Global planting of biotech crops grew 8 percent last year, to a record high of 395 million total acres, according to the latest report from Clive James at the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA). Despite the many regulatory hurdles that governments around the world have erected to the approval and adoption of biotech crop varieties, when farmers have the opportunity to plant them, they do. Last year, more than 16 and a half million farmers grew biotech crops in 29 different countries.
What’s particularly noteworthy is that, while activists try to portray biotechnology as a rich industrial world tool, the bulk of recent growth in biotech crop adoption has come among relatively resource-poor farmers in less developed and newly industrialized countries. The United States has, since the first biotech crop introductions back in the early 1990s, grown the largest number of acreage planted with biotech varieties. But, while annual acreage increases in countries like the U.S. and Canada is starting to flatten a bit, the most robust growth has come from Brazil, India, and China. LDCs and NICs now grow about half of the world’s total biotech crop acreage. In China alone, roughly 7 million poor farmers grow biotech crops on an average of just one and a quarter acres.
On a related note, in this short video, former Secretary of Agriculture Clayton Yeutter discusses the role that advanced technologies have played in making U.S. agriculture a vibrant and productive contributor to the global economy.
The federal government thwarted a promising cancer treatment. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) put Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski on trial twice, saying “it did not matter” whether his “unconventional cancer treatments saved people’s lives,” only “that he had failed to get the FDA’s permission first.” But as Reason’s Jacob Sullum notes, the Phase II clinical trials that the FDA belatedly carried out “under congressional pressure have supported what the teary testimonials of patients and their families suggested: Although Burzynski’s antineoplastons are far from a cure-all, they seem to be more effective, and are certainly much less devastating in their side effects, than radiation and chemotherapy for certain deadly, intractable cancers.”
The government is also thwarting the production of life-saving drugs, causing critical shortages of key medicines. The supply of an essential cancer drug may run out within weeks: “A crucial medicine to treat childhood leukemia is in such short supply that hospitals across the country may exhaust their stores within the next two weeks, leaving hundreds and perhaps thousands of children at risk of dying from a largely curable disease, federal officials and cancer doctors say.” As a commenter quoted by law professor Glenn Reynolds points out, this is the result of government price controls: “So price controls are imposed on injectable drugs and lo and behold a shortage arises. Who would have thunk it?” As a doctor notes, this drug shortage is far from unique: “these shortages are very real… one center I work at has trouble getting propofol for anesthesia and another cannot get zofran (ondansetron), one of the most effective anti-nausea drugs on the market.” As another commentator notes, the “government has distorted the market and removed incentives for the production of life-saving drugs.”
The Obama administration has also sought to sharply restrict the market for bone-marrow transplants, potentially costing thousands of lives. It recently asked a federal appeals court to extend the reach of the National Organ Transplant Act beyond its text, in order to ban compensation for the collection of peripheral blood stem cells needed by many transplant recipients. By doing so, it hopes to prevent organ transplants from being affected by “market forces.”
The federal DEA recently caused shortages of the drug Adderall, which is needed by people suffering from narcolepsy. Earlier, government regulations caused cancer and burn victims in the Third World to die in agony without any pain relief. More links on the federal government’s role in causing shortages of hospital drugs can be found here.
OPINION
SHIKA DALMIA: “GM Profits, But Taxpayers Are Still On the Hook”
“Three years after being rescued by a taxpayer bailout, General Motors (GM) last week announced some rather ambitious profit targets for 2012. But even if it meets these targets — a big if — taxpayers should not wait on one foot to recover their remaining “investment” in the company.”
TYLER COWEN: “Break Up the Banks? Here’s an Alternative”
“The more a bank is legally limited in terms of easily measurable size, the more it may resort to off-balance-sheet activities to make up the difference. ‘Breaking up big banks’ may really mean making these less-transparent bank activities much more important to a bank’s fate. [...] There is a better alternative: expanding the liability for major financial institutions. If a shareholder invests a dollar in a big bank, why not make that shareholder liable for the first $1.50 — or more — of losses as insolvency approaches? In essence, we would be making the shareholders liable for the costs that bank failures impose on society, and making the banks sort out the right mixes of activities and risks.”
MEGAN MCARDLE: “New Drugs Cost Even More Than You Think”
“For every approved drug, pharma spent between $4 billion and $11 billion on R&D. Yes, there’s probably some wiggle room on the accounting, but not that much–your auditor is not going to let you reclassify your new delivery trucks, or a Human Resources SVP, as a research expense. As Herper points out, this isn’t necessarily a vindication of pharma–one could demand to know why they have to spend so much money to develop new drugs. Yes, I know, it’s getting harder to find approvable new drugs, but the industry has been flailing for ten years, and so far, the only answer they have hit on seems to be ‘more layoffs!’”
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I don’t always agree with Peggy Noonan, but she makes a good point about why voter turnout and cable news ratings are down in this election year:
Maybe the story the political class is missing is not “They don’t like the Republican field,” or “They don’t like Obama.” Maybe the story is that people are tuning out altogether. Maybe they’re bored with politics, and most especially with politicians. Maybe they don’t think our government can’t (sic) solve anything. Maybe, even, our political class has done such a good job depicting the crisis we’re in that the American people, with their low faith in institutions, think nothing, really, can be done about it. So let’s check out. Let’s watch the game.
As Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch point out in The Declaration of Independents, businesses that treat their customers as badly as the Republican and Democratic parties treat theirs tend to go out of business. This may be exactly what we’re seeing.
The $26 billion mortgage settlement announced yesterday is bad news for “bond investors including pension funds, according to Pacific Investment Management Co.’s Scott Simon,” notes Bloomberg News. He says that the settlement rips off innocent investors and pension funds in order to reduce the banks’ costs of bailing out delinquent mortgage borrowers and others. (As we noted earlier, the Justice Department, state attorneys general, and the biggest banks reached an agreement to provide $26 billion to delinquent mortgage borrowers and others, such as left-wing housing counseling similar to ACORN — in what the New York Post calls a “deadbeat bailout”). As Simon notes,
“They’re using other people’s money to pay for a ton of this. Pension funds, 401(k)s and mutual funds are going to pick up a lot of the load.”
Asset managers are frustrated with the deal because, in addition to the debt the banks own, it gives credit to the lenders for changes to loans they hold no interest in and oversee for investors. That “treats people’s 401(k)s and pensions,” which hold mortgage securities, “like perpetrators as opposed to victims,” Simon said. The deal comes after all 50 states announced a probe into foreclosures in 2010 . . . costing bondholders as liquidations of bad debt were delayed.
“Think about this, you tell your kid, ‘You did something bad, I’m going to fine you $10, but if you can steal $22 from your mom, you can pay me with that,’ ” Simon said yesterday. . .
Laurie Goodman . . . who has advocated for mortgage forgiveness in testimony to Congress, joined him in criticizing the agreement yesterday. . .“There is a difference between principal reductions and giving banks credit for spending others’ people money.”
As we noted earlier, by ripping off mortgage investors, this deal will make investing in mortgages more risky, which will in turn drive up interest rates that homebuyers have to pay in the future. This deal only covers borrowers at certain banks, not those borrowers who mortgages are held by the government-sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which (unlike the private banks) have never repaid their bailout, and are currently still being bailed out at an ever-increasing tab of $170 billion.
This deal is not the only way that federal and state officials are messing up the housing market. The Obama administration is forcing banks to make risky loans (in the name of “fair lending”), thus planting the seeds of a future financial crisis. The Justice Department is suing banks that refuse to do so, and forcing them both to award preferential loans based on race, and to cough up money in “settlements,” some of which goes to left-wing “community” groups.
The Obama administration recently launched a multibillion dollar bailout for speculators. Bloomberg News reported that the administration is vastly expanding aid for certain “delinquent homeowners,” paying banks up to 63 cents for every dollar in principal they write off for such homeowners. Speculators will benefit, because bailout recipients don’t even have to live in a house to get its mortgage principal reduced at taxpayer expense.
My colleagues David Bier and Ryan Radia contributed to this post.
Per the scenario in a previous post, it’s April 2012. You are a conscientious congressional staffer who still takes seriously the need to be a steward of taxpayers’ money. (Yes, I know for a fact, there are more than a few of these folks around on Capitol Hill.) You are watching closely events surrounding an “omnibus” or “minibus” spending bill deemed even by conservative Republican members as “must-pass” because it funds the military as well as other parts of government.
Suddenly, you hear about an outrageous earmark about to be slipped into the bill that would enrich a Fortune 500 company. You decide to alert a network of fiscal watchdogs you’ve met with over the years to wage an instant campaign against this piece of corporate welfare.
You have all the information in the e-mail and are about to hit “send.” But then you remember something from a briefing you attended a couple days ago. The subject was the STOCK (Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge) Act – aimed at stopping “insider trading” by members and employees of Congress – that your boss and nearly every other member of Congress voted into law in February.
At the time, you didn’t think the law would affect you since the only trading you do is indirect, through your mutual funds and pension. You were surprised to learn, however, that you now have a broad “duty of confidentiality” that encompasses not just trading on “material, nonpublic information,” but disclosing information to those who might.
You sit back and think, “It is indeed possible that someone I send this to could buy stock in the company, or could short the company based on the coming outrage.” You stare at the computer screen wondering how virtually no one noticed how this law could have potentially criminalized an act of whistleblowing as abetting “insider trading.”
Such a scenario is almost certain if House and Senate versions of the STOCK Act are not modified before a final bill is sent to President Obama. The House passed the bill yesterday with a 417-2 vote after a similarly overwhelming 96-3 Senate vote last week. Both bills must go to “conference” to produce a final identical bill to be voted on by both houses, giving members an opportunity for a fix to help make sure that whistleblowing and routine communication with outside groups from being caught in the law’s web.
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OPINION
DON BOUDREAUX: “The Twistocracy”
“[U.S. Senator Kirsten] Gillibrand (D-NY) said: ‘The power to decide whether or not to use contraception lies with a woman – not her boss. What is more intrusive than trying to allow an employer to make medical decisions for someone who works for them?‘ The twisted logic underlying Ms. Gillibrand’s worldview is stunning. First she wants to collectivize health-care funding. Second, she then expresses indignance that express orders by the state on how private parties spend their funds are resisted by those private parties. And third, she parades her indignance as being a defense of private spheres of actions that ought not be intruded into by outsiders!”
PETER SCHWEIZER: “Warren Buffett: Baptist and Bootlegger”
“Warren Buffett is very much a political entrepreneur; his best investments are often in political relationships. In recent years, Buffett has used taxpayer money as a vehicle to even greater profit and wealth. Indeed, the success of some of his biggest bets and the profitability of some of his largest investments rely on government largesse and “coddling” with taxpayer money.”
KATY WALDMAN: “Uncle Sam Is Not Coming For Dinner”
“America is fat, but Americans disagree about what this means. Either the country’s obesity rates—one third of all adults are obese—are a dangerous health crisis, or they show that the nation is healthier and wealthier than ever. Either the government must act immediately to curb our waistlines, or we must act to curb our bloated government. These were the questions debated in NYU’s Skirball Center last night at theSlate/Intelligence Squared live debate, in which four health and policy experts argued the motion that “Obesity is the government’s business.””
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Countries across the world have turned to democracy in recent decades. There are still a few monarchies here and there, and plenty of dictatorships. Cuba and North Korea are even keeping the last dying embers of communism alight. But more and more, democracy is seen as the way to go.
One of the first things a new democracy needs is a constitution. One of a constitution’s jobs is to establish the government’s structure — how the executive, legislative, and judicial branches are composed, what their powers are (and aren’t!), and a few rules of procedure.
The U.S. Constitution is a model of simplicity. You can read the whole thing in under a half hour. And that is the secret of its success. It doesn’t need to outline the specifics of agricultural or trade policy. That’s Congress’ job.
The EU’s de facto constitution runs well over 200 pages. Where the U.S. Constitution paints with a broad brush, the European Union fills in every last detail. Most countries, including the U.S., are turning to this top-down model and rejecting the Constitution’s more bottom-up approach.
The thinking goes, “How can something so simple be effective when the modern world is such a complicated place? The 21st century is very different from the 18th century.”
Good question. The answer is that those extra layers of complexity are precisely why a bottom-up approach is more important than ever. Top-down governance is hard enough even in a simple agrarian economy. It is impossible in a world like ours. Too many variables. The more rules there are, the easier they are to subvert.
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The Justice Department, state attorneys general, and the biggest banks have reached an agreement to provide at least $26 billion to delinquent mortgage borrowers and others, such as left-wing housing counseling groups similar to ACORN. But if you were financially responsible, you very likely won’t benefit from this settlement, but may actually be harmed by it. It only benefits a small fraction of people who were foreclosed upon, as well as some underwater borrowers, most of them delinquent, whose mortgages were serviced by certain banks. You likely won’t get any money or principal reduction under this settlement if you paid your mortgage on time, especially if you were thrifty enough to make a large down payment (which usually prevents you from ending up underwater on your mortgage unless there is a huge decline in housing values). Instead, you may suffer, because the settlement may lead to mortgage interest rates rising in the future. (Politicians’ desire for this settlement was based on voodoo economics).
One feature of the agreement is that some delinquent borrowers who are underwater will see their mortgage principal reduced. But the cost of these principal reductions may be borne heavily by innocent third parties, not just the banks: the banks only retained a fraction of the mortgages they originated, selling the rest to mortgage investors (including some pension funds). So the banks are going to write off mortgage principal that is not wholly theirs, but rather the property of third-party investors, raising serious contractual and property rights issues. The settlement contains provisions which reward the banks for cutting mortgage principal balances through a specified formula, creating a serious conflict of interest between the banks and the investors on whose behalf the banks service the loan.
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Have a listen here.
Immigration law is second in complexity only to the income tax. In a new CEI paper, Policy Analyst Alex Nowrasteh proposes scrapping the whole thing and replacing it with a tariff. This is a much more humane approach to immigration, and in many cases will be less expensive for immigrants than the lawyers and fees they currently have to pay while they live in legal limbo. A tariff would also reduce illegal immigration by eliminating black markets. Money that currently goes to illegal smugglers and human traffickers could instead go to the U.S. Treasury. The idea can appeal to both the left and the right.
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