Quotulatiousness

June 11, 2011

They “buried the ban in the 300-plus pages of the 2007 energy bill, and very few talked about it in public”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Law, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:28

Virginia Postrel talks about the looming ban-that-isn’t-a-ban on incandescent lightbulbs:

One serious technophile, University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, spent much of 2007 flogging compact fluorescents on his popular Instapundit blog, eventually persuading more than 1,900 readers to swap 19,871 incandescent bulbs for CFLs. To this day, the Instapundit group is by far the largest participant at OneBillionBulbs.com, a bulb-switching campaign organized by the consulting firm Symmetric Technologies. But Reynolds himself has changed his mind.

“I’m deeply, deeply disappointed with CFL bulbs,” he wrote last month on his blog. “I replaced pretty much every regular bulb in the house with CFLs, but they’ve been failing at about the same rate as ordinary long-life bulbs, despite the promises of multiyear service. And I can’t tell any difference in my electric bill. Plus, the Insta-Wife hates the light.”

That was our experience with the early CFL bulbs, too: they didn’t come close to achieving the longevity we were supposedly paying all the extra money for. And, as I’ve posted before, they’re not as easy to clean up after breakage as the older bulbs.

So the activists offended by the public’s presumed wastefulness took a more direct approach. They joined forces with the big bulb producers, who had an interest in replacing low-margin commodities with high-margin specialty wares, and, with help from Congress and President George W. Bush, banned the bulbs people prefer.

It was an inside job. Neither ordinary consumers nor even organized interior designers had a say. Lawmakers buried the ban in the 300-plus pages of the 2007 energy bill, and very few talked about it in public. It was crony capitalism with a touch of green.

Crony capitalism is what the general public is coming to think is the only kind of capitalism, because they have seen so much of it during the last few presidencies. Your business can be plagued with petty regulators enforcing nitpicking rules, while Congress showers money and special privileges on big businesses and banks.

But, as she points out, it’s not technically a true ban:

Now, I realize that by complaining about the bulb ban — indeed, by calling it a ban — I am declaring myself an unsophisticated rube, the sort of person who supposedly takes marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. In a New York Times article last month, Penelope Green set people like me straight. The law, she patiently explained, “simply requires that companies make some of their incandescent bulbs work a bit better, meeting a series of rolling deadlines between 2012 and 2014.”

True, the law doesn’t affect all bulbs — just the vast majority. (It exempts certain special types, like the one in your refrigerator.) The domed halogen bulbs meet the new standards yet are technically incandescents; judging from my personal experiments, they produce light similar to that of old- fashioned bulbs. They do, however, cost twice as much as traditional bulbs and, if the packages are to be believed, don’t last as long.

I keep hoping that LED lights will be able to produce the kind of long-life that we used to be able to depend upon from incandescents, as CFLs and halogen bulbs have not come close to living up to the promises. However, LEDs have not yet managed that trick in commercial applications.

So, aside from allowing lobbyists to flex their muscles, what is the ban attempting to achieve? That’s not quite clear-cut:

Though anti-populist in the extreme, the bulb ban in fact evinces none of the polished wonkery you’d expect from sophisticated technocrats. For starters, it’s not clear what the point is. Why should the government try to make consumers use less electricity? There’s no foreign policy reason. Electricity comes mostly from coal, natural gas and nuclear plants, all domestic sources. So presumably the reason has something to do with air pollution or carbon-dioxide emissions.

But banning light bulbs is one of the least efficient ways imaginable to attack those problems. A lamp using power from a clean source is treated the same as a lamp using power from a dirty source. A ban gives electricity producers no incentive to reduce emissions.

China finally admits to (some) problems at the Three Gorges megadam

Filed under: China, Environment, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:47

It’s been “officially” a wonderful thing with absolutely no negative attributes for so long that it’s almost refreshing that the Chinese government is finally admitting it’s not all good news around the massive Three Gorges dam and reservoir:

In private, officials have worried about the project for some time and occasionally their doubts have surfaced in the official media. But the government itself has refused to acknowledge them. When the project was approved by the rubber-stamp parliament in 1992, debate was stifled by the oppressive political atmosphere of the time, following the Tiananmen Square massacre three years earlier. Last July, with the dam facing its biggest flood crest since completion in 2006, officials hinted that they might have overstated its ability to control flooding. On May 18th, with the dam again in the spotlight because of the drought, a cabinet meeting chaired by the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, went further in acknowledging drawbacks.

Having called the dam “hugely beneficial overall”, the cabinet’s statement said there were problems relating to the resettlement of 1.4m people, to the environment and to the “prevention of geological disasters” that urgently needed addressing. The dam, it said, had had “a certain impact” on navigation, irrigation and water-supply downstream. Some of these problems had been forecast at the design stage or spotted during construction. But they had been “difficult to resolve effectively because of limitations imposed by conditions at the time.” It did not elaborate.

June 9, 2011

Those ungrateful peasants

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Government, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

I had wondered about the origins of that bit of verse:

I asked if people were perhaps not tricked, but legitimately voting against the left because they objected to socialist policies such a massive spending and multiculturalism.

He responded that these issues were indeed difficult for ‘common people’ to comprehend, and therefore for the right to take advantage of. He reiterated however that the problem was not with the policies, it was that people did not ‘understand’.

This was a revealing statement, for it is a typical line of thinking across the left-wing political spectrum, from the most hardened communist to the most moderate social-democrat. While all leftists claim to be for the ‘people’, at the same time they have utter contempt for the people.

They believe they know what is best for the people, and if the people — uppity ungrateful peasants — object, then the people be damned.

Bertolt Brecht — ironically himself a dedicated Marxist — poked fun at this leftist mentality in a now famous poem, Die Lösung (The Solution), following a workers uprising against the Communist East German government in 1956.

    After the uprising of the 17th of June
    The Secretary of the Writers Union
    Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
    Stating that the people
    Had forfeited the confidence of the government
    And could win it back only
    By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
    In that case for the government
    To dissolve the people
    And elect another?

June 7, 2011

QotD: The Bill of Rights on federal government property

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

Friends,

There’s been a hassle on FaceBook about what civilians and cops can or can’t do on “government property”, with some saying the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply there. I wrote this in response:

A little civics lesson, gentlemen, if you will allow me. The Bill of Rights is misnamed. It is not a list of things we are “allowed” to do, it is a list of things that government is not allowed to do, principally to trespass against certain natural liberties that are ours simply by virtue of our having been born.

The Bill of rights, therefore, is actively in force any time, any place that there are human beings. If it were metaphysically possible (it is not) it would apply even more on so-called government property than anyplace else, since it is specifically government that is constrained by it.

Moreover, since it is not just Americans who are human beings (contrary to what many seem to believe) it puts a whole new face on the legality — or illegality — of war, and in particular the treatment being accorded to the political prisoners at Guantanamo and similar places.

L. Neil Smith, “Letters to the Editor”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2011-06-05.

June 6, 2011

Further extending the powers of the “Imperial Presidency”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:51

All that’s left is to start posting proscription lists and calling him “Father of his country” and getting his Secret Service detail to carry fasces1:

Let’s leave aside whether your position on bombing Libya while leading NATO from behind has anything to do with hawk or dove status. You don’t need to be the real Bob Taft or Bob Dole to start muttering about “Democrat wars.”

It’s a sad day for the Republic when insisting that the president actually, you know, get an authorization of force as kinda sorta suggested by the Constitution is seen as akin to open rebellion or creating a fifth column. What is this, Star Wars? Rome? As Tim Cavanaugh and that other super-peacenik outfit, the Washington Times, point out, between Kucinich’s and Boehner’s all-too-timid requests, three-quarters of the House of Representatives have expressed dissatisfaction when it comes to how Obama is deploying troops. The only real question is when Congress is going to take the advice of good ol’ Sharron Angle and man up already and start playing its actual role as a counterweight to an imperial presidency that has never served the nation any good.

1 The fasces were bundles of rods wrapped around an axe carried by Roman lictors who accompanied magistrates in Republican Rome. They represented the ability of the magistrate to dispense low justice (the rods, symbolizing corporal punishment) and high justice (the axe for capital punishment). The symbol was adopted by other nations and political movements after the fall of the empire.

Oxfam’s latest report a Curate’s Egg

Filed under: Economics, Food, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

Tim Worstall points out the good bits first:

Oxfam’s latest campaign, “Grow”, seems so lovely and cuddly that to criticise it is almost like torturing puppies. What could be wrong with trying to feed the hungry and thus make the world a better place? Alas, if wishes were kings we could all be monarchs for the day and what’s wrong with the campaign is not the initial wish but the list of damn fool things it intends to do.

Praise first: Oxfam is quite right that there are several entirely stupid things that are being done about food currently. The first and most obvious is the biofuels nonsense: food should go into people, or at least animals we can eat, not into cars. But the European Union has insisted that 10 per cent (to rise to 15 per cent) of all petrol/diesel must be made from plants instead. Oxfam seems to think that this will reduce emissions: despite every scientist worthy of his slide rule pointing out that growing and processing the plants emits more than the oil being replaced.

Another policy we should stop yesterday is the subsidy of the rich world’s farmers. Can’t make a profit growing what people want to eat? Then stop and do something else. We say this to car makers, to buggy whip makers and there’s nothing about wading in cow shit that makes farming any different. New Zealand did it and farming profits went up.

Well, that’s about it for the good:

And then the report goes entirely doolally over commodities speculation, over futures and options. One of the points the report makes (in one of the good bits) is that price volatility is damaging both to producers and consumers. So we’d like to have some method of dampening such volatility. At which point it insists that this means we must lessen speculation in foodstuffs. But, umm, speculation in foodstuffs is what dampens price volatility in foodstuffs.

If any Oxfam type happens to read this by mischance, here’s why. To make money in commodities you have to buy low and sell high. When you buy low you prevent prices from falling further, in fact you raise them: maybe only a little depending on how much of the market you’re buying, but raise them you do. Good, so we’ve just reduced the slumping of prices which do so much damage to farmers. When you sell high you’re increasing the supply onto the market at a time of shortage. This reduces the price volatility at the high end which does such damage to consumers. So, our speculator making money reduces price volatility: it’s only the speculator who buys high and sells low who increases it and as he goes bust very quickly we don’t need to worry about him.

The term in the headline explained.

June 3, 2011

June 6 is Tax Freedom Day in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:27

You can find your personal tax freedom day (if you live in Canada) by visiting the Fraser Institute’s Tax Freedom Day Calculator.

QotD: New York City, the capital city of Nanny State

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Food, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:49

The lowest blow in City Hall’s war on wicked food is its recurring efforts to ban the buying of fizzy pop with food stamps. In an initiative that could easily be titled ‘No Coke for poor black folk’, the Bloombergers have sought federal permission to prevent welfare recipients from using government cash to purchase fizzy drinks. The killjoyism of this campaign, the Scrooge-infused miserabilism of it, is astounding. City Hall has launched an advertising campaign demonising sugary drinks as one of the great evils of our time, and its internal email correspondence about the campaign, which was leaked to the New York Times, shines a rather harsh light on the evidence-lite nastiness of the modern-day nudge-and-nanny industry. Scientific advisers emailed Thomas Farley, Bloomberg’s overactive health adviser, to say that the ad’s claim that drinking pop can make you gain 10 or 15 pounds is ‘simplistic’ and ‘exaggerated’. Overriding them, Farley responded: ‘I think what people fear is getting fat, so we need some statement about what is bad about consuming so many calories.’ Who needs evidence when you have fear? The ad shows human fat gurgling from the top of a can of soda. One City Hall employee could barely conceal his excitement: it is ‘deliciously disgusting’, he said in one of the emails that was leaked.

‘Deliciously disgusting’ — that just about sums up how New York’s new rulers view the huddled masses of this extravagant city. In a complete reversal of the traditional democratic relationship, Bloomberg and co don’t consider it their duty to mirror the desires and outlook of those who elected them. They want to remake New Yorkers as models of what they consider to be healthy citizenship. Much of this stuff comes from Thomas Farley, who is championed by both Bloomberg and the liberal media as an admirably thin jogging aficionado who believes in the power of the nudge to remould the citizenry. He is a ‘superman’, the New York Times recently gushed, who has ‘grasshopper-like legs’ (eurgh), a result of the fact that ‘he exercises seven days a week, loves his vegetables and has never smoked a cigarette’ (boring). This fanboy fluff piece was illustrated with a picture of Farley leading a workout of not-so-thin black New Yorkers, his grasshopper-like legs just as sure a sign of his superiority as his white skin would have been 100 years ago.

Brendan O’Neill, “The men who killed New York”, The Spectator, 2011-06-04

For the federal government, $1B is a rounding error

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:46

Terence Corcoran glares balefully at what the federal government considers “deep cuts”:

We are destined for two days of political self-congratulation in Ottawa. Throne speech Friday. Budget Monday. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, will use these opportunities to heap praise on their even-keeled and prudent handling of the economy, their deft manoeuvring of federal finances through the global storm, and their unwavering determination to guide us through the many uncertainties that lie ahead.

What they will not talk about is how they are going to balance the federal budget on target. Even less likely are any signs of enthusiasm for what should be a Conservative priority: reducing government spending.

That project has been shuffled off to Tony Clement at Treasury Board, where he will chair a small Cabinet committee that will dither away for a year trying to find the fiscal equivalent of nickels and dimes in a piggy bank the size of the House of Commons. Their first year target is $1-billion in cuts in departmental budgets of $120-billion, a spending reduction of less than 1%.

This is not good enough, not even close. For future years, Mr. Clement’s team will be hunting for an additional $3-billion in annual savings aiming for a total reduction of $4-billion by 2014, or about 1.3% of Ottawa’s total expenses of $300-billion.

As anyone who has ever done a family budget, or worked through tough times on a corporate budget, a 1% cut is a piece of cake, not much more than a rounding error.

June 1, 2011

Similarities between US public schools and prisons

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:49

As kids, we always used to grumble about school and it being “like a prison”. Kids today probably say the same thing, but with rather more reason:

In the United States today, our public schools are not very good at educating our students, but they sure are great training grounds for learning how to live in a Big Brother police state control grid. Sadly, life in many U.S. public schools is now essentially equivalent to life in U.S. prisons. Most parents don’t realize this, but our students have very few rights when they are in school. Our public school students are being watched, tracked, recorded, searched and controlled like never before. Back when I was in high school, it was unheard of for a police officer to come to school, but today our public school students are being handcuffed and arrested in staggering numbers. When I was young we would joke that going to school was like going to prison, but today that is actually true.

The following are 18 signs that life in our public schools is now very similar to life in our prisons….

#1 Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has announced that school officials can search the cell phones and laptops of public school students if there are “reasonable grounds for suspecting that the search will turn up evidence that the student has violated or is violating either the law or the rules of the school.”

#2 It came out in court that one school district in Pennsylvania secretly recorded more than 66,000 images of students using webcams that were embedded in school-issued laptops that the students were using at home.

#3 If you can believe it, a “certified TSA official” was recently brought in to oversee student searches at the Santa Fe High School prom.

May 31, 2011

QotD: The paternalistic view of (some) crime victims

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:47

. . . there are certain regularities, and one of them is the way in which the victims of men such as Griffiths are described in the Guardian, the house journal of the British intelligentsia and its bureaucratic hangers-on. This is important because it illustrates the way in which a dominant elite — dominant de facto if not always de jure — thinks about social problems.

An article describing the victims of Wright, the Ipswich murderer, was titled THE WOMEN PUT INTO HARM’S WAY BY DRUGS. A similar article about Griffiths’s victims was headed “CROSSBOW CANNIBAL” VICTIMS’ DRUG HABITS MADE THEM VULNERABLE TO VIOLENCE. In other words, these women became prostitutes by force majeure, on the streets not because of choices they had made but because of chemical substances that controlled them without any conscious intervention on their part — no more than if, say, an abyss caused by an earthquake had suddenly opened up and swallowed them.

Now either we are all like this — no different from inanimate objects, which act and react mechanically, as Descartes supposed that dogs and cats did — or we are not. The view that we are brings with it certain difficulties. No one could live as if it were true; no one thinks of himself, or of those about him, as automatons; we are all faced with the need to make conscious decisions, to weigh alternatives in our minds, every waking hour of every day. Human life would be impossible, literally inconceivable, without consciousness and conscious decision making. It is true that certain medical conditions, such as temporal-lobe epilepsy during fits, deprive people of normal consciousness and that they nevertheless continue to behave in a recognizably human way; but if all, or even most, of humanity suffered from those conditions, human life would soon be at an end.

Assuming, then, that not everyone is driven to what he does by his own equivalent of drug addiction, the Guardian must assume that Wright’s and Griffiths’s victims were fundamentally different from you and me. Unlike us, they were not responsible for their actions; they did not make choices; they were not human in the fullest sense. Not only is this a view unlikely to find much favor with women who resemble the victims in some way; it also has potentially the most illiberal consequences. For it would justify us, the full human beings, in depriving such women of liberty. If “their hopeless addiction to heroin, alcohol or crack cocaine led them to sell their bodies in the red light district on the edge of Bradford city centre and made them vulnerable to violence,” as the article tells us, surely we should force our help on them to recover their full humanity, or, if that proves impossible, take them into preventive detention to protect them. They are the sheep, we the shepherds.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Murder Most Academic: A British Ph.D. candidate puts “homicide studies” into practice”, City Journal, 2011-05-31

May 26, 2011

Reason.tv: The government’s war on cameras

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 17:09

Here’s a different way to pay for socialized medicine

Filed under: Economics, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:35

Kevin Drum has an interesting proposal in Mother Jones:

So here’s an idea: why not reform Medicare by means testing it? Conservatives should love this idea.

Here’s how it works. Basically, we leave Medicare alone. Oh, we can still go ahead with some of the obvious reforms. Comparative effectiveness research is a no-brainer for anyone who’s not part of the Republican leadership. Ditto for some of the delivery reforms on the table. Or allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower prices. It would be great if that stuff works. But if it doesn’t, then people will need to pay more for their care. So why not have dead people pay? They don’t need the money any more, after all.

So Medicare stays roughly the same, but every time you receive medical care you also get a bill. You don’t have to pay it, though. It’s just there for accounting purposes. When you die, the bill gets paid out of your estate. If your estate is small or nonexistent, you’ve gotten lots of free medical care. If it’s large, you’ll pay for it all. If you’re somewhere in between, you’ll end up paying for part of the care you’ve received.

Obviously this gives people incentives to spend all their money before they die. That’s fine. I suspect they wouldn’t end up spending as much as you’d think. What it does mean, though, is that Medicare has first claim on their estate, not their kids. But that seems fair, doesn’t it?

It has the virtue of acknowledging that free healthcare isn’t actually “free” at all.

May 20, 2011

Only one high speed rail line in the world is profitable

Filed under: Economics, Government, Japan, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

Babbage looks at the economics of the various high speed railway lines both in service and planned:

Of all the high-speed train services around the world, only one really makes economic sense — the 550km (350-mile) Shinkansen route that connects the 30m people in greater Tokyo to the 20m residents of the Kansai cluster of cities comprising Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto and Nara. At peak times, up to 16 bullet trains an hour travel each way along the densely populated coastal plain that is home to over half of Japan’s 128m people.

Having worked for many years in Tokyo, with family in Osaka, your correspondent has made the two-and-a-half hour journey on the Tokaido bullet-train many times. It is clean, fast and highly civilised, though far from cheap. It beats flying, which is unbearably cramped by comparison, just as pricey, and dumps you an hour from downtown at either end.

The sole reason why Shinkansen plying the Tokaido route make money is the sheer density — and affluence — of the customers they serve. All the other Shinkansen routes in Japan lose cart-loads of cash, as high-speed trains do elsewhere in the world. Only indirect subsidies, creative accounting, political patronage and national chest-thumping keep them rolling.

California’s planned 800-mile high speed rail route cannot possibly earn a profit, for many reasons (not least of which is that the first segment of the network won’t even run high speed trains until the entire system is built). It’s going to cost an eye-watering amount of money even to build that first section:

Between them, the federal government, municipals along the proposed route and an assortment of private investors are being asked to chip in $30 billion. A further $10 billion is to be raised by a bond issue that Californian voters approved in 2008. Anything left unfunded will have to be met by taxpayers. They could be dunned for a lot. A study carried out in 2008 by the Reason Foundation and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association put the final cost of the complete 800-mile network at $81 billion.That is probably not far off the mark. Last week, the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office came out with a damning indictment of the project’s unrealistic cost estimates and poor management. The bill this legislative watchdog put on the first phase of the high-speed rail project alone is $67 billion — and higher still if the project runs into trouble gaining route approval in urban areas.

If the latter number is correct, then the first phase of the system is clocking in at nearly $1 billion per mile. And this is the “cheap” section running through mostly thinly populated farming areas. If, somehow, the more expensive sections of the planned network don’t cost much more, the total construction bill will top $800 billion. The original plan had the entire system costing $43 billion.

Cost overruns are an expected part of major government construction projects, but that’s insane.

May 17, 2011

Final legacy of the “Cash for Clunkers” program: higher used car prices

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

Remember the “Cash for Clunkers” program? It was supposed to give the auto industry a shot in the arm by buying up older vehicles, giving the owners vouchers toward (certain) new vehicles, then destroying the traded-in clunker. Even at the time, economists tried to point out that this was just an elaborate “broken window” fallacy.

Today, use car prices are indeed soaring:

As news outlets around the country are reporting, the price of used cars has lately soared to a modern-day record, with some cars commanding more used than they sold for when new. News accounts commonly finger the Japanese earthquake and high gas prices as reasons, but there are some problems fitting either reason to the case. While the earthquake affected the supply of new cars, it’s the previously driven kind that has scored the more impressive price jump. And while the rise in gas prices would explain a relative shift in buyer demand from SUVs and trucks toward smaller vehicles — which has indeed happened — the strength of the used-vehicle market lately has been such that even the thirstier vehicles have advanced in price, $4 gas or no.

No doubt there are multiple reasons for the price spike, including the severe general slump in new-auto sales in recent years, which has reduced the volume of newer cars coming onto the resale market. But — as Washington scrambles to take undeserved credit for whatever passes for normalization in the auto business these days — it’s worth remembering that an artificial scarcity of used cars isn’t just bad for the poor as a group: it’s bad in particular for the upwardly mobile poor, since in most of the country landing a job means needing to line up transportation to get to that job. When it suddenly costs $6,000 instead of $3,000 to get wheels, the move from unemployment to a paying job faces a new and discouraging barrier.

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