Quotulatiousness

February 4, 2013

A legal spectre is haunting the NFL

Filed under: Football, Health, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:12

In the wake of a vastly entertaining SuperBowl contest between the “San Francisco 50-1’ers”* and the “Baltimore Black Birds”*, Steve Chapman outlines the possibility that we won’t see too many more SuperBowl games:

Professional football is the most popular spectator sport in America, which is one reason yesterday’s Super Bowl was expected to draw 110 million viewers. With its famous athletes, storied franchises, and lucrative TV contracts, it’s an industry whose future appears limitless.

But football has a problem: the specter of mass brain damage among current and former players. So far, the steady trickle of disturbing revelations has had no apparent effect on ticket sales or TV ratings. What it has done, though, is more ominous: It has invited lawsuits.

If football falls into decline, it may not be the result of fans turning away, athletes avoiding it, or parents forbidding it. It may be from lawyers representing players who sustained chronic traumatic encephalopathy and expect to be compensated for the damage.

[. . .]

Walter Olson, a Cato Institute fellow, blogger (Overlawyered.com), and author of several books on liability, knows well how a tide of litigation can transform a landscape. And he has a bold prediction: “If we were to apply the same legal principles to football as we do to other industries, it would have to become extremely different, if not go out of business.”

“Seriously?” you may ask. A guy who made a good living engaging in high-speed collisions with 300-lb. blocks of granite can say he didn’t understand the risks involved? It may seem that case will be laughed out of court.

But Olson thinks not. “Courts have not been very friendly to this argument, particularly when something as grave as permanent brain damage is involved,” he told me. And it’s become apparent that while players were aware of the possibility of mangled knees, broken bones, and concussions, they didn’t grasp that repeated blows to the head could produce debilitating and irreversible mental harms.

* See the Samsung commercial in this post for explanation of the team names.

Everything is cyclical — Baby Boom to Baby Bust

Filed under: Economics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

In the Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Last looks at the demographic changes on tap for the United States as the fertility rate continues to drop below replacement:

The fertility rate is the number of children an average woman bears over the course of her life. The replacement rate is 2.1. If the average woman has more children than that, population grows. Fewer, and it contracts. Today, America’s total fertility rate is 1.93, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; it hasn’t been above the replacement rate in a sustained way since the early 1970s.

The nation’s falling fertility rate underlies many of our most difficult problems. Once a country’s fertility rate falls consistently below replacement, its age profile begins to shift. You get more old people than young people. And eventually, as the bloated cohort of old people dies off, population begins to contract. This dual problem — a population that is disproportionately old and shrinking overall — has enormous economic, political and cultural consequences.

For two generations we’ve been lectured about the dangers of overpopulation. But the conventional wisdom on this issue is wrong, twice. First, global population growth is slowing to a halt and will begin to shrink within 60 years. Second, as the work of economists Esther Boserups and Julian Simon demonstrated, growing populations lead to increased innovation and conservation. Think about it: Since 1970, commodity prices have continued to fall and America’s environment has become much cleaner and more sustainable — even though our population has increased by more than 50%. Human ingenuity, it turns out, is the most precious resource.

Low-fertility societies don’t innovate because their incentives for consumption tilt overwhelmingly toward health care. They don’t invest aggressively because, with the average age skewing higher, capital shifts to preserving and extending life and then begins drawing down. They cannot sustain social-security programs because they don’t have enough workers to pay for the retirees. They cannot project power because they lack the money to pay for defense and the military-age manpower to serve in their armed forces.

Update: Kelly McParland on the plight of some older workers: “If they’d never worked at all, and gotten by on social assistance, they might still have a financial lifeline.”

It would be cruel (and maybe unfair) to say they made their own beds, but it remains the fact that a great deal of the trouble they face results from the refusal to brook a more prudent approach to public finances for so many years. Programs that were unaffordable were pushed through time and again, paid for by more and more borrowing. When crises developed, the borrowing increased while spending was only rarely curtailed. The curse of deficit financing is its snowball effect: annual shortfalls pile up, pushing up the carrying costs, creating a self-perpetuating ever-expanding spending crisis. When a recession inevitably arrives, there are no reserves to deal with it, and even more borrowing ensues.

After so many decades of pretending it could go on forever, without there being a reckoning, the generation that created it is discovering how wrong they were. Not only is it destroying the retirement dreams of so many near-seniors, it’s preparing a poisoned legacy to hand to the next generation, and perhaps the one after that, unless they recognize the need for greater discipline and finally accept the pain that will necessary to put the process back on a sustainable track.

Canada is fortunate that it faced up to its debt crisis 15 years ago and is still benefiting from that fact, but the public memory is short and there will always be pressure to turn a blind eye to debt, and legislate for today. No wonder people get more conservative as they get older. They understand the price that has to be paid for putting costs off to tomorrow.

February 3, 2013

Bureaucracy and the would-be small business owner

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:40

It took me less than a day to start my own business — and it was all done online. We have it good: Canada is at the top of the league table for ease of starting a new business. Americans don’t have it as easy as we do:

Last week, having read my own writing about how it’s cheaper to buy a house than rent one in most markets, I decided to take my own advice. My wife and I bought a new place, and instead of selling our old condo, we’re going to rent it out. And thus I became a small-business man.

Or, rather, I’m becoming one. Entrepreneurship — even on the smallest and most banal scale — turns out to be a time-consuming pain in the you-know-what. My personal inconveniences aren’t a big deal, but in the aggregate, the difficulty of launching a business is a problem and it may be a more important one as time goes on.

[. . .]

The striking thing about all this isn’t so much that it was annoying — which it was — but that it had basically nothing to do with what the main purpose of landlord regulation should be — making sure I’m not luring tenants into some kind of unsafe situation. The part where the unit gets inspected to see if it’s up to code is a separate step. I was instructed to await a scheduling call that ought to take place sometime in the next 10 business days.

Not that I expect your pity. I don’t even pity myself. Going through the process, I mostly felt lucky to be a fluent-English-speaking college graduate with a flexible work schedule. But the presence of a stray pamphlet offering translation into Spanish, Chinese, or Amharic seemed like it would be only marginally useful to an immigrant entrepreneur. A person who needs to be at her day job from 9 to 5 would have a huge problem even getting to these offices while they’re open.

The bureaucratic hassles of entrepreneurship turn out to vary pretty substantially from place to place. The World Bank has a fairly crude measure of how easy it is to start a business in different countries and ranks the United States 13th. North of the border in Canada (ranked third), there’s typically just one “procedure” — a paperwork filing, basically — needed to launch a business. In America, it takes more like six.

US poised to increase involvement in Mali

Filed under: Africa, France, Military, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:27

Sheldon Richman explains why it could be a problem if the American presence in northwestern Africa is further expanded:

Ominously but unsurprisingly, the U.S. military’s Africa Command wants to increase its footprint in northwest Africa. What began as low-profile assistance to France’s campaign to wrest control of northern Mali (a former colony) from unwelcome jihadists could end up becoming something more.

The Washington Post reports that Africom “is preparing to establish a drone base in northwest Africa [probably Niger] so that it can increase surveillance missions on the local affiliate of Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups that American and other Western officials say pose a growing menace to the region.” But before that word “surveillance” can bring a sigh of relief, the Post adds, “For now, officials say they envision flying only unarmed surveillance drones from the base, though they have not ruled out conducting missile strikes at some point if the threat worsens.”

Meanwhile Bloomberg, citing American military officials, says Niger and the U.S. government have “reached an agreement allowing American military personnel to be stationed in the West African country and enabling them to take on Islamist militants in neighboring Mali, according to U.S. officials.… No decision has been made to station the drones.”

The irony is that surveillance drones could become the reason the “threat worsens,” and could provide the pretext to use drones armed with Hellfire missiles — the same kind used over 400 times in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, killing hundreds of noncombatants. Moving from surveillance to lethal strikes would be a boost for jihadist recruiters.

February 1, 2013

USS Guardian to be dismantled in place after grounding on coral reef

Filed under: Environment, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

The US Navy has decided that the best course of action is to break up the minesweeper USS Guardian after it ran solidly aground on a coral reef in the Sulu Sea:

USS Guardian aground in the Sulu Sea January 2013

“We’re working very closely with the Philippine coast guard, with their navy and their government personnel. We’ve been grateful for their support as we all work together to remove Guardian and minimize further damage to the reef,” James said.

It’s expected to take over a month to dismantle the Guardian, which ran aground before dawn on Jan. 17.

Crews have already removed 15,000 gallons of fuel from the ship. They’ve also taken off hundreds of gallons of lubricating oil and paint. They’ll be removing human wastewater and other materials that could harm the environment, James said.

The U.S. Navy is hiring floating cranes to help with the removal. A contractor in Singapore is sending the cranes, which should arrive on site in a few days.

The Navy originally said the Guardian would be lifted by crane onto a barge and taken to a shipyard. But now the Navy says the ship is “beyond economical repair.”

No one was injured when the ship ran aground at the reef in the Tubbataha National Marine Park. The park is a World Heritage Site in the Sulu Sea, about 400 miles southwest of Manila.

Update, 8 February: A bit more information about the salvage operations which are supposed to have started on February 4th.

January 31, 2013

Blaming “austerity” for most recent slowdown

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

David Harsanyi discusses the named (by the mainstream media) culprits for the unexpected drop in US fourth-quarter GDP:

So, U.S. consumer confidence unexpectedly plunged in January to its lowest level in more than a year. The U.S. economy unexpectedly posted a contraction in the fourth quarter of 2012 — for the first time since the recession — “defying” expectations that economic growth is in our future.

If the economy were as vibrant as President Barack Obama has told us it is, a belt tightening in a single sector of government surely wouldn’t be enough to bring about “negative growth.” But one did. Unexpectedly. No worries, though. Pundits on the left tell us that this contraction was good news — possibly the best contraction in the history of all contractions. The White House blamed Republicans and, I kid you not, corporate jet owners because — well, who else? But mostly, the left is bellyaching about the end of temporary military spending and a brutal austerity that’s enveloped a once great nation.

There’s a small problem with that argument. There is no austerity. In the fourth quarter of 2012, Washington spent $908 billion, which was $30 billion more than it spent in the last quarter of 2011 and nearly $100 billion more than it spent in the third quarter of 2012. Taxpayers took on another $400 billion in debt during the quarter. If this is poverty, can you imagine what robust spending looks like?

As always, for “austerity” to take the blame, there’d actually have to have been some austerity to start with. The US government certainly hasn’t been practicing austerity over the last four years.

January 30, 2013

Sequestration cuts must be more likely to happen because the sob stories are getting traction

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:53

Tad Dehaven thinks the upsurge in horror stories about what sequestration will do to the US economy means it’s more likely that those cuts will actually take place:

The odds that $85 billion in “unthinkable, draconian” sequestration spending cuts will go into effect in March as scheduled are looking better. The odds must be getting better because, as if on cue, the horror stories have commenced.

A perfect example is an article in the Washington Post that details the angst and suffering being experienced by federal bureaucrats and other taxpayer dependents over the mere possibility that the “drastic” cuts will occur. You see, the uncertainty surrounding the issue has forced government employees to draw up contingency plans. Contingency plans? Oh, the humanity!

[. . .]

I certainly believe that Washington’s bouncing from one manufactured fiscal crisis to the next is detrimental to the economy, but my sympathy lies with the private sector – not the federal bureaucracy. It’s the private sector that has been suffering under the constant uncertainty surrounding federal tax and regulatory policy. And let’s not forget that there is no public sector without the private sector – the former existing entirely at the latter’s expense.

Yet, what follows in the Post article is boo-hoo after boo-hoo without the slightest regard to those who are paying for it or whether the whiner’s agency could use some belt-tightening

American fourth quarter GDP down 0.1%

Filed under: Economics, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:29

The optimistic folks at Business Insider assure us that the unexpectedly bad number for the US fourth quarter hides some good news:

People will be stunned to see that today’s GDP report went negative for Q4… the first negative print since The Great Recession.

But the report isn’t that bad. In fact it was arguably good.

For one thing, most of the collapse was due to a stunning fall in military spending. That’s not good for GDP, but it doesn’t reflect the real underlying strength of the economy.

And it’s mostly due to war drawdown. That’s a good thing for everyone!

There’s a big, unstated reason for illegal immigration in the United States

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:07

The illegal immigration problem won’t improve until the American government addresses the difficulties of legal immigration:

Reason, October 2008 - What Part of Legal Immigration Don't You Understand?!?!?

Reason, October 2008 – What Part of Legal Immigration Don’t You Understand?!?!?

Click the image to see the larger version.

January 28, 2013

Women in combat roles

Filed under: Cancon, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

In the Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente “celebrates” the recent announcement by the US government that American women will soon be allowed to take front-line combat jobs:

In a milestone for gender equality, the Pentagon is finally ending the combat ban for women – a ban that had become woefully obsolete. At last, women warriors will get the recognition and promotions they deserve. The brass ceiling has been shattered, and that’s good news for both women and the military.

But she admits that there are problems with the new rules:

But please, people. Let’s get real. Women cannot equal men in ground combat, the kind of dirty, brutal stuff that (fortunately) makes up a very minor part of modern military life, especially post-Afghanistan. It’s not that they can’t be trained to kill — they can. The issue is that the physical differences between men and women are very large, and on the battlefield, they really matter, and can’t be wished away. Men are better fighters because they are bigger and stronger and can endure far more physical punishment before they break down.

The average female soldier is “about five inches shorter than the male soldier, has half the upper body strength, lower aerobic capacity and 37 per cent less muscle mass,” Stephanie Gutmann, author of The Kinder, Gentler Military, wrote in the New Republic. “She cannot pee standing up … She tends, particularly if she is under the age of 30 (as are 60 per cent of military personnel) to get pregnant.”

And there’s the practical experience the Canadian army has accumulated:

Overall, women account for 14 per cent of all jobs in the Canadian Forces, a slightly lower percentage than in the U.S. As a result of a human-rights decision, front-line combat jobs were opened to women in 1989. Yet today, despite strenuous recruiting efforts, women hold just 2.4 per cent of these jobs. Their commanding officers praise their competence but treat them differently, by shielding them from combat. According to a Wall Street Journal report this week, the widespread impression among Canadian female soldiers — much to their frustration — is they are used “only sparingly.” Men serving next to women also exhibit a counterproductive battlefield trait: protectiveness. They want to carry women’s gear and keep them out of harm’s way. As one male soldier told the Journal, “That brother-sister protective thought was always in the back of your mind.”

When I was in the militia in the mid-1970s, our basic training was fully integrated: the girls did the same physical training and field exercises as the boys. Even in peacetime, it was quite obvious that the sections with girls in them were doing what they could to encourage the girls to pass the training (re-distributing their gear to the others in the section, and pairing the girls up with the biggest guys for the more physical duties like digging trenches, etc.). I can only imagine that the same thing goes on in actual combat conditions.

Fortunately, we didn’t have any of the girls drop out for pregnancy (it was a summer training course of just about two months duration), but the US military reported that over 10% of all women in combat zones (not in actual front-line combat) were evacuated from the combat zone due to pregnancy in 2008.

January 27, 2013

Reason.tv: Two Cheers for the Coming Collapse of the U.S. Economy!

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:13

“At some point, holders of Treasury securities are going to recognize that these unfunded liabilities are going to affect the fiscal capabilities of the government and then you’re going to have the same situation that happened in Greece happening in the U.S.,” says Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, who is a professor of economics at San Jose State University and the author of a recent paper on the consequences of a U.S. government default. “In the short run it’s going to be painful, but in the long run it’ll be a good thing.”

Reason‘s Nick Gillespie sat down with Hummel at FreedomFest 2012 for a wide-ranging discussion on monetary policy, business cycle theory, the longevity of the welfare state, and why libertarians who rail against the Fed are like “generals fighting the last war.”

Held each July in Las Vegas, FreedomFest is attended by around 2,000 limited-government enthusiasts and libertarians a year. Reason TV spoke with over two dozen speakers and attendees.

January 22, 2013

Jazz has been shaped not only by musicians, but also by non-musical forces

Filed under: Books, History, Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:42

Robert Fulford talks about some of the unexpected changes in society and how they impacted the evolution of Jazz music:

Marc Myers, who writes for the Wall Street Journal and blogs at JazzWax.com, shrewdly 
explains this process in his new book, Why Jazz Happened (University of California Press). He describes how events ranging from city planning to inventions in sound technology altered the nature of jazz during three decades beginning in 1942. In those 30 years jazz changed from an accompaniment to dancing and drinking to a concert-based performance art directed at careful, even scholarly listeners. Myers can give at least half a dozen reasons why this happened, beginning with the suburbs.

In California the sprawl of the cities did more than shrink the audiences for artists like Teagarden. It also redefined the way jazz musicians worked together. In New York they saw each other often, since most of them lived within a few subway stops. In California they were physically separated and saw each other less often. They had to plan their rehearsals and recordings with care. 
Arrangements became more important to them. And by the end of the 1950s West Coast jazz had its own smooth, orderly, distinctive style, music created by geography.

The G.I. Bill, by which the U.S. government paid the university costs of veterans, had an even larger effect. Under the G.I. Bill John Lewis spent years at the Manhattan School of Music and later founded the Modern Jazz Quartet, the most elegant group of the era. Dick Hyman studied music at Columbia and became a superb all-purpose arranger and pianist. Dave Brubeck learned techniques of composition from Darius Milhaud, a renowned French composer, at Mills College (And Brubeck never let you forget it.) Pete Rugolo, Nelson Riddle and Jimmy Giuffre made themselves musically literate with the government’s support.

They and their students and colleagues became a new community of broadly educated musicians, the first generation of that kind in jazz history. The government, by accident, altered the tone of an art form.

A single genius-level engineer changed the possibilities of jazz form more than anyone else. He was Peter Goldmark, a Jewish Hungarian immigrant who became the star of CBS Laboratories. His name doesn’t get mentioned in Why Jazz Happened, but Myers nevertheless pays tribute to his accomplishment. In 1948 Goldmark introduced the LP, the 33-1/3 rpm disc, which became the worldwide standard until the CD replaced it in the late 1980s.

Before Goldmark, musicians had been limited to single discs running three minutes. Improvisation had to be carefully limited. The LP record allowed them to write or improvise at much greater length.

January 21, 2013

The civil rights movement as an insurgency

Filed under: History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:38

Mark Grimsley explains why the 1960’s civil rights movement should properly be considered an insurgency:

Labeling that movement an insurgency flies in the face of the common perception of what constitutes an insurgency. Three objections spring to mind. One is superficial, though perhaps understandable in the post-9/11 era: Isn’t it outrageous to call the movement an insurgency? Aren’t insurgencies evil? Such a reaction fails to recognize that the term “insurgency” is value-neutral. Insurgents have also fought for noble causes. The United States itself was the product of an insurgency.

The remaining objections are more substantive. First, the movement was nonviolent, so how could it have been an insurgency? After all, even the official U.S. Department of Defense definition of insurgency assumes “armed conflict” as a basic tactic. Second, it is often thought that the civil rights movement received unstinting support from the U.S. government. Popular films such as Mississippi Burning (1988), whose protagonists are Federal Bureau of Investigation agents hell-bent on defeating the Ku Klux Klan, reinforce this interpretation. If so much pressure on segregationist governments emanated from above, then using the term “insurgency” — a challenge to the existing power structure from below — seems preposterous.

These objections, however, hinge on serious misconceptions about the nature of the civil rights movement, about the stance the federal government took toward civil rights, and above all about the scope of the “insurgency” concept. Once these are cleared away, the notion of the movement as an insurgency becomes more plausible. Ultimately, it becomes inescapable.

Typically, groups excluded from power wage wars of insurgency, and Southern blacks certainly fit that description. Before 1965, few blacks in the Deep South could even vote. Nowhere in the South were they able to influence legislation and law enforcement through the normal political process. The civil rights movement attempted to gain access to political power by coercion. Had it been done with guns, no one would hesitate to think of it as an insurgency.

Reason.tv: It’s not what he said, but how he said it

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:50

“And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”

Reason TV looks back at Obama’s 2009 inaugural address to see how well his rhetoric compares to his first four years in office.

Produced by Meredith Bragg.

January 20, 2013

Corporate welfare — it’s the American way

Filed under: Business, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

Sheldon Richman on the amazingly inefficient US tax code and some of the ways it got that way:

When Congress and President Obama came up with their beyond-the-last-minute deal to put off addressing the coming fiscal crisis, The Wall Street Journal turned the spotlight on a little-noticed, yet too typical aspect of Washington’s machinations: “The bill’s seedier underside is the $40 billion or so in tax payoffs to every crony capitalist and special pleader with a lobbyist worth his million-dollar salary. Congress and the White House want everyone to ignore this corporate-welfare blowout,” the Journal reported.

So a bill that was represented as the first steps toward fiscal responsibility (try not to laugh too hard) contained billions of dollars in corporate welfare. And it was a bipartisan affair.

[. . .]

Manipulating the tax code to benefit particular interests has obvious appeal for politicians — it’s a source of power and influence — and a code that did not permit such manipulation would be much less attractive to them. Outright cash subsidies from the taxpayers, while not unheard of, smacks too much of cronyism and is more likely to alienate taxpayers. But complicated exceptions written into the tax laws can be presented as creative governance on behalf of the public interest. But it is cronyism as offensive as outright subsidies.

[. . .]

Corporate welfare is not primarily about lowering taxes. That would be a worthwhile goal, of course, and could be achieved simply by slashing tax rates and simplifying the code. But when taxes are lowered selectively by writing complicated exceptions into the law, the goal is to bestow privileges on cronies, not to reduce the burden of government on all. Corporate welfare, among its many sins, violates equal protection under the law.

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