Are teachers professionals or auto workers?

Last night I saw a great talk by Geoffrey Canada, who is an educator who has spent his career trying to change the culture in Harlem to one where education is valued and where kids realize they have opportunities beyond the streets. It was a good talk, with something of a church revival feel (lots of people in the audience obviously were already true believers).

He had a few choice things to say about teachers, though. First was the obligatory point that if we want success in education, we need to treat them like the professionals that they are, and that it's hard to attract talented professionals if you don't pay them like professionals.

But then he made a number of points that I suspect would make many teachers - particularly unionized teachers - uncomfortable. For example, that they need to work really hard (i.e., he makes no apologies for the fact that his schools run from labor day to the first week in August). Or that they need to be open to change, to experimentation, to measurement. He decried how difficult it is to make change, and called out the unions as one (but by no means the only) source of this resistance.

It got me thinking: teachers need to make a decision. Are they professionals or are they blue-collar workers? While there are certainly some professional unions, most of them - and in particular the ones which tend to impose the most innovation-resisting work rules - tend to be the domain of the blue-collar space.

If they want to be treated as professionals, who must live and die by their merits, then perhaps unionized teachers should think about how to act like professionals.

A good definition of "independents"

Or at least I think this Newsweek article about Obama's relationship with independents defines them in a way that describes my attitudes pretty well:

They yearn for "good government"—government that is open, fair, efficient, free of special interests' domination, and nonpartisan or bipartisan in spirit. They find no glory in ideological combat; they see it as destructive. They search for leaders who exhibit a sense of good will. They tend to fret about deficits and debt, but not in a reflexively antigovernmental way. They are not against social programs, but want them administered with old-school thrift. They are not "centrists" in the sense that they exist in some mathematical middle ground between "left" and "right." Nor are they necessarily angry "populists," eternally resenting and distrusting anyone with any power. They are outsiders who wish Washington were a better place

Brown victory in Massachusetts

So Massachusetts elected a conservative Republican to succeed Ted Kennedy. I'm not a fan of many of his positions. For example, I do not support waterboarding (I think it undermines our values and is not terribly useful), I support some form of cap-and-trade, and I think our health care system is flawed (although I don't claim to know enough to accurately judge whether the Democrats' proposed overhaul would make things better or worse).

But I'm actually happy that he won. Why? Because regardless of how I feel about his individual positions, I am a fan of competition. Having one party which is able to exert its will unchecked seems to me to be far more dangerous than any particular particular issue going some way that I don't like. Competition is good in the marketplace, and it's good in government because it reins in the worst excesses of either side. Compromises in legislation and policy are ugly sausage making, but nevertheless it's necessary to get any sausage at all, much less sausage that is edible.

Punishing banks

Today the Obama administration is proposing hefty new taxes on large banks, including ones that never took TARP money or have paid it back.

This has "bad idea" written all over it. It is nakedly vindictive and punishing people and companies for the sin of bad business practices. (And where the greater sin of actual fraud took place, tax policy in place of judicial action simply makes no sense, especially since it punishes the honest as well as the guilty.)

I don't mean to diminish the emotional appeal of the proposal. All taxpayers are (or should be) justifiably angry that they had to bail out the industry, and it is absolutely unseemly to see those very banks handing out huge bonuses to their executives. Alas, emotion and smart policy are rarely connected, and today's proposal from Obama is populist pandering at its worst.

But if we calm down for a moment and look at the situation, we see that we had banks that were teetering on the brink. We held our noses and gave them billions of dollars with the express goal of stabilizing them so that they could live another day to make another loan. They did, and in fact have been making profits (which is precisely the key ingredient to the very stability we wanted) and those banks that have been making profits have been paying back the TARP money. Wasn't that precisely our best-case scenario?

In the case of one of the banks most vilified for bonuses, Goldman Sachs, they paid it back in full (and my understanding is that they never wanted the money in the first place). In other words, they did exactly what we asked them to do, more quickly than we expected, and now we want to punish them for it?

There are many good reasons for reforming the financial industry. In particular, we need to ensure that no company is "too big to fail" (as I've posted before, this is not a statement of size per se but rather a statement of systemic risk posed by a company) so that we can let companies that make bad bets fail without worrying that they will bring down the entire economy with them.

This tax proposal from the administration is nothing more than a feel-good measure that punishes the banks for playing by the rules of the environment in which they found themselves. The only word I can think of for this is "stupid." If there was fraud, prosecute it. But if you just didn't like the way that banks responded to the incentives of the environment in which they operated, don't blame the banks - fix the incentives and regulations.

A great article on our response to terrorist threats

As usual, Fareed Zakaria pretty well captures my thinking about how we should (and should not) respond to terrorist threats.

I think he nails it that having us spend billions of dollars making travel miserable for millions of innocent non-terrorists and diverting planes and scrambling swat teams whenever somebody crosses into a secure area that wouldn't have been secure if not for the threat of terrorism seems like doing the terrorists jobs for them (admittedly, and thankfully, minus the bloodshed). But to the critical point: it doesn't make us any safer, it is a huge drain on our economy, and it perpetuates the very fear and tension that the terrorist seeks to create. How is that possibly justifiable as "defeating terrorism?"

The Israeli model for the US?

I've seen a number of posts such as this one since the failed Christmas bombing attempt about whether or not it's time for the TSA to adopt more Israeli-style security methodologies.

I completely agree that the TSA seems to be a bureaucrat's idea of security rather than an actual security mechanism. While I'm sure that it actually does prevent the casual/amateur/copycat/wannabe terrorist (and that's a good thing), I think that the harm it does in terms of false positives (i.e., people getting busted not because they actually are a security threat but because they break security-related rules, resulting in a security scare) and overall expense and hassle far outweighs the benefit. And as the Christmas attempt shows, any halfway trained professional can get through TSA-style security.

The Christmas attempt also shows that fellow passengers are among the best security mechanisms available. They stopped Richard Reid, they stopped this guy.

In other words, we are spending billions of dollars and untold delays and hassles for the appearance of security, without actually providing significantly improved security. And I would argue that appearance of security is worse than actual security, because it diverts attention and resources from finding true threats.

Which goes to prove the next point, which is that the folks advocating Israeli-style security for the US are on the ball when it comes to the fact that it is not about x-rays and removing shoes, it's about behavior. While I'm not wild about the intrusiveness of this approach, it's certainly a lot more effective and a lot more efficient.

My main concerns with Israeli-style security are twofold: scalability - we have dramatically greater numbers of air passengers, and the necessary intrusiveness which violates both our explicit constitutional protections and implicit expectations with respect to the degree to which we have to prove to our government that we have the right to travel before we are allowed to do so.

Nevertheless, I think we could learn a lot from Israel in this space and adjust our procedures to focus more on what works rather than on what "looks" secure. I suspect that we can both improve our security and lesson the burden, if only we were to take a data-driven approach to the problem.

Are carbon offsets like papal indulgences?

Today Ellen Goodman penned a column connecting fertility rates and women's to the environment, but it was this comment that caught my eye:

Well, I am not a fan of carbon offsets, which have been described as a get-out-of-jail-free card. I don't cotton to the idea that we can neutralize our wasteful ways by planting a tree in the rain forest. The idea that I can balance flying by preventing a few little carbon footprints smacks of an elitism I thought went out with the Raj

I've heard this sentiment before, although the comparison has usually been made to the old practice of selling indulgences.

I think the notion that a carbon offset is like "paying for a right to sin" or a "get-out-of-jail-free" misses the point entirely, and that belief can have dangerous consequences for policy discussions.

A sin is something you shouldn't do at all - that's why it's a sin (or if you prefer the get-out-of-jail analogy, something illegal is something you shouldn't do). Period. Hence an "offset" for sinful or unlawful behavior is anathema, and people like Goodman are absolutely right to view offsets such as indulgences or "get-out-of-jail" cards as a terrible thing.

But here's the key point: there is NOTHING WRONG with emitting carbon. The climate is not threatened by the emission of carbon. This is where Goodman and others get confused about offsets. The problem faced by the climate is the increase in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. If you emit a ton of CO2 in one place and store or sequester it in another place, then you have added no net CO2 to the atmosphere, and thus truly have "offset" your "sin." Indulgences or get-out-of-jail-free-cards do not undo the harm to the world of the original sin, but carbon offsets do.

Of course, this all presumes that the offsets are real, measurable, etc. - that they truly are offsetting emissions, sequestering carbon, planting trees, etc. But there is no intrinsic reason why a carbon offset cannot truly negate the effects of one's emissions.

If we view carbon emissions as intrinsically sinful, we will not make practical progress on climate change. Not that the best offset isn't an emission reduction, but the fact is that we can reduce but not eliminate many sources of carbon emissions, and offsetting can be a practical and useful means for ensuring that those emissions that remain do not become a "sin" to the climate.

Book report: "Turning oil into salt."

Just read "Turning Oil Into Salt" a couple of weeks ago - a great and insightful read. While I don't agree with the author on everything, I do agree with the basic premise of the book. That is that oil has become a strategic commodity because it enjoys a monopoly on transportation fuels, and that this provides both security and economic threats to America. Breaking that monopoly (i.e., allowing other fuels to compete with oil - even on today's internal combustion infrastructure) is not actually all that hard: about $100 added to the cost of a car makes it fully flex-fuel capable, enabling it to run on ethanol, methanol, or gasoline.

There are obviously a lot of policy decisions (e.g., do you allow imports of sugar-cane based ethanol from Brazil or use corn-based ethanol from Iowa?) and market issues to work through, but other countries have successfully addressed this issue. Brazil is a great case in point: the entire fleet there is flex-fuel, and they have lots of low-cost sugar-based ethanol. When oil prices skyrocketed last year, the mix of fuels significantly shifted towards ethanol; when oil prices eased, the blend shifted back toward petroleum. Brazilians were thus largely shielded from the shocks of the oil price swings, and oil had to actually compete on price for a share of Brazilians' fuel tanks.

And as newer plug-in-hybrid vehicles start hitting the streets (cars such as the Volt which primarily use an electric motor for the first 30-50 miles of travel, using an internal combustion engine either as a backup drive when the batteries deplete, or as a generator to supplement the batteries, thus extending range), you get an even bigger benefit: these cars can already make 100-200 miles per gallon of gasoline, and if they are made flex-fuel, they could conceivably go an arbitrary distance with no petroleum at all.

It's the sort of thing that would drive Ahmadinijad crazy. And isn't that a good thing?

More on "Too Big To Fail"

I've posted before about "Too big to fail," and it's back in the news again with discussions about regulatory reform. Planet Money (which I love) has been talking a bit about it, as has the Motley Fool.

As I've thought about this issue more, I've realized that the issue is not that we need to regulate entities when they become "too big" per se. Rather, the problem is that being "too big to fail" is actually saying something more subtle: the entity has introduced systemic risk into the system.

Boeing is a huge company, and were it to implode tomorrow it would cast a lot of damage in its industry and among its suppliers and would be an all-around "bad thing", but it would not destabilize the economy as a whole or unrelated industries. Lehman's implosion, on the other hand, demonstrated that it's risk-taking ultimately inflicted severe collateral damage throughout the entire financial sector - and ultimately throughout the entire economy as lending froze up in its wake.

So the issue is not size, and asking if we should break up banks if they become too "big" (which begs the question of how big that is and how you know), but rather that regulators should have full authority to be alert for introduction of systemic risk, and should be empowered to strictly regulate such behavior above and beyond whatever regular day-to-day regulation they are authorized. Maybe it means breaking up large companies, but when viewed in this light, breaking up a company becomes just one possible tool at a regulator's disposal, not the default.

By the way, I also particularly liked this quote from the Motley Fool article, which I think cuts through the heart of any anti-regulatory ideology on this point:

A commenter to our article suggested that suppressing the scope of banks runs contrary to the free market. "I guess you don't believe in free enterprise, and ... neither does the federal government," the poster wrote. This couldn't be further from the truth.

Economic freedom relies on individual risk-taking. In our current financial system, the stupidity of a few reckless bankers and traders creates unintended collective risk-taking. It's as far from freedom as you can get. We want a system where bank failures wreak havoc on stakeholders of just that bank, and nothing else. You can still screw up; just leave me out of it. That's freedom, and we're big fans of it.

Bad math at Fox News

The other day I was working out and flipping channels, and I saw Fox News folks commenting about a recent poll that showed support for the public option in the health care debate. What struck me was that they were latching on to the fact that more of the respondents to the poll identified themselves as Democrats than as Republicans, and they claimed that this made the poll flawed. In fact, they specifically said that the poll should have sampled an equal number of Democrats and Republicans.

Nice sentiment, but bad math. The point of a poll is to figure out the popularity of an issue among the general population (or a specific subset of that population such as voting adults, or seniors, or such if that is the specific goal of the poll). If you believe that the poll should equally sample Democrats and Republicans, that is basically assuming that the percentages of Democrats and Republicans are equal, which they are not. Rather, the ratio in the poll of Democrats and Republicans, if done correctly, should approximately match the ratio in the target population, and this almost certainly is not 1:1, as the Fox commentators seemed to think.

I do not know whether the ratio reported in the poll does match the broader population; if it was off by a meaningful amount, then that would have been a sign of a potential flaw in the poll. But alas, Fox did not report this information, so I find myself strangely uninformed by their broadcast.

Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize

This was a dumb decision by the Nobel committee. Really bad. It will only confirm the worst cynical accusations of political bias by the committee.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Obama, and there are many things I like about him. But the fact is that he has not yet had any meaningful "peace" accomplishments. He's changed the tone of the debate, he's had great rhetoric, that's all well and good and in the right direction, but that's only a prelude to accomplishment, not an accomplishment itself.

I don't know if the committee was trying to reward those gestures - in which case it is premature and can be legitimately accused of fawning over the young presidency. Or perhaps it is trying to influence decisions such as how to proceed in Afghanistan, in which case it is truly political.

But without any concrete accomplishments to cite - just "hope" and "tone" - this debases the value of the peace prize as a neutral reward for making the world a better place. I really hate to say this, but this decision demonstrates the peace prize committee (physics/chemistry/medicine, so far, still appear untainted) to be far more politically oriented than they are supposed to be.

The smart thing here would be for Obama to turn down the prize, pointing out that he has not had any success yet that would warrant it. That would gently, gracefully (and diplomatically) chide the committee and I think Obama would actually earn a lot of credit for doing so. I'm not optimistic he will do so, though.

Health Care Debate

I've resisted weighing in on the health care debate because it's a super complicated issue about which I don't know a lot. But I've been listening and learning, and I have reached some conclusions, more about the debate itself than about any specific policy within it.

The first issue, I think, is how we characterize the problem. I don't generally quote communists or Chinese leaders, but Deng Xiaoping is widely credited with the quote "I don't care if it's a white cat or a black cat. It's a good cat so long as it catches mice." While the quote probably predates him, the point is good: we should not be caught up in ideological purity, we should worry about whether a given proposal "catches mice." Labeling the various proposals "socialist" is not helpful. Whether or not the proposals meet the bar of being "socialist," the label is an emotionally charged one and it puts the recipient on the defensive at a personal level, which eliminates any chance of a productive discussion on the issues.

Even the implied personal insult of "socialist", we forget that the reason that we typically do not like "socialist" things in this country is not because they are "socialist" per se, but rather because most socialist solutions to problems are far worse at "catching mice" than free-market/private enterprise-based alternatives, and usually with other negative consequences (such as government control of decisions that we view as our own.)

These are good reasons to be exceptionally skeptical of "socialist" programs. We should, however, remember two things. First, we have had a number of generally accepted "socialist" programs for decades already - social security and medicare come to mind as two prominent examples - and they haven't destroyed our country (their biggest problem, I would assert, is that they are huge and growing budget items). The second thing to remember is that these two "socialist" programs are also hugely popular, and that politicians view them as 3rd rails. Funny thing: as a country we hate socialism but love socialist programs.

But there's a third reason we should take the word "socialist" out of the debate. As I said above, when comparing socialist solutions to market-based solutions, market-based almost always perform markedly better, which is why "socialist" has become a shorthand for "grossly inferior to market based solutions." But alas, in healthcare the "free market" is quite distorted in many significant and fundamental ways, so it is not at all obvious that "socialist" would be worse the way it would be in other similar situations.

Anyhow, my point above is NOT to defend socialist solutions to our healthcare problems (heck, if we can find a way to fix the market, that strikes me as vastly preferable.) Rather, it is simply to argue that the name calling is not helpful, and far better would be to judge whether one model "catches mice" better than another model.

Alas, this leads to the next question: what does it mean to "catch mice?" I think a huge part of the gap between our leaders is that there is no real agreement on the problems to solve, on what "success" looks like. Broadly speaking (and at the risk of stating the obvious), many Republicans believe that the system is basically sound, but needs incremental improvements such as malpractice reform, better use of information technology, and such. And obviously, they want as little governmental role as possible. Many Democrats believe that the system is fundamentally broken and needs more structural changes, including a stronger role for government.

Since there isn't agreement on the problem, we're unlikely to find agreement on solutions.

My personal view, as is often the case, is somewhere in between - we need to fix what's broken, but I don't see any reason to upend the pieces of the system that do work. I think there are areas, such as uniform insurance regulations or requirements for everyone to have some sort of insurance, or portability, can only be done by the federal government. But I also do not welcome a huge new government bureaucracy managing health care, even if such a thing already exists with Medicare.

Many on the right have spent all their time trashing the various Democratic plans, which is a shame because frankly I'd like to better understand their own definition of the problem and their proposed solution. I suppose such is the lot of being in the minority.

But there are quite a few for whom it seems the best solution is "do nothing." I cannot support that position. We do have very good healthcare in this country, but it is not demonstrably better than in other countries, and yet we pay more per capita than other nations. This strongly suggests that something is wrong, and it shouldn't surprise anybody. Healthcare, after all, is a highly distorted market:

• Consumers (patients) do not weigh cost/benefits (as they would in any functioning market), and have no incentive to do so. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, after all - we want people to get the care they need.) If they have insurance, then that will pay for everything after a duductible or co-pay. And with or without insurance, this is people's health so they will make decisions not on the economic inputs but on whether they can get well.
  
• Doctors have few incentives to contain costs. First of all, most doctors are fee for service, so they get paid for doing more, not less procedures. But more to the point, our litigious environment strongly encourages the doctor to do everything possible to ensure that nothing gets missed.
• People without insurance make disproportionate use of emergency rooms, which is one of the most expensive ways to provide health care. People don't get denied care here, even if uninsured, so this cost gets absorbed into the system and ultimately gets paid for by insurance premiums of covered people.
  

(NPR's Planet Money podcast, by the way, has done some great stories recently specifically explaining the economics and incentive structure in our current healthcare system.)

As a result, nobody should be surprised that insurance rates have doubled in just a few years or that insurance companies deny coverage to customers that could cost them money. In fact, I believe that we should be seeking universal coverage not because it's a wonderful lofty "human right" goal as the left often portrays it (that's not a sufficient reason, laudable though it may be), but rather because (a) we're paying it anyway by covering the uninsured in emergency rooms, and (b) we're paying higher rates than we would need to if everyone - including healthy people who don't use a lot of services - is paying into the system. That's the purpose of insurance, after all, is to spread the risk around. (I've blogged about this previously.)

So we have a pseudo-free-market system. Once can try to remove these distortions and let the markets do their gloriously efficient thing. Or we can say that it's fundamentally not a market system and try government. My instincts are to try the former and only go to the latter as a last resort, but I reach the limits of my competency in this space when I try to suggest my own solutions, so I can only use these guidelines to judge proposals made by others.

I have come to a few conclusions, though:

• The status-quo is going to become ever more expensive. So while I cringe when I hear the huge price tags associated with the various proposals in congress, I remind myself that the right metric is NOT what the cost of the program is. Rather, the metric is how that cost compares with the cost to the economy of doing nothing.
• The "Rationing" scare is a red-herring. The fact is that we have rationing today, based on economic situation (which is acceptable in a functioning market, which is not what we have) and by insurance company bureaucrats. People are concerned about government bureaucrats making health care decisions based on cost, but does it really make any difference if that bureaucrat is paid by the government or by an insurance company? Black cat/white cat. In any case, unless one supports the idea that everybody should have unlimited access to unlimited healthcare regardless of cost (which I presume nobody actually supports), then one necessarily accepts "rationing" of some sort or another. So the question is not whether there is rationing, it's a question of finding the best mechanisms for doing that rationing.
  
• The fundamental issue is that treatment is and always will be more expensive than healthy maintenance. The best thing that we can do to lower the cost and improve the quality of health care in this country is to provide incentives for healthy living and disincentives for unhealthy living. Obviously someone falling and breaking an arm, or suffering from a genetic disease are not the results of lifestyle choices and thus it is not fair to penalize people for this. But when lifestyle choices - smoking and obesity are two obvious examples - put a burden on the system that do not come with corresponding economic consequences, there is yet another market distortion to correct. And correcting that can lead to vastly more efficient (by which I mean "high quality at low cost") health care.
  

Joe Wilson Racist?

So now even Jimmy Carter is spouting off that Joe Wilson's "You Lie!" outburst was racially motivated. C'mon, people, this is ridiculous speculation. There's no way to prove that it wasn't racially motivated, and there's only one way to prove that it was (namely Mr. Wilson coming out and saying it was racially motivated, which I'm not expecting him to do), so it's pure hypothetical speculation of the form "it could be true and it can't be proven false, so it must be true." Never mind that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the true motivation for the outburst was (gasp!) political.

This is frankly a waste of everyone's time to debate such issues.

Racism is a real problem and it exists in many places, sometimes openly, sometimes subtly. But it is counterproductive to the goal of eliminating racism when we make it up where it doesn't exist. Let's get angry about real instances of racism. And it is especially counterproductive to useful debate when people who disagree (even rudely, as Wilson did) politically with a black president are labeled a racist or "uncomfortable with a black president."

And another good post on global warming

With all the "heat" (pardon the pun) around global warming, local meteorologist Cliff Mass has a good comment about the recent heatwave in the Pacific Northwest and what it means in the bigger picture of "climate change."

I don't know if I could have said it better myself.

A great post on TechDirt about how media companies are taking entirely the wrong approach to their customers. I've blogged before about how various industries (airlines and the recording industries in particular) seem to hate their customers, and this Techddirt post does a great job of making my point for me, both from the business model perspective and from the legal perspective.

Quit calling it a "tax"

The Waxman-Markey bill, which would establish a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, is making its way through congress. While I do favor the establishment of a cap-and-trade system, my purpose in this post is not to debate the merits of such a system in general or of Waxman-Markey in particular, but rather to focus on one part of the debate over the bill which I think is disingenuous: calling it a tax.

Cap-and-trade is fundamentally different from a tax in just about every sense of the word, especially so if the carbon emission credits are initially given away (and in Waxman-Markey as it currently stands, 85% are given away).

So why is this different from a tax? I see at least 4 reasons:

• Other than the initial auctioned permits, the government is not receiving revenue from the cost of carbon permits. Taxes are levies where the money goes to the government. In a cap and trade system, most of the money is going into the secondary markets. And the initial auction permits are no more a tax any more than the government selling radio spectrum could be called a "radio tax." If the government has a valuable resource owned by the people (such as radio spectrum or the right to pollute), it is quite reasonable to get compensation for letting individual people or companies use that shared resource; this is a permit, not a tax. Any amount that individuals pay on the energy bills is not going to the government, which makes it difficult to call it a tax.
  
• Tax rates are set by governments, not by markets. In a cap and trade system, markets set the price for carbon emissions. If the price goes up, the government does not make any more money. If the price goes down, the government does not lose any more money (again, excluding any initial sales of auctions).
• Taxes cannot go to zero by the behavior of the people being taxed. But under cap and trade, if the economy produces less total carbon than the cap allows, then the price of carbon can go to $0. This would actually be a good thing (though I don't expect it will actually happen).
• You're not allowed to offset your taxes, but you can in cap and trade. If I go into a high tax bracket, I can't average my salary with a homeless person's salary to get a lower tax rate. If I buy a house, I have to pay taxes on the land even if I give land away somewhere else. True carbon taxes have also been proposed, where the emitter would pay a price (probably set by the government) for each ton of emissions, regardless of how many trees they plant or how much they reduce carbon elsewhere. But with cap and trade, if I raise my carbon here and lower it there, I have no need for more permits and thus pay no more.

I'm not trying to argue that cap-and-trade systems have no cost (they certainly do), or that this particular bill is either a good implementation of cap-and-trade or effective at fighting climate change (I actually don't know enough to answer that, although my inclination is "yes" if only because it establishes a price for carbon, which currently has a rather arbitrary - and almost certainly incorrect - price of $0.) I'm sure there are lots of valid arguments against this bill, or against the timing (although I'm getting somewhat tired of the weak arguments that we shouldn't do anything at all, especially the arguments that climate change is a "hoax" or has no manmade cause).

Rather, I just want to make sure that we're calling this for what it is: it is an attempt to put a price on carbon, which is currently unaccounted for in our economic activity. This is a fundamentally different thing than a "tax."

The US position on the Iran elections

There's been a bunch of consternation over the past week over whether or not Obama has taken a tough enough stand on Iran's elections. He resisted for a while and finally gave in to the pressure, condemning the violence and repression of the demonstrations, while not directly saying that the election was a fraud. This I think was an appropriately tough stance.

Last week, Congress voted overwhelmingly to condemn Iran. I think this was a mistake.

Shouldn't we be supporting democracy and human rights around the world? Of course we can. The problem with the congressional vote and with a stronger statement from Obama is simply that it is counterproductive.

Look, everyone knows that the Iranian election was stolen. Saying so only gives the regime an excuse to say that the opposition is a puppet of the Americans, and as such actually hurts the cause of democracy. (Never mind that Mousavi isn't exactly our dream candidate). Pointing out that the election was a sham won't get them to change it and simply gives them an excuse for a crackdown. We should just be quiet on this point.

Focusing on the repression of demonstrators (rather than the election itself) makes much more sense, for the simple reason that it is not a direct commentary on a political process, and that beating up civilians is a much less tenable position than claiming that a rigged election is legitimate.

Dumb application of copyright law

Once again we have various content organizations misapplying copyright law. First, the usual caveat that I am not a lawyer, I'm approaching this from a layman's point of view regarding what the purpose of the law is, and what constitutes reasonable application thereof. Now we have ASCAP claiming that ringtones should be subject to a royalty each time they are played, claiming that it amounts to a "public performance."

An analysis based on the law is here, which reaches the conclusion that this is an untenable position to take, but I'll provide my own reductionist reasoning to prove that ASCAP is being ridiculous.

In fact, I have created my own ringtones out of music that I have legally purchased. The copyright holders for that music would probably believe that I need a separate license to use the music as a ringtone, but I believe that this is an unsupportable position.

I'll do this step by step. Please stop me (especially if there are any lawyers reading this!) at the point that I cross a legal or ethical line.

1. I purchase a song from Amazon. Technically, I have purchased a license to play a song and the MP3 file representing that song, but I do not have rights to "public performance," I do not have rights to resell it or sublicense it, etc. Since Amazon has not been sued for the MP3 business, I will assume that this is entirely kosher.
   
2. I put the music on my iPhone. It's an MP3 player, it seems hare to argue that putting MP3 files on an MP3 player is problematic.
3. I put my iPhone into a docking station with speakers to listen to it. This is where ASCAP is making the dubious claim that a "public performance" is taking place because others could walk by and hear the music. But that claim is ridiculous because people have been able to listen to music on boom boxes in public for decades and nobody has ever claimed that this crosses some "public performance" line unless the music is clearly there with a purpose of entertaining other people. I.e., if I own a bar, then I may need to pay royalties for playing music for my customers. But a private party is OK because it's private, and if I go to the park and listen to the music while I lie in the sun but other people passing by can hear it that's also OK because I'm not doing it for their benefit - I'm still enjoying music that I have every right to listen to.
4. Now I decide I like this song so much I'm going to play it over and over again. No violation here - that's something I'm allowed to do. I could do it with records, with tapes, with CDs, an MP3 is just a different medium.
5. In fact, it's actually just the first 30 seconds of the song that I really like, so every time the song gets 30 seconds in, I rewind it and start over. Again, something I could do with all previous media, and nobody ever claimed that I am somehow legally or ethically required to listen to the full song.
   
6. I get so tired of selecting the song, playing it for 30 seconds, and rewinding it to play it again that I program my iPhone to play that song whenever I press a button, wait 30 seconds, and then stop it. I haven't changed anything here but the means of activation, which clearly is not covered by copyright law. I.e., copyright law covers the rights to the music, not the user interface for the player of that music.
   
7. I decide that a physical button is too much work and instead decide to hook up the button to an electronic signal that is triggered whenever somebody calls me. Again, I have simply changed the activation method.

Presto, in seven perfectly acceptable steps I have a ringtone. Of course, the copyright holders and/or Apple would far prefer that I purchase a ringtone from them, and that's fine. (In fact, on my iPhone, I have to go through a few contortions to do the above process - they've deliberately made it obscure how to do this precisely to support purchase of ringtones rather than do-it-your-self.) But they cross the line when they demand that I do so or claim that somehow I am unethical or breaking a law when I do so. As long as I have purchased the MP3 and did not explicitly agree to additional contract terms (i.e., beyond simple copyright), I am entirely within my rights to do so (and even then, if I violate the contract then I have not broken copyright law but rather have broken a contract - a civil matter). And if the phone rings where other people can hear it, oh well. It's simply not a public performance anymore than playing a legally purchased CD on my boom box where others can hear it is.

This seems to be a specific application of a more troubling broader trend by content holders. The purpose of copyright is to protect content owners from the stealing of their intellectual property; this is a perfectly reasonable goal. When you buy an album or a movie you are really not buying the content per-se, but rather buying a license to consume it. (This is why you cannot legally make copies and redistribute it; that is beyond your licensed right.) But over the past ten years or so, we are seeing more and more attempts to control the exercise of that right, not just the granting thereof. The DMCA, for example, makes it illegal to copy a DVD to your computer's hard drive (because doing so requires bypassing the anti-piracy encryption on the DVD), even though the specific medium (DVD or hard drive) is immaterial to one's right to watch a movie. The ASCAP claims are another example of not only controlling whether you can consume their content (which is reasonable) but to also control the where/when/how of that consumption, which is a disturbing trend and which should not be enshrined in law.

More homegrown terrorism

The shooting at the Holocaust museum in Washington DC earlier this week reminds us that the threat of terrorism is not confined to foreigners or to followers of any particular religion. And yes, it is terrorism: the shooter targeted innocent, non-combatant civilians in order to make a broader political point. If that isn't terrorism than I don't know what is.

This is why we must go beyond basic profiling or bureaucratic mechanical charades that value appearance over actual provision of security. Terrorists can be hard to identify (although it seems that in this case, von Brunn, the accused shooter, had a long and public history of indications that he could do something like this), and neither removal of shoes at airports or the closing off of public areas do anything meaningful to help identify them. It takes intelligence and behavioral observations - tasks which are less easy to farm out to $10/hr unionized rent-a-mall cops, but which ultimately yield much greater bang for the buck in terms of actual security.

Why China doesn't deserve the respect it craves

Two words: "North Korea."

Despite all of the good it's done economically for China, the Beijing government recognizes that it would likely not remain elected were it freely chosen by its population. This is why it bristles so strongly at any notion of "interference in internal affairs." It values stability (translation: status quo, with it in power) above all else, and thus it is unacceptable for other nations to so much as comment on how the Chinese regime runs its affairs.

Alas, China also wishes to be respected as a first rate power on the world stage, and this desire, unfortunately, runs headlong into their first goal to be left alone in their authoritarian ways. Nothing exemplifies this more than North Korea. Here is an outlaw nation, which flouts every standard of civilized behavior both within and beyond its borders, which abuses its population mercilessly and threatens other nations recklessly. It is a problem which must be dealt with. And it has one clear Achilles heel: it is utterly dependent upon China.

China thus has a dilemma. It can do the right thing on the world stage and show that it is a responsible member of the world community, not a threat to others, a nation whose power others should welcome rather than fear. In other words, it can wield its influence over North Korea - by carrot and by stick - to get that petulant brat of a nation to behave or face consequences.

Or China can take the cowardly and self-serving approach of "stability" and consistency with its own mantra of not meddling in any other country's internal affairs. After all, if it is OK to influence a country from the outside (no matter what manner of evil is happening within that country's borders), that opens China up to similar inspection from the outside. It's pretty obvious that if Hitler were to come to power today that China might make some weak statement of protest, but would utterly refuse to stop trade in Zyklon B. After all, cutting off trade would be meddling in the internal affairs of another country. If you think this is a harsh statement, consider that genocide is occuring in Sudan, and China is doing a brisk business there.

True leadership and maturity come when one does things that are not necessarily in one's own direct interest, when one puts the broader good ahead of one's own personal good.

China is being tested, and it's obvious which approach it is choosing. And as long as it does so, it proves that it has not matured to the point where it deserves respect in world affairs. It simply is not yet a constructive member of the world community.