Resurrecting the Granary of Rome

It was such a good book title, I had to use it as a post title (link).

Although this isn't what I would normally consider "my" kind of book, I'm glad I picked it up. Mainly, the initial appeal was that I went to high school with the author, though I can't claim to have known her well.

The book has a certain amount of resonance with me, having just completed Tim Egan's The Worst Hard Times, a book about farmers in the Dust Bowl. Diana's [ahem] Dr. Davis' thesis in RtGoR is that the French colonists created a narrative in which Algeria was once a vast green sea of forests and grain, but that the nomads (read: barbaric Arabs) had ruined it with their primitive farming and especially herding methods. This "declensionist narrative" was used to justify the obvious outcome: the French were morally obligated to re-civilise Algeria and restore the region to its former glory.

The trouble was that it wasn't true.

There were three topics in the book that intrigued me. The first was the discussion of various types of property recognized by the indigenous Algerians, including communal property used to rotate grazing animals to allow for leaving some land fallow. The second was the interrelationship between deforestation and dessicationist [1] theories that instructed 19th century environmentalism and their foundation in Christian mythology. The third was the idea of environmentalism as social control.

The first is interesting to me as an example of alternative social organization. Davis describes briefly the concepts of melk, achaba, habous, and arsh [2]. The first is private property, the second is a "pasture contract" exchanging grazing rights for labor, and the third is land reserved for religious insttitutions. The fourth, the idea of communal property (mostly pasture but some cultivation) is curious: if the system is stable, it challenges my notions of the sustainability of commons found in narratives such as this description of the pilgrims' attempts to establish communal agriculture. Perhaps the tragedy is not as inevitable as Hardin would have us believe. Under some circumstances -- perhaps only those of small, nomadic, strictly religious tribes -- communal property may be sustainable and productive.

The second theme is interesting to me because of an embarrassing moment I suffered shortly after university. I had a friend there who was into environmental issues, and he preached that North America had once been entirely covered in forest [3]. I remember the look of bemused disbelief when I professed this at work one day, and realized how silly it was. It is one of the most striking memories I have about how I had acquired what I thought was knowledge, only to discover that it was pseudo-knowledge I had bought hook, line, and sinker based on no more than the strength of conviction of the source. On another occasion, I ran into a co-worker who believed that England had recently been completely barren of forests, the mirror image of my error. It would have been awfully difficult to build half-timbered houses, hide in the Sherwood forest, build pipes out of wood [4], build the world's most fearsome navy in the 19th century, or any number of other things if there were no trees on the island.

Indeed, both ideas are born of the same myth, the idea that the world was once covered in forests (Eden), but since man's fall from grace, the forest has gradually given way to hot deserts (reminiscent of what biblical location?). Because they contribute to this decline through their use of fire as an agricultural tool, natives (Algerians, North American Indians) must be deprived of their traditional ways of life and, not incidentally, of their property. Call them reservations, cantonments, or concentration camps, nomadic peoples must be controlled, "attached" to the land, and turned into farmers if possible and imprisoned if not. In Algeria, they also forced them to use money by forcing them to pay taxes in cash rather than in kind. Having deprived them of their traditional, nomadic, pastoral ways, and having also forced them out of barter and into the cash system, many had no choice but to enter the workforce as a laborer for the new French masters. That is my synopsis of Davis' thesis on environmentalism as social control; I related similar arguments earlier under this post.

The parallels between those conservation-as-state-expansion efforts and the intent of modern Global Warming enthusiasts are too obvious to overlook. Of course environmentalism is about social control. Although there are thoughtful believers who would like to see genuine threats to our future existence mitigated, there are others who latch onto any fad as a means of advancing state power. Sometimes called "watermelons" -- Green on the outside, Red on the inside -- such people move from one cause to another in hopes of finding the magic lever for bringing about a technocratic utopia. It seems to escape their notice that their causes are frequently the cover story for the simultaneous expansion of state-capitalism (which Davis rightly identifies by its simpler name, capitalism). Algeria went from a land of traditional herding and farming to a colony of small farmers to a corporation-dominated extension of France. Likewise, the American Plains transitioned from the land of the buffalo to a land of small land-grant farmers to ADM's central production facility. Both changes happened under cover of conservationist narratives - as it happens, those providing moral cover with a Christian-fall-from-Eden myth were almost literally Baptists to the corporate-colonial Bootleggers.

This revisionist history seems to me to be a great companion to recent responses to Jared Diamond's version of the Rapa Nui myth. Diamond claimed that the decline of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) was due to stupid and greedy human tendencies to destroy their own environment. In his version, they cut down all of their trees in a fit of one-upsmanship, with devastating consequences. The revisionists are finding two alternatives to the story: one is that rats caused the deforestation and that there was no long period of stability followed by collapse. Of course, the rats probably arrived at the island with the natives, but at least the humans intentional actions are off the hook. A second version (pdf) points out that the first Europeans verified trees on the island, were greeted by natives bearing palm leaves, and saw natives living in palm-thatched huts. Shortly after their arrival, the trees disappeared and the natives went into decline; Benny Peiser argues that this was no coincidence. His version, sometimes called The Rape of Rapa Nui, is a direct, though compressed, version of the Algerian story.




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[1] Despite Dr. Davis' dissection of the dessicationist theory, I am under the impression that recent research has indeed shown a relationship between deforestation in the Amazon and decreasing rainfall. Without pulling up lots of research and trying to figure out which findings are most reliable, all I can do is point out that (a) her reference was old (though she cited more recent research on the dessicationist narrative, I think the only physical science paper cited in refutation of the dessicationist theory was from 1982), and (b) her argument still seems correct. That is, I don't believe that the nomads destroyed so much vegetation that they created the Sahara; it seems rather more likely that they adapted to an existing fact. In a future edition, I would like to see her present and then answer stronger versions of the dessicationist theory.

[2] She also notes beylick and mokhzen, properties of the Ottoman state, and muwat, unproductive land that could be cleared, cultivated, and claimed.

[3] It's still a tempting myth given misleading maps like these - what does "virgin" mean? A recent National Geographic described in detail the number of modifications the natives had been making to their environment before the European arrival. The map creators are either unaware of natives' use of fire or unconcerned by it. The latter is consistent with the Noble Savage myth. It is perhaps notable that Rousseau was a popularizer of the myth, and Frenchmen would have been familiar with it even as they conquered the savages in Algeria. In fact, could this explain why they favored the sedate Berbers over the nomadic Arabs?

[4] This is a reference to something I recall reading in T. S. Ashton in which the poor were supposedly confined to neighborhoods where greedy developers couldn't even be bothered to use iron pipe. Ashton found that developers' greed wasn't the problem. It seemed that the neighborhoods in question had been built in the early 19th century, when England was busy fighting someone named Bonaparte. Iron was scarce and expensive, so the inhabitant-builders used wood for their own sewer pipes.

[5] As I noted in the review of Egan's book, Roosevelt's pet conservation method was to introduce forests to the Plains. Not only did that not work, but it made things worse as the trees soaked up what little groundwater there was. The Algerian experience was similar: in the 1870s, Francois Trottier tried to introduce eucalyptus trees throughout the country. The trees interfered with natural springs and soon enough they were removed and forgotten. The first repetition is tragedy, the second is farce.

Whoops, so sorry

From EconoSpeak:

Thomas A. Debrowski is Mattel's executive vice president for worldwide operations. After a meeting with Chinese product safety chief Li Changjiang, Mr. Debrowski decided his company should take a lot of the responsibility for the recent product recalls:

"Our reputation has been damaged lately by these recalls," Debrowski told Li in
a meeting at Li's office at which reporters were allowed to be present. " And Mattel takes full responsibility for these recalls and apologizes personally to you, the Chinese people, and all of our customers who received the toys," Debrowski said … The recalls have prompted complaints from China that manufacturers were being blamed for design faults introduced by Mattel. On Friday, Debrowski acknowledged that "vast majority of those products that were recalled were the result of a design flaw in Mattel's design, not through a manufacturing flaw in China's manufacturers." Lead-tainted toys accounted for only a small percentage of all toys recalled, he said, adding that: "We understand and appreciate deeply the issues that this has caused for the reputation of Chinese manufacturers." In a statement issued by the company, Mattel said its lead-related recalls were "overly inclusive, including toys that may not have had lead in paint in excess of the U.S. standards. [emphasis added]

Seems a little late, doesn't it? After all, one Chinese executive was found hanged [1] after a resulting export ban. The original lead paint problem was discovered by a "European retailer ", and subsequent problems were discovered by Mattel themselves. Of course, following this, the Consumer Product Safety Commission jumped in on the act -- I'm sorry, what value did they add to the process?

But American companies are using the resulting furor to full advantage as they push for import restrictions, something that plays well to the Lou Dobbs nativists, the anti-globalization left, and ... corporations who still have some domestic production. Domestic food producers, for example, as reported by the WSJ (Food Makers Get Appetite for Regulation):

The Grocery Manufacturers Association, the industry's largest trade group, tomorrow will unveil a proposal to beef up federal oversight of imported food and ingredients. Under a public-private partnership, the system would require the industry to adopt food-safety measures such as product tests and checks on foreign suppliers. [emphasis added]

So, they're in favor of regulation, but not of everyone, just of foreign suppliers. Wow, what do you call it when the Baptists are the Bootleggers? And what does it mean when the CPSC aids in the China-bashing?


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[1] Given the way the Chinese treat executives making high level mistakes, I think it's important to distinguish between "hanged himself" and "was found hanged".

Rationalizing the Oldest Industry by Force

Alfred Chandler's best known book, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, describes the shift from the atomistic, entrepreneurial market described by Adam Smith to the modern economy dominated by small groups of integrated, managed firms. The references to the apparel industry can be summarized briefly since apparel is not one of the industries that became rationalized in the way he describes.

The first industrial use of non-animal energy was the water-powered automatic loom developed in England in the late 18th century and brought to New England in the early 19th century. This led to a concentration of the textile industry around water sources. There was only a slight shift in the industry when anthracite coal arrived and steam-drive replaced stream-drive.

The coal-fueled energy revolution led to the railroads becoming next big industry, not because they were using it but because they were hauling it (coal-driven locomotives didn't become widely used until the last quarter of the 19th century). Telegraphy followed the railroads in a symbiotic relationship that formed the foundation for what followed: use of all-weather, high-speed transportation and long distance communication to coordinate the flow of goods from production through distribution to consumers.

The next industries to rationalize were those that could either use heat, transportation, and/or communications. These included:

• metal working (steel, using coal)
• wholesale & retail (using telegraphy to coordinate, trains to streamline)
  
• meat packing (Swift's rail cars)
• oil (first railroads, then pipelines)

Aside that will become relevant later: Dry goods merchants protested the rise of the department store, then the rise of the mail order operation (like Sears). Today, they protest the rise of the Big Box Store (Wal-Mart). The small retailer, while less common than before, has survived each of these consolidations, so far.

Chandler returns to apparel later in the book while looking at the most heavily capitalized and concentrated industries. He asserts that the returns to scale and capital for apparel are very low because

[e]ssentially, the machines took the place of manual operations. A machine did a task comparable to that of a worker in spinning, weaving, sewing, cutting, and fabricating. The maximum speed of cutting or shaping wood, cloth, or textile products by machinery was quickly reached. Nor did the spinning and weaving of natural fibers or the tanning of natural leather lend itself to massive increase of throughput by a greater application of energy.

This is entirely consistent with Kathleen's point

Sewing will always be labor intensive because cut fabric pieces cannot be smelted out like metal rods. Garments cannot be cut like sheetmetal and welded by machines. Fabric is flimsy; it must be handled by hands. No amount of technology will ever change this.

So, despite being an early link between the entrepreneurial Smithian world and the managed Chandlerian world, apparel was not consolidated, streamlined, and "rationalized" when so many other goods have been.

Not content to simply make a living, some people become enamored with the idea of getting rid of the competitors who kept them from becoming fabulously wealthy. There are few mechanisms for doing so successfully. You can try undercutting them and then buying them out, but John McGee showed that was not a feasible strategy even for Rockefeller. You can try combining with them through a cartel or horizontal merger, but the former is known not to work and Chandler showed that horizontal integration also failed; you had to both vertically integrate and develop a successful management structure to make mergers work.

Gabriel Kolko has described a third alternative; get the legislature to pass legislation ostensibly designed to help the consumer but which actually serves the interests of industry (or specific groups within industry). When rate cartels failed, the railroads ultimately turned to the federal government to act as their cartelizing agent. This function was performed by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), an agency ultimately charged with responsibility for setting both maximum and minimum rates for the railroads. In time they came to serve a similar function for over-the-road trucks and served as a model for the Civil Aviation Board (CAB), which oversaw the creation of no new interstate airlines from its inception in 1938 to its demise in 1978. Meatpackers also sought protection, which they received with the help of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, the novel which aimed at Americans' hearts but managed to cover Congress' backside. Bankers also wanted protection and got it with the Federal Reserve Act, which gave them input to a quasi-public board of governors and the US Treasury.

The Kolko Thesis describes what is happening in the apparel industry today. No firms have been able to internalize the coordination of a significant portion of the industry, either from the production or the distribution end. Though not perfect, it is surprisingly atomistic given the enormous size of the world market.

If you try to produce something of superior value and charge premium prices, there is nothing preventing someone from "knocking off" an article that required no small amount of inspiration, engineering, costly fabric and accessories (buttons, zippers, doodads) to produce. Like the Red Queen who was running as fast as she could just to stay in place, you are forced to constantly innovate in order to stay ahead. That's not a very satisfying way to get rich. The other option is to produce a commodity -- t-shirts, jeans, hoodies -- on which you make pennies on every piece and try to make it up on volume. That also is not a very satisfying way to get rich. Rather than taking either of these losing paths, it looks like a group of designers has decided to enlist the state to eliminate competition by seeking patent protection for designs.

The standard argument for copyright or patent protection is that it will encourage innovation by securing to the innovator exclusive rights to the innovation long enough to extract some monopoly rents. While that is a superficially plausible argument in this case, I'd say that Kathleen's description of the outcome of HR 2033 is much more likely:

I realize that sounds like a dramatic and exaggerated claim but if this legislation passes, contractors, pattern makers and even retailers will be exposed to liability. Let's say you have this nifty design that you claim you made up all on your own, with no inspiration from anybody anywhere and you hire one of us to make it up for you and you sell it and make your pile. Then, somebody comes out of the woodwork and claims it is their design, they own it and now you owe them. Problem is, you likely don't have much money, they'll want to sue everyone in your production and retail chain. That means me, your contractor and the stores who bought your stuff. After all, we "enabled" you. So, in order to avoid exposure, any contractor, pattern maker, sales rep or store owner -in the interests of avoiding law suits or facing criminal prosecution for dealing in pirated goods- is going to require you to prove ownership of your concept before they'll have anything to do with it. Minimally, you'll have to hire a lawyer, pay for searches through a design database of all existing design registrations. I cannot even begin to imagine how long this would take. You thought a trademark or logo search was bad? I have no doubt there's over 10,000 clothing designs out there for every logo. This will cost a fortune. But, you'll have to do it. No one will take your work otherwise. And because we'll have to have our own lawyers to check up on you and draw up contracts, the prices we charge you will at least double. We operate on tiny margins. I charge $50 an hour for patterns. IP attorneys get $250+, I'll have to triple my prices just to break even. Even with proof in hand, you will have no recourse other than to produce your registered design exactly as sketched. No design changes or iterations in process are allowed, otherwise you'll have to start all over again. Forget shortening that sleeve, changing the shape of that neckline or tapering the pant leg of that prototype. So what if it ends up looking lame and you have to start all over? That's the new cost of doing business. Feeling protected yet?

But hasn't IP protection been good for those industries that use it most? Perhaps, but the temptation is to say, "Look at the cell phone industry: there seems to be no shortage of innovation there." Ah, yes, but compared to what, exactly? What does cell phone innovation look like in an atomistic, entrepreneurial economy instead of in the oligopolistic, state-capitalist economy we (and Japan and Finland and South Korea) have now? Indeed, there was lots of innovation in the industry: as Bell's original patents expired, there were something like 200 telephone companies operating in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, and Ohio alone (from Adam Thierer's "Unnatural Monopoly"), but AT&T appealed to the federal government in 1913 and had themselves set up as a protected monopoly. You might remember that we had one phone company for the next seventy years.

The cell phone market consists of a few companies (Nokia, Motorola, LG, Samsung) while apparel consists of thousands of producers and thousands of retailers. Recall that small retailers have repeatedly complained about and then survived the onslaught of department stores, then mail order houses, and now big box stores. There survival has remained possible because the small retailers can still purchase from small manufacturers. When IP protection comes along, the industry will get vertically integrated and the supply for the small retailers will dry up. The companies that secure patents first will hold something over on first their competitors. Retailers will not be able to sell something from a producer who doesn't have a copyright. There will be no more than a dozen producer/retailer companies in the end: Wal-Mart, Nike, The Gap, and Target may soon be integrated apparel retailer-producers.

But why now? IP was around 100 years ago; they were aware of it in the industry (you should see the number of patented fit systems from the 19th century). Here is my best guess at the relevant history (with help from my wife, who clearly understands this better than I and may not agree with all of what follows):

1) Regionalism: In the period in which Chandler describes the process of consolidation in many other industries (roughly 1880-1920), apparel was resistant to consolidation for a number of reasons.

• The returns to scale limited as Chandler asserts
  
• Regional weather differences - cold, wet, dry, hot, windy all require different dress schemes.
• Resistance to rail distribution for various practical reasons. You wouldn't want to get the clothing near a coal-fired steam locomotive because it would be filthy upon delivery. You also couldn't effectively fill the box cars. In the steam rail era, it would have been much better to ship stacked bolts of cloth (only the outsides would get dirty, you could fill a box car) and produce garments on site.
  
• Shipping cotton and cotton cloth had occurred since the late 18th century, but there were still regional resource differences. Wool, cotton, leather would not have been equally available everywhere.
  
• Regional preference differences based on, for example, what they did for a living. Cowboys don't dress like bankers.
• Foreign influences - Texans met different people than New Yorkers
  

2) The post-war era created several changes:

• Increased prosperity. Prior to 1950, people generally only had a limited wardrobe. More disposable income set the stage for change.
• The washing machine. Prior to the 1950s, you had to wash it all by hand. More appliances lowered the cost of ownership.
• War: The federal government became the single largest consumer of clothing both through WWII and the Cold War. This meant the government set certain design and production standards, and as the single largest consumer, the various related industries (sewing machine manufacturers, for example) followed orders (in both senses). Women started wearing pants.
• Television and the interstate highway system: Prior to that, there was more regionalism in speech, food, and clothing. The decline of those barriers through television allowed more mass distribution, and that meant shifting from catering to local tastes to catering to the lowest common denominator. The interstate system lowered the cost of trucking. Hats and dress gloves became passe.
  

3) Logos: Terry Agins' The End of Fashion describes how, as clothing all became similar, companies began to resort to logos and branding to distinguish themselves. Remember the Izod alligator?
4) Sloan Managerialism: As Bill Waddell has theorized, many manufacturing firms have been taken over by MBAs with little or no production experience and an education in an Ivy League school where they were all taught the Sloan/Dupont theory of management. Production is a cost, so keep the logo and IP, outsource the production, and rely on branding.
5) Piracy: Branding has led to the rise of piracy. If you knock off a generic piece of clothing, you make no money. Knock off a Polo shirt, you make a little less than what Ralph Lauren makes. Piracy has also proliferated as Chinese production has come onto the market.
7) Agency: Diane von Furstenburg is the new president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) and the perfect agent of change. Having achieved only one notable design success, she basically became a brand and now wants to take the concept to the next level: the corporation with the most lawyers gets to control fashion. The CFDA is pushing HR2033 with the help of several trial-lawyer-fueled congresspersons. She could be a character in an Ayn Rand novel.

Apparel manufacture is still one of the few manufacturing businesses that you can start in your garage and sustain profitably on a small scale. HR 2033 will effectively put an end to that.

Energy roundup

1) News from Green Car Congress

• Hybrid sales are continuing to climb. According to the diligent folks at Green Car Congress, hybrids accounted for 3% of cars sold in May. It's weird, almost like there's some kind of incentive, perhaps something to do with the cost of fuel? Yet, the politicians tell us, the market will fail to bring us efficient cars unless we force them to do it via CAFE and hybrid subsidies. Hybrid subsidies might be a factor in their popularity, except that Toyota doesn't seem to be seeing much drop in demand after they hit the magic number that shuts off the subsidy every year.
• In another GCC article, we find that Honda is discontinuing the Accord hybrid. Apparently, "hybrid" does not equal "slam dunk". The Civic Hybrid works, the Accord Hybrid does not. Apparently, consumers haven't gone completely irrational over the "sexiness" of hybrids.
• Honda, Mercedes, and Bosch are exploring diesel-electric hybrids. Apparently they believe there may be a market in 70 mpg vehicles that can run on vegetable oil.
  

2) An NPR article on plug-in hybrids titled, "Corporations push Congress on Climate Policy" makes some fantastic-sounding claims:

A company called A123 Systems invented the battery pack. Les Goldman is the lawyer hired by the company to represent it in Washington. He has been bringing the Prius up to Capitol Hill, singing its praises to senators and staffers. He tells them it gets 100 to 170 miles per gallon — "and that includes charging the battery every 40 miles or so. And one charge, which takes about four hours, will cost you at the electricity rates in the Washington metropolitan area, at night at about 55 or 60 cents."

What A123 Systems wants is a tax break, not for itself, but for consumers. A decade ago, Congress approved tax credits worth up to $2,000, for buyers of new hybrids. It helped dealers sell thousands of the high-mileage cars. Now, Goldman asks the senators, why not do the same thing for these new battery packs?

Now, I assume you caught the fact that they want it for their consumers, not themselves, right? So they selflessly hired a lobbyist to point out that tax breaks helped Toyota sell "thousands of high-mileage cars". At no point does the reporter stop and ask if rising fuel prices were behind that increase rather than the tax breaks, nor does the reporter point out that A123 might perhaps benefit from those increased sales.

But let's go beyond that. Assuming the following:

• Approximately 65% of electricity energy is lost in transmission (see this great graphic). Thus, for each kW-h consumed, 3 must be generated.
• 1 kW-h of electricity is 3,600,000 Joules (3.6 MJ)
• A gallon of gasoline contains 132 MJ of energy
• Electricity costs about $0.10 per kW-h, so $0.55 to $0.60 worth of electricity is about 5.5 to 6.0 kW-h
  

That means that the plug-in hybrid is getting 40 miles per 5.5 kW-h or 40 miles per (5.5*3.6 MJ) = 2.02 miles/MJ. Inverting that, I get .495 MJ/mile, but that is for energy consumed, not energy generated. By multiplying by 3, I find that the vehicle used about 1.485 MJ of energy generated per mile. By inverting that number and multiplying by the 132 MJ/gallon of gas, I can calculate an equivalent mpg. The electricity is giving an equivalent of 267 miles per gallon for energy consumed, but about 89 mpg equivalent of energy generated because of transmission losses. Not bad.

It is also using gasoline at the rate of 170 miles per gallon. Using the higher figure, that's 170 miles per 132 MJ, or about .776 MJ/mile, roughly half the energy required to go one mile with electricity when accounting for transmission loss.

So for every mile it goes, it's consuming about .495 MJ of electricity used or 1.485 MJ of electricity generated and .776 MJ of gasoline. By adding those, I get the total average energy usage per mile. The combined efficiency -- accounting for transmission loss -- is about 58.5 mpg. That's not much more significant that what I can get in my car (50 mpg on the last tank).

Also, gasoline at $3.5/gallon is equal to $0.095 per kW-hr, or slightly cheaper than what I am using for the cost of electricity (diesel currently happens to be a much better deal at $2.70/gal).

So, instead of serving as a panacea, plug-in hybrids shift the fuel from oil to coal, natural gas, or nuclear, and shift the costs from your cheaper gasoline bill to your slightly more expensive electricity bill. Coal is reputed to be dirtier; it also happens to be burned somewhere other than in your own neighborhood. As you might guess, electric companies are behind some of these efforts to promote plug-ins.

Of course, if you were to install a wind or solar generator at the house, the electricity would be "free", but then again the sun and the wind usually aren't very effective at night when the car is parked. And, as I noted near the end of this article, some people are trying to get something for nothing by plugging their electric vehicles in at work. So here are two predictions/suggestions of what we may see in the next few years if fuel prices stay this high:

• Employers providing charging stations at worksite parking areas for charging employees' plug-ins. Install solar panels on the shelters and you increase your "green cred" while simultaneously providing shaded parking and "free" recharging. Sell extra power back to the grid (net metering) and make that unused space pay its own rent.
• Coin-op meters at large parking facilities for car charging. The coin-op serves as both parking fee and recharge fee. It would be nice if they would allow debit/credit/Paypal transactions, too.
  

3) Regarding the previous post on the news that Congress is considering a measure to block states from enacting more stringent measures: this poses a tactical problem for a decentralist. On the one hand, I'm against turning over all decision-making to a large and growing central decision-making bureaucracy and would much rather see local communities working to preserve their environment. On the other hand, opposing the federal/national Leviathan means protecting the paternalist busybody living next door. It puts you in the position of fighting for local decision-making, and then fighting against those decisions. Geez, I guess that's what Jefferson meant by, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." But at least I can meet my neighbors and reason through these issues. And when locals make decisions that help some and harm others, they know the score and can compensate them on the next go-round; when large nations make decisions, the far-flung citizens have little idea who is harmed or benefited, so they will remorselessly slam the same scapegoats in every round.

4) Department of Duh: The Worldwatch Institute claims that photovoltaic (PV) costs are set to decline 40% by 2010. Until just recently, as I noted back in July 2006, PV costs were rising. My guess is that consumer demand driven by both high fuel prices and worldwide government subsidization was driving the trend. Since then, the rise seems to have flattened out and even tipped the other way. If the WI predictions are correct, then Julian Simon should be calling WI founder and perpetual Malthusian doomsayer Lester Brown from the grave to say, "See? Told you so."

40% is a substantial reduction. As I noted in this post, PV is only economical under certain circumstances, but a 40% drop in prices certainly opens that up.

So why "duh"?

Well, if you know that the price is set to drop 40% in the next three years, why would you buy now? And if it is set to drop due to market supply and demand factors (which is arguable, see below), then why would you subsidize it? In fact, if many people would defer planned purchases just a little while, the over-production would create an inventory problem and drive prices down even faster.

Note from the WI report that the primary driver behind the supply increase is the money pouring into China from capital markets. Are they investing because they all believe in Peak Oil, in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, or in capturing some rents through programs like California's Million Solar Homes? If the latter, can this really be said to be a drop "due to market supply and demand factors"?

"Well, no matter" say the Big Government Greens, "whatever it takes to get there. As long as we get to screw Big Oil in the process."

How do you suppose Big Oil got that way? Hint: Among the biggest sellers of solar panels are little mom & pop companies like Shell and BP. Baptist, meet thy Bootlegger.

Running on glue and tar

My wife and I have been discussing where the world is going to go in the post-Peak Oil era. I for one am optimistic, but concerned about the transitional period. I think that we (humanity) will develop a variety of responses to the problem(s), and that we will be better off in the end, but I am concerned about the rate at which the transition will occur. There may be upheaval and pain in the interim, regardless of who is in the White House or what policies we follow to get there.

In the comments on Matthew Yglesias recent post on gouging, we see a response to higher fuel prices that I think is indicative of lazy, uncreative thinking. Simply keep piling on one supposed remedy after another. This is creative thinking in much the same way that fixing your mistakes after rushing through a job is productive work. (for my previous thoughts on gouging, see here, here, and here).

Some things seem to escape the attention of people who think like this. For example, the crimes committed by a gas station owner can be determined by looking at his prices compared to his competitors' as follows:

• higher: gouging
• lower: predatory intent
• equal: collusion

In this environment, it might be worthwhile to keep a lawyer on staff, nicht war? And since the laws are subject to change, a lobbyist might be useful. If everyone has to have lawyers and lobbyists, that creates a competitive advantage for larger businesses. I think I can assume that people who are against gouging are also against large businesses, so why don't they understand or acknowledge these problems?

---------------------------------

Then, I was reading about heterodoxy, Cowen, and Veblen, looked up Veblen, got side-tracked by Giffen Goods, and finally came across an essay in The Nation by Sasha Abramsky entitled, "Running on Fumes". He raises the idea that gasoline is a Giffen Good, one that poorer people will come to spend more on even as its price rises because they are locked into it.

Sasha says,

Indeed, the very fact that some commentators, such as the Cato Institute's Jerry Taylor, so glibly assume (or, at least, assumed pre-Katrina) that an oil price shock can be painlessly absorbed shows just how invisible the country's poor have become to much of its pundit class.

Since Taylor's offending comments are neither quoted nor referenced, I can only guess that Taylor said something like, "let the price mechanism work" in response to calls for price controls. The month prior to Abramsky's piece, Taylor wrote about fuel prices in NRO. I would recommend reading both before proceeding with the rest of this post.

Back?

It is of course debatable whether the price mechanism will work well with regards to energy. In the comments on James Hamilton's Peak Oil in America post, Stuart Staniford claims that recent empirical research indicates a short-term price elasticity of -0.05. An older survey indicates that the long term price elasticity is around -0.8 and the short term is around -0.2. In any case, this is for a general population, not the poor, so it is only indirectly relevant to the point. If these two articles can be taken as accurate, the indicated decrease in elasticity (magnitude) indicates that it will be harder to curtail gasoline use as price goes up than it was in 1979-1983; I would assume that it would be harder for the driving poor, but perhaps not so much for the urban poor who have access to other options. (I graph oil use vs. oil price here, but have not updated it since October 2005. Note how much reduction was achieved 1979-1983.)

Near his conclusion, Mr. Abramsky claims that the decline of the rural area about which he is writing is preventable, but

prevention involves the sort of innovation the Bush Administration, besotted as it is with laissez-faire triumphalism (not to mention oil-industry campaign cash), has been reluctant to embrace.

Did you just experience a self-administered lacto-nasal enema upon reading -- in a single sentence -- that the Bush Administration favors laissez-faire policies and that laissez-faire and oil-industry campaign cash are not mutually exclusive?

Indeed, this seems to be common in discussions of gouging, Peak Oil, current pricing, and related issues. Are Mr. Abramsky and the commenters on Matthew Yglesias' blog really claiming that the oil industry enjoys laissez-faire trade policy? That seems so absurd on its face that I cannot believe it needs rebuttal.

The oil industry came of age in the Progressive Era. Oil production had steadily increased and prices decreased for the entire history of the industry through the antitrust prosecution of Standard Oil. As the automobile caught on and demand heated up, Progressives were excited to be able to subsidize a competitor to railroads. Then, as the US got involved in World War I, businessmen eager to be freed from antitrust regulation jumped at the invitation to participate in the Commodities Section of the Petroleum War Services Committee and the Oil Division of the United States Fuel Administration. Dominick Armentano points out in Antitrust and Monopoly, that A. C. Bedford, president of Standard Oil of New Jersey, was appointed as chairman of the War Services Committee. Their experience of cooperation and "supervised competition", and the concurrent worldwide embrace of central planning (think about what was happening in Russia, Germany, Italy, and even England in the period between wars), paved the way to the corporative-creating National Industrial Recovery Act. When that was struck down, the Connally Hot Oil Act of 1935 was passed without hearings to maintain stability in the oil industry. It allocated state production quotas and provided a means to enforce restrictions on interstate transshipment in excess of those quotas.

The military has been tied in to oil production or at least the Middle East arguably since Eisenhower placed troops in Lebanon in 1958 and Kennedy defended Saudi interests in 1963. More recently, in 1980 Jimmy Carter announced the Carter Doctrine, stating that the US would defend its oil interests there. You have the obvious Bush wars since then, with Clinton lobbing a few bombs and establishing bases in Saudi Arabia in between.

In addition to regulatory and military support, we also have regulatory intervention and distortion. As James Hamilton has pointed out, one reason for the increase in gas prices during the tight markets in 2005 was the fact that the national market is segmented by EPA requirements and refineries cannot easily switch between the various boutique fuels favored by - you guessed it - Mr. Abramsky's fellow travelers. Finally, we have people who insist that we need to increase gas taxes so that we, like Eurotopia, will have gasoline prices near $10 per gallon.

Any guesses as to whether The Nation favors those higher fuel prices? I searched for "carbon tax" on their site and got 78 hits; the first one says, "A carbon tax would be simple --" The author goes on to add that

And as Charles Komanoff of the Carbon Tax Center argues, at least part of the proceeds of the tax could be rebated to poor and middle-income households through the income tax system, neutralizing any inequities. The unrebated balance could be used to subsidize alternative energy research and production. Given the historical successes of government funding of basic research in computing and medicine, there's every reason to believe the products of this work would be very promising.

Another two-fer: not only do we learn that the simple tax now has lots of other little simple ancillaries, like using the simple income tax system to rebate for gas, but we also discover that the government's funding of basic research has a proven track record. They don't explain exactly how we figure out the difference in rebates between subway-riding New Yorkers and rural Californians, so perhaps it is not as simple as they first insist. Nor do they actually compare the government's track record in conducting research to anything else, like privately funded applied research. Now, I think it's possible that government gives the private sector a good run in basic research, but recall that the human genome was first decoded by a private company in 1/10 the time and budget as that proposed by a government agency. But the private sector is much better at applied research, which is what was meant by "subsidize alternative energy research and production." So they call for applied research based on the government's track record in basic research? Nice sleight of hand.

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A greater protest must be registered over Mr. Abramsky's nearly complete silence on the century of other Progressive policies that have pushed the poor out of town and into the oil-based lifestyle. Once again, we can refer to Gabriel Kolko's Railroads and Regulation and The Triumph of Conservatism for an understanding of the politics underlying regulation in the Progressive Era. The tongue-in-cheek, short version is that competition was largely working for everyone except the capitalists themselves. Competition was forcing costs down so far that they were all headed for bankruptcy, so they tried cooperative arrangements. When those failed, they turned to the federal government to act as the cartelizing agent. Though Kolko doesn't specifically address it, it is easy to see that the electric power industry faced the same logic of high capital costs, low marginal production costs, and the resulting expansion, competition, system building, bankruptcy, and "need" for regulatory intervention. This eliminated the "destructive competition" in rails & utilities by constraining competition and innovation. The whole point of regulatory oversight was not consumer protection, as the unsophisticated, narcissistic state-worshipper would have you think, but rather stabilization for the industries so they could go back to peace, quiet, and regular dividends. That is why deregulation and people like Craig McCaw and Michael Milken were so upsetting to AT&T in the 1970s and 1980s, and why electric utilities are so resistant to deregulation today.

The same public who first wanted to give land grants and rights of way to railroads and canals in order to get rid of private turnpikes, and then wanted to constrain railroads because the average voter didn't understand the logic of the capital-intensive industry they had spawned, and now didn't like the fact that their regulations created a de jure cartel, wanted roads. They joined the Good Roads movement and fought for public subsidies for bicycles and then cars. When Louis Brandeis brought Harrington Emerson to the stand in the 1910 Eastern Freight Rate Cases to argue that every industry could be rationalized with and every consumer benefited by Taylor's Scientific Management, the public caught the bug for the Efficiency Movement and Technocracy Movement. They wanted to centrally manage everything. The goal was, as Herbert Croly put it, to produce "Jeffersonian ends with Hamiltonian means".

As outlined above, the Progressives in WWI and FDR's cabinet in the Depression and WWII supported a state-industrial oil policy to further rationalize oil production and distribution. In conjunction with the Good Roads and subsidization of the automobile (which gave rise to the Golden Age of manufacture and its corresponding anomie and unionism which many Progressives yearn for), the stage was set for moving out of high density urban areas and to the suburbs.

The push to suburbia has also been helped over the years with some uniquely Progressive policies. Rent control in New York City, for example (I once read that poverty-stricken Walter Cronkite lives in a rent-controlled building). The aforementioned utility subsidization, including the TVA and REA, which replaced farmer-owned windmills with investor-owner utilities. More recently, to "preserve their character" (a euphemism for "preserve their property values"), many cities (bastions of Right Wingerdom, like San Francisco) have banned urban development, forcing people out of town to find affordable housing. To pay for a wide variety of programs, some of which used to be privately provided by the working classes for themselves, cities have raised property and sales taxes (Santa Fe, for example: there's a reason you need to make $10/hour to live there, and it mostly has to do with California millionaires moving into the City Different; most of them are not exactly Goldwater Republicans). While the upper and middle classes were leaving the city to live in clean, quiet neighborhoods, these policies were all pushing the poor even further out of town.

In the specific case Mr. Abramsky addresses in his essay, the size of those towns probably needs to be smaller. They were dependent on mineral extraction and timber, both repeatedly attacked by people like Mr. Abramsky, but probably not by Jerry Taylor. Indeed, it's probably a safe bet that when people like Jerry Taylor raised the issue about the impact of stopping resource extraction on the workers, people like Mr. Abramsky glibly dismissed it, saying that the economy could easily absorb the jobs lost. But I will go further than either of them and point out something both should agree to (if they want to be logically consistent with their probable core values): continuing to live in a non-agricultural rural area is inherently energy intensive, and we should not continue to subsidize it if we really think Peak Oil is a concern.

I recently came across a site (probably something on Gristmill dealing with global warming) that claimed all of the skeptics of (Kyoto?) never provide any suggested solutions of their own. Does Mr. Abramsky offer a suggested solution for the poor people he exploits for his article? He offers a vague mention of mass transit, a system that works well in high density areas like Europe and the Northeast Corridor, but probably not in Northern California. He seems to imply that George Bush is personally responsible for the lack of mass transit despite the fact that ridership is higher than it was under Clinton.

Abramsky makes a quick offer to help them pay for oil, thus furthering the addiction that has them in this situation in the first place, and contributing to a 150 year legacy of trapping people in a state-underwritten prison. The latest insult in that legacy has been the ethanol subsidy, a Carter-era program with bipartisan support for all the wrong reasons: it reduces imports, it supports "family farmers", and it is "renewable". First used to replace lead (Pb) and reduce pollution, it actually increases certain types of pollution. The subsidies for "family" corn farmers mostly end up in the pockets of ADM. And the renewability, touted by Progressives, is having growing implications for poor people. As I noted in my review of Joshua Tickell's From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank, "Some bio-cheerleaders ... claim that a large scale shift to biofuels won't affect food prices, but that is almost certainly wrong. The amount of land required to make a dent into our petro-fuel usage would easily require both the fallow fields and some land currently used for food production. Demand up, price up, QED." Given recent headlines, I'm going to claim prescience, but I think every clear-headed person could figure this out on their own. Even Noam Chomsky figured it out in hindsight.

Finally, Abramsky also mentions the possibility of subsidizing efficient vehicles, something that has been going on for several years with mixed results*. In other words, we get some paeans to Progressive programs and a demonstration of how much good Mr. Abramsky can do with other people's money to prove that he cares. Some of his explanations are wrong, some suggested solutions are demonstrable failures, and one at least will probably make things worse (subsidizing oil? Really?!). At no time does Abramsky recognize or even seem to be aware of the contribution of his intellectual predecessors to the creation of the problems of today's poor. Instead, he turns the tables, claiming that those problems were caused by people like Jerry Taylor and policies like laissez faire and implying that anyone who doesn't accept his vaguely defined solutions is responsible for the misery and possibly death of the poor. "Laissez faire means you don't care."

Now, Mr. Abramsky is correct to question the effect on the poor, but he has come to exactly the wrong conclusion. His essay is nothing but rhetorical sleight of hand intended to impugn Jerry Taylor and anyone who dares suggest that the price mechanism is a better mechanism than any other so far identified to coordinate oil supply with oil demand. Mr. Abramsky is like George Washington's doctors who kept letting his blood, and upon remarking how sick he appeared -- probably the result of too much blood letting -- tried more blood letting.

Note that I did not say the price mechanism is the best means. Again, thinking negatively (what is that? perhaps not what you think), there may be a solution of which I have not heard yet, but until then the price mechanism is the least worst solution. Price controls are predicted by theory to create shortages, and the theory is confirmed by empirical data. A shorthand way of explaining this is the gas lines in the 70s and in Baghdad today. Surely, if the poor need gasoline, then some at high prices is better than none at any price? Ridiculing the least worst answer, or insulting the person who acknowledges it, is like accusing your doctor of murder for informing you that you will inevitably die.

Furthermore, Mr. Abramsky never seriously looks at the total effect of the price mechanism. It not only curtails demand, but it stimulates supply. Note the implications of this chart in The Economist, from the article "Venture Capitals". Furthermore, note an idea from this episode of Nova: "If you look at companies, like SunEdison, who are helping retailers put up solar panels on their roofs, you're suddenly seeing a linkage of the capital markets -- which have traditionally been very reluctant to get into solar energy -- with the retail sector. That's how you do things in America. You link the technology to the capital, and that's where the rubber hits the road." In America, the capital markets respond to a problem, while in other countries, the politicians respond. The former have to spend their own or their clients' money and are held accountable, the latter not so much.

"So what", you might say, "I don't care who produces the solution, so long as there is one. And so long as it benefits the least well off."

Well, here's so what. I'm vaguely familiar with the theory of functionalism. It says that institutions exist because a society needs them; institutions serve a purpose, a function. When I first heard of it, I immediately thought that it seems circular and lacks a mechanism to describe change; this appears to be an ongoing criticism of the theory. In any case, proponents of this theory use it to justify the existence of government agencies: obviously we must need them if they exist. If you evil bastard libertarians abolish some of those agencies, people will suffer.

That is true as far as it goes. It doesn't go far enough, though. There are two problems with it.

First, I have always believed that there are two problems faced by people who desire change: one is describing a desirable and reasonably realistic future. That is what I like about Kirkpatrick Sale. The second is to describe the path, how to get from here to there. The problem with simply saying "abolish such-and-such program" is that it doesn't describe what we reasonably expect to replace the functionality of that program or how the private institution that replaces the program will spontaneously evolve. For one thing, we don't know what it will look like or how it will evolve: if we did, we'd be in favor of planning. For another, "spontaneous" does not mean "instantaneous", and "evolve" does not mean "appear out of thin air".** So they are right to think that people would suffer if all we were saying is "abolish such-and-such", but we aren't: we are saying, "abolish such-and-such and allow some time for a better solution to evolve." Clearly, though, we need to do a better job of understanding and then explaining how institutions evolve.

The second problem with the functionalist-statist analysis is that it is usually based on an ignorance of history. Remember, if the existence of an institution implies a need for it, what answered that need before the government agency? This is a problem with the change mechanism in functionalism - if the agency sprung from nothingness, either the need must not have existed before, or the agency didn't spring from nothingness. So how does functionalism account for how or why would such a change occur? No answer seems to be forthcoming (but I admittedly have only a kindergartener's view of functionalism). In many cases, though, the solution to the riddle is that a private institution answered the need until it was co-opted by the government. As David Beito has documented, that was the case with much social insurance. The victor (the government) also gets to write the history and teach it in the schools it owns, so few people know about institutional arrangements that probably haven't existed for generations.

Let me bring this full circle.

Sasha Abramsky and others are claiming that laissez faire is not the answer to the problems posed by high gasoline prices for poor people, they are claiming it is the problem. I'm going to consider this patently false until someone can successfully convince me that oil policy is and has been laissez faire. Even stipulating to that claim, though, their recommended solutions of subsidizing the addiction would only prolong the problem and -- given that agencies rarely die once created -- would make the problem worse if oil prices should fall. They are refusing to face the possible fact that this area of California, like the Corps of Engineers' New Orleans, should not be as heavily populated as they were in the cheap-energy past. However, had laissez faire actually been practiced instead of the heady policy brew we have endured for the past 100+ years - regulating railroads and utilities, protecting them against innovators, encouraging suburban expansion, promoting efficiency in energy production at the expense of efficiency in distribution, reliability, and end use, then perhaps the poor people described in Mr. Abramsky's story wouldn't be locked into the lifestyle they are. People like Mr. Abramsky spent taxpayer money on the system that got them into this mess, now he has 100 ideas on how to spend more to keep them in the manner they have come to expect: poor, dependent, and hopeless. Ecologists refer to this approach of endlessly proposing the same solutions to the unintended consequences caused by an earlier round of similar interventions as "parachuting cats."

Given the power to enact their vision, they would systematically destroy every last vestige of spontaneous, private order in an effort to build community values. But such governments have a tendency to collapse of their own weight. When they do, the survivors look around and note that the community was kept together only by the fear of the increasingly necessary police state. There is no community spirit in such a place. Look at what the inhabitants of Russia have been enduring after the collapse of their system. Listen to this article on NPR about the lack of community values in Albania. No, really, listen to it. Generations of socialist theory have wiped out everything they knew about civil society. In America, de Tocqueville marveled at the Association phenomena; in Russia, people wished for their neighbors' barns to burn down.

That is why I prefer private to public institutions. I don't believe in market "magic"; too often have I been a disappointed consumer. Private solutions may not be perfect, but neither are state institutions. Too often have I also stood in DMV lines.

Cooperatives and associations are more democratic than an agency run by career bureaucrats. Furthermore, even Hirschman now acknowledges that Voice works only when Exit is a viable option. As a result, on average, private institutions are flexible and responsive and will evolve; public agencies are rigid and arrogant and will stagnate.***

Nobody resents an association they neither belong to nor pay for, even when that institution stands for something they loathe, but everyone hates paying for those parts of the government they oppose (agriculture? military?). Those who oppose democracy distrust private organizations and vote to suppress them (think Red Scare, Alien and Sedition, Palmer Raids, Radio Caracas Television). Those who genuflect to democracy cannot understand why people would vote for what they would call "undemocratic" programs and politicians. To comfort themselves, they develop theories of conspiracy, brainwashing & propaganda, or false class consciousness. They then begin to support politicians who promise to thwart those poor demented creatures, the opposition; in the end, the democrats line up to vote for the fascists, who proceed to replace private institutions with state institutions. The democrats are surprised when the anti-democrats take control of the machine and use it in surprising ways, perhaps even contrary to its original intent.

A public policy and agency require no imagination or creativity; simply - and I mean simply - propose a blunt mechanism for addressing whatever problem vexes you, then either declare victory or ask for more money and authority. The clever politician does both at once. Opponents can always be demonized as unpatriotic, asocial, and dangerous. A private institution requires work, creativity, conviction, persuasion, and innovation. It promotes civic values. Think Wikipedia, an institution created by libertarians (yes, Virginia, Jimbo Wales is one of those people). That is why I think that government is the intellectually lazy man's solution, and why it endangers the poor man whom he seeks to save.



* Yes, the Prius is great, but I get 46+ mpg with my non-hybrid. Somehow, the powers that be decided that hybrid was better than diesel, even though diesel fuel can be made easily from waste oil and renewable oil. I would argue that this is rather short-sighted, but not atypical. Also, several years ago I remember reading about the skyrocketing price of Suburbans in Arizona due to a shortage of them; apparently, the state was subsidizing a version with an alternative fuel modification (LNG or propane), but you could still run it on gasoline, so people were driving in from out of state and taking ownership of a friggin' Suburban at taxpayer expense for the purpose of saving gas. Personally, I think that if there is a role for the government here, it is to fund an E-prize as Lovins et al describe in The Oil Endgame. Remember, however, that the E-prize is named after the Ansari X-prize, a privately funded prize that has been moderately successful.

** In case you think I'm exaggerating about the strawmen used by anti-libertarians, look at what this says about libertarianism: "Libertarians believe (like Marxists believed back when there actually were Marxists) that if the government just shriveled away, a paradise would naturally spring into existence." Spring? It took hundreds of years to kill some institutions that themselves had to evolve over hundreds of years; only a fool would think they could be replaced overnight. Similarly, only a fool would think that "stroke of the pen, law of the land" equates to "problem solved". They are generally surprised to find out about "unintended consequences". Other than that, Midas' claim that things claimed by libertarians have never existed exposes the breathtaking ignorance of actual history usually found in people who read only popular history books. He could try starting with Homage to Catalonia or The Machinery of Freedom and work his way up from there.

*** Size is also important: I will take a small, decentralized public institution to a large corporation. Centralization and the distance between the top of the hierarchy and the end users or customers are also factors.

Two new cars I would like to drive

The first is, of course, the Smart car. Use the United States selection to see some interesting marketing information, especially regarding safety. Use a European country to see what models are possible (they will only be marketing a limited number of models in the US at first). I'd really like to try the 101 hp Brabus roadster. It weighs only 790 kg, and the engine weighs only 60 kg (that's about 132 pounds). That gives it Toyota MR2-like performance. I would be more interested in the regular Smart car if I lived in a big city where parking was at a premium.

The other is predominantly electric battery powered, and it has very interesting design points. Interesting, but perhaps a little too quirky. And with a top speed of 80 mph, I doubt it's an exhilarating drive. Good way to show off a technology, however. Hat tip to Kathleen for the links.

Baptists and Bootleggers, Deluxe Edition(s)

This week, the Senate is holding hearing on the activities of two lobbyists, Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon. It seems that they paid Ralph Reed, one-time leader of the Christian Coalition, to lead attacks against the Tigua Indian Tribe's Speaking Rock Casino. Once that campaign was successful, they then offered their contact with Tom Delay to get the decision reversed in exchange for campaign contributions. Got that? First they paid to have the Casino outlawed, then they got paid to get it reinstated.

The campaign to outlaw the casino could not have been won on the platform of "Make it illegal so we can peddle influence." No, they needed moral cover. Anybody know where to find a Baptist for hire? I guess they found Ralph Reed.

Could you ask for a clearer case of Baptist and Bootlegger association? As it turns out, yes you can.