Mike McDaniel:

On December 8, 2011, appearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder baldly asserted that he had no idea who authorized the deadly Fast and Furious debacle and added that he would be “surprised” if any evidence about it could ever be found.

Put aside, for the moment, Holder’s lack of transparency which has become standard operating procedure for the most transparent administration in history, and consider that Mr. Holder is correct for two primary and likely reasons: he knows who is responsible for every facet of Fast and Furious and has no intention of ever revealing that information, and he has the most important, powerful ace any corrupt bureaucrat or politician could possibly have up his sleeve, but more on this later.

According to Fox News, on January 19, Patrick J. Cunningham, chief of the U.S. Attorney’s Office Criminal Division for Arizona, through his attorneys, has notified Rep. Darrell Issa’s Committee that he will not testify before the committee as requested and that if subpoenaed, will take the Fifth and refuse to testify to avoid incriminating himself.

They saved your right to continue to use Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulbs if you so choose. We won’t all have to sit in our living rooms bathed in the Orwellian florescent glare of the over-priced alternative bulbs favored by devotees of the modern cult of Gaia.

The Politico reports.

The shutdown-averting budget bill will block federal light bulb efficiency standards, giving a win to House Republicans fighting the so-called ban on incandescent light bulbs.

GOP and Democratic sources tell POLITICO the final omnibus bill includes a rider defunding the Energy Department’s standards for traditional incandescent light bulbs to be 30 percent more energy efficient.

DOE’s light bulb rules — authorized under a 2007 energy law authored signed by President George W. Bush — would start going into effect Jan. 1. The rider will prevent DOE from implementing the rules through Sept. 30.

But Democrats said they could claim a “compromise” by adding language to the omnibus that requires DOE grant recipients greater than $1 million to certify they will upgrade the efficiency of their facilities by replacing any lighting to meet or exceed the 2007 energy law’s standards.

Fueled by conservative talk radio, Republicans made the last-ditch attempt to stop federal regulations from making their way into every Americans’ living room.

“There are just some issues that just grab the public’s attention. This is one of them,” said Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.). “It’s going to be dealt with in this legislation once and for all.”

Our self-appointed lords and masters on the left were not pleased.

White House… communications director Dan Pfeiffer [was] saying Wednesday that the House GOP plan would “undercut environmental protections.”

On Twitter, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) wrote: “I strongly oppose that language. I hope it’s deleted from any final bill that we pass.”

“This is just another poke in the eye,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.).

The feature humor item you’ll be seeing everywhere this holiday season is about a drastic shortage of butter in Norway occurring just as the Christmas season is at hand.

The journalists are telling us that the scarcity is the result of recent high Norwegian butter consumption resulting from a fashionable low-carb, high-fat diet on top of reduced production caused by a shortage of hay due to an unusually rainy summer growing season.

Profiteers are reported trying to charge as much as 350 euros ($465) for a 500-gram (1.1 lb. or 1 lb and 1.6 oz) packet of butter.

Ho, ho! Isn’t it funny?

None of the features on this news item I have found, however, notes that no butter shortage exists elsewhere in Europe or in the United States. But the AFP story offers a clue:

Last Friday, customs officers stopped a Russian at the Norwegian-Swedish border and seized 90 kilos (198 pounds) of butter stashed in his car.

The butter shortage obviously is not result, in a modern world, of a local dairy feed shortage, or of local supplies being exhausted by unusual demand. With rising demand and consumers willing to pay higher prices, the supply would be being met by enterprising Russians trying to make a kroner, if government were not standing in the way.

It is obvious that some kind of Norwegian limits on butter importation, doubtless in place to protect Norwegian dairy farmers, prevents legal access to supplies from abroad.

Norway’s holiday problem isn’t really about diet fads or rainy summers. It’s about government doing what government likes to do: delivering favors to special interests at the expense of society as a whole.

Time

lynnux notes that government regulation establishes the rules by which banks operate and even creates their opportunities for profits, but these vital economic realities come into being in the first place through the agency of politicians, people like Barney Frank, whose expertise (such as it is), and interests and concerns have no connection to economic realities or markets.

Politicians seem such busy-beavers today, “doing things” “for” us. Why such whirling dervishes, generating laws in bulk? In its broadest outlines, law is mostly static. Politicians seek to appear to the public to be men of action “doing something.” This leads them to make too many economic and personal choices that they are not supposed to be making “for” us at all, picking winners and losers. It is now to the point where, famously, they no longer even read the laws they promulgate upon the body politic. Their process is finger in the wind (test the zeitgeist for what buzz evokes positives), then claim to be acting in name of the democratic will of the people—who, like banks to regulators, can later be blamed, should anything go wrong. As a republic, not a direct democracy, our representatives are supposed to be doing the right thing, in their best judgment. We rely on their decency, wisdom, and intelligence and vision for the long term. They have no way of knowing anything about their constituency anyway, because to pollsters, people only express self-interest, not the public interest. The public interest can only be assessed at a remove, which is the representative’s job. Pollsters get whatever they fish for. Responders also like to echo conventional wisdom. Implementing conventional wisdom is not politicians’ job. ...

Politicians wrapped in soundbites simply may not be qualified to make all the rules they seek to impose on us in their show of “caring” for us. This, I think, is what Richard Posner is getting at when he speaks of The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy. We need systems engineers today who really do understand the system. Politicians are mostly not this, but marketing specialists. They dissolve always into futile calls for infinitely ethical global governmental forces (themselves) to abolish investment uncertainty in a complicated utopian merger with perfect empirical risk analysis, forgetting that the past is no divining rod of the future (nor of truth. ...

The law is being asked to make business judgments law simply should not be making at all. Law is static. Markets are not. The market will adjust to any fixed rule, changing the “new normal.” Positive feedback loops (“positive” does not imply good) can ensue, at many unexpected levels. The media’s celebrity focus on political figure summiteering, however, follows an old trope, of suggesting to the public that our pseudo-gods and deities, through law, can command markets. These heroes then arrogantly begin to believe their press releases and to act accordingly.

Lawyers often go to law school precisely because they don’t like math or statistics. The type can quite easily ignore economic reality as they proceed to plug old forms and numbers into new contexts.

Read the whole thing.

It doesn’t happen very often, but once in a blue moon you actually find a liberal exhibiting intellectual honesty and standing up for real principles. George State Law Professor Eric Segall has the audacity to tell the readership of Slate that, yes, Elena Kagan really should be recusing herself from participating in the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare. And he is dead right.

Doing the right thing is easy when nothing important is at stake. Doing the right thing is much harder when there is a lot to lose. Elena Kagan is a loyal Democrat who owes her Supreme Court appointment to President Barack Obama.* She is poised to review the constitutionality of Obama’s health care statute, which, if invalidated, might do serious damage to his re-election campaign as well as the Democratic Party. Even though it would be a hard decision to make, Elena Kagan should recuse herself from hearing challenges to the act.

So far it appears that only Republicans and conservatives want Kagan to recuse herself from hearing the case, while liberals and Democrats take the opposing view. I have been a liberal constitutional law professor for more than 20 years, and a loyal Democrat. I believe the Affordable Care Act is constitutional and that it would be truly unfortunate for the country (and the party) if the court strikes it down. I also recognize that there is a much greater chance of the court erroneously striking down the PPACA if Kagan recuses herself. That said, I believe that as a matter of both principle and law, Kagan should not hear the case.

But what are the odds that she has as much integrity as he does?

Libertarian (sounds like the modern California version to me) Jason Brennan is in a position make his liberals allies uncomfortable, when he connects the dots between liberal statist policy prescriptions and the kind of crony capitalism in which fat cat banks and corporations get to use the state as their servant and ally to build deeper regulatory moats and higher walls against competitors.

Dear members of the moderate left,

America is suffering from rampant, run-away corporatism and crony capitalism. We are increasingly a plutocracy in which government serves the interests of elite financiers and CEOs at the expense of everyone else.

You know this and you complain loudly about it. But the problem is your fault. You caused this state of affairs. Stop it.

Unlike we libertarianish people, you people actually hold and have been holding significant political power in the US over the past 50 years. What have you done with this power? You’ve greased the corporatist machine every chance you’ve gotten. You’ve made things worse, not better. Our current problems are your fault. You need to stop.

We told you this would happen, but you wouldn’t listen. You complain, rightly, that regulatory agencies are controlled by the very corporations they are supposed to constrain. Well, yeah, we told you that would happen. When you create power—and you people love to create power—the unscrupulous seek to capture that power for their personal benefit. Time and time again, they succeed. We told you that would happen, and we gave you an accurate account of how it would happen.

You complain, perhaps rightly, that corporations are just too big. Well, yeah, we told you that would happen. When you create complicated tax codes, complicated regulatory regimes, and complicated licensing rules, these regulations naturally select for larger and larger corporations. We told you that would happen. Of course, these increasingly large corporations then capture these rules, codes, and regulations to disadvantage their competitors and exploit the rest of us. We told you that would happen.

It’s not rocket science. It’s public choice economics. You recognized, rightly, that public choice economics was a threat to your ideology. So, you didn’t listen, because you didn’t want to be wrong. Public choice predicted that the government programs you created with the goal of fixing problems would often instead exacerbate those problems. Well, the evidence is in. You were wrong and public choice theory was right. If you have any decency, it is time to admit you were wrong and change. Stop making things worse.

You spent the past fifty years empowering corporations and the most unscrupulous of the rich. You created rampant moral hazard in the financial sector. You created the system that socializes risks but privatizes profit. You created the system that creates a revolving door between Obama’s staff and Goldman Sachs. There’s a reason why Wall Street throws money at Obama. It’s because you, the moderate left, are Wall Street’s biggest supporters. Oh, I know you complain about Wall Street. But your actions speak louder than your words.

From Dan Mitchell.

From Alex Tabarrok:

The NYTimes reported earlier this year that through an extraordinary use of tax breaks and clever accounting:

[General Electric] reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States. Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

The Times highlighted the skill of GE’s dream team:

G.E.’s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former Treasury official named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world’s best tax law firm. Indeed, the company’s slogan “Imagination at Work” fits this department well. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.

More recently from The Weekly Standard we find what kind of effort it takes to pay no taxes on $14 billion in profits:

General Electric, one of the largest corporations in America, filed a whopping 57,000-page federal tax return earlier this year but didn’t pay taxes on $14 billion in profits. The return, which was filed electronically, would have been 19 feet high if printed out and stacked.

(FYI, the length of GE’s tax return has doubled since 2006 when it (first?) filed electronically at an equivalent of 24,000 pages.)

GE’s tax bill illustrates both why our corporate tax rate is too high and too low. The nominal rate is too high which encourages a real rate which is too low.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

The Telegraph has a news item proving that the unelected elite bureaucracy does as excellent a job at supervising food standards as it does managing the European financial system.

Brussels bureaucrats were ridiculed yesterday after banning drink manufacturers from claiming that water can prevent dehydration.

EU officials concluded that, following a three-year investigation, there was no evidence to prove the previously undisputed fact.

Producers of bottled water are now forbidden by law from making the claim and will face a two-year jail sentence if they defy the edict, which comes into force in the UK next month.

Last night, critics claimed the EU was at odds with both science and common sense. Conservative MEP Roger Helmer said: “This is stupidity writ large.

“The euro is burning, the EU is falling apart and yet here they are: highly-paid, highly-pensioned officials worrying about the obvious qualities of water and trying to deny us the right to say what is patently true.

“If ever there were an episode which demonstrates the folly of the great European project then this is it.”

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, says those Occupy Wall Street protestors have got it right about the 1% exploiting the 99%. They just are mixed up about the identity of the parasitical 1%.

The “occupy” protest movement is thriving off the claim that the 99 percent are being exploited by the 1 percent, and there is truth in what they say. But they have the identities of the groups wrong. They imagine that it is the 1 percent of highest wealth holders who are the problem. In fact, that 1 percent includes some of the smartest, most innovative people in the country — the people who invent, market, and distribute material blessings to the whole population. They also own the capital that sustains productivity and growth.

But there is another 1 percent out there, those who do live parasitically off the population and exploit the 99 percent. Moreover, there is a long intellectual tradition, dating back to the late Middle Ages, that draws attention to the strange reality that a tiny minority lives off the productive labor of the overwhelming majority.

I’m speaking of the state, which even today is made up of a tiny sliver of the population but is the direct cause of all the impoverishing wars, inflation, taxes, regimentation, and social conflict. This 1 percent is the direct cause of the violence, the censorship, the unemployment, and vast amounts of poverty, too.

Look at the numbers, rounding from latest data. The US population is 307 million. There are about 20 million government employees at all levels, which makes 6.5 percent. But 6.2 million of these people are public-school teachers, whom I think we can say are not really the ruling elite. That takes us down to 4.4 percent.

We can knock of another half million who work for the post office, and probably the same who work for various service department bureaus. Probably another million do not work in any enforcement arm of the state, and there’s also the amazing labor-pool fluff that comes with any government work. Local governments do not cause nationwide problems (usually), and the same might be said of the 50 states. The real problem is at the federal level (8.5 million), from which we can subtract fluff, drones, and service workers.

In the end, we end up with about 3 million people who constitute what is commonly called the state. For short, we can just call these people the 1 percent.

The 1 percent do not generate any wealth of their own. Everything they have they get by taking from others under the cover of law. They live at our expense. ...

Why don’t the protesters get this? Because they are victims of propaganda by the state, doled out in public schools, that attempts to blame all human suffering on private parties and free enterprise. They do not comprehend that the real enemy is the institution that brainwashes them to think the way they do.

They are right that society is rife with conflicts, and that the contest is wildly lopsided. It is indeed the 99 percent versus the 1 percent. They’re just wrong about the identity of the enemy.

I think Mr. Rockwell is wrong, though, about those public school teachers and other government employees. Today’s public school system is an employment empire, which devotes far more energy to its real purpose of growing itself and gaining an ever larger share annual budget and staff than it does to its ostensible purpose of educating. Public schools in America are either rudimentary babysitting services which evolves into concentration camps or lavishly funded credentialing services designed to maintain the grip on status of the next generation of the haute bourgeoisie.

The left is protesting Wall Street while Barack Obama continues to whip up popular resentment of the US financial industry, but the massive regulation of that industry effectuated by Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank are already making sure that liberals are not going to have the world center of finance capitalism based conveniently in Lower Manhattan when they feel like kicking it around some more.

As the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, Wall Street is in serious decline. Jobs are evaporating.

New York City’s securities industry could lose nearly 10,000 jobs by the end of 2012, New York state’s comptroller predicted, a painful blow to the area’s economy and government budgets.

New York City’s securities industry could lose nearly 10,000 jobs by the end of 2012, New York state’s comptroller predicted, a painful blow to the area’s economy and government budgets, Aaron Lucchetti reports on Markets Hub. Banks in the New York area are also poised to shed jobs. Photo: AP.

In a report set to be released Tuesday, Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli also said bonuses are likely to shrink this year, reflecting lower profits on Wall Street.

Since January 2008, the securities industry in New York has seen 22,000 jobs evaporate. If Mr. DiNapoli’s prediction of 10,000 more jobs losses between August 2011 and year-end 2012 comes true, that would represent a decline of 17%. About 4,100 jobs have been eliminated since April, and deeper cuts are widely seen as inevitable given a recent flurry of corporate expense-trimming announcements.

There is a 1:1 relationship between recent federal regulations and Wall Street’s decline. Disgruntled lesbian rockers who think that capitalism has not been properly compensating them will soon have to go demonstrate in London and Abu Dhabi.

MSNBC records the passing of another landmark on the road to ruin for the current administration.

The U.S. has tumbled further down a global ranking of the world’s most competitive economies, landing at fifth place because of its huge deficits and declining public faith in government, a global economic group said Wednesday.

The announcement by the World Economic Forum was the latest bad news for the Obama administration, which has been struggling to boost the sinking U.S. economy and lower an unemployment rate of more than 9 percent.

Switzerland held onto the top spot for the third consecutive year in the annual ranking by the Geneva-based forum, which is best known for its exclusive meeting of luminaries in Davos, Switzerland, each January.

Singapore moved up to second place, bumping Sweden down to third. Finland moved up to fourth place, from seventh last year. The U.S. was in fourth place last year, after falling from No. 1 in 2008.

The rankings, which the forum has issued for more than three decades, are based on economic data and a survey of 15,000 business executives.

Yesterday afternoon, when the earthquake hit, I was two steps up a rickety flight of stairs in an old warehouse in Remington, Virginia where we’re storing some of the many books we cannot fit into the charming, antique Virginia farmhouse we are currently inhabiting.

I thought someone must be opening an exceptionally violent garage door on the other side of the wall, then began guessing someone was running some piece of heavy machinery nearby in the building. The vibration stopped, and I proceeded upstairs.

I only learned that it was an earthquake when I got back to the car and turned on the radio.

WMAL, 63 AM, the station I listen to El Rushbo on, switched over to full-time broadcasting about this major news event. Sean Hannity never even came on. Instead, Conservative talk radio host Chris Plante was dragged out a pizzeria, where he had been lunching, back to the studio to cover what was essentially a non-event.

Chris and his associates interviewed all sorts of ordinary people, who testified to all of their personal earthquake experiences (typically just as interesting as mine).

My blood ran cold when Chris Plante, the conservative, proceeded in Pavlovian journalistic manner to interview a state legislator from Prince George County about “government’s response.” I would have said, in his position: “Response? What response? There was no actual damage. No injuries. There wasn’t anything anyone needed to do.” But, no. The politico happily bloviated on and on about how each and every level of government bureaucracy, all the “first responders” in particular, turned on every flashing light and siren, and spun their wheels vigorously. Our rulers, guardians, supervisors, and protectors had to justify their existence by seeming to take control, and keeping the rest of us alerted and informed, even if there was nothing in particular to alert us about, beyond potential heavy traffic resulting from government offices releasing their personnel to commute home early.

Even a conservative commentator, like Chris Plante, can be found to behave as a true product of the culture of journalism and officialdom, when push comes shove (even in the case of a minor 5.9 push), the journalist Plante goes running to Big Brother to participate in, and to cover with canine respect, the charade of official expertise gravely protecting us, the helpless public, from all perils and vissiscitudes, even in an instance where there is nothing but the empty semblance of a real event.

Bah, humbug!

Being engaged in something, kind of, sort of, resembling journalism myself, as you can see, I, too, felt obliged to cover the terrible earthquake of 2011, and here from BuzzFeed are 20 photographs of some of the worst damage.

The author of Sippican Cottage lives in Rumford, Maine and builds furniture for a living. Looking at a YouTube of a wood-working shop, absolutely stuffed with tools, he was moved to reflection.

Unlike most of the world, I am not allowed to have the Process be the Product. At the end of the day there has to be something tangibly different with the world or we don’t eat. Sometimes we don’t eat anyway. Most of the world we inhabit now is all Process and no Product. What is Twitter, or Tumblr, or Facebook, or a million other things you could name that consist solely of: This is how I go, when I go like this.

The federal government thinks the process is the entire product. The public school system can produce only public school teachers. The EPA is now supposed to protect the air from humans. The Department of Energy doesn’t make any, and would prefer you didn’t as well—or else. Cities like Detroit are trying to exist with no population now. Search your mind. You’ll have to search hard to find exceptions, not examples.

Via Vanderleun.

In addition to the tragic spectacles of the vegetarian who met the hungry mountain lion while joggng in the state park, or the suburbanite who neglected to prepare properly for high altitude temperatures and snow when traveling in the high mountains, or the optimist who thought he could drive fast and inattentively around Devil’s Slide, California offers as well distressing scenes in which ordinary Americans encounter to their great misfortune hypertrophied large urban regulatory machines sprawling into their lives.

One day, while I was still living on the SF peninsula in San Carlos, I went outside to get something from my car, and the pretty Oriental young lady who lived in the house across the street (whose name I did not even know, we had only been on waving-hello terms) ran crying into my arms.

She and her husband, a silver-haired, distinguée executive-type who drove an S-class Mercedes, had purchased the typical run-down 1960s-era California spec house across the street from our rental for something north of a cool million. They then proceeded to gut snd completely rebuild the place. Construction activity had been going for about two years, and seemed finally to be nearing completion. I thought these neighbors seemed likely to be about to take up residence just about the same time I was scheduled to depart.

My neighbor began sobbing out her story. A building inspector from the city of San Carlos had just left. He had disapproved of the nails used to attach the wire-mesh to the outside of the house which had already been covered with stucco cement and painted. Because the city didn’t like the contractor’s choice of nail, my neighbors were going to have to give up plans to move in. They would be obliged to tear off the entire new exterior surface of their house, and re-attach new wire mesh and stucco, and paint the whole thing all over again. It would take months to do the demolition and exterior covering again, and it would cost a lot of money.

Beyond the many tens of thousands of dollars all that extra construction was going to cost, they’d have to do an additional move (their lease was up) and pay thousands of unnecessary dollars a month for another rental house. My neighbors had been hit with six figures in extra expenses by the local building code enforcement system over a nail.

No wonder the poor girl was sobbing. She probably felt a lot like Richard III.

I don’t doubt that there is some possibility that the use of a less-than-optimal nail to attach that wire mesh could result in problems. The mesh might gradually loosen, and come away from the wall of the house in places over time. Movement might occur, and the homeowner might find that portions of his stucco surface developed cracks. The poor homeowner might have to do some repairs one day. But, if every one of those nails fell right out, and the entire stucco coating on all four sides of the house fell right down onto the oleander bushes, it would be no skin off the nose of the city of San Carlos. San Carlos would not be paying for the repairs.

Building codes are represented to be necessary to protect the public. In urban California, at least, there is a reasonable argument for earthquake protection to be a factor taken into account in building standards. But codes obviously go characteristically far beyond addressing potential hazards to the general community. Building codes function to prevent competition from outside licensed guild-member businesses. Building codes protect the interests of unions. Building codes also operate as a secondary system of zoning, to protect the interests and impose the preferences of existing property owners. Building codes, finally, are also one more revenue source and a means of creating power.

In a lot of places, New York City would be a classic example, building codes describe an absolutely unattainable dream of perfection which never does and never can exist in the real world. Consequently, all buildings and all building owners are always guilty and in violation of lots of things. Officialdom can crack down and enforce the entire code any time it chooses. Make some kind of waves for officialdom, and watch the inspectors arrive, whip out their notepads and start writing.

All this is in reference to a horrifying LA Times story, describing how the long arm of big city city building regulation has, in recent years, begun reaching out to crush and destroy little people living far away in remote high desert locations which, unfortunately for them, nonetheless fall under the jurisdiction of the County of Los Angeles. Be sure to take your high blood pressure medication before reading the article or watching the video.

Hat tips to Glenn Reynolds and Iowahawk.

The commanding heights of our economy today are not heavy manufacturing, energy, and transportation. They are, rather, education and health care. These are our foremost growth sectors — the ones most central to employment and consumption; the ones that, increasingly, drive our economy. And it is in precisely these two sectors that the case for extensive government intervention and planning, if not outright control, is dominant — and becoming ever more so. ...

If it were true only that health care and education are increasingly important sectors of our economy, there would be little cause for concern. Indeed, societies ought to desire economies that are strong and flexible enough to hum along as new technologies and other developments cause industries within them to rise and fall. The problem, rather, is that both health care and education are increasingly government-dominated industries. And this domination produces two ill effects that exacerbate the changes these sectors are already undergoing: Government’s influence artificially increases the demand for health care and education (by significantly subsidizing both), and it makes both sectors even less efficient than they would be otherwise (by heavily regulating them and shielding them from market forces). ...

[I]n the cases of health care and education — in large part because of the dominance of government in these sectors — the prices of various “features” are often barely related to consumer preferences. With much of health-care and education spending paid for by third parties (and ultimately subsidized by government), consumers generally do not make decisions based on perceived relative value. The medical patient, instead of asking which medical procedure offers the greatest value, asks only whether the recommended procedure will be covered by insurance — a decision made by insurance-company or government bureaucrats, who have little sense of what is most important to the patient. The parents of a student in an elementary school are not responsible for choosing the school’s teaching methods; as “consumers,” they have no say in — and indeed, no way of knowing — whether the costly programs they pay for with their tax dollars are in fact producing good “value” in the form of their child’s education.

The result is that, in the sectors of education and health care, the preferences of policymakers — not of consumers — become the driving economic forces. And as these sectors become the new commanding heights, policymakers — rather than consumers and producers — will come to dominate more and more of our nation’s economic life.

Under these circumstances, the supposed inadequacy of market economics will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Markets can work in education and health care, but only if governments allow them to. This means that, for the champions of free enterprise, introducing market principles and mechanisms into health care and education must become a top priority in the years ahead.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to John C. Meyer.

Big Brother is coming soon to take away your 100w incandescent light bulbs, and he’s planning to remove the rest of them by 2014. Virginia Postrel explains that Congress and George W. Bush did one of their crony capitalism deals at the expense of your freedom of choice (and your interior decor).

When compact fluorescent light bulbs were new, promoters sold them as a market-oriented, win-win proposition. They were like “lite” beer: the same great illumination, for a fraction of the electric bill.

But, as with beer, not everyone was convinced. Some consumers didn’t like the high out-of-pocket cost. (A basic CFL runs about three times the initial price of the equivalent incandescent.) Some didn’t like that bulbs could take a while to build up to full intensity.

Some didn’t like the occasional flicker. And a lot didn’t like the light. Its bluish cast lacks the warmth of traditional incandescents and gives skin tones a somewhat deathly tinge. “Fluorescent is just not attractive,” a resolute restaurant designer once told me. “I don’t care what they say.” ...

By the end of last year, CFLs had managed to capture only 25 percent of the general-purpose light-bulb market—a decent business, sure, but hardly the radical transformation evangelists were going for. Most Americans, for most purposes, have stuck to traditional incandescents.

So the activists offended by the public’s presumed wastefulness took a more direct approach. They joined forces with the big bulb producers, who had an interest in replacing low-margin commodities with high-margin specialty wares, and, with help from Congress and President George W. Bush, banned the bulbs people prefer.

It was an inside job. Neither ordinary consumers nor even organized interior designers had a say. Lawmakers buried the ban in the 300-plus pages of the 2007 energy bill, and very few talked about it in public. It was crony capitalism with a touch of green.

Of such deals are Tea Parties born.

Read the whole thing.

Officials at the Department of Justice are in “panic mode,” according to multiple sources, as word spreads that congressional testimony next week will paint a bleak and humiliating picture of Operation Fast and Furious, the botched undercover operation that left a trail of blood from Mexico to Washington, D.C.

The operation was supposed to stem the flow of weapons from the U.S. to Mexico by allowing so-called straw buyers to purchase guns legally in the U.S. and later sell them in Mexico, usually to drug cartels.

Instead, ATF documents show that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms knowingly and deliberately flooded Mexico with assault rifles. Their intent was to expose the entire smuggling organization, from top to bottom, but the operation spun out of control and supervisors refused pleas from field agents to stop it.

Only after Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry died did ATF Agent John Dodson blow the whistle and expose the scandal.

“What people don’t understand is how long we will be dealing with this,” Dodson told Fox News back in March. “Those guns are gone. You can’t just give the order and get them back. There is no telling how many crimes will be committed before we retrieve them.”

But now the casualties are coming in.

Mexican officials estimate 150 of their people have been shot by Fast and Furious guns. Police have recovered roughly 700 guns at crime scenes, 250 in the U.S. and the rest in Mexico, including five AK-47s found at a cartel warehouse in Juarez last month.

A high-powered sniper rifle was used to shoot down a Mexican military helicopter. Two other Romanian-made AK-47s were found in a shoot-out that left 11 dead in the state of Jalisco three weeks ago.

The guns were traced to the Lone Wolf Gun Store in Glendale, Ariz., and were sold only after the store employees were told to do so by the ATF.

It is illegal to buy a gun for anyone but yourself. However, ATF’s own documents show it allowed just 15 men to buy 1,725 guns, and 1,318 of those were after the purchasers officially became targets of investigation.

If I could have my personal choice of one federal agency to defund or entirely abolish, I know which one it would be. I subscribe to the viewpoint that “Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms” ought to be the contents of the sign in the window of my local convenience store, not the name of a federal agency.

The Wall Street Journal finds Senator Chuck Schumer’s recent criticism of the regulatory impact on New York City’s financial industry of the Dodd-Frank bill, which he himself supported, to be an example of a recognizable pattern of political deception.

[W]ith Mr. Schumer, who voted to inflict this burden on an economy still struggling with high unemployment and slow growth, this is an all-too familiar pattern of behavior that can be summarized as follows:

Step One: Vote for destructive law.

Step Two: Complain about said law, while doing nothing to repeal it.

Step Three: Raise campaign money by showing to business community the volume of said complaints.

It was almost easy to forget that Mr. Schumer helped enact the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley financial accounting law when he spent much of the rest of the decade complaining about the stifling burden of financial regulations.

Looking forward, we can expect Mr. Schumer to express at myriad fundraising events his sympathy for those living with the consequences of Dodd-Frank. It’s a good bet that he’ll also claim that, if not for his valiant efforts on Capitol Hill, the financial reform would have been so much worse. And expect New York’s financial elite to keep writing checks.

There’s a word for people who keep falling for this: suckers.

One of the problems with appointing prominent members of a presidential administration to the Supreme Court is the issue that if litigation connected with a piece of legislation or executive order that official had a hand in crafting should subsequently occur, he (or she) might find it necessary to recuse himself from participation in the case.

Recusal is not an optional choice. 28 U.S.C. § 455 specifically states:

Any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned. ...

Where he has served in governmental employment and in such capacity participated as counsel, adviser or material witness concerning the proceeding or expressed an opinion concerning the merits of the particular case in controversy.

Supreme Court Associate Justice Elena Kagan has denied being involved in preparations for court defense of Obamacare while she was serving as Solicitor General, and declined to recuse herself from the Supreme Court decision of April 2011 refusing to “fast-track” for review Virginia’s lawsuit challenging Obamacare.

Judicial Watch sued under the Freedom of Information Act and has obtained documents suggesting that Justice Kagan may have a serious problem here.

According to a January 8, 2010, email from Neal Katyal, former Deputy Solicitor General (and current Acting Solicitor General) to Brian Hauck, Senior Counsel to Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, Kagan was involved in the strategy to defend Obamacare from the very beginning:

Subject: Re: Health Care Defense:

Brian, Elena would definitely like OSG [Office of Solicitor General] to be involved in this set of issues…we will bring in Elena as needed. [The “set of issues” refers to another email calling for assembling a group to figure out “how to defend against the…health care proposals that are pending.”]

On March 21, 2010, Katyal urged Kagan to attend a health care litigation meeting that was evidently organized by the Obama White House: “This is the first I’ve heard of this. I think you should go, no? I will, regardless, but feel like this is litigation of singular importance.”

In another email exchange that took place on January 8, 2010, Katyal’s Department of Justice colleague Brian Hauck asked Katyal about putting together a group to discuss challenges to Obamacare. “Could you figure out the right person or people for that?” Hauck asked. “Absolutely right on. Let’s crush them,” Katyal responded. “I’ll speak with Elena and designate someone.”

However, following the May 10, 2010, announcement that President Obama would nominate Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court, Katyal position changed significantly as he began to suggest that Kagan had been “walled off” from Obamacare discussions.

For example, the documents included the following May 17, 2010, exchange between Kagan, Katyal and Tracy Schmaler, a DOJ spokesperson:

Shmaler to Katyal, Subject HCR [Health Care Reform] litigation: “Has Elena been involved in any of that to the extent SG [Solicitor General’s] office was consulted?...

Katyal to Schmaler: “No she has never been involved in any of it. I’ve run it for the office, and have never discussed the issues with her one bit.”

Katyal (forwarded to Kagan): “This is what I told Tracy about Health Care.”

Kagan to Schmaler: “This needs to be coordinated. Tracy you should not say anything about this before talking to me.”

Included among the documents is a Vaughn index, a privilege log which describes records that are being withheld in whole or in part by the Justice Department. The index provides further evidence of Kagan’s involvement in Obamacare-related discussions.

For example, Kagan was included in an email chain (March 17–18, 2010) in which the following subject was discussed: “on what categories of legal arguments may arise and should be prepared in the anticipated lawsuit.” The subject of the email was “Health Care.” Another email chain on March 21, 2010, entitled “Health care litigation meeting,” references an “internal government meeting regarding the expected litigation.” Kagan is both author and recipient in the chain.

The index also references a series of email exchanges on May 17, 2010, between Kagan and Obama White House lawyers and staff regarding Kagan’s “draft answer” to potential questions about recusal during the Supreme Court confirmation process. The White House officials involved include: Susan Davies, Associate White House Counsel; Daniel Meltzer, then-Principal Deputy White House Counsel; Cynthia Hogan, Counsel to the Vice President; and Ronald Klain, then-Chief of Staff for Vice President Biden. The DOJ is refusing to produce this draft answer.

Judicial Watch describes itself as conducting an ongoing investigation of the matter.

The documents obtained so far fail to produce absolute “smoking gun” proof that Kagan violated the law in failing to recuse herself, but all the evidence of collaboration over accounts is extremely suggestive.

Ace aptly observes:

Just a crazy question here—has anyone said “We’ve got to get our stories straight” when everyone involved was planning on telling the truth?

Are “coordinated” stories generally more credible than uncoordinated, unscripted ones? I guess the Obama White House thinks so.

“Coordination”

It’s a hip, smart way to say “lying.”

I think he is making an excellent point, but he needs to expand his argument a bit and elaborate.

Epstein cites, as a particularly striking example, the kind of negotiations which have become customary in the case of building permits.

These days, to begin any new building project, every developer must obtain a sheaf of permits that go far beyond the relatively mundane functions of avoiding falling bricks or aligning curb cuts to secure entryways for indoor parking. Indeed, today’s new norm calls for exhaustive hearings before planning commissions and community boards; these investigations are intended to probe the size of a project, its exterior design, the number and type of apartment units, access for the disabled, the amount of affordable housing (with complex subsidies from both the government and the developer), project financing (with government guarantees), proper hiring practices (with appropriate set-asides for women and minority workers), and multiple inspections for just about everything.

Yet just as all these requirements can be imposed, they can also be waived. The waivers, though, often come at a price — or, more accurately, a land-use exaction. For instance, a cash-strapped local government may be willing to waive the requirement that a developer set aside a certain percentage of apartment units to rent at below-market rates to the poor. The catch, however, is that the developer must agree to provide funding to build or refurbish a public school, a public park, or a nearby train station. The developer almost inevitably yields to the exaction, because he knows that, if he does not, he faces prolonged resistance and constrictive red tape from the government — obstacles that could eventually sink his project. But the requests for exactions may come from many varied groups with different expectations and demands. Parents may want a new school or park, commuters may want a new train station, cyclists may want new bike lanes, the arts community a new public performance space, homeless advocates a new shelter, and so on. It may not be possible for the government or the developer to satisfy all of the groups simultaneously — and the attempt to do so can tie up development for years, or cause projects to be scrapped altogether. This phenomenon drives up the number of project failures, which in turn shrinks the supply of housing, which then drives up housing costs and puts even greater pressure on both the developers and the regulators.

Read the whole thing.

If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.

It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers.

Read the whole thing.

All you need to know about government bureaucracy:

** US Government regulations on sale of cabbage: 26,911 words.

Hat tip to Theo Spark.

85-Year-Old Philip F. Laverriere Sr. has been head of the city of Lawrence, Masachusetts’ non-profit anti-poverty agency since 1974. 37 years later, Lawrence still has poverty, but the Greater Lawrence Community Action Council, funded almost entirely by federal and state tax dollars, has grown into a $30 million-a-year operation with 310 employees overseeing an array of poverty programs including child care; immigration assistance; Head Start; low-income heating and weatherization; lead abatement; and even a youth baseball league. Over the years, Mr. Laverriere’s annual salary, allowances, and benefits have grown to $144,641.

The local Eagle-Tribune investigated between Jan. 28 and March 14 (as the result of a tip) and found Laverriere was working 15 hour weeks, visiting his office weekdays between 9 AM and 12 Noon, then retiring to spend the entire afternoon relaxing at his Elks Lodge.

Via Moonbattery.

Hot Air Pundit: U.S. Debt Jumped $72 Billion Same Day The U.S. House Voted to Cut Spending $6 Billion.