Raise taxes on pot, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines...

What happened in 1930 that suddenly gave the repeal movement political muscle? The answer is the Great Depression and the ravages that it inflicted on federal income-tax revenues.

Prior to the creation in 1913 of the national income tax, about a third of Uncle Sam's annual revenue came from liquor taxes. (The bulk of Uncle Sam's revenues came from customs duties.) Not so after 1913. Especially after the income tax surprised politicians during World War I with its incredible ability to rake in tax revenue, the importance of liquor taxation fell precipitously.

By 1920, the income tax supplied two-thirds of Uncle Sam's revenues and nine times more revenue than was then supplied by liquor taxes and customs duties combined. ...

Before the income tax, Congress effectively ignored such calls because to prohibit alcohol sales then would have hit Congress hard in the place it guards most zealously: its purse. But once a new and much more intoxicating source of revenue was discovered, the cost to politicians of pandering to the puritans and other anti-liquor lobbies dramatically fell...

From 1930 to 1931, income-tax revenues fell by 15 percent.

In 1932 they fell another 37 percent; 1932 income-tax revenues were 46 percent lower than just two years earlier. And by 1933 they were fully 60 percent lower than in 1930.

With no end of the Depression in sight, Washington got anxious for a substitute source of revenue.

That source was liquor sales....

So, if the history of alcohol prohibition is a guide, drug prohibition will not end merely because there are many sound, sensible and humane reasons to end it. Instead, it will end only if and when Congress gets desperate for another revenue source.

Illinois' coming financial implosion

Chris Edwards writes:

The report by the Commercial Club of Chicago begins: “Illinois is headed toward financial implosion–Illinois’ debt and unrecognized obligations have grown at an enormous rate.”

The study puts the state’s pension debt at $10 billion, its unfunded pension costs at $46 billion, its unfunded employee health care costs at $48 billion, and its unpaid Medicaid bills at $2 billion. The total costs that will be pushed onto tomorrow’s taxpayers without reforms is an enormous $106 billion, or $8,800 per every person in the state of Illinois.

As the report notes, the Illinois state constitution requires a balanced budget, but state policymakers are routinely abusing that requirement by financing spending with debt and imposing growing unfunded obligations on future generations.

Teaser

Every once in a while on NPR they use a quote to get us to listen. For awhile it was this:

I cannot think of another story I have ever covered where what seem to be the facts are so far away from the public debate.

This is what Adam Davidson was talking about. More here.

The Fable of the Keys

On whether the Dvorak keyboard is truly superior to QWERTY.

Lucky me?

After my laptop crashed, I slipstreamed a Windows XP CD with SP1 & 2 on another computer. I think I used ISO Recorder Power Toy, although currently that doesn't seem to be available. I don't remember if I used the slipstreamed version on my laptop, but recently when I tried to login to my office computer, Windows logged off immediately, so I googled and found this. Thank you Sunny Kummarasetti! Everything worked OK, except I had several dozen updates to do, and they would not install. Another search, and I found that I had to follow "Mac"'s advice:

Try re-registering the windows update components. This may help fix a corrupt installer


1. Click on Start and Run,
2. Type "REGSVR32 WUAPI.DLL" (without quotation marks) and press Enter.
3. Should get the message "DllRegisterServer in WUAPI.DLL succeeded" Click OK.
4. Repeat above for each of the following:

REGSVR32 WUAUENG1.DLL
REGSVR32 ATL.DLL
REGSVR32 WUPS2.DLL
REGSVR32 WUCLTUI.DLL
REGSVR32 WUPS.DLL
REGSVR32 WUWEB.DLL
REGSVR32 WUAUENG.DLL

5. Reboot

Success! (for now...)

Centuries of Cultural Foundations

Professor [Gregory Clark]’s argument implies that the current outsourcing trend is a small blip in a larger historical pattern of diverging productivity and living standards across nations. Wealthy countries face the most serious competitive challenges from other wealthy regions, or from nations on the cusp of development, and not from places with the lowest wages. Shortages of quality labor, for instance, are already holding back India in international competition.

...

Professor Clark argues that as late as the 18th century, most Europeans had not exceeded the standard of living in hunter-gatherer societies. Until recent times, the early advantages of Europe did not allow it to escape what economists call the Malthusian trap, in which rising populations periodically offset temporary gains in living standards.

The turning point came when England, and some other parts of Europe, managed a small but persistently positive rate of growth, starting around the 17th century. Pro-business values spread through English society. The Industrial Revolution was not so much a revolution as a continual building of small improvements, and indeed its history shows the difficulty of achieving regular growth. The explosion of technology came only in the late 19th century, well after many incremental gains.

...According to Professor Clark, the relative advantage of a highly disciplined and properly acculturated work force is greater for the more complex production processes of the modern world. Low morale and lax discipline will curtail simple factory production but the problem is far worse as production and management become more complex. The poorer countries remain stuck at the bottom as growing populations mean fewer resources for everyone else. Paradoxically, advances in sanitation and medical care, by saving lives, have driven down well-being for the average person. The population is rising in most of sub-Saharan Africa, but living standards have fallen below hunter-gatherer times and 40 percent below the average British living standard just before the Industrial Revolution. The upshot is this: The problem with foreign aid is not so much corruption but rather that the aid brings some real benefits and enables higher populations.

Professor Clark questions whether the poorest parts of the world will ever develop. Japan has climbed out of poverty, and now China is improving rapidly, but Dr. Clark views these successes as built upon hundreds of years of earlier cultural foundations. Formal education is no panacea, since well-functioning institutions are needed for it to be effective.

But the cultural foundations were evil patriarchal Confucian cultural foundations!

fake donor

Some 12,000 more people have registered as organ donors in the Netherlands since a Dutch TV hoax that featured a "competition" for a kidney.

The Big Donor Show was revealed to be a hoax as the fake donor was apparently about to reveal her choice of patient.

A fake donor? If we could still get our organs from China, the organ itself could be fake.

Fair and Balanced?

According to Mark J. Perry, wages and benefits for hourly workers of the big three American companies averaged over $140,000 in 2006, whereas Japanese auto manufacturers in the US paid $96,000 per year. Meanwhile, college professors in 2006 were supposed to be enjoying an average annual compensation $92,973 (average salary nationally + benefits). That's more than I'll ever make. But my point is, NPR's report fails to mention the relatively high salaries of US auto workers.

update
The NYT gives us this nugget:
"Workers with less time on the job were offered buyout deals of up to $140,000, which included a pension but no health care."

It doesn't mention the average salary.

Meanwhile, I can imagine the outcry: "$140,000! That's just what I make in a year!"

Moderate Muslims eager to build ties with the West through economic development

Although almost all Muslims believe the West should show more respect for Islam, radicals are more likely to feel that the West threatens and attempts to control their way of life. Moderates, on the other hand, are more eager to build ties with the West through economic development. This divergence of responses offers policymakers a key opportunity to develop strategies to prevent the moderate mainstream from sliding away, and to check the persuasive power of those who would do us harm.

Suppression of civil liberties leads to terrorism

class="times">...the conventional wisdom that poverty breeds terrorism is backed by surprisingly little hard evidence. "The evidence is nearly unanimous in rejecting either material deprivation or inadequate education as an important cause of support for terrorism or of participation in terrorist activities," [Princeton economist Alan Krueger] asserts...

So what is the cause? Suppression of civil liberties and political rights, Mr. Krueger hypothesizes. "When nonviolent means of protest are curtailed," he says, "malcontents appear to be more likely to turn to terrorist tactics."

Which -- ironically, given that Mr. Krueger is no fan of the president's actual policies at home or abroad -- is close to Mr. Bush's rhetoric: "Liberty has got the capacity to change enemies into allies."

Gorey pandering

Via Reason:

Al Gore’s massive personal energy consumption, fueled by his heated sidewalk leading to his heated pool, is well documented. Former Pink Floyd front man Roger Waters said he played the Giants Stadium gig because “anything that brings attention to this problem for our children and our grandchildren is a good thing.” So what, personally, is he doing to cut back his energy consumption “for our children?” “So far, very little,” he tells Rolling Stone. “I drink warm beer, obviously, which helps.” Has Roger built a personal Wall between Us and Them?

I hate to be cynical, but maybe saving the planet is only one of many goals sought at Live Earth. For some, performing was like a big group therapy session to assuage carbon-induced guilt. Others, like Roger Waters, might have seen an opportunity to recapture, at least for one set, past rock star glories.

For Al Gore, leading the global warming bandwagon may be the best way to rehabilitate a failed presidential candidate’s standing with liberal voters. Pandering to important voting blocks is nothing new for politicians, and Gore is one of the best.

Remember the Parents Music Resource Center, co-founded by Tipper Gore a few years before her husband ran for president in 1988? The PMRC was the perfect political platform for the Gores to establish their deep concern for “the children” being exposed to suggestive lyrics in popular music. Madonna, today’s environmental crusader and Live Earth star, was then branded one of the “Filthy Fifteen” by Tipper and the PMRC. Congressional hearings were scheduled, and Senators’ hands were wrung. The quote printed above was in fact Senator Al Gore’s opening statement at the 1985 Senate hearing, excoriating music industry executives for pedaling dirty music to kids. In the process, he established his bonafides as a “New Democrat” right in time for his first national campaign.

Today, Al Gore gets along famously with the music industry, and has apparently gotten over his earlier concerns about lyrical content. “Music,” he now says, “is a universal language that can reach people in ways that no other medium can.” I agree with that, and humbly suggest that Tipper download Hamburg Live Earth headliner Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice.” She probably won’t like it, but hey, we all have to make sacrifices for the environment.

So what was 9/11 all about?

According to Robert A. Pape's "database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 through 2003 - 315 in all", which "excludes attacks authorized by a national government",

The data show that there is far less of a connection between suicide terrorism and religious fundamentalism than most people think.

The leading instigators of suicide attacks are the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion. This group committed 76 of the 315 incidents, more than Hamas (54) or Islamic Jihad (27).

...

What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks actually have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in seeking aid from abroad, but is rarely the root cause.

Three general patterns in the data support these conclusions.

• First, nearly all suicide terrorist attacks - 301 of the 315 in the period I studied - took place as part of organized political or military campaigns.
• Second, democracies are uniquely vulnerable to suicide terrorists; America, France, India, Israel, Russia, Sri Lanka and Turkey have been the targets of almost every suicide attack of the past two decades.
• Third, suicide terrorist campaigns are directed toward a strategic objective: From Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to Kashmir to Chechnya, the sponsors of every campaign - 18 organizations in all - are seeking to establish or maintain political self-determination.

Which party creates opportunity and which one seeks merely to divide up the spoils?

Noting that the unemployment rate is a low 4.5% overall and that tthe Associated Press reported on Friday that it's only 2% for college-educated people,

Donald L. Luskin goes on to ask,

Why don't the Republicans do more to connect with those who benefit from low taxes, free trade and expanding markets? What if they laid claim to having lowered the unemployment rate to 2% for those who do something for themselves, such as graduate from college?...At least it would spark a more productive debate about which party creates opportunity and which one seeks merely to divide up the spoils.

That part I agree with. Omitted in my ellipsis above, he snarks parenthetically,

graduating from college doesn't require much in the ways of new skills or actual knowledge.

I'd say that depends on the field of study. Students who learn, say, Chinese, do learn a new skill.

Night now stretches forth her leaden sceptre

Rick Nevin's theory is that

lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children's exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.

What makes Nevin's work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

"It is stunning how strong the association is," Nevin said in an interview. "Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead."

Hillary the protectionist

One of the central tenets of Clintonomics was its embrace of globalization; indeed, a convincing argument can be made that Clinton did as much to advance the cause of free trade as any president of either party in the past 50 years. Yet as far as I can see, none of the top-tier Democratic runners has come close to offering a full-throated endorsement of this aspect of Clintonism. And although that may come as no surprise with regard to Obama or John Edwards, the distance between Hillary and her husband on the topic is both noteworthy and telling—not just about the brass-tacks electoral calculations behind her policy positions, but about the shifts now under way in Democratic economic orthodoxy.

...

She has even repeatedly spouted skepticism about the wisdom of NAFTA—while stopping short of blaming her husband for its deficiencies. “NAFTA was inherited by the Clinton administration,” she informed Time magazine. “I believe in the general principles it represented, but what we have learned is that we have to drive a tougher bargain.”

It’s tempting to mock this last point as a nakedly disingenuous reading of history, but … no, actually, it’s irresistible. Though Clinton did, in fact, inherit NAFTA from the Bush 41 régime, he campaigned for its passage as if his life depended on it, taking on the out-front protectionist bloc in the Democratic party at a time when his standing was far from solid—an act of considerable political courage and even greater political skill.

...

“In all my time in Washington,” says Rob Shapiro, chairman of the New Democrat Network Globalization Initiative and a key adviser to Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, “I’ve never seen less support for open trade across this town than today.”

...

[An] unaligned Democratic operative, who believes that Clinton has been on a roll of late, suggests that another factor besides Iraq is at work in shaping her views on trade. “There really are three overlapping issues, all of which reflect on the face America shows the world: trade, immigration, and Iraq,” says this operative, who worked in the Clinton White House. “It’s hard to be on the unpopular side of all three of those issues. So if Hillary is going to be liberal on immigration, she has to be where she is on trade.”

Take this with a grain of salt

Most suicide bombers are Muslim

Suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, but according to Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions, when religion is involved, the attackers are always Muslim. Why? The surprising answer is that Muslim suicide bombing has nothing to do with Islam or the Quran (except for two lines). It has a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex.

What distinguishes Islam from other major religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By allowing some men to monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of available women. If 50 percent of men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don't get any wives at all.

So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates. By doing so, they have little to lose and much to gain compared with men who already have wives. Across all societies, polygyny makes men violent, increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even after controlling for such obvious factors as economic development, economic inequality, population density, the level of democracy, and political factors in the region.

However, polygyny itself is not a sufficient cause of suicide bombing. Societies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are much more polygynous than the Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa. And they do have very high levels of violence. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from a long history of continuous civil wars—but not suicide bombings.

The other key ingredient is the promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in Islam. The prospect of exclusive access to virgins may not be so appealing to anyone who has even one mate on earth, which strict monogamy virtually guarantees. However, the prospect is quite appealing to anyone who faces the bleak reality on earth of being a complete reproductive loser.

It is the combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven that motivates many young Muslim men to commit suicide bombings. Consistent with this explanation, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but other (nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. And nearly all suicide bombers are single.

Could be, but I'm a little skeptical. This is from Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature; #1 reads: Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them) and starts, "Long before TV—in 15th- and 16th- century Italy, and possibly two millennia ago—women were dying their hair blond." What gets me is the "blond" part. For most humans, that hasn't been an option.

Startling new fact about the Iceman

The man hurried through a forest he knew well, wincing from the pain in his injured right hand and pausing occasionally to listen for sounds that he was being pursued. As he fled up the slope, the yellow pollen of the hornbeam blossoms fell like an invisible rain, salting the water and food he consumed when he stopped to rest. Five thousand years later, the Neolithic hunter we call the Iceman would still bear traces of this ancient dusting inside his body—a microscopic record of the time of year it was when he passed through this forest and into the nearby mountains, where fate would finally catch up with him...

Although we still don't know exactly what happened up there on that alpine ridge, we now know that he was murdered, and died very quickly, in the rocky hollow where his body was found.

It will take some time to find the perpetrator.

Parable of Gasoline and Milk

It is perhaps even more instructive to see how the government regulates these two commodities. Oil companies are constantly harassed by government as the world's great Satans, with windfall profits taxes and price gouging regulations, all on an industry that barely makes a 10% profit on sales in the best of times. Milk, on the other hand, gets huge government subsidies and handouts, including a price support system that is both arcane and incredibly costly. So Oil: windfall profits taxes. Milk, which is pricier but easier to produce: price supports. Does anyone really want to argue that regulation is a result of real market realities rather than just populist pandering for and against favored and unfavored groups?

Crises everywhere

Nothing beats a "crisis" to rally support for a big government effort. Right statists constantly drum up moral panics about sex and drugs. Also, Mexicans are "invading" and terrorists will surely blow us all up while singing the Star Spangled Banner at baseball games if we don't allow the executive Jack Bauer to torture military detainees whenever he wants. Similarly, left statists warn that the shores of Manhattan will be inundated by rising oceans and very cute baby polar bears will die in droves. Also, inequality is soaring, threatening the foundations of democracy. And the middle class lives in terrifying "economic insecurity." And so on.

By comparison to people on both the left and the right who would like the government to do something, libertarians can seem either ostrich-like, pollyanna-ish, or both. I suspect the "everything is going to be OK so the government can just stay out of it" bias played a key role in motivating many conservatives and libertarians to be favorably disposed toward skeptical findings about global warming. Let's call this "libertarian optimism bias." But I also suspect that the "OMG! there is a huge crisis so the government has to do something NOW" bias is at play at least as strongly in a number of important issues. Let's call this "statist pessimism bias."