Ben Stein's Tunnel Vision

Ben Stein in the Sunday Times, First, Tame That Envy. Then Give Thanks, writes about all he has to give thanks for. He then segues into this ode to investment:

"Because we little people are allowed to invest in the nation's growth, we can become big people. We no longer have to save under a mattress or in a bank. We no longer have to manage our money actively by buying and running a farm or an apartment building. Instead, we can flick a few buttons on a computer or make a call, and all the resources of the nation's best and brightest are at our command to let us hitch our wagons to the capitalist star.

IN the last 70 years or so, for the first time in history, the little guy has been able to invest with some assurance that he is not being ripped off, that he is being told the full story and that if his investment does well, he will reap the rewards, or at least a lot of them. (Don't let the hedge-fund hoopla fool you. By and large, they are not outperforming funds open to the little guy at vastly lower cost.)

Yes, there will be some rip-offs. There is too much money floating around and too much temptation for the system to be anything like tamperproof. But in general, that much-maligned Wall Street makes it possible for anyone with some savings, some sense and some discipline to have the engine of capitalism anywhere in the world roar for him like my Cadillac STS-V. Wall Street, for all its faults, makes it possible for any of us, like the fictional television character George Jefferson, to finally get a piece of the pie."

Of course, the reference to "70 years" slyly glides over the uncomfortable idea that a government bureaucracy was and is responsible for making Wall Street relatively safe for the little guy. It's too much to expect that a libertarian/conservative would give thanks for the SEC.

Bad Guys and Bureaucratic Tunnels

Yesterday's Post describes a list of people with whom U.S. citizens cannot do business--Hit-and-Miss List:

"The so-called 'Bad Guy List' is hardly a secret. The U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control maintains its 'Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List' to be easily accessible on its public Web site.

Wanna see it? Sure you do. Just key OFAC into your Web browser, and you'll find the 224-page document of the names of individuals, organizations, corporations and Web sites the feds suspect of terrorist or criminal activities and associations...

What's not widely known about it is that by federal law, sellers are supposed to check it even in the most common and mundane marketplace transactions."

Of course, it doesn't make much sense. If the Department of Homeland Security does its job, these people won't be in the country anyway. But Congress presumably legislated this requirement ignoring the existence of DHS and border controls. Why? Because we have tunnel vision--Congressional committees and then the House and Senate focus on what the Treasury department can do against terrorists/criminals; on another day on another week in another year they focus on DHS. But I guess a bureaucrat can't blame others for having tunnel vision.

Tom DeLay and Faceless Bureaucrats

From yesterday's NYTimes, Conservatives Wonder How to Fill Hole Left by DeLay - New York Times:

"'[DeLay] was a master, and developed, in many ways, the art of earmarking,' Mr. Franc said, referring to the process that allows a lawmaker to add local projects to a big spending bill. 'He saw the political value in that. He justified it in conservative terms, saying it was a form of local control and individual members knew best what was best for their district rather than the judgment of some nameless, faceless bureaucrat. And he drove it as far as he could, to the point where we now have about 14,000 earmarks, up from below 5,000 when Republicans took over in 1994.'"

Creative Destruction--by Hurricane

The Times today has an article on post-Katrina innovation by the New Orleans bureaucracy,City Hall Gets More Efficient, Despite a Hurricane (or Two) in dealing with huge problem of inspecting houses:

"Mr. Meffert addressed the problem by installing new software on dozens of Internet kiosks set up in public buildings ...[so]businesses and homeowners can type in the address of the home they need to have rebuilt, and the system does much of the rest.

It knows, for instance, that homes on certain parts of a given street have taken in four feet of water; it also knows the size of the home, the assessed value and the likely extent of damage. From there, it determines whether homeowners can rebuild (as opposed to demolish), and whether the Federal Emergency Management Agency will pay for it.

City Hall supervisors review the applications on the day they are filed. The next day, applicants can log on and print their building permits. The city knows the condition of the homes because it ascertained exactly how much water each precinct was under, and has preprogrammed the system to assess damage accordingly. If an application is outside the bounds of building ordinances, the permit will be denied... "

'It's pretty wild getting e-mails from some superhigh-tech cities asking me how we did that, then realizing, 'Wait a minute, I didn't have roads a few months ago,' ' Mr. Meffert said. 'But it's human nature. A lot of times you don't innovate unless you're forced to, and city halls typically have the luxury of not being forced to innovate.'"

I had reservations about kiosks when I worked--seemed as if users needed more handholding to learn a new system than a kiosk provided. But that may have changed with time. Meffert's quote is valid.

19th Century Americana

This is a website reviewed in one of my historical journals. If you're interested in what children read in the 19th century and/or in Americana I strongly suggest it.

I came across one 1851 letter from a girl in Virginia reporting the arrival of a new piano (the latest thing in midcentury American) saying--well if the Union dissolves at least we have our piano. Or this excerpt from The Behaviour Book, by Eliza Leslie (1853):

" If the servants are coloured men, refrain from all conversation in their presence that may grate harshly on their feelings, by reminding them of their unfortunate African blood. Do not talk of them as 'negroes,' * or 'darkies.' Avoid all discussions of abolition, (either for or against,) when coloured people are by. Also, quote none of their laughable sayings While they are present.

When the domestics are Irish, and you have occasion to reprove them for their negligence, forgetfulness, or blunders, do so without any reference to their country. If you find one who is disrespectful or insolent, or who persists in asserting a falsehood, it is safest to make no reply yourself, but to have the matter represented to the proprietor of the house; desiring that another waiter may be allotted to you."

Extremists and Moderates

Watched "The Weather Underground" documentary last night with rather mixed feelings. On the one hand, sharing the scorn for the "old farts" (see interview with Ayers and Dohrn) that they get from today's students, on the other hand trying to remember how I felt about them back in the day.

An interesting question: do political movements generate extremists naturally, as part of the socio-physics of the movement (rather like any avalanche will scatter boulders at the fringe of the fall while the fine dirt is at the base) or do extremists generate movements--those bold and brazen souls who challenge the establishment and bell the cat encourage the timid mice to think new thoughts and venture away from their hole? Or is "or" a false dichotomy? I suspect the latter, though it's certainly reassuring to visualize extremists as the foam on the waves. [ed--anyone tired of metaphors yet--enough already.]

Bruno Mangum

Eugene Volokh speculates that Senator Byrd and Justice Stevens might be the oldest fulltime employees of the federal government. However USDA's own Bruno Mangum is older. (I remember being introduced to Bruno in 1969 during a training visit in North Carolina. At that time he was an oldtime employee. Since then, I've completed my career and retired and he's still going.

Decline of the Fuji

I remember my sister recommending the Fuji apple to me, probably in the 1980's. They became my favorite apple--crisp and sweet. I bought them at Safeway. For some years they were packaged almost like eggs, coming on cardboard trays. Then they started coming in bulk, just like other apples, Red Delicious and such. But they were still good. I was willing to pay the premium price the store charged. Apples are seasonal, of course, and I remember seeing New Zealand Fuji's imported during the spring and summer to match the Washington Fujis available in the fall and winter. I wrote "match", but they didn't really match them. The imported apples weren't quite as good as the U.S. ones, but since all spring and summer apples are either imported or come from cold storage they still usually were better than other apples available at the same time.

But recently I've grown more dissatisfied with Fuji's. They're smaller and less reliably sweet and crisp. I'd guess what's happened is, as apple growers switched to Fuji's, the quality control has suffered. After all, this is a classic case of what economists call "free riding". Once the Fuji reputation is good enough to justify a price premium, there's every incentive for growers to cut corners on the quality. Plant poorer trees, ship a higher percentage of the apples from a tree. (Not every apple on a tree is of the same quality.)

It's another example of the problems with an unregulated free market. And it's an example of why I'm testing different apples from the store again.

Change Is Bad; Staying Where the Heart Is

Today's NYTimes mag has an interesting last page article by a teacher in a Tamaqua, PA, community college. (That's a forbidding area that I've traversed for almost 40 years via I-81 to and from DC. The area's not fit for farming, all the vegetation is long dead and compressed as coal.)

Coal Miner's Granddaughter:

"The fact is that I come from a long line of people who pick up and leave when things stop working out. My grandfather migrated from Poland to Hazelton, Pa., to mine coal, and when the mines closed, my father hitchhiked two hours south to Bethlehem to roll steel, and when the furnaces shut down, my brother moved to Nigeria, where he drills for oil. It seems natural, American really, to move on. Aren't most of us descended from people who did just that?

I ask the class to write what they hope to learn from me on index cards I give out, and they hand the cards to me as they file out. How to write a bid proposal. How to create a technical manual. No one, it seems, wants to learn how to escape."

Bureaucrat to Honor

STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT in today's NYTimes Magazine describe a bureaucrat to honor in Filling in the Tax Gap:

"an I.R.S. research officer in Washington named John Szilagyi had seen enough random audits to know that some taxpayers were incorrectly claiming dependents for the sake of an exemption. Sometimes it was a genuine mistake (a divorced wife and husband making duplicate claims on their children), and sometimes the claims were comically fraudulent (Szilagyi recalls at least one dependent's name listed as Fluffy, who was quite obviously a pet rather than a child).

Szilagyi decided that the most efficient way to clean up this mess was to simply require taxpayers to list their children's Social Security numbers. 'Initially, there was a lot of resistance to the idea,' says Szilagyi, now 66 and retired to Florida. 'The answer I got was that it was too much like '1984.'' The idea never made its way out of the agency.

A few years later, however, with Congress clamoring for more tax revenue, Szilagyi's idea was dug up, rushed forward and put into law for tax year 1986. When the returns started coming in the following April, Szilagyi recalls, he and his bosses were shocked: seven million dependents had suddenly vanished from the tax rolls, some incalculable combination of real pets and phantom children. Szilagyi's clever twist generated nearly $3 billion in revenues in a single year."