Archives for June, 2008
Would they also have Castro rum and Stalin vodka?
My friend Tom Palmer says that whenever he sees somebody sporting a Che Guevara t-shirt, he likes to ask the wearer, “That’s a great t-shirt; do you have the entire collection?” The wearer usually responds either with a blank stare or by asking Tom what does he mean, to which Tom then responds: “You know, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot…”
Now I can happily say that the disgusting Che is in the right company in at least one type of merchandise. The photo below was taken recently by a friend in vacation in Italy.
It’s also morbidly fitting that Che’s wine bottle would be decorated with a Cuban flag. He was Argentine, not Cuban, but Cuba is the country upon which he visited the most hell, so his crimes there are for what he should be most remembered. And as long as there are pinheads who would wear a communist mass murderer on their chest, the world will need constant, unremitting, badgering reminding of what Che really did. (Thanks to Philip Blumel for the photo.)
Hands-Free Driving: Bootleggers and Baptists
This article from CNET News does a (perhaps unintentionally) brilliant job of describing the Bootleggers and Baptists forces behind California’s new law banning using cell phones while driving, unless using a hands-free device. The first paragraph sums it up perfectly:
A good number of Californians think the state’s new hands-free cell phone law will bode well for public safety, if a random sampling of consumers by CNET News.com is any indication. But gadget retailers have their own reason to cheer–they’re reaping the cash benefits.
Mike Masnick writes an excellent post at TechDirt about the folly of such a law. Why single out particular unsafe driving practices, instead of just banning unsafe driving in general? Maybe because Bluetooth manufacturers have a strong incentive to legitimize using their devices while driving…
RIAA Attacks Safe Harbor
Ars reports that the RIAA is lobbying the government to sneak rules mandating web filtering into the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The proposed regulations would mandate that ISPs filter out copyright-infringing materials - and, in fact, all services that facilitate infringement, even those that also have legitimate uses. Killing P2P software in such a way would violate net neutrality principles far more than anything any ISP has yet tried. It would also gut the safe harbor provision of the DMCA, which sensibly argues that only actual copyright infringers - not the ISPs that transmit their data - can be held liable for infringement.
While we here at CEI oppose mandating net neutrality, we also oppose mandating violating it. The market - not government - is best-suited to decide which network management tools work best against congestion while providing what customers want.
Terms of Service Criminally Actionable?
Wired reports that:
In their eagerness to visit justice on a 49-year-old woman involved in the Megan Meier MySpace suicide tragedy, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are resorting to a novel and dangerous interpretation of a decades-old computer crime law - potentially making a felon out of anybody who violates the terms of service of any website, experts say.
Apparently, the terms of service were violated in this case by registering under a false name - a pretty minor offense that many of us, seeking anonymity, commit regularly. At most, such a violation may be grounds for banning the user from the site. (Perhaps in cases of terms of use violations that are extremely harmful to the website, the site should be able to sue for breach of contract in civil court.) But instead, the feds are trying to prosecute the defendant criminally.
The article quotes Jennifer Granick of the Electronic Frontier Foundation as saying, “This is a novel and extreme reading of what [the law] prohibits… It’s probably an unconstitutional reading of the statue.” Criminal law is normally reserved for actions prohibited by the state and is not used to enforce private contracts.
But courts are making the line between civil law and criminal law fuzzier. In Kansas v. Hendricks (1997), the Supreme Court upheld “civil commitment” for sex offenders after they had already completed their jail time. The Court said that the law was not really ex post facto punishment in addition to the criminals’ sentence, because it was a civil law, not a criminal one. In effect, the state could label any punishment - including indefinite sentencing to a psychiatric prison - as “civil” and get out of any pesky rules about double jeopardy or punishment in excess of sentence. Now, the government is turning the labels around again and applying the term “criminal” to anyone who violates a provision of something as minor as a website’s terms of service.
Affordable Housing Fetish Devastates Chicago Housing
Congress is now pushing for the creation of a taxpayer-subsidized “affordable housing trust” in mortgage bailout legislation nearing passage. The Boston Globe has a story on how the fetish for “affordable housing” resulted in dangerous, costly, wasteful subsidized housing units in the Chicago region, that enriched corrupt developers. Federal obsessions with ”affordable housing” and “diversity” in homeownership also helped spawn the mortgage crisis.
The Bell Tolls for Local Franchising
Broadband Reports has news:
The FCC made changes to cable franchise rules last year which prevent “local franchising authorities from unreasonably refusing to award competitive cable franchises”. Those changes have faced an ongoing battle in court by various city and state franchising agencies which argued that the FCC had usurped their power when changing the rules. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that the FCC was within its authority to make those changes. FCC Chief Kevin Martin issued a statement about the ruling saying that he was glad that the court had recognized the fact that the new rules are pro-customer, reducing delays in cable service provision and increasing competitive pricing in the market.
It is rare that we here in the Technology and Regulation department at the Competitive Enterprise Institute stand by the FCC, but in this case, kudos to Chairman Martin! Local franchising has been stifling cable competition for years, leading to our country’s decline in international broadband rankings. It is time for the federal government to stop local governments from creating monopolies and outlawing competition in the cable market. The Sixth Circuit’s ruling will allow the government to do so. Freedom is more important than federalism.
AIDS Subsidies Used to Subvert Anti-AIDS Message
Taxpayer-funded AIDS subsidies are being used to subvert successful anti-AIDS programs in African countries like Uganda that succeed by instilling a politically-incorrect truth: fidelity saves lives. That’s what Sam Ruteikara, Chair of Uganda’s National AIDS Prevention Committee, explains today in the Washington Post, in an editorial, “Let My People Go, AIDS Profiteers.” He laments, “In the fight against AIDS, profiteering has trumped prevention. AIDS is no longer simply a disease; it has become a multibillion-dollar industry.”
Western governments (and charities subsidized by them) have spent billions on anti-AIDS programs in Africa and elsewhere. They spend the money largely on expensive treatments for those who already have AIDS, rather than on preventing the spread of AIDS, which can be done far more cheaply.
In poor African countries like Lesotho, “H.I.V.-infected children are offered exemplary treatment, while children suffering from much simpler-to-treat diseases are left untreated, sometimes to die,” notes an AIDS researcher quoted in a post at Reason entitled “Too Much Money for AIDS.”
And when they do try to prevent the spread of AIDS, they do it the most expensive and ineffective ways possible, like using expensive anti-retroviral drugs, and importing condoms that have little chance of consistently reaching remote villages.
In Uganda, anti-AIDS campaigners cut AIDS rates through the ABC program, telling the public to either be faithful, abstain from sex, or use condoms (in that order). The program worked. In practice, the focus was on fidelity, not abstinence or condoms. (Condoms are useful in the West, but they are just too expensive and unavailable for people in impoverished African countries. If your annual income is $200, and you can’t afford to pay $10 in school fees for your children, you certainly aren’t going to spend $30 a year on condoms).
Uganda’s ”be faithful” message offends Western AIDS charity workers and foreign donors, who falsely claim that people can’t change their sexual behavior (just as social workers falsely insisted before welfare reform that people on welfare can’t change their ways). So they have used the carrot of subsidies to get Uganda to water down its “be-faithful” message, and AIDS rates have begun rising again. They have also made up a false statistic claiming that marital sex is more likely to transmit AIDS than sex with a prostitute.
So much foreign aid money is being spent on AIDS that countries like Botswana can’t handle it all. But diseases that wealthy Westerners don’t suffer from (and thus can’t relate to), like deadly forms of diarrhea, receive much less Western aid.
Meanwhile, AIDS rates in Zimbabwe are falling, even though that country’s economy and health care system are collapsing. That’s because the decline in its economy and reduction in foreign aid to that country has left men there too poor to afford having more than one partner at a time, thus reducing the spread of AIDS.
The U.S. versus Undersize Lobsters
I just criticized the ditzy Europeans for banning the sale of undersize kiwifruit. But now as I go through accumulated emails I come across this story by my friend Quin Hillyer on undersized lobster imports. I’m afraid it’s a close contest on which set of regulators is more idiotic. But since people were actually sentenced to jail in the U.S. case, I think America wins the foolishness contest. You decide.
When the story first broke in 1999, the Mobile Register played it tongue-in-cheek. “The defendants,” wrote reporter Mike Wilson, “have proved model prisoners, detained at present at minus 8 degrees Fahrenheit.” And building, and building. Because all of the lobster, not just the tails adjudged too short, was in the wrong packaging, that bumped up the “value” of the amount in violation.
And if it were an illegal import, well, that made it “smuggling,” right? And if the importers used the money they earned to buy any goods in the United States, well, that turned the case into “money laundering.”
Suddenly, the allegation of minor civil violations became a major criminal case. Three defendants were given sentences of – get this! – eight years each. In federal prison. To enforce a foreign regulation. About undersized lobsters.
The originally named defendants were 70,787 pounds of spiny lobster tails. Less than 5 percent of them were, horror of horrors, too short – which may or may not have been a violation of Honduran sea-harvest laws.
Even worse, the dastardly tails entered Bayou La Batre, Ala. not in the required cardboard containers, but in plastic. Again, Honduran law may have been violated.
U.S. prosecutors, perceiving a dangerous conspiracy, stopped bothering the lobsters and threw their net at the lobster importers. Using something called the Lacey Act, which makes it illegal in the United States to import goods in contravention of another nation’s laws, the prosecutors began building their case.
Better Be a Dog than A Human for Canadian Health Care
Because you’ll get treatment sooner as a dog! Reports Macleans magazine:
Dr. Danny Joffe is only half joking when he says that if he’d fallen asleep on the last day of vet school in Saskatoon and woken up some two decades later in his current workplace, he would not have believed it was an animal hospital. Joffe is one of 11 specialists at the C.A.R.E. Centre, a 28,000-sq.-foot palace of veterinary medicine built two years ago in Calgary by a consortium that owns 23 vet clinics and animal hospitals across British Columbia and Alberta. It has four operating theatres, a $100,000 CT machine, two ultrasound machines, a digital X-ray unit, an endoscopy centre, a lab and 16 examination rooms. Its intensive care unit boasts 20 cages and eight dog runs, staffed 24/7. “It’s just like an emergency centre at a tertiary care human hospital,” Joffe says.
There is almost no pet illness that can’t be treated here. For eye problems, C.A.R.E. provides ophthalmologists who perform cataract surgery. Orthopaedic surgeons do hip replacements or arthroscopy — minimally invasive surgery on joints. To treat cancer, a surprisingly common disease in dogs and cats, says Joffe, “Our oncologist can offer intricate chemotherapy protocols and our surgeons can do very extreme and elaborate surgeries, including mass removals, amputations and bone transplants from cadaver dogs.” As for MRIs, C.A.R.E. has a standing two appointments a week booked at a private human facility in the city. “For you or I it might be a several-month process,” says Joffe of getting an MRI. “We get it done in a week or less.”
Great. Just what we need in America. A medical system that treats animals better than people!
The EU Cracks Down on the Crime of Selling Small Kiwifruit
The line “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you” has long been a comic favorite. As well it should. The Daily Mail reports:
A market trader has been banned from selling a batch of kiwi fruits because they are 1mm smaller than EU rules allow.
Inspectors told 53-year- old Tim Down he is forbidden even to give away the fruits, which are perfectly healthy.
The father of three will now have to bin the 5,000 kiwis, costing him £1,000 in lost sales.
Speaking yesterday from the stall in Bristol he has owned for 20 years, Mr Down said: ‘It’s total nonsense. I work hard enough to make a living without all these bureaucrats telling us what we can and can’t sell.
‘They’re saying I’m a criminal for selling this fruit, but the real crime is that all this fruit will go to waste - all because it’s 1mm too small.
‘It’s a terrible waste, particularly when we’re all feeling the pinch from rising food prices and I’ve got to throw away this perfectly good fruit.’
The case comes only two weeks after the European Commission said it wants to relax rules on misshapen fruit and vegetables.
It could eventually mean an end to notorious bans on straight bananas, curved cucumbers and skinny carrots.
But that will bring little comfort to Mr Down in the meantime
I certainly feel safer. You can’t be too careful when it comes to midget kiwifruit!
Of course, I wish I could say that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has never done anything as stupid. But more than 20 years the Department enforced a “marketing order”–essentially a means to reduce supply and prop up prices–that required the destruction of ugly kiwifruit. If you have seen a kiwifruit before it’s been pealed, you know how ridiculous this rule was.
Falling Behind Emerging Markets: World Leader No More?
The U.S. is still the largest and most productive economy, but the warning signs are there. The latest is that America is losing its lead in share of millionaires worldwide. It’s an imperfect measure of economic success, to be sure, but does offer a rough measure of entrepreneurship and economic regulation. And the score is not good. Reports Robert Frank in the Wall Street Journal:
The U.S. is losing its market share of global millionaires.
The population of millionaires grew five times as fast in emerging markets as it did in the U.S. last year, according to a survey released Tuesday. That was the largest divergence between the U.S. and the big emerging markets since the comparisons were first published in 2003.
The number of millionaires in Brazil, Russia, India and China jumped 19% in 2007, compared with growth of 3.7% in the U.S., its slowest growth since 2002, according to the World Wealth Report, produced by Merrill Lynch & Co. and Capgemini.
Looking for Private Alternatives to the National Health Service
All you have to do is read British publications to see what the mess otherwise called the National Health Service. Yet the NHS is a sacred cow on right and left. The Institute of Economic Affairs has just published a new monograph which gives a flavor of the NHS’s many problems:
Politicians will go to any lengths to persuade the voting public that the National Health Service is safe in their hands. Alternative policy models cannot be placed before the electorate unless political parties take huge risks. Yet, at the same time, we see even a Labour government drawing private finance into the health service and giving patients rights to use the private sector.
This groundbreaking new study shows that, although politicians do not feel confident in proposing radical new models of healthcare, elite opinion in the media, in political circles, in academia and in policy think tanks has fallen out of love with the idea of a centrally planned health service provided and financed by government.
Elite opinion does not, as yet, warm to a free market in healthcare. Although aspects of a market-based system are accepted, ideas of ‘market failure’ loom large - especially amongst the political class. Nevertheless, the author shows how some groups of opinion formers are prepared to be more radical. These groups, she believes, may in time be effective in promoting a vision of a market in healthcare that is free from government interference and from the stifling power of government-granted professional monopolies.
Americans who believe that socializing health care is the wave of the future might want to have a read.
Father of Canadian Health Care Wants to Kill His Child!
American politicians are busy talking about how to socialize the U.S. health care system. But in Canada the father of the nationalized system is prepared to kill his child.
David Gratzer writes in Investor’s Business Daily:
Back in the 1960s, Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.
The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: “the father of Quebec medicare.” Even this title seems modest; Castonguay’s work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.
Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in “crisis.”
“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”
Castonguay advocates contracting out services to the private sector, going so far as suggesting that public hospitals rent space during off-hours to entrepreneurial doctors. He supports co-pays for patients who want to see physicians. Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance.
In America, these ideas may not sound shocking. But in Canada, where the private sector has been shunned for decades, these are extraordinary views, especially coming from Castonguay. It’s as if John Maynard Keynes, resting on his British death bed in 1946, had declared that his faith in government interventionism was misplaced.
What would drive a man like Castonguay to reconsider his long-held beliefs? Try a health care system so overburdened that hundreds of thousands in need of medical attention wait for care, any care; a system where people in towns like Norwalk, Ontario, participate in lotteries to win appointments with the local family doctor.
Americans might want to look before they leap into such a system!
Bill Gates Leaves Microsoft
Today, Bill Gates left Microsoft. As Cord Blomquist pointed out, Bill Gates has created more value for the world in his time at Microsoft than Mother Theresa:
Like it or not, it was Windows that provided the platform for much of the information revolution, which subsequently created a worldwide economic boom. We shouldn’t relegate this accomplishment to a mere footnote in Mr. Gates’ biography and it’s certainly worth considering the moral implications of that sort of wealth creation.
Donating his time and money to philanthropy is excellent as well, but let’s not ignore Gates’ less-charitable contributions to the world.
Tobacco Settlement Lawyer Sentenced in Bribery Case
Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, the crooked trial lawyer who helped orchestrate multibillion dollar settlements between the States and the big tobacco companies, was sentenced today to five years in prison for conspiring to bribe a judge, plus a $250,000 fine. We earlier discussed how consumers got ripped off by those settlements, how corrupt trial lawyers like Scruggs collectively received more than $15 billion (not million, billion) for helping to rip-off the public, and how states are misusing the money they collected under the settlements.
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