Category: Law
The assumption of “free disposal,” as applied to children
This rather horrifying link has been making the rounds on Twitter, here is the bottom line:
When a Liberian girl proves too much for her parents, they advertise her online and give her to a couple they’ve never met. Days later, she goes missing.
The practice is called “private re-homing,” and it seems plenty of it goes on, and without government scrutiny (in many cases a simple notarized statement may accompany the handover).
Maybe I’ve read too much Walter Block ($2.99 on Kindle) in my day, but well, um, well…you know. Is the solution to make the initial adopting parents keep the girl? That seems doubtful. Are the children better off being sent back to an orphanage rather than being re-gifted? Possibly so, but this is not obvious. From a legal point of view, for sure. But as for the utilitarian and Benthamite angle? A lot of evil parents might keep their newly adopted children (and to the detriment of those children) because return to the orphanage could be bureaucratic, costly, and also humiliating, at least compared to giving them away rather rapidly over the internet.
Should we screen adopting parents more rigorously, so as to prevent lemon parents from adopting in the first place? Well, maybe, and if you read the article you will see some cases where better upfront screening would have been highly desirable. But tougher screening as a general rule? I don’t know. Adoption is already costly and bureaucratic, it is on average welfare-enhancing, and maybe we can’t easily screen out most of the lemon parents anyway. Etc.
On the other side of the issue, limiting free disposal likely would improve the average quality of adopting parent through positive selection. Quite possibly that effect will predominate but I would ask for the same standards of evidence here that we apply to other policy decisions.
I say we don’t yet know the proper policy response to this issue, but it’s worth thinking this through with more rigor than a simple “mood affiliation” response might suggest.
The FTC vs. the DC Taxi Cab Commission
The FTC recently released a letter supporting competition in the DC Taxicab industry:
[The FTC] staff respectfully suggests that DCTC carefully consider the potential direct and indirect impact of its proposed regulations on competition. We believe that unwarranted restrictions on competition should be avoided, and any restrictions on competition that are implemented should be no broader than necessary to address legitimate subjects of regulation, such as safety and consumer protection, and narrowly crafted to minimize any potential anticompetitive impact.
In response, taxi commission chair Ron Linton suggested that Uber had a hand in writing the FTC letter. Regulators can sometimes be captured but not by firms launched in 2010! FTC commissioner Joshua Wright (formerly a colleague at GMU law) responds in the Washington Post with a telling point:
Linton’s uninformed comment tells us more about the commission’s approach to regulation than about the FTC’s. According to The Post, Linton described the commission’s regulatory role to that of a referee of competing interest groups.
Indeed, what competing groups is Linton talking about? Might it be producers and consumers? And what does it mean to “referee” the competition between producers and consumers if not to raise prices and incumbent profits?
Firefighter Hysteresis
The number of fires is down but the number of career firefighters is up, as I showed last year in my post firefighters don’t fight fires. Leon Neyfakh of the Boston Globe covers the situation in Boston:
…city records show that major fires are becoming vanishingly rare. In 1975, there were 417 of them. Last year, there were 40. That’s a decline of more than 90 percent. A city that was once a tinderbox of wooden houses has become—thanks to better building codes, automatic sprinkler systems, and more careful behavior—a much less vulnerable place.
As this has happened, however, the number of professional firefighters in Boston has dropped only slightly, from around 1,600 in the 1980s to just over 1,400 today. The cost of running the department, meanwhile, has increased by almost $43 million over the past decade, and currently stands at $185 million, or around 7.5 percent of the city’s total budget.
Later, I am quoted:
Alex Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University who discussed the fire statistics on the blog Marginal Revolution, explains it in terms of what’s called the “March of Dimes problem.” When polio was defeated, the March of Dimes, started under Franklin Delano Roosevelt to combat the disease, suddenly had no reason to exist. “They were actually successful, and it was something they never planned for,” said Tabarrok. “But instead of disbanding the organization, they set it onto a whole bunch of other tasks…and so it’s kind of lost its focus. It’s no longer easy to evaluate whether it’s doing a good job or not.”
This, in Tabarrok’s view, is what happened to the country’s fire departments: At a certain point, they became an organization in search of a mission. “So they ended up doing things they’re not necessarily the optimal people to do, like responding to medical emergencies.”
Some cities are trying to change but as I said in my original piece, “it’s hard to negotiate with heroes”. The situation in Toronto illustrates. Paramedics were recently assigned to more emergency calls at the expense of firefighters who have responded with photos ops in front of burned homes and threats that if their budget is cut children will die. Not wanting to lose their newly found responsibilities, the paramedics have responded with a campaign of their own leading to an awesome cat fight between the two agencies.
I enjoyed Margaret Wente’s conclusion:
A powerful combination of fear-mongering and hero worship has made Canada’s fire departments largely immune to budget cuts. As a consequence, the citizens are getting hosed.
Ronald Coase has passed away
Very sad news, he was one of the true greats, notice is here. Here is one good appreciation.
The charitable deduction in Singapore
There is no reason why deductions cannot be super-charged:
To encourage greater charitable giving in Singapore as the economy recovered, the Minister for Finance announced in Budget 2011 that tax deduction of 2.5 times will be extended for another 5 years to donations made from 1 January 2011 to 31 December 2015.
The full document is here. If that does not sink through, here is another discussion:
What this means is that for every dollar that you donate to charities, the government will deduct $2.50 off your tax payable. If you have been paying Income Tax, you will know that this is something extremely beneficial.
A few years ago the deduction was only 2x and that in turn was a relatively new policy. Do any of you know of research on the impact of these policies and changes?
Here is Bruce Bartlett, who is skeptical about the charitable deduction in the United States.
American violence is higher than you think
From Christopher Glazek:
…the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and violence.
Crime has not fallen in the United States—it’s been shifted. Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie—but as the single most shameful lie in American life.
From 1980 to 2007, the number of prisoners held in the United States quadrupled to 2.3 million, with an additional 5 million on probation or parole.
Here is one detail:
…the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.
Here is more, via Eli Dourado.
North Korea Fact of the Day
North Korea is the only country in the world where it is legal to use, sell, transport and cultivate marijuana.
How you know Singaporeans are really serious about microeconomics
If you have to pay a fine, say for incorrect behavior in public, the fine is defined as say “$250 plus GST,” where GST is a consumption tax similar to a VAT.
Think about it. Presumably you derive consumption pleasure from the fined activity. Paying the fine (stochastically) is, at the margin, equated with the return from other forms of consumption. The other forms of consumption are taxed and thus subject to GST. Therefore the fine-generating activity should be taxed too.
Do Not Mock the Freshmen
Here from a 1495 Leipzig University Statute is some good advice for the first day of classes:
Statute Forbidding Any One to Annoy or Unduly Injure the Freshmen.
Each and every one attached to this university is forbidden to offend with insult, torment, harass, drench with water or urine, throw on or defile with dust or any filth, mock by whistling, cry at them with a terrifying voice, or dare to molest in any way whatsoever physically or severely, any, who are called freshmen, in the market, streets, courts, colleges and living houses, or any place whatsoever, and particularly in the present college, when they have entered in order to matriculate or are leaving after matriculation.
Hat tip: Jason Kuznicki.
Spying on your loved ones? (or what you don’t know can’t hurt you?)
National Security Agency officers on several occasions have channeled their agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests, U.S. officials said.
The practice isn’t frequent — one official estimated a handful of cases in the last decade — but it’s common enough to garner its own spycraft label: LOVEINT.
Here is more.
*Ninety Percent of Everything*
The author is Rose George and the subtitle is Inside Shipping, The Invisible Industry that Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate. Here is one excerpt:
The biggest container ship can carry fifteen thousand boxes. It can hold 746 million bananas, one for every European..
And here is one other part:
EU-NAVFOR releases 80 percent of detained pirates because it can’t find willing courts.
Here is the book’s home page.
A Puzzle in Divorce Law
It’s easy to see why a divorce law might arise that allows men relatively easy divorce, as in the Old Testament which lets men divorce almost at will (as written, interpretations differ) but gives women no right to divorce at all. It is also easy to see why a society might adopt mutual consent under which both parties must agree in order to get a divorce or no-fault unilateral rules in which either party can get a divorce without the consent of the other. What is difficult to understand, however, is why a society would adopt divorce laws that make it difficult to get a divorce even when both parties want a divorce. Who benefits from such rules? And yet this was the common situation in England and the United States up until say the end of the 19th century. In England, for example, it took an Act of Parliament to get a divorce. One might argue that such rules benefit children but aside from the questionability of the premise this view would also have to answer how it is that children have political power?
Hat tip to Sasha Volokh for bringing the question to mind with an apropos quote on divorce from a 19th century British judge.
China’s experiment with cap and trade
Dirk Forrister and Paul Bledsoe report from the NYT:
China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, has begun its effort in the southern city of Shenzhen, paving the way for a national Chinese market in a few years. Like Europe, which voted to extend and improve its emissions market, and Australia and New Zealand, Shenzhen chose a carbon market as the most efficient way to lower its greenhouse gas emissions.
Under the Shenzhen program, the government will set limits on carbon dioxide discharges for 635 industrial companies and 197 public buildings that together account for about 40 percent of the city’s emissions. Polluters whose emissions fall below the limit can sell the difference in the form of pollution allowances to other polluters. These companies must decide whether it is cheaper to reduce emissions or pollute above their limit by buying allowances, whose price will be set by supply and demand. But the pressure will be on, because the limits will decrease over time. Six more regional pilot programs are planned over the next year.
This piece offers some further details, including this:
The caps require the emitters to collectively cut their carbon intensity by 6.7 per cent a year between this year and 2015.
After reading multiple sources, however, it seems that all these numbers involve fudges. And over the longer run the cap is defined relative to gdp:
Beijing has not agreed to binding caps on its emission volumes, but has set a target to cut emission intensity – carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product – by 40 to 45 per cent by 2020 from the 2005 level.
Here is further analysis from The Economist, which reckons that actual binding carbon caps will take ten years to evolve. This will be one good way to study whether these regimes are time consistent, noting that Europe’s regime has been in place for about ten years and still doesn’t work.
The price of phone calls for inmates will decline
After a decade of lobbying by prisoner advocacy groups, the Federal Communications Commission on Friday voted to lower inmate phone call rates.
The action seeks to address the exorbitant rates for phone calls made by inmates in jails and prisons across the country. A 15-minute phone call can cost $17, more than 10 times the average per-minute rate for typical consumer plans.
The proposal approved Friday will reduce the cost of phone calls made by prison inmates to a cap of 25 cents a minute for a collect call and 21 cents a minute for a debit or prepaid call.
By the way:
Phone companies oppose the changes, arguing they would make an already-competitive market even tougher on their bottom lines.
The companies insist it simply costs more to provide inmate phone services, which require security features such as call screening, restricting phone numbers and blocking three-way calls.
There is more here, and for the pointer I thank George McQuistion.
Is the Fourth Amendment Now Illegal?
In my view the fourth amendment is routinely being violated by the federal government. But is the fourth amendment, in particular the right to be secure in one’s papers, now illegal? Maybe. Violations of the fourth amendment by the federal government encourage the use of encryption but that avenue may now being blocked. Lavabit, the secure email service used by Edward Snowden, has suddenly and mysteriously closed with the creator leaving this message:
I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on–the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.
Other secure email providers have also shut down.
Recently I asked for suggestions to add to the Bill of Rights. One of mine was:
Congress shall pass no law abridging the right of the people to encrypt their documents and effects. (Modern supplement to the fourth amendment.)
I guess that amendment isn’t going to pass. I should not be surprised. In 2003 I said the cyber-libertarians were naive to dream of a new world of privacy and liberty built on the foundations of the internet and public key cryptography. Sadly, I got that one right.
Hat tip: Lynne Kiesling.
Addendum: Here is a longer account of what may be going on with Lavabit. Key graph:
There are already two theories as to what a FISA order against Lavabit may have looked like. First, FISA could have ordered Lavabit to insert spyware or build a back door for the N.S.A., as American and Canadian courts reportedly did to the encrypted e-mail service Hushmail, in 2007. Second, FISA could have ordered Lavabit to permit the N.S.A. to intercept users’ passwords. But the truth may never come out.