Reason Magazine - Staff

No Cause for Alarm

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:00:00 EDT

...

Newt Gingrich: Inflate Your Tires, Inflate Big Oil's Profits?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:46:00 EDT

Former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich told Sean Hannity that Barack Obama's suggestion that properly inflated tires save gas will actually put more money in the pockets of greedy oil companies. First, who knew that Gingrich was an enemy of Big Oil?

Gingrich's information is impeccably sourced to an email from a former military officer who apparently asserted that the profit margins on air pumps are higher than those at gas pumps. As the highly partisan folks at Think Progress point out, gas station owners rather than Chevron-Texaco, BP, Exxon Mobil or Shell garner any profits from air pumps. So Gingrich is now evidently against small retailers.

In any case, how much gasoline might one save by properly inflating one's tires? Information varies. The folks at the consumer auto rating site, Edmunds.com, ran some tests and found only a modest improvement in gas mileage. Popular Mechanics cites U.S. Department of Energy figures that suggest that underinflated tires cost about 3.3 percent on fuel economy. PM further notes:

Will maintaining proper tire pressures make a huge difference in the enormous amount of oil we import? No. But it can make a dent, albeit a very small one. According to the Department of Energy, underinflated tires alone cost the country more than 1.25 billion gal. of gasoline annually—roughly 1 percent of the total consumption of 142 billion gal. According to the Annual Energy Outlook 2007, published by the Energy Information Administration, offshore drilling would increase domestic production of crude oil by only about 1 percent.

We opened this discussion with Sen. Obama's assertion that we can offset the need to reopen offshore drilling—and save money at the pump—by keeping our tires inflated properly. He's right, although he's ignoring the potential for making a serious dent in natural gas production rates.

Finally, inflating versus drilling is a false partisan dichotomy. Why not do both?

What Would Happen If Farmers All Switched to Organic Crops?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:16:00 EDT

It's nice to see someone in the Bush administration defending science. The New York Times is running an interview with biologist Nina Federoff, who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences member and science advisor to the secretary of state. Federoff strongly defends biotech crops from their anti-science detractors:

There’s almost no food that isn’t genetically modified. Genetic modification is the basis of all evolution.
Things change because our planet is subjected to a lot of radiation, which causes DNA damage, which gets repaired, but results in mutations, which create a ready mixture of plants that people can choose from to improve agriculture.
In the last century, as we learned more about genes, we were able to devise ways of accelerating evolution.

So a lot of modern plant strains were created by applying chemicals or radiation to cause mutations that improved the crop. That’s how plant breeding was done in the 20th century. The paradox is that now that we’ve invented techniques that introduce just one gene without disturbing the rest, some people think that’s terrible.

Federoff notes that organic farming is not sustainable:

If we put more land under cultivation to feed the world’s growing population, we’re going to pull down the remaining forests.
And if that happens, it will contribute tremendously to desertification. The more we can grow on already cultivated land, the better. Europe, North America, Australia, Japan — we’ve been extremely successful in applying science to agriculture and we can afford to say, “Let’s go natural.” But there’s collateral damage.

What kind of collateral damage? How about famine?

If everybody switched to organic farming, we couldn’t support the earth’s current population — maybe half.

Whole interview here.

If Only Marie Antoinette Had Said, "Let Them Eat Rats!"*

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:15:00 EDT

Perhaps the whole unpleasantness of the French Revolution might have been avoided. In any case, Vijay Prakash, the Welfare Secretary in the Indian state of Bihar, according to the BBC, has made just this suggestion:

An official in the Indian state of Bihar has come up with a new idea to encourage low caste poor people to cope with food shortages - rat meat.

The Principal Secretary of the state's Welfare Department, Vijay Prakash, said that he was advancing his proposal after "much survey and ground work".

The Secretary noted:

"Rats have almost no bones and are quite rich in nutrition. People at large don't know this cuisine fact but gradually they are catching up."

Having dined on other rodents--guinea pigs and grey squirrels--I doubt his claim about bonelessness, but what especially caught my attention was the Secretary's assertion:

... that rat meat is not only a delicacy but a protein-enriched food, widely popular in Thailand and France.

France? Perhaps with a meuniere sauce?

Whole interesting solution to the food crisis here.

Kudos to H&R commenter emmajane.

*I know, I know, I used this trope on the Prince Charles post earlier today, but it just seemed so appropriate here.

"Let them eat organic shortbread"

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:19:00 EDT

Yesterday, I posted an item taking the Prince of Wales to task for his ignorant attack on biotech crops in the Daily Telegraph. The above headline is taken from a superb op/ed in the Financial Times on the subject:

Now [the Prince] has launched a passionate attack on modern farming. He sees no need for greater world agricultural production, thinks big companies have caused serious damage to farming and genetic modification has been a disaster. The prince is mistaken on all counts. ...

GM crops already allow greater yields with less water, less energy and with fewer chemicals. They will not, on their own, solve the world food shortage but they are already raising productivity growth. New strains of salt-resistant, drought-proof crops will allow us to farm poorer-quality land effectively.

In addition, an article in the Financial Times reports that Phil Willis, the chairman of the House of Commons' science committee...

said the use of science in farming had helped feed billions of people. “His lack of scientific understanding and his willingness to condemn millions of people to starvation in areas like sub-Saharan Africa is absolutely bewildering.”

Bewildering indeed.

The whole FT op/ed is worth reading here.

Close the Borders! Immigrants Emit Greenhouse Gases!

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:33:00 EDT

Greenhouse gases have apparently become the boogeyman for any and all issues. For example, the folks at the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies have just issued a report that warns that immigrants emit more greenhouse gases than if they had stayed at home mired in poverty.

Among the Center's startling findings is:

...immigrants in the United States produce an estimated four times more CO2 in the United States as they would have in their countries of origin.
U.S. immigrants produce an estimated 637 million metric tons of CO2 emissions annually - equal to Great Britain and Sweden combined.
The estimated 637 tons of CO2 U.S. immigrants produce annually is 482 million tons more than they would have produced had they remained in their home countries.
If the 482 million ton increase in global CO2 emissions caused by immigration to the United States were a separate country, it would rank 10th in the world in emissions...
Legal immigrants have a much larger impact because they have higher incomes and resulting emissions, and they are more numerous than illegal immigrants.

These figures are likely to be true. But is keeping people poor by depriving us of their labor and skills really the best way to address man-made global warming?

His Royal Highness, the Dunce of Wales, Speaks Against Biotech Crops

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 11:41:00 EDT

The Daily Telegraph reports:

The mass development of genetically modified crops risks causing the world's worst environmental disaster, The Prince of Wales has warned.

In his most outspoken intervention on the issue of GM food, the Prince said that multi-national companies were conducting an experiment with nature which had gone "seriously wrong"....

Relying on "gigantic corporations" for food, he said, would result in "absolute disaster".

"That would be the absolute destruction of everything... and the classic way of ensuring there is no food in the future," he said.

"What we should be talking about is food security not food production - that is what matters and that is what people will not understand.

"And if they think its somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another then again count me out, because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time."

Small farmers, in particular, would be the victims of "gigantic corporations" taking over the mass production of food.

"I think it's heading for real disaster," he said.

"If they think this is the way to go....we [will] end up with millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness."

There's a tremendous amount of anti-biotech misinformation packed into this interview. First and foremost, farmers in both developed and developing countries will not adopt biotech crops unless they benefit from them, either from greater productivity, fewer input costs, improved sustainability or all three.

Let's consider just a few cases: Biotech insect-resistant corn in the Philippines boosted yields by 37 percent, reduced the costs of insecticide spraying by 60 percent, maintained populations of beneficial insects in the fields, and increased farmers' profits by 88 percent. With regard to sustainability, herbicide-resistant biotech crops make soil saving no-till farming more possible and new varieties of biotech rice reduce the run-off of nitrogen fertilizer that can damage waterways. Finally, His Royal Witless ignores the fact that of the 12 million farmers who have adopted biotech crops, 11 million of them are resource-poor farmers working in developing countries.

Being the lord of a stately ~~Yorkshire~~ Gloucestershire manor, the prince evidently doesn't realize that people who escape rural poverty generally live better in cities.

The next and future king also attacks the Green Revolution which saved hundreds of millions of lives. Not only that, by dramatically boosting yields, the Green Revolution saved more than 100 million acres of forests and other natural landscapes in India alone from being plowed down to produce food. Around the world, high yield crops spared millions of square miles of wildlands from the plow.

If you want to read more of the nonsense being propounded by Britain's future monarch, go here.

Addendum: A number of academic biologists on a agricultural listserv that I monitor are complaining that the Telegraph's editors are apparently refusing to post their comments in favor of biotech crops.

Fighting Big Solar

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Last month, former Vice President Al Gore proposed a crash program that would require all electricity in the United States to be produced using renewable fuels such as solar, wind, and geothermal by 2018. The presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is aiming for a more modest goal—a national mandate that 25 percent of the country's electricity come from renewable fuels by 2025. And already 30 states are mandating that some portion of the electricity their residents buy be produced from renewable energy sources.

For example, renewable energy mandates in the sunny Southwest include Nevada at 20 percent renewables by 2015; New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah at 20 percent by 2020; and Arizona at 15 percent by 2025. California ambitiously decreed that 20 percent of its electricity will come from renewable sources by 2010.

Given their abundance of sun-drenched deserts, thermal solar power is the most promising form of renewable energy for these states. Most solar thermal plants generate electricity using mirrors to focus the sun's rays on liquid filled tubes, producing steam that drives turbines. The once killer objection that solar power cannot supply round-the-clock base load power because it only works when the sun shines is now being finessed. Engineers have devised ways to store heat—molten salt or ionic liquids—that can be used to produce steam to drive turbines through the night and on cloudy days.

So, base load solar power now seems technically feasible, but what about cost? Current solar thermal plants produce electricity at 15 to 17 cents per kilowatt hour, but many believe it will eventually fall to below 10 cents per kilowatt hour. By contrast, electricity from coal-fired plants costs around 3 to 4 cents per kilowatt hour. The push for switching from cheap coal to expensive solar is being justified on the grounds that humanity needs to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels that contribute to man-made global warming.

However, Fred Krupp, head of the Environmental Defense Fund, favors simply setting limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Why? Because as he correctly observes: ''In essence, renewable standards, subsidies and other mandates assume that the government has all the answers, rather than letting the market figure out the best way to produce energy at the lowest possible cost." But let's set that quibble aside and make the safe assumption that our politicians and regulators will continue to believe that they do have all the answers. In other words, these so-called renewable portfolio standards are not going to go away.

These mandates are driving a land rush in the Southwest as would-be renewable energy producers vie for the best spots, especially for locations suitable for producing solar energy. As a result, a conflict is brewing between the energy and conservation wings of the environmentalist movement. Why? Because solar plants take up a lot of space. In addition, new power lines will have to be built to transmit the renewable power to growing desert and coastal cities. This means trade-offs. Some desert acreage will have to be sacrificed in order to produce energy.

So far the federal Bureau of Land Management has received applications for more than 130 projects in the desert Southwest that could occupy more than 1 million acres of land. A million acres is more than 1,500 square miles. On the other hand, the Mojave Desert measures over 50,000 square miles. According to one estimate, if all these projects were built they could supply enough electricity to fuel 20 million homes.

While some national environmental groups recognize that such trade-offs are necessary, some local groups are fiercely fighting the development of utility-scale solar power generation in the desert. The California-based Alliance for Responsible Energy Policy argues that the push for Big Solar promotes the "permanent destruction of hundreds of thousands of acres of pristine public lands designated for multi-purpose use that belong to the people." The Alliance also accuses the development of solar power in the desert of "wilderness killing, unacceptable groundwater depletion and the erosion of hard fought protections of public lands and private rights."

The San Diego-based Desert Protective Council also opposes the construction of a high voltage power line that San Diego Gas & Electric says it needs to transmit renewable power from a solar generation project planned for California's Imperial Valley. The power line would run through an existing right-of-way in a state park, but each of its 141 new towers would average 130 feet in height. "Our take has been from day one, 'Here we go again,'" said Terry Weiner, Imperial County conservation coordinator for the Desert Protective Council to the San Diego Union-Tribune. "Here is where we can do everything out in the desert that we don't want to do in our own backyards in the city,'"

The Desert Protective Council has allies in this fight. "The idea that we're going to sacrifice critical pieces of our environment to protect other pieces of our environment seems a little ironic," said Elizabeth Goldstein, president of the nonprofit California Parks Foundation in the Los Angeles Times. "That's an irony I cannot accept. We have to find a way to do both." In other words, no trade-offs. These groups want renewable power to be generated locally, preferably by placing solar photovoltaic arrays on roofs.

"It's not just businesses that have slowed things down, it's not just Republicans that have slowed things down, it's also Democrats and also environmental activists sometimes that slow things down," declared a frustrated Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-Calif.) during a speech at Yale University this past spring. "They say that we want renewable energy but we don't want you to put it anywhere, we don't want you to use it." Schwarzenegger added, "I don't know whether this is ironic or absurd. But, I mean, if we cannot put solar power plants in the Mojave Desert, I don't know where the hell we can put it."

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Take the Test: What Economics Type Are You?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:16:00 EDT

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation offers a brief test that allegedly tells you what economics type you are. You can be pigeonholed as an innovation economist (Joseph Schumpeter), supply sider (Art Laffer), a liberal neo-classical economist (Robert Rubin), or a neo-Keynesian (needless to say, John Maynard Keynes). According to the test, I'm a moderate supply-sider, but there doesn't seem to be all that much difference between them and the liberal neo-classical types. Most of the people who've taken the test buy into Rubinomics.

The ITIF wants to push "innovation economics" which apparently means that private/public partnerships are just peachy:

In contrast, “innovation economics” recognizes the reality that a global, knowledge-based economy requires a new approach to national economic policy based less on capital accumulation, budget surpluses, or social spending and more on smart support for the building blocks of private sector growth and innovation.
Rather than focus on ensuring that prices accurately reflect costs to drive what conventional economists call allocative efficiency, innovation economists argue that the lion’s share of economic growth is determined by productivity and innovation.

I would like to suggest that the folks at the ITIF need to read and reflect on Friedrich Hayek's brilliant essay, "The Use of Knowledge in Society."

For what it's worth, take the test here.

Romulan Cloaking Devices Too?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:53:00 EDT

Is it a Star Trek universe yet? As frequent H&R commenter, the innominate one, points out in my earlier post on the possibility of Stark Trek warp drives, other researchers have developed materials that bend light that can make objects invisible. Memory Alpha describes the Romulan cloaking device as:

A cloaking device is a form of stealth technology that uses selective bending of light (and other forms of energy) to render a starship or other object completely invisible to the electromagnetic spectrum and most sensors.

The New York Times reports that researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have created materials that could render objects invisible:

Using tiny wires and fishnet structures, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found new ways to bend light backward, something that never occurs in nature.
This technology could lead to microscopes able to peer more deeply and clearly into living cells. And the same kind of structures might one day be adapted to bend light in other unnatural ways, creating a Harry Potter-like invisibility cloak. “This is definitely a big step toward that idea,” said Jason Valentine, a graduate student and a lead author of a paper to be published online Wednesday by the journal Nature. But scientists are still far from designing and manufacturing such a cloak.

New York Times article here.

Star Trek Warp Drive Possible?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:09:00 EDT

Memory Alpha, the wiki for all things Star Trek, describes the Enterprise's warp drive thusly:

Warp drive is a technology that allows space travel at faster-than-light speeds. It does this by generating warp fields to form a subspace bubble that envelops the starship, distorting the local spacetime continuum and moving the starship at velocities that exceed the speed of light. These velocities are referred to as warp factors.

Two physicists at Baylor University are proposing that string theory suggests that faster-than-light travel using something like the Enterprise's warp drive may be possible.

[They] theorize that by manipulating the extra spatial dimensions of string theory around a spaceship with an extremely large amount of energy, it would create a “bubble” that could cause the ship to travel faster than the speed of light....
The method is based on the Alcubierre drive, which proposes expanding the fabric of space behind a ship and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would not actually move, rather the ship would sit in a bubble between the expanding and shrinking space-time dimensions. Since space would move around the ship, the theory does not violate Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which states that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a massive object to the speed of light.

One problem:

The Baylor physicists estimate that the amount of energy needed to influence the extra dimension is equivalent to the entire mass of Jupiter being converted into pure energy for a ship measuring roughly 10 meters by 10 meters by 10 meters.

The Baylor press release on faster-than-light space travel here.

Addendum: Check out their two papers, "Putting the Warp in Warp Drive" and "Warp Drive: A New Approach" in arXive.

Discovery Institute Fellow Tells the Truth: "Intelligent Design ... is not a theory."

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:58:00 EDT

Syndicated conservative radio shlockmeister and newly minted Discovery Institute fellow Michael Medved tells the truth about intelligent design in a Jerusalem Post interview:

[Post:] Speaking of your desire for this kind of particularity, you are a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute that studies and believes in Intelligent Design. How do you, as an Orthodox Jew, reconcile with this kind of generality - with the view of their being a hierarchy with a chief "designer" - while believing in and praying to a very specific God?

[Medved:] The important thing about Intelligent Design is that it is not a theory - which is something I think they need to make more clear. Nor is Intelligent Design an explanation. Intelligent Design is a challenge. It's a challenge to evolution. It does not replace evolution with something else.

[Post:] The question is not whether it replaces evolution, but whether it replaces God.

[Medved:] No, you see, Intelligent Design doesn't tell you what is true; it tells you what is not true. It tells you that it cannot be that this whole process was random.

Medved is off message--he clearly needs to call back to Discovery Institute headquarters for his proper marching orders. Why? Because in public, the Discovery Institute does want to argue that intelligent design is a theory in the same way that evolutionary biology is a theory. Of course, the Discovery Institute's real motives were revealed in the notorious "Wedge Strategy" document.

Medved also shows a profound misunderstanding of natural selection. The mutations are random, but natural selection is not random-it is the process by which favorable mutations are preserved and deleterious ones are weeded out. Cumulative selection is a fundamentally nonrandom process.

Go here for a slightly revised version of my remarks during a recent debate on intelligent design in Las Vegas pitting Michael Shermer and me against the Discovery Institute's Stephen Meyer and George Gilder.

Hat tip to my colleague Dave Weigel & R.Hampton.

Death and Consumption, or Shop Before You Drop

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:36:00 EDT

After 9/11, Americans went on a shopping spree, according to an article in Knowledge@Wharton:

In the days and weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, millions of Americans came to grips with one undeniable fact: They were going to die. Having finally admitted to that, they did what one might expect. They started living.

As documented in various media reports, Americans in the wake of those attacks began doing all of the things they had always wanted to do. That included, apparently, a whole lot of shopping. They bought pricy luxury items -- Rolex watches, Mercedes Benz automobiles, high-end clothing -- and stocked up on food and supplies like never before.

Intrigued by this mass behavior, two researchers, Naomi Mandel at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University ~~Wharton Business School~~ and Dirk Smeesters at the Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands, decided to see if they could induce this behavior in experimental subjects. The researchers divided their test subjects into two groups. The first wrote an essay imagining their own deaths, and the second wrote about undergoing a medical procedure. Afterwards, each subject was given a grocery list and asked what they intended to buy that week. What did the researchers find?

The students in the MS [mortality salience] group said they would purchase "significantly more" items than the control group, including more fresh vegetables, fresh meats, canned meats and frozen foods, according to the paper. In a follow-up study, they actually measured the amount of cookies that participants ate in a “taste test,” and found that people who were thinking about death ate more cookies than those who were thinking about going to the doctor’s office.

The results not only provided "preliminary support for the idea that MS individuals want to consume a larger quantity of products than do others," according to the paper, but also, because the MS subjects included staples such as meats and vegetables on their lists, seemed to indicate that "participants [were] stocking up for reasons other than pure hedonic pleasure."

But if not for hedonistic pleasure, then why? Why were the subjects in the MS group so interested in buying all that stuff?

Mandel and Smeesters eventually rejected the idea that people were stocking up as a survivalist reflex or were trying to die broke ("you can't take it with you"). Instead, shopping in the face of death is escapism, especially for those with relatively low self-esteem.

Since death provokes shopping, the researchers have some advice for marketers:

"It would be tempting to market products to an audience during shows with death content -- something like "CSI" or the nightly news, which is, these days, full of reports of death," Mandel says. "You are more likely to get a favorable consumer response for products advertised during those shows."

Whole morbid article here.

Note to self: Stop watching so many CSI shows and maybe my credit card balances will improve. Also, I've got to remember to eat and not think about death just before going to the grocery store.

Bailey on Wisconsin Public Radio at 10:00 am CDT to Talk Energy Policy

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:39:00 EDT

Wisconsin reasonoids, I will be on WPR's Kathleen Dunn show to talk about energy policy proposals by Al Gore, John McCain, and Barack Obama.

Obama Energy Gimmickry 2

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 09:42:00 EDT

The Washington Post editorial page takes Sen. Barack Obama to task for his silly idea to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and his counterproductive windfall profits tax on oil companies proposal:

There were good ideas in the energy plan Sen. Barack Obama unveiled Monday. The most important of these is a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases that would auction off 100 percent of emission credits. The Illinois Democrat also announced a strong commitment to alternative energy sources and a stepped-up conservation effort. But then there were his proposals for a "windfall profits tax" on oil companies and his call to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Modifying his previous opposition to tapping the reserve, Mr. Obama would swap more-expensive light crude held there for cheaper heavy crude "with the goal of bringing down prices at the pump." President Bill Clinton did such a swap in September 2000 -- yes, just before another presidential election -- and President Bush released oil in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina. Both moves led to drops in the spot price of crude but not the sort of relief at the pump that Mr. Obama promises. Even if they had, any relief from Mr. Obama's plan would be temporary while compromising a reserve intended to protect against disruptions in supply caused by wars, boycotts and the like.
Meanwhile, thanks to high crude oil prices, energy companies are, indeed, reaping immense profits. In the second quarter of 2008, Exxon and Shell each made over $11.5 billion. However, Mr. Obama's proposal to take some of this money from Big Oil and distribute it, like Robin Hood, to hard-pressed American families doesn't make economic sense. To be sure, Mr. Obama would not copy the tax enacted under President Jimmy Carter in 1980, which netted $40 billion before its repeal in 1988 while imposing huge administrative burdens -- and retarding domestic oil production. Mr. Carter's tax was levied per-barrel, so it directly increased the marginal cost of producing crude -- and made figuring out which barrels to tax ridiculously complicated. Mr. Obama wants a surtax on net oil company profits above a "reasonable" level. The tax would be set high enough to raise $65 billion over the next five years, and the revenue would fund a one-shot tax rebate that Mr. Obama would like to give to families and individuals this year.
Making Exxon surrender money that is now falling into its lap would not necessarily affect its longer-term plans or incentives. Indeed, some of Big Oil's "windfall" already will go to the government: The more profit the companies earn, the more corporate income tax they pay. But to add a five-year tax increase on top of that to pay for a one-year gift to voters would, indeed, increase the cost of doing business. That cost would be passed along in forgone investment in new production, lower dividends for pension funds and other shareholders, and higher prices at the pump -- thus socking it to the consumers whom the plan is supposed to help. If oil prices fall, there might be no windfall profits to tax. Then the Obama rebate would have to be paid for through spending cuts, taxes on something else or borrowing.
When his presumptive Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), proposed a gas tax holiday as a way to reduce the high cost of driving, Mr. Obama showed political courage and intellectual honesty by refusing to sign on to that obvious gimmick. "It's an idea to get them through an election," Mr. Obama said. Now he has two such gimmicks of his own.

Post columnist Ruth Marcus also piles on:

As for a windfall-profits tax, if you want to produce more energy, it hardly makes sense to give oil companies less incentive to make investments. Nor does it make sense to tax companies because market conditions boost their profits -- any more than homeowners and shareholders should be penalized for selling during a boom.
Obama, too, has descended to misleading. He accuses McCain of wanting to give $4 billion in tax breaks to oil companies -- without mentioning that this is no special oil-only deal, just part of McCain's proposal for an overall reduction in the corporate tax rate, something Obama has said he'd consider. Does that put him in the pocket of Big Oil, too?

Forget cheaper gas, by November the candidates will be promising every voter whiter teeth, a full head of lustrous hair, and a great sex life.

Perpetuating Poverty by Protecting Livelihoods

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:10:00 EDT

The latest round of World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations foundered last week over policies that seek to "protect livelihoods." On one side stood India and China who insisted that they be allowed use a special safeguard mechanism (SSM) to boost tariffs to prevent surges of cheap food into their countries. Why? As Indian Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath explained, "The main issue was the security of livelihood of millions of poor farmers in India and other developing countries against import surges which could take place." Specifically, India and other developing countries want to impose additional duties to protect their poor farmers from agricultural product price declines caused by import surges. "When I am negotiating, I am willing to negotiate commerce. I am not willing to negotiate livelihood security, I am not willing to negotiate subsistence, I am not willing to negotiate poverty," insisted Nath.

On the other side stood the United States and other big agriculture exporting countries, including Brazil. U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab argued that SSMs would push trade liberalization back by 30 years. At the insistence of developing country negotiators, the United States and Europe agreed to cut their agricultural subsidies by 70 and 80 percent respectively. However, some developing country analysts believe that the United States was intransigent on the issue of SSMs because American negotiators wanted to avoid the topic of cotton subsidies, which was next on the WTO agenda. Scandalous U.S. cotton subsidies have depressed the world price of cotton, thus harming millions of poor cotton farmers in Africa and Asia.

Nath and other developing country WTO negotiators are absolutely right: subsidies are bad, period. They should be completely eliminated. But is protecting livelihoods from competition a good idea? In 2002, anti-globalization activist Vandana Shiva asserted, "The only way to protect incomes and entitlements in poor countries is to bring back controls on imports." And she may be right, but at what long-term cost?

First, let's define what we're talking about: what's the difference between a job and a livelihood? Livelihood connotes the earning of income by means other than wage labor. Another implication is that people who have a specific livelihood are somehow entitled to that livelihood. The way activists and policymakers use the term, livelihood rights suggests that people have a right to stay exactly where they are and to and to make a living by doing what they are currently doing. If your father was a farmer, then so are you and so will your grandchildren be. If your mother was a hand weaver, then so are you and so will your children be.

This kind of economic serfdom is a recipe for perpetuating poverty. People who depend upon livelihoods rather than jobs are generally the poorest people in the developing world. This is not a surprise since they make their livings through low-productivity activities like subsistence farming or small-scale manufacturing.

For example, about 75 percent of Indians live in rural areas and 64 percent of the workforce depends on agriculture for their livelihoods. Since agriculture contributes only 20 percent to India's gross national product, this means that nearly two-thirds of the population live on only one-fifth of the India's total income. In addition, nearly 60 percent of farms are smaller than one hectare (about 2.5 acres), while less than two percent are larger than ten hectares. This kind of rural backwardness explains why some 700 million Indians eke out an existence on two dollars or less per day.

Nath and other anti-trade activists argue that trade liberalization will undercut the pittances on which these poor people live. As an example of how trade destroys livelihoods, Shiva claims that imports of cheaper soybean oil, combined with new government sanitary packaging regulations, affected 10 million livelihoods of small-scale producers of traditional cooking oils. Shiva also warned that branded flour is undermining the livelihoods of millions of workers who operate small flour mills. Instead of taking raw wheat purchased at government shops to a local miller to be ground into flour, Indians are increasingly turning to higher quality branded flour. In 2002, Shiva noted, "Prices of coconuts have fallen 80 per cent, coffee prices have collapsed by over 60 percent, pepper prices have fallen 45 percent in India since the WTO declared, in 2000, that India must reduce import barriers."

In fairness, freer trade will force wrenching changes on the farming villages of the developing world. While some farmers in developing countries will be able to compete and become prosperous, most will have to seek more productive work as wage earners in industry or in the service economy.

One objection: What if no wage jobs are available? In that case, it would mean that the developing country is pursuing policies that are stymieing its overall economic growth. In fact, this is exactly what India was doing before 1991 when it ended the its bureaucratically hamstrung "License Raj" through sweeping economic liberalization reforms. After 1991, economic growth took off. As University of California-Berkeley economist J. Bradford Delong pointed out in 2001, if India's current post-liberalization growth trajectory is maintained, in 66 years average Indian real GDP per capita will be equal to that of the United States today. Had it remained on the pre-liberalization path, average Indian incomes would have equaled current American incomes by the year 2250.

Most people in developed countries did not become wealthier by pursuing the livelihoods of their parents. Neither will poor people in developing countries achieve prosperity by following in their parents' footsteps behind a water buffalo. Freer trade generates opportunities for them to join the wage economy and thus to enjoy the gains that an ever more elaborate division of labor makes possible. Policies that aim to protect livelihood security are essentially bribes to encourage people to stay on their subsistence farms and remain in remote villages. Ultimately, protecting livelihoods is a policy to protect and perpetuate poverty.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Who's Got an Energy Gimmick Now?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:00:00 EDT

Presumed Democratic Party presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama correctly derided his Republican rival Sen. John McCain for proposing a federal gasoline tax moratorium:

...we're arguing over a gimmick that would save you half a tank of gas over the course of the entire summer so that everyone in Washington can pat themselves on the back and say that they did something.

That was then: this is now.

Yesterday, the "we-are-the-ones-we've-been-waiting-for.-We-are-the-change-that-we-seek" candidate showed that he could be just as gimmicky as any other presidential aspirant. Obama proposed releasing 70 million barrels of crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as a way to drive down high gas prices. Conservative commentator Mark Impomeni does a few quick calculations and finds that Obama's gimmick would yield about two-fifths of a tank of gas per driver. The change-we-can-believe-in apparently believes that 40 percent of a tank of gas is less gimmicky than 50 percent.

Does Disease Cause Religion?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:45:00 EDT

University of New Mexico biologists Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill are proposing the idea that religions proliferate as a way to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. As the Telegraph reports:

Religions thrived to protect our ancestors against the ravages of disease, according to a radical new evolutionary theory of the genesis of faith....
[The researchers] come to this conclusion after studying why religions are far more numerous in the tropics compared with the temperate areas.
"Why does Cote d'Ivoire have 76 religions while Norway has 13, and why does Brazil have 159 religions while Canada has 15 even though in both comparisons the countries are similar in size?" they ask.
The reason is that religion helps to divide people and reduce the spread of diseases, which are more common the hotter the country, the research suggests.
Any society that increased its coherence by adopting a religion, and dealt less with local groups with other beliefs as a result of cultural isolation, gained an advantage in being less likely to pick up diseases from its neighbours, and in the longer term to have a slightly different genetic makeup that may offer protective effects, for instance by making them less susceptible to a virus.
Equally, societies where infectious diseases are more common are less likely to migrate and disperse, not because of the effects of disease itself but as a behaviour that has evolved over time.
" If this argument is correct then, across the globe, religion diversity should correlate positively with infectious disease diversity," they say.

So can we conclude that as we control more infectious diseases, secularization will spread? Or does correlation necessarily mean cause in this case?

Whole Telegraph article here.

Bridges All Fall Down?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:10:00 EDT

Today is the first anniversary of the collapse of the Interstate 35 bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. The disaster killed 13 and injured 145 people. Today also happens to be the day when my colleagues at the Reason Foundation issue their 17th annual report on performance of state highway systems. The study calculates the effectiveness and performance of each state in 12 different categories, including traffic fatalities, congestion, pavement condition, bridge condition, highway maintenance costs, and administrative costs. It just might give you a clue as to how likely you are to inadvertently end up in a river near you.

The winner: North Dakota. The loser: New Jersey.

My own state of Virginia comes in at 16th. “Virginia ranked 16th in overall performance and cost-effectiveness. In last year’s rankings, Virginia ranked 18th overall. Virginia is 22nd in urban interstate congestion, with 42.63 percent congested. The state tied for 1st in rural interstate condition and 28th in urban interstate condition. Virginia ranks 22nd in deficient bridges—23.10 percent of the state’s bridges are deemed structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. Virginia is 16th in the nation in fatality rates per 100 million vehicle miles traveled."

Check out how low your own state ranks in the highway circles of hell here. A Google map of the state rankings is here. For the full Reason Foundation study go here.

Another Terri Schiavo Muddle in the Making?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:22:00 EDT

Should authorities pull the plug on Janet Rivera, a woman who has been comatose for a couple of years in a Fresno, Calif. special care facility? In mid-July, Rivera's court-appointed conservator, on the advice of five physicians, asked that her respirator be removed and food and water be withheld. Some family members objected and the conservator reversed his request.

Rivera's situation differs in many respects from the Terri Schiavo case. First, Rivera is described as being comatose. Comatose by itself implies a possibly transient inability to respond to stimuli and temporary deep unconsciousness. On the other hand, the five physicians consulted by the conservator believe Rivera's unconsciousness is irreversible. Second, unlike the Schiavo case, Rivera's family members apparently all agree that she should receive artificial hydration and nutrition. And third, again unlike Schiavo's case, no one claims to know what Rivera would want to be done.

Although Rivera's court-appointed conservator says that expense played no role in his decision to have hydration and nutrition tubes withdrawn, there is an issue concerning how Rivera's care is being paid for. On July 28, the Chicago Tribune reported:

The cost of Rivera's care also has become part of the discussion.

Rivera's medical bills are being paid by Medi-Cal, the state-federal insurance program for low-income families.

Some bioethicists say that regardless of whether money is an issue in Rivera's case, her situation raises a question that's impossible to ignore in the end-of-life debate: How to decide whether it's worth spending limited resources to maintain life support in an apparently hopeless case.

"The stewardship of scarce resources does require us to take resources into account," said Ben Rich, a UC Davis bioethics professor. "But it has to be done carefully."

The cost issue and what is going to happen to Rivera in the immediate future was more or less resolved on July 29, when a California judge appointed one of Rivera's cousins as her conservator. The local Fox Television affiliate reported:

Rivera will likely spend the rest of her life in a hospital bed. Her family says they plan to keep her on life support until she is ready to die.

If Rivera's care were being paid for by a private insurance policy or out of her family's assets her case would not be a public issue. The weighing of benefits versus costs of care would have already been decided by the patient and/or her family in advance. However, decisions about rationing are inherent to government-financed medical care - bureaucrats, not patients, must weigh the benefts versus the costs on behalf of the taxpayers who are footing the bill. For now, a California court has ruled that Rivera's family can decide how much money California taxpayers must spend on her care.

Maybe They Shouldn't Choose a Medical Career?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:09:00 EDT

I am all in favor of medical pluralism. If Roman Catholic hospitals, doctors, nurses, and pharmacists don't want to perform abortions, use stem cells, or provide contraception that's fine with me. On the other hand, if conventional hospitals, abortion clinics, pharmacies, and university research facilities want to do these things, they shouldn't be forced to hire people who object to these treatments and procedures on moral grounds. Unfortunately, the Bush administration's Department of Health and Human Services is apparently trying to ram just such an "anti-discrimination" employment regulation through. According to the Washington Post, the DHHS justifies promulgating the proposed new regulation on the grounds that:

"In general, the Department is concerned that the development of an environment in the health care industry that is intolerant of certain religious beliefs, ethnic and cultural traditions, and moral convictions may discourage individuals from underrepresented and diverse backgrounds from entering health care professions," the document states.

If CVS pharmacies want to refuse to hire a pharmacist who won't dispense Plan B emergency contraception because he/she thinks it's tantamount to abortion, the company should have the right to that. The would-be pharmacist should seek work elsewhere. In vitro fertilization clinics and stem cell research facilities should be allowed to discriminate against people who think the services they offer are immoral and so forth.

Whole Post article here.

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them*--Anti-Biotech Edition

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:53:00 EDT

Anti-biotech crop activists are often economical with the truth, but this one is a particularly amusing howler. From GE Free NZ anti-biotech spokesperson Claire Bleakley:

“Bt is a insecticidal toxin and has known deleterious effects on the blood and organs."

If this were true (and it's not), this would be very disturbing news to consumers of organic foods and organic farmers who have been dousing their crops with b.t. for decades. But not to worry, the Environmental Protection Agency has found:

The delta-endotoxin proteins of B. thuringinesis have been intensively studied and no indications of mammalian toxicity have been reported. Furthermore, approximately 176 different B. thuringiensis products have been registered since 1961, and the Agency has not received any reports of dietary toxicity attributable to their use.

An even more recent EPA analysis of b.t. biotech crops finds:

The mammalian toxicity data gathered by the EPA currently are sufficient to support the Bt plant-incorporated protectant registrations. None of the products registered at this time, all of which have tolerance exemptions for food use, show any characteristics of toxins or food allergens.

Bleakley is just another in a long of line of anti-biotech liars.

*Apologies to Al Franken.

Trade Negotiations Tossed onto the Trash Heap

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:56:00 EDT

In May, the Copenhagen Consensus identified freer trade as the chief policy change that could bring the biggest immediate benefits to the humanity, especially to the developing countries. As I reported:

Number 2 on the list of Copenhagen Consensus 2008 priorities is to widen free trade by means of the Doha Development Agenda. The benefits from trade are enormous. Success at Doha trade negotiations could boost global income by $3 trillion per year, of which $2.5 trillion would go to the developing countries. At the Copenhagen Consensus Center press conference, University of Chicago economist Nancy Stokey explained, "Trade reform is not just for the long run, it would make people in developing countries better off right now. There are large benefits in the short run and the long run benefits are enormous."
Nobelist and University of California, Santa Barbara economist Finn Kydland noted that unless the economies of developing countries grow, they will still be mired in the same problems of poverty ten years from now as they are today. "By reducing trade barriers, income per capita will grow, enabling more people in developing countries to take care of some of these problems for themselves."

The really bad news today is the Doha Development Round of World Trade Organization negotiations in Geneva have collapsed. Trade negotiations always turn on figuring out how to bribe producers who hate competition into allowing consumers to have access to a wider and cheaper array of goods and services.

In this case, freer trade ran aground on the idiotic farm policies of both rich and poor countries. As the Associated Press reported:

After coming tantalizingly close to a historic trade deal, World Trade Organization talks collapsed Tuesday in a dismaying blow to seven years of efforts to open up the global economy.
Once promised as a recipe for lifting millions of people out of poverty, the end to nine days of high-level talks left no new trade openings for farmers and manufacturers, no global economic boost and no grand deal for Third World development.
It was by all accounts a disaster.
"This is a very painful failure and a real setback for the global economy when we really needed some good news," said Peter Mandelson, the European Union's trade commissioner....
It was all the more disappointing because the talks made greater progress than they had in years on issues such as farm subsidies and manufacturing tariffs — which were responsible for scuttling previous high-level trade efforts. The talks hit a snag over an obscure "safeguard" for protecting agricultural producers in the developing world from a sudden surge in imports or drop in commodity prices.
While farm import safeguards currently exist in rich and poor countries, they are rarely used and reflect only a minute portion of the billions of dollars in manufacturing, farm and services gains the WTO's Doha trade round was supposed to create.
"In the face of global food price crisis, it is ironic that the debate came down to how much and how fast could nations raise their barriers to imports of food," said U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab, who resisted attempts by China and India to ensure a loophole for developing countries allowing them to increase farm tariffs as part of an agreement.

It is always bad news when the win/win wealth-creating dynamic of free trade is stymied--especially so when the global economy is experiencing financial, food, and energy crises.

Whole AP story here.

Al Gore's Curiously Cost-Free Plan to Re-Power America

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:00:00 EDT

On July 17, Nobelist and Academy Award winner Al Gore issued a stirring challenge to our nation to produce 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and carbon-free sources within 10 years. Gore asserted, "The quickest, cheapest and best way to start using all this renewable energy is in the production of electricity. In fact, we can start right now using solar power, wind power and geothermal power to make electricity for our homes and businesses." This massive push for no-carbon electricity production would help prevent climate change and cut our dependence on foreign oil. Of course, great-souled visionaries such as Gore do not concern themselves with piddling and mundane issues such as who will pay for this marvelous no-carbon energy future and how much it will cost. Not being burdened with a great soul, I decided to don my green eyeshade and make a preliminary stab at figuring out how much Gore's scheme might cost us.

According to the Energy Information Administration, the existing capacity of U.S. coal, gas, and oil generating plants totals around 850,000 megawatts. So how much would it cost to replace those facilities with solar electric power? Let's use the recent announcement of a 280-megawatt thermal solar power plant in Arizona for $1 billion as the starting point for an admittedly rough calculation. Combined with a molten salt heat storage systems, solar thermal might be able to provide base load power. Crunching the numbers (850,000 megawatts/280 megawatts x $1 billion) produces a total capital cost of just over $3 trillion over the next ten years.

What about wind power? Oilman T. Boone Pickens is building the world's biggest wind energy project with an installed capacity of 4,000 megawatts at a cost of $10 billion, or about $2.5 billion per 1,000 megawatts. For purposes of illustration, this implies a total cost of around $2.1 trillion over the next ten years to replace current carbon-emitting electricity generation capacity with wind power. That's assuming that the wind projects generate electricity at their rated capacity at or near 100 percent of the time. Making the heroic assumption that in fact wind projects will generate power at about one-third of their rated capacity (due to wind variability), this would imply tripling the number of wind power generators. This boosts the total overall cost to more than $6 trillion over the next ten years.

What's the potential for geothermal electricity generation? Geothermal power taps the heat of the Earth itself to make steam to drive turbines to generate electricity. For instance, superhot water erupting from the Geysers in northern California fuel power plants with a generation capacity of 725 megawatts. But such geothermal sites are relatively rare. However, an unconventional geothermal source—hot dry rocks—might supply us with no-carbon electricity. In lots of places, rocks several kilometers down are quite hot. To get at this heat, engineers drill at least two boreholes and inject cool water in one. The injected water flows around fractured hot rocks and rises through the other borehole as steam to drive a turbine to generate electricity. Some very preliminary figures suggest that it would cost around $3 billion for build a 1000 megawatt geothermal plant. Replacing 850 gigawatts of carbon-emitting power generation capacity with geothermal electricity would cost around $2.5 trillion over ten years.

Curiously, nowhere does the "N-word"—nuclear—appear in Gore's speech. Currently, 104 nuclear power plants generate about 20 percent of America's electricity. Once a nuclear plant is up and running, it is essentially carbon-free. Westinghouse claims that it can build a third generation 1,000 megawatt nuclear power plant for around $1.4 billion. Assuming this estimate is right, all U.S. carbon-emitting electricity generation plants could be replaced with nuclear power at a cost of about $1.2 trillion by 2018.

One other issue: Just how does using renewable sources of energy to generate electricity free us from dependence on foreign oil when only a tiny bit of crude is burned to produce electricity? The vast majority of petroleum is turned into transportation fuels, while home heating accounts for around two percent of total U.S. petroleum consumption. The answer, evidently, is a vehicle fleet powered by electricity. Although Gore doesn't dwell on it, he does mention that we should help "our struggling auto giants switch to the manufacture of plug-in electric cars."

In 2006, a U.S. Department of Energy study concluded that if 84 percent of all cars and light trucks were plug in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), fueling them would not require any additional electric generation capacity. The study assumes that the PHEVs would travel an average of 33 miles per day solely on electric power and could be charged using off-peak power at night. PHEVs would cost between $6,000 and $10,000 more than conventional cars. Such a PHEV fleet could reduce oil consumption by 6.5 million barrels per day, or approximately 52 percent of our oil imports.

While the capital costs for current versions of renewable no-carbon electricity generation are high, one big advantage is that their fuel costs are low to non-existent. Gore is also probably right that the prices for renewable energy production technologies will fall in the future. However, his proposed crash program would put an immediate steep upward price pressure on the commodities—steel, concrete, silicon, copper—that go into building energy infrastructure. All of the rough calculations above are for generating capacity alone and do not include the costs of a $1 trillion smart grid upgrade for our creaky electric power distribution system. And does Gore plan to compensate the shareholders of conventional power generation companies when their assets are forcibly scrapped?

As a very rough low estimate, Gore's 10-year no-carbon energy plan would cost about $300 billion per year for the next ten years. According to the Brattle Group consultancy, "new and replacement generating plants will cost about $560 billon through 2030, absent a significant expansion of energy efficiency programs or new climate initiatives." That comes to an average of about $25 billion per year over the next 22 years. Gore's proposal is a "new climate initiative" that aims to spend twelve times more than the utility industry would otherwise annually invest in new and replacement generating capacity. Gore explicitly likens his scheme to NASA's Apollo program, but reaching the moon cost only $150 billion (in current dollars) spent over eight years. In other words, getting to the moon cost half of what Gore wants to spend annually to realize his no-carbon energy vision.

"Of course there are those who will tell us this can't be done," warned Gore. I am not one of those people. I am sure it can be done. But before embarking on his "generational challenge to re-power America," I would like the former vice-president to sketch out a few more details on how it's going to be paid for and who's going to be stuck with the bill. Without those answers, Gore's bold challenge amounts to little more than hot air.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

RomneyCare: Not Universal and Not Cheaper

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:41:00 EDT

First, an abashed confession: I had hoped, despite its flaws, that some improved version of Mitt Romney's Massachusetts health insurance mandate might help stop the slide toward what used to be called socialized medicine by leading to expanded private health insurance coverage. In 2006, then-Gov. Mitt Romney predicted in a Wall Street Journal op/ed:

Every uninsured citizen in Massachusetts will soon have affordable health insurance and the costs of health care will be reduced.

How was this miracle going to be achieved? Romney declared:

The solution we came up with was to make private health insurance much more affordable. Insurance reforms now permit policies with higher deductibles, higher copayments, coinsurance, provider networks and fewer mandated benefits like in vitro fertilization--and our insurers have committed to offer products nearly 50% less expensive. With private insurance finally affordable, I proposed that everyone must either purchase a product of their choice or demonstrate that they can pay for their own health care. It's a personal responsibility principle.

As the Wall Street Journal points out today, it hasn't worked out that way:

Supporters are exultant because 350,000 people are newly covered since former Governor Romney's parley with Beacon Hill Democrats in 2006; this cuts the state's uninsured rate by about half. That's not the promised "universal" system, but never mind. The ominous news is that only about 18,000 people -- or 5% of the newly insured -- have taken advantage of the "connector," which was supposed to be the plan's free-market innovation linking individuals to private insurers.

Most of this growth in coverage has instead come via a new state entitlement called Commonwealth Care. This provides subsidized insurance to those under 300% of the poverty level, or about $63,000 for a family of four. About 174,000 have joined this low- or no-cost program, a trend that is likely to speed up.

As this public option gets overwhelmed, budget gaskets are blowing everywhere. Mr. Patrick had already bumped up this year's spending to $869 million, $144 million over its original estimate. Liberals duly noted that these tax hikes are necessary because enrollment in Commonwealth Care is much higher than anticipated. But of course more people will have coverage if government gives it to them for free. The problem is that someone has to pay for it.

Who knew that giving away something for "free" would increase the demand for it?

Whole current WSJ op/ed here. Take a look at my Reason Foundation colleague Shikha Dalmia's insightful WSJ op/ed on health insurance mandates. My original proposal to mandate completely private health insurance here.