“A new analysis from the Brookings Institution’s Ted Gayer and Emily Parker found that the program was fairly inefficient as economic stimulus and mostly pulled forward auto sales that would have happened anyway. It also cut greenhouse-gas emissions a bit — the equivalent of taking up to 5 million cars off the road for a year — but at a steep cost. … ‘In the event of a future economic recession,’ they conclude, ‘we would not recommend repeating the [Cash for Clunkers] program.'” [Brad Plumer, Washington Post; earlier]
Archive for 2013
Security agencies vs. being made fun of
In cease-and-desist letters, the NSA and DHS have moved to squash satirical use of their insignia in connection with t-shirts and mugs saying things like “The NSA: The Only Part of Government That Actually Listens” [Paul Alan Levy]
Kansas: state sues sperm donor for child support
“A Kansas district court heard arguments [last] Friday in the case of a man who is being sued for thousands of dollars in child support by the state after donating his sperm to a same-sex couple he found through a Craigslist ad.” By law artificial insemination in Kansas requires a doctor’s supervision, but mechanic William Marotta instead relied on a private contract with the women who wanted his services, which the state argues cannot excuse him from parental responsibility. [NBC News]
Rulings unwelcome to prosecutors
They appear to have gotten one very conservative San Diego judge exiled to traffic court [Will Baude]
Mount Holly Gardens: ‘Til we moot again
It looks as if someone really doesn’t want the Obama administration’s treasured but shaky “housing disparate impact” theory to come under review by the Supreme Court [Josh Blackman on reports of settlement mooting Mount Holly, N.J. case granted certiorari and pending before the Court; earlier on controversial tactics used to moot St. Paul case through settlement]
More: Piscataway v. Taxman also dropped off the Court’s docket via a mootness tactic. And shorter Doug Kendall/Constitutional Accountability Center: how dare PLF, Cato and IJ take the Court’s word on what the issue is in Mt. Holly? [Ilya Shapiro]
La trahison des woncs
Megan McArdle on what the policy experts knew about ObamaCare but didn’t tell us. [Bloomberg]
International human rights roundup
- U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities remains a bad, bad, bad, idea, but Senate Foreign Relations Committee has now scheduled hearings for Nov. 5 and Nov. 12 in effort to push it through;
- Proliferation of human rights treaties not necessarily good for, well, human rights [Jacob Mchangana et al. via Sullivan “Dish”; cf. David Kopel, NYT “Room for Debate” last year]
- Claim: Urban planning schemes are a human right [Wikipedia on “Right to the City”] U.N. Special Rapporteur calls for legally enforceable international right to food [UN]
- CRPD cited in Spain by group campaigning against “disability-selective abortion” [Pablo de Lora, Harvard “Bill of Health”]
- Some forms of national sovereignty OK after all? Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (DRIP) cited in Indian tribal claims [Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, Truthout] “Lakota to file UN Genocide Charges Against US, South Dakota” [Jeff Armstrong, CounterPunch]
- “N.Y. state appeals ruling opens courthouse door to foreign victims” [Alison Frankel] First post-Kiobel ATS case smacks down plaintiffs on South Africa claims [Julian Ku/Opinio Juris, Fed Soc Blog]
- Panel from Cato’s Constitution Day includes Kenneth Anderson discussing his excellent article on Kiobel in the Cato Supreme Court Review; also includes presentations by Ilya Somin on property rights and Andrew Grossman on City of Arlington, with Roger Pilon moderating [Cato video, podcast]
Genealogy note
On Hallowe’en I often recall my ancestor Lydia Gilbert of Windsor, Ct., convicted of witchcraft in 1654 and probably executed (accounts here, here). Three years earlier Henry Stiles had been killed by an apparently accidental discharge of the firearm of neighbor Thomas Allyn, and three years later Lydia was charged with being the true cause of this misadventure. In modern American law we might call that third-party liability. And from a few years ago, a durable favorite post: “Toronto schools: Halloween insensitive to witches.”
NYC bureaucracy and the expediter culture
Businesses in New York that permits from City Hall — which at one time or another is likely to be most of them — commonly pay thousands of dollars for “expediters” to navigate municipal departments for them. That this system continues even after years of putatively pro-business, modernizing administration by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, says Ira Stoll, is “outrageous.” [Future of Capitalism]
“An epidemic of lifestyle moralism”
Christopher Snowdon on Britain’s hypertrophy of public health [Spiked Online]:
…[“Public health”] once meant vaccinations, sanitation and education. It was ‘public’ only in the sense that it protected people from contagious diseases carried by others. Today, it means protecting people from themselves. The word ‘epidemic’ has also been divorced from its meaning – an outbreak of infectious disease – and is instead used to describe endemic behaviour such as drinking, or non-contagious diseases such as cancer, or physical conditions such as obesity which are neither diseases nor activities. This switch from literal meanings to poetic metaphors helps to maintain the conceit that governments have the same rights and responsibility to police the habits of its citizens as they do to ensure that drinking water is uncontaminated. …
Once again, all it took was a change in terminology. A ‘binge-drinker’ had traditionally been someone who went on a session lasting several days. Now it means anyone who consumes more than three drinks in an evening. … Today, if you are gripped by an urge to eradicate some bad habit or other, you no longer have to make a nuisance of yourself knocking door-to-door or waving a placard in some dismal town square. You can instead find yourself a job in the vast network of publicly funded health groups and transform yourself from crank to ‘advocate’. … Although ‘public health’ is still popularly viewed as a wing of the medical profession, its enormous funding and prestige has attracted countless individuals whose lack of medical qualifications is compensated by their thirst for social change.
“Sin” taxes? “Fines for living in a way that displeases a purse-lipped elite.” For persons who are going to live well into old age in any event, the question is not so much “preventing” one eventual cause of death as swapping one for another, perhaps more troublesome cause. And always, always the moralizing:
It can scarcely be coincidence that the main targets of the public-health movement are the same vices of sloth, gluttony, smoking and drinking that have preoccupied moralists, evangelists and puritans since time immemorial. HL Mencken long ago described public health as ‘the corruption of medicine by morality’.
Whole thing here.