KMOX reports that the state Senate has endorsed repealing the Missouri’s motorcycle helmet law. This bill also has a good chance of being passed in the House of Representatives. Hopefully, the governor will sign it as well if it gets to him. This is a small but exciting move forward for personal freedom.
Iceland, the Financial Panic, and My Father-In-Law
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
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
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 …”
David Nicklaus on “Buy Local”
David Nicklaus continues to write about the locavore movement. Here are my comments on a column he wrote a few weeks ago. I think this explanation from his blog post is exactly on target:
Illinois produces corn for the rest of the world, and Illinoisans buy vegetables and fruit from places like California and Mexico. That arrangement creates wealth for all sides — producers make the highest possible profits, and consumers buy at the lowest possible prices. Reversing the arrangement, therefore – growing more vegetables in Illinois and making Californians grow their own corn – would make all sides worse off.
Nicklaus sounds exasperated that this economic fallacy is being dressed up by advocates as a “stimulus.” But it’s not surprising, because the run-of-the-mill stimulus plans operate on much the same principle. They encourage production that wouldn’t have happened without a directive from the state, ignoring comparative advantage and the market’s precise timing. And when stimulus advocates predict huge gains in wealth, they leave out the loss of what all those resources would have been used for if the stimulus hadn’t interfered.
Some of the typical stimulus plans are better than the locavores’ schemes because they don’t take resources so far away from their ideal uses in a free market. Building a bridge may be expensive, but some people can use the bridge for its intended purpose. Building a greenhouse to grow bananas in Illinois is like planting dollars in the ground and hoping they’ll grow into tropical fruit. It’s waste without any redeeming qualities.
Post on Resolutions Hits Close to Home
Brad Hollerbach’s post would be funnier if it didn’t sound so realistic:
Since, Easter is fast approaching and a lot of people — myself included — really like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs, I think the Missouri Legislature should consider a resolution honoring that candy.
Hollerbach is responding to the proliferation of resolutions in the General Assembly, which record legislators’ opinions and preferences about almost everything. But since we already have an official state dessert, to go along with our official state reptiles, invertebrates, game birds, and other stuff, a resolution honoring peanut butter eggs isn’t far-fetched. Hollerbach might have an easier time getting it passed if he could convince a fourth-grade civics class to adopt it, though.
Kansas City Cuts Costs, Keeps Control of KCI
Like an airplane landing in a river immediately after takeoff, a Kansas City council committee has killed even the consideration of privatizing the airport. The Star has the story. The committee failed to advance the proposal on a tie vote. And, while the city council is killing even the thought of an idea that could bring KC hundreds of millions of dollars, the mayor, council, and city manager are debating how to cut the city budget.
I commend the city manager and mayor for proposing significant lay-offs to deal with the budget, rather than passing tax increases. The fact is that way too many people in America work for the government. I realize that recessions may be the worst time to lay people off, but they are also the only time government does it. I’d be happy to see governments keep people on during bad times and lay them off in good times when they would have less trouble finding work, but it never works that way. Either you lay them of in the tough times or the government just grows and grows. In my opinion, the latter is far worse for our freedoms and budgets.
I do have a few suggestion for the city. If you are not going to privatize the airport, you could start small by privatizing the golf courses. And this entire idea should just be dropped:
Funkhouser also proposed several other changes, including spending an additional $500,000 for a citizen engagement program. He said he wanted the city to hire an ombudsman, a volunteer coordinator, a director of community engagement and several community organizers to dramatically improve residents’ engagement in government decision-making.
I am all for transparency and open government, but I draw the line at spending money like this. Government should just do the things it needs to do, and not spend money telling people what it is going to do as part of a PR scheme. Even worse is when officials try to get the thoughts of the 1 percent of cranks that attend public hearings for every pothole scheduled to be filled. Don’t waste time and money sending out a questionnaire for everything. Just do it as efficiently as possible, and voters will tell you whether you are doing the right thing by their votes. And their e-mails. And their phone calls. And their blog posts. And their anonymous, threatening letters. …
Financial Stability Coming Soon
Here’s a website that makes Transform Missouri look professional and confidence-inspiring: FinancialStability.gov. It’s been up for a few weeks, but it still says, “This site is coming soon.” You can scroll down for a bunch of fact sheets, but that’s all. This is what the whole Internet looked like when I had computer class in fifth grade.
I would be happy if I thought the federal government wasn’t paying anyone to work on this website. But I’m afraid they are paying somebody, and he’s just incompetent.
For Your Safety
When I saw the top headline (“Firefighters…”) on Russell Roberts’ blog, Cafe Hayek, I immediately thought of Dave’s post.
