Lemonade and Freedom

The Inexplicable War on Lemonade Stands

by E.D. Kain

I’m beginning to think that there’s a nation-wide government conspiracy against either lemonade or children, because these lemonade stand shutdowns seem to be getting more and more common. If you set up a stand for your kids, just be prepared for a visit from the cops.

In Coralville, Iowa police shut down 4-year-old Abigail Krstinger’s lemonade stand after it had been up for half an hour. Dustin Krustinger told reporters that his daughter was selling lemonade at 25 cents a cup during the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Race Across Iowa (or RAGBRAI), and couldn’t have made more than five dollars, adding “If the line is drawn to the point where a four-year-old eight blocks away can’t sell a couple glasses of lemonade for 25 cents, than I think the line has been drawn at the wrong spot.”

Nearby, mother Bobbie Nelson had her kids’ lemonade stand shutdown as well. Police informed her that a permit would cost $400.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, police shutdown a lemonade stand run by three girls who were saving money to go to a water park. Police said the girls needed a business license, a peddler’s permit, and a food permit to operate the stand, which cost $50 per day or $180 per year each, sums that would quickly cut into any possible profit-margin.

In Appleton, Wisconsin the city council recently passed an ordinance preventing vendors from selling products within two blocks of local events – including kids who want to sell lemonade or cookies.

These are hardly isolated incidents. From slapping parents with $500 finesfor letting their kids run unlicensed lemonade stands (though this was later waived after public outcry), to government officials calling the cops on kidsselling cupcakes, the list goes on and on and on.

Nor does it stop with kids. Food Trucks are also under the gun of regulators and city governments across the country. This isn’t to say that food trucks don’t need any regulations at all, but many of the regulations that come down the pipeline are pushed by brick-and-mortar competitors who want to keep competition at a minimum.

But it’s the shutdown of lemonade stands that I find so inexplicable. Who stands to lose from a couple of six-year-olds selling lemonade? Who stands to gain from shutting them down? Do local governments really think parents are going to pay for $400 vendor permits, or that kids can scrape together the money for food permits? Are there any actual safety risks? Kids have been selling lemonade for decades without permits of any sort. They often set the stands up just for fun, but many lemonade stands (or bake sales) are used to raise money for schools, cancer, or sick pets. Lemonade stands represent the most innocent, optimistic side of capitalism out there.

Fortunately, August 20th is now unofficially National Lemonade Freedom Day, because when life gives you overbearing government regulations…make lemonade, or something.

A map of lemonade stand crackdowns can be found here. They’re spread out pretty much all across the country.

Hat tip to Radley Balko and the Reason team for many of these stories, so many of which sound like they’ve been pulled straight from The Onion.

Why not replace S&P president?

Four Reasons S&P Got it Right

When will the Obama administration learn that more debt equals fewer jobs?

 

by Richard A. Epstein

The major headlines on Saturday, August 6, 2011, contained no surprises in announcing that Standard & Poor’s had downgraded the United States credit rating from AAA to AA+. That decision, of course, had this rich irony: the same credit agency that was lambasted for giving rosy ratings to toxic mortgage-backed securities is now being skewered, especially by liberals like Paul Krugman and the New York Times, for selling the United States short. The markets, however, did not react with the same skepticism toward the S&P as the committed liberals did. Inexorable and impersonal, the stock markets were 5.5 percent on Monday. The days of indifference to deficits have come to a close.

What clearly drove the S&P downgrade, and may yet drive other ratings agencies like Fitch and Moody’s to the same conclusion, is that this nation’s leaders and its restive public have yet to agree on a common solution to our debt crisis. In a sense, the S&P downgrade was a trailing indicator of the dismal prospects for sustained growth. The 512-point Dow nosedive on Thursday August 4, before the S&P ratings hit, had already sent the same message.

The main reason why the markets and the S&P moved in harmony stems from their recognition that last week’s disappointing debt compromise—with its puny $2.1 trillion in projected cuts—did not make a dent in the projected $40 trillion shortfall of our entitlement programs. Nor has it led to any national consensus on how, or indeed whether, to trim the debt. Sunday’s New York Times editorial offered its own predictable recommendations, noting with smug satisfaction that a NYT/CBS poll finds that "63 percent [of Americans] support raising taxes on households that earn more than $250,000 a year to help address the deficit." The punch line is that the fickle public has so rejected the Tea Party verities of the midterm elections that it now embraces some version of Obama’s tax–and-spend policies.

In light of all these grim developments, my libertarian worldview is not likely to be enacted into law anytime soon. Luckily, the folks at S&P do not require a majority vote to lower the United States credit rating. They may have been amused by the constant drumbeat from the likes of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi that the time has come to turn our attention from deficits to jobs, as if the creation of larger deficits will do anything to stop the bleeding job market. The way the Obama administration sees it, if the private firms continue to inexplicably sit on their mountains of cash, the government has to intervene with yet another failed stimulus program.

The disconnect between the debt crisis and the Obama administration was made clear by a recent announcement from Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius: the Obama administration, acting under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, has created yet another new entitlement that requires insurers to provide women with contraceptive services for free.

The clear lesson to the S&P folks is that entitlement spending, which was immunized from the debt ceiling compromise, remains on autopilot. No matter how much discretionary spending is curtailed, the revenue situation will only get worse if entitlements continue to rise, which they will unless meaningful regulatory reform takes place pronto. Yet that cannot happen as long as the Democrats keep control of the Senate and the White House.

So what should be done? On this occasion, I want to look beyond the debt, taxation, and expenditure debate to address other ways in which to remove some of the fetters that have limited economic growth. On this point, I think it is wise to return to some issues that were relevant in the run-up to the 2010-midterm elections. My fear then was that the no matter what the outcome of the midterm elections, the Obama administration would remain committed to the same four great vices of political statecraft that defined its first two years of governance, and that have left the economy in shambles.

These vices are (1) supporting high marginal rates of taxation, (2) backing labor unions through thick and thin, (3) being hostile to international free trade, and (4) championing, in good Progressive form, the full range of positive rights to health care and housing. Here is a thumbnail sketch as to why the president goes wrong on each of these.

High marginal tax rates

The Democrats’ fixation with high marginal tax rates does not fix what ails the tax system. Right now, tax revenues are low relative to GDP, but that derives from the decision to insulate about 50 percent of the public from the income tax, which has the unfortunate political consequence of inducing them to support government programs from which they benefit, but for which they do not pay.

Yet another problem with the high marginal tax rate agenda is that it presupposes that money now in the hands of gifted private individuals will be better spent or managed in the hands of the government. Yet we see from the dismal failure of the stimulus programs that this claim is false.

One vivid illustration of stimulus folly comes from the small town of Bridgman, Michigan. The town was the recipient of stimulus money that was used on infrastructure improvements. The old traffic light at the corner of Lake Street and Red Arrow Highway needed only five separate signal lights on a single wire to regulate the flow traffic in all directions. Too simple for a failing economy, the shiny new system now has four grand connecting arches, each of which supports three traffic lights, coupled with other regalia. As an added bonus, the new installation program ripped out sidewalks and curbs, to replace them with fake brickwork and old-fashioned streetlights. The major achievement of this upgrade was to block entry into the struggling stores on the main streets, depressing trade.

Imagine such "stimulus" repeated thousands of times across the country. The sad truth is that it is just as easy to waste money on infrastructure as it is on anything else, like entitlements. We need to finally admit that the old stimulus saw does not work. Going further into debt won’t create jobs in the future any more than it did in the past. On the contrary, all other things equal,controlling debt will lead to more jobs. It is therefore a form of economic suicide to embrace yet another stimulus program on the vague hope that it will miraculously succeed, even though it has already failed at least two or three times in the past.

Fealty to unions

The president’s uncritical support of the union agenda is a job killer of the first order. As a matter of simple economics, labor unions are inefficient monopolies that can only succeed by raising wages, lowering employment levels, and knocking out cheaper nonunion competition to maintain their positions. They also demand work rules that impose a further drag on the economy.

Unions cannot succeed at the bargaining table under the current statutory system. Too many workers realize that the higher wages that unions promise carry with them a high price tag. Dues are high, strikes are costly, and nonunion competition can force retrenchment or bankruptcy on newly unionized firms.

So unions now move in other directions to assert their power. They fight nonunion employers before zoning boards and building commissions. They harass firms that won’t yield to their demands by calling in public inspectors. They choke off the flow of imported goods made with cheaper foreign labor. They seek presidential favors. They prevail on the administration to hound private companies, like Boeing as it tries to build its new South Carolina plant. They support rich health mandates for private firms. And the list goes on.

These actions cost money and they are all counterproductive. The unwillingness of private employers to hire is not so inexplicable given the hostile labor law environment. Labor contracts only take place when the gains from trade exceed the costs of putting deals together. The Obama administration’s specializes in raising the costs of hiring while reducing the gains from those new hires. If it reversed both policies by ditching its union allies, then the labor markets would start to come back to life.

International free trade

The Obama administration’s official position is that it is in favor of free trade. Now comes the inevitable "but." That free trade has to be "fair" as well. It must respect the rights of labor unions abroad, and take a close look at environmental practices overseas. The upshot is that the exceptions overwhelm the rule, so that no new free trade agreements are struck, in part to appease the president’s big labor constituency.

It takes zero federal dollars (but real political will) to remove obstacles to trade, which will stimulate both imports and exports and could lead to real growth that might put a dent in the deficit. But once again, the Obama administration and its Democratic supporters take a line that should leave every credit rating agency and every citizen apoplectic. First, the administration erects trade barriers to shrink the economy. Second, it uses transfer payments to shrink it more.

Positive Rights

In a well-designed polity, the state should concentrate on enforcing a limited set of rights. It protects people against force, fraud, and monopoly, and it enforces private contracts that lead to gains from trade. It stays out of the business of supplying housing, education, and health care, which it does neither equitably nor well.

But the president’s health care act is one of many pieces of legislation that violates this norm by casting government into the center of an elaborate network of regulations likely to topple under their own weight. Getting out of this morass is not just a question of fine-tuning the presently overregulated health care system. What is needed is a deep awareness that constant political pressures on health care, housing, and education—combined with the slow and erratic response time of even the best public officials—cannot keep up with consumer demand and technological innovation. Ever.

Since the 1960s, we have run two large programs, Medicare and Medicaid, which have verified these predictions, as their costs have skyrocketed and finances have crumbled. It is devilishly difficult to unwind entitlement programs that transfer huge sums to people who are too old or infirm to fend for themselves. But it is utter foolishness to replicate anew the same flawed strategy on a grand canvas after it has failed with two major programs that are likely to implode within the next five to ten years.

Taking everything together, we have a truly a sorry situation before us. In my view, S&P was right to downgrade U.S. debt. The market is making the right call as well. It will not plummet. Rather, owing to the administration’s current intransigence, the economy will continue to stagnate, with slow declines in the standard of living for all Americans. The solution requires a real change in course, marked by a return to the classical liberal synthesis of strong property rights, low and flat taxes, and small government that keeps a close eye on tax expenditures.

Clearly this position does not resonate with a majority of the American public. It will take a real political leader to change our direction. As bad as the Obama’s policies are, no Republican presidential nominee has come close to articulating a comprehensive vision for our fiscal future. The odds are not good that such a candidate will emerge in the run up to the 2012 election.

Non human capital

The Desperation-of-Deprivation Myth

The West has incentivized non-productivity on an industrial scale.

By Mark Steyn

Unlike many of my comrades in the punditry game, I don’t do a lot of TV. But I’m currently promoting my latest doom-mongering bestseller, so I’m spending more time than usual on the telly circuit. This week I was on the BBC’s current-affairs flagship Newsnight. My moment in the spotlight followed a report on the recent riots in English cities, in the course of which an undercover reporter interviewed various rioters from Manchester who’d had a grand old time setting their city ablaze and then expressed no remorse over it. There then followed a studio discussion, along the usual lines. The host introduced a security guard who’d fought for Queen and country in Afghanistan and Bosnia and asked whether he sympathized with his neighbors. He did. When you live in an “impoverished society,” he said, “people do what they have to do to survive.”

When we right-wing madmen make our twice-a-decade appearance on mainstream TV, we’re invariably struck by how narrow are the bounds of acceptable discourse in polite society. But in this instance I was even more impressed by how liberal pieties triumph even over the supposed advantages of the medium. Television, we’re told, favors strong images — Nixon sweaty and unshaven, Kennedy groomed and glamorous, etc. But, in this instance, the security guard’s analysis, shared by three-quarters of the panel, was entirely at odds with the visual evidence: There was no “impoverished society.” The preceding film had shown a neat subdivision of pleasant red-brick maisonettes set in relatively landscaped grounds. There was grass, and it looked maintained. Granted, it was not as bucolic as my beloved New Hampshire, but, compared to the brutalized concrete bunkers in which the French and the Swedes entomb their seething Muslim populations, it was nothing to riot over. Nonetheless, someone explained that these riotous Mancunian youth were growing up in “deprivation,” and the rioters themselves seemed disposed to agree. Like they say in West Side Story, “I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived.” We’ve so accepted the correlation that we don’t even notice that they’re no longer deprived, but they are significantly more depraved.

In fact, these feral youth live better than 90 percent of the population of the planet. They certainly live better than their fellow youths halfway around the world who go to work each day in factories across China and India to make the cool electronic toys young Westerners expect to enjoy as their birthright. In Britain, as in America and Europe, the young take it for granted that this agreeable division of responsibilities is as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky: Rajiv and Suresh in Bangalore make the state-of-the-art gizmo, Kevin and Ron in Birmingham get to play with it. That’s just the way it is. And, because that’s the way it is, Kevin and Ron and the welfare state that attends their every need assume ’twill always be so.

To justify their looting, the looters appealed to the conventional desperation-of-deprivation narrative: They’d “do anything to get more money.” Anything, that is, except get up in the morning, put on a clean shirt, and go off to do a day’s work. That concept is all but unknown to the homes in which these guys were raised. Indeed, Newsnight immediately followed the riot discussion with a report on immigration to Britain from Eastern Europe. Any tourist in London quickly accepts that, unless he hails a cab or gets mugged, he will never be served by a native Londoner: Polish baristas, Balkan waitresses, but, until the mob shows up to torch his hotel, not a lot of Cockneys. A genial Member of Parliament argued that the real issue underlying the riots is “education and jobs,” but large numbers of employers seem to have concluded that, if you’ve got a job to offer, the best person to give it to is someone with the least exposure to a British education.

The rioters, meanwhile, have a crude understanding of how the system works. The proprietor of a Bang & Olufsen franchise revealed that the looters had expressed mystification as to why he objected to them stealing his goods. After all, he was insured, wasn’t he? So the insurance would pay for his stolen TVs and DVD players, wouldn’t it? The notion that, ultimately, someone has to pay for the insurance seemed to elude them, in the same way it seems to elude our elites that ultimately someone has to pay for Britain’s system of “National Insurance” — or what Canada calls “Social Insurance” and America “Social Security.”

The problem for the Western world is that it has incentivized non-productivity on an industrial scale. For large numbers at the lower end of the spectrum (still quaintly referred to by British reporters as “working class”), the ritual of work — of lifetime employment as a normal feature of life — has been all but bred out by multigenerational dependency. At the upper end of the spectrum, too many of us seem to regard an advanced Western society as the geopolitical version of a lavishly endowed charitable foundation that funds somnolent programming on NPR. I was talking to a trustiefundie Vermont student the other day who informed me her ambition is to “work for a non-profit.”

“What kind of ambition is that?” I said, a little bewildered. But she meant it, and so do most of her friends. Doesn’t care particularly what kind of “non-profit” it is: as long as no profits are involved, she’s eager to run up a six-figure college debt for a piece of the non-action. The entire state of Vermont is becoming a non-profit. And so in a certain sense is an America that’s 15 trillion dollars in the hole, and still cheerfully spending away.

In between the non-profit class and the non-working class, we have diverted too much human capital into a secure and undemanding bureaucracy-for-life: President Obama has further incentivized statism as a career through his education “reforms,” under which anyone who goes into “public service” will have their college loans forgiven after ten years.

Why?

As I point out in my book, in the last six decades the size of America’s state and local government workforce has increased over three times faster than the general population. Yet Obama says it’s still not enough: The bureaucracy needs even more of our manpower. Up north, Canada is currently undergoing a festival of mawkish sub–Princess Di grief-feasting over the death from cancer of the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Jack Layton’s career is most instructive. He came from a family of successful piano manufacturers — in 1887 H. A. Layton was presented with a prize for tuning by Queen Victoria’s daughter. But by the time Jack came along, the family’s private-sector wealth-creation gene had been pretty much tuned out for good: He was a career politician, so is his wife, and his son. They’re giving him a state funeral because being chair of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Toronto Renewable Energy Co-operative is apparently more admirable than being chairman of Layton Bros Pianos Ltd.

Again: Why?

The piano manufacturer pays for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, not the other way round. The private sector pays for the Vermont non-profits and the Manchester rioters and the entire malign alliance of the statism class and the dependency class currently crushing the Western world. America, Britain, Canada, and Europe are operating on a defective business model: Not enough of us do not enough productive work for not enough of our lives. The numbers are a symptom, but the real problem, in the excuses for Manchester, in the obsequies in Ottawa, in the ambitions of Vermont, is the waste of human capital.

Spending OPM

Somalis All Over

By J. Derbyshire

I quipped in a column here a few months ago that the Pacific island nation of Niue may be the world’s first country to be completely emptied out by emigration.

As you were. I have a new candidate for the title: Somalia. Its current population is listed as 9.3 million, but it seems to me that number must be declining fast by emigration. In Britain, the USA, and the other Anglosphere nations, there seem to be Somalis all over.

Here’s one: Mr. Saeed Khaliif. I should actually have said “here’s ten,” as Mr. Khaliif has a wife and eight children. (Though eight is only our best estimate. No one seems to know the exact number.)

The Khaliifs arrived in Britain three years ago as refugees from Somalia. In their three years of residence, neither has had paid employment, nor have they learned to speak English. What they have mainly spent their time doing is gaming Britain’s welfare system. Most recently they have moved into a seven-bedroom house in tony West Hampstead—Emma Thompson lives nearby. The house is worth $3.2 million. Monthly rent—paid for by British taxpayers—is $13,000.

Here is another Somali, Mrs. Hailmo Bokh of Memphis, Tennessee. “Somalian Woman and 11 Kids Call Memphis Home,” reads the headline.

To America’s shame, Mrs. Bokh and her kids have not been given a seven-bedroom house in an upscale neighborhood, only a three-bedroom apartment in a middling neighborhood. Like the Khaliifs, though, the Bokhs will be fed, clothed, and educated courtesy of native taxpayers. “The Catholic Charities of West Tennessee…will help them get on their feet in Memphis,” says the news story, but that’s disingenuous since: (a) CCWT gets at least half its revenues from government grants (see Part VIII here); and (b) as soon as they can—a few months at most—CCWT hands off refugees to the general welfare system.

We learn that Mrs. Bokh’s husband is still in Africa. They hope to get him over here soon. Perhaps he could stop off in London on his way to pick up some tips from Saeed Khaliif about how to play the welfare system. That would have the Bokhs in a nice Beverly Hills mansion in no time.

The Bokhs are at least not as bereft of a work ethic as the Khaliifs. CCWT assures us that the eldest son, age 20, will get a job, one that’s “maybe menial in nature, but he will provide for the rest of the family.” Jolly good luck to him with that. The official unemployment rate in Shelby County (home to Memphis) is 11.1 percent.

It’s the same all over the Anglosphere. Kathy Shaidle laid out the situation of Canadian Somalis here on Taki’s Mag a few days ago. (Kathy only had space to cover homicide, terrorism, drug-dealing, and female genital mutilation. Here’s a rapist to round out the picture.)

Australia? TIME magazine reports that “An estimated 16,000 Somalis have found refuge in Australia since the beginning of their country’s civil war 17 years ago.” Well, they should be pretty well settled in, then. How are they doing? “Unemployment remains a huge problem.” Oh, dear. Why is that?

Dr. Berhan Ahmed, chairman of the Melbourne-based African Think Tank, an organization dedicated to assisting African refugees, says outdated policies are responsible for migrants’ struggling in Australian society. Unemployment remains a huge problem. Ahmed also cites the practice of putting refugees into troubled government-owned housing complexes or high-rise apartment blocks “where often the drug dealers are who want to recruit the kids.”

See, the Australians need to adopt the British practice of giving the Somalis a nice house in a posh neighborhood. Then their kids would all be brain surgeons and software entrepreneurs in no time!

That TIME story, by the way, is mainly concerned with a police sweep last week in Melbourne to round up terrorists. “The police claim they had foiled a suicide plot by Al-Shabaab supporters to storm a Sydney military base and kill as many soldiers as possible.” (Al-Shabaab is a Somali Islamist group.)

Somalis and terrorism go together like Hindus and spelling bees. The chap who tried to blow up the city Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony in Portland, OR, last year is, yes, a Somali refugee, one of over 100,000 the USA has taken in since the early 1990s.

As the resident New Zealand watcher for Taki’s Mag, it would be remiss of me not to check in with the Kiwis on this. How are their Somalis doing? New Zealand has settled about 4,000 Somalis, and they have already made their mark—with, for example, New Zealand’s first-ever plane hijacking.

Now look: Any population has a lot of variation, and I have no doubt there are many law-abiding and industrious Somalis. When you take in 4,000, or 16,000, or 100,000, though, the law of averages is going to kick in—as it kicks in unmistakably in Somalia itself. Human-capital-wise, the Somali averages are simply terrible.

Things are rough in Somalia: chronic civil war, recurrent famine, disease, piracy. Private persons who are distressed by the Somalis’ plight should by no means be discouraged from doing anything they can think of to relieve the distress over there.

The reason nations have governments, though, is to protect and advance the interests of their own citizens. How the interests of Americans, Britons, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders have been advanced by having thousands of Somalis settled among them is not clear to me. 

Perhaps the State Department could send someone around to explain.

Who cares about facts?

Crime and the Great Recession

  During the Great Depression, when unemployment reached 25 percent, crime went down in many cities

by James Q. Wilson

During the seventies and eighties, scarcely any newspaper story about rising crime failed to mention that it was strongly linked to unemployment and poverty. The argument was straightforward: if less legitimate work was available, more illegal work would take place. Certain scholars agreed. Economist Gary Becker of the University of Chicago, a Nobel laureate, developed a powerful theory that crime was rational—that a person will commit crime if the expected utility exceeds that of using his time and other resources in pursuit of alternative activities, such as leisure or legitimate work. Observation may appear to bear this theory out; after all, neighborhoods with elevated crime rates tend to be those where poverty and unemployment are high as well.

But the notion that unemployment causes crime runs into some obvious difficulties. For one thing, the 1960s, a period of rising crime, had essentially the same unemployment rate as the late 1990s and early 2000s, a period when crime fell. Further, during the Great Depression, when unemployment hit 25 percent, the crime rate in many cities went down. (True, national crime statistics weren’t very useful back in the 1930s, but studies of local police records and individual citizens by scholars such as Glen Elder have generally found reduced crime, too.) Among the explanations offered for this puzzle is that unemployment and poverty were so common during the Great Depression that families became closer, devoted themselves to mutual support, and kept young people, who might be more inclined to criminal behavior, under constant adult supervision. These days, because many families are weaker and children are more independent, we would not see the same effect, so certain criminologists continue to suggest that a 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate should produce as much as a 2 percent increase in property-crime rates.

Yet when the recent recession struck, that didn’t happen. As the national unemployment rate doubled from around 5 percent to nearly 10 percent, the property-crime rate, far from spiking, fell significantly. For 2009, the FBI reported an 8 percent drop in the nationwide robbery rate and a 17 percent reduction in the auto-theft rate from the previous year. Big-city reports show the same thing. Between 2008 and 2010, New York City experienced a 4 percent decline in the robbery rate and a 10 percent fall in the burglary rate. Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles witnessed similar declines. The FBI’s latest numbers, for 2010, show that the national crime rate fell again.

Some scholars argue that the unemployment rate is too crude a measure of economic frustration to prove the connection between unemployment and crime, since it estimates only the percentage of the labor force that is looking for work and hasn’t found it. But other economic indicators tell much the same story. The labor-force participation rate lets us determine the percentage of the labor force that is neither working nor looking for work—individuals who are, in effect, detached from the labor force. These people should be especially vulnerable to criminal inclinations, if the bad-economy-leads-to-crime theory holds. In 2008, though, even as crime was falling, only about half of men aged 16 to 24 (who are disproportionately likely to commit crimes) were in the labor force, down from over two-thirds in 1988, and a comparable decline took place among African-American men (who are also disproportionately likely to commit crimes).

The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index offers another way to assess the link between the economy and crime. This measure rests on thousands of interviews asking people how their financial situations have changed over the last year, how they think the economy will do during the next year, and about their plans for buying durable goods. The index measures the way people feel, rather than the objective conditions they face. It has proved a very good predictor of stock-market behavior and, for a while, of the crime rate, which tended to climb when people lost confidence. 

When the index collapsed in 2009 and 2010, the stock market predictably went down with it—but this time, the crime rate went down, too.

So we have little reason to ascribe the recent crime decline to jobs, the labor market, or consumer sentiment. The question remains: Why is crime falling?

One obvious answer is that many more people are in prison than in the past. Experts differ on the size of the effect, but I think that William Spelman and Steven Levitt have it right in believing that greater incarceration can explain one-quarter or more of the crime decline. Yes, many thoughtful observers think that we put too many offenders in prison for too long. For some criminals, such as low-level drug dealers and former inmates returned to prison for parole violations, that may be so. But it’s true nevertheless that when prisoners are kept off the street, they can attack only one another, not you or your family.

Imprisonment’s crime-reduction effect helps explain why the burglary, car-theft, and robbery rates are lower in the United States than in England. The difference results not from willingness to send convicted offenders to prison, which is about the same in both countries, but in how long America keeps them behind bars. For the same offense, you will spend more time in prison here than in England. Still, prison can’t be the sole reason for the recent crime drop in this country: Canada has seen roughly the same decline in crime, but its imprisonment rate has been relatively flat for at least two decades.

Another possible reason for reduced crime is that potential victims may have become better at protecting themselves by equipping their homes with burglar alarms, installing extra locks on their cars, and moving into safer buildings or even safer neighborhoods. We have only the faintest idea, however, about how common these trends are or what effects on crime they may have.

Policing, as City Journal readers know, has become more disciplined over the last two decades; these days, it tends to be driven by the desire to reduce crime, rather than simply to maximize arrests, and that shift has reduced crime rates. One of the most important innovations is what has been called hot-spot policing. The great majority of crimes tend to occur in the same places. Put active police resources in those areas instead of telling officers to drive around waiting for 911 calls, and you can bring down crime. The hot-spot idea helped make the New York Police Department’s Compstat program—its planning and accountability system, which, using computerized maps, pinpoints where crime is taking place and enables police chiefs to hold precinct captains responsible for targeting those areas—so effective.

Researchers continue to test and refine hot-spot policing. For instance, criminologists Lawrence Sherman and David Weisburd, after analyzing data from more than 7,000 police arrivals at various locations in Minneapolis, showed that for every minute that an officer spent at a spot, the length of time without a crime there after the officer departed went up—until the officer had been gone for over 15 minutes. After that gap, the crime rate went up. The police can make the best use of their time by staying at a hot spot for a while, moving on, and returning after 15 minutes have elapsed.

Some cities now use a computer-based system for mapping traffic accidents and crime rates. They have noticed that the two measures tend to coincide: where there are more accidents, there is more crime. In Shawnee, Kansas, the police spent a lot more time in about 4 percent of the city’s area, where one-third of the crime occurred: burglaries then fell in that area by 60 percent (even though in the city as a whole, they fell by only 8 percent), and traffic accidents went down by 17 percent.

There may also be a medical reason for the crime decline. For decades, doctors have known that children with lots of lead in their blood are much more likely to be aggressive, violent, and delinquent. In 1974, the Environmental Protection Agency required oil companies to stop putting lead in gasoline. At the same time, lead in paint was banned for any new home (though old buildings still have lead paint, which children can absorb). Tests have shown that the amount of lead in Americans’ blood fell by four-fifths between 1975 and 1991. A 2000 study by economist Rick Nevin suggested that the reduction in gasoline lead produced more than half of the decline in violent crime during the nineties. A later study by Nevin claimed that this also happened in other nations. Another economist, Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, has made the same argument. (One oddity about this fascinating claim has yet to be explained: why the reduction related to lead-free blood included only violent crime, not property offenses.)

Yet one more shift that has probably helped bring down crime is the decrease in heavy cocaine use in many states. Measuring cocaine use is no easy matter; one has to infer it from interviews or from hospital-admission rates. Between 1992 and 2009, the number of admissions for cocaine or crack use fell by nearly two-thirds. In 1999, 9.8 percent of 12th-grade students said that they had tried cocaine; by 2010, that figure had fallen to 5.5 percent.

What we really need to know, though, is not how many people tried coke but how many are heavy users. Casual users who regard coke as a party drug are probably less likely to commit serious crimes than heavier users who may resort to theft and violence to feed their craving. But a study by Jonathan Caulkins at Carnegie Mellon University found that the total demand for cocaine dropped between 1988 and 2010, with a sharp decline among both light and heavy users. This fall in demand may help explain why cocaine has become cheaper, despite intense law enforcement efforts aimed at disrupting its distribution. Illegal markets, like legal ones, cut prices when demand falls.

Blacks still constitute the core of America’s crime problem (see “Is the Criminal-Justice System Racist?,” Spring 2008). But the African-American crime rate, too, has been falling, probably because of the same noneconomic factors behind falling crime in general: imprisonment, policing, environmental changes, and less cocaine abuse.

Knowing the exact crime rate of any ethnic or racial group isn’t easy, since most crimes don’t result in arrest or conviction, and those that do may be an unrepresentative fraction of all crimes. Nevertheless, we do know the racial characteristics of those who have been arrested for crimes, and they show that the number of blacks arrested has been falling. Barry Latzer of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice has demonstrated that between 1980 and 2005, arrests of blacks for homicide and other violent crimes fell by about half nationwide.

It’s also suggestive that in the five New York City precincts where the population is at least 80 percent black, the murder rate fell by 78 percent between 1990 and 2000. In the black neighborhoods of Chicago, which remains a higher-crime city than New York, burglary fell by 52 percent, robbery by 62 percent, and homicide by 33 percent between 1991 and 2003. A skeptic might retort that all these seeming gains were merely the result of police officers’ giving up and no longer recording crimes in black neighborhoods. But the skeptic would have a hard time explaining why opinion surveys in Chicago show that, among blacks, fear of crime was cut in half during the same period.

One can cite further evidence of a turnaround in black crime. Researchers at the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention found that in 1980, arrests of young blacks outnumbered arrests of whites by more than six to one. By 2002, the gap had been closed to just under four to one.

Drug use among blacks has changed even more dramatically than it has among the population as a whole. As Latzer points out—and his argument is confirmed by a study by Bruce D. Johnson, Andrew Golub, and Eloise Dunlap—among 13,000 people arrested in Manhattan between 1987 and 1997, a disproportionate number of whom were black, those born between 1948 and 1969 were heavily involved with crack cocaine, but those born after 1969 used little crack and instead smoked marijuana. The reason was simple: the younger African-Americans had known many people who used crack and other hard drugs and wound up in prisons, hospitals, and morgues. The risks of using marijuana were far less serious. This shift in drug use, if the New York City experience is borne out in other locations, can help explain the fall in black inner-city crime rates after the early 1990s.

John Donohue and Steven Levitt have advanced an additional explanation for the reduction in black crime: the legalization of abortion, which resulted in black children’s never being born into circumstances that would have made them likelier to become criminals. I have ignored that explanation because it remains a strongly contested finding, challenged by two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and by various academics.

At the deepest level, many of these shifts, taken together, suggest that crime in the United States is falling—even through the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression—because of a big improvement in the culture. The cultural argument may strike some as vague, but writers have relied on it in the past to explain both the Great Depression’s fall in crime and the sixties’ crime explosion. In the first period, on this view, people took self-control seriously; in the second, self-expression—at society’s cost—became more prevalent. It is a plausible case.

Culture creates a problem for social scientists like me, however. We do not know how to study it in a way that produces hard numbers and tested theories. Culture is the realm of novelists and biographers, not of data-driven social scientists. But we can take some comfort, perhaps, in reflecting that identifying the likely causes of the crime decline is even more important than precisely measuring it.

No civil act left behind

Boot of Big Government Comes Down on Gibson Guitar

Pete Townshend goes to work for the US Government.

by D. Blount

Who would have thought that when fascism came to America, it would be implemented by harmless-sounding agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service? In its latest crime against liberty, this malignant tentacle of Big Government wraps itself around the neck of an American icon:

Federal agents swooped in on Gibson Guitar Wednesday, raiding factories and offices in Memphis and Nashville, seizing several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. The Feds are keeping mum, but in a statement yesterday Gibson’s chairman and CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, defended his company’s manufacturing policies, accusing the Justice Department of bullying the company. “The wood the government seized Wednesday is from a Forest Stewardship Council certified supplier,” he said, suggesting the Feds are using the aggressive enforcement of overly broad laws to make the company cry uncle.

It isn’t the first time that agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service have come knocking at the storied maker of such iconic instruments as the Les Paul electric guitar, the J-160E acoustic-electric John Lennon played, and essential jazz-boxes such as Charlie Christian’s ES-150. In 2009 the Feds seized several guitars and pallets of wood from a Gibson factory, and both sides have been wrangling over the goods in a case with the delightful name “United States of America v. Ebony Wood in Various Forms.”

The question in the first raid seemed to be whether Gibson had been buying illegally harvested hardwoods from protected forests, such as the Madagascar ebony that makes for such lovely fretboards. … [W]ith the new raid, the government seems to be questioning whether some wood sourced from India met every regulatory jot and tittle.

Makers of guitars aren’t the only musical victims of our rogue rulers running amok:

Consider the recent experience of Pascal Vieillard, whose Atlanta-area company, A-440 Pianos, imported several antique Bösendorfers. Mr. Vieillard asked officials at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species how to fill out the correct paperwork — which simply encouraged them to alert U.S. Customs to give his shipment added scrutiny.

There was never any question that the instruments were old enough to have grandfathered ivory keys. But Mr. Vieillard didn’t have his paperwork straight when two-dozen federal agents came calling.

Facing criminal charges that might have put him in prison for years, Mr. Vieillard pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of violating the Lacey Act, and was handed a $17,500 fine and three years probation.

Just as non-politically correct food tastes better and non-politically correct cars drive better, musical instruments made out of non-politically correct materials sound better. Once again we see that liberalism being a totalitarian ideology, there is no corner of human existence that it won’t repress and diminish.

The ‘wrong side of history’

It is going to be Syria’s turn

By Melkulangara BHADRAKUMAR

The visuals beamed from Tripoli last night had an eerie familiarity. Cars blowing horns, Kalashnikovs firing into the air, youth and children aimlessly wandering on streets littered with heaps of debris, western cameramen eagerly lapping up the precious words in broken English by any local fellow holding forth on the stirring ideals of the 1789 French Revolution and the Magna Carta – the images are all-too-familiar. Somewhere else, some other time, one had seen these images, but couldn’t exactly place them. Could they have stealthily crept up from the attic of the mind, a slice of memory that was best forgotten or purged from the consciousness? Now, the morning after, it is clear the television channels were only replaying the scenes from Baghdad in 2003.

The narrative from Tripoli bears uncanny resemblance to Baghdad: A brutal, megalomaniacal dictator, who seemed omnipotent, gets overthrown by the people, and a wave of euphoria sweeps over an exhausted land. As the celebrations erupt, the western benefactor-cum-liberator walks on to the centre stage, duly taking stance on the ‘right side of history’. In the 19th century, he would have said in Kenya or India that he was carrying the ‘white man’s burden’. Now he claims he is bringing western enlightenment to people who are demanding it.

But it is a matter of time before the narrative withers away and chilling realities take hold. In Iraq, we have seen how a nation that was tiptoeing toward the OECD standards of development hardly 20 years ago has been reduced to beggary and anarchy.

A coup d’etat

Libya’s democratic opposition is a myth conjured up by the western countries and the ‘pro-West’ Arab governments. There are deep splits within the opposition and there are factions ranging from genuine liberals to Islamists to plain lumpen elements. Then there are the tribal divisions. The infighting among the various factions seems a recipe for another round of civil war, as the factions that have neither legitimacy nor authority jostle for power. The acuteness of the rifts burst into the open last month when the opposition’s commander-in-chief Abdul Fattah Younes was lured back from the front on a false pretext, taken away from his bodyguards and brutally tortured and killed by the rebels belonging to an Islamist faction.

The western media have begun openly discussing the role played by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO], which time and again intervened to tilt the military balance against Muammar Gaddafi. The revolution looks more like a coup d’etat instigated by Britain and France. Even then, it took the western alliance an awfully long time stretching over 6 months to get its ‘boys’ into Tripoli. Gaddafi is still keeping them guessing as to the manner of his grand exit. The stunning truth is that Gaddafi should decide when to stop fighting despite having the men and the material to prolong his defiance for a while.

His course of action in the coming hours or days would have great bearing on what follows. If there is going to be heavy bloodshed, revenge acts by the victors over the vanquished will likely follow. In political terms, Gaddafi’s imminent fall doesn’t mean the opposition has won. Divested of the NATO’s tactical support, the opposition would have lost. The big question, therefore, is going to be about NATO’s future role in Libya. Alongside appears the question of whether the NATO would now turn attention to Syria.

NATO embraces Arab world

With the mission of ‘regime change’ successfully accomplished, NATO ought to leave the Libyan theatre. The United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 has been overtaken. But the NATO’s withdrawal is too much to expect. Libya’s oil has been the leitmotif of the western intervention. Gaddafi’s recent proclivity to turn to Russia, China, Brazil and India to bring them into Libya’s oil sector obviously threatened the western interests. The pro-democracy rhetoric emanating out of London and Paris had all along had a hollow ring. The NATO’s intervention in Libya has stretched the limits of international law and the United Nations Charter. The alliance finds itself in the ludicrous position of seeking the legitimacy for its continued presence in Libya from the shady elements who masquerade as the ‘democratic’ forces, whose popular support is thin on the ground, on the pretext that there is still a job to be done.

There is indeed going to be a job to be done. It could well turn out to be Iraq and Afghanistan all over again. Resistance to foreign occupation is bound to appear sooner rather than later. Libyan tribes are steeped in the folklore of resistance. On the other hand, a great paradox of geopolitics is that anarchical conditions provide just the requisite pretext for occupation. The story of Libya is not going to be any different from that of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The West’s Libyan intervention introduces new templates in the geopolitics of the Middle East and Africa. It has brought NATO to the eastern Mediterranean and Africa. This is of a piece with the United States’ post-cold war strategy to mould the trans-Atlantic alliance into a global organization with the capability to act in global ‘hotspots’ with or without UN mandate. A pivotal role for the alliance in the ‘new Middle East’ seems all but certain. There is an ominous ring to the recap of the Libyan chapter by British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg: “I want to make it absolutely clear: the UK will not turn its back on the millions of citizens of Arab states looking to open up their societies, looking for a better life.”

Was he talking about Syria? Surely, Clegg couldn’t have been suggesting that Britain is raring to “open up” the societies in Saudi Arabia or Bahrain or Yemen and make the tribals living out there into modern-day citizens. With the Libyan operation drawing to a close, all eyes are turning on Syria. The Wall Street Journal speculates: “Libyans’ success affects the potentially more important rebellion in Syria… Already there are signs Libya is giving inspiration to the rebels trying to oust [Bashar al] Assad.” But then it also adds a caveat without which the discussion will remain incomplete: “There are crucial differences between Libya and Syria, and the Syrian template will be hard to replicate in Damascus.”

High stakes in Syria

However, the western mind is famous for its innovative capacity. Without doubt, Syria occupies the heart of the Middle East and conflict breaking out there will most certainly engulf the entire region – including Israel and, possibly, Iran and Turkey. On the other hand, the calibrated western moves in the recent weeks, racheting up sanctions, are strikingly similar to those taken in the prelude to the Libyan intervention. Sustained efforts are afoot to bring about a unified Syrian opposition. Last weekend’s conclave held in Turkey – third in a row – finally elected a ‘council’ ostensibly representing the voice of the Syrian people. Evidently, a focal point is being carefully crafted, which could be co-opted at a convenient point as the West’s democratic interlocutor representing Syria. The fig-leaf of Arab League support is also available. The ‘pro-West’ Arab regimes, which are autocratic themselves, have reappeared in the forefront of the western campaign as the flag carriers of representative rule in Syria.

Conceivably, the main hurdle would be to get a United Nations mandate for the western intervention in Syria. But the Libyan experience shows that an alibi can always be found. Turkey can be trusted to play a role here. When Turkey gets involved, Charter 5 of the NATO can be invoked. The heart of the matter is that regime change in Syria is imperative for the advancement of the US strategy in the Middle East and Washington is unlikely to brook any BRICS obstacles on its path, since the stakes are very high. The stakes include the expulsion of the Hamas leadership from Damascus; the break-up of the Syrian-Iranian axis; isolation of Iran and a push for regime change there; weakening and degradation of Hezbollah in Lebanon; and regaining Israel’s strategic dominance over the Arab world. And, of course, at the root of it all lies the control of oil, which George Kennan had said 60 years ago are “our resources” – and not “theirs” [Arabs’] – which are crucial for the continued prosperity of the western world. Mock at him if anyone claims that cash-strapped western governments and their war-weary citizens have no more appetite for wars.

Finally, all this means in geopolitical terms the rolling back of Russian and Chinese influence in the Middle East. A subtle western propaganda has begun pitting Russia and China as obstacles to regime change in the region – standing on the ‘wrong side of history’. It is a clever ideological twist to the hugely successful Cold-War era blueprint that pitted communism against Islam. The body language in the western capitals underscores that there is no conceivable way the US would let go the opportunity in Syria.