Government Unfunded Pensions

Coyote Blog harps on one of my favorite issues that no one else seems to notice; unfunded pension liabilities by governments. Private company owners go to jail for shenanigans that the government routinely gets away with. The New York Times uncovered the latest fraud by a government in New Jersey. These cases are the rule, not the exception, for the public sector and nothing will be done about it until it's a full blown crisis.

I have written more on unfunded/underfunded pensions here, here, here and here.

Baseball Season

Well baseball season has begun pretty well for the Indians. Great game yesterday afternoon even though Larry Vanover's strike zone was about the size of a quarter. I'm sure the fans braving the snow and 30 degree weather really enjoyed that. I hope today's game featuring Dice-K vs. Greinke is umped a little better because I'll be there. It's going to be all of 40 degrees at game time but this is a premiere matchup that I wouldn't miss for anything.

Some thoughts and predictions at this early stage in the season. The White Sox have shown this week that they are in danger of being in more of a battle for last place than they will be in for first place. But, I don't think the Royals have the pitching to make that battle very interesting. The Tigers are going to learn how difficult it is to repeat but still may get the Wild Card in a battle between the A's, Angels and Blue Jays.

The Nationals are hands down the worst team in the league this year, it's not even really a battle. I think the Red Sox are a Schilling injury away from being irrelevant this year. The Mariners will be the least interesting and worst team in the league, not a great combination.

Are the defending champions going to come in last in the NL Central this year? I wouldn't rule it out; they're old, don't hit well, don't have a good rotation and looked to not be major league ready against the Mets. The NL Central will be as even as any division has been. I don't think any team will win less than 70 games or win more than 90 games. The team that plays the best in the division will win it. I think it will be the Brewers, Sheets was very impressive on opening day and the addition of Suppan gives them the best 1-2-3 of any team in the division although Harang, Arroyo and Bailey may be the best by year's end. I think the Pirates have a legitimate shot at beating the Cardinals this year, alas in the battle for 5th place, but Bucs fans have to enjoy the little victories.

The Phillies are the class of the National League, meaning they would win about 80 games in the AL. The Mets aren't far behind but Milledge has got to be traded for a front line starter, maybe Buerhle or Garland when the White Sox throw in the towel, because they're not going far with Oliver Perez taking the ball on a regular basis. An August rotation of Glavine, Martinez, Pelfrey, Buerhle or Garland, El Duque or Maine could give them a good chance at 100 wins. The first team to 100 wins, I think it will be the Phils.

The NL West is a mess with only San Francisco out of the hunt. I don't think Colorado or Arizona are quite ready for prime time but they will be exciting at times. San Diego and LA will battle in a blah-fest, the winner of the division will have about 88 wins.

As I wrote earlier, the A's and Angels will be competitive in the West, whoever doesn't win it will be in the Wild Card chase. I give the edge to the Angels unless the Sarge Jr. and F-Rod controversies bring them down. Hopefully, Chone Figgins will get back on the field quickly and the Angels find a way to get Brandon Wood and Erick Aybar and Kendry Morales to the major leagues, whether with the Angels or not. If those guys are playing somewhere the Angels will be better.

The AL East, wow, could it be less stellar. 25% of major league payrolls reside in this division and the most interesting team, the Devil Rays, has a low payroll. But they have the best positional talent in the division. Unfortunately, they're going to be in a lot of 9 - 8 games because they don't have any pitching. The Yankees will buy their way into a good pitching staff and they have a great lineup. I think they take this division with 95 wins and no opposition in site. The Blue Jays will come up with about 88 wins and challenge for the Wild Card. The Red Sox will be done by August when Schilling goes down and decides to become a full-time blogger. Beckett's blisters will reappear, Dice-K will be an interesting 15 game winner, Manny will be Manny and Ortiz will mash. They'll probably be pretty fun to watch, but have mid-level talent in the bullpen, Varitek is on the decline and JD Drew will suck all the fun of the '04 team out of the clubhouse. Big disappointing season on the way.

The Indians are going to win 100 and show that the Central isn't as even as believed in spring training. The Twins are going to miss Liriano and Matt Garza will have the growing pains that Santana and Liriano didn't. The Twins just don't have the pitching to compete in this division. The Tigers are going to be good, just not as good as they were in the first half of last year. The Royals are going to steal some of the White Sox's wins from last year putting them on par with the White Sox in the division.

Playoffs: Indians, Yankees, Angels, Tigers (wild card), Phillies, Brewers, Dodgers, Mets(wild card)
World Series: Indians, Mets
Champion: Indians

The day after Hell will freeze over.

Home Ownership and Unemployment

Greg Mankiw has a nice post asking whether getting rid of subsidies for home ownership would reduce natural rates of unemployment. I answer, yes, as well as say eliminating the home mortgage interest deduction would have 18 other beneficial effects.

Intellectual Welfare

Coyote blogs about another instance of the government limiting a market to protect people from themselves. Let's get this straight, people should be free to make bad decisions. Outlawing bad decisions is the opposite of freedom.

Splainations

My previous post about borderline racism inspired some comments that I wasn't engaging properly in the debate. Point taken, but it took a little bit of snark to get me back in the game so the last post wasn't entirely wasted. Anyway, Megan McArdle who started this whole debate amongst Yglesias, Drum and herself has nice post explaining her thoughts on vouchers. I'm going to riff off of these because she's mostly right, just want to clarify some differences I have with her.

1) The American educational system sucks.

I would say it sucks for the poor.

2) It particularly sucks for poor and minority kids

See my #1, I don't think middle class kids have it that bad unless they're in some rich enclave of an inner city school district with a large proportion of poor kids.

3) It has sucked in approximately the same way for at least forty years.

Mostly agree, but I think the Great Society has increased the number of unemployable therefore increases the number of kids who have no real incentive to get an education.

4) The institutional barriers to not sucking are apparently insurmountable with the current interest groups in place. 5) It is extremely segregated by class, race, and income 6) It is extremely hard to recruit and keep good teachers 7) As a result, the schools with the most attractively upper middle class parents and children get almost all of the good teachers

Right on!

8) The main reason that it is hard to get good teachers (outside of rural areas where it is hard to get good anyone to move there) is that their pay, unlike that of other union workers, is at the bottom of the distribution for their education level.

I don't think this one is true at all. Teachers are paid close to the same amount as other occupations requiring a 4 year degree, especially if you pro-rate based on the hours teachers work in a year. Coyote did a nice post about this several years back.

9) Given that the pay is at the bottom of the distribution for educated professionals, one of the primary attractions of the job is its short workyear and near-ironclad job security. Short of molesting the students or screaming racial epithets at them, it's awfully hard to get fired from a teaching position.

A lot stuffed into this item, but it is hard to get fired which screws with the incentives.

10) Jobs whose primary attraction is short hours and the difficulty of getting fired rarely attract the cream of the crop. The best teachers are either those few gifted passionate souls who want to teach, or women who are trying to match their schedule to that of their children. The latter group is shrinking; the former group has always been small.

Not much more to build on, this is a fairly minor point.

11) Any meaningful reform of the school system that actually improves them will need to pay teachers much more.

I don't agree at all with this. I think many people would teach for the amount of money paid to teachers now. The system is what decintevizes teachers (I know I just made up a word).

12) Paying the current group of teachers much more will improve their standard of living immeasurably, but will do absolutely nothing for the students.

Wholeheartedly agree.

13) Therefore, coupled with higher teacher pay must come the ability to get rid of substandard teachers.

Must be able to clear dead weight easily.

14) This is not remotely feasible within the existing system

True!

15) The programmes which have been shown to work best with disadvantaged kids are the ones that are heavily scripted, involve lots of repetition and rote learning, and otherwise make life no fun for the teacher.

I don't agree with this one, I think a market system would bring many ways of learning into the education world, some would be fun for teachers others wouldn't, but kids would be matched to a system in which they could learn.

16) These programmes are rarely implemented, implying that teaching disadvantaged kids to read and do math are somewhere well down the priority list of your average school district.

Agreed, there's no reward for innovation.

17) Monopolies are rarely responsive to their customers.

Ask me about Time Warner cable!

18) School board elections are not a particularly good way to gather feedback on school performance, but other than lawsuits, it is the single mechanism currently available to school districts. School board elections are a particularly bad way to gather feedback in very large, dysfunctional polities like cities.

This is one that slips by most folks. There is no good way to get rid of bad school policies, especially when only a minority see the harm in a particular policy (ie. no music education).

19) A school where parents may pull their children at any moment is a school that worries about pleasing parents and children.

A very important point.

20) The government cannot hand out money without making sure schools meet basic requirements, like having a building, teachers, and some students. Any voucher programme will also have to periodically test kids to ensure that they are making progress.

Here's a big disagreement between McMegan and me, parents would be the feedback mechanism for vouchers. If the school can continue to get enrollment, that school is successful. We don't need government testing to verify kids are learning in a private school.

21) This is not the same thing as imposing the same set of elaborate regulations on everything from teacher hours to eraser purchasing that currently hamstring public schools, and then complaining that voucher schools don't do any better.

Agreed, I guess.

22) Current teacher certification standards are lunatic protectionism promulgated by education schools collecting fat rents for slapping a laminate veneer of professionalism on educators. Any one I have ever met who has done a real degree, and then sat through education classes, has attested to their utter lack of useful content. We have math teachers who are very good at making posters about race, and very bad at math. The way to teach someone to teach is to give them some elementary child psychology, and then have them practice on actual children, who will illustrate the folly of listening to professors of child psychology. "Teacher standards" are the absolute last thing we should be imposing on voucher programmes. Principals are pretty good at figuring out if a teacher can teach.

The big throwdown against education programs. I agree wholeheartedly that teachers need not be certified especially only certifying teachers with a degree in Education.

23) Any voucher programme will have to offer bonuses for educating difficult kids: poor kids, kids with emotional problems, kids with learning disabilities, and so forth. Otherwise, those kids will end up stuck in a ghetto. On the other hand, if you get the pricing right, you don't need to worry about lotteries and so forth.

A lot of room for debate here, I think that Democrats could certainly sign on to this as an Affirmative Action type program, but based on factors other than race. I'm on board with different voucher amounts for troubled kids.

24) To hell with rich people: if you're in, say, the top 5-10% of the income distribution, you ought to get the same help educating your kids as my parents got, which is to say none.

Certainly a little bit of income phaseout should be included.

25) Some people will be worse off under this system. There is no change ever that leaves every single person better off. This is not a reason to avoid change.

Important point.

On the whole I agree mostly with McMegan's explanations/thoughts. I have a really difficult time with those who think that public education doesn't have room for competition or that competition can't exist.

Borderline Racism

I know it's been a while since my last post, 4 months to be exact, but I've been busy. Anyway, I'd like to thank Kevin Drum for outraging me enough to get me to figure out my Blogger sign-in and posting a quick thought.

I'm not worried much about the standards at $15,000-a-year private schools, but I am worried about the standards at storefront operations in the inner city. The prospect of massive abuse is just too great.

To rephrase:

I'm not worried much about the standards at schools for rich white people, because they know how to spend their money, but I am worried about the standards at black schools because they don't know how to spend their money, they need rich OC white guys to look out for them. The prospect of massive abuse is just too great.

Democratic Leadership

I hope this isn't a harbinger of what to expect of Democratic leadership in Congress. Matthew Yglesias wants Democrats to not take any leadership on confirming or rejecting Bob Gates (he went to my high school, I can call him Bob).

My initial read -- subject to revision as we learn more -- is that they should take advantage of the presence of some hard-core wankers in their caucus. Blocking Gates is problematic. Giving Gates a seal of approval is also problematic. So, if Webb wins, let Gates come to the floor and let him be confirmed by 49 Republicans plus some combination of Lieberman, Ben Nelson, and Dick Cheney. That way Bush gets to keep running Bush's war Bush's way on Bush's say-so and Bush gets to keep reaping the blame when things keep going poorly.

So rather than take the lead and vote the way they feel, Yglesias is promoting an avenue that allows Democrats to be unaccountable. Because Gates is almost assured of being confirmed, they take no risk by actually voting for confirmation and if Gates' Iraq strategy doesn't work, they will have no blame. If Gates comes in and does a wonderful job, they can say they voted against him because of Bush's record of nominating cabinet members. No pain either way. I don't really see how this approach could be considered working with the President.

Then there's this little piece of non-leadership from Kevin Drum before the election on Tuesday.

Golly. You mean the Democratic document didn't have a whole section about exactly which taxes Nancy Pelosi wants to raise and by exactly how much? I wonder why? Kinsley then follows up this faux bumpkinism with a complaint that the Democrats also fail to present a plan for crushing the Iraq civil war, even though he admits one sentence later that neither does anyone else. If it weren't for the 800-word limit on op-eds, I figure the next paragraph would have been a complaint that Democrats lack a plan for turning water into wine.

Once again, the Democrats are afraid to actually say how they're planning on paying for their plans. Isn't this what they've been criticizing Republicans for for 6 years?

I don't know how to feel. I'm glad the Republicans aren't in charge of Congress any more because a divided government that actually has oversight works better than one party rule. On the other hand, I disagree with just about everything the Democrats stand for on the economic side of the table and it appears they will show no leadership whatsoever. They'll just try to position themselves to win the next election, which is what the Republicans have been charged with for the past 6 years. I guess I don't get how anything really changed.

Smoking Ban and Gambling

While reading the link from Radley's post about smoking ban silliness, I came across this little piece:

The new smoking ban applies to bars that serve food and those that don't have keno licenses. Some bars have applied for keno licenses to keep their smokers happy, and a few decided to give up food instead of smoking.

The state/city is increasing it's customer base, it's not about public health, it's about more establishments getting keno licenses and increasing state/city revenue.

By the way, calling 911 to report a smoker is a dangerous activity that threatens dispatcher's ability to actually, you know, handle more important things, like immediate danger reports.

Evil Waltons

How could Wal-Mart do this to the people? The Waltons, with their $19B each should quit exploiting the people. Now 8600 more have volunteered to be exploited, with a waiting list of over 45,000.

War on Wal-Mart

The other night I watched a little of the CNBC documentary about Wal-Mart. It's a real interesting show that explains their culture and processes to keep prices low. I believe there is nothing inherently evil about Wal-Mart, even if I prefer Target.

Unfortunately, labor unions see Wal-Mart in a different light and Democrats are listening. The WSJ has an excellent op-ed today explaining the phenomenon (I don't usually like to excerpt a whole article but I don't have a free link).

Wal-Mart may be expanding in the People's Republic of China, but here in capitalist America the low-price retailer has become the Democratic Party's favorite pinata. The media like to portray this as a populist uprising against heartless big business. But what they don't bother to disclose is that this entire get-Wal-Mart campaign is a political operation led and funded by organized labor.

We've done a little digging into the two most prominent anti-Wal-Mart groups, and they might as well operate out of AFL-CIO headquarters. An outfit called Wal-Mart Watch was created by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), probably the most powerful union in America after the National Education Association. Wal-Mart Watch is backed by Five Stones, a 501(c)3 organization that received $2,775,000 in 2005 from the SEIU, or 56% of its $5 million budget. According to financial records, SEIU also gave Five Stones $1 million in 2004 to launch the anti-Wal-Mart group, and SEIU president Andy Stern is the Wal-Mart Watch chairman.

A second group, Wake Up Wal-Mart, is more or less a subsidiary of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW). Wake Up Wal-Mart refuses to divulge its funding sources, but here is what we do know: The group was founded by the UFCW, is housed at UFCW headquarters, and its campaign director's $135,000 salary is paid by the UFCW.

Wake Up Wal-Mart also has close ties to the Democratic Party. Its union-funded campaign director is Paul Blank, who was political director of Howard Dean's failed Presidential campaign. The group sponsored a 19 state, 35-day bus tour across the U.S. earlier this year, staging anti-Wal-Mart rallies. Nearly every major Democratic Presidential hopeful has joined in the Wal-Mart-bashing, including Senators Joe Biden and Evan Bayh, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, and trial lawyer-turned-man-of the-people John Edwards. They all seem to believe they have to take this line to pass union muster for 2008.

Even Hillary Rodham Clinton has joined in the political fun. Never mind that she served six years on the Wal-Mart board during her time in Beltway exile as an Arkansas lawyer and, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was paid $18,000 per year plus $1,500 for every meeting near the end of her tenure. Most recently, Mrs. Clinton returned a $5,000 campaign contribution from Wal-Mart to protest its allegedly inadequate health care benefits. Maybe someone should ask her if she's returned her director's pay, with interest.
* * *

Most of the local protests against Wal-Mart are organized through the left-wing activist group ACORN, an acronym for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ACORN is the group that put the squeeze on the Chicago City Council to pass an ordinance this summer to require Wal-Mart, Target and other big-box stores to pay a minimum $10 an hour wage and $3 an hour in benefits by 2010. (Democratic Mayor Richard Daley vetoed the bill.) ACORN also pretends it is a locally organized and funded voice of the downtrodden masses. But guess where ACORN gets much of its money? Last year the SEIU chipped in $2,125,229 and the UFCW $165,692.

Then there are the anti-Wal-Mart "think tanks," if that's the right word for these political shops -- notably, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the University of California at Berkeley Labor Center. The job of these two outfits is to publish papers backing the economic claims of Wal-Mart critics. The UC Berkeley group recently asserted that Wal-Mart "reduces total take-home pay for retail workers."

The UC Berkeley Labor Center has received at least $43,550 from SEIU. The Economic Policy Institute received $100,000 from the SEIU and $40,000 from the UFCW in 2005 and has published several anti-Wal-Mart studies, particularly on the benefits of the Chicago ordinance. By the way, Andy Stern also sits on the EPI board. He's a busy guy.

Now, we're not predisposed to be pro- or anti-Wal-Mart. We've criticized Wal-Mart lobbying on policy grounds -- for example, when the company supported a minimum wage increase to court some nice publicity while also knowing this would harm any lower-priced competitors. However, it is simply fallacious to argue that Wal-Mart has harmed low-income families.

More than one study has shown that the real "Wal-Mart effect" has been to increase the purchasing power of working families by lowering prices for groceries, prescription drugs, electronic equipment and many other products that have become modern household necessities. One study, by the economic consulting firm Global Insight, calculates that Wal-Mart saves American households an average of $2,300 a year through lower prices, or a $263 billion reduction in the cost of living. That compares with $33 billion savings for low-income families from the federal food stamp program.
* * *

Alas, what's good for working families isn't always good news for unions and their bosses. They hate Wal-Mart because its blue-coated workforce is strictly non-union -- a policy that dates back to the day founder Sam Walton opened his first store. Today the company employs 1.3 million American workers, and its recent push into groceries has made life miserable for Safeway and other grocery chains organized by the service workers or the UFCW.

Wal-Mart pays an average of $10 an hour, which is more than many of its unionized competitors offer. And typically when a new Wal-Mart store opens in a poor area, it receives thousands of job applications for a few hundred openings. So Wal-Mart's retail jobs of $7 to $12 an hour, which the unions deride as "poverty wages," are actually in high demand.

But as we say, this campaign isn't about "working families," or any of the other rhapsody-for-the-common-man union slogans. If Wal-Mart were suddenly unionized, Big Labor's membership would double overnight and union leaders would collect an estimated $300 million in additional dues each year to sway more politicians. Short of that, their goal is to keep Wal-Mart out of cities so their union shops have less competition. That's what the war against Wal-Mart is truly about.

I guess because Democrats aren't in charge of anything they don't get branded with the catering to special interest stick. But, when do you ever see them turning down union money or doing something the unions don't like? The 2 shining examples of this are Wal-Mart bashing and support for public schools.

More Shelf Blogging

The shelves may be a little hard to see, but there's 4 of them there. We needed some shelves in the girls' closet to hold their winter clothes while we go through this Indian summer. Bonus points for me because these shelves had to be extra sturdy so my 20 month old girls couldn't pull them down. I believe I accomplished that mission. Also, we kissed the vertical blinds in the living room goodbye and hung up some horizontal blinds with a valance. I give you Shade Blogging!


For more Shelf Blogging check here, here and here.

Political Questions

If you're like me, and for your sake I hope you're not, you find yourself flummoxed to come up with questions when a politician comes to your door soliciting a vote. I have opinions and I want these people to tell me what they believe, but I don't want them to just give me the standard little "I'm for this, this and this and against that, that and that."

Also, typically the people trawling around in my neighborhood are candidates for city council, state representatives or some other local office. These are some of the most important offices for me, but, I typically can't come up with a question to ask these people on the fly, so I'm looking for the kind of questions that get at the candidates inner beliefs. The kind of thing Democrat and Republican used to mean.

For example, I would want to know if they believe in free trade, what they think the role of government is in this country etc. Those aren't questions John Q. Campaigner are typically ready to answer, but they're important for Campaigner to have an answer. Especially because today's local politician is tomorrow's national politician. I don't want to be electing someone for local office when I don't believe in what they think on national issues.

So, in light of this I'm going to email some of the bloggers I most respect and see what they think. I'm looking for pretty general questions that aren't stacked to get an answer a certain way like, "do you think it was worth thousands of American lives to start an illegal war in Iraq?". If the question's loaded, Campaigner will know how I want him to answer it.

R.I.P Buck O'Neil

I was saddened to learn last night via the Bottom Line on ESPN that Buck O'Neil had passed. Buck was probably the most famous Kansas Citian, certainly the most loved. It's like a piece of the city died. But, I know that Buck O'Neil meant a lot to people outside of Kansas City as well. Wright Thompson, a former KC Star reporter, has a nice tribute to Buck on ESPN.

We've all lost that magnificent baritone voice now, and the world is poorer for it. Not in the way we normally are when a famous person dies. No, O'Neil's voice was truly a gift to all of us. It taught us that love is more important than hate. It taught us that forgiveness is more important than bitterness. It taught us to live life now, to eat dessert always, to never let a red dress pass by.

When he didn't get into the Hall of Fame this year, people rightfully howled. As the news reached him, a final denied dream in a life full of dreams denied, he just smiled.

"God's been good to me," he said that day. "If I'm a Hall of Famer for you, that's all right with me. Just keep loving old Buck. Don't weep for Buck. No, man, be happy, be thankful."

On a day that should have been the pinnacle of a life dedicated to helping others, he showed up at the podium in Cooperstown anyway to help honor the Negro Leaguers who did make the cut, and he led the crowd in a song that will never be heard again:

"The greatest thrill Â… in all my life Â… is loving you."

He sang those words to the folks there and to those at home. Sitting here now, trying to imagine a world without Buck, I can't stop thinking about that song. As a former reporter for The Kansas City Star, I had my share of interaction with Buck. I heard him make cynical school children stand and sing in loud voices. It's clear to me now that knowing and loving Buck has been the greatest thrill in my professional life. It's been a thrill for all of us who knew and loved Buck, either in person or in spirit.

Thompson felt it appropriate to point out that he worked in KC in his national article. I think that's appropriate, Buck was one of those people that made you proud to be a Kansas Citian. He was our own and we loved him.

I met Buck once and got my picture taken with him. He had taken hundreds of pictures with people that day (it was a Royals open house) but, he took the time to ask my name and several other questions. He was particularly interested in the girl I was with, I remember.

Sometimes I would see Buck at Royals games and I would wave, he would wave back like he knew me. It always made me feel like he remembered me from the day we took that picture. I think he made everyone feel that way whenever he was around.

Craig, over at Royals Authority, has the text from Buck's Cooperstown speech here as well as his personal Buck stories.

Alright, sit down. This is outstanding! I’ve been a lot of places. I’ve done a lot of things that I really liked doing. I hit the homerun. I hit the grand slam homerun. I hit for the cycle. I’ve had a hole-in-one in golf. I’ve done a lot of things I liked doing. I shook hands with President Truman. Yeah. Oh, man, I took — Oh, [shook hands] with the other President and I…hugged his wife, Hilary. So I’ve done a lot of things I liked doing. But I’d rather be right here, right now, representing these people that helped build a bridge across the chasm of prejudice — not just the ones like Charlie Pride and me that later crossed it. Yeah. This is quite an honor for me.

Next, Negro League baseball. All you needed was a bus, and we rode in some of the best buses money could buy, yeah, a couple of sets of uniforms. You could have 20 of the best athletes that ever lived. And that’s who we are representing here today. It was outstanding. And playing in the Negro leagues — what a lot of you don’t know. See, when I played in the Negro leagues — I first came to the Negro leagues — five percent of Major League ball players were college men because the major leaguers wanted them right out of high school, put them in the minor league, bring them on in. But Negro leagues, 40 percent of Negro leagues, leaguers, were college men. The reason that was, we always spring trained in a black college town and that’s who we played in spring training, the black colleges. So when school was out, they came and played baseball. When baseball season was over, they’d go back to teaching, to coaching, or to classes. That was Negro League baseball. And I’m proud to have been a Negro league ball player. Yeah, yeah.

And I tell you what, they always said to me Buck, “I know you hate people for what they did to you or what they did to your folks.” I said, “No, man, I — I never learned to hate.” I hate cancer. Cancer killed my mother. My wife died 10 years ago of cancer. (I’m single, ladies.) A good friend of mine — I hate AIDS. A good friend of mine died of AIDS three months ago. I hate AIDS. But I can’t hate a human being because my God never made anything ugly. Now, you can be ugly if you wanna, boy, but God didn’t make you that way. Uh, uh.

So, I want you to light this valley up this afternoon. Martin [Luther King] said “Agape” is understanding, creative — a redemptive good will toward all men. Agape is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. And when you reach love on this level, you love all men, not because you like ‘em, not because their ways appeal to you, but you love them because God loved them. And I love Jehovah my God with all my heart, with all my soul, and I love every one of you — as I love myself.

Now, I want you to do something for me. I’m fixin’ to get off this stage now. I think I done my six minutes. But I want you to do something for me. I want you to hold hands. Whoever’s next to you, hold a hand. Come on, you Hall of Famers, hold hands. All you people out there, hold hands. Everybody hooked up? Everybody hooked up? Well then I tell you what. See, I know my brothers up here, my brothers over there — I see some black brothers of mine and sisters out there — I know they can sing. Can you white folks sing? I want you to sing after me:

The greatest thing — come on everybody –

The greatest thing in all of my life is loving you.

The greatest thing in all of my life is loving you.

The greatest thing in all of my life is loving you.

The greatest thing in all my life is loving you.

Thank you, folks. Thank you, folks. Thank you, folks. Thank you, folks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Now, sit down. Now, sit down. I could talk to you 10 minutes longer, but I got to go to the bathroom.

DDT's New Friend

Finally the World Health Organization has come around and approved the use of DDT to eradicate malaria in undeveloped countries. The WSJ has a nice editorial outlining my thoughts.

Malaria is the number one killer of pregnant women and children in Africa and among the top killers in Asia and South America. It's long been known that DDT is the cheapest and most effective way to contain the disease, which is spread by infected mosquitoes. But United Nations health agencies and others have for decades resisted employing DDT under pressure from anti-pesticide environmentalists. After tens of millions of preventable malarial deaths in these poor countries, it's nice to see WHO finally come to its senses.

The agency's malaria chief, Arata Kochi, told reporters that "one of the best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual spraying. Of the dozen or so insecticides WHO has approved as safe for house spraying, the most effective is DDT." He also said, "We must take a position based on the science and the data."

Mr. Kochi's intellectual honesty is commendable and all too rare among public health officials in this debate. For decades, the science and empirical data about DDT's effectiveness have been distorted or suppressed. Nevertheless, and Rachel Carson's scare-mongering notwithstanding, there is no evidence that DDT use in the amounts necessary to ward off malarial mosquitoes is harmful to humans, wildlife or the environment. Period.

By contrast, there's plenty of evidence -- from the U.S. and Europe to Australia, India, Sri Lanka and Brazil -- that spraying DDT is the best intervention. According to Pierre Guillet, another WHO official at Friday's press conference, South Africa temporarily stopped using DDT in 1996 because green groups were opposed, not because it wasn't working. Malaria takes a heavy toll on a country's economy by discouraging foreign investment and incapacitating otherwise productive people, so these anti-DDT alarmists have been helping to impoverish those they don't kill. There is something other-worldly, or worse, about well-heeled greens trying to deny the world's poorest people the very tool used by rich nations to eradicate this disease.

Even if WHO's decision won't change those minds, its stamp of approval on pesticide use matters in the public health world. Other organizations, ranging from the World Bank to Aid for International Development to Doctors Without Borders, look to WHO for guidance and will now likely reassess their own guidelines. The U.S. is typically the largest donor to these international agencies, and the recent efforts of Republican Senators Sam Brownback of Kansas and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who have called for DDT intervention and more responsible allocation of aid dollars generally, no doubt played a role in WHO's decision.

One insecticide won't end malaria, and DDT's proponents don't claim it will. But by keeping more people alive and healthy, DDT can help create the conditions for the only lasting solution, which is economic growth and development. It's encouraging that even a U.N. health agency seems to have figured that out.

Emphasis mine on my favorite sentence. Development is the malaria eradicator, not DDT, but DDT supports development.

Democrats Vs. Wal-Mart

I love it when George Will really lays into something.

Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America's political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets, because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots and announce -- yes, announce -- that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by . . . liberals.

Before they went on their bender of indignation about Wal-Mart (customers per week: 127 million), liberals had drummed McDonald's (customers per week: 175 million) out of civilized society because it is making us fat, or something. So, what next? Which preferences of ordinary Americans will liberals, in their role as national scolds, next disapprove? Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet?

No. The current issue of the American Prospect, an impeccably progressive magazine, carries a full-page advertisement denouncing something responsible for "lies, deception, immorality, corruption, and widespread labor, human rights and environmental abuses" and for having brought "great hardship and despair to people and communities throughout the world."

What is this focus of evil in the modern world? North Korea? The Bush administration? Fox News Channel? No, it is Coca-Cola (number of servings to Americans of the company's products each week: 2.5 billion).

Next up is football (too violent), beer (fattening and causes drunkenness) and television (should be exercising or reading).

Consumer Choice in Health Care

I've been reading, for the past 2 days, all the lefty bloggers tut-tutting about the Rand survey that studied medical care that a group of seniors was getting. Now, I admit that the results of the test were pretty damning (the patients rated their care higher than the quality it actually was). But, it still didn't sit right with me. I don't think a third party can determine what I like better than I can. Let's call this the Totino's pizza corollary. I like the $1.50 Totino's frozen pizzas better than I like the $5.99 Digiorno frozen pizza. I'm sure that in a taste test among 250 of the top pizza experts the Digiorno pizza would come out a huge winner. But for me, I like the crisp crust and the ratio of sauce to cheese on the Totino's (for those that haven't had the pleasure, Totinos doesn't have a lot of cheese). Does the fact that the experts would agree that Digiorno is better invalidate my opinion? I would argue, no.

Greg Mankiw takes my Totino's Corollary to new territory today;

What if the quality of the health care were judged not by the consumer but instead by an employee of the postal system? Or, worse, by a random member of Congress, while he was running for reelection and accepting campaign contributions from a variety of health-care providers? Yes, decision making in health care is hard, so mistakes are inevitable. But is there any reason to think that collectivized decision making is usually better than individual decision making?

Granted, my Totino's Corollary certainly makes light of educated health care opinion, but I also believe that a medical treatment that the consumer believes in has a much better chance of succeeding than one which is foisted upon them when they have very little choice in the manner. Especially a treatment that is determined by what would be a gigantic bureaucracy that kowtows to political interests.

Free to Choose in Estonia

Greg Mankiw excerpts John Tierney's column about Estonia, the Baltic Tiger. I wrote a couple of papers in graduate school about the reforms that Estonia undertook and how American businesses can capitalize on those reforms. What I find most interesting is how Laar instituted the flat tax and other Friedman ideas in a formerly Soviet republic.

Earlier today I read this post on Drum's blog.

Nonetheless, we desperately need radically more attention paid to full employment policies; to labor organization in service industries; to the distributional inequities of free trade policies; to national healthcare; and to significantly more progressive taxation.

I read Drum to remember why I am not a Democrat. Everything he is advocating in that sentence is everything that Friedman, Estonia, Ireland and other success stories would strongly stand against. Estonia has a very free market and their distribution inequality is virtually nonexistent in relation to the US. Why is that? Government policies aid in making the poor poorer, not free market economic policies.

Liberal School Choice

Let the schools pick the students. Anything to give more power to public bureaucrats instead of to the people.

Betts suggests this: first fund the schools equally on a per-student basis. Then distribute trade-able rights to admit highly advantaged students; and allow schools to auction those rights. Schools would then be forced to figure out how much they valued the money they were spending relative to the highly advantaged children they wanted. We don’t know what the outcome would be. At one end of the spectrum you’d have schools with high concentrations of advantage and not much money; at the other end of the spectrum high concentrations of disadvantage and loads of money. It would probably take a few years for administrators to work out what the real costs of disadvantaged children were; but they would have a powerful incentive to work it out.

I'm just about speechless.

Chicago Living Wage

Cafe Hayek's Russell Roberts takes down a proposed law in Chicago. The Chicago city council has a proposal to force big box retailers (defined as more than a billion dollars in sales with stores greater than 90,000 square feet) to pay workers $10/hr plus $3 in benefits. Target and Wal-Mart have responded by suspending plans to open more stores and deciding whether to close additional stores. Mayor Daley would also like to know how the aldermen in Chicago are going to replace the 8000 lost jobs if Wal-Mart doesn't continue its expansion.

Of course, if this plays out where the "living wage" is enacted and Target and Wal-Mart leave, then we're left with the unseen effects of such a law. With no big boxes prices will gradually rise to levels seen in the non-big box retailer world. Of course, this effect will be slow and unseen, therefore no one will really complain about it. There will just be 20,000 less jobs in the greater Chicago area. But that's not what gets aldermen elected, raising people's wages with a law gets them elected. Unfortunately, this law not only won't raise anyone's wages it will end up lowering wages by having more people fighting for fewer jobs in the retail sector.

In addition, the unskilled teenagers who can't find work stocking shelves or whatever unskilled kids do at Target are not going to get any job experience. With fewer business unable to give a teenager a job because of wage standards that teenager never gets a chance to get a toehold in the labor force. How's he going to get started? What happens is the kid gets public assistance at the first opportunity, then becomes involved in the neverending circle of government dependency. This dependency is what draws him out to vote for an alderman who will raise the wages of the poor by imposing some minimum wage. The cycle starts again, relegating another generation of teenagers to government dependency.

Global Warming Skeptic

Coyote Blog once again makes a coherent and unvitriolic case against global warming alarmism. Of course, to question the conventional wisdom of future doom from global warming is to be the ultimate in wingnuttery. But until climatoligists can come up with a model that works for the past 50 years, I don't necessarily believe their model for the next 100.