Ann Arbor Deer Cull

If you happen to live or work in Ann Arbor, Michigan and have noticed that there seem to be more deer around than usual, do not worry. The word has come down from the top. It's a green light on deer. But you might want to be careful. Snipers will be shooting deer not just in designated public parks but on private property, including in some people's backyards. As you might imagine this plan has engendered some pushback, not only from people who would prefer not to see "nature management" up close and personal but from those who are worried that they or theirs might catch a bullet to the head from a sniper who makes a mistake. That would be a bad thing, to go outside to look at the stars, or take out the garbage, or clean up after your dog and be shot down by someone who mistakes you for a deer. None of this would be necessary if wolves were allowed to do what they do but this sort of wildlife management is the price we pay for being human and forcing so many alterations in the food chain. I say the price "we" pay but of course we won't be paying the price. It will be the deer. 

ANN ARBOR, MI - The fatal shooting of a woman who was reportedly mistaken for a deer in western New York, an incident that recently made national headlines, has some Ann Arborites fearing a similar tragedy could happen here during the city's upcoming deer cull.
"Accidents happen when you shoot guns in neighborhoods after dark," said Ann Arbor resident Sabra Sanzotta, expressing concerns at a City Council meeting this week.

"Some of the parks you are planning to shoot in this year have playgrounds, and certainly the neighborhoods' backyards where you're planning to shoot have children and pets," Sanzotta told council members. "So it's an accident waiting to happen." Other residents spoke out at the meeting Monday night, Dec. 4, and shared similar concerns.

My Office Hours Are From Nine to Five

In the movie The Five Heartbeats there is a classic scene in which the singer Bird, disturbed by some irregularities with his royalty payment amount and frequency, confronts the cheerful gangster record label owner Big Red at a party. Big Red jovially attempts to explain to Bird that Big Red prefers to handle business during his office hours, which are nine to five, and not during his time off. Bird expresses his displeasure at this stance. Big Red then convinces Bird to see things his way. I was reminded of this movie scene recently when I was in line at the local post office. It was just before closing time. At closing time one of the post office employees will lock the entry door. At that point if you aren't already in line you won't be allowed into the post office service lobby.  Roughly two minutes after the workers had locked the entry door a man who may or may not have been mentally challenged came into the post office and started ranting and raving about how he needed to pick up a package. The workers said that the office was now closed. This man yelled that if he didn't get the package today then he would lose his job. The senior post office worker responded that the man's problems had nothing to do with them and that the man needed to close the door and leave. The man left. But he was wandering around the parking lot gesticulating and screaming. 

Then an older woman who was apparently either the man's caretaker, mother or grandmother came in. She also started yelling and making snide comments about how "you people" should help the man because he was about to lose his job. The post office worker again said that the office was closed and that the woman needed to leave. 

Child Support Gone Wrong: Michigan Man Paying For Child That's Not His

Apart from extreme purist libertarians and anarchists, I think most people would concede that a certain level of government is necessary. However I also think that many people outside of devoted statists would also admit that government has become in some cases too large, too powerful and far too dismissive of individual rights. There have been some recent incidents which do remind me of the fact that a government which has too much power will inevitably seek to exercise that power in ways that harm all of us. Now we all may have our pet peeves and biases. That's part of being human. I may be more concerned about police brutality than you. You might be worried about arrogant and bullying EPA workers when they are not even on my radar screen. Someone else might have good reason to really dislike ICE workers. And so on. Government is made up of flawed men and women, like every other institution. It makes mistakes just like we do. That's ok. But what's not ok, is when government, which has the right and the power to put you in prison and take money from you, makes a mistake, admits it made a mistake but continues to treat you as if it didn't. Do you have an extra $30,000 lying around? Because if you don't you have something in common with one Mr. Carnell Alexander of Detroit, Michigan. He doesn't have that money either. But even he did he wouldn't pay it to the State of Michigan. The state claims he owes them that money for something he did not do. Read more and see the video below the fold.
DETROIT (WXYZ) - The State of Michigan is ordering a Detroit man to pay tens of thousands of dollars, or go to prison. The reason? He owes back child support for a child that everyone agrees is not his.  "I feel like I’m standing in front of a brick wall with nowhere to go," said Carnell Alexander. He says he learned about the paternity case against him during a traffic stop in Detroit in the early 90s. The officer told him he is a deadbeat dad, there was a warrant out for his arrest. 

“I knew I didn’t have a child, so I was kind of blown back,” said Alexander. The state said he fathered a child in 1987, and ignored a court order to pay up. It was the first Carnell had heard of the court order. He'd never even met the child. Eventually he, by chance, ran into someone he knew would know where the woman was, and got a DNA test. It proved what he had been saying all along: the child he had never met was not his.

The mother had realized that, and the real father was in the child's life. Alexander took this information to court. The judge was unmoved. Carnell's ex had a baby, and didn't know who the father was. She was struggling to care for the child. When she applied for state assistance, the case worker told her she had to name the father....

Now although I think that the entire alimony/palimony/child support/divorce industry needs an overhaul this really is beyond what I thought the worst could be. The man has irrefutable proof that he's not the father and the judge really doesn't give a ****. This is precisely the sort of thing that could make people explode. Yes you should take care of your kids. And if need be the state should be able to "help" you do that. The flip side of that though is if the kid in question isn't yours then the child isn't your responsibility. For the state to try to make that child your responsibility goes beyond corruption and slides into tyranny. It's exactly like being convicted and sent to prison for a crime you didn't commit because the prosecutor and judge want to send a message to other criminals about the cost of defying the law. They aren't interested in the fact that you are not a criminal. This sort of thing really bothers me. If the so-called justice system is treating the innocent and the guilty exactly the same, something that I'll be discussing more in a future post, then what incentive does anyone have to pay attention to the system or as Peter Tosh referred to it, the s***stem. Absolutely no incentive at all. A system that behaves like this loses legitimacy in the eyes of the citizens. Ultimately it relies on pure power, little different than the Mafia hoodlum shaking down construction companies for the weekly payoff. But when people start to withhold their consent and stop obeying the system, the results will be unknowable. When there are more cases like that of Mr. Alexander more people will start to do just that.  And I'm sorry but if, absent rape, a woman doesn't know who the father of her child is, she should be shamed and criticized just as much as the lazy lothario with multiple children by multiple women and no way of supporting his women or children.

What are your thoughts?

If you were this man what would your next move be?

Why we need Government: North Carolina and Duke Energy Ash Spill

I'm not a huge fan of overly expansive government. I think that, especially on matters of conscience, privacy and police powers, the federal and state governments have over the course of the last fifty or sixty years, become far too intrusive, too powerful, and dangerously unresponsive to the individual citizens they purport to represent. I still believe that. However government does have some fundamental core duties. One of these is broadly what I'll call public safety. Public safety is often thought to comprise the cop on the street or a military member guarding the nation. That's correct but public safety goes beyond that. Public safety also encompasses the ability to enjoy clean air and water. It involves the ability to eat food anywhere in this country without worrying that you have an excellent chance of consuming deadly molds, bacteria, viruses, fecal material, or other items unfit for human consumption. It means you can purchase goods and services and get what you pay for without always having to bring along your violent ex-con cousin to guarantee that the seller doesn't pull a fast one.

So far so good right? However there is a conservative and occasionally libertarian streak in politics which is fundamentally opposed to the very idea of government interfering with individuals business. When such people actually gain control over the government the results are often no different than if the drug dealer paid off the chief of police. The people on the streets suffer. This truism was recently affirmed in North Carolina, home to my maternal kin. Read the article excerpted below:

RALEIGH, N.C. — Last June, state employees in charge of stopping water pollution were given updated marching orders on behalf of North Carolina’s new Republican governor and conservative lawmakers.

“The General Assembly doesn’t like you,” an official in the Department of Environment and Natural Resources told supervisors called to a drab meeting room here. “They cut your budget, but you didn’t get the message. And they cut your budget again, and you still didn’t get the message.” From now on, regulators were told, they must focus on customer service, meaning issuing environmental permits for businesses as quickly as possible.  Big changes are coming, the official said, according to three people in the meeting, two of whom took notes. “If you don’t like change, you’ll be gone.”

But when the nation’s largest utility, Duke Energy, spilled 39,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River in early February, those big changes were suddenly playing out in a different light.  Federal prosecutors have begun a criminal investigation into the spill and the relations between Duke and regulators at the environmental agency. The spill, which coated the river bottom 70 miles downstream and threatened drinking water and aquatic life, drew attention to a deal that the environmental department’s new leadership reached with Duke last year over pollution from coal ash ponds. It included a minimal fine but no order that Duke remove the ash — the waste from burning coal to generate electricity — from its leaky, unlined ponds. 

Environmental groups said the arrangement protected a powerful utility rather than the environment or the public. Critics say the accident, the third-largest coal ash spill on record, is inextricably linked to the state’s new environmental politics and reflects an enforcement agency led by a secretary who suggested that oil was a renewable resource and an assistant secretary who, as a state lawmaker, drew a bull’s-eye on a window in his office framing the environmental agency’s headquarters. 
“They’re terrified,” said John Dorney, a retired supervisor who keeps in touch with many current employees. “Now these people have to take a deep breath and say, ‘I know what the rules require, but what does the political process want me to do?’ ”

LINK

This is what happens when government is captured by private actors. Government's beneficial roles are diminished, limited or as Grover Norquist approvingly said ,"made small enough to drown in a bathtub". I like "small government" when we're talking about nosy NSA operatives or SWAT teams in Iowa that invade people's homes for non-violent crimes or bossy child protective services mandarins that seize children first and ask questions later. But when you're talking about things like clean air and water I'm not so sure that small government is the answer.

Or to put it another way smaller government may still be a good thing but not if it's one that is subservient to big business. I see government as similar to a referee in some instances. As the saying goes, the best referees do their jobs and are barely noticed. A really bad referee insists on enforcing every last single rule violation, no matter how petty. A worse referee may even make up violations that don't exist, hand out technicals and expulsions like free candy and have both teams so on edge that the game itself suffers. A different but equally bad referee may be so incompetent that they don't know the rulebook and/ or may not care about the game enough to enforce it even if they did. He may sit back in blissful apathy and say "let the teams work it out". And then finally there are those referees that actively prefer one team over the other and so only call violations on one side while ignoring those of the other. If you were a coach and found out that your game referee was the brother-in-law of the rival coach, his poker buddy or a member of his church you'd probably want a different referee. But if you were the corrupt referee who had already worked for a super rich coach and knew you were going to make millions more after fixing the game for him you'd probably have a really stupid grin on your face and be very happy with life.

None of those types are any good for the larger game society. What we need is, prosaically enough, a balance. Now it's true that for me, as opposed to some other writers here that balance would be slightly more tilted to government staying out of people's business but even I wouldn't argue that government has no role to play. The North Carolina incident is the result of business control over government. We should never forget that by definition, if something is an externality to a business, as pollution certainly is, under our free-market system the business has no immediate economic interest in trying to reduce that externality. The free market is largely unable to influence the business on externalities, hence the name. What keeps the business in line is accurate information about the externality shared with an intelligent informed citizenry, the fear of being hauled into civil or criminal court, and the ability of referees regulators to throw the flag via fines and prevent the business from producing that externality or at least make the business capture the true cost of its process. 

Too many conservatives and libertarians have converted to the almost religious belief system that state and federal government never ever ever have any positive role to play in any business regulation and that we should let the free market sort everything out. This is not only wrong but very dangerous to humans and other living creatures.
Duke Energy’s coal ash pond in Eden, N.C., which dumped 39,000 tons of poisonous sludge and slurry into the Dan River on Feb. 2 — the third-largest such spill in U.S. history — has refocused national attention on the environmental damage these holding ponds can render. But the damage isn’t just confined to when the sludge leaks into busted storm-water drainage pipes that never should have been running under the ponds to begin with, like the situation in Eden. It’s quite possible the damage from coal ash ponds is ongoing even in the absence of accidental spills. 
“These coal ash ponds are unlined, and people don’t realize that,” said Dean Naujoks, the Yadkin Riverkeeper who has been monitoring the Dan River spill. “They are continuously leaching arsenic, chromium, cadmium, mercury, all kinds of toxic heavy metals, into the ground and eventually into groundwater. Duke Energy has 32 of these ponds on 14 sites around the state, and every one of them is unlined. Every one of them is a threat to groundwater.”

We see this over and over again. Government is not always the answer but neither is it always the problem. We must reach a balance between private power, which is only accountable to ownership, and government power, which theoretically represents and is accountable to everyone. North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory worked for Duke Energy for twenty-eight years. He has worked as Governor for the people of North Carolina for a little over one. I wonder which employer has influenced him more. I certainly know which employer has paid him more.

Thoughts?

Still wrong after all these years

Walter Williams

A physicist, biologist, and economist are shipwrecked on an island with no food except canned goods. They have no can opener. They soberly consider their dilemma. Each professor presents a plan to the others.

The physicist has identified some coral reef. He proposes that at low tide he carefully wade out to the reef, break off some coral, attach it to a stone and use that tool to open the cans. The biologist disagrees. She states that because this island is known for inedible and highly acidic snails they should dig for those snails and express their acid to cut through the can lids.

The two scholars look expectantly at the economist. He says "Let's assume we have a can opener".

Walter Williams is an economist.  Much like the economist in the story, he is prone to making useless assumptions. Williams was the subject of a recent WSJ column. 

As a right wing libertarian Williams has a blind spot to free market inefficiencies and immoralities. He assumes morality. Williams thinks the majority of issues which impact black people are either their own fault or caused by the government.

Today just 17% of construction workers are unionized, but Democratic politicians, in deference to the AFL-CIO, have kept Davis-Bacon in place to protect them. Because most black construction workers aren't union members, however, the law has the effect of freezing them out of jobs. It also serves to significantly increase the costs of government projects, since there are fewer contractors to bid on them than there would be without Davis-Bacon.

Analysis of this issue launched Mr. Williams' career as a public intellectual, and in 1982 he published his first book, "The State Against Blacks," arguing that laws regulating economic activity are far larger impediments to black progress than racial bigotry and discrimination. Nearly 30 years later, he stands by that premise.

"Racial discrimination is not the problem of black people that it used to be" in his youth, says Mr. Williams. "Today I doubt you could find any significant problem that blacks face that is caused by racial discrimination. The 70% illegitimacy rate is a devastating problem, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with racism. The fact that in some areas black people are huddled in their homes at night, sometimes serving meals on the floor so they don't get hit by a stray bullet—that's not because the Klan is riding through the neighborhood."

Williams glosses over a few things.

The bloodiest war in this nation's history was fought because a group of slave owners were worried that the Federal government might interfere in the private marketplace and limit or end slavery. Afterwards the partisans and descendants of the losing side set up a formalized system of apartheid while those of the winning side, who generally eschewed most of the Southern Jim Crow system, still practiced what amounted to informal segregation. Each system also featured semi-regular outbursts of public or private violence should any Black person ignore certain barriers.

These systems finally broke down post-WW2 for a variety of reasons, free market capitalism not being the most prominent. In fact the general arc of the US political economy from 1910-1970 was away from free market capitalism. The most effective tool used to dismantle these structures was government action to limit the choices of private individuals and companies.

This is anathema to libertarians. Fundamentalist free market libertarians don't accept the government’s right to interfere in the private marketplace. They believe that the market will work it all out and if it doesn't why then it's up to the individual to shop, work or move somewhere else. So food safety laws, anti-discrimination laws, environmental protections, workplace safety regulations, child labor laws, medical licensing, unions, fair housing laws, affirmative action, taxes etc are all bad things under this point of view - very bad things indeed.

Williams ignores current studies which show that all else equal, race is still a major factor in who gets hired, who gets promoted, who even has the opportunity to interview in the first place (Helpful hint -try not to have a “black sounding” name on your resume.)

Black people don't get the same benefit (income) from education. 

Private decisions in aggregate can have a negative effect on a black person's ability to buy a home of his/her choosing. This also impacts future inherited wealth. (subject of a future post)

So is government always the solution? Are Black people perpetual victims? Does this mean that there aren't some Black people who need to get their behind in gear and get in the game?

OF COURSE NOT! No intelligent person argues that.

What's past is past and can't be changed. But the past has an impact on the present. Additionally some bad things are still occurring today.

Pretending that most problems arise from government intervention in the marketplace is just silly. It fits what I consider a loony libertarian view of the world but it doesn't match reality. It's a straw man which Williams has constructed in order to avoid confronting the limits of his ideology. Unsurprisingly he's no fan of Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, viewing it as unconstitutional and unnecessary.

  

So what's your take? Do you think the challenges black people face were primarily created or aggravated by government actions?  Does the federal government (or any arm of government) have the constitutional right to ban private discrimination?  Did the Great Society destroy the Black family? Is racism a thing of the past?