Jim Epstein e-mailed me to provide an update on the circumstances surrounding his arrest yesterday at a hearing of the D.C. Taxicab Commission, which we reported here. Here’s his post on Reason‘s Hit and Run blog, which includes video he shot before the police arrested him:
About 30 minutes into the meeting, I witnessed journalist Pete Tucker snap a still photo of the proceedings on his camera phone. A few minutes later, two police officers arrested Tucker. I filmed Tucker’s arrest and the audience’s subsequent outrage using my cell phone.
A few minutes later, as I was attempting to leave the building, I overheard the female officer who had arrested Tucker promise a woman, who I presumed to be an employee of the Taxi Commission, that she would confiscate my phone. Reason intern Kyle Blaine, overheard her say, “Do you want his phone? I can get his phone.”
(The woman who was given assurances by the officer that she could have my phone can be seen at the end of the video telling me, “You do not have permission to record this!”)
As I tried to leave, I was told by the same officer to “stay put.” I told her I was leaving and attempted to exit the building. I was then surrounded by officers, and told to remain still or I would be arrested.
I didn’t move, but I tried to get the attention of a group of cab drivers who were standing nearby. At this point I was arrested.
I spent the remainder of the day in a cell in the basement of the building. In the late afternoon, I was released.
This appears to be yet another case of abuse on the part of D.C.’s notoriously idiotic U.S. Park Police. Recall the Jefferson One dance-arrest case, and the follow-up dance-protests at the Jefferson Memorial for some background on Park Police overreach.
Who’d of thought it: cracking down on immigrant workers hurts the economy? Georgia’s learning the hard way as farms lose laborers and crops go unharvested. After its passing of strict anti-immigrant legislation in April, thousands of illegal workers have fled the state before the implementation of the law in July. This exodus of experienced farmhands meant 11,080 farm jobs left unfilled.
With a labor shortage to deal with, the government of the state of Georgia has a novel way of filling the vacancies: probationers. Atlanta also instituted a program to encourage those on probation to find work in the fields. Ex-cons, who find getting jobs difficult, aren’t exactly overjoyed at the opportunity, though. The grueling conditions and long hours of farm work discourage many new workers. Sometimes it only takes a few hours for them to quit.
Of course, the new workers cite wages as the reason for their high turnover rates, but you’ve got to wonder just how much would constitute “fair” pay. Whatever it is, it was high enough to make farmers turn to illegal workers in the first place. The lack of a stable workforce and skilled farmhands means less efficiency and less food. As food prices continue to rise, increasing the cost of labor on farms doesn’t sound like the smartest idea. The story’s too familiar though: politicians demagogue immigrants, then pass stupid bills, farmers complain, and almost everyone suffers.
The Congressional Budget Office has released its latest edition of the Long-Term Budget Outlook, and it makes for grim reading. Federal debt is currently at its highest level since just after World War II, but unlike in those dark days there is no let-up in increasing public expenditure in sight.
America’s welfare state chickens are coming home to roost, as the retirement of the baby boomers “portends a significant and sustained increase in the share of the population receiving benefits from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.” Add to this government investment in health care rising sharper than any other per person expenditure and we have a situation that the CBO director describes starkly on his blog:
Therefore, given the aging of the population and the rising cost of health care, the United States cannot achieve all of the following objectives in the future:
- Keep federal revenues at their average share of GDP during the past 40 years.
- Provide the same sorts of benefits for older Americans that we have provided in the past 40 years.
- Operate the rest of the federal government in line with its role in our economy and society during the past 40 years.
Putting fiscal policy on a sustainable path will require significant changes relative to our historical experience in popular programs, people’s tax payments, or both.
America’s current fiscal policy is the very definition of unsustainable. The CBO has essentially echoed the warning of Standard and Poor’s from a few weeks back, warning that things cannot go on this way.
So what are policy-makers to do? The current debate is between two options, of which one is disastrous and the other doesn’t go far enough.
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Last week the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) announced a major policy shift regarding Social Security. Formerly seen as the largest opponent to Social Security reform, AARP has recently acknowledged that the federal program cannot indefinitely pay out benefits at current levels. The group wants to see the program made “solvent” by making “minimal” changes. Unions could learn from this sentiment, instead they have brought legal challenges on reform efforts.
On Monday the Florida Education Association, the main teachers’ union in the state, filed a lawsuit against their Governor Rick Scott, challenging a new mandate that public employees contribute 3 percent of their salary towards their pensions. On Tuesday, 35,000 Ford employees filed grievances under a cost-sharing clause in their contracts. These employees are already paid $8/hour more than their non-union equivalents. Yesterday, the Communications Workers of America Local 1033 sued New Jersey for raising the amount that state employees contribute to their pensions.
The AARP’s seeming willingness to compromise in order to offer long term solvency to Social Security is a compromise that unions would be wise to observe. Big Labor has dug in their heels all over the United States by opposing any reform to pensions or collective bargaining agreements. This stubborn reaction to change neglects that most states will be facing insolvent pension funds within the next 15 to 20 years. If unions won’t let states reduce their workforce, lower wages or restructure pensions, where will the money come from to fix pensions? The only option left is to raise taxes, forcing taxpayers to subsidize government employees’ retirement.
If unions learned from AARP, they would find that reform is necessary for the retired people of the future. As see across the country, in both Democratic- and Republican-controlled states, union power is being reevaluated through pension and collective bargaining reform. By burying their heads in the sand and crying foul, unions will continue to be excluded from the negotiating table. This will continue to be a disservice to current union members and future members alike. Pensions must be reformed with or without union support. How can unions represent their members (their organizations’ purpose) if they refuse to show up to the negotiating table?
One of the themes of Stealing You Blind is how public sector unions have worked with politicians to organize an industrial-scale transfer of wealth from your pockets to their members’ pockets in the shape of exceptionally generous pension schemes. There have been two good examples this week of how this operates.
First up is this absolute-must-read New York Times story about how the racket (or perhaps ratchet would be a better description) was set up in California. This quotation is perhaps the most revealing (and gels with the public sector mindset described by Greg Conko here):
“We had no idea what we were doing,” said Tony Oliveira, who as a supervisor in Kings County, in central California, voted to increase employees’ benefits, and now is on the board of the state’s enormous pension fund. “This was probably the worst public policy decision in the state’s history. But everyone kept saying there was plenty of money. And no one wants to be responsible if all the cops quit to get paid more in the next town.”
The article also describes how the California state pension scheme, Calpers, was rigged to ensure that it continued to deliver:
Six of Calpers’s 13 board members were elected by government retirees or workers, as required by state law. Another was a union official. Two others were politicians who had sought union endorsements and campaign contributions…
When Calpers’s plan to expand pensions came up in the state Legislature, lawmakers from both parties voted for it. On the Senate floor, it passed after 45 seconds of debate with no dissenting votes. Some legislators from that period, in interviews, said they believed that public workers deserved to share in the economic growth.
Other lawmakers were told if they didn’t vote for the plan, public employee groups would attack them in ads and give their opponents tens of thousands of dollars in contributions, and they could lose endorsements from police, firefighters or other influential groups, according to legislators and lobbyists.
Such threats, politicians knew, were real. Over the next five years, public sector unions would spend more than $77 million on California state elections and ballot initiatives alone.
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Tech:
Winklevoss Twins Won’t Take Facebook Case To Supreme Court:
“It appears the lengthy legal dispute between Facebook and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss may be finally coming to an end.”
Consumer group reveals web-blocking plans:
“A consumer rights group has blasted proposals to block websites carrying pirated content, as laid out in a document handed to the Department for Culture, Music and Sport.”
Google Notches One Billion Unique Visitors Per Month:
“Google’s websites had more than a billion unique visitors in May, the first time an Internet company has hit that benchmark, according to comScore data released Tuesday.”
Global Warming / Environment / Energy:
Reduce your CO2 footprint by recycling past errors!:
“Anthony has pointed out the further inanities of that well-known vanity press, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This time it is Michael Mann (of Hockeystick fame) and company claiming an increase in the rate of sea level rise (complete paper here, by Kemp et al., hereinafter Kemp 2011). A number of commenters have pointed out significant shortcomings in the paper. AMac has noted at ClimateAudit that Mann’s oft-noted mistake of the upside-down Tiljander series lives on in Kemp 2011, thus presumably saving the CO2 required to generate new and unique errors. Steve McIntyre has pointed out that, as is all too common with the mainstream AGW folks and particularly true of anything touched by Michael Mann, the information provided is far, far, far from enough to reproduce their results. Judith Curry is also hosting a discussion of the issues.”
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The Constitution’s Commerce Clause gives Congress the power to regulate commerce. What does that mean, exactly? Over at the Daily Caller, my colleague Jacque Otto explain that regulation is about making commerce regular: no barriers to entry or trade, clear, understandable, and consistent rules, and so on.
Most of what people call regulation doesn’t have anything to with regular commerce. These kinds of rules are more accurately called interventions.
These interventions didn’t appear out of thin air, either:
One important reason regulators intervene is that many businesses want them to — businesses spend considerable effort and resources lobbying Washington to that end. For the most part, American companies compete on quality, price, or other consumer preferences. But on too many occasions, some companies try to use regulatory interventions to dispatch the competition. Sprint’s efforts to squander AT&T’s proposed purchase of T-Mobile are emblematic of this troubling trend.
Lessons abound for antitrust regulators — sorry, interveners.
Reason.tv producer and reporter Jim Epstein was arrested this afternoon at a hearing held before the D.C. Taxicab Commission. Nick Gillespie, editor-in-chief of Reason.com and Reason.tv, writes:
I regret to announce that Reason.tv producer and journalist Jim Epstein is being held by US Park Police for video recording an incident at a District of Columbia Taxicab Commission hearing taking place at the US Park Police Building in Anacostia Park. Our attorney is on the scene and reports that Epstein, who was attending the hearing as part of an upcoming story on plans to introduce a medallions system to D.C.’s taxi industry, should be released very shortly.
This is very unfortunate, but not exactly surprising given the current state of ethics (or lack thereof) among the D.C. taxicab industry, its regulators, and D.C.’s elected officials. We hope this situation resolves itself soon in Epstein’s favor.
Earlier, I wrote about the pending taxi medallion legislation and why it is a terrible idea.
Health and Human Services Director Kathleen Sebelius recently made a revealing statement on how she perceives the role of government and her place within it. She said, regarding the new FDA-mandated cigarette labels, that “The regulations are justified … because tobacco causes 443,000 premature deaths, and creates “$200 billion a year in health costs that we clearly could spend better elsewhere.” Following that logic, why not also mandate photos of lipo-suctioned fat on the menus at McDonald’s? Why not ban selling “King Size” bags of M&Ms or bars of Snickers? Surely these goods are also not beneficial to health, and the savings from less coronary bypass surgeries could be spent “better elsewhere” as well. It seems that Sebelius sees herself as America’s Mom, who has the authority to restrict consumer choices if she sees it in the interest of better health or in the interest of reducing overall health care costs.
"Put that Snickers down now!"
Not only does this parental philosophy on government violate the individual liberty of each citizen to decide for him/herself what food or product yields the most value (has Sebelius even considered that consumers do not value “health” over taste or satisfaction in many instances?), but it also presupposes that bad habits are the root cause of America’s high health care expenses. This could not be further from the truth, as it is instead government-run health care programs that exacerbate the problem of runaway spending by leaving consumers of tobacco or fatty foods with no financial incentive to limit unhealthy habits (as beneficiaries bear few to none of the costs associated with their treatment).
Conversely, individuals with private insurance face an increased financial burden for leading an unhealthy lifestyle because it leads to higher insurance premiums and more frequent co-pays for more doctor visits and for more prescribed pharmaceuticals. Therefore, a free-market health care system naturally disincentivizes many of the things that HHS and the FDA have decided to regulate against; however, the key difference between the two approaches is that the decision to choose a salad over French fries is an individual choice, a personal assessment of the costs versus the benefits, and not something that has been imposed from the top-down by a government bureaucracy.
Two things most people have never heard of before have been in the news recently: Bitcoin and LulzSec. Over the weekend the largest Bitcoin exchange, MTGox, was hacked, compromising user accounts and devastating the exchange’s credibility. The attack involved a massive sell off of Bitcoins in MTGox’s network, which is in the process of being rolled back.
Yesterday, the arrest by British Police of a suspected LulzSec member was announced. So what’s the link between the two? Apparently The Guardian feels confident enough to invent one. An article catchily titled “LulzSec rogue suspected of Bitcoin hack” outlines an unsupported theory about the Mt. Gox fiasco. So, who exactly suspects LulzSec, besides The Guardian? Except for those regurgitating The Guardian’s line, no one, really.
I suspect the sensational title isn’t anything more malicious than a plea for page views, but there’s still something dishonest about making such a tendentious link. There’s just no evidence linking LulzSec to the attack. The article admits that LulzSec would stand to lose from Bitcoin attacks and that LulzSec has denied responsibility, which the Guardian recognizes as out of character for a group of trolls after a successful hack. Finally, the article admits the “possibility of a third, as yet unnamed, group of hackers carrying out the attacks,” which would seem to be the most logical conclusion. Perhaps the Guardian should avoid running such blatantly misleading ledes. But I guess when you can only name one or two hacking collectives, its best to arbitrarily assign responsibility.
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