Quotulatiousness

December 19, 2012

Clever wording can’t take away an enumerated constitutional right

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:54

Megan McArdle on the pious hopes of those who hope to bring in draconian gun control regulation by abstruse and intricate verbal gymnastics:

Others are suggesting a de-facto ban, accomplished either through a huge tax, or a ban on ammunition. Oh, I’ve also seen calls to limit the amount of ammunition people can buy, but I don’t think those people have thought this through. For starters, the number of bullets used by a typical rampage shooter is about what a target shooter or hunter might go through in an afternoon or two of range practice. And most gun homicides are not rampage shootings; they have one or two victims, and a correspondingly small number of cartridges expended. Moreover, even a very strict per-purchase limit would permit people to accumulate ammunition over time.

No, the people who want to tax guns at 17,000%, or ban ammunition, or make cartridges cost $2,000 apiece, are the only ones hinting at something that might make a real dent in America’s unusually high rate of gun homicide. Except for one thing: you can’t do an end-run around an enumerated right with some sort of semantic game. Chief Justice John Roberts is not Rumplestiltskin; he is not bound by the universe to disappear if you can only find the correct secret word.

You cannot accomplish back-door censorship by taxing at 100% all profits of any news corporation named after a “carnivorous mammal of the dog family with a pointed muzzle and bushy tail, proverbial for its cunning.” You cannot curtail the right to protest by requiring instant background checks and a 90-day waiting period on anyone who wants to assemble with 500 of their friends in a public area. Nor can you restrict the supply of ink used to print Korans. If you pass a law like that, the Supreme Court will say “nice try, guys” and void all the painstakingly constructed verbal origami that was supposed to make civil liberties infringement look like an innocent exercise of the taxing power.

December 18, 2012

The real reason it’s so hard to cut military spending

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

From the January issue of Reason, Veronique de Rugy explains how the system is set up to protect military spending from even the most determined spending cuts:

The Department of Defense, with its 2.3 million workers, is the single largest employer in the United States. The defense industry, which is the main private-sector recipient of defense dollars, directly or indirectly employs another 3 million people. This, in a nutshell, is why it’s so hard to cut government spending in general and military spending in particular.

The scope and reach of the government are far bigger than we think, explains John J. Dilulio of the National Academy of Public Administration in the Spring 2012 issue of National Affairs. It’s more than just the money Washington spends or the people it employs. It’s also the people in the private sector who live off that spending. It’s the nonprofit organizations paid to help administer government programs. It’s the contractors who run the programs, the contractors’ sub-contractors, and so on.

[. . .]

Even when military contractors’ profits have reached an all-time high, Congress seems committed to sheltering the companies from any budget cuts. Industry lobbying probably plays a role here. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the U.S. defense and aerospace lobby doled out $24 million to political campaigns and committees during the 2008 campaign cycle and spent nearly $60 million on lobbying in 2011. Lockheed Martin alone spent $15 million in 2011 on its lobbying efforts, plus $2 million in political contributions. Boeing spent $16 million on lobbying the same year.

In his seminal 1971 article “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” the Nobel-winning economist George Stigler noted that agencies eventually become captive of the very interest groups they were ostensibly designed to police. Writing regulation or even spending legislation requires in-depth industry knowledge, so federal agencies and lawmakers tend to hire directly from the very companies they must oversee or spend money on.

The reverse is true too. In order to gain better access to their regulators and government funds, companies hire lobbyists who used to work for Congress or government agencies. Of the 408 lobbyists employed by the military industry to apply pressure on Congress, 70 percent used to work on Capitol Hill.

December 13, 2012

The ITU’s latest attempt to hijack the internet

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:09

David Gewirtz has the details:

According to The Weekly Standard, the chairman of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) decided to try an end-run around the U.S., Europe, and most freedom-loving nations by conducting a survey of nations and putting forth a resolution that gives governments control over Internet policy, which includes everything you and I send across the pipes.

Apparently, this wasn’t a binding policy, but it’s a political gambit designed to get the UN to continue the process of trying to wrest control of the Internet from those interested in freedom to those interested in control of freedoms.

I’m a strong believer in a global Internet, but I’m starting to think countries like China and Russia and Cuba and the various regressive Middle Eastern states are more trouble than they’re worth. Maybe it’s just time we pulled the Internet plug on them*.

December 12, 2012

“Big Food” is killing us!

Filed under: Cancon, Food, Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

At sp!ked, Rob Lyons debunks a recent video by Canadian anti-corporate activist Dr. Yoni Freedhoff:

This is a handy menu of food-related government intervention that is trotted out all the time by food crusaders everywhere. But before we get to those interventions, maybe we should ask how we got here in the first place.

First, food got cheaper while, on average, we’ve been generally getting richer. In particular, if America is anything to go by, we spent less as a proportion of income on meat and dairy products — surprisingly, spending on fruit and veg has been pretty constant — and more on processed foods and sweets. In other words, we bought convenience with the money we were saving.

Second, suppliers and retailers realised that as food got cheaper, the way to make money was to ‘add value’ — in other words, take basic ingredients and make them more convenient, more ‘fun’, more ‘premium’ or to appeal to some other psychological need. Yes, food manufacturers are as capable of bullshitting as anybody else with something to sell.

One of the other ways that suppliers add value is to make ‘healthy’ products. But who set up those health claims in the first place? It was the media, the medical profession and, most of all, governments. Who said we should be stuffing our faces with fruit to get our ‘five a day’? Who suggested that we get more omega-3s? Who said we should aim to eat low-fat diets? All of these ideas got the big official stamp of approval. And in the spirit of convenience, the food industry has made it easy, for better or for worse, to meet these official goals.

[. . .]

Moreover, what about the wild claims made for organic food? It has a completely spurious image as natural and wholesome, but study after study finds no consistent difference between organic foods and conventional foods — apart from the price. Yet it is often the most vociferously anti-Big Food campaigners, bloggers and ‘experts’ who push organic as the healthy alternative.

[. . .]

Rather than endless calls for regulations, bans and taxes — whose efficacy is doubtful but whose effect on personal autonomy would be substantial — it would be far better to recognise that any diet with some modicum of balance will be fine for most people, who will live to a greater age than their parents or grandparents, on average, no matter how much disapproved food they consume. Claims that any particular food is some dietary panacea should be treated with a large, metaphorical pinch of salt, whoever makes them, whether they are an evil mega corporation or the bloke behind the counter at the health-food shop.

Above all, a similarly healthy scepticism should be applied to crusading medics who want to scare us with the idea that Big Food is out to kill us and who encourage politicians to regulate what we eat.

December 4, 2012

ITU approves Deep Packet Inspection requirement to enable government snooping of internet traffic

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:59

The UN’s International Telecommunications Union continues its in-camera campaign to wrest control of the internet from all other organizations with a new policy designed to please intrusive and authoritarian governments worldwide:

The telecommunications standards arm of the U.N. has quietly endorsed the standardization of technologies that could give governments and companies the ability to sift through all of an Internet user’s traffic – including emails, banking transactions, and voice calls – without adequate privacy safeguards. The move suggests that some governments hope for a world where even encrypted communications may not be safe from prying eyes.

At the core of this development is the adoption of a proposed international standard that outlines requirements for a technology known as “Deep Packet Inspection” (DPI). As we’ve noted several times before, depending on how it is used, DPI has the potential to be extremely privacy-invasive, to defy user expectations, and to facilitate wiretapping.

[. . .]

The ITU-T DPI standard holds very little in reserve when it comes to privacy invasion. For example, the document optionally requires DPI systems to support inspection of encrypted traffic “in case of a local availability of the used encryption key(s).” It’s not entirely clear under what circumstances ISPs might have access to such keys, but in any event the very notion of decrypting the users’ traffic (quite possibly against their will) is antithetical to most norms, policies, and laws concerning privacy of communications. In discussing IPSec, an end-to-end encryption technology that obscures all traffic content, the document notes that “aspects related to application identification are for further study” – as if some future work may be dedicated to somehow breaking or circumventing IPSec.

Several global standards bodies, including the IETF and W3C, have launched initiatives to incorporate privacy considerations into their work. In fact, the IETF has long had a policy of not considering technical requirements for wiretapping in its work, taking the seemingly opposite approach to the ITU-T DPI document, as Germany pointed out in voicing its opposition to the ITU-T standard earlier this year. The ITU-T standard barely acknowledges that DPI has privacy implications, let alone does it provide a thorough analysis of how the potential privacy threats associated with the technology might be mitigated.

These aspects of the ITU-T Recommendation are troubling in light of calls from Russia and a number of Middle Eastern countries to make ITU-T Recommendations mandatory for Internet technology companies and network operators to build into their products. Mandatory standards are a bad idea even when they are well designed. Forcing the world’s technology companies to adopt standards developed in a body that fails to conduct rigorous privacy analysis could have dire global consequences for online trust and users’ rights.

December 3, 2012

We’re from the ITU and we’re here to “fix” your internet

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:32

At Techdirt, Nick Masnick recounts some of the wonderful things the International Telecommunications Union would like to “help” regarding that pesky “internet” thing:

We’ve been talking about the ITU’s upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) for a while now, and it’s no longer “upcoming.” Earlier today, the week and a half session kicked off in Dubai with plenty of expected controversy. The US, the EU and now Australia have all come out strongly against the ITU’s efforts to undermine the existing internet setup to favor authoritarian countries or state-controlled (or formerly state-controlled) telcos who want money for internet things they had nothing to do with. The BBC article above has a pretty good rundown of some of the scarier proposals being pitched behind closed doors at WCIT. Having the US, EU and Australia against these things is good, but the ITU works on a one-vote-per-country system, and plenty of other countries see this as a way to exert more control over the internet, in part to divert funds from elsewhere into their own coffers.

Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the ITU, keeps trying to claim that this is all about increasing internet access, but that’s difficult to square with reality:

    “The brutal truth is that the internet remains largely [the] rich world’s privilege, ” said Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union, ahead of the meeting.

    “ITU wants to change that.”

Of course, internet access has already been spreading to the far corners of the planet without any “help” from the ITU. Over two billion people are already online, representing about a third of the planet. And, yes, spreading that access further is a good goal, but the ITU is not the player to do it. The reason that the internet has been so successful and has already spread as far as it has, as fast as it has, is that it hasn’t been controlled by a bureaucratic government body in which only other governments could vote. Instead, it was built as an open interoperable system that anyone could help build out. It was built in a bottom up manner, mainly by engineers, not bureaucrats. Changing that now makes very little sense.

Canada is also on the record as being against the expansion of the ITU’s role.

Canada will look to prevent governments from taking more power over the Internet when governments sit down for 12 days of negotiations on the future of the Internet next week, but the government didn’t say Thursday where it stands on a contentious proposal that could see users pay more for online content.

Canada’s position going into the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) mirrors a number of Western allies in opposing having governments control how the Internet functions, leaving it to the current mix of public and private sector actors, according to documents released to Postmedia News under access to information laws. That stance is in contrast to proposals from some of the 193 members of the International Telecommunications Union, such as Russia, that want greater control over the Internet — more so than they already have in some cases — including more powers to track user identities online.

The meeting in Dubai will determine whether the ITU, an arm of the United Nations, will receive broad regulatory powers to set rules of road in cyberspace. The potential to centralize control over the Internet into the hands of governments has some users and hacktivists concerned that freedoms online would be crushed should a new binding international treaty change the status quo for how telecommunications companies interact across borders.

November 28, 2012

Is Ontario finally “grown up enough” for private wine stores?

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Law, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:38

In the National Post, David Lawrason talks about the push for changes to Ontario’s Prohibition-era laws regarding the sale of wine in private stores:

The Wine Council of Ontario has flipped the switch on a website called www.mywineshop.ca that allows citizens to create their own virtual wine shop. It is a very bold and clever marketing/lobbying idea. And it is the first time an industry association has initiated a public campaign aimed at creating private wine stores in the province. Gutsy stuff.

In less than a week it has painted an appetite-whetting tapestry of what privatization might look like in Ontario, complete with store themes, stock selections and locations across the province as designed by its citizens. And it is giving the public a very direct way to lobby their local MPPs for change.

One of the big reasons the Ontario wineries and wine writers fear pushing too hard for this modernization and liberalization of our drinking law is that the KGBO LCBO has a long history of retribution against dissenters:

The other theme is fear of LCBO retribution. (Talk about “the elephant in the room”). Even our braveheart John Szabo remarked at the end of his piece that “I hope I don’t get put on an (LCBO) interdiction list for writing this”. An importing agent replying to John’s article said he really wanted to talk about the issue ‘off the record’ as he was concerned that being put on an interdiction list would put him out of business.

This fear of the LCBO, whether justified or not, is another compelling reason to re-think the government monopoly. The fear shouldn’t exist within an otherwise free and democratic society; but it does. I have been writing on wine for over 25 years and during that time I have been involved in thousands of conversations with wineries, importers and consumers on shortcomings of the current system. Only once did an individual agree to be quoted.

When your livelihood depends on access to a product controlled by a monopoly, you dare not get on the wrong side of the powers-that-be controlling that monopoly. They may not break legs or leave horse’s heads in the beds of critics, but they can directly freeze the critics out of their profession. An excellent way to limit dissent. Just the hinted threat can be enough to make a would-be critic decide to toe the line and shut the hell up.

November 24, 2012

Regulating food container size as a form of soft protectionism

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Food — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:54

Terence Corcoran talks about the 1970s-era food packaging regulations that have suddenly become topical:

What started out looking like a regulatory non-event, the Harper government’s plan to repeal scores of petty federal rules governing the size of containers for packaged food in supermarkets, has suddenly become a great national food fight.

It’s industry against industry, food processors versus supply management, Heinz battling Campbell’s, baby-food makers against corn canners — all part of a war over jobs and trade and consumer dollars. Nominally over antiquated federal regulations, it’s also a war that highlights another reason why Canadian consumers pay more for products at the retail level.

[. . .]

Never mind peanut butter. Ottawa has detailed container specs for what looks like every food product on store shelves: canned vegetables, fruit juices, vacuum-packed corn, tomato juice, maple syrup, frozen spinach, pork and beans, bagged potatoes, soups, desserts, pies, sauerkraut, horseradish sauce, wine — and many more.

It is unclear why these detailed container-size regulations exist, but one explanation is that they are a result of Ottawa’s mass conversion to metric measure in the 1970s under then prime minister Pierre Trudeau. Under the metrication rules, the law mandated metric for all prepackaged food products.

Whatever the intent of the detailed regulations, the effect has been to erect trade barriers that have created protected industries that are now opposing the proposed changes. The Food Processors of Canada set up a web page, KeepFoodJobsInCanada, promoting an email campaign to force Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz to block the plan to repeal the container-size regulations. It seems to have worked, so far.

November 16, 2012

SEC employee stress levels must be down because they’re not surfing for porn during “98% of the workday”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:49

Ah, the hard life of the SEC employee must have gotten a bit less stressful recently. Tim Cushing has the, um, sordid details:

An internal investigative report of the SEC’s Trading and Markets division has been recently been reviewed by Reuters. After reading its rundown of the misdeeds and abuses uncovered, I’m left with the urge to laugh maniacally in the manner of someone having just cleared the tipping point and now sliding irretrievably into insanity. The sheer irresponsibility on display here springs from the sort of irredeemable carelessness that comes with spending other people’s money (taxes) and operating without any credible oversight or accountability (a large percentage of government entities).

Bess Levin at Dealbreaker points out that while the SEC’s internal investigation may have turned up several misdeeds, ranging from the merely stupid to the positively horrendous, it is quite a step up from the insatiable pornhounds that used to populate the Commission:

    If you had asked us two years or two months or two days ago if we thought that there would be a time in the near future when Securities and Exchange employees would not be regularly reprimanded for watching porn on their work-issued computers for 98 percent of the workday, we would have said absolutely not. No judgment, but in our professional opinion, people do not go from, among other things:

    * Receiving “over 16,000 access denials for Internet websites classified by the Commission’s Internet filter as either “Sex” or “Pornography” in a one-month period”

    * Accessing “Internet pornography and downloading pornographic images to his SEC computer during work hours so frequently that, on some days, he spent eight hours accessing Internet pornography…downloading so much pornography to his government computer that he exhausted the available space on the computer hard drive and downloaded pornography to CDs or DVDs that he accumulated in boxes in his office.”

    …to living a porn-free existence at l’office.

Truly a mind-boggling set of employees. One regional staff accountant ran into the “no-porn” wall 1,800 times in a two week period, yet remained undeterred. Those caught accessing porn with ridiculous frequency cited the “stress” of their jobs as the underlying reason for the nearly uninterrupted pornathons.

November 11, 2012

The natural lifecycle of a “monopoly”

Filed under: Asia, China, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:53

In Forbes, Tim Worstall celebrates the natural end to a “monopoly” — the quasi-monopoly of Chinese exports of rare earth compounds:

These past several years I’ve been shouting to all who would listen that while China does indeed have a stranglehold on current production of rare earths that’s not something that we really need to worry about. For the important thing about rare earths is that they’re not rare (nor earths either). There are plenty of deposits around and we can get all we need from other areas of the world if we should care to.

    The same cannot be said of Kuantan, the Malaysian locale where Lynas plans to build a rare earth processing plant, a type of facility residents and Australian supporters say, in online campaigns, will result in “millions of tonnes of toxic radioactive waste left behind”.

    Residents took Lynas to court in Malaysia, resulting in the suspension of its operating licence. That decision was overturned yesterday.

Lynas is the company desiring to mine the Mt. Weld deposit (a nice rich one it is too). They are going to separate the RE concentrate at that plant in Malaysia. There’s been a vocal campaign against the licensing of that extraction plant and Lynas has, as above, just succeeded in over-turning a previous license refusal. Once up and operating fully the plant should supply some 20,000 tonnes a year of REs. This is a substantial portion of demand outside China: it’s some 15% or so of entire global demand in fact.

And thus we again see how an apparent monopoly isn’t really all that much use to the supposed monopolist. It certainly was true that China supplied 95-97% of the world’s REs. Largely because they were willing to mine and supply at prices that made it not worth anyone else’s while to do so. But when they tried to constrain supply, to exercise that monopoly, instead of being able to exploit us all they simply encouraged the competition that destroys that monopoly.

Markets do indeed work and the only monopoly that can really be exploited is one that isn’t contestable. And an attempted monopoly in something as common as rare earths simply is contestable and thus cannot be exploited.

October 26, 2012

“Canada has effectively become the Digital Third World”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:21

In Forbes, Reuven Cohen looks at the state of internet access in Canada:

Before I get into what was discussed, I need to provide some context to the current state of Internet connectivity in Canada. To understand the Internet landscape in Canada is to endeavour into the realm of duopolies, bandwidth caps and mediocre Internet connections. As it stands today, Canada has effectively become the Digital Third World.

A recent video interview with The Globe and Mail’s Omar El Akkad and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings summaries the problems with cloud computing in Canada. Hastings’ specifically calls out capped Internet plans as compared to the rest of the world saying “Canada has the misfortune of being the country with the lowest internet caps maybe in the world but certainly in the developed world and in all of the Netflix world. In Mexico, Internet is largely uncapped; in the US it’s largely uncapped; in the UK it’s completely uncapped; in Canada there’s a number of providers with very low caps…I don’t quite understand it.”

Herein lies the problem, the widespread use of bandwidth caps in Canada is partially the result of a market defined by vast geographies and a limited population base. This has resulted in a highly concentrated market controlled by a small group of ISPs. Making things worse is a highly government controlled telecom industry that prevents foreign investments, particularly for wireless and broadband services. This combination of factors has led to one of the most restrictive markets for cloud computing as well as other internet related services found in any of the major industrialized nations today.

October 23, 2012

Canada’s foreign investment “net benefit” test is a farce

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:15

Andrew Coyne scrambles to find the right words to describe the indescribable:

The existing rules, as readers will know, require that a foreign takeover be of “net benefit” to Canada. How this is to be demonstrated, how it is even defined, is a secret to which the bidder is not privy — understandably enough, since it is not known to the government either. The result may be compared to a game of blind man’s bluff, only with both players wearing blindfolds. The bidder makes repeated attempts to hit the mark, while the government shouts encouragingly, “warmer… ” or “cooler…” depending on its best guess of where the target happens to be at the time.

I’m joking, of course. In fact, there’s a perfectly clear definition of “net benefit.” As set out in section 20 of the Investment Canada Act, the minister is required to take into account the effect of the investment on “the level and nature of economic activity in Canada,” specifically (but “without limiting the generality of the foregoing”) “on employment, on resource processing, on the utilization of parts, components and services produced in Canada and on exports from Canada.” Clear enough, right?

[. . .]

All told, I count more than 20 different criteria to be applied, vague, elusive and contradictory as they are. Whether it is possible to measure even one of them in any objective fashion, still less all of them at the same time, may be doubted — but even if you could, the Act provides no benchmark of what is acceptable, separately or collectively. Neither does it say what weight should be given to each in the minister’s calculations, or even whether he strictly has to pay any of them any mind at all (“the factors to be taken into account, where relevant, are…”).

In other words, the whole thing is a charade, applying a veneer of objectivity to what remains an entirely subjective — not to say opaque, arbitrary and meaningless — process. Which is good, since any attempt to define such benchmarks, weights, etc would be even more arbitrary and meaningless. Because there isn’t any objective definition of “net benefit,” at least in the sense implied, nor is it necessary to invent one. We don’t need to clarify the net benefit test. We need to abolish it.

October 21, 2012

Nick Gillespie: A libertarian appreciation for the late George McGovern

Filed under: History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:22

George McGovern will, unfortunately, be best known to most people as the poor beggar who lost the 1972 election to Richard Nixon in a blowout. Nick Gillespie says there was much more to McGovern than just being on the wrong side of an electoral landslide:

McGovern’s early criticism of the Vietnam War (he first spoke against it as a newly elected Democratic senator from South Dakota in 1963) was out of step with a bipartisan Cold War consensus that smothered serious debate for too long.

Yet when you take a longer view of his career — especially after he got bounced from the Senate in 1980 during the Republican landslide he helped create — what emerges is a rare public figure whose policy positions shifted to an increasingly libertarian stance in response to a world that’s far more complicated than most politicians can ever allow.

Born in 1922 and raised during the Depression, McGovern eventually earned a doctorate in American history before becoming a politician. But it was as a private citizen he became an expert in the law of unintended consequences, which elected officials ignore routinely. He came to recognize that attempts to control the economic and lifestyle choices of Americans aren’t only destructive to cherished national ideals, but ineffective as well. That legacy is more relevant now than ever.

[. . .]

In a 1997 New York Times op-ed article, he emphasized that simply because some people abuse freedom of choice is no reason to reduce it. “Despite the death of my daughter,” he argued, “I still appreciate the differences between use and abuse.” He rightly worried that lifestyle freedom, like economic freedom, was everywhere under attack: “New attempts to regulate behavior are coming from both the right and the left, depending only on the cause. But there are those of us who don’t want the tyranny of the majority (or the outspoken minority) to stop us from leading our lives in ways that have little impact on others.”

McGovern believed that attempts to impose single-value standards were profoundly un-American and “that we cannot allow the micromanaging of each other’s lives.” But as governments at various levels expand their control of everything from health-care to mortgages to the consumption of soda pop and so much more, that’s exactly what’s happening.

QotD: Environmental externalities

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:12

That other people place different values upon the environment than I do worries me not in the slightest. It is precisely such differences of opinions about value that make a market. What does annoy me intensely is that almost all of the environmental problems that are currently being complained about have indeed been studied by economists. And they’ve found solutions to them as well. Just about any and every environmental problem is either about externalities or common access to a resource. In many ways these are just the flip side of exactly the same problem. But we do indeed know how to solve each of them and both of them. Hardin on ownership or regulation, Pigou on tax or regulation, both mediated through Coase on transactions costs (with a decent assit from Ostrom on communal ownership). There, that’s it: far from economics ignoring matters environmental economics has solved the damn problems.

So why won’t the environmentalists listen?

Tim Worstall, “Why won’t the environmentalists learn any economics?”, Adam Smith Institute blog, 2012-10-21.

October 19, 2012

Minnesota takes a firm stance … against free education

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:43

If that headline sounds stupid, it’s only because it’s accurate:

Every day, it seems, we hear of yet another story of silly out-of-date regulations, which may have had a reasonable purpose initially, getting in the way of perfectly legitimate innovation. For example, there’s been a massive growth in “open courseware” or open education programs, that put various educational classes online for everyone to benefit. They’re not designed to replace the degrees of college, but rather to just help people learn. One of the biggest ones, Coursera, recently told people in Minnesota that they could no longer take Coursera classes, due to ridiculously outdated Minnesota regulations:

    Notice for Minnesota Users:

    Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so. If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera, or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for the class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota.

Update: In the first of what promises to be a cascade of Minnesota-education-related announcements, Popehat is forced to introduce new terms of service for Minnesota residents:

Now circumstances require us to create special terms of use for Minnesota residents. See, some of you have occasionally said that, despite our best efforts and lack of relevant skills or experience, you occasionally learn something at Popehat […] That’s problematical in Minnesota.

You’d think that Minnesota residents should be free to learn whatever they want from any site on the internet. You’d be wrong. The State of Minnesota determines not just what degrees may be offered there, but how its residents may learn things on the internet.

[. . .]

Now, I think it’s unlikely that Popehat would be treated as subject to the statute. We’re not a learning institution and we don’t offer “courses,” per se, except in the sense of “a course of abuse.” But we can’t be too careful. We’re talking about a state that thinks it should dictate whether web sites in other states can make free online content available to its citizens. Who knows what they’ll do next? I don’t want to subject Popehat to Minnesota’s onerous disclosure requirements or pay fees or be subject to injunctions if some functionary within the Minnesota Office of Higher Education decides that Popehat is attempting to offer courses in, say, Spammer Communications. I don’t want to have to go to Minnesota to defend myself. Lakes make me itchy. Plus, my lovely wife spent only a couple of years there in the 1970s and I still laugh at her accent, so I’m concerned that legal proceedings there may not go my way.

Update, 22 October: Minnesota belatedly realizes that beclowning yourselves in front of an international audience is sub-optimal:

Last week, we were among those who reported on a ridiculous attempt by regulators in Minnesota to enforce a regulation aimed at stopping degree mills, by telling various legitimate online learning providers like Coursera that Minnesota residents couldn’t take courses from without state approval. Thankfully, all of the attention has caused Minnesota officials to admit that this was silly and back down. According to Larry Pogemiller, director of the Minnesota Office of Higher Education:

    Obviously, our office encourages lifelong learning and wants Minnesotans to take advantage of educational materials available on the Internet, particularly if they’re free. No Minnesotan should hesitate to take advantage of free, online offerings from Coursera.

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