Category: Law
Very good sentences
This raises an interesting, tangentially related question. Liberals fulminate constantly against outrageous conservative obstruction, yet often seem nevertheless surprised by its effectiveness. Why is that? My guess is that liberals are sometimes deceived by assumptions about the scope of liberalising moral progress. Modern history is a series of conservative disappointments, and the trend of social change does have a generally liberal cast. The surprisingly rapid acceptance of legal gay marriage is a good example. Liberals are therefore accustomed to a giddy sense of riding at the vanguard of history, routed reactionaries choking in their dust. But all of us, whatever our colours, overestimate the moral and intellectual coherence of our political convictions. We’re inclined to see meaningful internal connections between our opinions—between our views on abortion and regulatory policy, say—when often there’s no connection deeper than the contingent expediencies of coalition politics. For liberals, this sometimes plays out as a tendency to see resistance to all liberal policy as an inevitably losing battle against the inexorable tide of history. This occasionally leads, in turn, to a slightly naive sense of surprise when a hard-won political victory isn’t consolidated by a decisive, validating shift in public opinion, but instead begins to be ratcheted back.
That is from Will Wilkinson.
Titling of Property
The NYTimes has an excellent piece on Greece’s broken property system:
In this age of satellite imagery, digital records and the instantaneous exchange of information, most of Greece’s land transaction records are still handwritten in ledgers, logged in by last names. No lot numbers. No clarity on boundaries or zoning. No obvious way to tell whether two people, or 10, have registered ownership of the same property.
As Greece tries to claw its way out of an economic crisis of historic proportions, one that has left 60 percent of young people without jobs, many experts cite the lack of a proper land registry as one of the biggest impediments to progress. It scares off foreign investors; makes it hard for the state to privatize its assets, as it has promised to do in exchange for bailout money; and makes it virtually impossible to collect property taxes.
… less than 7 percent of the country has been properly mapped, officials say. Experts say that even the Balkan states, recovering from years of Communism and civil war, are far ahead of Greece when it comes to land registries attached to zoning maps — an approach developed by the Romans and in wide use in much of the developed world since the 1800s.
Here from our course on development economics at MRUniversity is our video which covers the theory and empirical research on titling from Peru to Palau:
http://youtu.be/1CFqK_lHngs
Oops, and double oops…
Au pair programs are in danger of ending, a possible victim of legislation now moving through Congress…
At issue is a provision of the bill that would bar any labor contractor from charging a fee to foreign workers being brought into the country. Supporters say the measure is aimed at preventing the exploitation of foreign workers.
The roughly 13,000 au pairs who enter the U.S. each year are considered participants in an “exchange visitor program” run by the State Department. The Senate bill would change their status to “workers,” meaning the new bar on charging upfront fees would apply to them.
The story is here. I predict they will find some semi-legal way around this stipulation, should the bill pass, but still this is a big mistake. Au pairs should not be considered controversial immigrants.
The second oops is this, from the Detroit Institute of Arts:
Museum officials here said Friday they strongly opposed any forced art sales, after the powerful emergency manager of the city indicated that its prized holdings could be sold to pay off creditors in the event of a bankruptcy filing…legal experts say that in a municipal bankruptcy, it is possible for a city to sell assets, even cultural icons. James Spiotto, a bankruptcy attorney and author on municipal-finance issues based in Chicago, said that “in order to provide essential government services like public safety, roads and education, certain other programs are going to be curtailed or eliminated. So it’s not surprising that the sale of art is on the table.”
Putting that museum into private hands would not have been a bad idea. You also can take this as an illustration of the more general point, which I am fond of stressing, that once you consider wealth, hardly anywhere is actually bankrupt or insolvent. Debt problems are most of all problems of politics.
Prisoner unemployment is rising in California
Prison labor, once best known for making license plates, has grown to 57 factories doing such work as modular building construction, toner cartridge recycling, shoemaking and juice packaging, according to its latest annual report. Convicts supply closed-captioning for television and transcribe movies into Braille…
Yet even with workers paid 35 to 95 cents an hour, business is off. Sales are exclusively to state and local governments, almost all under budget pressure. The biggest customer, the Corrections Department, has 43,000 fewer inmates since 2006, many shifted to county jails to ease crowding. Revenue slipped 18 percent to $173 million in the fiscal year that ended in June, from almost $210 million five years earlier.
“We are statutorily required to be self-sufficient,” said Eric Reslock, a spokesman for the California Prison Industry Authority. Some work programs have been scaled back and all are being reviewed, he said.
That is from James Nash of Bloomberg. Here is one specific report for Bakersfield.
You can see that the initial shock to this system is largely demand-side. Yet there is still a relevant supply-side reason why many of these laid-off workers remain unemployed.
The economy that is Dubai (a different kind of driverless car)
Thousands of the finest automobiles ever made are now being abandoned every year since Dubai’s financial meltdown, left by expatriates and locals alike who flee in a hurry because they face crippling debts. With big loans to repay to the banks (unpaid debt or even bouncing a cheque is a criminal offence in Dubai), the panicked car owners make their way to the airport at top speeds and leave their vehicles in the car park, hopping on the next flight out of there, never to return…
Ferraris, Porsches, BMWs, Mercedes are regularly abandoned at the car park of Dubai International Airport, some with loan documents and apology notes simply left on the windscreen and in some cases with the keys still in the ignition.
…Residents complain about the unsightly vehicles hogging parking spaces at the airport and sitting slumped outside their fancy yacht clubs– it’s like, so not a good look.
There is more here, hat tip goes @jscarantino. By the way, a 19-year-old in Romania may have just made driverless cars significantly cheaper.
Further problems with ACA implementation
From Christopher Weaver and Anna Wilde Mathews:
Employers are increasingly recognizing they may be able to avoid certain penalties under the federal health law by offering very limited plans that can lack key benefits such as hospital coverage.
Benefits advisers and insurance brokers—bucking a commonly held expectation that the law would broadly enrich benefits—are pitching these low-benefit plans around the country. They cover minimal requirements such as preventive services, but often little more. Some of the plans wouldn’t cover surgery, X-rays or prenatal care at all. Others will be paired with limited packages to cover additional services, for instance, $100 a day for a hospital.
Federal officials say this type of plan, in concept, would appear to qualify as acceptable minimum coverage under the law, and let most employers avoid an across-the-workforce $2,000-per-worker penalty for firms that offer nothing. Employers could still face other penalties they anticipate would be far less costly.
It is unclear how many employers will adopt the strategy, but a handful of companies have signed on and an industry is sprouting around the tactic. More than a dozen brokers and benefit-administrators in 10 states said they were discussing the strategy with their clients.
There is more detail at the link, including a discussion of some of the legal uncertainties. Veronique de Rugy adds comment here.
Sentences to ponder
Fashion models are almost twice as likely to get their visas as computer programmers, by one rough measure.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Andrew Rowe.
Sentences to ponder
A family can get implicitly taxed 238% on that additional $501.
The thing is, I don’t even need to tell you what the topic is. The original source is here.
U.S. clothing chains do not support pact on Bangladesh reforms
From Brad Plumer:
Nearly all U.S. clothing chains, citing the fear of litigation, declined to sign an international pact ahead of a Wednesday deadline, potentially weakening what had been hailed as the best hope for bringing about major reforms in low-wage factories in Bangladesh.
Companies including Wal-Mart, Gap, Target and J.C. Penney had been pressed by labor groups to sign the document in the wake of last month’s factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed at least 1,127 people. More than a dozen European retailers did so. But U.S. companies feared the agreement would give labor groups and others the basis to sue them in court.
…Wal-Mart reiterated Wednesday that it would not sign the accord at this time, because it “introduces requirements, including governance and dispute resolution mechanisms, on supply chain matters that are appropriately left to retailers, suppliers and government, and are unnecessary to achieve fire and safety goals.”
…Most U.S. companies, however, balked at the language in the accord. Some said it would would expose them to excessive legal liability — particularly in America’s litigious courts. Written by labor groups, the agreement would require retailers who source clothing from Bangladesh to commit to pay for inspections, building upgrades and training — all enforced by binding arbitration.
Here is more. Most likely, the damage done to Bangladesh will continue. Note that the prospect of successful litigation was not what drove FDI into the 19th century United States, or twentieth century Singapore, to the point where wages rose significantly.
Red Lights for Profit
TAMPA BAY, Florida — A subtle, but significant tweak to Florida’s rules regarding traffic signals has allowed local cities and counties to shorten yellow light intervals, resulting in millions of dollars in additional red light camera fines.
The 10 News Investigators discovered the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) quietly changed the state’s policy on yellow intervals in 2011, reducing the minimum below federal recommendations. The rule change was followed by engineers, both from FDOT and local municipalities, collaborating to shorten the length of yellow lights at key intersections, specifically those with red light cameras (RLCs).
…Red light cameras generated more than $100 million in revenue last year…with 52.5 percent of the revenue going to the state. The rest is divided by cities, counties, and the camera companies….”Red light cameras are a for-profit business between cities and camera companies and the state,” said James Walker, executive director of the nonprofit National Motorists Association. “The (FDOT rule-change) was done, I believe, deliberately in order that more tickets would be given with yellows set deliberately too short.”
See Buchanan and Brennan’s The Power to Tax for an analytic approach and Benson, Rasmussen and Sollars for another example of bureaucratic revenue maximization.
Hat tip: Radley Balko.
Markets in everything
The market for methadone vomit in prison is lively, and the preferred recipe for this cocktail is one part puke (strained, please, bartender) to one part Tang.
Here is more, interesting on other points too, by Graeme Wood, mostly on the drug problem in the country of Georgia, and the pointer is from Wonkbook.
India fact of the day
“Seventy per cent of all global transfer pricing litigation is in India”…
Yet it is difficult for foreign companies to obtain legal clarification on these cases. Here is more, with the encompassing article by James Crabtree and Victor Mallet.
In praise of Bernie Sanders
This is an email from his press secretary:
I wanted to write to applaud your great piece in the NYT this weekend, and make sure you were aware of Sen. Sanders’ legislation on the issue.
During the last congress Sen. Sanders introduced a bill to create a $3 billion fund tasked with giving away prizes for drug breakthroughs. Here’s a release for the bill and here’s a video of a hearing the senator held on it where Joseph Stiglitz, Lawrence Lessig and Jamie Love all testify in support.
I thought you might be interested.
He is referring to my piece from this Sunday.
The Open Borders Movement
I spoke on The 180, a Canadian radio show on CBC, on the open borders movement. Ironically, the streaming version appears not to be available to Americans. You can listen to the podcast, however. The interview starts at about 3:18. Jim Brown, the interviewer, was very gracious in letting me speak and I thought we covered a lot. Here are two lightly transcribed bits:
The problem with poverty is not that people don’t have skills it is that they are imprisoned in countries where their political or geographic institutions prevent them from making a living. When people move to the U.S. or Canada they are perfectly capable of making a decent living. It’s not that there is something wrong with the people in other countries. The poverty is the fault of the governments under which they live and the unfortunate fact that some people are just unlucky and they happen to be born in a barren region and because of the policies of other countries they can’t leave that barren region. I think that is wrong.
When someone with low skills comes into Canada that benefits people in Canada who have high skills as it helps them to focus on what they do best. As I like to put it, a gardener who works for a particle physicist is indirectly helping to unlock the secrets of the universe.
See OpenBorders.info for a superb resource on all aspects of this question.
Jeremy Bentham’s *Not Paul, but Jesus, vol. III*
Bentham’s famous defense (or should I say advocacy?) of homosexuality and other non-traditional sexual and romantic relationships — he describes them as the “eccentric mode” — is now available in its entirety, for the first time I believe. Here is a blog post about the new publication. It is a fascinating work throughout and homosexuality is central to his answer to Malthus and the dangers of excess population.
The full text is freely available here (pdf), about two hundred pages. Here is one typical excerpt:
Yet by such a multitude of those who would start with horror at the very mention of a gratification afforded to the sexual appetite in any eccentric mode, how compleatly dissolute and unlimited is the indulgence afforded to the appetites of which the organs of taste and smell are the instruments, and how enormous is the expence at and by which this indulgence is so constantly and regularly procured.
By those by whom, to the pleasures of the table, no limits are attempted to be set other than those set, as above, by the allied considerations [of] self-regarding prudence and benevolence, why to the pleasures of the bed should any narrower limits be assigned? With what consistency can any difference be made in the extent given to the limits in the two cases? So much as to the question between the pleasures of the table taken in the aggregate on the one part, and the pleasures of the bed on the other.
Has Andrew Sullivan read this book? Through jstor, here is a related David M. Levy piece.