Regulation of the Day 172: Bestiality and Baggy Pants

Posted on May 6, 2011 | 1 comment

NBC Miami’s Brian Hamacher with the second-best lede I’ve read this week: “Floridians are going to have to start pulling up their pants and stop having sex with animals soon. ”

Florida’s state legislature passed an odd pair of bills on Wednesday. One would make bestiality a first-degree misdemeanor. The other would ban students from wearing their pants lower than legislators would like.

The bestiality bill, SB 344, is rather, ahem, detailed. I will spare you those details, and only point out that the bill would make it illegal to “Knowingly engage in any sexual conduct or sexual contact with an animal.” That means if someone unknowingly engages in the same (how?), they have not committed a crime. One wonders if any offenders will try to use that defense.

The baggy pants bill, SB 228, requires all Florida public school districts to add a droopy pants ban to their dress codes. The bill also prescribes punishments. First-time offenders get a verbal warning. A second offense means a suspension from extracurricular activities for up to five days. Every offense after that means up to three days of in-school suspension and no extracurriculars for up to 30 days. The student’s parents also get a note from the school.

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Posted in Regulation of the Day

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CEI Podcast for May 5, 2011: Salt

Posted on May 5, 2011 | Comments Off on CEI Podcast for May 5, 2011: Salt

Have a listen here.

A new study says that high-salt diets may not be as harmful as once thought. Research Associate Daniel Compton takes a look. He also points out that, even if salt is a health hazard, regulating salt intake probably won’t work as planned.

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Posted in CEI Podcast, Nanny State, regulation

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Headline of the Day

Posted on May 5, 2011 | Comments Off on Headline of the Day

Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson and Marlon Brando ‘drove across the U.S. in a rental car after 9/11, eating KFC’

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Posted in Uncategorized

Regulation of the Day 171: Cream Puffs

Posted on May 5, 2011 | Comments Off on Regulation of the Day 171: Cream Puffs

A new bill in the Wisconsin legislature would make the cream puff the state’s official dessert. An influential lobbying group consisting of fourth-graders from Mukwonago used Facebook and other media to pressure Sen. Mary Lazich into introducing the bill.

Despite support from the powerful Wisconsin Bakers Association, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel points that the cream puff bill’s success is not guaranteed. Previous attempts “to make Harley-Davidson the official state motorcycle and to recognize the microbe that turns milk into cheese failed to pass.”

This blog will be paying very close attention to the heated legislative battle in Madison to give the delicious cream puff its due. After all, the time that legislators spend on this is time they aren’t spending passing more harmful legislation.

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Posted in General Foolishness, Political Animals, Regulation of the Day

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What if the Rest of the Economy Was Run Like Public Schools?

Posted on May 5, 2011 | Comments Off on What if the Rest of the Economy Was Run Like Public Schools?

Don Boudreaux has a must-read in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries—”for free”—from its neighborhood public supermarket.

No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes.

Read the whole thing.

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Posted in education

Journalism 101: The Lede

Posted on May 4, 2011 | 2 comments

In journalism lingo, the lede (pronounced “leed”) is your lead sentence or paragraph. It’s spelled funny to avoid confusion with the word “lead.” A good lede grabs the reader’s attention and makes him want to keep reading.

Today, for example, I came across an article that contains what may well be the most effective lede of all time:

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A West Virginia man found wearing women’s underwear and standing over a goat’s carcass told police he was high on bath salts.

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Posted in General Foolishness

Free Trade Agreements Don’t Kill Jobs

Posted on May 4, 2011 | Comments Off on Free Trade Agreements Don’t Kill Jobs

Trade is going to be a hot issue this summer. Pending free trade agreements with Panama, Colombia, and South Korea might finally pass. Opponents of liberalization are already on the attack.

My colleague Jacque Otto already covered the creative destruction defense of trade today. Over at the Daily Caller, I look at employment data and find out that the labor force has grown by 23 million people since NAFTA passed. Doesn’t sound like a job-killer, does it?

Just as trade doesn’t kill jobs on net, neither does it create them on net. The real advantage of trade is that it allows people to specialize and become more productive. That is how economic growth happens:

When governments lower trade barriers, they allow more people to exchange and to work together. In economics jargon, the size of the relevant market gets bigger. And the bigger the relevant market, the more people can specialize.

Readers familiar with Adam Smith will recognize this as his division of labor. Everyone knows that specialized workers are more productive than jacks of all trades. That’s why Henry Ford’s assembly lines were so much more productive than his competitors’. The same number of people could suddenly produce more cars in less time, because they had a more specialized division of labor.

Workers didn’t have to waste time switching from one task to another. They got very good at their tasks. And because they knew their jobs so well, they were better able to come up with new, better ways of doing them. Rising productivity is how an economy grows. Prosperity doesn’t depend on the number of jobs. It depends on how much stuff workers can create.

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Posted in Economics, Publications, Trade

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Time to End the War on Terror

Posted on May 3, 2011 | Comments Off on Time to End the War on Terror

Osama bin Laden is dead. What now? Gene Healy offers his usual dose of common sense:

We now have nearly 100,000 troops in-country chasing what President Obama’s CIA director admits are “50 to 100” al Qaeda operatives, “maybe less.”

Now is a good time to leave Afghanistan and Iraq. Libya, too. Better late than never.

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Posted in International

Regulation of the Day 170: Kinder Eggs

Posted on May 3, 2011 | 2 comments

Kinder eggs are a type of candy that enjoys worldwide popularity. They are chocolate eggs with a plastic shell underneath the outside layer of chocolate. After kids enjoy the chocolate, they can open up the plastic shell and find a toy inside. They are especially popular around Easter.

They are also illegal in the United States. The Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Food and Drug Administration have declared the toys to be a safety hazard. Children could choke on them.

A third agency, Customs and Border Patrol, confiscates about 25,000 kinder eggs per year. Most people know that kinder eggs aren’t actually a choking hazard, so they don’t know about the ban and think nothing of bringing some home from a trip.

NRO’s Mark Steyn recently had just such a run-in when he and his children returned from a trip to Canada:

My kids asked the CBP seizure squad if they could eat the chocolate in front of the border guards while the border guards held on to the toys to prevent any choking hazard — and then, having safely consumed the chocolate, take the toys home as a separate item. This request was denied.

As I noted in a previous Regulation of the Day:

According to WebMD, 66 to 77 children under 10 die every year from choking on food in the U.S. That’s out of more than 42,000,000 children under 10, according to my calculations from U.S. Census data.

That means your child’s odds of choking to death on food are about 1 in 545,000. And that’s assuming 77 deaths, the high end of the range. Little Timmy is literally more likely to be struck by lightning (1 in 500,000) than choke to death on a hot dog.

I’m sure that CPSC, FDA, and CBP would love to credit their diligence in enforcing the kinder egg ban for those reassuring numbers. But common sense says they shouldn’t.

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Posted in Nanny State, Regulation of the Day

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Osama bin Laden Dies

Posted on May 2, 2011 | Comments Off on Osama bin Laden Dies

I was going to write something about this. But Radley beat me to it, and he said it far better than I could: Osama bin Laden may be dead, but he still won. Read the whole thing.

Not only did he spawn two long-term wars between the U.S. and Muslim countries — and for some reason we’re now in a third — but the cost in lost civil liberties has been enormous.

May his victory be a temporary one.

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Posted in International, Security Theater