The tax code shrinketh?

One of the book sets I have to update from time to time is the United States Code Service (USCS), which only the Civil District Attorney’s office keeps. Today I got to work and found on my desk a box of new USCS volumes. These particular volumes were six books on Title 26, the Internal Revenue Code, so I’m guessing it was the whole of our federal tax code. I was encouraged when I removed the 2008 volumes and replaced them with the new ones because the new volumes were noticeably thinner, and in fact, when I shelved the new ones there was still a gap large enough that an additional book could have fit there.

We’re less than two weeks from the inauguration of a President who has all but promised tax increases for some (i.e. people less likely to vote for Democrats), proposed a myriad of tax “credits” for others (i.e. transfers of wealth to favored groups of people, most of whom don’t pay income taxes to begin with, and who are statistically more likely to vote for Democrats), and whose economic policies seem influenced more by class warfare and some vacuous (and unconstitutional) idea of “fairness” than by an actual knowledge of basic economics. So if I can take some encouragement in anything I’ve seen at work this week, it’s that I removed six volumes of Internal Revenue Code and replaced them with six new volumes of significantly smaller breadth. Does that mean our tax code has shrunk significantly in the past year? I don’t know, but I can’t think of any other reason those six books would be so much smaller than they were the last time I shelved them, and any time our tax code shrinks rather than grows in a given year, that is a good thing, in my opinion.

What John McCain should have said

So I watched the final McCain-Obama debate last night, and while McCain did noticeably better than he had in the two previous debates, there were still numerous times where he frustrated me either with his refusal to hit back at some of Obama’s obvious fibs, or with his inept responses to Obama’s rhetoric that squandered genuine opportunities to articulate basic conservative principles and contrast them with Obama’s big government liberalism. It’s not as if Obama didn’t leave him some openings and weak spots to attack, and with a more articulate and clear-thinking and debater, going after Obama could have been like shooting fish in a barrel. Instead, McCain did worse than bring a knife to a gunfight, he brought a gun without a full clip, or, to symbolize a tool both candidates made mention of, he could have been shooting fish in a barrel but was only armed with a hatchet.

I will never run for President and it’s quite unlikely that I’ll ever be a candidate for any other elective office, as running a campaign and trying to be all things to all people and being deathly afraid of saying something that might upset one constituency or another is just not something I have the personality for. But I could see myself as being someone who engages in policy debates, that is, discussions that are substantive and don’t rely on the sort of tit-for-tat embellishing or distorting of records that candidates will engage in during heated election years.

So, in that spirit, I’ll say what John McCain could have and should have said in response to some of Obama’s statements.

During the discussion on taxes and the economy, Obama, for the third straight debate, characterized McCain’s capital gains tax cut and business tax cut proposals as being ones that would help “some of the wealthiest corporations in America”, as if Exxon Mobil was a specifically-targeted beneficiary, when that proposal would affect all businesses, which would necessarily include the largest ones. Obama also repeated his claim that under his own tax plan, “95 percent of working families, 95 percent of you out there, will get a tax cut”, which is a patently false and misleading statistic since not every “working family” pays income taxes, and in fact only about 60% of workers actually make enough money to owe income taxes, the top 50% of income earners pay about 97% of the total income tax burden. So McCain has had multiple opportunities to point out the discrepancy between Obama’s fantastical claims of how many people will get a tax cut and the reality of how few people actually pay taxes.

And if I had been sitting across from Obama when he invoked the name of Exxon Mobil and said my plan would give them “an additional $4 billion in tax breaks”, this would have been my response when my turn came up:

“First of all, my plan covers all companies and not just the extreme example you have given. You know that, Senator, but rather than debate the merits of cutting taxes on businesses and corporations, you have chosen to engage in class warfare by trying to stir up the worst kind of resentment and wealth envy in people, and by essentially promising to punish businesses large and small that make a lot of money because they are well-run and successful. Now you mentioned Exxon Mobil and said under my plan that company would pay $4 billion less in taxes. I ask you here tonight, what’s wrong with that? Exxon is a company just as Joe’s plumbing company is, and I’m not going to discriminate against them or deny them a cut in their business taxes just because they are one of the very largest corporations in this country. Exxon employs over 106,000 people, which is roughly the population of Erie, Pennsylvania. There are a lot of people who pay their electric bills, gas bills, home mortgages, car loans, and their kids’ college tuition with money they earned working for Exxon. When you tax Exxon, you don’t tax a person named Exxon or even a group of suit-wearing executives sitting in a boardroom; you tax the customers of that company, who will probably have to pay more for that company’s product as they raise their rates to be able to pay for increased taxes, or you make it harder for that company to hire additional employees. Now, you’ll probably respond by telling the American people that Exxon can afford it because they posted a profit of over $11 billion in the 2nd quarter of this year, although what you either don’t know or don’t care to point out is that their profit margin was less than 10%, that is, they earned less than a dime’s worth of profit on every dollar they invested. That is hardly an excessive profit margin, and nowhere near as high as those regularly posted by companies such as Google and Microsoft, two companies whose profits you and your fellow Democrats have been considerably less vigorous in attacking. Google’s profit margin was over 25% last year, their profit on every dollar they invested was two and a half times what Exxon’s was, and I’ve never heard you or anyone in your party decry Google for having excessive profits, let alone threaten to “take those profits“, perhaps because its executives mainly support Democrats.

“Our business tax rate is the second largest in the industrialized world. Cutting business taxes will make American companies more competetive internationally and will give them less of an incentive to, as you put it, “ship jobs overseas”, to countries whose taxes are more business-friendly. Domestically, it will free up more money so that those companies can hire new workers, invest in new equipment and technology, or open new branches and expand into new markets, which would help create new jobs in more areas and lead to increased local sales tax revenues in more towns and cities across the country. That, Senator Obama, is how you spread the wealth around, by encouraging investment and growth, not by taking more and more tax money from companies that have been successful and profitable and have employed thousands of people whose jobs earn them income to provide for themselves and their families. Such a thing would only create a disincentive to hire additional employees, and basic economics suggests it will lead to increased prices for consumers and/or lower wages for employees of those companies.

“Joe’s plumbing business might employ only a handful of people, but his company would benefit from a cut in his taxes. There are many tens of thousands of people working for Exxon and other large and profitable companies who depend just as much on their jobs for their livelihood and whose jobs depend just as much on their company’s success as Joe’s employees and their jobs would depend on his business and its success. Are you saying that because Exxon is so large and employs so many people and earns billions in net income, that it should not have its business taxes cut along with all other businesses? And do you think that the federal government punishing their success by taking more of their money in taxes and arbitrarily redistributing it will do more to “spread the wealth around” than rewarding their success by cutting their taxes and giving them an incentive to hire more workers?”

I’m sure Obama would have loved having to answer that. McCain did mention that our business tax rate was one of the highest in the world but he didn’t press that point and he’s never disputed Obama’s false claim that he would cut taxes for 95% of workers when fewer than 2/3 of workers pay income taxes.

I also would have had some words to say in response to Bob Schieffer’s question about the negative tone taken by both campaigns, and the use of guilt by association. McCain was very defensive about comments made recently by Rep. John Lewis (D-Georgia), where he repeated a dubious claim that McCain rallies were filled with people expressing vitriolic hatred for Obama and shouting racial slurs and death threats directed toward him, and he had the audacity to compare that with the late Alabama Governor George Wallace, who fought against desegregation as long as he could and had fire hoses sprayed at civil rights protesters and other such cruel acts. (Such a comparison comes across as hyperbolic on its face, but then again John Lewis is the same man who earlier this year claimed that giving his support to Obama over Hillary Clinton was a more difficult decision than participating in the Selma march. McCain might have gone beyond simply saying he was hurt by the baseless comparison, and said something like this:

“I know Congressman John Lewis. He has served his district in the House of Representatives for over 20 years. He was on the front lines of the civil rights movement in the 1960s; he was beaten badly for participating in the Selma march, and has the scars to prove it. He is to be admired for his history with the civil rights movement. But that does not give him the right to take the idiotic speech of a few people at one of my rallies and claim that they represent all or even most of my supporters, let alone compare me and my running mate with a racist southern governor who met civil rights protesters with fire hoses, police dogs, and beatings.

“Now, to be fair, your campaign has rebutted those remarks by Congressman Lewis, who is a strong supporter of yours. While I am hurt by his statements, I will not use his support for your campaign to tie him and his comments to you, and I say this now because the story is still fresh in many people’s minds. I remember during your acceptance speech at your party’s convention when you mentioned comments made by my friend Phil Gramm and tied them to me, as if I had spoken his very words myself and approved of them. You said this a full month after I had disowned his comments and he had stepped down from his position within my campaign.

“When it comes to guilt by association, I don’t find it very useful or fair to ask a candidate to respond to or repudiate every objectionable thing said by anyone who happens to support him, let alone to tie those comments to the candidate. Campaigns can get heated, and they can get emotional. You can’t always choose your supporters and you can’t control what all of them say. But you can choose your friends and people who you associate with. I’ve been in the Senate for over two decades, you’ve been in the United States Senate for two-thirds of one term. I’ve been involved in several campaigns at the state level and the national level, and so people have a lot of statements, votes, and personal history with which to judge me by. A relative newcomer like yourself is not nearly as well known, and when there are few votes to judge your record by, I don’t think it is out of bounds to examine the kind of people you have had long associations with. You were a close associate of Tony Rezko, a convicted money launderer and corrupt businessman who gave you your first ever campaign donations and who was a member of your campaign finance committee. For 20 years you were a member of a church pastored by a man who preached racial hatred and presented a distorted gospel based on Afro-centrism and socialism. This man was your spiritual mentor and more for two decades, and while you distanced yourself from him this year, it took you twenty years to do so and you gave shifting explanations for how much of his teachings you were aware of and when you knew about them.

“If Rev. Wright were merely a pastor who had given you his public support, I wouldn’t think it the least bit consequential what his teachings were, let alone ask you if you agreed with them. Some of your supporters have tried to do that very thing with me over Pastor John Hagee’s endorsement of me, as if because of his endorsement I should be made to answer for his anti-Catholic views, as if I had expressed them myself, when I have never been a member of his church or counted him as a spiritual mentor. If Rev. Wright’s was a church you attended infrequently as you worked and lived in Chicago and served your constituents, then it might be plausible that you didn’t know what Rev. Wright stood for. But the fact is that you came to him, talked with him, became a member of his church, sat and listened to 20 years of sermons that he preached from the pulpit, you married your wife in his church, had your two daughters baptized there, and named your second book after the title of one of his sermons. You had a very close friendship with this man for 20 years and yet you told the American people that you were surprised and shocked by his much-discussed comments earlier this year, which I won’t repeat here.

“This election is as much about character and judgement as it is about our resumés and qualifications, and those who you have freely chosen to align yourself with, accept spiritual advice from, tie your political fortunes to, and used your position of power to enrich with taxpayer-funded programs says more about you, your character, and your judgement than 30 years of Senate roll call votes could have.”

Okay, that’s way longer than McCain would have been allowed to speak, and much farther than he would have gone on the attack. But I felt the need to get that out while it was on my mind. This is directed more at Obama because I feel he would do far more damage to this country than McCain would, but this is not to say I think McCain is without his faults, as he has many, some of which I’ve written about before.

Obama’s convention speech

Obama’s speech tonight followed the speech template that has been consistent throughout this week’s DNC Convention: portray a McCain electoral victory as the equivalent of a 3rd Bush term (despite the undisputable fact that he has differed with Bush far more often than Obama has strayed from his party’s line), talk in generalities without offering hard specifics of certain policy agendas, decry the “same old politics” as divisive and talk about how Obama (who has never in his career had a history of compromising or working with both sides of any issue) will unify us and “heal” the divides that have persisted the past 8 years, laud the values of perseverance and self-reliance while praising big government solutions to all of society’s problems and painting a picture of America that is unrelentingly negative, and telling America that government and only government can bring people out of poverty, “level the playing field”, help more kids go to college (I had no idea it was the government’s job to do this), keep businesses from “shipping jobs overseas”, and enable women to earn “equal pay for an equal day’s work”.

Just as on foreign policy, where in the past four years the bulk of the Democrats put themselves in a position to only benefit politically from negative news about the war on terror in general and the Iraq war in particular, they have used their convention speeches this week to paint an overly negative and cynical picture of the American economy, and have put themselves (and Barack Obama in particular) in a position where they can only achieve their highest electoral success by convincing voters that things really are going as badly as they say they are. This despite the fact that our unemployment numbers are still quite good, and any Europeean nation would be having parades if their unemployment percentage was as low as ours. They touched on the housing “crisis”, which to them is somehow Bush’s fault, as everything is, despite the fact that some 97% of borrowers are still making their regular mortgage payments on time. The overblown “crisis” mentality of all that reminds me of a satirical article I read in the early 90s after the failure of President Clinton’s universal healthcare proposal, where one Clinton staffer is made to say something along the lines of, “I guess the American people decided we didn’t need to completely overhaul a system that works for 85% of them just to fit in the other 15%”, a reference to the mythical 40 million or so Americans who supposedly were without health insurance at the time.

Obama touched all the bases of traditional liberal myths about the economy and the Democratic Party’s shopworn class warfare rhetoric. I got upset numerous times and wanted to throw things at my TV. Obama was disingenuous to be sure, though not quite as rich as Bill Clinton’s speech Wednesday night, and judging it just as a speech, I think Obama’s speech paled in comparison with Bill Clinton’s. After a while I got mad enough to take down some notes for this blog. So here are a few points of contention I had with Obama’s rhetoric.

* I first pulled out my notepad shortly after he got to the following paragraph.

Ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves – protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.

He was doing okay until he stated that one of the things “we cannot do for ourselves” was to provide children with a decent education. The positive record of achievements by students educated at home shoots gaping holes in the idea that government is needed to give children “a decent education”. But Obama, like the rest of his party, has been in the pocket of the teachers unions for several decades (for some reason, he never refers to them as a “special interest” group), so he would be the last person to ever exalt the accomplishments of students who excel in school without the government’s help. It’s worth noting that you won’t find education mentioned once in the Constitution. And while we expect the government to build the roads, it’s a patently false and, at best, ill-informed to say that government should be expected to invest in “new science and technology” based on the reasoning that it’s something “we cannot do for ourselves”. Private enterprise, the entrepreneurial spirit of America, and economic incentives have always driven investments for and innovations in “new science and technology” far better than the government has.

* Obama, while hitting most of the targets he set out to hit, left himself wide open to return fire on a couple of points. Early on when talking about the economy, he made a reference to former Senator Phil Gramm, without naming him, calling him “one of his [McCain's] chief advisors” and “the man who wrote his economic plan” before going off on Gramm’s much-discussed remark that the U.S. had lately become “a nation of whiners”. Obama neglected to mention that Gramm had resigned his position with the McCain campaign staff and that his remarks had been disavowed by McCain himself. He also apparently doesn’t have a memory long enough to remember that Gramm, back when he was a Democratic congressman, had a big role in writing the bill for one of President Reagan’s tax cuts, which helped turn the economy around after the “misery index” days of the Carter administration. If anyone is qualified to be a major candidate’s economic adviser, it’s Phil Gramm.

But aside from that, what I think will come back to bite Obama the hardest is his tactic of linking McCain with the remarks of one of his associates, especially one who no longer works for him. Obama and his surrogates have decried “guilt by association” tactics during this campaign, especially after the controversy that arose after a spotlight was shined on remarks by Jeremiah Wright, not to mention the June conviction of Obama associate and fundraiser (and next door neighbor) Tony Rezko on charges of fraud and bribery. Now that he has cast that stone and criticized McCain (in a speech in front of 80,000+ spectators no less) for something one of his former advisors said, and which McCain publicly rejected, then surely he won’t be surprised if McCain returns fire and dares to link Obama with a whole litany of even more odious statements which have come from numerous associates of his.

* The single most jaw-dropping line of the night, for me, was when Obama was talking about the balance between government action and personal responsibility and he brought up his oft-used “brother’s keeper” reference.

That’s the promise of America – the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper.

For a man who put “audacity” in the title of one of his books and who throws the word around as much as he does, it was the height of audacity for him to claim “the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper” barely a week after several world news services reported that his youngest half-brother George Hussein Onyango Obama was living in a shack in a shanty town near Nairobi, Kenya and surviving on less than a dollar a month. Obama has only met him twice, and he made a passing reference to him in one of his books. But the “brother’s keeper” line is ironic for two reasons, one because of how richly Barack lives while spouting rhetoric about “working” people as his impoverished brother lives in a shack and makes less money in a month than one would need to buy a small order of fries at McDonald’s, and two, because he mentions the “brother’s keeper” line as scripture but seems to forget where in the Bible that line originated. It was spoken by Adam and Eve’s son Cain, who murdered his brother Abel and responded to God’s asking him where Abel was by saying, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9) That line is not used anywhere else in the Bible, and when Obama says, “Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us.” he is apparently reading from the same Bible with such fictional verses as, “God helps those who help themselves” or “What God brings you to, He’ll bring you through.”

For further reading, Douglas O’Brien wrote a great column Tuesday for the American Thinker in which he touches on Obama’s “apparent disconnection from many fundamental elements of his own life”, his astounding lack of any real accomplishments, and what his brother and his treatment of him says about his own character. Here are a couple of paragraphs from that article.

In his stint on the faculty of the University of Chicago, among the most intellectually rigorous of schools, he published not one single piece of scholarly work. As a State Senator in Springfield, he hung out with the movers and shakers, but formed no real personal alliances or friendships. He played in the most exclusive poker game in town, but never seemed to win or lose, as he rarely took risks or invested himself in the game, just as he never threw himself emotionally into his work.

We are coming to know a man whose life has been calculated, focused and driven toward goals, always moving forward and without room for error or encumbrance. His history is replete with individuals who served various purposes and who could be jettisoned as circumstances warranted. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Alice Palmer, Tony Rezko, Michael Pfleger, all to varying degrees, served the advancement of Barack Obama, and all have been denounced or denied. Even the woman who raised him served as his foil when he used his grandmother as the prototype for everyday white racism.

* Later he said that unlike McCain, he would “stop giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas”, without considering the possibility that corporations ship jobs overseas because the U.S. has the 2nd highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world. Unless the tax code is changed to make it more friendly to businesses (which is almost anathema to modern liberals), there will likely be more jobs shipped overseas. Of course, he declined to complain about foreign companies that “ship jobs overseas” to the U.S.

* On energy policy he said he would, “set a clear goal as President: in ten years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.” This is a pipe dream of the highest order, especially since he went on to say “drilling is a stop-gap measure, not a long-term solution. Not even close.” Only a liberal would have the logic to conclude that ending dependence on foreign oil could be accomplished without increasing drilling for domestic oil. It’s almost like trying to end our reliance on air conditioners by keeping our windows open, rather than investing in fans or insulation, or developing something new that works better than air conditioners at keeping homes cool. If you want to end dependence on foreign supplies of oil, you either have to produce more of your own oil, or you have to develop something that will take oil’s place. He’ll have to at least do the former because the latter is not even remotely feasible within the 10 year time window he’s talking about.

* He brought up the theme of keeping “the promise of equal pay for an equal day’s work, because I want my daughters to have exactly the same opportunities as your sons.” This is a tiresome and discredited myth that has long been propagated by women’s groups, one which asserts that they make less than men for equal work, based on the statistic that women make 76 cents for every dollar a man makes (as far as average salaries for men and women are concerned). But this oft-cited statistic doesn’t take into account the number of hours worked, the amount of experience and education, or the type of work involved. Studies in recent years have concluded that when women and men work in the same field and have equal educational accomplishments and equal experience, they make pretty much the same amount of money, and in fact the women often make slightly more. The idea that women don’t make “equal pay for an equal day’s work” is false because the statistic that argument is based on didn’t derive its numbers from workers doing “an equal day’s work”, doing the same kind of work, or even doing the same amount of work.

* I could write a lot more but it’s late and I need sleep. I’ll conclude with a comment about this entertaining passage:

We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don’t tell me that Democrats won’t defend this country. Don’t tell me that Democrats won’t keep us safe.

Just hilarious! To cite examples of Democrats who defended the U.S. and kept the country safe, he had to hearken back 45 years to JFK and 63 years to FDR! Was that the most recent example he could find? He didn’t mention Clinton or Carter, or even a name just as worthy as the first two: Truman. This would be like McCain defending the Republican party’s reputation by citing the actions of President Eisenhower, who left office in 1961. If he did such a thing he would be laughed off the stage.

black holes and angel food cake… racist?

Last week a controversy arose at a Commissioners Court meeting in Dallas, one which has become simultaneously amusing, silly, banal, and most of all, sad. I say “sad” because it arose out of one powerful man’s ignorance and his hair-trigger tendency to play the race card or make almost any argument somehow go back to race.

It all began on the morning of Monday July 7th, where the Dallas County commissioners were having a public meeting to discuss problems and complaints about the central collections office. The story goes that commissioner Kenneth Mayfield (who is white) said that the collections office had “become a black hole” based on how often paperwork gets lost there. To this, John Wiley Price, the sole black member of the five-person Commissioners Court (he has held his seat for nearly two full decades), said, “Excuse me!” He and a local judge (who is also black) present at the meeting asked for an apology from Mayfield for his supposedly insensitive “black hole” comment, to which he incredulously replied that no apology was needed since it was merely a figure of speech based on a well-known scientific term.

I couldn’t believe it when I first read about the incident. I knew Price had a reputation for stirring up controversy (indeed my earliest memories of hearing about him came from reports on the local news networks a long time ago that detailed various protests he would lead in downtown Dallas about one issue or another), but I was sure he was a smarter, more sensible and level-headed man that this. Did he seriously not know what a black hole was? How is it even plausible that any reasonable person could hear a term like “black hole” used in that context and jump to the conclusion that it was a racially-motivated remark?

The story appeared in local blogs and was spread nationally over the next few days, and on Thursday of last week, Price appeared on camera with a reporter [note: the linked clip includes the footage of his original blow-up over the "black hole" comment] from the local Fox affiliate, and rather than show he has any sense, he went even further and said he was tired of black or dark things being portrayed negatively in different areas of culture. He brought up the fact that angel food cake is white and devil’s food cake is black. Um, so what? I know a lot of white people who prefer devil’s food cake. It’s just a name!

He then sneered, “If you’re the black sheep of the family, then you’ve gotta be bad.” And here I thought that a black sheep was someone who didn’t fit in with the rest of his or her family, or as the dictionary puts it, “A person who is considered a disgrace to a particular group, usually a family.” But I guess I was wrong this whole time, not knowing that black sheep really got their name out of some animosity towards all things black, particularly people, or so Price seems to posit. I just can’t wait to hear what he thought of George Lucas having the iconic Star Wars villain Darth Vader wear all black, be voiced by a black man (James Earl Jones), and try to convince Luke Skywalker to join “the Dark Side of the Force.” Or if he thinks a person is racist for going to the bar and ordering a White Lady instead of a Black Russian. How far does such an absurd viewpoint go?

It’s not as if white and black or light and dark were invented yesterday, they’ve been used for symbolic contrasts and allegorical themes for thousands of years. Black holes were so named because they are an absence of light, indeed they are believed to be so powerful that light itself cannot escape their immense gravitational pull. As far as I know, they weren’t given that name by someone who thought black people sucked, or for any other reason even remotely tied to race.

George Lucas didn’t make the evil side of the Jedi order the Dark Side because of some animosity toward blacks, it was for symbolism, and traditional portrayals of good and evil sides as thematic opposites.

God didn’t command the Israelites to sacrifice a pure and spotless white lamb because He is racist. What lesson would have been brought home by the Israelites had they gotten the idea that it didn’t make any difference whether the lamb was spotless or crippled and defiled? It was to symbolize the sacrifice that Christ (the perfect, sinless Lamb of God) would make hundreds of years later (see: 1 Corinthians 5:7).

In chess, the reason that the player controlling the white pieces moves first is not because the ones who developed the rules believed whites were superior to blacks. (Or is it?)

Anyway, some places or things may have gotten their names because of prejudiced ideas from a bygone era and culture, but can’t we all agree that dressing someone down for uttering a term as benign as “black hole”, or bemoaning the fact that a dark-colored cake has “devil” in its name rather than “angel”, is silly or idiotic at best, and ignorantly pointless (or desperate) rabble-rousing at worst?

1911 City Codes, or Let’s See How Far We’ve Come

Days at the law library can be tedious and frustrating, with the latter usually depending on how busy it is that day, and on how many of the people visiting are actually sane. We all enjoy working with each other and have plenty of laughs and interesting conversations, though usually behind-the-scenes. So in that work environment we take our fun where we can get it. One source of entertainment and enlightenment is perusing some of the older (which invariably means smaller as well) law books that we have either on the shelves or lying around in the back hallway.

One such tome is the 1911 edition of the Dallas City Code, a book of city ordinances and regulations. I read parts of it during a very slow morning on Friday and found a few statutes from that time which paint an interesting picture of where our culture was 97 years ago, and just how far we’ve come since then. Here are a few examples.

Article 29 – Accosting a female in a public place
This made it unlawful for a male to make “any improper or indecent suggestions either by word or gesture or use any insulting words to any female” in a public place. Laws from this era were often aimed at one gender or another, and this was among several that specifically punished males for certain (vaguely defined) actions against females. I suppose Dallas didn’t have a problem with females accosting other females in public in those days. Violation of this article was punishable by a fine that could be as high as $100, which doesn’t sound like much until you consider that $100 in 1911 money was equivalent to well over $2,000 in today’s money. That’s a high price to pay for insulting a woman.

Article 34 – Accompanying a prostitute in a public place
This made it unlawful for a male to walk or ride in any public street or other public place “with a commonly reputed prostitute or lewd woman” (I think that was the polite way of saying “slut” during the Taft administration.) This was also punished by a maximum fine of $100, but it had a qualifier. Article 35 made it okay for a male to accompany a prostitute in public if he was “related to such prostitute or lewd woman within the third degree of relationship” or if it was shown to be necessary for him to accompany her for “some legal purpose or lawful business transaction.” You can insert your own joke there.

Article 38 – Disturbing a female in a public assembly
Unlike Article 29, this law applied to “any person” and not just to men, and it made it unlawful to engage in “rude or indecent behavior” or to use profane or obscene language to disturb any female for purposes of amusement, instruction, or recreation. I guess it wasn’t enough to ban the accosting of women and threaten people with the equivalent of a $2,000 fine, they had to go the extra mile and specifically ban people from disturbing females for amusement. I’m not sure how using profane or obscene language to disturb a female could be done under the guise of “instruction”, but obviously the people who ran Dallas in 1911 knew better than me.

Article 40 – Disturbing religious worship
This is pretty much the same law as the previous one, except it made it unlawful to make a disturbance in a church service. The maximum fine was the same as with the previous articles. A city ordinance that protects “religious worship” against disturbances? The ACLU would have had a field day with that.

Article 117 banned “playing ball in public parks”, which shows just how boring life was in 1911. You could go to Dallas’s public parks, but once you got there you couldn’t play cricket or even throw a ball around. The law actually makes specific mention of cricket, but not baseball or any other sport, it just outlaws playing any similar sports or games in the public parks.

Article 118 – Injuring the grass, vegetation and improvements in parks
This would probably be Al Gore’s favorite city ordinance from that time. If you thought going to a city park and not being allowed to throw a ball around was bad, this law was even more draconian. It said, “No person shall lie upon, or sit upon, or stand upon, or go upon, the grass, lawn or turf of any” public parks of the city of Dallas, “unless by direction of the authorities.” They didn’t go through the trouble of defining what “improper or indecent suggestions” or “rude or indecent behavior” were, but they made sure to cover all their bases in protecting the grass in the city’s public parks when they said people couldn’t “lie upon”, “sit upon”, “stand upon”, or “go upon” it without permission.

Article 203 – Playing ball, etc., in the city streets
This one shocked me when I read it, not because it banned playing ball, throwing stones, or using blow guns, air guns, and various other shooters in city streets, but because of one specific item it referenced. In one sentence it made it unlawful to throw stones, “or use a nigger-shooter or sling”, or discharge gravel or marbles with a shooter, etc. The city code normally sticks to legal terms and avoids nicknames and slang terms, so my jaw dropped when I read the sentence that mentioned what I later found out was a crude term for a sling shot, and what was most jarring to me was that they wrote “nigger-shooter” the same way they wrote “air gun” or “blow gun”, not within quotation marks (which would show that it was a slang term) but just as another term in that article, as if it was a normal and accepted term, and one that was well-known enough that anyone reading would know what item it meant. I was born 18 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed by President Lyndon Johnson, and the world I’ve grown up in bears little to no resemblance to that which existed in 1964, much less 1911, so I’m always a little shocked to see that terms like this were included in something as official as the city code for a city as big as Dallas (which had a population of over 92,000 at the time).

Article 210 – Bananna peels, etc. [typo in the original]
This was one of the more amusing article headings, and it banned the throwing of “banana peelings, or fruit peelings of any kind, on any public sidewalk.” I somehow doubt this article is still a part of the city code, but if it is, I sincerely hope someone has corrected them on how to spell “banana” at some point in the last 97 years. Why they even bothered to specifically mention bananas when they could have skipped that part and just banned leaving any fruit peelings on public sidewalks is unknown to me. It is interesting that they didn’t ban throwing vegetable peelings onto city sidewalks, and for that matter, they didn’t ban throwing them onto city streets. This was possibly because people were a lot less likely to slip on them if they were thrown onto the street, and this was still an era where the streets would have been teeming with horses, which might have made a quick snack of any fruit peelings thrown into their path. (I actually researched this a little, and found a message board where somebody said their horses loved eating banana peels, but not so much the bananas themselves, so this actually kinda makes sense why it would only be illegal to throw them on the sidewalks but not the streets.)

Article 292 – Intoxicated driver
Yes, even in 1911 they had laws against driving while in a state of intoxication, though I don’t remember if it specified drivers of motor vehicles or horse-drawn carriages. The punishment for this was a little more severe and included the violator being arrested and jailed for a night, and his horse(s) being put in the city livery for a period of time.

Economic questions for the Democrat Presidential candidates

We in Texas have our primary election day today, the results of which will, among other things, decide which candidates in both of the major parties will pick up the large number of delegates in the state. It is a big day for Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the latter of whom needs to win in Texas (and Ohio) today in order to have a realistic chance at both slowing down Obama’s momentum and ultimately winning the Democrat party’s nomination. Obama on the other hand, is looking for a decisive knockout that will make it all but impossible for him to lose the nomination.

Because the Texas primary is so crucial, we here have been inundated with campaign ads from both of the Democrat candidates. It’s hard to watch any prime time television program without seeing at least one Obama and/or Clinton ad. This has been annoying, as well as frustrating because in their most common ads they spout nearly identical rhetoric, and make similar campaign promises. It might as well be the same ad with different names at the end to “approve this message”. Both Obama and Clinton make vague statements and promises in these ads, which made me think of a number of questions I would ask them if I had the chance and they were answering under oath.

Question 1: Senators, both of your campaigns have produced ads in which you promise to fight “the special interests”, yet you give not even the vaguest definition of what “special interests” are or aren’t. Can you clarify this?

You talk about “special interests” as if they are a monolithic group with a common agenda that runs Washington, and not disparate organizations that often give voice to legitimate concerns. As Charles Krauthammer wrote last week, “To hear the candidates in this presidential campaign, you’d think lobbying is just one notch below waterboarding, a black art practiced by the great malefactors of wealth to keep the middle class in a vise and loose upon the nation every manner of scourge: oil dependency, greenhouse gases, unpayable mortgages and those tiny entrees you get at French restaurants.”

For example, out of the following list of issue advocacy groups, business groups, and professional organizations, can you please point out the ones which aren’t “special interests”: National Rifle Organization, People for the American Way, Club for Growth, National Education Association, AFL-CIO, Teamsters Union, EMILY’s List, NARAL (National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws), Americans for Fair Taxation, AARP, NAAA-ADC Inc. (the PAC for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, which in the 2008 election cycle has only donated funds to Sen. Obama and Gov. Bill Richardson), and the law firm of Fulbright & Jaworski (which has given over $17,000 to Obama’s campaign, nearly twice as much as any other Presidential candidate has received).

Question 2: Are “special interests” only the interest groups that support policies different from yours or that support your political opponents?

All of the Democrats have railed against Haliburton and cited Vice President Dick Cheney’s past job with that company. Senator Clinton, do you remember when your husband, as President, declared 1.7 million acres of Utah as a national monument in 1996? If so, do you also remember that this land was the world’s largest known source low-sulfur, clean-burning coal, which burns so cleanly that it meets the requirements of the Clean Air Act without needing refining? Perhaps you will recall that the owner of the world’s 2nd largest supply of this type of coal turned out to be Indonesian businessman James Riady, who gave millions in illegal donations to American political campaigns in the early 90s, including your husband’s 1992 Presidential campaign. This was the same James Riady that invited your husband to join the Lippo Group after he left office. Apparently Mr. Riady’s interests were very special. Are these the kinds of special interests you would fight as President?

Question 3: Senator Obama, when you announced your intent to run for Senator in 2004, barely anyone in Illinois had heard of you. In your first 6 years serving in the Illinois General Assembly, none of the bills you sponsored passed or even made it out of committee. In your seventh and final year, after the Democrats had gained control of the General Assembly, Illinois Senate Majority Leader Emil Jones, Jr. says he decided to help make a U.S. Senator out of you by making you the chief sponsor of nearly every prominent bill. The result was that 26 of those bills passed, many of which you’d had little connection with before you were made their official sponsor, and legislators who had championed some of those bills for decades before you got the credit for their passage, say it was like being a football player who had made a long run and gotten tackled at the 1 yard line, and then having to sit and watch the fullback score a 1 yard touchdown and get the points credited to him. You owe much, if not all, of your current standing to Emil Jones, and in your 2008 earmark requests you included tens of millions of dollars to be spent on pet projects in Mr. Jones state senate district. Surely this qualifies Jones’ interests as “special”. Are these the “special interests” you will fight as president?

Question 4: Both of you have adopted John Edwards-style populism with frequent use in ads and campaign events of the phrase “working families”. On Senator Obama’s campaign website he promises to “provide a tax cut for working families”. What exactly is a “working family” and why do you use this term instead of just “family” or “American family”?

Are you asserting that when a family pulls in more income they might cease to be a “working” family? Is there a dividing line with incomes that separates a “working” family from whatever you call the high earners? The Democrat party has spent 8 years railing against the evil top 1 percent of income earners, which as of 2005 included everyone who made over $364,700. The vast majority of people within this group only got there after years of school, hard work, and good decisions, and some who are in that group one year will not be the next year. Is a family with a doctor or lawyer (two professions that by definition require several years of post-graduate work and study, not to mention the constant need to keep up with new advances in medicine and changing legal code) at its head not a “working family”?

My father has a master’s degree and spent over a decade teaching at a high school before teaching U.S. history for over 15 years at the junior college level. With his current salary, he wouldn’t even make it into the top 25% of income earners, so I’m sure you would say I came from a “working family”. But suppose he had completed his doctoral work in British history that he began several years ago but decided not to finish, and that he had subsequently worked as a college professor and periodically published essays, articles, and books on his subject of expertise. Had he done that he might by now be a department chairman, and could easily fit into the top 10%-5% area (those making between $104,000 and $145,000). Had he followed such a career path, would he still have been the head of a “working family”, or would the increased income, in your view, make him less of a “worker” than a junior college history teacher?

Question 5: Senator Obama, would you follow through on promises to pull the U.S. out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, as you have talked about possibly doing in rallies before sympathetic union crowds?

Recent editorials in Investor’s Business Daily and USA Today have done a good job defending the success of NAFTA and questioned the logic of both yourself and Senator Clinton in trying to outdo each other with anti-NAFTA statements. Even the liberal San Francisco Chronicle didn’t buy your attacks on NAFTA or the blame you place on it for the loss of manufacturing jobs. The Canadian and Mexican governments are understandably worried that you might actually mean what you say when you promise to pull out of or force changes to a trade agreement between the 3 North American nations that has lead to millions of new jobs. A controversy was created when, as Byron York writes, a Canadian TV station reported that “a representative of the Obama campaign assured Canadian officials that they need not take Obama’s NAFTA threats seriously, that those threats were just political rhetoric intended to win Midwestern primaries.” This was later denied by both Obama and the Canadian government. So which is it? Are you supporting a betrayal of a trade agreement with our neighbors to win union votes, or because you actually believe it is good policy? Either of those answers would show you to have bad and/or cynical judgement on economic matters.

Question 6: Senator Clinton, when Exxon Mobil reported “record” profits of $39.5 billion (which actually gave the company a profit margin of around 10%, which could hardly be called an obscenely high margin for any company), you memorably said that you wanted to “take those profits“. This was a year or two after you told a group of wealthy supporters that she might have to raise their taxes and “take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” What part of the Constitution gives the federal government the power to arbitrarily seize lawfully earned profits from a company for no reason, especially after the company in question has already paid corporate taxes (Exxon paid $27.9 billion in income taxes that same year) and ended up making only 10 cents out of every dollar they have spent?

The federal gas tax sits at 18.4 cents per gallon, meaning the government, without spending any of the money and effort that Exxon must to drill for, extract, refine, transport, and sell its oil, takes 18.4 cents for every gallon of gas sold. And at this same time, Exxon is making 10 cents for every dollar they’ve spent to sell the oil they have drilled, and then you publicly state your wish to take their profits and use them in ways you see fit, which apparently is a better use of Exxon’s money than the research and development of new energy that they themselves already spend billions on.

As James Pethokoukis sarcastically asked at the time, “Why stop there? Why not confiscate a portion of Google’s fat annual profits–the company’s 2006 earnings were some $3 billion on revenue of $10.6 billion–and use it for some relevant national goal? The search-engine company is, after all, profiting from technological infrastructure it didn’t even build, an “information superhighway” (to use a quaint term) that came out of a government defense project. It’s time to pay Uncle Sam back.” Or would you be remiss to seize the profits of an astoundingly successful company run by liberals?

Do you believe government is best in economic matters? It seems clear from past statements by yourself and your husband that you do not trust Americans and American companies to spend their own money. You tell wealthy donors that the government might have to “take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” I don’t know how much more clearly socialistic a statement you could have made. During your husband’s presidency, when there was a projected federal budget surplus, small government advocates said that this showed the government had taken too much of the American people’s money and that is should be given back. President Clinton reportedly said, “We could give it all back to you and hope you spend it right. But…if you don’t spend it right…” Do you believe the federal government would do a better job of making economic decisions for people than they would themselves?

Question 7: As some commentators have pointed out, there are two prominent words that are almost completely absent from any speeches or policy statements coming from the two of you: freedom and responsibility. Do you believe in those concepts?

Obama and Hillary only talk about how much more in taxes should be seized from people, or how much more in entitlements they would spend on this group or that program. They pit high-achieving, high-earning people against those they affectionately call “working families”, as if they are distinctly different groups, and that the people in one group have never been a part of the other. They never talk about economic freedom or the freedom of a foreign company to freely sell their goods in the U.S. without protectionist tariffs, or the freedom of a U.S.-based company to spread out and create jobs in foreign countries that only dream of having the standard of living that we enjoy. They don’t talk about law-abiding people having the freedom to own their own property protected from the threat of a government entity seizing it via eminent domain laws so it can be sold to a large company or developer and bring more tax revenues to that city or county.

They never talk about people having responsibility for their own lives and making their own decisions, only of shielding people from that responsibility, be it in the form of welfare payments or in bailing out people who tried to live beyond their means and took out loans they couldn’t afford to pay off so they could live in a nicer house than they could reasonably afford to buy.

Until they prove otherwise, the Democrat party is still the party that believes not only that they can spend your money better, save your retirement money better, use your property better, and basically run your life better than you can, but that there is nothing wrong with more and more people surrendering responsibility for their own lives to the government and its entitlement programs.

National Lampoon’s Venezuelan Vacation

This week, the news site Slate.com has published a (so far) five-part series of columns by Andres Martinez titled, “Vacationing in Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian Paradise.” It is an observant and frequently humorous account of a vacation the writer and his girlfriend took to Venezuela. It includes tidbits about watching Chavez’s talk show, talking with friends who are no fans of Chavez, seeing the seemingly omnipresent Marxist-style propaganda on the walls of buildings in large cities, and hiking through a rainforest while battling a torrential rainstorm.

It’s a fascinating read overall. It doesn’t have a ton of quotes that will jump out at you but I liked a couple in particular. Martinez begins part 2 with this paragraph:

It’s surreal to walk around Caracas, a vibrant consumer-driven metropolis, and see the same type of propaganda billboards you see in Havana. (I had been expecting more subtlety.) It’s one thing to see posters proclaiming “Socialismo o Muerte” (Socialism or Death) amid Havana’s crumbling squalor, but it’s a bizarre juxtaposition to see Caracas’ “Patria, Socialismo, o Muerte” (Fatherland, Socialism, or Death) banners vying for space with ads for Coke and McDonald’s.

Later in the same column he writes about a dinner party he attended with his girlfriend’s cousins, at which they got into a discussion of Venezuela’s economy and how corruption, inflation, and the economy’s own inherent instability (not to mention Chavez’s unpredictable tendency to nationalize industries and scare off some successful companies based in foreign countries) has lead to a sharp decrease in foreign investment.

Times are good, for now, but it’s an unsustainable bubble in so many ways. As another guest puts it, “Being in business down here is a lot like being on a hot streak in a casino, only when it’s time to cash in your chips, you realize you’re in the Titanic’s casino.”

George Will on biofuels

George Will wrote a great column that was published in the Feb. 11 edition of Newsweek. In the column he writes about the government-created demand for ethanol for use in reducing pollution from gasoline, and how this is resulting not only in increased food prices around the world, but decreased forest land, which produces a decrease in greenhouse gases that is minimal at best.

Key quotes:

In 2005, America used 15 percent of its corn crop to supplant less than 2 percent of its gasoline use. In 2007, the government-contrived U.S. demand for ethanol was more than half the global increase in demand. The political importance of corn-growing, ethanol-making Iowa is one reason that biofuel mandates flow from Washington the way oil would flow from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge if it had nominating caucuses.

To avoid drilling for oil in ANWR’s moonscape, the planet savers evidently prefer destroying forests, even though they absorb greenhouse gases. Will ethanol prevent more carbon-dioxide emissions than would have been absorbed by the trees cut down to clear land for the production of crops for ethanol? Be that as it may, governments mandating the use of biofuels are one reason for the global rise in food prices, which is driving demand for more arable land. That demand is driving the destruction of forests—and animal habitats. In Indonesia alone, 44 million acres have been razed to make way for production of palm oil.

The argument that biofuels are important for reducing our energy dependence on unreliable or dangerous Middle Eastern nations (the two largest sources of U.S. oil imports are turbulent Canada and militant Mexico) is mocked by the 54-cents-a-gallon tariff penalizing Brazilian ethanol. The theory behind that tariff is as old as American history. It is that “infant industries”—in this case, the ethanol industry that the government has ordered into existence—require protection. But protection permanently infantilizes industries. 

Bill Clinton, by executive edict, declared 1.7 million acres of Utah to be a national monument. Under those acres are the largest known deposit—more than 60 billion tons—of low-sulfur, clean-burning coal. The second largest deposit, the value of which rose because of Clinton’s action locking up an alternative supply, is in Indonesia and is owned by a member of the Indonesian Riady family, of fragrant memory, which was generous to Clinton’s 1992 campaign.

Identity politics, “peace” at any price, and universal health care

I would like to share a few columns that I find very interesting. Two of them I only read within the past week, and the other some months ago but it is so concisely written and well-researched and timely thatI feel it must be read by any sober-minded person who seriously thinks “universal health care” is the solution to anything or that it would make health care in the U.S. better and not worse. The first column is a recent one by Christopher Hitchens and was published in The Wall Street Journal last week. Hitchens has become one of my favorite columnists in the past year and aside from his virulent anti-theist writings, he is always well worth reading. This article is titled ”The Perils of Identity Politics” and mainly talks about issues that have arisen from the prospect of our country possibly electing its first female or “black” President later this year, and how people who would wince at the idea of discriminating against someone on the grounds of gender or race seem to think that the only way to truly show that our country has moved forward would be for voters to vote in favor of someone because of their gender or race. Quotes that should make you want to read the rest of the column:

“People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of “race” or “gender” alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.”

 ”What are we trying to “get over” here? We are trying to get over the hideous legacy of slavery and segregation. But Mr. Obama is not a part of this legacy. His father was a citizen of Kenya, an independent African country, and his mother was a “white” American. He is as distant from the real “plantation” as I am. How — unless one thinks obsessively about color while affecting not to do so — does this make him “black”?

Far from taking us forward, this sort of discussion actually keeps us anchored in the past.”

 Another recent one is an article by Bruce Bawer called The Peace Racket, which was published in the quarterly City Journal. In it Bawer talks about some of the fallacies and moral corruption of the peace movement and some of its prominent names. The article begins thus:

 If you want peace, prepare for war.” Thus counseled Roman general Flavius Vegetius Renatus over 1,600 years ago. Nine centuries before that, Sun Tzu offered essentially the same advice, and it’s to him that Vegetius’s line is attributed at the beginning of a film that I saw recently at Oslo’s Nobel Peace Center. Yet the film cites this ancient wisdom only to reject it. After serving up a perverse potted history of the cold war, the thrust of which is that the peace movement brought down the Berlin Wall, the movie ends with words that turn Vegetius’s insight on its head: “If you want peace, prepare for peace.”

 

This purports to be wise counsel, a motto for the millennium. In reality, it’s wishful thinking that doesn’t follow logically from the history of the cold war, or of any war. For the cold war’s real lesson is the same one that Sun Tzu and Vegetius taught: conflict happens; power matters. It’s better to be strong than to be weak; you’re safer if others know that you’re ready to stand up for yourself than if you’re proudly outspoken about your defenselessness or your unwillingness to fight. There’s nothing mysterious about this truth. Yet it’s denied not only by the Peace Center film but also by the fast-growing, troubling movement at the center symbolizes and promotes.

 The last column is another from City Journal, this one written by Peter Huber and called “Cherry Garcia and the End of Socialized Medicine“. It’s very lengthy and doesn’t actually go in-depth about socialized medicine until you’re over three-fourths into it, but it makes many good points about how advances in medicine have always been done best when private individuals and companies were driving them, and that these advances can be retarded when government regulation gets in the way and tries to impose a one-size-fits-all plan to insure everyone.Best quotes:

Insurance makes sense for risks that people can’t control. Or to put it more bluntly, socialized medicine was a smart idea back when medicine was too stupid to halt infectious epidemics, discourage suicidal lifestyles, or discern the perils in killer genes. Berlin established national health coverage in 1883, soon after Robert Koch identified the bacterial cause of tuberculosis. When your neighbor has TB you’re happy to buy him a trip to a hospital, preferably in Aruba. Britain’s National Health Service was created in 1948, just as a cure—streptomycin—was becoming widely available. The antibiotic was cheaper than Aruba, and more effective, too. Washington began subsidizing a large chunk of U.S. health care five years earlier, when the IRS ruled that health benefits supplied by employers weren’t taxable income for employees. The poisonous effects of tobacco and diet weren’t nailed down until well into the 1950s. A systematic science for isolating and addressing perilous genes has emerged only in the last decade.

 

Most critics of the status quo focus on the more manageable of the two core problems that health insurers now face: runaway cost. But the real problem is that for many people, health care is getting cheaper. This is what makes actuaries wake up screaming in the night: disease is coming out of the closet, and the new medicine splits health-care economics in two. For the health conscious, skipping the Cherry Garcia may be difficult, but it’s cheap, and Lipitor at almost any price is much cheaper than a heart attack. The health careless skip only the pill, not the ice cream, and end up in desperate need of what helps the least and costs the most. Doctors, hospitals, and scalpels summoned late in the day cost far more, and accomplish far less, than chemistry tuned to the point where there’s never plaque to cut.

 

Drug companies introduce most new drugs here first, and affluent Americans pay premium prices while the patents last. Less affluent Americans, along with public and private insurers in the United States, Britain, Canada, and the rest of the developed world, get a sharply discounted ride on their economic coattails. Three-dollar statins in New York in 1996 get 30-cent statins to London in 2006 and three-cent statins to Kuala Lumpur a few years later.

 

Governments are impatient, however, especially when they have promised to supply what they can’t possibly afford but can readily seize. The promise of universal care implies state-of-the-art care, so governments’ principal response has been to skip straight to the three-cent pill. In the developing world, the authorities just fail to notice when pirates manufacture knockoffs. Most developed countries have gone halfway there, by instituting a monopoly buyer to bargain against the monopoly patent. Some members of Congress want to let U.S. patients order drugs from Canadian pharmacies, so that Ottawa will bargain with Pfizer on behalf of the poor in Oshkosh. Others want to set Washington up as the monopoly buying agent for all drugs that it pays for.

 

Drug companies, however, are quite smart enough not to develop three-dollar pills for three-cent buyers. Collectively, these price-depressing strategies already make it unprofitable to pursue many drugs that treat rare diseases, and drugs for all but the most common diseases earn most of their profit in the unregulated U.S. market.