Dispatches from District 48
Posts tagged ‘United States’
A new stadium for a professional sports team is going to be built without public money. At least, that is, without any money from governments of the United States. It will be built and owned by the Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, agruably a nation unto itself.
Most all the world pays a marginal cost for drugs, medical devices, and procedures that does not come close to repaying the development effort that went into those products. Further, most of the world has regimented medical systems that have very strong immune systems against any sort of innovation.
As a result, almost all medical innovation occurs and is paid for in the United States, with the rest of the world acting as a free rider. Sure, some Swiss or Japanese firms still develop a few drugs, but most of those efforts are still justified by profits in the US market.
To this end, Megan McArdle had my favorite quote of the day:
we're still driving quite a bit of product innovation. Our messy, organic, wasteful, unfair, irrational system allows experimentation, and they [Europeans] cherry pick the best results. If we stopped doing this, their system would stop looking so good.
This is not to mention that the US tends to act as the capacity of last resort for desperate people in other countries who either can no longer tolerate the wait for a procedure or are not allowed by their country to have a certain procedure or drug.
A lot of the lefty sites are gearing up the "poor aren't sharing in the benefits" bandwagon again. This is usually brought out of the garage whenever someone wants to put a really progressive soak-the-successful tax plan on the table. So get ready.
The key to parsing their argument is to understand the following distinction: Do you care about quintiles, or individuals? Because if you care about quintiles, then there is no doubt that the real median income of the lowest income quintile has not advanced much over the last 15-20 years. But quintiles are not individuals, and the evidence is that individuals are still doing well, whatever bracket they begin in. Because you see, while the average for the bottom quintile may not be much higher than the average for that bracket a decade ago, the fact is that the people in that bracket have changed. As Mark Perry writes:
A common misperception is that the top or bottom income quintiles, or the top or bottom X% by income, are static, closed, private clubs with very little turnover - once you get into a top or bottom quintile, or a certain income percent, you stay there for life, making it difficult for people to move to a different group. But reality is very different - people move up and down the income quintiles and percentage groups throughout their careers and lives. The top or bottom 1/5/10%, just like the top or bottom quintiles, are never the same people from year to year, there is constant turnover as we move up and down the quintiles.
He quotes some stats from Jeffrey Jones and Daniel Heil:
How much income mobility exists in America? Research consistently affirms that there is substantial upward income mobility in the United States, with the lowest income earners typically showing the strongest results. A Treasury Department study of the 1996"“2005 period used IRS income tax data to discern considerable mobility: more than 55% of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile. More than half the people in the lowest fifth of earners moved to a higher quintile over this period (29% to the second, 14% to the third, 10% to the fourth, and 5% to the highest).
Moreover, there is a great deal of movement in and out of the top income groups. The Treasury data show that 57% "of households in the top 1% in 2005 were not there nine years earlier." The rich sometimes get richer, but they get poorer as well. The study also reveals that income mobility has increased, not decreased, during the past twenty years. For example, 47.3% of those in the lowest income quintile in 1987 saw their incomes increase by at least 100% by 1996. That number jumped to 53.5% from 1996 to 2005.
The Pew Economic Mobility Project tried to track actual people, and not brackets, from tax returns. This is an imperfect science, but the only real way to look at income mobility. They found that 90% of white children and 73% of black children whose parents were in the lowest income quartile in the base period were later to be found in higher income quartiles. But this chart, from the same study, is really telling:
(click to enlarge)
That is a pretty amazing picture, marred only by something apparently bad occurring with the kids of middle class African Americans.
So how can there be so much income gain everywhere without the averages for the lower quintile increasing. I would offer at least two explanations:
Frequent readers will know that I am a strong supporter of open immigration....However, I am tempted to become a close-the-border proponent if the left continue to use numbers skewed by immigration to justify expansions of taxation and the welfare state. Whether they are illegal or not, whether they should be allowed to stay or not, the fact is that tens of millions of generally poor and unskilled immigrants have entered this country over the last several decades. These folks dominate the lower quintile of wage earners in this country, and skew all of our traditional economic indicators downwards. Median wages appear to be stagnating? Of course the metric looks this way "” as wages have risen, 10 million new folks have been inserted at the bottom. If you really want to know what the current median wage is on an apples to apples basis back to 1970, take the current reported median wage and count up about 10 million spots, and that should be the number "” and it will be much higher.
By the way, even for these immigrants, their position in the lower quintile represents upward mobility for them. Being in the middle of the lower quintile probably is a huge improvement over where they were in their home country - almost by definition, or they would not be working so hard to get here.
Sponsored by Congress' most senior member, Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), HR 759 amends the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to include provisions governing food safety. The bill provides for an accreditation system for food facilities, and would require written food safety plans and hazard analyses for any facilities that manufacture, process, pack, transport or hold food in the United States.
It also calls for country of origin labeling and science-based minimum standards for harvesting fruits and vegetables, as well as establishing a risk-based inspection schedule for food facilities. "¦
The [Cornucopia] institute claims the preventative measures [on handling of food on farms] are designed with large-scale producers and processors in mind and "would likely put smaller and organic producers at an economic and competitive disadvantage."
You hear this all the time from proponents of certain regulations -- "even _____ corporation supports it." GE supports global warming regulation. Large health care companies support heath care regulation. The list goes on forever. That is because regulation always aids the large established companies over smaller companies and future upstart competitors. Larger companies have the scale to spread compliance investments over larger sales volumes, and the political muscle to lobby Congress to tilt regulation in their favor (e.g. current cap-and-trade lobbying in Congress). Regulation creates a barrier to entry for potential new competitors as well.
I hate to admit it, but regulation in my own business (which I neither sought nor supported) has killed off many of my smaller competitors and vastly improved our company's competitive position. It is no accident that the list of the largest companies in heavily-regulated Europe nearly never change, decade after decade, whereas the American list has always seen substantial turnover.
Forget for a moment the real scientific questions about the future magnitude of anthropogenic global warming. Just imagine the abuse of this new proposed statute, given that incredibly difficult nature of causality in a complex, chaotic system like climate:
An under-the-radar provision in a House climate bill would give plaintiffs who claim to be victims of global warming a way to sue the federal government or businesses, according to a report Friday in The Washington Times.
The Times reported that Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman of California and Edward Markey of Massachusetts added it into a bill they authored.
The provision, which was just released, reportedly would set grounds for plaintiffs who has "suffered" or expect to suffer "harm" attributable at least in part to government inaction. The provision defines "harm" as "any effect of air pollution (including climate change)," according to the Times. Plaintiffs could seek up to $75,000 in damages a year from the government, with $1.5 million being the maximum total payout.
Remember that it was just weeks ago that the President of the United States blamed flooding in North Dakota on global warming. If flood damage that resulted from a colder-than-average winter and near record snowfall can be blamed on anthropogenic global warming, then anything can.
I am very glad to hear this from someone other than, uh, me:
China bashing during the past decade is reminiscent of the Japan bashing that occurred during the 1980s. It turned out that Japan's substantial export surplus with the US, its extensive accumulation of US Treasury bonds, and its purchases of assets in the US did not hurt the United States, but were for the most part foolish actions on the part of the Japanese government and businesses. I believe that similar conclusions will be reached about the parallel Chinese practices.
I have been saying this for years, that the Chinese trade and exchange rate policies everyone wanted to bash were doing nothing but helping us and hurting the Chinese people. I wrote a hypothetical post from the Chinese persepective nearly 3 years ago:
Our Chinese government continues to pursue a policy of export promotion, patting itself on the back for its trade surplus in manufactured goods with the United States. The Chinese government does so through a number of avenues, including:
- Limiting yuan convertibility, and keeping the yuan's value artificially low
- Imposing strict capital controls that limit dollar reinvestment to low-yield securities like US government T-bills
- Selling exports below cost and well below domestic prices (what the Americans call "dumping") and subsidizing products for export
It is important to note that each and every one of these government interventions subsidizes US citizens and consumers at the expense of Chinese citizens and consumers. A low yuan makes Chinese products cheap for Americans but makes imports relatively dear for Chinese. So-called "dumping" represents an even clearer direct subsidy of American consumers over their Chinese counterparts. And limiting foreign exchange re-investments to low-yield government bonds has acted as a direct subsidy of American taxpayers and the American government, saddling China with extraordinarily low yields on our nearly $1 trillion in foreign exchange. Every single step China takes to promote exports is in effect a subsidy of American consumers by Chinese citizens.
This policy of raping the domestic market in pursuit of exports and trade surpluses was one that Japan followed in the seventies and eighties. It sacrificed its own consumers, protecting local producers in the domestic market while subsidizing exports. Japanese consumers had to live with some of the highest prices in the world, so that Americans could get some of the lowest prices on those same goods. Japanese customers endured limited product choices and a horrendously outdated retail sector that were all protected by government regulation, all in the name of creating trade surpluses. And surpluses they did create. Japan achieved massive trade surpluses with the US, and built the largest accumulation of foreign exchange (mostly dollars) in the world. And what did this get them? Fifteen years of recession, from which the country is only now emerging, while the US economy happily continued to grow and create wealth in astonishing proportions, seemingly unaware that is was supposed to have been "defeated" by Japan.
We at Panda Blog believe it is insane for our Chinese government to continue to chase the chimera of ever-growing foreign exchange and trade surpluses. These achieved nothing lasting for Japan and they will achieve nothing for China. In fact, the only thing that amazes us more than China's subsidize-Americans strategy is that the Americans seem to complain about it so much. They complain about their trade deficits, which are nothing more than a reflection of their incredible wealth. They complain about the yuan exchange rate, which is set today to give discounts to Americans and price premiums to Chinese. They complain about China buying their government bonds, which does nothing more than reduce the costs of their Congress's insane deficit spending. They even complain about dumping, which is nothing more than a direct subsidy by China of lower prices for American consumers.
And, incredibly, the Americans complain that it is they that run a security risk with their current trade deficit with China! This claim is so crazy, we at Panda Blog have come to the conclusion that it must be the result of a misdirection campaign by CIA-controlled American media. After all, the fact that China exports more to the US than the US does to China means that by definition, more of China's economic production is dependent on the well-being of the American economy than vice-versa. And, with nearly a trillion dollars in foreign exchange invested heavily in US government bonds, it is China that has the most riding on the continued stability of the American government, rather than the reverse. American commentators invent scenarios where the Chinese could hurt the American economy, which we could, but only at the cost of hurting ourselves worse. Mutual Assured Destruction is alive and well, but today it is not just a feature of nuclear strategy but a fact of the global economy.
Napoleon said to never interrupt an enemy when he was making a mistake. I don't consider China an enemy, but it just flabbergasts me that the Chinese taxpayers and consumers see fit to subsidize lower prices for our consumers, and we feel the need to stop them.
There is a quote from Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor** that honestly reflects my opinion on the topic of leaving the US (Redford is Joe Turner, running away from the CIA, while Joubert is an assassin-for-hire):
Turner: I'd like to go back to New York.
Joubert: You have not much future there. It will happen this
way. You may be walking. Maybe the first sunny day of the spring. And a
car will slow beside you, and a door will open, and someone you know,
maybe even trust, will get out of the car. And he will smile, a
becoming smile. But he will leave open the door of the car and offer to
give you a lift.Turner: You seem to understand it all so well. What would you suggest?
Joubert: Personally, I prefer Europe.
Turner: Europe?
Joubert: Yes. Well, the fact is, what I do is not a bad occupation. Someone is always willing to pay.
Turner: I would find it"¦ tiring.
Joubert: Oh, no "†it's quite restful. It's"¦ almost peaceful.
No need to believe in either side, or any side. There is no cause.
There's only yourself. The belief is in your own precision.Turner: I was born in the United States, Joubert. I miss it when I'm away too long.
Joubert: A pity.
Turner: I don't think so.
A great line, particularly in a movie steeped in cold war weariness. Anyway, I was listening to some rant on NPR about leaving the US if McCain won the election, and I asked myself if I had to leave the US, what would be my rank order of countries to which I might move. My list is highly influenced by language (at 46 I hardly feel like learning a new language) and by countries of which I am knowledgeable. Here is what I came up with:
Here are some notes on the list, as well as some explanations of countries left off:
Readers are welcome to propose their own priorities in the comments.
** Postscript: Three Days of the Condor is one of my favorites, for a couple of reasons. First, I always loved Faye Dunaway. Second, and more important, I like thrillers that have a more languid pace. I know that sounds weird to say, and if I were a film critic I might have the right words, but there is something about the music and the editing and the pacing that almost stands in contrast to the urgencies of the plot itself. Despite being on the run through the movie, Redford never actually runs. No car chases either. Sort of the antonym to the shaky rapid-cut camera action of, say, the Bourne movies. Other movies I would put in this same category are LA Confidential (maybe my favorite movie) and perhaps the newer version of the Thomas Crowne Affair. I might put Chinatown on this list too, but then since 3 of the 4 would include Dunaway, one might think my first rather than my second criteria was driving the list.
By the way, even action movies could learn something from this. The first Indiana Jones movie was great in part because the action scenes were interspersed with quiet scenes. The audience gets to rest from time to time, and the action is highlighted by the contrast. You can even have some token character development. Later Indiana Jones movies fell into the trap of going for non-stop adrenalin.
Anyone who flies regularly and has not thought of at least five ways they could easily beat airport security isn't really trying. Jeffrey Goldberg actually tries a few:
Suspicious that the measures put in place after the attacks of September 11 to prevent further such attacks are almost entirely for show"”security theater is the term of art"”I have for some time now been testing, in modest ways, their effectiveness. Because the TSA's security regimen seems to be mainly thing-based"”most of its 44,500 airport officers are assigned to truffle through carry-on bags for things like guns, bombs, three-ounce tubes of anthrax, Crest toothpaste, nail clippers, Snapple, and so on"”I focused my efforts on bringing bad things through security in many different airports, primarily my home airport, Washington's Reagan National, the one situated approximately 17 feet from the Pentagon, but also in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Chicago, and at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport...
Schneier and I walked to the security checkpoint. "Counterterrorism in the airport is a show designed to make people feel better," he said. "Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers." This assumes, of course, that al-Qaeda will target airplanes for hijacking, or target aviation at all. "We defend against what the terrorists did last week," Schneier said. He believes that the country would be just as safe as it is today if airport security were rolled back to pre-9/11
levels. "Spend the rest of your money on intelligence, investigations, and emergency response."
Though I have to give props to the TSA for supporting first Amendment rights, I am not sure their concern over free speech and privacy was driving this encounter:
On another occasion, at LaGuardia, in New York, the
transportation-security officer in charge of my secondary screening
emptied my carry-on bag of nearly everything it contained, including a
yellow, three-foot-by-four-foot Hezbollah flag, purchased at a
Hezbollah gift shop in south Lebanon. The flag features, as its
charming main image, an upraised fist clutching an AK-47 automatic
rifle. Atop the rifle is a line of Arabic writing that reads Then surely the party of God are they who will be triumphant.
The officer took the flag and spread it out on the inspection table.
She finished her inspection, gave me back my flag, and told me I could
go. I said, "That's a Hezbollah flag." She said, "Uh-huh." Not "Uh-huh,
I've been trained to recognize the symbols of anti-American terror
groups, but after careful inspection of your physical person, your
behavior, and your last name, I've come to the conclusion that you are
not a Bekaa Valley"“trained threat to the United States commercial
aviation system," but "Uh-huh, I'm going on break, why are you talking
to me?"
It turns out, incredibly, that most airport employees are not screened. Because, you know, it would be grossly unfair to subject airport staff to the same sort of time-wasting indignities to which we all must acquiesce. Also, many commercial flights have a belly-full of US mail which I am pretty sure is not inspected in any way.
One of the pieces of data that turns out to be nearly impossible to find is a direct comparison of the median income by quartile on a PPP basis between countries. In other words, how does the income of, say, the US lower quartile compare to other countries? There are a zillion sites with metrics of income inequality and GINI indexes and such, but to my mind these are meaningless. OK, the poor in the US are much less wealthy than the rich in the US, but how do they compare to the poor of other nations. The few studies I have seen have reluctantly (remember, these are leftish academics) admitted that the US poor do pretty well vs. the poor in other nations. Here is data for US vs. Europe.
I got a lot of grief a few years ago when I said, related to Kwanzaa:
Every African-American should wake up each morning and say "I give
thanks that my ancestors suffered the horrors of the slavery passage,
suffered the indignity and humiliation of slavery, and suffered the
poverty and injustices of the post-war South so that I, today, can be
here, in this country, infinitely more free, healthier, safer and
better off financially than I would have been in Africa."
I wanted to actually make this comparison more real. I used the CIA Factbook to estimate the share of per capita GDP on a PPP basis earned by the top decile, or top 10% wealthiest individuals, in a number of African nations (Example page here for Ethiopia -- calculation would be [25.5%/10%] x $700 per capita).
So here are the results:
Hopefuly this is enough of a sample to give you an idea of the range. Only South Africa is a real outlier from this range. Now, by the same methodology and source, here is the average share of the per capita GDP for the bottom 10% of earners in the US:
Wow! This means that the average person in the bottom 10% in the US, most of whom we classify as below the poverty line, would easily, by multiples and orders of magnitude, be in the top 10% richest people in most African nations. And the surviving decedents of those poor folks who got dragged to the US in slavery would be the Bill Gateses of their mother countries.
The point being, of course, that the size of the pie is typically more important than how you divide it up. And it is nearly an axiom that government efforts to divide the pie more evenly almost always make it smaller.
** estimated based on 2006 median black household wages being about 70% of the US median household wages. Yes, I know, we are wildly mixing apples and oranges here to get African American share of GDP per capita in the US, but its in the ballpark -- certainly close enough to make my basic point. And yes, I know there are flaws in measuring income across countries even on a PPP basis. If anyone knows of how to get this data more directly, please email me.
Sometimes I snap at someone for their criticism of a particular politician. Typically, they assume I am doing so because I support that politician. But in reality, I am using just sick of the implication that somehow other politicians would have been much better. I absolutely agree with Don Boudreaux's comment:
Fareed Zakaria (author of a truly fine book and columnist for the
Washington Post) rightly argues that Sarah Palin is unqualified to be
president of the United States (and, hence, by extension, unqualified
to be V-P). Mr. Zakaria is correct that Gov. Palin's recent answer to a
question about the economy "is nonsense - a vapid emptying out of every
catchphrase about economics that came into her head." He's correct also
that she's unfit to be entrusted with the power of the modern
presidency.But Mr. Zakaria is incorrect to suppose that these traits separate
Gov. Palin from other candidates for high political office. Calls by
Senators McCain and Obama for cracking down on "speculators" are full
of classic and wrongheaded catchphrases, as is Sen. Obama's vocal
skepticism about free trade. Gov. Palin is merely less skilled in
passing off inanities and claptrap as profundities.
If so, great for them. The more free trade in the world, the better:
Canadian and European officials say they plan to begin
negotiating a massive agreement to integrate Canada's economy with the
27 nations of the European Union, with preliminary talks to be launched
at an Oct. 17 summit in Montreal three days after the federal election.Trade Minister Michael Fortier and his staff have been engaged for
the past two months with EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson and the
representatives of European governments in an effort to begin what a
senior EU official involved in the talks described in an interview
yesterday as "deep economic integration negotiations."If successful, Canada would be the first developed nation to have
open trade relations with the EU, which has completely open borders
between its members but imposes steep trade and investment barriers on
outsiders"¦A pact with the United States would be politically impossible in Europe, senior European Commission officials said.
I would have said that changing the last statement would be a great goal for an Obama administration that wants to make Europe love us again (did they ever?) But he has made clear that trade does not count in his definition of good relations, and in fact has already committed to initiating trade wars against our neighbors Mexico and Canada.
US unemployment in August "jumped unexpectedly" to 6.1%, by the oddest of coincidences in the first full month just after new, 12% higher US minimum wages took effect.
The unemployment rate is higher than it has been in the United States in the last 5 years, but substantially lower than the rate most Western European countries like France and Germany experience even during peak economic times.
In response, the Obama campaign is urging further increases to the minimum wage and emulation of labor policy and legislation in France and Germany.
I am sure you have seen various rankings where the US falls way behind other western nations in terms of infant mortality. This stat is jumped on by the left as justification for just how cold and heartless America is, and just how enlightened socialized medicine must be. However, no one seems to bother to check the statistic itself (certainly the media is too incompetent to do so, particularly when it fits their narrative). Statistics like this that are measured across nations are notoriously unreliable, as individual nations may have different definitions or methods for gathering the data.
And, in fact, this turns out to be the case with infant mortality, a fact I first reported here (related post on medical definitions driving national statistics here). This week, Mark Perry links to an article further illuminating the issue:
The main
factors affecting early infant survival are birth weight and
prematurity. The way that these factors are reported "” and how such
babies are treated statistically "” tells a different story than what
the numbers reveal. Low
birth weight infants are not counted against the "live birth"
statistics for many countries reporting low infant mortality rates.According
to the way statistics are calculated in Canada, Germany, and Austria, a
premature baby weighing less than 500 kg is not considered a living
child.
But
in the U.S., such very low birth weight babies are considered live
births. The mortality rate of such babies "” considered "unsalvageable"
outside of the U.S. and therefore never alive "” is extraordinarily
high; up to 869 per 1,000 in the first month of life alone. This skews
U.S. infant mortality statistics.Norway
boasts one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world. But when
the main determinant of mortality "” weight at birth "” is factored in,
Norway has no better survival rates than the United States....In the United States, all infants who show signs of life at birth
(take a breath, move voluntarily, have a heartbeat) are considered
alive.If a child in Hong Kong or Japan is born alive but dies within the
first 24 hours of birth, he or she is reported as a "miscarriage" and
does not affect the country's reported infant mortality rates....Efforts to salvage these tiny babies reflect this classification. Since
2000, 42 of the world's 52 surviving babies weighing less than 400g
(0.9 lbs.) were born in the United States.
Hmm, so in the US we actually try to save low-birthweight babies rather than label them unsalvageable. Wow, we sure have a cold and heartless system here. [disclosure: My nephew was a very pre-mature, very low-birthweight baby who could have fit in the palm of your hand at birth and survived by the full application of American medical technology. He is doing great today]
Barack Obama and most of the Democratic Party (as well as a sizable Lou Dobbs contingent in the Republican Party) fear trade and globalization. But like it or not, much of our economic growth is driven directly or indirectly by trade. In particular, even I found the export growth rates in this chart from Mark Perry surprisingly large:
After digging a First Amendment hole for itself in the Plame affair, the New York Times seems to still be hell-bent on narrowing the very First Amendment protections that probably kept its employees out of jail in the early 70's. Specifically, the Times frets that the US is out of step with Europe in having a much broader view of freedom of speech:
Six years later, a state court judge in New York dismissed
a libel case brought by several Puerto Rican groups against a business
executive who had called food stamps "basically a Puerto Rican
program." The First Amendment, Justice Eve M. Preminger wrote, does not
allow even false statements about racial or ethnic groups to be
suppressed or punished just because they may increase "the general
level of prejudice."Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.
"It
is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken," Jeremy Waldron, a
legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month,
"when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative
responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against
certain forms of vicious attack."
In the 1970's, members of my family worked in the oil industry, and we received numerous death threats of varying believability, and several of our friends received letter bombs or had family members kidnapped. Many of these attacks and threats were directly traceable to certain media shows that featured editorial attacks on the oil industry. So is the Times suggesting that the media should hold off on its criticism of the oil industry because this criticism created an atmosphere of hate in which these attacks were conducted?
No freaking way, because these calls to limit criticism and "hate speech" always have an ideological filter. There is never a suggestion that the speech bans be even-handed. Criticism of African Americans is outlawed, but exactly parallel language about white folks is A-OK. Criticising Islam is out, but Christianity is a fine target. Death threats against Haitian activists must be avoided at all costs, but death threats against corporate executives are no reflection on free speech or the media. The article is quite explicit that by their definition, hate speech only applies to "minorities," which you can translate to mean "groups the political class has decided to protect." You may be assured that members of the political class will find a way to get themselves included in this definition, so they can be free of criticism,
Kudos to Harvey Silvergate, who even makes the exact same point I have made about Hitler a number of times:
"Free speech matters because it works," Mr. Silverglate continued.
Scrutiny and debate are more effective ways of combating hate speech
than censorship, he said, and all the more so in the post-Sept. 11 era."The world didn't suffer because too many people read "˜Mein Kampf,' " Mr. Silverglate said. "Sending Hitler on a speaking tour of the United States would have been quite a good idea."
I will add that I am also happy to be out of step with Europe in terms of any number of other policies, including American libel law, or laws that make it ever so much easier to start a business, and European tolerance for a cozy business-political elite that, whatever their party, focuses on keeping their elite wealthy and powerful.
After digging a First Amendment hole for itself in the Plame affair, the New York Times seems to still be hell-bent on narrowing the very First Amendment protections that probably kept its employees out of jail in the early 70's. Specifically, the Times frets that the US is out of step with Europe in having a much broader view of freedom of speech:
Six years later, a state court judge in New York dismissed
a libel case brought by several Puerto Rican groups against a business
executive who had called food stamps "basically a Puerto Rican
program." The First Amendment, Justice Eve M. Preminger wrote, does not
allow even false statements about racial or ethnic groups to be
suppressed or punished just because they may increase "the general
level of prejudice."Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.
"It
is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken," Jeremy Waldron, a
legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month,
"when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative
responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against
certain forms of vicious attack."
In the 1970's, members of my family worked in the oil industry, and we received numerous death threats of varying believability, and several of our friends received letter bombs or had family members kidnapped. Many of these attacks and threats were directly traceable to certain media shows that featured editorial attacks on the oil industry. So is the Times suggesting that the media should hold off on its criticism of the oil industry because this criticism created an atmosphere of hate in which these attacks were conducted?
No freaking way, because these calls to limit criticism and "hate speech" always have an ideological filter. There is never a suggestion that the speech bans be even-handed. Criticism of African Americans is outlawed, but exactly parallel language about white folks is A-OK. Criticising Islam is out, but Christianity is a fine target. Death threats against Haitian activists must be avoided at all costs, but death threats against corporate executives are no reflection on free speech or the media. The article is quite explicit that by their definition, hate speech only applies to "minorities," which you can translate to mean "groups the political class has decided to protect." You may be assured that members of the political class will find a way to get themselves included in this definition, so they can be free of criticism,
Kudos to Harvey Silvergate, who even makes the exact same point I have made about Hitler a number of times:
"Free speech matters because it works," Mr. Silverglate continued.
Scrutiny and debate are more effective ways of combating hate speech
than censorship, he said, and all the more so in the post-Sept. 11 era."The world didn't suffer because too many people read "˜Mein Kampf,' " Mr. Silverglate said. "Sending Hitler on a speaking tour of the United States would have been quite a good idea."
I will add that I am also happy to be out of step with Europe in terms of any number of other policies, including American libel law, or laws that make it ever so much easier to start a business, and European tolerance for a cozy business-political elite that, whatever their party, focuses on keeping their elite wealthy and powerful.
The Europeans have crafted a regulatory environment in their labor market that grants all kinds of protections and gauranteed benefits at the expense of new or unskilled workers trying to join the workforce. We are doing the same thing:
This year, it's harder than ever for teens to find a summer job. Researchers at Northeastern University
described summer 2007 as "the worst in post-World War II history" for
teen summer employment, and those same researchers say that 2008 is
poised to be "even worse."According to their data, only about
one-third of Americans 16 to 19 years old will have a job this summer,
and vulnerable low-income and minority teens are going to fare even
worse.The percentage of teens classified as "unemployed""”those
who are actively seeking a job but can't get one"”is more than three
times higher than the national unemployment rate, according to the most
recent Department of Labor statistics.One of the prime reasons
for this drastic employment drought is the mandated wage hikes that
policymakers have forced down the throats of local businesses. Economic
research has shown time and again that increasing the minimum wage
destroys jobs for low-skilled workers while doing little to address
poverty.According to economist David Neumark of the University of California at Irvine,
for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage, employment for high
school dropouts and young black adults and teenagers falls by 8.5
percent. In the past 11 months alone, the United States' minimum wage has increased by more than twice that amount.
I am not big on arguing the immigration issue from an integration perspective, any more than I like to argue about who will pick the lettuce. Free movement around the globe and the ability to take a job by mutual consent of the two parties rather than based on their country of origin should drive immigraiton policy.
I live in the state with the highest percentage of illegal immigrants, and I have never gotten my head around why this was culturally bad. I think the Hispanic culture here brings at least as much to the table as, say, the Irish do in Boston. So I did not find this to be surprising (from the Manhattan Institute, via Reason)
In general, the longer an immigrant lives in the United States, the
more characteristics of native citizens he or she tends to take on,
said Jacob L. Vigdor, a professor at Duke University
and author of the study. During periods of intense immigration, such as
from 1870 to 1920, or during the immigration wave that began in the
1970s, new arrivals tend to drag down the average assimilation index of
the foreign-born population as a whole.The report found,
however, that the speed with which new arrivals take on native-born
traits has increased since the 1990s. As a result, even though the
foreign population doubled during that period, the newcomers did not
drive down the overall assimilation index of the foreign-born
population. Instead, it held relatively steady from 1990 to 2006."This
is something unprecedented in U.S. history," Vigdor said. "It shows
that the nation's capacity to assimilate new immigrants is strong."
Over the past 25 years, the population of the Pittsburgh urban area
has remained fixed at about 1.8 million people. Driving, however, has
increased by almost 50 percent.During this period, Pittsburgh has spent hundreds of millions of
dollars upgrading light-rail lines, building exclusive busways, and "”
in the latest project "” building a $435 million transit tunnel under the Allegheny River. Despite (or because of) this investment, transit ridership has dropped by more than 25 percent.Although the numbers vary slightly from place to place, Pittsburgh's
story is pretty typical of transit everywhere. Sure, some cities have
seen ridership gains, but subsidies to transit are huge and transit
does not make a notable (meaning 5 percent or more) contribution to
personal mobility in any urban area except New York (where it is 10
percent).
He has a good summary of what's wrong and what might work instead. I appreciated this observation in particular:
Why do we put up with this? The answer, of course, is that transit is
pork. "For most transit agencies in the United States, if they were to
write a mission statement that is reflective of what they do, they
would indicate that they exist for the purpose of serving their
employees and vendors," not transit riders, notes Cox.
"It shall be illegal and a violation of this Act," declared the House
of Representatives, "to limit the production or distribution of oil,
natural gas, or any other petroleum product"¦ or to otherwise take any
action in restraint of trade for oil, natural gas, or any petroleum
product when such action, combination, or collective action has a
direct, substantial, and reasonably foreseeable effect on the market,
supply, price, or distribution of oil, natural gas, or other petroleum
product in the United States."
Well, OPEC nations may or may not be in violation of this law. My guess is that if incompetence and general third-world type fraud is actionable, then they are guilty. It may be tougher to prove outright conspiracy.
BUT, there is one nation that has, right there on the public record, clear government legislation that substantially limits development of some of the largest potential new oil reserves in the US. That country is the United States, and by passage of this law, the entire Congress has made itself outlaws.
Yesterday we saw the people who have done the most to keep oil prices high (e.g. Congress) trying to blame shift their policy failures onto oil company executives. Hilariously, Maxine Waters thinks she would do a better job for consumers if she were in charge of the US oil companies.
Beyond the realities of supply and demand, which I guess we all despair of teaching Congress, there were these remarks by Shell's John Hofmeister (via Powerline):
While all oil-importing nations buy oil at global prices, some, notably
India and China, subsidize the cost of oil products to their nation's
consumers, feeding the demand for more oil despite record prices. They
do this to speed economic growth and to ensure a competitive advantage
relative to other nations.Meanwhile, in the United States, access to our own oil and gas
resources has been limited for the last 30 years, prohibiting companies
such as Shell from exploring and developing resources for the benefit
of the American people.Senator Sessions, I agree, it is not a free market.
According to the Department of the Interior, 62 percent of all
on-shore federal lands are off limits to oil and gas developments, with
restrictions applying to 92 percent of all federal lands. We have an
outer continental shelf moratorium on the Atlantic Ocean, an outer
continental shelf moratorium on the Pacific Ocean, an outer continental
shelf moratorium on the eastern Gulf of Mexico, congressional bans on
on-shore oil and gas activities in specific areas of the Rockies and
Alaska, and even a congressional ban on doing an analysis of the
resource potential for oil and gas in the Atlantic, Pacific and eastern
Gulf of Mexico.The Argonne National Laboratory did a report in 2004 that identified
40 specific federal policy areas that halt, limit, delay or restrict
natural gas projects. I urge you to review it. It is a long list. If I
may, I offer it today if you would like to include it in the record.When many of these policies were implemented, oil was selling in the
single digits, not the triple digits we see now. The cumulative effect
of these policies has been to discourage U.S. investment and send U.S.
companies outside the United States to produce new supplies.As a result, U.S. production has declined so much that nearly 60 percent of daily consumption comes from foreign sources.
The problem of access can be solved in this country by the same
government that has prohibited it. Congress could have chosen to lift
some or all of the current restrictions on exportation and production
of oil and gas. Congress could provide national policy to reverse the
persistent decline of domestically secure natural resource development.
This is a point I have made for a while:
Exxon Mobil is the largest U.S. oil and gas company, but we account for
only 2 percent of global energy production, only 3 percent of global
oil production, only 6 percent of global refining capacity, and only 1
percent of global petroleum reserves. With respect to petroleum
reserves, we rank 14th.
Government-owned national oil companies dominate the top spots. For an
American company to succeed in this competitive landscape and go head
to head with huge government-backed national oil companies, it needs
financial strength and scale to execute massive complex energy projects
requiring enormous long-term investments.
Lots more good stuff, check it out.
What follows is by no means the worst excess of our Congress. But it is an interesting demonstration of how Congress attempts to disguise legislation that is intended to help just one important contituent. The program looks moderately innocuous:
[T]his year's farm bill contains a special-interest provision you've
probably never heard of "” the Qualified Forestry Bonds program. This
provides federally funded tax-credit bonds for forest purchases that
meet the following four criteria:
The forest must be adjacent to U.S. Forest Service Land;
Well, it looks like it might be some land acquisition scheme by the US Forest Service, though by my observation they really aren't staffed or resourced to manage the land they already have.
But here is the truth of it:
But this farm-bill provision offers a lesson on how things are
sometimes done in Washington. Only one parcel of land in the entire
United States meets the criteria set for the Qualified Forestry Bonds
program. You see, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has approved
exactly one "Native Fish Habitat Conservation Plan,"
covering a 1.6-million-acre parcel that reaches from western Montana
into eastern Washington State. And that parcel is owned by the Plum
Creek Timber Company, the single largest private landowner in the
United States.
Glen Reynolds brings us this:
A provision in the US Carbon Neutral Government Act incorporated
into the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 act effectively
bars the US government from buying fuels that have greater life-cycle
emissions than fuels produced from conventional petroleum sources.The United States has defined Alberta oilsands as unconventional
because the bitumen mined from the ground requires upgrading and
refining as opposed to the traditional crude pumped from oil wells.California Democrat Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the
House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and Republican Tom
Davis added the clause.
Uh, right. Since we all burn pure unrefined crude oil pumped right from the oil well in our car.
Here is what a traditional crude oil goes through before it becomes gasoline:
- Water and salt must be removed
- The oil is heated up to over 700 degrees, and is separated into its fractions via distillation. Oil is made up of hydrocarbon chains of many lengths, from short ones (methane, ethane, propane) to very long ones (asphalt, heavy motor oils). Gasoline is somewhere in between.
- Each fraction generally has to be de-sulfurized. This generally occurs by injecting hydrogen into the fraction across a catalyst bed to remove the sulfur as Hydrogen Sulfide, a dangerous gas that must be further processed to produce pure sulfur.
- The gasoline fractions in a typical oil are nowhere near large enough for the relative demand. So additional steps must be taken to produce gasoline:
- Very heavy fractions have their molecules cracked at high temperatures, either in cokers, high temperature crackers or in fluid catalyst bed crackers. These processes either remove carbon in its pure form or remove it by combining it with hydrogen
- Certain fractions are reformed in combination with hyrdrogen, sometimes across a platinum catalyst, to produce molecules with better properties for gasoline, including higher octane.
- All over a refinery, there are small units that take individual fractions that use a variety of processes to create specific molecules that have useful properties
- All of these different fractions and products are blended in various proportions to make different grades of gasoline. These blends and proportions can change from city to city (to meet environmental regulations, Phoenix must have a gasoline blend that is unique in the US) and must change season to season (gas that burns well in winter will vapor lock in the summer time).
I am sure I left tons of steps out, but you get the idea. Below are my old digs at Exxon's Baytown Texas Refinery, where I worked as an engineer for 3 years out of college:
As a follow-up to this post on gas-price demagoguery, I would like to observe that the very same people who are most likely to demagogue about high gas prices in this country are the very same ones who advocate that the US adopt European-style taxation levels, regulatory policy, and CO2 targets, the results of which can be seen here:
If you can't read the colors on the scale well, I think you can guess which is the US price line and which are the European gas prices. Source here. Just to be clear, this has nothing to do with wholesale gasoline prices, which are substantially similar between the US and Europe:
Since the difference in price does not go to the producer, I will leave it as an exercise to guess where the extra $5 per gallon is going (hint: Uncle Francois) The cognitive dissonance required to call for 80% CO2 reductions while simultaneously decrying $3.50 gas prices is just stunning to me.
Update: From the same source, here are the gas prices in dollars per US gallon EXCLUDING taxes:
| Date | Belgium | France | Germany | Italy | Nthrlnds | UK | US |
| 4/14/2008 | 3.32 | 3.28 | 3.18 | 3.61 | 3.85 | 3.09 | 3.21 |
Update #2: More here on Hillary's sleight of hand. And this from Robert Samuelson, at how this cognitive dissonance extends to exploration limits:
We could be producing more, but Congress has put large areas of
potential supply off-limits. These include the Atlantic and Pacific
coasts and parts of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.
By government estimates, these areas may contain 25 billion to 30
billion barrels of oil (against about 30 billion barrels of proven U.S.
reserves today) and 80 trillion cubic feet or more of natural gas
(compared with about 200 tcf of proven reserves).What keeps these areas closed are exaggerated environmental fears,
strong prejudice against oil companies and sheer stupidity. Americans
favor both "energy independence" and cheap fuel. They deplore imports
-- who wants to pay foreigners? -- but oppose more production in the
United States. Got it? The result is a "no-pain energy agenda that
sounds appealing but has no basis in reality," writes Robert Bryce in
"Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of 'Energy Independence.' "
Remember Y2K? If you took the media and politicians seriously, this sure did seem like it was going to big a big apocalyptic deal (see survey in the postscript about economic depression and civil insurrection). Until it wasn't.
Odd Citizen points to an interesting study on this topic. The author links this
Australian study looking retrospectively at the Y2K scare, trying to understand
why an irrational collective hysteria developed that allowed for no skepticism
(seem familiar). The whole thing is interesting, but here is the money
quote:
From the perspective of public administration, the two most
compelling observations relate to conformity and collective amnesia. The
response to Y2K shows how relatively subtle characteristics of a policy problem
may produce a conformist response in which no policy actors have any incentive
to oppose, or even to critically assess, the dominant view. Moreover, in a
situation where a policy has been adopted and implemented with unanimous
support, or at least without any opposition, there is likely to be little
interest in critical evaluation when it appears that the costs of the policy
have outweighed the benefits.
The article is written without any reference to current
climate issues, but wow, does this sound familiar? It is a dead-on description of what is occurring with global warming.
The author also goes on to discuss public choice theory and why it is not necessarily a good explanatory model for the Y2K scare. He argues that a better explanation was the asymmetry of blame:
Individuals and groups who argued for a 'fix on failure' approach stood to benefit only modestly if this approach avoided unnecessary costs, but faced the risk of blame in the event of significant system failures attributable (accurately or otherwise) to Y2K related problems. Conversely, it was evident in advance that there was little risk of loss to individuals who advocated comprehensive remediation. The absence of any serious Y2K problems could always be attributed to the success of the remediation program.
The asymmetry of incentives was amplified by the possibility of litigation, particularly in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in other English-speaking countries. The reliance of the United States on tort litigation as a method of compensating those experiencing adverse outcomes of various kinds produces a strong bias in favour of 'defensive' expenditures. In particular, jurors have been highly unsympathetic to individuals and organisations that have chosen to disregard known low-probability risks.
The special characteristics of the Y2K problem were ideally suited to produce this kind of reaction. On the one hand, the problem was both widespread and comprehensible to non-experts, such as potential jurors. On the other hand, if 'embedded systems' are disregarded, the Y2K problem differed from most other computer 'bugs' in that a complete solution was feasible, though very expensive.
In these circumstances, litigation against organisations that had failed to undertake comprehensive Y2K remediation, and experienced any form of system breakdown in early 2000, was virtually guaranteed of success. By contrast, the risk of blame being allocated to organisations that overspent on Y2K remediation was perceived to be minimal. The absence of litigation or other processes for the allocation of blame in the aftermath of the Y2K non-event shows that this perception was accurate.
A rough parallel to this in the global warming world is the apparent ease of assigning blame for CO2 emissions to energy producers and car manufacturers (despite the fact that it is all of us who uses this energy and buys these cars) vs. the reluctance of media and others to quantify and assign blame for reductions in wealth and economic prosperity that might result from CO2 limitations.
Postscript: One other thing that is interesting to me as a libertarian: I often point out that the political parties are a joke, a mish-mash of shifting political positions that has little to do with deeply held theories of government and more to do with branding and populist electioneering. The Y2K-Climate comparison caused me to find a good example. In 1999, it was the Republicans using the Y2K issue as a club on the Democrats, arguing that the Clinton Administration, and Al Gore in particular, were ignoring this critical end-of-the-world crisis and that the government needed to be doing more. Really. Just check this out from Dec, 1999:
Last year, The National Journal devoted an entire issue to the subject, with headlines such as "The Big Glitch" and "Sorry, Al, This Bug's for You." In the special issue, Neil Munro cites a survey of industry and government executives and
programmers concerning potential fallout from the millennium bug, showing that 70 percent
anticipated a negative effect on the economy, with 10 percent of respondents not ruling
out the possibility of economic depression and civil insurrection.With a technology problem of this magnitude on the national horizon, where was the leadership of the nation's No. 1 techno-nerd and self-proclaimed creator of the "information superhighway," Vice President Al Gore?
Gore's familiarity with and personal interest in technology, specifically computer technology, makes suspect his long silence on the Y2K issue.
In his biography, "Gore: A Political Life," Bob Zelnick writes that Gore "had nothing to say during the first five-and-a-half years of his vice presidency
about the biggest problem in the history of high-tech America."
Let the record show that I was a Y2K skeptic before I was a climate skeptic.
I may be making common cause with some Republicans on the climate issue at the moment, but I don't trust them. In fact, already we see McCain jumping on the climate bandwagon (as he does with every populist issue -- he believes in nothing) and I have a strong sense GWB may dive into the climate fray quite soon.
