1/26/10 QAC Commissioners Meeting Comments

8 02 2010

I meant to post this last week, but after I had it 75% written and then lost it all I said to hell with it and decided to do it later. So here it is.

A couple weeks ago now I spoke at the Queen Anne’s County Commissioners Meeting. My purpose in speaking was to respond to an advisory opinion issued by the county Ethics Commission against my father (he spoke as well, in fact my comments follow and build off of his).

To offer a little bit of context, my father is a real estate broker and occasional small-scale developer. Queen Anne’s County unfortunately happens to be in the grip of a fervent, one might even say rabid, anti-growth movement. Even though the county is still something like 80% open land and in no danger of being over-developed (For the record, nowhere in QAC is over-developed or anywhere near it. I went to school in north New Jersey so I know what I’m talking about) the anti-growthers, who should rightfully be recognized not as anti-growth but as anti-freedom, are insistent upon stopping any and all development in county. As a result, since my father is a proponent of a reasonable growth policy, they have been fervently against his appointment to the county Planning Commission.

Their most recent move was to get Commissioner Fordonski to file an eleventh hour request for an advisory opinion as to whether my father or the one other person not opposed to growth would have a Conflict of Interest preventing them from serving. The Ethics Commission, in a clearly incorrect decision, held that yes, it was a Conflict of Interest (I’ll post more on this later most likely), hence the comments by my father and I.

You can watch them here. Once you click the link, choose Commissioners Meetings, then Commissioners Meeting 1/26/10 Part 1 of 2. My father’s comments begin at about 00:53:33 (be sure to watch his comments and then the back and forth afterwards). After that I speak at 01:08:15.


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Categories : Big Government, Liberty, Maryland, Queen Anne's County

Jeff Werner, Meet James Madison

5 02 2010

Jeff Werner is one of the particularly loud voices agitating for greater action against illegal immigrants. And, unsurprisingly, a lot of the statements he makes reflect a fundamental lack of understanding of the issue.

Take this one for example;

Remember, Illegal Aliens have no rights, they are breaking the Laws.  If they don’t like it, they can leave on their own terms without being arrested.  We feel no shame or pity for the families being broken up, they have brought this on themselves. By the way, what due process do Illegal Immigrants have?  What rights do they have?

Hate to break it to you Jeff, but they actually do have rights. Let me refer you to the words of President Madison;

Again, it is said, that aliens not being parties to the Constitution, the rights and privileges which it secures cannot be at all claimed by them.

To this reasoning, also, it might be answered, that although aliens are not parties to the Constitution, it does not follow that the Constitution has vested in Congress an absolute power over them. The parties to the Constitution may have granted, or retained, or modified the power over aliens, without regard to that particular consideration.

But a more direct reply is, that it does not follow, because aliens are not parties to the Constitution, as citizens are parties to it, that whilst they actually conform to it, they have no right to its protection. Aliens are not more parties to the laws, than they are parties to the Constitution; yet, it will not be disputed, that as they owe, on one hand, a temporary obedience, they are entitled in return to their protection and advantage.

If aliens had no rights under the Constitution, they might not only be banished, but even capitally punished, without a jury or the other incidents to a fair trial. But so far has a contrary principle been carried, in every part of the United States, that except on charges of treason, an alien has, besides all the common privileges, the special one of being tried by a jury, of which one-half may be also aliens.

And to add to that, courtesy of Eugene Volokh (also the source of the Madison quotation):

The Supreme Court has endorsed Madison’s view at least since Wong Wing v. U.S. (1896) as to the criminal procedure provisions, and in Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886) (also unanimously) as to the Equal Protection Clause racial equality principle. Aliens might be deportable for their speech (see here for more on that question), but they can’t be otherwise punished for it, nor can they be criminally prosecuted in the civil justice system without the normal constitutional protections.

So yeah, immigrants, even illegal ones do have rights. And those rights include Due Process. Sorry to break it to you.

In all seriousness though, people like Jeff Werner are an embarrassment and an albatross hanging on the neck of the Right. I really hope conservatives figure out soon that they need to give up on the immigrant hate, stop trying for enforcement of current law (a logistical impossibility), and embrace reforms of our Byzantine immigration law that make it easier to come legally.


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Categories : Immigration, Maryland

The Problem with E-Verify

1 02 2010

NOTE: Due to a misunderstanding on my part, there’s problems with my initial conclusion, see updates below body of post.

I have an op-ed I’m hoping will get published in some of the local papers soon dealing with immigration and one of the issues I touch on is the movement to make E-Verify mandatory for all employers in America. Since it is still being considered, I won’t publish any of it here, but I want to expand on the E-Verify point.

Even as anti-immigration activists seek to make E-Verify mandatory at the national level, they are pushing hard to get states to mandate it in the meantime. Simply put, this is a horrible idea.

I could point to a lot of different reasons why:

But I want to focus on one in particular. False positives.

For those unfamiliar, a false positive is when a test finds a person positive for something when they should be negative. You hear it a lot with regards to medical tests, like AIDS for example.

Since the E-Verify system is essentially a check to see whether you have the condition of being here illegally, it means it too is subject to false positives.

After pulling some numbers for Maryland and doing a Bayesian inference I found the following:

Using the most generous numbers I could for E-Verify supporters, 6.3% 6.1% of positives in Maryland would be false positives, equating to 354,916 343,649 people.

However, as I said, that’s being generous. I also ran a more realistic version of the numbers, using the changes listed below:

  • My source for Maryland population was the U.S. Census Bureau. Their figure is 5,633,597. According to Help Save Maryland the number of illegals in the state is 250,000. In my generous calculation I treated this as a subset of the total state population. However, realistically, illegals are unlikely to be part of Census numbers so I have added them to the population number for a total of 5,883,597.
  • For my generous calculations I was operating using a standard of 99.9% test accuracy for finding illegals as illegals.  For my realistic one I downgraded to the 99.5% accuracy cited by the Center for Immigration Studies (still pretty generous in my opinion).
  • In the first calculation I relied upon the .3% false positive rate cited by E-Verify supporters. As Jim Harper has noted, a number this low is suspect considering E-Verify’s previous track record, so I moved it up to 1%, still short of his 1.24%

So, running the numbers using these adjusted figures, the rate of false positives increases from 6.3% to 18.6%, or 1,094,349 people incorrectly being denied work (1,047,849 if you apply the percentage to the unadjusted population number).

When the stakes are as serious as they are with E-Verify, an error rate that impacts so many people is inexcusable. Maryland has no business mandating E-Verify and I encourage everyone to reach out to your state representatives and let them know that.

UPDATE 1:

As my good friend Tim Andrews has pointed out, I really should include the calculations.

First version:

.999(.044)/[.999(.044)+.003(.956)]=.939

1-.939=.061=6.1%

Second version:

.995(.042)/[.995(.042)+.01(.958)]=.814

1-.814=.816=18.6%

The .999/.995 refers to the accuracy of the test in identifying illegals as illegals.

The .044/.042 refers to the percentage of illegal immigrants in the Maryland population.

The .003/.01 refers to the percentage of false positives.

The .956/.958 refers to the percentage of persons in Maryland that are not illegal immigrants.

Hope that clears up any confusion.

UPDATE 2:

It has been pointed out to me by a friend far better at statistics than I that I mis-applied the result of the Bayesian inference and that it should have been applied to the number of total positives and over-sized the total sample by using a portion of the population to approximate the working portion (his recommendation was half). So here are my corrected calculations and results (all data say the same except the general population number has been halved and the illegal immigrant population is 84% of its previous total; this was derived by applying national demographic info from Pew’s Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States report to state numbers.)

.999(.075)/[.999(.075)+.003(.925)]=.96

1-.96=.04=4% of all positives being false positives

.995(.069)/.995(.069)+.01(.931)]=.881

1-.881=.116=11.9% of all positives being false positives

If we accept the 5.8% rate of positives cited by the DHS is accurate (I’m skeptical the system won’t turn up more positives, especially false ones, as more strain is put upon it), that still comes out to 6534 Marylanders being unjustly denied employment because of E-Verify under the most generous model and 20,891 under my realistic model (18,951 if you use the realistic percentage but the generous population number).

Obviously this isn’t as strong a point as I initially thought I had, but I think even 6534 people improperly denied employment because of E-Verify is too many – and when you consider that there’s no reason to think things would be as ideal as that forecast, the problem becomes even more pressing.


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Categories : E-Verify, Immigration, Maryland, Politics

Two Visions of Growth

1 02 2010

I have decided that there are two visions of growth in Queen Anne’s County (they presumably exist elsewhere as well, but I’ll focus on here because I know it best).

They are commonly referred to as pro-growth and anti-growth. Neither of these is accurate.

What the anti-growth advocate supports is not opposition to growth. It is an embrace of death. These individuals claim they are protecting a traditional way of life, but what they are really doing is advocating for quicksand, for trapping individuals in a mire that prevents them not just from progressing forward, but from moving at all. And the end result of that stagnation is death, a slow death by inevitable suffocation.

Inversely, what the pro-growth advocate truly stands for is not growth, but freedom. The freedom of the individual to use their property as they see fit. No Quick-Sander, as I think of them, would stand for a neighbor coming into his or her house and mandating how pictures must be hung or furniture arranged. And yet these same perople see nothing wrong with going to their neighbors and telling them what they can and cannot build or divide. Nothing differs between the property inside a home and the property upon which the home stands, and the pro-growth supporter recognizes this fundamental truth.

As we approach the coming county elections the respective forces will begin to mobilize once more. In some ways they already are. So remember, the issue isn’t being for or against growth. It’s being for or against freedom and for or against a slow death by suffocation.


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Categories : Liberty, Philosophy, Politics, Queen Anne's County

Budget Shenanigans

29 01 2010

As always happens this time of year, the governor of Maryland has to put forth the budget. This year the stakes are rather high with that since we’re facing a $2 billion shortfall.

Lost on the Shore has, quite accurately, noted that O’Malley’s proposed budget doesn’t really solve the problem. It closes the gap, but it does so through a mix of one-time fixes that just kick the problem down the road and assumptions of money that isn’t guaranteed to come in.

Unfortunately, in the same post he both advocates a rather poor solution to our budgetary woes (I direct him to my previous post on the follies of combined reporting) and buys into the foolish idea that the only options are to increase taxes and/or decrease spending on existing programs.

This is an incredibly foolish statement and one that is made all too frequently. It completely ignores the option of drastically reforming the structure of programs in order to reduce expenditures. Yes, this is technically cutting spending, but it’s far different from simply reducing the funding for a giving program. Through properly executed reforms you can get as good a product or better from the program at the same or lower cost.

There are a wide range of these, but I’ll point to two that should sufficiently gore oxen of both the left and the right.

1) Move our school system completely over to the charter model.

Charter schools have consistently shown that they produce results significantly higher results than regular public schools while charging a fraction of the cost. According to Andrew Coulson,

Based on the latest (2006-07) figures, the average charter school in Michigan spends $2,000 less in state and local tax dollars per pupil than the average district school. So the savings from a district-to-charter student exodus would add up to $3.5 billion annually

I don’t know the exact numbers, but if we received even a 1/3 of those kind of savings we’d be worlds better financially. And it shouldn’t be a hard move either. Since charter schools still have to meet basic government standards they are far less politically controversial than the even more effective school voucher programs. I would also note that charter schools aren’t some insane right-wing idea – prominent leftie blogger Matt Yglesias has repeatedly stated his support for charter schools.

2) Decriminalize marijuana.

According to economist Jeffrey Miron:

it costs taxpayers at least $7 billion per year to pay for the arrest and prosecution of pot offenders. Taxpayers pay another $1 billion per year to house the estimated 50,000 state and federal inmates serving time for pot, according to data derived from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Now admittedly, these are national numbers, but with the urban centers of both Baltimore and Washington, D.C. it stands to reason that Maryland could benefit substantially from reducing its expenditures arresting, prosecuting, and imprisoning people for marijuana usage.

This too shouldn’t be controversial. Several other states and localities have taken this step and have yet to annihilate themselves in an orgy of put-fueled violence. And should we be willing to go even further, and fully legalize pot the economic returns could be even larger.

I only point to these as two examples of innovative reforms that could allow the state to help close the budget deficit while not requiring an increase in taxes or reducing the spending in ways that will hurt beneficiaries of cut programs (like the patients at Upper Shore for example).

Governor O’Malley and the rest in Annapolis should be willing to look beyond the gimmicks and the usual business of politics to consider these and other such options.


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Categories : Annapolis, Maryland, Politics

Markets (not) in Everything: Tigers

27 01 2010

13 countries are meeting to discuss plans to work together to save tigers.

The aim of the three-day meeting is to convince countries to pledge to spend more on tiger conservation and set targets for boosting their numbers — vows that would then be finalized by heads of state in September at a meeting in Russia.

Of course, I’m sure that none of the measures they consider involve making tigers a farmable resource. Not like it didn’t help revive the Southern White Rhino population or anything.

Update: And I was right.


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Categories : Conservation, Economics, News, Tigers

Quite Possibly The Greatest Rap Video Ever

25 01 2010

You can get lyrics and free download of the song at Econstories.tv.

Hats off to you Russ Roberts, this is fantastic.


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Categories : Economics, F.A. Hayek, John Maynard Keynes

Switzerland, Please Stop Jerking Me Around

25 01 2010

The IRS demands Swiss banks turn over info of U.S. citizens with  accounts. First Switzerland tells America to piss off. Then they turn around and say “Ok, we’ll let you have what you want.”

And now they’ve done it again.

A Swiss court just threw a wrench in the gears of an IRS effort to impose bad U.S. tax law on an extraterritorial basis, ruling that Switzerland-based UBS does not have to hand over data to the American tax authorities. This ruling nullifies an agreement that the Swiss government was coerced into making with the U.S. government last year.

Switzerland, you’ve got the right stance at the moment. Tax havens are important and need to be defended:

Look at what happened recently in the thugocracy known as Venezuela, where Chavez began a new wave of expropriation. The Venezuelans with money in Cayman, Miami, and Switzerland were safe, but the people with assets inside the country have been ripped off by a criminal government. Or what about people subjected to persecution, such as political dissidents in Russia? Or Jews in North Africa? Or ethnic Chinese in Indonesia? Or homosexuals in Iran? And how about people in places such as Mexico where kidnappings are common and successful people are targeted, often on the basis of information leaked from tax departments. This world needs safe havens, jurisdictions such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands that offer oppressed people the protection of honest courts, financial privacy, and the rule of law. Heck, even the bureaucrat in charge of the OECD’s anti-tax competition campaign admitted to a British paper that “tax havens are essential for individuals who live in unstable regimes.”

So please, please, Switzerland – let this be the end of the back and forth. Tell the IRS to go screw itself and let that be the end of it.


Comments : 2 Comments »

Categories : Big Government, Switzerland, Taxes

Welcome to the New Rationing

15 01 2010

Please allow me to indulge in another “told you so moment.”

Back in August I explained the biggest reason I’m opposed to government involvement in healthcare.

That’s because the alternative isn’t an end to rationing. It’s a rearrangement of what drives it. Like it or not, when government becomes the arbiter of choice rather than the market, decisions cease to be driven by market forces and are instead driven by political pull. Try imagining a healthcare system where every health complaint is now a political interest. Do you think they’ll prioritized around necessity and importance? Or will it be around which ones have the best lobbyists and marketing?

So I was understandably not surprised to see this in the news:

The White House has reached a tentative agreement with labor leaders to tax high-cost health insurance policies, sources said Thursday. The agreement clears one of the last major obstacles on the path to final passage of comprehensive health care legislation…Health plans negotiated on behalf of state and local workers, or as part of collective-bargaining agreements, would be exempt for five years after the 2013 effective date

This is what happens when you put control into the politicians’ hands. So long as decisions get made, some method is going to be used to discriminate between consumers. The only question is if you prefer that to be decided by lobbyists and media campaigns or by the dollar.


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Categories : Big Government, Rent Seeking, Universal Healthcare

Thoughts on Avatar

14 01 2010

I saw Avatar shortly after it came out. Since then I’ve avoided weighing in on the variety of reactions to it. Overall, I had no disagreement that it was Dances With Wolves meets Fern Gully with aliens.

But I also saw another angle, one much more in line with my libertarian views. However, since no one else seemed to think so I figured I was simply stretching the limits of interpretation too far. A recent post by Donald Boudreaux has convinced me that it might not be such a stretch.

But here’s another, much-less-trumpeted piece of news that is cause for optimism about the future of freedom in China: In a report on how the movie ‘Avatar’ is perceived by the Chinese people, yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reports that “China’s moviegoers see a story about private property, not race.”

It’s a very interesting perspective and I highly recommend reading it. However my own libertarian take took a slightly different angle.

It takes 6 years to get from Earth to Pandora. Additionally, the movie suggests the corporation (or rather Pandora and the Na’vi) run through soldiers at a pretty breakneck pace, hence the high pay they’re offered. And then on top of that they’ve been there for a long time (Jake’s statement at the beginning suggests mankind has been going there since at least his childhood), long enough for them to build the Avatar program from the ground up. All of this for a mineral that sells at $20 million a kilo.

Now, I’m neither an economist nor an accountant, but it seemed a bit improbable to me that even at that going rate the company could really be making very much money with all of the costs and the strong implication that they haven’t been very successful mining the unobtanium due to the dangers of both the planet and the populace. And if they could be making that much money doing it, why are there no other companies competing with them there.

The only answer I can come up with is that the corporation operating on Pandora enjoyed the benefit of a government monopoly. That would allow them to both absorb far greater costs than they could otherwise and operate without competition.

I’m sure James Cameron never thought about this, but that it’s such a commonplace reality these days is probably an even bigger indictment of our current union of governmental and corporate power.

What are your thoughts? Does my view hold up, or is it complete crap?


Comments : 5 Comments »

Categories : Avatar, Corporate Welfare, Rent Seeking, Thoughts

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