Flood protection: If it’s not your business, it’s none of your business

From the Daily Camera:

The idea [from City of Boulder officials] is that a new set of codes would apply to new construction and substantial remodels of buildings that are designated as “critical facilities.” Under the city’s definition, those buildings include hospitals, sewage treatment plants, gas stations, nursing homes, police and fire stations, emergency shelters, urgent care centers, schools, day care centers, communications facilities and businesses that store or use hazardous waste.

The Daily Camera solicited its editorial advisory board to submit their views on this.  Mine was printed on August 28:

If it’s not your business, then it’s none of your business. Government has no right to mandate how private property owners protect against floods — let alone commandeer their buildings during emergencies. The proper response to a busybody in your life is “This is private and none of your business.”  The same goes for private properties that the city considers “critical facilities.” These include gas stations, nursing homes, day care and urgent care centers, and private schools and hospitals.

Property owners have the right and responsibility to insure against risk according to their own best judgment. In a free-market, short-sighted owners would pay for lax precautions through repairs, lost revenue, higher insurance premiums, and possibly lawsuits if hazardous materials are involved.

But government sabotages responsible ownership with tax-funded disaster assistance and the monopolistic National Flood Insurance Program. As a Competitive Enterprise Institute analysis discusses, the NFIP has little incentive to accurately asses flood risks. Over several years the NFIP “paid out $806,591 for repeated storm damage to a suburban Houston home that was valued at $114,480,” reported the Houston Chronicle.

Private flood insurers have beneficially balanced incentives. Selling policies that require excessive safety measures risks losing customers to competitors. But lax measures result in paying many costly claims.

Government mandates cannot achieve this balance. Boulder officials should consider the risks of mandates that significantly increase construction and remodeling costs. These can obstruct renovations and new construction, which can result in lost jobs, tax revenue, or continued use of already flood-prone buildings.

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Further reading:

Flawed voting system creates Maes & Tancredo conflict

Colorado’s 2010 gubernatorial race reveals a major flaw in our plurality-based elections: vote splitting. It’s well-known that Dan Maes and Tom Tancredo will split the Republican vote. This makes it much easier for Democrat John Hickenlooper to win compared to if one candidate withdrew. In an August 11 Rasmussen poll, the combined Maes/Tancredo votes exceeded Hickenlooper votes by 6 percentage points. Maes and Tancredo are similar enough candidates that if either withdraws, the other may gain enough votes to win.

Election rules should not create such conflict, or the related “spoiler effect” where voting for your favorite candidate helps your least favorite candidate win. Elections need not bind voters this way.

For example, a few U.S. cities use instant runoff voting, where to vote is to rank candidates according to your preference. Say the only candidates are Maes, Tancredo, and Hickenlooper, and you rank them in that order. If Dan Maes gets the least total first-choice votes, then he’s eliminated, and your vote is transferred to your next choice, Tancredo. In the runoff only Tancredo and Hickenlooper remain, and whoever has the most votes wins.

Critics of instant runoff voting point to possibly unfair results for popular second-choice candidates, or counter-intuitive results of Burlington Vermont’s recent mayoral election. But even with these potential drawbacks, instant runoff voting is preferable to today’s plurality voting. It remedies vote splitting, spoiler effects, and “wasted vote” concerns. More nuanced voting systems may improve upon instant runoff voting, but added complexity could limit their appeal.

This view on Colorado politics was originally printed in the Daily Camera (Boulder) on August 14 2010.

More resources on how the Democrats and Republicans shut out competition from third-party candidates:

• Book:  Not Invited to the Party: How the Demopublicans Have Rigged the System and Left Independents Out in the Cold, by James T. Bennett.
• The Cato Institute had an event on this last year. Watch or listen to it. Here’s a summary from the Cato site:

Free markets have few barriers to entry. Individuals and firms can offer new products or services to consumers, thereby fostering competition and choice. American elections, in contrast, are dominated by two parties. Not Invited to the Party synthesizes political science, economics, and history to demonstrate how the two-party system is the artificial creation of a network of laws, restrictions, and subsidies that favor the Democrats and Republicans and cripple potential challengers, depriving voters of truly vigorous political debate. Consequently, Americans are deprived of choices on election day and arguably, deprived of effective and accurate representation in Congress and the presidency.

City of Boulder should consider outsourcing, privatizing services

Background from the Daily Camera:

Boulder City Manager Jane Brautigam has been working this year to move to a “priority-based” budget, in which the things most important to the community are first in line for funding.

My response, published in the Camera:

The Boulder City Council should consider saving money the way private organizations often do: by outsourcing some of its operations to private firms. For-profit and non-profit firms that compete for government contracts have incentive to provide low-cost quality services. A firm won’t get a contract if its bid is too high, and its contract won’t be renewed if it does a lousy job. Typical savings from privatization are between five and twenty percent, reports the Reason Foundation.

The towns of Roswell and Sandy Springs, Georgia each have around 90,000 residents. But Sandy Springs’ annual budget is around $300 less per person. Why? Sandy Springs has outsourced many of its services to private-sector firms. Unlike surrounding cities with budget deficits, Sandy Springs has a surplus.

Outsourcing some Public Works services could be worthwhile. Consider Centennial, CO. In 2008 Centennial signed a five-year agreement with a private firm to “manage all public works functions for the city.” This includes “traffic engineering and operations, permit processing, inspections, administrative services, and street and roadside maintenance, including snow removal.”

Also examine Parks and Recreation. Consider outsourcing their operation to private firms.  Such privatization efforts have yielded 20% cost-savings. Or better yet, could the City raise money by leasing its facilities – rec centers, fields, pools, and golf course – to private organizations to manage them?

Or how about increasing user fees for Parks and Recreation programs? Don’t some programs compete with private firms, and make taxpayers subsidize other people’s leisure activities? This is both costly and unfair.

This was originally printed in the Daily Camera on July 31.

A couple of Daily Camera articles about this:

• Boulder’s low priorities for 2011 budget include SWAT team, EMT training
• Boulder city manager defends ranking public services

And the Priority Based Budget Memo dated July 27 by the City Manager and others. This includes one method by which they would prioritize city services.

End Boulder’s unnatural monopoly in electricity & natural gas service

Governments should not grant monopolies, but the Boulder City Council would by renewing Xcel’s franchise. Xcel would remain “the community’s sole provider for electrical and natural gas service,” says the City’s website. Xcel should do business without government protection from competition.  Competitors should be free to contract with land owners to run wire and gas lines, and sell their products to interested customers.

Some advocate another form of unnatural monopoly -  municipalization -  where government owns the electric utility. Supporters claim that “munis” have lower prices than franchised investor-owned utilities like Xcel. But this presents a false alternative between two types of government-created monopolies. Government should stick to its proper role: enforcing laws that protect individual rights. Here, this means repealing political controls that inhibit free-markets in electrical and natural gas service.

Others advocate “community choice aggregation.” This sounds like mandatory open access, which Texas has — Google “Texas  electricity shopping.” Mandatory open access involves forced competition that violates grid owners’ property rights: grid owners must sell grid access to competing power producers at contrived prices.

Maybe government-enforced competition is preferable to a government-enforced monopoly. But why settle for this?  Electricity is more a government-created monopoly than a “natural” one. Though state and federal controls inhibit competition, utilities compete for customers in about 10 U.S. towns. Such competition was more common before governments imposed regulations on them, as documented in “Electric Avenues,” published by the Cato Institute. Since the electric utilities themselves lobbied for these regulations, ask yourself who has benefited.

This was originally printed in the Boulder Daily Camera on July 17 2010.

More references on free-markets in electricity generation and distribution:

• Give Consumers Choice on Utilities, Vernon Smith and Lynne Kiesling at Reason.org.
• “Electricity Policy,” Chapter 44, Cato Handbook on Policy, 6th Edition, (2005).
• Clyde Wayne Crews, “Electric utility reform: The free market alternative to mandatory open access”, The Electricity Journal, Volume 10, Issue 10, December 1997, p. 32-43 [pdf][html at CEI.org]
• Electric Choices, Deregulation and the Future of Electric Power, Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. (associated with the Independent Institute.)
• Raymond C. Niles, Property Rights and the Crisis of the Electric Grid, The Objective Standard, Summer 2008.

Image via OpenClipArt.

CU campus concealed-carry & right to self-defense

Banning seat belts in cars would be immoral. Banning guns deserves equal condemnation.  Self-defense is a fundamental human right – not granted by governments, but recognized by just law. Gun bans deny peaceful people an effective means of self-defense against violent criminals, who ignore gun bans. Just as someone who disables seat belts shares responsibility for the resulting traffic fatalities, gun ban supporters are partially responsible for victims of violent crimes.

The issue at CU is whether people with concealed-carry handgun permits can be armed on campus.  Armed with baseless prejudice against permit holders, supporters of campus gun bans imagine hypothetical horrors that might result from allowing it. But none of these have occurred on campuses, like CSU, that have allowed concealed-carry. Actual horrors — mass school shootings — have occurred only on so-called “gun-free” campuses.

Violent criminals seek unarmed victims, as Dave Kopel documents in his law review article, “Pretend ‘Gun-free’ School Zones: A Deadly Legal Fiction.” A “gun free” campus invites rapists and murderers: “Commit your crimes here – your victims won’t shoot you!”

“Dial 911 and die,” warns Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. Police typically cannot respond in time to stop shootings, and have no legal obligation to protect us. Students owe their lives to heroic civilians such as Joel Myrick, Mikael Gross, and Tracey Bridges, who stopped school shootings with guns they retrieved from their cars.

Gun bans disarm such potential heroes and invite rapists, gay-bashers, and murderers to prey on defenseless victims.

The above was printed in the July 3 Daily Camera (Boulder, CO).

Other gun control resources:

• GunCite
• Is there a right to own a gun?, by Mike Huemer
• Dave Kopel
• ConcealedCampus.org’s rebuttal of common arguments against concealed-carry on campus

(Graphic courtesy of Oleg Volk and A-Human-Right.com.)

To lower college costs, eliminate tax-funded tuition subsidies

Last week Governor Ritter signed a bill that allows Colorado’s tax-funded universities to raise their tuition.  In response, “some Colorado students will see increased financial aid to offset the higher tuition, ” InDenverTimes reports.

Surely some parents are rightly concerned with fast-rising tuition costs.  But Capping college tuition would either degrade a school’s quality or reduce scholarships students receive. For lower tuition prices, eliminate tax-funded tuition subsidies and financial aid. Employers and prospective students would benefit.

Government-subsidized student loans and grants increase tuition prices. When government subsidizes the cost of education, students pay less, so more people want to buy what colleges sell. Colleges respond by increasing tuition and fees. This isn’t just theory.  Economist Gary Wolfram’s research documents empirical evidence that backs it up.

College subsidies hurt both students and employers. College isn’t for everyone, but tuition subsidies create the illusion that it is. As career counselor Marty Nemko summarizes, “College students with weak high school records usually drop out, having learned little, and with devastated self-esteem, a mountain of debt, and a job they could have obtained without college.” Employers hurt because these students could have spent their college years gaining valuable skills through, for example, an apprenticeship program or on-the-job training.

Absent harmful tax-funded college subsidies, private alternatives would replace them. These would include the familiar student loans and scholarships. An intriguing alternative would be “human capital contracts,” where in exchange for investors’ paying their college expenses, students repay them a percentage of their future earnings over a specified time.

Whatever the alternatives, it’s immoral for politicians to confiscate our earnings to distort the labor market and meddle in people’s lives. Young adults have the right to pursue their dreams and careers according to their own judgment, rather than the schemes of politicians.

A version of this article was published on-line in the Daily Camera on June 12, 2010.

Do today’s college students lack empathy?

Psychologists at the University of Michigan presented research on college students’ capacity to feel empathy over the past thirty years. It’s gotten significant amount of press coverage, e.g., for example,  in the USA Today, and PhysOrg, just to name two.  Ross Douhat has a good post on the subject at his New York Times blog. The Daily Camera (Boulder, CO) also covered the story, and the Camera’s editorial advisory board weighed in on the subject.  Here’s my contribution, as printed in the June 5 edition:

Hold on. Before making broad statements about today’s college students and what erodes empathy, it’s important make sure there’s supporting evidence.

The study, summarized at Professor Sara Konrath’s website, focuses on how students answered surveys designed to measure factors associated with empathy. Over thirty years, scores on the two factors best associated with empathic behavior have declined.

Surveys are one way to measure empathy. But are survey results consistent with other methods, such as peer ratings, cleverly designed behavioral tests, and measures of mirror neuron activity? Outside the lab, students volunteer for or donate to charitable causes. Has this decreased over the years?

For sake of argument, say the various methods tell the same story, that today’s students are less empathic. Many factors can be involved. These may include trends in parenting styles, prevalence of single-parent households, and how many siblings the students have. The students’ majors may also be a factor. To stereotype myself, what if recent empathy studies attracted mostly physicists and engineers? If these are relevant factors, have they changed among students surveyed over the past thirty years?

Yes, time spent on-line or playing violent video games are reasonable suspects. Surely the surveys can gather such information about the students, if don’t already.  Are these and other factors correlated with how the students scored empathy-wise?

But don’t forget, correlation does not mean causation.  A student’s capacity for empathy may predict whether he buys Guitar Hero or Grand Theft Auto.

Thanks to my wife, a psychologist, for her insights and for pointing out an flawed argument in an early draft.

Regarding college students’ rates of volunteering over the past 30 years, I realize that this probably is not a measure of empathy, as psychologists use the term these days. After all, people can volunteer for causes for many reasons. Still, such trends would be interesting to know in light of such research

Arizona immigration law: enforcing unjust laws are unjust

U.S. immigration policies are unjust, and Arizona’s attempt to enforce these policies perpetuates the injustice.  Immigration restrictions prevent peaceful and ambitious individuals and families from seeking a better life. Restrictions violate the rights of employers to hire who they please, whether they are from Colorado, India, or Mexico.

“The fundamental problem with America’s immigration system is that it forces Americans to justify to their government why they want to bring someone into the country, instead of requiring the government to justify to them why they can’t,” notes Forbes columnist Shikha Dalmia.

Legal immigration can take many years. For a cartoon depiction of this labyrinthine process, search on-line for “America’s Absurd Immigration Waiting Line.”

Local job-seekers cannot rightfully claim “first dibs” on job opportunities. Hiring the best person for the job should not be a crime, but immigration restrictions can make it so.  A temporary worker program would remedy this and other problems.  “A regulated channel for temporary workers would dramatically reduce the pressure on our borders, aid our economy and ease the task of our law enforcement agents inside the country,” testified former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. “There is an inextricable link between … a temporary worker program and better enforcement at the border.”

Some decry amnesty for illegal immigrants as undermining “law and order.” But valid moral principles trump unjust laws.  If it’s moral to apprehend illegal immigrants to maintain “law and order” was it moral in 1850 for authorities to apprehend escaped slaves under the Fugitive Slave Law?

The Daily Camera (Boulder, CO) printed a version of the above on May 22, 2010.

Here’s the cartoon depiction of America’s Absurd Immigration Waiting Line:

Boulder “SmartRegs” a dumb idea

The Daily Camera reports:

Thousands of landlords who rent out homes in Boulder will be forced to invest a combined millions of dollars in upgrades — costs that could be passed on through higher rent — if the city approves new energy-efficiency standards.

On Thursday, the Boulder Planning Board will take up “SmartRegs,” a proposed point-based system designed to get rental properties — which make up about half of the city’s housing stock — to reduce their carbon footprint.

Read the rest of the article. The Camera published my comments on this in the April 24 edition:

“SmartRegs” is corporate welfare to finance a wasteful solution to a problem with debatable significance and causes.

“What happened to global warming?” asked a BBC headline last year. “One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over,” the article concluded.

Warming aside, there are still problems to address. In “Breaking the Global Warming Gridlock,” CU Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. explains that instead of endlessly debating the science, “practical steps to reduce our vulnerability to today’s weather … would go a long way toward solving the problem of tomorrow’s climate.”

The most ethical step is to promote prosperity though economic liberty and free markets. Wealthy populations are less vulnerable to climate-related threats than poor ones.  As economist Indur Goklany observes, more people will die from hunger, unsafe drinking water, and malaria because of poverty than global warming.  In terms of human well-being, it’s better to be wealthier in a slightly warmer climate than poorer in a cooler one.

If you support actions to mitigate climate change, mandatory emissions reductions is not the best method. “Freakonomics” author Steven Levitt prefers geoengineering solutions. Unlike emission reductions, they take immediate effect. They are also reversible, and the cost is “literally thousands of times cheaper” than reducing carbon emissions, says Levitt.

Solutions promoting innovation and wealth probably offend religious strains of environmentalism as sinful hubris. After all, it celebrates human accomplishment rather than promoting self-denial, guilt for driving, and subservience to Gaia and big government.

Some useful references I either used or did not have room to mention given the word limit:

Colorado HB 1365: bad gas for Coloradans

How much would you pay for cleaner air?  Surely this depends on its current state, the proposed improvement, and if you could tell the difference. The EPA wants you to pay for cleaner air by mandating pollution limits on power plants. Colorado HB 1365 would legislate how electric utilities do it. Xcel Energy supports the bill, and estimates a 4-6 percent increase in utility bills, writes Vince Carroll in the Denver Post.

Since Coloradans have varying preferences for air quality and how much they’d pay to improve it, legislating a one-size-fits-all solution is not the best policy. As summarized in the book Free Market Environmentalism, courts heard common law nuisance cases concerning air pollution for years before the Clean Air Act. Polluters would compensate plaintiffs for demonstrated damages. Threats of costly lawsuits would encourage companies to reduce emissions.

If governments must legislate pollutants levels, they should let polluters find the most cost-effective ways to meet requirements. Otherwise, politicians will dictate political solutions that benefit their careers and favored lobbies at taxpayers’ expense.

House Bill 1365 smells like a political solution. It would require electric utilities using coal-fired power plants to submit “emission reduction plans.” The plan must give “primary consideration to replacing or repowering coal-fired electric generators with natural gas and to also consider other low-emitting resources.”

Indeed, politicians have subsidized the coal industry. But this does not justify subsidies or favors for their competitors. Instead, removing existing subsidies and let energy producers compete on their own merits.

This commentary was published in the Daily Camera (Boulder) on April 10, 2010.

The link to the Free Market Environmentalism book is to Google Books.  Most of the chapters are there, but the one on pollution , Chapter 10, is not.  Relevant references in the chapter include: Bruce Yandle, Bootleggers, Baptists, and Global Warming.  Check out his author page at the Property and Environment Research Center for more articles on common law and environmental issues. Also check out Indur Goklany’s work on air pollution and the Clean Air Act.