Dispatches from District 48
Posts tagged ‘lobbying’
I was familiar with the dynamics of the all-pay auction (I always called it the Wargames auction -- the only winning move is not to play). I had never thought of it as a good analog for lobbying expenditures, but it makes a lot of sense once David Zetland made the point. Good video at the link.
Rent-seeking is the new venture capital model, Kleiner Perkins managing partner Ray Lane explained to an electric car-conference here Wednesday.
In an extraordinary speech, Lane laid out how market socialism can guarantee profits for politically connected VC firms like Kleiner -- far more preferable to the old model of "throwing a dart at a dart board," as Lane has put it. While Silicon Valley-based Kleiner made its reputation as a financier of tech startups like Netscape, Lane confided that they are inherently risky ventures in uncertain, fast-moving markets.
By contrast, Lane expressed admiration for communist governments like China and market-socialist economies like France where government determines new markets, thus providing a more certain investment climate for rent-seekers. With Kleiner partner Al Gore lobbying for federal mandates from wind to electric cars, Kleiner would be assured of a return on otherwise risky investments like Fisker Automotive, a California electric car company.
Kevin Drum says:
The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act makes it illegal to sell toys that haven't been tested for lead content. In general, I think that's a perfectly fine idea.
He can't understand, though, why its effects seem so perverse and Draconian when its core is such a "perfectly fine idea." It is amazing to me that the law of unintended consequences is so hard even for seasoned political observers to grasp.
A sensible restriction might be that a child cannot by any reasonable use of the product ingest more than X concentration of lead. But of course that is not what the government does. The government requires that every toy undergo expensive testing and batch tracking (almost like that of an aircraft part). This is not by any means the same as simply requiring products to limit lead exposure. It is a one-size-fits-all regulation of process, rather than true safety. It imposes huge testing and tracking expenses on products that can't possibly have any lead in them.
And, like many laws of this kind, it imposes a huge penalty on small competitors and new entrants and rewards larger toy makers who both have the scale to pay for the testing and the political clout to shape the law in their favor. In fact, the big winner from the legislation has actually been Matel, the company whose recalls actually led to the law in the first place.
The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) requires third-party testing of nearly every object intended for a child's use, and was passed in response to several toy recalls in 2007 for lead and other chemicals. Six of those recalls were on toys made by Mattel, or its subsidiary Fisher Price.
Small toymakers were blindsided by the expensive requirement, which made no exception for small domestic companies working with materials that posed no threat.
"¦
So while most small toymakers had no idea this law was coming down the pike until it was too late, Mattel spent $1 million lobbying for a little provision to be included in the CPSIA permitting companies to test their own toys in "firewalled" labs that have won Consumer Product Safety Commission approval.
The million bucks was well spent, as Mattel gained approval late last week to test its own toys in the sites listed above"”just as the window for delayed enforcement closed.
Instead of winding up hurting, Mattel now has a cost advantage on mandatory testing, and a handy new government-sponsored barrier to entry for its competitors.
Update: Brad Warbiany has similar thoughts.
John Stossel has a story on errors found in new textbooks in Texas public schools (the word "we," for example, was misspelled).
One high school textbook misspelled the word "we." When describing an actor's "role" in a play, the book spells it "r-o-l-l."
A 9th grade literature book refers to a poem as a piece of 21st century literature, even though it was written in 1911 and the author died in 1933.
How do you misspell the word "we"? They spelled it, "wee."
The publishing companies said the textbooks were just first drafts that would be "cleaned up" before they make it into classrooms. But that doesn't wash with the TV station:
(P)ublishers said the same thing about math books... in 2007 that were eventually found to contain more than 100,000 mistakes...
Those math books are now in classrooms, and teachers continue to find errors.
Stossel is usually pretty quick to the jugular, but I think he misses the true reason for the screw-up. In a private market, suppliers must compete on price and performance because they know that companies will buy their product based on those criteria. In the government market, however, suppliers often can sidestep that whole product quality hassle and shortcut the process via political lobbying. Get a few key legislators or other government officials on your side, and that textbook order or military toilet seat contract is yours. Get John Murtha on your side, for example, and you can make money selling the government just about anything, or even nothing.
I think it's pretty clear that like defense contractors, municipal bond underwriters, and other government suppliers, textbooks suppliers have shifted resources from the product to political lobbying. Makes one pretty excited about prescription drug procurement under government health care, huh? Do we really want to see arguments for Viagra vs. Cialis played out on the house floor, as we do today for political footballs like the V-22 Osprey?
Sent to me by a bunch of readers, from the Atlantic interview with Thomas Schelling:
I sometimes wish that we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening -- you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth -- that would get people very concerned about climate change. But I don't think that's going to happen.
This reminds me of a post from way back, when Kevin Drum wrote:
Seeking to shape legislation before Congress, three major energy trade
associations have shifted their stances and decided to back mandatory
federal curbs on carbon dioxide and other man-made emissions that could
accelerate climate change.
I responded:
Having some Washington lobbying organizations switch which side of this incredibly difficult trade off they support is not "good news." Good news is finding out that this trade off may not be as stark as we think it is. Good news is finding some new technology that reduces emissions and which private citizens are willing to adopt without government coercion (e.g. sheets of solar cells that can be run out of factories like carpet from Dalton, Georgia). Or, good news is finding out that man's CO2 production has less of an effect on world climate than once thought. Oddly enough, this latter category of good news, surely the best possible news we could get on the topic, is seldom treated as good news by global warming activists. In fact, scientists with this message are called Holocaust deniers.
Postscript: It is particularly telling of a certain mindset that Schelling specifically wishes bad things to occur in the Midwest. By most leftish standards, people in flyover country (except maybe Ohio since it is a key swing state) don't really count.
Apparently in the future I will have two health plan choices -- my current plan or the government plan. And the only reason I will be able to keep my current plan is that is will be grandfathered in. A few years ago I switched plans, to get one with a better price and mix of benefits for my family. I will never be allowed to do this again under the new health care bill:
It didn't take long to run into an "uh-oh" moment when reading the House's "health care for all Americans" bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.
When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee.
It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of "Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage," the "Limitation On New Enrollment" section of the bill clearly states:
"Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day" of the year the legislation becomes law.
So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised "” with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won't be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers....
Wow, even for this cynical libertarian, this is a new low of technically complying with a promise while in substance completely violating the spirit of that promise.
By the way, how long will my current insurer even be able to offer me my plan given that it cannot generate any new business (I use Assurant, who specializes in individual policies for self-employed people like myself).
This is a great example of what I have been saying all along - regulation always helps large companies more than small. Everything in this legislation is tailor-made to help large companies who already have health plans and pound small companies and the self-employed. This is in part because the large companies have the lobbying muscle to get themselves a seat at the table as the bill is crafted. But it is more than just neglect, it is an outright attack. Large companies most fear competition from smaller, lower cost competitors. Anything to make the life of small business more expensive and difficult helps cement the big guys market position.
Update: Here is a scary thought -- what will it do to entrepeneurship in this country when a decision to leave a large company and go into business for oneself bascially means giving up private health insurance and going on Medicare?
Update #2: For readers, as well as a place for me to find it in the future, here is a link to all 1000+ pages of the bill. Enjoy.
Believe it or not, I am actually in Washington DC. I am on the executive committee of our little industry's trade group, and as such it is expected that once a year we venture to DC to talk to Senate and House staffers about what legislation is pending that may affect our business. I won't call this "lobbying" as that word implies we have any influence over outcomes. It is more of a grim due dilligence to see what we are going to have to try to deal with next.
As this activity has roughly the same appeal for me as being dragged naked by a truck down the Interstate, I have avoided this task for years. I finally relented to my duty, and here I am.
Democratic blogger Ezra Klein appears to be positioning Dem health care reforms as a way to cut costs, on the grounds that a reformed system will be able to make "hard choices" and "rational" coverage decisions, by which Klein seems to mean "not providing" treatments that are unproven or too expensive--when "a person's life, or health, is not worth the price." Matthew Yglesias' recent post seems to be saying the same thing, though clarity isn't its strong suit. (He must have left it on Journolist.)
...
The "rational," cost-cutting, "hard-choices" pitch isn't just awful marketing--I don't even think it's accurate. Put it this way: I'm for universal health care in large part precisely because I think the government will be less tough-minded and cost-conscious when it comes to the inevitable rationing of care than for-profit insurance companies will be. Take Arnold Kling's example of a young patient with cancer, where "the best hope is a treatment that costs $100,000 and offers a chance of success of 1 in 200." No "rational bureaucracy" would spend $20 million to save a life, Kling argues. I doubt any private insurance company is going to write a policy that spends $20 million to save a life. But I think the government--faced with demands from patient groups and disease lobbies and treatment providers and Oprah and run, ultimately, by politicians as terrified of being held responsible for denying treatment as they are quick to pander to the public's sentimental bias toward life--is less likely to be "rational" than the private sector.
That is to say, the government's more likely to pay for the treatment (assuming a doctor recommends it). So it's government for me.
He comes oh-so-close to getting it right, but then falls short.
Klein is right that the pressure will be to ration care -- we already see such rationing being seriously considered in Massachusetts (the model of choice for Democrats) under the weight of massive expenditures.
But Kaus is correct that if some high-powered and well-funded interest group gets behind a certain procedure, cost-effective or not, the government overlords of the program will likely approve it. As a result, for example, no potential treatment for breast cancer will ever be denied given the proven strength of women's groups lobbying for breast cancer treatment (already, breast cancer research is hugely over-funded vs. other diseases given its mortality, due in large part to this powerful lobbying).
But it is not one dynamic or the other. Both will exist. There will be huge pressures to cut back somewhere, as costs skyrocket. And there will be huge pressure from certain interest groups to fund treatment for certain diseases in unlimited amounts. The result will not be, as Kaus posits, that everything will be funded more than it is today -- the result will be that certain procedures and conditions with strong lobbying and political muscle will get funded more, with the difference being made up from cutting funding for conditions and procedures without a well-organized lobby.
Access to care will no longer be determined by money, but by political pull. (Yeah, I know, it's Ayn Rand's world and we all just live in it).
On tax day today, we should remember a key reason why taxes keep going up: Taxes equate to power for elected officials. The more money they have to spend, the more power they have. The more money they have to spend, the more people have to kowtow to them and send campaign contributions either to 1) score a share of the loot or 2) get a special deal or treatment on their own taxes.
We have a sense that there is more corruption than ever in politics, but I think its demonstrably true that people and politicians are not any more or less evil than they were 100 years ago. The only difference is that the sums in play from political influence are so much larger. Its a concept I try to explain to people all the time. The way to fix corruption in politics is not through campaign finance reform, it is through reducing the size of government. Because no matter what restrictions one puts in place, if we set up a system where it pays to invest in politicians, then people will find a way to do so:
In a remarkable illustration of the power of lobbying in Washington, a study released last week found that a single tax break in 2004 earned companies $220 for every dollar they spent on the issue "” a 22,000 percent rate of return on their investment.
The study by researchers at the University of Kansas underscores the central reason that lobbying has become a $3 billion-a-year industry in Washington: It pays. The $787 billion stimulus act and major spending proposals have ratcheted up the lobbying frenzy further this year, even as President Obama and public-interest groups press for sharper restrictions on the practice.
The paper by three Kansas professors examined the impact of a one-time tax break approved by Congress in 2004 that allowed multinational corporations to "repatriate" profits earned overseas....The researchers calculated an average rate of return of 22,000 percent for those companies that helped lobby for the tax break. Eli Lilly, for example, reported in disclosure documents that it spent $8.5 million in 2003 and 2004 to lobby for the provision "” and eventually gained tax savings of more than $2 billion.
These returns rival those in the narcotics trade, and you know how well we have performed in stopping that. We are seeing this effect right now in Arizona, where the County Commissioners of Pima County (centered on Tucson) are under investigation for rigging electronic voting machines to pass a recent tax increase.
Under the scrutiny of criminal investigators, election workers in Phoenix have spent the past week in a painstaking recount of 120,821 ballots that were cast three years ago for a Pima County transit tax.
The primary objective is to determine whether someone rigged the election by tampering with the optical-scan polling machines in Pima County, transforming "no" votes into "yes" votes.
The ballot measures wound up securing a half-cent increase in sales tax to provide cash for roads, buses and other transportation projects.
The reason -- taxes are power, and more taxes are more power.
Which of these spent more political contribution and lobbying money in the last election cycle:
Yes, it was the teachers. I am sure it was for the kids, though. This actually understates the teacher's efforts. The corporate donations of the oil and defense companies are spread pretty evenly between both parties. They are simply trying to buy access. The teachers gave their money almost entirely to the Democrats.
A month or two back, I was participating in the California Regional Council of Rural Counties annual meeting. At this conference, I was there to have a sort of informal debate on climate change with Joe Nation, a former California State legislator and currently a private consultant on climate issues.
To some extent my role was frustrating for the audience, because they were already stuck with complying with California's AB32 (a sort of state CO2 cap and trade system) and arguing that such legislation was pointless only served to upset them (my presentation, both in powerpoint and video is here). By the way, we often lump "government" together, but I can tell you that while the governor and the legislature of California may be 100% behind CO2 alarmism, the county commissioners were very sympathetic to the skeptic position.
Anyway, towards the end of my presentation I made a plea for a carbon tax over cap-and-trade, and said in fact that California's AB32 was living proof of my argument. The California Air Resources Board (CARB), which is tasked with implementing the plan, has already added hundreds of people to its staff and worked for over two years, is still no where near finished with rule-making. The complexity, and the battling political constituencies, is simply mind-boggling. It is already clear that the result is going to be a Byzantine, Rube Goldberg structure of detailed industry-specific reporting and permitting rules. Nearly 100% of CARB's time is taken up today with various groups running to them begging for some sort of special treatment (think "carbon bailout" and you will get the idea). No one thinks the process is fair or rational.
Under cap-and-trade, every single industry will report greenhouse gasses, have industry and firm-specific limits, myriads of permits, etc. For example, we had detailed discussions that day of how cattle flatulence will be treated and measured. The alternative is a carbon tax, which is dead simple. There is one single rate to set - the tax per weight of carbon in fuel. Fuels with more carbon per BTU, like coal, thereby get higher taxes. The system works like a sales tax, and could be administered by the BOE (who runs the California sales tax system) in its sleep.
The cap-and-trade system is far more expensive than a carbon tax. By the basic laws of supply and demand, both systems have to raise the cost of burning certain fuels by about the same amount to get about the same reduction in use. But the cap-and-trade system brings a huge overhead burden, both in government bureaucracy as well as compliance costs, that make it far, far more expensive for the same amount of benefit. Until he started sitting on the boards of companies who depend on these inefficiencies in the cap and trade system to make money, Al Gore advocated a straight carbon tax over cap-and-trade.
But we had an opportunity that day. Because the man who claims to be the author of AB32 is none other than Joe Nation, who was right there in the room. So we asked him why he took this approach. Here is what he said, really a civics lesson in one sentence:
I tried pass a carbon tax first, but there was absolutely no support for it among legislators [the same ones who overwhelmingly supported AB32]
If you can understand why this is, you can understand a lot about government. Because all these concerns that you and I might have about crafting rational public policy are not important to legislators. Here is how they think about it:
Update: A number of related thoughts and posts here, at Reason.
On several occasions I have have lamented the declining standard of activism:
Activist: A person who believes so strongly that a
problem needs to be remedied that she dedicates substantial time to ...
getting other people to fix the problem. It used to be that activists
sought voluntary help for their pet problem, and thus retained some
semblance of honor. However, our self-styled elite became frustrated
at some point in the past that despite their Ivy League masters degrees
in sociology, other people did not seem to respect their ideas nor were
they particularly interested in the activist's pet issues. So
activists sought out the double shortcut of spending their time not
solving the problem themselves, and not convincing other people to
help, but convincing the government it should compel others to fix the
supposed problem. This fascism of good intentions usually consists of
government taking money from the populace to throw at the activist's
issue, but can also take the form of government-compelled labor and/or
government limitations on choice.
It seems that there is a surprisingly large coalition ready to take this to its logical extreme: A group called Service Nation is set to spend a ton of money lobbying the government to create a program to force every young person into servitude by 2020.
Not satisfied with taking 20-40% of our income to spend as they see fit, the government hopes also to be able to order around the labor of millions of young adults. I feel like I am reading some bizarre historical re-enactment of the Soviet or Chinese youth programs. This whole program, which I am tentatively going to label "happy face fascism," makes me so sick I can't even address it further tonight. More later.
PS: This is, not coincidentally, exactly the idea Obama has been pushing (here and here). I say not coincidentally, because this is how one skirts stupid campaign finance laws - you get your supporters to take your top campaign planks and run with them as "independent" efforts that are not subject to campaign finance restrictions.
PPS: Just to head off an argument that came up last time in the comments, I have been a consistent opponent of the military draft as well.
Update: I know the allusion is over-used, but we are in 1984-land when people keep using the term "voluntary universal national service" as do the leaders of this effort. By universal, they mean that everyone has to do it. So they are calling for "national service that everyone is required by law to perform but is voluntary." I do not think that word means what you think it means.
The solution is to develop a system of voluntary universal national
service for our country and for the world. To call upon all young
adults to take at least one year to learn the hard and rugged skills of
practicing idealism.
Yes, lets teach them the "hard and rugged skills" of being forced to do labor that no one is willing to pay for voluntarily, so must be performed by slaves instead.
Another thought: TJIC made a relevant observation to this the other day:
I'm seeing more and more grudging praise for the efficiency of the Chinese dictatorship these days.
It tends to go something like this:
Sure, sure, they're horrible, and democracy is better, but if they
decide that they need to put in { more mass transit | a factory | a new
canal | an Olympic village }, they just tell everyone in the village
"move!", and the job gets done.
I get the same impression. Service Nation is the end result of such thinking.
Clarification: Service Nation denies they support mandatory service, and have removed the word "universal" from their site. However, it should be noted that many of the prominent supporters and board members of Service Nation have individually advocated for mandatory service. Also, no denial that they are seeking to create a new, massive government beauracracy.
Here is something I didn't know: Way back in the 1990's, Enron was lobbying hard for cap and trade legislation to create a lucrative new trading profit center for the company (HT Tom Nelson)
In the early 1990s Enron had helped establish the market for, and
became the major trader in, EPA's $20 billion-per-year sulphur dioxide
cap-and-trade program, the forerunner of today's proposed carbon credit
trade. This commodity exchange of emission allowances caused Enron's
stock to rapidly rise.Then came the inevitable question, what
next? How about a carbon dioxide cap-and-trade program? The problem was
that CO2 is not a pollutant, and therefore the EPA had no authority to
cap its emission. Al Gore took office in 1993 and almost immediately
became infatuated with the idea of an international environmental
regulatory regime. He led a U.S. initiative to review new projects
around the world and issue "˜credits' of so many tons of annual CO2
emission reduction. Under law a tradeable system was required, which
was exactly what Enron also wanted because they were already trading
pollutant credits.Thence Enron vigorously lobbied Clinton and
Congress, seeking EPA regulatory authority over CO2. From 1994 to 1996,
the Enron Foundation contributed nearly $1 million dollars - $990,000 -
to the Nature Conservancy, whose Climate Change Project promotes global
warming theories. Enron philanthropists lavished almost $1.5 million on
environmental groups that support international energy controls to
"reduce" global warming. Executives at Enron worked closely with the
Clinton administration to help create a scaremongering climate science
environment because the company believed the treaty could provide it
with a monstrous financial windfall. The plan was that once the problem
was in place the solution would be trotted out.
With Enron out of the picture, the way is clear for new players to dominate this multi-billion dollar new business. And look who is ready to take over from Enron:
The investment
vehicle headed by Al Gore has closed a new $683m fund to invest in
early-stage environmental companies and has mounted a robust defence of
green investing.The Climate Solutions Fund will be one of the biggest in the growing market for investment funds with an environmental slant.
The fund
will be focused on equity investments in small companies in four
sectors: renewable energy; energy efficiency technologies; energy from
biofuels and biomass; and the carbon trading markets.This is
the second fund from Generation Investment Management, chaired by the
former vice-president of the US and managed by David Blood, former head
of Goldman Sachs Asset Management.The first, the Global Equity
Strategy Fund, has $2.2bn invested in large companies the company
judges have "sustainable" businesses, from an environmental, social and
economic viewpoint. Mr Blood said he expected that fund to be worth
$5bn within two years, based on commitments from interested investors.
Going green indeed.
Huge alarm bells are going off as I read this headline in the Arizona Republic, whose motto should be "Happy to credulously print any crazy number your lobbying group puts in a press release." In this case, the headline reads:
Ariz. economy reaped $500M from Super Bowl
Uh, sure. Right. Bet that is a quality number. Lets first vet the source. Who provided the paper with this number?
A study released today by the Arizona Super Bowl Host Committee
estimates professional football's championship game at University of
Phoenix Stadium in Glendale generated an economic impact of $500.6
million for the state.
Oh, I see. Certainly a disinterested party. And how was this number arrived at?
Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business
completed the economic-impact report based on surveys of more than
1,500 visitors who came to the Valley to attend the game or take part
in festivities.The survey revealed that visitors stayed in Arizona for an average of
3.9 nights and spent an average of $617 each day on hotels, food,
alcohol, transportation, recreation, shopping and other categories. The
report also calculated the amount that organizations dropped during
Super Bowl week.
Well, its good to see the business school at America's #1 party college on the case. I would have thought this would be a very challenging study to conduct. In my naiveté, I might have assumed that these Superbowl visitors might have displaced other potential visitors who would have been there anyway. I would have fixated on the fact that Superbowl week is also Phoenix Open week and, given the beautiful winter weather here, one of the prime tourist weeks of the year even without the Superbowl. I might have wondered how hotel stays during a week when most local resort hotels are full anyway could have been credited to the Superbowl, particularly when many locals left town to avoid the scene. I might have been worried that I was not counting truly incremental revenues, but the folks in the business school at the university with Americas hottest coeds must be smarter than I am.
So apparently, these geniuses have found a way to assume that 100% of this $617 per day times 3.9 days is incremental and that there is no substitution effect. However, they have also managed to somehow assume that University of Phoenix Stadium is even larger than I thought. Because using these numbers, the only way to get to $500 million is if there were nearly 210,000 visitors. Wow. This does not even include the thousands of us from Phoenix who were also in the stadium.
Look, the way to do this study is simple. You look at sales tax receipts in Maricopa county over the period of January 2007-February 2008. You calculate an underlying growth rate. Then you compare the sales tax receipts for the Superbowl months (Jan-Feb 2008) with the same months a year previously, and see how much growth there is, if any, above the underlying growth rate. I will tell you the answer right now: It ain't anywhere close to $500 million. I will eat my hat if its over $50 million.
Here is a reality check: In 2004 the entire retail trade, from restaurants to stores to hotels, was $16.4 billion for all of Arizona. This is $315 million per week. Basically the study is saying that the entire retail trade for the whole state of Arizona was more than doubled in Superbowl week.
Bullshit.
Thanks to an email from a reader, comes this bizarre but all-too-common tale of an industry group supporting licensing to protect itself from competition:
Imagine you were a state legislator and some folks
asked you to pass a law making it a crime to give advice about paint
colors and throw pillows without a license. And imagine they told you
that the only people qualified to place large pieces of furniture in a
room are those who have gotten a college degree in interior design,
completed a two-year apprenticeship, and passed a national licensing
exam. And by the way, it is criminally misleading for people who
practice interior design to use that term without government permission.You might stare at them incredulously for a moment,
then look down at your calendar and say, "Oh, I get it -- April Fool!"
Right? Wrong.These folks represent the American Society of Interior
Designers (ASID), an industry group whose members have waged a 30-year,
multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign to legislate their competitors
out of business. And those absurd restrictions on advice about paint
selection, throw pillows and furniture placement represent the actual
fruits of lobbying in places like Alabama, Nevada and Illinois, where
ASID and its local affiliates have peddled their snake-oil mantra that
"Every decision an interior designer makes affects life safety and
quality of life."Legislative analysis by a half-dozen states that
rebuffed ASID's attempts to cartelize interior design -- including
Colorado, Washington and South Carolina -- has failed to support ASID's
claim that the location of your couch or the color of your bedroom
walls is literally a matter of life and death. As the Colorado
Department of Regulatory Agencies put it, there is "no evidence of
physical or financial harm being caused to . . . consumers by the
unregulated practice of interior designers."
I am not sure this even needs comment. I traditionally end my posts on licensing with this Milton Friedman quote:
The justification offered is always the same: to protect the consumer. However, the reason
is demonstrated by observing who lobbies at the state legislature for
the imposition or strengthening of licensure. The lobbyists are
invariably representatives of the occupation in question rather than of
the customers. True enough, plumbers presumably know better than anyone
else what their customers need to be protected against. However, it is
hard to regard altruistic concern for their customers as the primary
motive behind their determined efforts to get legal power to decide who
may be a plumber.
I just got a 15,000 page bid package (yes your read that right) to the shipper, and so my hell period of the last week is pretty much behind me. In my business, I bid to be a private operator of public and private recreation facilities, usually on a concession basis (). In this case, the government body we were bidding with required 16 copies of the bid, so really the bid was only about 900 pages long copied 16 times, but even generating 900 pages of business strategy and operations plans is tiring. Not to mention the logistics of making 14,000 copies.
While this may seem to be surprising, it is exactly this type of sales process that attracted me, in part, to this business. Yes, I know, most of you want to barf just thinking about preparing such a document. However, I knew myself well enough at the age of forty when I got into this to know that I am really, really good at this type of complicated written presentation and that I am really, really bad at face-to-face cold-call selling.
Postscript: So far, the business has been fun to run and we have had some real victories in privatizing public recreation, and new opportunities open up every day, as California threatens to close its parks. We do a fair amount of private work now, as well. I can't say that dealing with the government, particularly as a libertarian, is always fun, but so far the business has continued to be a pretty fair straight-up bid process with the best bid winning. However, the moment I start seeing evidence that the bid process is shifting to lobbying and rent-seeking, I'm out of here. I can't even muster up even the smallest desire to play that game.
Update: TJIC writes:
It's fascinating how modern technologies let introverts (or, at least,
people who aren't skilled or interested in traditional glad-handing)
thrive in fields that are thought to require exactly that sort of thing.
He was right the first time. I am an introvert. And this very blog is another great example of his point.
I have chided women's groups for the inconsistency of supporting choice and freedom from government coercion when it comes to decisions about their bodies, but at the same time lobbying for universal government health care. If after my previous posts you still fail to see the inherent contradiction, try this story:
A Winnipeg case currently winding its way to its grim conclusion pits
the children of Samuel Golubchuk against doctors at the Salvation Army
Grace General Hospital. According to the pleadings, Golubchuk's doctors
informed his children that their 84-year-old father is "in the process
of dying" and that they intended to hasten the process by removing his
ventilation, and if that proved insufficient to kill him quickly, to
also remove his feeding tube. In the event that the patient showed
discomfort during these procedures, the chief of the hospital's ICU
unit stated in his affidavit that he would administer morphine.Golubchuk
is an Orthodox Jew, as are his children. The latter have adamantly
opposed his removal from the ventilator and feeding tube, on the
grounds that Jewish law expressly forbids any action designed to
shorten life, and that if their father could express his wishes, he
would oppose the doctors acting to deliberately terminate his life.In
response, the director of the ICU informed Golubchuk's children that
neither their father's wishes nor their own are relevant, and he would
do whatever he decided was appropriate. Bill Olson, counsel for the ICU
director, told the Canadian Broadcasting Company that physicians have
the sole right to make decisions about treatment "” even if it goes
against a patient's religious beliefs "” and that "there is no right to
a continuation of treatment."...The claim of absolute physician discretion to withdraw life-support
advanced by the Canadian doctors would spell the end of any patient
autonomy over end-of-life decisions. So-called living wills, which are
recognized in many American states, and which allow a person to specify
in advance who should make such decisions in the event of their
incapacity, would be rendered nugatory.
I find the discussion of the "duty to die" to save the state money especially chilling. This story is also in the save vein.
Not much comment necessary for the following, except to say that I don't think one should be able to call this an unintended consequence of US biofuel and corn subsidies when 1) the results are utterly predictable and 2) folks like myself publicly predicted it.
The US is the world's leading producer of soy, but many American soy
farmers are shifting to corn to qualify for the government subsidies.
Since 2006, US corn production rose 19% while soy farming fell by 15%.The
drop-off in US soy has helped to drive a major increase in global soy
prices, which have nearly doubled in the last 14 months. In Brazil, the
world's second-largest soy producer, high soy prices are having a
serious impact on the Amazon rainforest and tropical savannas."Amazon
fires and forest destruction have spiked over the last several months,
especially in the main soy-producing states in Brazil," said Laurance.
"Just about everyone there attributes this to rising soy and beef
prices."High soy prices affect the Amazon in several ways. Some
forests are cleared for soy farms. Farmers also buy and convert many
cattle ranches into soy farms, effectively pushing the ranchers further
into the Amazonian frontier. Finally, wealthy soy farmers are lobbying
for major new Amazon highways to transport their soybeans to market,
and this is increasing access to forests for loggers and land
speculators.
I understand the logic behind reporter shield laws. However, I can't support the establishment of different classes of citizenship with different rights, particularly when these rights are tied to certain professions. Either everyone should be able to ignore a subpoena, or nobody should be able to do so. My individual rights should not be subject to a hiring decision by the NY Times.
For those who believe this is essential to the functioning of the press, it is left as an exercise to explain how the press has survived without it for over 200 years.
It is worth noting that this is effectively an extension of what Congress began with McCain-Feingold. In that law, Congress gave members of the press unique speech rights within 60 days of an election that the rest of us do not have. The press tries to piously portray itself as a special entity, but they sure do look like any other special interest group lobbying Congress for special privileges.
The most important college football poll of the year is out, and the top five are as follows (rank, team, #1 votes record so far, total points):
| 1. USC (45) 0-0 1,481 |
| 2. LSU (4) 0-0 1,372 |
| 3. Florida (9) 0-0 1,278 |
| 4. Texas 0-0 1,231 |
| 5. Michigan (2) 0-0 1,218 |
The rest of the list is here.
Many of you might notice that all of these teams have a record of 0-0. So you might ask, "Coyote, are you crazy, why did you call this the most important poll of the year?" Well, since I answered that last year, I will go back a year ago and quote myself:
In theory, voters in the college football polls each week come up
with their current ranking of teams, which in theory could be very
different from how they ranked things the previous week. In practice,
however, voters start with their rankings of the previous week and then
make adjustments up and down for individual teams based on that week's
game results....In effect, the college football rankings are a bit like a tennis ladder. Each
week, losers drop down 3-8 spots and all the winners and no-plays move up to
fill in the vacated spots. Sometimes a team will leapfrog another, but that is
rare and it is extremely rare to leapfrog more than 1 or 2 spots. In this sense, the
initial football poll is the most critical, since only those in the top 10-15
have any chance of moving up the ladder to #1.In
effect, the pre-season poll is the baseline off which all future polls
start. I haven't done the research, but you could probably refine my
statement in the previous paragraph to a set of rules such as:
- A three-loss team can never win the championship
- A two-loss team can win but only if they start in the top 5 of the pre-season poll
- A one-loss team can win but only if they start in the top 15
- An undefeated team can win even if they were left out of the
initial top 25, but only if they play in a major conference. A minor
conference team, even undefeated, will not ever end up #1 unless they
started the season in the top 25.Again, the numbers in these rules may not be exactly right, but I
think they are directionally correct. This is what I call my theory of
College Football Calvinism (the religion, not the cartoon character)
since one's ultimate fate is in large part pre-ordained by the polls
even before the season is born. So, if your alma mater has any shot at
the title, you should hope your AD is out there in the summer lobbying
the writers like hell to up their pre-season poll standings. Every spot
you gain in the pre-season poll is one you don't have to win on the
playing field.
I found this when I went to Pandora today (one of those applications that makes the Internet so entirely cool and worth all the spam and flame wars). I found this message:
Hi, it's Tim from Pandora,
I'm sorry to say that
today Pandora, along with most Internet radio sites, is going off the
air in observance of a Day Of Silence. We are doing this to bring to
your attention a disastrous turn of events that threatens the existence
of Pandora and all of internet radio. We need your help.Ignoring all rationality and responding only to the
lobbying of the RIAA, an arbitration committee in Washington DC has
drastically increased the licensing fees Internet radio sites must pay
to stream songs. Pandora's fees will triple, and are retroactive for
eighteen months! Left unchanged by Congress, every day will be like
today as internet radio sites start shutting down and the music dies.A bill called the "Internet Radio Equality Act" has already
been introduced in both the Senate (S. 1353) and House of
Representatives (H.R. 2060) to fix the problem and save Internet
radio--and Pandora--from obliteration.I'd like to ask you to call your Congressional
representatives today and ask them to become co-sponsors of the bill.
It will only take a few minutes and you can find your Congresspersons and their phone numbers by entering your zip code here.Your opinion matters to your representatives - so please take just a minute to call.
Visit www.savenetradio.org to continue following the fight to Save Internet Radio.
As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support.
-Tim Westergren
(Pandora founder)
All these years of writing about climate change, and I always have claimed that I was not in the pay of any interested industry groups. Well, I guess I lied. It appears "Big Recreation" is lobbying against greenhouse gas controls.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said:
"The
recreation industry's true threats come not from climate change --
which has always changed and will always change -- but from the
so-called global warming "˜solutions' being proposed by government
policymakers. Misguided efforts to "˜solve' global warming threaten to
damage the travel and recreation industry and consequently threaten the
American dream."
This is probably true, though the ski resort guys don't agree.
For those who don't know, several years ago I quit both boneheaded Fortune 50 life and boneheaded startup life to run my own recreation business, where I am trying to push a vision of, and make a little money from, privatization of public recreation. I am actually fairly well insulated from gas price shocks, though by accident rather than thought-out-in-advance strategy. We have mainly taken over government recreation facilities where the customer base is local weekend traffic (rather than say cross-the-country-to-see-old-faithful travelers). This is really by accident, because these facilities took less investment than the big national attractions. As it turns out, when gas prices go up, we actually do a bit better, because people still want to camp and use their RV, but they do it 100 miles from home rather than 1000.
By the way, I am working on a skeptics primer to anthropogenic global warming, which is why blogging has been light. If you'd be willing to read and comment on a pre-release version, email me and I will put you on the list for a pdf which will be coming in a week or so. In the mean time, some of my previous work is here
Regular readers will know I am skeptical that anthropomorphic global warming and its effects will be as bad as generally predicted. However, if I can work around this bias, I would like to cast the issue as neutrally as I can: Man-made CO2 will likely cause the world to warm some, and the negative effects of this for man are likely higher than the positive effects. Under some assumptions, these net negative effects of man-made warming could be astronomical in cost, while under other assumptions they will be less so. Against this variable outcome, efforts to substantially reduce CO2 production world wide and prevent further increases of atmospheric CO2 concentrations will carry a staggering cost, both in dollars and the inevitable social effects of locking developing countries into poverty they are just now escaping (not to mention loss of individual liberty from more government controls).
The political choice we therefore face is daunting: Do we pay an incredibly high price to abate an environmental change that may or may not be more costly than the cure? Reasonable people disagree on this, and I recognize that I may fall in the minority on which side I currently stand on (I think both warming and its abatement costs are overblown, mainly because I have a Julian-Simonesque confidence in man's adaptability and innovation).
Against this backdrop, we have Kevin Drum declaring "More good news on the global warming front:"
Seeking to shape legislation before Congress, three major energy trade
associations have shifted their stances and decided to back mandatory
federal curbs on carbon dioxide and other man-made emissions that could
accelerate climate change.
Here is my news flash: Having some Washington lobbying organizations switch which side of this incredibly difficult trade off they support is not "good news." Good news is finding out that this trade off may not be as stark as we think it is. Good news is finding some new technology that reduces emissions and which private citizens are willing to adopt without government coercion (e.g. sheets of solar cells that can be run out of factories like carpet from Dalton, Georgia). Or, good news is finding out that man's CO2 production has less of an effect on world climate than once thought. Oddly enough, this latter category of good news, surely the best possible news we could get on the topic, is seldom treated as good news by global warming activists. In fact, scientists with this message are called Holocaust deniers. I wonder why?
Update: LOL
I have written numerous times about how most anti-trust actions are initiated for the benefit not of consumers but of industry competitors. The incredible claim that Microsoft's giving away free applications with its OS somehow hurts consumers is just the most famous such example.
Now we face the specter of anti-trust review of the XM-Sirius satellite radio deal. All you need to know is that the National Association of Broadcasters, who represent the terrestrial competitors of satellite radio, are lobbying hard for the deal to be rejected. Nearly every line of the statement is hilarious, but this one caught me:
When
the FCC authorized satellite radio, it specifically found that
the public
would be served best by two competitive nationwide systems. Now,with their stock prices at rock bottom and their business model in
disarray
because of profligate spending practices, they seek a governmentbail-out to avoid competing in the marketplace.
First, I am sure that the NAB is deeply, deeply concerned about satellite radio serving the public well -- NOT. Customers gained by satellite radio are customers lost by the NAB**. In fact, if they really believed the merger would hurt the consumer experience with satellite radio, their statement would instead be "we are thrilled by this merger because it means that customers will be served poorly in the future by the new company and that means customers will defect back to us."
Second, I love the term "government bailout." What they mean by government bailout is the prospect that the government might not block this merger. Which, given the white-hot merger activity between NAB members over the past 5 years, means that most NAB members have received the same "bailout."
(HT: Hit and Run)
** In the TV market, terrestrial broadcasters, particularly their local affiliates, got the government to cover their butts by passing a "Must Carry" law, which basically requires that cable companies have to include all the local broadcasters in their feed. In practice, this and similar laws have forced satellite providers to give you your network feed only through your local affiliate. This means that instead of DirecTV being able to just give me the NBC national feed, they have to give me the NBC Phoenix affiliate. As a result, DirecTV has whole satellites that carry forty, fifty, sixty or more identical feeds. What a screaming waste, and it only gets worse with HDTV. Anyway, in radio, there is no similar law, so satellite growth is more of a zero-sum loss for terrestrial competitors. I think the NAB is just huffy they did not get their own must-carry subsidy law passed.
TJIC has a great link to a new law blog called CopyOwner focused no free speech issues. CopyOwner observes that Culver City, California appears to be emulating the Chinese Internet model, providing access for free, but only if you accept state censoring:
First, they offer Internet access, but you must agree to "limited"
Internet access. And they don't mean limited hours of the day, limited
locations, or a limited amount of time you can be on. No, when they say
"limited," they mean that they will censor access to parts of the
Internet. ("By using this free wireless network you are agreeing and
acknowledging you have read and accepted these terms and conditions of
use, and this wireless network provides only limited access to the
Internet.") In other words, they do not offer Internet access at all....Second, in order to gain the right to enjoy
this free, public, non-Internet access, no matter what you read in the
Bill of Rights (and the First Amendment, in particular) you must agree
that the government may abridge your freedom of speech and you further
agree that when it does so (as it promises to do), you will not
exercise your right to sue for the violation of your First Amendment
rights!I'm not making this up. Here's the fine print:
"Further, [by using it] you are agreeing to waive any claims,
including, but not limited to First Amendment claims, that may arise
from the City and Agency's decision to block access to "¦ matter and
websites [of its choosing] through this free wireless network "¦."From
a legal standpoint, it is the same as if the Culver City public library
were offering you free access to newspapers, but was first clipping out
the articles it didn't like and making you agree not to sue for
censorship if you wanted to read what was left.
My thought at first was that this was a liability response, but my sense is that the courts have been pretty consistent in protecting ISPs when plaintiff lawyers try to drag them in as deep pockets into lawsuits (e.g. trying to sue Earthlink because it was the medium for delivering a MySpace page which in turn allegedly facilitated some action someone is suing over). I am left with the sense that this is just politicians trying to protect themselves from criticism. I am almost tempted to see how this thing plays out - censorship really gets ugly in a democratic environment. You end up with a million interest groups all lobbying that they know best what should be censored. You would have people in the town office arguing for censorship of pornography, religion (both pro and con), evolution (pro and con), nazis, Israel, global warming skepticism. Whatever. (By the way, I have seen people arguing in some context for censoring every item in the preceding list)
