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Coyote Blog, Year Two Archives, Volume Two / 1 Coyote Blog: The Second Year Volume 2: April, 2006 to September, 2006 By Warren Meyer 2 / Warren Meyer Copyright © Warren Meyer, 2005 Coyote Blog, Year Two Archives, Volume Two / 3 Table of Contents Forward 5 April, 2006 6 Supreme Court Asleep 8 Immigration and the "Legality" Issue 9 Massachusetts Insurance Fiasco 11 Damages and Double Jeopardy 13 More on Massachusetts Health Insurance 14 My Worst Vendor Guess Who? 16 Limiting Free Speech Unifies Congress 18 The Peak Whale Theory 20 I'll Try Again Why The Trade Deficit is Not a Debt 22 Disturbing Trade News From China 29 May, 2006 33 My Immigration Reform Plan 34 Real Price Collusion Requires the Government 43 If it Passes, I'm Turning Off the Pumps 47 So Why Not Cuba? 54 Reconciling the Skilling Verdicts 63 Price Controls at Work 65 Are People Rational About Gas Prices? 66 The Connection Between Paul Ehrlich and Immigration Opponents 68 An Absurd Demand 71 June, 2006 75 The Obesity Obsession 77 Eminent Domain, But Without the Compensation 78 Statism Bites its Creators 79 July, 2006 85 Thoughts on Detentions 85 State of Arizona Channeling Enron 96 In Case You Thought Anti-Trust Was About Consumers 97 Estate Tax Confusion 98 Guilt or Innocence is Irrelevant, I Guess 103 A Skeptics Primer for "An Inconvenient Truth" 105 World's Largest Banana Republic 118 Answer: Wealth 119 August, 2006 120 Virtues of a Carbon Tax 120 Thoughts on Net Neutrality 121 I Have Government Derangement Syndrome 122 Thanks, China! 124 Katrina was Government Revealed 130 In Case You Thought Anti-Trust Was About Consumers, Part 2 132 Pre-Season College Football Rankings are the Most Important 140 Leaving Poverty in China 140 4 / Warren Meyer More Zero Sum Economics (Sigh) 142 Progressives in Their Own Words 150 Immigration Opponents Depend on Bad Public Schools 152 Free Market Does Not Mean Pro-Business 160 Ignoring a Positive Cancer Test 161 The Skeptical Middle Ground on Warming 162 September, 2006 164 Free Speech, But Only If Its Bilateral 164 Urban Heat Islands 165 Wanted: Honesty of Purpose 167 You Can't Make Decisions for Yourself 168 Circumscribing the "War on Terror" 170 What are People Afraid Of? 173 Coyote's Law and 9/11 177 Get Wal-Mart Out of the Public Trough 179 Arizona Minimum Wage Ballot Initiative 180 Broken Window Fallacy, On Steroids 183 More Anti-Immigration Scare Stats 184 Sanction of the Victim 190 You've Never Had It So Bad 192 Anti-Trust is Anti-Consumer 196 Index to Articles 202 Coyote Blog, Year Two Archives, Volume Two / 5 Forward This book is an archive of my blogging efforts at www.CoyoteBlog.com for the second year of the blog's existence, a time period stretching from April, 2006 to September 2006. A text record of a blog is by its nature very imperfect. The real advantage of blogging, beyond its immediacy and low-cost reach, is the ability to link other online sources to extend or provide backup for a particular article, called a “post”. Throughout this print record, you will see phrases that are underlined like this. In the original electronic version, these were links where readers could click through to view related material on other web sites. I have chosen to leave this underlining in this text version, as an aid to understanding where richer content was available to the original online readership. Another important point of style is that blog posts typically quote heavily from other sources as part of the commentary: Rather than using quotation marks, most quotes are indented and printed in italics, like this. In compiling this archive, I have chosen to remove many of the original posts. Most of these removed posts were short posts whose main purpose was to point readers to other interesting content on the web, and as such are nearly meaningless in a printed version. I have done some cleanup of spelling and grammar, but readers of this printed version should recognize that blogging is a real-time activity and readers generally do not expect publication quality prose. Along these same lines, you will encounter a number of Internet abbreviations, including LOL (laughing out Loud), OMG (Oh My God), and Fisk (to tear apart someone else's argument line by line). Readers online would have been very familiar with these shortcuts. You may also note that a number of the articles have sections at the end marked as “Update”. This is additional information added to the text after it was originally posted, consistent with the dynamic and real-time nature of blogging. Finally, given the sheer volume of material here and the near certainty that few people will be interested enough to plow through it all, I have highlighted some of my favorite posts in the Table of Contents on the previous page. The index at the back contains a full listing of all the articles included in this volume. Warren Meyer “Coyote” January, 2008 6 / Warren Meyer April, 2006 Force over Choice Progressives often wrap themselves up in a lot of libertarian-sounding jargon. But when push comes to shove, progressives are more comfortable with coercion than free association. James Taranto links this piece in his Friday Best of the Web: A longtime singer and guitarist with the Zucchini Brothers and a substitute teaching assistant for Washington-Saratoga-Warren-Hamilton-Essex BOCES [school board], Powell has lived frugally for years. He works about three days a week as a sub, earning about $70 a day, with no benefits. From March to October, he rides his bike 20 miles to work when work is available Part of that survival or so he thought included shopping at Wal-Mart to take advantage of cheaper prices for himself, his partner and her two children. Then his discussions about Wal- Mart with Sandra Carner-Shafran, a teaching assistant at BOCES and a member of the Board of Directors of New York State United Teachers, started churning inside him. . . . "I don't like what Wal-Mart stands for," Powell said, noting the mega-chain's scanty health insurance for staffers. "Because of all those things they can lower the prices." He and his partner agreed to go on food stamps for their family rather than shop at Wal-Mart any longer. Please observe the moral choice he made that is being applauded by those on the left: Rather than get low cost food from Wal-mart, which generally* transacts with its suppliers, employers, and customers through mutual self-interest and the consent of all parties in each transaction, he has decided it is MORE MORAL to get his food expropriated from the American taxpayer without their consent. Lovely. By the way, it is ironic that he is mad that Wal-mart employees accepts jobs with no health benefits when he in fact has made the same choice himself. More on what makes progressives tick here. *The exception being that Wal-Mart does use the force of government via imminent domain to obtain land where the free will of landowners would not cooperate and to get special tax credits from local governments to get area citizenry to subsidize its business. If Mr. Powell were to protest these practices, I would be all for it, but my guess is that he is not protesting government handouts to Walmart by signing up for government handouts for himself. Posted on April 1, 2006 at 09:16 AM Politics Negates Belief One of the advantages of not being a partisan of either the Democrats or Republicans is that I have more flexibility to actually say what I believe, without worrying that something I am saying might actually give Coyote Blog, Year Two Archives, Volume Two / 7 aid and comfort to my political enemies. I have always felt that it is really, really difficult and rare to become actively political without sacrificing consistency in your deeply held beliefs, particularly since both parties represent such an inconsistent hodge-podge of positions. The irony of this has been, at least until the advent of blogging, that I could be smug about maintaining my philosophic virginity but I left myself no avenue to make any impact with my strongly held beliefs. Given this, I was therefore struck by this, from Cathy Young at Reason, writing about Yale's future Taliban student: One striking aspect of this controversy is the reaction from Yale's liberal community. Della Sentilles, a Yale senior, recently wrote a piece for the Yale Herald denouncing such manifestations of rampant misogyny at Yale as the shortage of tenured female professors and poor childcare options. On her blog, a reader asked Sentilles about the presence at Yale of a former spokesman for one of the world's most misogynistic regimes. Her reply: "As a white American feminist, I do not feel comfortable making statements or judgments about other cultures, especially statements that suggest one culture is more sexist and repressive than another. American feminism is often linked to and manipulated by the state in order to further its own imperialist ends." It appears Ms. Sentilles, beyond having a lot of multi-cultural baggage, is terrified that if she actually criticizes Afghanistan in any way, she is somehow giving aid and comfort to the Bush administration, which feminists have declared enemy #1. The politics of US presidential elections, in this case, trump criticizing a regime that treated women worse (by far) than the US has at any time in its history. Which of course is one of the reasons* that women's groups in this country are sliding into irrelevance, putting their support of a broad range of leftish causes above speaking out on what is essentially apartheid-for-women in the Middle East (I say essentially, because women are actually far worse off in much of the Middle East than blacks ever were in South Africa). Whereas a decade ago the left was marching in the street to better the lot of blacks in South Africa, they are strangely mum on women in the Middle East. As a result, I can lament the condition of women in the Middle East, acknowledge that Saddam was a blight on humanity, but still oppose the war in Iraq as not worth the cost (when "cost" is defined broadly enough to include not must money and men but also opportunity cost). I can adopt this position because I am not required to put on the Republican happy face or Democratic America-always-sucks face. * Another reason is that it may be time for women to declare victory. Posted on April 1, 2006 at 10:44 PM More Trouble Than I Thought at GM Today's announcement that GM will sell 51% of their GMAC financing arm really brought home to me how bad things are at GM. I haven't really followed the situation, but I had assumed that GM was facing the same type demographic bomb as the airlines, fat and underfunded pensions and retiree health care benefits promised when times were good and US auto makers didn't face much troubling competition. Here is what I found interesting: GMAC is reported to make about $2.5 - 3 billion a year in profits. This might tend to imply a value of at least $25 to $30 billion, which is confirmed by the fact that GM just sold half for $14 billion. But GM as a whole has a market cap of just under twelve billion. This means that their entire manufacturing business is valued in the market at roughtly -$16 Billion. Yes, negative sixteen 8 / Warren Meyer billion. Another way to look at this is that if instead of selling GMAC yesterday, GM had instead sold all of their automotive manufacturing, brands, designs, etc. to someone for $1, and became a pure financing business, GM shareholders would be richer by $16 billion, the equivilent of raising the current stock price from about $21 to about $49. Posted on April 3, 2006 at 09:05 AM Supreme Court Asleep The Supreme Court refused to review the Padilla case: The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear the appeal of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen held in a military jail for more than three years as an "enemy combatant." The Court, however, declined to dismiss the case as moot, as the Bush Administration had urged. Only three Justices voted to hear the case, according to the order and accompanying opinions. The case was Padilla v. Hanft (05-533). The decision was a victory for the Bush Administration in one significant sense: by not finding the case to be moot, the Court leaves intact a sweeping Fourth Circuit Court decision upholding the president's wartime power to seize an American inside the U.S. and detain him or her as a terrorist enemy, without charges and for an extended period without a lawyer. The Court, of course, took no position on whether that was the right result, since it denied review. The Second Circuit Court, at an earlier stage of Padilla's own case, had ruled just the opposite of the Fourth Circuit, denying the president's power to seize him in the U.S. and hold him. That ruling, though, no longer stands as a precedent, since the Supreme Court earlier shifted Padilla's case from the Second to the Fourth Circuit. I don't even pretend to understand all the procedural stuff, but I find it amazing that the effective suspension of habeas corpus, particularly when the "war" and "enemy" that is used as its justification is so amorphous and open-ended, isn't something the Supreme Court would like to sink its teeth into. Apparently, the Justices were reluctant to address the case since it has now been made "hypothetical" by the transfer of status of Padilla from enemy combatant held incommunicado indefinitely to a more mainstream justice track. However, this transfer occurred, as the appeals court pointed out angrily, in a transparent effort by the Bush administration to avoid judicial review of indefinite detentions. Which raises the possibility that the administration could hold hundreds of people in such detention, systematically changing the status of any individual whose case comes for review, thereby avoiding review of the program in total. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, "Nothing prevents the Executive from returning to the road it earlier constructed and defended." One wonders by this logic if the segregationist south could have indefinitely postponed Supreme Court review via Brown vs. Board of Education just by letting individuals like Linda Brown individually into white schools whenever their cases got to the Supreme Court. And still I ask, as I did here, where the hell is Congress? I am sorry the Supreme Court failed to review this but the Constitution created this group called the legislative branch that is supposed to have the power to change the law. If law is unclear here, they could make it clear. Posted on April 4, 2006 at 08:44 AM Coyote Blog, Year Two Archives, Volume Two / 9 Immigration and the "Legality" Issue I know some may be bored with my immigration posts, so if you are, that's cool, you can ignore the rest. I have done something of late I normally don't do: I have tuned into conservative talk radio for bits and pieces of time over the last several days to get the gist of their arguments to limit immigration. The main arguments I have heard are: 1. Illegal immigrants are breaking the law 2. We should not reward law-breaking with amnesty. We need to round these folks up that are breaking the law and teach them a lesson. Or put them in concentration camps if that were logistically feasible 3. We don't like first generation Mexican immigrants carrying the Mexican flag in parades. (though we love it when 4th generation Irish carry Irish flags in parades) A recent commenter on my post defending open immigration, which is superseded by this pro- immigration post I like better, had this related insight: 1. YOUARE ILLEGAL 2. YOU ARE ILLEGAL 3. YOU ARE ILLEGAL 4. YOU ARE ILLEGAL 5. YOU ARE ILLEGAL 6-10000000 YOU ARE ILLEGAL DO I NEED TO WRITE THIS IN SPANISH SO THAT THE ILLEGALS CAN UNDERSTAND. IF YOU CAN READ THIS THEN YOU DID PASS THE BASIC ENGLISH TEST THAT IS RREQUIRED OF ALL LEAGAL MIGRANTS !!! OH, BTW, I HAVE THE RIGHT TO SAY THIS, BECAUSE I AM LEGAL!! It sure is comforting that us "leagal migrants" have to pass a basic English test, or we might come off as idiots when we post comments online. But you get the gist. My first thought is that this is certainly a circular argument. To answer my premise that "immigration should be legal for everyone" with the statement that "it is illegal" certainly seems to miss the point (it kind of reminds me of the king of swamp castle giving instructions to his guards in Monty Python and the Holy Grail) The marginally more sophisticated statement that "it is illegal and making it legal would only reward lawbreakers" would seem to preclude any future relaxation of any government regulation. Many people writing on this topic today lapse into pragmatic arguments ala "well, how would we pick the lettuce without them?" Frequent readers of this site will notice I seldom if ever resort to this type argument (except perhaps when I argued that immigration might be a solution to the demographic bomb in medicare and social security). My argument is simpler but I hear it discussed much less frequently: By what right are these folks "illegal"? What does it mean to be living in this country? Well, immigrants have to live somewhere, which presupposes they rent or buy living space from me or one of my neighbors. Does the government have the right to tell me who I can and can't transact with? Most conservatives would (rightly) say "no," except what they really seem to mean is "no, as long as that person you are leasing a room to was born within 10 / Warren Meyer some arbitrary lines on the map. The same argument goes for immigrants contracting their labor (ie getting a job). Normally, most conservatives would (rightly again) say that the government can't tell you who you can and can't hire. And by the way, note exactly what is being criminalized here - the illegal activity these folks are guilty of is making a life for their family and looking for work. Do you really want to go down the path of making these activities illegal? Or check out the comment again above. She/he implies that immigrants without the proper government papers don't even have speech rights, rights that even convicted felons have in this country. By the way, I understand that voting and welfare type handouts complicate this and can't be given day 1 to everyone who crosses the border I dealt in particular with the issue of New Deal social services killing immigration here. Our rights to association and commerce and free movement and speech flow from our humanity, not from the government. As I wrote before: Like the founders of this country, I believe that our individual rights exist by the very fact of our existance as thinking human beings, and that these rights are not the gift of kings or congressmen. Rights do not flow to us from government, but in fact governments are formed by men as an artificial construct to help us protect those rights, and well-constructed governments, like ours, are carefully limited in their powers to avoid stifling the rights we have inherently as human beings. Do you see where this is going? The individual rights we hold dear are our rights as human beings, NOT as citizens. They flow from our very existence, not from our government. As human beings, we have the right to assemble with whomever we want and to speak our minds. We have the right to live free of force or physical coercion from other men. We have the right to make mutually beneficial arrangements with other men, arrangements that might involve exchanging goods, purchasing shelter, or paying another man an agreed upon rate for his work. We have these rights and more in nature, and have therefore chosen to form governments not to be the source of these rights (for they already existed in advance of governments) but to provide protection of these rights against other men who might try to violate these rights through force or fraud. These rights of speech and assembly and commerce and property shouldn't, therefore, be contingent on "citizenship". I should be able, equally, to contract for service from David in New Jersey or Lars in Sweden. David or Lars, who are equally human beings, have the equal right to buy my property, if we can agree to terms. If he wants to get away from cold winters in Sweden, Lars can contract with a private airline to fly here, contract with another person to rent an apartment or buy housing, contract with a third person to provide his services in exchange for wages. But Lars can't do all these things today, and is excluded from these transactions just because he was born over some geographic line? To say that Lars or any other "foreign" resident has less of a right to engage in these decisions, behaviors, and transactions than a person born in the US is to imply that the US government is somehow the source of the right to pursue these activities, WHICH IT IS NOT. Disclosure: A number of my great-grandparents were immigrants from Germany. When they came over, most were poor, uneducated, unskilled and could not speak English. Several never learned to speak English. Many came over and initially took agricultural jobs and other low-skilled work. Because the new [...]... identity, but whoever you are you're welcome to guest blog here any time Update: About a year ago, my family of four was quoted about $650 a month for the type of full (not Coyote Blog, Year Two Archives, Volume Two / 15 catastrophic) medical insurance that the state of Mass is requiring This is about $8000 a year This strikes me as by far the most expensive item that any US government has required... 2006 at 02:50 PM Coyote Blog, Year Two Archives, Volume Two / 33 May, 2006 Office Move Complete Wow, was that a hassle I just finished moving my corporate office Hopefully, now that everything is hooked up again, blogging can resume Update: And per the comment, yes I did throw a bunch away, but it is still staggering how much waste paper we have to keep for the government for 3 to 5 to 7 years For example,.. .Coyote Blog, Year Two Archives, Volume Two / 11 country was intimidating to them, they tended to gather together in heavily German neighborhoods and small towns Now, of course, this description makes them totally different... which protects it by allowing no other competitive product to be sold in the state Give up? Well, most of you have probably guessed that this vendor is the government! Or specifically, Coyote Blog, Year Two Archives, Volume Two / 17 the Colorado Department of Wildlife and the specific product discussed is fishing licenses That is why this particular vendor can get away with practices that no company that... of speech came just as the GOP's conservative base is coming to the conclusion that House Republicans are not worth working for in October or venturing out to vote for in November Coyote Blog, Year Two Archives, Volume Two / 19 The "problem" Republicans addressed is that in 2004 Democrats were more successful than Republicans in using so-called 527 organizations advocacy groups named after the tax... of course, that figure is impossible - the farmland of this country couldn't possibly support even half this number But it is interesting to consider the environmental consequences Coyote Blog, Year Two Archives, Volume Two / 21 Take the issue of transportation Currently there are over 11 million horses in this country, the feeding and care of which constitute a significant part of our economy A population... really sloppy media people who have no idea what they are talking about (unfortunately, there are a lot of these) And a deficit is not a debt, though it can sometimes create a debt Coyote Blog, Year Two Archives, Volume Two / 23 I try to be very respectful of my readers I never delete a comment, unless it is spam/bot stuff or in a few cases where commenters have asked me to So it is only with the deepest... lot of the US dollars the Chinese find themselves with is that these dollars get invested in US investment vehicles, from real estate to government bonds to private equities There are Coyote Blog, Year Two Archives, Volume Two / 25 several points that need to be made here: a Just Because Chinese invest in US Government Bonds does not make them or the balance of trade responsible for this debt As I intimated... or war production industries I will still stick by my core point that investment in the US by Asian nationals is not treated the same as investment by European or Canadian nationals Coyote Blog, Year Two Archives, Volume Two / 27 I have also gotten a number of emails and comments on the differences between various trade and current account deficit indicators I tried to avoid getting into all that, assuming,... in real terms we are far below the peak cost of gasoline Using this and this MPG data (for passenger cars) and the inflation adjusted gas prices here, I got this chart (1979 dollars) Coyote Blog, Year Two Archives, Volume Two / 29 By the way, just so you know my personal incentives, there are very few people out there who run a business whose fortunes are more sensitive to gas prices than my recreation . Coyote Blog, Year Two Archives, Volume Two / 1 Coyote Blog: The Second Year Volume 2: April, 2006 to September, 2006 By. Articles 202 Coyote Blog, Year Two Archives, Volume Two / 5 Forward This book is an archive of my blogging efforts at www.CoyoteBlog.com for the second year of