Today’s Wall Street Journal editorial page thinks the outgoing 109th Congress managed to do a few things right in its closing session.

One of the items the Journal mentioned gave me pause. Apparently, Congress opened 8.3 million acres of the Outer Continental Shelf for drilling. The thought came to mind: It was closed? When? By what specific legislation? And following what debate? I have no idea. But everywhere one looks in today’s America, whatever it may be, it’s currently illegal, forbidden, verboten. And the opportunity to do anything will require special legislation.

It’s been a long time, I expect, since somebody took a cigarette, asked for permission to light up, and received the once-common reply: “It’s a free country.”

The Evening Standard has news of Britain’s Labour Government’s latest crime fighting initiative.

Parents could be forced to go to special classes to learn to sing their children nursery rhymes, a minister said.

Those who fail to read stories or sing to their youngsters threaten their children’s future and the state must put them right, Children’s Minister Beverley Hughes said.

Their children’s well-being is at risk ‘unless we act’, she declared.

And Mrs Hughes said the state would train a new ‘parenting workforce’ to ensure parents who fail to do their duty with nursery rhymes are found and ‘supported’.

The call for state intervention in the minute details of family life followed a series of Labour efforts to reduce anti-social behaviour and improve educational standards by imposing rigorous controls on the lives of the youngest children.

Mrs Hughes has established a national curriculum to set down how babies are taught to speak in childcare from the age of three months.

Her efforts have gone alongside a push by other ministers to determine exactly how parents treat their children down to how they should brush their teeth…

This autumn is likely to see an extension of parenting orders that can force parents to attend parenting classes so that they can be used on the say so of local councils against parents.

For the first time, parenting orders are likely to be directed against parents whose children have committed no criminal offence.

The threat of action against parents who fail to sing nursery rhymes was unveiled by Mrs Hughes as she gave the first details of Mr Blair’s ‘national parenting academy’, a body that will train teachers, psychologists and social workers to intervene in the lives of families and become the ‘parenting workforce’.

We’ve all heard of “the nanny-state,” but really!

The Times provides a typical story of fireworks misuse by an ordinary citizen illustrating precisely why we all need the nanny state to ban them in order to protect us from ourselves. After all, absolutely anyone might try this.

Daniel Gross performs a little back-of-the-envelope analysis of just how much liberal big government adds to the cost of living in New York City.

Personally, I think his estimate is far too conservative. The housing differential is much, much higher than 14%.

A 2002 study by Michael H. Schill, then a professor at New York University Law School, concluded that a host of factors—regulations, zoning, unions, the building code—made the cost of building a home one-third higher in New York City than in 21 other cities. Nationwide, housing and shelter eat up 42 percent of a typical consumer’s disposable income. For a buyer to acquire New York housing that’s equivalent in quality to the same type elsewhere, he would have to use 56 percent of his disposable income. The New York dollar loses 14 cents: 86 cents.

An annual study by the city of Washington, D.C., compares tax burdens in large cities. A hypothetical family of four living on $150,000 in New York would pay the nation’s highest combination of sales, auto, income, and property taxes: about $22,635, or 15.1 percent of income. By comparison, the national median is $14,219, or 9.5 percent. That’s another $8,416 extra per year here, or another 5.6 cents. Our dollar is down to 80.4 cents.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says overall prices here are 9.9 percent higher than the rest of the country. Remove the premium New Yorkers pay for housing and the currency is debased another 4.4 cents, to 76 cents.

But you can buy a dishwasher at 3:00 AM! And there’s home delivery Vietnamese!

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

US District Judge James Munley yesterday issued a temporary restraining order blocking enforcement of the Pennsylvania Anthracite Region city of Hazleton’s pair of anti-Illegal Immigration ordinances:

Illegal Immigration Relief Act

Ordinance 2006-13

Jurist, University of Pittsburgh School of Law summary

But, even so, Hazleton’s ordinance is driving people and businesses away from what would otherwise be rapidly turning into a mining ghost town.

On Wednesday, a tough, first-of-its-kind law targeting illegal immigrants was to take effect in this small hillside city in northeastern Pennsylvania. A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the measure for at least two weeks, but the evidence suggests many Hispanics _ illegal or otherwise _ have already left.

That, in turn, has hobbled the city’s Hispanic business district, where some shops have closed and others are struggling to stay open.

“Before, it was a nice place,” said Soto, 27, who came to the United States from the Dominican Republic a decade ago. “Now, we have a war against us. I am legal but I feel the pressure also.

Read the whole thing.

Earlier posting.

Thomas Sowell writes:

Although socialism has long claimed to be for the poor, it has probably done more damage, on net balance, to the poor than to the rich. After all, the rich have enough money to leave the country if they think the socialists are going to do them any serious harm.

Some of our own rich have already had their money leave the country, to be sheltered from the higher taxes that limousine liberals say we should all pay. Meanwhile, the liberal media give them kudos for their selfless advocacy of higher taxes on higher income people, forgetting that these are not taxes on wealth.

Most of the people in the upper income brackets are not rich and do not have wealth sheltered offshore. They are typically working people who have finally reached their peak earning years after many years of far more modest incomes — and now see much of what they have worked for siphoned off by politicians, to the accompaniment of lofty rhetoric.

The rich have learned to adapt socialist policies to their own benefit.

Sowell also identifies the factor behind much of the astonishing rise in real estate prices in many regions of the country in recent years: artificial shortages produced by zoning and building regulations designed to preclude development.

A very different form of socialism for the rich protects their communities from even the dangers of a free market. A whole array of laws and policies prevents outsiders from buying up property near them, even when these outsiders are ready to pay prices determined by supply and demand, rather than by eminent domain.

For example, the “open space” laws that have spread across the country to protect upscale communities represent one of the biggest collectivizations of land since the days of Josef Stalin.

Upscale residents say that they have a right to protect “our community.” But not even the rich own the whole community.

They own what they paid for — their own individual property. But they get the government to collectivize the often vastly larger surrounding property, in order to keep the unwashed masses from settling near them and spoiling their views.

Moreover, they wrap themselves in the mantle of idealism while doing this and denounce the “selfishness” of those who would stoop to building homes or apartments to house others, just to make money.

Hat tip to José Guardia.

Socialism is the philosophy of sissies, and now that everyone (including Socialists) recognizes that Socialism applied economically is a disaster, the energies of ameliorists tend to find outlet, not in the levelling of wealth, but in the elimination of any imaginable form of risk.

The New York Times reports that even Bill Callaghan, head of Britain’s Health and Safety Commission

believes that many of the decisions made in the name of health and safety in Britain are indeed asinine. These include schools requiring children to wear protective goggles when playing with nuts that have fallen from trees; schools banning bandages because of fears of latex allergies; and village fairs forbidding people to sell homemade cakes in case they contain contaminated eggs.

But the commission is blamed for them anyway. It set up a myth-busting page on its Web site explaining, for instance, that it was not involved in the decision last April to cancel a St. George’s Day breakfast in Wiltshire, after local officials ruled that the volunteer cooks were not formally trained in egg preparation…

Children who leave their coats and bags in special containers on field trips to the Science Museum in London, for example, are instructed by posted signs not to put anything on the lids, on account of Health and Safety rules. People buying cups of tea on British trains are ordered to carry them in paper bags for safety reasons — whether they want to or not.

Sailing down the placid Thames a year ago as part of the celebration marking the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, the actor playing Lord Nelson was required to accessorize his vintage admiral’s outfit with a contemporary life preserver, which tended to spoil the effect.

Nor are the Health and Safety Commission offices, at the end of Southwark Bridge in East London, immune to dispensing their own cautionary advice. Along with security passes, visitors are issued photocopied pamphlets offering instructions on how to identify the sound of the fire alarm (a “continuous ringing of bells”); where to go if a fire does break out (convene at the location marked on the map on the back); and what to do if they feel sick or fall down (there is a first-aid room on the first floor; all injuries, “no matter how minor,” must be reported).

Do you suppose Etonians are still allowed to play the Wall Game?

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

Madrid’s regional government has banned one third of the models from participating in a fashion show, because “excessive thinness might send the wrong message.”

Agence France

Europe and the state of California remain locked in fierce competition for the most absurd government action.

The federal government killed the Anthracite Coal industry of Northeastern Pennsylvania in the aftermath of WWII by environmental regulations, which prevented pumping water from the mines into the already thoroughy polluted regional watercourses. Minewater would continue to flow from abandoned collieries, the Shenandoah and Mahanoy Creeks and the Big Catawissa would still flow orange, but the collieries on which the region’s economy depended could no longer work below the water table, and thus could no longer profitably mine coal. Maple Hill, my hometown’s last colliery, closed down in 1954.

A few irredentists including one uncle of mine, having no other options, continued to mine coal in bootleg operations.

Bootleg mining started during the depression. Anthracite coal was so ubiquitous, and so near the surface in some places, that in those days a man could go just up on the mountain with a pick and shovel and dig coal. The land and mineral rights belonged to the Girard Estate or the Reading Coal Company, which had little ability to do anything about it, and these informal and illegal operations were called “coalholes” or “bootleg mines.”

In the modern era, bootleg miners commonly paid a small fee to the Company or Estate, and had permission to dig coal. Typically, they were “robbing the pillars,” i.e. taking coal left to support the roof of mines long ago mined out and abandoned. If they were careless, too greedy, or merely unlucky, as in the case of three bootleg coal miners near Shepton in the early 1970s, they could wind up buried by a cave-in.

These days, hard coal is back in fashion, being widely used for electrical generaton, and the small number of surviving bootleg miners are making a few bucks, but the government is closing them down, enforcing more new regulations with an iron hand.

Marc Brodzic, a native of New Jersey (probably having roots in the Region), has made a documentary titled: Hard Coal: Last of the Bootleg Miners about the near-pending extinction of the last dozen surviving bootleg mining operations.

The film was exhibited at the Philadelphia Film Festival and at the Waterfront Film Festival in Saugatuck, Michigan.

The spectacular scenery, a typically booming economy, and a climate which permits you to grow lemons and avocados in your backyard makes Californians seem rather spoiled to the rest of us. Californians typically express their appreciation for all their good fortune by the cultivation as a local art form of cloaking an unlimited sense of entitlement in the rhetoric of idealism.

How do you keep the other fellow (who actually owns the land) from doing anything with it that might deprive you of the pleasure of looking at it undeveloped? You just come up with an appropriate worthy cause: protecting some purportedly endangered amphibian, rodent or weed; avoiding sprawl; maintaining open space; and voila! You get to keep out the riff raff, and be spiritually enlightened too.

Today’s Wall Street Journal describes the plight of the Mexican immigrant worker in Monterey County renting out a room in the 1000 sq. ft. house that cost him half a million dollars, and still spending 70% of his income on his mortgage payment.

Meanwhile, Reuters describes the accelerating middle class exodus from idyllic coastal California to the baking hot interior Central Valley (renowned for its 110 degree temperatures) in search of affordable housing.

OAKLAND, California – Father Mark Wiesner has grown accustomed to wishing parishioners bon voyage as they flee the San Francisco area’s high housing costs for California’s Central Valley, where developers are increasingly transforming farms and ranches into a new suburbia.

“So many young couples I marry have to go to Modesto or Tracy to start their married lives,” said Wiesner, a Catholic priest in Oakland on the San Francisco Bay. “They simply can’t afford to stay here in the Bay area and to buy a single-family dwelling.”

Tracy and Modesto are 50 and 80 miles east of Oakland respectively. Both have seen blistering growth in recent years amid a middle-class exodus from California’s famed coastal urban centers in search of affordable housing.

Analysts say the middle-class flight will press on even if coastal home prices sag amid a national housing slowdown. Home prices near the state’s coastline would need to collapse to make buying a home there possible for many households.

Barring a collapse, ever more Californians will call the state’s Central Valley home because homes there are relatively affordable. July’s median home price in San Francisco was $771,000, compared with $438,000 in San Joaquin County roughly 60 miles to the east, according to real estate information service DataQuick Information Systems.

Southern California is seeing a similar exodus to Riverside and San Bernardino counties, known as the region’s Inland Empire, from Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties.

“Having been in the house market in Los Angeles, I can tell you a house with little bit of privacy and space to call your own is pretty hard to come by,” said economist Christopher Thornberg of the consulting firm Beacon Economics. “For many people getting out to that Inland Empire is the only way to really have a backyard for the kids.”

Jill Stewart, in the LA Daily News, denounces some of California’s latest absurd legislative proposals.

IN 1966, California voters created a full-time Legislature after Speaker Jesse Unruh promised a dazzlingly “professional” Legislature instead of part-timers earning $6,000 yearly. By 2007, legislators will earn $145,097 in wages and per diem, costing roughly $200 million annually, yet taxpayers get a dubious “product” in return: mountains of pointless laws.

We are drowning in 47,000 new laws enacted since 1966, covering everything from the size of typeface on official notices on employee bulletin boards to the arcane timing dictating when you must use your windshield wipers.

You couldn’t know this, but it’s illegal to throw away your cell phone. Lawbreaker!..

in 2004, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made news. He vetoed 311 bills. His vetoes caused legislators momentary pause. They sent him “only” 961 laws in 2005. Arnold let 729 become law — a “record low” in our times.

He has vetoed bills to strip independence from charter schools, to tell schools what sort of sprinklers to install, to protect grape pickers from eating unwashed grapes. He vetoed Assembly Bill 13 to prohibit “Redskins” as a school mascot, and AB 723 to require “tolerance training” of our kids — by our racially divided teachers. He vetoed AB 391 to pay “unemployment” to locked-out workers seeking raises (noting that “unemployment” checks are for people who lose jobs due to actions not their own — not for clever workers in the midst of negotiations). And many more.

Now, the Legislature is frenetically considering up to 1,700 extra laws before its Aug. 31 deadline — an embarrassing brew of self-serving special-interest claptrap that’s intrusive, abusive, regressive or downright offensive.

Assembly Bill 2641 by Democrat Joe Coto of San Jose, with scads of bipartisan coauthors, is the Legislature’s greedy bid to lure campaign riches from multimillionaire tribes who back the bill. It lets the “Native American Heritage Commission” delay any ground-disturbing activity in California — think of the possibilities! — that unearths remotely arguable “burial” items. It lets this commission, promoting tribal interests, decide what’s a “burial ground” and halt projects.

In this bad dream, landowners must negotiate with designated “descendants” of bones. This “commission” should have no more power over your land than the chamber of commerce. With huge Assembly support, 42-2, it heads to the Senate floor.

Senate Bill 1523, by the bombastically business-hating Democrat Richard Alarcón of Sun Valley, seeks to punish Wal-Mart. It would require any city or county, before allowing a store bigger than 100,000 square feet (Wal-Mart), to order an “economic impact” report. The purpose is to create a costly barrier to a store that’s wildly popular with working folks. With a lopsided Senate Democratic vote of 24-12, it heads to the Assembly floor.

Another odious “Thank God we’re not poor” bill is SB 1578 by Democrat Alan Lowenthal of Long Beach, making it “a crime” to tether a dog to a stationary object longer than three hours. If you’ve spent time in South Central, Richmond or Compton, you know that families tether dogs at home to ward off gangs and dealers. California laws already ban inhumane treatment. This bill springs from spoiled brats earning $145,097. It even exempts the upwardly mobile: In recreation settings, dogs can be tethered all day. (Let the poor eat cake; the rest of us are rafting.) It passed the Senate 21-14, and heads to the Assembly floor.

And there’s AB 2360 from Democrat Ted Lieu of El Segundo, who snapped to it when Tom Cruise enthused over using an ultrasound device to watch his unborn child. This silly bill bans the sale of ultrasound machines to all but professionals. No word yet on preventing parental purchase of tall chairs, boom boxes and furniture with sharp corners. With big bipartisan Assembly support of 63-10, it heads to the Senate floor.

And many hundreds more. If you let them, politicians suffocate you with rules. I’m praying the governor gives us a new record low for California laws in 2006.

American oil companies are not permitted to hunt for oil on the continental shelf adjacent to the Florida coast, but Canadian companies are already pumping 19,000 barrels a day 90 miles from Key West, and Communist Cuba is now exploring for oil even closer, aided by Canada, Spain, and China.

Washington Times