Archive for April, 2010
Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight
A record-setting heat wave has settled on the Beltway this week, resulting in my thermometer topping the 85°F mark by the time I came into work today.
Did I mention my thermometer is inside my apartment?
“Oh yuck,” you’re probably thinking. “You should get a place with air conditioning.”
But you see, my unit has air conditioning. The problem is that, under Virginia law, it can’t be turned on until May 1.
My apartment is in an older building (1958) with a centralized HVAC system. As a result, the whole building must either be in heating mode or cooling mode. One of the quirks of this system is that it takes a couple of days for it to be converted from one mode to the other.
That physical reality doesn’t jibe well with Virginia law, which requires (in the words of an Arlington County government brochure) that:
Every dwelling unit is … to have heating facilities that are properly maintained and keep all habitable rooms at a temperature of at least 65° during the day and 60° at night during ordinary winter conditions from October 15 – May 1.
The result is that, unless the building superintendent knows for certain that cold-weather conditions have ended for the year, a building with a system like mine (which isn’t uncommon) can only be in compliance with Virginia law if it keeps the air conditioning off until May 1. Hence my 85°F apartment.
No doubt, Virginia regulators will explain that such rules are necessary to protect the comfort and safety of apartment residents. But I wonder what they would say about the comfort and safety of the small children who live in my building and who spent the last few nights trying to sleep in 85°F heat?
Atomic Dreams
Last week I was on John Stossel’s (most excellent) new show on Fox Business News to discuss energy policy — in particular, popular myths that Republicans have about energy markets. One of the topics I touched upon was nuclear power. My argument was the same that I have offered in print: Nuclear power is a swell technology but, given the high construction costs associated with building nuclear reactors, it’s a technology that cannot compete in free markets without a massive amount of government support. If one believes in free markets, then one should look askance at such policies.
As expected, the atomic cult has taken offense.
Now, it is reasonable to argue that excessive regulatory oversight has driven up the cost of nuclear power and that a “better” regulatory regime would reduce costs. Perhaps. But I have yet to see any concrete accounting of exactly which regulations are “bad” along with associated price tags for the same. If anyone out there in Internet-land has access to a good, credible accounting like that, please, send it my way. But until I see something tangible, what we have here is assertion masquerading as fact.
Most of those who consider themselves “pro-nuke” are unaware of the fact that the current federal regulatory regime was thoroughly reformed in the late 1990s to comport with the industry’s model of what a “good” federal regulatory regime would look like. As Oliver Kingsley Jr., the President of Exelon Nuclear, put it in Senate testimony back in 2001:
The current regulatory environment has become more stable, timely, and predictable, and is an important contributor to improved performance of nuclear plants in the United States. This means that operators can focus more on achieving operational efficiencies and regulators can focus more on issues of safety significance. It is important to note that safety is being maintained and, in fact enhanced, as these benefits of regulatory reform are being realized. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission — and this Subcommittee — can claim a number of successes in their efforts to improve the nuclear regulatory environment. These include successful implementation of the NRC Reactor Oversight Process, the timely extension of operating licenses at Calvert Cliffs and Oconee, the establishment of a one-step licensing process for advanced reactors, the streamlining of the license transfer process, and the increased efficiency in processing licensing actions.
It’s certainly possible that the industry left some desirable reforms undone, but it seems relevant to me that the Nuclear Energy Institute — the trade association for the nuclear energy industry and a fervent supporter of all these government assistance programs — does not complain that they’re being unfairly hammered by costly red-tape.
For the most part, however, the push-back against the arguments I offered last week has little to do with this. It has to do with bias. According to a post by Rod Adams over at “Atomic Insights Blog,” I am guilty of ignoring subsidies doled-out to nuclear’s biggest competitor — natural gas — and because Cato gets money from Koch Industries, it’s clear that my convenient neglect of that matter is part of a corporate-funded attack on nuclear power. Indeed, Mr. Adams claims that he has unearthed a “smoking gun” with this observation.
Normally, I would ignore attacks like this. This particular post, however, offers the proverbial “teachable moment” that should not be allowed to go to waste.
Sick of ‘Cyber’
NPR is running a series of stories on “cybersecurity,” prompting some to express their exasperation with cybertouting of cyberthreats.
Some of my cyberefforts on that cyberscore are cyberhere, cyberhere, and cyberhere. CyberBen CyberFriedman has written cyberthis and cyberthis.
Sick of “cyber” yet? Good.
Securing computers, networks, and data is important. But there’s no such thing as cyberterrorism, “cyberwar” is what might occur in computing and communications during an actual war, and the bulk of the work is, as Bruce Schneier puts it, boring:
Securing our networks doesn’t require some secret advanced NSA technology. It’s the boring network security administration stuff we already know how to do: keep your patches up to date, install good anti-malware software, correctly configure your firewalls and intrusion-detection systems, monitor your networks.
A Government of Laws, Not Men
In the government of this commonwealth… the executive shall never exercise the legislative [or] judicial powers… to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men. — The Constitution of Massachusetts, 1780, drafted by John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Bowdoin
In contrast, consider today’s news:
The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday.
Americans, this is what arbitrary government looks like. As a simple matter of fact, even George III was never this arbitrary. Even he didn’t make individual colonists’ lives depend merely on an act of his own will.
Indeed, if I wanted a perfect example of what a government of men, not laws, looked like, I could just glance at the newspapers today and see what our government is doing right at this moment.
Do not respond that this power will only be used wisely and sparingly. Doing so just admits my basic point, namely that we now depend purely on the wisdom and restraint of our individual leaders. We depend on their wisdom and restraint — to check their own worst impulses. All power, both for and against, is contained in one individual. No legal processes, and no guarantees, separate us from them. And the stakes are life or death.
Likewise, do not respond that this power will only be used against very bad people. Again, doing so just admits that we now depend on an unreviewable judgment of character, not on a legal system with formal procedures and safeguards. Even in the dark days of the Cold War — even during the Revolution itself — we never ceded so much power to so few.
To those who think our leaders’ prudence is a sufficient check on their own power, consider this. Let’s both grant that Barack Obama is basically a decent, well-meaning guy (apart from the fact that a decent, well-meaning guy would never want a power like this). If he’s a decent guy, then perhaps he’ll use his newly claimed power wisely, insofar as such an atrocious power can be used wisely. But on the other hand, if I were truly evil, and if I wanted to assassinate with impunity all the people I hated… Suddenly now I’d be very interested in running for president.
Glenn Greenwald has a lot more on the issue, including evidence that Barack Obama was apparently against this power… before he was for it.
Ultra-Rich Leftists Want to Atone for their Guilt by Paying Higher Taxes…And They Want to Impose their Neurotic Views on the Rest of Us
A Washington Post columnist reports on a group of limousine liberals who are lobbying to pay more taxes. Of course, there’s no law that prevents them from writing big checks to the government and voluntarily paying more, so what they’re really lobbying for is higher taxes on the vast majority of investors and entrepreneurs who don’t want more of their income confiscated by the clowns in Washington and squandered on corrupt and inefficient programs:
A group of liberals got together Tuesday and proved that they, too, can have a tax rebellion. But theirs is a little bit different: They want to pay more taxes. “I’m in favor of higher taxes on people like me,” declared Eric Schoenberg, who is sitting on an investment banking fortune. He complained about “my absurdly low tax rates.” “We’re calling on other wealthy taxpayers to join us,” said paper-mill heir Mike Lapham, “to send the message to Congress and President Obama that it’s time to roll back the tax cuts on upper-income taxpayers.” …They are among 50 families with net assets of more than $1 million to take a “tax fairness” pledge — donating the amount they saved from Bush tax cuts to organizations fighting for the repeal of the Bush tax cuts. According to a study by Spectrem Group, 7.8 million households in the United States have assets of more than $1 million — so that leaves 7,799,950 millionaire households yet to take the pledge. …Of course, if millionaires really want to pay higher taxes, there’s nothing stopping them. The Treasury Department Web site even accepts contributions by credit card to pay the public debt. …His donation will, however, ease the sense of guilt that comes with great wealth, described poignantly by the millionaires: “In 1865, my great-great-grandfather Samuel Pruyn founded a paper mill on the banks of the Hudson River in Glens Falls, New York,” Lapham explained. Judy Pigott, an industrial heiress on the call, added her wish that her income, “mostly unearned income, be taxed at a rate that returns to the common good that I have received by a privilege.” Confessed Hollender, who now runs the Seventh Generation natural products company: “I grew up in Manhattan on Park Avenue in a 10-room apartment.”
P.S. It’s also rather revealing that Massachusetts had (and maybe still has) a portion of the state tax form allowing people to pay extra tax, yet very rich statists like John Kerry decided not to pay that tax while urging higher taxes for mere peasants like you and me.
P.P.S. I debated one of these guilt-ridden, silver-spoon, trust-fund rich people on CNN last year and never got an answer when I asked him why he wanted to pull up the ladder of opportunity for the rest of us who would like to become rich some day
Consumers in the Driver’s Seat—Oh, the Humanity!
Yesterday the D.C. Circuit ruled that Congress hadn’t given the Federal Communications Commission power to regulate the Internet and the FCC couldn’t bootstrap that power from other authority. It was a rare but welcome affirmation that the rule of law might actually pertain in the regulatory area.
But the Open Internet Coalition put out a release containing threat exaggeration to make Dick Cheney blush:
“Today’s DC Circuit decision . . . creates a dangerous situation, one where the health and openness of broadband Internet is being held hostage by the behavior of the major telco and cable providers.”
That’s right. It’s a hostage-taking when consumers and businesses—and not government—hammer out the terms and conditions of Internet access. Inferentially, the organization representing Google, Facebook, eBay, and Twitter believes that Internet users are too stupid and supine to choose the Internet service they want.
What these content companies are really after, of course, is government support in their tug-of-war with the companies that transport Internet content. It’s hard to know which produces the value of the Internet and which should gain the lion’s share of the rewards. Let the market—not lobbying—decide what reward content and transport deserve for their roles in the Internet ecosystem.
As I said of the Open Internet Coalition’s membership on a saltier, but still relentlessly charming, day: “[T]hese companies are losing their way. The leadership of these companies should fire their government relations staffs, disband their contrived advocacy organization, and get back to innovating and competing.”
Can We Be Both Up from Slavery and on the Road to Serfdom?
At Reason.com I argue that libertarians are wrong to look back at some point in the past for a golden age of liberty, and especially wrong to write paeans to the gloriously free 19th century without mentioning the little matter of 19 percent of Americans being held in chains.
For many libertarians, “the road to serfdom” is not just the title of a great book but also the window through which they see the world. We’re losing our freedom, year after year, they think….
Has there ever been a golden age of liberty? No, and there never will be. There will always be people who want to live their lives in peace, and there will always be people who want to exploit them or impose their own ideas on others. If we look at the long term—from a past that includes despotism, feudalism, absolutism, fascism, and communism—we’re clearly better off. When we look at our own country’s history—contrasting 2010 with 1776 or 1910 or 1950 or whatever—the story is less clear. We suffer under a lot of regulations and restrictions that our ancestors didn’t face.
But in 1776 black Americans were held in chattel slavery, and married women had no legal existence except as agents of their husbands. In 1910 and even 1950, blacks still suffered under the legal bonds of Jim Crow—and we all faced confiscatory tax rates throughout the postwar period.
I note that “I am particularly struck by libertarians and conservatives who celebrate the freedom of early America, and deplore our decline from those halcyon days, without bothering to mention the existence of slavery,” and I name a couple of examples. When we talk about how free Americans were in the 19th century, we should remember that many millions of Americans look back on those years and say
“My ancestors didn’t have the right to worship in their own way. My ancestors didn’t have the right to keep and bear arms. My ancestors didn’t have the protection of centuries-old legal procedures. My ancestors sure as heck didn’t have the right to keep what they produced, or to pursue an occupation of their choice, or to enter into mutually beneficial trades. In fact, my ancestors didn’t even have the minimal right of ‘the absence of physical constraint.’”
Postscript: In late-breaking news after the Reason article was written, Gov. Robert McDonnell (R-VA) has issued a proclamation declaring April “Confederate History Month.” As politicians often do with news they’re not really publicizing, McDonnell posted the proclamation on his website Friday, but no one noticed until Tuesday. The proclamation urges Virginians to “understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War” but does not mention slavery. Virginia’s last Republican governor, in issuing a proclamation remembering the Civil War, had at least acknowledged reality: ”The practice of slavery was an affront to man’s natural dignity, deprived African-Americans of their God given inalienable rights, degraded the human spirit and is abhorred and condemned by Virginians . . . Had there been no slavery, there would have been no war.” Amazingly, he was criticized for that simple and obvious statement, as was I when I quoted it a few years back.
Unions and State Government Management
State and local governments that have high levels of unionization have a harder time efficiently managing their finances and other aspects of their operations. At least, that’s my argument. The other day, I showed that states with higher levels of debt had higher levels of unionization. The statistical correlation was very strong.
Today, let’s look at the quality of state management, as measured by a major report by the Pew Center on the States. The Pew report gave letter grades to the 50 state governments for management of finances, employees, infrastructure, and information. Pew also provided an overall state score.
I’ve converted the Pew overall state government management scores to numbers from 1 to 10 and plotted them against state unionization rates (“10″ is the best management score). The chart below shows that as the share of a state workforce that is unionized grows, the overall quality of state management falls, as measure by the Pew scores. The chart shows the raw data in blue dots and the statistically fitted line in pink.
The bottom line: public-sector unionization is not a good idea, as it apparently leads to lower-quality government management and to higher debt levels. As such, I’ve argued that collective bargaining in state and local government workforces should be banned.
(Details: R-square at 0.12 indicates that unionization explains only a small share of management quality, but the F statistic at 6.3 and the t-stat on the management variable of -2.5 indicate that the regression is quite strongly statistically significant. Note that the unionization variable is the union share in state and local governments, but the Pew data regards only the states. Thus, I’m assuming that my unionization variable is a reasonable proxy for state-level unionization. Thanks for data help from Amy Mandler )
On Net Neutrality Regulation: Suppose Free Press Called a Crisis and Nobody Noticed?…
In the wake of today’s ruling in the D.C. Circuit that the FCC had exceeded its authority in attempting to regulate access to the Internet, I did a number of radio interviews and a radio debate with Derek Turner of Free Press, a leading advocate of Internet regulation.
The debate was a brief, fair exchange of views. I was struck, though, to hear Turner refer to the situation as a “crisis.” Sure enough, in a Free Press release, Turner says three times that the ruling creates a “crisis.”
Recall that in 2007 Comcast degraded the service it provided to a tiny group of customers using a bandwidth-hogging protocol called BitTorrent. Recall also that before the FCC acted, Comcast had stopped doing this, relenting to customer complaints, negative attention in news stories, and such.
In the wake of the D.C. Circuit ruling and the crisis it has created, Internet users can expect the following changes to their Internet service: None.
Wow. With crises like these, who needs tranquility?
“As a result of this decision, the FCC has virtually no power to stop Comcast from blocking Web sites,” the release intones.
That would be worrisome, though still not quite a crisis—except that Comcast would be undercutting its own business by doing that. Did you know also that no federal regulation bars people from burning their furniture in the backyard? That’s the same kind of problem.
As Tim Lee points out in his paper, “The Durable Internet,” consumer pressures are likely in almost all cases to rein in undesirable ISP practices. Computer scientist Lee presents examples of how ownership of communications platforms does not imply control. If an ISP persists in maintaining a harmful practice contrary to consumer demand—and consumers can’t express their desires by switching to another service—we can talk then. The focus should be on increasing competition by freeing up spectrum and removing regulatory barriers.
In the meantime, this “crisis” has me slightly drowsy and eager to go outside and enjoy the spring sunshine.
Nuclear Posture Review Signals Business as Usual
On balance, the Obama administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (PDF) signals more continuity than change. The review wisely clarifies the limited but essential role that nuclear weapons play in safeguarding U.S. national security through deterrence. Unfortunately, it fails to set the stage for dramatic and necessary changes to a bloated and outdated force structure because it reaffirms the U.S. commitment to other countries that imposes a huge burden on our military and on U.S. taxpayers.
The document anticipates that conventional weapons — namely a forward U.S. troop presence and ballistic missile defenses — will take on a greater share of the deterrence burden as the importance of nuclear weapons recede. This is a costly proposition at a time when U.S. military spending is already at a post-World War II high.
Stronger leadership is essential to reining in the entire nuclear weapons enterprise — the warheads and delivery platforms, as well as the laboratories and bureaucracies that support them. A more emphatic “no first use” policy would have assisted in this endeavor. The Obama administration chose instead to split the difference between conservatives who favor an expanded role for nuclear weapons and liberals who anticipate their complete elimination.
The NPR’s middle ground stance on first use has elicited most of the media’s attention, but the role that the U.S. military plays around the world — a role highlighted by the NPR’s repeated reassurances that our allies and partners will be covered by the U.S. security umbrella — deserves even greater scrutiny. Two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States continues to carry the burden for security in Europe and East Asia. The costs of this burden are growing, but the NPR merely sets the stage for the continuation of this worrisome trend.
The FCC Doesn’t Have Authority to Regulate the Internet–and Shouldn’t
In the fall of 2007, word emerged that Comcast had degraded the Internet traffic of some customers, whose use of a protocol called BitTorrent interfered with other Comcast customers’ Internet access.
Comcast handled it badly, and sites like TechLiberationFront covered the “Comcast Kerfuffle” extensively. Consumers prefer unfiltered access to the Internet.
By springtime, Comcast had sorted things out and made a deal with BitTorrent to develop a neutral traffic-management protocol.
Four months later, the FCC weighed in, finding that Comcast had acted badly and telling Comcast not to do that again. Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit concluded that the FCC exceeded its authority and reversed the FCC’s order against Comcast.
The court’s decision marks another turning point in the debate over whether the federal government should regulate Internet access services. What’s entertaining about it is that the problem was solved two years ago by market processes—sophisticated Internet users, a watchdog press, advocacy groups, and interested consumers communicating with one another over the Internet.
The next step will be for advocates to run to Congress, asking it to give the FCC authority to fix the problems of two years ago. But slow-moving, technologically unsophisticated bureaucrats do not know better than consumers and technologists how to run the Internet. The FCC’s “net neutrality” hopes are nothing more than public utility regulation for broadband. If they get that authority, your online experience will be a little more like dealing with the water company or the electric company and a little less like using the Internet.
As I’ve noted before, Tim Lee’s is the definitive paper. The Internet is far more durable than regulators and advocates imagine. And regulators are far less capable of neutrally arbitrating what’s in the public interest than most people realize.
The FCC doesn’t have authority to regulate the Internet. Congress and the president shouldn’t give it that authority.
What’s a Libertarian?
That’s the question that John Stossel will be asking Thursday night to a motley collection of guests, including P. J. O’Rourke, Andrew Napolitano, Jeffrey Miron, and me. Tune in the Fox Business Network at 8:00 p.m. ET.
It repeats many times, as noted here, but you know, it’s like the NCAA championship: you don’t want to watch the repeat on ESPN Classic, you want to watch it live with everyone else for the collective experience. So be there at 8:00 Thursday.
Or of course you could just read Libertarianism: A Primer and The Libertarian Reader.
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