With 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?
In 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.
Silly 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.”
Wired 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!
The 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.
…you make the passage of an anti-Ladies Night ordinance your primary goal in life. That’s the case with Coloradoan Steve Horner, who decided that Ladies Night promotions at bars were illegally discriminating against men. This led to a complaint to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which…agreed with him. At the Commission’s monthly meeting this week, they passed a resolution condemning Ladies Night promotions, helpfully suggesting alternate marketing strategies. Denver’s alt weekly Westword has the story:
…the commission made it through the weightier agenda items involving truly horrendous instances of discrimination to item “VI a) Discussion and action by the Commission regarding ladies night.” And it did take action: “Ladies’ night promotions may not involve price differentials or other differential treatment based on a protected class, whatever the intent,” reads the resolution it adopted. “The Commission strongly discourages ladies’ night promotions and recommends instead that establishments consider neutral promotions involving perhaps free or reduced admissions to a limited number of customers who appear before a certain time.”
Just what this state needs: bar specials designed by bureaucrats.
Exactly. I can only imagine how unpopular Steve is going to be amongst his fellow bar patrons – both the women who used to get cheap drinks and the men who enjoyed chatting them up. He might not rise to Steve Bartman levels of infamy, but he certainly won’t be getting any high fives from Colorado’s drinking/flirting community.
In the aftermath of the bipartisan deal between the Democrats and the Bush Administration, the question is whether the new enforceable environmental and ILO labor standards that are included in FTAs are the tipping point where they are overstretching into domestic affairs. Yesterday, AEI held an interesting panel discussion about this called “The Bipartisan Trade Bargain: Is the Deal Worth It?”
According to Jack K. Veroneau, deputy United States trade representative, the answer is no. We had the same discussion when the Jordan FTA was negotiated in which both the US and Jordan committed themselves to enforce domestic laws. This was not the end of the world as many conservative commentators contended, and so will these provisions not be a problem. We need the labor provisions to offset disruptive effects of the otherwise benign globalization.
Phil Levy, policy analyst at AEI, emphasized the creation of wealth and economic development as determinative for improving both labor and environmental standards. Countries simply have, and should have since they are in radically different economic situations, different views on what the appropriate standards are. This agreement has, according to Mr Levy, clearly gone too far.
Levy seemed much more aware of the problems of going down the line too far. If the new provisions are not the tipping point, then where is it? When we are obliged to abide vague ILO standards, will it ever stop? How much free trade can we sacrifice for the sake of simply trade? I’ll update this post tomorrow with opinions from the last panelists.
The Associated Press is reporting on the latest SCOTUS opinion from this morning, and as it turns out it’s one on which we filed an amicus brief (PDF link). In its decision on Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, the justices struck down the use of race by public school districts when admitting/assigning students to their various institutions. I’m sure legal maestro Hans will have much more to say later today (UPDATE: he has), but here’s the quick take for now:
The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected school diversity plans that take account of students’ race in two major public school districts but left the door open for using race in limited circumstances.
The decision in cases affecting schools in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle could imperil similar plans in hundreds of districts nationwide, and it further restricts how public school systems may attain racial diversity.
The court split, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts announcing the court’s judgment. The court’s four liberal justices dissented.
The districts “failed to show that they considered methods other than explicit racial classifications to achieve their stated goals,” Roberts said.
Previous posts on the case are here (12/6/06) here (5/18/06). The Seattle Times also has a timeline of action on the case going back to 2000 here.
Today on CEI’s Rachelwaswrong.org blog, Barun Mitra of the Liberty Institute (New Delhi, India) makes a plea for greater awareness about malaria’s victims and the need for DDT. His comments are compelling and worth repeating here:
It is good news that the demand for DDT to fight malaria is on the rise. Last year, India’s government exported their first consignment of DDT in almost 20 years to Eritrea and Mozambique. This year they doubled their shipments from last year and expect orders from more African countries soon. The competition in the international market—China being the sole exporter in the past decade—has already brought the price down by almost a half. U.S. funds to fight malaria are being used by some of the African countries to explore the DDT option.
Yet, DDT’s life saving uses may soon be threatened once again. At the recently held multinational meeting on the Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants in Senegal, the green NGOs made a concerted effort to stop DDT by proposing a range of reporting requirements that would either be impossible to fulfill by most poor countries or would make it very difficult to import. On top of that, some members of the EU strongly implied that use of DDT could potentially affect African agricultural exports to Europe.
Public health advocates need to build greater public awareness about the victims of malaria, in Africa and elsewhere. Political and civic leaders need to objectively assess the malaria and public health conditions in their countries, rather than getting bamboozled by the NGOs and some western aid agencies. If leadership is not exercised, the present window of opportunity against malaria will once again be squandered, and the poor will be left to bear the burden of malaria.
Lira Tantebeyava works for the women of Kyrgyzstan. Every day, she plots and executes strategies to bring equal rights to one half the people of that beautiful, mountainous country on the opposite side of the globe. She brooks sexism from no one in a society where it is cultural permissible for a man to kidnap a woman of his choosing to become his bride. Lira Tantebeyave is one tough hombre.
Lira is also a loving mother of five: 1 young woman, 3 girls, and a baby daughter. She is the devoted wife of Sayakbai, a gentleman giant, man enough to respect his wife as an equal.
Lira Tantebeyava was imprisoned in Talas City, Talas Oblast by authorities in the back pocket of the Jerooy gold mining company, a Kyrgyz subsidiary of Oxus Gold, a British multinational mining company. Lira had organized a rally against the mine, which the people of Talas, discreetly animist, despise for its environmental impact. For this, Lira spent three weeks in jail, was roughed up, and denied access to her family.
As libertarians, we hold true that a free market dynamic is the ideal principle upon which to organize an economy, and probably society as well. Usually, it is excess government that riles us. But let us never forget that such intangible as scruples have tangible manifestations. Optimal, even acceptable outcomes are not foreordained. It takes a great deal of self regulation. Good practices matter, if things are to work as we know they can.
Oxus Gold has earned notice. They have shamed themselves; they have shamed Britain; they have shamed the market. It is imperative to care because companies like this inhibit the cause.
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