The Exercise of Vital Powers

Apparently Governor Perdue doesn’t have an economist on staff. He’s frozen gas prices in the Metro area and now guaranteed we will have shortages.

On my drive home from work I saw two gas stations closed.

Good work. Next time do us all a favor and do nothing.

http://www.ajc.com/news/content/business/0805/31bizgasprices.html

Metro Atlanta drivers are facing the possibility of paying considerably more than $3 a gallon for gas by Labor Day — if they can get it at all.

The two pipelines that bring gasoline and jet fuel to the region are down — powerless to pump as Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on electrical infrastructure.

The metro Atlanta region generally has about a 10-day supply of gasoline in inventory, said BP spokesman Michael Kumpf. The pipelines have been down for two days.

Bad news for all those idiots who bought the SUVs. $3/gal isn’t going to affect my driving habits much. I’ll still drive rather than fly most places within 8 hrs of here. I’m not going to stop going out to eat or to the store. I’m not going to stop driving to work.

Of course if 1970s gas shortages develop, I’ll stop doing all of that. The one thing I will not do is wait 4 hours in line to fill up.

The issue of sustained Gas prices has be mildly concerned for other reasons. One is a panic in the stock market leading to job shortages in the high tech sector.

The other is the pin prick causing the housing bubble to burst. I figure on maybe a 10-15% drop in metro Atlanta home prices. California, New York and Northern VA could see as much as 50-60%. That will lead to many more foreclosures, lending institutional failures and more regulation of the lending industry by Washington. The end result of that will be that is will be much harder for people to buy their first home, and near impossible to buy a second investment property. All bad news for me.

Lost in the news about Katrina was the passing of Jude Wanniski, the originator of Supply Side Economics, and economic adviser to President Reagan.

TCS was the first to eulogize him here

James Glassman of the American Enterprise Institute writes:

One of the reasons I was drawn to Wanniski was his faith in the innate intelligence of average citizens, both American and otherwise. Here too, he was ahead of his time. The left wing, which has turned more and more elitist, now rejects ideas like Social Security personal accounts because, it believes, most people won’t be able to invest reasonably.

Misdirection is the magician’s practice where by they distract the audience with a flourish, while at the same time putting the proverbial rabbit into the hat. I sometimes think this is exactly what is going on in Washington with the debate over many social issues, Gay Marriage^TM being the one in vogue at the moment.

Cato’s Ed Crane seems to concur:

The silver lining to the bad decisions they’ve [The Supreme Court] been handing down is that they may be a wake-up call for those of use who believe in limited government to realize that the debate over judicial philosophy has to transcend Roe v. Wade. It is wrong that the litmus test for a new Supreme Court justice is his or her position on abortion. The religious right has more or less hijacked the debate over judicial philosophy, and I’m not so certain that the left doesn’t feel comfortable debating Roe v. Wade and avoiding the more important issues, like federalism and private property.
…..
I think one of the interesting things about these cases is that the so called liberal bloc on the Supreme Court was unanimous in decisions that clearly harm the little guy at the expense of the powerful. … Liberals in this day and age are more interested in enhancing the power of the state than they are in protecting the rights of individuals. Of course, far too many conservatives.. feel the same way.

Last weekend was a flurry of finishing books I’ve started but never finished.

It’s My Party, Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America

by Christine Todd Whitman

Not a bad book. She definitely takes the social conservatives to task. I take her for being someone who truly cares about conservation (I hate using the term environmentalist). Its mostly an autobiography, her time growing up in the GOP, her run for state legislature, then senate and eventually Governor of NJ. She was W’s first EPA secretary. Her experience there wasn’t pleasant, and she was less than thrilled with Cheney and the GOP Congressional leadership.

Kremlin Rising : Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution

by Peter Baker, Susan Glasser.

Two Washington Post foreign corespondents describe life under Yeltsin and Putin. You can tell they have an anti-Bush bias, but since the story is mostly about Putin it is tolerable. The authors have the typical American “democracy is grrreat!” attitude, and it colors their writing. Still it is a good, detailed story of what has been going on in Russia the past 5 years and worth a read.

Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government

by P. J. O’Rourke

Dated but still funny. Written under the first George Bush, it lampoons idiots in Congress, the President, K-Street and the media. P. J. O’Rourke rocks!

Next up on the reading queue:

• The FairTax Book by Neal Boortz and John Linder
• The Meaning of IS by Bob Barr.

I need to fit some fiction in sometime.

Writing in the WSJ, law prof Richard Epstein takes the jury to task in the Merck Vioxx civil trial. (The jury awarded the plaintiff’s widow $250 million in “pain and suffering” - Texas law caps that to $25 million.)

Commenting on the effect the verdict will have on other future drugs he said:

Your implicit verdict is to shut down the entire quest for new medical therapies. Your verdict says you think that the American public is really better off with just hot-water bottles and leftover aspirin tablets.

http://www.pointoflaw.com/columns/archives/001482.php

Who Killed Paypal?

Wait you ask, isn’t Paypal the largest online payment processor, with 73 million users.

Well, yes. But that was not the intention of PayPal’s founders.

Read Radley Balko’s excellent review (link) of The PayPal Wars and read the story of entrenched banking competitors, power hungry bureaucrats, and one giant e-commerce site.

Via Reason Hit and Run:

On Fox News Aug. 7, John Loftus, a former federal prosecutor, gave out the La Habra, California, home address of Iyad Hilal, who he said was the leader of a terrorist group with ties to the London bombings. He later repeated the La-Habra-is-harboring-a-terrorist line on popular local talk radio KFI.

Outraged Southern Californians drove by the house, taking surveillance pictures, yelling profanities, and spray-painting the word “Terrist.” But the vigilant citizens didn’t know one relevant detail — Iyad hasn’t lived at that address for at least three years.

“I’m scared to go to work and leave my kids home. I call them every 30 minutes to make sure they’re OK,” [house resident] Randy Vorick said.

“I keep telling myself this can’t be happening to me. This can’t be happening to my family. But it is. I want our lives to be normal again.”

If our justice system worked, The Vorick children’s college will now be paid for by Mr. Loftus’s assets, while Mr. Loftus spends time in prison. Alas, I don’t suspect that will happen. Either way, that is entirely inappropriate behavior for a federal prosecutor - and Fox News.

Of course the reactions of the people in SoCal who are harassing the Vorick’s is just as contemptible. I’m not willing to give Bin Laden the credit for knowing this would be the outcome of 9/11, but the damage from his attack extends well beyond lower Manhattan and Arlington - and the real tragedy it that is is mostly self inflicted.

In what seems like a counterpoint to all the talk about a liberally biased MSM, ABC News 7 in SF/Oakland ran a story on who is funding Cindy Sheehan’s summer camp in Crawford.

It is about what you would expect. A grieving mother wants [ to ask the President why her son had to die | to get a little attention to help deal with grief ] and the story gets picked up by a few news outlets. Then a few more. Then the big money political vultures swoop down and turn the whole thing into a media circus.

And to prove that Newton’s third law hold true for politics, Bush supporters and pushing a “Cindy you don’t speak for me tour”.

As someone who had a family member serving in Iraq (and who may return) I can’t honestly say how I’d deal with his death. Do you grieve privately, or do you use the loss God has given you to do what you already think is right. And if you do the latter, does that make you a Media Whore like Cindy Sheehan and Lisa Beamer?

http://www.rezendi.com/travels/bbbb.html

Ryan Lackey was the guy who moved onto an abandoned gun platform in the English Channel to setup a datahaven outside of any national jurisdiction. That business failed with the dot com bust. Now he is in Iraq doing satellite hook-ups for the US Military, contractors and other western interests.

The article gives an excellent view into a westerner’s life in Iraq and the problems Iraq is facing. Its a long read, but its worth it.

This is real-life Cryptonomicon.