I’ve argued in the past that a central function of the regulatory state is to restrain product feature and price competition between firms. Any state regulation which uniformly regulates some feature (like quality or safety), across an industry, will have the primary effect of removing that feature as an issue for cost competition between the firms in the industry. According to Butler Shaffer, in Calculated Chaos (San Francisco: Alchemy Books, 1985), “wage, working condition, or product standards” serve mainly to “universalize cost factors and thus restrict price competition.”

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Normally, on reading a pro-Green Revolution post, I’d reach for my gun. But seeing as how it’s Comrade Jim Henley, I guess I’ll just put on my contrarian hat and and mouth off a bit.

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I got a lot out of the comment thread to Alex Tabarrok’s post about Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution from earlier this month. It seems pretty inarguable to me that Borlaug’s work saved many lives in its day. It seems debatable whether what the present moment calls for now is more of the same. During the era of cheap oil, there was real economic - if not ecological - sense in pumping plants up with massive inputs of fossil fuel. Now? I’m honestly unsure what a post-hydrocarbon agriculture that can feed billions of people will (can) look like.

So. Let’s say you’re a center-right pundit with a reputation you feel you deserve for non-partisan evenhandedness and ideological heterodoxy. Even for being a bit of a contrarian. So when Barack Obama torpedoed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance regime, that might strike you as a teachable moment for liberals. After all, the McCain-Feingold regime is simply the latest iteration of a post-Watergate regulatory framework ostensibly designed to curb unseemly financial influences on the political system, but has achieved, with every new iteration, more expansive criminalization of political speech. What it has not achieved is any halt in the growth of the influence of allegedly malign special interests. On the contrary, some iterations of campaign finance regulation have actually augmented special interest influence.

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As I wrote yesterday over at Unqualified Offerings:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is working eagerly with a Democratic-controlled Congress to grant George Bush all the power Bush wants to intercept Americans’ telephone calls and emails without warrants, and to retroactively grant immunity from civil or criminal sanction to the telecoms that have been assisting with Bush’s illegal eavesdropping for years — telecoms that heavily contribute to congresspeople of both parties, and which are in the middle of lawsuits they’d dearly love to see rendered moot by Hoyer’s efforts.

[...]

To fully understand how sickening and outrageous this all is (and tell me, why did I vote a straight Dem ticket in ‘06 again?), read Greenwald. (Brief ad click-through.) I can’t do better than he does, as he has been working on this issue feverishly and my re-explaining it could only be a paraphrase of his posts. Then, contribute to this fund to put heat on Hoyer and the other Democrats who are acting like good little authoritarian GOP-bots.

Strange Bedfellows Unite to Fight FISA Deal (6/18/2008)

Contact: (202) 675-2312, media@dcaclu.org

Washington, DC — A sham spying deal could be rammed through both the Senate and House this week. It’s moving that fast. If we don’t stop this, telecom companies that broke the law by supplying mountains of personal information to the government without a warrant will be let off the hook.

A broad alliance of strange bedfellows is now forming to support a campaign to fight the gutting of FISA (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) with the intent to work together on all civil liberties, constitutional rights and rule of law issues.

The ACLU is joining with activists from the Ron Paul campaign, represented by Break the Matrix, Rick Williams and Trevor Lymon, and civil liberties writer Glenn Greenwald of Salon, and leading liberal bloggers including, Jane Hamsher of firedoglake, Matt Stoller of Open Left, John Amato of Crooks and Liars, Howie Klein of Down with Tyranny, Digby, Josh Nelson of The Seminal and activist Josh Koster to tell Congress that we will not let them ignore the Constitution or give immunity to telecoms which deliberately broke our laws for years.

This group of Strange Bedfellows is mobilizing a broad-based left-right coalition of office holders and candidates, public interest groups and individuals who are devoted to preserving basic constitutional liberties to join in the fight. The goal is to work together to impede the corrupt FISA/telecom amnesty deal.

Glenn Greenwald said, “The Beltway establishment has made clear that they support the Bush administration’s assault on our basic constitutional protections and the rule of law. Constitutional rights and the rule of law are not liberal or conservative principles. They’re American principles, and this broad-based alliance is devoted to defending them from the bipartisan political class that wants to trample upon them.”

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This, my friends, is corporatism and the military-industrial complex at work; companies so in bed with the federal govt that they do the state’s (dubious) bidding, at the expense of their customers’ trust and for fine pay (links omitted): (more…)

 Last week, Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have enabled women  to more effectively sue employers over gender based wage discrimination.   The bill was intended to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear , which limited the ability of workers to seek legal recourse under Title VII by enforcing a statute of limitations of 180 days from the first instance of wage discrimination (despite the fact that this type of discrimination is often as subtle as it is insidious and therefore can take much longer to uncover).  John McCain was absent on voting day, but made clear through comments that he opposed the bill.  Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins had this to say about the bill, the vote, and the absent McCain’s stance in the debate: (more…)

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Economics, John McCain says, is “not his strong suit.” So it’s nice to know he’s being tutored on the subject by one of the best. His new economic adviser, Carly Fiorina, is the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard.

During her stint in that company, she was a classic textbook case of MBA Disease: stripping assets, gutting human capital, downsizing, piling work on the survivors–and getting a big, fat pay package for herself.

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The federal Road Home program was supposed to help those who lost their homes in the Katrina mess rebuild both dwellings and lives. But the private contractor who managed this relief effort — ICF International — is going after those who were “overpaid,” seeking return of an average of $35K from each “overpaid” recipient. ICF is bidding for collection agencies to chase after approximately $175 million from these families. (Oh, and “[o]ne-third of qualified applicants for Road Home help had yet to receive any rebuilding check as of this past week.”)

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Obama really knows how to harsh a guy’s buzz.

A while back, I expressed the hope that he was to some extent a departure from establishment liberalism.  Establishment liberalism, I had previously argued, was the ideology of the professional and managerial New Middle Class, which managed the new large organizations that had sprung up in the corporate economy of the late nineteenth century, and wanted to manage society as a whole the same way they managed their corporations.  It was exemplified by Herbert Croly who, in The Promise of American Life, called for the achievement of “Jeffersonian ends by Hamiltonian means.”

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The distinction between the state, or “public” sector, and the “private” sector economy, is universal in commentary and policy analysis. But in the case of the corporate economy, it’s almost meaningless. First of all, the large corporation cannot be called “private property” in any meaningful sense. And second, the relationship between the corporate economy and the state resembles nothing so much as an interlocking directorate.

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The economic effects of licensing and certification regimes have been the subject of a couple of recent posts by Angelica, and of extensive discussion in the comments: “Call Me Street Food Libertarian” and “The Rats of El Toro.”

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