Archives for June, 2007
Bureaucrash Does Dallas (Morning News)
Welcome to OpenMarket.org! Please consider Subscribing to our RSS feed, so you don’t miss any of the news and analysis brought to you by CEI’s policy experts.
Congratulations to Jason and our friends at Americans for Prosperity and the Moving Picture Institute for their recent anti-Sicko demonstration here in DC. Photos and video available here.
Better yet, the protest has garnered a mention in Jason Robertson’s story about Sicko in the Dallas Morning News:
Weeks before the film opened, some health care activist groups began sending e-mails to journalists disputing Mr. Moore’s assessment of America’s health care system, as well as the efficiency of systems in other countries.
Bureaucrash, an international activist group based in Washington D.C., along with members of the Americans for Prosperity, and the Moving Picture Institute showed up at a D.C. premiere carrying signs saying, “Socialism Kills,” and “Guaranteed health care is a Guaranteed Failure.”
Here’s the crash video:
Entrepreneurs’ victory as House passes Sarbox relief
Entrepreneurs savored a small but significant victory last night in a surprise House vote that extended for one year an exemption for small public companies from burdensome requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley act. The measure’s success and support from a significant number of Democrats once again illustrates that Sarbanes-Oxley relief is has become a populist issue. Much of the public now correctly associates Sarbox with the burdens it places on honest entrepreneurial firms such as the Max & Erma’s regional hamburger chain, rather than its intended effort rein in companies like Enron.
AEI Panel Discussion about the bipartisan trade deal - Continued
Kimberly Ann Elliot, senior fellow with the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics, contended that labor and environmental standards do have role to play, but that the FTAs are too intrusive as they are now. She claimed that the US does not do anything to have a true positive effect on the actual enforcement of labor laws. It is indeed anti-democratic and patronizing to force democracies to adopt certain standards by FTAs. However, she did not want to say that the the agreements was not worth the deal.
The person with the most libertarian approach to trade was Avind Panagariya, Jagdish Bhagwati Professor of Indian Political Economy at Columbia University. He contended that most of the partners the US has chosen are not the ones to choose if we actually want to improve free trade. If this was the case, we should focus on larger nations like Brazil and China. The FTAs might actually work against the case of free trade by constantly forcing further rounds of domestic debate about each successive agreement. He opposed the view that FTAs should be used to improve labor and environmental standards.
Warren. H. Maruyama, the general counsel of the USTR, claimed that the new FTAs are better than nothing. He emphasized that in the current political context, the Bush Administration’s concession to the Democrats were necessary. He also mentioned that the US already complies by the environmental agreements included in the deal. He emphasized that if the deal had not been made, US trade would suffer, important allies in Latin America and South East Asia would be humiliated, and US’s attempts of promoting the rule of law abroad go down the drain.
The question is, isn’t the US humiliating its allies by claiming that it does not respect other countries democratic processes when it comes to labor and environmental standards? Trade with countries and let the creation of wealth be the engine for improved labor and environmental standards.
LOST at Sea
Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media quotes our beloved Fred in his column today about the Law of the Sea Treaty, and the debate over ratification that went on recently at the Heritage Foundation:
In a release, [House Republican Whip Roy] Blunt declared, “More than 25 years ago, President Reagan refused to commit this country to a treaty that would’ve weakened our sovereignty at home, and rendered American companies less competitive abroad…We need all the energy we can get, whenever and wherever we can get it. Submitting ourselves to an unelected, unaccountable international ocean bureaucracy when it comes to distributing what American companies rightfully mine doesn’t strike me as a good thing to do―25 years ago, today, tomorrow, or in the future.”
At the Heritage event, Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute used the question-and-answer period to make the point that UNCLOS “legitimizes a socialist entity as the best way to expand wealth for the world at a time when the World Bank and the IMF [International Monetary Fund] have totally rejected that.” He said ratification of the treaty would be foolish.
You can get the in depth background on the treaty from constitutional scholar Jeremy Rabkin’s paper The Law of the Sea Treaty: A Bad Deal for America, published last year.
Fred on Philanthropy in WSJ
Fred Smith, the president of CEI, was featured in today’s Wall Street Journal in a letter to the editor responding to Robert Barro’s commentary on Bill Gates (”Bill Gates’s Charitable Vistas,” editorial page, June 19).
In the piece Fred argues that wealth creation is much more affective at reducing poverty than philanthropy, especially in the case of Mr. Gates:
Traditional philanthropy is collective, tribal, even. The donor feels noble; paternalism reigns; poverty is perpetuated. Extending the institutions of economic liberty — even to the limited degree that this has occurred in China and India — has done more good than would have been achieved had Mr. Gates liquidated Microsoft and shipped all that money to Africa.
Though some might disagree that Bill Gates has created wealth in the world, those detractors are the minority. It’s simply undeniable that Microsoft helped to popularize the personal computer and that popularization saw the computer find its way into nearly every market in the world, squeezing more efficiency from some, revolutionizing others, and creating many from whole-cloth.
Steve Jobs has said of Bill Gates:
Bill built the first software company in the industry and I think he built the first software company before anybody really in our industry knew what a software company was.
That’s the legacy of Bill Gates, innovation, not donation.
George H.W. Bush Only Feared One Opponent Enough to Put Him in Jail
Dave Weigel has a great post today on the Wacky World of Lyndon LaRouche over at Hit & Run. We often see the acolytes of LLR here in DC near Open Market World Headquarters on the corner of Connecticut and K Streets. They pass out pamphlets, they chant, they sing, but most of all they annoy with a vengeance. As Dave points out, though, this is the first presidential election cycle since
1976 that has not seen LaRouche running for the Democratic nomination. He’s getting on in years, so his college-aged cultists will have to pick up the torch.
Also, here’s a little celebrity prison trivia from an old version of his Wikipedia entry archived on answers.com:
LaRouche did not stop all political activity while in prison. He ran for president again in 1992, met with international personages, and gave interviews. During part of his imprisonment he shared a cell with televangelist Jim Bakker at the Federal Medical Center located in Rochester, Minnesota. Bakker later wrote of his astonishment at LaRouche’s detailed knowledge of the Bible. According to Bakker, LaRouche received a daily briefing each morning by phone, often in German. Bakker reports that on more than one occasion LaRouche had information days before it was reported on the network news. Bakker also writes that his cellmate was paranoid and convinced that their cell was bugged. LaRouche was released on parole in 1994.
Grindhouse Grinds Down Crime
It’s received wisdom that violent movies encourage violence and that if only we were like our enlightened European cousins and restricted violence in movie theaters, we’d move instantly to a cafe society with low crime rates and gang-bangers discussing Sartre over strong coffee. Yes, I exaggerate, but whenever a study comes out that looks at the neurological responses to violent movies, that is the subtext of every article written.
Yet as with everything CEI deals with, the real story is a risk-risk trade-off. While the neurology certainly suggests an increase in violent impulses, the empirical evidence suggests that the act of watching the movie itself incapacitates those impulses:
What is the short-run impact of media violence on crime? Laboratory experiments in psychology find that exposure to media violence increases aggression. In this paper, we provide field evidence on this question. We exploit variation in violence of blockbuster movies between 1995 and 2002, and study the effect on same-day assaults. We find that violent crime decreases on days with higher theater audiences for violent movies. The effect is mostly driven by incapacitation: between 6PM and 12AM, an increase of one million in the audience for violent movies reduces violent crime by 1.5 to 2 percent. After the exposure to the movie, between 12AM and 6AM, crime is still reduced but the effect is smaller and less robust. We obtain similar, but noisier, results using data on DVD and VHS rentals. Overall, we find no evidence of a temporary surge in violent crime due to exposure to movie violence. Rather, our estimates suggest that in the short-run violent movies deter over 200 assaults daily. We discuss the endogeneity of releases. Potential interpretations for our results include a cathartic effect of movies, displacement of crime, and decrease in alcohol consumption. The differences with the experimental results may be due to experimental procedures, or to sorting into violent movies. Our design does not allow us to estimate long-run effects.
Perhaps those Ancient Greek dramatists were on to something with their idea of catharsis. It’s a good job the moral guardians of the day didn’t manage to get the Oresteia banned.
Riffing on Jonah
I testified yesterday at the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on “global warming issues and the power plant sector.” Both my written and oral remarks began with a riff on Jonah Goldberg’s NRO column, “Global Cooling Costs Too Much.”
Here’s what I told the assembled saviors of the planet:
Thank you, Chairman Boxer and members of this committee for inviting me to testify today.
Jonah Goldberg, the columnist, notes that Earth warmed about 0.7 degrees Celsius in the 20th century while global GDP increased by some 1,800 percent. For the sake of argument, says Goldberg, let’s agree that all of the warming was anthropogenic—the result of economic activity. And let’s further stipulate that the warming produced no benefits, only harms. “That’s still an amazing bargain,” he remarks.
Average life expectancies doubled in the 20th century. The human population nearly quadrupled yet per capita food supply increased. Literacy, medicine, leisure and even in many respects the environment hugely improved, at least in the prosperous West.
This suggests a thought experiment. Suppose you had the power to travel back in time and impose carbon caps on previous generations. How much growth would you be willing to sacrifice to avoid how many tenths of a degree of warming? Would humanity be better off today if the 20th century had half as much warming—but also a half or a third or even a quarter less growth? I doubt anyone on this committee would say “yes.” A poorer planet would also be a hungrier, sicker planet. Many of us might not even be alive.
How much future growth are you willing to sacrifice to mitigate global warming? That is not an idle question. Some people believe we’re now smart enough to measurably cool the planet without chilling the economy. But Europe is having a tough time meeting its Kyoto commitments, and Kyoto would have no detectable impact on global temperatures.
Every Day is Christmas When You’re an Ethanol Producer
Posted by Richard MorrisonOur good friend Tim Carney has an excellent op-ed today in the Examiner on who’s getting screwed and who’s getting rich off of the energy legislation that’s currently making its way through Congress:
While raising the CAFE [Corporate Average Fuel Economy] requirements would be a stick in the eye of the Big Three (whose political action committees [PACs] in 2006 gave about $1.3 million to federal candidates), it would clearly be a gift to the ethanol industry, whose strong connections to lawmakers are legendary. Ethanol, an alcohol fuel made from grain, usually corn, benefits from special tax breaks, protective tariffs, and federal and state handouts, as well as government mandates.
In the 2006 election cycle, the PAC for Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), the nation’s top ethanol maker, gave $120,000 to federal candidates while fellow agribusiness giant Cargill, No. 2 in ethanol, gave $223,000 to House and Senate candidates.
Also pulling for ethanol — and thus benefiting from stricter CAFE standards — is Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment firm that has invested $30 million in a Canadian ethanol maker.
Silicon Valley billionaire Vinod Khosla, who recently penned a New York Times op-ed along with former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., calling for even more ethanol mandates, is also heavily invested in ethanol.
Yes, the automakers see their profits and their business models at risk in the debate over CAFE, but, as in every Washington battle over increasing regulation, there’s somebody standing nearby ready to profit on both sides.
Read the whole thing here.
Thieves Fall Out
Posted by Myron EbellMy colleague Marlo Lewis testified at a painfully comic hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee yesterday on “examining global warming issues in the power plant sector”. Marlo’s testimony is well worth reading, as is the testimony of two other witnesses: Bob Murray, chairman and CEO of Murray Energy Corporation, one of the biggest independent coal companies in the country: and Tom Borelli of the Free Enterprise Action Fund.
But I write to discuss the testimony of three heads of major electric utilities and of two leading ‘viros. Peter Darbee, chairman and CEO of PG&E in California, supports a cap-and-trade scheme that would be fair to his company by giving out the initial allocations based on actions already undertaken that reduced emissions (called credits for early action) and on each emitter’s historical level of energy produced rather than on its historical level of emissions. This would favor utilities (like PG& E!) that don’t burn much or any coal and instead already rely on higher-priced lower-emitting fuels. To be fair to Darbee, I should cut him some slack because his company has to do business in California, a state whose energy policies are remindful of Alice’s Wonderland, only less rational.
It’s not like anyone could have foreseen it…
Posted by Ivan OsorioWith national security worries about Iran everywhere these days, the gas riots there yesterday make the Ahmedinejad regime seem not only less fearsome, but just plain stupid. No, not crazy, stupid: stupid enough to be incompetent schemers, and stupid enough to try to fix a botched state intervention – price subsidies — with another intervention — rationing — to reduce consumption after those subsidies artificially inflated demand. Who knew?
FTC Moves to Protect Bandwealth
Posted by Cord BlomquistIn a new report, Broadband Connectivity Competition Policy, the FTC routed the empty arguments of the “net neutrality” crowd, marking a significant victory for those who believe in competition and freedom on the net.
Robert Kahn, the inventor of the TCP/IP protocol has referred to “net neutrality” as nothing more than a regulatory slogan. In a piece in The Register Kahn is quoted as saying “I am totally opposed to mandating that nothing interesting can happen inside the net.”
What kind of interesting stuff “inside the net” is Kahn referring to? One example is managing traffic, called packet prioritizing, so that emails and websites are brought from servers to our displays quickly. This does mean that peer-to-peer network traffic and mp3 downloads are slower than they would be on an unmanaged network. Some call this unfair, but many customers and ISPs seem to think it’s very sensible.
ISPs also think its a good idea to ask Big Content (Ebay, Amazon, and Google) to pay their fair share. Of course Big Content doesn’t like this idea and has allied with activist groups to push the neutrality agenda and “defend the little guy.” Like so many initiatives offered up in Washington, neutrality regulation is just another attempt to hurt one industry in order to support another.
But this type of favoritism in Washington is what really hurts the little guy, because it means that those who use the internet very little will suffer the same high bills as those who are avid downloaders of music and movies. To make matters worse, outlawing smart networks would reduce the internet to a dumb pipe — meaning slower speeds for everyone.
For an in-depth look at how net-neutrality reduces our “bandwealth” be sure to check out my colleague Wayne Crews’s comments to the FCC, the other agency looking at web regulation.
Is net neutrality a new religion?
Posted by Ivan OsorioSilly reactions to the Federal Trade Commission’s new net neutrality report shouldn’t be surprising, but I didn’t expect the ridiculous-beyond-parody (over at Fark.com): “FTC shoots down net neutrality. RIP, Internet.”
Rain Man, Regulator
Posted by Ivan OsorioWired blogger Scott Gilbertson is upset about the Federal Trade Commission’s report urging caution regarding net neutrality regulation.
The Chairman of the FTC Deborah Platt Majoras says in a statement accompanying the report that “in the absence of significant market failure or demonstrated consumer harm, policy makers should be particularly hesitant to enact new regulation in this area.”
In other words wait and see if it all goes south and then maybe consider doing something to fix it.
Gilbertson is essentially criticizing the FTC for not considering every possible scenario of things that could go wrong. Applying such an argument to regulation is akin to applying the Rain Man approach to airline safety when traveling.
Charlie: Ray, all airlines have crashed at one time or another, that doesn’t mean that they are not safe.
Raymond: QANTAS. QANTAS never crashed.
Charlie: QANTAS?
Raymond: Never crashed.
Charlie: Oh that’s gonna do me a lot of good because QANTAS doesn’t fly to Los Angeles out of Cincinnati, you have to get to Melbourne! Melbourne, Australia in order to get the plane that flies to Los Angeles!Supreme Court Overturns Race-Based Student Assignments
Posted by Hans BaderThe Supreme Court has overturned the race-based assignment of students in Seattle and Louisville schools. (The decision can be found here).
CEI filed an amicus brief arguing that schools shouldn’t receive deference from the courts when they use race, pointing to the bizarre racial statements made by the Seattle Schools.
CEI pointed out that the Seattle Schools, on their website, have falsely claimed that “emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology” constitutes “cultural racism,” that only whites can be racist, that it is racist to expect minorities to plan ahead the way white people do, and that colorblindness is bad.
Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion announcing the court’s decision cites these statements, which were brought to the court’s attention by CEI.
So, too, does Justice Thomas’s concurrence, which rejects giving any deference to schools when they use race, and emphasizes that the bizarre “racial theories endorsed by the Seattle school board should cause the dissenters to question whether local school boards should be entrusted with the power to make decisions on the basis of race.”
At SCOTUSblog, I discuss what today’s decision means in this post.
Earlier, I explained why the use of race in the Seattle is not justified under a “desegregation” or “integration” rationale, since racial “imbalances” are not the same as “segregation,” and since Seattle has never been segregated, and there is therefore nothing to “desegregate” or “integrate.” John Rosenberg also has discussed the case at his insightful blog Discriminations.
-
About Us
OpenMarket.org is the staff blog of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. We believe that people improve their lives not through government regulation, but by making their own choices in a free marketplace. -
Search
-
Categories
Agriculture
Bureaucrash
CEI in the City
Culture
Economic Liberty
Energy
Environment
Global Warming
Healthcare Reform
Insurance
Intellectual Property
International
Legal
Mobility
Nanny State
Nano & Biotech
Odds & Ends
Personal Liberty
Politics as Usual
Precaution & Risk
Privacy
Sanctimony
Tech & Telecom
Trade
-
RSS Center
