The ACLU goes too far

I am really annoyed by the ACLU on this one -- this is stepping over the line:

This ceremony was held on Sunday, when the school was not in session.
No student or member of the faculty was required to attend
No religious object was left at the building

While the ACLU states that its mission is to monitor the separation of church and state, it seems to me that what it really wants is to prohibit religion entirely...

... or at least it wants to prohibit Christianity. I very much doubt that we would have seen a protest from the ACLU if there had been dancing and chants by a Native American tribe instead. How about if an African-American Muslim community had held a similar ceremony?
Our Bill of Rights does not prohibit religion -- it prohibits the government from mandating religion.
Don't let the ACLU prevail in this one!!

CHURCH SUPPORT AT MIDDLE SCHOOL
Blessing of school draws protest
Ceremony violated separation of church and state, ACLU says
Monday, August 28, 2006
Matt Zapotosky
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Pat Miller, right, and Carol Fry, center, of Karl Road Christian Church, lead about 180 people from four different North Side churches in a verse of Kumbaya outside Woodward Park Middle School. The group gathered yesterday to read a prayer and bless the school before the start of the school year.
About 180 members of four local churches surrounded a public middle school yesterday to bless the building and those who use it, despite objections from the American Civil Liberties Union about the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state.
Led by a minister from Epworth United Methodist Church, members of Epworth, Karl Road Christian Church, Karl Road Baptist Church and Ascension Lutheran Church joined hands and circled halfway around Woodward Park Middle School at 5151 Karl Rd. In unison, they asked the "great divine one, creator of us all" to bless each "student … teacher, staff and administrator" entering the building.
"Rain or shine, ACLU or not, nobody can stop those who have spirit-filled hearts," said Patricia Miller, who led the ceremony.
The nearby churches have an ongoing relationship with Woodward Park, providing supplies and other support. Miller said the ceremony at first was planned for inside the building and had the approval of the school’s principal, Jill Spanheimer.
Last week, Spanheimer said she didn’t remember that conversation and that the ceremony would have to be outside. Yesterday, she watched the ceremony from her yard, which borders the school grounds. She would not comment afterward.
The ACLU of Ohio sent a letter to Spanheimer and Superintendent Gene Harris last week, saying that permitting the event would violate the constitutional requirement that public schools remain neutral on religious matters. District officials responded with a letter stating the event was constitutional according to a U.S. Supreme Court case from New York state. In Good News Club v. Milford Central School, the court ruled that any group is permitted to rent and use public-school facilities.
"Anyone can walk onto the school grounds during the weekend," said Columbus Public Schools spokesman Greg Viebranz.
Gary Daniels, litigation coordinator for the ACLU of Ohio, said this event differed from the renting of school buildings, even those rented for a religious use.
"There’s not that appearance of endorsement by the school," he said. "There are worse scenarios that can be presented as far as being problematic from a church-state perspective, but this by no means is something that in my mind would pass constitutional muster."
Several participants said yesterday they did not think the ceremony, which lasted less than a half-hour, violated the separation of church and state, and some said they didn’t think church and state should be separated anyway.
Residents near the school who were interviewed by The Dispatch said they were not upset. In fact, they thought the event was a positive way to kick off the school year and benefited the neighborhood.
mzapotosky@dispatch.com
Copyright © 2006, The Columbus Dispatch

In Favor of Nuclear Power

With gasoline at $3.00/gallon and climbing, we’ve got to think seriously about building some new nuclear-powered electricity generating stations.

I suspect that there are millions of us Americans who would drive electric vehicles to work if the economics make sense. The vehicle needs to have the necessary features, of course. It needs to be comfortable for at least two people, have a little room for cargo, be able to operate at freeway speeds, can be recharged in six hours or less, have air conditioning and a decent sound system, and be available at a price point that makes sense.

A good deal of the freight in our country could be hauled between cities on the railroads, using trains powered by electric locomotives.

All the public transportation in our cities could be electric trolleys and buses.

If the electricity for all those applications comes from nuclear power plants, then we will make a huge dent in our demand for oil. The objective is not to lower the price of oil by reducing our demand, it’s to substantially eliminate the need for oil in our economy all together. Instead of being dependent on good relations with the oil-rich countries of the Middle East, we can tell them to keep their oil and find someone else to terrorize.

It is possible to have a safe nuclear powered infrastructure. The French have been doing it for years. One of the keys is their standardized reactor/generator design which can be replicated over and over. You get continuous improvement in both safety and efficiency only when you can apply your learning across the whole installed base of technology. In fact, I would be in favor of licensing France’s reactor design so that we get a head start with a known model.

What about the waste? We have to stop letting a few folks dictate the strategic energy policy of the whole country. We seem to have built a safe storage facility in Yucca Mountain, and we have safe mechanisms for transport. If we put the power plants in the right places, we don’t have to run the shipping casks through populated areas to get to the storage facility. What about the potential for bad guys high jacking a shipment? Why don’t we deploy troops to guard the power plants and the shipment trains instead of protecting our oil interests in the Middle East?

The alternative is to keep competing with the Chinese for oil until we both suck the world dry and end up going to war over what’s left.

Yes, keep working on all the other alternative fuel sources: wind, hydro, fusion, solar, etc. And let’s get serious about conservation. Tell my neighbors, commercial and residential, to turn off all the damn lights that create light pollution and waste energy. Let’s figure out how to store energy on a massive scale so don’t have to match generator capacity to the peak demand. The guys who designed the Niagara Power Project figured out a neat way to do this.

In the mix, there is still a need for an electrical power source which functions when there is no wind, or it’s cloudy, yet doesn’t rely on oil as an energy source. Nuclear power fits that bill.

Opponents of nuclear power – cut back your electrical energy consumption by 80% and your fossil fuel consumption by 100% for a month or two. That’s what life would be like when the oil runs out. Then let’s talk about the best way to make lots more power.

The Price of Gas, Part II -- Gouging & Inflation

Gouging – most people don’t understand what this term means, or at least when it is a bad thing. Folks see Exxon/Mobil posting $10B earnings in a quarter and say we’re being gouged at the pump for gas. Meanwhile they pay a higher price/gal for bottled water without blinking an eye. If the oil companies are operating substantially without government subsidy, then I think they should be able to keep raising the price until they feel they’ve maximized profits. Of course, they do get government subsidy in the form of tax incentives, so that makes things a little messier. But we won’t wean ourselves off petroleum until we are individually driven to change our behavior and seek alternatives. Classic economic theory would argue that the best thing for our country would be for the oil companies to raise the price, generate huge profits, and pay out a substantial fraction of those profits as dividends. That releases capital to be invested into other enterprises, some of which are likely to seek what comes after oil (which might not be limited to energy – it might be about further upgrades to the telecom system so that telecommuting is even more practical).

To me, gouging happens only in the face of a disaster, when an absolutely essential commodity is in the hands of a few, and those few raise the price to exorbitant levels, taking advantage of the situation. This happens rarely, and almost never in this country. What would you say if a cabbie in Manhattan on 9/11 said he would give you a ride, but for 10x the meter? If you a pregnant woman who needed to get to a hospital, I’d call that gouging. If you were a snotty upper East sider, I might say it’s just capitalism.

Inflation is another concept most people don’t understand. Properly defined, inflation occurs when the government adds currency to the economy faster than the growth in GNP. Having gas prices go up is not inflation. A key component of capitalism is the process where a producer raises prices to the point that consumers seek alternative answers to their needs and desires. If increasing gas prices causes me to lack the disposable income to buy other stuff I would like to have, then I am motivated to solve the problem of higher gas prices. I might buy more efficient car, or use more mass transit, or move close enough to my job and food source that I don’t need a car anymore (which is why poor people across the globe flock to cities).

Things are somewhat neutralized if my employer feels some obligation to raise my pay enough to offset the increase in gas price. But this still isn’t inflation. Presumably the employer must divert some resources away from other things to raise my pay. The employer might try to raise the price of their product to pass the cost on down the food chain. That still isn’t inflation, because the buyers of those products have the opportunity to pay the higher price or find another supplier. The rise in oil prices definitely has a ripple effect through the economy, but it’s exactly what needs to happen. Everyone feels a little piece of motivation to solve the macro problem.
Inflation happens when the government comes to the conclusion that the economy is slowing down, and that a way to stimulate it is to make money cheaper. They do this by massively increasing the amount of debt instruments they offer at the primary auction, in which the primary bond traders bid on the instruments by offering how much interest they are willing to pay. When government bonds are plentiful, they bid lower rates, which causes that influx of money to get passed on to the economy at a lower rate. When debt is cheaper for employers, they might be able to restructure their debt at a lower rate and free up some cash flow to pay higher salaries and higher prices for their other purchases. At the end of the day, nothing has changed as far as relative price (e.g. everything except money costs 1% more), and there is no motivation to change behavior.

But these money supply infusions are an addictive drug. The underlying dynamics aren’t changed, and the free market forces which would flow from the behavior changes driven by individual purchasing choices get squelched and perverted. As the new money is absorbed into the economy, it can seem like things are okay, but they're really not. Lenders begin to take note that long term debt is getting risky because the buying power of a dollar is being diluted, and so they increase lending rates. That wave works its way through the economy as higher borrowing costs for everything from houses to credit card debt to school loans.

The Fed is doing exactly the right thing by keeping the money supply under control (they don't control interest rates, they control the money supply -- notice that they talk about interest rate 'targets' they hope to achieve by controlling the amount of Treasury debt that place on the market -- see above). The last thing in the world we want is for them to dump a bunch of money into the economy to lower interest rates in the short term, because it starts a dangerous cycle and ultimately causes interest rates to go up.

So the let the gas companies charge all they can get away with. It's good for all of us.

Slave Reparation

I'm honored to have the opportunity to serve on the Board of Directors of the National Black Programming Consortium. This organization does important work bringing the story of the African-American community to a broad audience, primarily through films which are aired on PBS. I have learned much, and expect to learn much more.

One topic about which I have much to learn: the movement for paying reparation to the descendents of slaves in America. Here's some of my questions (I'll fill in answers as I learn them). The first set of questions are an attempt to understand why reparations are appropriate. These would seem to be the assertions:
Americans who are not the descendents of individuals held as slaves in America have benefited from the contributions made by the former slaves while they were in slavery. The time of such benefit would start at the moment the first slave landed in America and end when the reparation payment were made. For example, if slaves were used to clear a section of land later used to plant crops, every year that land has been in use, someone benefitted.

The fact that these people were, captured, deprived of their freedom, and made slaves is in of itself an injury, and should be compensated.

In the time after the emancipation of the slaves, discrimination continued, causing economic injury to the former slaves and their descendents. In general, the level of discrimination has diminished over time, but it is not yet been eliminated from our society.

What are others?

I don't think anyone would question that all of the above statements are true. But that's the easy part. The BIG problem is to assign a monetary value to these injuries. Some of the issues in this regard:
What is the fair value of a slave's labor? What were hired workers paid to do the same kind of work?
Many slaves were commanded to perform unspeakable acts in addition to their work duties. How is that compensated?

Slaves were treated like livestock in many cases. Men and women were forced to sire offspring, regardless of their relationship (men were loaned out like stud horses) and those children would be taken from them and sold like a calves.

The master could take the life of a slave without consequence.

I once read an essay by Thomas Sewell where he warned the African-American community that accepting reparations was not a good thing for the African American community. His logic was that with the payment of reparations, the rest of the American society might say "okay, that's settled." Then any perceived obligation to continue the effort to wipe out the lingering effects of slavery and discrimination would end. This could mean the termination of many programs which are targeted to bring the poor kids of the inner cities, which tend to be African-American, into the mainstream of opportunities in America. I think he has a point, but I don't treat it as the conclusive argument.

My education continues...

Articles I've found so far:

http://www.blacksense.com/articleview.php?ID=168

Iraq and Vietnam

There are some who call World War II the last 'good war.' I don't know who those people are, nor do I believe that any war can be judged to be 'good.' But I think I understand the comment.

In WWII, the enemy troops wore uniforms, used well-labeled equipment, and held defined positions of geography. There was 'friendly territory' and 'enemy territory.' The war ended when the leaders of the enemy government surrendered, after which their troops laid down their arms and ceased hostility.

Then came the wars in Korea and Vietnam. While the American troops were in uniform, the enemy might be a uniformed soldier, or he might be the teenager who stops by the post every day to mooch a cold soda. The definition of 'friendly territory' became a little more transient as the fighting moved from the battlefield to the village. An American Army or Marine unit could sweep through a village and drive out all the bad guys, but the Americans didn't stay to occupy and defend the village, and the bad guys just moved back in. In fact, the villagers might not have been good guys in the first place.

Or they might be folks who are just trying to survive. While some of the civilians might be fervent followers of whatever revolutionary movement is seeking control, most are just trying to get along without getting killed. The trouble is, it's hard to tell the revolutionaries from those who just want the fighting to stop. American policy has alway been to give the benefit of the doubt to the people, assuming them to be good guys unless they are actually observed trying to do harm. And so, American soldiers and Marines got regularly killed by bad guys hiding in plain sight.

Eventually, our guys get tired of getting picked off this way. After seeing a few of their buddies turned into goo by people they thought they were helping, the fuse finally blows and our guys kill everyone and everything not in an American uniform. And then they get called murderers.

The crime is in putting our troops in this position in the first place. If we can't tell who the enemy is by looking at them, then our troops don't belong there. If the mission isn't to drive invaders from our soil or that of our allies, we shouldn't go. Anything else is a pre-emptive invasion on our part -- and few Americans feel good about being invaders.

WWII wasn't the last 'good war,' if you accept my definition that a 'good war' is one in which our troops can have confidence who is a good guy and who is a bad guy, and that their objective is to get the enemy to surrender by taking away their battlefield positions and destroying their logistics capability.

That distinction goes to Desert Storm -- the operation to kick the Iraqi invaders out of Kuwait. We got to do all the stuff we're good at -- bring all of our technology and organization to bear on a uniformed enemy in defined positions. It was over when the bad guys were driven off our ally's land, and we could declare the mission to truly be accomplished. Admittedly, fighting Iraq isn't like fighting the Soviet Union or China, so it doesn't carry the magnitude of accomplishment of winning WWII. But it was the real deal.

In any war, we ask the young men of our country to point deadly weapons at other human beings and, with little analysis, take the lives of those they have been trained to identify as our enemy. Once they pull the trigger, they will have committed an act that otherwise in our society would been considered one of the worst crimes, punishable by a life in prison or even execution. If we are going to ask them to violate that standard of morality, we need to be sure the identity of the enemy is unambiguous and the mission is just. Otherwise we risk putting them in a situation where they have to quickly evaluate whether the 'civilians' around them are good guys or bad guys, and then act decisively. We doom them to live forever with those decisions.

Iraq is Vietnam all over again. Our mission can't be to drive the invaders out, because the revolutionaries are citizens of that same country. We can't take territory because we are already in the country we're trying to 'free.' Note that I'm not saying that this is a bad thing to do. Helping a country move from dictatorship to democracy is a good thing. But it's not a mission our military forces are built to carry out.

Big wars are won with strategy, tactics, training, leadership and execution. To that you add heroism and a little luck. But it also takes massive manufacturing and logistics capability. To fight a sustained battle, and to win a war, an army needs a constant and massive supply of weapons, ammunition, food and medical supplies. We're pretty good at that, and it's one of the reasons we did so well in Desert Storm.

But when the winning move for the revolutionaries is simply to get the outside power to tire of the pain and leave, you don't need to have, or even want to have, big engagements on the battlefield. This is how the American revolutionaries drove the British from the American colonies. Think about the American Revolution from the perspective of the British sometime. The first battle of the American Revolution took place because the British sent a company of soldiers from Boston to Concord to destroy a weapons cache (I suppose it was the 18th century version of the search for WMDs). The colonists drove the British out of Concord not by lining up and fighting in the civilized manner, but rather by picking them off from the woods. There were a couple of big battles in the Revolutionary War, but we never really defeated the British -- we just made it more painful (and expensive) than they cared to endure. After all, the outcome of the American Revolution was not to have the Americans gain control of the British Isles. We just got them to leave here.

Taking sides in a civil war, or a revolutionary war, is not something we Americans have the stomach to do. Our own Civil War remains the bloodiest conflict we ever engaged in. That's just the way civil wars go -- fighting between brothers always gets nasty. If you want to take sides and win in a civil war, you have to be willing to fight nasty, and we don't like our soldiers and Marines to do that.

It's immoral to send our troops to fight in a nasty war but not let them fight nasty. Let's bring them home before we destroy the minds and attitudes of another generation of our young people.

The Price of Gas

The price of gas has gone up 100% in the last year. Whose fault is it?

You know, it's the question which is the problem, and the symptom of the state of affairs in the United States today. Our country has become so huge and so complex that it is all but impossible to manage. Even at the township level, where I am most directly involved, the rhetoric is not about what is good for our community, but rather what is good for particular individuals.

Maybe things have always been this way in politics, and I'm just finally getting old enough to recognize the reality. That reality is that we have a shadow government which is "owned" by a small set of greedy and ambitious individuals, and the elected officials are pretty much their hand-picked pawns. As I commented in another blog entry, the difference between Democrats and Repblicans is negligible, and the struggle over who is in control of the White House and Congress isn't about ideology, but rather which set of puppetmasters get the keys to the kingdom for the next term. Of course, many of the puppetmasters play both sides.

So gas prices might be where they are because the puppetmasters have decided that this is the price the economy can withstand, in the same way drug pushers have to figure out how much their addict-customers can afford to pay. The pushers don't care whether the addicts thrive, only that they survive to buy drugs another day. Maybe that's exactly what the puppetmasters are thinking, and they'll keep pushing up the gas prices a little at a time, forever.

But it could be that gas prices are what they because of purely market-driven supply-and-demand microeconomic forces. Why is it not okay for the oil companies to push up gas prices until they see demand soften?

We have to be assured that the oil companies aren't engaging in price fixing -- where they get together and conspire to raise prices. But let's for a moment believe that they aren't. Why isn't it okay for them to keep raising prices until they see a decrease in demand? It's not like there is some law that says gas has to be cheap. Gasoline is not the easiest stuff in the world to make and distribute after all. First you have to find the crude oil (expensive), then you have to get it out of the ground (expensive), then you have to transport it (expensive), then you need to refine it into gasoline (expensive), then you have to transport it to market (expensive), and then you have to sell it at carefully engineered and operated gas stations (expensive). And we get to buy it for less than $3.00 gallon.

Compare that to the cost of soft drinks. Those are made from water (available pretty much everywhere), corn syrup (the grain elevators are stuffed and there's another crop on the way), and a few chemicals for color and taste. The manufacturing step is pretty straightforward compared to gasoline, and the logistics chain is much simpler. Nonetheless, we consider $4.50 for eight 20oz bottles of Gatorade to be a good price (per the current Kroger ad). That works out to $3.60 per gallon by the way.

Many folks note that the oil companies are making record profits with the gas prices so high, and think it is immoral. But don't we, the buyers, make the choice whether or not to pay that price? Our memories are so short. Back in the 1970s, we were all driving those big gas-guzzling Detroit battleships when gas was 50cents/gallon. Then the oil crisis hit, and Americans flocked to little American cars like the Ford Pinto and the Chevy Vega -- and to Hondas, Datsuns and Toyotas.

But then the oil prices stuck around $1 per gallon for the 90s, and we bought SUVs by the millions and continued moving further and further into the suburbs. It only took us a decade to forget the pain of high gas prices and go right back to gas gluttony. So now we start another changeover, with the early adopters buying up all the hybrid vehicles while SUVs are sitting unsold at the dealerships.

From a pure economic standpoint, it's entirely understandable that the oil companies should test the price elasticity of their product. Elasticity is the relationship between changes in price and changes in demand. The price/demand relationship is said to be elastic if raising prices lowers demand (and lowering prices increases demand), and inelastic if changes in the price don't have much effect on demand. The price/demand relationship for gasoline seems to be completely inelastic right now: regardless of the change in price, our demand stays the same. If I were the oil companies, I would keep pushing up the price until some weakness in demand is created, and then would try to figure out which combination of price and demand yield the maximum profit. That's what every other enterprise tries to do -- why is it inappropriate for the oil companies to do the same?

But you really have to be sure the oil companies are actually competing with each other. Many industries will have a 'price leader' who is big enough to set a price point for their product. Everyone else can be expected to cluster around whatever price that leader set. But some will sell for less and try to snag a little bit of the market on price alone. Others might try to charge more than the price leader by adding features or services to the product. Sometimes the little corner vendor grows up to be Wal-Mart, taking the market away from the leaders (when is the last time you shopped at Montgomery Ward?).

I guess I believe the big oil companies are still competing with each other, in the same way Coca-Cola competes with Pepsi. Coke and Pepsi spend millions on advertising to convince us that there is a really difference in between two products which are about 99% the same (water, sugar, food coloring), and they do so because taking away one point of market share from the other is worth a great deal of money. The gas companies also spend a vast amount of money on advertising? If they aren't competing with each other, why advertise at all?

I also think it's appropriate for the oil companies to make decent profits because it will give them capital to find more oil, and maybe even develop new energy sources. I heard it once said that if the railroads understood themselves to be in the transportation business, we would now be flying New York Central Airlines. But they viewed the airplane as a fad and not the future of transportation (Western Union made the same mistake with the telephone). I hope the railroads are figuring out that passenger rail travel may come back in vogue, and are investing in appropriate equipment, personnel and facilities to catch an increase in demand.

In the same way, I hope the oil companies are viewing themselves as energy companies, and are using a lot of that profit to develop better ways of making and distributing ethanol and hydrogen. They should also be the largest researchers in areas such as batteries and fuel cells. Otherwise, they should pay out some huge dividends to release capital to investors who can put it back into companies who are investing for the future. Either way, they should not be ashamed about making a profit. It's those profits which fund growth and innovation. Even if you tend to left-wing politics, you need profitable businesses to pay corporate taxes to fund your programs. Robin Hood is unemployed if there aren't any rich folks...

Bottom line, if you don't like the gas prices, get a cheaper car, use public transportation, ride your bike to work, or find some other solution. The oil companies don't owe you a cheaper price. Isn't our economy healthier in the long run if we let these high prices be the impetus to lessen our addiction to oil?

Illegal Aliens

Here's what I believe:

• If you are inside the borders of the United States of America, you had better be a citizen or a registered guest. You can't just sneak through the back door and think we don't care. The first time you get caught, we'll ship you home. The second time we'll throw you in jail for a while, then ship you home anyway. The third time, we'll throw you in jail for life.
  
• We don't owe illegal aliens free healthcare, or free schooling, or free anything else. It shouldn't even be a question. See the first point.
  
• I don't believe we need immigrant workers in the US because they will do jobs Americans refuse to do. We Americans do some pretty crappy jobs (just watch "Dirty Jobs" on TV). How about the guy who squishes cow manure in his bare hands to figure out if the feed mix needs to be adjusted? Or how about the guy who sucks the stuff out of the Port-A-Johns?The truth of the matter is that employers can hire illegal aliens to do these kinds of jobs for a fraction of the pay that most Americans would demand. If you offered me $200,000/yr to clean out Port-A-Johns with a toothbrush, I might consider it. The point is that if we cut off the supply of illegal aliens to employers, the employers would have to bid up the pay scale until workers accept the jobs.However, there are also many cases of jobs that had been filled by Americans who get replaced by illegal alients who will do the job for less. Around where I live, most every American framing carpenter and drywaller has been replaced by a Mexican crew. Those aren't crappy jobs that Americans won't do! Some will argue that if we have to pay more for labor, the prices of goods and services will go up. Yes, that's probably true. But we're paying for it anyway through our taxes, to pay for free healthcare, and free schools, and all that stuff. Reread the prior two points. I'd rather let the free market forces figure out what labor is worth, and what products and services are worth, than have a system based on government subsidy -- which is what we have now.
  
• If you come in legally to work for a little while, then go back home, you are a welcome guest. It enrichens both of us to have that kind of cultural interaction. I hope I am as welcome to be a guest worker in your country as you are here.
  
• If you are here as our guest, and don't intend to ever go home, then in some ways, you are insulting us. You want all the benefits of citizenship without the obligations. Maybe your spouse is American, and you both decided that you wanted to live here. I guess I understand loyalty to the home country. But it seems like you are saying "I want to live in America, I just don't want to be one." That's the insult.
  
• If you have have come to America as a legal guest, with the dream of becoming an American citizen, then I look forward to the day you take the oath of citizenship. Welcome to your new country!
  

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said one of my favorite things recently when he was getting pummeled by his countrymen for his support of the US: He said it still seemed like more people were trying to get in than to get out...

Amen.