Coyote Blog

Nicholas Kristof reported in the NY Times (via Reason)that Portland had found the secret to eternal motion, cutting CO2 emisions while paying no price and growing the economy:

Officials in Portland insist that the campaign to cut emissions has entailed no
significant economic price, and on the contrary has brought the city huge
benefits: less tax money spent on energy, more convenient transportation, a
greener city and expertise in energy efficiency that is helping local businesses
win contracts worldwide.... Portland's experience is so crucial. It confirms the
suggestions of some economists that we can take initial steps against global
warming without economic disruptions. Then in a decade or two, we can decide
whether to proceed with other, costlier steps....

Here's his big conclusion:

Perhaps eventually we will face hard trade-offs. But for now Portland shows we
can help our planet without "wrecking" our economy--indeed, at no significant
cost at all.

No one, particularly the science-challenged press who oh-so-wanted this to be true, asked themselves if this made any freaking sense at all.  Apparently, it doesn't:

In response to data requests from the Cascade Policy Institute, a Portland-based
think tank, the [Office of Sustainable Development] admitted that a math error
resulted in a 2004 carbon dioxide calculation that was 74,561 tons too low. The
re-stated total puts Multnomah County above the 1990 levels by more than 68,000
tons.

The implication?

What's more, Cascade's prez, John Charles, argues that, beyond bad math, there
are more basic methodological flaws that lead to an undercounting of
transportation-related emissions. "Portland's claim of painlessly reducing
carbon dioxide has been repeated over and over by journalists, bloggers, and
even some scientists for the past month, without any attempt to verify the
accuracy of the OSD's report," he writes. "In fact, actual carbon emissions have
been well above the level claimed by Portland, and any regulatory program
imposed by the government to lower emissions to pre-1990 levels is going to be
costly to consumers, something elected officials apparently don't understand."

Here was my prediction, in an article on "community" investment in services like broadband:

Bureaucracies never, ever let themselves die, and there is no way a
municipal broadband business will ever let itself be killed by a
competitor - that competitor will be blocked, even if that likely means
that local broadband consumers have to stick with higher costs and
outdated technologies.

Now there is nothing abnormal about this -- every business tries to protect itself from competitors.  But only the government has the unique and dangerous power to block competition by law, which makes it a particularly dangerous owner of business assets (either on their own or via the dreaded "public-private" partnership).

I must admit, I expected it to take some time to be proven right.  I expected that things would go OK for the local governments in broadband until an (inevitable) technology shift found them defending their outdated infrastructure against new entrants.  However, proof comes much faster, via Reason's Hit and Run:

Boston's Logan International Airport is attempting to pull the plug on
Continental Airlines' free Wi-Fi node, which competes with the airport's
$7.95-a-day pay service.

In an escalating series of threatening letters sent over the last few weeks,
airport officials have pledged to "take all necessary steps to have the (Wi-Fi)
antenna removed" from Continental's frequent flyer lounge....

At stake is a sizable chunk of revenue that Massport receives from its
pay-per-use Wi-Fi service, which is operated by a commercial provider
called Advanced Wireless Group.

Q.E.D.

Update:  By the way, the mother of all government backed cartels using state regulatory power to squash competition that might reduce government rents is in tobacco.  Good article here at Reason.  They summarize:

In short, a cartel of states has colluded with a cartel of tobacco companies to create a public-private
supercartel: a market-fixing scheme that is locked in by law, yet is accountable to no particular
government authority; that is immensely profitable to the parties at the expense of millions of hapless
consumers; and that is enforced with penalties that clobber any would-be defectors. The deal also creates
what amounts to a new national taxing authority that arises from state collusion and that bypasses Congress.
The companies provided the deep pockets, the states provided the muscle, private law firms provided the
legal talent, and public-interest groups provided legitimacy.

I have written a number of times that Republicans are returning to their bad old days of the 1970's, supporting aggresive social constraints and big government pro-large-business rather than pro-free-market economic controls.  Per Republican Rick Santorum, via Reason:

This whole idea of personal autonomy -- I don't think that most conservatives
hold that point of view. Some do. And they have this idea that people should be
left alone to do what they want to do, that government should keep taxes down,
keep regulation down, that we shouldn't get involved in the bedroom, that we
shouldn't be involved in cultural issues, people should do whatever they want.
Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world. And I think that
most conservatives understand that we can't go it alone, that there is no such
society that I'm aware of where we've had radical individualism and it has
succeeded as a culture.

This Reason Hit and Run post is a useful example to clarify the difference between "pro-business" and "pro-free-markets."  This earlier post of mine also addresses this distinction.

I have written a number of times that Republicans are returning to their bad old days of the 1970's, supporting aggresive social constraints and big government pro-large-business rather than pro-free-market economic controls.  Per Republican Rick Santorum, via Reason:

This whole idea of personal autonomy -- I don't think that most conservatives
hold that point of view. Some do. And they have this idea that people should be
left alone to do what they want to do, that government should keep taxes down,
keep regulation down, that we shouldn't get involved in the bedroom, that we
shouldn't be involved in cultural issues, people should do whatever they want.
Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world. And I think that
most conservatives understand that we can't go it alone, that there is no such
society that I'm aware of where we've had radical individualism and it has
succeeded as a culture.

This Reason Hit and Run post is a useful example to clarify the difference between "pro-business" and "pro-free-markets."  This earlier post of mine also addresses this distinction.

I have little patience for the campaign against American companies, particularly apparel companies, for operating "sweatshops" in other countries.  A bunch of American middle class protesters who have generally never been to the country involved complain that wages paid are too low.  Why too low?  Well, the only basis I can determine is that they are declare too low because the protesters involved would never take that $12 a day job themself.  Of course, the protesters have never wallowed in miserable poverty trying to live on $2 a day. As I wrote before:

Progressives do not like American factories appearing in third world
countries, paying locals wages progressives feel are too low, and
disrupting agrarian economies with which progressives were more
comfortable.  But these changes are all the sum of actions by
individuals, so it is illustrative to think about what is going on in
these countries at the individual level. 

One morning, a rice farmer in southeast Asia might faces a choice.
He can continue a life of brutal, back-breaking labor from dawn to dusk
for what is essentially subsistence earnings.  He can continue to see a
large number of his children die young from malnutrition and disease.
He can continue a lifestyle so static, so devoid of opportunity for
advancement, that it is nearly identical to the life led by his
ancestors in the same spot a thousand years ago.

Or, he can go to the local Nike factory, work long hours (but
certainly no longer than he worked in the field) for low pay (but
certainly more than he was making subsistence farming) and take a shot
at changing his life.  And you know what, many men (and women) in his
position choose the Nike factory.  And progressives hate this.  They
distrust this choice.  They distrust the change.  And, at its heart,
that is what globalization is all about - a deep seated conservatism
that distrusts the decision-making of individuals and fears change,
change that ironically might finally pull people out of untold
generations of utter poverty.

This week, with a hat tip to Cafe Hayek, I found this interesting new study by Powell and Skarbeck on wages at American plants in 3rd world nations.

 

We examined the apparel industry in 10 Asian and Latin American countries
often accused of having sweatshops and then we looked at 43 specific accusations
of unfair wages in 11 countries in the same regions. Our findings may seem
surprising. Not only were sweatshops superior to the dire alternatives
economists usually mentioned [such as working on subsistence farms], but they
often provided a better-than-average standard of living for their workers.

 

The apparel industry, which is often accused of unsafe working conditions and
poor wages, actually pays its foreign workers well enough for them to rise above
the poverty in their countries. While more than half of the population in most
of the countries we studied lived on less than $2 per day, in 90 percent of the
countries, working a 10-hour day in the apparel industry would lift a worker
above - often far above - that standard. For example, in Honduras, the site of
the infamous Kathy Lee Gifford sweatshop scandal, the average apparel worker
earns $13.10 per day, yet 44 percent of the country's population lives on less
than $2 per day.

Cafe Hayek concludes:

Powell's and Skarbek's lesson is straightforward and important. But it's a
lesson too often ignored by "activists" who would rather pose and prance as
moral crusaders than analyze situations in ways that might actually help people.
The lesson is summarized by what I call "The Economist's Question: "As
compared to what?"

In and of itself, situation A is neither good nor bad; it is good or bad only
in comparison with it's real alternatives.  This lesson is a hard one, perhaps
-- it's certainly an unromantic one -- but it's indispensable for sound
analysis.

I trash the Congress a lot, but a brief thanks to our local Congressman John Shadegg who was one of only 8 folks who managed a "no" vote against the pork-laden highway bill.  Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake was also one of the eight.

Update:  Flake also wins an award as the only Congressman who did not slip a special appropriation for his own district into the bill.

Posting will be kind of light this week because I am away at camp.  My wife signed us up for a family camp that they have run for years at UC-Santa Barbara.  One good sign already:  most of the guests have been coming for years.  One lady I had dinner with is here for the 28th year.

Basically all the family stay in the dorms here, and there are activities arranged by age group all day for the kids and optional activities for the adults.  Meals are in the cafeteria, where the food has been pretty decent.  The whole family has had a good time so far, though it had a bit of a rough start for me.  We drove here from Phoenix, and I am usually fine with long-distance drives.  However, the last 4 solid hours were spent basically inside LA fighting traffic.  I was ready to blow my brains out when I got here.  Unfortunately, our car was met at the gate by a group of camp counselors who were channeling "Up with People" or maybe the Mousketeers, but they were way to jolly for my mood at the time.

By the way, how does anyone study at a University that sits on a beach?  Well, at least the high speed LAN in the rooms works really well.

I have written a number of times about the broader implications of a privacy right embodied in decisions like Roe v. Wade.  In particular, I have wondered how such a right can cover abortion decisions, but not a range of other individual decisions.  I make this argument not as someone who wants to use regulatory precedent to ban abortions, but just the opposite:  I would like to see the privacy right in Roe v. Wade broadened to invalidate more areas of government intervention in individual lives.  I have discussed the conundrum that liberals face in defending this privacy right while opposing privacy rights in other areas of individual decision making (here and here).

Well, I did something last night I should have done long ago, and I bet very few others have actually done:  I read in its entirety, including supporting and dissenting opinions.  Five years ago, I would have been cowed into silence on commenting in detail on such decisions by the legal intelligentsia, who will likely insist that as a private citizen I am not trained or experienced enough to understand what's really going on in these opinions.  To which I say today:  Take a hike.  The US Constitution is successful, and the European one is not, in no small part because the US Constitution fits on the back of a cereal box (rather than being 9000 pages long) and is accessible to every American. 

Anyway, reading Roe v. Wade, I was struck most by just how much careful tightrope walking the majority opinion goes through to avoid just the dilemma I mentioned above: How to grant an unlimited, unassailable right to an abortion (at least in the first trimester) with no possibility of state intervention without at the same time invalidating half the regulatory structure of the US Government, from the FDA to the DEA to the NHTSA.  In the rest of this post, I will discuss the basis the Justices claim for this distinction, which I found to be uncompelling.

The first, most interesting observation for me was that none of the judges, either in the decision or the dissent, were willing to grant a strong and/or broad privacy right.  The majority opinion uses the interesting term "zones of privacy", which immediately set off alarm bells for me since the term is so similar to the "free speech zones" term I find repugnant (the whole country should be a free speech zone, not little patches of ground with ropes around them).  Apparently, these "privacy zones" fairly narrowly include marriage, sex and procreation, children's education and pregnancy.  I can't think of any compelling reason that those decisions and interactions between two adults should be "private" while eating, smoking, taking drugs and medications, getting breast implants, negotiating a wage, wearing a seat belt, using a tanning booth, getting a tattoo, or using a motorcycle helmet are not "private". 

The key phrase the Justices use is "compelling state interest".  What I find fascinating in this decision, and really I guess in most recent Supreme Court Jurisprudence, is that that somehow the 9th amendment, which retained to the people all powers and rights not specifically enumerated for the government, has gained this modifier.  Effectively the 9th amendment has been rewritten "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights,
shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the
people, unless some random politician can demonstrate a compelling state interest and then the government can do whatever the hell it wants".   

Rehnquist actually notes something similar in his dissent:

If the Court means by the term "privacy" no more than that the claim of
a person to be free from unwanted state regulation of consensual
transactions may be a form of "liberty" protected by the Fourteenth
Amendment, there is no doubt that similar claims have been upheld in
our earlier decisions on the basis of that liberty. I agree with the
statement of MR. JUSTICE STEWART in his concurring opinion that the
"liberty," against deprivation of which without due process the
Fourteenth
[410
U.S. 113, 173]

Amendment protects, embraces more than the rights found in the
Bill of Rights. But that liberty is not guaranteed absolutely against
deprivation, only against deprivation without due process of law. The
test traditionally applied in the area of social and economic
legislation is whether or not a law such as that challenged has a
rational relation to a valid state objective.

In some strange way, the Fourteenth Amendment, which was originally meant to add increased protection to citizens, has been turned around to justify government interventionism, just as long as some sort of "due process" has been followed.  Rather than buttress the 9th amendment, this modern interpretation of the 14th seems to gut the 9th amendment.

Just what is "a compelling state interest"?  Could there possibly be a more amorphous term, abusable term?  More importantly, who defines
it?  Remember that whoever gets to define compelling state interest becomes our de
facto ruler.  I think there is a really good reason that the framers of the Constitution did now write that "the government has all powers that there is a compelling state interest to have".  This line would have made the document a license for totalitarianism, but for some reason, our courts have basically rewritten the Constitution to read just this way. The only thing stopping us from being a totalitarian state today are judges that are willing to read "compelling state interest" narrowly.  And these judges just slow the process of creeping statism.  It only takes one decision, like Kelo, to expand the definition of state interest, and all case law afterward seem to follow this expanded view of government.  This statism is like entropy or time, a process that only proceeds in one direction, towards expansion of government power, never to its narrowing.  The Left in particular has gotten good at using the Stare Decisis concept to try to disallow revisiting any decision that expanded the scope of government (Roe v. Wade interestingly again being the one exception, since it is a limitation rather than expansion of state power).

This reading of the 9th and 14th amendment, and this concept of "valid state interest" appear to stem out of the Lochner case, which will be my next reading project.  I will try to report back next week.  However, even without reading this case, I will say that I have no patience for legal scholars who say that some bad outcome came from this case, which was based on a precedent in this case, which came out of that case, etc.  Have you ever taken a document, and copied it, and then made a copy of the copy, and then a copy of that copy, etc. for 20 or so generations?  On the 20th or so generation copy you will find spots and lines and such that were not in the original, but just appeared and then strengthened over time through generations of copying. In some cases, the original writing may be illegible. Sometimes, you have to ignore all the copying and go back to the original.  This is my position as an ordinary citizen on Supreme Court cases - at some point I get exasperated by these government powers that appear and evolve over time through generations of court cases - I just want to go back to the original (ie the Constitution) and point out that those powers are not supposed to be there.

However, you I hope see the quandary in which all this leaves abortion supporters on the left.  Much of their philosophy and political agenda rests on this notion of "a compelling state interest" in nearly every facet of human endeavor.  The left pushes constantly for expansion of government regulation into every corner of our lives.  They are trying to walk a line, a line so narrow I don't think it even exists, between there being no state interest in 16 year old girls getting abortions without their parents' knowledge or consent and there being a strong state interest in breast implants, painkillers, seat belt use, bike helmets, tobacco use, fatty foods, etc.  They somehow have to make the case that that a woman is fully able to make decisions about an abortion but is not able to make decisions, without significant government regulation and intervention, about her retirement savings, the wages she accepts for her work, her use of a tanning booth, and her choice of painkillers. I personally think she can handle all these, and more.

As a final note, it is more clear to me why abortion supporters fear a re-hearing of Roe v. Wade by the Court.  I must say that before reading the decision, I was taken in by their public comments that their fear was of conservatives reversing the decision on ideological grounds.  Having read the decision, though, their fear must be more fundamental:  Roe v. Wade in some sense stands athwart the inexorable march of government interventionism that the left generally applauds.  As such, a rehearing, however the case is decided, could only be a setback for the left:  Either Roe v. Wade is overturned, and the left is hoist on its own petard of creeping government intrusiveness, or Roe v. Wade is confirmed, and in fact is used as a precedent to strengthen the privacy right and thus provide a basis for overturning other statist regulatory infrastructure.  I am rooting for the latter.

My support for the Nature Conservancy and other land trusts who buy land for preservation rather than just expropriate the current holder through changed use regulations in this post garnered more comments than any of my other recent posts.  Presuming this is an indicator of interest in the topic, I point your attention to this article in the NY Times about environmentalists and grazing in southern Utah.  I no longer have much trust in the NY Times to portray such stories correctly, but from what they write, it looks like another great example of environmental activism using markets and consensual agreements rather than public coercion:

Mr. LeFevre wants the ranchers to win this range war against the lawyers and
politicians trying to restrict grazing on the plateau north of the Grand Canyon.
He fought unsuccessfully to stop the Clinton administration from declaring it
the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument because he knew the designation
would mean more regulations, more hikers and fewer cows....

But he is not bitter when he talks about the deal he made with an
environmentalist named Bill Hedden, the executive director of the Grand Canyon
Trust. Mr. Hedden's group doesn't use lobbyists or lawsuits (or guns) to drive
out ranchers. These environmentalists get land the old-fashioned way. They buy
it.

To reclaim the Escalante River canyon, Mr. Hedden bought the permits that
entitle Mr. LeFevre's cows to graze on the federal land near the river. He
figures it was a good deal for the environment because native shrubs and grasses
are reappearing, now that cows aren't eating and trampling the vegetation.

I love to see this.  The alternative Mr. LeFevre faced was steady expropriation of his grazing permits via creeping regulation and legal action:

Mr. LeFevre likes the deal because it enabled him to buy grazing permits for
higher ground that's easier for him and his cows to reach than the canyon. (He
was once almost killed there when his horse fell). He's also relieved to be on
land where hikers aren't pressuring the Bureau of Land Management to restrict
grazing, as they did for the canyon.

"I was afraid the B.L.M. would add so many restrictions that I wouldn't be
able to use the land anyway, and I'd be out the $100,000 I spent for the
permits," he said. "The B.L.M. just shuts you down. Bill said, 'Let's try to
resolve this peacefully and make you whole.' I respect that."

Ironically, this win-win environmentalism is being opposed by the Bush administration. 

The Interior Department has decided that environmentalists can no longer
simply buy grazing permits and retire them. Under its reading of the law - not
wholly shared by predecessors in the Clinton administration - land currently
being used by ranchers has already been determined to be "chiefly valuable for
grazing" and can be opened to herds at any time if the B.L.M.'s "land use
planning process" deems it necessary.

But why should a federal bureaucrat decide what's "chiefly valuable" about a
piece of land? Mr. Hedden and Mr. LeFevre have discovered a "land use planning
process" of their own: see who will pay the most for it. If an environmentalist
offers enough to induce a rancher to sell, that's the best indication the land
is more valuable for hiking than for grazing.

I have no idea why a grazing permit can't be retired - certainly that's legal and proper with emissions permits.  I never, ever thought I would find the NY Times writing something like "why should a federal bureaucrat decide what's "chiefly valuable" about a
piece of land", but I love it. And raspberries to the Bush Administration, who yet again are demonstrating that their lack of dedication to markets and private action.  Its time to admit that the republicans have returned to the bad old days of their 1970's support for big government crony capitalism.

The new policy may make short-term political sense for the Bush
administration by pleasing its Republican allies in Utah and lobbyists for the
ranching industry. But it's not good for individual ranchers, and it ensures
more bitter range wars in the future. If environmentalists can't spend their
money on land, they'll just spend it on lawyers.

Here is Mr. Hedden's site at the Grand Canyon Trust, which unfortunately seems to support lobbying for government coercion at least as much as market-based solutions.

Hat tip to Nature Noted, a great blog on land trusts.

Congress is probably going to extend Daylight Savings Time, despite complaints from airlines that their rescheduling and reprogramming costs will be exorbitant. Virginia Postrel points out that while a boon for the Northeast, southerners are not amused:

The source of this bright idea is, not surprisingly, the ever-meddlesome Ed Markey, who calls the bill
"a huge victory for sunshine lovers." As a certified sunshine lover, I'd say it
looks more like Massachusetts's revenge on Texas (and the rest of the Sunbelt)
for George Bush's victory over John Kerry. There are some places--and Dallas is
definitely one of them--that need just the opposite: shorter sunny evening
hours. Once the sun goes down and the temperature falls to the high 80s, you can
actually enjoy sitting outside.

The ostensible goal of the bill is energy saving, but the evidence
is weak.... 

Oddly missed even in fairly
thorough accounts is
any consideration of the extension's most obvious cost: More demand for
energy-eating air conditioning in the fast-growing, very hot Sunbelt. A lot more
people live down here than did back during the Nixon administration.

Southerners, come join Arizona on the "dark" side of this issue.  Arizona decided long ago that it had plenty of daylight, did not need to save it, and therefore was not going to play with the other kids.  We sometimes catch some grief for being out of step, but you don't see any of us scrambling around the house twice a year looking for our VCR manual to figure out how to change the clock.

The other day, I posted on a NY Times editorial that attempted to make the point that a .

This aggressively ridiculous position is none-the-less repeated by statists every day in many contexts.  Today I will focus on a post by David Sirota on the Huffington Blog.  Its premise is that government ownership of commercial assets is more conducive to freedom that private ownership.  I could probably have found a more serious writer to Fisk, but I am bored this afternoon and needed some fun.  Besides, its fun to see someone actively channeling some of the minor characters in Atlas Shrugged.

First, to be fair, I have to start with a strong point of agreement with Mr. Sirota:  Both of us are frustrated with the corporate welfare, subsidies, eminent domain land grabs, new stadiums, and incumbent protection laws handed by all levels of government to various corporations.  Mr. Sirota cites the stadium example in particular, which has always been a pet peeve of mine as well:

Usually, government is in the business of handing over huge amounts of
our taxpayer money to corporations, so that the corporations can just
take all the profits, and charge whatever they want to the customers.
That's been the backbone of the recent spate of high-profile stadium
deals, whereby city and state governments just fork over cash to private pro sports teams,
while getting no share of the massive profits in return, and letting
those teams charge higher and higher ticket prices to the fans whose
tax dollars are supporting them.

I feel fairly well protected on the price angle by the fact that I can just choose to not go to the games, but he is right that the government is handing over stadium money with little to show for it in return.

But this is where he and I diverge.  My answer is to stop crony capitalism, and to stop using government money and regulatory authority to support favored businesses.  Mr. Sirota goes the other direction, which one might call "in for a penny, in for a pound", of having the government continue investing in businesses but to do so on the government's own account.

ordinary Americans are realizing that there's an alternative path,
whereby community ownership of certain economic institutions and
businesses are a pretty good deal. Instead of allowing Corporate
America to reap the windfalls of everything, more and more communities
are trying to get a piece of the action "“ all while making sure the
public is adequately served, and not abused.

The highest profile example of this is in municipal broadband, where city governments are developing taxpayer-owned high speed Internet networks.
Instead of allowing Verizon or other corporations to control Internet
access and rake in all the profits from it, these communities are
making Internet access a public utility and sharing in the profits.
These communities can make some money at it, while doing the public a
service by keeping rates low.

I will accept his chosen example of broadband networks. I will also, for today, give the author a break and not challenge the bizarre notion that replacing a private company like Verizon who has a 5-10% profit margin with an inefficient government bureaucracy can yield substantial cost savings for customers AND fat profits for the municipal government.  In fact, I will leave the obvious efficiency arguments behind entirely and only discuss the morality, the right and wrong involved in his proposition.

Ownership and Capital Investment
Corporations like Verizon are owned by communities of millions of ordinary people through a mechanism we call "stocks".  Even the few large shareholders of Verizon tend to be investment funds, which are really just vehicles for aggregating ownership of many many ordinary people via mutual funds and/or the pension obligations they back.  Owners of Verizon provide capital to the company through their stock investment in an uncoreced transaction and of their own free will.  Their ownership is evidenced by actual paper shares, and is portable, such that they retain ownership anywhere they live, even overseas.  Investors at any time, if they don't like the company's performance or prospects, are able to cash out at the market price, and companies routinely return a portion of their surplus to them in the form of dividends.  Investors elect a board of directors to steward their investment in the company, and can throw these directors out any year with a 51% vote.  The company they have invested in must provide them clear reports quarterly using GAAP accounting rules about how their investment is fairing.

Contrast this to a municipal-owned broadband network.  In some sense, all members of the municipality have an ownership interest in the network, but they receive no documented evidence or guarantee of this ownership.  Local citizens are required by law to contribute capital to the enterprise via their taxes.  Their investment is mandated by the state, is not optional, and non-investment (via non-payment of taxes) is met with a prison sentence.  Once their money is invested, they may not sell their interest or in any way recover their investment.  History has shown that surpluses in municipal owned business seldom exist, but when they do, they are never returned to the citizens, but are spent in other government functions at the whim of the local authorities.  If the citizen moves, he loses any benefit of his investment.  Municipal authorities seldom produce financial statements for these enterprises, and, when they do, they would never pass GAAP muster.  Since the author mentions Enron, I will say that Enron had cleaner financial statements than most government entities.

The author clearly prefers the latter.  Does someone who chooses the latter over the former really care about freedom and individual rights?

Competition and Evolution

A private company, particularly in an industry like broadband with rapid technology change, is constantly subject to getting beaten by a competitor with better technology or a lower cost position.  In the absence of government intervention, the private company has to constantly match competitive technology changes and cost improvements, or die.  Its interesting that the author would choose broadband, because the corpses of literally hundreds of failed broadband companies litter the American landscape.  Broadband has historically been a brutal business, with most companies failing to repay their investment in their infrastructure.  I will confess that many of the major communications players have been slow to move in this area, but in large part it has been government incumbent protection, not market incentives, that have slowed progress.  Wireless broadband providers and equipment producers have to move rapidly -- they have already migrated from proprietary designs to A to B to G and now to N in just five years or so.  A private company without government protection in this environment is faced with two choices:  constantly upgrade, or die.

Now, lets look at municipally-owned broadband company.  Like the private company, it will have to make a large start-up investment to get the infrastructure in place.  Also like the private company, repaying this investment (and thereby avoiding hitting their taxpayers with new charges each month for operations, ala Amtrak) will require putting a lot of volume on the network.  Finally, also like the private company, it will be facing new technologies and new potential competitors almost before the network is complete.  So what does it do?  It could begin to reinvest in the infrastructure, earning the ire of local citizens because it goes back for yet more taxes for the development.  It could cut prices and drive for market share, lengthening the time before it breaks even and eliminates the tax subsidy it will require. 

Or, it has a third option that the private company does not have:  It can use its government authority to block new entrants.  I will tell you right now - the government will use this third option every single time.  Take another large government network business: The Post Office.  The USPS tried like hell to get the government to block Fedex, and almost succeeded.  The government continues to block competition to the USPS for first class local mail.  Heck, the USPS has tried at various times to argue that it should have authority over email and the Internet.  The government blocks new cigarette manufacturers to protect the settlement money it gets from the old-line tobacco companies and it blocks usage of Love Field in Dallas to protect D/FW airport.  Bureaucracies never, ever let themeselves die, and there is no way a municipal broadband business will ever let itself be killed by a competitor - that competitor will be blocked, even if that likely means that local broadband consumers have to stick with higher costs and outdated technologies.

Gee, that sounds great, huh?

Pricing
My sense is that this is what gets the socialists and community ownership guys excited.  You can see from the quotes above, the author sees the world of private enterprise as this enormous price gouging domain, with no accountability on prices.  Though he does not say it explicitly, I am sure if asked he would say that private corporations have no accountability to the public (ie consumers)on pricing, whereas the local municipal government would.  This pricing issue is I think at the heart of his support for public over private ownership:

People know corporations right now have far too much power
and far too much leeway to rip off ordinary citizens - but there is a
feeling that that's "just a fact of life." The Community Ownership
movement shows it doesn't have to be a fact of life, and that there is
an alternative

The obvious response is that private companies have a tremendous accountability on price, from two directions.  First, consumers, if prices are too high, can choose not to buy.  Second, if prices remain "too high" for long, then competitors emerge to undercut them.  Like most socialists or "progressives", the author doesn't understand or trust these mechanisms - he prefers top down rather than bottom-up accountability.

In this sense, he prefers the comfort of the municipal business where elected officials that the consumer votes for set prices, and trusts these elections to provide more accountability than the market  (how ). Even forgetting that government inefficiency will make price savings impossible in such a thin margin business, how can anyone look at Congress or this administration and believe that electoral accountability is stronger than the market.  Do you really feel that you can do more about to affect government set rates like local sales tax rates than you can in response to say rising cell phone rates?  If I don't like my cell phone rate, I can switch plans, switch companies, or switch to other technologies (land lines, VOIP, etc).  If I don't like the sales tax rate, the best I can do is move to New Hampshire.

Conclusion

Wow, this piece really went on for a long time, and certainly far longer than Mr. Sirota's article deserved.  As a final comment on the author's grasp of reality, note this quote, where he refers to:

the out-of-touch confines of the Beltway where free market extremism reigns supreme

LOL.  I would love to find even a little bit of free market extremism inside the Beltway.  And if by free-market extremism he means crony capitalism of the sort I described at the top of the post, well, he should be more careful with his word choice. 

For too long, our side has rolled over and died when it comes to
questions about how to manage the free market so that it works for
ordinary people.

Here is a hint - if you want to participate in the profits of the free market just like the fat cats, try this.

Tim Harford at Marginal Revolution touches on two of my favorite topics in one short post.  I have written a number of times about how frequant flyer mile holders seem to come out whole from airline bankrupcies when every other creditor has to take a major hair cut.  Even pensions are cut before frequant flyer mile obligations. Tim shares some ideas and a link to an Economist story with more on this topic.

What really caught my attention was when he discussed whether difficulties in getting any airline help in actually cashin in the miles was a stealthy way of repudiating the miles.  In his analysis, he has this nice restatement of Coyote's Law:

Never attribute to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by
incompetence.

I had an interesting discussion with my father-in-law about the term "judicial activism" which has led me to eschew the term.  Here's the reason:  He made the observation, I think from a story on NPR, that though conservatives seem to complain the most about liberal activism from the bench, in fact majorities of conservative judges on the Supreme Court have struck down more laws than their liberal counterparts.  It was the striking down of laws they considered "activist".

After thinking about this for a moment, it made me realize that he, and I guess NPR, used the term judicial activism differently than I do.  As a fairly strong libertarian, when I have referred negatively to judicial activism, I generally am thinking about judicial decisions to create new powers for the government and/or, from the bench, to put new restrictions on individual behavior.  In that sense, I think of decisions like Raich to be activist, because they sustain expansions of federal and government power.  As I have listened to both liberals and conservatives now, I realize that my usage of judicial activism is, ahem, out of the mainstream, and therefore confusing.  My personal concern is how the courts have ignored the 9th amendment and thrown the commerce clause out the window. 
I have decided that, as most people use the term, I am neutral to positive on what the majority refer to as judicial activism.  I think a lot more laws should be thrown out as unconstitutional, and if
this is the accepted definition of activist, them I like activism.  For example, I wish they had been more active in striking down laws and government activities in Raich and Kelo. 

Until I come up with a better term, I now describe myself as being against judicial expansion of federal power.  Maybe I can coin the term "judicial expansionism"?

A woman in Nigeria wants to buy 10 of my wife's handbags.   Right now, we have paypal's foreign credit card option turned off, and of course the Nigeria angle sends off warning bells.  Are there any good ways to accept money from Nigeria with minimal risk of fraud?

Several times on this blog I have found myself defending "hate speech".  Not because I agreed with it, but because I am deeply concerned that the effort to label certain speech "hate speech" is part of a general campaign to limit first amendment rights.  If speech limiters are successful in establishing the principal that certain speech is so bad that it is not protected by the first amendment, then we are suddenly at the mercy of whoever is in charge of defining "bad" for our speech rights.  Universities, ironically at the forefront of the "free speech" movement of the 60's, have been at the forefront of "hostile environment" limitations on speech in this decade.

There are many such examples.  The group FIRE, which fights speech limitations on campus, has a blog and a university rating system that is a great resource.  One recent example from their files is of Mr. J. Daniel at William Patterson University in New Jersey.  A couple of facts first, and then a fantastic letter in his defense from Rutgers professor Norman Levitt.  The background:

Mr. Daniel was one addressee of a mass mailing from Prof. Scala publicizing a
film she was about to show, a documentary that presented a positive view of
lesbian relationships. Mr. Daniel, who espouses religious doctrines deploring
homosexuality, responded with a request not to be sent similar notices in the
future, along with a few brief sentences summarizing his general views. It is
notable that he did not threaten Prof. Scala directly or by implication, nor did
he deny her right to show the film. He did not publicize the exchange. He did
not use the incident to launch a campaign of ridicule or vilification against
homosexuals or anyone else. He merely counterposed his ideas to those she was
presumably promoting, in a purely private way and in response to an unsolicited
message directed to him.

What Prof. Scala actually did was engage her university president in a joint effort to censor and punish Mr. Daniel.  I have read Mr. Daniel's comments, which I don't happen to agree with.  However, the response he got to his very reasonable actions is very scary.  Prof. Levitt describes the rest:

Prof. Scala, however, seems to regard disagreement with her position as a
punishable offense. In this respect, she has embraced peculiar dogmas that have
become all too prevalent on campuses throughout the nation. These hold that
there are certain groups who, by reason of a presumed history of oppression, are
to be safeguarded from opinions that they find distressing or uncomfortable. The
rights of others to hold, or at least to express, such dissonant views are
supposedly nullified by the new-minted "right" of the protected groups to be
shielded from discomfort and distress. Both the ethic of free speech and the
constitutional guarantees that bolster it are supposedly trumped by the duty to
shield the tender sensibilities of the officially recognized victim class. If,
by chance, someone utters a sentence or two, even in the context of private
discussion, that affronts these sensibilities, terms like "harassment" and
"hostile environment" are immediately trotted out to justify retribution against
the offending speaker. In short, the assumption is that colleges and
universities have both the right and the positive duty to require students,
faculty, and employees to uphold official doctrine on these matters, if only by
silencing themselves if they happen to disagree.

Wow, I wish I could write like that.  There is much more, all on point and very well written here.

The NJ Attorney General has chimed in and said... wait for it ... that Ms. Scala is entirely in the right and that Mr. Daniel is probably guilty of harassment and discrimination under NJ law as well for expressing his opinions.

By the way, if you think that Professor Levitt was exaggerating for saying that speech is condemned merely if it hurts the feelings of someone in a protected group, here is a very typical quote from a college speech code (I just grabbed the first one I found on the FIRE site):

The Albertson College
Student Handbook's harassment policy states that "[a]ny comments or conduct
relating to a person's race, gender, religion, disability, age or ethnic
background that fail to respect the dignity and feelings of the individual are
unacceptable." The Handbook also provides that "[a]ll inappropriate behaviors
may not be specifically covered in the misconduct definitions, and students will
be held accountable for behaviors considered inconsistent with the standards and
expectations described in this handbook."

Just to prove this is not an aberration, here is another:

The Rhodes College Policy on Discrimination and Harassment states
that "[f]reedom of expression does not include the right to intentionally and
maliciously aggravate, intimidate, ridicule or humiliate another person." Now,
we at FIRE know that all too many university administrators believe this
statement to be true; this is apparent from the way speech codes are enforced on
campuses across the country. However, few colleges and universities are bold
enough to make an explicit statement about free expression that directly
contradicts U.S. Supreme Court precedent. The administrators of Rhodes College
need to read the Supreme Court's decision in , in which the Court upheld
Hustler's right to publish a parody suggesting that Jerry Falwell's first sexual
experience was a drunken tryst in an outhouse with his own mother. Parody and
satire"”which often intentionally and maliciously ridicule and humiliate their
targets"”enjoy the strongest constitutional protection.

Update:  By the way, here is the whole text of the email in question.  Don't agree with him, but I have a hard time seeing anyone threatened and certainly can't fathom kicking the guy out of school and threatening him with prosecution for it.  More evidence that the promotors of diversity don't actually want diversity.

A recent editorial in the NY Times by Stanford professor David Kennedy really has me flabbergasted. So much so that I have rewritten this post three times and still not been able to adequately communicate my horror of this editorial.   Mr. Kennedy argues that the all volunteer, non-drafted, non-coerced-service army is a huge threat to America.

But the modern military's disjunction from American society is even more
disturbing. Since the time of the ancient Greeks through the American
Revolutionary War and well into the 20th century, the obligation to bear arms
and the privileges of citizenship have been intimately linked. It was for the
sake of that link between service and a full place in society that the founders
were so invested in militias and so worried about standing armies, which Samuel
Adams warned were "always dangerous to the liberties of the people."

By the way, his words "disjunction from American society" are his coy way of saying a volunteer army is not somehow as representative of America as a draft army.  This
article, as far as I can tell, is totally and completely about the
benefits of
draft (without ever actually using the word).  He is arguing that
forced compulsory military service is somehow more democratic and more appropriate for a free society than voluntary
service.  Forgetting how stupid this is for a minute, why is the volunteer army so "disturbing" to him?   It is really hard to figure out.  He keeps saying things like "the danger is obvious" but I guess I am just stupid - I can't find a clear statement of the danger in his editorial.  The closest I get is this:

But thanks to something that policymakers and academic experts grandly call
the "revolution in military affairs," which has wedded the newest electronic and
information technologies to the destructive purposes of the second-oldest
profession, we now have an active-duty military establishment that is,
proportionate to population, about 4 percent of the size of the force that won
World War II. And today's military budget is about 4 percent of gross domestic
product, as opposed to nearly 40 percent during World War II.

The implications are deeply unsettling: history's most potent military force
can now be put into the field by a society that scarcely breaks a sweat when it
does so. We can now wage war while putting at risk very few of our sons and
daughters, none of whom is obliged to serve. Modern warfare lays no significant
burdens on the larger body of citizens in whose name war is being waged.

This is not a healthy situation. It is, among other things, a standing
invitation to the kind of military adventurism that the founders correctly
feared was the greatest danger of standing armies - a danger made manifest in
their day by the career of Napoleon Bonaparte, whom Jefferson described as
having "transferred the destinies of the republic from the civil to the military
arm."

So in other words, its bad that wars are much less costly in lives and property.  If wars are less costly, and the combatants volunteers rather than conscripts, then we as a nation are more susceptible to military adventurism.  His bio says he is a historian, but what possible historical evidence does he bring forward for this?  None.   

In fact, there is no evidence that the government is any less likely to send a non-volunteer army (e.g. Korea, Vietnam) into harms way than a volunteer army (e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq).  In fact, we may actually be starting to see, via reenlistment rates, that the volunteer army provides a useful check against unpopular wars.  The author wants to imply that we would fight fewer bad wars with a draft, non-volunteer army.  But does anyone think we could have fought the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War with a volunteer army?  Only the draft made continuation of that war possible.  So where is his argument now?

Beyond the fact that his logic does not hold together, how morally bankrupt is it to long for the day when wars were much more costly in terms of lives and property?  Oh for the good old days of the 1960's when we could watch those much higher draft army body counts on the nightly news.  My guess is that he is not actually arguing that we should go back to higher body counts, but that the bodies we do have should represent a broader cross section of America.  In other words, he wants more elite rich white bodies (but not elite rich white Stanford bodies, since he and the Stanford faculty actively oppose all sorts of military recruiting and ROTC programs on campus). 

I have zero tolerance for this kind of forced-to-be-free fascism.  I have no idea what the author's politics are, but his argument reeks of collectivism and totalitarianism.  Think I am exaggerating?  Here is how he concludes:

The life of a robust democratic society should be strenuous; it should make
demands on its citizens when they are asked to engage with issues of life and
death. The "revolution in military affairs" has made obsolete the kind of huge
army that fought World War II, but a universal duty to service - perhaps in the
form of a lottery, or of compulsory national service with military duty as one
option among several

Sorry, but in a free society, there is not universal duty to service.   There is not "link between service and a full place in society."  When someone starts arguing that you have a "duty to service" and that government should "make demands on its citizens" rather than the other way around, run the other way because they are selling totalitarianism.

Update:  This is a pretty compelling article about a volunteer army at work.  Would they really be better off with a draft?

The south gate of Muthanna army barracks in Baghdad is one of the most
frequently bombed sites in Iraq.

Suicide bombers have killed 198 people here since last year.
Almost all were potential recruits to the country's fledgling armed forces.
Another 465 have been wounded.

Body parts that had been hurled by an explosion over the 30ft
high concrete wall a week earlier were still being picked up when the second
suicide bomber struck last week.

But, in an extraordinary display of optimism, the youngsters
hopeful of being recruited into the forces still come to queue....

The young men and handful of women in the queues say they are as
keen for the private's salary of $400 a month as they are to serve their country
to rid it off insurgents.

There are others who have had friends and relatives among the
estimated 25,000 civilians killed over the past two years. Some also believe
that the only way to get an American withdrawal from Iraq is to build a secure
and substantial security force.

But all have an air of defiance, and in some of the fresh
recruits there is a hint of gratitude for just making it through the queue at
the murderous south gate, on Zawraa Road.

Postscript:  I'm not really into the patriotism finger-pointing exercises so many people are into nowadays, but if you want some of that, try conservative blogger Captains Quarters writing on this same editorial.

As a libertarian, I am generally quite content to have Congress go on a 364 day a year vacation.  Maybe they can get together once a year and declare a national asparagus day or a national DVD rental day or whatever.

However, I will say that the debate about rules for military prisoner interrogations and detentions at Gitmo have caused me to make an exception to my general Lassaiz Faire approach.  One of the reasons we struggle with these issues is that, because we are facing the relatively new situation of having our military battle with non-uniformed insurgents not associated with any particular government or military force, the rules to be applied are fuzzy or non-existent.  Without rules, the administration has been making up its own, which activists of various stripes have been challenging in court.

And what is Congress doing?  Most of Congress has spent its time shouting out support or criticism (as the case may be) of the administration, and arguing about which judges should be selected to make sure that the administrations rules are or are not struck down.   I could have sworn that Congress has the primary responsibility for creating rules for these situations, to be enforced and interpreted by the Administration and courts.  Why is it, when there are no clear rules, Congress is the only branch of the government doing nothing?

Isn't it about time that Congress stop shouting encouragement or criticism from the shore and actually wade in with some legislation on these issues?  While I certainly have never been one to accept the Gitmo torture hysteria, its certainly a reasonable role for Congress to set standards for treatment of the type of non-military prisoners we are collecting.  For example, while the rules of Habeus Corpus for such a detainee are not necessarily the same as for a prisoner in the US, there certainly need to be some rules beyond the Administration's current ridiculous position that amounts to "we can hold them at our pleasure for as long as we want".

Update:  OK, I am obviously not keeping up.  I just got emailed a couple of links to some action on this front.  Reason has this:

A handful of Republican senators would like to determine:

(i) What is the definition of an "enemy combatant" who may be
detained by the military outside the ordinary civil justice system?; (ii) What
procedural rules should be employed by military tribunals?; and (iii) Which
interrogation techniques should be authorized, and which
prohibited?

Since these are questions the Supreme Court declined
to answer in its rulings on prisoner detention, it's nice to see that other
branch of government assuming a slightly less supine position--almost as if the
Constitution established it as a counterweight against the executive and the
judiciary.

Apparently the Bush administration, which could not manage to find the veto pen when the huge expansion of the already bankrupt Medicare system was in front of them, is announcing itself ready to veto anything:

that would restrict the President's authority to
protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack and bring terrorists to
justice, the President's senior advisers would recommend that he veto the bill.

Marty Lederman has much more analysis here.  His observation:

Heaven forbid Congress should have the nerve to actually exercise its
authorities under Article I, section 8, clauses 10, 11 and 14 of the
Constitution"”which empower Congress to define and punish Offences against the
Law of Nations, to make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water, and to make
Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces. For to do
so will invariably hamper the Executive's ability to keep the Nation safe from
terror.

Isn't this just a tad too much arrogation of power, even for this President?

I thought this quote, via Reason, from anti-smoking advocate Michael Siegel is representative of how many pseudo-scientific advocacy groups work today:

In the 20 years that I was a member of the tobacco control movement,
I was led to believe that there were only two sides to any anti-smoking issue:
our side and the tobacco industry side. Therefore, anyone who disagreed with our
position had to be, in some way, affiliated with the tobacco industry. I was
also taught to respond to their arguments not on any scientific grounds or on
the merit of their arguments, but by simply discrediting the person by attacking
their affiliation with the tobacco companies.

As I have found out over the past two decades, there are a lot of
individuals who disagree with a number of positions that the anti-smoking
movement has taken (interestingly, now I find myself to be one of them). And not
all of these individuals are affiliated with, or working for the tobacco
industry. As individuals who are not part of a tobacco industry campaign, these
people are entitled to express their opinions and their arguments really deserve
to be addressed on their merits. At very least, anti-smoking organizations and
advocates should not attack these individuals. Attacking their arguments is
legitimate, but attacking the individuals, in these cases, is not.

Take this statement, substitute global warming for anti-smoking and oil industry for tobacco industry and the statement still works just as well.

Update:  For another example, see the debate over child seat efficacy at the Freakonomics Blog.  A couple of researchers studied data on injury rates of kids in car seats vs. kids in seat belts, and found little incremental benefits of seat belts.  Note their desire to find the truth under the numbers:

What is more puzzling to me is why my results and Heaton's both suggest very
little injury benefit of car seats, but the medical literature often finds 70%
(!!) reductions of injuries with car seats relative to seat belts. We find
reductions that are an order of magnitude smaller. They use very different
methods -- surveying people in the weeks after crashes for instance -- but still
it is really a puzzle. Which is why, when you read my paper, I am extremely
cautious in interpreting the injury findings.

I hope that the medical researchers, Heaton, and I can all work together to
try to make some sense of the conflicting results being generated by these
different methodologies to resolve this important question.

Seems like a reasonable scientific attitude.  Now (via Marginal Revolution) here is the response of a child seat "activist" to their findings:

Their [Levitt and Dubner] conclusions stand in stark contrast to the existing
body of scientific data that support current child restraint recommendations,
and are, in our opinion, irresponsible and dangerous....We hope that this
misleading article does not cost a child his life.

In other words:  Open scientific debat = killing children.  Levitt and Dubner must work for Haliburton.  Levitt has an update to the whole debate here.

I got a call today from Mono County, California.  They require us to charge our visitors a 12% lodging tax on campground stays in any of the 11 campgrounds we operate in our county, which we report on a single quarterly filing.  Today, the County has suddenly decided that they need a separate sales tax report filed each period for each campground, so instead of 1 we need to file 11.  If every taxing authority tried to pull a Mono County on us, we would
have to file at least 250 separate sales tax reports each month.

In case you miss the implication of this, consider if the state of California did this for sales tax.  It would mean, say, that Unocal would have to file a separate sales tax report for every single gas station in the state - ie thousands of them each month  Of course, even California does not have the guts to require something so absurd.  We, like Unocal, register all of our separate locations with California but report all their sales and sales taxes in one unified report. 

So why can't Mono County be satisfied with the same approach?  Well, apparently a couple of their auditors had to spend some extra time trying to figure out which campgrounds belonged with which permits in a recent audit.  In order to save their auditors a few minutes of time in the future, they want to require me and others to spend many extra hours with these additional filings.  This is typical of government bureaucracies, which in doing cost-benefit analysis put enormous value on their own time but value taxpayers time at $0 an hour.  If all the reports I file had to be justified while valuing taxpayer's time at even $50 an hour, I would have a lot less feeding of the government to do.  More on my efforts to feed Vol (gratuitous Star Trek reference) here.

This is my first and probably last baseball post - read this blog if you want more baseball.

I am fascinated with the psychology of the closer position.  Some background:  The best baseball pitchers start games, and on average get through about 6 innings of 9.  The baseball manager's job is to stitch together a number of less talented pitchers to cover the 7th, 8th and 9th innings.  One would expect that the manager would flexibly match pitcher skills against the lineup he is facing.  For example, if the most dangerous batters for the opposing team are scheduled up in the 8th inning, he might send in his best relief pitcher in that inning.  One would not expect to see any particular emphasis on one inning or another:  after all, a game lost in the 7th counts the same as a game lost in the 9th.

This, however, is not how most managers operate.  Most managers have one very highly paid and more talented relief pitcher they call the "closer" that they pitch solely in the 9th inning.  Why?  Why is the 9th more important and deserving of a valuable player than the 8th?

The answer is part baseball conventional wisdom, which is as strong as in any old-line industry.  However, the other part of the explanation must lie in metrics.  If a manager loses a game in the 7th, it is just a loss.  If a manager loses a game in the 9th, the game was "blown".  Newspapers and talk shows keep and publish stats on games blown in the 9th, but not games lost in the 7th and 8th.  Games lost in the 9th are in a sense portrayed as more of a management failure than games lost in the 7th, and this is made worse by the fact that a game lost in the 9th is somehow more psychologically devastating for fans and media.  Managers are not dumb - recognizing that they get dinged on their performance rating more for a game lost in the 9th than the 8th, they have invented the closer role.  General managers take a disproportionately large part of their salary budget for relief pitching and dedicate it to this closer role.

A guy named Theo Epstein a couple of years ago, as a general manager, challenged this conventional wisdom.  He observed that more games were lost in the 7th and the 8th than the 9th, so hypothesized that relief pitching emphasis and salary dollars should be spread more evenly across the three innings.  One of his consultants was the famous Bill James, who has challenged baseball conventional wisdom with facts for years.  Epstein was roundly criticized by media and local fans alike for his "Closer by Committee" approach.  Eventually he was forgiven, when in the following year he brought his town its first world championship in 86 years.

For more on this and similar baseball topics, the book Moneyball is fabulous, and tells this story of the clash of fact-based analysis and baseball conventional wisdom, in a way that might be familiar to change agents in any number of Fortune 500 companies.

Today, I am filling out my EEO-1 form, which I always find a mildly distasteful task.  For those who don't know, the EEO-1 is an annual report the government requires of all but very small corporations.  It requires me to list numbers on how many of my workers are black females or Native American males or Asian or whatever.  I have to ask all my managers to stare at the skin color of their employees and tell me what flavor everyone is so I can report it.  The government is careful to tell us that it is bad form to actually ask people what race or ethnicity they are, so it is up to us to apply whatever racial stereotypes we carry to the task of identification.  So much for a color-blind society.

If you are so lost that you find yourself passing strange four-legged structures covered in gold foil and surrounded by scientific experiments, try this new Google mapping tool.  Oh, and make sure you don't miss the Easter egg you get from zooming all the way in to the highest zoom setting.

Gerry Thomas, inventor of the TV dinner, died here in Phoenix at the age of 83.  Though decried by the intelligentsia of this country, the TV dinner opened the door for a huge influx of products aimed at letting people who don't want to or can't cook create a decent meal.  As a kid, it never ceased to be a treat to get one of these for our evening meal, and looking back, Mr. Thomas and his successors probably cooked for me more than my mom.  Mr. Thomas is a member of the Frozen Food Hall of Fame (I kid you not) in Orlando.  This strikes me as a story that James Lileks should be all over.

Update:  According to CNN, James Doohan, recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's, has died as well.  How many times have you asked this guy to get you out of a tough spot?  Beam me up, Scotty.

A few days ago, I spilled a lot of electrons discussing the sources of wealth and poverty. This week, Arnold Kling has a great article applying many of the same concepts to give advice to Live8 and others who want to eliminate poverty.  While I droned on for about 30 inches of computer monitor space, Robert Lucas's quote in Kling's article gets to the heart of the issue in just a few lines:

"of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds
of millions of people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial
revolution to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct
redistribution of resources from rich to poor. The potential for improving the
lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current
production is nothing compared to the apparently limitless potential of
increasing production."

He concludes with some advice for protestors:

1. The world is a complex place. The farther you are
removed from a situation, the less likely that your intervention there will do
good and the greater risk that it will cause harm. No matter how thoughtfully it
is administered, long-distance aid will tend to be
ineffective.

2. The easiest poverty to prevent is poverty that is
close by. By developing useful skills and remaining employed, you can help keep
yourself and your family out of poverty. That makes you less of a burden on the
world than if you fly half way around the world to stage
confrontations.

3. Learn to distinguish motives from consequences. A
well-meaning policy can backfire. The seemingly cold-hearted impersonal market
is enormously beneficial.

4. Poverty is not a simple problem. See What Causes
Prosperity?

5. Remember that unlike the Folk Song Army of Tom
Lehrer's song, you have no monopoly on good intentions. A morality play in which
those who care crusade against those who are square makes for great theater.
However, it is not a realistic basis for economic policy.

As a parting shot, I noted previously the odd contradiction that is inherent in many G8 and similar protestors who purport to want to eliminate poverty:

In a nutshell, they want to fix poverty in the third world by
disavowing everything -- private property rights, individual
enterprise, free commerce, entrepreneurship, individual freedoms, etc.
-- that made the G8 not impoverished.  Rich nations, you have to help
the poor nations, but whatever you do, don't allow they to emulate what
you did to get rich. 

This is so nutty its unbelievable.  If they were camping outside of
the G8's door and saying that we want you to drop trade barriers on our
goods and help us foster entrepreneurship and we want your help
promoting private investment in our economy and infrastructure, I could
understand perfectly.  This is like activists camping outside of Jack
Welch's door looking for him to help the poor by funding programs to
teach children to drop out of school and avoid getting a jobs.

In Raich, the Supreme Court determined that marijuana grown, harvested, and consumed at the same house in California constituted interstate commerce and therefore was subject to federal rather than state regulation (via the Consitution's commerce clause).

However, apparently cigarettes purchased over the Internet from an Indian Nation within the boundaries of NY state and consumed in Washington state are not interstate commerce and are therefore subject to Washington State sales tax:

On Thursday, a federal judge ordered tribal Internet
cigarette vendor Scott Maybee to turn over his list of Washington
customers who purchased cigarettes through his Web site,
SmartSmoker.com between November 7, 2004 and April 1, 2005, writes the Buffalo News.
The Washington Department of Revenue is sending letters to those
appearing on Maybee's list asking for full payment of uncollected taxes
from their purchases.

Actually, it is probably not sales tax involved but "use tax", the cutesy way most states get around limitations on taxing interstate commerce.  Basically, they invented a thing called use tax that applies only on goods that you use in state and on which no sale tax was paid to any state.  While the use tax legal evasion is common to most states,  I have written before about other such cute evasions Washington State uses to collect taxes where they are not supposed to.