Government – Page 106 – artdiamondblog.com

Press Routinely Puffs Up Phony Scares

(p. 107) In the winter of 2001, . . . , a New York Times page-one lead story declared in breathless phrasing that the White House had just “canceled” regulations limiting arsenic in drinking water; taking their leads from the Times, all national newscasts that night declared that arsenic protection had been “canceled.” The Times went on to editorialize that government actually wanted Americans to “drink poisoned water” because this would serve the sinister interests of corporations, though how the conspiracy would serve sinister corporate interests was not explained, since the arsenic in drinking water occurs naturally. Government poisoning your water–a report you don’t want to miss tonight!

Except that nothing had been canceled. The White House had held up a pending rule to make arsenic protection more strict; while the pending rule was reviewed, prior rules remained in effect. The Environmental Protection Agency continued regulating arsenic in drinking water during the entire period when such protection was supposedly “canceled.” Then, in November 2001, the White House ended its review and put the much stricter rule into force. The New York Times did not play this as (p. 108) a headline lead, where the original scare story had been; enactment of the strict rule was buried in a small box on page A18. Network newscasts that had presented a shocking scandal of “canceled arsenic protection” as their big story also said little or nothing when instead stronger rules went into effect. This sort of puffing up of a phony scare, followed by studious ignoring of subsequent events that deflate the scare, is not rare. It is standard operating procedure in many quarters of journalism, including at the top.

Source:
Easterbrook, Gregg. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. Paperback ed. New York: Random House, 2004.
(Note: ellipsis added; italics in original.)

Energy Regulations Give Us Less Choice and Worse Washing Machines

(p. A17) It might not have been the most stylish, but for decades the top-loading laundry machine was the most affordable and dependable. Now it’s ruined–and Americans have politics to thank.

In 1996, top-loaders were pretty much the only type of washer around, and they were uniformly high quality. When Consumer Reports tested 18 models, 13 were “excellent” and five were “very good.” By 2007, though, not one was excellent and seven out of 21 were “fair” or “poor.” This month came the death knell: Consumer Reports simply dismissed all conventional top-loaders as “often mediocre or worse.”
How’s that for progress?
The culprit is the federal government’s obsession with energy efficiency. Efficiency standards for washing machines aren’t as well-known as those for light bulbs, which will effectively prohibit 100-watt incandescent bulbs next year. Nor are they the butt of jokes as low-flow toilets are. But in their quiet destruction of a highly affordable, perfectly satisfactory appliance, washer standards demonstrate the harmfulness of the ever-growing body of efficiency mandates.
. . .
Front-loaders meet federal standards more easily than top-loaders. Because they don’t fully immerse their laundry loads, they use less hot water and therefore less energy. But, as Americans are increasingly learning, front-loaders are expensive, often have mold problems, and don’t let you toss in a wayward sock after they’ve started.

For the full commentary, see:
SAM KAZMAN. “How Washington Ruined Your Washing Machine; The top-loading washer continues to disappear, thanks to the usual nanny state suspects.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., March 17, 2011): A17.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Today Is Eleventh Anniversary of Democrats’ Infamous Betrayal of Elián González

“In this April 22, 2000 file photo, Elian Gonzalez is held in a closet by Donato Dalrymple, one of the two men who rescued the boy from the ocean, right, as government officials search the home of Lazaro Gonzalez, early Saturday morning, April 22, 2000, in Miami. Armed federal agents seized Elian Gonzalez from the home of his Miami relatives before dawn Saturday, firing tear gas into an angry crowd as they left the scene with the weeping 6-year-old boy.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited below.

Today (April 22, 2011) is the eleventh anniversary of one of the darkest days in American history—when the Democratic Clinton Administration seized a six year old child in order to force him back into the slavery that his mother had died trying to escape.

(p. 7A) MIAMI (AP) – When federal agents stormed a home in the Little Havana community, snatched Elian Gonzalez from his father’s relatives and put him on a path back to his father in Cuba, thousands of Cuban-Americans took to Miami’s streets. Their anger helped give George W. Bush the White House months later and simmered long after that.

. . .
Elian was just shy of his sixth birthday when a fisherman found him floating in an inner tube in the waters off Fort Lauderdale on Thanksgiving 1999. His mother and others drowned trying to reach the U.S.
Elian’s father, who was separated from his mother, remained in Cuba, where he and Fidel Castro’s communist government demanded the boy’s return.
Elian was placed in the home of his great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, while the Miami relatives and other Cuban exiles went to court to fight an order by U.S. immigration officials to return him to Cuba. Janet Reno, President Bill Clinton’s attorney general and a Miami native, insisted the boy belonged with his father.
When talks broke down, she ordered the raid carried out April 22, 2000, the day before Easter. Her then-deputy, current U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, has said she wept after giving the order.
Associated Press photographer Alan Diaz captured Donato Dalrymple, the fisherman who had found the boy, backing into a bedroom closet with a terrified Elian in his arms as an immigration agent in tactical gear inches away aimed his gun toward them. The image won the Pulitzer Prize and brought criticism of the Justice Department to a frenzy.
. . .
The Cuban government, which tightly controls media access to Elian and his father, said neither is willing to give an interview. A government representative agreed to forward written questions from the AP to Elian, but there has been no response.
Pepe Hernandez, president of the Cuban American National Foundation, said his group predicted in 2000 that Elian would become a prop for the Castro government if he were returned. It was one reason, he said, the group fought for him to be kept in the U.S. and would do it again today, although behind the scenes to avoid negative publicity for the Cuban-American community.
“We knew what this kid was going to be subjected to,” Hernandez said. “And time has proven us right.”

For the full story, see:
JENNIFER KAY and MATT SEDENSKY. “10 years later, few stirred by Elian Gonzalez saga.” Omaha World-Herald (Thurs., April 22, 2010): 7A.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated April 21, 2010 and has the title “10 years after Elian, US players mum or moving on.”)

To Do Business in India, Bureaucrats Still Must Be Bribed

“In the twilight of his career heading Tata Group, Ratan Tata says he was thwarted in his homeland by arbitrary regulatory decisions and corruption.”

(p. B1) NEW DELHI–Ratan Tata has transformed Tata Group into the world’s best-known Indian company, the owner of Jaguar cars, the Pierre Hotel in New York and Tetley tea.

But in the twilight of his career as chairman of the $67.4 billion conglomerate, Mr. Tata, 73 years old, is frustrated that he hasn’t been able to expand more in his native India. He says bureaucratic delays, arbitrary regulatory decisions and widespread corruption have thwarted his domestic ambitions in such sectors as steel, power, aviation and telecommunications.
. . .
. . . 20 years after . . . reforms began, New Delhi still exerts tight control over large swaths of the economy. All too often, Mr. Tata and other critics say, regulators are picking winners and losers through their decisions, either by delaying certain projects and green-lighting others or by freeing up natural resources for some companies at the expense of others.
“Economically it is a much more open environment. It’s one that fosters a fair amount of free enterprise until you need approvals or some kind of sanction to get something done,” Mr. Tata said during an interview at the Tata-owned Taj Mahal hotel in New Delhi. “Then you still have problems, and maybe more acute then you did before.”
. . .
As chairman, one of Mr. Tata’s first goals was to get Tata back into the airline business. The company’s former airline had been nationalized to form Air India. He planned a venture with Singapore Airlines. But, he says, aviation ministry bureaucrats held up his application for years despite his constant prodding. An aviation ministry spokeswoman didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In 1998, after seven years of government inaction, Mr. Tata withdrew the application. “We went through three governments, three prime ministers, and each time there was a particular individual that thwarted our efforts,” he said in a TV interview last fall. He recalled a conversation with a fellow industrialist several years ago. “He said, ‘I don’t understand. You people are very stupid…. Why don’t you just pay?'”
Paying bribes isn’t his style, Mr. Tata says. “Maybe I’m stupid or old fashioned, but I really want to go to bed at night saying I haven’t succumbed to this.”

For the full story, see:
AMOL SHARMA. “India’s Tata Finds Home Hostile; Chair of Nation’s Best-Known Company Says Bureaucracy Slows Domestic Growth.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., April 13, 2011): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipses added, except for the one after the word “stupid” which appears in the original.)
(Note: in the online version of the article, the final paragraph quoted above reads: “Mr. Tata says paying bribes isn’t his style. “Maybe I’m stupid or old fashioned, but I really want to go to bed at night saying I haven’t succumbed to this,” he says.”

To Paul Ryan, More Market Incentives in Health Care Would Reduce Costs and Improve Care

(p. B1) . . . Medicare’s long-term funding gap — . . . is by far the biggest source of looming federal deficits.

. . .
(p. B13) Some health economists believe that a combination of higher taxes and more Medicare cost controls can solve the problem. Mr. Ryan does not. And his skepticism is healthy.
To him, the only way to reduce Medicare’s cost growth is to stop shielding people from the consequences of their decisions. If they want almost limitless medical treatments, they won’t be able to foist the bill on taxpayers, as they do now. They will instead have to buy a generous insurance plan, partly with their own money. The resulting market forces, Mr. Ryan argues, will eventually bring down costs and leave most people better off.

For the full story, see:
DAVID LEONHARDT. “Economic Scene; A Lopsided Proposal for Medicare.” The New York Times (Weds., April 6, 2011): B1 & B13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated April 5, 2011 and has the title “Economic Scene; Generational Divide Colors Debate Over Medicare’s Future.”)

Italy’s Dynastic Capitalism “Is Built Around Loyalty, Not Performance”

“Carlo Altomonte, an economist, says that “Italy’s problem isn’t that we have a lot of debt. It’s that we don’t grow.”” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 6) “I know that in the States, all Mediterranean countries get lumped together,” says Carlo Altomonte, an economist with Bocconi University in Milan. “But Italy’s problem isn’t that we have a lot of debt. It’s that we don’t grow.”
. . .
“There is no sense of what a market economy is in this country,” says Professor Altomonte. “What you see here is an incredible fear of competition.”
. . .
FIVE years ago, Francesco Giavazzi needed a taxi. Cabs are relatively scarce in Milan, especially at 5 a.m., when he wanted to head to the airport, so he called a company at 4:30 to schedule a pickup. But when he climbed into the cab half an hour later, he discovered that the meter had been running for more than 20 minutes, because the taxi driver had arrived soon after the call and started charging for (p. 7) his time. Allowed by the rules, but to Mr. Giavazzi, utterly unfair.
“So it was 20 euros before we started the trip to the airport,” recalls Mr. Giavazzi, who is an economics professor at Bocconi University. “I said, ‘This is impossible.’ ”
Professor Giavazzi later wrote an op-ed article denouncing this episode as another example of the toll exacted by Italy’s innumerable guilds, known by several names here, including “associazioni di categoria.” (These are different from unions, another force here, in that guilds are made up of independent players in a trade or profession who have joined to keep outsiders out and maintain standards, as opposed to representing employees in negotiations with management, as a union might.) Even baby sitters have associations in Italy.
The op-ed did not endear Professor Giavazzi to the city’s cab drivers. They pinned leaflets with his name and address at taxi stands around Milan and for the next five nights, cabs drove around his home, honking their horns.
“This is a country with a lot of rents,” says Professor Giavazzi, sitting in his office one recent afternoon, . . . “You need a notary public, it’s like 1,000 euros before you even open your mouth. If you’re a notary public in this country, you live like a king.”
For Mr. Barbera, as is true with every entrepreneur here, the prevalence and power of Italy’s guilds explains much of what is driving up costs. He says he must overspend for accountants, lawyers, truckers and other members of guilds on a list that goes on and on: “Everything has a tariff, and you have to pay.”
. . .
Italians, notes Professor Altomonte, are among the world’s heaviest consumers of bottled water. “Do you know why? Because the water in the tap comes from the government.”
The suspicion of Italians when it comes to extra-familial institutions explains why many here care more about protecting what they have than enhancing their wealth. Most Italians live less than a mile or two from their parents and stay there, often for financial benefits like cash and in-kind services like day care. It’s an insularity that runs all the way up to the corporate suites. The first goal of many entrepreneurs here isn’t growth, so much as keeping the business in the family. For a company to really expand, it needs capital, but that means giving up at least some control. So thousands of companies here remain stubbornly small — all of which means Italy is a haven for artisans but is in a lousy position to play the global domination game.
“The prevailing management style in this country is built around loyalty, not performance,” says Tito Boeri, scientific director at Fondazione Rodolfo Debenedetti, who has written about Italy’s dynastic capitalism.

For the full story, see:
DAVID SEGAL. “Is Italy Too Italian?” The New York Times (Sun., August 1, 2010): 1 & 6-7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated July 31, 2010.)

“The clothier Luciano Barbera in his family’s “spa for yarn,” where crates of thread rest for months. Economists fear that such small-scale artisanship cannot sustain Italy’s economy forever.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Socialism Is “Morally Corrupting”

On balance, Stephen Pollard believes that Claire Berlinski’s book on Thatcher is poorly written. But he does believe that Berlinski got one important point right:

(p. 22) She is quite right, . . . , to stress that Thatcher’s crusade against socialism was not merely about economic efficiency and prosperity but that above all, “it was that socialism itself — in all its incarnations, wherever and however it was applied — was morally corrupting.”

For the full review, see:
STEPHEN POLLARD. “Thatcher’s Legacy.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., January 18, 2009): 22.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Norte: the online version of the review has the date January 16, 2009.)

Book reviewed:
Berlinski, Claire. There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2008.

Father of Cornhusker Kickback Is Named “2010 Porker of the Year”

(p. 6A) Sen. Ben Nelson can’t shake the “Cornhusker Kickback.”
This week, a government watchdog group named the Nebraska Democrat its “2010 Porker of the Year,” based on an online poll.
Citizens Against Government Waste included Nelson in the poll, citing his role negotiating a provision of the federal health care bill that would have exempted Nebraska from paying the added costs of the law’s expanded Medicaid coverage. That provision was later dropped in favor of relief for all states, which Nelson has said was his goal all along.
Nelson cast the decisive 60th vote for the bill in late 2009.
. . .
Mark Fahleson, chairman of the Nebraska Republican Party, said Nelson was trying to rewrite history. “The fact is he’s the father of the Cornhusker Kickback,” he said.

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL O’CONNOR. “Nelson rejects group’s ‘Porker of Year’ label.” Omaha World-Herald (Fri., March 4, 2011): 6A.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Autos Give Us Autonomy

The open road. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 60) I’ve been converted by a renegade school of thinkers you might call the autonomists, because they extol the autonomy made possible by automobiles. Their school includes engineers and philosophers, political scientists like James Q. Wilson and number-crunching economists like Randal O’Toole, the author of the 540-page manifesto ”The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths.” These thinkers acknowledge the social and environmental problems caused by the car but argue that these would not be solved — in fact, would be mostly made worse — by the proposals coming from the car’s critics. They call smart growth a dumb idea, the result not of rational planning but of class snobbery and intellectual arrogance. They prefer to promote smart driving, which means more tolls, more roads and, yes, more cars.
. . .
(p. 65) . . . Macaulay . . . observed in the 19th century that ”every improvement of the means of locomotion benefits mankind morally and intellectually, as well as materially.”
. . .
In an essay called ”Autonomy and Automobility,” Loren E. Lomasky, a professor of political philosophy at the University of Virginia, invokes Aristotle’s concept of the ”self-mover” to argue that the ability to move about and see the world is the crucial distinction between higher and lower forms of life and is ultimately the source of what Kant would later call humans’ moral autonomy. ”The automobile is, arguably, rivaled only by the printing press (and perhaps within a few more years by the microchip) as an autonomy-enhancing contrivance of technology,” he writes. The planners determined to tame sprawl, Lomasky argues, are the intellectual heirs of Plato and his concept of the philosopher-king who would impose order on the unenlightened masses.

For the full commentary, see:
Tierney, John. “The Autonomist Manifesto (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Road).” The New York Times Magazine (Sun., September 26, 2004): 57-65.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The Lomasky essay is:

Lomasky, Loren E. “Autonomy and Automobility.” The Independent Review
2, no. 1 (Summer 1997): 5-28.

The Macaulay quote is from:
Macaulay, Thomas Babington. “Chap. 3, State of England in 1685.” The History of England from the Accession of James II. 1848.

The O’Toole book is:
O’Toole, Randal (sic). The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths: How Smart Growth Will Harm American Cities. Camp Sherman, Oregon: The Thoreau Institute, 2000.

The Wilson essay is:
Wilson, James Q. “Cars and Their Enemies.” Commentary 104, no. 1 (July 1997): 17-23.

In Greece It Is Illegal for Brewers to Produce Tea

“Demetri Politopoulos at his microbrewery in northern Greece. He says Greek leaders need to do more to make the country an easier place to do business.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1) DEMETRI POLITOPOULOS says he has suffered countless indignities in his 12-year battle to build a microbrewery and wrest a sliver of the Greek beer market from the Dutch colossus, Heineken.

His tires have been slashed and his products vandalized by unknown parties, he says, and his brewery has received threatening phone calls. And he says he has had to endure regular taunts — you left Manhattan to start up a beer factory in northern Greece? — not to mention the pain of losing 5.3 million euros.
Bad as all that has been, nothing prepared him for this reality: He would be breaking the law if he tried to fulfill his latest — and, he thinks, greatest — entrepreneurial dream. It is to have his brewery produce and export bottles of a Snapple-like beverage made from herbal tea, which he is cultivating in the mountains that surround this lush pocket of the country.
An obscure edict requires that brewers in Greece produce beer — and nothing else. Mr. Politopoulos has spent the better part of the last year trying fruitlessly to persuade the Greek government to strike it. “It’s probably a law that goes back to King Otto,” said Mr. Politopoulos with a grim chuckle, referring to the Bavarian-born king of Greece who introduced beer to the country around 1850.
Sitting in his office, Mr. Politopoulos took a long pull from a glass of his premium Vergina wheat beer and said it was absurd that he had to lobby Greek politicians to repeal a 19th-century law so that he could deliver the exports that Greece urgently needed. And, he said, his predicament was even worse than that: it was emblematic of the web of restrictions, monopolies and other distortions that have made many Greek companies uncompetitive, and pushed the country close to bankruptcy.

For the full story, see:
LANDON THOMAS Jr. “What’s Broken in Greece? Ask an Entrepreneur.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., January 30, 2011): 1 & 5.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated January 29, 2011.)

State Universities Are “Byzantine Mazes, Sometimes with No Obvious Exit”

(p. A20) . . . in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker proposed on Tuesday to separate the main Madison campus from the rest of the state university system, and make it a public authority. Last week, Madison’s chancellor, Carolyn A. Martin, told the Wisconsin Board of Regents that she was hamstrung by state control.

“The accumulated layers of bureaucracy and the control of our mission from a distance make our institutions byzantine mazes, sometimes with no obvious exit,” she said. “It’s hard to be more responsible or more responsive if we spend all our time trying to comprehend and then follow 25 steps to get approval for one purchase.”

For the full story, see:
TAMAR LEWIN. “Public Universities Seek More Autonomy as Financing From States Shrinks.” The New York Times (Thurs., March 3, 2011): A20.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated March 2, 2011.)