RedStateEclectic

Pot(ty) - Or (K)Not(ty)?

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Reports Hit & Run:

Today Nebraska and Oklahoma sued Colorado, arguing that marijuana legalization there is having spillover effects on neighboring states and should be reversed because it violates federal law. The two states are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to declare that Amendment 64, the legalization measure that Colorado voters approved in 2012, is "unconstitutional and unenforceable under the Supremacy Clause" because it conflicts with the Controlled Substances Act.

The source.

Make sure to look at background information, especially on the Supremacy Clause, in this article entitled Nebraska and Oklahoma Sue Colorado.

And The Washington Times reports here.

Transparency and the Art of Faking - Change We Can Believe In?

The art of faking - the above drawing is actually two-dimensional. Image credit.

Remember Obama campaigning based on the promise of a decisive turn towards transparency? He was right to champion transparency - but did he and his entourage mean it?

Writes Jim Harper of the CATO Institute:

The benefits of transparency are hard to explain. Bit by bit, we’re improving public oversight of government, I’ve been heard to say, implying more libertarian-friendly outcomes—never quite sure that I’m getting my message through.

Now comes a comment on transparency that articulates its importance better than I ever could. It’s Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber describing how lacking transparency allowed the president’s signature health care regulation to pass.

The source.

 

"This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO [Congressional Budget Office] scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that.  In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed… Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass....Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not."

The source.

Adds the Coyote:

By the way, Jonathon Gruber was the one in 2012 who said over and over that the limitation of subsidies to state-run exchanges was not a drafting error, but was an intentional feature meant to give incentives to states to create exchanges.  Now that it is clear that incentive did not do its job, and a case is in front of the Supreme Court attempting to enforce the plain language of the law, Gruber is now saying that he mispoke (over and over again) in 2012 and it was a typo.  Given the fact that he has now admitted he would gladly lie (and has) to the public to defend Obamacare, how much should we believe his current claims?

The source.

Looked upon from a different angle: What's up with GruberGate?

See also here, and Administrative Creep, Sue and Settle, but also Regulation - Good, Moot, and Malign, and Bureaucracy and Other Half-Truths.

Laura Ebke - News from the Campaign's Home Stretch

I am proud to be associated with Laura Ebke, a caring person of impeccable integrity and genuine humanity.

In so far as some people will not have the chance to learn the truth of the matter, it is, for someone who knows Laura as a conscientiously fair and honest person, both saddening and infuriating to see her, of all people, become the target of a "hit piece" of political defaming (see below P.S.).

But then, in the end, I am convinced that Laura's natural integrity will be her best advertisement among those that meet her during the campaign and those who know her anyway, as well as reaching many more on-line and by word of mouth.

Laura is a wonderfully balanced person of warmth, responsibility and circumspection, ideally suited to represent her fellow Nebraskans in the Legislature.

Just take a glimpse at Laura's facebook presence to see what I mean.

P.S.

Yesterday, my mother-in-law received a "hit piece"--paid for by the Nebraska Democratic Party--suggesting that "Laura Ebke: TOO Extreme for Women"--and that I was saying NO Health care that Nebraska Women deserve--like Mammograms, coverage of pre-existing conditions, and affordable access to contraception.

They refer the Campaign for Liberty Legislative survey, found here:http://www.campaignforliberty.org/surveys2/?id=59. My opponent didn't bother to answer it--nor did a lot of other candidates. I'm sure that this refers to the question about opposing Obamacare.

As the wife of a physician--and a woman--it's laughable to suggest that I am *against* any of those things. I just happen to believe that Obamacare doesn't fix the problem of access.

See also Vote Tuesday, Nov. 4th - Laura Ebke.

The Most Tolerable Imperfections - A Classical Liberal Interpretation of the Constitution

The study of human institutions is always a search for the most tolerable imperfections.

Richard A. Epstein

 

 

The Classical Liberal Constitution (1/2), The Case for Classical Liberalism, Classical Liberal vs.Libertarian vs. Anarcho-Capitalist, Cheese and Liberty.

Related articles

The Classical Liberal Constitution (2/2)

A Brief Course in Constitutional Law

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All in a nutshell, 30 minutes of constitutional law, covering many topics dealt with by Timothy M. Sandefur in his The Conscience of the Constitution.

 

Related articles

The Conscience of the Constitution

Milk Is Good for You

It is a mystery to me how one should be able to make any money at all with the product discussed in the below clip -- it just tastes awful. By contrast, milk is one of my favourite drinks. Also, the best energy drink I know is mate tea. Or a drop of vodka. But only a drop.

Mind you, Austria can be a funny place: you arrive at your ski resort, happy to take a breather, on the drinks menu you are being offered a fancy sounding drink which consists of whiskey and Red Bull. You order the oddity and are promptly served a glass of whiskey and a can of the energy drink. So you open the can and pour it into the whiskey. When you get to sip the drink and dreamily study the inscription on the can, you learn that it is illegal to mix the energy drink with alcohol. Which is oddly constricting, as the drink is only drinkable when heavily diluted with whiskey. In the meantime, you are left to reason - since it is me who has committed the mixing act, I suppose, the restaurant proprietor is off the hook, and full legal responsibility rests with the hapless foreigner.

I could talk for hours on the masochism of being a German spending a holiday in Austria.

As for the below opinion, while I regret the language used in certain passages and doubt the gentleman's economic literacy, I am impressed with the show of character and share with him a robust dislike of the beverage.

 

The Environmental Wisdom of Your Wallet - Locavores Get It Wrong

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Liberty is a great method to further and lift to success the wisdom that is randomly available among humankind, and a means to reduce to a minimum the society-wide contagion of the errors to which we all are so prone.

High-yield agriculture and long-distance trade have long delivered a similar outcome—more abundant and affordable food with reduced environmental impact—on a global scale…. So prepare your meal from the most affordable food you can find to do both your wallet and the planet a favor.

As the Marxist theorist Karl Kautsky observed in 1899 in his classic On the Agrarian Question,

As long as any rural economy is self-sufficient it has to produce everything which it needs, irrespective of whether the soil is suitable or not. Grain has to be cultivated on infertile, stony and steeply sloping ground as well as on rich soils.

In time though, the development of better production areas such as the Canadian Prairies removed the need to keep producing grain on poorer soils, “and where circumstances were favorable it was taken off the land and replaced by other types of agricultural production” such as orchards, beef cattle, and dairy cows. Exporting food items from production locations where water was abundant to consumers living in regions where it wasn’t similarly removed the need to drain surface waters and aquifers in many drier parts of the world. [...]

Unfortunately, in our carbon emissions-obsessed era, local food activists (or locavores) have embraced the notion of “food miles,” or the distance food items travel from farms to consumers, as the be all and end all of the environmental impact of agricultural production. As has been repeatedly and rigorously documented in numerous life cycle assessment (LCA) studies, however, the distance traveled by food is a worthless indicator of sustainable development.

Among other issues, producing food typically requires (much) more energy than moving it around, especially when significant amounts of heating and/or cold-protection technologies, irrigation water, fertilizers, pesticides, and other inputs are required to grow things in one region, but not in another. Reducing food miles typically means a greater environmental footprint given the use of additional resources in less desirable locations.

Another issue is that the distance travelled by food matters less than the mode of transportation. For instance, shipping food halfway around the world on a container ship often has a smaller footprint per item carried than a short trip by car to a grocery store to buy a small quantity of these items. [...]

Advances in transportation and conservation technologies have also historically increased the importation of perishable food items produced at different latitudes and decreased local food production and storage, in the process delivering greater freshness, lower costs, and reduced energy consumption.

Importing New Zealand apples in the northern hemisphere in April rather than preserving local apples picked in September in cold storage for several months, for example, has advantages. Not only is freshness improved, spoilage is reduced. And storage costs, mainly the need to maintain higher than normal CO2 concentrations, lower than ambient temperatures to inhibit spoilage, or higher than ambient temperatures to prevent freezing, are avoided.

Conclusion

While agricultural markets are not perfect, due to numerous subsidies and barriers to trade, market prices factor in the environmental impact of food production by including the additional costs from less desirable production locals.

The source

See also Iowa-Grown Toyotas.

The "Precautionary" Principle

Acting precautiously is not the same as ensuring risklessness. Put differently, precaution depends on a sense of proportion, a sensible trade-off between cost and remaining risk. In political debate one often hears of the "precautionary principle", but rarely is the reference accompanied by a clear and sensible account of the cost-benefit relations attending the "precaution" in question. Often one ends up with a lot of pre(-payment) and little caution in the way of what one is paying for.

Of course, calls for unspecified or all-out "precaution" are an indispensable part of the statist's toolbox.

Next time you hear of the "precautionary principle" or "Earth day" remember what Edward Calabrese has to say below:

The first Earth Day, in 1970, was celebrated after a wave of environmentalism swept the nation. Many give credit to Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, which popularized the notion of large-scale chemical pollution, for igniting the movement.

But she was really feeding off of a concept developed a few years earlier. The “precautionary principle” was conceptualized when the National Academy of Sciences proposed a radical change in the risk assessment of exposure to radiation and carcinogens. It recommended changing the regulatory paradigm from a “threshold dose” model to a linear one.

The threshold paradigm was what one might call common sense. It held that humans could tolerate small doses of things that, in larger doses, could be harmful.

Sunlight is a perfect example. Low doses are actually required for survival, as ultraviolet radiation — the same general type that causes sunburn — catalyzes the formation of Vitamin D. But, as is obvious to anyone who lives in a sun-drenched area, excessive exposure can lead to death in the near term (from dehydration) or the longer term (from skin cancer).

The “linear model” assumes that just a single molecule of a carcinogen or a single ionization from an X-ray can induce cancer. The enthusiasm spawned by Earth Day soon gave us brand new regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The EPA routinely applies the linear model to carcinogens.

“Environmental regulations based on the “linear model” are having a negative impact, not only on societal costs, but on our health as well.”

The linear model is a case study in the unintended consequences of the desire to do good. In this case, an ideologically driven scientist, Nobel Prize laureate Herman Muller, whose research formed the basis for EPA’s model, led the charge. A very powerful figure in health physics, he is now known to have marginalized and obstructed the publication of any research that provided evidence counter to the linear model.

If that sounds like the way senior climate scientists were found to behave in the famous 2009 “Climate-gate” emails, it should.

The regulatory agencies fell in line, as did a compliant scientific community and a media that was afraid to dig deeper. Every country followed the U.S.’ lead.

The linear model is rigid, absolute and wrong. We now know that there are so many flaws or holes in the linear dose response model that it looks more like Swiss cheese. The resulting environmental regulations are having a negative impact, not only on societal costs, but on our health as well.

The source.

See alo Hormesis versus Leviathan.

Let Them Eat Cake

Quite in keeping with his community organising superior knowledge, the president offers advice on how people ought to conduct themselves instead of inflicting stupid problems on themselves.

Here's a rant of a reply from the quarters of the unwashed that I have redacted for the expletives:

Marie Antoinette would have blushed in shame:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56xE-sogSTM (the video won't embed for some reason).

 

Blame Texas, because the solution to your wonderful, amazing new law pricing people out of being able to afford health insurance is obviously to take what were previously self-supporting citizens and put them on the dole? 

 

If I were the man to whom Marie up there was talking to, my response to his passing of the buck to the State of Texas would be “I don’t want to BE on the dole!  I was paying my own way – I was HAPPILY paying my own way – until you came along and fXXXXXX my chances of being able to do so all to hell with your misnamed “affordable” healthcare act, and now your solution to having destroyed my ability to pay my own way and be a net contributor to our society is to put me on the dole?  To strip me of my dignity and make me a parasite?  THAT is your grand solution, you fXXXXXXX self-worshipping neophyte!?”

 

Then, of all things, suggest that the man cancel his telephone service so that he might be able to afford your new, improved, insanely expensive healthcare plans?  If that isn’t the “let them eat cake” moment of the 21^st century, I don’t know what is.  Good [...] lord, man, I am absolutely at a loss.  How did this man even learn how to potty train, much less manage to elevate himself to the most powerful position in the free world? 

 

As if it is Marie’s place, or any person in the government’s place to dictate priorities in bill payment to private citizens – to have health insurance or to be able to communicate with people (possibly a pre-requisite for the man’s job, to begin with).  

 

This man is absolutely convinced that he has life figured out for everyone else; that no one's life deviates from his narrow views of what life should be one iota.  No wonder socialism always fails - you get men like this in charge, who have these myopic, one size fits all views about life, and can't for the life of him figure out why anyone would want to live a life different from the one he proscribes.   

The source.

The original quote from Rousseau - and more on its story:

Finally I recalled the stopgap solution of a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: "Let them eat brioche."

Taking the Constitution Seriously

Taking the Constitution seriously is not a trivial exercise. Randy Barnett is one of the best sources for insight and orientation concerning fundamental issues of US law and the constitution.

Apart from the constitutionality of Obamacare, Randy Barnett covers a whole range of interesting issues in the below interview. Of particular note I find his contention toward the end of the video that the abolitionists were the precursors of modern libertarians.

See also The Classical Conception of Natural Law.