Reasons For Optimism 5-6

5. The latest Gallup poll puts public support for legalizing marijuana at 50% for the first time. Regardless of your personal feelings about what people should be allowed to do, I think it’s rather obvious that the “war on drugs” has been very costly yet very unsuccessful. It is very costly to find people with marijuana and catch them and build prisons to put them in and keep them in. The law and its enforcement has not killed the demand for the drug but only sent it to the black market, supporting violent drug cartels. It makes little sense to put people in prison for consuming something that hurts themselves and no others, especially when prisons often merely serve as a network for recruiting and running the drug cartels – creating more problems for law enforcement, not less.

Sooner or later I expect California to be the first state to successfully pass a public resolution to legalize marijuana, and as overall public support continues to increase, I expect an alliance to emerge between varying political factions that will begin to see legalizing marijuana as a silver bullet to decrease budget costs, increase tax revenue, reduce border violence, and more. (Though I also hesitate to express that expectation with too much confidence or put a time interval on it.)

6. One of the leading iPod developers has created a smart thermostat. Technology has been hurtling forward in devices like phones and cars, but the programming in most thermostats is still clunky and hard to use. Tony Fadell has done his part to bring that device into the digital age, and it’s supposed to have Apple-inspired ease of use combined with enough artificial intelligence to save energy – and money – on your air and heating bills. $249 isn’t a bad starting price, and that’s before competition brings it down.

Competition In The Texting Marketplace

I wasn’t as fast as the typical Apple fanboy, but over the weekend I finally upgraded my iPhone 4 to iOS 5.0. Among other things, this means that any text I send to or receive from another iPhone will no longer count towards my $5 limit of 200 texts per month, because Apple will send it as data instead of through AT&T’s texting system. Over 3G the texts will instead count as a little bit of data, and when I’m in wi-fi the texts are now essentially completely free. My economic beliefs have led me to expect this event for several years, and even though it took longer than I expected, and did not take the form I expected, it is finally here. (Aside: I realize Blackberry has had a similar feature for some time, but I never had a Blackberry, and neither did most of my friends. The effects of the marketplace competition have finally reached me.)

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The Right To Keep Exotic Animals

It’s not the kind of news story you read every day. “Dozens of exotic animals, including bears, lions, tigers, cheetahs, wolves, giraffes and camels… on the prowl in eastern Ohio…” I found the media’s ubiquitous use of the word “exotic” interesting, as I had always considered the word to have an “unusual” connotation, and I don’t think lions and tigers are all that unusual since pretty much any zoo worth visiting has a few. (Let’s talk about Komodo dragons or a giant squid!) But I suppose it’s pretty unusual for Bengal tigers to be running free around a town like Zanesville, Ohio.

By now we all know the basic facts: 62-year-old Terry Thompson owned a “wild animal farm,” and on Tuesday he apparently set his animals free and killed himself. Local sheriffs and deputies ended up having to kill most of the animals as tranquilizing was not really in the logistics for public safety as nightfall ensued – something that even animal rights activists seem to be conceding, though sadly.

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Celebrating Good Capitalism

We stopped by the Bush Bean Museum on our way to the Smoky Mountains last weekend. I thought it just sounded like a random, quirky, and free place to visit, but I left with an appreciation for the underlying values represented by the museum. A large part of the museum simply showcases the history of the company as they overcame hardships, innovated new canning technologies, and came up with foods that customers wanted to buy – basically, a shining example of good capitalism.

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The Negative Externalities of Occupying Wall Main Street

Paul Krugman is at his best when he points out silly things Republicans say:

Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.

But Krugman is at his typical biased worst when he claims:

there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.

I think that’s an outright lie.

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Steve Jobs Proves We Are NOT The 99%

So the Occupy Wall Street protests are continuing and reverberating around the country. I sympathize with some of the grievances and demands pertaining to the unjust influence of corporations on our government. But in reading accounts and viewing pictures of the crowds and signs, it seems that the vast majority are expressing a more generic reaction against “corporate greed.” The most popular slogan of the movement seems to be “We Are The 99%,” suggesting that the top 1% wealthiest Americans have all the money and influence and that this is unjust. “We Are The 99%” is meant to bring solidarity to the lower classes, uniting 99% of the country under a common position.

Some of this may simply be, as an Econlog commenter suggests, a natural emotional reaction to the fact that life seems to be getting harder for a lot of us but not any harder for those at the top. Such a reaction is understandable, but I believe it is misguided to channel this reaction into anger at those at the top. Additionally, I believe the very slogan “We Are The 99%” reveals a defeatist mindset that I would encourage you to overcome. (Besides, you can arbitrarily define a group of people that includes 99% of the population, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of that 99% is mad at the other 1% like you are.)

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How Government Begets Government In Three Levels of Insanity

Back in August, I wrote about the Congressional legislation that reduced the fees banks could charge to merchants, and how Wells Fargo was fulfilling predictions that banks would make up for those fees in other ways. Now Bank of America has jumped on board, and they are blaming the government that they have to charge consumers for something they used to charge to businesses.

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How Occupy Wall Street Illustrates Left and Right Philosophies

I’ve been trying to decide if I had any thoughts worth blogging about the whole Occupy Wall Street protest thing. The general consensus is that they’re not really sure what their goals are but it’s something about “corporate greed” and perhaps something about the disproportionate influence of major corporations on our legislative process. I don’t feel like picking at the low-hanging fruit of the most hypocritical protestors or digging into whether or not there’s hypocrisy in the news coverage or speculating about whether or not they will become the “tea party of the left” or trying to analyze the nuances of the different kinds of protests and how many people got arrested and how long they were there and all that.

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Are Unemployment Benefits Unsustainable?

I saw an article on Yahoo! Finance yesterday about rising unemployment taxes for employers:

Companies have yet another reason not to boost hiring: rising unemployment taxes.

Employers around the nation are getting socked with higher state unemployment tax bills as states are forced to shell out more than $1 billion in interest payments this month. More than 30 states have had to borrow billions from a federal fund to cover unemployment benefits for their jobless residents in recent years.

And this is only the first of two tax spikes employers are contending with, on both the state and federal level. Come January, companies in 24 states could have to shell out between $21 and $63 more per employee in federal unemployment taxes.

There are plenty of details at the link as far as how and why the pricing varies at different states and levels of government, but the gist of it is that as unemployment remains high, governments are running out of money to pay the unemployed and are looking at ways to increase that revenue stream. Of course, since that revenue stream comes from businesses, raising those taxes pushes incentives for hiring in the exact opposite direction of what the government wants.

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