Category: Law
GMU needs food truck deregulation
Maksim Tsvetovat writes to me:
I'm a fellow professor at Mason Fairfax Campus. As I was reading about Sodexo monopolist hold on food service at Mason and their despicable labor practices and working conditions, I started wondering if there was a way to deal with this WHILE improving food options on campus. The answer is actually pretty simple — FOOD TRUCKS! I can almost taste the fresh tacos and arepas, or bahn mi, or udon noodles or… you name it.
This worked very well on the campus of my alma mater (Carnegie Mellon Unviersity) where food trucks coexist peacefully with Aramark but forced Aramark to improve quality of food, lower prices and improve labor practices (they were not happy about it and sued but lost in court — there's good precedent)
I'm talking to owner of one tasty taco truck to see if he'll come and park near Enterprise Hall at lunchtime — just as a trial balloon, to see how Mason reacts. I'm wondering if you (as a well-known local authority on ethnic food as well as a fellow professor) might be able to lend your voice to this and rally some support behind it. Even a simple blog posting would be a huge help!
Here is Matt Yglesias on DC food cart deregulation. Here is a good piece on black and grey market food on the other side of the Anacostia River. Here is the latest on food trucks in DC.
Does the well-off law professor have cause to complain?
This guy is the blogging topic of the weekend; his family earns $455,000 a year (addendum: this number seems not to be true) and yet he worries about his taxes going up and the resulting diminution of real income. I think we cannot permanently extend the Bush tax cuts; nonetheless, being a contrarian, I would like to explore the question of when a wealthy person has cause to complain. I read about this guy and his pitchfork and it genuinely scared me, especially his description of Ben Stein and his intermingling of the political and the aesthetic.
Let's say you live in a country which has some rich people, some people in the lower middle class, and some very very poor people. Or let's say you are a non-nationalist cosmopolitan. Or let's say they discovered the indigenous people in Alaska and New Mexico were worse off than we had thought.
In such societies, do the "lower middle class but not very poor people" have cause to complain? After all, some large group of others has it much, much tougher. Doesn't everyone who might suffer a loss have a potential claim to complain? At what percentile of wealth does your claim to complain go away or diminish? Even if it's an exponential function, can't Henderson's complaint lie within the shaded area, small though that region may be? Can't a rich person point out that he has a higher MU of money than a non-rich person might think? Or must that necessarily offend others? What kind of genuflections must he package along with that information, so as to avoid being considered offensive?
Do you have more of a right to complain about taxes if you were going to spend the money, bringing about the treasured "stimulus," noting that right now the wealthy are more inclined to spend? Do spendthrift wealthy people have a stronger right to complain if the multiplier on their potential spending is 1.5 rather than 0.6? Should wealthy people simply acquiesce to any policy change that leaves them in the top two percent, and keep their mouths shut in the meantime?
If you are wealthy, and complain about a pending loss, must you each time note that some people — many people — are worse off than you are? If you read a bad complaint, and complain about it, must you note that other people are stuck reading far worse material? Or is it OK just to complain? What if some other country's rich people support political tyranny, or perhaps an oppressive caste system, or maybe they don't pay any taxes at all? Can you still complain about your rich people? Or must you put in a disclaimer that you don't really have it so bad, given that others, in other countries, are stuck with even worse rich people?
Beware of moral arguments which do not address "At which margin?" I see a lot of attempts to lower the status of Todd Henderson, but not much real moral engagement.
A lot of people just like to complain, and that includes complaining about the complaining of others.
Oddly — or perhaps not – it's the people who feel they deserve their money who are the most likely to give it away.
Scary sentences
It seems the Obama administration is looking for any possible argument to justify its policy of assassinating U.S. citizens without legal restraint. But that's not always easy to manage:
“The more forcefully the administration urges a court to stay out because this is warfare, the more it puts itself in the uncomfortable position of arguing we’re at war even in Yemen,”
The administration doesn't want any possibility of judicial review:
…they are seeking to have the lawsuit dismissed without discussing its merits. For example, officials say, the brief is virtually certain to argue that Mr. Awlaki’s father has no legal standing to file a lawsuit on behalf of his son.
Is the administration trying to figure out the law, and then follow it, or to simply push through whatever it wants to do?
Are clearing mandates inefficient?
A new Cato paper by Craig Pirrong says yes, they are inefficient. This is a useful paper for sorting out some issues, because it argues consistently on a conceptual level. I especially like the point about how clearinghouses re-order the line of creditors, in favor of members, whether you like it or not. Overall, though, I'm not convinced by the main arguments against mandated clearinghouses. The phrase "not necessarily" is invoked too many times. Contra his p.24, it seems to me that clearinghouses would have had a strong profit incentive to monitor or limit the kind of risk-taking which led to the A.I.G. debacle. The key point is that a clearinghouse can more easily be forced to carry heavy capitalization and said capitalization, unlike with a current bank, cannot so easily be undone by off-balance sheet transactions or hidden leverage. The clearinghouse has different incentives and is much easier to regulate and therefore we should put some more trust in them. CME and NYSE and others did fine in a period of major market turmoil, so why not consider extending this model just a bit more?
I would think the main argument against mandated clearinghouses for CDS is simply the hair-trigger, discrete, non-smooth nature of default-linked payoffs, and whether any centralized intermediary has the predictive power to handle that and to demand sufficient collateral. Still, that is one way of putting CDS contracts to a non-TBTF commercial test, albeit a regulated commercial test. My worries about the actual CDS clearinghouse you will find here.
What will Basel III do?
Felix Salmon has one good summary, here a bit on community banks, overall emerging markets get off lightly, and Germany is unhappy (in this case probably a good thing). A few points:
1. This agreement is probably good news.
2. It is difficult to divine the net future effects of such changes upon announcement. There is also the question of how binding this ends up being and whether the implementation lags will matter.
3. One key question is how much current systems prevent regulatory arbitrage, namely driving more intermediation into less regulated, less reliable and less easily monitored institutions.
Stay tuned…
Is this more or less humane?
Inmates on death row are not told when they will be executed until the last minute – a procedure Japanese officials say prevents panic among inmates – and their family members and lawyers are informed only afterward, as are the news media.
And this:
The inmate is handcuffed and blindfolded before entering the execution room, officials said. Three prison wardens push separate buttons, only one of which releases the trapdoor [for hanging] – but they never find out which one. Wardens are given a bonus of about $230 every time they attend an execution.
The full story is here, interesting throughout. The murder conviction rate in Japan is 99 percent, some of which is likely due to false or pressured confessions.
*Sakhalin Island*
That is a book by Anton Chekhov, part memoir, part ethnographic study of a penal colony and the surrounding economic institutions on Sakhalin Island. I hardly ever hear of this work, but it is both a literary and social science masterpiece; I will teach it next spring in my Law and Literature class. Here is one review of the book. This excerpt reminded me of some recent events:
On the fifth line I marked their age. The women who were already over forty remembered theirs only with difficulty, and had to think for a bit before answering. Armenians from the Yerevan Region had no idea of their age at all. One of them answered me: "Might be thirty, but it could be fifty by now." In cases such as these, the age had to be determined approximately from their appearance and then verified from the relevant prison documents. Youths of fifteen and slightly older would usually reduce their ages. Some women would already by married, or have been engaged for ages in prostitution, yet still said they were thirteen or fourteen. The point about this is that children and juveniles in the poorest families receive a food ration from the state; which is issued only up to the age of fifteen, and here a simple calculation induces young people and their parents to tell lies.
These days, lying about age, and continued existence, seems to a standard practice in Japan. Here is more on Japan's "missing elderly". Apparently 884 people are listed as over 150 years of age; it is believed that many of these pensions still are being collected.
No Checks, No Balances
From the NYTimes
The lead plaintiff is Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen and legal resident of Britain who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002. He claimed he was turned over to the C.I.A., which flew him to Morocco and handed him off to its security service.
Moroccan interrogators, he said, held him for 18 months and subjected him to an array of tortures, including cutting his penis with a scalpel and then pouring a hot, stinging liquid on the open wounds.
Mr. Mohamed was later transferred back to the C.I.A., which he said flew him to its secret prison in Afghanistan. There, he said, he was held in continuous darkness, fed sparsely and subjected to loud noise – like the recorded screams of women and children – 24 hours a day.
He was later transferred again to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was held for an additional five years. He was released and returned to Britain in early 2009 and is now free.
and from the court's response:
First, that the judicial branch may have deferred to the
executive branch’s claim of privilege in the interest of
national security does not preclude the government from honoring
the fundamental principles of justice.
Oh that's nice the U.S. government is not precluded from honoring the fundamental principles of justice. Tell me, what government ever was?
Proposed markets in everything
In what Mr. DiSimone called his Free Limit Plan, he would give Nevadans and nonresidents the option to drive up to 90 miles an hour on state roads. The privilege would cost $25 a day and would conservatively generate more than $1 billion a year in new state revenue, he said.
DiSimone is an independent gubernatorial candidate, which I suppose means he is unlikely to win. The article is here and here and I thank John Thorne and Ted Craig for the pointers.
The rule of law, or the rule of men (women)?
The Obama administration on Thursday told health insurers that it will track those who enact "unjustified" rate increases linked to the health overhaul and may block those companies from a new marketplace for insurance coverage.
Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services, issued the warning in a letter to Karen Ignagni, the insurance industry's top lobbyist.
Ms. Sebelius said some insurers were notifying enrollees that their insurance premiums will increase next year as a result of the law's new benefits.
…"There will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases," Ms. Sebelius wrote. "We will not stand idly by as insurers blame their premium hikes and increased profits on the requirement that they provide consumers with basic protections."
Nowhere is it stated that these rate hikes are against the law (even if you think they should be), nor can this "misinformation" be against the law. Here is further information, including a copy of the letter, which is worse than I had been expecting.
In case you have not been paying attention
Here is a tidbit from today's news:
Among other policies, the Obama team has also placed a United States citizen on a targeted-killings list without a trial, blocked efforts by detainees in Afghanistan to bring habeas-corpus lawsuits challenging their indefinite imprisonment, and continued the C.I.A. rendition program – though the administration says it now takes greater safeguards to prevent detainees from being mistreated.
I wish to commend Kevin Drum in particular for continuing to draw our attention to these policies.
Western Cape prison gangs during and after apartheid
Have you ever seen a more appealing table of contents?:
Chapter 1: Nongoloza and Kilikijan
Chapter 2: The functions of violence I–Making men (and not children)
Chapter 3: The functions of violence II–Making men (and not women)
Chapter 4: Prison on the streets, the streets in prison
Chapter 5: Warders and gangs
It starts off a little slow and cliched, but picks up. Excerpt:
Once the drinking rituals have been completed and Kilikijan has discovered that his bandit brother drinks poison, Po instructs the two men to take the hide, drape it over the rock on which the band's diary is inscribed, and press it against the rock, until the diaries are imprinted on the animal's skin. The words of the diary, now duplicated–one on the rock, the other on the hide–are to become the law of the gang. Whenever there is a dispute about what bandits ought to do, Po says, consult the hide or the rock, because they are a record of how things were done at the beginning, and how things ought to be done in the future. Nongoloza rolls up the hide and takes it with him. Kilikijan is left with the rock.
That story is part of the opening myth of the piece. Read the whole thing, especially if you're into "strange and compelling, while laden with Erving Goffmanesque social science." It's ideal for Instapaper. Suddenly there comes:
The notion that order in the prisons was maintained by a delicate system of unwritten rules is one that begs for a control experiment. What happens when one side breaks the rules, when either ndotas or warders threaten to kill one another? Interestingly enough, there was a kind of control experiment in the 1980s: the medium-security, criminal prison on Robben Island.
The original pointer comes from Bamber.
Markets in Everything, Except Greenhouse Gases
In 2002 Time named Richard Sandor a “Hero of the Planet” for founding the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). The CCX traded permits based on voluntary but binding commitments from firms to cutback on carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases. Without enforced limits, however, or, if you prefer, without property rights in emissions, the market is not self-sustaining and CCX is cutting workers and may be wound down.
CCX founder Richard Sandor had hoped the exchange would become the hub for a national regulated market for greenhouse gas emissions to be kick-started by a U.S. climate change bill.
But prices for the carbon credits traded on the bourse since its 2003 launch, which were based on voluntary but legally binding emissions reduction commitments by its members, have crashed to around 10 cents a tonne from all-time highs of over $7 in 2008, and trading volumes have largely dried up.
Although the U.S. has vowed to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and despite the House of Representatives narrowly passing an ambitious climate bill in June 2008, several similar bills have stalled in the Senate in the past year.
“(The layoffs) seem to indicate that this market player thinks any U.S. climate action is still a way off,” said commodities house FCStone…
Fiscal stimulus coming to Haiti
Experts said the presidential and legislative elections could very well be the economic stimulus quake-ravaged Haitians have been awaiting since the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake left an estimated 300,000 dead, and wiped-out jobs. The campaigns are expected to hire tens of thousands of Haitians.
“It's like a cash transfer to the population, a sort of cash-for-work program,'' said Leslie Voltaire, a former government minister who plans to hire 10,000 Election Day monitors and a helicopter to get around Haiti's mountainous terrain.
The full story is here. And was the last election a model of Downsian competition? Maybe not:
In the 2006 presidential race, which saw Haitian President René Préval beat out 34 other candidates, experts speculated that a candidate needed between $3 million and $6 million to mount a strong challenge.
It is now also believed that the country can no longer afford to have senatorial elections every two years.
*Madoff Victims in Their Own Words*
That is the subtitle, the title is The Club No One Wanted to Join and the editor is Erin Arvedlund and the compiler is Alexandra Roth. Here are a few excerpts:
You are an evil predator…The Bible says that as Christ hung on the cross He cried out to God, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." I do not forgive you. You and your family knew exactly what you were doing. You will face God soon, and he will hold you accountable for your sins.
And another:
I no longer hate you. You are no longer the Monster that terrifies my dreams and fills my nightmares, because now I have courage and strength, and I have taken back control of my life.
This ordeal has allowed me to grow. It has allowed me to be a better friend, a better daughter, a better sister, and better me.
And for that I say, thank you!
And another:
P.S. I have been spelling your name in low caps for a while now, simply because you are a low life.
And:
I never met you, yet you had more influence and control over my life than I ever did.