Serendipitously, I am reading F. A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” (highly recommended; here is a free, heavily abridged version), and I came across the following passage:

“There is nothing in the basic principles of [classic] liberalism to make it a stationary creed; there are no hard-and-fast rules fixed once and for all. The fundamental principle that in the ordering of our affairs we should make as much use as possible of the spontaneous forces of society, and resort as little as possible to coercion, is capable of an infinite variety of applications.  There is, in particular, all the difference between deliberately creating a system within which competition will work as beneficially as possible and passively accepting institutions as they are.

Here, Hayek is countering the supposition that classic liberals (now better known as libertarians) are against all regulation. He is emphasizing that while some regulation is neccesary, we shouldn’t just accept the status quo.  Hayek continues:

Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some [classic] liberals on certain rough rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez faire.

Long’s essay echoes this sentiment regarding the harm some libertarians have done to the cause, although Long is talking about the embrace of big corporations rather than laissez faire; Long sees corporatism as anti-laissez faire.  But I found Hayek’s explanation for why libertarians default to laissez faire quite persuasive:

Yet in a sense, this was necessary and unavoidable.  Against innumerable interests which could show that particular measures would confer immediate and obvious benefits on some, while the harm they cause was much more indirect and difficult to see, nothing short of some hard-and-fast rule would have been effective.  And since a strong presumption in favor of industrial liberty had undoubtedly been established, the temptation to present it as a rule which knew no exceptions was too strong always to be resisted.

Hayek is describing laissez faire / deregulation as the only method to effectively battle special interests, and seems to be anticipating much of public choice theory’s explanation of special interest rent-seeking.  For example, think about the Big Three U.S. auto companies.  The possibility of billions of dollars in bailout money is a strong incentive for them to spend millions lobbying Congress.  Yet the cost to each individual tax payer is small enough, or hidden enough, that it is not worth an individual taxpayer’s time to protest.  This is a structural flaw in U.S. politics, and Hayek’s point may be that a hard-and-fast laissez faire rule is one useful way to correct this.

Of course, Hayek’s rationale for a hard-and-fast laissez faire rule doesn’t translate into pro-Corporations. In fact, as in my example above (and as Long’s essay indicates), corporations are very often the special interest seeking favorable treatment at the expense of the general public.  And in the broader sense, the above passage supports Long’s thesis that classic liberalism is not pro-corporate, although some libertarians are.

• Integrate Twitter updates and Facebook shares with this site.  The question is ‘why?’  Is it better just to have everything on facebook?  I know it’s certainly become easier to update there - I probably share 3-4 articles a week at least.  Need to think about this.
• Add links to DC resources
  • DCist
  • Brightest Young Things
  • HACDC

Step 1: Pull up the statute in Lexis, Pike & Fischer, or the like. At the bottom is a summary of all the acts that created or amended that statute. Lexis, as the first item in the “history” section, has a mass of cites that I haven’t actually figured out how to decypher. I think it might indicate which part of the statute at issue was modified by each subsequent act, which would be quite useful if you are only interested in a portion of the statute. In any case, Lexis does break it down for you in the rest of the section. Note the public law numbers of each Act amending your statute.
Step 2: Use GovTrack to look up each public law retrieved in note 1. Probably Blindingly Obvious Tip - the first three numbers of the public law number are the Congress in which that law was passed. GovTrack has a lot of information on the law, but I prefer to …
Step 3: Click through to THOMAS. The “All Congressional Actions” link will take you to a description of the provision’s path through Congress. Committee reports as well as floor discussions are listed here, with direct links to what you need.

Typically conference reports are quite useful and provide the best summary of what the final bill is trying to accomplish. However, frequently the containing measure is one of those enormous appropriations or budget bills that incorporate other bills by reference. Conference reports on that kind of bill frequently have no descriptions of the provisions. So you will have to figure out what incorporated bill contains the change to your statute and then look up that statute and check if there were committee reports for that statute.

Floor discussions and the Congressional Research Service summary can be useful if you cannot recover committee reports.

That’s about it! Happy hunting.

I already use some automated tools such as mailing lists provided by the various government agencies (such as the Federal Communications Commission’s Daily Digest mailing list). Yet I am constantly on the lookout for tools to help me streamline my information gathering.

Today I googled “Tracking government agencies” and found “Tracking Current Federal Legislation and Regulations: A Guide to Basic Sources (PDF)“. This is a Congressional Research Service report on digital, paper, and telephone resources for tracking legislative and administrative actions. I’ve already found some new, useful resources such as the online Daily Digest version of the Congressional Record. (Note: the latest issue (12/31/07) contains an interesting tabulation of Congressional action over the past year.)

As part of my New Year’s resolution to more frequently post to this blog, I’ll continue to note the resources I find useful in my day-to-day work at WBK, as I discover them. If you have any tools you’d suggest, I’d welcome your feedback in the comments.

What were these kids thinking? They pissed off everyone who already agreed with them, raised the profile of this event significantly, and come off as either racist or retarded. I’d love to do a full blown rant on the danger of half-assed satire to its author, but I’ll restrain myself.

BECK: Developing nations, like China and India, aren`t mandated to reduce their emissions under Kyoto. That`s a big problem for the U.S., especially since many developing nations are big polluters. It used to be thought that by 2020 that China was going to pass the United States in carbon dioxide emissions. New data says it`s going to happen in 2009. Even our vice president thought it was ridiculous:

AL GORE, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: “We will not submit this for ratification until there`s meaningful participation by key developing nations.”

Interesting, Al. Still hasn’t happened.

BECK: When Al Gore testified before Congress on global warming just a couple of months ago it was a media circus, but also testifying that day without any fanfare or really any coverage was Bjorn Lomborg. He`s the author of the best-selling book “The Skeptical Environmentalist”. He`s an expert on the economic impact [Neil’s emphasis - both typographically and epistemologically] of global warming.

Bjorn, you`re not a scientist, you`re a political scientist, so I`m not going to ask any science questions. I want to ask you, as a guy who believes in manmade global warming, why don`t you think Kyoto is the solution?

BJORN LOMBORG, AUTHOR, “THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST`S GUIDE”:  Kyoto is, at the same time, impossibly ambitious and yet entirely inconsequential when you talk about the environment. It will cost lots of money and end up doing virtually no good. That`s not a good deal.  It will basically postpone global warming for about five years at the end of the century. That`s not a very good deal.

BECK: OK. Just a few years ago, we had a massive heat wave in Europe. Thirty- five thousand people in France alone died. Another 2,000 people died from this heat wave in England. If we don`t stop global warming, won`t things just get worse and worse and more people will die just from — from the heat?

LOMBORG: Glenn, that`s exactly true and that`s, of course, what Al Gores tells us. With global warming you`re going to see more heat deaths, but what most people don`t tell us is we`re also going to see much less cold deaths. And actually, many more people die from cold than from heat. For England alone you mentioned the number 2,000 people. Actually that`s what we expect will die from more heat waves in 2080, but what we have to remember is that 20,000 fewer will die from cold each year in 2080.

Now I`m not sitting and saying we should go for global warming, but I`m saying we need to know both.

BECK: OK. You started something called the Copenhagen Consensus, and this was a group of experts from the U.N., economists, et cetera, et cetera, and you prioritized all of the world`s biggest problems and where we would be most effective in spending our money. AIDS was number one, right?

LOMBORG: Yes, and basically the point is again to say we have a tendency to bark up the wrong tree. We worry intensely about climate change, but the point is we can do very little good at very high cost. Let`s focus on where we can actually do a lot of good. If we care about this planet, if we care about its environment, shouldn`t we do where we can do the most good first?

What these Nobel laureates basically told us if we spend our money on HIV/AIDS, we can do $40 worth of good for every dollar. If we spend it on Kyoto, we can only do 30 cents. Let`s do the $40 first.

BECK: The top five quickly, and where does global warming fall in this list?

LOMBORG: Basically what they told us was it was HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, free trade, malaria and agricultural research. (ed - read the 2006 rankings.) Those are things that we can do cheaply and do an immense amount of impact in this world right now and also for future generations. Kyoto came down at the bottom. Not because climate change is not real, but simply because the way we tackled it through Kyoto is very expensive and a very poor way of helping the world.

Ah, economists. Cursed with rationality. But if the world really is warming, what cost-effective means are there to deal?

PATRICK MOORE, PHD, CHIEF SCIENTIST, GREENSPIRIT: There are a number of existing technologies that, if we adopted them aggressively now, we could make a considerable dent in our use of fossil fuels. The most important one, in my estimation, is nuclear energy, because it can immediately replace fossil fuels for electricity production.

BECK: Nuclear power is the second-largest source of energy in the U.S., giving us about 20 percent of our power, and it`s almost emission- free. But despite the fact that countries like France get more than 70 percent of their energy from nuclear power, no new licenses have been granted in the U.S. since the 1970s. Why? Environmental panic.

MOORE: That is what actually drives me nuts, is you`ve got Greenpeace and other major environmental groups saying that the civilization and the environment are going to be destroyed by global warming, catastrophe, chaos, and all of these scary words, and yet they are unwilling to adopt nuclear energy.

BECK: But, really, how risky is it?

MOORE: I don`t think there is much of a risk in nuclear energy myself. There`s 103 plants operating every day in the U.S., and no one has ever been injured by them. (ed - actually, it’s 104)

104? I had no idea. Let see, having more nuclear plants would both lower emissions AND make us more independent of foreign oil? What’s the downside here?

Anyhow, interesting transcript. I’ve left out a bunch of stuff I care less about, such as the squashing of dissent among climatologists.  Read the whole thing if you want more.

• I graduate law school in less than 2 months.
• I crossed the finish line at the DC marathon yesterday.
• I recently watched ‘Stranger Than Fiction’ and thought it was very good.
• If Oregon wins today, I have a damn good chance of winning two pools. Otherwise, I’m probably sunk.
• I just finished the first draft of a paper on the best ways to enhance the public domain, concluding that supporting peer-production projects such as wikipedia will both directly contribute to the public domain, AND help battle the misperception of information as property (rather than a public good). I’ll put the final draft up sometime in May.

Also I read a great book called “Quicksilver” by Neal Stephenson. It is the first in his Baroque trilogy and I loved almost every single one of its 900+ pages. In it, Stephenson captures in the adventures of its characters the emerging scientific and economic progress of Europe during the seventeenth century. Highly recommended to my one reader, who checks my page approximately every six months.

So i’m not really a car guy, but the Maybach Exelero really does it for me. So much so that I created a couple of 1024×768 background images for my desktop. Click the pictures to the right to download.

I’ll have to be satisfied with just pictures for now because 1) it’s a one-off car for Fulda Tyres and 2) Maybachs cost more than decent houses.