If you live in New Hampshire don’t voice your support for the bill to decriminalize marijana, especially to a representative who votes in the legislature.

Toby Iselin emailed his representative, Delmar Burridge, knowing full well that they disagreed on the issue. What Toby didn’t expect was a veiled threat that the police would be keeping an eye on him from then on.
The end of the response email from Burridge reads:

I am copying two members of the Keene Police Department in case you want to change your ways and act legal and save your friends.

You are very passionate in your beliefs and would make a great snitch. It is thrilling to dime on your so called friends.

This is kind of pathetic from someone who holds an elected office.

[via Hit & Run]

Blogged with Flock

Today I found one benefit to living in Los Angeles: The Reason Foundation is nearby. Last week I got an email inviting me to a lunchtime colloquium at their office. Adrian Moore spoke about the initiatives and propositions on the upcoming California ballot.
His analysis for this time around found that the proposed borrowing in this year’s ballot would lead to something like an extraordinary $88 billion in debt and interest for the state. Considering that most state budgets are less than half of that amount in their entirety, the amount should shock even citizens of New York and Texas.

Another disturbing finding about the bond proposals is that only a small fraction of the money would be spent on infrastructure–the only legitimate expense to be funded by debt. Most of the money would be allocated just to carry on existing programs, which should obviously be allocated for in the annual budget of the state.

It frustrates me to realize that even people who manage to get things on the ballot do not understand the wasteful and unaccountable nature of government and have no concept of economics whatsoever. The most obvious example of that is Prop 87 which would make it illegal for oil companies to pass a drilling tax on to consumers.

Even if there were detailed scrutinizing of the companies’ financial statements by government, Californians would end up paying higher prices at the pump because of the added costs of importing more oil. Oil would have to be imported because no company would keep low-producing wells online that would become unprofitable because of the added tax and therefore the supply being generated locally within California would need to be offset by oil from somewhere else.

I’m not sticking up for the oil companies; they are certainly involved in plenty of unsavory back room deals and receive for too many subsidies for me to be their cheerleader. I’m just laying out simply what will happen economically.

Anyway, the Reason Foundation consolidated much of its analysis on a great site at http://reason.org/californiaballot/ and if you look at anything read over the handy Pocket Guide to Propositions (.pdf).

technorati tags:california, election2006, propositions, initiatives, prop87, reason

Blogged with Flock

This is a bit old by now, but I’ve been quite busy this weekend.

The front page headline of Friday’s San Francisco Chronicle read: Silence means prison, Judge tells reporters. Apparently two Chronicle reporters are being threatened with jail time for not revealing court sources in their ongoing coverage of the BALCO story.

I know very little about the story. I don’t follow sports at all and I don’t care about steroid use in sports. What I do follow with interest are cases of First Amendment disputes, overarching government authority, and the Drug War. Regardless of the reporters’ opinions on how the whole steroids in baseball controversy should be solved (I’m not aware of what their opinions actually are), the whole issue stems from the War on Drugs.

Were the use of steroids among the general population not a matter of illegality but of personal choice, the issue could have been resolved within Major League Baseball itself. If baseball players had the choice of whether or not to use steroids without the threat of legal action, the only consequences they would face would be the rules of the league or of Major League Baseball. Major League Baseball as a private, voluntary organization is perfectly capable of setting its own rules with regard to its members’ behavior. If they wanted to keep steroids against the rules of the game, they could easily bar any player who infringes upon that rule. (There are those who say let them be permitted.) Also, as a voluntary organization, testing could be mandated in any fashion and players who disagreed with the policy could leave by choice. The Chronicle reporters would still have been covering a fantastic controversy whether or not steroid use was considered illegal by the government.

The fact that this scandal has now resulted in the very real threat of prison for journalists simply doing their jobs is rather shocking. The drug warriors (which include many prosecutors and judges) apparently regard the trampling of rights as insignificant as long as high profile users get busted. That the matter of steroid use among athletes is a higher priority among government prosecutors than the abuses perpetrated by government upon citizens every day appalls me.

technorati tags: baseball, balco, steroids, drugwar, freespeech, freepress

Tonight I watched a bootleg copy of X-Men 3. I don’t feel bad about it. I would have rented it at some point anyway.

I subscribe to Netflix. I can get any movie or TV show in the mail at any time. Downloading a movie or a TV show is simply a more efficient means of me getting what I normally would have received in the mail anyway.

Now, I’ve been a Netflix customer for many, many years. I’m on the plan where I get to have four DVDs out at once. The turnaround time for me getting movies is about three days. I mail one back and two days later a new one arrives. Theoretically I could stagger my DVD rentals so that I would have a new one coming in every single day. I don’t do this for a few reasons, but mainly because there is not that much stuff I want to watch.

My understanding of the movie rental business is that the rental companies buy each copy of a DVD from the studios for hundreds of dollars because they are expected to recoup their expenses with many rentals. The movies are already paid for and my monthly bill to Netflix takes care of me paying them. I’m paying for at least one DVD per day by that logic and the studios have my money in their pockets.
I certainly do not download and watch that many shows or movies in a month. Even if my method of getting my Hollywood entertainment doesn’t conform to the industry’s preferences, the ones who are in the business to profit are still coming out ahead with me.

I do not really see any problems with my way of thinking about this, but I would love to hear another take on it.

technorati tags:netflix, filesharing, downloading

Blogged with Flock

Jim Harper has a good succinct piece up today on the Cato Daily Commentary about the worthlessness of a National ID Card.

It’s true that surveillance makes law-abiding people easier for authorities to control. People required to show ID could, for instance, be run against databases of outstanding fines and tax delinquencies at local shopping malls. But identification gives the government no similar control over terrorists and sophisticated criminals - the people we’re trying to stop with these ID checks.

Criminals always find ways around the law. That is the definition of what they do. Besides making government more of a nuisance in honest citizens’ lives, a National ID would not tell authorities in advance who will commit crimes.

Examples are legion in terrorism, and routine in crime, of people with no history of wrongdoing being the ones who act. For the 9/11 attacks, Al Qaeda selected operatives without records of involvement in terrorism.

The whole piece is a quick read and fairly convincing, though it is only a fraction of the larger issue.

technorati tags: nationalid, security, privacy, policy

The most refreshing thing I’ve read all week:

The economic case for energy independence has always been nonsensical. It is not possible to shield American consumers from rising prices at the pump simply by replacing foreign oil with domestic oil. Why? Because regardless of where the oil is produced - Oman or Oklahoma - its prices are set by the global market.

From a piece by Shikha Dalmia on the Reason Foundation’s site. She lays out the case for why nationalistic scaremongerers are all wrong when it comes to proper policy in regards to oil.

After giving a history of attempted (but ultimately failed) market manipulation by various entities, she details why the incentives for every party involved are to bring more oil into production for the world market. Dalmia also explains how, in the end, this buying and selling between nations leads to more global stability.

Thus whatever other arguments there might be for boosting domestic oil production, national security is not one of them. While this might seem counter-intuitive, it is really part of the overall logic of trade: The mutual dependence that trade breeds fosters peace because it gives hostile trading partners an incentive to refrain from acting on their hostility. Energy independence would weaken that incentive.

technorati tags: oil, trade