Escrow account

 Bash the Messenger, Environment, Hammurabi-Handedness, Regulation, Rule of law  No Responses »
Jun 152010
 

WSJ headline: “U.S. to Demand BP Fund”

That is an inaccurate headline, of course. It’s the Obama administration that’s asking for it, not the U.S. The U.S. has laws against extortion. A better headline is a small blurb on the same page on which the misleading one appeared: “The White House plans to ask BP for a damage fund.”

If there is such an escrow account, though, who would keep the money for safekeeping and administer it? The Obama administration is not eligible, because its policy of nationalizing any industry within reach creates a conflict of interest.

The British government also has a conflict of interest.

The United Nations? The money would be gone in a day if deposited there.

Here are my three nominees:

  • The government of Ireland. The Irish have no great love for the Brits or for America, but get along reasonably well with both.
  • The government of the Czech Republic. Václav Klaus can be trusted not to be easily intimidated.
  • The government of Georgia. This would help focus more attention on a country that needs it. And Georgia would have great motivation not to mess up.

With liberty for some and regulation for others

 Regulation  No Responses »
Jun 142010
 

It wasn’t so long ago that we were told we had had enough laissez faire and that it was time for more regulation. Now Nancy Pelosi is telling us that we need more laissez faire and less regulation.

At least for some people. Maybe not for everybody.

WSJ article: “Pelosi: Ethics Are Overrated — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is sending private signals that she is willing to support watering down the powers of the Office of Congressional Ethics.“

Cause or create the conditions

 Human rights, Russia  No Responses »
Jun 122010
 

Does this mean the FSB can prevent the murders of people like Alexander Litvenenko and Anna Politkovskaya by locking up government officials who might “cause or create the conditions” for such things to happen?

From KyivPost:

MOSCOW, June 11 (Reuters) – Russia’s parliament on Friday voted to boost the powers of the successor to the Soviet KGB, allowing it to summon people it believes are about to commit a crime and threaten jail for those who disobey its orders….

The bill, which would allow the FSB to issue a legally binding summons to anyone whose actions it considers as “causing or creating the conditions for committing a crime,” was passed in the first of three required readings in the State Duma.

Modeling a Speech

 Education  No Responses »
Jun 122010
 

As a teacher, what words do you use to describe how to indoctrinate students rather than educate them? The task is made more difficult if you’ve received the remnants of a liberal education by which you’ve learned that your job is to educate rather than indoctrinate. So under those circumstances, how do you get students to parrot your ideology?

Teacher Elizabeth Collins found a way. She calls it “modeling a speech.”

Read about it in Best of the Web Today, in an article titled, “Those Who Can’t Teach, Blog“

Obama’s vigilante justice

 Abuse of power  No Responses »
Jun 102010
 

It appears that there is an effort to defend President Obama’s “kick ass” remarks about the BP oil leak by pointing out that it was in response to an interviewer who asked if it wasn’t time to kick some butt.

What I haven’t seen so far is any discussion about how these remarks — both the question and the answer — reveal a deep and dangerous misunderstanding of the proper purpose of government.

It’s not the proper job of the President and Congress to kick ass. It’s the job of the President to enforce the laws and bring violators to justice. If the laws are serving us badly, then it’s time to work to improve the laws and/or the enforcement mechanism.

I suppose some might say the “kick ass” remark is just a way of saying the same thing. But even if it were, which is doubtful given the history of this administration, it’s a bad way to say it became it promotes the idea of vigilante justice, of working outside the law.

We see this bad attitude in newspaper articles that, instead of informing us about regulatory mechanisms being proposed for, say, the banking industry, instead talk about whether or not the new laws are “tough.” But the question of whether they are tough distracts attention from the question of whether they are effective, predictable, and enforceable in a fair, corruption-free manner.

Armanda Galarraga and Joe the Plumber

 Regulation  No Responses »
Jun 052010
 

The cries for the Baseball Commissioner to award Armando Galarraga his perfect game remind me a bit of the outcry about Joe the Plumber: “But he isn’t a licensed plumber.”

Some people get too hung up on the official categories. Joe is a plumber, licensed or not, and Armando Galarraga pitched a perfect game, whether or not it goes into the official record books that way.

Russ Roberts helped me understand by writing the following:

Galarraga threw a perfect game. The blown call wasn’t in the seventh. It was the last out of the game. The replay is incontrovertible. He got the guy. He threw a perfect game. Everybody knows it. The other team knows it. The ump admits it. He threw a perfect game.

In any discussion of perfect games over the next 20 years, Galarraga’s name will be mentioned. So essentially his achievement is a perfect game with an asterisk or an un-asterisk because presumably his name will not be on the list. But I could see that happening.

The other irony is that there have been no-hitters that were preserved by bad scoring that changed a hit to an error. Those were not “really” no hitters but they go into the pantheon of great pitching performances. Galarraga is in the pantheon in everyone’s mind other than the official list and box score of the game.

Massachusetts and Sedition

 Dissent  No Responses »
May 252010
 

News item: “Governor Deval Patrick, even as he decried partisanship in Washington, said today that Republican opposition to President Obama’s agenda has become so obstinate that it ‘is almost at the level of sedition.'”

These Massachusetts politicians must have a thing about sedition. It was during the presidency of one such politician, John Adams, that the Alien and Sedition Acts were enacted — much to his everlasting discredit.

Back in the days when Liberals roamed the land, they would have torn a new one in any politician who disrespected the First Amendment the way Deval Patrick does.

How to explain things

 Bailouts, Health care reform, Words from President Obama  No Responses »
May 182010
 

how-to-tell-your-child

I think of President Obama every time I see this how-to guide for parents: “How to explain to your child that you’re going to sell him.”

According to the English-Russia web site where I first saw it, it’s one of a series of fake book covers designed to ward off kibbitzers. You put your real book inside it. People will leave you alone to read in peace.

Unfortunately, in the case of President Obama it’s no joke. Like when he put pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel to agree to the euro bailout for Greece. I don’t know why he wanted to put his fingerprint on that act of selling people down the river, unless it was his way of writing the contents for the above book.

Here’s a good article explaining who he was helping and who is being sold to pay for it: Greek Myths and the Euro Tragedy by John H. Cochrane in the May 18 WSJ.

And here is one about the health care plan that he said would allow us to keep our existing health plans: No, You Can’t Keep Your Health Plan (by Scott Gottleib in the same issue of the WSJ). It’s like he was explaining to us, “Certainly you can keep walking. We’re going to break your kneecaps, but nobody’s going to stop you from trying.”

Shipping lettuce by rabbit

 Bash the Messenger  1 Response »
May 142010
 

Useful phrase of the day: “This all sounds about as reliable as shipping lettuce by rabbit.”

It’s in an article by Ezra Levant titled, “The CBC’s left-wing bias.” He says the CBC is going to investigate itself to see if it has any left-wing bias, but it isn’t going to reveal the methodology for its study.

We could hire these guys to investigate climategate.

(I’ve never doubted that the CBC was left-wing, but back in the late 80s and early 90s there was a program I used to like that did things differently than I ever heard on NPR. It would investigate topics by conducting intensive interviews on both sides of an issue. I heard a thorough investigation of gun control issues that one would never get on NPR, for example. Alas, I don’t remember the name of that program, and it has been quite a few years since I’ve listened to any CBC at all. Maybe it’s time for us to do some vacation travel in Canada again.)

Lack of unified rules

 Bash the Messenger, Hammurabi-Handedness, Regulation  No Responses »
May 122010
 

Amazing lead paragraph by Kara Scannell and Fawn Johnson at the WSJ. It’s in an article titled, “Schapiro: Web of Rules Aided Fall.”

Regulators haven’t found evidence of a single cause for the May 6 stock-market plunge, but the lack of unified rules among stock exchanges played a role, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro said Tuesday.

There is not a single sentence in the entire article to explain how a “lack of unified rules among stock exchanges” could have played a role. I suppose mere reporters don’t get to ask questions at a congressional hearing, but surely they should have reported on how the congressional committee members let that comment go by without a word of explanation. Or perhaps there was an explanation, in which case Scannel and Johnson should have told us about it.

Why make a big deal out of this? Well, I am skeptical that a lack of unified rules could have caused a lack of stability. It’s just not the way large, complex systems usually work. Usually there is stability in diversity, not in uniformity.

I tend to think of the parallels between economic systems and biological ecosystems. Note how the headline used the word “web.” Webs are usually good for stability. If this is a rare exception, it would be worth knowing about it.

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