Quiet Declarations

If you claim to be humanitarian and you claim your desire is to help the people who are truly poor, my advice is to ignore the bottom bracket of U.S. income earners and invest your resources in ways to make life better for citizens in developing nations.  Here’s the chart — via Ezra Klein, who I’m sure would not endorse the point I’m making — that inspires me to comment on this topic today:

Ezra laments that the number of people who claim to need a car makes it less politically feasible to pass environmental regulations.  I celebrate the fact that we are so tremendously, fabulously, absurdly rich as a nation 66% of us actually cited a clothes dryer as a necessity.  52% of us would die on the spot without a TV set, and 8% of us may immediately suffer fatal convulsions if it’s not a flat-screen.  21% of us will suffer labor-induced hemorrhaging and slip into a coma if we have to wash our dishes by hand.

On the other hand, the citizens of some nations have it really, truly bad, and U.S. citizens are almost without fail not among them.  There are billions of people on earth who might one day, if they’re extremely lucky, be able to own one of the above products.  Technology will make the items cheaper and more accessible over time — provided that we don’t pass policies that make it even more difficult for businesses to pass the savings onto the consumer — but even then this is a misguided comparison.  I recommend recasting this survey as a forced ranking and including “luxuries” such as AIDS treatment, malaria treatment/containment, sanitation, clean water, etc. and see what happens.  Actually, my guess is iPods and flat-screen TVs will still beat out some of these as “necessities” because U.S. respondents can’t even conceive of a world without them and will psychologically reject the comparison.

Let me be even more direct.  If you support protectionism — agricultural subsidies, sugar quotas, or restrictions on anything that prevents workers in developing nations from being able to compete in U.S. markets — you are favoring the less rich to the great harm of the poor.  If you oppose an expansion of legal immigration, you are at best (yes, I said at best) promoting selfish nationalism at the expense of the livelihoods of people who are doing far worse than even most unemployed Americans.  And if you want to spend even one cent on environmental regulations before you spend it preventing malnutrition and malaria, and ensuring that every child has access to safe water, I don’t want to hear your complaining about how climate change is going to be disastrous for the poor.  News flash: the truly poor are in a pretty disastrous situation right now and I’m sorry their actual current plight doesn’t lend itself to as much sexy anti-corporate imagery as their potential future plight.

If you want to help your unemployed uncle or the people you consider part of your community, I’m not saying you should never do it.  Anyone with empathy possesses these communitarian tendencies, and rightly so.  What I am saying is if you’re going to get on a save-the-world high horse, educate yourself enough to have a chance at getting past the sort of cognitive dissonance that the above poll respondents clearly possess, and then get your priorities in order.

In 1985, the year Golden Girls debuted, the NBC lineup included The A-Team, Remington Steele, Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, The Facts of Life, Family Ties, Night Court, Miami Vice, The Cosby Show, and Cheers.

NBC’s Thursday night Must See TV formula of four sitcoms (followed by a separately advertised drama) included powerhouse schedules such as The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Cheers, Night Court, and Hill Street Blues (1984-87) and The Cosby Show, A Different World, Cheers, Wings (mostly), and L.A. Law (1987-92).

The coveted 8pm and 9pm (EST) Thursday night time slots were on NBC lockdown for years with The Cosby Show, Cheers, Mad About You, Seinfeld, Friends, Frasier, and Will & Grace, until a multi-network sitcom meltdown that in my opinion began around 2004.

Incidentally, this inspired me to look up ABC’s “TGIF” where I discovered, to my surprise, that it possessed much less continuity than I remember.

Bonus track.

Sugar-cane soft drinks are on the rise, and high-fructose corn syrup is on the decline, but unfortunately it has nothing to do with improvements in free trade:

 The case against HFCS comprises the three cardinal claims of food politics: Like other villainous ingredients—trans fat and artificial food dye come to mind—high-fructose corn syrup is accused of being at once unhealthy, unnatural, and unappetizing. (These might be described as the Hippocratic, Platonic, and Epicurean tines of the foodie movement.) While none of these claims is completely wrong when it comes to corn sweetener, none is quite right, either.

Okay, perhaps it’s unfair to label those as the wrong reasons — although Engber does, and backs it up in his column, concluding with this:

Let’s review: HFCS isn’t healthy, but there’s no reason to believe it’s any worse for you than cane or beet sugar; HFCS is just as “natural” as any other sweetener, at least according to the U.S. government; and while HFCS seems to have a slightly different taste from pure sucrose, many people prefer it.

Okay, let’s assume Engber is correct and these are stupid reasons.  So what?  It’s not like HFCS soft drinks are going away anytime soon; all we’ve seen is an expansion of choices in the soda market, and if people want to believe certain things about what they buy because it makes them feel better that’s their prerogative.  What’s really sad is that, thanks to protectionism, we all had to wait 25 years until cultural trends made it lucrative for soft drink manufacturers to reintroduce the product despite its higher production cost in order to appeal to the apparently false beliefs of the health-conscious demographic.

Via Robert Higgs, according to Bruce Watson:

[T]he Obama administration will succeed in “changing American patterns of behavior,” not simply by improving rail transportation, but also, along the same lines, by establishing “a strong moral counterbalance to the ‘greed is good’ ethos that has ruled much of the last 28 years.”

As Higgs says next, “You would have trouble making up this stuff.”  I like trains too, and many times have chosen trains over planes or cars, but treating public transportation as a moral (or religious) endeavor is just plain stupid.

In their spare time, some people do this thing called pleasure reading; I catch up on old work-related articles or links.  Today’s selections:

F.A. Harper’s Morals and the Welfare State (1952)

Randy Barnett’s Restitution: A New Paradigm of Criminal Justice (1977)

Murray Rothbard’s Four Strategies for Libertarian Change (1989) (PDF)

Vaclav Klaus’s Global Warming: Truth or Propaganda? (2007)

And, last but not least…

Dave Barry’s The Year in Review (2008)

James DeLong’s essay is a must-read.  Basically the idea is although we’ve been using the same Constitution since 1787, we’ve effectively gone through three major periods of constitutional upheaval — each preceded by a game-changing event — and we may be closer to a fourth than we think.

I’d really like to see a Fourth Republic, actually, because I’m extremely sympathetic to DeLong’s narrative that the “Special Interest State” infects all those in or affiliated with government in a far more insidious manner than most people believe, and it’s hard to imagine that what comes in the next era will be worse.  Unfortunately, I’m more pessimistic than he is about the current state of politics — I think the odds of the Special Interest State unwittingly engineering a total economic collapse outweigh the odds of a third-party revolution or grassroots upheaval.

It’s a bit lengthy, but it’s a fascinating perspective on the current state of affairs nonetheless and I highly endorse it.

h/t Blanks

How is it that I just found out about this??

Total cost of new Washington Nationals stadium: $693 million

Nats wins since new stadium opening: 59

That’s $11.7 million per win in initial stadium cost alone, entirely funded by the DC taxpayers so that Virginia and Maryland residents can enjoy a more pleasant baseball experience.  You’ll be happy to learn that at this pace, amortizing over a 30-year stadium lifespan (which appears to be roughly how long a team is willing to play in a stadium before extorting the city for a new one), DC taxpayers will only be out $391,595 per win.  Unfortunately for DC’s “investment,” the Nats are 0-7 so far this season.

By the way, DC is paying $26,555 per student in FY09 to have some of the worst performing schools in the country, just for comparison.

The state representative who sponsored the bill to allow wine sales in Tennessee grocery stores has withdrawn the bill due to lack of support from fellow lawmakers.  Thanks, bootleggers and baptists, for reminding us that liquor retailers and moralists who don’t think they can win a fair fight for their products on the open market can continue to look to government to ensure their interests prevail at the expense of consumer choice.

And in case you are wondering whether I actually compared small businesses who use government regulations to try and gain an unfair market advantage to bootleggers who use government regulations to try and gain an unfair market advantage — I most certainly did.  From this week’s Post editorial page:

Invoke small business, and the inevitable response is the policymaking equivalent of awwww, how sweet. Suggest that a proposed change might hurt small business, and you might as well be advocating torturing puppies. Now we like a cute puppy as well as the next editorial board, and we’re all for small business, too. But the problem with the way this argument is deployed is that the facts often do not support the claims of harm.

I think puppies are cute too, but when a puppy nips at me, I slap its nose.  And when a puppy bites me, I kick it across the room.  The moral of this story is that small businesses do not trump consumer choice just because they are small businesses, or hometown businesses, or family-owned businesses, or any other kind of “awwww, how sweet” business.  People who believe government ought to engage in this form of protectionism over their businesses are morally equivalent to ExxonMobil or General Motors or Halliburton or any other corporation that lobbies government for special benefits at the expense of other businesses or the public interest.

If you choose to buy from particular stores for any of the aforementioned reasons, that’s awesome and I fully support it, but these are not constitutionally protected classes and I resent that consumers face higher prices and reduced access to products because some group who thinks it deserves special protection can devote enough time and money to convince enough politicians to play favorites at the expense of the citizens they represent.

Ah, one of the age-old questions that nearly everyone has debated in his or her life: what is the proper definition of a sport?  After some thought, I offer my attempt: A sport is an activity in which (1) the exercise of physical skills is applied toward (2) the aim of producing a clear winner on the merits (3) as determined using a predefined and objective criteria.

My first assertion is one that has fallen under heavy scrutiny in recent years.  Presumably it could still include at least most forms of auto racing, which do require significant stamina, but it excludes a number of wholly nonphysical yet increasingly popular activities such as chess or card playing.  The problem with including nonphysical activity is that a clear line of demarcation is turned into a far more subjective one.  That said, I would not be wholly unsympathetic to eliminating the physical requirement if faced with a persuasive argument that also keeps the floodgates from opening.

My second point is fairly uncontroversial, I think.   The aim is to disqualify as a sport any activity whose winner is determined in advance or via pure chance.  This clearly rules out scripted activities such as professional wrestling, and many card or board games (although these would typically be excluded by my first criteria as well).

My contribution of significance (and, I suspect, some controversy) is my final point, which rules out any activity in which the results are determined by judges’ scoring: figure skating, synchronized swimming, marching band, and the “creative” or “general effect” portion of anything.  This criteria presents something of a challenge for boxing, where the preferred result is a win by knockout or technical knockout but it is possible to win by judges’ decision after an agreed number of rounds.  However, I contend this is roughly analogous to using coin flip as the seventh tie-breaker to determine who gets a final playoff spot; if the primary method for winning is objective, it is not unreasonable to apply subjective measures after the pre-agreed amount of time and/or other criteria yield no clear winner.

Thoughts?

You know something has run afoul of common sense when the Post and a Cato Institute policy scholar find themselves bedfellows — in this case, in their opposition to the new Department of Education’s fairly obvious suppression of evidence that would support a continued DC school voucher program.

A brief history: an amendment sunsetting the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program was tacked onto the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009, which was signed into law by President Obama on March 11.  A report by the Institute of Education Sciences (the Education Department’s research arm) shows positive results of the program.  This report was completed in November 2008 but not released until the afternoon of Friday April 3.

Cato’s Neal McCluskey questions the value of the IES in light of Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s failure (whether intentional or not) to release the report in advance of the congressional vote:

Clearly, it had the results well in advance of congressional action on the program. That leaves only a few reasons why it wouldn’t have released the findings — or even something characterized as “expedited” or “preliminary” — in time to inform congressional debate:

1. IES employees hadn’t sufficiently scrutinized — or perhaps even looked at — the report several months after they had received it.
2. IES had scrutinized the report and couldn’t push out the results because of strict adherence to rigid bureaucratic procedures.
3. For political or other reasons, IES purposely sat on the results.

None of those, quite simply, are acceptable answers given the job of IES as stated clearly on the Department of Education’s website: “The mission of IES is to provide rigorous evidence on which to ground education practice and policy.”

The Post takes Secretary Duncan to task directly for his decision to revoke 200 voucher scholarships for the 2009-10 year and admit no new students to the voucher program in light of its likely elimination.  The editorial is worth quoting at length:

No doubt Mr. Duncan is right about possible disruption for new students if the program were to end. But scholarship officials have been upfront with parents about the risks, and the decision really should be theirs. Let them decide whether they want to chance at least one year in a high-quality private school versus the crapshoot of D.C. public schools.That, after all, is what this program is about: giving poor families the choice that others, with higher salaries and more resources, take for granted. It’s a choice President Obama made when he enrolled his two children in the elite Sidwell Friends School. It’s a choice Mr. Duncan had when, after looking at the D.C. schools, he ended up buying a house in Arlington, where good schools are assumed. And it’s a choice taken away this week from LaTasha Bennett, a single mother who had planned to start her daughter in the same private school that her son attends and where he is excelling. Her desperation is heartbreaking as she talks about her daughter not getting the same opportunities her son has and of the hardship of having to shuttle between two schools.

It’s clear, though, from how the destruction of the program is being orchestrated, that issues such as parents’ needs, student performance and program effectiveness don’t matter next to the political demands of teachers’ unions. Congressional Democrats who receive ample campaign contributions from the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers laid the trap with budget language that placed the program on the block. And now comes Mr. Duncan with the sword.

Despite President Obama’s continued rhetoric about taking politics out of executive decision making — which, to be fair, no reasonable person from any side actually believes — it’s hard to see any reason other than politics for canceling a statistically successful voucher program over the objections of the parents who are lining up to enroll their children in it.  And that’s a truly lamentable victory of politics over both student opportunity and parental choice.

It’s finally happening: CW will air six episodes of Blonde Charity Mafia, the “docu-series” about a group of young DC socialites that seems to have been inspired by the controversial Georgetown social community Late Night Shots.  Mark your calendars for July 7!

Courtesy of your friendly neighborhood satirists, a couple of possible ways we could salvage the economy: