No for slots

The Slot legislation is very popular in my neighborhood. Everyone and their brother has a pro-slots sign displayed in their yard. Up to now I have been indifferent towards slots, but as the election nears I have been thinking more about them. I think that question 2 is bad idea.

I have no problem at all with the straight up legalization of slots. If question 2 was simply going to legalize slots and therefore allow private companies to operate slot facilities, I would be in favor of it. However, if the slots referendum is passed it will create a state run monopoly. Slot machines are private goods in that they are rival and excludable; therefore there is no fundamental reason why it makes sense to have the government operating them. This is almost like repealing the prohibition laws of the 1920's but establishing the government as a monopolistic brewer.

Secondly, the referendum is filled with add-ons to please special interest groups. A certain amount of the slots profits will go to fund education (making the Teachers Union very happy) and some of the profits will be turned into subsidies for the horse racing industry (making the farm lobby very happy). There are even some hand outs to minority owned businesses in the slots referendum. This is how politicians work: they can’t do anything without kissing the ass of special interest groups first.

The government will always spend more that it brings in. If you increase revenues, be those revenues from taxes or from slots profits, the government will blow through that money in the blink of an eye. The only way to balance a government budget the size of ours is to cut spending. Rationalizing that slots will ultimately lower taxes is just plain foolish.

Smaller government is better, and creating a government run slot monopoly will only increase the size of the government. This is why voting in favor of question 2 is a very bad idea.

A pound of flesh, no more, no less

Someone needs to clue this dentist into the real world. What kid is going is going to trade a pound of any kind of candy worth eating for 50 cents?

What children see as a tasty mound of gooey, chewy, sugary sweets represents something quite different to Parmar — tooth decay.

So, in an effort to reward children for giving up some of their Halloween loot while also contributing to a greater cause, Parmar is holding her first candy buy-back program Saturday, Nov. 1.

The Clarksville dentist is offering children 50 cents per pound of candy — along with, naturally, a toothbrush — and will send the candy to U.S. troops serving overseas.

I am not saying that I don't understand the concept, but the price is far below market. That's like having a high school beer buy back program and offering 50 cents a can. You won't get anything but Natty Boh.

Is anyone here a Toyota doctor?

If government regulation worked, health care would be the smoothest running industry in the country. However, regulations make healthcare burdensome for patients and doctors.

Some doctors in the area have embraced a new business model of care known as “boutique” medicine, in which patients pay an upfront fee of several thousand dollars a year in exchange for 24-hour access to physicians, unhurried appointments, home visits and other benefits. This concept has sprung from the feeling that many doctors have of being overworked.

Dr. Peter L. Beilenson, Howard County's health officer and former Baltimore health commissioner, said he understands the frustrations of primary-care doctors. "But I have serious qualms about this trend toward concierge medicine," he said. "It's absolutely critical that we have enough primary-care doctors, and this just compounds the problem."

By licensing doctors, the government and medical labor unions have created barriers to entry that are very high and that result in a low supply of high quality doctors. You would think that patients are better off, but in fact this makes patients pay more in terms of higher fees for medical services and longer waiting times to see their physician.

If you want to purchase a new car, you have the option of spending a bundle on a fully loaded BMW M3 convertible, or you buy something as modest and low cost as a Kia. You also have hundreds of options in between these two types of cars. By regulating the supply of doctors, we end up with a bunch of BMW doctors when in fact, a few-low end Kia doctors or mid-range Honda Accord doctors would serve the needs of many patients.

I have no doubt that the government, in a flagrant display of foolishness, will begin to regulate boutique medicine in order to ensure that no one can get good health care, be they rich or poor.

Forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl

I am not the biggest fan of publicly funded libraries. In addition to the arguments against them that I have raised in the past, I also think that their selection is often second rate. As a quick example, take H.L Mencken. Since Mencken was a local guy (from Baltimore) you would think that a Maryland library would have a pretty substantial selection of Mencken's work. Although the Mencken selection at the HoCo public library appears pretty decent at first glance (I know that link does not work, but I gave up trying to fix it), it is actually pretty pathetic when compared to the works from Mencken that can be found at Amazon.

I bring this up because I am reading a really good Mencken work that is not available at the local library ("A Mencken Crestomathy" which the first hit on Amazon). In this book Mencken goes on an entertaining but completely rational tirade against zoos. Here is my favorite part:

Least of all do zoos produce any new knowledge about animal behavior. Such knowledge must be got, not from animals penned up and tortured, but from animals in a state of nature. A professor studying the habits of the giraffe, for example, and confining his observations to specimens in zoos would inevitably come to the conclusion that the giraffe is a sedentary and melancholy beast, standing immovable for hours at a time and employing an Italian to feed him hay and cabbages.

Winston Smith, we know you don't recycle

The fancy new blue recycle bins that the county government has forced upon us come complete with a most Orwellian feature: a radio identification tag which allows the County to track how often the bin is used for recycling.

Maybe we can call the young Exec Mr. Has Bin or Kid Kan, since he’s the spirit behind the nearly $3 million program. You read that right. At a time of tight budgets and projected shortfalls, Howard is trying to green its little bit of America by going Big Blue. Part of that cost includes a nifty little radio-frequency identification tag that lets the county track which home has the bin and how often you recycle. Some petty gray-suited functionary is now going to assess my antisocial recycling opposition. It’s an intersection between Big Brother and garbage, not that there’s much difference between the two.

No word yet on when a similar device will be attached to Ulman's Escape hybrid so we know how often he drives it over the Crown Vic that he is chauffeured around in. Thanks to Columbia Talk for the pointer.

I'm an interest, and I am special

Continuing on my pre-election theme of the political process, I’ll rap about legislation and where it comes from. Politicians sell legislation to the public. They price they charge is paid in terms of votes, campaign contributions or a combination of both. They basically try to maximize their own benefit (even if that means using force on others) with only constraint being that they have to remain popular enough to keep getting elected.

Think of a piece of legislation that costs 10,000 people $10 each ($100,000 total), but it benefits 50 people $1,000 each ($50,000 total). Most people who are victimized by this legislation aren’t going to bother to fight it or even learn about it because it only harms them by $10, and because it is hard to organize a group that large. However, the group of 50 who benefit by $1,000 each will find it worthwhile to work to promote the legislation, especially if they are organized together as a special interest group (maybe they are labor union members, developers, a citizen activist group, Christians, or whatever). They will request meetings with the politician, distribute propaganda to promote the legislation, give politician money, etc. The small number of those who benefit will definitely make their voices heard, the many who are harmed may hardly even notice.

Opposing legislation that harms a large number of people by a small amount is a public good, and public goods are under-produced. This is essentially the same reason that there are few private fireworks shows (at least ones that attempt to make a profit). Many people are willing to pay a couple of bucks to see a fireworks show, but why would you pay when you can see the show for free? It’s not like anyone can hide the sky from you. Those who oppose legislation that harms a large number of people by a small amount face this same dilemma.

Anyway, that’s how special interests often work to screw the rest of us. Now I think I will go drink a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, unless the Bootleggers and Baptists have made that illegal.

Politically incorrect guide to politics

If, like me, you missed John Stossel's "Politically incorrect guide to politics", it is available on Youtube in six short segments (only five minutes or so each).  I think my favorite is video number five, on the farm subsidies, but all are well worth watching.  Below are Youtube links by topic:    

1.  Intro/government planning

2.  Financial bailout

3.  Katrina/disaster response of government

4.  Campaign finance "reform"

5.  Farm bill

6.  Short wrap up

Rational ignorance

Since the election is coming up in two weeks or so, I feel like writing about the incentives that underlie the election process.

The basic idea of the democratic process is that voters want politicians to do good things (maximize the general interest) and politicians want votes. Therefore, we vote for the candidate who will maximize the general interest of our community. If you think this through, it assumes that politicians are rational, but voters are not.

Individuals will take the time to obtain information about a candidate (or anything else in the world) as long as the benefit from that information exceeds the cost to obtain it. The cost of learning about how policies will impact the general interest is often high. The cost of learning where a politician stands on a particular issue can be high. Some people really like politics, so the cost for them to learn about candidates is not a high because they have fun doing it. Most people aren’t like this. If the cost of learning about what the best policies are and where a candidate stands on that policy are high, it is rational for you to be ignorant. This is why most people like to drill down to one or two issues: John McCain wants to take away a woman’s right to choose, or Barrack Obama has very little experience.

Also, your vote is probably not going to sway the election (although it was close for a handful of voters when Bush “defeated” Gore in Florida), which makes your vote almost worthless. This is why there are a fair number of people who stay home on election day for the price of transportation to the polls. Given these constraints, it is not surprising that most people spend very little time learning about the candidates and the issues. This also explains the rise of political parties that people can identify with. Vote for your team.

You can even test this. Ask a random Howard County voter who their council person is. Ask them who their state senator is or state delegates are. Ask them who their federal level representatives are. Ask them to name a single third party candidate. Unless you are asking someone who has an above average interest in the slimy game of politics (as most readers of this blog probably do) you will not get correct answers. I once told an intelligent person who has lived in this County for 50+ years that I saw Jim Robey at Clyde’s and I hardly recognized him because he lost so much weight. “Who is Jim Robey?” was their reply. I also talked to fairly informed Columbia resident who thought that Ken Ulman stopped the construction of the Plaza Tower.

If I get some time this week, I’ll ramble about special interests, unions, religious groups, etc. and how the ideal transfer of wealth from a politician’s point of view is one that is obvious to those that benefit and virtually undetectable to the victims of the transfer.

Ummmmm...wow

In Howard County, we know you love to recycle and we encourage that devoted relationship by stealing money from you to purchase recycling containers and then airing tacky commercials about it.

The best things in life are fee

Parents in Howard County that have kids in public schools get the benefit of somewhere around $10,000 per child in education services. If you have a couple of kids in public schools, you are getting them educated for pennies on your tax dollar. That's a pretty sweet deal. In fact, as I have argued in the past that is too sweet of a deal for parents.

Therefore, I am disappointed that Dr. Cousin, superintendent of public schools, place a freeze on the ability of the school system to charge fees for certain items provided to students (things like day planners, magazine subscriptions, and craft supplies). Dr. Cousin has placed this freeze to make sure that fees are being charged in an equitable fashion. Theses fees range from under $10 to just under $60 per child. Most schools charge around $15.

I can understand that Dr. Cousin would want to make sure that schools are charging these fees in a way that makes sense. But why would he put the whole program on hold while the question of fairness is sorted out? Doesn't he see that these fees are extremely small and the unintended consequences of not charging them could be much larger?

Teachers union president Ann DeLacy said fees also are charged at the high school level, including lab fees for science classes and supply fees in art classes.

Because many teachers pay for some supplies out of their own wallets, DeLacy said she hopes the moratorium on supply and fee requests won’t add to teachers’ personal expenses.

“That’s one concern, but the greater concern is that our programs are enriched by the children and the fees they pay,” she said.

Oakland Mills High School teacher Zenoba Stephens said she charges students in her culinary science and food and nutrition classes a $40 fee for ingredients used in cooking exercises.

“We use this lab fee for food because my students cook at least two times a week,” she said.

If the fee were to be eliminated without a boost in funding from the school system, students would lose interest in the course because they wouldn’t be able to cook as frequently, Stephens said.

“Kids get in there because they want to cook and more importantly they want to eat,” she said. “Virtual cooking isn’t something they’re going to enjoy.”

It could be worse. Some parents in Montgomery County are suing their public school system in an effort to stop the schools from charging fees for extras that their children get. That just takes chutzpah.

Choose Socialism

Choose Socialism in Howard County. Well, that is what the "choose civility" campaign seems to be saying:

The Howard County Library and 40 community partners in the "Choose Civility" initiative - an effort to make the county a national model of respect, consideration, empathy and tolerance - will sponsor a program on self-interest and societal interests, "Why Looking Out for Number One Doesn't Work."

The seminar, which teaches conflict-resolution techniques, will be at 7 p.m. Oct. 20 at the Central Library, 10375 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia. Candace A. Olds of Howard Community College's Conflict Resolution Center will speak.

If "looking out for number one" does not work, then please explain to me how all the magnificent advances in technology are the result of the profit motive, and how government has not produced one single innovation anywhere. Virtually every single thing that makes our modern day quality of life so high is the result of individuals each pursuing their separate interests.

Buried in the foolish title of this seminar is the notion that self interest is not enlightened enough to realize that a transaction that makes "Number One" better off will also make other parties to the transaction better off (absent the use of force or coercion, which by the way is how the government does things).

Pack Shack: the sequel

After wasting $187,000 of taxpayer money in an unsuccessful fight against the Pack Shack in Ellicott City, a new adult store has been targeted by county regulators. The county has asked Love Craft in Elkridge to either close or move to a new location.

Expect a long legal battle in which the costs will far outweigh any perceived benefits to the community.

Double Ulmantendre

If you like wine as much as you hate cancer, perhaps this event is for you. It is sponsored by the Ulman Cancer Fund for Young Adults. I really like the name: The Screw Cancer Event. Screw top wines are featured.

Sloop John CA

This totally cool machine was cruising Lake Kittamaqundi today in an effort to cut weeds and pick up floating trash. It's owned by CA so they probably use it on all the lakes in Columbia.



No word yet on how many bodies were found...

You can't do that in Columbia

Today I went to the University of Maryland, Central Maryland Research and Education Center’s open house. I thought that it would be really lame, but it was actually a lot of fun. They do this annually, so be sure to check it out next year.

They had a hayride (straw ride, actually) that went all around the farm and showed what kind of stuff they do there. The compost demonstration that was a stop on the hayride tour was interesting- they had plates and cups made from a corn base that you could compost in your own compost heap. This is one hades of a tractor for a hayride:



They also had a cow with a port hole in it so that you could put your arm in the rumen sack (which has a capacity of 200 pounds by the way) and feel all the chewed food. Amazingly, the cow did not mind at all. The chewed food did not smell very good:

Horse Park Task Force: Where are they now?

Well, I don’t know about the rest of the HPTF, but one member who was employed as a lobbyist serving at the pleasure of Ken Ulman was fired. Despite firing her, Ulman claims that he “thinks the world of her”. A replacement has already been tapped for the job. Tough love, I guess.

The state of politics

What does it say about our political leaders when the only reason that
I want to watch the Vice Presidential debate is so that I have better
context to watch the SNL skits on YouTube?

Aquatic Feasibility Study Released

The aquatic feasibility has been released (pdf). I have not read the whole thing yet, but I took a look at the numbers. Page 111 has the important stuff, which is the projected cash flows. Here is the gist:

The 50 meter pool option that a few vocal residents have been clamoring for will cost $17.3 million. Ignoring this initial cost to build the pool for a second, the cash needed to operate the pool will exceed the cash revenues generated by $430,000 per year. Let me repeat that: the pool will burn up over $430,000 in cash per year just to fund operations. This money will have to come from somewhere. If not the fairy godmother, then from taxes.

Here is the worst part: the above figure of $430,000 does not include debt service on the bonds to build the pool in the first place (i.e to generate the $17.3 million). The pool will require $1.5 million per year to be spent on debt service, which is the interest and principal paid to the bond holders. I did not see the specific terms of the bonds yet, but my quick calculations tell me that at an estimated rate of 6%, these are 20 year bonds. A lower interest rate will decrease the number of years, a higher rate will drag that out even longer.

So, the taxpayers will have to pay at least $1.9 million a year for the next 20 years to have this pool. Revenues from its operations won't pay for it. Gee Wally, I wonder why private investors don't want to build this pool?