One of the reasons to oppose expanding state power to remedy social injustice is because that power can later be abused. Take for example the city of Houston using its power of eminent domain. The Houston Chronicle reports:

When finished, the .09-acre patch of land near the Galleria will be the city’s smallest park. Too small even for a basketball court, Post Oak Lane Park might be big enough for a game of horseshoes, a few benches and greenery.

Using its power of eminent domain, the city of Houston seized the land for the park from brothers James and Jock Collins last year. Officials claimed there was a “public necessity” for the park in the Uptown area, despite the fact that a much larger one — the 4.7-acre Grady Park — is just two blocks away.

What will the new “pocket park” be used for? That’s hard to say. The city has yet to draw up any plans for the land at the corner of Post Oak Lane and San Felipe. In fact, city parks director Joe Turner testified in a sworn deposition last month that his department did not come up with the idea for the park and that he opposed using condemnation powers for its creation.

What the park will provide is a landscaped gateway to an upscale development planned next door, called BLVD Place.

Mayor Bill White and council members insist they condemned the land last year as a matter of good faith to taxpayers. The city needed some of the land to widen San Felipe and will turn the rest into the park.

But documents obtained by the Houston Chronicle show the move also helped BLVD Place developer Ed Wulfe, a major donor to White, seal the deal on a $12.5 million land sale related to his ambitious mixed-use development.

As noted by Wikipedia, eminent domain has since the 1950’s enjoyed an expanded interpretation to enable city officials to acquire dilapidated property and develop it so as to help the the poor.

Effectively, the way eminent domain was interpreted changed in the 1950s to give city planners more power to help poor people living in the slums. Of course these policies failed, but the expanded power never went away. And now city officials in Houston are using, arguably, the expanded eminent domain to take land a way from a private owner simply to give part of it to another private owner who happened to donate a significant amount of money to several politicians.

While many policies developed for helping the poor fail miserably and waste resources I think a genuine argument can be made that the real problem with developing legislation to help the poor is that it expands the state’s power. With every expansion comes more opportunities for abuse and corruption. Often times the long term damage of creating opportunities for corruption far outweigh any kind of assistance the expansion was intended to offer the poor. I would argue this is a good reason to oppose most attempts to using the state to remedy perceived social injustice.

Because their aren’t really enough reasons, the Austrian Economist points to this passage in Krugman’s recent op-ed piece.

No modern American president would repeat the fiscal mistake of 1932, in which the federal government tried to balance its budget in the face of a severe recession. The Obama administration will put deficit concerns on hold while it fights the economic crisis.

But even as Washington tries to rescue the economy, the nation will be reeling from the actions of 50 Herbert Hoovers — state governors who are slashing spending in a time of recession, often at the expense both of their most vulnerable constituents and of the nation’s economic future.

The Austrian Economist has this to say:

He’s quite correct that Hoover tried to balance the budget in 1932, and he’s also arguably correct that doing so was harmful. But notice what he doesn’t actually say and only implies: Hoover tried to balance the budget by cutting spending. He did NOT. In fact, he tried to balance the budget by signing the Revenue Act of 1932, which was a large tax increase, increasing the top marginal rate from the mid-20s to 63 percent. The effects of that tax increase on the deepening of the Great Depression can certainly be debated, but there’s no doubt that it made matters worse to some degree or another, and that its relevance for cutting spending right now is questionable.

What is particularly galling about Krugman’s blog post op-ed (those are just the first two paragraphs) is that he both leads the reader to believe Hoover slashed spending (in fact he raised it) and also refuses to engage the question of whether the mistake Hoover made was “balancing the budget” per se, or raising taxes. Again, one could have a good debate about the effects of the tax increase, but first Krugman would have to admit that it was in fact what Hoover did! (UPDATE: I should add that it’s probably obvious why Krugman and other liberals would not want to admit that Hoover raised taxes to balance the budget - not only does it provide more evidence that Hoover was no friend of laissez-faire, it also puts them in the position of frequently taking the same policy position as Hoover did at the depths of the depression. Talk about some history Krugman would certainly like to sweep under the rug…) Notice further how “Clintonian” this is: he never lied here, just led the reader to believe something through implication that was not true.

Krugman has never struck me as an honest kind of fellow. That must be the reason the NYTimes loves to publish his editorials.

Here is an example of an organizations going out of its way to protect the feelings of minorities by violating several of the most important virtues of America.

Clearly, no one favors the action this university office took in dealing with this supposed racist. However, I think a larger point needs to be made. Even those that support the idea of criminalizing speech that can be construed as harmful because it’s content focuses on a minority group need to understand that such regulation by its very nature easily lends itself to abuse. The line separating harmful speech and innocuous speech, in regards to minorities groups, is vague which offers a great deal of discretion to officials charged with making such determinations. Officials with an axe to grind can easily avail themselves of the vagueness in order to rectify what they perceive as social injustice.

It’s better to protect all kinds of speech, even the kind that might actually be harmful to a minority groups, then to subjugate such freedom to the whims of officials whose primary motivation is not to ferret out the most egregious examples of virulent speech, but to find opportunities to remedy delusions of social injustice.

But this only to hits upon a theme prevalent in many of my political positions. Accept the noise that a constitutionally protected right gives. Regulating the noise eliminates the right. Its better to let the moron declare racially virulent statements than give a jaded dimwitted official to much power in determining what ‘racially virulent’ means.

On several different occasions Darwin and I have gotten into arguments about the utility of unions. Coming out of that discussion was the argument unions are a more effective method for operating a company because the democratic nature of a union grants each worker some capacity to determine how the company should be ran. It was argued that this would allow the workers a more satisfying fulfilling work experience. When confronted with the notion that the purpose of company is not to make its workers feel satisfied but provide a good to a consumer Darwin would always respond that the workers would always vote in the best interest of the company.

The recent auto worker bailout has proven a great opportunity to see if unions will vote in their best interest. Recently, the liberal president, George W Bush has decided to lend about 17 billion to the auto workers with the implicit agreement that the workers would slash their wages to be commensurate with the other auto workers. Given that two of the big three are hemorrhaging massive amounts of money and are on the edge of bankruptcy you would expect the workers would vote on slashing wages as a means to save the company.

Imagine my surprise when I read this:

Just days before Christmas, the UAW let it be known it’ll fight any concessions on wages and benefits. “An undue tax on the workers” is how union boss Ron Gettelfinger described it as the UAW reneged on the deal almost before the ink was dry.

This will go down as one of the most cynical acts of political manipulation ever. The UAW agreed to one thing with President Bush, knowing full well President-elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats were big recipients of union largesse and would let them slide. They read the situation correctly.

How does Darwin explain the irrational act of this union? They are making a decision to benefit themselves that is obviously detrimental to the company. Companies do not exist for the satisfaction of the worker, their purpose is to provide goods for the consumer. It’s foolish to think that workers will act in the best interest of the company when the point of a union is to act in the best interest of the worker.

I have collected several excellent pieces detailing the problems with regulation.

The first takes a look at the Sarbanes-Oxley regulations which attempted to regulate accounting practices after Enron. He writes:

FASB is a group of seven theoretical accountants based in Norwalk, Connecticut. Its website shows that no FASB member ever started or ran a successful business and that only one member has even held a senior position in a prominent public company other than an accounting firm. Yet, FASB mandates the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles that corporations must use to report to their shareholders. The Securities and Exchange Commission enforces FASB mandates with the threat of criminal prosecution.

This is no doubt an example of ‘experts’ given way to much power in determining how an industry should operate. Bureaucrats and politicians love experts because it gives them access to legitimacy in their political dispositions when attempting to implement their intuitions into policy.

The focus of this this author post is to argue, rather convincingly, that despite the intentions of the legislators to force more transparency in corporate account reporting, the new rules in fact do quite the opposite. Its hard enough to craft effective legislation in an environment in which their is little political pressure, however when you have the powder keg of a scandal creating effective regulation is virtually impossible. This author’s arguments do a nice job of proving this position.

Here is an example of how regulation even in a relatively peaceful political environment leads to bad policy.

The Energy Policy Act of 1992 (EPAct) mandated that government agencies purchase flex-fuel vehicles for 75 percent of light duty fleets, hoping to spur automakers into building more fuel efficient vehicles and decrease gasoline consumption.

This leads to:

Problem was, replacement flex-fuel vehicles had larger engines in their predecessors and often ran on gasoline, usually due to difficulty obtaining E85…So, despite all good intentions, the result is an increase in government gasoline consumption.

One of the problem with arguing against regulation is that at the time of the passing into law its relatively unknown what kind of damage they can do. Additionally, rhetorically, its easy to cast regulations is a positive light. Its easy to cast regulation as a simple set of fair rules that will insure some kind of positive outcome. Those arguing against regulation find themselves cast as partisian unwilling to allow a set of simple rules that will insure fairness for most everyone.

The problem is that regulation quite often fails to bring about the promises its supporters advance and many times will bring about undesirable outcomes. This is because its virtually impossible to determine how applying a large set of rules to a massive organizational structure will affect it. The problem of prediction is compounded based on what level the rules are applied and the scope of the application. Thus specifically targeted regulations by an individual directly affected by a problem applied to the neighborhood he lives in is much easier to predict than regulation passed by a majority of senators voting to manage climate change.

One of the reasons regulations appeal to the educated left is because they foolishly believe they can predict the future. It has been my experience the more educated you become and the more intelligent people think you are, the more likely you are to think you can predict things that one can clearly not predict. I think this is one of the reasons why regulations among those on the left seem so reasonable and acceptable. Since ‘experts’ can predict the future it makes sense to implement regulations that will bring about a more desirable future.

But as they two links show, predicting the outcome of regulation is extremely difficult, and if you ask me, its just better to not mess with the system than to try and regulate it. But then again, unlike many of my readers, I’m smart enough to know I’m not smart enough to predict the future.

When offered a trade position in Obama’s adminstration representative Xavier Becerra declined. He gave this as his reason:

Mi preocupación es qué tanto peso hubiera tenido esta posición y llegué a la conclusión de que no sería prioridad número uno, quizá ni siquiera dos o tres,” Becerra told La Opinion.Translated to English, Becerra said, “My concern was how much weight this position [U.S. Trade Representative] would have and I came to the conclusion that it would not be priority No. 1, and perhaps, not even priority No. 2 or 3.”

Obama might be changing some of his positions:

Consider this - on issues such as FISA surveillance or the Bush tax cuts for the rich Obama has already back-pedaled. He is likely further to outrage a contingent of his supporters by declining to declare defeat in Iraq, blame Bush, and leave. There even seems to be a movement towards creating a bit of wiggle room on enhanced interrogation. One might have thought, that given these setbacks on substance, Obama would be generous in handing his leftmost admirers some symbolic victories (an indictment of Dick Cheney, for example) but with the Warren selection they are getting shut out there as well. Interesting. Of course, chuckling righties might wonder whether Obama is holding up on symbolic victories for the left because he knows they have some huge substantive wins coming…

Looking forward to strong denuciations from my readers on the left who happily denounced Bush on these issues.

New Look for the Holidays. Enjoy.

Among experts and pundits.

In The Know: Situation In Nigeria Seems Pretty Complex

Like a million times:

President To Face Down Monster Attack, Own Demons In Action-Packed Schedule