Mark Thompson

Please be aware of an important update to my post yesterday on the Carolina Lunch Box story.  I have placed the update at the end of that post.

{ 17 comments }

[UPDATED 2/16; see end of post for update]

[UPDATE II: 2/17 - Please see this piece of reporting from Glenn Beck's site The Blaze.  Beck's reporter, Madeleine Morgenstern, has done what the original stories did not, and put together a reasonably well-sourced story that sheds a lot of actual light on what happened here.  The story is not anonymously sourced, contains an actual copy of the letter at issue here, and fills a lot of the holes that the original story had.  I admit, after reading Morgenstern's piece, this story looks really bad, though I have to emphasize that it very much appears to be a function of the particular program at issue here, which is indeed an opt-in program. Nonetheless, consider the below retracted to the extent that it is inconsistent with Morgenstern's article.]

Making the rounds the last day or two has been this story from the “Carolina Journal,” the monthly newspaper of the John Locke Foundation, which bears the headline: “Preschooler’s Homemade Lunch Replaced with Cafeteria ‘Nuggets’; State agent inspects sack lunches, forces preschoolers to purchase cafeteria food instead.”  (The story was eventually supplemented by significantly better reporting from another outlet here, which still fails to make the case being pushed by the narrative).

The headline sounds horrible, and the body of the story only makes it seems worse, conjuring images of government agents rifling through four year old children’s lunches to enforce USDA standards on healthy lunches, prohibiting children from eating food deemed insufficiently healthy (including turkey sandwiches!), and forcing them to instead eat government provided and mandated food (to wit: oh-so-healthy chicken nuggets).  The original story also claims that the relevant regulations here apply to all pre-K programs, including home daycare programs, with the obvious implication that “this could happen to you!”  This hits all sorts of libertarian buttons: invasion of privacy by the government, nanny statism of the highest order, government incompetence, not to mention forced-feeding of children.  It even has the initial appearance of a well-sourced story, with quotes from the parent, the head of the state agency, and the school principal, not to mention the tie-in to Michelle Obama’s healthy school lunch platform.

Not surprisingly, this story has been picked up in large swathes of the libertarian and conservative blogospheres, including by Jacob Sullum, who is himself usually a pretty decent journalist, and entitled his post on the subject “North Carolina Food Inspector Rejects Little Girl’s Home-Packed Lunch in Favor of Chicken Nuggets.”  The story even reached the pinnacle of attention within the right-of-center ideological media with a Rush Limbaugh segment (in which the “state agent” morphed into a “federal agent” charged with inspecting all lunch boxes). Predictably, the most outraged headline came from one of the folks at LewRockwell.com, “The Lunch Nazis are coming! No, They’re Here!”

One problem: the story is a load of bunk at worst, a non-story at best, standing for little more than the proposition that low-income children in NC’s low-income pre-K program whose parents don’t send them to school with enough healthy food will be provided with additional food to supplement what their parents send them to school with.

For starters, the context in which all of this occurred was a public school pre-K program run by the state popularly known as “More at Four,” but now called the generic name “NC Pre-K.”  In order to have a child enrolled in this program, which has a limited number of slots, the parents must actively choose to enroll, with priority going to “at-risk” children, to wit: special needs children and (importantly) low-income children.  Indeed, to even be eligible for the program, the child must either fit in one of those two categories or have a parent on (or about to be called on) active military duty.  Enrollment as an “at-risk” child means that the child’s enrollment is fully subsidized by the state, regardless of whether the day care is private or public.

These facts are critical because the “state agent” in this story turns out to be nothing more than a researcher from a program that grades the performance of pre-schools and operates out of the FPG Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  It also does not appear that this institute has any actual authority other than to provide assessments, which the state then uses in making licensing decisions and in setting the fees it will pay the day care provider for subsidized care.

[click to continue…]

{ 455 comments }

One of the more common second-order views held by libertarians is that unions and free markets are antithetical to each other, and indeed that unions are inherently hostile towards free markets.  This view goes a long way towards explaining why libertarians as a group tend to be overwhelmingly hostile towards unions, and indeed rarely put any meaningful effort in towards cooperating with unions even where union policy preferences might otherwise closely align with libertarian preferences.  To be fair, it is also worth pointing out that many (though not necessarily most) liberals seem to share the fundamental assumption that the survival and strength of private sector unions is dependent on a large amount of state intervention in the economy.

This second-order view, however, is simply wrong and without evidence to support it.  Kevin Carson and I previously attempted to address this question last year.  In those posts, we explained how unions are placed at a disadvantage by virtue of state intervention, even in some cases where that state intervention is ostensibly pro-labor. These posts traced the history of labor legislation in the United States and showed how federal law has historically been used to suppress unionization in the private sector and the effectiveness thereof, particularly in the wake of the Taft-Hartley Act.  Additionally, these posts explained in detail how the strength of unions is very much dependent on their capacity for unpredictability, which government intervention of any sort tends to undermine.  Indeed, even prior to the Wagner Act of 1935, when the only federal legislation

Despite this case study of the US, it became clear in comments to my post last week that more than a case study is needed to refute these widely-held assumptions, which, as one commenter stated, are premised on the notion that “As long as there are no barriers of entry, a competitor can always enter the market with non-union wages and drive the union out.”

Fortunately, there is data to demonstrate that unions are quite capable of thriving in free markets, and indeed can do quite poorly in highly regulated markets.  We have reliable data on unionization rates in most developed countries thanks to statistics compiled by the OECD.*

Additionally, every year, the Heritage Foundation publishes a ranking of nearly every country in the world on its “Index of Economic Freedom,”** with each country also receiving a raw score.  By comparing unionization rates of OECD countries with their Heritage Foundation scores, we can get a pretty good idea of whether and in what direction labor union strength is correlated with the prevalence of free markets  (as defined by right-leaning conservatives and libertarians).

Using OECD data for 2008 – the last year for which complete data are available – and the Heritage Foundation’s 2009 index (which would be based upon data for 2008), here’s what we get:

 

The lines I’ve inserted into the graph represent the OECD averages.

Looking at the numbers more closely, we wind up with a slightly positive correlation between union membership and economic freedom of approximately .19.***

This is hardly a strong correlation, and I probably would not make the claim that it shows that unions succeed most when markets are, broadly speaking, free.  However, it does seem to rule out the commonly held notion that unions are inherently opposed to freer markets or that strong unions mean less free markets. [click to continue…]

{ 219 comments }

Seeing as I disliked both teams in The Big Game equally, I was unusually interested in the halftime show this year. I am not a terribly big fan of Madonna’s, but I’ve always appreciated her influence and capacity for showmanship, the latter of which was why I thought she would be an all-too-rare good choice for the halftime show. I have to say that not only did she fail to disappoint, but she turned in what was in my view the most enjoyable halftime show ever, Super Bowl or otherwise. That is a low bar, but I thought she actually put out the first halftime show befitting of a game annually responsible for the year’s largest TV audience.

Apparently the buzz today is about one of her guest performers flipping the bird (which I missed) and her making a bit of a misstep on the rafters (which I didn’t), but that would seem to ignore the awesome spectacle that was the rest of the show. The marching band was my favorite touch, but there were no shortage of other pretty cool moments. And can I just say how happy I was that she made no attempt to have the on-field audience that always seems to make these halftime shows so especially awkward?

For the readers: now that Madonna has set the bar and shown that it is possible to put together a non-awkward and outright enjoyable halftime show, what other artists are out there who can pull this off? Presumably Gaga (aka Madonna 2.0), but who else?

{ 60 comments }

I don’t know why, but I’ve been rediscovering early Barenaked Ladies and early Pat Green the last week or two. I can’t say that I care much for what BNL have done since (and including?) “One Week,” nor that I care much for what Mr. Green has done since around 2003, but “Old Apartment” still makes me want to start singing – badly – at the top of my lungs, and early Pat Green still gets me to fall in love with my wife all over again.

 

{ 13 comments }

This CBO study is being touted as proof by conservatives that the answer to this question is a resounding “YES!”  Going nearly as far is Megan McArdle, who nonetheless argues that “the CBO’s data suggest that we could probably get workers with a bachelor’s or lower for less money than we are now paying, and not suffer much decline in quality.”

A quick summation of the study’s results: on average, the federal government paid about 16% more in total compensation (wages + benefits) than a theoretically comparable private sector company would have paid after adjusting for thing like employee experience and education.  On average, federal wages (ie, not including benefits) were only about 2% more than in the private sector, but were 20% higher for employees with no more than a high school diploma, and 23% lower for employees with graduate or professional degrees.  The big difference came as a result of significantly higher benefit costs, which were on average almost 50% higher in the federal government, though benefits for employees with professional degrees were comparable in both the private sector and the federal government.   Benefits for those with a high school diploma or less were nearly 75% greater than in the private sector on average.  Moreover, though benefit costs in general make up the bulk of the difference in total compensation, most of that difference appears to come from the federal government’s offering of defined-benefit pension plans and the fact that it subsidizes retiree health insurance.

So does this mean that federal workers are overpaid, or that “we could probably get workers with a bachelor’s or lower for less money than we are now paying, and not suffer much decline in quality”?  I’m not at all certain.*

To be sure, it’s clear that the market has no more than an indirect role in setting federal compensation levels.  But the study actually explicitly rejects even McArdle’s relatively squishy claim, saying that an “assessment of how changes in the amount or composition of total compensation would affect the government’s ability to recruit and retain a qualified workforce is beyond the scope of this analysis.”

I think the CBO is right to make that disclaimer, which makes the actual utility of this study quite limited.

As the study notes, different employees can place vastly different values on compensation and wages, and the actual quality of an employee is ultimately unmeasurable in any meaningful way for purposes of a study like this.  Moreover, because the lion’s share of the discrepancy comes from retirement benefits increasingly unavailable in the private sector, any discussion involving the caliber of the federal workforce is going to require a discussion as to the benefits of a workforce where  workers have a strong incentive not constantly looking to change jobs the second something better comes along.

While it’s common to assume that job stability encourages laziness, the fact is that it also discourages experienced, quality, and yes, hardworking, employees from having a wandering eye.  That means a workforce more dedicated to their employer, and less in need of constant retraining.

This is a dynamic that gets ignored in these types of discussions all too easily, I think.   There may well be something to be said about the bad incentives created by job protections that make it difficult to impossible to fire a bad employee, but even with those bad incentives, it seems clear to me that the average new employee in any career path, no matter how much experience and training that employee possesses, is going to make boatloads more mistakes than the average employee with 5, 10, 15, 20 years experience working the same job or type of job for the same employer. [click to continue…]

{ 221 comments }

….Which is why I definitely did not see a bumper sticker this morning proclaiming that “All I needed to know about ISLAM I learned on 9/11,” right next to another bumper sticker admonishing one to “Work Harder…Millions on Welfare Are Depending on You!”  I definitely did not see this while driving around a state with one of the nation’s highest percentages of Muslims.

{ 120 comments }

In response to Mike’s emergency preparedness post, BlaiseP discusses the role of community in emergencies and specifically his experiences with the Amish in his area of Wisconsin, writing;

The Amish around here have been off the grid for a few centuries now.  Their proscriptions on being connected to the electrical grid don’t prohibit them from generating Amish Electricity with diesel motors.  They’ll make telephone calls for business, from someone else’s phone.   Lots of us give them rides here and there.   They’re intensely interested in how the rest of the world is doing things.

Talking to the guy who made my oak table, he says their unwillingness to modernize in certain respects is mostly to keep their own sense of community intact.

Blaise’s comment provides a pretext for the only smile-inducing 9/11 story of which I’m aware.  In so doing, it permits me finally write the 9/11 memorial post I just couldn’t bring myself to write a few months back.

About a year after 9/11, I switched to the night program in law school so I could work a full time job during the day.  I wound up working as a law clerk for a government agency in downtown DC a few blocks from the White House and got to be acquainted with one of the HR folks.  Naturally the subject of 9/11, and what we were each doing on that day, came up for discussion.

He explained to me how, immediately after the Pentagon was hit, all of the government offices were evacuated more or less at once.   The Metro of course was also simultaneously shut down and the Mother of All Traffic Jams created for those with vehicles.  So of course the only way for most people to get home was to walk.

For almost anyone who worked on the opposite side of the Mall from where they lived, this inevitably meant crossing the Mall in some fashion.  As a result, about 15 minutes after the Pentagon was hit, four massive walls of humanity descended more or less simultaneously upon the Mall in varying states of panic.  Prior to this, the Mall itself was unusually empty for a beautiful September day due to most tourists being transfixed by the attacks in New York.

Empty that is, except for a single Amish family calmly wandering around the center of the Mall, with the patriarch staring intently at a giant unfolded tourist map.  By this point the black smoke emanating from the Pentagon would likely have been visible from the Mall – it certainly dominated the view from my apartment in North Arlington.

The patriarch looks up finally and sees this mass of humanity converging upon him from all sides.  He smiles and stops the first person whose attention he can grab, which was my acquaintance.

“Pardon me,” he said, “but can you tell me how to get to the Museum of Natural History*?” [click to continue…]

{ 35 comments }

I had hoped to avoid a formal foray into the inevitable dissection of Ron Paul, his newsletters, and his ties to the far right that seems to have hit right on schedule.*  As one who at the time was pretty well plugged in to the libertarian blogosphere, the first incarnation of that process, in January 2008, was more than a little exhausting and brought a lot of ugly things about libertarianism to the surface that I’d rather not relive.

However, Steven Horwitz, whose posts on the subject in 2008 were critical to my own turn towards left-libertarianism, has entered the fray with a fairly detailed – and relatively widely linked – history of Ron Paul’s newsletters and their not-insignificant role in libertarian history.  If you haven’t already, you should read it.

Horwitz explains how the newsletters, along with the related Rothbard-Rockwell Report, were representative of a critical era in libertarian history during which Murray Rothbard sought to grow the libertarian movement in the early post-Communism era by more directly fusing it in a coalition with working and middle class conservatives, using “cultural” issues as the bait to get the conservatives to come along.**  Horwitz argues that this fusionism was deeply corrupting to libertarianism, destroying its inherent liberalism, and concludes:

It’s time to reclaim our progressive history from the hands of the right:  from the Old Right of the 40s, to the Reagan era LINOs, to the paleolibertarianism of the 1990s… [T]he heritage of libertarianism is properly a progressive one.

I could not agree more with this sentiment.

Ron Paul’s newsletters, as well as his successes in the last several years, should tell us quite a bit about libertarianism, past, present, and future.  Certainly, that he is doing as well as he is at present by emphasizing civil liberties and anti-militarism, and indeed doing especially well at recruiting liberals and independents to his cause, not to mention coming out increasingly in support of gay rights (though not as much, perhaps, as one would hope) and speaking passionately about the effects of the Drug War on people of color, should demonstrate that there is a surprisingly large constituency for a left-libertarianism.  Though his newsletters, and his close ties to racists and anti-Semites rightly disqualify him from the Presidency and make him a questionable protest vote at best, such success clears space for future candidates without that baggage to pick up the mantle in future elections.  That is not nothing, and is why I ultimately will still vote for him in the primaries next year, just as I did last time around.

However, those successes cannot be divorced from the successes of the newsletters, the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, and Rothbard’s fusionism more generally.  To the contrary, they are built upon those successes.  And, let me be clear: the one area where Horwitz and other commentators who have put Ron Paul’s newsletters and ties to racism in context are wrong is in suggesting that those newsletters and ties were in some way a failure.  The fact is that they were more than a little successful.  Those ties provided Paul with a national fundraising base that allowed him to raise more than twice the amount of money for his Congressional campaigns than the average House member between 1996 and 2004, an amount that would go especially far for someone seeking election in an obscure district in East Texas.  In other words, those newsletters and ties to fringe groups and Alex Jones types are largely responsible for Ron Paul’s presence in Congress at all.

[click to continue…]

{ Comments on this entry are closed }