Nanny State Update, with a light sprinkling of Cronyism

From The Huffington Post, on the actions of those who are trying to protect their contributors you:

NASHVILLE, Tenn.-- In June 2010 the Nashville Metropolitan City Council passed legislation raising the city's minimum fee for limo and sedan rentals, bumping it from $25 to $45. Drivers were prohibited by law from charging less. Other new regulations forbid limo companies from using leased vehicles, require cars to be dispatched only from the place of business, compel companies to wait 15 minutes before picking up a client, and ban parking in front of hotels and bars to wait for customers. More laws that take effect in January 2012 would also require companies to replace all sedans and SUVs over seven-years-old, and all limos 10-years-old and older. Vehicles older than five years cannot enter into service.

Passed under the guise of consumer protection, the net effect is to give large, existing car companies (also known as livery services) a huge advantage over smaller companies, and to effectively prevent any new companies from entering the market. Prior to the new laws, Tennesseans could purchase transportation from downtown Nashville to the airport in a limo or sedan for the same price as an average taxi ride. Nashville residents and visitors will now pay almost double for the same service.

Nashville folks in need of an affordable ride, and drivers looking to earn an independent living in a sagging economy, join a long line of people caught on the wrong end of a nationwide effort by big car services to squeeze extra profit by regulating competitors out of business. It's a case of regulations actually costing jobs and driving up costs, just as Republicans charge they always do. But this time, the regulations are being pushed by the GOP's so-called "job creators," the new name given to big business.

A transportation battle currently playing out across the country pits large, established car service companies against their smaller and independent competitors. State or local governments in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas and Oregon, have all passed minimum fare regulations. The fight over new laws in Nashville, where a group of smaller car service owners have filed suit in federal court, belies the black-and-white approach the both Democrats and Republicans take to regulation.

Wesley Hottot, an attorney for the Texas Chapter of Institute for Justice, a non-profit libertarian law firm, says the Tennessee Livery Association (TLA), a coalition of expensive limousine companies, pushed the bill through with a number of provisions that benefit only its members. “There is no point in this regulation. It has nothing to do with public safety. It has everything to do with economic protectionism,” Hottot says. Hottot and his team have litigated similar cases involving economic liberty and property rights in federal and state courts across the country.

Such minimum charges for non-taxi car services are common all over the country. In Austin, Texas for example, the minimum fare of livery vehicles is $45, in Houston it's $75, and in Portland, Oregon, the fares must be 35 percent higher than the prevailing taxi cab rate. Little Rock, Arkansas companies can charge no less than $50 for limousines, no matter how long the ride, and no less than $30 for SUVs and sedans.

Think about it.... the only way for an upstart company to squeeze into a marketplace is by better prices or better service.  The Nanny Staters are doing what they can to eliminate the pricing option. 
And speaking of silly licensing and regulatory requirements to protect existing businesses against newcomers, here's a fascinating piece from Style Weekly:

It looked like the least controversial cut on Gov. Bob McDonnell’s reform list. As part of his efforts to slim the state’s $39 billion annual budget, last week McDonnell proposed to deregulate three specific professions: hair braiding, interior design and mold remediation. The state no longer would license or certify people in those professions.

You might think the braiders, designers and remediators would be happy. Who wants more bureaucracy in their lives? But some of them are protesting the change, stirring up a small but fierce debate about government intervention in the free market.

“As a conservative, I understand the desire to deregulate,” says Christopher Good, an associate principal with Glen Allen design firm KSA Interiors. But if the state government steps back, he says, the profession suffers. “We’ll be essentially barred from competition,” he says.

Why? Interior designers who submit drawings for permits must be state-certified. The commonwealth — as well as the federal government and most localities — also requires certification for interior designers to bid on public projects, Good says: “So I assume they’ll have to rewrite that law.” Otherwise, he says, architects — who still are state-regulated — could snap up all the projects that require certification.

There are about 500 certified interior designers in the state and thousands of employees who work with them, Good says. Don’t call them decorators. Interior designers must know about fire codes, the proper placement of emergency exits and other safety practices. If unqualified and uncertified people begin practicing interior design, Good says, “we run the risk of there being catastrophic consequences.”

Highly unlikely, says Robert McNamara, a lawyer with the libertarian Institute for Justice. “There’s absolutely no evidence that anyone has ever been harmed in any way by an unlicensed interior designer,” McNamara says. McDonnell’s commission found “few, if any complaints” in interior design matters and very few regulatory violations.

The nonprofit Institute for Justice has battled interior-design regulation in several states, though not in Virginia. One Florida case is poised to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Who knew this was such a hot issue?

It’s a matter of economic liberty, McNamara says. Entrepreneurship is a fundamental American value, he says, yet requiring state regulation “serves as a way for established, entrenched businesses to keep new people from entering the marketplace.” He argues that interior designers should be able to practice freely without having to get a four-year degree, prove two years’ work experience and pass two exams — which Virginia requires for certification......

What about hair braiding, which is regulated for health reasons? Deregulation isn’t a good idea, says hair braiding instructor Dionne James Eggleston, who runs a salon and braiding school on Marshall Street in Richmond as well as a salon in Long Island, N.Y. “People need to be held accountable.”

In the hands of an unregulated, untrained hair braider, clients run the risk of being burned by hot water and “catching different things on their scalp,” Eggleston says. Getting licensed isn’t difficult, she says. After receiving 170 hours of training or an equivalent course, an aspiring Virginia braider must take a written exam on state regulations, sanitation practices and braiding techniques. Eggleston charges $2,000 for the 170-hour course.

“The hair braiding industry poses a minimal risk of public harm,” McDonnell’s commission reported. In the last five years, the commission found, Virginia has fined two hair braiders and one salon, and revoked one license.

The Institute for Justice doesn’t have a beef with basic, brief, health and safety training, McNamara says, nor with regulation of medical professionals. But it’s not the state’s job to make sure ordinary professionals, whether braiders or designers, are “good enough” to get an official stamp of approval. “That’s violating people’s basic right to economic liberty,” he says.

Professional regulation is an old Virginia tradition. One regulatory board, which licenses boat pilots in Virginia’s major shipping lanes, was chartered by the king of England in the 1600s. The state regulates dozens of other professions, including auctioneers, body piercers, boxing promoters, cemetery operators and property managers.

To shave $2 million off the budget, the governor also has proposed consolidating or eliminating dozens of other state boards and commissions. His list includes merging the Seed Potato Board and the Potato Board into “a single, unified Potato Board” to handle all research and regulation of Virginia potatoes. This suggestion has failed to spark any debate — yet

All of these links came from the great Radley Balko, to whom we should always be grateful. 

First they came for the Goat-Counters

First they came for the Goat-Counters,
But I did not speak out, for I was not a Goat-Counter....

Go here. 

Thanks to Radley Balko of The Agitator Blog for speaking out about the plight of government Goat-Counters. 
When the budget-cutters come for the government's Catfish-Counters, will YOU be the one who speaks out? 

Seen and Unseen and Obscene in Washington State

Radley Balko, of The Agitator Blog, has been linking to and commenting on some of the greatest stuff ever.  I've started going to his recommended links now and then, hitting a few, ranting about them, and saving them for a slow news day.  Here's a ferinstance:

If you've read any Libertarian-ish stuff at all in the last few years, you know that Washington State and Pennsylvania have state-controlled liquor monopolies. 
Here are a few quotes Balko selected from Reason magazine on Washington State's recent decision to allow its plantation worker citizens to purchase Jim Beam from someplace besides the plantation commisary:

Here's a little Seen And Unseen for you:

Seen:


Beginning next June, liquor sales will shift from the state to grocery and warehouse stores, including Costco. It means more than 900 state employees will lose their jobs, most of them workers at state-run liquor stores.

Unseen:

The state budgeting office figures the number of outlets selling liquor will jump from 328 to 1,428. It also expects the change to generate an average of $80 million more in annual revenue for the state and local governments over the next six years....Some liquor prices are expected to drop.

Plus bonus hilarious overstatement from vested interests:

Tom Geiger, communication director for the union representing more than 700 workers in state-run liquor stores, said he thought the results raised questions about democracy itself.

Anybody who doesn't think that's funny needs to have a drink.  From a low-cost, private establishment that isn't subsidized by theft, of course. 

It's time to go knock back a few and watch the Buffalo Bills cover a 5 1/2 point spread against Jerry Jones's Dallas Cowboys.  Have a good Sunday. 

More stunts from the people who can't deliver the mail.....

The great Radley Balko has devoted a significant part of his life to freeing wrongly convicted prisoners. 
Here's his latest cause:

Texas death row inmate Hank Skinner is set to be executed on November 9.


I wrote about Skinner for Slate last year. While the Troy Davis execution was awful because there were significant doubts about Davis’ guilt, and the Willingham execution because there has since been an overwhelming consensus among forensic arson experts that he was convicted with junk science, the outrage in Skinner’s case exceeds both—and that’s despite the fact that Skinner may well be guilty.

Skinner (who has already come within an hour of execution) is about to be executed despite the fact that there is testable DNA from the murder weapon, the rape kit, hairs one of the victims was found clutching, and a jacket left at the crime scene similar to one worn by another possible suspect, all of which has yet to be tested.

And it’s even worse than that. The state started testing on the hairs a decade ago. When preliminary mitochondrial testing came back negative as a match to either Skinner or the victim, the state just decided to stop further testing....

....I have no idea if Hank Skinner is guilty. Neither does the state of Texas. The difference is that I and anyone with a lick of conscience would prefer we find out before the man is put to death.


Seems that Texas officials would just rather not know.

Why Osama bin Laden won

As usual, Radley Balko has the best perspective on the events of the last couple of days:

In The Looming Tower, the Pulitzer-winning history of al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11, author Lawrence Wright lays out how Osama bin Laden’s motivation for the attacks that he planned in the 1990s, and then the September 11 attacks, was to draw the U.S. and the West into a prolonged war—an actual war in Afghanistan, and a broader global war with Islam.

Osama got both. And we gave him a prolonged war in Iraq to boot. By the end of Obama’s first term, we’ll probably top 6,000 dead U.S. troops in those two wars, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. The cost for both wars is also now well over $1 trillion.

We have also fundamentally altered who we are. A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of how we’ve changed since September 11 . . .

• We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured.
• We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured.
• In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.
• We’ve abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them.
• The government launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign implying that people who smoke marijuana are complicit in the murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens.
• The government illegally spied and eavesdropped on thousands of American citizens.
• Presidents from both of the two major political parties have claimed the power to detain suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial, based solely on the president’s designation of them as an “enemy combatant,” essentially making the president prosecutor, judge, and jury. (I’d also argue that the treatment of someone like Bradley Manning wouldn’t have been tolerated before September 11.)
• The current president has also claimed the power to execute U.S. citizens, off the battlefield, without a trial, and to prevent anyone from knowing about it after the fact.
• The Congress approved, the president signed, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a broadly written law making it a crime to advocate for any organization the government deems sympathetic to terrorism. This includes challenging the “terrorist” designation in the first place.
• Flying in America now means enduring a humiliating and hassling ritual that does little if anything to actually make flying any safer. Every time the government fails to catch an attempt at terrorism, it punishes the public for its failure by adding to the ritual.
• American Muslims, a heartening story of success and assimilation, are now harassed and denigrated for merely trying to build houses of worship.
• Without a warrant, the government can search and seize indefinitely the laptops and other personal electronic devices of anyone entering the country.
• The Department of Homeland Security now gives terrorism-fighting grants for local police departments across the country to purchase military equipment, such as armored personnel carriers, which is then used against U.S. citizens, mostly to serve drug warrants.

Hit the link at the top to read the rest of the piece.  It's excellent. 

But the government looks after the little guy !!!

From The Agitator:

There’s a lot going on in this video. But first and foremost it’s a lesson in public choice theory, or the misconception that appointed experts and regulators always act in the interest of the public, or in the interests of science. Self-interest is just as prevalent in the public sector as it is in the private sector.

The Weekly Radley - Libertarian Utopia Edition

The piece from New York magazine that I linked yesterday (The Trouble With Liberty) is getting kicked around The LibertySphere, and will probably continue getting kicked for a while. 
Here's part of Radley Balko's take on it, mostly about a statement that libertarians promise an unrealistic utopia just like every other political animal does:

No, they don’t. People use the utopia canard to make libertarianism seem creepy and cultish. Look, politics is a dirty, corrupt profession that rewards people who display the characteristics you least want in someone in whom you entrust important decisions about your life. The general premise of libertarianism is that people should be free to make their own decisions about their lives—that as much of our lives as possible should be kept within the sphere of civil, voluntary society, and out of the sphere of political society. There would still be problems in a libertarian society. There would still be crime, income inequality, acne, nu metal, and reality TV. Most libertarians merely believe that in a libertarian society, most people would be better off than they are now—that being free to make more of your own choices is preferable to having politicians make them for you. Most conservatives and liberals also believe that most people would be better off if their own policy preferences were implemented. That isn’t in the same ballpark as promising utopia. People will still make bad decisions. They should be free to do so.


If anything is utopian, it’s the idea that the world would be much better off if only we put more of society in the hands of a few very smart people who somehow know all the answers. And that somehow the political process will ensure that those all-knowing people always end up in a position to make all the decisions.

I wish I had said that. 

Red Light cameras are working exactly as intended: They're making money

Check out Radley Balko's latest post on Red Light cameras. 

They reduce the number of accidents at intersections, if you only count the number of side-impact collisions. 
The number of accidents caused by someone getting rear-ended from a driver slamming on the brakes at the same intersections? 
Those are conveniently dropped from the stats. 

And the revenue keeps a'flowing.....

Are you better off than a Vanderbilt?

Bryan Caplan, of the Library Of Economics And Liberty, just returned from the massive Biltmore estate, George Vanderbilt's massive North Carolina palace.

But how many  (of us) would actually want to trade places with George? Despite his massive library, (pipe) organ, and so on, I submit that any modern with a laptop and an internet connection has a vastly better book and music collection than he did. For all his riches, he didn't have air conditioning; he had to suffer through the North Carolina summers just like the poorest of us. Vanderbilt did travel the world, but without the airplane, he had to do so at a snail's pace.

Caplan goes on to write that Vanderbilt died at age 51 because of complications from an appendectomy.  Yeah.  An appendectomy.  He continues:

Vanderbilt clearly had it better than most of the people in his era. But the world has improved so much that, all things considered, the average American is now better off than this prince of the Gilded Age. I can't be sure, but I bet that George would have agreed. How much do you think he would have paid to live for a single day in your shoes?

Here's Radley Balko, commenting on his own trip to the Biltmore estate a few years ago....

Hackneyed libertarian observation: I couldn’t help but think that in most ways the average American today lives better than a baron like Vanderbilt did just a century ago, even by Biltmore standards.

Okay, so I don’t have awesome mountain views and milion-dollar tapestries in my one-bedroom Alexandria apartment. But much of what made the Biltmore so modern for its time — a swimming pool, a bowling alley, plumbing, a “fitness room,” elevators, refrigeration — most all of us at least have access to today. There aren’t many periods in human history when you can say that within a hundred years, that average man will live as “royalty” does.


Let's combine that with some census data about what the poorest Americans own:

% Households with:	Poor 1984	Poor  1994	Poor 2003	Poor 2005	All 1971	All 2005
Washing machine	58.2	71.7	67.0	68.7	71.3	84.0
Clothes dryer	35.6	50.2	58.5	61.2	44.5	81.2
Dishwasher	13.6	19.6	33.9	36.7	18.8	64.0
Refrigerator	95.8	97.9	98.2	98.5	83.3	99.3
Freezer	29.2	28.6	25.4	25.1	32.2	36.6
Stove	95.2	97.7	97.1	97.0	87.0	98.8
Microwave	12.5	60.0	88.7	91.2	1.0	96.4
Color TV	70.3	92.5	96.8	97.4	43.3	98.9
VCR	3.4	59.7	75.4	83.6	0.0	92.2
Personal computer	2.9	7.4	36.0	42.4	0.0	67.1
Telephone	71.0	76.7	87.3	79.8	93.0	90.6
Air conditioner	42.5	49.6	77.7	78.8	31.8	85.7
Cellular Telephone			34.7	48.3	0.0	71.3
One or more cars	64.1	71.8	72.8 (2001)		79.5

These numbers were compiled by The Austrian Economists.  Here are more observations from The Austrians:

I think these data largely speak for themselves. The only categories where the poor have become "worse off" are in freezers (likely due to more being built into fridges) and now telephones, which is, of course, explained by the gains in cell phones. Stoves are down slightly, but that too could be due to swapping regular stoves for microwaves or even toaster ovens. In any case, it's a pretty small decline.


The overall lesson is clear: lives for Americans below the poverty line continue to get better in terms of what they are able to put in their households and have to make use of everyday. And do note that the average American household in 2005 was doing much better than its 1971 counterpart. MUCH better - and this doesn't even count medical advances and the like. So whatever one hears about stagnating wages and the like, the bottom line is ultimately what we can afford to buy and have in our households to improve our lives. By those measures, life for the average American is better today than 35 years ago, life for poor Americans is much better than it was 35 years ago, and poor Americans today largely live better than the average American did 35 years ago. Hard to square with a narrative of economic stagnation or decline.

What the current policy regime holds for the future remains, of course, to be seen. But to use Pete's terms: as long as the Schumpeterian horse of innovation and the Smithian horse of the gains from trade outrun the Government horse of stupidity, the winners will continue to be you, me and our children and grandchildren, even if the stupid horse is running a bit faster than it used to.

So the next time one of our government employees starts talking about the widening gap between the lowest 20% and the highest 5%, remember this.....

1) With every new innovation, somebody got to own it first.  This applies to iPads, microwaves, video cameras (once the $35,000.00 Christmas gift in the Neiman-Marcus catalog), televisions, cell phones and plumbing. 
2) You can't prevent the top 5% from owning something without slowing its eventual use by the bottom 20%.
3) Free Market Capitalism has done more to improve the lives of more people than any Statist scheme ever devised. 

The Weekly Radley: "Let's Get Small"

I've long thought that if election results really matter to you, then your government is too big.  Elections should matter about as much as choosing a new lawn service. 

Here's Radley Balko with an explanation:

....in the spirit of bipartisanship I’ll go ahead and endorse Alvin Greene in addition to Paladino and O’Donnell. Politics is a ridiculous profession populated by ridiculous people. Maybe if we elect increasingly clownish candidates, the public will eventually come to realize this, and finally realize that it’s probably not a good idea to put larger and larger portions of our lives and livelihoods in the hands of people who have achieved success in a field that rewards character traits you spend your entire tenure as a parent trying to teach out of your kids.


I’m kidding about endorsing Greene, O’Donnell, and Paladino, but only because their election would give them actual power. But I see no particular reason to root for their opponents, either. And I see no reason to instinctively cheer for Republicans over Democrats. Or vice versa. At least electing transparently crazy people will make us more cautious about how they use their power.

Seriously....is Alvin Greene that much sillier than Nancy Pelosi, Trent Lott, or any other Pork Merchant? 

Me, I’m cheering for elections to matter less, and for politicians to have less impact on my life. I dream of waking up to find the results of the November 2 election on page A-10 of my November 3rd newspaper—because no one cared, because very little was at stake, because we stopped pinning our hopes and dreams on the results of a perverse process dominated by generally horrible people who have made a career of accumulating power for the sake of accumulating power.


Incidentally, this is also how you “get money out of politics.” You make politics and political outcomes less important. I’m amused by people who are surprised that as the power, scope, and influence of government grows, interest groups are correspondingly willing to spend increasingly more money to purchase a piece of that influence. I actually once heard a prominent lefty journalist express this very sentiment. They’re shocked by this!

Yes, without exception.  Shocked, I say!  Shocked ! 

It’s even cuter that they think they can continue to expand the size, scope, and influence government and prevent the government from being corrupted . . . by giving the same government yet more power, in this case to prevent itself from being corrupted. Inevitably, these new powers then manifest as new restrictions on our ability and freedom to criticize politicians. Because that’s their solution to the corruption of our politicians: Less criticism of politicians!

You cannot decrease government corruption, bribery, earmarking, pork-barreling, featherbedding, and favoritism by writing more laws.  The purpose of those laws is to sell exemptions to those laws. 
The only way to decrease the size and scope of the problem is to make the government smaller.  Much, much smaller.  Small enough to drown in the bathtub. 

Go here to listen to Steve Martin's "Let's Get Small". 

An Army officer comments on the Columbia Missouri drug raid

This video has now been seen by more than 1.2 million people.

Go here for my thoughts on why we continue to put up with government employees breaking down a door in the middle of the night, shooting two of the family dogs in front of a 7-year-old boy, finding a misdemeanor amount of marijuana, and then charging the homeowner with "child endangerment".
(It's because we're sheep.) 



Here's an email to Radley Balko from an army officer serving someplace in Afghanistan:

I am a US Army officer, currently serving in Afghanistan. My first thought on reading this story is this: Most American police SWAT teams probably have fewer restrictions on conducting forced entry raids than do US forces in Afghanistan.


For our troops over here to conduct any kind of forced entry, day or night, they have to meet one of two conditions: have a bad guy (or guys) inside actively shooting at them; or obtain permission from a 2-star general, who must be convinced by available intelligence (evidence) that the person or persons they're after is present at the location, and that it's too dangerous to try less coercive methods. The general can be pretty tough to convince, too. (I'm a staff liason, and one of my jobs is to present these briefings to obtain the required permission.)

Generally, our troops, including the special ops guys, use what we call "cordon and knock": they set up a perimeter around the target location to keep people from moving in or out,and then announce their presence and give the target an opportunity to surrender. In the majority of cases, even if the perimeter is established at night, the call out or knock on the gate doesn't happen until after the sun comes up.

Oh, and all of the bad guys we're going after are closely tied to killing and maiming people.

What might be amazing to American cops is that the vast majority of our targets surrender when called out.

I don't have a clear picture of the resources available to most police departments, but even so, I don't see any reason why they can't use similar methods.

And here's Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit on the officer's comments:

Quite different from using door-busting tactics to serve warrants on nonviolent drug offenders. Of course, one difference is that we care about winning the hearts and minds of people in Afghanistan . . . .

Bill Clinton: Remember what led to Oklahoma City (and, unhhh....forget about Waco)

In which Radley Balko takes Bill Clinton to the woodshed:

In today’s New York Times, Bill Clinton once again tries to tie the Oklahoma City bombing to those of us who hold “the belief that the greatest threat to American freedom is our government, and that public servants do not protect our freedoms, but abuse them.”

Of course he sort of proves those of us who do believe such things right by continually using April 19 to tie us to a deranged murderer instead of acknowledging, taking some responsibility for, or expressing any remorse whatsoever for another anniversary we observe today: the Clinton administration’s slaughter of 76 people, including 20 children, at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. Waco gets all of a sentence in Clinton’s op-ed.

Wow.  Bill should have checked his calendar a more closely before hitting the "send" key on that one. 
Clinton's NYT OpEd is nothing more than the latest step in the administration's opposition demonization program:  The Tea Party protesters are all racists.  Opposition to The Obamessiah is unpatriotic.  How could you dare say that you want the President to fail.  If you oppose The Teleprompter Jesus, you're encouraging irresponsible behavior. 
Well, good luck to 'em.  They're going to need it.  Here's something else from Balko's site:  A Pew Research survey that goes all the way back to Ike.  It charts the level of "trust in government".

As a libertarian, of course, you want to see this line dipping on down into the single digits until government is trusted with nothing more than roads, sewers, protecting the borders, and selling raffle tickets for their annual fund-raiser.

Back to Balko.  Here's are his closing paragraphs:

The thing is, Mr. Former President, if I may address you directly, is there are far too may public servants who, as you put it, “do not protect our freedoms, but abuse them.” I document them every day on this site. And so despite your admonition, I will continue to criticize them for it. And when, for example, they out and out murder innocent people in the name of a senseless, wasteful, and fundamentally illiberal policy (a policy, incidentally, that you enthusiastically support, despite your admission that you yourself have broken the country’s drug laws), I’ll go ahead and, to borrow your word, demonize them for it.


And you know what? I won’t feel the slightest tinge of guilt about doing so. Nor will I feel the least bit of responsibility for acts of anti-government violence, past or future, even when they’re committed in the name of one or more ideas I might otherwise endorse.

Because fundamentally and categorically, I repudiate the use of force and violence to impose my beliefs, political philosophy, or policy preferences on other people. Until you can say the same thing, Mr. Former President (and we both know you can’t), you can spare me your goddamned lecture.

The Weekly Radley - They Shot The Corgi

From The Columbia Daily Tribune:

A SWAT team broke into a guy's home, shot and killed one of his dogs, and then shot and injured his Corgi (here's a pic of a Corgi)....

....but they only found enough marijuana in the home to file misdemeanor charges against the homeowner. 

Here's Radley Balko on the incident:

So smoking pot = “child endangerment.”

Storming a home with guns, then firing bullets into the family pets as a child looks on = necessary police procedures to ensure everyone’s safety.


Just so we’re clear.

Yeah, you can argue that the police were just doing their job.  And the courts, when they convict someone of marijuana possession, they're just doing their job.  So are the jailers, the social workers, the prison guards, the prison construction lobby, and the drug cartels that depend on our laws to preserve their monopoly.

When are we going to stop paying people to do this job? 

In Praise Of Wal-Mart

Full Disclosure:  I work for a Wal-Mart supplier.  (We also supply Albertson's, Kroger, Winn-Dixie, Publix, HEB, Central Market, Brookshire's, Brookshire Brothers, and anyone else who wants to keep their groceries off the ground.  We've been keeping food off the floor since nineteen eighty-four, and we're better at it than anybody.  That's just how it is.)

I'm fascinated by Wal-Mart.  Because they bring good products to the masses at a low price, and because Wal-Mart plays a major role in keeping inflation down, and because Sam Walton probably deserved a Nobel prize, and because most low income families wouldn't swap their Wal-Mart for every social worker who has ever lived, and because of their anti-union stance, and because Wal-Mart accomplishes all this down-home Bentonville, Arkansas, goodness with no government aid, well, the lamestream media is required to portray Wal-Mart as downright satanic.   

We now have a few more goodies to add to that pile.  It's about the Wal-Mart produce selection.  Here's Reason magazine's Katherine Mangu-Ward:

(Author Corby) Kummer buys two batches of nearly identical groceries at Wal-Mart and Whole Foods. He has them prepared in a restaurant kitchen and invites taste testers to make a blind side-by-side comparison. The Whole Food grocery set cost $50 more, $20 of which is spent on top of the line chicken breasts (Wal-Mart didn't really offer equivalently high-end meat.)

The taste testers preferred the Wal-Mart veggies overwhelmingly, with complaints about the meat and dairy. "The tasters were surprised," he writes, "when the results were unblinded at the end of the meal and they learned that in a number of instances they had adamantly preferred Walmart produce. And they weren’t entirely happy."

Here's something else from Corby Kummer's original article about the taste test experiment, which is in the March 2010 Atlantic Monthly online edition:

Michelle Harvey, who is in charge of working with Walmart on agriculture programs at the local Environmental Defense Fund office, summarized a long conversation with me on the sustainability efforts she thinks the company is serious about: “It’s getting harder and harder to hate Walmart.”

Of course, it's getting harder and harder to hate Wal-Mart.  But what if hating Wal-Mart is one of the planks in your political party's platform?  I'm sure you'll find a way to continue that policy.
Some cynics think that Wal-Mart's sustainability efforts are nothing but window dressing.  Trust me.  I know differently.  They want everyone up and down their supply chain to operate in a sustainable manner.  Trust me.  I know.  They're for real on this.  I know.  Trust me. 
   
A few other things about the Atlantic Monthly Online's tour of Wal-Mart's produce offerings....Here's the picture they posted at the top of the article:

Are those not the best looking produce displays you've ever seen?  (Except, of course, for the others we have designed and manufactured for other grocery chains, which look just as good, but in a different sort of way?)  WE'VE MADE IT INTO THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !   Mark Twain published in The Atlantic !  So did Hemingway !  And the THE ATLANTIC FREAKIN' MONTHLY is running photos of our fruitstands ! ! ! ! ! 

And if that's not enough, the Atlantic Monthly even made a video.  Corby Kummer has good things to say about the quality of Wal-Mart's vegetables, but that's not the best part.....  Those are our shelves inside the wall refrigeration units !  Those are our new-era Produce Tables at the :40 mark, built by Ray The Wood God and Super Igor The Wonder Serb !  I think that's some of our plastic at the 2:00 mark, built by Danny Ray and company.  Those are our bakery displays over the narrator's left shoulder at the end of the video.

Hit the second button from the right if you want to view it in full screen mode. 
. 

But enough about us. You see, after all those exclamation points that I wasted in the previous paragraph, it might not even be our equipment in the video. WM has at least two suppliers for everything in their stores. (See the link above about how WM keeps inflation down.  Unlike the post office, the Department Of Motor Vehicles, or any other monopoly, we have competitors.  Therefore, we're obligated to build good products for a low price.  Let this be a lesson for anyone wanting a government monopoly in healthcare.)

One last thing....another one of my heroes, Radley Balko, wrote this post called "Does Wal-Mart make you skinny?" for The Daily Beast yesterday.  (It's been a good couple of days online for Wal-Mart.)

.....Economists Art Carden of Rhodes College and Charles Courtemanche of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro....conducted a study to find out (whether Wal-Mart had a positive impact on community health and overall economy.)   Carden and Courtemanche have done a number of studies on Wal-Mart. Carden insists they get no funding from the company, directly or indirectly. Rather, he says, the two free-market economists have been intrigued by the Wal-Mart debate and wanted to test some of the more common criticisms of the store. Generally, they’ve found that the worst fears about Wal-Mart are unfounded, and that the stores have a mostly positive impact on their communities.

But they thought this one might be different. “We expected the study to show an increase in obesity in communities with a Wal-Mart,” Carden says. “We know that Wal-Mart lowers the cost of food, but we figured it’s not always the best food for you.”

To their surprise, they found the opposite—there was a small but statistically significant reduction in obesity rates in communities with a Wal-Mart, perhaps because the store also sells fresh produce of good quality at a good price.....

In a widely cited 2005 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists Jerry Hausman and Ephraim Leibtag found that Wal-Mart significantly lowers prices in the communities where it sets up shop, even for people who never shop at the store. On food alone, Hausman and Leibtag found that Wal-Mart delivers a 25 percent benefit to consumers, which has a disproportionately positive effect on the poor because they spend a larger percentage of their income on food.

The mere presence of a Wal-Mart in a community results in the equivalent of a 6.5 percent increase in annual income, which, as The Washington Post’s Sebastian Mallaby has pointed out, makes the store a bigger boon to the poor than the federal government’s food-stamps program. And Carden and Courtemanche began their study before Wal-Mart began its $4 prescription drug program, which also delivers a big potential health benefit both to Wal-Mart customers and other consumers in the area, because many competing stores were moved to implement similar programs.

And here's the typical Radley Balko kicker at the end:

Every time Wal-Mart tries to open a store in a big city like Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York, it encounters a storm of protest from politicians, labor unions and activist groups who claim to speak for the poor and low-wage workers. Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry, who proposed the one-year moratorium on new fast-food restaurants on L.A.’s south side to combat childhood obesity, also in 2004, backed a bill to keep Wal-Mart out of that same community.

In Chicago in 2006, a proposed Wal-Mart store met with fierce opposition from groups critical of its labor practices—a position just reiterated by Mayor Richard Daley. So instead, Wal-Mart opened in Evergreen Park, one block outside the Chicago city limits. The store received 24,500 job applications for just 325 positions, and now generates more than $1 million per year in taxes for the small town while boosting revenue for local businesses.

Had Chicago’s politicians not been so obstinate, that economic windfall could have been enjoyed by the city’s low-income, mostly minority Chatham neighborhood—whose residents might have dropped some pounds as well.

The pictures of the GREAT looking produce displays in this post came from The Atlantic Monthly.  Thanks to Instapundit, as usual, for many of the original links.

The Weekly Radley - Who fears who ??

From Radley Balko's blog:

Somebody should turn this into a poster.

The Weekly Radley - Hank Williams edition

Hank Williams (the first) died 57 years ago today.
Lord have mercy, what a man.

Here's Damon Root, of Reason magazine (I've spent the morning on their site) on the continued influence of Hank I on just about everything.

"Your Cheatin' Heart", "Move It On Over", "Hey Good Looking", and several others are in the Whited guitar/vocal repetoire. They're usually well-received, eliciting polite smatterings of applause and appreciation, and nothing more. But "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" always, always, always makes someone say something like "Can you imagine that much hurt inside a person?"

This is a video of Hank's "Long Gone Lonesome Blues"



A fresh coat of Whitening to Radley Balko for the link. If anyone is wondering, I run an occasional feature called The Weekly Radley as a testament to the immense power of getting linked to by Radley Balko. Long story.

Why things are costing more and more and more and more

I found a great link on Radley Balko's site.

Check out these pics of American currency.


If you go to the site, notice how many banknotes said "payable in gold" or "two dollars in silver" or "payable to the bearer on demand", or similar verbiage. You could walk into the bank and swap this piece of paper for some silver or gold.

Do you think our government was a little more careful about printing batches of these babies?

Compare that system to the junk you see below. The little piece of paper that you sometimes see blowing down the street, and don't even bother to chase after? It says "THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE".

Why is it legal tender? Because they say so.

There are no longer any safeguards in place to prevent our government from spending these in the billions and printing these things by the trillions. You can to RonPaul.com for a good explanation of Fiat Money, Inflation, and Dr. Paul's proposal for an open competition in currencies.

Good luck when prices start doubling. A special prize will be awarded to the reader who sends me the first earnest MSM editorial blaming greedy corporations for the price increases.

The Weekly Radley - From "The Wire"

I've never seen this series, but I might have to check it out.

The Weekly Radley - From The Most Transparent Administration EVER

From Radley Balko's Agitator blog:

The Obama administration is sponsoring a workshop on government transparency . . . that will be closed to the public.

“I can understand skepticism anytime a meeting for government people is not necessarily open to the public,” Nisbet (director of the brand spankin' new Office of Government Information Services) said. “However, everything that is discussed there is absolutely available for the public to know about.”

We're having to submit paperwork and requests to have OUR government employees tell us what they're doing on issues like lobbying, bribery, quid pro quo pro Climaquidicks pro additional quo's, and which lobbyists are visiting the White House for plunder.

Raise your hand if you think everything is honest and above-board.....

Anyone ? Anyone at all?

The cartoon came from here.

The Weekly Radley - No one was ever murdered over a Michelob deal gone bad

Go here.