Archive for June, 2007
Tech and the Environment
Valleywag has an excellent rant on the problems with environmentalists’ blackmailing the technology industry:
To ignore the wider benefits of the digital revolution is obtuse. Here’s the fundamental truth: the more human activity is pursued online, the less the environmental footprint. Apple’s pioneering of desktop publishing did away with much of the filthy print industry; its easy video-conferencing will make some business trips unnecessary; Ebay’s person-to-person marketplace bypasses cumbersome retail logistics; and Google is replacing inefficient physical libraries and filing systems across the world. Frankly, if a few computers end up in dumps, rather than recycled: so what.
I can understand why it would be convenient to go after Apple. Steve Jobs’ computer maker is more easily pressured than most companies, because of its pristine brand, and because so many of its customers are environmentally conscious. Al Gore, the planet’s foremost defender, is on the board. Apple makes things, which are messy. And, given the holy war against climate change, and the political correctness that stifles critical thinking, the company can’t defend itself.
The green lobby may choose to target high-tech companies rather than, say, the oil, coal or auto industries. The ex-hippies in charge of Silicon Valley companies are easy targets. But any victory, in converting them to the cause, will be purely symbolic, useful for fund-raising, maybe, but ultimately meaningless. This campaign against Apple is, at best, moral blackmail and, at worst, a cynical shakedown. Shame on them.
Thanks to Joe for the pointer. There’s a broader point here, that was best articulated by Julian Simon: in the long run, free markets and technological progress are good for the environment, because reducing costs often means reducing waste, and reducing waste often means reducing your environmental footprint. Technological progress and rapid economic growth also allows us to devote more resources to cleaning up the environment. Plus it leads to more people having the luxury to spend their time hectoring companies like Apple for their environmental records.
Build a Wall
The prize for the best policy idea of the week goes to Steve Ahlenius, the president of the Chamber of Commerce in McAllen, Texas on the Mexican border. As reported in The Monitor, a local newspaper:
McAllen, Texas calls for a wall around Washington, D.C.
We feel the need to protect ourselves from bad legislation, bad ideas, and a waste of taxpayer money.
A wall around their homes and businesses will give the legislators and Washington bureaucrats a better understanding of what kind of message this action will send.
Let’s see if they decide to climb over it, tunnel under it, or walk around it.
My 56-Word Review of SiCKO
SiCKO was a very funny film, and I praise Michael Moore for starting the conversation and pointing out many horrors of the U.S. health care system.
But from a policy standpoint – and I say this more in sadness than in anger – SiCKO was so breathtaking a specimen of ignorant propaganda that it would make Pravda blush.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Health Care; Tax and Budget Policy
Oppressed Canadians Finally Reach Tax Freedom Day
American taxpayers worked until April 30 before they earned enough money to satisfy the rapacious demands of federal, state and local tax collectors. This is discouraging, but Americans should be grateful that they don’t live in Canada. The Fraser Institute has revealed that the average Canadian worked until June 20 before quenching the appetites of the political class. Taxpayers in Newfoundland and Labrador are still working as serfs for government. Their tax freedom day won’t arrive until July 1:
Starting tomorrow, Canadians have paid off the total tax bill imposed on them by government and can finally start working for themselves, according to The Fraser Institute’s annual Tax Freedom Day calculations. “If you look at the average Canadian family’s total tax bill, each and every dollar they earn before June 20 would be required to pay the taxes owing to all levels of government. It takes until June 20 before they begin earning money for themselves,” said Niels Veldhuis, The Fraser Institute’s Director of the Centre for Tax Studies. …This year Tax Freedom Day falls four days earlier than in 2006. The latest Tax Freedom Day in Canadian history was in 2000, when it fell on June 25. Tax Freedom Day moved forward to June 17 in 2001 before steadily retreating to June 24 in 2005 and 2006. “Even with the recent improvements, Tax Freedom day still falls almost two months later than in 1961, the earliest year for which we have calculations,” Veldhuis said. …Tax Freedom Day varies from province to province, depending on the taxation levels of each provincial government. Alberta enjoys the earliest Tax Freedom Day on June 1, followed by New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island (June 14), BC and Manitoba (June 16), Ontario and Nova Scotia (June 19), and Saskatchewan (June 22). Quebec has the second-latest Tax Freedom Day, on June 26, while Newfoundland and Labrador wait the longest, until July 1.
A Treatment for Politicians Addicted to the Drug War
This YouTube video from the Drug Policy Alliance is both amusing and educational. Don’t miss the disclaimers at the end.
How Not To Rear Pigs (And Receive Money For Not Doing So)
I have only so much contempt to go around, and my job calls me to expend most of it on U.S. government policies. But I have of late been so immersed in criticizing U.S. farm programs (and rightly so) that I have to remind myself of the insanity across the pond.
Or my friends remind me. My mate Ken sent me this letter from a would-be non-pig-farmer from the U.K., anxious to feed at the European Union’s trough.
My favorite excerpt:
“In your opinion what is the best kind of farm not to rear pigs on, and which is the best breed of pigs not to rear? I want to be sure I approach this endeavour in keeping with all government policies, as dictated by the EU under the Common Agricultural Policy. I would prefer not to rear bacon pigs. But if this is not the type you want not rearing, I will just as gladly not rear porkers.”
Read the rest, though. It’s worth the time.
Google Gets Sucked into the Parasite Economy
The Washington Post reports that Google “does not intend to repeat the mistake that its rival Microsoft made a decade ago.”
Microsoft was so disdainful of the federal government back then that it had almost no presence in Washington. Largely because of that neglect, the company was blindsided by a government antitrust lawsuit that cost it dearly.
Mindful of that history, Google is rapidly building a substantial presence in Washington and using that firepower against Microsoft, among others.
This story just keeps repeating itself. People build companies, and then activists, competitors, and politicians notice that they have deep pockets. It happened to Microsoft, then to Wal-Mart. When the parasite economy first started lapping at Google last year, I wrote this:
Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and many other wealthy officers of the company got rich the only way you can in a free market: by producing something other people want. A lot of brilliant people worked long hours producing computer software that hundreds of millions of people chose to use, in the midst of a highly competitive market that offered lots of other options.
But in our modern politicized economy — which National Journal columnist Jonathan Rauch called the “parasite economy” — no good deed goes unpunished for long. Some people want to declare Google a public utility that must be regulated in the public interest, perhaps by a federal Office of Search Engines. The Bush administration wants Google to turn over a million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from a one-week period. Congress is investigating how the company deals with the Chinese government’s demands for censorship of search results by Chinese users. Read the rest of this post »
The Folly of Mann
Colleen Wilcox, Superintendent of Schools for Santa Clara County, has an op-ed in today’s San Jose Mercury News critiquing vouchers. There is a great deal wrong with what she has to say. Referring to Horace Mann, the godfather of American state schooling, she writes:
It’s true that the history of our public schools has seen its share of disappointments. At certain times, in certain places, the system undeniably failed the students. But on the whole, Horace Mann’s model has served us well.
At certain times? In certain places? American students perform worse relative to their international peers the longer they stay in school (see the “Global Context” section of that .pdf). When compared across subjects and grades to other industrialized countries by the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, the Program on International Student Assessment, and the International Adult Literacy Survey, our performance is about average at the 4th grade, below average by the 8th grade, and at or near the bottom among high-school seniors and recent graduates.
And these patterns hold not only for the overall averages, but for our top-scorers as well. Not just at certain times. Not just in certain places.
Wilcox objects to vouchers on two grounds. First, that they are ostensibly “contrary to our fundamental belief in the separation of church and state.” Not so. As the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, a universally available school voucher that treats parents’ religious and non-religious school choices neutrally is entirely consistent with the First Amendment and the principle it is meant to uphold. Anyone worried about compelled support issues under vouchers can simply opt for tax credits instead, as I recommend here.
Her second objection is that allowing families to chose “private schools would drain precious dollars away from public schools.” But, the thing is, if the children aren’t in the public schools anymore, there is no point in paying them for those children is there? Then we’d be paying them, literally, for doing nothing.
Now, you might counter that, given the number of functionally illiterate and unprepared students graduated by public schools every year, we are already paying public schools for nothing. But this, please note, is entirely by accident. A system of deliberately paying public schools for nothing would not be an improvement.
Educational freedom, and market competition, beat government monopoly provision. The sooner we realize that, the better off our children and our nation will be.
And as for Horace Mann, he predicted 160 years ago that if we “let the Common [a.k.a. "public"] School be expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged.”
Eight generations and trillions of dollars later, color me a little skeptical about the merits of state schooling.
If You Like Goodness, You Should Love NCLB!
Yesterday, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) – which brings you the GRE, SAT, AP, and numerous other dreaded exams – released results of a survey supposedly showing that “Americans say ‘yes’” to reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The ETS pollsters reached this conclusion despite finding that more respondents opposed NCLB than supported it. How’s that possible? It takes a little prodding.
The survey’s first major finding is actually that most people – more than half – report knowing very little about the massive No Child Left Behind Act. It also finds that a plurality dislikes the law, with 43 percent opposing it and only 41 percent backing NCLB. But an accurate snapshot of public knowledge and opinion apparently wasn’t what ETS was after. No, what they wanted to know was what people thought about the law after they were offered a brief – and very positive – description of NCLB:
The No Child Left Behind Act provides federal funds for school districts with poor children in order to close achievement gaps. It also requires states to set standards for education and to test students each year to determine whether the standards are being met by all students. In addition, No Child Left Behind provides funding to help teachers become highly qualified. It also provides additional funding and prescribes consequences to schools that fail to achieve academic targets set by their state.
What a shock! After respondents got that description, support for the law rose to 56 percent. Sort of like if the description were “NCLB fulfills champagne wishes and caviar dreams for every student in America.” I mean, who is going to oppose “highly qualified” teachers, closing achievement gaps, and helping poor children? If anything, it’s a testament to how disliked NCLB truly is that the description only boosted support by 15 points. And imagine how low support might have dropped had ETS offered a little balance by, say, noting that NCLB has caused many states to lower their standards, and has produced no discernable increase in academic achievement despite boosting federal education spending by billions of dollars. Yet one more example of why you should never trust public opinion polls.
Antigua and Barbuda Raises the Stakes
$3.4 billion. That’s the price tag Antigua and Barbuda, the island nation which successfully argued that the United States was violating its obligations to open its market to foreign online gambling providers, puts on its lost revenues as a result of the U.S. ban on some internet gambling. (More here and here.)
They are seeking to recover the money by withdrawing the protection they provide for American intellectual property (see here). The idea behind this sort of action is to harness the power of a powerful lobby group (in this case, Hollywood and the software industry) to counteract the influence of anti-internet gambling groups: If intellectual property owners are caught in the cross-fire of the dispute, maybe the United States government would feel more pressure to comply with the series of rulings against current U.S. regulations.
The push to seek compensation through the World Trade Organization comes just one day after the European Union has indicated it wants compensation for the loss of market access, but through further opening of other sectors in lieu of lifting the ban. When the United States announced last month that it was responding to their loss at the WTO by seeking to “clarify” its commitments, they indicated that they would not provide compensation to Members harmed by the ban, as is called for by WTO rules. The USTR had reasoned that since they never intended to allow internet gambling in the first place (suggesting that their commitment to do just that was an “oversight”), then Members could not expect to receive any sort of compensation in return for solidifying the ban.
We’re planning to hold a forum on this topic on 25th July. Stay tuned for details.
More Farcical Trade Remedies Cases at the ITC
The menacing trade remedies laws have done their share to breed cynicism about U.S. free trade rhetoric. But this greeting on the website of the most recent U.S. petitioner is apropos of the tone conveyed by those laws.
Pretty scary, huh? Not as scary as being an importer of Chinese-manufactured, off-road tires, nowadays.
Having been acquainted with that grizzly, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that Titan Tires, one of the biggest American manufacturers of tires for agricultural machines, went on the offensive Monday, when it (along with several labor unions) filed petitions with the U.S. International Trade Commission and the Commerce Department for relief from allegedly subsidized and dumped import competition from China.
To win trade relief, Titan et. al. will need to demonstrate that the domestic industry is materially injured or threatened with material injury by reason of subsidized or dumped imports. It’s generally not very hard to satisfy the meager statutory thresholds for demonstrating injury, but what is so absolutely stunning to those naïve enough to expect a modicum of justice from the process is how petitioners can distort the truth with impunity before the ITC.
Although most of the crucial economic facts are redacted from the public version of this latest petition (which is accessible on the ITC’s website), here is a sample of the injury argument presented therein. From page 18: Read the rest of this post »
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