Coyote Blog

Via Carpe Diem

This does not include the millions in state and county jails.  All those drug offenders in jail for a victemless crime, essentially "for their own good."

"I've sentenced boys younger than you to the gas chamber. Didn't want to do it. I felt I owed it to them. "

Via Carpe Diem, from William Even and David Macpherson:

"Each 10% increase in the minimum wage [since 2007] was accompanied by a decrease in employment of 1.2% for Hispanic males, 2.5% for white males and 6.5% for black males. When looking at hours worked, we saw a similar effect: Each 10% increase in the minimum wage reduced hours worked by 1.7% for Hispanic males, 3% for white males and 6.6% for black males.

The data clearly show a disproportionate loss of hours and employment for black young adults. Let's put these lost opportunities into context. Between 2007 and 2010, employment for 16- to 24-year-old black males fell by approximately 34,300 as a result of the recession; over the same time period, approximately 26,400 lost their jobs as a result of increases in the minimum wage across the 50 states and at the federal level.

Via Carpe Diem

Almost all discussions about Medicare reform ignore one key factor: Medicare utilization is roughly 50% higher than private health-insurance utilization, even after adjusting for age and medical conditions. In other words, given two patients with similar health-care needs—one a Medicare beneficiary over age 65, the other an individual under 65 who has private health insurance—the senior will use nearly 50% more care.

Several factors help cause this substantial disparity. First and foremost is the lack of effective cost sharing. When people are insulated from the cost of a desirable product or service, they use more. Thus people who have comprehensive health coverage tend to use more care, and more expensive care—with no noticeable improvement in health outcomes—than those who have basic coverage or high deductibles.

Its amazing that we still have serious public debates about which way demand curves slope.

... people can seek out some pretty amazing spaces to do business.  Not sure OSHA would be hip to this.

Via Carpe Diem
Update: Substituted a video I thought was better.

Via Carpe Diem, yet another group of market incumbents using licensing and regulation to limit competition and, in particular, ban business models different than those of the incumbents.

From the Institute for Justice: "Until 2010, sedan and independent limo services were an affordable alternative to taxicabs in the Music City. A trip to the airport only cost $25. But in June 2010, the Metropolitan County Council passed a series of anti-competitive regulations requested by the Tennessee Livery Association - a trade group formed by expensive limousine companies. These regulations force sedan and independent limo companies to increase their fares to $45 minimum.

The regulations also prohibit limo and sedan companies from using leased vehicles, require them to dispatch only from their place of business, require them to wait a minimum of 15 minutes before picking up a customer and forbid them from parking or waiting for customers at hotels or bars. And, in January 2012, companies will have to take all vehicles off the road if they are more than 7 years old for a sedan or SUV or more than 10 years old for a limousine.

Two Americas:  Those who use the coersive power of the government to take money for themselves, and those who have to earn it by giving value for money in non-coerced , arms-length transactions.

Via Carpe Diem, which has more thoughts on the trend

Note:  I have seen folks defend this type of chart by saying it is just the function of  the inflection point of a normal distribution creeping by inflation across a dividing line.  But look the $180K+ in 2010 vs. the $150K+ in 2005.  By inflation, a $150,000 salary should not have increased to more than $165,000, but we see more than twice as many people making $180K plus today than made $150K plus five years ago.

Onion News Network:  Are Standardized Tests Biased Against Kids Who Don't Give a Shit? Via Carpe Diem.  The Onion is brilliant because in some ways, this is absurd and some ways it cuts way too close to reality.

I am done using the phrase "dangers of government trying to pick winners" because it implies that they sometimes might be successful.  They never are.  When governments choose, they choose losers.

I get a lot of pushback on this, because it seems to offend people's intuition.  They will say they know lots of good people they trust in government -- there is no way that all these smart, well-intentioned people are going to be so consistently wrong.

But the argument against government in this case (and in most other cases) is not based on the IQ or goodness of the individuals that populate it.  The argument is that even good people in groups make terrible decisions due to problems with their information and incentives.

The information problem is one that Hayek is famous for addressing.  In short, there is simply too much to know to make decisions for the entire economy.  In fact, folks with high IQ's often do especially poorly in this context, because they tend to overestimate their own knowledge and problem-solving ability.   And, even if one could be omniscient, it is still impossible to pick winners because 300 million people have different preferences and so one solution based on one set of idealized or mean preferences is going to sub-optimize for a lot of people  (remember this now that we all have to have health insurance plans on the exact same terms and coverage).

The incentives issue is perhaps an even more powerful problem.  We only have to look at the most recent health care bill and its progress through the legislative process to understand the power of incentives to shape rules and legislation in absurd ways.

Ethanol is a great illustration.  Scorned by scientists as both bad energy policy and bad environmental policy, ethanol mandates and subsidies do nothing but hurt the environment.  Ethanol generally takes more fossil fuels to produce than it replaces, it does almost nothing to reduce CO2 emissions, and it creates new environmental issues with land use as well as social issues from rising food prices.  If you listed a hundred potential legislative initiatives to improve the environment and energy policy, ethanol would likely be in the bottom 10.  But never-the-less, it is consistently the number 1 legislative solution adopted by western democracies, including the supposedly science-based Obama administration.

I used to say that if we could move the first Presidential primary out of Iowa, ethanol might go away, but obviously that understated the appeal of subsidizing the agricultural industry under the thin veneer of environmental policy, as demonstrated by these nutty large subsidies in Europe.  Via Carpe Diem:

Biofuels production in Europe is heavily subsidized. Support has also been increasing in the past years and today stand at approximately EUR4 billion ($5.76B). Another way to look at subsidies is that every litre of ethanol consumed in Europe gets 0.74 EUR (about $4 per gallon) and every litre of biodiesel 0.5 EUR ($2.72 per gallon). The effective rate of assistance to biofuels (taking account of all measures of support) adds up to more than 250% for ethanol (see chart above). Biodiesel, and especially rapeseed crops, have lower effective rates of assistance (up to approximately 60%).

This structure of support and protection is not economically sustainable. It is rather close to economic madness to pursue the sort of self-sufficiency or industrial policy ambitions that have guided EU policy towards biofuels. The total cost of every unit of biofuel becomes far too high, which slows down the readiness to shift away from fossil fuels.

The biofuels policy in the European Union is a classic example of "green protectionism" "“ protectionism that is not motivated for the benefit of the environment, but which uses environmental concerns to pursue non-environmental objectives. The European Union runs an extensive policy for subsidies to biofuel production. Border protection increases the level of subsidy by giving a market support from consumers to producers. Standards are used to favour domestically produced biofuels. It is difficult to escape the picture of a policy driven by industrial ambitions rather than environmental concerns. The intention and/or the effect of Europe's policy is associated with beliefs of self-sufficiency. Obviously, trade is not considered to be an integral part of an environmental ambition to shift from fossil fuels to biofuels.

We sometimes forget the good news.  Growth is not the enemy.  Growth, technology, trade, markets, capitalism -- these have improved the lives of more people more quickly than any number of Irish rock stars putting on benefit concerts.  Via Carpe Diem

Bank failures in the last coupe of years, in terms of institutions as well as assets, are still well below the S&L crisis of the 1980's.  So what justifies the current nationalization of the banking sector and the short-circuiting of institutional failures and the subsequent creation of moral hazard.  Via Carpe Diem.

Two large drivers of high health insurance costs in certain states is 1) bans on interstate competition for health insurance and 2) state-by-state mandates for minimum coverage.  These two government actions lead to some states having remarkably higher health insurance prices than others.  Via Carpe Diem:

The average health insurance ranges from a low of $1,254 in Wisconsin to a high of $8,537 in Massachusetts, and the national average is $2,613. That kind of variation couldn't exist in a competitive market for health insurance. Interstate competition for health insurance would go a long way towards bringing health insurance costs down.

That Massachusetts model sure is doing wonders, huh?  If reimportation of drugs from Canada makes sense, why not of policies across state lines? See where your state ranks here.

Via Carpe Diem, comes this September 30, 1999 NY Times story:

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among
minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is
easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from
banks and other lenders.

The action, which will begin as a
pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New
York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home
mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to
qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to
make it a nationwide program by next spring.

Fannie Mae, the
nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under
increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage
loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock
holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

In
addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been
pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime
borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings
are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get
loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates --
anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional
loans.

''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of
families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said
Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer.
''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch
below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to
paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime
market.''

Demographic information on these borrowers is
sketchy. But at least one study indicates that 18 percent of the loans
in the subprime market went to black borrowers, compared to 5 per cent
of loans in the conventional loan market.

In moving, even
tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on
significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during
flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run
into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue
similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.

''From
the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift
industry growing up around us,'' said Peter Wallison a resident fellow
at the American Enterprise Institute. ''If they fail, the government
will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed
out the thrift industry.''

Those heartless free marketing guys at the AEI -- always predicting doom every time we open our hearts to poor people.  Bailout?  What ridiculous scare-mongering.