I wish that Life = West Wing

I love West Wing…and I wish every day that what goes on in Washington will become more like the show.

I guess my wish is coming true.

Via Democracy in America

McCain’s Shady Finances

This is about to get real wonky real quick, so let me try to explain this situation as best as I understand it. (I’m taking most of my analysis from TAPPED and NPR)

According to campaign finance laws which McCain helped to implement and I don’t really understand, candidates can elect to receive public funds matching for campaign expenses which are tied to certain rules regulating how the candidate can spend the money and requiring the candidate to report various aspects of campaign finance.

Most candidates don’t want to accept public funds matching because that would limit how much they can spend from the time they accept the funds all the way up until the general election, but when McCain’s campaign fell on hard times leading up to the primary season they had to do something.

In a technically legal but rather morally ambiguous move (especially coming from the champion of finance reform) John McCain took out a loan from a bank against future federal matching funds. To clarify, McCain took out a loan today saying that if he didn’t win the nomination he wouldn’t drop out of the race until he had applied for enough matching funds to cover the loans

The Author at TAPPED sums up the implications of this loan.

“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is a promise to perpetuate a fraud on the American taxpayers: if he no longer intended to seek the presidency, he made a legally-binding promise to pretend to remain in the race just long enough to collect public money to repay the loan. “

The ethical implications of this move really make me rethink my views on Mr. McCain. Up until this week, with the exception of McCain-Feingold (which ironically caused this mess), I was a big fan of McCain. He did seem like a straight-talker, at the very least he seemed committed to doing what he thinks is right. But the scandals which have come to light this week are blowing holes in my support for a candidate with whom I disagree on several distinct policy issues.

Unfortunately, due to the rather complex nature of this loan problem, very few people will realize that John McCain might not be the honest boyscout he builds himself up to be.

Money Money Money

I can’t remember where I stole this link from, but the Washington Post has an article discussing the value of earmarks obtained by the three major presidential candidates.

John McCain comes in first place with zero earmarks. However the scandal-in-the-making with that pretty blond lobbyist has a distinct probability of derailing the straight talk express.

“Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the likely GOP presidential nominee, was one of five senators to reject earmarks entirely, part of his long-standing view that such measures prompt needless spending.”

On the Democratic side of things, Barack Obama wins hands down:

“Working with her New York colleagues in nearly every case, Clinton supported almost four times as much spending on earmarked projects as her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), whose $91 million total placed him in the bottom quarter of senators who seek earmarks, the study showed.”

…

“As a campaign issue, earmarks highlight significant differences in the spending philosophies of the top three candidates. Clinton has repeatedly supported earmarks as a way to bring home money for projects, while Obama adheres to a policy of using them only to support public entities.”

A McCain v Obama race looks really good for a lot of reasons. Reigning in congressional money-wasting (See: Hillary’s Woodstock museum) is just one of them.

I Hate Ray Ceo

Below is the letter-to-the-editors which I just submitted to the state press in reference to this piece by Ray Ceo published today. I hesitate to link to it for fear of artificially inflating his readership.

Editors:

Up until today (2/22/2008), the editors of the State Press could have proudly boasted that they had never published any content which made me physically ill. Unfortunately, since running Ray Ceo’s piece, the situation has changed.

Despite his (grammatically ambiguous) proclamation that he “loves God, and prayer, and condemn this to hell, and ‘amen’ that,” in his column he exhibits not only a failure to understand the church (forgivable), but a vile disrespect for what many consider an important part of their lives. He compares Pastor Paul Wirth, who, as far as I can tell, has never been convicted of any crime, to men who commit the most morally perverse actions seen in our society.

I’m not often heard demanding more respect for religion, but to accuse a man trying to promote healthy relationships (in a way widely documented as effective) of pedophilia and perversion is obscene in a way I’ve never before been exposed to. For too long too many churches have taken a negative, unhealthy view towards sex – either in or out of a monogamous relationship. It’s about time someone in the church, in an attempt to promote healthy lifestyles, advocates a more realistic view of sexuality.

I hope that Ceo wrote this as an attempt to inflate readership by riling up innocent subscribers such as myself, but I heartily condemn the editors for publishing this smut which borders on libel.

Ray Ceo should go back to writing about Britney Spears. He doesn’t do it well, but it ’s what he does best.

UPDATE: They printed my letter in today’s paper. You can read it online here.

Professor Quote of the Day

“Despite Anton Scalia’s claim of exceptional intellectual orthodoxy, his whole jurisprudence is entirely inconsistent and incoherent.“

~Professor De Marneffe

Pretentious Quote of the Day

Let us not then pursue,

By force impossible, by leave obtained

Unacceptable, though in heaven, our state

Of splendid vasallage; but rather seek

Our own good from ourselves, and from our own

Live to ourselves, though in this vast recess,

Free, and to none accountable, preferring

Hard liberty before the easy yoke

Of servile pomp.

Drugs in Britain: What’s effective?

The final post of my catch-up blogging on the past few issues of The Economist, I’ll be dealing with drugs yet again.

The report is kindest about treatment for drug-users, which gets five stars (the top mark) for effectiveness; three stars go to education programmes and the referral of arrested addicts. But on law enforcement, the most expensive plank of the anti-drugs strategy, things fall apart. Police-intelligence work scores two out of five, as does that of customs officers. At street level it gets worse: cracking down on drug-dealing and drug-related crime rates only one star, whereas action on “soft” drugs such as cannabis scores none at all…

On intercepted imports, for example, the Treasury noted that although seizures had increased, the ever-falling price of drugs in Britain suggested that “in large measure rising totals [of seized drugs] reflect rising volumes of drug imports.”

So England is facing the same problems with the drug trade as everyone else. Combating drug imports and trade is futile: it’s both profitable and pleasurable – a deadly combination for a government trying to prohibit any activity.

I’ve been trying to come up with a reasonable solution to the drug problem (and I’ll call it that, because of the negative externalities associated with addiction), and this article leads me to (what I think are) some fairly reasonable ideas.

• Don’t waste money fighting non-addictive low-impact drugs like marijuana. Why bother? It’s easy to grow, to obtain, to use, and many people say it has less negative social and personal impact than alcohol.
• Disseminate information, not fear. As terrifying as Arizona’s anti-meth ads may be, too often they appear to be unrealistic propaganda. Providing relevant and factual information about addiction will provide a far more lasting and serious impact. Educate the people on the margins, those “just thinking about it.”
• Help the addicts.  Take the money you would spend fighting the drug war, and invest that money in public infrastructure to help rehabilitate addicts. Stem the spread of diseases like AIDS, invest in methadone clinics, provide “testing kits” to help users protect themselves against foul chemicals cut into the drugs.

As far as I can tell, drug use and subsequent addictions are incurable problems of our society. They’re just too appealing to too many people. Focus on the drugs that cause problems. Hint: marijuana is not one of them. Educate people about addiction, don’t just try to scare them: the truth will do that on its own.

The war in drugs will always end in failure. Always…it’s about time we realize that and change tactics to recognize this fact.

Cadbury points out the problem with Fair-Trade

“‘But we found that productivity, not price, was the problem,” says Alec Cole of Cadbury.”

Here. This is a pretty good approximation of the problem with the fair-trade phenomenon. The fair-traders argue that by paying higher prices for commodities (coffee, produce, etc.) they allow the small farmers to earn enough to live-on and support their family, but they fail to realize that paying poor farmers above-market value for products only increases the incentive to farm that product, driving prices back down (sometimes known as oversupply).

Mr. Cole recognizes that the price of cocoa is not the problem for the farmers; it’s their thoroughly inefficient farming techniques. Many third-world farmers don’t understand fundamental basics such as crop-rotation, so without this kind of basic knowledge their productivity will remain low and they won’t ever be able to increase their profits.

I think Cadbury has it right:

“The aim of the venture is to show cocoa farmers how to increase yields using fertilizers and by working with each other. it will also help them to find additional sources of income by encouraging them to plant red peppers and mangoes, which can grow beneath cocoa trees, and coconuts, which can grow above them.”

Buy cocoa from the most efficient producers, the ones who are best at farming, because they’re the only ones who will be able to profit in the long run.

Give a man an inflated price for a commodity and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to farm and he’ll eat for a lifetime.

The Drug Problem: Disincentives

Although already briefly discussed here, I’m trying to catch-up on the blogging I missed this week while I was inundated with homework, so I feel the need to comment on the drug problems discussed in the past few issues of The Economist.

The America’s section in the February 2nd edition is preoccupied with drug fueled violence in Mexico and the Caribbean. Mexico is beginning to look increasingly like other South American countries already torn apart by the drug trade, while the Caribbean, best known for fruity drinks sporting bamboo umbrellas, could be devolving from tourist paradise to gang-controlled wasteland.

The subtext of the article should make anyone question the incentives at work in the drug trade. Any decrease in the supply of drugs caused by a decrease in the suppliers merely raises the equilibrium price for drugs increasing the incentive to become a drug dealer. In other words, the more illegal drugs are, the more incentives there are to get involved in the drug trade. Not only increased incentives to get involved, but increased incentives to protect your firm (read: gang) by means of increasingly extreme measures (read: violence).

The “legalize drugs” movement has quickly become trite because of the general populations immediate rejection of it, but, like Al Capone in prohibition-era Chicago, the only way to stop the gang-violence is to remove the incentives for it.

Besides the common-knowledge discussion of the gang controlled cross-border drug trafficking (which hasn’t been slowed despite both Mexican and American efforts), the article states that

“After years of talks, Mexico’s Congress looks set to approve, by mid-February, a reform that will convert the country’s legal arrangements from a Napoleonic-style inquisitorial system to an Anglo-American-style adversarial system. Also in the reform package are plans to give the police new powers, including the right to enter homes without a warrant when in hot pursuit.”

Blatant disregard for civil rights has become an increasingly prominent (and terrifying) facet of the war-on-drugs. Just like the argument against The Patriot Act, against sacrificing liberty in the face of fear, disregarding privacy for a perverse obsession with stopping private consumption of controlled substances.

Classic:

From Indexed