Bureaucrats are always behind the curve

Fifteen Things to Despise about Government Regulation

by Richard W. Fulmer and Robert L. Bradley 

Between the current financial mess and the debate over carbon-dioxide emissions controls, there is a lot of talk about regulation these days.  We are told, for example, that the recession would have been prevented if proper regulations had been in place.  While it is true that (by definition) the “right” regulations would have prevented bad and ensured good, it is also true that had an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent dictator been in charge, the recession would have been avoided as well.  The problem, of course, is that God, being otherwise occupied, didn’t run for president during the last election.

Enacting the right regulations is somewhat simpler than electing an omni-everything being to run the world — but not much.  As evidence, consider that it was a lot of the wrong regulations that got us into this mess in the first place.  Also consider the oft-heard argument that financial regulators needed to “get out ahead of the innovators.”  Clearly, a job for the omniscient.  There is, after all, a reason why the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk preceded the establishment of the Federal Aviation Administration.

Any time government regulators try to do much more than lay out the basic rules of the game, unintended consequences and moral hazards rear their ugly heads.  The following list of pitfalls, adapted from our bookEnergy: The Master Resource, is offered as a caution to regulatory enthusiasts.

1.  Laws and regulations may institutionalize the tragedy of the commons. The rule of capture (which stated that oil belonged to whomever pumped it out of the ground) and related regulations led petroleum companies to drill as many wells as possible in order to get the oil before their competitors could. By encouraging companies to drill otherwise unnecessary wells, the rule led to wasted resources and sometimes to reservoir damage.

Groundwater in the United States is still a common-property resource and because no one owns it, no one has an incentive to conserve it.  Farmers in California, enjoying subsidized water prices, have been growing water-intensive crops such as rice and cotton in desert areas despite endemic water shortages.

2.  Special interests lobby the government to get their products or services mandated by regulation. The mandated use of ethanol in automotive fuel is an example.  In the United States most ethanol is made from corn. Farmers who grow corn and companies that make ethanol from it have heavily pressured Congress to require its use.  As a further subsidy the government has banned imported ethanol even though it can be purchased from other countries for less than it costs to make it here.  One unintended consequence has been an increase in food prices.  As the price of corn has risen, so has corn-based animal feed and with it the price of beef, milk, chicken, and eggs.

3.  Regulations can create (or destroy) entire industries overnight. The use of such power adds uncertainty and risk to the market. If risk reaches unacceptable levels, investors put their money elsewhere. The concentration of political power in Washington forces companies to lobby Congress and the White House for protection against its arbitrary use. Corporate lobbying, in turn, increases people’s distrust of the system.

4.  Regulations are often the result of compromise. After concessions have been made to this powerful representative or that influential senator, the resulting law or regulation may be very different from the original proposal and have far different consequences. Politics may be “the art of the possible,” but what is politically possible may be neither practical nor environmentally friendly.

Compromise can also result in laws so vaguely worded that they can be interpreted in any number of ways. In the end it is left up to regulatory agencies and the courts to decide what a bill actually means. Their interpretations may be very different from the original intentions of the bill’s proponents.

The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977, for example, stated that only new factories and power plants would have to meet the tighter emissions standards imposed by the act. Existing plants would continue to be regulated under the preexisting standards unless the old plants were “substantially modified.” Unfortunately, Congress did not precisely specify what “substantially modified” meant.

In 1998 the EPA sued the owners of a number of old plants, charging that the upgrades done over the years to these plants had cumulatively added up to “substantial modifications.” The owners responded, with some justification, that the EPA had originally approved their changes and that altering the rules after the fact amounted to passage of a retroactive law, something explicitly forbidden by the U.S. Constitution (Section 9, Article 3).

5.  Lobbyists may support regulations as a way of hurting their competition. Utility companies with “old source” power plants, for example, welcomed the Clean Air Act’s 1977 amendments because it put potential competitors at a disadvantage by raising the cost of market entry.

Other amendments to the Clean Air Act required power companies to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions by installing scrubbers. A less expensive way to lower emissions would have been to switch to low-sulfur coal, but eastern labor unions and coal mining companies (which produce high-sulfur coal) successfully lobbied to get the requirement for scrubbers enacted into law. This resulted in a waste of resources since (otherwise unnecessary) scrubbers had to be built, installed, and powered.

In the United States during the twentieth century, government intervention in the energy market was commonly industry-driven. Firms often organized lobbying groups to obtain favorable regulation or special subsidies. Free-market economist Milton Friedman complained, “Time and again, I have castigated the oil companies for . . . seeking and getting governmental privilege.”

6.  Regulations can eliminate or alter feedback. Feedback is an essential component of any activity. Imagine how dangerous the world would be for a person who had lost the ability to feel pain (as happens with certain forms of leprosy). Such a person could do serious damage to himself by continuing to walk on a badly sprained ankle, or putting his hand on a hot stove without knowing it.

Government action can create a sort of institutional leprosy by weakening or even destroying the feedback loops that make it possible for companies to know whether their activities are of any value. For instance, by taxing productive companies in order to subsidize unproductive ones, governments perpetuate the waste of resources.

"Cui bono"

Confusion Masquerading as Science? Taxes and Spending

May 29, 2011

by Mario Rizzo

I am always amazed that when many economists give policy advice the sophistication and logical rigor that the discipline so values gets completely lost.
There are many ways to interpret this. One is that the level of precision appropriate to theory and to applied economics is not appropriate to the “art” of economic policy. Of course, I would suggest that maybe this teaches us something about the ultimate value of sophistication in the theoretical product. Do the precise concepts of theory and applied economics have referents in the “real world”? Or is most of the precision lost when we try to understand the world and recommend policies? This is an important question.
However, here I am interested in the sloppiness of the policy-relevant discussions that even very good and respectable economists produce. One interesting example is a recent “Economix” piece in The New York Times by the Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt.
I have two points: first, the confusing mix of science and value judgments; and second, the naïve analysis of the political process.
Let’s examine one of Reinhardt’s conclusions:

“Looking at the Congressional Budget Office’s chart, I came away convinced that Mr. Greenspan had it right: given what we, the people, expect the federal government to deliver – including, once again these days, a social insurance program called “federal disaster relief” — the only way to avoid a looming fiscal disaster would be to return to the higher taxes across the board that prevailed during the Clinton administration. (An alternative would be to bite the bullet and adopt a value-added tax, as other nations have done.)”

The previous charts that Reinhardt discusses portray that absent the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush tax cuts, recovery measures (aka “stimulus”), TARP, Fannie and Freddie May, and the economic downturn, the current deficit would be very small. In the foreseeable future the roles of the recovery measures and TARP/Fannie/Freddie shrink. So we are left with primarily with the Bush tax cuts and the lingering effects of the economic downturn. The latter is the permanent reduction in national income and hence in tax revenue caused by the recession.

From 2-to-1 to 1-to-2

Government vs. Production

So it’s just not true that the government bureaucrats aren’t "making things." They've been experts at making expensive jobs for themselves, experts at creating perpetual dependency and everlasting victimhood, experts at creating the road to national bankruptcy.

by Ralph Reiland

Impose the world's highest corporate income tax rate, and we can expect the result will be too few corporations and too much government. "The United States may soon wind up with the distinction that makes business leaders cringe -- the highest corporate tax rate in the world," wrote New York Times reporter David Kocieniewski last week.

"Topping out at 35 percent, America's corporate income tax rate trails that of only Japan, at 39.5 percent, which has said it plans to lower its rate," reported Kocieniewski.

Include additional taxes imposed at the state level, and the corporate tax rate in the U.S. jumps to more than 40 percent in 19 states.

Leading the pack are Iowa and Pennsylvania with corporate income taxes, respectively, of 12 percent and 9.99 percent, creating the nation's highest barriers via taxation to new corporate investment and associated new jobs.

Similarly in relation to obstacles to business expansion: Create an education system that produces four times more college graduates in social science and history than in engineering and computer science, and we can expect to see too many American firms unable to compete in the global marketplace and too many academics writing papers on America's lack of competitiveness.

In "We've Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers" (The Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2011), Stephen Moore, senior economics writer at The Journal, reported that in the U.S. today, "there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million)."

In short, we got better at expanding bureaucracies than manufacturing cars, better at making rules and regulations than producing clothes or oil.

It wasn't always this way. The world's first automatic transmission was invented in 1904 in Boston. The year before, Orville Wright became the first person in history to be a passenger in a machine that had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight.

In 1960, the aforementioned 2-to-1 ratio between government employees and manufacturing workers in America was weighted precisely in the opposite direction, as Moore reported, with "15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government."

Add to manufacturing the other key sectors in the American economy where people still make something tangible, something touchable, and the total employment still doesn't equal the bloated payroll levels in the government.

"More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined," explained Moore.

"Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital," reported Moore, "have more government bureaucrats than people making things."

Well, not exactly. It's not fully accurate to say that government bureaucrats aren't "making things."

They made a federal anti-poverty program that's produced a price tag of more than $13 trillion since the mid-1960s, plus trillions more at the local and state levels.

"The federal government now has 122 separate anti-poverty programs" with a cost of "$591 billion in 2009," recently reported the Cato Institute's Michael D. Tanner in Investor's Business Daily. That averages out to "$14,849 for every poor man, woman and child in America," Tanner explained. That's $59,396 for a poverty family of four -- in a nation where the median household income that same year was $49,777. Much of that $59,396 never gets to the poor, of course. It goes to the bureaucrats who “manage” the poor, the poverty experts who’d be out of work if they eliminated poverty.

So it’s just not true that the government bureaucrats aren’t "making things." They've been experts at making expensive jobs for themselves, experts at creating perpetual dependency and everlasting victimhood, experts at creating the road to national bankruptcy.

Without feathers

Midnight in Woodyland

by Christian Toto

If you thought Woody Allen waxed poetic about New York City on film, wait until you settle into your seat to see Midnight in Paris.

Allen’s latest effort, hastily dubbed a return to form by his gooey admirers, is a love letter to the City of Light. It also sees fit to mock Republicans, tea partiers, and anyone who thinks having a mistress might be unethical.

Watching a new Allen movie is akin to seeing the artist’s psyche laid bare. We know too much about the off-screen Allen, from his morally repugnant romance with then-girlfriend Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter to his support for admitted child rapist Roman Polanski.

It puts his movies in a less flattering light. And, frankly, Allen’s current projects can’t measure up to his older, better films.

In Midnight in Paris, Owen Wilson plays a flustered screenwriter named Gil visiting Paris with his fiancee, Inez (Rachel McAdams).

Gil is entranced by everything Paris has to offer, but he really longs to be in the Paris of the 1920s, a time when some of the greatest writers in history roamed the streets.

“I’m a Hollywood hack who never gave literature a real shot until now,” he wails.

One drunken night, a vintage car drives up to Gil and its passengers insist he hop in. A few minutes later Gil is hobnobbing with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and swapping stories with Ernest Hemingway.

Gil’s initial shock of being next to his literary idols quickly turns to merriment. Why question the time space continuum when you can pester Hemingway for writing tips?

The next day Gil finds himself back in modern day Paris along with his unpleasant fiancée, but every night he makes an excuse to revisit the city block where that magical car escorted him back in time. And, sure enough, the car keeps reappearing right on schedule.

But can Paris’ romanticized past deliver a meaningful future for Gil? And will he find true love with Picasso’s current squeeze (Marion Cotillard, who delivers the most enchanting performance in the movie)?

Midnight in Paris begins like a tourist video, with Allen rotating a series of static shots of the city in action. Yawn. The pedestrian start would be entirely forgivable if that old Allen spark were soon to follow.

It’s progressive, y’see

Burns Night for Israel: Scotland’s Literary Shame

by Ben Cohen

Heinrich Heine’s maxim about people being burned where books are also burned conjures up some of the most hellish images of Nazi rule. Raging bonfires devouring page after page of literature deemed toxic, their flames growing higher with each volume thrown onto the pile. There goes Freud, now it’s Hemingway, next up is Proust, until finally you reach the gates of Auschwitz.

By contrast, a book boycott seems a rather dour affair. Brownshirted thugs burning armfuls of books while surrounded by screaming onlookers is one thing. A bespectacled librarian removing books from the shelves to the warehouse is something else. No?

Actually, no In the case that I have in mind, concerning a provincial Scottish council’s decision to deprive its library users of books by Israeli authors, the underlying impulse is pretty much the same. And I’m not the only person to say so. Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Ron Prosor, a man not normally given to bombast, declared: “A place that boycotts books is not far from a place that burns them.” No doubt, those council bureaucrats implementing the boycott will be incensed by his statement. After all, while every Nazi supports a boycott of Israel, not every supporter of a boycott of Israel is a Nazi. Most boycott advocates, sensitive souls that they are, would be sorely wounded by such a suggestion.

Ergo, all the mealy-mouthed qualifications that follow. This is about solidarity with the Palestinians, not hatred of the Jews and their works; it’s progressive, y’see. It’s not a blanket ban, but something that will be decided on a book-by-book basis. And oh yes, according to West Dunbartonshire Regional Council Spokesperson Malcolm Bennie, the boycott doesn’t apply to Israeli books printed outside Israel, just those printed in Israel. In other words, the Harcourt edition I have of Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness is OK. My prized English edition of Ahad Ha’am’s Selected Essays, published by Sefer ve Sefel of Jerusalem, is not OK.

The Scots have, ironically, a rather Yiddish-sounding verb for this kind of thing: to “haiver,” roughly translated as talking nonsense, or “bollocks,” as it’s more commonly known throughout the British Isles. It is “haivering” because all the excuses and rationalizations cannot camouflage one basic truth. Just as the German book-burnings aimed at obliterating ideas deemed repellent to Nazi ideology, so its sanitized adaptation, in the form of a book boycott, seeks to quarantine those ideas on the wrong side of anti-Zionist ideology.

The Business of Poverty is booming

Obscene Salaries Dominate at Int’l Development Banks

by Richard Pollock

Many of Washington’s 2,600 technocrats working at the 

International Monetary Fund do not regard Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s lavish lifestyle as an anomaly.

Privately they admire it, recognizing it as a description of their own standard of living. They call their many unseen perks “golden handshakes.” At the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, and at the IMF, you find extravagantly paid men and women who masquerade as anti-poverty fighters for the Third World. As one World Bank vice president said upon his resignation: “Poverty reduction is the last thing on most World Bank bureaucrats’ minds.”

These global institutions are supposed to act as non-profits, but big salaries and big perks rule as the norm. And you’re paying for them: as the largest single contributor, American taxpayers pick up the tab.

By now everyone knows about DSK’s extravagant $420,000 employment agreement that included an additional $73,000 for living expenses — a provision explained thusly by the IMF: “To enable you to maintain … a scale of living appropriate to your position.” Most of the non-profit development world remained silent when the Fund announced a $250,000 “golden parachute” severance for the indicted managing director.

A PJM survey found that a common annual compensation package for senior management at the anti-poverty banks exceeds $500,000 — tax-free. World Bank President Robert Zoellick currently receives $441,980 in base salary and $284,500 in other benefits. Strauss-Kahn’s deputy, John Lipsky, receives $384,000 in base salary plus “living allowances.”

The fallacy of the benign ruler

The Inside World of an Economic Hitman

Below are clips from a speech given by John Perkins author of, Confessions of an Economic Hitman.

Although the speech was delivered in 2006, it is as relevant today as it was 5 years ago. It is an insider's account of how the IMF, World Bank and similar organizations muscle small countries for the benefit of the power elite. You have never heard a speech like this before. The full first clip, along with roughly the first 15 minutes of the second clip, are most informative. Perkins continues on after that, but at that point he calls for a new central type plan to organize the world. In other words, he doesn't get that it is central power that is the problem.
If his central power plan were to be implemented, the elitist bad guys would capture that power structure, just like they have captured the current power structure.
Amazingly, after Perkins describes in detail how the power structure he saw up close was an instrument of evil, he doesn't get what Hayek warned about, that the worst always get to the top. The real solution is free markets, where no one lords over another.
That said, the first clip, and half of the second, are awesome in describing how the power elite operate.

Heavenly Dream and the God-Awful Reality

David Mamet's Coming Out Party

"Before he moved to California, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet had never talked to a self-described conservative. 'I realized I lived in this bubble."

By BARI WEISS

In March 2008, David Mamet was outed in the Village Voice. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright had a comedy about an American president running on Broadway, and—perhaps to help with ticket sales—decided to write an article about the election season. The headline was subtle: "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal.'"

"They mistitled it," he insists. Mr. Mamet had given the piece the far more staid title, "Political Civility." But the Voice's headline was truth in advertising. "I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind," Mr. Mamet wrote, referring to his prior self as, yes, a "brain-dead liberal."

The article was the most popular ever published on the Voice's website. But was the acclaimed Mr. Mamet really a conservative?

For a few years, he played it coy. In a 2008 interview with New York Magazine, he sloughed off a question about who he was voting for: "I'm not the guy to ask about politics. I'm a gag writer." In 2010, he told PBS's Charlie Rose he'd only offer his opinion about President Obama off-camera.

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Ken Fallin

But spend five minutes with Mr. Mamet and you realize that coy can only last so long. "Being a rather pugnacious sort of fellow I thought, as Albert Finney says in 'Two for the Road': 'As I said to the duchess, 'If you want to be a duchess, be a duchess. If you want to make love, it's hats off.'"

Hats off, indeed. Now Mr. Mamet has written a book-length, raucous coming-out party: "The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture." (If only the Voice editors had been around to supply a snappier title.)

Hear him take on the left's sacred cows. Diversity is a "commodity." College is nothing more than "Socialist Camp." Liberalism is like roulette addiction. Toyota's Prius, he tells me, is an "anti-chick magnet" and "ugly as a dogcatcher's butt." Hollywood liberals—his former crowd—once embraced Communism "because they hadn't invented Pilates yet." Oh, and good radio isn't NPR ("National Palestinian Radio") but Dennis Prager, Michael Medved and Hugh Hewitt.

The book is blunt, at times funny, and often over the top. When I meet the apostate in a loft in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, he's wrapping up a production meeting. "Bye, bye, Bette!" he calls to the actress walking toward the elevator. That'd be Bette Midler. Al Pacino gets a bear hug. The two are starring in an upcoming HBO film about Phil Spector's murder trial. Mr. Mamet is directing and he looks the part in a scarf, black beret and round yellow-framed glasses. Looking out the window at NYU film school, where he used to teach, I ask him to tell me his conversion story.

More Fifth Column than Fourth Estate

by Andrew J. Coulson

Citing new Census figures, the New York Times claims that “public school districts spent an average of $10,499 per student on elementary and secondary education in the 2009 fiscal year.” But according to the most recent issue of the Digest of Education Statistics, expenditures haven’t been that low for over a decade. In the last year reported, 2007-08, total expenditures per pupil in average daily attendance were already $12,922 (in 2008-09 dollars). Adjusting for inflation, that’s about $13,500 in today’s dollars. (Looking at spending per student enrolled, rather than per student actually taught, lowers the total figure, but not by that much).

So what gives? How can the Times claim that public school “spending” is $3,000 lower than it actually is?

They simply exclude a huge swath of expenditures in the number that they call “spending,” without telling readers they have done so. Specifically, they ignore spending on things like… buildings. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think American public schools have returned to Plato’s practice of holding lessons in an olive grove. Until they do, they will use buildings. Buildings cost money. They aren’t erected, for free and fully furnished, from the mind of Zeus.

Not only does this arbitrary and unjustifiable exclusion of capital expenditures from the reported “spending” figures wildly mislead the public about what schools are really costing them, it also misleads the public about the trends in spending. As my colleague Adam Schaeffer reveals in the chart below, spending on physical facilities has increased at a far faster rate than other expenditures (remember those Taj Mahal schools?). So by channeling David Blaine and making capital spending disappear, the Times also misrepresents real spending growth. In so doing, they undermine the public’s and lawmakers’ ability to make sound policy decisions regarding education. If the Times prominently corrects this glaring error I will be utterly shocked.

Doritos smuggling

Raw Onions Served As Snack in D.C. Schools

by Walter Olson

Fifty-three elementary schools in the District of Columbia take part in the federal government’s Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, a recently ramped-up federal initiative that dishes out millions to local schools to get them to use raw produce as snacks. According to the Washington Examiner, it was by inadvertence that students at Turner Elementary School were given raw green onions (scallions) as a snack the other day when they were supposed to be given zucchini slices instead. Children were observed making “yuck” faces before throwing the offerings in the trash or, in some cases, resourcefully tucking them into their bags to take home for their parents to cook.

Are we sure this is the best way to keep students from sneaking Doritos into the building?

On a less tear-inducing note, the school board in the town of Darien, Conn. has unanimously voted to pull out of the federal school lunch program. Finance director Richard Huot cited current and forthcoming federal mandates that, among other things, ban chocolate milk, discourage reliance on refillable sports water bottles, and require schools to push salads in preference to longtime favorites such as fruit. The regulations also drive up labor costs, Huot said, and make the lunch program more complex to run generally. “The children in this town are savvy consumers,” Huot said. “You put a lousy product on the table; they are not going to buy it.”

As a famously affluent suburb, Darien can afford to turn down the bribes — sorry, subsidies — that come with doing it Washington’s way. Isn’t it a shame so many other communities feel they have no real financial choice but to go along?

Econ 101

North Sea production slumps after Budget tax hike

from the newspaper UK Independent

"North Sea oil production has slowed to its lowest level since records began 15 years ago following the Chancellor of the Exchequer's recent tax raid on the industry. An update from the U.K. Department of Energy yesterday showed the biggest fall in oil production since quarterly records started in 1995. Gas production fell 17.6 per cent from a year ago.The slowdown follows the Chancellor's controversial Budget decision to increase the supplementary tax on North Sea Oil production to 32 per cent from 20 per cent to pay for a cut in petrol duty. The Chancellor's decision drew an industry-wide outcry and claims that mature fields would be closed.An Oil and Gas UK survey warned that a quarter of 240 potential projects in the North Sea were less likely to go ahead after the tax increase."

Ideological regulation

Savage Nation vs Halfwit State

by Mark Steyn

I wrote two years ago about the British Government’s decision to ban Michael Savage from the United Kingdom. In his letter to Secretary Clinton, Congressman Allen West points out that Her Majesty’s Government chose to add to a list of Russian mass murderers and Hamas terrorists the name of a law-abiding citizen of the United States – and, as I pointed out back in 2009, did so on an utterly cynical and fraudulent basis. 

I’ve lost touch a bit with the case since then, but I can’t say I was surprised to discover this week that the new “Conservative” Home Secretary has upheld the exclusion order of her Labour predecessor. The letter from a bloke called Michael Atkins, for the Treasury Solicitor, is a remarkable document – not least the reference in 3 (c) to the “allegation” (as Atkins puts it) that Savage “has many homosexual friends and respects Islam as a great religion”.

Why should admission to the United Kingdom be conditional on either of these no doubt splendid attributes? Is there a minimum number of homosexual friends you need to get past Heathrow? Indeed, how many of the many immigrants to Britain who “respect Islam as a great religion” have “homosexual friends”?

I can’t help feeling (in light of my own experience up north) that it was a waste of time for Savage’s counsel to get into the weeds with HMG on this stuff. The issue here is a once free society’s grotesque embrace of ideological enforcement at the border. A land that was once the crucible of liberty betrays its own inheritance. How could any English solicitor, even a government hack, write the following?

Your client has not provided any evidence to show that he did not commit the unacceptable behaviour.

But the Home Office has never specified what if anything Savage “committed”. In civilized societies, the burden of proof is on the accuser. Here it’s not even clear what Savage is required to disprove. So much for the presumption of innocence. Everything about this squalid business underlines how quickly free speech is shriveling in Europe and how comfortable governments have grown with the ideological regulation of public discourse. 

Mark Steyn at his very best

Top Regulator To Wipe Away Tears Shed Over Spilled Milk

by Mark Steyn

Cass Sunstein is head of something called the "Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs." I've seen enough conspiracy thrillers to know that when someone has so obvious a blandly amorphous federal job description as that, it means he's running some deeply sinister wet-work operation of illegal targeted assassinations in unfriendly nations that the government spooks want to keep off the books and far from prying eyes.

Oh, no, wait. Actually, Covert Operative Sunstein passes his day doing more or less what the sign on the door says: He collects information about regulatory affairs. More specifically, he is charged by the president with "an unprecedented government-wide review of regulations" in order to "improve or remove those that are out-of-date, unnecessary, excessively burdensome or in conflict with other rules."

How many has he got "removed" so far?

Well, last week he took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to crow that dairy farmers will henceforth be exempted from the burdens of a 1970s EPA-era directive classifying milk as an "oil" and subjecting it, as Professor Sunstein typed with a straight face, "to costly rules designed to prevent oil spills."

But Ol' MacDonald and his crack team of Red Adair-trained milkmaids can henceforth relax, because now, writes Sunstein, Washington is "giving new meaning to the phrase, 'Don't cry over spilled milk.' "

That's a federally licensed joke from Sunstein's colleagues at the Agency of Guffaw and Titter Regulation, so feel free to laugh.

Did you know milk was an oil? It is to the federal government, and, if a Holstein blows in the Gulf of Mexico and beaches from Florida to Louisiana are suddenly threatened by a tide of full-fat crude, they want to know you've got the federally mandated equipment to deal with it.

With hindsight, the president's remark in the early days of the BP oil spill that he was meeting with experts "so I know whose ass to kick" was not just a bit of vulgar braggadocio but the fault of early Department of Energy findings that the spillage was caused by asses' milk from BP (Burros & Poitous, a member of the Big Ass cartel).

"Your ass is on the line!" as the president told BP's Tony Hayward after his donkey was found wandering down the first $38 billion stretch of the federally funded high-speed rail track.

Whoops, sorry, I made the mistake of hiring Cass Sunstein's federally accredited "spilled milk" gag writer. Where was I?

Oh, yeah, federal regulation. So this EPA directive requiring milk to be treated the same as petroleum for the purposes of storage and transportation has been around since the Seventies, and it's only taken the best part of four decades to get it partially suspended even though it's udderly insane? Hallelujah!

At that rate of regulatory reform, we'll be ... well, let Sunstein explain it. Aside from his crowing over spilled milk, he cites other triumphs: The Departments of Commerce and State are "pursuing reforms"; the Department of Health and Human Services "will be reconsidering burdensome regulatory requirements"; and the Department of the Interior will be "reviewing cumbersome, outdated regulations."

Is it really a mystery?

A One-Man Insurgency

BY ANNA BADKHE

Beneath a span beam bridge at the northern border of this 

provincial capital, the Maimana River trickles to a dun seep and turns to dust. Behind it, the layered escarpments of Turkestan Mountains' 12,000-foot crest fade to opal, then to nothing, evanescing into the blown-glass sky.

Between the mountains and the stream, on the dusty outskirts of Maimana, a handful of quivering flags mark the newest shrine in Faryab province: the grave of Samaruddin, a young border police officer killed by NATO troops after he murdered two American soldiers last month.

In this land of transubstantiation, the double metamorphosis of a policeman into a murderer and then, almost instantaneously, a saint lays bare the ultimate fulcrum for all the defeats of all the invasions that have befallen Afghanistan since time immemorial: the fervent, almost mystical, hatred of the occupier. A hatred that scores the face of every swallow-burrowed scarp, nourishes the root of every fruit tree, and supercedes all other loyalties and enmities. Even the cops in Maimana call Samaruddin "the shahid": the martyr.

"It's a religious thing," explained Col. Bismillah, a district police chief in whose Maimana suburb of domed clay houses and withering apricot orchards Samaruddin's body was buried. "Here in Afghanistan we believe infidels have martyred him for his faith."

On April 4, after what Samaruddin's supervisors say were three impeccable years of exemplary service, the 22-year-old man was manning a checkpoint outside the border police headquarters, a few dozen paces away from the bridge over the dying river. Several armored vehicles arrived, delivering American soldiers to train Samaruddin's fellow officers at the headquarters. All of a sudden, Samaruddin leveled his Kalashnikov at the foreigners and opened fire, killing two soldiers. When his rifle clip was empty, he ran off.

Two days later, NATO forces tracked him down in southern Maimana, where he was hiding in a friend's house, and shot him dead.