The New Smear Tactic

I was bumbling around the blogosphere (as I am wont to do) and came across this editorial detailing the story of Gary Lankford, who, while on the Ohio Republican party payroll, promoted the bald-faced lie that the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, current U.S. Rep Ted Strickland, was gay.

Oh, and his wife of 20 years was gay too.

Feel free to digest that for a moment. I'll wait.

This is distrubing on so many levels that I'm having trouble keeping them all organized. Okay, most obvious one first:

1) Just the facts, ma'am. This is a bald-faced lie that has no evidence of any sort to back it up. Merely a slanderous insinuation for the purpose of hurting a Democratic candidate in an important election for Ohio.

2) Your bile is ready, sir. This sorry episode takes smear tactics to a whole new level. Suggesting that someone is unfit for public office because he's gay (which both Strickland and his wife are decidedly not)? Disgusting.

3) Being homosexual doesn't show up on an x-ray. How do you prove something like someone's sexual orientation anyway? May I heartily suggest that someone find a callgirl and perform a public show (at Mr. Lankford's expense, naturally) for Mr. Strickland. If he demonstrates visible excitement (at the biological level, mind you) then I think we can conclude a few things.

Hmm...nah, a nut like Lankford might think that's a little obscene.

I know! We'll put some cameras in Strickland's bathroom, along with a relatively tall stack of dirty magazines. It'll be like a reality tv show.

Then again, that might be considered rather promiscuous. Well, if those two options are out, I'm fresh out of ideas. Personally, I think both those options should be considered, because clearly 20 years of marriage to a person of the opposite gender clearly isn't proof enough of someone's heterosexuality.

4) Who cares? Besides whack jobs like Lankford, who honestly cares about whether their Governor might be gay? Who would honestly change their position on a bill, for example, based on their sexual orientation? "Well, normally I'd veto this bill allowing the dismemberment of kittens for public entertainment, but since I'm gay..."

Yeah...no. Who in their right mind would think that someone who is elected by the people to do their business would let such a personal decision influence their policies?

...

Okay, that last part was a poorly-worded explanation. That's just me pulling out my "politicians should be more technocratic!" cap again. But you get the idea.

This is a repugnant story of smear tactics at their very worst. It does not bode well for American politics if this sort of behavior is not punished and punished severly.

The UN

Everyone should read Evan's diatribe against Kofi Annan.

This is primarily an econ blog, but sometimes current events just trump everything else.

Heritage Roundtable

Went to a roundtable discussion at the Heritage Foundation last night. It was only five bucks to get in, there was an open bar (a pleasant surprise; I thought I was going to have to pay), good company, and the discussion itself was all in very good fun.

The topic was, "Are libertarians anti-Left or anti-State?"

Marc and Evan, I'm certain you guys would have had even more mirth than I did, because you know the blogosphere much more than I do. The panel was composed of Matthew Yglesias, of TPM Cafe, fulfilling the role of token liberal and moderator; Nick Gillespie, editor-in-chief of Reason magazine, as representative of libertarians; and Jonah Goldberg of the National Review, the quintessential Conservative.

Goldberg spent his opening statements attacking the libertarian assaults on tradition; Gillespie spent most of it saying that people shouldn't follow "bullshit traditions for the sake of tradition" if it had no relevance in the real world, then promptly began throwing tee-shirts with the Reason logo on them into the surprisingly packed audience. (My guess is that about 200 or so people were in the auditorium).

No, unfortunately, I wasn't able to snag one. A guy in his mid-twenties dove over me to grasp the one that came my way like Kramer leaping for the football at that NY Giants game. I emerged without a free garment, which is a little dissapointing, but on the other hand, I was sitting next to an attractive girl who I had struck up a conversation with, and getting into a mosh pit for a free tee-shirt seemed somewhat counterintuitive to my objective (not like it really mattered; I never got the chance to ask her for her number).

But back to the debate. The man who introduced the three panelists insisted that we operate by the British rules of debate (think the Prime Minister's Questions; if you haven't, go watch it on C-SPAN and wish that our Congress got to do that), since those were the rules that he was raised on. In other words, every time Goldberg or Gillespie made a particularly incendiary comment, there was a smattering of boos, hisses, and "For shame, sir!" that erupted.

Like I said, fun times.

The main points of contention were threefold, covering the issues of:

• how "organic" society is and how it evolves (and if it should evolve)
• English monarchs
• Housing Regulations and the Reasons by which We Do the Things We Do

If this sounds like a Jeopardy board instead of a roundtable debate, I don't blame you. I was consistently reminded of Celebrity Jeopardy SNL skits, with Yglesias playing the irritated Trebek and Gillespie & Goldberg switching off between who was Sean Connery, taking potshots at the poor, defenseless liberal whenever they had the chance.

One of the debates involved whether or not society changes. Goldberg tried to make the point that society improves by staying true to "tradition" because through tradition, the bad parts are weeded out, and the "wisdom of the Ancients" shouldn't be disregarded. Gillespie said that slavery used to be part of the "wisdom of the Ancients" too and that tradition should be able to be justified in contemporary society in order to justify its existence. To demonstrate that the "Ancients" weren't always great, he brought up the English monarchs and how their "wisdom" wasn't so wise. He also asked Goldberg to name two, to which the Conservative replied, "Oh no, I'm not taking that bait."

How the names of two English monarchs constitutes bait is beyond me, but he also said that the most powerful English female monarch was Victoria (I'd say Queen Bess), so maybe there were darker forces at work here.

The Housing Regulations bit went like this:

Goldberg: I hate intellectuals and their constant harping about how believing that people do things for one reason. Intellectuals like Tim Russert (Tim Russert? An intellectual? I laugh.) always want "The one reason why we should go to war with Iraq" or things like that. But no one does anything for one reason. When you buy a house, you ask a lot of questions: what are the schools like...what is the neighborhood like...does it have a roof...
Gillespie: Does it have a roof? Of course it has a roof!

[Everyone laughs]

Yglesias: Because of the building regulations.

[More laughs]

Gillespie: Oh yeah, it's big business trying to take our roofs away. If it weren't for the government building inspectors, not one house would have a roof. Some grand conspiracy by big business.

[General Uproar]

I was laughing too hard to remember where things went from there. All in all, it was a good five dollars well-spent.

Pricing Pollution

One of the first things that you learn in economics is what can and cannot be included in things like GDP. Almost always the question of externalities comes up. Externalities are parts of supply and demand that aren't directly influencing the buyer or the seller, but instead a third party that is not present at the transaction. The best example is one that most people in the Northeast are at least somewhat familiar with:

A coal power plant in West Virginia builds extremely tall smokestacks for its putrid filth that it pumps out. The smoke rises high above the residents of that particular portion of Appalacia and is carried by air currents up into the Northeast. The supplier (the power plant) gets low costs on its production and the consumers (the homes/businesses supplied by said power plant) get cheap energy without having to worry about all that nasty pollution caused by the removal of sulphur from the coal and the burning thereof. The locals don't have the pollution because the smokestacks are so high that it floats right on over them.

Now, the Yankees up there in the Northeast aren't getting cheap power or jobs at the power plant; they're just getting screwed by a supply/demand transaction hundreds of miles away. Pollution is considered the quintessential externality.

Until the Kyoto Protocol came around, anyway. The Kyoto Protocol allowed for the development of what is now considered the most effective way to tag a price on pollution: let the market do it. I've heard whispers about a "green GDP" that's being conceived of by some government ministers in China to take pollution into account as a drain on GDP, but I'm not going to buy into that until it's official policy. It's still in the developmental stage anyway.

Right now the best way that we have to price carbon dioxide, one of the worst greenhouse gases, doesn't even exist here: the Emissions Trading System (ETS). We actually already do have an ETS for sulphur dioxide, which was set up back in 1990 by the Clean Air Act. By 2010, emissions of sulphur dioxide should have been halved from their '90 levels. Cool peas.

"But Josh, how can you, a quasi-free-market-wannabe-economist support such a scheme? It's that darn gov't tellin' us little people what to do!!! Yer a sellout!"

Oh, hush. I'm not a sellout and if you think you're going to get back onto my blog with that mouth, you can forget it. Anyway, moving on.

The beauty of this "scheme" is that it couples a goal that helps the greater good - lower pollution emissions, less global warming, lower health care costs from things like skin cancer, fewer government payouts to those unfortunate enough to have those maladies, and ultimately a lower budget deficit - with a market mechanism.

Here's how it works: let's say that the U.S. emits 100 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. The government auctions off 100 "emissions credits," each worth 1 million tons of legal carbon dioxide emissions. If you buy one credit, you're allowed to pollute up to 1 million tons of carbon dioxide for that year. Anytime during then you can sell any unused credits to someone else who is interested in paying for the right to pollute. If a company doesn't pollute as much as it thinks it will, it can always get a little extra cash by selling their surplus credits to someone else. The credits are only good for a year and they can only be used once, so there's no possibility of "saving up" credits or hoarding them. If the price is too low, then polluters will as many credits as they need (or as many as they can get). If the price is too high, it makes sense to adopt cleaner-burning processes or pollution controls so that the number of credits that need to be bought remains as low as possible.

Here's the trick: the ETS works like a game of musical chairs. Every time you start a new round, you pull one chair out of the circle. Same thing with the ETS: every year, the government reduces the number of credits that is auctioned off to meet a target.

Let's go back to our 100 million ton of carbon dioxide country again. In year 1, there are 100 1-million-ton credits sold. The government wants to decrease carbon dioxide emissions by 10% over 10 years. In year 2, there are 99 1-million-ton credits sold. In year 3, there are 98 sold, and so on. As supply dwindles, the price of pollution should rise. If the government is transparent with letting companies know how many credits they will sell in the future, companies can plan ahead and begin adopting cleaner technologies earlier.

However, the government has to realize that there is a danger. Something like this happened in France a month or two ago. Pollution emissions came in lower than expected and suddenly there was a gap between the emission credits that France allowed and the actual amount of pollution it was belching out. If pollution emissions are cut below the cap set by the government, suddenly the supply of credits (albeit dwindling) is suddenly plentiful relative to the demand.

What happened in France? The price of pollution emissions crashed. If this keeps up, more companies will by the credits, pollute more, and France will bring itself right up against the cap again. Assuming, of course, that the price of the credits makes it economically viable to pollute instead of adopt cleaner technologies.

Put it this way: say that it's more profitable for companies to buy up the credits if the cost of each credit is $20. It costs them $25 per ton to use cleaner technology or pollution controls. If the price of the pollution credits is $30 a ton, it makes more sense to use the cleaner technology. If the price falls to $20, buying the credits is more cost-effective.

So there is a bit of a conundrum with these government-imposed caps: total pollution will fall, but only as slowly as the long-term goals that the government sets in the first place. Policy cannot risk becoming schizophrenic on the issue, lowering the cap just to keep the "slack" out of the market if total pollution falls below target levels due to innovation, conservation, or technology. Not only that, but a government that gets in the habit of lowering the total cap could just as easily be replaced by one that wants to raise the cap under the aegis of promoting business.

Guarded, incrememental, predictable, and steady reduction in total pollution allowed, distributed among polluters by a market mechanism, is the most effective way to reduce pollution in a cost-effective manner.