--E. Frank Stephenson

Articles in today's WSJ (here and here, respectively) mention a couple of interesting trade associations: the National Association of Blind Merchants and the American Pyrotechnics Association.

I'll leave comments open for a day or two--feel free to add other interesting examples of rent seeking trade associations.

--Robert Lawson

Personally, though, I prefer N = 1 so I can fit any slope I want.

--Wilson Mixon

The AP headline: Baaad news? Global warming now shrinking sheep

The content: local warming is reducing mortality among some wild sheep in Scotland. Wonder if the runts that now survive would count this as baaad news? Did I insert enough a's?

--Robert Lawson

Scott Beaulier's post yesterday reminded me of how fragile city-level unemployment data are especially for small cities.

According to the Department of Labor, Bismarck, North Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate for a metropolitan area (3.5%). El Centro, California has the highest rate (26.8%).

Detroit, MI continues to have the highest rate for cities with 1 million or more people (14.9%).

I have a pretty good sense of why Detroit's rate is high, but do any of our readers know much about Bismarck or El Centro?

The Current Population Survey (CPS) upon which (if I am not mistaken) all unemployment figures are based represents a survey of approximately 110,000 individuals. according to BLS. El Centro has a population of about 40,000 people. Assuming El Centro has a representative number of respondents in the CPS, there are probably only about 15 respondents in El Centro. Of which, let's say only 10 are in the labor force. Thus the unemployment rate for El Centro is probably 2ish out of 10. But man alive if one of them got a job, the unemployment rate would fall by half!

UPDATE: A reader sends in the following correction (Thanks!):

The CPS data is used to calculate the national unemployment rate. Each state also has access to the CPS data (not published). However, because the sample size is small in most cases for the states, the state CPS is very volatile. And so the state unemployment rates are not determined by the CPS (due to volatility) but by the LAUS program. The state unemployment rates are modeled with an econometric regression. The county and city rates are determined separately using different methods from the state model. The bottom line is that the city rates are not determined by the CPS, but are determined by the LAUS model. More information about the LAUS program can be found on the BLS website. Tom Dougherty

--Edward J. Lopez

Here is a satellite shot of the Fort Trumbull neighborhood in New London, CT. Google Maps says the red marker is the former site of Susette Kelo's house. The several blocks of brown to the east and north is the defunct redevelopment area. After spending something like $18 million to acquire the tract and clear it of the homes that were previously on it, the area has sat completely undeveloped.

Now according a story in the local fishwrapper, the area smells bad---literally stinks (thanks to Reason blog for the pointer).

Maybe this is because of bad publicity. That's what attorney Wes Horton, who argued the city's case before the Kelo Court, said to me when I debated him at Trinity College last fall. Perhaps, though bad publicity couldn't have been the sole factor. And that does not exonerate all the other failures of centrally planned development by way of eminent domain.

Here is Ilya Somin on the failure of Poletown:

Although GM and the City of Detroit promised that the new plant would create over 6000 jobs for the community, in reality the new plant employed less than half that many workers. By destroying hundreds of homes and numerous businesses, churches, and other institutions, the Poletown condemnations very likely inflicted more economic harm than they created benefits.

Here is Carl Close on how eminent domain destroyed the Fillmore neighborhood in San Francisco.

Here is Time on the failure of urban renewal in New Haven, CT, where it was used more aggressively than anywhere else.

Here is me on successful economic development projects without using eminent domain.

And here is the introduction chapter to my forthcoming Law Without Romance, which contains two chapters on development takings.

--Art Carden

HT: Phil Heidenreich and Brent Butgereit, Marginal Revolution for the "Markets in Everything" concept.

--Art Carden

Here is Megan McArdle's succinct take on Walmart's endorsement of government-andated health coverage (HT: Sheldon Richman). The story was front-page news in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, and today the Journal editorializes--correctly, I think--on the hidden politics of the move. I'm skeptical of the company's ominous claim about wanting a "level playing field;" the public choice literature suggests that "leveling the playing field" via government action usually means "kneecapping potential competitors with legislation."

--Art Carden

You might have by now read about The Toaster Project, a project in which a student at the Royal College of Art in London tries to make a toaster completely from scratch. Here's Radley Balko's article on his piece, and here is a reply by the artist, Thomas Thwaites, that takes exception to Balko's interpretation.

From what I can gather, his project accomplished its purpose: to get people talking. I'm looking forward to finding ways to incorporate his project into the parts of econ 101 where I cover "I, Pencil."

--Art Carden

Here's a letter that I sent to the Memphis Commercial Appeal a few weeks ago that was never published:

"The "prevailing wage" ordinance passed by the County Commission on June 15 was a mistake that will end up hurting Shelby County workers. Opponents argued that it would "hurt businesses and raise costs," but it will also hurt workers. Specifically, it will hurt the workers who are unable to find construction work because their skills are not worth the "prevailing wage."

Ordinance supporters said that "it will help raise living standards and lead to safer work sites since better-trained workers will be on the job." This is half true. First, to add insult to injury, the windfall workers are expecting from the ordinance will evaporate as workers compete for employment on margins other than wages and productivity (waiting for work, specifically). Second, the reason "better-trained workers will be on the job" is because lower-skilled workers have now been legally barred from competing with them.

Price floors are always bad ideas, but they are especially bad ideas during recessions. In a period of rising unemployment, we should be looking to create opportunities rather than destroy them."

--E. Frank Stephenson

From today's Rome News-Tribune:

--E. Frank Stephenson

There was an interesting exchange about the cap and tax bill on yesterday morning's Fox and Friends show; here's Steve Doocy intereviewing Obama environmental official Carol Browner (transcript via lex/nex):

DOOCY: Hey, Carol, before you go, I know the bill's over 1,000 pages long. Have you read it?

BROWNER: Oh, I'm very familiar with this bill. We have...

DOOCY: Have you read it?

BROWNER: I've been watching this for a very long time. I am very...

DOOCY: I'm sure you've got an idea of it, but have you read it?

BROWNER: I've read major portions of it, absolutely.

DOOCY: So the answer, no, you haven't read it -- but you've read a big chunk of it?

BROWNER: Oh, no, no, no, that's not fair. That's absolutely not fair.

DOOCY: No, I'm just asking if you read the thousand pages.

BROWNER: I've read vast portions of it.

DOOCY: OK. Carol Browner, thank you.

I hope someone reads the monstrosity before it's too late. Here's a snip from yesterday's Rush Limbaugh program:

RUSH: Have you heard about this, folks? When you sell your house, environmental experts have to come in and do a survey to find out if you've got leaky windows, if all the environmental systems are correct, if you have relatively new appliances, and until you modernize in the way they say, you can't sell -- that's in the bill. I'm not kidding, Brian. See, you can't believe it. You can't. It's in the bill. It was in this amendment that Boehner read.

I haven't verified that Limbaugh's claim is correct (feel free to email me), but needing government permisson to sell one's home is a whole new level of big brotherism.

--E. Frank Stephenson

I came across this blog post about the possibility of a bike share program for Portland, Oregon. Two comments on the post were particularly interesting:

I happen to be from Romania. So in the news from my country, they just discovered a bunch of dedicated cyclists that were "borrowing" about 10 bikes/month from the Paris bike share program for a very long one way trip east. These things keep popping up in the strangest places, like Marrakesh Morocco.

And this one on a previous program called Yellow Bikes:

As a former Yellow Bikes(YB) volunteer, we "dumbed down" bikes by making them single speed, and replacing tubes with rubber hose that made for a hard ride. Inevitably,those bikes we 'released' would end up lost/stolen'destroyed. The Community Cycling Center, our fiscal sponsor, ended up killing the program and replacing it,later on, with Create a Commuter (CAC). CAC has an element of ownership and personal investment,something YBs lacked.

--Joshua Hall

A five minute video of Russ Sobel discussing his new edited volume (on which I was an assistant editor) can be found here.

--Wilson Mixon

From Powerline:

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has obtained an EPA study of the "endangerment" to human well-being ostensibly caused by carbon dioxide emissions, together with a set of EPA emails indicating that the study, which concludes that carbon dioxide is not a significant cause of climate change, was suppressed by the EPA for political reasons.

The Powerline blog entry provides links to the CEI correspondence and supporting email messages, and to the suppressed study.

--E. Frank Stephenson

From an AP article that appears in today's RN-T:

Diners will order big pancake breakfasts again. Business suits will sell briskly. So will name-brand luggage, gym memberships and pricey jeans. Spas will sell more facials and massages.

Taken together, these seemingly minor transactions will likely help lift the country out of its longest recession since World War II.

Maybe next recession we can skip the $787B blob of pork and just send eveyone out for pancakes and facials.

--Lawrence H. White

On Tuesday at Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala City I gave a lunchtime talk on "The Roaring Twenties and Austrian Business Cycle Theory," which is the subject of chapter 3 of my book-in-progress The Clash of Economic Ideas. Here is a 47-minute talking-head video. After lunch I gave a 10-minute interview on free banking and the financial crisis to Luis Figueroa of UFM, video available here.