Although it’s not 100 percent certain at this time, German health officials are becoming increasingly certain that the recent E. coli outbreak there can be traced to an organic farm. According to this article from The Scotsman:
German-grown bean sprouts are the likely source of the deadliest E coli outbreak in modern history, according to agricultural officials.The outbreak, which has killed 22 people and made more than 2,000 ill across Europe, is thought to have originated at an organic farm in northern Germany. Lower Saxony’s agriculture minister, Gert Lindemann, said tests had shown the bean sprouts were the probable cause.
That’s not the first major foodborne illness outbreak linked to organic production, nor will it be the last. As I noted on John Stossel’s Fox Business channel show last November, the terrible 2008 outbreak of E. coli in was found to have come from organically grown spinach in California. And plenty of other examples can be found. After all, organic farming eschews synthesized nitrogen fertilizers, and instead relies heavily on the use of animal manures for soil nutrient replacement. And, ”[t]he use of animal wastes for fertilization of produce plants increased the risk of E. coli contamination in organic and semiorganic produce significantly.” There is a small but growing literature finding significantly greater presence of E. coli and other foodborne pathogens on organic produce. See here, here, here, and here, for just a few examples.
It’s worth remembering, of course, that while tragic, deaths from foodborne illness are quite rare in industrialized countries like Germany and the United States considering the hundreds of millions of meals that are eaten every day. But while modern, technologically-advanced agricultural production practices are often blamed for heightening the risk of food contamination, scientists know that most of the real threats are all natural products of Mother Nature. More often than not, new technologies and modern practices tend to increase food safety, not decrease it.
“Only 16 percent of executives in the auto industry” support the Chrysler bailout, according to the Washington Post’s editorial today. I think the bailout was a bad idea, for the reasons I list in my own commentary at this link, where I also chronicle how the Obama administration has deceived the public about the cost and consequences of the bailouts, and disseminated misleading claims by GM about allegedly repaying taxpayers.
As the Washington Post editorial board, which has not endorsed a Republican for president since 1952, noted, the bailout sent a harmful “message” that the automakers are “too big to fail.” And the bailouts might not have been necessary to save most auto jobs, since even “If GM and Chrysler had failed, their profitable parts would, eventually, have been bought up and put to work by others … expanding production and hiring workers in the process. Government dollars spent propping up the two automakers might have created jobs elsewhere.”
Even if a bailout had been a good idea, the Obama administration did not handle its execution well. As the Post notes, it is questionable whether having “decided to aid the industry, the administration chose the best way of doing so. The administration … did not press the United Auto Workers, its political ally, for even deeper labor cost reductions” needed to maximize the automakers’ long-run chances of survival. Moreover, bailing out Chrysler was harmful to GM, since “propping up Chrysler would saddle GM with additional competition, thus complicating survival for the larger, stronger company.”
[click to continue…]
Recently there has been a bit of buzz surrounding an electronic currency called BitCoin. I was intrigued because BitCoin is based on a combination of technologies — peer-to-peer networking and public-key cryptography — which yield a highly resilient, secure, private infrastructure for exchanges. Despite these advantages, there are several fatal flaws with BitCoins that will make them a very poor currency.
To explain why, we need to understand something about how something becomes a money.
Imagine three of us are stranded on an island. Each of us specializes in producing a different good. I catch shrimp, you harvest coconuts, and the third resident of the island (let’s call him George) weaves baskets.
Now, I would very much like to trade my shrimp for George’s baskets, but there’s a problem: George is allergic to shrimp. Am I cursed to forever remain basketless? No. I know that George likes your coconuts, so the next time I see you, I trade for more coconuts than I plan to use myself. I can now offer George something he wants, coconuts, in exchange for a basket.
A transformation has taken place. Whereas originally coconuts were desired only for their use value, the value they have because people can use them to satisfy hunger, for instance, and their exchange value, the value they have because people think other people will accept them in a trade.
[click to continue…]
Mike Haege owns a tree-trimming business in Hastings, Minnesota. After a tornado hit northern Minneapolis, he decided to help out. On May 23, the day after the tornado, he signed up as a volunteer and brought some equipment to help people without insurance to dig out from the damage. Mike and his fellow volunteers removed fallen or damaged trees from driveways and doorways, all free of charge. He probably made a lot of friends that day.
Regulators were not among them. While he is licensed to work in many Minneapolis-area cities, he isn’t licensed in Minneapolis proper. So they kicked him out of the city. The Hastings Star Gazette reports:
The inspector told him to get out of the city, so Haege left with the volunteer. As they were on their way back to the volunteer area, residents waved down Haege, pleading for help. He pulled over and helped get a tree out of the way for them.
Haege had no idea police officers were behind him in a sort of unofficial escort out of town. He said they stopped traffic for about two hours while they figured out what to do with him. At one point, officers threatened to throw him in jail, he said.
All the while, residents continued defending him, screaming in his defense.
Officers told him to leave. They told him he was going to receive a “hefty fine” in the mail, and that if he stopped on the way out, the fine would be doubled.
True to their word, Mike later received a $275 fine in the mail. Keep that in mind next time you want to do a good deed.
In Sacramento, California, a bill that would regulate social networking is reportedly on its death bed after failing by five votes last week. The online industry and Internet users will be able to breathe a little easier this evening if the bill’s author, State Senator Ellen Corbett (D-San Leandro), doesn’t find the votes needed to bring her bill back by the end of today. Unfortunately, Corbett, has pledged to keep pursuing the issue if she fails today.
Corbett’s legislation (S.B. 242) would force social networking sites to alter their privacy settings to ensure that no user’s personal information is ever made available to the public without that individual’s explicit permission. The bill’s definition of personal information encompasses names, addresses, phone numbers, locations, and global positioning coordinates. It also includes more sensitive items such as social security numbers, savings account numbers, and credit card numbers.
The scope of information covered by the legislation is especially worrisome. Most individuals’ names, addresses, and phone numbers are already a matter of public record. Why should government dictate the default sharing settings of social networks? Users who are wary about publicizing their phone number or email address aren’t required to disclose any information to social networking sites.
Besides, when you sign up for an online service and disclose personal details, you’re already opting in to sharing. Shouldn’t users assume their basic identifying information will be made public when they sign up for a social network? Social networking has the world “social” in it for a reason! If some users don’t fully appreciate the privacy risks of social networking, shouldn’t we be focused on educating those users, rather than imposing harmful mandates on an innovative young industry?
[click to continue…]
“So far the auto industry’s added 113,000 jobs over the past two years.” So proclaimed President Obama in a speech at the Chrysler/Fiat plant in Toledo , Ohio, that was triumphal despite today’s horrific unemployment numbers. The 113,000 slightly less than the figure the administration and the media have touted all week of 115,000.
But to use some auto terminology, both sets of these jobs figures have been jacked up. As with buying a car, it’s always a good idea to look under the hood. And upon closer examination, this White House’s auto bailout “success” statistics turn into lemons.
In the cases of the GM and Chrysler “repaying” their loans, as my Competitive Enterprise Institute colleague Hans Bader and TruthAboutCars.com editor Edward Niedermeyer have documented, a substantial portion of the payback in both cases was — in Neidermeyer’s words — simply “shuffling government money from one pocket to another.” Chrysler is slated to receive a $3.5 billion Department of Energy loan Niedermeyer argues will free up capital to pay back the bailout funds. And even the White House admitted a couple days ago that the government will still lose $14 billion, though it makes much of the fact that this is much less than the projected taxpayer loss last year of $9 billion
And the White House is performing a similar “shuffle” of industry statistics in crediting all jobs added in the auto sector to the bailouts. Most likely included in the figure of 115,000 or 113,000 new auto industry jobs are jobs at Toyota, Hyundai, BMW and other foreign automakers with U.S. plants — job growth at nonunion plants that can hardly be attributed to the bailout of the domestic companies.
[click to continue…]
In his speech just completed at a Toledo, Ohio Chrysler plant, President Obama continued the government PR work on behalf of bailed out auto companies when he stated the misleading claim that Chrysler had completely repaid its government loan six years ahead of schedule. For more on how the government and these car companies are lying about the repayment of the bailout, see CEI’s news release from yesterday.
Some of the stranger goings-on in the world of regulation:
Today is a crucial day in the ongoing labor dispute between the NFL and the supposedly disbanded players’ union, the NFLPA as they return to court.
In order to try and force the owners to give up their plans to use more of the NFL’s annual profit to help expand the game, the NFLPA disbanded, allowing them to sue the NFL and its franchises for antitrust violations. The NFL responded by locking the players out. Today’s hearing, among other things, will decide whether that lockout is legal or not.
If the NFL wins, as seems likely, the players will have few options left. They can hope for a win at the hopelessly politicized National Labor Relations Board, which so often takes the union’s side, but they will still be locked out, and a win on the antitrust violations will probably be years away, years in which they will no longer be playing football. Nor is a win guaranteed, as a Supreme Court case last year reaffirmed that “the fact that NFL teams share an interest in making the entire league successful and profitable, and that they must cooperate in the production and scheduling of games, provides a perfectly sensible justification for making a host of collective decisions.”
If the players win their antitrust suit, it would in all likelihood mean an end to league parity, an end to the draft, an end to high rookie salaries, much greater disparity in wages between, say, quarterbacks and special teamers, and a host of other drastic changes to the game. Now, not all of those changes would be bad things, but they would certainly change the game from the product that millions of consumers enjoy and in all probability lead to a contraction of the NFL rather than its expansion (some teams are struggling already — imagine what would happen if the league was forced by government to abandon parity). Nor is it clear that the NFL is the only option for players. The rise of the AFL showed what can happen in this sport — it is not like baseball.
As a fan of the game for ten years even before I came to the US in the mid 1990s, I am very much hoping that the court rules quickly in favor of the owners today.
The San Diego metro area has been institutionalizing its boring reputation by undertaking in recent years what is arguably the most aggressive regional planning effort in the country. Enviros and “anti-sprawl” (read: anti-poor, anti-choice) types have fallen back in love with America’s Finest City over San Diego’s ease of meeting SB 375′s Sustainable Communities Strategies targets. Thanks to the members of the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), San Diegans can look forward to this whiter brighter future:
While the notion of efficiently coordinating transportation, housing, and commercial development across thousands of square miles and millions of people sounds daunting, officials in the San Diego area say that drafting the SCS was not nearly as difficult as it may be for other regions.
“A lot of the stuff in our plan is not new to us,” said SANDAG Executive Director Gary Gallegos. “It’s not a huge game-changer because we were already doing a lot of these things because they were good for us.”
The SCS relies on complex forecasts for regional growth—which is anticipated to include a growth in population from 3.2 million to 4.4 million and 400,000 more housing units by 2050—but much of the actual planning work that will contribute to the SCS has already been done.
Indeed, much of the region’s growth is already prescribed and accounted for, some of it before SB 375 was even imagined.
“San Diego, in spite of the fact that SB 375 and AB 32 came along, was already doing a lot of what was required by those pieces of legislation we had incorporated into our planning,” said County Supervisor Ron Roberts, who also is also an ARB board member. “We were already on a course to get to the transportation corridors and move the density from the furthest out areas.”
The California Air Resources Board set per capita emissions reductions targets for the state’s MPOs just last October. San Diego’s targets are 7% by 2020 and 13% by 2035.
So San Diego’s out front in the most out-front state in the country with respect to enviro-regulating itself into a situation far worse than climate change could ever do. Thanks to their heavy-handed land-use regulations, city officials’ hell-bound well intentions now add $220,000 to the price of a new single-family detached home. This so-called “smart growth” is anything but: it drives up housing prices and goods prices, reduces employment opportunities and entrepreneurial activity, limits personal mobility, and is generally supported by a very large, taxpayer-funded planning bureaucracy that’s primary purpose is to perpetuate itself and increase its political power.
Overall, “anti-sprawl” forces are reducing quality of life and the costs are disproportionately borne by low-income minorities, which is what makes this leftist program so ironically terrible.
RSS Updates 
RSS E-Mail Updates 
Twitter 
Facebook 
CEI.org 
WorkPlaceChoice.org 
GlobalWarming.org 
CEI On Demand Video 
Liberty Week Podcast 