The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) yesterday called on all states to ban “the nonemergency use of portable electronic devices (other than those designed to support the driving task) for all drivers.” This was in response to an August 2010 three-collision accident in Missouri involving two school buses traveling in a convoy, a pickup, and a truck-tractor. The accident killed two people and injured 38. It went like this:
Collision 1: The pickup driver, who was engaging in a text-message conversation, rear-ended the truck-tractor after failing to notice that it had slowed or stopped.
Collision 2: The first school bus, whose driver was distracted by a passenger bus pulled over on the side of the road, then struck the pickup, killing the pickup driver.
Collision 3: The second school bus, following the first bus too closely, was unable to stop in time to avoid the collision, killing a high school student seated in the rear of the first bus.
There were multiple factors involved: the pickup driver was distracted by his cell phone, the pickup driver was fatigued, the first school bus driver was distracted by the other passenger bus on the side of the road, and the second school bus driver failed to follow at a safe distance. However, it was the inattention and unsafe behavior of the school bus drivers that ultimately resulted in fatalities, and these collisions involved external, rather than internal factors. It is worth noting that at the time of the accident, Missouri had a law on the books that banned texting while driving for drivers under 21. The texting driver of the pickup was 19 years old.
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OPINION
JOHN STOSSEL: “Job Creators Fight Back”
“Government has no money of its own. All it does is take from some people and give to others, leaving less money in the private sector for job creation. Actually, it’s worse than that. Since government commandeers scarce resources by force and doesn’t have to peddle its so-called services on the market to consenting buyers, there’s no feedback mechanism to indicate if those services are worth more to people than what they were forced to go without.”
RAMESH PONNORU: “Inequality Talk Will Get Obama Nowhere”
“President Barack Obama wants to spend the next year talking about economic inequality. Republicans shouldn’t take the bait. In a speech last week in Kansas, the President presented rising economic inequality as the defining issue of our time. As is often true of political speeches, Obama didn’t make anything resembling a tight logical case. Instead he relied heavily on caricature (Republicans allegedly want everyone ‘to fend for themselves and play by their own rules’) and dubious assertion (supposedly there are billionaires who pay only 1 percent of their income in taxes).”
VIRGINIA POSTREL: “U.S. Universities Feast on Federal Student Aid”
“Any serious policy reform has to start by considering a heretical idea: Federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable may have encouraged rapidly rising tuitions. It’s not as crazy as it might sound.”
I didn’t have a chance to write about it then, but a few weeks back the Food and Drug Administration denied a citizen petition submitted by environmental activists asking the agency to forbid the “sub-therapeutic” use of certain antibiotics in food animals. The petition — initially filed in 2005, and fundamentally identical to one submitted in 1999 and rejected in 2001 — argued that using antibiotics for growth promotion, rather than to treat infected animals, contributes to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that threaten human health.
The issue is a complicated one, with serious implications for medical treatment and consumer well-being more broadly. We know that development by human pathogens of resistance to medically important antibiotics poses serious public health concerns. And, although a clear link between animal antibiotics use and human disease has not been proven, there are good theoretical reasons to believe, and some real world evidence suggesting, that it does — or at least could — occur.
Nevertheless, I would still argue that FDA made the right call, but for an incomplete reason. In response to both the 1999 and 2005 petitions, the agency essentially said that going through the formal legal process to revoke the approvals for a drug is intensive, time consuming, and a poor use of FDA resources. And because the agency already monitors the development of resistance and has both nominally voluntary and explicitly mandatory programs in place to restrict uses that may pose realistic threats to human health, FDA argued that beginning the revocation process isn’t worth it.
I would further argue, though, that the agency simply does not have sufficient information on which to base a decision to revoke the approvals in question, but that it should begin a less formal investigation to shed some light on the matter. The agency has never before compared the risks that arise from animal antibiotics uses to those that would arise from restricting them. But doing so should be mandatory before any bans or further restrictions are put in place.
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David Hogberg of Investor’s Business Daily and The American Spectator has a very complimentary review of my book, Stealing You Blind: How Government Fatcats Are Getting Rich Off of You:
Two stellar books have been published this year examining the “Political Class,” that group of people which includes politicians and bureaucrats, but also and the businesses and labor unions that enable and benefit from them. They are Stealing You Blind: How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off of You by Iain Murray and Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison by Peter Schweizer. They make excellent books for Christmas even though they are far more likely to generate outrage than good cheer.
Murray’s book focuses largely on the bureaucracy and why they have become an increasing threat to our freedom and our pocketbooks. Bureaucrats have a huge incentive to increase costs. In government, a bureaucrat’s success — his pay raises and promotions — is determined not by solving problems but by finding more problems to justify ever larger budgets and staff.
Stealing You Blind makes a great Christmas gift for the small government fan in your family!
On Monday, I sent this letter to the editor of the Financial Times in response to an appalling column by former British apparatchik Jonathan Powell:
Dear Sir,
It was disappointing to see such a prominent former diplomat as Jonathan Powell subscribe to the notion that Anglo-US relations are reducible to the friendliness or otherwise between US and British leaders. In fact, Britain and the US are tied together by an almost invisible web of culture, shared experience, and history. Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, such as the current President, have done their best to downplay or cut these links, but they do remain. They could indeed continue to form the basis for a profitable relationship between the two nations. If Europe does not want an independent, free-market-loving country like Britain as part of its monolithic customs union, perhaps the United States should invite Britain to join NAFTA, to form a North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement.
Sincerely,
Iain Murray
Free trade can play an important role in solving the world’s current problems. It is unfortunate that most countries (and in Europe’s case, the Eurozone) seem to be withdrawing into mercantilism.
In Washington, D.C., the region where I live, massive federal spending on government workers and contractors props up home values. My small, 60-year-old two-bedroom home, purchased in 2004 for over $400,000, is still worth over $500,000 even after the housing bubble popped elsewhere in the country. But in many other parts of the country, housing prices have simply collapsed after the end of the housing bubble. Software engineer Clayton Cramer (who is also a frequently-cited historian of gun regulations) discusses just how cheap homes have become in Idaho, listing houses:
Like this 4 bedroom, 3 bath, 2070 sq. ft. home in Salmon, Idaho, for $59,000. That’s not a down payment. That’s the full price.
Or this $24,000, 3 bedroom, 1 bath, 809 sq. ft. house in Osburn, Idaho. (Yes, that’s near the entrance to Yellowstone.)
Or this $36,900, 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 1296 sq. ft. house in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
Cramer writes about the role of speculation, some of it government-facilitated, in causing the housing bubble, and a recent Washington Post story on the subject:
Researchers with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that investors who used low-down-payment, subprime credit to purchase multiple residential properties helped inflate home prices . . . Investors defaulted in large numbers after home values began to drop in 2006. They accounted for more than 25 percent of seriously delinquent mortgage balances nationwide. . . Foreclosures skyrocketed as people couldn’t or refused to pay their underwater mortgages. Residential construction also languished, putting hundreds of construction workers in the hardest-hit states out of work.
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File under Hypocrisy 101.
Sheldon Adelson, the CEO and Chairman of Las Vegas Sands Corp., which owns some of the largest casinos in the world including the Venetian in Las Vegas, is “morally opposed” to online gambling. Adelson is the 8th wealthiest man in America, and the 16th wealthiest man in the world. His wealth is only relevant because he got wealthy through the casino business and is now engaged in what is likely blatant protectionism under the guise of moral opposition to an incredibly slight variation of an industry he’s been involved with for the majority of his adult life:
Last week, Adelson went to Asia to lobby for legalization of casinos in Japan and Vietnam. Las Vegas Sands is also pushing for a casino site in Miami, should Florida legalize gaming.
Before heading to Asia, Adelson visited Washington, D.C., to tell Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., and American Gaming Association President Frank Fahrenkopf Jr. of his opposition to Internet poker legalization. He reportedly told them he doesn’t believe technology can prevent underage gamblers from betting online, and that he is “morally opposed” to Internet gaming.
Strip rivals visited with Adelson recently to try to change his opinion toward a potential industry that many believe is worth more than $5 billion annually in gaming revenues.
The arguments fell on deaf ears.
Most major casino companies have deals in place with online gaming providers to start up U.S.-based Internet poker websites catering to Americans if Congress approves online poker legislation.
Las Vegas Sands spokesman Ron Reese said the company’s board of directors has not yet developed a strategy for Internet gaming, so Adelson’s sentiments are his personal views.
But let’s face reality. The board is not going to oppose the company’s chairman, chief executive officer and majority shareholder on this issue.
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OPINION
BILL WILSON: “Internet Piracy Bill: A Free Speech ‘Kill Switch’”
“What began as an attempt to restrain foreign piracy on the Internet has morphed into a domestic ‘kill switch’ on First Amendment freedom in the fastest-growing corner of the marketplace of ideas. Proposed federal legislation purporting to protect online intellectual property would also impose sweeping new government mandates on internet service providers – a positively Orwellian power grab that would permit the U.S. Justice Department to shut down any internet site it doesn’t like (and cut off its sources of income) on nothing more than a whim.”
JONATHAN MACEY: “Congress’ Phony Insider-Trading Reform”
“Members of Congress already get better health insurance and retirement benefits than other Americans. They are about to get better insider trading laws as well. ”
MIRIAM PEMBERTON: “Military Spending is the Weakest Job Creator”
“If you’re serious about examining the employment effect of these cuts in the military budget, you have to ask whether doing so would cost more or fewer jobs than doing something else with the money. New analysis by economists Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier at the University of Massachusetts provides the answer. Unlike the studies from AIA or the Pentagon, it is an independent analysis. It was funded by no industry or government agency — that is, no institution with a special interest in the outcome. Updating their previous studies from 2007 and 2009, Pollin and Garrett-Peltier compared the effects on jobs of spending an equivalent amount on the military, on clean energy, healthcare, education or simply returning the money to the private economy in the form of tax cuts. Among these options, military spending was the weakest job creator. ”
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The State of Maryland spends millions of Medicaid dollars on dead people, “about half of it from the federal government,” notes The Washington Examiner. Maryland officials ignored information in a federal Social Security database, and even information in their own computers, in approving this spending. Of the millions in improper payments, “$426,403 in postmortem Medicaid benefits had been paid to just 10 deceased individuals, nine of whom were enrolled in managed care organizations. In one case, Medicaid payments to a nursing home began eleven months after the individual had died.”
As we noted yesterday, dead people also get food stamps, and fraud in food stamp programs costs taxpayers billions of dollars. “While many recipients had invalid Social Security numbers and were double-dipping between federal and state programs, many of the recipients also happened to be dead. This has become a pervasive problem in the realm of government benefits. (The Social Security Administration also sends millions of dollars to recipients who are dead.)” As Jim Bovard noted in The Wall Street Journal, state attempts to prevent fraud in the food stamp program are being thwarted by the Obama administration: “The Obama administration is responding by cracking down on state governments’ antifraud measures.”
Obama’s stimulus package largely repealed welfare reform, encouraging states to make welfare payments to undeserving people. Much stimulus money has been wasted. It has gone to dead people and prisoners, wasteful welfare spending, abandoned bridges to nowhere, and unnecessary government buildings. The stimulus package subsidized foreign green jobs and wiped out jobs in our export sector. Small wonder that Harvard economist Robert Barro called it “the worst bill that has been put forward since the 1930s.”
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