Everyone’s A Rent-Seeker, Wind Edition

With all the discussion about the “fiscal cliff” and the big expiring tax cuts and all, some of the normal, smaller expiring things are getting lost in the shuffle… like, say, the $12 billion wind Production Tax Credit. Local St. Louis representative Scott Sifton explained on the radio the other day why he thinks renewing it “shouldn’t be a partisan issue.”

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Everyone’s A Rent-Seeker, Taxicab Edition

A year ago I wrote about the crazy, over-regulated New York City taxicab industry. Well, things are getting even crazier.

There’s a new rush of start-up competition, led by Uber, whose high-tech mobile app lets riders request luxury rides on demand instead of frantically trying to wave down a passing cab. It costs more than a cab, but the convenient experience seems to be immensely popular, and Uber has been slowly expanding to more and more cities.

Of course, the existing taxicab industries, already used to protective regulations in many cases, don’t like the competition, and there have been varying volleys and setbacks in recent months as established players have tried to put up, er, roadblocks to keep the new kids out.

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Reasons For Optimism 50-54

50. Over Thanksgiving I randomly caught some segments of a (CNBC?) TV program about John Deere and the combines they design and manufacture. They are constantly working on new models that harvest crops more efficiently and more cheaply and are easier to repair and a host of other endless improvements. The show felt like a brief glimpse into the millions of quiet, incremental innovations that capitalism is constantly bringing us, and perhaps part of the reason we are still able to feed an entire planet despite the doomsayers of decades ago. It’s easy to get caught up in the big and more visible bad news and forget the subtle productivity improvements that are quietly advancing in thousands of industries year after year.

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Lincoln, Corruption, and Compromise

I had the pleasure of watching the Lincoln movie over Thanksgiving weekend. The film fills almost three hours mostly with politicians talking to each other, which of course I found terribly interesting. I’m not spoiling too much to tell you that it mostly revolves around Abraham Lincoln buying votes with job offers and deceptions, all in order to pass the super-important Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery.

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Is Obamacare Already Beginning To Collapse?

There is a narrative of Obamacare as a triumphant reform of America’s medical system, engineered by the smartest technocrats in the country to create better and more affordable healthcare for us all. The obstructionist denialism of the Republicans was dealt a crippling blow with the Supreme Court’s upholding of the individual mandate last summer, and the 2012 elections finished them off. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is now free to work its glorious magic on the citizenry.

There is another narrative of Obamacare as a hodge-podge, cobbled-together, bureaucratic-bloated, corporate-handout monstrosity that was just barely sufficiently greased around the edges to buy enough votes to pass an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress. The overly ambitious assumptions and interventions supporting this precarious nightmare began cracking and unraveling almost immediately, and are fast accelerating towards a tipping point that will precipitate the inevitable collapse of this inherently unstable behemoth.

Even if every exquisite detail of the 906-page master plan was executed as perfectly as comic economist Jonathan Gruber imagined, my bias still expected the results to be less satisfactory than advertised. The scope of the overhaul was too broad and too deep; the entanglement of the new bureaucracy was too complex; the manipulated inputs into the CBO’s rosy cost analysis projections were too contrived. But, of course, as with any exceedingly large enterprise, the plan has not even proceeded according to plan.

The Early Cracking

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Why I Think It Should Be Hard For The Government To Read My Email

Well, it’s been two weeks since the Petraeus scandal broke, and the dust seems to be settling as we haven’t had any new shocking plot twists for a few consecutive days. I believe that the real scandal is not what the FBI uncovered (that the head of the CIA was having an affair with his biographer), but how they uncovered it (by poking through private emails with no warrant or even a real suspicion of a crime).

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Why the Israeli-Hamas Death Toll Is So Lopsided

Hamas and Israel are at it again, launching hundreds of rockets and airstrikes at each other. Typical news articles reporting on the latest developments say that around 139 Palestinians have died so far while around 5 Israelis have died. This leads to typical comments like “death totals 130 to 5… sounds like a legit war…”

These lopsided death tolls might lead one to believe the Israel is far more aggressive than Hamas, but this is not necessarily true. The same article says that Hamas has launched about 1,400 rockets into Israel, while Israel has carried out about 1,500 airstrikes into the Gaza Strip – roughly equivalent numbers. The reason the death toll is so striking is that Hamas basically sucks at attacking Israelis, and Israel is much better at defending itself.

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