Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

I was listening to a feeble and apologetic defense of opposition to mandatory seat belt laws by a local libertarian on the radio. It’s amazing how little respect for freedom there is in America. Why didn’t the libertarian just say, “Why should the police be able to stop me and force me to wear a seat belt when I’m driving two blocks down the street in a quiet neighborhood in my own car? What right do other people have to decide for me that seat belts are always, absolutely, necessary for safety? If I’m willing to take the risk, why can’t I?”

Mark Gergen at Balkinization has a good comment on legal formalism: (more…)

I wonder how hospitals and doctors calculate their accounts for bad debts and for charity? If they do it the way I suspect, bad accounting is raising health care costs by discouraging out-of-pocket payment in favor of insurance. Here’s the reason.

Suppose a hospital provides a bypass operation as charity. The accounting question is how this affects income and costs. The way I suspect it is done is that the hospital reports 0 income and reports the list price of the operation as a cost. Thus, if the list price is $100,000, the operation has reduced the hospital’s profit by $100,000.

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Slate has an article on state compensation to people wrongfully convicted who have served time in prison.

Only 21 states have compensation laws on the books, which spell out exactly how much you get for a wrongful conviction. Louisiana, for example, ponies up $15,000 for each year of incarceration, plus job training and help with college tuition. Alabama pays at least $50,000 a year, and California pays $100 per day. Meanwhile, the federal government forks over $50,000 for each year of incarceration for federal crimes, plus $50,000 for each year spent on death row.

In Connecticut, which is among the 29 states without compensation statutes, ex-prisoners must lobby the legislature to pass a private bill that grants compensation to a specific person. Here, the dollar amount loosely depends on what payments the state has made in the past. The number should account for the victim’s lost time, lost wages, and physical and mental suffering, as well as the effects on his or her family. Private bills are behind some of the multimillion-dollar rewards that make the headlines, but the payouts don’t always go off without a hitch. Florida, for instance, initially planned to award $1.25 million to Alan Crotzer for serving more than 24 years after being convicted of armed robbery and rape, but ultimately dropped the payment from its budget, instead giving $4.8 million to the parents of a teen who had died in juvie boot camp. (You can keep tabs on awards by reading Justice: Denied, “the magazine for the wrongly convicted.”)

Bonnie Goldstein in Slate on May 15 complains about revisions of a study on election fraud. She selectively quotes from the draft to make it seem as if it said that election fraud wasn’t a problem. Fortunately, she posts the original draft, which says the opposite– that the people they interviewed think there is widespread fraud (mostly absentee voting, vote buying, and illegal registrations) and slack Justice Department investigation.

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May 14 the World Bank posted its latest reports and annexes on the Wolfowitz kerfuffle. They include the report itself, lots of transcripts, and documents that Wolfowitz submitted. They do not include any other documents— the people attacking Wolfowitz rely on their word alone, though Xavier Coll does say he has personal notes that he was unwilling to make public. The documents support Wolfowitz, as always. I’d like to ask Coll why we can’t see his documents, and also ask him what kind of settlement for Shaha Riza he proposed, and why he has no record in writing of his proposal when he says he was taking such careful notes. We could ask much the same question of everyone else who is now criticizing Wolfowitz.

The report itself is audacious. It even criticizes Wolfowitz for responding to his critics, as thereby undermining the World Bank. The bureaucrats’ position now is that when the Ethics Committee told Wolfowitz, in writing, to “instruct” Coll on what to do with Riza, they meant for Wolfowitz to do whatever Coll thought should be done, and that when they told Wolfowitz to compensate Riza for the special hardship of having to leave the Bank’s normal promotion process, he wasn’t suppose to compensate her in any way out of the ordinary routine of promotion and salary increase. What weasels! If Wolfowitz does get fired, he’ll have a good lawsuit against the Bank.

May 18: Wolfowitz has now resigned, but in a compromise where the Board said,
“He assured us that he acted ethically and in good faith in what he believed were the best interests of the institution, and we accept that.” He cannot bring a lawsuit, since he resigned and since the Board has said it does not think he acted unethically– in effect, rejecting the report I discuss above but saying Wolfowitz should leave anyway just to get the fuss over. Too bad.

I forget whose idea this is, but it is a good one. Suppose each of 9 jurors gets a signal of guilty or innocence. They must be unanimous to convict. I get a signal of INNOCENT. We will vote independently, without discussion. What should I do?

I should not vote INNOCENT in equilibrium. Rather, I will mix. That is because if I pick INNOCENT, maybe everybody else has GUILTY, and I will wreck everything and there will be acquittal. Thus, in equilibrium there will be some people with INNOCENT signals who will vote GUILTY anyway.

Listening to a presentation of Leigh Linden and Jonah Rockoff’s, “There Goes the Neighborhood? Estimates of the Impact of Crime Risk on Property Values from Megan’s Laws”, I thought of an idea for a commercial website. Some states have sites where you can look up an address and see how many child molesters live nearby. Sometimes the requirement for an ex-con to register ends after a certain number of years. A new private website could harvest the state data, or simply get it by Freedom-of-Info Act and keep it up forever. Information on other crimes committed by neighbors could also be included. The site could be funded by advertising directed at people buying new homes.

The NYT
had a long story on the Chinese cough syrup poisoning. Antifreeze was labelled as glycerine in China and used in cough medicine in Panama. This is a great example for my article on trust and trade with the Third World. It’s also a good warning. I think I’ll stop eating canned food from China. (more…)

Prof. Bainbridge reports on the self-destruction of Ave Maria Law School. A faculty letter of protest and explanation has been made public. Here are two comments from the Bainbridge site: (more…)

A good way to reform taxes would be to eliminate the tax deduction for donations of property to charities. This is much abused, and requires difficult record-keeping if the value is to be accurately determined. Instead, however, if I have property that I wish to donate, I should be allowed to sell it and then give the money to the charity without having to report the capital gains part of it as income. Here’s how it would work.

Under current law, if I buy a painting for $10,000 and its value rises to $15,000 and I donate it to a charity, I get a deduction of $15,000 from this year’s income. If, instead, I sold the painting for $15,000 and gave the money to the charity, I would still get the $15,000 deduction, but I would also have to report a $5,000 capital gain and pay tax on that. I would pay more tax than if I donated the painting directly, and I would have to show how much I paid for the painting, the basis, which can be awkward sometimes (suppose I had inherited it instead, or received it as a gift).

Under my proposal, if I donated the painting, I would get no deduction. If I sold it and gave the $15,000, though I would get the deduction for $15,000 without any need to report the $5,000 income or to find out what the tax basis was.

Of course, my proposal isn’t perfect. The person who wanted to give his painting away to his alma mater would be discouraged from doing so under it. Maybe some special provision could be made, some costly and conservative valuation process for property gifts– say, the requirement that $2,000 be paid to cover the cost of an IRS valuation, and no possibility of doing your own valuation.

The dissent by Justices Ginsburg, Stevens, Souter, and Breyer in the Carhart partial-birth abortion case is revealing in how it separates morality from human rights and interest in human life.

      Ultimately, the Court admits that “moral concerns” are at work, concerns that could yield prohibitions on any abortion. See ante, at 28 (”Congress could … conclude that the type of abortion proscribed by the Act requires specific regulation because it implicates additional ethical and moral concerns that justify a special prohibition.”). Notably, the concerns expressed are untethered to any ground genuinely serving the Government’s interest in preserving life. By allowing such concerns to carry the day and case, overriding fundamental rights, the Court dishonors our precedent. See, e.g., Casey, 505 U. S., at 850 (”Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of morality, but that cannot control our decision. Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.”); Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558, 571 (2003) (Though “[f]or many persons [objections to homosexual conduct] are not trivial concerns but profound and deep convictions accepted as ethical and moral principles,” the power of the State may not be used “to enforce these views on the whole society through operation of the criminal law.” (citing Casey, 505 U. S., at 850)).

The Kennedy opinion in the Carhart partial-birth abortion case is interesting because it uses an information-failure argument at one point (rather inaptly for the Carhart law, since it implies that the law could be fixed by requiring the doctor to explain to the mother the grisly details of what he is going to do to her baby). Here is what he says.

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Here’s a shocking example of the way people think. Don Imus’s brief vulgarity is atrocious and must be punished. The music group Three 6 Mafia, which is much more vulgar, is fine, because they won an Academy Award for it. Morality is all relative, and is defined for us by Hollywood. This, of course, is the attitude that tolerated segregation and lynchings back when they, and not rap, were in fashion–or would have, if their promoters were from Southern California instead of just the South.

Beverly Calendar-Anderson, director of Bloomington’s Safe and Civil City program, offered help.

“I think Imus should have known better; he should have known where the line was,” she said Friday. “When you are on public airways … you have the responsibility not to harm people.”…

She had some insights into why Three 6 Mafia can get away with their nasty viewpoints more easily than some, Imus in particular.

“I don’t care for their music. I won’t listen to their music. I won’t buy their music,” she said. “But they have been accepted by mainstream media. They are Academy Award winners. As much as I dislike their lyrics, our country in a way has said they’re OK.”

I looked at the dissent by Justices Ginsburg, Stevens, Souter, and Breyer in the Carhart partial-birth abortion case this morning, thinking I’d find its fulminations amusing, but I found it bone-chilling instead. I hadn’t realized that so many judges— and, indeed, current Supreme Court cases, if these judge are to believed— support abortion of viables fetuses– that is, babies in the womb who could be delivered alive by Caesarean birth at the very moment that they are instead injected with poison, cut into pieces, or otherwise killed. There is a difference between this and infanticide, but it is very small: that abortion is less trouble for the woman than a Caesarean, and that the cost of tending to a premature baby is saved by killing it instead. But I should remove this last difference perhaps, since no doubt there are many people who would be willing to relieve the mother or the government of the financial burden.

Here is the relevant part of the dissent.

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I recall that when regulation started to become common (or was it the income tax?) there was legal controversy over whether requiring someone to report information to the government on a standard form was an unconstitutional requirement of self-incrimination. That would be worth thinking about again.

Consider, for example, a factory that must report its emissions of sulfur dioxide. Should it be required to do so even though having too high an emission is illegal?

If it can, then it must also be constitutional to send a form out to everyone asking them how much they have stolen in the past month, or how many illegal drugs they have used, right?

This seems worse than the usual “worst case” for self-incrimination— being required to testify under oath at your trial as to whether you committed the crime you are charged with. At least if you are on trial, there has already been enough independent evidence for an indictment. With the standard form, the government can go on a fishing expedition and get you even if it has no suspicions originally.

I found this discussion, which is interesting to think about in light of real v. pecuniary externalities, in William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, BOOK 3, CHAPTER 13 “Of Nuisance”

Also, if I am entitled to hold a fair or market, and another person sets up a fair or market so near mine that it does me a prejudice, it is a nuisance to the freehold which I have in my market or fair….

If a ferry is erected on a river, so near another ancient ferry as to draw away its custom, it is nuisance to the owner of the old one. For where there is a ferry by proscription, the owner is bound to keep it always in repair and readiness, for the ease of all the king’s subject; otherwise he maybe grievously amerced:18 it would be therefore extremely hard, if a new ferry were to share his profits, wich does not also share his burden. But, where the reason ceases, the law also ceases with it: therefore it is no nuisance to erect a mill so near mine, as to draw away the custom, unless the miller also intercepts the water. Neither is it a nuisance to set up any trade, or a school, in neighborhood or rivalship with another: for by such emulation the public are like to be gainers; and, if the new mil or school occasion a damage to the old one, it is damnum absque injuria.

From National Review’s blog, an insightful posting by Ed Whelan:

With respect to the Supreme Court’s ruling in the EPA “global warming” case: Highlighting Chief Justice Roberts’s devastating analysis, I asked in this post “how any justice serious about the judicial role could sign on to” Justice Stevens’s use of the 1907 ruling in Georgia v. Tennessee Copper Co. in support of his holding on standing. It turns out that the probable explanation is even bleaker than I imagined: Justice Kennedy himself raised the Tennessee Copper case in oral argument (see transcript at pages 14-15; HT Tony Mauro via How Appealing) and evidently imagined that he had an ingenious insight that had escaped everyone else. It seems quite likely that everyone but Kennedy recognized that Tennessee Copper was irrelevant to the standing question but that Stevens drafted his opinion to pander to Kennedy’s vanity—and Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer gladly signed on. Such is the sorry state of Supreme Court decisionmaking by these five justices.

Scooter Libby has been convicted of perjury for making false statements to a grand jury that was investigating whether someone had criminally leaked Valerie Plame’s identity to the public. It looks to me like he did make the false statements, and I would trust the jury on that. But is it a crime? I don’t see how it could be.

It is a crime only if the false statements were material to the investigation. They weren’t. Prosecutor Fitzgerald already knew that Richard Armitage had leaked Valerie Plame’s identity. He also must have known whether it was a crime to leak her name. He has not charged Armitage, so it must not have been a crime. In any case, the investigation had concluded its task, and Fitzgerald has not suggested that it had any other crimes to investigate. The grand jury’s job was over, though perhaps the jurors did not know it (I don’t know if Fitzgerald told them about Armitage). How, then, could Libby’s testimony have been material?

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