Regulation

Paid to stand in line

Feb 282008

Comcast is accused of paying people to stand in line in order to pack the FCC hearings on its traffic management practices. (Network World URL here.)

I don’t wish Comcast well in the issue before the FCC, especially given that they do not tell the truth. They claim to be managing traffic, but what they’re really doing is interrupting certain types of traffic.

I’ve had my own experience with Comcast not telling the truth, claiming that they were blocking my outgoing mail because it had been determined that my computer was spending spam, possibly because of a virus infection, and that I needed to install a fix. But they were speaking with forked tongue. They simply decided to block port 25. There are legitimate grounds for doing that, but a company that takes my money for a service ought to tell the truth about what service it’s providing. (I figured out my own way to work around the problem, but it was especially nasty of Comcast to do this to me on a Saturday morning when I had other activities planned, and when none of their people were available to answer questions about what was going on.)

But back to the issue of packing the hearings with people paid to stand in line.

One commenter says it’s a common practice to pay people to stand in line at hearings. If so, that’s a sad commentary on our system of government regulation. If the way to get public input on a decision-making process is to turn people into unproductive drones who stand for long hours in a queue, the system needs reform. One reform would be a market system in which entrepreneurial competitors are not blocked by regulations from offering competing service. Then we could provide public input by voting with our checkbooks.

The sad thing is the cluelessness of some of the commenters who eloquently denounce the hearing-packing practice. Their solution to this sort of government inefficiency? They want more government, namely a takeover of the telecom system by the government. Yeah, that’ll give people a way to provide efficient input into decision-making processes.

Hillary paperwork

Limits on government power, Regulation, Uncategorized No Responses »

Feb 012008

I’d mock it, too, if I heard Hillary say such a thing. If she really wants to do away with the horrendous paperwork of applying for college student-aid, she needs to get the government out of the business of subsidizing education loans. She can let the markets handle it and keep the paperwork simple, or she can have the government involved and the paperwork complicated. There really is no other method.

If you let the markets take care of it, lenders don’t need all the information that the government does. Yes, they do need to know some things about your finances, in order for you to convince them that they’ll get their money back. But they don’t need to know all the details that the government needs to know to keep cheaters from getting government money. In order for government to be fair and equitable in handing out money, it needs to know all sorts of things about us that are really none of its business.

From New York magazine:

Hillary believes, to the core of her political being, that what changes people’s lives are government programs. Her command of detail about these is prodigious, at times jaw-slackeningly so. And this often leads journalists to underestimate the effectiveness of her laundry-listy rhetorical métier. At her final speech in New Hampshire, I watched a well-known national columnist walk up to Doug Hattaway, one of her strategists, and mock a portion of her speech in which she promised that she’d do away with the horrendous paperwork involved in applying for college student aid. Hattaway simply shrugged and said, “She probably wouldn’t keep saying it if it didn’t get huge applause everywhere she goes.”

Hair of the dog

Regulation No Responses »

Dec 312007

The following is from the end of wikipedia article, “Hair of the Dog.” It perhaps should be read in context. Those who are tired of being told that we need to defer to the experts might find it amusing — especially the part in brackets. Some of the family liked it when I read it to them, and we haven’t even started on the evening festivities yet.

Medical professionals should be consulted regarding the proper treatment for hangovers, alcohol withdrawal, and withdrawal from other drugs. [citation needed]

Honor roll candidate

Regulation No Responses »

Nov 062007

This looks like a good candidate for the Subversive Honor Roll. It’s the Anti-Planner: Dedicated to the sunset of government planning. I learned about him from Bill Steigerwald at Townhall.com

He’s off to a good start when he says this:

I’ve often heard people say, “I’m not against planning, I’m just against bad government planning.” After 30 years of looking at government plans — forest plans, park plans, transportation plans, city plans, state plans, all kinds of plans — I’ve realized all government planning is bad.

Quality vs quantity of regulation

Free markets, Regulation No Responses »

Oct 032007

It was disorienting when I happened across this article a few weeks ago by Justin Fox in Time mag. (I wouldn’t want Time in our house; it was something I saw while making a cup of coffee in the lunchroom at work.)

Talking about the sub-prime loan crisis, he says:

Does this mean we need more regulation? Maybe, maybe not. It does indicate, though, that the mortgage business might be due for a return to its roots.

The disorienting part was that he seems to care what kind of regulation might be needed. Usually you have lefties crying for more regulation, and righties wanting less. It’s frustrating, because what usually matters is the kind of regulation.

Do people want regulation that creates new bureaucracy with the power to play favorites? Do they want regulation that uses market forces to the maximum extent possible? We hardly ever get into those discussions.

That’s not exactly what Fox wants to talk about, but he does seem to keep his head about him. And I think he makes a plausible point about the need to “shift mortgage risk back into the banking industry.” Maybe I’m prejudiced, because I think that too often the God of Almighty Liquidity creates situations where people-to-people interactions vanish, which is what happens when banks freely sell off loans to other companies that have had no relationship with the borrower.

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