A Stitch in Haste

A victory for gay rights, common sense, and plain language judicial interpretation:

United Parcel Service has decided to provide benefits to the same-sex civil union partners of its employees in New Jersey.
...
In May of this year, Gabriael "Nickie" Brazier, who is a driver for UPS who requested to have her civil union spouse, Heather Aurand, added to UPS's benefit plan so that the couple would not have to continue paying for a second, inferior, health insurance plan for Heather and could stop paying down a second yearly deductible. UPS responded with a letter outlining why it was denying spousal benefits to Brazier and Aurand, saying, "In summary, you cannot add Ms. Aurand as a spouse because New Jersey law does not treat civil unions the same as marriages, and the Plan requires a dependent spouse to be a spouse as defined under applicable state law."

The only indignation left to be hurled is for UPS' labor unions, particular the Teamsters, which should have promptly quashed UPS' absurd assertion that its collective bargaining agreements forbade offering the insurance (i.e., that unions would, somehow, oppose giving more employees more benefits). It was so preposterous as to be laughable. But the unions, to the best of my knowledge, stayed deafeningly silent on the controversy. Shame on them.

Meanwhile, anecdotes such as this will continue to accumulate throughout New Jersey, to the point where the either the legislature or the courts will have no choice to admit that the only way to achieve true marriage equality is to establish true marriage equality. Separate but equal is impossible.

Bravo, yet again, to the heroes of Lambda Legal.

Another quick example of how government creates an entirely false distinction between freedom of religion and freedom from religion:

In the absence of an emergency or epidemic of disease declared by the department of public health, no child whose parent or guardian states in writing that vaccination or immunization conflicts with his sincere religious beliefs shall be required to present said physician's certificate in order to be admitted to school.

So reads Massachusetts General Law 76-15. The state is unusual, perhaps unique, in granting only a religious exemption to compulsory childhood vaccination but not a conscience exemption.

"No, we don't do any test of religion," said Dr. Alfred DeMaria, chief medical officer for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. "That's not American, essentially, to do a test of people's religion."

But to do an atheist test? That's as American, and as ignorant, as a gay marriage ban.

Via Religion Clause.

---

On a tangent:

Barry Taylor practices naturopathic medicine, and defends these parents' right to choose.

There is no right, not even by libertarian standards, to choose to baselessly endanger your children. A parent who has a bona fide rational basis for concluding that immunization may pose some (nebulous, yet apparently) unacceptable risk might be forgiven if he guesses wrong. But a parent who insists that "it's up to God whether my child contracts polio" must never be forgiven, even if the kid is lucky enough not to get it.

---

Finally, I'm sure Tony at Rolling Doughnut could draw some analogies to the infant circumcision disgrace.

To review: In one of the more egregious examples of the Politics of the Warm Fuzzy Feeling, the federal government now requires law-abiding people to show ID when they buy even modest amounts of decongestants containing pseudoephedrine, and to have those purchases logged. The goal is to curb the manufacture of illegal methamphetamine. The pesky facts that:

• vast quantities of decongestant — more than can be casually purchased at a pharmacy — are needed to manufacture meth


• alternative methods of manufacturing meth are now available that do not require pseudoephedrine at all


• almost all meth production occurs outside the United States


• many people will simply forego the hassle and suffer needlessly

are all conveniently blanked out. You don't want the drug dealers to win, do you?

And what's a mere entry in a notebook behind the pharmacist's counter, right?

Wrong:

Detective Brian Lewis returns to his desk after lunch, scanning e-mails he missed.

One catches his eye: It says a suspected member of a methamphetamine ring bought a box of Sudafed at 1:34 p.m. at a CVS pharmacy.

Minutes later, Lewis is in his truck, circling the parking lot, searching for the woman.

So decongestant purchases are in fact often not "merely" being recorded on paper for future reference, but actively monitored electronically and automatically transmitted to law enforcement. Despite the fact that no illegal activity has occurred.

A perfectly legal transaction that, without more, could not possibly be connected to a crime, is now actively transmitted to law enforcement.

Not only that, but that same perfectly legal, objectively innocuous purchase is now, apparently*, probable cause to pursue and detain (not to mention access DMV records — the detective was looking for the "suspect's" license plate in the pharmacy parking lot).

You can craft your own slippery slope scenario extrapolating from this fact pattern. Rent the movie "Airport" from Netflix? Have the TSA instantly notified. Want to see "Naked Boys Singing" but left off the last word from your Google search? The child pornography unit at the FBI will now have their eye on you. And so on. (Don't forget Googling "using Sudafed to manufacture meth" to research a libertarian-minded blogpost — uh oh!)

The notion that legal activities should be casually monitored, curbed or banned in the name of crime prevention, public safety or national security, with little or no consideration of the costs in terms of lost civil liberties (and to dismiss dissenters as "whiners"), is the siren song of those who would myopically destroy the American way of life in order to save it.

Via FourthAmendment.com.

---

*It's possible that in this instance the "suspect" was on probation or parole with specific instructions never to buy pseudoephedrine products. That would be a slightly different fact pattern, but not very.

One historian says maybe:

When a majority of Supreme Court justices adopt a manifestly ideological agenda, it plunges the court into the vortex of American politics. If the Roberts court has entered voluntarily what Justice Felix Frankfurter once called the "political thicket," it may require a political solution to set it straight.
...
Still, there is nothing sacrosanct about having nine justices on the Supreme Court. Roosevelt's 1937 chicanery has given court-packing a bad name, but it is a hallowed American political tradition participated in by Republicans and Democrats alike.

If the current five-man majority persists in thumbing its nose at popular values, the election of a Democratic president and Congress could provide a corrective. It requires only a majority vote in both houses to add a justice or two.

Of course, "hallowed" is a conclusory, and in my view absurd, way to describe the politicization of the size of the Supreme Court.

I wonder: Exactly how less radical (and vindictive) would FDR's court-packing plan had to have been to move from "chicanery" to "hallowed"?

Keep in mind, meanwhile, that the only reason that a court "plunges into the vortex of American politics" is because American politics leaves the judiciary no other choice. Stated differently, there can be no "activist judges" without "activist legislators" passing controversial laws that often do not reflect "popular values."

And of course the only reason we have partisan politics, anywhere in government, is precisely because "popular values" is a chimera. We are not carbon copies of each other. The fact that some people think that's a problem in need of correction, by government fiat if necessary, is precisely why judicial independence is so vitally important to a free society.

Bottom line: The potential precariousness of judicial independence is yet another reason why the only truly trustworthy check-and-balance is "gridlock."

I would rather see the Supreme Court occasionally make the wrong decision for the right reason (i.e., judicial independence) than make the right decision for the wrong reason (i.e., fear of political reprisal). The reason is precisely because the former is far more likely to be the aberration, and the former can be far more easily corrected by later Courts in later decisions. Even with decisions like the ones we're now seeing, I will never fear stare decisis more than I fear Congress.

To mislabel unbridled majoritarianism as an appeal to the fiction of "popular values" has been the disgraceful tactic of radical social conservatives throughout the Bush administration. How woefully sad it would be if the Democrats of 2009 corrupted themselves in the same manner.

Isn't nominate-and-confirm enough? Must every nook and cranny of government be infested and infected with the moral defectiveness of the politician mindset? Can't anyone, not even Supreme Court justices, be allowed to rise above petty politics?

More thoughts at Distributed Intelligence.

---

I actually wrote this post before the news today that Chief Justice Roberts had a seizure. Yet another reminder that the composition of the Court should not be toyed with flippantly. Diamond and I wish him a speedy and uneventful recovery.

A self-standing comment I left at another blog in response to a supposed list (no link available) of the twenty most "gay friendly" colleges:

It seems to me that the most "gay-friendly" colleges are the ones that provide the best educational value and that best equip gay graduates for life in a not-so-gay-friendly world.

Having a gay dorm, weekly gay pizza parties or the occasional gay rights speaker is of diminished value if you end up with a less competitive résumé once you graduate.

(No particular disrespect toward any particular school intended. I'm speaking generally.)

Discuss.

"The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
--Oscar Wilde

Everyone knows that most traditionally structured colleges and universities engage in price discrimination — charging different students different amounts for the same education. The basis, typically, is simple Marxism: "From each according to his ability."

On the other hand, since college is strictly voluntary, and since colleges compete against each other on fronts other than net cost, the redistributionist nature of college finance is much less pernicious and obscene than, say, the death tax.

Nevertheless, how interesting it is that a new form of collegiate price discrimination — charging different students different amounts for different educations — seems so astonishing as to require a New York Times exposé:

Starting this fall, juniors and seniors pursuing an undergraduate major in the business school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will pay $500 more each semester than classmates. The University of Nebraska last year began charging engineering students a $40 premium for each hour of class credit. And Arizona State University this fall will phase in for upperclassmen in the journalism school a $250 per semester charge above the basic $2,411 tuition for in-state students.

Such moves are being driven by the high salaries commanded by professors in certain fields, the expense of specialized equipment and the difficulties of getting state legislatures to approve general tuition increases, university officials say.
...
Even as they embrace such pricing, many officials acknowledge they are queasy about a practice that appears to value one discipline over another or that could result in lower-income students clustering in less expensive fields.

A market-mimicking system where price differentials reflect cost differentials and where supply and demand play at least some role in dictating outcomes?

How utterly ghastly that must seem to the median college administrator.

Meanwhile, here's my question: Apologists for raced-based admission standards in higher education (not to mention the Supreme Court's recent race-based cases) rely on the proposition that an institution of higher learning is not so much about providing an education, but rather about providing an "environment" — and that such an "environment" requires "diversity" to be effective. So, for instance, the purpose of a law school ceases to be "training lawyers" but rather "creating an atmosphere" (as if the law can be inhaled like nasal spray).

But clearly, if the university is not about earning a degree but "absorbing an environment," then there can be no basis for price discrimination by major. Yes, the engineering major may have used up more (expensive) lab resources than the French major, but they were (supposedly) equally exposed to the "diversity" of the campus. Yes the economics major may attend a senior seminar by the (expensive) Nobel Prize winning faculty member while the sociology major gets to listen to an otherwise unemployable adjunct. But they (supposedly) equally partook of the "culture" of the campus. And they should all therefore have the same (nominal) tuition, no?

So which is it: "Education" or "learning"? "Diploma" or "diversity"? "Major" or "memories"?

For each choice, a college can (supposedly) be both. But its tuition bill (and its admission staff's algorithms) cannot.

More thoughts at Conglomerate.

--Is it a proper function of government to declare the Titanic "an international maritime memorial"?

--Finding true love in the jury room? (Via QuizLaw.)

--Who pays the Alternative Minimum Tax? (Hint: Not millionaires.)

--Is the Internet dead?

--Are 50% of all bankruptcies really caused by medical expenses? (Via TOTM.)

"I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end — where all men and all churches are treated as equal — where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice — where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind — and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood."
--John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1960

"I saw first hand the liberal future, and it doesn't work."
--Mitt Romney, March 2, 2007

Romney himself would probably be the first to insist that "he's no Jack Kennedy." But that won't stop him from planning a Kennedy-style speech to assuage concerns over his Mormonism:

Romney said it's too early to decide what he would say in such a speech, largely because he hasn't made a final decision to deliver such a talk.

In March, a Gallup poll found that 46 percent had a negative opinion of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant group, considers the LDS church a cult and many other Christian denominations also do not recognize Mormon baptism.
...
"I expect that evangelical Christians who believe in life and family values are going to vote for someone who shares their views and has a real prospect of being nominated by our party and becoming president," Romney told the AP.

Yeah right, good luck with that...

A few hasty stitches:

1. The issue underlying Kennedy's speech was not his Catholicism per se, but whether he could remain independent of the Vatican. Although the answer both before and after the 1960 election appeared to be "yes," the question of how Catholic politicians are expected to behave still resurfaces from time to time.

That's not the challenge facing Romney, however. There is no "pope" in Mormonism — there aren't even professional clerics. Just a bureaucrat who, while nominally called a "prophet," is not an autocratic or deemed-infallible ruler analogous to the Bishop of Rome. There is no one in LDS who could conceivably "pull Romney's strings" the way that John XXIII could conceivably have manipulated Kennedy.

Which makes the notion of a major "Mormon speech" by Romney essentially irrelevant. Voters aren't afraid of President Romney kowtowing to President Hinckley. They just happen to think that: (a) Mormons are weird; (b) Mormonism is at odds with much of the rest of Christianity, and (c) Romney is a disingenuous, flip-flopping moral defective panderer. And, since all three statements are factually correct, all the speeches in the world won't help Romney the way Kennedy's speech helped him. Kennedy was debunking a myth. How exactly can Romney debunk the truth?

2. Kennedy delivered his "Catholic speech" in September 1960 — after he had already won the Democratic nomination. He was making an appeal to the other side, not his own base. Romney, meanwhile, is trying to allay the fears of the very people who ought to be his most fervent supporters — theocrats, bigots and other radical social conservatives. So again, the idea that he can simply "pull a Kennedy" is counterintuitive at best.

---

Just to clarify: To me, "weird" is not an insult. I'm undoubtedly weirder than the median Mormon. But then again, I'm not running for president.

Time to clean out the aggregator.

---

ITEM: The Human Rights Campaign has, finally, announced that they will indeed have two journalists at their Democratic presidential debate joint press conference gala. One presumes the questions will be even spaced between sets by Melissa Etheridge. Previous post here.

---

ITEM: More evidence that China's economic statistics are unreliable. Which is a polite way of saying that China's Communist dictators lie about how "great" their economy is. Just like the Soviet Union, which claimed year in and year out that it was outperforming the West. Previous post here. (Via Econbrowser.)

---

ITEM: Another reminder that there is typically no First Amendment equivalent outside the United States — The New Zealand parliament has banned satire of its politicians. Are we much better with McCain-Feingold? Previous posts here.

---

ITEM: The BBC, meanwhile, is moving ahead with its plan to post its programming on the Internet, essentially in real time. Will broadcast television, or Netflix for that matter, eventually die out? Previous post here.

---

ITEM: Back in the states, the New Jersey Supreme Court has upheld the power of homeowner associations and their property owner members to enter into voluntary private contracts restricting displays such as political signs. Some misguided malcontents incorrectly frame these restrictions as a First Amendment issue. They are not — they are a freedom of contract issue. Previous post here.

---

ITEM: In New York, meanwhile, a class action has been filed on behalf of panhandlers arrested or interfered with as the result of a law declared unconstitutional fifteen years ago. Previous posts here (fourth item) and here.

---

ITEM: Jumping over to Washington State, disgruntled pharmacists are suing to strike down a law requiring them to dispense so-called "morning after pills." I have previously proposed a compromise approach based on common law contract principles.

---

ITEM: Traipsing down the Pacific coast, the California Supreme Court has invalidated local civil forfeiture laws in which cities "seize automobiles whose drivers are arrested for allegedly buying drugs or soliciting prostitutes." A minor libertarian victory at best, based not on constitutional issues of due process but merely on state and federal pre-emption grounds. Previous post here.

---

ITEM: Finally, Professor Larry Solum has updated his important entry in the Legal Theory Lexicon on the "Counter-Majoritarian Difficulty," the notion that there are some lines that government should never cross, no matter how many people support doing so. The oppression of insular minorities, most notably gays, is the most pressing example of our time. An absolute must-read. Previous post here.

No sooner had I stumbled across scottmonteith2000 on YouTube than he annoucned that he is no longer posting videos. How unfortunate.

So this seemed like an appropriate video to use for his Sunday Cute YouTuber selection:


I guess YouTubing can burn a person out just as blogging often does. Oh well...

A modified version of a comment I left at another blog on the not-news that John Edwards is continuing to make class warfare the centerpiece of his (soon to be failed) presidential campaign — this time in the form of ever higher federal taxes on the people who already pay most of the federal tax bill anyway:

Meanwhile, what two words appear nowhere in the article?

That's right: "deficit reduction."

I could almost not loathe him and his class warfare if he were to say, "Yes, I'll raise taxes, but only to reduce the deficit. Read my lips: No new programs!"

(Without of course, the moral defective inaccuracy of the George H.W. Bush version of those three infamous words.)

---

One quick fisk:

He also would raise the top tax rate on long-term capital gains to 28 percent — the same rate signed into law by President Reagan. Edwards said the increase would ensure that high-income investors pay taxes on their investment income at a rate similar to what regular families pay on earned income.

Ah yes, the Buffett Lie. Expect to see it more and more as the campaign progresses. In reality, since corporations remit about 35% of their net income in federal taxes on behalf (mostly) of shareholders, the true capital gains tax rate is often as high as 50%, hardly "a rate similar to what regular families pay on earned income."

(Incidentally, what is a "regular family"? Can a "regular family" not have capital gains (e.g., from selling mutual fund shares)? "Traditional marriage should be limited to one paycheck and one bank account..."? Good grief.)

Two reasons: First, as I've mentioned before, is the over-representation of the agricultural states (qua underpopulated states) in the Senate. When North Dakota has the same representation as New Jersey, national policy is going to equate a few North Dakota farmers with many New Jersey non-farmers. Which augurs well for North Dakotans and bodes ill for New Jerseyites.

Second is, perhaps surprisingly, the exact same phenomenon in the House:

A group of dissident lawmakers led by Representatives Ron Kind, Democrat of Wisconsin, and Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, is still pushing a plan to curtail the subsidies sharply.

But they have been largely outmuscled by the Agriculture Committee. It 46 members are slightly more than 10 percent of the House but their districts received more than 40 percent of all farm subsidies from 2003 to 2005, according to a database compiled by the Environmental Working Group, which opposes the subsidies.

Talk about the politician foxes guarding the henhouse subsidies.

Theoretically, in a world where politicians were not, by definition, moral defectives, it would make perfect sense for the Agriculture Committee to consist exclusively of members from agricultural states. Each to his legislative comparative advantage.

But in the real world -- where almost every action by Congress is driven by rent seeking, where every vote is sold either to lobbyists or the leadership, and where the question is never, ever, "How little can we tax and spend?" but always "How much can we tax and spend?" -- such a paradigm is a guarantee that reform is doomed from the outset.

---

More:

In the fall of 2005, grain prices plunged temporarily because of a bumper corn harvest and transportation problems resulting from Hurricane Katrina. Thousands of farmers locked in huge LDP profits, storing their grain and selling it for much more later when prices recovered. Farmers pocketed an estimated $3.8 billion more than was needed to give them the guaranteed price.

Could you imagine a government program in which an investment bank were eligible to apply for a taxpayer bailout whenever its portfolio fell, without actually being required to sell the investments? And later, when stocks rose again, the Wall Streeters could sell the investments and book the profits anyway, in addition to the taxpayer-subsidized compensation for the paper losses that never materialized?

Absurd? Yet that is exactly how the loan deficiency payment -- "LDP" -- program works for our "noble" Americans farmers, thanks to their "dedicated public servants" in Congress.

The mind reels.

---

More thoughts at no third solution, Cato Daily Dispatch.

To review: The government has no business providing any goods other than public goods. A public good is one that is neither excludable (I can withhold a cheeseburger from you if you do not pay for it) nor rivalrous (a cheeseburger cannot be consumed simultaneously by more than one person).

One instance where this seemingly obvious distinction between public and private goods gets conveniently befuddled is where a good is excludable but is not strictly rivalrous -- so-called club goods. Two separate people can each be excluded from a 200-seat movie theater, but they can also both watch the movie non-rivalrously (though 201 people cannot).

There is a robust economic science to club goods: how to price, when to expand, whether to price uniformly or engage in price discrimination. But one underlying truth remains: Club goods are not public goods. There is consequently no basis, none whatsoever, for the government to provide club goods. At most, the poor (and only the poor) can be subsidized to enable them to "join the club." But the line between welfare finance and outright public provision should never be crossed.

No one (I hope) would suggest that governments should own and operate movie theaters. Libraries, on the other hand, are also club goods (they're excludable just as movie theaters are), but most people (not most libertarians!) overlook this on dubious "positive externality" grounds (i.e., that a public library is more akin to a public school than a movie theater). On the other other hand, such positive externality arguments completely evaporate when public libraries engage in ancillary operations such a DVD rentals -- who would dare suggest that a Netflix subscription is somehow a public good?

Now, armed with that:

Golfers' wishes outweighed the argument for turning Jackson's [Mississippi] two public golf courses over to a private management company, Mayor Frank Melton said Wednesday.

You remember Frank Melton, right? He's the Hugo Chavez wannabe who seizes children on highways for group hugs and was warned by both the federal Justice Department and the state attorney general to stop impersonating a police officer (complete with firearms).

Melton later said he decided not to approve privatization of the Sonny Guy and Grove Park courses because he was not sure the city actually was losing money operating the courses.

"This is not a decision that needs to be made from City Hall. It needs to be made by the customers," Melton said. "I have asked them to come up with a list of things that need to be done (at the courses)."

Strange, I always thought the "customers" of government were the population generally and taxpayers specifically. Apparently not -- apparently city government now works strictly for golfers.

Grove Park and Sonny Guy golf courses lose about $300,000 annually.

Apparently Melton didn't get that memo. In any case, every taxpayer who does not use the golf course is subsidizing every person, taxpayer or otherwise, who does. All in the name of providing a supposedly "public good."

The only reason golf courses seem to get a waiver from the basic proposition that club goods should be strictly privately provided is of course because it is mostly a middle class pastime. If doctors, lawyers and stockbrokers played hopscotch (and if hopscotch were an expensive hobby), then we would no doubt see many municipal hopscotch parks -- on the grounds that hopscotch was, somehow, a "public good."

Perhaps class warriors like John Edwards ought to spend less time asking whether the rich can pay ever more taxes and instead ask mayors like Frank Melton (a Democrat, incidentally) why the poor are taxed so the not-poor can save on their greens fees and cart rentals.

(Via Out of Control.)

Now available at the YouTube videoblog page.

July 20, 2007 episode: military morale, Gates' gushing, Vitter's vices. And a prediction!

--One for the Evangelicals: Better Mormon than gay? (Via Good As You.)

--One for the (alleged) "crack dealing pieces of trash": Jail or cemetery?

--One for the lawyers: Suing for "reminding me of 9/11"?

--One for the nanny staters: Does 2.9 grams of trans fat warrant a histrionic "exposé"?

--One for the housewives: Is Bat Boy dead or just on hiatus? (Via Fark.)

Here was the answer:

All nine men said yes, two of the 10 women said no.

Can you guess the question?

---

Actually, the underlying fact pattern raises some important legal questions regarding substantive due process (i.e., the right to privacy), prisoners' rights and the void-for-vagueness doctrine (my sensors always sound "Red Alert!" when I see the words "vulgarity" and "obscenity" in a criminal statute or regulatory code).

Stay tuned...

(Via How Appealing.)

As taboo as this might be in certain circles, I will now be critical of Elizabeth Edwards:

Elizabeth Edwards raised in passing the importance of relying on locally-grown fruit.

"We've been moving back to 'buy local,'" Mrs. Edwards said, outlining a trade policy that "acknowledges the carbon footprint" of transporting fruit.

"I live in North Carolina. I'll probably never eat a tangerine again," she said, speaking of a time when the fruit ... reaches the price that it "needs" to be.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

"Eating locally" is a variation of that other utter nonsense, "buying locally." The best way to preserve the environment (whatever that means) is to consume as efficiently as possible, in terms of utility as well as cost.

If "long-distance food" is a better offering to a consumer (in terms not only of price but of utility), then it is the optimal purchase, not just for the consumer herself but for the environment as well.

The mere fact that transporting food (or anything else) over longer distances may require burning incrementally more fossil fuels merely suggests a properly crafted Pigou tax to correct the supposed externality (i.e., to make the price reflect the true cost). Abstinence is not only unnecessary but also counterproductive.

Consider: What next-best item will you spend your money on if not a tangerine? What "carbon footprint" will it leave? You're not eliminating the total carbon footprint of the tangerine, merely the marginal footprint between the tangerine and the next-best item. While making yourself worse off in terms of utility in the process. You're simply trading one cost (carbon emissions) for another (lost utility). In a way that, by definition, makes you worse off.

All this, somehow, makes the world a better place?

Think of it this way: Getting the biggest bang for your buck also means the fewest bangs on the environment.

Incidentally, one wonders, as do the commenters at Politico, whether Mrs. Edwards will also be giving up things like orange juice and bananas, neither of which are grown in North Carolina. Giving up tangerines is hardly the express lane to selfless asceticism.

More thoughts at Marginal Revolution.

---

By the same token and for the same reasons, the best path to economic prosperity is not to "buy American" or "buy local" or "buy black" or "buy gay," but simply to "buy cheap." To deliberately make yourself worse off economically by limiting your choices only empowers those who cannot successfully compete freely and fairly -- the same kind of collectivists who insist that "we" (i.e., they) need quotas and tariffs and subsidies. See, ironically, "farmers."

---

Note also that if Mrs. Edwards is merely bemoaning the fact that there is not yet such a Pigou tax on her tangerines (or anything else), then she could simply "tax herself" and agree to donate money to an environmental group every time she "eats transported." Just like how when Bill Clinton or Warren Buffett lament that they are not taxed enough, they could simply cut a check to the Treasury any time they felt like it. But they don't. Go figure.

More self-appointed warm-fuzzy-feeling do-gooders see only what they want to see:

Paper or plastic? It is a question that has long dogged grocery shoppers. But the debate may soon be settled for [Annapolis], where a bill aimed at protecting marine life would ban plastic bags from all retail stores.
...
Alexandra Cousteau, granddaughter of Jacques Cousteau and director of EarthEcho, an environmental education group in Washington, said, "Banning plastic makes sense for the simple reason that it takes more than 1,000 years to biodegrade, which means that every single piece of plastic we've ever manufactured is still around, and much of it ends up in the oceans killing animals."

Ignore for the moment the facially absurd claim that "much" of our plastic bag refuse ends up in the oceans. Our trash ends up in landfills. There is simply no oceanic "tragedy of the commons" here as there might be with whale hunting or tuna fishing.

Focus instead on the all-too-real economic consequences:

Instead of taking away plastic bags, which cost 2 cents each compared with 5 cents for paper bags, Annapolis should enforce its litter laws, [a supermarket spokesperson] said.

He added that Giant already offered a 3-cent credit for every plastic bag that customers return to the store and that 2,200 tons of bags a year were recycled and turned into backyard decks and park benches.

Paper bags are bulkier to transport than plastic bags, [he] added, and more trucks, fuel and pollution are involved in delivering them to stores.

So not only do these environmentalists hate the poor, by making them pay more for their groceries, but they also apparently hate the environment, advocating policies that would contribute to global warming. Go figure.

The way to deal with litter is with anti-littering laws. The way to deal with trash generally is to make it fee based. The way to deal with externalities — if you can objectively demonstrate that they even exist — is with carefully crafted Pigou taxes.

And the way to maximize "social welfare" is, always, to leave people alone as much as possible to pursue their individual welfare. That is the optimal environment, and therefore the optimal environmental policy.

More thoughts at Hit & Run.

Namely, the gay blood ban:

City blood supplies have dropped to dangerously low levels, raising concern that hospitals do not have enough blood to cope with a major emergency, blood donation officials warn.

"We are down to a one-day supply in some of the critical areas like Type O Negative," said Robert L. Jones, president of the New York Blood Center. "When it gets down to that point hospitals feel like they don't have enough even for routine procedures."
...
"We need everybody who possibly can -- between the ages of 16 and 75 -- to step forward and donate blood," said Jones. "Without their help we do not have a blood supply."

The shortages are also partly due to an ignorant, purely political policy that ignores the realities of the blood shortage and medical science in favor of the hysteria-pandering fiction that gay blood is an especial threat to public health.

"Better no blood than gay blood" is a worse disgrace of bigoted illogic than "undermines unit cohesion." And people may well start dying from it.

The "professional journalists" at the Moonie-owned, homosexual-"marriage"-in-scare-quotes Washington Times have some breaking news:

A ranking California Democrat is leading the movement to repeal the policy banning homosexuals in the military.

Rep. Ellen Tauscher, California Democrat, introduced House Resolution 1246 this year, which would repeal the "don't ask, don't tell" policy enacted in 1993 by the Clinton administration. Mrs. Tauscher's bill would ban any discrimination in the military on the basis of sexual orientation.

The bill is supported by a bipartisan coalition of 127 lawmakers.

Representative Tauscher is, of course, only filling in for Representative Marty Meehan, who introduced the Military Readiness Enhancement Act (H.R. 1246) long ago, complete with 126 co-sponsors. Meehan, you may recall, just retired from Congress to become the Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts. Hence the need for a new principal sponsor (i.e, Tauscher).

All information that apparently never made it to the "professional journalists" at the Washington Times, who felt compelled to present an uninformed Chicken Little report to its uninformed chicken-brained readers. Go figure.

---

Meanwhile, how many of the four sitting Democratic senators announced at tonight's debate joint press conference that they were introducing a companion bill repealing DADT in the Senate? Exactly zero? Gee, who saw that coming?

A self-standing comment I left on another blog:

Can you cite to one occasion in this campaign where Ron Paul has, unsolicited and not in response to an interviewer's question, used the word "libertarian"? Can you point to one page at his website that contain the word "libertarian"? Even his bio page omits his 1992 1988 big-L Libertarian candidacy.

Paul calling himself "a proud constitutionalist"* is like a gay calling himself "a proud alternative-lifestyler."

---

*And he's not even that. "Constitutionalists" don't believe that theocracy and anti-gay bigotry are perfectly hunky-dory so long as they occur at the state level. "Constitutionalists" do not complain about "rogue judges." And so on...

No substantive responses so far. Go figure.

In breaking non-news, Congress is poised yet again to force you to buy something you don't want:

The House has overwhelmingly rejected President Bush's plan to eliminate the $420 million federal subsidy for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The 357-72 vote last evening demonstrated the enduring political strength of public broadcasting. The outcome was never in doubt, unlike a fight two years ago when Republicans tried but failed to slash public broadcasting subsidies.

It's quite simple really: Public television might -- might -- have made sense when there were three television networks nationwide and perhaps four or five stations in any given market. It's downright silly when there are hundreds of channels in every market, a dozen or more of which do exactly what PBS does, and better. The metrics are comparable for public radio.

It is insolent paternalism to presume that people need to be forced to "buy culture" via tax-and-spend subsidies of PBS or any other manifestation of public arts funding. It is kindergarten naivete to believe that PBS is not politically biased (or at least politically susceptible). It is a disengenous bait-and-switch to insist that $420 million "isn't much."

If I were -- gasp -- a member of Congress, I would capitulate utterly on trying to fight PBS funding, simply based on opportunity costs: it's a futile gesture after two generations of propagandizing. I would, however, introduce legislation requiring PBS to rephrase its obnoxious gobbledygook mottos:

"A private corporation funded by the American people"
and
"by the annual financial support of viewers like you"
to
"A government bureaucracy funded by the American taxpayer"
and
"the annual taxes of people not watching this program"
Think my bill would pass?

Kip's Law: Every advocate of central planning always -- always -- envisions himself as the central planner.

Time to clean out the aggregator.

---

ITEM: District of Columbia politicians have announced that they will seek to appeal the circuit court ruling in Parker v. District, which struck down the capital's draconian gun law. The Supreme Court is widely thought likely to accept the case and revisit, for the first time in decades, whether the Second Amendment confers an individual right to bear arms or merely a state power to operate a militia. Previous posts here.

---

ITEM: Still on the Bill of Rights, the home of Suzette Kelo is being dismantled in anticipation of its being relocated. The "public use" requirement of the Fifth Amendment's eminent domain restriction was, you may recall, dismantled in Kelo v. New London and "relocated" down the toilet. (Via How Appealing.)

---

ITEM: Michael Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan failed to receive the required support of the New York Legislature. The plan would have fallen faster and harder if Bloomberg had not been a moral defective and openly acknowledged that the plan was not "anti-congestion" but anti-automobile. Bloomberg, meanwhile, threw an infantile temper tantrum over the issue -- hardly "presidential" behavior.

---

ITEM: Remember the child molester deemed "too short for prison" by a sentencing judge? An appellate court has upheld the probation-only sentence, but on other grounds. How tall is Scooter Libby?

---

ITEM: Netflix is lowering prices for two of its most popular subscription plans. Just as I predicted (fourth item). Yet another example of how it often takes very few competitors to bring about the benefits of competition.

---

ITEM: Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi pardoned opposition leaders who had faced execution and were ultimately sentenced to life in prison; see my previous post. Tne consensus is that the United States and other Western nations quietly pressured Meles into acting civilized for just a few fleeting moments, lest he lose his precious "trusted ally" status (and hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid).

And to prove just how fleeting those moments actually were, Meles promptly cut off emergency food supplies to an impoverished rebel region in his country. "Trusted ally" indeed...

---

ITEM: Speaking of dictators, Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chavez is now threatening to expel any foreigner who actually calls him a dictator. Which makes one wonder: What more than attempted thought control do his apologists need before they will finally capitulate and acknowledge Chavez for the psychopathic totalitarian that he now demonstrated himself to be? Stated differently, who was naive enough to think that he was "only" interested in oil? Previous posts here.

So says President Bush, in another one of those silly proclamations that all presidents issue:

The guidance and unconditional love of parents help create a nurturing environment so children can grow and reach their full potential. Parents work to impart to their children the strength and determination to follow their dreams and the courage to do what is right. They shape the character of their children by sharing their wisdom and setting a positive example. As role models, parents also instill the values and principles that help prepare children to be responsible adults and good citizens.

Sounds innocuous enough.

My Administration is committed to strengthening American families by supporting Federal, State, and faith-based and community programs that promote healthy marriages and responsible parenting.

But of course only healthy heterosexual marriages. To this president and the theocratic bigots who constitute (what's left of) his base, "healthy" presumes heterosexual, and "responsible parenting" presumes a mother and a father, to the exclusion of any other arrangement.

The notion that non-Ward-and-June families ought also to be "strengthened," or that non-Ozzie-and-Harriet marriages ought also to be "promoted," or that parents such as, say, Mary Cheney, ought also to be praised today, would all be abominations to this president and his supporters who embrace these sort of warm fuzzy feeling proclamations.

So much for happy days...

To review: The Supreme Court held in McCreary County v. ACLU, 545 U.S. 844 (2005), that a Decalogue could remain displayed on Texas courthouse property because it was part of a comprehensive secular display.

The case was backward-looking, essentially saying that — since the monument had already been there for several decades — it was entitled a level of deference that such religious displays would not normally receive. Fair enough.

But notice how the McCreary exception has been abused by theocrats recently. First we had Casper, Wyoming, wasting taxpayer money erecting a secular display around a lone Decalogue in order to rescue it from a First Amendment challenge. Because the more obvious and less obnoxious solution — remove the Decalogue — would apparently have been an abomination.

All this theocratic sturm und drang despite the fact that such remedial actions are not necessarily sanctioned by McCreary, which concerned already existing comprehensive displays and not post hoc efforts to "rescue" what would otherwise be impermissible. Stated differently, "was then and is now permissible" is not the same as "wasn't then but is now permissible." It's simply a different fact pattern.

In any event, theocrats in Berkley, Michigan, are now pushing the envelope even further:

City voters will get a chance in November to decide whether they want the city to display a nativity scene and other holiday symbols on City Hall property for the Christmas season.
...
The petition calls for the city to display the nativity scene along with secular holiday icons so that it is in compliance with existing law, which prohibits displays of only Christian religious icons on government property.

This insolence is the reciprocal of the Casper fact pattern. Rather than build a secular display around the religious icon, voters will now be invited to compel the erection of a religious icon within a pre-existing secular display.

...voters will now be invited to compel the erection of a religious icon...

Can you imagine a more unconstitutional act? How could such a vote not be deemed "the establishment of religion"?

What's next? Mandating a church be built on city property, right between the (secular) public library and the (secular) public swimming pool?

The mind reels.

The activist theocrats, so many of whom apparently seem to suffer from the jurisprudential equivalent of obsessive-compulsive disorder, will always concoct new ways to try twist and distort case law and the First Amendment, to try to blur the line between "God's house" and the courthouse. They will never run out of abominations to try to impose on others.

(Via Religion Clause.)

The second biggest challenge for any gay guy is: coming out of the closet.

The first biggest challenge is, of course:



Another big challenge is finding a boyfriend, as wimjimjams chronicles in a series of fun videos. Check them out.

"To enforce the law and defend the interests of the United States according to the law; to ensure public safety against threats foreign and domestic; to provide federal leadership in preventing and controlling crime; to seek just punishment for those guilty of unlawful behavior; and to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans."
--Department of Justice Mission Statement

"The refusal to answer pertinent questions in a matter of inquiry within the jurisdiction of the senate, of course, constitutes a contempt of that body, and by the statute this is also made an offense against the United States."
--In re Chapman, 166 U.S. 661 (1897)

The White House recently indicated that it will forbid any office or employee within the Justice Department to act upon a contempt citation by Congress once the administration has invoked executive privilege:

Under federal law, a statutory contempt citation by the House or Senate must be submitted to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, "whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action."

But administration officials argued yesterday that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges in cases, such as the prosecutor firings, in which the president has declared that testimony or documents are protected from release by executive privilege.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

On the other hand, it is also utter nonsense to proclaim that this showdown between Congress and Bush is in any way "constitutional," or worse, a "constitutional crisis."

To review: The terms "U.S. Attorney" and "Department of Justice" appear nowhere in Constitution. They are both creatures of statute. Indeed, the term "executive privilege" doesn't even has that pedigree — it's basically just a presumption (other privileges, such as attorney-client and spousal privilege, are themselves statutory and not constitutional in nature).

Consider this bizarre gobbledygook from a member of the "unitary executive" cult:

David B. Rifkin, who worked in the Justice Department and White House counsel's office under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, praised the position and said it is consistent with the idea of a "unitary executive." In practical terms, he said, "U.S. attorneys are emanations of a president's will."

Flunk-the-final wrong. U.S. attorneys are creations of statute — and therefore "emanations" of Congress's will just as much as — perhaps more than — the president's.

The Justice Department is, likewise, whatever statutory law says it is, and must perform whatever functions statutory law instructs it to perform. All else is sophistry.

If a duly enacted statute includes compulsory initiation of contempt prosecutions at the behest of Congress, then so be it.

And if the statute does not include such compulsory duties, then Congress can simply amend the statute. And the president can veto the amendment, and Congress can override the veto or attach it to the Justice Department's omnibus appropriation. And so on. Such is the legislative process.

But the situation is "constitutional" only in the Presentment Clause sense: What statutes have been enacted in the past, and which ones might be enacted in the future? There is simply no "crisis."

So too with executive privilege: If Congress doesn't agree with the president's interpretation of the concept, then Congress can simply revise it via statute — no different than, say, revising the Federal Rules of Evidence. Or Congress could at least try to revise it given the veto power. But again, no "constitutional crisis" exists.

As for what current statutory law demands, the plain language — "whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action" — seems clear enough, although there may well be statutory counterarguments (e.g., context-dropping or contradictory provisions elsewhere in statutory law). If the White House can make such arguments, then more power to it (pun intended). But to merely chant the mantra of "executive privilege" over and over like a drug-fogged shaman simply will not suffice.

More thoughts from Professor Frank Askin.

---

Finally, would now be a good time to revisit my proposal that United States Attorneys be given fixed seven-year terms rather than be considered political appointments?

Now available on YouTube.

July 13, 2007, episode: Iraq, al Qaeda, Surgeon General scandals. And a prediction.

"You want my money, my money. Those who bite me will be bitten back."
--Republican Representative Don Young of Alaska

The context:

Young took extreme exception to an amendment by Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) to strike money in a spending bill for native Alaskan and Hawaiian educational programs.
...
During his brief tirade Wednesday, Young suggested Republicans lost their majority because Garrett, whom he did not specifically name, and others had challenged spending during the GOP's tenure.

That's right -- the Republicans lost Congress not because of Iraq, not because of Guantanamo, not because of the War on Civil Liberties, but because they didn't pork and earmark enough.

Stated differently, the GOP didn't build enough Bridges to Nowhere.

The biggest downside to having a Democratic president after 2008 will be having a Democratic Congress to bloat up the budget with him (or -- gasp -- her). If I could have one wish, it would be for the Republicans to take back the Senate (with a Democratic House and President). Highly unlikely, all things considered (far more Republican senators are up for re-election in 2008; see also "Iraq"). But a pleasant fantasy nonetheless.

Democrats are not "better" than Republicans -- all politicians are, by definition, moral defectives. What's truly "better" is gridlock. We're going to have two years of it -- and almost certainly only two years.

So enjoy it while it lasts.

---

Meanwhile, the almost inconceivable gridlock scenario of a Democratic House, Republican Senate and Republican president would be endurable, but for three words: John Paul Stevens. But cf., this article.

To review: Ever since the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Tinker v. Des Moines, 393 U.S. 503 (1969), the broad question regarding students' constitutional liberties has been which rights they do and do not bring "past the schoolhouse gate."

Now, however, we are seeing not only an increasing presumption that the answer is "few or none" (supposed quasi-libertarian Clarence Thomas is adamant that the answer is "less than none"), but also a new, increasingly frequent encroachment by school officials before the schoolhouse gate -- the belief that students' liberties may be curtailed, and their conduct punished, for actions off school grounds and beyond the "educational environment."

The apex of this arrogant educratic presumptuousness was of course the recent decision in Morse v. Frederick, No. 06-278 (2007), which held that an adult student, not enrolled in school that day and not on school grounds, could be punished for engaging in expressive conduct on a public street. The mind reels.

But one should not let Morse eclipse another, more frequent manifestation of this new theory of abridging rights "before the schoolhouse gate" --

A Burlington [Connecticut] teenager has sued two top school officials, saying they violated her constitutional rights by removing her as class secretary because she used offensive slang to refer to administrators on an Internet blog.
...
[The principal] removed Doninger as the class of 2008 secretary and banned her from running for re-election after discovering the teen called unnamed school administrators "douchbags" (sic) on an online journal.

Avery Doninger posted the message to www.livejournal.com, which is not associated with the school, from a home computer.
...
While Doninger apologized and reported the incident to