Category Archives: News commentary

Here’s a toughie. Assume you support free-markets. That means you probably oppose government limits on what foods people can buy, such as New York Mayor Bloomberg’s so-called Big Gulp ban. A major reason for opposing such bans is that the government isn’t really capable of deciding what is healthy or unhealthy. If we ban sugary drinks, shouldn’t we also ban cholesterol-filled red meat? Vegan diets don’t have enough vitamin B-12, so maybe we should ban tofu. On the other hand, maybe Coca-Cola can escape the ban if it adds B-12 to its drinks.

The point is that free-market advocates oppose government control of what people eat because what gets labeled “healthy” or “unhealthy” will depend more on political power, fads, and urban folklore than on science and reason. Moreover, just as it is hard to end the corn ethanol program, once government labels something healthy or unhealthy, it will become very hard to change that label even if research proves it wrong.

On the other hand, the federal government gives out $75 billion a year in food stamps (technically the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program” or SNAP). The National Center for Public Policy Research considers itself a free-market advocate, yet it argues that food stamps should be dedicated only to healthy foods–and that the corporations that sell unhealthy foods shouldn’t lobby to keep their products in the program.

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Despite claims of a downtown population boom, the reality is that every demographic group is growing faster in the suburbs than the cities–and that includes poor people. According to an L.A. Times report on a new book from Brookings, between 2000 and 2011, the number of poor people living in suburbs grew by 67 percent and now outnumber poor people living in cities.

This is supposed to be a problem because antipoverty agencies are “unprepared to meet the need in suburban areas.” This being Brookings, one of the remedies is supposed to be “more (and better) transportation options” (meaning public transit) in the suburbs. But this begs the question: if antipoverty agencies and public transit are so critical to poor people, why did so many poor people move to the suburbs in the first place? The answer, of course, is that they aren’t that helpful.

Meanwhile, a report from Australia suggests that one reason why low-income populations are growing in the suburbs is that wealthy and upper-middle-class people are crowding poor people out of the inner cities. This is certainly the situation in many American urban areas, such as San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. This, of course, is what the cities wanted: to lure the high-taxpaying people away from the suburbs. In many cases, however, the way they are doing it is not by making the cities attractive to the rich but by making them unaffordable for the poor.

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Police cars today have cameras that can scan the license places on every car they see. Plate numbers are transmitted to a central computer and if a number is flagged as wanted in any way, the police in the cruiser get an alert and they can pull the car over. That sounds reassuring but it also represents a potentially serious invasion of privacy.

Compared with this, privacy concerns over such things as self-driving cars or VMT pricing seem tame. Yet conservatives manage to freak out over potential invasions of privacy by Google’s self-driving car as well as by proposals for VMT pricing.

Let’s get this straight. There is nothing about self-driving cars that are potentially an invasion of people’s privacy. Unlike police cars, the cars do not report to nor are they monitored by some central computer, Instead, all the electronics is on board the car. While some car systems being designed today could invade people’s privacy, the systems used to enable cars to drive themselves are not among them.

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Here’s a great idea sure to be endorsed by everyone who doesn’t think they get enough junk in their mailbox every day: tax email to subsidize the Postal Service.

I can see it now: A multi-billion-dollar annual slush fund that the president can use to reward his supporters in Congress. Labor agreements that allow mail carriers to retire on full pensions at age 55 after just ten years of work. Whole new lobby groups looking enviously at European postal subsidies and talking about how we need postal subsidies to “reconnect America.”

Whole engineering firms will devote themselves to doing studies of whether cities should accept federal funds to build new post offices. Soon people will point out how new post offices stimulate economic development. “We built one post office in a blighted area,” someone will no doubt say, “and got a billion dollars of new projects.” Others will complain about how unsustainable airmail is and demand a return to railway post offices.

Of course, this is only the beginning. We need to tax word processing software to subsidize typewriters; tax spreadsheets to subsidize slide rules; tax digital cameras to subsidize film manufacturers. Whole industries are disappearing before our eyes. Think of the lost jobs!
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