Government – Page 92 – artdiamondblog.com

The War on Drugs Likely “Increased the Rate of Addiction”

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ commentary quoted and cited below.

(p. C1) President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” in 1971. The expectation then was that drug trafficking in the United States could be greatly reduced in a short time through federal policing–and yet the war on drugs continues to this day. The cost has been large in terms of lives, money and the well-being of many Americans, especially the poor and less educated. By most accounts, the gains from the war have been modest at best.

The direct monetary cost to American taxpayers of the war on drugs includes spending on police, the court personnel used to try drug users and traffickers, and the guards and other resources spent on imprisoning and punishing those convicted of drug offenses. Total current spending is estimated at over $40 billion a year.
These costs don’t include many other harmful effects of the war on drugs that are difficult to quantify. For example, over the past 40 years the fraction of students who have dropped out of American high schools has remained large, at about 25%. Dropout rates are not high for middle-class white children, but they are very high for black and Hispanic children living in poor neighborhoods. Many factors explain the high dropout rates, especially bad schools and weak family support. But another important factor in inner-city neighborhoods is the temptation to drop out of school in order to profit from the drug trade.
The total number of persons incarcerated in state and federal prisons in the U.S. has grown from 330,000 in 1980 to about 1.6 million today. Much of the increase in this population is directly due to the war on drugs and the severe punishment for persons convicted of drug trafficking. About 50% of the inmates in federal prisons and 20% of those in state prisons have been convicted of either selling or using drugs. The many minor drug traffickers and drug users who spend time in jail find fewer opportunities for legal employment after they get out of prison, and they develop better skills at criminal activities.
. . .
(p. C2) It is generally harder to break an addiction to illegal goods, like drugs. Drug addicts may be leery of going to clinics or to nonprofit “drugs anonymous” groups for help. They fear they will be reported for consuming illegal substances. Since the consumption of illegal drugs must be hidden to avoid arrest and conviction, many drug consumers must alter their lives in order to avoid detection.
Usually overlooked in discussions of the effects of the war on drugs is that the illegality of drugs stunts the development of ways to help drug addicts, such as the drug equivalent of nicotine patches. Thus, though the war on drugs may well have induced lower drug use through higher prices, it has likely also increased the rate of addiction. The illegality of drugs makes it harder for addicts to get help in breaking their addictions. It leads them to associate more with other addicts and less with people who might help them quit.
. . .
The decriminalization of both drug use and the drug market won’t be attained easily, as there is powerful opposition to each of them. The disastrous effects of the American war on drugs are becoming more apparent, however, not only in the U.S. but beyond its borders. Former Mexican President Felipe Calderon has suggested “market solutions” as one alternative to the problem. Perhaps the combined efforts of leaders in different countries can succeed in making a big enough push toward finally ending this long, enormously destructive policy experiment.

For the full commentary, see:
GARY S. BECKER and KEVIN M. MURPHY. “Have We Lost the War on Drugs? After more than four decades of a failed experiment, the human cost has become too high. It is time to consider the decriminalization of drug use and the drug market.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., January 5, 2013): C1 & C2.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date January 4, 2013.)

David Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research

“Dr. Robert Langer’s research lab is at the forefront of moving academic discoveries into the marketplace.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1) HOW do you take particles in a test tube, or components in a tiny chip, and turn them into a $100 million company?

Dr. Robert Langer, 64, knows how. Since the 1980s, his Langer Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spun out companies whose products treat cancer, diabetes, heart disease and schizophrenia, among other diseases, and even thicken hair.
The Langer Lab is on the front lines of turning discoveries made in the lab into a range of drugs and drug delivery systems. Without this kind of technology transfer, the thinking goes, scientific discoveries might well sit on the shelf, stifling innovation.
A chemical engineer by training, Dr. Langer has helped start 25 companies and has 811 patents, issued or pending, to his name. More than 250 companies have licensed or sublicensed Langer Lab patents.
Polaris Venture Partners, a Boston venture capital firm, has invested $220 million in 18 Langer Lab-inspired businesses. Combined, these businesses have improved the health of many millions of people, says Terry McGuire, co-founder of Polaris.
. . .
(p. 7) Operating from the sixth floor of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research on the M.I.T. campus in Cambridge, Mass., Dr. Langer’s lab has a research budget of more than $10 million for 2012, coming mostly from federal sources.
. . .
David H. Koch, executive vice president of Koch Industries, the conglomerate based in Wichita, Kan., wrote in an e-mail that “innovation and education have long fueled the world’s most powerful economies, so I can’t think of a better or more natural synergy than the one between academia and industry.” Mr. Koch endowed Dr. Langer’s professorship at M.I.T. and is a graduate of the university.

For the full story, see:
HANNAH SELIGSON. “Hatching Ideas, and Companies, by the Dozens at M.I.T.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., November 25, 2012): 1 & 7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 24, 2012.)

How Chavez Punished Those Who Opposed Him

(p. 196) In 2004, the Hugo Chávez regime in Venezuela distributed the list of several million voters who had attempted to remove him from office throughout the government bureaucracy, allegedly to identify and punish these voters. We match the list of petition signers distributed by the government to household survey respondents to measure the economic effects of being identified as a Chávez political opponent. We find that voters who were identified as Chávez opponents experienced a 5 percent drop in earnings and a 1.3 percentage point drop in employment rates after the voter list was released.

Source:
Hsieh, Chang-Tai, Edward Miguel, Daniel Ortega, and Francisco Rodriguez. “The Price of Political Opposition: Evidence from Venezuela’s Maisanta.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 3, no. 2 (2011): 196-214.

“The Arpanet Was Not an Internet”

“Xerox PARC headquarters.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A11) A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: “The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet.”
. . .
Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the 1960s, sent an email to fellow technologists in 2004 setting the record straight: “The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks.”
If the government didn’t invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet’s backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.
But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.
According to a book about Xerox PARC, “Dealers of Lightning” (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn’t wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves. “We have a more immediate problem than they do,” Robert Metcalfe told his colleague John Shoch in 1973. “We have more networks than they do.” Mr. Shoch later recalled that ARPA staffers “were working under government funding and university contracts. They had contract administrators . . . and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to contend with.”

For the full commentary, see:
Gordon Crovitz. “INFORMATION AGE; Who Really Invented the Internet?” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., July 23, 2012): A11.
(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs was added; ellipsis internal to last paragraph was in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 22, 2012.)

I read the Hiltzik book several years ago, and my memory of it is not sharp, but I remember thinking that it was a useful book:
Hiltzik, Michael A. Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. New York: HarperBusiness, 1999.

Chávez Supporters Feared Losing Government Jobs

“A Chávez supporter. The president runs a well-oiled patronage system, a Tammany Hall-like operation but on a national scale. Government workers are frequently required to attend pro-Chávez rallies, and they come under pressure to vote for him.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

After the story quoted below was published, Chávez (alas) was re-elected.

(p. A1) Many Venezuelans who are eager to send Mr. Chávez packing, fed up with the country’s lackluster economy and rampant crime, are nonetheless anxious that voting against the president could mean being fired from a government job, losing a government-built home or being cut off from social welfare benefits.

“I work for the government, and it scares me,” said Luisa Arismendi, 33, a schoolteacher who cheered on a recent morning as Mr. Chávez’s challenger, Henrique Capriles Radonski, drove by in this northeastern city, waving from the back of a pickup truck. Until this year, she always voted for Mr. Chávez, and she hesitated before giving her name, worried about what would happen if her supervisors found out she was switching sides. “If Chávez wins,” she said, “I could be fired.”
. . .
(p. A6) The fear has deep roots. Venezuelans bitterly recall how the names of millions of voters were made public after they signed a petition for an unsuccessful 2004 recall referendum to force Mr. Chávez out of office. Many government workers whose names were on the list lost their jobs.
Mr. Chávez runs a well-oiled patronage system, a Tammany Hall-like operation but on a national scale. Government workers are frequently required to attend pro-Chávez rallies, and they come under other pressures.
“They tell me that I have to vote for Chávez,” said Diodimar Salazar, 37, who works at a government-run day care center in a rural area southeast of Cumaná. “They always threaten you that you will get fired.”
Ms. Salazar said that her pro-Chávez co-workers insisted that the government would know how she voted. But experience has taught her otherwise. She simply casts her vote for the opposition and then tells her co-workers that she voted for Mr. Chávez.
“I’m not going to take the risk,” said Fabiana Osteicoechea, 22, a law student in Caracas who said she would vote for Mr. Chávez even though she was an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Capriles. She said she was certain that Mr. Chávez would win and was afraid that the government career she hoped to have as a prosecutor could be blocked if she voted the wrong way.
“After the election, he’s going to have more power than now, lots more, and I think he will have a way of knowing who voted for whom,” she said. “I want to get a job with the government so, obviously I have to vote for Chávez.”

For the full story, see:
WILLIAM NEUMAN. “Fear of Losing Benefits Affects Venezuela Vote.” The New York Times (Sat., October 6, 2012): A1 & A6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date October 5, 2012, and has the title “Fears Persist Among Venezuelan Voters Ahead of Election.”)

Students Protest (and Toss) Federally Mandated “Healthy” (“Gross”) Food

“Lunch hour at Middle School 104 in Manhattan, where, on Friday, several seventh graders pronounced vegetables “gross.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) Outside Pittsburgh, they are proclaiming a strike, taking to Twitter and Facebook to spread the word. In a village near Milwaukee, hundreds staged a boycott. In a small farming and ranching community in western Kansas, they have produced a parody video. And in Parsippany, N.J., the protest is six days old and counting.

They are high school students, and their complaint is about lunch — healthier, smaller and more expensive than ever.
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which required public schools to follow new nutritional guidelines this academic year to receive extra federal lunch aid, has created a nationwide version of the age-old parental challenge: persuading children to eat what is good for them.
Because the lunches must now include fruits and vegetables, those who clamor for more cheese-laden nachos may find string beans and a peach cup instead. Because of limits on fat and sodium, some of those who crave French fries get baked sweet-potato wedges. Because of calorie restrictions, meat and carbohydrate portions are smaller. Gone is 2-percent chocolate milk, replaced by skim.
“Before, there was no taste and no flavor,” said Malik Barrows, a senior at Automotive High School in Brooklyn, who likes fruit but said his classmates threw away their mandatory helpings on the cafeteria floor. “Now there’s no taste, no flavor and it’s healthy, which makes it taste even worse.”
Students organized lunch strikes in a suburb of Pittsburgh, where in late August the hashtag “brownbagginit” was trending on Twitter, and outside Milwaukee, where the Mukwonago High School principal, Shawn McNulty, said participation in the lunch program had fallen 70 percent.
. . .
(p. A3) In Sharon Springs, Kan., lunch protesters at Wallace County High School posted a video on YouTube, “We Are Hungry”; in it, students faint in the hallways and during physical education class, acting as if they had been done in by meager helpings of potato puff casserole and chicken nuggets. To the tune of the song “We Are Young” by Fun, one student on the video sings, “My friends are at the corner store, getting junk so they don’t waste away.”
Since it was uploaded three weeks ago, “We Are Hungry” has had nearly 900,000 views.
Callahan Grund, a junior who stars in the video, said, “My opinion as a young farmer and rancher is that we produced this protein and it’s not being used to its full advantage.” He wakes up early every morning to do chores, stays after school for two hours of football practice and returns home for another round of chores. If it were not for the lunches his mother now packs him, he said, he would be hungry again just two hours after lunch.
In New York City, where school officials introduced whole-wheat breads, low-fat milk and other changes several years ago, the most noticeable change this year is the fruit and vegetable requirement, which has resulted in some waste, according to Eric Goldstein, the Education Department official who oversees food services. It is not hard to see why. At Middle School 104 in Gramercy Park on Friday, several seventh graders pronounced vegetables “gross.”
“I just throw them out,” said Danielson Gutierrez, 12, carrying a slice of pizza, which he had liberally sprinkled with seasonings, and a pear. He also offered his opinion on fruit: “I throw them out, too. I only like apples.”

For the full story, see:
VIVIAN YEE. “No Appetite for Good-for-You School Lunches.” The New York Times (Sat., October 6, 2012): A1 & A3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date October 5, 2012.)

“Dissatisfied with healthier school lunches, some Kansas students made a video parody.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Williams Made Providence a Sanctuary for the Persecuted

Source of book image: http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320716933l/11797348.jpg

I have not yet read Barry’s book on Roger Williams, but I did enjoy and learn from his earlier The Great Influenza book.

(p. 12) Williams struck overland, through snow and bitter cold, “wch I feele yet,” he reminisced later in life. He survived because he had help. “The ravens fed me in the wilderness,” he said, comparing himself to the scriptural prophets sustained by bird-borne morsels, though his “ravens” were Indians. With their assistance, he reached the upper bend of a bay that would be named for its inhabitants, the Narragansett. There, Williams bought land from its native proprietors and established a settlement he called Providence, to honor the divine assistance given to him and other Christians on their flights from persecution.
. . .
Next, Williams refused to take an oath of fidelity to Massachusetts, on the grounds that anything sworn in God’s name for worldly purposes was corrupt.
The authorities in Massachusetts were so outraged that having failed to arrest Williams, they tried to obliterate his new settlement. He went back to England to get a charter to protect his colony on his own terms: with a “hedge or wall of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wildernes of the world.” In several publications, he argued that the individual conscience should not — could not — be governed, let alone persecuted. If God was the ultimate punisher of sin, it was impious for humans to assume his authority. And it was “directly contrary to the nature of Christ Jesus . . . that throats of men should be torne out for his sake.”
Barry shows how controversial these beliefs were at the time, and in this way reinforces the standard image of Williams as an early proponent of liberty of conscience.

For the full review, see:
JOYCE E. CHAPLIN. “Errand in the Wilderness.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., May 26, 2012): 12.
(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs was added; ellipsis internal to quotation was in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 25, 2012 and has the title “Roger Williams: The Great Separationist.”)

The book being reviewed, is:
Barry, John M. Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty. New York: Viking Adult, 2012.

Unused Electric Car Chargers Multiply Due to Federal Subsidies

“Any takers?: Two EV chargers sit unused in White Plains, MD.” Source of photo: http://metablognews.com/wp-content/plugins/rss-poster/cache/d6fff_MK-BP785_CHARGE_G_20111016172708.jpg Source of caption: slightly edited from print version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) When McDonald’s franchisee Tom Wolf built his latest restaurant in Huntington, W. Va., late last year, he installed two chargers for all-electric cars so customers could juice their batteries while eating. So far, the charging station has been used a few times.
. . .
Across the U.S., such equipment is proliferating even though it is unclear whether plug-in cars will prove popular.
. . .
Fewer than 15,000 all-electric cars are on U.S. roads, says Plug In America, a group promoting the technology.
. . .
(p. B11) Charging equipment is popping up largely because of subsidies. As part of a $5 billion federal program to subsidize development of electric vehicles and battery technology, the U.S. Energy Department over the past two years provided about $130 million for two pilot projects that help pay for chargers at homes, offices and public locations.
. . .
Opinions vary on demand. J.D. Power & Associates expects all-electric vehicles will account for less than 1% of U.S. auto sales in 2018, or about 102,000 cars and light trucks. Including hybrids and plug-in hybrids the market share is forecast at 8%.
“The premiums associated with these products are still more than what the consumer is willing to bear,” says Mike VanNieuwkuyk, executive director of global vehicle research at J.D. Power.

For the full story, see:
JAMES R. HAGERTY And MIKE RAMSEY. “Charging Stations Multiply But Electric Cars Are Few.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., OCTOBER 17, 2011): B1 & B11.
(Note: ellipses added.)

“The Only Benefit of War Rationing”

(p. 538) The only benefit of war rationing, of which I am aware, is that an alert entrepreneur invented the bikini so as to conserve on the textiles that were then hard to come by for civilian use.

Source:
Shughart II, William F. “The New Deal and Modern Memory.” Southern Economic Journal 77, no. 3 (Jan. 2011): 515-42.

EU Costs Britain $238 Billion Per Year According to Congdon Report

“Nigel Farage has waged a 20-year campaign to get Britain to leave the European Union.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A7) Strasbourg, France THE floor of the European Union’s cavernous and mostly vacant parliamentary chamber here is hardly known for its lively debates. At least not until Nigel Farage, the Brussels-bashing leader of Britain’s fastest growing political party, gets up to speak.

The vast majority of the European Parliament’s 754 members, as they process the torrent of rules and regulations that Europe bestows upon them, are not inclined to question why they are here. The pay and perks are generous for those elected to five-year terms in low-turnout elections throughout the European Union’s 27 member countries. And the mission — to extend the sweep of European federalism — is for most a shared one.
But for Mr. Farage, who has waged a 20-year campaign to get Britain to leave the European Union, Strasbourg has become the perfect stage to disseminate his anti-European Union message by highlighting the bloc’s bureaucratic absurdities and spendthrift tendencies as well as by mocking with glee the most prominent proponents of a European superstate: the head of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, and the European Council president, Herman Van Rompuy. “I said you’d be the quiet assassin of nation-state democracy,” Mr. Farage has declared, as his target, Mr. Van Rompuy, squirmed in his seat just opposite, “and sure enough, in your dull and technocratic way, you’ve gone about your course.”
. . .
Last year, in net terms, Britain paid $16 billion to the European Union. But according to a recent study by the economist Tim Congdon, himself an Independence Party member, if the cost of regulation, waste and misallocated resources is included, the annual cost of membership rises to $238 billion a year, or about 10 percent of Britain’s economic output.
Perhaps the most egregious example of this profligacy is the spot where Mr. Farage has found fame: the European Parliament. As most of the legislative work is done in Brussels, the building is in use just three days each month. Analysts estimate that it costs taxpayers about $250 million a year to transport each month 754 members of Parliament, several thousand support staff members and lobbyists to this French city.
Mr. Farage lights another cigarette and shakes his head. “I just would like for my grandchildren to read some day that I did my part in saving my country from this lunacy,” he said with a sigh.

For the full story, see:
LANDON THOMAS Jr. “THE SATURDAY PROFILE; An Enemy of Brussels, and Not Afraid to Say So.” The New York Times (Sat., December 8, 2012): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date December 7, 2012.)

The Tim Congdon report mentioned is:
Congdon, Tim. “How Much Does the European Union Cost Britain?” UK Independence Party, 2012.
(Note: the report calculates a total cost of about 150 billion British pounds, which when converted to dollars is equal to the $238 billion reported in the article, at an exchange rate of about $1.587 per British pound.)

Does Washington Want “to Regulate Everything That’s Warm”?

“Mike Taylor displays a gas-log set at Acme Stove in Rockville, Md.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A8) Rett Rasmussen sells gas-log sets, which use a “dancing flame” design that his father invented more than 50 years ago to replicate a cozy wood fire.

They are just for decoration, he says. But as the season approaches for families to gather around the hearth–real or fake–Mr. Rasmussen and other makers of hearth products are having a flare-up with the Department of Energy. The federal agency says it has the authority to regulate the log sets as heating equipment, though it isn’t proposing any changes now.
The issue “just hit us out of left field,” said Mr. Rasmussen. His company of about 50 employees–Rasmussen Iron Works Inc. of Whittier, Calif.–has spent at least $20,000 to fight any regulatory change, he says.
. . .
Judge A. Raymond Randolph expressed sympathy for the industry, saying that an object is not a heater simply “because it makes the air around it warm.”
“I don’t understand that as a matter of pure English,” said Judge Randolph, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush. He added: “That’s like saying a match is designed to furnish warm air. It’s designed to furnish a flame.”
H. Thomas Byron, a Justice Department lawyer, said it was “rhetorical hyperbole” to suggest Washington wanted to regulate everything that’s warm. . . .
Mr. Rasmussen, who says the family business has struggled in the weak economy, monitors the case closely. “We’re alive and kicking, but it’s not what it used to be, and when you have to fight your government, it’s hard to see where it’s going to get back anywhere near where it has been,” he said.

For the full story, see:
RYAN TRACY. “Hearth Makers Get Hot Over Regulations.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., October 23, 2012): A8.
(Note: ellipses and bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was dated October 22, 2012.)
(Note: in the third paragraph “he says” appeared in the online, but not the print, version.)