Some advocate another form of unnatural monopoly -  municipalization -  where government owns the electric utility. Supporters claim that “munis” have lower prices than franchised investor-owned utilities like Xcel. But this presents a false alternative between two types of government-created monopolies. Government should stick to its proper role: enforcing laws that protect individual rights. Here, this means repealing political controls that inhibit free-markets in electrical and natural gas service.

Others advocate “community choice aggregation.” This sounds like mandatory open access, which Texas has — Google “Texas  electricity shopping.” Mandatory open access involves forced competition that violates grid owners’ property rights: grid owners must sell grid access to competing power producers at contrived prices.

Maybe government-enforced competition is preferable to a government-enforced monopoly. But why settle for this?  Electricity is more a government-created monopoly than a “natural” one. Though state and federal controls inhibit competition, utilities compete for customers in about 10 U.S. towns. Such competition was more common before governments imposed regulations on them, as documented in “Electric Avenues,” published by the Cato Institute. Since the electric utilities themselves lobbied for these regulations, ask yourself who has benefited.

This was originally printed in the Boulder Daily Camera on July 17 2010.

More references on free-markets in electricity generation and distribution:

• Give Consumers Choice on Utilities, Vernon Smith and Lynne Kiesling at Reason.org.
• “Electricity Policy,” Chapter 44, Cato Handbook on Policy, 6th Edition, (2005).
• Clyde Wayne Crews, “Electric utility reform: The free market alternative to mandatory open access”, The Electricity Journal, Volume 10, Issue 10, December 1997, p. 32-43 [pdf][html at CEI.org]
• Electric Choices, Deregulation and the Future of Electric Power, Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. (associated with the Independent Institute.)
• Raymond C. Niles, Property Rights and the Crisis of the Electric Grid, The Objective Standard, Summer 2008.

Image via OpenClipArt.

The issue at CU is whether people with concealed-carry handgun permits can be armed on campus.  Armed with baseless prejudice against permit holders, supporters of campus gun bans imagine hypothetical horrors that might result from allowing it. But none of these have occurred on campuses, like CSU, that have allowed concealed-carry. Actual horrors — mass school shootings — have occurred only on so-called “gun-free” campuses.

Violent criminals seek unarmed victims, as Dave Kopel documents in his law review article, “Pretend ‘Gun-free’ School Zones: A Deadly Legal Fiction.” A “gun free” campus invites rapists and murderers: “Commit your crimes here – your victims won’t shoot you!”

“Dial 911 and die,” warns Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. Police typically cannot respond in time to stop shootings, and have no legal obligation to protect us. Students owe their lives to heroic civilians such as Joel Myrick, Mikael Gross, and Tracey Bridges, who stopped school shootings with guns they retrieved from their cars.

Gun bans disarm such potential heroes and invite rapists, gay-bashers, and murderers to prey on defenseless victims.

The above was printed in the July 3 Daily Camera (Boulder, CO).

Other gun control resources:

• GunCite
• Is there a right to own a gun?, by Mike Huemer
• Dave Kopel
• ConcealedCampus.org’s rebuttal of common arguments against concealed-carry on campus

(Graphic courtesy of Oleg Volk and A-Human-Right.com.)

Also check out the chapter on minimum wage laws in Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.

(via Reason.tv)

In the first study of its kind, Chhatre and Arun Agrawal of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor compared forest ownership with data on carbon sequestration, which is estimated from the size and number of trees in a forest. Hectare-for-hectare, they found that tropical forest under local management stored more carbon than government-owned forests. There are exceptions, says Chhatre, “but our findings show that we can increase carbon sequestration simply by transferring ownership of forests from governments to communities”.

The New Scientist article is gated, and I got the above quote from Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. For more, see his post: The economics of local forest management (or another lesson in Elinor Ostrom).

In Reason magazine, Ronald Bailey writes:

Authors Ashwini Chhatre, a geographer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Arun Agrawal, a political scientist specializing in environmental policy at the University of Michigan, offer evidence that governments have a habit of licensing destructive logging and that they often fail to prevent resource rustling. In contrast, Chhatre and Agrawal found, forests owned by local communities are managed for the long term and store lots of carbon dioxide.

As Chhatre told New Scientist, “Our findings show that we can increase carbon sequestration simply by transferring ownership of forests from governments to communities.” Chhatre and Agrawal further suggest that locals are better at managing common pastures, coastal fisheries, and water supplies.

Read the whole article: Who owns the forests?.

Surely some parents are rightly concerned with fast-rising tuition costs.  But Capping college tuition would either degrade a school’s quality or reduce scholarships students receive. For lower tuition prices, eliminate tax-funded tuition subsidies and financial aid. Employers and prospective students would benefit.

Government-subsidized student loans and grants increase tuition prices. When government subsidizes the cost of education, students pay less, so more people want to buy what colleges sell. Colleges respond by increasing tuition and fees. This isn’t just theory.  Economist Gary Wolfram’s research documents empirical evidence that backs it up.

College subsidies hurt both students and employers. College isn’t for everyone, but tuition subsidies create the illusion that it is. As career counselor Marty Nemko summarizes, “College students with weak high school records usually drop out, having learned little, and with devastated self-esteem, a mountain of debt, and a job they could have obtained without college.” Employers hurt because these students could have spent their college years gaining valuable skills through, for example, an apprenticeship program or on-the-job training.

Absent harmful tax-funded college subsidies, private alternatives would replace them. These would include the familiar student loans and scholarships. An intriguing alternative would be “human capital contracts,” where in exchange for investors’ paying their college expenses, students repay them a percentage of their future earnings over a specified time.

Whatever the alternatives, it’s immoral for politicians to confiscate our earnings to distort the labor market and meddle in people’s lives. Young adults have the right to pursue their dreams and careers according to their own judgment, rather than the schemes of politicians.

A version of this article was published on-line in the Daily Camera on June 12, 2010.

Read more about great economist and writer Frederic Bastiat.

(Via Reason.tv)

1. In 1802, Why did the owners of newly built water-powered textile plants that support child labor laws in England?
2. Why did “American Telephone and Telegraph Company chairman Theodore Vail successfully called for federal regulation of long-distance telephone”?
3. Who benefited when the Magna Carta specified a “standard width for all cloth sold in the kingdom”?
4. “In hearings before passage of the 1972 federal Water Pollution Control Act, industrialists located along the Ohio River argued for the law.” Why?
5. Why did “the coal interests in Ohio and West Virginia … [lobby] for the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments requiring scrubbers on newly built and modified coal-fired electric utilities.”?
6. Why did John Deere petition the Environmental Protection Agency to increase pollution controls on small gasoline engines?
7. Why did Chicago meat packers lobby Congress to pass the 1906 Meat Inspection Act?

And today, why do certain power companies favor legislation like cap & trade & pollution controls?

The answer to all of these questions is that companies support political controls (regulations) that shield them from competition. Often the legislation is defended on moral grounds, like protecting children or the environment (whether it does or not), but the large drive is rent-seeking – to gain unfair advantage over others, or to to mooch off of them.  The classic example is alcohol prohibition, supported by both bootleggers and Baptists.  “Bootleggers and Baptists” now refers to the concurrence of unsavory business interests and (often questionable) ethical crusading for political controls.

Read the whole article in The Freeman: We Want to be Regulated.

“The fundamental problem with America’s immigration system is that it forces Americans to justify to their government why they want to bring someone into the country, instead of requiring the government to justify to them why they can’t,” notes Forbes columnist Shikha Dalmia.

Legal immigration can take many years. For a cartoon depiction of this labyrinthine process, search on-line for “America’s Absurd Immigration Waiting Line.”

Local job-seekers cannot rightfully claim “first dibs” on job opportunities. Hiring the best person for the job should not be a crime, but immigration restrictions can make it so.  A temporary worker program would remedy this and other problems.  “A regulated channel for temporary workers would dramatically reduce the pressure on our borders, aid our economy and ease the task of our law enforcement agents inside the country,” testified former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. “There is an inextricable link between … a temporary worker program and better enforcement at the border.”

Some decry amnesty for illegal immigrants as undermining “law and order.” But valid moral principles trump unjust laws.  If it’s moral to apprehend illegal immigrants to maintain “law and order” was it moral in 1850 for authorities to apprehend escaped slaves under the Fugitive Slave Law?

The Daily Camera (Boulder, CO) printed a version of the above on May 22, 2010.

Here’s the cartoon depiction of America’s Absurd Immigration Waiting Line:

On the “wait in line” argument, see also: A related article: “Legal Immigrants: Waiting Forever.”

For a general overview, I recommend the chapter on immigration in the Cato Handbook for Policymakers.

On jobs, I recommend Ari Armstrong’s On Immigration, Too Many Conservatives Oppose Liberty. He writes:

But won’t legal immigrants and guest workers take American jobs? In a free society, a job belongs to whomever an employer chooses to hire, and to nobody else. And we are frankly tired of alleged conservatives treating jobs as though they were some sort of socialized property of the collective. It’s time for Republicans to stop channeling Karl Marx when it comes to immigration policy.

I also recommend a very informative essay, Is there a right to immigrate?, by Mike Huemer, a Philosophy Professor at the University of Colorado. In the conclusion he writes:

In restricting the flow of immigration, the government does not merely allow a harm to occur, nor does it merely refrain from conferring a benefit; the government actively and coercively interferes with people’s acting to satisfy their needs, in a way that is extremely harmful to most potential immigrants.

Credit for amnesty argument goes to Craig Biddle in his article titled Immigration and Individual Rights in The Objective Standard.  I recommend the whole article.  Don Boudreaux also has a good comment on amnesty:

But rule-breakers hurt society only when the rules they break are ones that help society when these rules are followed.  It’s not at all clear to me that the existing rules that limit immigration are helpful; they are, indeed, much more likely to be simply a species of economic protectionism, buoyed by ugly nativism — rules that create and protect rents — rules that are anti-social in the deepest sense.

Temporary worker program: Thanks to Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute for the Chertoff quote. It’s from his article, “Immigration Reform Must Include a Temporary Worker Program.” Check out his more recent article, U.S. Needs to Let More Workers In.

Notes on immigrants and taxes:

On his blog Boudreaux provides some links on whether immigrants drain the welfare state. One link is to an article by Shikha Dalmia, on how much taxes illegal immigrants pay:

• ” A stunning two-thirds of illegal immigrants pay Medicare, Social Security and personal income taxes.”
• “the 1996 welfare reform bill disqualified illegal immigrants from nearly all means-tested government programs including food stamps, housing assistance, Medicaid and Medicare-funded hospitalization. The only services that illegals can still get are emergency medical care and K-12 education.” [I think this hold for five years after arriving - BTS]
• [I]n 1996 … the Internal Revenue Service began issuing identification numbers to enable illegal immigrants who don’t have Social Security numbers to file taxes. … . Close to 8 million of the 12 million or so illegal aliens in the country today file personal income taxes using these numbers, contributing billions to federal coffers.
• “aliens who are not self-employed have Social Security and Medicare taxes automatically withheld from their paychecks. Since undocumented workers have only fake numbers, they’ll never be able to collect the benefits these taxes are meant to pay for.”

I’d like to find the references to the above.  For example, USA Today reports that “The Social Security Administration estimates that about three-quarters of illegal workers pay taxes that contribute to the overall solvency of Social Security and Medicare.”

The Environmental Protection Agency’s “Rulemaking Matters!” contest invites filmmakers to submit short videos that explain how federal regulations touch our lives. The best video wins $2,500!  Presenting a reason.tv submission: “Rulemaking Matters!”

The EPA webpage for the contest is here.  Check out Reason.tv’s other two entries for the “Rulemaking Matters!” contest.

Also check out this entry from the Competitive Enterprise Insitute, A Day in the Life of the Regulatory State:

“You oppose Medicaid and government-run schools? You’re heartless and lack compassion.”  If you have ever made this accusation, even tacitly, I invite you to reconsider the government policies you support.

Why does being compassionate mean supporting government-run schools and health plans? This makes little sense if you view these programs as government-run charities. Would you agree to perpetually donate a portion of your monthly income to the same charity -  regardless of its effectiveness?  If the charity is doing a lousy job, wouldn’t you want the freedom to find a better one?

Read the whole article: Questioning Your “Compassionate” Politics. (Update, the Denver Daily News also published the article.)

Thanks to Ari Armstrong, Paul Hsieh, Dave Kopel, and my wife for their comments. Thanks to Jessica Corry for putting me in touch with HuffPo.  I acknowledge many others in links within the article.  One person I did not link was Michael Cloud, whose book Secrets of Libertarian Persuasion was quite helpful, especially for this sentence, which is basically his:

If you support mandatory charity, what do you authorize government to do to those who peacefully refuse to cooperate?

I also recommend Cloud’s CDs on this topic. Great material, and not much overlap with the book.

Peter Saint Andre also inspired some of my ideas for this article. Many years ago I read his essay, On the Road to Voluntary Government Financing.