Reading A Graph Between the Lines

This is a recent update to something that we've talked about here over the years: Compounded inflation from Jan. '00 to June '21 in several different categories of goods and services.  I think it's very illustrative. 

That's US Consumer Price inflation for 15 different things; and some categories are broader than others, but the overall changes in price go from up over 200% to down (guessing) 95%.  

It also shows from top to bottom the things that are highly government regulated (another way of saying there's no free market working) down to consumer goods that are regulated much more lightly (saying the free market if functioning fully).  

College tuition and fees are virtually untouched by the market economy.  The number of real classroom seats to put equally real student butts into is far smaller than the number of those butts.  In a free market, that supply/demand imbalance tends to raise prices but only a small number of students say "that's too much" and looks for other career options.  For those who don't look elsewhere, the fed.gov has guaranteed that grants, scholarships, and loans are available to pay for those seats regardless of the costs.  Or as we've just seen with graduate students, the Fed.gov just guarantees they'll pay back the loan regardless of what the student does, essentially making graduate schools free to anyone who reads their contracts. 

BTW, the leveling off of college textbook prices is surprising and unprecedented.  Nobody knows quite what to make of that other than to point out how remarkable it is.

Hospitalization and medical care services are likewise backed up by government edict as well as government direct payment, both Federal (e.g. Medicare) and state (Medicaid).  The effect of private insurance is harder to pin down because it's susceptible to market forces but only weakly compared to the patient picking the service and provider directly.  The insurance carriers compete to sell to the employers buying coverage, so there is some market there.  (In most instances, health insurance isn't bought directly by the person using it, rather it most often comes as a benefit with employment.)  The problem is that a third party (the contracted insurance company) doesn't have as much at stake as an individual buying their own healthcare. 

The lowest of the rising prices have been tied between Housing and Food and Beverages for the entire time; these are strongly competed for, but government programs for housing low income people affect the market, as does food relief (Food stamps/EBT cards).  

The most free market is for home electronics, and they pick TVs in particular.  I think most people might guess this and the world is full of stories of how much the prices for LED TVs dropped over the years.  In comparison to computers, for example, computers tend to have a harder to evaluate price for some level of performance.  Prices aren't in free fall or dropping in half every couple of years, but the buyer gets more for their money; maybe more processor cores, or more memory, faster solid state drive or other upgrades.   

Since "cellphone services" (I read the word "contracts") are full of government mandatory fees, I'm moderately surprised they say the prices have come down as much as they're saying.  Similarly, the prices of new cars are all affected by government mandates, but there haven't been any major changes going into effect over the period - say like increasing mandatory fuel efficiencies or other high cost demands.

In essence you can read this plot as reflective of the total effect of market intervention.  The higher the inflation, the more the government distorts the free markets, while the lower, the freer the market.  It's not a completely perfect correlation but it's a good one.

BATFE Going After 80% Receivers Again - Revised

The BATFE has apparently decided to start going into regulatory expansionism again, with a perceived change in administration coming to someone who's more likely to grow the Bureau's budgets again.  Back in October they started going after pistol braces in an apparent attempt to outlaw AR pistols - or start down that road.  According to TTAG (The Truth About Guns), on Thursday the 10th the BATFE raided Polymer80, one of the largest makers of 80% lowers and pistol frames.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

The raid target, Nevada-based Polymer80, is suspected of illegally manufacturing and distributing firearms, failing to pay taxes, shipping guns across state lines and failing to conduct background investigations, according to an application for a search warrant unsealed Thursday after the raid took place.

The probe focuses on Polymer80’s “Buy Build Shoot Kit,” which includes the parts to build a “ghost” handgun. The kit, which Polymer80 sells online, meets the definition of a firearm, ATF investigators determined according to the warrant application. That means it would have to be stamped with a serial number and couldn’t be sold to consumers who haven’t first passed a background check.

TTAG supplied this product photo of a “Buy Build Shoot Kit.” From what I know there isn't one gun in this photograph.  Nothing that requires a serial number or a background check.  It's no different than if you bought a bar of metal and some hunks of plastic.

Like everyone who sells these so-called 80% receivers (the percentage, though widely used, has no correspondence to reality), Polymer80 submitted their designs and products to the BATFE for a ruling on whether they met the criteria for not being a gun.  The Feds ruled that they're not guns, yet somehow the BATFE is saying when they sell a hunk of plastic that's not a gun with handful of small parts that aren't a gun in a common package, it becomes a gun.  Non-gun + non-gun = gun  

But the Buy Build Shoot Kits, which are advertised as having “all the necessary components to build a complete…pistol” weren’t submitted to the agency for approval, according to the application for the search warrant. These kits can be “assembled into fully functional firearms in a matter of minutes,” the warrant application says.

There was no reason to submit it to the agency for approval.  Nothing was a gun and nothing about what they were selling was new except being in one package.  Convenience makes it a gun?  This reminds me of the BATFE vs. Ares Armor case in 2014 in which the BATFE argued Ares Armor was illegally manufacturing guns.  What they were doing was making a plastic lower with a different color plastic in the fire control pocket, which would be removed when making it into a gun.  BATFE said the second plastic had to be added to a complete receiver which was turning a gun into "not a gun" and during the brief existence of the gun, it needed to be serialized and treated as a gun thereafter.  Ares Armor said their process documents proved that it was made all at once and a finished receiver was never present. 

As an aside, the absolute coolest trick in the world, and I've never heard anyone else ever talk about doing it, would be to mold this out of two grades of plastic. Wouldn't it just be the coolest thing you've ever seen if the body of the lower melted at say, 400 degrees, and the part that needed to be removed melted at 200? So that all you'd have to do to turn this 80% lower into a finished one would be to soak it in boiling water? I wonder if that could be done.

Of course, the BATFE is not a group to be all sophisticated about "dat legal shit."  They're much more interested in the "control" part of gun control.  I'm just surprised that they seem more than happy to open a can of worms that just a year ago they didn't want to get near.  Last October, the BATFE dropped charges of manufacturing guns against a guy who had set up a gun club so that any member could pay their $25 dues to join, put their lower receiver in a fixture he had designed, press "GO" on the CNC controller and let it turn an aluminum lower into a gun for them.  Considering that the BATFE had previously said if someone so much as marked where to drill a hole on an 80% lower that they had manufactured a gun, that seems like a pretty open and shut legal case, so why did they drop the case and let the guy go?

The judge in the case had given an opinion that completing a lower receiver still didn't turn it into a gun!  BATFE's laws don't do what they're intended to do, and if BATFE lost the case firearms law would collapse into a black hole of nothingness.  BATFE is terrified that they created a situation where there is no definition for which part of the AR-15 is the gun.  Their definition of a receiver is spread across both the upper and lower receiver in an AR-15. 

As I like to say, "don't worry; it's not that bad. It's worse." That ruling last October isn't the first. There was another case in 2016 in which BATFE dropped the case because the Judge read the law and said the guy wasn't manufacturing guns because a completed lower isn't a gun. To borrow a quote, BATFE is muy FUBAR.

As I said in my conclusion last October:

What the rulings seem to be saying is that the AR platform with its regulated lower and unregulated upper is inconsistent with Federal law. Since it's impossible to redesign the platform with millions of them already in peoples' hands, the solution is for congress to come up with a definition for the lower receiver that's workable. That's going to be a giant ball of fail; congress never writes laws that require technical details because none of them are qualified. On the other hand, if someone was to do things that the BATFE frowned on with some lower receivers, we have two cases that say they're going to quit before they get ruled against for all the marbles. In the words of Dirty Harry, "do you feel lucky?"

In this case, the polymer pistol isn't an AR, so I wonder if Polymer80 can argue the precedent set in 2016 and 2019, that nothing they're selling meets the federal legal definition of a gun? 

EDITED 12/12 1200 EST to add:

Today's Ammoland Shooting Sports News adds some context to this story.  This is wider than just a raid on Polymer80. 

This week ATF has shown up at multiple shooting-sports-related companies and retailer's door to demanded customer information about those American citizens who legally purchased 80% pistol frames.

They make the point that BATFE has demanded that Polymer80 turn over lists of buyers of the BATFE's targeted Buy Build Shoot kits, to do background checks on buyers to find prohibited persons.  Again, the problem with the kits appears to be convenience, and BATFE is essentially saying that anything a company sells that is based on the incomplete receiver concept needs to be submitted for their review.  Just as anything using the pistol brace concept needs to be submitted for their review. 

Rob Pincus of the Personal Defense Network has a worthwhile video here - there are two, the top one is nearly six minutes long, but worth the time.

Ammoland also points out that the BATE also "paid a visit" to Brownells to ensure they were not selling the convenient Buy Build Shoot kits, and found they were not (which they could have determined by visiting their online store and searching for them). 

“The ATF did visit our facility on Thursday, December 10, 2020,” said Ryan Repp, Brownells VP of Marketing. “It’s my understanding they inquired about our sales of the Polymer 80 ‘Buy, Build, Shoot’ kit. Brownells has not and does not sell that kit. Polymer 80 continues to be a great partner for Brownells. We proudly sell their 80% products and other parts.”

The ATF did raid or show up at other companies that sell other kits that include 80% part kits, barrels, and slides that are not Polymer80. AmmoLand News sources inside the ATF say that the agency is now considering 80% kits with all the parts needed to finish a pistol as a firearm. None of the companies had any warning on the change to ATF’s regulations before actual agents showed up making attempts to retrieve customer information.

The ATF is interested in the customer records, and this seems to be a nationwide crackdown. The agency’s intent on acquiring customer's personal records and run criminal background against the list to see if any felons have purchased the 80% frame. The ATF is making a de facto 80% gun registration. [I would add bold for emphasis, but it would take up the entire second two paragraphs: SiG]

This is a fast-developing situation.  I'll try to keep updates coming as I read about them.

Bottom-Feeder Lawyer Frenzy Over Roundup Seems to be Ending

Every now and then, I surprise myself by searching for something I'm absolutely sure I've written about before and don't find it.  Sometimes it has shown up when searching for totally off-the-wall search terms (can't think of an example) but ordinarily I search for the topic and find something I'm sure I've written. 

Not this time. I can find no evidence of having written about the bottom-feeding lawyer race to the bottom that has been going on over the weed killer Roundup.

Yesterday at Townhall, occasional columnist Angela Logomasini passed on the news that the bottom feeders seem to be moving on to something else to sue over.  It's an interesting story, if you know the background that no carefully controlled study has ever concluded that Roundup (glyphosate) causes cancer, nor has any country declared it a carcinogen.  Even the EPA hasn't ruled Roundup to be dangerous and you've got to know the EPA would love to regulate as much as they possibly can.  Ms. Logomasini put it this way:

All these cases are built on a single, discredited hazard assessment produced by a United Nations outfit known as the International Agency for Research on Cancer or IARC. IARC classified Roundup’s active ingredient—glyphosate—as a known carcinogen despite contrary findings by most governmental and nongovernmental entities around the world.

Yet IARC does not even attempt to determine if real-world exposures pose risks, they just consider the theoretical possibility of risk at some unspecified level.

I'm sure you know what's referred to as the First Law of Toxicology, which is "the dose makes the poison," right?  IARC totally ignores that.  If you look into IARC rulings, it's even more bizarre.  IARC places plutonium in their Group 1, the same cancer category as Chinese-style salty fish, leather and wood dusts.  I think everyone considers plutonium a carcinogen; the salty fish and sawdust, not so much.  They're hard to take seriously. 

The reason there's a feeding frenzy over suing Bayer AgroSciences, parent company of Monsanto, is that in some jury case a suit was successful and thus became a legal precedent.  In an attempt at self-preservation, Bayer established a policy of just paying out on these claims, but that sent the message to the lawyers that the gravy train had arrived. All they had to do was file and Bayer would pay out.

As the money has been paying out and the number of new cases is going down, the sharks are looking for a new place to feed.  They've found one.  Again, to Ms. Logomasini:

As Roundup cases hopefully winds down, there are a growing number of lawsuits focused on ethylene oxide (EO) on the horizon. EO is a chemical used to sterilize more than 50 percent of the nation’s medical supplies—including masks, bandages, ventilators, and more. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency aided and abetted the trial lawyers on this one in 2016 by producing an absurd assessment on the chemical’s risk.

I've long considered the EPA to be the High Priests of Junk Science, and this time it's Junk Science in the extreme.  The EPA has a program called the Integrated Risk Information System or (IRIS) (pdf warning on the link), and IRIS assigned a safe exposure limit of 0.1 parts per trillion for EO.  For perspective, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) says this is the equivalent of taking one drop of water and spreading it into 200 Olympic-sized swimming pools.  Must be powerful stuff, right? 

Here's where the EPA really screwed the pooch on this subject.  See, your body produces EO at levels 19,000 times greater than the EPA's 0.1 ppt.  All day, everyday.  Further, since this is part of the intricately regulated biochemistry of our bodies, the body clears EO quickly, with a half life (that is, levels falling by 50%) of 42 minutes.  If the EPA was right, people would be dropping like flies from the EO in their own bodies, inhaling it in the air, and more. 

Since the EPA declared it such a ridiculously potent poison, the lawyers have followed. 

Despite these realities, EPA’s air quality office used the IRIS number in a 2018 report that suggested people in communities near medical sterilization plants might face elevated cancer risks. Sensationalist news headlines followed, whipping up panic in several communities leading local and state governments to shut down several plants during 2019 and into 2020.

These closures exacerbated medical supply shortages  (pdf warning) just when the novel corona virus crisis started. Fortunately, in March and April of 2020, the Food and Drug Administration was able to get states and localities to open all but one of the facilities to help address shortages, but this issue is far from over.

The problem, I'm sure you can see, is that if the EPA doesn't reclassify EO, the lawyers may get lucky and get into a court with a dumb enough jury to award money, which will trigger a Roundup-like feeding frenzy that could shut down all the medical production that relies on it.  Instead of hurting one corporation (and the millions that depend on Bayer), they'll hurt everyone dependent on the medical facilities that sterilize with EO.  Which hurts everyone, especially in the days of the Rona. 

Typical lawyer attempt at trolling. 

Near Billion Dollar Solar Power Station Fails

The Crescent Dunes solar power plant in Tonopah was begun some 10 years ago and financed in part with a $737 million federal loan guarantee.  The state of Nevada added another $119 million, Crescent Dunes was another Concentrated Solar Power facility, like I've written about before, started with the intent to demonstrate ways to drive down the cost of solar power to be competitive with conventional (fossil fuel or nuclear) power generation technologies.

Crescent Dunes has bellied up.

It was expected to produce in excess of 500,000 MWh (MegaWatt*Hours) per year over 25 years, or 12,500,000 MWh, of fully dispatchable (or sort of) electricity at a cost of 0.08 $ per kWh.  This chart of the resultant power output shows it came close to 420,000 MWh produced spread over four years.

David Boaz at the Cato Institute adds a couple of important numbers.

The plant’s technology was designed to generate enough power night and day to supply a city the size of nearby Sparks, Nev. (population 100,000), but it never came close. Its power cost NV about $135 per megawatt‐​hour, compared with less than $30 per MWh today at a new Nevada photovoltaic solar farm, according to BloombergNEF, which researches fossil fuel alternatives.  [Note: for comparison, costs for electricity will vary around the country, but the utility I have here in east Central Florida gets in the vicinity of $8 to $9 per MWh, less than 30% of the $30 quoted for the new photovoltaic farms]

Say hi to your tax money:

Remind anyone of Solyndra? 

This morning, J.Kb at Miguel's Gun Free Zone posted a piece called, “Why Bernie Sanders won and the lesson the Republican party needs to learn from it.”  His point was that Bernie is appealing to people who hear about corruption like this plant or Solyndra and are enraged by it; that Bernie is appealing to people who see “banksters” - that combination word of banker and gangster - getting away with sucking all of the money out of corporations like a mutant mosquito sucking all the blood out of an animal.  Bernie is selling to rage.  The problem is the cure is going to be worse than the disease. 

I've said this so many times, I don't know how else to say it: raging against the machine is fine, but they're raging against the wrong machine!!!  The problem isn't the billionaires, the problem isn't the “vulture capitalists,” the problem is the government.  The government is infected with corruption from top to bottom, making the government bigger is feeding the monster.  Obligatory disclaimer that of course it isn't everyone and there are good people trying to unscrew things. 

Everything in our world has been structured to set this up for at least the last hundred years.  It's not capitalism that's causing the problem, it's the lack of capitalism.  We have a system in which a bunch of central bankers issue money that’s worthless, backed by nothing but thin air, and manipulate every single aspect of the economy.  If one “too big to fail” bank – or one “vulture capitalist” – is stupid and gets over extended, instead of facing the consequences of their actions, the central bankers create another few billion bucks out of nothing and bail them out. It’s pure central control – that other word for socialism/communism. We have a revolving table of regulators going to work in the industries they just regulated, and people from those industries going to be the regulators. You think that’s a free economy? That’s what you get when government gets bigger.
 
The problem is the government is making all of this worse, and putting someone in charge who's going to make the government bigger is going to make all of the problems worse. 

Idaho Embarks on Enormous Deregulation Experiment

If this is the post of the day, look to the right and see the graphic of the sunset with my message to Deregulate.  (If it's not the post of the day, look at the top of the right sidebar). 

1. Sunset all new laws.  That means all new Federal Laws get an expiration date.  
2. Throw out all useless old laws. Like how the Trump administration has thrown out 22 regulations for every new one they've added 

According to The Library of Economics and Liberty, and quoting from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Idaho has just thrown out all of their existing regulations.  All.  Admittedly, it wasn't planned and nobody seems to know quite what it means, but let me just quote from the article.

Something rather remarkable just happened in Idaho. The state legislature opted to—in essence—repeal the entire state regulatory code. The cause may have been dysfunction across legislative chambers, but the result is serendipitous. A new governor is presented with an unprecedented opportunity to repeal an outdated and burdensome regulatory code and replace it with a more streamlined and sensible set of rules. Other states should be paying close attention.

Instead, the legislature wrapped up an acrimonious session in April without passing a rule-reauthorization bill. As a result, come July 1, some 8,200 pages of regulations containing 736 chapters of state rules will expire. Any rules the governor opts to keep will have to be implemented as emergency regulations, and the legislature will consider them anew when it returns next January.

What does this mean?  Do STOP signs cease to be valid?  Is the state going to be overrun by inadequately licensed hair dressers or fingernail technicians, or some other specialty regulated into a tiny box by an established group of practitioners keeping newcomers out?  The authors of the articles say they don't know.

You might have come across the idea of a “regulatory reset.”  It would be like this, except deliberately crafted rather than the result of legislative dysfunction.  The idea is that the government eliminates all regulations and then brings back the ones it decides it wants.  Presumably, we would end up with substantially fewer regulations.  In practice, when deregulation is tried, regulatory agencies (think FCC, FDA, HEW, EPA and the alphabet soup of Fed.gov executive branch agencies) are reluctant to throw out sunsetted regulations.  It threatens their existence!  To borrow a quote from the Mercatus Center article:

The Idaho case also highlights the power of sunset provisions—or automatic expiration dates built into laws or regulations. In the past, academic research has found that sunset provisions are sometimes ineffective. Legislatures and agencies often readopt regulations without much thought.  To work well, sunsets may need to be structured such that large swaths of rules expire simultaneously, with reauthorization responsibilities falling to the legislature rather than regulators. Sunsets are perhaps most useful when rules are allowed to lapse and then forced back through the rulemaking process all over again. That way they can be subjected to public scrutiny, cost-benefit analysis, and perhaps even court challenges.  [Bold added: SiG]

The regulatory state hates this idea.  If the legislature is debating putting old rules back they're not working on new regulations.  I think that's a feature, not a bug.

It goes without saying that being in central Florida I'm just about as far from Idaho as one can get in the continental US and still be in the CONUS.  I imagine some of you are from Idaho and might have more insight.  Comments from anyone familiar with the Idaho goings-on are appreciated. 

On Letting Felons Vote From Prison

Short version - aw hell no.

Longer version, I assume everyone with a pulse heard Crazy Bernie say felons should be able to vote while they're still incarcerated during a CNN Town Hall Monday night.  Sanders is quoted as saying,

“If somebody commits a serious crime, sexual assault, murder, they're going to be punished. … But I think the right to vote is inherent to our democracy. Yes, even for terrible people.”

This actually stunned the CNN talking heads, with this exchange captured by Steve Guest making the rounds on Twitter:

While discussing Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris' comments on felons & terrorists voting from prison, Don Lemon says he was “stunned” Democrats are ok with terrorists voting from prison, & Chris Cuomo said it shows that “these people are way out there.” pic.twitter.com/LkyKnPQ6e2 

It shouldn't be extremely surprising because Bernie's from Vermont.  Vermont allows felons to vote while still incarcerated and has for the entire history of the state.  Felons may even run for office while incarcerated in the Green Mountain State. 

Still, Cuomo and Lemon are right: proposing this is going to have most of America thinking the party has slipped too far.  It's interesting that another presidential candidate, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, (I believe that's pronounced "booty judge" - at least, that's how I pronounce it) countered Sanders, saying, “When you’re convicted of a crime and you’re incarcerated … you lose certain rights.”

I think that's the starting point.  The example of capital crimes, like the Boston Marathon Bomber that Sanders was questioned about, is particularly egregious.  This guy deprived other people of all of their rights by killing them, and I don't think it's appropriate to talk about giving the murderer more rights than his victims.  By that standard, no felon who commits murder should ever get any of their rights back.

Longtime readers will know that one of the drums I beat regularly is the Over Regulated State, including how everything is becoming a felony, and how the average American now commits three felonies a day.  I should point out that lawyer Harvey Silvergate wrote that book back in 2011; I wouldn't be surprised if one could argue that it's up to four or five felonies a day by now.  Central to this story is that there are felonies which are minor crimes compared to the Boston bombing, murder, rape or other capital crimes.  Do you remember the story of inventor Krister Evertson?

Consider small-time inventor and entrepreneur Krister Evertson, who will testify at today's hearing. Krister never had so much as a traffic ticket before he was run off the road near his mother's home in Wasilla, Alaska, by SWAT-armored federal agents in large black SUVs training automatic weapons on him.

Evertson, who had been working on clean-energy fuel cells since he was in high school, had no idea what he'd done wrong. It turned out that when he legally sold some sodium (part of his fuel-cell materials) to raise cash, he forgot to put a federally mandated safety sticker on the UPS package he sent to the lawful purchaser.

Pulled over by SWAT team in full gear, pointing guns at him, because he forgot a sticker?   The story gets a bit worse because while the jury for this trial sided with Evertson, the prosecutor was not going to let a small time mistake dangerous thug like this embarrass him, nosiree.  He came up with another crime to charge Evertson with: "abandoning" his "dangerous" fuel cell materials while he was in jail for the label incident.  Although they were stored as the valuable materials they were, and not abandoned in some sort of dangerous state, he was convicted and spent a couple of years in Federal prison because of running afoul of this prosecutor, backed by the infinite checkbook of the Fed.gov.

Where am I going with this?  I think of someone like Evertson when I hear about felons in Federal prison, not the Boston Bomber (yeah, I know: really "terrible people" - as Bernie said - are there, too).  I think of some ordinary working guy who committed one of the countless felonies that happen everyday, but caught the attention of a zealous prosecutor.  When you're in prison, you lose many of your rights, and the right to vote doesn't seem like a major loss to me.  I lean to saying that while someone is in prison, they don't get normal citizen's rights.  Once they're released, and their "debt to society" is considered paid, they should get those rights back, including the right to legally buy a firearm, vote and all the rest.  The reality is that if someone is not in prison they can get a gun.  If the purpose is to keep them from hurting someone, and there's a genuine concern they will, keep them in prison!  Once they're out, once they've been declared ready to go back into society, they should get their rights back.

If everything is becoming a felony such that we're all committing three felonies a day, then we're all one random encounter with a zealous prosecutor from being a prohibited person and we all lose our 2nd amendment rights. This would allow us to get them back. 

(From the Daily Caller) 

Record Deregulation in 2017

During the final days of the campaign in '16, candidate Trump said he'd ask department heads to remove regulations at 2:1, that is, two removed for every one added.  As the spreader of Tales From the Over Regulated State, I was very happy to hear that.  Instead, Trump revealed in December that they had achieved 22:1 regulations removed to added, which is really change I can believe in.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute noted by the end of last year that the Federal Register for the year had the fewest pages since 1993 - a quarter of a century.

The calendar year concluded with 61,950 pages in the Federal Register… This is the lowest count since 1993’s 61,166 pages. …A year ago, Obama set the all-time Federal Register page record with 95,894 pages. Trump’s Federal Register is a 35 percent drop from Obama’s record… After the National Archives processes all the blank pages and skips in the 2017 Federal Register, Trump’s final count will ultimately be even lower. [Bold added - SiG]

 Consider this graphic excerpted from the CEI

Wayne Crews of the CEI adds:

Of course, the Federal Register may be a poor guide for regulation, but Washington doesn't go out of its way to honestly measure itself and disclose regulatory impact.

The “problem” of assessing magnitude is even worse this year, because many of Trump’s “rules” are rules written to get rid of rules.

Director of the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center Susan Dudely writes for Forbes on the differences Trump is making.

The pace of new regulation has visibly slowed in the Trump administration. A search of OMB’s database reveals that, between January 21 and December 20, 2017, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs concluded review of 21 “economically significant” regulations—those with impacts (costs or benefits) expected to be $100 million or more in a year. As the chart below shows, that is dramatically fewer rules than previous presidents have issued in their first years. This same database shows that Presidents G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, and G.W. Bush each issued 39 or 40 in their first years. President Obama issued 52 and even Reagan (considered the last deregulatory president) issued 36 economically significant final rules during his first year in office.

The Forbes article on deregulation opens with this photo opportunity shot of Trump showing the regulatory growth since the 1960s and promising to return federal regulations to 1960s levels.  Without dismantling yuge swaths of the Federal hydra, that's impossible.  Most of those regulations come from agencies that didn't even exist in the '60s; e.g., no EPA, no Department of Energy, no OSHA, no Department of Homeland Security, no Consumer Product Safety Commission and no Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. To name a few obvious offenders. 

The consensus is that it isn't within the president's powers to reduce the pile on the right to the size of the pile on the left.  But the consensus was also that Trump had no chance of being elected president.  A guy can dream, though, can't he? 

The Net Neutrality Argument Goes 2010 SEIU

My reference is to a protest covered here in May of 2010 in which SEIU hired goons showed up at the home of a Bank of America executive to protest loudly outside his house.  There were reports that the thugs were escorted by police, or at a minimum, the police were not willing to do anything to stop them.

The banker whose home was attacked had been at his child's baseball game.  Another, older, child was at home terrified and had locked himself in the bathroom.  Picture yourself in this situation; your child is home afraid and needs to be protected.  You're with a child that you just can't leave to fend for himself either, what do you do?  You don't have backup.  You aren't  a professional security guy or special forces operator.  You're a dad with two scared kids, and you're probably pretty scared yourself.

Dad parked some distance away, left the younger kid in the car and managed to force his way into the house.  Got older kid and escaped.  All was well.

The Net Neutrality protests crossed this Rubicon last week when protesters showed up at the home of FCC Chairman Ajit Pay, calling out his children by name and threatening them all with injury or death.  Dollars to donuts nobody protesting understands net neutrality, which is too complicated to put in a five second chant. 

Pai is now flanked by a Homeland Security protective detail everywhere he goes because of a deluge of specific, credible threats of violence toward him and his young children. He's also facing an onslaught of racist smears and attacks too obscene to quote – including an image asserting that Pai is Osama bin Laden after shaving his beard.

Members of Congress are coming under similar attack for supporting Pai's signature proposal. The most outrageous example resulted in a criminal indictment after Congressman John Katko received a message threatening: "I will find you and your family and I will kill you all. Do you understand? I will literally find all of you and your progeny and just wipe you from the face of the earth."

Death threats over arcane FCC rules? I think it's time to say, "Srsly?  WTF?  Why the rage over some law that hasn't really been in place more than a couple of years and was illegally passed to start with?"  In addition to not bothering to follow the Administrative Procedures Act that they're required to follow, starting in 2010 the Congress told the FCC they didn't have the authority to pass these rules.  In true Obama administration fashion, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski did it anyway.

Look, the Internet has been around since the late '80s/early '90s.  In the intervening 27 years, I've gone from accessing with a 14.4 kbaud dial-up to a 50 Mbit/second cable rate with no federal intervention.  The number of people connected is probably 10 million times the number connected back then.  Sounds like the market is working pretty well.  I think I remember hearing about the Net Neutrality concept in the '90s.  Seems like we did OK without it.  Quoting from the Townhall article linked above:

Nonetheless, in 2015, ultraliberal advocacy groups (fueled by $196 million from the Soros and Ford Foundations) and Silicon Valley giants like Google (which cycled a shocking 250 personnel through the Obama administration and saw regulating ISPs as a way to guarantee themselves access to below-market-rate downstream bandwidth) succeeded in getting the FCC to reclassify ISPs as regulated public utilities.

This was done under a Depression-era law designed for the old Ma Bell telephone monopoly. Thousands of requests to micromanage every aspect of the Internet piled up at the FCC Enforcement Bureau and the commission was set to adopt a sweeping new broadband tax to replace the private investment it scared off – with strings attached of course – during a Hillary Clinton administration.

The liberal organizers of the phony scare campaign had even bigger plans; Robert McChesney, the founder of Free Press – the group that was cited 46 times in the Obama net neutrality order – openly bragged: "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet.  But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control." [emphasis added - SiG]

"Free Press"?  Like most Marxist organizations, Free Press is dedicated to the exact opposite of what its name implies; they don't want a Free Press, or Free anything; they want government-run press.  Think Pravda and Izvestia of the old Soviet Union and you're right there. 

Somewhere else on line, I noticed a statement from Borepatch who I consider a pretty well-informed guy, saying that fully 50% of traffic on the 'net is from two services: Google (mostly YouTube) and Netflix.  The Foundation for Economic Education adds:

Net Neutrality had the backing of all the top names in content delivery, from Google to Yahoo to Netflix to Amazon. It’s had the quiet support of the leading Internet service providers Comcast and Verizon.  Both companies are on record in support of the principle, repeatedly and consistently, while opposing only Title II which makes them a public utility – a classic "have your cake and eat it" position.

The opposition, in contrast, had been represented by small players in the industry, hardware providers like Cisco, free-market think tanks and disinterested professors, and a small group of writers and pundits who know something about freedom and free-market economics.
...
Here’s what’s was really going on with net neutrality. The incumbent rulers of the world’s most exciting technology decided to lock down the prevailing market conditions to protect themselves against rising upstarts in a fast-changing market. The imposition of a rule against throttling content or using the market price system to allocate bandwidth resources protects against innovations that would disrupt the status quo.

I can hear some people saying they figured Netflix and Amazon would want Net Neutrality but why Comcast and Verizon?  The answer is what the FEE says in that third paragraph, the same answer whenever you see industries lobbying congress over rules that cost them money: they're big so they can afford the expense much better than a smaller startup so it prevents competitors coming up and challenging them.

For established firms, a rule like net neutrality can raise the costs of doing business, but there is a wonderful upside to this: your future potential competitors face the same costs. You are in a much better position to absorb higher costs than those barking at your heels. This means that you can slow down development, cool it on your investments in fiber optics, and generally rest on your laurels more.

But how can you sell such a nefarious plan? You get in good with the regulators. You support the idea in general, with some reservations, while tweaking the legislation in your favor. You know full well that this raises the costs to new competitors. When it passes, call it a vote for the “open internet” that will “preserve the right to communicate freely online.”

If you're Google, Amazon or Netflix, the last thing you want is some garage-based innovator to have a level playing field and become a threat.  Can't happen?  Remember MySpace?  Remember Archie, the first search engine?  Too far back?  Then do you remember Altavista?  Lycos?  Kids, ask your parents.  Google was a startup from a couple of precocious college kids; at some level they have to know that if they do get knocked off their throne it will be by a couple of kids like they were.  They want to prevent that and Net Neutrality may be a part of keeping their throne. 

Looked at this way, Net Neutrality is probably the ultimate bait and switch; the ultimate con game.  People think they're going to get ultimate streaming rates for everything every time, but nobody can do that without spending tons of money on infrastructure.  The big ISPs can do something but they don't have to knowing that startup technologies will never take their tidy little profit away if they managed the government well enough.  Marxists like Robert McChesney of Free Press, and George Soros will get their wish of destroying the "capitalist media", and the useful idiots protesting or threatening murder for net neutrality get their little government teat to suck on, since they think if the wise and wonderful gubmint is in charge everything will be wonderful.  Everybody's happy except for the people who understand and value free and open markets - meanwhile, development of the Internet slows and the expression "Internet Speed" goes away.  As Ajit Pai said in 2015 (quoting Emperor Palpatine from the Star Wars universe), “Young fool … Only now, at the end, do you understand.”  At the moment, Pai is standing up for a return to free and open markets.  It is, after all, what voters seemed to vote for when they gave power to Trump and the Stupid Party.

(generic artsy picture of optical fibers - source)

As I've said before, you have to admire the way the left controls the message.  Ask any typical person and they'll reflexively say the idea is wonderful because the ISPs are screwing us and want to slow all our net feeds down because they're evil.  Pissing off your customers is such a successful business strategy.  I see similar arguments like this from people claiming to be in the industry, so they must not understand the business aspects.  There never seems to be the thought that the market brought them the continuously improving and faster computers, tablets or phones, and that the same market is also continuously trying to build out faster and faster internet infrastructure.  There never seems to be the realization that the heavy hand of government could grind that to a halt.  There never seems to be a realization that the reason they're pissed at their ISP is exactly because their ISP is a state-regulated utility.  No recognition of any of these at all.

Tales From the Over Regulated State # 24 - Respect Our Authoritah

Does your area have those automated red light cameras that generate automatic traffic tickets if it "thinks" you've run a light?  Pushed by a handful of companies that sell the cameras as revenue streams (once they take their third - or half), they spilled into the country a decade ago.  Some had infiltrated my area at one time, but now appear to be going away.  This story, though takes place in Oregon, which is nearly as far as you can get from here and still be on the CONUS.  Reason Magazine online has the story.

When Mats Järlström's wife got snagged by one of Oregon's red light cameras in 2013, he challenged the ticket by questioning the timing of the yellow lights at intersections where cameras had been installed.

Since then, his research into red light cameras has earned him attention in local and national media—in 2014, he presented his evidence on an episode of "60 Minutes"—and an invitation to present at last year's annual meeting of the Institute of Transportation Engineers.

It also got him a $500 fine from the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying.

According to the board, Järlström's research into red light cameras and their effectiveness amounts to practicing engineering without a license. No, really. Järlström had sent a letter to the board in 2014 asking for the opportunity to present his research on how too-short yellow lights were making money for the state by putting the public's safety at risk. "I would like to present these fact for your review and comment," he wrote.

Are you familiar with the term PE, or Professional Engineer?  In some disciplines of engineering, notably civil engineering, state governments started regulating who may design or sign documents accepting responsibility for designs.  Wyoming appears to have been the first, in 1907.  As an electrical engineer designing products for a few military and commercial suppliers, I've never needed to apply for a PE, so I never went through the process, but it's required in certain areas.  For example, if someone is going to design a house, a PE must sign off on the drawings for the building inspectors.  I like to think of it this way:

• Teams that designed NASA's Saturn V or the SpaceX Falcon 9 - PE not required 
• Team that designed the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Walkway - PE required 

That may seem like I'm making fun of PEs, but I'm not.  I'm making fun of the bureaucrats who think having a PE sign drawings will keep bad things from happening.

In this case, the Oregon State Board is saying that because Järlström doesn't have their blessing, he not only isn't allowed to look at their designs, it's illegal for him to do so.  Järlström has sued the state, as you might expect, and is being aided by the Institute for Justice.

"Criticizing the government's engineering isn't a crime; it's a constitutional right," said Sam Gedge, an attorney at the Institute for Justice, in a statement. "Under the First Amendment, you don't need to be a licensed lawyer to write an article critical of a Supreme Court decision, you don't need to be a licensed landscape architect to create a gardening blog, and you don't need to be a licensed engineer to talk about traffic lights."

It turns out the reliably leftist utopia of Oregon guards their authority over engineering quite jealously.  The board

investigated a Republican gubernatorial candidate for using the phrase "I'm an engineer and a problem-solver" in a campaign ad. The candidate in question, Allen Alley, had a degree in engineering from Purdue University and worked as an engineer for Boeing (and, of course, wasn't trying to lie about his lack of an Oregon-issued licensed but merely was making a freaking campaign ad), but

It doesn't stop there. In 2010, the state board issued a $1,000 fine for illegally practicing engineering to a local activist who told the La Pine, Oregon, city council that a proposed new power plant would be too loud for nearby residents.

The board once investigated Portland Monthly magazine for running a story that described a young immigrant woman as "an engineer behind Portland's newest bridge." The woman in the story did not describe herself as an engineer, but the magazine's editors included that description in the headline, the board concluded.

In Järlström's case, what he did was what thousands of other engineers or techno geeks have done.  He looked at the design for how long lights remained yellow, found it was outdated so he figured out how to make it work better.  In stories like this, someone finds a better way, starts a company and sometimes even becomes the next Gates, or Woz or Musk.  But not in Glorious Peoples' Republic of Portlandia.  In Portlandia, it got him fined. 

He did a little Googling and found the formula used to set traffic-light times. The length of time a traffic light stays yellow is based on a relatively straightforward mathematical formula, originally drafted in 1959. Mats realized that the formula is incomplete, because it fails to capture the behavior of drivers making right turns. After developing a modified formula and even corresponding with one of the formula’s original creators, Mats started to reach out to others in the scientific community, government officials, and the media.

It's truly a ridiculous case.  The Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying said  “critiquing” the length of yellow lights and talking about his ideas with “members of the public” made Mats a lawbreaker because he’s not an Oregon-licensed professional engineer.  They also told Mats that he couldn’t refer to himself using the word “engineer” either.  Järlström actually is an engineer by degree from Sweden, and has held various problem-solving jobs that go with that training, he just doesn't have the state's blessings. 

It may be ridiculous, but it's classic leftist elitism.  Much like how blessings from the wise and wonderful state magically grant "The Only Ones" in law enforcement the ability to always handle firearms with near-infinite wisdom and safety, the board is saying only their blessings in the form of their PE license magically allow thinking.   

Tales From the Over Regulated State # 23 - Watch What You Eat

No, that doesn't mean, "You should watch what you eat" it's "They watch what you eat".

Perhaps we can get a break this time with the Trumpening, but new regulations from the FDA on restaurant food labeling take effect this May, and restaurants are struggling to comply.  Any restaurant with 20 or more locations as well as supermarket and convenience stores must post the calorie counts of their prepared food.   In case you were wondering, the evidence is that the requirement to post calorie counts affects restaurants and raises prices but consumers don't care.

To begin with, what they're asking isn't easy.  Yes, the restaurants can add up the calorie content of every food in a recipe and divide by the number of portions, but even that is tricky.  What about different suppliers?  Consider a pizza shop that buys their "special, secret sauce" from a few suppliers and they might use different ingredients with different calorie counts.  The FDA's answer?  Just use the largest number you can find.  In other words, just lie to make it sound worse.

Some restaurants get their ingredients from multiple suppliers. How would the calorie discrepancies figure into the total calorie count? The FDA has an answer for that: count the fattiest version. “You would not be penalized for over-declaring calories versus under-declaring,” the agency responded.

This could get out of hand fast and shows how out of touch the FDA is with the industry.  This might work for industrial producers with everything being made by machines, but most restaurants still use a lot of hand work and a lot of places for differences to creep in between the stated counts and the real counts.  

Let's go back to the hypothetical pizza (I saw them in concert with Ultimate Spinach in 1968).  How many calories in a slice of pizza?  That depends, doesn't it?  The best guess anyone can come up with is to find the caloric content of everything in the pizza, add it up, and divide by the number of slices, even though every slice will be different.  What about what's called a "party pie", where a rectangular pizza is cut into rectangular pieces?  Same concept, right?  Silly person!  You're trying to be logical, and this is the Federal Government we're talking about!

Initially, the FDA told a Chicago-based pizza chain it would need to declare calories for the entire pizza, if the pieces weren’t uniform. But Marla Topliff, president of Rosati’s Pizza, said the agency subsequently agreed to allow the chain to post calories for an average piece in a party-cut pie. Topliff said having to list calories for an entire pie would be unfair to party-cut pies, if traditionally cut pies were listed per slice. 

I don't know if you caught that, but the FDA originally said to count the calories for the entire pizza for every slice.  That's insane!  But let's go back to that question again.  How many calories in a slice of pizza?  Who cares?  Let's be honest here;  nobody going out for a pizza really cares about that.  Let me rephrase that: anybody going out for pizza who cares about it already has a pretty good idea of how many calories to expect.  Maybe they believe in having a treat meal once a week/month/year/whatever and this is it.  Why does the FDA insist on thinking that whatever restaurant meal someone has is their regular, everyday diet?

Side note.  Although I don't talk about it anywhere near as much as Denninger, I follow a similar low carb lifestyle as he does.  I've also read virtually everything I can find on the topic and listened to hundreds of hours of conference talks, presentations for the Obesity Medicine Association (formerly the American Society of Bariatric Physicians) and other MD practitioners.  The idea that weight control is as simple as calories in vs. calories out was almost discarded in the 1930s, and only survived because the preeminent obesity researchers were gone in the postwar years. Today's successful physicians find (1) no one approach is universal but (2) for the patients who are getting fatter on the currently recommended food pyramid, their problem is hormonal and not caloric.  In other words: they don't get fat because they overeat; they overeat because they're getting fat.  Not enough space to get into this here, but the best overall book is this. 

These regulations are a flaming waste of time and resources for the restaurants and will present costs that inevitably will get passed on to their customers who don't care about the information.  The only group that is made happy in any way is the idiots at the FDA.  The FDA is not only wasting time and consumer's money, they're doing the wrong things.  What they're requiring will have not have an effect on "the obesity problem".  It's probably too much to hope for, but I'm hoping some sanity in the coming Trumpening will stop these regulations before they waste too much more money.

Stock hypothetical pizza photo from PJMedia. 

Florida Legalizes "Medicinal Marijuana" But Don't Go There

In the election two weeks ago, Florida voters overwhelmingly approved the constitutional amendment to legalize so-called medical marijuana.  A few people have written about this, and I want to add my voice.  Using your medical marijuana will end your second amendment rights.  Period.  (Hat tip to Gun Free Zone). 

Simply, there appears to be ample legal precedent that states being able to legalize drugs is not a settled matter.  To the Feds, it doesn't matter what your state does: marijuana is a schedule 1 narcotic, and they preempt the state.  If the feds decide not to prosecute most users, no matter how temporarily, that's prosecutorial discretion, not agreeing it's legal.  If you're a going to buy that new gun and fill out a 4473 form, it specifically asks about marijuana use.

To the Federales, any use of marijuana is unlawful.  There is precedent that if you answer 4473 with "yes", your purchase will be denied even in a state that allows recreational use of marijuana.  You may choose to lie here, and like all lies on a form 4473, if that's found out, it's a federal felony, which will bar you from buying guns.  You can argue the semantics that "are you an unlawful user" is present tense, and since you don't currently have a joint in your mouth "no" is the truth.  You can argue that federal drug laws have no legal sway in the states.  Have really deep pockets if you want to try this.  The feds have the Infinite Checkbook (tm) and can outspend anything you have if they want to put you away.  In the first case, they'll argue that "user" means "someone who uses" and doesn't imply a time limit.  In the second, you're bucking about a hundred years of "settled case law".

I voted against the amendment for several reasons, and this was one.  The way our law is written, the marijuana may be obtained by a "caregiver", who doesn't need to be an RN, LPN or any of the recognized medical titles.  The way it was explained to me, a caregiver can apply for medical marijuana for a patient and make that patient into a liar if they answer "no" on a 4473.  Say you have some emergency surgery and require an aide to help you for six weeks or so: that aide could get the marijuana in your name, use it themselves or sell it, and jeopardize your rights.  It has been estimated there will be over 2000 pot shops in Florida soon, turning into a nearly $1.6 Billion/year industry, so someone anticipates lots of business and lots of money being made of it.

The big money behind the passing this amendment was a lawyer named John Morgan (known for his smarmy TV and radio commercials) who seems to have pushed it so he can be the lawyer to go to when someone wants to establish their pot shop.  As I say, lots of money to be made in the business.  This is the second time they've tried to pass it.  I note it's easy to find that the biggest funders for the 2014 campaign were John Morgan and George Soros.  Yeah, that George Soros.

I voted against it for a variety of reasons: I don't like the way Florida handles constitutional amendments, again, for a variety of reasons (nice discussion here).  I don't like the way the amendment was written.  And I don't like that whole "make it legal and tax it" thing.  Why should we want to hand that money over to the state?  Why should pot get a higher rate than any other sales tax?  If it's legal, sell it in the wine aisle in Publix, or in the local liquor store.  The state will make enough money taking down their drug enforcement squads.  Alcohol taxes make no sense to me anyway, but I know that's bucking well over a hundred years of "settled case law".  Consider this:  alcohol created by a chemical reaction in a chemical plant sells by the 55 gallon drum and is exempt from taxes.  Alcohol created by yeast fermenting something (grapes, barley, potatoes, whatever) is taxed.  Same exact chemical; one is taxed, one isn't.   

Do the federal drug laws need fixing?  Absolutely.  As does about 75% of the Code of Federal Regulations.  The haphazard way marijuana is being regulated across the country, where obeying your state's laws still violates federal laws, has got to go.  As it stands today, Federal prosecutors are in the position of being able to bring drug charges against anyone using medical marijuana whenever they feel like it.  Any prosecutor who wants to can charge any American with "three felonies a day" (that should probably be updated to four by now; that book is five years old).  It ends up  being at the discretion of the prosecutor, who may prosecute or not depending on whether the Attorney General is working for the drug cartels (cough, cough, Eric Holder) or just another crime family (Loretta Lynch).

EDITED 11/19/16 at 10:30 AM EST:  The BATFE just released a new version of the form 4473 that specifically addresses this issue.  It adds a sentence in bold font just below the question 11E cited above.  It states:  Warning:  The use or possession of marijuana remains unlawful under Federal law regardless of whether it has been legalized or decriminalized for medicinal or recreational purposes in the state where you reside.  

That's about as clear as they can make it. If you use marijuana, regardless of what your state says, they maintain their laws take precedence and you will be denied the sale.  If you use pot, no guns for you.

My Platform

I have never heard a single candidate say this, but Donald Trump has come the closest.  It's a simple two step approach to deregulation:  (1) all new laws are given an expiration date and (2) the CFR is to be gone through and laws eliminated. 

This will make liberals scream in agony.  I can hear the tired cliche's now: "Do you want to throw out food safety laws?  Do you want to poison people?"  With a CFR that numbers into the hundreds of thousands of pages, you can bet there are laws that are useless, or only used to entrap people who do minor things wrong.  I'm sure the CFR is like the states in that there still crazy laws on the books like that in Florida, it's illegal to have sex with a porcupine, and that in Alabama, it's illegal to keep an ice cream cone in your back pocket.

I've been harping on this idea for almost as long as I've been running this blog.  My most popular piece from the early days (2010) concerned how regulations are growing like weeds, how "Regulation and litigation are sand in the gears of society", and the costs of those regulations on businesses.  I repeatedly call for throwing out 2/3 or 3/4 of the Code of Federal Regulations.  Plus I've posted my "Tales from the Over Regulated State" series on an irregular basis 22 times, now.  Unfortunately, I didn't start numbering them until recently, so the numbers start with 18. 

Trump has actually called for deregulation and talks about it fairly regularly.  I haven't heard him talk about throwing out "yuuge" chunks of the CFR, but from my standpoint, they might have to spend the next eight years undoing what was passed in the last eight.

This is actually the project I was working on yesterday.  I wanted to draw the scene, but my "first-grade level" art skills couldn't close to being this good.  Instead, I found this as Free Clip Art.  I'd be honored if other people agreed and spread this around.

Tales From the Over Regulated State # 22 - When Federal Agencies Ignore Federal Law

There was a complex case of Federal overreach in the last month, in which the US Fish and Wildlife Service seized control of 77 Million acres of Alaska to gain Federal control over Alaskan wildlife.  The president of the Sportsmen's Alliance, Evan Heusinkveld, said, “We’re talking about an area larger than 45 of our 50 states”.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and its appointed director, Dan Ashe, have issued new regulations closing 77 million acres of land in Alaska to state wildlife management, including effective predator control and other established means and methods of hunting and trapping.

Historically, control of the wildlife in every state has been left to the states; we buy our hunting and fishing licenses from our state, not the Fed.gov.  It's a recognition that the wildlife doesn't belong to landowners, it belongs to the people closest to it, the state.  In this case, when Alaska was granted statehood in 1959, they were guaranteed ownership and control of game populations by Congress.  No other state is more legally entitled to manage its game populations, including on federal lands within its border, than Alaska.

It is spelled out in multiple laws and agreements, and was debated three times by Congress, ultimately resulting in giving Alaska precedence, including:

• the Alaska Statehood Act (1959),
• the Alaska Lands Act (1980) which created most of the 77-million-acres of refuges at the center of this unprecedented power grab, and
• the Refuge Improvement Act (1997) which also made hunting and fishing priority public uses on all refuge lands

With the vested power of Congress, these acts were clearly approved.

So that's three separate Federal laws the FWS is violating.  You might ask why?  Why now?  It turns out it's the same sordid story as we find everywhere else with this administration: cronyism.  Undue influence by left wing groups; in this case the HSUS - the Humane Society of the United States.  Behind the scenes, the HSUS – the most powerful anti-hunting lobby in the world and a group that despises all forms of hunting and hunters – was thanked by FWS director Ashe in a tweet.

"For ... ALL Americans" except the public's voice has been systematically silenced.  This was pure, banana republic, bureaucratic power grab, backed by the HSUS, an organization the country almost completely disagrees with.  In my mind, I can hear the FWS director Ashe saying,  " So what if we broke three acts of Congress?  We're the Feds!  Who's gonna stop us?  You... punk?".

The stench gets stronger. The rule changes include provisions that abruptly deny American citizens of their collective voice relative to management of the National Wildlife Refuge through the following:

• Doubling the length of emergency closures of refuge lands from 30 to 60 days
• Removing requirements for public hearings on such closures
• Complete elimination of the maximum length of a temporary closure

[emphasis added: SiG]

For the second point, they're saying the public has no voice whatsoever in how their wildlife refuge is managed.  Typical.  As for the third point, if there is no maximum length, then how can it be a temporary closure?  I'm sure you can envision a temporary closure that extends into years or decades just as easily as I can.  When has a federal regulation not been stretched to benefit those in control?

If Ashe and Pacelle were being honest with their Tweets and blogs, they’d say what these rule changes actually were: a successful usurpation of power by the federal government to advance an anti-hunting agenda in the bulwark state for hunters’ rights; an offensive move that will allow them to invade Western states and assume control of large swaths of federal public lands to eliminate hunting, trapping and other management methods with ease. 

Since this a violation of at least those three federal laws, in a sane world, this should be easily defeated.  It does, however, require going to court, which invokes the massive legal expenses that are incurred whenever anyone fights the infinite checkbook of the Fed.gov.  The Sportsmen's Alliance has already filed protests about this ruling.  I don't know if this ruling is a "done deal" or if it's open for comments, but it appears to be a final ruling.  The FWS, like every other federal agency, is required to follow the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946 when they announce new rules.  I've been unable to find anything open for comment on Regulation.Gov, so it appears this may be too late to comment on.  Or they figure that since they just violated three other major federal laws, what's one more?

An Alaskan Grizzly (source) 

Tales From the Over Regulated State # 21 - Wild Animals Take Part in Interstate Commerce?

Watts Up With That is one of my regular reads because it's not just a great place to catch up on the latest summary of the climate insanity, it's a great place to read a variety of topics that show up from time to time, and the comments are relatively sane compared to most places (where the topic usually becomes a stupid political attack within the first five comments).

This week, there was an article on Gray Wolves, and the main point of the article is that we may tend to think that there's a rather crisp, definition for what a biological species is; a definition that is broadly agreed-upon, but that isn't the case.  Along the way (actually in the comments) I ran into the story for this episode of TFORS.  While this is episode 21 of the series (which I didn't number until recently) it fits closely with #19 from last December, about how your property isn't your own if an endangered or protected species is involved.

To begin with, they point to an article in the NY Times that says according to an in-depth study of their DNA,

“The first large study of North American wolf genomes has found that there is only one species on the continent: the gray wolf. Two other purported species, the Eastern wolf and the red wolf, are mixes of gray wolf and coyote DNA, the scientists behind the study concluded.”

Bridgett M. vonHoldt of Princeton University, a DNA specialist who studies the genome of the canids (mammals of the dog family – Canidae):  that is domestic and wild dogs, wolves, foxes, jackals and dingoes, is the lead author behind this study.

At this point, it's pretty healthy to be saying "so what?".  The so-what is that the Federal Government, through the actions of the Usual Suspect agencies has been working on a program to protect the red wolf and conducting a Red Wolf Recovery Program.  In my mind, it's hard to declare a species to be endangered when it isn't actually a species.  In the same NY Times, two months prior, there was piece saying,

“Conservation groups submitted an emergency petition last week requesting that the United States Fish and Wildlife Service increase protection for the only wild population of red wolves left in the world.”
…
“It also seeks an upgrading of the status of red wolves, which are endangered, from “nonessential” to “essential.” The change in status would grant reserved habitat to the species and require consultations with biologists over how changes to land use would affect the wolves.”

Dr. vanHoldt’s study not only identified the three canids (Grey, Eastern and Red wolves) as a single species (albeit, the latter two are wolf-coyote hybrids - in domesticated dogs we call this a breed), but her paper states bluntly:

“The red wolf was listed as an endangered species in 1973, initiating a captive breeding program by the USFWS. The program began with 12 of 14 founding individuals that reproduced, selected from a panel of several hundred captured individuals that were thought to represent the ancestry spectrum ranging from coyote to pure red wolf and various admixtures of the two forms. These 12 founders were considered to be pure red wolves based on phenotypic characteristics and the lack of segregation of “coyote-like” traits in their offspring. The descendants of these founders defined the ancestry of the several hundred red wolves produced by the captive breeding program and have been the source for a single reintroduced population in eastern North Carolina.”

Since those members of a small population of wild red wolves were captured in the '70s and used to breed a new population, the reality is that the red wolf is not just a wolf-coyote cross, it's a man-made breed at this point.   So would the fact that the species the conservationists wants to protect is really a "mutt" of two (or more) other species cause them to say, "oh... well, that's clearly not what the Endangered Species Act is for, so we'll go home now"?  Of course not!  Here's where the story gets a bit longer, and switches over to the comment by Watts Up With That reader wrusssr. 

Let's go back to the '70s and the captive breeding program to rescue the red wolves.  The wolf population was burgeoning and the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) proposed introducing their pen-raised mongrels in Kentucky and Tennessee.  State officials, ranchers, and others in those states met them at the gate and told them hell no; they didn’t want the wolves.  Faced with local opposition, the FWS did what any fed agency does, they looked for a way to impose their will around the problem, deciding to release the red wolves on federal lands in the Kentucky/Tennessee/North Carolina area.

I'm sure you're guessing at this point that wolves don't read signs very well and didn't stay in the parks.  Exactly.   While the original population had radio collars (so "if they go out of the federal land, we'll just round them up") , but they quickly bred new generations of collarless wolves that began scouring private land for livestock meals – some more than 100 miles away.  Just like real wolves do in Idaho, Oregon, Montana and pretty much everywhere.  A landowner who shot one threatening his livestock was fined and required to feed captive red wolves for a year as his penance for not being environmentally sensitive enough.

Now it turns into a Federal case; more specifically states rights vs. the feds.  A lawsuit — Gibbs vs. Babbitt — was filed challenging the FWS’s authority to prevent landowners from killing wolves that were killing their livestock. This suit was filed in federal district court for the eastern portion of North Carolina; arguing citizens had the right under state law to protect their property from marauding wolves, the Endangered Species Act notwithstanding.  Once this got into court, the FWS lawyers argued straight-faced that ranchers and farmers killing wolves that killed livestock and wildlife on their property were “ . . . interfering with interstate commerce, and thus violating the Commerce Clause.”

Wait... A homeowner killing a wolf on their private property to protect the life of their private property violates the Interstate Commerce Clause?  How does a wild animal create interstate commerce?  Contract lawyers for FWS argued that tourists generated commerce when they came from places like New York to North Carolina to “hear the ‘wolves’ howl.”  The problem they faced was that no one could prove that anyone actually had come to North Carolina to hear the wolves' howl.  But critical facts like that aren't going to affect a Federal Judge!  Of course the Federal District Court for the eastern portion of North Carolina ruled in the FWS' favor!  The inevitable appeal to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals resulted in a split decision, which agreed with the lower court.  Wolves are now agents of interstate commerce. 

Two red wolf mutts being all interstate commerce-y.  I'll just close this with a quote from the first comment to this piece on WUWT:

There will be no peace, no justice, and no economic growth until the last lawyer is strangled with the entrails of the last environmentalist.