The Wrong Way to Legalize Drugs

In discussions about drug legalization, skeptics worry about addiction. I think that’s a legitimate concern, but the focus is too narrow.

Yes, legalization may lead a few more people to get hooked on drugs, but we also need to pay attention to the politicians who are so addicted to tax revenue that they are enabling black markets to continue.

In other words, voters are saying legalize and politicians are engaged in a grab for money.

In an article for the Wall Street Journal, Zusha Elinson  and Jimmy Vielkind report on how New York and California have botched legalization.

The illegal marijuana trade is booming in California, seven years after the state legalized its possession, cultivation and distribution. Unlicensed sales totaled $8.1 billion last year, dwarfing legal sales of $5.4 billion… New York legalized cannabis possession in small amounts in 2021. Two years later, just five shops sell marijuana legally in New York City, while 1,400 bodegas, smoke shops and other outlets without licenses do, according to an estimate by the city sheriff. …The persistence of the illegal pot business in the face of state legalization reflects a variety of forces. …high taxes on legal sales fan the embers of illicit ones. “When you start seeing tax rates that are approaching 30 to 40 percent on products, it’s really going to be difficult to compete against the remnants of an illegal market,” said Mason Tvert… In California, the historic cannabis basket of America, many growers find it easier and more profitable to supply illegal shops or to ship their product elsewhere than to comply with licensing requirements. …Curaleaf Holdings Inc., a large, publicly held company, is shifting its focus to states where taxes and regulations are less onerous. …legal shops thought they could succeed… But they have to add a 10% city cannabis tax, a 15% state excise tax and a 9.5% sales tax not exclusive to cannabis.

California has been the poster child for bad policy on marijuana taxation, but the Empire State is trying to catch up.

J.D. Tuccille takes a closer look at New York’s mistakes in an article for Reason.

Empire State officialdom still hasn’t learned its lessons, as evidenced by the heavy regulatory hand stifling sort-of-legalized marijuana…the legislation intended to bring the booming underground market into the open was hobbled from day one. “New York’s law…is surprisingly permissive in some respects but includes high taxes and other provisions that compromise the interests of consumers,” Reason‘s Jacob Sullum warned… Last year, as taxes and regulations added up, and licenses were issued based on social justice grounds, it became increasingly obvious that the state was creating a “legal” market “so hobbled that it will offer uncompetitive prices to consumers and daunting barriers to vendors,” as I noted… Unsurprisingly, the “unlicensed and illicit sale of cannabis” has been barely challenged by tax- and rule-hampered legal-ish competitors. …New York officials might have learned from their own cigarette policies. Those so burdened tobacco with taxes and rules that they managed to (this sounds familiar!) hand the majority of the market for a legal product to illegal vendors.

I’ll add one final point, which is that the greed for tax revenue is not just a fiscal issue.

By propping up the black market, politicians are enabling greater levels of violent crime.

P.S. Portugal is a role model on drug policy.

P.P.S. Keep in mind that the War on Drugs has led to other bad policies such as anti-money laundering laws and civil asset forfeiture laws.

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Government Inefficiency, Captured in a Headline

Way back in 2009, in the early days of writing this column, I shared an image that aptly summarizes the bad things that happen when politicians interfere with economic liberty.

The simple message is that more government is almost always the wrong answer.

• Wrong on taxes
• Wrong on money
• Wrong on trade
• Wrong on red tape
• Wrong on intervention
• Wrong on health

Today, we’re going to look at an example of how government spending is the wrong answer.

Here are some excerpts from a story in the Washington Post, but the headline tells you everything you need to know.

The offer to military veterans left unemployed by the coronavirus pandemic was tantalizing: A year of online courses courtesy of the federal government. Graduates would be set up for good jobs in high-demand fields… Schedules were disorganized and courses did not follow a set syllabus. School-provided laptops couldn’t run critical software. And during long stretches of scheduled class time, students were left without instruction… The disarray…is the most painful example of broader problems with the $386 million Veteran Rapid Retraining Assistance Program, or VRRAP. …nearly 90 schools have had their approvals yanked, according to VA officials, including several that were actively serving about 100 veterans. …only about 6,800 veterans had enrolled in the program, far fewer than the 17,250 Congress created it to serve, the agency said; just 397 had landed new jobs.

Some of you may be tempted to conclude that the program was a success since it did result in 397 jobs.

Others will conclude it was a failure since the budget was $386 million, implying each job cost taxpayers nearly $1 million.

I sympathize with the second conclusion, of course, but here are two questions that need to be answered.

1. How many of those 6,800 veterans would have landed new jobs if they didn’t participate in the program?
2. How much economic activity would have been generated if the $386 million was left in the private sector?

Suffice to say, the answers to those questions would show more jobs and more prosperity if the program was never created.

Incidentally, the story, authored by Lisa Rein and Yeganeh Torbati, includes this depressing bit of information.

The troubles with VRRAP were achingly predictable: A similar program rolled out in 2012 — the Veterans Retraining Assistance Program, or VRAP — also failed to attract students and was widely regarded as a flop.

In other words, it was already known that this specific type of program would be a flop.

Heck, there are decades of evidence that all types of government job-training programs are a failure.

So why did Congress approve this scheme?

Unfortunately, the story only tells us that this program was part of Biden’s failed $1.9 trillion stimulus boondoggle, but it does not tell us which politicians on Capitol Hill pushed the plan.

I’m sure we would find those politicians got a lot of campaign contributions from that the interest groups that financially benefited the boondoggle.

All part of Washington’s corrupt version of recycling.

P.S. Since today’s column highlighted how a headline can have a powerful message, here are some previous headlines that caught my attention.

• Least surprising headline
• Disappointingly inaccurate headline
• Insufficiently accurate headline
• Grossly dishonest headline
• Most predictable headline
• Multiple headlines that say the same thing

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The Volcanic Version of Government-Subsidized Moral Hazard

I’ve written several times about federally subsidized flood insurance, mostly to complain that it is terrible policy.

People are encouraged to build homes in low-lying areas, which then leads to needless destruction during floods.

The monetary cost is significant, but I get even more upset that responsible people are forced to finance other people’s irresponsible choices.

It’s such a bad policy that even Bernie Sanders favors reform.

And it’s such a bad policy that politicians in Hawaii decided it is worth copying. But they chose to subsidize building homes that are vulnerable to volcanic eruptions.

I’m not joking. Joe Kent of the Grassroot Institute wrote about this foolish system.

…the state originally encouraged the building of homes in this dangerous area by offering lava insurance where no private company would. …In response to the absence of private insurance, the state Legislature created the Hawaii Property Insurance Association (HPIA), whose job is to provide coverage for homes in areas that private insurance won’t touch. The law requires private insurance companies to pool their money to subsidize the expense of offering insurance in high-risk lava zones. …This resulted in a boom in the housing market below the active Kilauea volcano. …The moral hazard of this new insurance program gave a false sense of security to homebuilders in Leilani Estates.

And where, pray tell, can you find Leilani Estates?

In the most dangerous path of the most active volcano in Hawaii.

Given my libertarian sympathies, I think people should have the right to build in dangerous areas.

But I also think that they should bear the risks. Including what happened a few years ago.

…that hazard is very real for families watching their homes be engulfed by magma. What was seen as a “market failure” was really a warning sign to those building in Lava Zones 1 and 2. If the state had stayed out of the situation, probably fewer families would have built in the area, and today there might be less housing destruction.

The obvious moral of the story is that we should not have government-subsidized moral hazard.

That’s not a proper role of the federal government, and it’s not a proper role of state governments.

P.S. The same is true for subsidized terrorism insurance.

P.P.S. For more on government-created moral hazard, click here.

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Summarizing the Mentality of Government in One Sentence

Back in 2014, I shared a meme with a motto that was perfect for Washington, DC.

Today, let’s do something similar. But instead of a motto specifically for America’s unsavory capital, how about one sentence that summarizes the mentality of all governments.

I used a fill-in-the-blank format because there are so many possible answers.

After all, people in government value taxes more than growth, jobs, competitiveness, and all sorts of other factors.

And one of those other factors is public health, as we can see in this report by Rachel Pannett and Julia Mio Inuma in the Washington Post.

Japanese officials, worried about shifting demographics and a sharp decline in sin tax revenue, have come up with an unusual fix for their fiscal woes: encouraging young people to drink more. …Liquor tax revenue in the fiscal 2020 year was about $8.4 billion, a plunge of more than $813 million from the previous year, according to government data. That was the largest decline in three decades — and a cause for alarm for a government facing broad fiscal challenges. …The unorthodox push by bureaucrats to “revitalize the liquor industry” has faced a backlash…on Twitter. …“As long as they can collect taxes, I guess people’s health doesn’t matter.”

When I first saw this story, I thought it was a good fit for one of my columns highlighting “Great Moments in Foreign Government.”

But the final sentence of the excerpt caught my eye and motivated me to take a different approach.

Though the story gets added to my collection of “Strange Moments in Japanese Governance”:

• Licensing regulations for coffee enemas.
• Gimmicky tax and labor policies.
• Amazingly incompetent subsidies.

Yet another reminder that you’ve asked a very strange question if more government is the answer.

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Least Surprising Headline of All Time

Government spending, almost by definition, is wasteful. But it’s worth distinguishing between two types of waste.

1. Money that is spent properly but inefficiently.
2. Money that is diverted by crooks and scammers.

Today, we’re going to focus on the second type of waste.

I’ve previously written about widespread fraud affecting programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, disability, and the earned income credit.

Now let’s augment our previous analysis exposing how coronavirus-related spending has been a windfall for criminals.

We’ll start with a report from the Washington Post , authored by Tony Romm and Yeganeh Torbati. It contains a headline that begins with a quote that could apply to just about anything the government does.

Testifying at a little-noticed congressional hearing this spring, a top watchdog for the Labor Department estimated there could have been “at least” $163 billion in unemployment-related “overpayments,” a projection that includes wrongly paid sums as well as “significant” benefits obtained by malicious actors. …In many cases, the criminals stole the unemployment funds using real Americans’ personal information. They bombarded states with applications filed in the names of actual workers or people in prison — sometimes to such a degree that, in the case of Maryland, fraudulent claims came to outnumber real requests for help..

You won’t be surprised to learn that some bureaucrats did not want to stop the fraud.

Some of the malicious actors potentially even avoided detection, at least for a time, after the Labor Department refused to supply information needed to assist federal fraud investigations.

And you also won’t be surprised to learn that some states allowed far more fraud than other states.

In California, state officials acknowledged in October 2021 that they may have paid out more than $20 billion in undeserved unemployment payments to criminals. That included at least $810 million that had been wrongly paid to applicants whose information matched the names of people in prison.

The Wall Street Journal also opined on the topic of wasteful covid-related spending, but its editorial focused on the $1.9 trillion boondoggle that was pushed through by Biden.

…what happened to the $1.9 trillion for Covid Democrats passed last March? Most went to transfer payments, including child tax credits, enhanced unemployment benefits and stimulus checks. About a quarter subsidized state and local budgets and schools. Democrats appropriated a mere $80 billion for public health, only $16 billion of which was available for vaccines and therapies. …Democrats skimped on vaccine and therapies in order to ladle benefits to their political constituencies.

The bottom line is that Biden used the pandemic as an excuse to squander $1.9 trillion, even though at most only $80 billion of the money was for anything that was even vaguely related to vaccines and treatments.

From an economic perspective, that legislation was a spectacular failure.

I wonder whether we’ll ever learn how much of the remaining $1.82 trillion was wasted?

I’m guessing the answer is $1.82 trillion, but we won’t know how much was lost to run-of-the-mill waste and how much was lost to outright fraud.

P.S. Don’t forget that all government spending, even the small fraction that is spent wisely and efficiently, imposes economic costs. For more information, click here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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First-Hand Exposure to TSA Inefficiency and Incompetence

I’ve posted several videos about the Keystone Cops of airport security (see here, here, here, here, and here) and here’s another one to enjoy.

Why am I motivated to mock the Transportation Security Administration today?

For the simple reason that I went to the Atlanta Airport yesterday after watching my #1 Georgia Bulldogs win another game.

Yet when I exited the highway to the airport, traffic ground to a halt. It took me about 30 minutes to get to parking (a trip that normally takes about three minutes).

And then, when I got in the airport, the “Clear” line for accelerated screening was shut down, which required me to instead get in the slower “Pre-check” line (but still faster than the regular line).

But that line was much longer than normal, and moved much slower than normal, because the bureaucrats required us to take off shoes and remove laptops (things that normally are not required for flyers that have received Pre-check clearance).

So why did I have to endure and extra hour-plus of wasted time, risking my ability to make my flight?

Because some idiot earlier in the day accidentally packed a gun in his carry-on bag and then apparently panicked and grabbed the gun when it was (surprisingly enough) detected by screeners, causing an accidental discharge.

I don’t blame the TSA for engaging in a brief period of heightened security following this incident.

But it was utterly pointless to have a huge police presence on the airport roads hours later (thus slowing traffic to a crawl), along with shutting down the Clear line and eliminating the (comparative) efficiency of the Pre-check line (making it a slow slog).

This is empty “security theater,” particularly since there have already been nearly 5,000 cases this year of passengers forgetting about guns in carry-on bags. So it’s not as if finding a gun is unusual.

What is unusual, of course, is the accidental discharge – and the subsequent TSA over-reaction.

Which gives me an excuse to write about the TSA and the need for reform for only the third time since 2015 (I had one column about the TSA in 2019 and another one in 2016).

We’ll start with a just-published column by J.D. Tuccille for Reason.

…the TSA has proven itself skilled at harassing travelers and freaking out over pocketknives and water bottles while steadfastly failing at its assigned task of making air transportation any safer. The TSA, in short, is an awful example of government in action. …It’s not clear why anybody saw a need for the TSA, since it’s unlikely that a federal agency would have been any more successful than private contractors at predicting terrorists’ unprecedented use of aircraft as kamikaze weapons. It’s especially unlikely that the federal agency we actually got would have successfully diverted itself from confiscating play-doh to thwarting homicidal fanatics. …What the TSA is good at is high-visibility groping, scanning, and confiscating. Making people drop their pants, take off their shoes, and surrender their shampoo annoys people in a way that says “we’re doing something” without actually accomplishing anything.

Wow, I would suspect he also traveled through Atlanta yesterday, but his article was published Friday.

Next, we have an overall indictment of the TSA. Here are some excerpts from a column by Kevin Williamson for National Review.

The catalogue of the TSA’s sins reads like the diary of the Marquis de Sade, from the sexual abuse of children to the production of child pornography, beside which such workaday offenses as looting travelers’ property and smuggling drugs seem quaint. This is not a few bad apples — this is a crime syndicate pretending to be a federal agency. …The TSA’s record for providing actual security is practically nonexistent; security testers sneaking mock explosives and weapons past TSA screeners achieved an astonishing success rate of 95 percent. …Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport processes more passengers than does New York’s JFK, and its security process, including something like an El Al pre-board interview in which a well-trained security officer gives passengers the hairy Dutch eyeball, generally takes only a few minutes, whereas traversing JFK can take hours. …We need choice, competition, and accountability. And we also need to fire a few tens of thousands of people, starting with TSA administrator.

So what’s the solution?

David Inserra of the Heritage Foundation explains for FEE that the private sector is a better option.

A private model would allow for strengthened accountability, a decrease in operation costs, enhanced management of labor, and better focus on security threats and problems. …The TSA model is quite uncommon worldwide. The more common models utilize the government as a security regulator while a contractor or the airport itself provides security. This automatically pushes accountability and competition higher than the current U.S. model. …By looking to examples in Canada and Europe, we can observe how governments spend drastically less yet still manage to meet international aviation standards. These countries show that privately-hired scanning teams can manage personnel far more efficiently than the government and still make a profit. They also cost significantly less—Canada spent about 40 percent less per capita on aviation security than the U.S. in 2014, for example.

Amen.

Here’s the graphic accompanying the article. As you can see, other nations wisely utilize private contractors.

If Americans got better security, perhaps higher costs and longer lines would make it worthwhile.

But that’s not the case, as I’ve previously pointed out (see here, here, and here).

And if that’s not enough, here’s what NBC reported about bomb-sniffing dogs.

Bomb-sniffing K-9 teams at 10 major U.S. airports have failed tests that check how accurately they can detect explosives… New records obtained by KXAS through a Freedom of Information Act request call into question whether those dog teams are training enough to stay sharp and keep bombs out of airports and off planes… K-9 teams funded by the Transportation Security Administration have failed annual certification tests at 10 large airports 52 times between Jan. 1, 2013, and June 15, 2015, the most recent detailed numbers TSA provided. Some teams failed to find explosives, while others had too many false alarms that could cause unnecessary airport evacuations.

Humans are probably even worse, as Judd Gregg explained in a piece for the Hill.

The TSA failed to detect ninety percent of the bombs and weapons that were passed through its passenger screening system in its last test. Were the test also applied to baggage placed on planes, it is likely that their failure rate in detecting bombs specifically would be even higher. Thus, an agency that costs the taxpayer $7.5 billion a year, has 40,000-plus screeners and 15,000-plus administrators does not seem to be doing a very good job of protecting passengers on airplanes.

I have other pieces I can cite, but I’ll save them for another day.

Let’s close with an outrageous example of TSA foolishness, as captured by this tweet from Amy Alkon.

P.S. Here are other examples of bone-headed TSA actions.

• Confiscating a plastic hammer from a mentally retarded man.
• Detaining a woman for carrying breast milk.
• Hassling a woman for the unexplained red flag of having sequentially numbered checks.
• Demanding that a handicapped 4-year old boy walk through a metal detector without his leg braces.
• Putting an 8-year old cub scout on the no-fly list.
• Stopping a teenager from flying because her purse had an image of a gun.
• Seizing raygun belt buckles and Kitty Cat keychains.
• Taking a “fart gun” from a child.

P.P.S. I am willing to defend the TSA when the bureaucrats make sensible choices based on cost-benefit analysis.

P.P.P.S. And I am always willing to share some jokes at TSA’s expense (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

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Great Moments in Foreign Government

Time to update our series on “great moments in foreign government.”

We’ll start with Jersey. I wrote a few years ago about the (relatively) good tax laws in that British dependent territory off the coast of France.

But there are two ways those laws could be improved. First, officials could abolish its income tax because a zero income tax is better than a flat tax.

And with tax policy heading in the wrong direction in the United Kingdom, that would further enhance Jersey’s competitive advantage.

Sadly, the island’s lawmakers haven’t opted for that choice.

But they did approve a second reform. As reported by the New York Times, Jersey has joined the 20th century.

Lawmakers on the island of Jersey have approved scrapping a decades-old law that prevented married women from talking to the tax authorities without the permission of their husband or filing taxes under their own names… a popular tax haven, …its financial laws have not always kept up with the times: Under its current tax law, introduced in 1928, only the husband in a heterosexual marriage can pay taxes, with his wife’s earnings considered part of his income. …Things became a bit more modern in 2013, when a box appeared on income tax forms that husbands could tick rather than giving written permission. When civil unions and same-sex marriages became legal on the island, the law allowed the older partner to take the role of “husband” and the younger “wife.” …Under the proposal backed by a majority of lawmakers on Tuesday, taxpayers would be considered as individuals. …Legislation to bring in the changes will be drafted later this year and should come into effect in 2021.

Next, we’ll visit Indonesia, where the guy who drafted a law actually got some first-hand experience with how the law is implemented. The Daily Mail has the amusing details.

An Indonesian man working for an organisation which helped draft strict religious laws ordering adulterers to be flogged has himself been whipped after he was caught having an affair with a married woman. Mukhlis, who is a member of the Aceh Ulema Council and only goes under one name like many Indonesians, was beaten 28 times with a rattan cane in the provincial capital of Banda Aceh on Thursday. Mukhlis grimaced and flinched during the punishment, before his married companion was brought to the stage and flogged some 23 times.

Now let’s travel to Switzerland, which is a sensible country (at least by standards of the modern world) with all sorts of admirable policies.

But, as reported by the Economist, that nation’s politicians have some weird ideas. Such as a strategic coffee reserve.

The 15 big Swiss coffee retailers, roasters and importers, such as Nestlé, are required by law to store heaps of raw coffee. Together, these mandated coffee reserves amount to about 15,000 tonnes—enough for three months’ consumption. The government finances the storage costs through a levy on imports of coffee. All 15 companies are in favour of maintaining the coffee reserve—as long as they are paid for it. IG Kaffee, a lobby group, asks why the government wants to scrap a stockpile that has served Switzerland so well.

Not as strange as Germany’s coffee tax or Japan’s coffee enemas, but still rather odd.

Last but not least, the Venezuelan government is well known for economic mismanagement.

But BBC reports that it also should be known for military incompetence.

A Venezuelan navy coastal patrol boat sank in the Caribbean after allegedly ramming a cruise ship that it had ordered to change direction. …The incident took place near La Tortuga Island, a Venezuelan federal dependency, on 30 March.Columbia Cruise Services, which operates the Resolute, said the cruise ship had been carrying out routine engine maintenance in international waters…shortly after midnight, the Naiguata radioed the Resolute, questioning its intentions, and ordered the captain to follow it to a port on Isla Margarita, to the east. “While the master was in contact with the head office, gunshots were fired and, shortly thereafter, the navy vessel approached the starboard side at speed… and purposely collided with the RCGS Resolute,” it added. “The navy vessel continued to ram the starboard bow in an apparent attempt to turn the ship’s head towards Venezuelan territorial waters.” …the patrol boat began taking on water.

The moral of all these stories is that governments piss away money in very interesting and novel ways.

But while these stories are somewhat entertaining, they also confirm that it’s never a good idea to give politicians more money when they’ve repeatedly shown that they squander the revenues they already have.

P.S. Here are my posts about “great moments in local government” and “great moments in state government.”

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Statism in Five Images

It’s been almost three months since I shared some satiric images about government.

So let’s rectify that oversight with five new items.

We’ll start with some very wise words from Forest Gump (not the imposter).

The second item in today’s collection sort of reminds me of this “shovel” cartoon about Keynesian economics.

Both involve pointless gestures that will never produce results.

I don’t think I need to add any commentary to this next photo.

I shared a cartoon many years ago suggesting that organized crime and government have a lot in common.

Here’s a different view.

Per tradition, I’ve saved my favorite example for the conclusion.

The lower-right frame may not be proof of a stroke, but it’s definitely evidence of brain damage of some kind.

Remember, you’ve asked a very strange question if government is the answer.

P.S. My full collection of amusing images (and cartoons) about government can be viewed here.

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Government Intervention and Unintended Consequences

Most people say the key feature of capitalism is competition. Hard to argue with that characterization, but I would go one step further and say that it is one of the consequences of competition – “creative destruction” – that best captures why free markets make it possible for entrepreneurs to deliver mass prosperity.

But what’s the key feature of government? Is it waste? Dependency? Corruption?

Those are all good answers, but perhaps “unintended consequences” should be first on the list. Courtesy of Reason, here are three examples.

I’ve previously written about both ethanol subsidies and so-called employment protection legislation, two of the three examples were already familiar to me.

I wasn’t aware, however, that businesses resorted to big concrete edifices to get around Vermont’s billboard ban (though I have read, in a classic case of baptists and bootleggers, that big companies such as hotel chains sometimes try to thwart competition from small businesses by teaming up with environmentalists to ban billboards).

In the world of fiscal policy, there are many example of unintended consequences.

• Unemployment benefits producing more unemployment.
• Trying to penalize the rich, but hurting lower-income people.
• Raising tax rates but lowering tax revenue collections.

I’ll conclude by asking an open question: Can anyone give an example of a positive unintended consequence of government?

This isn’t a joke query. I assume there are a few examples, even if I can’t think of any of them.

P.S. Here’s a humorous example of an unintended consequence.

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Statism in Five Images

As a wonk, I prefer serious criticisms of government that focus on excessive spending, punitive tax rates, and pointless red tape.

But since I’ve never grown up, I also appreciate humor that mocks government.

So let’s enjoy a new collection of memes that target our overlords in Washington (these also apply to the politicians and bureaucrats in other national capitals, as well as those in state capitals and local government).

We’ll start with this four-frame summary of government.

For our second item, we have a cartoon that shows how government creates a big wedge between gross pay and take-home pay.

Needless to say, workers have less incentive to be productive in this system, which is why I often write boring columns about “deadweight loss.”

Next we have some of the warning signs of an abusive relationship, and some clever person added a bit of wisdom underneath.

At first, I thought this was an exaggeration, but then I realized it wasn’t difficult to think of a program or government activity that matches all 15 categories.

Our fourth item will make most sense to geology majors, but the rest of us can certainly understand the message in the final frame.

Indeed. Reminds me of Reagan’s 9-word warning.

Last but not least, my favorite item in today’s collection points out the eerie similarity between online scammers and political scammers.

The moral of the story is that you’ve asked a very weird question if government is the answer.

Makes you wonder if the “ancaps” actually have the right approach.

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Coronavirus and the Failure of Big Government, Part V

I wrote a four-part series last year about coronavirus and big government (here, here, here, and here), so it goes without saying that the first two lines of this tweet deserve some sort of accuracy award for hitting the nail on the head.

But the sentiment expressed in the last line of the tweet also deserves some sort of award.

I don’t know if the award should be for false hope or naive expectation, but I am sadly confident that everything will stay the same. Or perhaps get even worse.

Simply stated, instead of the deregulation that’s needed, here are some more likely outcomes.

• The World Health Organization will get rewarded with a bigger budget and more power, notwithstanding its failures.
• The Centers for Disease Control will get rewarded with a bigger budget and more power, notwithstanding its failures.
• The Food and Drug Administration will get rewarded with a bigger budget and more power, notwithstanding its failures.

Why am I so pessimistic? Because I understand “public choice,” which is the application of micro-economic analysis (things like incentives) to the behavior of politicians and bureaucrats. In other words, people in Washington act in ways to advance their own interests.

Just in case all this isn’t clear, here are a few headlines and tweets to drive the point home.

We’ll start with an understatement.

And here are examples of that failure.

Starting with a column in the Wall Street Journal.

And this tweet.

FDA officials wanted to engage private sector in February and were told to stand down. For many weeks, admin didn't get private sector involved as virus spread. It's a mistake now seen by many in the administration as one of the biggest response flaws. https://t.co/MxFXCFe3we https://t.co/JlmVmkGhqf

— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) April 17, 2020

There are many more headlines that tell tragic stories.

From the Houston Chronicle.

Here’s a very sad and succinct headline.

Government intervention also hurt in little ways.

This tweet tells us the lesson we should learn.

 

"The fact that these inflexible regulations can easily be discarded in times of crisis demonstrates the absurdity of those policies in the first place. If throwing out the regulations leads to good outcomes now, they should stay off the books later." https://t.co/AyUSqx3zfF

— The FGA (@TheFGA) April 12, 2020

As does this tweet as well.

This should be a major takeaway from the U.S.’s wasted February. Centralized regulation was perhaps the biggest problem. https://t.co/yz18GM0BD0

— Ben Thompson (@benthompson) April 15, 2020

One of Trump’s great failures was protectionism.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that trade barriers also hurt the fight against the pandemic.

And here’s a tweet about the FDA’s bungling.

Bottlenecks are caused by rigidity of FDA approved protocol for testing.

It says use kits for RNA extraction sold by two specific firms that can’t keep up. Labs give up.

Meanwhile academics show that you you can skip the RNA extraction step. No matter. Not approved.

— Paul Romer (@paulmromer) April 11, 2020

Don’t forget that bureaucracy and big government also caused problems in other nations.

Such as the United Kingdom.

Public Health England—in response to The Sun—have confirmed by omission that they:

1. Rebuffed help from commercial labs;
2. Did not pursue a mass testing strategy.
3. Are too incompetent to be put in charge of a mass testing strategy.

Here’s what we know ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/ujbBvfGTRi

— Matthew Lesh (@matthewlesh) April 21, 2020

Sounds like the bureaucrats in the U.K. want to compete with the FDA and CDC for some sort of incompetence award.

NEW | "If Public Health England refuses to cut through the red tape and allow testing to take place in facilities outside of its direct control extremely soon, countless lives will be needlessly lost. Let’s get on with it.” – @JasonReed624 https://t.co/fJt2SaN3Yg

— Free Market Conservatives (@FMConservatives) April 9, 2020

There was a better response in Germany because the private sector played a much bigger role.

And the German approach was better than the United States as well.

One secret of Germany’s success in averting COVID deaths was that it had no limits on private testing — the opposite of what our @US_FDA did. https://t.co/rA8pwNSYd7 @businessinsider

— Dean Clancy (@DeanClancy) April 5, 2020

Needless to say, the WHO also deserves some negative attention.

Indeed, it should come with this warning label.

And we’ll close by shifting back to the failure of government in the United States.

This column from the New York Times captures the real lesson of the past 12 months.

P.S. At the risk of outing myself as a libertarian, this image tells us everything we need to know. As does this collection of cartoons.

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A Genuine Quality-of-Life Achievement from the Trump Administration

Last year, I shared this video from the Competitive Enterprise Institute to help explain how government bureaucrats are making it harder for Americans to clean their plates, bowls, and silverware.

Washington’s dishwasher mandate is just one example of how red tape diminishes the quality of life.

Bureaucrats have concocted other ways of spreading misery and frustration.

• Inferior light bulbs
• Substandard toilets
• Inadequate washing machines
• Dribbling showers
• Dysfunctional gas cans

Call me crazy, but I don’t like spending extra time in the shower, flushing more than once, and risking self-immolation when I refill my lawnmower.

But there is a bit of good news. The Trump Administration wants to make it easier for us to clean up after dinner.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial is a good summary of the issue.

For years American homes have been stuck with dishwashers that take forever and still don’t get the job done. A new Department of Energy rule…will help change that. …Regulations on energy and water usage—tightened in 2013 by the Obama Administration—mean that dishwashers now take at least two hours to complete a full wash cycle. Dishes may still emerge with pieces of last night’s lasagna baked on. …CEI petitioned the Energy Department to allow dishwashers that would reduce the average cycle to one hour from two, while also giving better performance. CEI argued that if the aim of the regulation was to conserve water and energy, it’s unlikely they achieved their purpose. People responded to poor dishwasher performance by pre-rinsing each dish before putting it through their washers, wasting more water… The revised DOE rule is…an example of how common-sense deregulation can deliver real benefits for the public.

And Sam Rutzick of Reason explains this latest development in the battle for clean dishes.

Trump’s Department of Energy finalized a rule establishing a new product class for residential dishwashers that will have a normal cycle time of up to one hour and that can use five gallons of water per cycle. Those rules effectively roll back an Obama-era rule limiting standard dishwashers to use no more than 3.1 gallons of water per cycle. That limit forced dishwasher companies to adjust their products’ cycle lengths. And the supposedly more efficient but less useful dishwashers have been a punchline…the average dishwasher cycle time has jumped from the one-hour cycle that was common a decade ago to more than two hours today. The tighter rules didn’t lead to energy savings for customers. …they actually increased water consumption by 63 billion gallons, as households would have to run their dishwashers multiple cycles, or pre-rinse their dishes by hand, in order to get dishes actually clean.

But Rutzick’s column contains a very important caveat.

Joe Biden may reverse this important bit of deregulation.

Unfortunately, the new rules may not last. While the incoming administration has been vague about which deregulatory efforts they intend to undo, they have spoken in favor of tightening environmental regulations—and the new dishwasher rules could be a casualty. If so, that’ll be bad news for consumers. 

For what it’s worth, while he embraced some very bad policies during the campaign, I don’t think Joe Biden is a Bernie Sanders-style nutjob.

But I fear environmentalism is an area where he will push policy significantly to the left.

So I’m not overly optimistic that we’ll have better dishwashers in the future.

The only good news is that Americans, every time they do the dishes, will have an irritating reminder that government is the problem rather than the solution.

P.S. Yes, I realize better dishwashers are not as important as better tax policy (or as important as worse trade policy), but I don’t think politicians should be undermining our quality of life.

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The Most (Unintentionally) Accurate Tweet about Washington

Every so often, I’ll notice a tweet that has some remarkable characteristic.

• Best tweet about capitalism vs socialism.
• The most depressing tweet.
• Trump’s worst-ever tweet.
• The best-ever counter-tweet.
• The most-flattering tweet about Trump’s policy.
• The best-ever tweet about inequality.

Today, we’re going to add to this collection.

The Democratic National Committee sent out a tweet back in April that seems like it should have been issued instead by the Libertarian National Committee.

My answer to the DNC’s question is “never.” That’s why I’m a libertarian.

Even when I grudgingly acknowledge that something is a legitimate function of government, I’m never tempted to say or think that “things seem to be going smoothly.”

That’s true when looking at what happens in Washington, what happens in the states, and what happens at the local level.

Needless to say, the DNC wasn’t trying to recruit libertarians. The goal was to condemn Trump’s governing style, specifically with reference to a story about the administration’s chaotic approach to the coronavirus.

And I certainly agree that Trump gives critics plenty of ammunition.

But there are plenty of similar episodes of malfeasance and incompetence during the Obama years. And the Bush years. And in every preceding White House.

The bottom line (as suggested by my collection of “Government in Cartoons“) is that Washington at best is a clumsy oaf. And quite often is a bloated bully.

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From San Francisco, another Great Moment in Local Government

Some people say that California is the worst-governed state (I would probably choose Illinois or New Jersey, but it’s a close race).

And if you wanted to pick the worst-governed place in California, San Francisco might be at the top of the list.

The city manages to combine horrible zoning laws with insufferable red tape (there have been efforts to ban everything from Happy Meals to…umm…foreskins).

Most disturbing of all, San Francisco now has a major problem with public defecation (not that the sewer system is anything to brag about).

In an article for City Journal, Erica Sandberg explores the latest bit of upside-down governance from The City by the Bay.

San Francisco is surreptitiously placing homeless people in luxury hotels by designating them as emergency front-line workers, a term that the broader community understands to mean doctors, nurses, and similar professionals. …the city has evoked emergency-disaster law to keep the information private. Officials refuse to notify the public about what is happening in their community and are blocking the press by withholding the list of hotels and preventing reporters from entering the properties. …obfuscation is ultimately futile. Security guards standing outside hotel entrances, where they had never been before, are clear indicators that something is amiss. An uptick in crime, drug activity, and vagrancy around the hotels is another clue.

This sounds crazy, but it gets even worse.

The Department of Public Health manages the controversial free alcohol, cigarette, and cannabis program for homeless people placed in the hotels. …A public-records investigation into the matter has revealed that, as of June 16, DPH approved $3,795.98 to buy the homeless guests vodka and beer (cigarettes have been scrapped). …concerned inside sources report destroyed rooms and rampant illegal drug use. In one hotel, guests are given needle kits and are advised to call the front desk before shooting up. …The hotels were pressured into accepting the homeless guests, though they were also eager for the chance to recoup some revenue lost to the Covid-19 lockdowns. …The city-sponsored guests also receive personal grooming, sanitary, and cleaning supplies, three delivered meals, and laundry service for clothes and linens.

Free hotel room, along with free food and laundry service? And booze and pot?

Who knew being homeless was such a good racket!

Since I’m a fiscal wonk, this is the part that captured my attention.

Rooms are rented at close to $200 per night, totaling $6,000 a month—nearly double the cost of a private one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco.

Though I shouldn’t be surprised by such profligacy. The state government’s “success story” was spending “billions of dollars” to cause homelessness to “dip by 1 percent.”

And San Francisco’s government had a different program for the homeless that cost about $700 per night. So maybe the new approach described in above article is a fiscal bargain.

By the way, it appears that taxpayers across the country are contributing to this insane policy.

Hotel owners consented to the arrangements fully aware of the potential pitfalls, having been assured that FEMA dollars would cover at least some of the damages incurred.

Good ol’ FEMA. Always ready, willing, and able to foolishly spend taxpayer money.

P.S. While San Francisco is a bit of a mess, folks in other cities (such as Seattle, Chicago, New York City, Detroit, etc) can make a legitimate claim that they have the nation’s worst local government.

P.P.S. When he crunched all the numbers, Dean Stansel of Southern Methodist University found that the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario metropolitan statistical area in California had the worst policy in the country (San Francisco was #38 out of the 55 MSAs with at least 1 million residents).

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Government Mandates and Crummy Dishwashers

Four years ago, I wrote about how dishwashers don’t work very well because of foolish red tape from Washington.

The clever folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute put together a video on the topic.

I especially like the fake commercial at the start of the video.

But I don’t like the way my dishwasher performs.

And Jeffrey Tucker of the American Institute for Economic Research shares my disdain.

American dishwashers used to work. They were wonderful labor-saving devices. They kept our kitchens cleaner. They sanitized the dishes, helping to stop cross-contamination and generally improving health over the iffy process of handwashing. …Then one day they just stopped doing the work. What happened? …Dishwashers used to wash all the dishes in under one hour. Now they take two hours, three hours, and four hours, and still don’t get the dishes clean. …All of this is directly due to government regulations. …Now everything comes out foggy and spotted. This is true no matter which dishwasher you get. …None of this has really hurt the dishwasher industry. Sales have consistently risen for the last ten years. My theory is that people are buying replacements, thinking (rationally) that they just need a newer model. What consumers don’t know, and what manufacturers don’t want to admit, is that they no longer work. The older the model, the more likely it is to be operational.

Here’s the most astounding factoid.

One in five homes have just stopped using their dishwashers altogether.

And here’s the bottom line.

These regulations have caused an infuriating and devastating degradation of the quality of appliances and the quality of life in our homes.

I agree. In my home, I don’t bother putting items in the dishwasher until I’ve thoroughly rinsed them. Otherwise, I’ll find food residue and have to wash them again.

Here’s a chart from the Competitive Enterprise Institute on the average cycle time of dishwashers. As you can see, modern dishwashers take much longer because they do such a poor job.

Since I generally run my dishwasher before heading to bed, I’m not particularly worried about how long it takes.

I just want clean dishes at the end of the process. But that’s now much more difficult because of government.

If you want more examples of the regulatory state’s war on modern life, there are plenty of examples.

• Inferior light bulbs
• Substandard toilets
• Inadequate washing machines
• Dribbling showers
• Dysfunctional gas cans

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Great Moments in British Government

Technically, my coverage of U.K election week began last Monday with a look at Jeremy Corbyn’s radical statism, and ended yesterday with some analysis of Boris Johnson’s victory.

But since I’m still in England, this is an opportune time for a new edition of Great Moments in British Government.

For those who aren’t regular readers, I should add that “Great Moments” is a sarcastic term for odd stories that illustrate the incompetence and venality of government (state, local, foreign, etc).

We’ll start with a story that shows how insiders use government as a racket to enrich their lifestyles.

Local councils are spending millions on luxury cars for mayors and officials in “ceremonial” roles, an investigation has found. Over the past three years, 207 local authorities have spent more than £4.5million on vehicles including Bentleys, Jaguars and S-class Mercedes, information disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act reveals. The cars were used by mayors, lord mayors or chairmen. The TaxPayers’ Alliance, a campaign group which carried out the investigation, said the money went on officials who “often fulfil ceremonial duties within their local authority and serve as the ‘first citizen’.

Sounds like Washington’s gilded class!

For our next example, bureaucrats in the United Kingdom don’t do a very good job of teaching traditional subjects such as math and reading, so they’ve decided to try sharing their knowledge on a rather unconventional topic.

Children as young as six are being taught about touching or ‘stimulating’ their own genitals as part of classes that will become compulsory in hundreds of primary schools. Some parents believe the lessons – part of a controversial new sex and relationships teaching programme called All About Me – are ‘sexualising’ their young children. …Documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday detail how All About Me classes involve pupils aged between six and ten being told by teachers that there are ‘rules about touching yourself’. An explanation of ‘rules about self-stimulation’ appears in the scheme’s Year Two lesson plan for six and seven-year-olds. Under a section called Touching Myself, teachers are advised to tell children that ‘lots of people like to tickle or stroke themselves as it might feel nice’. …In one, pupils are told that when a girl called Autumn ‘has a bath and is alone she likes to touch herself between her legs. It feels nice’.

For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t have wanted my kids being exposed to this kind of topic, but I must admit that bureaucrats probably have some expertise on the matter.

Next, we have a story about a woman getting fined for feeding birds.

Neighbours complained about birds flocking to Maureen Francis’ garden after she began feeding them with bird seed and other food… Wiltshire Council gave Francis the protection notice after receiving complaints and told her she could only put out one ‘small caged bird feeder’. But she refused to comply with their demands, leading to the council taking her to court ‘for the sake of the neighbours’. When Francis failed to attend the hearing last week, magistrates convicted her of failing to comply with a protection notice in her absence. She was fined £250 for over feeding the animals and ordered to pay almost £1,600 in costs. Councillor Jerry Wickham, Wiltshire Council’s cabinet member for public protection, said: “Our officers made numerous attempts to engage with Mrs Francis to try and resolve this problem. “We were reluctant to take legal action but for the sake of the neighbours, prosecution was the only option.”

Gives over-criminalization a whole new meaning.

Last but not least, British officials decided it’s okay if a two-second journey is replaced by a one-hour trip.

Motorists in southwest England will need to pay special attention when driving through Dorset County next week, where officials are putting a 41-mile detour around a 65-foot stretch of construction work. …The small section of road A352 in Godmanstone, Dorset, will be closed Monday through Friday while construction crews work on a new sewage system… The detour is estimated to take an hour to complete. The closed portion of the road would take just over two seconds to travel at the 30 mph speed limit. …The council acknowledged that most residents will ignore the lengthy detour and use smaller roads to get around the construction work. Anyone caught using the closed stretch of road will be fined $1,291.

A few years ago, a clever entrepreneur in the United Kingdom dealt with a similar detour by building a private toll road.

I don’t know if such an option exists in this case, but I can state with considerable confidence that this impossibly inconvenient detour wouldn’t be an option if a private road company was making a sewage repair.

Why? Because private companies cater to customers.

Which is a good excuse to re-share this classic scene from Ghostbusters.

Amen.

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More Child Abuse at Government Schools

I’ve shared examples of brain-dead behavior by bureaucrats at the Transportation Security Agency.

But the folks at the TSA may be paragons of wisdom and judgement compared to administrators at government schools.

Those bureaucrats seem incapable of improving test scores, even when they get showered with tax dollars, but they’re always ready to go overboard when kids…gasp…play with toy guns.

Or even when they pretend a stick is a gun. Or when they pretend their fingers are a gun.

Here’s a crazy example that just happened.

A 12-year-old Overland Park girl formed a gun with her fingers, pointed at four of her Westridge Middle School classmates one at a time, and then turned the pretend weapon toward herself. Police hauled her out of school in handcuffs, arrested her and charged the child with a felony for threatening. …according to Johnson County District Court documents, on Sept. 18, the girl “unlawfully and feloniously communicated a threat to commit violence, with the intent to place another, in fear, or with the intent to cause the evacuation, lock down or disruption in regular, ongoing activities …” or created just the risk of causing such fear. …“I think that this is something that probably could have been handled in the principal’s office and got completely out of hand,” said Jon Cavanaugh, the girl’s grandfather in California, where the girl is now living. He said his granddaughter has no access to a real gun and she had no intent of harming anyone. “She was just mouthing off,” he said.

School bureaucrats also over-react if students like a picture of a toy gun.

Here’s a story from two years ago.

An Edgewood Middle School student was handed a 10-day suspension for “liking” a picture of a gun on Instagram with the caption “ready.” The parents of Zachary Bowlin posted a picture of the intended suspension notice which read, “The reason for the intended suspension is as follows: Liking a post on social media that indicated potential school violence.” “I was livid, I mean, I’m sitting here thinking ‘you just suspended him for ten days for liking a picture of a gun on a social media site,” father Marty Bowlin said. “He never shared, he never commented, he never made a threatening post… anything on the site, just liked it.” The picture in question is of an airsoft gun, and according to the students’ parents, their child didn’t comment on the post but simply liked the picture.

We’ll wrap up with another bizarre case from this year.

School bureaucrats also don’t approve if students engage in legal behavior when they’re not at school.

Two male students at Lacey Township High School in New Jersey posted photos of guns on Snapchat. One of the boys captioned his photo with “hot stuff” and “if there’s ever a zombie apocalypse, you know where to go.” The photos were not taken at school. They were not taken during school hours. They did not reference a school. They auto-deleted after 24 hours, which was well before the school became aware of them. And yet, administrators at Lacey Township High School suspended the boys for three days, and also gave them weekend detention. This was a clear violation of the students’ First Amendment rights, and the American Civil Liberties Union has now filed suit. …The two students had visited a gun range owned by an older brother on Saturday, March 10, 2018. They practiced shooting with “legally purchased and properly permitted” guns, according to the lawsuit. They also took a few photos and posted them on Snapchat. None of the snaps were threatening, and none of them referenced a school. Nevertheless, a parent of another student heard about the photos and contacted school authorities. On Monday, the boys were forced to meet with an assistant principal and an anti-bullying specialist, who quickly decided to punish them for clearly constitutionally-protected speech.

Kudos to the ACLU for getting involved on the right side.

I wish it was because they supported the 2nd Amendment as well as the 1st Amendment, but their involvement is a plus regardless.

But that’s a separate issue.

For today, our topic is misbehavior by school bureaucrats. Is there a way of discouraging these ridiculous suspensions?

The good news is that schools often back down when these episodes of political correctness get exposed. And maybe legal action also could help.

But I suspect the only effective answer is busting up a hopelessly bad government school monopoly.

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Great Moments in Foreign Government

I get quite agitated when the folks in Washington make dumb choices that waste money and hinder prosperity.

That being said, I take comfort in the fact that governments in other nations also do stupid things.

I guess this is the policy version of “misery loves company.” And it’s also a source of horror and/or amusement.

• Taxpayer-financed friends for mass murderers in Norway.
• Financing a giant “Burger Boy” in the United Kingdom.
• Promoting welfare tourism in the European Union.
• Spending $30 to collect $1 of tax in Germany.
• Regulation of coffee enemas in Japan.

So let’s update our collection of “great moments in foreign government.”

We’ll start in China, where a local government proved that incentives mattered.

In March, a man in Zhejiang, China…divorced his wife. He then married his sister-in-law. Shortly after, he divorced her too, in order to marry another sister-in-law. Several other members of the Pan family started to do the same with other relatives and eventually, 11 members of the brood married and divorced each other 23 times over a two-week period. Their motivation? To cash in on a compensation scheme… As part of an urban village renovation project, those living in the area are given a minimum compensation of one 40-square meter apartment, even though they didn’t own property. This was provided to any family whose hukou (household registration) was filed by April 10. But the Pan family learned that they could game the process by getting married, registering as residents of the village, and divorcing to do it again… By doing so, each family member would get their own household registration, which means more compensation. …The 11 family members involved have been arrested… Upon interrogation, one suspect said they didn’t think there was anything illegal with what they were doing.

I wonder if the Chinese government will learn anything about incentives from this episode.

Maybe, just maybe, it will then apply those lessons to tax policy (at the very least, by ignoring poisonous advice from the IMF and OECD).

In Spain, we re-confirm that governments are just as capable of wasting money on defense spending as they do on domestic programs.

A new, Spanish-designed submarine has a weighty problem: The vessel is more than 70 tons too heavy, and officials fear if it goes out to sea, it will not be able to surface. And a former Spanish official says the problem can be traced to a miscalculation — someone apparently put a decimal point in the wrong place. “It was a fatal mistake,” said Rafael Bardaji, who until recently was director of the Office of Strategic Assessment at Spain’s Defence Ministry. The Isaac Peral, the first in a new class of diesel-electric submarines, was nearly completed when engineers discovered the problem. …The Isaac Peral, named for a 19th century Spanish submarine designer, is one of four vessels in the class that are in various stages of construction. The country has invested about $2.7 billion in the program. The first was scheduled to be delivered in 2015 but the Spanish state-owned shipbuilder, Navantia, has said the weight problems could cause delays of up to two years.

Last but not least, we travel to Germany, where the government is trying to outdo New York City for the prize of most over-budget infrastructure boondoggle.

As a structure, it looks impressive enough. Until you pause, look around you, and absorb the silence. This is Berlin Brandenburg…, the new, state-of-the-art international airport… It is a bold new structure, costing billions, and was supposed to be completed in 2012. But it has never opened. BER has become for Germany not a new source of pride but a symbol of engineering catastrophe. …a “national trauma” and an ideal way “to learn how not to do things”. No passengers have ever emerged from the railway station, which is currently running only one “ghost train” a day, to keep the air moving. No-one has stayed at the smart airport hotel, which has a skeleton staff forlornly dusting rooms and turning on taps to keep the water supply moving. …Huge luggage carousels are being given their daily rotation to stop them from seizing up. …The company running the airport promises it will finally open next year, which would make it at least eight years late as well as billions over budget. …So what on Earth has happened…? politicians…set up a company to build an ambitious new airport. “The supervisory board was full of politicians who had no idea how to supervise the project,” says Prof Genia Kostka, of the Free University of Berlin. “They were in charge of key decisions.” …the politicians supervising the airport…insisted new departure gates were added to accommodate giant Airbus A380 aircraft, whose production has ended before the airport can open. …the overall cost of the project will be 6bn euros (£5.3bn) – if it opens as planned next year – up from an original projection of about 2bn euros. The final sum will be paid mostly by German taxpayers.

Of course taxpayers will get stuck with the tab. That’s the ongoing scam we call government.

But there is another question to ponder: How can a nation that is so aggressive (not to mention dogmatic and inventive) about collecting taxes be so incompetent at spending money?

The bottom line is that waste seems to be an inevitable part of government, regardless of the nation or the continent.

The moral of these stories, both from America and around the world, it that government is not the answer.

Unless, of course, you’ve asked a really strange question.

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Great Moments in Foreign Government

I spend much of my time analyzing the foolish and counterproductive policies imposed by Washington. Often accompanied by some mockery of politicians and their silly laws.

And I also employ the same approach when reviewing the bone-headed policies often pursued by state governments and local governments.

And since this is “International Liberty,” I obviously like to pay attention to what happens in other nations as well. I guess you could call it the global version of misery-loves-company.

So today we’re going to add to our collection of “Great Moments in Foreign Government.”

We’ll start in Egypt, where we got a version of alchemy. Except instead of turning a base metal into gold, a donkey was turned into a zebra.

A zoo in Egypt has denied painting black stripes on a donkey to make it look like a zebra after a photo of the animal appeared online. Student Mahmoud Sarhan put the images on Facebook after visiting Cairo’s International Garden municipal park. Aside from its small size and pointy ears, there were also black smudges on its face. …the enclosure contained two animals and that both had been painted. When contacted by local radio station Nogoum FM, zoo director Mohamed Sultan insisted the animal was not a fake.

The most amusing part of the report, though, was learning that zoos routinely try to mislead customers.

This is not the first time that a zoo has been accused of trying to fool its audience. Unable to find a way around the Israeli blockade, a zoo in Gaza painted two donkeys to look like zebras in 2009. Another Gaza zoo put stuffed animals on display in 2012 because of the shortages of animals. In 2013, a Chinese zoo in Henan province tried to pass off a Tibetan mastiff dog as an African lion, and in 2017 a zoo in Guangxi province disappointed visitors by exhibiting blow-up plastic penguins. Weeks later, another Guangxi zoo drew condemnation for displaying plastic butterflies. …Papua New Guinea is one of the poorest countries in Apec, with 40% of the population living on less than $1 a day according to the UN.

I have to confess, though, that I don’t know if any of these zoos were private. So maybe we have a problem that isn’t just limited to government.

Our next story is from India.

It seems that the military doesn’t understand that submarines are supposed to be watertight.

…it’s a good idea to, like, close the hatches before you dive. Call it a lesson learned for the Indian navy, which managed to put the country’s first nuclear-missile submarine, the $2.9 billion INS Arihant, out of commission in the most boneheaded way possible. The Hindu reported yesterday that the Arihant has been out of commission since suffering “major damage” some 10 months ago, due to what a navy source characterized as a “human error” — to wit: allowing water to flood to sub’s propulsion compartment after failing to secure one of the vessel’s external hatches. …It’s hard to articulate how major a foul-up this is… Indian authorities ordered the pipe replacement because they “likely felt that pipes exposed to corrosive seawater couldn’t be trusted again, particularly pipes that carry pressurized water coolant to and from the ship’s 83 megawatt nuclear reactor.”

Sounds like India’s navy would have been better off if the person in charge of the hatch had been one of the country’s famous no-show bureaucrats.

Now let’s turn our attention to Papau New Guinea, where the roads are so poor that it makes no sense to have fancy, high-speed cars.

Yet that didn’t stop the government from using a summit as an excuse to buy 40 Maseratis

Papua New Guinea’s government is under scrutiny for importing 40 luxury Maserati cars from Italy for the…Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit. The Quattroporte sedans, which cost more than $100,000 each (£75,000), will be used by foreign leaders. Media and activists have questioned if the poor Pacific country has wasted millions. …Apec Minister Justin Tkatchenko said the cars, which can reach speeds of 240 km/h (149 mph), would “provide the level of carriage for leaders that is the standard for vehicles used at Apec summits”. …Some of the Pacific country’s main roads are poorly maintained, with vehicle speeds limited to 80 km/h (50 mph). Other roads wind through mountainous terrain and often require a four-wheel-drive vehicle to navigate.

Incidentally, the government claimed that the Maseratis would be resold to private buyers, meaning no net cost to taxpayers. Highly unlikely, to be sure.

Moreover, if there was a follow-up story, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they magically wound up in the hands of politicians and their family members.

The bottom line is that governments manage to combine malicious venality with staggering incompetence. Quite a feat.

P.S. For what it’s worth, America’s political elite prefers to rely on taxpayer-financed limousines.

P.S.S. I’ve noticed on my trips to Cayman that there are lots of fancy, high-performance cars. In some sense this isn’t surprising. After all, zero-tax Cayman is a wealthy place. Yet I’ve always wondered why people buy such cars on a small island where high-speed travel is both difficult and unnecessary. But at least those are people spending their own money (though the government there certainly is capable of over-spending in other ways).

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My Sporadically Successful Career as a Global Money Launderer

I’ve written repeatedly about how anti-money laundering (AML) laws are pointless, expensive, intrusive, discriminatory, and ineffective.

And they especially hurt poor people according to the World Bank.

That’s a miserable track record, even by government standards.

Now it’s time to share two personal stories to illustrate how AML laws work in practice.

Episode 1

Last decade, I wrote an article for a U.K.-based publication that focused on the insurance industry. I didn’t even realize they paid, so I was obviously happy when a check arrived in the mail.

The only catch was that the check was in British pounds and various charges and conversion fees would have consumed almost all the money if I tried to deposit the money in my local bank.

But that wasn’t too much of a problem since I had an upcoming trip to give a speech in England.

I figured I would swing by the British bank where the magazine had an account, show them my passport, and get my cash.

Oh, such youthful naiveté.

Here’s what actually happened. I stopped by a branch and was told that I couldn’t cash the check because anti-money laundering rules required that I have an address in the U.K. (my hotel didn’t count).

Needless to say, I was a bit irritated. Though I didn’t give up. In hopes that my experience was an anomaly (i.e., a particularly silly teller with a bureaucratic mindset), I stopped at another branch of the bank.

But that didn’t work. I got the same excuse about AML requirements.

And I was similarly thwarted at a third branch. By the way, the tellers sympathized with my plight, but they said the government was being very strict.

So I figured the way to get around this regulatory barrier would be to sign the check and have a friend deposit the money in her account and then give me some cash.

But her bank said this was also against the AML rules.

Fortunately, we got lucky when we went to another branch of her bank. A teller basically acknowledged that government’s rules made it impossible for me to get my money and she decided to engage in a much-appreciated act of civil disobedience.

This episode was annoying, but the silver lining is that I was in the U.K. to speak at an international economic crime conference in Cambridge on the topic of money laundering.

So I began my speech a day or two later by pseudo-confessing that I had just violated the nation’s silly and counterproductive laws on money laundering (I said “this may have happened to me” to give me some legal wiggle room since the audience was dominated by government officials, and I didn’t want to take any risks).

Episode 2

Today, I had my second incident with anti-money laundering laws.

I have a friend from the Caribbean who now operates a small Dubai-based business and he asked me if I could use Western Union to wire some money to an employee in the Dominican Republic.

I’ve done this for him a couple of times in the past (it is far cheaper to send money from the U.S.), so I stopped by a branch this morning, filled out the paperwork and sent the money.

Or, to be more accurate, I thought I sent the money.

As I was walking out, I got a text from Western Union saying that they put a hold on the transfer and that I needed to call a 1-800 number to answer some questions.

So I made the call and was told that they blocked the transfer because they were trying to “protect me” from potential consumer fraud.

It’s possible that this was a potential reason, but I immediately suspected that Western Union was actually trying to comply with the various inane and counter-productive AML laws and regulations imposed by Washington.

My suspicions were warranted. Even though I explained that I wasn’t a victim of fraud and answered 10 minutes of pointless questions (how long did I know my friend in Dubai? when did I last see him? what would the employee use the money for?), Western Union ultimately decided to reject the transfer.

Why? I assume because AML laws and regulations require companies to flag “unusual transactions,” and financial institutions would rather turn away business rather than risk getting some bureaucrat upset.

So my unblemished track record of being a successful “money launderer” came to an end.

But here’s the real bottom line.

Other than wasting about 30 minutes, I didn’t lose anything. But a small business owner will now have to pay $150 more for a transaction, and an employee from a poor country will have to wait longer to get money.

In some sense, even Western Union is a victim. The company lost the $20 fee for my transaction. But that’s probably trivial compared to the money that they pay for staffers who have the job of investigating whether various transfers satisfy Uncle Sam’s onerous rules.

Even my “successful” example of money laundering in Episode 1 was costly. I lost about two hours of my day.

And if I wasn’t for the nice teller who decided to break the law, I probably would have lost out on about $100. Perhaps not worst outcome in the world, but now think about how poor people suffer when they suffer similar losses thanks to these policies.

Remember, by the way, all these costs aren’t offset by any benefits. There is zero evidence that AML laws reduce underlying crime rates (which was the rationale for these laws being imposed in the first place!).

P.S. You may not think AML policy lends itself to humor, but here’s an amusing anecdote involving our former President.

P.P.S. Some folks on the left use AML arguments to justify their “war on cash,” and they’re pushing to restrict cash as an interim measure.

P.P.P.S. Leftist politicians frequently accuse so-called tax havens of being sanctuaries for dirty money, but those low-tax jurisdictions have much better track records than onshore nations.

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Great Moments in British Government

A couple of days ago, citing bizarre government policies in India, Belgium, Malaysia, Romania, and Spain, I wrote about some “great moments in foreign government.”

Today, we’re going to give special attention to the United Kingdom.

I’m not claiming there’s an above-average level of government stupidity in the United Kingdom (though that’s distinctly possible). Instead, I suspect I simply get exposed to more stories from the U.K.

Whatever the reason, let’s start with this report from the Times.

Plastic stirrers and cotton buds are to be banned alongside straws… The move, expected to come into force as early as next year, is designed to curb “society’s addiction” to throwaway products, the environment secretary writes… The UK uses 13.2 billion cotton buds a year, more than any other member of the EU, as well as 44.1 billion stirrers and 42 billion straws, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature. …Mr Gove initiated plans last month to require retailers to impose a deposit on plastic bottles and has extended the 5p tax on plastic bags to smaller shops. Moves for an industry levy aimed at reducing the use of products such as takeaway food cartons are also underway in the Treasury.

Apparently, the supposedly conservative government in the United Kingdom thinks this type of green virtue signalling is a way of wooing the tiny collection of misguided Tories who oppose Brexit.

Mr Gove is said to believe that the issue helps reconnect the Conservatives with former supporters angry over Brexit.

Switching topics, here’s a bizarre story from the BBC.

Chelsea Russell, 19, from Liverpool posted the lyric from Snap Dogg’s I’m Trippin’ to pay tribute to a boy who died in a road crash, a court heard. Russell argued it was not offensive… Prosecutors said her sentence was increased from a fine to a community order “as it was a hate crime.” She was charged after Merseyside Police were anonymously sent a screenshot of her update. …The words Russell used on her account contained a racial label which some people find extremely offensive. …Prosecutor Angela Conlan said Russell’s defence also argued her profile “wasn’t public, but it had been proved in court that anyone could access it and “see the offensive language”. Russell was found guilty… She was given an eight-week community order, place on an eight-week curfew and told to pay costs of £500 and an £85 victim surcharge.

Given my utter lack of cultural awareness, I’ve never heard of Snap Dogg. I’m guessing he’s black, but I could be wrong.

In any event, this absurd story raises a couple of points.

• First, people should have the right to say offensive things.
• Second, it appears that there was no offensive intent.
• Third, this shouldn’t be an issue for government.

I’m sure that there’s still real racism in British society. I hope there is widespread scorn for people who practice that odious version of collectivism. I also support boycotts of private measures to punish unambiguous racists (the ideal goal is to have their minds changed by kindness).

Government should only step in when there’s a threat to life, liberty, or property.

Sadly, the British government is policing speech, perhaps even speech that should be considered totally benign.

Which is a good excuse to post this funny-yet-sad item from Libertarian Reddit.

Speaking of things that are funny and sad, here’s a Reason column on the latest development in the battle to leave Brits totally vulnerable to crime.

It turns out that when you pass laws disarming people in an attempt to prevent violence, criminals who habitually disregard all laws don’t make exceptions for the new rules. In London, crime still thrives despite the U.K.’s tight gun controls and the British political class is now desperately turning its attention to restricting knives. …Firearms are strictly restricted in the U.K., including a near-total ban on handguns. Nevertheless, “[i]n the 12 months to October 2017, there were 2,500 offences involving guns: a 16 per cent increase on the previous year and a 44 per cent increase on 2014,”… Criminals, it seems, are not averse to committing crimes—including the illegal acquisition of tools that help them commit more crimes. Besides illegal guns, British criminals also use edged weapons… Having failed to disarm criminals with gun controls that they defy, British politicians are now turning their attention to implementing something new and different: knife control. Because criminals will be much more respectful of knife laws than of those targeted at firearms, I guess. …Poundland (the British equivalent of a dollar store) announced last week that it will no longer sell kitchen knives in any of its 850 stores. Similar stores are being slapped with fines for selling knives to minors. British politicians propose banning home delivery of knives and police promote street-corner bins for the surrender of knives.

If you outlaw knives, only outlaws will have knives (in America, we apply that lesson to tanks).

And they’ll also have acid, as noted on Libertarian Reddit.

The cops don’t have the time and energy to concentrate on these real crimes.

Instead, they bust a girl for benignly quoting a bad word. Or they bust homeowners for harming robbers. Or harass employers who commit discrimination by advertising for “reliable” workers.

And apparently Brits also are on guard against the scourge of eggs in the hands of kids. And flour.

How embarrassing.

Today’s collection is even worse than the ones I shared in February and April.

P.S. And let’s not forget the U.K.’s creepy statism and ghoulish government-run healthcare.

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Great Moments in Foreign Government

Given the routine corruption and reckless spending in Washington, I frequently get asked how I keep my sanity.

It’s possible, as some of my friends argue, that I’m not actually sane. That would explain why I try to put my finger in the dyke of big government as more and more new leaks keep developing. Only a crazy person would fight against big government when politicians and bureaucrats have a “public choice” incentive to do the wrong thing.

Moreover, if “victory” is restoring the kind of limited government envisioned by the Founding Fathers, then there’s a 99.99 percent chance all my efforts will be wasted.

But allow me to offer a reason for optimism. What if we decide that “victory” is simply hindering the growth of government so that the private sector has enough “breathing room” to continue making our lives richer and better?

That’s the basic message of Human Progress, Marian Tupy’s website showing how the world is constantly improving. And we see good long-run developments from Economic Freedom of the World.

In other words, we don’t need to achieve Libertarian Nirvana. We just need to throw sand in the gears of government.

And that’s why I don’t think my life is pointless. To be sure, I haven’t given up on my dream of replacing the odious internal revenue code with a flat tax, but if the only thing I achieve is to protect America from a value-added tax, I’ll nonetheless go to my grave feeling like I did something very valuable for my country.

But there’s something else that keeps me sane. I also enjoy laughing at government. I regularly write about “great moments” in government and point out that incompetence and stupidity is a regular feature of the federal government, of state governments, and of local governments.

And I also enjoy mocking the spectacular screw-ups and bizarre blunders that are a feature of foreign governments as well.

And that’s our topic for today. So let’s start with this story from India about a very unusual example of vote buying.

A south Indian state has become possibly the first in the world to offer publicly-funded breast implants, its health minister arguing, “Why should beauty treatment not be available to the poor?” The Tamil Nadu state health department on Wednesday launched the free service at a clinic in the capital Chennai. …The clinic had already been providing breast reconstruction surgery for cancer patients, but was now extending the service for people who wished to alter the size of their breasts for other health or cosmetic reasons. The head of plastic surgery at the clinic, Dr V Ramadevi, said some of her patients…sought to augment or shrink their breasts for a boost in confidence. “There is a psychological benefit. Many girls who have larger breasts don’t like to go out. There is no reason this surgery should be restricted from the poor.” The procedure would also be available to men, she said. …Tamil Nadu’s government is known for its largesse, particularly under former chief minister Jayalalithaa, who pioneered free food canteens and doled out wedding jewellery and venues to the poor.

I’ve previously reported on crazy examples of government policy in India, so I suppose this story shouldn’t surprise me.

And since taxpayer-financed cosmetic surgery exists in the United Kingdom and the United States, Indian taxpayers can take solace that they’re not alone.

Now let’s go to Belgium, where there’s apparently a problem with rogue royalty.

Prince Laurent of Belgium has had his monthly allowance docked for a year, after a vote by the country’s federal parliament. The sanction was imposed after the prince attended a Chinese embassy reception last year without government permission, in full naval uniform. Lawmakers voted for a 15% cut to his €307,000 (£270,000; $378,000) annual allowance. …Prince Laurent, who is the younger brother of King Philippe, wrote a lengthy emotional letter to parliament before the vote on his endowment, arguing that, as a royal, he is unable to work for a living. He described the vote as “the trial of my life” and said it would “likely cause me serious prejudice” if MPs went against him. …The prince, 54, said the royal family had obstructed his attempts to be financially independent. …Lawmakers ultimately rejected his claim that no citizen of their country had been so exploited, voting to cut his stipend by 93 to 23 votes. …He had previously been criticised for attending meetings in Libya when the late Muammar Gaddafi was still in power, and making an unsanctioned 2011 trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, a former Belgian colony.

I suppose this is a feel-good story in that politicians actually voted to cut spending.

Though we should never forget that this is the country where the public sector consumes half of economic output but officials actually complained that it’s hard to fight terrorism because of “the small size of the Belgian government.”

Now it’s time for ar stop in Malaysia, where corrupt politicians spent the country into debt and now they want taxpayers to voluntarily cough up extra money.

When Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad unexpectedly won his bid for office in May, he pledged to…get the country’s $250 billion worth of debt under control. And this week, he announced the government had found a way to at least get started: crowdfunding. Within 24 hours, the “Malaysia Hope Fund” raised almost $2 million, the BBC reported. “The rakyat (people) voluntarily want to share their earnings with the government to help ease the burden,” the finance ministry said in a statement, announcing that it would be accepting donations to a special fund set up to help relieve the country’s debt. …The crowdfunding idea started with a 27-year-old named Nik Shazarina Bakti, who recently launched a private crowdfunding initiative to help relieve Malaysia’s debt.  She raised around $3,500 before the government stepped in. In a sense, the effort is a version of what she said Malaysians did during their struggle for independence from Britain, when they donated jewelry, money and valuables. It’s also similar to what South Korea did as it attempted to pull itself out of economic crisis in the late 1990s, and regular citizens lined up to donate their most prized possessions to the government, including wedding rings and trophies.

Hmmm…, $2 million raised to pay off $250 billion of debt. Methinks they won’t meet their goal.

Though this story reminds me that politicians like Elizabeth Warren want the rest of us to pay more tax, yet she conveniently doesn’t participate in her state’s version of voluntary crowdfunding.

Here’s an amazing story from Romania.

He’s a dead man walking and the court ruling is final. A Romanian court has rejected a man’s claim that he is still very much alive, after he was officially registered as deceased, the Associated Press reports. Constantin Reliu, 63, lost his case in Vasului because he appealed too late on the ruling, a court spokeswoman said Friday. The story goes that Reliu had traveled to Turkey in 1992 for work and lost contact with his family. Since his wife had not heard from her husband in years, she acquired a death certificate for him in 2016, the AP reports. However, since Reliu was discovered by Turkish authorities this year with expired papers, he was deported back to Romania. That’s when he discovered he had been declared dead.

Wow. I thought American courts generated some outlandish decisions, but this belies belief.

Last but not least, here’s a report from Spain that should leave you skeptical about the efficacy of additional NATO spending.

An attempt to deploy a new submarine for Spain’s navy has run aground again, after it emerged it cannot fit in its dock, Spanish media report. The S-80 boat was redesigned at great expense after an earlier mistake meant it had problems floating, and it was lengthened to correct the issue. Spanish newspaper El País now reports that after the changes, the docks at Cartagena can no longer fit the vessel. The cost for each has almost doubled, the newspaper said. …The original problem with the submarine dates back to 2013, when it was discovered that it was about 100 tons heavier than it needed to be. That caused a problem for its buoyancy – so it could submerge, but might not come back up again. A former Spanish official told the Associated Press at the time that someone had put a decimal point in the wrong place, and “nobody paid attention to review the calculations”. …the base at Cartagena will have to be dredged and reshaped to accommodate the now-floating longer vessel, the El País report said. Spain’s Defence Minister Margarita Robles, speaking on Spanish radio, admitted that “there have been deficiencies in the project”.

Call me crazy, but “deficiencies” doesn’t really describe what happened. Almost makes the Pentagon look frugal. Almost makes the German intelligence service look competent.

For previous examples of great moments in foreign government, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

P.S. In other words, my “government in cartoons” collection applies equally no matter where you travel.

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Great Moments in British Government

While much of my analysis focuses on the mess created by Washington, I periodically show my ecumenical nature by sharing “Great Moments in State Government” and “Great Moments in Local Government.”

And in keeping with the title of this page, I even occasionally share “Great Moments in Foreign Government.”

Today, though we’re going to get very specific and look at Great Moments in British Government. I did the same thing back in February and there’s so much new material that it’s time for an encore.

We’ll start with this story from the Daily Mail about an elderly man who was arrested for defending his home.

A 78-year-old homeowner has been arrested by murder detectives after a suspected burglar he fought with in his own kitchen died of a stab wound. …The homeowner was initially detained on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm but was later arrested on suspicion of murder. The case has been compared to that of Tony Martin, who was jailed for killing an intruder at his home in 1999. The break-in comes amid a surge in violence in the capital, with 49 people already having died in crimes in London in 2018. …The homeowner suffered bruising to his arms but police said his injuries are not life threatening.  He remains in custody at a south London police station.

Wow, this might be even more outrageous than the story about the woman who got arrested for merely brandishing a knife in her own home.

But Americans shouldn’t laugh too much about these stories since cops on this side of the Atlantic have arrested citizens for injuring burglars.

Next is a story from the Evening Standard about so-called political correctness run amok.

Mansfield College was forced to cancel a “420 themed” bop scheduled for this Friday – April 4 – after students complained. In an email sent to students…, organisers explained that the party would be a celebration of the “internationally recognised day of protest for the legalisation of Marijuana” on April 20. It invited undergraduates to “dress up as their favourite stoner.” …It also warned: “If you’re white, don’t try to go as Snoop Dogg or Bob Marley. Blackface isn’t cool.” …The invite sparked backlash from some students who said they felt the event encouraged “cultural appropriation.” One undergraduate said the college’s elected welfare representatives were worried that the event could be exclusionary. “Anyone who might have negative experiences of drugs or addiction might be affected by it,”… Within hours the entertainment team sent round an email cancelling the event and apologising for anyone they offended. They said: “We understand that this was met with offence and we want to apologise dearly to those who were offended,” they said.

I don’t know what’s more depressing, the fact that people complained or the fact that organizers cravenly apologized.

But maybe I’m not thinking about this the right way. I had a “negative experience” that “affected” me when Alabama beat Georgia for the national championship back in January. Maybe I should demand to remove the Yellowhammer State from all maps so I don’t get “triggered”.

Our final story might belong in a column about “Great Moments in Government-Run Healthcare“, but it seems to fit well with today’s collection.

A humanist will lead a team of priests as the first atheist head chaplain in the history of the NHS. …Lindsay van Dijk is one of the youngest chaplains in the NHS and will lead three priests from the Church of England, Baptist and evangelical denominations… As a humanist, Ms van Dijk believes life is giving meaning by seeking happiness and helping others find happiness too. Humanists do not believe in God or an afterlife. …Ms van Dijk told the Times at Stoke Mandeville Hospital: ‘Anyone within the chaplaincy team goes to patients to lend a listening ear, to provide spiritual and emotional support, and doesn’t specifically say “I’m from this faith” as it’s not important. …She added that in her new role she has experienced ‘mostly curiousity’ rather than objections. …The chief executive of Christian Concern Andrea Williams said: …’Putting a humanist in charge of the chaplaincy team shows how far we have come from the Christian roots of the NHS.’

I never realized that there were “Christian roots” to government-run healthcare (if so, God must like needless death and terrible suffering).

But let’s set that aside and focus on the main story. I assume that NHS chaplains are actually government bureaucrats rather than local volunteers, so part of me is thinking this is a waste of money.

But I also am a bit perplexed by the notion of having an atheist chaplain. Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Why not hire the woman as “head grief counselor” or something like that?

Maybe it’s time to resuscitate my “U.S. vs U.K. inane-government-policy contest“.

P.S. The U.K. might have the lead in that contest because it actually has proven that a government can be so incompetent that it can’t even give away money.

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Bureaucrats Behaving Badly

Time for a confession.

I routinely mock bureaucrats, but I don’t really think they are any worse than other people. Indeed, I have plenty of friends and acquaintances who work for various levels of government and they are fundamentally decent people.

The real problem is that bureaucracies create bad incentives. So even people who are generally good will be tempted to exploit rules that reward bad behavior.

And some of these folks, operating in systems with bad incentives, will morph into bad people. Heck, some of them are so awful that I elect them to the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame.

But it’s also important to recognize other bureaucrats – as well as the perverse rules that encourage their bad actions.

Let’s start with a cop in New Jersey who went above and beyond the call of duty, at least if the call of duty involves ripping off taxpayers.

…former Police Chief Philip Zacche…could spend the first decade of his retirement in federal prison after he admitted to stealing $31,713 from an agency that serves the city’s neediest families. Federal prosecutors said Friday that Zacche filled out phony time sheets to get paid for security work that he never performed for the Jersey City Housing Authority. …As a member of the department’s brass, Zacche pulled a six-figure salary before overtime. He earned even more by working an off-duty part-time gig as a security officer for the Authority’s Marion Gardens housing development. When he retired in June, city taxpayers had to cut Zacche a check for $512,620 to compensate him for 450 unused comp and vacation days. The 61-year-old Manalapan resident is now set to collect a pension of at least $11,946 every month for the rest of his life.

That’s a pension of more than $140,000 per year. And he gets it well before age 65. No wonder New Jersey is a fiscal mess.

Let’s also highlight a senior federal bureaucrat who specialized in exploiting immigrants to steal money.

A chief counsel at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has admitted stealing immigrants’ identities to defraud banks. Raphael Sanchez, 44, forged identity documents on his government computer to open bank accounts and credit cards in the names of seven immigrants. He racked up more than $190,000 (£135,000) in personal loans, transferred funds and card-spending during the four-year scam. …He claimed three were dependent relatives on his tax returns for 2014 to 2016. …He resigned from his role at the ICE’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor after his crimes came to light.

I’m almost impressed by this guy’s depravity. Not only did he steal identities, but he even listed some of the victims as dependents on his tax return. That’s real chutzpah!

And notice that theft and fraud apparently are not enough to get a bureaucrat fired. Instead, he resigned.

And since we’re on the topic of bureaucrats doing bad things and not getting fired, we may as well note that the guy who sent the false alert in Hawaii is still getting checks from the taxpayers he terrified.

The worker who sent a false missile alert to Hawaiian residents on Saturday has reportedly been reassigned. The civil defence employee has been moved to another role, but not fired, according to multiplemedia reports. In a press conference on Saturday, the head of Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency, Vern Miyagi, said the worker “feels terrible.” …The Post also confirmed that there are no plans to fire the employee.

Here’s a fourth example, dealing with a former Obama appointee who was unmasked for screwing taxpayers.

Vikrum Aiyer liked to commute to his government job by taxi. On at least 130 occasions over two years — the majority during a four-month stretch in 2016 — the then-chief of staff for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office called a taxi to pick him up near his home in the District. He was chauffeured across the Potomac River 10 miles or so to the agency’s headquarters in downtown Alexandria. And then…Aiyer billed the government for each ride. To escape notice, Aiyer impersonated current and former high-level agency officials, writing their names on cab receipts and vouchers he submitted to the taxi company, which then billed the government, investigators found. …Aiyer…released a statement saying he had a “misunderstanding of agency taxi rules.”

Hmmm…, I think I’ll go to the grocery store later today and slip a couple of steaks into my jacket. If I get caught leaving the store, I’ll say I had a “misunderstanding of store rules.”

The good news, at least if we’re grading on a curve, is that it only took about two years for the government to realize what was happening.

Aiyer’s unauthorized rides apparently went unnoticed for at least two years by budget officials who reviewed the invoices from Alexandria Yellow Cab, which has a contract to provide authorized taxi services for agency officials. The patent office paid the taxi company more than $4,000 for Aiyer’s rides, the report says. …For most of the cab rides, Aiyer was picked up on a street corner a tenth of a mile from his home, according to the report. But he wrote on the invoice that he was leaving from Commerce Department headquarters in downtown Washington. …investigators found…that he “used the Agency’s Cab Company account to facilitate his weekend social activity… Aiyer also racked up $15,000 in expenses on his government-issued credit card, charging for food and drink at local bars, clubs, coffee shops, restaurants, grocery stores, dry cleaners and at least one liquor store, the report said. …The report says he also misstated his educational credentials on résumés he submitted to the Obama administration, claiming to have a postgraduate degree that he did not receive.

By the way, the article mentioned that Aiyer was a technology adviser for the White House. Did he advise on how to lie on your resume and how to get taxpayers to finance one’s social life?

A common problem in most of these stories is that politicians and bureaucrats conspire together to create rules that enable bad behavior.

Government employee unions, for instance, give lots of money to politicians and then sit down with those lawmakers to “negotiate” pay and benefit packages.

Needless to say, the interests of taxpayers don’t get represented. And that’s why many state and local governments are careening toward bankruptcy.

What’s especially discouraging is how these deals often include loopholes that are designed to be exploited.

For instance, the Los Angeles Times has a very depressing exposé showing how senior bureaucrats in the police and fire departments benefited from a scam allowing them to double dip. But not just double dip. They get extra compensation and oftentimes then don’t do any work.

When Capt. Tia Morris turned 50, after about three decades in the Los Angeles Police Department, she became eligible to retire with nearly 90% of her salary. But like many cops and firefighters in her position, the decision to keep working was a financial no-brainer, thanks to a program that allowed her to nearly double her pay by keeping her salary while also collecting her pension. A month after Morris entered the program, her husband, a detective, joined too. Their combined income for four years in the Deferred Retirement Option Plan was just shy of $2 million, city payroll records show. But the city didn’t benefit much from the Morrises’ experience: They both filed claims for carpal tunnel syndrome and other cumulative ailments about halfway through the program. She spent nearly two years on disability and sick leave; he missed more than two years… The couple spent at least some of their paid time off recovering at their condo in Cabo San Lucas.

Yes, I’m sure they were “recovering” at their luxurious place on the beach.

Just like the other bureaucrats who exploited the system.

The Morrises are far from alone. In fact, they’re among hundreds of Los Angeles police and firefighters who have turned the DROP program — which has doled out more than $1.6 billion in extra pension payments since its inception in 2002 — into an extended leave at nearly twice the pay… Former Police Capt. Daryl Russell, who collected $1.5 million over five years in the program, missed nearly three of those years because of pain from a bad knee, carpal tunnel and multiple injuries he claimed he suffered after falling out of an office chair. …Former firefighter Thomas Futterer, an avid runner who lives in Long Beach, hurt a knee “misstepping off the fire truck,” three weeks after entering DROP, according to city records. The injury kept him off the job for almost a full year.Less than two months after the knee injury, a Tom Futterer from Long Beach crossed the finish line of a half-marathon in Portland, Ore.

Yes, you read correctly. His knee supposedly was so damaged that he couldn’t work, but he nonetheless runs long-distance races.

I’m beginning to think that firefighters in big cities are the most cossetted of all bureaucrats. I now understand the hostility in this video.

Here’s some background on the DROP scam.

The idea of allowing retirement-age public employees to collect their pensions while working and receiving paychecks originated more than three decades ago in tiny East Baton Rouge, La. …the goal was the opposite: to discourage older employees from staying so long that they limited upward mobility for younger workers. And it had a two-year time limit. Since then, versions of the program have been adopted by dozens of states, counties and cities across the country. The details vary — some have short terms to encourage early retirement, others have long terms to retain experience — but the central appeal for employees is constant: two large checks instead of one. …former Mayor Richard Riordan…said: “Oh, yeah, that was a mistake…it’s total fraud.” …in recent years, a growing number of jurisdictions have abandoned or drastically scaled back DROP programs because the math doesn’t work. …Instead of saving money, or remaining “cost-neutral,” the programs lead to ballooning pension costs and accusations that employees are simply double-dipping.

Needless to say, the taxpayers who finance all this aren’t treated nearly as well as government insiders.

When most Los Angeles taxpayers reach the standard retirement age, 65, they face a stark choice: keep working and collecting their paychecks or quit and start collecting Social Security, which replaces only a small fraction of annual wages for most people.When city firefighters or police officers reach their retirement age, 50, the choices are far better. They can keep working for a paycheck, they can retire with up to 90% of their salary in pension and city-subsidized health insurance for life, or they can enter DROP. For many, the choice is easy. …they keep working and collecting their paychecks for up to five years while their pension checks are deposited into a special account. …the city guarantees 5% interest on the money in the account. The city also adds annual cost-of-living raises to the pension checks to make sure they keep pace with inflation.

Disgusting.

Let’s close by speculating whether Trump will do anything to fix this mess, at least the part that occurs on the federal level.

Some pro-Trump readers sent me this story from the Washington Post and suggested it shows that the President is making progress.

…a year into his takeover of Washington, President Trump has made a significant down payment on his campaign pledge to shrink the federal bureaucracy… By the end of September, all Cabinet departments except Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs and Interior had fewer permanent staff than when Trump took office in January — with most shedding many hundreds of employees, according to an analysis of federal personnel data… The falloff has been driven by an exodus of civil servants, a diminished corps of political appointees and an effective hiring freeze. …Federal workers fret that their jobs could be zeroed out amid buyouts and early retirement offers that already have prompted hundreds of their colleagues to leave, according to interviews with three dozen employees across the government. Many chafed as supervisors laid down new rules they said are aimed at holding poor performers and problem workers to account. …“Morale has never been lower,” said Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 federal workers at more than 30 agencies. “Government is making itself a lot less attractive as an employer.”……Agencies have told employees that they should no longer count on getting glowing reviews in their performance appraisals, according to staff in multiple offices, as has been the case for years. Housing and Urban Development managers, for example, are being evaluated for the first time on how effectively they address poor performers.

If I was planning to die in the next month, I would probably agree with readers that Trump made progress in this area.

But as I wrote last year, the only way to successfully shrink bureaucracy in the long run is to shrink government.

Yet Trump just capitulated to a budget deal that increases spending.

I’m willing to praise this President when he does good things, but his weak record on spending almost surely is going to translate into a bigger bureaucracy over time. Though I hope I’m wrong.

Here are two final additional passages from the story that deserve some attention. Starting with an honest bureaucrat.

…some civil servants said they welcome the focus on rooting out waste and holding federal workers to high standards. “Oftentimes we run on autopilot and continue to fund programs that don’t produce the results that were intended,” said Stephanie Valentine, a program analyst at the Education Department. “You can’t keep blindly spending because that’s what we’ve always done.”

And since I’ve previously contrasted Bill Clinton’s good record and Obama’s bad record, this passage is added confirmation of my findings.

Trump already has begun to reverse the growth of the Obama era, when the government added a total of 188,000 permanent employees, according to Office of Personnel Management data. …The last time federal employment dropped during a president’s first year, President Bill Clinton was in the White House.

It’s also worth noting that the bureaucracy didn’t contract during the big-government Bush years.

I’ll conclude by circling back to my original point. Most bureaucrats are no better or no worse than the rest of us. Given the perverse “public choice” incentives inherent in government, however, the good bureaucrats often are lured into bad behavior and the bad bureaucrats frequently become scam artists and crooks.

P.S. If my conclusion was too grim and pessimistic, you can cheer yourself up with another example of bureaucrat humor.

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From the British Isles, Great Moments in Foreign Government

One of the great insights of “public choice” is that politicians engage in self-serving behavior just like everyone else.

But there’s a profound difference between them and us. In the private economy, we can only make ourselves better off by providing value to others. In government, by contrast, politicians oftentimes make themselves better off by providing unearned benefits to various interest groups.

This elementary insight is a good starting point for those who want to understand how Washington (mal)functions.

And these behavioral insights don’t change when you cross national borders, which is why I periodically share examples of bizarre boondoggles as part of my series on “Great Moments in Foreign Government”. Here are some examples of prior editions.

• Paid sex breaks for bureaucrats in Sweden.
• The German spy agency employing a terrorist.
• Welfare payments for illegal polygamous marriages in the United Kingdom.
• Stopping kids from selling worms in Canada.
• Buying trains that are too wide for railway stations in France.
• Taxpayer-financed friends for mass killers in Norway.

Today, we have a special version of this series from the British Isles.

We’ll start with a story, from the U.K.-based Sunday Times, about a voluntary tax scheme in a rich part of London.

Westminster city council said it would be writing to 15,000 of its wealthiest homeowners asking them to make a voluntary donation on top of their council tax. The initiative comes amid warnings that a crisis in local government funding is likely to drive five councils into insolvency within the next 12 months, with 10 running out of money within two years. …The begging letters scheme, dubbed the “Westminster community contribution”, will see letters sent to all 15,000 band H properties, worth about £1m and above. Nickie Aiken, leader of Westminster council, said she had decided to tap the wealthy for donations because “they have asked me, ‘Why can’t we pay more council tax?’ We are giving people the option. It is an opportunity to invest in their neighbourhood.” …A total of 904 people replied.

My immediate reaction is that there are 904 nitwits in Westminster.

But, to be fair, it doesn’t say they responded by sending extra money to the local council. Maybe they scrawled obscenities on the notice and returned it, which would have been my preferred response.

But I’m guessing many of them did cough up some cash, which makes them more foolish than the taxpayers of Norway. And even more foolish than hypocritical leftists in the United States.

It’s also frustrating that there’s no data in the story on why local councils are feeling a budget pinch. I’m guessing that they’re in trouble because spending has climbed much faster than inflation (similar to what happened where I live in Fairfax County, Virginia). So why reward that overspending with additional payments?

Now let’s head across the Irish Sea.

The Irish Times has a story about how a program that supposedly was designed to help homeless people actually is lining the pockets of well-to-do property owners.

The Government’s homeless family hub solution is not only a short-term fix for a long-term crisis, it’s a shocking deal for taxpayers that benefits private operators. …doesn’t “hub” have a cosy ring to it? There will be a total of 18 family accommodation hubs in Dublin, nine of which include hotels and B&Bs already in use being “adapted”. …Let’s take the former Mater Dei site as a prime example. Dublin City Council (DCC) earmarked €4.5 million to refurbish the former college complex to house 50 families… Sources say the project is likely to substantially overrun due to “many extras”… The problem is, after ploughing millions into a magnificent revamp, the council must hand the property back to the archdiocese in less than three years. …This is mirrored in every one of the family hubs, the longest lease being just five years. It starts to look like an incredible deal for the private owners. They get back a terrifically refurbished, furnished and equipped building, paid for by taxpayers, that can be rented out for profit. Everything goes back to the owner… On top of the deal of a lifetime, DCC is paying rent on the site, a figure it described as “nominal” but not nominal enough to make public.

Cronies getting rich(er) thanks to programs that supposedly were designed to help the poor? As Inspector Renault said in Casablanca, “I’m shocked, shocked”!

Probably as shocked as he was to learn that Obamacare cost estimates were wrong and that childcare subsidies led to higher costs in the U.K.

Sadly, insiders always figure out how to line their pockets as government gets bigger. It’s a feature, not a bug.

Last but not least, let’s travel to Scotland.

In the U.K.-based Times, we learn that the government is so incompetent that it has a hard time ripping off European taxpayers for farm subsidies.

Scottish ministers have appealed to Europe for help in heading off a looming crisis in farm subsidy payments for the second year running. Discussions have taken place with the European Commission to set up “contingency plans” in case Scottish farmers once again missed out on their payouts. An extension to the end-of-the-month deadline for processing payments is vital if the Scottish government is to avoid being hit with millions of pounds in fines. …The first minister is likely to be asked what her government is doing to make sure farmers get their payments on time. Scottish ministers came in for extensive criticism last year after an IT failure delayed European agriculture subsidy payments to thousands of farmers.

What makes this story extra depressing is that the supposed Conservative opposition doesn’t question the wisdom of handouts.

…the Scottish government had asked for a deadline extension earlier this week, prompting anger from opposition politicians. Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Conservative leader,…added: “It’s a disgrace that so many farmers are still waiting for payments, and it looks like, for the second year running, the SNP is going to have to go cap-in-hand to Europe and ask for special treatment.”

And it goes without saying that the welfare recipients…oops, I mean farmers…are anxious to know when their handouts will arrive.

Scott Walker, the chief executive of the National Farmers’ Union in Scotland, said: “Everyone who is due a payment simply wants to know when it will arrive and that is a reasonable demand.”

Sigh.

One of the reasons I was sympathetic to Scottish independence is that the entitlement mindset in the country may have been disrupted if they lost subsidies from the central government in London. Redistribution isn’t as fun when you’re taking money from your own pockets.

However, that wouldn’t have put an end to handouts from the statists in Brussels, assuming that Scotland would have been part of the European Union. So I’ll never be without things to write about. That’s good for me, bad for Europe.

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Great Moments in State Government

States such as Illinois, California, New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey have very serious structural problems because of high tax burdens and unsustainable spending levels (often associated with excessive pay and benefits for bureaucrats).

I frequently write about those big issues, but I also like to periodically share examples of other bone-headed policies at the state level. These are not the types of policies that threaten bankruptcy, but they illustrate why it’s not a good idea to give power to politicians and bureaucrats.

• A threat of prison time in Indiana for rescuing a baby deer.
• An armed raid of an okra farm in Georgia.
• Spending more on bureaucracy than grants in Illinois.
• Corrupt insider dealing by a law firm in New York.

Here are some new examples.

We have a column in Forbes about the dangerous plague of unlicensed and unregulated (gasp!) cakes in New Jersey.

At first, she sold her baked goods to support her son’s school fundraisers. …Soon Heather started receiving requests from family, friends, sports fundraisers, and even a wedding venue. …With this business, Heather hoped she could pay for her son’s college education and one day open her own brick-and-mortar cake pop shop. Unfortunately, her dreams were dashed thanks to a law that exists only in New Jersey. Unlike 49 other states, selling baked goods made at home is illegal in the Garden State. Baking and selling just one cake, cookie or muffin risks fines as high as $1,000. When Heather learned she had to shut down her cake pop sideline, the news was “crushing,” she said.

As is so often the case when governments are suppressing liberty, “health and safety” is the excuse.

New Jersey’s main justification for the ban is to protect the public’s health and safety—a claim that’s belied by the fact that nearly every other state has a “cottage food” law on the books, which legalizes the sale of homemade cakes, cookies, jams and other food deemed “not potentially hazardous.” …In order to sell cake pops, cookies or other shelf-stable treats in New Jersey, Heather must either build a licensed “retail food establishment” separate from her home kitchen or she can rent a commercial kitchen, which can easily cost $35 an hour.

Fortunately, the Institute for Justice is fighting to overturn the law.

Heather and two other home bakers joined with the Institute for Justice and filed a lawsuit against the state earlier this month. …A similar IJ lawsuit has already defeated a pastry prohibition in Wisconsin. Over the summer, a Wisconsin judge struck down the state’s ban on selling home-baked goods because there was “no real or substantial connection” between the law and public safety. …In his ruling, Lafayette Circuit Court Judge Duane Jorgenson noted that the ban protected established businesses from greater competition, which is why groups like the Wisconsin Bakers Association heavily backed the law. …Those rulings followed a 2015 IJ court victory on behalf of home bakers in Minnesota, which galvanized the state to expand its cottage food laws. Now the state boasts over 3,000 cottage food producers.

Notice, by the way, that protecting an established interest group was the real purpose of the law. In other words, the law was basically similar to schemes for occupational licensing.

This next item is so strange that I wonder whether it is somehow fake. But I also suspect it’s too bizarre to be fake. In any event, I wonder about the reason for this government-mandated notice?!? And if you find a (gasp!) vending machine without the notice, what purpose is served by calling the number? And do the bureaucrats expect people to memorize the number in case they stumble upon a rogue vending machine?!?

Oh, and how long before some people figure out how to remove the notice and then call the government in hopes of getting the “cash reward”?

If anybody knows the answer to any of these questions, feel free to share your thoughts. In the meantime, I’ll simply assume that the notice presumably isn’t as pointless and stupid at this pedestrian sign and definitely not as creepy and malevolent as this “public service” notice.

Next, we have a story from ABC News about taxpayer-funded generosity to pets in Michigan.

A dog in western Michigan has been approved for unemployment benefits — and he’d be bringing in a cool $360 a week. Michael Haddock, of Saugatuck, Michigan, says he received a letter on Saturday from the State of Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency (UIA) addressed to Michael Ryder, according to Grand Rapids ABC affiliate WZZM. Michael is his name. Ryder is his dog’s name. …Haddock says the employer listed on the letter was a restaurant chain in Metro Detroit. After receiving the letter, Haddock contacted the restaurant chain and the state unemployment office. …The Michigan UIA announced Tuesday it was creating a special investigative unit to handle the recent increase in fake unemployment claims. The agency attributes many of the claims to recent data breaches. Haddock isn’t sure how scammers got his dog’s name.

I’m clearly behind the times. I have some cats that need to sign up for handouts!

On a more serious note, I confess that I’m not aware of the degree to which unemployment benefits are fraudulent. Hopefully it’s not as bad as the EITC, though I’m confident that problem is bigger than politicians and bureaucrats would ever admit.

And why would folks in the government even care? After all, it’s our money they’re squandering rather than their own. And Milton Friedman educated us on what that means.

From the perspective of good public policy, though, the real problem with such benefits (as personalized here and here) is that they lure people into extended periods of joblessness.

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The Nanny State’s War to Lower the Quality of Life

Considering that America’s Founders created a very small central government that operated for more than 100 years without any income tax (or any other broad-based tax), it’s very disappointing that Washington is now consuming more that 20 percent of our nation’s output.

That’s bad for growth since resources are diverted from the productive sector of the economy.

But let’s also keep in mind that politicians also impose policies that may not have much impact on GDP statistics, but definitely reduce our quality of life.

I’ve written about some of these annoying bits of red tape.

• Inferior light bulbs
• Substandard toilets
• Inadequate washing machines
• Crummy dishwashers
• Dribbling showers

Jeffrey Tucker, in a column for the Foundation for Economic Education, shares my disdain for the nanny state.

Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.

And he points out another item to add to our list.

We now have gas cans that don’t work nearly as well as they used to because of mindless bureaucracy.

Who would make a can without a vent unless it was done under duress? After all, everyone knows to vent anything that pours. Otherwise, it doesn’t pour right and is likely to spill. …The whole trend began in (wait for it) California. …The notion spread and was picked up by the EPA, which is always looking for new and innovative ways to spread as much human misery as possible. …So…you have not been able to buy gas cans that work properly. They are not permitted to have a separate vent. The top has to close automatically.

Environmental zealots tell us we need these poorly functioning gas cans to save the environment from vapor.

But as Tucker explains, the policy is backfiring.

…don’t tell me about spillage. It is far more likely to spill when the gas is gurgling out in various uneven ways, when one spout has to both pour and suck in air. …There is no possible rationale for these kinds of regulations. It can’t be about emissions really, since the new cans are more likely to result in spills.

Amen.

This is a never-ending nightmare when I mow my lawn. When it’s time to refill the gas tank, I know gas is going to spill regardless of how careful I am.

I can’t imagine that’s good for the environment (I’m sure it releases far more vapor than would seep into the atmosphere with a vent), but I confess that my main concern is that gas dribbles onto a hot lawnmower engine. So I’m always poised to run away from my mower if the thing bursts into flame.

Oh, the joy of red tape!

Writing for Forbes, Clyde Wayne Crews also has commented on this inane and counter-productive regulation.

…when I first tried to use these new gas cans a few months after purchase I was shocked at their new spring-loaded, Mousetrap game style…spouts. …You need three hands to operate today’s gas can spouts. You’ll start each project spilling more gas than you get into the mower, motorcycle, car or whichever. In other words, you will create more vapor emissions than you ever would have otherwise. …No gas cans available for sale anymore have vents on the opposite top-side either, so when trying to pour you get a sloshing, heaving mess, burping gasoline eruptions leaking from the complex yet flimsy spout that easily breaks.

But Wayne very helpfully proposes a solution…assuming one is willing to incur a small risk.

…in order to harm the Earth less with a normal, non-polluting spout, I was wondering about workarounds for the inhumane, vapor-spewing trick spouts the environmentally unfriendly EPA forces you to buy to increase pollution. With a bit of searching, I found so-called EZ Pour “water” jugs. Note: You and I cannot use these alternatives to pour gasoline into vehicles or equipment, since that is an illegal non-EPA bureaucrat-approved hack, but they can be used to pour “liquid,” however.

The EPA can have our EZ Pour jugs when they pry them from our cold, dead, non-polluting fingers!

I had some fun in 2013 by pointing out that when they outlaw tanks, only outlaws will have tanks. Who could have predicted we’d be saying the same thing about well-functioning gas cans?

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The Medicaid Scam: Higher Taxes Are an “Investment” to Generate More Spending

I don’t like it when voters support tax increases.

Needless to say, voters rarely if ever vote to raise their own taxes. Instead, they get seduced into robbing their neighbors in exchange for the promise of new goodies from politicians.

Regardless, it’s still very unfortunate when it happens because it shows an erosion in the American spirit (we should be more like Switzerland!).

I raise this issue because the people of Oregon just gave fairly strong support to a tax-hike referendum. Here are some of the details.

…voters approved hundreds of millions of dollars in health care taxes in a special election. Measure 101, which led 62 percent to 38 percent with returns partially tallied, was the only issue on the ballot. It will raise $210 million to $320 million in taxes on Oregon’s largest hospitals and many health insurance policies by 2019.

At first glance, this is just another example of Oregon voters voting for bigger government and more class warfare.

But as you read further in the story, you’ll find something remarkable.

…the tax deal was a victory for…the health care industry, which bankrolled the “yes” campaign. …The largest contributor to the campaign to pass the taxes was the association that represents Oregon hospitals. Other health care companies also spent heavily to pass the measure.

Huh? Why would an industry support and bankroll an initiative to give more of their money to government?!?

It turns out that the industry isn’t filled with masochists (like the neurotic trust fund leftists who posture in favor of higher taxes). Instead, the special interests such as the hospital lobby viewed a couple of hundred million of taxes as an “investment” that will generate about $1 billion of taxpayer-financed loot.

…the health care industry…will benefit from the resulting $1 billion-plus that will be spent on Oregonians’ health care. …

And taxpayers in other states will pick up a majority of the tab!

That tax revenue will enable Oregon to qualify for $630 million to $960 million in federal Medicaid matching funds that benefit the state’s health care industry. …state taxes would allow the state to keep federal matching funds.

This scam was exposed last year in a Wall Street Journal column.

…42 states tax hospitals. Why? One answer is the perverse incentives built into the Medicaid law. When a state returns tax money to hospitals through Medicaid “supplemental payments,” it qualifies for matching funds from Washington. …Medicaid supplemental payments, as the term implies, are separate and distinct from the reimbursements that cover the actual cost of services rendered to beneficiaries. But the federal government turns a blind eye to the circular nature of the arrangement: Hospitals and other providers are both the source and the recipient of most of the funds.

Here are more details on this oleaginous ripoff.

…supplemental-payment schemes…“have the effect of shifting costs to the federal government,” according to a 2014 study by the Governmental Accountability Office. The more a state taxes its hospitals and then gives them money back, the more federal funds it can obtain. …The hospital tax is the biggest revenue-raiser, but 44 states also tax nursing homes, and 34 tax at least one other type of health-care provider. The GAO study found that these taxes had almost doubled nationally, from about $9.5 billion in 2008 to $18.5 billion in 2012.

By the way, I have written on this topic before, and even included a handy infographic that explains a version of the scam.

Let’s now return to the column. The author cites an example from Connecticut.

Connecticut hospitals will pay $900 million in taxes, but the state will offset that with $600 million in supplemental Medicaid payments—matched with $450 million of federal funds. The state keeps those matching funds, plus the $300 million from the hospital tax, meaning Hartford comes out ahead in the whole scheme by $750 million. Nice work if you can get it.

I’m not a fan of my home state, but the Nutmeg State is hardly alone is playing this game.

What’s remarkable is that there are 8 states what don’t participate in the ripoff.

Anyhow, I can’t resist making one final point. Here’s a sordid tidbit from the earlier story about what happened in Oregon.

Democrats in the Oregon House helped achieve the deal by agreeing to fund three projects in a Medford Republican’s district, in exchange for that lawmaker providing the lone Republican “yes” vote in the state House.

One more piece of evidence that Republicans often are the most despicable people.

P.S. While today’s column focused on an odious quirk in the Medicaid program, let’s not lose sight of the forest by fixating on this particular tree. The reason we should care is that Medicaid is an initiative-sapping, money-draining program that greatly contributes to the mess in our overall healthcare system.

P.P.S. Which is why I encourage folks to watch the short video I narrated on the program. Pay close attention to the discussion that starts at 1:48. I explain that programs with both federal and state spending create perverse incentives for even more spending (e.g., what I wrote today). This is mostly because politicians in either Washington or state capitals can expand eligibility and take full credit for new handouts while only being responsible for a portion of the costs.

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Government Run Amok at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) must be anxious to get on my list of government bureaucracies that shouldn’t exist.

The bureaucrats have engaged in some really silly and petty behavior (such as confiscating Airsoft toy guns because they might be machine guns), and they’ve engaged in some behavior that is criminally stupid and dangerous (running guns to Mexican drug gangs as part of the “Fast and Furious” fiasco).

Now we have another example. Though it’s so bizarre that I’m not sure how to classify it. Basically, the bureaucrats created an illegal slush fund, and then used the money illegally.

The New York Times has been on top of this story. Here are excerpts from the latest report.

For seven years, agents at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives followed an unwritten policy: If you needed to buy something for one of your cases, do not bother asking Washington. Talk to agents in Bristol, Va., who controlled a multimillion-dollar account unrestricted by Congress or the bureaucracy. …thousands of pages of newly unsealed records reveal a widespread scheme — a highly unorthodox merger of an undercover law enforcement operation and a legitimate business. What began as a way to catch black-market cigarette dealers quickly transformed into a nearly untraceable A.T.F. slush fund that agents from around the country could tap. …One agent steered hundreds of thousands of dollars in real estate, electronics and money to his church and his children’s sports teams, records show. …At least tens of millions of dollars moved through the account before it was shut down in 2013, but no one can say for sure how much. The government never tracked it.

Oh, by the way, the BATF was breaking the law.

Federal law prohibits mixing government and private money. The A.T.F. now acknowledges it can point to no legal justification for the scheme.

But you won’t be surprised to learn that there have been no consequences.

…no one was ever prosecuted, Congress was only recently notified, and the Justice Department tried for years to keep the records secret.

And it’s also worth noting that this is also a tax issue. As I’ve noted before, high tax rates encourage illegality.

Though cigarettes are available at any corner store, they are extraordinarily profitable to smuggle. That’s because taxes are high and every state sets its own rates. Virginia charges $3 per carton. New York charges $43.50. The simplest scheme — buying cigarettes in Virginia and selling them tax-free in New York — can generate tens of thousands of dollars in illicit cash. By some estimates, more than half of New York’s cigarettes come from the black market.

By the way, I can help but wonder why the federal government is engaging in all sorts of dodgy behavior to help enforce bad state tax laws. Yes, I realize the cigarettes are crossing state lines, but so what? The illegal (but not immoral) behavior occurs when an untaxed cigarette is sold inside the borders of, say, New York. Why should Washington get involved?

In other words, I like the fact that borders limit the power of government. It’s why I don’t like global schemes to undermine tax competition (why should Swiss banks be required to enforce bad U.S. tax law?), and it’s why I don’t like the so-called Marketplace Fairness Act (why should merchants in one state be required to enforce the sales taxes of other states?).

But I’m digressing.

Let’s get back to the Bureau’s misbehavior. Here’s some additional reporting from the U.K.-based Times.

A US government crime-fighting agency ran a secret bank account that its employees used to buy luxury cars, property and trips to casinos. Officers for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), charged with investigating smuggling and gun crimes, built up a slush fund worth tens of millions of dollars through illicit cigarette sales, ostensibly as part of an operation to catch traffickers. The scandal is the latest controversy to hit the agency, which has been criticised in recent years for lack of accountability and allowing the flow of guns and drugs to go unchecked. …Cash from the slush fund generated at an ATF field office in Bristol, Virginia, …funded activities such as a trip to Las Vegas, donations to agents’ children and the booking of a $21,000 suite at a Nascar race.

And what about the overall BATF bureaucracy? Well, it’s getting some unfavorable attention. Keep in mind that this scandal is on top of the “Fast and Furious” scandal of the Obama years.

The ATF has said that it has “implemented substantial enhancements to its policies, and has markedly improved leadership, training, communication, accountability and operational oversight”. Under the previous administration, it was widely derided for a botched weapons operation known as “Fast and Furious”. The agency allowed licensed firearms dealers to sell weapons to illegal buyers, hoping to track the guns to Mexican drug cartel kingpins. But out of the 2,000 firearms sold, only a fraction have been traced. The secret account scandal has renewed calls from across the political spectrum for the department of about 2,000 agents to be reformed or shut down.

Last but not least, I think we have a new member of the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame.

Thomas Lesnak, a senior ATF investigator, began the scheme. …Mr Lesnak retired with his pension and was not reprimanded.

Just like Lois Lerner and the IRS, engaging in corrupt and crooked behavior and then escaping any punishment.

Maybe the two of them should hook up? They’d make a great couple. I’m sure they could even figure out a way to make taxpayers finance their wedding and honeymoon.

P.S. The “Fast and Furious” scheme was just one of scandals that occurred during the Obama years, but it may have been the most foolish. Didn’t anybody at the BATF realize that it wasn’t a good idea to funnel weapons to Mexican drug gangs?!?

P.P.S. The silver lining to that dark cloud is that we got a couple of good one-liners about the Obama Administration’s gun-running scandal from Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon.

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Taxpayers Are Getting Drowned by Government-Subsidized Flood Insurance

Government subsidies have an unfortunate habit of causing widespread economic damage and often result in huge burdens for taxpayers (though sometimes consumers are the ones getting pillaged).

• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac subsidies contributed to a massive housing bubble that destabilized the entire financial system.
• Means-tested subsidies have undermined progress on poverty by trapping people in long-run government dependency.
• Direct and indirect healthcare subsidies have created a huge third-party payer problem and led to high costs and inefficiency.
• Agriculture subsidies impose heavy costs on both consumers and taxpayers to reward large, politically connected agribusinesses.
• Federal subsidies for higher education have helped colleges fund more bureaucracy and saddled students with higher tuition.
• Unemployment subsidies increase and extend joblessness by giving people money so long as they don’t obtain a new position.

The common thread is that government intervention interferes with the normal operation of the price system and thus leads to distortions since markets are prevented from functioning properly.

Let’s add another example, and it’s very timely because of the flooding in Texas. The federal government subsidizes flood insurance. And it does so in a way that is bad for taxpayers and bad for the environment, while also giving a windfall to rich people and putting lives at risk.

That’s an impressive list, even by government standards.

In a must-read column for USA Today, my old friend Jim Bovard is very critical of the program.

Hurricane Harvey…offers the clearest lesson why Congress should not perpetuate the federal National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)… The ravages in Houston and elsewhere would be far less if the federal government had not offered massively subsidized flood insurance in high risk, environmentally perilous locales. …NFIP embraced a “flood-rebuild-repeat” model that has spawned an almost $25 billion debt.

And when Jim says “flood-rebuild-repeat,” he’s not joking.

NFIP paid to rebuild one Houston home 16 times in 18 years, spending almost a million dollars to perpetually restore a house worth less than $120,000. Harris County, Texas (which includes Houston), has almost 10,000 properties which have filed repetitive flood insurance damage claims. The Washington Post recently reported that a house “outside Baton Rouge, valued at $55,921, has flooded 40 times over the years, amassing $428,379 in claims.

And he points out that the program is reverse class warfare.

Flood insurance subsidies benefit well-off households, and payouts disproportionately go to areas with much higher than average home values. Working stiffs in Idaho and Oklahoma are taxed to underwrite mansions for the elite. …NBC News revealed in 2014 that FEMA revised its flood maps to give 95%+ discounted insurance premiums to “hundreds of oceanfront condo buildings and million-dollar homes,” including properties on its “repetitive loss list.”

My colleague Chris Edwards has a comprehensive study of the federal government’s role in disaster relief. Here’s some of what he wrote about the history of subsidized flood insurance.

In 1968 the National Flood Insurance Act offered federal insurance to properties at risk for flooding. A key justification by supporters of federal flood insurance was that it would alleviate the need to pass special aid legislation after each flood disaster. As it has turned out, however, taxpayers are now both subsidizing flood insurance and paying for special relief bills passed after floods. …NFIP was supposed to save taxpayers money by alleviating the need for Congress to pass emergency aid packages after floods. Taxpayers were also not supposed to be burdened by the program itself because insurance premiums were to cover the system’s costs. Also, the NFIP included floodplain regulations that are imposed on communities adopting the program. These regulations were supposed to mitigate the harm from floods. None of the promises panned out. …Most importantly, rather than reducing the nation’s flooding problems, the NFIP has likely made flood damage worse by encouraging more development in hazardous areas. Since 1970, the estimated number of Americans living in coastal areas designated as Special Flood Hazard Areas (SFHAs) by FEMA has increased from 10 million to more than 16 million. Subsidized flood insurance has backfired by helping to draw more people and development into flood zones.

To add insult to injury, the program is poorly run.

The GAO has had the NFIP on its “high-risk” list of troubled programs for years. …In recent years, the program has accumulated more than $24 billion in debt because payouts have far exceeded premiums. Today, the program is in financial crisis and taxpayers will likely bear the burden of its large debt. The NFIP’s financial shortcomings are typical of government-run businesses. Unlike private insurance, the NFIP charges artificially low rates, does not build capital surpluses, and does not purchase reinsurance to cover catastrophic losses. …The GAO says that “by design, NFIP is not an actuarially sound program.” …A 2011 insurance industry study found that overall NFIP premiums are only half the level needed to cover the system’s full costs, and property owners in high-risk areas pay just one-third of full market rates.

But the biggest problem is that the program encourages imprudent – and even dangerous – behavior.

…artificially low rates subsidize people to live in high-risk flood areas. …NFIP is that it has encouraged development in hazardous areas. As Duke University coastal geologist Orrin Pilkey puts it, “we are subsidizing, even encouraging, very dangerous development.” Federal flood insurance has incentivized individuals and developers to build in hazardous areas…more lives and property are put in harm’s way.

And the program has plenty of repeat business.

…some property owners repeatedly rebuild in hazardous locations knowing that the government will bail them out after each flood. Repetitive loss properties account for only about 1 percent of all policies, but are responsible for about one-third of all NFIP claims. …One Mississippi home valued at $69,900 has flooded 34 times since 1978, and the owner has received $663,000 in NFIP payments over the years.

Here’s an image from Reddit’s libertarian page. Very appropriate given today’s topic.

An article for The Week looks specifically at how the program lured the people of Houston into taking excessive risk.

Why would the practical, fiscally conservative people of Texas anchor their financial security in houses that are now literally underwater? …a major culprit is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and specifically its subsidiary, the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). …Well-meaning but drenched in perverse incentives, they are complicit in the horrifying destruction now racking the Texas gulf coast. …a normal insurance company would jack up the premium price to cover the high risk of floodplain construction, thus discouraging vulnerable building plans among those who cannot afford to cover the cost of disaster, the NFIP will insure this construction at a discount. …an artificially low premium like the NFIP offers cruelly deludes homeowners into believing their flood-prone houses are far safer than they are. …NFIP has taxpayers subsidizing unrealistically low premiums that incentivize new construction on dangerous land, and its discounts are available even to wealthy homeowners with pricey properties. “About 80 percent of NFIP households are in counties that rank in the top income quintile,” notes a recent report at Politico, and “[w]ealthier households also tend to receive larger subsidies.”

How do we solve this government-created problem?

With the same answer that Chris gave.

Axing the NFIP and transitioning back to private flood insurance, with its accurate risk signaling, is much overdue.

Writing for Reason, Ronald Bailey explains the perverse incentives created by the program.

The main lesson that the public and policymakers ought to learn from Harvey is: Don’t build in flood plains, and especially don’t rebuild in flood plains. Unfortunately, the flood insurance program teaches the exact opposite lesson, selling subsidized insurance whose premiums do not come close to covering the risks home and business owners in flood prone areas face. As a result, the NFIP is currently $25 billion in debt. Federally subsidized flood insurance represents a moral hazard, Kevin Starbuck, Assistant City Manager and former Emergency Management Coordinator for the City of Amarillo, argues, because it encourages people to take on more risk because taxpayers bear the cost of those hazards.

And, in many cases, bear those costs over and over and over again.

Federal Emergency Management Agency data shows that from 1978 through 2015, 3.8 percent of flood insurance policyholders have filed repetitively for losses that account for a disproportionate 35.5 percent of flood loss claims and 30.5 percent of claim payments, Starbuck says.

The solution, once again, is obvious.

…taxpayers should not be required to subsidize people who choose to build and live on flood plains. When Congress reauthorizes the NFIP, it should initiate a phase-in of charging grandfathered properties premiums commensurate with their risks. This will likely lower the market values of affected homes and businesses and thus send a strong signal to others to avoid building and living in such risky areas.

A couple of months ago, before Harvey, the Wall Street Journal presciently opined about the downside of government-provided flood insurance.

A classic example of government dysfunction is a federal insurance program that helps pay to drain basements in millions of America’s second homes. …The 1968 program insures more than $1 trillion in property, with about five million policies in 2016 for those who live in areas prone to flooding. The program is more than $24 billion in debt. One reason for the hole is that about 20% of policies are directly subsidized. More than 75% of such policies are in counties in the top 30% for home values, according to a Government Accountability Office analysis, and many dot the affluent coasts of Florida, California and Texas. In other words, this is a wealth transfer from low and middle-income families to the folks who own real estate on Nantucket. …The best reform would be to convert the program into a private operation, though Members of both parties would pile together like sandbags to block it.

The editorial noted that Representative Jeb Hensarling, Chairman of the Financial Services Committee, has tried to limit the program. Since he’s a Texan, it will be interesting to see if his pro-market principles remain in the aftermath of Harvey (based on his record, I’m guessing yes).

In another Reason column, Katherine Mangu-Ward put together a list of things politicians shouldn’t do once the storm is over.

Here are a few things Trump and his pals absolutely shouldn’t do in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, but probably will: …Increase funding for the federal flood insurance program. When it comes time to rebuild, everyone will studiously avoid discussing the fact that maybe we shouldn’t be using a massive federal insurance program to incentivize building in areas that are repeatedly hit by storms. There’s a reason private insurers don’t offer policies to many coastal dwellers, and it ain’t “market failure.”

Needless to say, I’m not optimistic that her advice will be heeded.

Though you would think some Democrats would be on the correct side, if for no other reason than the program is a big fat subsidy for rich people.

One of those fat cats even confessed that the program is a boondoggle that lines his pockets. Here are some excerpts from a 2004 column by John Stossel.

…the biggest welfare queens are the already wealthy. Their lobbyists fawn over politicians, giving them little bits of money — campaign contributions, plane trips, dinners, golf outings — in exchange for huge chunks of taxpayers’ money.

John then confesses that he put his snout if the taxpayer trough.

I got some of your money too. …In 1980 I built a wonderful beach house. Four bedrooms — every room with a view of the Atlantic Ocean. It was an absurd place to build, right on the edge of the ocean. All that stood between my house and ruin was a hundred feet of sand. My father told me: “Don’t do it; it’s too risky. No one should build so close to an ocean.” But I built anyway. Why? As my eager-for-the-business architect said, “Why not? If the ocean destroys your house, the government will pay for a new one.” What? Why would the government do that? Why would it encourage people to build in such risky places? That would be insane. But the architect was right. If the ocean took my house, Uncle Sam would pay to replace it under the National Flood Insurance Program. Since private insurers weren’t dumb enough to sell cheap insurance to people who built on the edges of oceans or rivers, Congress decided the government should step in and do it. …I did have to pay insurance premiums, but they were dirt cheap — mine never exceeded a few hundred dollars a year.

Lots of rich people like this subsidy.

The insurance, of course, has encouraged more people to build on the edges of rivers and oceans. …Subsidized insurance goes to movie stars in Malibu, to rich people in Kennebunkport (where the Bush family has its vacation compound), to rich people in Hyannis (where the Kennedy family has its), and to all sorts of people like me who ought to be paying our own way.

John was even an example of the “flood-rebuild-repeat” syndrome.

…just four years after I built my house, a two-day northeaster swept away my first floor. …After the water receded, the government bought me a new first floor. Federal flood insurance payments are like buying drunken drivers new cars after they wreck theirs. I never invited you taxpayers to my home. You shouldn’t have to pay for my ocean view.

More than once!

On New Year’s Day, 1995, …The ocean had knocked down my government-approved flood-resistant pilings and eaten my house. It was an upsetting loss for me, but financially I made out just fine. You paid for the house — and its contents.

Though now another rich person will get the subsidy.

I could have rebuilt the beach house and possibly ripped you taxpayers off again, but I’d had enough. I sold the land. Now someone’s built an even bigger house on my old property. Bet we’ll soon have to pay for that one, too.

Let’s close with some systematic data on the regressivity of the program.

Two of my other colleagues, Ike Brannon and Ari Blask, authored a study on the flood insurance program. They covered lots of material, but here’s what they wrote about poor-to-rich redistribution.

Wealthier households benefit disproportionately from the reduced average cost of flood insurance brought about by government intervention. Of course, not all NFIP-insured properties are high value, but insured homes are on average more valuable than noninsured homes. …In 2007, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) published a report containing statistics on the average and median values of properties in the NFIP. …The median value of properties in the NFIP exceeded the median value of an American home across all four categories, as shown in Table 1. …40 percent of coastal properties receiving subsidies were worth more than $500,000 and 12 percent were worth more than $1 million. …Comparisons of NFIP premiums with potential private premiums show that NFIP policyholders with the most risk exposure tend to receive the largest subsidy, with 80 percent of explicit subsidy recipients living in counties in the top income quintile.

And here’s Table 1 from their study.

My guide to having an ethical bleeding heart is very straightforward.

If taking money from rich people to give to poor people is wrong, then taking money from poor people to line the pockets of rich people is utterly reprehensible.

I’ll write in the near future about why the federal government shouldn’t be involved in disaster relief. But I wanted to specifically highlight the wretched impact of subsidized flood insurance because it is such a perverse example of how government promotes unjust inequality.

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