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?.

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:

Thousands of landlords who rent out homes in Boulder will be forced to invest a combined millions of dollars in upgrades — costs that could be passed on through higher rent — if the city approves new energy-efficiency standards.

On Thursday, the Boulder Planning Board will take up “SmartRegs,” a proposed point-based system designed to get rental properties — which make up about half of the city’s housing stock — to reduce their carbon footprint.

Read the rest of the article. The Camera published my comments on this in the April 24 edition:

“SmartRegs” is corporate welfare to finance a wasteful solution to a problem with debatable significance and causes.

“What happened to global warming?” asked a BBC headline last year. “One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over,” the article concluded.

Warming aside, there are still problems to address. In “Breaking the Global Warming Gridlock,” CU Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. explains that instead of endlessly debating the science, “practical steps to reduce our vulnerability to today’s weather … would go a long way toward solving the problem of tomorrow’s climate.”

The most ethical step is to promote prosperity though economic liberty and free markets. Wealthy populations are less vulnerable to climate-related threats than poor ones.  As economist Indur Goklany observes, more people will die from hunger, unsafe drinking water, and malaria because of poverty than global warming.  In terms of human well-being, it’s better to be wealthier in a slightly warmer climate than poorer in a cooler one.

If you support actions to mitigate climate change, mandatory emissions reductions is not the best method. “Freakonomics” author Steven Levitt prefers geoengineering solutions. Unlike emission reductions, they take immediate effect. They are also reversible, and the cost is “literally thousands of times cheaper” than reducing carbon emissions, says Levitt.

Solutions promoting innovation and wealth probably offend religious strains of environmentalism as sinful hubris. After all, it celebrates human accomplishment rather than promoting self-denial, guilt for driving, and subservience to Gaia and big government.

Some useful references I either used or did not have room to mention given the word limit:

• ClimateDebateDaily.com: A log of essay and research from two perspectives:
  1. “…supporting the idea that global warming poses a clear threat to humanity, that it is largely caused by human activity, and that solutions to the problems of climate change lie within human reach.”
  2. “…challenging the view that the world warming that began around 1880 is caused by human activity, that it poses a serious threat, or that the vagaries of earth’s climate are within human control.”
• Ari Armstrong, Radical Environmentalists Undermine Human Progress.
• From Science Daily: “In contradiction to some recent studies, [Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol] finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.”
• The Times of London reports: “The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.”
• Studies and commentary by Cato Institute scholars.
• From David Thoreaux at the Independent Institute:
  

As reported in the London Daily Mail, Phil Jones, the scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal in which leaked email documents reveal that IPCC scientists were manipulating data, has now made a series of major admissions, including the following:

* Data for the IPCC’s vital “hockey stick graph” used by climate alarmists has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before, such as the Medieval Warm Period—but NOT due to man-made changes”

In response to Nub’s comment below, I found the BBC interview with Phil Jones. The relevant section shows that it’s not accurate to say, as the Daily Mail did, that  “there has been no global warming since 1995.”  Here’s the section:

B – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

Since Coloradans have varying preferences for air quality and how much they’d pay to improve it, legislating a one-size-fits-all solution is not the best policy. As summarized in the book Free Market Environmentalism, courts heard common law nuisance cases concerning air pollution for years before the Clean Air Act. Polluters would compensate plaintiffs for demonstrated damages. Threats of costly lawsuits would encourage companies to reduce emissions.

If governments must legislate pollutants levels, they should let polluters find the most cost-effective ways to meet requirements. Otherwise, politicians will dictate political solutions that benefit their careers and favored lobbies at taxpayers’ expense.

House Bill 1365 smells like a political solution. It would require electric utilities using coal-fired power plants to submit “emission reduction plans.” The plan must give “primary consideration to replacing or repowering coal-fired electric generators with natural gas and to also consider other low-emitting resources.”

Indeed, politicians have subsidized the coal industry. But this does not justify subsidies or favors for their competitors. Instead, removing existing subsidies and let energy producers compete on their own merits.

This commentary was published in the Daily Camera (Boulder) on April 10, 2010.

The link to the Free Market Environmentalism book is to Google Books.  Most of the chapters are there, but the one on pollution , Chapter 10, is not.  Relevant references in the chapter include: Bruce Yandle, Bootleggers, Baptists, and Global Warming.  Check out his author page at the Property and Environment Research Center for more articles on common law and environmental issues. Also check out Indur Goklany’s work on air pollution and the Clean Air Act.

Some food for thought by Robert Nozick, an excerpt from Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 290-292 (1974), winner of the National Book Foundation’s National Book Award in 1975.

Consider the following sequence of cases, which we shall call the Tale of the Slave, and imagine it is about you.

1. There is a slave completely at the mercy of his brutal master’s whims. He often is cruelly beaten, called out in the middle of the night, and so on.

2. The master is kindlier and beats the slave only for stated infractions of his rules (not fulfilling the work quota, and so on). He gives the slave some free time.

3. The master has a group of slaves, and he decides how things are to be allocated among them on nice grounds, taking into account their needs, merit, and so on.

4. The master allows his slaves four days on their own and requires them to work only three days a week on his land. The rest of the time is their own.

5. The master allows his slaves to go off and work in the city (or anywhere they wish) for wages. He requires only that they send back to him three-sevenths of their wages. He also retains the power to recall them to the plantation if some emergency threatens his land; and to raise or lower the three-sevenths amount required to be turned over to him. He further retains the right to restrict the slaves from participating in certain dangerous activities that threaten his financial return, for example, mountain climbing, cigarette smoking.

6. The master allows all of his 10,000 slaves, except you, to vote, and the joint decision is made by all of them. There is open discussion, and so forth, among them, and they have the power to determine to what uses to put whatever percentage of your (and their) earnings they decide to take; what activities legitimately may be forbidden to you, and so on.

   Let us pause in this sequence to take stock. If the master contracts this transfer of power so that he cannot withdraw it, you have a change of master. You now have 10,000 masters instead of just one; rather you have one 10,000-headed master. Perhaps the 10,000 even will be kindlier than the benevolent master in case 2. Still, they are your master. However, still more can be done. A kindly single master (as in case 2) might allow his slave(s) to speak up and try to persuade him to make a certain decision. The 10,000-headed master can do this also.
   

7. Though still not having the vote, you are at liberty (and are given the right) to enter into the discussions of the 10,000, to try to persuade them to adopt various policies and to treat you and themselves in a certain way. They then go off to vote to decide upon policies covering the vast range of their powers.

8. In appreciation of your useful contributions to discussion, the 10,000 allow you to vote if they are deadlocked; they commit themselves to this procedure. After the discussion you mark your vote on a slip of paper, and they go off and vote. In the eventuality that they divide evenly on some issue, 5,000 for and 5,000 against, they look at your ballot and count it in. This has never yet happened; they have never yet had occasion to open your ballot. (A single master also might commit himself to letting his slave decide any issue concerning him about which he, the master, was absolutely indifferent.)

9. They throw your vote in with theirs. If they are exactly tied your vote carries the issue. Otherwise it makes no difference to the electoral outcome.

The question is: which transition from case 1 to case 9 made it no longer the tale of a slave?