Pretty much everyone knows–or should know–that many, and maybe most, of the points made by most politicians are of little value, amounting to little more than equine feces at best. A commercial I saw the other day illustrated that the same is true of TV commercials. (Yes, I realize that’s no discovery. But still…) The advertisement I saw featured a clean-cut young man making a pitch to “buy American-made gasoline at Kwik Fill” because doing so “strengthens our economy.” Do people believe that type of thing? The short answer is:  Yes. How do I know? Because presidents–and presidential candidates–have been saying pretty much the same thing for close to 4 decades, beginning with Nixon and continuing right up through Obama.

Rachel Maddow–not exactly a standard-bearer for libertarian ideals and the power of the free market–demolished this lunacy on her show, and the episode is immortalized on YouTube, under the appropriate title, “Oil Is Oil Is Oil.” There is no such thing as “foreign” oil and there is no such thing as “domestic” oil. There is no way to purchase oil from domestic sources or that “benefits Americans only.” Maddow covers many valid points in the video–which is recommended viewing–but in economics-speak, oil is fungible. As such, the concept of energy independence by lessening the U.S. dependence on foreign oil is just the same old jingoistic bird cage liner scrapings. All oil is sold on an international market and all oil is purchased from that same place. Which service station you use is largely irrelevant.

Admittedly, Maddow makes a couple points with which I disagree, most notably in her suggestion that we can affect positive change by lessening our overall dependence on oil. To that suggestion, my response would be “Why?” To what purpose should we–users of energy–attempt to cut back on our usage of energy? To what purpose should we–people who benefit from all manner of conveniences due directly to the technology of fossil fuels–attempt to change our ways? I can only assume that Maddow believes, like many liberals, and many conservatives, that the consumer should react to policy concerns versus market signals. If oil is the cheapest alternative, then the consumer should continue to buy it, period. If, and when, oil becomes so rare as to not be the cheapest alternative (and/or the best technological alternative) the costs should reflect it, and we consumers will move on to something else. (The costs will reflect it, unless the government gets in the way.) The problem is not over-dependence on oil. The problem is lack of understanding of basic economics, the market, and the ramifications of supply and demand.

Of more concern to me, and maybe more importance, is this:  If this type of obviously-flawed economics thinking, as evidenced by that commercial, has pervaded presidential talking points for forty years and continues to pervade TV advertising even now, how much more horribly flawed information flows unabated?

Bottom Line:  I guess they don’t call it the idiot box for nothing.

Cross-posted at the LRCBlog.

Nice article in Investor’s Business Daily on Mises, which quotes extensively from TLS blogger Jeff Tucker and Austrians Bettina Bien Greaves and Mark Thornton:

Let Free Markets Work, Said Ludwig Von Mises

By PETER BENESH, FOR INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY Posted 12/13/2011 01:47 PM ET

Ludwig von Mises was born in Ukraine, studied in Vienna, fought in World War I, and in 1940 landed in America, where he lectured and wrote books. View Enlarged Image

If he were around today to see the economic mess in the U.S. and Europe, Ludwig von Mises would be entitled to a big, fat “I told you so.”

Mises held that whenever government tinkers with the economy, especially the money supply, it screws things up.

Natural market forces do a better job of ironing out inflation, ending a recession and boosting employment, he said and wrote.

Though he lived to age 92, from his birth in 1881 in what is now Ukraine to his death in 1973 in New York City, Mises never drew the plaudits he deserved, says Jeffrey Tucker, executive editor of Laissez Faire Books, a libertarian publisher and bookseller owned by financial forecasting firm Agora Financial.

“Mises deserves every bit as much recognition as his contemporary, Albert Einstein,” Tucker told IBD.

Read more>>

Nice post from Austrian economist (and fellow Rush fanatic) Steve Horwitz, on the Coordination Problem blog:

Pausing to Note the Continued Upward Climb of Humanity

Steven Horwitz

With a new study out today that provides evidence that those who approach their lives with a spirit of gratitude (when it’s deserved of course) to others score higher across a whole number of measures of well-being, it’s worth taking a moment for some “social gratitude.”

In a world of pepper-spraying cops, genital-groping TSA agents, and a debt-to-GDP ratio that’s topped 100 percent, it’s sometimes hard to find the good, but despite the ankle weights the state keeps attaching to us, humanity keeps running, moving ever upward.

In the long view, life expectancy continues to rise as do literacy rates.  Slavery is in long-run retreat and illegal in every country, and despite the apparent desire of US politicians of both parties to declare war on every small country in the mid-east, deaths from war continue to fall and violence in general continues its decline.  Every day the news is full of new secular miracles, from 3-D printers that can produce the head for Jeff Dunham’s new dummy to medical procedures that save lives that would have been lost even as recently as a few years ago.  The average American household continues to be able to afford fantastic toys that the rich of a generation ago could not have imagined, and poor Americans today are more likely to own basic necessities (not to mention “toys”) than was the average American household a generation ago.

And perhaps most important:  a diminishing percentage of humanity lives on less than $1 per day, and global income inequality is falling as well.

Even as freedom retreats in some quarters, the freedoms we have left continue to improve the lot of humanity in ways our ancestors could only dream of.  The sad part is that we continue to weight and shackle ourselves in ways that are slowing that progress from what it could have been.  We do so because too many are too skeptical about the benefits of freedom and those with power (or who want it) are all too willing to take advantage of that skepticism to serve their own interests, both political and corporate.

As we pause to recognize all we are grateful for today, let’s also re-commit ourselves to the task at hand, which is to understand the degree to which free people under the right institutions can maximize the degree of social cooperation, peace, and prosperity made possible by the progressive extension of the division of labor and exchange.  And let’s further re-commit ourselves to taking what we’ve learned and spreading it to the four corners of the Earth so that the cornucopia so many enjoy in the West can be the reality not just for every American, but for all of humanity.

As discussed in the Techcrunch post Android Researcher Hit With C&D After Dissecting Monitoring Software, Android security researcher Trevor Eckhart posted about the mobile tracking software from a company called Carrier IQ. As explained in the Techcrunch post:

Carrier IQ pitches themselves as the “leading provider of mobile service intelligence solutions,” and provides their services to a number of players in the mobile space. The company’s main U.S. carrier partner is Sprint, and Eckhart claims that their tracking software appears on Android devices from HTC and Samsung among others.

According to Eckhart’s research, Carrier IQ is capable of monitoring everything from where the phone is to what apps are installed, and even which keys are being pressed. Carrier IQ says that the information is collected to give carriers insight into how the mobile use experience can be improved. It sounds like a noble enough goal, except Eckhart found that the software could run without the user’s knowledge or consent as was the case with the HTC phones he tested.

Carrier IQ’s general counsel then fired off a vicious cease-and-desist letter [PDF] against Eckhart, “claiming that he committed copyright infringement by reproducing some of the company’s training materials in his post and that he made ‘false allegations’ about the nature of their software.” In other words, Carrier IQ was trying to squelch criticism of it by using copyright law to censor its critic. These tactics are one reason I not only despise copyright, but that I have begun to really detest what the legal profession has become: a bunch of arrogant bullies. The C&D letter is outrageous: it gave Eckhart two days to commit to all kinds of groveling, making a public apology, replacing his original blog post with one written by Carrier IQ, and so on. While threatening him with tens of thousands of dollars of damages, if not more, with some dubious claims, as discussed in a recent episode of This Week in Law. For example, according to some of the legal pundits on TWiL, the statutory damages and attorneys’ fees threatened are available only for a registered copyright work, and the material in question did not appear to have been registered. Further, Ekhard would probably have a fair use defense (as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argues as well).

In any case, after its threats was noticed and blogged and tweeted about on the Internet, and after Eckhart bravely contacted the EFF for help instead of backing down, Carrier IQ realized what a PR disaster its threats had created, and their CEO retracted their C&D and publicly apologized to the developer. (See Techcrunch’s post Carrier IQ Retracts Their C&D, Apologizes To The Android Researcher They Hassled.) From the release:

As, of today, we are withdrawing our cease and desist letter to Mr. Trevor Eckhart. We have reached out to Mr. Eckhart and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to apologize. Our action was misguided and we are deeply sorry for any concern or trouble that our letter may have caused Mr. Eckhart. We sincerely appreciate and respect EFF’s work on his behalf, and share their commitment to protecting free speech in a rapidly changing technological world.

The full text of the release is below. The EFF was truly heroic here (see Eckhart’s post Why I love the EFF; and EFF’s post Carrier IQ Tries to Censor Research With Baseless Legal Threat).

[c4sif]

This image is patented by Google, not being evil

I was reading about the cool Mark Twain Google doodle here and was surprised to find that Google had actually managed to obtain a patent related to the idea of using homepage doodles. The inventor is Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin; the patent application was filed back in April 2001 but not granted as a patent until March 2011. The patent’s title is “Systems and methods for enticing users to access a web site” (PTO version; Google versionwith PDF). The abstract and claim 1 are below:

Abstract: A system provides a periodically changing story line and/or a special event company logo to entice users to access a web page. For the story line, the system may receive objects that tell a story according to the story line and successively provide the objects on the web page for predetermined or random amounts of time. For the special event company logo, the system may modify a standard company logo for a special event to create a special event logo, associate one or more search terms with the special event logo, and upload the special event logo to the web page. The system may then receive a user selection of the special event logo and provide search results relating to the special event.

Claim 1. A non-transitory computer-readable medium that stores instructions executable by one or more processors to perform a method for attracting users to a web page, comprising: instructions for creating a special event logo by modifying a standard company logo for a special event, where the instructions for creating the special event logo includes instructions for modifying the standard company logo with one or more animated images; instructions for associating a link or search results with the special event logo, the link identifying a document relating to the special event, the search results relating to the special event; instructions for uploading the special event logo to the web page; instructions for receiving a user selection of the special event logo; and instructions for providing the document relating to the special event or the search results relating to the special event based on the user selection.

This got me curious as to what other patents Brin might have obtained. Here they are (sigh):

1	8,037,065		Information extraction from a database
2	8,024,326		Methods and systems for improving a search ranking using related queries
3	8,009,141		Seeing with your hand
4	7,912,915		Systems and methods for enticing users to access a web site
5	7,650,330		Information extraction from a database
6	7,505,964		Methods and systems for improving a search ranking using related queries
7	7,366,668		Voice interface for a search engine
8	7,136,854		Methods and apparatus for providing search results in response to an ambiguous search query
9	7,027,987		Voice interface for a search engine
10	6,865,575		Methods and apparatus for using a modified index to provide search results in response to an ambiguous search query
11	6,678,681		Information extraction from a database
12	6,529,903		Methods and apparatus for using a modified index to provide search results in response to an ambiguous search query
13	6,185,559		Method and apparatus for dynamically counting large itemsets

Another search reveals 925 patents owned by Google (the thousands of patents acquired from Motorola Mobility are evidently not yet assigned to Google in the PTO database so don’t show up here), plus a bunch of pending patent applications.

You can’t really blame Google for playing the patent game and trying to build up a defensive patent portfolio. Still, asserting this patent against innocent companies would surely violate the company motto “Don’t be evil“.

[c4sif]

The media are in a kerfuffle about a short-term egg shortage caused by Target and other supermarket chains dropping a major supplier, Sparboe Farms, following reports that workers at its production facilities abused chickens and failed to follow the company’s animal welfare policy.  The revelations were punctuated by a graphic undercover video released by animal rights group Mercy for Animals, which showed workers stuffing chickens into cramped battery cages, pulling rotting carcasses out of cages, “torturing” birds by swinging them around by their legs, and so on.  No matter how you feel about animal rights, it’s not pleasant to watch.

Sparboe, for its part, has shifted its damage control into overdrive, posting updates about steps it has taken to “rectify problems” and pointing out that it is the first egg supplier to receive USDA certification.  Which, given these reports, provides some insight into the worth of government certifications.

I expect a government response will be forthcoming, and Sparboe may face fines and possibly a regiment of FDA inspectors swarming over its farms in the months to come.  But anything the government can do in its enforcement role pales next to the punishment which can be meted out by the market.  Even if millions of consumers haven’t suddenly adopted veganism in response to the video, they still have let their displeasure be known, and the result is that Sparboe has lost significant business and is now forced to reevaluate its practices in order to regain consumer trust.  Which is exactly as it should be.  No amount of regulatory oversight will prevent every problem in our food supply (this year has also seen the deadliest listeria outbreak, from tainted cantaloupe, since the 1920s), but with the ease with which information disseminates online, the market will help ensure such problems do not go unnoticed by consumers, who are then free to vote their conscience.  If only the market was free to punish every business, no matter how large or small, for bad decisions and unethical practices.

Massachusetts fisherman Carlos Rafael pulled in what should have been a life-changing fish this week, but before he could unload it for a huge payday, his local chapter of ridiculous-rule-enforcers, A.K.A., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA)  enforcement division, took him down. (Whew! That was close.) You see, although Rafeal had filed all the appropriate paperwork to catch tuna, the behemoth in question was caught in his boat’s nets and not via rod and reel, as is specified, well, someplace. As a result, the authorities had no choice but to pinch the fish when Rafael’s boat returned to port. The expected $400,000 payday that could come from the sale of fish will very likely go into NOAA’s asset forfeiture fund. Nice racket. (Or, should that be, nice rod and reel?)

H/T:  James Nellis

…cross-posted at LRCBlog.

Auburn, Alabama, experienced some tornado damage the other day, and the place was just a mess. Trees were down. Houses had collapse. Fences were in tatters. Yards were trash heaps. The damage was not major by any standard but there was plenty to do in the wake of this one.

As happens, enterprise was there to make a buck fixing things up. Contractors came from all states in all directions. The unemployed suddenly had work. Skills that had been dormant were suddenly needed. This isn’t the Broken Window fallacy; it is just a reality that new kinds of work needs to be done and enterprise jumps at the chance. Good for enterprise and good for those who need help repairing the damage.

So get this. The following note appeared in my inbox this morning, from the Chamber of Commerce:

The chamber would also like to remind those of you who have damage to your personal property to ask for proof of a license to do business in Auburn as you are negotiating with contractors and other businesses for cleanup, roof repair and other services. Additionally, we as a chamber encourage you to use your local chamber members first. For your convenience we have provided you with a list of chamber members who could offer their service to you.

What’s the priority? Getting the job done or preserving the cartel of favored businesses? We know where the Chamber stands.

Over at the Center for a Stateless Society, Michael Kleen asks whether compassionate libertarians can agree to oppose sweatshops as a matter of social justice. Ah, but what does he mean by “oppose” and “social justice”?

Libertarianism is not about people just getting by; it is about maximizing human liberty. Liberty cannot be achieved as long as eking out a living in dangerous conditions for 12 to 14 hours a day is an individual’s most attractive option.

So there could not have been liberty prior to modern times?

Either this line of argument was not thought out or Kleen subscribes to a Marxist-style determinist-materialist conception of history. I hope for the former, as these lines strike me as a propagandistic rhetorical flourish.

Incidentally, the conception of liberty used by Kleen here equivocates between the libertarian conception (i.e., not being subject to the threat or use of initiatory physical force) and a more left-liberal/socialist conception of liberty as positive economic freedoms. I’m afraid compassionate libertarians cannot get on board with such a conflation. To treat both as a matter of political justice is to try to wed contradictions, because “promoting” positive economic freedoms in this way will necessarily require the violation of rights (liberty). This is the mistake made by statist socialists and left-liberals.

Although Kleen uses the term “social justice,” he actually conflates political justice and social justice here and elsewhere in his post. If one insists on using the term “justice” in reference to positive economic freedoms, it is important to distinguish social justice (more a matter of personal morality and unenforceable in a libertarian legal system) from political justice (liberty/rights, which are enforceable in a libertarian legal system).

Kleen also seems to conflate pointing out that people often choose to work in a sweatshop because they see it as better than the alternatives with endorsing sweatshops as ideal work environments. I can’t speak for everyone who doesn’t see sweatshops as unjust and an indictment of capitalism, but I think that most do not think of sweatshops as ideal or unequivocally good. We just do not think that capitalism, as amazing as it is, can magically allow a poor, agricultural society to just skip over the terrible working conditions of the Industrial Revolution in its transition to an industrial or post-industrial economy.

Sweatshops are simply often better than the alternatives available and opposing them via statist means will only be counterproductive, harming the very poor such policies are meant to help. This does not mean we “favor” sweatshops in the abstract or propose them as an ideal business model. It does not mean we do not sympathize with the plight of the poor working in such conditions. Having to point this out makes me feel like I do when libertarians oppose the state performing some function and statists of all parties assume that means we don’t want that function performed at all — e.g., we oppose social-welfare policies so that must mean we hate the poor and want them out on the streets, starving to death, dying of disease. Hardly.

Kleen’s post contains a few other nits in need of picking:

A sweatshop is not any working environment in a developing economy; it is a working environment that is considered to be unreasonably difficult or dangerous.

This strikes me as a question-begging definition of sweatshops. For one thing, what is “unreasonable”? This qualification reminds me of the reasonable-man standard in social contract theories. The problem is that the interpretation of what is reasonable is rather subjective, which is why every social contract theory just so happens to arrive at political conclusions the theorist already favored to begin with.

But then Kleen goes on to contradict himself in the remainder of the paragraph — for when he describes the conditions indicative of sweatshops, he is describing the type of working environment one would expect to exist in a poor, developing country.

Against those who are supposedly in favor of sweatshops, Kleen writes,

No considerations are given for alternative labor models, such as co-ops, family owned farms or businesses, mutual associations, or guilds, all of which are available to any individuals who choose to utilize them. (emphasis added)

What is stopping people working in sweatshops from setting up such arrangements? If they have the capital and entrepreneurial acumen to do this, then why do they choose to work in sweatshops?

Kleen further claims, “Since sweatshop owners and managers are directly responsible for the conditions of their businesses…” the evidence is there that these owners and managers, and the multinational enterprises who contract with them, are implicated in the injustices that workers have suffered.

This seems to assume three things:

1. That historical poverty and statist policies don’t have anything to do with sweatshops often being the best option available.
2. That there are no economic constraints on one’s behavior — that economic laws do not apply — and the only thing stopping sweatshop owners and managers from providing their employees with 1st-world working conditions is a callous heart and selfish greed. They can afford to raise operating costs without hurting their bottom line — without shrinking their profit margins and negatively impacting their competitiveness in the market — or making personal financial sacrifices.
3. That sweatshop owners and managers have an obligation to provide “reasonable” working conditions and pay regardless of eonomic conditions and their own situations — not just a moral obligation, mind you, but an obligation grounded in justice such that they would be violating the rights of their employees by not doing so. As a matter of justice, one must engage in personal self-sacrifice, forego profits, and risk going out of business.

I don’t see how any of these assumptions hold. Kleen just assumes the truth of his “Since….”

When “eking out a living in dangerous conditions for 12 to 14 hours a day is an individual’s most attractive option. In such a society, the mutually beneficial arrangements that define the world of commerce have clearly broken down” (emphasis added).

Unless there are actual rights-violations involved, I don’t see how this is the case.