Just Get Prices Right...

People don't like scarcity. Resources they like should be available in infinite quantity at a zero, or an "affordable" price.

Me, I don't like gravity. Let's legislate that away. I'm 6'1". I should be able to dunk. Sure, I'm fat and out of shape. But the REAL problem is physics. As Sinead said: "Fight the real enemy!", in this case: gravity. I'm being denied an important civil dunking right here. There ought to be a law.

Okay, gravity is a physical law, not a statute. But we have no more chance of solving the problem of scarcity by outlawing it. Reminds of Winnie Churchill's line: You can't promote peace simply by praising its virtues. You can't promote cheap, infinite supplies of stuff simply by saying how nice it would be if we had cheap, infinite supplies of stuff. Even though it's true that it would be nice.

But if you allow markets to work properly, you can get lots more stuff, and lots cheaper stuff.

Take electricity....please. We cap price, give producers incentives to pad their rate base with nonproductive assets, and then whine when we run short. Sean at Catallarchy makes a nice comparison: what other business tries to tell its customers to use less of its product?

The solution is to let electricity producers price discriminate, by time. If they could charge the full marginal cost to customers, then peak load problems go away. Yes, lots of people might go without AC, but they wouldn't leave their AC running because the cross-subsidized rate is too low to make them care.

And, if prices could rise to their market-clearing level, all those other technologies that tree-hugging bed-wetters love so much (solar, geothermal, squirrels on little wheels hooked to generators (unless this happened), generators run by violent wave motion in my waterbed, etc) would actual become economically feasible. Charging the market price for electricity is the best thing that could happen for the environment.

Just get prices right. Everything else falls into place without direction, or orders from the nanny.

UPDATE: To RL in Canadiana...we subsidize GASOLINE even more, pumpkin. We would have electric cars in just a couple of years if we charged market prices for gas. But we don't. It wasn't the automakers who killed the electric car, they just pulled the trigger. Our tax policies and foreign policies, the ones that keep gas prices at least a dollar or more below the true price...that is what aimed the gun at the electric car and cocked it. Why would you blame corporations for trying to make profits? It's what they do. But when government enables corporations to misuse market power, because the UAW is such a strong voting bloc in a few states, and because oil companies make big contributions....just get prices right. If gas prices rise to their natural level, consumer demand for electric cars will overwhelm automaker opposition. I'm not sure why CNN got that so wrong. Wait...I am sure. They have no clue about how markets work, and they love the nanny.

Must Have Been a Slow News Day for the Grey Lady

On Sunday, the NYT took a strange shot at Elizabeth (Call me Libby, and I'll kick your ass!) Dole.

I'm not Dole's biggest booster, but I think it must have been a pretty slow news day.

They do (rightly) point out that she raised more $ last cycle than this. But they didn't point out that the reason Schumer has raised TWICE as much is because big donors stopped giving to the Democratic party once Dean took over as chief warlock at DNC.

NYT also says Senator Dole has a "distinctive" southern accent. Maybe if you are from New York, it's distinctive. I happen to find the New York accent "distinctive", myself. Southern people sound normal. That's what accents ARE, bunkie: they distinguish where you are from. And whether you learned enough manners from your mama to write about actual news rather than talk people down. It always amazes me how parochial New Yorkers are: any detail of NYCity geography you don't know, it shows you are a yokel. But they are proud of their ignorance of THE ENTIRE REST OF THE COUNTRY. You have seen the map...they aren't kidding. But then if ignorance is bliss, why aren't all New Yorkers HAPPY? They should be ecstatic.

Notice that the name "Howard Dean" did not appear in the NYT story, which is supposed to be about people who are having trouble doing their fund-raising job. I would have thought HD would have merited his own paragraph.

(nod to Anonyman, who knows things)

Are You Handy?

If Jimi Hendrix had played hand music like this, the album title would have been "Are You Handy?"

My college roommate, old friend, best man at my wedding, and all around musically talented guy, RLH, used to play the hands (though he also played the trumpet, and very well). But this guy on NPR is amazing.

Listen to a sample, if you are not at work, or syncopated flatulence sounds is okay at your workplace.....Hail to the chief, if your boss walks in.

When I Escaped I Didn't Feel Like I Got Away

I had not seen this.

My man Coturnix provides that link to a....well, I don't know what you would call it. Conscientious objector of a sort, I suppose.

SEATTLE (July 23) -- When First Lt. Ehren K. Watada of the Army shipped out for a tour of duty in South Korea two years ago, he was a promising young officer rated among the best by his superiors. Like many young men after Sept. 11, he had volunteered “out of a desire to protect our country,” he said, even paying $800 for a medical test to prove he qualified despite childhood asthma.

...

Lieutenant Watada said that when he reported to Fort Lewis in June 2005, in preparation for deployment to Iraq, he was beginning to have doubts. “I was still prepared to go, still willing to go to Iraq,” he said. “I thought it was my responsibility to learn about the present situation. At that time, I never conceived our government would deceive the Army or deceive the people.”

He was not asking for leave as a conscientious objector, Lieutenant Watada said, a status assigned to those who oppose all military service because of moral objections to war. It was only the Iraq war that he said he opposed.

Military historians say it is rare in the era of the all-voluntary Army for officers to do what Lieutenant Watada has done.

“Certainly it’s far from unusual in the annals of war for this to happen,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in military affairs at the Brookings Institution. “But it is pretty obscure since the draft ended.”

Mr. O’Hanlon said that if other officers followed suit, it would be nearly impossible to run the military. “The idea that any individual officer can decide which war to fight doesn’t really pass the common-sense test,” he said.

An impossible choice. Of course officers have to follow orders. Yet the "I vass chust following ze orters!" didn't carry much water at Nuremberg. I guess I am on the side of the military here. But you have to admit that Lt. Watada is not a coward, not by any stretch.

ATSRTWT

Blog Death: Is it just entropy?

So many blogs I like, and used to read, have gone silent, or nearly so. It is an epidemic; is it just summer?

AntiClimacus
Ex Nihilo
Freedom from Faith
Unfettered
Whacking Day
Yobbo

Fortunately, Peaktalk is back. And the hot chick SEEMS to be back, though it may just be another tease. (You all know how she is...)

But I may have to strike half a dozen from my list of links. Moribund, without explanation. Sad.

Of course, I took a hiatus myself. But I said I was going to.

Now, noboby OWES us posts. But give us a hint you are okay, for heaven's sake.

There Ain't No Good Guy, But There Are Some Bad Guys

A friend, a smart friend, wrote to ask me my thoughts on the Israeli attack on Lebanon. In particular, said friend asked, "why does the U.S. get to have all these weapons of mass destruction...Israel gets to have 300 nuclear warheads...and we drop weapons of mass destruction on other countries but yet...they aren't supposed to have any WMD's themselves. And the logic is? If you were an Arab country near Israel, would you want one nuclear weapon perhaps?"

I find this question remarkable. The difference in our world views is so great that...well, we must be looking at different worlds. Let me take a shot at this.

1. Israel has not pledged to destroy ANY of the nations surrounding it.

2. Hezbollah (controls Lebanon), Hamas (controls Palestinian Territory), Syria, Iran, and Iraq (until three years ago) have all openly sworn that they will do all in their power to destroy Israel, and kill all the Jews in the middle east.

As in: Kill. All. Destroy. Everything.

3. That asymmetry seems to me to explain the asymmetry in our policy. Israel has weapons, does not claim to want to destroy other nations and kill their entire populations. Countries that DO want to destroy other nations and kill their entire populations, we should try to keep them from getting nuclear weapons. So, no, I don't think we should give one nuclear weapon to each nation. I think we should try to convince extremists (i.e., Hezbollah) to stop attacking Israeli civilian populations with rockets and mortars from the cover of another innocent civilian population (i.e., Lebanon).

4. Further, I don't see how anyone could blame the Israelis for what is going on in Lebanon. Hezbollah is a group of Syrian-backed thugs, and the international community has allowed Syria to overthrow the legitimate Lebanese authority.

5. The Lebanese, understandably, are saying "a pox on BOTH your houses" to the Israelis or Palestinians. But how do they feel about the gangsters, thugs, and theocratic soldiers in Syria? The cowardice of the French, the erstwhile mandatory power in Lebanon, and current pussweiler Security Council taker-up-of-space, is what brought on this disaster. When someone blames Israel, I am genuinely amazed.

6. The solution is for the UN (using those crack French troops) to occupy Lebanon, for real this time, and throw out the Syrians, confiscate the rockets, and seal the Syrian border. Then force the Israelis to pull back and stop attacking, which they will be happy to do since Hezbollah will no longer be a threat. And then everyone can live happily ever after. (Okay, no, since the French won't actually commit any troops, and Syrian border is much too long to seal, or even supervise, and Hezbollah is actually becoming more popular in Lebanon, for reasons that totally escape me. U.S. and England don't really have any troops to spare, and Russia and China...well, don't hold your breath. It's the fire this time for Lebanon).

I have a number of friends in the Israeli military, and press. They are all pacifists, some of them extreme pacifists. They are horrified at what they are doing. But there is nothing else to do....Sometimes things just get caught up in an inexorable logic of destruction, and the world watches in horror. There ain't no good guy.

(UPDATE: Interesting post from DD. I don't see this as just / unjust. I see this in terms of alternatives. I think Israel is making a mistake, and Hezbollah is winning the war of public opinion. I just don't see that Israel has any alternative)

Damon, Apparently, Really DOES Suck

More evidence that Scott Boras is the living agent of Satan.

A baby bib.

It seems Johnny Damon (my homie!) thinks he owns all the rights to the word "Damon."

So, it actually makes sense for Boras to act this way. Damon.....Daemon.... Demon....Daddy of Boras.

(Nod to JJ, who knows stuff. He certainly knows that Boras is Satan, for example).

And, I **liked** the title

Dan Drezner has an interesting post on the political power of "big models."

As if size matters. And, it does, it DOES.

Recovered Space vs. Real Political Space

I am sick up and fed with reading papers in poli sci that confuse the recovered space of political action in legislatures with the actual space of political conflict in the society.

This problem has been analyzed in various ways, but two of the most orthodox are Hinich and Munger (1994, Michigan), Ideology and the Theory of Political Choice, and Poole and Rosenthal (1997, Oxford) Congress: A Political Economic History of Roll Call Voting.

Hinich and Munger argue that any empirically recovered space will have dimension one less than the number of effective parties, if those parties are coherent. That is, imagine a complex n-dimensional space of “real” preferences. Now, imagine two parties are points in this space. The line intersecting the two points (and that is what a recovered space is) will have dimension one, like any line.

Poole and Rosenthal back this up, and add quite a bit more useful information about changes over time. If a party is NOT coherent, or cohesive, there may be factions, and so more than one dimension, even in the recovered space.

(Now, let's be fair: the technique of Poole and Rosenthal is much older than the H&M contribution, and Keith rightly attributes the original idea of "what if there are just different spaces?" to Peter Ordeshook, in the 1960s. Here is a very cool, and intellectually honest, history of the idea)

Now, the underlying “true” space can be very complex indeed, and interest groups and outside forces constantly try to get past the filters imposed by agenda control of calendars and committees in the legislature.

If they do, or if the legislators’ own beliefs intrude, the recovered space may reflect these tensions.

The money point: I would expect scholars to recognzie the problem of using the recovered space (and NOMINATE is certainly one such) as a metric for understanding national politics. What it is, is a measure of the voting patterns of legislators on issues that are allowed to come to the floor for a roll call vote. The author will need to point out the shortcomings of recovered measures, and explain the mapping from real issues into NOMINATE space.

Then, it will be easier to discuss the difference (made much of here) between introduction of “new” dimensions as heresthetic manipulation or genuine cross-cutting cleavages. The gate-keeping roll of the majority party, legislative calendars, and the Rules Committee are key factors in keeping out the contagion of new issues just for heresthetic purposes. But it is much harder to isolate the chamber from the “real” pathogen of genuine cleavages within the party.

I do not mean to minimize the P&R contribution. To be fair, they make no claim to be measuring the OVERALL ideology of the society. And their technique is rightly accorded great respect as the primary measure of legislative voting patterns over time in the U.S.

But I wish that users of that measure would be as careful as its creators.

How to Be Web Smart

KKM's new web site (the middle "K" stands for "Kuppa", by the way).
It's "How to be Web Smart"

It is a really WONDERFUL web site.

I found three sites I was unaware of, and which I will likely use often. Fascinating.

Check it out.....