Category: Current Events

I’m still not sure how concerned to be about this upcoming debtpocalypse or whatever. For one thing, the stock market is supposed to crash, and Treasury interest rates are supposed to rise (and if money’s being pulled out of both investments I’m not sure where it’s going to go… Euro bonds? No way. Commodities? Not with oil dropping every time the global economy coughs. Gold, maybe? Not all of it… I just don’t know.)

But more on those Treasury bond interest rates. We keep hearing that the United States will suffer irreparable damage to its credit, and that not increasing the debt ceiling will lead to the interest on our debt going up by so much that we would actually be increasing the debt! That sounds pretty bad. So why do I keep reading about non-pocalpyse forecasts like this one?

If the U.S. defaults on some obligations after Aug. 2, even if it pays bondholders, S&P forecasts short-term interest rates would rise 0.50 percentage points and long-term interest rates by 1 percentage point.

In the very same article, I read this:

Yields on benchmark 10-year notes rose six basis points, or 0.06 percentage point, to 2.96 per cent July 22 in New York, from 2.91 per cent on July 15, according to Bloomberg Bond Trader prices.

Still, markets through last week hadn’t demonstrated great concern about the potential for a default. Yields on 10-year- notes remained well below the average of 4.06 per cent during the past decade.

Wait. For whatever reason, the interest rate on U.S. debt is over a percentage point lower than it has averaged for the last decade. Apparently a lot of investors still think it’s a safer bet than some other countries’ debt. Or maybe they just have an insane optimism that the U.S. will really increase the debt ceiling, or at least, continue to pay the debt interest. Regardless, the forecasted crisis is that the interest rates will rise a whole percentage point and go back to the long-term average?

I’m just not seeing the catastrophe.

When 2011 crosses over to 2012, the 100-watt incandescent light bulb will no longer be legally sold in the United States. The 75-watt and 60-watt bulbs will follow in respective years. The government wants us to use more energy-efficient lighting, and some folks are hoarding the old light bulbs in advance of the ban while others mock them for exercising the right to pay higher electric bills. How did this all happen? Are the alternatives to incandescents really better? And what marked my journey from sympathizing with the hoarders, to distancing myself from them, to actually becoming one of them?

Continue reading I Never Wanted To Be A Light Bulb Hoarder

Did you ever play that game Lemonade Tycoon? Well, it may be going the way of the Oregon Trail, at least in Midway, Georgia, where police shut down a lemonade stand for want of a business license.

Midway Police Chief Kelly Morningstar says police also didn’t know how the lemonade was made, who made it or what was in it.

The girls had been operating for one day when Morningstar and another officer cruised by.

The girls needed a business license, peddler’s permit and food permit to operate, even on residential property. The permits cost $50 a day or $180 per year.

One girl, 14-year-old Casity Dixon, says the three had to listen to police and shut down.

The girls are now doing chores and yard work to make money.

Well, I think that’s pretty sad. Some folks are arguing that the police were just enforcing the law of the land, but if this law is designed to be enforced at this level, then I think this law is pretty dumb.

Look, I’m not the kind of conservative that thinks “business license” is a code word for “socialism,” but there’s gotta be a reasonable limit somewhere. Does it cost $50 for a garage sale in that town? How about a bake sale? Do Girl Scouts need a permit to sell cookies? Would I need a $180 business license to sell something on eBay or mow my neighbor’s lawn for some cash?

Continue reading The Right To A Lemonade Stand

In all the excitement around Google+, I’ve tried to understand what it has to offer that existing social networks don’t. It seems fairly similar to Facebook, maybe with better options and interfaces for things like grouping friends and controlling who sees what. But it’s getting a lot of attention and everyone’s been begging for invites to try it out. Google is responding to feedback and there will surely be many changes to Google+ as well as to the competitors trying to keep up. But it has stormed past 10 million users already and it will definitely be a major player in the social networking wars, at least for now.

Anyway, today I realized one interesting thing about Google Plus: it may be the first social network that’s already integrated into an existing site (this is essentially why it could grow and acheive critical mass so fast). Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Quora, StumbleUpon, whatever – the site is the social network. But Google does a million things already. So what makes this really interesting?

Google Plus might be harder to block. Now a lot of companies are actively engaging in social media these days, and it’s even being claimed that none of the “top 100 companies to work for” block social media, but social media can still be a productivity drainer in the workplace and a lot of companies like to block the major social networks. Block facebook.com? Easy. But who’s going to block google.com? Employees may use the search engine for their everyday activites. Some companies may even promote the use of Google Docs within their business. No one’s going to block google.com!

Of course it’s not just companies that try to block social media. Schools and universities do too. How many students will flock to Google+ if they realize that they can interact freely there?

Ah, and what about governments? An uncensored Internet makes dictators uneasy. Egypt tried to block Twitter during the revolts this spring, so Google and Twitter actually rolled out a feature for voice tweeting from your phone! China has scuffled with Google even before the Arab Spring revolters were using social media. But if a ruler wants to block social media without the backlash risk of actually blocking Google itself, it may no longer be able to.

Now maybe you can just block the subdomain plus.google.com, assuming Google’s syntax is going to stay consistent, so maybe all Google+ has done is move a social network from the domain sphere to the subdomain sphere. Still, with all the integration going on among Google’s services, it’s more complicated than it used to be.

And in their quest for an open world, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google changes the URLs to work from google.com/plus to make it even harder to block. But maybe blocking ability isn’t on Google’s mind at all. We’ll just have to wait and see.

In April 2010, Arizona established a controversial illegal immigration law, and I heard anecdotes about Hispanics leaving the state. I thought this would be a good test of conservative and liberal ideologies. If conservatives are right and illegal immigrants are a net drain on resources, then the state’s economy should boom; if liberals are right and illegal immigrants contribute to an economy by doing jobs Americans don’t want and by paying more taxes then conservatives think, then the state’s economy should suffer.

Arizona’s unemployment rate in April 2010 was 9.5% and the 19th worst of the 50 states. As of May 2011 it’s tied for 17th worst at 9.1%. It’s one data point with lots of factors, but there’s no obvious “success” or “failure” thus far.

Well now we have something much more interesting.

Continue reading Georgia’s Crops, Illegal Immigrants, and Unemployment Benefits

The interstate highway system was established in the 1950’s to improve transportation between the states (Wikipedia has a good history.) Its initiation was typical of a government project – it cost about 5 times as much and took about 3 times as long as initially estimated – but overall it’s been a pretty good success story for the pro-government crowd. It’s essentially a public good with positive externalities that helps facilitate transportation and communication between states. The opportunities and conveniences it provides are probably a much greater contribution to the overall economy than what the states would have had without it (although you can probably find a libertarian to argue otherwise).

Of course, ongoing maintenance of the highway system costs money, and in 1956 a tax was established on gas. Its current value of 18.4 cents per gallon has been basically unchanged since 1993. There are a few other sources of revenue and a few other uses of the revenue (see linked article), but for the most part the highway system is maintained by the tax.

In all the Tea Party rhetoric these days against taxes, it’s easy to forget one of the main reasons governments collect taxes at all – to pay for things that everybody uses. And for years, the federal gas tax has been one of the best examples out there of a proper tax. Unlike, say, income tax or sales tax, there’s a pretty direct correlation to what you’re paying for and where that money goes to improve your life. It’s not perfect – everybody doesn’t drive on the interstate in equal proportions – but it’s pretty good. People who use the most gas are the ones most likely to be driving down the long interstates, causing wear and tear on those roads but also paying into the gas tax. To put it simply: road use and gas use have been pretty strongly related.

But things are changing.

Continue reading The Growing Road Tax Problem

In January, the funny but irreverent Bill Maher argued that the NFL is an example of the success of socialism, because “they literally share the wealth, through salary caps and revenue sharing – TV is their biggest source of revenue, and they put all of it in a big commie pot and split it 32 ways.” He called it an example of the Democratic philosophy that everyone deserves an equal opportunity, and said this is why the tiny town of Green Bay has just as good of a chance as a metropolis to produce a Super Bowl winner, unlike, say, baseball with its Yankee dominance.

Continue reading NFL Lockout: Socialism Doesn’t Solve The Greed Problem

A quick recap for those out of the loop… The transition from monarchy to democracy across the globe in recent centuries had largely been ignored by Africa and the Middle East. Then suddenly in 2011, a bunch of citizens got fed up and started rioting, and it spread across several countries. Maybe it was food prices; maybe it was Twitter. But rulers started getting overthrown and it was officially dubbed the “Arab Spring.” Some of the rulers weren’t too excited about abdicating their thrones, and started mercilessly slaughtering protesters in an attempt to quell the rebellions.

Especially in Libya. Except the rebels became more organized and started fighting back. Dictator Gaddafi brought out military aircraft. Talk about escalation! Everybody from the U.N. and the Arab League started talking about creating a no-fly zone to protect the rebels. Finally, they did. Of course the United States, with a military budget nearly as big as the rest of the world combined (depending on who’s counting), helped out – firing over 100 Tomahawk cruise missiles and stuff like that.

Continue reading It’s Getting Bizarre With Obama And Libya

One of the kinda cool things about the United States is states’ rights, or what’s left of them. The federal government controls a bunch of stuff, but all 50 states have branches of government that do lots of stuff and set lots of rules, and people like to compare different states to try to learn about the pros and cons of various policies – although due to the complexity of it all, and the inherent geographical differences between a lot of states, it usually just ends up in confirmation bias.

Such was Salon’s accusation of a recent “Koch-funded study” that ranked states based on their level of freedom. They claim that these sorts of libertarian-esque studies tend to deliberately pick factors that will put the red states at the top and the blue states at the bottom. The producers of the study want you to think that the freer states are much better places to live. But Andrew Leonard, the author of the Salon piece, asks a very valid question: if super-liberal states like California, New York, and New Jersey are such horrible places to live, why are they among the country’s highest populations? “Sixty-five million Americans in just three states cower under a totalitarian shadow!” he jests. If these freedom-less societies are really so bad, why don’t they all move?

Continue reading If CA and NY are so horrible why does everyone live there?

The raging Arizona wildfire, which was recently determined to be the largest in state history, makes an excellent case study for postlibertarian thought. Now here are externalities if I ever saw them: hundreds of thousands of acres across multiple states being burned, communities being disrupted or temporarily displaced… and just think about the opportunity cost of all the firefighters working on this thing! And all because of some irresponsible campers (at least that seems to be the running plausible theory, and we’ll go with it for the sake of thought experiment).

Clearly it is in society’s interest to prevent such things from happening. The general libertarian free-market approach is pretty simple… find who caused it and make their consequences very large. It may not change what already happened, but it will give everyone else the incentive to not let something like that happen again, right?

But what if that’s the fallacy of Assumed Information Flow? What if we never figure out who caused it? Or what if we figure out and lay hefty penalties but the next round of irresponsible campers doesn’t even know that all of that happened?

The statist response to preventing forest fires would probably involve something like requiring explicit permits to have campground fires, limiting all fires to within 25 feet of any tree over 6 feet tall, and setting up an agency with funds to initiate regular campground inspections to ensure that everyone is following the rules.

But like many other regulations, the cost to freedom might be very high. What if it incentivizes people to avoid campgrounds altogether? What if the arbitrary numbers in the rules aren’t optimal? What if the inspections aren’t actually carried out regularly, accurately, and bribe-free? (Oh, wait, I forget, that never happens with any existing regulation enforcements…)

Proponents of freedom believe that it comes with a price – the risk of some bad things happening – but they generally believe that it’s worth that cost because trying really hard to eliminate some kinds of risk just isn’t worth the cost and the negative consequences, and it’s not often not effective even if it was worth it.

Of course, that response is not going to give much comfort to anyone whose home was destroyed by the wildfire. And it’s not going to refill whatever coffers are currently being drained by the firefighting battles. The statist response above is a bit of a straw man, of course – I haven’t seen anyone honestly calling for such things to prevent forest fires, but maybe there is something that can reasonably done to enhance the flow of information about irresponsible campers and encourage them to take more responsibility without damaging freedom in an unacceptable way.

Ultimately, it’s true what Smokey the Bear has always said. Only you can prevent forest fires. If we tried to make the state responsible, I don’t think it would work. Postlibertarianism is not about trying to make the state responsible; it’s about being open to incentivizing responsibility out of other people who don’t want to be responsible. I don’t know how easy or hard that would be, but I’m open to smart personal-responsibility-encouraging regulation over “no-regulation-forever-and-ever.” The question is whether such “smart regulation” actually exists and has any more chance of being accomplished in the world than regular state-responsibility regulation…