January 2012

Regulation of the Day 72: Brass Toys, Killer of Children

by Ryan Young on November 13, 2009

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Features, Health and Illness, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Regulation of the Day, Zeitgeist

Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc. These days, it often also contains up to 2% lead to make it more workable. That means it runs afoul of federal standards for lead in children’s toys.

Fortunately, it turns out that children handling toy cars or other toys with brass parts does not raise their lead concentrations to anywhere near harmful levels. No harm, no foul, right?

Doesn’t matter, say regulators. No exceptions.

Toymakers presumably choose brass because it is cheap, durable, and better than alternative materials. Now they will have to turn to those second-best materials despite no evidence of harm.

There is also one benefit being overlooked. Copper alloys such as brass have natural antibacterial properties, a definite plus when children are involved.

So the next time you see little Johnny crying because he’s sick and his toy car’s axle is broken, you’ll know who to blame.

Yes, I will be posting about the new CDC swine flu estimates

by Michael Fumento on November 13, 2009 · 1 comment

in Health and Illness

At a glance, though, the estimates look okay it’s the spin and the lack of perspective that I have trouble with. And while the media have missed it, they also show an extremely low case-fatality ratio compared to seasonal flu.

According to the CDC, seasonal flu causes 15 to 60 million infections yearly with 36,000 resulting deaths, for a fatality rate ranging from 0.06% to 0.24%. It now estimates that since the swine flu outbreak began there have been 22 million cases causing 4000 deaths, for a fatality rate of 0.0182%. So the death rate from seasonal flu is about three to 12 times higher.

It estimates there have been 540 child deaths – those under age 18. But if just 3% of seasonal flu deaths were in children it would come out to 1,080 deaths.

Once again, it’s much squealing about nothing.

Once again, the media are squealing about nothing.

Intel Settles With AMD

by Elizabeth Jacobson on November 12, 2009

in Tech & Telecom

Intel and AMD have announced a settlement in their 4-year legal antitrust battle. As per the agreement, Intel will pay AMD $1.25 billion, an amount that’s likely far less than what they would have owed had Intel lost it’s case in court. Intel claims that it will not change its business practices because they were never illegal in the first place.

Hopefully, this agreement between private companies will send a signal to the Federal Trade Commission, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, and European Union regulators. Each has targeted Intel in the past, with the EU’s case against the company resulting in a fine of $1.5 billion. If two companies can agree that no unfair business practices are going on, it’s difficult to see where that leaves a federal case against them, especially considering that consumers don’t appear to have been negatively affected by the increasingly fast (and ever-cheaper) processors that have been coming to market in the past decade.

While it remains unclear what impact this agreement will have on Intel’s other legal troubles with both the federal government and European Union regulators, consumers can take heart knowing that this truce has the effect of freeing up vast resources for both companies that would have otherwise been wrapped up in legal costs. Intel and AMD can quit taking jabs at each other and get back to building newer, faster, cheaper processors.

Free Government Money: Broadband Edition

by Elizabeth Jacobson on November 12, 2009

in Stimulus to Nowhere, Tech & Telecom

As part of the America Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009, congress has set aside $7.2 billion for Obama’s national broadband plan. It should come as no surprise that numerous municipalities and telecommunications companies have applied for a piece of the pie. In light of the continuing climb in the unemployment rate (which reached 10.2% in October), the Obama administration has decided to try to put the broadband stimulus money in the hands of developers ASAP, and has announced that the rest of the broadband funds will be awarded in one more round, instead of two more as was previously planned.

Matt Lasar at Ars Technica outlines some of the overly-ambitious – and unbelievably expensive – grant requests that can be found on the BroadbandUSA Applications Database. Among the bank-breaking proposals include a $240 million request to build an under-the-sea fiber network to connect the most remote parts of Alaska, and a request for $35 million to provide gigabit-speed (yes, gigabit!) connectivity in Hawaii.

I’ve perused the BroadbandUSA database myself, and I found plenty more requests for astronomical amounts of taxpayer money. Some of the more excessive proposals:

  • $70 million to bring last-mile Fiber-to-the-home connections to residents of southeast Iowa.
  • $56 million for “world-class” fiber gigabit service plus wireless for Vermont residents.
  • $125 million for “state-of-the-art” access for rural Mississippi counties.
  • $60 million to increase the speeds of available internet in the dense urban landscape known as “western Texas” (the same desert that served as the setting for No Country for Old Men, a region with a population density of about 10 people per square mile).
  • $500 million for Echostar and ViaSat to bring satellite internet to 20 targeted states. It seems that if your next business venture requires a $500 million government handout in order to become profitable, the project probably wasn’t going to create much value in the first place.
  • $275,000 to create several youth-oriented public internet radio stations for public housing communities in Pennsylvania.

While the dollar amount of the last one on this list is dwarfed by most of the other proposals, the request illustrates the wishful thinking of public broadcasting aficionados. Youth-oriented children’s radio programming may have a positive impact on youngsters growing up in public housing, I don’t know. But public radio only serves the public interest insofar as there are people who actually tune in. If National Public Radio and their frequent pleas for money pledge drives are any indication, the demand for public radio is pretty weak. Unless the government wants to sit children down and force them to listen, this sounds like $275k will be going straight down the drain.

Just as there are trade-offs involved in all policy decisions, there are also trade-offs to consider when determining where to live. High-speed internet access is best-suited for communities with large enough populations such that high demand makes the large capital investments of building new networks an attractive investment. Smaller, outstate communities generally have to wait for the price of technology to come down before next-generation connections arrive in their locale. This is neither some kind of strange phenomenon, nor ploy by capitalists to keep the good life away from rural populations; it’s just the economics of the high-tech sector. Government cannot turn Mason City, Iowa into San Jose, California without causing a huge dead-weight loss to the taxpayers.

Obama Administration Hits Brakes on Project Labor Agreement

by Ivan Osorio on November 12, 2009

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Labor, Regulation

The Obama administration this week called off bidding on what would have been a union-friendly federal construction project bidding process, in response to a contractor complaint over its inclusion of a project labor agreement (PLA), which would disadvantage nonunion contractors, reports The Washington Times. The bids were for a $35 million contract ot build a Job Corps center in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Under a PLA, an open shop contractor could be required to employ workers from union hiring halls, acquire apprentices from union apprentice programs, and require employees to pay union dues. The Labor Department acknowledged that the complaing over the PLA was the reason it called off bidding.

This is as surprising as it is welcome. From promoting card-check legislation to imposing duties on Chinese tires to stalling on new international trade agreements, the Obama administration has consistently promoted the interests of organized labor, which strongly supports Obama, hoping that he can implement policy changes to help unions stem their decades-long private sector membership decline. Whatever the reason, this should be encouraging to advocates of open competition and flexible labor markets.

For more on project labor agreements see here.

ACORN Challenges Cut-Off Of Federal Funds After Child Prostitution Scandal, Claiming It Is ‘Unconstitutional’

by Hans Bader on November 12, 2009

in Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

ACORN has just filed a lawsuit in New York challenging as “unconstitutional” its loss of federal funds after its role in a child prostitution scandal was exposed.  Earlier, it sued those who exposed its role in that scandal for $2 million, claiming that the exposure violated its privacy rights under state audiotaping laws.  ACORN claims that Congress’s vote to cut off federal funds to ACORN is an unconstitutional bill of attainder.

ACORN is a left-wing group that launched President Obama’s career as a community organizer (ACORN stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now).  Obama has long-standing ties to ACORN, and an ACORN affiliate received received $800,000 from Obama’s campaign.  Earlier, a liberal prosecutor (and fervent Obama supporter) threatened to punish those who exposed ACORN’s scandalous actions, while turning a blind eye to ACORN’s wrongdoing.  Now, however, Obama is quite rationally distancing himself from ACORN, which has become an embarrassment to its one-time supporters.

Legal scholars like Hans Von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation have explained why Congress’s cut-off of funds to ACORN was perfectly constitutional.  It is easy to see why Congress would not want scarce federal funds to go to ACORN, which has a long history of terrible financial mismanagement, waste of funds, financial fraud, vote fraud, and tax evasion.  Congress had many legitimate,  non-punitive reasons for cutting off funds to ACORN.

ACORN’s lawsuit is brought by the radically left-wing Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR).  CCR’s founder, William Kunstler, was very open about the fact that he believed in civil liberties only for left-wingers in capitalist societies, not for dissidents of any stripe in Communist countries.  A classic example was his attitude towards dissidents in South Vietnam.  Many of these dissidents were liberals who had once criticized the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government.  After communist North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam, the dissidents began politely criticizing the human-rights abuses of the new government.  They were promptly sent to re-education camps, where they were starved or tortured to death.  The new Communist government turned out to be far crueler than the old right-wing government, which had at least allowed dissidents to live.

When some liberals, like Joan Baez, criticized this oppression against dissidents they had once worked with, William Kunstler refused to do so, saying that once a communist regime took power, he was not in favor of criticizing it for any human-rights abuses it committed.  Kunstler said, “I don’t believe in criticizing socialist governments publicly, even if there are human-rights violations.”  To Kunstler, civil liberties were just a tool to be used to bring down capitalist governments and pave the way for a communist “dictatorship of the proletariat.”  Once such a dictatorship was in power, there was no more need for civil liberties or individual freedoms of any kind, since individual freedom could only prove an obstacle to the socialist transformation of society.

SEIU’s California Scheming V

by Ivan Osorio on November 12, 2009

in Labor, Politics as Usual

The bitter ongoing fight between the national leadership of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the former leadership of a SEIU Oakland, California, health care workers local has taken an even nastier turn.

Early this year, SEIU, under the leadership of Andy Stern, forced a merger between the Oakland health care local, United Healthcare Workers-West (UHW), and a Los Angeles-area local where a major corruption scandal broke last year — leading that local’s chief, Stern ally Tyrone Freeman, to resign.

In response to the Stern-led SEIU bullying, UHW president Sal Rosselli broke with SEIU and formed a new union, the National Union of United Healthcare Workers (NUHW). Since its founding, NUHW has tried to attract workers disgruntled with SEIU, which has fought back, hard. Last Friday, November 6, NUHW filed a complaint with the California Public Employment Relations Board, alleging voter intimidation and vote tampering by SEIU representatives in a June decertification election, reports, The Wall Street Journal.

The allegations are ugly. As the Journal‘s Matthew Kaminski further explains: 

The NUHW immediately called for a re-run of the election, challenging voting irregularities. The two unions have traded accusations since. But now, Carlos Martinez, an immigrant from El Salvador who was on the SEIU’s staff during the campaign, has come forward—so he says—to blow the whistle on his employer. Mr. Martinez went door-to-door canvassing the home-care workers during the 15-day election. Like him, many of them are native Spanish speakers; some are illiterate.

… Mr. Martinez says he was instructed by superiors to tell the workers that if they voted against the SEIU, they could lose their medical benefits, see their green cards or citizenship revoked and possibly be deported. He says he and other staffers were also told to pressure voters to spoil ballots that had been filled out for the NUHW. In other instances he filled ballots out for them. He says he even took some to the post office, as did other SEIU campaign workers.

All of these actions, if true, are a violation of state or federal laws governing union elections. In all, he adds, he visited 550 homes. “We scared people. We took the secret ballot away from these people,” he says. “It was wrong.”

SEIU has denied these allegations. SEIU needs to make its case, but its own recent history of trying to intimidate opponents will make doing so very difficult before any fair-minded audience.

For more on SEIU, see here.

Not without honor, save in his own home . . .

by Michael Fumento on November 12, 2009

in Odds & Ends

I’m a hit in the Czech Republic, a land renowned for beautiful architecture and even more beautiful women. Well, at least I got mentioned in a Czech language publication, CDN.CZ, which roughly states:

Other data collected by Michael Fumento from the Washington Times, reveal that people are panicked in the U.S. to seven percent of all visitors to clinics! Most of those who not been affected by H1N1 virus. And they have struck again with such weak signs that do not require hospitalization. By going to the crowded hospital, may greatly help the spread of disease.

Actually, it never occurred to me that mildly ill people going to emergency rooms were spreading the disease to the worried well. But obviously that must be the case. It’s a false attribution I embrace! God bless the Czech Republic!

And those beautiful women.

Regulation of the Day 71: Waistlines

by Ryan Young on November 12, 2009

in Culture, Health and Illness, International, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation, Regulation of the Day, Zeitgeist

In Japan, it is illegal for men to have a waist larger than 33.5 inches. The limit for women is 35.4 inches. Those in violation are forced to undergo counseling (Hat tip to CEI colleague Megan McLaughlin).

The law, passed last year, is part of an effort to keep obesity rates low and avoid related health problems.

One problem with using wasitlines as the primary metric is that results can vary among measurers. According to one article, “Satoru Yamada, a doctor at Kitasato Institute Hospital in Tokyo, published a study two years ago in which several doctors measured the waist of the same person. Their results varied by as much as 7.8 centimeters.”

That’s almost ten percent of the average waistline. It is sad that Japanese regulators have a strong enough nanny-state streak to legislate allowable physical dimensions. But the lack of precision in enforcing their edict must be maddening for the people involved.

The government forgot about hiring the vet

by Michael Fumento on November 11, 2009

in Employment, Odds & Ends

With unemployment up yet again, it must be reassuring to Americans that job-seeking veterans are being helped so much by the government, and by all those Web-based organizations with such names as VetJobs.com, MilitaryHire.com, RecruitMilitary.com, HireVeterans.com, and Military Job Zone.

Except that they’re not. Remember the expression “Don’t forget; hire the vet”? We’ve forgotten.

Read my Philadelphia Inquirer piece, “No Medals for Hiring Vets,” and be enraged.

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