Archives for the 'Nanny State' Category
Abrogating Peter’s Contract to Pay Paul — Mortgage Bailout’s Billion-Dollar Hit to Retirement Savings
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Many commentators, such as Open Market’s Hans Bader, have done a diligent job tracking the costs to taxpayers of the mortgage bailout scheduled to be voted on this week. The Congressional Budget Office just came out with an estimate of $2.7 billion for H.R. 5830, the so-called FHA Houshing Stabilization and Homeownership Retention Act of 2008.
But there could be an even greater cost from the bill to millions of middle-class investors saving for their retirement or the education of their children. The bill has the Federal Housing Administration guarantee the refinancing of a mortgage in return from a “haircut” from the owners of the loan. The bill requires loans to be guranteed at no more than 90 percent of the value, meaning a 10 percent loss for investors. But this haircut will “shave” billions of dollars off from funds saved for retirement or education.
This bill not only “robs Peter to Pay Paul,” through taxpayers bailout of bad loans by banks and borrowers. It can also be said to “abrogate Paul’s contract to Peter.” This is because many of the mortgages often aren’t owned by the banks that service them, but frequently by millions of middle class investors through their interests in entitities that have mortgage-backed securities (MBS).
Many middle-class folks who have 401(k) accounts, mutual funds, money market funds or defined-benefit pensions are indirect holders of MBS. In fact, according to investment bank Credit Suisse, 14 percent of MBS are owned by pensions and mutual funds that serve middle-class savers.
So, let’s do some math. The bill authorizes the FHA to guarantee up to $300 billion in mortgages. With the 10 percent haircut, the loans were originally worth $333 billion. So $33 billion represents the potential lost savings by the private sector. Now assume a random 14 percent of the loans in this program represent those owned by pensions and mutual funds. 14 percent of $33 billion is $4.6 billion.
The bottom line is that middle-class savers and investors could be left with almost $5 billion less for retirement and education of their children. Another compelling reason this bailout is not worth the cost.
Want a Burger in New Jersey? Pay Up!
Politicians are always looking for the easy source of money. New Jersey legislators hoping to pay for health care want to tax fast food. Reports WCBS TV:
The sputtering economy has caused an increase in prices of many staples including gasoline, rice, ice cream, even beer. Now some lawmakers in New Jersey are considering taking food taxes a step further and install a proverbial “sin” tax on fast food.
Yes, the idea of marking up your favorite fast food burger or pack of fries is actually being tossed around, and it’s not settling well with many residents.
“They’re taxing everything. Now you’re gonna tax fast food? That’s crazy,” said Newark resident Miriam Robertson.
This proposal shows how government naturally begets government. Provide health care, so every unhealthy private action suddenly becomes a matter of public concern. Money must be raised, creating an opportunity punish the irresponsible. Taxation naturally becomes social engineering.
Michigan Social Workers Seize Child Who Inadvertently Drank
Michigan CPS workers seized a 7-year-old who drank lemonade that his father purchased for him without knowing that it contained a small amount of alcohol. (As Ted Frank notes, when CPS seized the child, he had no alcohol in his system). They put him in foster care for two days and refused to release him to his aunts. Then they released him to his mother on the condition that his father, an archaeology professor, move out of the house until a full court hearing could be held. After that later hearing, the father, found not guilty of child abuse, was finally allowed to move back into his own house. If the professor “and his wife weren’t upper-middle-class academics with access to the University of Michigan Law School clinic professors, it could have been much worse. ‘Don Duquette, a U-M law professor who directs the university’s Child Advocacy Law Clinic, represented Ratte and his wife. He notes sardonically that the most remarkable thing about the couple’s case may be the relative speed with which they were reunited with Leo.’”
CPS workers have an incentive to seize children, since the federal government gives states incentives for seizing and adopting out children, and CPS workers are more likely to be fired for failing to prevent child abuse than for wrongly seizing children, even if the seizure itself causes the child devastating psychological harm.
I wrote earlier about how temporary seizures of infants based on erroneous accusations later found to be false can become permanent, when courts rule that the infant has become attached to her foster family and thus should not be returned even if the alleged abuse that led to the seizure did not actually occur. I also discussed the violation of due process involved in the mass seizures of children in the strange FLDS religious sect, hundreds of whom were seized based on a single, anonymous, allegation of abuse by a caller pretending to be a teenager in the sect, and who continue to be held without any hearing on whether they individually are endangered (although the removal of some of the children might well be warranted if it occurred after a full judicial hearing).
Ban the Smokes, Kill the Smokers
The unintended consequences of government are wonderful to behold. Impose a minimum wage and put poor, ill-educated teens out of work. Raise auto fuel-economy requirements, and kill more people in accidents as they travel in smaller cars. Ban cigarette smoking in local bars and restaurants, and cause more drunk driving accidents as smokers drive further to find more congenial locales.
The problem with this, say Scott Adams and Chad Cotti, economists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is that smoking bans seem to have been followed by an increase in drunk-driving and in fatal accidents involving alcohol. In research published in the Journal of Public Economics, the authors find evidence that smokers are driving farther to places where smoking in bars is allowed.
The researchers analysed data from 120 American counties, 20 of which had banned smoking. They found a smoking ban increased fatal alcohol-related car accidents by 13% in a typical county containing 680,000 people. This is the equivalent of 2.5 fatal accidents (equivalent to approximately six deaths). Furthermore, drunk-driving smokers have not changed their ways over time. In areas where the ban has been in place for longer than 18 months, the increased accident rate is 19%.
The findings, say the pair, are consistent with the suggestion that smokers are driving farther to alternative places to drink. This may be because they are driving to bars with outdoor seating, or to bars which are not enforcing the smoking ban.
Another explanation is that some smokers are “jurisdiction shopping” to places where they may puff. Accident rates can be especially high where border-hopping to still-smoky bars is possible. Accidents in Delaware county in Pennsylvania increased by 26% after the next-door state of Delaware introduced a smoking ban in 2002. Similarly, when Boulder county banned smoking, fatal accidents in Jefferson county, between Boulder county and Denver, went up by 40%. How this weighs up against the long-term health effects of smoking bans is unclear. But it serves as a warning to well-meaning legislators.
Makes you wonder what government is going to do for an encore!
Throwing the Baby Out With the Bathwater
George Mason University Law Professor David Bernstein has a thought-provoking post on the seizure of hundreds of children, including nursing infants, from their mothers, who belong to a strange polygamist sect (FLDS). At the end of the day, the sect’s disturbing practices (such as allegedly conditioning adolescents to accept underage polygamous marriages) may well warrant removal of many of the children from their parents’ custody, but the decision by Judge Barbara Walther allowing the immediate seizure of all the children, regardless of age, prior to a full judicial hearing (based on a single, anonymous, apparently false allegation of abuse), and absent an imminent threat to their health, seems indefensible and in violation of due process and the children’s constitutional rights.
Taking an infant away from its mother can be very damaging to the infant. (For example, my daughter, a very finicky eater, will not let anybody other than my wife or me feed her, and she usually only lets me feed her if it’s early in the morning. We have to work diligently to get her to eat enough). That’s especially true for nursing infants.
Being placed in foster care can be cause devastating psychological harm to a young child, as Judge Kleinfeld noted in Doe v. Lebbos.
Moreover, erroneous child abuse charges can have legally permanent, irrevocable consequences that devastate a family. In Arlington County, Virginia, parents proved themselves innocent of a false, anonymous charge that they were starving their child (who was actually at her proper weight when CPS workers snatched her), but the judge later refused to return the child to them, permanently cutting off their parental rights based heavily on his conclusion that the child — seized as a newborn — had developed a bond with her foster parents as a result of being snatched. (That ruling is on appeal).
Federal law provides financial incentives for CPS agencies to seize and adopt out children, which may lead to overzealous child-snatching.
EU Defends Against the Bagpipe Menace
The European Union finally is doing something useful. It is defending people against noisy bagpipes.
THEIR high-pitched skirl has put fear into the hearts of Scotland’s enemies and sent sensitive tourists reaching for the cotton wool.
Now, however, the bagpipes are to be quietened by an edict from Brussels.
From this month, pipers must adhere to strict volume limits or risk breaking European Union health and safety laws. Bands have been ordered to tone down or wear earplugs to limit noise exposure to 85 decibels.
Typically, a pipe band played at full volume peaks at 122 decibels outdoors, noisier than the sound of either a nightclub or a chainsaw, which rises to 116 decibels.
The prospect of more subdued bagpipes will be welcomed by some, but musicians have warned performances will suffer.
Pipe majors claim it is virtually impossible to play quietly or to tune a band when the musicians are wearing earplugs, raising the prospect of a cacophony at showcase events such as the Edinburgh military tattoo.
The rules in effect limit practice without earplugs to about 15 minutes a day.
While piping schools have begun issuing students with hearing protectors, pipe majors are preparing to make a stand.
Ian Hughes, head of the RAF Leuchars band at an airbase in Fife, claimed the new legislation in effect outlawed bagpipe playing for the first time in more than 250 years.
The last time was after the Jacobite rising of 1745 and the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s clansmen at the battle of Culloden.
How did Europe survive the bagpipers over the last three centuries without the EU’s regulatory assistance?
Legalized Child-Stealing in Arlington County, Virginia
The Washington Examiner has a must-read editorial called “Baby Snatching by Arlington County.”
It shows that if County social workers seize your baby, based on false allegations of neglect, and put your baby in foster care long enough, you might never get your child back, even if you prove yourself innocent, because the courts will say it’s in “the best interests of the child” that your baby stay with the foster parents he’s gotten used to living with. (Taking that logic to its ultimate conclusion, a kidnapper who kidnapped a newborn from a hospital and then escaped prosecution on a technicality could keep the child, because the child would have bonded with the kidnapper by the time the kidnapper was apprehended).
That’s the gist of a recent Arlington, Virginia circuit court decision described in today’s Washington Examiner. County social workers took a baby away from her parents based largely on false, anonymous allegations that she was being starved, even though she was at her proper weight at the time they seized her from her parents. And although those allegations were later ruled false by a CPS hearing officer, the judge permanently removed her from her parents anyway, claiming she had bonded with her new foster parents and thus might be traumatized if she were returned. (He also cited evidence that her natural parents were not model parents, but that is not the test for terminating parental rights under the Supreme Court’s decision in Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745 (1982). If it were, millions of healthy children could be removed from their families by social workers). Parents Nancy Hey and Christopher Slitor spent a staggering $350,000 in legal bills in their losing fight for their child.
I personally am worried about this court decision, even though I and my family have never been accused of child neglect or abuse, because my wife, at the suggestion of our pediatrician, called Arlington County social workers because our baby is extremely difficult to feed, and they then visited our house earlier this year. (Our baby Sarah is 70th percentile in height and skull size, but only 10th percentile in weight). I thought nothing of this visit at the time, since our baby is lively and healthy and has never been neglected or abused, and my wife is a good mother (who conscientiously cared for many children as a nanny, and helped raise her own nephew).
Although the circuit court decision is apparently justified by the so-called “best interest of the child,” its long run effect is to harm children by discouraging even fit, non-abusive parents from seeking advice or information from doctors or social workers when their children have behaviors or injuries that might sometimes be associated with parental abuse or neglect. Good parents will now worry about talking to doctors (who are required by state laws to report any possibility of abuse or neglect to social workers) or social workers lest it lead to unwarranted (and unreversible) seizures of a child by social workers.
Parents already have to worry that if they take their child to the doctor, and reasonably disagree with the doctor’s preferred treatment, overzealous social workers will temporarily seize their child. That’s what happened to Corissa Mueller, who took her baby daughter Taige to the doctor because the baby had a high temperature, and then had social workers temporarily seize the child after she rejected the doctor’s preferred treatment (a spinal tap) in favor of a reasonable alternative she felt posed fewer health risks. (The Center for Individual Rights, my former law firm, is representing Mueller in a constitutional lawsuit against Idaho state social worker April Auker for her role in the seizure in Mueller v. Idaho. A federal judge in Idaho refused to dismiss the lawsuit, citing a 1999 ruling in favor of parental rights by the federal appeals court in that region, the Ninth Circuit.) Since conditions in foster care are often bad, even temporary seizures of a child can cause devastating emotional and psychological harm.
The Arlington County court ruling, now on appeal, radically increases the risk to parents of taking an injured, ill, or behaviorally-disordered child to a doctor, by allowing an erroneous temporary seizure of a child based on suspicions of abuse to become permanent merely because of the passage of time, even if the child turns out never to have been neglected or abused. Arlington County seems to be moving towards the situation in some foreign countries like England, where children are removed permanently from their parents based on the most meager suspicions of abuse, fueled in part by the bounties that social workers and local governments receive for seizing children from their parents and then adopting them out.
Powerful Sarbanes-Oxley Bureaucrats Challenged in Court
Point of Law reports on an appeals court hearing Tuesday over the constitutionality of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. (The PCAOB, which produces tons of red tape and “busywork” for accountants and businesses, is the bureaucratic agency created by the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a law that cost the stock market $1.4 trillion in value, and business $35 billion in annual compliance costs, while doing virtually nothing to prevent corporate mismanagement). Ted Frank, Director of the AEI Legal Center, reports that “the DC Circuit heard arguments appealing the dismissal of a challenge to the constitutionality of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (Feb. 2006), an institution whose members are appointed by the SEC, which would seem to violate the Appointments Clause. . .A panel of Judges Brett Kavanaugh, Judith Rogers, and Janice Rogers Brown expressed substantial skepticism to the PCAOB’s position, as Michael Carvin argued that the board was a permanent government-like agency with extraordinarily broad and unchecked prosecutorial powers, but outside the power of the president to appoint or remove officials. (Dow Jones Newswires, Apr. 15; CEI press release). Because of a nonseverability provision in Sarbanes-Oxley, a finding that PCAOB is unconstitutional would strike down the law entirely, but the argument was not reported on by any newspaper—not even the Wall Street Journal.” CEI is assisting in the court challenge to the PCAOB, a case known as Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB, and earlier explained how the PCAOB violates the Appointments Clause.
Happy Birthday, Junkscience.com
Congratulations are in order to our friend Steve Milloy, who is celebrating the 12th year of his flagship website, Junkscience.com. Ever since 1996 he’s been exposing “All the junk that’s fit to debunk” - whether it’s dire predictions of catastrophic global warming, activist nonsense about childhood vaccines or mega-myths about mega-vitamins, Steve is there to set the record straight and our minds at ease.
Since it would be too much to ask that the disinformation tribe actually disband, we’ll hope for second best and wish The Junkman another successful twelve years.
Bowing to the Multicultural Idol
Maryland legislators are inflicting a moronic new “diversity” mandate on Maryland colleges.
Legislation to force institutions of higher learning in Maryland to create “cultural diversity” programs is making its way through the General Assembly with little opposition from lawmakers — who should be defending academic freedom, not crushing it. HB 905, which passed the House of Delegates 122-to-9, requires all colleges and universities that receive state aid to submit a yearly report on what they’ve done “to promote and enhance cultural diversity.” A companion bill sailed through the state Senate on an equally lopsided 41-6 vote.
The Examiner condemns this as an assault on academic freedom, noting that “all of Maryland’s institutions of higher learning, public and private, will be forced to bow before the same multicultural idol.”
The “diversity” requirement will probably end up enriching the worst kind of scam artists, the “diversity consultants” (like the notorious racist and race-baiter Glenn Singleton) who will now be hired by foolish college administrators to “promote” diversity. Diversity training often backfires on the institutions that hire diversity trainers, and sometimes even leads to discrimination and civil-rights lawsuits against those institutions, by both minority and white employees.
FDA using consumer safety to blackmail Capitol Hill for more funds
FDA commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach put on his best “Mom, Dad, I don’t get enough allowance! whine” at a conference in DC last week.
“FDA might fail,” he said. “Peril exists!”
He was of course fishing for more funds for his agency. Last time the agency got a huge increase in 1993, they almost doubled the staffing from 1,400 to 2,100, which temporarily led to a more efficient permit approval process before it dropped back down below pre expansion levels.
In order to protect US citizens from FDA’s tendency to be overcautious in approving drugs, we should remove their veto power. We should be very clear that nothing, and no body could make US citizens safe. The responsibility to evaluate the risk and benefits of a medication belongs to the patient and the doctor who is treating the patient.
FDA should continue with their evaluation as they do today, but the bureaucratic overcaution the agency is displaying to avoid bad press and political examination is delaying important medications. People are dying while waiting for the bloated bureaucracy to approve medications.
Eschenback does not need more funds; he needs a more efficient agency. More funds will bloat it further.
Lawsuits, Sarbanes-Oxley Law Ravage U.S. Capital Markets
“U.S. capital markets again lost ground against global competitors last year, highlighting the need to streamline regulation and crack down on excessive securities litigation, industry experts said on Wednesday. The United States received only 6.9 percent of the funds raised in global initial public offerings in 2007 and did not participate in any of the top 20 global IPOs.”
Lawsuits aren’t the only reason capital is fleeing America for better investment opportunities elsewhere. Another reason is the devastatingly costly Sarbanes-Oxley law Congress passed in 2002 in the wake of the Enron bankruptcy. That law’s burdensome bureaucratic requirements and regulations have cost the stock market $1.4 trillion in value, and imposed an additional $35 billion in annual compliance costs on American business, while doing nothing to prevent another Enron, as recent mortgage losses at Countrywide Financial show.
CEI is assisting a court challenge to provisions of that law that violate the Appointments Clause of the Constitution and separation-of-powers safeguards. A challenge to those provisions will be heard by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on April 15 in the case of Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (FEF v. PCAOB).
Last Day to Vote For Freedom in Economist.com Debate
Today is the last day to vote for the free market and against overregulation in a debate I am participating at the web site of the magazine The Economist. If Open Market readers aren’t enthused about any of the candidates in this year’s presidential election, here is a venue where their vote could make a difference and the principles of freedom are definitely at stake. If CEI and I and the free-market side win this debate, it could have a positive influence on the larger debate over regulation of financial markets.
I am arguing in favor of the proposition, “By intervening to regulate business and financial risks, governments have made things worse.” To vote for me and for less regulation, go to the site, http://www.economist.com/debate, register (registration is free), and cast your vote as “PRO.” Voting continues all through today, and will cease tomorrow at an unspecified time.
The voting is neck and neck. I am now winning 52 to 48 percent, after being down earlier this week 47 to 53 percent. Every vote counts for the free-market to squeak out a victory in these challenging times when much of the media is blaming deregulation for all the ongoing financial woes.
Today, after being attacked by three “featured participants” arguing for an ever-expanding regulatory state, I finally get an ally among the guest commenters. Thomas Firey, managing editor of the Cato Institute’s magazine Regulation, writes a masterful refutation of the nostalgia among the commenters for New Deal banking regulations.
“Let us consider just how well US banking regulation ‘worked’ in the post-war period,” Firey writes. “[T]hroughout the post-war period, costs to borrowers were much higher than they are today. Since the banking deregulations of 1980-91, terms for both depositors and borrowers have improved greatly.”
Firey also argues that while stricter lending regulations may have benefitted the lenders and borrowers involved in the 1 million subprime loans now in default, “what of the other 5 million subprime loans that are in good standing, most of which have provided people with homes that they otherwise could not have purchased?”
I make many of the same points in my “Closing Statement” that was posted yesterday. “Indeed, when looked at in terms of distribution, the housing boom’s benefits may have been even more widely dispersed than those of the tech boom,” I argue. “Nearly 70% of US families and close to one-half of American black and Latino families now own the homes in which they live.” I remind readers that the overall foreclosures, while numbering in the millions in correspondence with the dramatic increase in the number of homeowners, is still only 2.04 percent of all mortgage loans.
I argue that while some volatility is the price we pay for a dynamic economy that improves everyone’s standard of living, “volatility can be much reduced through the introduction of what we should call a second stage of deregulation. Let us deregulate private risk management, as we have risk-taking, for ordinary investors as well as hedge-fund fat cats.”
As an example, I propose lifting restrictions that make it difficult for mutual funds to short stocks and other securities. Allowing mutual funds to engage in the same strategies as the smart hedge funds that shorted subprime loans would bring gains to middle-class investors and would have sent a stonger signal to the markets that something was wrong with mortgage securities.
Appreciate any feedback or suggestions from Open Market readers on deregulating risk management. In the meantime, make your freedom-loving voice heard today in the Economist debate!
Oh, if only both sides could lose …
Courtesy of Ivan, I’ve been directed to this press release from the Weston A. Price Foundation decrying a U.S. FDA and California Department of Food and Agriculture crackdown on purveyors of “raw” — that is, unpasteurized — milk. Now, I have very little sympathy for people who think raw milk is perfectly safe and/or somehow better for us than pasteurized milk. After all, pasteurization was seen as a remarkable scientific breakthrough and public health miracle for a reason: raw milk can harbor any number of nasty bacteria — including S. typhimurium, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, E. coli O157:H7, Listeria, Campylobacter, and Brucella.
That said, there’s no good reason why consenting adults should not be able to buy and consume raw milk. And, if the claims made in this press release are accurate (and I don’t vouch for the accuracy of anything put out by the Weston A. Price Foundation), these regulatory enforcers really ought to have something better to do. Apparently, what’s gotten their panties in a bunch is the interstate sale by a California dairy of unpasteurized bovine colostrum (also known as “first milk,” it’s the very high protein milk produced in the first few days after birth) for use in pet food. Seems that zoos like to feed colostrum to certain animals, and they prefer unpasteurized product.
Every budget season, FDA officials trudge up to Capitol Hill and complain that they don’t have sufficient resources to perform their really important work. Well, I think we may have identified a good place to cut the enforcement budget.
More than Rotten Teeth in the UK
picture via freedomandshit.org
I’ve been following the discussion on bad British teeth between Eli and Fran and while it may be that fluoridation in public water offers some protection for teeth, I think it is Britain’s culture-wide belief that “the public good” outweighs individual rights which has caused the rotting of their teeth (among other things).
In fact, recent studies comparing countries with fluoridated water versus countries without, found that the positive effects of fluoride were much less significant than we previously thought.
“In lifetime residents of fluoridated areas 47% had evidence of erosion; in 21% erosion had progressed to the dentine or pulp. The corresponding figures in non-fluoridated areas were 43% and 21% respectively… Levels in fluoridated and non-fluoridated areas were similar. “
Additionally, any positive result from drinking fluoridated water is nullified (especially in the USA) by the increasing reliance on bottled water.
I have to agree with Eli, if only on the point that Brits’ rotten teeth spring from a deeper cause than drinking water. However, I disagree that the fundamental problem is their unwillingness to spend money on public services. While it may be true that Brits spend less than other countries on dental hygiene, the real problem is the enslavement of the profession–namely a disregard for individual rights.
In an article last January, Bloomberg reported that, while many in the UK were doing without regular dental care, many were using private care or, alternately, having work done over seas where they waits are shorter and costs minimal.
And though a startlingly 36 percent of respondents to the poll say they’ve gone more than 2 years without seeing a dentist, the problem isn’t lack of money–it’s lack of dentists. 1 in 10 dentists “dropped out” of the NHS system since April ‘06 when the government changed the contract with doctors. But there is a bright spot on the horizon; something that makes me hope the stereotype of bad british teeth will not apply for much longer. This wonderful development is the invasion of capitalism into the UK dental market. According to the same Bloomberg article:
The U.K.’s private dental market grew 63 percent to 3 billion pounds ($5.9 billion) from 2002 to 2006, overtaking the 2.4 billion pounds budgeted by the government.
Doctors, fed up with being treated like slaves to the state, are refusing to treat NHS patients. You can make the argument that increases in government spending would convince dentists to treat NHS patients, but the root of the problem I continue treating NHS patients While you may argue that increases in government spending on dental care would entice dentists to continue treating NHS patients, I think the root of the problem is the prevention of letting dentists work for profit. The government in the UK treats doctors as if, by virtue of their profession, they are duty bound to sacrifice their lives for the good of the people and implicitly believes that they ought to should treat patients regardless of personal gain or personal pain. The result is shoddy work, long waits, and eventual existing of the system in favor of something more profitable.
Hopefully, with private care on the rise, the British will have something to smile about in the future.
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