Some rambling about dumbass government proposals

Anyone who knows me or has been following my blogs knows that I am a strong believer in open free markets as long as two things are true:

> people are given enough information to make informed choices
> there are no externalities that cause my free choice to harm someone else or
prevent them from making their own free choice.

My background in human factors also gives me a good insight into the predictably irrational (thanks Dan Ariely) nature of a lot of human behavior.

This combination often makes me cringe about the workings of government. I know that politicians are not also experts in things like economics or human factors. So I could excuse them if they, as individuals, didn’t understand some of the consequences of their proposals. But they had staffs loaded with people who can look this stuff up. They can call in experts from any field for advice, either informally or to testify at Congressional hearings. And yet, we still get these foolish proposals day after day.

I heard that Nancy Pelosi today decided that the solution to the health care crisis is a windfall tax on health insurance companies. I wish the term “windfall tax” would be removed from the lexicon completely. Profitability and success should never be a criterion for higher corporate taxes.

There is also the FCC’s drive for net neutrality. A good neutrality rule would allow bandwidth providers to charge based on the bandwidth used by the content provider, but to do it anonymously (hence the “neutral” part). But to say that they can’t differentiate on price in any way is simply ridiculous.

The Supreme Court has some important issues on its plate this term as well. My free market principles tell me that government should not ban any activities without a very good reason. So what about Chicago’s ban on handguns? I think there are reasons for some kinds of gun bans. Even though “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” there is very little reason for someone to have an assault rifle, even for hunting. So banning these seems like it is worth losing a little freedom for the great benefit of getting these off the streets. But to ban all handguns in the entire city? This might be going a bit too far.

And there is also the case regarding the government ceded a small bit of a park to the VFW so the cross can be maintained without violated the separation of church and state. This seems pretty underhanded to me. The government gave only the few square feet of land under the cross to the VFW and only on the condition that they keep the cross there and do whatever maintenance is required. The rest of the park is still government territory. But because the government now doesn’t own the land, there is no first amendment problem. If this is permitted, the government can get around just about every limitation on government action there is, just be privatizing some piece of the process. I usually don’t buy the slippery slope argument, but this would scare me a bit.

Finally, there is the new evidence regarding the NY city law about having nutritional information posted in restaurants. I have blogged about this before, and now we have a real life example of what I have been talking about. It turns out that surveys of NY eaters say that the posted information does affect their choices. But not how you might think if you haven’t read my other blog posts. Just as research has shown, people order main courses with fewer calories. But then they reward themselves for their good choices by ordering more high calorie side dishes, drinks and desserts. So the net change is minimal, or even higher calorie in total. Oops. But the people who may be helped by this are people who really care about their nutrition who can now make truly informed decisions. They eat less because previously they had no clue just how bad some of those meals are. Maybe that’s an OK tradeoff.