Income Inequality

Cross-posted as a comment at EconLog:

Along with dire claims of "inequality" and "shrinking wages" doesn't it make sense to look at European countries that have many of the policies that progressives want to implement? How are Germany and France doing under higher minimum wages, more powerful unions andmore restrictive labor policies?

Everything is argued in theory, but there are plenty of real world implementations of similar policies.

A Republican Shows Signs Of Fiscal Restraint

Unfortunately, its only when it serves naked self-interest. The man that brought you the Bridge to Nowhere has learned fiscally responsibility!

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) held up a bill that would create a free, searchable database of government contracts and grants because he was worried about the proposal's price tag, his spokesman told me this afternoon. Its cost has been estimated at $15 million.

Stevens' office has asked Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), the sponsor of the bill, for "a cost-benefit analysis to make sure this does not create an extra layer of unnecessary bureaucracy,” spokesman Aaron Saunders said. The Senator “wanted to make sure that this wasn’t going to be a huge cost to the taxpayer and that it achieves the goal which the bill is meant to achieve.”

So building a $200 million dollar bridge for 50 people that didn't even ask for a bridge is beyond reproach, but a $15 million dollar bill that will provide a little (and I do mean only a little) bit of transparency needs extra scrutiny.

When is Mr Stevens up for re-election again? (answer: 2008) I certainly hope that a Republican will seek to overthrow this particular benevolent dictator.

And The Number One Reason Is

There are a lot of reasons to oppose municiple internet providers. This example, by far, is the one that will be the most persuasive to the largest number of people.

Culver City, Calif., is the first operator of a municipal wireless network to filter legal content and applications that the city finds objectionable.

The city has installed filtering software that blocks access to legal adult sites and, more significantly, prevents peer-to-peer file sharing. Ironically, municipal networks are often touted by activists who say commercial service providers are more likely to interfere with free access to Web content. Let the record show that the first U.S. ISP to censor Internet access was a muni network.

Suppliers motivated by profit will give consumers what they want, suppliers motivated by politics will provide customers with what they think they need or with what will score them the most political points.

Culver City may be the first municiple provider to censor content, but they won't be the last.

Will Germany Follow Ireland or East Germany?

My guess is that this is the leading edge of a growing trend.

Koerber is one of 145,000 Germans who fled the fatherland last year amid record postwar unemployment, pushing emigration to its highest level since 1954, Federal Statistics Office figures show. Last year was also the first since the late 1960s that emigrants outnumbered Germans returning home from living abroad, the statistics office said.

Even more troubling to German officials and business leaders, many were skilled workers like Koerber. The loss of such people, they say, may threaten Germany's economic competitiveness in the future.

As more and more Germans leave and find success they lower the perception of risk in picking up your roots to relocate. They tell their family and friends how great it is and supply a base of support for other emigrants. If Germany doesn’t take drastic measures to improve its economy – lower taxes, relax labor rules, ease the burden of regulation – this trickle is going to become a river.

I shouldn’t have to explain what will happen to the German tax base and pension system when highly paid, skilled workers are replaced by uneducated immigrants, I only hope that German lawmakers are as smart.

The only question I have is will the response be to create a freer economy or a restrictive emigration policy?

Living The Life Of The Unwashed

Red-light cameras seemed like a great idea to Albuquerque city officials--until they started catching colleagues on camera. At least a dozen city cops and bus drivers have filed a lawsuit, after discovering that it doesn't seem very fair to get a ticket from a machine in the mail, with almost no recourse to challenge it.

So, is the problem the automatic tickets or the fact that city officials routinely are able to escape the laws that they impose on the rest of us?

I have a sneaking suspicion that far fewer laws would be passed if they were enforced across the board.

Look Before You Leap

I happened to notice that Blogger is running a new Beta for its blog interface. Some cool new features include drag-and-drop template changes, labels (tags finally!) and RSS feeds for comments.

I had the form all filled out and mouse hovering over the submit button to make the switch when out of the corner of my eyes I saw a link to stuff that doesn't work yet. Oops. I almost alienated my two readers that comment regularly. That would have been disasterous.

You would think that I would follow my own advise a bit more often. Never click on any button unless you know what it does.

Oh The Humanity

In the manufactured crisis of the moment, the PC crowd is in a tizzy about Survivor using – gasp – race to separate the contestants into teams. What, exactly, is so troubling about a group of Asians battling a group of White guys battling a group of Hispanics battling a group of Blacks in a relay race?

I have even been accused of being racist for pointing at that this arbitrary separation is no big deal. So tell me who is the racist? The person that thinks that teams doing logic puzzles can approach a game regardless of the racial makeup of the teams or the person that feels pointing out the differences in the color of skin is unmentionable?

A group of New York City officials are a bit miffed about the tribe setup in the newest installment of CBS's Survivor, which begins its new season in a few short weeks. You see, in order to keep the franchise as fresh as possible after thirteen editions of the program Mark Brunett has decided to split the tribes along racial lines: blacks, Asians, Latinos and whites.

Well, NYC officials aren't happy about that. According to City Councilman John Liu, the division along racial lines will promotes divisiveness. Liu, along with a coalition of officials, are asking CBS to reconsider its plans to air the program because it will promote racial division and negative typecasts. The network is defending the show, saying that the racially-divided theme of this season follows the show's tradition of introducing new creative elements and casting structures that reflect cultural and social issues.

Let me be the first person to mention publicly how thankful I am that government officials do not (yet) get to decide what is on my TV. Can you imagine the bland, substance free drivel that would crowd the airwaves if hack politicians got a veto? You probably don’t even have to venture outside the NYC City Council to find someone that would be offended by just about anything.

So now that the airwaves are safe for now, perhaps the NYC City Council can tackle more troubling issues like the suffering of Geese or the color of their taxi driver’s socks.

The False Choice

From Bruce Schneier on the British terrorism plot.

1. There was some serious cash flow from someone, presumably someone abroad.


2. There was no imminent threat.


3. However, the threat was real. And it seems pretty clear that it would have bypassed all existing airport security systems.


4. The conspirators were radicalized by the war in Iraq, although it is impossible to say whether they would have been otherwise radicalized without it.


5. They were caught through police work, not through any broad surveillance, and were under surveillance for more than a year.

I wanted to touch briefly on item number three.  Terrorists will always try to bypass existing security systems which is why it is pointless to continuously move the target on what is and what is not legal to take on a plane.

Terrorists hit soft targets, the perpetrators of 9/11 used items that were legal as did the British nuts.  The only way to defeat attacks on airplanes is to undercover the plots before they hatch.  The rest of this nonsense merely makes life difficult for the rest of us while accomplishing nothing in realms of safety.

What Is Going On?

The bill was introduced in early April and has already been passed by a committee (the step in the process where senators usually bottle up controversial bills) and placed on the Senate’s legislative calendar.

But one senator doesn’t like it. And that may be enough to derail it, because he (or she) has put a hold on it. A secret hold. How’s that for irony -- a secret hold on an open-government bill?

How is it that one anonymous prick can put a halt on legislation? Filabusters are bad enough, but now anyone can put a halt to the legislative process merely by being vindictive?

On second thought – how come Coburn, Obama, et al don’t use this clever process to just halt the budget process?

Something is fishy here – can anyone explain it to me?

The Infallible Academic

Why do so many people give automatic deference to people with a couple of letters after their last name?

I don't know if anyone has noticed this, but About.com's Aaron Stanton is in the middle of a back and forth firefight with Dr. Thompson, a Harvard researcher who recently testified before the U.S. Congress about violent video games. She published a study that listed Pac-Man as being 62% violent. Stanton attacked in an article criticizing her research. Then, Joystiq.com contacted Dr. Thompson and got an interview and a response, published her rebuttal, in which she defends the Pac-Man rating and the study. So today, Stanton attempted to tear the study apart, detailing why it's flawed even though Thompson claims otherwise. On one hand we have an established Harvard Phd, who has testified before the U.S. congress, against a game journalist with a bachelors degree in Psychology. Hmmm…

You can find an opinion that spans the entire realm of possibility within academia – heck even within a single institution the size of Harvard. Just because some professor spouts an opinion or publishes a paper doesn’t make it fact. The disdain that many show to people that would dare question someone in the Ivory Tower is scandalous.

People expressing opinions should always – always – be challenged. Academics make mistakes, they suffer confirmation bias and they are frequently just wrong. It is only by questioning conventional wisdom that progress can ever be made. Automatically agreeing with whatever some prof says will only ensure that we maintain the status quo forever. Not a prospect that is remotely appealing to me.