The Only Winning Move

As mentioned before, I read Matt Yglesias for two reasons, one noble, one base. This entry on land development is a sterling example of the former. In it, Yglesias calls out what he rightly terms a “tribal bias” on the left in favor of activists and against businessmen. That’s the one he explicitly acknowledges, anyway. I think there’s also a behind-the-scenes condemnation of the Left’s (or, rather, a certain vocal subsection of the Left’s) general opposition to development, especially when it involves symbols of progress and material wealth like skyscrapers and factories. I dunno, read it and judge for yourself, of course, but I get the feeling he’s saying it without saying it - mostly because it’s the kind of thing that you know but can’t prove, and it’s not worth the hassle of trying to defend it as a position. In any case, he points out that in many cases, businessmen left to their own devices are actually engaged in activity that Progressives should applaud - such as, for example, building tall buildings that alleviate space crunches in inner cities, making rent in general more affordable for everyone. My own take would be to say that in the overwhelming majority of cases what businessmen do, left to their own devices, results in a more efficient allocation of more-available resources/goods/services for everyone, and so we should in general leave them to their own devices as much as possible, but then, what’s in itallics pretty much makes up the difference between a practical liberal* (me) and a practical progressive (Yglesias).

One frequent theme on Yglesias’ blog is the strange affection Libertarians seem to have for cars and highways. Considering that government roadbuilding actually amounts to a subsidy for vehicle travel, he argues that if Libertarians were consistent, they would stop defending road travel over rails and at the very least say that we should leave it up to the market to sort out which mode of transportation ends up more popular with commuters. On this issue, I whole-heartedly agree with him. Cars are NOT a symbol of freedom, as so many Libertarians seem to think - at least, not as long as you’re driving on roads that are entirely financed by the government. And while I can see a small-l libertarian case for government investment in a highway system, I think it’s a fair libertarian litmus test to ask whether the person advocating such subsidies is suspicious of them. In my own view, the government should not be financing road construction at all (nor taxing property and gasoline nearly as much as they do, to head off a common objection about the expense of private road-building) - but anyone who isn’t at least suspicious of public roads just isn’t a Libertarian. I further agree with Yglesias about the positive benefits of eliminating the road subsidy. I think there would be fewer roads, and such roads as existed would be (a) better-maintained, (b) more strategically placed, and (c) more affordable.

The first one is obvious. In general people take better care of things that they own and want people to use. The government has an incentive only to keep roads basically useable; private investors have an incentive to make them excellent. Anyone from North Carolina will know what I mean by the second one. From the time we’re born, North Carolinians are fed a bunch of propaganda about how great the roads in our state are supposed to be - and by some measures North Carolina does indeed have (if you can believe it) more miles of paved road than any other state in the Union. But you can’t help noticing that those roads aren’t where they should be. In particular, I-40 isn’t - which is a big deal considering that it’s pretty much the only east-west artery in the state. It’s incontrovertible proof of just how much corruption costs - not only because the route is longer than it needs to be to get where it’s going (to route traffic through the hometowns of certain people who happened to be state legislators at the time of construction, you see), and because it’s also about half as big as it should be (which is why in the 90s you had to add an extra hour to your trip if you were going anywhere near Greensboro), but also because the maintenence costs of having it go through the particular mountain route it takes are just silly. No clear-conscienced Libertarian can look at something like I-40 and say that the government can be trusted to build an efficient transportation network. As for (c), I of course have to qualify this to say more affordabe in general. With due apologies to my sister, obviously people who live in the boonies just ’cause it’s cool would have a harder time paying for their life choices. But that’s as it should be. Much as I love where my sister lives, I can think of no reason why the state or county taxpayer should cover the costs of getting there.

And this is basically Yglesias’ big point. If there were no road subsidy, probably we would be less spread out, there would therefore be less of an incentive to own a car for a lot of people and consequently a greater consumer pool for rail travel, which would, as a result, see some private investment. It’s a big win for the environment, a big win for alternative energy investment and overall a big win for economic efficiency. And yes, in a strange way, Progressives who hate skyscrapers and hate inner city developers out of prejudice are unintentionally stacking the deck against the kind of transportation choices they claim to favor. Because by forbidding big inner-city development projects, we only make it more expensive to live in the city, which means more people will choose NOT to live in the city, which means a greater pool of voters with a stake in subsidized roads.

Progressives, as a rule, don’t listen to Libertarians when we try to explain these things to them, which is why bloggers like Yglesias are so valuable. And which is why for my side I try to be the kind of Libertarian who points out to his own the kinds of contradictions Yglesias likes to highlight. Cars are fun, but they’re not good transportation policy, and they’re not libertarian transportation policy at all.

*Tired of writing this disclaimer, but of course I mean “classical liberal,” as opposed to “New York Times liberal.”

Well this was nothing if not inevitable. Pepsi has had to apologize for the “Before You Score” iPhone app, which, if you’re one of the few who still hasn’t heard, classifies girls into 24 groups, gives you tips on how to get them and even does things like provide links to nearby vegan restaurants if it’s, say, the granola type you’re pursuing.

A couple of thoughts on this.

The double standard here just added a whole dimension of breathtaking. I have yet, in my life, to pick up a copy of a woman’s magazine that doesn’t contain at least one article about the girls’ version of exactly this. Granted, my only exposure is 5 min. here and there while waiting in hair salons, but that just underscores how common these things are. Classifying guys for the purpose of attracting their interest ranks just behind tips for staying thin in column space share. Women have killed approximately a continent worth of old-growth forest printing exactly the kind of thing they’re now supposedly so offended by. Stop to marvel.

What is it with cola companies and brain farts? I’m old enough to remember New Coke. And Wikipedia confirms that Crystal Pepsi really happened (though I admit I wasn’t sure until I looked it up). Well, OK, I guess any industry gets two faux pas-es. Cut me some slack, I’m trying to blog here! My point is just that I can’t imagine what, in 2009, would convince a bunch of corporate executives that it would be AOK to launch an app that helps guys get girls. Maybe some corporate executives are so privileged that they’ve been living in a skyscraper penthouse since 1973? EVERYONE by now has gotten the memo that whatever guys do to get girls is deeply wrong, never mind that girls want to be gotten.

Alright, a third thought. Girls who are honest about golddigging probably love this app, even if they wouldn’t say it in public. It helps guys feel like they have an ace in the hole, which gives them confidence, and hooks them up with suggestions for places to take girls and things to buy for girls. AND it eliminates any need to feel guilty about ditching the guy at the end of the night. He was playing his game, you were playing yours, right?

Public opinion is a weird thing is all I’m saying. New Coke is actually a case in point. All taste tests showed that it was the most popular drink in America. It flopped IN SPITE OF tasting better than either Coke Classic or Pepsi. And the reason has everything to do with brand perception and herd mentality, for which product quality has never been a match. Create an app that helps guys give girls what they want and what do girls think about it? It’s EEEEEVILLLL…. Which is how I know there is no God: only Evolution could’ve produced a mating system this ridiculous.

TOWM quote of the day come from Matt Yglesias, just returning from a trip through Northern Europe:

I felt much more cultural distance between Germans and Americans than I’d seen in any other European country. The population of Germany seems really determined to live up to all stereotypes.

I vouch for its veracity.

You wake up one morning and read the news to find that Barack Obama is this year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient a mere 8 months into his presidency. Do you (a) rationalize or (b) ridicule? Not that these are the only possible responses: you could (c) shrug and read the next story or (d) celebrate what you consider to be a worthy choice, but (a) and (b) are far and away the lion’s share of the reactions I’ve heard both in person and in the press.

Interestingly, the European press overwhelmingly chooses option (a). From Spiegel’s roundup of international opinion about Obama’s Nobel Prize, nearly all are rationalizations, and this one happens to be my favorite:

Für ungeschriebene, nur versprochene Romane und Verse werden gewöhnlich keine Nobelpreise vergeben, auch nicht für noch unentdeckte naturwissenschaftliche Phänomene. Beim Friedenspreis aber wird das ganze menschliche Potential - und, ja, das Versprechen und die Hoffnung auf Erfolg - in die Waagschale geworfen: nicht nur unterschriebene internationale Verträge oder beendete bewaffnete Konflikte. Die Preisträger vom vorvergangenen Jahr, Al Gore und der Uno-Klimarat, haben das Problem der Erderwärmung auch nicht gelöst. Aber bis heute scheint es, dass sie globale Denk- und Handlungsmuster aufgezeigt haben, von denen man seither nicht abweichen kann. Dies könnte auch das wichtigste Resultat der Anerkennung für Obama werden, der erst seit kaum neun Monaten im Amt ist, viele Probleme neu gestellt, aber kaum welche gelöst hat.

That’s from the Hungarian Nepszabadsag. So this translation is from the Hungarian from the German, and might maybe lose something:

For unwritten, merely promised novels and poems, Nobel Prizes are usually not awarded, nor for undiscovered natural phenomena. But in the case of the Peace Price the whole of mankind’s potential - and, yes, promises and hope of success - are on the scale: not just signed international treaties and ended armed conflicts. The winners from last year, Al Gore and the UN Climate Council, did not solve the problem of Global Warming. But they’ve continued to show patterns of thought and action that are global in scope, patterns from which it is no longer possible to deviate. This could be the most important result of the recognition for Obama, who has barely been in office nine months, has looked at many problems in new ways, but has yet to solve any.

I like this one because it’s the most transparent. Notice how it highlights what it’s trying to obscure: that prizes should be awarded on achievement rather than promise of same. Its attempts to draw a distinction between the Peace Prize and All Those Other Prizes on this basis are surely not convincing to anyone - not to the people who wrote this, and probably not to most of their readers. And that’s because no one has ever expected a Chemistry Prize recipient to explain all of Chemistry, nor an Economics Prize recipient to solve all Economics problems, nor a Literature Prize recipient to write the definitive world novel. So OF COURSE no one expects a Peace Prize recipient to actually achieve world peace. What we do expect is some kind of tangible results on this front - simply, as the paper aptly puts it, because “Nobel Prizes are usually not awarded for merely promised novels and poems nor for undiscovered natural phenomena.” The world must be a measurably better place than it would have been without this person’s efforts, and there is no evidence that Obama has even made a distinguished effort, let alone changed anything for the better. That he might do so in the future is true of millions of people.

No, rationalization is an inherently dishonest business, so if you’re going to get away with it, you have to have the soap nearby and be ready to get your hands dirty. You can’t obscure the truth by telling it directly.

What’s interesting to me is why American papers seem to be divided between ridicule and rationalization where the European press is pretty much all rationalization. And yes, I have a theory. It goes like this: the Nobel Prize is a worthy institution of European prestige, and the editors of these papers are protecting its reputation. Although it’s true enough that nominal support for Obama in Europe is sky high, there’s always the question of how much of it is really Obama-enthusiasm and how much is anti-Bush backlash. After 8 years of a president they despised - culturally more than politically - they finally get one who talks Europe’s line. It may not be so much that they like this guy as that they want to make clear to the American public how much they hated the predecessor. And if that’s true, then I think all of this support for Obama’s Nobel is probably less about Obama and more about saving the Prize’s reputation. Because let’s face it, EVERY time they give out one of these prizes we all think to ourself “who gave THEM the right?” Their right to pontificate on who is helping the world comes from broad acceptance of their decisions. Note that it doesn’t have to be broad agreement with all of those decisions by any means - just a general perception that they put thought and effort into it and make their decisions in a serious and unbiased fashion.

Giving the Prize to Obama will have dynamited that perception. Yes, I think it does more damage than, say, handing it to Yassr Arafat in 1994. At least with Arafat we understood that it was part of a tradition of awarding the Prize to both sides in a regional agreement. Le Duc Tho had the decency to refuse such an arrangement in 1973, but Menachim Begin (like Arafat, a terrorist before he was a legitimate politician) did not, and that’s just that. With Obama, we’re talking about an award based literally on nothing. It is a naked political endorsement, an award not on any kind of outside standard but just because “the committee likes the guy.” It’s exactly this kind of capriciousness that undermines fiat authority, and it is in trying to protect that authority that the European press is pretty much monolithically offering rationalizations for the choice. It is not really about Obama.

TOWM’s quote of the day comes from this must-read article by James Capretta:

President Obama said Monday that the debate on health care has gone on long enough, and now is the time to pass something. But does Congress, let alone the public, really understand what these bills would mean for the health sector and the wider U.S. economy? In 1994, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued a lengthy assessment of the Clinton administration’s proposal, covering everything from its distributional consequences to the budgetary treatment of its various moving parts. The public should get the same kind of thorough review of what Obamacare would mean before Congress takes any further steps toward passage.

Right. On. My biggest problem with the healthcare “reform” debate remains how hastily this bill is being rammed through Congress. For something this systemic, Congress needs to slow the fuck down, take its time, put its thinking cap on and give real consideration to what the unintended consequences of this bill are going to be. If the history of these systems in Europe is any guide, they WILL fail to see all of them, and adjustments to policy will be necessary in years to come. But the fact that this is inevitable is NO EXCUSE for not trying to minimize the damage now. Certain people - including especially the President - are a little too concerned with their reputation among the historians to do their job at the moment. Which, ironically, virtually guarantees that they will fail at their real goal since the more haste that goes into passing this bill now the more waste we’re likely to have to correct later.

Capretta has, in fact, identified one potential source of waste that has escaped everyone’s attention: there is a hidden, completely unintentional (one assumes) tax in the bill to the tune of 30% on middle class families. The reasoning is that as you drift into a higher tax bracket, your public option subsidy diminishes, and since the bill also requires you to carry health insurance you will have to make up the difference yourself. What it ammounts to is a sudden $7500 increase in your taxes if you move above the poverty line. That’s a huge disincentive to do so in anyone’s book. And it’s obviously unjust: we should not be rewarding lack of industry. It’s also bad policy: if people are discouraged from seeking higher incomes, obviously the tax base that goes to pay for this plan will be smaller as well. Which means - and gee, who saw this one coming?- that the bill will ultimately end up being more expensive than forecast, just like - all together now! - EVERY OTHER SOCIAL SPENDING BILL IN HISTORY.

Again, I agree that healthcare reform is necessary. Our current system is broken, or at least overpriced. Again, I would prefer that “reform” take the form of massive deregulation that would allow the market to function rationally. Again, I understand that this is unlikely, so I’m not holding my breath. And again, and most importantly, if we MUST have a “public option,” and it seems we must, the Congress REALLY needs to take the time to slow down and THINK ABOUT IT. I am not amused - in fact I am outraged - by this rush to cobble together some kind, ANY kind, of plan just so Obama can pat himself on the back for passing public healthcare. Obama, and Congress, need to sit down and get to work already. They’re on the clock and on our payroll.

This year’s Nobel Prize winner for Literature is Herta Müller, the best author I’ve never read. I first came across her while shelving books at the library as an undergrad. I worked in a room where books came in from publishers for review by professors. The way I understand it, each department was allowed a certain number of purchases per semester, and it was my job to take the books out, organize them, and then send out some kind of notification that they’d arrived so the designated prof. from each department could come and review them. Being very interested in foreign languages and majoring in Literature, I usually took the time to look over the foreign language literature section, and Müller’s The Land of Green Plums was there one day. I stole it to read it - because I was and am very much interested in the Ceausescu dictatorship, and information on it was a bit hard to come by in 1996 - but I was a big stress case as an undergrad, constantly taking too many classes and therefore overcommitted, so I didn’t make it much more than 30 pages in before quietly returning it.

Anyway, it seems she’s something of an international sensation among literary critics, and now they’ve awarded her the Nobel Prize for Literature. Congratulations, I guess. I wasn’t too impressed with the bit I read, I have to say, but it wasn’t very much, and I wasn’t getting a lot of sleep at the time! I should probably pick up that book again, for old times’ sake.

Two interesting sidenotes from the Spiegel article about the prize if you happen to read German. First, nowhere in the article is Müller referred to as an “Aussiedler(in)” - the common expression for someone who is of German descent and has moved back to Germany. She’s simply German. It’s especially noteworthy in this case because she’s otherwise an Aussiedler’s Aussiedler - born, raised, and lived the first half of her adulthood in Romania, writes, talks and lectures about life in Romania, is presumably bilingual in Romanian and German, and even writes essays about how foreign Germany was when she first moved there in the 1980s. I say this because Herr Henzl, the caretaker of the dorm I lived in in Würzburg in 1995-6 was also an Aussiedler from Romania, and everyone knew this and felt the need to bring it up. So, the conclusion seems to be, then, that just as in Korea and Japan, people who would otherwise be only half-acceptable as natives are suddenly the real deal when they’re internationally famous. I’m so glad I’m not from a country that’s obsessed with ethnic identity…

The other one being - and this is a feather in Robin Hanson’s cap - that even though Müler is not typical of the recent trend in prize winners and was considered a longshot for the prize this year, the London bookies managed to call it right, even if most Nobel Committee watchers had their eyes on other balls. So we get another neat demonstration of the uncanny ability of betting markets to aggregate disparate bits of information accurately, telling us something that all experts knew without a single one of them being aware they knew it. Or, more accurately, they knew it even though no one of them did. Legalize them already!

I read Matt Yglesias’ blog for two completely incompatible reasons. The noble reason is because he seems like a genuinely open-minded person, at least on the policy level. He manages to be a voice of the left without buying all of their knee-jerk myths. Would that more commentators on both sides of the aisle thought for themselves as much as Yglesias does. The base reason, however, is pure entertainment: in between all this honest questioning of his party’s line he still manages to pull off all the typical pundit screamer abuses of basic reasoning.

In the second vein, there’s a really good one today. Yglesias wants to extrapolate from the fact that the Republican contender is losing in the New Jersey governor’s election to the conclusion that the Republican Party nationally is in dire straits. New Jersey, folks. As though - leaving aside that generalizing from a single example is already a named fallacy - New Jersey somehow is now or has ever been indicative of national political trends.

And then there’s this beauty of a line here:

Twenty years ago, New Jersey was a solidly conservative state. Mike Dukakis got 42 percent of the vote there, less than Obama got in South Carolina.

Oh Jesus Christ this is ignorant. Let’s take one data point from one election 20 years ago in one state, compare it with another data point from this year in a completely different election in a completely different state, ignore any elections between those two points in either state, ignore any relevant differences between the presidential candidates in question (and their opponents), ignore any relevant differences between the gubernatorial candidates in question, and ignore even any potential corroborating evidence from local elections in the states in question, and just, you know, conclude what I want because comment is free and who’s stopping me? If I were a junior high school teacher grading essays from a low-track English class this would fail. Stop for a moment to marvel that the actual author is a Harvard grad who has been published in Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times Magazine. Sometimes it’s really easy to want to just give up and go home on American political commentary.

Alright - I get it - he’s merely holding the Christie/Corzine election up as a neat packaged symbol of the independent fact of the Republican Party’s low standing at the moment. But a symbol should be representative, and the New Jersey governor’s election somehow just doesn’t do it for me - or, I suspect, anyone else at all - as a leading indicator of the national standing of the Republican Party. Not even if you compare this year’s election with a 20+-year-old presidential election in South Carolina. Thanks for the laughs, kid.

Lest we paint with too broad a brush, it turns out there is no shortage of celebrities who think Polanski should be extradited and put on trial. Courtesy of chrismm of Dreamwidth: the link goes to a list of them. It’s important to get this out there since all the commentary on the subject is on how morally reprehensible Hollywood supposedly is. Well, maybe they are. Probably they are. But like all generalizations this one has tons of exceptions, so keep those in mind when casting stones.

My guess is that the kind of behavior we’re seeing from a lot of Hollywood luminaries about Roman Polanski - defending him in spite of his admission to have committed a pretty heinous crime (one without a statute of limitations, in fact) - is nothing special to Hollywood, but can be found in pretty much any privileged circle. It isn’t too much trouble to dig up cases of politicians and corporate executives scratching each other’s backs in this way. And in fact, I’m not even sure it’s a function of privilege exclusively. If the Duke Rape Case and Tawana Brawley Incident have taught us anything, they’ve taught us that racial and/or ideological solidarity can excuse just about anything for some people too. People look out for their own. That’s how it is. And that’s why we bother trying to build an impartial and detached judiciary at all: because people can’t be trusted to do the right thing by everyone else when their friends are in the dock. A lot of people in Hollywood are behaving badly over this, but it isn’t surprising, it isn’t all of them, and while I’m inclined to agree (on the basis of no particular evidence) that there are probably more sociopaths per capita in Hollywood than in most of the rest of the world, that some of them make stupid rationalizations for their immoral friends is not a behavior they invented, nor are they its exclusive practitioners. So please, when casting stones, keep in mind that there are plenty of celebrities who, though shame or actual moral conviction, do in fact condemn Polanski in public.

What is it about politics that brings out the child in us? I think there should be a principle - along the lines of Godwin’s Law - that holds that over the range of opinons a person holds on any subject, his opinions on politics are invariably his most infantile (open for discussion: is sports an exception?).

Illustration of the principle for today comes courtesy of a 61-year-old woman. I cannot emphasize enough that this woman has been on the planet for more than 60 years. She is nevertheless able to tell her daughter in all seriousness that she doesn’t want to go to lunch with some bunch of Republicans because “Republicans are all just out for themselves.”

Now let’s just stop for a moment to consider the assumptions that go into a statement like that and ask ourselves whether any of them are at all even remotely plausible.

First - you’d have to assume that somehow the Democratic and Republican Parties actually caputre the entire range of possible political opinion in the US to such a fine-grained level that we can make assertions about people’s personalities based on which of these two parties they identify with. Is it even remotely plausible that this is the case? OF COURSE NOT. Actually, I’m not even completely sure what the Republican Party in particular stands for. As far as I can tell, it’s a rag-tag fleet of three otherwise completely unrelated and mutually incompatible ideologies that all happen to have some beef or other with the Democrats, so they form an alliance. It’s very much an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” kind of thing. The Democrats are more coherent (they all seem to think that there are social problems which can be fixed by some degree of increased government micromanagement of the economy), but their agenda is still broad enough that I would hesitate to make blanket assumptions about anyone who self-identifies as Democrat. And this is not to mention, of course, the hoardes of single-issue voters who really only care about one thing and join the appropriate party without regard to the rest of the platform. Think Mike Huckabee - who is basically a socialist and would be a Democrat but for Abortion, Evolution, and Homosexual Marriage. I mean really, there but for the Grace of God goes He - yuk yuk.

Second - having made the first already-implausible assumption, you’d then have to convince yourself that the actual, obtaining alignment - out of all possible arrangements - just so happened to come out such that all the caring people identify with one party and the spiteful, selfish people with the other. And, further, that, even though this is so and everyone knows this to be true, rather than calling them the “What’s in it for Us?” Party and the “Heal the World” Party, we decided to go with the largely indistinguishable “Republican” and “Democrat” instead.

Third - having made the first two already screamingly-ludicrous assumptions, you’d then go on to believe that there is an entire swathe of the population that has no idea whether it’s caring or selfish and in fact changes its mind about this from election to election, for it is these people’s confusion alone that explains why sometimes it’s the good guys and sometimes it’s the bad guys that win.

Fourth - that within this completely incredible framework, it never occurs to anyone in the selfish party to pretend to be a member of the caring party as a smokescreen for hatching selfish plots, nor does it ever occur to anyone in the caring party to pretend to be selfish so as to stealh care for people from behind enemy lines. Only if you make this kind of assumption can you know - before even meeting them - that your Republican lunch partners are all going to be “in it for themselves.”

How do people make it to 60 with worldviews this simplistic, I ask you? I ask you because I have no answers. I just note that politics forms a kind of exception here. Alright, and sports, maybe, but sports are a form of escapist entertainment, so no one really expects responsibility here. Adults gotta play too, right? But with politics - I mean - well - at least in theory political opinions are opinions about how we would like society to run, and that would seem to be a Very Important Thing. And yet, not just this woman but tons of people make it to their 60s honestly believing that there are only two sides which are, roughly speaking, Good and Evil, and that this exhausts the choices, and that everone identifies in public honestly with the party that’s really in their heart, never mind that this makes it harder to get away with nefarious schemes if you are, in fact, nefarious, and that the people in the middle are there because they really just are stumped on this question of whether they’re for Good or for Evil. Poppycock!

And yet, it’s not uncommon! I just don’t get it…

Wouldn’t it be healthier, going in to a political lunch, to assume that the people on the other side of the table are, like you, well-intentioned and intelligent human beings, who just happen to have some different priorities, and that just maybe by having lunch with these people you can explain some things to them they might not have considered, or have some things explained to you that you might not have considered, each side always with their eye on the goal? Just asking.

Here’s an example of rent-seeking if I’ve ever seen one: LA will now mandate anti-graffiti coats on all buildings, commercial and residential. Here’s the way it works: you have to paint your house with some kind of magic paint, or else sign an agreement with the city agreeing to remove graffiti if it appears on your house within 7 days or face a $550 fine.

Here’s the Arroyo Seco Neighborhood Council on the law:

Allowing graffiti to stay visible to the public for seven days effectively rewards taggers, providing them with more than twice the window to showcase their vandalism, and makes ongoing removal efforts worthless.

OK, so it’s not about cutting down on graffiti - not really. What IS it about then? Well, what else? Lining the pockets of whatever company makes the magic paint, that’s what. Because why market and advertise when you can have city council just order everyone to buy your stuff?

This is why a right to private property need to be included in the Constitution: because it’s always cheaper to bribe the government than it is to invest in marketing and R&D. It’s always easier to game the system than to play the game.

And you know what’s even better than having to bribe city council to make it illegal not to buy your products? When mandating your products saves city council money anyway. In this case, they now get to wash their hands of graffiti removal efforts since it’s no longer the city’s responsibility to do cleanup. Neat.

Left-leaning members of the audience who think a public option on healthcare is a good idea, please take note. Healthcare is a very different domain from home ownership, granted, but many of the same principles apply. Ask yourself whether, once there’s a public option, a drug company will need to make its case to the general public (by which I mean the AMA, naturally) anymore? All it will now need to do is find the handful of regulators responsible for mandating which drugs are covered (or even required for certain treatments) under the public option, bribe them, and have done with it. The bribes will be expensive as bribes go, but dirt cheap compared with honest market-testing and research investment. Why innovate and compete when you can just have the school bully lay down the law? If any of you can think of any rational reason why this sort of corruption will not increase under Obama’s proposed “public option,” I would be really interested in hearing your argument. I will be frank and say right now that I do not believe you can make the case, because you know as well as I do that I’m right. And, thanks to stupid voting on the part of the public in November, we will certainly get to find out. You know another way this case is similar to what’s coming with the public insurance “option?” When the regulators can’t be bothered to find the money for something they are tasked with - as city council apparently can’t in the case of their graffiti clean-up committments in LA - they can and will find ways to pass the cost on to you. The parallel is already there in the part of the statute requiring people to carry health insurance. We will only see more examples of this as time goes by. It is inevitable that the mandated public option will not be able to cover its expenses (hey, I’m only going on data from every other welfare program in history). It is inevitable for the same reason this is true of every welfare program: because welfare programs are invariably cheaper to the end user (not to the tax base as a whole, of course) than the private options, because they fix their prices based on political reality rather than market reality - aka actual cost, and this means that they (a) eventually run a deficit and (b) that deficit only grows with time as more and more people take advantage of the public option. So please, don’t talk to me about how Obama has promised that this will not happen because if the 100% occurrence of this in historical experience is any indication, it WILL happen, in spite of Mr. Obama’s best efforts. And that means eventually the healthcare regulators will be seeking to cut costs they imposed on themselves in exactly the same way that the LA City Council is currently cutting costs it imposed on itself: by passing the cost on to people who are actually the victims.

Obama promises that his plan will be tax- and deficit neutral. It will not be. Voters can be forgiven for falling for this - after all, not everyone’s all that sharp. But Mr. Obama cannot be forgiven for making this promise, because he surely knows it is one he cannot keep. Wake up, America! We need to put the brakes on this debate, calm down, and demand that our government say something realistic about healthcare. And, more importantly, take its time in coming up with whatever plan it ends up passing. Haste makes waste.