The Only Republican in San Francisco

San Francisco demonstrates tolerance, part 2

I wrote in an earlier post about how, too often, San Francisco’s legendary tolerance is forthcoming just so long as you’re not different. Last week a Christian youth group held a concert here in the city. Here is a local pol’s reaction:

[California State] Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, was quoted telling counterprotesters Friday that the gathering Christians were "loud, they're obnoxious, they're disgusting and they should get out of San Francisco." [...]

On Monday, however, Leno struck a more reasoned tone [...] he said the youth group was "welcome in San Francisco," even though he does worry that its religious rhetoric could "under a cloak of love" feed a "fearful world's appetite for hate."

Hmm. Different people, particularly those from out of town, are apparently disgusting to Mr. Leno. Seriously, he comes off like a redneck carrying a torch.

Accusing Christians of feeding hate under a rhetorical cloak of love? What then should we make of hiding bigotry in a rhetorical claim of tolerance?

Refreshingly, the Chronicle took the supes to task:

THE IRONY was obviously lost on the clueless San Francisco supervisors when they passed a resolution warning that a Christian youth gathering could "negatively influence the politics of America's most tolerant and progressive city." [...]

The supervisors' reaction to the evangelical Christians was so boorishly over the top that only one word could describe it:

Intolerant.

By all accounts, the group behaved just like any other concert audience. I am not a religious sort, and frankly don’t see much that would attract me to such an event. But I would like to think I represent the San Francisco that knows how to allow folks to explore their own beliefs.

Pardon my stating the obvious: real tolerance requires successfully co-existing with those with substantial differences. Simply believing oneself to be superior to some other group is the opposite of this.

Updated design

So, my good buddy JoeTekk suggested I move away from the dark-background thing here on the blog. Yeah, I had to agree, but I am also 100% incompetent at visual design. So I fired up one of the Typepad templates and made a few tweaks for readability.

Resisting the net neutrality Kool Aid?

It appears that the current draft of a new communications bill has held off on mandating ‘net neutrality. I think this is a hopeful move and the right one — we don’t need new legislation to dictate how bits cross the wire.

Proponents of neutrality legislation argue that the the absence of such “would fail to protect the Internet.” Trust me, even though the motives behind ‘net neutrality sound generally benign, I think most tech firms will rue the day they invited the federal government into their routing tables. Check out my extended rants sophisticated analyses here.

(While on the subject, Declan McCullagh, the author of the above article, has a fascinating series on how technology firms lobby for influence in Washington.)

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Update: This post at News.com actually gives a much better overview of the current state of the debate. Here’s Rep. Barton:

"This bill will produce an explosion of opportunity for American workers, and American consumers will get an array of video services that were unimagined just a few years ago"

I think that’s exactly right. As I’ve described, the last ten years have seen an unprecedented explosion of innovation emerge from the Wild West of the Web. Why would we try to legislate it now?

Here’s Public Knowledge:

The provisions will not stop the cable and telephone companies from degrading Internet traffic and they do not contain strong enough penalties to discourage misbehavior. Without stronger legislation, the cable and telephone companies will have the power to change the fundamental nature of the Internet. This bill needs significant improvement before it will preserve the open Internet that consumers and service providers expect and deserve.

Emphases mine. Two things notable here. The first is that they are taking a fundamentally punitive approach to the issue — the solution seems to be in finding the most discouraging penalties. Keep in mind, one person’s misbehavior is another person’s innovation.

The second is that they do not want change. “Power to change” is downright aspirational for a technologist like me, and yet is used as a pejorative above. PK believes that it is more important to “preserve”, and I think this is exactly not the spirit (or history) of the Internet. It is, dare I say, nannyish.

Here’s Sen. Wyden:

"This legislation begins the construction of a multilayered, toll-strewn information superhighway that is out of sync with what has made the Internet work: access for all"

Sorry, that is plain wrong. What has made the Internet work is a free market and an absence of inhibitions on protocols or performance.

The best way to find out if Sen. Wyden is right is to take a snapshot of the current state of the net — performance, variety of content, quality of experience — and take a look five years from now, should we manage to hold off a neutrality mandate. Does he sincerely believe that users’ experiences will be degraded by the addition of a “fast lane”? It stands counter to reason and to history.

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Another thought (damn, I need to get a life): Internet2 is exactly as neutrality proponents fear. It is a high-bandwidth dedicated network, with QoS. Does anyone believe it’s hurting the traditional Internet?

Socialized health care for Cali

The Gentle Cricket has posted the first in a series on California state bill SB840, which (by his reading) would bring all Cali health care under government control. I suggest that you read his post, since he is clearly invested in studying the bill and its promoters. An excerpt:

All federal, state and county monies currently spent on health care will be reallocated to the state Health Care Fund. This will supply about one-third of the needed funding. [...] The remaining funding will come from state health taxes that will replace health insurance premiums now paid to insurance companies and co-pays and deductibles now paid to providers. Premiums will be affordable for every Californian and every business because what families pay is in proportion to their income and what employers pay is in proportion to wages

Oy! Doesn’t that last part sound a lot like the old Karl Marx quote, “From each, according to his ability, to each, according to his needs”? Talk about repeating history...

The problem with socialized health care is that there is no relationship between what one pays and what one receives. Further, like any tax, the rich pay for more than they receive, and the poor pay much less, which makes for a two-tiered society — assuming the rich folks stick around, that is.

(If you think your insurance company is bureaucratic, imagine if health care were run by those who run the DMV!)

Kidding aside, this bill would be tragic. The hope that spending would somehow be manageable flies in the face of logic and history. The only way for health care to be both widely available and generally equitable is to have those who receive treatment to be responsible for buying it. Vacuuming and redistributing all health care dollars through “the system” is the opposite of this.

Our private insurance system exists to mitigate risks. It has a great incentive to understand and quantify these risks, and does a reasonably good job when it is free to operate. An unencumbered insurance system allows us to transform health care from unmanageably expensive to manageably expensive.

And that’s the point: health care is very expensive. This is largely due to advances in medicine and our moral premise that no cost is too great when saving lives.

Given this combination, putting spending in the hands of bureaucrats means that there is almost no incentive to control costs. By any estimate, such a system would be economically catastrophic as health care, in the form of taxes, engulfs the economy.

I don’t have a silver bullet here, but the basis of any policy must be that individuals are responsible for their own health care expenses. Insurance companies, with a profit motive, can manage risk and negotiate prices on behalf of individuals, as they do now.

Let’s fix the actual problems, perhaps by mandating that citizens buy private coverage (that Mitt guy again!), and giving insurance companies better incentives to compete. Let’s not pretend that there is a free lunch.

Cross-posted at California Conservative

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Added: Jane Galt outlines the criteria and a first-pass, elegant solution. Great reading.

NY Times on Michael Steele

The busy week for articles on black conservatives continues. The New York Times magazine adds a long profile on Michael Steele, the Republican candidate for Senate in Maryland, and an African-American.

The article sets the tone with a typical bit of NYT agenda-journalism, implying that Mr. Steele is a novelty and/or a token. Once you get past that, though, it is reasonably flattering:

His bearing is both regal and warm. He seemed to already know many of the women in the room. With them, he bent his big frame at the waist and expertly planted a kiss on the cheek. He seemed less like a powerful politician than like a young man raised in the local church, back in town and wearing a fine suit, who had made a success of himself and was now returning to tell everyone about it.

Of course, in addition to Mr. Steele’s personal story, the article takes some time to do the political calculus.

Joe Trippi [...] paints a sort of developing nightmare for his party. "The Republicans are like the Chinese — they think in terms of like a 50-year plan. [...] Their goal is permanent realignment. What we have in Maryland is a national strategy against a party that is not strategizing at all."

More tellingly:

If the Republicans can win in a state like Maryland because they pried away some of the black vote from the Democrats, Trippi said, "It will be over." Over for whom? I asked. "The Democrats," he responded. He didn't mean just in Maryland — he meant in the whole country, because the electoral math for Democrats begins with an assumption of capturing something like 90 percent of the African-American vote.

I am certainly not the only one to notice these things, it’s clearly been part of Republicans’ plans for a while. The ‘Pubs are fielding a number of African-Americans in prominent races, especially for governor, and the candidates are saying the right things for the political base: pro-business, pro-life, religious, preaching self-reliance. Mr. Steele’s conservative bona fides seem to be in place, including an autographed picture from Reagan. ;)

(I like Joe Trippi a lot, btw, he’s a straight shooter and a good read, even if he works for the other side.)

To be clear, Steele is still a politician first, and as such everything should be taken with a grain of salt. The Republicans would be making a huge mistake if they let him off the hook on policy simply because he is an attractive candidate. He needs to walk the talk if charges of tokenism are to be avoided. So far, though, he seems substantial, polished and ballsy. Read the whole article.

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More: Betsy’s Page goes a bit further on Steele and the Dems’ dilemma. Hat tip Ed Driscoll for leading me to it.

Dems can play that, too

My previous post on opportunities for Republicans (I recently saw the abbreviation ‘Pubs, not bad) to take away a traditional Democratic demographic (that would be a Dem demo) can work the other way, too. I suspect we will begin to see more pro-life Dems this year.

This George Will article mentions that Bob Casey, the current Democratic front-runner for the Senate seat in PA is pro-life. Did you know that liberal Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is pro-life (and Mormon) as well? And the ever-triangulating Hillary is trying to have it both ways.

Evangelicals (and security moms) are the main reason that Republicans keep winning. By targeting these folks with pro-life candidates, Dems tempt a voter that ‘Pubs take for granted. The goal has less to do with actually winning these folks over — at the end of the day, most simply won’t buy that Dems are tolerant of religion — and more to do with forcing the ‘Pubs to expend resources defending their turf.

Ain’t politics fun?

Black conservatives and Republican opportunities

This has been a busy week for articles on black voters and conservatism.

What started it for me was this article by George Will on the constitutional defeat of school vouchers in Florida. The essence is that the Florida state constitution holds that “uniform” is more important than “high quality” when it comes to state provision of education.

What is interesting is that school choice represents a strategic wedge for the Republicans, for two reasons.

The more obvious is that vouchers diminish the power of the teachers’ unions, by allowing kids to opt out of their monopoly. Teachers’ unions are a pillar of the Democratic party.

The more subtle point is that vouchers are very popular among poorer voters, who are often saddled with the worst schools and fewest choices. That poor voters should see Republican policies improving their prospects is anathema to the Dems. If school vouchers are popular, Dems fear that they will never get those voters back.

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Then today I read an interesting overview in The Economist about black conservatives in America. The gist of the article is that they do exist, but that many black folks are uneasy about identifying themselves as Republicans. In other words, they are double minorities.

While the Economist notes that majority-black Congressional districts will stay Democrat for the foreseeable future — largely due to gerrymandering — there are substantial gains to be had by Republicans.

How? Well, perhaps the greatest point of opportunity is that black voters, and black congressmen that claim to represent them, are ideologically different:

[B]lack Americans tend to be quite socially conservative, but their representatives are anything but. Only four black congressmen voted to ban partial-birth abortion in 2003, though most blacks abhor the procedure. [...]

Most African-Americans favour school choice, yet not one black member of Congress voted to support a voucher programme to rescue mostly black pupils from failing schools in Washington, DC. [...]

Blacks are stiffed by the current [...] Social Security system, because they die younger than whites and so collect fewer benefits. Yet blacks in Congress were united in their opposition to Mr Bush's tentative reform plan last year

Democrats take the black vote for granted, that’s not news. What is news is that Republicans have an opportunity to blunt the power of identity politics if they can convincingly demonstrate that their policies align with the interests of black voters.

George Will has noted in the past, and the Economist article similarly notes, that if Republicans can gain even 25% of the black vote over time, Democrats may never win another election. That has not gone unnoticed.

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P.S. Check out this article in the WSJ on Thomas Sowell on the intersection of race and economics, and I meant to link earlier to this very inspiring evisceration of identity politics by Shelby Steele.

The only fair trade is free trade

An article over at the Financial Times declares China’s competitiveness ‘on the decline’. They base this headline on the fact that labor prices in China are rising, after several years of deflation.

This is a great sign, despite the dour headline. Why? It means that the standard of living in China is rising.

[...] an average 2-3 per cent increase in the once unbeatable China price its US and European clients were willing to pay. He pointed to a “double-digit” rise in Chinese labour costs, the revaluation of the renminbi and higher oil and energy costs for the shift.

“China’s costs are all going up,” Mr Fung said. “It is no longer the most cost-effective country in the region...Anything [sourced] from China has a higher inflation component than from other places around the world.”

A “double-digit rise in labor costs” can only come from one place: higher wages. These higher wages increase the buying power of a large swath of the population, bringing them out of poverty and creating a consumer class.

This development is entirely natural in a free market. You’ve probably heard arguments which claim that the pursuit of inexpensive labor is exploitative and that we should follow “fair trade” standards. While well intended, these are typically counterproductive when trying to improve living standards.

Consumers — not just Wal-Mart shoppers but large labor consumers like manufacturers — will seek out the best product at the best price. The cheapest labor comes from the poorest countries, and this is not at all coincidental. This dictates a greater likelihood that flows of capital will go to the places that most need it. To me, that is the essence of “fair”: a system which directs wealth to those which need it most.

Based on this thinking, if China is becoming more expensive, what might we expect? From the article:

Beneficiaries of China’s rising prices have included textile and garment manufacturers in India, Bangladesh and Cambodia, which were expected to lose orders to China after the quota regime governing textile production expired in January 2005. [...]

“In Bangladesh factories are so overbooked – it’s like China used to be,” added Bruce Rockowitz, the president of Li & Fung’s trading arm, who oversees sourcing operations on four continents.

It seems to me that we should make the benefits of globalization as broadly-based as possible. The best way to do this is to let the market operate freely, and we are watching it unfold in southeast Asia.

By contrast, “Fair Trade” arguments typically demand that manufacturers pay a higher wage than the market demands. This is a nice sentiment, but does not offer the developing world a net benefit. By raising labor costs artificially, consumers buy less labor. This means that fewer people get jobs, and more to the point, fewer poor people get jobs. (The same dynamic is evident here with minimum wages.)

China’s moving up the economic ladder is entirely predictable and desirable, and will continue to the extent that we liberalise the market. Their poorer neighbors are seeing new manufacturing jobs being created, along with the hope of future prosperity. Oh, and the Wal-Mart shoppers get better prices, too.

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Update: The NY Times has picked up on this as well:

The shortage of workers is pushing up wages and swelling the ranks of the country's middle class, and it could make Chinese-made products less of a bargain worldwide. International manufacturers are already talking about moving factories to lower-cost countries like Vietnam. [...]

The changes also suggest that China may already be moving up the economic ladder, as workers see opportunities beyond simply being unskilled assemblers of the world's goods. Rising wages may also prompt Chinese consumers to start buying more products from other countries, helping to balance the nation's huge trade surpluses.

Ah, let’s look at that last bit. Chinese consumers, with their increasing wealth, will look to other countries to buy products. However, their buying power is diminished, since the yuan is artificially devalued. Basically, the effort to make Chinese producers cheaper on the world market has the corollary effect of making Chinese consumers effectively poorer in the same market.

My hope is that this will increase pressure on the Chinese government to free up the yuan to float to its natural value. This will benefit Chinese consumers and will remove distortions in the market. In turn, this will likely reduce the US’ current accounts deficit.

Moving ahead, falling behind

From Reuters today, with a headline “Best job market in 5 years for grads”:

U.S. college graduates are facing the best job market since 2001, with business, computer, engineering, education and health care grads in highest demand [...]

"We are approaching full employment and some employers are already dreaming up perks to attract the best talent," [...]

Graduates with economic or finance degrees will see the biggest gain with starting salaries up 11 percent to $45,191, while accounting salaries are up 6.2 percent, business management salaries up 3.9 percent and pay for civil engineers 4.3 percent higher.

Pretty remarkable for an economy that has endured Katrina and 9/11. That an economy should survive those things is historically notable. That it should thrive is simply historic.

A note of caution from the above, however.

[...] graduates should not assume the improved labor market will guarantee everyone a job.

"Even as demand and salaries rise, college students should not be lulled into thinking that the job search will be easy or that jobs will be handed to anyone with a degree," he warned.

True dat. Why do I point this out? To juxtapose it against a more tragic situation.

VIOLENCE flared at the end of a giant anti-government protest in France yesterday as youths fought running battles with riot police in Paris after burning a car and smashing several shop windows. [...]

Sébastien Lasau, 26, a railway worker, confirmed that many of the rioters were students. “They are daddy’s boys from the chic arrondissements. They came equipped with scarves and lemons to counter the effects of the tear gas, and many of them have ski goggles as well.”

Students have closed 16 universities and disrupted classes at 35 others in protest at the law, which is intended to encourage hiring in companies wary of taking on new staff. Chirac called ... it “an important element in the policy of fighting unemployment”.

French unemployment among young people is generally quoted in the 20-30% range, double the rate in the US and in freer European economies such as Britain’s. The source of this problem, to state the obvious, is a lack of job creation.

The tragedy is manifold. Not least is that the protesters are élite, educated, native French. They have been handed as much privilege as can be imagined. And yet, they persist in the belief that their government owes them jobs.

Their government cannot promise jobs, because it, like all governments, cannot actually produce wealth. The best it can do is to create circumstances in which jobs can be created. That these privileged kids are willing to do great damage, with such disregard for this fact, is astonishing to me.

I don’t know all the details of Mr. Villepin’s plan, but the heart of it is that employers are given greater latitude in hiring and firing. It is the latter part that is the rioters’ grievance.

What they must realize is that the freedom to hire and the freedom to fire are the same thing. Put another way, when we restrict the ability of companies to get rid of workers based on their needs, they become much less likely to hire in the first place.

Here’s an analogy. Let’s say it were government policy to increase the rate of marriage. We put the following law in place: if you have gone on three or more dates with a person, you must marry them. That will ensure that people stay in relationships, right?

Of course, the likely outcome would be that most people avoid the third date, or dating at all, or they work hard to keep the relationship under the table. Rational employers are doing the same thing.

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The second part of the tragedy is that France is a welfare state, with great promises to its older generations. This requires the younger generations to produce enough wealth to support themselves and their predecessors. The best and brightest of the younger generation, the ones with the highest earning potential, are refusing to work, and are violently trying to prevent laws that would require that their employment be tied to their employability.

This is very sad for the elder French who’ve spent their lives working to support the social safety net.

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The third part of this tragedy? The residents of the banlieues, who rioted over unemployment this past fall, will be the real victims, and the real source of danger, should the élites succeed in repressing economic liberalisation.

We in the US certainly don’t have everything right, but we do make the correct priority of wealth and job creation before all else. I hope our French cousins will focus their energies on their own future. We need them.

Cross-posted at California Conservative.

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Update: Brussels Journal has more:

They are, indeed, being reduced to serfdom but not, however, by Villepin’s [proposed law] – a sensible measure which can only be qualified as being too little too late – but by the so-called “social” policies of yesteryear and by the “latter day revolutionaries,” the trade union leaders and the Socialist politicians intent on continuing their self-defeating policies.

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Update: Claire Berlinski at the WaPo seconds my sentiment that the real losers here are not the rich kids rioting, but the poor immigrants in the suburbs.

Net neutrality vs free speech

I am technologist by trade — a web developer — so you’ll have to pardon me if I get a bit worked up on places where tech intersects politics. You’ve heard me harp on the issue (and threat) of net neutrality legislation. Time for more!

My basic argument has been that differentiated, premium services are part of a healthy and forward-looking market. The proposed legislation actually makes it illegal to charge for better service and build the better network. It is an attempt to cast the ‘net as a public utility, emulating our sclerotic power and traditional telephone systems.

We need to think about the next generation of high-bandwidth ‘net services and leave all options on the table. Skype, Google, iTunes and a hundred other life-enhancing innovations were neither anticipated nor sanctioned by the government. We can’t possibly know what will exist in five years, and we are perennially on the verge of a new wave of amazing things. Let’s not regulate them before they exist.

That’s the background, so let’s go further: network neutrality legislation should be fought on grounds of free speech.

Free speech, as in the First Amendment, means that government cannot restrict the means of communication. Free speech also means that individuals and companies can decide what is said, and not said, using their resources.

Even if you are attracted to the idea of net neutrality as a concept (I am not), consider this: the likelihood of a federal bureaucracy correctly defining “neutrality” is about as high as its defining “decency”.

Think about recent attempts to legislate decency. Do you feel like the FCC are overstepping their bounds, applying a crude hand, perhaps even violating the First Amendment? I do too.

We should apply this thinking to such attempts to proscribe how bits cross the wire. The proposed neutrality legislation is exactly that: a law that dictates how private network traffic must be managed.

That network traffic, in my humble opinion, is speech. It’s not a question of finding the right kind of law. It is a question of whether the government is within their right to legislate at all. I say no.

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News.com has very good coverage of recent developments. Some of it is encouraging, such as Randolph May’s piece, which posits that we should approach claims of network abuses on a case-by-case basis, with existing law.

Also, the PFF blog has an inspiring note from a technologist who gives a scientist-in-the-trenches account of why now is exactly the wrong time to legislate. I would excerpt it, except that I found every sentence to be pithy and valuable. I suggest you simply read it yourself.