January 2012

Social Security, Health Care, and Partisan Hackery

by Ryan Young on February 8, 2010

in Healthcare, Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

Megan McArdle points out a delicious piece of partisan hackery.

Back in 2005, President Bush proposed privatizing Social Security. This was one of his few good ideas. But because of poor salesmanship, it was less than popular. Nothing came of it. Rather than press on, The New York Times urged him to cave in, in accordance with the peoples’ wishes.

This year’s health care bill is similarly unpopular. Now The New York Times is urging President Obama to press on, against the peoples’ wishes.

Go read her whole post. It’s great.

Federal Government Shuts Down Due to Snow

by Ryan Young on February 8, 2010

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Regulation, Stimulus to Nowhere, Zeitgeist

Few people outside of the DC area are likely to notice, but the recent snowstorm shut down the federal government today. Another big snow is on the way, so the feds are also taking tomorrow off.

The Washington Post reports:

Official estimate [sic] that closing the federal government for a day due to the weather costs roughly $100 million in lost productivity and opportunity costs, meaning this weekend’s storm will have potentially cost taxpayers at least $250 million, for last Friday’s early dismissal and Monday’s and Tuesday’s closures.

That is dwarfed, of course, by the opportunity costs of having a $3.8 trillion federal government in the first place. Not to mention the productivity losses.The federal government spends $49.1 billion enforcing regulations that cost nearly $1.2 trillion. if even half of that were freed up, imagine the good that would come of it.

The billions and billions of dollars spent on earmarks and stimulus would do far more good if that money stayed in the productive sector, subject to the self-correcting mechanisms of profit and loss.

In short: America benefits when Washington busybodies take a few days off. So enjoy it while it lasts.

There is great wisdom in Mark Twain’s famous adage: “No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the congress is in session.”

A disease cluster scare implodes; a new one is born

by Michael Fumento on February 8, 2010

in Health and Illness, Precaution & Risk

Yesterday I wrote that a scare over a scleroderma cluster in South Boston had been resolved when the state department of health found no links to anything manmade, but rather than the sufferers were simply genetically more inclined to developing the disease.

But now Florida activists have just goaded the Palm Beach County Health Department into declaring a cluster of child cancer cases in the town of Acreage. Residents are alternately angered and terrified, including by none other than uber-activist Erin Brockovich herself, about whose cold-blooded antics I’ve published 15 articles. She came to town to express her concern and outrage, with two law firms in tow handing out contracts labeled “Contingency Fee Agreement & Power of Attorney.”

Implicated have been radioactive well water, pesticides, solvents, jet fuel, and other causes. Everything but coincidence, as health officials obviously believe. Meanwhile, in addition to being terrified over their kids’ health, people in the town have found they can’t move if they want to because their property values have collapsed.

Implicated have been pesticides, solvents, radium, jet fuel, and other causes. Everything but coincidence, as health officials obviously believe.

I found out about this because I received an email today that read in part:

I wrote to you earlier because Erin Brockovich was starting hysteria and pressing the government to call our community a cancer cluster.  Now, with skewed population numbers and a number as small as three, the health officials have deemed us a pediatric cancer cluster.  Now people are calling to condemn this community with 12,000 CHILDREN (not total). People are scared and trying to blame whatever and whoever.

An unofficial poll by a newspaper online website found two-thirds of those voting thought Brocko was only out for personal gain (Oh, such ingrates!), and some comments by townspeople seemed to reflect, shall we say, a certain degree of anger. Here’s one.

The people of the Acreage have alot to lose, cant move, cant refi, cant sell, cant do anything with your property but still pay taxes and your mortgage for how ever many years this takes.

No mortgage company is going to work with anybody out here till this is over how long do you figure it will take? 5 years? 10 years? And while were all sitting on worthless property we will have the added cost of city water to be stuck with..

And while this is going on we all live on dead ground good for nothing…….Show me the proof!!! You can’t there is none!!!!

I dunno. Call me insensitive. But I don’t think doing this to people is right.

“Monopoly” in a media saturated world

by Wayne Crews on February 8, 2010

in Odds & Ends

So the proposed Comcast/NBC merger was met with “skepticism” by Washington politicians. Will Comcast charge for content that was once free? will it ensure that emergency programming gets through? These services and decisions about them are normal offerings that a concerned public expects; a merged entity ignores them at its peril.

The two firms’ CEOs respectively made assurances to lawmakers like 18-term term Chairman Henry Waxman. (Speaking of the lack of choice, this gentleman’s own constitents get to vote for him, but none of the rest of us have any say whatsoever–decade after decade–even though his laws impact us all).

But those assurances about programming aren’t what politicians care about, not really. This proceeding serves to help re-energize the old political campaign against what politicians laughably call “media consolidation.” (Here’s one of my defenses of so-called “media monopoly” in Communications Lawyer so no need to repeat it here now; I’m not an attorney but I play one at a think tank.)

Any antitrust intervention that relieves Comcast/NBC’s competitors of critical market impulses, of the driving need to respond to any potentially new superior service or slate of services, hurts the interests of consumers. These endless proceedings and delays, before this one those of Echostar/DirecTV, Sirius/XM and others, all directly harm consumer interests and the communications marketplace. There is too much tolerance of pointless FCC and congressional interference in today’s media-saturated world, and too much tolerance of media competitors who properly should have no say whatsoever in whether or not a rival’s merger goes forward.

Basically, antitrust about dismantling what others have created or hope to create, undermining large scale voluntarism and enterprise, and replacing it with even larger scale compulsion or prohibition. The (not “unintended,” as often claimed) result of which is to send the “free” market careening off into a direction it never would have taken, a direction in defiance of shareholder capitalism and market pressures. I wrote about this very problem in a letter in the Wall Street Journal last week.

The emergence of ever-greater competitive alternatives on the media horizon will be damaged by the destruction of wealth entailed in halting a productive merger. The merger, if it goes through, may or may not prove successful for the companies themselves. Regardless, it is precisely the market’s task to respond to this and future deals competitively, not leverage Washington to avoid having to engineer and sweat over such a response. To those rivals that might feel satisfaction at the barriers and future conditions put on this merger if it’s even “approved” (how is that even a term appropriate to free enterprise?): Political disapproval of Comcast/NBC makes it even easier to put others in the crosshairs next time.

Regulation of the Day 112: Importing Pork Rinds

by Ryan Young on February 8, 2010

in Health and Illness, Regulation, Regulation of the Day, Trade

The federal government is loosening its restrictions on importing pork rinds from Brazil. Rudolph Foods, Inc., an Ohio company, owns a factory in Brazil, and stands to benefit from the ruling.

Competitors are up in arms. Citing exotic illnesses like foot-and-mouth disease, one competitor told The Wall Street Journal, “It just takes one pig” that is infected to spread a disease… “The risk is low, but the consequences are really high.”

If that is his strongest argument, then the case against liberalization is as weak as it gets. Instead of using the power of government to hobble its rivals, this company should go out and improve its product. Make its pork rind recipe even tastier. And cheaper. Use the import liberalization to its own advantage if possible.

The Objections to Wind Farms

by Michael Fumento on February 8, 2010 · 2 comments

in Energy

Despite massive subsidies, wind power still only provides about two percent of U.S. energy. Part of the problem is inherent. It takes a lot of turbines to produce the power that a single coal-fired or nuke plant can produce. So wind farms are going to comprise a lot of turbines. And that causes problems, as we’ve been seeing in a 10-year fight over constructing a 130-turbine offshore wind farm near Martha’s Vineyard.

It would be the first offshore wind project in the country and furnish about 75 percent of Cape Cod’s energy.

Ian Bowles, the Massachusetts energy and environmental affairs secretary, has called the project “symbolic of America’s struggle with clean energy. Its symbolism has risen above the number of megawatts.”

Although some protests have been dealt with, including potential hindrance to navigation and fishing and harm to birds, Indians are still against it. (I used to say “native Americans” until once when I was interviewing two of them and I kept saying “native Americans” and they kept referring to themselves as “Indians.”)

The Indians in the area practice a sunrise ritual on the sound and also say they may have artifacts buried beneath the seabed, according to the Washington Post. They’ve gotten the sound qualified for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, which could restrict its commercial use.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says that although his department is trying to broker a deal between the tribes and Energy Management, the company seeking to build the farm, “I’m not holding my breath for a consensus.” If both sides can’t settle on a compromise by April, he says, he’s going to just lay down the law himself in April and probably tick off everybody.

Michael Moynihan, director of the Green Project at NDN, a centrist think tank, told the Post, “It is emblematic of the difficulty of getting wind online, anywhere in America, with a system designed a century ago that is frankly hostile to renewable energy.”

Right. If it were just a few tightly-bunched turbines, it wouldn’t be a problem. But these farms, in addition to things like chopping up birds and bats have a big and obvious footprint.

Compare that with the nearest power plant to my home, which I often pass on my bike rides. It’s small, but probably provides more power than hundreds of turbines. Nonetheless, being coal-powered it drew the ire of a number of local residents. So the owners did something really smart. They built a wooden wall around the plant, then painted a very nice mural on it depicting local history.

This being the land of George Washington, the murals include such as Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. The wall isn’t that high, yet it’s enough so that if you didn’t already know the plant was there you wouldn’t know it was there. It has smokestacks, but you never see anything come out of them. The only ugly aspect was the coal pile, and it’s now obscured.

Out of sight, out of mind. But you can’t do that with wind. Solar has its own problem, also based on inefficiency, in that it requires huge tracts of land for all the panels needed.

But if you’re looking for new facilities that don’t produce greenhouse gas emissions there is a fourth solution. Nuclear power. A natural gas-burning power plant under construction has just exploded, killing five people. Every year, American coal miners die violently in mines or slowly from exposure to coal dust. Nuclear power in this country has never killed anybody. No birds, no bats, and most importantly no humans. That’s also true in France, where 70 percent of their power comes from nukes.

And today’s nuke plant designs are less prone to accidents than ever.

The writing is on the wall. Go nuclear.

Another “man-made” disease cluster solved

by Michael Fumento on February 7, 2010

in Health and Illness

What man-made pollutants were causing the mysterious cluster of scleroderma in South Boston?

Scleroderma is a rare, incurable, sometimes fatal illness that hardens muscles and internal organs. It’s victims are overwhelming women. It’s an autoimmune disease, meaning the body’s immune system is attacking itself.

There’s been a cluster of the disease in a section of South Boston which has long confounded citizens, except that they knew it had to have a man-made cause. Some blamed a nearby power plant. Others hazardous waste sites.

It got national media attention and led to an 11-year Massachusetts Department of Public Health. In their just-released findings they did indeed find “higher than expected cases’’ in a neighborhood of about 30,000 people.

But they found the significant cause was not the environment, but rather genetics.

“It’s not necessarily that the community they were living in was producing this disease,’’ Robert Simms, the chief of rheumatology at Boston Medical Center and a researcher in the study told the Boston Globe. “When you look at the data, it does not support that.’’

The study found that people with a family history of specific autoimmune-rheumatic diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, Raynaud’s disease, lupus, and thyroid disease, were more likely to develop scleroderma.

“For the women afflicted with the disfiguring disease,” said the reporter, “the findings have come as a bitter disappointment.”

“I believe there is a cumulative effect,’’ said Mary Cooney, a South Boston activist who has been working with the state on the study. “If these women had grown up in West Roxbury or Hyde Park, they would not have gotten the disease.’’

Have sympathy for these women. They are no hardcore environmental activists receiving tens of millions of dollars from mega-foundations to prove a that which isn’t. As one put it, “I thought that if we had an answer then we could fix it,’’ adding, “It would help us make sense of why so many of my neighbors have this horrible disease.’’

As Simms put it, the women were seeking “emotional validation.’’

That said, clusters like these are quite common and virtually never pan out (the main exception is drug side affects), but the media play them for all they’re worth – to attack perfectly safe technologies.

The most famous, or infamous as it were, is probably the Long Island breast cancer cluster.

As I wrote back in 1997:

Since the early 1990s, women in the Northeastern U.S., especially Long Island, New York, have been claiming that A) they are suffering an extraordinary rate of breast cancer, and that B) the cause most assuredly lies in the hand of man.

What the specific pollutant is, they have been at a loss to say – pesticides in general, chlorinated chemicals, power lines. The point is that some faceless, nameless corporation run by insensitive (no doubt cigar-chomping) white males has to be at fault.

Environmentalists have willingly accommodated them in this belief. Not long ago the left-wing magazine Mother Jones featured a cover with a woman wearing a gas mask as a brassiere.

But nothing ever came of it. One study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute showed that women in the Northeast are indeed more likely to die of breast cancer than in some regions of the country, but less than others. It also found the risk was almost completely due to certain risk factors which these women have incurred, including having children later in life and greater rates of alcohol use and obesity.

It might also have noted that Ashkenazi Jews have extraordinary breast cancer rates and that Long Island has large Jewish population.

But the activists didn’t want to hear this. Cindy Pearson, a spokeswoman for the Washington-based National Women’s Health Network, told the Boston Globe the study “doesn’t set my mind at ease, and it doesn’t make me think there aren’t environmental factors at work.”

Yet in 1993 still another study found that the Long Island breast cancer rate wasn’t extraordinary. Using a computer database, the Long Island-based newspaper Newsday discovered, “The highest breast cancer incidence rates were in the San Francisco Bay area, suburban Boston, and suburban Chicago, not on Long Island. Nassau and Suffolk (the counties making up Long Island) ranked right in the middle of the group studied.”

Did this mollify the Long Island activists? Far from it. “The fact that Long Island isn’t alone isn’t a comforting thought at all – it’s an even more disturbing message,” one told Newsday.

Get it? The original problem was that Long Island’s breast cancer rate was so extraordinarily high. When it turned out it wasn’t extraordinarily high it was proof of an even greater problem.

Since I wrote my article, the National Cancer Institute released a study giving man-made chemicals on Long Island an all clear.

“Long Island is not the breast cancer capital of the United States, as the activists say, Dan Fagin, who covered the Long Island “epidemic” for 12 years at Newsday, told the British Medical Journal. “It’s the capital of breast cancer activists.”

Yet the NCI is studying the situation to this this day and probably always will. There are still activists. And still grant-hungry researchers willing to confirm, reconfirm, and then reconfirm again findings. This though the money and effort could be so much better spent on finding and reducing real risks.

American Spectator’s Tom Bethel writes about my views on Wikipedia

by Michael Fumento on February 7, 2010

in Odds & Ends

In an American Spectator piece, “Global Warmists Feel a Chilly Wind,” Tom Bethell states, “Two weeks ago I wrote an article here about global warming and the advocates – call them warmists – who tamper with Wikipedia to reflect their own biases. One warmist named William Connolley, a green ideologue in Britain, had rewritten 5,428 climate articles. His goal was to bring the articles into line with Green Party dogma.”

He states, “I contacted Michael Fumento, a science writer who often endorses non-consensus positions. (He has done good work lately in drawing attention to the scare tactics of the “flu-pandemic” promoters; and, earlier, in questioning “AIDS” in Africa. It can be diagnosed there without an HIV test.) Fumento wrote:

The Wiki thing is highly problematic and Wikipedia has expressly been a thorn in my side. Problem is that despite what you hear, wikis are NOT self-correcting. They’re “last-person correcting.” If under the World Series entry on Wikipedia I write that the 2009 Series was won by the Cubs, that’s what the entry says unless and until somebody else fixes it. Then I can go right back and change it. In short, wikis favor those with the most time on their hands – a testament to the expression about idle hands…

Case in point regarding my own entry: Somebody keeps inserting that I’m a scholar at Hudson Institute. I haven’t been with Hudson since 2006. So I keep asking a friend to correct the entry. He does so. And within a short period it’s been changed back. I can’t even guess at the motives but somebody out there has a vested interest in me being seen as still with Hudson.

I can go on. My original Wiki entry was horrible slanted against me. That’s essentially true for all conservatives. When Wikipedia gets political, it tends to be left-political. I changed some of the disinformation and documented it as Wikipedia is supposed to require, though you can randomly look at entries and find such terminology as “documented needed.” But I thereupon found myself permanently banned from editing a Wikipedia entry. (Yes, I could always use a false IP address.) But who knows more about me than me?

Other people have since done a lot of work to make my entry more fair, but even now under where it lists my freelancing it mentions only one journal, a conservative one. I’ve freelanced for scores of major publications over the last quarter century including many mainstream ones such as New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, USA Weekend, and indeed just days ago the LA Times for the second time. I’ve had the cover the leftwing New Republic. These are all on my website, and indeed you can find a number just on my “bio” page on that site. Why do they list just one publication and make it a conservative one?

Yes, it’s a rhetorical question.

I find that Wikipedia can be a heck of a lot of fun. I watch a show on the Military Channel about, say, the P-51 Mustang and I go to Wikipedia and read lots more about it. It also find it can generate good leads for information. But you’ll note that I’ve long since given up using Wikipedia for hyperlinks in my articles. There’s a reason for that.

No More Education. Please.

by Wayne Crews on February 7, 2010 · 1 comment

in Culture, Odds & Ends

Graduate school can destroy lives. That's the takeaway from "The Ph.D. Problem" in Harvard Magazine, though the publication is too polite to say so directly. But there you have it. Maxim magazine put it similarly in a story by Tom Conlon called "No More Education" with the teaser: "There's a time and a place for everything, and that's college. But once those four years are up it's time for you to get a life." And further:

You know who you are. You're the twenty-and thirty-somethings who refuse to grow up and get a job. You're the research assistants, TAs, philosophy master's candidates, and other lifelong academics who hide behind syllabi and term papers, hoping real life won't notice you....We're calling your bullsh*t. You're officially on notice.

Of course, the political and social response to such waste is yet more money for universities and programs in all walks of life, from the mania for "saving" brick-and-mortar libraries in the Amazon and Google Books age, to the new House-passed "Cybersecurity Enhancement Act" that funnels millions to research centers and the creation of Ph.D.'s, which may have little to do with specific computer security training actually needed. No one will point out how off the rails the whole thing is, we have to pretend together.
Anyway, these articles and the runaway university-state reminds me of a point made by a social critic 150 years ago: “There are two universities in England, four in France, ten in Prussia, and thirty-seven in Ohio.”

Regulation of the Day 111: Buying Wine in New York

by Ryan Young on February 6, 2010

in Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation, Regulation of the Day

It is illegal for grocery stores to sell wine in the state of New York. Only liquor stores are allowed to sell the stuff.

This regulation, a relic of Prohibition, lives on because of one of the central concepts in public choice theory: diffused costs and concentrated benefits.

The benefits are concentrated in one constituency: liquor stores. Regulations give them get millions of dollars in free business. That means they have millions of reasons to lobby to keep the status quo.

Consumers, on the other hand, are hurt by the ban by the exact amount that liquor stores benefit. But that hurt is spread far and wide. No one consumer feels enough pain to hire a high-priced lobbyist to open up the market.

That means New York’s misguided restrictions on competition are likely to continue for some time. It’s hard to imagine an aggrieved shopper suing New York’s wine cartel because she has to make an extra trip to get the wine on her grocery list. Or because she pays a bit more than if she lived in a different state.

(Hat tip: Jonathan Moore)

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