Out of Control

Louisiana HB 699, which creates a statewide franchising process, has passed the state senate 27-10, and now awaits sign-off by Gov. Kathleen Blanco.

Blanco need not sign the bill for it to become law. Louisiana has something of a reverse “pocket veto;” the governor must declare a veto outright and send it back to the legislature. She has until July 11 to do so.

Given the strong support in both chambers (HB 699 passed the House 73-26), veto offers a difficult prospect, despite the heavy lobbying Blanco’s seeing from local franchise authorities. Veto override, however, is questionable as the legislature has adjourned.

In passing the House, the bill was revised to further level the playing field between cable companies and telephone companies—cable companies will now be able to apply for a statewide franchise once a competitor moves in. The earlier House version required them to wait until current local franchises expired.

YORKSHIRE firms are going bust because traffic queues are forcing shoppers to give up and go home in despair, according to one of Britain's biggest business pressure groups.

A campaign against congestion is being stepped up following the re-election of Leeds businessman Chris Glen as chairman of the Yorkshire and Humber policy unit of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB).

Mr Glen, who was re-elected unopposed by the FSB's 14,500 members in the region, said the problem had reached crisis point.

According to FSB research, almost half of all businesses in Yorkshire and the Humber lost more than 50 working hours in the year because of traffic congestion, and 17 per cent lost more than 100 hours.

Nearly a third of the 1,400 businesses questioned in Yorkshire lost more than £1,000 because of congestion problems, while one in 10 lost more than £5,000.

Article here.

Related: Part I

I've pointed out that there’s some evidence that government-sector managers, who have been even more resistant to telecommuting than their private-sector counterparts, are beginning to warm up to the idea.

Yet it still gets a chilly reception from many of these folks:

Top managers are holding back the spread of telecommuting at some government agencies, several officials said during a panel discussion earlier this month.

For government agencies to fully realize the benefits of telecommuting, such top managers need to change their attitudes, said Wendell Joice, head of the U.S. General Services Administration's governmentwide telework team.
"We are hampered by constantly having to beg and plead," said Joice, speaking at a conference called Continuity of Operations Planning in the Federal Government and Industry: Enabling a Mobile Workforce in Times of Crisis. The event, held here, was sponsored by iPass Inc., RSA Security Inc. and research firm Input Inc.

Article here.

Related: When telecommuters screw up (but was he really a telecommuter?)

Related: Report: Govt work safe to do at home

Reacting to customer displeasure with early termination fees (ETFs) Verizon Wireless this week announced a plan to pro-rate the charge, which is assessed on customers who switch from Verizon to other wireless companies before their Verizon contract term is up.

While ETFs ostensibly protect the front-end loss carriers take on sale of heavily discounted wireless phones, consumers increasingly have objected to the ETF, which in Verizon’s case is $175, along with the increasing length of the commitment carriers demand—now as long as two years.

In a concession to this, Verizon Wireless ETFs on individual contracts will now decrease over time. It will cost Verizon customers substantially less to switch carriers in the final months of their contracts as it would at the outset.

"The number of complaints on this issue is the single largest that our customers have," said Denny Strigl, CEO of Verizon Wireless, in an interview with AP. He called ETFs a "black eye" for the industry. "It's a legitimate complaint: If they leave in month one or month 23, they pay the same charge."

The article notes that for Verizon, which has the best customer retention rates in the industry, the move is less of a gambit than it would be for other service providers. In addition, ETFs have been a target of regulators, and Veruizon’s move may be an attempt to fend off government intervention. For example, they would be tightly controlled under a new wireless consumer “bill of rights” proposed in New York State.

Verizon’s decision, however, shows that the market responds to adverse customer reactions. It’s what competition is all about. Perhaps here, one of Verizon’s competitors will choose to raise the stakes, and offer a better deal. Hence, ETF reform becomes a marketing proposition that can influence a buying decision, not a uniform code that encourages business conformity.

I had a piece in yesterday's TCS Daily:

When it comes to internet connections we are quick to appreciate the importance of speed. Whether we're shopping, job hunting, or doing just about anything else, we recognize that our opportunities expand when broadband connections let us zip around this global network quickly. We'd never want to return to dial-up now, but that's what we're doing with another network -- our roadway system.

Whole thing here.

After vigorous debate on network neutrality, followed by a close vote to exclude such a provision from the final bill, the Senate Commerce and Energy Committee approved a telecommunications reform bill 15-7 yesterday.

The bill has yet to be placed on the Senate calendar. The bill, S. 2686, substantially revised from its first draft, creates a national video franchising process that will let telephone companies enter local markets faster—accelerating the spread of cable and broadband competition.

Prior to the vote, the committee tied 11-11 on a network neutrality provision that would have prevented Internet service providers from offering content and applications providers any fee-based quality of service tiers. The provision was therefore dropped. It was another defeat for network neutrality, a regulatory scheme heavily favored by Google, Yahoo, eBay and Amazon.com, who maintain hundreds of thousands of servers on the Web and plan to aggregate content, commerce, advertising and other bandwidth-intensive services.

Network neutrality may emerge again in a floor fight. In the House, Rep. Edward Markey (D., Mass.) introduced an amendment to the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement (COPE) Act of 2006, but the measure was defeated in a voice vote. COPE went on to pass the House. If the Senate bill passes the two will go to joint conference.

Sen. Ron Wydon (D., Ore.), a network neutrality supporter (whose home state just saw a major infusion of Google investment capital) promises to filibuster a net neutrality amendment. Patrick Ross of the Progress & Freedom Foundation takes some of Wydon to task on some of his notions about the Internet here.

Good news from California...the "Protect Our Homes Act" has qualified for the November ballot. It's basically a "Kelo-Plus" measure that aims to restrict the use of eminent domain for economic development purposes, as well as provide compensation for regulatory takings, similar to Oregon's Measure 37:

An initiative that would ban government seizure of land to facilitate private developments has qualified for California's November ballot, the secretary of state's office said Tuesday.

Supporters of the "Protect Our Homes Act'' collected about 1 million signatures, many more than the 600,000 valid signatures needed to qualify.

It is one of many initiatives appearing on ballots across the country in response to the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling last year upholding a Connecticut town's right use eminent domain to seize private land to develop a hotel, condominiums and commercial space.

The California measure would require governments to occupy seized property themselves or contract out for public use. It also could increase how much governments must pay for seized property.

Critics say the California initiative is grossly misleading because in addition to the eminent domain provisions it would gut government's ability to regulate land use and urban growth.

In particular, the measure contains controversial language that would require governments to compensate landowners if new regulations not directly related to public safety hurt a property's value -- unless the property is exempted from the new restrictions.

Cities, redevelopment agencies, urban planners and environmental, school and public safety groups say they will vigorously fight the measure.

For more on Measure 37, see my April 2006 study here, as well as this op-ed.

After being accused of disseminating “disinformation” time and again whenever I write about the mounting number of municipal broadband failures, it is not without some satisfaction that I can report that city officials in Chaska, Minn., have been yanking our chain about the “success” of their municipal wireless system for the past 18 months.

It turns out Chaska, which has been repeatedly (and exclusively) upheld as the shining example of a successful muni wireless operation, has been a disaster.

Its problems, catalogued by TechDirt, haven’t been much different from other cities. Much of it dealt with engineering the high-frequency, low power radio coverage that WiFi uses, a day-to-day task that gives 25-year industry veterans grey hairs, yet that every city seems to believe can be done by an intern with a second-hand oscilloscope. Earlier this year Chaska disclosed that it had gone overbudget by $300,000—some 50 percent—optimizing its system.

Although they made the problems sound minor, in truth, most of the residents were unable to access the system until a few weeks ago--and TechDirt remains skeptical of that claim. Throughout all this Chaska misled everyone, never admitting its sizable problems. I recall speaking the North Cable Association Conference in Minneapolis, I raised all the issues about muni wireless that should concern cities, while the Chaska city official who shared the panel assured the audience that, in his case, muni wireless was a financial and popular success.

Every time I have addressed the boondoggle that is muni wireless, I hear Chaska, Chaska, Chaka, to the point where I was being forced to concede it as an example of a muni system that worked. Well no more. To date, we are hard-pressed to find any city that has successfully pulled off municipal broadband in any form. They may get systems up, but they are poor in quality, coverage and financial return. Even the press senses blood in the water. Uncritical, saccharine-laced stories about how muni broadband was bringing “hope” to rural America have given way to sober pieces like Newsweek’s Wi-Fi Fever .

I have been following this issue closely for some two years. From what I've seen I can confidently predict that cities like Philadelphia, San Francisco, Portland and others that have struck deals with private partners are not going to get anything near the networks they expect. Right now, free market competitors show every sign of getting far wider and higher quality broadband coverage before any muni-sponsored effort cuts over. By the time these large private-partnerships come on-line—if ever—most of the low-end market will have choices, either from other commercial players or from nonprofits. EarthLink, MetroFi and Google will simply shrug their shoulders and stick to serving high-revenue areas, while enjoying all the right-of-way discounts and city contract revenues they negotiated for themselves. Politicians who touted these sweetheart deals will decide the less said about them the better.

It’s time for cities to read the headlines and wise up. Muni broadband doesn’t work and never will. Stick a fork in this debate. It’s done.

Back in May, I blogged that local revenues from video franchise fees were safe as long as cable TV companies used a local satellite head-end to receive hundreds of programming channels and pipe them down to area homes.

“Should programming delivery shift to a Web-based client-server model, where the cable box works more like a web browser than a TV channel tuner, subscription-based Internet video could replace today’s downlink-and-transmit model.”

It’s happening faster than even I would have thought. The Wall Street Journal reports today that Comcast and Time Warner are investing in technology that helps move Web content to television sets.

They see clearly see a future where the Web is a source of first-line entertainment programming—Hollywood movies and network TV shows—and they don’t want to be left out.

In addition to quietly purchasing in companies like thePlatform Inc., a startup that builds devices that routes video from the Internet to TVs and cellphones, Comcast is placing more content on its Comcast.net site. Right now, users must be Comcast customers to access and download material, but the Journal reports that Comcast is mulling the possibility of marketing Web-based content to everyone with a broadband connection, a move that would further heighten the competitive stakes.

Time Warner Cable, of course, is a sister unit of AOL, which has thrown its hat in the content aggregation ring, and both are owned by media giant Time Warner.

Consumers, of course, will be the big winners. Slingboxes have placed the term “place-shifting” alongside “time-shifting,” spawned by VCRs so long ago. Users are no longer stuck with the cable programming line-up. Elected officials who have clamored for a la carte choice have to like this. Never mind “family tiers,” isn’t the ability to download individual programs the ultimate in a la carte? Yet franchise fees will be more difficult to justify when cable companies can deliver programming without a physical presence in local area. Comcast can sell programming from its web site into Time Warner territory, but isn’t hit with the five percent fee that Time Warner is.

Local franchise authorities like those in DuPage County, who are clinging ferociously to old franchise fee models, stand to be the big losers. While franchise rules, including the newer state rules, call for fees to be assessed on pay-per-view services delivered via the traditional local head-end, they largely exclude services delivered over a high-speed Internet connection.

The problem has been that franchise fees are assessed on a service, not on the fact that cable companies require right-of-way. In most areas, cable companies pay both. And a lot of farnchise "reform" simply extends those extra fees to telephone companies who choose to offer video over existing lines.

That's why the few franchise reform bills that force local authorities to apply payments income to right-of-way make the most sense. Even so, these fees should reflect the true cost of right-of-way--and its accommodation--on the part of the municipality. Service-defined fees will be harder to maintain, simply as a matter of course. The industry's revenue stream is changing. Local authorities are on the clock.

Investing is tricky enough without politicians throwing in another X factor.

Robert Higgs explains how regime uncertainty exacerbated the Great Depression and, in a recent SF Chronicle piece, Bob Poole points out how it’s now having the same impact on traffic congestion:

Instead of following Utah and other states that enacted legislation to attract private investors, the California measure allows only four pilot projects and requires legislative approval for each project.

Florida tried that approach. It passed a public-private partnership law in 1991, but for 13 years, not a single project got done. Why? The risk was too great. Would you have team of engineers and finance people spend months and tens of millions of dollars preparing a highway design and working out the finances, only to risk having the state legislature reject the plan on a whim? Of course not. Florida saw the light and removed the legislative approval step, requiring only normal state Department of Transportation approval.

Read the whole piece here.

People tend to bristle at road pricing when they think of it in the abstract, but they're friendlier to it when they experience it firsthand. Why?

Part of the reason is because we value our time more than we say we do:

[UC Irvine economist David] Brownstone looked at the preferences of travelers on a stretch of the Escondido (I-15) Freeway in San Diego County, where express toll lanes are available. He found a wide gap between what people say in surveys about the value of their time and what they actually do when given the chance to save time by paying a toll.

The behavior of commuters on the I-15 indicates they value their time about twice as much as they say they do in surveys, Brownstone found. His results affirm a tendency found in other studies, he said.

UCI’s Ken Small worked on putting a dollar figure on how much we value our time:

Small studied the choices of people who travel on the 91, whether they use the Express Lanes or not. By inputting data about lane choices, time savings and toll prices into a computer, he found that the value drivers placed on travel time varied widely, but averaged about $20 an hour.

More here.

The gap between what people say and what they do is also very apparent when they consider public transit. But in this case, transit looks much better in theory than in practice.

Folks who live in areas that don't have extensive transit systems often dream about zipping past congestion in a sleek rail car and those who have big transit systems like them more than they use them.

A new statewide study co-written by a University of Texas at Arlington economist found that sales tax revenue drops by more than $560,000 every time a city hosts a regular-season NFL game.

NBA games lower sales tax revenue by $16,000 per game, the study found, while NHL and Major League Baseball games tend to boost average sales tax revenue by small amounts.

"When it comes to NFL games, that number seems awfully large and negative, but I'm convinced it's there," said UTA's Craig Depken.

Large traffic jams that accompany Dallas Cowboys and Houston Texans games also lead to what Dr. Depken calls the "hunker-down" and "skedaddle" factors. Fans might spend money in Irving during a Cowboys game, but more residents are likely to avoid gridlock by staying home or driving to a neighboring city to shop or dine.

According to the study, NBA Finals games produce a modest boost in economic activity, but not enough to make up for drain other playoff games bring. Certain pro game seem to generate revenue. The Super Bowl was the biggest winner and political conventions were the biggest losers.

Critics of the study say it is too focused on sales tax revenue and doesn't take into account many benefits of professional sporting events.

Linda DiMario, president and CEO of the Arlington Convention & Visitors Bureau, said she's seen plenty of studies like Dr. Depken's in the past. Most have a narrow focus, she said.

The teams promote civic pride, attract millions of dollars in free publicity and help support adjacent businesses, Ms. DiMario said.

Often adjacent businesses don’t get much in the way of positive impact because fans spend their dollars inside the stadium. But hey, if owners of pro sports teams want to build fancy stadiums with their own dough, then more power to ‘em.

And how about all that civic pride and free pub?

Football has increased Irving's name recognition, [Maura Gast, executive director of the Irving Convention and Visitors Bureau] said, but all people know is that the Cowboys play there and it's near Dallas. That doesn't necessarily translate into a big boost in tourism.

Len recently pointed to this:

But while arenas with big-time tenants may bolster a city's self-image and quality of life, evidence shows they have a minimal economic upside. Most operate at a loss.

In "The Economics of Sports Facilities and Their Communities," published in 2000 in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, authors Andrew Zimbalist of Smith College and John Siegfried of Vanderbilt University argue that "independent work on the economic impact of stadiums and arenas has uniformly found that there is no statistically significant positive correlation between sports facility construction and economic development."

The authors cite several studies, including one by sports economist Robert Baade that found "no significant difference in personal income growth from 1958 to 1987 between 36 metropolitan areas that hosted a team in one of the four premier professional sports leagues and 12 otherwise comparable areas that did not." The authors' conclusion: Arenas put a drag on the local economy by hurting spending on other activities in the city and boosting municipal costs such as security.

Related: Subsidies and Lies

Related: “large public subsides cannot be justified on economic grounds”

Related: Big Box Boondoggles

Vermon attempted to take the ridiculous idea of campaign contribution and spending limits to the silly extreme, and got shot down. A victory for the 1st Amendment.

The decision here,a nd a summary here.

Reason's Amicus Brief here.

California and North Dakota could have licensing structures in place by the end of the summer for farmers and researchers that want to grow hemp. Once pending laws in these state legislatures pass, intrepid individuals seeking a two-year license to grow the crop will have the unenviable right to pay an application fee, pay for a full state and federal criminal background check on themselves, get fingerprinted, have their property GPSed, submit samples of their crop for regular laboratory testing, and report the sales of their crop to the government (the crop can only be sold to other licensees). And that’s either after getting a permit from the federal government or shortly before having your business ransacked by the DEA.

Meanwhile, they don’t call it “weed” for nothing: the plant grows wild throughout the Midwest. Here’s a gem from a South Dakota news station earlier this month:

Someone spotted suspicious buds growing outside the Federal Courthouse and new Federal Building in downtown Sioux Falls. Someday the beds will be flowers or grass, but somehow we don't think developers had this kind of grass in mind. Just to be sure it wasn't some other weed posing as marijuana, we had it tested, and sure enough, it's ditch weed, or low grade pot, right outside the very building where people are put away for dealing it.

No one wanted to stir the pot by going on camera and talking about the mishap, but city officials and a developer KSFY spoke with say it's most certainly an accident. Crews bring in dirt for major construction projects like this one and more than likely, the seeds were sitting in the soil, just waiting to sprout.

Ditch weed is relatively easy to find growing wild in this part of the country. It was initially grown for the hemp used to make rope during World War II. And, even though the THC level, that is it's psychoactive property, is very low, it is still illegal. And now, it's sitting right outside the building that will house the U.S. Attorney's Office.

“Ditchweed,” the Cannabis variety that grows wild in the US and has no value as a drug, is big business for the DEA’s Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program: a quick internet search shows that these plants constituted 99% of plants seized in 1996, 99% of plants seized in 2003, and 262 million plants (99%) of those seized in 2004.

Hemp products are the only agricultural products in the United States that are currently legal to import and sell, but not to grow. So the lesson, apparently, is that you can buy hemp, eat hemp, wear hemp, drive hemp—but if you find hemp growing wild on your land or you have the audacity to want to grow it, you’ll be getting a visit from the federal government.

Unless, of course, you are the federal government.

Some interesting musings on privatization from Gary Becker.

Thanks to Max for the tip.

Rachel DiCarlo has a great piece in the Weekly Standard on one of the smart growth social engineers' latest pursuits: traffic calming...

PROPONENTS OF TRAFFIC CALMING--mostly government planners--not only oppose new highway construction and, in some instances, highway maintenance, but want to reduce mobility by installing roadway barriers and traffic-slowing devices that clog up the roads. In other words, rather than alleviate congestion, traffic calming aims to induce it.

Why create congestion? The goal is to make driving as undesirable as possible, thereby discouraging sprawl and encouraging people to live in high-density areas, where they will either ride mass transportation or walk. Since most cities have trouble filling seats on their money-losing transit systems, traffic calming is also another way to try to make these systems more financially justifiable.

. . . .

There's no firm data on how many cities and municipalities have invested in traffic calming, but it's difficult to find one that hasn't. (The FHWA has a partial list here.) Portland, Oregon, the birthplace of smart growth, spends over $2 million a year on traffic calming. Transportation expert Randal O'Toole notes in his book The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths that the Port of Portland, which helped fund the light rail line to the city's airport, claimed in a slideshow presentation that the key to successful airport rail is a "congested highway and roadway access system." Ten years ago, Portland predicted that its traffic-calming plan would triple local congestion, and concluded that "congestion signals positive urban development." The good news for the city council is that they're on target: In 2003 (the last year for which data is available), Portland's total delay had risen to 33,387,000 hours a year from 25,066,000 in 1996, according to the Texas Transportation Institute.

In Austin, to support a $15 million program that would change one-way streets into two-way streets, the city passed a "transportation hierarchy" resolution that would give first priority to pedestrians, second to public transit, third to bicycles, and last to private vehicles. Officials conceded that their plan would cause a 23 percent increase in traffic delays, but went ahead with it anyway. In 2002, San Jose spent $15.4 million converting 10 one-way streets into two-way streets.

Drive down a main thoroughfare in the busy Northern Virginia suburbs of Arlington and Alexandria and you'll find any combination of traffic-calming devices, which federal tax dollars helped fund. In 2005 alone the federal government gave $8 million to Northern Virginia's Loudon County for its traffic-calming programs.

Aside from purposefully-induced congestion and high costs, DiCarlo notes other significant downsides to traffic calming:

• Reduced safety: Studies show that converting one-way streets to two-way streets--leads to an increase in car accidents. One study found that changing streets from one-way to two-way increases the accident rate by an average of 30 to 40 percent. Accidents declined by the same rate when streets were converted from two-way to one-way.
• Increased fire/EMS response time: Each speed bump an ambulance or fire truck has to cross creates an additional 10 seconds of delay. Over the course of a trip, this can add up to precious time lost, unnecessarily increasing the risks to lives and homes
• Increased pollution: Cars pollute most when accelerating and when traveling at slower speeds, both an inevitable byproduct of traffic calming measures. And there's no evidence that traffic calming actually keeps cars off the road.
• Increased fuel consumption: DiCarlo notes that the time spent idling in traffic costs Americans $63.1 billion in wasted fuel annually, the equivalent of 2.3 million gallons of gasoline.

All of this in the supposedly noble pursuit of density and increased mass transit usage...only in the bizarro world of smart growth would this sort of policy make sense.

Once again Joel Schwartz nails it on air pollution issues, this time in the venerable Washington Post.

The EPA attributes well over 90 percent of the benefits of its clean air programs to improvements in human health. Thus, a key policy question is whether EPA's health-benefit claims are credible.

. . .

The most serious claim about air pollution is that it prematurely kills tens of thousands of Americans each year. This claim is based on small statistical correlations between pollution levels and risk of death. But correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation, as demonstrated recently by a number of embarrassing reversals of conventional medical wisdom.

The air pollution--mortality claim deserves even greater skepticism. First, it is based on the same unreliable correlation methods that have led medical authorities astray in other areas. Second, even though pollution is weakly correlated with higher premature mortality on average, it seems to protect against death in about one-third of cities. How could pollution kill people in some cities and save them in others? More likely, both results are chance correlations rather than real effects. Third, in laboratory experiments, researchers have been unable to kill animals by exposing them to air pollution at levels many times greater than ever occur in the United States.

The WB (not the TV network, the slightly less entertaining international institution) has released a report on why and how countries should be doing performance-based contracting for highway maintenance.

Amazingly, we are stil baby-stepping on this here in the U.S., despite some established successes and plenty of evidence of benefits, as seen in the how-to guide Geoff and I did with Sam McCarthy back in '03.

Speaking of the Knowledge Problem, I forgot to link earlier this month to a nice analysis Lynne did of FERC's report to Congress on Competition in the Wholesale and Retail Markets for Electric Energy.

A neat post over on the Knowledg Problem about how incentives helped Ghana to victory.

It is fascinating to me how E-Bay has allowed people to exchange goods that even the best of the face-to-face or catalogue sales systems could never touch. How many thousands of tons of goods are exchanged each year on E-bay and other internet services that otherwise would have wound up in a landfill? Internet trade is a great boon to reuse, which is far more important than recycling.

This article looks at legislative battles E-bay is fighting to prevent the usual suspects from regulating all this wonderful trade out of existence.

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to strengthen the rights of the American people against the taking of their private property, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Policy. It is the policy of the United States to protect the rights of Americans to their private property, including by limiting the taking of private property by the Federal Government to situations in which the taking is for public use, with just compensation, and for the purpose of benefiting the general public and not merely for the purpose of advancing the economic interest of private parties to be given ownership or use of the property taken.

More here.

Don Boudreaux comments on the first chapter of a new book by Robert Higgs, Depression, War, and Cold War:

Higgs's thesis in this chapter, which is backed by data (including interesting data on bond yields from the mid-1920s through the mid-1950s), is that the Great Depression was prolonged and deepened by the "regime uncertainty" created by FDR and the New Deal. As it turns out, Uncle Sam never engaged in wholesale nationalizations and other whacky central-planning schemes -- but no one in the 1930s knew what the future held. For investors back then to believe that any investments they made in the U.S. might be confiscated or regulated to smithereens was not unreasonable, given the rhetoric of the time and the shift in policy brought by FDR and his "brain trust."

This "regime uncertainty" stifled investment, keeping the economy stagnant.

An earlier version of this chapter is available here.

Well the developed world’s most corrupt nation is France, according to a new monograph by London’s Institute of Economic Affairs:

The study of corruption in the developed world by economist Ian Senior awards Olympic-style medals for corruption at different levels of government and society, so that corruption by Presidents and Prime Ministers results in a gold medal and corruption by lesser politicians and officials leads to the award of silver or bronze medals.

According to this method, at the head of the medal table France receives four gold medals, Japan three gold medals and Italy two.

The UK lies in fourteenth place, with no gold or silver medals, but three bronze.

More here.

Related: Russia Robbing Itself

Homer Simpson once said that you’ve got to be pretty desperate to do it with a robot.

Well, desperate people rejoice because that possibility may not be far away:

"People are going to be having sex with robots within five years," says Henrik Christensen of the European Robotics Research Network (Euron).

Christensen apparently worries that robots might be built too sexy: “So should limits be set on the appearance, for example, of such robotic sex toys?”

Might all this prompt hookers to join the War Against the Machines to stop those buckets of bolts from taking human jobs?

And it’s not just the ladies (and fellas) of the night who should worry. All sorts of jobs are at risk:

The National Health Service has used a robot called da Vinci to perform surgery at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in London. … More advanced versions are expected to be doing everyday domestic tasks and helping to care for the elderly in as little as 20 years.

A bunch of scientists and academics have gathered together to figure out how to ensure that we humans stay in control of things:

THE race is on to keep humans one step ahead of robots: an international team of scientists and academics is to publish a "code of ethics" for machines as they become more and more sophisticated.

Although the nightmare vision of a Terminator world controlled by machines may seem fanciful, scientists believe the boundaries for human-robot interaction must be set now, before super-intelligent robots develop beyond our control.

"There are two levels of priority," says Gianmarco Verruggio, a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, northern Italy, and chief architect of the guide, to be published next month.

"We have to manage the ethics of the scientists making the robots and the artificial ethics inside the robots."

Article here.

More on the robot threat here and here.

(One day a robot may even boot Lou Dobbs from his anchor chair.)

The WSJ had a great piece this week debunking the myth that shiny new sports arenas are an economic boon for cities.

Like Des Moines, Iowa, and Little Rock, Ark., Kansas City is among a growing number of U.S. cities taking an "If you build it, they will come" approach to stadiums, ballparks and particularly arenas. Encouraged by a building boom since the early 1990s in which major cities built new sports facilities for their professional teams, municipalities are raising money by such means as issuing bonds or imposing taxes to finance the building of new arenas in hopes of energizing their economies.

. . . .

But while arenas with big-time tenants may bolster a city's self-image and quality of life, evidence shows they have a minimal economic upside. Most operate at a loss.

In "The Economics of Sports Facilities and Their Communities," published in 2000 in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, authors Andrew Zimbalist of Smith College and John Siegfried of Vanderbilt University argue that "independent work on the economic impact of stadiums and arenas has uniformly found that there is no statistically significant positive correlation between sports facility construction and economic development."

The authors cite several studies, including one by sports economist Robert Baade that found "no significant difference in personal income growth from 1958 to 1987 between 36 metropolitan areas that hosted a team in one of the four premier professional sports leagues and 12 otherwise comparable areas that did not." The authors' conclusion: Arenas put a drag on the local economy by hurting spending on other activities in the city and boosting municipal costs such as security.

"It doesn't make sense to build an arena for economic reasons, even if you have a team," Mr. Zimbalist says. "To do so not having a team is irresponsible."

The article has some great examples offering evidence that: (1) "building it" is no guarantee that "they will come," and (2) what cities tout as "successful" stadia somehow often still operate at a loss.

Nashville, Tenn., completed the $156 million Gaylord Entertainment Center in 1996 and has had an NHL team, the Predators, playing there since 1998. Proponents of the center say Nashville has won substantial economic returns for its investment, especially downtown.

Kevin Lavender, a longtime member of the city's Metropolitan Sports Authority, which oversees the arena says: "There's no debate [about whether] it's been positive." (Debate or not, Nashville operates the 17,000-seat venue at a loss of about $4 million a year and is currently balking at requests by the Predators for certain upgrades.)

Other cities have built costly stadiums never to see a team materialize. San Antonio's $186 million Alamodome opened in 1993 with expectations that it would deliver the city a National Football League franchise. The closest the 65,000-seat indoor stadium has come was when it hosted the New Orleans Saints football team for three games last year.

The Alamodome was home to the NBA Spurs for a decade, and it has hosted a NCAA men's basketball Final Four, among other events. But the stadium has only 38 luxury suites, and even the addition of 14 more boxes by next September is probably too few to attract an NFL franchise.

Still other arena-building cities have had to wait years for a team. St. Petersburg, Fla., opened its Sun Coast Dome in 1990 in hopes of attracting Major League Baseball. Meantime, the city lost $2 million a year on the stadium, even while the facility was home to the NHL Tampa Bay Lightning for several seasons. By the time a major-league team, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, began playing in 1998, the $110 million stadium needed a $66 million infusion.

Full disclosure: I love heading to Houston's impressive Minute Maid Park for an Astros game as much as the next guy. I haven't been inside the new Reliant Stadium for a Texans game yet, but it looks to be a state-of-the-art spot to catch some 'ball. But the facts are the facts as far as stadium-driven economic development goes.

Randal O'Toole has a great op-ed in the Globe and Mail today that uses the Kelo decision, and its deference to comprehensive planning as a legitimate justification for the use of eminent domain, as a launching point for a consise, eloquent critique of modern urban planning:

The Supreme Court's majority in Kelo v. New London assumed that the benefits of the Connecticut city's plan would be greater than the costs. But rather than ask whether that had been true of previous plans, the court simply judged the planners by their intentions, not their results.

In fact, comprehensive urban plans in the United States, and the rest of the developed and developing world, have a nasty habit of costing far more than the planners project, producing far fewer benefits and causing all sorts of unintended harmful consequences.

The reason is simple: Cities, like economies, are far too complex to scientifically plan. Rather than admit they can't do it, planners follow simplistic fads. In the 1950s, the fad was high-rise public housing projects, which proved disastrous all over the world. Today, the fad is "smart growth," packing people into high-density, mixed-use developments and rebuilding existing neighbourhoods of single-family homes with higher densities.

My hometown of Portland, Ore., is recognized throughout the United States as the model for "smart growth." In 1992, planners promised to save the Portland region from becoming like Los Angeles, the most congested, most polluted and one of the most expensive urban areas in America. To do this, Portland planners decided to increase the region's population density by 70 per cent, build few new roads (because new roads encourage people to drive) and, instead, build lots of light-rail and streetcar lines.

As an afterthought, planners compared other urban areas across America with their future vision of Portland. One area turned out to have the highest population density, the fewest miles of freeway per capita, and an expensive system of passenger rail lines. Which urban area was it? Why, Los Angeles, of course.

. . . .

The truth is, no one can ever collect or understand enough data to understand a complex urban area, much less predict the future. But "if economic reality is so complex that it can only be described by complicated mathematical models," says planning guru Herman Daly, "then the reality should be simplified." Lenin would have liked that.

Read the whole thing.

On the eve of the first anniversary of the Kelo decision, Tim Worstall's TCS Daily column today shares the news on a signficant blow to private property rights in the U.K. If you, like 90% of Americans, thought that Kelo was bad, get a load of this:

Can things get worse though? Could it be possible that this idea that property exists to serve the community, rather than property being a private possession, be taken further? Unfortunately, yes, it can be taken further and it comes from my own country, the United Kingdom.

It's an old saying, a trope or a truism if you prefer, that "An Englishman's home is his castle". Whatever happens outside in the streets, whatever idiocies the current political pygmies have decided to inflict upon the populace, the possession and enjoyment of one's own property was safe, guarded by both law and custom. Certainly there were eminent domain purchases, broadly in line with American practice but as of the first of this month the government no longer even has to pay.

Yes, you did read that correctly, your paid off, unmortgaged, fully owned property can be taken away from you without your even being paid for it.

The law is here: The Housing (Empty Dwelling Management Orders) (Prescribed Exceptions and Requirements) (England) Order 2006. Something of a mouthful, I know, but what this and the preceding pieces of legislation actually state is that if you leave a property uninhabited for 6 months then the local council can take it from you and rent it to whomever it likes. There are a few exceptions, such as vacation homes and so on, but at a stroke the entire basis of property law has changed. Instead of it being yours to do with as you wish it is yours as long, and only as long, as you do as the government wishes.

The set up is that if you have left the property empty then the local council must make reasonable efforts to contact you to let out the house or apartment. If you still decide that you don't want to, then they will do it for you. Worse, far worse, is if their "reasonable efforts" don't actually find you, then they'll do it without actually telling you. These orders allowing them to do this will last 7 years, and can be extended. Yes, this will even be possible in the case of a death: the inheritors have 6 months (not from probate, but from the granting of representation: and there are many only even mildly complicated estates that can take more than 6 months to run the executor's course) to dispose of the property or conceivably have it compulsorarily rented out from underneath them.

That local council can charge you a management fee for this service that you obviously don't want and should then pass on to you whatever is left of the rent they have been charging your new unwanted tenant. Your new tenants will not, of course, be quite from the top drawer of society, for like anywhere else in the world, that's not the social stratum from whom the inhabitants of "social" housing are drawn. Yet you will be responsible for the costs of ensuring that said housing is maintained to the highest standards, whether or not they actually pay any rent; indeed, you won't actually be able to evict them if they should trash the place for, of course, you are not the manager or agent for the property; that is the local council.

Rep. Henry Waxman has released a report on the extent of contracting by the federal government and slams the practice as wasteful and mismanaged. See the report here and the LA Times article here Waxman has long been a fan of government employees and opponent of most anything the private sector does, so take it with a grain of salt, but the report makes some good points.

The report "reveals an 86% increase in contracts with private businesses, from $203 billion in 2000 to $377.5 billion a year in 2005 — a growth rate nearly double that of federal spending as a whole. At the same time, federal payrolls also have grown: The government now has about 1,874,000 civilian employees, up from 1,738,000 five years ago."

Aside: Ain't it great to have the "party of small government" running Congress? I think I am with Ron Bailey that we need a Democrat president now just to get some gridlock.

Cribbing from the LA Times article, the report argues that:

Poor contract planning and weak oversight have led to government overspending and corruption by companies that have padded their invoices, charged for services not provided and received award fees for jobs that were completed late.

In many cases the types and terms of the contracts have made them ripe for abuse:

• Spending on cost-plus contracts — under which the government bears the risk of cost overruns — has increased from $62 billion in 2000 to $110 billion in 2005.

• Spending on no-bid contracts — those granted without competition from other companies — rose 110%, to $97.8 billion, during the same period.

• Spending on monopoly contracts, which allow the government to buy goods and services without defining them in advance, nearly doubled, to $15.3 billion.

At the same time, the report ignores some key things. Repeated independent studies of federal contracting in the last six years have found a great deal of cost savings have resulted--so the inept or corrupt contracts are a minority. And higher risk contracts like cost plus or no bid make perfect sense under some narrow circumstances, and the Waxman report makes no attempt to distinguish them, just lumps them all together as bad.

We should walk away acknowledging that there needs to be a lot more accountability and better management in the federal contracting process. That means we also have to recognize that the Bush Administration and the Congress share blame here.

The Administration has been bullish on contracting, but almost utterly uninterested in oversight and policy management--key OMB positions overseeing contracting sat vacant for an eternity. And as federal agencies have shifted to ever more contracting, the issue of how to manage this radically different federal government never rose to the Cabinet level discussions it should have. No Cabinet member has got out front on pushing for a lot more contract management expertise and career path reward and integration into decision making in their agency.

And Congress is just as bad. They have seen repeated reports about this transformation in the way agencies are doing business, but as whole Congress hasn't cared about it much, overseen it much, and certainly has not appropriated for a transformed workforce that has to manage a lot more contracts.

The best accountability for contracts is that they are results based--easy to measure if you get what you are paying for. But federal agencies can hardly do results based contracts when they don't measure their own results. The Administration has, to its credit, pushed a management agenda to become more results based, but Congress has been uninterested in that as well.

Bottom line--lots of bad stuff goes on with contacts. But you are kidding yourself if you think it is any worse that what goes on in federal agencies themselves. Contracting most often helps get the job done and manage costs. We don't need to start by addressing symptoms, but need to get at the root of the problem. As long as there is no performance accountability in the system and no attempt to narrow the focus of agencies on to core missions and goals, there will be plenty of nonsense.

Wendell Cox on the upside of sprawl in Montreal:

For various reasons, Montreal has been losing economic ground to Toronto and other North American urban areas over the last decades. But this could be changing. Politics and infrastructure are combining to substantially improve the competitiveness of the Montreal region.

In the Montreal area, as in all other urban areas in western Europe and North America, nearly all employment and population growth has occurred in the suburbs in recent decades and the automobile has become the dominant mode of transportation. Suburbanization (pejoratively called "urban sprawl") has made it possible for unprecedented numbers of households to own their own homes and accumulate capital that otherwise would have simply enriched their landlords.

. . . .

Montreal and provincial officials should not succumb to the pessimistic and alarmist reports calling for a crackdown on car use and regulations to prevent suburban development. While other urban areas pursue policies that restrict mobility and raise housing prices, Montreal's competitive position is likely to improve and the region faces a brighter future.

Read the whole thing.

Leonardo da Vinci proposed the first underground thoroughfare to decongest Milan’s clogged roadways.

In this LAT op-ed Bob Poole proposes the same idea.

Milan’s political bosses nixed da Vinci’s idea. Let’s see how LA’s pols react to tunneling.

I came across an article by planning prof. Donald Shoup in UCLA Magazine (sorry no link or date) titled “Paradise Paved.”

He explaines how he tried to track down the source of this tidbit he read in a book written by two Berkeley professors: “In the United States, the automobile consumes close to half of the land area of cities; in Los Angeles, the figure approaches two-thirds.”

Turns out the tidbit was probably made up, but Shoup did find another interesting bit from an Australian researcher who writes:

“Many years ago as a planning student, I tried to calculate the figure for Melbourne. In older areas the figure was approaching one-third—but that was largely because of the generous, colonial, pre-auto allocation of space to ‘streets.’ We discovered that the figure for the modern suburbs was well below 25 percent, suggesting, paradoxically, that urban areas designed for car use in fact devoted less land to roads and streets.”

Shoup notes that streets existed long before cars and that “the share of urban land devoted to streets may even have declined since cars arrived."

And now for the bigger picture: If you grabbed 100 people off the street and asked the how much of our nation has been developed, what do you think they'd say?

This study (pdf) by Ed Glaeser and Matthew Kahn points out that only about 5 percent of America is developed (see p. 36).

Wendell Cox penned this short look at why we should avoid the next big boondoggle in California.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Taking taxpayers for a ride
Proposed state high-speed rail system would cost too much to do too little

There has been considerable discussion about the proposed California High Speed Rail project. California taxpayers are being subjected to grandiose claims about reduced traffic congestion and cost-effective alternatives to flying and driving.

The HSR system, which would connect Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Sacramento and areas in between, would require as a down payment a $10 billion bond issue that voters may consider as soon as November. The California High Speed Rail Authority says the system could cost much more – $37 billion. Reality is more like $75 billion.

Luckily, the Assembly last month passed a bill that would delay the bond election until 2008. That bill is now in the Senate Appropriations Committee, where there is no clear indication whether it will come to a vote anytime soon. However, there is evidence the Assembly's caution is justified, and the Senate should follow its lead.

First, the HSR system is likely to cost much more than advertised. Cost projections for large transportation projects are notoriously inaccurate. Boston's two-decade "Big Dig" racked up three times its projected cost, even after accounting for inflation. Across the country, transit megaprojects have escalated in cost after approval; these are not isolated cases.

What's more, it appears these overruns are not accidental. Research by Bengt Flyvbjerg of the University of Aarlborg (Denmark) published in the Journal of the American Planning Association demonstrates these projects routinely surpass estimated costs due to "strategic misrepresentation." Planners and proponents underestimate costs in hopes of obtaining project approvals that would otherwise be impossible.

As a Los Angeles County transportation commissioner, I witnessed costs escalate for the Blue Line light rail from Los Angeles to Long Beach eventually exceeding three times original projections (inflation-adjusted). At no point did anyone seriously question the increases, because the taxpayers had already committed to the project. There was simply no incentive to keep costs down. Why should we expect the HSR project to be any different?

Flyvbjerg and others also have found that ridership estimates tend to be overstated. The Los Angeles Red Line subway even today carries less than one-half the ridership that was projected when we approved it.

Ridership is important because the California high-speed rail system is advertised as not needing its operations subsidized by taxpayers. But this claim is likely based on an overestimation of the ridership and an underestimation of the operating costs. Amtrak's high-speed Acela service between Washington, D.C., and New York City carries little more than one-tenth the passengers that proponents promise for the California system, despite serving a larger market. So it is likely taxpayers will need to keep their checkbooks open indefinitely to subsidize HSR operation.

All this would be irrelevant if we needed such a system. The California HSR has been touted as a strategy for reducing highway congestion. In fact, projections indicate that traffic congestion along the rail corridors will still increase 26 percent by 2020, even with the high-speed trains. Without them the increase by 2020 would be 31 percent.

Claims of reduced air traffic congestion are similarly flawed. Most air travel between the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California already avoids the busy San Francisco International and Los Angeles International airports, and their share of travel is declining. Planners delude themselves into believing HSR will take away half of air traffic volume. But last year Amtrak said its New York-to-Washington high-speed service lost ridership to stronger airline competition. Planners assume airlines will stand idly by as their customers jump on the train. In fact, airlines will compete, and compete hard.

Much has been made of HSR's purported cost-effectiveness, with claims that highway improvements would cost more than twice as much as the rail project. But the highway alternative would produce four times the congestion relief, making it twice as cost-effective, even without the inevitable cost escalations for high-speed rail.

Thus, for California, the question is not whether high-speed rail would be nice – it would be. The fundamental question is whether it is worth the tens of billions it could cost. At this point, there is every reason to believe this project would be, quite simply, a waste of money.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wendell Cox
Former member, Los Angeles County Transportation commission

Virginia Postrel's nice column in the LA Times on the hell of regulation of, and attitudes toward, organ donors.

First West Hollywood officials required that pet owners be known as "pet guardians." Then they banned cat declawing and even considered outlawing pet cosmetic surgery.

On Monday, the Westside town famous for its novel municipal lawmaking took a stab at legalizing the recreational use of small amounts of marijuana.

But achieving that goal might prove difficult.

The City Council approved a resolution that urges the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department to make marijuana-related offenses a "low priority" that deputies should largely ignore.

In doing so, it became the first city in Southern California to request that its law enforcement agency look the other way at recreational pot use and target only the sale of marijuana.

...

San Francisco and Oakland have passed similar rules. But unlike those cities, West Hollywood lacks its own police force. Instead it contracts with the county sheriff for police services.

LAT article here; thanks to Courtney for the tip.

WeHo has no authority to force the county department to comply with its vote and Sheriff Baca isn’t going to side with the City Council.

But is it better to spend more than 10 grand per weed arrest?

When cops focus too much on marijuana-related arrests, their priorities get hazy:

In Florida, our research reveals that the War on Drugs was fought at the expense of property crime as police efforts shifted to drugs. This means that the chances of being arrested for a property crime falls, and burglars can commit more crimes before they are apprehended. We estimate there was a 10 percent increase in property crimes due to reallocating police effort from property crime to drug offenses in Florida between 1984 and 1989. Drug policy expert Mark Kleiman confirms this view: “much of the increase in local drug enforcement during the 1980s came at the expense of other law enforcement efforts... As a result, certain kinds of property crimes are treated as unworthy of investigation or prosecution.”

And how about those unintended consequences:

A 1994 National Bureau of Economic Research study found that youth tend to drink more beer when the price of marijuana rises, with the result being more traffic fatalities. Beer drinkers are either more likely to drink and drive or they are more dangerous drivers than those in a pot stupor. Research shows that alcohol impaired drivers are more aggressive than those under the influence of cannabis.

Such trade-offfs are especially in significant in bar/club-rich West Hollywood.

More from Bruce Benson and David Rasmussen here.

The decision is in on the highly-anticipated Rapanos and Carabell consolidated wetlands cases, and the Supreme Court has rejected the Feds' overly expansive definition of a "wetland" under the Clean Water Act. SCOTUSblog reports:

A pluarlity of the Supreme Court concluded on Monday that the Clean Water Act's protection of "waters of the United States" is limited to those bodies of water that are "permanent, standing or continously flowing," and thus does not embrace channels through which water flows only some of the time. And, the Court added, "navigable waters" under the Act ordinarily is no broader than U.S. waters. The decision appeared to rule out protection against filling-in or pollution of wetlands not part of actual waterways. The actual impact of the plurality opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia appears to have been qualified somewhat by a lengthy concurrence by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who supplied a fifth vote for the result. After Scalia announced his opinion, Kennedy discussed his separate views.

The AP article is here .

The opinions are posted here. Here's a key bit from Scalia's opinion:

In sum, on its only plausible interpretation, the phrase “the waters of the United States” includes only those relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water “forming geographic features” that are described in ordinary parlance as “streams[,] … oceans, rivers, [and] lakes.” See Webster’s Second 2882. The phrase does not include channels through which water flows intermittently or ephemerally, or channels that periodically provide drainage for rainfall. The Corps’ expansive interpretation of the “the waters of the United States” is thus not “based on a permissible construction of the statute.” Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U. S. 837, 843 (1984) .

From the syllabus:

A wetland may not be considered “adjacent to” remote “waters of the United States” based on a mere hydrologic connection. [...] Thus, only those wetlands with a continuous surface connection to bodies that are “waters of the United States” in their own right, so that there is no clear demarcation between the two, are “adjacent” to such waters and covered by the Act.

More updates to come.

A bad idea continues to spread:

The idea of asking developers to include affordable housing as a component of their broader development plans is not "a foreign concept for Philadelphia," Mayor Street says.

As a bevy of nonprofit groups today prepares a campaign for what they call "inclusionary housing," Street says he's open to the idea of codifying what has been an inconsistent approach.

"I think we are in a little better position to consider a project like this today than in the past," Street said. "We now have huge market-rate housing going up and a lot of construction and development all over the place, and it gives us an opportunity to say, 'Hey, how about putting something in the till for affordable housing?' "

Check out Reason's studies on inclusionary zoning (here and here) to discover the severe, unintended consequences that have stemmed from several California cities' forays into this misguided affordable housing policy.

Okay, here's a little humor for a Friday.

Anyone who has owned a dog or cat will see the humor in "pets' diaries" immediately. But, as I received this via email, as a policy wonk is bound to do, I couldn't help but think about worldviews and how they translate into the way we govern, who would be more likely to govern for freedom, and who would be more likely to govern for control. I began thinking about Thomas Sowell's book "A Conflict of Visions" where he discusses those with a "constrained view"--we are inherently limited (by knowledge, experience, etc.) in what we can accomplish--and those with an "unconstrained view" (like pogressives who think we know enough to accomplish a lot through government and public policy). I also thought of Viginia Postrel's excellent book, "The Future and Its Enemies" and whether those embracing the dynamism would be better than those who value stasis at governing in a free society.

So, even if you've seen this, it's fun to read and now you have the opportunity to ponder the larger questions about whether dogs or cats would value individual freedom in our system of Constitutional and representative democracy. Are you a dog or a cat?

EXCERPTS FROM A DOG'S DAILY DIARY: 8:00 a.m. Oh, boy! Dog food! My favorite! 9:30 a.m. Wow! A car ride! This is a blast! 9:40 a.m. A walk in the park! Ate some crap...Delicious! 10:30 a.m. Getting rubbed and petted! I'm in love! 12:00 p.m. Lunch! Yummy! 1:00 p.m. Playing in the yard! I just love it! 3:00 p.m. Staring adoringly at my masters feet...they're the best! I'll wag my tail in joy. 4:00 p.m. Hooray! The kids are home! I'm bouncing off the walls! 5:00 p.m. Milkbones! Great! 7:00 p.m. Get to play ball! This is too good to be true! 8:00 p.m. Wow! Watching TV with my master! Heavenly! 11:00 p.m. Sleeping at the bottom of my master's bed! Life is soooooooo great!

EXCERPTS FROM A CAT'S DAILY DIARY:
Day 683 of My Captivity:
My captors continue to taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects. They
dine lavishly on fresh meat, while the other inmates and I are fed hash or
some sort of dry nuggets. Although I make my contempt for the rations
perfectly clear, I nevertheless must eat something in order to keep up my
strength. The only thing that keeps me going is my dream of escape. In an
attempt to disgust them, I once again vomited on the floor.

Today I decapitated a mouse and dropped its headless body at their feet. I
had hoped this would strike fear into their hearts, since it clearly
demonstrates what I am capable of. However, they merely made condescending
comments about what a "good little hunter" I am. The audacity!!

There was some sort of assembly of their accomplices tonight. I was placed
in solitary confinement for the duration of the event. However, I could
hear the noise and smell the food. I overheard that my confinement was due
to my power of "allergies." I must learn what this means, and how to use it
to my advantage.

Today I was almost successful in an attempt to assassinate one of my
tormentors by weaving around his feet as he was walking. I must try this
again tomorrow-but at the top of the stairs.

I am convinced that the other prisoners here are flunkies and snitches. The
dog receives special privileges. He is regularly released-and he seems more
than willing to return! He is obviously retarded. The bird has got to be an
informant-I observe him communicating with the guards regularly. I am
certain that he reports my every move. The captors have arranged protective
custody for him in an elevated cell, so he is safe....... For now.

In a decision that could affect several counties, the North Carolina Court of Appeals issued a decision last week that Durham County has no statutory authority to assess impact fees on new development.

The case challenges the county's right to impose impact fees on new development to finance construction of new schools without having a direct statutory approval from the state General Assembly.

After a number of failed attempts in recent years to persuade North Carolina legislators to support a bill implementing impact fees, Durham County officials in 2003 put in place an impact fee system on their own, claiming that their right to impose the fees was already covered under state law.

The fees, which were either $1,155 for a multi-family residence or $2,000 for a single family home, were implemented in 2003 to help finance the construction of badly needed schools.

The County plans to ask the state Supreme Court to review the decision.

Looks like some other counties are using a slightly different tack - fees imposed under local adequate public facilities ordinances - to generate revenue from new development. I wouldn't be surprised if other counties moved in this direction given the impact fee ruling.

The nation’s premier supporter of network neutrality—because it supposedly would protect the Internet for the “little guy”—maintains more than 450,000 web servers in 25 locations across the country.

And even that estimate was a “best guess” in a fascinating report about Google’s ambitions in The New York Times June 14.

The article, by John Markoff and Saul Hansell, examines a huge data center Google has quietly set up in The Dalles, Ore., and provides an illuminating look at how Google, along with Microsoft and Yahoo, are rapidly expanding their own Internet operations. It deserves reading by anyone with an opinion on network neutrality.

“And odd as it may seem, the barren desert land surrounding the Columbia along the Oregon-Washington border — at the intersection of cheap electricity and readily accessible data networking — is the backdrop for a multibillion-dollar face-off among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo that will determine dominance in the online world in the years ahead,” the authors write.

From the whistling past the graveyard file...Boise's transit agency has to offer free rides to get people to ride the public bus system, and the Mayor thinks they need a light rail system?

With finances that auditors describe as murky and a fleet of buses that often run without passengers, the Treasure Valley's biggest bus system is on shaky footing. And even though managers say they are retooling the books and designing better routes, the Treasure Valley's transit system needs help. Meanwhile, Mayor Dave Bieter says he wants Boise to move toward new transit options, including downtown trolleys and, ultimately, some form of light rail. Some city officials are wondering if Valley Ride is ready.

"Personally, I'm looking at ridership," said Boise City Councilor Jim Tibbs, who sits on the Valley Regional Transit Board. "Before anybody starts talking about a light rail system, you'd better start getting some butts in seats on the bus first."

Problems surfaced first in 2005, when an in-depth audit of Valley Regional Transit uncovered financial reporting practices that didn't exactly go by the book and, in some cases, didn't even conform to basic bookkeeping standards. The independent audit submitted in April of 2005 described financial mismanagement that included a lack of timekeeping records, inventory reports or written procedures. Bus managers say they recently fixed what auditors called "material weakness" and "reportable conditions" but Boise city officials say there's more to be done.

Valley Regional Transit (VRT) needs to demonstrate that it can live within its means, said Bieter spokesman Michael Zuzel. Without that, lawmakers and the public will be unlikely to send money their way.

More riders would also add dollars to the bus budget. But VRT managers admit that limited resources have created a basic problem: Commuters don't see the bus as a viable transit option because they don't find many buses that take them where they need to go when they need to go.

If the bus system is so mismanaged that it can't figure out a decent route system, why would anyone even consider light rail--a far less flexible means of transit than buses--in Boise?

At least one senator sees the value in tying budget decisions to agency performance:

Sen. Tom Coburn, R.-Okla., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information and International Security, held a hearing to address the transparency of, and potential for bias in, the administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool.

In opening remarks, Coburn praised the PART process, which entails quantifying the success of federal programs through a standardized set of questions, for bringing a new tool to bear on program assessment. He acknowledged that any such tool would be a "blunt instrument" given the size and scope of government activities, but chided other lawmakers for not taking PART scores into account in making budget decisions, in part out of loyalty to pet programs that might be underperforming.

Coburn highlighted a vote by the House appropriations subcommittee that funds the Labor, Education and Health and Human Services departments to insert language prohibiting the use of PART assessments at those agencies in the appropriations bill.

. . . .

Testifying that the PART improves management by shining a bright light on programs, [OMB's deputy director for management Clay] Johnson pointed to the government's ExpectMore.gov website, which makes PART data available for public scrutiny.

Johnson's statements walked a fine line between pushing what he described as a secondary use of the tool in informing budget decisions, and deference to Congress's constitutional power to regulate spending. The administration rates agencies on budget-performance integration in its quarterly traffic-light-style management score card, and encourages Congress to consider programs' PART scores in making budget decisions.

Full article here.

Why was the 20th century so violent, and why did its worst excesses occur in the early 1940s and in Central and Eastern Europe, Manchuria and Korea? [In his new book, War of the World, Niall] Ferguson’s answer is ethnic conflict, economics and empires in decline.

You can’t really have a discussion about 20th century atrocities without giving plenty of time to communism. That’s why I hope Ferguson’s book (and the forthcoming UK TV series based on it) doesn’t tip-toe around the issue like this review does.

Years ago, I wrote about our ambivalence over communism in my review of The Black Book of Communism:

Black Book underscores the enormity of communism's impact. Communism once stood on four continents, ruling one-third of humanity, always poised to expand. There was a clear line of inheritance from regime to regime. Each received material aid and ideological inspiration from its predecessor. Most important, individuals were as expendable as grains of sand. According to the authors, the communist death toll approaches 100 million people.

The authors' research offers a rough exposition of the crimes of communism: USSR, 20 million deaths; China, 65 million deaths; Vietnam, 1 million deaths; North Korea, 2 million deaths; Cambodia, 2 million deaths; Eastern Europe, 1 million deaths; Latin America, 150,000 deaths; Africa, 1.7 million deaths; Afghanistan, 1.5 million deaths; the international communist movement and communist parties not in power, about 10,000 deaths.

Communism compiled a lengthy enemies list, which included political parties, clergy, intellectuals, shopkeepers, many ethnic groups, and other "socially dangerous elements." Enemies were starved and worked to death; executed with bullets, shovels, and hammers; devoured by dogs; lit on fire; and made to kill one another for their capturers' amusement.

The U.S. economy is chugging along pretty well. Unemployment is low. So is inflation.

James Glassman asks: So why aren’t Americans happier about it?

Since January 2001 Gallup has conducted monthly polls that ask Americans to rate the nation’s economic condition: What is mind-boggling is that more respondents fall into the negative camp now than during the 2001 recession. Today, respondents who are negative on the economy outweigh those who are positive by more than two-to-one. Gallup concludes that "Americans' views of economic conditions in this country have essentially never recovered from the precipitous drop they took in 2001 after the dot-com boom ended."

Pollsters and politicians have noticed that there are lags in the public's perception of how the economy is doing, but the length of the delay this time is a little ridiculous. The recession ended four and a half years ago; unemployment peaked in mid-2003.

There may be better explanations. For example, a 2004 paper by Princeton economists Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger explores the fascinating question of how the public forms its opinions -- not on the economy but on economic policy -- and finds that "ideology is the most important determinant...while measures of self-interest are least important."

Gallup hints at a similar conclusion: data show consistently that Americans who identify with the party in power "are more positive about the way things are going in the country." In other words, it's not reality but partisanship or ideology that determines one's view of the economic situation.

Sadly, I think there’s something to this theory that ideology-trumps-reality: “If ‘my guy’ isn’t in the White House, then the economy must be a mess!”

But what if who's in power is less clear? Our government spends less when one party is in the White House and the other controls Congress. Is this another reason to root for divided government?

If this analysis is correct, then Republicans will have a difficult time this November. Since President Bush took office, the period when Americans felt best about the economy was the third quarter of 2004, just before his re-election, when 32 percent were positive and 42 percent negative, compared with a 25-55 split today.

In other words, supporters are abandoning the president -- most likely for reasons other than the economy, such as the war in Iraq -- and an improvement in the economy won't help.

If this is true, it’s too bad that we can’t separate the economy from how we feel about other issues. Then again, maybe there’s some good news in here.

At least the change in opinion occurred while the same guy was in office. In other words, while our political affiliations might shape how we see the economic conditions, for a good chunk of us there comes a point when we no longer stand by our man simply because we identify with the party in power.

Whole thing here.

Harry Teasly, a Reason board member, writes about how bad policies are threatening to put Florida's property insurance market under water.

When politicians, without regard to risks and costs, attempt to make a commodity or service, in this case insurance, affordable and available, they distort reality and decision-making, which gives rise to unintended consequences and future problems.

The following nugget from the June 10 Richmond Times-Dispatch about a draft press release that Greenpeace accidentally put out speaks for itself:

Armageddonist

Once in a while the slick surface of public relations and spin-doctoring pulls back to reveal the messy -- and often entertaining -- truth. That happened recently when President Bush visited Pennsylvania to talk about nuclear energy.

Greenpeace was ready. Or almost ready. It prepared a "fact sheet" denouncing the Exelon Limerick Generating Station outside Pottstown where Bush made his remarks. "In the 20 years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident," it read, "there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE]."

A spokesman for the environmental group said it had not meant to release that early draft of the broadsheet. (It probably wouldn't have, if it took as much care to prevent accidents as the nuclear industry does.) Nevertheless, it's good to know Greenpeace sticks by its anti-nuke stance even when it can't explain why.
This story can be found at: http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?

Not anymore, says Johan Norberg:

Long the paragon of social democracy, the Swedish model is rotting from within. Ironically, the unique social and economic foundation that first allowed Sweden to construct its political edifice--and which makes it such a difficult model for other countries to emulate--has been critically weakened by the system it helped create. Far from a being a solution for the new sick men of Europe, Sweden must face serious and fundamental challenges at the heart of its social model.

Recently, Sweden has adopted some market reforms:

In the early 1990s a deep recession forced Sweden to abandon a lot of the excesses from the 1970s and 1980s. Marginal tax rates were cut, the central bank was made independent, public pensions were cut and partially privatized, school vouchers were introduced, and private providers were welcomed in health care. Several markets were deregulated, like energy, the post office, transportation, television and, most importantly, telecom, which opened the way for the success of companies like Ericsson.

Well worth reading the whole thing.

No doubt attitude plays a role in this too. A Swedish friend of mine speaks about how Swedes regard financial success with suspicion, rather than admiration. According to her, even the founder of IKEA is seen as a scoundrel.

One of the best sources of investment analysis for the average householder, The Motley Fool, succinctly puts the network neutrality controversy in perspective. Alyce Lomax, a Motley Fool writer, urges Google and eBay, two of the most vocal net neutrality proponents, to dial down the rhetoric and cautions readers not to pick up the phone and call their Congressman or –woman just because eBay CEO Meg Whitman’s putting out “nice and scary” metaphors about two-tier Internet.

I love the democratizing elements of the Internet, and can appreciate its power to, in effect, rally Internet users. At the same time, I find this d