In a new editorial, Jacob Sullum at Reason writes of New York City's little-noticed marijuana crackdown.

While marijuana arrests have risen between two- and three-fold nationwide since 1990, the increase in New York has been much more dramatic. "From 1997 to 2006," sociologist Harry Levine and drug policy activist Deborah Small note in the NYCLU report, "the New York City Police Department arrested and jailed more than 353,000 people simply for possessing small amounts of marijuana. This was eleven times more marijuana arrests than in the previous decade."

Based on their analysis of arrest data and their interviews with police, arrestees, and public defenders, Levine and Small conclude that the pot busts are largely a byproduct of the NYPD's aggressive "stop and frisk" tactics. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that police may briefly detain people they suspect of involvement in criminal activity and, as a precautionary measure, pat them down for weapons. Taking advantage of this Fourth Amendment loophole, New York City police stopped and frisked people more than half a million times in 2006.

...

Levine and Small note that busting pot smokers is a relatively safe and easy way to pad arrest figures, which creates the illusion of productivity, and generate overtime pay, a practice known as "collars for dollars."

From the collars' perspective, getting arrested for a trivial, victimless offense, which saddles them with criminal records that can impair their ability to obtain an education and make a living, is humiliating and embittering. It is especially rankling because police seem to be targeting poor black and Hispanic men for treatment that would not be tolerated if it were aimed at affluent white New Yorkers.

Survey data indicate that among 18-to-25-year-olds, the age group where the pot busts are concentrated, whites are more likely than blacks or Hispanics to smoke marijuana. Yet Levine and Small found that in New York blacks and Hispanics are, respectively, five and three times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.

Calling his effort "Operation Chaos," Rush Limbaugh has been urging Republicans to cross over and vote for Hillary. There are competing claims about how successful his effort has been (here and here), so I decided to exploit variation in the Indiana and NC primary rules to see how much influence Limbaugh had on yesterday's results.

Here's the key idea--Indiana has an open primary but NC does not permit Republicans to vote in the Democrat primary (unaffiliated voters can). Moreover, NC had a contested primary for the GOP nomination for governor that would serve to keep NC Republicans in their own election.

So I estimated a regression model for the percent of the vote received by Hillary in NC and IN counties. RHS variables include the black percent of the population, the percent of the population between ages 16 & 24, the percent of the population over 65, the percent of the population that is male, and per capita income. The model also includes a dummy variable taking a value of 1 for IN counties--this variable should pick up any support for Hillary that is not explained by the other variables thereby making it a crude measure of the Rush effect.

So what do the results find? The Indiana dummy has a coefficient of 0.53 meaning that on average Hillary got a about one-half percentage point larger share in Indiana than would be explained by the control variables. The point estimate is not statistically significant (t = 0.43). The regressors perform as one would expect, except the percent male has no effect (either in magnitude or significance).

My student worker Katie compiled data for me and is compiling more as I type. Look for updates later.

BTW, Limbaugh has just come on. He is claiming credit for tilting IN to Hillary and playing audio to that effect from John Kerry. My results suggest otherwise.

As there are bad policies today concerning food, there were bad policies yesterday. From the May 6, 1908 NYT:

ST. PETERSBURG [Russia] - The Russian sugar industry centering at Kiev is passing through a serious crisis. it already has resulted in the suspension of payments by two of the great manufacturing and refining firms...The trouble in the sugar industry is due in large measure to restriction of exports; the production is far in excess of the Russian market.

Taxation can take a number of forms, but the most insidious are those that are non-monetary in nature. A good example comes from the May 6, 1908 NYT:

George H. Fearons, General Attorney for the Western Union Telegraph Company, addressed the House Committee on Inter-State and Foreign Commerce to-day in opposition to the bill introduced by Mr. Carey of Wisconsin to require telegraph companies to transmit with telegrams the time of filing messages and the time of putting them on the wire.

Mr. Fearons said that 60 per cent. of the telegraph business of the country was the transmission of information for Exchanges, Boards of Trade, and similar commercial bodies, 20 per cent. was newspaper matter, 15 per cent. railroad intelligence, and less than 3 per cent. "private and social telegrams."

He said that on the basis of 74,805,000 telegrams transmitted annually, the additional number of words imposed by the bill upon the Western union Company for transmission would be equal to 17,454,000 ten word-messages.

The extra messages would represent an in-kind tax because the marginal cost of an additional message was not zero - there were congestion problems, no doubt. Assuming the attorney was telling the truth, the 17+ million requred additional messages would represet a 23% increase in the number of messages sent. Western Union would likely have respond by sending fewer non-required messages.

I wonder what political interest group Rep. Carey was trying to appease: were there claims that Western Union sat on certain messages and gave preference to other messages, sort of a 1908-version of net neutrality? My hunch is that Rep. Carey was responding to a complaint from one or more "private and social" consumers.

If the Boards and Exchanges were anxious about timely delivery of information, given their market share of telegrams sent they would have been able to exert some pressure on Western Union to improve service. The same woudl have gone for the newspapers and the railroads.

I wonder if this bill, like many bills, was submitted to "protect the rights" of small-time consumers and in the process tax the heck out of the firm that provided a valuable service. This sounds a lot like many of the bad policies proffered today.

However, history shows that Western Union already faced competition: the postal service, the telephone, the wireless, and eventually the fax, and the Internet. It took a while but roughly 100 years later Western Union sent its last telegram.

From a Canadian colleague about an upcoming conference he's attending in the middle east that Al Jazeera is covering:

This is good from a Canadian point of view. Al Jazeera is far to the right of the CBC and much less sympathetic to terrorists.

From Lew Rockwell's Prisoner Nation:

There are 2.3 million people behind bars. China, with four times as many people, has 1.6 million in prison.

In terms of population, the United States has 751 people in prison for every 100,000, while the closest competitor in this regard is Russia with 627. I'm struck by this figure: 531 in Cuba. The median global rate is 125.

What's amazing is that most of this imprisoning trend is recent, dating really from the 1980s, and most of the change is due to drug laws. From 1925 to 1975, the rate of imprisonment was stable at 110, lower than the international average, which is what you might expect in a country that purports to value freedom. But then it suddenly shot up in the 1980s. There were 30,000 people in jail for drugs in 1980, while today there are half a million.

Have you seen ANY challenge to the notion that McCain is benefitting from the protracted Clinton-Obama primary? Some things to consider.

1. As a general rule, doesn't head-to-head competition make for better competitors? Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire a decade ago. Or even hopped-up Ben Johnson made Carl Lewis a better sprinter two decades ago. Athletes are one thing. Would the same hold for politicians?

2. The standard story for why the primary benefits McCain is somethign like this. The two Ds have to go hard left in the primary, and the harder left Obama and Clinton have to go to beat each other, the harder it'll be for them to come back to center in the general. A counter argument is that the primary and general election dimensions are sufficiently different (there are D issues and then there are R issues) that it doesn't much matter. An additional counter argument is that by beating each other up, Clinton and Obama work out all the kinks and hone their messages and leave very little for McCain to go negative with.

3. Generic ballot tests. When pollsters pit a generic Democrat with an unnamed Republica, the Democrat easily wins. Does the attention and exposure of the Democratic primary strengthen or weaken that?

4. The lack of a known opponent has to be hurting McCain's campaign finance. According to the FEC, he's raised just over $80 million so far this election cycle. He'll need to raise another $300 million in the next 9 months to match W's total for the 2004 cycle. So far Obama's raised $240 mil.

It just seems to me that to say this benefits McCain is to say that political competition is ruinous. Maybe so. But maybe not, too.

Any thoughts?

... from co-blogger Mike Munger:

"If John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were on a bridge and it collapsed, America would be saved."

Mike may be a bit optimistic here--he'd also need Edwards, Huckabee, and large chunk of Congress to be on the bridge.

ADDENDUM: Save the emails, it's only a methaphorical bridge. I don't advocate harming these folks and I'm sure Mike doesn't either.

Does this Guardian article offer a portent of things to come for the US?

Farewell the age of reason, welcome the idiocracy. Only George Orwell could have invented - and named - the [UK] government's Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) that came into operation yesterday. It is the latest in a long line of measures intended to ease the conscience of the rich while keeping the poor miserable, in this case spectacularly so.

I’m on the way back from the APEE meetings, where a lot of DOLers have been for the past few days. There were a ton of really good papers on the program, and the plenary talks were outstanding. My favorite was yesterday when David Henderson gave a talk, “Is the ‘Net, on net, good for freedom?” In short, David’s answer is ‘yes,’ although he acknowledges that governments use advanced technologies to track individuals and censors uses of these same technologies. I think it's very difficult to say whether the Internet itself is good for freedom, because it depends on how limited government is in the first place, and that varies across societies. Clearly in closed societies, socialist governments have a strong interest in limiting communication of any sort. Alvaro Vargas Llosa writes about the dramatic story of the failed attempt by Raul Castro's government to censor the Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez, who writes about daily life in under the degenerate regime. The film, Lives of Others, highlights various forms of information being banned under East Germany, from books and newspapers to even government statistics on suicide rates. Before Vietnam's doi moi reforms in the late 1980's people there had virtually no contact with the outside world but now there are something like 15 million Internet users. As societies become more open in general, their peoples become less tolerant of government controlling anything, including the Internet. Even private organizations, such as Google, are scrutinized for storing data on individuals [story on EU here]. I am largely ignorant of the details of this debate but I do think David is right. Still, I think it's important to say that the Internet's benefit to freedom isn't certain; it depends on people's vigilance against censorship and privacy invasion in general.

The April 3, 1908 NYT has a report that you would NEVER see today:

President Roosevelt has been the recipient of gifts of almost every conceivable description...Yesterday a monster sea turtle weighing 350 pounds, a product of Nicaraguan waters, was presented to the President...

The President spent nearly an hour contemplating his new pet and debating as to what disposition to make of it. Finally the splendid specimen of sea food was turned over to the White House chef. Mr. Roosevelt has asked several luncheon guests for the next several days.

Nice.

From the April 2, 1908 NYT:

BERLIN - An authentic report is in circulation here that a bill will soon be introduced in the Prussian Diet raising the civil list of the Emperor. This list now amounts to $3,900,000 a year, which is paid the Emperor as King of Prussia and not as German Emperor; the latter position carries no salary.

The explanation offered for raising the list is the increased cost of living, which bears particularly heavy on the royal house because of the large number of children and other persons dependent upon the purse of the monarch.

So many kids!! Good grief.

From the April 2, 1908 NYT:

MILWAUKEE, Wis. -- Fear of a Social Democrat victory at the election next Tuesday is said to be the reason that there was not a single bid received from any banking house for the $325,000 bond issue, which was to have been allotted today. The Social Democrats have been gaining in strength here for several years past, and polled 12,000 votes out of a total of about 60,000.

Matt Welch on McCain and individualism:

Like many country-first, party-second military officers who began second careers in Washington, Mr. McCain is often mischaracterized as a politician without any identifiable ideology. But all of his actions can be seen as an attempt to use the federal government to restore your faith in ... the federal government. Once we all put our shoulder on the same wheel, there’s nothing this country can’t do.

[...] I, for one, would welcome President McCain’s unilateral wars on pork-barrel spending and waterboarding — but it’s treacherous territory for those of us who consider “the pursuit of happiness” as something best defined by individuals, not crusading presidents-to-be.

Former senator (D-Alaska) a gadfly Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel announced yesterday that he is joining the Libertarian Party and will be seeking its 2008 nomination for president. Fox News reports:

In an e-mail to supporters, Gravel, 77, wrote, “I look forward to advancing my presidential candidacy within the Libertarian Party, which is considerably closer to my values, my foreign policy views and my domestic views.”

The same report also notes, however:

Last month, Gravel endorsed Green Party presidential nominee Jesse Johnson. [According to a spokesman,] Gravel didn’t see any reason “why not” to offer his backing since “voting party line is not smart” and he agrees with Johnson’s message as well as the Green Party’s approach of “direct democracy, mobilizing at a grassroots level, working with people one-on-one and enabling citizen democracy.”

The LP national convention will be held in May. 14 announced candidates are already in contention for the nomination. Apart from Gravel, the only candidate I've heard of is ... wait, I haven't heard of any of them.

In the U.S., third parties and anti-establishment folks groan about the two-party dominance that is American politics. Today's Iranian elections provide a little perspective. Reuters has the full story here. A few key excerpts.

By Zahra Hosseinian and Parisa Hafezi

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranians voted on Friday in a low-key election likely to keep parliament in the grip of conservatives after unelected state bodies barred many reformist foes of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from the race.

[...]

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has effectively endorsed Ahmadinejad and his government, cast his ballot early and urged others to do the same.

Khamenei usually stays above the political fray, but he was quoted as saying in newspapers on Thursday that Iranians should consider "voting for those who can pave the way for the current government which is active and willing to serve".

His support for Ahmadinejad was relayed by anonymous text messages to mobile phone users on Friday.

Shrugging off reformists' complaints that the system was stacked against them, Ahmadinejad said after voting: "Our revolution means the presence of people ... Parliament belongs to people and it should be a reflection of what they want."

[...]

The president can rely on loyalists like Hassan Siavashi, 45. "It is my religious duty to vote. I pray God will help Ahmadinejad's group to win," he said before voting in Tehran.

Bibi Zahra, an elderly woman in a black chador, said she had put her trust in her son's choice. "I don't know who I was voting for, he filled in the form for me," she added.

.

When this much makes it into the press, you know it's only the tip of the iceberg. Without meaningful political competition, democracy collapses toward autocracy.

... for getting to participate in the North Carolina gubernatorial debate in October (he's the Libertarian candidate). The debate will be held in Charlotte--maybe Craig can live blog it for us.

Looking for some supreme swag--then donate to Mike's campaign. Logo t-shirts, collector's quality coffee mugs, and more--all for a modest donation. It's the best $50 I've spent today ...

My trolling of Catholic blogs brought up two stories I'm guessing are of interest to DoL readers (who are probably Friedman fans, himself a staunch supporter of more choices in education). First, Jimmy Akin directs to this story about a California state appelate court case on the credentials of home-schooling parents:

"Parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children," wrote Justice H. Walter Croskey in a Feb. 28 opinion signed by the two other members of the district court.

A second post by Carl Olson points to an opinion piece in the Manila Standard Today:

The inevitable question is whether it is in the best interest of the child to be insulated from beliefs, ideas and values outside of what his parents allow. To say it more accurately, should the state stand by and allow children to be raised in accordance with their parents‘ biases and prejudices? Or does the state, in accordance with its own right to preserve itself, have the right to intervene, even to the point of infringing on parental authority, in order to provide the child with a more holistic view of the world and humanity?

Call me a conspiracy nut, but is it that hard to believe that, perhaps, parents who hold dissenting views on human-caused global warming, the benefits of redistribution programs, political correctness, or heck, even the logic of Social Security, might be deemed unfit to teach their children outside of state supervision? I take a medium-size tinfoil hat, please.

Interesting article, especially given the author's identity. Its title is "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal,'" but Gary Roseman says I must use the word Statist.

I wrote a play about politics, ... [a]nd as part of the "writing process," as I believe it's called, I started thinking about politics, ... which is to say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.

The play, ... a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind. ...

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart. This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part. ...

I'd observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

So, taking the tragic view, the question was not "Is everything perfect?" but "How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?" Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out? I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to.

Do I speak as a member of the "privileged class"? If you will—but classes in the United States are mobile, not static, which is the Marxist view. That is: Immigrants came and continue to come here penniless and can (and do) become rich; the nerd makes a trillion dollars; the single mother, penniless and ignorant of English, sends her two sons to college (my grandmother). ...

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

"Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

Malcolm Forbes is supposed to have said, "Nepotism's OK as long as it's kept in the family." In that vein, NPR's "Steve Inskeep talks to [Scott] Simon, host of [NPR's] Weekend Edition Saturday, about his book, about growing up in Chicago and about the simultaneously selfless — and self-absorbed — enterprise of politics."

On the last point, Simon approvingly quotes his principal character: "Of course, the system isn't fair. It favors the rich, and the beautiful, and the shameless. But everyone gets a chance in the end."

That bit of praise sounds like a succinct statement the condemnation that statists use when calling for "regulation" of markets. Doesn't it occur to them that, given the levers available in both the market and the political system, the rich, the beautiful, and shameless are even more likely to prosper than if "regulation" were absent?

William F. Buckley died today. This is a sad day for me. He was my first introduction to conservative/libertarian thought thanks to a friend's willingness to let me read his National Review magazine back in high school.* Already a budding anti-communist, Buckley opened my eyes to the importance of economic liberalism as part of the the American tradition. Buckley was a great uniter among libertarians and conservatives in the 1970s and 80s.

Yes, I know Buckley was no Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist, and my own views have traveled far from those high school days. I didn't always agree with him then and found my views moving farther away from Buckley's over time. Still I will allow myself a moment to honor the man who helped me get where I am today.

Sadly, Buckley's passing is symbolic also of the death of the libertarianism in the American conservative movement. I'm afraid there aren't too many conservatives left who would sail out to international waters to try some pot (or rather few who'd admit to it).

*Reading The Freeman, at the instigation of a high school teacher, was my first intro to real libertarian thought.

Addendum: I also read and enjoyed most of his spy novels. Not high literature by any standard, but good for the genre.

Holman Jenkins in today's Opinion Journal [link here, thanks to Richard Reinsch for the pointer]:

Any debate about a housing bailout can be put aside -- the bailout is underway... No, the perverse effect won't be a replay of the '30s, or even Japan's decade of stagnation in the '90s, but the latter is your model, with a little inflation thrown in. The goal: avoid foreclosures and slow the fall of home prices to market-clearing levels.

As for the "little inflation thrown in," SJSU's Barstool Economists have this:

Warren Gibson queries:

According to the BLS wizards at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm the housing component has been rising at a annual rate of about 3%, though not quite that fast in the last couple months. Can anyone tell me why, with house prices declining, the housing component of CPI continues to rise? What am I missing here? I know they assume homeowners are renting to themselves, and maybe BLS isn't "marking to market" existing houses.

Jeff Hummell replies:

Not since 1982 has the CPI included house prices, nor is there any logical reason that it should. It is after all, a "consumer" price index, and the purchase of a house is primarily an investment. About 40 percent of the CPI comes from housing costs, which includes actual and imputed rents (30 percent), fuel and other utilities (5 percent), and household furnishings and operations (5 percent). Do you know any tenant who has seen a decrease in rents over the last year? I certainly don't. Rents are imputed for owner-occupied housing from the actual market rents of similar propertis, so you are right, they are not marked to the market value of the house, in either the CPI or the National Income and Product Accounts. Imputed rents should only noticeably fall with a decline in house prices if they noticeably rose (faster than other goods and services) with an increase in house prices.

Back to Jenkins and the policy question:

Making the hole even harder to climb out of in tough-love fashion, government policy itself played a big role in creating the bubble, on the bipartisan theory that homeownership begets "social stability."

[...]

So much for subsidizing our way to greater "social stability" by luring marginal borrowers into debt to own a home. The truth today is that politicians are rushing to prop up house prices not to rescue the poor from the ignominy of renting, but to get past the next election without affluent voters having to confront a realistic decline in the market value of their main assets.

So that clears things up, huh?

It is interesting to read about the prohibition movement and its success in the South during the mid nineteen-aughts. Of course, within a decade the rest of the country will jump on the prohibition wagon (as it were). An important lesson from that episode is the amazing amount of patience and persistence the prohibitionists displayed. Today, there are similar groups with patience and persistence and the empirical question is whether their policies would be any better than those of the past.

The Feb. 25, 1908 NYT has the following information:

Representative E. F. Acheson now proposes to give Congress an opportunity to put itself on record on the question of National Prohibition. Many of the members of Congress, including several from Pennsylvania, have declared that they are in favor of National prohibition, but are opposed to State and local option, as it cannot be enforced.

Mr. Acheson introduced a resolution to-day for an amendment to the Federal Constitution providing that the sale, importation, and manufacture of intoxicating liquors, including beer, ale, wine, and of opium, cocaine, or other narcotic drugs, except for medicinal and mechanical purposes shall be prohibited in the United States and all the Territories.

Whether Acheson was the first or not, such suggestions ultimately led to this:

Amendment XVIII

Passed by Congress December 18, 1917. Ratified January 16, 1919. Repealed by amendment 21.

Section 1.

After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

Section 2.

The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Section 3.

This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

Thanks.

Recently, the Mrs. and I caught a snippet of Barack Obama calling for "a leader who can end the division in Washington." One of us asked the other didn't Bush run to be a uniter not a divider or some such pablum? Indeed he did (maybe Hillary should try to sniff out some plagiarism). Actually, I'm with Kevin "Gridlock is Good" Grier--bipartisanship is vastly overrated (think stimulus package).

The "9/11 Truthers" contend that the attacks of that day were an "inside job" designed to "lead the U.S. to war." The Feb. 18, 1908 NYT reports on the "Maine Truthers" (from Spain):

The Diario Espanol, the organof the ultra-Spanish element, in a leading article to-day referring to the special celebration by Americans of the tenth anniversary of the blowing up of the battleship maine, says:

"This commemorates the blackest blot on American history, the world, including honest Americans, believing that the ship was blown up by direct orders from the War Department for the purpose of justification in the plan to despoil Spain of Cuba."

The paper adduces as "convincing proof" that the officers of the Maine attended the funeral of the victims in full dress uniform, which showed that they must have sent their uniforms ashore "in anticipation of the explosion," and alleges that the reason the wreck has not been raised is that it would conclusively demonstrate that the explosion was in the magazine.

More here

From the Feb. 11, 1908 NYT concerning the rebuilding of Chinatown after the April 1906 San Francisco earthquake:

The rebuilt Chinatown of San Francisco contains substantial new buildings as picturesque as those destroyed by the fire and earthquake, but more convenient and sanitary...

The Oriental aspect of the Chinese quarter is carefully preserved for good business reasons...

Fully 15,000 Chinese have returned to San Francisco from Oakland and other places of refuge. they have not yet reestablished their temples, as they feared the gods would not be contented at the scene of the great disaster. But this year the cornerstones of new temples are to be laid, and many more Chinese will return, taking their gods with them.

I am admittedly not well versed in the history of Chinatown(s) - my suspicion is that they are/were a form of segregation. However, what is striking is the rebuilding is ostensibly completed in less than two years and without a hint of government assistance mentioned in the story.

One wants to make comparisons with another disaster area in this country, even if to do so is not completely honest.

For our friends in the Northeast (and elsewhere) who face dramatic increases in road and bridge tolls in the near future, a letter to the editor from the Feb. 9, 1908 NYT:

Now that the Thaw trial is over, please turn your attention to a free Brooklyn Bridge topic and let me know why I should pay 10 cents [$2.26 in 2006 dollars] to drive across the [Brooklyn] bridge, who gets the money, and such other information as will explain why, after I have crossed the bridge, I can drive free over several hundred miles of paved, cleaned, and lighted thoroughfares, that cost many millions of dollars to build and cost ten times as much to maintain as both bridges?

An article in the Feb. 7, 1908 NYT puts our current primary antics in some perspective:

ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. - The wildest scenes of disorder characterized the proceedings of the Republican Convention here to-day, which elected two complete delegations to the National Convention, one in favor of Taft and the other uninstructed.

For several weeks there had been a threatened departure from the expressed wishes of the Administration forces, who had been laying plans for the indorsement of the Administration and the sending to the National Convention of a delegation favoring Taft.

From the Jan. 6, 1908 NYT:

The eagle which has perched upon the top of the historic mace at the right hand of the Speaker of the House of Representatives these sixty-seven years, since John Tyler was President, is sick.

For all these years the eagle has withstood the onslaughts of eloquence. It sat there calmly through the thunders of war statesmen. The slavery question was debated in its presence, and after the war it heard Conkling, Blaine, Lamar, Sunset Cox, and a long line of orators, even down to the present time of John Wesley Gaines, all without a quiver. But this week has been too much for it.

The spread-eagle speeches which have shaken the rafters not only of the Capitol, but of the country, have at last aroused the emulation of the silver eagle, and it decided to stretch its mighty pinions for a flight. But, alas! like so many other flights of the week, it fell flat.

I received this note from an economist friend in Nairobi, Kenya whose home is close to one of the areas of the unrest:

I am unable to sleep, I have called all the police numbers, called intelligence agents, newsrooms-nobody is rescuing the poor souls. I am watching from my window, impotent and enraged.

For his safety, I will not reveal his name. He is now trying to move his family and staff to safer digs. Donations (501c3 deductible thanks to his American friends) are being accepted. Contact me directly for details if you're interested/able to help.

[No, this is not a scam. I know the guy and this is real.]

George Will on biofuels. The Riady story needs to be repeated as often as possible.

The political importance of corn-growing, ethanol-making Iowa is one reason that biofuel mandates flow from Washington the way oil would flow from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge if it had nominating caucuses.

ANWR's 10.4 billion barrels of oil have become hostage to the planet's saviors (e.g., John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama), who block drilling in even a tiny patch of ANWR. You could fit Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Delaware into ANWR's frozen desolation; the "footprint" of the drilling operation would be one sixth the size of Washington's Dulles airport.

Americans can still drill for … water. Water rights (T. Boone Pickens has bought 400,000 acres of them in the Texas Panhandle) are becoming more valuable as ethanol production, which is extremely water-intensive, puts pressure on supplies.

To avoid drilling for oil in ANWR's moonscape, the planet savers evidently prefer destroying forests, even though they absorb greenhouse gases. ... The destruction of forests is one reason European governments are rethinking their biofuel enthusiasm. The European Union has awakened to the fact that growing crops (which requires diesel fuel for tractors, and nitrogen fertilizer made with natural gas) and turning them into biofuel (transporting them to energy-devouring manufacturing plants) takes a toll on the environment

If the argument for ethanol is that domestically produced energy should be increased, there are better ways of doing that. On the outer continental shelf there is a 50-year supply of clean-burning natural gas . . . that the government . . . will not allow to be extracted. But, then, consider what was done in 1996 by the dominant half of today's Clinton tandem presidential candidacy.

Bill Clinton, by executive edict, declared 1.7 million acres of Utah to be a national monument. Under those acres are the largest known deposit—more than 60 billion tons—of low-sulfur, clean-burning coal. The second largest deposit, the value of which rose because of Clinton's action locking up an alternative supply, is in Indonesia and is owned by a member of the Indonesian Riady family, of fragrant memory, which was generous to Clinton's 1992 campaign.

Steve Chapman on Obama's stance(s) regarding marijuana:

Recently, he had told a New Hampshire newspaper, "I'm not in favor of decriminalization."

This episode reveals that as a candidate, Obama is more fond of bold rhetoric than bold policies. But it also proves the impossibility of talking sense on the subject of illicit drugs during a political campaign. That course of action would mean admitting the inadmissible: that the prohibition of cannabis has been cruel, wasteful and fraudulent.

Cruel because it leads to the arrest of nearly 700,000 people a year for mere possession of a substance that is comparatively benign. Wasteful because it expends billions of dollars in police, court and correctional resources that could be deployed against dangerous predators. Fraudulent because it hasn't solved anything: According to the federal government, nearly 100 million Americans have tried the stuff.
. . .
Had we enforced our statutes more vigorously, of course, Bush, Clinton and the others would never have been elected anything, because they would be ex-convicts. Yet Bush, Clinton and the others were happy to put people behind bars for crimes they themselves committed.

From the Feb. 4, 1908 NYT:

With the unanimous consent in the [New York] Senate to-night, Senator McCall of the Sixteenth District introduced a bill authorizing the Park Board of New York to spend an additional sum of $1,500,000 for the development of parks and driveways.

"Fourteen years ago," he said, "a law was enacted permitting this expenditure for the benefit of the unemployed. The need for such relief is greater now than it was fourteen years ago. It is estimated that 130,000 skilled mechanics and 15,000 men without trades, are without employment in New York today."

Unmentioned is that such an expenditure "for the benefit of the unemployed" came at the expense of the employed (at least to some degree).

I just took this reasonably (but not perfectly) crafted quiz that selects the presidential candidate closest to your views. It spit out John McCain! Not Ron Paul?! Huh?!

It could the be quiz itself I guess. It had no questions on campaign finance and I LOATHE John McCain's views there. Plus I have a deep fear that McCain is a hot head, but that character issue wasn't on the quiz. Plus Paul's views (e.g., abortion is a state issue) don't lend themselves to the quiz format very well.

But I can't deny the fact that except for Iraq and Immigration. issues on which I disagree with all of the Republicans (except for Paul on Iraq), I seem close to McCain.

Here were the results:

Agree with McCain:
Taxes
Stem-Cell Research
Health Care
Abortion
Social Security
Line-Item Veto
Energy
Marriage
Death Penalty
Gun Control
Environment
Education

Disagree with McCain:
Iraq
Immigration

From Reuters.

Prophetic?

Another excellent offering from Mike Lester of the Rome News-Tribune:

A fascinating editorial in the Jan. 23, 1908 NYT discusses how the Democratic party might want to get rid of a candidate that has been hanging around for too long:

Why should [William Jennings] Bryan get out unless he is forced out? From the point of view of the Democrat, the patriot, the wise party leader, innumerable reasons may be advanced why he should abandon his pretensions to the candidacy; from the personal point of view of Mr. Bryan, not one. Mr. Bryan is a very successful man. In seeking a third nomination he is pursuing the path of success that has led him to fame and fortune. He is a rich man. He has said that he has money enough to make him comfortable the rest of his life. He has made his fortune by being the candidate, by refusing to relinquish his grasp upon the leadership of the Democratic Party. Because of the position he holds men buy his Commoner, and lecture committees pay him large fees. Mr. Bryan, in the language of the street, has a "good thing." He would be a fool to let go of it.

Might this apply to a certain "third term" seeker today?

From John J. DiIulio Jr.'s analysis ("The Wacko-Vet Myth: Now echoed by the New York Times") of the Times's drive-by shooting ("Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles"):

The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and other veterans' advocacy groups are absolutely correct that not merely "many" but the vast majority of veterans not only remain completely law-abiding but go on to lead stable and productive personal, professional, and civic lives. Assuming 121 homicide cases in relation to 749,932 total discharges through 2007, 99.98 percent of all discharged Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have not committed or been charged with homicide.

And assuming 121 cases and 749,932 total discharges, the homicide offending rate for the discharged veterans would be 16.1 per 100,000. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has demographic data aplenty on homicide offending rates. For instance, in 2005, for white males aged 18-24, the rate was about 20 per 100,000. The Times opined that 121 was the "minimum" number, even as it counted veterans charged but not convicted with veterans tried and found guilty. Doubling the number to 242 would double the rate to 32.2 per 100,000.

Such crude but contextualizing calculations aside, the right question to ask is whether the veterans, other things being equal (controlling for age, race, gender, education, income, prior criminal history, and other variables), offend at rates that are significantly different from otherwise comparable groups (including groups that have an extreme PTSD incidence). Without doing the relevant statistical (multiple-regression) analyses with all the requisite empirical data, it is impossible to say.

Hillary Clinton likens White House to prison

Perhaps it has something to do with her soaring narcissism and lust for power.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says,

Only three categories of people need be "disappointed" by the forthcoming identification cards, the Homeland Security chief told attendees at a midday press conference here: terrorists, illegal immigrants, and con-men.

I'm not a terrorist, illegal immigrant or con man, but I'm not happy about this. So make that four categories, you nazi wannabe.

From the Jan. 8, 1908 NYT:

"I know that some people are giving much thought to the money question, but that is not worrying me much. The people of this country have made it possible for me to acquire an independent income for all time to come, so I have no worry on that score."

This remark was made by William Jennings Bryan toward the close of his address here [Omaha, Neb.] last night before the Jacksonian Club. This is Mr. Bryan's first statement as to the extent of his own finances.

Here's WJB's famous "Cross of Gold" speech.

Wherein John Tierney represents Al Gore as an "availability entrepreneur." Seems like a charitable term.

[A]vailability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.

The Dec. 23, 1907 NYT reports on legislative restraint on the part of Confederate veterans:

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - United Confederate Veterans, of this city, yesterday by unanimous vote went on record in opposition to the bill introduced by Congressman Hobson providing for pensioning Confederate veterans. The resolution concludes:

"While we appreciate the good intentions of the distinguished gentleman, we feel assured no such bill could ever become a law. The offering of such a bill in Congress would result in the reopening of wounds long since healed, and engendering bitterness long since abandoned."

It would be refreshing if some today would show similar restraint.

From a Competitive Enterprise Institute posting: "It seems the [Washington] Post believes that if an emission drops and no bureaucrat was around to mandate it, it didn't really drop. ... Under any relevant modern baseline, e.g., the year Europe made its Kyoto promise (1997) or thereafter, U.S. emissions have risen far more slowly than those of its noisiest antagonists. For example, International Energy Agency data show that over the past 7 years (2000-2006), the annual rate of increase for U.S. CO2 emissions is approximately one-third of the EU's rate of increase. Indeed, over the same period even the smaller EU-15 economy has increased its CO2 emissions in actual volume greater than the U.S. by more than 20%, even while the U.S. economy and population also grew more rapidly."

From the December 13, 1907 NYT:

CHICAGO - Far-reaching effects of the great snowstorm of January, 1905, were uncovered last night by the City Civil Service Commission. The phenomenon discovered was that 1,100 street laborers still are employed by the city for the removal of that remarkable snowfall. Notwithstanding the scientific interest developed, the commission unanimously decided that from reasons of economy, a new rule be enacting limiting to five days the period for which emergency street cleaning laborers may be employed in Chicago.

According to the records, these 1,100 emergency laborers were kept pegging away at the removal of that snow all through the campaign for the election of Mayor Edward F. Dunne and all through his administration. Curiously enough, the number of men required for the removal of snow rose to 1,500 in July.

Excellent.

... from co-blogger Brad Smith:

Next year, more candidates than ever will have the funds needed to get their messages to voters. That's because 2008 is shaping up to be the best-financed campaign in history.

But some people aren't celebrating this diversity of messages. Supporters of campaign finance and speech regulation, in the name of "reform," want to expand government subsidized campaigns. Behind the rhetoric of "clean" elections is a system that suppresses political speech by ordinary citizens, decreases confidence in government and produces none of what it promises.

The last major campaign finance law, known as McCain-Feingold, required the independent audit and investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accountability Office, to study government financing systems in Maine and Arizona, states that proponents cited as exemplary of the alleged benefits of government financing. ...

Tax funding of campaigns is supposed to reduce special-interest influence. But since Maine's program began, the number of lobbyists in the state has increased dramatically. ...

Tax financing of campaigns takes your money and gives it to someone else so that person can run against the things in which you believe. Such a welfare system for politicians will not cure our system. Real reform will occur only after citizens are freed of government restraints on their political speech. Call it "the First Amendment solution."

Dear Professor,

Dr. David Beito of the University of Alabama and I have been working on a project to collect endorsements for Ron Paul from those in academia. Our Web site is http://www.academicsforpaul.com/ . So far we have quite a few signatories, and I am wondering if you would be interested in signing on as well. To learn more about Congressman Paul, visit www.RonPaul2008.com. Also, a press release was sent out by the official campaign touting the endorsements of these Professors: http://www.ronpaul2008.com/press-releases/.

Please let me know if you would like to endorse Ron Paul for President. Also, if you know of another Professor who may be interested, please forward this message to them. Thanks for your consideration.


Sincerely,

Aaron Biterman (AULibertarians@aol.com)

From the Dec. 6, 1907 NYT:

WASHINGTON - President Roosevelt to-night instructed Gen. Funston to dispatch a sufficient force of regulars to Goldfield, Nev., to control the situation there. This action was taken upon receipt of a telegraphic request from the Governor of Nevada. The troops will proceed from San Francisco and the strength of the expedition is left to the judgement of Gen. Funson.

Why do politicians lie?

The traditional public choice answer is "because they can." Once in office incumbents enjoy an electoral advantage because rational ignorance creates some slack between voter-principals and politician-agents. Politicians with enough reputational capital can afford to indulge in prevaricating rhetoric, wealth transfers to special interests, and perhaps even the occasional tryst, because democratic institutions are inefficient. Incentives matter, dammit!

The new generation of public choice invokes systematic biases in the beliefs of voter-principals deviating from political truth, as revealed by scientific method. For all the much deserved attention to Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter, the lesser-known yet equally forceful book, Rational Choice and Democratic Deliberation, by political theorists Guido Pincione and Fernando Teson, is well-suited to explaining systematic lies in politics and the democratic failure that results. One voter bias, due to epistemic rational ignorance, is a preference for vivid information over opaque explanations. Vivid information is

"a) emotionally interesting, b) concrete and imagery-provoking, and c) proximate in a sensory, temporal, or spatial way." For example, we will feel more indignant about a heinous crime if we watch the gory details on the evening news. If the newscaster also tells us that the suspect was out of prison on a "technicality," we will overstate the relevance of the crime as confirmatory evidence for the theory that heinous crimes are due to the leniency of the justice system. [Pincione and Teson, p.23, omitting footnotes]

In contrast, we spurn opaque explanations like invisible hand, spontaneous order, comparative advantage, reputational self-regulation, and broken window fallacies. People adopt vivid beliefs by default and confirmatory biases put a premium on vivid information that reinforces the default. So false stories can become ingrained, and [p]oliticians have an incentive to spread vivid explanations, for the public will believe them given their default views" (p.35).

Take Al Gore, who is flying to Stockholm (a shocking carbon waste!) to receive his piece of Nobel history on Monday. Yesterday's WSJ.com Opinion Journal has Holman Jenkins on "The Science of Gore's Nobel", which was "awarded for promoting belief in manmade global warming as a crisis." Jenkins invokes the same cognitive psychology that supports political failure arguments of Caplan, Pincione & Teson, and others like Tyler Cowen on voter self-deception. Voter bias finds root in anchoring effects like cognitive-cost-minimizing people choosing to adopt views that are the most available or accessible. Jenkins:

[Kahneman and Tversky's] insight has been fruitful and multiplied: "Availability cascade" has been coined for the way a proposition can become irresistible simply by the media repeating it; "informational cascades" for the tendency to replace our beliefs with the crowd's beliefs; and "reputational cascade" for the rational incentive to do so.

Mr. Gore clearly understands the game he's playing, judging by his resort to such nondispositive arguments as: "The people who dispute the international consensus on global warming are in the same category now with the people who think the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona."

Here's exactly the problem that availability cascades pose: What if the heads being counted to certify an alleged "consensus" arrived at their positions by counting heads?

Falsely claiming consensus behind one's views is a form of political deception, which as Pincione and Teson point out, commits the argumentum ad populum fallacy. Logic be damned. Rather, "citing agreement of others is, in short, a particularly vivid (and often fallacious) way to argue in politics." (p.43)

What this all amounts to is a refinement of government failure theory. Throw cognitive biases together in large numbers and systemic failures pop out. Pincione and Teson:

Discourse failure as a social phenomenon results...from the mutually reinforcing interaction of rational ignorance and posturing against the background of redistributive politics. Political actors who stand to gain from spreading certain kinds of information will be helped by citizens who are willing to do their share, as it were, in the acquisition of confirmatory evidence of the default vivid beliefs. In other words, the cost of supplying convenient information is reduced by ingrained cognitive errors, and correspondingly, those who want to change public opinion in the direction of opaque theories will face higher costs. Not only will they have to argue against vivid views that the public holds by default; they will also have to counter the psychological biases just discussed. (p.44)

Politicians lie because they can, yes, but also "because they have to!" Incentives yada yada. Perceptions matter too, dammit!

Hat tips to:
Nico Maloberti for showing me the Pincione and Teson book;
Richard Reinsch for pointer to the Jenkins WSJ.com article.

Here is Jenkins on the science of global warming: "Let's be honets, all we have is a hypothesis."
Here is my previous entry on the challenges of Liberal persuasion.

Steve Chapman on the beguiling notion of energy independence:

[A]lready I can guarantee two things. First, the next president will be elected on a promise to lead the nation to energy independence. Second, the promise won't be kept.

It's enchanting to imagine swearing off foreign oil in favor of ethanol . . ., or fuels derived from . . . coal. But even if all the corn grown in this country went toward ethanol, it would cut our gasoline consumption by no more than 12 percent. So why does ethanol get treated like the prettiest girl at the prom? . . . I've got two words for you: Iowa caucuses.

As for coal, schemes to turn it into liquid fuel for cars and planes have been around for half a century — including a dismal failure launched during Jimmy Carter's administration.

It would be good to reduce our consumption of oil, if only because it would reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. But replacing oil with alternatives that also pollute misses the point. And as ethanol demonstrates, a drive for energy independence is likely to veer off into wasteful handouts to powerful interests

A better approach would be a carbon tax, which would simultaneously promote conservation, curb emissions and impartially boost environment-friendly alternatives. But a carbon tax would be a tough sell to the American public.

And why bother? Energy independence is a mirage, but it sells itself..

Ruth Marcus takes on Paul Krugman:

In liberal Democratic circles, the debate over Social Security has taken a dangerous "don't worry, be happy" turn.

The argument has two equally dishonest components. The first is to deny that Social Security faces a daunting financing problem .... The second is to mischaracterize the arguments of those who advocate responsible action, accusing them of hyping the system's woes.

One prominent practitioner of this misguided approach is New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. "Inside the Beltway, doomsaying about Social Security -- declaring that the program as we know it can't survive the onslaught of retiring baby boomers -- is regarded as a sort of badge of seriousness, a way of showing how statesmanlike and tough-minded you are," Krugman wrote last week. "In fact, the whole Beltway obsession with the fiscal burden of an aging population is misguided."

Somebody should introduce Paul Krugman to . . . Paul Krugman.

"[A] decade from now the population served by those programs [Social Security and Medicare] will explode. . . . Because of those facts, merely balancing the federal budget would be a deeply irresponsible policy -- because that would leave us unprepared for the demographic deluge, with no alternative once it arrives except to raise taxes and slash benefits." (July 11, 2001)

And so forth.

Imagine something like this, from the Nov. 14, 1907 NYT, being written today:

In answer to one of the numerous protests which have been received at the White House against the new gold coin which have been coined without the words "In God We Trust," President Roosevelt has written a letter:

"When the question of the new coinage came up we looked into the law and found there was no warrant therein for putting "In God We Trust" on the coins. As the custom, although without legal warrant, had grown up, however, I might have felt at liberty to keep the inscription had I approved of its being on the coinage. But as I did not approve of it I did not direct that it should again be put on...

My own feeling in the matter is due to my very firm conviction that to put such a motto on coins, or to use it in any kindred manner, not only does no good, but does positive harm, and is in effect irreverence, which comes dangerously close to sacrilege.

Needless to say, TR's stance was not popular. For example, a "red-hot debate" took place in the Episcopal Diocesan Convention.:

yesterday, by a vote of 131 to 81, passed resolutions protesting against the elimination of the motto "In God We Trust" from the new ten-dollar gold pieces. The debate on the question lasted an hour and a half, and for a part of that time the convention was in some disorder.

Closing lines of an interesting column by Jonah Goldberg:

I don't know what the best tax rates are, for rich or poor.

But I'm pretty sure that it's unhealthy for a democracy when the majority of citizens don't see government as a service they're reluctantly paying for but as an extortionist that cuts them in for a share of the loot.

90 years ago today saw the Bolshevik Revolution, and NPR dedicated some on-air time this morning to the event. Surprisingly, the first paragraph admits that "The communist revolution ushered in a totalitarian dictatorship that killed and imprisoned tens of millions of people." Since capitalism's demise is supposedly inevitable but has yet to happen, the price tag for the socialist paradise must be in the hundreds of millions then.

The story interviews a Russian born in 1917 who had both his parents killed by the workers' regime, fought for Russia in WWII, was captured and imprisoned by Nazis, and survived only to return home and be imprisoned 10 years by Russians who thought he was a German spy.

So, though the 90 year old who lived through the era recognizes the horrors of Bolshevism, those who didn't live through it do not:

Syleia Daripova, 34, says she believes Stalin was a great man.
"Not every person can accumulate power in his hands like that," Daripova says. People say he murdered half of Russia … but, still, he was a unique personality. There are very few like him in history."

Imagine how much more unique he would have been if he killed three-fourths!

Notes on socialized medicine:

Michael Moore's SiCKO is opening in Britain this week, but the British are not amused. Anyone can extol the virtues of universal government-furnished health care, they say, when they have never had to use it.

Peter Huber in "Cherry Garcia and the End of Socialized Medicine" in City Journal. The new age of "molecular medicine," of designer drugs for specific genetic defects, is going to break up the current system of government universal health care that Michael Moore so loves.

But Michael Moore and his slacker-liberal army would fight to the last mockumentary to stop that. They have a right to free and unlimited health care and they know it.

You might wonder why they make such a fuss. After all, Huber writes,"Three-dollar statins in New York in 1996 get 30-cent statins to London in 2006 and three-cent statins to Kuala Lumpur a few years later."

But that's not good enough for our progressive friends. They want three-cent statins now. Anything less is a triumph of greed over human need.

That's why it would be prudent not to place any bets on the end of socialized medicine any time soon.

Instead, we should expect it to lurch from one disaster to the next.

It's encouraging to think that Hillary Clinton is uniquely qualified, by education, temperament, experience, and plain dumb luck to be the US leader fated to test universal health insurance to destruction.

After she and her wrecking crew have finished then we can start to build a health care system that really works.

Meanwhile there is always medical tourism.

Bushies might claim that much of the spending growth is for military purposes, but take a look at Reagan who also spent much on strengthening the military. Source here.

John Edwards, too, has puzzling ideas. For the entertainment of Iowans, he has reinvented himself as a 19th-century Kansan -- Mary Elizabeth Lease, the prairie populist who urged farmers to "raise less corn and more Hell." In August, Edwards urged an Iowa audience to throw off Washington's yoke: "We need to take the power out of the hands of these insiders that are rigging the system against you."

To measure how much Iowans are suffering from the rigging, Stephen Slivinski of the libertarian Cato Institute was asked to mine the most recent Census Bureau data. He concluded that Iowans paid $15.6 billion in revenues to the federal government and got $19.4 billion back, a gain of $1,286.53 per Iowan.

But that is not all. Washington has rigged the system to inundate corn-growing Iowa with subsidies for corn-based ethanol. Slivinski says it is difficult to pin down the Iowa corn farmers' harvest of dollars because the subsidies come from exemptions from excise taxes and tariffs (54 cents per imported gallon) that stifle competition from cheap ethanol imports. It is, however, reasonable to add $2 billion to Iowa's gain from Washington's rigging of the system, so the average Iowan's gain is at least $1,963.65.

Suppose Iowa did not have crucial presidential nominating caucuses. Or suppose it had them but that its crucial crop were, say, broccoli rather than corn. Would the federal government still be, well, rigging the system to create a phony "market" to satisfy a specious "demand" for mandatory and subsidized ethanol? No, but it probably would be mandating broccoli at every meal.

Many politicians pander, as Edwards does with gusto, to Americans' current penchant for self-pity. Hence the incessant talk about "the forgotten middle class." Because such talk is incessant, it of course refutes itself.

Article here.

This report from Yahoo News by Nancy Zuckerbrod, AP Education Writer, is fairly typical:

WASHINGTON - Low-income students who attend urban public high schools generally do just as well as private-school students with similar backgrounds, according to a study being released Wednesday.

Students at independent private schools and most parochial schools scored the same on 12th-grade achievement tests in core academic subjects as those in traditional public high schools when income and other family characteristics were taken into account, according to the study by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy.

Of course, this is not what the report from the "nonpartisan" CEP says. The actual report is based on a set of regression equations in which 8th grade tests are the major predictors of 12th grade test results. Thus, at most the report tells something about how much the students gain between the 8th and 12th grades. Even this is problematic, as the body of the study concedes (p. 19): "Just as it is possible in the NAEP research that private schools attract higher achieving students to begin with, it is possible in this study that private schools promote greater
parental involvement."

No F scores are provided for non-comprehensive public schools as a group, and none are provided for parental characteristics as a group. For some of the school types, the number of observations appears to be quite small (Report, p. 26: "No type had fewer than 25 NELS survey participants for this analysis.")

Back to the AP story:

[T]he new study not only compared students by income levels but also looked at a range of other family characteristics, such as whether a parent participates in school life. "When these were taken into account, the private-school advantage went away," the report states. The study looked at 1,000 low-income students from cities who are part of a nationally representative sample of kids surveyed over a period of years, along with parents and teachers, as part of a federal research effort.

In fact, the estimated impacts of these family characteristics as measured by beta coefficients is quite small and not always with the "right" sign. And the sample used in this study is anything but "nationally representative" as the report (p.26) says: "This subset amounted to 1,003 students. By focusing on this subset, the study limited private school comparisons to those affecting inner-city populations...."

From Cooler Heads Digest, 10/10/07:

Hypocrite of the Week

Connie Heidegaard, Denmark’s Environment Minister, last week claimed to be an increasingly impatient emissary on behalf of “the planet”, demanding that the U.S. make the same promise as Europe to reduce its greenhouse gas (principally CO2) emissions.

That same week, Denmark released figures showing that it increased its 2006 CO2 emissions by 16.1% over 2005 levels, citing their growing economy (which relies on coal-fired power, it seems).

U.S. emissions, however, dropped 1.3% over the same time, while the economy grew by 3.3%.

From John Leo's column on the political leanings of professors:

Although business school professors are believed to be predominantly conservative, professors of business voted 2-1 for Kerry. These professors were barely more conservative than liberal.

I don't how one can describe a group that voted 2-1 for Kerry as being more conservative than liberal.

From a letter to the editor of the October 5, 1907 NYT:

While Mr. Roosevelt is interested in the later days of the Roman Empire, could you not call his attention to the fact that one chief reason of its disintegration and its easy final "fall" was the gradual weakening of local governments and the centralizing of these old local powers in the capital city? When the centre became weak there was no strength left elsewhere.

Steven Milloy reports that the Low Carbon Economy Act of 2007 "would cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion in its first 10 years and untold trillions of dollars in subsequent decades." Further, "This week, the EPA sent its analysis of the bill’s impact on climate to Bingaman and Specter. Now we can see what we’d get for our money, and we may as well just build a giant bonfire with the cash and enjoy toasting marshmallows over it." [Milloy does not examine the global-warming implications of the bonfire.]

Using IPCC formulas, Milloy estimates the implications of the EPA's estimates for the earth's temperature. (The EPA does't make these computations. Milloy suspects that's because the results would be embarrassing to the Act's authors.) Milloy's estimates:

Under the no-action scenario (718-to-695 ppm), the IPCC formulas indicate that the multitrillion-dollar Bingaman-Specter bill might reduce average global temperature by 0.13 degrees Celsius. Under the maximum regulation scenario (514-to-491 ppm), Bingaman-Specter might reduce average global temperature by 0.18 degrees Celsius.

Foreign Affairs carries the article, "Why Climate Change Can't Be Stopped," that suggests the approach with highest payoff: "Dollar for dollar, the most efficient way to cut global greenhouse gas emissions would be, in theory, to invest hundreds of billions of dollars to improve China’s energy efficiency. But Congress would never support such an approach." That last sentence might be the understatement of the century.

This headline from the Oct. 3, 1907 NYT, describing a speech President Teddy Roosevelt gave in St. Louis, could easily describe the current political environment:

USE VAST FEDERAL POWER - ROOSEVELT

Constitution Must Be Interpreted to Fit the Modern Day Conditions

BATTLESHIPS TO RETURN

Tells St. Louisians Nation's Duty is to Restore the Mississippi River to Its Proper Place in Commerce

The entirety of the speech is printed in the paper, with the following section headings:

"Great Lakes a Prime Example" - for a national waterway policy

"Nation's Share of Levee Building" - levees are the federal government's responsibility.

"Advantage of the Panama Canal" - indirectly connects the Great Lakes with the Pacific

"Urges Great Fighting Navy"

"Control of Corporations"

"Growth of National Powers" - a more populous nation requires more centralized government powers.

"Control our Inter-state commerce"

Nice.

Posted by Craig Depken at 11:57 AM in Politics

September 30, 2007

On Republicans c. 1907

I have mentioned this in some earlier post, but the Democrat candidate for the 1908 election was chosen in 1906 - there were no primaries or anything like that. This is just to put the current marathon, multi-year Presidential race in some perspective.

The Sept. 30, 1907 NYT has a letter to the editor concerning the 1908 election which ends with the following paragraph:

The object for which the Republican Party was organized was accomplished forty-two years ago, and there is no further reason under the sun for its continued existence. In fact, the party has degenerated into a system of commercial despotism which acts through party legislation as if we were at commercial war with the world, and taxes the people on a war basis so increasingly oppressive that it is becoming a problem for the average citizen now live decently.

PRO BONO PUBLICO

I submit that the spirit of this paragraph pertains to both major parties in the U.S. today.

Posted by Craig Depken at 07:55 PM in Politics

September 27, 2007

On fairness c. 1907

From the September 27, 1907 NYT:

North Dakota will be the name of Battleship No. 23, one of the new 20,000-ton vessels, contracts for which were recently awarded by the Navy Department. The other vessel will be called the Deleware.

President Roosevelt has decided that as so many vessels bear the names of New York cities it would be unfair to carry out the original plan of naming No. 23 the New York and of changing the cruiser of that name to the Saratoga. Utah now is the only one of the States after which no war vessel has been named.

Posted by Craig Depken at 11:17 AM in Politics

September 24, 2007

Taxation for thee but not for me c. 1907

From the Sept. 24, 1907 NYT:

It is known that the members of the French Chamber of Deputies last year voted themselves an additional salary of 6,000 francs. It is not so well known that this action was resented by the Socialists...By some means it came to be understood that a "divvy" was the duty of the Socialist Deputy. If he handed over half of the "unearned increment" to the Socialist Treasury he might keep the other half.

So far, so good. However, it is interesting that the socialists didn't take all of the pay raise.

But it gets better:

Thirty-two Socialist Deputies have accordingly submitted to this Socialist tax. But ten have made only a partial surrender of the moiety, pleading, possibly the same "increase in the cost of living" which was pleaded in behalf of the increase of pay. Eight have omitted to divided with the party to any extent whatever, being apparently of the opinion that 3,000 francs would compensate them for any odium they might incur by keeping it for themselves...

Such an excellent and subtle economic argument offered in a similar story today would be surprising.

Posted by Craig Depken at 12:30 PM in Politics

September 22, 2007

HillaryCare Catch-22

From the WSJ's "Best of the Web Today":

The Associated Press reports on a Hillary Clinton health-care speech:

"It is long past time that Americans and the richest of all countries realize that health care is a right and not a privilege," Clinton said at a labor forum in Chicago. "And that goes especially for people who work hard every single day."

First she claims that "health care is a right and not a privilege," but then she qualifies this statement by saying "that goes especially for people who work hard every single day." The implication of the latter statement is that the right to health care is contingent on working hard "every single day."

But just the other day, the New York Post quoted Mrs. Clinton as drawing a different link between work and medicine:

The former first lady said she could envision a day when "you have to show proof to your employer that you're insured as a part of the job interview--like when your kid goes to school and has to show proof of vaccination.

"At this point, we don't have anything punitive that we have proposed," she said.

Well, that's reassuring. In Hillary Clinton's America, it seems, health insurance will be like experience: You can't get a job without it, and you can't get it without a job.

Posted by E. Frank Stephenson at 03:33 PM in Politics

Irony

GA political columnist Bill Shipp writes in today's RNT (no link) that "Georgia's congressmen don't bring home bacon." Shipp writes that Rep. Jack Kingston (his district is southeastern GA along the coast) owes "Georgians a big fat apology" and calls the $83 million in federal funds that Kingston has obtained for local projects "peanuts." It's rather ironic then that Kingston is Georgia's most pork happy Republican congressman.

Even more ironic--the page opposite of Shipp's column contains a photo of our congressman posing with the results of a local project for which he obtained federal funding.

Posted by E. Frank Stephenson at 03:17 PM in Politics

September 21, 2007

Polar Opposites

Best of the Web points to an NYT article, "Scientists Report Severe Retreat of Arctic Ice." The article runs 459 words. The first 441 words expand on the title. Here are the last 18 words: "Sea ice around Antarctica has seen unusual winter expansions recently, and this week is near a record high."

Posted by Wilson Mixon at 08:41 PM in Politics

Capitalist anarchists? c. 1907

From the Sept. 21, 1907 NYT:

PITTSBURG - Intense excitement was caused here this afternoon when an Anarchistic notice was found posted on the high board fence which surrounds the old cathedral property, for which H. C. Frick paid $1,300,000...

The notice was written on a typewritter, and was perfect as to spelling and punctuation. It was as follows:

ANARCHIST'S NOTICE

Murder the Rich and Burn their Homes.

Too long have the working people of this city been trampled by the rich. How easy it is for them to enjoy themselves, when they grind out the lives of the poor to add to their riches! How easy it is for them to enjoy themselves by sacrificing men's lives! Join with us and redress your wrongs. We have suffered too long.

We want agents to murder the rich and burn their homes. Wages, $10 a day. If you are the right kind of a man, go to the corner of Wood Street and Fifth Avenue, and a man will give you the proper sign.

EH.net suggests that nominal GDP per capita was about $390 per year, or approximately $2 per day. Now, if the redressing of wrongs provides a "good," the "right man" should be willing to pay for the privelege. Having to pay five times the average day's wage (and 8 times what Rockefeller paid his summer help), suggests that the recruitment of anarchists, and especially those who would be willing to commit murder and arson, was not easy.

The police at first think the posting is a joke but then:

they noticed several suspicious persons at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Wood Street, [and] they arrested them.

Posted by Craig Depken at 03:59 PM in Politics

For the Children

An interesting historical note from a reader at the Mises blog site:

As early as 1871 the Liberals in my home town of Kettering, England, had (as Herbert Spencer in near by Darby would have been aware) already given up supporting liberty.

They campaigned for a School Board (which they were able to do under the Act of Parliament passed by the Liberal party government the previous year) to force people to pay for schools they wished to build and control.

The Liberals did this not because there were no schools in Kettering, but because most of them were Church of England "National" schools and they disliked the Anglican Church.

There was nothing to stop the Liberals building more "Nonconformist" (i.e. hard line Protestant) "British" schools, and most of the rich manufacturers in the town were Liberal "nonconformists" (so they could have educated the children of the poor in schools that avoided the "wicked" teachings of the Church of England had they chosen to spend their own money) - but they choose to opt for force (i.e. to reject liberty).

Posted by Wilson Mixon at 01:26 PM in Politics

September 19, 2007

On campaign financing c. 1907

From a Sept. 28, 1907 NYT editorial describing a speech by Judge Parker at Jamestown:

In the struggle for mastery in both State and Nation money has been sought as well for illegitimate uses as legitimate uses. As the corruption of the electorate has widened and deepened the demand for money has increased, a demand which long ago outgrew any sum that could be raised by patriotic contributors. So corporations having favors to ask were invited to contribute, and they did so, knowing full well that when legislation was needed or undesirable legislation was threatened the head of the organization could be relied upon for assistance; that his statement that this corporation contributed ten or one hundred thousand dollars to the campaign fund would lock or unlock the door to legislative or administrative action.

On the other hand, the "head of the organization" could simply claim that they did not know the individual or corporation who had contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars, could insist that they would not be swayed by contributions, and could "swear off" political action committee dollars.

As I have mentioned before, our problems aren't necessarily new, they are just "ours."

Posted by Craig Depken at 12:48 PM in Politics

September 14, 2007

" ... the strangest product launch since that of New Coke in 1985"

So says George Will about the launch of Fred Thompson's campaign for president. Will is especially scathing about Thompson's role in McCain-Feingold; a snippet:

In 1997, Thompson chaired a Senate committee investigating 1996 election spending. In its final report, issued in 1998, Thompson's committee recommended a statutory "restriction on issue advocacy" during "a set period prior to an election" when the speech includes "any use of a candidate's name or image." And in 1999, Thompson co-sponsored legislation containing what became, in 2002, the McCain-Feingold blackout periods imposed on any television or radio ad that "refers to" a candidate for federal office -- a portion of which the Supreme Court in June declared unconstitutional.

Thompson, contrary to his current memories, was deeply involved in expanding government restrictions on political speech generally and the ban on issue ads specifically. Yet he told Ingraham "I voted for all of it," meaning McCain-Feingold, but said "I don't support that" provision of it.

Oh? Why, then, did he file his own brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold McCain-Feingold, stressing Congress' especially "compelling interest" in squelching issue ads that "influence" elections?

Posted by E. Frank Stephenson at 12:45 PM in Politics

September 10, 2007

Higgs on 9/11

On this sad anniversary, Bob Higgs pulls few punches reminding us of the many ways in which the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001 have been used to feed Leviathan. Exerpt:

In the United States, everything memorable becomes an article of commerce in some fashion, and 9/11 is no exception. Many of these commercial offerings are maudlin or otherwise in bad taste, to be sure, but in this country no one is shocked when sellers market tasteless products successfully, and anyone who does not fancy the goods may simply decline to consume them. Indeed, one suspects that by this time, the demand for 9/11 media extravaganzas may be wearing rather thin even among those of mawkish sensibilities.

Far more troubling and much more dangerous, however, is the state’s exploitation of 9/11. During the past six years, 9/11 has often served as an all-purpose instrument in the state’s propaganda kit. For the Bush administration, it has provided the answer to every critical question about foreign and defense policies, among other things. If we challenge the wisdom, legality, or morality of the U.S. invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the government’s spokesmen and supporters throw 9/11 in our face. If we criticize the enormous run-up in spending for military purposes and for “homeland security,” much of it obvious political pork that contributes nothing to the public’s safety, the response to our criticism is that the people dare not risk another 9/11. If we express doubts about the wildly ambitious and morally presumptuous U.S. foreign policy of global hegemony, which, in its present swollen form, followed closely on the heels of George W. Bush’s embrace of a humble foreign policy with no nation building during the 2000 presidential campaign (“I don’t want to be the world’s policeman”), we are told that 9/11 changed everything. If we object to the government’s multifaceted assault on our civil liberties, the president stridently declares that everything being done is necessary to prevent another 9/11. If we wave our copy of the Constitution and express doubts about the president’s claim of overriding power as a “unitary executive,” the government’s lawyers assert that since 9/11 the nation has been “at war,” and hence the president’s constitutional power as commander-in-chief trumps everything else.

Comparisons between 9/11/2001 and 12/07/1941 follow.