutrality.   Net neutrality supporters should be forewarned that the number of content and privacy restrictions that will pour forth from regulators will dwarf the essentially non-existent cases of net neutrality violation we have seen so far in the unregulated market.
2. I am still pretty sure the net effect of these regulations, whether they really affect net neutrality or not, will be to disarm ISP's in favor of content providers in the typical supply chain vertical wars that occur in a free market.  At the end of the day, an ISP's last resort in negotiating with a content provider is to shut them out for a time, just as the content provider can do the same in reverse to the ISP's customers.  Banning an ISP from doing so is like banning a union from striking. And for those who keep telling me that this sort of behavior is different and won't be illegal under net neutrality, then please explain to me how in practice one defines a ban based on a supply chain rent-division arguments and a ban based on nefarious non neutrality.

The AZ Republic rounds up some actual sick leave excuses people have tried:

"I accidentally got on a plane" was on the list of most dubious excuses for calling in sick to work, according to a recent survey by careerbuilders.com.

"I just put a casserole in the oven," "I need to tweak my botched plastic surgery," and "I broke my ankle after my leg fell asleep while I was sitting on the toilet," were among other hilarious, yet real, excuses that employers reported.

The survey found that 28 percent of employees called in sick when they were feeling well, down from 32 percent last year, and that one in four employers have caught an employee faking sick through social media.

There are more at the link.

We get very, very little of this, so we are lucky to have great employees.  Since many of my employees are in the 70s, 80s, and even 90s (really), employee absences are generally real, quite serious health concerns.  Besides, since most of my employees live on the work site, it is a little harder to fake this kind of thing.

It will be interesting what having the incentive of getting paid, in addition to just skipping out of work, will do to this.

Yesterday, when writing about the US Forest Service (USFS) restrictions on commercial photography in wilderness areas, I discussed the contradictions that make their policy problematic

The USFS has undermined their own argument by making exceptions based on the purpose of the filming.  Apparently only commercial filming hurts ecosystems, not amateur photography.  And apparently commercial filming that has positive messages about the USFS are OK too.  Its just commercial filming that goes into a beer company ad that hurts ecosystems.  You see the problem.  If it's the use itself that is the problem, then the USFS should be banning the use altogether.  By banning some photography but not all based on the content and use of that photography, that strikes me as a first amendment issue.

Despite working with the USFS on lands management every day, this policy was new to me.  I hypothesized

[There is a] large group in the USFS that is at best skeptical and at worst hostile to commercial activity.  They would explain these rules, at least in private, by saying that anything commercial is by definition antithetical to the very concept of wilderness that they hold in their heads, and that thus all commercial activity needs to be banned in the wilderness because it is inherently corrupting.

Reading Overlawyered, I saw this US Forest Service quote from the Oregonian to explain their position on commercial photography:

Liz Close, the Forest Service's acting wilderness director, says the restrictions have been in place on a temporary basis for four years and are meant to preserve the untamed character of the country's wilderness.

Close didn't cite any real-life examples of why the policy is needed or what problems it's addressing. She didn't know whether any media outlets had applied for permits in the last four years.

She said the agency was implementing the Wilderness Act of 1964, which aims to protect wilderness areas from being exploited for commercial gain.

"It's not a problem, it's a responsibility," she said. "We have to follow the statutory requirements."

So it appears that the purpose of the Wilderness Act is interpreted by the USFS as "protect wilderness areas from being exploited for commercial gain."

But the Wilderness Act makes just a brief mention of commercial activity (It was written back in the day when laws did not have to be 2000 pages long, so you can read the who thing here).  Its main purpose is to keep the lands wild and the ecology as free as possible from man's intervention

In order to assure that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition, it is hereby declared to be the policy of the Congress to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness. For this purpose there is hereby established a National Wilderness Preservation System to be composed of federally owned areas designated by the Congress as "wilderness areas," and these shall be administered for the use and enjoyment of the American people in such manner as will leave them unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness, and so as to provide for the protection of these areas, the preservation of their wilderness character, and for the gathering and dissemination of information regarding their use and enjoyment as wilderness...

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.

There is nothing in this that in any way shape or form should be affected by photography (unless the photography has some sort of heavy footprint, like making a Hollywood movie with hundreds of people and equipment and catering trucks, etc.).

The Wilderness Act is not primarily about protecting the Wilderness from commercial gain.  It is about protecting the natural operation of ecosystems from intervention of any sort by man.  Commercial activity is barely mentioned, and only as a minor aside deep into the legislation.  But many US Forest Service employees have an antipathy to commercial activity and have sort of reinterpreted it in their mind as being an anti-commercialism act.  Here are the only mentions of commercial activity in the law:

Except as specifically provided for in this Act, and subject to existing private rights, there shall be no commercial enterprise and no permanent road within any wilderness area designated by this Act and except as necessary to meet minimum requirements for the administration of the area for the purpose of this Act (including measures required in emergencies involving the health and safety of persons within the area), there shall be no temporary road, no use of motor vehicles, motorized equipment or motorboats, no landing of aircraft, no other form of mechanical transport, and no structure or installation within any such area. ...

Commercial services may be performed within the wilderness areas designated by this Act to the extent necessary for activities which are proper for realizing the recreational or other wilderness purposes of the areas.

In this usage (I am not an attorney so there is likely a long history of how the term "commercial enterprise" is understood in the law) my sense is this means that people are not to be conducting commerce -- trading goods and services for money-  within the boundaries of the wilderness area. Essentially, they don't want a gift shop or McDonald's there.   Grouped with the bit about roads, this is a paragraph about facilities and equipment and having a footprint.

So is a lone person taking pictures a commercial enterprise within the area? I doubt it. The actual commerce is conducted outside the park and there is nothing about photography that impairs the wilderness nature of the park.   My interpretation is that taking pictures is OK but setting up a photography store is forbidden.  But by the US Forest Service's definition, I suppose they should also ban people from collecting material for a book. If I walk through the wilderness area taking notes for a book I want to write, and then leave the area and write it and sell it, I am not sure how this is any different from commercial photography. And does this mean that I can't wear any clothes or bring any equipment into the wilderness area that I purchased commercially?

PS-  Beyond a skepticism about capitalism, there is an other reason public lands people might want to shortcut the Federal Wilderness Act as "preventing commercial activity" -- it lets them off the hook.  The Wilderness Act was about preventing meddling in the ecosystem (an impossible goal, but we will leave that for another day) and this applied to all groups -- commercial, government, educational.  By shortcutting the Act as being about commerce, it helps folks forget that the same strictures should apply to agency personnel as well.  I was up in Yellowstone listening to discussions of reintroduction of the wolf and the ongoing killing of thousands of non-native fish in Yellowstone Lake and various streams.  The goal of these interventions is to reverse past interventions, but even so they strike me as violations of the Federal Wilderness Act.

With every item or service we buy, supply and demand are matched via prices.  Except water.  Because, for a variety of populist and politically scheming motives, no one wants to suggest "raising prices to consumers" as the obvious solution to reducing California water use in a drought, despite the fact that it would reduce demand in -- by definition -- the lowest value uses as well as provide incentives new sources and alternatives.  So instead we get authoritarian stuff like this (press release from CA Senator Fran Pavely):

SACRAMENTO – Governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 1281 by Senator Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills) on Thursday to require greater disclosure of water use in oil production.

Oil well operators use large amounts of water in processes such as water flooding, steam flooding and steam injection, which are designed to increase the flow of thicker oil from the ground. In 2013, these enhanced oil recovery operations used more than 80 billion gallons of water in California, the equivalent amount used by about 500,000 households and more than 800 times the amount used for hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”).

The impact of this use on domestic and agricultural water supplies is not known because oil companies are not required to disclose details about their water use

“At a time when families, business and farmers are suffering the effects of severe drought, all Californians need to do their part to use valuable water resources more wisely,” Senator Pavley said. “The public has the right to know about the oil industry’s use of limited fresh water supplies.”

Oil well operators have an available source of recycled water known as “produced water,” which is trapped deep underground and often comes to the surface during oil production. More than 130 billion gallons of produced water surfaced during oil production in California last year.

Many oil companies already recycle some of their produced water, but the amount is not known because of the lack of disclosure. Senate Bill 1281 requires oil well operators to report the amount and source of their water, including information on their use of recycled water.

The ONLY reason for such disclosure is because they want to impose some sort of autocratic command and control rules on oil industry water use -- not water quality mind you, but the amount of water they use.  Add this to all the other creepy Cuba-style water actions, like having neighbors spy on each other to monitor water use, and you will understand why folks like Milton Friedman argued that free markets were essential to free societies.

In honor of the California water situation, I have created the second in my series of Venn diagram on economic beliefs.

The other day I wrote about non-monetary job benefits.  Here is an example:

A small-time vintner's use of volunteer workers has put him out of business after the state squeezed him like a late-summer grape for $115,000 in fines -- and sent a chill through the wine industry.

The volunteers, some of them learning to make wine while helping out, were illegally unpaid laborers, and Westover Winery should have been paying them and paying worker taxes, the state Department of Industrial Relations said.

"I didn't know it was illegal to use volunteers at a winery; it's a common practice," said winery owner Bill Smyth.

State law prohibits for-profit businesses from using volunteers.

Before the fine, volunteer labor was common at wineries in the nearby Livermore Valley, said Fenestra Winery owner Lanny Replogle.

...

About half the people the state considered Westover employees were taking a free class at the Palomares Canyon Road winery. Students learned about growing vines, harvesting and blending grapes and marketing the finished product.

"This was an incredible opportunity for me," said Peter Goodwin, a home winemaker from Walnut Creek who said he dreams of opening a winery with some friends. "I got to learn from someone who knows the business."

The winery sometimes asked Goodwin if he wanted to assist in different tasks.

"That's what I wanted, to be as involved as much as possible -- it was all about learning," he said. "I don't understand the state's action. It was my time, and I volunteered."

I have mixed feelings on this.  On the one hand, this demonstrates the appalling violation of individual freedom that minimum wage laws create -- not just for the employer, but for the employee as well.  Minimum wage laws mean that you are not allowed to perform labor for less than that minimum, even if you choose to and get non-monetary benefits that you feel fully compensate you for the time.

On the other hand, you have to be particularly clueless, especially in California, to claim ignorance on this.  I work in an industry that 10 years ago routinely accepted volunteer labor (illegally) and I was never lulled by the "everyone else is doing it in the industry" excuse.  I will say that it is irritating to try to run a business in compliance with the law and to find yourself undercut by folks who are avoiding the more expensive parts of the law.  Years ago there used to be a couple of non-profits who competed against me running campgrounds.  They were really for profit - they just paid their president a large salary rather than dividends - but used the non-profit status** as a dodge to try to accept volunteer labor.  Eventually, they were stopped by several courts from doing so.

Yes, I know this is kind of odd.  You might ask yourself, why are there so many people willing to take their volunteer position when you are offering paid jobs?  It turns out here are a lot of non-monetary benefits to this job such that people will do it for free.  In fact, that huge fountain of hypocrisy that is the Federal Government exempts itself from paying minimum wage and accepts volunteers to run its campgrounds where I must pay them.

** the non-profit status helped them in one other way.  We take over operation of recreation areas under concession contract from the government.  Many government employees hate this sort of outsourcing partnership, and really find it - for the lack of a better word - dirty to sully themselves interacting with a profit-making entity.  The non-profit status helped my competitors seem friendlier -- ie less capitalistic -- than I.  California recently passed a law allowing lower cost third party operation of certain parks functions but only if this was performed by a non-profit.   I had a US Forest Service District Ranger in Kentucky tell me once that he was offended that I made money on public lands, providing services in the National Forest.  I answered, "Oh, and you work for free?"  I said that I did not know how much he made but I guessed $80-100 thousand a year.  I said that would be over double what my company made in profit in the same forest operating and paying for hundreds of camp sites.  Why was I dirty for making money in the Forest but he thought he as "clean"?

I saw this by accident on the California FAQ on the state minimum wage.

1.	Q.	What is the minimum wage?
	A.	Effective January 1, 2008, the minimum wage in California is $8.00 per hour. It will increase to $9.00 per hour effective July 1, 2014, and to $10.00 per hour effective January 1, 2016. For sheepherders, however, effective July 1, 2002, the minimum wage was set at $1,200.00 per month. On January 1, 2007, this wage increased to a minimum monthly salary of $1,333.20, and on January 1, 2008, it increased again to a minimum monthly salary of $1,422.52. Effective July 1, 2014, the minimum monthly salary for sheepherders will be $1600.34. Effective January 1, 2016, the minimum monthly salary for sheepherders will be $1777.98. Wages paid to sheepherders may not be offset by meals or lodging provided by the employer. Instead, there are provisions in IWC Order 14-2007, Sections 10(F), (G) and (H) that apply to sheepherders with respect to monthly meal and lodging benefits required to be provided by the employer.

 

What the hell?  The new minimum wage is absolutely appropriate to every industry in California except sheepherding?  It would be interesting to see the political process that led to this one narrow special rule.  The state Speaker of the House's brother-in-law is probably in the sheep business.

This kind of crap is frustrating as hell for me.  We have a labor model that is generally not even considered when politicians are setting labor law, and thus compliance causes us fits.  I would love special labor exemptions for my workers as well, but I don't have any pull in Sacramento.

Postscript:  While most folks think of the minimum wage as a restriction on employers, it is just as much a restriction on workers as well.  I am glad to see the California site acknowledge this:

3.	Q.	May an employee agree to work for less than the minimum wage?
	A.	No.

New York City has instituted a draconian "ban the box" law that makes it extremely difficult for employers to avoid hiring people with criminal records  (via Overlawyered)

The bill, which is likely to become law in some form, would prohibit the commonly used "check boxes" on job applications that ask about past convictions. It also would forbid employers from asking questions about an applicant's criminal history until a conditional job offer has been tendered....

The bigger concern is lawsuits from job seekers. To be able to reject an applicant because of a past conviction, employers would have to go through a rigorous process that, if not followed, would result in the presumption that a business owner engaged in unlawful discrimination, Mr. Goldstein said.

“I think you’d see some increases in litigation, and this is not exactly a well-settled area of law,” he said.

Proponents say the bill would simply offer a clearer way for businesses to follow state law requiring employers to go through a multistep test to determine if an applicant's past criminal behavior correlates with the position being sought.

Additionally, the City Council bill would allow an applicant rejected because of a past crime seven days to respond. The job would have to be held open during that time.

An employer's failure to adhere to the process could lead to a fine of at least $1,000. In the bill's current form, the business would bear the burden of proof in any resulting lawsuit by the job applicant, Mr. Goldstein said.

“Rather than the normal context, we have the burden here shifting,” he said. “It would be on the employer to present clear and convincing evidence that it had not engaged in unlawful discrimination.”

Given that the burden of proof seems to be on businesses in employee lawsuits even when the playing field is supposed to be level, I shudder to think what a statutory burden of proof would mean.  Likely an automatic win for any employee.

Given this, here is a question for you:  Imagine that I hired a convicted felon who then committed a crime against one of my customers.    Would I be shielded from liability because I had limited ability to screen out candidates who posed dangers to customers?  HA!  No way.  The plaintiff's attorney for the customer would be in front of the jury making me look like Attila the Hun for not screening felons from my applicant pool, even as the government made that task effectively impossible.

That is the key to this law -- that proponents can claim that one can screen out felons "if appropriate to the job" but in fact the law makes it effectively impossible to do so without imposing staggering litigation costs on me.  So we get the Leftist ideal - I can be sued by employees for screening out felons and I can simultaneously be sued by customers for not screening out felons.

Hans Bader of the CEI takes my post the other day on Obama's Executive Order 13673 and runs with it much further.  I had written

Government contractors would be insane to operate in California (and perhaps other regulatory hell-holes, but I am familiar with California).  California has a myriad of arcane labor laws (like break laws and heat stress laws) that are difficult to comply with, combined with a legislature that shifts the laws every year to make it hard to keep up, combined with a regulatory and judicial culture that assumes businesses are guilty until proven innocent.  If state labor violations or suits lead to loss of business at the national level, why the hell would a contractor ever want to have employees in California?

Bader provides the numbers:

Whether a large company is sued for discrimination or labor law violations often has more to do with its location than whether it violated the law. A recent study shows that “California has the most frequent incidences of [employment-practices] charges in the country, with a 42 percent higher chance of being sued by an employee for establishments . . . over the national average. Other states and jurisdictions where employers are at a high risk of employee suits include the District of Columbia (32% above the national average) [and] Illinois (26%).” It’s because of their location, not because California employers are more racist or anti-union than employers in other states (indeed, California employers spend more time and money on compliance mechanisms than employers elsewhere).

He goes on to discuss what I think is actually is a bigger issue than differential penalties, which is the criminalization of things in California that are perfectly legal in other places.  The best example is lunch breaks.  Companies don't just have to provide lunch breaks, they have an affirmative responsibility to make sure an employee takes a non-working lunch.  An employee who voluntarily does some work while taking a lunch break (e.g. answers a question from a customer that might walk up to her) makes the company liable for a penalty.  I kid you not.  That is why California corporations have sometimes made it a firing offense to be caught doing work at lunch, because it makes the company liable under the law.

"Due to increases in the Minnesota minimum wage, daily camping rates will increase by $2 in 2015 and an additional $1 in 2016."

Apparently there is yet another executive order with far reaching consequences for government contractors, Executive Order 13673  (does it bother anyone else that we are up in the 13 thousands on these?  Did they start numbering at 1?)  Hans Bader has the details:

A July 31 executive order by President Obama will make it very costly for employers to challenge dubious allegations of wrongdoing against them, if they are government contractors (which employ a quarter of the American workforce). Executive Order 13,673 will allow trial lawyers to extort larger settlements from companies, and enable bureaucratic agencies to extract costly settlements over conduct that may have been perfectly legal. That’s the conclusion of The Wall Street Journal and prominent labor lawyer Eugene Scalia.

This “Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces” order allows government officials to cut off the contracts of contractors and subcontractors that do not “consistently adhere” to a wide array of complex labor, antidiscrimination, harassment, workplace-safety and disabilities-rights laws. Never mind that every large national business, no matter how conscientious, has at least one successful lawsuit against it under federal labor and employment laws, which is inevitable when a company has thousands of employees who can sue it in hundreds of different courts that often have differing interpretations of the law. The order also bans using perfectly legal arbitration agreements, overstepping the President’s legal authority.

I can say as someone who absolutely bends over backwards to be in compliance, it just is not possible to be totally clean.  We have won most all of the lawsuits and actions against us over the years vis a vis labor laws and related charges.  A lot of these are pro forma discrimination charges that some employees in protected groups file automatically when terminated, usually without any evidence of specific discrimination.  We have, to date, won all of these "was he a Hispanic that was terminated rather than he was terminated because he was Hispanic" suits.  We have only lost one case.  To give you an idea of how hard it can be to be 100% in compliance, let me describe it:

We had a government contract governed by the Service Contract Act, which sets out minimum wages to be paid for different types of jobs.  These wages typically are in two parts - a base wage and, if the company does not have benefits, a fringe payment in lieu of such benefits.  For example, it might say that a day laborer must be paid (I will use round numbers for simplicity) $12 an hour base wages plus $4 an hour for fringes.  So we paid the worker $16 and hour and felt ourselves in compliance.  

Then we had a Department of Labor audit.  The investigator insisted that the law required that we break these two payments into two lines on the paycheck.  So instead of having  a paycheck that said 40 hours times $16, it needed to say 40 hours times $12 and 40 hours times $4.  Thus we were found to be in violation and issued a huge fine.  I protested that the law said no such thing -- the law said I had to have a clear paper trail of what I paid people.  It did not say the labor and fringes had to be shown separately on the paycheck, nor did any DOL published regulation require this  (and of course I also pointed out that the intent of the law that someone get paid a minimum amount had been fulfilled).  

Apparently, the DOL had an internal handbook that suggested this as a correct practice, but this had never been tested in court nor embodied in a published regulation.  To impose the fine, my attorney said they had to take me to court.  I said go for it.  The DOL chose not to press the case, and we adjusted our paycheck practices to avoid the issue in the future.  I was happy to comply with this, as stupid as it was, but it was impossible to know it was an actual requirement until I got busted for violating this double-secret practice.  But there it is on my record - VIOLATION!

I will leave it to Bader's article to explore some of the implications of this order, but I want to add some unintended(?) consequences of my own:

• Government contractors would be insane to operate in California (and perhaps other regulatory hell-holes, but I am familiar with California).  California has a myriad of arcane labor laws (like break laws and heat stress laws) that are difficult to comply with, combined with a legislature that shifts the laws every year to make it hard to keep up, combined with a regulatory and judicial culture that assumes businesses are guilty until proven innocent.  If state labor violations or suits lead to loss of business at the national level, why the hell would a contractor ever want to have employees in California?
• I have a couple of smaller competitors who have sent employees into the parks we operate who then filed extensive, manufactured complaints to the government about our service, timed to make it difficult on us when we bid against them for the contract renewal.  How tempting will it be for companies to place employees in their rival who then file serial labor complaints to undermine that rival in future contract awards?
• Companies that do government contracting as a sideline are going to be driven out of the business, reducing the choice and competition among contractors.   Earlier I discussed how 41 CFR 60-2.1  and 41 CFR 60-4.1, also the result of an Obama executive order, drove our company out of our last incidental contracting business (though we deal with the government all the time, it is generally through concession contracts where we get paid by the public, not by the government, so a lot of government contracting law does not apply to these contracts).

Kevin Drum seems here to be making the case for Federalism

Via Vox, here's a colorful map from Broadview Networks that helps illustrate one reason that policymaking in Congress often seems so disconnected from the real world. It's because policymakers tend to be pretty well-off folks living in a pretty well-off region that shelters them from the problems many of the rest of us encounter. If you live in Missouri, you might be annoyed [about a local problem].  But if you live in Washington DC or northern Virginia, guess what? [Your local situation is much better]! Virginia is ranked #1 in the nation, and DC is right behind it. So is it any wonder that this really doesn't seem like a pressing problem in Congress?

Wow, this seems like a great argument for Federalism, as well as a number of libertarian critiques of government in general.   Good going, Kevin!

But then I realized he doesn't really believe this.  Drum is as much a supporter as anyone on the Left of Federal mandates over local action (e.g. Common Core).

Further, I realized that he was essentially nuts.  Because the issue he is lamenting is Internet speeds.  Some people have faster Internet than others, and he is just so frustrated that Congress does not realize this.  He actually seems to be hoping Congress will somehow intervene to equalize Internet speeds.  I would love to know, in these people's minds, if there are any issues to trivial for Congress to wade into.

By the way, if Congress had stepped into Internet regulation, we would still probably be surfing at 1200 baud.  After all, all that high speed Internet stuff might kill jobs at Hayes and US Robotics (makers of old telephone modems for those too young to remember).  Look at how long it took to get a political/corporate consensus on HD TV standards.  Ugh, we would probably all have that goofy French TV-computer solution the Left wanted to force on the United States 15 years or so ago.

Postscript:  The UN ITU spent a lot of time driving phone manufacturers to using micro-USB in a bid at government-led standardization.  The only problem is that micro-USB sucks.  It is ubiquitous, which is nice, but from a form and function standpoint is far harder to use and plug in than Apple's lightning connector, which is much easier to insert, less prone to damage, and can be inserted in either direction.  Perhaps young people with better eyes do not notice but I spend a lot of time jamming micro usb cables in the wrong way.  I hate having to put on my glasses just to plug in my phone, which is why I like my Nexus 5 with wireless charging.

Our public utility APS wants to enter the rooftop solar business.  As a ratepayer and taxpayer, I have deep concerns about this because of the numerous ways this venture could end up with various hidden subsidies.

However, I find it simply hilarious that current rooftop solar providers, including #1 subsidy whore and crony capitalist SolarCity.  Here is what trade group Arizona Solar Energy Industry Association wrote in an email to me today.  I have highlighted some of the bits that got my blood boiling this morning:

In an unprecedented announcement that took the solar industry by surprise, Arizona’s largest utility, APS, announced that it intends to begin competing directly with Arizona solar installers. APS announced Monday that it is seeking permission to spend between $57 and $70 million -not including its profits- of ratepayer money to install solar on the roofs of homes in its service territory and to compete directly with solar installers of all sizes.

“The idea of our members who compete in the free market today having to all of a sudden compete with a regulated monopoly is frightening. How would you like it if the government just stepped in and started competing with your business?” said Corey Garrison, CEO of Arizona based Southface Solar and treasurer of Arizona Solar Energy Industries Association (AriSEIA). "APS has proposed subsidizing certain customers that allow it to put solar on their rooftops while the free market gets no more utility subsidy and actually gets charged for going solar."

It has been well publicized that APS spent much of the last year in a battle with the very industry it now seeks to dominate. Throughout 2013 APS urged the Arizona Corporation Commission to install a huge monthly tax on those who would put solar on their roof. It has also been reported that APS urged the Department of Revenue to institute a new property tax on rooftop solar panels that are leased to customers.

“After spending a year misleading the public with well-publicized lies and misdirection, APS seems to think this is a good time for it to be rewarded with an expansion of its monopoly franchise” said Corey Garrison

Unlike rooftop solar companies that must compete with each other on a level playing field, APS earns a guaranteed rate of return off of its assets including these proposed rooftop solar installations. If approved, APS would be permitted to advertise its solar product in its customer bills and to use its customer lists to market and sell, all with employees paid for by ratepayers. Unlike traditional, free market rooftop solar which is paid for only by the customer that installs the system, APS will be asking all its ratepayers to pay the cost of, and guarantee its profits on, each of the systems it installs under this program.

“This is a massive expansion of the monopoly into an area that is well served by the free market” continued Garrison, “what’s next; will APS ask to sell electric cars or ovens or some other set of goods or services?”

This is hilarious.  The rooftop installers in AZ lost some of the subsidy from power companies (e.g. APS) over the past years but still get a myriad of subsidies for themselves and their customers.  We will use one of the larger installers, SolarCity, as an example.  This is from the SolarCity web site:

Federal, state and local governments offer incredible solar tax credits and rebates to encourage homeowners to switch to renewable energy to lower their energy usage and switch to solar power. The amount of the rebate subsidy varies by program, but some are generous enough to cover up to 30% of your solar power system cost.

The federal government allows you to deduct 30% of your solar power system costs off your federal taxes through an investment tax credit (ITC). If you do not expect to owe taxes this year, you can roll over your credit to the following year.

.... Some locations have additional incentives to make solar even more affordable.  SolarCity will get the most for your project

SolarCity is committed to helping you benefit from every federal, state and utility rebate and tax credit available for your energy upgrade projects.

Navigating through government rebate programs on your own can be intimidating. SolarCity will identify all of the qualifying tax credit and rebate programs for your system and file the required paperwork for you. We will even credit you for the state rebate upfront so that you do not have to wait for the government to send you a check later.

This language is a bit odd, since in most cases SolarCity captures these credits for themselves and then passes on the savings (presumably, but maybe not) to customers via lower power costs, exactly the same model APS is proposing.

Customers, however, must sign a contract agreeing to cede "any and all tax credits, incentives, renewable energy credits, green tags, carbon offset credits, utility rebates or any other non-power attributes of the system" to SolarCity. The tax credits are passed on to its investors, which include the venture-capital firms Draper Fisher Jurvetson, DBL Investors and Al Gore's Generation Investment Management LLP.

The description by solar installers that they somehow represent the "free market" is simply hilarious, given the dependence of their industry on taxpayer subsidies (either of the installers or the customers).  SolarCity admits that their business would actually never be able to operate in a free market:

SolarCity officials, including Musk’s cousins and fellow Obama donors Lyndon and Peter Rive, acknowledged the company’s dependence on government support in its 2012 IPO filing. “Our business currently depends on the availability of rebates, tax credits and other financial incentives,” they wrote. “The expiration, elimination or reduction of these rebates, credits and incentives would adversely impact our business.”

A more recent SolarCity filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission notes: “[The company’s] ability to provide solar energy systems to customers on an economically viable basis depends on our ability to finance these systems with fund investors who require particular tax and other benefits.”

Rooftop installers also have their business buoyed by government mandates that power companies pay residential solar producers 2-3x the going wholesale market rate for any electricity they put into the grid

SolarCity also benefits from "net metering" policies that 43 states, including California, have adopted. Utilities pay solar-panel customers the retail power rate for the solar power they generate but don't use and then export to the grid. Retail rates can be two to three times as high as the wholesale price of electricity because transmission and delivery costs, along with taxes and other surcharges that fund state renewable programs, are baked in.

So in California, solar ratepayers on average are credited about 16 cents per kilowatt hour on their electric bills for the excess energy they generate—even though utilities could buy that power at less than half the cost from other types of power generators.

This was the battle referred to obliquely in the press release above.  The electric utility APS wanted to stop overpaying for power from these rooftop solar installations.   Rooftop installers fought back.  In the end, a fixed charge was placed on homeowners to account for part of this over-payment, an odd solution in my mind that seems to have ticked off both sides.

So the supposedly "free market" rooftop companies are competing successfully with regulated utilities because they got Federal, state, and local subsidies; are exempted from things like paying property tax on leased equipment that every other business has to pay; and get a mandate from the state that utilities have to pay double the market price for their power.  Is it any wonder that a regulated utility, which is no stranger to cronyism and feeding at the subsidy trough, might want to get a piece of that action?

ASEIA, you are welcome to duke it out for first spot at the trough with APS, but don't corrupt the word "free market" by trying to apply the term to yourselves.