Owning Water & Marketing Water

Over at St. Maximos' Hut:

"This goes to the argument in Thomas Woods' The Church and the Market that says that moral arguments that do not recognize economic realities are not effective moral arguments. I find this position compelling.

Thus it seems to me that we ought to be able to demand that opponents of markets bear the burden of proof on showing how alternative institutions will provide a superior outcome on both moral and practical terms."

The issue underlying this blog post seems to be whether or not to use markets to allocate water. This may be another illustration of an inaccurate or imprecise discussion of "market." I suspect that the mistake in analysis here is to actually characterize the policy concerns as whether to market water or not. I suspect the real issue is whether to have individuals own water on terms like any other private property ownership, or whether to have government own the water.

I don't think we can have something owned in a way other than private ownership. The question then is whether individuals own water or government is the only private owner. If individuals do not own water, then either no one owns water and it is an open access resource, or government owns water. Government in the western United States seems to allow individual ownership, yet it does not allow the voluntary transfer of that ownership. I think this means government really owns the water and has decided on rules by which it will exclude some people from using water while allowing others.

The government can give up ownership and allow individuals to own and trade water, or it can continue with it's own ownership. If government continues it's own ownership, then the policy discussion should more explicitly discuss the rules government should choose with respect to excluding and allowing access and use of its water.

Do you think this is a crazy way of thinking about water in the West?

Endangered Species or Habitat?

Chris Bruce:

"There are at least two variants of the argument that biodiversity should be increased. The weak goal seeks only to weigh costs against benefits when choosing the level of protection to be given to endangered species. The strong goal requires that every endangered species be protected, regardless of expense.

Many environmentalists implicitly or explicitly espouse the strong goal, and it is this goal that is embodied in the Endangered Species Act (ESA). What I wish to argue here is, first, that the public has not supported this view. To the extent that they have accepted that increasing biodiversity is a desirable goal, it is the weak goal that they have adopted, not the strong goal. Second, I argue that environmentalists’ support for the strong goal is only the public expression of a deeper goal: the protection of natural landscapes."

[. . . .]

Dozens, if not hundreds, of examples can found of situations in which environmental groups had pressed unsuccessfully for preservation of a habitat, not because it was believed that the habitat was home to an endangered species, but because the proponents wished to preserve the natural landscape. When an endangered species was found to live in the habitat, the presence of that species was used to justify the preservation of the species’ habitat. For example, opponents of suburban growth have discovered new allies in the pygmy owl on the outskirts of Tucson; the golden-cheeked warbler in the Balcones Canyonland on the edge of Austin; Preble’s meadow jumping mouse habitat near Denver; and Orcutt grass and fairy shrimp in Sacramento. And the spotted owl has provided a trump card for those who had previously fought unsuccessfully for preservation of old growth forests in Washington and Oregon.

In none of these cases can the sincerity of the proponents of endangered species protection be questioned. But in each case, and in many others, it is clear that preservation of natural landscapes was of at least as much importance as preservation of species. My argument here is that, in the public debate, it is important to recognise what the true, underlying goal of public policy is. In this case, I suggest that we would be advised to place less emphasis on species and more on landscapes.

Do you think this is a plausible hypothesis? If so, can we expect to preserve landscapes through the regulation and prohibition of land uses, or should we expect government to have to purchase the land parcels that make the landscapes? I think purchase would be required, at least if we are interested in effectiveness and in justice.

Entirely Market Forces

Earlier this week I blogged on issues that were suggested by:

"While everyone understands that some spheres of life should not be subject entirely to market forces. . ."

I'm not sure I did a very good job with my thoughts in that earlier post. I think maybe I can do better today.

It seems to me that the perspective presented by such a sentence is likely to be backwards. Let's start be considering what market forces involve. Fundamentally, market forces involve a buyer and a seller making an exchange. The interaction between people involved in "market forces" is a voluntary interaction. The realm of market forces involves the realm of voluntary action in our lives. Of course, not all voluntary action is going to be described as part of a market. Not all aspects of our lives involve exchange. Market forces involve voluntary interdependent actions that we characterize as exchange.

One reason we talk about "market forces" is because we are interested in the role of government and public policy in our lives. A fundamental difference between market forces and government (public policy) is that while markets are voluntary, government is inherently coercive.

When considering a statement like "some spheres of life should not be subject entirely to market forces", we are led to ask: What spheres of our lives should not be subject to market forces? Because I see the market as part of the "spheres of our lives" that are characterized by voluntary individual behavior, I don't think this question is really very informative. I think our starting point, or our default position, should be voluntary choices. It seems quite easy to justify voluntary choices and voluntary behavior, at least if such voluntary behavior does not harm others. I think a better way to put the relevant question is: What spheres of our lives should be subject to coercion or coercive forces? If one chooses to interact with others in exchange and through prices, or if one chooses to interact with others without prices and without exchange, either way the interactions are voluntary. It seems to me quite difficult to be concerned about the voluntary realms of our lives. The really important questions involve what realms of our lives we think it is appropriate to be subject to coercion or coercive forces. I believe the answers to such questions will point to the appropriate role for government in our lives.

As I said earlier this week, I think most will agree that it is wrong, in general, to coerce (or aggress against) another person. There is one exception to this general principal: coercion or force may be used against another in self-defense. The police power role for government fits this idea of self-defense. That is, we turn to government and give it the power to protect us from harm to our person or our property that would be caused (or has been caused) by another.

The really interesting and important questions do not involve what spheres of our lives we want to be characterized by voluntary choices and behavior, but what spheres of our lives do we want to say that it is acceptable for coercion to be used to interrupt what would otherwise by the voluntary spheres of our lives.

Undercover Economist

Peter Boettke:

"Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist has just been published. It is not a principles of economics text, but it is perhaps the best book currently available in its genre. In my opinion there is more economic intuition behind this book than Freakonomics -- a judgment which might shock some readers. But the persistent and consistent applications of opportunity cost reasoning and explaining how order emerges out of the behavior of individuals even though it is not anyone's intention to promote the overall order is revealed throughout The Undercover Economists in a vareity of illustrative stories from throughout the developed and developing world. We get stories of wonderful unintended desirable consequences within some regimes, and the horror of unintended undesirable conseuqences in others. Harford's work is one which champions 'looking out the window' and making sense of what is seen through the economic way of thinking. In many ways this is what it is all about, and once you 'get it' it is wonderfully addictive and transformative. Economics is the mind-quake everyone needs to make sense of the world around us, and on the basis of that understanding arrange our political, legal social and economic affairs so we can simultaneously achieve liberty, peace and prosperity."

Subject Entirely to Market Forces

Of late, there have been many times that I have wondered about the way "the market" in used in conversation. I think our conversations about "the market" may not always be very useful, and perhaps this is because we aren't very careful about what is meant by "the market." I just read what I think is another illustration of this posted by Jason Scorse over at Environmental Economics Now, I don't really mean to pick on this specific essay. I simply want to use the way reference is made to "the market" to try to illustrate my concerns. Consider the following paragraph:

"We are living at a time when there is a strong backlash against environmentalism and pieces like, “The Common Good” do little more than add fuel to the fire. The majority of Americans are generally supportive of environmental causes, but become wary when environmentalists spend an exorbitant amount of time criticizing the capitalist economic system that has propelled America to such prominence and virtually unparalleled material well-being. While everyone understands that some spheres of life should not be subject entirely to market forces, using overly broad and ill-defined notions of what constitutes the “commons” is more likely to convince people that environmentalists are leftover communists than to draw rightful attention to the many serious problems plaguing open-access resources (it’s also simply sloppy thinking). In addition, with conservatives in charge of all the branches of the Federal Government rallying against the “encroachment of the market system” is clearly not a winning strategy."

Note the suggestion that everyone understands that not all areas of life should be "subject entirely to market forces." I'm not quite sure what this means, and I suspect I might not agree with the suggestion.

It seems human nature to "truck, barter, and trade" as Adam Smith may have put it. It seems to me that even in oppresive systems of political economy, market forces are at work. Individual behavior and response to personally experienced conditions and objectives can be influenced by government policy and thereby government coercion, but the tendency to exchange with others is ever present in human behavior. When government is too coercive, the exchanges tend to move away from the watchful eyes of government and its coercion [see DeSoto for some illustrations]. I see market forces as the realm of life in which people voluntary exchange with one another. Since market forces are characterized by voluntary exchange, it is hard to understand why we would agree to oppose such forces in any area of life, unless of course, there is reason to believe the person or property of others is harmed as a direct result.

I think the real issue regarding government concerns, first, seeing that government and economy are not separate spheres in our lives, but rather co-evolving spheres that make a system of political economy, and second, seeing that government is by nature inherently coercive. The question then is not government or markets, but rather, in what ways do we think it is acceptable to use coercion.

I think most agree that it is wrong to coerce others, e.g., it is wrong to harm others or to take what belongs to others. I think most would also agree that it is acceptable to use coercion (or to use force) in self defense; to protect yourself and your property from harm by the coercive and forceful actions of others. In this regard, I think all would agree that the at least one role for government coercion is to mirror the individual use of coercion for self-defense. Government which uses its coercion as "police power" to enforce laws against harm to person or property by others is widely regarded as legitimate.

The question really seems to me to be: Are there other circumstances for which we think the use of coercion is acceptable in our lives?

The market is the realm of voluntary, uncoerced interactions between people. Beyond the use of government coercion to enforce property rights and voluntary contracts, are there really other government actions that we think acceptable for the use of coercion in our lives? Why should we want to have coercion used to inhibit and constrain what would otherwise be the voluntary and uncoerced interactions between ourselves and others (i.e. the market)?

Butterfly Economics

I was browsing a book this morning, Butterfly Economics, and discovered the following in the opening paragraph:

"Scientific research can often seem obscure and even pointless to outsiders. This is not so much due to the intellectural difficulty involved in understanding such activity, for it is widely accepted that this will inevitably be the case. It is rather that many of the topics which are examined seem to be almost designed to incur the scorn and wrath of the lay person. Before sitting down this morning to write these very words, for example, my eye fell on a report in a serious British newspaper. An American psychologist had been visiting the country to carry out a study of rams in the English Lake District. His research was complete. 'Ten per cent of all rams', he proclaimed solemnly, 'are homosexual.' Readers no doubt took consolation from the fact that this finding was obtained at the expense of the American taxpayer and not themselves."

Alas, what consolation for the American taxpayer?

The 2nd paragraph was equally interesting:

"Nor are such examples confined exclusively to the sciences. I have long admired Emily Bronte's novel Wuthering Heights. The opening chapters, in which Lockwood first encounters the ill-tempered Heathcliff and his assorted household, seem to me to be one of the finest pieces of comedy in the whole corpus of English literature. Realizing that not everyone shares this opinion, and in order to improve my understanding, I recently opened a modern work of literary criticism on Bronte's masterpiece. It was completely impenetrable. Many of the individual words were quite new to me, and whole sentences, indeed whole pages, appeared to lack any coherent meaning. I sought solace in the preface, where I learned that the density of the text was deliberate. 'The analysis of literature and culture', declared the author, 'is a task no less difficult, and not less demanding of a specialized language, than the study of sub-atomic particles.' I hastened immediately to a textbook on orthodox economic theory in an effort to restore my sanity."

Katrina & K-12 Vouchers

It is reported in the Wall Street Journal that there is a proposal to pay for school districts to take displaced students in the aftermath of Katrina.

"There's no shortage of bills in Congress to provide school aid for victims of the Gulf Coast hurricanes. But by far the best proposal out there is the Family Education Reimbursement Act, if for no other reason than its express goal is to circumvent the bureaucracies that make it so difficult to speed federal relief to displaced students and the schools that take them in.

The measure was introduced last week by House Education Committee Chairman John Boehner of Ohio and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, both Republicans, and its implementation couldn't be simpler. To create an account, parents could register on the Web, through a toll-free number or by signing up in person at a school. The accounts would provide up to $6,700 for each child, which is the average expenditure in states that have been enrolling the bulk of Katrina's 372,000 displaced students.

Next, parents would provide the account number to the school enrolling their child, and the school would use that information to get reimbursed. That's it. No endless paperwork for the families. No lengthy reimbursement procedure for the schools. Instead of forcing a school that has graciously opened its doors to refugees to make an extra funding request to the district, which in turn must go to the state, which in turn must go to the feds, the legislation provides a user-friendly alternative.

All schools would be eligible -- public, private, parochial or charters. And the accounts would be portable. The money would follow the child in case a displaced family decides to move back home or relocate somewhere else. And in a welcome nod to fiscal conscientiousness that has been all too rare in Congress, at the end of the school year any unused funds would go back to the Treasury. The program would be administered by an agency -- preferably a private one -- that could be up and running in as little as a month's time."

Hey, this sounds like a voucher, we can't be doing things that way. It might work and things could then get out of hand. Vouchers in Colorado for higher education. Now vouchers proposed for helping children after Katrina. People may be starting to see there is wisdom in education vouchers, eh?

I note these vouchers would be for $6700, or the average cost per student at the schools displaced students are enrolling in. I wonder if we should be concerned about what is going on here, even if vouchers are being used? After all, these students are displaced because of Katrina, and that means local government in the damaged areas are not having to educate these students. Isn't there tax revenue that has been collected for the affected school districts? And, even if not, why isn't the responsibility for educating these students falling on local government? It seems that the hurricane hasn't changed the nature of education funding in our federalist system. Perhaps the $6700 should be a loan to local government?

What's A Blog Worth?

The Volokh Conspiracy reports:

"Paul Caron reports that The Volokh Conspiracy is worth $1.3 million (OK, probably not enough to justify a corporate jet, even if it was a sensible estimate). From his lips to God's ears.

I checked . . . Economics and Liberty is worth only $1700.

Barred Owls v. Spotted Owls

In the WSJ [subscription required]:

"But at least we have the owls, right? Wrong. Scientists are struggling to explain why, more than 10 years after a halt of logging on the 'old growth' trees in which spotted owls are supposed to thrive, the bird's population has continued to plummet -- declining by 7% a year in Washington. The answer, biologists are beginning to admit, is … another owl. Barred owls migrated into spotted owl territory decades ago, and have a nasty habit of killing the smaller birds, driving them out of their homes, or mating with them -- producing impure offspring. 'We're seeing two species duke it out. It's too early to tell if [spotted owls] will survive,' federal wildlife biologist Eric Forsman was quoted as saying last year." [Kimberley A. Strassel, "Owls of Protest," Wall Street Journal, October 19, 2005, page A12]

It is also reported that after the spotted owl was listed as endangered the result was an 80% decrease in logging on 24 million acres. A Congressional committee apparently found that more than 900 mills, with at least 130,000 employed, closed. It is also reported that there were some who thought the barred owls might be a problem as a rival species back in 1992.

There seems to have been a significant economic loss associated with a government policy that now appears may have been misguided. I wonder if government has a response to the barred owl threat to the spotted owl?

Vaccine Shortages

There is an interesting commentary in today's WSJ [subscription required]. John Berlau explains that SEC rules offer disincentives for corporations who might otherwise be interested in making flu vaccines:

"Under the policy, even if the total cash due is paid up-front for a product, 'revenue should not be recognized until final delivery has occurred.' And 'delivery generally is not considered to have occurred unless the product has been delivered to the customer's place of business.' The SEC bulletin makes clear this is generally the case even when 'customers may not yet be ready to take delivery of the products for various reasons.'

The upshot of this policy is that no matter how much cash the government puts in vaccine-makers' hands for making drugs for the stockpile, they cannot include this money in their official sales until it is actually delivered to doctors when and if there is a disease outbreak. This period can last more than a year. While one part of government is urging manufacturers to have a reserve on hand for a flu outbreak, another is telling them that they won't show any gain on their books for doing so. In fact, companies that contribute to the stockpile will take a paper loss for this part of their business, because the SEC is not about to let them postpone 'recognition' of their costs of making the vaccines. And because of other regulations and trial lawyers always eager to pounce on 'deceptive' accounting, it is difficult for companies to communicate with investors about this distorted earnings picture.

As a result, vaccine maker Aventis (now Sanofi-Aventis) specifically cited the SEC policy as the reason it dropped out of the stockpile for children's vaccines in 2004. 'We are unable because of the financial issues … to proceed until this is resolved,' Christine Grant, the firm's vice president for public policy, told UPI. Merck did not drop out, but a vice president commented to USA Today, 'Imagine, for all the products sold, if we couldn't record them as revenue. Our shareholders would not be pleased.'

Since the flu vaccine shortage of last year, government health officials have talked to the SEC about the changing policy for vaccines. But in the era of Sarbanes-Oxley, the commission hasn't budged. It is possible that a firm might have to return money if a batch of vaccines spoiled in the stockpile. But this usually wouldn't make a dent in revenues reported to shareholders. Rather, it's the current accounting policy that paints the distorted picture to investors by making vaccine makers look less attractive than other firms even when they have a solid cash flow."

Corruption & Prosperity

Jennifer Roback Morse:

"Why do some countries develop economically, while others stagnate? Both the World Bank Institute and economist Alvaro Vargas Llosa point to the problem of corruption as one of the major culprits. They say that the most important “natural resources” for economic development are not raw materials like oil or coal, but moral qualities like the even-handed enforcement of law, and the transparency of government."

Avian Flu

Silviu Dochia:

"I can't help but feel like the authorities are in denial and are focused on the wrong 'measures'. The avian flu virus cannot be contained at this stage: it will be with us for a long time. Import bans and border checks are symbolic, more than anything. And despite the statements of some politicians, we can do very little 'to ensure the virus does not mutate'. These are the facts. What is important is that we accept this reality and deal with it in a responsible way, by being as ready as we can for the likely emergency."

Any thoughts on whether this is crying "the sky is falling?" Do you think the "authorities" can handle the threat?

Cities: Economy-Ecology

Jason Potts writes about the economy of cities by borrowing from ecology:

"Economic theory has always had a blind-spot when it comes to geographical spatial analysis. Price signals go a long way in abstract, yet the connective or associative distribution of economic activities remains a not much studied and, indeed, barely recognized economic phenomena.

Yet it is the heart of economics. The spatial (or generic) distribution of activities is the current state of the order (or division of labor) of an economic system. Any economic order means an organizational distribution of who is doing what and in what order. While we may attribute localized clustering to spatial features of a place (e.g. a great port or beach) there is yet a stronger force of social gravitation.

I think this is good stuff for us to think about. Standard economic analysis is static, and yet, real economic activity is probably better described as a dynamic complex process that evolves.

He suggests borrowing the idea of ecological hotspots in which diversity is concentrated, and he speculates that we might see cities as hotspots where economic diversity is concentrated. I also like his suggestion that:

"So, evolutionary economists need to understand how cities form as economic attractors."

Miers Nomination

I was going to wait till the confirmation hearing to decide whether or not to support the latest Supreme Court nomination. Over the past week I've been leading toward the conclusion that I could not support Harriet Miers. Today's commentary by Robert Bork has led me to conclude that I don't support her nomination. Consider this from Robert Bork:

"But that is only part of the damage Mr. Bush has done. For the past 20 years conservatives have been articulating the philosophy of originalism, the only approach that can make judicial review democratically legitimate. Originalism simply means that the judge must discern from the relevant materials--debates at the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers, newspaper accounts of the time, debates in the state ratifying conventions, and the like--the principles the ratifiers understood themselves to be enacting. The remainder of the task is to apply those principles to unforeseen circumstances, a task that law performs all the time. Any philosophy that does not confine judges to the original understanding inevitably makes the Constitution the plaything of willful judges."

Should the confirmation hearing actually take place, I suppose I might change my mind. But I cannot support the nomination of anyone to the Court that does not understand, and is not clearly committed to, the principles people thought they were putting into our Constitution when the text or its amendments were ratified.

Iraq's Economic Prosperity

Michael Rubin

". . .Other indicators suggest Iraqis have confidence in their future. The Iraqi dinar, freely traded in international currency markets, is stable.

When people fear for their future, they invest in gold; jewelry and coins can be sewn into clothes and smuggled out of the country. When people feel confident about the future, they buy real estate. Property prices have skyrocketed across Iraq. Decrepit houses in Sadr City, a Shiite slum on the outskirts of Baghdad, can easily cost $45,000. Houses in upper-middle-class districts of Mansour and Karrada can cost more than 20 times that. Restaurant owners spend $50,000 on top-of-the-line generators to keep open despite the frequent blackouts. In September 2005, there were 40 buildings nine stories or higher under construction in the Kurdish city of Sulaymani. Five years ago, there were none. Iraqis would not spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on real estate if they weren't confident that the law would protect their investment.

Iraqis now see the fruit of foreign investment. A year ago in Baghdad, Iraqis drank water and soft drinks imported from neighboring countries. Now they drink water bottled in plants scattered across Iraq. When I visited a Baghdad computer shop last spring, my hosts handed me a can of Pepsi. An Arabic banner across the can announced, "The only soft drink manufactured in Iraq." In August, a Coca-Cola executive in Istanbul told me their Baghdad operation is not far behind. Turkish investors in partnership with local Iraqis have built modern hotels in Basra."

Do we have some "leading economic indicators" described here? For economic prosperity people need to expect that government will enforce property rights and contracts over time. Without such assurance, people see few incentives to invest because the returns to investment occur after a period of time. Rubin's commentary suggests that with people purchasing land and with foreign investors creating new investments, Iraq's future may well include an increasingly prosperous economy over time.

Nothing Short of Idiocy

We may admit that the director or the board of directors are people with superior ability, wise, and full of good intentions. But it would be nothing short of idiocy to assume that they are omniscient and infallible.

Ludwig von Mises

The Court, Commerce, & Water Pollution

The Supreme Court has decided to review whether pollution of intra-state waterways is within the Congressional power to regulation interstate commerce. In the Wall Street Journal [subscription required]:

"Wading into a long-running environmental dispute, the Supreme Court agreed to decide how deeply within state lines the federal Clean Water Act extends.

In a pair of cases from Michigan, developers contend Congress never intended to regulate 'intrastate' waterways with scant connection to interstate commerce. And even if it did, they say, Washington lacks the constitutional power to reach that far.

The implications are broad. 'We're talking about thousands of property owners nationwide,' covering as much as 100 million acres of intrastate wetlands in the contiguous U.S., said Reed Hopper, an attorney with the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation in Sacramento, Calif., which represents one of the developers." ["High Court to Examine the Scope Of Federal Clean-Water Laws , by Jess Bravin, WSJ, October 12, 2005, page A4]

Perhaps the reference to wetlands is more to the point, than is "intrastate waterways." The article in the Washington Post explains:

"At the center of the debate is the Clean Water Act, which gave the federal government authority to block pollution in 'the waters of the United States.' At the time, this jurisdiction was premised on Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce on the country's 'navigable' waters.

Since then, federal regulators have defined the waters of the United States to include wetlands that are 'adjacent' to larger rivers or lakes, but there is dispute about the precise meaning of 'adjacent.'

The government views wetlands as part of complex ecosystems that must be kept clean to preserve the quality of the larger bodies of water they ultimately feed. Property owners, supported by such organizations as the National Association of Home Builders, say this is a sweeping definition that rubs out state and local land-use authority -- and adds to the cost of housing.

The court tried to avoid the constitutional issue in 2001, when it ruled that the federal government could not use the Clean Water Act to protect small, shallow ponds in Illinois just because they are used by migratory birds.

In that case, the court implied that the Clean Water Act required a 'significant nexus' between a wetland and an 'adjacent' larger body of water. [Charles Lane, "Court to Rule on Federal Regulation of Wetlands, Washington Post, October 12, 2005, page A04]

It seems to me that wetlands within a state should not be considered within interstate commerce, and therefore Congress should not, constitutionally, have the power to regulate such land. I hope Roberts remembers his hapless toad.

Thomas Schelling

Here is a description of the work of one of yesterday's Nobel prize winners, which is offered in commentary in the WSJ [subscription required] by David Henderson:

"Mr. Schelling did it as a true social scientist, with spectacular results. His thinking led to important insights in areas ranging from nuclear war to figuring out meeting places to traffic jams to racial segregation. His specialty was understanding the behavior of real humans, and game theory was one of his tools. But it was just that -- a tool. Instead of using formal proofs, Mr. Schelling first told illustrative stories and then, using words, showed why things happened the way they did. As Harvard economist Richard Zeckhauser wrote in a 1989 tribute, Mr. Schelling 'stayed away from the Journal of Advanced Economic Gobbledygook' and played 'his games in a world that is richer than most game theory analyses.'"

Nomination

In the words of Alexander Hamilton, by way of commentary by Randy Barnett:

"To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. . . . He would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure."

Congressional Spending

WSJ.com:

"Congress's approval ratings have plummeted this year in almost direct inverse proportion to the amount of money it is spending. "

Could this possibly be true?

Nomination

Tom Sowell:

"When it comes to taking on a tough fight with the Senate Democrats over judicial nominations, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist doesn't really have a majority to lead. Before the President nominated anybody, before he even took the oath of office for his second term, Senator Arlen Specter was already warning him not to nominate anyone who would rile up the Senate. Later, Senator John Warner issued a similar warning. It sounded like a familiar Republican strategy of pre-emptive surrender.

Before we can judge how the President played his hand, we have to consider what kind of hand he had to play. It was a weak hand -- and the weakness was in the Republican Senators.

Does this mean that Harriet Miers will not be a good Supreme Court justice if she is confirmed? It is hard to imagine her being worse than Sandra Day O'Connor -- or even as bad."

I haven't decided yet what I think of the President's latest Court nomination. I do tend to agree with Sowell that the President has taken on many tough issues, and that the Senate Republicans have, as a group, shown less than stellar leadership.

On the other hand, being told that this nominee shares the President's judicial philosophy, that she is an evangelical Christian supported by people who seem only interested in 1 issue (Roe v. Wade), and that she is a strict constructionist, doesn't really lead me to support the nomination. I want to know what she says about: the commerce clause, the meaning of necessary and proper, whether the 9th and 10 amendments have been redacted from her copy of the Constitution, if she thinks Congress's power to tax is unconstrained, and if she thinks "public use" = "public purpose." If she doesn't have my understanding of the words in the Constitution, then the reasons I hear in the public debate in support of her nomination mean nothing to me.

Nomination

Captain's Quarters:

"If Miers' evangelicalism remains the top selling point of her nomination, then I submit that the White House has already lost this battle. They need to stop promoting religion as a legitimate point of consideration on Miers' curriculum vitae, or else conservative nominations will face nothing less than an Inquisition on every confirmation -- an Inquisition endorsed by the foolishness of short-sighted conservatives."

I don't really care if Meirs is an evangelical, a catholic, or an aethist. It seems to me that if her support for this nomination is based upon her commitment to a faith, and thereby upon a particular view of abortion, then her support is essentially no different from supporting a "living constitution" view of constitutional interpretation. The reason for my conclusion is that her support seems to be based upon her personal ethics that she will bring to the Court that abortion is wrong. This seems consistent with the "living constitution" approach that says judges are supposed to re-interpret the Constitution over time according to changes in cultural views. In contrast, I want someone on the Court who brings a commitment to the original meaning of the words that have been ratified as our Constitution. With that commitment, a justice might find that abortion is or is not constitutional based upon the meaning of the words, and not because the justice personally thinks abortion is right or wrong, or because the justice discovers that the culture thinks abortion is right or wrong.

Nomination

Peggy Noonan:

"No one can know how the experience of the court will affect someone--the detachment from life as lived by the proles, the respect you become used to, the Harvard Law Review clerks from famous families who are only too happy to pick up your dry cleaning and listen to the third recounting of your boring anecdote. Everyone wants you at dinner. You notice that you actually look quite good in black.

And you become used to the idea that unlike everyone else in the country, you have job security. A lifetime appointment. When people have complete professional security they are more likely in time to show a new conceit. I don't know why this is, but I think it's connected to the fact that they're lucky, and it seems somehow hardwired in human nature that when people are lucky they come to think they deserve it: It's not luck, it's virtue. And since it's virtue my decisions are by their nature virtuous. I think I'll decree that local government, if it judges it necessary, can throw grandma out of the house and turn her tired little neighborhood into a box store that will yield higher tax revenues. Thus Kelo v. New London is born. I decree it.

But I'm thinking of something different. I've noticed that we live in an age in which judges and legal minds seem to hide their own judicial philosophy from themselves. And that might explain why a Harriet Miers has reached the age of 60 and no one seems to know what she thinks.

Having a philosophy is all too big and too dangerous--paper trails, insights inadequately phrased that come back to haunt. Lawyers with ambition seem to have become adept at hiding their essential intellectual nature from themselves. They break the law down into tiny chewable pieces and endlessly masticate them. They break it down into small manageable bits, avoiding the larger abstractions. It's one of the reasons they're so boring.

In a highly politicized climate it's not really convenient for lawyers to know their deepest beliefs and convictions. Robert Bork, serious thinker and mature concluder, became bork, living verb. Or rather living past-tense verb.

Only reluctantly and only with time do lawyers now develop a philosophy. They get on the court, and reveal it to us day by day. And reveal it, one senses, to themselves."

So, why not have a public debate about a Court nominee's approach to understanding what the Constitution means? Get it all out in the open. Stop worrying about what a nominee might decide about a specific case. Let the Senators and the nominee tell the public what they think the commerce clause means, what public use means, what necessary and proper means. Let the chips fall where they may in the Senate. Perhaps the "We the People" attitude of the Constitution would be better served.

A Useful Definition of Rent Seeking

Richard Epstein offers an insightful definition of rent seeking:

". . .rent-seeking in politics is simply a statement that the sovereign, i.e., those fallible people with sovereign power, will allow the citizen a little something so long as he continues to make the sovereign better off."

He also has a helpful way of looking at our constitution:

". . .the issue of constitutionalism is just this: how to constrain the misconduct of the sovereign while allowing him the ncessary power to keep peace and good order."

I believe there was a period of time in the history of the Supreme Court's constitutional jurisprudence (a.k.a. "the economic due process era") that the Court's opinions often reflected an understanding of these insights. I believe "founders" like James Madison understood these insights as well. Perhaps the Senators in the confirmation hearings for Justices of the Supreme Court could ask whether or not nominees understand these insights still today?

Well, perhaps not. After all, the fallible people with sovereign power, are some of the same people who are asking the questions. Silly me.

Pigs Can't Fly

Russell Roberts:

"Maybe there is good reason for the feds to step in here or there or everywhere. But how does that reason look in reality? How does it work in practice? If implementation requires flying pigs, maybe there isn't a good reason after all.

Here is what I tell my children. In downtown Wahsington, DC, we keep a document under glass called the Constitution. You should know that we had a Constitution to keep government from being too powerful and from doing things that are better left to us to do for ourselves. Maybe someday we will take it out from under the glass and it will be alive again. Not alive the way that most people mean it. By alive, they mean dead. They mean to have a Constitution so flexible that it can stand for nothing. But someday, maybe, it can be alive in the way that it once was, written for a world where pigs are not presumed to fly."

A Case for Immigration

Arnold Kling:

". . . . One reason that I am pro-immigrant is that I think that many immigrants -- and certainly the immigrants I most want to encourage -- are highly appreciative of the American system. Coming from countries where government controls more of the economy and where public officials are more corrupt, they are often grateful for the opportunities that our economy provides.

In contrast, as the school year begins, my daughter in high school is being inundated with the typical anti-American propaganda of the Left. She is bombarded with lessons claiming that America 'controls' too much of the world's wealth, that we are racist and uncaring, that we spoil the environment, etc.

So here is what I propose. Let all of the teachers, professors, journalists, celebrities and others who espouse disgust with America be encouraged to emigrate. And let immigrants take their places."

Very interesting, eh?

Louisiana's Looters

In the Washington Post:

"THE NATION is at war. It is mired in debt. It has been hit by floods and hurricanes. In the face of this adversity, congressional leaders have rightly dropped proposals for yet more tax cuts, and some have suggested removing the pork from the recently passed transportation bill. But this spirit of forbearance has not touched the Louisiana congressional delegation. The state's representatives have come up with a request for $250 billion in federal reconstruction funds for Louisiana alone -- more than $50,000 per person in the state. This money would come on top of payouts from businesses, national charities and insurers. And it would come on top of the $62.3 billion that Congress has already appropriated for emergency relief.

Like looters who seize six televisions when their homes have room for only two, the Louisiana legislators are out to grab more federal cash than they could possibly spend usefully. For example, their bill demands $7 billion for rebuilding evacuation and energy supply routes, but it also demands a separate $5 billion for road building and makes no mention of the $3.1 billion already awarded to the state in the recent transportation legislation. The bill demands $50 billion in community development block grants, partly to get small businesses going, but it also demands $150 million for a small-business loan fund plus generous business tax breaks. The bill even asks for $35 million for seafood marketing and $25 million for a sugar-cane research laboratory. This is the equivalent of New York responding to the attacks on the World Trade Center by insisting upon a federally financed stadium in Brooklyn."

Perhaps this is a clear illustration of the incentives faced by those in legislatures. What do legislatures do? They spend money. They make more laws.

When does "disaster relief" become just another example of "rent seeking?"

Porkbusters

What an interesting website. If you ever want to understand just how large the federal government pork barrel was, then this might be the place to start looking.

Scalia on Government Arts

Scalia:

"Scalia said Thursday he believes the government did not violate the First Amendment in the case of the Serrano photo - it did not pass any law to throw the 'modern day DaVinci' into jail nor did it stop him from displaying his art, he said.

'I can truly understand the discomfort with government making artistic choices, but the only remedy is to get government out of funding,' he told the audience."

Let's review the relevant Constitutional language:

"Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech. . ." (1st Amendment).

Justice Scalia argues that when government spends money it can spend it on any art it wants, and that, what government cannot constitutionally do is make a law that would constrain what someone else wants to say through his or her art.

It seems to me this is the plain meaning of the language we find in our Constitution. What do you think?

Senator Salazar: Basic Function of Government

US Senator Ken Salazar:

"The basic function of the federal government is to respond to national disasters just like Hurricane Katrina."

What is this all about? The BASIC FUNCTION of the federal government is to respond to national disasters?

Maybe we need to look closely at the language spoken by politicians. I suppose by "federal government" he could mean the combined system of state, local, and national government. If so, then perhaps we could sign on to this assertion. On the other hand, neither the President nor the Congress is responsible for the entire system of state, local, and national government. I suspect Senator Salazar is really saying he thinks the basic function of our national government, and therefore of Congress, is to respond to national disasters. And, this assertion I think is false. I suggest the basic function of the federal government is "to provide for the common Defense" (to borrow a phrase from the Constitution). I've read Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution to no avail. I do not find there that Congress has the power to respond to disasters resulting from hurricanes.

And, that brings up a second interesting aspect of Senator Salazar's assertion. Note that he uses the term NATIONAL DISASTER, and not the term NATURAL DISASTER. Of course, a hurricane can result in a natural disaster, but I'm not really clear on why we have seen a national disaster. Using the word "national" seems to suggest damage that is nation wide. The hurricane leads to a great many individual disasters because of damaged property and lost lives. It even causes damage to city and state government infrastructure and services. But, it seems to me this is really not accurately discribed as "national." In contrast, the attacks of 9/11 were attacks on this nation of citizens, and is truly a NATIONAL disaster. Of course, responding to such national disasters does seem to be the basic function of our national government. I think it is stretching way too far to think the basic function of our national government is to respond to natural disasters.

Scientism

The Austrian Economists :

"The effort by economists to ape the scientific methodology of the natural sciences is one of the most intellectually dangerous ideas of the 20th century. Unfortunately, despite the rise in the 1980s and 1990s of serious philosophical challenges to the hegemony of scientism, economists in the 21st century seems to be moving along unaffected by this critique. At least in the 1940s and 1950s, economists sought philosophical justification for their practice of model and measure. Now-a-days, the focus is on conventionalism. The only justification is that economists do what other economists do, and what they do is build models and test for statistical significance."

There is probably more than a little truth in this, don't you agree?

Economics & Economic Literacy

Russell Roberts:

"Too many economics classes at the undergraduate level are a dumbed-down version of graduate economics, which in turn is often a dumbed-down version of physics. Kidding about the physics, but I do think economics over the last 25 years has added what is thought to be rigor, in hopes of being more like the respected physical sciences, with little gain in understanding of the real world.

Rather than being like physics, economics is more like biology, or better, ecology. Too often the economy is viewed as an engine or some other linear set of relationships, where it is presumed that by pushing lever A, I can move object B. I would argue that the economy is better understood as an ecosystem, a complex system of interactions where order emerges rather than being imposed from above."

The models we teach as economics to undergraduates do indeed encourage students and even other economists to see the economy as a machine with controls that government can manage if only we economists provide the necessary information. Indeed, I agree the economy would be better understood as a dynamic system with spontaneous order and emergent novelty. Unfortunately, none of our textbooks look like this.

"The other problem I think we have in reaching people is that some special interests have a vested interest in spreading economic misinformation. So labor unions, for example, encourage people to believe that Wal-Mart is driving down wages or that manufacturing is the key to economic growth in America. I find it interesting that people don't view these arguments more skeptically, the same way they would view any self-interested argument. I don't know whether people presume that unions are altruistic or whether such arguments successfully tap into the reader's or listener's already-existing worldview. The proliferation of bad economics from folks who profit from ignorance is a big challenge."

Very well put. I'm not optimistic since I have good reasons to assume that voters are rationally ignorant.

Civilization Advances

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

Alfred Whitehead

I'm wondering how government would help in advancing civilization?

Kelo on Kelo

Susette Kelo:

"Today, I am scheduled to testify before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on eminent domain abuse. I sincerely hope Congress will do what judges and local legislators so far have failed to do for me and for thousands of others across the nation: protect our homes under a plain reading of the U.S. Constitution, which says government may only take private property for a 'public use.' "

It just doesn't seem like that language is difficult to understand, eh?

This is how Susette see the case:

Why did the City and the New London Development Corp. (NLDC) want to kick us out? To make way for up-scale condos and other private developments that could bring in more taxes to the city and possibly more jobs. The poor and middle class had to make way for the rich and politically connected.

If the government was taking our property for a road or firehouse, I would be prepared to sell without a fight. But the government should not be able to force me to sell my home so someone else can enjoy my view. NLDC wants my land to market to a developer for projects to "complement" our area's new Pfizer facility. This is for private profit, not public use.

Her view seems about right to me.

Like my neighbors up the street, I worked hard (in my case, at up to three jobs at a time) to pay for my home. And we should not be forced out by our own government simply because someone else who carries more political clout wants the land for a nonpublic use. Isn't that what the courts, Congress and the Constitution are supposed to protect us from?

As I sat there in the U.S. Supreme Court back in February and listened to the justices hear my case, I was so disappointed their very first question and first concern was for the power of government rather than the rights of citizens.

WOW! It seem to me, that if the Judicial branch of government doesn't think it's first priority is to protect individuals from government, then we might just as well not have a Judicial branch of government. The logic of getting elected means that neither the Legislative branch, nor the Executive branch, will see incentives to protect individuals from government.

Sadly, she might be right about the following as well:

In many ways, my neighbors and I are the victims of legislators, lawyers and judges who believe it is somehow a sign of intelligence to make language that clearly means one thing mean something exactly the opposite: "Public use" now means private use; judges don't judge but instead let legislators decide whether they're violating the Constitution. There is nothing intelligent about misusing language in this way to take away people's homes and their rights.

On the other hand, perhaps it is even worse than this. Could it be that far too many learned people no longer truly value the liberty of the individual, and value instead finding ways to grab hold of the coercive power of government. I don't know, could be I'm still just in a bad mood.

The Cynical Optimist

Bryan Caplan:

"I've thought of myself as a cynic since junior high at the latest. But I've also long considered myself an optimist. Is it possible to be both? At least as I use the terms, it is.

In large part, I think of cynicism as the view that the average quality of human beings and the world is a lot lower than it could and ought to be. Professors should be passionate about answering the Big Questions of their fields, but most of them are boring careerists. Movies and tv ought to be creative and thoughtful, but most of it is derivative claptrap. And so on.

So how can I think this and remain an optimist? Because optimism, as I practice it anyway, is an attitude and a strategy, not a description of the world. As an optimist, I try not to dwell on boring careerists and derivative claptrap. Instead, I seek out the exceptions to the rule and appreciate what I find. Just because the average is low doesn't mean that you can't personally consume high quality. And even when the quality I consume is far from ideal, I try to mentally change the subject to another dimension where I have blessings to count."

I think I might be a cynical optimist.

Senators On Judiciary

Eric Jaffe:

"I am struck, watching the hearings, at the complete disconnect between the criticisms of many of those opposing Judge Roberts and a cogent view of the role of the courts. It seems that many of the criticisms are policy based — x or y rulings would lead to bad RESULTS — and make no reference whatsoever regarding whether such results are in fact the correct interpretation of the law (or the Constitution). Judge Roberts's repeated point was that he was committed to the law, and not to a political agenda, yet most of the criticism seems to be that he lacks a particular favored agenda on things like civil rights, the environment, etc. But certainly the critics cannot have it both ways, pissing and moaning that he might reject a substantive conclusion that they favor, yet demand that he not bring his personal views into the judging process. Unless they think that he will misinterpret the law in a way that follows his allegedly retrograde views and opposes their more 'enlightened' views, it seems that their criticism should be about the laws as written, or the Constitution itself, and not about the jurist who interprets them faithfully. Demanding a Justice that would distort the laws to serve a particular end, be it civil rights, the environment, or what have you, is basically demanding a jurist who would be dishonest and violate his oath of office."

Law Professor Disapproval

Eric Jaffe:

"I see that in the hearings Charles Fried makes a point similar to mine. August company for me, less so for him. The professors complaining about Judge Roberts continue to fall into the same trap. The notion that the courts should be a beacon for some particular substantive agenda rather than simply for scrupulous adherence to the law and the Constitution is troubling, to say the least."

Could it be that the complaining professors, and throw in complaining Senators, simply don't like the very idea of constitutional government?

Is there a meaningful idea of constitutional government if there is a "living constitution" as this term is defined today?

An Honest Constitutional Republic

With the recent Roberts confirmation hearings, and given that I'm teaching my course in Constitution and the Economy this semester, I've been thinking about the Constitution a lot lately.

I guess I make 2 assumptions or perhaps accept 2 principles: (1) a person should be able to read and understand our written Constitution without being a constitutional scholar or an attorney practicing constitutional law, and (2) it is better, other things constant, to be more honest, rather than less honest, with our constitutional system of government.

I find it hard to match the written words in our Constitution, as published, with our system of government today.

I wonder what words we would write down for our Constitution today, assuming that we wanted it to summarize, in a simple way, what the Supreme Court thinks it means? I suppose this is a bit like Barnett's idea of the "lost constitution" . But, I think it would be of great value to have an honest constitutional republic, and therefore, to consider how we would have to rewrite the words in our Constitution to be consistent with the real constitution, i.e., with the constitution as it is viewed by the Supreme Court today.

I want to suggest language for some clauses that would have to be included in a constitution that honestly reflected our constitutional system of government today. This is just my suggestion for a first draft, if you will, of some of the clauses:

A. The Supreme Court shall have the power to amend the written words of the Constitution by simple majority vote.

B. Congress and State governments shall have the police power.

C. Congress shall have the power to regulate any aspect of our individual lives, and this includes the power to prohibit behavior.

D. Congress shall have the power to tax income, wealth, and any form of economic activity. It shall have the power to impose taxes differentially among the citizens.

E. Congress shall have the power to subsidize any aspect of our lives, and to do so differentially among the citizens.

F. Congress and State governments shall have the power to grant special privileges and immunities differentially among the citizens.

G. Congress shall have the power to own property. Congress owns the air and the wildlife of the country, and may take food or shelter for its wildlife from individuals without compensation.

H. Any level of government shall have the power to take private property for any public purpose, and this includes the power to take private property for private ownerhip by others. This power to take private property requires compensation be paid by government, but full compensation is not required for use of this power.

I. The powers of Congress and of the States are constrained by the following:

1. There must be a strict separation between government and religion.
2. No law may be made abridging the freedom of speech in the areas of politics and certain forms of art.
3. No law shall be made abridging an individual's right to privacy.
4. No law shall be made impairing the obligation of contracts, except on the expressed written agreement of a majority of the Justices of the Supreme Court.
5. No law shall be made that deny's equal protection of the laws to every person, except on the expressed written agreement of a majority of the Justices of the Supreme Court.

J. There are no individual rights retained by the people, nor are there powers specifically reserved to the states. If at some time in the future, Congress shall want to undertake an activity which has not been covered specifically by this Constitution, then Congress shall have the general power to tax and spend as it sees fit, unless a majority of the Justices of the Supreme Court disagrees.

Could be I'm just in a bad mood this morning.

How do you think our Constitution would have to be rewritten so that we wouldn't have to be constitutional scholars to know what it says?

Kopel, Reynolds, & Congress on Commerce

Dave Kopel and Glenn Reynolds:

"The president's moral views on cloning are not unreasonable — though any time you find yourself agreeing with Luddites like Jeremy Rifkin and Kirkpatrick Sale is probably a good time to reconsider whether you're right. But whether or not cloning research is a bad idea, the president needs to spend a lot more time thinking about whether it's something that the federal government even has the power to ban.

The federal government, as the president has reminded us, is a government of limited powers, powers that are enumerated in the Constitution. And nothing in the Constitution grants the federal government the power to ban research into cloning, or to suppress other types of science.

The fact that Congress has the power to raise armies, enact bankruptcy laws, and create a Postal Service obviously doesn't give Congress the power to ban scientific research. There's only one enumerated power of Congress for which even a bad-faith argument can be made in favor of congressional power. The Constitution grants Congress power "to regulate Commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian Tribes" (Art. I, sec. 8, cl. 3). From the 1960s through the 1980s, the Supreme Court interpreted this congressional power to regulate some types of commerce as congressional power to regulate anything, anytime, anywhere."

I think this view of the interstate commerce power of Congress makes sense. In view of many of the questions and statements made by Senators in the Roberts hearing this week, I wonder what those in Congress think about the commerce clause. Chief Justice Marshall wrote for the Court in the first case to interpret the Commerce Clause that when the Constitution says that Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce this also means that there are some areas of economic activity that Congress does not have the power to regulate. I wonder what those in Congress would include on a list of those areas of economic activity Congress does not have the power to regulate?

Last night I heard a Senator say on television something like (I'm paraphrasing): "Roberts says we cannot regulate manufacturing. Nobody else says that." So, I take that to mean that at least this Senator thinks this is true: manufacturing = interstate commerce. If manufacturing is interstate commerce, then what aspects of economic activity cannot be regulated by Congress? Can anybody suggest a list of things Congress cannot do? What do you think members of Congress would put on this list?

FIRE - First Amendment and Academic Freedom Triumph at Brooklyn College

"BROOKLYN, N.Y., September 14, 2005—In a swift and crucial victory for freedom of speech and academic freedom, Brooklyn College has affirmed that prominent professor KC Johnson will not be subjected to an unconstitutional inquisition into his views. The college surrendered mere days after the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) came to Johnson’s public defense.

Since May of this year, Johnson has been speaking out against the use of “dispositions” theory by Brooklyn College’s School of Education (SOE). Since this theory requires that education students’ commitment to “social justice” be evaluated along with academic performance, Johnson fears its use constitutes an ideological litmus test and invites viewpoint discrimination.

In response to Johnson’s constitutionally protected statements, dozens of SOE professors demanded in a June 20 letter that he cease his “attacks.” Most chillingly, it was also alleged at an “emergency academic freedom meeting” of the faculty union that Johnson would face an official investigation by an “Integrity Committee.”

Johnson never received any notice of such an investigation, nor did the administration confirm or deny its existence. Since he faced a similar secret investigation during a 2002 tenure dispute—and the administration dissolved the student government last fall for passing a resolution it did not like—he was not overly confident that his freedom of speech would be protected.

“Professors certainly have a right to disagree about pedagogy,” noted David French, president of FIRE. “It would have been both illegal and immoral for Brooklyn College to allow KC Johnson to face another official inquisition. Thankfully, this dire outcome has been averted.”"

Wow, basing a student's achievement in her major on her commitment to social justice. I'm kind of disappointed to hear there is a constitutionally protected right to speak out against such a practice. I would like to be able to evaluate my students' commitment to individual liberty, or even to economic efficiency.

Seriously, I'm glad FIRE exists.

The Numbers are Broken

Russell Roberts:

"I know, there are lots of complications to this argument, lots of caveats and lots of footnotes. But the bottom line is that to correctly account for the impact of housing prices on my well-being you would have to take account of depreciation and taxes and maintenance and capital gains and expected capital gains. Too complicated. You can't leave housing out of the index. That would make the index meaningless. But the index as currently estimated is a poor measure for deflating my salary and particularly poor when housing prices and rental rates are rising steadily."

The numbers may be "broken." Perhaps there is another possibility. Perhaps such numbers can't tell us much that is worthwhile and accurate in general. It certainty seems that the numbers cannot tell us the things many people are saying the numbers tell us.

Ann Althouse On Senator Feinstein

Ann Althouse:

"Here's the part I heard in the car that lowered my opinion of Feinstein:

Commerce clause, the 14th Amendment, Lopez, which began a chain of about 36 cases, striking down major pieces of legislation. It's not easy to get a bill passed here. I mean, there are hearings, there are discussions, there are markups, there's one house, there's another house, there's a president.

It goes through most of the time scrubbed pretty good before it gets to the president.

Gun-free schools -- struck down in 1995, an impermissible use of the commerce clause.

'96, Moses Lake, Washington -- shooting in a school. '97, Bethel, Alaska, principal and one student killed. '97, Pearl, Mississippi, two students killed and seven wounded by a 16-year old. 1997, West Paducah, three students killed, five wounded.

Stamps, Arkansas, two students wounded. Jonesboro, '98, four students, one teacher killed; 10 others wounded outside West Side Middle School. Edinboro, Pennsylvania, one teacher killed, two students.

And on and on and on -- an impermissible use of the commerce clause to prohibit possession of a weapon in schools.

Now, at what point does crime influence commerce?

Why did I dislike that so much? Because there is a complete disconnect between the legal question, the scope of the Commerce Clause, and the rhetorical listing of victims of violence. Is the listener not supposed to notice that there are state laws against murder that don't prevent all murders? Why would a federal law against gun possession have been more effective? Or is one of Congress's enumerated powers the power to show it cares?"

Yes, I think that is one of Congress's enumerated powers, isn't it? She comments on most of the rest of Senators, and I thought it was fun. You might want to read all of it.

Senator Feinstein

Senator Feinstein:

"In fact, over the past decade, the Rehnquist court has weakened or invalidated more than three dozen federal statutes. Almost a third of these decisions were based on the commerce clause and the Fourteenth Amendment. FEINSTEIN: If you, Judge Roberts, subscribe the Rehnquist court’s restrictive interpretation of Congress’s ability to legislate, the impact could be enormous. It would severely restrict the ability of a Congress to tackle nationwide issues that the American people have actually elected us to address."

I hope Justice Roberts is at least like Justice Rehnquist, and I will be quite happy if he is more like Justice Thomas.

Justice Roberts

Justice Roberts:

"Mr. Chairman, when I worked in the Department of Justice, in the office of the solicitor general, it was my job to argue cases for the United States before the Supreme court.

I always found it very moving to stand before the justices and say, I speak for my country.

But it was after I left the department and began arguing cases against the United States that I fully appreciated the importance of the Supreme Court and our constitutional system.

Here was the United States, the most powerful entity in the world, aligned against my client. And, yet, all I had to do was convince the court that I was right on the law and the government was wrong and all that power and might would recede in deference to the rule of law.

That is a remarkable thing.

It is what we mean when we say that we are a government of laws and not of men. It is that rule of law that protects the rights and liberties of all Americans. It is the envy of the world. Because without the rule of law, any rights are meaningless.

President Ronald Reagan used to speak of the Soviet constitution, and he noted that it purported to grant wonderful rights of all sorts to people. But those rights were empty promises, because that system did not have an independent judiciary to uphold the rule of law and enforce those rights. We do, because of the wisdom of our founders and the sacrifices of our heroes over the generations to make their vision a reality."

Senator Landrieu On New Orleans

Senator Landrieu interviewed yesterday:

"WALLACE: Senator Landrieu, I want to ask you — and I'll ask you both, but let me start with you — about the local response.

Was it incompetent and insulting for Mayor Ray Nagin to order a mandatory evacuation, but then to leave buses — and we have a picture of them — hundreds of buses idle, so that they could be flooded, instead of using them to get people out.

LANDRIEU: Well, Chris, I was there, as you know, through the whole ordeal with state and local officials, and was right there with Louisiana Democrats and Republicans, city council members, police chiefs, mayors, the governors, and could watch what Haley Barbour was doing and Governor Riley in Alabama.

I am not going to level criticism at the local level. These people did...

WALLACE: But I'd like you to answer, if you could, this one specific question.

LANDRIEU: Well, I will. I will answer it. I am not going to level criticism at local and state officials. Mayor Nagin and most mayors in this country have a hard time getting their people to work on a sunny day, let alone getting them out of the city in front of a hurricane. And it's because this administration and administrations before them do not understand the difficulties that mayors — whether they are in Orlando, Miami, or New Orleans — face.

(CROSSTALK)

LANDRIEU: In other words, this administration did not believe in mass transit. They won't even get people to work on a sunny day, let alone getting them out...

WALLACE: But Senator, there were hundreds of buses sitting in that parking lot. Can I just ask the question?

LANDRIEU: You can, but let me finish, if I could, please.

(CROSSTALK)

WALLACE: Well, look in the picture here. There were hundreds of buses in parking lots. The city and the state.

LANDRIEU: That is underwater. Those...

WALLACE: It wasn't underwater before the...

LANDRIEU: Those buses were underwater. Those buses...

WALLACE: They weren't underwater on Saturday; they weren't underwater on Sunday.

LANDRIEU: We had two catastrophes. We had a hurricane and then we had a levee break. When the levee broke, not only did New Orleans go underwater, but St. Bernard when underwater and St. Tammany Parish went underwater.

WALLACE: But they weren't underwater on Sunday.

LANDRIEU: And Plaquemines went underwater. And because the mayor evacuated the city, we had the best evacuation between Haley Barbour and Kathleen Blanco of any evacuation I've seen. I'm 50 years old; I've never seen one any better.

WALLACE: But there were a hundred thousand people left in the city.

LANDRIEU: They did a hundred thousand people left in the city because this federal government won't support cities to evacuate people, whether it's from earthquakes, tornadoes, or hurricanes. And that's the truth.

And that will come out in the hearing."

Well. . . .Does this sound like a politician, or what?

Global Warming & The Precautionary Principle

Jordan Ballor:

"Vernon L. Smith, a Nobel laureate and professor of economics and law at George Mason University, recognizes the economic concerns that are often overlooked. He writes, “If we ignore this rule of optimality and begin abatement now for damages caused by emissions after 100 years, we leave our descendants with fewer resources - 100 years of return on the abatement costs not incurred - to devote to subsequent damage control. The critical oversight here is the failure to respect opportunity cost. Each generation must be responsible for the future effect of that generation’s emission damage. Earlier generations have the responsibility of leaving subsequent generations a capital stock that has not been diminished by incurring premature abatement costs.”

Often those arguing in favor of global warming policies today will make reference to "the precautionary principle," which seems to be an idea that amounts to "we shouldn't take chances with the future." Support for global warming policies today is also argued on the grounds that the present generation has obligations of justice to future generations. It seems to me that Vernon Smith's analysis suggests that those wanting government policies toward global warming today are quite possibly misguided in terms of those specific concerns. Would you agree?

Here is another thought. It seems to me that while the precautionary principle sounds reasonable, it doesn't really tell us very much at all. Specifically, while it suggests we should take precautions against a risk that a harmful event will occur in the future, it doesn't give us any basis for deciding what is a sufficient amount of precaution. On the other hand, it seems to me that Vernon Smith's approach leads us to think directly about that very question. Would you agree?

On Congress, Katrina, & Self-Investigations

John Tierney:

"At last there is a light in the darkness. Washington was slow to respond to Katrina's victims, but now Congress has finally sprung into action. It has bravely promised to investigate the situation.

Unfortunately, the members haven't figured out exactly how, because Democrats want it to be done by outsiders. They say the Republicans will turn it into a cover-up. But why does that bother the Democrats so much? Shouldn't members of both parties want to cover this up?

Suppose, for instance, investigators try to find out who had the brilliant idea of putting the Federal Emergency Management Agency inside a new department with an organizational chart modeled on the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture and Food Economy. One Democrat, Hillary Clinton, did question whether FEMA would suffer, but the idea was originally championed by her colleagues, particularly Joe Lieberman.

Mr. Lieberman joined Mrs. Clinton this week in calling for a "re-examination" of FEMA's status, but he was against independence before he was for it. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he helped lead the charge to create the Department of Homeland Security.

Republicans first resisted, as the Democratic National Committee pointed out during the presidential campaign last year. Its radio advertisement declared: "John Kerry fought to establish the Department of Homeland Security. George Bush opposed it for almost a year after 9/11. . . . ."

Very interesting. I do wonder what Congressional investigations will reveal about government and hurricanes. Probably not much to implicate themselves I suppose. Oh, I do look forward to hearing what our Congress discovers.

Read the whole piece. I suspect you will gain greater insight by reading Tierney on this than you will later from the investigations.

Adam Smith On Policy

". . . .in the great chess board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it."

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Red Cross Out - Refugees In

Glenn Reynolds:

"So while the Red Cross was being kept out of New Orleans, refugees were being kept in."

Looks like local government had police block a dry route out of New Orleans, while state government kept Red Cross, and I've also heard the Salvation Army, out of New Orleans and thereby away from those in need.

Money Flowed to Questionable Projects

Washington Post:

"In Katrina's wake, Louisiana politicians and other critics have complained about paltry funding for the Army Corps in general and Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five years of President Bush's administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large.

Much of that Louisiana money was spent to try to keep low-lying New Orleans dry. But hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated water projects demanded by the state's congressional delegation and approved by the Corps, often after economic analyses that turned out to be inaccurate. Despite a series of independent investigations criticizing Army Corps construction projects as wasteful pork-barrel spending, Louisiana's representatives have kept bringing home the bacon.

For example, after a $194 million deepening project for the Port of Iberia flunked a Corps cost-benefit analysis, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) tucked language into an emergency Iraq spending bill ordering the agency to redo its calculations. The Corps also spends tens of millions of dollars a year dredging little-used waterways such as the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the Atchafalaya River and the Red River -- now known as the J. Bennett Johnston Waterway, in honor of the project's congressional godfather -- for barge traffic that is less than forecast."

Hmmmm. Sounds like something one would expect after studying Public Choice, eh?

Hurricane Lessons

Glenn Reynolds has posted on lessons learned already from the hurricane experience in New Orleans. I think it is a must read.

Firefighters & FEMA

Salt Lake Tribune:

"'It's a misallocation of resources. Completely,' said the Texas firefighter.
'It's just an under-utilization of very talented people,' said South Salt Lake Fire Chief Steve Foote"

Using firefighters to be community relations officers? Huh? Is this the very definition of "inefficiency?"

But, isn't it great to see these firefighters come from all across the country to do what they are committed to, i.e. serving the public?

Emergent Prices

Russell Roberts:

"We teach our students that prices are set by supply and demand. But this logic is exactly backwards. Supply and demand are concepts economists invented to help us understand prices. The emergence of prices from the tendency of human beings to truck, barter and exchange caused the invention of supply and demand as a way for our brains to organize our thinking about the orderliness of prices and the behavior such order makes possible."

This is worth some thought. Check out the essay he links to as well.

Anatomy of a Flood: 3 Deadly Waves

From the Wall Street Journal [subscription required]:

"On Aug. 29, as Hurricane Katrina brought chaos to this city, three massive waves of water poured largely unseen into the eastern section of town and neighboring St. Bernard Parish.

One surged west, off a churning Lake Borgne. Another came across from Lake Pontchartrain in the north. That sent a steel barge ramming through the Industrial Canal, a major shipping artery that cuts north to south through the city, possibly scything a breach that became 500 feet long, letting waters pour into nearby neighborhoods.

The waves inundated the mostly working-class eastern districts, home to 160,000 people. In some places, the water rose as fast as a foot per minute, survivors say.

Until now, the world's attention has focused on the levee system protecting the city's central districts, and on the near-anarchy in the storm's aftermath. But a complete reckoning of the damage and death toll will likely focus on an entirely different event, hitherto overlooked: the devastating swamping of the eastern sections of New Orleans, hours before the central flooding began. The final tallying of the dead across the city will be substantially dictated by how many residents of these neighborhoods got out alive."

So, I think it is 9 days after the hurricane, and it is reported in the news that there were events during the hurricane itself that led to flooding parts of New Orleans. Previously, the story was that flooding resulted after the hurricane. I wonder if the politicians and pundits who are pointing fingers of blame, might not want to adopt a more cautious attitude? If the events described in this news article are accurately portrayed, then perhaps hindsight will point to a history of inadequate government action on every level and for many years?

Disasters & Governments II

Hugh Hewitt has a tutorial on the meaning of our federal system of government vis a vis disasters.

Disasters & Governments

Bob Williams has an interesting commentary in today's Wall Street Journal [subscription required]:

"Mayor Nagin was responsible for giving the order for mandatory evacuation and supervising the actual evacuation: His office of Emergency Preparedness (not the federal government) must coordinate with the state on elements of evacuation and assist in directing the transportation of evacuees to staging areas. Mayor Nagin had to be encouraged by the governor to contact the National Hurricane Center before he finally, belatedly, issued the order for mandatory evacuation. And sadly, it apparently took a personal call from the president to urge the governor to order the mandatory evacuation.

The city's evacuation plan states: 'The city of New Orleans will utilize all available resources to quickly and safely evacuate threatened areas.' But even though the city has enough school and transit buses to evacuate 12,000 citizens per fleet run, the mayor did not use them. To compound the problem, the buses were not moved to high ground and were flooded. The plan also states that 'special arrangements will be made to evacuate persons unable to transport themselves or who require specific lifesaving assistance. Additional personnel will be recruited to assist in evacuation procedures as needed.' This was not done.

The evacuation plan warned that 'if an evacuation order is issued without the mechanisms needed to disseminate the information to the affected persons, then we face the possibility of having large numbers of people either stranded and left to the mercy of a storm, or left in an area impacted by toxic materials.' That is precisely what happened because of the mayor's failure.

Instead of evacuating the people, the mayor ordered the refugees to the Superdome and Convention Center without adequate security and no provisions for food, water and sanitary conditions. As a result people died, and there was even rape committed, in these facilities. Mayor Nagin failed in his responsibility to provide public safety and to manage the orderly evacuation of the citizens of New Orleans. Now he wants to blame Gov. Blanco and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In an emergency the first requirement is for the city's emergency center to be linked to the state emergency operations center. This was not done.

The federal government does not have the authority to intervene in a state emergency without the request of a governor. President Bush declared an emergency prior to Katrina hitting New Orleans, so the only action needed for federal assistance was for Gov. Blanco to request the specific type of assistance she needed. She failed to send a timely request for specific aid.

In addition, unlike the governors of New York, Oklahoma and California in past disasters, Gov. Blanco failed to take charge of the situation and ensure that the state emergency operation facility was in constant contact with Mayor Nagin and FEMA. It is likely that thousands of people died because of the failure of Gov. Blanco to implement the state plan, which mentions the possible need to evacuate up to one million people. The plan clearly gives the governor the authority for declaring an emergency, sending in state resources to the disaster area and requesting necessary federal assistance.

State legislators and governors nationwide need to update their contingency plans and the operation procedures for state emergency centers. Hurricane Katrina had been forecast for days, but that will not always be the case with a disaster (think of terrorist attacks). It must be made clear that the governor and locally elected officials are in charge of the 'first response.'

I am not attempting to excuse some of the delays in FEMA's response. Congress and the president need to take corrective action there, also. However, if citizens expect FEMA to be a first responder to terrorist attacks or other local emergencies (earthquakes, forest fires, volcanoes), they will be disappointed. The federal government's role is to offer aid upon request."

Now I'm a long way from the hurricane damaged region of the country, and I know it can be quite a challenge to discern what is true and what is false just by watching news on television, so I don't want to point too many fingers at government officials. I do find Mr. Williams' commentary credible. Our system of political economy is a federal system. State and local government, not the national government, has the police power. There are police departments and fire departments at every local level of government. So, my intuition is that in our system it is states and local governments that are responsible for public safety after a natural disaster such as a hurricane. And, I think this is as it should be.

So, I guess I'm thinking that all the harping on the poor federal response by specific politicians, at all levels of government (national, state, and local), is about par for the course. When it comes to government, what are the people in government best at, especially if they are people who are elected to office?

There are a few other tidbits I find interesting in the aftermath of Katrina:

-- I've heard that the Louisiana Constitution does not allow the governor to declare martial law.

-- The President cannot call out or order the National Guard, unless the National Guard forces are first "federalized."

-- FEMA has been incorporated into a much larger bureaurcracy with the formation of the Department of Homeland Security, and therefore, it's response may be significantly slower now than in the past.

-- While the President has committed military personnel to the New Orleans area, it is the National Guard which is still under the direction of the state's governor which is responsible right now for policing the city.

Whether the national, state, and local governments could have done better in the aftermath of the hurricane, it seems to me that what we have witnessed is really not far from what we should expect from government following a disasterous event.

Why Most Published Research Findings are False

Alex Tabborak:

"Ioannidis says most published research findings are false. This is plausible in his field of medicine where it is easy to imagine that there are more than 800 false hypotheses out of 1000. In medicine, there is hardly any theory to exclude a hypothesis from being tested. Want to avoid colon cancer? Let's see if an apple a day keeps the doctor away. No? What about a serving of bananas? Let's try vitamin C and don't forget red wine. Studies in medicine also have notoriously small sample sizes. Lots of studies that make the NYTimes involve less than 50 people - that reduces the probability that you will accept a true hypothesis and raises the probability that the typical study is false.

So economics does ok on the main factors in the diagram but there are other effects which also reduce the probability the typical result is true and economics has no advantages on these - see the extension.

Sadly, things get really bad when lots of researchers are chasing the same set of hypotheses. Indeed, the larger the number of researchers the more likely the average result is to be false!"

I think this post at Marginal Revolution is very enlightening.

Consider the implications for public policy decision-making. There are many issues of public policy these days that involve scientific studies and understanding. If most published empirical studies are false, what does this mean about the ability of scientific study to inform our policy makers?

Now let's add one more consideration. Take a look at Aaron Wildavsky's book But Is It True? Wildavsky discusses what happens when science gets mixed up with politics. My short summary is that what science gets mixed up with politics, we end up with politics, and it becomes difficult to navigate through the public debate to know what science is telling us, even when the science is true and not false.

Priceless

In Priceless , Ackerman and Heinzerling write:

"Nature is unable to tell us about its own values and needs for protection. There is no Lorax who speaks for the trees; all we can do is ask about society's valuation of the existence of forests. If whales were consumers, swimming up to the market with cash held in their fins, economists could interview them about their willingness to pay for not being harpooned. Instead, we are left with contingent valuation of the existence of whales as our only option for assigning a number to their lives.

This is, in a sense an advance over the individualism of the market economy. Calculation of existence values recognizes the role of social decision making; it asks, as market economics usually does not, what the population as a whole thinks about a topic. But at the same time, the expression of social priorities through existence values asks us to view ourselves only as consumers; it attempts to replace voting with shopping." (p. 176)

I'm just not sure what a person is to make of this. I think economic analysis of environmental policy issues has numerous strengths and weaknesses, but it seems almost silly to suggest that one of the weaknesses of environmental economic analysis is that all it can do "is ask about society's valuation of the existence of forests."

I've read 3/4 of Priceless and I've not found the authors to, yet, explicitly describe their alternative to the use of economic analysis. I wonder if their alternative to economic analysis can also survive their Lorax criticism?