Lively Debate

Yesterday was the 400th anniversary of Guy Fawkes' "gunpowder plot" to blow up the King and House of Lords in 1605. 400 years and they still remember today. If I have any British readers here (I know I do on my other blog), I'd love to hear about anything special they did for the occasion. I wonder if the 9/11 terrorist attacks will be another "day of infamy" that Americans will remember 400 years later?

I have never understood protectionist Republicans. How can you be against taxes but for tariffs? How can you oppose government interference, but support the government deciding which jobs are more worthwhile. How can you dislike government handouts, but support corporate welfare?

Thats what protectionism is. The government deciding that some jobs are more worthwhile than others and redistributing wealth to those special interest groups at the expense of others. Worst of all, protectionism is regressive. It places proportionately more of a burden on those with lower incomes.

There are two angles to fight poverty. One is to concentrate on the income side. While nobody is overtly anti-job, I think there are ways of increasing personal income and ways of creating jobs that most Republicans would dislike such as direct subsidies and make work jobs. A minimum wage falls into the misguided, but well-meaning category. Protectionism does too.

A second angle to fight poverty is to increase buying power by decreasing prices. What does it mean to be poor if you have a place to live, enough to eat and have cable tv? Cheap prices are the free trader's welfare system.

Sugar is the poster child for free trade issues. One famous case study is the move of the lifesavers plant from Michigan to Canada. Here are some of the factors involved in the decision to move from a progressive viewpoint:

Boyd said a recent survey by his firm indicates Life Savers will pay nonunion workers in Mount Royal about $12.50 an hour--$3 less than their counterparts in Holland. With the Canadian government picking up the tab for health coverage, the savings come to about $6.5 million a year.

"Labor costs dominate the equation," Boyd said. "They account for at least 70% of all operating costs. . . . That's the real driver in the site selection process."

Workers and city officials remain convinced that the culprit is sugar. They blame the closing on a combination of federal tariffs, trade quotas and loans that benefit U.S. sugar beet and sugar cane farmers by keeping the price of domestic bulk sugar at 21 cents a pound, compared to 6 cents on the international market. That makes a big difference to Life Savers, which uses 113 tons of sugar a day. Each Life Savers candy is 95% sugar.

Last year, Brachs candy cited high domestic sugar prices in announcing that it would close its 77-year-old west Chicago plant and move 1,100 jobs overseas, one of several candy-makers to do so. Kraft isn't saying how much it will save on the crucial ingredient. State and local officials estimate it will be $6 million a year.

Sugar prices may not be the only factor in this decision, but one thing remains clear. American consumers are over paying for sugar. Since a person can only consume so much sugar in a year (the 2001 average was 64 lbs of sugar and 81 pounds of corn sweeteners), this represents a regressive redistribution of wealth. The poor consumers of the US, of which there are many, are directly subsidizing the US sugar industry, of which there are few. Do you know anyone who works in the sugar industry? Do you know anyone who does NOT consume sugar?

Another example are the steel industry protections that Bush enacted in the middle of his last term in order to score points in politically valuable Pennsylvania. The result? A huge loss of manufacturing jobs further down the value chain in states like Ohio, which became the swing state in the election. It turns out that there are far more workers in the industries that use steel than in the industry that makes it.

Here is the thing, as consumers, we are all downstream in the "value chain." Protectionism harms the economy as a whole in order to favor special interest groups with political muscle.

That doesn't sound very Republican to me.

This weeks Carnival of the Capitalists is out. The five things I want you to read from this edition are:

• Let's Tax These Bubble-Driven Windfall Profits talks about an oil bubble.
• Regulation Begets Regulation tackles gas price regulation as well. popular subject these days with the capitalists.
• Improving Access to Advanced Degrees suggests subsidizing education rather than tourism as the path to economic growth.
• Sexist swedes reveals how regulation intended to help women in the workplace has unintended consequences.
• How the Internet Helps Pricing Efficiencies talks the internet and the used book market.

Enjoy.

My last treatment of Crime in Britian has proven surprisingly popular with google. That post dealt with the consequences of banning guns.

Its not uncommon to hear the slippery slope argument against banning guns. Whats next? Banning knives?

Well, today, I ran across this recommendation to ban kitchen knives in Britian to reduce stabbings. Yikes! Where does the slippery slope lead after this?

"Stay away from my girl, or I swear I'll fetch the comfy chair!"

I've been out of town for a while, so this weeks Carnival linkage is way late. This weeks selections from the Carnival of the Capitalists takes on the theme of wasteful government spending.

• Bush should sign the highway bill looks at the benefits of the US highway system and suggests that this years highway bill would pay for itself in increased commerce and efficiency. The problem is that the highway bill doesn't necessarily only apply to highways. Instead, this bill seems to contain severe pork. (See this analysis)
• Until reading this post, I had no idea that the court had declared these kinds of tax incentives unconstitutional. Good for the court. Bribing businesses to relocate is not only wasteful of public funds, but unfair to the businesses that don't participate.
• And finally, Corporate Welfare and climate change. Innovation, not regulation is required for any realistically sustainable environmental effort.

No Federalism on the Right highlights an interesting issue:

For decades, liberals scoffed at federalist arguments that the people of Wisconsin or Wyoming understood their own needs better than a distant Congress. They brought more and more power to Washington, over-riding state legislatures and imposing mandates on every nook and cranny of governance.

Now those chickens have come home to roost. Republicans run Washington, and they're using the federal power that liberals built in ways that liberals never envisioned.

I think there is definitely a long term re-alignment of power in the US. Perhaps issues such as isolationism, fiscal responsibility and states rights can really only belong to an opposition party.

Pual Graham has an interesting essay up on how PR firms manipulate the media.

A surprisingly large fraction of what you read in newspapers and magazines consists of such press hits: stories that, though not false, are there because someone paid for them to be ... PR is the news equivalent of search engine optimization

John Stossel talks about PR from the perspective of a reporter in his book Give Me a Break. As a consumer reporter, he was targeted with PR from law firms trying to get him to run "XXX is bad" type stories in order to prepare juries for yet-to-be filed lawsuits.

Do you trust the links at the top of the search engine results? Do you trust the story at the top of the news? It would seem to depend on the topic. Stossel made me distrust "XXX is harmful" stories. Now Graham makes me question the "XXX is great" stories. I guess you have to ask "who stands to gain" whenever you see something in the media.

To prove my point, you might examine my link to John Stossel's book more closely.

I like to see stories like this. This is what I elected Bush to do. To get tough on the sources of terrorism: Syria, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. David Brooks has an Editorial comparing the fall of Communism with the spread of democracy in the middle east. Bush doesn't have the eloquence of Reagan, but through his actions of bringing about elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, he has issued a parallel call across the middle east: "Mr. Dictator, let your people vote."

The war on Iraq was justified with WMD, but I always felt that the primary benefit of attacking Iraq would be to break the status quo in the middle east. There is a recent Colin Powell interview which discusses the motives of regime change versus WMD.

The NY Times of all places has a nice article on the benefits of free trade, citing a study of both short and long term effects.

In the short term, there were some shifts in jobs. However, in the long term, overall employment was unaffected, wages went UP, not down, and productivity soared.

I have been fascinated by the drink robot at the McDonald's drive-through window, and now another McD's item has come to my attention via metafilter. Apparently, they are starting to outsource order taking in some restaurants.

I like this as an example of outsourcing because it is free of some of the emotional baggage associated with other forms of outsourcing. The work is staying in the United States. The jobs were "low paying" to begin with, although they are clearly taking advantage of geographic pay differentials. Nobody is going to think that a career "order taker" can't get a new job. And everyone has gone through the drive-through at McDonalds.

Brand Autopsy highlights some of the benefits of this change. This drive through is faster, presumably they can pass cost savings on to the customers, and the company can handle more customers in the same period of time.

So next time you hear someone ranting about the evils of outsourcing (say Lou Dobbs), what you have to remember is that consumers benefit more from lower prices and efficiency than workers lose. Far more people eat at McDonalds (billions served) than work there.

Consumers (thats you) are the hidden victims of anti-outsourcing efforts, whether the product is fast food, automobiles, or software.

It looks like I am not the only one to notice the Canadian coast on the electoral map.

Well, it looks like bush wins. If you read my political entries, you will know that I supported Bush. I'm glad the election is over, though, one way or the other.

Joi Ito:

For awhile, many of us thought that they had been conned into voting for Bush - that they didn't know he wanted to be a War President. Many people didn't equate the US policies with the people of America.

I've said before that non-americans should be careful not to read too much into politically opportunistic domestic opposition to the war.

The two biggests mistakes of the Bush Campaign:

The premature politically motivated theatrical "mission accomplished" aircraft carrier victory declaration. I think Americans would have been much more tolerant of how the war in iraq was going if Bush hadn't screwed up and said it was over.

The poor performance in the first debate. Fratboy Bush simply didn't do his homework. Kerry had a terrible and confusing position on Iraq and I'm sure the Bush team thought they would wipe the podium with him. However, i listened to a Kerry speech a week before the debate and he seemed to have pulled together his message on Iraq into a coherent whole, obviously in preparation for the debate. Bush came prepared to debate convention time Kerry, not debate the Kerry that showed up.

I think either of these two mistakes alone could have cost Bush the election. That they didn't shows what a poor candidate Kerry was.

The two biggest Democratic campaign mistakes:

The Primary process. The anti-war and "Bush is not my president" base of the party rushed the primary process and picked the wrong candidate. I've been saying that sheer Bush hate was not enough to win an election. You need a vision. Dean's early lead forced Kerry to change his position from pro-war to anti-war and then to some hindsight induced synthesis of the two. The candidates seemed to have a gentleman's agreement not to criticize each other and focus on Bush. To avoid damaging their candidate, they got behind one man too quickly. The liberal base picked a candidate from a region that they had locked up to begin with and who wasn't accustomed to communicating with the church going, gun toting moderates of the american interior. Geographically speaking, and all else being equal in the democratic leaning west coast, northeast and "canadian coast," if Gephardt could have carried his home state of Missouri and tipped the still too close to call neighboring Iowa, there would be a Democratic president now.

The Vietnam, um I mean Democratic convention. Kerry squandered his opportunity to lay out a future vision for America and instead focused on the past, and worst yet took a reactionary opposition party position to Bush. Quick, compare and contrast the Kerry and Bush health care plans for America. Most people don't know anything more than Kerry is for health care. Kerry wasted his opportunity to communicate and set his own agenda for the election.

I was surprised by some statistics from this post on British versus American self defense:

What British police condemn as "vigilante" behaviour has produced an American burglary rate less than half the English rate. And, while 53 per cent of English burglaries occur when someone is at home, only 13 per cent do in America

It seems that if this were true, stories of being at home and burglarized would be fairly common in Britain. Is this true?

Well, I went to the bar last night and watched part of the baseball game, but through the magic of the PVR, I watched the debate this morning and here are my comments. As before, I have seen no third party analysis.

One thing that I noticed was that Kerry's standby topic, the one he used when he wanted to avoid a question or to use up time was health care. Bush's standby topic was education.

I think Bush did poorly addressing the issues of job loss and minimum wage. He mostly avoided them by going to his standby education answer. I think Kerry scored some points here, although I really dislike the idea of a manufacturing jobs tax credit. The last thing we need is another industry specific government subsidy.

I think Bush did a really good job of answering the question about why health care costs are so high: lack of accountability, lawsuits, and inefficiency. Kerry had a couple good points on the cost side too, namely drug re-importation and more preventive medicine.

Both candidates left one out. We are simply buying more health care. For example, if you got AIDS 20 years ago, you just died quickly. Now, you can live much longer, but with expensive treatment. There is more health care available to buy and we are eager purchasers.

The problems with healthcare costs need to be solved my reducing the costs, not simply re-distributing them.

One thing I noticed about Kerry is that he has a political poker tell. Whenever he disagrees with someone, instead of saying that, he says "I respect your views." Maybe I am simply stating the obvious. I've been accused of that before. A good example was in the religion question where Kerry says "I respect everything that the president just said." What he really means is "I disagree with everything the president just said." He uses that phrasing on the abortion issue, too.

Bush introduced the gay marriage amendment. I'm not sure, but I think this may be a politically better position for Bush. However, I do not think that the Constitution is the appropriate place to resolve this issue.

The debate was supposed to be about domestic affairs, but Bush had the opportunity to bring up Kerry's terrorism nuisance comments. Bush also brought up the fact that Kerry voted against Gulf War I, raising the question of just how many allies did Kerry think was necessary to go to war. I thought it was a good point and one that hadn't occurred to me before. Bush also tried to label Kerry's iraq policy as retreat and defeat. I think we will hear more of this phrase for the rest of the election.

One thing I noticed over the three debates is that Kerry seemed very well prepared for all three, while Bush did not seem prepared for the first one. I think I can understand why. Kerry's position of Iraq really was unclear and inconsistent. To Kerry's credit, he seemed to be able to forge a consistent message about Iraq about a week before the first debate. I don't think the Bush campaign was prepared for the possibility that Kerry might do that. The first debate was characterized by Bush's failure to rebut Kerry's new iraq message. He spent the next two debates in some way catching up for this original failure.

Overall, it was a great series of debates about real issues. I have to say that I think this election has been one of the more important with more real difference in opinion than any of the others that I have voted in.

Well, I watched the debate again tonight. Unfortunately, I missed the VP debate because I forgot to record it.

I thought this was a good debate with real discussion over the issues.

The first part about Iraq was a little more refined than the first debate. Kerry avoided talking about his summit idea. Bush had to bring it up himself. If you strip away the hindsight and recriminations and look at plans for the future, Kerry's plan for iraq seems to reduce to get more allies. However, he doesn't say who these allies would be and what they would do and why they would join him and not Bush. I think the Iraq point goes to Bush. It is good for Kerry that Iraq will be off limits in the last debate.

Kerry's best moment was the Canadian Drug reimportation issue. Its a good idea, Bush should have done it like he said he would.

I think Bush also has a point with medical malpractice and the real cost being the practice of defensive medicine. I've blogged about tort reform before.

Kerry's response on the abortion question was terrible and meandering.

During the Patriot Act question, Bush was almost going to quote the constitution and then stopped himself. I think if he hadn't that would probably been the quote of the day tomorrow.

I think this format was a little better for Bush. He was able to show a little personal warmth and make a couple of jokes.

I was wrong about the last debate, apparently, but I think Bush came out a little bit ahead in this one. As before, These are my impressions before I have seen any third party commentary.

Well, I watched the debate tonight. Who won? I think its a tie, but only due to Bush's dismal public speaking skills.

Bush's Overall Message: You are safer with me. What I am doing in Iraq makes you safer. Kerry has no consistent position on iraq.

I think bush did a good job of driving in the central message through sheer tongue twisted repetition. Every question came around to one or all of these points.

Kerry's Message: Bush an incompetent liar. I can do better.

Kerry's ability to actually answer the questions that he was asked dilutes his ability to come out of the debate with a memorable message. You try summarizing Kerry's overall messaage in 80 characters or less. When I typed out the bush summary above, it was a no brainer. I had to pause and think for a while to summarize Kerry's overall message. And I just watched the debate. What will you remember tomorrow? point to Bush.

My first impression was that Kerry wanted to trap bush in the "friendly tall man handshake of death" and that bush doesn't want to be seen anywhere near Kerry. minor point to Kerry.

I think Kerry had some inconsistencies in his responses that a more agile debater than bush might have taken advantage of to reinforce his message about Kerry's consistency. Kerry claimed that we didn't have enough allies in iraq, and that we have too many in North Korea. Kerry claimed that we relied too much on American troops in Iraq instead of allies, and that we relied too much on allies instead of American troops in Afghanistan (Tora Bora).

In a rare display of minor debating ability, Bush seemed to partially dismantle Kerry's claim that he can recruit new allies for Iraq. I think this claim will be further dismantled and disected by the press, pundits and surrogates over the next few days. As it should. It seems to be the central point of Kerry's plan for Iraq (assuming that summits are a part of recruiting allies).

Bush missed an opportunity when Kerry talked about not confusing the warrior with the war to bring up Kerry's congressional war crimes testimony. This may be the next swift boat vets ad.

Bush visibly changed on the war widow question. He seems more human and less politician at these moments. (unlike Kerry's fake laugh at the second question.)

Anyway, those are my impressions. I haven't seen any third party analysis of the debate yet. I'll catch up on that tommorrow.

Judge Richard Posner's arguments that global warming is a bigger problem that malaria seem misguided to me.

Malnutrition and malaria are serious problems too, but one effect of eliminating them would be to cause a population surge, which would in turn increase global warming, because added population means added energy demands (met primarily by burning fossil fuels) and added food demands (met in part by deforestation).

So it would be bad if less people died of malnutrition and malaria? I guess when you live in Chicago, Malaria and global warming are equally abstract and far off problems. The 300 million people who get malaria each year and one million people who die from it might set different priorities given the chance.

The Copenhagen consensus is all about reasonable priorities.

The horse race political story of the day seems to be why the DNC last week had such a small effect on the presidential race poll numbers this week.

The democratic spin is that no bounce was expected because the race is close and people have made up their minds.

I have my own theory. I tried to watch Kerry's speech last week, but I fell asleep sometime after his daughters hamster CPR story and woke up to a bunch of talking heads after the speech was over. I tried to find out what Kerry said, but the CNN analysis crew seemed to be more interested in complimenting each other than re-capping Kerry's speech. As I recall, only one sound bit clip was replayed. I tuned in to Lou Dobbs the next day, and the speech was hardly covered. My theory is that the speech wasn't memorable or newsworthy enough to fuel a bounce. I say this without having seen the speech, which I'd still like to watch.

It hardly matters if there is a bounce or not except to the the horserace watchers who will have to wait to see if Bush gets a bounce to evaluate the reality of the idea that everyone has made up their minds. Those attempting the "minds made up" spin might be setting themselves up for some uncomfortable questions should Bush eek out a bounce after the RNC.

Hopefully, I will be able to stay awake for Bush's RNC speech. At least he usually manages to avoid mangling the language in the highly rehearsed speeches such as this.

John Stossel has an interesting article on unintended consequences of lawsuits. I have wondered why the number C-sections keeps rising. Is it true that three fourths of all obstetricians have been sued?

I watched John Stossel on CSPAN and he made a compelling argument against some lawsuits. He talked about how as a consumer reporter for ABC, lawyers would try to hand him ready made stories on the supposed dangers of this product as the first stage in developing a class action lawsuit. After this, I think twice now about the objectivity and accuracy of the various X considered harmful stories when I see one on the news.

I told my mom about seeing Stossel on CSPAN and she bought his book and enjoyed it. She gave it to my brother to bring to me and I am looking forward to getting it one of these days.

I can see a need for tort reform when lawyers set up lawsuit factories to practice legal extortion. Would you vote for Edwards if he were formerly a lawyer for Acacia or SCO? I would like to see more information on Edward's trial cases before the election.

UPDATE: NYT article on Edwards trial work including more information on Cerebral Palsy C-section lawsuits.

I just got back from the last of a string of spring parties (graduation, birthdays, babies, etc.) I heard one of the most extraordinary lines of thought today. A woman in three sentences or less was able to draw a direct and dire connection between gay marriage and terrorist attacks on the United States. I came late to the conversation, but to the best of my ability to recall, her reasoning was as follows: The gay marriage is weakening the superior moral position of this country. The attack on 9/11 is a sign that God no longer favors this country and has withdrawn his special protection. Therefore, if gay marriage is made legal on a federal level, we can expect terrorist attacks right here in rural America. Apparently the vanguard of this local terrorism will be middle eastern doctors. (American born doctors don't want to service poor rural areas such as where this woman lives.)

I guarantee that this woman will vote. Part of this woman's pitch was to get others to vote.

After listening to this, I am struck by how little it actually matters if there was a connection between Iraq and 9/11.

I don't think those outside the US quite realize the deep and permanent effect that the attacks of 9/11 had on this country. They should not mistake a temporary political alliance between Bush's domestic political enemies and the anti-war effort as indicative of long term or deeply held American opinion.