From Q and O:

CARMEL, N.Y. (AP) - It was quite a New Year's Eve at the home of
Richard Berger in Carmel - in Putnam County. Someone in the house broke
a rectal thermometer and the family called 911 around 10:30 to report
the small mercury spill.

Several dozen volunteers [the headline says 100] from the Carmel Fire Department responded to the house on Brookview Drive.

Fire Chief Darryl Johnson says mercury is a hazardous material that can cause stomach problems if inhaled.

Men wearing protective gear used wet sponges to clean up the puddle.

It was packaged and brought to the Carmel firehouse where the county health department will dispose of it today.

The Berger family was not hurt.

I remember breaking a few thermometers when I was a kid.  You took a piece of paper, creased it into a cup shape, and used the edge to pick up the little blobs without touching them.  I still seem to be alive today.  I am sure those little blobs are buried deep in some landfill now, a ticking time bomb for future generations.  And people wonder why gas prices are so high.  A country this panicky over a fraction of a gram of mercury will never let a new refinery get constructed.

I am not sure I find Nick Saban's $32 million contract with Alabama that surprising.  After all, Alabama considers itself a top-10 program but a series of rejections have made the job tainted goods.  When prestige won't sell, money is always the fall back.   And Saban has learned what most other college coaches have learned -- the NFL is a LOT of freaking work and stress compared to college.

My question is a different one.  My guess is that this makes Saban the highest paid state government employee in Alabama.  Is there any state where a college men's football or basketball coach is not the highest paid state official?

Apparently, the French government is planning to sink a couple of Billion euros into a risky new technology called an "internet search engine." (via hit and run)

Germany and France had initially discussed plans to commit €1 billion
to €2 billion, or $1.3 billion to $2.6 billion, over five years to
Quaero. The project was to have been paid for by the French and German
governments, with contributions from technology companies like Thomson
and France Télécom on the west side of the Rhine, and Siemens and
Deutsche Telekom to the east.

In related news, the French government also announced a massive technology development effort to invent some kind of round thing for cars to roll around on.

President Bush today, among other proposals, advocated earmark reform in a WSJ Op-Ed piece.  Great, though I would have thought his adult supervision on this issue with the Republican Congress last year would have been more effective.  Also, I would like to turn his attention to a novel Constitutional device called a "veto" that he already has at his command to handle pork-laden bills.

From Reason's Hit and Run:

Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to
Congress, found himself under attack last month when he announced he'd
take his oath of office on the Koran -- especially from Virginia Rep.
Virgil Goode, who called it a threat to American values.

Yet the
holy book at tomorrow's ceremony has an unassailably all-American
provenance. We've learned that the new congressman -- in a savvy bit of
political symbolism -- will hold the personal copy once owned by Thomas
Jefferson.

Yes that Thomas Jefferson, the one whose house Monticello is located in Goode's district.  LOL.

With my views, I can't imagine ever getting elected to office, but I wonder what book I could be sworn in on?  Ayn Rand is often suggested, but though her work has had a tremendous impact on me, I think she now sends off a slightly creepy, cultish vibe that might not work well on the PR front.  The Wealth of Nations?  Hayek's Road to Serfdom?  Free to Choose?  How about Julian Simon -- his optimism in free human endeavor probably reflects my personal outlook better than anyone.

I'm not sure about any of those.  I think that putting your hand on a copy of the US Constitution would be the most appropriate symbol, and would solve those nasty religion debates in a way I think both left and right could agree on.

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.

I thought this was a great first line:

My nephew started Kindergarten this year, unfortunately in a government
school.

He continues:

I fear for the future of this amazingly intelligent child, but
at least his mother is determined to protect him from an environment
that is overtly hostile to intellectual growth and achievement. And,
he's got some of the same genes I got, and shows every sign of being
the same arrogant, stubborn bastard I've always been, so there's hope
for him. I just wish I was there to help.

Yes, I know that the blogosphere needs another award like Washington needs another lobbyist.  But for a while now I have wanted to create an award aimed solely at blog aesthetics.  What I am shooting for is an award that pays no attention to content, that has as much to do with the blog's reasoned arguments as the Miss Hawaiian Tropic Bikini competition has to do with mental agility.  In a world where 1,998,000 out of 2,000,000 blogs are butt-ugly Blogger template jobs with all the charm of a Wal-Mart at 3AM, I would like to reward real creativity. 

What I want to do is take your nominations in the comments of this post. Please post links to the blog websites you think have the nicest visual style.  I will choose six or eight I like the best, and put them up for a vote.  Just to give you an idea, here are a couple I have viewed in the last few hours that I think are attractive in some way.  This blog has a pleasing layout.  And this blog has a gorgeous header image, though the rest of the layout does not do much for me.  Ironically, this blog layout has never done much for me, either, and this site always makes me want to poke my eyeballs out.  But you may disagree.  Again, please ignore content -- the last thing I need here is some left-right flamefest.

As a second competition, because everyone seems to like the flameouts more than the successes (just look at the popularity of the American Idol episodes where they show the total losers) I will also accept nominations for the worst blog look and feel.  Is there a blog out there you think has a "face made for RSS"?  You can nominate it too!

I am a little behind on my email, so I am late in posting some of the reviews coming in on my book BMOC.  My habit is to post every review I can find, positive or negative.  Let me know by email if you have a review and I will link it as well.  Some of the reviewers below seem to like the book a lot, while some are more lukewarm, but I thank everyone for reading it and taking the time to post a thoughtful review.

After years of practice with non-fiction, I am still refining my fiction voice and style.  It is hard to over-emphasize how important it is to get critical feedback from people who are not a) paid by me, i.e. editors or b) friends and family, who make up most everyone's first readers.  I am already learning a lot from reviews about what works and doesn't work, what is interesting, and what comes off as a cliche.   And of course I continue to be proud that I have some of the smartest readers in the blogosphere.  Thanks.  [Of course I am going to quote the good stuff, but click through to see everything]

Human Advancement (what a beautiful web design he has)

I picked it up Christmas morning, with the intention of reading a
chapter or two in that little lull that always comes after the presents
are opened. You've heard the cliche "I couldn't put it down"? Well,
next thing I knew dinner was ready, and after eating I picked it right
back up and finished it.

I had kind of assumed it would be another one of those libertarian
fantasy novels. You know the kind, Montana secedes from the US; or a
small band of people decide they won't take it any more and go off
somewhere to found their own government; or a lone rebel plots to take
down the system by finding and eliminating the few key people who keep
it going, etc. I've taken to calling it "LibFic". So I thought this
would be more of the same: a book from a fellow libertarian blogger
whom I've had on my blogroll almost since I started this, and a book
that was in a niche - a very narrow niche - that I like.

Turns out that it was a pretty mainstream corporate espionage novel,
complete with a murder to be solved, a young, attractive and competent
protagonist, and more than one opening for a sequel. It fits the genre
that is popular today, (with dramatic but generic names like "Malice of
Intent"), and as such is entertainment, not great literature. But it is
a good story, and while it is not overtly libertarian (seems that
Warren forgot to include the 70-page speech painfully "integrated" into
the plot that outlines his entire philosphical edifice), it does have a
refreshing libertarian sensibility that is usually absent from books in
that genre....

In the process, the book paints a picture of the media/legal/government
complex that is as damning as the portrayals of the
military/industrial complex, or the profit/oppression complex that is
usual the root of all evil. Warren pulls this off without lengthy
digressions to explain to us that this cabal exists, and why it is so
bad. Instead, he just shows it in action, and each example serves not
to "interrupt our plot for this important message", but to further the
plot and to draw the characters.

The Unrepentant Individual  (great blog name)

Pagan Vigil  (does everyone have a better blog name than mine?)

Dispatches from TJICistan (I wish he would stop making me feel guilty with his workout synopses)

There is also a nice 5-star review on Amazon.   You can also get a low-cost pdf version here.  And I have posted the first 8 chapters starting here.

Dave Barry has his end of year review up:

As the campaign lumbers to the finish line, the Republicans desperately
hope that the voters will not notice that they "” once the party of
small government "” have turned into the party of war-bungling,
corruption-tolerating, pork-spewing power-lusting toads, while the
Democrats desperately hope that the voters will not notice that they
are still, basically, the Democrats.

Ted Kennedy:

"We have 36 million Americans that are going to bed hungry every
night. 36 million Americans! And 12 million of those are children!"

Boston Globe (via Instapundit)

Obesity battle starts young for urban poor

By the time they reach the age of 3, more than one-third of low-income
urban children are already overweight or obese, according to a study
released yesterday that provides alarming evidence that the nation's
battle of the bulge begins when toddlers are barely out of diapers.

I have long suspected that there are substantial problems in the income data that folks on the sky-is-falling side of the inequality and risk debate are using.  One point I have made several times is that rising entrepreneurship tends to void many of the conclusions made by these folks who are commenting from an "everyone is an office or factory worker" paradigm.  In particular:

• Entrepreneurs have much riskier income profiles.  To a statistician mining tax returns, I look like I have fallen from a good upper middle-class job into, well, poverty for the first two years of my new company.  I haven't, but my data point is being used by Jacob Hacker and others to say that somehow there is a great risk-shift that is being foisted on the middle class against their will.  In fact, I and the growing number of people who run their own small businesses choose this life.
• The introduction of the "S-corporation" means that an increasing amount of entrepeneurial income is showing up on 1040's.  With C corporations, the incentive was to delay taking any income from the company for as long as possible to avoid double taxation, preferably taking it at time of the company's sale.  With S-Corporations, there is no double taxation problem so corporate income flows through to the individual 1040.  Business owners are suddenly reporting more income not because they are making more, but because they are recognizing it in a different way in a different tax form.  Much of the rich getting richer is actually just the rich recognizing their corporate income in small businesses in a different way.

Much more here from Chris Edwards at Cato, reporting on an interesting report coming soon from Alan Reynolds.

I swear I have had this identical conversation with my relatives that TJIC has with his.  In particular, he gets at the issue of the hidden labor tax:

TJIC: OK, what's the cost of trash separation?

X: Trash separation?

TJIC: Yes, trash separation. You don't "recycle", per
se, your step is just putting in extra labor to separate your garbage
into two piles -

X: It's free.

TJIC: It's free?  Would you say that it takes 30 seconds a day extra to separate trash?

X: No.

Y: More like 60 seconds.

TJIC: OK, 60 seconds per day is 6 hours per year.  At $50 / hour, that's $300 of labor -

X: But that's nonsense, because we weren't going to get paid for that labor anyway.

TJIC: Yes, but you could have done something enjoyable with that time.

I wrote more about this here, where I also linked to a great Bullshit! episode on recycling.

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.

Please stop tell me that I have no right to question Al Gore when he wants to take over the world economy to his own ends.  And please stop telling me that catastrophic man-made global warming is now beyond question:

One of the many disturbing aspects of global warming hysteria is the
way moonbats who use it to promote their ominous political agenda
insist on a consensus that simply does not exist. A recent survey
of more than 12,000 environmental scientists and practitioners by the
National Registry of Environmental Professionals shows that despite the
hysteria and considerable pressure to conform to the "correct" view,
many scientists are choosing skepticism over the safety of the herd.

The survey found that:

• 34% disagree that global warming is a serious problem;
• 41% disagree that warming trends "can be, in large part, attributed to human activity";
• 71% disagree that human activity has significantly contributed to hurricanes;
• 33% disagree that the US government is not doing enough about global warming;
• 47% disagree that international agreements such as the preposterous
  Kyoto Protocol provide a useful framework for addressing global climate
  change.

There are good reasons to believe in some man-made global warming, but there are very good reasons to doubt it will be as catastrophic as portrayed in the media, and very, very good reasons not to hand over the throttle of the world economy to environmental groups in anticipation of such uncertain events.  My position on the skeptical middle ground on climate change is here.

A few days late (I usually publish on Thursday night) here are chapters 5 and 6 of my book BMOC, available on Amazon.com and as a low-cost pdf.  Chapters 1 and 2 are here;  Chapters 3 and 4 are here.  All chapters are indexed here.

chapter five

"Tell me, Mr.
Marsh, what does BMOC do?"

Continue reading ‘BMOC, Chapters 5 and 6’ »

I have removed some code from the site that was really slowing down load times.  Hopefully those of you who are not reading CB via RSS reader will find the site responds a lot faster.

One of the excuses statists often use to promote government over private enterprise is that businesses are "short-term focused".  They are only after "profit in the next quarter."  They don't "invest for the long-term" like a government can.  Really?

Iran's oil exports are plummeting at 10pc a year on lack of
investment and could be exhausted within a decade, depriving the world
economy of its second-biggest source of crude supplies.

A report by the US National Academy of Sciences said rickety
infrastructure dating back to the era of the Shah had crippled output,
while local fuel use was rising at 6pc a year.

"Their domestic demand is growing at the highest rate of any country
in the world," said Prof Roger Stern, an Iran expert at Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore.

"They need to invest $2.5bn (£1.28bn) a year just to stand still
and they're not doing it because it's politically easier to spend the
money on social welfare and the army than to wait four to six years for
a return on investment," he said.

"They've been running down the industry like this for 20 years."

You never hear this problem in the privately run oil industry.  And I can say with complete confidence that this is a government problem, not just an Iran problem. 

Take one area in this country I know about, public recreation.   The BLM, the Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Corps of Engineers (not to mention state, county and local authorities) all run thousands of recreation facilities across the country.  And I can tell you that no public entity I know of budgets or spends adequate money on preventative and routine maintenance.  The nature of the process is that Congressmen love to get their name attached to building a new government recreation facility - that's sexy.  But then they never appropriate enough money to keep it maintained.  In their calculus, politicians can get a lot more political mileage from spending money in year 2 on another flashy announcement of a new facility than they can from spending that money to maintain the facilities they funded in year 1.

Can you imagine someone like Disney doing this?  Of course not.  The Magic Kingdom at DisneyWorld, the oldest of the them parks there, looks as fresh and new and well-kept when you visit it as does the newer MGM and Animal Kingdom parks.

And don't even get me started on government pensions and Social Security.  Oops, too late, I am started.  Yes, a few private companies in steel and airlines have under-funded pensions (though the government is partially to blame there) but by the definition of "under-funded" that private companies use, nearly every single public pension fund in the country is under-funded.  That is because most public pensions do not actually put away any money (zero, zip) for future liabilities -- they simply pay this year's required payments out of this year's funds.  States and municipalities have a huge balloon pension burden coming -- just wait twenty years and we will all be talking about it.  And Social Security, for all the smoke and mirrors, effectively works the same way, since current premiums in excess of current obligations are spent on the feds general obligations (if you still think there is some trust fund out there, wake up.)

Ted Frank at Overlawyered is posting links to his favorite Overlawyered stories of 2006, month by month .  Don't miss the link to yours truly in March.  update:  Hey, I'm in February too.

I am always suspicious when retailers try to pursue a parallel channel model.  Most tend to screw it up.  Office supply retailer Staples gets my screwed-up online retailer of the year award.  We tried Staples online service when a sales person visited us and offered us a corporate discount to try their remote order service.  The first several orders failed to show up on the promised dates, a hardship for a small office where someone often has to explicitly wait around for such a delivery.  Their delivery windows are worse than even those provided by the cable company, promising only to show up sometime between 9 and 5. 

This week, I waited all day for a couple of filing cabinets, which showed up battered and beaten up.   It was clear that the cabinets were damaged just from looking at the boxes.  I hope no one in my company would ever ship something that looked so banged up to a customers without checking on it.  Sure enough, the cabinets were a mess, and I insisted on sending them back.  The driver said, sorry, you already signed for them, I can't take them, call customer service. 

So I called customer service and they did what?  Scheduled another pickup/delivery.  So I again waited all day today for the replacements.  The driver took the old ones, but the new ones were again in beaten up boxes - one had black electrical tape patching it up.  But I had learned.  I said I would not sign for them until I had opened and inspected them.  The driver said I was not allowed to inspect them until I signed for them.  Great.  Well, like an idiot I signed and then immediately upon opening the boxes found that they were both beaten up.  Obviously they had a bad lot of these type cabinets, and I had begged them to inspect my two replacements first before they came out, but no joy.  And of course, the driver would not take them back because ... I had already signed for them.

This restrictive approach to customer acceptance of merchandise, which I would summarize as "you have to accept the merchandise without inspection" stands in marked contrast to how this works in their stores.  I believe that I would certainly be entitled in the store to look at the actual cabinet, rather than the box, before I decided to accept the merchandise.  Heck, I am pretty sure it was my local Staples store that, when they sold me two chairs, unboxed them and assembled them for free.

So tomorrow is yet another visit.  I again begged Staples to inspect the cabinets before they put them on the truck to make sure this third set would be OK, since they obviously were pulling from a bad lot.  The Staples customer service guy said that their warehouse folks don't do that kind of thing.  No shit.

Update: OK, I give up.  The replacements were battered as well.  Why through this no one in the warehouse would have the initiative to check on what is obviously a bad lot they have received from the manufacturer is beyond me.   I have left them on the curb for Staples to get whenever they want them.  They were good about my credit.

For those who think marathoners are wimps:

Paul Keeley, a U.S. Marine at the South Carolina
Military School, wants to run the Boston Marathon unshod next year.
Last summer, he began training by pounding the streets of Charleston,
S.C., in combat boots, hoping to nurture some preliminary calluses. He
took off the boots this fall but soon landed on a surgeon's table for
an abscess in his middle toe that required draining. Mr. Keeley, 18,
says his calluses had hardened so well that he felt no pain when a pine
needle or some other sharp object penetrated his skin and worked its
way to the bone. He says he's still on track with his
barefoot-in-Boston plan.

"Barefoot running isn't for sissies," says Jonathan
Summers, a 37-year-old Boston horticulturist who took up the regimen
this summer after seeing a couple of unshod runners pass him by at a
local 10K race. "It's like running on sandpaper."...

Paul Keeley, a U.S. Marine at the South Carolina
Military School, wants to run the Boston Marathon unshod next year.
Last summer, he began training by pounding the streets of Charleston,
S.C., in combat boots, hoping to nurture some preliminary calluses. He
took off the boots this fall but soon landed on a surgeon's table for
an abscess in his middle toe that required draining. Mr. Keeley, 18,
says his calluses had hardened so well that he felt no pain when a pine
needle or some other sharp object penetrated his skin and worked its
way to the bone. He says he's still on track with his
barefoot-in-Boston plan.

"Barefoot running isn't for sissies," says Jonathan
Summers, a 37-year-old Boston horticulturist who took up the regimen
this summer after seeing a couple of unshod runners pass him by at a
local 10K race. "It's like running on sandpaper."

This is a weird case, via Radley Balko:  A court issues a search warrant for a bullet, correctly stating the specific location to be searched and the reasons the bullet is needed.  No problem so far, but unfortunately, the bullet is inside someone and must be surgically removed.

In the middle of Joshua Bush's forehead, two inches above his eyes,
lies the evidence that prosecutors say could send the teenager to
prison for attempted murder: a 9 mm bullet, lodged just under the skin.

Prosecutors
say it will prove that Bush, 17, tried to kill the owner of a used-car
lot after a robbery in July. And they have obtained a search warrant to
extract the slug.

But Bush and his lawyer are fighting the
removal, in a legal and medical oddity that raises questions about
patient privacy and how far the government can go to solve crimes
without running afoul of the constitutional protection against
unreasonable searches and seizures.

They go on to mention this problem:

Police then obtained a second search warrant and scheduled the
operation for last week at the University of Texas Medical Branch
hospital in Galveston. It was postponed again, however, after the
hospital decided not to participate for reasons it would not discuss.

Prosecutors said they continue to look for a doctor or hospital willing to remove the bullet.

Duh.  No private doctor or hospital is going to do this procedure.  Whoever removes this bullet is 100% guaranteed to get named on at least one lawsuit seconds after the procedure.  Even if they win the suit, the cost of defending themselves will outweigh anything they might get paid for the procedure.

The other day I posted on Second Life, which seems to be trying to do something eerily similar to the virtual world in Snow Crash.  TJIC has more, from an article in the WaPo:

"¦Earlier this month, U.S. Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner visited
Second Life, appearing as a balding, bespectacled cartoon rendering of
himself, and addressed a crowd of other animated characters on a range
of legal issues, including property rights in virtual reality. Posner
stressed that it was in Linden Lab's interest to ensure due process and
other rights.

"They want people to invest in Second Life, and we know
people won't invest if their rights are not reasonably secure," he told
the audience, which included a giant chipmunk and several supermodels. He went on to predict the eventual emergence of an "international law of virtual worlds" similar to international maritime law"¦

I have liquor licenses in about six different states, and like sales taxes, the process varies a lot by state.  But one universal impression I have is that the whole liquor licensing process has long ago ceased to serve its original purpose and has instead become either become captive to rent-seekers or has become a bureaucratic jobs program or both.  Al Capone died more than half a century ago.  And while one might argue there is some government interest in making sure minors don't buy the product and similar rules are followed, the liquor licensing process is orders of magnitude more complex and onerous than, say, getting a license to sell cigarettes or to prepare foods on site, both of which have similar features.

The liquor licensing process in most states was crafted in the 1930s, with the end of prohibition.  At that time, the primary concern was to keep out organized crime interests who had run the liquor business during prohibition.  So the process includes FBI background checks, as well as minute disclosure of every single person who has ever loaned you money, so they can be checked out to make sure you are in no way beholden to anyone who is a bad guy in the FBI computers.  The licenses take months to obtain (including a fingerprinting process) and cost thousands of dollars a year, presumably to offset the bureaucracy required to review all the applications.  Here in Arizona, minuscule errors, such as abbreviating "Boulevard" in an address to "Blvd" can cause the application to be rejected and have to be resubmitted.  Believe me, I know.

Worse than the ridiculous jobs-program-and-mindless-bureaucracy-fighting-a-threat-that-no-longer-exists problem is the way liquor licenses are now used in many locales for rent-seeking.  The worst offenders are states that purposefully artificially limit the number of liquor licenses.  This is quite obviously an incumbent protection program, protecting current liquor businesses from new competition.  California is one such state.  Even after I had purchased an existing license for a ridiculous amount of money ($5000 I think), I still had to make my case to the local county planning board who had final approval as to whether they would allow me a license into the county.  I asked them why this was necessary, and they were very up front about it (the following is paraphrased but accurate):

If we issue too many licenses, then it would be hard for you to make money.  We are really just helping you.

Sorry, but I don't need help.  I am willing to take the risk.  And does anyone really think that Shasta County California is looking after me, an out-of-state business just entering the area?  Of course not.  What they are really saying is "let us decide if all our buddies here in the county who we play golf with and who donate to our campaigns are OK with you competing with them."

In fact, this is exactly what happens in Lake Havasu City, AZ.  Though Arizona is not a state that limits liquor licenses, Lake Havasu required some kind of local board meeting to approve our license in that city.  The stated reason was that they wanted to make sure the new liquor business would not bring down the image of the city.  Which is hilarious, for anyone who has been to Lake Havasu City, particularly in spring break.  In fact, I am pretty sure it was an excuse for all the local interests to decide if they could tolerate another competitor or not.

All this comes to mind after I read this article by Radley Balko.  It is a good example of what can happen to you if your business depends on a government license and the local rent-seekers decide that your business needs to go.  A very brief excerpt:

I'll get into the
harassment, entrapment, and defamation Mr. Ruttenberg has endured in a
bit. For the moment, I'd like to focus on possible reasons for the
harassment. Why has this been going on for several years? I think there
are a few minor motivating factors. For one, I think there is,
unfortunately, some antisemitism at play. There's also a strange
rivalry Mr. Ruttenberg had with a Manassas Park police officer over a
girl. And I think part of this may be driven by city officials who for
whatever reason simply began to harbor a grudge against Ruttenberg.
Remember Milton Friedman's old axiom: Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

But I think something else is going on, here. And Black Velvet Bruce
Li has hit it. I believe there is some very strong circumstantial
evidence suggesting that Mr. Ruttenberg's bar was targeted by the city
of Manassas Park because the city had its eye on the property as a
possible site for an off-track betting facility for the Colonial Downs
horse racing track in New Kent County, Virgina.

Update:  I guess this is the day to blog about outdated 1930's liquor legislation.

When the Legislature wrote the first alcohol laws after
Prohibition was repealed in 1933, California defined what a beer is and
what wine is. The definition was simple"”anything added to beer or wine
renders it something else. Sometime thereafter beer and wine producers
started adding things such as preservatives, flavor enhancers and other
things. So narrowly reading the law there is NO such product as either
beer or wine sold in California today. Now common sense and alcohol
regulators know that is not true and so for years have ignored this
narrow interpretation.

Last week [on December 13] a bare
majority of the Board of Equalization voted for the narrow
interpretation of the law, and have begun the process to tax all
alcohols with any additives as distilled spirits. This will increase
the taxes charged on beers, wines, flavored malt beverages, and
flavored beers to the level on hard liquor.

The dated California
law defines beer as having no additives whatsoever. No beer that I know
of"” except perhaps some home brews"”meets this definition.

There is no doubt that electricity markets are a mess.  Electric utilities have been regulated for so long and in so many ways, and new capacity is so hard to add, the deregulation experiments tend to fail over short time periods for any number of reasons.  In California, what was called "deregulation" never really was such, since pricing signals were never passed on to consumers and therefore never really influenced demand.  In Texas, the areas where my company operates still struggle with deregulation, and we have seen few price or customer service benefits. 

This is not that surprising when you consider other major industries that have been so thoroughly regulated.   Railroads come to mind, for example.  Deregulation occurred thirty years ago and we are only recently starting to see a renaissance in that industry.  Pre-deregulation airline incumbents (e.g. Delta, United, American) are still struggling with open markets.

Mike Gibberson links a pair of court decisions that may set back any progress made in deregulating at least the wholesale electricity markets.  In a series of suits, the State of California is seeking a mulligan, asking the court to rule that wholesale electricity contracts it entered into in 2000-2001 should be voided because the price was too high and FERC did not have the authority to allow blanket market-based rather than cost-based electricity pricing.  And the judges seem to agree:

The panel held that prices set in those bilateral transactions pursuant
to FERC's market-based program enjoyed no presumption of legality.

I don't think there is anything more depressing to a good anarcho-capitalist like myself than seeing the government rule that a price negotiated at arms length by the free will of consenting, and in this case well-informed adults enjoys "no presumption of legality."  If not, then what does?  Is that where we are heading, to a world where no voluntary actions enjoy a presumption of legality?

By the way, one has to remember that this is not a case of an impoverished high school drop-out in East St. Louis signing a high interest rate loan he didn't understand.  This is the case of highly paid electricity executives and government electricity officials signing electricity contracts.  It is as ridiculous to argue that they were somehow duped in buying the one and only item they ever buy for resale as to argue that Frito-Lay somehow shouldn't be held responsible for the price it negotiates for potatoes.  These electricity companies knew they had obligations to supply power at retail at certain rates and failed to lock up enough supply in advance.  Whether Jeff Skilling gamed the short-term spot market is irrelevant - the utility executives were at fault for finding themselves beholden to the spot market for so great a volume of electricity, and doubly at fault for taking this power at insane rates when other lower cost options were available to them (such as cutting off customers on interruptible contracts).