Government – Page 108 – artdiamondblog.com

The Nanny State Versus Fun

“A boy slides down the enclosed “Monster Slide,” which drops riders the length of three flights of stairs.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

We took Jenny to several children’s museums when she was young, but none was as neat as the City Museum.
It appears that it has continued to get better in the years since.
My view is that a child’s parents should generally decide what risks their child should be allowed to take. Parents have a right to be parents, and they generally do a better job of it than the government does.

(p. A1) The City Museum, housed in 10-story brick building, shows none of the restraint or quiet typical of museums. A cross between a playground and a theme park, it recycles St. Louis’ industrial past into such attractions as slides made from assembly-line rollers. Just about everything can be touched or climbed, including dozens of Mr. Cassilly’s sculptures, among them a walk-through whale on (p. A10) the first floor.

Despite the whiff of danger, or perhaps because of it, the City Museum is one of St. Louis’s most popular attractions. Its 700,000 annual attendance is roughly twice the population of St. Louis and dwarfs the turnout at refined destinations such as the St. Louis Art Museum.
The injuries and lawsuits put the City Museum at the center of an enduring argument over the line between liability and personal responsibility. Some of the injured and their lawyers say the museum is deceptively dangerous and doesn’t do enough to publicize its risks through signs or other warnings.
Mr. Cassilly counters that it is as safe as it can be without being a bore. “They [lawyers] are taking the fun out of life.”
. . .
Mr. Cassilly trained as a sculptor but made most of his money as a developer, having bought, renovated and sold some four dozen homes and commercial properties over the years. In 1993 he paid $525,000 for two downtown St. Louis buildings once used by a shoe company, and opened the City Museum in 1997. It’s now a for-profit enterprise that he co-owns with a local investor.
He says the museum is about first-hand experience, a “computer-free zone” where rules are kept to a minimum. At the “skateless park,” kids run up and slide down wooden skateboard ramps now used as slides. One smaller ramp has a rope swing that kids use to swing across the ramp, not always successfully.
“I slipped and the edge scraped my leg,” said Garett Vance, 11, sitting atop what the museum bills as the world’s largest pencil with a museum-provided ice pack taped to his leg. His mother, Mindy Vance, says a friend warned her that the museum was dangerous but she wasn’t deterred.
“You take a risk when you go anyplace,” says Ms. Vance, a nurse-practitioner who lives in Springfield, Ill., about two hours away.

For the full story, see:
CONOR DOUGHERTY. “This Museum Exposes Kids to Thrills, Chills and Trial Lawyers; Defiant St. Louis Venue Owner’s Claim: Attorneys ‘Take the Fun Out of Life’.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., MAY 1, 2010): A1 & A10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“Visitors passed through a dark tunnel. The injured and their lawyers say the museum is deceptively dangerous and doesn’t do enough to publicize its risks. Mr. Cassilly, the founder, counters that it is as safe as it can be without being a bore.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

Henry Ford’s Finest Hour

(p. 52) Not all men who refused to sign the code could be easily intimidated. In the auto industry Henry Ford refused to sign the NRA code and jack up his car prices, as his competitors were doing. “I do not think that this country is ready to be treated like Russia for a while,” Ford wrote in his notebook. “There is a lot of the pioneer spirit here yet:’ However, General Motors, Chrysler, and the smaller independents eagerly signed Blue Eagle codes, which, under penalty of fine and imprisonment, regulated their production, (p. 53) wages. prices, and hours of work. Ford was astounded: his colleagues preferred stability and government regulation to competition and free trade. He was especially irked when Pierre S. DuPont, the former head of General Motors, urged him at a party to sign the code.

In the face of strong pressure from the NRA, Ford refused to sign the auto code. He defied the law, pronouncing it un-American and unconstitutional. Hugh Johnson, the NRA chief, and President Roosevelt, however, wanted government control as well as compliance. They tried to pressure Ford into signing the code, and when he refused they tried force. Ford would receive no government contracts until he signed–and with the large increase in government agencies during the 1930s, that meant a huge business. For example, the bid of a Ford agency on five hundred trucks for the Civilian Conservation Corps was $169,000 below the next best offer. The government announced, however, that it would reject Ford’s bid and pay $169,000 more for the trucks because Ford refused to sign the auto code. As Roosevelt announced at a press conference, “We have got to eliminate the purchase of Ford cars” for the government because Ford has not “gone along with the general [NRA] agreement:”

Source:
Folsom, Burton W., Jr. New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America. New York: Threshold Editions, 2008.
(Note: ellipses in original.)

New York City Government Protects Us from More than Three Living in an Apartment

“From left, Doua Moua, 23, George Summer, 30, and David Everett and Jasmine Ward, both 21, are among six people in a four-bedroom apartment in Hamilton Heights. “It’s part of New York City culture,” Mr. Moua said.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A16) Doua Moua, 23, played a menacing gangster in a Clint Eastwood movie, but Mr. Moua swears he really is a nice, gentle and rules-abiding fellow. At least he was until he moved to New York City and unwittingly slipped into a world of lawlessness.

Mr. Moua lives with five roommates. And in New York, home to some of the nation’s highest rents and more than eight million people, many of them single, it is illegal for more than three unrelated people to live in an apartment or a house.
. . .
Mr. Moua’s landlord, who did not want his name published for fear of a crackdown, said he wrestled with converting some of his apartments into four-bedroom units. He knew it was illegal to allow four unrelated people to live together, but decided that if tenants were willing to live in what was once a dining room, it was fine with him. He could collect slightly more in rent over all and charge less for each room.
“If it’s done in a good way, and there’s not unlimited cramming in, and the shared facilities are adequate,” the landlord said, “then it actually helps solve the affordable housing problem, which I think is a good thing.”

For the full story, see:
CARA BUCKLEY. “A Law Limits Housemates to Three? Who Knew?” The New York Times (Mon., March 29, 2010): A16.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated March 28, 2010 and has the title “In New York, Breaking a Law on Roommates.”)

“From left, Anya Kogan, 27, Jordan Dann, 33, Nick Turner, 29, and Michelle McGowan, 32, share a town house in Brooklyn.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Pear Growers Suffer From Unintended Consequences of Land-Use Law

“”We hit the wall,” the 63-year-old grower says. . . . , Mr. Naumes showed off a Bosc pear.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A3) MEDFORD, Ore.–Farmers say conditions in southern Oregon’s Rogue River Valley are among the best in the world for raising pears. Yet for the past decade, acreage planted in pears has been halved, as has the number of growers.

Land-use regulations designed to maintain open space and preserve farmland are to blame, pear growers here say.
It is a paradox few foresaw in 1973, when Oregon passed Senate Bill 100. That measure, considered a landmark of the budding environmental movement, put Oregon on the map as the “greenest” of U.S. states by placing zoning decisions with a central agency, outside the purview of local authorities.
The law had a huge impact in restricting suburban sprawl throughout the state, preserving environmentally critical habitats.
But since the mid-1990s, more than 3,500 acres planted in pears have gone out of production here. From 87 pear farms operating in 1992, only 48 remain.
. . .
The credit crunch and consumers unwilling to splurge for $30 boxes of pears are behind much of the pain, growers say. Yet they insist their real headache is their inability to raise capital by selling land at top value, which they say would let them buy farmland further from residential areas. That is because land-use laws say their orchards must remain in agriculture.
“It’s the worst case of unintended consequences you can imagine,” says David D. Lowry, chief executive of Associated Fruit Co., the smallest of Medford’s Big Three, who fears his business could be the next to close. Like others, he has plenty of land to sell, but no one willing to buy as long as it is zoned for farming only.

For the full story, see:
JOEL MILLMAN. “Oregon Pear Growers Sour on Land Law; Farmers Say Landmark 1970s Measure Aimed at Conserving Agricultural Areas Limits Their Ability to Nurture Investment.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., APRIL 2, 2010): A3.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

FDR’s NRA Price-Fixing Helped Big Firms “Ruin” Little Firms

(p. 50) Among those damaged was Carl Pharis, the general manager of Pharis Tire and Rubber Company in Newark, Ohio. Pharis employed over one thousand people, mainly in the Newark area. His company grew because, in Pharis’s words, “we would make the best possible rubber tire and sell it at the lowest price consistent with a modest but safe profit.” He and his employees had survived the grim Great Depression years because they had lower prices, a good tire, and solid support in central Ohio from buyers who knew the company because it was local and because it priced its tires lower than the larger firms. As Pharis said, “It is obvious that they cannot make as good a tire as we make and sell it at the price at which we can sell at a profit:”

Then came the NRA with its high fixed prices for tires. As Pharis said, “Since the industry began to formulate a Code under the N. R. A., in June, 1933, we have at all times opposed any form of price-fixing. We believe it to be illegal and we know it to be oppressive.” He added, “We quite understand that, if we were compelled to sell our tires at exactly the same price as they sell their tires, their great national consumer acceptance would soon capture our purchasers and ruin us. Since we have so little of this consumer publicity when compared with them, our only hope is in our ability (p. 51) to make as good or a better tire than they make and to sell it at a less[er] price. . . . ”
Since Pharis and other small companies were no longer allowed to sell tires at discounted rates, Goodyear and Firestone “could go out just as they have gone out,” Pharis noted, “and say to prospective customers that, since they had to pay the same price, it would be wiser if they bought the nationally advertised lines.”
In a nutshell, Pharis put it this way: “The Government deliberately raised our prices up towards the prices at which the big companies wanted to sell, at which they could make a profit, . . . where more easily, with much less loss, they could come down and ‘get us’ and where, bound by N. R. A. decrees, we could not use lower prices, although we could have lowered them and still made a decent profit.”
Pharis was on the verge of closing down and having to lay off all of his one thousand employees. His company, with its low prices and quality tires, could weather the Great Depression, but not the NRA. “If we were asking favors from the Government,” Pharis concluded, “there would be little justice in our complaints. . . . And so, if the big fellows, with their too-heavy investments and high costs of manufacturing and selling, cannot successfully compete with us little fellows without Government aid, they should quit.”

Source:
Folsom, Burton W., Jr. New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America. New York: Threshold Editions, 2008.
(Note: ellipses in original.)

Government Quotas Raise U.S. Sugar Price from 17 Cents a Pound to 31 Cents a Pound

Every semester in my principles of microeconomics course, I show the students a wonderful old 60 Minutes segment on the U.S. government’s sugar quotas program. I tell them, alas, that the policy is still the same. Below is recent evidence:

(p. C1) . . . , U.S. sugar farmers have successfully blocked efforts to significantly increase imports, assuring them of little price competition.

Restrictions on imports have caused American users to pay much more than the rest of the world for sugar. That gap recently blew out to its widest in a decade.
Mr. Vilsack’s comments raised the prospect of increased demand for global sugar and drove prices up 2.7%, or 0.44 cent, to 16.98 cents a pound on ICE Futures U.S. Prices for U.S. domestic sugar dropped 2.1%, to 30.8 cents a pound. That narrowed the gap between the two to 13.82 cents a pound.

For the full story, see:
CAROLYN CUI and BILL TOMSON , ILAN BRAT. “USDA Says It May Relax Sugar Quotas For This Year.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., APRIL 14, 2010): C1 & C2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the title of the online version of the article is “USDA Says It May Relax Sugar Quotas.”)

Much of the Value of “Chinese” Imports is Added Outside of China

(p. A17) In a 2006 paper, Stanford University economist Lawrence Lau found that Chinese value-added accounted for about 37% of the total value of U.S. imports from China. In 2008, using a different methodology, U.S. International Trade Commission economist Robert Koopman, along with economists Zhi Wang and Shang-jin Wei, found the figure to be closer to 50%. In other words, despite all the hand-wringing about the value of imports from China, one-half to nearly two thirds of that value is not even Chinese. Instead, it reflects the efforts of workers and capital in other countries, including the U.S. In overstating Chinese value by 100% to 200%, the official U.S. import statistics are a poor proxy for job loss.

Seldom noted in the union-controlled discussion of trade on Capitol Hill is that the jobs of large numbers of American workers depend on imports from China. The proliferation of transnational production and supply chains has joined higher-value-added U.S. manufacturing, design, and R&D activities with lower-value manufacturing and assembly operations in China.
According to a widely cited 2007 study by Greg Linden, Kenneth L. Kraemer and Jason Dedrick of the University of California, Irvine, each Apple iPod costs $150 to produce. But only about $4 of that cost is Chinese value-added. Most of the value comes from components made in other countries, including the U.S. Yet when those iPods are imported from China, where they are snapped together, the full $150 is counted as an import from China, adding to the trade deficit and inflating EPI’s job-loss figures.
In reality, those imported iPods support thousands of U.S. jobs up the value chain–in engineering, design, finance, manufacturing, marketing, distribution, retail and elsewhere. A 25% tariff on imports from China would penalize the non-Chinese companies and workers who create most of the iPod’s value.

For the full commentary, see:
DANIEL IKENSON. “China Trade and American Jobs; Studies suggest that one-half to two-thirds of the value of ‘Chinese’ imports is added in other countries, including the U.S.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., APRIL 2, 2010): A17.

April 22nd Was Tenth Anniversary of Democrats’ Infamous Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez

“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.

Yesterday (April 22, 2010) was the tenth anniversary of one of the darkest days in American history—when the 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.”)

Taxpayers Taking a Haircut as States “Scramble” to Find Something New to Tax

“A LITTLE OFF THE TOP; Michigan residents may have to pay a 5.5 percent tax for haircuts. States across the nation are considering similar taxes on services to solve their budget problems.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1) In the scramble to find something, anything, to generate more revenue, states are considering new taxes on virtually everything: garbage pickup, dating services, bowling night, haircuts, even clowns.

“It’s hard enough doing what we do,” grumbled John Luke, a plumber in the Philadelphia suburbs. His services would, for the first time, come with an added tax if the governor has his way.
Opponents of imposing taxes on services like funerals, legal advice, helicopter rides and dry cleaning argue that this push comes as businesses are barely clinging to life and can ill afford to see customers further put off by new taxes. This is especially true, they say, in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, where some of the most sweeping proposals are being considered this spring.
But this is also a period of economic gloom for states. Pension funds are in the red, federal stimulus help will soon vanish, and revenues from traditional sources like income and property taxes are slumping ever lower, with few elected officials willing to risk voter wrath by raising them.
. . .
(p. 20) But from coast to coast, desperate governments are looking to tap into new revenue streams.
In Nebraska, a lawmaker has introduced a bill to tax armored car services, farm equipment repairs, shoe shines, taxidermy, reflexology and scooter repairs. In Kentucky, Jim Wayne, a state representative, and some fellow Democrats are proposing taxing high-end services: golf greens fees, limousine and hot-air-balloon rides, and private landscaping.
In June, voters in Maine will decide whether to accept a state overhaul of its tax system that would newly tax services like tailor alterations, blimp rides, and entertainment provided by clowns, comedians and jugglers.

For the full story, see:
MONICA DAVEY. “States Seeking Cash Hope to Expand Taxes to Services.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., ed: March 28, 2010): 1 & 20.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated March 27, 2010, and has the title “States Seeking Cash Hope to Expand Taxes to Services.”)

Source of graph: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

If We Want More Jobs, We Need More (Steve) Jobs

(p. A19) Mr. Obama and his advisers need to grasp this essential fact: Entrepreneurs are not just a cute little subsector of the American economy. They are the whole game. They will give us tomorrow’s Apples and the multiplier effect of small businesses and exciting new jobs that go with them. Entrepreneurs are necessary to keep our large multinationals on their toes. It’s no coincidence that the entrepreneurial flowering of the 1970s forced a managerial revolution in large companies during the 1980s and 1990s. Without Steve Jobs, there would have been no Lou Gerstner to reinvent IBM in the ’90s. Entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs make everyone better.

For the full story, see:
RICH KARLGAARD. “Apple to the Rescue?” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., JANUARY 28, 2010): A19.

New York Forces Entrepreneur to Subsidize His Competitor

(p. A24) Last year, the State Legislature levied a new tariff on most of the businesses in the New York City region. The metropolitan commuter transportation mobility tax requires employers to set aside 34 cents for every $100 in payroll costs, and hand the money over to a battered, barely breathing patient on the state’s fiscal operating table: the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The tax has not worked out so well. So far, its projected revenues are coming in about $400 million below the state’s estimates — which, in part, will mean reduced subway and bus service for New Yorkers starting this summer. It has also prompted a furious backlash from suburban officials who resent bankrolling an agency that, they say, benefits the city at the expense of its surrounding counties.
And then there is William Schoolman, 69, amateur activist, self-described ”prototypical entrepreneur,” and proprietor of the Hampton Luxury Liner bus fleet. In December, he filed a lawsuit in State Supreme Court claiming the tax is unconstitutional and demanding its repeal. The reason?
”Competition,” Mr. Schoolman said in a recent telephone interview, anger rising in his voice. ”This is the first time that I ever had to pay a subsidy directly to my competitor. That’s the thing that really bothers me.”

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM. “Suing Over a Transit Tax, in the Name of Competition.” The New York Times (Tues., February 16, 2010): A24.