Brother Neil’s Price-Inflating Ticket Scalping Scheme

Posted on by David Stokes

Because we covered the repeal of scalping laws so heavily awhile back (and I like to think our blog entries played a very small part in Missouri’s silly law being changed), I had to link to this Wall Street Journal article, which I found via the Kansas City Star. It turns out that many of the biggest beneficiaries of free-market ticket exchanges are artists themselves, who withhold some choice seats for sale in select online ticket exchanges.

I see nothing illegal with this; the title of this post is more meant in fun than anger. It is, however, unseemly that so many artists do what is plainly ticket scalping while making it appear that they are just fans exchanging tickets with each other for whatever price buyers want to pay. A more up-front policy is needed, but I don’t think it has to be legislated. I don’t think it is a crime that someone thought the $1,000 they spent to see one of the greatest bands of all time went to a stranger, when it really went to the band, but it is still improper.

If U2 wanted to charge me more to sit in the front row on the stage-left aisle for their 1987 Joshua Tree tour when it came to St. Louis, they could have just told me that up front. Instead, they made me go and win the ticket lottery, which was totally awesome.

P.S. — And now you know what my favorite bands are. Plus, you can add in all the classic rock greats, but you could have guessed that.

Why Limits on Embryo Transfers Are Like Motorcycle Helmet Laws

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Some of the arguments I’m hearing for limits on the number of embryos that can be implanted in a woman are similar to the arguments for motorcycle helmet laws. For example, this is from the Post-Dispatch story today:

“If you implant eight embryos into a woman, you’re putting her life at risk and you’re putting the lives of the eight babies at risk, and the taxpayers are going to have the burden of paying for it,” Schaaf said.

That’s State Rep. Robert Schaaf, explaining why he thinks the state is justified in interfering with fertility treatment decisions. Sound familiar? That’s what people say in support of motorcycle helmet laws. If you get into a crash without a helmet on your head, taxpayers pay for the ambulance you ride in, hospital emergency room, and so on. Therefore, the state can’t allow you to take any risks.

The article uncovers another horrible policy idea: forcing insurance companies to pay for in vitro fertilization. The rationale is that people are asking doctors to implant large numbers of embryos to improve their chances, because they don’t want to have to pay for another round of treatment. Obviously, an insurance mandate would raise premiums for everyone–kind of like how when you have octuplets, everyone’s taxes have to help pay for the care if you can’t afford to support them. Except women rarely give birth to octuplets, so one or two cases don’t really have any deleterious effect on taxpayers, although women receive fertility treatments all the time. An insurance mandate would spread a burden across society, all in the hopes of preventing another burden that hasn’t materialized yet and probably never will.

I have my own idea for a new law. Give women the choice of risky fertility treatments. Just make them sign a form that if they give birth to octuplets, they’ll guarantee that the children will always wear helmets when riding motorcycles. You’ll have increased risk from the treatment, and decreased risk from the safe motorcycle riding. They’ll cancel each other out.

The Perfect Example of Why MoDOT Should Be Governed As It Is

Posted on by David Stokes

In Missouri, we like to elect people to office and then not give them all the powers one might assume they would have. In Kansas City, the mayor is a glorified council member, while the city manager handles day-to-day operations. (Note: This is not a comment about any individual mayor, just a comment on the government structure; the same goes for my following comments.) In neither St. Louis nor Kansas City does the mayor have control over the police department, election board, school district, or judicial appointments. In St. Louis, the mayor has no control over the transit agency. Now, in some of these instances the mayors have some input — for example, both mayors serve as one of the members of the police board — but, in general, these things are run by the state-appointed boards.

Please understand, I am not saying this is automatically a bad thing. I particularly like the fact that the police in St. Louis are under the state’s control. My friends who are cops hate the idea of being controlled by 28 different aldermen, each exercising power within their respective wards. It’s much better that they report to a more independent entity — recent towing troubles aside.

This happens at the state level, too, with MoDOT being the most obvious example. The governor and legislature have little input once they select and confirm the members of the MoDOT board, which is independently funded and responsible to itself. If you want to see why this is good policy for Missouri, I shall point you to the top headlines at johncombest.com today: article after article of elected officials complaining that their cities are not getting enough from the stimulus spending. St. Louis city, St. Louis County, Jackson … they were particularly mad in Jackson:

When discussion turned to specifics, Lohr and Bollinger noted that Cape Girardeau has two projects and Jackson priorities were unfunded.

So, people who live in Jackson never drive in Cape? Will they not benefit from improvements five miles away? I am going to stop here, because I feel an episode of snippiness coming on.

In my opinion, it is far better to have an independent board making decisions based on what is good for the transportation network of the entire state than empowering politicians to fight over the funds.

It’s Assessment Day in St. Louis County

Posted on by David Stokes

Everybody’s favorite biannual activity is online today in St. Louis County. It’s reassessment day! Go to the county’s website and see how much your assessment has increased or decreased. The county reports an overall average decrease of 9 percent, but the school district breakdown will have to come later. Here is what you want to see:

  • You want to at least be on the average for your area. That way you will not see any tax increases when various taxing districts roll up their rates to guarantee at least the same amount of revenue as last year. Since right now we only have the countywide average, you at least want to see a 9-percent decrease.

  • The real winners in the assessment lottery are going to be the people whose assessments decrease more than the average for their school district. They are the ones who will see actual tax decreases.

  • With the coming tax roll-ups, anyone who sees an assessment increase, no matter how small, is in for a tax wallop when the bills come. One of my neighbors saw a 12-percent increase. When the taxes roll up, I assume by roughly 9 percent, the rate increase plus the assessment increase is going to give those people one hell of a tax hike.

  • It still feels like a lottery, no matter how much the assessor says it isn’t. My house and the houses belonging to my two neighbors received three very different assessments. Our home’s assessment decreased right on the average (and we’re very happy about that), one neighbor’s assessment decreased only slightly (like 2 percent), and the other neighbor’s assessment rose by 12 percent. Don’t tell me is isn’t a lottery.

  • I don’t blame anyone in particular for bringing about this lottery impression. With 360,000 parcels, it’s probably impossible to avoid, unless you abandon individual assessments in favor of area averages, which I proposed in 2007.

  • St. Louis County itself has decreased its tax rate, for which County Executive Charlie Dooley and the council should be commended. Now it is up to the school districts, etc., to hold their rates down. If they all automatically roll up by the full amount of the assessment loss, which they are legally entitled to do, then people are barely going to see any tax cuts at all. It is simply that the county makes up a small part of the overall tax rates.

  • Should the county average have decreased by more than 9 percent? Perhaps, but I really don’t know. Councilman Greg Quinn thinks they should have fallen much further, and he may well be right.

Iceland, the Financial Panic, and My Father-In-Law

Posted on by David Stokes

I am a big Michael Lewis fan. I have read Moneyball twice, along with many of the essays he is famous for. One of those essays/articles is in this month’s Vanity Fair, and I can’t recommend it enough. It is a brutally funny critique of the rise and fall of investment banking in Iceland, with a nice side trip to the world of elves. (I got the link to the article from Freakonomics.) The moral of the story is that, believe it or not, people without any experience in investment banking who are suddenly given control of billions of dollars don’t always do a good job. Now, I realize that in America, people with lots of experience on Wall Street didn’t necessarily do such a good job either, but the Iceland story is funnier, so let’s run with it.

I am pleased to say that my father-in-law is loosely involved in this story, though not by name or specifics and not in a way that at all involves the financial collapse. There are really only two businesses in Iceland, aside from the now-killed financial industry: fishing and aluminum smelting. My father-in-law works for Alcoa as an engineer, and has spent a lot of time in Iceland working on the smelting plant discussed in the Vanity Fair story. So, now I have to ask him whether the men of Iceland are really as aggressive as the story says they are, and also whether he had to do any of the work certifying that no elves were being harmed. …

The best line in the whole, terrific essay:

It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.”

Disenfranchisement

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Thanks to Combest for linking to this op-ed about early voting. Early voting does sound nice, especially given the long lines people have to wait in on election day. But I disagree that students are being disenfranchised because many of them miss deadlines or forget which day to vote. Everyone knows you vote for presidents in the fall, so even if students don’t have a clue which month you vote in or which day, they have all summer to familiarize themselves with the process. If students can’t take enough initiative to figure out which day to vote, then I don’t trust them to research candidates either.

The Little Engine That Could

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Train service around here can be awfully slow. Not so slow as the horse-drawn carriages the government allowed to fade away, but slow nonetheless. (Although you do sometimes see carriages at fancy weddings. Wouldn’t it be funny if people rented Amtrak cars for romantic occasions? That’s another idea for a reality show.)

Some of the federal stimulus money may be used to speed things up. This article in the Kansas City Star gives the details: The Obama administration wants to spend $13 billion during the next five years to make train service faster. But not much faster. And Amtrak is blaming its slow-as-a-turtle pace on our free-enterprise economy:

“We are where we are because of where we’ve been,” said Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari. “Our rail system has functioned on a private ownership model going back to the 1800s. In the much more compact countries of Europe, they work on a government model.”

I’m thinking: What about Japan? Japan’s high-speed rail system is usually held up as a model of excellence. This is what the Mackinac Center concluded in a report on privatization and passenger rail:

In Japan, privatization has reinvigorated development efforts, and the new railways have designed more experimental trains using more advanced technology than the old national railway would have.

And as for Amtrak’s private ownership roots, here’s a lengthy Wikipedia article on the subject of Amtrak’s funding from federal and state governments. Given Amtrak’s extensive support from several levels of government, the comments about being hindered by too much capitalism sound like poor excuses for sticking to the same outdated technologies. Passengers would be better served by private ownership of the railways and healthy competition.

Or Amtrak could just continue on its uphill course, saying, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can …”

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