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.)

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.

Hold on. Before making broad statements about today’s college students and what erodes empathy, it’s important make sure there’s supporting evidence.

The study, summarized at Professor Sara Konrath’s website, focuses on how students answered surveys designed to measure factors associated with empathy. Over thirty years, scores on the two factors best associated with empathic behavior have declined.

Surveys are one way to measure empathy. But are survey results consistent with other methods, such as peer ratings, cleverly designed behavioral tests, and measures of mirror neuron activity? Outside the lab, students volunteer for or donate to charitable causes. Has this decreased over the years?

For sake of argument, say the various methods tell the same story, that today’s students are less empathic. Many factors can be involved. These may include trends in parenting styles, prevalence of single-parent households, and how many siblings the students have. The students’ majors may also be a factor. To stereotype myself, what if recent empathy studies attracted mostly physicists and engineers? If these are relevant factors, have they changed among students surveyed over the past thirty years?

Yes, time spent on-line or playing violent video games are reasonable suspects. Surely the surveys can gather such information about the students, if don’t already.  Are these and other factors correlated with how the students scored empathy-wise?

But don’t forget, correlation does not mean causation.  A student’s capacity for empathy may predict whether he buys Guitar Hero or Grand Theft Auto.

Thanks to my wife, a psychologist, for her insights and for pointing out an flawed argument in an early draft.

Regarding college students’ rates of volunteering over the past 30 years, I realize that this probably is not a measure of empathy, as psychologists use the term these days. After all, people can volunteer for causes for many reasons. Still, such trends would be interesting to know in light of such research

“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.”

“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.

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.

ObamaCare is a scam. It further empowers politicians to dictate how you seek medical care and support charities. Politicians should protect, rather than violate, your right to make these choices. The bill is not reform. Rather, it spreads a disease that masquerades as its own cure: authoritarian politically-controlled medicine.

The alleged “right” to health care gives this phony reform a moral facade. In practice, the “right” to health care means government decides when it’s “right” for you to get it.

More fundamentally, health care is not a right. Rights are freedoms to act, not entitlements to what others produce. Say you break your arm and cannot afford treatment. It’s admirable for doctors to voluntarily donate their time or for charities to help you pay.

A government-fabricated “right” to health care is compulsory charity, which violates actual rights. Government would either force doctors to mend your arm, or force others to pay. ObamaCare’s compulsory charity includes explicit taxes and taxes hidden in legislation that inflates insurance premiums.

We need authentic reform. Political controls have wedged insurers between patients and doctors, and employers between patients and insurers.  Legislation shields insurers from competition and outlaws affordable insurance. Patients are rarely the paying customer, so no one has incentive to please them.

ObamaCare exacerbates these problems by expanding Massachusetts’ phony reform nationally. Expect similar outcomes as its controls pile on: higher insurance premiums and poor access to doctors. New taxes will also stifle medical innovation and economic growth.

For real, effective, and moral reform, see healthcare.cato.org.

* * *

Thanks to Ari Armstrong and Paul Hsieh for their edits and suggestions.

Boulder’s Sacred Heart of Jesus school has decided that two schoolchildren cannot return to their private, Catholic school after this year because their parents are a lesbian couple. … What do you think?

My response, published in the Camera on March 14:

The Sacred Heart school teaches that “gay marriage is against the will of God,” writes the school’s pastor Bill Breslin. “Why would good parents want their children to learn something they don’t believe in?” he asks. Good question. Parents consider many factors when choosing a school. Maybe other factors outweighed this one — especially since the two children are in preschool and kindergarten. What would Sacred Heart teachers do, present a puppet show about human sexuality?

Puppets or not, parish schools like Sacred Heart seek to, in Breslin’s words, “to assist children in becoming disciples of Christ and to stand as a light shining in the darkness that has rejected Christianity and the truth of being human, including the meaning of human sexuality.”

To distinguish light from darkness, students must learn about, discuss, and debate both “dark” and “light” ideas.  Imagine a “Defense Against the Dark Arts” class from the Harry Potter novels – without the physical danger, of course. Not that school officials would approve the title. The syllabus could include the Wikipedia entry on “biology and sexual orientation.”  Students could debate the documentary “For the Bible Tells Me So,” which shows how gays suffer from religious moralizing and presents tolerant interpretations of relevant Biblical passages. Advanced students could view the South Park episode that mocks “conversion therapy” aimed at “correcting” a homosexual’s sexual orientation.

In such a class students might become critical and independent thinkers, and not substitute their own judgments with those of scripture or authority figures.

*          *          *
Scene from the South Park episode:

Watch the whole episode.