From the Sept. 30, 1905 NYT:

The anti-automobile movement that developed a few days ago in the organization of the Anti-Mobile Association of North Branch seems likely to spread throughout New Jersey....The speaker's at last night's meeting declared that the laws concerning the use of the highways of the State must be remodeled, so as to throw as many restrictions around automobile travel as possible. It was decided to oppose every candidate for the State Senate or Assembly who owns or has ever been known to ride in an automobile (emphasis added).

MADRID -- An imam who wrote a book on how to beat your wife without leaving marks on her body has been ordered by a judge in Spain to study the country's constitution.
The judge told Mohamed Kamal Mustafa, imam of a mosque in the southern resort of Fuengirola, to spend six months studying three articles of the constitution and the universal declaration of human rights.
Mr. Mustafa was sentenced to 15 months in jail and fined about $2,600 last year after being found guilty of inciting violence against women.
A judge released him after 22 days in jail on the condition that he undertake a re-education course.
The Spanish government has set up a commission to find ways for the Muslim community to regulate itself. A central recommendation is that imams speak Spanish and have a basic knowledge of human rights and Spanish law.
In his book "Women in Islam," published four years ago, Mr. Mustafa wrote that verbal warnings followed by a period of sexual inactivity could be used to discipline a disobedient wife.
If that failed, he argued that, according to Islamic law, beatings could be judiciously administered.
"The blows should be concentrated on the hands and feet using a rod that is thin and light so that it does not leave scars or bruises on the body," he wrote.

Barbaric. Full story here; registration required.

Boy Faces Suspension For Bringing Butter Knife To School

HT: Best of the Web Today

Big news from St. Louis: Anheuser-Busch launches “a series of seasonal beers available on tap”. This fall’s offering is Jack’s Pumpkin Spice Ale, whose flavor the AB product manager describes as “a wicked blend of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, clove and real delicious pumpkins." Seriously.

The pumpkin beer will also be available in stores as part of the Michelob Special Sampler Collection, “a seasonal package of bottled specialty beers”.

No word yet on the flavoring of the winter brew that AB will make available in December. Cranberry? Sugar cookie? Peppermint candy cane?

A beer mat that knows when a glass is nearly empty and automatically asks for a refill has been created by thirsty researchers in Germany.

Andreas Butz at the University of Munich and Michael Schmitz from Saarland University came up with the idea while out drinking with their students.

The disc-shaped mat can be attached to a normal beer mat so that it still soaks up spilt liquid and displays an advertisement. But it also contains a pressure sensor and radio transmitter to alert bar staff of the need for a refill.

Full story here.

HT Wilson Mixon.

From today's AJC:

With fuel prices climbing again, Gov. Sonny Perdue extended the "state of emergency" Thursday for two weeks to protect drivers from price gouging at the pumps.

I received this interesting e-mail on Wednesday from a friend and I thought I'd pass it along (with permission).

Here is a report from Hurricane Rita ravaged Nacogdoches, TX.

With the pending hurricane, I had the wife and the kids move up to Mom’s home in northern, TX to ride out the storm. The university President cancelled classes Thursday afternoon until they were to restart on the following Tuesday. However, the university would “remain open” and he required all administration and staff to remain on the job throughout the whole period. As an administrator I had to remain here to step in for my boss who was stuck out of town due to the closure of the Houston airport. The hurricane hit on Saturday afternoon, with the eye of the storm passing just 30 miles to the east. Electricity went out for most people in the area early Saturday morning. Water and phone service remained available for most homes within the city throughout the storm, but those living out in the country had neither. Power has since been restored to most businesses in town and to the university as well, but half the residential neighborhoods in town and most of the country residents remain without any power (including the Stroup household).

Standing in for the boss can be fairly interesting. I was called by the University President at 5:00am Friday morning. He asked me to attend an “emergency” meeting at 6:00am at the university. There the college Deans and various university administrators discussed how to coordinate notifying the remainder of the university administration and staff that they could turn around and go home once they came to work at 8:00am that morning. For some reason, the fact that this decision process could have taken place before the close of business Thursday afternoon, after classes had already been cancelled and before all these people went home for the day, was not discussed. (You gotta love bureaucracy.)

But one learns some interesting things going through a scenario like this. Every time you enter a dark room you turn on the light switch despite knowing full well that there is no power—sometimes you do this twice within a matter of fifteen seconds. Sometimes you even find yourself looking for those little nightlights to plug in the hallway to help you see, only to realize that, just like the light bulbs in the ceiling, they require power, too. Then you’re glad that nobody is with you to make fun of your stupidity. Also, the entire (slightly smelly) contents of a medium sized chest freezer can be placed comfortably into three large plastic garbage bags, making convenient hauling it all to the city dump. I was one of many people there, all holding black trash bags and tossing them into a pile and smelling the pungent aroma.

Cleaning up the storm debris from the yard allows you to notice that half the town seems to be burning scarce gasoline by driving around neighborhoods in some gruesome spectator sport. They slow down and gawk, mouth fully agape and finger pointing, at the neighbor’s 50 foot tall oak tree that unfortunately has bisected her roof. You feel like putting up traffic cones and charging a dollar per vehicle for admission. Also, you learn to entertain yourself when it is only 7:00pm at night and there is no television, no light to read books by, and only two radio stations remain on the air to listen to on your transistor radio. Unfortunately, one is a rap station and the other one country. You can’t make out what the rappers are saying so you pick country one, only to wonder just how many songs can be written about having yet another beer to try to forget about the fact that you’re such an dolt that your lady’s been cheatin’ on ya with your “best friend”? It makes you wonder just how much of a dolt you’ve been yourself lately. Then the guilty feelings make you turn off the radio, preferring the silence to the introspection.

But it all could have been worse. Our house was spared any damage, as our only fallen tree out in the back yard had landed perfectly in a spot that did not hurt any structure or any other trees. Merely a foot to the right or left would have damaged something. A couple of good friends came over with a chain saw and we three made quick work of cleaning it up. Of course sharing an obligatory cold beer followed all the hard work (yes, I had a small stash sitting on ice in the cooler—for morale purposes, of course). And unlike many of my friends, at least I had no “refugees” to house that had come up from the Houston area. I really feel for those poor folks from the Houston-Galveston-Beaumont areas on the Texas coast. They all spent 24 to 36 hours driving northward only a hundred miles on super-congested highways in the 95 degree weather with the A/C turned off to save precious gasoline (which was nowhere to be found along the way). They were trying to escape the potential of having to endure high winds, extended power outages and heavy rains on the coast, only to arrive in Nacogdoches exhausted and cranky, to sleep on the hard floors with dozens of their extended (and, let’s face it, usually “extended” for good reason) relatives, where they experienced heavy winds, extended power outages and heavy rains. Of course, when they had enough of all that, they then tried to return home on the same super-congested highways with the same shortage of gasoline in the same heat without A/C, trying to return to neighborhoods that the police may or may not yet deem to be open for the public.

Yup, every time I get hot, tired and frustrated I think about their ordeal and I tell myself, “It could always be worse.”

I still complain, though… and I think you would, too.

Mike

Aha! So it really wasn't global warming, 30-year weather cycles, and the like. The reason hurricanes hit where they did is because of "gambling, sin and wickedness." Of course, everyone knows that Lake Charles, LA and Galveston, TX are the national homes of wickedness and gambling, respectively.

Erwin said the catastrophic storms are part of a pattern evident in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, claiming God has removed an umbrella of protection from America due to an increase in abortion, pornography and prostitution.

I wonder if the guy in the grocery cart stole the umbrella of protection.

If God wanted to punish gambling, sin, and wickedness, don't you think he would go after much easier targets? I'm sure you'd find more such behavior per square foot in the state capitals and Congress than in New Orleans or Vegas.

Hat tip to Boortz again. Oh, and BTW, I'm Catholic so don't worry about the destination of my soul, dear readers. I really don't see how statements like the good Senator's are effective in bringing people to Christ. They do seem pretty successful at making us Christians look like boobs.

P.S. Rumor has it that the AWOL New Orleans cops never existed except on the forms directing federal law enforcement money to the city. So who was cashing their paychecks?...

I don't know much about protecting property in a hurricane because I choose to visit rather than live where hurricanes strike. I don't know what to say about this one, but maybe the Aggies know something other people don't?

Aggies and Tea-sippers can chime in.

From the Sept. 28, 1905 NYT article "Give us $25,000,000 says Board of Education" :

Commissioner Collier, who presented the budget, said that the estimate was the lowest the Finance Committee could frame. He said the increase was due largely to the increases in teachers' salaries, according to the Davis law, and the appointment of new teachers.

"If the appropriation is cut down so that substitutes will have to be employed in place of regular teachers," he said, "this board will not be responsible for any of the harm that must necessarily follow. To continue the work of the department properly we must have every dollar we ask for."

The rhetoric hasn't changed a single bit in 100 years. Perhaps this is because the rhetoric is almost always successful?

Another statement in the article describes a situation you wouldn't see in any legislature in this great land:

When the budget was presented to the board many of the Commissioners whistled softly. It called for an appropriation of $25,178,540.96 just $3,181,523.19 more than was awarded last year - and the board had to fight hard for that appropriation.

I like the idea of politicians, or anybody else spending public money, emanating the "soft whistle." I let out one after Bush's call for $200,000,000,000 to rebuild New Orleans.

How about the appropriation being listed to the penny? Today, appropriation numbers are so huge that we round up (or down) to the nearest BILLION. If Bush had asked for $200,000,000,112.53 would that have rattled more cages?

From the Sept. 28, 1905 NYT:

Alleging that her husband had compelled her to go around their home on roller skates and had done other strange things, Mrs. Emma Kopp appeared before Justice Garretson in Special Term of the Supreme Court, Brooklyn, and opposed his release from the Long Island Home for the Insane in Amityville...Mrs. Kopp in her affidavit said that he had for some time taken fifteen or twenty drinks of whisky each day, and on some days had consumed two quarts.

He acquired a passion for kite flying and purchased fifteen kites. Later he bought a number of pairs of roller skates and compelled her to use them. He brought ten dogs of various breeds and sizes into the house on one day, and on antoehr he carried fifteen framed pictures to his home. On another occasion Mr. Kopp bought 200 padlocks and tried to fashem them all to his trunk.

Justice Garretson remanded the man to the sanitarium.

Poor guy. Today he would have had an all-expenses paid trip to Chicago or some other city to be the object of ridicule or fascination (depending on one's take) on one of the daily shows. Of course, fifteen to twenty snorts of whisky a day will make just about anybody "crazy."

The principle of comparative advantage teaches us that two traders don’t compete for shares of a fixed pie -- their trade enlarges the pie. Likewise, trading nations don't compete for shares of a fixed world pie -- they trade, and thereby enlarge the world pie. Even the country with the least absolute advantage (poorest at turning inputs into outputs) has a comparative advantage (low opportunity cost in foregone outputs) in producing something, and thus can successfully export that something (can “compete” in some world markets). Even the richest country can't successfully export everything (cannot "compete" in some world markets).

Nonetheless the World Economic Forum (the folks who annually hold a confab for movers and shakers in Davos, Switzerland) has released a ranking of the overall “competitiveness” of 117 of the world’s economies. According to the International Herald Tribune,

The study assigned scores to nations by looking at factors like government economic policy, the strength of local institutions and the degree to which technology has been used to bolster growth.

In other words, it ranks how well a country’s economic policies and institutions match the set of policies and institutions desired by the World Economic Forum. Which is all very interesting – but it isn’t really a measure of competitiveness. The notion of overall competitiveness is simply nonsense. Finland, which was ranked first, can't compete in producing bananas or wine.

I just finished watching Stephen Moore and Robert Reich on Kudlow & Company on CNBC, and after both agreeing that the highway and energy bills should be stripped of their pork, the two disagreed about cutting taxes on income, dividends and capital gains, and dying (the estate tax; I didn't know how to end that sentence).

Moore of course was for cutting all, but Reich countered that cutting taxes would be absolutely the wrong move right now. He mentioned the Conference Board's report recently that consumer sentiment dropped sharply in September and that the U of M Survey of Consumers also dropped in August. He then said what I figured he'd say (paraphrasing): "when consumers and the poor are upset the last thing we want to do is enact policies that only help the rich."

Reich, now an econ professor, obviously knows what I know and what I tell my students, that pessimistic expectations can reduce GDP. Of course, it doesn't help when an economics professor on national TV begs the question. Perhaps the poor in New Orleans would not approve of the tax cuts because YOU, Prof. Reich, told them on TV that cuts in dividend taxes, etc., will only help the rich and not them, without any evidence whatsoever to back up your claim. Certainly the poor (or anyone) will interpret news in innumerable ways, but it seems disingenuous to conclude, as a supposed outside observer, that they will loudly disapprove of a policy whose empirical effects you actively distort to a general audience.

Since he's relatively out of politics now, you'd think Reich would have ground all of his axes and could return to the world of impartiality. For you non-economist readers of DoL, please note that only a few of us in the profession are this dismal.

Maybe it's Reich's beard, but I'm reminded of my earlier post about Marx. Why are some people so actively involved in the business of wealth-destruction and regression (philosophically speaking, not OLS)?

In re: homestate governor's "two day holiday." Notwithstanding the ambiguity about net gasoline consumption (see below), I wonder if he hasn't stumbled on something. I bet there are more than two days of school that are essentially "extra." Why can't we cut those out as well? In the limit, all of public education? The monetary and non-monetary savings could sum to something considerable.

Regarding the policy qua political decision, the "gasoline saving initiative" seems to be a classic example of political calculation trumping good economic policy. The policy is chosen if the political gain to "saving" gasoline is greater than the expected political costs of Georgian school-kids not performing well on their skills tests (because of fewer days in school). As the expected political costs are a combination of actual political costs if school performance drops and the probability of school performance dropping, if Perdue and his handlers (correctly?) figure the odds that student performance will drop are small then "saving gasoline" is the political policy chosen, regardless of economic efficacy.

In the Sept. 27, 1905 NYT is a short article concerning Yale football:

The first scoring of the season came to-day at Yale Field, when the Varsity, after a series of short and hard rushes, carried the ball back over the substitutes' goal line for a touch-down. Roome, Varsity half back, had the honor of being the first to score at Yale this year.

What a far cry from today's ESPN highlights.

A month back I blogged on Iowa's pink locker room for visiting football teams. A rankled Iowa law professor is now protesting that the pink locker room violates NCAA rules.

Sign a left wing petition for every cause!

[HT: Brad]

Declaring "snow days," Georgia Gov Sonny Perdue closed schools today and tomorrow to save gas and reduce supply problems in the wake of Rita. The gov claims the school closings will save 500,000 gallons of gas by idling school buses.

It's entirely possible, of course, that Gov. Perdue's policy will result in greater gas usage than having schools operate as usual. Georgia had 1.38 million government school kids in 2002-2003 (data obtained from the Georgia Statistics System); if each kid's parents use about four-tenths of a gallon (=500,000 gallons divided by 1.38 million kids) more gas than they would if the kids were in school then total gas usage would increase. Would this happen? Hard to say, but it's certainly possible if having the little tykes out of school results in extra driving.

Now the kicker: What's even worse than having policymakers guided by shaky economic thinking? Hypocrisy. Earlier this evening I was watching a few innings of the Braves game--guess which gas conserving politician was seated in the stands? Yup, our beloved governor who wasn't so concerned about gas availability that he couldn't drive across town to catch a ballgame.

There is a documentary coming out this fall, an extension of the short film, "Brainwashing 101."

It is described here.

The main film should be out in the next few months. And in THAT FILM, you will see (ahem), well....me. Kgrease, speaking truth to flowers. I'm giving it two thumbs up, way up.

Had loads of trouble getting on, for some reason. Finally, after months of trying gave up. Haven't posted here since May. Pretty lame, but...

But now: new computer, no problems and no worries.

So--a link to a piece I enjoyed writing, on EconLib

The part that matters:

Do people do things for us because those people are good, because they love us? Sometimes they do. Your family loves you, and your friends would sacrifice things for you. But for most of us, family and friends is a pretty small group. We can't rely on just those few people for all the things we need in the world. Something other than love, and altruism, has to organize all the thousands of activities and choices we all depend on every day.

ATSRTWT...

An excellent article by Robert Dunn at George Washington University pointing to hypocricy on campus (shock and awe!), to wit the lack of income redistribution schemes in academia - both intra and intercampus.

Why isn't there more of this in the MSM? Calling people out would seem to be such good sport. I suppose the "smart people" wouldn't want to hang out with the media types if they were reminded of how the "smart people arguments" only apply for certain people.

Andrew McGuinness of the blog AnomalyUK has pointed me to a study by Alesina, Glaeser and Sacerdote that may have been the basis for Paul Krugman's claim that racial diversity (plus racial animosity) explains America's smaller welfare state in comparison to Europe. I haven't read the study. But given that the Scandanavian countries have the least racial diversity and the most generous welfare states, and the US the reverse, a correlation across OECD countries does seem plausible.

Andrew rightly notes that "all this is quite orthogonal to the argument over the effectiveness of state welfare systems in reducing poverty."

If there is a correlation across OECD countries, it raises the question of reverse causation. A country with an expensive welfare state can't afford to just let the whole world in. I experienced this effect firsthand some years ago when I was offered a job in Australia, but the immigration authorities barred entry of my kids (who need special education). A country with an expensive welfare state will impose immigration policies that tend to maintain its ethnic homogeneity. Which are the racist countries now? If we consider the racially disparate impact of immigration barriers against the world's poor, the causal story becomes quite different from Krugman's: America can afford to be less racialst in its immigration policies (e.g. against Latinos) because it has a less expensive welfare state.

Testing the correlation across US states would remove the immigration-restriction factor, because mobility across states is unrestricted. But that also means that we need a time-series test, because if the (disproportionately black and Latino) poor have migrated to states with larger welfare benefits, a cross-section will spuriously suggest (contra Krugman) that a whiter state population causes lower welfare benefits.

ADDENDUM: Having now perused the Alesina-Glaeser-Sacerdote paper, it's obvious that Krugman was drawing heavily on that paper -- so heavily that it's shameful that he didn't mention it in his column.

2nd ADDENDUM: Frank Stephenson has pointed me to a paper by Erzo Luttmer [Journal of Political Economy, 2001, vol. 109, no. 3], which seems to reinforce AGS. Its abstract states that "levels of welfare benefits are relatively low in racially heterogeneous states."

Neal Boortz's recent appearance on "Hannity and Colmes" has resulted in a big stink over whether Boortz referred to people who favor the estate/death tax are Marxists. (See Cathy Young and Neal Boortz for more details.)

Pulling The Marx-Engels Reader off the bookshelf, I turn to the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" (p. 490 of the book) and find a 10-point program. The third item on that list is "Abolition of all right of inheritance." Strictly speaking, the death tax doesn't abolish "all right of inheritance." It is also possible (though I think unlikely) that someone might favor abolishing inheritance but oppose the other nine items in Marx's program. Nonetheless, it looks like ole Neal might be onto something. The strong reaction from the Media Matters crowd suggests that Neal just might have hit a nerve.

ADDENDUM: Speaking of Marx, I loved co-blogger Tim's line:

"We are ready to fire the heads of FEMA, Homeland Security, even Bush himself, over a thousand dead from Katrina, yet people love the figurehead of a philosophical movement that has killed tens of millions. If only we could tie Marx to Halliburton, maybe people would stop idolizing him."

Don Boudreaux writes about economic freedom in his Pittsburgh Tribune-Review column.

Not sure if this expands on Craig's "Property rights? What property rights?" line of thinking. The BBC had a vote for greatest philosopher of all time. The winner likely will generate less controversy than the votes on the next season of American Idol, but is anyone surprised that BBC voters chose Marx (Karl, not Richard)? GWB's favorite philosopher didn't even make the top ten, but you could argue that one of his more famous students did; St. Thomas Aquinas came in 7th. Both holy candidates were beaten by Friedrich "God is Dead" Nietzsche who just missed the bronze.

We make fun of the flat-earth society, but is being a Marxist much different? The typical rejoinder is "true Marxism has never been tried anywhere. It always gets corrupted by the people trying to implement it." I've been trying to get people to subscribe to my philosophy of anti-gravitism or levitism on the same grounds. Sure, things fall to the earth but my belief in a world without gravity just hasn't been attempted in the proper circumstances yet. I think I need someone with a rugged, bearded face as my primary proponent. Maybe this comes close.

What I've never understood is that, since Marx believed that communism was the inevitable result of capitalism's also inevitable implosion, should not all Marxists be the biggest champions of capitalism? Championing capitalism's progress will hasten its demise, if Marx is right. Of course, it leads a Marxist into the predicament of criticizing a system that, historically speaking, has done the most, relative to all other economic systems, to better the lives of those Marxists are supposedly trying to help.

We are ready to fire the heads of FEMA, Homeland Security, even Bush himself, over a thousand dead from Katrina, yet people love the figurehead of a philosophical movement that has killed tens of millions. If only we could tie Marx to Halliburton, maybe people would stop idolizing him.

Hat tip to Acton's Samuel Gregg.

City planners beware: the backlash against the Kelo decision continues.

Back before the Kelo decision, Alderman Thomas E. Bauer was pushing a plan for the city to use eminent domain to acquire several commercial properties (from owners who didn’t want to sell) which would then be turned over to a private developer to build a QuikTrip gas station and minimart at the corner of Manchester and McCausland in the Dogtown neighborhood of St. Louis. Dogtown residents didn’t like the use of eminent domain, despite Bauer’s promise that sales taxes from the mart would pay for road-widening. They were concerned that their homes could be next. They instituted a recall against Bauer.

It takes a lot of chutzpah for an alderman to think it’s up to him to decide that a certain corner should be awarded to a certain business firm, existing property owners be damned. And Bauer did not lack for chutzpah. He filed a $2 million defamation suit against five of his critics. After Kelo he accused his political opponents of exploiting the "hysteria over eminent domain", and called them "dissident crazies." (More on the dispute here.)

On Tuesday, in a special election, 60% voted to oust Bauer.

A special election will be held later in the year to fill Bauer’s seat. I happily expect the candidates to outdo one another in their opposition to using eminent domain for private redevelopment.

The local rag has an article describing action by the U.S. Senate passing a one-year moratorium on horse slaughter in the United States. There are only three horse slaughterhouses in the country, two of which are located here in the DFW area, so the good folks in San Francisco aren't too worried. However, according to horse owners, it takes approximately $500 to "properly" dispose of a horse. Ranchers have been able to sell their horses to a slaugherhouse for approximately $500, which suggests mutually beneficial trade - but Trigger is involved so it must be immoral, or at least legislated out of existence.

Animal activists have evidently lobbied for years to get horse slaughter rendered illegal, and they have achieved a minor victory. I wonder what the response by farmers will be - perhaps a more cruel end to the aged horse? I can imagine ranchers taking aged horses to national parks, etc. and setting them "free" and letting the rest of us pick up the bill for caring, feeding, disposing of the animals when they perish. Perhaps ranchers should show up with their aging horses on the doorstep of the Society for Animal Protective Legislation and the Doris Day Animal League (the groups lobbying for the moratorium) - ranchers could just tie the horses to the hitching post out front and walk away. These activist groups have installed said hitcing posts haven't they? If not, just leave a bunch of horses over night in the parking lot.

As one of our Texas senators remarked, "[i]s government going to declare that personal property is valueless without just compensation? Apparently so."

From the WaPo:

TAKAMATSU, Japan -- A rose by any other name is still a rose, but in the hands of Shogo Kariyazaki -- the celebrity florist who has bloomed into one of Japan's richest men -- a rose is as good as gold.

One part Liberace, one part Martha Stewart, Japan's gender-blending home guru was greeted this week by a standing-room-only crowd in this sleepy western town. With glossy lips, flowing bleached-blond hair and a black silk shirt embroidered with birds of paradise in flight, the slight 46-year-old exclaimed, "Beauty is the essential thing in life!" He then tossed yellow roses and pansies into a vase as his audience offered enthusiastic "oohs" and "aahs."

An estimated 20,000 locals -- one in every 15 residents of Takamatsu -- paid $5 each to view his "fantasy forest exhibition" of day-glo trees and heart-shaped anthuriums at the city's largest department store. Kariyazaki is so popular through his TV appearances, live shows and corporate sponsorships that he ranked as one of the country's biggest individual taxpayers last year, earning 10 times the average salary of Toyota's top executives, according to Japan's National Tax Agency.

Governors Seek Gas Price Gouging Probe

Note: The article focuses on eight Democrat governors, but several Republican govs (including Perdue of GA and Blunt of MO) have been huffing and puffing about so-called price gouging.

HT: Lynne Kiesling

A news item (ht Drudge):

Police found cases of food, clothing and tools intended for hurricane victims at the home of the chief administrative officer for a New Orleans suburb, authorities said Wednesday.

Officers searched Cedric Floyd's home because of complaints that city workers were helping themselves to donations for hurricane victims. Floyd, who runs the day-to-day operations in the suburb of Kenner, was in charge of distributing the goods.

From this story:

A week after selling the naming rights to its practice facility, the Columbus Blue Jackets are getting the naming rights to Columbus Children's Hospital's planned family center.

The team's charitable arm, the Blue Jackets Foundation, said Wednesday it will donate $1.5 million over 15 years to the hospital's proposed center. In return, the facility will be named the Columbus Blue Jackets Foundation Family Resource Center.

Perhaps they could have cut out the middle man?

This is a picture from our local fish wrap depicting northbound traffic on I-45 from Houston. The TxDOT has requested permission to introduce contraflow traffic, i.e., letting people drive North on Southbound lanes. But it seems that a "request" should be unneccesary.

Georgia learned the value of contraflow with Floyd a few years ago - my brother took two hours to go fifteen miles on I-16 to I-95. Once he got off on GA17, he made it to Athens in another two and a half hours (speeding, of course, because all the cops were at the interstate). Meanwhile, another mutual friend took twenty four hours to get to Atlanta - which on a good day can be done in about three hours (okay, probably a bit longer if you don't speed).

The contraflow concept is a good example of public benefits (or aggregated private benefits) of outbound traffic exceeding the private costs of the relatively few people heading inbound. When an evacuation route is in place and an evacuation order has been issued, why isn't contraflow immediately instituted?

Evidently, sheople are not willing to take matters into their own hands and impose contraflow - although I think some of that might have happened in the exodus from Savannah during Floyd. In general, our society operates relatively very well because people obey the "rules" even when the rules are not specifically enforced, such as stopping at a stop sign in the middle of the night when it is obvious there is no one around. However, when a potentially life threatening storm is right behind you, perhaps a bit of "controlled illegality" (I can't come up with a better term), rather than complete anarchy, can be welfare improving?

Moreover, another question that makes me scratch my head is why people wait on the government to make traffic flow easier? Why don't people get an Atlas and "find" the U.S. or state highways where there are fewer cars? After all, the roads are still free.

Note: Colleague Dennis Wilson postulates that evacuees only want to drive on big roads. There are other reasons people don't get off the main interstate and take the back roads, but they don't seem convincing to me.

At an IHS seminar last summer I gave a lecture on property rights. I talked about the usual stuff--property rights reduce the tragedy of the commons, property rights are a prequisite for investment and economic progress, and property rights are necessary to guarantee other rights such as freedom of religion and freedom of the press. During the Q&A following the lecture, an Argentinian student in the audience told us about a study of granting property rights in a Buenos Aires squatters' camp. She explained that the study confirmed my arguments about the beneficial effects of private property. I have now located (but not read) the paper; here's the abstract:

The empirical evaluation of the causal effects of land property rights typically suffers
from selectivity bias. The allocation of property rights across households in the
population is usually not random but based on wealth, family characteristics, political
clientelism, and other mechanisms built on differences between the groups that acquire
property rights and the groups that do not. We exploit a natural experiment in the
allocation of property rights to overcome this problem. More than twenty years ago, a
group of squatters occupied a piece of privately owned land in a suburban area of
Buenos Aires, Argentina. When the Congress passed an expropriation law transferring
the land from the former owners to the squatters, some of the former owners
surrendered the land (and received a compensation), while others decide to sue in the
slow Argentine courts. These different decisions by the former owners generated an
allocation of property rights that is exogenous to the characteristics of the squatters. Our
results show significant effects of urban land property rights on housing investment,
household size, and school performance. Contradicting De Soto’s hypotheses, we found
non-significant effects on labor income and access to credit markets.

Earlier this year, Georgia passed a law requiring voters show a government issued ID (instead of something such as a work badge or utility bill) at the polls. Now the ACLU and other have filed suit claiming that the new ID requirement is a new "poll tax" because one has to pay up to $35 for a government issued ID. Kudos to GA and shame on the ACLU--part of having the right to vote is having reasonable requirements that other voters don't vote more than once, don't vote out of district, etc.

For a real public interest, civil liberties legal organization check out the Institute for Justice.

Craig's last post brought to mind today's Mike Lester cartoon in the RNT:

Lump sum transfers seem to be difficult for politiicians to understand or buy into. This article by Steven Landsburg starts out on the right track.

$200,000,000,000/1,000,000 people in New Orleans = $200,000 per New Orleans evacuee. It gets worse (or better), if one assumed four people per household. Let's not forget the good folks of Mississippi and Alabama.

Rita is heading our way, unfortunately by the time it gets to the DFW area it will likely be a Cat 1 or Tropical storm. We can use the rain, but we won't flood like other areas. Alas, no pay day for us.

Things have been quiet on the Larry Summers front lately, but I've found a couple of items suggesting that just maybe Summers was onto something.

First the abstract of a recent NBER Working Paper from Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund:

Competitive high ranking positions are largely occupied by men, and women remain scarce in engineering and sciences. Explanations for these occupational differences focus on discrimination and preferences for work hours and field of study. We examine if absent these factors gender differences in occupations may still occur. Specifically we explore whether women and men, on a leveled playing field, differ in their selection into competitive environments. Men and women in a laboratory experiment perform a real task under a non-competitive piece rate and a competitive tournament scheme. Although there are no gender differences in performance under either compensation, there is a substantial gender difference when participants subsequently choose the scheme they want to apply to their next performance. Twice as many men as women choose the tournament over the piece rate. This gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance either before or after the entry decision. Furthermore, while men are more optimistic about their relative performance, differences in beliefs only explain a small share of the gap in tournament entry. In a final task we assess the impact of non-tournament-specific factors, such as risk and feedback aversion, on the gender difference in compensation choice. We conclude that even controlling for these general factors, there is a large residual gender gap in tournament entry.

Next the NYT's (aptly named) Louise Story reports:

At Yale and other top colleges, women are being groomed to take their place in an ever more diverse professional elite. It is almost taken for granted that, just as they make up half the students at these institutions, they will move into leadership roles on an equal basis with their male classmates.

There is just one problem with this scenario: many of these women say that is not what they want.

Many women at the nation's most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.

Just to be absolutely clear--men and women should be equally free to pursue their dreams. But if it turns out that a smaller share of women than men want to be scientists (or any other occupation) then people who suggest that any observed differences might reflect individual choices rather than discrimination should not be treated as though they have violated some taboo.

From Paul Krugman’s latest column:

And who can honestly deny that race is a major reason America treats its poor more harshly than any other advanced country? To put it crudely: a middle-class European, thinking about the poor, says to himself, "There but for the grace of God go I." A middle-class American is all too likely to think, perhaps without admitting it to himself, "Why should I be taxed to support those people?"

“America treats its poor more harshly” in Krugmanspeak means, of course, that the welfare state gives away slightly fewer goods and services than in Europe. Never mind that the US economy offers more upward mobility and freer immigration. Never mind the greater support for fraternal organizations and charities that respectively help the working and non-working poor, regardless of race.

A middle-class American is indeed likely to think “Why should I be taxed to support those people who don’t support themselves?,” even while he makes out a check to the Red Cross. He might also think “How wasteful is government bureaucracy?” and “How is it doing the poor a favor to create a culture of welfare-state dependency?”. But what does any of that have to do with race?

We have here another example of Krugman’s tendency, aptly noted by Arnold Kling, to skip making arguments about “the consequences of policies”, and instead attack “the alleged motives of individuals who advocate policies”. Krugman’s tactic, in Kling’s words, is to “deny the legitimacy of one's opponents to even state their case. [Such] arguments do not give rise to constructive discussion. They are almost impossible to test empirically.”

In this case, Krugman might have offered empirical evidence to back his racial hypothesis, but he didn’t even try. Is there any? For example, are welfare programs more generous in cities and states (say, West Virginia) where the poor population is whiter? I honestly doubt it, but I could be wrong.

Minneapolis is the next city to drink the coolaid (misspelled to avoid trademark infringement) and propose a new stadium. In this case, the 68,000 retractable roof stadium is thought to cost $675m!! Cost breakdown is proposed as follows:

The county and the team are proposing a financing package for the stadium that would have the Vikings pay $280 million of stadium costs. Anoka County would fund the same amount from a 0.75% countywide sales tax. State-issued general obligation bonds would cover roughly $115 million of the costs for on-site infrastructure and a portion of the retractable roof.

Private contribution of 41% is a bit more than average over the past decade. as is the $9,926 construction cost per seat. Our boondoggle here in Arlington is supposedly going to run $650m for a 75,000 seat stadium - fifty percent public/private and only $9,000 construction cost per seat.

The end of the story contains a little nugget worth thinking about:

According to the county, initial estimates suggest that the project will, over time, generate a revenue surplus for the state in excess of $245 million.

Sports economists have been howling in the wind for years, but here is yet more evidence (albeit indirect and unintentional) that stadiums are terrible investments for governments. Over the course of thirty years the entire project will yield the state (on its nominal investment) a 213% return? Sounds great, but according to my arithmetic this backs out to a 2.5% annual return on investment. Ouch.

Brendan Miniter wonders: "Republicans have abandoned small government. Why shouldn't voters abandon them?"

An excerpt:

The conservative Congress has brought back the welfare state.

This isn't all Katrina's fault. Republicans have been kidding themselves for years that they are still the stewards of fiscal conservatism and limited government. The Medicare prescription drug plan is just one example. Run down the list of the some 80 federal entitlements--including Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, Pell Grants and so much more--and it becomes clear that little has been done to take these massive programs off of spending autopilot. Welfare reform and Freedom to Farm in the 1990s were nice, but what has the GOP done lately? In many cases Republicans have ramped up spending and then bragged about it.

What we're seeing in the wake of Katrina is that despite all the winks and assurances to the contrary as they passed the energy and transportation bills, Republicans in Congress don't know how to control spending and are at a loss as to why they even should. That's one way to govern. But if Republicans no longer believe in smaller government, why not put the Democrats back in charge?

Meanwhile, the FEC has filed a lawsuit against the Club for Growth, one of the few true advocates of limited government and the most effective organization at persuading Republicans (and the occasional Democrat) to stick to their limited government principles. Of course there's more at stake than one's tax bill--like McCain-Feingold and other so-called campaign finance reform, the suit also endangers political free speech. Here's hoping the club prevails.

It looks like the Fulton County government schools will not be using eminent domain to seize land for a planned Jewish school. Story here.

The Iranian rial is one of the least valuable currency units in the world. At today’s exchange rate, it takes 9015 rials to buy one US dollar. (The only currencies worth even less are the Indonesian rupiah at 10,184 to the dollar, the Vietnamese dong at 15,875, the Romanian lei at 28,670, and the Turkish lira at 1.342 million.) Rial prices are accordingly high in nominal terms.

Traders in Iran’s unofficial markets, who evidently don’t like prices with so many zeroes, are reportedly using an unofficial unit of account called the “tooman”, equal to 10 rials. The tooman has become so popular that the Central Bank of Iran has found it necessary to announce that it is not planning to replace the rial with the tooman. Apart from easing calculations a bit, and requiring the reprinting of currency notes and coins, lopping off a zero from all currency and all pricetags would have no real effect. Nor would it seem to matter whether the new unit were called a “new rial” or a “tooman”. So this account of the debate over currency reform seems a bit surreal:

Experts are divided on the issue of changing national currency. Some believe that it is not necessary to change the national currency from the rial to the tooman and that it would be favorable to knock off a zero from the rial.

The latest issue of the Review of Austrian Economics is available. There are some very good articles in this issue, including Chris Coyne's, "The Institutional Prerequisites for Post-conflict Reconstruction.

The work that Pete Boettke and his students are doing on the role of institutions in promoting economic growth is extremely interesting and important work. One of the things that I particularly enjoy is that this line of inquiry is almost singlehandedly bringing applied political economy back into Austrian Economics. Ben Powell's paper on "State Development Planning: Did it Create an East Asian Miracle?" is a great example of this.

Russia's major oil producers agreed Monday to freeze their gasoline prices in the country until the end of the year, the Interfax news agency said, citing the Industry and Energy Ministry

A freeze on the price of vodka is sure to follow.
Story here

Conan O'Brien visits Old Bethpage to play 1864 vintage base ball.

Speaking for Josh and myself, this isn't funny!

[Warning: Ads on page not necessarily workplace safe.]

As of today, the San Diego Padres stand in first place in the NL West division with a mediocre record of 74-74 (after a couple of wins this past weekend). They are 5.5 games up on the second place Giants with 14 games to go, and look likely to win the division possibly even with a losing record.

Here's my vote for a new rule in the MLB that no team can make the playoffs without at least a .500 record.

Russ Sobel at WVU has had a big couple weeks in the media talking about his research on the economics of FEMA.

News item:

The groundbreaking ceremony Sunday afternoon was supposed to celebrate the start of construction of the private Jewish high school's 18-acre campus in Sandy Springs.

Instead, a mood of uncertainty and apprehension mixed with the hot late-summer air as parents and school officials grappled with the realization that all the plans they've made may be in jeopardy.

The Fulton County school system wants to buy the Weber School site and use the land to build a new elementary school. In a strongly worded letter sent earlier this month, the school district indicated that unless Weber sold the property by today, the school board would use eminent domain to obtain the land.

Sofia - A tussle between a hunter and his dog in north-east Bulgaria over prey ended with the dog shooting the man ...

The man lost his temper ... and began beating it with the rifle.

But the dog's paw caught the trigger and the hunter ended up with buckshot hitting him. The extent of his injuries was not reported ...

Full story here.

HT: Wilson