One of the highlights of our big annual dinner last week was our faux public service announcement from a future where nanny-state regulators have taken over. Behold, the terrifying possibilities of the Department of Pre-Regulation:
Credits (in no particular order) include: Erin Wildermuth, Cord Blomquist, Ivan Osorio, Brooke Oberwetter, Jeremy Lott, Megan McLaughlin, William Yeatman, Julie Walsh, Kate McLaughlin, Dominick Saran, Jason Talley, Greg Conko, Christine Hall, Sam Kazman, Al Canata, Holly Jackson and Richard Morrison. Also, special thanks to Philip K. Dick and Scott Frank for a little inspiration.
A little bird tells us that earlier today Rush Limbaugh read John Berlau’s letter urging the head of the Nobel Peach Prize committee to bestow the award, not on Al Gore, but on Rush Limbaugh. Mr. Limbaugh was nominated by the conservative Landmark Legal Foundation. As John Berlau argues in the letter:
I can say without reservation that on one of the most important issues facing the world — a threat far more immediate than global warming — Mr. Limbaugh has made the greater contribution to public health. In fact, Mr. Gore’s contributions regarding this issue, by contrast, have been detrimental to public health.
This issue I’m speaking of is the epidemic of malaria in third-world countries. As you know (or should know), malaria kills more than one million people a year and infects hundreds of millions every year. There is a scientific consensus that the best — and in many cases the only — effective way to control the mosquitoes that spread this deadly disease is with the insecticide dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, otherwise known as DDT. But DDT unfortunately has been vilified by advocacy groups and the popular press based on junk science.
Over the past decade and a half, Mr. Limbaugh has been at times almost a lone media voice correcting misinformation about DDT and also pointing out its life-saving benefits against diseases like malaria. Mr. Gore, by contrast, has continued to spread DDT myths as well as misleading information about the causes of the malaria epidemic.
Yesterday, by a vote of 5-to-4, the Supreme Court actually enforced the 180-day statute of limitations contained in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, dismissing an employee’s claim that she had been subject to sex discrimination years earlier that affected her pay.
Press accounts about the decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. have uncritically reported this allegation, without even noting that the majority didn’t prevent the plaintiff from obtaining relief: Her inept lawyers and the plain language of the statute under which she sued did.
The majority pointed out that the plaintiff could just as easily have sued under the Equal Pay Act, which specifically bans sex discrimination in pay, and has a longer statute of limitations — and broader definition of discrimination — than the statutory provision that the plaintiff sued under. If she had done that, she probably would have won her lawsuit. But she didn’t do that. Instead, she just sued under Title VII, alleging intentional discrimination.
For all of you who were unable to make it to CEI’s annual banquet/gala/extravaganza last Thursday, here’s the opening video. Fred greeted the crowd from the future, and gave us a few clues as to what we can expect from the next century.
Banking firm HSBC is to give $100 million to various environmental groups to “respond to global warming.” According to the HSBC press release, much of the money is to expand the size and influence of the environmental organizations:
HSBC’s US$100 million partnership – including the largest donations to each of these charities and the largest donation ever made by a British company – has significant programme targets and offers transformational support for the environmental charities. The donation will help to deliver increased capacity, help the charities to expand across new countries and research sites, and increase their access to more people.
This is, of course, additional to the $150 million environmental groups are spending in the U.S. each year on global warming.
It might be noted that HSBC stands to benefit considerably if carbon trading becomes the $3 trillion market some have suggested it could be. The World Wide Fund for Nature (formerly World Wildlife Fund), which has received $35 million in this deal, has lobbied for cap-and-trade in Europe.
But I’ve got some good news for you. Coburn isn’t all alone in his crusade to stop Congress from honoring Rachel Carson. He has some good friends in the U.S. House of Representatives. There, in April, 53 representatives voted against naming the post office after Carson. Another 3 voted “present,” which also often signals symbolic opposition to a bill.
The bill passed the House anyway. Unlike the Senate, where a minority of Senators or even one Senator has tremendous power to block a bill, the House is pretty much run by majority rule.
Still the fact that there were a good number of dissenters in the House may embolden some more Senators to join Coburn and just say no to the cult of Rachel. And it’s interesting to look at the vote and see who voted which way.
The good news is that the “nays” included some of the very top members of the House Republican leadership, including Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Minority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo. The bad news is that some free market-leaning members who should know better, such as Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Republican Study Committee chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, were among the “yeas.” And for those of you who are Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., fans, you should know that he cast his vote in favor of honoring Rachel. Hmmm, I wonder if there’s any evidence that she was an illegal alien?!
It’s also bad news that no Democrat voted against the bill. The effective combating of malaria in poor countries should be a bipartisan issue. Hopefully, it soon will be.
As Richard points out, D.C. has a pretty decent system for getting taxi medalions out. Last I looked into it–a few years ago–D.C. was one of only two major U.S. cities that doesn’t ration medalions. (The other is San Diego.) Even a lot of smaller cities like Hartford, CT charge a lot for taxi medallions.
The result is interesting: it’s much easier to get a cab during rush hour than it is in other major cities, BUT it’s nearly impossible to get a cab to come to an outlying location simply by calling. No company has been able to set up a decent dispatch system. But there are market-based workarounds. First-limo-like car service is surprisingly reasonable in D.C.–a trip to Dulles Airport in a chauffeured car that waits for you on both ends costs only about 50 percent more than taking the same trip by taxi. (In New York, it’s 300 percent; Chicago 200 percent.) Furthermore, a handful of enterprising individual cab drivers hand out business cards and higher rates for coming in response to a mobile phone call.
Fares are also low in D.C. for many trips. The cost of a taxi ride is based on “zone” travel that tend to make trips between downtown and the Capitol Hill cheap and everything else expensive. Since there are no meters, furthermore, drivers can always charge tourists more and get away with it. Not fair, perhaps, but it actually makes economic sense in a way: tourists pay more for most everything else anyway.
On balance, D.C.–generally a garden of socalism–has created a taxi system that, for the most part, lets the market work. There are a bunch of tradeoffs involved in this system, but it may be the best system around: it keeps fares low for people in town, lets drivers do better than the fare rates would suggest and makes it easy to find a cab. Has anyone seen a system that works better?
CEI’s Angela Logomasini gives kudos to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Olka.) for his stand against honoring the 100th birthday of environmentalist icon Rachel Carson. Here’s why.
Carson used explosive rhetoric and junk science to advance an anti-technology agenda that turned many people against using all man-made chemicals.
Most seriously, Carson inspired enough fear to prompt nations to discontinue using the pesticide DDT, even for malaria control. Before Carson completed her book, DDT played a vitally important role in the eradication of mosquitoes carrying malaria in Western nations and was making progress in other nations around the globe.
This success was so great that DDT’s discoverer, Paul Herman Muller, earned a Nobel Prize in Medicine, and the National Academy of Sciences declared in 1970: “To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. … DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable.”
Today, hundreds of millions of people — mostly African children under 5 — become seriously ill and more than a million die every year from malaria in large measure because so many nations stopped using DDT following publication of Carson’s book.
Last September, Dr. Arata Kochi, director of the World Health Organization’s Global Malaria Program, called on the environmental community to “help save African babies as you are helping to save the environment.” Kochi’s plea was part of an announcement that the WHO would seek increased use of DDT to fight malaria.
Rather than answer his call, two activist groups, the Pesticide Action Network of North America (PANNA) and Beyond Pesticides, prefer to carry on the Carson legacy. They are shamelessly working to undermine the WHO’s endorsement of DDT by spreading misinformation about DDT risks.
In New York City, like in many U.S. cities, the number of licensed taxi cabs is strictly controlled. In order to operate one, you need what’s called a medallion – a little metal shield you affix to the hood of your cab so that the regulators know you’re official. At one time, this was a relatively inexpensive formality – in 1937, when the system began, a medallion would only have cost you $10, or approximately $140 in 2006 dollars. My, how times have changed.
A recent sale of new medallions earlier this month set a new record: $600,000 for one of a pair bought by “a large corporate fleet operator.” With prices like that, it makes it very difficult for a humble cabbie to aspire to own his own ride. Some individuals do still purchase medallions today, except now it requires financing more akin to opening a corporate franchise than the registration fee is started out as.
Why so much you ask? An unhealthy connivance of taxi drivers and corporate medallion owners who have both short and long term reasons for limiting the number of medallions and thus the total number of cabs on the street. They’ve been so successful over the years that, according to Bloomberg, not a single new medallion was issued in the 60-some years between in mid-1940s and 1996.
Contrast that to DC, where the costs of becoming a street legal taxi driver seem to add up thusly: a mandatory training course ($375), an oral exam ($60), a written exam ($30), a fingerprint card ($35), and a one-year license fee ($85). That brings me up to $585. There may be some other hoops to jump through that aren’t spelled out on the DC Taxicab Commission website, but at least the system doesn’t set its barrier to entry at over half a million dollars.
It was inevitable. In the Internet age, interest groups seeking influence in Washington are joining presidential candidates in discovering a new electronic tool to press their agenda: YouTube.
“Send your underwear to the undersecretary” urges the actress in the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s stinging 66-second anti-regulatory video posted on YouTube, a free video-sharing site that is a subsidiary of Google. The video blames a 2001 Energy Department rule for an energy-efficiency standard that it says has made new models of washing machines more expensive while getting laundry less clean.
The underwear video illustrates what other advocacy groups are finding out: YouTube is a cheap, creative way to get a message to a potentially vast audience. This slow migration is in addition to more traditional lobbying approaches, such as direct mail, Web sites and scripted phone calls to federal officials.
And now we find out that the Drudge Report has also linked to the story, under the headline “Lobbyists Discover Power of YouTube…” We’re technically not lobbyists, of course, but we’ll take the hits anyway. Here’s the video again, in case you missed it:
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