Mexico's biggest drug lord: thanks for the drug war!

This is pretty funny, and would be embarrassing to the American govenrment if not for the fact that the mainstream media for sure won't cover it: the leader of one of Mexico's two biggest drug cartels thanking the American government for keeping recreational drugs illegal, fueling the black market profits that made Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera, head of the Sinaloa cartel, a billionaire. According to the HuffPo:

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera reported head of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, ranked 701st on Forbes' yearly report of the wealthiest men alive, and worth an estimated $1 billion, today officially thanked United States politicians for making sure that drugs remain illegal. According to one of his closest confidants, he said, "I couldn't have gotten so stinking rich without George Bush, George Bush Jr., Ronald Reagan, even El Presidente Obama, none of them have the cajones to stand up to all the big money that wants to keep this stuff illegal. From the bottom of my heart, I want to say, Gracias amigos, I owe my whole empire to you."

And then there's this big, about the Mexican government desperately desiring that the US government legalize drugs, which of course ain't gonna happen:

According to sources in the Mexican government, President Calderon is begging American officials to, in the words of reggae great Peter Tosh, legalize it. "Oh yeah," said an official close to the Mexican president, "Felipe is going crazy. He's screaming at everybody who comes in, 'Why don't they make this sh*t legal already! You're killing me here!' Look, everyone knows, when you have Prohibition, you create gangsters. And the more you prohibit, the more gangsters you make. El Chapo is hero now to all those slumdogs who want to be millionaires. Kids in the street, when they play games, they all want to be El Chapo, the baddest man in the whole damn town."

The pot rehab industry scam

NORML has some pretty horrifying statistics about the marijuana rehab treatment industry (something I've talked about before), showing that it seems the vast majority of people enrolled in them probably don't have any addiction at all, and have no reason to be in rehab. By the government's own admission, 37% of people admitted to treatment centers for marijuana addiction said they hadn't used marijuana in the month prior to their admission. On top of that, another 16% used it either once, twice, or three times in the month prior to entering rehab. In addition, only 15% of admissions are voluntary – the majority are the work of criminal courts, and the remainder are presumably juveniles sent by their parents.

By the way, I should mention that these treatment centers are (I believe) almost always private, for-profit, and paid for out-of-pocket by those who are sent by courts to them.

Another fun fact about the pot rehab scam industry: they love blogspam, and will leave it on any blog that mentions marijuana and rehabilitation. They take a couple of weeks to pile up, but for an example, look at all the comments I had to delete on an earlier post about pot rehab.

Update: And the spam begins! I'll leave them up just for shits and giggles...

The trade-off between passenger and freight rail

Normally Robert Poole at the Reason Foundation makes my blood curdle, but his blog post at the Reason Foundation brings up a very good point, if it is indeed true: because of Europe's emphasis on passenger rail, they only ship 10% of freight by rail, compared to a figure of 41% in the United States. I'm not entirely sure of the significance of this when all is said and done, but it's a fascinating fact.

So in fact, what the new federal funding will mostly be used for is upgrades to the existing shared passenger/freight tracks, aiming to get Amtrak trains up to speeds of 90 to 100 mph rather than today’s 60 or 70 mph. But that raises the question of getting the best use out of America’s existing railroad infrastructure. While it’s possible, with lots of passing sidings and expensive signaling systems, to operate both fast passenger trains and slower (and much longer) freight trains on the same trackage, the performance of both is hindered. U.S. freight railroads still have serious difficulties attracting time-sensitive freight, because rail freight takes so long (an intermodal trip from Tacoma to Columbus or Cincinnati takes 7 to 12 days) and is so uncertain (i.e., from 7 to 12 days!). Today’s high-tech, just-in-time logistics system cannot operate with such long times or with large schedule uncertainty, which is why so much freight moves by truck instead of rail.

In contrast with the United States, European countries over the last 50 years have opted to use their railroad networks primarily for passenger service (except for the new, separate HSR lines). If you compare goods-movement in Europe (the 27 EU countries) and the United States, you find that as of 2005, rail carried only 10% of all freight ton-miles in Europe, compared with 41% in the USA. Trucks in Europe handled 45% of ton-miles, compared with 30% here. That different mix of goods transport (other categories include pipeline, inland waterway, air freight, and coastwise shipping) has consequences for GHG emissions. In response to my query, Wendell Cox pulled together preliminary estimates of goods-movement GHGs for Europe and the United States and posted them here. (These are preliminary estimates, and Cox welcomes feedback.) What they show is that the GHG intensity of goods movement in Europe averages 193 grams/ton-mile compared with 155 grams/ton-mile in the United States. In other words, the current U.S. policy of using its railroad network mostly for freight is “greener” than the European policy of using its network primarily for passenger service.

Thus, by putting more 100 mph passenger trains on existing railroads, we risk thwarting the hoped-for shift of more freight from truck to rail.

Only a nihilist would oppose a subsidized press

"Only a nihilist would consider it sufficient to rely on profit-seeking commercial interests or philanthropy to educate our youth or defend the nation from attack." — The Nation on news subsidies.

Obama wrong on ag policy, Cuba, and drugs

Stephen Walt and those theoretical IR and government types generally annoy the hell out of me, but he nails it on the head in an article for Foreign Policy called "Dumb and Dumber" about three American foreign policy moves. On all three issues – farm subsidies, the Cuba embargo, and the war on drugs – he takes the libertarian viewpoint.

Unfortunately, Obama doesn't seem to have taken a sensible approach to any of them. On farm subsidies he's mouthed platitudes all the while supporting the bulk of the subsidies, and his campaign-era stance on corn ethanol was downright cynical. On Cuba, he's allowed more remittences and visits home, but hasn't fully liberalized either trade or travel. And on the war on drugs, he's budged about two inches in the right direction: appointing a vaguely progressive drug czar, and halting the federal raids on medical marijuana in states where it's legal under state law.

The NYT can't tell socialism from capitalism

The NYT ran an article the other day about the supposed evils of water privatization in Chile, replete with all sorts of boilerplate platitudes against capitalism (“[the] market can regulate for more economic efficiency, but not for more social-economic efficiency”), and it's pretty emblematic of the lazy way in which the Times throws around the words "free market."

The article focuses on a town called Quillagua, which is (apparently) the driest town in the world – which makes you wonder, maybe humans shouldn't actually be living there in the first place?

But anyway, the bizarre thing about the town's history is that there's really not much in it that could be justifiably pinned on the free market. Here're some bits that directly relate to Quillagua:

That prosperity first began to ebb in 1987, when the military government reduced the water to the town by more than two-thirds, said Raul Molina, a geographer at the University of Chile. But the big blows came in 1997 and 2000, when two episodes of contamination ruined the river for crop irrigation or livestock during the critical summer months.

An initial study by a professor concluded that the 1997 contamination had probably come from a copper mine run by Codelco, the state mining giant. The Chilean government then hired German experts, who said the contamination had a natural origin.

Chile’s regional Agriculture and Livestock Service, part of the Ministry of Agriculture, refuted those findings in 2000, saying in a report that people, not nature, were responsible. Heavy metals and other substances associated with mineral processing were found that killed off the river’s shrimp and made the water undrinkable for livestock. (Drinking water for residents had been transported in for decades.)

Codelco, the world’s largest copper miner, rejects any responsibility. Pablo Orozco, a company spokesman, said that the river water had been bad for years, and that heavy rains around the time of the contamination episodes had briefly swelled it, sweeping sediments and other substances into the water.

First of all, the fact that a "military government reduced the water to the town" seems to me like an argument against public stewardship of water, not for. And then there's the doozy about "the state mining giant," which, in addition to being an offender in Chile, is a global giant, presumably doing similar things across the world. Which leaves me wondering why in the hell the Times thinks that (according to the article's title) "Chilean Town Withers in Free Market for Water." Am I missing something, or did the Times just characterize a military government and a state mining company as the free market?!

Unions and total internet privacy, or a newspaper - take your pick

Apparently you can either have unionized labor or a newspaper, but you can't have both. The NYT reports:

No one knows which will be the first big city without a large paper, but there are candidates all across the country. The Hearst Corporation, which owns The Post-Intelligencer, has also threatened to close The San Francisco Chronicle, which lost more than $1 million a week last year, unless it can wring significant savings from the operation.

In a tentative deal reached Tuesday night, the California Media Workers Guild agreed to less vacation time, longer workweeks and more flexibility for The Chronicle to make layoffs without regard to seniority. Union officials say they have been told to expect the elimination of at least 150 guild jobs, almost one-third of the total, and management is still trying to negotiate concessions from the Teamsters union.

Advance Publications said last fall that it might shut down The Star-Ledger, the dominant paper in New Jersey, but a set of cutbacks and union concessions kept the paper alive in much-downsized form.

With all the hand-wringing on the left about the demise of journalism and the abhorrent suggestion that the government subsidize the news, it's amazing that I haven't heard once the suggestion that perhaps newspapers ought to be immune from laws compelling employers to accept unionized employees any more than a free market in labor would demand. In that ridiculous HuffPo piece by Monroe Price, he digs so deep that he suggests that "[making] subscribing to a newspaper tax-deductible" is a serious way to get people to abandon free online media.

Also: it's funny that none of these people bemoaning the death of the media don't see the connection between targeted advertising initiatives like this one by Google and the continued health of online media, which relies heavily on ad revenue. It's an uncomfortable fact for those who like the idea of the internet as a one-way street, but the truth is: what's good for advertisers is good for consumers, in that without the ad revenues, there's nothing to consume.

Chinese alphabets and logograms

The debate over Chinese characters has always interested me, but I confess to thinking that the struggle was generally between those who wanted to keep the logogram characters, and those who wanted to move to an alphabetic system, like in Vietnam. But, after having read this article (via thebrowser.com – my new favorite link aggregators), I learn that there is a school of thought arguing for a return to traditional Chinese characters (as opposed to the simplified system instituted by the communists in mainland China). The traditional characters are still in use in Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, whereas mainland Chinese and overseas Chinese in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia use the simplified forms.

It's generally true that the simplified characters are easier to learn, though leaning only them makes it difficult for younger Chinese to understand older texts, and the high literacy rates of Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan prove that it's not impossible for a literate society to use traditional characters. However, apparently some thing that excluding people from the literate population is precisely what China ought to do to revive its high culture:

The clash between high and low culture is taken even further by Xu Jinru, a self-described "poet, scholar, and conservative thinker," who frequently argues that simplified characters are directly responsible for social decay: "The more literacy spreads, the further culture declines."

And then on the other end of the spectrum, we have those who believe that China should scrap the character system altogether in favor of a phonetic alphabet. This shift is already underway (albeit unintentionally) among people who've grown up with computers, who input characters using the alphabetic pin-yin system, and who are losing their command of the character system – a system which takes constant practice to maintain.

Most people I know who know something about China and literacy argue that an alphabet is inevitable, but I'll be interested to see fifty years hence how the Chinese are writing.

Obama's Trade Rep admits pandering

I do appreciate the public choice ramifications of democracy, but I still don't totally understand why things like this happen mere months after a president takes office, during a crisis that few believe will still be with us during the run-up to the 2010 election:

[Probable U.S. Trade Representative] Kirk [...] is viewed by many as a pragmatist who in the past has supported the notion of free trade.

Yet the administration, analysts say, is also up against an American public that is increasingly blaming the open U.S. trade policies of the past as part of the toxic mix at the root of the nation's economic problems. Kirk suggested as much yesterday.

"It is true that cheaper foreign products helped squeezed American families stretch their dollars, and the sale of our goods and services abroad support American families," he said. "But it is also true that the overarching benefits of trade are difficult to appreciate when a plant closes in a small community because of increased foreign competition."

Take out the words "families" and "community," and that looks like it could have come straight out of a public choice textbook arguing why inefficient interest group politics are inevitable in a democracy.

Also, I'd be interested to know, before the dawn of the eternal election campaign, were presidential administrations less likely to engage in this sort of blatant populism early on in their terms? I suspect the answer was no, which sort of invalidates the premise of the question – i.e., the eternal election isn't really a modern invention.

William Tucker debunks the notion that a "smart grid" will save America

William Tucker at The Infrastructurist (perhaps my new favorite blog) has an article up in which he debunks the myth that the "smart grid" is going to alleviate America's energy woes.

First of all, he points out that a smart grid and a grid capable of distributing solar and wind power from the states with (i.e., the interior) to the states without (i.e., the coasts) are two totally different projects, and that any effort to conflate the two arrises either out of ignorance of willful deception:

The second premise is that the smart grid will help integrate wind and solar energy - the two balky “renewables” that have the disadvantage of not being dispatchable when we want them. With the smart grid, wind and solar generation will always be available somewhere and so can be conveyed to where it’s needed.

But these are different things. The true “smart grid” will be a digitalized distribution system that conveys real-time information. Incorporating remote wind and solar, on the other hand, will require an upgraded grid, something entirely different. Our present 345-kilovolt AC transmission wires can’t do it without unacceptable line losses. We will need to rebuild to 765-kilovolt DC system – something that could take decades and easily cost several trillion dollars.

And then he makes this point, which explains why all you ever hear about are how you're going to do your dishes and laundry at night instead of during the day:

It’s fitting that the girl is standing in front of a clothes dryer because that and washing dishes are the only examples anyone has ever been able to come up with about how residential users are going to “redistribute” their energy consumption.

What else can they do? Are they going to wait until after midnight to watch television? Are they going to heat up dinner at 4 a.m.? Are they going to turn on lights at sunrise instead of when it gets dark? And how about air conditioning, that most voracious consumer of electricity? One suggestion floated by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in “The Green Grid,” a study published last June, is that people might “pre-cool” their homes by running the air conditioning in the morning in anticipation of hot afternoons. This may indeed level peak loads. But it will also consume more energy, since some of the pre-cooling will obviously dissipate.

The same author also has another good article on the same blog about nuclear power, in which he argues that it's a lot safer than people think, though I wish he'd spent a bit more time on the economics of nuclear power regulation. Namely, I'd like to know: could nuclear power be cost competitive with coal- and oil-fired power plants and still be just as safe? (Though he does touch on it when he points out that environmental controls on nuclear are much stricter than on coal-fired plants, despite the fact that the latter spew more radioactive substances than their nuclear counterparts.)