The Wizard just gazed into his crystal ball got out of a meeting with a vendor at work. The vendor in question just sold $17 million worth of widgets to Facebook. The reason for this? I learned the following stuff about Facebook's website:
1) Facebook users spend 16 billion minutes on the website every day.
2) Facebook users click on over 1 million photographs that are hosted on the site every second.
Wow! Now that's some wizardry!
On Friday, July 16th 2010, the Houston Property Rights Association welcomed Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos as its speaker. The Wizard had set up a Facebook event for Attorney Lykos's event, ergo her speech managed to attract several dozen new faces that we had never seen before. It was a successful event.
Mrs. Lykos didn't really need an introduction to the audience, as she is a well known local and state politics. She has spent her working career in law enforcement and criminal justice, starting as a police officer, then working her way through law school. Later she became a criminal court judge before eventually winning election as Harris County District Attorney.
The Wizard didn't take detailed notes on Lykos's speech, but The Wizard found Lykos to be a refreshing speaker. After having spent many years attending public meetings and lunches, and hearing untold numbers of windbag speakers and audience members talk at such events, Lykos proved to be direct and to the point. When several audience members raised their hands and started going off tangent on issues that had little or nothing to do with the topics being discussed at hand, as many people are won't to do, Lykos would get straight to the point in dealing with such people. She would summarize their remarks, answer them, and move on to the next person. She is the type of person who doesn't like people wasting their time or her time and the Wizard doesn't doubt that this comes from Ms. Lykos having spent years as a judge sitting on the bench.
Several matters Lykos touched on were:
1) The Harris County District Attorney office employs some 300 attorneys and support staff that sift through scores of thousands of cases every year, whereas Lykos told the audience that Cook County (Chicago) has more than three times as many personnel with only twice the population of Harris County.
Without having a thorough knowledge of the situation, it's hard for the Wizard to judge whether hiring more prosecutors and support staff would result in better criminal justice, or would it result in what would effectively amount to zero marginal productivity from the extra prosecutors and staff.
2) The 2010 budget for the DA's office was reduced by the Harris County Commissioner's Court from $60 million to $54 million. It blows the Wizard's mind that the DA's budget is that small. The DA's office is only 4 percent of the Harris County commissioners budget.
3) Lykos briefly addressed the issues of drugs and rehabilitation. Lykos argues that we do not do enough for rehabilitation, and that is socially costly as falling back into that kind of life often causes one's life to go downhill. On drugs, Lykos is a conservative. She flatly stated that anyone who thinks that drug legalization is the answer to the drug issue had not seen anyone on methamphetamines. Nobody brought up the crack pipe policy, though in all fairness nobody probably had that issue on their minds beforehand.
4) Lykos cited a number of prominent cases, including various sex offender cases where her office had worked with a number of local, state, federal, and international law enforcement bodies to bring people to justice. One person made a criticism on whether this was good use of tax dollars, but Lykos stated that criminals needed to be shown that fleeing would not save them from justice.
5) A regional crime lab. Lykos campaigned on support for a regional crime lab. The Wizard has written some thoughts on whether a regional crime lab would be better than what we have now for crime labs or whether we would merely be transferring the problems we have today to a new regional lab. However, Lykos did say that the City of Houston and Harris County were in negotiations over a regional lab, but more importantly she stated that the cost of a new lab would only be a few million dollars.
Just days after Lykos spoke to HPRA, the Houston Chronicle carried a story reminding the public that the Houston Police Department still has a backlog of over 4,000 rape test kits dating back to 1996, on top of nearly 1,000 new criminal cases that await DNA testing. Then came the case of Allen Wayne Porter, which DNA evidence showed could not link him to a rape crime where an eyewitness identified him as being the perpetrator.
The Chronicle story on Lykos's call for a temporary DNA lab mentioned that the Houston Police Department applied for a $1.1 million federal grant to help clear up the backlog of DNA cases under HPD's jurisdiction. That's right folks - only $1.1 million, and somehow we can't find the money to clear up backlogs of cases for rape victims. The Houston City Council recently approved a $4.2 billion budget, Metro owes the City of Houston $160 million in back payments but is still too busy wanting to build trains, and America has a federal government that is now running annual deficits of over $1 trillion per year!
Lykos mentioned that if we were to rectify this injustice to criminal victims (and the accused) - and this clearly is an injustice - then Houstonians are going to have to start lobbying Houston City Council and the County Commissioners to get this backlog taken care of.
The Obama administration and the left have long claimed that they are for "social justice" and making America a "fair" society. Lost amongst those claims however, is that the first claims - made before any others - as to why men instituted government is to protect property rights, to make sure that people can sleep in their beds at night in peace, and to seek justice for those who have been wronged through criminal acts perpetrated by others. Yet somehow we can't seem to find a few comparative nickels and dimes to better do criminal justice, while untold billions are spent through federal entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, bailing out failed corporations and Wall Street, contracts, millions of government jobs, wars, and redistributed through the tax codes. And the Wizard thinks that something is really wrong when we've lost sight of that.
Wizard
The Houston Chronicle carried the story On July 8th, 2010, that the Renew Houston charter amendment campaign had reportedly garnered 30,000 signatures which they turned into the City Secretary's office for verification and certification for going on the November 2010 ballot.
The Wizard has heard CM Stephen Costello speak twice on the Renew Houston initiative, and intends to blog about the matter, but before writing about the charter amendment campaign, the Wizard decided to quote Renew Houston itself as to why the promoters are pushing this agenda:
Houston is an aging city. Over 60 % of all drainage and streets are past their useful life; 80% will be past their useful life in the next 20 years. When a street is assigned for re-construction, it takes the city 12 years before the work will commence due to lack of funding. ...
Americans are seemingly bombarded left and right with stories of aging infrastructure that hasn't been worked on for decades, that of course needs billions of new tax dollars over and above what governments already spend to be successfully maintained. At the same time, America has witnessed spectacular infrastructure failures in recent years, including the failures of the levees in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis. President Obama's new head of the FTA, Peter Rogoff, made a speech in Boston in May 2010, where he stated that the six largest local government transit agencies in America had $50 billion in deferred maintenance of their rail lines, and now Houstonians are being told by an interest group campaign that 60 percent of Houston streets and drainage are past their useful life.
So, this begs the question: Why is it that governments, whether local, state, or federal, seemingly fail over and over and over again not to do needed maintenance on existing infrastructure? The easy answer to such a question would be, "What do you expect Wizard? Of course the gummit don't do things right! Why should this be any different? Why do you want to waste our time on this?" Well, if that's your answer, then maybe we should be privatizing public infrastructure. After all, this is an endemic problem!
But as though on queue, last month the Wizard received his most recent issue of The Independent Review. In the issue, economist Dr. John Bratland addresses the neglect of public infrastructure through comparing how a private entrepreneur handles capital (and capital goods), verses how politicians and bureaucrats spend their political and bureaucratic capital.
Dr. Bratland's article makes for great reading. Without going through the entire article, the Wizard will focus on the high points of what Bratland is saying.
Market signaling: Bratland notes that there is a distinction between capital and capital goods. Capital could be construed as everything that an entrepreneur has at their disposal in order to make judgments that help maintain, and hopefully increase, the income and profit stream of the enterprise. This includes labor, land, cash receivables, whatever. Capital goods are individual pieces of capital, including that land, labor, finance, machinery, etc. Bratland points out that the entrepreneur operates in a framework of contracts and private property rights that help guide the entrepreneur towards making the best decisions, and that the entrepreneur often faces competitive pressures and operates under some uncertainty about the future.
Bratland goes on to say that entrepreneurs will incorporate decisions on the purchase and maintenance of capital goods, based on whether they will maintain or increase the income stream. Entrepreneurs may decide, for example, to defer maintenance for a while on capital goods, if the entrepreneur judges that there will be little or no effect on the overall income stream. But, Bratland points out that successful entrepreneurs always incorporate maintenance costs into maintaining the capital goods in their purview. The entrepreneur will get market signals and feedback that help the entrepreneur make decisions on maintenance and replacement of capital goods.
Verses no market signals: Needless to say, none of this framework exists in the world of public infrastructure maintenance. Bratland points out that there is no market of exchange when it comes to public infrastructure and there are no private property rights. Most importantly, there is no market signal to indicate that a street, a freeway, a sewer line, drainage culverts, or any other element of public infrastructure needs to be maintained or for that matter be replaced! There is no income stream available to tell governments that maintaining existing infrastructure is the correct thing to do.
Politicians and bureaucrats will have, and pursue, conflicting agendas upon assuming office and during the course of their careers. Politicians may come under political or competitive pressures to keep taxes and expenditures low. Politicians may or may not be in a position to obtain substantial monies for infrastructure maintenance via the legislative process for their districts. Politicians will also spend monies on infrastructure if they can perceive that it will enhance their power, career goals, or affect roll call votes in other issues. Politicians may perceive for example, that they can gain more votes or power through voting to devote monies towards health care or education, rather than infrastructure maintenance. Politicians or bureaucrats may deny maintenance monies to other politicians, bureaucracies, or geographical areas, if it were to meet certain goals. Bureaucrats may have career goals that include obtaining jobs in academia or the lucrative private sector, which often have little or nothing to do with maintaining public infrastructure. Politicians and bureaucrats often correctly perceive that they often can gain more power, prestige, or favorable press, through building new infrastructure over maintaining existing infrastructure. Both politicians and bureaucrats may or may not be particularly publicly spirited in their actions.
But most of all, bureaucrats and politicians really are not in a position to be able to weigh whether building new infrastructure or maintaining older infrastructure is the best use of public dollars, since there is no market mechanism to guide their decisions. Making such decisions inevitably involves making some judgment about opportunity costs and social welfare, of which there are no real answers. Considering all these factors, as stunning as this sounds, neglecting existing infrastructure for years or decades and letting it go to pot could be - and often is - the best political outcome from the perspective of people who are involved in the political process.
Next, the Wizard will address the Renew Houston charter amendment.
Wizard
The Wizard has been rather tired of late, not convinced that the scribings on this blog were making much of a difference. It's hard to keep going at something when you don't think that you're making much of a difference. Life goes on.
Yet, the Wizard does have a three day weekend to celebrate the Fourth of July. The Wizard has worked (and funded) Tea Party rallies on April 15th for the past two years, and it's not hard for the Wizard to think that a better name for April 15th is Dependence Day for many Americans: 50 million Americans collecting Social Security and Medicare benefits, 20+ million Americans are now employed by local, state, or the federal governments of the United States; some 25 percent of Americans now work for private firms that have major contracts with the United States government.
And all of this brings for the question of what are the ends of government?
The Wizard got to sitting down this evening and actually reading through the entire Declaration of Independence. It's not a tough read - only 5 1/2 pages in my pocket version put out by the Heritage Foundation. But then the Wizard started to ponder about it, and that's when things get interesting.
Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration in three parts. The first is a world famous declaration of rights:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness...
What follows is a list of grievances that the document's signers have against the King and government of Great Britain. The Declaration then concludes with The Declaration that these United Colonies are, and of Right out to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that the Colonials intended to take their place amongst the powers of the Earth.
And so it was, and so they did. Yet, the war between America and Great Britain had been going on since April 1775 with the Battle of Lexington and Concord, but this document didn't get written until July 4th 1776. A period of fourteen and a half months had gone by in between. So what gives?
Well, the overarching problem, at least from the standpoint of the British, was that Britain had been involved with an ongoing rivalry with France and her other European competitors for 250 years for world dominance before the shots were fired on the battlefields of 1775. More proximately, the Seven Years War with France and others had ended with the British having driven the French out as a major power in North America. The problem with this was that the war had left Britain deeply in debt, as wars tend to do to the regimes that get involved in them. So, then it was that the British Parliament decided that the colonials, who enjoyed the protection of the Crown, were going to have to cough up.
The problem with that was that two fold - one was that the Colonials had more or less been taking care of their own affairs for the past 150 years, and secondly, they weren't being given a voice in the decision. History would have been a very interesting thing had Parliament decided to give the Colonials some seats in Parliament in exchange for being taxed.
But the British didn't do this. Among the significant things about The Declaration is something that few people consider - who actually signed it. Look at the list of names - John Adams, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, John Penn, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Morris, Thomas Jefferson, amongst them. These were famous men, men of substance, and part of the accepted establishment. Men who are part of the establishment are not men who are going to do some half cocked off the wall thing like sign a document whereby they were pledging to throw their lives away, without some hope that they are actually going to come through with what they hope to accomplish and their skins intact.
That in turn would explain the 14 1/2 months between the time which the shots were fired on the battlefields of Massachusetts and The Declaration. The signers of The Declaration did something very interesting. By declaring that the States were now sovereign powers, they could now effectively say to all other nation states in the world that this war was not an internal affair of Britain's - a subjugation of impertinent rebels. What this was in fact was a war between sovereign powers, between the nation of Great Britain and the new America. That in turn would have helped encourage other European powers to subtly intervene on behalf of the American colonials, and hence one explanation for the interval between the actual Declaration and the start of the war was that The Declaration had a political motive to it. These conservative men would have no doubt thought that before signing this document that there could be some assurances that they could in fact expect such help from the other European powers, and hence there would be some hope that they could in fact win such a war against the greatest military power on the planet.
But there are other aspects to The Declaration to think about. The list of grievances is pretty long for one. So why did it have to be so long? One thought is that it had to be long and specific enough to enable the signers to say that there were all these grievances that we had. That's to reinforce why they were making the bold step of throwing off the shackles of the Crown and going their own way. Another is that the list would be long enough to encompass all the complaints that would unite all the the Colonials against the Crown.
Then there was the part about The Declaration that Jefferson substituted - that of property. Jefferson wrote that we had inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but not that we had inalienable rights to property. Why did Jefferson not assert this, while earlier John Locke asserted that property was essential to liberty? Well, maybe Jefferson and the rest of the signers of The Declaration didn't want people to think that this was a rich man's war. On the other hand, Enlightenment thinkers were stumbling forward to a more expansive view of humanity, and were starting to think about what owning property really meant. Readers can ponder this matter more here.
But perhaps the most important aspect of The Declaration is that Jefferson also writes that the Colonials have petitioned the King George the Monarch for Redress of their grievances, an ancient thing that humble people all over the world have resorted to since time immemorial. Yet, what has happened? Was it not impossible not to notice that the Redcoated soldiers on American soil were the King's soldiers? By what right could the Colonial rebels decide to declare their independence?
The Wizard heard John Culberson give a talk some months back whereby one of the last of the Founding generation spoke at his deathbed and stated that the reason why the average Joes took up arms against Britain was not because they had read about Montesquieu, or other political theories. It was because they had gotten used to minding their own affairs. But even that is not enough for what is happening now. The real question that the Colonials faced was - what are the ends of government? Why were we seeing the King's soldiers in our streets? Edmund Burke discerned early on that if King George and Parliament went too far with the American colonials, then the Colonials would start to wonder what this was all about, and thoughts like that are the beginnings of rebellion.
The peoples of the British Isles had been thrashing through government for many many centuries before those pesky rebels across the Water decided to ump up and declare their independence. Barely 130 years before, the British themselves had fought their own Civil War, between the supporters of Parliament and the Crown. The overall premise of governing in the United Kingdom eventually evolved into something like, "We the Parliament are the Sovereign Power in this land. We will support the Monarchy, forever, and everything we do will be done in the name of His (or Her) Majesty." Indeed, Great Britain held a general election less than two months ago that looked for a while as though they would return a hung Parliament. One aspect of this was that Queen Elizabeth herself might have had to get involved to resolve the matter, something that would awe Americans. Jefferson wrote that government derived its power from the consent from the governed, an entirely different premise from what the Colonials were being governed under.
America is having to ask that same question today - what are the ends of government? It certainly isn't to support a Monarchy until the end of time! The Progressives have had their answers for the past 100 years, and little by little they have been - well - progressing towards their goals. Progressives say that they want an America that is "fair", but what is fairness? Progressives want an America that is "just", but what is just? Progressives say that America needs to take care of its less fortunate, but by what standard are people less fortunate? More importantly, how long do people need to be taken care of, and who exactly is supposed to be taking care of people? The government? Churches? Or is it families and friends? Or are Americans to start thinking harder about their own futures and taking care of themselves?
In a similar vein, some Conservatives say that America needs to promote Democracy in the world. It will promote the safety of America they say and promote our happiness, but what is it going to take to promote Democracy? Why are we in Afghanistan, and not North Korea or China? Do the ends justify the means, and are those ends a justification at all?
And what are to be the ends of government in America? Are we to have our guns taken away, regardless of how dangerous our neighborhoods are? Are we to be told we can't smoke in a restaurant regardless of what the restaurant owner thinks? Are we told we can only eat what foods the government approves of? Are we to be told we cannot smoke some marijuana? Are we to be told we have to pay taxes because we have accumulated too much wealth? Are we to be told we can only contribute so many dollars to a politician's campaign? Then do these edicts conflict with our unalienable Rights that our Founders declared for us to possess - among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?
So why have many of my liberties been taken away? Are they really for my own good, and what is it all to you anyway? The Wizard thinks that some folks out there have some thinking to do.
Wizard