White-Washing From Up High

Cross-Posted from the Examiner.

Retiree Former President Bill William J. Clinton writes in The Atlantic that were we to paint the roofs of our houses white, the energy savings would more than pay for the cost of hiring young delinquents unemployed kids to do the work. The City of New York is already paying kids to do this. Never mind the fact that they can’t find work because minimum wage laws make it illegal to do so. This isn’t just a solution to a problem made by a different program; this is “the single best idea to jumpstart job creation.”

But it continues! “Every black roof in New York should be white; every roof in Chicago should be white; every roof in Little Rock should be white. Every flat tar-surface roof anywhere!” William J. cannot contain his excitement.

Lest you think that the fun ends there, it turns out that simple white paint might absorb as much energy as black. Perhaps it’s best not to take the advice of (ex) government officials in the area of cost savings.

Government Math: Non-Budgetary Edition

We all know that the governments often ignore reality but they have also been known not only to oppose known mathematical facts, but also actively legislate against them, as illustrated by Indiana trying to change the value of pi to 3.2.

It starts with a Mr Edward Goodwin trying to find a square with the exact same area as a circle. Despite being proved impossible years before, Mr. Goodwin constructed a falsified proof, had it published (showing that journals, even then, were suspect in their selection), and then copyrighted it. While he wanted to extract royalties from everyone using his formula, he offered to let the state of Indiana use it for free (for educational purposes), but only if they officially recognize his impossible method as truth.

Read the rest of the story here. The best part is when it gets unanimously passed by the Indiana House.

What's more scary, the fact that 67 representatives thought they had the power to redefine mathematics, or the fact that they almost succeeded?

Budget Battle 2010: Or, Why I’m Not Sorry for Unions

Cross posted from Examiner.com

Over the last few months, anyone with a political inclination has been handed a rifle and filed into their respective trenches. We’ve passed talking about the issue a long, long time ago and now we’re left with the most violent of bloodless politics. While everyone talks about “the budget”, it’s not the budget that started the war: entrenched special interest did.

Budget cutting will always step on toes, but it wasn’t until the reforms started to outlaw public-sector unions that the hornets’ nest was truly stirred. That should be the first hint as to what lies at the heart of this conflict.

As far as special interests are concerned, unions are ten-ton gorillas, public unions even more so. Membership in Wisconsin is mandatory and so is the paying of dues. These dues are used to bend the political machine in their favor. Overtime pay is a great example of this. Instead of hiring more people or simply scheduling their employees properly, state institutions (especially prisons) will regularly shell out heavily for overtime pay. In 2010, overtime pay in the state reached $52.8 million. Lists are regularly published of employees who make over twice their base annual salary in overtime pay alone; simple guards and nurses making six-figure incomes. This is fiscal irresponsibility that can only be found in the public sector. This is a great reason why I’m not very broken up about the loss of collective bargaining rights for public employees.

The extreme backlash provoked by the disfranchisement of privlaged is exactly what Mancur Olson described in “The Rise and Decline of Nations”. Olson talks about how democracies slowly decline over time as they become more encrusted with special interest draining wealth and energy from taxpayers for their own personal benefit. As time goes on, these interests become so deeply rooted in the nation that it becomes impossible to root them out. Even if the reforms don’t stick over time, picking a fight with the public unions will be the last political act of Governor Walker. It’s the kind of political despair that only a student of Public Choice theory can truly appreciate.

Unions may be onerous leaches on the democratic political system, but Ross Kenyon writes that the issue of collective bargaining is more ambiguous then it seems. While the balance of power between the state and public unions may be a bit off, outlawing the unions overnight shifts the balance of power dangerously in the opposite direction.

There certainly are larger budgetary issues at stake (remember this is about the budget?) and there is no guarantee that the state won’t be heavy-handed towards its employees, but I find it hard to muster pity for their loss. These changes mostly affect workers in health and detention fields, both of which could do with a large dose of market competition. Instead of debating the proper way to regulate state monopolies, why don’t we question their existence in the first place?

Protectionism the Magic Dragon

Schools need to change. No one who is sufficiently aware of the situation should feel content with the state of education in America. The Organization for Economics Cooperation and Development ranks US students 14^th in the world, (just behind Denmark, and far behind Estonia), despite spending the 4^th most per student. The problem obviously is not a lack of funds. Yet money is very close to the root of this evil.

The trail of money will often lead to the heart of any issue. Public schools receive money whether parents choose to send their children there or not. Even people without children must pay for schools. Here lies the diseased heart of the education system. The same market forces that provide us an unprecedented bounty of shelter, food, and clothing have been replaced with a political bureaucracy. The actual consumers of education (parents and their children) are deemed unfit to vote with their dollars and choose an education that suits them. Thus, the monopoly monster continues to live, and the only standards it must meet are policies and regulations filtered through the bowels of the political system and greased by the dollars of lobbyists.

The ideal solution would be to stop the flow of governmental money to the education sector and destroy this machine, but a century of entrenched bureaucracy, special interest, and a public groomed into dependency will not allow it. Instead, a more tactical approach must be made if American education is to be saved from itself. However, it doesn’t require much cunning, or even creativity; the most practical solutions have already been tested and proved.

Voucher programs and charter schools have existed since the 1980’s. Today, thirty years worth of data from programs across the nation have shown far lower costs and better scores. Yet, when they are sporadically implemented, an onslaught of opposition swarms to kill it. It is the dragon Protectionism, rising again to steal a little from the many to give much to the few. Instead of fairly competing for the dollars of parents, the education industry shields itself using the power of law. Education unions donate around $5.4 million dollars to political candidates (95% of them Democrats, above average for labor unions). These unions exert an enormous effort to protect themselves from the horrors of being forced to please customers instead of buying senators. 

Opponents paint these solutions as “giving up on public education”. This emotional argument tries to make the odd assertion that public education is worth saving, and implies that there exists only an ignorant wilderness outside of “No Child Left Behind” and other government programs. Should we really be surprised to find that the mechanism that shaped our growth and development as children should have also trained us to revere it well into our adulthood? Consider this nostalgia another reason that this machine should be dismantled, piece by piece.

Competition, that four-letter word, is the antidote to bring down this monster monopoly. The tools to inject it, vouchers and charter schools, have been proving themselves for three decades now. However, anyone who wishes to carry this torch into the darkness must face the servants of Protectionism, and they are well trained in the cruel art of political violence.

Cheeseheads Has Two Meanings

There's a huge throw-down in Wisconsin lately. As I once called this arctic wasteland my home, I try to check in every now and then and see if violent uprisings have taken over the land (my beautiful fiancée lives there, so these things are important). Well, it turns out that something like that happened just this week.

Wisconsin, like every other state, is running out of money. Thus, the governer, Scott Walker, decided to change (among other things), the health care and pension package for state employees. As per the war-time reporter at WTMJ:

Walker's plan would make workers pay half the costs of their pensions and at least 12.6 percent of their health care premiums. State employees' costs would go up by an average of 8 percent. The changes would save the state $30 million by June 30 and $300 million over the next two years to address a $3.6 billion budget shortfall.

Unions could still represent workers, but could not seek pay increases above the Consumer Price Index unless approved by a public referendum. Unions also could not force employees to pay dues and would have to hold annual votes to stay organized. Local police, firefighters and state troopers would retain their collective bargaining rights.

So, the pensions and premiums will increase, and they can't ask to increase wages above inflation. The last part seems sensable, but surely the premium increases are outrageous, right? Not really.

"It's not asking a lot, it's still about half of what private sector pensions do and health care packages do. So he's [the Governor is] basically saying, I want you public workers to pay half of what our private sector counterparts and he's getting riots."

So it all boils down to a privileged special interest whining because they'll have to pay half the rate for health insurance as normal people. A travesty, to be sure. *Yawn*, wake me up when they decide to refill the snack machine only one a month.

The best part are the demonstrations by the teachers union. Throwing the teacher unions out in from of the cameras is like threatening to drown a box of kittens. The image of a bunch of middle-aged women tending for sweet children evokes a mother-child image. Why, don't cut our pay, think of the children! If they cared about the children, they wouldn't work so hard to defend a system that pretty much does the opposite of educate. Those school teachers protesting at the capital are essentially like the autoworkers who made the Ford Festiva acting all hot and bothered about their pay when they make a product nobody wants to buy. Anyways, they look cute on camera and they get people thinking about the children, not the whiny antics of the other state unions.

But it doesn't stop there! For the price of one, you get two crazy events! While the republicans have enough votes to pass the bill, they legally can't even vote on it unless at least one democrat is present, and they all fled the state. Walker has be threatening to use the national guard to hunt them down and drag them back from their little stunt.

Wisconsin, you always make me laugh...

United Together for Unfair Wages

Labor unions serve no beneficial social purpose today. They were initially founded almost a century ago to battle low wages and poor working conditions. The reason that these are not big issues today has nothing to do with unions, and everything to do with more jobs to pick from. As long as you’re not working at a sweatshop with armed guards, you’re always free to quit. That’s not to say there won’t be costs involved, but if you ever find yourself in a Upton Sinclare-esque situation where you work 12 hours a day under life-threatening conditions and your boss rapes your wife while you’re gone, you don’t need to start a Marxist revolt to change.

The fact is that unions are nothing but a special interest now, and a huge industry as well. Through dues, unions rake in millions of dollars a year, and for what? As much as they may talk about it, the last thing unions want are fair wages. They exist to leverage huge amounts of power (including truly massive political donations) to insure that their members receive more wages and benefits then they could ever receive by negotiating in an open market.

The best way we can know the true value of something is by seeing what the market will pay for it. This is how we figure out the wages of everyone from butchers, checkout clerks, to football players. Yet, somehow we decided the government has to decide the worth of teachers and plumbers.  

It's not heartless to ask union workers to compete for wages like everyone else: it's common sense. If the wages remain too low to satisfy the workers, then they should change jobs. Steel workers in America have been suffering for a long time because American steel is manufactured more inefficient then and costs more then other steel. This should be a sign that our resources (either labor or otherwise) would be more efficient in another sector. These sectoral shifts are common and happen every few decades. To prop them up would be as foolish as subsidizing the failing buggy whip industry so it can compete against Ford and his new contraptions.  When unions press for more and more, the only result is a drain away from more productive sectors of the economy. 

Not From The Onion: Sarah Palin Seeks to Trademark Her Name

Palin (and her white-trash daughter) have gone straight to B-list celebrity status by attempting to trademark their names. After quiting her day job mid-term, this is the loudest way to announce that she's just a wannabe "entertainment" figure, and not an actual politician.

The best part might be that she was denied because she didn't bother to sign the documents.

This latest durp is hot on the heels of last weeks herp that Bristol was scheduled to speak to Washington University students about abstinence, a topic she's no doubt well acquainted with."It had been reported that she would receive between $15,000 and $30,000 to speak". Sanity ensued, and the speech was canceled.

The Police: Now With More Sting

Governmental power expands into many areas. Whether it's growing plants, building houses, or eating food , The Man is always trying to get all up in your business, as the youth say. But of all these areas, I fear the expansion of police powers the most. While I happen to enjoy the law and order provided by police and court systems, there's a line between keeper-of-the-peace and SS stormtroopers: a line that is regularly crossed by jack-booted SWAT teams at 5 in the morning.

Conspiracy paranoids and Alex Jones have pretty much turned The Rise of the Police State into an elvis-in-a-UFO-style joke. They've been predicting for decades a fascist take-over of the country, and every single example of abuse is a rumble of thunder from the coming fascist storm. Lets be perfectly clear: that's as crazy as your aunt Fran, who thinks that someone's been trying to poison her for decades. The only problem is there are far more rumbles of thunder then you'd think. Here's some examples. 

1. Local police in Michigan raid a completely legal and licensed marijuana dispensary. They don't arrest or press charges on anyone, but instead they lift all the cash in the place (and on the people). 
2. Film a cop, especially a cop abusing the law, and you get the smack down. Time and time again. They are like the Amish, in that they fear the thieft of their souls if they are filmed, but they lack their simple brethren's compassion, gentleness, and honesty. Legally, they like to charge filming a police officer as wiretapping, which is a felony. I guess the meaning of "wiretapping" has changed since I last checked...
3. A camera in an interrogation room happened to miss the part when a woman arrested for  DUI happened to beat herself savagely as she fell down. Also, she happens to be in a pool of ketchup. That's their story, and their sticking to it.
4. People chilling out, getting stoned are such a threat to society that they require swift and violent responses, and if we happen to break a few eggs, so be it.“They pulled me outside in the freezing cold in my underwear, manhandle my wife, point a gun at my daughter and they won’t even tell me what they are doing in my house,” said McKay. “It was terrifying and humiliating beyond belief.” Botched paramilitary drug raids are far, far more common then you'd think. Here's a map of lost reported cases across the nation. It's a trend of policy, not just a few mistakes.
5. Dogs. Policemen hate dogs almost as much as the postman, only they're packing.  Bust into an elderly couple's home at night decked out in masks and guns and their dog does it's job by barking at you? Go ahead and put one right between it's cute puppy dog eyes. Now, toss them out of bed and slap cuffs on them. Turns out that Beatrix and Harold don't get high for fun? Oh, our bad. If you'll lucky, they might get a check to fix the door you broke down. Too bad the courts have ruled that pet dogs have no monitory value, even if they happen to be pure breeds owned by the mayor. Sometimes, they like to shoot dogs even if they're on an entirely unrelated case and just happen to be in the neighborhood. 
6. Do you have an ID from a country on our hate-list? We'll scoop you up and arrest you because you didn't stand in line long enough (immigration link). Those cuffs will never come off your filthy wrists until you get out of 'merica, even if you happen to go into labor.
7. If the police even suspect you of violating drug laws, all your property is up for grabs. As of 2008, 3.1 billion dollars where taken this way, and only 20% of times involved an actual prosecution. The best part about this is that it's completely legal. Even if the police admit, in writing, that you did nothing wrong. The best example of this is when a college student was driving around with a lot of cash to give to his aunt for a car. When he gets pulled for a traffic violation, the cops seize the cash, all $17,500 of it. Instead of being charged with a crime, it became his job to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it wasn't drug money. While this looks like "burden of proof ju-jitsu",  it's more "you can't stop us sumo".

Cats only require a tactical petting

I doubt that these are signs of a movement to overthrow america and go all ruby-ridge on your survivalist hide-outs, but they are troubling nonetheless. The fact that this power exists, and that its abuses are more then just isolated incidents. We're not talking about unfair subsidies, or burdening taxes; we're talking about lives being violently ruined. Innocent until proven guilty only exists on Perry Mason. If they suspect you did something, they'll treat you like terrorist. Unless you're in an airport, in which case they ALWAYS treat you like a terrorist.

Most of these cases involve drugs. This is one of the strongest reasons I support legalization (or at least decriminalization) of marijuana. General principles of prohibition aside, I see far more violent crime coming from enforcement then from the drug itself. Not to mention that the black market for drugs funds entire armies  in south america. Lets make this clear: I am personally against drug use, but on the whole, I will gladly trade off a few more lazy stoners with the munchies then have these violent acts committed on completely innocent people.

You might notice that there are no stories here about from Maracopa county. There are so many bizarre stories stories that come out of that bandit stronghold that I'll count is as an outlier, as a mercy to the rest of the country. 

Glenn Beck's Rally and the Emptiness of Moralist Religion

The polarizing Glenn Beck recently hosted his Restoring Honor rally on the steps of the Lincoln memorial. Predictably, this has stirred the voices (but not THOSE voices, thankfully). It’s the range of the voices, not their roaring volume, which fascinates.

The Washington Post wrote a great summery of the event. While in many ways it seems to represent the republican/tea-party ideals, it wasn’t a political rally, at least not a normal one. In short, the call was for the nation as a whole to bring more religion in the "public square" and to reclaim it’s previous greatness. Reason Magazine has a great view from the perspective of those in the crowd.

First on the scene, we have the ever-virulent Christopher Hitchens, who decried the entire event as a white-man’s pity party. Hitchens saw the Restoring Honor rally as the majority class throwing a temper tantrum because they’re not enough of a majority. This class struggle, he says, is also at the heart of the mosque ordeal, the 14^th amendment, and most of Arizona.

Where he actually becomes interesting is when he calls Christianity anything but an endangered religion (you can almost hear the sign of resignation). There’s a yes-and-no answer about this. What was once termed “the culture wars” has become nothing but lot of angry people hoisting state-enforced moralism. Any semblance of a war vanished when everyone else got bored and walked away. Most of the momentum in Christianity was towards this battle, and when the fight collapsed, the movement slammed against the ground and left everyone dazed and confused about what to do. I think they still are.

Rob Harrison’s commentary sees through the fog of class and cultural warfare. He claims that Beck’s call for a religious nation is actually a call for more empty moralism. Those crying to Restore Honor would be perfectly happy if people behaved well, followed the rules, and never breathed a word of Christ. Harrison quotes Michel Horton:

Over a half-century ago, Donald Grey Barnhouse, pastor of Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church, gave his CBS radio audience a different picture of what it would look like if Satan took control of a town in America. He said that all of the bars and pool halls would be closed, pornography banished, pristine streets and sidewalks would be occupied by tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The kids would answer “Yes, sir,” “No, ma’am,” and the churches would be full on Sunday . . . where Christ is not preached.

This is what the larger institutions of Christianity are turning into. They have cut a powerful Being into a small, weak god who so desperately needs their help to fix all the problems of the world. Somehow, the Holy Spirit simply has no power unless they, along with the republican party, change peoples minds.

This absolutely not what the nation needs. Harrison states my thoughts exactly:

The only kind of revival I want to see is one that can only be created by the Holy Spirit, who lives and breathes to talk about Jesus and the Father: the revival of the injudicious and incendiary proclamation of the radical gospel of grace, of the infinite love and unfathomable grace of God in Jesus Christ, capturing the hearts and minds of the people of God. That kind of revival—yes!—will have profound political and social consequences, should it come; but it will never be about those consequences, never be for those consequences. It won’t be about America, about restoring our honor or rebuilding our character. It will only ever be about and for glorifying and praising and giving thanks to God the Father for his Son Jesus Christ, who is ours by the work of his Holy Spirit. It will be for God and God alone.

The New Imperial Cult

The President of the United States bears the ever-increasing weight of responsibility, a weight that only grows only more massive as time rolls on. Now, more than ever, we place our demands and desires before the door of the oval office.

Obama’s intercessions in the Gulf oil-spill were only necessary because the people clamored for action. While we already have a legal system in place to deal with liability, Obama strong-armed BP into creating an alternative one, not primarily because it would be better, but because we demand action.

From the bank bailouts to the economic stimulus package, we have demonstrated that we prefer actions to results. We demand our country be like a Michael Bay movie; flash and explosions without purpose or motivation. We don’t care what happens, as long as it does, and fast. We beg for a figure with the splendor of a modern celebrity and the power of an ancient deity. In other times, we would have constructed a temple; today we’ll just give him a star in Hollywood.

With the possible exception of the Civil War, there have never been more crises then when America was founded. Shoe-horned onto a continent surrounded by entrenched empires on one side and hostile natives on the other, the leaders at the time had far more to be concerned about then we today every have. Yet, instead of pounding a bully pulpit and demanding more authority, they deliberately limited it.

This worship hardly started with Obama, but he wears it best. We have come a long way from the unassuming chief magistrate the framers had in mind. Today, voters are whipped into frenzy, one mock crisis at a time. Bill Clinton exemplified this when he said “we must also protect our children by standing firm in our determination to ban the advertising and marketing of cigarettes that endanger their lives”. Thankfully, the dire consequences of cigarette advertising have been narrowly averted, and society was made safe again.

We ask for jobs, but all we get is inflation. We ask for protection, eventually, we realize that the president is not a deity. Instead of realizing our blasphemy, we decide that we simply chose the wrong one, and start our search for god-king anew. Our latest pick has described his ascension as the moment the “oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”.

George Washington might have rejected kingship, but today we’ll elect no man who is not willing to wear the crown.