Real life and the minimum wage

I've worked for minimum wage; if I remember right, it was $3.35/hour at the time. I remember wishing that my wages were higher, and grumbling about my paychecks with my buddies as we spent our take on pizza and cokes.

Would my situation have been improved if the minimum wage had been magically raised to, say, $7.00/hour while I was working that first job?

I doubt it -- I doubted it even then. I may have been a resentful teenager, but I wasn't a complete economic illiterate. Even as I grumbled to my friends, I strongly suspected that, given my limited skills and maturity, I was barely worth what I was making. Hike the minimum wage much above where it was, and my paycheck wouldn't grow -- it would disappear as my responsibilities were shifted to people who could actually perform at that pay level.

So it's with interest that I read the account of businessman Warren Meyer -- a fellow who runs private campgrounds and public campground under contract -- as he details his experience with and response to minimum wage laws. As he describes it, his company's survival isn't threatened by mandated hikes in wages. But the number of people the company employs and who it employs does change dramatically when government tries to set a minimum price for labor. That's because, when minimum wages are raised, his company has options; it can:

1. simply refuse to engage in certain projects (therefore hiring nobody)
   
   
2. hire more-productive employees (excluding whole classes of potential labor) or outsource to contractors who hire more-productive employees
   
   
3. replace workers with automation
   
   
4. raise the cost of its offerings to the public.
   

For example:

Anyway, on this particular concession we have to pay our living-on-site workers based on the SCA. This means, for example, that someone who sits in a parking lot booth collecting parking fees must be paid something like $12.50 an hour, which translates to a bit over $15.60 when you factor in FICA, SUI and workers comp. Over 2000 hours a year that is $31,200 a year.

A fully automated fee collection machine (which actually does more than the attendent, since it takes credit and debit cards as well as makes change for cash) costs $23,000. Plus, the machine never will sue over wrongful termination, never will discriminate against or sexually harass a customer, never will steal, and never will fail to show up for work.

What would you do? I would prefer to have the person there, and if we put the machine in I will still probably staff the booth on busy summer weekends to help customers out, but over 5 years the machine may save us over $100,000.

Economists and policy makers have long made the case against mandated minimum wages as job killers, but such arguments are in dry language and seem abstract when compared to the promise of a fatter paycheck at the end of the week. Meyer's anecdotes put a little flesh on the bones of the argument against minimum wages.

By the way, when you check out Meyer's piece, don't miss the comments. Some are well thought out, but the pro-minimum bits are doozies. In particular, there's the poster who wants to shut down all businesses that pay less than $10/hour because such low pay "is an abuse."

I guess it's better to have your pride -- and your unemployment.

Dibor Roberts update

If Dibor Roberts or any of her supporters is reading this blog, please contact me at jd(at)tuccille.com. I've been approached by a civil right attorney interested in discussing the possibility of taking the Roberts case on a pro bono basis. I'll be happy to put you in touch.

Totally unscientific candidate visibility index

So, based on the visibility of their campaigns as I drive around running errands, how are the various contenders for the powers of the U.S. presidency doing in my area?

Over the past many months of electioneering, only three candidates have had any visibility at all, ranked below in diminishing order of in-your-faceness:

Ron Paul

An abundance of yard signs that pop up with the surprising regularity of the paperboy in Better off Dead. Turn a corner, and there's another one; turn another corner and ... Oh my God! They're everywhere!

Paul's support is also visible on bumper stickers, and in the message "Go Ron Paul!" soaped on the rear window of one guy's truck.

Mitt Romney

Several (OK, two) yard signs along the road.

Barack Obama

One bumper sticker seen on a car outside Mount Hope, a natural foods store in Cottonwood.

Winners: John McCain and Hillary Clinton.

Yeah, that's right. Nobody really likes McNasty enough to put his name on their bumper or in their front yard, but they'll still go through the motions of voting for him. The Arizona State University's Cronkite/Eight poll has McCain at 41% support, well ahead of Romney's 18% and Paul's anemic 2%.

Likewise, I have yet to meet anybody truly enthusiastic about Hillary, but she still polls in this state at 45% -- almost double Obama's 24%.

Unfortunately, visibility measures passion, but winning isn't about passion; it's just about rousing enough people to detour to the polling station to check your name after stopping by the diner for chorizo and eggs. They may do so grudgingly and without any enthusiasm to speak of, but if they do it at all, you nab the big prize.

Who says we shouldn't require warrants for wiretaps?

In the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Cato Institute staffer and supposed libertarian Roger Pilon made the case for granting President Bush's request for essentially unlimited surveillance power free of any significant oversight.

Wait. That can't be right.

Crap -- it is. Read Pilon's own words:

Today the Senate takes up a bipartisan surveillance authorization measure that's already passed the Intelligence Committee. The clock is ticking. This Friday a temporary law called the Protect America Act will expire. If Congress does not act before then, the president's statutory power to prevent terrorist attacks will be seriously compromised.

This dangerous situation should never have arisen. From the beginning, presidents have exercised their Article II executive power to gather foreign intelligence — in war and peace alike, without congressional or judicial intrusion. As our principal agent in foreign affairs, the president is constitutionally bound to protect the nation. For that, intelligence is essential.

The rest of the column lays out the case for why Congress and the judiciary should butt out and leave the executive branch to the serious business of eavesdropping on people's phone calls -- at least, when the words "foreign intelligence" can be invoked. It's a breathtakingly imperial argument of the sort I expect to see coming from the pen of an AEI staffer or a Weekly Standard scribe -- not somebody who heads up constitutional studies for Cato.

To give Cato its due, the whole place hasn't gone blood-and-soil on us. On Cato's blog yesterday, Timothy Lee, explicitly rebutting Pilon, argues that Congress should definitely provide for judicial oversight of surveillance operations, if only to make sure that the president doesn't engage in wholesale civil rights violations under the screen of "foreign intelligence":

Roger’s position appears to be that neither the courts nor Congress may place any restrictions on domestic surveillance activities that the president declares to be related to foreign intelligence gathering. But that’s not good enough. Without judicial oversight, there is no way to know if the executive branch is properly limiting its activities to spies and terrorists, or if they’ve begun to invade the privacy of petty criminals or even law-abiding individuals. This is no hypothetical scenario. The FBI conducted extensive surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights and anti-war leaders in the 1960s and 1970s, which was one of the reasons Congress enacted new safeguards in the first place.

Lee didn't have to dig too deeply to uncover abuses committed by the executive branch in the past; surely Pilon is just as aware of why Congress imposed judicial oversight on eavesdropping operations to begin with. Yet, in the Journal column, Pilon makes it sound as if Congress was just being spiteful by requiring that Fourth Amendment protections apply to electronic searches as well as to physical pawing through people's sock drawers.

If Roger Pilon is going to abandon the cause of liberty, can't he come up with a better argument to make his case?

Can I get one?

A marijuana-dispensing vending machine, that is. They're the hot new thing in California.

Now, that's cool

Arlo Guthrie, son of Woody and famed singer of "Alice's Restaurant," has endorsed Ron Paul for president. If you've heard the anti-war, anti-draft song, or seen the movie, Guthrie's endorsement comes as no great surprise.

Watch Guthrie perform "Alice's Restaurant" here.

Lessons for the law-abiding from Greece

Lest night's episode of the excellent Travel Channel show, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, brought the boozing, snarky celebrity chef to Greece for overindulgence in local cuisine, booze, music, dance and firearms. Firearms? Yes, not only did Bourdain hunt quail with a shotgun, but an outdoor raki-fueled picnic on Crete featured one of the participants firing his pistol in the air as part of the raucous festivities.

But Greece is supposed to have strict gun-control laws. In fact, Greece does have strict gun-control laws. Shotguns are relatively easy to come by for hunting, but handguns and even rifles are tightly restricted. According to an online posting by a Greek gun owner:

There are generally two ways that one can legally get a gun in Greece.

One is, if your life is in danger, due to your job, social status or functionality, or if you have some good friends in the right places. In that case, you can easily obtain, what is known as a Concealed Self-Protection Carrying Permit (let's call it CSCP, for short). This permit allows you to have only one gun and a very limited amount of cartridges (30 or usually less). Now, if you are allowed to have 30 rounds, you can only fire, let's say half of them for practice. How can a person be trusted to protect his own life with so little practice is of course beyond my comprehension.

The second reason that entitles you to own a firearm, is to be an athlete in a shooting sport. This permit allows you to have more than one guns (usually a 0.22 LR, a 0.32 or 0.38 or 9mm, etc) in order to be able to participate in the corresponding shooting matches. In order to get such a permit, you must be a member of an athletic shooting club for several months, and to have participated in several matches (using either your friend's guns or your clubs guns, if they have any). The club is responsible for supplying you with cartridges you need for your practice sessions and your participation in shooting matches. Of course, this permit does not allow you to carry your gun(s) on yourself. You are only allowed to transport you guns in bags or suitcases to and from the shooting range. For those interested to know I have this kind of permit.

It's unlikely that the fellow on No Reservations was expending his limited legal allotment of ammo for the edification of Bourdain and company, so chances are that at least his ammunition was illegally owned, and it's a fair bet that the gun itself wasn't one familiar to the authorities. Nevertheless, he felt perfectly comfortable popping off rounds in front of a TV crew.

Why? Well, the answer may be found in another part of that Greek gun owner's post:

...there are some areas in Greece, like Crete and Mani, where guns are not that restricted. That does not come from these areas having different legislation that the rest of the country. It is more of a customary habit than anything else, which however is endorsed by some politicians.

OK -- so the festive-minded gunman was probably taking advantage of Crete's traditional nudge-and-wink attitude toward the country's gun laws.

In fact, as of 2005, the Greek government estimated that the country's population of 11 million harbored 1.5 million illegal firearms.

Actually, that's not all that surprising. Americans with an eye toward "reforming" the way things are done in the United States are fond of pointing toward tighter gun control laws in the UK, higher taxes in France or hate-speech laws elsewhere. But while touting the alleged virtues of the rules imposed by other governments, Americans with statute-envy miss an important point: The people of the United States are a lot more likely to actually obey the deficient laws to which they are subject than the citizens of many other countries are to even notice the oh-so enlightened legislation that they enjoy. Greece may have much tighter gun control laws than the U.S., but the descendants of Plato and Socrates clearly take those laws with a very large grain of salt -- and a case of 9mm ammunition.

In many countries, passing laws often seems to be more an exercise in letting eager young parliamentarians vent their elitist frustrations (and satisfy the letter of various international treaties) than an actual effort to change the way life is lived by the majority of people. The laws get passed and the enforcers do their best to make folks obey, but compliance ... well, compliance is another matter.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a Flemish law professor in the early 1990s that somehow drifted into a discussion of the apparent willingness of Europeans to pay much higher taxes than Americans. Was it because Europeans really wanted a higher level of services and were willing to pay accordingly?

The professor laughed and told us that he couldn't speak for all Europeans, but Belgians weren't any more eager to pay than Americans -- they just thought they were getting something for nothing. Belgians, he said, all thought they were the best tax evaders in the world. They weren't entirely right about that -- they paid more than they anticipated -- but they held back tax money at a rate undreamed of by Americans.

Taxes are a good place to start when comparing the willingness of different peoples to submit to the law, since they're the easiest laws for which to quantify compliance. Oddly enough, even though compliance should be relatively easy to calculate, official figures are hard to com by. But according to the latest figures, Americans have a roughly 84% rate of compliance with the federal income tax. By contrast, orderly, reputedly law-abiding Switzerland had an estimated tax-compliance rate of about 78% as of 1995 (figures here in PDF format). That's Switzerland, which could be expected to be a model of compliance among Western European countries. (As for that professor's beloved Belgium ... Time says "tax evasion is a national sport" in the country.)

America's myth of rugged individualism runs up against its surprisingly law-abiding nature as compared to the countries from which its citizens originally came.

Of course, America's law-abiding nature evolved in a climate of relatively light-handed governance and stable institutions. While Europeans groaned under authoritarian monarchs, totalitarian regimes and unrestrained majorities, the United States enjoyed a comparatively hands-off approach. Since most laws made sense or, at least, weren't terribly objectionable, it was easy to obey them and assume that the neighbors should do the same.

Not that Americans have been sheep. When something particularly nasty, like Prohibition, came around, non-compliance became, pace Belgium, a national sport.

But American government is no longer so light-handed. Rules proliferate like weeds -- smoking bans, light-bulb prohibitions ... and, of course, gun laws and higher taxes. Laws no longer seem so easily tolerated as they once were. When laws become too numerous, intrusive and overall objectionable, it's unlikely that they'll long command the respect and obedience of the people subject to them.

I'll lay odds that, before too long, the United States will soon be a place where breaking the law in front of a TV camera seems as reasonable to the average person as it was to Anthony Bourdain's Greek host.

The next step in campaign finance 'reform'?

New Zealand has a new law -- the Electoral Finance Act -- regulating political speech during campaign season. According to the New Zealand Herald:

Non-political "third parties" and all individuals are subject to controls for almost the entire year before an election.

Citizens must now register with the state - through the Electoral Commission - if they want to spend $12,000 or more on advertising a cause that might influence voters, even if their message does not name a party or candidate.

The "regulated period" law prevents individuals and groups spending more than $120,000.

Political parties will be allowed to spend 20 times as much as that to promote their messages and will be able to use taxpayers' money from their parliamentary budgets to communicate with voters well beyond that limit.

Political parties will retain taxpayer-funded broadcasting rights worth millions.

Blogs are exempted -- but not regular Websites. Can't see the difference? Neither can many Kiwis, but that didn't protect 21-year-old Andrew Moore, who was forced to take down his anti-Labour Party Website under threat from the Electoral Commission. The site had cost less than NZ$100 to set up, but could have drawn a NZ$10,000 fine if he didn't publish his home address -- a disclosure he wasn't prepared to make in the heated environment of a political campaign.

Muzzling personal Websites that give voice to political opinions? The U.S. hasn't gone there yet, but New Zealand offers a glimpse of just what the "reformers" have in store for us.

Obama the new JFK? Let's hope not

In the New York Times, Camelot spawn Caroline Kennedy tells us that she's supporting the senator from Illinois for the Democratic presidential nomination because he reminds her of her father, President John F. Kennedy.

OVER the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This sense is even more profound today. That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.

My reasons are patriotic, political and personal, and the three are intertwined. All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. And the generation he inspired has passed that spirit on to its children. I meet young people who were born long after John F. Kennedy was president, yet who ask me how to live out his ideals.

Far be it from be to question Caroline Kennedy's comparison of Barack Obama to her late father. If she says "for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be" the sort of inspirational president her father was, I believe her. So Senator Obama is JFK redux. Good for him.

But bad for us. The very argument that Ms. Kennedy uses to argue on behalf of Sen. Obama is a good reason to recoil from her endorsement in revulsion.

Sometimes it takes a while to recognize that someone has a special ability to get us to believe in ourselves, to tie that belief to our highest ideals and imagine that together we can do great things. In those rare moments, when such a person comes along, we need to put aside our plans and reach for what we know is possible.

"[T]ogether we can do great things"? "[P]ut aside our plans and reach for what we know is possible"? Gag.

Look, political office is a messy business. It's entire purpose is to manage the use of coercion to achieve goals favored by those in power and their supporters. To attempt to achieve something -- anything -- through political power is to endorse the idea that people should be threatened with fines, imprisonment and even death if they refuse to comply. Imagine going shopping with a gun instead of a debit card and you have the fundamental truth of any political agenda.

Now, there may be a limited place for the use of coercion. I don't have a real problem with coercing rapists, muggers and murderers into seeking new career paths. But pot smokers? People who renovate their homes without a permit? Gamblers? Folks who hire people who enter the country without government permission? Tell me how sticking guns in their faces and (sometimes) pulling the trigger is a morally upright thing to do. Take your time; I'm really interested in hearing your argument.

Maybe (unlikely) you'll convince me that the widespread use of coercion is a necessary thing, however unsavory. But that won't make coercive power and the people who seek it "inspirational"; it'll make coercion a necessary evil to be tentatively entrusted to the least enthusiastic seekers of power we can find.

Frankly, to admit to being "inspired" by politicians is a lot like confessing that your nipples get hard when you watch a mugger kick a victim bloody in the gutter. It may be the case, but it's not really something you should be sharing with anybody other than your shrink.

Arizona starts to see nativist fallout

Barron's magazine predicted that Arizona's move to impose tough sanctions on employers who hire illegal immigrants would result in an "Arizona apocalypse," and while it's too early to know if that dire forecast will come to pass, something is certainly in the works. Facing a ten-day suspension of their business licenses after a first offense, and a permanent revocation of licenses after a second transgression, companies are laying workers off, reassessing their ability to do business and even moving out of state.

Reports Agence France-Presse:

A crew leader who worked for Rick Robinson's Phoenix landscaping company left the state because his wife is an illegal worker. The worker was scared his wife would be deported.

"I've talked to other companies who have said they can't find anybody," Robinson said. "I've heard they're going to Utah or Texas or New Mexico because they don't have a law like this. We and other landscape companies are uncertain as to how far-reaching it will be. People don't know what they can and can't do. The whole thing is confusing, gross, and unfair."

David Jones, head of the Arizona Contractors Association, said he knows of three construction companies which have laid off 30, 40, and 70 employees respectively since the beginning of the year.

Unable to find jobs, or fearful that their loved ones will be caught and deported, illegal immigrants and their legal friends and relatives are fleeing the state in what the press has dubbed "Hispanic panic." In a state where illegals make up better than 10% of the workforce, the exodus promises to have a major impact. The vacancy rate in Tucson-area apartment complexes favored by illegal immigrants has jumped dramatically since the law went into effect. According to the Arizona Daily Star:

The vacancy rate on Tucson's South Side jumped to 11.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007, up from 7.1 percent a year earlier, according to Phoenix-based RealData Inc., a real estate research and consulting firm.

That area of the city has more than twice the rate of foreign-born residents than the city as a whole, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

On the Southeast Side, 10.7 percent of apartments were empty, up from 5.9 percent a year before. That part of the city has a lower percentage of foreign-born residents.

As a whole, the metro area vacancy rate grew 1 percentage point to 8.3 percent, according to RealData.

Of course, advocates of the sanctions law will say that this is exactly the result they were hoping for; they want Hispanics to flee the state (usually, they'll claim that they just want the illegal ones to leave). But with workers leaving Arizona, taking their rent money, mortgage payments and shopping dollars with them, and with state employers facing rising labor costs -- if they can even find workers -- the economy is likely to take a major hit. In fact, the University of Arizona predicts a $29 billion economic loss if illegal workers are successfully purged from the state (full report here in PDF).

Of course, the law won't be universally successful. Faced with a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't choice, many businesses will just take their chances with illegal workers, and many will slip under the radar. At least one immigration expert -- Marc Rosenblum of the University of New Orleans -- predicts major growth in the underground economy, with more workers than ever before getting paid off the books.

Black markets have dulled the economic effects of stupid policies in the past, and will likely do so this time around too. But off-the-books workers will have less security and less money than they would if allowed to function in the official economy, and they'll contribute less than they would otherwise. That's especially true since workers have the option of going where they're welcome -- already there are reports that Mexicans intent on seeking work in the U.S. are bypassing the increasingly unfriendly border states. Why take an uncertain cash job in unwelcoming Arizona when you can get a job with benefits in Oregon or Virginia?

The real losers will be the people of Arizona -- the nativists tightening the screws, the workers and employers getting the shaft and the disinterested rest who find making a living increasingly treated as a privilege to be withdrawn at the whim of government officials.

Attacked by a cop on a dark road

On the night of July 29, 2007, Dibor Roberts, a Senegalese-born American citizen living in Cottonwood, Arizona, was driving home from her job as a nurse's aide at an assisted living center located in the Village of Oak Creek, an unincorporated community near Sedona. Along Beaverhead Flat Road, an unlit, unpopulated route through the desert, she suddenly saw flashing lights in her rearview mirror. Fearful of stopping on a deserted stretch of pavement, especially in light of reports she'd heard of criminals impersonating police, she decided to proceed to a populated area before stopping the car, the nearest such area being Cornville, an unincorporated settlement along the road to Cottonwood. She slowed her car to acknowledge the flashing lights and continued to drive. Her decision wasn't especially unusual -- in fact, it's recommended by some police departments. The Goodyear, Arizona, Police Department offers the following advice on its Website:

If you are in doubt about the vehicle with flashing red and blue emergency lights that is attempting to stop you, there are several things you can do:

If in an isolated area, continue to a public place that is well lighted. While doing this, obey all traffic laws and do not speed up to get there.

If you have a cellular phone, and can use it safely, call the police and let them know that an unmarked vehicle is attempting to stop you.

On Cornville Road, well before the populated area, Sheriff's Sergeant Jeff Newnum apparently tired of waiting for Roberts to reach a settled area. While he was, in fact, a police officer, he now proceeded to justify every fear an American may have about rogue cops. He raced his cruiser in front of Roberts's car, forcing her off the road. He then smashed her driver's-side window with his baton and grabbed a cellphone she was using to check his identity. Accounts vary at this point. While police deny it, the press has reported that Newnum dragged Roberts from her vehicle, threw her to the ground, and handcuffed her while driving his knee into her back.

All of this because she was going 15 miles over the speed limit on a deserted rural road.

Roberts's treatment has been, unsurprisingly, controversial in Arizona's Verde Valley. In a sparsely settled area not known for protests of any kind, 30 supporters showed up at her December 31, 2007 scheduling conference in Judge Janis Sterling's courtroom in Prescott, the county seat. This was the second such hearing, since all charges against Roberts had previously been dropped on November 2, 2007.

Roberts faces two felonies charges: unlawful flight from a law officer and resisting arrest. Resisting arrest? Well, Sergeant Newnum apparently injured himself while breaking into Roberts's car.

But Sergeant Newnum doesn't stand alone. Yavapai County Sheriff Steve Waugh may be many things, but disloyal to his troops isn't one of them. Amidst mounting protests and public outrage, Waugh held a press conference on January 15 to defend his hot-headed officer's abuse of a scared woman on a lonely road. He voiced his full support for Newnum, faulting the sergeant only for cutting off Roberts to force her to the side of the road. Waugh also implied that Roberts was chemically impaired -- the first time such an allegation has surfaced long months after she was taken into custody, and one that has never surfaced in the form of formal charges.

In other words, smashing Roberts's car window and dragging her out of a vehicle because he was impatient is A-OK by the good sheriff.

Dibor Roberts now faces felony convictions and prison time all because she was scared by an unexpected confrontation on a dark and deserted road. As it turned out, she had more reason to be afraid than she knew.

Sergeant Newnum is still roaming the roads of Yavapai County, comfortable in the knowledge that he can abuse innocent people and still enjoy the support of Sheriff Steve Waugh.

And the people of Yavapai County? Well, we're all well-advised to approach any encounter with a Sheriff's deputy with the idea that we'll have to fight in self-defense. Sometimes, vicious thugs don't impersonate police officers -- they are police officers.

Sheriff Steve Waugh can be reached at:

email: web.sheriff@co.yavapai.az.us
phone: (928) 771-3260

Bush closer to snooping approval

This from the Wall Street Journal:

The Senate rejected an attempt by a number of Democrats to strip from surveillance legislation a provision that would bar lawsuits against phone companies alleged to have helped the government's warrantless spying, handing President Bush a small initial victory.

Congress seems poised to renew the extraordinary wiretapping powers allowed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which would otherwise expire on February 1. Such renewal could effectively make permanent some of the police-state powers granted to the government in the panic-stricken wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The power of embarrassment

The case of a shameless land-grab by prominent retired judge and former mayor of Boulder, Colorado, Richard McLean, and his politically connected wife, Edith Stevens, has taken an interesting turn. Colorado State Rep. Claire Levy, whom Stevens served as campaign treasurer at the time she and McLean took advantage of the relatively unknown legal doctrine of adverse possession to steal one-third of a parcel of land from the neighboring Kirlin family, has proposed legislation to make such unsavory scenarios somewhat more difficult in the future. The legislative move would also help to distance her from her one-time allies, since the relationship has become something of an albatross around her neck.

One bill would address the unseemly and much-commented-upon situation which had current Boulder District Judge James C. Klein awarding former Boulder District Judge Richard McLean a profitable real estate windfall. The other bill, which she didn't originate, but which she is co-sponsoring, would somewhat reform the use of adverse possession so that it less thoroughly resembles highway robbery.

Levy -- who is friends with McLean and Stevens, and who has faced public calls to "disassociate" herself from the couple -- said her straightforward, four-sentence-long amendment would fix that issue. It requires the chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court to appoint a presiding judge from another jurisdiction in county and district court cases where one of the parties is a current or former judge from within the same district in which the case is filed...

Levy also is co-sponsoring legislation that would change the requirements to win an adverse-possession claim, and would give judges in those types of cases the power to charge fair-market value for any land won through adverse possession. That bill is scheduled to be heard by the judiciary committee Feb. 6.

The reform bill, in particular, seems to be on the fast track to passage by state legislators caught unprepared by the level of public outrage over the legalized theft of a parcel of land by the savvy and well-connected Boulder couple. According to the Boulder Daily Camera, "[a]t least 31 state representatives and 17 state senators have co-sponsored" the measure.

Unfortunately, none of this means that the Kirlins get their stolen land back; it just makes similar robberies more difficult in the future. The family has appealed Judge Klein's initial ruling, but the Kirlins are given little chance of success. "Legalized theft" may be wrong, but it is, after all, legal.

All of this injustice comes at a significant price. The Kirlins estimate their legal bills at $200,000. They're pretty well-heeled, so they're not headed for the poor-house. But just imagine how little fight most families on a tight budget could put up under similar circumstances -- especially with disappointment the likely ultimate outcome.

Whatever reform measures do pass -- and it looks like something certainly will make it into the law books -- we can certainly thank the desperate efforts of Claire Levy and her colleagues in the Colorado legislature to put as much space as possible between themselves and the likes of Richard McLean and Edith Stevens.

Felonious massage

There are lots of unfortunate things about the untimely death of Heath Ledger, but what strikes me as especially unjust is the fact that the woman, Ledger's masseuse, who found the actor and notified authorities and his friends of his death may be in hot water because of her role in the case. Check out this passage from the New York Times:

The police said that all five witnesses — Ms. Solomon, Ms. Wolozin, and the three guards summoned by Ms. Olsen — were cooperating with the authorities.

The police said they could not immediately say if Ms. Wolozin was a licensed masseuse. There is no Diana Wolozin listed in the state database of licensed massage therapists. It is a felony to practice massage without a license in New York.

A felony? As if it wasn't ridiculous enough to require people to seek government permission to rub customers' backs, the Empire State actually charges non-compliers with felonies. Ms. Wolozin may face some pretty severe consequences because she chose to draw attention to herself by doing the right thing rather than simply walking away.

If Ms. Wolozin is really digging her knuckles into the sore muscles of her clients without benefit of a state-issued piece of paper, and if authorities choose to make an issue of the matter, she may lose her right to vote (at least temporarily), to own firearms, to hold a liquor license (you need government permission to sell booze, too) and face other restrictions.

And that's in addition to any time served.

Despite spurious claims about protecting the public from incompetents and charlatans, occupational licensing laws have long had more to do with creating barriers to entry into trades and professions and so shielding existing practitioners from competition. That's a fairly well established fact among economists, and a point largely acknowledged by most people, at least when they talk about trades outside of such designated priesthoods as medicine and law. As Professor S. David Young of the European Institute of Business Administration (INSEAD) has written:

A careful analysis of licensing's effects across a broad range of occupations reveals some striking, and strikingly negative, similarities. Occupational regulation has limited consumer choice, raised consumer costs, increased practitioner income, limited practitioner mobility, and deprived the poor of adequate services—all without demonstrated improvements in the quality or safety of the licensed activities.

Why have states required licensing of so many occupations if the results are so counter to consumer interests? Participants in any regulatory process must have a reason for getting involved. Because the number of potential political and legal battles is large, people tend to concentrate on those battles in which their personal stake is high. Because their per capita stakes in the licensing controversy are so much greater than those of consumers, it is professionals who usually determine the regulatory agenda in their domains. Crucial licensing decisions that can affect vast numbers of people are often made with little or no input from the public. If such a process serves the public interest, it is only by happenstance.

With licensing laws representing such bold-faced abuses of state power for private gain, it's especially unconscionable that violating licensing restrictions can have such profoundly dire results as imprisonment and loss of rights.

Yes, Heath Ledger's death is unfortunate -- but the peril in which Diana Wolozin now finds herself may be the most underappreciated part of the matter.

Too honest

This is why acting like a boy scout with the powers-that-be is not a good idea.

Snuffed out for their own good

While visiting family and friends in Maryland this week, I stopped by a smoking-friendly venue in Severna Park with my father for a cigar and a bourbon. The Back Room at the Woodfire Restaurant was explicitly established as a smoking venue, with a humidor from which you can purchase cigars if you haven't brought your own, and a clientele that appreciates the smell of smoldering tobacco. The staff are mostly smokers themselves, and none too pleased by the changes coming in February when Maryland's broad smoking ban goes into effect, snuffing out smokes even in places that were specifically created to offer people an amenable environment in which to light up.

Business was light when I was there (a Monday afternoon), but the customers at the bar were interrogating the bartender over the ultimate fate of the humidor's contents. The disposition of the cigars has yet to be determined, though a smoking-ban sale seems to be in the works. The ultimate fate of the Back Room is also an open question. Can a successful cigar bar find new life as just another place to have a drink? Like it or not, the owners and staff at the Woodfire are about to find out.

And the folks who take advantage of the Back Room's looming cigar sale will probably have to count themselves lucky that they can, for the moment, still enjoy their purchases at home.

Technology and the abortion debate

Abortion isn't about to go away as a contentious issue any time soon, but the the controversial procedure is losing much of its vulnerability to public protests and political intervention because of long-anticipated changes in technology. Says the Washington Post:

The French abortion pill RU-486, on the market since 2000, has become an increasingly common alternative, making abortion less clinical and more private. At a time when the overall number of abortions has been steadily declining, RU-486-induced abortions have been rising by 22 percent a year and now account for 14 percent of the total -- and more than one in five early abortions performed by the ninth week of pregnancy.

Where once abortion meant identifiable providers and centralized clinics that could be targeted for protests and public shaming -- or more-violent reactions -- now the procedure increasingly involves discreetly obtaining a drug from a wider pool of physicians who don't need to acquire the specialized training and equipment required for performing a surgical procedure. As one patient quoted in the article reveals:

"It was something I could do at home and be with my husband," Gilbert said of taking the pill. "It was a decision we made together alone, and we were able to take care of it this way alone. It was just a much more private affair."

She added: "I wouldn't say it was easy -- it's never easy to terminate a pregnancy. But in the grand scheme of things, it was much more pleasant than a surgical procedure."

The shift in the way abortions are performed may just be starting, since, in some European countries, "more than 60 percent of abortions are performed with the drug."

None of this is likely to change the moral and political debate over abortion, of course, but it is an illustration of how advances in technology can help to make even the most controversial practices more accessible and less susceptible to public scorn and political shifts. Indeed, the easier abortions are to obtain without walking a gauntlet of protesters or traveling far distances, the more widespread they're likely to become.

Whatever your opinion on abortion itself, there's a lesson here on how to entrench any controversial practice or product by improving the ease with which it can be obtained and by dispersing the practice or product to a multitude of relatively unidentifiable sources.

Imagine, for example, what reducing the production of firearms to an easy and practically automated home workshop activity can/will do to the debate over gun control. To a certain extent, that has already happened, but advancing technology promises to put production in the hands of even the least skilled tinkerers.

Technology can't settle debates over right and wrong, but it can make those debates somewhat pointless.

Heads up

I'll be on the road for a week or so, attending the wedding of a friend and giving my son a chance to visit with his cousins and his grandparents. Posting will be spotty.

Ranking economic freedom

Reports the Daily Telegraph:

Britain has slipped out of the ranks of fully "free" countries in this year's Heritage Index of Economic Freedom, reflecting the sharp rise in the tax burden and ballooning state sector.

The country has continued to slide down the league under Gordon Brown's economic management, falling from fifth to tenth place over the last two years. It has been overtaken by Canada, Chile, Switzerland, Australia, and the United States.

The UK is now ranked as "mostly free" -- a status it shares with Germany, Japan, Bahrain, Armenia and Trinidad. The country still ranks in the top ten -- by the skin of its teeth -- but its economic climate is clearly moving in the wrong direction.

The Index of Economic Freedom defines economic freedom as:

The highest form of economic freedom provides an absolute right of property ownership, fully realized freedoms of movement for labor, capital, and goods, and an absolute absence of coercion or constraint of economic liberty beyond the extent necessary for citizens to protect and maintain liberty itself. In other words, individuals are free to work, produce, consume, and invest in any way they please, and that freedom is both protected by the state and unconstrained by the state.

That freedom is assessed according to the following criteria:

• Business Freedom
  
• Trade Freedom
  
• Fiscal Freedom
  
• Government Size
  
• Monetary Freedom
  
• Investment Freedom
  
• Financial Freedom
  
• Property Rights
  
• Freedom from Corruption
  
• Labor Freedom
  

The top ten ranked nations are:

1. Hong Kong
   
2. Singapore
   
3. Ireland
   
4. Australia
   
5. United States
   
6. New Zealand
   
7. Canada
   
8. Chile
   
9. Switzerland
   
10. United Kingdom
    

North Korea comes in dead last.

Note that the United States has also dropped a hair in the ratings, "reflecting minor declines in four of the 10 economic freedoms," specifically, fiscal freedom, government size, monetary freedom and freedom from corruption.

Is anybody holding out any high hopes for the direction taken by the U.S. in future ratings?

Not so non-lethal

Without commenting on the propriety of the use of a Taser in this incident, here's more evidence that Tasers really aren't a risk-free means of controlling people. They may still be a less-dangerous choice than firearms when the use of a significant degree of force is called for, but people do die.

And no, this isn't an isolated incident.

Just to be fair to all the candidates ...

More questionable comments and affiliations from candidates for president:

Hillary Clinton has used anti-semitic slurs -- specifically, calling her husband's one-time adviser Paul Fray a "Jew bastard."

Rudy Giuliani's aides and associates keep getting caught making anti-Muslim comments, such as the suggestion by John Deady, New Hampshire co-chair of Veterans for Rudy, that America's Mayor would "chase [Muslims] back to their caves.”

Mike Huckabee wants to "amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view." He also called for AIDS patients to be quarantined.

John McCain plays footsie with the Christian right and calls Asians "gooks."

Barack Obama's spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who inspired the title of Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope, has equated Zionism with racism and is an admirer of open anti-semite Louis Farrakhan.

Can we have some new candidates now?

Some of these points bother me more than others (I'm especially frightened by the prospect of the Constitution being amended to make the country an explicit theocracy), but I think it's fair to air everybody's dirty laundry while we're at it.

I'm sure I've left somebody out. Let me know if I've unfairly spared any candidate.

What's under the rock ...

Reason magazine's Julian Sanchez and David Weigel did the digging into those old Ron Paul newsletters for all of us who wish it didn't have to be done. Their conclusion is that the hate-filled newsletters were produced as part of a conscious strategy by the circle around economist Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell (now head of the Ludwig von Mises Institute) to appeal to social conservatives (really, social neanderthals) as a deliberate "paleo" break with the liberal social views of the mainstream libertarian movement. Members of Ron Paul's family were employees of the company that produced the newsletters, and Paul remains closely associated with Lew Rockwell, who played a key role in the project.

The newsletters, then, were apparently part of a cynical strategy to exploit racism for the purpose of building political support and raising money (a possibility raised earlier by Timothy Virkkala). That Paul has never personally used bigotry as part of his own political language tells me that he may not personally share those views -- but that he was (and is) comfortable enough with them to use bigotry as a political tool and to continue to associate with those who spearheaded the strategy.

To say that I'm appalled is an under-statement. I'm also embarrassed that my first reaction was something of a defense of Ron Paul, however half-hearted.

It's not enough to not be a bigot; exploiting bigotry for political gain is also despicable.

Prince of pot to serve time

"Prince of pot" Marc Emery, an activist for marijuana legalization, publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine and dealer in marijuana seeds, is going to have to serve some hard time after all. Canadian authorities arrested Emery at the behest of U.S. anti-drug officials, even though Emery runs his businesses entirely from north of the border. His sale of seeds to American customers was apparently the only hook ticked-off Canadian police needed to do their U.S. colleagues' bidding.

After a long fight, Emery accepted a ten-year sentence -- of which he'll have to serve at least five years -- in order to avoid an even longer sentence and to keep co-accused Michelle Rainey and Greg Williams out from behind bars.

Yes, the long arm of American drug prohibitionists reaches far and wide indeed -- even beyond their nominal jurisdiction.

Update: See the National Post's well-considered editorial regarding this case.

The limits of speech in Canada

Via Wendy McElroy's blog comes news of the persecution of Ezra Levant, former publisher of the conservative magazine Western Standard (now available only online) by the horribly mis-named Alberta Human Rights Commission. Levant has been summoned before the commission, under threat of legal penalties, to answer complaints about his magazine's reprinting of cartoons critical of Islam, originally published, amidst much controversy, by Denmark's Jyllands-Posten newspaper in 2005 as a comment on self-censorship and political correctness. The complaints allege that the printing of the cartoons foments "hate" against Canadian Muslims and that it is the business of the government to monitor speech and suppress that which offends certain groups.

To Levant's credit, he came out swinging. He's documenting the whole ordeal on his blog, including video clips of the proceedings published against the commission's wishes. His opening statement questioned the very legitimacy of the commission and its seeming interest in regulating what ought to be free speech.

I am here at this government interrogation under protest. It is my position that the government has no legal or moral authority to interrogate me or anyone else for publishing these words and pictures. That is a violation of my ancient and inalienable freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and in this case, religious freedom and the separation of mosque and state. It is especially perverted that a bureaucracy calling itself the Alberta human rights commission would be the government agency violating my human rights. So I will now call those bureaucrats “the commission” or “the hrc”, since to call the commission a “human rights commission” is to destroy the meaning of those words.

This isn't the first time a north-of-the-border human rights commission has stepped into questionable territory. The conservative writer Mark Steyn has also been targeted because Macleans magazine published an excerpt from his book, America Alone, which is harshly critical of Muslim immigrants to the West. A woman named Jessica Beaumont was issued a cease-and-desist order by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal for publishing anti-gay Bible verses on American websites. And Stephen Boisson, the executive director of the Concerned Christian Coalition, faces sanctions for similar anti-gay views voiced in a letter-to-the-editor published in a newspaper.

The opinions that draw the attention of the "human rights" bureaucrats are, in many cases, objectionable to large numbers of people, but none of them rise to the level of physical attacks, or even incitement to violence. They are, in all cases, expressions of strongly held thoughts and beliefs that may excite equally strong reactions -- precisely the sort of speech that free speech protections of the sort contained in the U.S. First Amendment and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are suppose to cover if they are to have any meaning at all.

Civil libertarian Alan Borovoy, who had a hand in the creation of Canada's human rights tribunals, now publicly regrets what they have become, saying, "During the years when my colleagues and I were labouring to create such commissions, we never imagined that they might ultimately be used against freedom of speech." Elsewhere, Borovoy commented, "Even truthful articles describing some of the awful situations in this world could run afoul of this law, it is so broad and such a potential threat to freedom of speech."

Every government is subject to criticism about the inroads it makes into the natural rights of the people who are subject to its power. The U.S., as most posts on this blog demonstrate, is no exception. But free speech is really the ultimate test of a political institution. If officials respect people's right to say things that raise hackles and produce protests, then they're at least pretending to abide by some limitations on their power; if they openly suppress ideas that offend them, then they clearly see no proper limits on their authority to intrude into people's lives.

Canada's political institutions, at the moment, are failing the test.

Smoky workplace debate resolved

Anti-smoking zealots claim that bans on smoking in the workplace are necessary to protect employees and customers -- non-smoking employees in particular, since they can't turn around and leave the way customers might. That's especially true of businesses that don't deal directly with the public, so don't have to worry about patrons wandering in and being permanently damaged by a brief whiff of cigarette smoke. The American Lung Association maintains a Web page dedicated to the benefits of a smoke-free workplace. The page contains such pearls of wisdom as:

Separating smokers from nonsmokers, cleaning the air and ventilating buildings cannot eliminate exposure to secondhand smoke. Smokefree workplace policies are the only effective way to eliminate exposure.

The European Industrial Relations Observatory, in commenting on a proposed ban in Norway, said:

The main rationale behind the government’s proposal is to provide protection against passive smoking in bars and restaurants. Tobacco smoke is seen as a particular threat to the health and well-being of employees in such establishments, and it is also widely recognised that they enjoy relatively weak legal protection against such working environment hazards.

But what if there aren't any non-smokers in the office -- and won't be, by design? What if a small German company fires all its non-smoking employees and vows not to hire any more because they're considered "troublemakers"?

The manager of the 10-person IT company in Buesum, named Thomas J., told the Hamburger Morgenpost newspaper he had fired the trio because their non-smoking was causing disruptions.

Germany introduced non-smoking rules in pubs and restaurants on January 1, but Germans working in small offices are still allowed to smoke.

"I can't be bothered with trouble-makers," Thomas was quoted saying. "We're on the phone all the time and it's just easier to work while smoking. Everyone picks on smokers these days. It's time for revenge. I'm only going to hire smokers from now on."

Well, there's no danger of non-smokers being involuntarily exposed to cigarette smoke under this arrangement. That means that anti-smoking activists should be happy, right?

Right?

Update: The story is apparently a hoax pulled by a pro-smoking activist. But I think the point raised is still a valid one.

Freedom, Michael Kinsley and a ham sandwich

Michael Kinsley is generally a thoughtful writer who at least tries to take his opponents' arguments seriously rather than fulminating from the ramparts about the evils of those who disagree with him. Specifically, he's been somewhat more receptive to libertarian arguments than many of his "liberal" colleagues, even going so far as, at one point, to argue that libertarians should join him in the Democratic Party. But his latest column makes you wonder if he's been reading his own arguments over the years. It's patronizing toward people who advocate letting people run their own lives, and raises some hoary old arguments against the spontaneous order that arises from freely made choices.

Part of his argument is simply an authoritarian dismissal of preferences he doesn't understand. For instance, he criticizes the idea of letting people purchase and drink unpasteurized milk because he thinks it's just a wacky idea. "No one should want to drink unpasteurized milk, and almost no one does."

But there are people who prefer raw (unpasteurized) milk, claiming it has all sorts of benefits. Are they correctly assessing the benefits they perceive against the risks of raw milk? Libertarians say that's an analysis they have the right to make for themselves. Kinsley would substitute his judgment for theirs, just because he doesn't share their preferences.

Kinsley also asserts that authoritarian policies such as income redistribution are OK because they express values of which he does approve -- equality-of-result, in particular. He chastises libertarians who consider such policies immoral because they violate the fundamental right to be free and enjoy the fruits of one's own labor -- that's a mere preference, he would have us believe, that overlooks "some degree of material equality as a necessary basis for political equality; the huge role of luck in getting each of us to our relative stations in life."

But there's a huge moral issue that he blithely dismisses; he entirely overlooks the libertarian opposition to achieving goals by initiating force. Libertarians oppose the initiation of force on principle, seeing it as a violation of the autonomy of the individual -- and as a sure path to the transformation of state power into a bludgeon to be used to enforce the preferred values of whoever manages to win temporary control -- values such as equality-of-result. But would he want those raw-milk drinkers banning pasteurized milk should they win political power? Kinsley oddly ignores this issue even as he acknowledges that:

... democracy and majority rule are no answers. Tyranny of the majority is a constant danger. How would you like a law requiring people with odd Social Security numbers to give $1,000 to people with even Social Security numbers? To libertarians, much of what government does is essentially just that.

In an ancient, moldy and long-discredited criticism of letting people make their own arrangements to produce and distribute products and services that people want and need, Kinsley argues that libertarians just make things too complicated where simple mandates would do.

Libertarians have a fondness for complex arrangements to make markets work in situations where the textbooks say they can't. Hey, let's issue stamps, y'see, and use the revenue to form a corporation that sells stock to buy military equipment, then the government leases the equipment and the stockholders vote on whether to use it ... and so on. The point becomes proving a point, not economic or government efficiency. ...

Sometimes libertarians end up reinventing the wheel. My favorite example is an article I read years ago advocating privatization of highways. This is a classic libertarian fantasy: government auctions off the land, private enterprise pays for construction and maintenance, tolls cover the cost, competing routes keep it all efficient.

And what about, uh, intersections? Well, markets would recognize that it is more efficient for one company to own the intersections, but it would have an incentive to strike the right balance between customers on each highway. And stoplights? Ultimately, the author had worked his way up to a giant monopoly that would build, own and maintain all the roads and charge an annual fee to people who wanted to use them. None dare call it government.

Kinsley takes an (I assume) speculative article in which the author contemplates how roads might arise in a free society and takes that as a prescription for how things would be arranged. That's a classic error repeatedly made by people who can't understand how matters can arrange themselves -- and fear the complex decision-making involved in such a process -- even as they live in the midst of a society largely organized along precisely those free-wheeling lines.

Hmmm ...

Imagine, for example, two people raised in a society where food is a government monopoly. They sit in State Cafeteria No. 67, eating ham sandwiches for lunch and bullshitting about the way things are -- and ought to be.

Rachel: Oh no. Ham sandwiches again. I would love to eat something else -- anything else -- for lunch.

Bob: It's only a matter of time. Just last year they changed the name of the Ham Sandwich Office to the Office of Sandwiches, Soups and Salads.

Rachel: But we're still eating ham sandwiches.

Bob: Well ... It takes a lot of work. They have to make sure that the state farms can produce enough vegetables for salads and soup in addition to the lettuce and tomato for the sandwiches. And they don't want there to be a glut of ham if lots of people prefer salads and soup. It has to be done right.

Rachel: I think we'd be a lot better off if the government got out of the food business.

Bob: What? You mean, privatize the state cafeterias?

Rachel: No, go for broke! Close the cafeterias and see what private businesses take their place. I bet lots of people would open restaurants. Some would serve soup, some salad, some sandwiches -- and maybe other things too. Maybe you could even get ethnic food. And gourmet food. And if you were on the run, you could stop by a cart on a street corner or in a restaurant that promised fast service.

Bob: Where would th