January 2012

Bureaucrash Does Dallas (Morning News)

by Richard Morrison on June 30, 2007

in Bureaucrash, Economy, Healthcare

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

by John Berlau on June 30, 2007

in Economy, Legal

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.

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AEI Panel Discussion about the bipartisan trade deal – Continued

by Angela Logomasini on June 30, 2007

in Economy, Trade

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

by Richard Morrison on June 29, 2007

in Economy, Legal

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

by Cord Blomquist on June 29, 2007

in Economy, Tech & Telecom

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

by Richard Morrison on June 29, 2007

in Coalitions & Outreach

LaRouche poster

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

by Iain Murray on June 29, 2007

in Nanny State, Personal Liberty

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

by Marlo Lewis on June 29, 2007

in Global Warming

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.

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Every Day is Christmas When You’re an Ethanol Producer

by Richard Morrison on June 29, 2007

in Agriculture, Economy, Environment, Politics as Usual

Our 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

by Myron Ebell on June 29, 2007

in Environment

My 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.

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