Quiet Declarations

According to Bob Novak, Karl Rove suggests it was corruption, not Iraq.  Regardless of what you think about Iraq, I find this a plausible explanation.  The reconstruction was already doing poorly before Bush was re-elected.  The real change in the polls came in 2005 with a series of political catastophies — failure of social security reform, the incompetence/corruption associated with Hurricane Katrina (which I contend was systemic of government disaster relief, not indicative of this particular administration, but that’s neither here nor there), and the series of political scandals.

A lame-duck president plus scandals equals political exhaustion.  People get bored and irratated and start looking around.  People are still bored and irritated, and not just with the presidency or Congress’s approval rating wouldn’t be almost as low.  And controlling for the people who vehemently opposed Iraq or Bush from the beginning, it seems hard to pin the change in sentiment exclusively or even substantively on Iraq.

Glen reports on the new California law banning all cell phone use while driving unless a hands-free device is used.  The meat:

I know this is a self-assessment and therefore possibly biased, but I think – for me at least – there are only two dangerous phases of talking on the phone while driving: (1) before the conversation, when I’m fumbling to find the phone and either dial a number or answer before the call gets shunted to voicemail, and (2) after the conversation, when I’m hanging up and stowing the phone somewhere. These are the phases when I’m most likely to take my eyes off the road.

The new cell phone law has increased the inconvenience of phase 1. Now I have to pick up the phone, locate the earphone hanging at the end of a cord somewhere, stick it in my ear, and finally answer or dial. (Phase 2 is also slightly more inconvenient, though it’s not too hard to pull the earphone out.) The end result is that I spend more time distracted from my driving than if there were no law.

In terms of my personal experience, I concur. and I’ll add one additional point.  If a sudden danger were to arise on the road while I was talking on my cell phone, I would most likely drop the phone in order to regain full use of my sensory perception.  A hands-free device stuck in my ear prevents me from being able to take such action at a moment’s notice.

The law clearly isn’t trying to prevent mental distraction, or it would ban cell phone use altogether.  It isn’t trying to prevent the problems associated with dialing the phone, or with stowing the phone — indeed, as Glen points out, it probably makes those actions more dangerous.  And it now permanently affixes the distraction to your ear instead of allowing you to escape it in a time of danger.  All it really seems to do is make it easier to drive with two hands, which many people don’t do anyway.

(Oh, and increase revenue for state police departments, for the rent-seeking watchdogs in the audience.)

Several people have been asking about my next trip to Nashville.  It’s going to be a 5-6 day trip across the weekend of September 15-16.  Note that Sept. 15 is Wine on the River and Sept. 16 is Titans vs. Colts in the home opener.

If you’re in Nashville, email me about coffee or a beer while I’m around – and if you’re in DC, you should think about this opportunity to get a guided tour of the Athens of the South!

There are many positives to spending 26 of the last 60 days at conferences for work, which is why I’m happy to do it every year.  Here are a few of the negatives.

-I’ve basically been working every free night and weekend to catch up on stuff from the office.

-I’ve got several friends in DC for the summer that are going to leave in the next two weeks who I still haven’t seen.

-Thanks to work-sponsored all-you-can-eat buffets, less need to walk, and having to miss my standard 6:30 am raquetball games, I’ve been sitting on about 5-10 extra pounds for the entire summer.  (Fortunately, that’s already started to change upon returning to my normal routine.)

-Or maybe the 5-10 lbs is the portion of my income that I shifted from food to entertainment (read: desserts and drinks) while work was covering my meals.

-Last, and probably least, this blog doesn’t get updated very much during the summer  :)

Many of my friends are traveling consultants, which I would rather enjoy being at some point, so none of this is really complaining.  I’m just the kind of guy who usually notices greener grass somewhere else, so I thought I’d make the observations.

Last week I attended a screening of the new documentary The Call of the Entrepreneur, produced by the Acton Institute.  Arnold Kling was there also, and I completely agree with his review of its themes and implications.

I like it!  (via Jane Galt)

Reason’s Ron Bailey cites an op-ed by Steven Pinker that essentially suggests we shouldn’t be afraid to discuss unsettling ideas.

Professor Randy Barnett wrote an op-ed in Tuesday’s WSJ arguing that, philosophically and legally speaking, “libertarian first principles do not dictate a single stance towards the war in Iraq”.  Scroll further down to see related discussion on Volokh, as well as Randy’s follow-up posts.

More than a few libertarians ardently disagreed — see Andrew Sullivan, David Beito, Julian Sanchez, Justin Raimondo, and my colleague Pete, to name a few — and the column provoked several not-so-kind responses including a few from people who know Randy personally.  I don’t want to get into this too much, except to make a few meta-level points about the rebuttals:

–Ideological anarchists can credibly counter that state action is illigitimate, and if consistently held that is a defensible position.  Arguing that intervention was illigitimate because a dictatorship such as Iraq is a legitimate state and a democratic republic such as the United States is somehow less legitimate is both false and absurd.

–Ideological pacifists can credibly counter that aggression is illigitimate, and if consistently held that is a defensible position.  But it must be consistently held.

–Randy’s argument cannot be refuted on the grounds that the evidence to invade was insufficient or that the reconstruction was botched.  Those are incidental to the central question of whether pre-2003 Iraq was acting in a manner that made it conceivable for a libertarian to believe intervention was warranted.

–If it is conceivable that state military action can be used to deter an imminent threat, then libertarians who supported the war in Afghanistan, or who would support a military response against Bin Laden or Al-Qaeda without prior authorization by the relevant sovereign nation, are no longer arguing as a matter of principle but as a matter of degree.

–Those who have decided to argue instead whether Randy can be a “real” libertarian are basically engaging in an ad hominem attack, regardless of how he defines himself.  This how-purist-are-you crap is irrelevant to the larger question of how to move toward a more peaceful and prosperous society, and if the measure of a libertarian is ideological purity than I don’t see why a deliberative person would want to self-identify as one.

Finally, I want to again link to Randy’s follow-up post even though it’s included above, for a couple of reasons. First, I think his arguments about why there can be more than one position on Iraq are very good, some of which I’ve reflected above.  But second, I want to draw attention to all the qualifiers and disclaimers he’s forced to throw into his piece in order to attempt to soften the hostility of the attacks, and what a travesty that is.

Some people have simply decided there’s no room for debate, and they’ve stopped listening to nuances in arguments.  It’s particularly hypocritical for libertarians to do so, given how they’ve been the victim of such attacks by leftists for decades and by a growing number of conservatives over the last several years.  The battle for ideas ought to be fought using the best arguments, not the loudest ones.

Enjoy Joke 1 and Joke 2, both courtesy of Andrew Sullivan.  Comment free.

The Post and I actually agreed on something this morning: replacing DC’s taxi zone system with meters would be a good thing.

The main argument I’m aware of in favor of the zone system is that it keeps costs low for people on the Hill who generally cab within one zone.  At first I was confused as to why most able-bodied people would even need a cab to move within one zone, given the Metro and the city’s general walkability and such, until I took a quick glance at the zone map.  Think politicians had any say in drawing the zones?

Let’s assume for a moment that we’re concerned about the average taxi patron who’s not working on the Hill: meters are the expected mode of cost calculation, and the actual method, in every city except DC.  The argument that meters invite abuse because taxi drivers could take a circuitous route is common — so common, in fact, that everyone who takes a taxi accepts this as a potential cost.  From the editorial:

The experience of other cities (the District is alone in using zones) as well as numerous studies attest to the logic of a system that computes fares in an understandable fashion based on time and distance. Sometimes the driver will benefit; at other times, the passenger will. The most recent commission study, for instance, showed that on the whole, customers traveling shorter distances would save with meters, while longer trips would cost more.

Let’s talk about those longer trips for a moment.  DC is only 62 square miles, most of them serviced by MetroRail and MetroBus, so those long distances are typically to Virginia or Maryland.  An interesting quirk of the zone system is that, because DC alone uses zones, DC taxis can’t pick up passengers in Virginia and Virginia taxis can’t pick up passengers in DC.  (I don’t know about Maryland, though I assume it’s the same at Virginia.)

My guess is the coexistence of two exclusionary systems has inflated the prices of Arlington-based cabs because they’ve got to pay for a round trip whenever a passenger goes to DC.  And, as any Virginia resident who’s tried to get a cab from the city on Saturday night knows, DC cabs lose so much money by going to Virginia that they resort to bartering with the passengers.  On a busy night, a trip from Dupont to Ballston with 4 passengers costs $20-25 if you negotiate, and it could be $40 if you forget to negotiate.  Try to offer the $12-15 that you would pay to get into town in a metered taxi, and the driver won’t even let you in the car.  How is that unintended consequence less confusing or more helpful than a metered system?

And by the way, while we’re on the subject, if you want to really be screwed over on a taxi fare take a trip to or from Dulles Airport.  The Washington Flyer service has been very protective of its transportation monopoly — so much so that don’t be surprised if you see them getting a little kickback when the Silver Line opens.  The result?  Higher fares for everyone because no cab company can do business in both directions.  But this is a case against rent seeking, not the DC zone system, so I digress….

To be fair, I don’t cab much.  But also to be fair, if you spend a lot of time in a taxi in a city like DC, it’s typically either a business expense or a luxury expense.  The confusion argument is a nonstarter because the small percentage of people who would be both confused and harmed will be confused and harmed in both cases.  The people who get uniquely screwed by the zone system are visitors who haven’t studied the zone map and non-DC residents who have to pay a premium to get service at all.

Okay, this is mostly absurd, but still funny:

When I mentioned to someone the — should I say it? — irony of Gordon “War on Big-time Sports” Gee leaving for Ohio State, they pointed out something interesting.

Vanderbilt lost by only six points to national champion Florida last year while the mighty Buckeyes lost by four touchdowns.

Hmmm. Maybe Gee took a step down in athletic terms.

On the other hand, it’s still moving from the SEC to the Big Ten, even if it is from Vanderbilt to Ohio State…

As the story notes, if the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case (as most experts believe will happen) it will set the stage for what could be the most significant Second Amendment ruling in history.

For background, here’s a piece detailing how the lawsuit was crafted, and here are my previous comments on the case (including a link to the actual ruling).

I’ve always rather liked John Edwards, although I could never put my finger on exactly why… now I remember!

I thought about linking to Ilya Somin’s recent posts about a Fourteenth Amendment challenge to ladies’ nights at bars, but I hesitated because I didn’t have much to contribute.  I’m now glad I waited, because Glen Whitman picked up the slack in discussing the nature of the market for ladies’ nights.

Well, it’s that time of year again — one of our roommates is departing and we’re looking for someone to fill the vacancy.  Here’s our advertisement.

We have a seriously amazing living situation, for reasons even above and beyond what we highlighted in the post.  f you know of anybody who needs a place beginning in early August, please pass this information along.  We’re having an open house this Tuesday night, details in the post.  Thanks!