A Contest: Which Story Is More Upsetting?

Here's a change of pace. Instead of doing separate blog posts on the following two stories, I'm curious to see which one generates the most irritation/anger/disgust from you readers. The first option comes from the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, which is appropriately upset that Government Motors...oops, I mean General Motors...is back in the business of lobbying and dishing out campaign contributions. I don't think there's anything wrong with petitioning government and participating in the political process, but I don't think individuals or companies should be doing it with money taken from me by a coercive government.

General Motors is 61%-owned by American taxpayers, who were less than thrilled when forced to buy GM by Presidents Bush and Obama. We can only imagine how M's unwilling owners will react now that the company is once again spending freely on lobbying and political campaigns. The Journal reports that the company has been particularly kind lately to Midwestern Democratic incumbents while shovelling out a total of $90,500 in campaign donations so far in the current election cycle. On the lobbying side, The Hill newspaper reports that GM has spent $7 million in the four quarters since exiting bankruptcy, retaining a who's who of Washington hired guns. This may sound like the business model of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac all over again, but remember that the failed mortgage giants at least had to shut down most of their Beltway influence operation once they explicitly became wards of the state. GM has your money and now it apparently has the license to use it to lobby Congress and support its political friends. ...There's also the intriguing legal matter of the United Auto Workers union still lobbying Congress and supporting political campaigns even after becoming a partner with the government in the automobile business.

The second option embarrasses me greatly, because it is a sign of bureaucratic nonsense from my beloved University of Georgia. A student got in trouble for sending an email to the Parking Services division to gripe about the lack of scooter parking. The snot-nosed bureaucrat who received the email apparently got the vapors because of this sentence: "Did you guys just throw darts at a map to decide where to put scooter corrals? Can I expect you guys to get off your asses and put in a corral near there some point before I fucking graduate and/or the sun runs out of hydrogen?" This led to the student being subjected to real threats and potential disciplinary action. Fortunately, the great folks at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education came to the rescue and the craven bureaucrats at UGA backed down.

The University of Georgia (UGA) has withdrawn charges of "disorderly conduct" and "disruption" filed against a student after he sent a mocking e-mail to UGA Parking Services to complain about the lack of parking spaces for scooters on campus. Although Parking Services specifically asks students for both "negative & positive" comments on its performance, student Jacob Lovell spent nearly a month under the threat of punishment after submitting his e-mail. UGA backed down after Lovell came to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help. "Jacob Lovell just wanted to park his scooter on campus, and when he found it a frustrating experience he sent a joking e-mail to the department that had asked for his feedback. But when it received his e-mail, he was threatened with punishment!" said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff. "Only on a college campus could a clearly flippant response to requests for complaints about parking on campus be turned into a judicial investigation for disorderly conduct." ...On August 17, 2010, Lovell e-mailed Parking Services with his complaint about its service. His flippant and joking e-mail mused, "Did you guys just throw darts at a map to decide where to put scooter corrals?" and otherwise made fun of the department for what he perceived to be its poor job of providing parking for scooters. Four hours later, Parking Services replied, "Your e-mail was sent to student judiciary." On September 3, 2010, Associate Dean of Students Kimberly Ellis sent Lovell a letter charging him with two violations of UGA's University Conduct Regulations, stating, "Specifically, it is alleged that Mr. Lovell engaged in disorderly conduct and disrupted parking services when he sent an email to them that was threatening." ...The letter required Lovell to make a disciplinary appointment by September 13. Ellis informed Lovell that failure to do so would result in his record being "flagged," rendering him unable to add, drop, or register for classes. Lovell complied with this requirement on September 13. Meanwhile, on September 10, FIRE wrote UGA President Michael F. Adams, explaining that Lovell's grievance was protected by the First Amendment. FIRE also repeated to President Adams that UGA maintains unconstitutional speech codes in addition to the regulations used against Lovell's protected speech, and that administrators could be held personally liable by a court for the violation of students' constitutional rights, as a federal judge in Georgia ruled recently. On September 14, Ellis informed Lovell that she "did not find sufficient evidence to move forward" with the charges and that the matter was now "closed."

So which story is more nauseating? In the grand scheme of things, the General Motors story is more meaningful because the company is stealing our money and then using our money to lobby for more handouts. Yet I can't help but think the UGA story is very symbolic of arrogant and stupid bureaucracy. as many of us have experienced on our trips to a DMV or our efforts to get through security at airports. Every encounter creates the risk that a job-for-life bureaucrat may decide to make your life miserable.

Giving Cops Bad Incentives to Harass Victimless Behavior

The Washington Post has an interesting report about the huge amount of money that Fairfax County spends to go after gambling. The story cites critics who ask "why law enforcement spends valuable time and money on combating sports gambling. The answer is obvious - and explicit in the story: "...police in Virginia are allowed to keep 100 percent of the assets they seize in state gambling cases." In other words, harassing the gambling business is a profit-making endeavor for police. And it also can be deadly since cops killed an optometrist during a SWAT arrest. The Institute for Justice has a powerful video on the dangers of "policing for profit," and Fairfax County is just one bad example of how this lures cops into misallocating resources to fight behaviors that shouldn't even be illegal.

It's football season, and for millions of Americans that means betting season. ...It's a crime that Fairfax County police take seriously. So seriously that in one recent gambling investigation, they spent -- and lost -- more than $300,000 in cash to take down a Las Vegas-based online bookie and his group of Fairfax-based associates. ...Police critics have long wondered why law enforcement spends valuable time and money on combating sports gambling. In Fairfax, the police rarely publicize their arrests, and the details of their investigations are little known outside the small corps of detectives in the money laundering unit. Unlike drug cases, police in Virginia are allowed to keep 100 percent of the assets they seize in state gambling cases, so other agencies or divisions receive no benefit. And the vast majority of those arrested are placed on probation. "What a waste," said Nicholas Beltrante, founder of the Virginia Citizens Coalition for Police Accountability, a group formed earlier this year in part to combat unnecessary police spending. "The police should be utilizing their resources for more serious crimes." Fairfax's most notorious gambling investigation ended in disaster. In 2006, an undercover detective lost more than $5,000 while betting on NFL games with optometrist Salvatore J. Culosi -- and when the detective called in a SWAT team to make the arrest, an officer shot Culosi once in the heart and killed him. ...Since 2004, the squad has seized about $1 million in cash and assets annually, but some of those cases landed in federal court, where money is divided among various agencies, Schaible said. ...One case from 2006, that of admitted bookmaker Kyle Peters, resulted in police seizing and keeping $566,940 from his bank accounts. Schaible said such funds are recycled "back into investigating cases. It's helping us resolve these and fight further crime."

Protecting Good Cops with Oversight to Deter Bad Cops

Here's a great video on the issue of whether police can and should be videotaped. Put together by my Cato colleagues, the answer is yes, of course. The only thing I'll add is that this actually is a great way to protect the reputation of the vast majority of cops who do their jobs honorably.

Gangster Government in Action

Even though I've been in Washington for 25 years, I still get nauseated by the predatory behavior of the looters and moochers. The latest example of disgusting behavior is from the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who is engaging in Hugo Chavez-style threats to block insurance companies from raising rates in response to the new costs imposed by Obamacare. Michael Barone's column and a Wall Street Journal editorial capture the odious nature of this banana republic stunt. Here's part of what Barone wrote:

"There will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases." ...Secretary Sebelius objects to claims by health insurers that they are raising premiums because of increased costs imposed by the Obamacare law passed by Congress last March. ...Sebelius has "zero tolerance" for that kind of thing. She promises to issue regulations to require "state or federal review of all potentially unreasonable rate increases" (which would presumably mean all rate increases). And there's a threat. "We will also keep track of insurers with a record of unjustified rate increases: Those plans may be excluded from health insurance Exchanges in 2014." That's a significant date, the first year in which state insurance exchanges are slated to get a monopoly on the issuance of individual health insurance policies. Sebelius is threatening to put health insurers out of business in a substantial portion of the market if they state that Obamacare is boosting their costs. "Congress shall make no law," reads the First Amendment, "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." Sebelius' approach is different: "zero tolerance" for dissent. The threat to use government regulation to destroy or harm someone's business because they disagree with government officials is thuggery. Like the Obama administration's transfer of money from Chrysler bondholders to its political allies in the United Auto Workers, it is a form of gangster government. ...Sebelius and the Obama administration...want to stamp out negative speech about Obamacare. "Zero tolerance" means they are ready to use the powers of government to threaten economic harm on those who dissent.

Here's a blurb from the WSJ:

The White House was always going to blame insurance companies for any cost increases, even when its own policies cause them. Witness Kathleen Sebelius's Thursday letter to America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade group—a thuggish message even by her standards. The Health and Human Services secretary wrote that some insurers have been attributing part of their 2011 premium increases to ObamaCare and warned that "there will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases." Zero tolerance for expressing an opinion, or offering an explanation to policyholders? They're more subtle than this in Caracas. ...This is nasty stuff and an obvious attempt to shift political blame for rising insurance costs before the election. It's also an early sign of life under ObamaCare, when all health-care decisions are political and the bureaucrats decide who can charge how much for a service or product.

Gross Abuse of Police Power

Here's a very disturbing story I saw on Instapundit. A cop arrested a woman for the supposed crime of not getting off her own front porch. Apparently, the cop didn't like the fact that she was observing - and perhaps even filming on her cell phone camera - a traffic stop. If there is any justification for what the cop did, it certainly is not apparent from the full story. What's particularly disturbing is not just that the cop made a seemingly abusive arrest, but that a judge then convicted the woman. Libertarians instinctively will be skeptical of the government in this case, but I hope that viewed is widely share. Our Founding Fathers gave us a Constitution that limited the power of government, and there should be a clear and compelling reason before an individual is stepped on by the police power of the state. If you rob, rape, and murder, those are good reasons. Standing on your court and filming a traffic stop doesn't pass that test.

The resisting-arrest conviction last week of Felicia Gibson has left a lot of people wondering. Can a person be charged with resisting arrest while observing a traffic stop from his or her own front porch? Salisbury Police Officer Mark Hunter thought so, and last week District Court Judge Beth Dixon agreed. Because Gibson did not at first comply when the officer told her and others to go inside, the judge found Gibson guilty of resisting, delaying or obstructing an officer. Gibson was not the only bystander watching the action on the street. She was the only one holding up a cell-phone video camera. But court testimony never indicated that Hunter told her to stop the camera; he just told her to go inside.

Tough-on-Crime Is the Right Approach, but only if Laws Are Just

The Economist has an excellent article about criminal justice in America, including valuable observations about the over-abundance of victimless crimes and incomprehensible laws that result in prison time for failing to understand the intricacies of government regulations. My only quibble is that the article could have paid more attention to the potential value of locking up people who commit real crimes such as rape, murder, burglary, and assault. I realize I'm nit-picking, and I'm fully aware that prosecutors can engage in abuse even when targeting genuine criminals, but there are some people who belong in jail.

Three pickup trucks pulled up outside George Norris’s home in Spring, Texas. Six armed police in flak jackets jumped out. Thinking they must have come to the wrong place, Mr Norris opened his front door, and was startled to be shoved against a wall and frisked for weapons. He was forced into a chair for four hours while officers ransacked his house. They pulled out drawers, rifled through papers, dumped things on the floor and eventually loaded 37 boxes of Mr Norris’s possessions onto their pickups. They refused to tell him what he had done wrong. “It wasn’t fun, I can tell you that,” he recalls. Mr Norris was 65 years old at the time, and a collector of orchids. He eventually discovered that he was suspected of smuggling the flowers into America, an offence under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. This came as a shock. He did indeed import flowers and sell them to other orchid-lovers. And it was true that his suppliers in Latin America were sometimes sloppy about their paperwork. In a shipment of many similar-looking plants, it was rare for each permit to match each orchid precisely. In March 2004, five months after the raid, Mr Norris was indicted, handcuffed and thrown into a cell with a suspected murderer and two suspected drug-dealers. When told why he was there, “they thought it hilarious.” One asked: “What do you do with these things? Smoke ’em?” Prosecutors described Mr Norris as the “kingpin” of an international smuggling ring. He was dumbfounded: his annual profits were never more than about $20,000. When prosecutors suggested that he should inform on other smugglers in return for a lighter sentence, he refused, insisting he knew nothing beyond hearsay. He pleaded innocent. But an undercover federal agent had ordered some orchids from him, a few of which arrived without the correct papers. For this, he was charged with making a false statement to a government official, a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Since he had communicated with his suppliers, he was charged with conspiracy, which also carries a potential five-year term. As his legal bills exploded, Mr Norris reluctantly changed his plea to guilty, though he still protests his innocence. He was sentenced to 17 months in prison. ...Justice is harsher in America than in any other rich country. Between 2.3m and 2.4m Americans are behind bars, roughly one in every 100 adults. ...As a proportion of its total population, America incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany and 12 times more than Japan. ...The system has three big flaws, say criminologists. First, it puts too many people away for too long. Second, it criminalises acts that need not be criminalised. Third, it is unpredictable. Many laws, especially federal ones, are so vaguely written that people cannot easily tell whether they have broken them. ...Badly drafted laws create traps for the unwary. In 2006 Georgia Thompson, a civil servant in Wisconsin, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for depriving the public of “the intangible right of honest services”. Her crime was to award a contract (for travel services) to the best bidder. A firm called Adelman Travel scored the most points (on an official scale) for price and quality, so Ms Thompson picked it. She ignored a rule that required her to penalise Adelman for a slapdash presentation when bidding. For this act of common sense, she served four months. (An appeals court freed her.) ...There are over 4,000 federal crimes, and many times that number of regulations that carry criminal penalties. When analysts at the Congressional Research Service tried to count the number of separate offences on the books, they were forced to give up, exhausted. Rules concerning corporate governance or the environment are often impossible to understand, yet breaking them can land you in prison. In many criminal cases, the common-law requirement that a defendant must have a mens rea (ie, he must or should know that he is doing wrong) has been weakened or erased. “The founders viewed the criminal sanction as a last resort, reserved for serious offences, clearly defined, so ordinary citizens would know whether they were violating the law. Yet over the last 40 years, an unholy alliance of big-business-hating liberals and tough-on-crime conservatives has made criminalisation the first line of attack—a way to demonstrate seriousness about the social problem of the month, whether it’s corporate scandals or e-mail spam,” writes Gene Healy, a libertarian scholar. “You can serve federal time for interstate transport of water hyacinths, trafficking in unlicensed dentures, or misappropriating the likeness of Woodsy Owl.” “You’re (probably) a federal criminal,” declares Alex Kozinski, an appeals-court judge, in a provocative essay of that title. Making a false statement to a federal official is an offence. So is lying to someone who then repeats your lie to a federal official. Failing to prevent your employees from breaking regulations you have never heard of can be a crime. A boss got six months in prison because one of his workers accidentally broke a pipe, causing oil to spill into a river. “It didn’t matter that he had no reason to learn about the [Clean Water Act’s] labyrinth of regulations, since he was merely a railroad-construction supervisor,” laments Judge Kozinski. ...Some prosecutors, such as Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced ex-governor of New York, have built political careers by nailing people whom voters don’t like, such as financiers.

Government Thuggery

It is common to mock paper-pushing bureaucrats and nanny-state politicians for silly laws and mindless regulations, but sometimes absurd policies translate into genuine oppression. John Stossel outlines some of the disturbing ways that the American people are being mistreated.

Something's happened to America, and it isn't good. It's become easier to get into trouble. We've become a nation of a million rules...top-down rules formed in the brains of meddling bureaucrats who think they know better than we how to manage our lives. Cross them, and we are in trouble. The National Marine Fishery Service (NMFS) received an anonymous fax that a seafood shipment to Alabama from David McNab contained "undersized lobster tails" and was improperly packed in clear plastic bags, rather than the cardboard boxes allegedly required under Honduran law. When the $4 million shipment arrived, NMFS agents seized it. McNab served eight years in prison, even though the Honduran government informed the court that the regulation requiring cardboard boxes had been repealed. How about this one? Four kindergartners -- yes, 5-year-old boys -- played cops and robbers at Wilson Elementary in New Jersey. One yelled: "Boom! I have a bazooka, and I want to shoot you." He did not, of course, have a bazooka. Nevertheless, all four boys were suspended from school for three days for "making threats," a violation of their school district's zero-tolerance policy. ...Palo Alto, Calif., ordered Kay Leibrand, a grandmother, to lower her carefully trimmed hedges. Leibrand argued that no one's vision was obstructed and asked the code officer to take a look. He refused. Then the city dispatched two police officers. They arrested her, loaded her into a patrol car in front of her neighbors and hauled her down to the station. In 2001, honor student Lindsay Brown parked her car in the wrong spot at her high school. A county police
officer looked inside and saw a kitchen knife -- a butter knife with a rounded tip. Because Lindsay was on school property, she had violated the zero-tolerance policy for knives. She was arrested, handcuffed and hauled off to county jail where she spent nine hours on a felony weapons possession charge. School Principal Fred Bode told a local paper, "A weapon is a weapon."

Bureaucracy Run Amok

John Derbyshire of National Review has an interesting article on bureaucratic harassment of private business. He begins with a personal story of something that happened when he first came to the United States and was working at a food-preparation company:

The first federal regulator I ever knew was a fellow named Ernie. ...Ernie was a power freak. If you showed him the respect he thought he was entitled to, he was generally harmless. If you crossed him, however, his wrath was terrible. The boss of the firm was a no-nonsense former Marine. ...He put up with Ernie as best he could, but sometimes the forbearance required was too great. ...On one occasion the boss lost it and yelled at Ernie. Ernie then had his minions go round the firm “tagging” all the preparation tables with what looked like old-fashioned white luggage tags. Peered at up close, the tags revealed printed messages saying that no food product could go anywhere near the tagged table until the tag was removed, with ferocious federal penalties threatened against transgressors. The tags could, of course, only be removed by Ernie. The tables were out of commission. We had to scrub those suckers three or four times over with green scouring pads and Comet before Ernie would deign to remove his tags and let the firm get on with their business. Another time, after some other go-round with the boss, Ernie determined that the firm’s ZIP code was printed on the dinner boxes in too small a font. The boss had to get rolls of stick-over labels printed up, and we menials spent a couple of days working our way through the freezer rooms relabeling the dinners so the ZIP code was in the FDA-approved font size. I guess this was real important to the nation’s health.

The substance of his article is another example of bureaucratic excess, though this time with much greater potential for economic damage. The federal bureaucracy and Washington political elite (with the support of big companies that don't like competition) are hampering the development of an industry that is offering 100-percent safe genetic testing for consumers. The excerpt is long, but shows how government intervention is both unwarranted and driven by bad motives.

A firm named Pathway Genomics, based in San Diego, is one of many that have come up in the past few years offering to scan a person’s DNA and report on any significant disease-risk or drug-response markers. You swab your cheek with a sterile Q-Tip they provide, or spit into a sterile plastic tube, and you send the saliva sample off to them. They scan it and send you back the information. The cost of a test can be from $20 to $500, depending on how many markers are scanned for. Earlier this year Pathway entered into a deal with Walgrens, a nationwide drugstore chain with 7,500 outlets. The deal would have allowed Pathway to operate counters at 6,000 of those outlets, selling their service. Instead of signing up with Pathway via their website and sending in your saliva sample through the mail, you could do the thing right there in your local drugstore. Health reporter Rob Stein at the Washington Post did a story on the Pathway-Walgreens deal. The story appeared in the May 11 edition of the newspaper. By way of researching it, Stein called the FDA to ask them for a quote. ...The call, however, woke the FDA from their dogmatic slumbers. ...The regulocrats lumbered into action. A letter went out to Pathway warning them that their test was a “medical device” likely subject to FDA oversight and pre-marketing approval. Hearing of this, Walgreens canceled the deal with Pathway. Close behind the FDA, like jackals following tigers, came Congress. Henry Waxman, head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, demanded a comprehensive document dump from three of the firms — every letter, every lab report, every e-mail. Last week the FDA escalated the war, sending letters out to five more of the firms (23andMe, Navigenics, DeCode, Illumina, and Knome) couched in similar terms to the original Pathway letter. ...The logic of classifying these DNA scans as “medical devices” bears a closer look. What actually is a “medical device”? Answer: A medical device is anything the FDA declares to be a medical device. ...You might still think it’s a bit of a stretch to call these tests “medical devices.” They are, after all, merely informational. Consumers are not being dosed with anything, or having anything attached to or implanted in their bodies, nor even inserted into their mouths for purposes of tongue depression. “Medical device”? Huh? ...Lest you should think this is a straightforward tale of power-crazed regulators and tax-hungry politicians killing off an infant industry, please let it be noted that Big Government is by no means the only predator that struggling start-ups must face. There is also Big Business. In seeking to widen its regulatory scope, the FDA has some support from big, established biotech companies. Back in 2008, biotech giant Genentech petitioned the FDA to expand its authority into products involving “laboratory-developed tests” (LDTs). An LDT is one with an expert in the loop. An example of a non-LDT would be a home pregnancy test — no expert between test and interpretation. LDTs are more lightly regulated than non-LDTs, for understandable reasons. ...It was natural for Genentech and other established companies to look with disfavor on impertinent startups taking advantage of regulatory loopholes. Big Business is just as capable of hating entrepreneurial startups as is Big Government. A business can only lobby, though. Government can act. ....The U.S.A. is a real nice place to have a job in government, and still a pretty nice place to work for a big corporation — especially one designated “too big to fail.” For the start-up entrepreneur in an ideologically fraught field, however, the environment is increasingly hostile. Why do they even bother?

Asset Forfeiture Laws Should Be Repealed

I´ve already posted a great video from the folks at the Institute for Justice about this issue, but this John Stossel column is another good reminder of the corrupt and evil impact of asset forfeiture laws. If bureaucrats have an incentive to take people´s property - even if they never get convicted of a crime, the results are bound to be horrendous. Repeal is the right answer, but at the very least the laws should be changed so cops and prosecutors can´t line their own pockets:

Zaher El-Ali has repaired and sold cars in Houston for 30 years. One day, he sold a truck to a man on credit. Ali was holding the title to the car until he was paid, but before he got his money the buyer was arrested for drunk driving. The cops then seized Ali's truck and kept it, planning to sell it. ...The police say they can keep it under forfeiture law because the person driving the car that day broke the law. It doesn't matter that the driver wasn't the owner. It's as if the truck committed the crime. "I have never seen a truck drive," Ali said. I don't think it's the fault of the truck. And they know better." Something has gone wrong when the police can seize the property of innocent people. ... This is serious, folks. The police can seize your property if they think it was used in a crime. If you want it back, you must prove it was not used criminally. The burden of proof is on you. This reverses a centuries-old safeguard in Anglo-American law against arbitrary government power. The feds do this, too. In 1986, the Justice Department made $94 million on forfeitures. Today, its forfeiture fund has more than a billion in it. ..."When you give people the wrong incentives, people respond accordingly. And so it shouldn't be surprising that they're stretching the definition of law enforcement," Balko said. "But the fundamental point is that you should not have people out there enforcing the laws benefiting directly from them."

Beyond Satire and Into the Realm of Moral Turpitude

I was planning on concentrating solely on the debacle in Greece today, but (thanks to Pejman Yousefzadeh's twitter feed) I saw a blog post about a story that is beyond disgusting.

I don't want to spoil the surprise, so I'll merely say that it is horrifying that American taxpayers are financing more than 20 percent of the budget for the organization employing the amoral slug quoted in the Washington Post report.

Government Is a Racket to Enrich Bureaucrats and Rip Off the Rest of Us

Every experience I've had with speed cameras has been negative. That's hardly a surprise, but the other common experience is that they always are set up in places where the speed limit is absurdly low (a 45-mph limit on a stretch of interstate highway in DC is a good example). As one might suspect, there is considerable evidence that greedy and corrupt governments use cameras as a revenue generator. But cameras are not a necessary component of speed traps. Here's a story from Michigan about how local governments are ignoring state requirements to set reasonable speed limits solely because the bureaucrats want to rip off motorists:

Metro Detroit motorists who exceed posted speed limits may not be breaking the law, because in many cases the limits themselves are unlawful, according to one of the state's top traffic cops. Four years after the passage of Public Act 85, which requires municipalities in Michigan to conduct studies to set proper speed limits, most cities, villages and townships have not complied, according to Lt. Gary Megge, head of the Michigan State Police Traffic Services Section. One likely reason, said Megge, whose section advises communities on how to set proper speed limits, is that communities want speeding ticket revenue, and failing to conduct the required speed studies allows them to keep enforcing their speed limits that Megge calls "artificially low." ...Ferndale Police Chief Michael Kitchen admitted revenue was the reason behind his recent decision to step up traffic enforcement. "We have to write more tickets in order to avoid layoffs," Kitchen said. ...Kitchen admitted that the 35-mph speed limit on the most heavily-driven roadway in Ferndale -- Woodward Avenue near Nine Mile -- is likely too low. "That speed limit would probably be 45 mph if they ever did a speed study," said Kitchen, adding that Woodward falls under MDOT's jurisdiction.

Gangster Government

I'm down in Miami for the Resource Bank and saw this video at the Heritage Foundation booth. They did an excellent job exposing how the federal government too often acts like a bunch of thugs. I am disgusted and ashamed that my government puts people like this in prison.

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Government Thuggery and Healthcare

Congressman Henry Waxman is one of the most odious statists in a town dominated by people who love big government. From his perch as Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, this career politician played a big role in concocting Obamacare - including the costly provisions that will burden the business community and undermine job creation. So it is the height of chutpah that Waxman is now holding who hearings to browbeat companies that have acknowledged - as required by law - some of the burdens in the legislation that will affect their bottom line. Investor's Business Daily savages Waxman for this unseemly thuggery:

In legally mandated filings, AT&T reported that ObamaCare will cost it $1 billion. Deere & Co. reported $150 million in new costs. Caterpillar must cough up $100 million. 3M must pay another $90 million. AK Steel gets to fork over $31 million. Valero Energy will pay $30 million. There'll be more as other companies report anticipated costs to fulfill their requirements to inform shareholders. What it shows is a huge wave of costs rolling over the private sector to pay for this bill. It's the real cost of ObamaCare, a bill House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had touted daily as "paid for" in her pitch for Congressional votes. ...As a result of ObamaCare's changes, companies now can either pay for those costs — and lay off workers, hold off expansion or move abroad — or scrap their prescription drug programs altogether, dumping their retirees onto the federal government. Either way, the costs are "paid for" — but they've also just skyrocketed, thanks to ObamaCare. Instead of admitting the economic reality voters and companies have been warning Congress about, and maybe offering to read the bill next time, Waxman seeks to blame the very businesses the Democrats have just victimized. ...Now it's time to pay the piper, and Waxman doesn't want to pay. He has decided to haul the executives into yet another round of star chamber hearings to explain just why two and two make four. This is an implied threat to companies either to cook their books or face legal or political sanctions for embarrassing Congress by revealing the true impact of its health care bill on the private sector. It has its place with what Stalin did in Soviet Russia, denouncing farmers as hoarders after setting artificially low prices for crops, and what Hugo Chavez is doing today in Venezuela, dictating prices on raw goods and limiting access to money while penalizing companies for passing on those costs to customers.

Asset Forfeiture Laws: A License to Steal?

This Institute for Justice video shows what happens when bad laws are enacted (often using the excuse of fighting crime) that give government unchecked power.

More Senseless and Overbearing Government

Any bureaucrat involved in a stunt like this deserves to be fired.

To think, these are the folks we're expecting to keep us safe from terrorism!

H&R Block and the IRS: An Unholy Alliance to Ransack Taxpayers

The late George Stigler, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, is famous in part because of his work on "regulatory capture," which occurs when interest groups use the coercive power of government to thwart competition and undeservedly line their own pockets. A perfect (and distasteful) example of this can be found in today's Washington Post, which reports that the IRS plans to impose new regulations dictating who can prepare tax returns. Not surprisingly, the new rules have the support of big tax preparation shops such as H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt, which see this as an opportunity to squeeze smaller competitors out of the market. The IRS and the big firms claim more regulations are needed to protect consumers from shoddy work, but this is the usual rationale for licensing laws and other government-imposed barriers to entry and the Institute for Justice repeatedly has shown such rules are designed to benefit insiders rather than consumers. Tax preparers do make many mistakes, to be sure, but that is a reflection of a nightmarish tax code, and the annual tax test conducted by Money magazine showed that even the most-skilled professionals - such as CPAs, tax lawyers, and enrolled agents - were unable to figure out how to correctly fill out a hypothetical family's tax return. But since the IRS routinely makes major mistakes as well, perhaps the moral of the story is that we need fundamental tax reform, not IRS rules to create a cartel for the benefit of H&R Block and other big firms. Would any of this be an issue if we had a flat tax or national sales tax?

The Internal Revenue Service plans to test, register and screen people who get paid to prepare tax returns, stepping into a virtually unregulated business on which millions of Americans depend for crucial financial services. ...the moves could increase the cost of having tax returns prepared. ...Starting with the 2011 tax season, the IRS plans to require paid preparers to register with the agency. ...The new testing and education standards will exempt certified public accountants, lawyers, and tax practitioners known as "enrolled agents," who are cleared to represent taxpayers in dealing with the IRS... Tax prep giants H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt expressed support for the requirements announced Monday. Under the new rules, H&R Block "won't be competing against people who aren't regulated and don't have the same standards as we do," said Kathryn Fulton, senior vice president for government relations. ...Citing a gap in the agency's plan, Fulton said the IRS should impose the same rules on unpaid preparers of tax returns. ...In field tests, the IRS noted Monday, tax-return preparers often gave bad advice. In a 2006 study in which employees of the Government Accountability Office posed as taxpayers and visited outlets of tax prep chains, all 19 preparers made mistakes, the IRS reported. ...It is unclear how much of the blame rests with the tax code's confusing nature, a perennial target of politicians' criticism. Do regulated professionals such as CPAs perform better than their unregulated counterparts? The IRS commissioner said the agency does not have the data to answer that question.

More Power for the IRS

Continuing a bad trend, Congress is poised to boost the budget, staffing, and power of the IRS in order to further pester investors and entrepreneurs. Improving tax compliance is the excuse for this move, but it will further diminish job creation and investment. If politicians were serious about wanting to improve compliance, they would lower tax rates and reform the tax system. Reuters reports:

A new Internal Revenue Service unit set up to catch rich tax cheats hiding their wealth in complex business entities is rapidly taking shape with the hiring of hundreds of employees. ...Another IRS official told Reuters "hundreds" of people have already been hired to staff the new unit, including some from within the agency. ...Tax authorities in Japan, Germany and the UK have also created similar units. The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday approved a $387 million boost for the IRS for the fiscal year that started October 1, in part to fund the high-wealth unit. ...The IRS has also begun initial steps to join forces with other governments to scrutinize corporate tax filings to prevent "tax arbitrage" by companies seeking the best regime. ...Some tax practitioners expressed worry about such coordination. "With any new thing, you never want to be the guinea pig," Mary Lou Fahey, general counsel for the Tax Executive Institute, comprised of business executives, said.

Great Speech, but I Hope the Story About the 86-Year Old Woman Is Not True

This is a great speech by Judge Napolitano. The first and last parts focus on whether Congress has the authority (or competence) to run a health care system. The answer, for those who care about the Constitution, is no. The middle section of the speech, though, is about government oppression and the PATRIOT Act. I hope that he somehow has it wrong and this is not really part of the law.

Soviet-Style Tax Collection Tactics in the Windy City

During the Cold War, Americans often would use dark humor to mock the totalitarian nature of the Soviet regime, and it was not uncommon to joke about children turning in their parents for anti-Soviet behavior in exchange for a pair of Western blue jeans. In the real world, of course, these things are not funny, and folks in places such as Cuba still live in fear that neighborhood informants will get them in trouble with the secret police. So it is particularly nauseating to see that the City of Chicago is encouraging some taxpayers to snitch on others:

Chicago and Cook County residents aren’t the only ones about to get shocking tax news; the city is debuting a “tax whistle-blower” plan that could turn neighbor against neighbor in Chicago's business community. The folks at city hall will pay cash bounties to informants who turn in business tax cheats around the city. The reward would amount to some sort of percentage of the tax money that the city recovers. "It's just another way of bringing people into compliance," Revenue Department spokesman Ed Walsh told the Sun-Times .