The NYT preaches to the choir

The NYT has an editorial today about industrial farming called "The Worst Way of Farming." While I generally agree with the gist of the editorial – that industrial farming is not efficient and is a bad idea – I think the way they authors go about making their point is a bit bizarre. Since the NYT is a liberal paper, and its readers are generally wont to agree with calls for regulation, centering the editorial around a call for environmental regulations and heavy-handed mandates seems too much like preaching to the choir. The editors ought to be promoting, first and foremost, market-enhancing reforms before encouraging further regulations. While the article suggests that government distortions in the markets for water and animal feed encourage this type of farming, the editors don't mention it more than once, and don't make it explicitly clear that a part of solving the problem is to reintroduce market competition into the farm sector. This would be much more palatable to the general public, which is (I would suppose) much less warm to the statist policies that the NYT concludes at the end are necessary. Rather than backing an idea that only statist liberals could get behind, why not center the piece on a call for dismantling the barriers to free enterprise that currently exist? That way, neither Democrats nor Republicans could credibly disagree.

This is something that's relevant not just to the issue of farming, but to every issue: an issue whose main constituency is the left would do itself huge favors by focusing on arguments that appeal to right-wingers.

Markets in everything: graveyard edition

This ought to make a nice addition to the Markets in Everything series. From Radio Free Europe (yes, it still exists!), an article about markets in information about mass graves in the former Yugoslavia:

Already from the first days and weeks of the conflict in 1992, individuals sought to obtain money by providing information about the locations of prisoners and detainees. Some people offered to arrange prisoner exchanges or releases in exchange for payment. The practice continued into the postwar era, when individuals from all three ethnic groups offered information about mass graves and other burial sites for profit. About 12,000 victims of the conflict remain unaccounted for. [...]

Bogdanic argued that few people in possession of information about mass graves or the remains of individuals are willing to tell what they know out of human decency, but want some form of compensation instead. The demands, he added, vary greatly.

Predictably, there's someone stepping in crying foul, and but at least he admits that what he proposes is against the wishes of those he's trying to help:

Accordingly, Bogdanic believes it is necessary to establish regulations to set boundaries for payments for such information and involve government institutions in the process. He noted, however, that victims' families tend to reject that idea, presumably because they fear that regulating the sale of information would deter individuals from coming forward and telling what they know.

And how accurate is the information?

Karabasic noted that the information offered usually proves accurate. The sellers are clearly from the area and can identify the victims by first and last names.

Voltaire: a detriment to public health, safety, and welfare

Robert Darnton has an article in the New York Review of Books about the history of written information, and in it he discusses textual stability and the weak de facto intellectual property rights of authors. Apparently, even the best engaged in and profited from what America's two biggest cities say is "detrimental to the public health, safety, and welfare":

The most widely diffused edition of Diderot's Encyclopédie in eighteenth-century France contained hundreds of pages that did not exist in the original edition. Its editor was a clergyman who padded the text with excerpts from a sermon by his bishop in order to win the bishop's patronage. Voltaire considered the Encyclopédie so imperfect that he designed his last great work, Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, as a nine-volume sequel to it. In order to spice up his text and to increase its diffusion, he collaborated with pirates behind the back of his own publisher, adding passages to the pirated editions.

Toothless measures

What's the point in seizing something that a person can legally buy in any supermarket or kitchen supply store?

The kitchen knife is the most common weapon used in teenage stabbings, Sir Ian Blair said today, as he revealed that close to 200 weapons have been seized since officers stepped up stop and search measures in response to a spate of recent knife crime.

Black Philadelphia and the Prophet's Arabia

I was listening to All Things Considered on NPR today, and they were playing the second part of a piece about polygamy in Islam in America. It was about the increased occurence of polygamy amongst black American converts to Islam. It was a fascinating piece, and included this interesting parallel between seventh century Arabia and modern-day black inner-city neighborhoods:

Abdullah, the imam, has conducted religious ceremonies for a dozen polygamous marriages.

Abdullah says polygamy in Islam dates back to the 7th century, when battles were killing off Muslim men and leaving widows and children unprotected. [...]

The single women at the mosque say polygamy is a fact of life. But it's not their first choice.

"Every woman has a preference to be the sole wife," says Aliya, echoing the sentiments of the others. Aliya is a 28-year-old single woman who is finishing up a master's degree. She says that South Philadelphia in the 21st century is a little like Arabia in the 7th century. There is a dearth of men to marry.

"We're dealing with brothers who are incarcerated — that is, unavailable," she says. "And then unfortunately, you have the AIDS and HIV crisis, where HIV has struck the African-American community disproportionately to others. So when you look at it that way, there is a shortage."

High energy prices beget war, or is it the other way around?

At Human Events, Venezuela dissident Gustavo Coronel has an article up about energy and security that, in my opinion, has a bit of a weird perspective. First of all, the author starts off by saying that "[s]omebody seems to have cut Adam Smith’s invisible hand, at least in what pertains to the market dynamics of the international oil industry." Well, of course – the vast majority of the world's fossil fuels are in the hands of state corporations, and you can't expect state corporations to act as profit-maximizers in the same way that private entities do.

Then he goes on to discuss the intersection between tight energy supply and deteriorating security conditions among oil-producing nations, and concludes that these worsening security conditions are a result of high oil prices. But that seems a little backwards to me, especially given the factors that he lists in the upward climb of energy prices. Among them are Iran's nuclear ambitions, Chávez's increasing pariah status, and Saudi Arabia's flagging support of the US. But these are the causes of high energy prices, not the results. It's sad to me that even ultra-conservative publications like Human Events don't see Russia's hand in all three trends. But I suppose it's part of the broader post-Cold War trend of conservatives easing up on their criticism of the Eurasian empire, with the notable exception of John McCain. (Though I often ask myself whether Russian anti-American posturing isn't a sort of provocation, and if the Russian hawks aren't playing right into the Kremlin's hands.)

American steel makes a comeback

According to the WaPo, steel is experiencing a resurgence in America. On the back of the declining dollar, skyrocketing demand overseas, and leaner plants, Amex's steel index has grown by 50% annually for the past half-decade. The Post also mentions that organized labor's diminished role at the plants might have something to do with American steel's competitiveness:

Part of the credit for steel's rebirth goes to the pragmatism of the United Steelworkers. The union become a supporter of mill consolidations, agreed to more job flexibility in labor contracts and went along with a move to replace guaranteed pensions with defined-contribution plans. The union was able to extract agreements from owners to streamline companies' management ranks and set aside a share of profits to fund health-care and prescription drug plans for retirees and their families who had lost them in the wave of bankruptcies. [...]

The mills themselves emerged much leaner and more technologically advanced, allowing many fewer workers to make roughly the same amount of steel.

Back in the 1970s, there were more than 500,000 steel workers in the United States, a number that has been reduced by more than two-thirds, even as the number of workers has edged up in recent years, according to the American Iron and Steel Institute. The amount of labor required to manufacture a ton of steel has gone from roughly 12 man-hours to about 1.2, analysts say. Steel workers continue to be well paid, union officials say, earning $65,000 a year or more, when incentive pay, profit sharing and a modest amount of overtime are included.

"Labor has become much less of a factor in the cost of steel," Rhody said. "That particular part of the equation has equalized, making domestic steel much more competitive."

Astute recent historians might remember that Bush slapped some tariffs on steel in 2002, but those restrictions were lifted by 2003. However, the Post article doesn't mention the voluntary export restraints that China placed on its steel industry, which likely boosted the ability of American firms to sell their steel on world markets. I'm not sure what the extent of these barriers were, or if they're still in place.

Fraud at the Pentagon

Though the US military's budget has doubled since 2000 to more than $600 billion annually, the amount of auditors checking for fraud and abuse has stayed essentially flat, says Wired. Over $150 billion each year goes unaudited, and each auditor is responsible for reviewing the mind-bogglingly high amount of over $2 billion per year. From the article:

Crime – and even threats to national security – have also been allowed to flourish, thanks to the staffing shortages. Working with other agencies, the DOD IG's criminal investigators have brought in "770 criminal indictments, 644 convictions, and over $3.14 billion in criminal, civil, and administrative recoveries." But many other incidents are going unchecked. "Technology/Munitions theft and diversion crimes cannot be adequately investigated allowing these items to fall into the hands of those that would do the United States harm," according to the report.

"There have been massive holes in oversight for years, and in these shadows, criminals have been ripping off taxpayers and depriving our soldiers by wasting and stealing money and supplying defective equipment," Project on Government Oversight investigator Nick Schwellenbach tells Danger Room.

The DOD IG's office has certainly stayed busy. In just the last few months, the DOD IG caught a Philippine corporation bilking $100 million from the military health care system; nabbed a trio trying to bribe their way into drinking water contracts for troops; busted an Air Force general who tried to steer a $50 million deal to his buddies; and launched investigations into the Pentagon's propaganda projects and the youthful arms-dealer who sold tens of millions of dollars' worth of dud ammunition to the government.

Feds crack down on victimless rental crimes

This article from the Houston Chronicle highlights exactly the reason I don't have a problem with illegal immigration: it's entirely voluntary. People voluntarily come, people voluntarily rent out properties to immigrants, and people voluntary hire immigrants. People obviously also voluntarily sell food, clothing, and myriad other products to immigrants. The only thing involuntary that immigrants engage in is using the benefits of the welfare state (public schools and occasionally emergency rooms, mostly), but anyone who argues against [illegal] immigration on the basis of the welfare benefits they could receive ought to direct their ire at the welfare state itself, not the immigrants who are taking advantage of it. As Milton Friedman once said, "you can't have free immigration and a welfare state."

Teenager solves never-decomposing plastic dilemma

From Wired, "Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag in Three Months":

The Record reports that Burd mixed landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic and let it stew. The plastic indeed decomposed more quickly than it would in nature; after experimenting with different temperatures and configurations, Burd isolated the microbial munchers. One came from the bacterial genus Pseudomonas, and the other from the genus Sphingomonas.

Burd says this should be easy on an industrial scale: all that's needed is a fermenter, a growth medium and plastic, and the bacteria themselves provide most of the energy by producing heat as they eat. The only waste is water and a bit of carbon dioxide.