brooklyn

Regulation Roundup

by Ryan Young on September 30, 2011

in Regulation

Here’s a fresh batch of regulatory bloopers:

  • In Michigan, it is legal to kill ducks during hunting season, but not to scare them.
  • In Pateros, Washington, it is illegal for dogs to be nuisances.
  • Massage parlors are illegal in well-named Horneytown, North Carolina.
  • In Salem, West Virginia, it is illegal to eat candy if you’re going to church in the next 90 minutes.
  • In Maine, it is illegal to walk on any street with untied shoelaces.
  • In New Britain, Connecticut, fire trucks on their way to a fire may not go faster than 25 mph.
  • In Brooklyn, New York, it is against the law for horses to sleep in bathtubs.
  • In South Dakota, it is illegal to fall asleep inside a cheese factory.

Regulation of the Day 135: Mustache Nets

by Ryan Young on April 28, 2010

in Regulation of the Day

CORRECTION: It appears that I’ve been had. Commenter Dietsch at Jacob Grier‘s blog points out that the article was probably an April Fool’s joke. There are such things as beard net regulations on the books in various cities. But this particularly amusing story appears not to be true; probably for the better.

Hair nets have been a staple of the food service industry for a long time. They are not the most dignified fashion accessory. But they serve a useful purpose. Just like church and state, hair and food are best kept separate. Hair nets are a much easier way to accomplish that goal than, say, mandatory baldness for all kitchen staffs.

Which brings us to the latest fad in Brooklyn’s trendy Cobble Hill neighborhood: mustache nets. For some reason,Victorian-themed restaurants and bars are all the rage right now. Bars are redecorating with old-fashioned furniture and artwork. Bartenders are redecorating themselves with outlandish 19th-century facial hair, from mutton chops to handlebar mustaches.

Unfortunately, a regulation from approximately the same time period is getting in the way of all this nostalgic fun. New York State law requires all persons with facial hair who are serving food or drink to wear a mustache net.

Regulators have been cracking down on un-netted mustaches. They have cited several establishments, as Chow reports:

The crackdown was a surprise to restaurant employees—one bartender apparently panicked and attempted to hide behind a taxidermied warthog. However, many of those cited have remained defiant.

“I’d be happy to have my staff wear mustache nets—if I could find a sustainable source,” said a representative of one of the establishments targeted in the raid. “And so far, I have not found a mustache net farm whose mustache netting practices I believe in.”

It’s pretty easy to see why the nets aren’t very popular. A Google image search for “moustache net” yields this picture:

mustache-net

Doesn’t exactly befit the image of a chic bartender. But in New York, that’s the law.

Regulation of the Day 125: Salt

by Ryan Young on March 11, 2010

in Health and Illness, Healthcare, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation of the Day

Having eliminated all crime from New York’s streets, ended homelessness, rebuilt Ground Zero, and fixed the state’s ailing public schools, New York’s state legislature has set its sights on how much salt you eat.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg already has a plan to reduce NYC residents’ salt intake by 25 percent over five years. But State Assemblyman Felix Ortiz (D-Brooklyn) thinks that doesn’t go nearly far enough. And it only covers New York City, for starters. The rest of the state’s salt intake would remain perilously unregulated under the Bloomberg plan.

That’s why Mr. Ortiz has introduced statewide legislation that would “make it illegal for restaurants to use salt in the preparation of food. Period.”

A $1,000 fine would accompany each violation.

Tom Colicchio, who owns a restaurant and has appeared on the television show Top Chef, is livid. He told the New York Daily News that “New York City is considered the restaurant capital of the world. If they banned salt, nobody would come here anymore… Anybody who wants to taste food with no salt, go to a hospital and taste that.”

He’s right; the salt ban does offend culinary decency. But there’s another angle that’s at least as important: personal responsibility.
If I want to pile on the salt, as Mayor Bloomberg famously does, that’s my right. But I also need to be liable for the consequences. If chronic salt over-consumption gives me high blood pressure and heart trouble, that’s my fault. I should pay the cost.

But that’s not how the current health care system works. We suffer from the 12-cent problem: on average, people only pay 12 cents for every dollar of health care they consume. Roughly 50 cents are picked up by the government, and insurers cover the rest.
That means people have less incentive to watch what they eat than under a more honest system. Why not rack up huge health care bills? Everyone else is paying for me. Health care on sale! 88 percent off!

Freedom cannot exist without responsibility. Decades of government encroachments in health care have taken away a lot of our responsibility for health care decisions. So it makes some sense that Mr. Ortiz would finish the job by taking away peoples’ freedom to eat what they want.

A better solution would be to have both freedom and responsibility, instead of neither. Ban the salt ban. Give people more control over their health care dollars. Let us be free. Let us be responsible. We’re all adults here. Treat us as such, Mr. Ortiz.

ACORN Challenges Cut-Off Of Federal Funds After Child Prostitution Scandal, Claiming It Is ‘Unconstitutional’

by Hans Bader on November 12, 2009

in Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

ACORN has just filed a lawsuit in New York challenging as “unconstitutional” its loss of federal funds after its role in a child prostitution scandal was exposed.  Earlier, it sued those who exposed its role in that scandal for $2 million, claiming that the exposure violated its privacy rights under state audiotaping laws.  ACORN claims that Congress’s vote to cut off federal funds to ACORN is an unconstitutional bill of attainder.

ACORN is a left-wing group that launched President Obama’s career as a community organizer (ACORN stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now).  Obama has long-standing ties to ACORN, and an ACORN affiliate received received $800,000 from Obama’s campaign.  Earlier, a liberal prosecutor (and fervent Obama supporter) threatened to punish those who exposed ACORN’s scandalous actions, while turning a blind eye to ACORN’s wrongdoing.  Now, however, Obama is quite rationally distancing himself from ACORN, which has become an embarrassment to its one-time supporters.

Legal scholars like Hans Von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation have explained why Congress’s cut-off of funds to ACORN was perfectly constitutional.  It is easy to see why Congress would not want scarce federal funds to go to ACORN, which has a long history of terrible financial mismanagement, waste of funds, financial fraud, vote fraud, and tax evasion.  Congress had many legitimate,  non-punitive reasons for cutting off funds to ACORN.

ACORN’s lawsuit is brought by the radically left-wing Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR).  CCR’s founder, William Kunstler, was very open about the fact that he believed in civil liberties only for left-wingers in capitalist societies, not for dissidents of any stripe in Communist countries.  A classic example was his attitude towards dissidents in South Vietnam.  Many of these dissidents were liberals who had once criticized the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government.  After communist North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam, the dissidents began politely criticizing the human-rights abuses of the new government.  They were promptly sent to re-education camps, where they were starved or tortured to death.  The new Communist government turned out to be far crueler than the old right-wing government, which had at least allowed dissidents to live.

When some liberals, like Joan Baez, criticized this oppression against dissidents they had once worked with, William Kunstler refused to do so, saying that once a communist regime took power, he was not in favor of criticizing it for any human-rights abuses it committed.  Kunstler said, “I don’t believe in criticizing socialist governments publicly, even if there are human-rights violations.”  To Kunstler, civil liberties were just a tool to be used to bring down capitalist governments and pave the way for a communist “dictatorship of the proletariat.”  Once such a dictatorship was in power, there was no more need for civil liberties or individual freedoms of any kind, since individual freedom could only prove an obstacle to the socialist transformation of society.

ACORN Tied to Brooklyn Land-grabber

by Marc Scribner on September 21, 2009 · 1 comment

in Economy, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere

The multi-billion dollar Atlantic Yards development project in Brooklyn, New York–subsidized to the tune of $1.6 billion by New York taxpayers–is facing new scrutiny after politically-connected developer Bruce Ratner’s ties with embattled left-wing activist group ACORN were revealed. As it currently stands, the public-financed redevelopment plan relies on extensive use of eminent domain that would leave many long-time residents and business owners out in the cold. But ACORN, as one would expect, is framing the debate in racial terms:

ACORN’s New York director, Bertha Lewis, is a vocal and enthusiastic supporter of Ratner’s development. At a news conference announcing the project would proceed, Lewis, onstage, planted photo-op kisses on both Ratner and Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Lewis has also framed it on racial terms: “The overwhelming folks who are opposed are white people and wealthier people and more secure people and people who just arrived. *** We’re tired of being pushed out.”

It helps inspire Lewis, one imagines, that ACORN got that loan from Ratner and that Ratner gave her a hand in devising the low-income housing portions of his development. Ratner, it appears, has bought an ally, not just with cash, but with power — ACORN will now be shaping who lives where. “We’re developers now,” Lewis told New York Magazine.

But what Lewis and ACORN don’t mention is that Ratner quietly directed $1.5 million in grants and low-interest loans to the cash-strapped group last year–after major foundation support dried up due to an embezzlement scandal–leading Atlantic Yards opponent and former Working Families Party (a New York minor party with deep ties to ACORN) activist Patti Hagan to declare, “ACORN is a corrupt organization that had its silence bought by Ratner.” Opposition groups, including Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, have alleged corruption in the past, and even fence-sitting local politicians are questioning the development timeline and the security of future funding, which do not look promising. In fact, a new study estimates that the Atlantic Yards project would take twice as long to complete than Ratner currently claims. But objections from actual neighborhood activists are unlikely to change ACORN’s mind on the project. An ACORN whistleblower says the group stands to bring in at least $5 million annually in housing revenue thanks to a cushy deal brokered by Ratner.

Brooklyn Land Grab Opponents Allege Government Corruption

by Marc Scribner on August 5, 2009

in Economy, Legal, Personal Liberty

Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB), a group opposed to the taxpayer-financed development project Atlantic Yards, filed a motion with the New York Court of Appeals alleging that the environmental impact statement authored by the Empire State Development Corporation was illegally biased and predetermined in a manner that favors the property developer.

Specifically, according to DDDB, the latest brief filed in the case that challenges the environmental review asks the Court of Appeals to hear its case and address the following:

“1. Whether ESDC’s purposeful denial and mischaracterization of the uncontroverted economic conditions and trends in the project area, and its knowing misrepresentations of crime data in the project area, to support its ‘blight’ determination, demonstrate a degree of bias and corruption on the part of ESDC which warrants invalidation of its determination that the area is ‘substandard and insanitary’ for purposes of designating the project a ‘land use improvement project’ under the Urban Development Corporation Act (UDCA).

2. Whether ESDC’s purposeful denial and mischaracterization of the uncontroverted economic conditions and development trends in the project area, in order to justify its rejection of project alternatives, demonstrate a degree of bias and corruption on the part of ESDC which warrants invalidation of its rejection of project alternatives under State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA).

3. Whether ESDC was required to consider the economic conditions and development trends in the project area in order to exercise its authority to designate and undertake the project as a ‘land use improvement project’ under the UDCA.

4. Whether a sports arena leased for one dollar per year to a private, for-profit entity to be operated as a professional sports facility, with trivial civic benefits, may nevertheless be designated a ‘civic project’ under the UDCA.

5. Whether the standard of review of an agency action under CPLR Article 78 is the same as the standard of review in a taxpayer action under section 51 of the General Municipal Law.”

The proposed Atlantic Yards project is financed in part by $1.6 billion+ in government subsidies. Forest City Ratner, the developer, is attempting to seize many of the affected parcels through eminent domain in order to construct high rise commercial and residential towers, along with a 20,000-seat arena. As noted by Daniel B. Kelly in the forthcoming Supreme Court Economic Review 2009 (ungated working paper available at SSRN), illegal pretextual takings–use of eminent domain when a deal between government and preferred private developer has already been reached–are far more common when development agencies author environmental impact statements and undertake “blight” determination studies. These analyses typically ignore current local economic trends and attempt to paint the economic landscape in the bleakest terms possible in order to convince the appropriate bureaucrats that a state-run, public-private “economic rehabilitation” plan is neccessary.

But, largely due to the poorly-reasoned majority opinion in Kelo v. New London, property owners now often face a Sisyphean task when they are forced to confront an unholy alliance between government bureaucrats and rent-seeking private developers.