January 2012

Collective Bargaining and the Individual

by Trey Kovacs on March 8, 2011 · 2 comments

in Labor, Personal Liberty

Post image for Collective Bargaining and the Individual

The debate over the government employee protests in Wisconsin has skipped over a fundamental question: Why does collective bargaining exist in the first place? Equality seems to be the motivation. Workers in the same occupation who have the same amount of experience should be compensated the same.

The attempt of an egalitarian society is pointless. Equal opportunity is a cherished American ideal. But enforced equality in outcomes undermines both the incentive to excel and the right to the full fruits of one’s own labor.

Every individual in society has unique needs and wants. That makes it impossible for groups of inherently diverse individuals to organize behind a given set of “true” collective goals — unless government requires it.

Collective bargaining needs the force of government behind it because, in a free market, there is no sound economic argument for it. What incentive does an employer have to arbitrarily give certain fixed wages to certain workers because of their membership in a given organization? There is no economic reason why an employer would pay his most effective employee the same wage as one who doesn’t perform as well.

[click to continue…]

Human Achievement of the Day: Tree-Bombing Planes

by Michelle Minton on March 8, 2011 · 1 comment

in Environment, Features, Private Conservation

Post image for Human Achievement of the Day: Tree-Bombing Planes

As our frenemies over at Treehugger wrote last October about how Lockheed Martin had come up with an ingenious idea for its 2,500 decommissioned Hercules cargo planes: mass-planting of trees.

As The Guardian reports, while these planes were once used for aerial assaults, they can now drop sapling-containing cones instead of land mines — about 3,000 cones a minute or about 900,000 a day.

According to Peter Simmons from Lockheed Martin:

Equipment we developed for precision planting of fields of landmines can be adapted easily for planting trees.

…The tree cones are pointed and designed to bury themselves in the ground at the same depth as if they had been planted by hand. They contain fertilizer and a material that soaks up surrounding moisture, watering the roots of the tree.

The containers are metal but rot immediately so the tree can put its roots into the soil.

Lockheed has set up Aerial Forestation Inc., a company to market the idea. But just who might pay for something like this? According the article, the system works well for replacing forests that have disappeared for one reason or another. For example, desert areas like Egypt, where there is already a pilot program in the works, the Scottish mountains, or the Black Forest, part of which was cut down for strategic military purposes during the Cold War.

The turboprop plane, which was originally designed for troop medical evacuation and cargo transport, might someday be used to speed up the process of reforestation post-disaster. For example, when Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, it took nearly 25 years for wind-blown seeds to take root to begin to regrow the forest that the super-heated pyroclastic flow leveled. Perhaps with this new way of planting we can accomplish the Herculean task of regrowing an entire forest in less than a decade.

This is what human achievement hour is all about: using human intelligence, creativity, and technology — not government interference or mandated conservation to come up with the solutions of the future.

My Statement on the REINS Act Hearing

by John Berlau on March 8, 2011

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy

Here’s my full statement on today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing on the REINS Act:

We commend the House Judiciary Committee for gathering distinguished experts such as New York Law School Professor David Schoenbrod for what should be an illuminating hearing on Congress’s role and responsibilities in reining in the regulatory state. The REINS Act, introduced in the Senate by Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and in the House by Rep. Geoff Davis, another Kentuckian, is at heart about accountability in government.

The issue is not just one of good politics or even good policy, but of constitutional government as well. Article 1, Section 1 of the Constitution vests “all legislative powers” in the U.S. Congress. Yet what most often happens in today’s administrative state is that regulators in the executive branch, technically charged with enforcing provisions of laws, actually write much of the law as applied.

[click to continue…]

Alcohol Regulation Roundup: Fat Tuesday Edition

by Michelle Minton on March 8, 2011

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Nanny State, Personal Liberty

Post image for Alcohol Regulation Roundup: Fat Tuesday Edition

Happy Fat Tuesday, everyone! While you enjoy that frosty alcoholic beverage, enjoy this latest round of alcohol-related regulatory actions throughout the nation:

Colorado: Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper is feeling the heat after his office issues an “executive fiat” overturning a law that prevents restaurants and bars from selling low alcohol beer. The bill, which was passed last year, forced the state to abide by the rule already on the books that states only grocery and convenience stores may sell low-alcohol beer. As a result, many light and low-alcohol Irish Stouts were prohibited from being served in bars. The bill was an attempt by grocery and convenience stores to draw attention to the need to do away with the distinction between low and higher alcohol beers and allow all stores to sell full strength beer. Hickenlooper, a former microbrewer, said that his office was involved in the surprise rules issued by the Division of Liquor Enforcement that overturns the ban on low-alcohol beer in restaurants.

The grocers and convenience stores said they were stunned by the abrupt repeal of rules that had taken months to hammer out.

Just a few days after the governor’s move, lawmakers announced that they will hold special hearings today (March 8, 2011) to review his actions.

Rep. Larry Liston, R-Colorado Springs, chairman of the House Economic and Business Development Committee, and Rep. Brian DelGrosso, R-Loveland, chairman of the House Finance Committee, will hold a rare joint hearing of their committees today. Liston said lawmakers want to understand how the rule change occurred and for what purpose.

While Hickenlooper takes his licks, St. Patty’s day revelers will have their Irish Stouts, and the issue of full-strength beer in grocery and convenience stores is likely to return to the legislature.

[click to continue…]

Morning Media Summary

by Lee Doren on March 8, 2011

in Odds & Ends

Post image for Morning Media Summary

Tech:

Google disables Android malware:
“Google is remotely disabling malicious software that deceived more than a quarter of a million owners of Android smartphones, as the outbreak continues to raise questions on the company’s approach to security.”

China pledges to step up administration of Internet:
“China says it will step up administration of the Internet this year while continuing to build out the country’s fiber-optic backbone and expand broadband access for consumers.”

How Facebook plans to bust up the SMS profit cartel:
“Under the cell phone industry’s peculiar pricing system, downloading data to your smartphone is amazingly cheap—unless the data in question happens to be a text message. In that case the price of a download jumps roughly 50,000-fold, from just a few pennies per megabyte of data to a whopping $1000 or so per megabyte.”

[click to continue…]

How to Help Small Businesses

by Ryan Young on March 7, 2011 · 2 comments

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Regulation

Post image for How to Help Small Businesses

Politicians love small businesses. Almost every campaign stump speech gushes about how important they are for the economy. Never afraid to put our money where their mouth is, politicians even started a Small Business Administration in 1953 to transfer money from taxpayers to small businesses. Today, the SBA’s budget is nearing $1 billion.

Given how much taxpayer money politicians lavish on small businesses, most of elected officials are confident that they are helping, not hurting. They should listen more closely to the consituency they claim to love so much. The Bush-Obama era has been one of ever-increasing spending and regulation. And those hurt small businesses.

Paychex, Inc., a payroll service provider that works with many small businesses, recently commissioned a survey. They asked small business owners their thoughts on the economy, and what the biggest obstacles are to growing their businesses. The most common gripe? Regulation. 47 percent of small business owners say that regulations have “slowed or prevented” their business from growing.

The Rochester Business Journal reports that the types of regulations that most concern small business owners are “tax changes (56 percent), health care reform (39 percent) and state regulations in response to budgetary challenges (25 percent). The research found 61 percent of respondents have seen more government regulation over the past five years.”

[click to continue…]

Human Achievement of the Day: Turning Plastic Waste Back into Oil

by Michelle Minton on March 7, 2011 · 1 comment

in Energy, Environment, Features, Global Warming, Natural Resources

Post image for Human Achievement of the Day: Turning Plastic Waste Back into Oil

This “human achievement of the day” is a true example of why we at CEI and many others around the world choose to celebrate the ingenuity expressed when individuals can exploit resources. Apart from increasing personal wealth and improving the quality of life for humans around the globe, it is technology, not “conservation,” that results in more “environmentally friendly” technologies. The machine that turns plastic waste into oil is just one example of this.

The miracle of plastics: The invention of plastic is arguable one of the most important contributions to the improving quality of human life. Plastics are used in medicine, aeronautics, travel, construction, and electronics. In fact, if it wasn’t for plastic materials, one wonders if we’d have the satellites used to track the changes in Earth’s environment.

The problem with plastic: While plastics make much of modern human life possible, there are some who see the downsides of plastics. Making these synthetic materials accounts for 7 percent of the world’s annual petroleum usage, which increases demand and the price of oil. At the same time, disposing of plastic is environmentally tricky: it takes a while for plastics to biodegrade naturally — some say it takes between 500 and 1,000 years – and there is a fear that these materials will  fill our oceans and landfills. Several cities have banned or taxed the use of plastic bags, which some believe are polluting rivers, streams, and oceans.

[click to continue…]

How Do Unions Work — Trade or Theft?

by Grant Babcock on March 7, 2011

in Employment, Features, Labor, Personal Liberty

Post image for How Do Unions Work — Trade or Theft?

In his work The State, sociologist Franz Oppenheimer draws a distinction that has been widely adopted among libertarian intellectuals. Oppenheimer outlines two methods of acquiring wealth (and here we mean not just wealth narrowly construed, viz. money, but broadly construed — “welfare” would be close in meaning). On one hand, we have production and exchange; on the other, theft and extortion. The first method Oppenheimer terms “the economic means,” the latter he calls cheekily “the political means.”

The economic means constitute a positive-sum game. When two parties engage in a trade it is because each judges that they stand to gain. The distinguishing features of the economic means are peacefulness and mutuality. The political means are at best a zero-sum game. One party’s gain can be produced only by another party’s loss. The distinguishing features of the political means are predation and antagonism.

By now I’ve treated the political means with enough scorn that it should be clear which of the two I feel is a more appropriate principle to govern human interactions. However, it probably won’t do to assert so without argument — although I think preferring the economic means should have a certain intuitive appeal. Fans of utilitarian/economic arguments should note that it is only through the economic means, and only with the exclusion of the political means, that a Pareto optimum is attainable. We might also employ the more obvious ethical arguments against theft and violence, and remark that at the heart of many of our ideas about ethics, consensuality seems to be central.

I gloss over these considerations because I am concerned primarily here not with teasing out all the ethical implications of economic/political distinction, but in determining which classification describes union activity.

[click to continue…]

Morning Media Summary

by Lee Doren on March 7, 2011

in Odds & Ends

Post image for Morning Media Summary

Tech:

Hacked:
“Earlier today, the site was maliciously attacked. Many of you were either unable to access the site or received an intrusion message.”

Falling Demand for Brains?:
“About 15 years ago, before I became a regular columnist, the Times asked me and a bunch of other people to contribute to a special edition celebrating the 100th anniversary of the NYT magazine. The stated rule was that the pieces should be written as if submitted in 2096, looking back at the magazine’s second century.”

Rumor: Facebook resumes talks with Skype:
“You may soon be able to start a Skype video call with your friends on Facebook. The latest rumor suggests that Facebook and Skype have resumed talks about integrating the video conferencing technology on the social network.”

[click to continue…]

Obamacare’s Costs Rise, as Obama Backers Get Preferential Treatment

by Hans Bader on March 7, 2011 · 1 comment

in Economy, Features, Healthcare, Politics as Usual, Regulation

Post image for Obamacare’s Costs Rise, as Obama Backers Get Preferential Treatment

The cost of Obamacare continues to explode and exceed its sponsors’ predictions. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has now admitted to double-counting in the Obamacare budget, using the same $500 billion twice, first “to sustain” the existing Medicare program and then to “pay for” brand new Obamacare entitlements. Last year, the CBO hiked its estimate of Obamacare’s costs by $115 billion, even as many of its promised benefits failed to materialize.

Obamacare was supposed to save patients money by curbing insurance company profits and expanding state Medicaid programs to cover millions more people. (This expansion was criticized by state officials, including a few Democrats such as former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, who called it “the mother of all unfunded mandates.” Bredesen’s health care legal advisor concluded that Obamacare’s Medicaid-expansion provisions were unconstitutional.)

[click to continue…]

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →