Excuse Me, You Aren't Charging Enough For Gas

An ethanol-pump owner says he wants to lower his prices but the state won't let him.
Badger Ethanol in Monroe charges around $2.22 for a gallon of E-85, an alcohol-fuel mixture that is 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline, by volume.

Badger's owners wanted to cut the price to $2 but said they had to artificially hike prices after some competitors complained Badger wasn't meeting the state's minimum markup laws.

The markup law is "antiquated" and the governor and Legislature should eliminate it, said Gary Kramer, head of Badger State Ethanol.

Wisconsin Consumer Protection investigators launched a probe into Badger's fuel prices and found E-85 selling for just over $2 a gallon.

Based on a complicated formula, the investigators said the price should have been $1 more.

On Tuesday, Gov. Jim Doyle ordered state investigators to do nothing to stop the pricing.

I’m glad that the governor stepped up in the name of common-sense, but why were the regulators even wasting their time on this?  Which consumer interests were they perusing?

Is any more evidence necessary that government shouldn’t be messing in markets?  They will always come to serve entrenched special interests at the expense of consumers.

HatTip: Pagan Vigil

Never Underestimate The Logic Of Politicians

Opponents of statewide franchise licensing for television services have a really bizarre argument:

Some lawmakers in South Jersey opposed the law because they feared it would allow the telephone companies to focus on providing television service only to the state’s more densely populated — and profitable regions — while ignoring lower-income and sparsely populated communities in the south.

Even if true (and you don’t have to look any farther than cell-phone competition to know that it’s not) it make no sense. Leaving some residents at the status quo is a reason to oppose a bill that would make everyone else better off?

Of course the real reason that they opposed the legislation is that it cuts local governments out of the tax game. They will no longer be able to extort cash out of the cable providers.

It’s quite simple really – when you give consumers more choices they win. Every time.

Update: Brian and Eli respond in the comments - perhaps they weren't agreeing quite as much as I thought they were.

The Problem Is Not The Guns

Arnold Kling thinks that we should disarm Muslims and there are others that seem to agree.

I believe that what we need going forward is a policy of disarming Muslims. I believe that we must keep devout Muslims away from weapons, and keep weapons away from devout Muslims. I can work with Muslims, send my children to school with Muslims, and be friends with Muslims. I do not have an issue with their religion, as long as they do not have weapons. However, the combination of weapons and Islam poses unacceptable danger to the rest of us.

To be honest, it appears to me simply a justification for a prejudiced view. Only a very small minority of Muslims take up arms against the West (many more would express a desire to, but few actually do).

Is it really appropriate to disarm (thus violate their natural rights) the majority in order to protect ourselves against a minority?

I think that the clear answer is no. There is something wrong with the Muslim world right now, but going after symptoms will not cure the disease.

Add onto this the fact that most of the violence is not perpetrated with conventional weapons I think that you clearly have a policy that will confirm to the Arab world that the west hates them and provide little, if any, actual benefit.

Black Tax Gold

Gov. Frank Murkowski imposed a state hiring freeze Wednesday because of the millions of dollars in revenue Alaska is losing as a result of the Prudhoe Bay oil field shutdown, and said he would support hearings into BP's maintenance practices.

The governor also said he would direct Alaska's attorney general to investigate whether the state could hold the oil giant fully accountable for the state's losses.
…
The expected loss of 400,000 barrels per day at today's oil prices means the state is losing about $6.4 million a day in royalties and taxes, Revenue Commissioner Bill Corbus said.
The state receives 89 percent of its income from oil revenue; Alaska has no state sales tax and no personal income tax. The Prudhoe Bay shutdown will cut in half Alaska's total oil production and the resulting revenue.

What an interesting theory of governance – grow government to the size of tax revenue and when the people you are stealing collecting from don’t meet your estimates – they are responsible for your poor planning.

"BP must get the entire Prudhoe Bay back up and running as soon as it is safely possible," Murkowski told a joint session of the state Legislature.
…
Three Democratic legislators released a letter to Murkowski calling on the governor to hold hearings and have BP officials explain under oath what they did, or failed to do, to maintain Prudhoe Bay's pipelines.

…

Murkowski questioned why BP abruptly shut down the entire Prudhoe Bay field after finding a leak of only four to five barrels.

"What did BP learn last Sunday that it did not know previously that would cause BP to take such precipitous action?" Murkowski asked. He complained also that the state was not consulted before the decision was made.

What an arrogant prick. The operation of the oil pipelines are not a state concern – it’s a private concern. No one other than BP knows what is the best way to handle its oil pipelines. It should not have to justify its actions to any government, especially a state government.

If BP was somehow negligent and caused environmental damage its certainly plausible to fine them for that, but holding hearings because BP wasn’t responsible enough to keep the tax oil pipeline open is simply going too far.

If only BP wasn’t interested in fixing the pipelines anyway (after all they are losing billions a day in real revenue), they could sit on it and tell Gov Murkowski to go stick it.

Slapping Israel's Hand

I have avoided talking about the Israeli – Hezollah crisis to date mainly because I don’t have anything to add.  Israel has the right to defend herself in whichever way she thinks is most effective.  I’m not sure that the current tact is the correct one, but that is neither here nor there.

I do know that the US’s unwavering support exacerbates the issue.  The Arab world has this perception and I don’t think that they are necessarily wrong.  Imagine my surprise when I came across this headline:

U.S. directs criticism at Israel

Wow, is the US really going to be an impartial party in the current crisis?  Not quite.

The White House said Wednesday neither Israel nor Hezbollah should escalate their month-old war, as Israel decided to widen its ground invasion in southern Lebanon.

Is that really what passes as criticism these days?  That neither party should escalate violence?  No wonder the Arab states think that we kowtow to Israel demands.  A criticism would be a directive to actually do something substantive, not a mild statement of what everyone in the world really wants.

Budgets Don't Grow On Trees

I don’t think Bono understands where government budgets come from:

[T]he band — whose frontman Bono campaigns against global poverty — made the move in response to Ireland imposing a 250,000-euro cap on tax-free incomes. The ceiling ... [removes] the tax exemption on royalties previously in place and from which U2 and other Irish singers and bands benefited in their early years.

U2 were reportedly the world's biggest music earners last year, with an income of about 217 million euros. ... Last week, it was widely reported in Britain that the Rolling Stones paid only 1.6 percent in tax on earnings of 81.3 million pounds last year by using offshore trusts and companies, including one in the Netherlands.

The man that has been begging, pleading and cajoling governments to hand out billions of dollars in aid to Africa doesn’t think that he should participate in footing the bill.

What a hypocrite.

HatTip: KipEsquire

Conspiracy

Justice Antonin Scalia on Monday afternoon denied the request of the Texas GOP to delay a federal appeals court ruling that requires the name of former Rep. Tom DeLay to remain on the congressional ballot for this fall's election. That ended the matter, since the Republican party's lawyer, James Bopp, Jr., said he would not renew the request with another member of the Court.

I must be reading that wrong.  I thought Scalia was a Republican lapdog and simply did their bidding.  Can someone point out the right-wing conspiracy in this move?  

Perhaps he thought DeLay was a Democrat.

Morons Use Commerce to Avoid... Commerce?

I stumbled upon the Burning Man festival via a comment on A Stitch In Haste.

It doesn’t sound particularly interesting (to me) but I found something odd in the description of the event.

Primary Focus of the Event
…
Commerce-free event. No cash transactions are allowed at Burning Man
…
The participants instead rely on a gift economy, a sort of potlatch. Since the earliest days of the event, an underground barter economy has also existed, in which burners exchange material goods and/or favors with each other;

Um, isn’t any exchange of goods de facto commerce?

Commerce is the trading of something of economic value such as goods, services, information or money between two or more entities.

The arbitrary banning of money (which is what I assume they mean by commerce free) is rather inefficient. If I want a groovy Burning-Man t-shirt but the guy that has one only wants a Che t-shirt and I only have Eliot Sptizer t-shirts I’m probably not going to get what I want.

The concept of money is to allow everyone to possess something that can be universally traded. I have $10, I give it to the guy with the Burning Man t-shirt and he, in turn, gives it to the guy with the Che t-shirt. Everyone gets what they want without have to deal with a bunch of unnecessary transactions (which are still commerce).

People find the dumbest ways to show their dislike for capitalism without understanding that their replacement activity is really an inefficient form of the exact same system that they are trying to protest.

Morons.

Outlandish Government Salaries?

Chris Edwards says that federal employees make twice as much as private citizens (on average):

New data was released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis on federal employee wages and benefits. The data for 2005 shows that compensation for the average federal civilian worker ($106,579) is now exactly double the average compensation in the U.S. private sector ($53,289).
(See Tables 6.2D, 6.5D, and 6.6D here, www.bea.gov/bea/dn/nipaweb/index.asp).
The federal pay advantage has been soaring in recent years. The ratio of average federal to average private compensation increased from 51 percent in 1990, to 68 percent in 2000, to 100 percent today.

If that is true, and I see no reason to doubt the numbers, why do I always hear about how crappy public sector pay is? The benefits are (supposedly) great, but the pay sucks. Is that an urban myth? Does it depend on job function? Or are political jobs so overpaid that it skews the overall outlook?

Busting At The Seams

Amanda Frost on overcrowding on Capital Hill:

So why should anyone care? Well, I don’t claim that improving working conditions on Capitol Hill should become a national priority. But nonetheless I think the time lost waiting for elevators, foraging for food, and trying to find a quiet place for a conference call is a net loss for taxpayers. And I wonder if it doesn’t create an atmosphere of anxiety, annoyance, and general frustration that infects the day-to-day interactions of staffers and senators with each other and the constituencies they serve.

My first instinct is to say – the more time Senators and staffers spend waiting, the less time they have eroding our liberties.

My second reaction is that the solution is easy – decrease the size of government so that there aren’t quite so many people on the Hill.

Either way, I find it difficult to feel sorry for our Senatorial Overlords. (Which isn’t to say that Amanda does either, follow the link and decide for yourself)