Coyote Blog

Growing up, my dad was a corporate executive in an industry where family members were routinely kidnapped and held for ransom in various countries.  As a result, I had a no-travel list of countries I could not visit, which included unsurprising entries like certain third world nations but also included countries like Italy and Germany, which we forget were plagued with Red Brigade kidnappings in the 1970's.

Foreign executives may have to add the United States to their no-travel list, as the US steps up its campaign of arresting people for activities they engaged in outside our country and which were legal in their home countries:

The founders of the online payment service Neteller have apparently been arrested  at airports in New York and Los Angeles.

It's
not yet clear why they were arrested. But it's worth noting that
Neteller, which is based in the Isle of Man, is the only offshore
online payment service that decided to continue to allow its U.S.
customers to do business with online gambling sites after the new bill
banning such transactions passed at the end of the last Congress.

And of course, U.S. officials have made a habit of late  of arresting high-profile offshore gambling executives when they pass through the U.S. to switch planes.

If an American, changing planes in Saudi Arabia, was arrested for being gay, or not wearing a burka, we would be outraged.  Brits should similarly be outraged that their subjects are being thrown in US jails for activities that are perfectly legal in their home country.

Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute: (via Maggies Farm)

This
is the most widely held myth about education in America--and the one
most directly at odds with the available evidence. Few people are aware
that our education spending per pupil has been growing steadily for 50
years. At the end of World War II, public schools in the United States
spent a total of $1,214 per student in inflation-adjusted 2002 dollars.
By the middle of the 1950s that figure had roughly doubled to $2,345.
By 1972 it had almost doubled again, reaching $4,479. And since then,
it has doubled a third time, climbing to $8,745 in 2002.

Since
the early 1970s, when the federal government launched a standardized
exam called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), it
has been possible to measure student outcomes in a reliable, objective
way. Over that period, inflation-adjusted spending per pupil doubled.
So if more money produces better results in schools, we would expect to
see significant improvements in test scores during this period. That
didn't happen. For twelfth-grade students, who represent the end
product of the education system, NAEP scores in math, science, and
reading have all remained flat over the past 30 years. And the high
school graduation rate hasn't budged. Increased spending did not yield more learning.

There is a lot more good stuff in the article, from class size to teacher pay.  I would observe that he misses one component of teacher pay -- that they tend to have higher than average benefit packages, which makes their jobs even more competitive with other professionals.  I covered much of the same ground 18 months ago in my Teacher Salary Myth post (which still earns me some good hate mail).

I am with TJIC when he says that while colonizing space is a cool thing to do, it doesn't justify government coercion.

For a while now, I have been wanting to post on some of my positions that have changed since I was 18, as I have morphed from a secular conservative to a full fledged libertarian anarcho-capitalist.   One such issue is on space.  I used to be a supporter of government space programs (it was hard not to be such, watching moon landings and Tang commercials in my formative years).  My logic was that the government wastes trillions on all kind of stupid stuff, and the space program was kind of interesting.  I supported it as one of the government's least-bad things.

Unfortunately, I have realized that if you add up every person in the United States's list of least-bad government programs you get ... the totality of the US budget.  Each program has a supporter that thinks that program is a kind of cool exception in the morass of government waste.  I have also, by the way, come to the conclusion that the space program is a direction-less mess, and is not really as interesting as I once thought it was.  The planetary probes are still cool (and probably have the most bang for the buck) but the ISS just seems like a UN building in space and the current plans for Moon and Mars missions appear to be NASA full-employment programs rather than realistic missions.

One of the issues that is giving Democrats an entre to wack on oil companies is the issue of "subsidies" for deep offshore drilling.  These subsidies appear to take the form (though nothing in the world of oil field royalty payments is very simple or clear) of reduced royalty payments:

With oil prices still above $60 a barrel, do oil companies need
inducements to find and produce more oil? That's the underlying
question of today's NYT front-page article about an Interior Department report questioning the value of royalty rebates and tax breaks for gas and oil production.

The rebates are targeted at expensive and difficult exploration,
usually in deep water or that requires deep drilling. The intention is
to incentivize that exploration, allowing the United States to increase
its domestic reserves using "unconventional oil."

This is the kind of "incentivizing" that always goes wrong for the government, and turns even the best of intentions into massive rent-seeking opportunities.  My solution is similar to Cato's Tom Firey's:  Just make the royalty payment amounts and percentages subject to a bid as part of the offshore leasing process.  The government can include minimum reserve prices and such to protect itself (as they already do for offshore leases).  He suggests rolling all the value into a single up front number.  I would instead suggest a bid upfront number plus a bid royalty that is either a fixed amount per barrel, or more likely, a fixed percentage of oil revenues at some benchmark oil price.

What I am NOT sympathetic to is one party in a lease agreement trying to use its legislative party to void the terms of a previous agreement because it no longer likes the terms:

The article notes that royalties and corporate taxes deliver into
federal coffers about 40 percent of the revenue produced from oil and
gas extracted from federal property. The worldwide average government
take is about 60"“65 percent. A 40 percent federal take may have been
fair at a time when oil prices and profits were lower, the article
suggests, but the government should be getting a much higher cut from
today's prices.

Trying to just void previous deals in order to get better terms is just thuggery, and is the worst possible disincentive for long-term investment.

This is so wrong.  When possessing cash is a crime:

A federal appeals
court ruled yesterday that if a motorist is carrying large sums of
money, it is automatically subject to confiscation. In the case
entitled, "United States of America v. $124,700 in U.S. Currency," the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit took that amount of cash
away from Emiliano Gomez Gonzolez, a man with a "lack of significant
criminal history" neither accused nor convicted of any crime.

I know what you are thinking -- there must be some other facts Coyote is leaving out that explain why a man should have his money confiscated for no other reason than he chose to keep it in cash.  Read the whole thing, because you won't find anything that makes this sane.  I do a lot of business down on the border, and get many Mexican customers (legally) visiting as a tourist.  Almost to a one, they show up with large rolls of cash.  Our preference for key fob credit chips and ubiquitous Visa cards is not shared by every other culture, and the desire to keep one's assets in cash should not be a crime (it may not be smart, but not a crime).  Hell, murderers have more protection under the law than this person carrying cash.

I would be interested to hear more about this from folks with a legal background, but I am surprised that an appeals court even has the purview to find that a crime exists when lower courts found none.  The problem here, I think, is that the cash can (legally, which is nuts) be seized and kept without a trial, just on the say-so of the police, who have the incentive to decide that the cash is seizable because they get to drop it into their budget pool.  So I guess the trier of fact is the police (?) and the lower court reversed the police decision and then the circuit court is reinstating it. 

This is just one example of the incredibly high price we pay in civil liberties for the war on drugs.  See this post to measure the countervailing benefits of the war on drugs.  Hat tip:  Catallarchy.

Update: Via Hit and Run, here is another nice feature of the war on drugs:

Tim takes one 24-hour Claritin-D tablet just about every day. That
puts him just under the legal limit of 75-hundred milligrams of pseudo
ephedrine a month. The limit is part of a new law that Quad Cities
authorities are beginning to strictly enforce.

The law limits the
amount of pseudo ephedrine you can buy. Pseudo ephedrine is an
ingredient in medicines like Sudafed and Claritin-D, and it's also a
key ingredient in methamphetamines.

"It's the only allergy medicine that works for me "“ for my allergies," Tim explained.

The only problem is, Tim has a teenaged son who also suffers from allergies. And minors are not allowed to buy pseudo ephedrine.

"I bought some for my boy because he was going away to church camp and he needed it," he said.

  That decision put Tim over the legal limit. Two months later, there was a warrant for his arrest.

And off to jail he went, with no apologies:

But even if you're not making meth, if you go over that limit "“ of one maximum strength pill per day "“ you will be arrested.

  "Does it take drastic measures? Absolutely. Have we seen a positive result? Absolutely," Sandoval stressed.

Do you see the similarity in these two stories.  Two different people, both punished by the state for taking legal actions similar to those taken by drug dealers (holding cash and buying Claritin) with absolutely no evidence they in fact had anything to do with illegal drugs.  Next up:  Anyone driving a Porche 911 will be arrested since those cars are favored by drug dealers. 

New numbers for US vs. European CO2 growth have been making the rounds, based on a Wall Street Journal article today.  Jonathon Adler at Volokh has the key numbers for CO2 growth rates:

	U.S.	E.U.
1990-1995	6.4%	-2.2%
1995-2000	10.1%	2.2%
2000-2004	2.1%	4.5%

The Wall Street Journal tries to make the point that maybe the US somehow has a better approach to CO2 reduction.  Here is the reality:  Neither the US or the EU has done anything of substance to really reduce CO2 production, because at the end of the day no one can tolerate the political and economic costs associated with severe reduction using current technology.

But there is a story in these numbers.  That story goes back to the crafting of the Kyoto treaty, and  sheds an interesting light on what EU negotiators were really trying to achieve.

The Kyoto Treaty called for signatories to roll back CO2 emissions to 1990 levels.  Since Kyoto was signed in the late nineties, one was immediately led to wonder, why 1990?  Why not just freeze levels in place as they were currently?

The reason for the 1990 date was all about counting coup on the United States.  The date was selected by the European negotiators who dominated the treaty process specifically to minimize the burden on Europe and maximize the burden on the US.  Look at the numbers above.  The negotiators had the 1990-1995 numbers in hand when they crafted the treaty and had a good sense of what the 1995-2000 numbers would look like.  They knew that at that point in time, getting to 1990 levels for the EU was no work -- they were already there -- and that it would be a tremendous burden for the US.  Many holier-than-thou folks in this country have criticized the US for not signing Kyoto.  But look at what we were handed to sign - a document that at the point of signing put no burden on the EU, little burden on Japan, no burden on the developing world, and tremendous burden on the US.  We were handed a loaded gun and asked to shoot ourselves with it.  Long before Bush drew jeers for walking away from the treaty, the Senate voted 99-0 not to touch the thing until it was changed.

But shouldn't the European's get some credit for the 1990-1995 reduction?  Not really.  The reduction came from several fronts unrelated to actions to reduce CO2:

• The European and Japanese economies were absolutely on their backs, reducing economic growth which drives CO2 growth.  I have not looked up the numbers, but the 1990s are probably the time of the biggest negative differential for the European vs. US economy in my lifetime.
• The British were phasing out the use of carbon-heavy domestic coals for a variety of reasons unrelated to carbon dioxide production.
• German reunification had just occurred, so tons of outdated Soviet inefficient and polluting industrial plant had just entered the EU, and was expected to be shut down and modernized for economic reasons over the 1990's.  The negotiators went out of their way to make sure they picked a date when all this mess was in their base number, making it easier to hit their target.
• The 1990 also puts Russia in the base.  Since 1990, as the negotiators knew, the Russian economy had contracted significantly.
• At the same time the American economy was going gangbusters, causing great envy among Europeans.

Kyoto was carefully crafted to make America look like the bad guy.  The European's goal was to craft treaty responsibilities that would require no real effort in Europe, with most of the burden carried by the US.  But times change, and the game is catching up with them.

Conservative pundits often observe that "this is a new type of war -- shouldn't the president have new powers to fight it?"  Well, maybe.  But I think there is a question that is at least as valid:  "Given that enemy combatants don't wear uniforms any more, shouldn't we exercise more care than in the past in how we designate people as combatants?"  The much greater ambiguity in naming combatants would seem to demand extra layers of process protection and appeal rights for such persons.

Unfortunately, this Administration, with the aid and comfort of the US Congress, has gone exactly in the opposite direction.  As Jim Bovard writes, via Cato-at-Liberty:

The MCA awarded Bush the power to label anyone on earth an enemy
combatant and lock then up in perpetuity, nullifying the habeas corpus
provision of the Constitution and "turning back the clock 800 years,"
as Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) said. While only foreigners can be tried
before military tribunals, Americans accused of being enemy combatants
can be detained indefinitely without charges and without appeal. Even
though the Pentagon has effectively admitted that many of the people
detained at Guantanamo were wrongfully seized and held, the MCA
presumes that the president of the United States is both omniscient and
always fair.

Sixty years ago, when the military hauled in a guy dressed in a gray Wermacht uniform captured in the Ardennes Forest, you kindof gave them the benefit of the doubt that he was an enemy combatant.  How long until merely exercising free speech rights in favor of a terrorist group gets one labeled a "combatant."

He warned "that immigration to this country is increasing and"¦is making its greatest relative increase from races most alien to the body of the American people and from the lowest and most illiterate classes among those races....half of whom have no occupation and most of whom represent the rudest form of labor," are "people whom
it is very difficult to assimilate and do not promise well for the standard
of civilization in the United States."

[He] complained that many of them "have no money at all.  They land in this country without a cent in their pockets." ...He objected that many "stay but a short time in the United States" in order to "then return to their native country with such money
as they have been able to save here." He warned that these sorts of
immigrants, "who come to the United States, reduce the rate of wages
by ruinous competition, and then take their savings out of the country, are not desirable. They are mere birds of passage. They form an element
in the population which regards home as a foreign country, instead of
that in which they live and earn money. They have no interest or stake in the country, and they never become American citizens."

Whoa, who is that?  J.D Hayworth?  Tom Tancredo?  Surely its someone bashing on Mexican immigration -- the mantra is so familiar.

Well, no.  Actually, it is Henry Cabot Lodge, in 1891, most likely referring to your grandparents.  In these words, he was speaking mainly of Italians, but they are the same charges made against the Irish in the mid-19th century or Eastern Europeans in the early 20th century or, of course, against Mexicans today.  Do you really want to stake out the position that yes, this argument was wrong every time it has been used in the last 200 years but it's suddenly right today?

From Marginal Revolution:

The FASAB has asked
that the United States government start including future Medicare and
Social Security liabilities in current budget deficit figures:

Monday,
the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board released a proposal in
which the government would have to account for the cost of future
Social Security payments year by year as people build up entitlements.

Seen in advance of its release by the Financial Times, the switch in
accounting practices would be an international accounting anomaly, as
most other governments treat social insurance as a political commitment
to pay future benefits rather than a financial liability, the newspaper
said.

The FASAB is made up of six independent members who support the
proposal and three opposing members from the U.S. Treasury, the White
House Office of Management and Budget and the Government Accountability
Office.

I support this change despite the fact it may result in what I consider bad outcomes (e.g. big tax increases) as the magnitude of future liabilities become clear.  Tyler Cowen also argues it may make these programs harder to scale back, since it shifts the future payments from a political promise to a financial commitment.  But just like free speech, one has to be consistent in one's support for transparency.

If this all seems arcane to you, let me give you some perspective.  Today, Jeff Skilling was given over 30 years in jail for various accounting-related frauds, supposedly hiding losses and liabilities from shareholders's view.  But what Skilling was convicted of doing were minor, subtle accounting tricks involving penny-ante sums of money compared to the egregious games Congress plays with accounting for the federal government's future liabilities.  Skilling was accused, for example, of booking future liabilities in certain joint ventures where they were hard to find; the feds, in contrast, do not book future liabilities at all.

My Congressman, John Shadegg, is a generally reliable opponent of taxes and expansions of government.  So why is he sponsoring this garbage:

The House last week overwhelmingly approved and sent to the Senate
bipartisan legislation by Congressmen Brad Sherman and John Shadegg to
fund joint research by Americans and Israelis into alternative energy
sources.

"Cutting-edge research by top scientists from the United States and
Israel could reduce our reliance on foreign oil by promoting more
efficient uses of traditional energy sources and by developing energy
alternatives," Sherman said.

The Shadegg-Sherman legislation would establish in the Department of
Energy an International Energy Advisory Board to advise the secretary
on the $20-million-a-year grant program authorized by the bill. The
United States-Israel Energy Cooperation Act would encourage cooperation
on research, development, and commercialization of alternative energy,
improved energy efficiency and renewable energy sources.

Why, why, why?  I understand, but don't accept, the political pressure to increase alternative energy spending (though see here on its effectiveness) but why are we creating yet another program and grant bureaucracy?  And why should the funds not be spent on the most promising research out of the entire superset of possible projects but be narrowly focused on only investing in a portfolio of projects presumably combining US and Israeli citizens?

Frequent readers of this blog will know that this quote from Milton Friedman on licensing is one of my favorites:

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.

Ilya Somin at Volokh has an interesting post (though right this moment their site seems to be down) about the American Bar Associations (ABA) role in accrediting colleges.

To my mind, the problem goes beyond the shortcomings of specific ABA standards.
The real mistake is allowing an organization with a blatant conflict of interest
to take over the accreditation role in the first place. As an interest group
representing lawyers, the ABA has an obvious stake in limiting entry into the
profession so as to decrease the competition faced by its members. One way of
doing so is by restricting the number of accredited law schools, at least in the
vast majority of states that require all or most aspiring lawyers to attend an
ABA-accredited school in order to take the bar exam.  We would not allow an
organization run by Chrysler, GM, and Ford to set regulatory standards
determining who has the right to sell cars in the United States. Requiring ABA
accreditation for law schools is the exact equivalent in our industry....

To be completely clear, I am NOT arguing that the ABA should be prevented from
certifying schools as meeting what it considers to be appropriate standards. I
am merely suggesting that ABA accreditation should not be required by law as a
prerequisite for allowing a school's graduates to take the bar. If ABA
accreditation really is a sign of school quality, then applicants can take that
into account in making their decisions on what school to attend, just as they
currently consider US News rankings and other data. If some form of legally
mandated accreditation is needed (and I highly doubt that it is), the system
should be run by an independent agency insulated as much as possible from
control by the ABA and other interest groups representing practicing lawyers.
There should be similar insulation, by the way, from influence by established
law schools, since we too have an obvious self-interest in limiting competition
by preventing new entry into the legal education market.

This week, the US took a step to normalize relations with Libya:

The United States restored
full diplomatic ties with Libya on Monday, rewarding the
longtime pariah nation for scrapping its weapons of mass
destruction programs and signaling incentives for Iran and
North Korea if they do the same

The logic was that Libya still is a sucky dictatorship, but it has taken some important steps forward into the light which we want to reward.  Perhaps more importantly, the administration acknowledges that increasing intercourse with the western democracies tends to have liberalizing effects in countries in this world of open communications (see: China).  Its a difficult trade-off, but I am fine with this.  Certainly we are no virgin in terms of having diplomatic relations with bad governments.

My question is:  Why doesn't this same logic apply to Cuba?  I think it is pretty clear that embargo and shunning over the past 40+ years have had as much effect as they are going to have.  Why not try engagement?  I think this particularly makes sense well before the chaos that may ensue after Castro's death.  If anything, just by reading the behavior of Cuban expats, Cubans remind be of the Chinese in terms of their entrepreneurship, and I certainly think engagement has worked better than shunning in China. 

Of course I already know the answer to my question:  Because Cuban expats make up a large voting block in the most critical presidential election swing state and no candidate wants to be soft on Castro.  But this seems to make it even more of an opportunity for a second-term president who doesn't have to contest Florida again.

Update:  Yes, I did indeed spell it "Lybia" at first.  Seems vaguely Feudian.  Excuse 1:  Blogging is a real time function.  Excuse 2:  Its just a hobby.  Excuse 3:  I was a mechanical engineer in school

The following is from our Chinese sister publication called Panda Blog:

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.

Panda Blog goes on to ask that their government end these distorting policies, for the sake of China's future.  I for one kindof hope that they keep subsidizing the stuff I buy over at Wal-mart...

Jennifer Britz, the Dean of Admissions at Kenyon College reports that she is sad to say that she is admitting boys who are less qualified than female applicants in order to maintain gender parity.

Had she been a male applicant, there would have been little, if any,
hesitation to admit. The reality is that because young men are rarer,
they're more valued applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and
universities report that they get more female than male applicants, and
more than 56 percent of undergraduates nationwide are women.
Demographers predict that by 2009, only 42 percent of all baccalaureate
degrees awarded in the United States will be given to men.

I have four reactions.

One.  Yeah!  Lets take a moment to celebrate a victory for women.  Its great to see us talking about "too many" qualified women flooding colleges, just a few years after feminists were still writing books about schools failing girls.

Two.  I finally get to say something that I have wished for decades to hear from members of various minority groups that have been the benficiary of affirmative action:  Stop giving us men a special break.  Boys in high school are falling behind girls in their achievement, and are not going to get the message as long as you keep taking less qualified boys instead of more qualified girls.  The colleges I attended 20+ years ago survived fine with 2/3 men, they can do the same with 2/3 women.

Three.  This just reinforces my advice I have been giving to Ivy League and other great schools: Find a way to grow!  The new challenge for the 21st century is not to spend an incremental 5% more on the same top students, but to recognize that there are so many more great, polished graduates that are Ivy ready than ever before.

Four.  In this article you can get a little peek at how the college admissions process has turned volunteerism from, well, volunteerism to a grim requirement.  Among eleven-year-olds in my son's class, I saw kids get turned down for an honor society despite having 4.0+ grade point averages, playing multiple sports at a very high level, and doing about 20 hours of community service over the year.  Apparently, this level of community service was not robust enough -- people with lower grades make it, people with no sports make it, people with no leadership activities make it, but NO ONE makes it without a lot more than 20 hours of community service - at the age of eleven.  Believe it or not, my son now keeps a log book of time spent on activities he can count as service -- we have better documentation of this work than we do of his grades!  Volunteerism has become nearly the one minimum requirement that of all the various components is never waived in college admissions.

I can't help but suspect of late that the whole Dubai ports mess signals an intent by protectionists of many stripes to hop on the security bandwagon as a way to repackage protectionism.  One had but to observe the many Congressmen who up to date have shown very little interest in security issues suddenly becoming born-again hawks with on the Dubai issue.  Democratic politicians who up to this point had opposed any actions targeted at Arabs or Muslims as profiling and hate-based suddenly saw the light and opposed the deal based on absolutely no other evidence than the fact the owners were from Dubai.  I particularly laughed at the quote by Howard Dean lamenting that "control of the ports of the United States must be retained by American companies" (funny, since Dubai-ownership was taking over operations from a British company, not an American company).  The Dubai ports deal opposition was first and foremost protectionism, begun at the behest of a domestic company that lost a bid in Miami and a number of domestic unions.

Now we can start to see this bandwagon grow.  I was in the airport and saw one Congressman (Duncan Hunter, I think, but I am not positive) on CNN proposing new legislation to ban foreign ownership of any infrastructure deemed security-sensitive.  He specifically mentioned power plants, which told me that he was thinking pretty expansively. This is rank protectionism, pure and simple.  You can quickly imagine everything from power plants to oil companies to telephone providers - really just about anyone - coming under the auspices of a critical industry that should be all American.  Just check out the case of low-cost airline upstart Virgin America to see how this security dodge is being used to protect companies from competition and prevent consumers from getting more choices and lower prices (also see WSJ$).

Xenophobia, in terms of this protectionism and the new immigrant backlash, appears to be one of the few bipartisan issues that politicians from both sides of the aisle can get behind.  I fear a new McCarthyism in the works.

Check out this very nice NY Times article (I think it is outside the firewall) on Harvard economist Edward Glaeser and his takes on urban economics and housing markets.  One study of his that resonates with me is his research about just how much modern regulation and zoning is contributing to the high cost of housing:

Glaeser and several colleagues considered two explanations. First, the
possibility that builders in the metro area were running out of land and that
home prices reflected that scarcity. The second hypothesis was that building
permits were scarce, not land. Had the 187 townships in the metro area created a
web of regulations that hindered building to such a degree that demand far
outstripped supply, driving prices up?

Almost as a rule, Glaeser is skeptical of the lack-of-land argument. He has
previously noted (with a collaborator, Matthew Kahn) that 95 percent of the
United States remains undeveloped and that if every American were given a house
on a quarter acre, so that every family of four had a full acre, that
distribution would not use up half the land in Texas. Most of Boston's metro
area, he concluded, wasn't particularly dense, and even in places where it was,
like the centers of Boston and Cambridge, there was ample opportunity to
construct higher buildings with more housing units.

So, after sorting through a mountain of data, Glaeser decided that the
housing crisis was man-made. The region's zoning regulations "” which were
enacted by locales in the first half of the 20th century to separate residential
land from commercial and industrial land and which generally promoted the
orderly growth of suburbs "” had become so various and complex in the second half
of the 20th century that they were limiting growth. Land-use rules of the 1920's
were meant to assure homeowners that their neighbors wouldn't raise hogs in
their backyards, throw up a shack on a sliver of land nearby or build a factory
next door, but the zoning rules of the 1970's and 1980's were different in
nature and effect. Regulations in Glaeser's new hometown of Weston, for
instance, made extremely large lot sizes mandatory in some neighborhoods and
placed high environmental hurdles (some reasonable, others not, in Glaeser's
view) in front of developers. Other towns passed ordinances governing sidewalks,
street widths, the shape of lots, septic lines and so on "” all with the result,
in Glaeser's analysis, of curtailing the supply of housing. The same phenomenon,
he says, has inflated prices in metro areas all along the East and West Coasts.

One of his other areas of research was new to me.  Glaeser argues that the long-lived nature of housing is part of what keeps cities like Detroit and St. Louis around long after the economic and demographic logic would have had them die. 

Glaeser and Gyourko determined that the durable nature of housing itself
explains this phenomenon. People can flee, but houses can take a century or more
to finally fall to pieces. "These places still exist," Glaeser says of Detroit
and St. Louis, "because the housing is permanent. And if you want to understand
why they're poor, it's actually also in part because the housing is permanent."
For Glaeser, this is the story not only of these two places but also of Buffalo,
Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh "” the powerhouse cities of
America in 1950 that consistently and inexorably lost population over the next
50 years. It is not just that there were poor people and the jobs left and the
poor people were stuck there. "Thousands of poor come to Detroit each year and
live in places that are cheaper than any other place to live in part because
they've got durable housing still around," Glaeser says. The net population of
Detroit usually decreases each year, in other words, but the city still attracts
plenty of people drawn by its extreme affordability. As Gyourko points out, in
the year 2000 the median house price in Philadelphia was $59,700; in Detroit, it
was $63,600. Those prices are well below the actual construction costs of the
homes. "To build them new, it would cost at least $80,000," Gyourko says, "so
there's no builder who would build those today. And as long as those houses
remain, the people remain."

There's a lot more in the article, including a positive economic take on the role of roads and automobiles that he sets in counterpoint to the typical aesthetic arguments against sprawl. 

I found this next bit supremely ironic, though it matches my observations of these cities as well:

Zoning and housing supply ultimately determine not only who lives in a city but
also the very nature of these places. Boston, San Francisco and Manhattan are
obviously becoming rarefied destinations, mostly for America's elites (Glaeser
calls the cities "luxury goods"), with housing floating beyond the reach of the
young and the middle class. These cities' economies are in the process of
becoming boutique, too, accommodating only the most skilled and privileged.
Their desire to limit construction and grow not in buildings and population but
in prices has, in effect, begun to shape their destiny.

Residents of these cities turn up their noses at the aesthetics and red-state politics of places like Houston and Phoenix, piously believing that all the while they are the true friends of the poor, while at the same time putting in place a government-enforced housing system that only the rich can afford, driving those of moderate incomes to, well, Houston and Phoenix.

This last observation provides a fitting conclusion:

And what surprises him is that the changes in how we have treated property
rights for the last 40 years "” who gets permission to build, the size and
location of what owners are permitted to build "” have been the subject of
virtually no national dialogue, even as the effects on prices, in his view, have
been extraordinary.

I've gotten mail and comments on some of my surveillance- and detention-related posts, particularly this one here, that boil down to "but warrant-less national security eavesdropping is legal". John Hinderaker at Powerline makes this argument fairly compellingly.  To which I can answer, fine, but whether it is narrowly legal or illegal is a topic for partisan blogs who want to score points for or against Bush.  As one of those weird libertarian guys, my intention was to stand aside from the question of legality and instead pose the question of "yes, but is it right?"

Foreigners are People Too

It is interesting that I have to make this point more and more nowadays: Foreignors are human beings too.  For example, this idea that non-US citizens have (or should have) the same rights we do was one I highlighted in my defense of open immigration:

The individual rights we hold dear are our rights as human beings, NOT
as citizens.  They flow from our very existence, not from our
government. As human beings, we have the right to assemble with
whomever we want and to speak our minds.  We have the right to live
free of force or physical coercion from other men.  We have the right
to make mutually beneficial arrangements with other men, arrangements
that might involve exchanging goods, purchasing shelter, or paying
another man an agreed upon rate for his work.  We have these rights and
more in nature, and have therefore chosen to form governments not to be
the source of these rights (for they already existed in advance of
governments) but to provide protection of these rights against other
men who might try to violate these rights through force or fraud

Speech, commerce, property, association, and yes, privacy -- these are all rights we have as human beings, so that the fact of citizenship in the US should not have any bearing on whether our government should respect these rights (except in the case of war, which we get into in a while).

These issues are oh-so-much clearer when we flip our perspective.  For Americans reading this, ask yourself:

• Does the government of Great Britain (or Russia, or Iran) have the right to wiretap your phone calls at will without warrant or review just because you are not a citizen of their country?
• Does the government of Great Britain (or Russia, or Iran) have the right to detain you indefinitely without access to a lawyer or embassy if a powerful person in their government declares you an enemy combatant?

If you answered "yes", then recognize that the 1979 capture of the US embassy staff in Iran was probably legal by your rules, as was nearly every other detention of American citizens by another country.  If you answered "no", then you need to be worried about what the US is doing in the name of national security, for certainly both Bush and Clinton, among others, claim(ed) these rights.  And if you answered "no" for all other countries but "yes" for us, presumably because you trust our guys but not theirs, I will admit you have some historical precedent, since the US for all its faults has generally acted more honorably than 99% of the other nations of the world over the last 100 years.  But you do need to think about the meaning of the rule of law, and why its always a bad idea to give good men power that you don't want bad men to have.

By saying this, I realize that am I not only out of step with the US appellate courts (as Hinderaker points out) and with the Supreme Court (at least on the detention issue, since they haven't ruled on the warrant-less search powers) but also perhaps with the founding fathers.  While most of the folks who wrote the Constitution understood the notion of rights that are derived from nature rather than from the state, the Constitution is mute on the laws of the US vis a vis foreign citizens (excepts where it comes to war).  It is interesting to note that the Bill of Rights doesn't make any distinctions between citizens and non-citizens - there is nothing, for example, that modifies the prescriptions of the fourth amendment to apply only to searches of US citizens.  One could easily interpret the Bill of Rights as proscribing the actions of the US government against any person of any nationality.  Anyway, if I am in conflict with the founding fathers, so be it -- the Constitution is a fabulous document as totally ahead of its time as would be having 19th century India put a man on the moon, but it was not perfect.

The Magic Words: National Security

You may notice that defenders of these presidential powers tend to play a little verbal slight of hand (in addition to the one discussed here):  They translate the president's powers as CinC to mean "carte blanch for national security issues".  You hear this slight-of-hand so often, one starts to think its written that way in the Constitution, so it is probably good to remind ourselves what that document actually says:

The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the
United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called
into the actual service of the United States

That's it.  The president can give orders to the military  -- whether that means he can do anything he wants in the name of national security is a whole other issue.  Folks also seem to want to argue that this CinC power cannot be modified or limited in any way, but that's silly.  The third amendment is aimed solely at the limiting the power of the military.   And certainly the folks who first adopted the constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the 4th amendment applied to the military as well.  In fact, they would have said especially the military.

The Right Way to do Searches

Here is how we have generally interpreted the 4th amendment:  The legislative branch sets the ground rules, as followed by the Administration.  The administrations selection of targets is reviewed by the Judiciary (warrants) and is also subject to later review at trial (via the admissibility of evidence).  What we try to avoid is allowing the same person to set the rules, choose the target, and perform the surveillance, all in secret and without outside review.  The problems with the NSA wiretapping program is not that it is wrong per se, but that it may violate this process.  The administration is claiming the right to choose the target and perform the surveillance under the own rules and in secret with no possibility of review.   

Declaration of War Needs to Mean Something Again

If there is any part of the constitution that has really gone by the wayside in the last 50 years it is the provisions around declaration of war.  Over the past decades, president's have claimed the power to move forces into action, not just defensively but offensively, without a Congressional declaration of war.  And Hinderaker sees the declaration of war, or the Authorization to Use Military Force
(AUMF) as irrelevant to the legality of warrant-less national security
searches.  He is arguing that the President in his CinC power may search without warrant if it is substantially to fight an enemy.  And, absent an AUMF or a declaration of war, who decides if a group or nation or person is an enemy?  why, the President does.  And, who determines if a surveillance is necessary to fight this enemy? Why, yes, the President does as well.  And who reviews these decisions to make sure the President hasn't chosen to search or wiretap, under the pretext of national security, communists in Hollywood, Martin Luther King, or a self-generated "enemies list" -- no one, I mean, no Administration official in this country would ever do those things, would they?

I have increasingly come to the belief that the AUMF, or declaration of war, is supposed to mean something. (I am not a Constitutional scholar, and don't want to hear about how I don't understand such and such precedent* -- this is my own interpretation).  If one goes back to my first argument above, that all people, not just citizens, are constitutionally protected from our government searching or detaining them without warrant, then the declaration of war is that formal step that is necessary to free the CinC from these restrictions vis a vis a certain named and defined enemy.  The declaration of war, or AUMF, is effectively then the mass warrant, that gives the president the right in his role as CinC to attack those folks with our troops and detain them and spy on them, etc.  And even then, this is not without limit, since none of us are very happy with the Japanese detention precedent in WWII.  This view of the declaration of war is more consistent with the original notion of separation of powers than is the "administration can do anything to protect national security" view.  It allows the President pretty free reign to fight an enemy, including the types of tactics under dispute, but only after the body the founders considered the most sober had approved the war and the enemy (by sober I mean as envisioned by the founding fathers, and not as demonstrated in recent supreme court nomination hearings).

This obviously makes a declaration of war a BIG DEAL, which it should be, rather than just a set piece vote ratifying what the president seems hellbent to do anyway or a statement of moral support, along the lines of a "we support the troops" resolution.  It means that the Congress, god forbid, actually needs to treat the vote with some responsibility and understand the implications of what they are voting for, or else modify the AUMF or articles of war with specific limitations of scope.  And it means Congress needs to think twice and maybe three times before authorizing war against something as nebulous as "A Qaeda" or "terrorism".  And it means that GWB probably is doing nothing illegal, at least in the programs as discovered, but it doesn't mean that the courts or Congress can't change that in the future.

* Constitutional scholars live and die by the great god "precedent", and certainly the legal system would be thrown into disarray if court decisions did not provide precedents for later decisions.  All predictability in the system would vanish.  However, it is more than OK from time to time to go back to the original words of the Constitution to see if the march of serial precedent has somehow taken us off course.  I often liken this to a copier machine.  If you take a plain piece of paper, and copy it, and then copy the copy, and then copy that copy, etc. through twenty or thirty generations, you will end up with a paper that is supposed to be a copy of the original, but in fact is covered with spots and other artifacts that were not on the original.  A series of court precedents can also create such artifacts that can only really be identified not from looking at the last precedent it was built on, but going all the way back to the original Constitution.

Via Instapundit, comes this article by Rebecca MacKinnon on how blogs are filtered and censored in China, and in particular, how Time's Man of the Year Bill Gates seems to be taking a leadership role in the censorship arms race.

Microsoft's MSN Spaces continues to censor its Chinese language blogs,
and has become more aggressive and thorough at censorship since I first checked out MSN's censorship system last summer.  On New Years Eve, MSN Spaces took down the popular blog written by Zhao Jing, aka Michael Anti...

Now, It is VERY important to note that the inaccessible blog was moved
or removed at the server level and that the blog remains inaccessible
from the United States as well as from China. This means that the
action was taken NOT by Chinese authorities responsible for filtering
and censoring the Internet for Chinese viewers, but by MSN staff at the
level of the MSN servers.

In addition to taking down sites that offend the overlords of China, Microsoft is also actively filtering blog content

Back over the summer I wrote a post titled Screenshots of Censorship
about how MSN spaces was censoring the titles of its Chinese blogs, but
not posts themselves. According to my testing in mid-late December,
they now censoring much more intensely.   

On December 16th I created a blog and attempted to make various
posts with politically sensitive words. When I attempted to post
entries with titles like "Tibet Independence" or "Falun Gong"
(a banned religious group), I got an error message saying: "This item
includes forbidden language. Please delete forbidden language from this
item."

I understand that the business climate in China causes businesses some difficult choices.  Refusing to acquiesce to certain government rules, like censorship, essentially cedes a large a growing market to the locals.  But at some point, that's just what you have to be willing to do, when market share is just too ethically expensive.

A while back, I wrote the Porkbusters post on Arizona farm subsidies, which are mainly cotton subsidies.  Cotton gets subsidized both with direct farm subsidies as well as price-subsidized water (this is a desert, after all, and unlike Egypt we don't have the Nile running through it).

Porkopolis is on the case with a further potential subsidy, as the US Government is apparently transferring a valuable piece of Phoenix commercial real estate to Arizona cotton growers:

A review of the final bill passed by both the House and the Senate shows that Senators DeWine and Voinovich, along with 97 other Senators,
voted for a provision that transfers a federal facility and surrounding
land to the Arizona Cotton Growers Association and Supima:

SEC.
783. As soon as practicable after the Agricultural Research Service
Operations at the Western Cotton Research Laboratory located at 4135
East Broadway Road in Phoenix, Arizona, have ceased, the Secretary of
Agriculture shall convey, without consideration, to the Arizona Cotton Growers Association and Supima all right, title, and interest of the United States in and to the real property at that location, including improvements.

They've got a very deep investigative report. 

Congress is again on the verge of conferring new Constitutional rights to a narrow subset of American citizenry.  Already the recipient of speech rights that the rest of us don't enjoy, the major media organizations are also about to receive a special pass from cooperating with law enforcement and criminal investigations.  The reason for granting these new rights is in part because the media, with their business model in tatters, has learned a lesson from the steel and airline industry about running to Congress for help.

First there were special speech rights for the Press:  McCain-Feingold

This special treatment began with the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Act, which gave journalists unique speech rights during elections by taking away the speech rights of every other non-media-credentialed American in the 30-90 days prior to an election.  Of course, those of us who don't work for the NY Times or CBS were kind of confused about how we had somehow lost our constitutional right to political speech.  Reasonably, many of us in the blogosphere wanted our speech rights back, and campaigned to be called journalists (i.e. to get the media exemption from campaign speech restrictions).  As I wrote back in June:

These past few weeks, we have been debating whether this media
exemption from speech restrictions should be extended to bloggers.  At
first, I was in favor.  Then I was torn.
Now, I am pissed.  The more I think of it, it is insane that we are
creating a 2-tiered system of first amendment rights at all, and I
really don't care any more who is in which tier.  Given the wording of
the Constitution, how do I decide who gets speech and who doesn't - it
sounds like everyone is supposed to...

I
have come to the conclusion that arguing over who gets the media
exemption is like arguing about whether a Native American in 1960's
Alabama should use the white or the colored-only bathroom:  It is an
obscene discussion and is missing the whole point, that the facilities
shouldn't be segregated in the first place.

Now, Congress is Considering Enhanced "Shield" Laws

Now Congress is ready to take another step in the same direction of giving the media special enhanced platinum-level Constitutional rights with the proposed Federal Shield Law.  No doubt inspired by the whole Valerie Plame / Judith Miller mess, this is yet another example of Congress feeling like it has to "do something" with a half-assed solution to a non-problem that no one at this point, except perhaps Ms. Miller, even really understands.  The Federal Shield Law, named in typical Orwellian fashion the "Free Flow of Information Act", would make reporters the only citizens of the United States who can evade subpoenas and legally stand in contempt of court, a right we have determined that not even presidents have.

These shield laws, which I have criticized before, are often justified as necessary supports for the First Amendment.  Beyond the fact that the press in this country has functioned for centuries quite nicely without such shield laws, and have toppled President's without these extra rights, they are somehow now "necessary to help the United States regain its status as an 'exemplar' of press freedom", according to bill sponsor Richard Luger  (a statement made without explaining either why this was true or even how or when the US stopped being an 'exemplar' of press freedom).

Luger is not even shy about admitting that this law effectively creates two classes of citizen in the United States:

Lugar acknowledged that the legislation could amount to a "privilege" for reporters over other Americans.

"I think, very frankly, you can make a case that this is a special
boon for reporters, and certainly for their role in freedom of the
press," he said. "At the end of the day what we will come out with says
there is something privileged about being a reporter, and being able to
report on something without being thrown into jail."

Um, reporters can already report things without being thrown in jail.  Judith Miller, the explicit reason for the bill's existence, according to Luger, was thrown in jail not for her reporting, but her refusing to participate in an investigation.  An investigation that her employer the NY Times cheer-led the government into starting.  She was put in jail for refusing to testify about a source who had in fact already given her verbal permission before she went to jail to reveal his name.

Glenn Reynolds has a nice quote about the proposal:

ONE CHARACTERISTIC OF THE TITLED NOBILITY was its immunity from some
legal rules laid on the commoners; that's why such titles were an
important boon that the King could bestow on favorites. Reading this statement by Richard Lugar on the proposed journalists' shield law, which probably won't cover bloggers, I wonder if we're getting into the same territory

The Licensing Issue:  Who is a Journalist?

This new special privilege afforded to journalists, when combined with the special speech rights conferred in McCain-Feingold, increases the importance of the question "So who is a journalist and who qualifies for these unique privileges?" I predicted way back in February that I thought some type of official licensing program was going to be proposed for journalists.  Well, here it is in black and white in the aforementioned article on the new shield law:

A key reason some journalists oppose the popular federal shield
proposal is fear that giving Congress the power to define who is and
isn't a journalist could lead effectively to the licensing of
journalists.

Back in February, I predicted that the effort at licensing would fail, but now I have changed my mind.  After all, you can't have all of us unwashed folks who actually got good grades in math so we didn't have to default back to a journalism degree in college getting hold of these special privileges.  Only elite people who have proved themselves worth of being beyond legal accountability, folks like Dan Rather or the Katrina reporters, can be trusted with these extra rights and privileges.

Whenever the government by legislation gives a group of people special powers, it always leads to licensing.  It HAS to, else the courts would forever be bogged down with fights over who is in and who is out.  It is much easier to say "the only people who have the right to evade subpoenas are people with this piece of paper."  Using medicine as a parallel example, once you decide the average person can't be trusted to educate themselves enough to make their own medication decisions, you end up with a process where only licensed MD's can issue prescriptions.  The same will be true in journalism.

What is Really Going On Here

To understand what is really going on here, think "steel industry" or "airline industry".  When technology or markets or customers or competition changed in industries like steel, the last desperate defense of the US steel industry was to run to the government begging for import restrictions and price supports and subsidies and pension bailouts and god-knows what else.  Boy-oh-boy wouldn't the steel industry in the US love to have a law that says only licensed steel makers can sell steel in the US, and by the way, the current steel industry participants will control the licensing board.

Think that is a ridiculous exaggeration?  It can't be any more stupid than this form of licensing (or this one;  or this one).  Here are the various trade-specific licenses
you need here in Scottsdale - I would hate to see the list for some
place like Santa Monica.  My favorite is the one that says "An
additional license is required for those firms which are going out of
business."  Or for an exact parallel to my steel industry hypothetical, try this law from Ohio to liscence new auctioneers:

Besides costing $200 and posting a $50,000 bond,
the license requires a one-year apprenticeship to a licensed auctioneer, acting
as a bid-caller in 12 auctions, attending an approved auction school, passing a
written and oral exam. Failure to get a license could result in the seller being
fined up to $1,000 and jailed for a maximum of 90 days.

And my commentary on it:

Note that under this system, auctioneers
have an automatic veto over new competition, since all potential
competitors must find an existing auctioneer to take them on as an
apprentice.  Imagine the consumer electronics business - "I'm sorry,
you can't make or sell any DVD players until Sony or Toshiba have
agreed to take you on as an intern for a year".  Yeah, I bet we'd see a
lot of new electronics firms in that system - not.

This is exactly what is going on with the media.  The world, at least for the US media, is changing.  Subscriptions and ad revenues have been falling year after year after year.  People either giving up this media all-together or switching to new competitors, such as online media, in large numbers and there is no indication that this trend will stop.  As a result, the traditional media finds itself with its back against the wall.

What to do?  What every other industry has done - run to Congress!  Major media groups were extraordinarily strong supporters of McCain-Feingold, knowing that by limiting speech of everyone else, it added to its own influence and power come election time.  Over time, Congress will continue to add new privileges for the media, like the shield law, in part because it knows that it needs to stay in good with the only group of people who have full speech rights come election time.

The one thing I disagree with in the quote above about licensing is the notion that many in the press oppose it.  They are right to see the prospect as scary (see unintended consequences below) but once a licensing system is in place, I GUARANTEE that the licensed press will be huge supporters of licensing.  Just like lawyers and doctors, the press will find a way to take control of their own licensing and use it to keep out competitors they don't like.  Those pajama-clad bloggers irritating you - well, just make sure that they don't get licensed.  Come election time, they will all have to shut up, because only licensed journalists will have the media exemption in McC-F.  Milton Freedman described this process years ago:

The justification offered [for licensing] 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.

And as I said here:

Such credentialing can provide a powerful comeback for industry insiders under attack.  Teachers, for example, use it every chance they get to attack home schooling and private schools,
despite the fact that uncertified teachers in both these latter
environments do better than the average certified teacher (for example,
kids home schooled by moms who dropped out of high school performed at
the 83rd percentile).  So, next time the MSM is under attack from the blogosphere, rather than address the issues, they can say that that guy in Tennessee is just a college professor and isn't even a licensed journalist.

Hit and Run described how doctors use the licensing process, and even hazing of interns, to keep their numbers down and therefore their salaries (and their fees to us) up:

When Kevin Drum commented on the New England Journal
article, he said that the system's defenders "sound like nothing so
much as a bunch of 50s frat boys defending hazing after some freshman
has been found dead in an arroyo somewhere."

Hazing is the right metaphor. The system serves the same
purpose: It's a brutal initiation to a privileged club. Medical hazing
is part of the set of barriers that limit entry to the profession;
whatever other reasons there are for it, it's ultimately a byproduct of
occupational licensing.
Those long shifts don't just undermine public health. They drive away
qualified men and women, reducing the supply of doctors and allowing
those who survive the trial to charge more for their services.

Unintended consequences

Of course, all this has unintended consequences, as does any government meddling in individual decisions, limitations of rights, or attempts to pick industry winners. 

The first unintended consequence, or more accurately I guess I should call it the first irony because I am not sure that it is unintended, is that laws meant to keep the elite from having undue influence vs. the little guy in politics (via spending limits) have done just the opposite - concentrated political speech in a few elites in the media and squashed the one medium, blogging and the Internet, that hold the promise of giving individuals like myself new, inexpensive ways of influencing politics.

The second unintended and really scary consequence is that in attempting to remove a lever of government control over media - the subpoena power - Congress is potentially creating a larger one - that of licensing.  Of all the news-oriented media in the world, which is the most bland?  I would answer local TV and radio (by this I mean their local programming, not the syndicated stuff they air).  Why?  Because they are already subject to government licensing that to this point other media, such as newspapers, have not.  Local broadcast outlets are VERY self-conscious about protecting their license, and tend to keep their programming bland to avoid irritating some government bureaucrat.  Just look at how many rolled over immediately and dropped Howard Stern when the government started looking cross-eyed at Stern's raunchiness.  Do we really want all the media subject to this kind of pressure?

Technorati Tags:  Media

COYOTE BLOG EXCLUSIVE!!  We have obtained the preliminary agenda for the upcoming UN Internet Conference in Tunisia.

AGENDA

Day 1

Dinner
Benon Sevan has generously offered to supply dinner from a selection of
the food provided to the Iraqi people under the UN Oil-for-food program.
Unfortunately, it was found at the last minute that no one in the
oil-for-food department has any contacts with companies that actually sell food.
The French delegation has generously stepped in the last minute with
chicken and Vichy water for everyone.

After-Dinner Keynote Address:  Fighting Hate Speech
Wen Jaibao
Premier, China

All of us are concerned with the growth of hate speech on the web.  Spread by foreign anarchists and CIA operatives called "bloggers", these lies present a constant danger to all of our governments..  Premier Wen, whose country under Chairman Mao broke Germany's and Russia's records for the most people sent to government-sponsored sensitivity training, outlines some of the technologies China is using to protect Chinese citizens from foreign deception.  He also will discuss how he got US companies like Cisco and Microsoft to abandon their public principles in exchange for promises of large contracts

Day 2

Pricing for Domain Names
Kojo Annan

Kojo will discuss a number of technical issues associated with domain name pricing.  Among the topics discussed will be "how large a kickback should be demanded of large US companies renewing their domain name registrations", "how should kickback money be distributed between general assembly members", "how can sub-contracts be funneled to key family members", and "how Paypal can be used to facilitate 'courtesy' payments".  Kojo will also discuss the mechanics of Swiss banking as it applies to government Internet supervision.

Pornography on the Web
Hassan al Saud
Saudi Arabian Security Service

Director al Saud will discuss approaches for limiting pornography on the web, such as photos showing NFL Cheerleaders, hot protest babes, or any woman with tattoos, body piercings, or a bare midriff, including nearly the entire UC-Santa Barbara female population.  Al Saud will review his groundbreaking work filtering news service web pages for the names of women and women authors and replacing them with men's names.  Afterwards, al Saud will be signing copies of his bestseller "Gone with the Wind".

Lunch
Robert Mugabe has generously offered to supply lunch from the fine
farms of Zimbabwe.  Unfortunately, unforeseen...technical problems will
make that impossible.  We ask that all delegates go outside the meeting hall and fend for themselves for lunch.

Future of email scams
Dr. Hamzu Kalo
Lagos Nigeria

Many of us are concerned with the growth of email scams.  In this important discussion, Dr. Kalu will discuss topics including "How can other countries get a piece of Nigeria's lucrative email scam business", "how can UN imprimatur be used to increase email scam returns", and "how should government's tax email scam revenue".  Working papers from Dr. Kalo's last conference can be found here.

Shortsighted Nationalization
Hugo Chavez
President, Venezuela

Mr. Chavez will argue his controversial hypothesis that it is shortsighted to immediately nationalize US corporate assets when taking office.  His premise is that it is better to wait 6-12 months, after companies have become complacent, before seizing their operations.  Mr. Chavez will also address the difficult issue of how to attract new foreign investment when every successful foreign enterprise in the history of your country has been nationalized.

Snack Break
Sponsored by Cisco and Microsoft to introduce their joint Internet initiative with the United Nations entitled "We are for freedom and democracy, except when we're not."

Promise of the Internet for Managing elections
Jimmy Carter
ex-President, United States of America

Everyone should be familiar with President Carter's outstanding work courageously certifying the election in Venezuela while challenging corrupt elections in Florida and Ohio.  President Carter will address the topic of using Internet technology for elections.  He will show that paper ballot technology can still leave a potentially dangerous paper trail, while Internet voting allows for nearly total ability to manage elections to make sure that the will of the people is not thwarted by CIA-financed lying upstarts.

Farewell Dinner
Dinner was to be provided by the United States delegation, but US authorities could not provide documentation that no genetically modified foods were used to prepare the meal.  It has been decided that it is better for the meeting delegates to go hungry than risk eating any GM crops.

Transportation
No transportation has been arranged, but officials are encouraged to nationalize any assets they need to reach the conference.

Email
In the spirit of promoting the
Internet and Tunisia's leading role in it, all participants will be
allowed full access to email while in the conference.  All email will
be downloaded by our WIFI (Working-group Investigating Foreign-corruption via the Internet)
and printed out for our guests.  Conference participants should note
that emails with language directly threatening the state** will not be
passed on.

**Note that this includes any references derogatory to the Tunisian government, its officials, and its ruling party, as well as any comments defaming the governments of Libya, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, or any ally of Tunisia or in fact any other country that is not the United States.  It also includes any references to women without clothes, women working, women driving a car, or women doing anything outside of the house or their male family members' control.  It also includes mentions of provocative terminology and hate speech, including the words freedom, free press, free speech, democracy, property, capitalism, non-Muslim religions, George Bush, the state of Texas, Shiner Bock Beer, or the Dallas Cowboys.  Making fun of the Arizona Cardinals, however, is always OK.

Update:  This column is obviously a failed parody, because to be ironic you have to exaggerate reality at least somewhat.  I may have actually fallen short of reality:

As Tunisia prepares to host the controversial
World Summit for the Information Society in November, Tunisian opposition activist Neila
Charchour Hachicha informs Global Voices that the online freedom of speech protest site launched by
Tunisians on Monday, www.yezzi.org has
already been blocked by the Tunisian authorities.

The online protest, called "Freedom
of Expression in Mourning," is organized by The Tunisian Association for the Promotion
and Defense of Cyberspace (Association Tunisienne pour la Promotion et la
Défense du Cyberespace).

More on the UN Internet conference here as well.

Technorati Tags:  United Nations, humor, internet

When I read this article on waste disposal, via Instapundit, all I could think of was Julian Simon.  For those who may be too young to remember, back in the 80's, after the panic that we were running out of oil was over, but before the current panic that we are producing too much carbon dioxide, there was a panic that we were running out of garbage dump space.  Uh, never mind:

Simply put, operators of garbage dumps are stuffing more waste than
anyone expected into the giant plastic-lined holes, keeping disposal
prices down and making the construction of new landfills largely
unnecessary....

The
productivity leap is the second major economic surprise from the trash
business in the last 20 years. First, it became clear in the early
1990's that there was a glut of disposal space, not the widely believed
shortage that had drawn headlines in the 1980's. Although many town
dumps had closed, they were replaced by fewer, but huge, regional ones.
That sent dumping prices plunging in many areas in the early 1990's and
led to a long slump in the waste industry.

Since then, the
industry and its followers have been relying on time - about 330
million tons of trash went into landfills in the United States last
year alone, according to Solid Waste Digest, a trade publication - to
fill up some of those holes, erase the glut and send disposal prices
skyward again. Instead, dump capacity has kept growing, and rapidly,
even as only a few new dumps were built.

Shortages seldom persist where the human mind is left free to attack the problem, and economic incentives are allowed to operate freely.  I wrote my own post attacking the zero-sum mentality that causes certain people to jump from one shortage-panic to the next. 

My prediction:  Five years from now, we will be seeing the same article on oil and natural gas.  "This oil field in west Texas is over 80 years old, and was thought to be depleted, until $60 oil prices and some new technology...."   You get the idea.

I am renouncing my place of birth.  No, not my country.  For all its faults, I love the United States and miss it when I am away.  And no, not my birth state of Texas, despite its perceived great Satan status among the media elite.  I am not even renouncing my birth city of Houston, despite the fact I don't think I could ever return to the traffic and humidity.  I am taking the bold, original step of renouncing my birth hospital.  I was born at St. Luke's in the Texas Medical Center, and they are apparently going over to the dark side:

St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital's famed medical tower will soon be renamed for a
Houston lawyer who has made millions taking the health care industry to trial.

The plan to rename the edifice after John O'Quinn in recognition of a $25
million donation by his foundation has infuriated many St. Luke's doctors, who
last week began circulating a petition against it and Monday night convened an
emergency meeting of the medical executive committee.

"Perhaps you are unaware of the intensity of feelings held by many physicians
about Mr. John O'Quinn," says the petition, which is addressed to the Rev. Don
Wimberly, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Texas and chairman of the St.
Luke's Episcopal Health System board of directors. "The primary source of his
financial success has been representing plaintiffs in medical liability and
products liability cases, many of them groundless."

Where does the money come from?  In part from O'Quinn's baseless but infuriatingly successful suits over breast implants, which no serious medical study have shown to be dangerous:

A plaintiff's lawyer who often has sued doctors, O'Quinn made some of his
fortune on litigation involving breast implants, which bankrupted a company (Dow
Corning) even though the consensus later developed that the science didn't back
up the claims.

Another part of the money comes from pushing bogus asbestos claims that have kept most of the asbestos settlement money out of the hands of the truly sick:

In July 2005, a Corpus Christi federal judge fined O'Quinn's law firm for its
part helping to produce what she called bogus diagnoses involving the
occupational illness silicosis, a serious and occasionally fatal lung disease.
She said the claims "defy all medical knowledge" and the diagnoses were about
"litigation rather than health care."

More on the growing scandal in asbestos screening here and here.  Overlawyered has the whole store here, as well as links to plenty of background on Mr. O'Quinn.

Groups like the NAACP are actively pursuing claims for compensation from both corporations and governments for slavery in the United States 140 or more years ago (that's 7+ generations in the past).  The particular article linked is on seeking reparations from corporations, but many efforts exist to extract compensation from taxpayers, e.g. you and I.

Lets forget for a minute why I owe money for what my great-great-great-great-great grandfather did to your great-great-great-great-great grandfather.  Lets even forget that my great-great grandparents and all preceding generations of my family did not even live in this country.  Forget even about whether a statute of limitations has been exceeded by waiting 140+ years and seven or more generations to file a claim.

Lets however ask the question of what damages are incurred by the current generation of African-Americans who are decedents of American slaves.  Clearly the slaves themselves were irreparably harmed by slavery, but lets talk about the people who are actually bringing the suit.

If it were not for slavery, then many African-Americans today would be ... in Africa.  And in Africa, they would very, very likely be in horrible mind-numbing poverty (see Live8).  Its hard to pin down a number, but estimates of average incomes in Sub-Saharan Africa are between $600 per year and $1,770 per year.  By comparison, the average income of an African American was $14,397 in 1999 and is certainly higher today, since black incomes are growing rapidly in this country and actually falling in Africa.  And African American life expectancies, which still have some catching up to do with whites in the US, are nevertheless 10-25 years longer than their counterparts in the old country.  Everything from AIDS survival rates to education levels to VCR ownership and Internet access are far superior for American blacks than blacks in Africa.  So in this context, how does one demonstrate economic damages from slavery?

If I were an African American, I would give thanks every day that my ancestors endured the torture and humiliation and horror of slavery so that today my family could live, despite frustrations that sill exist for blacks, in relative wealth and prosperity and good health instead of some sub-Saharan shit-hole.

One Note:  I have certainly gotten some interesting emails on this one, including at least one "you will roast in hell" offering.  One comment I have gotten several times is "But there is no statute of limitations on murder, so how can there be on slavery?"   To which I answer - yes, there is not statute of limitations on murder, BUT, if we fail to catch a murderer in his lifetime, we don't throw his kids or grandkids in jail in his stead, nor do we ask his grandkids to pay reparations for his murders.  If we suddenly could absolutely prove the identity of Jack the Ripper, would we track down all his descendants and sue them for his actions? 

The second comment I get, presumably from African-Americans by the pronouns "I" and "we" used in the emails, is "we had our heritage ripped away".  I will confess that I may have a blind spot on this loss-of-heritage issue.  My great-grandparents were forcibly exiled from Germany about a century ago, and I don't shed any tears for my lost heritage, particularly given Germany's atrocious actions during the twentieth century.  I am thrilled to be an American and reject or at least ignore my German heritage.  I am not at all saddened my disconnectedness from the Kaiser or Hitler, and am not sure in turn that if I was black I would feel a loss from not being closer to Robert Mugabe or any of a zillion other repressive African regimes. 

By the way, in terms of being disconnected from one's heritage,  I have no way to prove it or get the numbers, but I would be willing to be that there are more college students right now studying black and/or African history in the US than in the whole of Africa.

This is another in a series of my lamentations on this country not having a strong and credible opposition party.  Previously, I have derided the Democrats for not coming up with a viable foreign policy alternative, but they appear just as week on domestic policy issues.

I have made my disdain for Kelo fairly clear.  It has taken a while, but someone other than a major beneficiary of eminent domain (e.g. the NY Times, which got their new HQ building courtesy of an eminent domain condemnation) has tried to defend it.  The defender is Nancy Pelosi, and boy has it become clear why we don't have a stronger opposition party in this country.  The Democrats have chosen this mental midget as their Congressional leader?  Check out this interview, via NRO:

 

"Q: Later this
morning, many Members of the House Republican leadership, along with
John Cornyn from the Senate, are holding a news conference on eminent
domain, the decision of the Supreme Court the other day, and they are
going to offer legislation that would restrict it, prohibiting federal
funds from being used in such a manner.

Two questions: What was your reaction to the Supreme Court decision
on this topic, and what do you think about legislation to, in the minds
of opponents at least, remedy or changing it?

Ms. Pelosi: As a Member of Congress, and actually all of us and
anyone who holds a public office in our country, we take an oath of
office to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Very central to
that in that Constitution is the separation of powers. I believe that
whatever you think about a particular decision of the Supreme Court,
and I certainly have been in disagreement with them on many occasions,
it is not appropriate for the Congress to say we're going to withhold
funds for the Court because we don't like a decision.

Q: Not on the Court, withhold funds from the eminent domain purchases
that wouldn't involve public use. I apologize if I framed the question
poorly. It wouldn't be withholding federal funds from the Court, but
withhold Federal funds from eminent domain type purchases that are not
just involved in public good.

Ms. Pelosi: Again, without focusing on the actual decision, just to
say that when you withhold funds from enforcing a decision of the
Supreme Court you are, in fact, nullifying a decision of the Supreme
Court. This is in violation of the respect for separation of church --
powers in our Constitution, church and state as well. Sometimes the
Republicans have a problem with that as well. But forgive my
digression.

So the answer to your question is, I would oppose any legislation
that says we would withhold funds for the enforcement of any decision
of the Supreme Court no matter how opposed I am to that decision. And
I'm not saying that I'm opposed to this decision, I'm just saying in
general.

Q: Could you talk about this decision? What you think of it?

Ms. Pelosi: It is a decision of the Supreme Court. If Congress wants
to change it, it will require legislation of a level of a
constitutional amendment. So this is almost as if God has spoken. It's an elementary discussion now. They have made the decision.

Q: Do you think it is appropriate for municipalities to be able to use eminent domain to take land for economic development?

Ms. Pelosi: The Supreme Court has decided, knowing the particulars
of this case, that that was appropriate, and so I would support that.

(emphasis added)

This is just crazy.  I guess as a Kelo-hater, I should be happy in this case that the opposition is so weak, but my god it is a depressing revelation for the future on other issues.