No Truce With Kings

There was some good news recently about a local free speech case. This quote is from the Post-Dispatch’s article about the decision.

Appeals court backs man in fight over St. Louis eminent domain sign

ST. LOUIS • A federal appeals court on Wednesday struck down at least part of St. Louis’ sign ordinance and ruled that a St. Louis man had the right to protest eminent domain with a two-story mural on the side of an apartment building near Soulard.

Jim Roos commissioned the two-story painted mural, roughly 360 square feet in size, that proclaims “End Eminent Domain Abuse” inside a red circle with a slash to protest the government’s taking of private land, but the city ordered him to remove it in 2007, saying it violated city sign regulations prohibiting signs in that area larger than 30 square feet.

I’ve see the sign in this picture many times, while headed north on I-55 into Illinois. It’s hard to miss. And it’s good to hear it will be around for a while.

A week ago today I was returning from a two-day trip to central Mississippi. I left a spot southeast of Yazoo City about 8:30 PM and drove directly back to St. Louis.

I was relying on my GPS system and it directed me to take US 49E to get to I-55, so I was driving toward Greenwood, MS on that route. It looked like pretty rural country, as well as I could make it out in the dark. That’s when I came upon a traffic checkpoint in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. There were two police cruisers on each shoulder and four (as I recall) officers standing in the middle of the road. I couldn’t see anything else nearby.

I was a little surprised by this, since it was such an isolated area. But it’s not the first time I’ve run across that. The cops in Wayland, Missouri, a little bitty place near the Iowa border, used to run "seat belt checkpoints" 10 years ago. They only ran them on the holiday weekends: Independence Day, Labor Day and so on. I suppose they got the maximum traffic and number of DWI busts on those days.

When I stopped, the Mississippi highway patrolmen did the usual: flashed their lights inside the car to see what was visible and chatted me up for a few minutes. What bothers me about the stop, though, is they asked for my driver’s license. I showed it to them… but I was sorely tempted to ask why I should. I was obviously sober and was complying with Mississippi’s seat belt law. There were no burned-out lights on my car. In short, there was no visible reason to suspect me of breaking any laws, so what’s with requiring me to show identification?

But I was eager to get home (which didn’t happen until 4 AM Sunday) and I wasn’t familiar with Mississippi state law. For all I knew, arguing with them about it would have meant spending the night in a county lock-up just to find out that they did have the legal right to demand my ID. The Supreme Court has upheld state laws to conduct checkpoints, after all.

Still, I wasn’t happy that I didn’t challenge them on it. What is this "Papers, please!" nonsense?

Today I was trying to find out if I have to put with this stuff in the future. That’s when I came across this interesting article at KSWB, the Fox TV affiliate in San Diego. Police at a sobriety checkpoint in Escondido broke out the window on a man’s car because he refused to roll it down and show them his driver’s license.

Here’s the video that accompanies the article.

Seeing this, I’m thinking that what I did in Mississippi was the practical choice. Nonetheless, it doesn’t sit well. And I’m reminded of my father-in-law saying, "If you don’t defend your rights, you don’t have any."

Part of our retirement plan is rental property. We’re not retired yet but my wife and I own two single-family homes that we’ve been renting for 20+ years. In fact, we’ve been planning to buy some more rental property, given the current buyer’s market in real estate. But that plan may be on hold for a while.

In one of our rental houses, the tenants are a couple, the couple’s two young children, and the wife’s mother. Recently the wife called and told us that (a) her younger daughter’s blood test showed an slighlty elevated lead level and (b) that a county inspector had come to the check the house (without our knowledge) and would be sending us a list of "lead violations" that we’d be required to have remediated.

Naturally we weren’t pleased to learn about this. And we were surprised by it, too. Our older son spent his first two years in that house with us and we never had a problem with lead in his blood. Other tenants have lived there with young children with no problems to our knowledge.

The house was built in the 1940s, so it’s no surprise that it has lead-based paint beneath the latex paint that’s been applied over time. It’s comparable in age to most of the houses in its neighborhood and my estimate is that at least 75% of the other houses in the neighborhood have lead-based paint in them as well. So, lucky us.

It took a week before the county’s letter arrived at our home. And then it was another week before we could meet with the inspector – and an unexpected case worker who accompanied her. According to the case worker, any time a child’s blood tests above the limit, the county "invites itself" into the child’s home to inspect the property. I was struck by the "invites itself" euphemism for what amounts to a no-notice property inspection. But evidently that’s the law – or the regulation, I suppose.

The county inspector is requiring quite a bit of work: replacement of all the windows and the front entry door. She also specified enough work on the other two exterior doors and the interior doors and the door jambs that it will be cheaper to replace them rather than to remove the old paint and keep them. Finally, most of the interior trim (casing) for the windows & doors as well as the baseboard must be painted with an "lead encapsulating" paint.

In short, I expect it will be a $10 – $12,000 project. It’s not great news. But we’re looking on the bright side: we don’t want to be party to making a little girl ill. And the house will be much improved by having new windows and exterior doors. (The other work is unnecessary, IMO, but is the cost of doing business in a bureaucrat-regulated polity.)

All this is required in order for us to continue renting the house. Further, there’s the threat of heavy fines ($1,000 per day per violation – we had 12 violations) and imprisonment for failure to remediate the items on the inspector’s list of violations in a timely manner.

What particularly irks me is that the state and county require the work to be done by a licensed lead remediation contractor. So even though it’s all simple enough that we could do it ourselves, and take the necessary precautions while doing it, we’re not allowed to.

There are a few other things that we find unsettling about this process.

First is the severity of the threatened penalties. Who knew that landlords were such scofflaws that they need to be threatened so? Imprisonment for what amounts to a code violation? WTF?

It’s not as though the county doesn’t know where our house is, after all. And we can’t take the house on the lam with us.

Second, there’s an amazing lack of concern about causality here; there’s no scientific rigor at all. The threshold for lead poisoning is a level of 10 micrograms per deciliter of whole blood. The child’s blood test showed 15 mg/dl – just over the threshold, relative to the scale that’s used (which runs up to 50 – 60 mg/dl).

Missouri state regulation specifies that there have to be two tests, at least 3 months apart, with elevated lead levels. That’s a good way to avoid reacting to a spurious test result. But St. Louis County regulation isn’t that reasonable: a single test with an elevated result will trigger a "self invited" inspection. And if any lead paint is detected in the house, it’s immediately assumed to be the proximate cause of the problem. Q.E.D.

The county inspector told us that she’d tested the water and she’d used a "wipe test" to check for lead in dust in the house. Both of those were negative, she said. Nonetheless, there was lead paint (under newer paint) and that’s a problem that must be corrected post-haste.

Sources other than the primary residence are ignored. The little girl frequently stays with her aunt while her parents are both working. But the county won’t be interested in looking at her aunt’s house until we perform the remediation on our house. Then – if the lead level in the child’s blood is still elevated – that’s when they’ll look for other potential causes.

In short, the problem might be caused by something in a different place where the child regularly spends time, but that makes no difference to what we’re required to do.

But the third point is the one I find particularly disappointing. It’s the "free money" attitude of most of the people involved. When we met with the county inspector she urged us to apply for funding for this work and gave us a flyer describing a source. I didn’t read it myself but my wife told me that it works like this.

If the tenant’s personal income qualifies (i.e., is low enough) then the property owner can get funding for remediating the lead. What kind of sense does that make? The only thing I can think is that they don’t want landlords to raise the rent as a result of the expenses being imposed on them.

But the funding isn’t a grant; it’s a loan. When the house is sold, the loan must be repaid. In other words, we could get "free money" to finance this work (or part of it) at the cost of a lien on hour house. Thanks but no thanks.

Naturally, the contractors we’ve talked to know all about this. After we describe the work to them, they all tell us, "You know, you can get ‘free money’ to do this."

What is it with all these people? Isn’t believing in "free money" sort of like believing in the Easter Bunny? Don’t they realize where that money comes from?

I understand that any particular individual may feel like he’s getting over on the system when the "free money" he gets is more than a year or two’s tax bill. But don’t they understand that this isn’t the only "free money" deal going on? There are probably thousands of programs in the United States that are funded by government grants — that is, that pass out "free money".

Our taxes have to pay for all of those programs. So a one-time "free money" benefit is probably no benefit at all – relative to having long-term lower taxes by eliminating all those give-aways.

Judge Jim Gray gives several good reasons to. Judge Gray wrote Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed: A Judicial Indictment Of War On Drugs.

Reason.tv posted this clip last March (2010) – but it bears repeating until this thoughtless prohibition is ended.

The 18^th amendment didn’t work and was repealed.

The War on Drugs doesn’t work and should be repealed.

How many times do we have to keep making the same mistake?

I’ve seen a couple of mentions lately about Pennsylvania’s state-owned-and-operated liquor stores. "Like prisoners in a gulag," is how a NYT article describes liquor shoppers in Pennsylvania.

I can believe the gulag part, even though I’ve never been in a Pennsylvania liquor store. I thought that kind of store had disappeared years ago but I guess I’m not too surprised Pennsylvania still has them. My impression is that alcohol control laws in the northeastern US are a little weird. A lot of different laws, a lot of different taxes, and a lot of states in a small area passing all those laws and taxes.

I recall a visit to my wife’s cousins in Massachusetts once. One of our outings was a not-too-long drive to Connecticut to buy beer and wine. I think that trip was due to lower taxes. I remember that the Connecticut stores were conveniently located just barely over the state line. I could’ve thrown a rock back into Massachusetts.

The Pennsylvania stories reminded me of my year-long stint in Iowa in 1974 & 1975. I worked CATV construction then and I’d gone to Des Moines to work on the system being built there. At that time in Iowa, you could buy beer (and maybe wine) at any gas station or grocery. But if you wanted liquor, you could only buy that at state-operated liquor stores.

I visited an Iowa State liquor store once to buy a fifth of whiskey as a gift for a friend’s father. This would have been in December, 1974 and it was sort of like a trip to the DMV.

As I recall, the store’s very plain entry admitted you to an anteroom. A counter stretching across the width of the store separated this anteroom from the shelves of liquor in the rear. And here’s how you bought your bottle of hooch.

You went to the right side of the counter and told state employee #1 what you wanted; he marked items on a check list. Then he passed that list along to state employee #2, who fetched your order from the shelves in back. (There was more than one person filling this role, IIRC.) #2 gave it to state employee #3, who packaged it for you. Finally the package was handed to state employee #4, at the left side of the counter, and he took your payment and rang the sale on the register.

Only after the sale was concluded did you actually get to touch or look at what you’d bought. If you didn’t know exactly what you wanted when you walked in, I suppose you were out of luck.

There were four people doing what one person would do in any sensible, privately operated store. They were all middle-aged, or older, men and naturally none of them was in any particular hurry. It all paid the same, eh?

And of course, it had the same take-a-number system that many DMVs and post offices use to insure first-come, first-served customer handling.

It was one of the oddest things I’d seen in my young life and I remember thinking, ‘What is this? The Iowa Full Employment Center?’ Since I couldn’t imagine what business the State of Iowa had running retail stores, what I took away was another lesson in limited government.

Even though Iowa doesn’t run state-operated stores any longer, it’s still one of the 19 states which hold monopolies on liquor sales.

Luckily, I’m in the next state south and its alcohol control laws are very liberal.

Early this week, I came across a Reuters report in which Al Gore called ethanol policy ‘not a good idea’. The thing that struck me was that he pretty much admitted pandering to farmers by voting for ethanol subsidies. (Thanks for ‘fessing up, Al. Better late than never, I suppose.)

Today I found this interesting post by Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy on the topic. Maybe there’s hope we’ll be rid of this boondoggle.

The End of Ethanol?

Maybe it’s the new mood in Congress. Maybe the stars are aligned. Whatever the cause, opposition to ethanol subsidies is cropping up in some unusual places — and just in time, as ethanol tax credits are set to expire in a few weeks. […]

Meanwhile, on the other end of the political spectrum, Senators Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Jim DeMint (R-SC) are taking aim at ethanol subsidies as yet another special-interest energy policy boondoggle that should be opposed by free-marketeers and environmental activists alike. […]

As Jonathan Zasloff notes, the ethanol issue also presents Republicans with an opportunity to show how less government intervention can be better for the environment.

Ethanol is a lose-lose proposition any way you slice it: it costs a big chunk of money, it’s horrible for the environment, and it does nothing but enrich special interests. It’s particularly bad on the climate, because the amount of emissions requiring to produce a liter of ethanol is actually more than just using gasoline. Kudos to Senators Coburn and DeMint for pushing this.

Go get ’em, Senators!

Here’s an interesting opinion piece from The Washington Post that’s worth your time to read.

Strangling innovation with red tape
By Morris Panner
Friday, November 19, 2010

As a Democrat whose politics are undeniably liberal on social issues, I lamented the outcome of the midterm elections. But as an entrepreneur with two software start-ups under my belt, I couldn’t help but celebrate – and more than a little. As the fall campaigns wore on, I had found myself listening closely to the Tea Party, nursing the hope that its message would push both major parties to change the way they do business.

To understand my motivation, pick up the November issue of Washingtonian magazine. The annual Salary Survey notes on Page 81 that top trade association leaders (industry lobbyists) make multimillion-dollar salaries to “keep tabs on what the federal government was doing or might do.”

These outsize earnings are symptomatic of a disease that is slowly killing the American economy. We are creating so much regulation – over tax policy, health care, financial activity – that smart people have figured out that they can get rich faster and more easily by manipulating rules on behalf of existing corporations than by creating net new activity and wealth. Gamesmanship pays better than entrepreneurship.

I dislike re-posting other people’s blog posts in their entirety. But there are exceptions to every rule and Radley Balko hits the nail squarely on the head in this post from October 7:

Just So I Have This Right…

….a federal judge has just ruled that the federal government can force me to purchase a product from a private company, under the argument that my not purchasing that product affects interstate commerce.

For those of you who support this ruling: Under an interpretation of the Commerce Clause that says the federal government can regulate inactivity, can you name anything at all that the feds wouldn’t have the power to regulate?

And if you can’t (and let’s face it, you can’t), why was the Constitution written in the first place? As I understand it, the whole point was to lay out a defined set of federal powers, divided among the three branches, with the understanding that the powers not specifically enumerated in the document are retained by the states and the people.

But if that set of powers includes everything you do (see Wickard and Raich), and everything you don’t do (what Obamacare proponents are advocating here), what’s the point in having a Constitution at all?

Indeed. Why do we pretend we have a government based on principle when everyone (seemingly) ignores those principles?

Justice Thomas raised this same point in his dissent on the Raich case:

Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.