Who's really endangered?

A man wants to encourage the growth of a wild turkey population near his farm. He's a hunter -- perhaps he wants some new targets. He may even eat the wild turkeys he kills.

At any rate, he knows there's a pack of coyotes in the area and fears the coyotes will not give the wild turkey population a chance to increase. So he baits some traps for the coyotes with beef laced with a lethal and illegal poison.

He kills some coyotes.

Some bald eagles feed on the coyote carcasses and die, too.

A passerby sees the dead bald eagles and tells the feds, who set out to discover who is responsible for illegally killing the birds. As reported by the New York Times:

With no prior criminal history, he was sentenced to two years of probation and was ordered to pay a $10,000 fine.

As a convicted felon, Mr. Collier would have to give up his collection of hunting guns, a blow to his lifestyle. “We kind of got a hunting heritage in this family,” he said. “It’s what we do.”

For the sake of two dead birds our government spent thousands of dollars, and used up court and prosecutors' time, to ruin the life of a human being. The birds have no thoughts, no plans for their life, no chosen obligations or enjoyments -- and no rights. Mr. Collier was fined, humiliated, and deprived of one of the chief joys of his life because he accidentally killed some rare birds.

[I]t was not so much the felony conviction for killing two bald eagles that stung the most, and that stung plenty. It was the loss of his hunting rifles that went with it.

For his mother, June S. Collier, it was the pain of seeing her son’s name sullied in their town of roughly 5,000 people in southeastern Missouri, where the family had lived, farmed and hunted for four generations.

To all you casual environmentalists out there who believe that there "oughta be a law" to protect endangered species, is this really what you wanted? If it isn't what you wanted, have you examined your beliefs lately?

I Hope So . . .

The New York Times reports that Clout Has Plunged for Automakers and Union, Too. Seems like people are getting sick of the above-market compensation unions are able to extract at gunpoint:

. . . [O]ne of the U.A.W.’s most prized accomplishments — winning income security for its laid-off members — is not helping the union as it argues for money to help protect its workers at a time when employees across other industries are facing layoffs.

The U.A.W. program, called the Jobs Bank at G.M., provided nearly full pay for laid off workers while they waited for new jobs. A new version of it is less generous, but has left an impression in the public imagination of a place where workers sit around getting paid for doing nothing.

“In good times, the public can tolerate the Jobs Bank,” said Gary N. Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. “But in bad times, the public has very little patience for that.”

And running to the government for a heaping slice of corporate-welfare pie doesn't work when politics isn't on your side:

When the leaders of the three Detroit auto companies and the United Automobile Workers union travel to Washington to make their case for a federal bailout, they will be flying into stiff headwinds of public opinion.

Thus far, much of the commentary in Washington, in the pages of major newspapers and on the Web, has been against providing financial support for the companies, which they will say they desperately need in hearings beginning on Tuesday.

The waves of criticism have been so strong that Susan Tompor, a columnist for The Detroit Free Press, was moved to write on Sunday’s front page: “I never knew Detroit was a dirty word.”

But here's what I find most interesting:

Some Congressional support has also dwindled because the automakers closed plants in other states, like Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Delaware, and consolidated their operations closer to home.

Meanwhile, foreign auto companies have built plants across the South . . . .

Right there, in The New York Times, is a preview of what very well could happen if the Big-3 American automakers suffer a major contraction -- some foreign automakers will try to take advantage of demand for cars that the Big-3 auto makers can no longer meet. The foreign automakers will purchase plants and equipment and employ many that lost jobs with the Big-3. It happened before, and it can happen again.

The Truth about the Economic Crisis -- in a Nutshell

There is a great, succinct summary of what's going on in the economy at Principles in Practice, the blog of the political and cultural journal The Objective Standard. The title says it all: "Stop Blaming Capitalism for Government Failures." Here's a sample:

. . . Consider the current crisis. The causes are complex, but the driving force is clearly government intervention: the Fed keeping interest rates below the rate of inflation, thus encouraging people to borrow and providing the impetus for a housing bubble; the Community Reinvestment Act, which forces banks to lend money to low-income and poor-credit households; the creation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with government-guaranteed debt leading to artificially low mortgage rates and the illusion that the financial instruments created by bundling them are low risk; government-licensed rating agencies, which gave AAA ratings to mortgage-backed securities, creating a false sense of confidence; deposit insurance and the “too big to fail” doctrine, whose bailout promises have created huge distortions in incentives and risk-taking throughout the financial system; and so on. In the face of this long list, who can say with a straight face that the housing and financial markets were frontiers of “cowboy capitalism”?

This is just the latest example of a pattern that has been going on since the rise of capitalism: capitalism is blamed for the ills of government intervention—and then even more government intervention is proposed as the cure. The Great Depression? Despite massive evidence that the Federal Reserve’s and other government policies were responsible for the crash and the inability of the economy to recover, it was laissez-faire that was blamed. Consequently, in the aftermath, the government’s power over the economy was not curtailed but dramatically expanded. Or what about the energy crisis of the 1970s? Despite compelling evidence that it was brought on by monetary inflation exacerbated by the abandonment of the remnants of the gold standard, and made worse by prices controls, “greedy” oil companies were blamed. The prescribed “solution” was for the government to exert even more control.

It’s time to stop blaming capitalism for the sins of government intervention, and give true laissez-faire a chance. Now that would be a change we could we believe in.

Post Mortem

I followed this political season more closely than I've followed any other. There's the narrative that this just wasn't the Republicans' year, the brand is too tarnished. There's the narrative that Obama is a cool customer, and the narrative that McCain squandered his honorable "maverick" brand. There's the it's-the-economy-stupid-redux narrative. There's the Obama's-shady-associations narrative.

What to make of these narratives? Which one is true?

None, I think. It's all euphemism. I think that every four years, but perhaps in this presidential election cycle in particular given Obama's historic candidacy, the American electorate trots out its metaphysical angst for all to see. And there's a big rush to put the just-so stories out there to cover it up.

The angst to which I refer? It's your garden variety can-I-cope-with-reality angst. American voters get the opportunity to choose which story they prefer to tell themselves about why the problem isn't within, but in the world they never made.

Some people tell themselves that someone is trying to take what they have, some "other." That other might be after their money, or after the spiritual values that they claim make them feel good about themselves. When they seek an answer to why their self-image is threatened, they look down at the threat from "below," from the people they consider beneath them in moral stature. These people run Right with the Republicans.

Some people tell themselves that others got unfair advantages, that those others have forced inequitable bargains on everyone else. When they seek an answer to why their life seems harder than they feel they deserve, they see the threat as coming from "above," from people who get to enjoy the high life because of the luck of the draw. These people run Left with the Democrats.

Both today's Left and Right are really two sides of the same coin. (Yes, I know, depressingly unoriginal observation, there.) They're both asking for the same thing -- they want the government to steal from someone and give to them what they feel themselves incapable of producing on their own. Those on the Right are looking for unearned moral status. Those on the Left are looking for unearned material wealth. Neither those on the Left nor on the Right realize that asking for the unearned is always a single problem, and that there's no real difference between them.

The Right needs to wash out its soul with soap and water. The Left needs to recognize the crook that looks back at them when they look in the mirror.

I sometimes despair of either side accepting that theirs alone is the responsibility for living and enjoying the good life.

(Cross-posted to NoodleFood.)

Calling all statisticians

Reading articles like this just pisses me off. An environmentalist economist concludes that "Lowering air pollution in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley would save more lives annually than ending all motor vehicle fatalities" (what a surprise).

[Jane] Hall and colleague Victor Brajer analyzed ozone and fine particulate
concentrations across the two basins in 5-by-5 kilometer grids from 2005 through
2007. The researchers applied those numbers to the health affects they are known
to cause, then assigned peer-reviewed economic values to each illness or death
that could result.

Anyone out there good at looking at numbers and methodologies of studies like these? And I can't find the study, does anyone know where to get it?

Another shocker

So the U.N. has appointed to their "human rights council" Richard Falk, who doubts that the U.S. was the victim of a terrorist attack by Islamofascists on 9/11. It's completely in keeping with the U.N.'s raison d'etre: to legitimize freedom-haters through the by trumpeting their membership in an organization along with free countries. And are we surprised that Falk is a professor at an Ivy League university?

(H/T Volokh Conspiracy.)

I'm shocked, SHOCKED!

What, like this is a surprise? One day someone will do a post-mortem on the bailout and see that some beekeeper in Oklahoma got $500K by qualifying as a distressed bank.